MAD, not Marx: Khrushchev and the nuclear revolution

ABSTRACT

The revival of nuclear strategy in US policy and scholarship has been strengthened by arguments that the ‘nuclear revolution’ – the assumption that thermonuclear bombs and missiles had made major war too dangerous to wage – does not affect international behaviour as much as nuclear revolution advocates claim. This article shows that the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev indeed regarded nuclear war as too dangerous to wage, a decision which manifested itself not so much in foreign policy or military doctrine but in his determination to avoid war when the possibility arose. We argue that Khrushchev’s experience provides us with a more useful way to characterise the nuclear revolution and suggest some implications of this argument for contemporary debates about nuclear weaponry.

KEYWORDS:

• Nikita Khrushchev
• nuclear revolution
• nuclear strategy
• Cold War
• Soviet Union

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank their following friends and colleagues for comments on earlier drafts of this article: Richard Beardsworth, Avery Goldstein, James Hershberg, Robert Jervis, Mark Kramer, Nuno Monteiro, Brendan Rittenhouse-Green, Jan Ruzicka, Jayita Sarkar, Caitlin Talmadge, and William Wohlforth. A version of the article was presented at the ‘Conflict and Cooperation in the Nuclear Age’ workshop at Yale University in September 2016.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ An official overview of the development of US nuclear policy and weaponry can be found in the 2010 United States Nuclear Posture Review, <http://archive.defense.gov/npr/docs/2010%20Nuclear%20Posture%20Review%20Report.pdf> For more recent official policy, see the Congressional Budget Office’s 2015 report, ‘Projected Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2015–2024,’ <https://www.cbo.gov/publication/49956>.

² Recent scholarship which suggests that the United States would benefit from new nuclear strategies include Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, ‘The New Era of Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence and Conflict’, Strategic Studies Quarterly 7/1 (Spring 2013) 3–12; K. A. Lieber and D. G. Press, ‘The New Era of Counterforce: Technological Change and the Future of Nuclear Deterrence’, International Security 41/4 (Spring 2017), 9–49; Matthew Kroenig, ‘Nuclear Superiority and the Balance of Resolve: Explaining Nuclear Crisis Outcomes’, International Organization 67/1 (Winter 2013), 141–171; Matthew Kroenig, ‘Facing Reality: Getting NATO Ready for a New Cold War’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 57/1 (Winter/Spring 2015), 49–70; and Austin Long and Brendan Rittenhouse-Green, ‘Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence, Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 38/1–2 (Winter 2015) 38–73. Also see Francis Gavin, ‘Strategies of Inhibition: U.S. Grand Strategy, the Nuclear Revolution, and Nonproliferation’, International Security 40/1 (Summer 2015), 16–17.

³ Lieber and Press, ‘The New Era of Nuclear Weapons’, 3–5; also see Alexandre Debs and Nuno Monteiro, Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016) Ch. 1.

⁴ See Hans Morgenthau, ‘The Four Paradoxes of Nuclear Strategy’, American Political Science Review 58/1 (Spring 1964), 23–35; George Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age (New York: Random House 1983); Kenneth Waltz, ‘Nuclear Myths and Political Realities’, American Political Science Review 84/3 (Autumn 1990), 731–45; Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1984); and Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1989).

⁵ More recent scholarship which incorporate the assumption that the nuclear revolution transforms international politics include Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2007); Daniel Deudney, ‘Unipolarity and Nuclear Weapons’, in G. John Ikenberry, Michael Mastanduno, and William Wohlforth (eds.), International Relations Theory and the Consequences of Unipolarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011); Avery Goldstein, Deterrence and Security in the 21^st Century: China, Britain, France and the Enduring Legacy of the Nuclear Revolution (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press 2000); Susan B. Martin, ‘The Continuing Value of Nuclear Weapons: A Structural Realist Analysis’, Contemporary Security Policy 34/1 (Spring 2013), 174–94; Charles Glaser and Steve Fetter, ‘Should the United States Reject MAD? Damage Limitation and U.S. Nuclear Strategy Towards China’, International Security 41/1 (Summer 2016), 49–98; and Nuno Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014). Monteiro writes (p. 50) that ‘the nuclear revolution is an integral component of my theory of unipolarity’.

⁶ Ronald Reagan, ‘Address before a Joint Session of the U.S. Congress on the State of the Union,’ 25 January 1984, access via The American Presidency Project, <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=40205>.

