Robert Jervis and the Nuclear Question

Marc TrachtenbergUCLA Political Science Department

December 22, 2011

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“Strategic thinking, or ‘theory’ if one prefers,” Bernard Brodie once

argued, “is nothing if not pragmatic.” “The theory of strategy is a theory for

action,” Brodie felt; it had to be concerned primarily with the problems of

the real world.1 Robert Jervis would probably not go quite that far. For

him, the intellectual issues are fascinating in their own terms. But those

issues are very much bound up in his mind with questions about policy,

questions that loomed so large in the world he was born into. Even as a

young boy in the late 1940s he had wondered about how the Cold War

should be waged—about how tough or how conciliatory U.S. policy should be

—and that kind of problem, he says, has “remained the focal point of much

of my research ever since.”2 One question in particular has long been one

of Jervis’s central concerns: the nuclear question—the question of the role

that nuclear weapons play, or should play, in international political life. Two

of his books and a number of his articles deal with it directly, but the

question comes up in one way or another, or at least lies just a bit below the

surface, in practically everything he has written.

The first of those two books, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy

(1984), was a critique of the “countervailing strategy,” America’s official

1 Bernard Brodie, “Why Were We So (Strategically) Wrong?” Foreign Policy, no. 5 (Winter 1971-72), pp. 151-152.2 Robert Jervis, “Politics, Political Science, and Specialization,” PSOnline (www.apsanet.org), June 2002, p. 187; Jervis interview with Harry Kreisler, November 17, 2005 (transcript of video), p. 2 (http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Jervis/jervis-con2.html); Thierry Balzacq, “Logics of Mind and International System” (interview with Jervis), Review of International Studies 30 (2004), pp. 559-560; P. Schouten, “Robert Jervis on Nuclear Weapons, Explaining the Non-Realist Politics of the Bush Administration and US Military Presence in Europe, ” Theory Talk No. 12 (July 2008), pp. 2-3 (http://theorytalks.fileave.com/TheoryTalk12_Jervis.pdf); and Jervis video interview with The Autograph, part 1 (June 29, 2009) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32zUToUkHNs).

nuclear strategy from 1974 on. That strategy, as he points out, was based

on the idea that the western powers had to be able to “deny the Soviets a

military advantage from any aggression they might contemplate”—that “the

United States must be prepared to meet and block Soviet force at any level

of violence.”3 America and her allies could no longer rely on a threat to

destroy Soviet society. Since the Soviets would certainly respond in kind, a

massive strike would be suicidal, and the threat to launch it would not be

credible. Instead, the argument ran, nuclear forces, if they were used at all,

had to be used in a more limited, more discriminate, way. Nuclear strategy

needed to become more flexible and more attuned to what the Soviets

valued—superiority in numbers of weapons, for example, or the ability of the

Soviet leaders to control their own society.

For Jervis, that strategy did not really make sense. He had seen the

classified papers in which the rationale for the strategy had been laid out

and was somewhat taken aback. The architects of the strategy, it seemed,

did not know what they were doing. It was that experience that led him to

write his first major article on the nuclear question, “Why Nuclear

Superiority Doesn’t Matter,” and that article led to the Illogic of American

Nuclear Strategy book.4

What exactly did he find so appalling? As that book title suggests, the

main problem was that the various strands of the strategy simply did not

hold together intellectually: when you studied it closely, you found a “maze

3 Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 11.4 Robert Jervis, “Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn’t Matter,” Political Science Quarterly 94:4 (Winter 1979-80); interview with Kreisler, p. 2.

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of incoherence and contradictions.”5 The two major elements of the strategy

were simply “incompatible” with each other. The basic problem the strategy

was supposed to meet was that if the Soviet urban-industrial base were

destroyed, the USSR would respond by destroying America’s urban-

industrial base; an attack which destroyed what the Soviets really valued

would be suicidal and therefore unimplementable and devoid of credibility.

It was for that reason that America needed the ability to use its forces in a

more limited way. But that logic, Jervis writes, “would apply equally well if

we substituted ‘leadership and political control’ for ‘the industrial urban

base of the Soviet Union.’” “There would be no reason for the Russians to hold

back once American forces had destroyed what they value most,” and that was

true whether we were talking about their society or about the Soviet leaders’

ability to control it: “The threat to destroy Communist control of the state, then,

does not meet the countervailing strategy’s criterion for credibility; it is not an

‘implementable’ threat.”6 The whole goal of the strategy, moreover, was to

strengthen deterrence, and it might have had that effect, he points out, if the

Russians could actually be made to believe that the Americans really meant

was they said about the controllability of nuclear war. But top U.S. officials,

Jervis shows, actually admitted, as one Secretary of Defense from the period

put it, that “in the event of a limited nuclear exchange, ‘avoiding escalation

to mutual destruction is not likely.’”7

For Jervis, these problems were rooted in what (borrowing a term

from Hans Morgenthau) he calls “conventionalization”: “the attempt to

5 Jervis, Illogic, p. 13.6 Ibid., pp. 73-74.7 Harold Brown, quoted in ibid., p. 111.

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understand our world by employing the intellectual tools of the prenuclear

era.”8 In fact, the “main theme” of the book is the idea that the emphasis of

the countervailing strategy on “blocking and seeking to destroy Soviet

military power,” which “makes perfect sense in the prenuclear world, is

profoundly misleading in the current era of abundant weapons of mass

destruction.”9 It is clear what Jervis has in mind here, and in fact the basic

phenomenon he is pointing to is deeply puzzling. For both the United

States and the Soviet Union, planning for general war was originally based

on the idea that one should try to destroy as much of the enemy’s nuclear

capability as one could as quickly as one could, and during the 1950s and

into the very early 1960s, the U.S. government, at least, might have

reasonably hoped that with such a strategy the enemy might be kept from

doing really heavy damage to American society. The puzzle is that people,

especially in the military, continued to think that that was the way to

conduct a general war even after it became clear that the most massive

counterforce strike would not neutralize the enemy’s ability to destroy

American society. It was as though the fundamental aim of protecting the

country had receded into the background, and that the goal of destroying as

much of the enemy’s strike force as possible had now become an end in

itself: success would be determined by how well the plan achieved its own

internal goals—that is, by how effectively the specific enemy assets it

targeted were destroyed—and not by what happened to the country after the

attack was executed.10

8 Ibid., p. 14; see also pp. 56-57.9 Ibid., pp. 11-12.10 See Scott Sagan, “SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy,” International Security 12:1 (Summer, 1987), esp. p. 36. Carl Kaysen, who was at

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So the problems Jervis talked about were quite real. But suppose the

countervailing strategy had been cleaned up a bit. Suppose the Soviet

political control structure had not been targeted, and suppose U.S. officials

had taken the line (as in fact they sometimes did) that escalation, although

certainly possible, was by no means certain. Would the strategy then get a

passing grade? Jervis, following Thomas Schelling, thinks it is rational for a

state to be willing to run a certain risk of escalation; its willingness to do so

might allow it to defend its interests no matter what the local military

balance is like.11 And he also thinks it would have strengthened the U.S.

position if the Soviets really thought the Americans were prepared to run

those risks.12 Would he therefore approve of that cleaned-up strategy?

One has the sense that the answer is no—that his distaste for the

countervailing strategy rests on something more basic. For in The Illogic of

American Nuclear Strategy, he was not simply taking potshots at the official

policy that the U.S. governments of the day had put forward. His critique

was rooted in a certain theory of how international politics works in the

shadow of nuclear weapons, what he calls the theory of the nuclear

revolution.

