Misinterpreting Soviet Nuclear Strategy: Lessons for North Korea

As the nuclear standoff on the Korean Peninsula shows no sign of abating and the risk of accidental nuclear war between North Korea and the United States is increasing, a look back at the U.S.-Soviet confrontation during the Cold War may benefit U.S. policymakers engaged in devising diplomatic and military responses to Kim Jong-un’s nuclear weapons program.

Retrospectively viewed, both the United States and the Soviet Union blatantly erred in equating plans for future military actions, including the use of the nuclear weapons, with each power’s inferable aggressive intentions. Throughout the Cold War, both sides repeatedly made misguided judgments based on conflating the two indicators, which usually were further distorted by prevailing prejudices, preconceptions, political passion, and institutional rivalry, as Rodric Braithwaite asserts in his book Armageddon and Paranoia: The Nuclear Confrontation.

However, the United States and the Soviet Union – similar to Washington and Pyongyang today – faced different problems when it came to obtaining reliable information on their respective opponent: the Americans had too little secret intelligence on Soviet decision-making processes and military plans, whereas the Russians had too much information about U.S. government deliberations on these matters.

Soviet analysts had a particularly hard time trying to figure out official U.S. policy amid often contradictory statements made by the U.S. military, politicians, and intellectuals. As Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko lamented, U.S. policies can “change as quickly as the weather in the North Atlantic.” Kim Jong-un and his inner leadership circle likely share this sentiment, as reports have emerged that the opposing statements issued by the Trump administration on its North Korea policy bewilder North Korean officials.

Misconceptions about a nuclear-armed opponent’s intentions during a military crisis as a result of misinterpreting intelligence can increase the risk of a nuclear war. In the case of the decades-long nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States, this repeatedly proved to be the case.

Based on interviews with 22 senior personnel involved in Soviet strategic and operational planning for nuclear war, summarized in a 1995 report prepared for the U.S. government by the Pentagon contractor BDM Corporation, three erroneous assumptions seem to be especially relevant for today’s situation on the Korean Peninsula.

First, U.S. analysts generally exaggerated Soviet aggressiveness and willingness to launch a nuclear war.  Second, they underestimated Soviet fears of a U.S nuclear first strike. Third, U.S. analysts misjudged the Soviets’ readiness to launch preemptive nuclear strikes in anticipation of a military confrontation with NATO.

In regard to the first point, the United States underestimated “the extent to which the Soviet leadership was deterred from using nuclear weapons,” the BDM report states. A number of U.S. analysts believed that the Soviet Union was working toward creating a military force posture that would enable it to fight and win a nuclear war based on official Soviet ideological pronouncements that a nuclear war was survivable. One U.S. analyst noted that the Soviets did not believe that a nuclear exchange would result in “mutual suicide” but that the “country better prepared for it and in possession of a superior strategy could win and emerge as a viable society.”

Officially, from 1950 to 1980, the Soviet high command never “decoupled” conventional from nuclear war, insisting that any “war would turn nuclear from the start,” as the historian Martin van Creveld notes. A mid-1970s classified assessment on Soviet nuclear posture, compiled by a team of U.S. Soviet experts, stated: “They think not in terms of nuclear stability, mutual assured destruction, or strategic sufficiency but of an effective nuclear war-fighting capability.”

In reality, the BDM study finds that the Soviet military high command “understood the devastating consequences of nuclear war” and wanted to “avoid it at all cost,” as one former Soviet official puts it. Already in 1968, Soviet nuclear war planners concluded that they could not win a nuclear war. Indeed, the Soviets never developed a working definition of what constitutes victory in a nuclear confrontation. By the mid-1970s, the Soviet Union followed “a no first strike policy.” By 1981, the Soviet General Staff concluded that nuclear weapons would be counterproductive in a military clash with NATO in Europe. Moscow, another former official reveals, “never intended to initiate the employment of nuclear weapons.”

Second, the United States thought that its declaratory nuclear policy of deterrence clearly signaled to the Soviets that it would not launch a nuclear first strike. A CIA assessment from 1973 emphasizes: “At the time, the Soviets evidently do not anticipate a sudden first strike by the U.S.” However, the entire political and military leadership of the Soviet Union had a deep-seated psychological fear, based on the German surprise attack in 1941, of a U.S. first strike. According to the BDM report, “They perceive[d] U.S. intentions to be aggressive and did not believe the superpower nuclear balance to be stable.” Indeed, “virtually all interview subjects stressed that they perceived the U.S. to be preparing for a first strike.”

The former Soviet officials cited a number of indicators to support their conclusions, including U.S. development of highly accurate multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicles, and the relative vulnerability of U.S. missile silos, among other things. According to one ex-official, U.S. missile silos were “relatively poorly protected by overhead cover and grouped rather close to each other and to the cluster’s launch control center,” convincing the Soviet high command that these missiles “were first-strike weapons.” U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative as part of a massive increase in U.S. defense paired with his anti-communist rhetoric only accentuated Soviet fears.

The deputy chief of the General Staff of the Strategic Rocket Forces, General Varfolomei Korobushnin, said in 1992: “Throughout the mid-1970s and through the mid-1980s, I firmly believed that the U.S. was willing and capable of a first strike against us.” Official NATO statements and Reagan’s massive rearmament program, he said, “only affirmed my belief that the was possible (…) All U.S. actions pointed in this direction.”

The United States’ Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) for nuclear war consistently included a preemptive first strike option. Indeed, “[t]he nature, scale, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped by the requirement[s] (…) to attempt to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet and Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia,” the U.S. nuclear war planner Daniel Ellsberg noted in a recent book.

Eventually, Reagan came around to understanding Soviet fears. “[T]he Soviets are so defense-minded, so paranoid about being attacked, that (…) we ought to tell them that no one here has any intention of doing anything like that (…) Maybe they are scared of us and think we are a threat [sic],” he wrote in his diary. “I began to realize that many Soviet officials fear us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike.”

Third, U.S. analysts knew that the Soviet nuclear war doctrine up to the 1960s relied on preemptive strikes against NATO. In the 1970s, it was replaced by a launch-under-attack doctrine and retaliation given the development of a Soviet second-strike capability. Nevertheless, they failed to discern that Soviet military and political leadership were not convinced that their early detection systems would be good enough to detect a U.S. first strike and launch their missiles under attack. They also failed to grasp that the Soviets feared that their command control systems were inadequately protected to guarantee an effective retaliatory strike capability. As a result, U.S. analysts failed to understand that preemptive strikes continued to be seen as a viable option by the Soviet General Staff throughout the Cold War.

As the 1973 CIA assessment on Soviet nuclear doctrine states:

[P]reemption will probably continue to appear in Soviet military writings (…) This is not to say that preemption is very high on the scale of likelihood. If Soviet planners have done any realistic simulations of the outcome of a strategic nuclear exchange, and there is evidence that they have, they would almost certainly have concluded that even after an all-out Soviet preemptive attack the U.S. could inflict enormous devastation on the Soviet Union.

Yet, while preemption was not part of official Soviet doctrine in the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet Rocket Forces were nevertheless ready to “strike an enemy that is preparing to launch a nuclear strike before he is able to launch,” as one former Soviet official said, according to the BDM report. This was underpinned by the assumption that the United State would “be first to prepare for nuclear use, and Soviet preemption would then occur in response to observations of NATO preparations.” This misconception could invite dangerous miscalculation, especially if one side, as the United States did under Richard Nixon, chooses to pursue a “madman strategy” of nuclear brinkmanship.

It goes without saying that the three mistaken U.S. assumptions on Soviet nuclear strategy and intentions cannot be applied to the entire U.S. government apparatus. There were always important voices of dissent and all three assumptions cited above were challenged at one time or the other by reports offering different conclusions. For example, National Intelligence Estimates as a rule were broadly accurate in their analysis of Soviet nuclear thinking, according to Rodric Braithwaite. Furthermore, thinking and plans for nuclear war changed in both countries during the decades-long Cold War. There are also obvious limitations to using oral history, such as the interviews of 22 former high-ranking Soviet officials, to make broad general points about what the United States got right and wrong about Soviet nuclear strategy.

Still, there are some major takeaways from the U.S.-Soviet nuclear standoff during the Cold War years for the ongoing crisis on the Korean Peninsula. First, overestimating an opponent’s aggressive potential will only further escalate tensions and heighten the perceived security dilemma, inadvertently increasing the chance of nuclear war. Second, cultural and historical factors – for example, the Soviets’ fear of a repeat of the June 1941 invasion by Nazi Germany – are important dynamics to consider when devising strategies and policies to deter a nuclear-armed opponent. Third, any strategy that entails nuclear brinkmanship should be avoided as long as the opponent’s intentions and nuclear warfare doctrine are unclear or ill-defined.

One of the important differences between the Cold War nuclear confrontation and the ongoing standoff on the Korean Peninsula is that both the United States and Soviet Union embraced nuclear deterrence as a modus operandi. In 2017, senior White House officials have repeatedly stated that they believe that nuclear deterrence with North Korea will not work. Whether this is part of a nuclear brinkmanship strategy or a genuine belief that Kim Jong-un is not a rational actor susceptible to deterrence, it does not increase hopes of averting a possible nuclear disaster.