Nuclear warfare
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Template:History of war Nuclear war, or atomic war, is war in which nuclear weapons are used.
In general the discussion can be broken down further into subgroups. In the limited nuclear war (sometimes attack or exchange) only small numbers of weapons are used in a tactical exchange aimed primarily at opposing military forces. In the full-scale nuclear war large numbers of weapons are used in an attack aimed at an entire country, both military and civilian targets being "fair game". Soon after the first use of atomic weapons, a doomsday clock was instigated as a symbolic countdown to such full-scale nuclear wars.
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Hiroshima to Semipalatinsk
The United States is the only nation to have actually used nuclear weapons in war, or on civilian populations, having in 1945 dropped two of them on cities in Japan – one on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki.
For several years after World War II, the US developed and maintained a strategic force based on the B-36 bomber that would be able to attack any potential aggressor from bomber bases in the US. The possibility of an actual nuclear attack on the US was considered somewhat remote because no other nation had "the bomb". Instead, many strategists were fearful that a rogue general would launch an attack on the Soviet Union independently and without orders (as suggested in the novel Fail-Safe and the film Dr. Strangelove). To assuage this fear, the US placed its nuclear weapons under the control of a new, separate agency named The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). In the event of a war, the Strategic Air Command (or SAC) bombers would be moved to AEC bases to be loaded with bombs in a process that would likely have taken several days.
Over a period of a few years, many in the US defense community became increasingly convinced of the invincibility of the United States to a nuclear attack. Indeed, it became generally believed that the threat of nuclear war would deter any strike against the United States. Simultaneously, there was some discussion about placing the AEC's arsenal under international control or placing limits on its development.
On August 29, 1949 the USSR tested its first bomb at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan (see also Soviet atomic bomb project). Scientists in the United States from the Manhattan Project had warned that in time the Soviet Union would certainly develop a nuclear capability of its own. Nevertheless, the effect upon military thinking and planning in the US was astounding, primarily due to the fact that American military strategists had not anticipated the Soviets would 'catch up' this soon. However, at this time, they had not discovered that the Russians had conducted significant espionage of the project from spies at Los Alamos, the most significant of which were Theodore Hall and Klaus Fuchs. The first Soviet bomb was more or less a deliberate copy of the Fat Man device.
With the idiomatic cat out of the bag, world-wide nuclear proliferation accelerated, with Britain testing its first atomic bomb in 1952, and France in 1960. Notably the Western European arsenals have always been nearly insignificant compared to those of the superpowers, and it was the nuclear weapons of the USA and USSR which were of greatest concern to the world for the remainder of the 20th century.
The Cold War
Though the USSR now had nuclear weapon capabilities, the US still had a massive advantage in terms of bombers and weapons. In any exchange of hostilities, the US would be easily capable of bombing the USSR, while the USSR would have some difficulty arranging the reverse.
The widespread introduction of jet-powered interceptor aircraft upset this balance somewhat by reducing the effectiveness of the US bomber fleet. In 1949 Curtis LeMay was placed in command of the Strategic Air Command and instituted a program to update the bomber fleet to one that was all-jet. During the early 1950s the B-47 and B-52 were introduced, providing the ability to bomb the USSR more easily.
Before the development of a capable strategic missile force in the Soviet Union, much of the war-fighting doctrine held by western nations revolved around the use of a large number of smaller nuclear weapons used in a tactical role. It is arguable if such use could be considered "limited" however, because it was believed that the US would use their own strategic weapons (mainly bombers at the time) should the USSR deploy any kind of nuclear weapon against civilian targets.
Several scares about the increasing ability of the USSR's strategic bomber forces surfaced during the 1950s. The defensive response by the US was to deploy a fairly strong layered defense consisting of interceptor aircraft and anti-aircraft missiles and guns, like the Nike or Skysweeper, near larger cities. However this was a small response compared to the construction of a huge fleet of nuclear bombers. The main strategy was to massively penetrate the USSR. Because such a large area could not be defended against attack in any credible way, the USSR would "lose" any exchange.
This logic became ingrained in US combat strategy and persisted for the duration of the Cold War. As long as the strategic force of the US was larger than the USSR's forces in total, there was nothing to worry about. Moreover, the USSR could not afford to build any reasonable counterforce; the economic output of the United States was such that the USSR could never catch up, because the whole country was devastated economically.
A new revolution in thinking occurred with the introduction of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which the USSR first successfully tested in the late 1950s. To deliver a warhead to a target, a missile was far less expensive than a bomber that could do the same job. Moreover, at the time it was impossible to intercept ICBMs due to their high altitude and speed. The USSR could now afford to go head-to-head with the US in terms of raw numbers, although for a time they appeared to have chosen not to.
