When and how to use or not to use the atomic bomb

The instability of today's international system has restored the nuclear threat to the preeminence it enjoyed during the Cold War. The possibility that some actor, rational or not, might resort to the employment of atomic bombs to advance its interests is, again, plausible; how to avoid it is one of the main responsibilities of many world leaders.

This concern is paralleled by a growing public interest in nuclear deterrence issues, which has a direct translation in the substantial increase in the issue of publications dealing with this subject from the most varied angles.

'The Bomb. Presidents, Generals and the Secret History of Nuclear War' is a very interesting contribution to the literature on nuclear armament. In this work, Fred Kaplan, a renowned American journalist specializing in national security issues, offers a journey that spans from the beginning of the atomic era to the present day. It is a rigorous work but, at the same time, very accessible to the non-specialist public, with the important added value derived from the author's access to the political and military circles where the American nuclear policy is forged and decided, and from the contribution of data from recently declassified documentation, which has revealed unpublished aspects of this policy.

Throughout its chapter, 'The Bomb' introduces fundamental concepts of nuclear deterrence - mass retaliation, flexible response, mutually assured destruction or 'escalate to de-escalate' are just a few of them - placing them in their political and strategic context, while tracing the serious dilemmas faced by all American presidents of the atomic era: how to maintain the credibility of deterrence with the lowest possible level of force; is a first-use doctrine adequate; what targets should nuclear weapons achieve?Is a first-use doctrine adequate; what targets should nuclear weapons achieve; if the U.S. launches a limited strike, will it be perceived as such by Moscow; and if the U.S. launches a limited strike, will it be perceived as such by Moscow? Kaplan's account sample how they all had to ponder these existential questions, and how they all chose to accept the reinforcement of their nuclear power, despite the moral repugnance they may have felt inwardly for the employment these weapons.

The account of the role of politicians and the military in atomic decision-making and the internal tensions within the Armed Forces over who should take the lead in an eventual nuclear response is perhaps the most valuable contribution of the book, also because of how little known this aspect is. For several years, there was an underhand struggle within the U.S. Armed Forces between the Navy and the Air Force to be the focal point of any nuclear response, an issue that was far from trivial, since others as important as the distribution of the defense budget depended on the political decision taken in this regard. In this rivalry, the Air Force favored the accumulation of a large mass of nuclear warheads - naturally, under its control - with which to literally obliterate the USSR, while the Navy postulated a smaller arsenal, based initially on the 'Polaris' missile embarked on submarines, capable of guaranteeing a devastating second attack in the event of receiving a first attack from the Soviets.

Especially illuminating is the account of the role of Strategic Air Command (SAC) in defining the nation's nuclear strategy and doctrine, as well as in deciding on the issue of warheads needed to serve that strategy. This headquarters, under the leadership of the temperamental Air Force General Curtis LeMay during several of the most critical years of the Cold War, systematically opted to accumulate a large warhead issue , justifying its decision through the definition of the Joint Operational Plan for nuclear weapons employment ; the 'Single Integrated Operational Plan' (SIOP). This document, a core topic in the definition of the targets to be attacked in the event of a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, offers, according to the author, a clear example of how the SAC ignored, during the internship, several presidential directives that ordered a leave review of the warheads necessary for the internship of the plan.

William Kaufmann, a RAND Corporation analyst, and Franklin Miller, a Defense department official under George W. H. Bush, are presented in the book as interesting counterpoints to the prevailing SAC view. The former because, critical of the viability and moral rectitude of the doctrine of massive retaliation, he introduced the idea ofcounterforce targets. This contribution proposed a significant conventional reinforcement as the best way to counter a Soviet attack at the same level, articulating, in case conventional defense was not effective, a gradual nuclear response on Soviet military targets (including nuclear ones), as a notice that, if hostilities did not cease, massive retaliation would then be escalated. Miller, for his part, was the first to carry out an in-depth revision of the SIOP, overcoming the resistance, bordering in some cases on hostility, of a significant part of the SAC, and which resulted in a significant reduction in the issue of targets and, therefore, in the number of warheads needed to serve them, which went from 12,000 to 5,888.

These questions illustrate, without exhausting them, the many facets of the history of the atomic bomb and nuclear deterrence in an extremely interesting and attractive work, to which some objections could be made, such as focusing almost exclusively on the American atomic bomb, leaving the reader in an almost total darkness regarding the nature and form of the discussion that, at the same time, was taking place in other nuclear powers such as France, Great Britain and, above all, the Soviet Union; or falling into the conventional vision of the lunatic Trump to dismiss his nuclear policy without going into the validity of some of his arguments; or presenting a vision of the Obama era that is close to hagiography. Without damaging the value of the work as a whole, these aspects do detract one iota of rigor from a degree scroll that, despite everything, is essential to better understand the international status of our days.