For Jervis, the nuclear revolution itself has two elements: “the

overwhelming power of the weapons and the existence of mutual second-

that briefing, remembers the president asking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer: “‘General, why are we hitting all those targets in China?’ And Lemnitzer said, ‘they’re in the plan, Mr. President.’” It was, Kaysen noted, a “super-classic version” of a briefing, and Kennedy was infuriated. Interview with Carl Kaysen, August 3, 1988. More generally, on the emphasis placed on damage expectancy criteria in planning for general war, see also Bruce Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington: Brookings, 1993), esp. pp. 38-39, 43. 11 See, for example, Robert Jervis, “Deterrence Theory Revisited,” World Politics 31, no. 1 (October 1978), p. 300, and Illogic, p. 134.12 Illogic, p. 111.

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strike capability, meaning that neither side can eliminate the other’s

retaliatory capacity by launching a first strike.”13 The theory of the nuclear

revolution, on the other hand, is a set of arguments about what all this

means. The key claim is that we can be fairly relaxed about living in this

kind of world: “If nuclear weapons have had the influence that the nuclear-

revolution theory indicates they should have, then there will be peace

between the superpowers, crises will be rare, neither side will be eager to

press bargaining advantages to the limit, the status quo will be relatively

easy to maintain, and political outcomes will not be closely related to either

the nuclear or the conventional balance.”14

These conclusions, however, have by no means been universally

accepted. Many people have taken the view that while massive, survivable

forces have made all-out war extremely unlikely, they have at the same time

made it easier for states to use force in more limited ways. As Jervis himself

puts the argument: “if an uncontrolled war would lead to mutual

destruction, then neither side should ever start one. But this very stability

allows either side to use limited violence because the other’s threat to

respond by all-out retaliation cannot be very credible.”15 (This, as he points

out, is what Glenn Snyder called the “stability-instability paradox.”) But that

kind of argument, he says, is based on a fallacy. It assumes that a general

war can break out only if at least one side deliberately decides to start one.

But a conflict can escalate even if “no one wants it to.”16 “Undesired

13 Ibid., p. 22.14 Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 45.15 Illogic, p. 31. See also Nuclear Revolution, pp. 19-20.16 Nuclear Revolution, pp. 19, 21.

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escalation” is by no means impossible; “events can readily escape control.”17

As Brodie pointed out, “violence between great opponents is inherently

difficult to control.”18 “There is an irreducible minimum of unpredictability

that operates,” Jervis writes, “especially in situations which engage a state’s

highest values.”19 And, as odd as it might seem, this whole state of affairs

has a stabilizing effect. It was because things could escalate without anyone

wanting them to that both sides would have to behave cautiously, no matter

what the local military balance was. That danger of inadvertent war would

keep any potential enemy at bay. “Paradoxically,” he writes, “stability is in

part the product of the belief that the world is not entirely stable, that things

could somehow get out of control.”20

But that risk of inadvertent war was not just something that was built

into the system and had to be accepted as a fact of life. It was also

something that could be consciously exploited—and in this context Jervis

builds on Thomas Schelling’s well-known arguments about the

17 Robert Jervis, “Arms Control, Stability, and Causes of War,” Daedalus 120:1 (Winter 1991), p. 175.18 Quoted in Illogic, p. 137. Jervis also quotes the Kng of Italy saying, with regard to the German move that triggered the Second Moroccan Crisis in 1911, that in such circumstances the cannons “have a way of going off on their own.” Nuclear Revolution, p. 86. But statesmen often take a more sober view. During the July Crisis in 1914, for example, Russian foreign minister Sazonov remarked that “there was no fear that the guns would go off by themselves.” Quoted in Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, 3 vols. (London: 1952-57), 2:682. And I should also note that Brodie himself did not take the threat of inadvertent war too seriously. See, for example, Brodie to Schelling, December 18, 1964, Brodie Papers, Box 2, UCLA Research Library, and Bernard Brodie, “How Much is Enough? Guns versus Butter Revisited,” California Seminar on Arms Control and Foreign Policy, Lecture Series no. 56, August 1975; some comments from that talk are quoted in Marc Trachtenberg “ The Past and Future of Arms Control,” Daedalus 120, no. 1(Winter 1991), pp. 208-209. And during the Cuban missile crisis, Brodie (as he later wrote) “felt utterly confident” that the crisis “would not deteriorate into war.” Bernard Brodie, “Morals and Strategy,” Worldview 7, no. 9 (September 1964) , p. 7.

19 “Deterrence Theory Revisited,” pp. 299-300.20 “Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn’t Matter,” p. 620.

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“manipulation of risk” and the “threat that leaves something to chance.”21

Even if statesmen would never do anything that they knew would lead

directly to a general nuclear war, they could still rationally take actions that

involved a certain risk—say, a ten percent chance—that things would spin

out of control.22 Indeed, they could take actions which they knew would

increase the risk of escalation in the hope that their adversaries would find

that level of risk unbearable. But both sides could play that game, and the

outcome of the dispute would depend on which side had the greater resolve

—that is, on which side was the last to find the level of risk intolerable. The

balance of resolve would therefore play a key role in international political

life.

And one of Jervis’s main points here (again building on Schelling) was

that “the ability to tolerate and raise the level of risk is not closely tied to

military superiority.”23 In a world where both sides have the ability to

destroy the other no matter who struck first, the strategic nuclear balance

(as measured by numbers of weapons, megatonnage, throw-weights, and so

on) does not mean much in any case, and imbalances at lower levels of

violence are of relatively minor importance because the losing side can

always take measures that increase the level of risk—and given what was at

stake, the fear of a nuclear holocaust, and not what was going on in the

ground war, was bound to dominate the situation.24 So it was not important,

for example, that the West be able to hold off a Soviet conventional attack on

21 See especially Illogic, pp. 137-138.22 Ibid., pp. 134, 168; “Deterrence Theory Revisited,” p. 300.23 Illogic, p. 135. See also “Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn’t Matter,” pp. 626, 628.24 Illogic, p. 141.

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Europe with conventional forces alone.25 It could rely on the deterrent effect

created by the fact that no one could be sure that the war would not

escalate; it could if necessary use nuclear weapons not for any direct

military purpose but rather to “generate risks that further escalation will

occur.”26 The basic argument here is thus rather far-reaching. This was,

quite explicitly, an argument against flexible response strategies in general,

and not just against the “countervailing strategy” of the post-1974 period.27

Jervis, of course, understands that there are problems with his

approach to strategic issues. In a world where crises, to use Schelling’s

phrase, are “competitions in risk-taking,” confrontations, Jervis writes,

would “resemble the game of Chicken,” and in that situation no one can be

sure that the outcome will be peaceful.28 And even if war is avoided, it is by

no means certain that the status quo power would prevail. The poker game

of risk manipulation, after all, could be played by both sides; “the fear of

war could be used as a lever to change the status quo as well as to preserve

it.”29 In a clash of wills, moreover, no one can tell how far each side would

25 Ibid., pp. 129-134, 169.26 Ibid., p. 167.27 This is quite clear from the way the argument in “Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn’t Matter” is framed, and especially from the way flexible response is discussed in that article.28 Illogic, p. 152.29 Nuclear Revolution, p. 29. See also ibid., p. 40, and Robert Jervis, “Theories of War in an Era of Leading-Power Peace,” American Political Science Review 96:1 (March 2002), p. 7. One does not need a nuclear Hitler to have this kind of problem; someone like Khrushchev was also fully capable of playing that kind of game. For him, as his son put it, nuclear forces could serve as a “method of exerting pressure, threats, and even blackmail.” Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (University Park: Penn State Press, 2000), p. 670. Nixon, incidentally, in a 1985 interview which dealt mainly with the nuclear issue, rated Khrushchev “‘the most brilliant world leader I have ever met.’ That brilliance was manifested, he says, in Khrushchev's having nurtured a reputation for rashness and unpredictability. ‘He scared the hell out of people.’” “What the President Saw: A Nation Coming into its Own,” Time, July 29, 1985.

