blackett and the origins of nuclear strategy

8

Click here to load reader

Upload: michael-howard

Post on 29-Jan-2017

216 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Blackett and the Origins of Nuclear Strategy

Blackett and the Origins of Nuclear StrategyAuthor(s): Michael HowardSource: The Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Feb., 1985), pp. 89-95Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals on behalf of the Operational Research SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2582499 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 07:17

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Palgrave Macmillan Journals and Operational Research Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The Journal of the Operational Research Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.213.220.109 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:17:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Blackett and the Origins of Nuclear Strategy

J. OpI Res. Soc. Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 89-95, 1985 0160-5682/85 S3.00 + 0.00 Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved Copyright ? 1985 Operational Research Society Ltd

The Blackett Memorial Lecture 1984

Blackett and the Origins of Nuclear Strategy MICHAEL HOWARD

Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford

I feel not only honoured but grateful to have been given the opportunity to deliver this lecture. Patrick Blackett was a man to whom I owe a deep personal and professional debt of gratitude. Thirty years ago I was given the task of creating what is now the Department of War Studies at Kings's College London the first of its kind in this country and indeed in the world. With much trepidation I approached Blackett, then an apparently remote and awe-inspiring figure at Imperial College, and invited him to deliver a lecture in an inaugural series which was intended to define and publicize the activities of the new department. Not only did he agree and give a scintillating lecture which attracted much attention, but he took a deep interest in everything we were doing in the Department and remained for the rest of his active academic career unremittingly supportive and helpful. Four years later in 1958, when with a group of journalists, politicians and churchmen I was helping to establish what has now become the International Institute for Strategic Studies, I again approached him, this time asking him to serve on our Council. Again he readily agreed and became one of our most valuable councillors, in particular finding the premises in Adam Street, leased from the Royal Society of Arts, in which the Institute functioned for 20 years. Finally he enlisted me into the British delegation to the early Pugwash Conferences, where I found myself in the company of such luminaries as John Cockcroft, William Penney, Solly Zuckerman, Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard and Henry Kissinger, trying to establish contact across cultural and ideological barriers with our colleagues in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. During those 10 years, therefore, between 1954 and 1964, which was when Blackett transferred his energies to Whitehall to become a close adviser to Harold Wilson's first administration, I was able to watch at first hand his development as one of the leading thinkers in this country on the problem of nuclear weapons and the preservation of peace. The subsequent 20 years since 1964 have seen developments in weapon technology amounting almost to a further revolution, but the problems with which Blackett then wrestled have remained as contentious in the 1980s as they were for the 1960s. Indeed much that he wrote has now become commonplace in British strategic thinking, and insofar as a consensus can be established in this country, excluding extreme unilateralists, it would be very much along the lines that Blackett laid out a quarter of a century ago.

Patrick Blackett's distinctive contribution to strategic thinking came less from his brilliance as a scientist then from his personal experience of war, and the healthy scepticism which that experience had given him of all theories based upon either unstated or unverifiable hypotheses. Blackett claimed with some reason to have been "the only atomic scientist brought up as a professional fighting man",' and the eight adolescent years which he spent in the Royal Navy between 1913 and 1919 equipped him not just with a stern sense of what was practically possible and necessary in warfare but with first-hand knowledge of what war was like; with an understanding of that Clausewitzian element of 'friction' without which all theories of war are meaningless. In his writings Blackett referred repeatedly to the Battle of Jutland, when the vessel on which he was serving, the Barham, steamed past a great oily patch littered with flotsam and the bobbing heads of survivors where the battle-cruiser Queen Mary had been destroyed by a single German salvo a few moments before. "There's something wrong with our bloody ships today, Chatfield", Admiral Beatty had calmly remarked about the disaster. In fact there was something wrong with the Royal Navy as a whole: the way it designed its ships, the way in which it thought about war, the way in which it waged war. It worked too much on hiunches and unverified assumptions. It did not take enough trouble to find out about its enemy. It did not sufficiently base its tactics on hard reasoning from observable phenomena. When Blackett returned

