'Diplomatic Wallop': Nixon and the Return of Counterforce

Abstract

In the early 1970s, US nuclear posture—the combination of weapons and war plans that comprised US nuclear capabilities—took a durable and confusing turn towards counterforce. This paper explains how and why. It was in the early 1970s that that the US began to work hard, persistently, to improve its first strike counterforce capabilities. At the same time, it abandoned its pursuit of missile defense technologies that could have augmented offensive counterforce. This was odd. On one hand, nuclear hawks could argue that despite its counterforce investments, the US was not serious about fielding forces that were useful for anything but retaliation. Having abandoned defenses, American threats to use nuclear weapons first, or in a limited way, rang hollow. Nuclear doves, on the other hand, were equally unhappy about counterforce. Not only was it wasteful, but insofar as it created first strike incentives, it was also dangerous. Consequently, Washington’s pursuit of ‘half throttle counterforce’—where offensive forces were not backstopped by defenses—from the early 1970s onward is a puzzling thing. The vast majority of academic writing on US nuclear posture seeks to explain this odd behavior by blaming pathologies inherent in the US military bureaucracy. In this paper, I show that ‘pathological posture theory’ fails to explain the US turn towards counterforce in the early 1970s. Instead, I show that President Nixon was the primary driver behind the United States’ embrace of ‘half-throttle’ counterforce. Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and even Clinton followed in his footsteps, but it was Nixon who led the charge. Nixon’s decision-making was a product of his beliefs about nuclear weapons and foreign policy. In Nixon’s mind, the nuclear balance was an indicator of national strength that could boost or diminish US resolve and influence a wide range of diplomatic outcomes. Some inchoate conception of nuclear advantage, Nixon believed, permitted the US to walk tall in the world, and get its way, even if that advantage was not in fact militarily usable.