- Record: found
- Abstract: found
- Article: found
Opening the Closed World of the Cold War and American Nuclear Strategy
Abstract
It is argued in this paper that the closed world of computer simulations and nuclear games which Edwards describes is an imaginary place. Indeed, Edwards' closed world is a caricature of the real world of Cold War and American nuclear strategy. His account of the imaginary world and its development draws on and perpetuates the folklore of Cold War and American nuclear strategy. The folklore, which fails to acknowledge the frightening realities of the strategy of nuclear deterrence, has achieved a high level of academic respectability in the United States and elsewhere. Even though Edwards does not simply accept the folklore chapter and verse, enough of it survives intact in his book to leave his history of computers in the Cold War wanting at key stages and in important respects. Because he likens nuclear war to a computer game, he seriously underestimates the grave risks and dangers that accompanied American preparations and planning for nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In the end, Edwards trivialises the deadly serious business of nuclear war planning and preparation.
Content
Author and article information
Notes and References
Other works which give voice to the folklore include, for example: Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, Simon & Schuster, 1983; Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice, Columbia University Press, New York and London, 1974; Barry H. Steiner, ‘Using the absolute weapon: early ideas of Bernard Brodie on atomic strategy’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, 7, 4 December 1984, pp. 365-93; and Michael Howard, ‘The classical strategists’ in his Studies in War and Peace, Maurice, Temple, Smith, London, 1970. The folklore is subjected to sustained critique in Mark Rix, Discipline and Threatened Punishment: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence and the Discipline of Strategic Studies, 1946-1960, Ph.D. thesis, University of Wollongong, 1997.
This was the title of a paper by Albert Wohlstetter published in Foreign Affairs, 37, January 1959, pp. 211-34. Wohlstetter was a leading RAND strategic theorist in the 1950s and early 1960s. ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror’ is examined later in this article.
For an extended study of how game theory could be profitably employed in the analysis of strategic problems such as ‘deterrence’ (as understood by the strategic theorists) see Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Oxford University Press, London, Oxford and New York, 1963 (reprinted 1973).
John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1944. In this book, the authors attempted to demonstrate that game theory could be applied to economic behaviour and all types of social and political conflict.
For a study of the RAND Corporation and the activities of its personnel, written from the perspective of the folklore, see Bruce L. R. Smith, The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1966.
The founding work in deterrence theory is Bernard Brodie (ed.), The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, Harcourt, Brace & Co, New York, 1946. Brodie's Strategy in the Missile Age, The RAND Corporation/Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1959, is arguably the most authoritative work in deterrence theory published in the 1950s. See also H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1960.
This insight informed the RAND studies of SAC's system of air bases which were conducted by a team of RAND analysts led by Wohlstetter. The findings of these studies (discussed below) were summarised in the ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror’.
NSC 20/4, ‘US objectives with respect to the USSR to counter Soviet threats to US security’, 23 November 23 1948, in Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Caddis (eds), Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950, Columbia University Press, New York, 1978, pp. 203–11.
An extended discussion and analysis of the development of the military planners’ concept of ‘deterrence’ appears in Mark Rix, op. cit., Chapters 4 and 5.
David Allen Rosenberg, ‘U.S. nuclear strategy: theory vs. practice’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1987, p. 20.
David Allen Rosenberg, ‘The origins of overkill: nuclear weapons and American strategy, 1945 1960’, International Security, 7, 4, Spring 1983, p. 9.
Ibid, p. 10 and Rosenberg, op. cit., 1987, p. 21.
Rosenberg, op. cit., 1983, p. 23.
The first of these reports is R-266 (the number which it was assigned at RAND), The Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases, RAND Corporation, April 1954; and, the second, R-290, Protecting US Power to Strike Back in the 1950's and 1960's, RAND Corporation, 1 September 1956.
Brodie revealed this to be the case in B. Brodie, ‘The development of nuclear strategy’, International Security, 2, 4, Spring 1978, pp. 67–8.
This point has been made by Kaplan, op. cit., pp. 109–10.
SAC Commanding General Curtis Le May quoted in D. A. Rosenberg, “A smoking radiating ruin at the end of two hours”: documents on American plans for nuclear war with the Soviet Union, 1954-1955’, International Security, 6, 3, Winter 1981/82, p. 28.
Rosenberg, op. cit., 1983, pp. 47–9.