That cuts both ways, of course. If a Democratic administration could handle a really troublesome foreign situation while losing only texas and the South south of north carolina plus alaska and say idaho, well, where’s the downside?

But a GOP administration that had the chance to lose new york and massachusetts etc would really need to look at their remaining tax base….

The Battle-Management Ballistic Missile radar near Moscow was targeted with NINETY-FOUR (94) warheads.

Ninety four because they weren’t sure about the precision? So how far away were those nomenklatura, that they’d be sure they’d be unbombed?

I can easily believe Zbigniew Brzezinski told that story. It’s kind of like Kahn’s story, “You don’t have a war plan, all you have is a sort of horrible spasm!”. Of course he wanted to tell the world he was an expert on russians and the military was doing it all wrong, but were we actually sparing 75% of the white russians? No way.

Here’s the story I believe. Our nuclear contractors were producing new nuclear devices at a rate that was comfortable for them. It wasn’t that our military planners looked at new maps of russia and decided which new places needed bombing and asked for that many bombs. It was the contractors decided how many bombs to make, and congress provided the money, and then the military guys looked at the maps and figured out places they could target with them. The site you mentioned couldn’t possibly deserve 94 hits, except that we had that many bombs extra. Not like we had market forces to tell us how many bombs to make.

And, btw, we DID cut back on the nukes “all on our lonesome ” during the Carter years. Only problem was the SU didn’t follow suit and Carter’s last defense budget showed an increase reversing three budget reductions.

Sure. It wasn’t an arms race, since it didn’t matter how many bombs either side had. We finally noticed how expensive it was getting and cut back, and the russians who were even less sensitive to market forces than us, kept going. and then Carter had to build back up again or he’d have some Republican claim there was a missile gap and win the election that way. A couple of bureaucracies playing “status quo”. Luckily, neither of them had their status quo involve actually using the nukes.

One bit of ephemera before my reply: If you think targeting rural crossroads was bad,
we also—at the request of the Army—targeted large forests as potential “staging areas”
for hidden Warsaw Pact tank formations, We in the Air Force used to sarcastically refer to these targets as “tree blow-downs.”

(A technical point: In order to assure high-value targets had a 90+ percent kill probability it was often necessary to target multiple weapons to insure this, given Soviet defenses, equipment malfunctions and the inaccuracy of missiles. The Battle-Management Ballistic Missile radar near Moscow was targeted with NINETY-FOUR (94) warheads. One of the targets I used to sit—a Polish military airfield—had four weapons programmed. A Pershing missile, was first, a West German F-104 was second, I was third 4 minutes behind him and an F-111 from another base in England was 4 minutes right behind me.)

On the matter of MAD, you are confusing “Defense” with “”Deterrence.” Defense is what you do when deterrence fails—and the sort of weapons posture necessary for defense is not necessairly the one needed for deterrence. Our bone of contention is that I am of the opinion (and I think the literature supports me on this) that if the Soviets thought they could have launched a “winning” first-strike that would have cost them “only” 25% of their population, they would have. Remember, it depends on WHICH 25% would have been lost, the nomenklatura or the Turkmanians. In an article in the Atlantic Monthly well over a decade ago Ziebnew Brzenehski is quoted, upon receiving an initial briefing on US SIOP warplans as Carter’s new National Security Advisor as saying: “But where are the plans to kill the Russians?” When an agast briefer replied that the plans he had just briefed would kill hundreds of millions ZB cut him off by saying that no, the briefer didn’t understand. The Soviet leadership didn’t give a damn about how many Tashkentians died, it was the Great White Russians that comprised the original heart of Russia and from whence the leadership cadres came from that were the only thing the Soviet leaders cared about protecting. Deterrence would only be had if the Soviet leaders knew that they would be PERSONALLY targeted and that they would be the first to perish.

