School of War - Ep 114: Eric Edelman on the Foundations of Nuclear Strategy (New Makers of Modern Strategy #11)

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

Eric Edelman, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and Ambassador to Turkey and Finland, joins the show to talk about how nuclear strategic thinking began and how those debates resonate today. ▪️  Times      •      01:47 Introduction      •      02:45 Oppenheimer’s Borden in reality     •      07:00 Brodie and The Absolute Power     •      11:12 Deterrence before Hiroshima      •      13:15 Blackett and Fear, War, and the Bomb       •      19:40 Counter-value vs counter-force      •      37:33 Russian nuclear strategy       •      42:44 Extended deterrence        •      52:37 Pain tolerance    Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

It seems like everyone is talking about artificial intelligence these days and the battlefield revolutions that it may or may not cause, but not that long ago in 1945. It really wasn't that long ago, by the way, which is a simple observation that I think everyone should give a lot of thought to. The advent of nuclear weapons sparked a revolution in war fighting and in strategic thought. How did the strategists of the day rethink their understanding of war in the face of the terrible new weapon? What if their work still applies today? or maps on to the coming of new technologies. Let's get into it.

It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We have people who are not seen buildings. We shall fight on the beaches. We should fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Eric Aedleman, who is counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He served in a number of senior roles in government. He retired as a career minister from the U.S. Foreign Service.

Back in 2009, he served as Undersecretary of Defense for Possible. policy. He's been ambassador to Finland, ambassador to Turkey, many other roles. He is an expert on among other things. Nuclear Strategy, which is our happy subject for today. Eric, thank you so much for joining the show. Aaron, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be with you today. So this is yet another installment in our series on the New Makers of Modern Strategy, the really excellent volume edited by Hal Brands. We did a number of episodes on last year, and you contributed a chapter on the foundations or the first, you know, I guess, what, 30, 40 years or so of nuclear strategy and strategic thinking, particularly in the United States.

But I have to say, just before we get to the substance, I was deeply charmed to dive into the chapter, which is really excellent, by the way, and just my fear for today is we're going to run out of time because it covers so much material really clearly. But as somebody who I will confess, my ignorance really only knows or knew William Borden through his role as the villain or a villain of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, it is a treat to see him portrayed in somewhat more positive terms as a serious thinker and a quite reasonable thinker about nuclear strategic matters. But what did you think of the portrayal, I assume you saw it,

what did you think of the portrayal in Oppenheimer? I haven't seen the film yet. I have to confess. And I suppose that, you know, is occupational hazard. When you know a lot about a subject, seeing movies about it sometimes is very, very disillusioning. I will at some point bring myself to spend the, you know, inordinate number of hours that it takes to see, see Oppenheimer. But I was not, you know, surprised to, you know, to learn that he was being depicted that way because I think that, in fact,

Borden is less well remembered today than he was back in the 40s and 50s, in part because he did have this Inspector Javier-like role in Oppenheimer's, you know, security clearance process and pushed very hard to have Oppenheimer's security clearance lifted. You know, I think it's very easy in the contemporary period to look back and say, oh, this was just terrible and, you know, horrible, you know, misguided, red scare, anti-communism, etc. But there were, you know, Soviet spies working in this area. There had been a Soviet spy ring in the Manhattan Project. It wasn't completely, you know, crazy to be concerned about, you know, a number of communist associations that Oppenheimer had. And it's easy in retrospect to look back

and blame Borden. But, you know, but it wasn't crazy at the time. And moreover, the most important thing is Borden's main ideas about nuclear strategy were really expressed in 1946 long before the Oppenheimer affair. And that part, I think, has been lost kind of in the midst of time. And as the late Cullen Gray explained as well, some of what Borden wrote about in 1946 when he wrote, there will be no time, were so far ahead of his time, you know, that people couldn't process it or appreciated. I mean, he was talking about unmanned systems. He was talking about sensors, missile defenses, lots of things that were way, way, way ahead of their time and therefore didn't get the appreciation that they deserve. Although, interestingly, the late Robert Jervis,

who, you know, was one of the seminal figures, you know, and a great political scientist, with whom I have a lot of differences on nuclear strategy, by the way, but who did a lot of great work nonetheless. He remarked in an article that I cite in the chapter that really, you know, Bernard Brody's absolute weapon written as an essay in the full of 1945, published in spring in 1946, and Borden's book are really the two seminal writings on nuclear strategy and everything else after that really is kind of footnotes. Yeah. Well, to be clear, though, I think it's a good movie. I thought the portrayal of Borden and also of the Robert Downey junior figure, the head of the atomic commission was...

