Abstract
The five books under review address nuclear weapons and the risk of war during the Cold War. Four of the five contend this risk was higher than understood by policymakers at the time or many scholars in its aftermath. They attribute this risk to strategic alerts, close encounters of opposing forces in crisis, and lack of access to critical intelligence. They consider the superpowers to have emerged unscathed from the Cuban missile crisis as much due to luck as leader commitments to avoid war. I interrogate the concept of “luck” and use my analysis to evaluate these arguments.
Martin Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Knopf, 2020), pp. xi + 604.
Fred Kaplan, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), pp. 372.
Serhii Plokhy, Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 2021), pp. 464.
Benoît Pelopidas, Repenser les choix nucléaires (Paris: SciencesPo Les Presses, 2022), pp. 306.
Theodore Voorhees, The Silent Guns of Two Octobers: Kennedy and Khrushchev Play the Double Game, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2021), p. 380.
The Cold War ended three decades ago and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Euphoria was short-lived. As the threat of nuclear war receded, that of environmental catastrophe looms larger. Now there is talk of another Cold War – or worse still, cold wars, between the West and China and the West and Russia. There is renewed interest in nuclear weapons and their delivery systems and talk of the advantages of military superiority and even of the possibility of using nuclear threats and weapons to achieve political ends – all of this despite public recognition by the governments of the U.S., Russia, U.K., France, and China that nuclear war is unwinnable and that everything in their power should be done to avoid one. 1 Once again, however, some officials and intellectuals claim that deterrence is failing, advocate new weapons and strategic superiority, and war plans that rest on the assumption that a great power conflict could be kept limited. All of these countries are upgrading their arsenals and the U.S. once again refused to disavow the first use of nuclear weapons despite a large public campaign toward this end. 2 The concern for nuclear war has risen considerably since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Those who advocate new weapons and design strategies for their possible use are oblivious to some of the principal lessons of the Cold War. That conflict revealed that minimal deterrence works because leaders almost everywhere are horrified by the prospect of nuclear war; that the quest for strategic advantage and bellicose rhetoric is more likely to provoke than restrain adversaries; that crises between nuclear powers are riskier than supposed because of the difficulty of preventing undesired and unanticipated escalation; and that the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis – the most acute confrontation of the Cold War – was due perhaps as much to luck as political skill. Four of the five books under review advocate all or some of these lessons and offer evidence and reasoned argument in support of them.
The fifth book – Vorhees’ The Silent Guns – stands out for its downplaying risk in the missile crisis and dismissing altogether the possibility of the unwanted use of nuclear weapons. Its arguments are unconvincing and often little more than assertions not backed by any evidence and not informed by evidence to the contrary. I include the Vorhees book in my essay because it has been taken seriously elsewhere and gives voice and support to those in military and think tanks who pursue policies and goals that we now know to be dangerous and contrary to any country’s national interest. 3
All of these books – Vorhees included – take positions on questions of risk, uncertainty, and luck and use them to assess the wisdom of Cold War policies and strategies. They devote special attention to the Cuban missile crisis in this regard, although Sherwin, Kaplan, and Plokhy offer a broader narrative accounts of nuclear weapons, nuclear strategy, and nuclear crises during the Cold War. Pelopidas does so as well but organizes his book around conceptual categories. I review and evaluate their arguments and conclude with some thoughts about risk, uncertainty, and luck. Overall, I argue that we need a more elaborate framing of these concepts to develop a better understanding of their role in the Cold War and in conflicts more generally
Martin Sherwin died in October 2021. His research centered on nuclear questions. He was coauthor of a prize-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), and author of World Destroyed (1975), about Hiroshima and its legacies. He was a Lieutenant in the Navy during the missile crisis, an event that piqued his interest in the subject. Gambling with Armageddon was his final book and is a fitting legacy. Sherwin offers an account of Soviet-American relations and nuclear weapons from Hiroshima to the missile crisis. He argues that the drawbacks of nuclear weapons far outweigh any of their putative benefits. The atomic bomb helped to end World War II, but Japan would have surrendered soon in its absence. America’s short-lived nuclear monopoly offered no real political advantages, and the pursuit of the hydrogen bomb by both superpowers triggered off an arms race and exacerbated tensions. Mutual anxieties led to provocative behavior on both sides that culminated in the missile crisis. Sherwin recounts the crisis in detail, the diplomacy that resolved it, and the difficulty both leaders had in forestalling escalation.