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go; the process could quite conceivably lead to “mutual devastation.” 30 And

finally, in a world where a willingness to take risks plays such a central role,

“small issues will often loom large, not because of their intrinsic importance,

but because they are taken as tests of resolve.”31 In that kind of world, “it

was both crucial and difficult to make plausible the threat to trigger” all-out

war; “extraordinary measures” would be “necessary, such as behaving

unpredictably and committing oneself to defend exposed positions like West

Berlin.”32

But in practice he does not think that these problems loom very

large.33 One of the basic reasons is that the balance of resolve in his view

favors the status quo power: “Risk, of course, puts pressures on both sides.

But a given level of risk may be acceptable to the defender of the status quo

and intolerable to an aggressor; the threat to raise the risk to a given level

may be credible when made by the former and not credible when made by

the latter.”34 That whole way of looking at things—and this is characteristic

of Jervis’s approach to these issues—is reinforced by an argument drawn

from cognitive psychology to the effect that fear is a more powerful emotion

than greed—that a loss hurts more than an equivalent gain gratifies.35 All of 30 Illogic, pp. 152-153. 31 Nuclear Revolution, p. 39.32 Robert Jervis, “Was the Cold War a Security Dilemma?” Journal of Cold War Studies 3, no. 1 (Winter 2001), p. 54.33 Illogic, pp. 153-157.34 Ibid., pp. 134, 153-157. See also Nuclear Revolution, pp. 30-35, “Deterrence Theory Revisited,” pp. 317-318, and “Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn’t Matter,” p. 632. A counter-argument here would build on Jervis’s “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma” article, which came out in World Politics (30 no. 2) in January 1978. One of Jervis’s basic points there was that in certain circumstances status quo powers are led to adopt aggressive policies; a key implication here is that the distinction between aggressive and defensive policies is not necessarily as sharp as one might think.35 Nuclear Revolution, pp. 31, 168-173.

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this serves to support the general conclusion that, at least for a country like

the United States during the Cold War, deterrence is relatively easy to

achieve, and that American defense policy should be based on a relatively

straightforward risk manipulation strategy. This was a situation that Jervis

was quite comfortable with. Indeed, from his point of view, a certain degree

of instability—that is, a certain risk that a limited war could develop into a

nuclear holocaust, even if neither side wanted it to—was desirable: “While

both sides have an interest in eliminating extreme crisis instability, they

need to see that there is some chance that events could get out of control

once violence is employed because this is the main generator of caution and

the primary means of exerting pressure on the other side. . . . If security is

linked in part to the danger of inadvertent war, then too much stability could

make the world safe for coercion and violence.”36

How Risk is Generated

What is to be made of that whole line of argument? The concept of

risk plays a central role in Jervis’s basic approach to nuclear issues, but why,

in a world of secure second-strike forces, should there be any real risk of all-

out war, given that both sides know very well what such a war would mean?

There are two ways, Jervis writes, in which escalation can occur in

such a world. It can happen “either as the result of an unintended explosion

to all-out war or in a controlled manner, as one sides intensifies the violence

to bring pressure to bear on the other.”37 A strategy of controlled escalation

could in principle lead to utter devastation, as each side gradually and

36 “Arms Control, Stability, and Causes of War,” p. 177.37 Nuclear Revolution, p. 82. See all Illogic, p. 137.

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deliberately increases the level of destruction in the hope that if it goes just

a bit further its adversary will give way. In such a conflict, where the

willingness to take punishment as well as to inflict it would be crucial,

“states could destroy each other piecemeal” because the process “had no

upper limit”: there was no reason in theory why it could not continue until

both sides were destroyed.38 But such a war, as Jervis says, “strains the

imagination,” and he tends to place much greater emphasis on the risk of

unintended escalation, viewing it in fact as the only real basis for a policy of

deterrence.39 A threat to take action “could lead to great violence even

though no one wants it to”; that threat, he writes in one particularly striking

passage:

can be credible even when the threat to actually start a major war would not be because the action might not lead to war; the threat can be effective because the action could lead to war. Thus the commonsense claim that a “credible policy of [nuclear] first use implies an ability . . . to control the process of escalation” has it backwards. A high degree of control would defeat deterrence since it would mean that all-out war would occur only if the state sought it; it is the other side’s knowledge that escalation is not completely controllable that gives the threat of limited military use great potency.40

Indeed, he sometimes argues that a nuclear holocaust, if it ever occurred,

could only come about through a process of inadvertent escalation—that “as

long as each side maintains a second-strike capability, the highest levels of

violence now can be reached through no other path.”41

38 Nuclear Revolution, p. 94. See also Illogic, p. 21.39 Nuclear Revolution, p. 96. Thus, in the section of this book on “Two Kinds of Escalation” (pp. 82-95), he spends about twelve pages talking about “unintended explosion to all-out war” whereas less than a single page is devoted to “controlled escalation.”40 Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 66. Emphasis in original text. The internal quotation is from a 1986 article by Leon Sloss.41 Nuclear Revolution, p. 24.

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There is something quite puzzling about this whole approach to the

issue. The idea is that both sides are under no illusions about what a

general nuclear war would mean: it would be such an enormous disaster

that both sides would very much want to avoid it if they had any real control

over the situation. But at the same time the assumption is that a conflict

could “easily” escalate, that “whenever violence is set in motion . . . events

can readily escape control,” that “dangerous situations can lead to

escalation even if both sides desire to keep them under control”—that “the

outcome that everyone wants to avoid” can actually “come about.”42 Is it

possible that a disaster of this magnitude could really come about in this

way?

How exactly could this happen? As Jervis sees it, at the heart of that

process of inadvertent escalation lies the incentive to preempt—that is, to

strike the enemy in full force before the enemy has the chance to do the

same thing to you. “Total war,” he says, “could not occur in the absence of

the belief that war is imminent and inevitable and that, as terrible as

striking first would be, receiving the first blow would be even worse.”43 “If

all-out war comes,” he argues, “it can only come through preemption, loss of

control, and each side’s belief that the other is about to strike.”44 But the

problem here is that preemption scarcely makes sense in a world where

both sides have secure second-strike capabilities. The nuclear revolution,

that is, should have made preemption an absurdity. As Jervis himself points

out, “when offensive advantage is slight (i.e., when even striking first will

42 See, respectively, Nuclear Revolution, p. 94; “Arms Control, Stability, and Causes of War,” p. 175; Illogic, pp. 147-148; and Nuclear Revolution, p. 21.43 Nuclear Revolution, p. 136.44 Ibid., p. 24. Emphasis in original text.

