Nuclear war, or atomic war, is war in
which nuclear weapons are used.
In general
the discussion can be broken down
further into subgroups. In
the limited nuclear war (sometimes attack or exchange) only small
numbers of weapons are used in a tactical exchange aimed primarily at
opposing military forces. In the full-scale nuclear war large numbers
of weapons are used in an attack aimed at an entire country, both
military and civilian targets being "fair game". Soon after the first
use of atomic weapons, a doomsday clock was instigated as a symbolic
countdown to such full-scale nuclear wars.
Hiroshima to
Semipalatinsk
The
United States is the only nation to
have actually used nuclear
weapons in war, or on civilian populations, having in 1945 dropped two
of them on cities in Japan – one on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki.
For several years
after World War II, the US developed and maintained a
strategic force based on the B-36 bomber that would be able to attack
any potential aggressor from bomber bases in the US. The possibility of
an actual nuclear attack on the US was considered somewhat remote
because no other nation had "the bomb". Instead, many strategists were
fearful that a rogue general would launch an attack on the Soviet Union
independently and without orders (as suggested in the novel Fail-Safe
and the film Dr. Strangelove). To assuage this fear, the US placed its
nuclear weapons under the control of a new, separate agency named The
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). In the event of a war, the Strategic
Air Command (or SAC) bombers would be moved to AEC bases to be loaded
with bombs in a process that would likely have taken several days.
Over a period of
a few years, many in the US defense community became
increasingly convinced of the invincibility of the United States to a
nuclear attack. Indeed, it became generally believed that the threat of
nuclear war would deter any strike against the United States.
Simultaneously, there was some discussion about placing the AEC's
arsenal under international control or placing limits on its
development.
On August 29,
1949 the USSR tested its first bomb at Semipalatinsk in
Kazakhstan (see also Soviet atomic bomb project). Scientists in the
United States from the Manhattan Project had warned that in time the
Soviet Union would certainly develop a nuclear capability of its own.
Nevertheless, the effect upon military thinking and planning in the US
was astounding.
With the
idiomatic cat out of the bag, world-wide nuclear proliferation
accelerated, with Britain testing her first atomic bomb in 1952, and
France hers in 1960. Notably the Western European arsenals have always
been nearly insignificant compared to those of the superpowers, and it
was the nuclear weapons of the USA and USSR which were of greatest
concern to the world for the remainder of the 20th century.
The Cold War
Though
the USSR now had nuclear weapon
capabilities, the US still had a
massive advantage in terms of bombers and weapons. In any exchange of
hostilities, the US would be easily capable of bombing the USSR, while
the USSR would have some difficulty arranging the reverse.
The widespread
introduction of jet-powered interceptor aircraft upset
this balance somewhat by reducing the effectiveness of the US bomber
fleet. In 1949 Curtis LeMay was placed in command of the Strategic Air
Command and instituted a program to update the bomber fleet to one that
was all-jet. During the early 1950s the B-47 and B-52 were introduced,
providing the ability to more easily bomb the USSR.
Before the
development of a capable strategic missile force in the
Soviet Union, much of the war-fighting doctrine held by western nations
revolved around the use of a large number of smaller nuclear weapons
used in a tactical role. It is arguable if such use could be considered
"limited" however, because it was believed that the US would use their
own strategic weapons (mainly bombers at the time) should the USSR
deploy any kind of nuclear weapon against civilian targets.
Several scares
about the increasing ability of the USSR's strategic
bomber forces surfaced during the 1950s. The defensive response by the
US was to deploy a fairly strong layered defense consisting of
interceptor aircraft and anti-aircraft missiles and guns, like the Nike
or Skysweeper, near larger cities. However this was a small response
compared to the construction of a huge fleet of nuclear bombers. The
main strategy was to massively penetrate the USSR. Because such a large
area could not be defended against attack in any credible way, the USSR
would "lose" any exchange.