That crisis offers important lessons about nuclear deterrence and crisis management. First and foremost, in the words of Martin Sherwin, is “that nuclear armaments create the perils they are deployed to prevent, but are of little use in resolving them.” 4 Drawing on Cuba and the 1973 Middle East crisis, Janice Stein and I made the same argument and explored the political and psychological reasons why deterrence prompts the very behavior it is designed to prevent. 5 Like other students of the crisis, Sherwin argues that the outcome of the crisis was due as much to mutual concessions than to coercion and that they were motivated by strong mutual desires to avoid war. 6
The most engaging part of Sherwin’s book is his documentation of yet another incident that could have led to nuclear escalation. On 27 October, at the height of the crisis, war seemed a real possibility to everyone. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) had been put on DEF-CON level 3, and its bombers flew off to the fail-safe points. Missile sites, at home and abroad, were brought up to a higher state of readiness. The 873rd Tactical Missile Squadron in Okinawa was mistakenly ordered to fire its 32 cruise missiles at its designated Soviet and Chinese targets. Each of the missiles carried a 1.1 megaton warhead. At 1500 Washington time, the Squadron received its daily coded message and was shocked to discover that it matched a pre-existing code. For the first time, the launch officer now had to open his sealed pouch. To his horror, Captain William Bassett discovered that the codes matched, requiring him to launch four of the cruise missiles. He and his fellow officers were perplexed because something like this could only happen if the air force was on DEF-CON level 1. In the absence of this highest of alerts, Captain Bassett told his fellow officers they needed to proceed with great caution. He requested confirmation from the Missile Operations Center (MOC), which he received. Many other officers would simply have followed their orders, and a junior launch officer announced that he was going to fire his missiles. Captain Bassett immediately dispatched two armed airman to shoot him unless he stood down or they received word that the U.S. had gone to DEF-CON 1. Checking back with the MOC, Bassett demanded verbal confirmation of the launch order from the major in charge. The major withdrew the launch order and they then received a “stand down” order in a follow-on coded message. 7
Sherwin attributes the resolution of the missile crisis in the first instance to the blockade. It avoided any direct use of force that, in his judgment, would have rapidly escalated to a wider war. It was also a product of luck, given the misunderstandings that divided the superpowers, their leaders’ exaggerated belief in their ability to control events, and the several incidents that could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. “In the final analysis,” he writes, “luck was also necessary to shield diplomacy from the several accidents and miscalculations that almost created a war.” 8 Sherwin suggests that regardless of how many wise decisions prudent leaders make, good fortune is crucial to emerging unscathed from a nuclear confrontation. Sherwin can be faulted for not telling us more about what he means by luck. Reading between the lines, I infer that he is thinking about outcomes over which leaders exercised no control, either because it was beyond their ability to do so, or their failure to grasp the necessity of trying to exercise control. “Lucky” outcomes are those that break your way, as was the case with the failure of any of the incidents cited to lead to more serious military escalation for both superpowers. I will return to this problem in my conclusion.
If Sherwin is largely, although by no means, entirely focused, on the American side of the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis, Serhii Plokhy tells us more on the Soviet side. Some of his claims are questionable, notably about Khrushchev’s motives, his belief that he had helped Kennedy win the election and was owed something in return, and his judgment that in substance the Soviets came off better. I will ignore his claims because this is not an article about the missile crisis but about nuclear weapons and their consequences. Here Plokhy echoes Sherwin in contending that leaders on both sides behaved irresponsibly in the run-up to the crisis, that both were fearful of war, exaggerated their control over their respective armed forces, were shocked by the incidents they learned about, and were lucky to have emerged successfully from the crisis.
Like Sherwin, Plokhy does not elaborate what he means by luck, although he, like Sherwin, describes in detail incidents that seemingly could easily have started a wider war. He provides more detail on the war-threatening encounter at sea described by Sherwin. The two authors tell the same story with each offering additional details. It is apparent that the U.S. Navy (USN) behaved more aggressively than Kennedy and McNamara expected, although both the President and Secretary of Defense had read and signed off on the orders Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George Anderson had prepared. These orders authorized the USN to take protective measures in advance against Soviet submarines.
The Soviet attack submarine, the B-59, was forced to surface in the Caribbean because of low batteries and rising temperatures. It had spent much of the day trying to elude American ships and planes conducting coordinated anti-submarine warfare. Once in sight it was strafed by an ASW S-2 Tracker aircraft that flew overhead at an altitude of only 10–15 m. Machine gun bullets hit the water in front of it and on either side. American destroyers surrounded the submarine, pointed their guns at it and tried to blind the crew on deck with searchlights. Captain Valentin G. Savitsky not unreasonably concluded that they were under attack. Perhaps war had broken out, he reasoned. His orders compelled him to fire his nuclear torpedo if attacked. Before leaving port, the chief of staff of the Northern Fleet had made it clear to his submarine commanders that if attack was imminent, they should fire first. 9
Savitsky and his fellow commanders made a pact among themselves that they would go down fighting rather than disgrace their country. Savitsky ordered an urgent dive and the readying and loading of their nuclear tipped torpedo. His descent into the submarine was blocked temporarily by the stocky signaling officer, who had become stuck in the conning tower. Also on board and on deck the B-59, was Captain Vassily A. Arkhipov, representing the brigade commander. He observed that the American destroyers were firing over, not at, their submarine and that one of the destroyers was trying to signal to them. He yelled at Savitsky to cancel the dive. 10
The U.S. Navy came within a hair’s breadth of starting a nuclear war because its dropping of grenades to make Soviet submarines surface, and subsequent harassment by destroyers and aircraft, made at least one Soviet Captain convinced that war had broken out and that he should retaliate before being sunk. It seems almost certain that this would have happened had Captain Arkhipov not been on deck and if the signaling officer had not blocked access to the conning tower. The submarine’s torpedo would have sunk at least one ship, if not more, and – with or without authorization from the White House – the USN would have attacked all the submarines they were tracking. There would have been a shooting war in the Caribbean involving nuclear weapons. It is anyone’s guess what would have happened next.