The Strauss. Yeah, thank you. It was clearly an error of some sort and that they were clearly the good guys and the proper way of viewing the movie is to view them as the good guys. But in any event, to stick with substance, look, I mean, I think one of the reasons why your chapters is really valuable is I have this instinct across subject matters, that it tends to be the case that the earliest or first questions raised about something when people are confronting something for the first time. Those tend to be the, if not the right questions,

attention to those questions tends to give you the deepest understanding of the subject, whatever has come in their way. And that's what you, that's what you do in this chapter. And so let's get right to it. So you, you begin with this, this trio of thinkers, Brody as a sort of the centerpiece or the person who gives birth to a kind of mainstream thinking on nuclear strategy, and then a critic from the right in the form of William Borden, and a critic from the left in the form of PMS Blackett. Let's start with Brody. What were Brody's real insights and contributions in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bomb?

Brody, first of all, wrote the absolute weapon in which he argued, again, this was written in the fall of 1945. Very presciently, he said the difference that, the atomic bomb has made is that before the bomb, the duty and responsibility of defense establishments was to prepare for war. And henceforth, the duty and responsibility of them is to prepare to avoid war and prevent war. And hence the notion essentially of nuclear deterrence, nuclear strategic deterrence was born. And that really was kind of the beginning of of all of this. Brody made a number of other contributions as well later on. I mean,

he wrote a number of essays that for Princeton had published a book, Press University Press, published in the mid to late 50s called Strategy in the Missile Age, which talked about the difficulties of limited nuclear war. He addressed some of the early issues of escalation and escalation dynamics. so he covered a lot of a lot of ground. I think towards the later end of his career, he, I think, became more, you know, sort of a defender of the sort of arms control, you know, sort of orthodoxy.

But he made enormous contributions. He was part of a group at Rand, which was a research and analysis division set up by the U.S. Air Force, to actually do what you were suggesting, Aaron, which is get a bunch of really smart people to think about these first-order questions that nuclear strategy required people to wrestle with, to grapple with. Notably, Brody's insight that with nuclear weapons involved, you really want to prevent war not figure out how to fight one with nuclear weapons.

And so Brody was kind of at the foundation of it, but then there were all these other people who debated with him and argued with him, worked side by side at Rand, including Herman Kahn, who is sort of probably most notorious as at least one of the models for Dr. Strange Love, the Peter Sellers role that he performed in that movie. There was Thomas Schelling, the Nobel laureate in economics, who made very, very substantial contributions as well in the late 50s, early 60s. both in the area of deterrence and arms control theory. And then there was Albert Wollstetter, a mathematician who was brought in to work at Rand on these issues

and also made some very, very important contributions. I believe Wollstetter was perhaps after Borden, the most penetrating thinker about nuclear strategy in that early period when, as you say, people were wrestling with first order questions. And then there was also, of course, the late Andrew Marshall, who was operating in this environment as well, made some contributions as well in the late 50s, early 60s that I note in the chapter. And then went on to head the Office of Met Assessment at the Pentagon for more than 40 years into his early 90s. Here's a question that I feel like I should know the answer to, but I really don't. So all of a sudden, this question of deterrence becomes dominant for. You know, maybe it wasn't so obvious in 1946, but for reasons it seemed obvious to us now,

certainly. A nuclear war seems like something that you'd rather prevent than fight. What was the status of the conversation about deterrence prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Was there serious work that had been done or serious thinking that had been done on the question of deterrence as part of a broader range of strategic options of which it was sort of one among many? and that it emerges from that as a primary consideration, or is it sort of come about from the emergence of A-bombs on the scene? Like, help me understand that. Well, there was discussion of deterrence before Hiroshima.

There's actually George Quester, political scientist who taught both at Cornell, my undergraduate alma mater and later at the University of Maryland for many years, actually wrote a book called deterrence before Hiroshima. I think it's, it, we tend to, people tended not to talk about deterrence so much. They talked about diplomacy, avoiding war, and things like that. And we kind of retrospectively have, you know, you know, imposed that, you know, that term in the examination of what we now see as escalation dynamics sort of on, you know, in retrospect. And there were some RAND studies that actually contributed to this discussion of what had happened previously as well that kind of imposed this notion of escalation and deterrence, you know,

on the discussion. So, I mean, the notion of deterrence has, you know, existed from time immemorial, you know, if you want to, if you want peace, prepare for war is an old, you know, Roman, you know, maxim. So it's not that the notion was unknown to people before 1945. It's just that we didn't talk about it in quite the same way as we have since the advent of nuclear weapons and the focus on prevention of war. Let's talk about these early critics of Brody, who even though they are not necessarily the names that are best remembered, the debate, as you outlined it in the chapter, seems to me to really crystallize debates. debates we're having today. I mean, at some fundamental level, nothing has changed from these early arguments. So we'll start on the left with Blackett, though I guess Blackett and Brody kind of

collapsed together as time goes on. But initially, they kind of converge over time. Yeah. But initially there is a sort of left liberal divide, I guess, to put it in political terms. What is what is the nature of the disagreement? Well, Blackett was a physicist, a Brit, who worked on the tube-alloy's project, the British contribution. to research on nuclear weapons. During World War II, he'd been involved in operations research and very skeptical about strategic bombing throughout World War II to begin with, and very much a person on the left. And he publishes a number of essays and a book of the collected of his essays in 1948 called Fear War and the Bomb. And basically, he articulates a couple of very important

