Blessed Are the Peacemakers: In Praise of Nuclear Strategists

We recently commemorated the 75^th anniversaries of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that forced a reluctant Japan to surrender and thereby end the Second World War. As usual, there was much soul was searching and beating of breasts about America's "sin" of ushering in the nuclear age. But the harsh reality is that the United States (with help from Great Britain) succeeded in harnessing the destructive power of the atom just in time—if Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union got there first, the “liberal” world order of the previous 75 years would have been aborted, and what Winston Churchill called a “new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science,” would have descended on the world.

The invention of nuclear weapons did not change human nature, and one of the constants throughout human history is war. There have been plenty of wars since the dawn of the nuclear age, but none of them has come close to the scale of the 20^th century’s two world wars. The major world powers have refrained from all-out war principally because of the fear of nuclear destruction. Nuclear deterrence has worked to limit the size and destructiveness of modern war. This is the paradox of the nuclear age.

And deterrence—even nuclear deterrence—did not just happen. The mere existence of nuclear weapons did not and does not guarantee the effectiveness of deterrence. Since the dawn of the nuclear era, strategists—mostly civilians—have thought about and planned for the “unthinkable,” a nuclear war. Deterrence to be effective must be credible. The credibility of a threat to use nuclear weapons involves questions of relative force structure, doctrine, deployments, and will. It is those questions that Western nuclear strategists thought about, wrote about, and debated to promote deterrence and preserve what one of them, Albert Wohlstetter, called “the delicate balance of terror.”

Beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s and continuing throughout much of the Cold War, Wohlstetter was joined in this intellectual effort by Herman Kahn, Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, Henry Kissinger, France’s Raymond Aron, Paul Nitze, Britain’s Colin Gray, Edward Luttwak, Gen. Daniel Graham, and Robert Jastrow, among others. Their output of books and articles, and their frequent role as defense consultants, helped Western statesmen and militaries construct a nuclear force and develop nuclear doctrines that prevented global war and lessened the scope of fighting in limited wars.

Wohlstetter wrote about “the logic of war in the thermonuclear age” and the fragile and shifting nuclear balance in his seminal Foreign Affairs article, "The Delicate Balance of Terror" (1959). He also brilliantly dissected the flaws of Catholic Bishops and elder statesmen's nuclear disarmament schemes in "Bishops, Statesmen, and Other Strategists on the Bombing of Innocents" in the June 1983 issue of Commentary. You can read these and his other articles on nuclear strategy in Nuclear Heuristics (2009).

Henry Kissinger wrote Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957) wherein he analyzed nuclear war, including limited nuclear war, in the context of global geopolitics. He explained that “nuclear technology makes it possible for the first time in history, to shift the balance of power solely through developments within the territory of another sovereign state.” The numbers of weapons and delivery systems mattered. Three years later, Herman Kahn wrote On Thermonuclear War, where he explored deterrence, warfighting, escalation, limited nuclear war, counterforce and counter-value doctrines, targeting, accuracy, survivability, basing of weapons, first-strike capability, and various war scenarios. Kahn sought to be the Clausewitz of nuclear war. Some of Kahn’s ideas were anticipated by France’s Raymond Aron in On War (1958).

Meanwhile, Bernard Brodie in Strategy in the Missile Age (1957) and Thomas Schelling in The Strategy of Conflict (1960) emphasized deterrence, anticipating the Kennedy-Johnson administration’s adoption of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which held that as long as nuclear powers maintained a sufficient “second-strike” retaliatory capability, no nuclear power would launch a first strike.  

 Later in the Cold War, as U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals became roughly equal, Edward Luttwak brilliantly analyzed "How to Think About Nuclear War,” the title of one of his articles collected in On the Meaning of Victory (1986). Luttwak concluded that "without nuclear deterrence, great- power politics would resume as before 1945." Looking back on all of the Cold War crises, he continued, "it is impossible to believe that another world war could have been avoided had it not been for the terror that nuclear weapons inspire."

Nuclear weapons helped keep the general peace during the Cold War. Deterrence worked. It continues to work in the post-Cold War world. The nuclear strategists who wrote about weapons of mass destruction, including plans for their deployment and use, were effectively the "peacemakers" of the nuclear era. They did far more to preserve general peace than the pacifists and disarmament groups who repeatedly called for abolishing nuclear weapons and Western unilateral disarmament. As Edward Luttwak noted, the Cold War's many crises never escalated to the point of all-out war. We should all be grateful for that. "Blessed are the peacemakers."

Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21^stCentury, America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War, and Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier’s Journey through the Second World War. He has written lengthy introductions to two of Mahan’s books, and has written on historical and foreign policy topics for The Diplomat, the University Bookman, Joint Force Quarterly, the Asian Review of Books, the New York Journal of Books, the Claremont Review of Books, American Diplomacy, the Washington Times, and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy.