BRITAIN IN NATO NEVILLE BROWN ONE SHILLING AND SIXPENCE NEVILLE BROWN was until recently Research Associate at the Institute for Strategic Studies. FABIAN TRACT 357 THE FABIAN SOCIETY' 11, Dartmouth Street, S.WI BP 1615"11 (Js7) Note.-This pamphlet, like all publications of the F AB/AN SOCIETY, represents not the collective view of the Society but only the view of the individual who prepared it. The responsibility nf the Society is limited to approving the publications which it issues as worthy of consideration withi11 the Labour Movement. November, 1964. I. The New Strategic Environment THROUGHOUT the last decade, commentators have tended to assume that, in the absence of an international control agreement, the strategic arms race will just go on and on. Soviet and American military publicists have speculated cheerfully on the merits of combat systems in space- one USAF general, for example, has listed six reasons why he thinks an American missile base on the moon would confer on the West strategic superiority. Part of the opposition to the British Polaris has rested on the contention that it will soon become useless through obsolescence. Pacifists have continually demanded general and complete disarmament tomorrow because, they have often said, the day after it may be too late. For an arms race to be maintained, one of two conditions has to be satisfied. Either a series of technological breakthroughs have successively to render obsolete existing major weapons, or else there have to be opportunities for one side or the other to establish a worthwhile numerical superiority. Both the United States and the USSR now have installed hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of accurately delivering warheads worth millions of tons of TNT. Because they depend still on liquid fuels Soviet ICBMs are expensive and cannot readily be emplaced in underground sites. But when the USSR follows the American lead and supplements or replaces liquid-driven rockets with solid fuelled ones each of the superpowers will have at their disposal weapons which, I believe, could never be significantly improved upon. No doubt military-industrial pressure groups in both countries will continue to press for the introduction of variants that incorporate marginal improvements in reliability or in other respects. To all intents and purposes, however, the technology of strategic war has become stable. This situation will be nullified if it ever becomes practicable to create an anti-missile defence that is effective against first-class powers. But this prospect is remote. Any launching complex that was to stand any chance of intercepting a fair proportion of incoming missiles would have to include a mass of formidably expensive electronic equipment. One such complex would have to be positioned near every potential target in order to obtain a comprehensive area coverage. Fall-out protection would have to be provided for all civilians. Even an effort as great as this could be thwarted by the rival superpower increasing the number of strategic rockets at its disposal until it was able to 'saturate' each launch complex. All the indications are that one superpower could always provide the extra ICBMs required to saturate a complex for less than one tenth of the cost of the BRITAIN IN NATO complex itself. This is not to say that there is no justification, even prima facie, for the extensive anti-missile development programmes which the USA and the USSR are currently engaged upon. Anti-missile defences might have some value against the small and slow missiles that certain of the secondary powers could create. Highly sophisticated forms of antimissile defence might, as will be noted again below, be at least partially effective against Polaris. Anti-missile missiles might also be useful for protecting the fifty or so ICBMs that would be retained as a minimum deterrent by Russia and by America if certain disarmament proposals were implemented. But nobody should imagine that either super-power stands any serious chance of affording its cities immunity from the assaults of the other. The United States still enjoys an important strategic superiority although the margin is now dwindling. Her intercontinental bomber force is stronger, although by how much depends upon one's definition of an intercontinental bomber. Her fleet of ballistic submarines-i.e., submarines capable of firing strategic rockets such as Polaris-is superior. She currently has 900 ICBMs, whereas the USSR has around 200. The respective bomber forces were built up at a time when the USA was substantially richer in proportion to the USSR than she is today. Her lead in respect of submarines is due to greater naval experience and better underwater nuclear propulsion units and submarine- launched ballistic missiles. Her numerical advantage in ICBMs is due to the fact that the technological breakthrough to solid fuels in this sphere has given her such economies of large scale production that the USSR has so far felt unable to compete. During the 1960 to 1963 period the USSR expanded its intercontinental rocket strength only slowly and concentrated rather on building up a sizeable echelon of medium-range rockets targetted on NATO Europe. This, she obviously felt, would be a way of offsetting American ICBM strength without encouraging a crash expansion of that strength. It would