The missile crisis took place in the broader context of the Cold War and with it considerable theorizing within the government, academy, and think tanks about the ways in which nuclear weapon could advance national security. Fred Kaplan has produced the best history of American thinking about this question. It should be required reading for all presidential candidates as well as anyone interested in politics, national security, and bureaucratic politics.
Kaplan’s narrative begins with the Truman administration and ends with Donald Trump. The presidents run the gamut from those relatively uninterested in the details of nuclear plans (Ford and Clinton) to very interested (Kennedy, Carter). Some were largely supportive of the military and others highly critical. To varying degrees, most sought to influence, if not significantly change, the existing strategic plans. Without exception, they failed. The most important thread that runs through the narrative is the extent to which the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and its successor managed to derail, ignore, or finesse repeated presidential demands for more flexible options. The generals, motivated by their belief that once nuclear weapons were used, war would become an all-out slugging match, sought to make it such from the outset. So-called flexible options were a charade that may have existed on paper, but not in practice. Had the order for nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union and its forces ever been given, presidents would have had few choices about targets or the scale of attack.
Presidents were committed to doing what was in their power to avoid nuclear war, or any possibility of a nuclear exchange. Like the generals, they suspected, or believed, that nuclear use could not be kept limited but would quickly escalate and kill many millions of people, even hundreds of millions. 11 However presidents drew the opposite conclusion from most of the generals and admirals – who controlled these weapons – in that they would not launch them, and most definitely not if they were not attacked by the Soviet Union. Even then, they hoped that nuclear retaliation was not a foregone conclusion. Obama’s advisors pushed for an option that would have allowed a conventional response to a very limited and tactical use of Soviet nuclear weapons in Europe. Several presidents, including Eisenhower, Nixon, and Carter, told advisors that under no circumstances would they be responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent civilians. 12 Robert McNamara revealed that “in long private conversations with successive Presidents – Kennedy and Johnson – I recommended, without qualification, that they never initiate, under any circumstances, the use of nuclear weapons. I believe they accepted my recommendation.” 13 Later, George Bush and Brent Scowcroft decided they would not retaliate with nuclear weapons against Saddam Hussein even if he used chemical weapons against American forces. 14 French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn offered blanket rejections of using nuclear weapons. 15
Presidents and their advisors kept trying to square the circle by pushing the military to develop options that would produce less collateral damage. The initial Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) prepared when General Curtis LeMay was head of SAC would have killed several hundred million people who had the misfortune to live between the Elbe River and the South China Sea – and that estimate only included those destroyed by blast. The generals refused to calculate fatalities that would be caused by fire, radiation, lack of medical care, starvation, or any other side effects, on the grounds that they could not be measured with any precision. LeMay and his successors went in the opposite direction from presidents. They demanded and received more weapons. They then expanded their target list to justify more weapons in a cycle that led to an arsenal of over 80,000 nuclear weapons targeted against almost anything of military or economic value in communist countries. Needless to say, air force expectations of collateral damage rose rather than fell. Close examinations of the target deck revealed enormous overkill, with two or three weapons allocated to the same soft targets, and additional weapons targeted on supply chains for weapons production on the dubious assumption that the Soviets could quickly resume tank or missile production if they were not destroyed. Suggestions by presidential advisors not to target Eastern Europeans and the Chinese or non-military sites were met with stony silence or derision in the Pentagon. So too was the request to develop a plan focused on destroying infrastructure.
Fortunately, we do not know how the tension between political desires for restraint and military commitment to overkill would have been resolved in practice. If attacked, would a president really fail to retaliate even if it meant massive, destructive salvos? If a president insisted on a very selective strike would the military have provided him with an option? The other unknown is, of course, whether the Soviets would have ever initiated nuclear warfare. As with the Americans, the answer cannot be inferred from their war plans because political leaders, not generals, made decisions. Over the decades, the American military defended its belief in the massive use of force on the grounds that the Soviets would escalate if they did not. Now we have some evidence from the Soviet side to shed light on this question but unfortunately Kaplan does not make use of it to adjudicate conflicting claims about the possible consequences of limited attacks.
