Air University Review, November-December 1981

Strategic Equivalence
What is it? How do we get it?

For most of the postwar period, American defense policy rested on some form of strategic nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. There was disagreement at times over how such superiority should be designed or measured, but there was a rough consensus until the mid-1960s that the United States should have more and better forces than the U.S.S.R. in all three legs of the strategic triad. There was also disagreement in this period about how impressive a margin of U.S. nuclear superiority should be preserved. The most ambitious formulation was the "no cities" counterforce doctrine articulated by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in 1962, but this very soon gave way to emphasis on "assured destruction," as the growth in Soviet forces began to make the U.S. requirements for very effective damage limitation prohibitively expensive.

It was not until plans for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) got under way that consensus settled on the acceptability of strategic parity. As Soviet forces continued to grow and as détente deteriorated in the 1970s, debate within the U.S. defense and arms control communities grew sharper about whether and for how long parity would endure. Then, with the 1980 presidential campaign, advocacy of U.S. nuclear superiority became respectable again.

No sooner had President Reagan been elected, though, than it became evident that fiscal pressures will make it impossible to launch the sort of strategic crash program that would be necessary to regain a meaningful edge of U.S. nuclear superiority, especially given the requirements for refurbishing conventional forces, as well as the prospects for a Soviet counter-buildup if SALT restraints disappear. Whether they like it or not, the leaders of the current administration may have all they can do to preserve rough strategic equivalence.

A large part of the problem in the strategic debate of recent years has been lack of communication between opposing factions. Despite the volume and detail of contending analyses produced, there has been remarkably little progress in broadening agreement on the standards for measuring and judging the strategic balance. Articulation of the norms of "essential equivalence" and "countervailing strategy" by Secretaries of Defense James R. Schlesinger and Harold Brown were a contribution, but much room remains for clarification of how such principles should be translated into force structure and arms control negotiating goals.

One of the many reasons the Carter administration had trouble defending the SALT II treaty against charges that it was an unequal agreement was that there has never been an explicit statement of the criteria for equivalence that represented a consensus of strategic analysts. Nor was there such a consensus between the administration and Moscow. SALT negotiations focused on inputs, striking bargains over tradeoffs in elements between asymmetrical U.S. and Soviet force structures, without definitely specifying what the output should be in terms of overall operational capability. Thus, equality in the treaty was manifestly defined in terms of numbers of launchers, but only implicitly, at best, in terms of "stability," hard-target kill capabilities, assured destruction, or other indices of what the asymmetrically configured weapon inventories could actually do to the opponent in a war. Allowing the ambiguity to remain was not inadvertent; indeed, it was necessary because both sides have different security requirements, priorities, and concepts of threat that may preclude mutually acceptable clarity in the emergent balance.

Similarly, the conceptual dissension within the American defense community may block agreement on the desirable operational implications of an equal nuclear balance. For a political realist more than a technical scholastic, precision is the enemy of negotiation whether internal or external. Dean Rusk argued, "Once you involve yourself in a lot of detail, you are dead."¹ To the extent this is true, equivalence in the nuclear balance will always remain elusive because it exists in the eyes of different beholders.

There are numerous concepts of strategic parity, several of which I will discuss in ascending order of complexity. Judgment of the simpler formulations depends on one’s theological position in traditional debates about counterforce or countervalue targeting policy. Evaluation of the more recondite variants is complicated by uncertainties in data used for calculation of probable wartime force interactions. Taking the debate beyond matters of faith is desirable but difficult because apparently refined quantitative assessments sometimes mask reliance on unverified assumptions or unclear interrelationships.

The minimalist definition of strategic parity, advanced by Khrushchev in the late 1950s and accepted by some Western observers, identifies it with possession of second-strike capabilities by both sides, irrespective of differences in relative levels of destructive power—in short, mutual assured destruction, even at unequal levels, constitutes parity. According to McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy believed such parity existed, despite continuing U.S. numerical superiority in weapons.² This definition may represent mutual deterrence, but not equivalence; rather it serves to discredit the importance of equality in forces.