have the additional advantage of compensating for NATO's advantage in terms of the number and variety of tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Central Europe. This policy depended upon the location of Soviet ICBMs remammg unknown. For some time after the U-2 flights this policy held. It seems, however, that towards the middle of 1962 United States military space reconnaissance began to expose Soviet missile dispositions. In June of that year Mr. McNamara made his famous Ann Arbor speech in which he said that for some time ahead the USA would be able to fight any war by means of a Counterforce Strategy that consisted of confining attacks to key enemy military installations. Soviet panic reaction to this challenge could explain the sudden shipment of medium range missiles to Cuba. To say this is not to condemn the Americans for forcing those missiles out of the Caribbean -their presence there would almost certainly have enhanced the risk of accidental war within the Western Hemisphere; it is merely to say that even as recently as 1962 the danger of war through miscalculation was much greater than it is today. BRITAIN IN NATO The Soviet "deterrent" is more stable now than it was two years ago. In 1963 a new ICBM with a new fuelling system was introduced and this was capable of leaving its site before an incoming missile arrived. Mr. McNamara has since acknowledged that henceforward it will be absurd to think of disarming the Russians by a Counterforce blow and that damage in any continental exchange will be both heavy and bilateral. Besides, the Soviet deterrent is becoming increasingly capable of riding out a disarming blow without its ICBMs leaving the ground. At the close of 1962 the USA had about 450 rockets capable of hitting Russia and Russia about 80 capable of hitting the U.S.A. On the arbitrary but not unrealistic assumption that, on the average, each American rocket stood a 50 per cent chance of destroying a Soviet one, we can say that if the Americans hadl fired 250 of their missiles simultaneously they might have reduced the Soviet ICBM strength to around 10. Ten missiles might not have been capable of inflicting unacceptable damage on the USA. By 1967 the USSR is likely to have of the order of 500 JCBMs. To reduce that force to, say, 10, the Americans would need 3,000 rockets. In fact they are scheduled to have only I ,700. These comparisons are a little speculative and very imprecise but they do establish the point that the mathematics of targetting combines with the costing of anti-missile defence to ensure that between the superpowers an increasingly stable nuclear stalemate is developing. The Effects of Stalemate Some of the consequences of this are obviously good. The ten billion pounds the USA has spent on strategic missiles since 1961 is not an expenditure that need be repeated on anything like the same scale. War is increasingly unlikely to start through technical accident or false intelligence. Neither of the super-powers is now under much compulsion to release its deterrent on the basis of provisional radar warnings or secret service forecasts of impending attack. A corollary of this is that any nuclear war that ever starts is unlikely ever to grow into a total global exchange. At some stage along its brutal and chaotic course it is likely to be halted by mutual agreement. How do these prospects affect the American guarantee? What bearing have they on the arguments about the retention in Western Europe of more or less independent nuclear forces by Britain and France? The Gaullists say that the erosion of American strategic supremacy is bound to mean that the Americans will be afraid to shield Western Europe from nuclear blackmail because to do so would be to invite national suicide. But what they assume, with their narrow Cartesian thought patterns, is that there are no choices open to the USA between passive acquiescence and the total destruction of the world. In fact, however, that very stability that is one of the nuclear stalemate's central features makes it possible to threaten or indulge in the piecemeal use of strategic weapons to hurt, weaken, frighten, or humiliate an opponent in order to change his will. Suppose, for example, that the Russians seized part of Western Europe. Courses BRITAIN IN NATO of action that might be threatened or adopted include non-lethal shows of force such as the release of dummy or low yield warheads high over remote Siberia. Other alternatives would include attacks on small cities or secondary military installations. Such attacks could consist of the delivery of warheads singly or in salvos and might or might not be preceded by specific ultimata. Applications of force of this kind would need to be synchronised with hard crisis bargaining through diplomatic channels. Nobody can say what precise form any such conflict might take nor what its result might be, but this is no reason for dismissing it as inherently less plausible than other kinds of military action. Controlled response has been widely discussed in the United States by such influential strategists as Hermann Kahn. Soviet strategic literature now also carries references to it. The doctrine of controlled response has important implications for countries that have sought, or which may seek, independent nuclear deterrents. One of them is that one may enjoy nuclear protection