ATOMIC BOMB.

The first atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico in the United States in July 1945, and the second and third were used against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the next month, bringing World War II in the Pacific to a ferocious close. By this time Germany had surrendered, yet it was the European war, and the prospect of the Nazis getting the bomb first, that provided the stimulus to the wartime development of the bomb, and it was the demands of European security that continued to influence the development, deployment, and strategic thinking surrounding nuclear weapons.

The remarkable continuity of the Cold War that developed following World War II, and the apparent symmetry, with two alliances each dominated by a superpower owning a formidable nuclear arsenal, provided an unusually stable context. It meant that on the one hand there were always strategic reasons to develop new weapons and explore new strategies, yet on the other there was a limited risk of the weapons actually being used in anger. In part this was because of the caution and circumspection induced by the fear of nuclear war. Memoirs and archives all testify to the anxieties felt by political leaders at times of crisis when there was the slightest risk of having to make decisions that could lead to these weapons being used.

ORIGINS

By the late 1930s, scientific breakthroughs in nuclear physics were coming so quickly that the theoretical possibility of creating massive explosions through splitting the individual atoms (nuclear fission) within a critical mass of material (uranium) and so producing a "chain reaction" was coming to be widely recognized. If Germany had not expelled so many of its top scientists because they were Jews, they would have been well placed to turn the developing science into actual weapons. In the event, émigré scientists, first in Britain and then the United States, fearful of this possibility, played critical roles in the wartime race to build the first weapons. Their work was completed just in time for the end of the war, and it is an interesting question for speculation as to what would have happened if there had not been time for the actual use of these weapons. The secret would not have been withheld from the Soviet Union, which was kept well informed by its spies in the Anglo-American project.

After years of air raids of increasing horror, the destructive impact of the first atomic bombs was not in itself so shocking. The Allied air raids against Hamburg and Tokyo inflicted more death and destruction. In addition to the new, insidious feature of radioactivity, the main difference was in their efficiency. One bomb could achieve what would otherwise require the loads of two hundred heavy bombers. In addition, the new weapons were not of great importance in the onset of the Cold War in Europe. It has been argued that their monopolistic position gave the Americans some confidence in their bargaining over the shape of postwar Europe, but while there may have been some momentary hopes of strategic advantage, the administration of Harry S. Truman (1884–1972) could not actually threaten their use so soon after World War II (and there were actually very few weapons available for use), and the Soviet advantage lay in the fact that it was their troops and commissars who were actually controlling developments on the ground in Central and Eastern Europe. Although a combination of events, including the Communist Czech coup (1948) and the Berlin blockade and airlift (1948–1949), convinced the Americans that they had to make a renewed commitment to Europe, reflected in the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in April 1949, this was, at first, essentially a political more than a military move.

The limited potential relevance of the weapons to the fate of Europe was apparently confirmed in August 1949 when it was learned that the Soviet Union had tested its own device. Whatever advantages gained by the United States through its nuclear monopoly would eventually be neutralized. The Truman administration accepted that over time it would be necessary to build up conventional forces to counter Soviet strength on the ground if it wished to prevent the sort of push across the Iron Curtain that was witnessed in the summer of 1950 as communist forces invaded South Korea. As a result the United States and Britain began a major rearmament program.

MASSIVE RETALIATION

To buy time, and because he had no confidence that American restraint would be reciprocated by the Soviet Union, President Truman authorized the development of thermonuclear weapons. The move from fission to fusion weapons, based on the energy generated as atoms combined, was almost as important as the original development of atomic bombs. There was now no natural limit on the destructive power of weapons. Their explosive yields could range from the low kilotons (equivalent to thousands of tons of TNT) to the high megatons (equivalent to millions of tons of TNT). In addition, new production facilities meant that there was a move from scarcity to plenty.

The administration of President Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969), which came to power in January 1953, was sufficiently emboldened by these developments, including the success, after some false starts, of the thermonuclear program, to push nuclear weapons to the center of its strategy. This was in part because of the frustrating experience of the inconclusive conventional war fought in Korea and also because of the developing economic burden of conventional rearmament. So much had now been invested in nuclear weapons that the marginal costs of building up the arsenal made them a relatively cheap option compared with matching the Eastern bloc in conventional weapons. Most importantly, Eisenhower was confident in nuclear deterrence. He did not believe that the Soviet Union was in a rush to go to war and was instead prepared for a long haul, during which both sides might maneuver for strategic advantage and test the other's staying power. In this context he saw the great advantage of nuclear weapons as reminding Moscow just what dangers they would run if they ever tried to break out of the developing Cold War stalemate.

U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles (1888–1959) announced the new strategy in January 1954. He declared that in the future, rather than attempting to maintain large conventional forces around the Sino-Soviet periphery (the two communist giants were still treated as a single entity at this time), a U.S. response to aggression would be "at places and with means of our own choosing." This was interpreted as threatening nuclear attack against targets in the Soviet Union and China in response to conventional aggression anywhere in the world, and the doctrine became known as "massive retaliation." This was probably intended to be of more relevance to areas other than Europe. The French were battling it out in Vietnam at the time, and Eisenhower had been influenced by the apparent role of nuclear threats in getting the Soviets to agree to an armistice in the Korean War. The doctrine was widely criticized for placing undue reliance on nuclear threats, which would become less credible as Soviet nuclear strength grew. Few doubted that the United States would respond vigorously to any challenge in Europe, but the concern was that a limited challenge elsewhere would find the United States with few options other than the nuclear with which to respond, leaving it with a dire choice between "suicide or surrender."

Yet while the Eisenhower administration clearly put Europe in a higher category than its other security commitments, and did not remove from the continent the conventional forces that had been sent during the alarms of the early 1950s, the dependence on nuclear deterrence created problems. There was bound to be some doubt as to whether the Americans really would be prepared to sacrifice New York or Chicago for Paris or London. Furthermore, the allies were responsible for the security of the western part of a divided Germany and, much more difficult, the western part of a divided Berlin, stuck well inside East Germany and not obviously defensible by conventional means. Under the conventional buildup set in motion under the Truman administration, the United States always planned to rearm West Germany. So soon after the Nazi era, this was bound to be controversial. It took until 1954 for a formula to be found by which West Germany rearmed but was permitted no chemical or nuclear weapons and was part of NATO's military command. In return, the West German government sought a commitment by its new allies to the concept of "forward defense," so that any aggression would be held at the inner-German border, for so much of its population and industry was concentrated close to this border. The German fear was that otherwise its territory would be used to provide a battleground, to be sacrificed, in extremis, to gain time for reinforcements to arrive from North America. Now that NATO was not going to attempt to match Soviet conventional forces, forward defense meant, in effect, that nuclear deterrence was linked to this border.

European governments came to see great advantages in the Eisenhower approach. It did not rely on a readiness to fight conventional wars, which could be almost as devastating for the continent as a nuclear war. One of the problems with conventional deterrence was that Moscow would not feel that its own territory would be at risk so long as the combat could be confined to the center of Europe. In addition, this arrangement saved the Europeans the expense of sustaining large-scale conventional forces, especially as they were pessimistic as to the possibility of ever matching Warsaw Pact strength. Despite the evident Soviet concern over what it saw to be the anomalous position of West Berlin, NATO countries grew increasingly doubtful that there was a serious risk of a World War III.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND EUROPEAN SECURITY

An important shift in American thinking came when John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963) became president in January 1961. Kennedy was not so sanguine about Soviet intentions, especially when he faced an early and severe crisis over West Berlin, which peaked when the Berlin Wall was constructed in August 1961. Nor did he and his senior aides feel any confidence in nuclear threats given the growing Soviet capacity for retaliation. How could a credible deterrent be fashioned out of an incredible nuclear threat? Kennedy wanted NATO to commit extra forces to raise the nuclear threshold—that is, the point at which nuclear weapons would be necessary to stave off conventional defeat. He was fortified by analyses that suggested that previous intelligence assessments had exaggerated the strength of the Warsaw Pact.

