Once proper communication was possible, and the players could use direct speech and overt bargaining, the “pure-coordination game,” Schelling suggests, “not only ceases to be interesting but virtually ceases to be a ‘game.’ ”33
Yet for all the possibilities of indirect communication, the influence of norms and conventions of behavior, or the focal points thrown up by nature, it was hard to see how they could be more reliable than direct communications. In circumstances where the opportunities for direct communication were sparse, as was the case between the two ideological blocs for much of the Cold War, Schelling’s insight about the possibility of still finding shared focal points by indirect means was valuable. But it could not be taken too far. It did not necessarily mean that these points would be found when they were really needed. Moreover, when two sides were working with such different sets of values and beliefs, what was salient for one might not be so salient for the other. Without direct communication to verify that an agreed point had been found, it was possible to miscalulate by assuming that the other side attached the same salience to the same point or by assuming that agreement on such matters was impossible. It could seem, as Hedley Bull observed in a review of Arms and Influence, that the superpowers would be “sending and receiving messages and ironing out understandings” with “scarcely as much as a nod or a wink.”34
First and Second Strikes
Schelling argued that not only was it possible to think of nuclear strategy in terms of bargaining and coercion but it was unwise to think of it in any other way. This challenged the idea of a decisive victory directly by claiming that at least in the nuclear area it made no sense. That did not mean that there was no concept of what a decisive nuclear victory would look like. To ensure success it would have to take the form of a knockout blow that left the opponent no chance to retaliate. This was not a possibility that either side in the Cold War ever felt able to dismiss entirely. It provided part of the dynamic of the arms race between the two sides and governed calculations of risk. A “first-strike capability” came to refer to the potential ability to disarm the enemy in a surprise attack. No military operation ever conceived could be as fateful. It would be the first and only time it would be attempted and would be launched in secret, using untried weapons against a range of disparate targets in a wholly unique scenario, using equally untried defenses to catch any retaliatory weapons. Whether such a capability was in reach depended on evaluations of the developing capabilities of offensive and defensive weapons.
In a celebrated RAND study of the mid-1950s, a team led by Albert Wohlstetter demonstrated that the air bases of the U.S. Strategic Air Command could be vulnerable to a surprise attack. Retaliation from such an attack would be impossible, thereby exposing the United States and its allies to Soviet blackmail.35 This challenged the prevailing view that nuclear weapons could be used solely in “counter-value” strikes against easily targeted political and economic centers. A “counter-force” strike against military targets would potentially be strategically decisive because it would leave the opponent without any way of retaliating. If, however, the attacked nation was able to absorb an attempted first strike and retain sufficient forces to hit back then it would have a “second-strike capability.” Wohlstetter believed that this study, drawing on “the tradition of operations research and empirical systems analysis,” far more than Schelling’s musings, discovered the “vulnerabilities of strategic forces.”36
Suppose both sides had a first-strike capability. Brodie set out the alternative possibilities in a 1954 article in which he observed that in a world in which “either side can make a surprise attack on the other” it would make sense to be “trigger-happy.” As with the “American gunfighter duel, frontier style,” the “one who leads on the draw and the aim achieves a good clean win.” If neither side had the capability, however, trigger-happiness would be suicidal, and restraint only prudent.37 Depending on how the technology developed, there would either be powerful pressures to preempt at times of high political tension, which could lead to a dangerous dynamic, or there would be considerable stability, as no premium would be attached to unleashing nuclear hostilities. Thus, confidence in stability depended on expectations with regard to the opponent’s attitude and behavior. In a compelling example of his mode of analysis, Schelling described a “reciprocal fear of surprise attack” to show how an apparently stable system of deterrence could suddenly be destabilized even when there was no “fundamental” basis for either side to strike first: “A modest temptation on each side to sneak in a first blow—a temptation too small by itself to motivate an attack—might become compounded through a process of interacting expectations, with additional motive for attack being produced by successive cycles of ‘He thinks we think he thinks we think … he thinks we think he’ll attack; so he thinks we shall; so he will; so we must.’ ”
To reduce any chance of such thoughts, nuclear systems should be unequivocally geared to a second strike: relatively invulnerable and relatively inaccurate. In practice this meant that cities would be threatened, not weapons. The logic became even more uncomfortable and paradoxical. Nothing should be done to diminish the murderous consequences of a nuclear war because nothing should be done to encourage any thought that it was worth starting. “A weapon that can hurt only people, and cannot possibly damage the other side’s striking force,” Schelling explained, “is profoundly defensive; it provides its possessor no incentive to strike first.” The danger lay with weapons intended to “seek out the enemy’s missiles and bombers—that can exploit the advantage of striking first and consequently provide a temptation to do so.”38 The aim was to stabilize the U.S.-Soviet nuclear relationship. On this basis, Schelling noted, missile-carrying submarines were admirable for second-strike purposes. They were extremely hard to find and destroy at sea, but it was also hard (at the time he was writing) to use them for accurate strikes against the enemy forces. For this reason, Schelling argued that Americans should not want a monopoly on these submarines, for if they “have either no intention or no political capacity for a first strike it would usually be helpful if the enemy were confidently assured of this.”
If such reasoning led to conclusions that seemed quite bizarre to the military mind, the same was true for those on the other side of the argument, campaigning for radical measures of disarmament. The more weapons one had, the more difficult it was for the adversary to wipe them out in a surprise attack. An agreement designed to stabilize the nuclear relationship would be easier to maintain at higher rather than lower levels, for it would be much more difficult to prepare to cheat by hiding extra missiles if the starting numbers were high.39 Neither the military nor the disarmers were at all sure that their activities should be mutually reinforcing. The term “arms control” was in fact coined in the 1950s precisely to identify forms of mutual understanding that were compatible with the new imperatives of military strategy.40 It meant that the military had to get used to the idea that while opposing the enemy’s force they must
also collaborate, implicitly if not explicitly, in avoiding the kinds of crises in which withdrawal is intolerable for both sides, in avoiding false alarms and mistaken intentions, and in providing—along with its deterrent threat of resistance or retaliation in the event of unacceptable challenges—reassurance that restraint on the part of potential enemies will be matched by restraint of our own.41
In line with Schelling’s general interest in how productive agreements could be reached without direct communication, arms control could involve “induced or reciprocated ‘self-control,’ whether the inducements include negotiated treaties or just informal understandings and reciprocated restraints.”42
In any event, technological developments supported the second strike. Attempts to develop effective defenses against nuclear attack proved futile. By the mid-1960s, fears eased of a technological arms race that might encourage either side to unleash a surprise attack. For the foreseeable future, each side could eliminate the oth
er as a modern industrial state. Robert McNamara, as secretary of defense, argued that so long as the two superpowers had confidence in their capacity for mutual assured destruction—an ability to impose “unacceptable damage” defined as 25 percent of population and 50 percent of industry—the relationship between the two would be stable. These levels, it should be noted, reflected less a judgment about the tolerances of modern societies and more the point at which extra explosions would result in diminishing marginal returns measured by new damage and casualties, the point at which—to use Winston Churchill’s vivid phrase—“all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.”
If serious fighting did begin, the incentives would shift. Assuming no rush into nuclear exchanges, it would still be possible to shape the development of the conflict by drawing on the potential of what could happen. So long as cities were spared there was some hope of establishing a new bargain, even in the midst of war. But once cities were destroyed there was nothing else to lose. Attacks on cities would be “a massive and modern version of an ancient institution: the exchange of hostages.” Keeping something of value vulnerable was a way of enforcing good behavior.43 Like Clausewitz, Schelling saw how raw and angry passions could also undermine restraint.
The process by which a conflict intensified and became more dangerous came to be described as “escalation.” This word (not one that Schelling favored) came into vogue to describe a tragic process as a limited war became total. It was based on the metaphor of the moving staircase that once started could not be stopped, however much the original decision might be regretted. The term—initially interchangeable with words like explosion, eruption, and trigger—was first used to challenge the idea of a limited nuclear war. Henry Kissinger, for example, defined escalation in 1960 as “the addition of increments of power until limited war insensibly merges into all-out war.”44 Schelling was aware of opportunities to use the process for bargaining purposes as well as how these would become fewer as control over events was progressively lost. To get the aggressor to stop and preferably go back to the starting point, relinquishing captured territory, the threat would have to be credible and serious, yet the circumstances would be those in which a previous deterrent threat had not been taken sufficiently seriously. The function of limited war therefore had to be understood less in terms of ensuring that war stayed limited and more in terms of posing “the deliberate risk of all-out war” and keeping the risk of escalation “within moderate limits above zero.”45 The role of the first nuclear exchanges would not be “solely or mainly to redress a balance on the battlefield” but primarily “to make the war too painful or too dangerous to continue.”46
Schelling developed his ideas before it became apparent that the superpower confrontation would become dominated by thoughts of mutual destruction. The possibilities that Schelling explored did not materialize because the consequences of any nuclear use would be so horrendous that they did not lend themselves to subtle and clever maneuvers. Crisis behavior became careful, cautious, and circumspect. So much of Schelling’s framework can be considered in retrospect as a mind-clearing exercise, exploring a range of possibilities that never moved beyond speculative hypotheses but at least demonstrated the inadequacy of conventional strategic thought. During the 1950s, with memories of past lurches to war still strong, few were confident that a third world war could be indefinitely postponed. The exploration of the logic of deterrence, and why it made sense to accept this logic rather than attempt to circumvent it, was important enough to justify the effort.
Existential Deterrence
It might have even been possible to imagine a major war between the two superpowers in which nuclear weapons were not used, although few would have been prepared to rely on continuing restraint. The core problem which niggled away at America’s strategists was that of extended deterrence, the commitment to bring nuclear means to the aid of non-nuclear allies. Once a stalemate was reached, it seemed reckless to consider nuclear war on behalf of allies. But the Europeans were assumed to have insufficient conventional strength to hold back a determined assault by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. If Europe was not to be overrun, there at least had to be a possibility that the United States would initiate nuclear war. Were it not for this basic political commitment, reflecting a vital interest, there would have been no need to worry about Schelling’s “threats that left something to chance.” This idea was best captured by so-called tactical nuclear weapons whose military value could never be properly explained but conveyed the risk that once entangled in a land war in Europe, they could trigger nuclear war in a way that was beyond rational consideration.
