Word of the demise of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces reawakened many happy memories for me. I was in the UK in 1982 as principal diplomatic representative for the deployment of Pershing and Ground Launch Cruise Missiles, and back in Washington in 1988-89 chairing the interagency group backstopping the negotiations that removed the missiles I had worked to deploy. I helped get them in, and I helped get them out.
I was a minor player, of course, as were all of us on the American side both great and small—save one man: The INF Treaty was Ronald Reagan’s baby. Caricatured as a nuclear bomb-happy hawk, Reagan turned out to be the most anti-nuclear President we’ve ever had. He wasn’t the first President to grasp the folly of the nuclear arms race. But unlike his predecessors, he went all-in on eliminating certain categories of weapons and drastically reducing others. First on the list for elimination: intermediate range nuclear missiles.
But there was a catch: The Soviets had them and we didn’t, at least not in Europe. Beginning in the 1970s, the Soviets began deployment of an intermediate range missile called the SS-20. One of them now stands in the great hall of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, but in the late 1970s we had never seen one, even in satellite photography. (This was still true when the INF Treaty was signed. At our insistence, the package that accompanied the treaty included pictures of the SS-20 to ensure we knew what one looked like). We did know that it could send its three nuclear warheads anywhere in Europe, and—because it was mounted on mobile launchers—we could do nothing to prevent it. Eventually, 600 or so SS-20s were deployed with 1,800 warheads, give or take—enough to make the rubble bounce in major European cities and crossroad hamlets alike.
According to the then-prevailing ideology, this Soviet deployment removed a “link” from the Western “chain” of deterrence. There was no chain, of course, still less a link, but metaphors like that have a lot more power than arcane studies or even reality itself, so suddenly there existed in Washington the conviction that SS-20s constituted an existential threat.
The reasons were rooted in Cold War theology. The central fact was the imbalance in Europe between the conventional forces of the Soviet Union and NATO. So great was this imbalance that it might tempt the Soviets to launch a conventional strike across the inner German border. How could such an attack be deterred short of escalation to an all-out suicidal nuclear war? And could that even work, since threatening it lacked a certain credibility?
So the West made a great show of possessing conventional strength enough to throw the Soviets back through the Fulda gap, but the show, being very much off-Broadway, lacked much conviction. Soviet tank divisions were poised on or near the inner-German border. Most of ours were garrisoned in the United States. I was witness in the port of Antwerp to one of the massive annual “Reforger” exercises, meant to prove that all this weight of metal could be deployed quickly to Europe in the event of a crisis. It proved the opposite. I remember a bedlam of diesel smoke, broken down tanks, and swearing drivers all crowding through port facilities that in an actual war would have been destroyed by an opening missile salvo. I recall thinking that a Soviet agent or three was probably watching this, too, and drawing the same conclusions.
But if conventional forces weren’t up to the job, how could a Soviet attack be deterred? As already intimated, the answer involved two bits of joined strategic jargon. The first was “flexible response”—the notion that our first response to a Soviet attack would be conventional; the second was “linkage,” sometimes known as the U.S. “nuclear umbrella”—a guarantee that if a conventional response failed, the U.S. government would resort to nuclear weapons. The Soviets would be deterred by the knowledge that their conventional success would lead to our nuclear response, triggering a nuclear war and bringing great and perhaps terminal destruction to everyone concerned.
Officially, rhetorically, the Soviets accepted none of this. They refused to be deterred by logic, in other words. They may have had nuclear weapons, but they lacked think tanks; they had no equivalent to the RAND Corporation. So they argued that once the nuclear threshold was crossed, hostilities would soon escalate to an all-out nuclear exchange. Inconveniently enough, our war gaming tended to show the same thing. If so, then the Soviet conventional advantage was significantly real: It may not have been able or even intended to win a war of choice, but its very existence might work as a wedge to undermine nervous Germans on the western side of the line, thus driving a wedge between NATO and its most importantly situated European ally.
And indeed, the Ostpolitik leanings of some West German governments seemed to validate the political implications of the Soviet advantage. But we, officially, rhetorically, accepted none of that. We held tightly to our ideological mummery. Taken together, the Soviet refusal to admit the possibility that we might use nuclear weapons to stave off defeat in the Cold War, and our refusal to admit that, all else equal, the Soviet conventional imbalance might undermine the political solidarity of NATO, eventually came to structure the whole of the Cold War strategic conversation in the 1960s and 1970s. Though it took two to tango, no one planned this dance. No one could possibly have planned it.