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lead to disaster) it is hard to see how an all-out nuclear war could start”; “as

long as both sides believe that all-out war would result in mutual

devastation, first-strike incentives are negligible and crisis stability is

relatively easy to attain.”45 In a rational world, “a state whose leaders

believe that war will lead to total devastation will have no incentive to

preempt even if many of their missiles are vulnerable.” A country would be

tempted to preempt only in a world where “being struck first is much worse

than getting the first blow in”—or if it believed, rightly or wrongly, that it

was living in such a world.46

Was Jervis correct to believe that with survivable nuclear forces

neither side had any real incentive to preempt—that if a risk of preemption

existed it was only because of people’s inability to think rationally about

nuclear issues, or to act rationally in time of crisis? Beginning in 1978, with

the publication of an important article by John Steinbruner, a major

challenge was mounted to that whole line of argument.47 The basic claim

there was that common notions about the stability of a world in which

neither side could essentially wipe out the other side’s strategic forces were

highly problematic.48 The problem, according to analysts like Steinbruner

and Bruce Blair, was that people had thought in terms of the vulnerability of

the weapons, whereas the vulnerability of the command, control and

45 “Arms Control, Stability, and Causes of War,” pp. 181, 176.46 “Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn’t Matter,” p. 625.47 John Steinbruner, “National Security and the Concept of Strategic Stability,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 22:3 (September 1978). See also John Steinbruner, “Nuclear Decapitation,” Foreign Policy, no. 45 (Winter 1981-82); and Bruce Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington: Brookings, 1985). 48 See Steinbruner, “Concept of Strategic Stability,” p. 418; and Blair, Strategic Command and Control, pp. 4-5.

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communication (or “C3”) system was actually far more important. The direct

effects of C3 vulnerability, they argued, were quite serious. An attack on the

U.S. command structure, Blair wrote, “would have severely impaired and

possibly blocked U.S. retaliation”; this created incentives for both sides to

preempt in a crisis.49

But the indirect effects played a more fundamental role in this

analysis. The risk that the C3 system, and especially the political leadership,

could be destroyed or paralyzed at the start of a war meant that the

authority to conduct military operations would have to be predelegated to

military commanders. But predelegation would increase the risk of

escalation, and the problem was particularly serious when the forces are put

on alert. C3 vulnerability, moreover, “produced powerful incentives within

the U.S. military planning system to conduct full-scale strategic operations

at the outset of any serious nuclear engagement.”50 The country’s ability to

mount an organized, systematic attack—the sort of attack the forces had

been prepared to execute and which the military, somewhat irrationally,

believed in—would be compromised when the command and control system

collapsed.51 But that emphasis placed on rapid response might lead a

country to strike before it was actually under attack. It might have to act on

the basis of faulty or inadequate or ambiguous information. The political

leadership might find it hard to resist the pressure for decisive action—to

agree to the implementation of the plan the military had been primed to put

49 Blair, Strategic Command and Control, pp. 4-5. See also ibid., pp. 7, 285, and Steinbruner, “Nuclear Decapitation,” p. 19.50 Steinbruner, “Nuclear Decapitation,” p. 22. See also Steinbruner, “Concept of Strategic Stability,” p. 421, and Bruce Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington: Brookings, 1993), pp. 7, 167.51 Blair, Accidental Nuclear War, pp. 6-7, 54, and especially 167.

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into effect: “the most serious threat of war under current circumstances,”

Steinbruner writes, “probably lies in the possibility that organizationally and

technically complex military operations might override coherent policy

decision and produce a war that was not intended.”52 It is in this sense that

command and control vulnerabilities could lead to an “accidental nuclear

war.”

Jervis tends to take his distance from that set of arguments, even

though they purport to explain how risk might be generated. The problems

those writers have talked about, he says, “should not be exaggerated”: “the

first-strike incentives created by C3 vulnerability are sharply limited,” since

the destruction of the C3 system “probably would not prevent retaliation.”53

And in my view at least that judgment is clearly correct. Given the

vulnerability of the command and control system, authority to order a

nuclear attack obviously had to be predelegated; the predelegation

arrangements would almost certainly include guidance about how and when

that authority would be used; and indeed that guidance provided for an “all-

out, unrestrained” response in the event the enemy launched a decapitation

strike—or at least that is what former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown

52 Steinbruner, “Concept of Strategic Stability,” p. 424. The unwieldiness of military forces, and the difficulty that the political leadership would have in managing, or even in understanding, what the military was doing in a crisis or limited war situation, is an important theme not just in this literature, but even more in Scott Sagan’s work. Sagan, in fact, thinks that there were “close calls” during the Cuban Missile Crisis for this sort of reason, the “most grave” of which was the straying of an American reconnaissance plane into Soviet airspace on October 27, 1962, as the crisis was coming to a head. Scott Sagan, Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 146-147. My own view is that an isolated incident of this sort would never have led to a nuclear holocaust. As President Kennedy put it during the crisis (referring to a rather different problem), why would the Soviets allow a general war to begin in “that sort of half-assed way?” Transcript of October 16, 1962, Cuban Missile Crisis meetings (first meeting), p. 25, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston.53 Nuclear Revolution, pp. 146-148.

16

claimed in his memoirs.54 And what that means is that the political

authorities, and the top military leadership as well, could afford to hold back

if the evidence of an enemy attack was not absolutely unambiguous; instead

of ordering an attack, it could always take much milder measures, like

getting the bombers in the air and taking action to reduce the vulnerability

of submarines. The whole argument that the leadership would be under

enormous pressure to act quickly might have had a certain validity if the

missile force was all that the country had—that is, if bombers and

submarines did not exist, or could be paralyzed by the destruction of the C3

system and the absence of predelegated authority to their commanders.55

But in a world of survivable forces, in which effective predelegation

arrangements had been worked out, it is hard to believe that strategic

preemption of any sort really made sense. It is hard to believe, in other

words, that C3 vulnerability meant that the risk of an accidental nuclear war

was very real.

So where does this leave us? There might have been no incentive for

either side to strike first in a crisis; the problem of “inadvertent war” was

probably a good deal less serious than many people think. But perhaps all

this is beside the point. The real risk might be negligible—in large part

because people on both sides would think it was so great. And they would

54 Blair quotes that passage from Brown’s memoirs in The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, p. 50; Sagan had also quoted it in Moving Targets, p. 143.55 Thus Blair says that “the discretionary authority to fire surely did not devolve to the SSBN, ICBM, or bomber commanders.” Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, p. 47. But can one really believe that missile submarine commanders, for example, were not given any instructions about what to do in the event communication was totally cut off and they were sure the country, including the national capital, had suffered a major nuclear attack—perhaps instructions that they would only read after they had good reason to think that an attack had taken place? For what it is worth, I myself once heard a former U.S. official, at a conference in Germany in 1988 or 1989, hint quite strongly that instructions for such contingencies had in fact been issued.

