Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies 9781501734304

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Innovation and the Arms Race

Cornell Studies in Security Affairs

edited by Robert J. Art and Robert Jervis Strategic Nuclear Targeting, edited by Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1929-1942, by Michael A. Barnhart Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas of Military Service, by Eliot A. Cohen Great Power Politics and the Struggle over Austria, 1945-1955, by Audrey Kurth Cronin Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies, by Matthew Evangelista The Wrong War: American Policy and the Dimensions of the Korean Conflict, 1950-1955, by Rosemary Foot The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, 1954-1958, by Jiri Hochman The Warsaw Pact: Alliance in Transition? edited by David Holloway and Jane M. O. Sharp The lllogic of American Nuclear Strategy, by Robert Jervis Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion, by Richard Ned Lebow The Nuclear Future, by Michael Mandelbaum Conventional Deterrence, by John J. Mearsheimer The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars, by Barry R. Posen Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945, by Leon V. Sigal The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914, by Jack Snyder The Militarization of Space: U.S. Policy, 1945-1984, by Paul B. Stares Making the Alliance Work: The United States and Western Europe, by Gregory F. Treverton The Origins of Alliances, by Stephen M. Walt The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1955-1959, by Wesley K. Wark

Innovation and the Arms Race HOW THE UNITED STATES AND THE SOVIET UNION DEVELOP NEW MILITARY TECHNOLOGIES

Matthew Evangelista

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 1988 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1988 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number 0-8014-2165-9 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 87-27547 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. The paper in this book is acid-free and meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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Contents

Preface Abbreviations Part

I. Technology and the Arms Race

1. Theory and Policy 2. Sources of Innovation 3. Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR Part

4. 3. 6. 7.

II. From Tactical Nuclear Weapons to Star Wars

*x xv 1 6 22 5° 83

The Origins of U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons Explaining the Technological Arms Race The Arms Race and the Academy

86 153 218 269

Selected Bibliography Index

277

[vii]

291

The teleological aspect of the science of international politics has been conspicuous from the outset. It took its rise from a great and disastrous war; and the overwhelming purpose which dominated and inspired the pioneers of the new science was to obviate a recurrence of this disease of the international body politic. The passionate desire to prevent war determined the whole initial course and direction of the study. —Edward Hallett Carr, 1939 We think about world politics not because it is aesthetically beau¬ tiful, because we believe that it is governable by simple, knowable laws, or because it provides rich, easily accessible data for the testing of empirical hypotheses. Were those concerns para¬ mount, we would look elsewhere. We study world politics be¬ cause we think it will determine the fate of the earth. —Robert O. Keohane, 1983

Preface

The relationship between technological innovation and the ac¬ cumulation of new weapons lies at the core of the Soviet-American arms race. Most observers have recognized a pattern: the United States develops an important innovation in weaponry and the Soviet Union responds first by developing countermeasures to the new weapons and then by imitating and producing them in large numbers. It can be argued that neither side finds its security enhanced by this process. The USSR expends considerable effort merely to keep up with U.S. technological prowess; the United States nevertheless finds that its innovations confer no great advantage once the USSR has mass-pro¬ duced them and incorporated them into its military strategy. It is not surprising, then, that students of world politics have sought to explain the dynamics of this technological arms race and to set forth proposals for curbing it. Yet prevailing explanations of international relations do not account well for the phenomenon. After examining why weapons innovation constitutes a problem, I discuss in chapter 1 two of the leading schools of thought, generally identified under the rubrics “balance of power” and “bureaucratic politics." Both aim to explain continuity and stability in world politics and therefore have difficulty explaining change. These explanations are so general that they also fail to recognize important differences at the level of the state—differences that are essential to grasp if we are to understand the impetus behind Soviet and U.S. arms policies. Chapter 1 also discusses explanations put forward by students of the arms race. The literature on the arms race does not neglect the problem of change, and a substantial segment of it is devoted specifically to the question of innovation in weapons technology. But arms-race theory is in many respects a subset of international-relations theory and exhibits [ix]

Preface

many of its drawbacks. Two competing schools of thought—one em¬ phasizing external factors, the other internal—roughly correspond to the balance-of-power and bureaucratic-politics approaches, respec¬ tively. I examine the problems associated with both types of explana¬ tion and the problems they share. Among those problems are the tendency to conceive of Soviet decision making as a "mirror image" of the U.S. process and the erroneous or inconsistent policy prescriptions that follow. A focus on the external versus internal causes of the arms race has become unproductive. We need a new approach, one that captures the dynamic of innovation while incorporating internal and external factors in a relatively parsimonious fashion. Chapters 2 and 3 describe such an approach. It is derived deduc¬ tively from two sources: from the growing body of theoretically ori¬ ented literature that relates state structures (domestic politics) to inter¬ national relations (foreign policy) and from economic and organiza¬ tional theories of innovation. At the same time, the approach makes inductive use of empirical data on weapons procurement and more general information on the way military research and development are organized in the United States and in the USSR. This information is used in chapter 3 to formulate generalizations about the process of weapons innovation in the two countries, through a focused, compara¬ tive analysis of six cases. Several generalizations emerge. In the United States, impetus for innovation in weapons technology comes from the bottom—from sci¬ entists in government or private laboratories and the military officials with whom they are in close contact. The new proposal is pushed up through the bureaucracy until it attracts the attention of supporters in the Congress and the Executive. In this respect, a new weapon starts with a technological idea rather than as a response to a specific threat or as a means to fulfill a long-standing mission. Internal factors are paramount for most of the process of innovation; external ones come into play at a later stage, when a window opens and provides an opportunity to justify the new weapon—often on the perception of a Soviet military threat. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, secrecy, compartmentalization of information, and the centralized system of political control inhibit tech¬ nological innovation and the diffusion of new ideas. Therefore, impe¬ tus for an innovation in weapons technology is more likely to come from the top, as a response to technological developments abroad, than to emerge unsolicited from the weapons labs and military bu¬ reaucracies. In the Soviet case, then, external factors play an early role in stimulating weapons innovation and internal forces act later to influ¬ ence the way a directive to implement a certain innovation is carried out.

[x]

Preface

Chapters 4 and 5 examine the decisions made by the United States and the Soviet Union to develop tactical nuclear weapons and deploy them in Europe in the 1950s. The development of such weapons clearly constitutes an innovation in military policy as well as in weapons tech¬ nology. In the mid-i940s, atomic bombs were considered a scarce resource, intended primarily as a means of mass destruction to be employed against population centers and major strategic targets. In the late 1940s, when the United States demonstrated the technical capability of producing relatively small, efficient, and lightweight nu¬ clear weapons, the notion of using such weapons in support of ground troops on a battlefield arose. How this development came about and how the Soviet case differed are explained through process-tracing comparative case studies. Chapter 6 revisits the internal-external debate by taking a second cut at the empirical data in chapters 4 and 5 in order to evaluate competing explanations derived from the external and internal schools. It then looks at a few cases of U.S. and Soviet weapons innovation which appear to deviate from the generalized process outlined here as well as at recent developments that conform to it. In both instances, insights derived from the comparative theoretical analysis and the historical record suggest alternatives to the technological arms race—in the do¬ main of arms control and disarmament, for example. The second half of chapter 6 presents these policy alternatives. The pattern proposed as a generalized explanation for the technological arms race—the United States introduces a technological innovation and the Soviets then reproduce it in large quantities—suggests a straightforward and plausible arms-control solution: a trade-off of U.S. technological restraint for Soviet quantitative advantages. The poten¬ tial for such an approach should apply not only to the limited sphere of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe but to issues ranging from conven¬ tional "Deep Strike" weapons to "Star Wars." More generally, by iden¬ tifying the factors that come into play at each stage of the Soviet and U.S. processes of innovation, the analysis suggests how and when influence could be exerted on each side to affect the outcomes. The explanation presented here seeks not only to address a central debate in the field of international relations but also to suggest consistent policy recommendations that offer some hope of curbing the tech¬ nological arms race. This book seeks to combine an evaluation of competing explanations of international relations with comparative historical case studies of Soviet and U.S. decisions on the basis of primary source material. In the past, one major obstacle to such studies has been the asymmetry of information available about U.S. and Soviet policy. Despite the restric[xi]

Preface

tions that the Reagan administration has placed on the release of his¬ torical materials, much of the documentary record of U.S. decisions related to the arms race is in principle available through the Freedom of Information Act and the declassification process in the various national archives. For access to these documents, I am indebted to the archivists at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas; the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Library at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; and the Modern Military Branch of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The USSR provides no such access to its archives. Yet the asymmetry in the availability of primary documents should not be overstated; nor should it serve as an excuse for ignoring or making invalid assump¬ tions about the Soviet side of the arms race. This study demonstrates just how much information can be gleaned about Soviet decisions. A surprisingly wide variety of sources is actually available. Such sources include memoirs of weapons designers and scientists, some of whom have emigrated to the West; lists of documents pertaining to the devel¬ opment of missiles on file in the Soviet Academy of Sciences; declassified Western intelligence analyses of Soviet weapons and nu¬ clear tests; Soviet military memoirs, official histories, and doctrinal writings; and, not least, the tape-recorded reminiscences of the key political figure in military decisions of the period discussed in the main Soviet case study—Nikita Khrushchev. Despite the relative unavailability of information, enough can be learned about the USSR to permit useful generalizations about the Soviet-American competition in weapons innovation. My attempt to gain such information has benefited greatly from the advice and exam¬ ple of David Holloway. He has called my attention to many Soviet sources and lent me hundreds of pages of his own materials, without which this book would have been impossible. His work on innovation and Soviet military policy has had a major influence on my own, and his high standards of scholarship provide a goal to which I continue to aspire. Other individuals and institutions have contributed to this project. During the early stages of my work, the Peace Studies Program at Cornell University provided a stimulating and supportive atmosphere (as well as research funding), for which I thank its directors, Richard Ned Lebow and Judith Reppy, and its many members. I also acknowl¬ edge the generous support of the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University and grants from the Institute for the Study of World Politics, the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, the Andrew Dickson White Fellowship at Cornell, the Brookings Institu¬ te]

Preface

tion, and, at the University of Michigan, the Center for Russian and East European Studies and the Program of International Peace and Security Research. I thank Jonathan Sanders of the Harriman Institute of Columbia University for allowing me access to the Khrushchev tran¬ scripts located there. In trying to understand the technical and political aspects of the Soviet-U.S. military competition, I benefited from discussions with several physicists and weapons designers. I thank in particular Hans Bethe, William Filler, Richard Garwin, Sergei Polikanov, Theodore Postol, George Smith, and Herbert York, none of whom bears respon¬ sibility for any of my remaining errors. For comments on various parts of the manuscript and discussions that have been helpful to me in writing it, I thank Coit Blacker, Randall Forsberg, Raymond Garthoff, Zvi Gitelman, Charles Glaser, Dennis Gormley, Milton Leitenberg, Michael MccGwire, Lawrence Mohr, Charles Naef, Athanassios Platias, Condoleezza Rice, Edward Rhodes, Richard Rosecrance, Jane Sharp, David Singer, George Staller, and William Zimmerman. My conception of the U.S. case benefited from an early exchange of correspondence with David Alan Rosenberg and some useful comments from Barton Bernstein. For their careful reading and extensive comments on the manuscript, I am especially grateful to Robert Jervis, Peter Katzenstein, Judith Reppy, Thomas Risse-Kappen, and Jack Snyder. For indispensable help in persuading my new com¬ puter to understand what I typed into my old one, I thank Mark Weishan, Lorrie Harvey, and especially Daniela Williams, who also helped to prepare the bibliography. For moral support I am grateful to my family, especially my mother, to Myril and Maurice Filler, and to my friends and former housemates at the Stewart Little Cooperative in Ithaca, New York. My greatest debt is to Joan Filler. I dedicate this work to her not only for her careful reading and helpful criticisms of it but, more important, for her efforts (by and large successful) to remind me that there is more to life than research and writing. For her patience when I seemed to forget that fundamental truth, and for much else, I thank her. Matthew Evangelista

Ann Arbor, Michigan

[xiii]


7, . „ _ . . . .. , 31See, e.g., Alain Joxe, "Technostrategie et democratic, Le Monde diplomatique, November 1984, p. 11. Joxe explains moves toward greater Franco-German military cooperation and an "integrated" conventional-nuclear battlefield on the basis of the French development of short-range missiles with enhanced-radiation (neutron-bomb) warheads. 32Se6/ e_gi( Herbert F. York, Race to Oblivion: A Participant's Guide to the Arms Race (New York, 1970); his essay with G. Allen Greb, "Military Research and Development: A Postwar History," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 33 (January 1977)- *3~26; Hs book The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco, 1978): and his articles in

Theory and Policy

ly some of those who have joined the debate over the role of technol¬ ogy have caricatured the more sophisticated views in order to demon¬ strate what few people dispute-—that decisions on weapons innova¬ tions depend not only on technology but on politics as well.33 An understanding of the relationship between scientific expertise and po¬ litical decisions is still lacking.

"Mirror-Imaging" and the Homogeneity of Explanations

Whereas competing explanations differ in their appraisal of the role of technology and of the relative influence of internal versus external causes, they bear a striking resemblance to one another in two re¬ spects. Most of the explanations derive from studies of U.S. weapons procurement, and most assume that what is true for the United States is true for the Soviet Union as well. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara made this point clearly in explaining his notion of the action-reaction phenomenon: "What is essential to understand here," he said, "is that the Soviet Union and the United States mutually influence one another's strategic plans. Whatever their intentions or our intentions, actions—or even real¬ istically potential actions—on either side relating to the build-up of nuclear forces necessarily trigger reactions on the other side. It is pre¬ cisely this action-reaction phenomenon that fuels an arms race."34 Proponents of the bureaucratic and organizational models make the same point. "While actions of foreign governments and uncertainty about the intentions of other countries are obviously important," write Allison and Morris, "the weapons in the American and Soviet force postures are predominantly the result of factors internal to each nation. Therefore," they maintain, "actions by the Soviet Union serve pri¬ marily as justification for the American participants in the bureaucratic struggle to advance weapons that they favor for reasons only tangen¬ tially related to Soviet behavior." They suggest that the "corollary ac-

Scientific American, some of which are reprinted in Russett and Blair, Progress in Arms Control. Mary Kaldor's views on the role of technological innovation are found in her Baroque Arsenal. See also the discussion in Colin Gray, The Soviet-American Arms Race (Westmead, 1976), esp. pp. 37-53. The "technological imperative" is a major focus of the text by Dietrich Schroeer, Science, Technology, and the Arms Race (New York, 1984), al¬ though he also calls attention to political factors. 33A case in point is Jonathan B. Stein, From H-Bomb to Star Wars: The Politics of Strategic Decision Making (Lexington, Mass., 1984). ^Address to the editors and publishers of UP1, San Francisco, 18 September 1967, quoted in Robert S. McNamara, The Essence of Security: Reflections in Office (New York, 1968), pp. 58-59.

Innovation and the Arms Race

tion in the Soviet Union seems to be even more intense."35 European researchers have tended to make similar arguments. Senghaas and Krell, for example, have both claimed that if more information were available about the Soviet Union, it would reveal similar influences at work in the decision-making processes of the two countries.36 On both sides of the debate over the role of scientists and technol¬ ogy, one finds the tendency to make generalizations about the United States apply to the Soviet Union as well. Consider, for example, Solly Zuckerman's views on "the man in the laboratory. Zuckerman argues. Military chiefs, who by convention are the official advisors on national security, merely serve as a channel through which the men in the labora¬ tories transmit their views. For it is the man in the laboratory not the soldier or sailor or airman—who at the start proposes that for this or that arcane reason it would be useful to improve an old or to devise a new nuclear warhead; and if a new warhead, then a new missile, and, given a new missile, a new system within which it has to fit. It is he, the techni cian, not the commander in the field, who starts the process of formulat¬ ing the so-called military need.

He concludes, "The men in the nuclear weapons laboratories on both sides have succeeded in creating a world with an irrational foundation, on which a new set of political realities has in turn had to be built. Zuckerman has participated directly in the making of military R&D policy in Britain, and he has been closely associated with the military R&D community in the United States as well. The application of his observations to the Soviet Union, however, is not so well founded. The few students of the arms race who are also specialists on the Soviet Union have tended to reject explanations of Soviet decision making which derive from analogy to U.S. cases.38 It may be useful to consider some of the problems of trying to use an explanation for the 35Allison and Morris, "Exploring the Determinants of Military Weapons, p. 126, em¬ phasis added, original emphasis removed. ^Senghaas, Riistung und Militarisms, p. 18; Krell, Riistungsdynamik und Riistungskontrolle, p. 278. In a study that does examine both U.S. and Soviet developments, mainly in the conventional area, Krell and Schmidt postulate a perfect symmetry be¬ tween the decision-making processes of the two sides. See Rustungswettlauf in Europa, esp the diagram on p. 158, where the only difference between the two sides is that one is designated "Ost" and the other "West." Dieter Senghaas, in his recent work, has recog¬ nized important differences between Soviet and U.S. decision-making processes and has revised his views on the applicability of the "autism" model. See Die Zukunft Europas: Probleme der Friedensgestaltung [Europe's future: Problems of creating peace] (Fran furt/Main, 1986). For a discussion of his conclusions, see the review by Thomas RisseKappen in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 43 (May 1987): 50-52. 37Solly Zuckerman, "Science Advisors and Scientific Advisors," Proceedings of the Amer¬ ican Philosophical Society 124 (August 1980): 250-51; emphasis added. .... , 38gee, e.g., Matthew P. Gallagher and Karl F. Spielmann, Jr., Soviet Decision-Making for Defense: A Critique of U.S. Perspectives on the Arms Race (New York, 1972). For an analysis [18]

Theory and Policy

arms race which accounts at best for the behavior of only one partici¬ pant. These problems arise most obviously when students of the arms race seek to use their theoretical explanations to provide policy guidance.

The Theory-Policy Disjunction

The study of Soviet-American military competition clearly has rele¬ vance for the conduct of policy. Most of the major participants in scholarly research on the causes of the arms race have also been in¬ volved in policy debates, through work in government, as peacemovement and arms-control activists, or both. Many of the articles and books I have cited were written in the heat of the debate over such controversial programs as ABM and MIRV. Most authors have made explicit the policy prescriptions that they believe follow from their explanations for the arms race. One of two types of problems arises, however, when authors derive military and arms-control policies from arms-race theories. Either the theories show insufficient resemblance to reality and are discredited by the subsequent course of the arms race, and therefore are deemed unreliable for providing policy guid¬ ance; or the policy recommendations are not logically consistent with the theoretical analysis to begin with. The first problem is exhibited by the academic and policy debates over the ABM in the late 1960s. Those who saw an action-reaction phenomenon at work, for example, argued against building a U.S. ABM system. They expected the Soviets to respond with a large force of missiles, perhaps equipped with multiple warheads and decoys, to overwhelm the U.S. defense. Those who made such arguments in¬ cluded not only academics but the secretary of defense at the time, Robert McNamara.39 The action-reaction hypothesis became doubtful after the SALT treaty of 1972 limited ABM systems and the Soviets continued to build a large force of MIRV missiles.40 If Soviet "reactions" that finds European notions of Eigendynamik lacking in the ability to explain Soviet decisions, see David Holloway, “Technology and Political Decision in Soviet Armaments Policy," Journal of Peace Research 4 (1974): 257-79. See also the discussions by Arthur J. Alexander, “Modeling Soviet Defense Decisionmaking," and Stephen M. Meyer, “Soviet National Security Decisionmaking: What Do We Know and What Do We Understand? both in Soviet Decisionmaking for National Security, ed. Jiri Valenta and William C. Potter (London, 1984). 39See his speeches, collected in Essence of Security. Rathjens makes the argument in "Dynamics of the Arms Race," p. 43. ^Rathjens wrote that if ABM systems were limited, "the incentive to acquire MIRVs for penetrating defenses would be eliminated." He did point out, however, that 'the incentive to acquire them for counterforce purposes would remain," although the extent to which this judgment fits an action-reaction hypothesis, in the absence of a U.S. ABM, is open to question. See "Dynamics of the Arms Race," p. 43. [19]

Innovation and the Arms Race

followed non-existent U.S. "actions/' critics argued, of what value to policymakers was an action-reaction hypothesis? The bureaucratic-politics approach seemed to account better for such developments as the Soviet missile buildup of the 1970s, because the deployment of large numbers of weapons could be viewed as the out¬ come of standard operating procedures and bureaucratic inertia. The policy prescriptions of those who favored internal explanations for the arms race were, however, inconsistent with their analysis. Allison and Morris, for example, argued that "a major concern of arms-control advocates should be to ferret out the factors within the United States and the Soviet Union that influence weapons developments." Their pro¬ posals for reform applied, however, only to the United States: "restruc¬ ture the weapons-development process so as to provide points of clear choice among competing alternatives; increase the responsibility (and influence) of elected officials in these choices, increase official account¬ ability for their results."41 Whatever the merits of such proposals, they affect only the internal decision-making process of the United States. If Allison and his colleagues believed that U.S. reforms would influence Soviet behavior in the arms race, they were implicitly accepting a central tenet of the action-reaction hypothesis. Discussion within the peace movement during the late 1970s and early 1980s in many respects reflected the academic debate of several years earlier. Thus the analysis adopted by many activists focused on the internal motivations for Western and Soviet military policies, but the policies they advocated centered on unilateral Western restraint. There was some implication that the Soviets would respond by curtail¬ ing their own military programs, although such a response would appear logically inconsistent with the notion of an internal dynamic, by which each side acts independently of the other. Opponents of arms control and disarmament are no less inconsistent in the relationship between their theoretical frameworks and their pol¬ icy prescriptions. Many argue, for example, that Soviet military policy cannot be explained as a reaction to perceived U.S. threats—that it is driven by internal expansionist motives (whether ideological, cultural, or bureaucratic in origin). At the same time, these people tend to support the procurement of additional U.S. weapons in order to deter Soviet actions. But if the Soviets are motivated by an internal dynamic, not by the perception of external threat, new U.S. weapons logically 41Allison and Morris, "Exploring the Determinants of Military Weapons," pp. 126-27; emphasis added. More detailed analyses and more specific policy recommendations along the same lines are described in Frederic A. Morris, ed., "Acquiring Weapons, pt. 2, pp. 111-215, in Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, vol. 4 (Washington, D.C., June 1975)/ aPP- K-

[20]

Theory and Policy

will not enhance deterrence. In order for a new weapon to deter the Soviets, it must first be perceived by them as a threat; and once it is perceived as a threat, it could provoke a reaction.42 In this way, many proposals for "winning" the arms race are as logically flawed as the proposals for ending it. In order to understand the prospects for influencing the Soviet and U.S. governments to show restraint in their military policy, we need a better grasp of how that policy is made. In order to affect the course of the technological arms race, we must understand how the Soviet Union and the United States make and implement decisions on weap¬ ons innovations. 42Although not put in terms of international-relations or arms-race explanations, these views can be found in, e.g., Richard Pipes, Survival Is Not Enough (New York, 1984)-

[21]

[2] Sources of Innovation The [Soviet] system lacks the technological entrepreneurs who in the West respond to new market opportunities without being directed—the self-generating “Silicon Valley" microelectronics industrialists. —The Soviet Weapons Industry, CIA report, 1986

Theoretical Background

Although much of the literature on international relations has been characterized by debate over external versus internal determinants, a number of students of the subject have become dissatisfied with such a sharp dichotomy. Especially when trying to account for change, they have found it necessary to incorporate both domestic and international factors into their explanations. As always, such recent endeavors are not without precedent.1 What is valuable about current research, how¬ ever, is the attempt to incorporate domestic factors systematically into explanations of foreign policy. Most of the work has been conducted in the field of international political economy, where scholars have em¬ phasized the importance of "domestic structures," especially the inter¬ action between the state apparatus and societal groups.2 Although the subject matter and goals of that body of work differ from mine, the nn accounting for the dissolution of the balance-of-power system in Europe during the nineteenth century, for example, Polanyi cited a variety of domestic factors, particularly economic ones. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, 1944), esp. chap. 1. For an early and ambitious attempt to incorporate domestic political variables into a systemic theory of international relations, see Richard N. Rosecrance, Action and Reaction in World Politics (Boston, 1963). 2See Peter J. Katzenstein, “International Relations and Domestic Structures. Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States," International Organization 30 (Winter 1976): 1-45; and the essays in Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies of Ad¬ vanced Industrial States, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein, (Madison, Wis., 1978). For a detailed application of this type of analysis to U.S. foreign economic policy in regard to raw materials, see Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Invest¬ ments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J., 1978)- An ambitious, theoretically grounded attempt to relate internal and external factors in explaining revolutionary change is Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (New York, 1979). [22]

Sources of Innovation

insights into the relationships of state, society, and foreign policy are generally applicable. In their studies of foreign economic policies of advanced industrial states, Peter Katzenstein and his colleagues focused on the relative strengths of state and society in order to account for variations in the way each country responded to such external events as the 1973 crisis. Katzenstein posited a continuum, with the United States and Britain representing weak states and strong societies and with France and Japan representing strong states and weak societies. These histor¬ ically conditioned state structures were held to determine to a certain extent the objectives and instruments of a given country's foreign eco¬ nomic policies.3

Historical Origins The historical explanations that students of international political economy have adopted to account for the relative strengths of state and society in particular countries owe a good deal to the work of Alexander Gerschenkron and Barrington Moore, Jr.4 These authors drew attention to the effects that the timing of industrialization has on a country's domestic structures. The early industrializing countries, such as Britain and the United States, took advantage of favorable geographic circumstances and a relative absence of international pres¬ sures to industrialize at a gradual pace. Industrialization was carried out by private manufacturers and financed by private capital; the lim¬ ited role played by a weak state allowed for the development of demo¬ cratic institutions. In the late industrializers, such as Germany and Japan, the pressure of the international system and competition from more advanced countries required the state to take a leading role—for example, in mobilizing capital for industrial investment. This pattern resulted in strong authoritarian states with weak societal forces and a consequent absence of democracy.5 3Katzenstein's essay "International Relations and Domestic Structures" contrasted the United States and France, whereas Between Power and Plenty incorporated the other advanced industrial countries into a continuum. 4Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), chap. 1; Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966). 5This summary draws on Gerschenkron, "Economic Backwardness, and Moore, Social Origins. Other important discussions of these ideas are found in Theda Skocpol, "A Critical Review of Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," Politics and Society 4 (Fall 1973): 1-34; Peter Gourevitch, "The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics," International Organization 32 (Autumn 1978); James R. Kurth, "The Political Consequences of the Product Cycle: Industrial Flistory and Political Outcomes," International Organization 33 (Winter 1979): i~33[23]

Innovation and the Arms Race

The third pattern—late, late industrialization—is typified by Russia and China. Under extreme international pressure. Communist elites in these countries undertook costly campaigns of forced-draft industrial¬ ization to catch up with their more advanced competitors. The political outcome of such "revolutions from above" included highly centralized, strong states with weak, even atomized societies.6 In this sense, Gerschenkron wrote, the "Soviet government can be properly de¬ scribed as a product of the country's economic backwardness."7 Contemporary adherents to the state/society approach have tended to focus mainly on economic policy. Yet Gerschenkron and Moore always called attention to the relationships among military exigencies, the pattern of industrialization, and the relative strength of state and society in a given country. The case of the Soviet Union illustrates these relationships particu¬ larly well. The pattern of sensitivity to foreign pressure leading to strong centralization and state intervention finds antecedents far back in Russian history.8 The centralizing and bureaucratizing reforms of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century are attributable mainly to the requirements of war and the need to compete with more advanced neighbors such as Sweden.9 A similar pattern is evident in the indus¬ trialization drive organized in the 1890s by Sergei Witte, Russia's min¬ ister of finance. It emphasized the development of railroads, the mili¬ tary importance of which Russia's international competitors had already made clear. As Hugh Seton-Watson observed, "Russia, being a latecomer to the process of industrialization, was following the exam¬ ple of more advanced countries at a more rapid pace than they had had at comparable stages of their history."10 The reforms undertaken dur¬ ing the first decade of the twentieth century, in the wake of Russia's defeat in the war against Japan, provide an additional example.11 During the Soviet period as well, one finds a strong relationship between military requirements and centralized, forced-draft industrial¬ ization. Stalin made the point in 1931 when he argued that it was 6Moore, Social Origins. For a discussion of a related pattern, see Ellen Kay Trimberger, Revolution from Above: Military Bureaucrats and Development in Japan, Turkey, Egypt, and Peru (New Brunswick, N.J., 1978).

7Gerschenkron, "Economic Backwardness," p. 28. 8This section benefits from Jack Snyder's suggestions. See Walter McKenzie Pintner and Don Karl Rowney, eds., Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980). 9See, e.g., Vasili Klyuchevsky, Peter the Great, trans. Liliana Archibald (New York, 1958). 10Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801-1917 (Oxford, 1967), p. 522. See also Alexander Gerschenkron, Continuity in History and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), chap. 7. nSeton-Watson, Russian Empire, esp. pp. 649-62. [24]

Sources of Innovation

necessary to overcome his country's economic backwardness: "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us."12 Stalin's ruthless policies of collectivization of agriculture and rapid in¬ dustrialization were plainly intended to contribute to the buildup of Soviet military power, albeit at terrible cost to the populace. It seems apparent, then, that the international pressures faced by a late, late industrializer such as the USSR affect the development of both military and economic policy by fostering the growth of a highly centralized/ strong, hierarchically organized state at the expense of civil society.

Contemporary Policy Put in its historical context, the state/society analysis appears quite relevant to a comparative study of Soviet and U.S. military policy. In this sphere, as in that of economic policy, one could characterize the United States as a weak state/strong society and the Soviet Union as a strong state/weak society.13 A consideration of the relationship be¬ tween state and society in the two countries also suggests certain ob¬ servations about the relative influence of external and internal factors on the initiation of policy. A powerful, centralized state such as the Soviet Union should exhibit greater sensitivity and responsiveness to external stimuli; and a state with strong, autonomous bureaucracies and interest groups, such as the United States, should be more respon¬ sive to internal pressures.14 These generalizations follow from the his¬ torical writing that forms the basis for much of contemporary state/society analysis. They are also consistent with the findings of comparative studies in Soviet and U.S. policy making. Consider, for example, Katzenstein's characterization of the role of societal forces in the making of U.S. foreign policy. Katzenstein finds that the "ideal-type" of bureaucracy described by Max Weber fails to account for the decidedly political nature of U.S. policy making. In the United States, the "size of this bureaucracy and the scale of its opera¬ tions have become so large that they lead to a lack of control by central foreign policy decision makers." Katzenstein notes that "the rule of law 12Quoted in David Holloway, "War, Militarism, and the Soviet State," Alternatives 6 (March 1980): 67. 13Krasner puts Russia after the 1917 revolution at the extreme of strong state/weak society. Although the Soviet state today is hardly able "to remake the society and culture in which it exists—that is, to change economic institutions, values, and patterns of interaction among private groups"—it still ranks among the strongest internationally in relation to its society. See Krasner, Defending the National Interest, pp. 56, 69. 14A preliminary elaboration of this argument is found in Matthew Evangelista, Why the Soviets Buy the Weapons They Do," World Politics 36 (July 1984): 597-618.

Innovation and the Arms Race

in democratic systems gives the bureaucracy a larger autonomy from the executive than it might enjoy in other forms of government, thus further encouraging a political process within the bureaucracy."15 A number of students of U.S. politics have called particular attention to the role of Congress, as well as the bureaucracy, and the extent to which both can be "captured" by political interests.16 Such factors con¬ tribute to the "fragmentation and dispersion of power and authority" in the U.S. system.17 By contrast, the autonomy of the foreign and military policy-making bureaucracies in the Soviet Union is sharply circumscribed by Commu¬ nist party control, and the legislature (the Supreme Soviet) has no independent political power. As T. H. Rigby has pointed out, Weber s ideal-type bureaucracy does not satisfactorily account for Soviet reality either—but for reasons that differ from those put forward by Katzenstein in his discussion of the United States. Rigby argues that the Soviet system is made up of "task-achieving bureaucracies," a type not considered by Weber. In the Soviet Union, political authorities "set out not only to prescribe the goals and specific tasks of the constituent units of society but indeed directly to manage their implementation through official bureaucracies."18 One of the party's primary methods of control is the system of no¬ menklatura, by which all important appointments to government, ad¬ ministrative, economic, and other positions must receive prior party approval.19 The system applies to the military sphere as well. Thus centralized party supervision of military matters appears firmly estab¬ lished, despite occasional claims to the contrary.20 Although not explicitly adopting a state/society analysis, Zbigniew 15Katzenstein, "Introduction: Domestic and International Forces and Strategies of For¬ eign Economic Policy/' in Katzenstein, Between Power and Plenty, p. 14. 16Nelson W. Polsby, Congress and the Presidency, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), pp. 140-41; Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York, 1967), p.

339. i7]^j-asri0r summarizes the literature in U.S. politics and relates it to the making of foreign policy in Defending the National Interest, pp. 61-66. See also Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "The Domestic Roots of American Policy," in The Making of America's Soviet Policy, ed. Nye (New Haven, Conn., 1984), pp. 1-10. 18T. H. Rigby, "Introduction: Political Legitimacy, Weber and Communist Monoorganizational Systems," in Political Legitimation in Communist States, ed. T. H. Rigby and Ferenc Feher (New York, 1982), pp. 10-12. 19For a discussion and additional references, see Donald D. Barry and Carol BarnerBarry, Contemporary Soviet Politics: An Introduction, 3d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1987), pp. 120-22. 20One reason that party control over the military is less tenuous than some Western observers claim is that political and military leaders have typically shared a broad con¬ sensus about the goals and requirements of Soviet security policy. For a discussion, see Timothy J. Colton, Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority: The Structure of Soviet Military Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). [26]

Sources of Innovation

Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington, in their book Political Power. USA/USSR, describe the policy-making processes in the two countries in a manner similiar to that employed by Katzenstein and his col¬ leagues. Furthermore, they address the issue of innovation that is central to our present concerns. The authors make the following com¬ parison: "In the United States, pressures for change tend to bubble up continually. ... In the Soviet Union, in contrast, innovation tends to have a stop-and-start, trial-and-error quality. Major changes are initi¬ ated from the top."21 A study of Soviet decision making in the military sphere draws a similar conclusion when it evaluates the role of internal pressures cre¬ ated by military bureaucrats and scientists: Unlike the American "expert," who can go outside the system to gain backing for his ideas, the Soviet "expert" has only higher level patrons to turn to—a recourse that may be just as effective in cutting red tape, but one that results in precisely what the system is intended to achieve in any event, namely, keeping the initiative in the decision-making process firmly under the control of the political authorities.

"Compared with the American system," the analysis concludes, "the Soviet system encourages the flow of ideas from the top down rather than from the bottom up."22 It is apparent that differences between various countries' processes of innovation (for example, bottom up versus top down) can be under¬ stood on the basis of the relative strengths of state and society. The state/society relationship, in turn, depends largely on historical cir¬ cumstances. An understanding of why in the contemporary period one country is more innovative than another depends, however, on expla¬ nations at a lower level of generality. One should look at the way society is organized in relation to the state.23 To account for the relative 21Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, Political Power: USA/USSR (New York, 1963), pp. 228-29. For a suggestive discussion of applying the Brzezinski/ Huntington analysis of policy making to Soviet security decisions, see William C. Potter, "The Study of Soviet Decisionmaking for National Security: What Is to Be Done? in Soviet Decisionmaking for National Security, ed. Jiri Valenta and William C. Potter (London, 1984), pp. 298-307. 22Matthew P. Gallagher and Karl F. Spielmann, Jr., Soviet Decision-Making for Defense: A Critique of U.S. Perspectives on the Arms Race (New York, 1972), p. 77. 23Katzenstein and his colleagues have found, for example, that although France and Japan are both strong, centralized states, their objectives and instruments of foreign economic policy differ. Katzenstein accounts for these differences in part by calling attention to the divergent natures of the two societies—Japan's is centralized and cohe¬ sive, while France's is decentralized and conflictual. See his "Conclusion: Domestic Structures and Strategies of Foreign Economic Policy," in Between Power and Plenty, esp. pp. 323-36. These differences in societal organization help to explain the two countries'

Innovation and the Arms Race

degrees of innovativeness between the United States and the Soviet Union in the field of weaponry, for example, one must consider how military research and development are carried out in each country.24

Innovation and the Organization of Military

R&D

Students of organization theory have identified five structural char¬ acteristics that appear to affect organizational innovativeness: central¬ ization, complexity, formalization, interconnectedness, and organiza¬ tional slack.25 Economists call attention to related characteristics of market structure and the research environment that appear to be linked to technological innovation.26 Table 2 summarizes the structural differing approaches to innovation. Katzenstein adopts a similar analysis in his later study of industrial change in Austria and Switzerland, Corporatism and Change: Austria, Switzerland, and the Politics of Industry (Ithaca, 1984). In a similar vein, Ronald Amann mentions in passing a resemblance between the Soviet Union and Japan in "develop¬ mental [historical] variables," which Gerschenkron would argue has led to the emergence of strong states in both countries. Yet it is differences in societal—particularly economic—organization that probably account most for their divergent approaches to innovation. See Ronald Amann, "Industrial Innovation in the Soviet Union: Meth¬ odological Perspectives and Conclusions," in Industrial Innovation in the Soviet Union, ed. Ronald Amann and Julian Cooper (New Haven, Conn., 1982), p. 10. Studies of organiza¬ tional factors that affect technological change in other centrally planned economies are also compatible with the analysis presented here. See Raymond Bentley, Technological Change in the German Democratic Republic (Boulder, Colo., 1984), esp. chap 8, where he compares the GDR and West Germany on the one hand and the GDR and the Soviet Union on the other; Jonathan D. Pollack, The R&D Process and Technological Innovation in the Chinese Industrial System, Rand Report R-3284 (Santa Monica, Calif., May 1983). 24Mary Kaldor draws a similar conclusion in "Military R&D: Cause or Consequence of the Arms Race?" International Social Science Journal, 35, no. 1 (1983): 25-46. 25Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 3d ed. (New York, 1983), pp. 359-61. Organization theorists have not succeeded in developing a "theory of innovation" that applies to all classes of the phenomenon, and one important study argues that it is impossible to do so. See Lawrence B. Mohr, Explaining Organizational Behavior: The Limits and Possibilities of Theory and Research (San Francisco, 1982). The generalizations sum¬ marized by Rogers do, however, appear to account well for variations in weapons inno¬ vation between the United States and the USSR. 26This section draws on F. M. Scherer, Industrial Market Structure and Economic Perfor¬ mance, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1980), esp. pp. 407-38; and, for the comparisons to the Soviet Union, on Ronald Amann's introduction and David Holloway's chapters in Amann and Cooper, Industrial Innovation. See also Stanislaw Gomulka, "The Incompatibility of Social¬ ism and Rapid Innovation" (chap. 2), and Alastair McAuley, "Central Planning, Market Socialism and Rapid Innovation" (chap. 3), in Technology Transfer and East-West Relations, ed. Mark E. Schaffer (New York, 1985); Kazimierz Poznanski, The Environment for Tech¬ nological Change in Centrally Planned Economies, World Bank Staff Working Paper no. 718 (Washington, D.C., January 1985). Also germane to this topic is the important study by Joseph S. Berliner, The Innovation Decision in Soviet Industry (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), although Berliner overstates the differences between military and civilian innovativeness when he argues, for example, that the developments in the military sphere "have in effect been removed from the normal operation of the economic system" (p. 506). [28]

Sources of Innovation Table 2. Organizational characteristics related to innovation

Relative degree found in organization of military R&D

Expectation of innovativeness

Effect on Characteristic Centralization Complexity Formalization Interconnectedness Organizational slack

innovativeness

U.S.A.

USSR

U.S.A.

USSR

Inhibits Encourages Inhibits Encourages Encourages

Low High Low High High

High Low High Low Low

High High High High High

Low Low Low Low Low

Cols. 1 and 2 draw on Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 3d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1983), pp. 339-61.

characteristics found in the United States and the USSR and their ex¬ pected effects on innovation. Although I use here the terminology employed by organization the¬ orists, the distinctions between the U.S. and Soviet systems can be described in a more straightforward fashion. Research and develop¬ ment in the United States are organized in a decentralized manner that encourages the free flow of information and rewards low-level initia¬ tives. Soviet R&D, by contrast, is highly centralized, hierarchical, and characterized by excessive secrecy and compartmentalization. These features stem in large part from each country's historical development within the international system. Because the nature of the U.S. system is familiar to readers, I shall focus mainly on the Soviet system, using the U.S. system for comparison.

Centralization Students of innovation have found that centralization tends to be negatively associated with innovativeness; that is, the more power and control are concentrated in an organization, the less innovative the organization is: "The range of new ideas in an organization seems to be restricted when a few central leaders dominate the scene."27 Both state and research organization are much more highly centralized in the Soviet Union than in the United States. Soviet as well as Western scholars recognize that the highly centralized Soviet system inhibits incentive and innovation. Indeed, Soviet political leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev have complained of 27Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, pp. 359-60. [29]

Innovation and the Arms Race the tendency for people to look to the top level to resolve issues that could be decided at lower levels.28 The Soviet economist P. Iakovlev has observed that this "excessively centralized administration elimi¬ nates the sense of personal responsibility—the result is a mood of indifference within the apparat [that] more often than not leads people to adopt a negative attitude toward the organization for which they work."29 Although a centralized system tends to inhibit innovation, it partly compensates for that problem by an ability to marshal resources be¬ hind new projects, once a decision to innovate is made. Students of the Soviet Union and other centrally planned economies have long recog¬ nized this characteristic. In such an economy, the Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev argues, it "is easier to avoid industrial anar¬ chy, to mobilize the country's resources, and to solve crucial tech¬ nological and economic problems more rapidly." A centrally planned economy "can undertake necessary projects where there is no question of quick returns."30 An official U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) briefing on Soviet economic administration concurs that perhaps its main advantage lies "in enabling the leadership to mobilize resources in crash programs to achieve priority objectives."31 Economists have identified two related characteristics of the centrally planned economy which inhibit innovation: lack of competi¬ tion among producers and weak consumer demand for innovative products. "With some justification it may be held that the absence of competition and a direct relationship with the customer is 'the most potent single factor impeding innovation' in the USSR."32 Although some Western observers have cited the Soviet military as the one sector of the economy where competition prevails and thereby enhances in¬ novation, this characterization appears overdrawn. As Holloway points out, prototypes of weapons that appear to be competitive may 28See the discussion in Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 435. For Gorbachev's comments, Mikhail Gor¬ bachev, Political Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the 2yth Party Congress (Moscow, 1986), p. 71. At full meetings of the Politburo, Soviet leaders have, according to weekly reports in the Soviet press, discussed such relatively minor issues as whether to approve production of a "new model of a light automobile" and an energy-saving tractor, "type K-700." See the reports in Pravda, 25 March 1983 and 22 April 1983. I am grateful to Steve Wegren for calling these reports to my attention. 29Iakovlev, in Voprosy filosofii [Questions of philosophy], no. 5 (1971): 36-38, quoted in Roy A. Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy (New York, 1975), p. 253. ^Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy, p. 238. 31Henry Rowen, "Central Intelligence Agency Briefing on the Soviet Economy," in The Soviet Polity in the Modern Era, ed. Erik P. Hoffmann and Robbin F. Laird (New York, 1984), p. 431. See also Amann, introduction to Amann and Cooper, Industrial Innovation, pp. 12-13, 25-26. 32Amann, introduction to Industrial Innovation, p. 12.

Sources of Innovation

be assigned different military missions. More important, "most com¬ petition ends at the paper design stage. . . . Competitive develop¬ ment, which appears now to be less important than before, has never been a universal practice/733 A recent CIA study also concludes that Soviet designers "have not faced the competitive pressures that drive Western designers to press the state of the art. Rather,77 the study argues, "they have been required to use off-the-shelf components, and employ the preferred design and manufacturing methods detailed in official design handbooks."34 The common notion that the Soviet mili¬ tary economy differs greatly from the civilian one in terms of competi¬ tion seems overdrawn. Regarding the need for demand to stimulate innovation, both Soviet and Western observers have pointed to the example of the military industry and contrasted it to the civilian sphere. As S. Belotserkovskii writes in Pravda, the "creative process produces an atmosphere of high spirits and enthusiasm [vysokogo dushevnogo pod" etna], under condi¬ tions when the results of research are awaited, in order to be discussed immediately, and when one is looking forward to using them quickly.77 He notes the success of leaders of research groups—such as Korolev, Kurchatov, Keldysh, and Tupolev—whose work was highly valued by the party and whose products were much in demand.35 It is not sur¬ prising that they all came from the military sector. A number of West¬ ern analysts argue, in fact, that the military is the only innovative branch of Soviet technology, because it is the only one with close relations between producer and customer.36 Yet, without the impetus from the party and top military officials, the conditions for innovation would still be lacking. As Holloway argues, it seems more natural to speak of obstacles being overcome than to point to a strong innovative dynamic in the defence industry itself. If left to themselves the design bureaux would no doubt carry on designing weap¬ ons and the factories would keep on producing them; but there is nothing to suggest that they would be very innovative. It is the political leadership and the armed forces that have created the conditions for innovation in the defence sector and directed its activities into innovative paths.37 33Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector," in Amann and Cooper, Industrial Innovation, p. 319. ^CIA, The Soviet Weapons Industry: An Overview, Directorate of Intelligence Report DI 86-10016 (September 1986), esp. p. 19. 35S. Belotserkovskii, "Effektivnost' nauki: Uchenogo rastit poisk" [The effectiveness of science: The search makes the scientist growj, Pravda, 24 September 1982. 36E.g., Berliner, Innovation Decision. 37Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector," p. 352. Similar conclusions are drawn by Gallagher and Spielmann, Soviet Decision-Making for Defense, pp. 21-28, 60-70; and by CIA, Soviet Weapons Industry, esp. p. 15. [31]

Innovation and the Arms Race

This is not to argue that Soviet weapons designers never propose inno¬ vations on their own initiative. Typically, however, such proposals need high-level backing, consistency with existing military priorities, and extensive organizational restructuring to be carried out.38 Thus, although the resources of a centrally planned economy can be channeled to promote particular innovations, centralization itself ap¬ pears to inhibit innovativeness. At the level of the organization, spe¬ cialists on innovation have drawn a similar conclusion: "Although the initiation of innovations in a centralized organization is less frequent than in a decentralized organization, the centralization may actually encourage the implementation of innovations, once the innovation decision is made."39 In Soviet research institutes, centralization and concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals are combined with a hierarchi¬ cal structure of administration, all apparently to the detriment of inno¬ vation.40 Take, for example, the Moscow Radio Plant—"one of the key military research and production establishments of the Soviet Union, specializing in guidance and control equipment." There, management power is concentrated in a "Triumvirate" composed of representatives from the director's office, the Plant Party Committee, and the Plant Trade Union. "All responsible decisions, directives, agreements, refer¬ ences for travel abroad and so forth are usually taken up by the Trium¬ virate, and their signatures appear on all pertinent documents."41 In research institutes devoted to nuclear physics, a similar situation prevails, in that only the top directors have any influence over major decisions. Centralized control is maintained by strict limitations on access to information. This point is clear from the testimony of Sergei Polikanov, a physicist who conducted research in the West as well as in the Soviet nuclear program before his emigration to West Germany in the late 1970s. One important way that Soviet science differs from ^For some examples from the memoirs of designers of tanks, aircraft, and other systems, see Edward L. Warner III, The Military in Contemporary Soviet Politics: An Institu¬ tional Analysis (New York, 1977), pp. 178-86. For developments in the field of radar, see A. Fedoseev, Zapadnia: Chelovek i sotsializm [The trap: Man and socialism] (Frank¬ furt/Main, 1976); John Erickson, "Radio-Location and the Air Defense Problem: The Design and Development of Soviet Radar, 1934-1940," Science Studies (1977): 241-68. For examples from computer technology, see Henry Eric Firdman, Decision-Making in the Soviet Microelectronics Industry: The Leningrad Design Bureau, a Case Study (Falls Church, Va., 1984), esp. pp. 13-20. 39Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, p. 360. On this point, see also James Q. Wilson, "Innovation in Organization: Notes toward a Theory," in Approaches to Organizational Design, ed. James D. Thompson (Pittsburgh, 1966), pp. 195-218. I thank Robert Jervis for calling it to my attention. 40Wilson, "Innovation in Organization," pp. 212-14. 41Irina Dunskaya, Security Practices at Soviet Scientific Research Facilities (Falls Church, Va., 1983), pp. iv, 9.

[321

Sources of Innovation

Western science, argues Polikanov, is found in the question of who participates "in regard to the choice of directions research will take." In the Soviet Union, the "number of physicists who are well informed about decisions affecting large projects is limited. All this naturally influences the development of nuclear physics and effectively excludes young scientists from the process of forming new scientific directions." Such exclusion, Polikanov maintains, "undoubtedly lowers the general level of nuclear physics in the Soviet Union."42 Mikhail Agursky, an emigre who worked in a research institute sup¬ porting Soviet missile production, made a similar point concerning the centralization of power there. The leadership of his institute con¬ stituted "a single coalition" of "people not younger than 55-60 years old," who "occupied the key positions (director, chief designer, several heads of sections and laboratories, and so forth)." Agursky argued that although this group of older administrators was less qualified than the younger scientific workers, it succeeded by dint of its central leader¬ ship position in dominating the course of research. Agursky main¬ tained that the junior scientists were "more competent, yet deprived of any independence in [their] work."43 His comments about the qualifi¬ cations of the institute's personnel address another characteristic that innovation theorists have associated with organizational innovative¬ ness: complexity. Complexity

Students of innovation define complexity as "the degree to which an organization's members possess a relatively high level of knowledge and expertise, usually measured by the members' range of occupation¬ al specialties and their degree of professionalism expressed by formal training."44 Complexity is said to encourage members to conceive and propose innovations, but it may pose barriers to implementing them. It would be extremely difficult to measure the relative degrees of knowledge, expertise, and training of members of military R&D facili^Sergei Polikanov, Nuclear Physics in the Soviet Union: Current Status and Future Prospects (Falls Church, Va., 1984), p. 15. 43Mikhail Agursky, Nauchno-issledovateVskii institut technologii mashinostroeniia kak chast' sovetskogo voenno-promyshlennogo kompleksa [The Research Institute of Machine-Building Technology as a part of the Soviet military-industrial complex], Hebrew Institute of Jerusalem, Soviet and East European Research Centre, Soviet Institutions Series, Paper no. 8 (September 1976), pp. 40-43. Parts of this paper have been translated into English: Mikhail Agursky and Hannes Adomeit, "The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex, Sur¬ vey 24 (Spring 1979): 106-24; and Agursky, The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex, Jeru¬ salem Papers on Peace Problems, no. 31, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations (Jerusalem, 1980). “^Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, p. 360. [33]

Innovation and the Arms Race

ties in the United States and in the USSR. It may be possible, however, to compare military and civilian researchers in the Soviet Union and then to relate these findings to the U.S. researchers. First, however, a more basic point needs to be made. Complexity in the Soviet Union, like other characteristics that affect innovativeness (such as centralization), can be understood to stem from the historical circumstances under which Russia developed. Industrializing later than Western Europe and the United States, Russia inevitably lagged behind them in the ability to train and assemble a body of scientific personnel comparable to those of Western countries. Although one would think this problem had long since been solved, some evidence suggests otherwise. According to the most careful analysis of Soviet data available, in overall resources of scientific personnel in industry (including military-related branches) the USSR did not catch up to the United States until the 1970s. Furthermore, the USSR continues to lag behind the United States in the science-intensity of its industry (the number of scientists per industrial worker).45 In many respects, then, the historical legacy of backwardness that Gerschenkron identified has not been eradicated. In the past, it was assumed that the overall state of Soviet technologi¬ cal development had little effect on the military sector—that the mili¬ tary, owing to its privileged status, was protected from the shortcom¬ ings of the rest of the economy. It was believed, for example, that Soviet military R&D employed the cream of the crop among the coun¬ try's scientists. It was thought that the working conditions, facilities, and availability of materials, plus higher salaries and other perquisites, led the top Soviet scientists and engineers to prefer work in the military sector.46 This common wisdom has recently been called into question. Evidence from emigres who worked in both the civilian and military fields in the Soviet Union provides a very different picture. One emigre argues that military research, especially in his field (space rocketry), "began to lose some of its glamor" during the 1960s. "More important for the people working in it, the benefits they had enjoyed were gradu¬ ally eroding." The personnel in Sergei Korolev's rocket design bureau, for example, were no longer excused from military service: "Towards the end of the 1960s all deferments were cancelled and men were called 45Julian Cooper, "Scientists and Soviet Industry: A Statistical Analysis," discussion paper, ser. RC/B17, no. B, Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham (November 1981). See also Ronald Amann, Julian Cooper, and R. W. Davies, eds.. The Technological Level of Soviet Industry (New Haven, Conn., 1977). 46Gur Ofer, The Opportunity Cost of the Nonmonetary Advantages of the Soviet Military R&D Effort, Rand Paper R-1741-DDRE (Santa Monica, Calif., August 1975); Ofer, The Relative Efficiency of Military Research and Development in the Soviet Union: A Systems Approach, Rand Paper R-2522-AE (Santa Monica, Calif., 1980). See also Zhores Medvedev, Soviet Science (London, 1979), pp. 144-50. [34]

Sources of Innovation

up in droves." With this incentive gone, "many began to seek jobs elsewhere."47 Similar observations are offered by Agursky, who worked in R&D institutes in Soviet civilian industry, under the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and in the Ministry of General Machine-Building (responsible for Soviet missile and space production). Agursky attributes the declin¬ ing prestige of the military sector since World War II mainly to condi¬ tions imposed by strict secrecy. "Secrecy in the military industry," he argues, "leads to a deterioration of its personnel—the engineeringtechnical staff, as well as the workers." Furthermore, it "exerts a sharp¬ ly negative influence on the intellectual work in the military industry, lowering its effectiveness and causing the most capable people to leave."48 The secret nature of the work means that military scientists are not allowed many of the advantages of their civilian counterparts, such as contact with foreign colleagues and the ability to publish articles and books in the open press.49 According to Nikita Khrushchev, this was the reason that the Soviet Nobel-laureate physicist Petr Kapitsa gave for his refusal to engage in military research.50 Reasons given by other scientists include the fact that even though salaries are sometimes higher in the military sector, they cannot be supplemented in the way that civilian salaries can be—by fees from consulting, tutoring, and writing, for example, and by honoraria from lectures. Therefore, the argument goes, the most ambitious and capable scientists seek em¬ ployment in the civilian sector, where they are comparatively free from such restrictions, leaving scientists of lesser ability to work for the military. As one observer put it, "if first-rate scientists are put off by the quality and environment of military research, second-raters perhaps find this a useful channel for career advancement."51 47Victor Yevsikov, Re-entry Technology and the Soviet Space Program (Some Personal Obser¬ vations) (Falls Church, Va., 1982), pp. xi, 12. 48Agursky, Nauchno-issledovateVskii institut, pp. 20-27. Agursky employed an electrical metaphor, vyzyvaia ottok, which literally refers to an "outflow" of the most capable people. 49"Soviet scientists, much more than engineers, are very concerned with the 'priorities' (an official date) assigned to their findings, and strive to bring their large and small discoveries to the attention of scientific circles as soon as possible. For this reason scien¬ tists are usually not interested in having their work classified, preferring to publish their articles quickly in widely-read scientific journals, or to present their results at national or international conferences and symposia": Dunskaya, Security Practices, p. 101. See also Arthur J. Alexander, "Soviet Weapons Development and the Scientific Community," in Science and Technology in the Soviet Union: Proceedings of a Conference, July 26-27, 1QS4, Department of Statistics, Stanford University (31 January 1985), pp. 27-28; CIA, Soviet Weapons Industry, p. 15. 50Transcript of Khrushchev's tape-recorded reminiscences, at Harriman Institute, Co¬ lumbia University, pp. 426-30. 51Alexander, "Soviet Weapons Development," p. 28; Agursky, Nauchno-issledovateV skii institut, pp. 20-2:1; CIA, Soviet Weapons Industry, p. 15.

[35]

Innovation and the Arms Race

Because of the unattractive nature of work in the military sector, some observers argue, the faculties and institutes that train students specifically for such work are considered the least prestigious. Conse¬ quently, even the Bauman Technical Institute and the Moscow Avia¬ tion Institute have reportedly been able to attract only mediocre stu¬ dents. Many of the students receive permission to engage in secret work for the military during the course of their education, and they are allowed to use this work for credit toward their diplomas. Owing to the limited number of academic experts permitted to evaluate such secret work, the standards for higher degrees in restricted military fields are far lower than those in civilian ones.52 In addition, survey data from interviews with emigre scientists indicate that membership in the Communist party is far more important for obtaining higher degrees in military R&D than in the civilian sector, where the granting of degrees evidently depends more on academic merit.53 For such reasons, it is argued, the quality of researchers defending dissertations tends to be lower in the military sphere than in the civilian. Evidence from Soviet military sources tends to support the impres¬ sions gained from emigres. General G. I. Pokrovskii, for example—a top Soviet authority on military-technical matters during the 1950s— complained in print about the quality of students in military-technical research: "The preparation of military-scientific cadres, combining ad¬ vanced studies of military affairs and technology, is not being carried out sufficiently systematically." He found overly narrow technical spe¬ cialization and lack of concern for practical applications of scientific work most responsible for this state of affairs: "In particular, such an accusation could be advanced against very many candidate and doc¬ toral dissertations defended in recent years at military-technical academies."54 52Agursky, Nauchno-issledovatel'skii institut, pp. 22-23. Dunskaya (Security Practices, p. 117) writes: "Some believe that it is significantly easier to defend a classified dissertation: one isn't required to copy and distribute the abstract of the dissertation to more than a hundred addresses; only a narrow circle of people are present for the defense, and approval of the dissertation by the All-Union Certification Commission (VAK) is ob¬ tained much more quickly." 53Robert F. Miller, "The Role of the Communist Party in Soviet Research and Develop¬ ment," Soviet Studies 37 (January 1985): 56. ^G. Pokrovskii, "Rol' nauki v sovremennoi voine" [The role of science in contempo¬ rary war], Voennaia mysl' [Military thought], no. 3 (March 1955): 27. The "candidate" degree (kandidat nauk) requires at least three years of postgraduate study and the prepa¬ ration of original research for publication. It corresponds to something between a mas¬ ter's and a Ph.D. The Soviet doctorate (doktor nauk) is of much higher distinction and more rarely awarded. From 1937 to *957' f°r example, only 12,000 doctorates were granted in the entire USSR, compared to more than 100,000 candidate degrees. For a discussion, see Nigel Grant, Soviet Education, 4th ed. (Flammondsworth, 1979)' PP- 144—

45[36]

Sources of Innovation

As evidence for the poor quality of workers in the military field relative to those in civilian industry, Agursky cites, among other exam¬ ples, knowledge of foreign languages. He considers the ability to read other languages, especially English, as essential for Soviet military and civilian R&D, because, he claims, foreign technical journals constitute the major source of information on potentially useful innovations.55 Pokrovskii put forward a similar view; he wrote that knowledge of foreign languages "is a very important condition for increasing one's understanding of technical military affairs. It is essential for people associated with military technology and with military science to remain constantly in touch with not only Soviet literature but also with foreign literature which deals with their specialties."56 Agursky believes that, owing to the poor pay and work conditions of technical translators, Russian translations of foreign articles do not constitute a satisfactory substitute for a reading knowledge of the foreign language.57 Pokrovskii agrees, arguing that "an accurate and complete picture of foreign scientific, technological, and military achievements can be ac¬ quired only by reading foreign publications in the original. 58 As a measure of their overall qualifications, Agursky compares the staffs at the three institutes where he worked—one affiliated with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, another with an industrial ministry, and the third with the military. Practically all of the members of the Acade¬ my of Sciences institute knew at least one foreign language, and many knew two or three. At the industrial ministry's institute, many of the researchers knew enough English to read technical journals in their field. At the military's research institute, by contrast, Agursky found that in his department of nearly six hundred members, those who could read English, even with some difficulty, numbered only six to eight people. For this and other reasons, Agursky concludes that work¬ ers in the Soviet military industry are less qualified and of a "lower intellectual level" than those in the civilian sector.59 Although 55Medvedev makes the same point in Soviet Science, pp. 64-65; so does Yevsikov in Re¬ entry Technology, pp. 7-8. The importance of foreign technical journals is emphasized in Julian Cooper, "Western Technology and Soviet Economic Power," in Schaffer, Technol¬ ogy Transfer, pp. 83-85. See also Cooper, "Western Technology and the Soviet Defense Industry," in Trade, Technology, and Soviet-American Relations, ed. Bruce Parrott (Bloom¬ ington, Ind., 1985), esp. pp. 187-88. A thorough discussion of Soviet institutions in¬ volved in making foreign technical literature available is found in Bruce Parrott, Informa¬ tion Transfer in Soviet Science and Engineering: A Study of Documentary Channels, Rand Report R-2667-ARPA (Santa Monica, Calif., November 1981). 56General G. I. Pokrovskii, Science and Technology in Contemporary War, trans. Raymond L. Garthoff (1956; New York, 1959), p. 105. 57Agursky, Nauchno-issledovateTskii institut, p. 17. 58Pokrovskii, Science and Technology, pp. 104-5. 59Agursky, Nauchno-issledovateTskii institut, p. 17. [37]

Innovation and the Arms Race

Pokrovskii did not explicitly draw the same conclusion, he did claim— after Engels and Lenin—that the "level of development of military technology depends directly on the level of economic and technologi¬ cal development" in the society as a whole.60 He did not argue, as some Western analysts have done, that the military sector constitutes the leading technological edge or that it possesses the most highly qualified personnel. In the United States, most of the R&D for new weapons is conducted by private contractors.61 Therefore, in order to argue that Soviet mili¬ tary R&D organizations rate higher than U.S. ones on the scale of complexity, one would have to assume that—contrary to Agursky's assertions—members of Soviet military R&D organizations are at least as well qualified as those of Soviet civilian R&D organizations and that members of Soviet civilian R&D organizations are in turn better qualified than U.S. civilians whose companies do contract work for the Department of Defense. These assumptions seem little supported by the available evidence.62 The evaluation by one student of Soviet sci¬ ence and military policy seems more reasonable: "Although the lower quality of [Soviet] military scientists has not been universally accepted or described by all sources, the evidence contains enough instances to indicate that it is a serious issue that cannot be disregarded."63 One may safely conclude, then, that on the scale of complexity, which is closely associated with innovation, the United States ranks above the Soviet Union.