And, btw, we DID cut back on the nukes “all on our lonesome ” during the Carter years. Only problem was the SU didn’t follow suit and Carter’s last defense budget showed an increase reversing three budget reductions. As his SECDEF Harold Brown is on the record as saying in explaining the budget increases: “When we build, they build; when we don’t build, they STILL build.”

Deterrence works—MAD doesn’t.

Note that britain, france, china, india, and pakistan all depend on MAD and none of them has been bombed yet. Only the USA, russia, and israel attempt large numbers of nukes, and they haven’t been bombed yet either.

Note that the whole idea that iraq or iran mustn’t be allowed to get one single nuke is that MAD is completely effective on us. We are not willing to attack a nation that can destroy part of a single US city.

Note that the russians were considering a preventive attack on china, and perhaps it was us that persuaded them not to, and pretty soon china had enough nukes that the USSR negotiated a more-or-less peace with them rather than fight.

I have a suspicion that you have confused a part of the MAD idea. If some enemy were to nuke us and destroy a quarter of the USA, would we surrender? No, we’d hit them back as hard as we could. But if we saw a chance to completely destroy an enemy and lose only 1/4 of the USA in return, would we do it? Absolutely not. We only invade foreign countries when it looks like a cakewalk. And the same with the USSR and russia. If we attacked them they’d fight back until they couldn’t fight any longer. But would they attack us? No. They never did.

Our conventional forces in europe were never adequate to stop a Warsaw pact advance, until toward the end. We had the idea we’d fall back and make them take unacceptable losses. And we said we’d use tactical nukes, and their own doctrine said that any use of nukes would inevitably escalate to total nuclear war. Even though they probably could have reached the west atlantic coast, the russians never attacked. Maybe they just didn’t want to? However the details went, they didn’t think the rewards were worth the cost.

And it does no good to say that the arms race was useless in that both sides had more than enough weaponry to destroy each other at much lower levels. The point is, the Soviets believed that “size matters” and what we are talking about is deterrence seen in the psychological eye of the beholder.

Well, we had so many nukes that we ran out of targets, we were reduced to targetting crossroads. We had a collection of military contractors whose prosperity required that we continue spending enough to increase our nuclear arsenal. And the doctrine was that it didn’t matter how utterly we destroyed the USSR while they destroyed us, what mattered was only what we thought the russians thought. Sweet. And if we cut back on new nukes all by our lonesome then it would become a campaign issue. “The incumbent let us get another missile gap!” What really mattered was what US voters thought.

But in reality, it truly didn’t matter whether we destroyed every isolated railroad bridge in russia, along with all their cities and towns and rail yards. We did have enough stuff there for MAD to work. If you want to say that MAD doctrine called for us to stop making nukes at a tenth or a twentieth or a fiftieth of the level and we didn’t, OK, no problem. There was an unknown chance that MAD would not have worked, that what we did might not have worked. If the wrong russians were convinced it was OK to lose 25% of everything, they might just as easily get convinced they have saboteurs in the USA who have disabled all our missiles and they can attack at will. If they were willing to pay some private group in the USA to do that, is there a chance they’d find one who’d try to convince them it was done? You bet.

When you get right down to it, if you don’t want your cities destroyed there’s no substitute for peace.

(Sorry to have delayed, computer crash.)

“They didn’t want us to know where their stuff was all the time.”

So this is an excuse to provocatively shoot-down unarmed aircraft in Int. airspace in defiance of Int. Law causing the death of US aircrews? Is your statement to be taken as condoning that?

