WILLIAM BURR AND DAVID ALAN ROSENBERG
During the years after the Cuban missile crisis, both superpowers treaded more warily to avoid direct confrontations, but traditional Cold War concerns kept them expanding their nuclear arsenals and preparing for the possibility of World War III. Motivated by fear and suspicion, but also by diplomatic and political purposes, both Moscow and Washington invested huge sums in thousands of nuclear weapons and intercontinental delivery systems. During the 1960s, the United States deployed over a thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), hundreds of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and took the arms race in a new qualitative direction by developing accurate multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs). The Soviets, determined never to be outmatched again in a crisis, began to field a formidable ICBM force. Before Moscow reached strategic parity with Washington, and ended US nuclear supremacy, however, a stalemate had emerged, where neither side could launch a preemptive strike to gain a military advantage without incurring horrific losses. While the leaders of the superpowers recognized that nuclear weapons were militarily unusable, except in the most extreme circumstances, they nevertheless wanted them for deterrence and for diplomatic leverage.
In Europe, the cockpit of Cold War rivalries, apprehensions about military force imbalances and fears of nuclear blackmail and first strikes gave nuclear weapons a central role in alliance policies and politics. To validate security guarantees and to deter political and military threats, both the Soviet Union and the United States stockpiled thousands of tactical nuclear weapons on European soil. In light of the terrible danger of a nuclear conflagration in Central Europe, both superpowers searched for "flexible response" options to raise the threshold for nuclear weapons use in a confrontation.
The emergence of strategic parity at the close of the 1960s provided the context for superpower detente. US and Soviet leaders wanted to moderate
Cold War rivalries and avoid confrontations, but those goals uneasily coexisted with commitments to preserving and developing strategic advantages. Despite efforts at strategic arms control, innovations such as MIRVs and cruise missiles provided new fields for the nuclear competition and renewed apprehension about the vulnerability of strategic forces. With Moscow and Washington relying on electronic systems to enhance warning of strategic attack, both governments headed toward risky launch-on-warning capabilities, which raised the chances ofnuclear catastrophe. While the United States and the Soviet Union continued to avoid nuclear weapons use, the practice of nuclear deterrence and nuclear blackmail remained risk-laden enterprises.
World History