Formalization

Formalization, or the extent to which an organization imposes set rules and procedures for its members to follow, is generally considered to impede innovation but to encourage implementation once a decision ^Pokrovskii, Science and Technology, pp. 3-9, 66-67; Pokrovskii, "Rol' nauki v sovremennoi voine," p. 29. 61Judith V. Reppy, The IR&D Program of the Department of Defense, Peace Studies Pro¬ gram Occasional Paper no. 6, Cornell University (March 1976), p. 7. 62The most careful comparison of the relative levels of Soviet and Western technology (Amann, Cooper, and Davies, Technological Level of Soviet Industry) found the Soviets lagging behind in most sectors. The authors did not blame this state of affairs on poor qualifications and training of Soviet researchers; they accounted for much of the differ¬ ence on the basis of systemic factors inherent in market versus centrally planned econo¬ mies. By the same token, the authors did not argue that the level of Soviet technology fell below that of the West despite superior Soviet personnel. 63Alexander, "Soviet Weapons Development," p. 28. [38]

Sources of Innovation

to innovate has been made.64 Here again the U.S. and Soviet systems differ substantially. Formalization is in some sense inherent in the hierarchical nature of Soviet society. At the same time, the degree of formalization can vary from one research group to another, depending on such factors as the style of leadership and the "creative atmosphere."65 Formalization in military R&D organizations is, however, reinforced by the demands of strict secrecy. The security functions at such organizations are per¬ formed by the so-called First Department (Pervyi Otdel), which is "re¬ sponsible for keeping and issuing classified documents, letters, reports and projects, arranging temporary duty trips to secure facilities, dis¬ patching secret correspondence and related tasks."66 All of the func¬ tions that fall within the purview of the First Department are governed by specific and cumbersome rules. A few examples suggest the stifling effect they must have on incentives for innovative work. Take, for instance, the procedures necessary for conducting one's daily work with classified materials. Each member of a plant or design bureau that conducts classified research is issued a number by the First Department. The number appears on the researcher's portfolio, which contains his or her work notebook, unfinished writings, and any other classified materials. The First Department keeps all portfolios in its safes. Employees are allowed access to their portfolios only in ex¬ change for their permanent plant passes. They are issued temporary passes, containing the same number as their portfolios. The procedure then works as follows: In order to get one's portfolio or some other material for work, it is necessary to give one's number or the number of the required material and hand one's plant pass through the safe-room window. The First Department employee hands back the portfolio and requested material together with the temporary pass, which can be used only on plant grounds. One must sign the First Department logbook for the portfolio and an individual card for each piece of material taken out for tempo¬ rary use. The cards are kept in a pigeonhole, under the number of the person checking out the material. When the material is returned, the ^Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, pp. 360-61. Scherer, Industrial Market Structure, pp. 413-15, writes in terms of the size of a firm and the disadvantages of large corporations, where decisions to innovate "must filter through a whole chain of command. 65See Belotserkovskii, "Effektivnost' nauki"; M. J. Berry's chapter in Amann and Cooper, Industrial Innovation, pp. 53-55. ^Dunskaya, Security Practices, p. 10. See also Arthur J. Alexander, Decision-Making in Soviet Weapons Procurement, Adelphi Papers nos. 147 and 148 (London, 1978-79), pp. 2528; Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector," pp. 339-41; McAuley, "Central Plan¬ ning, Market Socialism, and Rapid Innovation," in Schaffer, Technology Transfer, esp. pp. 46-47. [39]

Innovation and the Arms Race

appropriate card is taken out of its pigeonhole and the receipt is signed by the employee of the First Department, who includes it with the material. When a portfolio is returned, a second signature is entered into the logbook in the same way. Only after going through this pro¬ cess do employees retrieve their permanent passes—without which they are not allowed to leave the plant grounds, even to go out for lunch.67 The rules for writing classified reports are equally complicated and strict. Written drafts of material to be typed must be entered into spe¬ cial numbered notebooks, which contain ninety-nine perforated pre¬ numbered pages. As each page is typed, the foreman of the typing office issues a stub, which the owner of the notebook must endorse in order to receive the typed page. To understand the burdens such prac¬ tices impose on Soviet research, one should bear in mind that much more material is classified in the USSR than in the United States.68 Agursky illustrates this problem with an anecdote concerning Soviet scientists from a military R&D institute who attended an international machine-tool exhibition in Paris. Upon their return, the members of the delegation wrote up a 300-page report based on the public informa¬ tion they had gathered. The First Department at their institute insisted that the information be considered classified and demanded that it be rewritten by hand into a special classified notebook, to be retyped by the secret typing pool. Only after several days of negotiation and the personal intervention of the institute's director was a compromise struck, whereby each page of the original report would be stamped "secret," to give the impression that formal procedures had been fol¬ lowed. It is difficult to disagree with Agursky's assessment that the atmosphere created by such formalization "greatly impedes efficient work" and inhibits innovation.69 U.S. scientists face fewer barriers to the conduct of classified re¬ search than their Soviet counterparts do. This would be the case even if the specific security procedures in the two countries were similar, be¬ cause a substantial amount of what is published openly in the United States is classified in the Soviet Union. A Soviet scientist working in a classified military research unit, for example, was once requested to 67Dunskaya, Security Practices, pp. 32-34. 68por more excruciating details of Soviet security practices, see Dunskaya, Security Practices, pp. 32-40 and passim. Similar accounts are found in the writings of other emigre scientists, even those who did not work in the military field. See, e.g., Yevsikov, Re-entry Technology, pp. 7-8, 32, 40; Firdman, Decision-Making, chap. 5; Sergei Polikanov, Razryv: Zapiski atomnogo fizika [Explosion: Notes of an atomic physicist] (Frankfurt/Main, 1983), pp. 105-12, concerning the role of the KGB; Medvedev, Soviet Science, p. 124. The everyday burden of secrecy is a prominent theme of Agursky's writing as well. 69Agursky and Adomeit, “Soviet Military-Industrial Complex, p. 111. [40]

Sources of Innovation

prepare a report for which she needed information on design features of various types of Soviet aircraft. After going through the appropriate procedures, she received the relevant documents from the First Department. They turned out to be based on published U.S. material that had been translated into Russian: "Thus American technical analy¬ sis of Soviet aircraft provided a working description of Soviet aircraft for Soviet scientists."70 In a similar fashion, even Soviet military of¬ ficers writing on matters of strategy and tactics are often denied access to information on their own country's weapons. They too must rely' instead on data published openly in the United States.71 Such restric¬ tions, when applied to the field of military R&D, have obvious deleterious effects on innovativeness. Although U.S. security practices no doubt involve a fair amount of bureaucratic red tape and idiosyncrasy, they have more often come under criticism for laxity.72 In any case, they hardly compare with the strict adherence to formal and cumbersome rules evident in the Soviet system. Such formalization is attributable largely to the Soviet obses¬ sion with secrecy, a characteristic with strong historical roots. 70Dunskaya, Security Practices, p. 139. Yevsikov, Re-entry Technology, pp. 7, 40, makes a similar point. The classification of documents produced in the USSR is the responsibility of the person who creates the document, the so-called document executor. Because the First Department retains the right to investigate the classification procedures of particu¬ lar laboratories, and such investigations are often used as a pretext to purge "untrustwor¬ thy" individuals, "there is a tendency for document executors to overclassify their R&D." "This overclassification," according to one account, "inhibits the diffusion of Soviet inno¬ vations." See Firdman, Decision-Making, esp. pp. 75-77. 71In the papers attributed to Oleg Penkovskiy, the writer discusses articles he turned over to Western intelligence services from the top-secret "Special Collection" of the Soviet General Staff journal, Voennaia mysT. Penkovskiy writes that one author "uses American data, taken from open American sources, on the characteristics and effects of nuclear weapons. . . . Having set the proper political tone, he assumes a very serious, studious air of objectivity—what a fraud—to explain why he is forced to use American data in his study: He can't get access to similar data on our own Soviet weapons!": The Penkovskiy Papers (New York, 1965), pp. 244-45; emphasis removed. Although it appears that the "papers" are actually the work of the CIA rather than of Penkovskiy, they are based on material he provided. See U.S. Congress, Senate, Foreign and Military Intelli¬ gence, bk. 1: Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 94th Cong. 2d sess. Report no. 94-755 (26 April 1977), p. 453. In any case, a reading of the issues of Voennaia mysl' that have been released makes it clear that much of the material is based on Western data, as "Penkovskiy" points out. 72In early 1986, for example, the Convair division of General Dynamics Corporation received an "unsatisfactory" rating for its security procedures and temporarily lost its clearance for any new military contracts. Such a rating signified that "a facility has lost or is in imminent danger of losing its ability to adequately safeguard classified documents." Workers claimed "that it would be fairly easy for a stranger to get inside a Convair plant : Nicholas D. Kristof, "Part of General Dynamics Losing Security Clearance," Nezv York Times, 2 February 1986. See also Robert Lindsey, "Need Joins Greed to Smuggle U.S. Technology," New York Times, 4 February 1986. For a discussion that emphasizes the trade-offs among individual freedom, scientific integrity, and U.S. security practices, see Don K. Price, Government and Science (1954; New York, 1962), pp. 95-123. [41]

Innovation and the Arms Race

Interconnectedness Students of innovation have used the concept of interconnectedness, defined as "the degree to which the units in a social system are linked by interpersonal networks," to assess the ability of an organization to disseminate new ideas rapidly among its members. High interconnec¬ tedness is considered positively related to organizational innovative¬ ness.73 Economists, including Soviet ones, draw a similar conclusion when they write that a "close working relationship" among research, development, and production personnel "is an essential pre-requisite for successful innovation."74 According to Holloway, "the Soviet system is not well adapted to the lateral or horizontal transfer of technology across departmental bound¬ aries, unless this is organized as a matter of priority from the top."75 Furthermore, Soviet weapons design bureaus are institutionally sepa¬ rate from the research institutes that support them. Because weapons development programs "are not the way in which funds are acquired for applied research, the institutes have no incentive to press fancy technology on the designer." The result is "that while designers may be highly innovative within the existing state of the art—i.e. in the way in which they put available technology together in a specific design— their designs may not provide a direct and immediate stimulus to raising the state of the art."76 These observations about the importance and difficulty of technol¬ ogy transfer are supported by emigre accounts. One former Soviet specialist in microelectronics, for example, attributes the success of his department to an "unusual organizational structure" that "circum¬ vented difficulties prevalent in most Soviet electronics organizations, where the interface between designers and production engineers was frequently painful and critical." In his department, the "integration of research, design, and production in one laboratory made for a highly efficient operation," although "it stood in obvious contradiction to con¬ ventional norms of Soviet industrial R&D." Owing to the extraordinary arrangements necessary to maintain this kind of cooperation between R&D units, this observer has deemed technological breakthrough "per73Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, p. 361. 74Amann, introduction to Amann and Cooper, Industrial Innovation, p. 13. For Soviet statements, see A. Volkov, Rabota na sebia [Work for oneself] (Moscow, 1970), pp. 17, 19, cited in Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy, pp. 262-63, 392-93; Belotserkovskii, "Effektivnost'nauki." 75David Holloway, "The Soviet Style of Military R&D," in The Genesis of New Weapons: Decision Making for Military R&D, ed. Franklin A. Long and Judith Reppy (New York, 1980), p. 155. _ . 76Ibid., pp. 318-19. See also Roy S. Jacobson, "Soviet Military R&D: A Perpetual Follower of U.S. Initiatives?" Signal, December 1984, pp. 103-7. [42]

Sources of Innovation haps the most difficult and least plausible event to occur on its own in Soviet industrial life."77 In the USSR the question of interconnectedness is not limited to matters of organizational structure. It raises a much larger issue—that of barriers to the free flow of information. Again the role of secrecy must be stressed, for it inhibits innovation to a much greater extent than the notion of low interconnectedness suggests. The extent to which these factors impede military innovation was recognized in the USSR as early as 1940. In that year the journal of the Commissariat of' Aircraft Industry pointed out that the strict compartmentalization of information, dictated by the requirements of secrecy, led to poor cir¬ culation of information among research enterprises and needless du¬ plication of efforts. The journal complained that "very often our designer solves problems which have already been solved in an adja¬ cent design bureau." In one instance, three design bureaus at the same aviation plant, working in isolation from one another, developed "the same unsuccessful scheme," two of them after it had already been tried and rejected by the first. The journal concluded: "It is said that such isolation is necessary, that it is caused by secrecy. But too much secrecy is ruining our work."78 Recent reports from emigres who were associated with military R&D when they lived in the USSR bear additional witness to the stifling nature of secrecy and compartmentalization in Soviet research organi¬ zations. Sergei Polikanov, who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons program in the early 1950s, describes how at that time the general secrecy surrounding nuclear physics research impeded the flow of information to those scientists standing at the base of the hier¬ archical pyramid. Reports on the results of scientific research had gath¬ ered on the shelves of the so-called First Departments (security depart¬ ments), and younger scientists had no access to them. . . . Only the intercession of a research group leader could secure permission for a younger scientist to familiarize himself with the results of an experiment. It would be no exaggeration to state that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a young Soviet physicist could learn more about the status of nuclear physics from the American journal Physical Review than from [comparable] work done in the Soviet Union because results of Soviet research were accumulated solely in classified reports."79 Problems of low interconnectedness and a restricted flow of informa¬ tion were not, in fact, limited to the young physicists at the base of the ^Firdman, Decision-Making, pp. n, 15-16. 78Tekhnika vozdushnogo flota [Equipment of the air force], no. 6 (1940): 5, quoted in Bruce Parrott, Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 68-69. 79Polikanov, Nuclear Physics in the Soviet Union, p. 3.

[43]

Innovation and the Arms Race

hierarchy. Even Igor Kurchatov, the top figure in Soviet nuclear re¬ search (including military applications) during the 1950s, was not im¬ mune to the effects of secrecy. One of his colleagues writes that in 1956 Kurchatov organized a meeting of 300 scientists from "various towns and places that did not yet have names"—a euphemistic description of classified research centers—"matters that, up to this time, had only been whispered about behind closed doors." Evidently even Kurchatov—"the most informed participant of the meeting"—learned for the first time about some of the secret research in his field. Kurchatov attempted to overcome the problems of interconnectedness endemic to Soviet research, especially in the military sphere. As one of his associates put it: "Knowing practically all of the work in physics in the Soviet Union, Kurchatov saw well the hindrance caused by the conditions of the work's secrecy. Therefore he always tried, even on the test ranges, to eliminate the interdepartmental barriers and to re¬ vive the exchange of ideas and information."80 If Kurchatov was at all successful in these endeavors, his success was short-lived. During the 1970s the Soviet preoccupation with secrecy continued to limit the degree of interconnectedness between as well as within re¬ search institutes. A researcher who already possessed a security clearance and wanted to visit a colleague at another establishment where classified work was conducted found the procedure compli¬ cated. To take such a trip—or komandirovka, as it is called in Russian— demanded considerable preparation and paperwork, the constant issu¬ ing and verifying of passes, and the filling out of forms. Once the researcher arrived at the colleague's institute, the same security prac¬ tices as at the home institute came into effect. The researcher was not, for example, allowed to keep any notes taken at the colleague's in¬ stitute. Instead, such notes had to be written into pre-numbered note¬ books and presented to the First Department. The First Department then sent the notebooks by special mail to its counterpart at the home institute, where they were deposited in the researcher's classified port¬ folio. Mainly for reasons of economy, the duration of a komandirovka was limited to one month.81 After reviewing such practices, one Soviet emigre scientist summarized them as follows: "The First Department in actuality discourages scientists and engineers from the free exchange of ideas, learning about the outside world, and the selection of col¬ leagues on the basis of accomplishments. Thus, it is one factor of the Soviet R&D environment which impedes technological break¬ throughs."82 80N.

A.

Vlasov,

"Vstrechi s Kurchatovym"

[Meetings with Kurchatov],

Vestnik

Akademii Nauk SSSR [Bulletin of the USSR Academy of Sciences], no. 7 (July 1985): 120, 119. 81Dunskaya, Security Practices, pp. 36-40. 82Firdman, Decision-Making, pp. 76-77. [44]

Sources of Innovation

In the United States, by contrast, one finds far fewer barriers to contacts between researchers working on related classified projects. Since World War II, a number of organizations have been established specifically to coordinate the R&D activities of various institutes and to encourage the free flow of information and personnel. One of the earliest was the Research and Development Board, established by the National Security Act of 1947. As the "highest level R&D management unit in the Pentagon," the board had an important indirect impact on the future course of military R&D through its functioning as a mecha-' nism for the exchange of information and ideas among those with authority and influence in some other capacity. Its military members generally had real authority over R&D in their respective services, and many of its civilian members served on other bodies, many of which had more direct influence over events than the Research and Develop¬ ment Board itself.83 Although the Research and Development Board involved predominantly high-level contacts, it served also to encour¬ age greater cooperation among individual researchers from the organi¬ zations represented. A less formal means of bringing together civilian and military per¬ sonnel to work on classified military problems is through ad hoc stud¬ ies. Many have been conducted at Harvard University and the Mas¬ sachusetts Institute of Technology, as the names of some of the more prominent projects indicate: Beacon Hill, Charles, East River, and Lin¬ coln.84 Such projects suggest the relatively insignificant burdens that U.S. security practices impose on the flow of information and ideas considered beneficial to innovation. Students of the subject recognize that "the degree to which institu¬ tional arrangements encourage or hinder the movement of people, with their luggage of ideas and information, is of major importance to innovation."85 According to this criterion of interconnectedness, the United States should appear far more innovative than the Soviet Union in the sphere of military R&D.

Organizational Slack

Organizational slack—"the degree to which uncommitted resources are available to an organization"—is considered to be positively related 83Herbert F. York and G. Allen Greb, "Military Research and Development: A Postwar History," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 33 (January 1977): pp. 15-16. ^Ibid., p. 18. 85Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector," p. 290; Louis Lavoie, "The Limits of Soviet Technology," Technology Review, November-December 1985, esp. pp. 74-75. See also the discussion on innovation in the context of the effect of the size of a firm in Scherer, Industrial Market Structure, pp. 413-22. [45]

Innovation and the Arms Race

to organizational and technological innovativeness.86 On this measure, the market economy of the United States seems to provide more organ¬ izational slack than the central planning of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet system the main objective of an enterprise is the fulfillment of the plan, and the plans in general are quite "taut." As one economist pointed out, only by "ameliorating the phenome¬ non of 'taut planning'" can the system permit "a certain amount of surplus capacity, which inclines the producer towards a more positive view of innovation."87 Yet meeting the plan is still central to Soviet industry, including the military sector. Thus the incentive structure of the military R&D system militates against the use of organizational slack for innovation, as Jerry Hough argued: "Since plan fulfillment depends more on the nature of the original plan than on the manager's performance, the manager fights for as easy a plan as possible. Compli¬ cated or radically new weapons increase the danger of production problems and delays; hence the manager—and the ministry—strongly prefer old weapons to new ones."88 It remains the case as a former Polish military official wrote, that the "bonus for introducing new products or new technologies is much lower than that for performing the quantitative production." There is no incentive, even in the military sector, for taking the risks associated with technological innovation. "Industry, including military industry, the planning apparatus of the ministries, and even Gosplan [the state planning committee] are not allies of the quick development of modern weaponry." It is the top political and military leadership who must push for innovation.89 This situation appears to apply to Soviet military R&D institutes as well as to industrial enterprises. "The general inflexibility of the centrally planned economy," according to one account, constitutes a serious "constraint on weapons R&D. Because of unreliability of sup¬ ply and inability to rely on contracts or plans to guarantee deliveries, designers are reluctant to ask for new products from suppliers they have not dealt with in the past. They face strong incentives to use off^Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, p. 361. See also Richard M. Cyert and James G. March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963), pp. 278-79; Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3d ed. (New York, 195°)' PP- 87-88, 101-3; Scherer, Industrial Market Structure, pp. 424-25. 87Amann, introduction to Amann and Cooper, Industrial Innovations, p. 13. On the relationship of taut planning to innovation in centrally planned economies, see also Bentley, Technological Change, passim. ^Jerry F. Hough, "Soviet Decision-Making on Defense," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 41 (August 1985): 85. 89Michael Checinski, A Comparison of the Polish and Soviet Armaments Decisionmaking Systems, Rand Report R-2662-AF (Santa Monica, Calif., 1981), pp. 56-57. Also Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector," pp. 342-44; and Karl F. Spielmann, "Defense Indus¬ trialists in the USSR," Problems of Communism, September-October 1976, esp. pp. 59-60.

[46]

Sources of Innovation

the-shelf components that can be counted on to perform to acceptable (though perhaps not optimal) standards." For these reasons, "designers are reluctant to venture into new realms. They face power¬ ful disincentives to use advanced technology or to look toward science for solutions to their problems."90 Similar views are expressed in the memoirs of the Soviet aircraft designer A. S. Iakovlev: "A designer should not for a minute forget that all improvements, no matter how important they are for raising the quality of the weapon, should be introduced with the consideration' that this should have a minimal effect on fulfillment of the plan." Although Iakovlev was writing in the context of wartime production, his remarks are still relevant to Soviet peacetime military R&D. As he described the situation, "designers were very closely connected to se¬ ries production. Before introducing an innovation into existing weap¬ onry, they had to imagine precisely what difficulties in the technologi¬ cal process this improvement might cause."91 Another designer, A. N. Tupolev, was quoted as arguing: "The country needs airplanes like black bread. You can offer pralines, cakes, and so forth, but there's no point. There aren't any ingredients from which to make them."92 The premium put on quantitative indicators by the centrally planned econ¬ omy and the inability to produce high-quality advanced-technology components generally appear to lead designers to prefer simple designs that can be mass-produced. Emigre accounts again provide evidence to support these observa¬ tions. Some of them describe at length the efforts of various design bureaus to meet the deadlines for development of products demanded by the government. The designers evidently give low priority to seek¬ ing out and incorporating new technologies. The accounts suggest that whatever "slack" time is not spent working on the product itself is used in trying to find ways to fix the blame for its late delivery on "sub¬ contracting" organizations. The design bureaus push onto their pro¬ duction-technology institutes "an enormous volume of work that can¬ not possibly be carried out, and that they really do not need at all, in order to lay blame on that institute should that need arise."93 A source from the military electronics sector argues that it is not unusual for one research facility to subcontract with another "for the development of a given electronic subsystem and to simultaneously develop the same 90Alexander, "Soviet Weapons Development," pp. 20-21. See also Gallagher and

Spielmann, Soviet Decision-Making for Defense, pp. 60-66. 91A. S. Iakovlev, Rasskazy aviakonstruktora [Stories of an aircraft designer] (Moscow, 1967)/ P- 3°892G. Ozerov, Tupolevskaia sharaga [The Tupolev prison design bureau], 2d ed. (Frank¬ furt/Main, 1973), p. 57. 93Agursky, Soviet Military-Industrial Complex, pp. 26-29.

[47]

Innovation and the Arms Race

subsystem 'in-house.' In this way, in the event of a failure, [the first facility] would receive no blame; in the case of success, [it] could claim all credit. Certainly," the account concludes, "such redundancy of ef¬ fort resulted in a great deal of inefficiency, yet it remains prevalent in the Soviet military-industrial complex today."94 Already overburdened with make-work projects, Soviet R&D in¬ stitutes appear to have little in the way of the extra resources of time and personnel considered beneficial to innovation; nor are they willing to take the risk.95 Designers who do attempt to initiate projects face a Catch-22 situation: "directors cannot get resources before being as¬ signed a project; after getting a project, work must begin immediately so as to not be accused of 'sabotaging important defense work.'" They may try to mobilize "internal reserves" through the ruse of "exceeding and fixing"—"hiring more people than are actually permitted, then fixing the situation by requesting additional manpower" for "special" purposes—but such practices are usually unsuccessful.96 In the United States, by contrast, the Department of Defense has established two programs precisely to provide the slack needed for initiating innovations. The Bid and Proposal (B&P) program allows private companies to charge as overhead on their other Defense Department contracts the costs of preparing unsolicited proposals for additional new weapons. The Independent Research and Develop¬ ment (IR&D) program allows firms to recover the R&D costs of projects that they themselves initiated, without a prior government contract or any congressional oversight. The B&P and IR&D programs have been supported on the ground that they promote an innovative atmosphere that is otherwise lacking in contract R&D.97 Furthermore, the "evidence suggests that most IR&D projects fall in the area of development of new products rather than basic or applied research, and certainly most technical work in the B&P category must belong to the product development area." Thus, as a major study of the program points out, "IR&D funds serve as an organizational cushion, a source of 'slack' in the language of organiza¬ tion theory." At a cost of more than a billion dollars per year, such programs can be said to enhance the innovativeness of U.S. R&D enterprises.98 94Firdman, Decision-Making, p. 17. 95Lavoie, "Limits of Soviet Technology," p. 71. A Soviet discussion by R. Bakhtanov and P. Volin in Literaturnaia gazeta [Literary newspaper], 6 September 1967, is sum¬ marized in Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy, p. 393. 96Firdman, Decision-Making, pp. 60-61. , 97Charles M. Herzfeld, "The Military R&D Process—A View from Industry, Bulletin of

the Atomic Scientists 34 (December 1978): 33-40. 98Reppy, IR&D Program, esp. pp. 33, 46-47.

[48]

Sources of Innovation

Thus, according to the criterion of organizational slack, one would expect to see greater weapons innovation in the United States than in the USSR. In fact, the situation in the United States appears to be almost the reverse of the one in the USSR. The taut system of planning in the Soviet Union makes low-level managers unwilling to take risks for the sake of innovation, but they are exhorted to do so by the upper echelons of the party and military. In the United States, in contrast, as one observer notes, "the top managers of the Department of Defense generally look for relatively simple, low-risk approaches to military' technology problems," whereas "many of the lower level managers [and private corporations] still pursue the most advanced technology and accept the highest risks."99 "Herzfeld, "Military R&D Process," p. 36.

[49]

[3] Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR [The effectiveness of our forces] will be improved through pro¬ gressive re-equipment made possible and necessary by tech¬ nological advances. This course has been deliberately chosen as best suited to the requirements and peculiar capabilities of the Western democracies. —Admiral Arthur Radford, 1955 Indeed, contemporary war is a war of motors, of minds, and of scientists who create new types of armament, better and more quickly. We, of course, lagged behind in this. —Nikita Khrushchev, 1971

Methods and Definitions

The literature in political science on the "issue area" discusses the proposition that actors and policy processes will differ according to the particular issue involved.1 In an important article that applied issuearea analysis to the question of weapons procurement, James Kurth related four "modes of change" that he had identified to four "modes of causation."2 Kurth's consideration of innovative change and his sugThe seminal article in the literature dealt with U.S. domestic politics: Theodore J. Lowi, "American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies, and Political Theory, World Politics 16 duly 1964): 677-715. Lowi applied his concepts to foreign policy in "Making Democracy Safe for the World: National Politics," in Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy, ed. James N. Rosenau (New York, 1967), pp. 295-331. In the same volume, see Rosenau's "Foreign Policy as an Issue Area"; and his "Pre-theories and Theories of Foreign Policy," in Approaches to Comparative and International Politics, ed. R. Barry Farrell (Evanston, Ill., 1966), pp. 27-92. Some scholars have benefited from the insights provided by Arnold Wolfers's essay "The Actors in International Politics," in his Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, 1962), pp. 3-35. See, e.g., William Zimmerman, "Issue Area and Foreign-Policy Process: A Research Note in Search of a General Theory, American Political Science Review 67 (December i973): 1204—12; William C. Potter, Issue Area and Foreign Policy Analysis," International Organization 34 (Summer 1980): 405-27. 2James Kurth, "A Widening Gyre: The Logic of American Weapons Procurement," Public Policy, no. 19 (Summer 1971): 373-404. Kurth's four modes of change (quantitative, innovative, renovative, and redistributive) were matched to four modes of causation (bureaucratic politics, bureaucratic process, bureaucratic-corporate allliances, and the

[50]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

gestion that different forces come into play at different stages of the process inform much of the discussion presented here. This analysis also draws on the findings of students of policy initiation in U.S. do¬ mestic politics.* * 3 Analyses of the arms race often rely on case studies. The use of casestudy methods is generally dictated by the type of questions the re¬ searcher wants to investigate. For example, although comparative analysis of levels of military spending may serve to test hypotheses of action-reaction, they cannot contribute to an understanding of the' "black box" of decision making. To understand the policy process—to identify means of influencing it, for example—a fine-grained case study may be required. Case studies need not, however, sacrifice methodological rigor for the sake of policy relevance.4 The method of structured, focused comparison, in which the researcher asks specific questions about each case or looks for evidence to support propositions derived from competing hypotheses, can contribute to the generaliza¬ tions that are a necessary step on the way to theory.5 I adopt such a method here in trying to generalize about the U.S. and Soviet pro¬ cesses of weapons innovation. Technological innovation in weaponry is defined here as the develop¬ ment of a new military technology that leads to significant changes— for example, in the realm of strategy, in the organization of military forces, or in the distribution of resources among services. The term does not refer to the incremental improvements in the characteristics of weapons that arguably constitute the main activity of military research and development.6 This definition is broader than the one used in the field of economics. Joseph Schumpeter, for example, distinguished among invention, innovation, and imitation (or diffusion); and other writers distinguish among invention, entrepreneurship, investment, economic system). See also his "Why We Buy the Weapons We Do," Foreign Policy, no. 11 (Summer 1973): 33-56; and "Aerospace Production Lines and American Defense Spending," in Testing the Theory of the Military-Industrial Complex, ed. Steven Rosen (Lex¬ ington, Mass., 1973), chap. 6. 3See, in particular, John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (Boston, 1984). 4Jack Snyder, "Richness, Rigor, and Relevance in the Study of Soviet Foreign Policy," International Security 9 (Winter 1984-85): 89-108. 5For discussions and examples of this method, see Alexander L. George and Timothy J. McKeown, "Case Studies and Theories of Organizational Decision Making," in Ad¬ vances in Information Processing in Organizations (Greenwich, Conn., 1985), 2: 21-58; Alex¬ ander L. George, "Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of Structured, Focused Comparison," in Diplomacy: New Approaches in History, Theory, and Policy, ed. P. G. Lauren (New York, 1979), pp. 43-68; A. L. George and R. Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York, 1974). 6Milton Leitenberg, "The Dynamics of Military Technology Today," International Social Science Journal 25, no. 3 (1973): 336-57.

[51]

Innovation and the Arms Race Table 3. Stages in the process of weapons innovation USSR

United States 1. Technocratic initiative Discovery of new technical possi¬ bilities; scientists advocate military applications 2. Consensus building Scientists and military associates gen¬ erate interest in new technology within military-technical community 3. Promotion Scientific, military, and industrial "entrepreneurs" promote new weap¬ on proposals within military services, Congress, and Executive 4. Open windows External threats serve as windows of opportunity for military to push a new weapon into production

5. High-level endorsement Pentagon officials gain congressional support for mass production of a new weapon, justified with more specific reference to an external

1. Stifled initiative Limited technical antecedents, some discussion of possibilities, but inno¬ vation constrained by established priorities 2. Preparatory measures Low-level efforts prepare broad tech¬ nological background but continue to yield to higher-priority programs 3. High-level response Directed response to foreign initia¬ tive, beginning of reassessment of priorities from top 4. Mobilization Leadership endorses all-out effort to pursue innovation as nature of new priorities becomes evident; finds al¬ lies in military to implement new program 5. Mass production Mass production of new weapon coincides with implementation of new priorities, often publicly an¬ nounced at highest levels

threat

and development. Such distinctions, however, have not, by and large, been adopted by students of military affairs.* * * * * * 7 In the arms-race lit ture, it has become customary to include all of the stages from mvention to diffusion under the rubric of "innovation." I continue the prac¬ tice of using the broader definition; what I describe here as the Soviet and U.S. "processes of innovation" encompass a fuller spectrum of activity than what economists understand by the term. In effect, how¬ ever, by breaking the process of innovation into the five stages out¬ lined in Table 3, I retain the distinctions that range from invention to diffusion.8 7See e.g. Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men (New York, 1949); Michael H. Armacost The Politics of Weapons Innovation: The Thor-Jupiter Controversy (New Yor , f9™) Two exceptions are worth noting: Harry G. Gelber, "Technical Innovahon and Arms Control," World Politics 26 (July 1974): 509-4U and Mary Kaldor,

The Weapons

Succession Process," World Politics 38 (July 1986): 577-95, «On the definitions employed by economists, see Joseph A. Schumpeter, History f Economic Analysis (New York, 1954); F. M. Scherer, "Market Structure and Tedmol^pral Innovation " chap. 15 in his Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance, 2d e . Chkago 1980). For a discussion of the literature: "A Background Review of the-Relahonships between Technological Innovation and the Economy," in Technology, Trade, and the

U.S. Economy (Washington, D.C., 1978)- PP- 18-48. [521

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR Stages in the Process of

U.S.

Weapons Innovation

The first of the five stages in which U.S. weapons innovations are carried out generally begins when scientists in weapons laboratories and military officials in close contact with them recognize technical possibilities for new weapons. They actively promote the military ap¬ plications of their technological discoveries in a process of consensus building that starts with the military-technical community and is grad¬ ually pushed up to include high-level military officials. Congress, and' usually the Executive. At some point, advocates of the innovation may be assisted by an often unrelated foreign development or the appear¬ ance of a threat.9 In the later stages, as supporters seek advanced development and production of the new weapon, they appeal to a more specific threat, sometimes one quite different from the threat that provided the earlier opportunity to promote their innovation. When Kurth wrote of this process, he did not explicitly delineate stages and actors within the mode of "innovative change"; they can, however, be drawn out of his discussion and developed inductively from the existing case-study literature and from additional material found in the declassified archives. Stage 1: Technocratic Initiative Writing of the initial stage, for example, Kurth argues that "because an innovative change is unfamiliar and sometimes inexpensive, it nor¬ mally begins not in a decision at the higher levels of policymaking and budget-making but in technical and organizational procedures for research and development." Kurth believes that at this early stage, "some kind of technocratic explanation seems best" in accounting for innovation.10 When there is an abundance of resources and little central control, technical ideas for new weapons tend to flourish. The development of the first generation of U.S. ballistic missiles provides considerable evi9The generalizations presented here for the United States share some elements with ones put forward by Samuel P. Huntington in The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics (New York, 1961), chap. 5. The differences are, however, substantial. Huntington focused not only on technological innovation but also on what he called program innovation. He found the sources of innovation mainly in external develop¬ ments, and he viewed such innovation in a favorable light: "The innovation of these programs reflected the changing requirements of deterrence which, in turn, stemmed primarily from the development and expansion of Soviet strategic capabilities. ... In retrospect, the desirability of each of these innovations seems clear" (p. 285). It is in the description of the domestic process of innovation and consensus-building that Hunt¬ ington's explanation resembles the one discussed here. 10Kurth, "Widening Gyre," pp. 396-97.

[53]

Innovation and the Arms Race

dence to support this point. As one study indicates: "The pluralism of the services and their prolific contractual relationships with a host of industrial suppliers, university laboratories, and non-profit research institutes eager to refine or replenish the strategic arsenal, insured that the initiative for proposing novel weapon systems was diffused wide¬ ly."11 The proliferation of innovative ideas is enhanced by two factors: the willingness of private firms to undertake research at their own expense (much of which is later reimbursed) and the reluctance of higher political authorities to restrict an R&D program whose potential is still uncertain.12 Examples of both factors appear in the history of the early U.S. missile program. K. T. Keller, the first director of the Office of Guided Missiles in the Truman administration, estimated that when he was appointed, at the end of August 1950, "there were about 4,000 people in the Services organizations and 11,000 in contractor and private or¬ ganizations working on guided missiles."13 Even before Keller as¬ sumed his post, while he was president of Chrysler Corporation, he received numerous solicitations from firms all over the country that had conducted work in the missile field and wanted to interest the new director in their proposals and ideas.14 Although Keller, once in office, conducted rather thorough investigations of most proposals (including visits to many firms), he allowed R&D to continue on a number of redundant systems. Even programs that the government eliminated would often con¬ tinue under private sponsorship, in the expectation that they would eventually become beneficiaries of new contracts. One notable exam¬ ple concerns the Air Force project MX 744, a study of the technical prospects for intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs), initiated 11Armacost/ Politics of Weapons Innovation, p. 252. 12See Judith Reppy, "Defense Department Payments for 'Company-Financed' R&D," Research Policy 6 (1977): 396-410; and Reppy, The 1R&D Program of the Department of Defense, Peace Studies Program Occasional Paper no. 6, Cornell University (March 1976). On the role of uncertainty in weapons decisions, see Morton J. Peck and Frederic M. Scherer, The Weapons Acquisition Process: An Economic Analysis (Boston, 1962), esp. chaps. 2, 8, 11. On the impact of risk and uncertainty on an organization's propensity to innovate, see George W. Downs, Jr., and Lawrence B. Mohr, "Toward a Theory of Innovation," Administration and Society 10 (February 1979): 379-408. 13Papers of K. T. Keller, box 1, folder "Guided Missiles—Final Report by the Director, Office of Guided Missiles, Sept. 17, 1953," in HSTL. 14He received, for example, letters from S. L. Glamb, president of dual Remote Control Co., Garden City, Mich., whose company had been working on guided missiles since 1932; Fred Tutton, an engineer in Wichita, Kan., who described a number of his own novel proposals; and Edward T. Klee of Detroit, who offered to convert his Austin automobile plant in Ontario to the production of missiles and who included photographs and a floor plan: Papers of K. T. Keller, box 1, folder "Guided Missiles—Corres., i95°~ 52," in HSTL.

[54]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

in 1946. When the Air Force limited its contract with Convair Corpora¬ tion in 1949 to consideration of missile-guidance problems, the com¬ pany pursued additional technical issues with its own funds. In June 1951 the Air Force reactivated its previous contract on the MX 774, which eventually developed into the Atlas ICBM.15 Progress in the early years of the U.S. nuclear submarine program can be attributed to a similar lack of close government supervision. Weak central control permitted a vigorous campaign of what one ob¬ server has termed "public entrepreneurship" on the part of Captain * Hyman Rickover, the Navy's main proponent of nuclear-powered subs.16 Rickover and Admiral Earle Mills, his superior at the Navy's Bureau of Ships, recognized the potential for nuclear propulsion of naval vessels during World War II. Their interest was stimulated by physicist Ross Gunn of the Naval Research Laboratory, who had at¬ tended a discussion of nuclear fission by Enrico Fermi in 1939 and "began pondering the notion of using nuclear power to drive a submarine."17 Rickover, who was trained as an engineer, started to pursue nuclear propulsion as a matter of priority. He persuaded Mills to assign him to the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC's) nuclear reactor project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Rickover and his military colleagues were given no particular tasks on the project. They were able to devote their time to mastering the fundamentals of nuclear engineering. At Oak Ridge the "general air of uncertainty and slack suited Rickover's purpose" and, as theories of innovation would predict, encouraged the promo¬ tion of new ideas. As early as 1946, Rickover and his associates "pur¬ sued knowledge, not for its own sake, but for the applied and specific purpose of building a nuclear reactor for use in naval vessels."18 The external environment, particularly the weak control exerted by the AEC, gave wide scope for initiative to such ambitious entrepre¬ neurs as Rickover. For its first several years, the AEC "was in an ex15"Chronology of Significant Events in the U.S. Intermediate and Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Programs," 8 November 1957, Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject ser. Department of Defense subser., box 7, folder "Missiles and Satellites, Chronology of Significant Events in U.S. ICBM and IRBM Programs," in DDEL. 16Eugene Lewis, Public Entrepreneurship: Toward a Theory of Bureaucratic Political Power (Bloomington, Ind., 1980), chaps. 2, 3. Other writers refer to policy entrepreneurs; see, e.g., Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies; Nelson W. Polsby, Political Innova¬ tion in America: The Politics of Policy Innovation (New Haven, Conn., 1984). A similar concept is called technological entrepreneurship in Matthew Evangelista, "Case Studies and Theories of the Arms Race," Bulletin of Peace Proposals 17 (June 1986): 197-206. For additional discussions of Rickover's entrepreneurial efforts, see Norman Polmar and Thomas P. Allen, Rickover: Controversy and Genius (New York, 1982); Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Nuclear Navy, 1946-1962 (Chicago, 1974). 17Lewis, Public Entrepreneurship, p. 38. 18Ibid., pp. 41-42.

[55]

Innovation and the Arms Race

tremely confused state." The "lack of direction from Washington" in combination with the structural characteristics of the research program at Oak Ridge enhanced the prospects for successful innovation during this first stage.19 Structural characteristics of the research environment also contrib¬ uted considerably to the success of the MIRV development program as well. As Ted Greenwood has pointed out, a technical "community is more likely to conceive of and propose innovative ideas to the extent that it is complex, diversified, decentralized, loosely coordinated, and tied together by an efficient communications network." He finds that the Air Force R&D community that developed the MIRV "satisfied those criteria much more fully" than did the R&D communities of the other services.20 As Herbert York explains, the ideas that combined to produce the MIRV developed along a number of independent lines: "The technol¬ ogy necessary for MIRV's evolved from research directed toward sev¬ eral independent and quite disparate goals. Ideas and personnel were exchanged among the various programs, so that the course of develop¬ ment became not a thread but a fabric. It could have been cut in any number of places without seriously impeding the progress of the MIRV system."21 Promoters of technical ideas for antimissile systems, multi¬ ple-satellite launchers, and offensive "penetration aids" for overcom¬ ing missile defenses later combined their efforts in the pursuit of MIRV. These examples suggest that the combination of vigorous activity at the base and weak control at the top allowed "technocratic" forces, as Kurth calls them, to dominate the initial stage in the process of U.S. weapons innovation. Stage 2: Consensus Building

Technology is not an autonomous force, however. If an idea for a new weapon is to attract political support and funding, it must have promoters. Often the promoters are the very scientists who make the initial discoveries. During what may be considered the second stage in the process of weapons innovation, they collaborate with colleagues and with officials in the military and industrial R&D community in order to generate interest in the new proposal. 19Ibid., p. 41. 20Ted Greenwood, Making the MIRV: A Study of Defense Decision Making (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), p- 147. 21Herbert F. York, "Multiple-Warhead Missiles," in Progress in Arms Control?, ed. Bruce M. Russett and Bruce G. Blair (San Francisco, 1979), p. 124.

[56]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

Two practices typically characterize this second stage. The first is the continuing inability to limit technical options. The second is a tendency on the part of promoters of an innovation to build a consensus in its favor by incorporating all of the technical features desired by potential supporters. The first practice leads to a redundancy in weapons pro¬ duced. The second often results in weapons of greater technical so¬ phistication than is desirable for a given military mission. One case study concluded, "While there is a tendency today to attribute the development of increasingly sophisticated weaponry to the legitimate , demands of warfare or to the illegitimate greed of defense firms and senior officers, sophistication may be the by-product of intense intra¬ service bargaining and consensus-building."22 Brzezinski and Hunt¬ ington, among others, have found consensus-building typical of the U.S. policy process.23 They argue that it is a form of persuasion that usually precedes a decision, and they contrast it with the Soviet prac¬ tice of "mobilizing" support after a decision has been made.24 The three cases considered here exhibit either the inability to limit options, the amalgamation of technological features (so-called gold-plating) to en¬ hance consensus building, or both. The early U.S. ballistic missile program during this second stage continued to show evidence of unwillingness to limit options, as a study of the nearly identical Thor and Jupiter missiles demonstrates: "In the Thor-Jupiter case, officials regularly attempted to cope with the uncertainties of technology by traveling simultaneously down several paths, by foreclosing their options slowly and by deferring the drastic choices as long as possible." Evidence from the same case also yielded the generalization that "securing the requisite program approvals for a 22Thomas L. McNaugher, The M16 Controversies: Military Organizations and Weapons Acquisition (New York, 1984), p. 181. The classic example of such gold-plating is the development of the F-111 aircraft. See Robert F. Coulam, Illusions of Choice: the F-111 and the Problem of Weapons Acquisition Reform (Princeton, N.J., 1977). Whatever “consensus" was achieved, however, came as a result of the efforts of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. See Robert J. Art, The TFX Decision: McNamara and the Military (Boston, 1968). 23Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, Political Power: USA/USSR, (New York, 1963), p. 209. Earlier discussions are found in two articles by Roger Hilsman: "Congressional-Executive Relations and the Foreign Policy Consensus," American Politi¬ cal Science Review 32 (September 1958): 725-44; and "The Foreign Policy Consensus: An Interim Research Report," Journal of Conflict Resolution 3 (December 1959): 361-82. For an application to nuclear-weapons policy and the role of scientists, see Harold Karan Jacob¬ son and Eric Stein, Diplomats, Scientists, and Politicians: The United States and the Nuclear Test Ban Negotiations (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966), esp. pp. 9-11. 24For a critique of Brzezinski's notion of mobilized participation in the Soviet system, based on survey data from recent emigrants, see William Zimmerman, “Mobilized Par¬ ticipation and the Nature of the Soviet Dictatorship," in Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the Soviet Union, ed. James Millar (Cambridge, Eng., 1987). The more narrowly understood notion of mobilizing elements of the system to carry out a high-level decision still seems useful, however.

[57]

Innovation and the Arms Race

major technical innovation entails consensus-building efforts of ever widening scope."25 Similar features characterized the early years of the U.S. nuclear submarine program. A number of competing technological develop¬ ments were promoted as hedges against uncertainty. One method Rickover employed to gain support was to advocate technical designs favored by others if he thought they could be useful for his project as well. He sided with the physicist Alvin Weinberg in 1946 against the Daniels reactor project at Oak Ridge, in favor of one that used a pres¬ surized water system. He then persuaded the engineer Harold Etherington, who headed the AEC's reactor group in Clinton, Tennessee, to undertake studies of the feasibility of the pressurized water system for a naval reactor. Rickover's success can be attributed to the decentralized environ¬ ment in which he worked as well as to his own skills: "His entrepre¬ neurship was phenomenal. Although an unknown Navy captain with little or no status or recognition within AEC or Clinton, Rickover had managed to get his superior to espouse his own views, and to have the Etherington group begin studying the feasibility of a naval reactor without the knowledge or direction of their superiors." Later, Rickover was obliged to support the parallel development of both reactor designs, but he was able to make a virtue of this necessity. Rickover could rely on the technical expertise of the physicists and engineers at the Argonne National Laboratory, who were working on reactor and propulsion systems that he did not prefer, while having a relatively free hand to contract with such companies as Westinghouse to develop the systems he favored.26 Rickover had considerable success persuading the Atomic Energy Commission of the merits of his technical proposals. He had managed to elicit interest in his ideas even before the AEC had formulated any policy on reactor designs. At a meeting of the AEC's reactor develop¬ ment group in Tennessee in 1947, Rickover and Mills were able to convince a number of prominent members, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, of the technical feasibility and desirability of their pro¬ posals for a nuclear-powered submarine.27 Rickover had already man¬ aged to interest the physicist Edward Teller in his plan for developing a naval reactor. Teller in turn wrote to Lawrence Hafstad, executive sec¬ retary of the Pentagon's Research and Development Board and later the AEC's first director of reactor development.28 It was Mills who 25Armacost, Politics of Weapons Innovation, pp. 256-57, 252. 26Lewis, Public Entrepreneurship, pp. 46, 50-51. 27Ibid., p. 45. 28Edward Teller to Lawrence Hafstad, 19 August 1947, in Papers of Lawrence R. Hafstad, G-U, folder "Joint Research and Development Board," in HSTL.

[58]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

recommended Hafstad to direct the AEC's reactor development divi¬ sion. Hafstad in turn appointed Rickover to head the naval reactors branch.29 Rickover7s consensus building and bargaining over technical options gave his project a considerable boost during this second stage. The case of MIRV demonstrates a related means of enhancing sup¬ port for a program. It shows how scientists pursuing independent projects with similar technologies can collaborate to promote a new weapon that constitutes an amalgam of their ideas and interests. Dur¬ ing a later stage they persuade their respective institutional sponsors to * promote the new system, for a variety of independent and even con¬ flicting goals. As Greenwood observes, "in the initial stages of the MIRV program only the technical community was involved and gave support. But a broader consensus was quickly forged among all rele¬ vant centers of power and resources." These centers included several divisions of the Air Force and Navy, a number of branches within the office of the secretary of defense, the director of defense research and engineering, aerospace contractors, and the weapons laboratories of the AEC.30 Greenwood's analysis is consistent with the generalizations pre¬ sented here, in that the initiative for the programs emerged from below and proceeded with little high-level supervision until quite late. Green¬ wood indicates that top political participants, including the president, the Bureau of the Budget, and the Congress, later "ratified decisions made without their direct participation." He stresses that the consen¬ sus forged among the lower-level actors "was based on neither an agreed strategy nor shared priorities. Rather, everyone saw that devel¬ opment and deployment of MIRV would further its own interests and policy preferences. It did not matter that these were disparate and frequently conflicting. The existence of the consensus was essential," according to Greenwood, "for the relatively unencumbered advance of the MIRV programs."31 During subsequent stages, programs normally require a higher level of visibility in order to attract sufficient support for the necessary funding. Stage 3: Promotion During the third stage of the process of weapons innovation, scien¬ tists and their military and industrial associates in the R&D community promote the new weapons proposal within the military services, the Congress, and the Executive, until it gains influential supporters. To promote weapons innovation during the early stages in the U.S. 29Lewis, Public Entrepreneurship, pp. 44-45, 52. ^Greenwood, Making the MIRV, p. 144. 31Ibid.

[59]

Innovation and the Arms Race

process, it is usually not necessary to appeal to external developments. The impediments to change generally associated with organizational and bureaucratic routines, and amply documented by students of bu¬ reaucracy, are less relevant to the U.S. military. Interservice rivalry, among other factors, has contributed to an ethos of change.32 To a large extent, technological innovation has become the routine of U.S. military bureaucracies. As one observer suggests, "the most dramatic arms race decisions rest on the basis of the regular ongoing activity of large organisations whose duty it is to nag constantly at military tech¬ nological frontiers."33 This generalization is supported by students of organizational behavior who have described the notion of routine change: "When one does not have to struggle toward overcoming be¬ havioral intertia in order to change, innovation must come about rather naturally, in the normal flow of things."34 A number of observers have remarked that the Air Force, through a system of awarding R&D contracts that it developed during the 1950s, helped facilitate the process of accumulating support for continuous weapons innovations. "Throughout the 1950s," argues one observer, "the Air Force was the most advanced of the services" in technological innovation.35 At that time, the "generosity of Air Force contract pro¬ cedures quickly inflated the technical manpower market, depleting the government's in-house pool and demonstrating great political efficacy. In a sense, the Air Force, through contracting, financed a powerful constituency to advance its interests in Congress."36 The military's interest in technological innovation in weaponry has thereby become widely shared. The widespread belief that the development of new weapons creates opportunities for employment has apparently been particularly influential in gaining congressional support for military innovations.37 32Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston, 1967), esp. pp. 199-200; Armacost,

Politics of Weapons Innovation. 33Colin Gray, The Soviet-American Arms Race (Westmead, 1976), p. 39. The argument is developed in more detail in Mary Kaldor, The Baroque Arsenal (New York, 1981), esp. chaps. 1, 3. ^Lawrence B. Mohr, "Innovation Theory: An Assessment from the Vantage Point of the New Electronic Technology in Organizations," in New Technology as Organizational Innovation, ed. J. M. Pennings (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). 35Huntington, Common Defense, pp. 288-89. 36H. L. Nieburg, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March 1966), quoted in Adam Yarmolinsky, The Military Establishment: Its Impacts on American Society (New York, 1971), p. 56. 37Before popular opposition—and later an arms-control treaty—limited its deploy¬ ment, the antiballistic missile (ABM) program accumulated support in this manner. The original "thin" version proposed by the Johnson administration "would have involved 28 private contractors with plants located in 42 states. It thereby affected the interests of 84 Senators and 172 Congressmen"; furthermore, some $5 billion in contracts was at stake: Yarmolinsky, Military Establishment, p. 57. For a general discussion of the link between employment and new weapons programs, see Miroslav Nincic, The Arms Race: The Politi¬ cal Economy of Military Growth (New York, 1982), esp. chap. 3.

[60]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

There is no doubt, however, that despite a strong predilection for technological innovation as the solution to problems of military se¬ curity, certain weapons innovations run into difficulty when they ap¬ pear to threaten organizational traditions or missions. Even in the de¬ centralized U.S. system, where low-level initiative is generally encouraged, an external threat is often useful for breaking through organizational and bureaucratic barriers to change. In the Soviet sys¬ tem, leaders use external developments to implement change from above; in the U.S. system, lower-level actors try to promote their pro-' grams from the bottom, by invoking threats. Such threats arise not only from potential enemies but (perhaps more often) from competing programs in rival military services. A study of the early years of R&D on long-range missiles argues that for "much of the period there was no institutional lobby" for them. Development "was hindered by organizational structures and belief patterns" that favored bombers.38 Consequently the scientists and R&D firms working on missiles had difficulty eliciting interest within the Air Force.39 When promoters of weapons innovations run into such bureaucratic and organizational barriers, they often invoke threats to advance their cause. Typically, during this third stage, they argue that existing or¬ ganizational structures are inadequate to meet the threat. The threat itself is often posed not by an enemy power but by a rival service. One analyst argues, for example, that in the case of the U.S. ballistic missile program, before 1954, "the Air Staff was interested in long-range stra¬ tegic missiles only when they perceived a threat from an enemy or from a sister service. And of the two, threats from the Army or Navy seemed to motivate the Air Staff more."40 The same situation prevailed in the case of intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), where Army interest "had a considerable catalytic effect on the Air Force's interest in the IRBM. While posing an opportunity and challenge for the Army, the IRBM posed a potential threat to the Air Force," in that it could be seen as a substitute for aircraft in fulfilling certain combat missions.41 38Edmund Beard, Developing the ICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics (New York, 1976), pp. 8-9. 39A similar situation occurred during the 1970s with programs for development of the remotely piloted vehicle (RPV), perceived by its supporters as a possible substitute for expensive tactical aircraft. Because the RPV was considered a competitor of existing systems (in bombing, reconnaissance, and other missions), it had difficulty attracting a constituency. The author of a study of the RPV pointed out the similarity to the case of the ICBM. "Where ICBMs once challenged the status quo of strategic bombers, RPVs are now doing the same with tactical fighters": Samuel L. Hall, Weapons Choices and Advanced Technology: The RPV, Peace Studies Program Occasional Paper no. 10, Cornell University (September 1978), p. 35. ^Beard, Developing the ICBM, p. 222. 41Armacost, Politics of Weapons Innovation, p. 63.

[61]

Innovation and the Arms Race

Although internal threats (from rival services) appear to constitute the primary motivation for pursuing programs that meet bureaucratic re¬ sistance during this third stage, promoters of an innovation tend pub¬ licly to invoke an external threat. They are often thereby able to make the organizational changes necessary to carry through the innovation. One need not believe in conspiracy theories in order to call attention to this behavior. The phenomenon of "an answer actively looking for a question" has long been recognized by students of organizational be¬ havior, who argue that the "creation of need is not a curiosity of the market in consumer products; it is a general phenomenon of processes of choice."42 In the case of the ballistic missile, its most notable promoter, Trevor Gardner, the assistant secretary of defense for research and develop¬ ment, pointed to evidence of Soviet work on missiles as the problem for which he had the solution. His initial attempts were unsuccessful. An intelligence briefing on the Soviet program, presented in October 1952, "seems to have resulted in the calm appraisal that the Soviets were following the same cautious, step-level approach" taken by the United States.43 During the next couple of years, Gardner had better luck invoking the Soviet missile threat, with the aid of numerous re¬ ports prepared by the Rand Corporation.44 In the spring of 1954, the Air Force approved Gardner's plans for reorganizing the ballistic mis¬ sile program. In July Gardner appointed General Bernard Schriever as head of the new Western Development Division of the Air Research and Development Command.45 Following these changes the ICBM project "received remarkably strong and persistent support," and its "revolutionary management structure" helped "to speed the project."46 In the case of the nuclear submarine, Rickover managed to anticipate potential threats before they emerged and to make the requisite organi¬ zational changes. The main challenges to his project came from the rest of the Navy. The resources devoted to nuclear propulsion necessarily limited the funds available for higher Navy priorities, such as the building of new ships and aircraft carriers. Although the third stage typically describes a process of accumulating high-level support to counter threats to a particular program, Rickover achieved this goal in a particularly dramatic fashion. Long before the nuclear reactor intend¬ ed to power the first atomic submarine was ready to be installed, 42Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen, "A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice," Administrative Science Quarterly 17 (March 1972): 3. 43Beard, Developing the ICBM, p. 163. ^Ibid., pp. 159-65; Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York, 1983), pp. 111*745Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, pp. 116-17. ^Beard, Developing the ICBM, p. 216.

[62]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

Rickover ordered the Electric Boat Company to begin work on the submarine itself, the Nautilus. Rickover then managed to persuade high Navy officials, members of Congress, representatives of the AEC, and even the president of the United States to attend the keel-laying ceremony for the new submarine. Rickover secured a high-level commitment to his project in a single coup: "When Harry S Truman dedicated the Nautilus keel in June of 1952, the story received page one headlines and thousands of lines in news magazines and editorials throughout the world. This publicity' and timing were chosen and orchestrated by Rickover and constituted an investment of support which transcended party and organization." Rickover then succeeded in expanding his own role in directing the project when he became assistant chief for ships in the Navy's Bureau of Ships. The new job "gave Rickover direct responsibility for supervis¬ ing construction at Electric Boat and later for supervising the building of nuclear ships and boats at the Naval facilities at Portsmouth and Mare Island."47 These new organizational arrangements helped ward off threats to his project and ensure its success. The MIRV program never met the kind of bureaucratic resistance encountered by certain weapons innovations during this stage. Some Air Force officers, however, expressed initial opposition to it in the belief that "a rapid acceptance of MIRV might damage the Air Force's case for a very large Minuteman force" of land-based missiles. Propo¬ nents of the MIRV overcame this resistance in two ways. First, they invoked the potential threat of a large force of Soviet missiles. Second, they touted the MIRV as the most cost-effective means of countering the threat. They argued that the Soviets could deploy so many missiles that it would be extremely ineffective to assign one Minuteman missile to each Soviet one. The MIRV offered a way of multiplying the number of targets a given missile could hit. In view of the technical improve¬ ments in accuracy that were predicted, the MIRV would constitute the ideal "counterforce" weapon, capable of destroying hardened Soviet military targets, including missiles in concrete silos.48 The MIRV program exhibited the phenomenon of internal threats as well. Threats from rival services did not put the MIRV program itself at risk, however, because the services involved—the Air Force and the Navy—both supported it. Because each service wanted to develop its own MIRV, coping with the "threat" from the opposing service did not require organizational changes of the sort that propelled the ICBM and nuclear submarine to success. Rather, each service had to produce a unique rationale for the MIRV and a concomitant set of requirements 47Lewis, Public Entrepreneurship, pp. 65-67. 48Greenwood, Making the MIRV, pp. 59-65.

[63]

Innovation and the Arms Race

that the other service's MIRV program could not fulfill. The question of requirements and rationales for weapons innovations typically arises during the fourth stage. Stage 4: Open Windows Once a weapon has received sufficient support from the services and from Congress to enter advanced R&D, it still must be approved for production as a prototype. Kurth argues that in order for a program to go from research and development to production and deployment, its promoters must engender a certain bureaucratic momentum and ap¬ peal to "strategic fears."49 It is often during this stage that a weapon is justified on the basis of an external threat. The threat may be projected rather than actual, vague rather than specific. One student of U.S. politics has identified a comparable phenome¬ non that he considers necessary for the successful promotion of a do¬ mestic policy innovation: what he calls an "open window." Such win¬ dows provide an opportunity for entrepreneurs to advocate their preferred programs. To take a particularly striking case, promoters of urban mass transit tried to advance their "solution" by taking advan¬ tage of three windows in succession—inner-city traffic congestion, air pollution, and the oil shortage—all apparently to no avail.50 The Soviet launching of the world's first artificial earth satellite, Sput¬ nik, in October 1957 constituted such a window for promoters of U.S. ballistic missiles. Sputnik was perceived as a potential threat, because the ability to launch a satellite indicates the technical capability of launching a long-range ballistic missile as well.51 The Soviet feat there¬ fore had a dramatic effect on prospects for the development of U.S. missiles, much as the outbreak of the Korean war had done for earlier programs.52 By spawning fears of a missile g^p. Sputnik transformed the U.S. ICBM from a project that was supported mainly by the Air Force and its contractors into a program of the highest national priority.53 49Kurth, “Widening Gyre," pp. 396-9750Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, p. 181. siin fact, the Soviets had tested their first ICBM in August 1957, but this event received far less attention than the Sputnik launch. 52The war boosted the prospects for a number of systems that were meeting resistance from entrenched bureaucracies. The war also helped create a climate for maintaining high levels of military spending in general. Huntington calls such developments as the Korean war “trigger events"; see his Common Defense, pp. 201, 291-92, 3For related discussions, see York and Greb, “Military Research and Development , Herbert F. York, Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race (New York, 1970), pp. 82-

83-

53York, Race to Oblivion, esp. chaps. 6, 7.

[64]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

The weapons whose success resulted in part from external factors such as the Korean war and Sputnik should not be seen as reactions to them, as an action-reaction explanation would hold. Rather, the exter¬ nal factors should be understood as catalysts—in the sense of speeding up the process of getting a new weapon adopted but not initiating it. The weapons promoted as responses to new external threats were often unnecessary or did not meet the particular threat for which they were supposedly intended. In the case of Sputnik and the missile gap, for example. President ' Eisenhower was confident that the threat posed by an emerging Soviet missile capability could be adequately met by the enormous force of U.S. strategic bombers and did not necessitate a crash program to mass-produce U.S. ICBMs. He evidently believed that an eventual deployment of some "150 well-targeted missiles might be enough" to meet the Soviet challenge.54 According to one of his aides. General Andrew Goodpaster, Eisenhower was well aware of the extent to which the military services and their industrial allies made opportunis¬ tic use of various "gaps": "The whole story of the bomber gap, the whole story of the missile gap, this was very largely fed by the—in his view, and I think in fact—by the arms manufacturers, the military services, and the politicians who saw this as something they could exploit and on which they, of course, could receive the support of the services and of the arms manufacturers."55 It is often in this sense that external factors provide an important impetus to the funding of weapons innovations from advanced R&D to production during this fourth stage. Rickover's successful efforts to fund production of nuclear-powered submarines relied relatively little on the invoking of specific external threats. The lure of nuclear technology itself was probably sufficient to attract the support of Congress and the president. There was, nev¬ ertheless, a sense in which a general notion of "Soviet threat" contrib¬ uted to Rickover's success. One writer refers to it as "the most emotion¬ al issue in the country at the time" and lists the factors that engendered support for the kind of innovative weapon that Rickover promoted: "The detonation of the Soviet nuclear bomb in 1949, the subsequent investigation of nuclear spies, and the McCarthy witch hunts were among the major political issues in the United States. There was also the long and frustrating war in Korea against communist forces, a war which had yielded little for people to cheer about. Yet, here was Rickover holding a show which made everybody happy." Perhaps 54Quoted in David Alan Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-1960," International Security 7 (Spring 1983): 45-46. 55Andrew Goodpaster, Oral History Interview no. 4, 16 January 1978, p. 108, HSTL.

[65]

Innovation and the Arms Race

more important was the fact that the nuclear technology that powered the Nautilus and its successors had evident civilian applications as well. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, as well as the members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) of the Congress, were prominent advocates of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. During the mid-1950s Rickover had managed to get the Navy to allow him to direct development of the first commercial nuclear reactor. When, in 1957, "the giant pressurized water system at Shippinport began to light some of the homes of ordinary people in Western Pennsylvania," Rickover was assured of support for his military applications as well.56 Supporters of the MIRV justified its production entirely on the basis of its military applications, and with particular reference to Soviet threats. Most notably, they argued that multiple warheads were neces¬ sary to penetrate a large-scale ABM defense system, in the event the Soviets deployed one. This was the official position of the U.S. govern¬ ment, although researchers have identified a number of perhaps more important rationales of the individual services and the office of the secretary of defense in the Pentagon.57 The Navy apparently did see the MIRV as a way to ensure that its Polaris missiles could still retaliate against Soviet urban-industrial targets if a Soviet ABM were deployed. Navy officials at this stage were evidently not interested in competing with the Air Force for its preferred "counterforce" mission. The Air Force, by contrast, saw the MIRV as the ideal counterforce weapon. It could enable a relatively small force of U.S. missiles to attack a larger force of Soviet missiles, and—as the accuracy of MIRVs improved—it could provide a high theoretical probability of destroying the Soviet missiles even in hardened underground silos. Although the potential threat of a Soviet ABM system was publicly the most prominent rationale put forth by supporters of the MIRV during the fourth stage, the counterforce mission was clearly more important. As early as 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in a top-secret memorandum, cast doubt on the relevance of the ABM argument for U.S. plans to deploy MIRVs. He indicated that the Unit¬ ed States had arrived at the number of MIRV Minuteman III missiles it planned to produce "by considering the Soviet military and urban tar¬ get system in the absence of ballistic missile defenses [ABMs\."58 The coun¬ terforce rationale for MIRVs did not receive such prominence publicly until the fifth stage. ^Lewis, Public Entrepreneurship, pp. 66, 81-82. 57This section draws mainly on Greenwood, Making the MIRV; and York, "MultipleWarhead Missiles." 58McNamara to Johnson, "Recommended FY68-72 Strategic Offensive and Defensive Forces," memo, 9 November 1966, p. A-3, quoted in Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, p. 364; Kaplan's emphasis.

[66]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

Stage 5: High-Level Endorsement During the final stage in the process of U.S. weapons innovation, promoters of a new system seek wide public and congressional sup¬ port in order to secure full funding for large-scale production of the weapon. Often under greater scrutiny than during earlier stages, the program typically must be justified with reference to a more specific threat or opportunity. Because promoters of the new weapon have already amassed considerable support, however, rationales for pro-. ducing the system need not have much grounding in reality. The justification for going ahead with large-scale deployment of Minuteman missiles, even after it became clear that the "missile gap" was clearly in favor of the United States, constitutes a classic example. Desmond Ball argues that a long-standing U.S. commitment to "strate¬ gic superiority" over the Soviet Union formed the foundation for the U.S. missile buildup. Even though Secretary of Defense McNamara and his systems analysts had calculated "how much is enough" for deterrence, these amounts could readily be surpassed in the interest of ensuring superiority. This fundamental goal was reinforced by political and economic interests that had accumulated around the missile pro¬ gram at this late stage in its development. Ball calls particular attention to the role of the Kennedy campaign commitments that centered on overcoming the missile gap, spurious as it turned out to be, and the extensive bargaining between McNamara and the Air Force and Navy.59 Thus, although the Americans were still calling attention to the Soviets' missile program to justify their own, factors internal to the U.S. decision process seem more salient. Large-scale production of nuclear-powered submarines is also best explained by internal factors at this stage. The technical successes of Rickover's innovation, in combination with the emergence of ballistic missiles, made the nuclear submarine a popular program in Congress. External factors, in particular the threat posed by Soviet missiles, also played some role, in that the invulnerability of the submarines ap¬ peared all the more attractive. The Navy skillfully argued a case for a more modest force of strategic nuclear weapons than the Air Force desired, and one that seemed more consistent with a policy of "assured destruction." In this manner, Rickover's dream of a nuclear fleet was realized in the form of a force of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines. In some sense the final stage of the process of innovation for the first 59Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration (Berkeley, Calif., 1980). See also Alain Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1962-1969 (New York, 1971).