As to MAD, it always was a Chimera mis-understood by the public and even elements in our own government and certainly never totally accepted by all elements in the SU.
Remember, it was based on the concept that one didn’t need to maintain parity in the arms race—one only had to maintain forces under this concept sufficient to inflict “unacceptable” damage to the muscle and sinuews of the Soviet Union even despite a first strike by the Soviet Union that would have left them “victorious” by anyone’s standards—thus deterring even a nominally superior force. This concept had the advantage of letting the US run a slower pace in the arms race rather than respond to the demands of “keeping up” in automatic response to the logic of the functional equivalent of a set of quadratic equations, thus reducing budgetary pressures, which is why it so appealed to bean-counter ex Ford accountant McNamera—which is why he pushed it. Unfortunately there is little evidence that the SU ever bought into Mac’s logic.(which as I’ve said was 25% damage across the board)

Rather, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the SU was much more impressed by the existence of a robust US force roughly equal in capabilities to it’s own and the possibility that in any war with the US it might actually “lose.” Most students of the Soviets now coming to realize that they were willing to accept almost ANY level of casualties as long as they “won,” Brute force, not nuanced, sophisticated deterrence theory about the utility of various aspects of asymmetrical defense postures kept the Soviets at bay. MAD receives undue credit. Our force posture never approached the sort of configuration the logic of MAD called for at any rate. And the SALT treaties were an attempt by Kissinger to lock in parity before a war weary Congress refused to fund at a level capable of keeping up with the SU as they pulled away from us and gained the upper hand.

And it does no good to say that the arms race was useless in that both sides had more than enough weaponry to destroy each other at much lower levels. The point is, the Soviets believed that “size matters” and what we are talking about is deterrence seen in the psychological eye of the beholder. It is the psychological meilleur that counts. If the only thing that’s stopping one’s opponent from pushing the nuclear trigger is the belief that wearing a garlic clove around one’s neck protects from nuclear blasts then everybody damn well better be wearing fresh garlic cloves. The important thing was what actually deterred the Soviet mind, not what McNamera thought “ought” to deter them. And the overwhelming evidence indicates that brute force alone deterred them;
the niceties of the logic of MAD being lost on them. MAD was simply a dubious concept we glommed onto because it was catchy and a seemingly an attractive way out of the tread-mill to oblivion of the arms race. Thus we labeled everything we did as being in keeping with the precepts of MAD whether it was or not—which thankfully it wasn’t.

Your recent posts to me read like a series of non sequiturs. Sure, israel and north korea attacked mostly-unarmed US spy ships, leading us to stop sending them in unprotected. The USSR was weak and they knew it; they didn’t want us to know where all their stuff was all the time. I sure don’t see how Brest-Litovsk compares. The bolsheviks agreed to give up stuff which they reasonably promptly got back. It was a controversial move that got them breathing time they needed. But after something is nuked you don’t get it back. Different context entirely.

SALT was a recognition that we had kept increasing our nuclear force by default, without any thought to how big it needed to be, and we got ourselves a face-saving method to quit. Note that after SALT the USSR was still deterred. We couldn’t quit building new nukes unless the USSR quit too, or else another politician would try Kennedy’s ruse and claim there was a missile gap.

I claim that MAD succeeded in preventing world war between the Warsaw Pact versus NATO etc. While you seem to be saying tht it failed to do so. I’m really not sure how to proceed here.

No, I am talking about those intelligence reconnaissance flights by both sides that took place in international airspace, as exampled by the Navy P-3 Orion ELINT aircraft downed by the PRC, (the latest such affair) not U-2 flights nor earlier RB-47 SAC flights which Curt “Bombs Away With Curt Lemay” Lemay had flown over the length and width of the SU in the early fifties because the SU was incapable of shooting them down with the weapons they then had.

As for the Cuban crisis, I am not at home now with access to my personal library, but I believe you will find in Graham Allison’s seminal work “The Cuban Missile Crisis” that he mentions an RF-101 Voodoo pilot who was downed and killed during a reconnissance run over Cuba at the hight—even provides his picture. Was a Major, I believe…..

