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Nuclear War and Nuclear Fear in the 1970s and 1980s

Nicholas Thompson Journal of Contemporary History 2011 46: 136 DOI: 10.1177/0022009410383298 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jch.sagepub.com/content/46/1/136.citation

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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright ! 2011 The Author. Vol. 46(1), 136149. ISSN 0022-0094. DOI: 10.1177/0022009410383298

Nicholas Thompson

Nuclear War and Nuclear Fear in the 1970s and 1980s

In September 1949, brooding over the recent discovery that the Soviet Union had tested an atomic weapon, George Kennan wrote a telling note in his diary. Then the head of the State Departments Policy Planning Staff, Kennan declared that what matters are intentions, rather than the capabilities of other nations. His compatriots obsession with the latter, he added, meant that the United States was drifting toward a morbid preoccupation with the fact that the Russians conceivably could drop atomic bombs on this country.1 Kennans point was insightful, but of limited value. The United States could not really know the Soviets intentions, then or at any other point during the Cold War. Intentions can be partially determined in many different ways: through the help of spies, by careful analysis of shifting capabilities, with close analysis of public statements. But for decades a lack of understanding of what Moscow wanted, or what it planned to do, was one of the biggest weaknesses of the United States foreign policy. It was also the source of some of the most intense debates of the Cold War: did the Soviet Union have any plans of launching a surprise nuclear strike against the United States? Did it think that it could, in some sense, win a nuclear conict; or was it fully persuaded that this was impossible because of the logic of mutually assured destruction? Did it really have ambitions to turn western Europe communist? With the opening of Soviet archives, historians have come closer to answering some of these questions. And with the revelation of one set of documents in particular, another substantial step can be made. Those documents are a set of interviews conducted by a researcher named John Hines, of the BDM Corporation, between 1990 and 1994 and obtained by this author through the Freedom of Information Act. The interviews were commissioned by Andrew Marshall in the Defense Departments Ofce of Net Assessment and conducted between 1990 and 1994.2 They appear in a
The documents upon which this paper is based are available online at http:// thehawkandthedove.nickthompson.com. 1 George Kennan diary entry, 26 Sept. 1949, George F. Kennan papers, Mudd Library, Princeton, box 1R. 2 John G. Hines, Ellis M. Mishulovich, and John F. Shull, Soviet Intentions, 19651985, vol. 1, An Analytical Comparison of U.S.-Soviet Assessments during the Cold War, and vol. 2, Soviet Post-Cold War Testimonial Evidence (Germantown, MD, 1995).

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two-volume document titled Soviet Intentions, 19651985, obtained by the author via the Freedom of Information Act and made public in the fall of 2009 by the National Security Archive.3 For many years, only one scholar, John Battilega, had drawn on the interviews,4 with others citing his work.5 In the spring of 2009, another scholar, Gordon Barrass, published a book that drew on the interviews.6 But for the most part, these conversations remained buried and their conclusions have not been fully incorporated by Cold War historians. The main interviewer, John Hines, and his partners, Ellis Mishulovich and John Shull, talked to 22 Soviet military planners and strategists, most of whom are virtually unknown to American Cold War literature.7 Some of the subjects sat for multiple interviews, and the General Staff ofcer with prime responsibilities in these matters, Andrian Danilevich, participated in seven. The rst of his talks took place on 5 March 1990, 21 months before the collapse of his political order; the last on 9 December 1994, almost halfway through the term of Boris Yeltsin. Hiness task was to gain a greater understanding of Soviet strategy and the bureaucratic dynamics driving it. He formulated a set of specic questions to ask his subjects, and many respondents appear to have been quite forthcoming. Hines had the great fortune of conducting the interviews during a relative high point in the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, and during a brief window when Soviet war strategists felt free to talk. Nonetheless, there are many topics left uncovered there is almost nothing, for example, on Soviet-American tensions over Germany, one of the core issues of the Cold War. In an introductory note, Marshall praises the interviews for enhancing our understanding of the differences in how Washington and Moscow developed and operated their nuclear arsenals. But he also adds that numerous issues were not fully resolved, in part because the report was not completed before Hines left BDM. In particular, he notes the disconnect between Soviet doctrine and observed force structure.8 Interviews are of course biased sources. Subjects inate their own import, remember selectively, or tell their interviewer what they think he wants to hear. For this reason, all of the statements in Soviet Intentions should be somewhat

