Behind the Scenes of Détente, or the Schlesinger Doctrine
Dialogue without illusions
The dialogue between the Russian leadership and D. Trump has given rise to excessive hope among some of our compatriots for the normalization of Russian-American relations in the long term, not as naive as it was during the first presidential term of the current overseas leader, but still.
Normalization beyond the immediate framework was indeed possible, but thirty years ago. And it fully met the geopolitical interests of the United States only under the condition of non-expansion of NATO to the east, which was discussed in my recent article “Kennan as an unheard prophet, or Why Trump was late.”
But then the White House became dizzy with success, and he failed to use his victory in the Cold War rationally.
In the current conditions, the inertia of more than half a century of confrontation and the complex of problems it has generated – old ones, associated with the struggle for resources and the cheap labor market – are unlikely to be overcome in the long term.
Why did the nineties provide a unique opportunity to build stable relations? Because in other decades, the Cold War-accumulated trend toward confrontation persisted even with the maximum warming of relations between the Kremlin and the White House after the signing of the SALT-1 treaty and the establishment of good personal contacts between L.I. Brezhnev and R. Nixon, which I wrote about, see: "SALT-1: a stable balance of fear."
During these same hours, perhaps even far from reporters and their cameras, Kissinger and Schlesinger formulated the principles of a new doctrine that made a new round of the arms race inevitable.
It is important to understand that the détente that became a symbol of the seventies became possible after the USSR achieved military parity with the USA, literally forcing the White House to conduct an equal dialogue with us. Even the Cuban Missile Crisis cannot yet be considered as such.
However, parity was by no means identical to the US readiness to recognize it as an integral part of Soviet-American relations in the long term.
And when the ink on the document signed above was still wet, the United States took a step toward a new round of the arms race, which was reflected in the Schlesinger Doctrine. Let's talk.
Towards parity
Let's start with parity. The path to it was not easy for the USSR, and the question is still relevant: how necessary is it? The bet on an asymmetric nuclear strike, which guarantees the destruction of critical military and civilian infrastructure in the United States, neutralized the risk of World War III.
Shouldn’t Moscow have taken the intensive path of building up its nuclear arsenal rather than the extensive one, based on the principle: less is more?
In this case, the country's leadership could redistribute part of the budget funds to the production of high-quality consumer goods - this became a problem in the late USSR - and balance the policy in the agricultural sector, that is, follow the path once proposed by G.M. Malenkov.
But the Kremlin chose a different strategy, allowing itself to be drawn into an arms race and achieving parity at too high a price, which gave rise to a servility towards the West in part of the late Soviet urbanized society – one of its reflections in cinema: the scene with the black marketeer from “The Most Charming and Attractive.”
The visible peak of parity was the aerospace system "Energia" - "Buran", which, on the one hand, evoked admiration for the genius of Soviet engineering and design thought and the production capacity of a great country, and on the other hand, testified to the unprofitable spending of budget funds and the dead-end path of development of cosmonautics from the point of view of the efficiency of using its achievements.
A symbol of the military-scientific and industrial power of the USSR and, at the same time, the unprofitable expenditure of budget funds
In a sense, Energia-Buran demonstrated a crisis – both in terms of the set of relevant competencies and in terms of understanding the tasks facing the country – of the aging party nomenclature, which we also recently discussed in the article “The Death of K. U. Chernenko. An Unnoticed Date, or At the Turn of the Epochs.”
After all, according to legend, the much more economical aerospace system "Spiral" was buried by the then Minister of Defense, Marshal A.A. Grechko.
And yet Moscow was satisfied with the parity achieved with the United States and the SALT-1 treaty signed after difficult negotiations, Washington was not, and... however, let's take a small step back.
The US in Search of Asymmetry
Even before parity was achieved, at the very beginning of the sixties, American planners assumed the following figures for losses that the Soviet Union, China and the countries of the socialist camp would suffer in the event of a Third World War following a nuclear strike on their military-industrial facilities. Between 360 and 525 million people were to die, mostly civilians.
At that time, the Soviet Union could not inflict equal losses on its opponents, and relations with China were rapidly deteriorating. The ratio of forces, according to the assessment of R. McNamara, who headed the Defense Department in the Kennedy administration, was 17 to 1, that is, 5000 American nuclear weapons against 300 of ours.
