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As for an attempted Soviet decapitating attack on American missiles, that danger has always been mired in a paradox. No matter how homicidal or even genocidal the enemy is thought to be, he is not supposed to be suicidal. Deterrence presupposes not only the capacity to retaliate but also sanity and the imperative of self-preservation on both sides. A madman bent on self- destruction is, almost by definition, impossible to deter. It has always required a suspension of disbelief to imagine a sane Soviet leadership, no matter how cold-blooded, calculating that it could, in any meaningful sense, get away with an attack on the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Even if all American land-based missiles were destroyed, the men in the Kremlin would have to count on the distinct possibility that their country, and perhaps their command bunker, would sustain a pulverizing blow from U.S. submarine- and bomber- launched weapons.
Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, a world-class thinker about the unthinkable and nobody's softy, acknowledged back in the 1970s that a Soviet decision to attack American missiles would be a "cosmic roll of the dice." Yet Soviets play chess; they do not shoot craps. Stalin advanced several black pawns and a knight against one of white's most vulnerable squares, West Berlin, in 1948. Nikita Khrushchev tried a similar gambit in 1961, and he was downright reckless over Cuba in 1962. The stupidity as well as the failure of that move contributed to his downfall.
Those episodes, scary as they were at the time, should be strangely reassuring in retrospect. They prove that deterrence is something like a force of nature. The very existence of nuclear weapons exercises a gravitational pull on the superpowers during moments of political and military confrontation, tugging them back from the brink. In a real crisis, precise calculations on one side about exactly how many of what kind of weapons the other side has do not matter all that much; what matters is that both have nuclear weapons, period.
This concept of "existential deterrence" (so named by McGeorge Bundy, who was at John F. Kennedy's side during his showdowns with Khrushchev) is rooted in common sense and experience alike. Yet until now it has never been deemed a prudent basis for keeping the peace. Why? Because worst-case assumptions about Soviet intentions have fed, and fed upon, worst-case assumptions about Soviet capabilities.
Even now the nightmare of a Soviet nuclear attack continues to darken the waking hours of Western military and political leaders and the theoreticians who advise them. The Bush Administration remains committed to an expensive, redundant and provocative array of new strategic nuclear weapons -- the MX and Midgetman intercontinental missiles, the B-1 and B-2 (Stealth) bombers and the Trident II submarine-launched missile. These programs are monuments to old thinking. They are throwbacks to the days when the strategists accepted, as an article of their dark faith, the vulnerability of the U.S. to Kremlin crapshooters.