Kahn’s nuclear war fighting scenarios are carefully thought out, but they assume the participants are intelligent, reasonable men working with detailed situational knowledge and capable and functioning communication, command and control systems.

In reality, Total Thermonuclear War will be just like every other war: confusion, uncertainty, total chaos, bad intelligence, flawed communications and a broken chain of command. The men who are closest to the fighting only see a little piece of it. Those in a position to contemplate the whole conflict are too far away from the action to make any sense of it. You can plan all you want, but once it gets rolling it has a mind of its own. No one knows what the hell is going on until years later when the historians laboriously reconstruct the whole affair–and then, they’ll only get half of it right.

Shortly after I read Kahn I read Tuchman’s “The Guns of August”, a much more realistic assessment of the fog of war than Kahn ever imagined. TGoA was about the First World War, and it shows how the architects of that catastrophe thought they had it all thought out ahead of time, the same arrogance and stupidity exhibited by Kahn.

Tuchman never saw combat either, but she was a lot smarter than Kahn–and fortunately, much more influential. When JFK managed the Cuban Missile Crisis, he had just finished reading Tuchman’s book.

Nuclear war fighting capability can be defined as offensive, or first-strike, or defensive (second-strike or retaliatory/deterrent). The former are highly accurate and expensive weapons produced in relatively small numbers since they will be used to start a war. They are aimed at hardened or highly defended military targets. The latter are cheap, not particularly accurate, but produced in large numbers so enough will survive a first strike. They are aimed at cities.

Then there was the Reagan plan to convert the sub-launched Polaris ICBM force (a perfectly reasonable retaliatory defensive configuration) into a super-accurate MIRVed first strike system. The idea was the sub-launched missiles would take out Soviet air defenses so our bombers could get through easier. Why not just let the missiles replace the bombers altogether?

It turns out the Air Force was afraid the bombers would become obsolete, and the Navy wanted to get funding to upgrade its obsolete sub force. Unfortunately, it converted a perfectly effective and credible retaliatory defensive system (one that could be held back in reserve until the nature of the attack was perfectly well understood)that already existed into a highly destabilizing first strike weapon that scared the hell out of the Soviets.

A lot of these “defense” decisions have little to do with national security or military necessity, they are political or economic moves made to satisfy local state interests, or economic centers, or even inter-service rivalries.

Several times during the Cold War both sides almost precipitated a conflict by proposing or even deploying systems of dubious deterrent value but obvious aggressive (first strike) capabilities. The decisions to introduce these systems were usually political or economic, not military.

Other systems, like Jimmy Carter’s idea to put our 2nd-strike missiles on rails so they could be shuffled around (an excellent way to make a Soviet first strike harder to pull off} were dismissed as ridiculous.

Instead, we went for replacing the perfectly good second-strike missiles in our hardened silos with highly accurate Mirved first strike rockets. I personally worked on one system designed to frustrate and bypass a non-threatening Soviet retaliatory system to make our own first strike easier.

Look up Hermann Kahn.

(I was born on an Air Force Base in the center of a ring of Atlas rocket silos just before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sometimes I think I have a really old PTSD.)

The defender doesn’t need his missiles to be too accurate, since he is targeting cities and economic targets, not hardened military facilities that must be taken out early in the conflict. He spends his money on making his weapons very numerous, highly mobile, or encasing them in concrete, so they can better survive a first strike.

The problem is that it makes sense to mix and conceal your defensive and offensive capabilities to make your enemy’s planning more difficult, which tends to make it more likely for him to misjudge your motives and intentions. This only increases the possibility, and severity, of an accidental conflict…

We’re very fortunate our arms race with the Soviets didn’t lead to disaster. We won’t be that lucky a second time.

As the Fat Man says in “The Maltese Falcon”; “this requires careful judgement on both sides, since in the heat of action men can’t be counted to act in their own best interest.”

The Chinese are having a shit-fit as well, but, after all, that’s their job. They get very upset and indignant when the neighbors they try to bully have the audacity to arm themselves in self-defense. Da noive of dem guys!