89

This content downloaded from 91.213.220.109 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:17:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 3: Blackett and the Origins of Nuclear Strategy

Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 36, No. 2

to the Services as a scientific adviser in the Second World War, it was with the object, as he put it, of "encouraging numerical thinking and helping to avoid running the war on gusts of emotion".2

I do not need to remind this audience of the contributions which Blackett made to operational research during that war-contributions which began before the war in 1935, when he became a member of Sir Henry Tizard's famous Committee on Air Defence, whose study of radar development transformed the nature of air warfare. Nor do I need to remind you of the part he played in seconding Tizard in his now famous controversy with Lord Cherwell over the effectiveness of strategic bombing. That controversy, however, is of particular importance to us because to a large extent it shaped Blackett's attitude towards the possibilities and limitations of air warfare in the early years of the nuclear age. Like Tizard, Blackett was deeply sceptical of the claims Cherwell put forward for the destructive capabilities of strategic bombing, believing (rightly, as he subsequently showed) that these overestimated the true capability of RAF Bomber Command by a factor of six. Hostility to strategic bombing was in any case deeply engrained in Blackett's old Service, the Royal Navy, which desperately needed aircraft for the Battle of the Atlantic, and Blackett would have been less than human if he had not allowed their needs to weigh with him very considerably. But it was on a basis of tough numerical analysis that he showed that Bomber Command could not possibly perform all that it promised; and he was one of the first people to give publicity to the results of the post-war United States Strategic Bombing Survey which so devastatingly measured those expectations against actual achievement.

This experience also made Blackett sceptical about the belief current in the immediate aftermath of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that nuclear weapons would transform the nature of war; and that the inflated claims of the early prophets of air power, that bombing would end the war in a matter of weeks, if not days, would not at last come true. In his work The Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy, published in 1948, Blackett pointed out that some 3 million tons of ordinary bombs had been dropped on the enemy by Allied aircraft during the Second World War. So "since one atomic bomb of the 1945 type produces about the same material destruction as 2000 tons of ordinary bombs," he argued, "it is [thus] certain that a very large number of atomic bombs would be needed to defeat a great nation by bombing alone..., [and] a long-drawn out and bitter struggle over much of Europe and Asia, involving million-strong land armies, vast military casualties and widespread civil war would be inevitable".3 The Allied bomber offensive had achieved results only once it had achieved total command of the air; but the development of jet-powered fighters and improved AA weapons would make this increasingly difficult to obtain. So very large numbers of aircraft (and in consequence of bombs) would be needed to overcome the resulting attrition. In any case, Blackett pointed out, "a huge number of atomic bombs would have been necessary to inflict on Russia as much damage as she actually suffered by the German invasion". In consequence, he concluded, "a war between America and Russia would be of world wide extent and would be a war of all arms, and probably of very long duration". 4

These sombre predictions were in fact shared by both the American and the Soviet military planners. Blackett made the shrewd but unpopular diagnosis that these calculations explained the Soviet determination to maintain its grip on Eastern Europe as a defensive glacis, in the same way as they led the American military to urge the retention of as much as possible of Western Europe to provide bases for their nuclear striking forces. Equally unpopular was his view that the "Baruch Plan" for the international control of nuclear weapons had been quite understandably rejected by the Soviet Union, since it would have placed that country in a permanent position of nuclear inferiority to the United States and its Western allies. But most unpopular of all was the advice which he gave the British Government, in November 1945, not to go ahead with the manufacture of its own nuclear weapons. To do so, he said, would be a dissipation of scarce resources; it would not produce stockpiles on a sufficient scale to be effective; and it would invite Soviet pre-emption against Western Europe. It would be better, he suggested, that Britain should set an example of what was eventually to be termed 'non-proliferation' and use both her military and scientific resources more productively.5