3 These interviews are available on the website of the National Security Archive: http:// www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb285/index.htm, accessed by author on 30 December 2009. 4 John A. Battilega, Soviet Views of Nuclear Warfare: The Post-Cold War Interviews, in Henry D. Sokolski (ed.), Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, its Origins and Practice (Carlisle, PA, 2004), 15174. 5 See for example Peter Scoblic, U.S. vs. Them (New York 2008), 109. 6 Gordon Barrass, The Great Cold War: A Journey through the Hall of Mirrors (Stanford, CA, 2009). 7 Also included in the document are notes from interviews with American defense officials: Harold Brown, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Fred Ikle, Robert Komer, Andrew Marshall, Rod McDaniel, and James Schlesinger. These interviews are of limited value, since the information and viewpoints contained in them have since been published in numerous other places. 8 Andrew Marshall, memorandum for distribution, Hines, vol. 1: unnumbered first page of introduction.

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discounted. That said, there is good reason that Marshall took the results seriously.9 Hines interviewed extensively and in Russian. Some statements seem aimed at making the Soviet Union appear softer to American eyes; but others have the opposite effect. While Hines did not get conclusive answers on certain topics and there were many more questions central to the Cold War that he never asked his style and technique produced a great deal of valuable insights. Many of his ndings were further conrmed during a set of follow-up interviews with some of the surviving subjects, which were conducted by this author in Moscow in 2009. Perhaps the most early dramatic story in the Hines interviews comes from 1972, when Leonid Brezhnev was being briefed by his advisers on the consequences of a massive out-of-the-blue nuclear strike by the United States. Eighty million Soviets would be dead; the armed forces would be reduced to onethousandth of their strength; the European part of the Soviet Union would be laid waste by radiation. The country would be totally ruined; yet the General Secretary, assuming he somehow survived, would be forced to respond. Brezhnev was terried by the facts. But what came next rattled him more. The presentation was part of a drill, and for the next step, he would have to press a literal button that would launch three ICBMs with dummy warheads. The General Secretary was visibly shaken and pale and his hand trembled, as the time came. Standing next to Defense Minister Andrei Grechko, he asked, several times over, whether his next action would have any realworld consequences. Andrei Antonovich, are you sure this is just an exercise?10 The story of Brezhnev and the button is particularly appropriate, not just because of its evident drama. But it demonstrates one of the central conclusions that follows from reading all of the interviews: Soviet war planning was neither as hard-hearted, nor as sophisticated, as many Americans believed. Moscows war plans were not detailed; its weapons purchases were not the fruit of complicated strategic decisions made by men trained in game theory; and Soviet leaders had no desire to launch a rst strike against the United States. Policies were unco-ordinated and improvised; decisions came out of bureaucratic wrangling and inefciency. The Soviet war planners, it seems, were quite a bit like their American counterparts. In that regard, Soviet intentions seem to have been much like what the doves, like Kennan, described. But evidence from these new documents does not, by any means, prove that the hawks were routed in the grand American debate. In some ways, particularly concerning Soviet strategy once a war had started, Moscow appears likely to have behaved in just the terrifying way that the hawks expected. The rst specic dividing line between the hawks and the doves in the United States was whether the Soviet Union actually had any specic intention
9 Marshall, interview with author, 9 October 2008. 10 Andrian Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 27.