arguments that kind of resonate, as you suggest, kind of down through the rest of the debate on deterrence. One is he suggests that the use of the atomic bomb in 1945 was unnecessary from a military point of view and that the war could have been ended without the use of nuclear weapons. And moreover, the reason the U.S., in fact, used nuclear weapons had nothing to do with defeating Japan. It had to do with preventing the Soviet Union from entering the war. And it was done in effect to preclude the Soviets from moving into East Asia. And it was part of the larger Cold War mentality that Black had attributed to U.S. policymakers. And this becomes a trope on the left, you know, doubt.

And you can see it. It appears again in 1965 in a book by Garil Parvitz, a young scholar at the University of Wisconsin, part of the Wisconsin. He was not actually a historian, but he was in that environment of the so-called Wisconsin School of Diplomatic Revisionist. History that William Appelman Williams is mostly associated with, as well as his students and others. But O'Paravich wrote a book, Atomic Diplomacy that tried to flesh out this argument, that Roosevelt had a policy of accommodation with Stalin and that Truman came in and kind of reversed that policy and then used the atomic bomb in an effort to intimidate the Soviets and to have, quote, atomic diplomacy.

I think there's some more recent efforts with the opening of more archives, including Soviet archives, to extend that argument and buttress it. I don't find that argument terribly convincing because it's very clear that. you know, General Marshall and others actually desperately wanted the Soviets to enter the war because they needed the manpower and they didn't want to face an invasion of the Japanese home islands without bringing Japanese manpower to bear and freezing Japanese the Kwandung Army and Manchuria up there. So I don't think it, you know, it's a very compelling argument, but it all starts with Blackett and that continues to this day. The other thing that, you know, Blackett basically argues, and

And this is where he and Brody ultimately kind of converge is he basically says deterrence is really very easy. You only need a few nuclear weapons because a few nuclear weapons are enough. As long as they exist, you know, no one in their right mind is going to start a war with someone who's got nuclear weapons because they'll be punished with a nuclear strike themselves and therefore, you know, deterrence will hold. and this is sometimes described as existential deterrence, you know, because I exist, if you're a nuclear weapon, because I exist, I deter, you know, to paraphrase Descartes. So, you know, Wollstetter and others began to argue in the late 1950s after Wollstetter did a number of studies for Rand on the vulnerability of U.S. bomber bases to potential Russian first strike that actually deterrence, wasn't that easy. It was actually very complicated because Wellstetter argued in a very famous foreign affairs article called the delicate balance of terror that you needed to not just

have a bunch of nuclear weapons with which you could threaten your rival. You needed to actually, for deterrence to work, be able to ride out a first strike by your rival and still have enough in reserve to impose unacceptable damage on the adversary. And this was the sort of second strike retaliatory capability that actually made deterrence work. And it was actually very hard. It wasn't something that was really that easy to, you know, to understand when you had sufficient nuclear forces that you could deter your adversary. And out of this, by the way, out of his work on bomber vulnerability came, you know, strip alerts and having, you know, 24-hour, you know, combat patrols with, you know, aircraft that would direct a nuclear war if we actually got into one.

A lot of changes, you know, came out of that in the late 1950s to our nuclear posture. But he was really Wollstetter who first sort of, you know, articulated all of this. Although a lot of his thinking in that sense was, you know, prefigured to some agree by stuff that Borden wrote and there will not there will not be time back in in 1940 France. So one of the one of the distinctions though obviously correct me here if I get this wrong between Blackett and Borden maybe Blackett and other figures later is I take it that this this concept of minimum deterrence.

The reason why it's a handful of nuclear weapons are just scary is because you're going to fire them right at the heart of the enemy's whole national life, right? You're going to take out Moscow, right? You're going to impose a cost with your small arsenal that no rational person would invite upon themselves, even setting aside the problems that you just highlighted, that maybe actually your weapons don't survive the bad guys for a strike. And I guess Borden, among the differences between them is Borden is thinking about using nuclear weapons for military targeting and thinking about them in a strategic sense sort of below,

like a strategic sense in a more practical way as a part of a broader military campaign. Talk about that and about Borden's thinking more generally. Yeah, Borden in 1945 said, look, you know, in the end of the day, we're not going to use these things to destroy cities because that won't make any sense. You know, what you'll want to do is destroy your adversaries, you know, military forces. He was very prescient in the sense that he foresaw in 1945, the advent of missile warfare. And what he says in 1945 is, look, ultimately we're going to end up, both sides are going to have, you know, missiles. This is going to be, you know, a conflict if we have one in which they're going to be salvos of missiles, you know, attacking one another.