It was typical of Blackett's abrasive scepticism that his analysis, while leading him to agree with the professional military assessment of the nature of a new war, led him also into questioning the highly conventional political judgements in which their strategic recommendations were based. He

90

This content downloaded from 91.213.220.109 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:17:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 4: Blackett and the Origins of Nuclear Strategy

M. Howard The Blackett Memorial Lecture 1984

was by no means alone in the immediate post-war years in seeing a deep divergence of interest between Britain and the United States as well as between the United States and the Soviet Union. Those were the years, as Lord Bullock's biography of Ernest Bevin has reminded us, when the two nations were deeply at odds over such issues as the treatment of occupied Germany, Jewish immigration into Palestine and, not least, the terms on which the United States was to underwrite British financial solvency. But whereas this sense of divergence led the Government to press ahead with its plans for an independent British bomb, it made Blackett, like many of his colleagues in the Labour Party, favour, at least for a time, the creation of a 'third force', if not actual neutralism. He was, in consequence, thereafter suspect as an adviser in Whitehall or at least in the Ministry of Defence.

But all these assessments, political and military, were to be overtaken by events. Blackett could not foresee-at that stage no-one could how rapidly both American and Soviet scientists were to develop what was then referred to as 'the superbomb'. But, unlike most of his contemporaries, he did guess in 1948 that "a period of five years from now is the latest possible date at which one could reasonably expect that the USSR would not possess at least some atomic bombs". As for further developments, Blackett saw the attractiveness of smaller and lighter nuclear bombs which could be carried in smaller and faster aircraft "or as the warhead of a V2 weapon of reasonable size"; but the technical problems seemed to him in 1948 likely to be so immense "that no type of pilotless aircraft or rocket is likely to be useful for attack at a range of 1000 miles on such a small target as a single factory or an atomic bomb plant for at least very many years".6 He wisely did not set a figure on this negative prognosis. It was in fact to take about 25 years-a period which seems short in retrospect; but most of us here today would certainly think of 2009 as being 'many years ahead'.

In the early 1950s there did come the development of thermonuclear weapons, the order of magnitude of whose destructiveness rendered out of date all the calculations on which Blackett and the professional military had hitherto based their strategic analysis. Paradoxically, their advent appeared providential to defence planners in the West, who had been wrestling with the insoluble problem of how to sustain a capacity to fight a global war on a peacetime economy. First the United Kingdom, in 1953, then the United States, in 1954, announced their intention of developing force-structures intended, not to fight a war, but to deter one by their capacity to inflict inescapable and unacceptable damage on any 'aggressor'. Since they did so at a moment when the Soviet Union was rapidly acquiring the capacity to retaliate in kind, it did not take an analyst of Blackett's stature to perceive the problems inherent in such a policy. It was indeed out of the critiques of this concept of 'massive retaliation' that the whole corpus of nuclear theory was to develop on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, scholars like Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, Thomas Schelling and Albert Wohlstetter developed concepts of great depth and subtlety which still constitute the basic texts for the subject. In Britain, a smaller group attacked the problem: Alastair Buchan, Denis Healey, Rear-Admiral Sir Anthony Buzzard, and the veteran military analyst Captain B. H. Liddell Hart. But it was Patrick Blackett's experience and incisiveness that largely dominated their thinking, and it is his work that best bears re-reading. For it defined with force and precision the fundamental problems of nuclear strategy that the longer, more sophisticated works of American experts all too often obfuscated or ignored.