⁷ McGeorge Bundy, who was involved in the development of nuclear strategies under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, famously expressed this view in 1969. ‘Think tank analysts can set levels of “acceptable” damage well up in the millions of lives. They can assume that the loss of dozens of great cities is somehow a real choice for sane men. In the real world of real political leaders – whether here or in the Soviet Union – a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one’s own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable.’ McGeorge Bundy, ‘To Cap the Volcano’, Foreign Affairs 48/1 (October 1969), 9–10.

⁸ Waltz, ‘Nuclear Myths and Political Realities’, p. 740.

⁹ This article builds upon several historical studies, including David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven: Yale University Press 1994); Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War (New York: Norton 2006); Vladislav Zubok and Hope Harrison, ‘The Nuclear Education of Nikita Khrushchev,’ in John Lewis Gaddis. et al. (eds.), Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb (New York: Oxford University Press 1999); William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York: Norton 2003); Margot Light, The Soviet Theory of International Relations (Brighton: Wheatsheaf 1988); and Michael MccGwire, Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy (Washington: Brookings Institute Press 1987).

¹⁰ For a study of the tensions between the nuclear revolution and Marxism more generally, and how this problem speaks to contemporary Marxist scholarship, see Campbell Craig, ‘When the Whip Comes Down’, European Journal of International Security 2/1 (forthcoming).

¹¹ See J. V. Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House 1952).

¹² Quoted in Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster 1995), p. 181. William Wohlforth argues that Stalin believed that the post-war era would be ‘a grand, cataclysmic replay of prewar world politics’. William Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions during the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1993), p. 85.

¹³ ‘TASS information bulletin,’ 7 May 1953; G.A. Goncharov et al. (eds.), Atomnyi Proekt SSSR 3-1 (Moscow-Saratov: Nauka 2008), 634–640.

¹⁴ Report from Malyshev and Vannikov to Malenkov, August 28–29, 1953. G.A. Goncharov et al. (eds.), Atomnyi Proekt SSSR 3-2 (Moscow-Saratov: Nauka 2009), 79.

¹⁵ G.A. Goncharov et al. (eds.), Atomnyi Proekt SSSR 2-7 (Moscow-Saratov: Nauka 2007), 568.

¹⁶ Harrison Salisbury, ‘Malenkov says both sides would lose in atomic war’, New York Times, 14 Mar. 1954, p. 1.

¹⁷ Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev: Reformator (Moscow: Vremya 2010), 166.

¹⁸ Article by Igor Kurchatov (et al) (unpublished), March 1954, Atomnyi Proekt SSSR 3–2, pp. 163–167. See also Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 337–338.

¹⁹ Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev: Reformator, p. 167.

²⁰ Molotov’s remarks at the January (1955) Party Plenum, 31 January 1955, Russian State Archive for Contemporary History (RGANI): fond 2, opis 1, delo 127, listy 112–114.

²¹ Russian Foreign Ministry, Serbian Foreign Ministry (eds.), Sovetsko-Yugoslavskie Otnosheniya, 1945-1956 gg (Novosibirsk: Al'fa-Porte 2010), 660. 

²² Conversation between Nikita Khrushchev and the Indonesian Ambassador Subandrio, 22 March 1955, RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 565, list 6.

²³ A. A. Fursenko et al. (eds.), Postanovleniya TsK KPSS, 1954–1964, 2 (Moscow: Rosspen 2006), 139–144.

²⁴ Ibid., 99.

²⁵ Conversation between Kliment Voroshilov, Nikita Khrushchev et al. with an Iranian parliamentary delegation, 13 January 1956, Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation (AVPRF): fond 06, opis 15a, papka 21, delo 8, listy 12–29.

²⁶ Report on the test of RDS-37, 23 November 1955, Atomnyi Proekt SSSR, 3–2, 423–424.

²⁷ A. A. Fursenko et al. (eds.), Prezidium TsK KPSS, 1954–1964, 1 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003), 88–95.

²⁸ Zubok and Harrison, ‘The Nuclear Education of Nikita Khrushchev,’ 147.

²⁹ M. Dejean à M. Pineau, 9 March 1956, French Foreign Ministry (ed.), Documents diplomatiques français 1956 – Tome I (1er janvier – 30 juin) (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale 1988), 362.

³⁰ ‘N.S. Khrushchev: U Stalina Byli Momenty Prosvetleniya’, Istochnik 2 (1994), 90.

³¹ Conversation between Kliment Voroshilov, Nikita Khrushchev et al. with an Iranian parliamentarydelegation, 13 January 1956, AVPRF: fond 06,opis 15a, papka 21, delo 8, listy 12–29.

³² Conversation between Nikita Khrushchev and the Shah, 27 June 1956. RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 567, listy 21, 19.

³³ ‘Note from N. Khrushchev to the CPSU CC Presidium regarding conversations with Yugoslav leaders in the Crimea,’ 8 October 1956, CWIHP Digital Archive: <http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/112230.pdf?v=3c340b00832f55dab215f7f1d7908df9>.

³⁴ Conversation between Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong, 31 July 1958. In the authors’ possession.

³⁵ See letters from N.A. Bulganin to Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet, 5 November 1956, both printed in Pravda, 6 November 1956, 1–2.

³⁶ See, for example, Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris 2011).

³⁷ Letter from Nikita Khrushchev to Gamal Abdel Nasser, 12 April 1959 in V. V. Naumkin (ed.), Blizhnevostochnyi Konflikt, 1957–1967, 2 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond Demokratiya 2003), 267.

³⁸ Ibid., 269.

³⁹ Khrushchev’s draft letter to Mao Zedong, 19 September 1958, RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 351, list 139.

⁴⁰ Khrushchev’s letter to Eisenhower, 19 September 1958, published in Pravda, 20 July 1958, p. 1.

⁴¹ Finnish Ambassador to China Carl-Johan Sundstrom’s conversation with Chairman Mao Zedong, 28 January 1955, Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive: 117-00429-04.

⁴² This formula became even more popular during the 1961 crisis. See, for example, Khrushchev’s fourth meeting with John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 4 June 1961, RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 468, listy 76–80.

⁴³ Record of the Presidium meeting, 6 November 1958 in Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, 338–339. For a detailed discussion see Douglas Selvage, ‘Khrushchev’s November 1958 Berlin Ultimatum: New Evidence from the Polish Archives,’ Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 11 (Winter 1988), 200.

⁴⁴ Khrushchev stated this estimate on a number of occasions, including in the Presidium discussions. See, for example, Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, 503.

⁴⁵ Nikita Khrushchev’s conversation with John J. McCloy, 26 July 1961, RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 581, listy 91–143.

⁴⁶ Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, 346.

⁴⁷ Conversation between Harold Macmillan and Nikita Khrushchev, 22 February 1959. UK National Archive, PREM 11/2690 (Visit of Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary to Soviet Union, Feb.–Mar.).

⁴⁸ Telegram from the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, 17 June 1959, 9p.m., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, Berlin Crisis, 1958–1959, VOLUME VIII (Washington DC: The United States Government Printing Office 1993), 913–917.

⁴⁹ Khrushchev did not close the question of the German treaty until January 1963 but it never regained the sort of intensity as it had in 1958–59.

⁵⁰ Nikita Khrushchev’s note to the CC CPSU Prezidium concerning further measures in cutting the Soviet Union’s armed forces, 8 December 1959, RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 351, listy 3–12.

⁵¹ Ibid.

⁵² Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, 395–397.

⁵³ Conversation between Harold Macmillan and Nikita Khrushchev, 22 February 1959. UK National Archive, PREM 11/2690 (Visit of Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary to Soviet Union, Feb-Mar).

⁵⁴ Conversation between Nikita Khrushchev and Lazaro Cardenas, 29 November 1958. RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 574, list 134.

⁵⁵ Nikita Khrushchev, Vremya, Lyudi, Vlast', 2 (Moscow: Moskovskie Novosti 1999), 419. Also see Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, Ch. 10.

⁵⁶ Conversation between Nikita Khrushchev and Jawaharlal Nehru, 12 February 1960, RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 562, list 143.

⁵⁷ Ibid., list 144. See also Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, 243–44.

⁵⁸ Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, 431.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 425.

⁶⁰ See Christopher Preble, John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press 2004).

⁶¹ Quoted in Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, 255.

⁶² Nikita Khrushchev’s statement to domestic and foreign journalists, 11 May 1960, RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 613, listy 62–77.

⁶³ Conversation between Nikita Khrushchev and Harold Macmillan, 15 May 1960 (4:30pm), RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 631, listy 83–85.

⁶⁴ Peter Catterall (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries, II (London: Pan Books 2011), 297.

⁶⁵ Conversation between Nikita Khrushchev and Harold Macmillan, 15 May 1960 (4:30pm).

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ Mikhail Prozumenshchikov et al. (eds.), Venskii Val’s Kholodnoi Voiny: Vokrug Vstrechi N.S. Khrushcheva i Dzh. F. Kennedi v 1961 godu v Vene (Moscow: Rosspen 2011), 78–79.

⁶⁸ Conversation between Nikita Khrushchev and John J. McCloy, 26 July 1961. Reproduced in Venskii Val’s Kholodnoi Voiny, 386.

⁶⁹ Conversation between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy, 4 June 1961. Reproduced in Ibid., 251.

⁷⁰ For a detailed account, see Hope Harrison, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton: Princeton UP 2005).

⁷¹ Presidium CC CPSU Discussion, 8 January 1962, in Prezidium TsK KPSS, 537–538.

⁷² Conversation between Nikita Khrushchev and Kwame Nkrumah, 28 August 1961. RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 556, list 45.

⁷³ For a detailed exploration, see Sergey Radchenko, ‘On Hedgehogs and Passions: History, Hearsay, and Hotchpotch in the Writing of the Cuban Missile Crisis’, in Len Scott and R. Gerald Hughes (eds.), The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Critical Reappraisal (Abingdon: Routledge 2015).

⁷⁴ Nikita Khrushchev’s remarks on a draft of his letter to John F. Kennedy, 21 April 1961. Venskii Val’s Kholodnoi Voiny, 167.

⁷⁵ Ibid.

⁷⁶ Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, Edward Crankshaw, Strobe Talbott, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little Brown 1970), 493–4.

⁷⁷ Nikita Khrushchev’s conversation with the deputy foreign minister of Iran, 26 October 1962, RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 567, list 117. On Khrushchev’s motivation to deliver the missiles for purposes of great-power prestige, see Robert Jervis, ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis: What Can We Know, How Did It Start, and Why Did It End?’ in Scott and Hughes (eds.), The Cuban Missile Crisis, 9.

⁷⁸ Malinovsky cable to Pliev, 22 October 1962, Wilson Center Digital Archive, document at http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117316; also see Mark Kramer, ‘Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis for Warsaw Pact Nuclear Operations’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin 8–9 (1995), 348–54.

⁷⁹ http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117324; Malinovsky cable to Pliev, 27 October 1962, Wilson Center Digital Archive, document at http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117326.

⁸⁰ Presidium discussion, 25 October 1962, Wilson Center digital archive, document at http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/115136. An excellent brief chapter on Khrushchev’s diplomacy during the Cuban Missile Crisis is Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, Ch. 19.

⁸¹ James G. Blight, ‎Bruce J. Allyn, ‎David A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (New York: Rowman and Littlefield 2002), 509.

⁸² Dictation by Nikita Khrushchev, 30 October 1962. RGANI: fond 52, opis 1, delo 600, list 8.

⁸³ Conversation between Nikita Khrushchev and Antonin Novotny, 30 October 1962, Wilson Center digital archive, document at <http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/115219>.

⁸⁴ See Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, Chs. 1–2; Daniel Deudney, ‘Nuclear Weapons and the Waning of the Real-State,’ Daedalus 124/2 (Spring 1995) 209–31; and Waltz, ‘Nuclear Myths and Political Realities.’ For a recent overview, see Stephen Walt, ‘Rethinking the Nuclear Revolution,’ Foreign Policy online, 3 August 2010, <http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/08/03/rethinking-the-nuclear-revolution/>.

⁸⁵ Robert Jervis, Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, Chs. 1–2.

⁸⁶ See Lieber and Press, ‘The New Era of Nuclear Weapons,’ and their forthcoming Myth of the Nuclear Revolution. Keir Lieber, and Daryl Press, ‘The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of U.S.Primacy’, International Security 30/4 (Spring 2006), 7–44.

⁸⁷ Quoted in Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 339.

⁸⁸ Quoted in Beth Fischer, The Reagan Reversal (Columbia: University of Missouri Press 2000), 121. The full quotation from Reagan: ‘There are still some people at the Pentagon who think that nuclear war is “winnable.” I thought they were crazy.’ On another occasion Reagan noted in his diary that ‘we have to do all we can to have a deterrent and to see there is never a nuclear war.’ Quoted in Michael Dobbs, Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (London: Bloomsbury 1996), 113.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Campbell Craig

Campbell Craig is professor of International Politics at Cardiff University. He has held senior fellowships at Yale University, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and the European University Institute, and is the author (with Fredrik Logevall) of America’s Cold War: the Politics of Insecurity (Harvard University Press, 2009). His forthcoming book (with Jan Ruzicka) on US unipolar preponderance and the nuclear nonproliferation regime will be published by Cornell University Press.

Sergey Radchenko

Sergey Radchenko is Professor of International Politics at Cardiff University and Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the author of Unwanted Visionaries: the Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford UP 2014), and Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 (Palo Alto: Stanford UP 2009).