Through this prism of mutually assured rational denial, the deployment of SS-20s tipped the scale. Now the Soviets could launch a sudden nuclear attack in Europe with missiles that lacked the range to reach the United States, keeping in reserve those that did to deter us in case we were tempted to retaliate on Europe’s behalf. Thus linkage would be weakened—unless, that is, we deployed nuclear missiles of our own in Western Europe to fill the theoretical gap. If we did, then we could hit nearly every significant target in the Soviet Union from territory not part of our country, and the Soviets would lack a corresponding capacity.
More basic to the logic of strategic interaction, we could then choose to respond at any given “rung” of the nuclear “ladder”; battlefield nuclear weapons would match battlefield weapons, intermediate range missiles would respond to intermediate range missiles, and so on until either the Soviets lost their nerve to continue, or they didn’t, in which case both of the superpowers would be reduced to radioactive wastelands. Or not, because the uber-logic of mutual assured destruction suggested that, some residual uncertainties necessarily left on the street, the whole business would have been deterred before it started. Which was good. Which was the whole point of mutual assured destruction. Which, when you worked it out, meant that all those Soviet tanks and soldiers were of no avail to Moscow, militarily or politically. So we had deterrence, the Soviets did not threaten Western Europe, our allies were safe, and the alliance worked…sort of.
Put another way, “linkage,” like Tinker Bell, could only exist as long as all sides believed in it, or could be presumed to believe it, whatever they actually said. But that was neither unusual nor a big problem, since a lot of human behavior works that way: paper money, the arbitrary symbolic construction of language, love, and so much more. But by the 1970s, the faith needed to sustain linkage had begun to erode, especially in Western Europe. And one of possibly several reasons for that erosion was the Soviet attainment of strategic nuclear parity with the United States.
Was the United States really willing to put its cities on the line to protect German cities we ourselves had all but destroyed not 30 years before? That question had been posed since the early 1950s, but it was posed more piquantly by the early 1970s. And didn’t the linkage argument cut both ways? Perhaps the purpose of deploying U.S. nuclear missiles in Europe was not to link, but to de-link—to ensure, in other words, that any future nuclear war would be fought in Europe, leaving U.S. territory a sanctuary, as it had been in both world wars. And then there were the millions of Europeans who opposed nuclear weapons as the terrible instruments of destruction they are, whether linked or not.
Great Britain was the key to the NATO counter-deployment. If we couldn’t deploy there, we wouldn’t be able to deploy anywhere in Europe. The anti-nuclear forces realized this too, of course, and began to mobilize. The Committee on Nuclear Disarmament (CND), moribund since the 1950s, sprang back to robust life, mustering 300,000 protestors in Hyde Park in 1981 just as Parliament was deciding whether to accept our missiles. Several thousand protestors marched from London to Greenham Common, where some of the missiles were to be stationed, and camps sprung up around the gates. Then it rained, and the men went home. When the weather improved, the men came back, but the women weren’t interested in sunshine protestors, so the men were turned away and the Women of Greenham Common were born. Some of the Women were still there when the last missile was removed nine years later.
The Executive Director of CND was Monsignor Bruce Kent, a mild-mannered cleric who presided from a storefront office in the decidedly unfashionable London suburb of Finsbury. The first time I called—it was 1982 and CND was at its height—he was surprised but welcoming. No one purporting to represent the U.S. government had ever shown interest in a dialogue with CND, and—to tell the truth—nobody had authorized me to start one. I went several times after that. We would invariably drink tea and rehearse our arguments, mine based on the prevalent theology about deterrence and linkage and the rest of it.
I’m embarrassed now to remember how earnestly I repeated the nuclear narrative. I may even have accepted it as fact in those days, through a fact of a rather phenomenological kind. I preached to university audiences, too, sometimes smuggled in through dank basements to meet a handful of young Tories in out-of-the-way lecture halls while much larger crowds waved placards outside.
The Women of Greenham persevered, pouring super glue into the locks on gates surrounding the base, and taunting the guards who chased them away. But in in the end only one woman mattered, and her name was Margaret Thatcher. She held firm. She always held firm. That became more politically palatable, and took the initiative from groups like CND, when President Reagan proposed the “zero option”—a stroke of negotiating genius. Instead of the two sides agreeing on equal levels of intermediate range weapons, why not abolish that category of weapons altogether?
Since this would mean the destruction of Soviet missiles in return for missiles we hadn’t deployed yet, it seemed a one-sided bargain the Soviets would never accept. Meanwhile, however, it would give the United States the negotiating initiative and defang the anti-deployment forces in Western Europe; in short, zero would become a classic poison pill. That’s what its original proponents, led by Richard Perle, expected, and that’s what would have happened had not Ronald Reagan taken “zero” seriously and, with his unique combination of charm and persistence, persuaded Mikhail Gorbachev to go along.
