Strategy (33 page)

There was still anxiety over whether the blockade could be enforced. Robert Kennedy wrote of his brother as he waited to see how Soviet ships would respond.

I think these few minutes were the time of greatest concern for the President. Was the world on the brink of a holocaust? Was it our error? A mistake? Was there something further that should have been done? Or not done? His hand went up to his face and covered his mouth. He opened and closed his fist. His face seemed drawn, his eyes pained, almost gray.

From the other side, consider a long, impassioned private letter to Kennedy that arrived two days later from the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev:

If people do not show wisdom, then in the final analysis they will come to a clash, like blind moles, and then reciprocal extermination will begin…. we and you ought not to pull on the ends of the rope
in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut it, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.
⁵¹

On Saturday, October 27, 1962, tensions were at their height after mixed messages from Moscow—one conciliatory, the other tough—and the added tension of an American spy plane getting shot down over Cuba. The presumed response was to retaliate against Soviet surface-to-air missile sites in Cuba. While this might be held back, at some point surveillance would need to start again, putting U.S. aircraft at risk and making a response unavoidable. Robert McNamara set out a possible script. If surveillance aircraft were fired upon, the United States would have to respond. There would be losses of aircraft, and “we'll be shooting up Cuba quite a bit.” This was not a position that could be sustained for very long. “So we must be prepared to attack Cuba—quickly.” This was going to require an “all-out attack” involving air strikes, with “sorties every day thereafter, and I personally believe that this is almost certain to lead to an invasion, I won't say certain to, but
almost
certain to lead to an invasion.”

The next stage assumed a tit-for-tat reprisal from Khrushchev: “If we do this, and leave those missiles in Turkey the Soviet Union
may
, and I think probably will, attack the Turkish missiles.” This led inexorably on to the proposition that “
if
the Soviet Union attacks the Turkish missiles, we
must
respond. We
cannot
allow a Soviet attack on the—on the Jupiter missiles in Turkey without a military response by NATO.” He continued

Now the minimum military response by NATO to a Soviet attack on the Turkish Jupiter missiles would be a response with conventional weapons by NATO forces in Turkey, that is to say Turkish and U.S. aircraft, against Soviet warships and/or naval bases in the Black Sea area. Now that to me is the absolute minimum, and I would say that it is
damned dangerous
to—to have had a Soviet attack on Turkey and a NATO response on the Soviet Union.
⁵²

McNamara took this sufficiently seriously, even though he was assuming in this script that his own government would take choices that he clearly thought unwise, to suspect that a nuclear war would be set in motion the next day. In reality, neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev were prepared to
contemplate such a calamity and they found a way to draw back from the brink: withdrawal of Soviet missiles in return for an American promise not to invade Cuba. During the crisis there were many examples of how poorly the two sides understood each other, yet on the most fundamental issue they had a shared view. They were determined to avoid a nuclear tragedy.

Although the outcome of the missile crisis was shaped by a shared fear of nuclear war, one conclusion drawn was that with a clear head and a strong will, such crises were possible to manage. In particular, the successful outcome was used to challenge the notion of escalation. This had been not so much a strategy as something to be avoided. After the crisis, the metaphor was challenged for failing to recognize the potential for graduated moves, especially during the early stages of a conflict before serious battle had been joined. Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter observed that “there are down-escalators as well as up-escalators, and there are landings between escalators where one can decide to get off or get on, to go up or down, or to stay there; or to take the stairs. Just where automaticity or irreversibility takes over is an uncertain but vital matter, and that is one of the reasons a decision maker may want to take a breath at a landing to consider next steps.”
⁵³

Herman Kahn sought to show that even once nuclear exchanges had begun there were ways of conducting operations that might keep the pressure on the other side while avoiding Armageddon. He saw escalation as a dragon to be slain: not so much a phenomenon operating independent of human action but a possible product of inadequate intellectual and physical preparation. He introduced the idea that escalation might be a deliberate act. The noun acquired a verb when he referred to “people who wish to escalate a little themselves, but somehow feel that the other side would not be willing to go one step further.”
⁵⁴
Escalation was transformed from a hopelessly unruly process to one that might be tamed and possibly manipulated. In his 1965 book
On Escalation
, he introduced the “escalation ladder” with sixteen thresholds and forty-four steps. For most, the striking feature of the book was the possibility of anyone coming up with almost thirty distinct ways of using nuclear weapons following their first use at rung fifteen.
⁵⁵
The escalation up the ladder concluded, when all semblance of control had been lost, with a “wargasm.” Kahn declared himself innocent of the Freudian connotations. Luigi Nono, the radical Italian composer, used Kahn's ladder as the theme for a musical composition dedicated to the National Liberation Front of Vietnam, which moved from (1) “crisi manifesta” to (44) “spasmo o guerra insensata.”
⁵⁶

McGeorge Bundy, former national security advisor to both Kennedy and Johnson, also reacted strongly to analyses such as these. He concluded that
the arms race had become largely irrelevant in terms of actual international political behavior. Once both sides acquired thermonuclear weapons, there was a stalemate. The “certain prospect of retaliation” meant that there had been “literally no prospect at all that any sane political authority, in either the United States or the Soviet Union, would consciously choose to start a nuclear war.” He wrote of the “enormous gulf between what political leaders really think about nuclear weapons and what is assumed in complex calculations of relative ‘advantage' in simulated strategic warfare.” In the think tanks, levels of “acceptable” damage could involve the loss of tens of millions of lives, so that the “loss of dozens of great cities is somehow a real choice for sane men.” For Bundy, in “the real world of real political leaders” a “decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable.”
⁵⁷