European governments resisted these arguments strongly. They argued that all war had to be deterred, not just nuclear war, and that conventional buildups would be expensive and ineffectual. The Americans kept up the pressure, but after the 1961 Berlin crisis (and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis), concern about a European war subsided. Meanwhile, demands in Vietnam reduced the spare military capacity of the United States. In 1967 a compromise was found in the doctrine of "flexible response." The Europeans recognized the U.S. requirement for an extended conventional stage, so that the first shots across the Iron Curtain would not lead automatically to a nuclear holocaust, and the United States accepted the need for a clear link between a land war in Europe and its own strategic nuclear arsenal. If the alliance looked like it was being overrun as a result of the conventional superiority of the Warsaw Pact, NATO reserved for itself the option of being the first to use nuclear weapons.

This link would be provided by short-range, tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs). These had first been introduced into the NATO inventory during the 1950s as nuclear equivalents to all types of conventional munitions—from mortars and artillery shells to air-delivered bombs and depth-charges, and even mines. There was a hope that this extra firepower would make it possible to take on communists in limited nuclear wars without resorting to incredible threats of massive retaliation. Simulations of their use during the 1950s soon demonstrated that they were not just more powerful conventional weapons, but would lead to great death and destruction, including among the people supposedly being defended. Warsaw Pact forces would obtain comparable weapons of their own and would neutralize any Western advantage. Nor could there be confidence that nuclear use, once begun, would stop with TNWs. There could soon be escalation to strategic—intercontinental—nuclear use.

Though TNWs could not be considered ordinary weapons of war, their close integration with conventional forces meant that they were more likely than strategic forces to get entangled in a land war in Europe. This created an added risk for the Soviet Union. It was hard to demonstrate that under any circumstances nuclear war would be a rational option for NATO leaders, but once a major war was under way the circumstances would not be conducive to rationality and it was possible that, in the heat of the moment, some nuclear use might be authorized. The dynamics of escalation could lead to a potentially catastrophic conclusion. Deterrence did not require certainty that nuclear weapons would be used—only a small possibility. So TNWs provided a demonstration of the extent to which the fate of both superpowers was linked to stability in the center of Europe.

This meant that deterrence would depend less on the implementation of a clear threat but a risk of matters getting out of control, which was an uncomfortable prospect. There was an intense alliance debate in the late 1970s over how to replace the first generation of TNWs. If they were made smaller and more precise, then this would imply a readiness to use them to fight a nuclear war rather than simply deter, and a return to the idea that they were just more powerful forms of conventional weapons. This was the purpose of the so-called "neutron bomb" (actually a thermonuclear missile warhead or artillery shell of enhanced radiation and reduced blast), which was criticized for blurring the boundary between conventional and nuclear weapons and thereby making it much easier to go nuclear.

MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION

The debate over the neutron bomb, which ended with President Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) deciding not to deploy it, was the first major public discussion of these weapons since the 1950s. During the intervening years, most of the attention had been taken up with the problem of the strategic nuclear balance. The doctrine of massive retaliation had assumed that U.S. nuclear superiority could last for some time, but the Americans were slow off the mark when it came to developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and were stung when the Soviet Union apparently stole the lead, and undermined its reputation for technological inferiority, when it launched the first artificial Earth satellite (Sputnik 1) in October 1957, not long after it had also tested the first ICBM. Now the fear was of Soviet superiority, and there was talk of a missile gap. Of particular concern was that the Soviets might turn their advantage into a first strike capability, so that they could mount a surprise attack against U.S. air and missile bases and so render retaliation impossible. This would be the only way to "win" a nuclear war. This possibility would be denied with the development of a second-strike capability, the capacity to launch a devastating riposte even after absorbing an enemy attempt at a first strike. If both sides developed first-strike capabilities then future crises would be very tense, because it would create pressure to gain the advantage by preemption. On the other hand, if both sides enjoyed second-strike capabilities then the situation should be more stable, as there would be no premium attached to striking first.