And what makes sense is to attack the adversary's forces, not their populations. And this is a difference that emerges between Borden and Blackett and also like the difference between deterrence being easy and deterrents. being hard, also marks, you know, kind of the debate as it kind of continues through the 50, 60, 70s, and into the present day, honestly, you see it reemerging in some sense now as the, as we try and figure out how to deter two nuclear peers, both Russia and China. And this becomes known as essentially the distinction between counter value targeting, you know, targeting the urban areas and the populations of our adversaries and counter-force targeting in which what Borden was advocating was counter-force targeting that would basically aim at the military forces

and the command and control of those forces that your adversary has. And one of the themes of my chapter is that over time there has been a divergence between those in government, those of us in government who had to actually practice deterrence, and those who have been theorizing it, theorizing about it, either in the academy or in think tanks. And that is, there has been a general acceptance of what came to be called mutual assured destruction in the 60s. We could talk a little bit about the origins of that, but that, as Robert Turvers said, that's not a strategy, it's a condition that having two heavily armed sides with second strike retaliatory capability, that's a condition. And therefore, it doesn't make sense to actually constantly be

looking for advantages like Merving, multiple independently retargetable warheads on missiles to be able to go after your adversary's forces because, you know, in the end of the day, you only just need to, you know, have enough to, you know, threaten their populations, and that will be enough to deter. And so this ongoing debate for policymakers, I think, you know, with a kind of Viberian ethic of responsibility, not to just think about how to deter and give them throwing up your hands once deterrence fails and, you know, you have to actually think about, you know, the consequences and what you would actually do in a nuclear war,

the idea that you would be attacking populations and then leaving the U.S. population vulnerable to retaliatory attack, you know, I think most of us who were involved in this, almost unanimously, I would say, found, you know, not to be acceptable. You wanted to limit the damage that would be done to an American population as much as you possibly could and concentrate on disabling your adversaries,

forces. And there's another element to this. I think that it's important as well to note that if you want to deter, the most effective deterrent is a nuclear force posture. Your adversary actually thinks you might execute. And if, you know, this was the conundrum that McNamara, you know, understood during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he said it's very hard to make credible undertaking an incredible action, which is killing tens, if not hundreds and millions of people by launching a strike on populations. But forces that are credible that can actually execute a disabling strike that would attack nuclear forces command and control actually has a deterrent effect. If people think that you might actually execute that in an extremist, it is much more

powerful deterrent, I think, than, you know, a kind of totally incredible strategy that, you know, would have you not only wiping out millions of civilians, but but also opening up your own population to the same. There's also an issue, by the way, about military lawyers not allowing you to do that because there's obviously under the long-of-arm conflict, you know, requirements for proportionality. But you see this resurfacing. You see it resurfacing. There were recently an article in Foreign Affairs that argued, well, the way to solve our so-called three-body problem, how do we deter Russia and China now that they're both China on the way to being a nuclear peer, not there yet, but soon enough in policy terms, it'll be in early 30s. The answer they say is,

well, we don't need to build up our nuclear forces, so we have enough forces to be able to execute counter-force strategies against both nuclear peers, because that'll probably require additional nuclear forces, the answer is just say, we already have enough to kill everybody in China and Russia if we attack their populations, so let's just do that. So this debate between counterforce and counter-value is resurfacing. How did the defenders of counter-value targeting respond to the kind of obvious line of critique? That there's just been. It's just been, bad faith here. Your position is you countervalue types. Your position is it's no big deal. We've got a few nukes and we'll just be psychopathic mass murderers when the moment comes.

And the fact that we might do that is enough to solve our problems. But it's also relevant, the people who say this tend to be subscribers to a kind of gentler kind of politics that suggests, you know, they're not the fire-breathing conservatives who the popular imagination might suspect of actually being interested in great acts of violence. They're the kind of people who actually you might suspect would be more pacifistic in their inclinations. And so you come very rapidly to the inclusion that they have no intention whatsoever. And then, of course, if the bad guys figure out that that fact, which surely they do,

deterrence, actually doesn't really exist at all. That's a kind of obvious criticism. What's the response? You know, their response generally is that, you know, the distinction between countervalue in counter-force targeting is maybe smaller than, you know, you think, because going after nuclear forces, you know, these weapons are, are so destructive that because these forces are, by and large, co-located with urban areas, you're going to be killing a lot. You're going to be killing millions of people anyway. So what's the difference between 25 million and 50 million? It's a variant of,

you know, their argument, I think, is a variant of Stalin's famous comment that one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. And so, you know, they basically say it doesn't, it doesn't really matter how many you kill, because once you start killing that many people, you know, there's not going to be any, you know, barriers left to escalation and attacks on population. Well, that's really just kind of a counter-accusation, isn't it, that the counter-force types than are just acting in bad faith, that in fact, countervalue targeters themselves. I mean, there is enough kind of unfortunate truth to it that it carries some surface plausibility. The reality is you can, you know, tailor your forces to deter by going after the things that

your adversary values as opposed to populations. Although when we try to do that, when you try to argue for lower yield weapons, that are not as destructive and don't bring in their wake enough, you know, that much collateral damage, you then get into this trick box where they say, oh, you're trying to actually plan for nuclear war because you're going to make these weapons more usable. Therefore, policymakers will be more tempted to actually use them and launch a nuclear war. So you're actually arguing for a nuclear warfighting strategy when, in fact, you know, my argument is, is what I said to you earlier, Aaron, which is the most credible deterrent, going back to the