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of launching a nuclear surprise attack. Here, the answer seems close to unambiguous. A rst strike was not even discussed, said Igor Illarionov, an aide to Defense Minister Ustinov, describing the post-Khrushchev era. I dont know of a single document or discussion in which a rst-strike doctrine was adopted.11 Varfolomei Korobushin, Deputy Chief of Staff for the strategic rocket forces, added, We had no intention of initiating a rst strike.12 The Soviet armed forces did not plan to use nuclear weapons rst and were forbidden to exercise initiation of nuclear use, said Gen. Makhmut Gareev, Deputy Chief of the General Staff for scientic work and operational readiness. All exercises, tactical to operational-strategic, passed through my hands from 1974 to 1988. Before that I was assigned to high-level staff and command positions in various western military districts, and I would almost certainly have known if such a scenario were used.13 Danilevich admitted that a few rogues within the Soviet system wanted a rst strike notably Grechko but their individual views did not come close to ofcial policy. Danilevich reected: We never had a single thought of a rst strike against the US. I mean in a practical, not theoretical sense. Theoretically there were mountains of plans and writing, and exercises. But in practice, to hold discussions at the political level to decide such questions, this was absolutely out of the question. The respondent who came nearest to asserting that the Soviets considered a rst strike was Viktor Surikov, president of the Institute for Defense Studies. Insisting that the United States had a policy of striking pre-emptively in a time of crisis, Surikov said that the Soviets had entertained the same thoughts, primarily because truly knowledgeable military and civilian leaders simply did not believe Soviet systems had the reliability to ride out an attack and respond effectively, if at all.14 But Surikov did not say that the Soviet Union ever planned such an assault, or even that it had built its forces with an eye to force concessions by threatening to launch a specter repeatedly raised by American hardliners in the 1970s and 1980s. His point was that the Soviet Union would meet rising pressure, at some point, with an attack. Former general staff ofcer Victor Starodubov made a similar point in a 1994 round table between American and Soviet nuclear ofcials.15 The interviewees even deny that a rst strike had been a serious contingency during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The weapons sent to Cuba were aimed at American cities, not weapons sites.16 But in October 1962, when
11 Igor Illarionov, in Hines, vol. 2, 80. 12 Varfolomei Korobushin, in Hines, vol. 2, 108. 13 Makhmut Gareev, in Hines, vol. 2, 74. 14 Viktor Surikov, in Hines, vol. 2, 134. 15 Victor Starodubov, quoted in Salt II and the Growth of Mistrust, A Conference of US and Russian Policy-makers and Scholars held at Musgrove Plantation, St Simons Island, Georgia, 69 May 1994, 33. 16 Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 38.

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nuclear war was a real possibility, the question of a preemptive strike was not considered, said Danilevich.17 In fact, two decades later, the Soviets would actually have to convince Cuba of the folly of a nuclear attack. In the early 1980s Fidel Castro pressed hard for a tougher Soviet line against the U.S. up to and including possible nuclear strikes, Danilevich said. The GS had to actively disabuse him of this view by spelling out the ecological consequences for Cuba of a Soviet strike against the U.S. This changed Castros positions considerably.18 Though the Soviets didnt plan to launch an act of total aggression, they dreaded that the United States would. In fact, they assumed that this was the core of modern US doctrine. Korobushin declared that: Throughout the mid1970s and up through the mid-1980s, I rmly believed that the U.S. was willing and capable of a rst strike against us. NATOs ofcial stance, which did not rule out this possibility, only afrmed my belief that this was possible. We were very much afraid.19 In 2009, several Soviet defense ofcials were asked whether tensions would have been reduced if the United States had declared a policy of no rst use of nuclear weapons in the early 1980s as Kennan advocated, against the objections of many people, including his long-time rival Paul Nitze.20 Unanimously, the Soviets said that it would have made a difference. Tensions were so high, said Viktor Koltunov, a Soviet arms negotiator and defense ofcial, that announcing a policy of no rst use would really have had a lot of impact.21 The Soviets believed this partly out of fear. Russia had been invaded repeatedly, from every direction except the far north, for centuries; and Hitler had stunned the country with his surprise invasion in 1941, beginning a war in which many of the interview subjects had fought. But their observations counted as much as their psychology. They noted that the United States even talked openly of selective strikes against the Soviet Union: PD 59,22 a Carter administration doctrine that declared that the United States would respond to certain kinds of Soviet conventional aggression with selective nuclear strikes.23 But the most convincing, or at least the most cited, evidence of Americas nefarious purposes came from Soviet satellite intelligence that American ICBMs were grouped closely together, not well protected by silos, and spaced near command centers. Surely, such poorly defended missiles couldnt be intended for retaliatory purposes? These observations, according to Vitalii Tsygichko, convinced the General Staff that U.S. land-based ICBMs were not intended to
17 Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 61. 18 Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 28. 19 Korobushin, in Hines, vol. 2, 106. 20 Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and The Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (New York 2009). 21 Viktor Koltunov, author interview, 13 February 2009. Also Nikolai Detinov, author interview, 11 February 2009 and Vladimir Dvorkin, author interview, 12 February 2009. 22 PD 59: Jimmy Carter, Presidential Directive 59: Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy, 25 July 1980. 23 Hines, vol. 1, 2.

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ride out an attack but instead were rst-strike weapons and were routinely referred to as such by Soviet military planners in all subsequent discussions and internal writings.24 Ironically, at the same time Soviet silo hardening had convinced Americans of Moscows aggressive intentions and its desired ability to ght a prolonged nuclear war. According to the 1976 analysis of Team B, an outside group of conservative military experts brought in to evaluate the CIAs analysis of Soviet intentions, this hardening was designed to provide a much higher level of survivability than that planned by the Western world. It represents clear evidence of the Soviet desire to achieve a nuclear war ghting capability in contradiction to the mutual deterrence concepts of the West.25 In other words, Washington scared Moscow by not hardening silos, while Moscow scared Washington by doing so. The lack of a rst-strike strategy did not, however, mean that the Kremlin was in the hands of Boy Scouts, or that they had a prohibition against using weapons in a conict. Until the early 1980s when they realized that war would cause fatal damage to the country and perhaps the planet the Soviet leadership expected to prevail in a nuclear confrontation if it came. In fact, in some ways, these interviews conrm the central premise of the Team B report and of hawks like Nitze. We considered that we held advantages in certain areas, such as throw-weight, land-based systems, in control systems, in silo protection, in number of weapons, so we thought we could win a nuclear war, said Danilevich.26 His statement carries more than a faint echo of the arguments put forth by Richard Pipes in a famous 1977 article titled, Why the Soviet Union Thinks it Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War.27 In his remarkably detailed book The Collapse of the Soviet Military, William Odom describes a debate in the United States about whether the Soviet Union was building nuclear weapons merely to deter a nuclear conict, or whether it was doing so to prevail if one were to come.28 These interviews add credence to his conclusions that the Soviets were indeed building their forces to ght a conict. Perhaps more ominously, the principal Soviet strategy by the mid-1970s was launch under attack. Incoming missiles would lead to an immediate, at-out response aiming at American cities instead of at the (presumably empty) silos.29 [Launch under attack] was the basis for our thinking until recently, said Danilevich in 1992.30 In the 2009 interviews, several Soviet arms ofcials
24 Vitalii Tsygichko, in Hines, vol. 2, 151. 25 United States, Central Intelligence Agency (December 1976), Intelligence community experiment in competitive analysis: Soviet strategic objectives, an alternate view: Report of Team B. Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, 25. 26 Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 29. 27 Richard Pipes, Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War, Commentary 64 (July 1977), 2134. 28 William E. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military, (New Haven, CT, 1998), 6672. 29 Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 31. 30 Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 31.

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unanimously said that Moscow had every intention of greeting even a limited American strike with a full response.31 This policy wasnt realistic in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union depended on liquid fuel weapons, which would take hours to prepare for launching.32 Gradually the missiles improved, so that they would take only an hour or two. In 1970, the Soviet Union acquired the R-100, which had a ready time of 12 minutes.33 Retaliation could now be instant. Several of those interviewed by Hines in fact expressed great pride in this potential retaliation. Korubushin said that our
satellites were able to detect a strategic missile attack upon launch, approximately 30 minutes from impact but we did not consider the attack conrmed until our radar conrmed the trajectory to target approximately 14 minutes prior to the rst splash. Yet our control system was so well prepared that this was more than enough time to launch a retaliatory strike, even if it took the leadership over 10 minutes to make a decision. It took just 13 seconds to deliver the decision from Moscow to all of the launch sites in the Soviet Union . . . This shows that we were preparing only for a retaliatory-meeting strike. Why else would we have spent billions of rubles to design and build such a sophisticated command and control system?34