Again, Blackett's strategic analysis was based on and reinforced by historical experience. He was scornful of the argument set out in the British Defence White paper of 1954, that superior Western technology would enable them to counter the Soviet advantage in manpower. He knew that it was exactly this kind of assumption which had led to the disasters at Jutland and elsewhere in the First World War. Technological superiority, he wrote, was "something to strive and to hope for, but not too often to rely on for planning purposes".7 A few years later he was to take issue with the young Henry Kissinger on the same grounds. In his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy Kissinger had contrasted "the flexibility and self-reliance of an American officer-corps 'drawn from a society in which individual initiative has traditionally been encouraged' with the rigidity of Soviet military organisation". This Blackett described as "plain poppycock". "To one who remembers similar beliefs about British personal and technical superiority current before the First World War and remembers the outcome," he wrote, "I can only comment, 'this is where I came in'."8

The main problem posed by a doctrine of 'massive retaliation', as Blackett was not alone

91

This content downloaded from 91.213.220.109 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:17:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 5: Blackett and the Origins of Nuclear Strategy

Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 36, No. 2

(although he was among the first) in perceiving, was that a strategy based on initiating a nuclear strike lacked credibility as a deterrent unless one was ready and willing to absorb the adversary's subsequent nuclear counter-blow a problem, incidentally, to which nobody has ever come up with any very convincing answer. Neither the United States nor the British Governments were prepared to complement their offensive deterrent posture with the protective domestic measures necessary to make it credible. Blackett was particularly scornful of the British Government's allocation of ?50 million to civil defence. The Defence White Paper of 1956, when announcing this, explained that "within the proportion of our resources that can be made available for home defence, the Government's aim will be to take the precautions without which, should the worst happen, ordered society could not survive". "The concealed assumption", Blackett pointed out, "is that the funds made available ... are in fact adequate to enable ordered society to survive an all-out atomic war. . . This is one example among others where a flagrant lack of quantitative thinking has been glossed over by a suave phrase."9 One wonders whether the situation is any better today.

Nevertheless, in the Lees Knowles Lectures, which he delivered for Trinity College Cambridge in the spring of 1956, Blackett appeared more sanguine about the credibility of a policy of 'massive retaliation'. "A strategic atomic stalemate is already in existence", he stated, which made "all-out total war between East and West. .. highly unlikely." Indeed, he suggested, "We should act as if atomic and hydrogen bombs have abolished total war and concentrate our efforts on working out how few are needed to keep it abolished."'" If 'massive retaliation' was as incredible a deterrence-posture as Blackett had suggested, then he had no right to assume that the 'Balance of Terror' was as stable as he claimed. It was a contradiction which he never fully resolved.

Like many others, Blackett took some time to make up his mind about the feasibility of using nuclear weapons in a tactical or battlefield role. In 1948, like his friend Robert Oppenheimer in the United States, who was working on the famous 'Project Vista', he was interested in exploring their usefulness against such military targets as those which had been provided by the Normandy landings, against ports and airfields, and against large naval units at sea. Six years later, official thinking caught up with him, when NATO forces began to introduce tactical nuclear weapons to strengthen the defence of Western Europe. Blackett observed at the time that "NATO planners must be greatly inhibited in planning for the tactical use of atomic weapons because of the uncertainty as to whether strategic considerations will actually allow their use". But in his Lees Knowles lectures he gave an on the whole benevolent survey of the various proposals for "Graduated Deterrence", which were currently advocating the limited use of nuclear weapons in preference to the immediate unleashing of all-out nuclear war. Two years later, however, he came out firmly against them. In a lecture delivered at Chatham House in April 1958, he stated flatly that once the Soviet Union had attained nuclear equality, any attempt to persuade or compel her to conform to Western ideas of limited war were bound to fail. Indeed, he suggested, the Soviets "may now be in a position to try to force the West to comply with their own set of rules for limited war, which in certain circumstances might well exclude the use of tactical weapons". In any case, he thought it "on the whole unlikely that Britain and America would in fact initiate the use of tactical nuclear weapons if a limited war broke out in Europe. I think that at the last minute they would leave the land forces to fight without nuclear weapons."