[67]

Innovation and the Arms Race

nuclear-powered (Nautilus) subs coincided with the middle stages of a similar process for the first nuclear ballistic-missile (Polaris) subs. As one observer put it, "Rickover's contribution to the management of technological innovation was, of course, the predecessor of the equally successful Polaris Project. Despite the ostensible differences between the management of the projects, on most crucial points of comparison there was a striking similarity."60 Indeed, a major study of the Polaris development program gives the impression that the factors identified in the earlier case applied here as well: "The success of the Polaris program depended upon the ability of its proponents to promote and to protect the Polaris. Competitors had to be eliminated; reviewing agencies had to be outmaneuvered; congressmen, admirals, news¬ papermen, and academicians had to be co-opted."61 As with the Nau¬ tilus program, the Soviet military threat did not constitute an impor¬ tant impetus at the early stages, nor did it figure prominently in the last stage. In the case of the MIRV, however, the Soviet threat continued to be invoked during what is identified here as the fifth stage. During the late 1960s the government was still justifying the MIRV to Congress on the basis of a potential threat of a large-scale Soviet ABM system.62 Even after the SALT I Treaty sharply curtailed the deployment of ABMs on both sides, however, the Pentagon continued to seek and to obtain funding for the further production and deployment of advanced MIRVs. The counterforce rationale for the weapons became more ex¬ plicit during this final stage. Yet, as York has pointed out, weapons such as the MIRV "evolve from many independent and seemingly unrelated goals and decisions."63 The "external" factors—the military threats or requirements—generally appear only in the later stages of a U.S. weapons innovation, and then mainly as justifications for weap¬ ons that are desired for other reasons.

Stages in the Process of Soviet Weapons Innovation

In many respects the Soviet pattern of weapons innovation reverses the U.S. pattern. External factors come into play early to stimulate ^Lewis, Public Entrepreneurship, p. 86. 61Harvey M. Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 244. 62See, e.g., the testimonies of Philip Farley, John Foster, and Warren Nutter in U.S. Congress, House, Diplomatic and Strategic Impact of Multiple Warhead Missiles, Hearings before the Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Developments of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 1969. 63York, "Multiple-Warhead Missiles," p. 131.

[68]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

innovation. As David Holloway put it, "Soviet military R & D in the post-war period can be seen as the effort of a basically non-innovative system to cope with revolutionary technological change, which has been generated primarily by the Soviet Union's potential enemies." He finds that "major innovation decisions cannot easily be handled within the standard operating procedures of the military R & D system, and require intervention from the top to authorize new funding and new institutional arrangements."64 Thus, in looking for a Soviet pattern, one should expect to see little impetus to innovation during the initial' stages, until high-level intervention comes into play to restructure pri¬ orities and pave the way for successful innovation during the later stages.

Stage 1: Stifled Initiative The Soviet Union enjoys a high level of scientific talent and devotes more resources to military R&D than any other country in the world, with the possible exception of the United States.65 One should expect, then, that the USSR would not lag substantially behind other countries with respect to the technological foundations for weapons develop¬ ments. During this first stage, therefore, one should find evidence of technical antecedents to future military innovations and discussion of possible military applications of emerging technologies. One should also find organizational and systemic constraints preventing the active pursuit of potential developments that do not coincide with existing priorities. The case of jet-interceptor aircraft constitutes a good example of a low-level program that provided the technological basis for a highpriority development at a later stage. The Soviets did not emphasize the use of interceptor aircraft in the war against Nazi Germany. Most of their fighter aircraft were assigned roles in support of ground forces.66 During the war, however, Soviet design bureaus did pursue develop^David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven, Conn., 1983), pp. 148-49. 65Randall Forsberg, Resources Devoted to Military Research and Development: An Interna¬ tional Comparison (Stockholm, 1972). b6Voiska protivovozdushnoi oborony strany: Istoricheskii ocherk (Troops of anti-air defense of the country: A historical outline] (Moscow, 1968); Voiska PVO strany v Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine, 1941-1945 [Troops of anti-air defense of the country in the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945] (Moscow, 1981); G. Zimin, "PVO Strany Troops in the Great Patriotic War," Voennaia mysi [Military Thought], no. 5 (May 1965) (FBIS translation): 100-112; K. Ver¬ shinin, "The Development of the Operational Art of the Soviet Air Force," Voennaia mysT, no. 6 (June 1967) (FBIS translation): 1-13; Oleg Hoeffding, Soviet Interdiction Opera¬ tions, 1941-1945, Rand Report R-556-PR (Santa Monica, Calif., 1970); Alexander Boyd, The Soviet Air Force since 1918 (New York, 1977), chaps. 7-11.

[69]

Innovation and the Arms Race

merit of interceptor aircraft that incorporated a significant technological advance—jet propulsion.67 Development of jet interceptors was ac¬ corded relatively low priority at this stage. The case of rocketry provides an example of how even highly inno¬ vative Soviet research programs, promoted by dynamic entrepre¬ neurial figures, can be made to yield to existing priorities and central control. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii, especially while he served as chief of armament for the Red Army, strongly supported the develop¬ ment of military rockets, and Soviet research in this field was quite advanced by world standards.68 The fate of rocket research under Tukhachevskii represents the ultimate sanction that the central politi¬ cal authorities in the USSR can impose when they decide to enforce their priorities. During the military purge of 1937 Stalin had Tukhachevskii executed, along with a number of his proteges at the main rocket research institute.69 S. P. Korolev, who later became the Soviet Union's most prominent rocket designer, was imprisoned until 1942. His interrogator reportedly accused him of not understanding that "your pyrotechnics and fireworks are not only not needed by our country, but are harmful to it." He argued that Korolev should be building airplanes, not rockets.70 Early Soviet research into nuclear fission also met with some resis¬ tance, although nothing like the repression that Tukhachevskii and his colleagues suffered. The Soviet Academy of Sciences did not accord high priority to the research, which was being undertaken at institutes in Leningrad, Moscow, and Kharkov, even though some Soviet scien¬ tists did call attention to its possible military applications. Although the academy set up a Uranium Commission in June 1940, it rejected a 67The rocket designer Sergei Korolev worked, for example, on a preliminary concep¬ tual design (predeskiznyi proekt) for a jet interceptor, based on a project he had first proposed in 1936. See lz istorii sovetskoi kosmonavtiki: Sbornik pamiati akademika Sergeia Pavlovicha Koroleva [From the history of Soviet cosmonautics: A collection of reminis¬ cences of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev] (Moscow, 1983), pp. 219-24. See also V. B. Shavrov, Istoriia konstruksii samoletov v SSSR, 1938-1950 [History of the construction of airplanes in the USSR] (Moscow, 1978); A. S. Iakovlev, 50 let Sovetskogo samoletostroeniia [50 years of Soviet aircraft construction] (Moscow, 1968). ^David Holloway, "Military Technology," in The Technological Level of Soviet Industry, ed Ronald Amann, Julian Cooper, and R. W. Davis (New Haven, Conn., 1977), pp. 40789; Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector," in Industrial Innovation in the Soviet Union, ed. Ronald Amann and Julian Cooper (New Haven, Conn., 1982), pp. 276-414. 69For a discussion of Tukhachevskii's role and his fate, see Condoleezza Rice, The Revolution in Soviet Military Affairs and the Soviet System," in Science and Technology in the Soviet Union: Proceedings of a Conference, July 26-27, 1984, Department of Statistics, Stanford University (31 January 1985), esp. pp. 125-40. 70G. Ozerov, Tupolevskaia sharaga, 2d ed. (Frankfurt/Main, 1973), PP- 34-35. A recent Soviet account claims that Korolev was formally charged with selling aircraft design plans to the German firm Messerschmitt. See Iaroslav Golovanov, "Sem' dnei iz zhizm Koroleva" [Seven days from the life of Korolev], Literaturnaia gazeta, 7 January 1987.

[70]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

proposal by Igor Kurchatov to request additional funds from the gov¬ ernment to pursue research into a nuclear chain reaction. The existing priorities demanded that the scientists work to fulfill the Third FiveYear Plan, in the interest of strengthening the Soviet defense capability.71 The German invasion of 22 June 1941 put a halt to Soviet nuclear research and brought defense priorities into sharper relief. Even Kurchatov abandoned his earlier work on nuclear fission in order to concentrate on problems of more immediate military relevance.

Stage 2: Preparatory Measures During an intervening stage, identified here as the second, low-level efforts in a particular area continue, but they still yield to higher-pri¬ ority programs. This second period nevertheless prepares a broad tech¬ nological background, which becomes useful in later stages, when ef¬ forts are accelerated. The preparatory measures are often instituted in response to events abroad, and the subsequent acceleration of efforts almost invariably is made in response to an identifiable foreign devel¬ opment or threat. An important stimulus to development of jet-interceptor aircraft oc¬ curred during World War II. As one account describes, the "appear¬ ance of Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft over Moscow in late 1943 re¬ awakened fears of a renewed German bombing offensive." In response, the Lavochkin, Iakovlev, and Sukhoi design bureaus were ordered to produce high-altitude fighter interceptors with rocketboosted engines.72 Designers of the engines themselves, such as A. M. Isaev, were also assigned new tasks intended to produce break¬ throughs in capabilities for interception of bombers.73 None of the projects was particularly successful, but the attempt provided impor¬ tant background knowledge for further developments. Not until what is called here the third stage did the development of jet interceptors receive sufficient priority to achieve major advances. The rocket program provides a particularly strong example of the effect that a hierarchy of priorities can have on particular weapons development programs. After Tukhachevskii's execution, in 1937, R&D on rocketry languished. The limited research that was conducted focused on rocket boosters for aircraft engines and rocket artillery, such as the Katiusha. Even the latter weapon found little support with71David Holloway, "Entering the Nuclear Arms Race: The Soviet Decision to Build the Atomic Bomb, 1939-45," Social Studies of Science 11 (1981): 159-97. 72Boyd, Soviet Air Force since 1918, p. 202. 73See his biography by Mikhail Arlazorov, Doroga na kosttwdrom [Road to the Cos¬ modrome], 2d ed. (Moscow, 1984), p. 93.

Innovation and the Arms Race

in the Main Artillery Administration, which was responsible for its development. The external factor that often came into play at this second stage was the growing threat of war. Production of the Katiusha was authorized only on 21 June 1941, the day before the German invasion.74 Although the Katiusha's main designer, Georgii Langemak, had been executed in 1937, one of his assistants, A. G. Kostikov, survived to organize production of the weapon.75 The war gave a certain impetus to other work in rocketry, but appar¬ ently only to projects that seemed of immediate military value. For example, on his release from prison in 1942, Sergei Korolev continued his work on rocket-assisted aircraft, with the designers V. M. Miasishchev and V. P. Glushko. Their work on such planes as the Pe-2 was intended to provide some military utility during the course of the war. Only in late 1944 did Korolev begin experimental work on other projects, such as cruise missiles.76 The Soviet atomic bomb program does not correspond well to this generalized second stage. The German invasion of 22 June 1941 inter¬ rupted what probably would otherwise have been a continuation of low-level efforts. These efforts most likely would have attentively fol¬ lowed foreign advances, such as Enrico Fermi's achievement of a chain reaction in December 1942. Instead, the physicists interested in the uranium problem abandoned their work on it in favor of military pro¬ jects deemed more immediately relevant to the war effort, such as radar development and the protection of ships against mines.77 Still, evidence from the atomic bomb program supports the general line of argument made here. Even the scientists who would have pre¬ ferred to pursue concentrated efforts in the field of nuclear fission could not prevail against the priorities established by Stalin. One such scientist, Kurchatov's twenty-eight-year-old colleague G. N. Flerov, made persistent attempts. From late 1941 through 1942, Flerov wrote to the State Defense Committee, lectured to a group of top nuclear physi¬ cists in Kazan, appealed to Kurchatov, and finally took his case to Stalin himself, all in order to urge development of a uranium bomb.78 Flerov's efforts succeeded only when they coincided with the appear¬ ance of evidence of U.S. and German atomic-bomb programs. Such evidence of foreign developments figures prominently in decisions taken during the third stage of innovation. 74Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector," p. 388.

75Zhores Medvedev, Soviet Science (London, 1979), p. 37. 7bIz istorii sovetskoi kosmonavtiki, pp. 224-25. ^Holloway, "Entering the Nuclear Arms Race," pp. 171-73. 78Ibid., pp. 172-174.

[72]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

Stage 3: High-Level Response The third stage in the process of Soviet weapons innovation typically marks the initiation of a directed response to foreign developments and normally coincides with the beginning of a reassessment of pri¬ orities. The accelerated effort evident during this stage is not the prod¬ uct of low-level pressure and lobbying, as explanations that focus on bureaucratic and organizational factors hold. The rechanneling of re¬ sources necessary to achieve further development of weapons during , this stage requires high-level approval. The available evidence con¬ cerning major Soviet innovations indicates that the impetus for increas¬ ing efforts at this stage comes from the top. The Soviet postwar emphasis on interceptor aircraft indeed appears to have stemmed from high-level decisions. The new emphasis con¬ stituted a response to foreign developments in two senses. In the course of pushing back the German armies in the spring of 1945, the Soviets gained access to two-thirds of the research and production facilities of the German aircraft industry. Stalin was determined to take advantage of foreign technical expertise in developing the areas of high-priority military technology in which the USSR lagged—jet air¬ craft engines, for example. He sent teams of engineers to dismantle and bring back to the Soviet Union entire factories that had produced German Junkers, Messerschmitt, and other aircraft.79 In this sense, Stalin can be said to have responded to a technological opportunity.80 Stalin's decision to emphasize production of high-altitude intercep¬ tor aircraft over ground-attack fighters—a major shift in Soviet pol¬ icy—constituted a response to foreign developments in a second sense. Stalin reportedly recognized the potential for strategic bombing during the course of the war. Especially after the United States had used atomic bombs against Japan, Stalin moved to prepare the Soviet air forces to carry out a new top-priority mission—air defense against high-altitude strategic bombers.81 This innovation in policy was accom¬ panied by an innovation in weaponry: the first Soviet jet aircraft were not bombers or ground-attack fighters but high-altitude interceptors, the Iak-13 and MiG-9. Their engines borrowed substantially from Ger¬ man technology, for Stalin had sent the rocket-engine designer Valen¬ tin Glushko to Germany during the winter of 1943-46 specifically to 79Boyd, Soviet Air Force, pp. 205-7. 80For a Soviet discussion of reliance on German technology at this stage, see A. S. Iakovlev, Tsel' zhizni (Zapiski aviakonstruktora) [The goal of a lifetime (Notes of an aircraft designer)], 2d ed. (Moscow, 1968), pp. 446-64. 81For a discussion of this shift, see Matthew Evangelista, "The Evolution of the Soviet Tactical Air Forces," Soviet Armed Forces Revieiv Annual 7 (1982-83): 451-79.

[73]

Innovation and the Arms Race

study the German efforts. As one observer understated it, "the mea¬ sures taken by the Luftwaffe to develop target-defence rocket fighters for use against high-altitude day bombers were not lost on the Sovi¬ ets."82 Indeed, we cannot understand the way the Soviets adopted innovations in jet technology and aircraft design without taking into consideration their perceptions of specific external threats and the availability of foreign technology. Developments in foreign technology also figured prominently in the Soviet missile program at this stage. During the war it had focused mainly on rocket artillery and rocket propulsion for aircraft. The suc¬ cess of the German V-rocket program evidently triggered Soviet inter¬ est in the potential of long-range ballistic and cruise missiles.83 The summer of 1944 constituted something of a turning point in Soviet missile development, as information on German uses of the V-rockets became available.84 In July, Glushko became chief designer in a special design bureau for the development of rocket engines that had pre¬ viously been part of the Kazan aviation factory. Korolev was appointed his deputy. One of Korolev's first projects was to assemble into a report the results of research on cruise missiles that he had undertaken during the 1930s, before his arrest.85 During 1943 Korolev and his colleagues accelerated their research on rocketry, especially as the Soviet armies moved west and gave the scientists who followed them access to the German missile facilities at Peenemiinde and elsewhere.86 Scientists from the design bureau led by Isaev were able to study German V-2 rockets recovered in Poland as early as 1944. Although Isaev claims to have resisted pressure to pro82Boyd, Soviet Air Force, p. 207; Iakovlev, Tsel' zhizni, pp. 446-64. ^Soviet articles published during and immediately after the war revealed the close attention paid to foreign developments in the rocket field. See, e.g., "Raketnoe oruzhie [Rocket weaponry], Voennaia mysl, no. 2 (February i945): 91-93' which is based on an article in the U.S. Infantry Journal; A. Ivanov, "Letaiushchie bomby Fau-i" [Flying bombs V-i], Za oborony [For defense], nos. 5-6 (March 1946): 20-21; A. Ivanov, Letaiushchaia bomba Fau-2" [Flying bomb V-2], Za oborony, no. 10 (May 1946); 21-22; N. Nikiforov, "Reaktivnaia artilleriia" [Rocket artillery], Za oborony, nos. 17-18 (September 1946): 1112; A. Ivanov, "Sovremennye bombardirovochnye sredstva' [Contemporary means of bombing], Za oborony, nos. 23-24 (December 1946): 19-20; P. N. Kuleshov, "Reaktivnaia artilleriia i ee budushchee" [Rocket artillery and its future], Za oborony, nos. 1-2 (January 1947); 22-24; V. Bibanov, "Reaktivnye aviabomby" [Rocket-propelled air bombs], Za

oborony, no. 5 (March 1947): 21-22. mn. P. Mil'chenko, Zalpy nad neboi [Volleys over the sky] (Moscow, 1983), p. 171. Also V. P. Glushko, Put' v raketnoi tekhnike [Journey in rocket technology] (Moscow, 1977), pp. 490, 494. 85/z istorii sovetskoi kosmonavtiki, pp. 224-25. ^Early Soviet missile research and the role of German technology are discussed in CIA Report US/UK GM 4-52, "A Summary of Soviet Guided Missile Intelligence," 20 July 1953; and CIA, Office of Scientific Intelligence, Scientific Intelligence Research Aid, "Sri-

1741

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

duce a Soviet copy of the V-2 engine, there is little doubt that the German weapon made a significant impact on his work. From the fall of 1944, he was allowed to shift from work on rocket-assisted aircraft engines to his preferred task—developing boosters for ballistic mis¬ siles.87 The impetus to innovation in Soviet rocketry at this third stage clearly owes a great deal to German progress. One CIA report noted, "There is no doubt that it took the German wartime success with guided missiles to cause Stalin and his colleagues to devote large scale support to the Soviet effort in this field."88 Not until the next stage, however, did development of long-range missiles become a major priority. Although Soviet work on nuclear fission had been disrupted by the German invasion, it began again in early 1943. In response to a decree issued by the State Defense Committee in late 1942, Kurchatov set up a laboratory under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences to study the "uranium problem." The proximate cause of the decree was a letter that the young physicist G. N. Flerov had written to Stalin. Flerov had published a short research note in the U.S. journal Physical Review in July 1940 and had searched in vain through foreign physics journals for a response. When he noticed that nothing at all had been published on nuclear fission, he deduced from the "dogs that did not bark" that the field had become classified in the United States.89 Flerov's letter was taken seriously, no doubt because it coincided with other intelligence information indicating German and U.S. research into nuclear weap¬ ons. According to Holloway, "the key factor in the atomic decision of 1942 was Soviet knowledge of the German and American work on the bomb." The decision was by no means, however, intended to set off an all-out effort to develop a bomb in a short period of time: "From the pace at which the work got under way it is quite clear that neither the Soviet leaders nor the Soviet scientists expected to have a uranium bomb ready for use in the war."90 The decision to initiate a top-priority program would not be made until August 1943—the start of the fourth stage.

entific Research Institute and Experimental Factory 88 for Guided Missile Development, Moskva/Kaliningrad," OSI-C-RA/6o-2, 4 March i960, both available on microfiche. See also Frederick I. Ordway III and Mitchell Sharpe, The Rocket Team (New York, 1979), esp. pp. 318-43. 87Arlazorov, Doroga na kosmodrom, pp. 99-101. 88C1A, "Scientific Research Institute and Experimental Factory 88," p. 11. 89Holloway, "Entering the Nuclear Arms Race," pp. 173-75. Flerov's story is also repeated in an emigre account; see Sergei Polikanov, Razryv: Zapiski atomnogo fizika [Ex¬ plosion: Notes of an atomic physicist] (Frankfurt/Main, 1983), pp. 7-10. ^Holloway, "Entering the Nuclear Arms Race," pp. 175-76.

[75]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

Stage 4: Mobilization During the fourth stage, the Soviet leadership typically endorses an all-out effort to pursue a particular innovation. At the same time, the change in priorities that allows the system to overcome its usual inertia becomes more evident. Although the specific character of new weap¬ ons programs is to a certain degree constrained by existing organiza¬ tional structures and technological antecedents, the top leadership still retains to a remarkable extent an ability to intervene in the process of carrying out an innovation. In the case of postwar interceptor aircraft, for example, details were evidently decided at the highest level. The success of the MiG—15 interceptor, considered a "dramatic advance" in Soviet capabilities by Western observers,91 can be attributed in part to the fact that it was powered by Soviet versions of the British Nene jet engine, some of which were purchased in 1946.92 The proposal to purchase the engines was taken up directly with Stalin, who reportedly exclaimed, "What kind of fool would sell his secrets!" His designers explained that the engines had been widely advertised in the press and had been sold to a number of countries already. It is clear, then, even according to these Soviet accounts, that the availability of foreign technology played an important role in the MiG-15 development and that the decision to purchase the technology was made at the highest level.93 More important, however, was the perception of the threat of U.S. nuclear attack, which made production of a high-quality jet interceptor one of the primary tasks of the early postwar Soviet military program. Stalin had initiated a crash program, with the goal of producing interim jet interceptors by the end of 1946. The MiG-9 and Iak-15 aircraft were already being deployed in the main Moscow and Baku air-defense districts in early 1947.94 While the two straight-wing interceptors were being rushed into production in 1946, orders for a superior swept-wing aircraft—the MiG-15—were handed down. Its characteristics make clear that its primary mission was high-altitude interception of bomb¬ ers.95 The production of this aircraft was accorded higher priority than 91See, e.g., Boyd, Soviet Air Force, p. 213. 92Iakovlev, 50 let Sovetskogo samoletostroeniia, p. 118. 93Iakovlev, Tsel' zhizni, p. 464. 94Ordena Lenina Moskovskii voennyi okrug [The Order of Lenin Moscow military district] (Moscow, 1971), p. 314; Bakinskii okrug protivovozdushnoi oborony: Istoricheskii ocherk, 19201974 gg. [Baku anti-air defense district: A historical outline, 1920-1974] (Baku, 1974), p194. For an interesting memoir account of the assimilation of jet fighters into Soviet air defense units during this period, see Vladimir Lavrinenkov, Bez voiny [Without war] (Kiev, 1982), esp. pp. 111-15. . . 95Shavrov, Istoriia konstruksii samoletov, p. 302; Jean Alexander, Russian Aircraft since 1940 (London, 1975), p- 209. See also the JCS Report JIC 632/1, Tactical Evaluation of the MiG-15 as an All-Weather Fighter and Ground-Attack Plane," 26 May 1953' discussed in Evangelista, "Evolution of the Soviet Tactical Air Forces."

[76]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

that of any other type, and some 15,000 were eventually manufac¬ tured.96 Although development of the MiG-15 was aided by the avail¬ ability of foreign technology, the main impetus for the program was the threat of U.S. atomic attack, which forced a reordering of priorities in favor of air defense. The major advances in the Soviet missile program are not so easily attributable to specific foreign threats, although the pattern of innova¬ tion described here appears generally to fit. In 1945 a Scientific Council was organized under the Council of Ministers to direct rocket develop¬ ment. Its membership included some sixty scientists, military officers, and industrial managers.97 During the next year a major network of research institutes, plants, and design bureaus was established to carry out the rocket development program.98 Also in 1946 Sergei Korolev was named chief designer for the development of ballistic missiles.99 All of these events required major investments and reallocations of resources. The decisions clearly came from the top. In his biography of Marshal M. I. Nedelin, former commander of the strategic rocket forces, his successor. Marshal V. I. Tolubko, describes the centralized coordination of the rocket program at this stage. Nedelin was expected to get approval from the General Staff for his plans and to submit monthly reports to the Ministry of Defense, the government, and the state planning committee, Gosplan. Stalin him¬ self on occasion would meet with the top figures in the rocket program, such as Korolev, Kurchatov, and Nedelin. Tolubko reports that at such meetings, "one felt that he had a full impression of the state of rocket construction and atomic research, both in our country and abroad."100 Clearly Stalin was motivated at this time by foreign developments, particularly the worsening of relations with the United States. His perception of the United States as the most likely Soviet adversary in a future world war probably contributed to his decision in April 1947 to pursue development of a long-range rocket capable of hitting the Unit¬ ed States.101 The decision taken at this stage to implement a program of 96For a discussion of the relative priorities of various Soviet missions at this time, see Evangelista, "Evolution of the Soviet Tactical Air Forces." 97Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector," p. 391. See also V. Tolubko, Nedelin: Pervyi glavkom strategicheskikh [Nedelin: First commander of the strategic (rocket forces)] (Moscow, 1979), pp. 174-75. 98V. S. Avduevskii and S. D. Grishin, "Razvitie raketnoi tekhniki v SSSR v periode 1946-1957 gg." [The development of rocket technology in the USSR in the period 19461957], in Issledovaniia po istorii i teorii razvitiia aviatsionnoi i raketno-kosmichheskoi nauki i tekhniki [Research in the history and theory of the development of aviation and rocketspace science and technology], issue 3 (Moscow, 1984), pp. 9-10; Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector," p. 391. "Iz istorii Sovetskoi kosmonavtiki, pp. 14, 47; Tolubko, Nedelin, p. 175. 100Tolubko, Nedelin, p. 175. 101Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector," p. 391.

[77]

Innovation and the Arms Race

rocket development as a matter of high priority would have a profound effect on the subsequent evolution of Soviet military policy. Decisions concerning the atomic-bomb program, taken during the fourth stage, had an equal or greater effect. The creation of an atomic weapon became a matter of the highest priority, at Stalin's demand, and Stalin followed developments with the same attention he paid to the rocket program. In mid-August 1945, Stalin is reported to have ordered B. L. Vannikov, the People's Commissar of Munitions, and the physicist I. V. Kurchatov to "provide us with atomic weapons in the shortest possible time." It seems clear that the main impetus to Stalin's decision was the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by U.S. atom¬ ic weapons.102 The August meeting resulted in a major reallocation of resources and the creation of two organizations to oversee the atomic program: the Scientific-Technical Council, composed of leading scien¬ tists, industrial managers, and engineers; and the Main Administration for Atomic Energy, headed by Vannikov.103 It took four years to the month from the decision to undertake an allout effort to create an atomic bomb to the first Soviet nuclear explosion. The test took place on 29 August 1949 and was announced to the Soviet people the following month, only after President Truman had already revealed it in the West.104

Stage 5: Mass Production During the fifth stage in the innovation process one normally is able to find public evidence of a change in policy. Often a high-level state¬ ment of policy coincides with the mass production of a new weapon and the implementation of new priorities. In the case of interceptor aircraft, the major shift in Soviet policy was signified by the creation in 1948 of a new branch of the Soviet armed forces, the anti-air defense troops of the country, Voiska protivovozdushnoi oborony strany, or PVO.105 During the autumn of that year, the MiG-15 underwent state trials. It was produced and deployed in the thousands starting very shortly thereafter.106 Even during the later stages of the Soviet process of innovation, 102The quote comes from a review of a biography of Vannikov by G. Ustinov, which apparently was never published. In "Entering the Nuclear Arms Race," p. 183, Holloway cites the review by A. Lavrent'eva, "Stroiteli novogo mira" [Builders of a new world], V mire knig [In the world of books], no. 9 (1970): 4. 103Holloway, "Entering the Nuclear Arms Race," pp. 185-85. 104A compilation of U.S. and Soviet announcements of Soviet nuclear tests up to 1956 is found in "Soviet Atomic Tests," a report prepared by the AEC, in the papers of the Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject ser. Alphabetical subser., box 3, folder "AEC, Vol. I (6), August 1956-February 1957," in DDEL. 105Voiska protivovozdushnoi oborony strany, pp. 352-53. 106Boyd, Soviet Air Force, p. 213.

[78]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

external factors can be important. The reorganization of the Soviet airdefense system that resulted in the creation of the PVO constituted a response to a major trend in U.S. strategic policy, if not to specific developments. Soviet sources identify 1948 and subsequent years as particularly dangerous.107 During the first half of 1948 the United States began to deploy B-29 "atomic bombers" in Germany and En¬ gland. In June 1948, during the Berlin blockade, three squadrons (sixty aircraft) of B-29S were dispatched to bases in England.108 If the Soviet air-defense reorganization was not specifically a response to the earlier B-29 deployments, it was certainly a response to the orientation of U.S. policy represented by them. Since 1945 the United States had been obtaining bases in Europe and the Middle East from which bomb¬ ers of the Air Force's Strategic Air Command (SAC) could strike the USSR. Soviet authors duly note these and other relevant develop¬ ments, such as the introduction of the B-36 (the world's first intercon¬ tinental bomber) in 1949 and of the B-47 as a jet replacement for the B29 in the following year.109 The threat posed by some two thousand U.S. medium- and long-range bombers during the first postwar decade meant that even after having implemented a major innovation in air defense, the Soviets would remain attentive to external factors. At the same time, the way the Soviets addressed their problems in air defense inevitably drew on their historical experience. Organiza¬ tional factors posed fewer constraints, however, in that strong central control could impose considerable experimentation in the design and organization of an air-defense system.110 Organizational and technological factors figure prominently in the fifth stage of innovation in Soviet rocketry. External factors probably played a lesser role, in that the Soviets' decision to emphasize missiles over aircraft as their main strategic nuclear delivery system was not directly related to U.S. actions. The threat posed by U.S. nuclear bomb¬ ers in Europe and the United States did increase dramatically during the 1950s, however, providing additional targets for attack by Soviet missiles—and thereby justifying larger production runs.111 The exter¬ nal elements should not, therefore, be entirely disregarded. W7Voiska protivovozdushnoi oborony strany, pp. 337-40. 108The original plans had called for deployments in France as well. See the memoran¬ dum of the fifteenth meeting of the NSC, 16 July 1948, in PSF, NSC Meetings, Memoran¬ da for the President, box 220, folder "1948," in HSTL. See also Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 2945-1950 (New York, 1980), p. 258. W9Voiska protivovozdushnoi oborony strany, pp. 338-40. 110For discussions of such experiments, see Evangelista, "Evolution of the Soviet Tacti¬ cal Air Forces," p. 454; Voiska protivovozdushnoi oborony strany, pp. 352-53; and M. V. Zakharov, ed., 50 let Vooruzhennykh Sil SSSR [50 years of the armed forces of the USSR] (Moscow, 1968), p. 511. 11 Robert P. Berman and John C. Baker, Soviet Strategic Forces: Requirements and Re¬ sponses (Washington, D.C., 1982), pp. 42-44.

[79]

Innovation and the Arms Race

The case of Soviet missiles diverges somewhat from the ideal type at this fifth stage, in that the decision to produce rockets in massive quantitites and to emphasize them in Soviet military strategy followed by many years the initial decision to develop a long-range rocket as a matter of top priority. In pursuing both aircraft and missiles as poten¬ tial strategic delivery vehicles, the Soviets evidently wanted to hedge their bets against technological uncertainties.112 Explanations that focus on bureaucratic and organizational politics fail to account for this decade-long period of indecision. They would have predicted an ear¬ lier emphasis on rockets, owing to the strong artillery tradition and bureaucratic clout of the Soviet ground forces. One must look even at this stage to the level of the political leadership to account for the decision to keep the bomber option open, even though the Soviet air forces were in a position of bureaucratic weakness.113 The decision to go with missiles was probably made during 1958-59, in part at least as a result of studies and conferences sponsored by the Soviet General Staff.114 It was formally announced by Nikita Khrushchev in a speech before the Supreme Soviet in January i960, when he declared that a future war would inevitably be a nuclearrocket war.115 At that point, assembly lines at Soviet aircraft factories had been converted to missile production. As Khrushchev later that year claimed before the UN General Assembly, they now began churn ing out missiles "like sausages."116 Khrushchev later announced that a new military service—the Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF)—had been formed in late 1959 to take command of deploying the new missile systems. The SRF was ranked at the top of the hierarchy of services, even above the army.117 Implementing such changes as the retooling of aircraft plants to produce missiles and the dismantling of aircraft design bureaus in favor of rocket teams required decisions at the level of the Politburo.118 112Khrushchev transcript, pp. 920, 930, 965, and passim. See also the discussion in chap. 5, below. , . „ ^ ,. 113In this regard, it is useful to consider the "National Leadership perspective dis¬ cussed by Karl F. Spielmann, Analyzing Soviet Strategic Arms Decisions (Boulder, Colo., 114V. G. Kulikov, ed., Akademiia general'nogo shtaba [General Staff Academy] (Moscow, 1976), pp. 143-44/ 156-60. 115Speech printed in Pravda, 15 January i960. nespeech of 23 September i960, quoted in Arnold L. Horelick and Myron Rush, Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy (Chicago, 1966), p. 81. Khrushchev discusses these developments as well as his use of the sausage metaphor in Khrushchev transcnpt, PPiHarriet1Fast Scott and William F. Scott, The Armed Forces of the USSR (Boulder, Colo., 1979), pp. 133-41. For a Soviet discussion, see Voennyi entsiklopedicheskn slovar' [Military encyclopedic dictionary] (Moscow, 1983), p. 622. 118Khrushchev transcript, pp. 920, 923, 938, and esp. 952-54, where Khrushchev dis-

[80]

Weapons Innovation: U.S./USSR

These measures would appear to threaten prevailing industrial and bureaucratic structures and interests. Thus explanations that refer to a Soviet military-industrial or military-bureaucratic complex contribute little to an understanding of such changes.119 Likewise, explanations focusing on bureaucratic politics cannot explain such a significant change as the creation of a new service. This initiative demanded a decision at the highest level. According to Marshal Tolubko, three options were considered: apportioning the new nuclear rocket weap¬ ons among the four services (army, navy, air force, and air-defense troops), giving them only to the navy and air forces, or creating an independent service in charge of rocket weapons—the option chosen.120 At this stage, explanations that call attention to the role of tradition, history, and relative bureaucratic strength have something to offer. These factors help us to understand why the SRF was formed out of the artillery troops of the ground forces.121 It is important to recog¬ nize, however, that the new service would not have been created with¬ out high-level initiative and continuing support. As one Soviet source put it, "the structuring and strengthening of the Strategic Rocket Forces came about under the direct control of the Central Committee of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] and with its active help."122 The development of Soviet nuclear weapons during the fifth stage was equally dependent on high-level sanction. Decisions were evi¬ dently taken to go directly from the creation of a fission weapon to work on developing a fusion weapon, or hydrogen bomb. Even at this late stage, however, external factors continued to have salience. The Soviet development of a thermonuclear "superbomb," for example, was evidently enhanced by the success of a U.S. nuclear test in 1952. An analysis of the U.S. test apparently provided the Soviets with clues cusses reestablishing a design bureau for a scientist who had been imprisoned by Stalin. See also Agursky, Nauchno-issledovatel'skii institut, p. 33; Mikhail Turetsky, The Introduc¬ tion of Missile Systems into the Soviet Navy (1945-1962) (Falls Church, Va., 1983), pp. 20-23. 119For some examples of that approach, see Jacques Sapir, Les armes de la puissance ou la

puissance des armes: Production de materiel militaire et developpement economique en Union sovietique [The arms of power or the power of arms: Production of military materiel and economic development in the Soviet Union], Cahiers d'Etudes Strategiques, no. 2 (Paris, 1983); Dieter Lutz, Introduction, in Die Riistung der Sowjetunion: Rustungdynamik und burokratische Strukturen [The armament of the Soviet Union: Armament dynamics and bureaucratic Structures], ed. Lutz (Baden-Baden, 1979), pp. 9-13' Vernon Aspaturian, "The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex—Does It Exist?" Journal of International Affairs 26, no. 1 (1972): 1-28; Andrew Cockburn, The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine (New York, 1983). 120Tolubko, Nedelin, p. 188. 121Holloway, Soviet Union and the Arms Race, p. 153. 122Sovetskie Vooruzhennye Sily: Istoriia stoitel'stva [Soviet Armed Forces: History of (their) structuring] (Moscow, 1978), p. 421.

[81]

Innovation and the Arms Race

as to the configuration of a weapon vastly more powerful than the ones they had previously tested.123 The reactive nature of Soviet policy even at such a late date has led some observers to believe that restraint in the U.S. hydrogen bomb program may have provided an opportunity to negotiate an arms control agreement with the Soviets earlier than was otherwise possible.124 123David Holloway, "Research Note: Soviet Thermonuclear Research," International Security 4 (Winter 1979-80): 192-97. 124McGeorge Bundy, "The H-Bomb: A Missed Chance," New York Review of Books, 13 May 1982; Herbert F. York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco, 1976), esp. chap. 6.

[82]

PART

II

From Tactical Nuclear Weapons to Star Wars The development of tactical nuclear weapons is of particular interest for three reasons. First, these weapons constitute a prominent example of a military innovation that was intended to provide an advantage to one side but that served instead to decrease the security of both sides. In that regard, tactical nuclear weapons are representative of the dan¬ gerous and counterproductive nature of the technological arms race. The most dangerous aspect of innovations in weaponry is the pos¬ sibility that they could contribute to the outbreak of war during a period of crisis. The problems that tactical nuclear weapons pose for crisis stability have long been recognized. Owing to their short range, they must be deployed close to the front lines of a potential battlefield. There the weapons are vulnerable to destruction or capture, and in a crisis military leaders would come under pressure to "use them or lose them." Their use on the battlefield—even in a limited fashion—would risk escalation to all-out nuclear war.1 The widespread deployment of delivery vehicles capable of firing conventional and chemical muni¬ tions as well as nuclear ones has led to concern that one side might misinterpret its opponent's use of these weapons with conventional munitions as the initiation of nuclear war and decide to launch its own nuclear attack.2 Even if escalation could reliably be avoided, the use of tactical nuclear weapons in a densely populated area such as central Europe would destroy what was supposed to be defended.3 For these The possibility of escalation was recognized quite early—for example, in James E. King, Jr., "Nuclear Plenty and Limited War," Foreign Affairs 35 (January 1957): 238-56; R. N. Rosecrance, "Can We Limit Nuclear War?" Military Review 38 (March 1959): 51-59- For an early and thorough discussion of the literature, see Morton H. Halperin, Limited War in the Nuclear Age (New York, 1963), pp. 95-112. 2For a concise discussion of this problem, see Leon V. Sigal, Nuclear Forces in Europe: Enduring Dilemmas and Present Prospects (Washington, D.C., 1984), chap. 6. 3Helmut Schmidt remarked in 1962: "Even if the use of tactical nuclear weapons did not lead to the extremes of escalation, viz. to total war with strategic nuclear weapons, it would nevertheless lead to the most extensive devastation of Europe and to the most extensive loss of life amongst its peoples. Europe is the battlefield for these weapons": Defense or Retaliation: A German View, trans. Edward Thomas (New York, 1962), p. 100.

[83]

Innovation and the Arms Race

reasons, during the early 1980s increasing numbers of NATO military officers came to believe that tactical nuclear weapons did not enhance alliance security and were in fact devoid of military utility.4 The British military strategist B. H. Liddell Hart made much the same point some twenty years earlier when he remarked, "It would be better if such weapons had never been introduced."5 The counterproductive nature of the widescale deployments of tacti¬ cal nuclear weapons has been implicitly recognized by both the NATO alliance and the Warsaw Pact. During the early 1980s NATO agreed— albeit partly for domestic political reasons—to withdraw more than two thousand short-range nuclear weapons from Europe.6 In its disar¬ mament proposals over the years, the USSR has persistently advocated the complete removal of such weapons. At this writing, however, both sides continue to produce and deploy tactical nuclear systems. The second factor of interest lies in the discrepancy between the magnitude of the Soviet and U.S. tactical nuclear arsenals and the limited information published about the origins of these weapons. "Tactical" nuclear weapons—defined broadly as all weapons that are not part of the systems intended for "strategic" warfare at interconti¬ nental range—constitute the bulk of the world's nuclear forces. Al¬ though the superpowers possess roughly ten thousand strategic nu¬ clear warheads each, their tactical systems number several times that many.7 Military planners evidently attach considerable importance to these weapons, yet this book is the first detailed study, based on pri¬ mary sources, that discusses their initial development both in the Unit¬ ed States and in the Soviet Union. The third reason for focusing on these cases is methodological in nature. Few, if any, previous studies have set forth specific hypotheses about the process of weapons innovation so as to evaluate them through investigation of particular cases. Indeed, as chapter 1 sug¬ gests, deriving such hypotheses from the rather general theoretical approaches of the balance-of-power and bureaucratic-politics schools 4See, for example. Field Marshal Lord Michael Carver, A Policy for Peace (London, 1982); and the numerous statements by retired NATO officers collected in H. W. Tromp and G. R. LaRocque, eds.. Nuclear War in Europe (Groningen, 1982); and in Generale fur den Frieden [Generals for Peace], interviews conducted by Gerhard Kade (Cologne, 1981). See also the remarks by Louis Mountbatten, "A Military Commander Surveys the Nu¬ clear Arms Race," International Security 4 (Winter 1979-80): 3-55B. H. Liddell Hart, Deterrent or Defence (London, i960), quoted in Solly Zuckerman, Nuclear Illusion and Reality (New York, 1982), p. 61. 6The NATO position was stated in the so-called Montebello decision of 1983, reprinted in NATO Review 31, no. 5 (1983): 32-33. For a skeptical analysis of NATO's position on tactical nuclear weapons, see William M. Arkin, "Fewer Warheads in Europe, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 43 (August-September 1986), 4-5. 'William M. Arkin and Richard W. Fieldhouse, Nuclear Battlefields: Global Links in the Arms Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). [84]

From Tactical Nuclear Weapons to Star Wars

would be difficult. Both approaches have more to say about inertia and stagnation than about change and innovation. How, then, could one evaluate the contention made here that the prevailing explanations for the arms race are inadequate and that another approach is superior? Fortunately, the case of tactical nuclear weapons has given rise to a number of competing hypotheses that relate to the debate between internal and external explanations of arms races and, by implication, between bureaucratic politics and balance-of-power explanations. For the U.S. case, such hypotheses have included the notions that tactical nuclear weapons were invented as a rational response to a Soviet superiority in conventional military forces and that they were developed as the most cost-effective means of fulfilling certain military missions—the "more bang for the buck" thesis. These by no means mutually exclusive explanations constitute the most prominent offer¬ ings from the external school. The internal school tends to focus on the parochial interests of the military services, particularly the U.S. Army's competition with the Air Force for a share of the nuclear pie. Explana¬ tions for developments on the Soviet side are harder to come by. One could, however, easily imagine a comparable internal explanation (focusing on the strong bureaucratic position of the Soviet army) as well as an external action-reaction one (Soviet tactical nuclear weapons as a rational response to those of the United States). If the following detailed examination of the cases points up short¬ comings in these apparently compelling hypotheses and supports in¬ stead the generalizations put forward in chapter 3, it should strengthen the explanation for the technological arms race presented there. The next two chapters relate in chronological fashion the development of U.S. and Soviet tactical nuclear weapons, making the case for the bottom-up and top-down generalizations and at times calling attention to evidence that would or would not support the common alternate ex¬ planations for the arms race. Chapter 6 then reviews this evidence and systematically evaluates the main contending explanations for the de¬ velopment of tactical nuclear weapons.

[85]

[4l The Origins of U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons "All we need is some newfangled kind of a gun. My Boys in the Back Room have already begun to think up a walloping whizz-zinger one! My Bright Boys are thinking. They're on the right track. They'll think up one quick and we'll send you right back!" —Dr. Seuss, The Butter Battle Book

The potential for the tactical employment of nuclear weapons origi¬ nated with U.S. scientists and weapons designers, who in 1948 discov¬ ered means of producing relatively efficient low-yield nuclear war¬ heads in large quantities. They promoted the concept of battlefield nuclear warfare among military officials, legislators, and members of the AEC through several stages of consensus building. The scientists were initially motivated by a desire for a "nuclear solution" to U.S. security problems other than the strategic bombing of civilians. In June 1950 the outbreak of war in Korea provided an early external rationale for exploring the tactical possibilities of the atomic bomb. In 1951 the threat of a potential Soviet invasion of Western Europe provided a window to justify the mass production of tactical nuclear weapons. During the later stages of the innovation process, advocates of battlefield nuclear warfare took their arguments to the public in an effort to influence the debate in their favor. Only during the final stage did the process reach the top of the political system, when President Truman approved a major expansion of the atomic program in 1952. It was justified primarily on the basis of technical developments that provided an opportunity for the widescale produc¬ tion of tactical nuclear weapons. Starting in that year, the weapons began to be deployed in Europe and on aircraft carriers around the world. [86]

The Origins of U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Stage i: Technocratic Initiative (1945-1948) The first stage finds only limited interest within the U.S. military in employing nuclear weapons for tactical purposes. The prevailing wis¬ dom at the time was that nuclear weapons were too expensive and too large for use against anything but major strategic targets. In the pub¬ lic's mind they were weapons of terror to be employed against civilian populations. Only when physicists and weapons designers discovered the means to make nuclear weapons more compact and efficient did the notion arise that they might be used for a wide variety of missions. The atomic scientists became the first advocates of tactical nuclear weapons.

Early Views on Tactical Atomic Warfare The concept of using nuclear weapons against military targets on the battlefield appeared almost immediately in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In September 1945 an article in the British journal The Navy mentioned that "if it were possible to use the power of atomic energy and yet by some means to focus it more finely, destruction might then be confined to military targets in the strictest sense." The author suggested the possibility of attaching an atomic warhead to a rocket such as the German V-2.1 The same journal published another article the next month which contained the essence of most of the arguments that would appear in future years to support the notion of developing and deploying tactical nuclear weapons. In addition, it made specific mention of the concept of atomic artillery. The author, Captain Russell Grenfell of the Royal Navy, suggested that even after certain countries ("say, France and Spain") had developed atomic weapons and long-range delivery capabilties, they could still invade one another with land armies. As the answer to this threat, Grenfell proposed "to switch the atomic artillery from the city targets to the invading army. Thus," he argued, "we are brought back to first principles of strategy and to the tradi¬ tionally higher [moral] value of making the enemy's armed forces the objective in preference to the more primitive idea" of strategic bombing.2 JMaj. Oliver Stewart, "Atoms and Air Forces," The Navy, September 1945, reprinted in Military Review 25 (February 1946): 90-92. 2Cap. Russell Grenfell, "Future Warfare and the Atomic Bomb," The Nairy, October 1945, reprinted in Military Review 25 (March 1946): 113-16. 1 he expression atomic artillery was used as early as 1937, as the title of a book by the British physicist John Kellock Robertson. It was not, however, intended to apply to a weapon; it was instead a meta¬ phor for the process of nuclear fission. The same is true of the title of Robertson's later book. Atomic Artillery and the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1945).

[87]

Innovation and the Arms Race

The belief that the atomic bombing of military targets was less primi¬ tive and even of higher moral value would later serve as a major reason for J. Robert Oppenheimer's advocacy of tactical nuclear weapons as an alternative to strategic bombing with hydrogen bombs. This was not Oppenheimer's original position, however. He at first shared the near¬ ly unanimous view that nuclear weapons were best suited for attacking cities. While visiting Cornell University's physics department in May 1946, Oppenheimer wrote a letter to President Truman in which he argued against going forward with the first post—World War II atomic test series, at Bikini Island. The exercise, called Operation Crossroads, was intended to test the effects of nuclear weapons against naval tar¬ gets. Oppenheimer wrote, "Surely the overwhelming effectiveness of atomic weapons lies in their use for the bombardment of cities, and of centers of production and population." In comparision with the study and effort required to understand these effects, he argued "the detailed determination of the destructiveness of atomic weapons against naval craft would appear trivial."3 Truman requested acting secretary of state Dean Acheson to discuss with him this "letter from a 'cry baby' scien¬ tist," as the president called Oppenheimer.4 Operation Crossroads went ahead as scheduled, against the opposi¬ tion of Oppenheimer and some other scientists and despite the fact that the testing coincided with the presentation of the U.S. plan for international control of atomic energy before the United Nations. The timing of the exercise cast some doubt on the sincerity of the United States and of its representative, Bernard Baruch.5 Ironically, the mili¬ tary evaluation of the Bikini tests performed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) came to the conclusions Oppenheimer had predicted: "the bomb is pre-eminently a weapon for use against human life and activities in large urban and industrial areas, as well as seaports." Calling attention to the limitations on fissionable material and numbers of weapons, the JCS report suggested that only under special circumstances should consideration be given to tactical uses of atomic weapons—for exam¬ ple, against "troops engaged in amphibious landings or concentrated 3Oppenheimer to Truman, 3 May 1946, in Papers of Harry S. Truman, PSF, box 201, folder "Atomic Energy—Russia," in HSTL. 4Truman to Acheson, 7 May 1946, memo, ibid. Truman used the same expression to describe Oppenheimer during interviews with Merle Miller, in the latter s Plain Speaking (New York, 1974), p. 228. , , , Secretary of State James Byrnes had expressed concern in that regard and had re¬ quested that the tests be postponed, but he was opposed by Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. See The Forrestal Diaries, ed. Walter Millis (New York, 1951), pp- 149-5°; and discussions by Barton J. Bernstein, "The Quest for Security: American Foreign Policy and International Control of the Atomic Bomb, 1942-1946,' journal of American History 60 (March 1974): 1003-44; Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston, 1978); Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945-1950 (New York, 1980).

[88]

The Origins of U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons

in staging areas."6 This assessment constituted the prevailing wisdom on tactical uses of atomic weapons in the immediate postwar years. One notable disagreement with this generally accepted evaluation of the bomb's utility came from Lieutenant General James M. Gavin, perhaps the most prominent military proponent of tactical nuclear weapons in the years to come. One of the few in the Army who was immediately attracted to nuclear weapons, Gavin was by 1946 working on ways to involve the Army in nuclear warfare. In his words, "Our earliest nuclear thinking in the Army was in terms of how to defend against use of the bomb on us, and how to team up with nuclear' bombers in the offense." Gavin's proposal was "to match nuclear bomber attacks with a parachute assault," not a surprising suggestion in light of Gavin's wartime experience as a specialist on airborne opera¬ tions and commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. For Gavin, "the results of the Bikini tests in 1947 began to suggest new fields of possible tactical application." Thus, although the official Bikini Evaluation Board argued that troop concentrations would provide atomic targets only in exceptional cases, and that strategic bombing of urban centers should predominate, Gavin drew the opposite conclusion.7 Gavin's interest in tactical uses for atomic weapons apparently found little echo in the U.S. Army in the immediate postwar years. In fact, the Army paid little attention at all to nuclear weapons then. By way of illustration, consider the Army's journal Military Review, published by the Command and General Staff College (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth. Reading through the issues appearing in the months following the end of World War II, one would learn nothing of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki until February 1946, and then only in a re¬ printed British article.8 Although it touched on the notion of battlefield uses of atomic weapons—a subject in which one would expect the Army to take an interest—the article was accorded no special attention by the editors. It appeared in the "Foreign Military Digests" section of

Military Review, sandwiched between a Soviet article on street fighting and a Spanish article on coastal defense. There was apparently no attempt to solicit U.S. articles on possible tactical uses of atomic weapons.9 In August 1947 a military writer published an article, again in a 6 M. Golovin, O nekotorykh voprosakh upravleniia v nastupaternom boiu (i945_1953 88-) some questions of control in offensive combat (1945-1953)]/ Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 1 (January 1978). 48-55; A- Dunin, "Razvitie sukhoputnykh voisk v poslevoennyi period" [The develop¬ ment of the ground forces in the postwar period], Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 5 (May 1978): 33-40; L. Mikriukov and V. Babich, "Razvitie taktiki istrebitel'noi aviatsii posle vtoroi mirovoi voiny" [The development of tactics of fighter aviation after the Second World War], Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 5 (May 1977): esp. 29-32. 4Raymond L. Garthoff, Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age (New York, 1958), pp. 61-63. A valuable guide to Soviet military writings, "A Bibliography of Published Soviet Sources on Selected Fields of Military Technology (i937-1956)/” was compiled by Garthoff in 1955— 1957 and is available in the Library of Congress. I am grateful to David Holloway for lending me his copy. For a list of Soviet announcements of nuclear-weapons tests, see "Soviet Atomic Tests," prepared by the AEC and found in papers from the Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject ser., Alphabetical subser., box 3, folder "AEC, Vol. 1 (6), August 1956- February 1957," in DDEL.

Innovation and the Arms Race

questions to ourselves more than once in the Academy. They had not left our minds even on the first postwar New Year's Eve."5 Shortly thereafter, sometime in January 1946, Lavrinenkov learned for the first time a few of the most basic facts about nuclear weapons. His lesson took place during a visit from his wife's father, General P. F. Ratov. "Now, Volodia," Ratov said to his son-in-law, "listen to what you won't have found out anywhere until now. You've read of course about the superpowerful American bombs, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki." "Some vague reports have reached us," answered Lav¬ rinenkov. "Know this, then: Hiroshima and Nagasaki don't exist. They've been wiped off the face of the earth." "How could that be?" Lavrinenkov gasped in amazement. "These weren't ordinary bombs, they were atomic." Ratov went on briefly to explain the cause and consequences of atomic explosions, including the effects of radiation. The rest of the conversation seems on the surface simply to address the "barbarity" of the U.S. bombings. At the same time, however, it ap¬ pears to constitute a veiled criticism of the lack of information about nuclear weapons available to Soviet citizens. "Why in the world are they silent about all this?" Lavrinenkov exclaimed. "This is a crime such as humanity has never known!" "That's how it is," answered Ratov. "But they're silent about it even in America."6 As always, one must be cautious in using such an anecdotal account to glean information about Soviet politics. Much of the subsequent discussion between Lavrinenkov and Ratov—for example, concerning how Stalin reacted to Truman's mention of the bomb at the Potsdam conference—repeats almost word for word the accounts found in other Soviet (and, for that matter. Western) sources.7 Other remarks made during the conversation about U.S. intentions in dropping the bombs are nothing more than the standard Soviet formulations and cliches. Finally, even the comments that seem original are often incorrect. In a certain sense, though, their lack of verisimilitude hints at their authen5Vladimir Lavrinenkov, Bez voiny [Without war] (Kiev, 1982), pp. 66-69. 6Ibid., pp. 66-69. Tor example, Ratov argued that "the dropping of the bombs by the Americans is not the last act of the war that just ended, but the first act of the one that's beginning"—in other words, as he later explained, the Cold War: Lavrinenkov, Bez voiny, p. 69. Com¬ pare with Blackett's observation in Bear, War, and the Bomb, p. 139: "We may conclude that the dropping of the atomic bombs was not so much the last military act of the second World War, as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress." Similar interpretations are found in G. K. Zhukov, The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov (New York, 1971), pp. 474-75; Valentin Berezhkov, History in the Making: Memoirs of World War II Diplomacy, trans. Dudley Hagen and Barry Jones (Moscow, 1983), p. 469. For the classic statement of this position, see Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York, 1965); see also Alperovitz, "More on Atomic Diplomacy," and Martin J. Sherwin, "Old Issues in New Editions," both in Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 41 (December 1985): 35-44.

I158]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

ticity. Despite the impression given in the conversation, for example, a good deal of information on the nature and effects of atomic weapons was in fact published in the Soviet Union as early as 1946. The informa¬ tion came in the form of a Russian translation of the highly informative Smyth report,8 put out under the auspices of the military director of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, in part to justify the project's huge expense.9 The fact that an air force lieutenant studying at one of the top Soviet military academies appeared to know nothing of the existence of the report seems consistent with what is known about the compartmentalization of information in the USSR, especially concerning such a sensi¬ tive issue as nuclear weapons. Probably only the top political and military leaders and scientists involved in the weapons program had access to the information. Furthermore, when General Ratov claimed that little information on nuclear weapons was available in the United States, he was of course wrong. But it seems plausible that the general would make such an argument in an attempt to excuse the fact that Soviet information is so tightly held. Pondering the Tactical Implications of the Bomb The official policy of censorship did not prevent military officers from reflecting on the implications of nuclear weapons among them¬ selves—including possible tactical application. No formal discussion of the issue was permitted, however.10 Lavrinenkov recounts the experi8Henry DeWolf Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb under the Auspices of the United States Government, 194.0— 1945 (Princeton, N.J., 1945). 9This was at least the interpretation of members of the British atomic program who reviewed the first draft of Smyth s report. See the materials in the Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject Ser., Department of Defense subser., box 3, folder "Defense— Classified (1)," in DDEL. 10There were some exceptions to the prohibition on mentioning nuclear weapons in the restricted military press, but no substantive discussions took place. In a typical example, one article quoted First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei A. Gromyko at a meeting in Paris in June 1951: ' The arms race, the working out of plans for the use of atomic bombs, the construction of hundreds of air and naval bases, the huge increase of military budgets, the wide propaganda of war and military hysteria all these are the results of the Atlantic pact [NATO]": quoted in D. Kozhevnikov, "Severo-atlanticheskii soiuz i ego vooruzhennye sily" [The North Atlantic pact and its armed forces], V oennaia mysl', no. 7 (July 1951): 82. In a discussion ostensibly concerning NATO's military forces, this was the sole mention of nuclear weapons, and much of U.S. and perforce NATO strategy was being based on them. Another article from 1951' without mentioning nu¬ clear weapons, tried to grapple with the implications of an opponent s use of massi\ e air strikes; it employed some of the language and concepts that appeared in the mid-i95os in discussions of nuclear war. See la. Dashevskii, "Upravlenie voiskami v nastupatel noi operatsii v slozhnoi obstanovke" [Control of troops in offensive operations in a compli¬ cated situation], Voennaia mysl, no. 4 (April 1951): 3~12[159]

Innovation and the Arms Race

ences of the Frunze students in 1946: "In lessons on tactics and equip¬ ment of the imperialist armies, we repeatedly tried to get the teachers to talk about the American superpowerful bombs. Although only vaguely at the time, we all the same understood that the appearance of these bombs should entail a fundamental change of the conception of armed struggle." The academy instructors were unwilling to discuss the issue in class. Thus, even though in the months following his talk with Ratov, Lavrinenkov often thought about the implications of nu¬ clear weapons, he shared these thoughts only with his closest friend and fellow pilot, A. I. Pokryshin: Both of us—in fact, everyone in our group—wanted to know in what direction tactical thought would go, what was waiting for us in this regard in the near future. Then, however, in 1946, no one could satisfy our natural curiosity, because for the time being nothing was really known about the barbarous weapon. We were studying conventional classical tactics, were weary from edu¬ cational overload, mastering the knowledge of a combined-arms officer, yet not knowing how useful it would be in our future service.11

Lavrinenkov's account suggests that some Soviet military officers considered the tactical implications of nuclear weapons quite early on. In that sense, their behavior paralleled that of U.S. military personnel such as those at the CGSC. Thus one finds a similarity between the Soviet and U.S. cases at this initial stage of early interest in tactical nuclear weapons.

The Role of the Academies The differences however, are more significant. The faculty members at Fort Leavenworth were free to devise courses of instruction on the implications of nuclear weapons on their own initiative, without direc¬ tion or approval from higher authorities in the Army, let alone the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the president. The faculty members at the Frunze and Voroshilov academies, by contrast, were not permitted to discuss nu¬ clear weapons with their students even informally until after Stalin's death. As early as the summer of 1947 the instructors at the CGSC had published their own pamphlet. Atomic Energy—Basic Principles and Mili11 Lavrinenkov, Bez voiny, pp. 70-71. [160]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

tary Application.12 During the next several years, courses about atomic weapons taught at the CGSC depended on improvisation and class discussion.13 Not until 1954, two years after the first U.S. tactical nu¬ clear weapons were deployed in Europe, was a formal committee as¬ signed the task of developing a comprehensive curriculum to cover the study of nuclear weapons at the college.14 In the Soviet Union the situation was the reverse. Not even informal classroom discussion took place until the formal curriculum had been established. This state of affairs obtained for several years after the first Soviet atomic explosion was announced. Lavrinenkov recounts the reaction of one of his colleagues on hear¬ ing the announcement, in September i949: soon as there are atom¬ ic bombs, it's necessary to prepare for defense against them, to study the tactics of combat activities under conditions of the use of the new weapon." Lavrinenkov answered, "There's little you and I can do about that here." Then he explains to the reader, "The point is that up to this time nothing concrete about the consequences of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been disseminated in the press." (Such information did not appear until 1954-) "But then' in 1949, we continued to live by the old lessons, to study to fight in conditions of conventional methods of conducting war." Nevertheless, Lavrinenkov tried to reassure his friend: "Don't worry, Anton Mat¬ veevich, in the General Staff they're undoubtedly already racking their brains over these problems."15 It is reasonable to assume that there was some consideration of the implications of nuclear weapons within the General Staff before Stalin died. One Soviet military authority indicates, however, that discussion was rather limited. Considering the post-1953 period and the implica¬ tions of nuclear weapons for Soviet operational art, he wrote. The preparation for this new and extremely important stage of develop¬ ment of Soviet operational art was begun ahead of time although it should have been done earlier than it was to attract the attention of 12PL-54 C&GSC-24 Jul 47-1425, found in a manila envelope labeled "1948 Exercise 210211," in CGSC Library. At this early stage, however, the Fort Leavenworth instructors did not explore the tactical applications of nuclear weapons in great depth. This decision owed more to the prevailing assessments of the nature of the atomic bomb than to any restrictions on what could be taught. 13This is suggested by the materials found in the envelope cited in n.12 and in two bound volumes, "Regular Course, School of Personnel, 1947-1948, Set 6-Part 1," and "Regular Course, 1948-1949, Misc., 50-43A-707," in CGSC Library. 14"Nature of the Curriculum, Command and General Staff College, in Light of Impact of Atomic Weapons, 1935-1956," Committee Report, Fort Leavenworth, 5 November 1954, known as the "Easterbrook Report," in CGSC Library. 15Lavrinenkov, Bez voiny, pp. 141-42.

[l6l]

Innovation and the Arms Race

broad circles of military cadres to the new problem."16 Some Soviet writers have expressed harsher judgments: "Stalin's scornful state¬ ments about atomic weapons were the reason why our military thought was not directed in time to an objective and farseeing evolu¬ tion of the new instruments of warfare, to the discovery and analysis of new phenomena of armed conflict and of the revolution in military affairs which had developed."17 In any case, it is clear that Stalin's influence stifled creative thinking on the implications of the new weapons. Even at the General Staff Academy, nothing was taught to the cadres about nuclear weapons until the first curriculum on the subject re¬ quired a fundamental restructuring of the academy's program for the academic year 1953-54. Lavrinenkov found this out himself, as a mem¬ ber of that first class.18 At the Frunze Academy as well, the introduc¬ tion of courses on nuclear weapons coincided with major changes in the academy's organization, including the abolition of certain depart¬ ments and the creation of new ones.19 This short review suggests two things about the initial stage of Soviet interest in the tactical applications of nuclear weapons. The first is that curiosity among Soviet military officers about the implications of the new weapons appears to have been great, and a number of innovative notions may have come up in informal discussion. The second is equal¬ ly important. No formal discussion of the implications of nuclear weap¬ ons took place even at military academies, and no dissemination of information about the nature and effects of the first atomic bombs was allowed until after 1953. Structural differences between the USSR and the United States in the way politics and society are organized seem to account for the di¬ vergent approaches to the consideration of nuclear weapons. In the United States the extent of discussion of the implications of the new weapons—as represented, for example, in the curricula of military academies and in the popular and military press—roughly reflected the level of interest in the subject within the Army and elsewhere. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, central political and military authority imposed a censorship on discussion of nuclear weapons, broadly through control of the press and specifically through the determination 16V. Ivanov, "Development of Soviet Operational Art," Voennaia mysi, no. 3 (March 1967)111 (FBIS translation). 17S. Kozlov, "The Development of Soviet Military Science after World War II," Voennaia mysV, no. 2 (February 1964): 33. (FBIS translation FDD 934). 18Lavrinenkov, Bez voiny, pp. 141-42, 186—87; aiso Kulikov, Akademiia General'nogo Shtaba, chap. 5, esp. pp. 141-45. l9Voennaia Akademiia imeni M. V. Frunze, pp. 191-94.

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

of curricula at individual military academies. Potentially innovative military thinking from below confronted formal structural impedi¬ ments from above. For these reasons, one can assume that Soviet Gen¬ eral Staff officers did not devote any serious attention to the tactical implications of nuclear weapons before the first Soviet bomb was test¬ ed, in 1949.

Technical Antecedents The discussion of the U.S. case identified as an additional compo¬ nent of the first stage the technical antecedents that would provide the basis for future development of tactical nuclear weapons. These ante¬ cedents included the level of technology attained in the development of nuclear weapons and work on delivery vehicles—mainly missiles and aircraft—-that would later be combined with tactical warheads and bombs. The evidence available for the Soviet side supports the conclu¬ sion that little attention was devoted to tactical nuclear weapons before 1949. Concerning nuclear weapons themselves, the evidence suggests that the Soviet Union focused most of its attention from August 1945 on developing the atomic bomb as quickly as possible, and from there proceeded immediately to development of the hydrogen bomb, start¬ ing in the fall of 1949.20 The technical antecedents for what later became delivery vehicles for Soviet nuclear weapons in many ways parallel those in the U.S. case. The Soviets emphasized systems capable of delivering nuclear weap¬ ons to strategic targets along the periphery of the USSR (mainly Eu¬ rope) and, as soon as feasible, in the United States as well. The shorterrange systems developed during this time either were not intended to carry nuclear weapons or were built primarily as experimental versions of weapons intended eventually to possess longer ranges. Missiles constitute the most apparent example. Soviet interest in the military applications of rocketry date from the late 1920s. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii promoted the development of missile technol¬ ogy while serving as commander of the Leningrad Military District, from 1928 to 1931, and later as chief of armament of the Red Army. When Tukhachevskii was executed, during the military purge in 1937, Soviet rocket development suffered along with him. A number of Tukhachevskii's proteges were arrested, including Sergei Korolev, who would later become a major figure in the postwar missile pro20David Holloway, "Research Note: Soviet Thermonuclear Development," International Security 4 (Winter 1979-80): 192-97.