MAD was designed by McNamera around what he(McNamera) thought would deter HIM, if he were a Soviet. It posited a force sufficient to cause a 25% attrition of the Soviet Armed forces, industrial capacity and population, respectively. Only problem with that is that while that might be enough to deter McNamera, would it have indeed deterred the Soviets? History provides a guide here. In order to preserve the Communist party Lenin, at the treaty of Brest-Litovisk, gave away 98% of Russia’s steel mills, 89%of her working coal mines, and 20% of her most educated and productive population. So what would give one confidence that a loss of 25% of ANYTHING would deter committed ideologues? And conversations with Russian bureaucrats “in the know”
post collapse of the SU seemed to confirm that MAD was not a limiting factor.

Remember, the concept upon which MAD was based required a destruction of national muscle and bone sufficient to deter even a side with distinct superiority of weapons at any given time because of the shock of unacceptable losses even in victory. In short, the beauty of MAD from McNamera’s point of view was that it allowed for aysmetrical force postures which meant that, beyond a certain point, the US did not have to compete in the arms race, saving pressure on the budget. Kissinger’s desperate SALT efforts were a recognition that the Soviets did not buy into the logic of MAD and that only by keeping the opposing forces at relative parity could the Soviets be deterred. SALT was a tacit recognition that MAD was a failed concept unrecognized/honored by the Soviets.

As an ex-USAF type who sat on top of nuclear weapons for a living from time to time while on alert in England in the late sixties and early seventies I can attest from personal experience that from our end we were far more worried that, due to multiple checks and redundancies in the command structure, we would never get the “GO CODE” in time before a Soviet SS#20 came stumbling by. And all this even if things worked as advertised—which they rarely do—even within our own command structure.

I would also point out that while during the Cold War many, many unarmed reconnaissance aircraft of ours were shot down with great loss of life by both the Soviets and the PRC, not once was a Soviet or Chinese reconnaissance aircraft downed by gunfire by the Western powers—let alone with loss of life. It was the North Koreans who violated international law and in a technical act of war seized a US naval vessel in international waters by armed assault with loss of life, not the other way round. And I would remind you that it was the Soviets who rejected Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” confidence-building proposal of mutual reconnaissance flights—not the other way round. I think you’re looking for psychopaths in all the wrong places……

Virgil, what you describe is precisely MAD in action. They don’t have to buy into the entire MAD concept. They only have to be deterred.

You’re certainly right about the Cuban Crisis, although the Soviets HAD to know that the shootdown of one of our reconnaissance aircraft during the stand-off would be interpreted as a provocation and thus in this single instance at least one could accuse them of risky and irresponsible behavior—although I chalk that up to the “10%” in any bureaucracy who “never get the word,” just as American naval forces were forcing Soviet subs to the surface despite Kennedy and McNamera issuing orders not to. No, what I am talking about are those who actually thought that a nuclear war could be fought and “won.” There is a considerable literature and Soviet documents that indicate that many in the Soviet military never bought into the entire concept of MAD and that the only thing that constrained them was the belief that, given our range of weapons systems and distribution of forces in conjunction with our allies—they might actually “loose.” Remember after the fall of the wall, findings in East Germany revealed that they had thousands of street signs pre-manufactured with new street names for W. Berlin and tens of thousands of campaign medals struck off to award to those participating the victorious “liberation” of Europe. Only people totally removed from the realities of nuclear war would go to the trouble of doing such things. I would note that no such counterpart anticipatory medals or street signs for a post-nuclear conquered Soviet Union have ever existed in the West……

“Shoot your own dog.”

We have enough psychopaths in this country to protect against, it’s too much of a stretch to protect against psychopaths all over the world.

Let’s first eliminate the danger that crazy government officials in the USA start a nuclear war, and then after that’s settled we can spare the attention to the similar dangers from foreign nations. If you remember, the last time we publicly threatened to nuke a foreign nation was in 2003. Let’s go to at least 2013 without another nuclear threat from us, before we attack a hypothetical future threat.