without having a national nuclear force of one's own. Another is that a state that has acquired a small nuclear force may still be incapable of standing up to a big one. By gradual and limited use of nuclear weapons the latter could progressively erode the material strength of the former and, in the process, break, its will. Important graduations will always exist within the nuclear club. Five Polaris submarines would not put Britain on par with Russia. BRITAIN IN NATO 2. The Pros and Cons of Nuclear Independence MERRY Englanders regard Polaris as a Maypole around which they may dance. But this fact should not blind us to the worth of some of the arguments that have been, or that could be, advanced in favour of the endeavour to keep in the thermonuclear business. Only a few years ago the leaders of both the major parties accepted the thesis that nuclear status conferred extra world influence on those that enjoyed it. Thus, on March 2nd, 1955, Lord Attlee said that such had been his experience. The Tories have reiterated that our place at the top table depends upon possession of "the Bomb". More specifically they claim that this helped Britain to bring about the partial test ban. The full history of the preliminary negotiations has yet to be written, but it does indeed appear that at one stage their momentum was sustained by British seismological testimony that served to narrow the Soviet-American divergence on the question of the number of "on site" control posts needed to monitor underground tests. This claim is not wholly invalidated by the exclusion of subterranean tests from the final treaty. French enthusiasts for independent deterrence have argued that a nuclear power located in the centre of Europe is, ipso facto, better placed to defend it than one set 3,000 miles away. This contention is complementary to the one noted earlier about growing American reluctance ever to come to Europe's rescue. Both are logical developments of a widespread French belief that any nuclear war in Central Europe is bound to embrace the whole region and so trigger off against the Soviet homeland the two national deterrents contained therein. But, irrespective of the strength of the local opposition, the Russians are unlikely ever deliberately to subject Western Europe to a nuclear attack so massive as to destroy it outright. Any military initiative they ever take will have precise political ends and the particular victim will almost certainly be West Germany. Either West Berlin will be invaded or beseiged or else there will be a limited ground advance into the Federal Republic or a threat to use low yield nuclear devices against selected targets within it. In none of these circumstances would geography automatically ensure that the Anglo-French deterrents provided the Germans with protection. Only the continued existence of a plenitude of tactical nuclear weapons inside Germany and of strategic ones outside it would do this. At present the vast majority of the warheads in both categories are being provided by the Americans. 6 BRITAIN IN NATO The fact that it is improbwble that the Russians will ever break the peace by launching a saturation nuclear attack against Western Europe does not mean that they never would feel tempted to raise the conflict towards that kind of level if initial challenges were effectively countered. Were they so tempted then what the French say about the lessening dependability of the American gt~arantee might be borne out. Very possibly the Unit~d States would hesitate to launch a counterstrike against Russia comm~ nsurate to a heavy . Soviet bombardment of NATO Europe. For this reason European strategic forces might make the contribution to the alliance of rendering the Russians yet more reluctant than they might otherwise be to run the risk of war on a continental scale. But, as is now almost universally realised, a purely European strategic dleterrent would be a poor second best to our present alliance arrangements. For one thing transatlantic interdependence involves much informal consultation and this tends to liberalise attitudes on both sides of the ocean. American thought about the Arab World has often been more rational than European, and European thought about the Far East and the Caribbean more rational than American. To this general consideration can be added several specific ones. Between 1961 and 1964 alone, the Americans have spent over £10,000,000,000 on their nuclear deterrent and an attempt to go it alone could mean for Europe a comparable outlay. Although entitled "European" such a deterrent would, as it is usually envisaged, ignore the legitimate security interests of Scandinavia and of Greece and Turkey. Heavy West German participation would be inevitable and this would most likely be regarded by the Russians as provocative. The propinquity of the states concerned would ease but by no means eradicate multinational command and control problems. Whilst the deterrent was being created the Soviet Union might feel free to launch or threaten a forestalling blow. From all this, it does not follow, however, that the Anglo-French strategic forces cannot usefully be regarded as the foundations upon which a European force could be built should this ever appear necessary. NATO might not last indefinately. America may weary of her current responsibilities. Europe might wish to dissociate