Innovation and the Arms Race

gram; and some were shot.21 Official Soviet interest in rocketry did not revive until after the war; it was stimulated mainly by German work on long-range ballistic and cruise missiles, the so-called V-rockets. Following the war, the Soviets recruited German missile scientists who had not escaped to the West to continue development of the V-rockets.22 The first Soviet rocket unit was formed on 15 July 1946 to make a "contribution to the mastery of the first examples of rocket weaponry."23 A joint British-American study claimed that although the unit was subordinated to the Soviet Army, some navy and air officers participated as well. The intelligence report named Marshal Voronov, chief of artillery, as "supervisor" and Major General of Artillery Tveretskii as commanding officer.24 Technical rocket specialists S. P. Korolev, V. P. Glushko, and others evidently also spent time in Ger¬ many familiarizing themselves with the state of German rocket technology.25 When Korolev returned to the USSR, he set up shop at a former aircraft factory near Moscow, where German scientists also had been brought to work. Korolev's group and the Germans evidently worked along parallel lines of development.26 In January 1947 Korolev pre¬ sented a proposal for developing a rocket with a range of 500 to 600 21David Holloway, "Military Technology," in The Technological Level of Soviet Industry, ed. Ronald Amann, Julian Cooper, and R. W. Davies (New Haven, Conn., 1977), pp. 448-51; David Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector: Battle Tanks and ICBMs," in Industrial Innovation in the Soviet Union, ed. Ronald Amann and Julian Cooper (New Haven, Conn., 1982), pp. 386-89; Condoleezza Rice, "The Revolution in Military Affairs and the Soviet System," in Science and Technology in the Soviet Union: Proceedings of a Conference, July 26-27, 1984 (Stanford, Calif., 1984), esp. pp. 132-40. ^CIA Report US/UK GM 4-52, "A Summary of Soviet Guided Missile Intelligence," 20 July 1953, on microfiche, borrowed from David Holloway. See also the account by Fre¬ derick I. Ordway III and Mitchell Sharpe, The Rocket Team (New York, 1979), esp. pp. 318-43, for discussion of Soviet use of the Germans. 23Gvardiia "Katiusha" [The "Katiusha" guards] (Leningrad, 1978), p. 306. 24CIA Report, "Summary of Soviet Guided Missile Intelligence," p. A13. The role of Marshal N. N. Voronov in the early missile program is also discussed by the Soviet author A. P. Romanov, in his Konstruktor kosmicheskikh korablei [Designer of space ships], 5th ed. (Moscow, 1981), pp. 74-79. 25Korolev and Iu. A. Pobedonostev are mentioned in a report by the CIA, Office of Scientific Intelligence, Scientific Intelligence Research Aid, "Scientific Research Institute and Experimental Factory 88 for Guided Missile Development, Moskva/Kaliningrad," OSI-C-RA/60-2, 4 March i960, p. 11, doc. no. 0244, in CIA Research Reports: The Soviet Union, 1946-1976, ed. Paul Kesaris (Frederick, Md., 1982). Romanov, Konstruktor kosmicheskikh korablei, pp. 75-76, lists Korolev, Glushko, N. A. Piliugin, and V. P. Barm¬ in. Other Soviet biographies are silent on Korolev's time in Germany. One study of Korolev discusses this period and even presents a chronology of his work, without mentioning his stay there. See P. B. Tsybin, "O zadachakh po izucheniiu nauchnogo naslediia S. P. Koroleva" [On tasks in the study of the scientific legacy of S. P. Korolev] (p. 89), and "Materialy k biograficheskoi khronike" [Materials toward a biographical chronicle] (pp. 225-26), both in Iz istorii sovetskoi kosmonavtiki [From the history of Soviet cosmonautics] (Moscow, 1983). 26CIA, "Scientific Research Institute and Experimental Factory 88," p. 11. [164]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

kilometers, but he was instructed to work instead on an analogous Soviet version of the 300-kilometer German A-4 (later called V-2) ballis¬ tic missile. The development of this weapon, dubbed "R-i" (for raketa, or rocket) was intended to help "industry and the army quickly to master all the peculiarities of creation and exploitation of large guided rockets."27 In March 1947 Korolev presented a report on the Soviet R-2, a followon missile intended to double the range of its predecessor, the R-i. On 25 April of that year Dmitrii Ustinov, at that time the minister of arma¬ ments, attended a meeting of the scientific-technical council of. Korolev's institute, at which the chief designer defended a draft pro¬ posal for the R-2. In October Korolev directed the first flight test of "experimental missiles" at Kapustin Iar apparently only German mis¬ siles, because the R-i and R-2 were not tested until 1948 and 1950, respectively.28 Mitrofan Nedelin, chief marshal of artillery, partici¬ pated in the October tests.29 By this time the Soviet rocket and space program had come under direction of a state commission, headed by Korolev.30 Although the missiles developed by Korolev's institute in 1947—the R-i and R-2—had ranges comparable to those of future tactical nuclear systems, they were apparently not envisioned as delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons. M. V. Keldysh, an expert on ballistics and missile guidance who worked closely with Korolev, implies as much when he writes of the quick development of "the first combat rockets—R-i, R-2, and others, including the first rocket carrying an atomic combat charge [i.e., warhead]."31 Apparently, then, the R-i and R-2 did not carry nuclear warheads. The nuclear-armed rocket Keldysh refers to proba¬ bly is the weapon known in the West as SS-3/ a longer-range system. It appears that none of the tactical aircraft developed up to 1949 (and much later as well) were capable of delivering the first-generation nu¬ clear weapons. The jet-fighter aircraft designed by the Iako\le\ and Mikoian-Gurevich bureaus were intended to serve primarily as inter¬ ceptors, not ground-attack fighter-bombers. They were armed with cannon of various calibers to shoot down other aircraft, and few w ere designed to carry any bombs at all, let alone nuclear ones.327"Materialy k biograficheskoi khronike," p. 226. 28Ibid., pp. 226-30. 29V. Tolubko, Nedelin: Pervyi glavkom strategicheskikh [Nedelin: Hrst commander-inchief of the strategic (rocket forces)] (Moscow, 1979), pp. 177“7830"Materialy k biograficheskoi khronike," p. 226. 3iM. V. Keldysh, "Vospominaniia o S.P. Koroleva" [Reminiscences of S. P. Korolev], Iz istorii sovetskoi kosmonavtiki, pp. 26-27. 32Aleksandr N. Ponomarev, Sovetskie aviatsiomiye konstruktory [Soviet aviation de¬ signers] (Moscow, 1977); V. B. Shavrov, lstoriia konstruksii samoletov v SSSR 1938-1950 gg. [History of the construction of airplanes in the USSR, 1938-1950] (Moscow, 197**)' Jean [165]

Innovation and the Arms Race

The Soviet light bomber produced during this period, often credited by Western analysts with the capability of carrying nuclear weapons, probably was not designed to do so. In 1948 the prototype of this plane, the Iliushin-28, won out over the Tupolev-14 in flight-test tri¬ als.33 According to Iliushin, at a meeting in the Kremlin, Stalin person¬ ally approved production of the aircraft—the first Soviet jet bomber (bombardirovshchik). His main concern was that it be put into series production immediately. Iliushin promised to have twenty-five aircraft ready by the May Day parade in 1950.34 By that time the Soviets had tested only their first atomic bomb and would not have engineered a weapon light enough for the II-28 to deliver. The plane's maximum payload is generally put at 3,000 kilo¬ grams, but its "normal" payload—the weight it could carry and still maintain its intended range and other flight characteristics—was 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds).35 With such a payload the II-28 would not be able to carry at normal ranges the first U.S. tactical bomb—the Mark V—which weighed 3,000 pounds, let alone the first-generation weap¬ ons of the Nagasaki type (10,000 pounds).36 U.S. intelligence analysts wrote of "the probable development of a nuclear weapon compatible with jet light bombers" in the USSR only in 1956; at the time, this was only a supposition, not later confirmed.37 Two years later, however, a Soviet military analyst wrote that the typical weight of a bomb intend¬ ed for use against small targets was 1.6 tons—still too heavy for the II-28.38 Finally, the fact that over a thousand II-28S were produced,39

Alexander, Russian Aircraft since 1940 (London, 1975); Alexander, Boyd, The Soviet Air Force since 1918 (New York, 1977); Matthew Evangelista, "The Evolution of the Soviet Tactical Air Forces," Soviet Armed Forces Review Annual 7 (1982-83): 451-79. ^Ponomarev, Sovetskie aviatsionnye konstruktory, p. 37. ^P. T. Astashenkov, Konstruktor legendarnykh Ilov [Designer of the legendary "Ils"] (Moscow, 1972), pp. 80-83. For an account of the tests, see P. T. Astashenkov and N. Denisov, Komandarm krylatykh [Commander of the winged (craft)] (Moscow, 1983), pp. 104-5. 35Shavrov, Istoriia konstruksii samoletov, p. 369. The point is also made by A. S. Iakovlev, TseT zhizni (Zapiski aviakonstruktora) [The goal of a lifetime (notes of an aircraft designer)], 2d ed. (Moscow, 1968), pp. 465-66. ^Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, and Milton M. Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook, vol. 1, U. S. Nuclear Forces and Capabilities (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 9. 37"Implications of Soviet Armaments Programs and Increasing Military Capabilities," report of the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, JIC 436/2, 16 January 1956, p. 8, Records of the JCS, MMB NA; and personal communication, Ray¬ mond Garthoff. ^A. Petrov, "Upravliaemye snariady s atomnymi zariadami v aviatsii i PVO" [Guided projectiles with atomic charges in aviation and PVO (air defense)], in Atomnaia energiia v aviatsii i raketnoi tekhnike [Atomic energy in aviation and rocket technology], ed. P. As¬ tashenkov (Moscow, 1959), p. 89. 39Astashenkov, Konstruktor legendarnykh Ilov, p. 84, claims that "several thousands" were produced. [166]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

starting at a time when Soviet nuclear weapons probably numbered at most in the dozens, suggests that they were intended for mass attacks with conventional bombs. One also draws such a conclusion from retrospective reviews of developments in Soviet air operations. A number of authors point out that only during the late 1950s, many years after initial deployment of the II-28, did it first become possible to send aircraft on bombing raids singly or in pairs—owing in part to the availability of nuclear weapons: "Frontal and long-range aviation was converted from operations by large groups to operations by small groups and even single aircraft. This became expedient as a result of the increased effectiveness of aerial means of destruction (especially nuclear bombs), the increase in the speeds of aircraft, and the intensification of countermeasures by air-defense means."40 By comparison with the chronology of the U.S. case, there appears to have been little institutional interest on the part of Soviet political, military, or scientific leadership for tactical nuclear weapons or their delivery vehicles during this first stage.

Stage 2: Preparatory Measures (1950-1952)

Several sources of information, including Soviet and emigre memoir accounts and declassified U.S. intelligence estimates, help us to gauge the level of soviet interest in tactical nuclear weapons during the sec¬ ond stage. Furthermore, by estimating lead times for tactical systems that began to appear in the late 1950s, one can get an idea of when the original orders were issued. The comparable U.S. stage saw nuclear physicists and weapons designers promoting the development of tactical systems and attempt¬ ing to recruit allies in order to attract political support for their cause. Many of the initiatives of the scientists and their military supporters were carried out independently, without specific approval or oversight from higher authority. Despite the fact that official priority was given to a crash program for the development and production of ther¬ monuclear weapons, the major atomic expansion programs of this period allowed for (and were often justified on the basis of) substantial progress in nuclear weapons for battlefield use—the H-bomb s leading competitor. In the Soviet case, the clear priority granted to strategic weapons, in combination with other characteristics of the Soviet sys¬ tem (such as compartmentalization and secrecy in the R&D programs), did not allow for comparable progress. 40R. Vershinin, "The Development of the Operational Art of the Soviet Air Force," Voennaia mysl', no. 6 (June 1967): 11 (FBIS translation FPD 0112/68). [167]

Innovation and the Arms Race

The Nuclear Scientists We have no evidence that two schools of thought—proponents of strategic bombing and advocates of battlefield nuclear warfare—com¬ peted in the Soviet Union as they did in the United States. There appears to have been no equivalent to the initiative put forward by Oppenheimer and others to develop tactical nuclear weapons as an alternative to strategic bombing with high-yield thermonuclear weap¬ ons. The moral imperative that led Oppenheimer to seek a way to avoid mass destruction of civilians in the event of war evidently did not operate at this early stage among the majority of Soviet atomic scientists. During the first years of the Soviet nuclear program, including the work on the H-bomb, most Soviet scientists were apparently not con¬ cerned about the long-term consequences of their work, about the danger of an arms race or the threat of nuclear war—except to the extent that they saw their work as a means of deterring the United States from starting one. As Sergei Polikanov, a physicist who worked in the Soviet nuclear program in the early 1950s and later emigrated to West Germany, put it, "most of the people working on this problem did not suffer from these complexes which now exist. They just con¬ sidered that this was quite normal work to do." The idea, he explained, was to do the "maximum" for the country's defense, and it was as¬ sumed that the Americans were doing the maximum as well.41 In an interview with Pravda, Iulii Khariton, a nuclear physicist who played a prominent role in the Soviet atomic bomb program, also ar¬ gued that the scientists had no misgivings about their work. His re¬ marks, which focused on the first Soviet atomic bomb, apply to the H-bomb as well. Khariton mentioned reminiscences by U.S. physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project and what he characterized as their expressions of fear at the first atomic test at Alamagordo. For the Soviet physicists, on the other hand, Khariton claimed, "it wasn't a question of fear. Don't forget, we had a supreme task: in the shortest period of time to create weaponry that could defend our country! When the problem was successfully resolved, we felt relief, even hap¬ piness—indeed, possessing such weaponry, we were removing the possibility of having it used against the USSR with impunity."42 Kurchatov's biographer puts forward an additional reason for the Soviet scientists' unquestioning pursuit of thermonuclear weapons. It is a political rather than a military-deterrent rationale—one that is con¬ sistent with official Soviet commentary: "Kurchatov and all our nuclear ““Interview with Sergei Polikanov, Darmstadt, West Germany, 27 July 1984. 42V. Gubarev, "Fizika—eto moia zhizn'" (Physics is my life), interview with Iu. Khariton in Pravda, 20 February 1984. [168]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

scientists had no doubt that if the Americans alone mastered the secret of the hydrogen bomb, they would also use it—for political black¬ mail."43 Another important motivation for Soviet scientists, which is apparent in Soviet as well as emigre publications, was a sense of com¬ petition with their U.S. counterparts—not simply competition in the sense of an arms race but competition in manifesting technical prowess.44 Whatever their reasons for supporting the decision to develop the H-bomb, Soviet scientists seem not to have experienced the concerns of their American counterparts. Unlike Oppenheimer, Whitman, and the other American physicists, they apparently had no moral motiva¬ tion to offer tactical nuclear weapons as a substitute for strategic bomb¬ ing. Some Soviet scientists did apparently become concerned about the consequences of their work, but only following the test explosions of their first thermonuclear weapons. Faced with the reality of the H-bomb's destructive force and the evidence of additional dangerous effects, such as radioactive fallout, certain scientists began to express growing concern. Andrei Sakharov, the "father of the Soviet H-bomb," is the most prominent example, but even Igor Kurchatov, the physicist who directed the Soviet nuclear weapons program from 1943 until his death in i960, was evidently not immune to such concerns.45 Once certain Soviet scientists did recognize a need to do something about the forces they had unleashed, they apparently did not follow the U.S. example. Rather than promote the use of nuclear weapons against military targets in the field as an alternative to strategic bombing, they began to argue in support of a test ban and certain measures of disarmament. At a comparable stage in their nuclear-weapons program, Soviet scientists appear not to have campaigned for battlefield applications of the weapons, either out of moral compulsion or for reasons of technical "sweetness." Furthermore, it appears that the Soviets did not carry out a major program to develop tactical nuclear weapons simultaneously with their hydrogen-bomb program, as did the Americans.

The Nuclear Test Program The Soviet nuclear testing program constitutes one important source of evidence. There is general agreement that up to the summer of 1933 43P. T. Astashenkov, Podvig Akademika Kurchatova [The accomplishment of Academi¬ cian Kurchatov], Tvortsy nauki i tekhniki [Creators of science and technology] (Moscow, 1979), p. 104. ^Ibid., p. 129; Sergei Polikanov, Razryv: Zapiski atomnogo fizika [Explosion: Notes of an atomic physicist] (Frankfurt/Main, 1983), p. 115. 45Andrei Sakharov, Sakharov Speaks (New York, 1974), pp. 30-34. [169]

Innovation and the Arms Race

the Soviets had tested only three atomic weapons. Their first test oc¬ curred on 29 August 1949.46 The next test took place in late September 1951 and was announced in the United States in October. Stalin con¬ firmed this test himself and added that "tests of atomic bombs of differ¬ ent calibers will be conducted in the future as well."47 Only one more test followed, in mid-October, then nothing further until August

1953*48 The CIA estimated the size of the Soviet atomic stockpile in 1951 at twenty-five to forty-five weapons.49 These estimates may be on the high side. At a comparable stage in the U.S. program—that is, two years after the first test—only about a dozen weapons were assem¬ bled.50 In any case, the Soviet weapons available before 1953 and prob¬ ably later would logically include only versions of the weapons already tested. These weapons were not compact or light enough for tactical delivery. As one authoritative Soviet source put it, "the first models of nuclear munitions (atomic and hydrogen bombs) had a substantial weight and large dimensions. Only powerful aircraft could deliver them to the target."51 The same statement could not be made about the comparable stage in the U.S. program. By the time thermonuclear weapons were under development, work on lightweight, small-yield fission weapons had resulted in several models suitable for delivery by tactical aircraft and even artillery. In this respect the nuclear compo¬ nent of the technical antecedents in the Soviet case differs from the American. The crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb evidently took precedence for the top Soviet nuclear physicists during the period ^For information concerning the detection system by which the United States learned of Soviet nuclear tests, see the materials in box 199, "Atomic Bomb—Long-range detec¬ tion," Papers of Harry S. Truman, PSF, in HSTL. 47Quoted without reference in Arnold Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif., 1959), p. 124. Stalin's comments were in fact published in Pravda on 6 October 1951 and are quoted in AEC, "Soviet Atomic Tests," in DDEL. ^CIA Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, Scientific Intelligence Report SI 118-51, "Status of the Soviet Atomic Energy Program," 6 March 1952, p. 7, in Kesaris,

CIA Research Reports. 49CIA, ORE 91-49, "Estimate of the Effects of the Soviet Possession of the Atomic Bomb upon the Security of the United States and upon the Probabilities of Direct Soviet Military Action," 6 April 1950, p. 11, PSF, Intelligence File, box 254, in HSTL. The CIA later estimated a stockpile of fifty bombs in mid-1952, although it admitted that the actual number could be from half to twice as many. CIA National Intelligence Estimate, appen¬ dices to NIE 64 (pt. 1), "Soviet Bloc Capabilities through Mid-1953," 12 November 1952, p. 4, PSF, Intelligence File, folder "National Intelligence Estimates, 64-66," in HSTL. For a discussion of the competing estimates, see John Prados, The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelli¬ gence Analysis and Russian Military Strength (New York, 1982), pp. 20-23. ^Cochran, et al., Nuclear Weapons Databook, 1:15; David Alan Rosenberg, "U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, 1945-1950," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 38 (May 1982): 25-30. 51M. V. Zakharov, ed., 50 let Vooruzhennykh Sil SSSR [Fifty years of the Armed Forces of the USSR] (Moscow, 1968), p. 504. [170]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

1950-1952. Undoubtedly other physicists and engineers worked on refining the early fission weapons in order to decrease their size and weight as well as to make them more efficient. In addition, evidence from the 1953 test series suggests that Soviet nuclear-weapons designers also worked on incorporating thermonuclear "boosting" principles to enhance the efficiency of the fission explosion. These developments would allow for more efficient small-yield explosions, but they would not necessarily mean decreases in size and weight sufficient for tactical delivery.

Delivery Vehicles In order to get a better idea of whether the Soviets had tactical applications in mind for the nuclear weapons they designed during 1950-1952, it is useful to consider what kind of delivery systems they were designing simultaneously. Preparations had already been under way to produce aircraft to deliver nuclear weapons. These weapons were intended for strategic missions, however, mainly in the European theater and later for attack against the continental United States. Pri¬ mary targets in both cases would have been SAC bomber bases.52 In the late 1940s some Soviet Tupolev-4 aircraft (copies of the U.S. B-29) were probably adapted to carry nuclear weapons, at a time when the stockpile of bombs was very low. By the late 1940s the Soviets began developing planes specifically intended for a nuclear role. These planes apparently did not include nuclear-capable light jet bombers, however. Sometime in 1949 or 1950 Sergei Iliushin, designer of the II-28, began work on a new jet bomber, the II-30. This aircraft was to have a more powerful engine and longer range but the same payload as the II-28. It was probably not, therefore, intended to serve as a nuclear bomber. In any case, Stalin would not allow Iliushin to continue work on the II-30. He insisted that the design bureau work on improving the II-28 engine instead. The order dictated: "No distractions. Orient yourself only to the I1-28/'53 In 1951 the Iliushin bureau prepared a prototype aircraft called II-46, essentially a "grown-up" version of the II-28, with larger size and payload, longer range, and greater speed.54 This plane was intended to replace the Tu-4 in the forces of long-range aviation (which include 52Robert P. Berman and John C. Baker, Soviet Strategic Forces: Requirements ami Responses (Washington, D.C., 1982), pp. 1-4, 27-29; Stephen M. Meyer, Soviet Theatre Nuclear Forces, pt. 1: Development of Doctrine and Objectives, Adelphi Paper no. 187 (London, Winter 1983-84), pp. 7-13; and pt. 2: Capabilities and Implications, Adelphi Paper no. 188 (Winter 1983-84), pp. 4-6. 53Astashenkov, Konstruktor legendarnykh llov, pp. 84-85. ^Ibid., pp. 85-86.

Innovation and the Arms Race

aircraft that would be classified as medium-range in the United States).55 It seems safe to assume, then, that it was designed to serve primarily as a nuclear-weapons carrier. The II-46 however, was re¬ jected for series production in favor of the Tupolev-16.56 The Tu-16 was a medium-range bomber intended primarily for nuclear and con¬ ventional attacks against strategic targets, particularly in Europe, and probably against U.S. aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean.57 Thus none of the Soviet aircraft designed during this period to deliver nu¬ clear weapons was intended for tactical support of ground troops. The Soviet missile program during the period 1950-1952 seems also to have been devoted primarily to developing weapons for strategic uses. One missile developed during this time, designated SS-3 by Western intelligence agencies, first appeared in public on 11 November 1957, during a parade through Red Square celebrating the fortieth an¬ niversary of the Bolshevik revolution. The missile designer Sergei Korolev attended the parade, at which, Soviet sources indicate, exam¬ ples of both his strategic and his operational-tactical missiles were ex¬ hibited.58 A number of sources claim that the SS-3, although first dis¬ played publicly in 1957, actually entered service in 1955.59 If it did, it must have been developed during the period under consideration, 1950-1952. Some Western sources describe the SS-3 as a tactical or operationaltactical nuclear system "assigned to support Ground Force opera¬ tions."60 It seems more likely to be one of the systems displayed in 1957 which the Soviets consider "strategic." Its range was not dictated by a requirement for tactical nuclear support of ground troops; rather, it represented a necessary intermediate stage of development from the V-rockets to longer-range strategic missiles.61 Nikita Khrushchev, in the transcript of his tape-recorded reminiscences, seems to make this point himself. He mentions that the Soviets were working on rockets capable of reaching the United States but in the mid-1950s had suc¬ ceeded in developing systems of ranges sufficient to attack only Brit¬ ain, France, and West Germany: "We were able, by means of the rocket R-5, as it was then called, almost to reach these territories."62 The R-5 seems pretty clearly to be what is known in the West as SS-3. ^ was the 55Ponomarev, Sovetskie aviatsionnye konstruktory, p. 102. ^Ibid.; Astashenkov, Konstruktor legendarnykh llov, pp. 85-86. 57Berman and Baker, Soviet Strategic Forces, p. 45. 58"Materialy k biograficheskoi khronike," p. 239. 59Ray Bonds, ed., Russian Military Power (New York, 1980), p. 200; Barton Wright,

Soviet Missiles (Lexington, Mass., 1986). ^Berman and Baker, Soviet Strategic Forces, p. 41. 61Berman and Baker make this argument as well; ibid., p. 97. 62Khrushchev transcript, Harriman Institute, Columbia University, p. 951. [172]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

only Soviet missile system deployed before 1959 that could threaten Western Europe, and the Soviet leadership certainly considered it nec¬ essary to threaten the United States as well. A look at the history of the R-5 provides further evidence that the weapon was considered an interim development on the way to build¬ ing a long-range strategic rocket. It was intended to contribute to the fulfillment of Stalin's directive of April 1947 to develop a long-range missile capable of attacking the United States. One Soviet source de¬ scribes this endeavor as "task number one," along with the develop-, ment of atomic weapons.63 By 1948 some thirteen scientific institutes and thirty-five major factories were involved in developing such mis¬ siles, with Korolev in overall direction.64 The immediate predecessors to the R-5 were the R-3 and R-3A. The original proposal for the R-3, which was worked out in March 1948, specified a range of 3,000 kilometers. According to Soviet definitions, this weapon would be considered "strategic" because it possessed a range greater than 1,000 kilometers.65 In 1951 another version of the weapon, designated R-3A, with a smaller warhead, increased the range by 50 percent.66 Korolev began work on the R-5 in 1952 on the basis of his previous experience with the R-3 A. His biographical chronicle mentions that in 1954 Korolev directed "the development of the project of the first com¬ bat strategic BRDD [ballisticheskaia raketa dal'nego deistviia, or long-range ballistic rocket] . . . , learning from the results of the flight tests of the experimental strategic rocket R-5." In February 1955 he is described as directing "the concluding launch of the third stage of flight tests of the rocket R-5."67 A version of this system is presumably what was dis¬ played in Red Square in 1957. Evidently designers other than Korolev also worked on tactical rock¬ etry during this second stage, and their efforts should have provided some technological foundation for later developments. Details here are unfortunately scarce. One CIA report from i960 mentions accounts provided by German emigres of someone called Keney, who was iden¬ tified as "research chief and chief designer in small missile develop¬ ment circa 1950." He was thought to have been associated with an 63/z istorii aviatsii i kosmonavtiki [From the history of aviation and cosmonautics], issue 35 (Moscow, 1978), p. 65. ^Ibid., pp. 63-66; also Romanov, Konstruktor kosmicheskikh korablei, p. 77. 65At ranges of less than 1,000 kilometers weapons are considered "operational-tactical or "tactical," and at ranges of more than 5,500 kilometers strategic missiles are con¬ sidered "intercontinental." See Voennyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar [Military encyclopedic dictionary] (Moscow, 1983), p. 620. ^"Materialy k biograficheskoi khronike," p. 231. 67Ibid., pp. 232-34.

[173]

Innovation and the Arms Race

artillery institute.68 The same report reinforces the impression that the Soviet government assigned relatively low priority to tactical systems at this stage.

The Prospect of Nuclear Combat In addition to low-level preparatory measures in the technical sphere, this second stage saw the first official concern about the im¬ plications of nuclear weapons for combat. Here, too, priority remained low and major efforts were not undertaken until what is considered here the third stage. In 1951 the Soviet General Staff ordered General Ivan E. Petrov, commander of the Turkestan military district, to "prepare a plan of a large exercise in which questions connected with the use of nuclear weapons would be worked out." The intention of the exercise was to conduct troop maneuvers under conditions resembling nuclear attack; information on nuclear weapons was so tightly held and so scarce— indeed, by this time the Soviets had tested only one atomic bomb— that Petrov was unable to carry out his assignment. He appealed to the chief of the General Staff "to help in developing the plan and to send him those who knew the details of the new weaponry and could sug¬ gest in which direction the planning of the exercises should be carried out."69 The General Staff sent six officers to Turkestan, led by General A. A. Gryzlov. They spent a week at the district headquarters drawing up a plan that was later approved by both the General Staff and the Ministry of Defense. Then they directed the local forces in military maneuvers intended to evaluate their plan. The exercise did not apparently in¬ clude any physical simulation of atomic effects, but it did, according to one participant, provide some basis for future thinking about nuclear combat.70 More extensive exercises, including one involving the actual detonation of a nuclear device, were not carried out until after evidence of comparable U.S. developments appeared.

Stage 3: High-Level Response (1953-1957) Currently available evidence suggests that the first real Soviet inter¬ est in developing a capability for tactical uses of nuclear weapons ap68CIA, "Scientific Research Institute and Experimental Factory 88," p. 28. 69Vladimir Karpov, Polkovodets [Commander] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1985)/ P522. 70Ibid., pp. 523-24. Karpov was one of the six General Staff officers who participated. [174]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

peared in 1953. In order to account for Soviet developments during the stage that begins in that year, one must look first to external factors. It seems clear that two related U.S. initiatives galvanized the Soviet polit¬ ical and military leadership to confront the issue of tactical nuclear warfare. The first was the beginning of widescale deployment of U.S. tactical nuclear systems in Europe during 1953.71 The second was the U.S. decision taken in the fall of that year that "in the event of hos¬ tilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as avail¬ able for use as other munitions."72 The decision, presented to NATO allies in a restricted session of the North Atlantic Council in Paris in mid-December 1933, received broader public attention when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations announcing the new policy of "massive retaliation."73 Impetus to Change Most analysts of Soviet military policy have identified 1933-54 as a major turning point.74 They have rightly claimed that the death of Stalin, in March 1953, loosened the constraints on discussions of the implications of nuclear weapons and set in motion the process of re¬ evaluating Soviet military policy. It can be argued, however, that the deployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe constituted an important impetus to change in Soviet policy during this period. In response to the U.S. initiative, even Stalin—had he lived—might have revised his views.75 ^Some systems had already been secretly deployed in Britain and with naval forces in the Mediterranean in the spring of 1952, but public attention was not drawn to these developments until the following year. See the discussion in chap. 4. 72The statement was approved as national policy on 30 October 1953. JCS 2101/113, 9 December 1953, with decision, 10 December 1933, CCS 381 U.S. (1-31-50), sec. 31, JCS, quoted in David Alan Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and Amer¬ ican Strategy, 1945-1960," International Security, 7 (Spring 1983): 31. 73See the notes prepared by Livingston Merchant, Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, 16 December 1953, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, vol. 5: Western European Security, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1984), pp. 476-79. 74See, for example, Garthoff, Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age, pp. 63-69; Herbert S. Dinerstein, War and the Soviet Union, rev. ed. (New York, 1962), chap. 2; David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven, Conn., 1982), pp. 35-36; Michael MccGwire, "The Turning Points in Soviet Naval Policy," in Soviet Naval Developments: Capability and Context, ed. MccGwire (New York, 1973), esp. p. 202; MccGwire, Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C., 1987); Meyer, Soviet Theatre Nuclear

Forces pt. 1, pp. 12-13. 75Notra Trulock III, in his "Weapons of Mass Destruction in Soviet Military Strategy," makes a persuasive case that the U.S. deployments perforce required a rethinking of Soviet conceptions of ground warfare. He makes the argument on pp. 17-26 and 29-30 of his unpublished paper, apparently completed during the fall of 1984 for the U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency under the auspices of Science Applications, Inc., of Denver. A similar point is made about the effect of the U.S. deployments in Evangelista, Evolution of Soviet Tactical Air Forces," pp. 469-70.

[175]

Innovation and the Arms Race

The Soviet response to the U.S. initiative involved short-term coun¬ termeasures to deal with the threat posed by U.S. tactical nuclear sys¬ tems and provided for developing a capability in the longer term to imitate the U.S. programs. The evidence that points to the short term response includes a major restructuring of the Soviet air forces, the first training of troops for combat under conditions of the use of nuclear weapons, and the introduction of a new curriculum at the General Staff Academy on the implications of nuclear weapons. Evidence for longerterm changes initiated during this period comes from a variety of sources: memoir accounts, the nuclear-weapons test program, and a retrospective analysis of the delivery vehicles that appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s, for which orders were evidently issued in

1953-54The Professors of Atomic Affairs During the first few years following 1953 the Soviets carried out plans to enable them to produce tactical nuclear weapons and their delivery systems if they decided at a later date to give priority to bat¬ tlefield nuclear capabilities. At the same time the Soviets quickly initi¬ ated a short-term response—the preparation of their troops for combat under conditions of the use of nuclear weapons. As one Soviet account put it, "questions of the defense of troops from means of mass destruc¬ tion as well as the bases for conducting operations in combat actions under conditions of its use were worked out before the adoption of nuclear weapons for armament."76 Before the troops could be prepared, it was necessary to create in¬ structors for them. As a result of the Stalinist censorship on nuclear matters, knowledge of atomic weapons was limited to high-level scien¬ tific and military personnel. The first evidence of a change in Soviet policy is found in decisions taken to increase the information available about nuclear weapons and to initiate at all levels discussion of the implications of their use. This change was particularly noticeable in the case of the Soviet air forces. In 1951 the General Staff had adopted a five-year plan for the development of Soviet air power. During the next two years, members of the General Staff Academy worked on the problem of employing tactical aviation in offensive and defensive oper¬ ations under conditions of "high activity of the opponent's aviation. At the end of 1953 "correctives" were introduced, based on an order handed down from the Ministry of Defense. The order was 'to study nuclear weapons and operations under conditions of their use. 77 76V. Ivanov, "Development of Soviet Operational Art," Voennaia mysV, no. 3 (March 1967): 11 (FBIS translation). ^Kulikov, Akademiia General'nogo Shtaba, pp. 129-30. [176]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons During 1953-54 the curriculum of the General Staff Academy was restructured to encompass discussion of the impact of nuclear weap¬ ons on military affairs. Again, to use the case of the air forces, the decision to take account of nuclear weapons meant "it was necessary to study practically anew the planning of frontal defensive and offensive operations, to resolve all operational-tactical tasks, taking into con¬ sideration the opponent's possession of means of atomic attack." Par¬ ticular attention was drawn to the ability of nuclear weapons to destroy entire military units, air bases, and artillery positions.78 The emphasis was clearly on studying the implications of enemy employment of nuclear weapons on the battlefield—in other words, tactical rather than strategic use. The Soviets had addressed the threat of strategic nuclear attack in the late 1940s by implementing a system of national air defenses and developing their own atomic weapons.79 Stalin apparently believed he could accomplish these tasks without disseminating information about nuclear weapons to the troops. Dealing with the tactical implications of the bomb was another story, at least as far as Stalin's successors were concerned. They used the General Staff Academy to create a cadre of instructors to train Soviet forces for combat on the nuclear battlefield. One student who attended the Academy during the first year of the new curriculum remembered: A colossal weight lay on the shoulders of [the] teachers. It was demanded of them to remake, to restructure all the programs, while we were firmly to master a great deal of new knowledge, so that, after graduating, we ourselves would train troops in activities under conditions of the use of means of mass destruction. . . . The troops needed "professors of atomic affairs," and we, the students of the General Staff Academy, were obliged to become them.80

The decision to move beyond the limited investigation of the effect of nuclear weapons on combat (as evinced, for example, by the 1951 exercise in Turkestan) to widescale training and dissemination of infor¬ mation appears to stem from an external impetus—the example of the United States. As one Soviet source puts it, "it became known that beyond the ocean large exercises were being conducted, with the prac¬ tical use of nuclear weapons and real action of troops in these condi¬ tions. Naturally, the need to carry out such exercises in our army 78Lavrinenkov, Bez voiny, p. 188. 79Evangelista, "Evolution of Soviet Tactical Air Forces"; David Holloway, "Entering the Nuclear Arms Race: The Soviet Decision to Build the Atomic Bomb, 1939-45/ Social Studies of Science 11 (1981): 159-97. 80Lavrinenkov, Bez voiny, pp. 187-88.

Innovation and the Arms Race

became imminent, in order to come to more concrete conclusions." Marshal Georgii Zhukov, who became deputy minister of defense after Stalin's death, was put in charge of the atomic exercises.81 The first exposure of Soviet troops to military activity in a "nuclear environment" took place in September 1953 in the Carpathian military district. Although no actual nuclear weapons were used. Academicians Kurchatov and Korolev both participated as consultants in the plan¬ ning of a simulated nuclear blast. The exercises were observed by highlevel members of the Ministry of Defense, the General Staff, and the military academies. The exercises conducted in the Carpathian district, as well as those held in other military districts during the following year, focused primarily on defense against an opponent's use of nu¬ clear weapons.82

It is not surprising that Soviet exercises did not immediately focus on offensive nuclear operations. Soviet troops themselves were not pro¬ vided with any atomic weapons until sometime in 1954.83 The title of a report presented to the military council of the Belorussian military district in January of that year is typical: "Fundamental Characteristics of the Conduct of Military Activities under Conditions of Use by an Opponent of Atomic Weaponry."84 During the fall of 1954, Soviet air units also received their first training in "defense against weapons of mass destruction." They tried to deal with such issues as: "How to maintain the endurance of aerodromes and equipment during an atomic strike? How to fly out from an air field contaminated with radioactive particles? How to guarantee safety in going through radi¬ oactive clouds? How to organize the deactivation of planes and the sanitary processing of personnel?"85 For the purposes of troop exercises, information on nuclear effects came from two main sources. The first was introductory material on 81Karpov, Polkovodets, p 524.

82Krasnoznamennyi Prikarpatskii: Istoriia Krasnoznamennogo Prikarpatskogo voennogo okruga [Red-banner Carpathian: History of the Red-banner Carpathian military district], 2d ed. (Moscow, 1982), pp. 118—19, 126. For a discussion of these exercises and their effect on the evolution of Soviet armored forces, see Benjamin Miller, "The Development of Soviet Armor" (diss. in progress, Cornell University). 83Sovetskie Vooruzhennye Sily: Istoriia stroiteistva [Soviet Armed Forces: History of (their) structuring] (Moscow, 1978), pp. 415-16; K. Vershinin, "The Development of the Opera¬ tional Art of the Soviet Air Force," Voennaia mysl', no. 6 (June 1967): 11 (FBIS translation FPD 0112/68); P. Kutakhov, "Air Forces in the Past and Present," Voennaia mysl', no. 10 (October 1973): 31 (FBIS translation FPD 0063). 84Krazsnoznamennyi Belorusskii voennyi okrug [Red-banner Belorussian military district] (Moscow, 1983), p. 292; emphasis added. For similar accounts of attention to defense against the effects of an opponent's nuclear weapons, see Istoriia Ural'skogo voennogo okruga [History of the Ural military district] (Moscow, 1970), pp. 277-78; and I. Pavlovskii, "The Ground Troops of the Soviet Armed Forces," Voennaia mysl, no. 11 (November 1967): 33 (FBIS translation FPD 0157/68). 85Lavrinenkov, Be2 voiny, pp. 188-89. [178]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

the physics of nuclear weapons and some consideration of nuclear effects, such as blast and radiation. Much of this material consisted of summaries and often direct translations of U.S. work. The first pub¬ lished discussions of the military use of nuclear energy in the postStalin period appeared in the military newspaper Red Star in January 1954. A number of these early articles were collected and distributed as small books or pamphlets.86 A more restricted audience of high-level officers had access to detailed reviews of U.S. thinking on the implica¬ tions of tactical nuclear weapons.87

"Skillful Troops Aren't Scared of Nukes" The first actual test of a nuclear weapon in the presence of troops took place in September 1954.88 A contemporary Soviet account, in¬ tended for a restricted military audience, described the purpose of the exercise: As follows from the report of [the Soviet news agency! TASS from 17 September 1954, in the Soviet Union a test of one of the types of atomic weaponry was carried out in accordance with the plan of scientific re¬ search work. The goal of the test was the study of the effects of an atomic explosion. Valuable results were received from the test, which will help Soviet scientists and engineers successfully resolve the task of defense from atomic attack.89 86See, for example, Atomnaia energiia: Sbornik statei [Atomic energy: A collection of articles] (Moscow, 1954); Problemy ispoVzovaniia atomnoi energii: sbornik statei [Problems of the use of atomic energy: A collection of articles] (Moscow, 1955). 87For example, N. Tsygichko, "Nekotorye voprosy taktiki amerikanskikh voisk v usloviiakh primeneniia atomnogo oruzhiia" [Some questions of the tactics of American troops in conditions of the use of atomic weaponry], Voennaia mysl, no. 4 (April 1955)80-89; "Deistvie atomnogo oruzhiia," Voennaia mysl', no. 3 (March 1934): 69-78, selected translation from the U.S. government publication The Effects of Atomic Weapons (Wash¬ ington, D.C., 1950), which includes discussion of protecting personnel from nuclear effects.

.

^Voennyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar', p. 859; Kievskii krasnoznamennyi: lstorna krasnoznamennogo Kievskogo voennogo okruga, lgig-igyz [Kiev Red-banner: History of the Redbanner Kiev military district, 1919-1972] (Moscow, 1974), p- 327- An editorial published as the exercise was in progress stressed the need to train the troops under the conditions a potential opponent's means of attack would impose. See "Trebovaniia sovremennoi voiny—na polia osennikh uchenii" [The demands of contemporary war on the field of the autumn exercises], Voennaia mysl', no. 9 (September 1954): 1-14- This test was men¬ tioned briefly in app. E of a U.S. intelligence report prepared by the Office of Scientific Intelligence of the CIA. See the Ad Hoc Panel on Nuclear Test Limitations, "Impact of a September 1958 Nuclear Test Moratorium on Soviet Nuclear Weapons Capabilities," 18 March 1958, p. 7, Office of the Staff Secretary, NSC ser., Subject subser., box 6, folder "Nuclear Testing (8)," in DDEL. 89Editorial "Tridtsat' sed'maia godovshchina Velikogo Oktiabria" [Thirty-seventh anni¬ versary of the Great October (revolution)], Voennaia mysl’, no. 11 (November i954); 5This TASS announcement is for some reason not listed in the AEC report, "Soviet Atomic

Innovation and the Arms Race The information stemming from these exercises was not immediately made available. In one typical case of a defensive exercise against a simulated atomic attack, in November 1954, only the unit commander had completed a course on nuclear weapons. The troops participating in the exercise knew nothing about them.90 Although the editors of Military Thought exhorted Soviet officers not "to think that one can engage in scientific-theoretical activity only with¬ in the walls of the academy," it was difficult to apply academic knowl¬ edge of nuclear weapons in the field.91 This situation led one Soviet study to admit that tactical exercises during this period "had several defects." For example, "with the appearance of nuclear weapons at some exercises, indiscriminate advances of troops at high rates of speed were allowed, sometimes even without deployment in a military formation." In assessing the results of the exercises, the commentator found that "the consequences of the use of nuclear weaponry were not adequately taken into account." Furthermore, many of the early ex¬ ercises had a preplanned character that rendered them rather unrealis¬ tic.92 These criticisms are virtually identical to those made of compar¬ able U.S. exercises. Soviet troops evidently compensated for ignorance and lack of real¬ ism in their atomic exercises by bravado. The slogan "skillful troops aren't scared of nukes" was adopted by one air unit that engaged in defensive exercises against simulated atomic attacks.93 The newspaper of the Moscow military district, reporting on the training of troops to fight under nuclear conditions, likewise claimed that "atomic weapon¬ ry is not frightening to the brave and skillful soldier."94 While Soviet troops prepared, however inadequately, to counter atomic weapons on the battlefield, Soviet scientists turned to the prob¬ lem of developing corresponding tactical nuclear weapons.

Tests," although a somewhat different announcement is listed for 17 September 1953, the previous year. Either the Americans missed the 1954 announcement or the Soviet au¬ thors misstated the year of the announcement in order to have an official source to cite. They would then be able to reveal more information than was originally reported— namely, that the test was intended to study the effects of nuclear weapons on personnel. ^Lavrinenkov, Bez voiny, pp. 198-99. 91"Trebovaniia sovremennoi voiny," p. 13. 92M. A. Gareev, Takticheskie ucheniia i manevry [Tactical exercises and maneuvers] (Moscow, 1977), pp. 171-72, 189—90. For a more upbeat account of the nuclear exercises, see Karpov, Polkovodets, pp. 524-26. 93Lavrinenkov, Bez voiny, p. 203. I am grateful to Gerry Mullin and David Lumsdaine for improving my rendering of the Russian umelym soldatom ne strashen atom. 94A. Novgorodov, "Deistviia v usloviiakh primeneniia atomnogo oruzhiia" [Actions under conditions of the use of atomic weaponry], Krasnyi voin [Red warrior], cited in "Besedy ob atomnom oruzhii" [Conversations about atomic weaponry], Krasnaia zvezda [Red Star], 3 July 1954, p. 2. [180]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

The Nuclear Weapons Program

The most intriguing reference to small nuclear weapons appears in a book by Sergei Polikanov, a physicist who worked in the Soviet nu¬ clear-weapons program in the 1950s and emigrated to West Germany in 1978. Polikanov writes of an experiment he conducted with I. E. Kutikov under the direction of G. N. Flerov at Cheliabinsk, in the Ural Mountains, during the winter of 1953: The question that stood before us was simple. Is it possible to find condi- ' tions under which the burning of plutonium in an atomic reactor will be accompanied by the accumulation of new fuel? But that wasn't all. If we were lucky, then the possibility would not be excluded of opening a path to an atomic bomb with a small amount of the material necessary to bring about an explosion.

Later, Polikanov mentions these experiments in describing his flight from the Urals back to Moscow: I thought of the last three months spent in the Urals. It was clear that the "small atomic bomb" wouldn't work. Later, in 1955, at Kurchatov's sug¬ gestion, Flerov told about our experiments at a session of the Academy of Sciences. In the report it was said that "it is doubtful that atomic reactors of intermediate neutrons will be useful for the reproduction of nuclear fuel." Of course, nothing was said about the true goals of our work.95

What were the true goals of the experiments? Elsewhere Polikanov describes the work of Flerov's group as follows: "One of the goals of our experiments was to find the best conditions for fuel breeding, and to estimate the possibility of achieving a chain reaction in small volume with a relatively small amount of finite isotope."96 In an interview Polikanov was no more specific about the goals of the project to devel¬ op a "small nuclear explosion." He explained that the experiment "was never formulated as work devoted to construction of a weapon." He added: "In our discussions we never talked about weapon problems, but probably that was discussed without me. ... I was never engaged in any discussion at the top level." At the time, Polikanov realized that his experiments probably held some implications for weapons devel¬ opment, but he and the other younger researchers were more inter95Polikanov, Razryv, pp. 40-41, 50. 96Sergei Polikanov, "Soviet Nuclear Physics: From Nuclear Weapons to International Cooperation," Paper no. 9 in the seminar series "Soviet Science and Technology: Eyewit¬ ness Accounts," cosponsored by Harvard University, M.I.T., and the Ford Foundation, 1983. See also Polikanov, Nuclear Physics in the Soviet Union: Current Status and Future Prospects (Falls Church, Va., 1984), p. 80.

Innovation and the Arms Race

ested in the implications for basic physics. They left the military as¬ pects to such senior scientists as Kurchatov.97 This account seems to support the notion that in the USSR ideas for innovative weapons do not often come from the rank-and-file scientists in the weapons labs, as appears to happen frequently in the United States. Because the junior Soviet scientists were not informed of the broad context of their research, let alone the possible goals related to the development of specific weapons, there was little chance that the Soviet equivalent of a Ted Taylor would put forward innovative proposals.98 Concerning the specific question of when work on tactical nuclear weapons began in the USSR, Polikanov's account is less helpful. Two of the more likely interpretations of his work do relate to this question, however. One possibility is that Polikanov and Kutikov were directed to try to achieve critical mass with an amount of material less than usual for atomic explosions—with the specific intention of trying to develop a small, lightweight weapon. Another possibility, perhaps the more likely one, is also related to the question of tactical nuclear weapons, but in a more general sense. The experiments conducted by Flerov's group were concerned mainly with the issue of developing a breeder reactor to create fissionable material.99 If the experiments had been successful, they would have helped alleviate the serious shortage of fissionable material that made Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership reluctant to divert any to the production of weapons for tactical use. In this context, the idea would have been to use the principle of a breeder reactor to cause a small amount of material to explode, thereby producing additional fission¬ able material, as a breeder reactor would do.100 In any case, Pol¬ ikanov's experiment failed. As he put it, "it would be difficult to call it beautiful and elegant, and it was clear that the results would never enter into the textbooks."101 One further possibility is that Polikanov's work was in some way 97Interview with Polikanov, Darmstadt, 27 July 1984. 98For a discussion of Taylor's role in the U.S. nuclear-weapons program, see chap. 4 above and John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy (New York, 1974), pp. 54-59, 83-84. "This is clear from Polikanov's writing and from the report to the Soviet Academy of Sciences that Flerov presented on his group's work. See G. N. Flerov, "Raboty Akademii Nauk SSSR po reaktoram s uranom-235, plutoniiem-239 i vodorodnym zamedlitelem" (Report to the Academy of Sciences USSR on reactors with uranium-235, plutonium239, and a hydrogen moderator], in Sessiia Akademii Nauk SSSR po mirnomy ispol'zovaniiu atomnoi energii, 1-5 iulia 1955 g. (Session of the Academy of Sciences USSR on the peaceful use of atomic energy, 1-5 July 1955] (Moscow, 1955), pp. 170-84. 100I am grateful to George Smith of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory for this insight in conversation, 7 May 1985. 101Polikanov, Razryv, p. 40.

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

related to a general directive to study the potential for development of new models of nuclear weapons. Certainly the Soviets were well aware of Western developments at the time, from such publications as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. As Kurchatov's biographer pointed out, "Igor Vasil'evich succeeded in acquainting himself with everything that was published during these days in the foreign press about atomic weaponry."102 Some works, such as Ralph Lapp's New Force, which dealt at length with tactical nuclear weapons, were translated almost immediately into Russian.103 Review articles published in the restricted Soviet journal Military Thought and the widely distributed Red Star demonstrate how closely the Soviets followed the U.S. discussion of tactical nuclear weapons and rockets in the 1950s. The articles provide numerous details on the testing of nuclear weapons at the Nevada test site, all culled from the U.S. press.104 It would not be surprising if the Soviets also managed to have agents near the Nevada proving ground to observe the first tests of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons.105 Additional, albeit still inconclusive, evidence concerning early Soviet interest in low-yield nuclear weapons comes from declassified U.S. government reports. Although heavily sanitized, with almost all of the details removed, the reports of meetings of the scientists who analyzed the early Soviet nuclear tests provide some clues. Up to the summer of 1953, the Soviets had tested only three atomic weapons. In August 1953 they carried out a new test series, with four explosions, dubbed by U.S. analysts Joe-4 through Joe-7. Joe-4 attract¬ ed the most attention because it involved a thermonuclear reaction to obtain a much higher yield than previous Soviet tests had done. The Soviet press described the test as involving "one of a variety of hydro102Astashenkov, Podvig Akademika Kurchatova, p. 101. 103The Lapp book was published as R. Lepp, Novaia sila (ob atomakh i liudiakh) [The new force (of atoms and people)] (Moscow, 1954). It was reviewed by Iu. Arbatov in "Amerikanskii uchenyi ob atomnom oruzhii" [An American scientist on atomic weaponry], Krasnaia zvezda [Red star], 16 April 1954; and by V. Sergeev in Vestnik vozdushnogo flota [Herald of the air force], no. 8 (August 1954): 61-64. 104For one of the more impressive Soviet reviews, see V. Khomich and V. Nikol skii, "Upravliaemye snariady i bespilotnye sredstva napadeniia vooruzhennvkh sil SShA (Obzor amerikanskoi pechati)" [Controlled projectiles and unpiloted means of attack of the armed forces of the USA (Review of the American press)], Voennaia mysl, no. 7> (Jul\ 1954): 84-95. See also M. Krementsov, "Deistviia nazemnykh voisk v usloviiakh primeneniia atomnogo oruzhiia" [Actions of ground forces under conditions of the use of atomic weaponry], Krasnaia zvezda, 1 September 1954; N. Petrov, "O nekotorvkh vzgliadakh v SSha na taktiku sukhoputnykh voisk v usloviiakh primeneniia atomnogo oruzhiia" [On some views in the USA on tactics of ground forces under conditions of the use of atomic weaponry], Krasnaia zvezda, 17 February 1955- Both are reviews ot George Reinhardt and William Kintner, Atomic Weapons in Land Combat (Harrisburg, Pa., 1953); it was also reviewed by P. Batalov, in Vestnik vozdushnogo flota, no. 12 (December 1954)- 66— 7°105George Smith in conversation, 20 May 1985. [183]

Innovation and the Arms Race

gen bombs." Premier Malenkov had announced to the Supreme Soviet several days before the test that the "U.S. has no monopoly in the production of the hydrogen bomb."106 Thus most of the attention of the U.S. analysts was devoted to the question of whether this weapon truly constituted a "superbomb," capable in principle of unlimited ex¬ plosive power.107 With attention focused on the race to develop hydrogen bombs, the public gave little regard to the other tests in the Soviet series. In fact, the AEC announced only one of them, with the result that retrospec¬ tive unclassified lists of Soviet nuclear explosions, including the AEC's own, make no mention of the other tests.108 Partial declassification of U.S. government documents has revealed the existence of the other three tests.109 The comprehensive analysis of these early tests, if it is ever declassified, will shed more light on initial Soviet interest in smallyield nuclear weapons.110 Analysis of the Joe-4 revealed that it was not, in fact, a true superb¬ omb—a bomb in which a relatively small fission explosion ignites an indefinitely large thermonuclear explosion.111 Joe-4 represented an al¬ ternative method of increasing yield by "igniting a fairly small amount of thermonuclear material with a comparatively large amount of fis¬ sionable material."112 A similar method, termed "boosting," enhances the efficiency of fission by combining it with a thermonuclear reac¬ tion.113 According to one national intelligence estimate (NIE), the Joe-4 did 106AEC report, "Soviet Atomic Tests," in DDEL; also Paul C. Fine to Gen. Fields, memos, "Malenkov Statement," 10 August 1953, and "Russian Test," 24 August 1953, Historian's Office, DOE. 107Herbert F. York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco, 1976), pp. 89-92. i°8See, e.g., the reports of the DOE (successor to the AEC), Summary of Foreign Nuclear Detonations (Washington, D.C., various years); and Iwo Zander and Rolf Araskog, Nu¬ clear Explosions 1945-1972: Basic Data, FOA 4 Report, Research Institute of National Defence, Stockholm (April 1973). A recent nongovernment report does include the early unannounced Soviet tests; see Jeffrey I. Sands, Robert S. Norris, and Thomas B. Cochran, "Known Soviet Nuclear Explosions, 1949-1985 Preliminary List," Nuclear Weapons Databook Working Paper NWD 86-3, National Resources Defense Council, Washington, D.C. (February 1986). 109Minutes of 37th Meeting of GAC, 4-6 November 1953, Historian's Office, DOE. 110The DOE has refused to release the full list of Soviet nuclear explosions, even those of thirty years ago. The list is included in a document prepared by the Los Alamos laboratory, "Known Soviet Nuclear Tests—1949 through 31 December 1984." mHolloway, "Research Note: Soviet Thermonuclear Development," p. 194; York, Ad¬ visors, pp. 91-93. 112Herbert F. York, "The Debate over the Hydrogen Bomb," Scientific American, Octo¬ ber 1975, reprinted in Bruce M. Russett and Bruce G. Blair, Progress in Arms Control? (San Francisco, 1979), p. 14. 113See York's discussion in Advisors, pp. 22-23 and passim.

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

apparently employ "thermonuclear boosting principles." These princi¬ ples were used in the 1953 test series "to produce energy yields in the range of the equivalent of a few thousand to at least one million tons of TNT." In other words, at least one of the other weapons tested in the 1953 test series was estimated to be of low yield—-a few kilotons—yet to have used a thermonuclear boosting technique. Later, the same NIE posited a notional Soviet stockpile for 1959 that could include, among other types, more than a thousand weapons identified as "Boosted Pu 3 KT."114 At least four major analyses contributed to the conclusion that the Soviets were capable of constructing such low-yield nuclear weapons. The Air Force's AFOAT-i program had been detecting and analyzing Soviet nuclear tests since 1949.115 In addition, the members of the General Advisory Committee to the AEC reviewed the findings, heard briefings from AFOAT-i, and presented independent reports of their conclusions. The Los Alamos weapons laboratory performed several analyses of Soviet tests as more information became available. Finally, a small group of scientists, chaired by Hans Bethe of Cornell Univer¬ sity, did a follow-up to the GAC report. In a three-day meeting at the beginning of November 1953, the GAC discussed the four Soviet tests of the preceding August. Little of the discussion has been declassified, but enough to indicate that the NIE estimates of Soviet capabilities to build low-yield weapons came from analyses of the August test series. It is clear, for example, that at least Joe-6 and Joe-7 were of low yield. One infers from the discussion of Joe-7, particular, that the GAC members believed the Soviets had made very efficient use of the bomb's fissionable material, through expert design of the chemical explosive used to implode the fissile core. In his cover letter to the GAC minutes, committee chairman I. I. Rabi used the evidence from the Joe-7 test to argue that the AEC should "initiate a vigorous program of research in chemical explosives suitable for the implosion of atomic weapons." Rabi suggested that the "gains to be achieved from success in this direction are enormous both in the reduction in size of large fission weapons and even more importantly in the possibility of making 114CIA, NIE-11-4-54, 13 August 1954, OSANSA. NSC ser. Subject subser., box 10, folder "Soviet Capabilities and Probable Courses of Action through Mid-1959, NIE-11-4-54 (2)," pp. 52, 56, in DDEL. 115The forms of detection and analysis included seismic observation, electromagnetic long-range detection, collection and radiochemical analysis of bomb debris, and acoustic detection and analysis. See Minutes of 37th GAC Meeting, DOE. For the early history of the detection program, see box 199, "Atomic Bomb—Long-range detection, PSF, in HSTL. [185]

Innovation and the Arms Race

smaller fission weapons of simple design and great economy of fission¬ able material116 The scientists of the GAC found that the Joe-5, 6, and 7 tests each "presented puzzling features." The discussion, therefore, "was spec¬ ulative in character."117 Rabi's cover letter explained that the "discus¬ sions, though most enlightening, still leave us with a feeling that much remains to be understood about the design, purpose and operation of the four Soviet devices, a feeling which was shared by all present."118 A later study by a smaller group, assembled under Bethe's direction, failed to resolve a number of areas of uncertainty, or so one infers from the few sentences of the report that have been declassified. Further¬ more, the Bethe committee makes clear that its speculations about Soviet motivations in testing certain devices "are necessarily colored by our knowledge of our own weapons development."119 This problem applied to the work of the GAC as well.120 The mem¬ bers of the GAC tended to think that the Soviet devices tested in November 1953 were intended for application to air defense. Walter Whitman remarked, "Russia's first concern is air defense against our Strategic Air Command."121 Another participant suggested, "Perhaps the designs were for the conversion of some of their large bombs to a large number of air defense missiles."122 Willard Libby "objected that it would be very hard for them to have enough of the small bombs for effective air defense." Others, however, "tended to find the suggestion plausible. The possibilities of air to air, ground to air, etc., rocket mis¬ siles should be considered. A whole class of small weapons may emerge for such uses."123 It seems in retrospect that the U.S. scientists' interpretation of the Soviet program may have suffered from mirror-imaging. Many scien¬ tists involved in the weapons program at this time were preoccupied with problems of continental air defense and were especially interested in developing nuclear-armed surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) for highaltitude interception of bombers. K. T. Keller, director of the Office of 116I. I. Rabi to Lewis L. Strauss, 7 November 1953, DOE; emphasis added. 117Minutes of 37th GAC Meeting, DOE, 2d sess., p. 12. 118Rabi to Strauss, 7 November 1953, DOE. 119"Summary of Preliminary Findings of the Committee on Evaluating Foreign Tests," 26 December 1953, p. 5, DOE. 120Bethe proposed one possible solution to the difficulty of evaluating Soviet tests without having knowledge of the U.S. experience interfere. He suggested setting up a group of physicists who had not worked in the U.S. atomic program since the war to undertake an independent evaluation. See Bethe to Strauss, 30 December 1953' Office of the Historian, DOE. mMinutes of 37th GAC Meeting, DOE 3d sess., p. 15. ^Ibid., 2d sess., p. 14. ^Ibid., 3d sess., p. 15.