Presidents and generals agreed that the primary goal of nuclear weapons was deterrence. Kaplan’s 1983 book, Wizards of Armageddon, examined the emergence of the strategy of deterrence in the 1950s and 1960s. There have been major controversies since then, most notably about how much was enough to deter the Soviets and whether deterrence required counterforce capability. Kaplan maintains that the American arsenal always exceeded the requirements of deterrence, and very much so since the Kennedy administration’s buildup. Evidence from the Soviet side would have allowed him to make a more compelling argument to this effect because what in practice deters is always decided by the target state not the would-be deterrer. My research with Janice Stein suggests that Soviet leaders, like their American counterparts, were terrified by the prospect of nuclear war, never aspired to launch a first strike, and that minimal deterrence would have been quite robust. 16 If so, much of the U.S. military buildup was unnecessary, wasteful, and provocative. It is no exaggeration to say that the development of nuclear arsenals on both sides were a response to acute tensions between East and West. But after the Helsinki Accords of 1975, which settled the territorial status quo in central Europe, those weapons became the principal source of conflict and prolonged the Cold War. Kaplan is among those who believe that they came close to causing a war when Soviet military and political officials thought that the Able Archer exercise of 1983 might be a cover for launching a nuclear attack against their country. 17
Kaplan’s book is novel in its focus on debates over the size and nature of the nuclear arsenal over the span of the nuclear era. It drives home the point that military planners had no ethical concerns and that their acquisition of weapons was driven by inter-service rivalries in the first instance and later by the quest for organizational budgets and power. They do not appear to have made any serious effort to limit civilian casualties or to have expressed any concern of the rising numbers of people they would kill as their arsenal grew. This is not surprising given the directorship – more properly, near-ownership – of SAC by Curtis LeMay. This dictatorial, authoritarian, planner of the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the bombing of Japanese cities, demonstrated no concern for civilian casualties during World War II but seemed to welcome them as a means of destroying enemy morale. The bombing campaign of Japan is estimated at having killed upwards of 500,000 people. 18 LeMay brought his amorality to nuclear planning where it took hold and endured long after his retirement.
LeMay’s twin commitments to strike first and massively continues to characterize the US military approach to nuclear weapons. Consecutive presidents have for the most part been appalled by the Pentagon’s strategic plans and sought to change them but, as noted, without any real success. In part this is attributable to their unwillingness to lock horns in a serious way with the military. Of equal importance, presidents from Carter on were surrounded by principal advisors who often sided with the military. They supported war-fighting, larger arsenals, and opposed any declaration of no-first-use of nuclear weapons. Jimmy Carter was consistently undercut by hardline, anti-Soviet National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ronald Reagan met more opposition at Reykjavik from American officials than from Mikhail Gorbachev, and Barrack Obama’s advisors, led by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, almost all uniformly opposed his desire to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, proclaim a no-first-use declaratory policy, and make a public promise not to use nuclear weapons against countries that did not possess them. 19
Kaplan’s new book, as did his earlier Wizards of Armageddon, implicate civilians as much as it does the military. The national security establishment is dominated by officials who accept deterrence uncritically, but believe that it is always at risk in the absence of the latest war-fighting weaponry, and that credibility will be diminished and allies frightened by adopting a no-first-use policy. They have for the most part repeatedly favored military interventions that end up seriously damaging American interests. President Biden’s choices for Secretary of State and national security advisor are from central casting in this regard and little positive can be expected from them with regard to nuclear weapons and declaratory policy.
Benoît Pelopidas’ book is a good companion volume to Kaplan. It too asks if nuclear weapons promote security or generate conflict. Opponents of nuclear weapons condemn them as dangers to the peace and seek their elimination. Proponents insist that these weapons have maintained the peace since 1945. Pelopidas asks what we need to know to answer this question with any degree of confidence, and of equal importance, how we should frame our inquiry. His starting point is an assault on what he refers to as “the hegemonic discourse” that has normalized these weapons and all but delegitimized any questioning of their necessity. 20 It defends the arsenals of the great powers – some see them as stabilizing – but is highly critical of other states acquiring nuclear weapons. These leading nuclear weapons states direct attention away from their arsenals and raise alarm about those of less responsible states. In the West, the focus of concern is on Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea.
Pelopidas distinguishes horizontal from vertical proliferation. There has been surprisingly little horizontal proliferation since the end of the Cold War; some states with nuclear weapons or weapons programs gave them up. However, there has been considerable vertical proliferation as major powers like the U.S., U.K., France, Russia, and China are significantly improving the quality of their weapons and delivery systems. Some 143 states have never shown any interest in acquiring nuclear weapons. 21 Equally notable is the fact that none of the lesser powers have gone nuclear without the help of at least one of the major powers. 22 Proliferation would not have occurred, or would have been a longer and more costly process, in the absence of their complicity.
Pelopidas insists that proliferation or non-proliferation is at its core a political choice. He challenges three assumptions of the dominant, realist discourse. He denies that proliferation is predominantly determined by the capability to produce nuclear weapons. He rejects the assertion that a non-nuclear state must place itself under the protective umbrella of a nuclear state to guarantee its security. States with nuclear weapons have failed, as did the Soviet Union. Most without them have thrived. He further denies the claim that only some kind of profound shock can persuade a nuclear power to renounce its arsenal. Proliferation and non-proliferation are the result of political choices. Rejecting these realist claims creates intellectual and political space for a more considered approach to nuclear weapons. It also encourages political actors to consider the downside of nuclear weapons, which includes the very real possibility of accidents, misjudgments, or runaway escalation in a crisis. Non-nuclear states have as much interest in security and reducing their vulnerability as nuclear-armed states, and are as vulnerable to the consequences of nuclear accidents or war. Pelopidas maintains they should have a place at any international table at which proliferation or arms control is discussed. 23
In his conclusion, Pelopidas offers a framework for debate and choice. It includes a list of the putative advantages and dangers of nuclear arsenals. He explores the inconsistencies between policies and their justifications and to encourage readers and policymakers to develop more appropriate justifications and policies. He describes two possible “utopias,” not to advocate either, but to offer them as ideal types to help frame more serious analysis of current policies and feasible choices and a dialogue between those in favor of and opposed to nuclear weapons. He also urges military planners, political leaders and analysts to “desacralize nuclear weapons without conventionalizing them.” 24 This involves identifying what kinds of targets, that could not be destroyed by conventional weapons, are needed to make deterrence robust. Such an exercise would inevitably encourage a reduction in nuclear targeting and result in many fewer dead civilians in case of war.
