Abstract
The Western debate often took the appearance of being between a focus on the ‘Soviet threat’ or the ‘nuclear threat’ (‘red or dead’ in the earliest version). This was especially the case at the start of the 1980s as protest movements in Western countries challenged the Reagan Administration’s conviction that most of the world’s security problems could be traced to Moscow. The resultant debate forced into the open many of the particular dilemmas of nuclear strategy and gave strength to those who argued that this dilemma could only be resolved by measures of radical disarmament—multilateral if possible but unilateral if necessary.
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Notes
- 1.
President Ronald Reagan, Address to British Parliament, 8 June 1982, http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/reagan-parliament.htm.
- 2.
President Ronald Reagan, Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida. 8 March 1983, http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/reagan-evil-empire-speech-text/.
- 3.
This point is made with great force in Philip Bobbitt, Democracy and Deterrence: The History and Future of Nuclear Strategy (London: Macmillan, 1988).
- 4.
Quoted in Davies, Limited Nuclear Options, p. 6.
- 5.
Quoted in Richard Burt, New Weapons and Technologies: Debate and Directions (London: IISS, 1976), p. 21. This is an excellent survey of these issues. See also Christoph Bertram (ed.), New Conventional Weapons and East-West Security (Two Parts) (London: IISS, 1978).
- 6.
Michael J. Brenner, ‘Tactical nuclear strategy and European defence: a critical reappraisal’, International Affairs, LI:1 (January 1975).
- 7.
Robert D. McFadden, ‘Samuel T. Cohen: Neutron Bomb Creator Dies at 89’, New York Times (December 1, 2010).
- 8.
Walter Pincus, ‘Neutron Killer Warhead Buried in ERDA Budget’, Washington Post (June 6, 1977). ERDA was the Energy Research & Development Administration.
- 9.
Sherri Wasserman, Neutron Bomb Controversy: A Study in Alliance Politics (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1983). S. T. Cohen, ‘Enhanced radiation weapons: setting the record straight’, Strategic Review (Winter 1978); Fred M. Kaplan. ‘Enhanced radiation weapons’, Scientific American, 238:5 (May 1978).
- 10.
Jimmy Carter oral history interview, November 29, 1982. Can be accessed at: https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-histories/jimmy-carter-oral-history-president-united-states.
- 11.
Helmut Schmidt, ‘The 1977 Alastair Buchan memorial lecture’, Survival, 20:1 (1978).
- 12.
On this set of issues see Richard Burt, ‘The SS-20 and the Euro-strategic balance’, World Today (February 1977); Greg Treverton, ‘Nuclear weapons and the gray area’, Foreign Affairs, LVII (Summer 1979); Freedman, Britain and Nuclear Weapons; G. Philip Hughes, ‘Cutting the Gordian knot: a theatre nuclear force for deterrence in Europe’, Orbis, XXII (Summer 1978).
- 13.
For some interesting essays on the anti-nuclear movements of the 1980s, see Peter Van Den Dungen (ed.), West European Pacifism and the Strategy for Peace (London: Macmillan, 1985). For a rich study with a slightly broader canvas (though confined only to Britain) see Philip Sabin, The Third World War Scare in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1986). On West Germany see David Yost and Thomas Glad, ‘West German party politics and theater nuclear modernization since 1977’, Armed Forces and Society (Summer 1982) and Jeffrey Boutwell, ‘Politics and the peace movement in West Germany’, International Security (Spring 1983). On France, where anti-nuclear protest is most remarkable for its absence, see Jolyon Howorth and Patricia Chilton (eds.), Defence and Dissent in Contemporary France (London: Croom Helm, 1984).
- 14.
See David Capitanchik and Richard Eichenberg, Defence and Public Opinion, Chatham House Paper No. 20 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul for RIIA, 1983).
- 15.
The most quoted was probably that by Colin Gray and Keith Payne from 1980, ‘Victory is possible’, Foreign Policy.
- 16.
International Herald Tribune, 21 October 1981.
- 17.
Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1983).
- 18.
In E. P. Thompson and Dan Smith (eds.), Protest and Survive (London: Penguin, 1980). This book (the title of which is a pun on the British Government’s civil defence leaflet Protect and Survive) provides the most accessible statement of the anti-nuclear movements’ case. Thompson’s most substantial critique of deterrence theory is found in ‘Deterrence and addiction’, included in a collection of essays, E.P. Thompson, Zero Option (London: Merlin Press, 1982).