[186]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Guided Missiles under the Truman administration, gave top priority to air-defense applications of missiles.124 The U.S. scientists apparently assumed that the Soviets were doing the same thing. In reality, the Soviets devoted most of their attention to developing jet interceptor aircraft to meet their air-defense requirements.125 Although they con¬ ducted a vigorous SAM development program, based initially on Ger¬ man technology, the Soviets apparently did not give priority during these years to adapting nuclear weapons to their air-defense mis¬ siles.126 Khrushchev mentions Soviet work on nuclear SAMs (zenitnye atomnye zariady) in his reminiscences but argues that it was accorded low priority because "then we preferred strategic weaponry, because we had little material for atomic and hydrogen bombs. And we con¬ sidered that the most important thing was to have weaponry which would hold our opponents in some fear, so that they wouldn't permit themselves to attack the Soviet Union."127 During the late 1950s some Soviet military writers did discuss the potential application of nuclear weapons to air-defense missiles, but mainly with reference to U.S. systems. It is not clear that the Soviets had comparable systems at the time.128 What, then, were the purposes of the low-yield tests? Two pos124K. T. Keller, "Report to the President on Status of Guided Missiles," 10 July 1951, p. 1, Papers of K. T. Keller, box 1, folder "Guided Missiles—Corres, 1950-1952," in HSTL. The scientists undertook a number of studies of the problem of air defense, most notably Project Charles, the summer study conducted at M.I.T. See AEG, In the Matter of J. Robert

Oppenheimer, Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board and Texts of Principal Documents and Letters, reprinted with an index and foreword by Philip M. Stem (1954; Cambridge, Mass., 1970); and Herbert F. York and G. Allen Greb, "Military Research and Development: A Postwar History," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 33 (January 1977): 1326. 125Evangelista, "Evolution of Soviet Tactical Air Forces." 126Most of the standard sources on Soviet military capabilities do not mention any SAMs with nuclear warheads. See, e.g., David C. Isby, Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army (London, 1981), pp. 245-72; Bonds, Russian Military Power, pp. 55-56; Soviet Mili¬ tary Power, 3d ed. (Washington, D.C., 1984), pp. 36-39; Ronald T. Pretty, ed., Jane's Weapon Systems, 1981-82 (New York, 1982), pp. 73-77. One exception is Michael J. H. Taylor and John W. R. Taylor, Missiles of the World (New York, 1972), p. 47, writing of the "Mk 4" version of the Soviet SA-2, first displayed in Moscow in 1967: "It was described by the Soviet commentator as being far more effective than earlier versions, which may imply use of a nuclear warhead in the bulged, white-painted nose-cone." For evidence of early Soviet interest in air-defense missiles, see CIA, "Scientific Research Institute and Experimental Factory 88," pp. 9-10. 127Khrushchev transcript, p. 965. 128See, for example, Petrov, "Upravliaemye snariady," pp. 78-93. He writes, "If one speaks of tendencies in the development of anti-aircraft guided systems, then, according to the opinion of foreign specialists, it is necessary above all to stress . . . the conversion to atomic combat charges [warheads]" (p. 87). See also the mention by G. Pokrovskii, "Samolety, mezhkontinental'nye rakety i drugie nositeli termoiadernogo oruzhiia" [Air¬ planes, intercontinental rockets, and other carriers of thermonuclear weaponry], and V. Glukhov, "Ob effektivnosti raketnogo oruzhiia" [On the effectiveness of rocket weapon¬ ry], both in Astashenkov, Atomnaia energiia, pp. 30, 104. [187]

Innovation and the Arms Race

sibilities come to mind. The Soviets may have been working to develop devices that used a relatively small amount of fissionable material and could therefore be engineered into warheads to fit on SAMs or bombs for tactical aircraft. The U.S. analysis of the Soviet tests suggests that they demonstrated some success in increasing the efficiency of the explosions. The U.S. scientists felt confident in their evaluation of the efficiency of the Soviet devices. Bethe's report on Joe-4, for example, indicated that "the ratio of total fissions to 235 invested"—a measure of the efficiency of the explosion—"may be considered as well estab¬ lished." Conclusions about the dimensions and weight of the bomb were far less certain.129 The same can probably be said for the analyses of the other shots of that series. Thus, although the explosions of lowyield devices appeared relatively efficient, the extent of Soviet progress toward lightweight, deliverable weapons for tactical use was still unclear. Perhaps, though, the Soviets were not pursuing this particular goal. The more efficient weapons they tested could instead have been di¬ rectly related to the hydrogen bomb program. Perhaps the Joe-5, 6, and 7 bombs were intended as designs for triggers to ignite the ther¬ monuclear fuel of hydrogen bombs.130 In any case, refining fission weapons for use as triggers would also contribute toward making the technology available for other applications. Aircraft Unmistakable Soviet interest in atomic weapons for tactical uses comes from a review of developments in aircraft during this period. Although it is not possible to fix an exact date, it appears that sometime in 1953 an order was handed down to develop a jet fighter-bomber capable of delivering nuclear weapons on the battlefield. Before this time, the Soviets did not design any aircraft with this role in mind. The first Soviet aircraft designed to serve as a tactical nuclear bomber was almost certainly the Sukhoi-7, which first appeared in service in 1959. One Soviet account discusses how in the 1950s the shturmovik propeller-driven bombers were replaced by jet fighter-bombers such as the MiG-i5bis. The account suggests that this generation of aircraft 129Bethe's report is quoted in K. E. Fields, Memorandum for the Commissioners and General Manager, AEC, Subject: Joe-4, 23 September 1953, DOE. 130For a discussion of triggers, see Peter Danckwerts, Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb," New Scientist 2 (September 1982): 641-42; his account draws on a letter by C. Hansen, published in the Chicago Tribune, 19 October 1979. Hansen's letter figured in the controversy over the Progressive magazine's publication of details concerning the construction of thermonuclear weapons. See A. DeVolpi et al.. Born Secret: The H-Bomb, the Progressive Case, and National Security (New York, 1981), passim. [188]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

was replaced by the first nuclear-capable fighter-bombers: "Later, our designers developed a special type of jet fighter-bomber aircraft. Fighter-bombers, capable of use as conventional as well as nuclear weapons, became a formidable means of destruction of small targets that appear suddenly."131 Other sources make it clear that the air forces were not supplied with nuclear weapons until 1954 and that the first nuclear-capable ground-attack aircraft appeared well after that date, as the result of a special order.132 The order seems to have been presented to the designer Pavel Sukhoi. His bureau had been developing successful fighter aircraft throughout the war and into the first postwar years. In 1949, however, following a serious accident with his prototype Su-15 fighter, Sukhoi's bureau appears to have been shut down. When the bureau reopened, it began to number its prototypes from Su-i, as if to leave no connec¬ tion to the past.133 When the bureau began its work again, probably in 1953,134 it focused on jet fighters and fighter-bombers. It seems plaus¬ ible to suggest that the Soviet leadership decided to reestablish the Sukhoi bureau specifically to develop a jet fighter-bomber for tactical delivery of nuclear weapons. This interpretation is consistent with the generalizations made ear¬ lier about the process of weapons innovation in the USSR. The decision to develop a tactical nuclear bomber evidently did not come from tech¬ nical ideas under development, because the Sukhoi bureau's work was in the midst of a hiatus when the decision was taken. It did not result from low-level bureaucrats pursuing parochial interests, because the decision required action at the highest levels and a major reallocation of resources to reopen the bureau. Missiles

Interest in adapting missiles for possible nuclear use on the bat¬ tlefield also becomes evident at the beginning of this third stage. Al¬ though strategic missiles continued to receive the highest priority, decisions were made during this time to develop a capability for deliv131Aviatsiia i kosmonavtika SSSR [Aviation and cosmonautics USSR] (Moscow, 1968), p. 243. Also K. Vershinin, "The Influence of Scientific Technical Progress on the Develop¬ ment of the Air Force and Its Strategy in the Postwar Period," Voennaia mysl', no. 5 (May 1966): 38 (FBIS translation, FPD 0665-67). 132P. Kutakhov, "Air Forces in the Past and Present," Voennaia mysY, no. 10 (October 1973): 31 (FBIS translation, FPD 0063). See also the sources cited in n. 131. 133Alexander, Russian Aircraft since 1940, p. 340. 134Ibid., p. 341: "After a break of some six or seven years—during four of which there was no Sukhoi OKB [opytno-konstruktorskoe buro, or experimental design bureau]— Sukhoi's name was once again to the fore in 1956." In other words, the bureau was closed from 1949 or 1950 until 1953 or 1954. [189]

Innovation and the Arms Race

ery of nuclear weapons by missiles of tactical and operational-tactical range. A number of systems apparently intended for tactical nuclear sup¬ port of troops on the battlefield first appeared during 1957 and 1958. These systems included an operational-tactical missile of 150-kilometer range, designated SS-ib, or Scud in the West. It took part in the same Red Square parade at which Korolev's R-5 strategic missile was shown, in November 1957. A year later. Western intelligence sources identified the 30-kilometer FROG (a U.S. acronym for "free rocket over ground") tactical missile.135 During the same period, the first-generation Soviet cruise missiles began to appear as well, although they were intended mainly for naval missions, as opposed to ground-support roles.136 All of these weapons were under development during this third stage. It is not possible with the information currently available to provide a detailed discussion of the development of each of these tactical or operational-tactical missile systems. Fortunately, a good account of the development of one representative system is found in a biographical chronicle of Sergei Korolev's work, which draws on material from the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It provides the following information about the designer's work on an operational-tactical missile during this period: In 1952 Korolev directed the development of a design proposal for a long-range rocket of "protracted storage" (dlitel'nogo khraneniia), employing an engine designed by A. M. Isaev. On 28 April 1953 the first successful test launch of this weapon took place. It is referred to as an "experimental operational-tactical rocket." The final launch of this first series of tests was carried out in June at Kapustin Iar. The second series was conducted during the following spring, from April to May 1954. During the winter of 1954-55 the "examination" flight tests (zachetnye letnye ispytaniia) of the missile took place. The missile appar¬ ently failed its exam, because a modified version was tested the follow¬ ing winter. In March and April 1957 the modified missile was fired from a new type of launching mechanism. In September the missile apparently passed its "examination" tests well enough to appear on Red Square two months later.137 It is possible that this missile is the one known as SS-ib, but it may also be a different model, or even one that was never deployed in large numbers, despite its appearance on Red Square.138 135Wright, Soviet Missiles. 136Nuclear Weapons Databook: vol. 3: Soviet Nuclear Weapons, chap. 10. 137"Materialy k biograficheskoi khronike," pp. 232-39. 138Mikhail Turetsky, a participant in some missile testing programs for the Soviet navy during the 1950s and early 1960s, claims that the Scud missile was known as R-11FM in the USSR and that it was created by a designer named Makaev. Turetsky maintains that the missile did not have a nuclear warhead, as most Western analysts assume, but

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

It is difficult to evaluate the priority of such work on operationaltactical missiles during the years from 1953 to 1957. One means of doing so, however, is found in the biography of Marshal Nedelin, missile specialist and first commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF). His biographer. Marshal Tolubko, writes that in the 1930s "Nedelin was appointed Commander of Artillery of the Armed Forces, then Deputy War Minister for Armament, then again Commander of Artillery in the Soviet Army, and again Deputy Minister of Defense of the USSR for Armament." Tolubko explains that such shifts reflected the state of the rocket program at various times: "When cardinal prob¬ lems on the production and testing of rocket-nuclear weaponry were being decided, Nedelin became Deputy Minister for Armament, while in the period of introduction of new combat systems into the forces, he was charged with leading the artillery, into which the first rocket units were then entering."139 During the first major period in which Korolev's bureau was con¬ ducting tests of operational-tactical missiles, April 1933 to February 1955/ Nedelin was serving as artillery commander. Evidently this test program was not considered sufficiently important to demand his per¬ sonal attention at the test ranges. During a subsequent stage of devel¬ opment and testing of Korolev's operational-tactical systems, from December 1933 to April 1937, Nedelin did serve in a position to oversee the program. In March 1933 he became deputy minister of defense for armaments. This period also witnessed intensive testing and develop¬ ment of longer-range strategic systems. Nedelin's career corresponds more closely to the progress of these strategic systems than to that of the shorter-range missiles. For example, he retained his position in the Ministry of Defense even while the SS-3 rocket was being deployed with army units in the field. He took a command post again only at the end of 1939, when he became the first commander-in-chief of the new¬ ly created SRF and oversaw the initial deployment of long-range strate¬ gic systems. Nedelin's jobs suggest that the highest priority during these years was accorded to the strategic mission.140

instead had a conventional one that was inseparable from the missile body: Mikhail Turetsky, The Introduction of Missile Systems into the Soviet Navy (1945-1962) (Falls Church, Va., 1983), pp. 63-66. The Penkovskiy Papers (Garden City, N.Y., 1965), based in part on material released by the Soviet spy Oleg Penkovskiy, claims that the R-11 was produced with both conventional and nuclear warheads, the latter variant costing five to ten times as much as the former (p. 323). 139Tolubko, Nedelin, p. 181. 140For the dates of Nedelin's assignments, see ibid., pp. 215-16. Jerry Hough first suggested using Tolubko's quote to gain insights into Soviet priorities, in his essay, "The Historical Legacy in Soviet Weapons Development," in Soviet Decisionmaking /or National Security, ed. William Potter and Jiri Valenta (London, 1984), pp. 95-96.

Innovation and the Arms Race

Technical constraints reinforced existing priorities and played a sig¬ nificant role in limiting the production of tactical nuclear missile sys¬ tems during this period. Khrushchev repeatedly calls attention to the shortage of fissionable materials for making nuclear warheads and the consequent decision to emphasize strategic systems.141 Another tech¬ nical factor relates to accuracy of the delivery systems, especially firstgeneration missiles. Because nuclear weapons are so destructive, mili¬ tary planners would want to make the explosive yields of battlefield systems as low as possible in order to reduce the risks to their own troops. The extremely poor accuracy of the early Soviet missiles, how¬ ever, would dictate high-yield warheads that would give some as¬ surance of destroying the target, even if the missile landed far off the mark. The sum of arguments evidently favored continued emphasis on high-yield strategic systems. Official Soviet sources reinforce the conclusion that, although during this period the Soviets first gave direct attention to providing a future tactical-missile capability, their main objective was to develop strategic systems. One account, published by an institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, refers to a "most important scientific-technical decision," taken in 1954, that "the basic forces and means of Soviet rocket con¬ struction and adjacent branches of industry would concentrate on the creation of a new, multi-stage, intercontinental ballistic rocket."142 It was following this decision that Marshal Nedelin returned to the Defense Ministry to oversee missile development.143 It is clear that the goal of creating long-range strategic systems continued to receive pre¬ cedence over all the other projects of the Soviet missile program. The Soviets had nevertheless begun to introduce limited numbers of tactical and operational-tactical nuclear missiles into the forces, proba¬ bly by late 1957. Despite the priority they accorded to strategic sys¬ tems, the Soviets wanted to field at least a small initial tactical force early and to prepare a capability for the potential large-scale deploy¬ ment of tactical systems sometime in the future. This behavior is con¬ sistent with what one analyst has described as the Soviets' "multiplelevel method of application whereby a weapons system is introduced into service progressively at different stages in its development, al¬ though all levels of application will have stemmed from the same origi¬ nal design decision." In contrast to "the Western countries, which tend 141Khrushchev transcript, pp. 401, 403, 965. i42v. S. Avduevskii and S. D. Grishin, "Razvitie raketnoi tekhniki v SSSR v periode 1946-1957 gg." [The development of rocket technology in the USSR in the period 19461957], in Issledovaniia po istorii i teorii razvitiia aviatsionnoi i raketno-kosmicheskoi nauki i tekhniki [Research in the history and theory of the development of aviation and rocketspace science and technology], issue 3 (Moscow, 1984), p. 11. 143Tolubko, Nedelin, p. 216. [192]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

to complete the full development of a new system before introducing it into operational service, once the Soviet Union has decided to adopt a major new capability she tries to put it to work at as early a stage in its development as possible."144 In the case of tactical missiles, the Soviets tried to put them to work during what is considered here the third stage in the process of innovation.

Nuclear Artillery During this third stage the Soviets appear to have initiated work on another type of delivery vehicle for tactical nuclear weapons in addi¬ tion to aircraft and missiles—the so-called atomic cannon. This was in essence a field artillery piece that could shoot a nuclear projectile. The main sources of information on the development of this weapon are the reminiscences of Khrushchev and retrospective analyses based on contemporary Western reports of Soviet nuclear-capable artillery. Khrushchev's account does not permit us to fix an exact date for the initiation of work on Soviet nuclear artillery. He suggests that the military first called attention to the possibility of such a weapon on the basis of published reports of the U.S. atomic cannon. He indicates that the idea of building a Soviet counterpart was first discussed while Stalin was still alive and that—owing to the dictator's monopoly on military decisions—Khrushchev himself was not directly involved. As he put it, the Americans, "as I was told, were working on cannons that fire atomic charges. The military knew about this already in Stalin s time. It was easy to find out about it because the Americans published it in their newspapers."145 As we have seen, the earliest mention in the United States of plans for "an artillery piece that would fire an atomic weapon" came in a radio address by General Lawton Collins, Army chief of staff, in June 1950. The following February, in an interview with U.S. News & World Report, Collins predicted that the Army would soon deploy such a weapon. The publicity that these remarks received at the time is consistent with Khrushchev's recollection that the atten144MccGwire, "Turning Points in Soviet Naval Policy," p. 183. For a similar argument regarding Soviet air- and missile-defense systems, see Johan J. Holst, "Missile Defense, the Soviet Union, and the Arms Race," in Why ABM?: Policy Issues in the Missile Defense Controversy, ed. Johan J. Holst and William Schneider, Jr. (New York, 1969), esp. pp. 149-50. / 145Khrushchev transcript, p. 401; emphasis added. For discussion of Stalin's monopol¬ ization of military decisions, see pp. 384, 928, 941—42. In Strobe Talbott s selective trans¬ lation and publication of Khrushchev's reminiscences, he renders kak nine govorili as "1 think" rather than the more literal "as I was told." This phrasing suggests the possibility that Khrushchev was involved in the initial deliberations rather than the more likely interpretation that he was told about them later. See Strobe Talbott, ed., Khrushthez’ Remembers: The Last Testament (Boston, 1974), pp- 52_53-

[193]

Innovation and the Arms Race

tion of the Soviet military was drawn to U.S. developments while Stalin was still alive. Khrushchev suggests that the initiative for imitating the U.S. atomic cannon came from the Soviet military: "Its advantages, they argued, were that it was more accurate and that it could support troops and be used against the opponent's infantry."146 It is possible that Stalin him¬ self was personally attracted to the proposal; his high evaluation of artillery is well known.147 In any case, it seems that work on a Soviet atomic cannon was already in progress before Khrushchev had a chance to evaluate the merits of the weapon.

The Role of Soviet Scientists Khrushchev's account clearly indicates that the process by which the Soviets initially decided to develop nuclear artillery differed signifi¬ cantly from its American counterpart. In the USSR the initiative ap¬ pears to have come from high levels in the military (those with access to information about foreign developments) and was undertaken with Stalin's approval. In the United States, by contrast, the top echelons of the military and government were not involved in the early decisions to develop the atomic cannon. The impetus came from scientists who discovered the possibility of creating nuclear shells small enough to fit inside the barrel of a field artillery piece. Partly as a reflection of their strategic preferences (in favor of battlefield nuclear warfare as an alter¬ native to massive destruction of cities) and partly out of technological hubris, the U.S. scientists promoted their new weapon until it gained acceptance at higher levels. The role of the Soviet nuclear scientists was quite different. Even after Stalin died, when Khrushchev and his colleagues became respon¬ sible for Soviet military decisions, the scientists were not playing a leading role in the promotion of nuclear artillery. Unlike their Ameri¬ can counterparts, who called attention to the military capabilities af¬ forded by new technical developments, the Soviet scientists stressed the difficulties entailed in making a small nuclear explosive. By analogy to the U.S. case, these difficulties probably included "some difficult problems in projectile design associated with the prevention of assem¬ bly during the acceleration in the gun barrel," problems the U.S. scien146Khrushchev transcript, p. 401. 147Stalin often referred to artillery as the "god of war." For a discussion, see Douglas M. Hart and Dennis M. Gormley, "The Evolution of Soviet Interest in Atomic Artillery," Royal United Services Institute Journal 128, no. 2 (1983): 25; and David C. Isby, Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army (London, 1981), chap. 10. [194]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

tists claimed to have "adequately solved."148 Limitations on fissionable material posed an additional problem. Khrushchev reports: "It was very difficult for our scientists to create a shell with an atomic charge, because it involved a large expenditure of atomic materials. It turned out, the scientists said, that the smaller the size in which the atomic charge was confined, the larger the amount required for achieving a given explosive yield."149 His scientific advisers informed Khrushchev that nuclear warheads for missiles would use less fissionable material yet create a larger explosion than nuclear artillery shells. Khrushchev gives the impression that by the time he received this advice, it was too late—the nuclear cannons had already been produced. He suggests that the artillery pieces themselves were manufactured before their nuclear shells. It is important to recognize that Khrushchev's sense of chronology is often demonstrably weak. Nevertheless, it is probably safe to use his recollections, if not for precise dating of decisions, then at least as an indicator of the position of Soviet nuclear scientists vis-avis the atomic cannon. They were not its major advocates. The post-Stalin leadership, at any rate, decided to allow work on the weapon to continue, probably as a hedge against technological uncer¬ tainty. Thus artillery pieces that Western analysts judged to be nuclearcapable first appeared publicly in a parade in Red Square in November 1957. During subsequent years, however, Khrushchev would assert new military priorities and restrict programs for weapons that did not conform to them, such as the atomic cannon.

Keeping Options Open The main characteristics of the third stage of Soviet weapons innova¬ tion include short-term responses to a foreign initiative and the genera¬ tion of long-term programs to provide comparable capabilities. The Soviets tend at this stage to hedge their bets by pursuing all of the lines of development that their adversaries pursue. In the case of tactical nuclear weapons, the Soviets developed prototypes for all of the deliv¬ ery systems on which they knew the Americans were working—air¬ craft, missiles, and artillery. This is not to say that the Soviets simply imitated the U.S. nuclear posture. Even while giving high-level sanc¬ tion to efforts to provide a tactical nuclear capability, Khrushchev did not put the same degree of emphasis on such programs as the Ameri148An analysis of the U.S. 280-mm atomic cannon is found in “Project Vista: A Study of Ground and Air Tactical Warfare with Especial Reference to the Defense of Western Europe," 2 February 1952, 1:186-87, in MMB NA. 149Khrushchev transcript, p. 401.

Innovation and the Arms Race

cans did. He still accorded priority to strategic systems. Thomas Wolfe describes the situation: The task of creating a strategic deterrent force, left unfinished at the end of the Stalin era, was in the forefront of Khrushchev's military policy concerns. This meant, among other things, that, unless he was prepared to reverse priorities in midstream, the problem of coping with the new NATO strategy of tactical nuclear response would have to be met within the framework of military preparedness measures already underway. Moreover, Soviet nuclear technology then was still concentrating on the development of strategic weapons, and apparently lagged well behind the United States in developing smaller tactical weapons at the lower end of the nuclear spectrum. Putting Soviet European theater forces straighta¬ way on a tactical atomic footing to match NATO programs was, therefore, not yet feasible, but would have to wait until strategic force requirements were more nearly satisfied.150

The initiation of work on tactical systems could not wait, however, even until it became certain which delivery vehicles were most suitable. It seems that Khrushchev would have preferred to concentrate on one main type of delivery vehicle for tactical nuclear weapons but at this stage was unwilling to limit Soviet options. This is apparent from remarks Khrushchev made in reference to discussions within the Sovi¬ et leadership over military priorities in 1955-56: We still had to resolve the question of construction of rocket and aviation armament. That is, we had to create armed forces with the same systems as our probable opponent possessed. These were all airborne systems. They would be planes—bombers—or rockets. We could not yet really rely on rockets then. We were still in a situation where we considered that an air force and bombers were important.151

Khrushchev's recollection of the situation finds corroboration in official Soviet historical and doctrinal writings that also emphasize the role of aircraft during this period.152 150Thomas W. Wolfe, Soviet Power and Europe, 1945-1970 (Baltimore, 1970), pp. 141-42. 151Khrushchev transcript, pp. 920, 923. The context for Khrushchev's remarks is a debate over whether to cut back on plans that Stalin had initiated for a large expansion of the Soviet fleet. Adm. Kuznetsov lost the argument for continuing the buildup and was dismissed from his position as commander-in-chief of the Soviet navy in 1956. For his biography, see Voennyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar', p. 381. For a discussion of the subse¬ quent changes in Soviet naval construction, see MccGwire, Soviet Naval Developments, esp. chaps. 12, 13, 16. 152One official history explained, "Inasmuch as nuclear weaponry was originally pro¬ duced only as atomic bombs, aviation preserved a monopolistic position of sole carrier of nuclear charges for several years." See Aviatsiia i kosmonavtika SSSR, p. 241. Another [196]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Although the Soviet leaders kept their options open, they also al¬ lowed broad consideration of alternatives within the military, before major decisions were taken. It would appear that as late as 1957 the Soviets had still not settled on missiles as their main nuclear delivery vehicle. In that year the Soviet military publishing house was still issuing lengthy monographs on topics ranging from the potential of a nuclear-powered bomber to reviews of Western writings on aircraft technology and the use of air power for strategic and tactical pur¬ poses.153 Proponents of aircraft argued that nuclear weapons were too expensive to be delivered by systems as inaccurate as the current gen¬ eration of missiles.154 Another reason the Soviets did not immediately choose one particu¬ lar delivery vehicle for tactical missions is that a number of prominent military figures evidently had ambivalent feelings about battlefield nu¬ clear weapons as such. Major-General Pokrovskii, for example, al¬ though a leading advocate of advanced military technology, expressed two reservations about such weapons. Writing for a high-level military audience, he argued first that "new means of military equipment ac¬ quire combat significance only when they become assimilated by the army massively and organically." This could not be the case with tacti¬ cal nuclear weapons, however, until strategic requirements were fulfilled. Pokrovskii's second reservation concerned his contention that even when new military systems were deployed massively, they would not be decisive unless they could perform in coordination with existing systems. "This situation has enormous significance, in particu¬ lar, for working out the means for joint use of atomic weaponry, and artillery and aviation that employ conventional bombs and artillery fire." Pokrovskii expressed concern that the effects of Soviet nuclear explosions on the battlefield would obscure targets intended for con¬ ventional attack and would complicate bombing, air maneuvers, and artillery operations. He particularly criticized the employment of largeaccount describes aviation as "the basic means of delivering nuclear ammunition for the period 1954-1959. See K. Vershinin, "The Influence of Scientific Technical Progress on the Development of the Air Force and Its Strategy in the Postwar Period," Voennaia mysl, no. 5 (May 1966): 38 (FBIS translation FPD 0665/67); and K. Vershinin, "The Develop¬ ment of the Operational Art of the Soviet Air Force," Voennaia mysl', no. 6 (June 1967): 11 (FPD 0112/68). 153See, for example, G. N. Nestorenko, A. I. Sobolev, and Iu. N. Sushkov, Primenenie atomnykh dvigatelei v aviatsii [The use of atomic engines in aviation] (Moscow, 1957); P. F. Berezin, ed., Voenno-vozdushnye sily v sovremennoi voine (po inostrannym vzgliadarn) [Air forces in contemporary war (according to foreign views)] (Moscow, 1957)- See also the works published by Maj. Gen. G. I. Pokrovskii in 1956 arid 1957' collected and translated by Raymond L. Garthoff as Science and Technology in Contemporary War (New York, 1959). 154B. Aleksandrov, in Krylia rodiny [Wings of the homeland], no. 1 (January i957); 3°' cited in Garthoff, Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age, p. 226. [197]

Innovation and the Arms Race

caliber atomic artillery in this regard, although he also called attention to potentially useful applications of such weapons.155 Other prominent Soviet military figures, such as Major General Nikolai Talenskii, editor of Military Thought in the mid-1950s, called into question the notion of tactical nuclear warfare itself. Talenskii argued: Atomic weaponry, by the essence of its combat properties, is intended first of all particularly for actions against large economic and political centers, against big cities, against peaceful populations. The use of atomic weaponry—be it an atomic aviation bomb, an atomic rocket, or an atomic artillery charge—is ineffective against troops acting in present-day strong¬ ly dispersed combat formations, who have the possibility of taking cover in specially equipped trenches and shelters that can be constructed with modern engineering technology in rather short periods of time.156

Talenskii argued, as Pokrovskii did, that tactical nuclear weapons would pose a danger to and complicate the actions of the troops em¬ ploying them. He also argued, along with Minister of Defense Zhukov and other Soviet military commentators, that the distinction made in the West between tactical and strategic uses of nuclear weapons is a false one—that any nuclear weapons of the power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, even if used on a battlefield in densely populated Europe, would kill large numbers of civilians.157 Unlike Pokrovskii's article, which was written for a restricted Soviet military audience, Talenskii's remarks were translated into several for¬ eign languages and widely distributed abroad. One must be especially cautious in interpreting arguments made by Soviet generals in masscirculation periodicals; one can have more confidence, however, when the views expressed there are also found in restricted military journals. In the case of tactical nuclear weapons, it seems clear from both sources that there was no agreement among Soviet military leaders as to the appropriate delivery vehicle and even a certain ambivalence about the merits of battlefield nuclear warfare itself. During this period the Soviets hedged their bets by continuing to emphasize aircraft as their primary delivery vehicle while pursuing the development of missiles and artillery in anticipation of the possibility 155G. Pokrovskii, "Rol' nauki v sovremennoi voine" [The role of science in contempo¬ rary war], Voennaia mysl’, no. 3 (March 1955): 28. 156N. Talenskii, "Ob atomnom i obychnom oruzhii" [On atomic and conventional weaponry], Mezhdunarodnaia zhizn’ [International life, published in English as Internation¬ al Affairs], no. 1 (January 1955): 20-27. 157Ibid. See also (Lt. Gen.) N. Gritchin, "O chem ne sleduet zabyt' amerikanskim atomshchikam" [What the American atomites should not forget], Pravda, 7 January 1955; (Marshal) G. Zhukov, speech to 20th Party Congress, Pravda, 20 February 1956. [198]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

of their widespread future use. Only during the next stage did pri¬ orities shift, as a result of high-level decisions made to emphasize missiles as the main delivery system for both strategic and tactical nuclear weapons.

Stage

4:

Mobilization

(1958-1959)

During the fourth stage, one should begin to see concrete evidence of a shift in military priorities and a decision to make an all-out effort in pursuit of a particular innovation. External factors generally have less salience in determining the course of Soviet behavior. The military does not simply imitate foreign strategies and operational practices as it incorporates new weapons that first appeared abroad. Rather, while continuing to observe and study foreign developments, Soviet military officers, through the agency of the General Staff, rely on their own history and traditions as guides for adopting novel weaponry. At the same time, the political leadership retains the ability to intervene in the process of innovation, sometimes in response to external stimuli. In the case of tactical nuclear weapons, a number of decisions were taken during the fourth stage. At a general level, decisions were made about the nature of a future war. These decisions in turn led to others about particular weapons—for example, which of the nuclear delivery vehicles developed during the previous stage should be produced and in what quantity. Decisions on delivery vehicles undoubtedly influ¬ enced the nature of the nuclear testing program as well. The sources for understanding these three types of decisions include doctrinal and historical writings, evidence of weapons deployments, and informa¬ tion about Soviet nuclear tests.

On the Nature of a Future War Although the death of Stalin in 1953 had for the first time opened up the possibility of discussing the implications of nuclear weapons for warfare, progress was slow. First it was necessary simply to make available basic information on the nature of nuclear weapons and their effects. Articles in the military press and a new curriculum at the Gen¬ eral Staff Academy accomplished this objective. Soviet thinking on the nature of a future war did not, however, undergo immediate reevalua¬ tion. Some analysts believe that such a reevaluation was facilitated by the appointment of Marshal Georgii Zhukov to the position of minister of defense in February 1955' "While there is no evidence to substantiate this view conclusively, it is likely that Zhukov displayed the initiative [i99]

Innovation and the Arms Race

in opening the question of revitalizing Soviet military thought."158 In a speech to senior military officers, reported in the restricted journal Military Thought, Zhukov advocated the "deep study of contemporary military technology and advanced military thought," in order to adjust Soviet military science to the demands of a future war.159 During the next couple of years the Soviet military press, and especially Military Thought, published wide-ranging debates on the relevance of Stalinist military orthodoxy to the nuclear age, including such central questions as the role of surprise.160 Despite these debates, the Soviets did not undertake a systematic review of their military doctrine until 1958-59. Preliminary discussion of the impact of nuclear weapons took place during a conference orga¬ nized by the Ministry of Defense in May 1957, which, in the words of Marshal Matvei Zakharov, "constituted a good prerequisite for the sharp improvement of military science and scientific research work."161 The main work, however, was carried out at the General Staff Acade¬ my in a series of conferences organized in 1958 and 1959 to assess the impact of nuclear weapons and missiles on the nature of war.162 What conclusions did the conferences produce regarding tactical nu¬ clear weapons? We can gain some indication by looking at the weapons that began to be deployed at this time and the organizational structure into which they entered.

Tactical Nuclear Missiles The importance of the late 1950s in Soviet military policy lies mainly in the fact that during this time the nuclear-armed missile began to be considered the primary weapon of the Soviet armed forces. The suc¬ cessful test of a multistage intercontinental rocket in August 1957 and the launching of Sputnik in October of that year evidently persuaded Soviet military and political leaders of the rocket's potential as a weapon when it was joined with a thermonuclear warhead.163 Also during these years the first tactical and operational-tactical missiles—the FROG and Scud systems, respectively—were deployed with the ground forces, 158Garthoff, Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age, p. 69. See also David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven, Conn., 1983), p. 36; John Erickson, "The Soviet Military System: Doctrine, Technology, and 'Style,'" in Soviet Military Power and Perfor¬ mance, ed. John Erickson and E. J. Feuchtwanger (London, 1979), pp. 25-26. 159Voennaia mysl', no. 3 (March 1955): 3, quoted in Garthoff, Soviet Strategy, pp. 67-68. 160For detailed accounts of the debates, see Garthoff, Soviet Strategy; and Dinerstein, War and the Soviet Union. 161Zakharov, 50 let Vooruzhennykh Sil SSSR, p. 521. 162Ibid. See also Holloway, Soviet Union and the Arms Race, pp. 37-38; Penkovskiy, Penkovskiy Papers, pp. 242-45. 163Sovetskie Vooruzhennye Sily, pp. 416-17; Tolubko, Nedelin, pp. 178-81.

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

and the SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile began operational deploy¬ ment in 1959. Many Western observers have the mistaken impression that Khrush¬ chev opposed the introduction of tactical nuclear weapons into Soviet forces. Some portray him as having favored a "minimum deterrent" force of strategic nuclear weapons and having agreed to deploy tactical systems only under great pressure from the military. Others argue that he would have supported the widescale deployment of tactical systems with the troops but for technical constraints on the availability of fis¬ sionable materials. Both views are misperceptions that stem largely from incorrect translations of remarks made in his tape-recorded remi¬ niscences. Strobe Talbott translates Khrushchev as follows:

There were incidents when Marshal Grechko insisted that we develop a tactical missile with a small nuclear warhead that could be used by our infantry against an advancing army. I agreed with Grechko that it would be good to arm our troops with tactical nuclear weapons at the platoon and regiment level or even at the division level, but I had to explain to him that the smaller the explosive charge of a warhead, the more raw [fissionablel material you need—and we simply didn't have enough raw material to go around. Therefore we had to concentrate first and foremost on intercontinental—that is, strategic rather than tactical—missiles.

Talbott implies—correctly, it seems—that Khrushchev discussed these matters with Grechko sometime after the marshal assumed the posi¬ tion of commander-in-chief of the Soviet ground forces, in 1957. But Talbott mistranslates and misunderstands Khrushchev's point.164 The original transcript makes it clear that Khrushchev did support the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, but not at levels below the division—quite the opposite of Talbott's account: There were incidents when Marshal Grechko obstinately demanded [of us] to make a missile with a small [atomic] charge, so that there would be missiles in the troops. I understand that this would be very good—the troops would be confident, [but Grechko wanted] immediately that the advancing [nastupaiushchaia] army have atomic artillery, that is, atomic missiles. But we said then that one should not demand [any atomic] charge at the platoon or company [level], for we didn't have all that much atomic fuel [goriuchego atomnogo] then, and therefore it was necessary above all to create intercontinental missiles and strategic and tactical missiles, but not 164Talbott, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, pp. 52-53. For biographic data on Marshal Grechko, see Voenno-entsiklopedicheskii slovar', pp. 213-14. [201]

Innovation and the Arms Race artillery, not missiles that would have atomic charges even at the division [level]. This we couldn't do.165

Admittedly, Khrushchev's account is jumbled. It is clear from the rest of the transcript, however, that he did favor production of missiles of tactical, operational-tactical, strategic, and intercontinental range.166 What he opposed was deployment of nuclear missiles at command levels as low as the division. These are evidently the systems he refers to as "atomic artillery," because they would be deployed organically with the troops at low levels in the manner of conventional artillery units. The views Khrushchev expresses in his reminiscences correspond to what actually happened. Missiles of all ranges—capable of delivering nuclear and conventional munitions—were produced during Khrush¬ chev's tenure, but they were not deployed at low command levels. Instead, two batteries with two launchers each for FROG missiles were assigned to certain tank and motorized rifle divisions. They were con¬ trolled not by the division commander but by the army commander— that is, the next highest level. The Scud missiles, which first appeared in the late 1950s, were controlled at the army or front level.167 Unlike the Americans, who expected to employ nuclear artillery and missiles against the complete range of targets previously attacked with conven¬ tional weapons, the Soviets intended their division-level nuclear weap¬ ons for a much more selective group of targets.168 It is probably to this practice that Khrushchev refers when he says that the leadership re¬ jected the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons at or below the division level. Although Khrushchev attributes the decision primarily to technical constraints (the shortage of fissionable material), some of his officers made military arguments against the widescale deployment of bat¬ tlefield nuclear systems. Here it is important to note that, contrary to Talbott's translation, Khrushchev does not claim that he turned down a request by Grechko for tactical nuclear weapons to be used "against an advancing army." Rather, he rejected deployment of weapons in165Khrushchev transcript, p. 403; emphasis added. 166Ibid., pp. 402, 989. 167Bonds, Russian Military Power, p. 152; Isby, Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army, pp. 209-14. 168Hart and Gormley, "Evolution of Soviet Interest in Atomic Artillery," pp. 25-28. For discussions of the U.S. practice, see Frank J. Sackton, "Atomic Weapons for the Battalion Commander," Combat Forces Journal, December 1954/ PP- 43—44/ Edward L. Rowny, "Ground Tactics in an Atomic War," Combat Forces Journal, August 1954, pp. 18-22; George B. Sloan, "A Dynamic Role for the Army in Atomic Warfare," n.d., and Lt. Col. Charles B. Hazeltine, Jr., "The Effects of Atomic Weapons on Ground Warfare," 1 Febru¬ ary 1954, both in CJCS 471.6 (19 April 56), MMB NA, copies courtesy of Charles Naef. [202]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

tended to support an advancing Soviet army. Khrushchev seems to have sided with the Soviet military officers who argued that nuclear weapons used in a ground-force offensive would be more trouble than they were worth. Such arguments were made most forcefully in a successful attempt to halt production of Soviet nuclear artillery.

The Demise of the Atomic Cannon The Soviet nuclear artillery program appears to have survived until 1958. In an article in Red Star on 18 November 1956, commemorating Soviet Artillery Day, Marshal Chistiakov enumerated the attributes of both nuclear and conventional systems: There can be no doubt that atomic weaponry not only does not push out artillery but, on the contrary, expands the limits of its use. Artillery, in the first place rocket artillery [reaktivnaia], can be used for firing atomic shells, not only in the tactical zone of activity of the ground forces, and in their interests, but also along with long-range aircraft—for strategic goals.169

A year later, in November 1957, Soviet nuclear artillery pieces first appeared in public, in a parade in Red Square. Western sources identi¬ fied a 310-millimeter howitzer and a 420-millimeter mortar as nuclearcapable.170 Although Khrushchev's reminiscences support the contention that nuclear artillery was displayed on parade, they contradict Marshal Chistiakov's high evaluation of the weapons. Soviet nuclear scientists evidently expressed reservations about the system, especially in com¬ parison with nuclear-armed rockets. Khrushchev mentions requesting the views of a person with "great experience in the use of atomic energy, because he was the minister who was involved in these prob¬ lems."171 The reference is probably to E. P. Slavskii, the minister of medium machine building (in charge of nuclear-weapons development and production) since 1937, whose involvement in the nuclear-weap¬ ons program dates to 1946.172 In recalling the criticisms that were level¬ ed at the atomic cannon, Khrushchev mentions, in addition to its inef169M. N. Chistiakov, "Artilleriia Sovetskoi Armii" [Artillery of the Soviet Army], Krasnaia zvezda, 18 November 1956. 170Isby, Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army, p. 194. 171Khrushchev transcript, p. 402. 172Holloway, Soviet Union and the Anns Race, pp. 158-59. For some details of Slavskii's life, see John McDonnell, "The Soviet Defense Industry as a Pressure Group," chap. 6, annex B, pp. 119-20, in Soviet Naval Policy: Objectives and Constraints, ed. Michael MccGwire, Ken Booth, and John McDonnell (New York, 1975). The chapter also puts Slavskii's ministry into the context of the Soviet military industry and economy as a whole. [203]

Innovation and the Arms Race ficient use of nuclear materials, the difficulty of camouflaging the weapon and its short range. Soviet military analysts had argued against the atomic cannon as early as 1955. General Pokrovskii was apparently concerned about the dangers that would be posed to Soviet troops in using such a weapon during quickly changing battlefield situations.173 This concern became more widely expressed in high-level military publications during the 1960s and 1970s, but it is unlikely that Pokrovskii was alone in express¬ ing it during the mid-1950s.174 In 1956 a published Soviet military anal¬ ysis of the U.S. 280-millimeter atomic cannon argued that the wide publicity the weapon had received in the foreign press "could not hide the serious deficiencies limiting the possibility of its military utility." This criticism undoubtedly applied to the weapon's Soviet counterpart as well. The article reported that during maneuvers "there were occa¬ sions when the cannons could not move along by-roads washed out by rain, rolled down in a ditch, and lagged behind the troops."175 During a war, such circumstances would render a short-range nuclear weapon useless at best, or dangerous if an attempt were made to fire it. As a formerly top-secret U.S. analysis of the 280-millimeter atomic cannon described it, "its deficiencies are associated primarily with its limited range and its inefficient, inflexible projectile. The short range implies an increased vulnerability to destruction or capture, since it has to be sited near the front. It cannot be kept to the rear, since its limited maneuverability would frequently prevent its being brought within range in time." The report also called attention to an opponent's ability to keep out of range of the atomic cannon, whose shells could be fired only up to eight miles. Finally, the report appears to discuss the threat that such a short-range system would pose to the troops employing it, although this section has been sanitized and remains secret.176 For such reasons Khrushchev and the leadership decided against further production of Soviet nuclear-capable artillery. Khrushchev re¬ called: "We discussed [it] for a long time, exchanging opinions with military people, with artillerists, and in the end the artillerists them¬ selves were forced to admit that this weapon was not first-class, that it 173Pokrovskii, "Rob nauki v sovremennoi voine," p. 28. 174For later mentions of the problem, see V. Kolesov, "Massing of Artillery under Contemporary Circumstances," Voennaia mysl', no. 11 (November 1972): 73 (FBIS transla¬ tion FPD 0049). 175I. Pivovarov, "Atomnaia artilleriia SShA" [Atomic artillery of the USA], Voennye znaniia [Military knowledge], no. 7 duly 1956): 30. 176"Project Vista," 1:187. For related criticisms of the 280-mm cannon, see the Oral History interview of one of Eisenhower's aides, Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster, 10 April 1982, p. 18, in DDEL. An Air Force officer who served during the Truman administration referred to the weapon as "that fool cannon, the atomic cannon": Oral History of Eugene M. Zuckert, 27 September 1971, p. 73, in HSTL. [204]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

didn't justify the expenses that we were spending on its creation, and as for using it—it didn't fulfill its assignment. It had to be rejected, and we halted construction." The Soviets continued, however, to display the weapon. Khrushchev recounts: "We used to show it in Red Square. . . . When it was pulled out, it created a great impression—the big, long barrel—and it stood out from all the [other] artillery."177 This incident suggests that even if a weapon is rejected on military grounds, the Soviets may still see political utility in it. In this case, Khrushchev seems to have considered it important to appear to match the per¬ ceived U.S. technical achievement of a nuclear artillery piece. Yet un¬ like the Americans, who continued to deploy the 280-millimeter atomic cannon in Europe and to produce subsequent generations of nuclear artillery, the Soviets appear never to have introduced their atomic can¬ non into the armament of the troops.178 In fact, they ceased production of it in favor of missiles and, to a lesser extent, aircraft. Only in the 1970s did the Soviets initiate production of a new generation of nu¬ clear-capable artillery, following a major change in their evaluation of the nature of a future war.

Tactical Aviation One of the major decisions taken during 1958-59 was to reduce reliance on aircraft in favor of missiles. Soviet tactical aircraft during the postwar period have been deployed both with the independent Air Defense Troops (Voiska PVO Strany) and with the Frontal (Tactical) Aviation branch (Frontovaia aviatsiia) of the Soviet air forces.179 With the appearance of nuclear weapons in the Soviet arsenal, the Frontal Avia¬ tion forces were cut from a high of 12,000 planes in the mid-1950s to a few thousand in the 1960s.180 Khrushchev publicly denigrated the role of aircraft in the nuclear age, as a component of his "missile di¬ plomacy."181 At the same time, however, he approved production of several aircraft, including the Sukhoi-7 tactical fighter-bomber, the development of which had been ordered in about 1953. The Iakovlev28 jet fighter-bomber, which began to replace the II-28 in 1961, was also under advanced development at this time.182 177Khrushchev transcript, p. 402. 178Isby, Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army, p. 194. 179See Evangelista, "Evolution of the Soviet Tactical Air Forces." 180Boyd, Soviet Air Force, p. 218. 181Arnold L. Horelick and Myron Rush, Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy (Chicago, 1966). 182Ponomarev, Sovetskie aviatsionnye konstruktory, pp. 119-20; John W. R. Taylor, ed., jane's All the World's Aircraft, 1981-1982 (London, 1981), pp. 230-31; Meyer, Soviet Theatre Nuclear Forces, pt. 2, p. 12 and appendices. [205]

Innovation and the Arms Race

One should not explain the production of these aircraft in terms of a bureaucratic victory of the Soviet air force over Khrushchev. Rather, the decision makes more sense as the result of high-level deliberations in the General Staff and close consultation with the political leadership. After agreeing to curtail production of nuclear artillery, the Soviet mili¬ tary still perceived a requirement for a weapon to destroy certain categories of targets that were unsuitable for missile strikes, among them targets that required greater accuracy than the early missiles could muster, mobile targets, and targets close to the Soviet troops. It was apparently decided to destroy such targets with nuclear strikes from aircraft.183 In later years conventional weapons, including frontal aviation and artillery, would be assigned to these targets.184 But in the late 1950s Khrushchev was intent on cutting back the size of the Soviet forces, and this cutback included the conventionally armed air forces and artillery.185 A plausible case can be made that in deciding which tactical nuclear systems should be procured, the Soviets related rejec¬ tion of the atomic cannon to the decision to produce the Sukhoi fighterbomber. A prototype of the Su-7 was flown in 1956, and production models appeared in 1959. Hundreds of the aircraft were ultimately produced, including many for export. Only during the 1970s was the Su-7 replaced in Soviet Frontal Aviation by new generations of fighterbombers and ground-attack aircraft intended mainly for conventional operations.186 The decision to produce the Su-7 aircraft for delivery of tactical nu¬ clear weapons, along with tactical and operational-tactical missiles, indicates that during this fourth stage, 1958-59, the Soviets committed themselves to procuring a battlefield nuclear capability as part of an overall program to prepare the armed forces for general nuclear war. 183P. Galin, "Samolety i rakety—nositeli takticheskogo iademogo oruzhiia" [Airplanes and rockets—carriers of tactical nuclear weaponry], in Astashenkov, Atomnaia energiia, pp. 48-77; M. Kalinin, "Sovershenstvovanie boevoi gotovnosti aviatsionnykh chastei i podrazdelenii v poslevoennyi period" [The improvement of combat readiness of aviation units and subunits in the postwar period], Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal [Military-historical journal], no. 7 (July 1979): 36; S. Krasovskii, "Trends in the Use of Aircraft in a Nuclear War," Voennaia mysl', no. 3 (March 1967): 28 (FBIS translation FPD 1224/67). See also the discussion in Thomas W. Wolfe, Soviet Strategy at the Crossroads (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), pp. 179-83184I. Liutov, "Some Problems of Defense without the Use of Nuclear Weapons," Voen¬ naia mysl', no. 7 (July 1966): 36-46 (FBIS translation FPIR 0475/67); P. Shkarubskii, "The Artillery in Modern Combat Operations of the Ground Forces," Voennaia mysl', no. 6 (June 1968): 61-66 (FBIS translation FPD 0005/69). 185Hart and Gormley, "Evolution of Soviet Interest in Atomic Artillery"; Wolfe, Soviet Power and Europe, esp. chap. 8. 186Bonds, Russian Military Power pp. 56-66, 88; Joshua M. Epstein, Measuring Military Power: The Soviet Air Threat to Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1984).

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

The nuclear test program offers further evidence that these years con¬ stitute an important decision period.

Nuclear Testing and the Test Ban During the mid-1950s the U.S. Atomic Energy Detection System in¬ terpreted several Soviet nuclear explosions as being of low yield. The Joe-6 and Joe-7 devices exploded in 1953 were so judged, as were the* weapon detonated in the presence of troops in 1954 and one of the five explosions detected in 1955.187 A Soviet test of 26 September 1957 was given a preliminary estimate of "between 7 and 70 kilotons with a preference for the lower end of this yield."188 These estimates did not, in themselves, reveal much about the nature of the nuclear weapons that the Soviets would deploy. Most U.S. estimates of the mid-1950s suggested that the Soviets would succeed in incorporating low-yield weapons into their armed forces by about 1958. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) of the JCS argued that the Soviets would by that year have available low-yield weapons ranging from 0.5 to 5 kilotons. The JIC report estimated that by "mid-1956, the USSR will probably have nuclear war heads for weapons other than bombs."189 A paper prepared for the NSC indi¬ cated that by "1958-60 the Soviet Union is believed capable of produc¬ ing nuclear weapons adapted in size and weight to delivery by fighter aircraft."190 It is possible, on the basis of some partially declassified U.S. intelli¬ gence assessments, to get a more precise estimate of when the USSR succeeded in producing low-yield weapons considered small and effi¬ cient enough to deploy with tactical systems. The assessments were carried out in order to evaluate the impact of a nuclear test mor¬ atorium. The Soviets had proposed a two- or three-year moratorium on 187On the 1955 tests, one of which was estimated at 5 kilotons, see “Intelligence Information for Use in the AFSWP [Armed Forces Special Weapons Project] Weapons Oriented Course (Advanced)," 10 February 1956 (corrected 15 February' 1956), in Hollo¬ way, “Research Note." 188Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, memo, "Another Soviet Nuclear Test," Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject ser.. Alphabetical subser., box 7, folder “CIA, Vol. I (5)," in DDEL. 189JIC 436/2, "Implications of Soviet Armaments Programs and Increasing Military' Capabilities," 16 January 1956, Records of the JCS, MMB NA, p. 5. 190Ellis A. Johnson, "The National Costs and Policies Required to Maintain a Modern Weapons System," p. 129. The paper, originally classified secret, was prepared for a panel chaired by Maj. Gen. F. L. Anderson, USAF (ret.), located in OSANSA, NSC ser.. Policy Papers subser., folder "Psychological Aspects of U.S. Strategy [November 1955]," in DDEL. [207]

Innovation and the Arms Race

14 June 1957. Under the auspices of the CIA and the NSC, groups of weapons scientists were organized to prepare reports intended to pro¬ vide some background for a U.S. response.191 Even though those agen¬ cies have refused to release most of the contents of the reports, the material available still yields some knowledge of the Soviet nuclear weapons program. One report estimated that "as of the end of 1958, the United States possesses an advantage in yield versus weight ratios, in flexibility of applications, in the economy of use of special nuclear materials and possibly in knowledge of weapons effects of a specialized nature." All of these characteristics are relevant to the development of efficient, small, low-yield tactical weapons. The JCS argued on the basis of the reports that a test moratorium would prevent U.S. development of, among other things, "economical designs of warheads for highly mobile systems for the support of battle groups" and "clean weapons in the middle and lower range yields."192 Logically, a test ban would limit Soviet development of these weapons to a greater extent, in view of the United States' estimated advantage in the relevant areas of weapons technology. In 1958 the Soviets apparently conducted two series of low-yield tests, separated by a self-imposed moratorium. On 31 March 1958 Khrushchev announced a unilateral suspension of Soviet nuclear tests which would continue as long as other countries also refrained from testing. One analysis describes the timing of the move as "trans¬ parently cynical—they had just completed a major series of tests and the U.S. was just about to start one."193 The Soviet test series evidently consisted primarily of low-yield devices.194 Thus, while U.S. scientists 191"Report of NSC Ad Hoc Working Group on the Technical Feasibility of a Cessation of Nuclear Testing/' chaired by Hans Bethe, 27 March 1958, Office of the Staff Secretary, NSC ser.. Subject subser., box 6, folder "Nuclear Testing (6)/' in DDEL; Office of Scien¬ tific Intelligence, CIA, app. E, "Impact of a September 1958 Nuclear Test Moratorium on Soviet Nuclear Weapons Capabilities," prepared for Ad Hoc Panel on Nuclear Test Limitations, 18 March 1958, ibid., folder "Nuclear Testing (8)," in DDEL. For some background on the panels, see James R. Killian, Jr., Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)/ pp. 150-58. 192Donald A. Quarles, Deputy Secretary of Defense, to Chairman, Ad Hoc Panel on Nuclear Test Cessation, memo, 21 March 1958, Subject: "The Effects of a Total Suspen¬ sion or Cessation of Nuclear Testing," pp. 1-3, folder "Nuclear Testing (8)," in DDEL. 193Glenn T. Seaborg, with the assistance of Benjamin S. Loeb, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban (Berkeley, Calif., 1981), p. 11. A Soviet emigre scientist argues that the Soviet moratorium was related to a nuclear disaster that took place in the Ural Mountains sometime late in 1957. "It was probably necessary to shut down plutonium-producing plants temporarily, and this was a good excuse for Khrushchev's unexpected move": Zhores A. Medvedev, Soviet Science (Oxford, 1979), p- 96. For an extended discussion, see Medvedev, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals (New York, 1979). 194Zander and Araskog, Nuclear Explosions, p. 24. [208]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

were pointing out the advantages the United States possessed in this sphere of weapons technology, the Soviets were trying to catch up. In the spring of 1958 Khrushchev may have been convinced that Soviet weapons designs were adequate for the nuclear force he envi¬ sioned. Some of his military and scientific advisers, however, appear to have disagreed. "Our military and scientists who worked in this area of defense," he recalled, "also exerted their pressure" to persuade him not to continue the ban.195 The published translation of Khrushchev's memoirs, however, mentions only pressure from the military, leading # some observers to conclude that the "nuclear physicists engaged in the nuclear arms program were satisfied by this decision" to cease testing. This view is reinforced by Andrei Sakharov's account of his own op¬ position to the Soviet test program and of the support he apparently had among other weapons designers.196 It is not entirely clear what role the major Soviet weapons scientists played in the 1958 test-ban debate. At this stage some of them may have attempted to influence the government to continue testing, as such U.S. weapons designers as Edward Teller did. Identifying those Soviets scientists would not, however, be an easy task. During the late 1950s, for example, the nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov is said to have taken a personal interest in the battlefield applications of nuclear sys¬ tems.197 One could conjecture that he favored continued tests to per¬ fect such systems. One of Kurchatov's biographers claims that the physicist would often sign "Soldier Kurchatov" at the bottom of his notes and memoranda.198 Thus one might think that Kurchatov put pressure on Khrushchev to continue nuclear testing in order to im¬ prove the efficiency of low-yield weapons for tactical purposes, among other reasons. This conclusion, however, runs directly contrary to Sakharov's account of how Kurchatov—inspired by a memorandum Sakharov had written—traveled to Yalta "to meet with Khrushchev in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the 1958 tests."199 In any case, Khrushchev did not continue the 1958 moratorium. He 195Khrushchev transcript, pp. 940-41. 196Talbott, in Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, has Khrushchev report only that "we were under increasing pressure from our military" (p. 69). For Sakharov's role, see Sakharov Speaks, pp. 30-34. The quote is from Medvedev, Soviet Science, pp. 95-98; Medvedev appears to rely mainly on Talbott's translation and Sakharov s account. 197A scientist who worked in Kurchatov's Institute of Atomic Energy during the late 1950s reported seeing a field manual for tactical nuclear systems on Kurchatov s desk: interview with Sergei Polikanov, Darmstadt, 27 July 1984. 198Astashenkov, Podvig Akademika Kurchatova, p. 100. 199Sakharov, Sakharov Speaks, p. 32. Kurchatov argued in favor of a test ban in a contribution to a collection of articles by Soviet scientists (including Sakharov) which was published abroad as well as in the USSR. See A. V. Lebedinsky, What Russian Scientists

Say about Fallout (New York, 1962). [209]

Innovation and the Arms Race

undoubtedly was under pressure from some quarters, especially given that the United States was unwilling to agree to a mutual test ban.200 As an alternative. President Eisenhower suggested convening a panel of experts to investigate the potential for monitoring a test ban. Khrushchev agreed to this proposal, and, after observing that the Unit¬ ed States had conducted more than fifty tests since the Soviet mor¬ atorium began, he announced the resumption of Soviet testing as well.201 On 3 February 1959 "Soldier Kurchatov" announced the results of the autumn 1938 test series at the Twenty-first Party Congress of the CPSU. He stated: "These tests turned out to be highly successful. They showed the great effectiveness of several new principles, worked out by Soviet scientists and engineers. As a result, the Soviet Army re¬ ceived even more powerful, more perfect, more reliable, more com¬ pact, and cheaper atomic and hydrogen weaponry."202 Although such results were clearly to the benefit of Soviet strategic systems, cheaper and more compact weapons were especially important for battlefield nuclear applications. Kurchatov's speech extolling the results of the test series seems in¬ congruous in light of Sakharov's claim that his fellow physicist op¬ posed it. In March 1958, apparently in support of Khrushchev's im¬ position of the unilateral test ban, Kurchatov had argued before a session of the Supreme Soviet: "Soviet designers of rockets and other nuclear delivery vehicles have performed their task brilliantly. The people can rest assured. The defense of the Homeland is now reliably guaranteed."203 In Soviet parlance, such formulations are generally intended to indicate support for restraining certain military programs. Given this position, Kurchatov's later remarks could have been a kind of recantation that the Soviet leadership forced him to make so as not to reveal internal divisions over the test ban. It is evidently difficult to identify the exact constellation of factors supporting and opposing a test ban and the further development of the technology of nuclear warheads during this stage. What is clear, how¬ ever, is that key choices were made during the late 1930s on production of tactical nuclear delivery vehicles. Soviet military leaders evaluated and argued about the merits of missiles versus artillery versus aircraft. 200For speculation about Khrushchev's internal opposition, see Christer Jonsson, Soviet Bargaining Behavior: The Nuclear Test Ban Case (New York, 1979), esp. pt. 4. 201Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban, pp. 14-15; Zander and Araskog, Nuclear Explosions, pp. 24-27. 202Quoted in Astashenkov, Podvig Akademika Kurchatova, p. 142. Soviet Army generally refers to the armed forces as a whole, not simply the ground forces. 203Quoted in A. Romanov, Konstruktor kosmicheskikh korablei [Designer of space ships], 2d ed. (Moscow, 1971), p. 50. [210]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

The political leadership appears to have followed the debate closely and to have made the major decisions on the allocation of military resources. Thus, in some sense, this fourth stage in the process of innovation reveals more internal factors at work than in earlier stages. The Soviet military based their recommendations on their own under¬ standing of the requirements of a future war and the nature of military science. At the same time, however, the political leadership retained the right to sanction any resulting decisions as well as to intervene in ways that could dramatically affect Soviet military programs—for in¬ stance, in implementing a unilateral nuclear test moratorium. These interventions must in turn be understood in relation to such external factors as the attitude of the other nuclear powers toward a test ban.

Stage 5: Mass Production (1960-1964)

The fifth stage in the process of Soviet weapons innovation typically consists of the consolidation of a change in priorities, high-level an¬ nouncements acknowledging the change, mass production of the rele¬ vant new weaponry, and large-scale implementation of the new pri¬ orities. For the case of tactical nuclear weapons, this stage corresponds to the fifth stage in the process of converting to nuclear-armed missiles in general. The decision to emphasize missiles in a future war, and to procure them in large quantity instead of procuring aircraft, was evi¬ dently part of the same complex of decisions that led to extensive production and deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, primarily mis¬ siles. At the same time, however, the deployments were apparently related to specific military requirements and did not result simply from the momentum of a larger decision.

The New Doctrine Soviet military analysts typically refer to i960 as the start of a new period in Soviet military development.204 The period is characterized 204For some examples, see M. Cherednichenko, "Ob osobennostiakh razvitiia voennogo iskusstva v poslevoennyi period" [On the peculiarities of the development of military art in the postwar period], Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 6, (June 1970); L. Mikriukov and V. Babich, "Razvitie taktiki istrebitel'noi aviatsii posle vtoroi mirovoi voiny" [Development of tactics of fighter aviation after the Second World War], Voennoistoricheskii zhurnal, no. 5 (May 1977); V. Ivanov, "Development of Soviet Operational Art," Voennaia mysl', no. 3 (March 1967) (FB1S trans. FPD1224/67); S. Kozlov, "Ihe Development of Soviet Military Science after World War II," Voennaia mysl', no. 2 (Febru¬ ary 1964) (FBIS trans. FDD934). [211]

Innovation and the Arms Race

mainly by the massive introduction of nuclear-armed missiles as the main combat system of the Soviet armed forces and the concomitant assessment that a future world war would be fought primarily with such weapons. In 1956, in his address to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, Marshal Zhukov had predicted that a future war would entail "the mass use of air forces, various rocket weapons and various means of mass destruction, such as atomic, thermonuclear, chemical, and bacteriological weapons."205 Five years later. Marshal Rodion Malinovskii, Zhukov's successor as minister of defense, reported to the Twenty-second Party Congress that a future world war, if it "is un¬ leashed by the imperialist aggressors, will inevitably take the form of nuclear rocket war, that is, such a war where the main means of strik¬ ing will be the nuclear weapon and the basic means of delivering it to the target will be the rocket." Malinovskii was essentially paraphrasing the description of the new doctrine, as he put it, "distinctly and expres¬ sively laid down by our Supreme Commander-in-Chief Nikita Ser¬ geevich Khrushchev in his historical speech at the IV session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in i960."206 Khrushchev's speech, delivered on 14 January i960, was intended to summarize the results of the reevaluation of Soviet military doctrine that had taken place during the previous couple of years. This work, conducted under the auspices of the General Staff, had concluded that a future war would begin with nuclear-rocket strikes deep into the opponent's territory. Khrushchev argued in his speech that even if the United States carried out a surprise attack against the Soviet Union, the Soviets would have sufficient forces to retaliate and "give a proper rebuff to the aggressor." Khrushchev also stressed the importance of maintaining invulnerable retaliatory forces. He suggested that the USSR would be at an advantage in the event of a nuclear war, owing to its vast territory and the dispersion of its population, industry, and military forces.207 The further implications of the new doctrine were 205Zhukov's address is quoted by Pavel A. Chuvikov, Marksizm-Leninizm 0 voine i armii [Marxism-Leninism on war and the army], 2d ed. (Moscow, 1956), quoted in The Soviet Art of War: Doctrine, Strategy, and Tactics, ed. Harriet Fast Scott and William F. Scott, (Boulder, Colo., 1982), p. 135. 206R. Ia. Malinovskii, in XXII S"ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza: Stenograficheskii otchet [zzd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Ste¬ nographic report] (Moscow, 1962), 2: 108-21, quoted in Scott and Scott, Soviet Art of War, p. 168. 207Khrushchev's speech is reprinted in Pravda, 15 January i960. He discusses the new military doctrine mainly on p. 3. See also the discussion in Holloway, Soviet Union and the Arms Race, pp. 37-43. In his retirement, Khrushchev apparently revised his views and decided that neither side would be at an advantage in a nuclear war: "In this war that might come about, it will be difficult to tell the vanquished from the victor. If it breaks out between the Soviet Union and the USA, this war will of course be a common defeat": Khrushchev transcript, p. 1289. [212]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

explored in a "Special Collection" of articles, published in the journal Military Thought, starting the same month that Khrushchev delivered his speech.208

New Weapons and New Organization Khrushchev also spelled out the implications of the new doctrine for the organization and equipment of the Soviet armed forces: Our state has at its disposal powerful rocket equipment. Military aviation and the navy, with the contemporary development of military technol¬ ogy, have lost their former significance. This type of weaponry is being not reduced but replaced. Military aviation is almost all being replaced by rocket equipment. We have now sharply cut back and evidently will go on to further reductions and even a halt in the production of bombers and other obsolete equipment.209

Concerning organization, Khrushchev announced the formation of rocket units with personnel from disbanded artillery and air forces. Without explicitly saying so, Khrushchev was reporting a decision, formally ratified by the CPSU Central Committee and the Council of Ministers on 17 December 1959, to create the Strategic Rocket Forces as an independent branch of the Soviet armed forces.210 These decisions had a tremendous effect on the development of the Soviet military during the next several years, as Soviet sources de¬ scribe: "In the early 1960s, as the result of fulfillment of the decisions adopted by the party and the Soviet government for further develop¬ ing the forces and means of armed defense of our state, there was mass introduction of new, more effective nuclear-missile weapons into all branches of the armed forces, especially into the newly created strate¬ gic rocket troops."211 Production of aircraft, particularly for strategic purposes, was—as Khrushchev predicted—sharply curtailed. Further¬ more, as one analysis maintains, "no aircraft for theatre nuclear mis¬ sions entered development for production" until about 1966.212 Soviet motivations for choosing missiles over aircraft have been dis208The lead article, "The Theory of Military Art Needs Review," was by Lt. Gen. A. I. Gastilovich, deputy chief of the General Staff Academy for military-scientific work. See Holloway, Soviet Union and the Arms Race, p. 38; Penkovskiy, Penkovskiy Papers, pp. 242-43. 209Pravda, 15 January i960, p. 3. 2WVoennyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar', p. 859; Tolubko, Nedeliti, p. 188. 2ni. Pavlovskii, "The Ground Troops of the Soviet Armed Forces," Voennaia tnysi, no. 11 (November 1967): 34 (FBIS translation FPD 0157/68). 212Meyer, Soviet Theatre Nuclear Forces, pt. 2, p. 19. [213]

Innovation and the Arms Race

cussed in detail elsewhere.213 The decision was due partly to technical considerations, the Soviet long-range bomber program having been notably unsuccessful. At the same time, Khrushchev appears to have perceived a political utility in emphasizing a weapons system other than aircraft—in which the United States had an advantage. Further, ballistic missiles could be portrayed as more modern, capable, and threatening than bombers, which were vulnerable to air defenses. All of these points figured in Khrushchev's "missile diplomacy."214 In any case, the decision to go with missiles had definite implications for tactical nuclear weapons. Khrushchev's announcement that a future war would inevitably be a nuclear-rocket war indicated that the debate over aircraft versus mis¬ siles for the delivery of tactical nuclear weapons was resolved. The deployment of FROG and Scud missiles, which had begun slowly in late 1957 or early 1958, picked up its pace in the early 1960s. Several hundred systems were deployed by mid-decade.215 The large-scale deployment of these tactical nuclear weapons constitutes the final stage in the process of innovation.

