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.15 The new strategy was supported by a major counter-force arms pro-curement programme focused on reducing the perceived vulnerability of Amer-ican ICBMs to a Soviet first-strike and recapturing strategic superiority.16 Thisincluded the MX Peacekeeper MIRVed ICBM and Trident II D5 MIRVed SLBM.Nuclear strategy shifted under Reagan from  countervailing to  prevailing : anuanced distinction that based strategy on fighting and winning a long, pro-tracted nuclear war.17 The credibility of American nuclear deterrent threatsrequired a superior nuclear force capable of responding to a wide range ofattacks and able to absorb a Soviet first-strike and then threaten greater losses onthe Soviet Union than those inflicted on America.Without the superiorityneeded for  escalation dominance the Soviet Union would be more aggressiveand force political concessions.By allowing the Soviet Union to attain nuclearparity, the government argued, America had effectively disarmed itself.18Reagan was still prepared to negotiate, but only from a position of militarystrength.To regain nuclear superiority Reagan planned to accelerate the TridentII programme and B-2 stealth bomber programme, deploy mobile ICBMs,including making the MX mobile, modernise tactical nuclear forces and mod-ernise the nuclear command and control infrastructure.1916 Nuclear policy at the end of the Cold WarThe counter-force build-up met strong resistance in Congress where fundingwas curtailed and dependent on progress in arms control with Moscow.Reagantherefore looked to escape the dilemma of nuclear vulnerability and the realityof mutual assured destruction through the  Star Wars Strategic Defense Initi-ative (SDI).20 The aim of SDI was to both destroy incoming Soviet nuclear war-heads and increase economic pressure on the Soviet Union as it struggled tocompete in a new defensive technological arms race.As SDI faltered in the mid-1980s Reagan eventually reverted to arms control to escape the nucleardilemma, facilitated by the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev as a new, youngSoviet leader.This resulted in the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty(INF) and the foundation of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).21Gorbachev and Reagan also came remarkably close to agreeing to eliminate allballistic missiles by 1996 at the 1986 Reykjavik summit following Gorbachev sproposal to eliminate all nuclear forces by 2000.22Cold War nuclear weapons policy was characterised by two broad sets ofcompeting ideas about the role of nuclear weapons, the meaning of nucleardeterrence, the utility of negotiations and arms control, and the intentions of theSoviet leadership.The first maintained that nuclear strategy should be one ofdeterrence based on the threat of nuclear retaliation in response to a Sovietattack since the only role for nuclear weapons was to deter the Soviet Unionfrom using theirs.23 This required an invulnerable second-strike force, whichSLBMs could provide, and assumed that nuclear parity would be an essentialfact of the superpower relationship.The credibility of the nuclear threat lay inthe fundamental reality of mutual assured destruction based on the impossibilityof controlling or winning a nuclear war in any meaningful sense.It was notexplicitly assumed that the Soviet Union was preparing to fight and win anuclear war.Instead Moscow was considered aggressive but cautious.Further-more, it was increasingly accepted that the arms race operated according to anaction-reaction cycle that could only be controlled through mutual restraint.Value was seen in strategic arms control and a certain degree of cooperationbased on recognition of a mutual interest in capping the nuclear arms race andstabilising the strategic relationship.This approach was encapsulated byMcGeorge Bundy, adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson on nationalsecurity, who argued that the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons was based ontheir existence alone and that the nuances of location, capability and strategywere essentially irrelevant.24The second set of ideas maintained that America should not accept or assumenuclear parity but should maintain nuclear superiority.This was based on threeassumptions.First, that the Soviet Union was an aggressive, expansionist stateactively developing a disarming nuclear first-strike capability to destroyAmerica s nuclear arsenal and coerce Washington during political crises [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]