In the Anglosphere and Francosphere the two camps tend to stereotype and talk past each other. One possible vehicle for dialogue and clearer thinking is the concept of risk – which is central to nuclear weapons – and any assessment of their benefits and costs. Pelopidas argues that risk has been poorly conceptualized. It is generally restricted to estimates of the likelihood of war and excludes the cost of maintaining nuclear arsenals. The latter should be focused on the likelihood of nuclear accidents and inadvertent, misguided, unauthorized use of these weapons. Pelopidas has written extensively elsewhere about these dangers, and has ferreted out previously unavailable information about accidents and the near-use of weapons in acute crises. 25 His book will soon appear in an English language edition.
Where does this leave us? I want to offer two conclusions that draw on these books and my own research. The first is a theoretical question, one that may seem recherché but has profound substantive implications. It has to do with risk. Thomas Schelling is famous for the concept of the risk that leaves something to chance. 26 States can “win” crisis confrontations by showing willingness to take greater risk. Schelling acknowledges that risk is difficult to assess and builds his argument on that reality. Escalation beyond some point involves risks that are difficult to calculate, in large part, in his view, because they depend on how the other side will respond. He frames escalation as a game of repetitive moves and introduces a chess analogy to illustrate his argument.
Schelling’s approach – and that of many policymakers and strategists – rests on largely unarticulated and highly questionable assumptions. He argued that rough assessments of risk can be made with some degree of certainty. Leaders and their adversaries, moreover, will more or less share assessments of the point at which they leave the realm of readily calculated risk for a gray zone of greater uncertainty. There is a fundamental conceptual problem here. A risk that leaves something to chance conflates risk and uncertainty, unless, of course, we can identify with some precision just what is left to chance. Schelling does not engage this question – so obviously central to his formulation – because he wants to have it both ways. He wants to introduce uncertainty into the equation, but what we might call “controlled uncertainty” that is bounded and its nature largely understood by actors. This is an oxymoron and indicative of Schelling’s refusal to accord uncertainty any meaningful role by fundamentally and erroneously treating it as an extension of risk. To acknowledge uncertainty and its important role in crisis would undercut the relevance of rational models. There is also a great substantive failing here as well because Schelling reduces uncertainty to lack of advance knowledge of how another side will respond to your next “move” in the crisis game. He is oblivious to the more fundamental causes of uncertainty arising from lack of understanding and loss of control.
Our authors indicate the absurdity – and the danger – of these illusions. 27 Drawing on the missile crisis as their prime example, they make it clear that neither Kennedy and his advisors nor Khrushchev and his were very good at estimating risks at any level of interaction. Khrushchev seriously miscalculated Kennedy’s response to his secret missile deployment, Kennedy miscalculated the risks of the blockade – although correctly estimated that it was much less risky than direct military action – and at the height of the crisis, both leaders fortunately exaggerated the other’s willingness to use force. The first miscalculation produced the crisis, the second raised the possibility of inadvertent and runaway escalation, and the third produced the mutual concessions that resolved the crisis. Kennedy and Khrushchev erred in their risk assessment because they failed to understand the political constraints under which the other operated. They did consider the possibility of military escalation, but thought it would arise – as Schelling did in his post-crisis analysis – from the other’s calculated response to their initiatives, not to accidents and the violation of orders by their subordinates.
Kennedy and Khrushchev, their advisors, and later, Schelling, were to varying degrees insensitive to the more serious risk of one or both sides to loss of control to their own military. As we now know, the shoot-down of the American U-2 spy plane by a Soviet air defense battery was due to the blatant violation of Khrushchev and Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky’s orders not to fire on American aircraft unless they attacked. 28 Sherwin and Plokhy document other incidents – described above – where the American navy’s behavior in the Caribbean and inexplicable launch orders to an American missile unit in Taiwan almost led to the firing of a nuclear-tipped torpedo and missiles.
For the most part, the several authors reviewed associate luck with control; luck becomes necessary when leaders lose control and, Sherwin for one, equates control with good leadership. The missile crisis suggests that good leadership cannot guarantee control. Pelopidas urges us to differentiate sharply between control and luck, and not to reduce lucky cases to controlled cases. 29 There is strong support for this claim. Research on accidents in complex systems like nuclear power plants, hospitals, and aircraft, indicate that accidents are sometimes attributable to controls. In their efforts to control for known causes of failure, those who have engineered these systems have ignored other possible causes of failure – usually ones that have not imagined – and more likely by efforts to minimize or prevent known ones. 30 This problem arguably exists with nuclear weapons and their control in crisis situations. 31 We need to separate control and luck in our minds and become sensitive to other sources of what we call bad luck.
The second conclusion is directly substantive and concerns the putative benefits of nuclear arsenals. Realists over the course of the last 70 years have contended that these weapons are the ultimate source of security. Nobody would dare attack a nuclear power and risk total destruction unless they thought their adversary lacked the will to respond. The credibility question has dominated the American strategic discourse since 1945, and here too Schelling played a major role by suggesting that all commitments are linked and that if you fail to defend any one of them all of them become questionable. 32 The fixation on credibility arose from the belief that if a nuclear war ever happened it would be the result of a conscious decision by an adversary. This focus was entirely misplaced. We know today that Soviet leaders feared nuclear war as much as their American counterparts and that none of them ever aspired to invade Western Europe or attack the U.S., although their respective military’s produced all kinds of offensive war plans. We also know that Soviet leaders never doubted American credibility. Quite the reverse, they thought Americans reckless, even trigger-happy. 33 Khrushchev insisted on a secret missile deployment because, he told the Castro brothers, if he deployed them openly, as they suggested, Kennedy would send out the navy to stop or even sink the ships transporting them. 34
Nuclear deterrence is a deeply problematic strategy. These several studies of the Cuban missile crisis, and my book with Janice Stein on the subject, indicate that nuclear deterrence was more provocative than restraining. Its role in provoking the Cuban missile crisis is well-documented and so too is its effect in prolonging the Cold War. 35 As the arms race ratcheted up, and each superpower felt more insecure in contemplating a first strike by the other, the more insecure they felt and the more weapons they developed and deployed. Some of this insecurity was justified, but much of it rested on the false assumptions that the other side would attack if it believed it had a definitive advantage or might be coming close to having such an advantage. Analysts also invariably resorted to worst-case analysis. American war-gamers assumed that the Soviets would strike on some Sunday morning when Americans were hungover and their systems were at a low state of readiness and that all Soviet delivery systems would work perfectly and warheads land right on target. 36
All the authors emphasize the downside of deterrence. Benoît Pelopidas augments this argument by stressing the potential of nuclear accidents in peacetime and the ever-present possibility of launching missiles in response to erroneous reports of a massive incoming attack. The U.S. and the Soviet Union had close encounters with both kinds of problems. Pelopidas stresses how the nuclear “debate” has been largely one-sided because it has been framed in a way by advocates of these weapons that all but excludes the possibility of an accident or unauthorized launch. The author of this review remembers his encounter in the early 1980s with air force generals who not only denied any vulnerability in their command and control procedures but also were angry with him for even posing the question. 37
The final book under review, by Theodore Voorhees, cuts against the grain. He contends that the Cuban missile crisis is an event to celebrate because it provides “a more reassuring explanation for the striking degree of mutual self-restraint that the key actors displayed on that occasion.” The Cold War more generally proved to be “a surprisingly safe period to be alive” for “it was a time when nuclear weapons were a shared monopoly of the world’s two superpowers.” American and Soviet leaders “recognized that the presence of thousands of these devastating weapons on both sides of the battlefield not only rendered the option of launching a nuclear attack essentially unthinkable, it also effectively prevented the superpowers from engaging even in low-level gunfire with conventional weapons, as that might escalate to the forbidden outcome of a nuclear exchange.” 38
In his account of the Cuban missile and Berlin crises of 1961–1962 Voorhees offers a more upbeat analysis than almost anybody else except for early accounts by Kennedy administration officials like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Theodore Sorensen, and Roger Hilsman, all committed to making their boss look good. 39 Voorhees contends that all the threats on both sides were mere posturing and that peace was never threatened. As noted, this review is not about the Cuban missile or Berlin crises, and addresses them only so far as they say something about nuclear weapons, their role in the Cold War, and the risks they entailed. I find Voorhees’ account of these two crises bizarre, poorly argued, and pollyannaish to the extreme.
As for the risk of war, Voorhees marshals considerable evidence to show the two superpower leaders regarded nuclear war with utter horror and did what they could in both the Berlin and Cuban crises to prevent any kind of military exchange. His assessment in this regard does not differ in any significant way from those of the other authors reviewed. There is a general consensus, and has been for some time, that both superpower leaders considered war between them – even a conventional war – the worst thing that could possibly happen. However, premeditated attack was on the table on the American side, where the hawks pushed for airstrikes against the Soviet missiles in Cuba, followed up by an invasion. Kennedy came reasonably close to deciding in favor of it, and members of the ExComm agreed that if he had had to make a decision on the first day they met it would almost certainly have been for an air strike. 40 We might also consider the counterfactual of Richard Nixon having been elected president in 1960, as he almost was. It is by no means evident that he would have exercised the same degree of restraint as Kennedy. 41
Voorhees is well-versed with the several incidents described by Sherwin, Kaplan, Plokhy, any of which, in their opinion, could have triggered the use of nuclear weapons. Whether such a conflict would have escalated is anybody’s guess and mine is that it would have been difficult to have avoided further escalation. Fortunately, we are in the realm of speculation here, as the Americans did not invade Cuba and thereby confront Soviet forces armed with nuclear-tipped short-range missiles, U.S. naval officers in Taiwan exercised constraint when they received their launch order, as did Soviet submarine captains in the face of what they initially thought were attacks against them by U.S. navy ships and planes.
In contrast to Sherwin, Kaplan, and Plokhy, Voorhees argues that there was no real risk of a violent encounter or of runaway escalation in the aftermath of an accidental or unauthorized launch of nuclear weapons. Part of his argument appears to rest on the dedication of Kennedy and Khrushchev to avoid war. But it is not at all clear how that dedication – unknown to local military actors on either side – had any bearing on what happened or could have happened. It certainly did not stop Admiral Anderson from taking the most permissive interpretation of his orders when it came to Soviet submarines. Voorhees makes the questionable claim that because we emerged successfully from both the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, and that several incidents we know of did not lead to war, the chance of war was slight. I find this akin to saying that if a slow middle-aged man and a younger one with a very bad back ran across a busy highway at rush hour twice, and did not get hit by cars, even though a couple come close, therefore the risk of crossing is very low.
The only real argument Voorhees makes against a violent encounter in Berlin, Cuba, at sea or via a launch pad, is the difficulty and cost to those who might consider pulling a trigger or pushing a button. He asks how could a diesel submarine surrounded, trapped, hounded, denied freedom of maneuver, and running out of air needed for locomotion and breathing have located and picked a target? How could its captain maneuver his vessel to take aim without courting a rain of destruction? How could the nuclear torpedo have been set to hit the enemy without also destroying the submarine and its crew?” In his judgment, these “undeniable top-of-mind problems surely help to underscore the essential inevitability of the actual outcome.” 42
Voorhees exaggerates the problems confronted by the submarine. Once submerged, it could have maneuvered because it was not under attack, and could have launched a torpedo with a 20 kiloton warhead. Its explosion – assuming the torpedo did not malfunction – would have created a wave, possibly 90 feet in height, that would have sunk or severely damaged elements of the American fleet. 43 Any launch would have been picked up almost immediately by the USN and the Soviet submarine destroyed. But the captains had made a pact not to dishonor their country and so Captain Savitsky would not necessarily have been deterred by the prospect of death. Even if we recognize the difficulties Captain Savitsky faced, such constraints did not exist at the American cruise missile base in Taiwan, or perhaps in Cuba, where the Soviet regiment may well have felt that launching their Luna missiles was the only way they might survive.
Voorhees, as noted, has a fallback argument: that the launch of one or a few weapons would not have triggered escalation because of the mutual commitments of Kennedy and Khrushchev to avoid it. He cites Len Scott to the effect that if the launch was considered accidental there would be no retaliation and offers additional evidence of Kennedy’s desire to avoid nuclear war. 44 Once again, Voorhees misses the point, and also misrepresents Scott. 45 He assumes that any decision to escalate would be made by the two leaders, and would not be made, given their strong desires to preserve the peace. However, any nuclear incident that could provoke escalation would have been the result of lower-level decisions. As Scott Sagan observes: "President Kennedy may well have been prudent. He did not, however, have unchallenged final control over U.S. nuclear weapons.” 46 So too, I believe, would the first stages of escalation in the form of tit-for-tat responses. By the time either national leader got wind of what was happening their choices might have been limited and also their ability to prevent any further use of nuclear weapons.
Voorhees’s book is a classic instance of denial. It gives the impression of being exhaustively researched and reasonable. But it denies “luck” in nuclear crises and insists that we live in the best of all worlds. The few counterfactuals that are offered in support – noted above – are questionable and fail to consider other alternatives or make any real assessment of their relatively feasibility.
Four of the five authors make a compelling case that nuclear weapons have been more of a curse than a blessing: they argue that nuclear weapons helped to provoke serious crises and that luck was necessary to prevent military escalation. The latter was especially the case in the Cuban missile crisis. Their arguments are backed by good evidence and are compelling. Scholars and policymakers would be well-advised to take them seriously. This conclusion points to a broader one: the need for providing democratic accountability for nuclear weapons, their deployments, and possible uses. Sherwin shows how Kennedy lied to the American public and took unnecessary risks. 47 Nuclear planners in turn misled the President and reduced the choices open to him. Both presidents and planners continue to create an illusion of consensus and conspire, despite tensions between them, to keep nuclear questions from public or even congressional scrutiny. There is a striking parallel here to efforts of neoliberals to insulate economic institutions and decisions from democratic control. 48 It has had disastrous consequences for the well-being of ordinary people, and it could have the same effect in the nuclear sphere.
In conclusion, I turn to the question of luck than runs through all these books but is not really conceptualized in any of them. To be fair, Pelopidas has written about it elsewhere. 49
Luck is closely connected to risk, and as noted earlier, refers in the first instance to outcomes over which actors have no control. The classic example is the toss of the dice. If the dice are fair, and we make a very large number of tosses, we can predict that each of the six numbers will come up roughly as often as the others. We can say nothing about an individual toss or a few of them. They are matters of luck. So luck exists even in domains where we can measure risk with any precision. Luck is more important in the realm of uncertainty, encounters in which we have no base rates and perhaps only uncertain ideas of causation.
Much of international relations is characterized by uncertainty. Wars are singular events that are highly context dependent and their frequency has declined over the centuries. We cannot establish base rates because what we call wars are not comparable “cases” that are independent of one another. Moreover, we have no data set that includes cases of “no war,” that is where underlying conditions were present but war did not occur in the absence of a catalyst. 50 Without base rates the best we can do is to conduct counterfactual probing. How much do we have to change to get a different outcome – military escalation of some kind in the case of Cuba for example? The more minimal and credible changes that lead to such an outcome, the more likely such an outcome becomes. This is the unspoken assumption of the Sherwin, Kaplan, Plokhy, and Pelopidas books. The more we have to change the more embedded features of the context (e.g. organizational structures, weapons, alliance structures) or the further back in time we have to go to bring about minimal changes that will have longer-term effects, the less likely an alternative outcome becomes. 51
Vorhees, our outlier, argues that war would have to result from a decision by a leader to wage it, and did not occur because Kennedy and Khrushchev were committed to keeping the peace. He would probably insist that we would have to do away with nuclear weapons, and perhaps even memories of World War II, to find Soviet and American leaders willing to go to war. In this analysis, there is no luck involved in the peaceful resolution of the missile crisis. Counterfactual analysis not only helps us explore the contingency of events, it also requires analysts to be explicit about the assumptions underlying their analysis and that prompt their invocation – or not – of luck. We in turn make our own assessments of their assumptions and can use them to formulate independent estimates of luck.
The Cuban missile crisis suggest that many analysts, including some of our authors, invoke luck – good or bad – to explain outcomes whose causes seem remote or complex and not under the control of actors. 52 Cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that people consistently underestimate the role of luck. 53 This is evident in all the early accounts by analysts who for the most part treated the confrontation as a rational encounter in which greater resolve and military capability determined the outcome. 54 By contrast, many officials, at least on the American side, considered themselves lucky. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis President Kennedy told his aide Theodore Sorensen that he thought the odds of the Soviets going to war at the time had been “somewhere between one out of three and even. Our escape seems awesome.” 55 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy thought this a reasonable estimate of the risks. 56 Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze were insistent that the President had greatly exaggerated the prospect of war. 57 More information has become available in the six decades since the crisis and the several books add to our empirical base. Four of these five books also provide a much-needed corrective to a strategic literature still dominated by rational models that assume that risk is measurable and that luck plays little or no role in avoiding war.
We do not have base rates for nuclear crises and cold wars. In their absence, there is no way of calculating risk and hence, luck in any meaningful way. We can make gross generalizations, for example, that war or runaway escalation is less likely when the strategic forces of adversarial states is at its day-to-day level of readiness as opposed to a much higher alert level during an acute crisis. But nothing more. This difference between strategic models and strategic reality is nicely captured by Frank Knight, who back in 1921 distinguished risk from uncertainty. The former describes situations where risk is quantifiable because of known base rates and those of uncertainty, where it is not. Unlike many economists, Knight was forthright in acknowledging the essential unpredictability of many kinds of events. 58 Economists pretend that most of the situations they model are amenable to risk analysis, when in fact, they are characterized by uncertainty. This kind of analysis has carried over to strategy – remember, Schelling was an economist – where situations our authors have documented were in the realm of uncertainty have been treated as if they were in the domain of risk. Such analysis is not only flawed, but combined with the other unwarranted and over-optimistic assumptions noted earlier, make successful crisis management less rather than more likely because of the false expectations it encourages. 59 The same holds true, Pelopidas maintains, for the management of nuclear forces on a daily basis.
This problem is made worse by the tendency to mistakenly predict future outcomes on the basis of previous ones, and faulty understanding of the degree to which agents have control over these outcomes. 60 The conventional wisdom long assumed, as noted, that Kennedy “won” the missile crisis because of his willingness to take risks – actions made more credible and effective by his country’s conventional and strategic military advantage. This created the expectation of further successes, and lead in short order to intervention in Vietnam. The more extreme someone’s good fortune – say scoring three goals in a football game – the less likely it is to be repeated, but the more people, including the actors involved, expect it to reoccur. 61 Thus, judgments made on the basis of woefully incomplete information, and that are often highly motivated, exercise a deep hold over policymakers and analysts. They constitute the frame of reference for assessing future problems and responses to them. When this happens, analysis is less than helpful, and success may involve more luck than it otherwise would have. These several books therefore are suggestive of lessons than go far beyond the problem of nuclear weapons and international crisis.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ken Booth and reviewers for their thoughtful and helpful comments and criticisms.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.