17

think it was quite substantial, not because they had reached any particular

conclusion about how much of an incentive there was to preempt. They

would be impressed instead by the fact that the two nuclear giants were

confronting each other, that fundamental political interests were engaged,

that the level of tension had intensified: they would be struck by the simple

fact that the world had gone up a step or two on the ladder, and that the top

rung was therefore getting closer. To be sure, that effect could be

undermined (and the political consequences could be serious) if policy

makers made it too clear that they were unwilling to run any risk

whatsoever. But generally speaking the sense of risk would be rooted in the

simple fact that things seemed to be moving in the direction of all-out war.56

It is that visceral feeling, and not the “reality” itself, that would be crucial,

and that is all that you need to make the argument that a sense of risk is

important. In this area, as Jervis notes—and this, I think, is a point whose

full meaning takes a while to sink in—“there is no reality to be described

that is independent of people’s beliefs about it.”57

When Resolve Is King

The sense that matters might escalate is thus bound to weigh heavily

in a major confrontation between nuclear powers. But the real question

here has to do with policy. To the extent that we have any choice in the

56 On this point, see Bernard Brodie, “Political Impact of U.S. Force Postures,” Rand Paper, May 1963, p. 7, Digital National Security Archive (http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com/home.do), document CC03116 [henceforth cited in the form: DNSA/CC03116]. See also Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 94-96—although Schelling, it is important to note, later argues in that same book that the incentive to preempt plays the crucial role in the escalatory process (p. 227).57 Illogic, p. 38.

18

matter, how much would we want to rely on “threats that leave something to

chance”—that is, on taking actions, if the time comes, that increase the

probability of an (unintended) nuclear holocaust? Many people, of course,

do not find that sort of strategy particularly attractive. The nuclear left

never really embraced that Schellingesque approach: the whole idea of

relying on a “doomsday machine linked to a roulette wheel” (to use Morton

Halperin’s phrase) had very little appeal in those quarters.58 And the

nuclear right was scarcely more enthusiastic. According to people on that

part of the political spectrum, control over escalation should never be

deliberately abandoned.59 From their point of view, the risk of escalation

was not a phenomenon to be exploited: it was a danger to be minimized.

So what are we to make of the risk manipulation strategy? To the extent

that we have a choice—and Jervis is certainly right to think that in the nuclear era

we have much less of a choice in this regard than we did in the past, although he

obviously assumes we have some—would we want to live in a world where political

outcomes are determined by which side is willing to run the greater risk of general

war—where victory would go to the side with the strongest nerves? Such a world,

I think, could be quite dangerous. The reason is simple. In international politics,

as in other areas of life, what you reward is what you get: there would be a great

premium on resolve, on risk-taking, and perhaps ultimately on recklessness, as

each side is led by competitive pressure to toughen its own stance.60 As Jervis 58 Morton Halperin, Nuclear Fallacy: Dispelling the Myth of Nuclear Strategy (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1987), pp. 85, 113.59 For a good example of that sort of thinking, see Albert Wohlstetter and Richard Brody, “Continuing Control as a Requirement for Deterring,” in Ashton Carter, John Steinbruner, and Charles Zraket, eds., Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington: Brookings, 1987), esp. p. 152. See also the Leon Sloss article which Jervis quotes in System Effects, p. 66.60 I am drawing here on a review I did of The Spread of Nuclear Weapons by Kenneth Waltz and Scott Sagan, available online at

19

himself points out, moreover, in this kind of world, where “each side wants to

stand firm if and only if it believes that the other will back down,” the two sides

have a strong incentive to adopt tactics that strengthen their bargaining positions:

to overstate how strongly they feel about an issue, to pretend to be foolhardy, to

act as though “they do not understand the risks they are running.” At the same

time, each side has a strong incentive to adopt counter-tactics—to suggest, for

example, that the impression one’s adversary is trying to give is not to be taken at

face value, but rather has to be understood in bargaining terms, or at least that

one believes this to be the case.61 This sort of thing is obviously bound to play a

certain role in international political life, and especially in relations between

nuclear powers. But do we really want it to play a greater role than it absolutely

has to? To the degree we have any choice in the matter, wouldn’t we want

something more tangible, less purely subjective, to play a greater role in shaping

political outcomes?

Those problems with the way a system based on resolve would work strike

me as very fundamental. To be sure, during the Cold War period they never really

came into play in a major way. In theory the problem could have been quite

serious—a Berlin Crisis during the period of nuclear parity might have been very

dangerous indeed—but in practice political differences were never great enough to

generate a true “competition in risk-taking.” Even in the Cuban missile crisis, you

don’t really find either side playing that kind of game.

The real problem was somewhat different. It had to do not so much with

actual resolve as with posturing—and especially with each actor’s attempts to http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/cv/prolif.doc. A truncated version, with the title “Waltzing toward Armageddon” (which I did not give it), was published in The National Interest in the Fall of 2002.61 Robert Jervis, “Bargaining and Bargaining Tactics,” in J. Roland Pennock and John Chapman, eds., Coercion, (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972), pp. 282-285.

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manipulate not just its adversary’s beliefs about the controllability of an armed

conflict, but even more the adversary’s beliefs about whether that actor really

believes what it says about the controllability, or uncontrollability, of the fighting,

once it reaches a certain level. People’s minds become the battlefield and this

gives international political life a rather odd character. And the question again is

whether, to the extent we have any choice in the matter, this is the kind of nuclear

world we want to live in, or whether some alternative would be better.

Jervis, of course, is quite aware of this sort of problem, and in fact a real

sensitivity to the importance of what each side thinks about what the other

believes and to the efforts each side makes to manipulate the other’s beliefs about

what it itself is thinking is one of the hallmarks of his work.62 Thus note, for

example, his discussion of the question of what the U.S. government should say

about limited nuclear war:

The threat of a limited response can be more credible than that of all-out war only if the Russians believe that American leaders believe that escalation can be avoided. . . . What is crucial for the added credibility that the ability to carry out limited strikes brings is not the Russians’ beliefs about whether nuclear war can be kept limited, but their beliefs about what the American decision-makers think about this question. Indeed, deterrence would be maximized if the Russians thought control was impossible, but believed that the United States thought it was relatively easy.63

On the other hand, if a country wanted to deter its adversary from adopting

a limited nuclear war-fighting strategy, it should pretend that it believed

62 Indeed, his very first book, and to my mind one of his best, was explicitly concerned with the role of deception in international politics: Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 10-11. 63 Illogic, p. 111. I should note that Jervis is taking issue here, in passing, with the common view that the adoption of a limited nuclear war-fighting strategy would only make sense if the Soviets agreed to play by the same rules, and that their refusal to accept those rules meant that the strategy was not viable. This passage, incidentally, could serve as a defense of the countervailing strategy, especially in light of the Schlesinger comment quoted in the next paragraph.

21

that matters were bound to escalate and that it would therefore not fight a

limited nuclear war (no matter what its true policy was). The goal would be

to get one’s opponent to conclude that it was too dangerous to use nuclear

weapons in even a limited way.64 So given that both sets of calculations

could come into play, you might have a kind of tug-of-war, with each actor

trying to convince its rivals not so much that its way of viewing the problem

of escalation was correct, but rather that it really believed it was correct,

and had not just adopted that way of talking about the issue for bargaining

purposes.

As it turns out—and this point would not have registered on me if I

had not been exposed to Jervis’s way of thinking—strategic discourse during

the latter part of the Cold War is to a considerable extent to be understood

in those terms. When you look at the new material that has come out on

nuclear strategy in that period, you are struck by the degree to which both

sides were playing that kind of game. The countervailing strategy, it now

seems, was something of a fraud. President Nixon, for example, made it

clear to his top advisors that the United States would not use nuclear

weapons even tactically in a purely European war: “We will never use the

tactical nuclears,” he said; the “nuclear umbrella in NATO” was “a lot of

crap.”65 Given that attitude, a large counterforce attack aimed at targets

within the Soviet Union was scarcely conceivable, and indeed it seems that

National Security Decision Memorandum 242 of January 1974, the document

64 See Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma,” p. 210.65 National Security Council meeting, November 19, 1970, p. 9, DNSA/KT00211; and National Security Council meeting, February 19, 1969, quoted in William Burr, “The Nixon Administration, the ‘Horror Strategy,’ and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969-1972,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 3 (Summer 2005), p. 48 n. 31.

22

calling for the development of limited nuclear war-fighting options, was

never really implemented, at least not in a strategically meaningful way.66

The main point of the strategy was to influence Soviet perceptions of

American thinking, or at least that was what former Secretary of Defense

James Schlesinger, one of the architects of the strategy, told an interviewer

in 1991:

Schlesinger did not care whether the Soviets believed in LNO [limited nuclear options], so long as they believed that the U.S. was convinced of the feasibility of LNO. Even if the Soviets refused to believe that a nuclear war could be limited, they would still be deterred because in their view, a limited U.S. strike would lead to an all-out war, a very self-deterring prospect. In this connection, Schlesinger volunteered that he never passed up an opportunity to announce and clarify the LNO doctrine—before Congress, to the press, in official and informal speeches. He explained that the way in which the concept was presented—that is, the body language, tone of voice, general seriousness of manner—was almost more important than what was said.67

The USSR’s policy of pretending that a nuclear war would be uncontrollable,

it now appears, was also intended to influence its adversaries’ perceptions. 66 This at least was General William Odom’s judgment. Odom had learned a good deal about these issues when he was on the NSC staff during from 1977 to 1980. See Military Planning for European Theatre Conflict during the Cold War: An Oral History Roundtable, Stockholm, 24- 25 April 2006, Zürcher Beiträge zur Sicherheitspolitik, no. 79 (Zurich: ETH Zürich, 2007), p. 132, available online at http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/documents/ZB79_000.pdf. NSDM 242 was published in Terry Terriff, The Nixon Administration and the Making of U.S. Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 237-241. Terriff’s discussion of the implementation issue in chapter 7 of his book is more restrained, but a careful reading suggests that viable nuclear war-fighting options were not really developed.67 John Hines interview with James Schlesinger, October 29, 1991, Soviet Intentions 1965-1985 Volume II: Soviet Post-Cold War Testimonial Evidence (BDM Corporation, 1995; declassified 2009), p. 129; available online at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb285/index.htm. Emphasis in original text. It is interesting to note in this context that Kissinger was not interested in playing this game and in fact in a meeting with Soviet foreign minister Gromyko set out to distance both himself and President Ford from the Schlesinger strategy. He told Gromyko that an oral message from Brezhnev complaining about Schlesinger’s statements was “not unhelpful,” that the president did not share Schlesinger’s views, and that what Schlesinger was saying was “an attempt by a Cabinet member to play politics in an election year.” Kissinger-Gromyko meeting, July 11, 1975, in William Burr, ed., The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York: New Press, 1998), p. 361.

23

The point of taking that line, according to some key former Soviet officials

(including high military officers), was to “enhance deterrence.” All the talk

about a rapid expansion of a European war to include targets in America

was not to be taken at face value. If that had been the Soviets’ real policy,

“people would not have known about its existence.” The real Soviet

reaction, in the event a small number of weapons were used against them,

would probably have been quite limited; they certainly would not have

opted automatically for a nuclear holocaust in such a case.68 Nuclear

strategy thus had a certain air of unreality, a point noted by Vitalii

Tsygichko, who had been deeply involved with Soviet nuclear policy from

1962 on: “please bear in mind that, although we planned operations with

the use of nuclear weapons in case of a first strike from the West, nobody

seriously believed that such a war could take place. It was like a

confrontation, a struggle of ideas, and a kind of intellectual competition,

because everybody knew what would happen if such actions were

undertaken in reality.”69

In this sort of world, one takes a position in the hope of affecting one’s

adversary’s beliefs, and not just beliefs about abstract and rather

hypothetical issues of nuclear strategy. The premium placed on resolve and

(perhaps even more) on perceptions of resolve can also have a profound

impact on the actual conduct of policy. The Nixon-Kissinger period (1969-

68 Vitalii Tsygichko comments, Military Planning for European Theatre Conflict, p. 171 (for the second quotation); John Hines, Ellis M. Mishulovich, and John F. Shulle, Soviet Intentions 1965-1985, Volume I: An Analytical Comparison of U.S.-Soviet Assessments During the Cold War (BDM Corporation, 1995; also available at the website cited in the previous footnote), pp. 37-39; Kataev interview in ibid., 2:101; Danilevich interview in ibid., 2:29, 31-32, 40-42, 56-60, 64, 68. Danilevich’s comments in those passages about the shift toward a more flexible strategy in the mid-1970s are particularly interesting. 69 Military Planning for European Theatre Conflict, p.166.

24

1974) is of particular interest in this connection. As U.S. leaders saw it at

the time, the situation in Europe was not rock-solid. Given that the West

Germans were not allowed to develop a nuclear capability of their own, the

nuclear defense of western Europe was America’s responsibility. But as the

Soviet arsenal grew, the American nuclear guarantee became increasingly

problematic: the Nixon comment quoted above about how the United States

would “never use the tactical nuclears” is just the most striking

manifestation of a very fundamental shift. But that situation, where western

Europe was increasingly exposed to Soviet nuclear power, was bound to

have major political repercussions. It was one of the main causes of the shift

in German policy toward accommodation with the USSR in this period;

given the strategic situation, the German leadership did not want to come

anywhere close to risking a European war.70

From the U.S. point of view, this whole situation was quite troubling.

The Americans could not pursue a relatively relaxed policy in Europe,

confident that a very effective counterweight to Soviet power there was

already in place. They had to be far more active. Their China policy is to be

seen in this context: their goal was to “play China” against the USSR; their

ability to hold the line in Europe, they thought, depended on China

remaining an independent great power, and indeed one that was hostile to

the USSR. As Kissinger told French president Pompidou in May 1973: “If

70 See Marc Trachtenberg, “The Structure of Great Power Politics, 1963-1975,” in Marc Trachtenberg, The Cold War and After: History, Theory and the Logic of International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), esp. pp. 162-67. A shorter version of this paper was published in vol. 2 of the Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. O.A. Westad and Melvyn Leffler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

25

the Soviet Union managed to render China impotent, Europe would become

a Finland and the United States would be completely isolated.”71

And partly to make sure that the United States was able to pursue

that policy toward China and partly because the U.S. government felt it

needed to make up for the weakness of its position in Europe by cultivating

the appearance of toughness, Kissinger thought the United States would

have to take a hard line if the Russians challenged the American position

anywhere. “When aggressive action occurs, we will act decisively, and if

necessary brutally,” he told the Chinese in November 1973; the danger of

Soviet expansionism could be “reduced if not eliminated” if “we resist

brutally whenever there is the slightest military threat.”72 Two years later,

in another meeting with Chinese leaders, he was still singing the same song:

“if the Soviet Union should stretch out its hands, we will be brutal in our

response, no matter where it occurs—and we won’t ask people whether they

share our assessment when we resist.”73 It was therefore important to make

the Soviets believe that the United States would rather go nuclear than

accept a major political loss: “It is in our interest to make the Soviet Union

believe that we will not acquiesce in an overturning of the equilibrium no

matter what weapons are involved.”74

71 Kissinger-Pompidou meeting, May 18, 1973, p. 4, DNSA/KT00728. Kissinger’s comment about “playing China against the Soviet Union” appears on the same page.72 Kissinger-Zhou Enlai meeting, November 11, 1973, p. 10, DNSA/CH00278; Kissinger-Zhou Enlai meeting, November 12, 1973, pp. 18-20, DNSA/CH00279.73 Kissinger-Deng Xiaoping meeting, October 20, 1975 (afternoon), p. 14, DNSA/KT01812. 74 Kissinger-Deng Xiaoping meeting, October 20, 1975 (morning), p. 7, DNSA/KT01811. Given Nixon’s attitude toward nuclear weapons, what this meant was that the United States was going to have to try to bluff the Soviets. But Kissinger by no means dismissed the idea of a bluff strategy out of hand. “In the nuclear age,” he said in his memoirs, “a bluff taken seriously is useful; a serious threat taken as a bluff may prove disastrous.” Henry Kissinger, White House Years

26

And actual policy in regional disputes was framed with these

considerations in mind. A number of episodes here— especially the Yom

Kippur War nuclear alert in 1973, and now also the “madman” nuclear alert

of October 1969—are fairly well-known.75 But the story of U.S. policy

during the 1971 South Asia Crisis is also quite revealing in this context.

What is striking here is the importance that was placed on psychological

phenomena—on who was perceived as tough and who was thought of as

(Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 67. He was obviously quite taken with that point and had made it a number of times in his earlier writings. See, for example, Henry Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice (New York: Harper, 1961), p. 12, and Henry Kissinger, The Troubled Partnership (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965), p. 19; and Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy, expanded edition (New York: Norton, 1974), p. 61. Note also Daniel Ellsberg’s account of a 1970 meeting with Kissinger, quoted in Bruce Mazlish, Kissinger: The European Mind in American Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 185-186.75 On this general issue, see Francis Gavin, “Nuclear Nixon: Ironies, Puzzles, and the Triumph of Realpolitik,” in Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, eds., Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969-1977 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 136-138. Note especially the record of the taped Nixon-Kissinger conversation of April 4, 1972, which Gavin quotes from toward the beginning of his article, but which is very much worth reading in full: Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS], 1969-76, 14:258-260. On the 1969 episode, see William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball, “Nixon’s Secret Nuclear Alert: Vietnam War Diplomacy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test, October 1969,” Cold War History 3, no. 2 (January 2003) and Scott Sagan and Jeremi Suri, “The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969,” International Security 27, no. 4 (Spring 2003). See also “Nixon’s Nuclear Ploy: The Vietnam Negotiations and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test, October 1969,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 81 (a supplement to the Burr and Kimball article, with twelve documents relating to this episode), http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB81/index.htm; and the Nixon-Kissinger telephone conversation of October 20, 1969, DNSA/KA01400. On the 1973 alert, see Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation:  American-Soviet relations from Nixon to Reagan, rev. ed. (Washington: Brookings, 1994), pp. 420-433; Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 226-288; Sagan, Limits of Safety, pp. 212-224, and the sources cited there (pp. 212-213 n. 26). Nixon and Kissinger claimed, moreover, that they had “stood the Soviets down” in the Jordanian and Cuban affairs in 1970 and also believed that the Chinese saw it that way. See Nixon-Kissinger meeting, December 12, 1971 (tape transcript), summarized in Editorial Note, FRUS 1969-1976, 11:782-783. The transcript itself is available online in vol. E-7 of that series (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/nixon/e7/index.htm), doc. 177. Note also Kissinger’s remarks to Deng Xiaoping on October 20, 1975, in Burr, Kissinger Transcripts, p. 386. On the India-Pakistan episode, see Robert McMahon, “The Danger of Geopolitical Fantasies: Nixon, Kissinger, and the South Asia Crisis of 1971,” in Logevall and Preston, Nixon and the World, esp. pp. 263-266.

27

weak—and the sort of posturing that kind of mentality led to. Given the fact

that the inhabitants of what was then East Pakistan were welcoming the

Indian troops as liberators, why, Nixon wondered, did the United States

have to take such a strong anti-Indian stand? A big part of the answer,

Kissinger replied, was that the U.S. government needed to try to “prevent a

complete collapse of the world’s psychological balance of power, which will

be produced if a combination of the Soviet Union and the Soviet armed

client state can tackle a not insignificant country without anybody doing

anything.” “I have to tell you honestly I consider this our Rhineland,” he

added; “if the Russians come out of it totally cocky, we may have a Middle

East war in the spring.”76 The Russians, Kissinger had told Treasury

Secretary Connally a few days earlier, had to be shown “that it’s too risky to

kick us in the teeth.”77

So the U.S. government sent a carrier task force into the area, and on

December 9 Nixon warned the Soviets in no uncertain terms that a

continuation of the war (into West Pakistan) might lead to a “confrontation”

with the United States.78 Kissinger told a Soviet diplomat the next day that

the United States was “moving some military forces, but it will not be

visible” until the 12th; that meant, he told Nixon, that the Soviets were in

effect being given “a sort of veiled ultimatum.”79 And the U.S. government

76 Nixon-Kissinger meeting , December 9, 1971 (tape transcript), quoted in Editorial Note, FRUS 1969-76, 11:722. The full transcript is in FRUS 1969-76, E-7, doc. 168.77 Kissinger-Connally meeting, December 5, 1971 (tape transcript), FRUS 1969-76, E-7, doc. 159.78 Nixon meeting with Soviet agriculture minister Matskevich, December 9, 1971, FRUS 1969-76, 11:725. Nixon was pleased by his performance: “I really stuck it to him,” he told Kissinger after the meeting. Ibid., p. 725n. See also the transcript of the meeting with Matskevich and of the Nixon-Kissinger exchange that followed in vol. E-7, doc. 169.79 Nixon-Kissinger conversation, December 10, 1971, FRUS 1969-76, E-7, doc. 173.

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also encouraged the Chinese to move troops to their border with India. “I

tell you a movement of even some Chinese toward that border,” Nixon told

Kissinger, “could scare those goddamn Indians to death.”80 Kissinger met

with the Chinese on December 10. He hinted that they should take action,

and said that if they did so, “the US would oppose efforts of others to

interfere with the People’s Republic.”81 This, Kissinger later suggested, was

tantamount to saying that “we will prevent pressures on you from other

countries”—that is, from the Soviets.82

Up to that point, the U.S. leaders did not think they were running

much of a risk. They were not really putting all their chips in the pot; it was

clear that if the Soviets were unaccommodating—“brutal,” in Kissinger’s

language—that the United States would give way and accept the situation.83

The United States, in other words, had been bluffing: “I must warn you, Mr.

President,” Kissinger told Nixon on December 8, “if our bluff is called we’ll

be in trouble.” And when Nixon asked how, Kissinger replied: “Well, we’ll

lose.”84 But on the 12th they learned that the Chinese “wanted to meet on an

urgent basis,” and they assumed this meant that China was “going to move.”