The INF Treaty laid the groundwork for agreements on reductions in strategic nuclear weapons, and that led in turn to the qualitative denaturing of the Cold War, and, along with other factors, to the end of the Cold War on terms quite splendid for our side. So the Treaty, all told, made the world a better and safer place. The supposed nuclear hawk turned out to be the decisive nuclear dove. Credit goes as well to Gorbachev, who agreed to dismantle his already tested and deployed SS-20s despite strong pushback from his military advisers.
When the weapons were gone, linkage was neither stronger nor weaker than before, but a new and more positive chapter had opened in the nuclear arms race. That was the important thing. The SS-20s, GLCMs, and Pershings had turned out to be pieces in an elaborate diplomatic game to see whether the unity of the Western alliance could be breached, and whether the Soviet Union—already conscious of its political weakness and technological inferiority—could steal a march on the West in the nuclear confrontation. Answers: It couldn’t, or at any rate didn’t; and it couldn’t, but at any rate didn’t. Of course, contingency being what it is, things might have turned out otherwise.
Eliminating the missiles didn’t change the ultimate military balance, but it did move the world a little bit back from the nuclear brink. The prevailing narrative had been all about launchers and warhead numbers and first-strike options. Now it was about reductions and verification and missile defense. New fantasies were invented around these themes, no more realistic, as it turned out, than those that had come before, but on the whole they were much more hopeful fantasies. That has to count for something.
That was then, and this is now. In recent years the Russians have developed and deployed a ground-launched cruise missile that violates the INF Treaty. They tried to disguise what they were doing, then denied they were doing it, and then said we were doing it too. (Might the Saudis in the Khashoggi episode have taken their public relations strategy from Moscow?) In any case, lately the Russians have taken to parading those missiles as part of a new and impressive nuclear capability, many elements of which are far more threatening than ground-launched cruise missiles, whatever their range. But it is a strange way to persuade observers that the missile doesn’t exist.
The United States has its own trillion-dollar nuclear modernization program, which includes the development of small, maneuverable nuclear warheads that critics and supporters alike see as warfighting weapons. The Chinese are doing the same. Thus the major nuclear powers have—or will soon have—nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles enough to place them precisely on target anywhere in the world with little or no warning. Hypersonic glide vehicles, long-range drones, zombie submarines doubling as nuclear bombs, and new generations of nuclear bombers both manned and unmanned have rendered the narrow proscriptions agreed to in the INF Treaty of purely historical interest.
In this new environment, the United States will be free once again to develop and deploy whatever land-based intermediate range nuclear missiles it wants. But the Administration has already said it won’t take advantage. That’s good, because there would be no place on land to base them. The theoretical and political basis for deployment anywhere in Europe or Asia has disappeared, along with confidence in our responsible use of power. There could be no talk of linkage now; the Europeans seem less threatened by the new Russian missiles than by our erratic and often hostile Chief Executive.
Perhaps nuclear deterrence in Europe was always an elaborate bluff. Thankfully it was never called, and now, for practical purposes, it has been taken off the table. A purely transactional world in which military engagement is seen in terms of profit and loss may seem an abomination to a generation like mine who thought in terms of American principles and American leadership. It may seem a tragedy that Ronald Reagan would be the last of our Presidents who might with justification claim the title “Leader of the Free World.” But the election of Donald Trump signaled the end to all that.
The demise of the INF Treaty—in many ways President Reagan’s proudest achievement—merely underlines this new reality. It was a symbol within a system of symbols at the outset, and it’s again a similar kind of symbol now. It could not prevent nuclear weapons from becoming more versatile, smaller, easier, and more tempting to use; nor could it stop a new generation of academics from conjuring new narratives for using them. If we suppose, as President Reagan did, that the multiplication of nuclear weapons itself is a threat to civilization, then troubling and dangerous times lie ahead.
Still, for those of us who like to look on the bright side of life whenever remotely possible, there’s this: As long as the narrative about assured second strike, escalatory dominance, flexible response, linkage, and the rest of it held a grip on the public mind, there was the danger that powerful people would treat the metaphors as reality and blow the whole of our species to dust. Daniel Boorstin once wrote that when God wants to curse men, he makes them believe their own propaganda.
Powerful people may still blow up the world, of course. But in the new age of transactional security, we are far less likely to risk nuclear war in defense of bumper sticker jargon produced by clueless intellectuals. Tinker Bell is not just merely dead; she’s truly and sincerely dead. We see the world from a businessman’s perspective now. And whatever else can be said about nuclear war, this much is beyond dispute: It’s no way to make a buck.
That leaves us with a curiosity straining to become a paradox. After the Chinese, the Russians, we Americans, and too many others have finished current deployment programs within the next seven to ten years, there will likely be many more deployed nuclear weapons than there are now, but also significantly fewer hair triggers for nuclear war than there were fifty years ago. Most likely.