The retaliation was to be instant as well as massive. We would answer with full force to any use of weapons on the part of the Americans, no matter how limited, said Korobushin. We never conducted any exercises using selective strikes, and I know because I participated in all our nuclear exercises. I suggested to Akhromeev that we conduct exercises using limited strikes, but he rejected this idea.35 These views, again, were conrmed in follow-up interviews in 2009. If war had come, its almost certain that it would quickly have turned into a massive conagration.36 There was even a plan to retaliate if the entire command and control structure had been wiped out through the workings of something that can reasonably be called a doomsday machine. Called Dead Hand, the goal of the device described in the interviews was to automatically direct full-scale retaliation, even with everyone in the Kremlin dead and all normal lines of communication severed. The system revolved around command missiles hidden away and protected in heavily hardened silos designed to withstand extraordinary blasts, as well as massive electro-magnetic pulses. Each missile had the launch codes that could re off a eet of ICBMs on the ground that were targeted at American cities. The command missiles would soar above the radioactive ruin and send down low-frequency radio wave signals that would start the counter-attack.
31 Dvorkin, author interview, 12 February 2009; Tsygichko, author interview, 12 February 2009. 32 Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 39. 33 Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 61. 34 Korobushin, in Hines, vol. 2, 108. 35 Korobushin, in Hines, Vol. 2, 107. 36 Koltunov, author interview, 13 February 2009; Tsygichko, author interview, 12 February 2009; Dvorkin, author interview, 12 February 2009.

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Who would issue the order to launch the command missiles? Ideally, someone high up in the Kremlin. But if everyone was dead, according to two of the interviews, the missiles could just launch themselves as long as some authorized person had unblocked them, in the hours or minutes before being blown up. After that safety was removed, according to Vitalii Kataev, senior advisor to the chairman of the Central Committee Defense Industry Department, launch control would depend on
local automatic triggers associated with each command missile. The triggers, fed by numerous sensors, will launch its local command missile and, in turn, its associated cluster of ICBMs once the sensors are excited by the light, or seismic shock, or radiation, or atmospheric density associated with an incoming nuclear strike.37

His statement was conrmed by Korobushin.38 Its extremely likely, however, that Kataev and Korobushin were either slightly mistaken, or deliberately misleading, in what they said. Several Soviet military ofcials denied in 2009 interviews that such a doomsday system had ever gone into active use.39 And Danilevich said that top defense leaders did discuss the idea, but that they ultimately rejected completing it. It is very dangerous because it can cause accidental nuclear war with unpredictable consequences. So this idea was rejected and it was not developed in practice.40 Surikov was even more precise. He claimed that he and his subordinates had indeed designed such a system and presented it to the Central Committee Secretary responsible for military industry. He got the green light to proceed, but was ultimately thwarted by Marshal Akhromeev, Chief of the General Staff. As a result of this rejection, the Dead Hand trigger mechanism was never realized.41 The most likely answer is that the Soviet Union did indeed plan for a fully automatic response system, but that it was rejected.42 Instead, the military built a semi-automatic system called Perimeter.43 This system, the details of which have been published before,44 and which were conrmed in a 2009 interview,45 works just like the one Kataev described, with one signicant difference. After the system has been unlocked, and after the sensors have identied that a nuclear bomb has struck the Soviet Union, a military ofcial still has to authorize the nal launch. An automated system can delegate control from the
37 Vitalii Kataev, in Hines, vol. 2, 100. 38 Korobushin, in Hines, vol. 2, 107. 39 Dvorkin, author interview, 12 February 2009; Detinov, author interview, 11 February 2009. 40 Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 63. 41 Surikov, in Hines, vol. 2, 135. 42 Nicholas Thompson, Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine, Wired Magazine, October 2009; http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf_deadhand? currentPageall, accessed by author on 30 December 2009. 43 Bruce Blair, Global Zero Alert for Nuclear Forces (Washington, DC, 1995), 45. 44 Pavel Podvig (ed.), Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 65. 45 Valery Yarynich, author interview, 20 March 2009.