Roman maxima, if you want a piece, prepare for war, is a nuclear force posture your adversaries think you might actually use. There's also a kind of moral dilemma here that Michael Walzer, the political philosopher, outlined. You know, he basically said nuclear deterrence is moral because you're seeking to prevent war and prevent mass killing of humans. So it's moral. to kind of make deterrent threats that you will use nuclear weapons. However, if you ever got to the point where you actually did it, it would be immoral because, you know, you would be killing millions of people. You'd be violating the, you know, the, you know, just war doctrine of proportionality,

etc. And which sort of, it's a, again, it's like a moral lobeous strip. It kind of turns in on itself because, again, it's only a deterrent. if the adversary thinks you'll do it. I mean, one of the quotations that I use, there are two epigrams to the chapter. One is the Brody comment, which we talked about earlier. The other is a very prescient comment that Henry Kissinger made in a book, not his big book on nuclear American foreign policy and nuclear weapons, which he wrote in the mid-50s that made his reputation. but a book he wrote a little bit later that's less well known called The Necessity of Choice,

which was written in the early 1960s, just as intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, were just first coming on to the scene and were reducing the amount of warning time that national leaders would have in order to make decisions about use of nuclear weapons from five or six, seven, eight hours of flight time of bombers from, you know, over the pole from one continent to the other down to about 30 minutes, which was, you know, very jarring for people to think about these, you know, incredibly weighty life and death decisions having to be made in this incredibly compressed period of time, something that Schelling wrote

about a lot in his writings about nuclear strategy. And Kissinger wrote in 1961, is the problem with nuclear strategy and nuclear deterrence is it relies on a psychological sense. state of your adversary, what's going on in your adversary's head, which you can never really know. And in that regard, he says, a step that you take that is a bluff, but is seen as serious, is more of a deterrent than a serious step that is meant as a, that is taken as a bluff, because it's what your adversary thinks that's important here. And this is, I think, where a lot of the divergence between practitioners and theorists comes. So in the early 1960s, you know, late 1950s, early 1960s, there are a series of

studies at Rand essentially led by William Kaufman, Andy Marshall is among those people making these studies as well, which is basically coming to the conclusion after the Eisenhower policy of massive retaliation, which was essentially, you know, a counter-value strategy that held Russian populations at risk, that really the most effective strategy was a countervalue strategy that went after the adversary's weapons. And so a lot of this thinking is imported into Robert McNamara's Pentagon. Kauffman, in fact, goes to work for McNamara. And my colleague, Frank Gavin, who has another chapter on nuclear strategy and new makers, makes the argument that's very, very hard to actually track the influence of these ideas on actually policy making. He's absolutely right, of course.

I mean, I think it's still worth studying those ideas for the reasons you said that when people are dealing with these ideas, when they're fresh and new, the thoughts they have are usually, you know, we're penetrating than a lot of, you know, what comes after. So some of this counterforce strategy is being imported into McNamara's Pentagon. But McNamara is also wrestling with a political problem, which is that the Kennedy administration had campaigned in the 1960 election on an illusory missile gap. There's a big panic in the United States after the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first Earth satellite, artificial Earth satellite,

because the ability to launch a satellite into space shows that a nation has mastered the missile technology of staging that would also allow you to fire an intercontinental ballistic missile, not into orbit, but to attack an adversary with nuclear warhead. And so there is a big panic that there's a missile gap that the Russians have developed, you know, more missiles than we have, and that there's a effort launched by Eisenhower, a crash program to get our own intercontinental ballistic missile up and running, which he does very successfully.

The question becomes, once Kennedy administration is in office, they start a big nuclear buildup to deal with this. missile gap, although they discover upon entry into office that, in fact, because of the intelligence we had from first U-2 flights and then later the Corona program, satellite program that was launched, that the Russians actually have far fewer missiles than we do. And the buildup continues, however, McNamara is looking for a limiting principle. How do I know, the famous question he poses how much is enough, you know, to deter. And this is really the problem that, you know, Wollstetter had also identified Wollstetter,

by the way, was an advisor to the Kennedy campaign in 1960, in his late 1950s essay in foreign affairs on the delicate balance of terror. And Matt Mera and his colleagues at the Pentagon come up with, you know, a notion of so-called assured destruction. The way to deter the Soviets, they conclude, is if you can destroy some sort of, set percentage, 60%, 70%, the percentage has changed, by the way, over time in McNamara's thinking of Soviet industry and some percent, you know, whether it's 60 or 75 percent of the, or 50 percent, of the Soviet population, if you have this capability of, quote, assured destruction, that will