- 19.
These arguments are addressed in Lawrence Freedman, The Price of Peace: Living with the Nuclear Dilemma (London: Firethorne, 1986), ch. 4.
- 20.
Such as Horst Afheldt of the Max-Planck-Institut. See, for example, his ‘The necessity, preconditions and consequences of a no-first-use policy’ in Frank Blackaby, Jozef Goldblat and Sverre Lodgaard (eds.), No-First Use (London: Taylor & Francis for SIPRI, 1984).
- 21.
Vladimir Bukovsky, ‘The peace movement and the Soviet Union’, Commentary (May 1982).
- 22.
Interview with Randall Forsberg, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, 11/09/1987; Angela Santese, ‘Ronald Reagan, the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign and the Nuclear Scare of the 1980s’, The International History Review, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2017, pp. 496–520; Randall Forsberg, ‘A bilateral nuclear-weapon freeze’, Scientific American 247:5 (November 1982). Senator Edward Kennedy and Senator Mark Hatfield, Freeze: How You Can Prevent Nuclear War (New York: Bantam Books, 1982). For analyses, see Adam Garfinkel, The Politics of the Nuclear Freeze (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1984) and Paul Cole and William J. Taylor (eds.), The Nuclear Freeze Debate (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1983).
- 23.
Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (London: Cape, 1982); The Abolition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 113.
- 24.
Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations (Washington DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1975). Paul J Crutzen and John W. Birks, ‘The atmosphere after a nuclear war: Twilight at noon’, Ambio 11 (203), 1982, pp. 114–25.
- 25.
Carl Sagan, ‘Would nuclear war be the end of the world?’, Parade (30 October 1983). The key scientific paper was Richard Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas Ackerman, and James Pollack, and Carl Sagan, ‘Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of multiple nuclear explosions’, Science, 222 (23 December 1983), pp. 1283–1292 (Known as TTAPS paper after authors initials).
- 26.
Matthias Dörries, ‘The Politics of Atmospheric Sciences: “Nuclear Winter” and Global Climate Change’, Osiris 26 (2011): pp. 198–223.
- 27.
Edward Teller, ‘Climatic Change with nuclear war’, Nature, 318, 14 November 1985. S. Fred Singer, ‘Is the “Nuclear Winter” real?’, Nature, 310, 23 August 1984. Russell Seitz, ‘In from the cold: “nuclear winter” melts down’, The National Interest, 5 (Fall 1986), pp. 3–17. Over time further studies were generally supportive of the science behind the nuclear winter thesis.
- 28.
Carl Sagan, ‘Nuclear war and climatic catastrophe’, Foreign Affairs (Winter 1983/84).
- 29.
Jill Lepore, ‘Autumn of the Atomic Science’, The New Yorker, 30 January 2017; Sagan’s role recounted in Paul Rubinson, Redefining Science: Scientists, the National Security State, and Nuclear Weapons in Cold War America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017); Lawrence Badash A Nuclear Winter’s Tale: Science and Politics in the 1980s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway Merchants of Doubt (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Brian Martin, ‘Nuclear Winter: Science and Politics’, Science and Public Policy, 15:5 (October 1988), pp. 321–34.
- 30.
Theodore Rueter and Thomas Kalil, ‘Review: Nuclear Strategy and Nuclear Winter’, World Politics, Vol. 43, No. 4, July 1991, pp. 587–607; Paul Rubinson, ‘The global effects of nuclear winter: science and antinuclear protest in the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1980s’, Cold War History, 14:1, 2014, pp. 47–69; George Carrier, ‘Nuclear winter: the state of the science’, Issues in Science and Technology (Winter 1985). For a hostile critique, see Russell Seitz, ‘In from the cold: “nuclear winter” melts down’, The National Interest (Fall 1986).
- 31.
National Conference of Catholic Bishops, ‘The challenge of peace: God’s promise and our response’, Origins (National Catholic Documentary Service), vol. 13 (19 May 1983).
- 32.
The report of a working party under the chairmanship of the Bishop of Salisbury, The Church and the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons and the Christian Conscience (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982). A leading British policy-maker who is a practising Catholic argued the moral case for nuclear deterrence in Michael Quinlan, ‘Preventing war’, The Tablet (July 1981). Winning Peace (December 1983).
- 33.
Nikolai Sokov, ‘Nuclear Weapons in Russian National Security Strategy’ in Stephen Blank, ed., Russian Nuclear weapons: Past, Present, and Future (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, 2011), p. 187.
- 34.
Michael Novak, ‘Moral clarity in the nuclear age’, National Review (1 April 1983); Albert Wohlstetter, ‘Bishops, statesmen, and other strategists on the bombing of civilians’, Commentary (June 1983). For a response see Francis X. Winters, ‘Bishops and scholars: the peace pastoral under siege’, The Review of Politics (Winter 1986).
- 35.
Robert Tucker, The Nuclear Debate (New York: Holmes & Meter, 1985). See also Joseph Nye, Nuclear Ethics (New York: The Free Press, 1986), Geoffrey Goodwin (ed.), Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence (London: Croom Helm, 1982).
- 36.
McGeorge Bundy, George F. Kennan, Robert S. McNamara and Gerard Smith, ‘Nuclear weapons and the Atlantic Alliance’, Foreign Affairs (Spring 1982).
- 37.
Robert S. McNamara, ‘The military role of nuclear weapons: perceptions and misperceptions’, Foreign Affairs (Fall 1983), p. 79. He adds ‘I believe they accepted my recommendations’.
- 38.
Fred Iklé, ‘NATO’s “first nuclear use”: a deepening trap?’, Strategic Review (Winter 1980).
- 39.
Karl Kaiser, Georg Leber, Alois Mertes and Franz-Joseph Schulze, ‘Nuclear weapons and the preservation of peace: a German response to no first use’, Foreign Affairs (Summer 1982).
- 40.
J. M. Legge, Theater Nuclear Weapons and the NATO Strategy of Flexible Response.
- 41.
See, for example, John Mearsheimer, ‘Why the Soviets can’t win quickly in Central Europe’, International Security (Summer 1982).
- 42.
Some of the most substantial work of this sort was undertaken under the auspices of the Natural Resources Defense Council who produced a series of Nuclear Weapons Databooks, opening with a volume which underlined the extent and the quality of the US nuclear arsenal: Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin and Milton M. Hoenig, US Nuclear Forces and Capabilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1984). Somewhat less careful is Tom Gervasi, The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy (New York: Harper & Row, 1986) which exhibits many of the faults the author is criticizing.
- 43.
See, for example, Seweryn Bialer and Joan Afferica, ‘Reagan and Russia’, Foreign Affairs (Winter 1982/83).
- 44.
Bruce Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1985); Desmond Ball, Can Nuclear War be Controlled? Adelphi Papers 169 (London: IISS, 1981).
- 45.
Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Weapons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
- 46.
Richard Ned Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).
- 47.
Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985).
- 48.
A debate on the relevance of August 1914 for the contemporary situation was carried out in the pages of International Security. See Stephen Van Evera, ‘The cult of the offensive and the origins of the First World War’ and Jack Snyder, ‘Civil-military relations and the cult of the offensive’ in International Security 9:1 (Summer 1984); Scott Sagan, ‘1914 revisited: allies, offense and instability’, International Security 11:2 (Fall 1986) and correspondence between Snyder and Sagan, International Security, 11:3 (Winter 1986/87).
- 49.
For an interesting compilation of the various positions in the nuclear debate which notes the continuities with previous decades see Robert Levine, The Strategic Nuclear Debate (Santa Monica, Calif.: The RAND Corporation, 1987).
- 50.
Morton Halperin, Nuclear Fallacy: Dispelling the Myth of Nuclear Strategy (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1987); Robert S. McNamara, Blundering into Disaster: Surviving the First Century of the Nuclear Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). They are discussed in Lawrence Freedman ‘I exist: therefore I deter?’, International Security (Summer 1988).
- 51.
Thomas Schelling, ‘What went wrong with arms control?’, Foreign Affairs (Winter 1985/86), p. 233.
- 52.
Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
- 53.
Leon Wieseltier, Nuclear War, Nuclear Peace (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983).
- 54.
McGeorge Bundy, ‘The bishops and the Bomb’, The New York Review (16 June 1983).
- 55.
For a rare attempt to suggest targeting criteria from this perspective (which were essentially geared to terminating hostilities as soon as possible) see Leon Wieseltier, ‘When deterrence fails’, Foreign Affairs (Spring 1985).
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Freedman, L., Michaels, J. (2019). The Rise of Anti-Nuclear Protest. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_33
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