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Kremlin to someone of low rank. But Perimeter still requires a human actually to re off the weapons. According to historian David Hoffman, who in the fall of 2009 published a full accounting of the system that conrms and extends what is said in the Hines interviews, the point of the Dead Hand was partly to give the USSR the opportunity to respond to a nuclear strike even if the aging leaders then in command were not able to make a decision in time. It was also designed to buy time in the event of a crisis. If Soviet radars picked up signs of an incoming American strike, there would not be the same pressure upon the leadership to respond immediately.46 What might be most remarkable about the Doomsday Machine was that it might well have been rejected on the merits. According to these interviews, if that was so, it was a rare event. Many of the sources report that logic or rational planning did not primarily drive Soviet defense expenditure. At rst, under the reign of Grechko, Defense Minister from 1967 to 1976, many decisions seem to have been made almost without reason. He was a simple cavalry ofcer with very little ability to understand technical and strategic questions, said Illarionov, who added that many programs were canceled simply on Grechkos whims.47 But even after Grechko died, and even in choices he was not involved in, decisions nally came about because of internal politics and the military industrial complex. The missile builders built what they wanted, and the defense establishment took what it could get. The political leadership, from Khrushchev through Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev, was both disengaged and ill-informed. As a result, duplicate systems and unnecessary missiles were built. And in many cases Soviet plans were made entirely independently of American choices. In late 1970, men such as Paul Warnke, the head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Jimmy Carter, suggested that the United States should stop building weapons in order to gauge the Soviet response.48 If Hines interviews are to be believed, nothing would have happened. The industrialists kept producing what they wanted to produce and the desires of the military customers continued to be ignored, said Gareev.49 Kataev told of the director of one of the production facilities coming to Defense Minister Dmitrii Ustinov. The director would say,
Dmitrii Fedorovich, please take a few dozen missiles. And Ustinov would reply, But what will I do with them, Aleksandr Maksimovich? To which the director would reply, But if you dont, how will I feed the working class? And Ustinov would take the missiles, which the army did not really need. But they were produced and the Ministry of Defense had to buy them.50

46 47 48 49 50

David Hoffman, The Dead Hand (New York 2009), 1513, 4213. Illarionov, in Hines, vol. 2, 84. Paul Warnke, Apes on a Treadmill, Foreign Policy (Spring 1975), 1229. Gareev, in Hines, vol. 2, 76. Kataev, in Hines, vol. 2, 956.

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Statements from Kataev like this are echoed in Hoffmans The Dead Hand, a book which afrms the power of the Soviet military industrial complex.51 Illarionov describes a meeting in the mountains overlooking Yalta in the Crimea, at which the producers of two different types of ICBMs proclaimed the virtues of their systems. The designer of the system Illarionov considered inferior was a friend of Brezhnevs, which seemed to make a considerable difference. At the end, Brezhnev proved unable to decide, and so the system went ahead with both. This decision which was very harmful to the countrys economy, was made because of Brezhnevs indecisiveness and unwillingness to quarrel with his closest friends.52 In Moscow, everything was militarized, said Tsygichko. The whole country worked with weapons. We just had to keep feeding the machine. We couldnt stop it.53 Of course missile decisions werent made entirely by missile builders. The Soviets were responding at least in part to American advances. The two ICBMs under discussion in the Crimea, for example, were partly proposed as counterweights to the American Minuteman II.54 Lenin taught that we must have all of the weapons that our opponents have, said Danilevich. So we strove to produce everything that you had.55 The hero of these interviews is Danilevich, a man almost entirely unknown to English-language history books. The commander of a signal battalion during the Second World War,56 he served as a General Staff ofcer from 1964 to 1990 and as assistant for doctrine and strategy to General Staff chiefs Akhromeev and Mikhail Moiseev. He wrote the three-volume Strategy of Deep Operations that, according to Hines, was the basic reference document for Soviet strategic and operational nuclear and conventional planning for at least the last decade of the Soviet state. At the beginning of the process, Hines knew almost nothing about Danilevich.57 But seven interviews later, they seem to have become close. The nal interview took place at Danilevichs home, and included a mention of the old soldiers deeds in the Great Patriotic War. Throughout the talks, Danilevich comes across as wise and understanding, with extraordinary recall. He sounds at times like Robert McNamara, whom he cites twice as an inuence. General Danilevich said that McNamaras ideas were concrete and implied that Soviet thinking was less specic and not as systematically developed. It was clear that he believed that Soviet strategists had borrowed from McNamara in their thinking about nuclear forces in the 1960s.58
51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 Hoffman, Dead Hand, op. cit., 2089. Illarionov, in Hines, vol. 2, 82. Tsygichko, author interview, 12 February 2009. Illarionov, in Hines, vol. 2, 80. Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 44. Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 67. Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 21. Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 21.