The following year indeed, in an article published in the New Statesman in December 1959, Blackett was quite explicitly advocating what would now be termed a 'No First Use' policy. In practice, he considered,

"the West would accept limited defeat rather than take the three risks inherent in initiating tactical nuclear war: the risk of accelerating defeat in the field; the risk of obliterating the people whom one is attempting to defend or protect; and the risk of starting the process of escalation towards total war."'13

In consequence he considered that "NATO would be well-advised to announce that in no circumstances would it initiate the use of tactical nuclear weapons, though it would use them if the Soviet forces did." In general, indeed, he suggested that ever since the war, the West had "committed a vast military blunder in neglecting adequate preparation for land warfare in the mistaken view that atomic weapons would do instead".

92

This content downloaded from 91.213.220.109 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:17:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 6: Blackett and the Origins of Nuclear Strategy

M. Howard The Blackett Memorial Lecture 1984

This was a view which Blackett had been developing throughout the 1950s. Nuclear weapons, he believed, were politically and militarily sterile. Their only utility was reciprocally to deter their use. He cited as evidence Henry Kissinger's complaint in 1957 that "we have never succeeded in translating our military [nuclear] superiority to political advantage". 4 To attain or defend political objectives, one needed conventional forces; and the gravamen of Blackett's charge against Western defence policy as a whole in the 1950s was

"that by concentrating so much material effort on the deterrence, by threat of atomic bombardment, of the USSR from a full-scale attack on Europe, it weakens our ability to play an effective role in many parts of the world where minor wars may and do continually occur. So by reducing relatively the land forces, tactical and transport aircraft etc. required to fight minor wars, we may find it more difficult to prevent such minor wars spreading into bigger wars. In this way, the policy of the Great Deterrent may make a major war more rather than less likely."''5

This was a view which naturally commanded much sympathy within the British armed forces themselves. Their capacity to deal with what they called 'brush-fire wars' was ruthlessly cut back by Defence Ministers of both parties, who, from Mr Duncan Sandys onwards, were more concerned with balancing their shrinking budgets than with maintaining a capacity for global intervention by conventional forces whose costs soared increasingly year by year. In the United States, where identical opinions were being voiced by experts as disparate as the young Professor Henry Kissinger and the veteran General Maxwell Taylor, it found even more influential support. It convinced, among others, the incoming President J. F. Kennedy, who took advantage of a Congress panicked into generosity in the aftermath of the first Sputnik flight to restore the conventional capabilities which his predecessor had so drastically reduced.

As a result, the United States had the resources to fight their war in Vietnam; which makes one wonder whether Blackett and those who thought like him were right after all. That experience suggested indeed that, while conflicts in the Third World could certainly not be resolved by Western nuclear power, they could not necessarily be resolved by Western conventional forces either. Against the Vietnam disaster are to be set the successful British interventions in Kuwait, East Africa, Borneo and, come to that, the Falkland Islands. But the success of those operations was the result of a precise limitation of objective and skilful management of forces which a more lavish provision of resources might have done little to improve and much to adulterate. Like other critics then and since, Blackett urged the improvement of the conventional defences of Western Europe; but the continuing inability of these, judged by any ordinary military standards, to match their Soviet opponents without that recourse to tactical nuclear weapons which Blackett condemned suggests that the nuclear balance was in fact remarkably stable; that the threat of 'massive retaliation', however illogical and suicidal strategically, was politically more effective than he and its other critics believed.

Indeed, towards the end of the next decade Blackett found himself having to defend the stability of the nuclear balance against attack from another quarter. Whereas his scepticism had previously been directed against the crude and, to his mind, innumerate concepts of official strategists, he was now increasingly concerned by the highly sophisticated analyses which were flowing across the Atlantic, based, to his way of thinking, on a complete lack of understanding of the realities of war. The theory of deterrence, he complained in 1959, had brought into existence