Do you have some links for this? I don’t think I’ve seen this claim made before, and the Soviet records of the Cuban missile crisis seem to show pretty much the opposite.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0393317900/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books

The question that was always posed by those seeking to divine the intentions of the old Soviet Union was to ask to what extent was the leadership cadre captives of it’s own ideology insofar as it’s impact on foreign policy decision-making as opposed to traditional nationalistic power considerations dictated by geography and history. To my mind, the classic (and best) answer was given by Jim Schlessinger when he replied to this question on one Sunday morning talk show by saying: “Well, it’s (Communist ideology) not everything, but it’s not nothing either.”

My worry in the case of Iran is the extent to which those in control who hew to the apocalyptic view of the desirability of bringing forth the return of the “twelfth Imam,” seeing control slipping away will think, like Mr. Toad, that the end of them and the end of the world are all one and the same—so why not? If the fall of the old Soviet Union and our access to hitherto unreachable records teach any lessons at all,
it is the revelation that many in power there were more truly insane and dellusional than even the West’s worst critics had imagined—and that there was a significant faction that would have been all too willing to initiate a nuclear war to further these delusions.

Likewise, China, although having a leadership cadre seemingly measurably more
resistant to unreality, (and, unlike the case in Iran, certainly free from religious ideations) has demonstrated at times the extent to which it’s bedrock belief in it’s own ideology might cause elements in it’s leadership cadre to think about, and risk the “unthinkable” if they truly believed that ultimate control was irrevocably slipping away. Of course none of these things are necessairly inevitable, or even currently highly probable, but the catastrophic consequences that would result from the realization of such fears as outlined are enough I would think, to seriously worry about, and include in our thought processes as something to be alert to the possibility of, and guard against. As to what policies, if followed, would obviate the
possibility of these fears becoming reality? That is a question for another time, but
it is enough to say that such fears should not be dismissed out of hand. People that think in the way I have described really do exist—many of them with their hands near the levers of power. People minimized the extent to which Hitler was truly dangerous also—the same with Stalin (“I’ve seen the future and it works!”) and
whistling past the grave-yard about the dangers of psychopaths in China and Iran
as something to be ignored in a world now grown too sophisticated, cosmopolitan and “connected” for such things is something only intellectuals can possibly believe in—as Orwell would have reminded us.

China is the larger and more dynamic society. But we can hope they don’t think they need a nuclear war with us.

Iran doesn’t have to attack first unless they believe we’re going to attack them. Even then, the disparity in strength is too big. They know they can’t win a war with us, so they have to persuade us not to attack. A nuclear deterrent might scare us, but it’s risky because it scares us too much—we might persuade ourselves they’d commit national suicide by trying to nuke us, and that might get us to attack.

They claim they aren’t trying to get a nuke. It’s rational for them not to, though it’s also rational for them to claim they aren’t if they are. But their cover story actually makes good sense. They really are heading to run out of oil in 20 years or so, and it didn’t make sense for them to burn oil that they could get $100/barrel for, to make their electricity. To have a functioning nuclear power grid in 20 years they need to start now. And they need to hide their nuclear sites from us because we’re likely to bomb them.

Their supreme religious leader has told them not to make nuclear weapons. We say their government is controlled by that guy, who gets his temporal authority from people who believe he’s pious. We don’t have a good western analogy to that, but what would happen if the Pope told the world that it’s the purest evil to make nukes, and then the Vatican made nukes? He controls the iranian government because people believe in him, he tells the iranian government not to make nukes, the iranian government makes nukes. You can have it both ways, but you have to work at it.

I can’t really see the iranians being scared enough of us to attack until after we finish collapsing and are on the way back up. Likewise china.

Be careful about disinformation. Would a chinese communist authority publish a paper that said the chinese communist party will inevitably lose market share unless they get into a nuclear war? Wouldn’t that be like a prominent GOP party source saying publicly that the GOP is doomed forever unless we start a war with china? Prominent GOP hacks would never say in public that the GOP is doomed. It’s suspect that a prominent chinese communist would say that.