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But, unlike the American Defense Secretary, Danilevich never sounds cocky or brash, and it is clear that the weapons did not come to torment him. To other Soviet war planners, as evidenced by these interviews, nuclear war would be such a terrifying absolute that it precluded reason. It was all or nothing. Trembling at the false button that day in 1972, Brezhnev represented one extreme; standing at his side, Grechko stood for the other. Beside Grechko, however, was Danilevich, a man who advocated complex responses, not just brute retaliation. How had he planned for responding to an American strike? It depended greatly on all the factors at play. If the US delivered 20 hits, we might have responded with 15. There were other times when you struck with 15 and we retaliated with 30, he said. The principle was that we must have adequate actions at our disposal.59 But Danilevich never soared into outer space with his planning, like, say, Herman Kahn, whose intricate theories of nuclear conict traced potential battles all the way up to the ultimate wargasm. All Danilevichs talk was measured, and leavened with a sense that war waged by human beings was impossible fully to predict. If the military art could be reduced to arithmetic, we would not need any wars, Danilevich said.
You could simply look at the correlation of forces, make some calculations, and tell your opponent, We outnumber you 2 : 1, victory is ours, please surrender. But in reality you could outnumber your opponent 3 : 1 and still suffer a crushing defeat, like Hannibal defeated the Romans, or like the German victories over us in 1941. So the correlation of forces is significant, but there is also a sea of specic, subjective factors, or even random events, which reduce these objective factors to nil.60

According to these interviews, the two sides never came that close to nuclear war. Yes, there was a terrible risk during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and yes, Khrushchevs temperament could have led to cataclysm. Danilevich classied the period 19605 as the period of nuclear euphoria, in which all non-nuclear weapons were seen almost seen as superuous. The Soviet military plan was to follow a pre-emptive nuclear strike with a land advance along the entire Front, which would lead to the conquest of western Europe in no more than ten days. This description afrms the accuracy of the 1964 war plan for Europe, unearthed and described by Vojtech Mastny and the Parallel History Project.61 The departure of Khrushchev, however, meant the return of sanity. Danilevich classied the period from 196575 as a descent to earth. The Soviets rebuilt their conventional forces, accepted that there could be terrible consequences from any nuclear exchange, and readjusted their plans. Rolling
59 Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 59. 60 Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 30. 61 Vojech Mastny, Petr Lunak, Anna Lochner, and Christian Nuenlist, Taking Lyon on the Ninth Day? The 1964 Warsaw Pact Plan for a Nuclear War in Europe and Related Documents, The Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security, http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/collections/colltopic.cfm?lngen&id15365, accessed on 30 December 2009.

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across Europe was now expected to take one month. It was also during this period that the Soviet Union developed a strategy of retaliatory instead of preemptive strikes. From there, the weapons got larger and the risk of war got smaller. Danilevich classied 1975 to 1991 as a period of strategic balance. From 1980 to 1985, the Soviets considered it possible that a limited nuclear war could be fought. After 1985 came the complete realization that a nuclear war cannot be won. The new doctrine, he said, became deterrence, war prevention, and limited war, if war must be fought.62 The interviews draw to a close just after the Cold War does. To Danilevich, the collapse of the Soviet system was an opportunity for intense collaboration among the superpowers, ranging from integrated combat structures to joint warning systems.63 It might even lead, he suggested, to the inclusion of Russia in NATO.64 That didnt happen, of course, and ve years later the Russian economy collapsed. Soon came the ascendancy of Putin and the eventual rise of tensions with the West. Along with that came the ever-more-thorough restriction of access to documents. Ongoing developments in Russia make it appear that the opportunity to interview key participants and freely obtain data on relatively sensitive issues is rapidly closing, if it has not already closed,65 wrote Marshall in his covering letter for Soviet Intentions; little has changed on that front in 13 years. One can only hope that Danilevichs Strategy of Deep Operations will be eventually made public and translated into English. It no doubt provides far more detail than these interviews do about how exactly he planned a superpower conict. Still, that would not mean we would know for sure how such a war would have gone. As evidenced in the rest of the interviews, pure rationality did not guide Soviet nuclear decision-making and planning. Choices about procurement were not made because of rules written down in a book, and neither, likely, would choices about bombing. They were guided by fear, by instinct, and by bureaucracy. Not only that, but war is utterly unpredictable, as Danilevich said. You would have planned 2000 scenarios on paper, but the real situation would certainly have been the 2001st. The interviews will not settle the long-running debates in the United States about Soviet intentions, but they do point in a few very interesting directions. For starters, America should have been less worried about a Soviet surprise attack and far more worried about an accidental nuclear war. No one thought that there was much margin for error when it came to conict. But it turns out that there was close to zero. The Soviet Union intended to respond massively to any American nuclear strike, even if limited or targeted at a remote area. Asked if the Soviet Union would have responded massively to an
62 63 64 65 Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 557. Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 47. Danilevich, in Hines, vol. 2, 47. Marshall, in Hines, vol. 1, unnumbered first page of introduction.

