1. On NATO's favorable position, see, for example, Jane M. O. Sharp's letter "The Myth of Warsaw Pact Superiority Debunked," New York Times, November 9, 1986; Joshua M. Epstein's op-ed "Preserving Security in Europe," New York Times, November 14, 1986; Tom Wicker, "Don't Fear for NATO," New York Times, February 8, 1988, p. A19; and, for more detail, Center for Defense Information, "NATO and Warsaw Pact Forces: Conventional War in Europe," The Defense Monitor 17, no. 3 (1988). On NATO responses to any Warsaw Pact conventional advantages, see, for example, General Bernard W. Rogers, ''The Atlantic Alliance: Prescriptions for a Difficult Decade," Foreign Affairs, Summer 1982, pp. 1145-1156; and Strengthening Conventional Deterrence in Europe, Report of the European Security Study (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983).

2. Earl C. Ravenal, "Counterforce and Alliance: The Ultimate Connection," International Security 6, no. 4 (Spring 1982): 36. Ravenal believes that higher levels of credibility may be required for political reasons, even if they are irrelevant to extended deterrence: "It takes more credibility to keep an ally than to deter an enemy" (p. 36).

3. Allan S. Krass and Matthew Goodman, "Nuclear Rationality: The Clausewitzian Strategies of the Superpowers" (photocopied); Colin Gray and Keith Payne, "Victory Is Possible," Foreign Policy, no. 39 (Summer 1980).

4. Earl C. Ravenal, "Counterforce and Alliance," p. 32.

5. Robert Endicott Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 242.

6. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 164, 163-164, 136.

7. Ibid., pp. 167, 168.

8. Ibid., pp. 170-171, 177-178, 176, 177.

6. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 164, 163-164, 136.

7. Ibid., pp. 167, 168.

8. Ibid., pp. 170-171, 177-178, 176, 177.

6. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 164, 163-164, 136.

7. Ibid., pp. 167, 168.

8. Ibid., pp. 170-171, 177-178, 176, 177.

9. "Who Could Start a Nuclear War?" Defense Monitor 14, no. 3 (1985): 1, 2, 4, 6.

10. Lori Esposito and James A. Schear, The Command and Control of Nuclear Weapons, Workshop Report (Aspen, Colo.: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, 1985), pp. 15, 3, 17 (emphasis added). In Europe, they note, "there would ... be immediate pressure for dispersal [of nuclear weapons], especially of longer-range INF systems, if hostilities seemed imminent." Moreover NATO might well "consider the prospect of conditional delegations of release authority" to fire nuclear weapons (p. 16).

11. Barry R. Posen, "Inadvertent Nuclear War? Escalation and NATO's Northern Flank," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence, ed. Miller, p. 98 (emphasis in original; first published in International Security 7, no. 2 [Fall 1982]).

12. Ibid., p. 86.

11. Barry R. Posen, "Inadvertent Nuclear War? Escalation and NATO's Northern Flank," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence, ed. Miller, p. 98 (emphasis in original; first published in International Security 7, no. 2 [Fall 1982]).

12. Ibid., p. 86.

13. Michael T. Klare, "Securing the Firebreak," World Policy Journal 2, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 229-230; Alain C. Enthoven, "American Deterrent Policy," in

Problems of National Strategy: A Book of Readings, ed. Henry Kissinger (New York: Praeger, 1965), p. 124, cited in Klare, "Securing the Firebreak," p. 232.

