Reading this column on WWIII potentially being started by a flock of geese made me think about an implicit assumption often made in these scenarios.
Basically the reasoning seems to be, that if we had reasonable confidence a nuke was heading our way, we would:
(a) Initiate missile defence procedures
(b) Launch our nuclear missiles (at what seems like the source)
Well, obviously (a) makes sense. In fact, it makes sense to do (a) if there’s even the tiniest possibility of a missile.
But why do (b) immediately? It’s not like they’re going to be able to take out all the US land-based missiles in one stroke (and it would be obvious very early in detection if that’s what they were attempting to do). Why risk starting WWIII unnecessarily to get the retaliation in at the earliest opportunity?
Presumably because initiating a nuclear attack without warning or provocation would be the first step towards annihilating the other country and in their hysteria they assumed that was what the other state would do. Especially if the USSR was attacking military targets, it would get progressively harder to launch a counter attack. But if the first strike was a legitimate accident, it would be the worst course of action.
Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy—the *fear *to attack.
It doesn’t matter if (b) hits some global optimum or not. If you can convince the other guy that you will retaliate without hesitation, then they are less likely to strike preemptively. At least that’s the theory.
Actually, the OP is mistaken in a couple of items. The ability of the enemy to take out a substantial portion of your retaliatory strike was the main reason you launched on warning. That way you still had the Mutual in MAD. That’s also the reason we went with a land-sea-air system of delivery. Made it that much harder to wipe out a large portion of the response.
Second, we had and still do not have any missile defense procedures. So you are left with option 1.
The idea is that blowing up one American city is just as much an act of war as blowing up fifty American cities. So if you saw one Soviet missile heading toward an America city, then you figured a general war had started.
And if you were fighting a general war, you wanted to do it well. So you’d want to launch a general attack against the Soviets in order to destroy as much of their nuclear arsenal as you could before they launched the rest of it against you.
Nuclear war doesn’t work well incrementally. It’s more binary - you’re either having a nuclear war or you aren’t. Once you cross the nuclear threshold, you launch everything you’ve got.
The Soviets understand this as well and have the same doctrine. You often see this in the same books and movies as the OP described. You’ll have some general pointing out that it makes no sense that the Soviets launched one missile so there must be some kind of mistake.
I’m quite prepared to say my ignorance is vastly larger than my knowledge on this subject. I’m not sure you’ve found any mistakes though.
Let me clarify what I was saying:
An assumption that many people make in discussing these kinds of alerts is that the US (and probably other countries) operate under a policy of “launch on warning”. I’m saying that IMO such a policy wouldn’t make much sense (I make no claim about what the real policies are).
There’s a big risk in launching missiles, and little strategic gain in firing now rather than in, say, 40 minutes time, when you’ll know for sure what’s going on.
I did however include the caveat that it would be obvious if they were trying to take out all our ground-based missiles in one go. And what I meant by that is: if we detected a whole slew of missiles apparently heading towards our nukes and/or missile defence, then that’s a different situation and time really is of the essence.
But just seeing one, or even a handful, of apparent missiles, is different. I don’t think it makes sense in such scenarios to make a bunch of assumptions and immediately press the “end of the world” button.
You’re correct, it doesn’t make sense, and there have been several occasions when that scenario played out in real life, avoiding nuclear war. Here’s one of them: Stanislav Petrov - Wikipedia
What if what you find out in forty minutes is that they launched all the rest of their missiles one minute ago? In retrospect, you’d have been better off launching your minutes at the first notice and destroying those missiles in their silos.
It’s not just about maintaining your ability to launch. It’s about preventing the enemy’s ability to launch. If it turns out that it takes the Soviets thirty minutes to launch their missiles and it takes you eight minutes to launch your missiles and twenty minutes for them to reach their target, then you’ve got two minutes to decide what you want to do.
But the surprising thing is that mutual assured destruction wasn’t inherently irrational. It was the culmination of a series of rational decisions. There was no point where you could say that the people involved made an obvious error based on the information they had available to them at the time or what they could reasonably surmise about the future.
And the amazing thing is that it worked. It was a precarious solution but we pulled it off. We prevented not only the use of nuclear weapons after 1945 but we almost certainly also avoided a massive conventional war. The threat of killing hundreds of millions ended up actually saving the lives of millions.
Another reason for launch on warning is the ability to use your command and control structures to the fullest before they’re wiped out as these are the primary targets in a first strike. Once command and control is damaged, getting orders out becomes difficult and getting orders out that will be accepted as authentic and obeyed even moreso. Keep in mind that there can be less than 15 minutes to respond to a missle attack launched by submarines.
Depends on how you define “worked”. One might argue that when Petrov didn’t launch a “retaliatory” strike as he was supposed to, it was a failure of MAD (though of course, we’re all glad that it failed on that occasion). Which is made all the more ironic by the fact that the reason for the failure was that Petrov thought it worked.
Personally, I think that the reason World War III never kicked off actually had nothing to do with MAD. I think that it never kicked off for the simple reason that most people are fundamentally decent.
But our nuclear policy was developed by people who had lived through the era of the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, and the Cultural Revolution. They had little reason to rely on the fundamental decency of humanity.
It’s funny everyone’s talking about nuclear war / WWIII as something which could have happened in the past.
Well…there’s not the obvious stand off now, or the (preposterous) race to have the most missiles, but there’s still easily enough remaining to cause a nuclear winter…
There’s quite a gap between “first suspected missile detected” and “all of our (land-based) missiles destroyed”. Clearly you have to press the red button somewhere in that gap. But there’s little advantage (and lots of risk) in firing at the absolute first sign of trouble.
I’d wait until at least one of:
Absolute confirmation (e.g. visual) of missiles
The formal announcement of a nuclear attack
Detonation of a warhead (whether it reached its target or not)
A large number of missiles are detected, aimed at key facilities and/or population centres
This doesn’t seem a likely scenario though, does it?
They send one or two missiles over just to piss us off and then wait?
While I agree with that in theory, I don’t think launch-on-warning is as irrational as you say, because you are assuming perfect conditions which may not apply in the actual event.
Might never occur reliably enough to persuade you.
Like, an engraved invitation?
Imagine all communications are jammed and Channel 23 is reporting a big blast at the airbase. How big? You don’t know! Was that one of the supposed incoming missiles, or some idiot smoking while refilling his Ford F-150? You don’t know! You have 2 minutes.
The problem here is the Shadow Protocol. Or the Stealth Solution. Or the mind ray. Or whatever you have failed to foresee that has shielded you from knowing that, indeed, all the missiles are inbound, and you’ve only managed to detect one or two.
The idea of holding back and waiting to see is sound under certain assumptions, but are those assumptions reliable?
Sure, they didn’t believe that human decency would come through in the end-- That’s why they developed MAD. But what I’m saying is that, unbeknownst to them, MAD and other such preparations were blessedly unnecessary, because human decency did come through.
There’s also the possibility of a military coup should a political leader fail to respond to a minor (ha) nuclear attack. I’m sure the POTUS would far prefer to extirpate the planet several times over than appear wear in front of his generals. So MAD may have been equally about PR.