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American demonstration strike in an unpopulated part of Siberia, Tsygichko said absolutely.66 Of course, in the actual crisis, cooler heads might have prevailed. But the world is very lucky that the proposition was never tested. This fact suggests that there was wisdom in the views of men like Kennan, who advocated conspicuous military restraint on the part of the United States, in order to reduce tensions and Moscows hair-trigger alert. It certainly seems that the United States should, for example, have committed itself to a policy of no rst use in the early 1980s. An accidental launch or a ock of geese perceived as a launch could have had even more devastating consequences than previously assumed. (Interestingly, this might be less true with the Soviets deploying the Perimeter system; by turning it on, and assuring a counter to an American strike, the Soviets might have felt less of a burden to respond immediately to possibly fallacious reports of an incoming launch.) The interviews simultaneously do considerable damage to scholars and game theorists who believed that limited war could be fought, led by Henry Kissinger, who introduced that concept to the American public.67 In fact, the Hines interviews cast doubt on the relevance of many of the complicated models built by game theorists. Most of the games invented by American academics and scholars in the 1950s and 1960s assumed a rational enemy. But we now know that Soviet war planning was more visceral and emotional than was assumed by the models. At the same time, the militarization of Soviet society, and the insistence of its top war planners on the necessity of massive retaliation, suggests that there was little hope for political peace between the two sides. It is true, as Melvyn Lefer has declared, that the fears that haunted Soviet and American leaders did not stem from accurate assessments of actual intentions but from deeply embedded ideological axioms about motives and aims.68 That said, it may not have made much of a difference if the United States had had a more realistic analysis of Soviet aims. The military industrial complex was going to keep building its weapons.69 That machine, as Tsygichko and others say, could not have been stopped. In that regard, the interviews support the arguments put forth by Vladislav Zubok in his 2007 book A Failed Empire.70 In this work, Zubok argues that the Soviets built so many heavy missiles in the 1970s in part because of the inferiority complex they developed after having to back down in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but also because they just realized that they could. The Hines
66 Tsygichko, author interview, 12 February 2009. 67 Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York 1957). 68 Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York 2007), 3367. 69 The general structure of the Soviet military industrial complex is described well in Christopher Davis, Country Survey XVI: The Defence Sector in the Economy of a Declining Superpower: Soviet Union and Russia 19652001, Defence and Peace Economics 13(3) (2002), 14577. 70 Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007).

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interviews similarly support the recent work of Pavel Podvig, who examined recently opened archives of Soviet data to develop an analysis of whether their weaponry was designed for retaliation or for an initial attack.71 Based on his analysis of the accuracy of Soviet missiles and the choices made in how to deploy them, Podvig argued that Moscow was not planning a rst strike, a position well supported by the Hines interviews. Perhaps the central conclusion from the interviews is how similar the Soviets and the Americans were. Each side had to deal with powerful military industrial complexes and each side had total faith in its own benign intentions to accompany its total faith in the oppositions malevolent aims. Each believed it needed to build up its arsenal for defensive purposes, not in the service of setting up an attack. The Soviets were not the men portrayed by Kennan and the doves; nor were they the men portrayed by Nitze and the hawks. They were some combination thereof, with a few plans like the doomsday machine about which neither hawks nor doves had any inkling. Scholars have long suggested that the long truce between the two superpowers was maintained because of the mutually assured destruction that would follow a conict. Thats surely true, but these interviews add a compelling twist. Peace was kept not only because both sides knew how damaging a war could be, but because both sides believed it would simply not be part of their national character to start one.

Nicholas Thompson
is a senior editor at The New Yorker and a senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New American Foundation. He is the author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, which was published by Henry Holt in 2009.

71 Pavel Podvig, The Window of Vulnerability that Wasnt, International Security 33(1) (Summer 2008), 11838.

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