Allocation Politics and the Arms Race: A Soviet Constituency for Arms Control

Abstract

When it comes to dealing with the Soviets, US policy in the 1980s seems to follow the scholarship of the 1970s. It was then that American commentators discovered Marshal Sokolovskii, whose defence philosophy we still hear quoted as the standard reference for Soviet thought.¹ It was also then that the Defence Minister in Moscow (until 1976 Marshal Grechko) articulated his pre-emptive strategies for Soviet nuclear weapons and demanded superiority over the arsenals of capitalism. Richard Pipes’s classic account of warfighting elements in Moscow’s strategic doctrine — his 1977 Commentary article, ‘Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War’ — depicted Soviet policy as ‘diametrically opposite’ to US thinking on deterrence: ‘not deterrence but victory, not sufficiency in weapons but superiority, not retaliation but offensive action.’²