Note: I wrote above about an asymmetric response, implying the qualitative development of weapons that would allow us to inflict maximum damage on the United States. In the early sixties, the USSR did not have such capabilities. In 1959, the first George Washington-class SSBN entered service with the US Navy, and our response – the long-range anti-submarine aircraft Tu-142 – was accepted into service only in the year of the signing of SALT-1.
SSBN "George Washington"
And yet, even in a situation of significant superiority, the United States, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, doubted its guaranteed victory and transformed its strategy for using nuclear weapons. weapons from the doctrine of "massive retaliation" to deterring the enemy and preventing a nuclear war. McNamara wrote about the reasons for this transformation - I have cited a relevant excerpt from his memoirs in the article "The Pentagon's Wisest Chief and His Morons".
To the previous photo: and our worthy, albeit stretched out in time, answer – Tu-142
In turn, Nixon and Secretary of State G. Kissinger had to work in new conditions, determined in the international arena by three markers. The first was negative for the USA – the strategic defeat in Vietnam; the second, on the contrary, became a political triumph, first of all for Kissinger – the establishment of relations with the PRC, Nixon’s visit there and historical meeting with Mao; the third, in fact, was parity with the USSR, the consequence of which was detente, expressed in the Soyuz-Apollo mission, etc.
However, in the quiet of their offices, Kissinger and Nixon's Defense Department chief J. Schlesinger—both of whom, according to journalist L. King, disliked each other—were working on a document that was formalized on January 17, 1974, as National Security Decision Memorandum 242, commonly known as the Schlesinger Doctrine.
And yet it's a race
The Pentagon was counting on the development and subsequent use in the event of a nuclear war of high-precision weapons capable of destroying military-political facilities and their leadership in order to minimize the USSR’s ability to launch a retaliatory strike, and this was supposed to be done without a significant increase in the number of carriers, that is, from a formal legal point of view, without going beyond the framework of SALT-1.
The historic moment of signing SALT-1. I wonder what, say, A.N. Kosygin and W. Rogers were thinking about at that moment?
At the same time, Schlesinger had a negative attitude towards the concept of a massive nuclear strike, not considering it effective. It is not for nothing that in the West the doctrine he developed was called the doctrine of "selective strikes". Schlesinger himself laconically explained the formulation of its provisions by the need to find a third way between suicide and capitulation.
Regarding capitulation: the US periodically cut defense spending, which Schlesinger actively protested, especially against the backdrop of the growing military potential of the USSR, as well as the prospect of an increase in the number of nuclear powers.
An important detail: within the framework of the doctrine being formulated, Schlesinger relied on the already existing superiority of the United States in the field of electronics, which, as subsequent events related to the arms race showed, was the right step – our lag in this area had already become apparent in the second half of the sixties.
It is interesting that half a century before Trump, Schlesinger advocated increasing the military spending of the members of the North Atlantic Alliance to 5% of their GNP, because he considered a conflict between the Warsaw Pact and NATO countries to be quite real.
The American leadership was aware that the Soviet Union was in full swing testing new ICBMs and SLBMs with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). In December 1975, the Strategic Missile Forces three combat missile systems (BMCS) with intercontinental missiles capable of carrying MIRVs are accepted at once. And in March 1976, the first mobile ground missile system RSD-10 "Pioneer" is accepted into service
– writes military expert S. Kolesnikov.All this made Brussels nervous, especially Germany, since NATO countries would become targets for Soviet missiles in the event of a nuclear war without the ability to neutralize them.
Schlesinger's Arguments, or the Doctrine with Holes
However, I think that the security of Europe was secondary for Schlesinger; the main thing for him was to ensure the dominance of the United States on the world stage, by means of which it would be possible either to prevent the Third World War by forcing Moscow to accept Washington's conditions in the event of a confrontation, or to force the USSR to peace in the American style by a series of pinpoint strikes with short- and medium-range missiles, without getting drawn into a full-scale nuclear war.
Political scientist A. V. Fenenko:
The document proposed four options for nuclear strikes:
1) demonstration strike: defeat of several
selective targets to demonstrate to the enemy readiness to use nuclear weapons;
2) counterelite strike: destruction of military-political
the country's leadership before it makes a decision to launch a retaliatory counterattack
stroke;
3) counter-force strike: destruction of launchers
enemy;
4) counter-value (counter-city strike): defeat of enemy cities,
which could also be carried out both in a total and in a limited manner
option.