Photos of Soviet missile sites set off a wave of panic in the US military, something the launch of Sputnik would do for the public a few years later. Politicians, notably then US Senator John Kennedy suggested a "missile gap" between the Soviets and the US. This was a savvy political ploy as the US administration almost certainly knew better and also knew that they could not be corrected without violating military security. One result of this, however, was that the Soviets believed the vulnerability actually existed, with resulting temptation; luckily cooler heads prevailed. After Kennedy won the 1960 Presidential election, the "missile gap" conveniently went away. The US military gave missile development programs the highest national priority, and several spy aircraft and reconnaissance satellites were designed and deployed to check on Soviet progress.
Issues came to a head during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The USSR backed down from what could have been the spark for a nuclear war, and decided to institute a massive building program of their own. By the late 1960s numbers of ICBMs and warheads were so high on both sides that either the USA or USSR was capable of destroying the other country's infrastructure. Thus a balance of power system known as mutually assured destruction (MAD) came into being. It was thought that the possibility of a general thermonuclear war was so deadly neither power would risk initiating one.
One problem with this idea was that it was entirely possible a nuclear war could have occurred without either side intentionally striking first. Early warning systems are notoriously error-prone. On 78 occasions in 1979, for example, a "missile display conference" was called to evaluate detections potentially threatening to the North American continent. Some of these were trivial errors, spotted quickly. But several went to more serious levels. For example, on 26 September 1983, Stanislav Petrov received convincing indications of a US first strike launch against the USSR - but had the instinct that it was a computer error and, contrary to his orders, sat on his hands. Similar incidents happened many times in the US, due to failed computer chips, flights of geese (6 December 1950), test programs, bureaucratic failures to notify early warning military men of legitimate launches of test or weather missiles. And for many years, US strategic bombers were kept airborne on a rotating basis round the clock until the sheer number and gravity of accidents persuaded policymakers it wasn't worth it.
By the late 1970s, citizens in the US and USSR (and indeed the entire world) had been living with MAD for about a decade. It became deeply ingrained into the popular culture. Such an exchange would have killed many millions of individuals directly and possibly induced a nuclear winter which could have led to the death of a large portion of humanity and certainly the collapse of global civilization. Many movies such as The Day After, Testament, Threads, WarGames, and Dr.Strangelove depict this scenario, as did the Planet of the Apes (1968-1973) and Mad Max (1979-1985) films.
According to the 1980 United Nations report General and Complete Disarmament: Comprehensive Study on Nuclear Weapons: Report of the Secretary-General, it was estimated that in total there were approximately 40,000 nuclear warheads in existence at that time with a total yield of approximately 13,000 megatons of TNT. By comparison, when the volcano Tambora erupted in 1815 it exploded with a force of roughly 1000 megatons of TNT. Many people believed that a full-scale nuclear war could result in the extinction of the human species, though not all analysts agreed on the assumptions required for these models.
The idea that any nuclear conflict would eventually escalate into MAD was a challenge for military strategists. This challenge was particularly severe for the United States and its NATO allies because it was believed until the 1970s that a Soviet tank invasion of Western Europe would quickly overwhelm NATO conventional forces, leading to the necessity of escalating to theater nuclear weapons.
A number of interesting concepts were developed. Early ICBMs were inaccurate which led to the concept of counter-city strikes -- attacks directly on the enemy population leading to a collapse of the enemy's will to fight, although it appears that this was the American interpretation of the Soviet stance while the Soviet strategy was never clearly anti-population. During the Cold War the USSR invested in extensive protected civilian infrastructure such as large nuclear proof bunkers and non-perishable food stores. In the US, by comparison, little to no preparations were made for civilians at all, except for the occasional backyard fallout shelter built by private individuals. This was part of a deliberate strategy on the Americans' part that stressed the difference between first and second strike strategies. By leaving their population largely exposed, this gave the impression that the US had no intention of launching a first strike nuclear war, as their cities would clearly be obliterated in the retaliation.
The US also made a point during this period of targeting their missiles on Russian population centers rather than military targets. This was intended to reinforce the second strike pose. If the Soviets attacked first, then there would be no point in destroying empty missile silos that had already launched; the only thing left to hit would be cities. By contrast, if America had gone to great lengths to protect their citizens and targeted the enemy's silos, that might have led the Russians to believe the US was planning a first strike, where they would eliminate Soviet missiles while still in their silos and be able to survive a weakened counter attack in their reinforced bunkers. In this way, both sides were (theoretically) assured that the other would not strike first, and a war without a first strike will not occur.
This strategy had one major and very possibly critical flaw, soon realised by military analysts but highly underplayed by the US military: Conventional NATO forces in the European theatre of war were considered to be outnumbered by similar Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces, and while the western countries invested heavily in high-tech conventional weapons to counter this (partly perceived) imbalance, it was assumed that in case of a major Soviet attack (commonly perceived as the 'red tanks rolling towards the North Sea' scenario) that NATO, in the face of conventional defeat, would soon have no other choice but to resort to tactical nuclear weapons. Most analysts agreed that once the first nuclear exchange had occurred, escalation to global nuclear war would become almost inevitable.
So, while official US policy was a clearly stated 'non first-use policy', never to strike first with nuclear weapons, the reality was that the lack of strength of conventional NATO forces would force the US to either abandon Western Europe or use nuclear weapons in its defense. Even though investigations after the Soviet collapse by historians and military analysts revealed that the effectiveness of Warsaw Pact forces was rated far higher than they really were, official NATO doctrine had been critically flawed from the outset and global thermonuclear war would have been a very real possibility had actual conflict occurred.
This major flaw, although largely ignored by the military community, quickly gathered public interest and many movies and books were based upon this and several other weaknesses in the policy of mutually assured destruction.
As missile technology improved, the emphasis moved to counter-force strikes: ones that directly attacked the enemy's means of waging war. This was the predominant doctrine from the late 1960s onwards. Additionally the development of warheads (at least in the US) moved towards delivering a small explosive force more accurately and with a "cleaner" blast (with fewer long-lasting radioactive isotopes). In any conflict therefore, damage would have been initially limited to military targets, there may well have been 'withholds' for targets near civilian areas. The argument was that the destruction of a city would be a military advantage to the attacked. The enemy had used up weapons and a threat in the destruction while the attacked was relieved of the need to defend the city and still had their entire military potential untouched.
Only if a nuclear conflict were extended into a number of 'spasm' strikes would direct strikes against civilians occur as the more accurate weapons would be expended early; if one side was 'losing', the potential for using less accurate submarine-launched missiles would occur.
Another major shift in nuclear doctrine was the development of the submarine-based nuclear missile, the SLBM. It was hailed by military theorists as a weapon that would assure a surprise attack would not destroy the capability to retaliate, and therefore would make nuclear war less likely.
However, it was soon realised that submarines could 'sneak up' close to enemy coastlines and decrease the 'warning time'- the time between detection of the launch and impact of the missile - from as much as half an hour to under three minutes. This greatly increased the credibility of a 'surprise first strike' by one of the factions and theoretically made it possible to knock out or disrupt the chain of command before a counterstrike could be ordered. It strengthened the notion that a nuclear war could be 'won' and this resulted not only in greatly increased tension but also in a dramatic increase in military spending. The submarines and their missile systems were very expensive (one fully equipped nuclear powered nuclear missile submarine could easily cost more than the entire GNP of a third world nation), but the greatest cost came in the development of both sea- and land-based anti-submarine defenses and in improving and strengthening the chain of command. As a result, military spending skyrocketed.
Current concerns
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, conflict between the United States and Russia appears much less likely. Stockpiles of nuclear warheads are being reduced on both sides and tensions between the two countries have greatly reduced. The concerns of political strategists have now shifted to other areas of the world.
Current fears of nuclear war are mainly centred around India (first test May 18, 1974, the "Smiling Buddha" test) and Pakistan (first test May 1998), two nations whose majority religions and histories, as well as a territorial dispute in Kashmir and mutual possession of substantial (though probably numbered in dozens rather than thousands) nuclear arsenals makes many extremely nervous. Both have waged several wars over the conflict in Kashmir and the region as a whole is considered highly volatile, with conflicts in Afghanistan and the Middle East considerably influencing policy, and several assassinations of high-ranking government officials and continuing Hindu-Muslim incidents in India heightening both national and international tension. Recent studies undertaken by the CIA cite the enduring Pakistani-Indian conflict as the most likely to escalate into nuclear war.
In the case of Pakistan, a few countries fear that the threat of radical extremists seizing power and thus control over the nuclear arsenal has raised additional fears. The Pakistani government has disputed these claims, saying that absolute proper measures insure nuclear safety.
In the case of India, there had been several threats made by the former BJP government which claimed that pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Pakistan was necessary to assure India's safety. The plans for these strikes was later eliminated due to global pressure.
Another flashpoint which has analysts worried is a possible conflict between the United States and the People's Republic of China over Taiwan. Although economic forces have decreased the possibility of military conflict, there remains the worry that increasing military buildup and a move toward Taiwan independence could spin out of control.
A third potential flashpoint lies in the Middle East, where Israel is thought to possess on the order of between one and four hundred nuclear warheads (although this has never been officially confirmed by Israel). Israel has been involved in wars with its neighbors on numerous occasions, and its small geographic size would mean that in the event of future wars the Israeli military might have very little time to react to a future invasion or other major threat; the situation could escalate to nuclear warfare very quickly in some scenarios.
Sub-strategic use
The above examples envisage nuclear warfare at a strategic level, i.e. total war. The United Kingdom has a declared policy of sub-strategic nuclear strikes, in which case a limited strike would be carried out. The then Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind described this as a deterrence against harm to the UK's vital interests. Rifkind argued that following the end of the Cold War agressors may believe the threat of a strategic nuclear attack to be bluff, and that a policy of a more limited strike would ensure that the nuclear deterrent had credibility.
This sub-strategic policy, and the related potential for a new generation of limited yield "battlefield" nuclear weapons from the United States alarms anti-nuclear groups who believe it will make the use of nuclear weapons a more acceptable part of a country's arsenal.
Nuclear terrorism
In addition, there is the possibility that so-called "rogue states" such as Iran, and North Korea (see North Korea nuclear weapons program) may acquire or manufacture nuclear weapons. North Korea reported having manufactured nuclear weapons, however, other states are skeptical. Nuclear terrorism by non-state organisations could well be more likely, as states possessing nuclear weapons are susceptible to retaliation in kind. Geographically-dispersed and mobile terrorist organizations are not so easy to discourage by the threat of retaliation. Furthermore, while the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War, it greatly increased the risk that former Soviet nuclear weapons might become available on the black market.
Pyongyang's opulent subway systems double as hardened bomb shelters capable of sustaining the entire population for several months, raising concerns about their first-strike willingness.
Taking a different tack, South Africa declared after its transition from an apartheid regime that it had in fact produced about six crude nuclear weapons as a 'last-resort' weapon against an envisioned race war, but that they have now been destroyed. In fact the development laboratories and storage facilities have now become a sight-seeing tour.
Glossary
- ABM
- Anti-Ballistic Missile. Missiles designed to intercept and destroy ballistic missiles. Can also refer to the ABM treaty, signed by Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, which halted the development and use of such systems due to fears that such systems could counter the MAD scenario and, thereby, increase the likelihood that an ABM protected country would use their nuclear weapons aggressively.
- ALCM
- Air Launched Cruise Missile.
- Ballistic missile
- A missile using a ballistic trajectory involving a significant ascent and descent including suborbital and partial orbital trajectories.
- Cruise missile
- A missile using a low altitude trajectory intended to avoid detection by radar systems. Cruise missiles have shorter range and lower payloads than ballistic missiles, usually, and are not known to carry MIRVs.
- GLCM
- Ground Launched Cruise Missile.
- ICBM
- Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.
- INF
- Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987, which eliminated tactical ("battlefield") nuclear devices and GLCMs from Europe.
- MAD
- Mutual assured destruction. The doctrine of preventing nuclear war by creating a situation in which any use of nuclear weapons would result in the certain destruction of both the attacker and the defender.
- MIRV
- Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles, nuclear devices carried, usually ten or twelve at a time on a single ICBM, allowing a single launched missile to strike a handful of targets, and allowing a few missiles to strike several targets redundantly.
- SALT I
- Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. A treaty signed by Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev in 1972, limiting the growth of US and Soviet missile arsenals.
- SALT II
- A treaty designed to further limit the growth of US and Soviet missile arsenals.
- SDI
- Strategic Defense Initiative, more commonly known as Star Wars. A system proposed by Ronald Reagan to use space-based systems to detect, intercept and destroy ICBMs and MIRVs. Criticized for its costs, doubts that it would be effective, and concerns that it would violate the ABM treaty and offset MAD, it was not supported by the Congress of the United States at that time.
- SLBM
- Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile.
- SLCM
- Submarine Launched Cruise Missile.
- START -- STrategic Arms Reductions Treaty
- A treaty proposed by Ronald Reagan to reduce the numbers of missiles and warheads.
- START II
- A treaty signed by George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin in January 1993 to ban the use of MIRVs.
See also
- Biological warfare
- Chemical warfare
- Conventional warfare
- Nuclear proliferation
- Nuclear arms race
- Weapons of mass destruction
- Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice concerning legality of nuclear weapons
- Square Leg
External links
- Nuclear News (http://HavenWorks.com/nuclear) at HavenWorks.com
- 20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War (http://www.nuclearfiles.org/kinuclearweapons/anwindex.html) by Alan F. Philips, M.D.
- More false alerts (http://mt.sopris.net/mpc/military/false.alerts.html)de:Atomkrieg
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