Another definition that is trickier, but still places fewer analytic demands on the concept than definitions based on exchange calculations, is the Madison Avenue view. This emphasizes perceived parity (or superiority) and more specifically the simple images of untutored elites. Such perceptions, in this argument, depend largely on a few gross indices of striking power that are easily observable—numbers, size, and apparent modernity of delivery vehicles—which may not necessarily reflect the net capabilities that would be apparent to analysts who appreciate more arcane indices such as guidance accuracy. Edward N. Luttwak concludes that the Soviet Union has won the battle of perceptions by deploying larger numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and visibly bigger ones, whose advantage is not perceptually mitigated by the U.S. advantage in bombers because the untutored believe bombers are "old-fashioned."³ This standard suggests that the United States should emphasize heavy ICBMs in its force structure, a change that might not be entirely desirable in terms of some informed analysts’ conceptions of strategic stability because—as long as ICBMs are vulnerable—they raise the incentives for preemption. More dovish analysts might make use of the Madison Avenue approach by emphasizing the American advantage in number of warheads (since the Soviet edge in yield per warhead is less easily appreciated), although that will be harder to do if Soviet proliferation of reentry vehicles narrows the gap in this decade, as official projections indicate.

There are at least two problems with a Madison Avenue approach to equivalence. First, the subjectivity of the standard is so compounded that it is probably impossible to translate it into procurement decisions that do not seem surreal to some large groups of observers and hence defeat the purpose of confidence building. The translation depends on American perceptions of foreign perceptions; the flimsiness of data on the latter would almost certainly make the former an exercise in wishful thinking that projects the American perceiver’s own instincts or preferences into his judgement of what foreigners believe. Debate and dissent among American strategists would be aggravated rather than assuaged. Second, the not ion is intellectually interesting, but it is practically fanciful and strategically irresponsible. The politics of strategic planning precludes astronomically expensive investments that are rationalized by public relations criteria that diverge from military logic. It is fine to have a strategic force that appears impressive to Third World or European leaders who lack a serious understanding of nuclear strategy, but only if it is consistent with what impresses the most important group of perceivers who are not untutored: the Soviet General Staff and Politburo. Military and deterrent effectiveness have to be the prime criteria even if they do not always coincide with the heftiest image that can he presented to nonspecialists. And it is probable anyway that a balance which could be enshrined in a formal treaty between the superpowers, whatever its component characteristics, would appear equivalent to ignorant observers by virtue of the agreement itself, which would carry more symbolic weight than pictorial differences between SS-18s and Minuteman IIIs.

The clearest elements of operational criteria for superiority or equivalence are static indices of destructive capacity: numbers of strategic launchers or delivery vehicles, payload or throw-weight, numbers of warheads, circular error probable (CEP)—a measure of accuracy—and equivalent megatonnage (EMT). Given modern technical intelligence, these can be counted and charted with some degree of confidence, and, although future projections are debatable, there is negligible dispute about present figures (CEP is an exception in both respects). The problem with static indices is that their significance is uncertain when opposing force structures are asymmetrical.⁴ The distribution of offsetting advantages that constitute net equivalence depends on which particular indices seem most salient, and that depends on assumptions about their compound interaction.

This brings us to the most refined but also the trickiest level of assessment: dynamic calculations of actual nuclear exchanges in wartime. This requires stipulation of what weapons are directed against which targets, which side strikes first, and uncertain variables such as the amount of strategic warning (and consequent alert rates), weapon system reliability, height of burst, effectiveness of active and passive defenses, scope and timing of attacks, performance of command and communications systems, and, depending on the level of analytic sophistication, factors such as atmospheric conditions. Unlike static force structure, these variables are not observable and can only flow from extrapolation and simulation. This leaves ample room for judgment, which can make strategic theories almost self-validating: within a substantial range almost any assessment of equivalence or imbalance can be proved by varying several premises of the model for force interaction, or tilting the estimates of system capabilities toward one end of the range of uncertainty. This does not necessarily imply intellectual dishonesty; it simply means that the impact of strategic preferences (and different views about how pessimistically uncertain variables should be treated) on appreciation of the strategic balance cannot be overcome by increasing the rigor of empirical analysis. Statistics thus become manipulable weapons in the strategic debate. Given the complexity of the variables involved in a force interaction that has never happened and cannot be tested, any model is Procrustean. A few examples of analyses that have figured prominently in recent debate illustrate the problem.

In 1974 Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger presented Congress with calculations of the effects of limited Soviet counterforce attacks. The studies were meant to show that fairly effective attacks could be mounted without inflicting massive collateral damage—800,000 fatalities (1.6 million total casualties) in a strike against ICBMs, and 300,000 dead (750,000 casualties) in a strike against bomber bases. Therefore, Schlesinger warned, imbalance in capacity for discriminating counterforce strikes could leave the United States vulnerable to "self-deterrence" from retaliation.

