Soviet Nuclear Doctrine
Speculation on the nature of nuclear warfare and its potential impact on international politics has never been popular in the United States. Herman Kahn's famous works in the early sixties, On Thermonuclear War and Thinking about the Unthinkable, were answered not by equally well-thought-out theoretical challenges but by a barrage of moral outrage that demonstrated just how unthinkable the subject really was to much of the American academic and political community, as well as to the general public.
Soviet publications on strategy and tactics do not represent contributions to a freewheeling interchange of scholarly opinions and differences but could more appropriately be characterized as statements of the accepted, official position arrived at by consensus within the higher political and military circles.
Some Western analysts contended that Soviet statements were merely a "commodity for export". The contrary contention has likewise been alive and well over time. In 1975, Frank R. Barnett argued that "it would be inconceivable that the Moscow regime would risk deluding its own military personnel on such a mass scale, simply to confound the West." About a decade later, Benjamin Lambeth affirmed that "...it has long been recognized by Western analysts that the Soviets can scarcely lie to their own officers charged with implementing Soviet defense guidance merely in order to deceive outsiders." Numerous Western researchers of all persuasions, in fact, were convinced that Soviet writings provided an expansive display-case for de facto elite perceptions.
The period 1945-1953 is traditionally viewed as the period during which the Soviet Union modernized its military technology and methods of conducting strategic action in light of the U.S. possession of nuclear weapons. The period after 1954 is associated with the incorporation of nuclear weapons and missiles into the Soviet Armed Forces, and with the appearance of new branches of the Armed Forces and troop arms. Throughout the 1950s, nuclear weapons were few and viewed only as a means of supplementing the firepower of troops. The major thrust of Soviet military strategy was to maintain a conventional military force whose offensive capabilities would negate Western atomic and conventional military power.
Throughout the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s, the United States possessed continuous superiority in number and technical quality of nuclear weapons, even if not always certain of the existence or extent of the lead. During the same period, the Soviet Union, well aware of US strategic superiority, was generally pre-occupied with catching up with the US. The growing Western thermonuclear threat caused the Soviets in the 1960s to modify their strategy. In the early 1960s Khrushchev adopted a strategy, soon delineated by Sokolovsky, which was based on Soviet creation of a thermonuclear capability equal to that of the West and a presumed reduced Soviet conventional capability, designed, in part, to respond to internal Soviet imperatives and facilitate expansion of the Soviet economy. The central feature of this strategy was the assumption that future war would be inescapably global and nuclear in nature.
It should be recalled that the 1960s belonged to Sokolovskiy, Chief of the Soviet General Staff from 1953 to 1960. The volume Military Strategy [Voyennaya strategiya], which was compiled in 1960 by a group of military scholars headed by Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky, long served as one of the chief explications of the basic premises of Soviet strategy and doctrine. As the first Soviet work of its kind to appear in almost four decades, the Sokolovskiy volume attracted wide attention in the West.
The straight forward war-fighting approach to nuclear strategy did not necessarily imply a confident belief that “victory” in nuclear war is feasible (although the goal is repeatedly proclaimed), but it reflected a strong conviction that, whatever costs nuclear war might entail , strategic planning must be oriented toward prevailing in it, should it occur - not at carrying out one side of a mutual suicide pact with a perfidious enemy. Even if general nuclear war under all foreseeable circumstances was perceived as catastrophic and deterrence of such a war is the overriding purpose of Soviet strategic exertions, a sensible policy in the Soviet view must attempt to provide the offensive and defensive ingredients for conducting such a war, maximizing chances of national survival and securing the best possible outcome.
In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and the failure of Khrushchev's effort to improve the USSR's strategic position at one stroke, Soviet leaders saw the building of a significant deterrent force as their most pressing military requirement. Politically and ideologically hostile to the US, and thinking and behaving as rulers of a great power, they recognized that their strategic military forces were conspicuously inferior to those of their most dangerous rival, the US. It was evident to them that their small force of ICBMs, heavy bombers, and missile submarines was being grossly outnumbered by US missile and bomber deployment programs. Their response was to undertake a massive effort to redress this growing imbalance - to achieve at a minimum a relation of rough parity - by deploying large, survivable strategic attack forces and improving their strategic defenses.