deter the Soviets. But the problem was this was a bunch, this was not a calculation it was made on the basis of deep understanding and research into the Soviet mindset, what Soviet leaders thought, what Soviet military thought. It was based on calculations of what we would be deterred by. And this is a constant problem, I think, in American deterrence thinking, which is that we conclude that things that would deter us would deter the adversary, whether it's Russia or China or Iran, North Korea. It doesn't matter, really, because it's just changed the names of the guilty parties and the process still the same. And the problem is that may not at all be how the other side thinks about these things. And in fact, you know, we, we know a lot now about how the Soviets

thought about these things. They thought about this problem in a completely different way than we did. And so we were trying to develop, you know, methods of deterrence that were very disconnected from what our adversaries thought. Yeah, this issue, not necessarily in the nuclear context, but more broadly is a borderline obsession of mine, this question of mirror imaging and us just sort of assuming that the other guy thinks like we do. To me, the most recent peak of the madness was the lead up to Putin going into Ukraine in 2022.

to when we had administration officials, you know, speaking as though, you know, the invasion itself should deter him. I mean, war itself should be a deterrent for Putin. Why would anyone rationally seek such a thing? Even as the evidence was accumulating, and actually they knew that he was pursuing it, like the cognitive disconnect was so obvious that they could not accept that actually his aim was, he wanted Ukraine. He just wanted Ukraine, as he had said aloud repeatedly.

But in any way, I want to say. stick with this for a second and stick with, of course, nukes. Can you say more about what you just alluded to that we now know more about Russian thinking about what would what would have deterred them? What was their thinking like? This is not in the chapter, but it's really interesting. Yeah, so we know a lot now because we did a lot of interviews after the Cold War. And John Hines and Ellis Mushulovich for BDM Corporation did a number of interviews with former senior Soviet officials who were involved in their nuclear enterprise. And this work was done actually at the behest of Andy Marshall in the Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon. Some of it is

available in redacted form through the National Security Archive. Their website, you can actually read some of this stuff. And there was a lot of literature. I mean, the Russian military had a literature, some of it in open source, that basically argued that a, you know, they tried to apply what they called the science of Marxism, Leninism, to military affairs, regarded military affairs as a science, and argued that it would be possible to actually wage and win a nuclear war. And we knew that, for instance, we now know that Soviet war plans, for instance, in Europe involved the use of large numbers of so-called tactical theater nuclear weapons in in central Europe as part of their move into into Germany across the inner German dividing line. So we, you know,

spent a lot of time agonizing about how to deal with, you know, nuclear weapons in an invasion contingency in Western Europe and hoped to be able to, through the Kennedy administration's strategy of flexible response, increase our conventional capability, so you didn't have to have early use of nuclear weapons. Truth of matter is, Soviet nuclear plans said they were going to use these things early and often. They were going to have a lot of them, and they were going to use them early in the campaign. We also know those from those interviews that Heinz and Vashulovich did, that Soviet civilian leaders were actually very, very chary about using nuclear. weapons. They were very, very worried about this, much more so than their military was. They were

very cognizant of the fact that the commanded control system that they had was pretty rickety and might not operate all that well in a nuclear war environment. They weren't sure how this would work. And there's one very telling anecdote, and I can't remember which one of the Soviet officials recounted this, but there was one nuclear exercise where during the course of the exercise, the Soviets developed something like the so-called football that we have, which is the briefcase that contains the nuclear war plans and codes that a president of United States would have to authorize to execute our single, what was then called the single integrated operational plan, the SIEHOP, which was a nuclear war plan, that, you know, by the way, would have

and tailed kind of massive strikes. I mean, it got kind of built during the Eisenhower years under massive retaliation. And presidents forever thereafter basically tried to, you know, make it more usable. But it still had this quality of what Herman Kahn kind of unkindly and provocatively called a wargasm, where you would just let loose, you know, this panoply of, um, thousands and thousands of missiles aimed at the adversary. And so this, they had a version of this. It was called the Chegat or Chimodanchic. It was a small suitcase that had the codes and whatnot,

had a button, you know, and they brought this up to Brezhnev in an exercise, and Brezhnev kind of the blood drains out of his face. He goes totally white. This is in an exercise, right? And he basically says, nothing is going to happen if I touch this, right? It's not, I mean, we're not going to actually launch a nuclear war. I mean, this is how, you know, incredibly concerned the Soviet civilian leaders were about, you know,

prospect of nuclear war, which was at variance with what a lot of the military was thinking about how, you know, this, you know, this would operate and this would be used. In the time we have left, can we talk a little bit about extended deterrence and the evolution of thinking on how nuclear weapons intersect with obligations to defend allies, whether in Western Europe, I guess Western Europe primarily as a focus of consideration throughout the Cold War, but also East Asia, East Asia very much today. I mean, it's obviously a very present-day concern, and how these questions of counter-force versus counter-value or small number of big weapons versus larger number of big and small weapons. How does our thinking evolve about how nuclear weapons can be used to maintain the freedom of