Bundy's belief that the more esoteric strategic debates had lost touch with reality led in 1983 to the argument that because both sides would be able to retaliate with thermonuclear weapons even after the “strongest possible preemptive attack,” there was in place a form of deterrence which he described as “existential,” resting on “uncertainty about what could happen.”
⁵⁸
This removed the strategic effect from particular weapons programs, preparations for employment, or doctrinal pronouncements. So long as any superpower war carried a high risk of utter calamity, it was best not to take risks. This notion proved to be extremely seductive not only because of its intuitive plausibility but because it solved all those perplexing problems of nuclear policy by rendering them virtually irrelevant, so long as they did not stray too far into the realms of recklessness and foolishness. Although in policymaking circles it was still extremely difficult to think of ways to assess the size and composition of nuclear arsenals except by reference to the assumed requirements of actual exchanges, as evidenced in numerous debates in Washington over new weapons systems, these debates eventually acquired a routine quality. The scenarios became drained of credibility. Nuclear deterrence worked for the United States because it warned of the severe dangers of disrupting the status quo. The sense of danger depended not on the rationality of a nuclear response but on the residual doubt that once the passions of war had been unleashed no reliance could be placed on the irrationality of nuclear response.

The power of Armies is a visible thing
,
Formal and circumscribed in time and space;
But who the limits of that power shall trace
Which a brave People into light can bring
Or hide, at will,—for freedom combating
By just revenge inflamed? No foot may chase
,
No eye can follow, to a fatal place
That power, that spirit, whether on the wing
Like the strong wind, or sleeping like the wind
Within its awful caves

—William Wordsworth,
1811

I
F NUCLEAR WEAPONS
pulled military strategy away from conventional warfare in one direction, guerrilla warfare moved it in another. With nuclear weapons the issue was about threatening society with extreme force. Guerrilla warfare was about the response of an enraged society to illegitimate military force. Although it later acquired an association with radical political movements, its basic attraction was as a method that could help weaker sides survive. Although as a form of warfare it was not at all new, and had recently been adopted in the American War of Independence, guerrilla warfare gained
its name from the tactics of ambush and harassment used during the “little war” fought by Spaniards against French occupation forces at the start of the nineteenth century. Wordsworth's poem refers to this campaign.

Guerrilla warfare was therefore defensive, fought on home territory with the advantages of popular support and local knowledge. It was geared to a strategy of exhaustion, gaining time in the hope that the enemy would tire or that something else would turn up. Such warfare was unlikely to be successful on its own. Irregular forces worked most effectively when providing a distraction to an enemy also facing regular forces in a more conventional campaign. Napoleon suffered in Spain because he also faced the British army. Similarly, Russian peasants made life additionally miserable for French forces in 1812. Clausewitz, who experienced the French occupation of Prussia and was in a position to observe the Spanish insurrection and the French debacle in Russia, made guerrilla warfare the subject of his early lectures and writing. In
On War
, it was considered a form of defense. By the 1820s, when Clausewitz wrote most of
On War
, it had become an uncommon strategy. Popular energies appeared to have been played out and conservative states were in command.

Guerrilla warfare could cause an occupying force trouble, but it was the “last and desperate resort” of an otherwise defeated people. A general uprising against an occupier would need to be “nebulous and elusive,” because as soon as it became concrete it could be crushed. Though a strategically defensive concept, the tactics of guerrilla warfare had to be offensive, aiming to catch the enemy unawares. Guerrilla warfare would most likely be effective when conducted from rough and inaccessible terrain in a country's interior. Clausewitz did not see irregular militias as being of much value in the absence of regular forces.
¹
Jomini had a similar response. He understood the challenges militias could pose for occupying forces, and how difficult they might make wars of expansion if popular opinion could readily be excited, but he recoiled from the prospect. Wars in which entire peoples had become animated by religious, national, or ideological differences he considered deplorable, “organized assassination,” arousing “violent passions that make them spiteful, cruel, and terrible.” He acknowledged that his “prejudices were with the good old times when the French and English guards courteously invited each other to fire first” rather than the “frightful epoch when priests, women, and children throughout Spain plotted the murder of isolated soldiers.”
²

During the 1830s, the possibility that guerrilla warfare might serve an insurrection was raised by Mazzini's failed Young Italy campaign, with the red-shirted Giuseppe Garibaldi emerging as a gifted guerrilla commander. Despite this example, the main models for revolutionary violence remained a sudden uprising of the masses that would catch authorities by surprise. The
idea that they might be worn down gradually in a prolonged campaign did not catch on. Frederick Engels, in an article drafted for Karl Marx, saw the emergence of the guerrillas in Spain as a reflection of the failure of the Spanish army. Engels presented them as more of a mob than an army, motivated by “hatred, revenge, and love of plunder.”
³
He tended to think in terms of conventional military formations, even when contemplating revolution, and assumed that after a revolution a socialist republic would need a proper army for its defense. The presumption that a revolution would need a disciplined fighting force of class-conscious proletarians continued to influence socialist thinking, so that guerrilla warfare was seen as the domain of anarchists and criminals, of drunken riffraff indulging their violent tendencies. Though somewhat sympathetic to this view in Russia, Lenin refused to dismiss guerrilla warfare entirely. But he believed it could only be a subordinate form of struggle, not the main method, and would benefit from proper party discipline to keep it under control. Once the mass movement had reached a certain stage of development, guerrilla warfare was not out of the question during the “fairly large intervals” that would occur between the “big engagements” in the revolutionary civil war.
⁴