How NATO plans can lead to war
Robert Silver
BLUNDERING INTO DISASTER: SURVIVING THE FIRST CENTURY OF THE NUCLEAR AGE by Robert McNamara
Bloomsbury, £12.95
n 1962, Robert McNamara was Presi- dent Kennedy's secretary for defence. Stewart Alsop, a columnist on the Saturday Evening Post, visited him at the Pentagon. How did he react to new evidence that the Russians were hardening their missile sites? 'Thank God,' said McNamara. The Post printed his view. Congress was out- raged. Calls were made for his resignation, but he survived.
`I wanted the Soviet leaders,' he writes, to have confidence that their forces would survive an American attack and would be capable of retaliating effectively.' An enemy who felt 'cornered, panicky and desperate' in a crisis would be pressured to use its weapons pre-emptively. The theory of mutual deterrence assumes an opponent sure that you, too, will be deterred. Aside from a few split infinitives, this is a brief, crisp, cogent statement, based on university lectures, of the case against current nuclear planning by the West. It includes interesting first-hand insights into the Cuban crisis in 1962. McNamara has more direct political experience of nuclear planning — seven years as defence secret- ary — than anyone else around in NATO, including Lord Carrington and Denis Healey. In the 1960s, he initiated the shift from 'massive retaliation' to 'flexible re- sponse' in NATO strategy. Weapons were graded and an attack would be met at the same level. The West would take every step to reduce the risk of escalation. The shift presupposed adequate conventional forces.
His thesis is that nuclear arms are not weapons in any identifiable sense. Their deployment only makes sense as a deter- rent to the other side's use of its own nuclear missiles. This flies in the face of what has become NATO's war-plan, given its de facto abandonment of flexible re- sponse. Within hours of a Soviet conven- tional attack in Europe, NATO intends to use tactical nuclear weapons. Exercises in the 1950s and the 1970s established that the employment of these missiles, inviting
I
retaliation and escalation, would bring about the deaths of at least two million Europeans.
His brief history of NATO policy in the 1960s reveals that the decision in 1952-3 to use nuclear artillery in response to an attack by tanks was a choice for defence on the cheap. Without it, NATO needed 96 active divisions; with it, only 32. Now, it only needs a decision by each member state, on the lines of Bernard Rogers' proposal, to raise defence spending by four per cent a year, or $20 billion over six years — most of which can be raised through the Trident programme, suitably invested in the interim at the Halifax.
Miscalculation in a crisis, leading to a pre-emptive attack, induced by doubts about the firmness of the deterrent, is one of the two major dangers that East-West relations will lead to a holocaust; a repeat performance of Germany's behaviour in 1914. This is aggravated by the proximity of tactical missiles to the inter-German border, inevitably given their range; McNamara points out that this gives the Russians an incentive to overrun them quickly and prevent their use, and encour- ages the West to use them before they are captured. The other danger is that a conventional attack from the East leads to a tactical response by the West, itself inducing an intercontinental strategit exchange. Star Wars envisages a world without nuclear weapons; under attack, McNamara argues, we would have to respond in kind to tanks, guns and aircraft. 'If then,' he asks, 'why not now?' — a question with Tolstoyan, if not Talmudic overtones.
His ultimate goal is 'mutual deterrence at the lowest force levels consistent with stability — invulnerable forces that can inflict unacceptable damage'; in other words, a balance of terror through strategic minima. This is the logic of the balance that has kept the peace in Europe for 40 years. It is the classical view, which needs to be defended against twin threats. SDI destroys the balance. Missiles cease to be invulnerable, whether they are destroyed in their silos or in the air by satellite. Specialists now agree that an SDI system can only be 95 per cent efficient, potent enough, he argues, to deal with the de- pleted Soviet forces which survive a US first-strike; 'a leaky umbrella offers no protection in a downpour, but is quite useful in a drizzle'. It is an incentive to make sure a first-strike is first. Soviet suspicions make perfect sense.
He is equally refreshing on the topic of a world without nuclear weapons, the official goal on both sides. Anyone who builds even one missile in this utopia will have a unique capacity for blackmail. The ability to make nuclear missiles cannot be abo- lished. The corollary is that the minimum has to be maintained for ever — though McNamara, despite his own logic, cannot quite bring himself to endorse this view.
McNamara is not a genius. He just happens to be able to think out the consequences of different arguments. This is rare in a nuclear world of entrenched postures, party points and experts in bomb-shelters. It may be due to his train- ing as a Harvard MBA. He supplies the tersest analysis on offer of how current NATO plans can directly lead to war and what we can do about it. Step-by-step thinking in the nuclear debate is out of fashion as unilateralists denounce Penta- gon game theory and multilateralists rest their case on 'negotiating from strength'. What this book does is to set out the lasting components of the equation. The seasonal clamour over SDI and arms talks in Gene- va appear, in that context, the devices of a diabolical Svengali, who invents shiny peb- bles to attract us to bury our heads on the beach. As for the British deterrent, it looks like a supreme non-issue, a kind of nation- al Clochemerle.
Previous page