This logic became
ingrained in US combat strategy and persisted for the
duration of the Cold War. As long as the strategic force of the US was
larger than the USSR's forces in total, there was nothing to worry
about. Moreover, the USSR could not afford to build any reasonable
counterforce; the economic output of the United States was such that
the USSR could never catch up, because the whole country was devastated
economically.
A new revolution
in thinking occurred with the introduction of the
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which the USSR first
successfully tested in the late 1950s. To deliver a warhead to a
target, a missile was far less expensive than a bomber that could do
the same job. Moreover, at the time it was impossible to intercept
ICBM's due to their high altitude and speed. The USSR could now afford
to go head-to-head with the US in terms of raw numbers, although for a
time they appeared to have chosen not to.
Photos of Soviet
missile sites set off a wave of panic in the US
military, something the launch of Sputnik would do for the public a few
years later. Politicians, notably then US Senator John Kennedy
suggested a "missile gap" between the Soviets and the US. This was a
savvy political ploy as the US administration almost certainly knew
better and also knew that they could not be corrected without violating
military security. One result of this, however, was that the Soviets
believed the vulnerablity actually existed, with resulting temptation;
luckily cooler heads prevailed. After Kennedy won the 1960 Presidential
election, the "missile gap" conveniently went away. The US military
gave missile development programs the highest national priority, and
several spy aircraft and reconnaissance satellites were designed and
deployed to check on Soviet progress.
Issues came to a
head during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The USSR
backed down from what could have been the spark for a nuclear war, and
decided to institute a massive building program of their own. By the
late 1960s numbers of ICBMs and warheads were so high on both sides
that either the USA or USSR were capable of destroying the other
country's infrastructure. Thus a balance of power system known as
mutually assured destruction (MAD) came into being. It was thought that
the possibility of a general thermonuclear war was so deadly neither
power would risk initiating one.
By the late
1970s, citizens in the US and USSR (and indeed the entire
world) had been living with MAD for about a decade. It became deeply
ingrained into the popular culture. Such an exchange would have killed
many millions of individuals directly and possibly induced a nuclear
winter which could have led to the death of a large portion of humanity
and certainly the collapse of global civilization. Many movies such as
The Day After, Threads, WarGames, and Dr.Strangelove depict this
scenario, as did the Planet of the Apes (1968-1973) and Mad Max
(1979-1985) films.
According to the
1980 United Nations report General and Complete
Disarmament: Comprehensive Study on Nuclear Weapons: Report of the
Secretary-General, it was estimated that in total there were
approximately 40,000 nuclear warheads in existence at that time with a
total yield of approximately 13,000 megatons of TNT. By comparison,
when the volcano Tambora erupted in 1815 it exploded with a force of
roughly 1000 megatons of TNT. Many people believed that a full-scale
nuclear war could result in the extinction of the human species, but
this was not based on any well-supported models.
The idea that any
nuclear conflict would eventually escalate into MAD
was a challenge for military strategists. This challenge was
particularly severe for the United States and its NATO allies because
it was believed until the 1970s that a Soviet tank invasion of Western
Europe would quickly overwhelm NATO conventional forces, leading to the
necessity of escalating to theater nuclear weapons.
A number of
interesting concepts were developed. Early ICBMs were
inaccurate which led to the concept of counter-city strikes -- attacks
directly on the enemy population leading to a collapse of the enemy's
will to fight, although it appears that this was the American
interpretation of the Soviet stance while the Soviet strategy was never
clearly anti-population. During the Cold War the USSR invested in
extensive protected civilian infrastructure such as large nuclear proof
bunkers and non-perishable food stores. In the US, by comparison,
little to no preparations were made for civilians at all, except for
the occasional backyard fallout shelter built by private individuals.
This was part of a deliberate strategy on the Americans' part that
stressed the difference between first and second strike strategies. By
leaving their population largely exposed, this gave the impression that
the US had no intention of launching a first strike nuclear war, as
their cities would clearly be decimated in the retaliation.
The US also made
a point during this period of targeting their missiles
on Russian population centers rather than military targets. This was
intended to reinforce the second strike pose. If the Soviets attacked
first, then there would be no point in destroying empty missile silos
that had already launched; the only thing left to hit would be cities.