''an excessively complicated set of theoretical and numerical arguments essentially dealing with such problems as the extent to which a military threat which one dares not implement can deter an enemy from an action which you do not want him to take, or force him to do something that you want him to do. The ramifications of such theories and calculations have reached scholastic subtlety and are expressed in a formidable jargon ... theorising which, however necessary it is, in my view is hardly likely to provide the military and civil heads of governments with the basis of practical decisions in a crisis."'16

Two years later, in 1961, Blackett returned to the charge. The 'models' on which American strategic analysts had based their calculations were subtle and elaborate but bore little relation to the real world. The problem was to know whether "the model which has been constructed is sufficiently like the real events which it purports to represent to allow conclusions which have much

93

This content downloaded from 91.213.220.109 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:17:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 7: Blackett and the Origins of Nuclear Strategy

Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 36, No. 2

relevance to executive action". The conclusions of operational analysis always had to be checked against "the conclusions reached in a more intuitive manner by attempting to envisage the situation as a whole". In the Second World War he calculated that in only about one tenth of cases could operational research add anything to the decisions reached by military staffs "through the exercise of their traditional judgement and wisdom". If operational research staffs cannot improve on military conclusions based on rough calculation, he said, they should keep quiet: "never should they fall into the trap of decking out what is essentially only a hunch with pseudo-scientific backing. "17

All this was preliminary to a ferocious critique of the highly influential article which the American analyst Albert Wohlstetter had published in the periodical Foreign Affairs in January 1959 under the title The Delicate Balance of Terror. This article summarized the conclusions of a study which Wohlstetter had carried out at Rand Corporation for the United States Air Force on the basing modes of Strategic Air Command, and he had come to some highly disturbing conclusions. The bases from which the U.S. Air Force intended to launch their nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union, Wohlstetter had shown, were highly vulnerable to a pre-emptive attack. Further, little or no provision had been made for the organization of effective command and control of strike forces in the aftermath of such an attack. The requirements for a credible deterrent force were thus far more complex and extensive than had generally been believed. It had to be large enough for a substantial proportion to survive a surprise attack and strike back against an adversary whose defenses were prepared, whose population was largely sheltered through effective measures of civil defence, and whose regime was sufficiently ruthless to accept enormous damage in pursuit of their totalitarian aims of world conquest. This meant a very large force indeed: deterrence, argued Wohlstetter, could not be obtained on the cheap.

The Wohlstetter article appeared at the height of the panic in the United States about the so-called 'missile gap' the belief that the Soviet Union had a commanding lead over the United States in the production and deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles. This belief was powerfully exploited in the Presidential campaign of 1960 by a Democratic party which, within a few months of coming into office, had to admit that no such gap existed. None the less, huge appropriations were voted to expand the strategic nuclear forces of the United States by land, sea and air in order to meet the enormous requirements which, according to the Wohlstetter thesis, were needed if the United States was to maintain a credible posture of deterrence.

Of all Patrick Blackett's writings on nuclear strategy, that which best repays re-reading is the article, "A critique of some contemporary defence thinking", which appeared in Encounter magazine in April 1961 and is reprinted in his collection, Studies of War. With a distinctive mixture of numerical analysis and tough common sense, he demolished the assumption on which the theory of the missile gap was based, and with controlled passion he attacked the political presuppositions which underlay Wohlstetter's analysis. In the first place, he pointed out, it was utterly unrealistic to assume that any government, however ruthless, would consider launching a surprise attack in the certain knowledge that it could not escape retaliation on a scale which at best was likely to involve some 20 million casualties, with all the economic destruction that would go with them. In the second place, a force on the scale visualized was bound to be seen by the Soviets as posing the threat of a pre-emptive strike against their own forces; for one could not expect the Soviets to attribute to the West any more benign intentions than the West attributed to them. Inevitably they would respond. To accept the idea that stability could only be obtained by "a great increase of expenditure on research and development of long range missiles and a large increase in their invulnerability", wrote Blackett, "is likely to lead to wrong allocations of priorities as well as a worsening of the international atmosphere". It would destroy all hope of effective arms control agreements and open the way to "an endless and increasing arms race".18