The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), however, challenged the realism of several assumptions in the Defense Department model (such as height of burst, wind conditions, fission content of weapons, and population protection) and presented calculations that estimated casualties at up to 50 million.⁵ The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) conducted another study which concluded that fatalities could range up to about 18 million.⁶ A later OTA assessment concluded, "The effects of a nuclear war that cannot be calculated are at least as important as those for which calculations are attempted."⁷

Another influential collection of calculations has been presented by Paul H. Nitze in several articles and papers since the mid-1970s. These figures project a marked imbalance in forces following a counterforce exchange, giving the Soviet Union escalation dominance by virtue of a more intimidating countervalue reserve than the United States. The inference then is that in a crisis, faced with this prospect, Moscow would have more bargaining power since Washington would see only much greater losses as the alternative to accommodation.⁸Jan Lodal rebutted this argument by changing the terms of reference, shifting the focus to from post-exchange to postattack ratios and the impressive U.S. assured destruction capabilities available after absorption of a Soviet first strike;⁹ he challenged the relevance of Nitze’s calculations, but not the figures themselves.

Other analysts, however, have challenged the data. Gary D. Brewer and Bruce G. Blair charge that Nitze used discrepant assumptions and calculations in two of his articles; they note that Department of Defense FY79 calculations presented projections through 1987 more favorable to the United States. They also argue: (1) Nitze apparently assumes, using T.K. Jones’s data, that all U.S. bomber payload is expended against Backfire bases—a lower priority target even if the Backfires, as is unlikely, were caught on the ground—even though official executive testimony has acknowledged that B-52s would be used against ICBM silos as well as other targets; (2) assuming that defenses prevent bombers from attacking silos, Nitze ignores the possibility of corridor-cutting; (3) Nitze’s model, contradicting the Department of Defense FY79 Annual Report, assumes minimal effectiveness of air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) against silos; and (4) since the Soviets normally deploy only four fleet ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) in firing positions near U.S. coasts, the transit of more submarines surged to increase the threat to bomber bases from submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) with short flight times would give Washington time to surge bomber alert levels and disperse them to additional inland bases, yet Nitze’s model assumes that all bombers not on day-to-day alert (as well as 30 percent of those on alert) are destroyed.¹⁰ In another widely circulated paper, Nitze’s calculations yield alarming projections, but he assumes ALCM CEPs are 300 feet and also assumes that U.S. MIRVed ICBMs have identical CEPs in 1977 and 1985 while comparable Soviet CEPs are cut in half during this period.¹¹The figure for ALCMs is two to three times higher than some other estimates prevalent in open literature, and it is hard to rationalize the lack of change in the U.S. ICBM CEP from 1977 to 1985 given intervening deployment of the new NS-20 guidance system (although on this score it should be noted that Nitze’s figure for the present—600 feet—is generous, since other prevalent estimates run closer to 700).

Nitze’s basic conclusions may yet not be wildly incorrect. Indeed, estimates of the accuracy and capability of Soviet SS-18s and SS-19s, revised since Nitze wrote, make the prospects look a bit grimmer than they did at the time of DOD’s FY79 projections. But they rest on combinations of assumptions about weapon-to-target allocations and uncertainties in system performance, which are much more problematic than the apparent sophistication and clarity of his graphs would suggest.

A final example of statistical warfare is an entry from the other side of the spectrum of opinion. In 1978 the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency released a computerized study that supposedly demonstrated a much more even balance of strategic capabilities than suggested by analyses such as Nitze’s. To produce this conclusion, ACDA assumed that differences in Soviet and American target systems were not significant and evaluated the effectiveness of both nations’ forces against a hypothetical common set of 1500 hard targets and 5000 soft targets. To show the persistence of equivalence into the mid-1980s, the analysis also relied on the tradeoffs necessary to reach an equal damage point (EDP) of destruction against hard and soft targets.¹² The problem is that neither abstraction is relevant to the case of greatest concern: a Soviet first strike.