our partners and our interests on the Eurasian periphery? Yeah, I mean, this was one of the biggest challenges of the Cold War, and it is actually the place where the biggest crises in the Cold War all erupt essentially over questions of extended deterrence. starting with the Korean War, which is very seminal in all of this for a variety of reasons that I touch on, you know, in the chapter in New Makers. So the ink is barely dry on the NATO treaty in 1949 when the North Koreans invade South Korea in June of 1950. And, you know, you and I have been talking for most of this time about deterrence. in the context of central or what sometimes called, you know, general strategic deterrence, which is to say deterring the Soviets from launching a strike on the, first strike on the United

States or vice versa. You know, a lot of times people ridicule all of this saying, oh, all of this was focused on this notion of the bolt out of the blue, a surprise attack, which was never in the cards. Nobody was going to do that. Only problem was for both American and Soviet leaders, their lived experience, told them that's precisely what can happen to you if you're not careful. I mean, the United States, obviously, had been the victim of a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor in December of 1940, 1941. And then the Soviet Union was a victim of a surprise attack by Edolf Hitler in violation of the Nazi Soviet pact in June of 1941. So both leader-national leaderships, you know, had this, you know, incredibly searing experience of surprise attack

in their historical memories. And so the idea that, you know, they were wasting time worried about a bolt out of the blue is really kind of foolishness because obviously people would be worried about that, particularly in a domain, whereas Paul Nipzig argued in 1950, you know, the first mover advantage is really pretty great. If you have the ability to strike with nuclear weapons and knock out your adversary early on, you know, that would give you a tremendous, you know, advantage, obviously, in war. So in 1950, Truman has got to decide whether or not to defend South Korea. Now, you know, interestingly, in January of 1950, the Secretary of State, Dean Atchison, give a speech at the National Press Club, outlining the U.S. security perimeter

in Asia. We were in the process negotiating a peace treaty with Japan, a treaty of security and not a peace treaty, but security treaty with Japan. And the perimeter, defense perimeter, that Atchson outlines notably does not include, you know, South Korea. And in fact, the U.S. was in the process of getting ready to get its occupation troops out of South Korea. in 1950 when the war starts. And what's striking about the war is the United States ends up defending South Korea, but largely because it's worried about the credibility of its commitment to defend the treaty allies that's just signed up in Europe.

And so the war in Korea is sometimes described by historians as an Asian war to defend NATO. And this becomes true, you know, later on, the whole U.S. involvement in Vietnam is, in fact, in some ways driven by concerns, perhaps in his place, over credibility of U.S. assurances to allies in Europe that we will defend them against potential Soviet invasion. In a context in which the Soviets, of course, are in Europe, they have interior lines of communication, and they've created a glossies of satellite. light states on their eastern periphery in Eastern Europe by virtue, by dint of having occupied them. As Stalin told Milovangilis, the Yugoslav journalist in this war talking about World War II, whoever occupies territory gets to impose their social system on it, which is precisely what Soviets do throughout Eastern Europe, pretty much everywhere on their periphery with the exception of Finland, which is a very interesting exception. But the stakes in Cold War are largely

Europe, but East Asia is important, too. It's identified as a crucial, important area of population for demographic reasons, but industry, of course, as well in Japan. The United States, of course, had a particular relationship with the Philippines as well. So there's, you know, there's a lot that, you know, drives the U.S. into having a position in East Asia, but defending it, you know, and making these credible guarantees that we would defend them in extremists with nuclear weapons becomes very, very difficult to execute. And it requires constant attention to deployments of nuclear weapons, to the presence of nuclear weapons assets in theaters, and the demonstration of U.S. capability and of will.

Dennis Healy, who was the Labor Party politician who was the Secretary of State for Defense, wrote in, after having served in government, wrote that the U.S. needed its nuclear forces 5% to deter its adversaries, but 95% to assure its allies. And so extended deterrence, that is the ability of the United States to extend the panumbra of protection over allies of its nuclear forces becomes a constant challenge. And the threat that our defense of ourselves and our willingness to defend Europe would become decoupled is a preoccupation that Americans repeatedly run into,

whether it's in the periodic crises over Berlin beginning in 1948, and again, the period 1958 to 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis. You see it resurfaced in the 1970s when the Soviets begin to deploy SS20 intermediate range nuclear missiles into Eastern Europe, which then ultimately leads to the U.S. decision to deploy ground-launch cruise missiles and Persian II ballistic missiles into Europe and ultimately to the negotiation by Ronald Reagan of the INF Treaty, which the Russians in subsequent years violated in which the Trump administration

correctly, in my view, left the treaty. And so, you know, basically extended deterrence is the constant preoccupation of the U.S. throughout the Cold War. Today, this preoccupation is returning. I mean, we didn't really think about it very much for a very long time because the United States was so much more powerful than any of our adversaries. Now that we're dealing with pure adversaries and disruptors like North Korea and Iran, we have to think about extended deterrence again. And, you know, the fact that this is becoming an issue again is probably the greatest testimony of that is the desire of Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who clearly would like to have a security treaty with an Article 5 like guarantee from the