By the start of the 1960s, there was a developing view in the United States that the best way to ease this problem was to reduce dependence upon nuclear threats by increasing conventional forces—to create deterrence by denial. The difficulty was that a conventional build-up would be expensive and such obvious efforts to reduce their nuclear liabilities would suggest to European minds that the Americans might consider European security a less than vital interest. Behind this there was a disjunction between the formal strategic analysis emerging from the American think tanks and the politics of Europe, divided between two hostile ideological blocs, yet enjoying some stability. The Europeans did not view the continent as being on the edge of war. They understood that nuclear threats might not be credible, but deterrence could still work because of the residual possibility that in the irrational, intense circumstances of another European war, nuclear weapons might be used. The possibility did not have to be very large for political leaders to decide to stick with a manageable status quo. On this basis, the key to deterrence was alliance, the close link between American power—including its nuclear arsenal—and European security. The threat to deterrence was anything which undermined that link.
Here was a clash of strategic frameworks. One was top down, the classical, grand strategic perspective which focused on the formidable reasons not to risk war when it was possible to imagine catastrophe for all involved. The other was bottom up, an operational analysis which considered where the advantage might lie in a conflict, should the politicians decide the stakes were worth the fight. This pointed to an inability to match Soviet conventional strength. Only increasingly incredible nuclear threats were available should Moscow take advantage of this vulnerability, raising the possibility that it just might.
This issue came to a head in 1961 when newly elected President Kennedy was faced with a major challenge over the status of Berlin. The old German capital was firmly in communist East Germany, yet as part of the postwar settlement it had been divided into two. West Berlin, connected uneasily to West Germany, offered an easy route out for East Germans seeking to escape communism. This was a major irritant to Moscow. There were threats that summer of a Soviet move to cut off West Berlin and bring it into communist control. As the city was indefensible by conventional means, any effort to prevent this carried a risk of nuclear war. Ultimately this risk was sufficient for the communists to limit the provocation, and they built a wall which divided Berlin and so kept their people hemmed in.
During that summer’s crisis, a paper by Schelling setting out his ideas on limited nuclear conflict was passed to Kennedy. The paper stressed the importance of heightening the risk to the enemy rather than making a futile bid to win a decisive victory. “We should plan for a war of nerve, of demonstration and of bargaining, not of tactical target destruction.” This paper apparently made a “deep impression” on Kennedy. Schelling had been talking with McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security advisor. They shared a concern that the military seemed unable to think through the “hideous jump between conventional warfare and a single massive all-out blast.”47 His main contribution to policy at this time, however, was to help set up a “crisis game” that sought to simulate, as closely as possible, the confused and stressful conditions decision-makers might face and the questions to be addressed should tensions over Berlin escalate. Schelling’s game explored
how the Berlin crisis might unfold. This had the advantage of being a contained scenario, in which the dimensions and core views of the protagonists were known. In September 1961, a number of rounds of this game took place in Washington designed to impress on the participants the “bargaining aspect of a military crisis.” The games forced senior policymakers—military and civilian—to work out responses to various contingencies. The conclusions, which had an effect on both official thought and Schelling’s future theorizing, emphasized the pressure of events. It was far harder to communicate efficiently than was often assumed, as the enemy saw only the actions and not the intent behind them, and there would be far less time for diplomacy to operate than had been hoped.
Yet it also became extraordinarily difficult in the games to trigger a large-scale conventional war, much less a nuclear conflict. According to Alan Ferguson, Schelling’s collaborator, “our inability to get a fight started” was the “single most striking result.”48 The games also highlighted a problem with Berlin: “Whoever it is who has to initiate the action that neither side wants is the side that is deterred. In a fragile situation, good strategy involves leaving the overt act up to the other side.”49 The game therefore gave little support to the idea that any nuclear use, even for signaling purposes, provided realistic options for NATO in the event that the Berlin crisis worsened but it did reinforce the size of the gap between conventional and nuclear war. Reporting back to Kennedy, an aide highlighted the difficulty of using “military power flexibly and effectively for tactical purposes in the conduct of the day to day political struggle with the Soviet Union.”50
The next year Kennedy faced an even greater crisis prompted by the discovery that the Soviet Union was building missile sites in Cuba. Many of the conversations of leading players on the American side were recorded as they debated potential moves and counter-moves. The president spent much of the crisis trying to determine the effect of a particular course of action on Moscow, and to do this he tried to put himself in Nikita Khrushchev’s shoes. In doing so, Kennedy supposed that the Soviet leader was cast in the same mould, responding to the same stimuli and facing the same sort of pressures from his own hard-liners, finding it as hard as Kennedy would to back down from public commitments. He was fearful that a missile strike against Cuba would lead to a Soviet attack against Turkey, where American missiles of equivalent range and targeting were based; a blockade of Cuba would revive the issue of a blockade of West Berlin.
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