In the decade to follow, the Soviets worked a dramatic improvement in their strategic posture relative to the US. American deployment programs leveled off in the mid- and late 1960s, and the Soviets began to catch up. The Soviets built a large number of ICBMS in order to match - and then to surpass - the number of US ICBMs, and also to increase the probability that many would survive an initial US attack. They built missile-launching submarines which were highly survivable when deployed, and they retained a manned bomber force as yet another option.
The way the Soviets developed, deployed, and operated their strategic forces indicated how they probably viewed the utility of these forces: They had shown by their efforts that they were unwilling to remain in a position of marked inferiority, and that they consider their larger policy aims to be prejudiced by such a position.
One prominent line of reasoning in Soviet strategic writings expressed the expectation that any major war with the West would be preceded by a buildup in political tensions, allowing time for Soviet forces to be brought up to appropriate readiness. Not all military writers concurred, however, in the "period of rising tension" thesis. In June 1968 an article in the restricted circulation version of "Military Thought", the chief theoretical journal ofthe Soviet General Staff, argued that the possibilityof delivering a surprise attack had increased while detection capabilities had been decreasing. More importantly, the article suggested that rising political tension would not necessarily precede the initiationof nuclear war. It said that, for the purpose of misinformation and deceiving public opinion, the enemy might act to improve relations and, under cover of this maneuver, suddenly unleash a war.
Given either the generally accepted expectation of rising tension or the dissenting view of a possible deceptive improvement of relations, the question became what strategic options the Soviet leadership considered regarding the use of their nuclear forces. In this regard, the Soviets discussedthree such options: preemption, launch-on-warning, and retaliation.
Soviet military writings frequently discussed the possibility of strategic pre-emption. Their descriptions of Western initiation of nuclear war were often followed by statements calling for the "forestalling" or "frustrating" of such an attack - beating the other side to the draw. The concept of preemption continued to appear in Soviet military writings. Aside from a first-strike strategy, preemption offers the most effective - or least ineffective - way to use Soviet strategic forces for the traditional military objective of destroying the enemy's means of waging war.
This was not to say that pre-emption was very high on the scale of likelihood. If Soviet planners had done any realistic simulations of the outcome of a strategic nuclear exchange, they would almost certainly have concluded that even after an all-out Soviet preemptive attack the US could inflict enormous devastation on the Soviet Union. For example, in US simulations it was found that SLBMs and alert bombers included in US programed forces could alone kill nearly 40 percent of the total USSR population even after a first strike on the us strategic forces by the most advanced Soviet force.
Although pre-emption was presented in Soviet military writings as an advantageous strategic option, it failed to address such factors as the US early warning systems and retaliatory capabilities. The brunt of a Soviet preemptive strike - one designed to "forestall" a US attack - would necessarily fall on US ICBM launch sites and bomber bases. Yet, if US early warning systems functioned as intended, the Soviets could not be certain that their nuclear warhead's would reach US targets before the US could launch a counterattack. Given the immense risks involved, the leadership would need to be absolutely certain that the US was about to attack before ordering preemption.
Another strategic option that the Soviets apparently considered was the concept of launch-on-warning - that is, launching an all-out attack when there was clear evidence that an enemy attack had already begun. Veiled references to launch-on-warning had appeared in Soviet writings since the early 1960s but became more specific over time. In 1970 two Soviet civilian spokesmen, the director of the USA-Canada Institute and the deputy director of the Institute of World Economics and International Relations [IMEMO], asserted in discussions with members of US research institutes that launch-on-warning was part of Soviet military doctrine.