This put them on the spot. What if the Soviets responded by moving against

China? If the United States then just sat on its hands, Kissinger said, “we’ll

be finished.” Did that mean, Nixon wondered, that the U.S. government

80 Nixon-Kissinger phone conversation, quoted in FRUS 1969-76, 11:706. See also Nixon-Kissinger meeting, December 10, 1971, quoted in ibid., pp. 741-742, and Nixon-Kissinger-Mitchell meeting, December 8, 1971, FRUS 1969-76, E-7, doc. 165. 81 Kissinger-Huang meeting, December 10, 1971, FRUS 1969-76, 11:755.82 Nixon-Kissinger-Haig meeting, December 12, 1971, FRUS 1969-76, E-7, doc. 177.83 Nixon-Kissinger meeting, December 9, 1971, quoted in FRUS 1969-76, 11:721. 84 Nixon-Kissinger-Mitchell meeting, December 8, 1971, FRUS 1969-76, E-7, doc. 165.

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should “start lobbing nuclear weapons in”? Kissinger hesitated. “We better

call them off,” he said, but then quickly corrected himself: “I think we can’t

call them off, frankly,” because that would put the administration’s whole

global strategy in jeopardy. Once again, he emphasized the psychological

implications of a weakening of the U.S. position: “If the Russians get away

with facing down the Chinese, and if the Indians get away with licking the

Pakistanis,” the situation would be disastrous; “we may be looking right

down the gun barrel.” China would be humiliated; the world balance of

power would shift dramatically; the Soviets would be emboldened; and

there would be a “ghastly war in the Middle East.” So if push came to shove

and the USSR attacked China, America needed to take a tough line—not

“lobbing in” nuclear weapons, but going on alert, putting forces in, maybe

giving the Chinese “bombing assistance” (whatever that meant).85

As it turned out, however, the Chinese did not move and the crisis

soon subsided. It is thus hard to know what would have happened if

American resolve had been tested in a serious way. Perhaps the U.S.

government would have pulled back before matters had gone too far. But

even if that were the case, the story still tells us something about how things

work in a world where resolve plays such a fundamental role. It shows, I

think, how right Jervis was when he talked about the downside of that kind

of world—about how small issues could get blown out of proportion

“because they are taken as tests of resolve,” and about how people could be

led to behave in an at least apparently irrational way, in order to “make

plausible the threat to trigger” a nuclear war.86

85 Nixon-Kissinger-Haig meeting, December 12, 1971, ibid., doc. 177.86 Nuclear Revolution, p. 39; Jervis, “Was the Cold War a Security Dilemma?” p. 54.

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But doesn’t all this suggest that, to the extent that we have any choice

in the matter, we should not want to live in such a world—that is, one in

which governments are led to behave the way U.S. leaders did during the

Nixon-Kissinger period? Even if one assumes that all the posturing was pure

bluff and the American government would never have run a real risk of war

with the Soviet Union even if that country attacked China, one still has to

wonder about whether alternatives were available and, if so, whether they

would have been better. For suppose a more solid defense had been in

place in Europe—one in which the West’s ability to defend the status quo did

not rest too heavily on a threat to risk a nuclear holocaust. The U.S.

government could then have been fairly relaxed in its dealings with the two

great Communist powers; it would not have had to be so concerned with the

“world’s psychological balance of power” in every regional dispute. It would

not have had to rely so much on deception and pretense—on feigning

greater resolve than it itself felt, on trying to bluff its way through every

regional conflict that came up. Policy could have been more open and more

honest; a genuine meeting of the minds would have been easier to reach.

Communication between rival powers is hard enough—generally harder than

policy makers think at the time—even without the kind of posturing one sees

in a world where resolve is so important.87 But given the seriousness of the 87 No one, in fact, has thrown more light on this kind of problem than Jervis himself. See especially Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). One of the points he makes is particularly striking. People, he argues, tend to over-estimate their ability to make their intentions clear to their adversary. Having put so much thought into the working out of a policy, they “tend to think that the message about it they wish to convey will be clear to the receiver. Since they are aware of what to them is the important pattern in their actions, they often feel that the pattern will be equally obvious to others, and they overlook the degree to which the message is apparent to them only because they know what to look for.” Robert Jervis, “Hypotheses on Misperception,” World Politics 20, no. 3 (April 1968), p. 474. This point has had a certain resonance in the scholarly literature; one writer liked it so much that he

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problem, do we really want to make it even more difficult for rival powers to

understand each other by choosing to live in a world where bluff and

deception are bound to lie at the heart of international political life?

A Mind in Motion

It is hard to judge Jervis’s work the way you would another scholar’s.

You don’t associate him with a particular well-developed theory of

international politics—that is, with a particular set of claims about how the

world works. You don’t think of him the way you think of someone like

Kenneth Waltz or John Mearsheimer. His whole approach is remarkably

undogmatic. He looks at a problem in a certain light and he makes certain

points about it. The points are often quite striking, but after making a

certain argument, you can practically hear him saying to himself: “Now wait

a minute, isn’t there another way of looking at it?” The perspective shifts,

and soon everything appears in a rather different light. Again, the points

might be quite perceptive, and indeed they sometimes lead you to rethink

your own basic understanding of things. But given his intellectual

restlessness, his insistence on looking at things from a variety of angles, his

refusal to do what most scholars would do and just wrap things up in a nice

neat package, it is not hard to find him saying things that run counter to

some of his basic arguments.

simply lifted it and presented it as his own. See Eric Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 169. Schelling, incidentally, had made a similar point a few years earlier. See the summary of his comment on the famous Berlin game he conducted in September 1961 by one of General Taylor’s assistants, DNSA/BC02499, para. 2(a), and also Schelling’s later discussion of that game at a meeting at the Kennedy School on November 22, 1988, DNSA/BC02946, pp. 11-12.

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I used to think that this was to be understood in terms of Jervis’s

personal style. But now I think that the appearance of eclecticism is

somewhat misleading, and that the sort of analysis he engages in is rooted in

a certain vision of how things work and of how the world should be studied.

That vision is laid out most explicitly in System Effects, which to my mind is

his deepest, most interesting but also most under-appreciated book. One of

his basic arguments there was that people tend to think too much in terms

of direct effects. They are too quick to draw straight lines, for example,

from intentions to consequences. But in systems—and the international

political system is a good case in point—the indirect effects are so wide-

ranging and so important that one is never quite sure what impact a

particular action would have or how a particular development is to be

explained. Our whole way of analyzing things, in Jervis’s view, is

fundamentally misguided: we think, for example, that we can understand

the effect of something by looking at situations that are the same except for

that one variable; but “when we are dealing with systems,” he says, “things

cannot change one at a time—everything else cannot be held constant.”88

The world is much too complex to focus on just one set of effects, especially

since people are inclined to focus on those effects which for one reason or

another they happen to find congenial.89 Given how easy it is to miss so

much of the picture, you have to make a real effort to look at things from

different angles—to do the kind of analysis that might lead to conclusions

that run counter to what you would like to believe.

88 System Effects, p. 73.89 Ibid.

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My own teacher, Raymond Sontag, once said to me that there are no

answers in history. It took me a long time to understand what he had in

mind. It is that when we study international politics, we have to deal with

some very difficult issues, in intellectual terms and in moral terms as well.

But it is an illusion to think that there are solutions to those problems “out

there” just waiting for us to discover them. It is the journey that matters,

even if it doesn’t lead to any particular destination, or even to any

destination at all. We grapple with the core issues of the field as honestly

and as carefully as we can, and in doing so we almost automatically develop

a deeper understanding of how things work; just working in that way, we

somehow end up seeing beyond our own preconceptions. That was Sontag’s

view, and I think it is Jervis’s as well.

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