The U.S.S.R. has a much larger number of hard targets than the United States, so the ACDA calculations exaggerate relative U.S. counterforce capabilities. And if the Soviets are preempting rather than retaliating, there is no reason to believe they would seek to destroy as many soft countervalue targets as hard military ones. Maximizing the butchery of civilians might conceivably make sense for a second-strike but offers no military payoff for the initiator of a nuclear war. (If desired, it could be accomplished in follow-up attacks with reloaded or recycled systems over subsequent days.) To stipulate the EDP as a goal, especially when the hypothetical base of soft targets is over three times greater than that for the hard, is to understate Soviet counterforce capabilities by draining them away, in the calculations, for other missions. Also, the ACDA model apparently assumes that U.S. forces are fully generated and that the soft target base consists of point rather than area targets, which overrates the U.S. advantage in number of warheads and underrates the Soviet advantage in yield.¹³

All of these analyses, thus, can use similar inputs in regard to the number and physical capabilities of U.S. and Soviet weapons yet produce very dissimilar conclusions about the balance (or its implications) because the studies are scenario-dependent, and vast uncertainties about targeting, alert levels, or unpredictable circumstances of engagement govern the scenarios. Empirical analysis can highlight important considerations, but it cannot transcend fundamental faiths about strategy. By the beginning of the 1980s, the definition of equivalence remained even more elusive within the U.S. defense community than between U.S. and Soviet negotiators.

The best simple operational norm for strategic nuclear equivalence would be a distribution of forces that embodies no net advantage in either postattack counterforce capabilities or postexchange countervalue reserves. But as long as discernible proportions of American and Soviet weapons remain vulnerable, there is no definition of equivalent force structures that can satisfy everyone completely. Because partial counterforce vulnerability creates a "first-strike bonus," hawks can argue that for the Soviets "parity plus initiative is superiority."¹⁴ To overcome this problem would require (1) dismantling of vulnerable forces by both sides; or (2) preattack superiority in counter-force capabilities by the nation striking second; or (3) a preattack imbalance in forces capable of destroying hard targets that still did not give the favored side a meaningful advantage for a first strike.

The first solution is analytically ideal but politically fanciful, at least for the 1980s. Massive investment in ICBMs makes it hard for the Soviets to divest, especially when the disparity in antisubmarine warfare (ASW) capabilities favoring the United States makes the sea-based elements seem less inherently secure to them than to us. Were such a solution to free Washington from the huge financial costs of deploying a survivable MX missile system, permitting funds to be rechanneled to air-breathing elements of the triad where near-term U.S. potential is more pronounced than the Russians’—or, in the longer term, to the Trident II D-5 missile which could give the U.S. SSBN force some invulnerable fast counterforce capability—it could hardly seem equivalent to Moscow.

The second solution would be obviously unequal by any "fair" standard, one meant to stand up under the possibility that either side could strike first. It might seem fair to Americans who "know" we would never start a nuclear war, but it would have to be achieved by unilateral effort in an expensive competition with Soviet deployments unconstrained by formal arms limitation based on equality defined in terms of capabilities rather than intentions.

The third solution may not be more practical but is worth exploring. It would involve a tradeoff between ICBMs with time-urgent countermilitary potential (CMP) appropriate for preemption and slow counterforce systems (bombers and cruise missiles), which are not credibly threatening in terms of first-strike options. The Soviets would be allowed the edge in the first, the United States in the second. Both sides would then be able to capitalize on the different force elements in which they have a technical advantage. This would, however, require agreement on limiting terminal defenses of Soviet ICBM silos. (Some defenders of Nitze’s analysis debunk the significance of a second-strike against Soviet silos with ALCMs by arguing that their slow flight time precludes catching the missiles still in the holes. But if the Soviets have decided to strike first, why should one assume they would not be just as prepared to launch their reserves on short warning of incoming retaliatory ballistic missiles as they would be on longer warning of the approach of ALCMs? The only logical rationale behind counterforce targeting for second-strike retaliation must be the desire to preclude reloading of silos and to deny the attacker the option to withhold reserves. Both goals may just as well be served by slow counterforce as by time-urgent capabilities.) Moreover, if the U.S. reduced its ICBMs to expand its air-breathing forces, it would also reduce Soviet CMP by trimming the target base against which ICBMs are uniquely useful (massive Soviet throw-weight becomes simple overkill if it can only be used effectively against countervalue targets).¹⁵ In so doing, total CMP would be balanced yet technical instability would theoretically be reduced since U.S. forces would be proportionally less vulnerable to a fast-counterforce first strike, and American slow counterforce capabilities should logically pose only a retaliatory threat, rather than a preemptive one, to the U.S.S.R.

The disadvantage of this course for the United States would lie in movement toward a dyad, raising the potential risks from a technological breakthrough in ASW, air defense, or SLBM capabilities against bomber bases. Also, many U.S. observers have come to more modest conclusions about how effective cruise missiles will actually be in a counterforce role. The problem from the Soviets’ point of view is an apparent lack of agreement that air-breathing systems constitute no first-strike threat. Even if they admitted this about ALCMs, they view ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) scheduled to be deployed in Western Europe as more threatening, especially in synergistic combination with Pershing II missiles.