In the event, technological developments supported the second strike. As ICBMs were deployed by the United States in the early 1960s, they were placed in hardened underground silos, so that an unlikely direct hit would be required to destroy them. Harder to hit because they would be harder to find would be submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). In principle, effective defenses might shore up a first-strike capability, but the standards for defense against nuclear weapons had to be much higher than for conventional air raids, because of the impact of just one offensive weapon getting through—and the defensive systems would have to cope with thousands. Any improvements in the radars and anti-missile missiles were countered by even greater improvements in offensive systems—notably multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs) that could swamp any defenses, especially when combined with decoys. Civil defense promised scant protection to civilians: at best, there might be some chance of avoiding exposure to nuclear fallout.

During the 1960s, the U.S. secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara (b. 1916) argued that the situation was one of "mutual assured destruction" (which soon became known by its acronym MAD). This meant that the two superpowers were each able to impose "unacceptable damage" (defined as 25 percent of population and 50 percent of industry). This he considered the source of stability and he urged that all policies, from new weapons procurement to arms control measures, be geared toward this end. Although this approach encountered strong opposition, it was, by and large, followed through the Richard Nixon (1913–1994) and Carter administrations. Opponents warned that if MAD failed to deter, then any war would soon lead to genocide, and also that it suggested that nuclear weapons could only be used to deter other nuclear weapons, thereby adding to the risk of conventional aggression and so undermining the commitments made to allies to use nuclear weapons first on their behalf. Nor, it was argued, was there evidence that the Soviet Union had signed up to this theory. Soviet strategy appeared to envisage using nuclear weapons to obtain a decisive military advantage and reducing the damage that an enemy might do to Soviet territory (if necessary, by launching preemptive strikes).

The main effort to break out of MAD was made by President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) in the 1980s. Initially, he continued with the search for offensive nuclear operations to allow the United States to "prevail" in a protracted war with the Soviet Union, but his most significant initiative was to call for a true ballistic missile defense system that could protect lives rather than avenge them, thereby rendering nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." The science was bound to defeat the ambition, given the diverse means of delivering nuclear weapons. Reagan concluded with increasingly radical arms control proposals developed in dialogue with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (b.1931) from 1985. In January 1986, Gorbachev set out a radical disarmament agenda leading toward a nuclear-free world by the end of the century, and Reagan was clearly not unsympathetic to this vision. The only difference was that he saw his strategic defense initiative fitting in with this vision and Gorbachev did not.

BEYOND DETERRENCE

The shared disarmament agenda constituted a formidable challenge to the orthodox view that nuclear weapons were vital to West European security in the face of preponderant Soviet conventional forces. Yet in practice the Europeans tolerated the steady decline in the credibility of threats to use nuclear weapons first. They concluded that deterrence could survive with only the slightest risk of nuclear use, especially when it was so hard to construct a realistic scenario for a European war. In addition, Europe's own populations were unenthusiastic about allowing their security to depend on nuclear threats. This became apparent following NATO's decision in 1979 to modernize its intermediate nuclear forces (INF) with the Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) and the Tomahawk cruise missile. The idea was to convince the Soviet Union that it could be put directly at risk by systems based in Europe in a way that could not be achieved by TNWs. European governments had also expressed concern that during the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II, signed in 1979), the United States concentrated on achieving symmetry between the nuclear forces of the two superpowers, while paying little attention to the superiority within the European theater of the Warsaw Pact in both nuclear and conventional weapons. However, after NATO's 1979 decision, large-scale protests sprang up in Europe and North America. Voicing a concern that a new arms race was getting under way in Europe, the protests took on special urgency following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the election of the hawkish Ronald Reagan.

The protests encouraged NATO to put less public stress on the requirements of flexible response and more on the need to match the deployment of the Soviet intermediate-range SS-20. In November 1981, at a time when there was real doubt that the NATO missiles would ever be deployed, Reagan offered to abandon the program if all SS-20s were removed. This "zero option" was rejected. The measure of the change during that decade was that, once deployment had taken place, Gorbachev agreed to the zero option. In December 1987, Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

Reagan's interest in a nuclear-free world encouraged discussion about the possibility of a European nuclear force, independent of the United States, based on the French and British capabilities. The United Kingdom had always, officially at least, committed its strategic nuclear forces (which since the late 1960s had been SLBMs) to NATO. Britain's rationale for maintaining a national nuclear force involved a combination of the political influence that could be brought to bear on its allies, especially the United States, and a claim to be contributing to the overall deterrent posture. France, by contrast, had always had a much more nationalistic rationale, although it had claimed that its force de frappe would defend allies. Neither country was eager or really able to take over from the United States the broader deterrent role; nor did their allies see them in that role. The alternative to reinforcing deterrence was to introduce new TNWs, but the Germans could see that these would mean that any nuclear war would be confined to its soil (East and West), and the political climate was now against any new nuclear systems. Soon the whole issue appeared to be irrelevant as European communism collapsed and the Cold War could be declared over. There was nothing left to deter, while the potential targets for NATO's short-range nuclear missiles were embracing liberal democracy and capitalism.

AFTER THE COLD WAR

The traditional calculus of European security was turned upside down. NATO now had conventional superiority—against all comers—and it was Russia that was considering using nuclear first-use threats to shore up its security position. The nuclear danger in Europe was soon seen to be less the traditional threat of a rising and radical great power and more chronic weakness in a declining great power, leading to questions about the control of the nuclear systems within the former Soviet Union, and the revival of older conflicts and rivalries within Europe, suppressed during the Cold War. Instead of moves to introduce new TNWs, the Americans moved to encourage Russians to eliminate all of their own, to prevent them falling into the wrong hands, and triggered the process by announcing the withdrawal of their systems from land and sea deployments. In the strategic arms reduction talks, both sides agreed to progressive reductions in the size of their arsenals, with the main limiting factor the cost of their decommissioning.

While relations between the old nuclear antagonists had been transformed, new nuclear powers were starting to emerge. After the First Persian Gulf War in 1991, it was revealed just how advanced Iraq had become in its nuclear capability. During the 1990s concerns also grew about Iran and North Korea, while India and Pakistan actually tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Within Europe the major risk of proliferation came with the breakup of the former Soviet Union, but Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan accepted that they could not hold on to the systems inherited from the Soviet Union. NATO countries took the view that so long as other states had nuclear arsenals, and even a capacity to inflict death and destruction on a massive scale by other means, then it was only prudent to sustain arsenals of their own. What was less clear was whether they would consider nuclear use in response to the use of chemical or biological weapons. In practice because of conventional superiority, particularly in air power, they would have plenty of alternative means of responding without having to inflict massive destruction themselves.

The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on 11 September 2001 raised the specter of superterrorists gaining access to nuclear or, more likely, chemical or biological weapons. This specter was used to justify the U.S.- and U.K.-led war against Iraq beginning in 2003, although the lack of subsequent evidence of these capabilities undermined the rationale. This episode nonetheless illustrated the extent to which nuclear weapons, having first been developed in the context of titanic struggles between great powers, when major centers of population had come to appear as natural and legitimate targets for attack, now had to be understood in a world in which the major powers were at peace, and conventional forces could be used with precision, but where weak powers and sub-state groups might try to gain some artificial strength through gaining access to the most destructive weapons.

See alsoCold War; Disarmament; Gorbachev, Mikhail; NATO; Nuclear Weapons; Soviet Union; World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Freedman, Lawrence. The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. 3rd ed. Houndmills, U.K., 2003. Summarizes the history of strategic thought in this area.

Gaddis, John Lewis, Philip H. Gordon, Ernest R. May, and Jonathan Rosenberg, eds. Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy since 1945. Oxford, U.K., 1999. Considers the impact on policymakers.

Garthoff, Raymond. The Great Transition: American Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War. Washington, D.C., 1994. An excellent discussion of the interaction of nuclear weapons and foreign policy as the Cold War came to an end.

Heuser, Beatrice. NATO, Britain, France, and the FRG: Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe, 1949–2000. New York, 1997. Covers the key debates within West European countries.

Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb. New Haven, Conn., 1994. The history of the early Soviet program.

Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York, 1986. Author wrote the best books on the development of the first nuclear weapons.

——. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. New York, 1995.

Sagan, Scott D., and Kenneth N. Waltz. The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate. New York, 1995. Debates the big issues of post–Cold War nuclear war policy.

Zubok, Vladislav, and Constantine Pleshakov. Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev. Cambridge, Mass., 1996.

Lawrence Freedman