Political Initiative or Military Tradition? This final stage reveals low-level bureaucratic activity related to deci¬ sions concerning control of the new missile systems. The top-down generalization about the Soviet innovation process still applies, how¬ ever, because the priorities of the political and military leadership pre¬ vailed over the parochial interests of particular officers. Some com¬ manders within the ground forces, for example, apparently had opposed the proposal to allocate missiles to a new, independent com¬ mand. Yet, after discussing several alternate suggestions, the political leadership nonetheless decided to form the Strategic Rocket Forces and make them responsible for all missiles of greater than 1,000 kilometers in range.216 Materials attributed to Oleg Penkovskiy describe the resistance of Chief Marshal of Artillery Sergei Varentsov to the allocation of longrange missiles to the new service as well as to what he considered an overemphasis on missiles within the army. Varentsov served as com213See, for example, Edward L. Warner III, The Military in Contemporary Soviet Politics: An Institutional Analysis (New York, 1977), pp. 138-45; Berman and Baker, Soviet Strategic Forces, pp. 45-49; Meyer, Soviet Theatre Nuclear Forces, pt. 1, pp. 17-21. 214Horelick and Rush, Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy. 215Nuclear Weapons Databook, vol. 3, chap. 8; Meyer, Soviet Theatre Nuclear Forces, pt. 2, pp. 11-16 and appendices; Wright, Soviet Missiles. 216Tolubko, Nedelin, p. 188. [214]

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons

mander of missile troops and artillery under the commander-in-chief of the ground forces until he was demoted as a result of Penkovskiy's espionage in 1963 (he had long been Penkovskiy's patron). Varentsov had apparently already earned the ire of top political and military leaders for, among other things, his views on Soviet missile develop¬ ment. He opposed the sharp decline in resources allocated to the artil¬ lery forces at a time when Khrushchev boasted that the increased fire¬ power of nuclear missiles would allow for substantial reductions in ground troops—particularly in artillery units.217 In his reminiscences, Khrushchev describes other artillery officers who opposed his policies. It took top-level political initiative, not merely internal bureaucratic rivalry, to enforce the new priorities.218 Even in the details of military planning for the new tactical nuclear weapons, the top-down approach remains evident. One finds that to a certain extent the Soviets worked out their plans according to standard operating procedures and traditions. At the same time, however, the top leadership still determined the hierarchy of military objectives, largely in response to foreign developments. The impact of NATO military deployments on the Soviet tactical nuclear posture constitutes a clear example. Not only did the initial U.S. deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Europe act as a stimulus to the Soviet programs, but U.S. and NATO nuclear weapons and related facilities became prime targets of the emerging Soviet tactical nuclear force. Soviet military literature makes clear the importance of an enemy's nuclear systems as targets for Soviet nuclear attack during the 1960s. Such military requirements affected even the most traditional forms of Soviet warfare, such as the offensive tank operation: "When destroying an enemy tank grouping it should be remembered that its nuclear weapons are primary objectives."219 In defensive operations as well, "destruction of the attacking troops' nuclear weapons" is described as "undoubtedly the main [task]," the objective of which is "to deprive him of superiority, thereby creating the most advantageous conditions for breaking up the attack being readied or which has already begun."220 217For Khrushchev's views, see his speech in Pravda, 15 January i960, and the discus¬ sion in Wolfe, Soviet Power and Europe, pp. 173-78. On Varentsov's views, see Penkovskiy, Penkovskiy Papers, pp. 3, 289-91, 334. For a Soviet account of the Penkovskiv affair, see N. F. Chistiakov, Po zakonu i sovesti [According to law and conscience] (Moscow, 1979), chap. 1. 218Khrushchev transcript, p. 936. 219A. Zhilin, "Some Questions of Meeting Engagements of Large Tank Groupings," Voennaia mysl', no. 2 (February 1964): 2 (FBIS translation FDD 934). 220M. Fedulov, M. Shmelev, A. Siniaev, and I. Liutov, "Problems of Modern Com¬ bined-Arms Combat," Voennaia mysl', no. 10 (October 1964): 32 (FBIS translation FDD

9M)[215]

Innovation and the Arms Race

Even into the late 1960s, the Soviets did not exhibit the mentality of "nuclear plenty" that affected U.S. military planners throughout the previous decade. Restrictions on numbers of Soviet weapons available contributed to the USSR's decision to put enemy nuclear weapons at the top of its hierarchy of military targets. It is not always possible to inflict a simultaneous and decisive defeat due to a lack of weapons, particularly nuclear ammunition. Consequently, the defeat of an enemy before he can launch his attack should be carried out in a selective manner. During this period of destruction, involving the use of nuclear weapons and strikes by artillery, air units and other weapons, prime attention should be given to the destruction of the enemy's nuclear missile weapons.221

Analyses of the relationship among such writings, deployments of weapons, and military exercises persuasively suggest a link between NATO's deployments of nuclear weapons and the Soviet tactical nu¬ clear posture.222 In some sense, the fact that Soviet plans for the use of tactical nuclear weapons were worked out in such detail—by the relating of Soviet forces to specific NATO military targets—could signify a loss of politi¬ cal initiative. There is some evidence to suggest that Khrushchev con¬ ceived of nuclear weapons in terms more of their deterrent effect than of their specific military utility in the event of war. As he put it in 1971, following his forced retirement, the most important military posture is "that which defends our country and deters [sderzhivaet] our opponent from an attack on us and our allies. And that," he added, depends on "rocket-nuclear weapons, strategic rockets, tactical rockets." The pur¬ pose of such rockets, he argued, is "to threaten an opponent at the foundation of his existence, that is, to strike his cities and industry and carry out strikes against the opponent on his territory."223 During his tenure in office, Khrushchev had made similar remarks, including some in his January i960 speech. David Holloway points out: Khrushchev seems to have gone further than most military thinkers in believing (though the evidence is not conclusive) that the requirements for fighting and winning a nuclear war did not need to be met, and that war could be prevented through the threat of destructive retaliation. This 221L. Solov'ev and S. Taran, "The Employment of Defense by the Ground Forces under Modern Conditions," Voennaia mysl', no. 12 (December 1968): 49 (FBIS translation FPD 0102/69). 222See especially Meyer, Soviet Theatre Nuclear Forces; and Trulock, "Weapons of Mass Destruction in Soviet Military Strategy." 223Khrushchev transcript, pp. 989, 403.

The Origins of Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons was at variance with the military insistence that a strategy had to be devised, and the forces provided, for waging and winning a general nu¬ clear war.224

If this were Khrushchev's only military goal—to threaten nuclear re¬ taliation against an enemy's civilian population and industry—he had no need for short-range tactical nuclear weapons. It is clear, however, that Khrushchev was well aware of the battlefield uses to which his military planners assigned nuclear weapons. He himself recalls having discussed such plans, in regard to the issue of nuclear artillery versus rockets, for example. It may well be that military preparations for fight¬ ing with nuclear weapons went beyond what Khrushchev had antici¬ pated. During the turbulent last years of his rule, he may have paid less attention to such developments than he had done earlier. In one respect, Khrushchev continued to oversee Soviet develop¬ ments in the tactical nuclear field, because he included the relevant weapons as part of his arms-control policy. Although it is not certain how serious Soviet disarmament proposals at the time were, the accep¬ tance of any of them by the West would have curtailed the deployment of tactical nuclear (and other) forces. Soviet leaders evidently recog¬ nized this fact; Marshal Zhukov declared in 1957 that "tactical atomic weapons, if they are not banned, will in the next few years be introduced into the organic armament of the troops in place of conventional weap¬ ons."225 The NATO powers did not pursue Soviet proposals to limit production and deployment of nuclear weapons during the 1950s, so the Soviet political leaders' ability to rein in those military systems in the interest of arms control was never tested. One could argue, how¬ ever, that Khrushchev would have more consistently pursued the ob¬ jective of a retaliatory "deterrent" force, rather than a "war-fighting" force, if the United States had been willing to limit its forces as well. 224Holloway, Soviet Union and the Arms Race, p. 42. See also the discussion in Wolfe, Soviet Power and Europe, pp. 133-37225Zhukov quoted in Krasnaia zvezda, 23 March 1957, by Garthoff, Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age, p. 112.

[217]

[6] Explaining the Technological Arms Race [Technological] developments have opened new vistas for appli¬ cation in strategic, tactical and naval warfare. As a natural result, we can foresee greater and greater demands for nuclear weapons and the fissionable materials on which they are based. —I. I. Rabi, chairman, GAC, 1953 [The Strategic Defense Initiative] asserts the fundamental morali¬ ty of peace through strength, and the fundamental morality of peace through technology. —Reagan administration aide, 1985

We have seen the plausibility of applying the bottom-up versus topdown generalizations to the process of weapons innovation in the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively. Now let us reex¬ amine the debate on external versus internal sources of the arms race in light of evidence from the case studies of U.S. and Soviet tactical nu¬ clear weapons. We can then apply the insights gained to more recent developments. Finally, the conclusions drawn from the case studies may suggest measures for coping with the Soviet-American competi¬ tion in weapons technology.

The Internal-Versus-External Debate Revisited

Let us see how well the explanations offered by the internal and external schools account for the developments we have been examin¬ ing. For both the U.S. and the Soviet cases, it is not difficult to identify plausible bureaucratic/organizational explanations, on the one hand, and systemic/balance-of-power/action-reaction ones, on the other. [218]

Ex-plaining the Technological Arms Race

U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons A variety of internal explanations for the U.S. development of tacti¬ cal nuclear weapons have been put forward. Many accounts argue for a mix of bureaucratic, economic, and technological factors. External ex¬ planations for the development tend to emphasize a Soviet military threat to Europe, the need to inspire hope and enhance cohesion in the NATO alliance, or both.

More Bang for the Buck. One common internal explanation for U.S.' tactical nuclear weapons is an economic one: nuclear weapons pro¬ vided "more bang for the buck" and were a cheap substitute for large armed forces. We have seen that such economic arguments were ap¬ parently useful in persuading President Truman to approve the devel¬ opment of tactical nuclear weapons. They were important as well to the Eisenhower "New Look" policy. During the the debate over the atomic expansion of 1952, however—the major decision affecting the production of tactical nuclear weapons—members of the NSC ex¬ pressed more concern about the economic impact of the decision than relief about how much money it would save. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, for example, felt obliged to offer his opinion as to whether the impact of the program would "come at a time when the economy of the country could stand it," and suggested that it "probably" would.1 Only after Congress had approved the expansion would some of its advocates admit the enormity of the cost. Thus Gordon Dean, chair¬ man of the AEC, revealed in his memoirs that the program's budget would exceed "the combined capital investment" of the top half-dozen U.S. corporations.2 Even at the time, however, another prominent supporter of tactical nuclear weapons. Senator Brien McMahon, was obliged to concede that neither the JCS nor the civilian service secretaries in the Pentagon believed that expansion of atomic-weapons production "would result in the reduction of the over-all costs of the mobilization program. 3 Later, as tactical nuclear weapons were being deployed in Europe in 1954, the secretaries of state and defense wrote to the president that some changes in NATO forces and equipment could be anticipated. "There is litte hope, however, that the new system of weapons will cost Memorandum for the President, 17 January 1952, PSF, folder "Atomic Energy— Expansion of the Atomic Energy Program," p. 4, in HSTL. 2Gordon Dean, Report on the Atom, 2d ed. (New York, 1957), pp- 68-69. 3"An Interview with Senator McMahon," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 8 (January 1952): 13. [219]

Innovation and the Arms Race

less than the system it replaces, and it might well cost more."4 Indeed, the most vociferous proponents of tactical nuclear weapons were call¬ ing for the production of tens and even hundreds of thousands of them.5 Such production would cost enormous sums of money, even if it did replace manpower with firepower. Tactical nuclear weapons were evidently not considered a big money-saver in the sense of permitting reductions in personnel. Such, at least, was the opinion of the leading U.S. military figures at the time the weapons were first produced. Members of the U.S. Army were particularly critical of the "more bang for the buck" argument, starting with the chief of staff himself. General Matthew Ridgway claimed that the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons "does not warrant the assumption that the need for soldiers will become less. On the con¬ trary," he argued, "there are indications that the trend will be in the opposite direction." He cited several reasons for needing more forces: the increased depth of the battlefield, the need for greater dispersion of forces, and the multiplication of maintenance and support facilities to supply large numbers of small, mobile combat units.6 In short, the vastly increased destructive power of nuclear weapons would entail far more battlefield casualties than in conventional warfare. Therefore, many argued, more troops were needed. It is not clear, however, that supporters of tactical nuclear weapons would have changed their position even if large numbers of troops had been available. Many proponents of battlefield nuclear warfare be¬ lieved they occupied the moral high ground in preferring nuclear weapons to conventional armies. In 1954, for example, NATO com4Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense (Wilson) to President, memo. Subject: Recommended U.S. Position on NATO Nuclear Strategy, 2 or 3 November 1954, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, vol. 5: Western European Security, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1983), p. 531 (hereafter FRUS). 5James Gavin, War and Peace in the Space Age (New York, 1958), p. 174, recounts his congressional testimony in the spring of 1955, in which he called for tens of thousands. On p. 228 he predicts a need for ten times that many in the future. AEC commissioner Thomas Murray, in his Nuclear Policy for War and Peace (Cleveland, i960), pp. 60-61, also saw a need for tens of thousands, whereas his colleague Gordon Dean, in Report on the Atom, saw no limit to the number of tactical nuclear weapons that might be required; see Dean's chap. 6, esp. p. 327. 6Ridgway's remarks come from a speech delivered on 9 September 1954, quoted in Memorandum for Admiral Radford, Subject: Differing Philosophies, Generals Ridgway and Gruenther, 11 September 1954, p. 3, CJCS 092.2 North Atlantic Treaty, in MMB NA. 1 am grateful to Charles Naef for calling this document to my attention. Ridgway ex¬ pressed similar views in congressional testimony, in an undated document, "Notes for Questions or Comment," Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject ser.. Alphabetical subser., box 3, folder "Army—Testimony [by Gen. Ridgway] re Strength," in DDEL. See also his biography, Matthew Ridgway, Soldier (New York, 1956). For similar views from other Army officers, see Maxwell Taylor, The Uncertain Trumpet (New York, 1959); and Gavin, War and Peace, pp. 139, 151, 229.

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

mander General Alfred Gruenther made the following argument: "When one considers the low value placed on human life by the Sovi¬ ets, we, in our humble opinion, believe it would be a major mistake for the West to adopt a type of strategy which substitutes human beings for atomic weapons."7 A similar view, in nearly identical words, was expressed a couple of years earlier by the authors of the Vista report, which promoted tactical nuclear weapons as the solution to European security problems.8 Secretary of State John Foster Dulles put it more eloquently in a meeting with NATO foreign ministers in 1954: "If the people of the free world were to renounce the use of their actual and potential superiority in terms of new [nuclear] weapons and means for their application with greater mobility and flexibility, then they would have abandoned the principles which throughout the ages have en¬ abled those who had freedom to prevail against the brute power of a despotic system."9 Thus, although the internal economic argument was advanced to justify the production of tactical nuclear weapons, it cannot serve as the sole or even the main explanation for the decision.

The Atomic Army. Perhaps the most common internal explanation for the U.S. development of tactical nuclear weapons is of the bureaucra¬ tic-politics variety: The U.S. Army learned from the Air Force that nuclear weapons were the key to budgetary and bureaucratic success. Battlefield nuclear weapons, the argument goes, became a means of enhancing the Army's position vis-a-vis the other services. Evidence for this view is found in the testimony of some Army officials them¬ selves. General John B. Medaris, for example, argued to his colleagues in favor of tactical nuclear missiles: You're fighting a losing game. If you put all your energy and effort into justifying these conventional weapons and ammunition even though I know we need them, I think you are going to get very little money of any kind. It is far easier to justify a budget with the modern items that are popular and I would strongly recommend that you increase the amount you show in the budget for the production of missiles, limiting yourself on the other items to the modest quantities that you know you can get by with. If you increase your demands for guided missiles, I think there is a fair chance you can get a decent budget. Why don't you accentuate the 7Gruenther's speech of 8 June 1954 is quoted in Memorandum for Adm. Radford, p. 2. 8"Project Vista: A Study of Ground and Air Tactical Warfare with Especial Reference to the Defense of Western Europe," 2 February 1952, chap. 2, p. io, in MMB NA. 9Statement by the Secretary of State to the North Atlantic Council Closed Ministerial Session, Paris, 23 April 1934, FRUS, pt. 1, pp. 512-13. For a discussion of the extent to which such views influenced U.S. thinking about tactical nuclear weapons, see (Lt. Col.) A. C. Bacevich, The Pentomic Era: The U.S. Army between Korea ami Vietnam (Washington, D.C., 1986), esp. pp. 56-58. [221]

Innovation and the Arms Race positive and go with what is popular since you cannot get the other stuff anyway?10

Students of bureaucratic politics have cited Medaris's remarks to sup¬ port a bureaucratic explanation for the development of tactical nuclear missiles.11 Yet the bureaucratic perspective only partly accounts for development of the weapons. It especially fails to explain the initiation of programs to develop tactical nuclear weapons.

The Lure of Technology. Another internal explanation, related to the bureaucratic one, focuses on the role of technology. Versions of this explanation come primarily from scientists and biographers of weap¬ ons designers.12 Their argument seems valid as far as it goes—that "ideas for a new weapon system derive in the first place, not from the military, but from different groups of scientists and technologists who are concerned to replace or improve old weapons systems."13 But as we have seen, the role of the weapons designers was eventually eclipsed by that of the military services, the AEC, and Congress. Still, the emphasis on technology contributes some understanding of how new weapons are promoted to a broader public. Weapons innova¬ tions are often presented as a "technical fix" for security problems— what General Omar Bradley once criticized as "the permanent Ameri¬ can desire to substitute machines for men and magic weapons for conventional armaments."14 It was to this desire that General Medaris alluded in proposing that the Army "accentuate the positive and go with what is popular." Decades later, a group of "military reformers" in the United States would echo General Bradley's complaint that the U.S. military and public were too susceptible to the lure of technol¬ ogy.15 The focus of their criticism is the notion that only through the exploitation of its technological advantages can the United States coun¬ ter Soviet numerical strengths.

The Soviet Threat. The standard external explanation for the develop¬ ment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons holds that they were one tech10John B. Medaris, Countdown for Decision (New York, i960), p. 65. nE.g., Michael H. Armacost, The Politics of Weapons Innovation: The Thor-Jupiter Contro¬ versy (New York, 1969), esp. pp. 42-49. For the classic statement of the Army's role and "essence," from the bureaucratic-politics perspective, see Morton H. Halperin, Bureaucra¬ tic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C., 1974), esp. pp. 34-35, 43-46. 12Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York, 1979), esp. pp. 96, 109; John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy (New York, 1974); Solly Zuckerman, Nuclear Illusion and Reality (New York, 1982). 13Zuckerman, Nuclear Illusion and Reality, p. 103. 14Speech published in Combat Forces Journal 2 (December 1951): 11-12. 15See, e.g., James Fallows, National Defense (New York, 1981). See also Bacevich, Pentomic Era, esp. chap. 6. [222]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

nological response to a Soviet numerical advantage in ground forces. The explanation falls under the action-reaction rubric. One of the earliest expressions of the argument comes, ironically, from Ralph Lapp, an observer who would later reverse his position and cite internal determinants and the "technological imperative" for the development of new weapons: The overwhelming troop superiority of the Soviet Union jeopardized the security of Western Europe. No means seemed in sight to oppose the , crushing weight of Red divisions with Allied ground forces in comparable number. Lacking the man power the military leaders in the United States decided to employ weapon power against the threat of the Red Army. It was only natural to turn to the most potent of all weapons and to adapt it to the battlefield. Emphasis was therefore placed upon the development of smaller-lighter A-weapons which might be used tactically to ward off the threat of Communist aggression.16

Lapp's is at best an idealized description of the process of weapons innovation. In fact, it is quite inaccurate as concerns the origins of tactical nuclear weapons. An "overwhelming" superiority of Soviet ground forces was not the initial impetus to the development of such weapons. U.S. military leaders had already "decided to employ weap¬ on power" in the form of the Strategic Air Command to counter this perceived Soviet threat.17 Some U.S. atomic scientists, most notably J. Robert Oppenheimer, viewed the military's emphasis on strategic nu¬ clear bombing as dangerous and immoral. When they discovered new technical means of producing small nuclear weapons, the scientists— not the military—proposed the tactical-nuclear "solution." They viewed their proposal as a way of opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb. As we have seen, the first concrete discussion of the battlefield appli¬ cation of nuclear weapons was inspired not by a Soviet threat to Eu¬ rope but by the Korean war. A number of weapons scientists visited Korea and studied the possibilities for using nuclear weapons there. Only later, when large-scale production of tactical systems was under debate, did the scientists, along with their military and congressional allies, call attention to the situation in Europe. It appears that the threat of a Soviet conventional invasion of West-

16Ralph Lapp, The New Force: The Story of Atoms and People (New York, 1953), p. 119. 17Indeed, plans for establishing a worldwide network of strategic bomber bases pre¬ dated identification of the Soviet Union as a potential major threat. See Melvyn P. Leffler, "The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-1948," American Historical Review 89 (April 1984): 346-81. [223]

Innovation and the Arms Race

ern Europe was considerably exaggerated during the early postwar years.18 By 1948 the Soviets had demobilized their wartime forces to a far greater extent than the United States was publicly willing to indi¬ cate. Recently some former NATO officials have admitted the existence of several "soft" areas of U.S. intelligence that led to an overestimation of Soviet capabilities.19 The conventional balance in Europe in 1948, when tactical nuclear weapons were invented, did not substantially favor the Soviet side. During the early 1950s, when the Soviet forces had been reequipped and numerically augmented, NATO planners were anticipating a Western conventional buildup that would match the (still overestimated) Soviet force, without considering the use of nuclear weapons. Had the so-called Lisbon force goals been fully im¬ plemented, NATO would have enjoyed superiority over the Soviet forces deployed in Eastern Europe and the western USSR. The argu¬ ment that tactical nuclear weapons could compensate for numerically inferior NATO forces received most prominence only after the weap¬ ons had already been deployed in Europe.20 Even at that point, some of the most prominent supporters of tactical nuclear weapons declined to invoke a Soviet threat. General James Gavin, for example, on the basis of his analysis of Soviet logistic capabilities and possible invasion routes, claimed "l do not think Soviet prospects of conquering Europe by nonatomic means are very bright, and they realize this."21 The action-reaction explanation does not account for the development of tactical nuclear weapons, although, as we have seen, the situation in Europe (and earlier in Korea) did serve as a "window," or rationale, for them.

Alliance Cohesion. Some analysts argue that the United States deploys nuclear weapons in Europe primarily to reassure its NATO allies of its commitment to participate in their defense. Such nuclear reassurance is said to follow in the wake of alliance crises as a means to restore lost cohesion.22 This notion of a U.S. military fix for alliance 18Matthew Evangelista, "Stalin's Postwar Army Reappraised," International Security 7 (Winter 1982-83): 110-38. 19See, e.g., the remarks by a member of the first U.S. Joint Staff and NATO Standing Group, Robert C. Richardson (Brig. Gen., USAF, ret.), "NATO Nuclear Strategy: A Look Back," Strategic Review, Spring 1981, p. 38. 20For an excellent review and critique of the arguments, see Morton Ft. Fialperin. Limited War in the Nuclear Age (New York, 1963), chap. 4. For a thorough discussion of the Lisbon goals and other issues related to European rearmament, see Charles Naef, "The Politics of West German Rearmament, 1950-1956" (diss., Rutgers University, 1979). 21Gavin, War and Peace, pp. 147-48. 22This explanation for NATO's nuclear weapons is discussed in David N. Schwartz, NATO’s Nuclear Dilemmas (Washington, D.C., 1983); Jane M. O. Sharp, "Arms Control and Alliance Commitments," Political Science Quarterly, 100 (Winter 1985-86): 649-67; Christoph Bertram, "European Security and the German Problem," International Security 4 (Winter 1979-80): 111-12. [224]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

political problems constitutes a second type of external explanation. Like the action-reaction explanation, it has tended to be employed as a post hoc rationale for deployments made for other reasons.23 It does not account well for the U.S. decision to develop tactical nuclear weap¬ ons for deployment in Europe. The United States began to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Eu¬ rope in 1952, apparently without the knowledge of NATO allies. As we have seen. General Eisenhower had extremely limited access to infor¬ mation about the tactical nuclear weapons designated for the support of his forces when he served as NATO's first supreme commander. Logically, the deployment of nuclear weapons to Europe, because it was kept secret, could not have been intended to reassure the allies or bolster alliance cohesion. When U.S. military leaders did discuss nu¬ clear weapons with the allies at all—and even then only in general terms—they argued that the new weapons would not affect existing rearmament plans and would not serve as a panacea for Europe's security problems.24 When the NATO allies began to learn of the U.S. deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, they generally reacted with concern. The JCS sought to assuage such concern by inviting certain NATO representa¬ tives to observe a nuclear test in Nevada in June 1952. The State Department and the AEG rejected the proposal mainly on the ground that the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 did not allow foreigners access to "restricted data" or "classified security information" concerning nu¬ clear weapons.25 Not until it was amended in 1954 did the act permit non-U.S. NATO commanders to learn anything about the nuclear forces intended for their defense. "Thus," one author points out, "France's Marshal Juin, commanding allied ground forces in Europe, was forbidden to know the nature and number of atomic arms he might eventually have at his disposal."26 The NATO allies first learned of U.S. plans for the tactical atomic defense of Western Europe wThen Dulles mentioned to the foreign ministers of Britain and France over dinner in July 1953 that the United States was planning to deploy atomic-capable 280-millimeter artillery pieces in Europe. The Europeans seemed relieved to learn that the weapons would initially be deployed only with conventional ammuni¬ tion. British acting foreign minister Lord Salisbury "implied a reluc23For a discussion, see Matthew Evangelista, "Case Studies and Theories of the Arms Race," Bulletin of Peace Proposals 17, no. 2 (1986): 197-206. 24See, e.g., Gen. Omar Bradley's remarks, as quoted in a telegram from U.S. Perma¬ nent Representative on the North Atlantic Council (Draper) to Department of State, 22 September 1952, in FRUS, pt. 1, pp. 327-28. 25See the letters and memoranda from May 1952 in PSF, Subject File, folder "NSC Atomic—atomic test Nevada (attendance of NATO representatives)," in HSIL. 26Robert Endicott Osgood, NATO: The Entangling Alliance (Chicago, 1962), pp. 105-6.

[225I

Innovation and the Arms Race

tance to emphasize or point up the fact that the guns could also fire atomic shells/'27 Essentially, the United States presented its allies with a fait accompli. As a State Department official put it at the time, the United States did not consider it "necessary or advisable" to "seek permission for this project either from the North Atlantic Council or from any of the NATO countries or Germany, any more than in the case of the deployment of other weapons."28 This approach does not suggest a U.S. interest in using nuclear weapons to encourage alliance cooperation or enhance cohesion. Later, when queried by NATO foreign ministers about U.S. nuclear plans, Dulles would say only—according to notes taken at the closed meeting—that the United States "has developed weapons in number and variety such that they are assuming almost [a] conventional role."29 At another restricted session of the North Atlantic Council, in April 1954, Dulles formally revealed U.S. plans "to use atomic weapons as conventional weapons" in the event of a Soviet invasion. The NATO representatives attending the meeting were evidently stunned by Dul¬ les's remarks. As a cover letter accompanying a copy of the top-secret speech put it, "You could have heard a pin drop as the Secretary talked." Requests from the British delegation for a copy of the speech were denied.30 Rather than reassure the Europeans, the United States had fright¬ ened them with talk of employing nuclear weapons as if they were conventional. In November 1954 a joint memorandum from the secre¬ taries of state and defense advised that subsequent "U.S. actions will be designed to limit, insofar as possible, the political problems inherent in a NATO nuclear concept."31 The allies evidently continued to ex¬ press concern about U.S. plans, apparently causing some exasperation in the Pentagon. A memorandum for the chairman of the JCS com¬ plained, "Our allies might endeavor to impose a veto on actions which the United States considers essential to its own security or to the se¬ curity of its armed forces exposed to enemy attack." It proposed that 27Memorandum by Douglas MacArthur II, 15 July 1953, in FRUS, pt. 2, pp. 1641-42. 28Deputy Under Secretary of State (Matthews) to Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (Nash), 30 July 1953, in FRUS, pt. 1, pp. 437-39. 29From Notes Prepared by Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs (Merchant) on the Restricted Session of the North Atlantic Council, 16 December 1953, in FRUS, pt. 1, pp. 476-78. ^Livingston Merchant to Walter Bedell Smith, 24 April 1954, with "Proposed Talking Paper' for Use in Clarifying United States Position regarding Atomic and Hydrogen Weapons during Course of NATO Meeting in Paris on 23 April 1954/' available on microfiche from Declassified Document Reference Service of Carrollton Press (Arlington, Va.). Dulles's speech is reprinted in FRUS, pt. 1, pp. 509-14. Part of Merchant's cover letter is quoted in a footnote on p. 509, but not the remark about hearing a pin drop. 31Memorandum cited in n. 4 above in FRUS, p. 531. [226]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

"both the British and the French should be informed that insofar as NATO is concerned the United States reserves the right instantly to use atomic weapons in event of enemy attack," even if there is no time to obtain the allies7 concurrence.32 In December the United States per¬ suaded the NATO Council of Ministers to approve MC 48, "The Most Effective Pattern of NATO Military Strength for the Next Few Years," a document drawn up by the NATO Standing Group.33 The document reflected the U.S. objective "to normalize the use of atomic weapons," as NATO supreme commander General Gruenther put it. Still, he ex¬ pressed concern about the reluctance "of some NATO representatives to face up to the issues in the Standing Group paper," and he resur¬ rected the earlier proposal to have allied observers at an upcoming nuclear test shot.34 By mid-1956 Gruenther had still not managed to get the allies to agree that the "successful defense of NATO has come to depend, irreversibly, on the use of atomic weapons." The more the Europeans learned about the consequences of nuclear war—the peril posed by radioactive fallout, for example—the less confident they be¬ came in U.S. policies. "An educational campaign," Gruenther argued in a telegram to the secretary of defense, is "urgently needed on the subject of fallout with the purpose of re-establishing confidence in the minds of the Europeans as to the essentiality of our atomic posture and our ability to cope with the associated problems."35 Documentary evidence from the 1950s makes clear that U.S. officials did not see the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe as a means for reassuring the allies of the United States' commitment to their defense; they understood that the nuclear weapons themselves had become a major cause of concern. During the intervening decades, thousands of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons have been deployed in Europe. Yet the revival of antinuclear sentiment starting in the late 1970s offers testimony to the enduring difficulty of achieving "the pur¬ pose of re-establishing confidence in the minds of the Europeans" when it comes to U.S. nuclear policy.

The American Process of Innovation. All of the external and internal explanations that have been offered have something to contribute to an 32Memorandum for Admiral Radford, 8 December 1954, author unknown, CJCS 092.2 North Atlantic Treaty (11 September 1954), in MMB NA. 33Mentioned in Armed Forces Policy Council Meeting, Briefing Notes, Subject: Agen¬ da Item No. 2—"New Weapons, Including Atomic, for Allied Forces," 5 October 1955, Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject ser. DOD subser., box 6, folder "Military’ Planning, 1954-1955 (4)," in DDEL. 34Gruenther to Radford, telegram, 10 December 1954, CJCS 092.2 North Atlantic Treaty (10 December 1954); copy courtesy of Charles Naef. 35Gruenther to Secretary of Defense, telegram, 2 July 1956, CJCS 471.6 (2 July 1956)/ in MMB NA; copy courtesy of Charles Naef. [227]

Innovation and the Arms Race

understanding of the United States' decision to develop tactical nuclear weapons. Lest we conclude that "everything" plays a role in such decisions, I have divided the process into five stages so that we may see which factors come into play at which point. The explanation of¬ fered here can be generalized to account for other U.S. decisions on weapons innovation. Thus we find that internal factors figure promi¬ nently in the early stages, as scientists seek support for new technical ideas among their military associates. In the case of tactical nuclear weapons, these internal influences were evident in the efforts of Oppenheimer and his colleagues on the GAC and other agencies working with the AEC. During the middle stages, external factors—such as the identifica¬ tion of a foreign threat—serve to aid the process of consensus-build¬ ing, as the supporters of new weapons seek funding from Congress. External events often provide a window of opportunity that enhances the prospects for a particular innovation. The Korean war constituted the first such window, and the fear of another Korea in Europe the second. Both situations gave a boost to efforts to promote tactical nu¬ clear weapons. During the later stages, arguments focusing on the new weapon's cost-effectiveness, its desirability to NATO allies, or its usefulness as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the USSR may come into play. The first two arguments figured in the case of tactical nuclear weapons, but—in the years before the era of Soviet-American arms control—the third had not yet emerged. It is often only at the last stage that a weapon reaches the attention of the Executive and comes to the Con¬ gress for allocation of production funds. Tactical nuclear weapons reached this point during the third expansion of the U.S. atomic-ener¬ gy program, during the spring of 1952, at the same time the initial firstgeneration tactical nuclear weapons were being deployed in Europe.

Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons Far less has been written about the genesis of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons than about their U.S. counterparts. The literature on interna¬ tional relations and the arms race, however, as well as Soviet studies, reveal explanations that could plausibly be put forward by proponents of both the internal and external schools.

More Rubble for the Ruble. There is considerable evidence to support the notion that a Soviet equivalent of the U.S. "more bang for the buck" economic rationale played some role in the development of the USSR's tactical nuclear force. Nikita Khrushchev claimed in i960 that "fire¬ power" mattered more than "how many soldiers we have under arms, [228]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

how many people are wearing soldiers' greatcoats." He used this argu¬ ment to justify cuts in conventional forces which he claimed had re¬ duced the Soviet armed forces by one-third since 1955.36 Khrushchev's reductions, and his rationale for them, met resistance from some sec¬ tors of the military right from the start. Lieutenant General Krasil'nikov of the General Staff, for example, argued that the prospect of a nuclear battlefield "calls not for the reduction of the numbers of combatants but for their logical further increase, since the threat of wiping out divi¬ sions grows, and large reserves will be needed for their replace¬ ment."37 A number of Soviet military figures cited arguments by U.S. generals Bradley, Collins, Ridgway, Taylor, and others to support a case for maintaining mass armies.38 Khrushchev's views prevailed, however, as the Soviet armed forces were cut, by his count, from a postwar high of 5,763,000 in 1955 to 3,623,000 in i960.39 Although Khrushchev clearly had an economic motive for cutting the size of the conventional armies—primarily to free labor for civilian purposes—he apparently did not initiate tactical nuclear programs with this as his major goal. In a curious inversion of the U.S. situation, Khrushchev used the deployment of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons to justify his troop reductions, whereas U.S. officials used Western short¬ falls in troop levels to justify deployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weap¬ ons.40 In neither case does the economic rationale suffice to explain the process of weapons innovation.

The Atomic Army. Students of bureaucratic politics might put for¬ ward the following explanation for Soviet tactical nuclear weapons: As the premier service in the Soviet armed forces, the army would natu¬ rally demand and get the most modern weapons and seek to adapt them to its traditional roles. Graham Allison uses an explanation of this sort to account for the substantial Soviet deployment of medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) in the late 1950s and for what he sees as a Soviet delay in deploying ICBMs. Allison argues that deployment of ICBMs was delayed because, until i960, there was no organization to push for them. When the Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF) were formed,

36Pravda,

15 January i960. 37S. Krasil'nikov, Marksizm-Leninizm 0 voine i arniii [Marxism-Leninism on war and the army] (Moscow, 1956), pp. 148, 150-51, quoted in Raymond L. Garthoff, Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age (New York, 1958), pp. 79, 154, in a slightly different translation. 38See Garthoff's discussion in Soviet Strategy, pp. 124-25. 39Khrushchev, in Pravda, 15 January i960. For a good overview of the debates over conventional reductions, see Thomas W. Wolfe, Soviet Power and Europe, 1Q45-1970 (Bal¬ timore, 1970), chap. 8. 40European members of NATO tended to adopt the Soviet approach—that is, justify¬ ing their failure to meet the Lisbon force goals on the basis of the U.S. deployment of atomic weapons in Europe. See Schwartz, NATO's Nuclear Dilemmas, pp. 31-34. [229]

Innovation and the Arms Race

the ICBM got a strong organizational advocate, whose influence was reflected in subsequent missile deployments. In the meantime, the army deployed its preferred weapons—MRBMs—as a result of its greater bureaucratic strength.41 This kind of explanation could be applied to the case of tactical nuclear weapons as well. These weapons would appear to conform more easily to the Soviet army's traditional roles, and one would ex¬ pect to see the bureaucratically strong artillery forces pressing for adoption of nuclear artillery, for example. Indeed, as we have seen, the atomic cannon was one of the first Soviet tactical nuclear systems to be displayed in public, in 1957. But there is no compelling reason to iden¬ tify internal, bureaucratic factors as crucial to the decision. The Soviet weapon appeared many years after its U.S. counterpart, and it could not have been developed without high-level sanction, probably from Stalin himself. Other students of bureaucratic politics and organizational behavior might, in fact, make the opposite argument about the army's attitude toward nuclear artillery—that the Soviet ground forces would see nu¬ clear weapons as a threat to their "organizational essence," a means of replacing their reliable and battle-tested conventional artillery pieces with unproven technologies.42 Such resistance on the part of military services to innovations that appear to threaten their essence are well documented.43 Herein lies an obvious problem, in that the bureaucratic/organiza¬ tional perspective predicts both advocacy of and opposition to innova¬ tion. This problem aside, what contribution can the analysis of bu¬ reaucratic factors make to the case of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons? First, Allison's understanding of the USSR's military decisions of the late 1950s is limited.44 It does not make sense to describe the MRBM program as an army project that competed with a national strategic ICBM program. For the USSR, medium- and intermediate-range mis¬ siles are considered strategic weapons and have been intended for use against U.S. "forward-based" strategic systems assigned to bases along the periphery of the Soviet Union.45 The development of strategic mis41Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston, 1971), pp. 114-15. . „ 42This explanation appears to be consistent with Halperin's observations in Bureaucra¬ tic Politics and Foreign Policy. 43The classic study is Edward L. Katzenbach, Jr., "The Horse Cavalry in the Twentieth Century: A Study of Policy Response," Public Policy 8 (1958): 120-49. For a more recent example, see Edmund Beard, Developing the ICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics (New York, 1976). ^For a somewhat different critique of Allison's approach, see Karl F. Spielmann, Analyzing Soviet Strategic Arms Decisions (Boulder, Colo., 1978), esp. pp. 116-19. 45Robert P. Berman and John C. Baker, Soviet Strategic Forces: Requirements and Responses (Washington, D.C., 1982).

[23°]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

siles constituted a top priority for the Soviet leadership throughout the postwar period. In 1954, six years before the formation of the SRF, a major decision was already taken to concentrate the Soviet missile program "on the creation of a new, multi-stage, intercontinental ballis¬ tic rocket."46 In that same year Sergei Korolev, the chief rocket designer, directed the development of the first strategic rocket, the R5. It was apparently accorded higher priority than the shorter-range systems that appeared later.47 The formation of the SRF was not a cause but a consequence of the Soviet leadership's emphasis on strate¬ gic nuclear missiles. If, nonetheless, the ICBM program was "delayed/ the delay was due less to bureaucratic factors than to technical prob¬ lems and a hierarchy of military goals that gave priority to striking regional strategic targets.48 Bureaucratic analyses that focus on the resistance of the Soviet army to the postwar emphasis on missiles are more useful than those that see the army as an independent impetus to the program, although both explanations fail to predict the final outcome—creation of the SRF. It does appear that the decision to create the SRF met with strong opposition from commanders in the ground forces—the dominant So¬ viet service up to that time. But many Soviet army officers, particularly the artillerists, objected not only to the SRF but to the missile program in general. In any case, the top political and military leaders prevailed; the SRF was formed in December 1959, and all missiles of greater that 1,000 kilometers in range were assigned to it. The missile commands of the ground forces maintained control of the shorter-range tactical and operational-tactical systems. Here again the tank and artillery commanders—historically the strongest bu¬ reaucratic forces—lost out. The Soviet atomic cannon, for example, was apparently never produced in large numbers or deployed with the artillery troops. Instead, Soviet military planners assigned to a tactical fighter-bomber, the Sukhoi-7, the missions for which nuclear artillery would have been responsible. This outcome is quite the opposite of what a bureaucratic-politics model would have predicted. The Soviet air force was one of the weakest services bureaucratically and could not 46V. S. Avduevskii and S. D. Grishin, "Razvitie raketnoi tekhniki v SSSR v periode 1946-1957 gg." [The development of rocket technology in the USSR in the period 19461957], in Issledovaniia po istorii i teorii razvitiia aviatsionnoi i raketno-kosmicheskoi nauki i tekhniki [Research in the history and theory of the development of aviation and rocketspace science and technology), issue 3 (Moscow, 1984), p. 11. 47/,Materialy k biograficheskoi khronike" [Materials toward a biographical chronicle], in lz istorii sovetskoi kosmonavtiki [From the history of Soviet cosmonautics] (Moscow, 1983), pp. 232-34. L . . , “^Berman and Baker, Soviet Strategic Forces. Khrushchev himself discusses the technical shortcomings of the first Soviet ICBM—the R-7, or semiorka (designated SS-6 in the West)—in the transcript of his reminiscences, Harriman Library, Columbia University, PP- 930/ 933/ 937-

[231I

Innovation and the Arms Race

have prevailed over the army to get its airplane at the expense of the army's cannon. Nor did the aircraft design bureau push for the new weapon. Sukhoi's bureau had closed down several years earlier and was apparently reconstituted at the initiative of the top leadership. In sum, the argument that Soviet military decisions result primarily from the "pulling and hauling" of bureaucratic actors does not find support in the case of tactical nuclear weapons.49

The Lure of Technology. Internal technocratic arguments serve no bet¬ ter to account for the initiation of Soviet tactical nuclear programs. We have seen the emphasis that Soviet nuclear scientists put on develop¬ ing atomic and thermonuclear weapons for strategic purposes. Soviet weapons designers apparently did not press for the development of small weapons for tactical purposes, as did their counterparts in the United States (most notably Oppenheimer). This conclusion stems from more than a lack of evidence of such pressure. It seems clear that during the equivalent period of the Soviet atomic program, the scientists who worked on decreasing the size and in¬ creasing the efficiency of nuclear weapons were—unlike their U.S. counterparts—not in a position to promote specific military uses. One scientist who worked in 1953 on problems related to a "small nuclear explosion" was not allowed information concerning the ultimate mili¬ tary purpose, if any, of the experiments. Logically, he could not have promoted work whose relevance he was not permitted to know. In any case, his experiments were a failure.50 The scientists who were in a position to influence military policy through their connections with top political and military leaders ap¬ pear not to have been interested in the tactical applications of the bomb. One prime candidate would have been A. A. Blagonravov, a Soviet scientist and military officer who specialized in problems of ballistics. From 1946 to 1950 he served as president of the Academy of Artillery Sciences within the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In this posi¬ tion he could have advocated the tactical uses of nuclear weapons—for example, in the form of atomic artillery. Instead, he appears to have seen nuclear weapons only as competitors to conventional artillery. In one article he wrote that Western scientists were "busy with searches for new types of weaponry. Many writers and military specialists in England and the U.S.A. are now speaking and writing about how 49The expression is used by Graham T. Allison and Morton H. Halperin, "Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications," in Theory and Policy in International Relations, ed. Richard H. Ullman and Raymond Tanter (Princeton, N.J., 1972), p. 43. ^Sergei Polikanov, Razryv: Zapiski atomnogo fizika [Explosion: Notes of an atomic physi¬ cist] (Frankfurt/Main, 1983), pp. 50, 79, interview with Polikanov, Darmstadt, 27 July 1984. [232]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

artillery has outlived its age, that now, with the discovery of the atomic bomb, artillery has lost its role on the battlefield. We Soviet scientists do not reject the thought of finding new types of weaponry for our Homeland, but we will not deliver our glorious artillery to the ar¬ chives."51 Only after the Americans had deployed their atomic cannon did Soviet military scientists write about the possibilities for nuclear artillery. Evidence from Khrushchev's reminiscences suggests that even after the Soviets produced an atomic artillery piece, their nuclear scientists criticized rather than promoted it. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, who wrote of the "new vistas" that their technical developments had opened up, Soviet scientists pointed to the inefficient use of nuclear materials that an atomic artillery shell would entail, especially in com¬ parison with missiles, and to the weapon's numerous military deficien¬ cies.52 Finally, we have seen that small-yield nuclear weapons, suitable for tactical deployment, were extensively developed and tested only after the top political leadership had authorized the development and production of missiles and aircraft for their delivery. In the U.S. case, by contrast, the scientists promoted the nuclear weapons first, devel¬ oped and tested them, and then adapted them to existing delivery vehicles. The presence of such technocratic forces in the initiation of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons marks a crucial difference from the Sovi¬ et case.

The U.S. Threat. The main impetus to the development of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons appears to have been an external one—the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe, starting in 1952-53. The Soviet response does not, however, correspond to an ideal-type action-reaction phenomenon. The balance-of-power, or realist, notion that "contending states imitate the military innovations contrived by the country of greatest capability and ingenuity" tells part of the story. The Soviet case does not, however, support the generalization that "weapons of major contenders, and even their strategies, begin to look much the same all over the world."53 The USSR did not respond to the deployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe simply by imitating the U.S. initiative. Instead the 51From an article in Voennoe obuchenie [Military education], no. 6 (1947), quoted in K. V. Frolov, A. A. Parkhomenko, and M. K. Uskov, Anatolii Arkad’evich Blagonravov, 1S943975 (Moscow, 1982), pp. 68-69. 52Khrushchev transcript, p. 402. G. Pokrovskii, "Rol' nauki v sovremennoi voine" [The role of science in contemporary war], Voennaia mysl' [Military thought], no. 3 (March 1935): 28. 53The quotations are from Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass., 1979), p. 127.

[233]

Innovation and the Arms Race

Soviets implemented a program of short- and long-term responses. One analyst has distinguished between "off-setting" and "emulating" responses.54 The immediate Soviet actions—reorganizing the air defense forces and training troops for the first time to fight under nuclear conditions—were of the offsetting variety. In air defense the Soviets did not imitate U.S. practices. The United States did not face the threat of battlefield nuclear weapons against its combat troops in Europe, and U.S. tactical air power concentrated mainly on long-range interdiction. There was, therefore, no U.S. practice of antiatomic air defense for the Soviets to imitate. The Soviets did, however, borrow extensively from U.S. literature on nuclear effects. By the dual means of air defense and protective battlefield tactics the Soviets attempted to offset U.S. tactical nuclear air power, artillery, and missiles. Preparing for the long term, the Soviets emulated the United States by initiating development of all the types of delivery vehicles for tacti¬ cal nuclear weapons which they knew the Americans were develop¬ ing—aircraft, artillery, and missiles. Later, however, U.S. and Soviet practices diverged, as the Soviet leadership made decisions to cease production of nuclear artillery, not to deploy existing systems with the troops, and to focus on missiles as the primary delivery vehicle for tactical nuclear strikes. In order to understand the aspects of the long¬ term Soviet response that did not represent emulation of U.S. prac¬ tices, one must turn to internal—mainly historical—factors. Internal influences on the Soviet tactical nuclear posture affected mainly the organization of the forces and the military practices in which they would engage in time of war. Both of these factors owe much to the Soviet (and Russian) artillery tradition, particularly to techniques of barrage and counterbattery fire.55 These internal, historical influences conditioned the Soviet response to external developments. The U.S. deployments of tactical nuclear weapons did affect the size and organization of the Soviet forces, but the USSR did not simply copy the U.S. force posture. In some sense, Soviet tactical nuclear weapons themselves were an off-setting re¬ sponse to the U.S. deployments. Although the Americans seemed to value tactical nuclear weapons mainly for their effectiveness against large concentrations of enemy personnel, the Soviets, instead of emu¬ lating this practice, preferred to offset it by targeting their nuclear ^Stephen M. Meyer, "Soviet Strategic Programmes and the US SDI," Survival 27 (November-December 1985): 274-92. A similar distinction between offsetting and imita¬ tive reactions was made by Johan J. Holst in "Missile Defense, the Soviet Union, and the Arms Race," in Why ABM? Policy Issues in the Missile Defense Controversy, ed. Johan J. Holst and William Schneider, Jr. (New York, 1969), esp. pp. 161-79. 55David C. Isby, Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army (London, 1981), chaps. 10, 11. [234]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

weapons against the U.S. ones.56 The Soviets appear to have deter¬ mined the size of their operational-tactical nuclear forces largely on the basis of requirements for targeting U.S. and NATO nuclear weapons and related facilities.57 The U.S. deployment of tactical nuclear weap¬ ons appears, then, to have acted as both stimulus and conditioner of Soviet responses. But we cannot understand these responses without taking into consideration Soviet organizational and military-historical factors.

Political Prestige. Another external explanation is that the Soviets em¬ ulate the military developments of U.S. technological ingenuity mainly for reasons of political prestige—to bolster their image as an equal superpower. Certain developments related to tactical nuclear weapons may be understood in this light. The U.S. atomic cannon, for example, was highly touted in the West as an important technological advance. Early Soviet efforts to develop nuclear artillery may reflect a perceived need to match the U.S. initiative. As it turns out, however, neither the U.S. nor the Soviet version was a great technical success. Require¬ ments of political prestige did not prevent the Soviets from ceasing production of the weapon, but they may account for its display during parades in Red Square. In some sense, the Soviets perceive much of their military competi¬ tion with the United States as a test of their technical prowess. Ul¬ timately, however, political prestige seems to have yielded to the de¬ mands of military efficiency when it came to determining a tacticalnuclear force posture. Sometimes the two factors worked in tandem, as when the Soviets tried to use their apparent successes in missile tech¬ nology for political benefit.

Kremlinology and Coalition Building. In trying to account for a wide range of often conflicting foreign policy goals that the USSR pursues, many analysts have turned to //Kremlinology,,—the attempt to associ¬ ate particular policy preferences with the power struggles of individu56For some representative statements of the U.S./NATO perspective of the 1950s, see Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, "The Changing Army," Combat Forces journal, October 1955, p. 10; Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, "The Changing Face of War," Combat Forces Journal, January 1955, pp. 20-23; Col. Edward L. Rowny, "Ground Tactics in an Atomic War," Combat Forces Journal, August 1954, pp. 18-22. For somewhat more explicit discus¬ sions, see Col. George B. Sloan, "A Dynamic Role for the Army in Atomic Warfare/' n.d., and Lt. Col. Charles B. Hazeltine, Jr., "The Effects of Atomic Weapons on Ground Warfare," 1 February 1954, both in CJCS 471.6 (19 April 56), MMB NA. 57Stephen M. Meyer, Soviet Theatre Nuclear Forces, pt. 1: Development of Doctrine and Objectives, Adelphi Paper no. 187 (London, Winter 1983-84); and pt. 2: Capabilities and Implications, Adelphi Paper no. 188 (Winter 1983-84). [235]

Innovation and the Arms Race

als within the Soviet leadership.58 A related, more recent approach focuses on the process of coalition building. Soviet policies are viewed as the product of logrolling among competing domestic interests.59 When applied to international relations, the coalition-building ap¬ proach suggests that internal factors determine foreign policy outcomes.60 Can the Kremlinological and coalition-building approaches shed light on Soviet decisions concerning tactical nuclear weapons? To an¬ swer the question, one would first have to try to relate particular mili¬ tary options to individual Soviet leaders. Then one would have to demonstrate that the predominance of a given policy option rose and fell with the political fortunes of those who apparently supported it. In the sphere of Soviet military policy, the most notable association of a leader with a policy preference concerns Stalin's policy on informa¬ tion about nuclear weapons. As part of a general restriction on the professional autonomy of the Soviet military, Stalin would not permit extensive discussion of the implications of nuclear weapons for con¬ temporary warfare. In seeking allies in their struggle for power, Sta¬ lin's successors could therefore appeal to the military by offering the officers a greater degree of professional autonomy, particularly in con¬ sidering how to incorporate nuclear weapons into Soviet military strategy.61 The process of reevaluating Soviet military strategy in the light of nuclear weapons started immediately after Stalin's death. It was pur¬ sued with considerable intensity during the spring of 1955, following Marshal Georgii Zhukov's appointment as minister of defense. Zhukov is widely considered to have been one of Khrushchev's allies in the first secretary's struggle with such opponents as Georgii Mal¬ enkov and Viacheslav Molotov. Indeed, Zhukov became defense min¬ ister following Khrushchev's successful bid to remove Malenkov from his post as chairman of the Council of Ministers at the Supreme Soviet session in February 1955. Zhukov was also instrumental in helping 58Among the important Kremlinological studies of the Khrushchev period are Robert Conquest, Power and Policy in the USSR: The Study of Soviet Dynasties (London, 1961); Carl A. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957-1964 (Baltimore, 1966); Robert M. Slusser, The Berlin Crisis of 1961: Soviet-American Relations and the Struggle for Power in the Kremlin (Baltimore, 1973); Michel Tatu, Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev to Kosygin, trans. Helen Katel (New York, 1969). 59See, e.g., George W. Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (London, 1982). ^Jack Snyder, "Myths of Empire: Domestic Structure and Strategic Ideology" (Colum¬ bia University, October 1986, mimeo). 61For a discussion of the role of professional military autonomy, see Roman Kolkowicz, The Soviet Military and the Communist Party (Princeton, N.J., 1967), esp. chap. 5. [236]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

Khrushchev defeat the so-called antiparty group in June 1957.62 To what extent, then, did the military views of the two allies— Khrushchev and Zhukov—correspond? Following Stalin's death, sharp differences appeared among his suc¬ cessors concerning the allocation of resources between military and civilian purposes. The Kremlinological approach seems to have some value in explaining the outcomes of major debates over such broad issues of policy. In this case, for example, Zhukov's apparent endorse¬ ment of Khrushchev's promilitary position (against Malenkov's fa¬ vored policy of rapid growth of consumer goods) was undoubtedly important. Applying a Kremlinological analysis to more specific issues—for ex¬ ample, concerning weapons development—would be more problemat¬ ic. Not only would one have to identify a commonality of views—as, for example, between Zhukov and Khrushchev—but one would have to find evidence that Khrushchev's rivals in the leadership advocated competing proposals for weapons development per se and that debates on these issues figured in the power struggle. In this sense, the Kremlinological approach appears to have less to contribute to explain¬ ing the development of tactical nuclear weapons. On questions concerning the nature of a future war and the appro¬ priate weapons for the USSR to develop, Khrushchev and Zhukov appear to have found many areas of agreement. Zhukov evidently took an early interest in the implications of nuclear weapons for Soviet military strategy.63 At the same time, he appears to have favored keep¬ ing all options open concerning the type of weapons the Soviet military should adopt. In his speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, in 1956, for example, Zhukov argued that a future war would involve the use of aircraft as well as missiles and would be fought with conventional, chemical, and bacteriological as well as nuclear arms.64 Khrushchev also favored the development of nuclear weapons, and he too was unwilling to limit Soviet options during the first few years after Stalin's death.65 As we have seen, the period 1953-1957 saw Soviet pursuit of the main types of weapons being developed in the West. The impor62These events are discussed in (among others) Conquest, Power and Policy; Kolkovvicz, Soviet Military and Communist Party; Linden, Khrushchev and Soviet Leadership; and Tatu, Power in the Kremlin. 63Vladimir Karpov, Polkovodets [Commander] (Moscow, 1985), esp. p. 524. ^Zhukov's address is quoted by Pavel A. Chuvikov, Marksizm-Leninizm 0 voine i armii [Marxism-Leninism on war and the army], 2d ed. (Moscow, 1956), quoted in l he Soviet Art of War: Doctrine, Strategy, and Tactics, ed. Harriet Fast Scott and William F. Scott, (Boulder, Colo., 1982), p. 135. 65Khrushchev transcript, pp. 920, 923. [237]

Innovation and the Arms Race

tant point, however, is that the appropriate approach to weapons de¬ velopment does not appear to have become a contentious issue in the struggle for power among the post-Stalin leadership. To be sure, there were vigorous debates over the implications of nuclear weapons for Soviet military strategy, but they were conducted mainly in the spe¬ cialized military press. The leadership appears to have reached a con¬ sensus at this stage not to inject politics into these professional discussions. As Khrushchev consolidated his power during the mid-1950s, he began to exert more influence on Soviet military policy. Some of the insights of the coalition-building approach are useful for understand¬ ing how the first secretary implemented his preferred policies. One of Khrushchev's goals was to carry out substantial reductions in conven¬ tional forces as nuclear weapons were introduced into the Soviet army. Some military officers resisted the policy. In order to prevail, Khrushchev relied on Zhukov's authority and prestige within the mili¬ tary. At a later stage, when Khrushchev decided to emphasize missiles as the main delivery vehicle for Soviet strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, he adopted a similar coalition-building strategy. In 1959 he coopted Chief Marshal of Artillery Mitrofan Nedelin to head the SRF, whose ranks were made up of troops from the artillery and air defense forces.66 Since the new emphasis on nuclear weapons entailed sub¬ stantial reductions in artillery and air forces, it was useful for Khrushchev to find allies within those services. As an explanation for Soviet weapons innovation, the Kremlinological approach has two main shortcomings. First, by its excessive focus on internal power struggles, it fails to account for the possibility of an external impetus to a new development. In the case of tactical nuclear weapons, U.S. military initiatives, combined with concern that Stalin's tight control had hindered Soviet strategic thinking, apparently led to a consensus among the new political leaders to explore a range of possi¬ ble responses.67 Indeed, the task seemed so urgent that military policy became the first beneficiary of the new leadership's decision to loosen restrictions on public discussion of many political and social issues.68 The second problem is that Kremlinology overstates the importance of coalitions between military and political figures for the success of a given policy. There is no question that Khrushchev relied on Zhukov for support, especially in June 1957, but it is likely that the first secre66V. Tolubko, Nedelin: Pervyi glavkom strategicheskikh [Nedelin: First commander-inchief of the strategic (rocket forces)] (Moscow, 1979), esp. p. 188. 67Khrushchev transcript, pp. 920, 923. 68jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 210-13; Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders. [238]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

tary would have been able to carry out his preferred military policies even without the marshal's help. Indeed, by October 1957 Khrushchev was sufficiently powerful to have Zhukov removed from his position as defense minister as well as from the Presidium and Central Commit¬ tee. The marshal had become an obstacle to Khrushchev's plans—to decentralize the Ministry of the Defense Industry and the Ministry of the Aviation Industry, for example.69 Zhukov may also have opposed Khrushchev's intention to focus on nuclear-armed missiles at the ex¬ pense of other weapons. Even Zhukov is an exceptional case, in that he wielded considerably more political power than most military officers. When it comes to formulating military policy, William Odom has pointed out, the marshals "are not in a position to frame the issues; they can only respond to the way issues are framed above them."70 The Kremlinological approach exaggerates the independent power of the military and understates the top-down nature of the Soviet political system.

The Soviet Process of Innovation. It is evident that neither the theories that focus entirely on internal, bureaucratic factors nor those that stress external, systemic factors can adequately account for the development of Soviet tactical nuclear forces. Bureaucratic, organizational, and Kremlinological explanations underestimate the reactive aspects of So¬ viet policy. Balance-of-power theories neglect the distinctive features of the USSR's military strategy and forces as well as its political system. When we break the Soviet process of innovation into stages, we can discern when external factors offer the greatest explanatory power and when internal factors do so. Internal influences—in particular the centralized, secretive nature of the Soviet system—act to inhibit inno¬ vation during the early stages. Some students at Soviet military acade¬ mies expressed interest in battlefield nuclear warfare during the first stage, and scientists in laboratories became familiar with the relevant technologies during the second. Yet official priorities did not permit development of tactical nuclear weapons. Only during the third stage did external influences—in this case, the deployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe—push the Soviet political and military leadership to respond. During the later stages, these responses were conditioned by internal organizational and historical factors; they were implemented through alliances between Khrushchev and senior mili¬ tary officers. At the same time, external developments retained con¬ siderable importance for Soviet policy in influencing both the require69Conquest, Power and Policy, chap. 13, esp. p. 338. 70William E. Odom, "The Soviet Military: The Party Connection," Problems of Commu¬ nism 22 (September-October 1973): 25.

Innovation and the Arms Race

merits for new weapons and the nature of Soviet disarmament proposals.

Explaining Weapons Innovations The comparative generalizations put forward in this book seek to explain the origins of major weapons innovations in the United States and the Soviet Union. These are the developments in the arms race that have tended to attract the most attention from scholars as well as the general public, although the prevailing explanations have a num¬ ber of shortcomings. One advantage of the generalizations offered here is that they avoid the pitfalls of monocausal explanations and at the same time are sufficiently parsimonious to make some contribution to debates over policy. Not every weapons innovation, of course, conforms to our five gen¬ eralized stages, and we shall be examining some that do not. It ap¬ pears, however, that in many respects the generalizations remain use¬ ful even for these cases, and that they offer, on balance, greater explanatory power than such models as action-reaction and Eigendynamik. Then we shall see how the generalizations apply to more recent cases, such as the neutron bomb, advanced-technology conven¬ tional weapons, and strategic defense, or "Star Wars," systems.

Deviant Cases At least two cases of Soviet weapons innovation do not conform well to the generalizations discussed here: the development of the hydro¬ gen bomb and the deployment of an ABM system. The cases of both Soviet and U.S. production of ICBMs also pose some problems.

The Soviet H-Bomb. The Soviets did not wait for a successful foreign demonstration of the H-bomb's feasibility; Soviet nuclear phsysicists gave high priority to the development of a thermonuclear bomb only two months after the test of the first Soviet fission bomb, in August 1949.71 They later claimed to have developed the H-bomb before the United States. They argued that the U.S. thermonuclear explosion of 31 October 1952 (called "Mike") was merely a device, not a usable bomb, whereas the first Soviet thermonuclear test, of 12 August 1953, ^David Holloway, "Research Note: Soviet Thermonuclear Development." International Security 4 (Winter 1979-80): 193. [240]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

was of a weapon deliverable by aircraft or missiles.72 Subsequent anal¬ yses reveal, however, that although the Soviet test involved ther¬ monuclear reactions, it was not a true superbomb, capable in principle of unlimited explosive power.73 Some participants in the U.S. H-bomb decision have bought the Soviet argument, mainly, it seems, for self-serving reasons. Paul Nitze, for example, cites David Holloway's research to make the following claim: "It is now clear that the Russians developed a hydrogen weapon before we did. Our device was tested before theirs was, but they had gone straight toward weapon development, had a thermonuclear device before we did, and had been proceeding at full speed on its development while we were still worrying about the problem in the spring of 1950." He adds that the "idea that the Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons was a reaction to what we had done is simply incorrect."74 This account serves well to justify the position Nitze took in 1949 in support of an all-out U.S. H-bomb program, but—contrary to his claim—it is not borne out by Holloway's research, including the article Nitze cites. Holloway's work indicates that although the Soviet H-bomb story does not fit my generalization for Soviet weapons innovation in some important respects, it does so in others. For example, the Soviet gov¬ ernment was apparently aware of U.S. American interest in fusion weapons as early as 1946. Soviet scientists confirmed that there was some basis for the belief that a thermonuclear reaction could be achieved.75 Holloway argues—on the basis of evidence from the con¬ fession of Klaus Fuchs—that the Soviet government may have ordered Fuchs to find out about U.S. developments. In 1947 Fuchs apparently reported to the Soviets on discussions held at Los Alamos in the spring of the previous year.76 In the U.S. case, such scientists as Edward Teller gathered support for the H-bomb within Congress and the mili¬ tary and then pressed for President Truman's approval. In the Soviet case, by contrast, the government took the initiative to learn about the U.S. program before endorsing an all-out effort. The Soviet H-bomb decision proceeded in stages, some of which are 72See, for example, Igor Kurchatov's remarks in his speech before the Supreme Soviet, 31 March 1938, reprinted in Atomnaia energiia v aviatsii i raketnoi tekhnike [Atomic energy in aviation and rocket technology], ed. P. T. Astashenkov (Moscow, 1959), p. 473Holloway, "Research Note," p. 194; Herbert F. York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco, 1976), pp. 91-93. 74Paul Nitze, "The Development of NSC 68," International Security 4 (Spring 1980): 176, citing Holloway's article in the previous issue. 75I. N. Golovin. /. V. Kurchatov, 3d ed. (Moscow, 1978), p. 92. 76Holloway, "Research Note," p. 193; and personal communication. [241]

Innovation and the Arms Race

comparable to the ones proposed here. Contrary to Nitze's claim, for example, the Soviets were not working at "full speed" on their H-bomb in the spring of 1950. Holloway's research (as well as Soviet accounts) points to an acceleration of Soviet efforts during the fall of 1952, in response to the U.S. test in October: "The Mike test stimulated them to work more intensively on the mechanism behind the very high yield of that test and analysis of the fallout would have helped them to discover that mechanism."77 Holloway concludes, "if we can find elements both of reaction and of an internal dynamic in Soviet policy, the overall effect of American actions was to speed up the Soviet effort to develop thermonuclear weapons."78 His conclusion is broadly consistent with the observations about Soviet weapons innovation put forward here.