14. Klare, "Securing the Firebreak," pp. 234, 240. Klare cites General Louis Wagner's testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, March 11, 1980 (p. 239). The firebreak concept actually applies to all types of nuclear weapons, not only those at the low end of the destructive spectrum. Just as there are tactical conventional weapons that tactical nuclear weapons can come to resemble, there are also strategic conventional weapons that strategic nuclear weapons can come to resemble. Old-style ICBMs, with their huge warheads and inaccurate delivery, obviously differed from conventional strategic weapons systems. Though the ashes of Dresden and Tokyo showed that nonnuclear strategic bombing can rapidly extinguish hundreds of thousands of lives, no one could mistake a conventional American air attack on the Soviet Union with a barrage of old Titan II missiles, which carry 9-megaton warheads about 450 times more powerful than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. A modern Minuteman III/ Mk-12 ICBM, in contrast, carries a 0.17-megaton warhead, 50 times smaller than the Titan II, and (in theory at least) delivers it about six times more accurately. The most modern strategic missile systems, such as MX and the submarine-based Trident II/D-5, can supposedly deliver warheads reliably to within 400 feet of the target. Such weapons may appear able to conduct surgical nuclear strikes—say, against Soviet missile silos—that would not be altogether different from conventional bombing. Indeed, the major trend in strategic nuclear weapons systems, as in tactical ones, has been to refine them so that they can do the jobs of conventional ones, destroying military targets without decimating huge areas. In theory it is more tempting to leap the firebreak with a few well-aimed, low-yield Minuteman III/Mk-12 warheads than with monstrous multimegaton Titan IIs that could easily fall far off target and would almost certainly be the opening shot of an orgy of mass destruction. One day, conventional warheads mounted on strategic delivery systems (such as super-accurate long-range cruise missiles) may even be able to do at least some of the jobs now given to their nuclear counterparts. Then strategic missiles would be dual-capable too.

15. Complete destruction is unlikely at least in comparison to nuclear war and over a relatively short period of time. Casualties in Vietnam, for example, ran to the millions and included the decimation of the agricultural economic base, the ecology, and much of the social system. Some have said that the Vietcong did not fear nuclear weapons, since conventional ones were already doing so much damage. But despite the monstrous conventional attacks it suffered, Vietnam exists physically and socially. That might not be true had nuclear weapons been used. Another large-scale conventional war involving the superpowers, if by some miracle it remained conventional, might leave both societies alive. That cannot be said of a large-scale nuclear war.

16. McGeorge Bundy, "To Cap the Volcano," Foreign Affairs 48, no. 1 (October 1969): 9-10.

17. Societies can defend themselves—partially but effectively—against conventional

weapons, and they can bring conventional war to a halt long before they suffer or inflict complete destruction. True, conventional munitions can wreak total destruction, but only over a period of time long enough for the conflicts to resolve. As Thomas Schelling notes: "Against defenseless people there is not much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick.... Something like the same destruction always could be done. With nuclear weapons there is an expectation that it would be done" (Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966], pp. 19, 23; emphasis in original).

18. Robert S. McNamara, "The Military Role of Nuclear Weapons: Perceptions and Misperceptions," Foreign Affairs 62 (Fall 1983), pp. 71-72.

19. Klaus Knorr, "Controlling Nuclear War," International Security 9, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 92, 89; Leon Wieseltier, "When Deterrence Fails," Foreign Affairs 63, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 847; General Jones, quoted in Washington Post, June 19, 1982, p. A3. In principle some weapons could occupy an intermediate place in the hierarchy of destructiveness, spanning the gap between the conventional weapons of normal warfare and the unconventional weapons of total destruction. Because of this ambiguity, both credibility and the firebreak might be affected by how such weapons evolve. Some argue that today's chemical and biological weapons already hold this middle ground.

20. All technical data on nuclear weapons systems in this section are from Cochran, Arkin, and Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook, vol. 1.

21. Desmond Ball, "Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?" Aldephi Paper No. 169 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981), p. 37 (emphasis in original); Krass and Goodman, "Nuclear Rationality," p. 29.

22. Ronald Reagan, quoted in Boston Globe, March 30, 1980; Gordon H. Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis," International Security 2, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 107-108.

23. Ball, "Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?" pp. 35, 37; Esposito and Schear, "Command and Control," p. 17.

24. Barry M. Blechman and Douglas M. Hart, "The Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons: The 1973 Middle East Crisis," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence, ed. Miller, p. 294 (first published in International Security 7, no. 1 [Summer 1982]).

25. Blechman and Hart, "Political Utility," pp. 294-295 (emphasis in original); Esposito and Schear, "Command and Control," p. 15; Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), p. 187.

26. See Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence, pp. 36-43; H. R. Haldeman, The End of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978), pp. 82-83, cited in Daniel Ellsberg, "A Call to Mutiny," in The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention, ed. Joseph Gerson (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), pp. 56-57.

27. For other discussions of the competing effects, see Glenn Snyder, "The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror," in The Balance of Power, ed. Paul Seabury (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965); Ravenal, "Counterforce and Alliance," p. 27; and Peter J. Liberman and Neil R. Thomason, "No-First-Use Unknowable," Foreign Policy, no. 64 (Fall 1986): 17-36.