In October 1970, G. A. Trofimenko, a leading Soviet civilian writer on military affairs, noted in an unclassified Soviet journal that in launch-on-warning the usual process of decision making would have to be set aside in favor of an automatic, instantaneous counterattack upon detection of incoming missiles. He went on to warn of the dangers of an accidental catastrophe which would, as he put it, "turn the gloomiest prophecies of military science fiction into sinister reality."
None of the Soviet statements about either pre-emption or launch-on-warning had come from the upper levels of the civilian leadership. When Brezhnev and his Politburo colleagues talk about Soviet nuclear attack capabilities, it was in the context of what they termed "retribution" - that is, retaliation. Retaliation was the oldest declared Soviet strategy and the one most frequently advocated by the top party and government officials. In its initial form this strategy was apparently based on the assumptions that a massive nuclear surprise attack by the US was the least likely case, that such an attack most probably would come about by extreme provocation, and that the USSR could control the level of provocation and thus pull out of a situation that might lead to an attack by US strategic forces.
By the 1970s, while the emphasis on retaliation had not changed, the Soviet strategic buildup during the late 1960s made it a thoroughly credible Soviet doctrine. The assumptions underlying the leadership's view of retaliation had been reflected in the official Soviet position at SALT. These assumptions were that the US and the USSR already possess more than enough nuclear weapons to bring about a world-wide catastrophe, that the side first subjected to attack would inevitably retain a retaliatory force capable of annihilating the attacker's homeland, and that a war between the two superpowers would be disastrous for both.
From 1965-1976, the proponents of nuclear force development held center stage precisely because of the open-ended nature of the dialectic of arms development. While they were prepared to concede that all-out nuclear war would result in unacceptable damage in present-day conditions, they deemed it "indisputable that, in all countries that have nuclear weapons, means and methods of active and passive defense against these weapons and their carriers will be perfected."
Col. Ye. Rybkin clarified the premise in late 1965: "There is a possibility of developing and creating new means of waging war, which are capable of reliably parrying an opponent's nuclear strikes."'39 Over a decade later, V.M.Bondarenko was even more explicit: "Granted the potential opponents do have the weapons for mutual destruction, then the side that first manages to create a means of defense against them will acquire a decisive advantage. The history of military-technological development is replete with examples wherein weapons that seemed irresistible have, within a certain time, been countered by sufficiently effective means of defense... "
In 1975, Marshal of the Soviet Union Minister of Defense A.A.Grechko wrote in The Armed Forces of the Soviet State that " ... the aggressive nature of imperialism has not changed and as long as it exists, the threat of a new world war also persists. And there is no other guarantee in the world against its outbreak than strengthening the economic and defense might of the USSR and of all the states of the socialist coranwiity and raising the combat power of the Soviet Armed Force s and of other fraternal armies."
In January 1977, General Secretary L.I.Brezhnev delivered an address in the city of Tula whose impact on Soviet doctrine and capabilities continued until the end of the Cold War. By rejecting the possibility of a means of defense against nuclear weapons, or a damage-limiting capacity in nuclear War, Brezhnev closed the door on a debate that had lasted for over a decade in Soviet military thought. Since Tula, the Soviet politico-military leadership presented a consensus on the reality of "Mutual Assured-Destruction" in present-day conditions. The Soviet debate on the viability of nuclear-war as an instrument of policy waslike wise resolved by a consensus: nuclear war is so unpromising and dangerous that it remained an instrument of policy only in theory, an instrumenit of policy that cannot be used.
In a 1978 interview conducted by the German Social Democratic Party Weekly Vorwarts, L.I.Brezhnev described the declining utility of "superiority": "The Soviet Union on its part feels that approximate equality and parity are enough for defense needs. We do not set for ourselves the goal of achieving military superiority. We know also that this very concept no longer makes sense given the present enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means for their delivery already accumulated." Writing in Pravda in 1984, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko agreed that in present-day conditions, "[c]alculations on achieving military superiority are untenable and without prospect."
