22 February 2010

Why the Stockpiles?

 

At the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads.

At the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads.

By Jonathan Reed Winkler

Maintaining huge and expensive nuclear warhead stockpiles was the cost of peace during the Cold War. Jonathan Reed Winkler is an associate professor of history at Wright State University in Ohio. This article appears in the February 2010 issue of eJournal USA, A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.

At the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union had between them tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. Ultimately, none were ever used in anger. Why did these two superpowers build up such colossal stockpiles of nuclear weapons, particularly if both sides hoped never to use them? The answer is complex.

Should war have ever broken out during the Cold War, both the United States and Soviet Union intended to use nuclear weapons against opposing military forces, industrial targets, and urban centers.

Each side came to see early on that a nuclear war would be enormously destructive to itself, to its opponent, and, indeed, to the rest of the world. As a result, both superpowers came to view nuclear weapons principally as a deterrent that would give each side second thoughts about going to war.

After the utter devastation of the Second World War, few wished a conflict that promised to be even more destructive. In the end, the expense of maintaining enormous stockpiles of nuclear warheads was the cost of peace between the two superpowers for more than 50 years.

The United States concluded in the late 1940s that it needed a large number of nuclear weapons for several reasons. Because surprise attacks, such as the one at Pearl Harbor, might well occur at the outset of future wars, the United States would build an arsenal so large that its ability to retaliate would survive any attack.

Cold War

These ideas developed even before the United States fully identified the Soviet Union as its chief rival. As the Cold War unfolded, it was clear the Soviets had a strong numerical advantage in conventional forces. Should war break out, the Soviets could easily overwhelm U.S. and NATO armies in the opening weeks. The United States concluded that only atomic weapons could offset that advantage.

After the Soviets detonated their own atomic bomb in 1949, negating the U.S. advantage, and gained an ally in the People’s Republic of China, U.S. officials ultimately chose to build the more powerful hydrogen bomb [See “Fission, Fusion”] and to implement a major conventional and nuclear buildup to meet the Soviet threat.

By the early 1950s, the United States was on its way to having a major nuclear arsenal. It fielded some 1,600 medium- and long-range bombers to the Soviets’ 200. Both sides built up tactical weapons as well, including, for example, atomic field artillery and nuclear depth charges.

A number of reasons accounted for the scale of the U.S. nuclear buildup from 1948 until the middle 1960s.

First, the United States had until the early 1960s imperfect information about the Soviet Union’s true military strength (high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft and satellites began to provide better information). As a result, it wildly overestimated Soviet industrial capacity.

Second, the United States continued to fear Soviet conventional superiority in Europe. Tactical atomic weapons were viewed as the counter. The massive Red Army could gain little by overrunning European territory were it then subject to a devastating nuclear counterattack.

Third, President Dwight Eisenhower sought to use a massive nuclear buildup as a way to preserve peace. Such an arsenal would be comparatively cheaper and less disruptive to the U.S. economy than a sustained peacetime conventional buildup to match the numerically superior Soviet forces. Eisenhower’s threat to escalate any conflict to a full-out nuclear war — “massive retaliation” — would deter the Soviet Union while also restraining U.S. allies and even the United States itself.

Peak Stockpile

The nuclear stockpile had to be high, however, to ensure that U.S. nuclear forces could still carry out wartime missions despite accidents, effective Soviet defenses, and losses to any Soviet first strike. At its peak in 1966–1967, the U.S. nuclear warhead stockpile amounted to 31,000, with some 2,200 strategic bombers and missiles to carry them.

Fears of surprise attack abated in the 1960s with the adoption of submarine-launched ballistic missiles. It was nearly impossible to know where all nuclear-powered submarines were at any one time under the ocean. As a result, both sides could be confident that the other could not launch a surprise attack and escape retaliation.

The Soviet and U.S. reliance on a triad of strategic nuclear forces — manned bombers, land-based missiles, and submarine-launched missiles — meant mutually assured destruction (MAD). The idea of MAD confirmed that nuclear war would be unwinnable and helped to stabilize the Cold War.

Despite this concept of MAD, the Soviet Union embarked on a substantial nuclear weapons buildup through the second half of the Cold War to catch up and in some areas surpass the United States, while the United States focused instead on Southeast Asia. At its peak in 1986, the Soviet nuclear warhead stockpile is understood to have exceeded 40,000. Soviet strategic delivery systems peaked at approximately 2,500 bombers, submarine-launched missiles, and land-based missiles in 1979.

Though the marginal utility of the additional nuclear weapons built in the later Cold War was small, their presence made the idea of nuclear war so unthinkable that it was avoided. Though expensive, that was the price for averting catastrophe.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.