1) demonstration strike: defeat of several
selective targets to demonstrate to the enemy readiness to use nuclear weapons;
2) counterelite strike: destruction of military-political
the country's leadership before it makes a decision to launch a retaliatory counterattack
stroke;
3) counter-force strike: destruction of launchers
enemy;
4) counter-value (counter-city strike): defeat of enemy cities,
which could also be carried out both in a total and in a limited manner
option.
Within the framework of this concept, the practical implementation of the first point is not very clear, since a counterattack of retaliation on our part after a demonstration attack by the enemy is obvious.
I would also like to draw attention to the psychological aspect of the problem, which, as it seems to me, was not taken into account by Schlesinger to the proper extent. Information about the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba caused hysteria in the USA. Nothing similar was observed in the USSR after the deployment of American Jupiters in Incirlik, Turkey.
Yes, our society was relatively closed, and citizens simply, apparently, did not know about the missiles near the borders of the USSR. But even if this had been reported on the program "Vremya", it is unlikely that the reaction of the Soviet people would have been akin to the American one, although the leadership expressed concern.
Fear Factor, or A Couple of Quotes from Stephen King
Americans were indeed afraid of nuclear war, as S. King wrote. The quote is lengthy, but it is worth it:
My first experience of horror—real horror, not encounters with demons or ghosts living in my imagination—was on an October day in 1957. I had just turned ten. And, as expected, I was in a movie theater—the Stratford Theater in downtown Stratford, Connecticut.
The Saturday afternoon when I experienced genuine terror was Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. And just as the aliens are preparing to attack the Capitol in the last part of the film, the film stopped. The screen went black. The theater was packed with children, but, strangely enough, everyone was quiet. If you go back to your younger days, you will remember that a crowd of kids has many ways of expressing their irritation when a movie is interrupted or starts late: rhythmic clapping; the great cry of the childish tribe, “We want a movie! We want a movie! We want a movie!”; candy boxes flying at the screen; popcorn tubes; and who knows what else. If anyone has a popper in his pocket from the Fourth of July, he will take it out, show it to his friends for approval and admiration, and then light it and throw it to the ceiling.
But nothing like that happened that October day. And the film didn't break - they just turned off the projector. And then something unheard of happened: the lights came on in the hall. We sat there, looking around and blinking from the bright light, like moles.
The manager came onto the stage and raised his hand, asking for silence, a completely unnecessary gesture.
We sat on chairs like mannequins and looked at the manager. He looked worried and sickly - or maybe the lighting was to blame. We wondered what kind of disaster had caused him to stop the film at its most tense moment, but then the manager spoke up, and the trembling in his voice confused us even more.
"I want to tell you," he began, "that the Russians have launched a space satellite into orbit around the Earth. They called it... 'sputnik.'
The announcement was met with absolute, deathly silence. A theater full of kids with ponytails and hedgehogs, in jeans and skirts, with Captain Midnight rings, kids who had just discovered Chuck Berry and Little Richards and listened to New York radio stations in the evenings with such bated breath as if they were signals from another planet.
We grew up on Captain Video and Terry and the Pirates. We watched Casey throw around a bunch of Asians like bowling pins in the comics. We watched Richard Carlson catch dirty Communist spies by the thousands in I Led a Triple Life. We paid a quarter to see Hugh Marlowe in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and got this killer freebie news.
I remember very clearly: the terrible, dead silence of the cinema hall was suddenly broken by a lonely cry; I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl, the voice was full of tears and frightened anger: “Come on, show the movie, liar!”
The Saturday afternoon when I experienced genuine terror was Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. And just as the aliens are preparing to attack the Capitol in the last part of the film, the film stopped. The screen went black. The theater was packed with children, but, strangely enough, everyone was quiet. If you go back to your younger days, you will remember that a crowd of kids has many ways of expressing their irritation when a movie is interrupted or starts late: rhythmic clapping; the great cry of the childish tribe, “We want a movie! We want a movie! We want a movie!”; candy boxes flying at the screen; popcorn tubes; and who knows what else. If anyone has a popper in his pocket from the Fourth of July, he will take it out, show it to his friends for approval and admiration, and then light it and throw it to the ceiling.
But nothing like that happened that October day. And the film didn't break - they just turned off the projector. And then something unheard of happened: the lights came on in the hall. We sat there, looking around and blinking from the bright light, like moles.
The manager came onto the stage and raised his hand, asking for silence, a completely unnecessary gesture.
We sat on chairs like mannequins and looked at the manager. He looked worried and sickly - or maybe the lighting was to blame. We wondered what kind of disaster had caused him to stop the film at its most tense moment, but then the manager spoke up, and the trembling in his voice confused us even more.
"I want to tell you," he began, "that the Russians have launched a space satellite into orbit around the Earth. They called it... 'sputnik.'
The announcement was met with absolute, deathly silence. A theater full of kids with ponytails and hedgehogs, in jeans and skirts, with Captain Midnight rings, kids who had just discovered Chuck Berry and Little Richards and listened to New York radio stations in the evenings with such bated breath as if they were signals from another planet.
We grew up on Captain Video and Terry and the Pirates. We watched Casey throw around a bunch of Asians like bowling pins in the comics. We watched Richard Carlson catch dirty Communist spies by the thousands in I Led a Triple Life. We paid a quarter to see Hugh Marlowe in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and got this killer freebie news.
I remember very clearly: the terrible, dead silence of the cinema hall was suddenly broken by a lonely cry; I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl, the voice was full of tears and frightened anger: “Come on, show the movie, liar!”
And here is how the acknowledged king of horror himself explains such a reaction:
We, the children of war, were fertile ground for the seeds of terror; we grew up in a strange, almost circus-like atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national pride. We were told that we were the greatest nation on Earth, and that any bandit from behind the Iron Curtain who tried to attack us in the great saloon of foreign policy would find out who had the fastest gun in the West. But we were also constantly reminded what supplies to keep in the nuclear shelters, and how long to stay there after we won the war. We had more food than any people in history, but the milk we grew up with was laced with strontium-90 from the nuclear tests.
King brilliantly conveyed the atmosphere of fear of nuclear war that reigned in the United States.
There were no such sentiments in the post-war USSR, and they could not have been experienced by the true generation of victors in World War II.
In short, any risk of a retaliatory strike—and the Schlesinger Doctrine did not even mitigate it—excluded for the United States the possibility of a nuclear conflict with the USSR on a limited scale.
For the White House, there was only one path to victory, given its disagreement with the coexistence of two systems with guaranteed parity: to make a retaliatory strike from the USSR impossible.
On a new round
And the US, amid talk of detente, continued its escalation course, which Brezhnev had rightly criticized at the diplomatic level in 1974. The following year, Schlesinger was dismissed, but his doctrine did not sink into oblivion.
J. Schlesinger
By early 1976, the topic of "the Soviet Union's military buildup" and "the need to restore U.S. military superiority" was increasingly replacing the topic of detente and arms control from the administration's lexicon, writes Lieutenant General V. P. Starodubov. The White House and the Pentagon were increasing pressure on Congress, demanding support for new military programs. In the wake of growing anti-detente, Congress, for the first time in five years, did not reduce the appropriations requested by the military. On February 10, 1976, the U.S. President approved the Defense Department budget for the next fiscal year in the amount of $90,5 billion.
The challenge was thrown down, and the USSR, represented by the aging technocrat Marshal D. F. Ustinov, who headed the Ministry of Defense in the same year of 1976, accepted it. But that is another story.
Использованная литература:
King S. Dance of Death. – M.: AST, 2018.
Kvartalnov A. Evolution and development prospects of the concept of global and prompt strike - M.: PIR-PRESS, 2021
Kolesnikov S. Second attempt
McKinzie M.G., Cochran T.B., Norris R.S., Arkin W.M. America's Nuclear War Plan: Time for Change
Starodubov V.P. Superpowers of the 2001th century. Strategic confrontation. – M.: OLMA-PRESS, XNUMX
Khlobustov O. Lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis
Fenenko A.V. Changing role of the nuclear factor in modern international relations: military-political and institutional aspects topic of dissertation and abstract
Fenenko A.V. Asymmetric model of nuclear deterrence. Analysis and forecast. Journal of IMEMO RAS, 2021, No. 3, pp. 13-29.
Fenenko A. V. Evolution of the Theory of Nuclear Deterrence in the United States during the Cold War // Bulletin of St. Petersburg University. International Relations. 2020. Vol. 13. Issue 1. P. 111–135.
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