In the late 1970s, coincidentally with Tula, Soviet mainstream thinking revived the practice of citing Lenin's forecasts on the future impossibility of war due to its destructiveness: "war between the leading countries will not only be the greatest of crimes, but also can, and inevitably will, lead to the undermining of the very conditions essential for-the existence of human society."
L.I.Brezhnev set the line on limited nuclear war when he announced at the 26th Party Congress in early 1981 that the Western notion of keeping a nuclear war limited was "a flagrant deception of the peoples! A nuclear war limited in American terms, say to Europe, would mean at the very beginning the certain extinction of European civilization. And indeed the U.S. itself could of course not remain on the sidelines, away from the flames of war... " Since L.I.Brezhnev's 1981 address, Soviet political and military elites have consistently stressed the impossibility of keeping a nuclear war limited. Raymond Garthoff explained that "[a]part from probably reflecting a genuine Soviet concern over escalation, this authoritative public declaratory stance clearly has been directed at dissuading U.S. leaders from contemplating limited nuclear warfare as an option, rather than at pursuing such an option themselves. The Soviet leaders have been quite prepared to forego the option of threatening a Eurostrategic war as a price for reducing Western interest in such an option."
While the Soviet consensus on the diminishing military uptiliy of nuclear weapons represented a ground-breaking shift in doctrine since the heyday of Marshal Sokolovskiy, there was scant evidence of any dispute on the new correlation of war and policy in a nuclear age. Marshal Ogarkov and other hard-minded imilitary figures emerged as the architects of the Soviet shift away from a nuciar war-fighting and war-winning strategy, while General Secretary Gorbachev fashiohed a corresponding arms control agenda.
Beginning in the early 1980’s, Soviet elites feared that they were losing the cold war and understood that the strains of the cold war competition were worsening the Soviet economy and encouraging the disintegrative internal conditions that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. They feared that the United States, sensing this growing weakness, might try to exploit the situation by launching a surprise nuclear attack.
VRYAN was the largest cold war intelligence program ever launched by Russia. It’s an acronym that stands for "surprise nuclear missile attack". Beginning in the early 1980’s, the political military elite told the KGB and the GRU and their other intelligence services to be on the lookout for the possibility that the United States might imminently launch a surprise nuclear attack. This was because of the strains and stresses when they realized they were losing the cold war and they were fearful that the West might actually be moving to finish them off.
So they started looking for evidence that the United States was preparing to launch a nuclear surprise attack. Every 2 weeks a VRYAN report was sent to their top political-military leadership on the possibility that nuclear war was right around the corner. This program is known, begun in the early 1980s, is known to have continued at least into the 1990s.
There was also a computer program that was part of the VRYAN project because of the belief that they would be able to, by calculating the correlation of forces, the balance of military and economic and political power and looking at particular strategic warning indicators, use a very sophisticated computer program to predict when the United States might actually launch this nuclear attack. This was to inform the General staff so that they could beat the US to the punch and strike first. A war scare occurred during ABLE ARCHER–83, a NATO theater nuclear exercise in November 1983;
Soviet references to the phenomenon that every weapon breeds its own counter-weapon began to emerge en masse after the "Star Wars" speech on 23 March 1983. In 1985, A. Kokoshin wrote that creation of the space-based systems will inevitably lead to the emergence of "systems for resisting those weapons, after which more weapons to combat those systems will appear." Kokoshin also summarized the view of numerous Soviet elite commentators: "After all, the entire history of creating new weapons proves: for every weapon, a counter-weapon is always found."
Beginning in 1985, the Soviets designated a new period in military development, soon defined within the context of a recast military doctrine emphasizing "defensiveness" in its political component, but clearly shaped in many of its military-technical aspects by reassessments which had begun during the previous decade. Subsequently, the Soviets have articulated several variations of their future military strategy couched analogously in historical terms. Gorbachev's current program of "defensiveness" postulated Soviet maintenance of a defensive capability sufficient to absorb and repulse an enemy blow.
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