United States that would provide the kingdom of Saudi Arabia with the kind of protection that we've provided other treaty allies. And implicitly, countries with him, we've had a special relationship like Israel, like Egypt, like Saudi Arabia, but he wants it spell down in writing. It's kind of interesting, I think, tell, you know, tell about the concerns people have now for extended deterrence again. And this counter, I want to be respectful of your time here, but the countervalue versus counterforce question plays out in the same way in the extended deterrence context. Advocates of counter value sort of set you up, set us up for a situation where,

I can't remember which example is used in the famous illustration of this point, but we'll pick, you know, we'll pick Taiwan today, for our example. Are you really going to sacrifice New York to defend Taipei? That is to say, if your concept of extended deterrence is we're just going to murder the enemy population and invite the inevitable response that that will provoke, well, obviously, that's not attractive. And it's hard to imagine a president doing that or anyone doing that. And that's, of course, it seems to me to hurl an accusation of had faith here, the point. And if you favor counterforce, the counter value advocates will say, well, you want to fight a nuclear war? Like, you want to deploy these smaller weapons that you're actually going to fight with? To which my response is, you know, when you look at a guy like Xi Jinping, who, not to see everything through the lens of popular culture, but he really, his youth is like, it's like you couldn't write the backstory of a comic book villain more, more eerily than Xi Jinping's actual youth was lived with his mother denouncing his father, in the culture revolution, his sister committing suicide, his own restication. I mean, this is a man

who was formed by extraordinarily hard circumstances who then climbed his way to the top of what is returning to once more an unmistakably totalitarian regime. I'm inclined to take him pretty seriously and to think that maybe his pain tolerance is pretty high. I assume you agree, but I don't want to speak for you. You know, so we didn't talk about it really much, but one of the big crises of extended deterrence in the 1950s, actually two crises of extended deterrence, took place over the Taiwan Strait crises, over these very much inconsequential islands, Kimoy and Matsu, right off the coast of the People's Republic. In 1958, I mean, we deployed Matador missiles, nuclear warheads to London, and, you know,

Eisenhower actually convinced certainly the Soviets that we were ready to perhaps go to nuclear war, which is why they pressed Mao to pull back and not to exacerbate the crisis. By the way, that was a failure of Soviet extended nuclear deterrence since they were joined at the time by a treaty of friendship. And as a result, it was really the beginning of China's own nuclear weapons, which in 1964 would result in Chinese nuclear weapon test because the Soviets didn't, you know, do enough from the Chinese point of view to defend, you know, defend China's interests in Taiwan. Look, if you, if the only option you have to go to the president and say, you know,

Mr. or Madam President, you know, let's say a crisis in the Persian Gulf, we can, you know, if we get into a fight, we could turn Iran into glass if they use nuclear weapons. or you can do nothing, you know, you don't want the president, in my view, to be in that position. You want the president to have more options. When you start to talk about more usable nuclear options, this goes back to Secretary of Defense Jim Schlesinger, who in the 1970s, and he and Henry Kissinger both were trying to generate more options that would allow nuclear weapons to play a role in international politics in a way that play to U.S. strengths, but you immediately get accused of your planning for nuclear war when,

in fact, you're doing the opposite. You're trying to prevent nuclear war by having plans that the adversary takes seriously and believes you might execute, you know, if they were to do something that calls forth that, you know, that kind of response through aggression. And I think it's this misunderstanding of escalation dynamics. which has wrong-footed us so much in Ukraine, because we have exhibited so much concern about, you know, Putin's potential willingness to escalate and use thinner nuclear weapons in Ukraine, despite the fact that every time he's been asked the question directly, most recently were Tucker Carlson, he says, I have no intention of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

You know, the threats he's made, and he has made nuclear threats, he's rattled the, you know, cage and rattled the nuclear saber. They've been very vague in general, but when asked specifically about nuclear, he disclaims any intention of using them. And I think that's, you know, the important thing to keep in mind. In nuclear deterrence, to go back to the quotation from Kissinger, you're trying to raise doubts in your adversary's mind and constantly advertise. the doubts that exist in your mind is, you know, undercutting your ability to do that. Ambassador Eric Aedleman, you have many affiliations that I could cite on our way at the door here. I will describe you simply as a contributor to new makers of modern strategy, which listeners that this show know is high praise.

Really, really interesting conversation, important conversation, important chapter two that I hope people check out. Thank you so much for making the time. Well, thanks for having me, Aaron. I always am happy to talk about nuclear weapons. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.