itself from the USA if the latter embarked on policies in, say, Latin America or East Asia that most Europeans found repugnant. The world might become effectively a bipolar collusion between the big two to the disadvantage of the remainder. This would not be impossible, in 1807 and 1939 Russia joined hands with her most powerful rival to carve up spheres of influence. She could do so again. All of the above arguments are ones in favour of keeping some kind of nuclear option open. Not one of them is an argument in favour of endeavouring to keep, or pretending to keep, a fully fledged independent national deterrent continuously in being. Why Sir Alec Douglas-Home should have taken as self-evident the proposition that our nuclear policy would have no effect on 1he behaviour of China or France is not clear. One small atomic explosion does not commit China BRITAIN' IN NATO to a policy of independent deterrence and, indeed, the advent of new leaders in Russia may encourage Peking to reassess its whole strategic policy. De Gaulle's France may be well nigh impervious to external influences, but De Gaulle will not last forever. There can be no dloubt that, in general terms, the strongest objection to the maintenance of a national deterrent is that it encourages others to follow suit~ A bipolar world might not be the best of all possible ones, but one that contained, say, 20 nuclear nations would be a great deal worse. The "haz~rd of war through teehnical accident or miscalculation would be much greater. NATO would be weakened by the progressive generation of inistrust and proliferation both reflected and encouraged. At present the pressures towards proliferation are not strong. This is shown by the facts that almost all countries have signed the test ban and that the present nuclear powers are most loth to export their knowhow. But this equilibrium is an essentially unstable one. Once a trend towards proliferation had set in again it might accelerate very rapid~y. Strategic Planning Lately there has been much talk about trading in nuclear independence in order to obtain part control of som~ guidelines that NATO might lay down in order to advise the American President on the application of his strategic forces. These might consist either of "blueprints" prepared in anticipation of crises or else of opinions conveyed in the course of them. That NATO needs some strategic planning authority is now obvious, but its creation is likely to be a slow and difficult operation. Little thought has yet been devoted to the form an authority might take and, in particular, to how it would resolve issues like weighted votes, unanimity, majority decisions and planning for nuclear crises which, like Cuba, originate outside the formal boundaries of NATO or which are confined to one region within the alliance. How valuable blueprints could ever be is uncertain. Strategy is a banal science and it is difficult to enunciate in the abstract principles for the conduct of war that are meaningful without being trite. If, on the other hand, one elaborated procedures for dealing with specific eventualities one would almost certainly get one's premises wrong. Multinational participation in the active management of any crisis might well be useful, but, in the ultimate, there is a difference between tendering advice and exercising authority. Executive control, which would carry with it the veto sanction, would inevitably be concentrated in the handls of the President. It would seem, therefore, whilst it might well be a good thing to trade in existing or proposed strategic forces in the sense of assigning them to the alliance, it would not be wise to dismantle them altogether. A trade-in should be a continual process and not one single and irreversible act. Just as none of the arguments against the abandonment of independent nuclear status were arguments in favour of remaining a nuclear power on the present scale or on the present terms, so none of the arguments in favour of it are ones in favour of a complete rejection of the nuclear option. To decide what form this option should take it is necessary to examine more closely the choices now available. BRITAIN IN NATO 3. Britain's Present Nuclear Forces THIS country has accumulated already enough material to make about 1,500 nuclear warheads. Some are available for use by the Fleet Air Arm and by RAF tactical squadrons. Many, including most of the larger ones, are earmarked for the 180 V-Bombers, which could carry on a single trip a combined total of well over 1,000 megatons of thermonuclear explosive. Last year these Victor and Vulcan aircraft were assigned to NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, but this assignation was made subject to the unusual qualification that they could be withdrawn in times of special national emergency. It is generally thought that the V-Bombers would be particularly useful to SACEUR as a means of delivering pinpoint attacks on river crossings. Another £50 to £100,000,000 is due to be spent in the course of the next twelve months on the modernisation of the V-Bomber squadrons. Thenceforward the charge on the taxpayer will come simply from running costs and from occasional piecemeal modifications. The peacetime expenditure by the USAF on a tactical warplane is £300,000 per year and on a heavy strategic bomber £1,000,000. Routine operation of one