By contrast, if America had gone to great lengths to protect their
citizens and targeted the enemy's silos, that might have led the
Russians to believe the US was planning a first strike, where they
would eliminate Soviet missiles while still in their silos and be able
to survive a weakened counter attack in their reinforced bunkers. In
this way, both sides were (theoretically) assured that the other would
not strike first, and a war without a first strike will not occur.
This strategy had
one major and very possibly critical flaw, soon
realised by military analysts but highly underplayed by the US
military: Conventional NATO forces in the European theatre of war were
considered to be outnumbered by similar Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces,
and while the western countries invested heavily in high-tech
conventional weapons to counter this (partly perceived) imbalance, it
was assumed that in case of a major Soviet attack (commonly perceived
as the 'red tanks rolling towards the North Sea' scenario) that NATO,
in the face of conventional defeat, would soon have no other choice but
to resort to tactical nuclear weapons. Most analysts agreed that once
the first nuclear exchange had occurred, escalation to global nuclear
war would become almost inevitable.
So, while
official US policy was a clearly stated 'non first-use
policy', never to strike first with nuclear weapons, the reality was
that the lack of strength of conventional NATO forces would force the
US to either abandon Western Europe or use nuclear weapons in its
defense. Even though after Soviet collapse investigations by historians
and military analysts revealed that the effectiveness of Warsaw Pact
forces was rated far higher than they really were, official NATO
doctrine had been critically flawed from the onset and global
thermonuclear war would have been a very real possibility had actual
conflict occurred.
This major flaw,
although largely ignored by the military community,
quickly gathered public interest and many movies and books were based
upon this and several other weaknesses in the policy of mutually
assured destruction.
As missile
technology improved the emphasis moved to counter-force
strikes: ones that directly attacked the enemy's means of waging war.
This was the predominant doctrine from the late 1960s onwards.
Additionally the development of warheads (at least in the US) moved
towards delivering a small explosive force more accurately and with a
"cleaner" blast (with fewer long-lasting radioactive isotopes). In any
conflict therefore, damage would have been initially limited to
military targets, there may well have been 'withholds' for targets near
civilian areas. The argument was that the destruction of a city would
be a military advantage to the attacked. The enemy had used up weapons
and a threat in the destruction while the attacked was relieved of the
need to defend the city and still had their entire military potential
untouched.
Only if a nuclear
conflict were extended into a number of 'spasm'
strikes would direct strikes against civilians occur as the more
accurate weapons would be expended early; if one side was 'losing', the
potential for using less accurate submarine-launched missiles would
occur.
Another major
shift in nuclear doctrine was the development of the
submarine-based nuclear missile, the SLBM. It was hailed by military
theorists as a weapon that would assure a surprise attack, would not
destroy the capability to retaliate, and therefore would make nuclear
war less likely. However, it was soon realised that submarines could
'sneak up' close to enemy coastlines and decrease the 'warning time'-
the time between detection of the launch and impact of the missile -
from as much as half an hour to under three minutes. This greatly
increased the credibility of a 'surprise first strike' by one of the
factions and theoretically made it possible to knock out or disrupt the
chain of command before a counterstrike could be ordered. It
strengthened the notion that a nuclear war could be 'won' and this
resulted not only in greatly increased tension but also in a dramatic
increase in military spending. The submarines and their missile systems
were very expensive (one fully equipped nuclear powered nuclear missile
submarine could easily cost more than the entire GNP of a third world
nation), but the greatest cost came in the development of both sea- and
land-based anti-submarine defenses and in improving and strengthening
the chain of command. As a result, military spending skyrocketed.
The fact remains
that tactical use of nuclear weapons against military
targets would have caused death, destruction, and hardship on an
immense scale, and that even limited strategic use would have had a
global impact. Even comprehensive civil defense efforts to protect
civilian populations would only partially mitigate the catastrophic
effects of nuclear warfare. Continue
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