This brings up the dimension of dispute about equivalence that rarely figures in American analyses but is central in discussions with Moscow: the role of U.S. long-range theater nuclear forces (LRTNF)—"forward-based systems" to the Soviets—in the strategic balance. The Russians assessed the December 1979 NATO decision to modernize LRTNF with GLCMs and Pershing IIs capable of striking the Soviet interior as an attempt to circumvent SALT constraints and reestablish U.S. superiority. The U.S. position that LRTNF are balanced by Soviet intermediate range SS-20s and Backfires is rejected because those weapons cannot reach U.S. territory; "equal security" of the two superpowers in terms of homeland vulnerability, rather than "essential equivalence" in force levels, is the Soviet criterion for parity.

The logical ground on which Washington can counter this position is to define "equal security" in terms of the two collective alliances, rather than the superpowers alone, so that Soviet weapons targeted on Western Europe must be compensated for by weapons of comparable capability—defined in terms of range rather than the countries in which they would land. By this logic Moscow would be allowed to counter the Chinese threat by deployment of intermediate-range systems in Soviet far eastern territory, where they could reach neither NATO nor American targets, and negotiations on theater nuclear arms control would balance Soviet medium and intermediate-range weapons capable of reaching Western Europe against U.S. LRTNF and British and French strategic forces. (Shorter-range Soviet weapons that could reach NATO from, say, East Germany would be counted against shorter-range U.S. tactical nuclear systems.) The mobility of the SS-20 raises problems for such a formula but might be countered by the U.S. option to transfer medium-range nuclear-capable aircraft from CONUS to Europe. Another related problem with this formula is that it is difficult to determine how dual-capable aircraft (such as F-4s) should be counted; the United States has steadfastly resisted incorporating such systems in negotiations.

Moreover, NATO allies prefer not to seek full equivalence in LRTNF— which is why the 1979 decision was to deploy fewer than 600 GLCMs and Pershing IIs—for fear of decoupling U.S. central strategic forces from European defense. Finally, the proposed standard of fairness would legitimize deployment of forward-based systems by the Soviets in Cuba—something Americans would furiously reject out of hand.

There are many other nuances or drawbacks to all these potential formulas and many other potential schemes for defining equivalence. This article is not the place for a full technical analysis. But it is evident that definitional clarification, while needed for conceptual progress in the quest for nuclear equivalence, may complicate the problem in practice as much as it solves it. Perhaps equivalence must always remain elusive because the closer we come to achieving it, the more the approach dredges up political and psychological contradictions that underlie U.S. policy, alliance solidarity, and superpower conceptions of their respective security requirements. And the whole problem is further compounded by the growth of sensitivity to dimensions of strategic balance beyond the distribution of weapons themselves. This growth has been due to the swing of the pendulum of strategic opinion, since the mid1970s, toward concern with flexibility and endurance in employment of nuclear forces for a long war, embodied officially at the end of the Carter administration in the countervailing strategy and PDs-53, -58, and -59. As Richard Burt suggests,

it may become necessary to distinguish between two separate military balances: a symbo1ic balance based on static hardware counts and an operational balance reflecting the real capabilities of the two sides to engage in sustained nuclear conflict. . . a policy of reinvigorating American long-range nuclear forces would not be designed to once again attain "strategic superiority." . . . As traditionally defined, such a capability is beyond the reach of either superpower for the foreseeable future. However, it is not outlandish to think that the United States could achieve a new form of nuclear advantage based not so much on static indices of nuclear capability or qualitative advantage in such areas as missile accuracy, but on the relative capacity to manage a nuclear conflict . . . . "escalation agility" through preeminence in C³ offers the United States the best opportunity to offset the Soviet Union’s crude preference for "escalation dominance."¹⁶

Considerations such as survivability of command, control, communications (C³) are indeed far more important than evening up marginal differences in the balance of force structure; redressing the Minuteman vulnerability problem is irrelevant if a decapitating attack could still paralyze the release of strategic retaliation, allowing time for the Soviets to reload and pare down surviving forces in subsequent waves of follow-up attacks. It is difficult, however, to conceive a definable or negotiable notion of equivalence in organizational and intelligence capabilities for nuclear war. U.S. domestic debate, as well as arms control negotiations, have already been overloaded and stalled by the difficulties of assessing the balance of weaponry alone. Progress in conceiving and approaching equivalence in the latter dimension bilaterally, though a limited approach, would facilitate unilateral adaptations in the other dimensions.