The Soviet ABM. A case that fits less well into the five-stage process of Soviet weapons innovation is that of the Soviet ABM system. Khrushchev claimed that Soviet research into ballistic-missile defense was conducted simultaneously with early research into intercontinen¬ tal-range offensive missiles: "When we told the scientists and engi¬ neers to create intercontinental rockets, we immediately told another group of scientists and engineers to work out means to combat these rockets."79 Such a program of R&D, undertaken at the initiative of the leadership, would be compatible with the early stages as put forward here. Yet, contrary to what the five-stage model would expect, the USSR did not wait to see a successful deployment of a U.S. ABM before deploying its own first-generation system. During the early 1960s the Soviets began to deploy around Leningrad what some Western ana¬ lysts interpreted as an ABM system, although it was based on existing air defense technologies. The Leningrad system was soon dismantled, probably owing to negative evaluations of even its air-defense capabilities. Another system, of greater range but still limited capability, was built around Moscow shortly thereafter.80 The USSR's ABM system was not developed in response to a comparable U.S. system, although the Soviets were surely aware of U.S. efforts in this regard. In other respects, however, the Soviet ABM conforms to generaliza¬ tions made here. The system's technical antecedents included the Ger77Holloway, "Research Note," p. 196. York makes the same point in Advisors, p. 100. For a Soviet account, see Golovin, 1. V. Kurchatov, p. 94. 78Holloway, "Research Note," p. 196. ■^Khrushchev's remarks were made in an interview wiih Arthur Sulzberger, originally published in the New York Times, 8 September 1961, and reprinted in Izvestiia, 9 Septem¬ ber 1961, from which he is quoted here. soSayre Stevens, "The Soviet BMD Program," in Ballistic Missile Defense, ed. Ashton B. Carter and David N. Schwartz (Washington, D.C., 1984), pp. 192-201. [242]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

man Wasserfall air-defense missile, which Soviet research teams stud¬ ied and imitated during the early postwar years.81 This work was certainly conducted under high-level direction, much as Soviet re¬ search on offensive missiles was initiated in response to German devel¬ opments. The Soviet ABM did not emerge from the bottom, at the initiative of scientists, as the U.S. system appears to have done.82 The Moscow ABM deployment is also consistent with the observa¬ tion that the Soviets tend to field an innovation in limited numbers before it has been perfected and then to make gradual improve¬ ments.83 The generalizations here also help account for the fact that the Soviets have not made an all-out effort to pursue ABM defense. Such an effort would require a major revision of priorities, to move from emphasis on offensive nuclear retaliation to development and mass production of defensive systems. Soviet support for the ABM treaty and for further restrictions on "space strike weapons" reinforces evi¬ dence that such a shift in priorities is unlikely.84

Soviet and U.S. ICBMs. The open, decentralized United States might have been predicted to develop ICBMs before the Soviet Union, which might then have been expected to catch up quickly and mass-produce them in large numbers. In fact, the history of ICBM development ap¬ pears to document the opposite pattern: the USSR launched the first ICBM in August 1957; the United States matched the Soviet accom¬ plishment only in November 1958, but during the next few years pro¬ duced a force of ICBMs so large that the Soviets did not equal it for nearly a decade.85 This account overstates the differences between the ICBM story and the generalized processes of U.S. and Soviet innovation. As we have seen, initial Soviet work on ballistic missiles during the 1930s was constrained by existing priorities, central control, and ultimately Stalin¬ ist terror. The revival of the Soviet missile program required an exter¬ nal impetus, which came not from the United States but from the 81CIA Report US/UK GM 4-52, "A Summary of Soviet Guided Missile Intelligence," 20 July 1953, microfiche courtesy of David Holloway; Stevens, "Soviet BMD Program, pp. 189-91. 82Herbert F. York, Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race (New York, 397°) • 83Stevens, "Soviet BMD Program," p. 200. See also Stephen M. Meyer, "Soviet Military Programmes and the 'New High Ground,'" Survival 25 (September-October 1983): 213, 215015. ^See Raymond L. Garthoff, "BMD and East-West Relations," in Carter and Schwartz, Ballistic Missile Defense, esp. pp. 286-314; David Holloway, "The Strategic Defense Initia¬ tive and the Soviet Union," Daedalus 114 (Summer 1985): 257-78; Bruce Parrott, The Soviet Union and Ballistic Missile Defense (Boulder Colo., 1987). 85This section has benefited from discussions with Edward Rhodes and Richard Rosecrance. [243]

Innovation and the Arms Race

V-rockets of Nazi Germany. Subsequent Soviet missile development fits the pattern fairly well. The early test of the SS-6 missile in 1957 is consistent with observations about the USSR's deployment of innova¬ tions even before they are perfected. Harder to explain, however, is the long hiatus between that test and the production of a large ICBM force. It should be accounted for in part by competing demands for missile production—to provide a force of medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles assigned to regional targets, such as U.S. bomber bases in Europe and North Africa, which the Soviets consider of strate¬ gic importance. Technical shortcomings in the first-generation missiles also undoubtedly played a role. Eventually the centralized Soviet econ¬ omy did perform as expected, producing by the early 1970s a quantity of ICBMs that exceeded the U.S. force. The main anomaly to account for in the U.S. case is the delay in producing an ICBM. Initially, at least one prominent scientific adviser to the U.S. government dismissed the possibility of creating guided missiles that could achieve ranges of even 1,000 miles.86 This notable exception aside, the bottom-up and consensus-building generaliza¬ tions apply fairly well to the case of U.S. ICBMs. Many other weapons designers were interested in pursuing a long-range ballistic missile. The delay in producing one, it seems, is best explained by bureaucratic resistance from SAC, which feared a threat to its bomber force.87 The five-stage model of U.S. weapons innovation does, however, take such resistance into account, finding that it sometimes appears during the third stage and especially during the fourth. At that point supporters of the innovation invoke external, occasionally seren¬ dipitous factors to break through the bureaucratic inertia. In the case of the ICBM, apparent Soviet successes with ballistic missiles, and in particular the launching of Sputnik, provided the window that enabled supporters to accelerate the U.S. program. The large and rapid quan¬ titative buildup is attributable to a variety of factors—political, bu¬ reaucratic, and economic—that are compatible with my generali¬ zations.88 ^Vannevar Bush put forward that view as early as 22 August 1945, in a meeting with the Joint Staff Planners of the JCS. See James F. Schnabel, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy, vol. 1: 1945-3947 (Wilmington, Del., 1979)/ PP- 137~39- He continued to hold such views, and even published them in 1949, in a work that became something of a best seller. See Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Tree Men (New York, 1949). 87Beard, Developing the ICBM. 88The best account is Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Pro¬ gram of the Kennedy Administration (Berkeley, Calif., 1980). [244]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

Recent Cases The five-stage processes of U.S. and Soviet weapons innovation are offered as ideal types. No claims are made for their universal ap¬ plicability. At the same time, they do appear to account for the qualita¬ tive Soviet-American arms race better than their competitors.

The U.S. Neutron Bomb. The development of the enhanced-radiation weapon (ERW), or neutron bomb, exhibits all of the characteristics of the generalized U.S. weapons innovation process. Its only notable anomalous feature is the length of time that elapsed between the weap¬ on's invention in 1958 and its production during the late 1970s—over twenty years. This time lapse was due mainly to the difficulty the ERW's proponents had in gaining support for the weapon within the armed services. The twenty-year efforts of the scientists provide exten¬ sive evidence to document the bottom-up process of technological en¬ trepreneurship and consensus building.89 The concept of a warhead that kills primarily with neutron radiation (instead of with the blast, heat, and gamma radiation of standard fis¬ sion and fusion weapons) was considered during the development of the H-bomb in the late 1940s. When confronted with competing claims for tactical nuclear weapons from Oppenheimer and others, propo¬ nents of the H-bomb, such as Teller, pointed to the promise of an enhanced-radiation thermonuclear weapon that would be more suita¬ ble for battlefield use than standard fission weapons. The main techni¬ cal breakthrough came in 1958 as a result of the work of Samuel Cohen, then a physicist with the Rand Corporation.90 Through his contacts in the Air Force, Teller was able to get its Science Advisory Board to establish a panel to investigate the technical feasibility of the enhanced-radiation concept. The panel, chaired by Cohen, presented its findings to the Air Force in the fall of 1958, to an unenthusiastic response. Cohen blamed his failure to sell the ERW on the Air Force's predilection for strategic bombing. There was some interest in using ERWs for tactical purposes in the Third World, but not enough to overcome the traditional strategic bias.91 Teller, Cohen, and the other ERW supporters next tried to sell their idea to the Navy. They worked through retired Navy captain John 89This section draws on Evangelista, "Case Studies and Theories of the Arms Race. ^George B. Kistiakowsky, "The Folly of the Neutron Bomb," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 34 (September 1978): 25-29; Samuel T. Cohen, 7 he Neutron Bomb: Political, Technological, and Military Issues (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), p. 5; Cohen, The Truth about the Neutron Bomb (New York, 1983), pp. 34-35. 91Cohen, Neutron Bomb, pp. 4-9; Cohen, Truth about the Neutron Bomb, pp. 36, 41. [245]

Innovation and the Arms Race

Morse, a former official at NATO headquarters in Europe and then assistant to the chairman for National Security Affairs of the AEC. Despite some initial interest, however, the Navy did not pursue enhanced-radiation warheads for its weapons. The likely reason is that by the late 1950s most of the Navy's nuclear programs centered on nu¬ clear-powered missile-carrying submarines, which had no use for ERWs and did not need the budgetary competition.92 When Teller's efforts proved futile, he turned to the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government and to the civilian leader¬ ship of the Defense Department. Captain Morse, in his capacity as assistant to the chairman of the AEC, tried to reach the president directly with a memorandum in support of "clean" weapons for tactical use. Morse was assisted by two of Eisenhower's White House aides. General Robert Cutler and F. M. Dearborn, Jr., who helped him through several revisions of the memorandum.93 Cohen was also in direct contact with the White House, through another of the presi¬ dent's aides. Major John Eisenhower. Major Eisenhower received one of Cohen's many briefings during the summer of 1959. Cohen also sent him a copy of a Rand report promoting "clean" nuclear weapons for "limited war." In November 1959 the president himself was briefed on the report.94 The extensive briefings conducted by Cohen and other weapons-lab scientists attracted some public attention, and information concerning enhanced-radiation weapons and the scientists' lobbying efforts ap¬ peared in the Washington Post and other publications as early as 1959.95 Teller and his colleagues were by this time trying mainly to persuade the Army to adopt ERWs as tactical weapons. The fact that Teller and Cohen turned to the Army only after unsuccessful attempts to interest the Air Force and Navy in ERWs belies the popular impression that Cohen created the ERW primarily as a battlefield antitank weapon for European use. Cohen himself writes, "Keep in mind that it was in the 92As Cohen himself put it. Navy opponents of the ERW were "spreading the word around" the Pentagon that the Polaris submarines "were going to be doomed by neutron weapons": Truth about the Neutron Bomb, p. 51. For the role of Morse, see pp. 14, 42-44, 47-5593Morse's efforts are extensively documented in the Records of OS ANSA, OCB ser.. Subject subser., box 1, folders "Atomic Energy Commission—General (7) and (9)"; box 4, folder "Nuclear Energy Matters (3) and (4)," in DDEL. 94The report by Cohen was declassified with some deletions (including part of the title). See Samuel T. Cohen, Low-Yield Fusion Weapons for Limited Wars [deleted], Rand Report R-347, 1 June 1959, located in the Office of the Staff Secretary: Records 1957-61, Subject ser., DOD subser., box 3, folder "Defense—Classified (1)," in DDEL. John Eisenhower indicated in writing on the report that the president was briefed on 10 November 1959. See also Cohen to John Eisenhower, 23 September 1959, ibid. 95Edward Gamerekian, "New A-Bomb 'Pinpoints' Lethal Dose: Could Make Test Ban Meaningless," Washington Post, 19 July 1959. See also Cohen, Neutron Bomb, p. 12. [246]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

context of Asian scenarios that the neutron bomb was first con¬ ceived."96 This aspect of the neutron-bomb story bears a remarkable resemblance to the development of tactical fission weapons, which were first justified for their potential use in Korea and only later ration¬ alized on the basis of a Soviet threat to Europe. In any case. Teller and Cohen were not able to secure Army support for production of the ERW as a tactical weapon. Army officials were particularly skeptical about the ERW's effectiveness as an antitank weapon, on the basis of experimental data indicating "that only within a relatively small area near the explosion would the enemy troops be instantly incapacitated. Troops occupying a much larger area would be injured, though before death they would remain capable of fighting for at least some time after the irradiation."97 Thus the scientific promoters of the neutron bomb were unable to interest any of the military services in adopting it as a battlefield nu¬ clear weapon. The Air Force preferred its strategic-missile and bomber programs; the Navy favored its Polaris system; and the Army was preoccupied with the Vietnam war, a conventional buildup (justified by the Kennedy-McNamara "flexible response" doctrine), and, later, stewardship of the Sentinel ABM program. The scientists were able to gather enough support for "clean" ERWs to defeat the comprehensive test ban but not enough to produce the weapons themselves. They had the backing of the AEC, the JCAE, and the Defense Department, but without the sponsorship of a particular service they could not pro¬ ceed.98 Promoters of enhanced-radiation technology achieved a minor, albeit temporary, success when an enhanced-radiation-capable war¬ head was designed for the Sprint ABM missile, part of the Safeguard system, which was dismantled in 1974." During the early 1970s the nuclear-weapons laboratories, which had continued work on enhanced-radiation weapons, launched a vigorous campaign to promote their use on the battlefield. In congressional testimony in 1973/ Harold Agnew, director of the Los Alamos lab, clearly was referring to ERWs when he said: "I know we at Los Alamos have a small, but very elite group that meets with outside people in the defense community and in the various think tanks. They are working very aggressively, trying to influence the DOD [Department of Defense] to consider using these [deleted] weapons which could be very decisive on a battlefield, yet would limit collateral damage that is 96Cohen, Truth about the Neutron Bomb, p. 15. 97Kistiakowsky, "Folly of the Neutron Bomb," p. 25. 98See the discussion in Sherri L. Wasserman, The Neutron Bomb Controversy: A Study in Alliance Politics (New York, 1983), pp. 24-27. "Kistiakowsky, "Folly of the Neutron Bomb," p. 25. [247]

Innovation and the Arms Race

usually associated with nuclear weapons/'100 The main problem for the weapon's promoters was the lack of a military sponsor. The Army continued to reject ERWs in favor of standard nuclear warheads on the ground of military effectiveness. During the course of the U.S. innovation process, proponents of a new weapon often exploit a window of opportunity in order to gain support for or break resistance to their project. The window sometimes appears in the guise of a foreign threat. In the case of the neutron bomb, however, the window came in the form of congressional rejec¬ tion of the Army's proposal to modernize its nuclear artillery. In 1973 the JCAE turned down the Army's request for new nuclear artillery shells, for three main reasons: excessive cost ($400,000 per shell), the vulnerability of short-range systems (and the consequent "use them or lose them" pressures), and the personal opposition of Senator Stuart Symington, who was against any increase in the tactical nuclear stockpile.101 The Army somewhat reluctantly came to support the development of neutron warheads as the only possibility of getting any nuclear artillery at all. Having had its modernization proposal rejected by Congress, it could not simply come back with the same proposal. Therefore, on 29 August 1973, immediately following the congressional rejection, the Army chief of staff drew up a memoran¬ dum directing a study to "reexamine" nuclear-warhead requirements for artillery projectiles. According to Cohen, the memorandum "re¬ questing the study is full of radiation-dose requirements for inca¬ pacitating military personnel, with the concomitant requirement to 'minimize collateral damage,' i.e., damage to civilian structure. In oth¬ er words, the memo directed a neutron bomb study."102 Despite the newfound support of the Army, a key obstacle to the production of ERWs remained—in the person of Senator Symington. When Symington retired from the Senate in 1976, there was nothing further to hinder the approval of ERW production. Symington's JCAE was dissolved and its duties assumed by the Senate Armed Services Committee; its chairman was John Stennis, and its membership in¬ cluded Henry Jackson and Strom Thurmond—all strong proponents of 100U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Military Applications of Nuclear Technology, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Military Applications, 93d Cong., 1st sess., 16 April 1973, pt. 1, p. 49. 101Ibid. These reasons are clear from the testimony. Symington's opposition to tactical nuclear weapons and "limited nuclear war" was expressed in personal correspondence to the author, 27 November 1984, and is mentioned in Deborah Shapley, "The Media and National Security," Daedalus, Fall 1982, pp. 200-201. See also the discussion in Milton Leitenberg, "Background Materials on Tactical Nuclear Weapons," in SIPRI, Tactical Nuclear Weapons: European Perspectives (London, 1978), esp. pp. 54-57. 102Cohen, Truth about the Neutron Bomb, p. 100. [248]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

tactical nuclear weapons. With Symington out of the way, the Energy Research and Development Administration (successor to the AEC) was able to include a production request for ERWs for the Lance missile in the president's annual stockpile review of 24 November 1976. Presi¬ dent Ford approved the request, as did the Senate Armed Services Committee in hearings the following March.103 During the next administration, the neutron bomb became a divisive issue within the NATO alliance, as President Jimmy Carter tried to get European agreement on deploying the weapon before he would order its production.104 Such interalliance squabbles did not ultimately affect ERW production. Carter decided in April 1978 to defer production but six months later ordered the Department of Energy to produce enhanced-radiation components. In October 1978 production activities began on the W70-3 enhanced-radiation warhead for the Lance mis¬ sile. Several hundred of these warheads have now been built and are stored in the United States, ready to be deployed in Europe in the event of war or if NATO allies request them.105 The latest chapter in the neutron-bomb saga suggests that the re¬ quirements for consensus-building may have lessened in recent years. During the spring of 1984, General Bernard Rogers, supreme allied commander, Europe, engaged in a major lobbying effort to get con¬ gressional approval for the W-82 warhead for NATO's 155-millimeter artillery—a warhead that can be made into an enhanced-radiation weapon through the simple insertion of a tritium module. At an esti¬ mated cost of $2.6 million each, and manifesting all of the problems for which nuclear artillery shells were rejected in 1973, the new warhead was not popular with the Congress. Its proponents—including Gener¬ al Rogers, who had been noted previously for his supposed interest in decreasing NATO's reliance on nuclear weapons—were able to per¬ suade a couple of key senators to support the weapon. These senators, in particular Bennett Johnston and Sam Nunn, then attached an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill to fund the W-82. By deceptively characterizing the amendment as one that would prohibit the production of enhanced-radiation shells (in fact it only prohibits 103U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Energy Research atui Develop¬ ment Administration Fiscal Year 1978 Authorization, 95th Cong., 1st sess., 25 March 1977 (Washington, D.C., 1977), pp. 4/ 7> 30-31104There are many accounts of this issue; see, e.g., Milton Leitenberg, "The Neutron Bomb—Enhanced Radiation Warheads," Journal of Strategic Studies 5 (September 1982): 341-69; Wasserman, Neutron Bomb Controversy. 105Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, and Milton M. Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook, vol. 1: U.S. Nuclear Forces and Capabilities (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 72; William M. Arkin and Richard W. Fieldhouse, Nuclear Battlefields: Global Links in the Arms Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 60. [249]

Innovation and the Arms Race

their final assembly), and by introducing the amendment during an allnight session, the sponsors were able to get it passed without a roll-call vote at 3:00 a.m. on 21 June 1984.106 Such explanations as action-reaction do not help much to explain the origins of the U.S. neutron bomb, even though the proponents of the bomb have often justified it as a reaction to Soviet superiority in tanks deployed against Western Europe. Yet the Soviets have enjoyed such superiority since 1945, and the concept of a neutron bomb has existed since 1958. Action-reaction does not explain why it was not built ear¬ lier. Nor do internal technological-imperative explanations serve. They argue that if a weapon can be built, it will be. The neutron bomb, however, was not built for twenty years, for lack of a service interested in it. A better explanation is the one that traces the weapon's develop¬ ment through several stages, from a technical idea pushed up by scien¬ tists from the bottom, to a system with sufficient military and govern¬ ment support to be produced.

A Soviet Neutron Bomb? Unclassified sources permit us to know noth¬ ing for certain about a Soviet neutron-bomb program. My generaliza¬ tions about the Soviet process of innovation, however, in combination with what information is available, do allow for some informed speculation. The five-stage top-down explanation for Soviet weapons innovation suggests that the technical background for enhanced-radiation weap¬ ons was present early in the USSR's nuclear program. The physicists involved in the creation of Soviet thermonuclear weapons—Igor Kurchatov, Andrei Sakharov, Igor Tamm, and others—obviously had the relevant technical expertise. The top-down explanation predicts that the scientists would not ini¬ tiate work on a weapon that did not conform to existing military pri¬ orities but would wait for the leadership to call their attention to for¬ eign developments. During the late 1950s the Soviets evidently did pay close attention to U.S. commentary on neutron bombs. At that time U.S. opponents of a nuclear test ban were arguing that a "clean" ther¬ monuclear weapon—one that would rely on neutron radiation instead of blast as its primary kill mechanism—could be developed. Such a neutron bomb, it was claimed, would cause no fallout—a major con¬ cern of those who favored a test ban—and would allow for more "dis¬ criminate" use on a battlefield. Much of the Soviet commentary sought to dispute both of these contentions. 106This account follows Christopher Paine, "Senator Nunn's Shell Game," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 41 (February 1985): 5-8. See also Wayne Biddle, "New Army Shells Fill Dual Purpose," New York Times, 14 December 1984. [250]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

Soviet analysts pointed out that fallout could be avoided if the fission explosion that detonates an H-bomb's thermonuclear reaction were replaced by some other means of creating a high temperature. They called attention, however, to the fact that foreign experts could not foresee the development of such a means any time soon.107 The other theoretical means of reducing fallout would be to detonate a ther¬ monuclear weapon far above the ground, so that irradiated earth would not be thrown up and widely dispersed. Soviet analysts, how¬ ever, ridiculed the notion that during the "fog of war" bombs or mis¬ siles could reliably be expected to explode exactly where and how they were intended.108 Some of the Soviet discussions—especially those by the prominent Soviet scientists Tamm and Emel'ianov—seem to reveal a sensitivity to accusations that the Americans were developing an important weapon that the USSR did not possess. Tamm, for example, felt obliged to state, "As a rule, in our epoch, the interval of time that elapses between important scientific and technological discoveries in different countries is very short." It may be significant that he immediately went on to cite Andrei Sakharov's work on controlled thermonuclear reactions (for peaceful applications) in August 1950 as an example of a Soviet discov¬ ery that was duplicated independently by U.S. scientists several months later.109 Tamm himself had participated with Sakharov in that work, as at least one Soviet source had by that time already dis¬ cussed.110 The same source links the Sakharov-Tamm experiments to the problem of igniting a thermonuclear reaction without detonating a bomb, and it discusses a related experiment conducted by Kurchatov in 1952. It would not be reading too much into Tamm's article to sug¬ gest that it was intended as reassurance that Soviet scientists could match a U.S. initiative if necessary: "Assume that a group of investiga¬ tors succeeded in beating its rivals to a relatively important military technological achievement. This group and its superiors know that this kind of advantage will inevitably be short-lived and that within six months, or a year or two, their rivals will catch up with them."111 In an article about the neutron bomb Emel'ianov reviewed U.S. com¬ mentary on the bomb, discussed the requirements for igniting a ther107M. Arkhipov, "O tak nazyvaemoi 'chistoi' vodorodnoi bombe" [On the so-called "clean" hydrogen bomb], in Astashenkov, Atomnaia energiia, p. 185; I. Tamm, "The Dangers of the Arms Race," International Affairs, March 1961, p. 65; V. Emel'ianov, "Diskussiia o neitronnoi bombe" [Discussion about the neutron bomb], Novae vremiia [New times], no. 32 (4 April 1961): 8-10. 108Arkhipov, "O tak nazyvaemoi 'chistoi' vodorodnoi bombe," pp. 182-83. 109Tamm, "Dangers of the Arms Race," p. 66. 110E.g., P. T. Astashenkov, Atomnaia protnyshlennost' [Atomic industry] (Moscow, 1956), pp. 46-49. mTamm, "Dangers of the Arms Race," p. 66. [251]

Innovation and the Arms Race

monuclear reaction without a fission explosion, and argued that "the word 'impossible7 is disappearing from the lexicon of scientists." Fur¬ ther, "scientists of many countries are working on the resolution of this task, occupying themselves with the problem of directed ther¬ monuclear processes." He contended that although U.S. scientists were working on these issues for military purposes, the USSR was pursuing only peaceful goals. Having implied that the Soviet Union had no interest in developing a neutron bomb, he suggested why: "Woe to him who tries to use against our country and our people a neutron or any other kind of bomb. All the power of the Soviet country will fall upon those who do it. They will pay for it."112 Emel'ianov's threat is consistent with official Soviet declaratory policy of the time. Unlike the Americans, the Soviets professed no interest in "discrimi¬ nating" or "clean" nuclear weapons and no willingness to engage in "limited" nuclear war. My generalizations about Soviet innovation suggest, then, that the USSR reacted to U.S. discussions about developing a neutron bomb by making sure its scientists were capable of matching any U.S. initia¬ tives. In the hierarchy of Soviet military objectives at the time, how¬ ever, the production of enhanced-radiation weapons would not have achieved high priority. Some independent evidence—of unknown reliability—appears to support this contention; it comes from a Soviet emigre sociologist who claims that the Soviet government decided about 1972 "to stop devel¬ opment of a 'clean atomic bomb'" on the basis of sociological studies conducted under the auspices of the Ministry of Defense.113 Perhaps the Soviets simply maintained a low level of research into enhancedradiation concepts until the mid-1970s. Then the U.S. decision to pro¬ duce ERWs for use with battlefield nuclear systems might have served to make the Soviets reconsider their position. One could argue that some Soviet military leaders viewed neutron weapons as a potential means of improving their ability to keep a nuclear conflict from escalat¬ ing to intercontinental war—the central objective of a new hierarchy of military priorities that was apparently being worked out in the early 1970s.114 Some U.S. proponents of the neutron bomb also argued that the weapon would help to limit a nuclear war, although many analysts disagreed. If the Soviets had seen the neutron bomb as consistent with 112Emel'ianov, "Diskussiia o neitronnoi bombe," pp. 8-10. 113Ilia Zemtsov, "Istoriia razvitiia Sovetskoi sotsiologii" [History of the development of Soviet sociology], Grani [Frontiers] 32, no. 103 (1977): 269-71; for a shorter mention in English, see his "Ideology and Politics: Sociology in the Grip of Politics," Crossroads 6 (Spring 1980): 43-44. 114For a discussion of the shift in hierarchies, see Michael MccGwire, Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C., 1987). [252]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

their emerging new hierarchy, one could argue, they would have adopted it. The evidence suggests that the Soviet political leadership was not enthusiastic about matching the U.S. neutron-bomb initiative. General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev offered in November 1978 not to deploy such weapons if the United States would refrain from doing so as well. He added a threat to produce comparable Soviet weapons if the United States went ahead with its plans, and he claimed that the USSR had already tested an ERW design but had decided against producing the weapon. Subsequent Soviet commentary implied that Brezhnev had used hyperbole in stating that the USSR had actually tested such a weapon.115 In any case, his arms-control proposal indicated a willing¬ ness to forgo a Soviet neutron bomb.116 Having made their threat, however, the Soviets may have felt obliged to deploy an ERW once the United States did so—especially if a case could be made that the weapon conformed to Soviet military strategy. Here the evidence is only fragmentary. One Western analyst with close government connections argues, for example, that the Sovi¬ et 240-millimeter mortar "makes sense only if it has an enhanced radia¬ tion (ER) warhead," apparently owing to its short range.117 Given the state of the evidence, no definitive word on a Soviet neu¬ tron-bomb program can be offered. The five-stage model does help us to evaluate that evidence, however, so that we may make reasonable speculations that are consistent with what is known about the Soviet innovation process. One conclusion that conforms to the model is that Soviet possession of enhanced-radiation warheads will redound to the disadvantage of NATO. The weapons were originally touted as provid¬ ing the West with a defensive advantage (or giving the West "escala¬ tion dominance" at a level between conventional and nuclear war), 115David K. Shipler, "Soviet Tested a Neutron Weapon, Brezhnev Tells Group of Senators," New York Times, 18 November 1978; for the contradiction, see Leonid Zamiatin in Stern, 1 October 1981, p. 242; both are discussed in Leitenberg, "Neutron Bomb." 116For subsequent Soviet proposals, see the discussion by Peter Schlotter and Stephan Tiedtke, "Die sowjetische Riistungskontrollinitiative vom Oktober 1979—eine verpasste Chance?" [The Soviet arms-control initiative of October 1979—a missed chance?], in Studiengruppe Militarpolitik, Aufrusten, um Abzuriisten? [Arm in order to disarm?] (Ham¬ burg, 1980), pp. 180-93. 117He admits, though, that "the intelligence community may not agree." Philip Karber is quoted in Armed Forces Journal, May 1984, p. 87. It is also possible that the Soviets are deploying an enhanced-radiation-capable warhead on the new ABM missiles that are part of their Moscow system. The high-acceleration endoatmospheric interceptor mis¬ siles are considered comparable to the U.S. Sprint. See Stevens, "Soviet BMD Program," pp. 211-12; Department of Defense, Soviet Military Power 1986 (Washington, D.C., 1986), pp. 43-44. Further, the requirement to engage targets within the atmosphere, close to Moscow, would appear to dictate trying to reduce the explosive yield in favor of neutron radiation—to which incoming warheads are vulnerable. [253]

Innovation and the Arms Race

under the assumption, presumably, that the Soviets would not deploy their own. They may now have done so, and in any case can in princi¬ ple produce and deploy them in large numbers. If it is true, as one Pentagon consultant maintains, that "mutual possession tends to favor the attacker over the defender," then development of the neutron bomb, like so many previous U.S. innovations, has diminished West¬ ern security.118 "Deep-Strike" Weapons. Current developments in the area of ad¬ vanced-technology conventional weapons provide further evidence to support the pattern of Soviet-American interaction in weapons innova¬ tion identified here. The complex of systems that have come to be called "Deep-Strike" weapons actually involve a number of innovative technologies—sensors for target acquisition; information-processing equipment for command, control, and communication; and novel ex¬ plosives and missiles—that began to emerge during the 1960s.119 Dur¬ ing the U.S. war in Vietnam, these technologies were combined into systems for target acquisition and bombing. Later, supporters of the new systems promoted their application to European defense, in a fashion that recalls aspects of the development of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons. There are other parallels to the tactical-nuclear weapon story in the origins of Deep-Strike weapons. In the earlier case, for example, scien¬ tists who opposed the prevailing policy of strategic bombing and pro¬ duction of the H-bomb promoted their development of small-yield battlefield nuclear weapons as an alternative. Many of the ideas for contemporary advanced-technology conventional weapons appear to have originated with the "automated" or "electronic" battlefield pro¬ posed by a number of prominent U.S. scientists who opposed the U.S. bombing campaign in Vietnam. They participated in a group known as "Jason," which in 1966 sponsored a summer study, of the sort that produced the 1952 Vista report advocating tactical nuclear weapons. 118Karber's view on mutual possession is reported in Armed Forces Journal, May 1984, p. 87. 119For a review of some of the relevant technologies, see Cecil I. Hudson, Jr., and Peter H. Haas, "New Technologies: The Prospects," in Beyond Nuclear Deterrence: New Aims, New Arms, ed. Johan J. Holst and Uwe Nerlich (New York, 1977), pp. 107-48; Donald R. Cotter, "Potential Future Roles for Conventional and Nuclear Forces in Defense of West¬ ern Europe," in ESECS, Strengthening Conventional Deterrence in Europe: Proposals for the 1980s, Report of the European Security Study (New York, 1983), pp. 209-53. See also Kosta Tsipis, "New Technologies and New Weapons Systems" (chap. 2), and Jorma K Miettinen, "Can Conventional New Technologies and New Tactics Replace Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Europe?" (chap. 3), both in Arms Control and Technological Innovation, ed. David Carlton and Carlo Schaerf (New York, 1977); and the contributions to William Gutteridge and Trevor Taylor, eds.. The Dangers of New Weapon Systems (New York, 1983). [254]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

According to the Defense Department's history of the Vietnam war, later published as the Pentagon Papers, "having submitted a stinging condemnation of the bombing, the Study Group was under some obli¬ gation to offer constructive alternatives." In the list of components the scientists proposed for a system to prevent infiltration of North Viet¬ namese troops into the South were represented most of the tech¬ nologies that have evolved into Deep-Strike weapons.120 Subsequent stages in the process of promoting Deep-Strike innova¬ tions appear to correspond to this study's generalizations. Efforts at consensus building are especially well reflected in publications ori¬ ented toward gaining support for the new weapons.121 Promoters have relied on such windows of opportunity as the rise of anti-nuclear senti¬ ment within NATO, justifying their proposals as a means of "raising the nuclear threshold."122 They also describe their technical solutions as reactions to Soviet initiatives. A great deal of effort, for example, has gone into portraying the Soviet "Operational Maneuver Groups" (OMGs) as a qualitatively new threat that can be countered only by superior Western technology. In fact, the Soviet operational practices associated with the OMGs (a term the Soviets themselves apparently do not use) have a long history.123 Further, many Western analysts have found that the technical "solutions" bear little relevance to the problems posed by Soviet OMGs.124 Indeed, some specialists in Soviet u0The Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed. p. 120, quoted in Science against the People (Berkeley, Calif., December 1972), a study of the Jason Group, esp. pp. 4-6.1 am grateful to Lisbeth Gronlund for calling the study to my attention. mSee especially Diminishing the Nuclear Threat: NATO's Defence and New Technology, Report of the British Atlantic Committee (February 1984); and ESECS, Strengthening Conventional Deterrence. An early effort was Holst and Nerlich, Beyond Nuclear Deterrence. 122For skeptical evaluations of this claim, see Matthew Evangelista, "Offense or Defense: A Tale of Two Commissions," World Policy Journal 1 (Fall 1983): 45-69; Fen Osier Hampson, "Groping for Technical Panaceas: The European Conventional Balance and Nuclear Stability," International Security 8 (Winter 1983-84): 57-82; Michael Klare, "NATO's Conventional Weapons," Technology Reivew, May-June 1985, pp. 34-40, 73; Phil Williams and William Wallace, "Emerging Technologies and European Security," Survival 26 (March-April 1984): 70-78. 123David R. Jones, "The Advanced Guard and Mobility in Russian and Soviet Military Thought and Practice," SAFRA Papers l (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1985); Benjamin H. Miller, "Evolving Soviet Armored Doctrine: The Use of Armored Forces for Exploitation," paper presented to the Fifteenth Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Kansas City, Kans. (22-25 October 1983); Christopher N. Donnelly, "Soviet Operational Concepts in the 1980s," in ESECS, Strengthening Con¬ ventional Deterrence, pp. 105-36. For a popular example of overstating the novelty of OMGs, see "Moscow's New Strategy," Newsweek, 5 December 1983, pp. 58, 61, 62. The article is based on P. H. Vigor, Soviet Blitzkrieg Theory (New York, 1983). Vigor argues, after Donnelly, that "the Soviet armed forces have just come up with a new concept, the operational maneuvre group" (p. 130). 124Trevor N. Dupuy, "Why Strike Deep Won't Work," Armed Forces Journal, January 1983, p. 56; Jeffrey Record, "NATO's Forward Defense and Striking Deep," Armed Forces Journal, November 1983, pp. 42-48; Stephen L. Canby, "The Operational Limits of Emer¬ ging Technology," International Defense Review 18, 6 (1985): 875-80. [255]

Innovation and the Arms Race

military policy have pointed out that the "defense community in the West has found in the OMG a novel instrument by which to justify military requirements" for weapons that are actually desired for other reasons.125 In the same vein, another specialist reminded his readers— in the context of NATO responses to the Soviet OMG—of Murphy's seventh law: "For every difficult and complex question there is always a straightforward, wrong answer."126 In all of these respects the development of Deep-Strike weapons appears to conform to the generalized pattern of U.S. weapons innova¬ tion. Does Soviet behavior correspond as well to the pattern predicted here? Western analysts have already called attention to the likelihood of both off-setting and emulating Soviet responses: "It would be short¬ sighted to assume that the Soviets will not invent technical or tactical devices to blunt NATO improvements. Soviet emulation might also turn such weapons to the advantage of offensive operations."127 In a pattern already familiar from the case studies of tactical nuclear weap¬ ons, the Soviets would thereby pose a greater threat to NATO, by incorporating and producing in large numbers the weapons that were supposed to give the West an advantage. Most of the elements of the Soviet innovation process seem present in the case of Deep-Strike weapons. Highly accurate, conventionally armed strike complexes would fit in well with the Soviet hierarchy of objectives that began to emerge in the early 1970s.128 It is clear that the USSR has been following U.S. developments in these new areas of military technology ever since their first appearance during the Viet¬ nam war.129 Top Soviet military leaders, such as Marshal Nikolai 125John G. Hines and Philip A. Peterson, "The Warsaw Pact Strategic Offensive: The OMG in Context," International Defense Review, 16 no. 10 (1983): 1391-95. The authors argue that, rather than investing in exotic Deep-Strike technologies, "the single greatest deterrent that the western alliance may present to Warsaw Pact initiation of an OMG-led offensive might be the establishment of truly effective air defense of NATO airfields." For a related critique, see Trevor N. Dupuy, "The Soviet Second Echelon: Is This a Red Herring?" Armed Forces Journal, August 1982, pp. 60-64. For an example of how the OMG second-echelon threat is used to justify new NATO programs, see Donald R. Cotter's letter in response to Dupuy's article. Armed Forces Journal, October 1982, pp. 6, 8. 126Christopher Donnelly, "The Development of the Soviet Concept of Echeloning," NATO Review 32 (December 1984): 17. 127Richard K. Betts, "Conventional Deterrence: Predictive Uncertainty and Policy Con¬ fidence," World Politics 37 (January 1985): 161. The point is also made in K.-Peter Stratmann, "Prospective Tasks and Capabilities Required for NATO's Conventional Forces," in ESECS, Strengthening Conventional Deterrence, esp. pp. 180-85. The notions of offset¬ ting versus emulating responses are found in Meyer, "Soviet Strategic Programmes and the US SDI." For an earlier discussion, see Holst, "Missile Defense." 128Dennis M. Gormley, "A New Dimension to Soviet Theater Strategy," Orbis 29 (Fall 1985): 537-89. See also Kerry L. Hines, "Soviet Short-Range Ballistic Missiles: Now a Conventional Deep-Strike Mission," International Defense Review 18, no. 12 (1985): 190914. 129For one example, see V. Dmitriev's article on fuel-air explosives in Zarubezhnoe voennoe obozrenie [Foreign military review], no. 9 (September 1983): 48-53. For recent U.S. [256]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

Ogarkov, have called attention to the development in the West of "weapons based on new physical principles" and to the need for the USSR to overcome conservatism, inertia, and narrow-mindedness in responding to NATO's challenge. In an interview, Ogarkov specifically listed all of the technical developments associated with Deep-Strike concepts.130 It appears likely, then, that the twofold Soviet response to foreign technological initiatives identified here is well under way for Deep-Strike weapons. Star Wars. Many of the technologies required for Deep-Strike weap¬ ons are also essential for the U.S. "Star Wars" program of strategic missile defense. The emerging pattern of Soviet-American interaction in this sphere bears some similarity to earlier cases of weapons innovation. At first glance, the Star Wars program—or the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), as it is formally known—appears to contradict the bottom-up generalization about U.S. weapons innovation. Surely, the argument goes, SDI was launched from the very top, in President Ronald Reagan's speech of 23 March 1983, at a time when the relevant technologies were immature at best.131 Astute students of U.S. military policy recognize, however, that pressure for strategic defenses had been building up from the bottom for many years before the presi¬ dent's speech. Such pressure received attention even in the daily press, especially during the early period of the first Reagan administra¬ tion. By March 1982 potential investors in military industries were being informed that "the ballistic missile defense (BMD) program is a major national priority," whose funding had increased by 37 percent over that of the previous year and was scheduled to double in the next.132 work in the area, see W. S. Filler, "The Influence of Reactive Cases on Airblast from High Explosive," preprint from the Eighth Symposium (International) on Detonation, Albu¬ querque, N.M., 15-19 July 1985. 130See "Zashchita sotsializma: opyt istorii i sovremennost'" [Defense of socialism: The experience of history and the present], Krasnaia zvezda [Red star], 9 May 1984; Ogarkov includes a similar list in his remarks at a meeting of the party aktiv of the Soviet Ministry of Defense, reprinted in Krasnaia zvezda, 22 June 1983; and in N. V. Ogarkov, Istoriia uchit bditel'nosti [History teaches vigilance] (Moscow, 1985), p. 25. 131This position is put forward in Jonathan B. Stein, From H-Bomb to Star Wars: The Politics of Strategic Decision Making (Lexington, Mass., 1984). l32lnvesting in the Defense Industry: The Defense Budget, Research Report Defense Series no. 17, First Albany Corporation, Albany, N.Y. (March 1982), p. 10. For press accounts: Richard Halloran, "U.S. to Increase Military Funds for Space Uses," Hew York Times, 29 September 1982; Philip M. Boffey, "Pressures Are Increasing for Arms Race in Space," New York Times, 18 October 1982, one of a three-part series of articles. Readers of popular science magazines had even more advanced warning of the emerging Star Wars tech¬ nologies. See, e.g., "Lasers Light Up the Battlefield," High Technology, 1 (NovemberDecember 1981): 76-80. 1 am grateful to Mark Arsenault for calling this article to my attention. [257]

Innovation and the Arms Race

As with tactical nuclear weapons and the neutron bomb, the initia¬ tive for Star Wars came from physicists and weapons designers associ¬ ated with government laboratories—in this case, the Lawrence Liver¬ more nuclear weapons lab in California. The physicist most responsible for promoting Star Wars—Edward Teller—is the same one who lobbied for the H-bomb during the late 1940s and against a nuclear test ban and in favor of "clean" neutron bombs during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some of his proteges at Livermore have also engaged in considerable political activity in support of their projects—most no¬ tably Lowell Wood, leader of the "O Group," which invented the nuclear-pumped X-ray laser.133 Teller himself promoted the laser and other defense technologies in a series of personal meetings with Presi¬ dent Reagan. These meetings took place long before the Star Wars speech, and were publicly reported at the time. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also met with Reagan in February 1983 to advocate a new empha¬ sis on strategic defenses.134 Star Wars is not such a notable departure from the norm of U.S. weapons innovation as it first appears. In one sense, though, the Star Wars initiative does appear to differ from the ideal-type U.S. innovation, because the scientific and military proponents of the system made it to the top before the process of consensus building was complete. Star Wars is not unique in that regard, however. The H-bomb decision, for example, was largely kept secret from the public and most of Congress, so that a consensus was formed within a very small group close to the Executive. In other instances as well, the proponents of certain weapons gained access to the White House before they had garnered substantial support else¬ where. The attempt by Teller and Cohen to sell "clean" bombs to President Eisenhower is a case in point. To a certain extent. Teller's success in winning over Ronald Reagan to his cause was fortuitous. The two met in 1967 when then governor Reagan visited Teller's Liver¬ more laboratory. Teller briefed Reagan as part of a consenus building campaign in support of a number of the lab's projects.135 How could he know that Reagan would one day become president? Reagan's presidency provided a window of opportunity for the pro133An excellent account of the origins of Star Wars is William J. Broad, Star Warriors (New York, 1985). As a reporter for the New York Times, Broad covered much of the story in his articles; see, e.g., "Reagan's 'Star Wars' Bid: Many Ideas Converging," New York Times, 4 March 1985; and "The Secret behind 'Star Wars,'" New York Times Magazine, 11 August 1985, pp. 32ft. For a good early treatment, see Robert Scheer, "Reagan's 'Star Wars' Plan," in his With Enough Shovels (New York, 1983), pp. 283-97. 134E.g., "Teller Briefs Reagan on Killer Lasers," New York Times, 18 October 1982; the discussion in Broad, Star Warriors; and G. Allen Greb, Science Advice to Presidents: From Test Bans to the Strategic Defense Initiative, IGCC Research paper no. 3 (San Diego, Calif., 1987). 135Broad, Star Warriors, pp. 122-23. [258]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

moters of ballistic-missile defense. It is certainly conceivable, however, that another window would have appeared, even if Reagan had never been born. For example, the Air Force might have been expected to turn to strategic defense as its plans for new offensive weapons, such as the MX missile, were repeatedly frustrated by a Congress skeptical of the weapons' value. In much the same way, the Army came to support enhanced-radiation neutron warheads only after 1974, when Congress rejected its proposal for new nuclear artillery. The U.S. strategic defense program is far enough along for students of Soviet military policy to speculate about possible responses to it. Their predictions are generally consistent with the pattern described here: short-term offsetting countermeasures followed by an emulating response in the more distant future.136 In this case the Soviets have a substantial foundation in the research and development of strategic defense technologies on which to build. They also have the world's only deployed ABM system around Moscow. It is a mistake to argue, however, as the State and Defense departments have done, that these facts "suggest that the USSR may be preparing an ABM defense of its national territory" and would like to "break out" of the constraints of the ABM treaty.137 It makes more sense to see the Soviet strategic defense program as a hedge against technological uncertainty. As one former CIA specialist on Soviet mili¬ tary policy wrote in 1983, although the USSR's ABM program "has made significant technological progress over the past decade, it really has only now achieved the level of technology that was available to the United States ten years ago."138 Both the R&D program and the limited operational deployment of an ABM system around Moscow constitute the technical antecedents to a possible future large-scale defense. Sovi¬ et military priorities would have to shift dramatically, however, to support extensive production and deployment of a Star Wars defense. For now, the Soviets seem committed to the ABM treaty as a means of restraining U.S. technology and ensuring Soviet retaliatory capabil¬ ities.139 If the Reagan Star Wars program does in fact trigger a reevaluation of 136Meyer, "Soviet Strategic Programmes"; Holloway, "Strategic Defense Initiative"; Parrott, Soviet Union and Ballistic Missile Defense. 137Soviet Strategic Defense Programs, report released by the U.S. Departments of Defense and State (October 1985), p. 5. For further discussion of this claim, see Holloway, "Strate¬ gic Defense Initiative," pp. 263-65. 138Stevens, "Soviet BMD Program," p. 217. 139Garthoff, "BMD and East-West Relations"; Holloway, "Strategic Defense Initiative"; Parrott, Soviet Union and Ballistic Missile Defense. The chief of the Soviet General Staff has come out strongly in favor of the ABM treaty; see S. Akhromeev, "Dogovor po PRO— pregrada na puti gonki strategicheskikh vooruzhenii" [The ABM treaty—barrier on the road to a strategic arms race], Pravda, 4 June 1985, p. 4.

[259]

Innovation and the Arms Race

Soviet strategic priorities, it will have set off a series of reactions that will most likely redound to the disadvantage of both sides. Many of the short-term countermeasures that the Soviets might adopt could be con¬ strained by the implementation of an arms-reduction agreement. Thus the Soviets would be unlikely to agree to limits on numbers of MIRV ICBMs, for proliferation of these weapons would constitute an easy and straightforward counter to a U.S. strategic defense. Other rela¬ tively short-term countermeasures would include developing the means to destroy a U.S. space-based defense system. The Soviets in this case would be unwilling to limit their deployment of antisatellite weapons that could carry out such missions.140 The Soviets' reluctance to agree to reductions in ICBMs in the absence of a U.S. abandonment of Star Wars reflects an appreciation of the requirements for potential short-term countermeasures.141 In the longer term, many analysts foresee the USSR undertaking an emulating response to deployment of a U.S. strategic defense. Mainly for reasons of political prestige, the argument goes, the Soviets would feel obliged to deploy their own Star Wars system.142 This prediction is consistent in many respects with the generalizations made here about Soviet responses. The atomic cannon, for example, appears to have been produced initially as a hedge against uncertainty. It was dis¬ played in Red Square primarily for the political impression it created and to demonstrate that the USSR could match the products of U.S. technological efforts. Later, however, when the Soviet political and military leadership realized that the weapon did not perform ade¬ quately and did not conform to Soviet strategy, they halted its produc¬ tion. Economic constraints and competing military (as well as civilian) demands evidently persuaded the Soviet leadership to forgo produc¬ ing a costly weapon simply for the sake of prestige. It is possible that the Soviets may choose to follow the same path in responding to the Star Wars program. Economic constraints and com¬ peting demands for resources may limit the Soviet response. As Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev himself pointed out, however, counter¬ measures alone "will be effective, though less expensive, and quicker to produce."143 The important point, in any case, is that both the offset140For discussions of countermeasures, see Meyer, "Soviet Strategic Programmes"; Holloway, "Strategic Defense Initiative," pp. 268-72. 141For a review of Soviet proposals, see Chalmers Hardenbergh, ed.. Arms Control Reporter (Brookline, Mass., monthly compendium). 142Meyer, "Soviet Strategic Programmes"; Holloway, "Strategic Defense Initiative," p. 272. 143His remarks from a press conference following the Geneva summit meeting with President Reagan in November 1985 are quoted in New York Times, 17 December 1985, p. A16. For a discussion, see Matthew Evangelista, "The New Soviet Approach to Se¬ curity," World Policy Journal 3 (Fall 1986): 561-99.

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

ting and the emulating responses have the potential to render the United States less secure than it was before SDI was ever proposed. In its implications for political relations, economic well-being, and crisis stability. Star Wars exhibits all of the negative characteristics of the earlier technological innovations. There are, however, ways to avoid another cycle of dangerous Soviet responses to U.S. technological initiatives.

Alternatives to the Technological Arms Race

The elements of a grand compromise to avert an arms race in space have been evident to analysts and editorial writers alike virtually since Reagan first announced the Star Wars program, in March 1983. SDI would be employed as a bargaining chip to get the Soviets to agree to substantial reductions in their force of heavy MIRV SS-18 missiles.144 Such an agreement would require each side to make sacrifices in its primary area of strength: for the United States, its ability to initiate technological innovations; for the USSR, its ability to imitate those innovations and produce them in large quantities. The arms control deal that received so much attention during the mid-1980s entails U.S. restraint in the next major technological innovation (SDI) in return for Soviet cutbacks in the previous major innovation (multiple-warhead ICBMs). At first it seemed incredible that the USSR would find such a deal attractive. In essence, the Soviets would be agreeing to cut back the most potent component of their strategic forces in return for the United States' pledge simply to continue to abide by its international commit¬ ments—in this case, the 1972 treaty restricting deployment of ABM systems. Obviously, the Soviets would not agree to such disproportio¬ nate reductions in their existing forces merely in return for the Ameri¬ cans' renunciation of future deployments. Or would they? A trade of quantity for quality would in fact be consistent with my analysis of relative Soviet and U.S. strengths. Gorbachev's proposals did indicate a willingness to countenance substantial reductions in Soviet "heavy" 144Such an approach is suggested by John Steinbruner, “Arms Control: Crisis or Com¬ promise," Foreign Affairs 63 (Summer 1985): 136-49. See also his "U.S. and Soviet Se¬ curity Perspectives," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 41 (August 1985): 89-93; and Achieving Effective Arms Control: Recommendations, Background, and Analysis, a Report of the Commit¬ tee on International Arms Control and Security Affairs of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (November 1985), pp. 68-69. The bargaining-chip rationale under¬ lies some congressional support for SDI as well. See, e.g., "Les Aspin Speaks on Arms Control," interview in Arms Control Today, January-February 1986: 20-24.

Innovation and the Arms Race

missiles in return for strengthening the ABM treaty and U.S. reduc¬ tions.145 Moreover, as we shall see, the history of the arms race sug¬ gests that the Soviets would prefer a compromise of this sort to uncon¬ strained competition in new technologies. The "Moment of Hope" The closest the Soviet Union and the NATO powers came to a com¬ promise settlement of the arms race during the 1950s occurred on 10 May 1955. On that day the USSR accepted an Anglo-French memoran¬ dum that was intended to form the basis for the future work of the UN Disarmament Subcommittee. The United States had already expressed support for the goals of the memorandum, which included, among other things, the total prohibition of the use and manufacture of nu¬ clear weapons, major reductions in all armed forces and conventional armaments, and the establishment of adequate organs of control and inspection. Adherence to the plan would have required the USSR to cut back its armed forces from 5.7 million men to between 1 and 1.5 million. The latter figures, proposed originally by the Western powers, would have constituted a significantly disproportionate reduction in Soviet forces compared to those of France, Britain, and the United States. In return the Soviets would have benefited from the eventual destruction of stocks of U.S. nuclear weapons, but their own would have had to be destroyed as well. The USSR seemed willing to accept such a deal.146 The initial Western response to the Soviet proposal was favorable. The U.S. delegate to the UN subcommittee, after forty-eight hours' consultation with his government, announced that the United States was "gratified to find that the concepts which we have put forward over a considerable length of time, and which we have repeated many times during [these] past two months, have been accepted in a large measure by the Soviet Union." Jules Moch, the French representative, exclaimed that "the whole thing looks too good to be true," and the British representative expressed satisfaction that the West's proposals 145Evangelista, "New Soviet Approach to Security." 146The classic account of these negotiations is Philip Noel-Baker, The Arms Race: A Programme for World Disarmament (New York, 1958), pp. 12-30. The Soviet proposal is reprinted in Documents on Disarmament, 1945-1959, vol. 1: 1945-1956 (Washington, D.C., i960), pp. 456-67, and is discussed in a declassified official progress report, "Proposed Policy of the United States on the Question of Disarmament," vol. 1, 26 May 1955, Special Staff Study for the President, NSC Action no. 1328, by Harold E. Stassen, docu¬ ment located in papers of OS ANSA, NSC ser.. Policy Papers subser., box 2, folder "NSC 112/1 Disarmament (3)," in DDEL. A detailed analysis of Soviet objectives is found in Lincoln P. Bloomfield, Walter C. Clemens, Jr., and Franklyn Griffiths, Khrushchev and the Arms Race: Soviet Interest in Arms Control and Disarmament, 1954-1964 (Cambridge, Mass., 1966). [262]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

"have now been largely, and in some cases, entirely, adopted by the Soviet Union and made into its own proposals."147 At that point, the Soviets wanted to work out the specific details of an agreement, but the Western governments insisted on a recess. When the subcommittee met again, in the autumn of 1955, the West¬ ern delegates refused to discuss the earlier proposals. The U.S. repre¬ sentative was instructed to "place a reservation" on the earlier U.S. position, in effect renouncing it in favor of the new Open Skies pro¬ posal that President Eisenhower had put forward at the Geneva sum¬ mit meeting in July.148 As many U.S. participants had anticipated, the Soviets denounced the Eisenhower proposal as a deliberate attempt at espionage. The plan envisioned unrestricted overflights of each coun¬ try's territory and the exchange of "blueprints" of military facilities. One U.S. diplomat who was present at the unveiling of the Open Skies proposal remembers that "no one had any illusions that the Russians with their passion for secrecy would ever accept it."149 Thus passed what the main chronicler of these events described as a rare "moment of hope" in postwar disarmament efforts.150 In retrospect, especially now that many of the relevant U.S. docu¬ ments have been declassified, it is clear that the United States was not interested in securing an agreement with the Soviets to reduce and eliminate nuclear and conventional arms. U.S. officials preferred the risk of an unconstrained arms race to any conceivable agreement that could be reached with the USSR. Both the Department of Defense and the AEC expressed doubt that any "technical means" could be devised to ensure against Soviet cheating. Thus, as a paper prepared for the NSC described, U.S. disarmament policy through the mid-1950s was formulated primarily for its effect on "public relations," with no ac¬ count taken of the possibility that the USSR might actually accept the West's proposals.151 147Noel-Baker quotes from the verbatim records of the discussions, in Arms Race, pp. 21-22. 148Ibid., p. 23. See also W. W. Rostow, Open Skies: Eisenhower's Proposal of July 21, 1955 (Austin, Tex., 1982). 149Oral History interview with Vernon Walters, 21 April 1970, p. 42, in DDEL. 150Noel-Baker, Arms Race. 151The report stated, in regard to U.S. disarmament policy: "Consideration of this problem has been more often than not mainly stimulated by U.S. concern over Soviet maneuvers and tactics in the UN on the disarmament question; fear of Soviet proposals which might gain international support but be impossible for the U.S. to accept; concern over similar pressures from our allies; and a general desire to keep the initiative on the question in U.S. hands in a manner that will demonstrate to the free world our good record and basically peaceful and constructive intentions in this respect": T. B. Koons, "The Disarmament Problem and U.S. Policy before the NSC," 22 April 1955, OSANSA, Special Assistant Ser., Subject subser., box 4, folder "Disarmament—General (i955~5^) (3)," p. 2 in DDEL. The report includes an "annex" that puts forward the views of the AEC and the State and Defense Departments, as well as a chronology of U.S. policy decisions on disarmament from 1953 to 1955. [263]

Innovation and the Arms Race

The Eisenhower administration could not agree on anything beyond the propaganda aspects of its disarmament policy. The fragmented nature of U.S. policy making in this respect applies to the sphere of disarmament as well as to weapons innovation. Opposition to U.S. support for the UN plan percolated up from the bottom during the early 1950s, much as proposals for new weapons did. In late 1954 the Defense Department and the AEC came out explicitly against the UN disarmament plan as "unfeasible and contrary to the security interests of the U.S." Unable to reconcile this opposition with the State Depart¬ ment's advocacy of continued negotiation, Eisenhower appointed Harold Stassen as his special representative "to conduct on a fulltime basis a further review of U.S. policies on control of armaments." He also decided "in the interim period to continue support of the current United States position in the UN although providing for adjustments and emphasis."152 Soviet acceptance of the U.S.-approved UN plan on 10 May 1955 in effect called Eisenhower's bluff. Perhaps the Soviets were bluffing as well. At least one observer— although hardly a disinterested one—has suggested that the USSR's proposals issued in advance of the Geneva summit were intended "to encourage complacency in the West." The Soviets intented, in this view, not to signal a willingness to restrict their armaments but rather "to induce the West to diminish the attention and outlays devoted to the arms race," while they continued "to close the gap in weapons of mass destruction and to modernize their ground forces."153 A more objective reading of the Soviet position would find some genuine interest in securing an agreement on mutual reductions in armed forces. Evidence comes from many quarters. For example, a Soviet defector who had specialized in disarmament at the Foreign Ministry reports that a major change in the USSR's approach took place following the death of Stalin. He quotes his superior as revealing, "We're starting a new policy that will mean serious negotiating on disarmament."154 A Yugoslav diplomat, whom Khrushchev treated somewhat as a confidant, presents further evidence of the new leader's interest in the issue.155 Western scholars recognize as well 152Ibid., pp. 3-4 and Annex A. 153Rostow, Open Skies, p. 20. Rostow was one of the principal architects of the "Open Skies" proposal, a main objective of which was, in his words, "to achieve at the summit a positive political and psychological result" (xi). 154Arkady N. Shevchenko, Breaking with Moscow (New York, 1985), p. 78. The veracity of Shevchenko's account has been called into question in regard to the circumstances of his defection, the extent of his personal relations with top Soviet officials, and his value to U.S. intelligence. He has not, however, been challenged on the details of his early years in the Foreign Ministry. See Edward Jay Epstein, "The Spy Who Came in to Be Sold," New Republic, 15 and 22 July 1985, pp. 35-42. 155Veljko Micunovic, Moscow Diary, trans. David Floyd (New York, 1980), pp. 157, 166. [264]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

Khrushchev's willingness to make concessions in the disarmament sphere and on related issues, such as the status of Austria.156 More important, Soviet actions corroborate these secondhand and speculative accounts. In the wake of failure to obtain Western agree¬ ment on large-scale reductions in conventional forces, the Soviets re¬ duced their army unilaterally. From 1955 through 1957 the USSR cut back its armed forces by an estimated 1.84 million men.157 Khrushchev's reductions were so extensive that they evidently had a seriously demoralizing effect on his military forces, as Soviet memoiraccounts attest.158 If Khrushchev was willing to risk such discontent within his armed forces in order to limit his military expenditures, he certainly would have preferred to obtain some Western concessions in return. In his later reminiscences, Khrushchev indicates that he viewed his unilateral gesture as a means to convey Soviet interest in further mutual reductions: "To fight for disarmament or reduction of arma¬ ments at the same time as the Soviet Union had such an enormous army—no one would believe it."159 The unilateral reductions were supposed to inspire reciprocal Western measures, or at least serious negotiations, but they did neither. U.S. officials at the time seemed willing to pocket Soviet concessions without giving anything in return, while at the same time playing down the significance of the unilateral reductions in the USSR's armed forces.160 They preferred to compete with the Soviets at the publicrelations level—and the Open Skies proposal made for good public relations—rather than to negotiate seriously. In light of subsequent developments in the arms race, this was an extremely short-sighted and counterproductive position to adopt. That the USSR saw its concessions as a means to halt threatening U.S. developments is beyond doubt. The Soviets apparently sought to trade their numerical strength in conventional forces for the growing U.S. advantages in tactical nuclear weaponry.161 During 1956 U.S. de156Vojtech Mastny, "Kremlin Politics and the Austrian Settlement," Problems of Commu¬ nism 31 (July-August 1982): 37-51; Deborah Welch Larson, "Crisis Prevention and the Austrian State Treaty," International Organization 41 (Winter 1987): 27-60. See also Bloom¬ field, Clemens, and Griffiths, Khrushchev and the Arms Race. 157Soviet figures given by Khrushchev in a speech, reprinted in Pravda, 15 January i960, are generally accepted by Western analysts. See the extensive discussion in Wolfe, Soviet Power and Europe, pp. 162-66. 158See, e.g., Vladimir Lavrinenkov, Bez voiny [Without war] (Kiev, 1982), pp. 225-27. 159Khrushchev transcript, pp. 403-4. 160See, e.g., the background press statement prepared by the President's Special Com¬ mittee on Disarmament Problems, Joseph S. Toner, Executive Secretary, in response to the Soviet announcement of a second series of reductions, 14 May 1956, in Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject ser.. Alphabetical subser., box 11, folder "Disarmament [Vol. 1] (6) [May-June 1956]," in DDEL. 161BloomfieId et al., Khrushchev and the Arms Race, esp. pp. 85-86. [265]

Innovation and the Arms Race

velopments probably appeared increasingly ominous to the Soviet Union. The U.S. Army, for example, announced the impending deployment of an 8-inch nuclear artillery shell, "which, in effect, makes an atomic cannon of every one of the hundreds of 8-inch howitzers now in the hands of the army throughout the world."162 The announcement coincided with the reorganization of U.S. forces into the so-called pentomic divisions, for combat on a nuclear battlefield.163 During 1957 Soviet concerns were reflected in the proposals put forward by Valentin Zorin, the USSR's representative to the UN Disar¬ mament Subcommittee. "The Soviet Union," he stated, "considers nec¬ essary a complete prohibition of atomic and hydrogen weapons, in¬ cluding the use of all types of rocket missiles and artillery which are suitable for employment as atomic and hydrogen weapons." The USSR, he argued, was not willing to confine discussions to interconti¬ nental strategic systems. Equally important were "short- and mediumrange rockets or atomic artillery, which are no less dangerous to the security of States, especially in Europe with its comparatively short distances and dense population."164 The timing of the Soviet proposal to ban tactical nuclear weapons is significant. The proposal was made toward the end of the third stage in the innovation process. The Soviet government had initiated work on all types of tactical nuclear delivery vehicles—aircraft, missiles, artill¬ ery—and was nearing the point when it would have to make impor¬ tant choices. In 1957 Khrushchev was apparently under pressure from Marshal Grechko to deploy tactical nuclear missiles at the platoon or company level within the ground forces. He was able to resist the pressure for such large-scale deployments for a time, as his reminis¬ cences and later developments attest.165 During the next stage, how¬ ever, Khrushchev did authorize extensive development of operationaltactical missiles and—starting in about i960—their mass production. It seems evident, then, that Zorin's proposal was made at an important 162Army Ordnance OTL announcement, n.d. (probably fall 1956), OS ANSA, OCB ser.. Subject subser., box 3, folder "Misc. (1), [1955-56]," in DDEL. This approximate date is evident from correspondence between the Defense Department and the AEC over whether to make a public announcement. See, e.g., AEC chairman Lewis Strauss to Assistant Secretary of Defense Herbert Loper, 16 March 1956; Loper to Strauss, 20 Au¬ gust 1956; and AEC to Elmer Staats, head of the Operations Coordinating Board, memo, 10 September 1956, all in ibid. The information concerning the 8-inch shell had actually been published already, on 18 March 1956, through the Chicago Tribune Press Service, according to Strauss to Loper, 30 March 1956, ibid. 163See the presentation by Gen. Maxwell Taylor in Memorandum of Conference with the President, 11 October 1956, Ann Whitman File, DDE Diary, box 19, folder October 1956 Diary Staff Memos," in DDEL. See also Bacevich, Pentomic Era. 164Zorin's remarks to the subcommittee on 18 March 1957 are quoted in Noel-Baker,

Arms Race, p. 24n2i. 165Khrushchev transcript, p. 403.

[266]

Explaining the Technological Arms Race

turning point, when a mutual Soviet-American ban on tactical nuclear weapons could have forestalled subsequent Soviet deployments. Khrushchev sought to convey this message to his adversaries in the West. It was perhaps at Khrushchev's insistence, for example, that Marshal Zhukov warned—only five days after Zorin's proposal—that "tactical atomic weapons, if they are not banned, will in the next few years be introduced into the organic armament of the troops in place of conventional weapons."166 Unlike the fragmented U.S. approach to disarmament, the Soviet' approach reflects more often a centralization and coordination of di¬ plomacy and military policy. Although Khrushchev clearly recognized the propaganda value of far-reaching disarmament proposals, his ef¬ forts to limit conventional forces and ban tactical nuclear weapons from Europe were serious ones, consistent with his view of the require¬ ments of Soviet security. They failed, in large measure, because the United States did not take them equally seriously. U.S. officials did not appreciate the relationship between Soviet disarmament proposals and potential military developments. One consequence of their ignorance is the current deployment of thousands of Soviet and U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in the heart of Central Europe.

Trading Comparative Advantages A "quantity for quality" trade with the United States during the 1950s would have been consistent with the Soviet process of weapons innovation and with Soviet security objectives. The same appears to be true in the case of Star Wars. The Soviets seem to prefer to accept some reductions in their successful development of a recent technological innovation—the multiple-warhead ICBM—to an all-out arms race in strategic defense technologies. Moreover, the Soviets appear to believe that the same technologies that would be employed in space warfare— microprocessors, sensors, lasers, and particle-beam weapons—could be more effective on the ground. If successfully deployed, they could threaten the areas in which the Soviets have numerical advantages, as in tanks and artillery pieces.167 The fear of a costly and dangerous new technological arms race is clearly behind Soviet disarmament pro¬ posals.168 Yet U.S. security objectives could also be better served through disarmament agreements than through pursuit of such techni¬ cal panaceas as SDI. l66Krasnaia zvezda, 23 March 1957. 167This point is made in Alex Gliksman, "Behind Moscow's Fear of 'Star Wars,'" Nezv

York Times, 13 February 1986. 168Evangelista, "The New Soviet Approach to Security." [267]

Innovation and the Arms Race

There is good reason to believe that SDI would exhibit the worst features of previous technological innovations in weaponry—econom¬ ically, politically, and in its effect on crisis stability.169 Yet the Reagan administration has been unwilling even to negotiate limitations on the project, despite the substantial concessions the Soviets have offered in return. If the next administration meets Soviet proposals with similar intransigence, it may destroy a rare opportunity to put a brake on the technological arms race. The trade of quantity for quality, of present innovations for future ones, could apply not only to space weapons but to offensive DeepStrike and other systems. A major agreement of negotiated restraint on technological innovations could create a climate for more broad-reach¬ ing measures of disarmament,170 with considerable scope for unilateral initiatives as well. 169This conclusion is drawn by Sidney D. Drell, Philip J. Farley, and David Holloway,

The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: A Technical, Political, and Arms Control Assessment (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); and by the authors of numerous other studies. See, e.g., Charles L. Glaser, "Why Even Good Defenses May Be Bad," International Security 9 (Fall 1984): 92-123; Glaser, "Do We Want the Missile Defenses We Can Build?" International Security 10 (Summer 1983): 25-57; two reports by the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress, published as Strategic Defenses (Princeton, N.J., 1986); the essays in John Tirman, ed.. The Fallacy of Star Wars (New York, 1983). 170A particularly promising approach is put forward in Randall Forsberg, "Confining the Military to Defense as a Route to Disarmament," World Policy Journal 1 (Winter 1984): 285-318. See also her "Parallel Cuts in Nuclear and Conventional Forces," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 41 (August 1985): 152-56.

[268]

[7] The Arms Race and the Academy I am not convinced Russia has the [atomic] bomb. I am not con¬ vinced the Russians have achieved the know-how to put the complicated mechanism together to make an A-bomb; I am not convinced they have the bomb. —Harry Truman, 1953 The Soviets—-this isn't new for them—they're up at full pitch. I doubt if they could expand their military production anyplace beyond where it is right now or the rate that it is. —Ronald Reagan, 1984

We have seen that the openness and decentralization of U.S. society encourage technological innovations in weaponry, whereas the Soviet Union inhibits innovation with its obsessive secrecy and centralization. These same characteristics do, however, allow the USSR to concentrate its resources and respond to U.S. initiatives in ways that ultimately redound to the disadvantage of both countries. Yet the pattern of inter¬ action and the relative strengths of the two sides suggest that an alter¬ native to an unconstrained arms race is possible if each side sacrifices its advantage in return for mutual restraint. Is there any reason to hope that the United States and the USSR will in fact recognize the benefits of a negotiated settlement of the arms race? We have seen that the prevailing schools of thought in international relations do not account well for the technological arms race between the superpowers. The debate over internal versus external determi¬ nants which has preoccupied the field has failed to explain some of the most urgent and interesting problems of international life. In recent years, however, scholars have made considerable progress by becom¬ ing more eclectic in their methods and more catholic in their applica¬ tions. These are hopeful developments, and some of them suggest hopeful answers to the question of whether the United States and the USSR will learn to cooperate. [269]

Innovation and the Arms Race Conflict and Cooperation

The early study of the postwar Soviet-American arms race was domi¬ nated by game theory and strategic rational-actor approaches. Many adherents to these methods were associated with the Rand Corpora¬ tion and the U.S. government.1 Over the years, their state-centric, realist approaches came under attack from students of bureaucratic politics and organizational processes, who found it more valuable to look to internal determinants of foreign policy.2 Before they had succeeded in resolving the internal-external debate, many students of world politics had shifted their attention from prob¬ lems of military conflict and war to problems of economics and trade. The main reasons are not hard to identify. The end of the Vietnam war and the promise of improved relations and arms-control treaties be¬ tween the superpowers made questions of defense and military strat¬ egy appear less urgent. The oil crises of 1973 and 1979 and increasing Third World demands for a more equitable international economic or¬ der led to greater scholarly attention to issues of world politics other than military power. Coincidentally with their shift of subject area, a number of students of international relations became more eclectic in their approach, many of them attempting to combine features of the internal and external schools as well as Marxist traditions.3 With the return of a Cold War atmosphere in the 1980s, many ob¬ servers felt compelled to address problems of the arms race and mili¬ tary conflict. They benefited from the diversity of approaches that had flourished in the field and were no longer satisfied with the strict dichotomy of earlier years between internal and external factors, eco¬ nomic and military issues.4 'An excellent history of the U.S. strategists is Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York, 1983). 2This admittedly superficial overview roughly follows Stephen D. Krasner, ed.. Inter¬ national Regimes (Ithaca, 1983), pp. vii-ix. It also benefits from discussions with Peter Katzenstein. 3For examples from various approaches, see Peter J. Katzenstein, ed.. Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States (Madison, Wis., 1978); Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transi¬ tion (Boston, 1977); Theda Skocpol, State and Social Revolutions (New York, 1979); Peter Evans, Dependent Development (Princeton, N.J., 1979). Tor representative examples, see Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca, 1984); Jack Snyder, The Ideol¬ ogy of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, 1984); Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis (Baltimore, 1981); David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven, Conn., 1983); Thomas Risse-Kappen, Gesellschaftlicher Konsens und Internationale Kompatibilitdt: Anforderungen und Entscheidungen zur westdeutschen Sicherheitspolitik, i9yy-i984 (Mainz, 1988).

[270]

The Arms Race and the Academy State and Society

The distinction between the "high politics" of military security and the "low politics" of economics tends to be overdrawn. Stephen Krasner, for example, argues that the state/society approach he adopts would not be relevant to the military sphere: "A state that is weak in relation to its own society can act effectively in the strategic arena because its preferences are not likely to diverge from those of individu¬ al societal groups." Defining the "strategic arena" of "high politics" far too narrowly, he states that "it could be assumed that all groups in society would support the preservation of territorial and political integrity."5 The means those groups advocate to preserve territorial and political integrity could, however, vary considerably. Analysis of the develop¬ ment of various U.S. and Soviet weapons indicates, for example, that the range of views within society on the advisability of pursuing a particular weapon or strategy can be quite broad. How does one decide whether or not all these views make a difference? Krasner believes the issue-area ("high" versus "low" politics) provides some indication of when one can safely ignore a particular level of analysis (societal inter¬ est groups in his case). The comparative study of weapons innovation suggests, by contrast, that the nature of the state/society relationship in a given country seems to matter more than the type of issue in question. It casts doubt on the hypothesis "that differences in policy process across issue areas within a given state, the United States or the Soviet Union as cases in point, may be as great as differences in for¬ eign-policy process within a particular arena of power for each."6 The same factors that account for differences in the U.S. and Soviet eco¬ nomic systems—degree of centralization, flow of information, com¬ petition—appear to bear on military policies as well. The differences between the two systems, between the state/society relations in each country, appear to matter more than which chessboard the actors are playing on.7 Military policy in the United States tends to be more susceptible to internal pressures from the bottom, whereas Soviet mili¬ tary policy manifests greater control from the top, and appears more reactive to external factors. Neither the external, action-reaction explanations nor the internal, 5Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J., 1978), pp. 70, 329. 6William Zimmerman, "Issue Area and Foreign-Policy Process: A Research Note in Search of a General Theory," American Political Science Review 67 (December 1973): 1212. ^The metaphor comes from Stanley Hoffmann, "International Organization and the International System," International Organization 24 (Summer 1970): 389-413. [271]

Innovation and the Arms Race

bureaucratic explanations adequately account for the behavior of the United States and the Soviet Union in the technological arms race. The main problem is that the explanations cannot be applied in a homoge¬ neous fashion to two countries with such different domestic structures. This is not to say that the prevailing explanations for international politics are wholly irrelevant to the study of weapons innovation. A focus on domestic structures suggests that the balance of internal and external influences on a given country's policy will vary with the rela¬ tive strength of state and society. Thus it appears that external, actionreaction factors account better for Soviet behavior, owing to the strong, centralized nature of the Soviet state. Internal, bureaucratic, and espe¬ cially technocratic explanations account better for the actions of the United States, where strong societal forces influence a relatively weak state. Yet even differentiated in this way, the internal/external dichotomy is still not entirely satisfactory, especially for explaining developments beyond the initiation of a weapons innovation. We have seen that in the Soviet Union, internal factors—such as the organization of military forces, tradition, and the coalitions between military and political lead¬ ers—do influence the implementation of an innovation. At a compar¬ able point in the United States, external factors in the form of windows of opportunity serve to facilitate the process of building consensus around a new weapon. For these reasons, it seems useful to posit a multistage process of innovation for each country in order to identify the relationship between internal and external influences at any given time. Comparative analysis of the processes of innovation in the United States and the USSR reveals the strengths and weaknesses of each side in ways that homogeneous explanations do not. It gives rise to a pre¬ scription for ending the technological arms race that focuses on the differences in the way the two sides interact. The United States is strong in innovation; the Soviet Union is strong in mass production. A hopeful approach to slowing the arms race, therefore, would be for the two adversaries to sacrifice their relative strengths in the interest of mutual advantage.

The Fallacy of the Last Move

What appears to an observer to be an ideal compromise, however, may be perceived by the protagonists themselves as giving up their sole source of strength. It may not seem worthwhile to them. The United States sets a high value on its technological prowess. The Sovi[272]

The Arms Race and the Academy

ets seem equally committed to their ability to marshal their resources, produce in massive quantities, "overfulfill the plan." Both approaches have contributed to the superpowers' inability to understand the con¬ sequences of their own actions. The United States has consistently fallen victim to the fallacy of the last move—the belief that the Soviets would not choose, or would not be able, to match a U.S. initiative in the arms race.8 President Truman expressed disbelief that the Soviets really had the know-how to pro¬ duce a deliverable atomic bomb, even as late as three and a half years after he himself had announced the explosion of their first one. Presi¬ dent Eisenhower evinced similar skepticism about Soviet abilities. General Andrew Goodpaster, one of Eisenhower's former aides, was once asked how the president felt about tactical nuclear weapons. Eisenhower "knew it was a matter of time before the Soviets had them," the interviewer began. "The Soviets were continuing to build up a capability. Did he see the fact that the Soviets could also possess a deterrent or a strong nuclear threat in conjunction with the conven¬ tional force as affecting the capabilities of American deterrence at all?" "I think," answered Goodpaster, "he doubted that their weapons would ever be of the same quality as ours in terms of accuracy and reliability and that kind of thing, with their ability to do the really top¬ flight engineering work. He doubted that they would ever find very much of a way to put them to use."9 This view appears to have been widespread within the U.S. Army at the time: "Although the Soviets had acquired the basic secret of the bomb, the Army believed that the United States alone possessed the know-how to make nuclear weap¬ ons small enough, accurate enough, and in sufficient quantity to be usable in land combat."10 Subsequent developments proved these pre¬ dictions false. Yet the lessons have not been learned.

The Shadow of the Future

The study of world politics during the past few years has begun to undergo a kind of convergence. Students of military policy have bor¬ rowed concepts from the study of international political economy.11

8For a discussion, see Herbert F. York, Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Anns Race (New York, 1970), esp. pp. 210-12. 9Andrew Goodpaster, Oral History interview, 10 April 1982, p. 29, in HSTL. 10A. J. Bacevich, The Pentomic Era: The U.S. Army between Korea and Vietnam (Wash¬ ington, D.C., 1986), p. 140; emphasis in original. nFor example, see Athanassios Platias, "High Politics in Small Countries" (diss., Cor¬ nell University, 1986).

[273]

Innovation and the Arms Race

From the other side, game theorists have begun to apply strategic analysis, once employed mainly for military questions, to issues rang¬ ing from natural selection in biology to tariff wars in international trade.12 Game theorists have also devoted attention to arms races, deliberately seeking strategies that engender cooperation.13 They have come up with some hopeful results. Robert Axelrod, for example, finds the prospects of a tit-for-tat strat¬ egy in the context of a two-player Prisoner's Dilemma game (the sort often used to characterize the superpower arms race) conducive to gradual, mutual disarmament. The requirements are twofold: the states must recognize the consequences of continued mutual defec¬ tions (lower payoffs for both), and they must realize that they will continue to interact in the future. In this manner, the shadow of the future is cast on the present, inducing the two sides to cooperate.14 But one side must be willing to take the initiative.

Taking the Lead

In 1970 Herbert York published his authoritative study of the SovietAmerican arms race. Although much has changed since then, his anal¬ ysis and prescription remain timely. Writing of the United States, York argued that "we are richer and more powerful," "our science and tech¬ nology are more dynamic," "we generate more ideas of all kinds." For these very reasons, we can and must take the lead in cooling the arms race, in putting the genie back in the bottle, in inducing the rest of the world to move in the direction of arms control, disarmament and sanity. Just as our unilateral actions were in large part responsible for the current dangerous state of affairs, we must expect that unilateral moves on our part will be necessary if we are ever to get the process reversed.15 12Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York, 1984); Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York, 1986), esp. pp. 231-39; Robert O. Keohane, "Reciprocity in International Relations," Internation¬ al Organization 40 (Winter i986):i-28; the essays in a special issue of World Politics 38 (October 1983); Beth V. Yarbrough and Robert M. Yarbrough, "Reciprocity, Bilateralism, and Economic 'Hostages': Self-Enforcing Agreements in International Trade," Interna¬ tional Studies Quarterly 30 (March 1986): 7-21; John Kroll, "Strategic Cooperation and Conflict: The Collapse of Free Trade in the Nineteenth Century" (diss., Cornell Univer¬ sity, 1986). 13Axelrod, Evolution of Cooperation; Rosecrance, Rise of the Trading State; Steven J. Brams, Superpower Games (New Haven, Conn., 1985); George W. Downs, David M. Rocke, and Randolph M. Siverson, "Arms Races and Cooperation," World Politics 38 (October 1985): 118-46. 14Axelrod, Evolution of Cooperation. 15York, Race to Oblivion, p. 239.

[274]

The Arms Race and the Academy

York's prescription was well founded. The developments discussed here support his intuition that the Soviets would probably respond favorably to a U.S. gesture of restraint. Yet U.S. officials have not heeded York's advice. They have continued to pursue technological innovations in the hope of gaining an advantage that the USSR will be unable to overcome. Ironically, it is not the United States but the Soviet Union that has attempted a policy of unilateral restraint. During the mid-1980s, the Soviets adopted a number of initiatives intended to persuade the Unit¬ ed States to agree to arms limitations. They maintained a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing for over a year and a half, while the United States exploded more than twenty-five nuclear devices; they halted deployment of SS-20 missiles targeted against Europe and with¬ drew some fifty of them; they refrained from testing antisatellite weap¬ ons; and they allowed unprecedented measures of on-site inspection to verify compliance with arms agreements—including the presence of U.S. scientists with seismic monitoring equipment adjacent to Soviet nuclear test ranges.16 In the language of game theory, the Soviet policy is one of "graduated reciprocation in tension-reduction," or GRIT. The GRIT strategy may be superior to tit-for-tat in situations where the two sides must overcome considerable mistrust—a fair characterization of the 1980s.17 The Soviet initiatives suggest a preference for an alternative to the competition in military technology with the United States, for although the USSR has been able to match U.S. innovations and produce them in large numbers, these actions have in turn served to justify new U.S. weapons developments. U.S. officials as well should recognize that unilateral U.S. advantages—especially in the realm of technological innovations—are short-lived, that they provide no guarantee of se¬ curity. In acknowledging the counterproductive nature of the tech¬ nological arms race, the United States and the USSR would open the way to cooperative agreements aimed at ending it. Both sides would fall under the shadow of the future instead of falling for the fallacy of the last move. 16Matthew Evangelista, "The New Soviet Approach to Security," World Policy Journal 3 (Fall 1986): 561-99. 17The concept originated with Charles E. Osgood, Alternative to War or Surrender (Urbana. Ill., 1962); an excellent comparison of GRIT with tit-for-tat is found in Deborah Welch Larson, "Crisis Prevention and the Austrian State Treaty," International Organiza¬

tion 41 (Winter 1987): 27-60. Her subject matter—Soviet-American relations during the mid-i950S-provides many parallels to the situation three decades later.

[275]

Selected Bibliography

Archival Sources Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDEL). Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri (HSTL). Modern Military Branch, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (MMB NA). U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Library, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (CGSC Library). Nikita S. Khrushchev transcript, W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, Columbia University.

Secondary Sources Acland-Hood, Mary. "Military Research and Development: Some Aspects of Its Resource Use in the USA and USSR." In World Armament and Disarmament: S1PR1 Yearbook 1983. London: Taylor & Francis, 1984. Agursky, Mikhail. Nauchno-issledovatel'skii institut tekhnologii mashinostroeniia kak chast' Sovetskogo voenno-promyshlennogo kompleksa. Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jeru¬ salem, Soviet and East European Research Center, 1976. Alexander, Jean. Russian Aircraft since 1940. London: Putnam, 1975. Allison, Graham. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. -and Morton H. Halperin. "Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Im¬ plications." In Theory and Policy in International Relations, ed. Richard H. Ullman and Raymond Tanter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. - and Frederic A. Morris. "Exploring the Determinants of Military Weapons." Daedalus 104 (Summer 1975). Alperovitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965. Amann, Ronald, and Julian Cooper, eds. Industrial Innovation in the Soviet Union. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. -, J. M. Cooper, and R. W. Davies, eds. The Technological Ltmel of Soviet Industry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Arkin, William M., and Richard W. Fieldhouse. Nuclear Battlefields: Global Links in the Arms Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1985. [277]

Selected Bibliography Arlazorov, Mikhail. Doroga na kosmodrom. 2d ed. Moscow: Politizdat, 1984. Armacost, Michael H. The Politics of Weapons Innovation: The Thor-Jupiter Controversy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Art, Robert J. The TFX Decision: McNamara and the Military. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968. -and Kenneth N. Waltz, eds. The Use of Force: International Politics and Foreign Policy. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. Astashenkov, P. T., ed. Atomnaia energiia v aviatsii i raketnoi tekhnike. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1959. -. Atomnaia promyshlennost'. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1956. -. Konstruktor legendarnykh Ilov. Moscow: Politizdat, 1972. -. Podvig Akademika Kurchatova: Tvortsy nauki i tekhniki. Moscow: Znanie, 1979. -and N. Denisov. Komandarm krylatykh. Moscow: Politizdat, 1983. Avduevskii, V. S., and S. D. Grishin. "Razvitie raketnoi tekhniki v SSSR v periode 19461957 S8-" In Issledovaniia po istorii i teorii razvitiia aviatsionnoi i raketno-kosmichheskoi nauki i tekhniki. Moscow: Nauka, 1984. Aviatsiia i kosmonavtika SSSR. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1968. Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Bacevich, A. J. The Pentomic Era: The U.S. Army between Korea and Vietnam. Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1986. "A Background Review of the Relationships between Technological Innovation and the Economy." In Technology, Trade, and the U.S. Economy. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1978. Bakinskii okrug protivovozdushnoi oborony: lstoricheskii ocherk 1920-19J4 gg. Baku: Azerbaidzhanskoe gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1974. Ball, Desmond. Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Admin¬ istration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Barry, Donald D., and Carol Bamer-Barry. Contemporary Soviet Politics: An Introduction. 3d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987. Beard, Edmund. Developing the ICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics. New York: Colum¬ bia University Press, 1976. Bentley, Raymond. Technological Change in the German Democratic Republic. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1984. Berezhkov, Valentin. History in the Making: Memoirs of World War 11 Diplomacy. Trans, by Dudley Hagen and Barry Jones. Moscow: Progress, 1983. Berman, Robert P., and John C. Baker. Soviet Strategic Forces: Requirements and Responses. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1982. Bernstein, Barton J. "The H-Bomb Decisions: Were They Inevitable?" In National Security and International Stability, ed. Bernard Brodie, Michael D. Intriligator, and Roman Kolkowicz. Cambridge, Mass.: Oelgeschlager, Gunn, & Hain, 1983. Blackett, P. M. S. Fear, War, and the Bomb. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948. Bloomfield, Lincoln P., Walter C. Clemens, Jr., and Franklyn Griffiths. Khrushchev and the Arms Race: Soviet Interest in Arms Control and Disarmament, 1954-1964. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1966. Bonds, Ray, ed. Russian Military Power. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980. Boyd, Alexander. The Soviet Air Force since 1918. New York: Stein & Day, 1977. Brams, Steven J. Superpower Games. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Breslauer, George W. Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982. Broad, William J. Star Warriors. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Brooks, Harvey. "The Military Innovation System and the Qualitative Arms Race." Daedalus 104, (Summer 1975). [278]

Selected Bibliography Brzezinski, Zbigniew, and Samuel P. Huntington. Political Power: USA/USSR. New York: Viking, 1963. Bull, Hedley. The Control of the Arms Race. 2d ed. New York: Praeger, 1965. Bush, Vannevar. Modern Arms and Free Men. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1949. Carlton, David, and Carlo Schaerf, eds. Arms Control and Technological Innovation. New York: John Wiley, 1977. Carver, Michael. A Policy for Peace. London: Faber & Faber, 1982. Chistiakov, N. R. Po zakonu i sovesti. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1979. Cochran, Thomas B., William M. Arkin, and Milton M. Hoenig. Nuclear Weapons Databook. Vol. 1: U.S. Nuclear Forces and Capabilities. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1984. Cohen, Michael D., James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen. "A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice." Administrative Sciences Quarterly 17 (March 1972). Cohen, Samuel T. The Neutron Bomb: Political, Technological, and Military Issues. Cam¬ bridge, Mass.: Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, 1978. -—. The Truth About the Neutron Bomb. New York: Morrow, 1983. Colton, Timothy J. Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority: The Structure of Soviet Military Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Condit, Kenneth W. History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy. Vol. 2: 1947-1949. Wilmington, Del.: Glazier, 1979. Cooper, Julian. "Western Technology and Soviet Economic Power." In Technology Trans¬ fer and East-West Relations, ed. Mark Schaffer. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. -—. "Western Technology and the Soviet Defense Industry." In Trade, Technology, and Soviet-American Relations, ed. Bruce Parrott. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Cotter, Donald R. "Potential Future Roles for Conventional and Nuclear Forces m Defense of Western Europe." In Strengthening Conventional Deterrence in Europe: Pro¬ posals for the 1980’s. Report of the European Security Study. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. Coulam, Robert F. Illusions of Choice: The F-111 and the Problem of Weapons Acquisition Reform. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Cowen, Regina. Defense Procurement in the FRG: Politics and Organization. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987. Cyert, Richard M., and James G. March. A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Dean, Gordon. Report on the Atom. 2d ed. New York: Knopf, 1957. DeVolpi, A., G. E. Marsh, T. A. Postol, and G. S. Stanford. Born Secret: The Bomb, the Progressive Case and National Security. New York: Pergamon, 1981. Dinerstein, Herbert S. War and the Soviet Union. Rev. ed. New York: Praeger, 1962. Downs, Anthony. Inside Bureaucracy. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. Dunskaya, Irina. Security Practices at Soviet Scientific Research Facilities. Falls Church, \ a.: Delphic Associates, 1983. Dyson, Freeman. Disturbing the Universe. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Elliot, David C. "Project Vista and Nuclear Weapons in Europe." International Security 11 (Summer 1986). Enthoven, Alain, and K. Wayne Smith. How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 2962-3969. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Epstein, Joshua M. Measuring Military Power: The Soviet Air Threat to Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Erickson, John. "The Soviet Military System: Doctrine, Technology, and 'Style.'" In Soviet Military Power and Performance, ed. John Erickson and E.J. Feuchtwanger. Lon¬ don: Macmillan, 1979.

[279]

Selected Bibliography

Evangelista, Matthew. "Case Studies and Theories of the Arms Race." Bulletin of Peace Proposals 17 (June 1986). -. "The Evolution of the Soviet Tactical Air Forces." Soviet Armed Forces Review Annual 7 (i983)-. "The New Soviet Approach to Security." World Policy Journal 3 (Fall 1986). -. "Offense or Defense: A Tale of Two Commissions." World Policy Journal 1 (Fall 1983). -. "Stalin's Postwar Army Reappraised." International Security 7 (Winter 1982-83). -. "Why the Soviets Buy the Weapons They Do." World Politics 36 (July 1984). Evans, Peter. Dependent Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Fahey, James C. The Ships and Aircraft of the United States Fleet. Victory ed. New York: Ships and Aircraft, 1945. Fallows, James. National Defense. New York: Random House, 1981. Fedoseev, A. Zapadnia: Chelovek i sotsializm. Frankfurt/Main: Possev, 1976. Firdman, Henry Eric. Decision-Making in the Soviet Microelectronics Industry: The Leningrad Design Bureau, a Case Study. Falls Church, Va.: Delphic Associates, 1984. Fischer, Dietrich. Preventing War in the Nuclear Age. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984. Flerov, G. N. "Raboty Akademii Nauk SSSR po reaktoram s uranom-235, plutoniiem239 i vodorodnym zamedlitelem." In Sessiia Akademii Nauk SSSR po mirnomy ispol'zovaniiu atomnoi energii, 1-5 iulia 1955 g. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1955Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954. Vol. 5, Western European Security. Pt. 1. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983. Forsberg, Randall. "Confining the Military to Defense as a Route to Disarmament." World Policy Journal 1 (Winter 1984). -. "Military R and D: A Worldwide Institution?" Proceedings of the American Philosophi¬ cal Society 124 (August 1980). -."Parallel Cuts in Nuclear and Conventional Forces." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 41 (August 1985). -. Resources Devoted to Military Research and Development: An International Comparison. SIPRI. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1972. Frolov, K. V., A. A. Parkhomenko, and M. K. Uskov. Anatolii Arkad'evich Blagonravov, i894~i9y5. Moscow: Nauka, 1982. Fubini, E. "Reconnaissance and Surveillance as Essential Elements of Peace." In Impact of New Technologies on the Arms Race, ed. B. T. Feld, T. Greenwood, G. W. Rathjens, and S. Weinberg. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1971. Gaddis, John L. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gallagher, Matthew P., and Karl F. Spielmann, Jr. Soviet Decision-Making for Defense: A Critique of U.S. Perspectives on the Arms Race. New York: Praeger, 1972. Gareev, M. A. Takticheskie ucheniia i manevry. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1977. Garthoff, Raymond L. Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age. New York: Praeger, 1958. Gavin, James M. War and Peace in the Space Age. New York: Harper, 1958. Gelber, Harry G. "Technical Innovation and Arms Control." World Politics 26 (July 1974). George, Alexander L. "Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of Struc¬ tured, Focused Comparison." In Diplomacy: New Approaches in History, Theory, and Policy, ed. P. G. Lauren. New York: Free Press, 1979. -and Timothy J. McKeown. "Case Studies and Theories of Organizational Decision Making." In Advances in Information Processing in Organizations, vol. 2: Research on Public Organizations. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1985.

Selected Bibliography -and Richard Smoke. Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. Gerschenkron, Alexander. Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962. Gilpin, Robert. American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy. Princeton: Princeton Uni¬ versity Press, 1962. -. War and Change in World Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Glushko, V. P. Put' v raketnoi tekhnike. Moscow: Mashinostroenie, 1977. Golovin, I. N. 1. V. Kurchatov. 3d ed. Moscow: Atomizdat, 1978. Grant, Nigel. Soviet Education. 4th ed. Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979. Gray, Colin. The Soviet-American Arms Race. Westmead: Saxon House, 1976. Greenwood, Ted. Making the MIRV: A Study of Defense Decision Making. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1975. -. "Reconnaissance and Arms Control." Scientific American, February 1973- Rpt. in Progress in Arms Control?, ed. Bruce M. Russett and Bruce G. Blair. San Francisco: Freeman, 1979. Gutteridge, William, and Trevor Taylor, eds. The Dangers of New Weapon Systems. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. Gvardiia "Katiusha." Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1978. Halperin, Morton H. Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1974. -. Eimited War in the Nuclear Age. New York: Wiley, 1963. Hammond, Paul Y. "Super-Carriers and B-36 Bombers: Appropriations, Strategy, and Politics." In American Civil-Military Decisions, ed. Harold Stein. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1963. Herken, Gregg. The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945-2950. New York: Knopf, 1980. Hewlett, Richard G. Nuclear Navy, 1946-1962. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. -and Francis Duncan. Atomic Shield, i94y-i9^2. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969. David Holloway. "Entering the Nuclear Arms Race: The Soviet Decision to Build the Atomic Bomb, 1939-45." Social Studies of Science 11 (1981). -. "Innovation in the Defence Sector." In Industrial Innovation in the Soviet Union, ed. Ronald Amann and Julian Cooper. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. -. "Military Technology." In The Technological Level of Soviet Industry, ed. Ronald Amann, J. M. Cooper, and R. W. Davies. New Haven: Yale University Pres, 1977. -. "Research Note: Soviet Thermonuclear Development." International Security 4 (Win¬ ter 1979-80). -. "The Soviet Style of Military R&D," In The Genesis of Neu> Weapons: Decision Making for Military R&D, ed. Franklin A. Long and Judith Reppy. New York: Pergamon, 1980. -. The Soviet Union and the Arms Race. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. -. "The Strategic Defense Initiative and the Soviet Union." Daedalus 114 (Summer 1985). -. "Technology and Political Decision in Soviet Armaments Policy." Journal of Peace Research 11, no. 4 (1974). -. "War, Militarism, and the Soviet State." Alternatives 6 (March 1980). Holst, Johan J. "Missile Defense, the Soviet Union and the Arms Race," In Why ABM? Policy Issues in the Missile Defense Controversy, ed. Holst and William Schneider, Jr. New York: Pergamon, 1969. -and Uwe Nerlich, eds. Beyond Nuclear Deterrence: Nezv Aims, New Arms. New York: Crane, Russak, 1977.

Selected Bibliography Horelick, Arnold L., and Myron Rush. Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Hough, Jerry. "The Historical Legacy in Soviet Weapons Development." In Soviet Deci¬ sionmaking for National Security, ed. William Potter and Jiri Valenta, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984. -and Merle Fainsod. How the Soviet Union Is Governed. Cambridge: Harvard Univer¬ sity Press, 1979. Huntington, Samuel P. "Arms Races: Prerequisites and Results," In Public Policy, ed. Carl J. Friedrich and Seymour E. Harris. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. -. The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Iakovlev, A. S. 50 let Sovetskogo samoletostroeniia. Moscow: Nauka, 1968. -. Rasskazy aviakonstruktora. Moscow: Detskaia Literatura, 1967. -. Tsel' zhizni (Zapiski aviakonstruktora). id ed. Moscow: Politizdat, 1968. Isby, David C. Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army. London: Jane's, 1981. Istoriia Ural'skogo voennogo okruga. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1970. Iz istorii sovetskoi kosmonavtiki: Sbornik pamiati akademika Sergeia Pavlovicha Koroleva. Moscow: Nauka, 1983. Jacobson, Harold Karan, and Eric Stein. Diplomats, Scientists, and Politicians: The United States and the Nuclear Test Ban Negotiations. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966. Jahn, Egbert. "The Role of the Armaments Complex in Soviet Society (Is There a Soviet Military Industrial Complex?)." journal of Peace Research 12, no. 3 (1975). Jervis, Robert. "Cooperation under the Security Dilemma." World Politics 30 (January 1978). -. Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Jones, Christopher. Soviet Influence in Eastern Europe: Political Autonomy and the Warsaw Pact. New York: Praeger, 1981. Jones, David R. "The Advanced Guard and Mobility in Russian and Soviet Military Thought and Practice." In SAFRA Papers I. Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1985. Jonsson, Christer. Soviet Bargaining Behavior: The Nuclear Test Ban Case. New York: Colum¬ bia University Press, 1979. Kaldor, Mary. The Baroque Arsenal. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981. -. "Military R&D: Cause or Consequence of the Arms Race?" International Social Sci¬ ence Journal 35, no. 1 (1983). -. "The Weapons Succession Process." World Politics 38 (July 1986). Kaplan, Fred. The Wizards of Armageddon. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Karpov, Vladimir. Polkovodets. Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel', 1985. Katzenstein, Peter J. Corporatism and Change: Austria, Switzerland, and the Politics of Indus¬ try. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. -. "International Relations and Domestic Structures: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States." International Organization 30 (Winter 1976). -, ed. Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Kelleher, Catherine McArdle. Germany and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Keohane, Robert O. "Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond," Ada W. Finifter, Political Science: The State of the Discipline. Washington, D.C.: American Politi¬ cal Science Association, 1983. [282]

Selected Bibliography -and Joseph S. Nye. Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977. Kievskii krasnoznamennyi: Istoriia krasnoznamennogo Kievskogo voennogo okruga, 1919-1972. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1974. Killian, James R., Jr. Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assi¬ stant to the President for Science and Technology. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1977. Kingdon, John W. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. Kolkowicz, Roman. The Soviet Military and the Communist Party. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Kolodziej, Edward A. The Uncommon Defense and Congress, 194.5-1963. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966. Kramish, Arnold. Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959. Krasner, Stephen D. Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. -, ed. International Regimes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Krasnoznamennyi Belorusskii voennyi okrug. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1983. Krasnoznamennyi Prikarpatskii: Istoriia Krasnoznamennogo Prikarpatskogo voennogo okruga. 2d ed. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1982. Krell, Gert. Riistungsdynamik und Rustungskontrolle: Die gesellschaftlichen Auseinandersetzungen um Salt in den USA, 1969-1975. 2d ed. Frankfurt/Main: Haag & Herchen, 1978. -and Hans-Joachim Schmidt. Der Riistungswettlauf in Europa: Mittelstreckensysteme, konventionelle Waffen, Rustungskontrolle. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1982. Kulikov, V. G., ed. Akademiia generaVnogo shtaba. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1976. Kurth, James. "Why We Buy the Weapons We Do." Foreign Policy, no. 11 (Summer 1973)--. "A Widening Gyre: The Logic of American Weapons Procurement." Public Policy, no. 19 (Summer 1971). Lapp, Ralph E. Arms beyond Doubt: The Tyranny of Weapons Technology. New York: Cow¬ les, 1970. -. The New Force: The Story of Atoms and People. New York: Harper, 1953. Lavrinenkov, Vladimir. Bez voiny. Kiev: Politizdat Ukrainy, 1982. Lebedinsky, A. V. What Russian Scientists Say about Fallout. New York: Collier, 1962. Lebow, Richard Ned. Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. -. Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Leitenberg, Milton. "Background Materials on Tactical Nuclear Weapons." In SIPRI, Tactical Nuclear Weapons: European Perspectives. London: Taylor & Francis, 1978. -. "The Dynamics of Military Technology Today." International Social Science Journal 25 no. 3 (1973). Levy, Jack S. "The Offense-Defense Balance of Military Technology: A Theoretical and Historical Analysis." International Studies Quarterly 28 (June 1984). Lewis, Eugene. Public Entrepreneurship: Toward a Theory of Bureaucratic Political Pou}er. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Lewis, Kevin N. "Balance and Counterbalance: Technology and the Arms Race." Orbis 29 (Summer 1985). Liddell Hart, B. H. Deterrent or Defence. London: Stevens, i960. Lilienthal, David E. The Journals of David E. Lilienthal. Vol. 2: The Atomic Energy Years, 1945-1950. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. [283]

Selected Bibliography Long, Franklin A. "Advancing Military Technology: Recipe for an Arms Race." Current History 82 (May 1983). Lowi, Theodore J. "Making Democracy Safe for the World: National Politics," In Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy, ed. James N. Rosenau. New York: Free Press, 1967. Lutz, Dieter, ed. Die Riistung der Sowjetunion: Rustungsdynamik und burokratische Strukturen. Baden: Nomos Verlag, 1979. McConnell, Grant. Private Power and American Democracy. New York: Knopf, 1967. MccGwire, Michael. Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: Brook¬ ings Institution, 1987. -. "The Turning Points in Soviet Naval Policy." In Soviet Naval Developments: Capability and Context, ed. Michael MccGwire. New York: Praeger, 1973. -, Ken Booth, and John McDonnell, eds. Soviet Naval Policy: Objectives and Constraints. New York: Praeger, 1975. McNamara, Robert S. The Essence of Security: Reflections in Office. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. McNaugher, Thomas L. The M16 Controversies: Military Organizations and Weapons Acquisi¬ tion. New York: Praeger, 1984. McPhee, John. The Curve of Binding Energy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974. Medaris, John B. Countdown for Decision. New York: Putnam, i960. Medvedev, Roy A. On Socialist Democracy. New York: Norton, 1975. Medvedev, Zhores. Nuclear Disaster in the Urals. New York: Random House, 1979. -. Soviet Science. London: Oxford University Press, 1979. Meyer, Stephen M. "Soviet Strategic Programmes and the US SDL" Survival zrj (Novem¬ ber/December 1985). -. Soviet Theatre Nuclear Forces. Pt. 1: Development of Doctrine and Objectives. Pt. 2: Capabilities and Implications. London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 198384. Micunovic, Veljko. Moscow Diary. Trans. David Floyd. New York: Doubleday, 1980. Mil'chenko, N. P. Zalpy nad neboi. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1983. Millikan, Robert A. The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950. Millis, Walter, ed. The Forrestal Diaries. New York: Viking, 1951. Mohr, Lawrence. Explaining Organizational Behavior: The Limits and Possibilities of Theory and Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1982. Moore, Barrington, Jr. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon, 1966. Morse, Philip M. In at the Beginnings: A Physicist's Life. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1977. Mueller, John E., ed.. Approaches to Measurement in International Relations: A Non-Evangeli¬ cal Approach. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969. Muller, Edwin. Riistungspolitik und Rustungsdynamik: Fall USA. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1985. Murray, Thomas. Nuclear Policy for War and Peace. Cleveland: World, i960. Nestorenko, G. N., A. I. Sobolev, and Iu. N. Sushkov. Primenenie atomnykh dvigatelei v aviatsii. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1937. Nincic, Miroslav. The Arms Race: The Political Economy of Military Growth. New York: Praeger, 1982. Noel-Baker, Philip. The Arms Race: A Programme for World Disarmament. New York: Oceana, 1958. Nye, Joseph S., Jr. "The Domestic Roots of American Policy." In The Making of America's Soviet Policy, ed. Joseph S. Nye, Jr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Odom, William E. "Soviet Force Posture: Dilemmas and Directions." Problems of Commu¬ nism 34 (July-August 1985). [284]

Selected Bibliography -. "The Soviet Military: The Party Connection." Problems of Communism 22 (September-October 1973). Ogarkov, N. V. Istoriia uchit bditel'nosti. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1985. Ordena Lenina Moskovskii voennyi okrug. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1971. Ordway, Frederick I., Ill, and Mitchell Sharpe. The Rocket Team. New York: Crowell, 1979. Osgood, Robert Endicott. NATO: The Entangling Alliance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Ozerov, G. Tupolevskaia sharaga. 2d ed. Frankfurt/Main: Possev, 1973. Parrott, Bruce. Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1983. -. The Soviet Union and Ballistic Missile Defense. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987. ' Peck, Morton J., and Frederic M. Scherer. The Weapons Acquisition Precess: An Economic Analysis. Boston: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, 1962. Penkovskiy, Oleg. The Penkovskiy Papers. Trans. Peter Deriabin. New York: Doubleday, 1965. Platias, Athanassios. "High Politics in Small Countries." Diss., Cornell University, 1986. Pokrovskii, G. I. Science and Technology in Contemporary War. Trans. Raymond L. Garthoff. New York: Praeger, 1959. First published 1956. Polikanov, Sergei. Nuclear Physics in the Soviet Union: Current Status and Future Prospects. Falls Church, Va.: Delphic Associates, 1984. -. Razryv: Zapiski atomnogo fizika. Frankfurt/Main: Possev, 1983. Polmar, Norman, and Thomas P. Allen. Rickover: Controversy and Genius. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. Polsby, Nelson W. Congress and the Presidency. 2d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1971. Ponomarev, Aleksandr N. Sovetskie aviatsionnye konstruktory. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1977. Poole, Walter S. History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy. Vol. 4: 1950-1952. Wilmington, Del.: Glazier, 1979. Posen, Barry R. The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Potter, William C. "Issue Area and Foreign Policy Analysis." International Organization 34 (Summer 1980). Prados, John. The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelligence Analysis and Russian Military Strength. New York: Dial, 1982. Pretty, Ronald T., ed. Jane's Weapon Systems, 1981-82. New York: Jane's, 1982. Price, Don K. Government and Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. First published 1954. Problemy ispoTzovaniia atomnoi energii: Sbornik statei. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1953. Quester, George. Offense and Defense in the International System. New York: Wiley, 1977. Rathjens, George W. "The Dynamics of the Arms Race." Scientific American, April 1969. Reprinted in Progress in Arms Control?, ed. Bruce M. Russett and Bruce G. Blair. San Francisco: Freeman, 1979. Reinhardt, George, and William Kintner. Atomic Weapons in Lind Combat. Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Service Publishing, 1953. Ridgway, Matthew. Soldier. New York: Harper, 1936. Rigby, T. H. "Introduction: Political Legitimacy, Weber and Communist Mono-Organi¬ zational Systems." In Political Legitimation in Communist States, ed. T. H. Rigby and Ferenc Feher. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982. Risse-Kappen, Thomas. Gesellschaftlicher Konsens und Internationale Kompatibilitdt: Anforderungen und Entscheidungen sur westdeutschen Sicherheitspolitik, lqyy-iqSq. Mainz: Grunewald-Kaiser, 1988.

Selected Bibliography Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. 3d ed. New York: Free Press, 1983. Romanov, A. P. Konstruktor kosmicheskikh korablei. 3th ed. Moscow: Politizdat, 1981. Rose, John P. The Evolution of U.S. Army Nuclear Doctrine, 1945-1980. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1980. Rosecrance, Richard N. Action and Reaction in World Politics. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963. -. The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Rosen, Steven, ed. Testing the Theory of the Military-Industrial Complex. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1973. Rosenau, James N. "Foreign Policy as an Issue Area." In Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy, ed. James N. Rosenau. New York: Free Press, 1967. -• “Pre-theories and Theories of Foreign Policy." In Approaches to Comparative and

International Politics, ed. R. Barry Farrell. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966. Rosenberg, David Alan. "American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision." Journal of American History 66 (June 1979). -. "The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-1960." International Security 7 (Spring 1983). . "U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, 1945-1950." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 38 (May 1982). Rosenberg, Howard. Atomic Soldiers: American Victims of Nuclear Experiments. Boston: Beacon, 1980. Rostow, W. W. Open Skies: Eisenhower's Proposal of July 21, 1955. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Rowen, Henry. "Central Intelligence Agency Briefing on the Soviet Economy." In The

Soviet Polity in the Modern Era, ed. Erik P. Hoffmann and Robbin F. Laird. New York: Aldine, 1984. Russett, Bruce. "International Interactions and Processes: The Internal vs. External Debate Revisited." In Political Science: The State of the Discipline, ed. Ada W. Finifter. Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association, 1983. and Bruce G. Blair, eds. Progress in Arms Control? San Francisco: Freeman, 1979. Saffer, Thomas H., and Orville E. Kelly. Countdown Zero: GI Victims of U.S. Atomic Testing. New York: Penguin, 1982. Sakharov, Andrei. Sakharov Speaks. New York: Knopf, 1974. Sanders, Jerry. Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment. Boston: South End Press, 1983. Sapir, Jacques. Les Armes de la puissance ou la puissance des armes: Production de materiel

militaire et developpement economique en Union sovietique. Cahiers d'Etudes Strategiques, no. 2. Paris: Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherches sur la Paix et d'Etudes Strategi¬ ques, 1983. Sapolsky, Harvey M. The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972. Schaffer, Mark, ed. Technology Transfer and East-West Relations. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. Scheer, Robert. With Enough Shovels. New York: Vintage, 1983. Schelling, Thomas C. Arms and Influence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. Scherer, F. M. Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance. 2d ed. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1980. Schilling, Warner R., Paul V. Hammond, and Glenn H. Snyder, eds. Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. Schlotter, Peter, and Stephan Tiedtke. "Die sowjetische Rustungskontrollinitiative vom

[286]

Selected Bibliography Oktober 1979—eine verpasste Chance?" In Studiengruppe Militarpolitik, Aufriisten,

um Abzurusten? Hamburg: Reinbeck bei Rowohlt, 1980. Schnabel, James F. The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy. Vol. 1: 1945-2947. Wilmington, Del.: Glazier, 1979. Schroeer, Dietrich. Science, Technology, and the Nuclear Arms Race. New York: Wiley, 1984. Schumpeter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. 3d ed. New York: Harper, 1950. -. History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. Schwartz, David N. NATO's Nuclear Dilemmas. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1983. Scott, Harriet Fast, and William F. Scott. The Armed Forces of the USSR. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1979. -, eds. The Soviet Art of War: Doctrine, Strategy, and Tactics. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1982. Scoville, Herbert. "Missile Submarines and National Security." In Progress in Arms Con¬

trol?, ed. Bruce Russett and Bruce G. Blair. San Francisco: Freeman, 1979. Seaborg, Glenn T. Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban. Berkeley: University of Califor¬ nia Press, 1981. Senghaas, Dieter. Rustung und Militarismus. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. --. Die Zukunft Europas: Probleme der Friedensgestaltung. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Sharp, Jane M. O. "Arms Control and Alliance Commitments." Political Science Quarterly 100 (Winter 1985-86). Shavrov, V. B. lstoriia konstruksii samoletov v SSSR 1938-1950 gg. Moscow: Mashinostroenie, 1978. Shevchenko, Arkady N. Breaking with Moscow. New York: Knopf, 1985. Sigal, Leon V. Nuclear Forces in Europe: Enduring Dilemmas and Present Prospects. Wash¬ ington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1984. Singer, J. David. Deterrence, Arms Control, and Disarmament. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984. First published 1962. -. "Weapons Technology and International Stability." Centennial Review 5 (Fall 1961). Skocpol, Theda. State and Social Revolutions. New York: Cambridge University Press,

1979Smyth, Henry DeWolf. Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the

Development of the Atomic Bomb under the Auspices of the United States Government, 19401945. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945. Snyder, Jack. The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Sovetskie Vooruzhennye Sily: lstoriia stoitel'stva. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1978. Spielmann, Karl F. Analyzing Soviet Strategic Arms Decisions. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1978. Stein, Jonathan B. From H-Bomb to Star Wars: The Politics of Strategic Decision Making. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1984. Stern, Philip M., with Harold P. Green. The Oppenheimer Case. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Stevens, Sayre. "The Soviet BMD Program." In Ballistic Missile Defense, ed. Ashton B. Carter and David N. Schwartz. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1984.

Strategic Defenses. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Strauss, Lewis L. Men and Decisions. New York: Doubleday, 1962. Talbott, Strobe, ed. Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.

[287]

Selected Bibliography Tammen, Ronald L. MIRV and the Arms Race: An Interpretation of Defense Strategy. New York: Praeger, 1973. Taylor, John W. R., ed. fane's All the World's Aircraft, 1981-1982. London: Jane's, 1981. Taylor, Maxwell. The Uncertain Trumpet. New York: Harper, 1939. Taylor, Michael J. H., and John W. R. Taylor. Missiles of the World. New York: Scribner's, 1972. Thompson, E. P. Beyond the Cold War: A New Approach to the Arms Race and Nuclear Annihilation. New York: Pantheon, 1982. -. The Heavy Dancers. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Tirman, John, ed. The Fallacy of Star Wars. New York: Random House, 1983. Tolubko, V. Nedelin: Pervyi glavkom strategicheskikh. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1979. Tromp, H. W., and G. R. LaRocque, eds. Nuclear War in Europe. Groningen: Groningen University Press, 1982. Turetsky, Mikhail. The Introduction of Missile Systems into the Soviet Navy (1945-1962). Falls Church, Va.: Delphic Associates, 1983. Van Evera, Stephen. "The Causes of War." Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1983. Vigor, P. H. Soviet Blitzkrieg Theory. New York: St. Martin's, 1983.

Voennaia akademiia imeni M. V. Frunze. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1980. Voennyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar'. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1983. Voiska protivovozdushnoi oborony strany: Istoricheskii ocherk. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1968. Voiska PVO strany v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine, 1941-1945. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1981. Waltz, Kenneth N. Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959. -. Theory of International Politics. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979. Warner, Edward L., III. The Military in Contemporary Soviet Politics: An Institutional Analy¬ sis. New York: Praeger, 1977. Wasserman, Sherri L. The Neutron Bomb Controversy: A Study in Alliance Politics. New York: Praeger, 1983. Wilson, James Q. "Innovation in Organization: Notes toward a Theory." In Approaches to

Organizational Design, ed. James D. Thompson. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966. Wolfe, Thomas W. Soviet Power and Europe, i945~i9yo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer¬ sity Press, 1970. -. Soviet Strategy at the Crossroads. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965. Wolfers, Arnold. Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962. Wright, Barton. Soviet Missiles. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1986. Yarmolinsky, Adam. The Military Establishment: Its Impacts on American Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Yergin, Daniel. Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. Yevsikov, Victor. Re-entry Technology and the Soviet Space Program (Some Personal Observa¬

tions). Falls Church, Va.: Delphic Associates, 1982. York, Herbert F. The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb. San Francisco: Freeman, 1976. -. Race to Oblivion: A Participant's Guide to the Arms Race. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. -. "Reconnaissance Satellites and the Arms Race." In Arms Control and Technological

Innovation, ed. David Carlton and Carlo Schaerf. New York: Wiley, 1977. Zakharov, M. V., ed. 50 let Vooruzhennykh Sil SSSR. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1968. [288]

Selected Bibliography Zander, Iwo, and Rolf Araskog. Nuclear Explosions 194.5-1972, Basic Data. Stockholm: Research Institute of National Defence, 1973. Zhukov, G. K. The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. New York: Delacorte, 1971. Zimmerman, William. "Issue Area and Foreign-Policy Process: A Research Note in Search of a General Theory." American Political Science Review 67 (December 1973). Zuckerman, Solly. Nuclear Illusion and Reality. New York: Viking, 1982.

[289]

Index

ABM. See Antiballistic missile systems Academy of Sciences, Soviet, 35, 37, 70, 75, 181, 190, 192, 232 Acheson, Dean, 88, 99, 111, 146-130, 219 Action-reaction explanations, 10-11, 1415, 19-20, 51, 240, 271-272; for Soviet weapons, 17, 85, 233-233, 239-240; for U.S. weapons, 63, 218, 222-223, 25° Advanced-technology conventional weapons, 240, 234-257, 268 Agnew, Harold, 247-248 Agursky, Mikhail, 33-35, 37, 40 Aircraft: German: air-defense fighters, 73-74; bombers, 71; Junkers, 73; Messerschmitt, 73 Soviet, 41, 70, 79, 213-214; fighters, 69, 73; fighter-bombers, 188-189; Frontal Aviation, 205-206; Iak-15, 73, 76; Iak-28, 205; II-28, 166-167, 171, 205; II-30, 171; II—46, 171-172; interceptors, 69-71, 73, 165, 187; long-range bombers, 213-214; MiG9, 73, 76; MiG-15, 76-77; MiGi5bis, 188; Pe-2, 72; Su-i, 189; Su7, 188-189, 205-206, 231-232; Su15, 189; Tu-4, 171-172; Tu-14, 166; Tu-16, 172 U.S.: AJ-i, 119, 140; B-29, 79, 171; B36, 79, 105, 107; B-45, 152; B-47, 79; F-84, 91, 152; P2V, 91, 119, 140; strategic bombers, 65, 73, 76-77, 79, 103, 105 Aircraft carriers, 62, 86, 119, 140, 172 Air defense: Soviet, 73-74, 76-79, 81, 186-187, 205/ 233-234; U.S., 233234 [291]

Air force: Soviet, 81, 176-177, 205-206, 231-232 U.S., 59-60, 97-99, 107, 127, 133, 138-140, 145-150, 245-246, 259; competition with Army, 61-62, 85, 90-91, 103-106, 124, 221-222; and ICBM, 54-56, 62-67, 124; and MIRV, 63-64, 66. See also Strategic Air Command Allison, Graham, T., 10-15, 17, 20, 229232 Alvarez, Luis, 117-118 Anglo-French disarmament memorandum (1955), 262-267 Antiballistic missile systems (ABM): Soviet, 10-11, 66, 68, 242-243; U.S., 12, 19, 56, 68, 242-243, 247, 257-261 Antiballistic missile treaty (1972), 11, 19, 68, 243, 259, 261-262 Antiparty group, 236-239 Antisatellite weapons (ASAT), 260, 275 Argonne National Laboratory, 58 Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, 151

Arms control, 1, 82, 217, 253, 274-275. See also Disarmament Arms race: alternatives to, 261-275; economic burden, 1-4; explanations for, 84-85; qualitative versus quantitative, 1 Army: Soviet, 70, 74, 80-81, 85, 93; and missile program, 164, 214-215, 229232 U.S.: competition with Air Force, 6162, 85, 90-91, 103-106, 124, 221222; interest in tactical nuclear weapons, 89-94, 9^-99/ 112-114, 121-124, 14&-152/ 157> 259, 266,

Index Army, U.S. (cont.) 273; and Korean war, 114-116, 121122; tests nuclear weapons in presence of troops, 131-133, 150152 Army Operations Research Office, 128, 132-133 Artillery: Soviet, 81, 191, 205-206, 214-215, 230, 231-233, 238; Katiusha, 71-72; nuclear artillery, 193-199, 201-206, 231-235, 253, 260; rocket artillery, 71-72, 74 U.S.: nuclear artillery, 114-115, 123, 140, 193-195, 204-205, 225-226, 230, 234-235, 248-249, 259-260, 266 Atomic bomb. See Nuclear weapons Atomic cannon, 97, 114-115, 193-199, 260. See also Artillery Atomic Energy Commission, U.S. (AEC), 120, 246; advocacy of tactical nuclear weapons, 86, 126, 222; and first atomic expansion, 99-102; and the hydrogen bomb decision, 106107, 110-113; influence of atomic scientists on, 95-99, 228; and nuclear submarine program, 55, 5859, 63; and nuclear test program, 130-132, 151-152, 225; opposition to disarmament, 263-263; and second atomic expansion, 122-123; and Soviet nuclear tests, 184-186; and third atomic expansion, 146-150, 219 Atomic expansion, U.S., 167; first (194950), 99-104, 106; second (1950-51), 122-123; third (1952), 86, 146-150, 219 Austria, 264-265 Axelrod, Robert, 274-275 Bacher, Robert, 117, 137 Baku, 76, 109 Balance-of-power explanations, 6-10, 84-85, 218, 221-222, 233, 239 Ball, Desmond, 67 Ballistic missile defense. See Antiballistic missile systems Baruch, Bernard, 88 Bauman Technical Institute, 36 Belorussian military district, 178 Belotserkovskii, S., 31 Berkeley, University of California at, 113 Berlin blockade (1948), 79, 92 Bethe, Hans, 92, 185-188 Bid and Proposal (B&P) program, 48 Bikini Island nuclear tests, 88-89

Blagonravov, A. A., 232-233 Bomber gap, 65 Bombers. See Aircraft Borden, William, 109 Bottom-up process of innovation (U.S.), 27, 59-61, 85, 162-163, 243-245, 250, 257, 264, 271 Bowles, Edward, 116-117 Bradbury, Norris, 94, 103 Bradley, Omar, 93-94, 104, 109-110, 145, 222, 229 Brezhnev, Leonid I., 253 Britain, 18, 23, 79, 172, 225-227, 232233, 262 Brookhaven National Laboratory, 98 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 26-27, 57 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 121-122, 183 Bureaucratic politics, 6-15, 17, 20, 8485, 270-272; and Soviet weapons innovation, 17, 20, 27, 73, 80-81, 189, 214-215, 229-232; and U.S. weapons innovation, 25-27, 60-63, 218, 221-222, 244 Bureau of the Budget, U.S., 59, 123 Bureau of Ships, U.S., 55, 63 Burke, Arleigh, 101 Bush, Vannevar, 120, 126, 244

California Institute of Technology (Caltech), 117, 128, 134-137, 141 Carney, Robert B., 125-126, 152 Carpathian military district, 178 Carter, Jimmy, 249 Case-study methods, 51, 84-85 Censorship of nuclear matters in the USSR, 43, 156, 159-163, 176, 236237

Central Committee, CPSU, 81, 213, 239 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3031, 75; estimates of Soviet capabilities, 170, 173, 208, 259 Central planning, 46-49, 244 Centralization, 24-33, 56, 239, 267, 269, 271-272 Cheliabinsk, 181 China, 23, 120, 136 Chistiakov, M. N., 203 Christie, Robert, 137 Chrysler Corporation, 55 Classified research practices: Soviet, 3944; U.S., 45 Clinton nuclear reactor project, 58 Coalition building in Soviet politics, 235-239, 272 Cohen, Samuel, 118-119, 245-248, 258 [292]

Index Collins, Lawton, 114-115, 125, 193-194, 229 Command and General Staff College, U.S. Army, 89-90, 104-105, 115, 148, 150, 156, 160-162 Commissariat of Aircraft Industry, USSR, 43 Committee on Atomic Energy, U.S., 9497, 117-118; Panel on Long-Range Objectives (1948), 94, 118, 139; Panel on Military Objectives in the Use of Atomic Energy (1950), 117118, 120, 138-139 Committee on the Present Danger, 126 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), 26-27, 36, 81 Compartmentalization of information, 29, 159, 167 Competition, 30, 61, 271 Complexity, 28, 33-38, 56 Congress, U.S., 16, 93, 150; role in weapons procurement, 16, 59-60, 63-68, 241, 247-250, 259; support for tactical nuclear weapons, 124, 126-129, 146, 219, 222, 228, 248249. See also House of Representatives, U.S.; Senate, U.S. Congresses, CPSU: Twentieth (1956), 212, 237; Twenty-first (1959)/ 210; Twenty-second (1962), 212 Consensus building, 53, 56-59, 86, 228, 244-245, 249, 255, 258, 272 Convair Corporation, 55 Conventional forces: Soviet, 15, 85, 256-257; exaggerations of strength of, 93, 222-224; major reductions in, 228-229, 238-239, 262-268 U.S., 15, 92-93. See also Soviet invasion of Western Europe Cornell University, 88, 139, 185 Council of Ministers, USSR, 77, 213, 236 Counterforce, 63, 66, 68 Crisis stability, 1-3, 83, 261, 268 Cutler, Robert, 246

Davis, Arthur C., 127 Dean, Gordon, 106, 110, 130-132, 145-150, 153-154 Dearborn, F. M., Jr., 246 Declassified U.S. documents as source of information on Soviet military, 167, 183-187, 207-208 "Deep-Strike" weapons, 240, 254-257, 268 [293]

Defense Department, U.S., 3-5, 38, 48-49, 94-95, 98, 109, 117, 122-123, 129, 141, 154, 246-248, 259, 263264. See also Pentagon, the; specific branches Delivery Vehicles. See particular type, e.g., Aircraft; Missiles Dennison, Robert L., 101-103 Design bureaus/designers, 31-35, 3849, 69-77, ^o, 113, 188-189, 209210, 232, 244, 258 Disarmament, 148, 169, 217, 239-240,' 262-268, 274-275. See also Arms control Domestic structures, 22-27, 271-272 DuBridge, Lee, no, 137-139 Dulles, John Foster, 175, 221, 225-226 Economic costs of arms race, 1-5 Economic theories of innovation, 28, 271 Eigendynamik, 11, 14-15, 20-21, 240, 242 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 65-66, 125, 136-138, 142-144, 152, 210, 219, 225, 246, 258, 263-264, 273 Eisenhower, John, 246 Electric Boat Company, 63 Emel'ianov, V., 251-252 Emigres as source of information on Soviet military, 34-48, 167, 252 Energy, Department of, U.S., 249 Energy Research and Development Administration, 248-249 Engels, Friedrich, 38 Enhanced-radiation weapons, 240, 245254, 258-259 Eniwetok atoll, 114, 125 Etherington, Harold, 58 Europe, 34, 84, 108; defense of, 86, 9293, 100-101, 104, 115, 123-126, 134145, 219-228, 254; deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in, 152, 171172, 219-228, 232-234, 239; peace research in, 11, 14-15 Executive branch, U.S., 53, 59, 228, 258. See also specific presidents External determinants of foreign policy, 6-10, 65, 67-69, 71-73/ 78“79/ 174175, 218-240, 269-272 Fallacy of the last move, 272-275 Fechteler, William M., 140-141 Federation of American Scientists, 112 Fermi, Enrico, 55, 72, 110 Fields, K. E., 151 Finletter, Thomas, 137-139 First Department (KGB), 39-44

Index Fissionable material. See Nuclear weapons Flerov, G. N., 72, 75, 181-182 Flexible Response, 247 Ford, Gerald, 249 Formalization, 28, 38-41 Forrestal, James, 93 Forward-based systems (FBS), 230, 244 Fowler, William, 138 France, 23, 40, 87, 125, 172, 225-227, 262 Frankfurt Peace Research Institute, 11, 14-15 Frunze Academy, 156-163, 239 Fuchs, Klaus, 241 Game theory, 270, 274-275 Gardner, Trevor, 62 Gavin, James M.: advocates nuclear weapons use in Korea, 116-117, 121-122; assigned to NATO, 125126, 141; early interest in nuclear weapons, 89, 98-99; promotes tactical nuclear weapons, 104, 106, 125-126, 157, 224; supports hydrogen bomb, 111-112; and Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, 98-99, 134 General Advisory Committee, U.S., 9599, 106-109, 118, 120, 134, 185-186, 218, 228 General Staff, Soviet, 77, 80, 161-163, 174, 176, 178, 199-200, 212-213, 229 General Staff Academy, Soviet, 156, 162-163, 176-177, 199-200 Geneva summit meeting (1955), 263-264 George Washington University, 132 German invasion of the USSR (1941), 71_72/ 74 Germany, 15, 23, 32, 71-73, 79, 168, 172-173, 181, 226 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 23-24, 34 Getting, Ivan, 133 Glushko, V. P., 72-74, 164 Goodpaster, Andrew, 65, 273 Gorbachev, Mikhail S., 29, 260-262 Gosplan (USSR State Planning Committee), 46, 77 Grechko, Andrei, 201-203, 266 Greece, 125-126 Greenwood, Ted, 56, 59 Grenfell, Russell, 87, 90 Griggs, David, 139 GRIT (Gradual Reductions in Tension), 275 Ground forces. See Conventional forces Groves, Leslie, 159

Gruenther, Alfred, 220-221, 227 Gryzlov, A. A., 174 Gunn, Ross, 55 Hafstad, Lawrence, 58-59 Halperin, Morton, 10-12 Handy, Thomas, T., 143 Harriman, Averell, 144 Harvard University, 11, 15, 45 Hiroshima, atomic bombing of, 15, 73, 78, 87-89, 98, 128, 131, 156-161, 198 Holloway, David, 30-31, 42, 69, 75, 216-217, 241-242 Hough, Jerry, 46 House of Representatives, U.S.: Appropriations Committee, 154; Armed Services Committee, 93. See also Congress, U.S.; Senate, U.S. Hull, J. E., 98 Human Resources Research Office, 132 Huntington, Samuel P., 1, 26-27, 57 Hydrogen bomb: Soviet, 81, 168-169, 170-171, 240-242 U.S., 81, 106-112, 118, 122, 167, 240242, 245; moral opposition to, 106107, 112-113, 120-122, 169, 223, 254; tactical uses of, 107-112, 245. See also Nuclear weapons Iakovlev, A.S., 47, 71, 165 Iakovlev, P., 30 Iliushin, Sergei, 171-172 Independent Research and Development (IR&D) program, 48 Industrialization, rate of, 23-25 Information: flow of, 29, 43-45, 271; restrictions in the USSR, 43-44, 156-162, 180, 236-237 Innovation in weaponry: benefits, 1; costs, 1-5; definition, 12, 51; generalizations about the Soviet process, 27, 239-240; generalizations about the U.S. process, 27, 227-228; incentives required for, 29, 46-49, 60-61; organizational factors relating to, 28-49; resistance to, 9-13, 60-63, 69, 230-231 Innovation theory, 28-49 Interconnectedness, 28, 42-45 Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). See Missiles Interest groups, 25-27 Internal determinants of foreign policy, 11-13, 20-21, 218-240, 269-272 International political economy, 22-25, 270-273 [294]

Index Interservice rivalry, 60-63 Isaev, A. M., 71, 74-75, 190 Issue-area, 50-51, 271 Italy, 125-126 Jackson, Henry, 248-249 Japan, 23-24, 73 Jason group, 254-255 Jet engines, 69-71, 73-76 Johns Hopkins University, 128 Johnson, Louis, 99, 101-103, 111 Johnston, Bennett, 249-250 Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S., 88, 127-129, 160, 207-208; and first atomic expansion (1949), 99-104; and hydrogen bomb decision, 109-110; and nuclear weapons in Europe, 140-145, 152, 225-226; and nuclear weapons in Korea, 119-120; and third atomic expansion (1952), 145150, 153-154 Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), U.S., 66, 106-107, 111, 123124, 127, 140-141, 146, 247-248 Juin, A. P., 225 Kaldor, Mary, 16 Kapitsa, Petr, 35 Kapustin Iar, 190 Katzenstein, Peter J., 23, 27 Kazan, 72, 74 Keldysh, M. V., 31, 165 Keller, K. T., 54, 140-141, 186-187 Kelly, M. J., 117 Kennedy, John F., 67 Khariton, Iulii, 168 Kharkov, 70 Khrushchev, Nikita S., 35, 50, 146, 242; and conventional-force reductions, 228-229, 238-239, 265-267; decisions on nuclear artillery, 193195, 204-205, 217, 233-235; and Kremlin power struggles, 235-239; on nature of a future war, 80, 211213; on nuclear deterrence, 216-217, 228-229; an