of the Victors or Vulcans, which are medium strategic bombers, probably costs the RAF something over £300,000 per year. Half of this would consist of payments to air and ground crews. A flying schedule that averaged rather less than one hour per day would involve each bomber and its aerial tanker support in the annual consumption of about £100,000 worth of aviation spirit. Since the craft are packed with electr·onic gear and high performance machinery, approximately another £100,000 p.a should be allowed for component replacement and modification. How well might the V-Bombers perform in a strategic role? Basic to this question is that of whether they could ride out a Soviet disarming blow. They would seek to do this by dispersing during a period of tension to a selection of about 100 British airfields plus a few overseas. The small groups of bombers would then stand by their respective runways ready to scramble to safety distances on receipt of radar warnings of the approach of enemy missiles. Against the present echelon of Soviet medium range missiles this evasion technique would be adequate. If, however, the USSR introduced missiles that carried greater warheads or that flew faster or on lower trajectories, things would be different. So would they be if the Russians emplaced strategic missiles in Poland or Czechoslovakia or if through a marked numerical expansion they became a:ble to bracket dlispersal stations. Recourse would then have to be made to continuous airborn alerts. These would be unlikely to ensure immunity for more than one third of the force. BRITAIN IN NATO Nowadays deep high altitude penetration of heavily defended air space depends upon the use of electronic techniques to blind or confuse enemy radar. Because of a feeling that the West is gradually losing its superiority over the USSR in the field •of military electronics, emphasis has recently switched to low level approaches. This tactic is not, of course, without its weaknesses. Potential antidotes to the low flier include short range groundto- air weapons clustered around key objectives and long-range interceptor planes on patrol high aloft. The RAF nevertheless feels that their Victors and Vulcans will still be of strategic value in the early 1970s. Their forecast may well prove correct. For one thing the USSR may be reluctant to incur the very heavy expenditure involved in continual improvement of its antiaircraft defences. The Conservative unwillingness to assign to NATO without reservation any of the V -bombers was irrational. The force would be very difficult to use in a private nuclear quarrel with the Soviet Union. Manned bombers are unsuitable for limited or slow motion strategic war because their percentage prospects of getting through are much reduced if they are committed in driblets. Besides it would be virtually impossible to deliver both high and! low level sorties without flying over NATO Europe. There is, however, a case for declining to assign a small fraction of the force so that it can be held ready to deter or to fight in non-nuclear wars outside the NATO area-i.e. outside those territories and sea areas that lie within or contiguous to that part of the Atlantic basin which is North of the Tropic of Cancer; Bomber Command planes were so used in Kuwait in 1961 and in Malaysia in 1963. A "bonus" strategic role has been claimed for the Tactical Strike and Reconnaissance-2 aircraft (TSR-2) which is due to fly with the RAF during the 1967 to 1980 period. It will be able to take off fr·om small unprepared strips and it will be able to fly a good deal lower a great deal faster than the V -Bombers. But its tactical specification will make it rather inappropriate for strategic work in certain respects. Among them will be crew strength, fuel capacity, bombload, and the weight and variety of electric gear. If Britain cancelled the TSR-2, disbanded the V-Bomber squadrons, and declined to purchase Polaris, would she thereby become a member of the non-nuclear club? The answer would seem to be "No". A great knowledge of thermonuclear techniques would remain and so we would be free to construct, for example, large static hydrogen bombs of the Doomsday Machine variety ready for use in indiscriminate "death-strings". We would continue to operate various aircraft that might serve as tolerably efficient nuclear delivery vehicles. Though we might demolish all our nuclear stockpile we could never conclusively prove that it had in fact been 100 per cent destroyed. Besides, nuclear weapons are not the only means of strategic conflict. There is also germ warfare and of this we have a knowledge that few other nations can rival. The debate about Polaris should be recognised as being one about comparative advantage and not about absolute choice. 10 BRJTAIN IN NATO 4. The Bahamas Agreement WHEN President Kennedy and Mr. Macmillan discussed at Nassau the implications of the Skybolt cancellation they agreed upon two major items of new policy. One was that they would press for the formation within NATO of what is now entitled the Multilateral Force-i.e. a fleet of a mixed manned surface ships armed with the Polaris A-3 missile, which can deliver a megaton warhead across 2,500 miles. The other was that Britain, and France should she so wish, should receive the A-3 missile "... on a continuing basis" so that it could be installed in nuclear-