The preceding discussion necessarily oversimplified a very complex set of questions and potential solutions. Beyond the issue of whether my speculative suggestions make solid intellectual sense is the issue of whether it is feasible to implement them—either through the bureaucratic battles and compromises that produce a U.S. policy position or in the rough-and-tumble arms control bargaining with the Soviets, who are unlikely to embrace American concepts.

If we subordinate strategic idealism to political realism, it may be necessary to admit that continued ambiguity is the only way to grease the wheels of change in policy and diplomacy. Perhaps Dean Rusk was right in stating that analytical precision will preclude progress in stabilizing the strategic balance, and perhaps the roughness in rough parity is what facilitates agreement. If so, however, the prospects for significant progress in improving U.S. strategic security may be grim. The closer we came to parity in the past decade, the farther we got from consensus on what sort of force balance is satisfactory. In the absence of reassuring treaty restraints on quantitative and qualitative improvements in Soviet forces, and without a blank check for the expansion of American forces, continued conceptual ambiguity is only likely to aggravate the strategic debate and nervousness within the United States. Given tightening constraints, it is hard to see how a bit more clarity (about what we want out of the strategic balance) could hurt.

This article is excerpted from a chapter in a forthcoming book edited by Samuel P. Huntington.

1. Quoted in John Newhouse, Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT (New York, 1973), p. 45.

2. McGeorge Bundy, "The Future of Strategic Deterrence," Surviva1, November-December 1979, pp. 269-70.

3. Edward N. Luttwak, "Perceptions of Military Force and US Defence Policy," Survival, January-February 1977, pp. 2, 4-7. Luttwak recommends the injection of "perceptual impact analyses" into U.S. force planning, p. 8.

4. See Thomas A. Brown, "Number Mysticism, Rationality and the Strategic Balance," Orbis, Fall 1977, pp. 479-98.

5. U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearing, Briefing on Counterforce Attacks, 93rd Cong., 2d sess., 1975, pp. 13-15, 25-26, 30-33.

6. Sidney D. Drell and Frank von Hippel, "Limited Nuclear War," Scientific American, November 1976, p. 35.

7. The Effect of Nuclear War (Washington: Office of Technology Assessment, [1979]), p. 3.

8. Paul Nitze, "Assuring Strategic Stability in an Era of Détente," Foreign Affairs, January 1976, and "Deterring Our Deterrent," Foreign Policy, Winter 1976-1977.

9. Jan Lodal, "Assuring Strategic Stability: An Alternate View," Foreign Affairs, April 1976. See Nitze’s surrebuttal in "Comment and Correspondence," Foreign Affairs, July 1976.

10. Gary D. Brewer and Bruce G. Blair, "War Games and National Security with a Grain of SALT," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 1979, pp. 20-22. For another critique, see Joseph M. Grieco, Paul H. Nitze and Strategic Stability: A Critical Analysis, Occasional Paper No. 9 (Ithaca: Cornell University Peace Studies Program, November 1976).

11. Paul H. Nitze, "Current SALT II Negotiating Posture," unpublished paper, 15 January 1979, p. 25.

12. "U.S. and Soviet Strategic Capability through the Mid-1980s," Department of State Bulletin, October 1978, pp. 24-25.

13. Some of these points are made in "An Evaluation of U.S. and Soviet Strategic Capability through the Mid-1980s: A Comparative Analysis’," Press Release (Washington: Committee on the Present Danger, September 1978), pp. 3-4.

14. Lieutenant General Daniel Graham, USA (Ret), quoted in "Documentation," International Security, Fall 1977, p. 178.

15. Even Colin Gray admits this, though he sees other considerations far outweighing the value of the solution. The Future of Land-Based Missile Forces, Adelphi Paper No. 140 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, Winter 1977), p. 9.

16. Richard Burt, "Reassessing the Strategic Balance," International Security, Summer 1980, pp. 39, 51.

Richard Betts (B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University) is a Research Associate in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. He previously served on the faculties at Harvard, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins universities and was a staff member of the National Security Council and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Dr. Betts is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Strategic Studies. He is author of Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises (1977), coauthor of The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (1979)--both highly acclaimed--and Nonproliferation and U.S. Foreign Policy (1980), and has published in many professional journals.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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