Blackett's sombre prediction was to be fully justified. It can be argued that the moment when 'the arms race' really took off was during the early years of the Kennedy Administration when the expansion of U.S. nuclear capabilities to counter a Soviet challenge which did not yet exist and to meet the exacting requirements of Wohlstetter's worst-case analysis triggered off the massive expansion of Soviet I.C.B.M.s, which in its turn created a new panic in the United States in the late 1970s; on the crest of which another administration came into power in 1980, pledged to yet greater deployments and higher expenditure. It may be that, given the development of missile

94

This content downloaded from 91.213.220.109 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:17:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 8: Blackett and the Origins of Nuclear Strategy

M. Howard-The Blackett Memorial Lecture 1984

technology the improvement of range, accuracy and miniaturization this escalation would have occurred anyway. But certainly every stage in it down to our recent experiences with Cruise missiles has been justified in terms of the kind of far-fetched unrealistic worst-case analysis which Blackett so rightly abominated. Indeed one cannot help but be struck, when one reads the work which American strategic analysts have produced in such huge quantities over the past 20 years, by the contrast between the subtlety and logic of their technical arguments and the crudity and ignorance of the political assumptions on which these are all too often based.

Blackett's contribution to strategic thought lay not in any specific theory or theories nor even in any startlingly original insights into the new problems of the nuclear age. It lay in the quality of mind that he brought to them; the scientist's capacity for hard reasoning based on observable data combined with a solid common sense and understanding both of war and of politics which was rare among his more fluent and sophisticated American contemporaries and which has, alas, grown still rarer. The only figure of comparable quality across the Atlantic was the late Bernard Brodie-a man, curiously enough, who also came to strategic studies from a background in naval affairs. Like all the rest of us, Blackett explored blind alleys and put forward ideas which, on reflection, he wisely abandoned. His views would now be labelled by strategic theorists as 'minimal deterrence' or MAD (mutually assured destruction) and considered so primitive as to be hardly worth taking into account. To my mind, however, they remain as valid today as they were 20 years ago: the only basis on which both an acceptable defence policy and a credible arms-control policy can be based.

"I have not the slightest doubt" Blackett wrote in that final article in 1961 "that the main danger today is not from the rational act of responsible statesmen, but is due to essentially irrational acts of irresponsible, frightened, humiliated, revengeful, or just mad people or perhaps, more likely still, from the confused actions of well-meaning people overwhelmed by complex circumstances beyond their mental or moral ceiling."'19

Can there be any doubt that the situation remains fundamentally unchanged today?

REFERENCES 1. P. M. S. BLACKETT (1962) Studies of War Nuclear and Conventional, p. 75. Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh. 2. Ibid., p. 74. 3. P. M. S. BLACKETT (1948) Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy, pp. 4-5. Turnstile Press, London. 4. Ibid., pp. 53, 55. 5. M. GOWING (1974) Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945-52, Vol. I, pp. 194-206. Macmillan,

London. 6. P. M. S. BLACKETT (1948) Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy, p. 49. Turnstile Press, London. 7. P. M. S. BLACKETT (1962) Studies of War Nuclear and Conventional, p. 43. Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh. 8. Ibid., p. 62. 9. P. M. S. BLACKETT (1956) Atomic Weapons and East-West Relations, pp. 24-25. Cambridge University Press.

10. Ibid., pp. 5, 100. 11. P. M. S. BLACKETT (1962) Studies of War Nuclear and Conventional, p. 43. Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh. 12. Ibid., pp. 64-65. 13. Ibid., p. 84. 14. Ibid., p. 57. 15. Ibid., p. 45. 16. Ibid., p. 92. 17. Ibid., pp. 128-130. 18. Ibid., p. 141. 19. Ibid., p. 141.

95

This content downloaded from 91.213.220.109 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:17:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions