states should be improbable. The belligerent facing such defeat would be strongly
motivated to resort to its nuclear arms rather than suffer conventional defeat.
Third, a nuclear-armed state can defeat an enemy without first defeating its armed
forces, but if that enemy also was nuclear armed the net result would be bilateral defeat.
This condition renders the prospect of high-intensity conflict distinctly unattractive.
Fourth, as the Cold War probably illustrated, nuclear weapons raise the threshold for
the resort to force. Nuclear-armed states are, or ought to be, much more reluctant to
fight each other than are non-nuclear states. One must add the caveat that this claim for
the revolutionary effect of nuclear weapons rests uneasily on negative evidence, which is
to say on events that did nothappen. There is no way to be certain why possible wars did
not occur. For a further caveat, the extant body of nuclear lore still derives overwhelmingly
from the Cold War. It is entirely possible that the twenty-first century will witness nuclear-
armed polities behaving with less restraint than did protagonists in the twentieth.
Fifth, nuclear weapons have the effect of freezing conditions of political confrontation.
It is not only war that is too perilous to contemplate as a policy option. Even dangerous
behaviour short of war is likely to be judged irresponsibly risky. Nuclear weapons appear
to have deprived war of its prime traditional rationale. No longer can it be regarded as an
instrument of policy to solve a problem that cannot be settled in any other way, at least
not in conflicts between nuclear-armed rivals.
These points comprise the strategic core of the nuclear revolution. That revolution
appeared to have consequences that were anti-strategic; antipathetic to the possibility of
victory; potentially mutually suicidal; encouraging of super-cautious behaviour by
nuclear-armed rivals; and promoting of geopolitical immobility. But the nuclear narrative
of the Cold War was not quite that simple and certain.
Nuclear strategy
If nuclear weapons cannot serve political purposes as weapons in military use, they can
certainly serve policy by the threat of their employment. Eventually, both superpowers
recognized that large-scale nuclear use would be self-defeating, since a disarming first
strike ceased to be militarily feasible by the mid- to late 1960s. Until that time, the United
States might have succeeded with a surprise attack upon Soviet nuclear forces. The rival
nuclear arsenals were dynamic in quantity and quality. Not until the 1960s were both the
United States and the Soviet Union able to deploy long-range nuclear-armed forces in
the diversity of basing modes that should render a successful surprise attack against them
impossible. The now familiar strategic forces triad – comprising ICBMs (intercontinental
ballistic missiles), SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) and manned bombers
- appeared only early in that decade.
Irrespective of whether nuclear strategy was a futile pursuit, it was an inescapable
necessity. As their nuclear arsenals grew from the tens to the thousands, and eventually
to the tens of thousands, the United States and the Soviet Union, followed by others, had
to develop nuclear strategies (see Table 15.1). Furthermore, those strategies had to be
tailored to the unique geostrategic situation of each state. Also, they were in constant
need of amendment as the technologies of weapon design and delivery evolved. Most
particularly, by the close of the 1950s the Nuclear Age had been joined, with synergistic
effect, by the Missile Age.
Cold War: nuclear revolution 211