Crisis Management in the Nuclear Age (1987) / Chapter Skim
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Managing Superpower Crises
Managing Superpower Crises
Pages 8-25
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From page 8... ...
and Soviet governments receive information from embassies and military assistance groups abroad, allies, intelligence reconnaissance from satellites, intelligence agents, and the news media. In the United States, assessment and option development are carried out by the National Security Council (NSC)
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In the Soviet Union, it is thought that assessment and option development are performed by the staff of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Foreign Ministry, the General Staff, and the intelligence community.
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SOURCE: Edward Warner, The Rand Corporation Deliberation and decision making in the United States are carried out by the president, the NSC, and any ad hoc group of key advisers that the president may call into being during a particular crisis. The NSC normally includes the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
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From page 11... ...
The Soviets are said to have involved only about six men, all Politburo members, in managing the Cuban Missile Crisis.8 Both countries used a compressed version of their top leadership in that crisis. Both the United States and the USSR have similar options for action and execution.
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From page 12... ...
. CRISIS MANAGEMENT IN THE NUCLEAR AGE any serious crisis and, using knowledge about decision making under stress and the experience of past international crises, some of the problems that might arise.
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From page 13... ...
Llewellyn Thompson is reported to have fulfilled this role in interpreting Soviet messages and anticipating likely Soviet responses to U.S. moves during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the presence of such a specially skilled person in future crises cannot be assured.
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In the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. leaders thought Soviet Premier Khrushchev understood quite well that the introduction of nuclear missiles into Cuba would not be acceptable.~7 But this was not obvious to Khrushchev.
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For example, it is sometimes difficult in practice for civilian officials to exercise their authority over military officers. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara is said to have gone into the situation room, where he began asking a lot of
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during the Cuban Missile Crisis, some handled the stress well and others did not. Two individuals reportedly were overstressed, becoming very passive and unable to function.
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There is insufficient direct evidence to conclude that lack of experience, insufficient preparation, psychological breakdowns under stress, or premature group consensus is likely to seriously impair the ability of leaders to make rational and sound decisions in a particular kind of superpower crisis. But there is also insufficient evidence to support a faith that leaders on both sides will always maintain sufficient control and exercise sound enough judgment to avoid nuclear war.
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From page 18... ...
There have recently been a few Soviet writings about management of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and some high-level Soviets have engaged in discussions of crisis management with U.S. experts and former government officials.
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In past superpower crises, both sides have used their military forces to signal their commitments and intentions- an emphatic but potentially dangerous method of communication. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States dispersed loaded bombers to 40 civilian airports around the country.34 During the 1973 Middle East Crisis, the Soviets gave a prominent signal by putting their airborne divisions on alert after Israel violated a cease-fire and
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To ensure their capacity to retaliate, however, they have dispersed the physical capability to operate weapons to a relatively large number of military commanders because central authorities cannot be reliably protected against preemptive attack and because the detailed management
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Another reason may be long-standing naval opposition to restrictions on the authority of ship commanders. The Soviet Union has similarly elaborate control systems, including two separate political control channels and a physical control technology.38 This control is necessarily incomplete, however, in that field commanders must retain significant independent authority over the operational management of military forces.
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From page 23... ...
Furthermore, to protect against catastrophic failure of their retaliatory forces, both the United States and the Soviet Union have prepared for such rapid responses to evidence of impending attack that the distinction between retaliation and preemption is very finely drawn and may be unstable under crisis conditions.39 These dual tensions, between centralized and dispersed authority and between the declared intention to use nuclear forces only in response to attack and the strong incentives to initiate operations before suffering the full weight of attack, are particularly acute in the European military theatre. The extreme destructiveness and rapid pace of nuclear warfare demands extensive central direction, while the slower pace of conventional weapons engagements and the complexity of the circumstances they generate both allows and requires delegation of greater authority to immediate commanders.
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From page 24... ...
According to some Western observers, the Soviet military establishment is procedurally more centralized, more dependent on the performance of central command authorities, less willing to rely on the adaptive actions of immediate weapons commanders, less willing to alert its forces without an actual commitment to war, and more inclined to a massive centrally programmed action if war does occur.4i Though sharing many of the same properties of centralized management, the United States establishment is nonetheless more inclined to limited, probing, adaptive reactions in advanced stages of crisis and even in the initial stages of war.42 Despite differences of style, the effort to maintain and enhance retaliatory capacity has led both superpowers to develop large and highly decentralized military establishments with responsibility for conventional and nuclear weapons whose actions cannot be completely controlled or monitored from any central location. In a crisis, leaders must maintain an inherently difficult balance of central direction and decentralized adaptive operations under an intense time pressure.
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From page 25... ...
, but a similar action might not be supported by the OAS today. The United States has a spotty record of consultation with its allies on foreign policy matters in recent years, as indicated by disputes with its European allies over the neutron bomb, the sanctions the United States tried to impose against construction of the Soviet natural gas pipeline after the imposition of martial law in Poland, the arms control proposals President Reagan made at the Reykjavik summit without Allied consultation, and the selling of arms to Iran in 1985 and 1986 while the U.S.
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