cruise missile crisis 1980s

The Near Nuclear War of 1983 

How the Air Force helped avert a nuclear catastrophe and save the world .

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Robert Beckhusen

New Documents Reveal How a 1980s Nuclear War Scare Became a Full-Blown Crisis

During 10 days in November 1983, the United States and the Soviet Union nearly started a nuclear war. Newly declassified documents from the CIA, NSA, KGB, and senior officials in both countries reveal just how close we came to mutually assured destruction -- over a military exercise.

That exercise, Able Archer 83, simulated the transition by NATO from a conventional war to a nuclear war, culminating in the simulated release of warheads against the Soviet Union. NATO changed its readiness condition during Able Archer to DEFCON 1 , the highest level. The Soviets interpreted the simulation as a ruse to conceal a first strike and readied their nukes. At this period in history, and especially during the exercise, a single false alarm or miscalculation could have brought Armageddon.

According to a diplomatic memo obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by National Security Archives researcher Nate Jones, Soviet General Secretary Yuri Adroprov warned U.S. ambassador Averell Harriman six months before the crisis that both countries "may be moving toward a red line" in which a miscalculation could spark a nuclear war. Harriman later wrote that he believed Andropov was concerned "over the state of U.S.-Soviet relations and his desire to see them at least 'normalized,' if not improved."

The early 1980s was a "crisis period, a pre-wartime period," said Gen. Varfolomei Korobushin, the former deputy chief of staff of the Soviet nuclear Strategic Rocket Forces, according to an interview conducted by the Pentagon in the early 1990s and obtained by Jones. The Kremlin's Central Committee slept in shifts. There were fears the deployment of Pershing II ballistic missiles to Europe (also in November 1983) could tip the balance. If a conventional war erupted, Soviet planners worried their troops would come close to capturing the nuclear-tipped missiles, prompting the United States to fire them.

The Soviet Union, according to an unclassified article written for the CIA's classified Studies in Intelligence journal and provided to Jones, notes that Soviet fears of a preemptive American nuclear attack "while exaggerated, were scarcely insane." This stemmed from the Soviet experience during World War II, when the Third Reich launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history. Soviet officials worried history might be repeated by NATO.

Oleg Gordievsky , a CIA and MI6 source during the Cold War , was previously known to have warned the West about these fears, but the CIA article identifies a second source of this information: a Czech intelligence officer with ties to the KGB who "noted that his counterparts were obsessed with the historical parallel between 1941 and 1983. He believed this feeling was almost visceral, not intellectual, and deeply affected Soviet thinking."

President Reagan wasn't sure, and in March, 1984, asked Arthur Hartman, his ambassador to the Soviet Union, "Do you think Soviet leaders really fear us, or is all the huffing and puffing just part of their propaganda?" We don't know what Hartman said in response, but John McMahon, the CIA director at the time, believed the Soviets were simply "rattling their pots and pans" to stop further Pershing II deployments.

Emily Mullin

Joel Khalili

C. Brandon Ogbunu

It's unclear how much of the fear was just pots and pans. Jones writes that although "real-time analysts, retroactive re-inspectors, and the historical community may be at odds as to how dangerous the War Scare was, all agree that the dearth of available evidence has made conclusions harder to deduce." Jones did not get all the information he asked for. (The complete list of unclassified documents are collected at the Archives' website , with two more sets of documents to follow.) The NSA told him it had 81 more documents, but did not release them. However, it did "review, approve for release, stamp, and send a printout of a Wikipedia article ," he noted.

Still, we do have more evidence of serious Soviet preparations. Documents obtained by Jones detail a massive KGB intelligence-gathering mission called Operation RYaN . (The name is a Russian acronym for "nuclear missile attack.") According to the CIA article, RYaN was "for real" and accelerated in the early 1980s during the scare. The goal was to find out if and when the United States and NATO would attack. According to KGB instructions sent to agents in London, Soviet spies were to monitor bomb shelters, blood banks, military bases and key financial and religious leaders for signs of war preparations. "Many of the assigned observations would have been very poor indicators of a nuclear attack," Jones warns.

But in another sense, the scrambling for any scrap of intelligence -- whether good or bad -- reflected a feverish belief among some quarters that war was just around the corner. "[T]he Reagan administration marked the height of the Cold War," notes one declassified history published by the National Security Agency. "The president referred to the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire, and was determined to spend it into the ground. The Politburo reciprocated, and the rhetoric on both sides, especially during the first Reagan administration, drove the hysteria. Some called it the Second Cold War. The period 1982-1984 marked the most dangerous Soviet-American confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis."

Worse, there were "a lot of crazy people" in the Kremlin and Soviet military command, according to Vitalii Tsygichko, an analyst for the Soviet General Staff who was interviewed by the Pentagon. "I know many military people who look like normal people, but it was difficult to explain to them that waging nuclear war was not feasible. We had a lot of arguments in this respect. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there are a lot of stupid people both in NATO and our country."

Considering the consequences of a war, and how close it came, those comments certainly ring true.

Matt Burgess

Andrew Couts

Andy Greenberg

Eric Geller

David Nield

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Cruise missiles in Europe (1979 to 1980)

In December 1979 Nato announced that, in response to the Soviet's stockpiling of their nuclear weapons, Cruise missiles would be sited in Europe. Since Cruise missiles were designed to be 'first-strike' weapons, this was a clear sign that the US nuclear doctrine of deterrence had shifted to one aiming to fight, and win, a nuclear war. In response, the Soviet Union withdrew its offer to negotiate.

Government announce that RAF base at Greenham Common will house nuclear missiles

In July 1980 Secretary of State for Defence Francis Pym told the House of Commons that a total of 160 Cruise missiles would be located at RAF Greenham Common, Berkshire, as well as the disused RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire. The UK would contribute 220 personnel to help guard the bases and the cost to the country would be £16m. There was no public debate.

Protest at Greenham (1981 to 1983)

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The 1983 Military Drill That Nearly Sparked Nuclear War With the Soviets

Fearful that the Able Archer 83 exercise was a cover for a NATO nuclear strike, the U.S.S.R. readied its own weapons for launch

Francine Uenuma

History Correspondent

In November 1983, during a particularly tense period in the Cold War, Soviet observers spotted planes carrying what appeared to be warheads taxiing out of their NATO hangars. Shortly after, command centers for the NATO military alliance exchanged a flurry of communication, and, after receiving reports that their Soviet adversaries had used chemical weapons, the United States decided to intensify readiness to DEFCON 1—the highest of the nuclear threat categories , surpassing the DEFCON 2 alert declared at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis two decades prior. Concerned about a preemptive strike, Soviet forces prepared their nuclear weapons for launch.

There was just one problem. None of the NATO escalation was real—at least, not in the minds of the Western forces participating in the Able Archer 83 war game.

A variation of an annual military training exercise, the scenario started with a change in Soviet leadership, heightened proxy rivalries and the Soviets’ invasion of several European countries. Lasting five days, it culminated in NATO resorting to the use of nuclear weapons. Soviet intelligence watched the event with special interest, suspicious that the U.S. might carry out a nuclear strike under the guise of a drill. The realism of Able Archer was ironically effective: It was designed to simulate the start of a nuclear war, and many argue that it almost did.

“In response to this exercise, the Soviets readied their forces, including their nuclear forces, in a way that scared NATO decision makers eventually all the way up to President [Ronald] Reagan,” says Nate Jones , author of Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War and a senior fellow at the National Security Archive .

Perhaps most concerning is that the danger was largely unknown and overlooked, both during the exercise and throughout that precarious year , when changes in leadership and an acceleration in the nuclear arms race ratcheted up tensions between the two superpowers. A since-declassified 1990 report by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Review Board (PFIAB) concluded, “In 1983 we may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger.”

Almost 40 years later, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has evoked comparisons with the Cold War, particularly when it comes to Russian President Vladimir Putin ’s vaguely worded threats. At the onset of the war, Putin warned of “consequences you have never seen”—a declaration interpreted in some quarters as a nod to his country’s nuclear capabilities. More recently, U.S. President Joe Biden’s announcement of new weapons for Ukraine elicited an admonition from Moscow about “unpredictable consequences.” Biden has declined to send American troops and cautioned that “direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III.”

“The Russians have made some allusions not rising to the level of explicit threats, but it’s very, very strongly implied,” says Edward Geist , a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation , a nonprofit global policy think tank. Though he doesn’t see a commensurate change in Russia’s actions or positioning of nuclear assets, Geist interprets the message being sent to NATO as “you don’t want to actually get directly involved in this because that could escalate to nuclear war. … It’s not worth the risk, so you should stay out and let us do what we want in Ukraine.”

By the fall of 1983, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had reached a point of mutually assured misunderstanding. Relations between the two nations were at a particularly low ebb in the decades-long Cold War, which had emerged out of the ashes of World War II. The elimination of a common enemy—Nazi Germany—allowed the victors to shift their focus to each other as rivals. Following America’s use of an atomic weapon against Japan in 1945 and the Soviet Union’s own nuclear test in 1949, the arms race began in full effect.

NATO, a security alliance established between the U.S. and Western European nations in 1949, was mirrored by the Warsaw Pact , a defense treaty signed by the Soviet Union and members of its Eastern Bloc. Two years after the Warsaw Pact’s formation in 1955, the Soviets launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I , placing space on the playing field even as the rivalry continued to take shape on Earth through proxy wars in Asia. In the 1970s, a mood of détente prevailed as President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev reached a series of agreements aimed at arms control.

Early in the next decade, with new leadership on both sides, détente had evaporated. After taking office in 1981, Reagan matched his campaign rhetoric by initiating a doubling of the defense budget . Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, who assumed power the following year , came to the job after heading the KGB, where he initiated Operation RYaN , whose name is an acronym describing a sudden nuclear attack. “The main objective of our intelligence service is not to miss the military preparations of the enemy … for a nuclear strike,” Andropov said in 1981 .

Operation RYaN lent itself to confirmation bias, with many routine activities—such as official visits or blood drives—feeding fears of war. And when it came to looking for signs of imminent attack, Able Archer fit the bill.

On the American side, defense and intelligence officials “shared the long-held view that ‘the U.S. doesn’t do Pearl Harbors,’” writes historian Taylor Downing in 1983: Reagan, Andropov and a World on the Brink . The Americans therefore assumed the Soviets knew they had no intention of launching a preemptive nuclear attack. Early intelligence estimates after Able Archer dismissed apparent Soviet fears as a ploy to slow American defense buildup. As the PFIAB report noted, analysts “identified signs of emotional and paranoid Soviet behavior” yet saw “motives for trying to cleverly manipulate Western perceptions.”

It was a vicious circle. The Soviets refused to believe the Americans were bluffing; the Americans, meanwhile, suspected the Soviets were bluffing about not thinking the Americans were bluffing.

A series of inflammatory events that year paved the way for the fraught moments of Able Archer. In a March speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Reagan characterized the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and decried those “who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority.”

Later that month, the president announced plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly dubbed “Star Wars”), which aimed to intercept incoming nuclear missiles from space. Reagan viewed it purely as a defensive measure, but the Soviet Union saw a shield that would enable the U.S. to take offensive action by reducing its fear of retaliation. Such protection would undermine the notion of mutually assured destruction , which was seen as a grim deterrent for starting a nuclear war.

American military planes and ships pressed at Soviet borders in so-called PSYOPS, or psychological operations —shows of force that further aggravated the Soviets. In the spring of 1983, the looming presence of these American warcraft prompted Andropov to adopt a policy of “ shoot to kill ” at any similar incursion.

On the night of September 1, the civilian airliner Korean Airlines 007 went off course on its flight from Anchorage to Seoul. The Soviets, mistaking the plane for a military aircraft, shot it down, killing all 269 people on board. Reagan called it a “ massacre .”

Perhaps most alarming to the Soviets was NATO’s deployment of new intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles that could strike the U.S.S.R.—and Moscow itself—faster than previously possible. Though this operation took place in response to the Soviets’ development of similarly potent missiles in the late 1970s, Soviet leaders still saw the move as menacing. Just weeks before Able Archer, Soviet Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov characterized the NATO missiles “as means for a first strike, the ‘decapitation strike,’” in a meeting with fellow Warsaw Pact officials, according to documents held by the National Security Archive. The threat posed by the missiles increased the argument for a launch on warning strategy, which made speed—and therefore a decrease in decision-making time—the linchpin of defense.

In June, during a private meeting with a former American emissary to Moscow, Andropov expressed fears of a conflagration far worse than the Second World War, in which the two nations had been allies. “This war may perhaps not occur through evil intent,” he said , “but could happen through miscalculation.”

Able Archer 83 was part of a constellation of recurring NATO exercises. But some elements—including the dummy warheads, the DEFCON status changes and communications patterns (including periods of speculation-inducing radio silence)—were unique to that year. Managed out of NATO’s headquarters in Brussels and involving components across Western Europe, the training simulated coordination across the alliance’s commands in response to aggression by the Warsaw Pact.

As the Able Archer scenario intensified, the head of the Soviet air forces ordered a state of readiness that “included preparations for immediate use of nuclear weapons,” according to later-declassified sources referenced in a memorandum by Lieutenant General Leonard Perroots , then the Air Force’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence in Europe. During the exercise, analysts concluded that at least one squadron “was loading a munitions configuration that they had never actually loaded before.” Perroots’ concerns were echoed by the PFIAB, which called the reaction of Soviet intelligence, including 36 surveillance flights, “unprecedented.”

At the time, Perroots chose to continue monitoring development and not escalate in kind. (His prudent inaction has drawn comparisons to Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who correctly interpreted a false alarm of nuclear attack that September.) In his memorandum, Perroots outlined a “potentially disastrous situation,” one that he found even more alarming after Oleg Gordievsky , a high-level KGB officer who served as a double agent for the British, revealed that the Soviet security agency believed Able Archer would serve as an ideal “cover” for an attack. After the exercise, with the benefit of hindsight, the PFIAB report called Perroots’ patience a “fortuitous, if ill-informed, decision.”

“We now know how nervous the [Soviet] leadership became, ... [putting] the entire [state] arsenal with its 11,000 warheads on to maximum combat alert,” writes Downing in his book. He describes a seriously ill Andropov conferring with military leaders at a clinic outside of Moscow as the exercise proceeded apace, capturing the essence of the problem that was at the crux of Able Archer and the “war scare” as a whole: “It was impossible for satellites to pick up any insight into the state of paranoia in the Soviet leadership.”

Though these men never publicly mentioned Able Archer by name, glimpses into their mindsets at the time are available. Days after Able Archer concluded, defense minister Ustinov wrote in the state-run Pravda newspaper that NATO’s exercises “are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from a real deployment of armed forces for aggression.”

Blind spots were plentiful on both sides. Robert Gates , then the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence, told Downing that “we may have been at the brink of nuclear war and not even known it.” In retrospect, the “miscalculation” that Andropov had feared five months earlier seemed plausible.

Scholars still debate exactly how dangerous this juncture was. Simon Miles of Duke University has argued that the retrospective analysis of Able Archer is overblown, as evidenced by Soviet actions that fell short of their nuclear capabilities. Contemporary extrapolations based on what the Soviets did or did not do will always be impossible to fully prove or disprove.

The Soviets refused to believe the Americans were bluffing; the Americans, meanwhile, suspected the Soviets were bluffing about not thinking the Americans were bluffing.

Jones, who is also the Freedom of Information Act director for the Washington Post , notes that some information about the exercise remains inaccessible to the public; even portions of the 1990 PFIAB report are redacted. “I would say to the skeptics that the more that’s declassified, the more scary it looks,” he adds.

The precarious decline of U.S.-Soviet relations throughout those months left an impression on Reagan. Presented with a summary of recent Soviet actions that pointed to broader war preparations—including the bolstering of domestic civil defenses, the pattern of troop movements within the country and shifts from commercial to military use—the president called them “really scary.”

Reagan’s November 18, 1983, diary entry reflects a realization that these fears were genuine: “I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked that without in any way being soft on them we ought to tell then no one here has any intention of doing anything like that. What the h—l have they got that anyone would want.”

The ensuing years brought a reduction in tensions that led to the end of the Cold War. The shift in Reagan’s approach was complemented by the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. Despite leading on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum, the two men found avenues for cooperation in the later 1980s.

The Cold War is now three decades in the rearview mirror, and the invasion of Ukraine is a far cry from a fictional exercise. But while history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself , it does mutate—and once again, nuclear-tinged rhetoric is making headlines .

Geist considers the nuclear threat low risk at present but acknowledges that the mere specter of it still carries great influence. “It’s framing what is considered possible for basically all ... foreign governments, including our own,” he says. “The idea of direct intervention would be much more seriously considered against a non-nuclear power.”

Common to this or any other chapter of the post-World War II nuclear world is the fact that no nuclear threat, whether vague or explicit, comes without a degree of risk. As Jones point out, “The danger of brinksmanship ”—a foreign policy practice that pushes parties to the edge of confrontation—“is it’s easier than we think for one side to fall into the brink.”

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Center for International Maritime Security

The Politics of Naval Innovation: Cruise Missiles and the Tomahawk

The following republication is adapted from a chapter from The Politics of Naval Innovation , a paper sponsored by the Office of Net Assessment and conducted by the Strategic Research Department of the U.S. Naval War College’s Center for Naval Warfare Studies. Read it in its original form here.

By CDR Gregory A. Engel

This chapter explores the origins of the modern cruise missile and the ultimate development of the Tomahawk cruise missile, particularly the conventional variant. In keeping with the theme of the study, it focuses on the politics of cruise missile development and the implications as they relate to a Revolution in Military Affairs. The full history of cruise missiles can be traced to the development of the V-1 “buzz bomb” used in the Second World War. Since this history is available in many publications, it will not be discussed here nor is it especially pertinent to modern cruise missile development. Worth noting, however, is that the enthusiasm of many early Harpoon and Tomahawk advocates can be linked to the Regulus and other unmanned aircraft programs of the 1950s and 1960s.

What this chapter will show is that although air- and sea-launched cruise missiles (ALCM/SLCM) began along different paths neither would have come to full production and operation had it not been for intervention from the highest civilian levels. Having support from the top, however, did not mean there were not currents, crosscurrents, and eddies below the surface (i.e., at the senior and middle military levels) stirring up the political waters. Studying the challenges faced by cruise missile advocates and how they were overcome can provide valuable lessons for those tasked with developing tomorrow’s technological innovations.

The development of the modern cruise missile spanned nearly fifteen years from conception to initial operational capability (IOC). To those introduced to the cruise missile on CNN during the Gulf crisis in 1991, however, the modern cruise missile seemed more like an overnight leap from science fiction to reality. But as this chapter will show, both cruise missile technology and doctrinal adaptations were slow to be accepted.

The political and bureaucratic roads to acceptance of the sea-launched cruise missile were never smooth. As Ronald Huisken noted, “The weapons acquisition process is a most complex amalgam of political, military, technological, economic, and bureaucratic considerations …. Rational behavior in this field is particularly hard to define and even harder to enforce.” 1 Since they first became feasible, the Navy demonstrated an interest in cruise missiles. But finding a champion for them among the Navy’s three primary warfighting “unions” (associated with carrier aviation, submarines and surface warfare) proved difficult. Despite the cancellation of the Regulus program in the 1960s, some surface warfighters aspired to develop an antiship cruise missile which could compete with evolving Soviet technologies. But carrier aviation was the centerpiece of naval war at sea, so initially little support could be garnered for a new variety of surface-to-surface missile. As the requirement for an antiship missile became more evident following the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) were given some surface-to-surface capability. 2

However, following the 1967 sinking of the Israeli destroyer Eilat by an Egyptian SSN-2 Styx missile, Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt, Jr., then a Rear Admiral and head of the Systems Analysis Division, was directed by Paul Nitze, the Secretary of the Navy, via Admiral Thomas Moorer, the Chief of Naval Operations, to initiate a study on cruise missiles that eventually led to the Harpoon.

When Nitze directed the Navy to undertake the study on surface-to-surface missiles, there were two prevailing military requirements. The first was that the US needed such a capability to counter the growing strategic potential of the Soviets. The second was to improve the US’s strategic balance. During this period, there was growing alarm over the rapidly expanding Soviet nuclear missile arsenal and the naval shipbuilding race which (to some) the Soviets appeared to be winning. Admiral Zumwalt was one of those concerned individuals and saw the cruise missile as a required capability. He brought this conviction with him when he became the Chief of Naval Operations in July 1970. 3

Naval doctrine at this time held that US surface vessels did not need long-range surface-to-surface capabilities as long as carrier aviation could provide them. 4 Many in Congress shared this view. Against this backdrop, Zumwalt and other likeminded advocates of cruise missiles began their efforts to gain acceptance of cruise missiles within the Navy and on the Hill.

Following over two years of study and tests, a November 1970 meeting of the Defense Select Acquisition Review Council (DSARC) approved the development of the AGM-84 Harpoon missile. By this time, the Harpoon had both sea- and air-launched variants. Within the Navy, the Harpoon had been bureaucratically opposed by the carrier community because it posed a threat to naval aviation missions. During the Vietnam War period, the carrier union was a major benefactor of naval defense funding and it did not want to support any weapons system which could hinder or compete with aircraft or carrier acquisition programs. In order to gain their support, the Harpoon was technologically limited in range. 5

The Harpoon project had been under the direction of Navy Captain Claude P. “Bud” Ekas with Commander Walter Locke serving as his guidance project officer. Both officers were later promoted to Rear Admiral. In 1971, the Navy began studying a third Harpoon variant, one which could be launched from submarine torpedo tubes. Concurrently, the Navy began a program to study the Advanced Cruise Missile (ACM). This advanced model was to have an extended range of over 300 miles and to be launched from vertical launch tubes. 6 This proposal was generally supported by the submarine community (the criticality of this support will be discussed later).

With the advent of the ACM, it was decided to create the advanced cruise missile project office with Locke as director. The Naval Ordnance Systems Command (NAVORD) wanted control of the ACM project and argued that it was the appropriate parent organization for submarine-launched missiles. Admiral Hyman Rickover and other OPNAV submarine admirals opposed this believing that Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) was more imaginative and efficient than NAVORD. The earlier assignment of the ship- and air-launched Harpoon to NAVAIR had effectively co-opted the technical leadership of naval aviation. As a result, the ACM program remained under NAVAIR where work proceeded rapidly…. 7

….The ACM program of 1971, which barely lasted two years, was significant in that it formed the political, fiscal, and technological connection between the Harpoon and the Tomahawk. Long-range cruise missile advocates within the Navy were having difficulty promoting the larger submarine-launched cruise missile because of the ACM’s need for a new submarine. In 1973, they admitted they had no urgent military requirement for a long-range tactical (anti-ship) variant of the SLCM, but they justified it as a bargain with small added cost to strategic cruise missile development. SLCM represented a technological advancement of untold potential that begged for a home. Congressional and OSD acceptance of the ACM paid the bulk of the development costs of a tactical (anti-ship) variant of the SLCM. 19 This all fit fortuitously into the timeframe when SALT I negotiators were searching for strategic options.

By mid-1972, there was little support for the tactical nuclear variant of the ACM and the critics within the Navy were powerful. Thus Ekas and Locke worked to link the ACM development team with OSD strategic advocates. Funding and advocacy remained available within OSD for strategic versions of the SLCM. “It was thus only sensible to arrange a marriage of convenience. With Zumwalt’s manipulation, Laird’s intervention thus set the Navy on a nearly irreversible course. By 6 November 1972 – the date of the consolidation order – surface fleet proponents of a new surface-to-surface missile had effectively won their battle, even if they did not realize it at the time.” 20 In December 1972, a new program office, PMA-263, was established and Captain Locke was transferred from the Harpoon Program Office to become the Program Manager. 21

Admiral Locke has noted that others in the Navy Department did not believe in the cruise missile. He received a telephone call in June 1972 from an OPNAV staff Captain directing him to “do the right thing” with the recently allocated project funding, i.e., get the money “assigned to things doing work that we can use afterward.” The implication was that the Pentagon had decided it was going to be a one-year program and then was going away. Cruise missiles were seen as a SALT I bargaining chip that made Congressional hawks feel good. 22 Not even all submariners were infatuated with the idea; but two submariners who did support it were Admiral Robert Long and Vice Admiral Joe Williams. Admiral Long, who was OP-02 (Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Undersea Warfare), believed cruise missiles would do more than take up space for torpedoes – the most common complaint heard from submariners – and was its most influential advocate. 23 He was supported by Vice Admiral Williams, who was noted by Locke as also being important to the cruise missile program in the early 1970s…. 24

….Initial technical studies indicated that desired cruise missile ranges could not be obtained from a weapon designed to fit in a 21-inch torpedo tube; thus, the missile necessitated development of a new submarine fitted with 40-inch vertical launch tubes. Zumwalt, who understood this relationship, directed his Systems Analyses staff, OP-96, to argue against the submarine and criticize the cruise missile. 27 A curious position to be in as cruise missile advocates. 28 ADM Zumwalt was not prepared to concede the 60,000 SHP submarine to ADM Rickover for a variety of reasons, but primarily because it would decrement funding for other Project 60 items. Submariners believed that getting approval for installing the newly envisioned encapsulated Harpoon would eventually lead to a newer, increased capability torpedo. Without ADM Zumwalt’s knowledge, Joe Williams and Bud Ekas received approval from the Vice CNO, Admiral Cousins, to discretely prototype and test the encapsulated Harpoon. When advised of the results, ADM Zumwalt was chagrined that there was a possible submarine conspiracy underfoot but was eventually persuaded that the funding for further testing would be minimal (mainly for the canisters, tail sections, and the test missiles). There was also the possibility of SSNs carrying later versions of the Harpoon with greatly extended ranges which would allow strikes on the Soviet Navy when weather might preclude carrier aviation strikes in the northern latitudes. 29

Although ADM Zumwalt had relented, he remained wary of the submarine community’s desire for a new, larger submarine. As program manager for SLCM, Admiral Locke found himself allied with the submariners in order to garner funding support for his missile. Zumwalt threatened to end procurement of the 688-class SSN if Rickover continued to pursue the 60,000 SHP submarine. 30 When wind tunnel tests, which had been directed by Locke, indicated that the required range could be obtained from a cruise missile which could fit in the 21-inch torpedo tube, Rickover and other submariners agreed to halt their quest for a larger attack submarine in exchange for continued procurement of the 688-class and continued development of the cruise missile soon to be known as the Tomahawk. 31 Thus, the ACM project was quietly dropped in 1972, but the research on anti-ship cruise missiles continued as part of the SLCM program at Zumwalt’s personal insistence. 32 Following a January 1972 memo from the Secretary of Defense to the DDR&E which started a Strategic Cruise Missile program using FY 72 supplemental funds that were never appropriated, the CNO ordered that priority be given to the encapsulated Harpoon. 33

A fifth option eventually evolved and, as a result to Locke’s persistent effort with the OSD and OPNAV staffs, was accepted. That option was to proceed with the development of a cruise missile with both strategic and tactical nuclear applications that would be compatible with all existing potential launch platforms. What this fifth option really did was detach the missile’s technical challenges from a specific launch platform so that missile development could progress independently of the submarine issue. 34

In 1973, Defense Secretary Laird was replaced by Eliot Richardson. Although Richardson stated he supported Laird’s views on SLCM, his endorsement was neither as enthusiastic nor emphatic. He merely indicated that the United States should give some attention to this particular area of technology, for both strategic and tactical nuclear roles. Support from OSD did not wane, however, and was kicked into high gear by William P. Clements, the Deputy Secretary of Defense. President Nixon had handpicked Clements to assemble a team of acquisition experts from civilian industries to fill the OSD Under Secretaries positions. 35 Clements coordinated his efforts with Dr. Foster, who was still Director Defense Engineering and Research. All major defense projects were evaluated and those with the most promise were maintained or strengthened; those lacking promise were decreased or cancelled. He was also looking for programs that would give the US leverage, and when he learned about cruise missiles, he became a super advocate. 36 The cruise missile represented the cutting edge of new technology and held promise of a high payoff for low relative cost. It’s fair to say that the US “wouldn’t have had a cruise missile without Bill Clements grasping, conceptually, the idea and pushing the hell out it.'” 37

… Despite these technological breakthroughs, by 1974, missions for the cruise missile were still vague. Congress wanted to know why the Navy would be putting a 1,400 NM missile on submarines when, for years, they had been working to increase the distance from which they could launch attacks against the Soviet Union. They also wanted to know whether it was to be a strategic or tactical nuclear missile. The Air Force was still wary of a strategic SLCM because they didn’t want further Navy encroachment on their strategic missions. 45 Congress had additional misgivings about what effect the cruise missile would have on strategic stability since the strategic and tactical variants were virtually indistinguishable. No one denied that the cruise missile exhibited great promise, but it lacked a specified mission…

… This indistinct mission for the SLCM proved politically useful within the Navy (even though some in Congress believed it was strategic nonsense). Conceptual flexibility offered naval innovators the means of overcoming significant obstacles in their quest for a long-range surface-to-surface missile. It also offered Defense Department officials the opportunity to urge the Air Force to work on the ALCM. And because it was ambiguous, the new SLCM mission did not raise undue suspicion in the carrier community. As long as a strategic cruise missile appeared to be the goal, the tactical anti-ship version could be treated as a fortuitous spinoff. So, although the Navy drafted a requirement for an anti-ship version of the cruise missile in November 1974, it purposely paced its progress behind the strategic version. 48

This strategic rationale may have pacified Congress, but not Zumwalt. As early as 1974, Navy studies had specified the SSN as the launch platform for the SLCM even though that mission would require diverting them from their primary role, anti-submarine warfare (ASW). Zumwalt wanted cruise missiles on surface platforms as anti-ship weapons. Before he left office as CNO in 1974, he designated all cruisers as platforms for the SLCM, particularly the newly proposed nuclear-powered strike cruiser. This particular proposal was not well-received because some thought it would violate the requirement of minimizing the vulnerability of these platforms. Zumwalt received support from Clements who wouldn’t approve another new shipbuilding program unless Tomahawk cruise missiles were included. As a result, Zumwalt got what he wanted from the beginning – a capable anti-ship missile for the surface navy… 49

… Pursuit of a conventional land-attack variant was a watershed for the Tomahawk. By placing a land-attack missile on a variety of surface combatants, the Navy’s firepower was dramatically increased as was the Soviet’s targeting problem. But the real doctrinal breakthrough was that surface combatants could now mount land-attack operations independently of the Carrier Battle Group in situations where only a limited air threat existed. The Tomahawk Anti-ship Missile (TASM) was the only version that any subgroup within the Services even lukewarmly desired, but the Navy surface fleet had to proceed cautiously and indirectly to get it. 53 Furthermore, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research and Development, Tyler Marcy, stressed before procurement hearings in early 1977 that the Navy’s primary interest in the Tomahawk was the conventionally-armed anti-ship variant….

…Presidents facing a crisis are now just as likely to ask “where are the Tomahawks” as they are “where are the carriers?” Conventional Tomahawks are now considered one of the weapons of choice to make political statements against rogue states. When the Soviet Union crumbled and the Russian submarine threat diminished, conventional Tomahawks assured that submarines and surface combatants still had a role and were capable of meeting the new security challenges. In fact, this dispersed firepower was a primary reason the Naval Services were able to contemplate the new littoral warfare strategic vision detailed in … From the Sea …. 54

OSD Assumes Control

…Finally on 30 September 1977, Dr. William Perry, the new Director of Defense Research and Engineering, issued a memorandum to the Secretaries of the Air Force and Navy stating that because the ALCM flyoff was elevated to a matter “of highest national priority,” OSD would not allow the Air Force to continue to impede the creation of the Joint Cruise Missile Project Office (JCMPO) or its subsequent operation. 85 Perry directed that the present project management team be retained, that all Deputy Program Managers were to be collocated with the JCMPO, and that the JCMPO was a Chief of Naval Materiel Command-level designated project office. He once again directed the Air Force and Navy to allocate their entire cruise missile program funds directly to the JCMPO. In addition, Perry established an Executive Committee (EXCOM) to provide programmatic and fiscal direction with himself as chairman. 86 The original purpose of the EXCOM was to provide a forum for rapid review and discussion of problem areas and to build consensus concerning solutions. Dr. Perry, as the EXCOM chairman and now the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (USDR&E; DDR&E’s new title), acted as the senior authority whenever it became necessary to resolve disputes between the Services. It was probably the only way to force Service acceptance of a truly joint program in the 1970s. 87

Thus within a span of a few months, management of cruise missile development evolved from one of Pentagon hindrance to one where the Under Secretary of Defense fostered rapid problem resolution. This probably wouldn’t have happened had not the ALCM emerged as a high national priority. 88 …Without Dr. Perry’s direct intervention, expeditious and fiscally efficient development of the cruise missile would not have occurred.

Final Political Notes

Like any other organizational endeavor, military activity is fraught with political machinations. In this case, segments of the military Services did not want cruise missiles because they threatened their missions and doctrine, as well as competed for scarce funding. “The long-range air-launched cruise missile (ALCM) was rammed down the throat of the Air Force. The Army refused to accept development responsibility for the ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM). The Navy – specifically the carrier Admirals – did not want the Tomahawk Anti-ship Missile because it represented a clear and present danger to the mission of the carrier-based aircraft.” 89 There was a “not invented here” mentality that was almost insurmountable among the Services. 90

Furthermore, the Air Force and Navy objected to a project manager who seemed to have been removed from their control. In order to streamline the cruise missile program, he was given direct communication links to the Under Secretary of Defense. This greatly facilitated program direction and allowed for rapid assimilation of technological breakthroughs. 91 However, the JCMPO also aggravated and alienated the Services which had now effectively lost control of both their funds and their programs. The program director immediately became an outsider. 92 The fact that the Navy and Air Force had completely different objectives also led to problems. “Anytime there’s not a consensus, the budgeteers, or budget analysts, will bore right in until they get two sides,” can demonstrate policy inconsistencies and then use them as justification to cut the budget. 93 Perry’s Executive Committee was established to ensure inconsistencies did not develop, but was not designed to be a rubber stamp group where Locke could go and receive approval by fiat. The EXCOM was a vehicle where concerned parties could come together and quickly get a decision on important issues. 94

Cruise missile development would not have proceeded as fast or gone as far had it not been for senior-level, civilian intervention bolstering the strong leadership provided by the Program Director. 95 Technological innovation abetted the development process, but by itself would not have created a self-sustaining momentum.

“At every crucial stage in the development of each type of cruise missile, high level political intervention was necessary either to start it or to sustain it,” particularly during the period from 1973 to 1977 when SALT II forced cruise missile advocates to bargain hard for systems which many in the military did not want…. 96

….Service mavericks and zealots were required as well. Admiral Locke was certainly one, and as director of the JCMPO, he became a strong advocate who was able to professionally guide cruise missile development. He was replaced in August 1982 by Admiral Stephen Hostettler. The Navy insisted the change was necessary because of poor missile reliability and schedule delays. 98 Naval leadership also wanted “their own man” in charge of the process. Because Admiral Locke had effectively bypassed naval leadership to overcome numerous problems, he was considered an outsider. In fact, Locke had been appointed because he was a good program manager and somebody whom OSD could trust. His unique power base automatically placed him at odds with the Navy. 99 On several occasions, Clements intervened to save Locke’s career because the Navy was trying to get rid of him. Locke was working on a program that wasn’t in the Navy mainstream and they feared the emergence of another Rickover. 100 Nevertheless, without Admiral Locke’s leadership, cruise missiles would not have been developed when they were.

1. Ronald Huisken, The Origin of the Strategic Cruise Missile (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1981), p. xiii.

2. Interview with RearAdmiral Walter M. Locke, USN, (Ret.), McLean, VA, 5 May 1993.

3. Interview with Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., USN (Ret.), former Chief of Naval Operations, Washington, D.C., 28 May 1993.

4. Richard K. Betts, ed., Cruise Missiles: Technology, Strategy, Politics (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1981), p. 380. ADM Zumwalt’s predecessor, ADM Moorer, chose to respond to the Eilat incident by enhancing the capabilities of the carrier fleet, not those of the surface fleet. (Ibid., p. 384).

5. Zumwalt interview, 28 May 1993.

6. Betts, op. cit. in note 4, p. 84.

7. Locke interview, 5 May 1993.

19. Ibid., p. 30.

20. Kenneth P. Werrell, The Evolution of the Cruise Missile (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1985), p. 387.

21. Ross R. Hatch, Joseph L. Luber andJames W. Walker, “Fifty Years of Strike Warfare Research at the Applied Physics Laboratory,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest , Vol. 13, No. 1 (1992), p. 117.

22. Locke interview, 5 May 1993.

23. Interview with Vice Admiral James Doyle, USN, (Ret.), Bethesda, MD, 11 August 1993.

24. Admiral Locke greatly credits their vision and assistance during the early formation years of the cruise missile. Locke interview, 14 July 1993.

29. Interview with Vice AdmiralJoc Williams, USN, (Ret.), Groton, CT, 26 August 1993. The majority of the information in this paragraph is from this interview.

31. Admiral Zumwalt acknowledged in his book that Rickover and carrier aviation were impediments to his Project 60 plan throughout his tenure as CNO. [Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., On Watch: A Memoir (New York: Quadrangle, 1976)] His apparent lack of advocacy for cruise missiles should not be misinterpreted. He used cruise missiles as a bargaining chip to obtain his higher goal of a balanced Navy which he felt was necessary to counter the Soviet threat. His threats to prevent Harpoon/cruise missile employment was merely a counter to Rickover’s “shenanigans,” as he referred to them.

32. Betts, op. cit. in note 4, p. 386. The Soviets eventually fielded their own large cruise missile submarine, the Oscar-class.

33. Werrell, op. cit. in note 20, p. 151 and Locke interview, 28 August 1994.

34. Locke interview, 5 May 1993. (Emphasis added).

35. Interview with the Honorable William P. Clements, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Taos, NM, 16 June 1993.

36. Locke interview, 5 May 1993.

37. Interview with Dr. Malcolm Currie, former Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Van Nuys, CA, 21 September 1993.

45. Interview with Bob Holsapple, former Public Affairs and Congressional Relations Officer for the Tomahawk program, Alexandria, VA, 27 May 1993.

48. Rear Admiral Walter Locke’s testimony in Fiscal Year 1975 Authorization Hearings, pt. 7, pp. 3665-7.

49. ADM Zumwalt also saw the inclusion of SLCMs aboard surface ships as one final triumph over Rickover.

53. Betts, op. cit. in note 4, p. 406.

54. … From the Sea: Preparing the Naval Service for the 21st Century (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, September 1992).

85. Conrow, op. cit. in note 83, p. 6

86. Members of the EXCOM included DDR&E (chairman), the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (RE&S), the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force (RD&L), the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, the Air Force Vice Chief of Staff, the Assistant Secretary of Defense (PA&E), and the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Comptroller). After the first meeting, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Commander Air Force Systems Command were added as permanent members. [Conrow, op. cit. in note 83, p. 14.]

87. Interview with Dr. William Perry, Secretary of Defense and former Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Newport, RI, 23 June 1993.

88. Conrow, op. cit. in note 83, p. 63.

89. Betts, op. cit. in note 4, p. 360.

90. Clements interview, 16June 1993. The Navy Secretariat’s reasonable belief was that OSD was using the Navy to develop an Air Force missile. This contributed to its “not invented here” attitude. [Locke interview, 28 August 1994].

91. Wohlstetter interview, 18 September 1993.

92. Naval personnel, such as Vice Admiral Ken Carr, who held positions outside of the Navy’s organization, were critical. Carr was Clements’ Executive Assistant and helped maintain backdoor channels for Locke that were as important, if not more important, than formal chains of command. Interview with Vice Admiral Ken Carr, USN, (Ret.), former Executive Assistant for William Clements, Groton Long Point, CT, 24 August 1993.

93. Interview with Mr. Al Best, SAIC, Alexandria, VA, 14 July 1993.

94. Perry interview, 23 June 1993.

95. Betts, op. cit. in note 4, p. 361.

96. Werrell, op. cit. in note 20, p. 361.

98. Werrell, op. cit. in note 20, p. 2 1 1 .

99. Currie interview, 21 September 1993.

100. Parker interview, 22 September 1993.

Featured Image: The battleship USS WISCONSIN (BB-64) launches a BGM-109 Tomahawk missile against a target in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm.

One thought on “The Politics of Naval Innovation: Cruise Missiles and the Tomahawk”

Greg shouid read American Defense Reform, 2022. Georgetown. Oliver and Toprani, pp 91-95 for a fuller picture of Zumwalt in Tomahawk.

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Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.

Canada's cruise missile testing controversy of 1983

Guidance system for u.s. weapon was to be tested in northern alberta.

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NDP External Affairs critic Pauline Jewett was steaming mad. Not just that an American weapon was going to be tested on Canadian soil, but at the Liberal cabinet's timing in announcing its decision.

"What a flabby performance! Isn't this typical? Parliament's not in session. Six o'clock on Friday afternoon they make the announcement... typical sleazy Liberal tactics!"

'We have a place in the West'

Two Liberal cabinet ministers, Allan MacEachen and Gilles LaMontagne, made no apologies for putting the word out just before a summer weekend on July 15, 1983.

As CBC Ottawa reporter Mike Duffy tells viewers, MacEachen said that as a western democracy, Canada had an obligation to do its share to help its allies. Offering a place for the cruise missile to be tested was part of Canada's commitment that alliance. 

Besides, the testing was going to be in unpopulated northern Canada and the missile, which was designed to carry a nuclear warhead, would be unarmed. Moreover, it would do no damage to Canada or its people or the environment.

In the weeks and months following the announcement, there were public demonstrations and court challenges against testing of the cruise missile. In October 1984, an art student was jailed for defacing the Constitution , insisting it was "stained" already by the government's decision to allow cruise missile testing in Canada.

Testing of the cruise missile began in northern Alberta in March 1984.

The Saga Of The AGM-129 Cruise Missile That Was Basically A Stealth Jet Designed Upside Down

The Advanced Cruise Missile was too far ahead of its time, so much so that it was eventually succeeded by the missile it was supposed to replace.

Aviation_Intel

Most people would be surprised to hear that the most advanced nuclear-tipped cruise missile ever put into operation was retired from service while its predecessor, a less survivable missile it was supposed to replace, soldiers on in U.S. Air Force service to this very day. This topsy-turvy reality is somewhat metaphorical of General Dynamics' AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile (ACM) itself. In fact, the AGM-129 could be considered the second stealth aircraft to ever enter production, because that is what it really was, albeit one that was designed upside down, and for good reason. 

The origins of the ACM are fairly straightforward. The AGM-86B Air-Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM) entered service in the early 1980s. When it was being designed, and while the non-production AGM-86A was undergoing initial trials, the best way to deliver a nuclear warhead deep inside Soviet airspace by an air-breathing platform was via low-altitude penetration . The AGM-86 was designed exactly for that, to punch through at treetop level using terrain contour matching , terrain-following radar, and inertial navigation to get close enough to a target that the W80 nuclear warhead onboard could do its job successfully. 

Later on, the AGM-86C and D would integrate GPS to deliver pinpoint conventional strikes. You can read all about the AGM-86C/D's capabilities in this recent piece of ours , but the nuclear-armed version of the era had no such accuracy. Regardless, survivability against quickly evolving Soviet air defenses was the most pressing requirement in the Air Force's air-launched cruise missile portfolio as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s. 

The AGM-86B had a few stealthy characteristics, but it was far from a true low observable design. Just as it came into service, the Air Force realized that the days when being able to beat air defenses via low-flying alone were coming to an end. Airborne early warning and control aircraft and advanced fire control radars with look-down-shoot-down capabilities, like those on Russia's 4th generation fighter and interceptor fleets (Su-27 and MiG-31, specifically), would decrease the effectiveness of nap-of-the-earth flying tactics. Something far more survivable was needed, and fast. 

Out of a handful of DARPA initiatives and studies dubbed TEAL DAWN that explored future cruise missile technologies and long-range bomber strategies, it was concluded that  the new stealth bomber then in development alone wouldn't be survivable against the densest Soviet air defenses. Long-range and survivable standoff weapons would be needed in part to mitigate those defenses. Two requirements were established—one stealthy missile that could travel around 1,500 miles or more and another that could travel over 5,000 miles. The latter clearly invalidated much of the need for a stealth bomber in the first place and it was thought that at least a decade would be needed to develop such a long-range weapon.  As a result, it was jettisoned to concentrate on the shorter-ranged stealthy cruise missile requirement that could be fielded quickly and equip the Air Force's new stealth bomber—at least that's what they hoped. With this in mind, a competition to build such a weapon was quietly launched.  

Lockheed, Boeing, and General Dynamics ended up squaring off in secret for this new contract. Lockheed's Skunk Works leveraged their work on the F-117 program, which was just spinning up in a very secretive operational state at the time , to produce its F-117-shaped cruise missile, known under the code name SENIOR PROM. The details surrounding Boeing's design remain unclear. General Dynamics' design was a bit more of a traditional configuration, but one that was clean-sheet and packed with very stealthy features arranged in unique ways to maximize its effectiveness and efficiency. SENIOR PROM, which was a test program before competing for the Advanced Cruise Missile contract, was very stealthy, but it would have been troublesome fitting it into a bomber's weapons bay. By 1983, General Dynamics clenched the contract and the AGM-129A Advanced Cruise Missile was officially born.

General Dynamics' design, which measured nearly 21 feet long and weighed in at 3,700 pounds, was downright wicked looking. A faceted, stiletto-shaped fuselage with a chined, sharp-tip nose area and forward-swept pop-out wings gave it a sinister, almost Klingon-like look. Not just the wings were backward, all the low observable features were oriented towards defeating detection from above , not below. This resulted in an upside-down-looking airframe of sorts. 

The vertical stabilizer-rudder pointed down instead of up. It was made up of composite materials, as were the missile's horizontal forward-swept stabilizers, to remain nearly invisible to the most threatening radar bands. The vertical stabilizer was also offset to the left side of the fuselage's centerline. 

That gas from the missile's two-dimensional exhaust aperture was blown over a platypus-like defuser structure that shielded its signature from, you guessed it, above, instead of below. The exhaust was also mixed with cold air to help further attenuate its infrared signature. Soviet  infrared search and track (IRST) systems were advancing in capability at the time and included on all of Russia's 4th generation fighter/interceptor designs, so infrared signature reduction was weighted heavily alongside radar cross-section reduction during the competition that led to the AGM-129.

The low-observable trapezoidal air inlet sat flush on the bottom of the missile instead of the top of it and fed the engine with air through a serpentine duct, thus eliminating any radar return from the engine fan face. Realizing a flush air inlet on something that flies at transonic speeds comes with major design challenges and it's not like any stealthy air inlet configuration is easy to design or produce , to begin with. Beyond its underlying radar-evading structures , the AGM-129 was also covered with radar absorbent material and coatings and given an olive drab color to blend in with the terrain it would roar over just before sparking off a nuclear apocalypse.

So, if you think the AGM-129 looks like it is flying inverted, that is by very conscious design. Overall, the missile was designed with a particular weight put on stealth from its upper and forward aspects, where it was most vulnerable. From directly to its side, its radar signature was reduced, but more visible than from other angles. This was deemed a non-issue because the pulse-doppler radars that could threaten it from above are unable to detect low-flying targets hiding in ground clutter while flying at perpendicular angles to the radar antenna as they remain inside the radar's "doppler notch." You can read more about this phenomenon and the tactics associated with it here.

Navigation was also innovative. The AGM-129 introduced a laser doppler velocimeter into its navigational suite, which, like the AGM-86, also included inertial navigation and terrain contour matching. This gave it substantially better accuracy over long distances than the AGM-86B, which was designed less than a decade before it. 

It also included laser detection and ranging system (LADAR) to aid in low-altitude flight, which further allowed it to fine-tune its endgame attack run down to as accurate as 90 feet according to stated metrics, although the system likely became even more accurate as it matured. Considering it still packed the same W80 variable yield warhead (5kt-150kt) as the AGM-86B, its better accuracy substantially increased its effectiveness, especially against reinforced targets or those that are partially shielded by terrain. 

LADAR, as opposed to radar, also allowed the AGM-129 to remain electromagnetically silent, giving off no radio frequency energy when it was most vulnerable and thus making it even harder to detect. There were some tradeoffs though, LADAR could have trouble receiving data against certain surfaces, such as those that were extremely reflective or highly light absorbent. Still, the system was extremely effective and because the missile was so stealthy, it could fly at higher altitudes and in most cases still survive to make it to its target if need be. 

Still, the system was not perfect. During one test over Dugway Proving Ground in 1997, an AGM-129 was flying so low it impacted some trailers belonging to an observatory. Nobody was hurt in the incident and the missile had been flying for three and a half hours before the accident. It turns out the mission planners had no idea the trailers were there and how the missile got so low was unclear to begin with. 

The missile was fast, traveling at just under the speed of sound, and it also packed a very long range. It used a far more fuel-efficient engine, the Williams International F112-WR-100 turbofan, than the one found on the AGM-86, which gave it significantly greater range while retaining similar dimensions and the same payload. Officially, ACM could reach out 2,000 miles to its target , but it seems clear that its real range was actually significantly further, especially when flying a more efficient flight profile during more benign portions of its trip to its target area. As noted earlier, the missile's high degree of stealth meant that it could climb to more efficient altitudes during certain phases of flight and still have a high chance of surviving to complete its horrific task. 

Another interesting component of the AGM-129 was its computer system. From how it has been explained to me it used basically one central processor and computing system to run the vast majority of the missile's functions. For early 1980s military technology, this is an amazing feat. Basically, the computer system and the system designed to used it on the missile was absolutely cutting-edge for its time.

It can't be stressed enough how advanced the ACM was for its time. It had many elements that hadn't yet emerged from the classified manned aircraft realm, but was an autonomous system meant to fly thousands of miles to its target without aid and to be built by the hundreds. It was truly a highly sensitive modern marvel of its era.

The first flight test of an AGM-129 occurred in July of 1985, with the first production missiles being delivered two years later, in 1987. It was that year when the program became public, as well. In that sense, it was the first disclosure of a stealth flying machine ever. Still, the program struggled early in its production run. There were technological issues that popped up in flight testing, but the major problems were with building the advanced missiles themselves. Remember, at the time of its first deliveries, no stealth aircraft had even been acknowledged by the Air Force. This wouldn't occur until two years later when the F-117 was officially disclosed to the public. So, the technologies used in its manufacturing were absolutely cutting-edge in nature. 

The missile's very aggressive concurrent testing and production schedule concept and major labor issues with the International Association of Machinists began to cripple the program and it quickly became a pariah on Capitol Hill and in certain parts of the Pentagon. By the end of the decade, the AGM-129 was being declared a fiasco. Things got so bad with quality control issues that production was halted between 1989 and 1991.

Of course, the timing of this setback couldn't have been worse. The Cold War was ending and the defense budget was set to snap back hard, especially in terms of strategic weaponry. In addition, the B-2 wouldn't fly until 1989 and still would have a long developmental road ahead of it. The B-1B was also having its own troubles and the missile was never designed to fit in its weapons bays , it was too long, and eventually, the B-1B would lose its nuclear role altogether. So, the weapon that was procured at least in part to be paired with the stealth bomber would be relegated to the B-52.

The confluence of these factors, as well as the START treaty which limited these types of weapons, resulted in a drastic reduction of the programmed buy. The nearly 1,500 missiles needed to replace the AGM-86B in full was slashed down to less than half that, and eventually to a final number of just 460 missiles. Unit cost soared partially as a result of the curtailed order, with each missile costing roughly $4.3 million in 1992 dollars. This is extremely expensive for a cruise missile even by today's standards. A decade earlier, the AGM-86Bs cost around $1.3 million each. The ACM had truly entered a Pentagon budgetary 'death spiral' alongside the plane that was supposed to carry it, the B-2.

Still, they were the most advanced cruise missiles in the world and the truncated force of 460 missiles soldiered on over the next two decades, exclusively equipping the B-52 force. A single B-52 could carry 20 of the missiles at one time. Six on each wing pylon and eight in the jet's cavernous weapons bay on a rotary launcher.

Two other AGM-129 variants were proposed, but never came to fruition. The AGM-129B was a shadowy initiative to equip a revised design with an axial-flow jet engine, new software, and a different nuclear warhead to take on a specialized role that remains classified. This could have been a GPS-equipped, imaging infrared, or otherwise more precise upgrade of the weapon that would also be equipped with a penetrating nuclear warhead of a lower yield to take on heavily fortified bunkers and more hardened structures. Then again, maybe it was something more exotic, we just don't know for absolute certain. 

The other proposed variant was a conventional land attack model similar to the AGM-86C/D Conventional Air-Launched Cruise Missiles (CALCM), but far more survivable and with a lot longer reach. GPS would have been necessary for this weapon, just like it was for its CALCM progenitor. An imaging infrared seeker with imaging matching could have been injected into the design for even better accuracy. In retrospect, this would have been a relatively amazing weapon. 

The ACMs that were built may have received a GPS upgrade sometime during the decade and a half or so that followed their introduction into service in 1990, although it remains unclear if this actually happened. It would have given the missiles pinpoint accuracy, but GPS connectivity would not be assured during a nuclear war and it may have been cost-prohibitive to integrate a GPS antenna onto the ACM's stealth airframe. If the upgrade did happen, it would have likely occurred when the missiles were put through a Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) in the early 2000s that would allow them to serve until 2030 and possibly beyond. 

Regardless of this life extension program, in 2007, the 17th year of the AGM-129's operational service, it was decided that the entire ACM force would be drawn down and eliminated from service by the end of 2012. A number of factors contributed to this decision, the first being the post 9/11 focus on counter-insurgency operations instead of preparing for peer state conflicts. The U.S. had two raging wars on its hands that were anything but cheap, and the Russian bear remained largely dormant at the time, while China was just on precipice its economic, geopolitical, and technological rise. The AGM-129 program, with its relatively small fleet made up of super high-tech 1980s technology, meant that sustaining the missiles was far from a cheap or easy task. The AGM-86B, although much less survivable, checked a box for much less money and had commonality with its conventionally armed cousin, the AGM-86C/D, which helped significantly in terms of sustainment scalability.

Beyond fiscal matters, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) with Russia also meant more warheads would be pulled off the front lines. So, the Air Force moved forward with not just retiring the AGM-129, but destroying the fleet, a task that was completed as planned by the end of 2012. 

During its drawdown period, one highly publicized and unfortunate event occurred with what were historically very shy missiles. On August 30th, 2007 a "Bent Spear" incident occurred with a package of 12 ACMs. A B-52H was set to ferry unarmed ACMs from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. The missiles were to be decommissioned at Barksdale, so the mission itself wasn't necessarily out of the ordinary. What was not normal is that six of the missiles were actually carrying their W-80 thermonuclear warheads. 

The nuclear-armed B-52 sat overnight without a proper security detail and other precautions until the crew showed up for the mission the next day. During pre-flight checks, the crew did not inspect both pylons loaded with missiles. They only inspected the one that held six unarmed ACMs, but logged that both pylons full of missiles were indeed checked and that they were unarmed. The crews then flew across the Midwest not knowing they were carrying six nuclear warheads. 

After arriving at Barksdale, the jet sat for another eight hours without standard precautions associated with nuclear-armed aircraft. It was nearly a day and a half after the Minot AFB personnel blew off normal procedures and loaded the hot ACMs on the B-52 that the fact that the plane was actually carrying live warheads was discovered. The incident was the first of its kind in four decades and sent shockwaves through the Air Force and the Pentagon. A subsequent investigation showed horrible disregard for critical nuclear weapons handling protocols and everyone from four unit commanders down to those directly involved were heavily disciplined or removed from duty. All nuclear weapons handling was suspended at Minot AFB. It also resulted in a new set of procedures that were designed to make sure such a breakdown in procedures doesn't happen again. 

It was a sad end to the troubled development and career of the world's first stealth cruise missile. 

In retrospect, the decision not just to retire, but fully destroy the AGM-129 cadre seems like a very poor one. Today, the Air Force is working on developing a new stealthy long-range nuclear-tipped cruise missile, the Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) weapon, a program that will cost tens of billions of dollars and won't produce an operational missile until at least 2030. Raytheon, which owns the AGM-129 design after it bought Hughes Missile Systems, which bought General Dynamics' missile portfolio prior, is competing with Lockheed for the LRSO contract. In the meantime, the AGM-86B is supposed to remain a viable deterrent even in an era of ever more capable highly integrated air defense systems, ones that now rely on look-down-shoot-down sensors more than they did 35 years ago and that are far more advanced in general than what existed when ACM was conceived. This begs the question, is the AGM-86B really a survivable deterrent at all? The true answer, that we will never officially get, is probably less comforting than we may want to hear. 

The truth is, the AGM-129 was way ahead of its time. Today, there are numerous stealthy cruise missiles in production or will be in production soon and they are becoming an extremely sought-after item. The USAF can't get enough of Lockheed's JASSM family of missiles , which continues to rapidly grow in capability, while the Navy is procuring the anti-ship LRASM cousin of JASSM, the stealthy Naval Strike Missile , and a powered version of the JSOW. Multiple foreign militaries have their own stealthy cruise missiles , as well. But these are conventionally armed weapons. It will be at least another decade until a nuclear-armed stealth cruise missile hits the USAF's inventory again. That weapon, the LRSO, will be in many ways the son of AGM-129 and from what we are hearing, it will be absolutely loaded with the latest and greatest technology that will allow it to survive in the most inhospitable of combat environments. It is also meant to equip the USAF's new stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider.

Somehow this all sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it?

Contact the author: [email protected]

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Strait of Hormuz

Assessing the threat to oil flows through the strait.

Anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs) are modern long-range weapons of naval combat, designed specifically to target ships. Due to their stealth, accuracy, and low-cost, ASCMs have become weapon of choice for militaries around the world. ASCMs were used in over half of attacks on merchant shipping by Iran and Iraq during the  Tanker War .[i]

Iran reportedly has acquired hundreds of ASCMs that they could likely use to try to disrupt oil flows through the Strait.

How ASCMs Work

Relevant historical use of ascms.

• Iran & ASCMs

Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Exocet-mil.jpg

Caption: An Exocet missile fired from a land-based launcher

In order for an ASCM to function properly, it must perform the following sequence correctly:

Some ASCMs locate their targets using radar. This technique requires the launcher to have a line of sight to the target, limiting the range of the missile to the radar horizon and preventing the missile from seeing a target that is hidden by any terrain obstacles. Furthermore, simple scanning radars cannot determine the difference between cargo, container, and oil tanker ships, all of which can be of similar size.

Missiles that locate their targets using scanning radars also emit radio waves, revealing their position. This limits the utility of these missiles in asymmetric warfare: once the launcher reveals its location, it is vulnerable to attack by the adversary's conventional forces.

During the Cold War, the superpowers developed another targeting method, "over-the-horizon targeting," mostly in an effort to expand the range of their missiles. In this technique, a launch technician either programs a missile's flight path or a set of target coordinates, and the missile simply flies to the target area. Over-the-horizon targeting requires a spotter to relay the target coordinates to the shooter, but the shooter need not actually be able to see the target himself. This targeting method has become considerably easier to use in recent years due to the ubiquity of GPS navigation devices.

A booster kit propels the missile from the launch platform to an adequate speed and altitude to enable the missile to transition to the cruise flight mode.

Each type of ASCM uses its own propellant. There are two main types of propellants: 1. liquid; 2. solid. Liquid propellants require complicated piping and pumping equipment to feed their engines and more time to prepare to launch, but they provide greater thrust and an in-flight throttle (although it takes time to build the thrust when first ignited). Solid propellants, on the other hand, do not require complicated engines, but they rely on complicated chemistry during production and on strong casings to withstand the intense pressures that they generate during flight. Solid propellant missiles can fire much faster and accelerate more quickly at liftoff, but they cannot be throttled in flight.

Most modern ASCMs use solid-propellant boosters. The burning rate of the propellant can be affected by temperature, and temperatures higher than 100° F can lead to unsatisfactory performance.[ii] As such high temperatures are commonplace in Iran, this certainly could lead to missile launch problems in an attempt to disrupt traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

For the cruise phase, ASCMs tend to use ramjet or turbojet engines. Ramjet engines contain no moving parts and compress intake air using the forward speed of the air vehicle. Turbojet engines use a turbine-driven compressor. Both then ignite a mixture of the compressed air and fuel, producing a high-velocity jet in the exhaust plume. The momentum of the exhaust stream then propels the missile forward.[iii]

Some (especially older) ASCMs use radar to track the position of the target throughout the missile's flight.[iv] This guidance mechanism requires the missile or the launcher to maintain a continuous radar lock on the target, revealing its position and limiting its maneuverability. Losing radar lock would usually cause the missile to miss its target.

More modern missiles that simply follow an internal navigation computer are subject to various kinds of navigation errors. Inertial guidance systems "drift" during flight, which can have a significant impact on accuracy over long distances, but modern inertial navigation systems use updates from GPS receivers or other devices that greatly improve their accuracy.[v] Moreover, within the confines of the Arabian Gulf, drift is unlikely to make a substantial difference. Simple mistakes during entry of the target coordinates or the flight path are a more likely source of error when working with modern weapons.

Once an ASCM reaches the vicinity of its target, it turns on its terminal guidance system. Most ASCMs use radar or infra-red seekers, somtimes on multiple bands to circumvent the electronic counter-measures that warship targets typically deploy. The open ocean offers few radar returns or heat signatures in the vicinity of the target ship, so the missile is likely to home in on its intended target. In areas with more ship traffic or near coastlines, terminal guidance systems may choose the wrong target. Radars also sometimes pick up ocean waves or other clutter, leading the missile away from the target ship.

During the Iran-Iraq War, radars incorrectly identified targets as  tankers  multiple times. For example, Iranians defended tankers loading at their oil terminals by constructing decoys out of ship wreckage and outfitting buoys with radar reflectors. One decoy buoy near Kharg Island was hit approximately 20 times.[vi]

Once a missile hits its target, its warhead must explode to do serious damage, and it turns out that the explosion should not be taken for granted. For example, Exocet missiles frequent failed to explode during the Tanker War and also during the Falklands War (more than 20% of the time). But even if a warhead fails to detonate, the ASCM can still do damage: any remaining fuel in the missile can explode and burn, which could by itself cause significant damage and even a ship loss. During the Falklands War, the HMS Sheffield was hit by an Exocet missile that did not detonate, but the missile's liquid fuel set the destroyer on fire.

The damage caused by the missile will depend on its warhead size. Simply put, larger warheads have more destructive capacity. ASCM warheads range drastically in size, from small 220-pound models to massive 2,200-pound warheads. Although each type of ASCM has its own detailed specifications, missiles produced in eastern states such as Russia and China tend to have larger warheads than western ones.

The maritime threat of ASCMs is serious: ASCMs cause severe damage and are difficult to combat. Historically, ASCMs have played a critical role in warfare.

• The Germans in WWII were the first to use ASCMs.
• In 1967, Egypt sunk the Israeli destroyer Eilat with four Styx ASCMs. Egypt fired the missiles from missile boats supplied by the Soviet Union.[vii]
• During the Falklands War (1982), four Argentine Navy Super Etendard fighters sunk a British Type 42 destroyer and a support ship, the Atlantic Conveyor, with Exocet missiles. A land-based Exocet missile also struck the Royal Navy's HMS Glamorgan, but maneuvers made by the Glamorgan minimized damage to the ship.[viii]
• During the  Tanker War , Iran and Iraq used anti-ship missiles in more than half of all attacks on shipping. Iraq used missiles in approximately 80 percent of their attacks on commercial ships.
• The U.S. Navy used Harpoon missiles to sink an Iranian patrol boat, Joshan, during Operation Praying Mantis in 1988.
• In Operation Desert Storm, Iraqis fired a Silkworm missile in the Gulf. The Silkworm was intercepted and destroyed by a Sea Dart missile launched by HMS Gloucester.
• In 2006, Hezbollah fired a radar-guided[ix] C-802 at the Hanit, an Israeli corvette. Four Israeli sailors were killed and the Hanit sustained significant damage. An additional C-802 missile fired at the corvette missed, striking a nearby Cambodian-flagged merchant ship.[x]

Caption: A Mirage aircraft firing an Exocet missile

Source: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/images/c-801_1.jpg

Caption: Sardine / CS 801 missile fired from a naval warship

Iran & ASCMs

Iran currently does not possess any reliable western ASCM. They have either used up these missiles (i.e., Harpoons purchased by the Shah) in Iran-Iraq War, or their Western-supplied systems are so extremely unreliable that they cannot be considered operational (e.g., their Sea Killers).[xi] However, Iran has acquired a number of Chinese ASCM models " perhaps 100 Seersuckers,[xii] 125 Sardines[xiii] and 75 Saccades, and perhaps more.[xiv] There are also reports that Iran acquired the Russian SS-N-22 Moskit, also known as the Sunburn[xv], though the reliability of these reports is disputed.[xvi]

Sardine/CS 801: This missile is roughly equivalent to the French Exocet, the ASCM most frequently fired by the Iraqis during the Iran-Iraq War. Once fired, the missile boosts to 164 feet, cruises between 65 feet and 98 feet, and then descends to 15-20 feet before hitting its target. The missile uses a solid rocket booster, and itssemi-armor-piercing warhead weighs 363 pounds. [xvii]

Saccade/ CS 802: The CS 802 is an upgraded CS 801, and most characteristics are similar.[xviii] One main difference is the Saccade has a turbojet propulsion system after its rocket-assisted boost phase. The Saccade also has a range of 70 to 75 miles and a 363-pound semi-armor-piercing warhead.[xix]

Seersucker: The Seersucker is an older missile system. It uses a Russian "˜Square Tie' fire control radar and a radio altimeter guidance system. The Seersucker cruises at 98 feet above the sea and descends to 26 feet during the terminal phase.[xx] The Seersucker warhead is quite large at 1,130 pounds. Iran fired at least eight Seersuckers against Kuwait during the Iran-Iraq War, only three of which hit their targets. [xxi]

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Moskit_missile.jpg

Caption: Picture of a Moskit (or Sunburn) missile

M-80E Moskit (SS-N-22 Sunburn)

The Russian-made M-80E Moskit employs a 661-pound, semi-armor piercing warhead. The Moskit uses a liquid ramjet engine and four solid boosters to reach a speed of Mach 2.1 with a cruising trajectory between seven and ten meters above the water's surface.[xxii] It is fueled by a kerosene-type fuel but also has a solid-propellant booster. Its maximum range is 108 nautical miles. By approaching the target more than twice as fast as other cruise missiles,Moskit is designed to reduce the target's time to employ self-defense weapons. [xxiii] However, since tankers do not have defensive capabilities, Moskits offer little advantage (other than their larger warhead) over Iran's Chinese missiles for attempts to stop tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

[i] S. Navias and E.R. Hooton, Tanker Wars: The Assault on Merchant Shipping During the Iran-Iraq Crisis, 1980-1988 (New York: I.B. Taurus & Co Ltd, 1996), pp. 87-88.

[ii] GlobalSecurity.org, SMS GUIDED MISSILES, AERODYNAMICS, AND FLIGHT PRINCIPLES. Online. Available: www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/navy/nrtc/14110_ch9.pdf. Accessed: April 9, 2008.

[iii] MissileThreat.com, Glossary for Cruise Missiles. Online. Available: http://www.missilethreat.com/cruise/pageID.1736/default.asp. Accessed: April 9, 2008

[iv] GlobalSecurity.org, SMS GUIDED MISSILES, AERODYNAMICS, AND FLIGHT PRINCIPLES. Online. Available: www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/navy/nrtc/14110_ch9.pdf. Accessed: April 9, 2008.

[v] David J Nicholls, "Cruise Missiles and Modern War," Occasional Paper No. 13 Center for Strategy and Technology Air War College (May 2000), p. 6.

[vi] Martin S. Navias and E.R. Hooton, Tanker Wars: The Assault on Merchant Shipping During the Iran-Iraq Crisis, 1980-1988 (New York: I.B. Taurus & Co Ltd, 1996), p. XX.

[vii] Carlo Kopp, "Warship Vulnerability," Air Power Australia (July 2005). Online. Available: http://www.ausairpower.net/Warship-Hits.html. Accessed: October 4, 2007

[viii] Carlo Kopp, "Warship Vulnerability," Air Power Australia (July 2005). Online. Available: http://www.ausairpower.net/Warship-Hits.html Accessed: October 4, 2007.

[ix] Christian Lowe ed., "Hezbollah's Surprise Weapons," DefenseTech.org. Online. Available: http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002591.html Accessed: October 4, 2007.

[x] Matt Hilburn, "Asymmetric Strategy: Growing Iranian Navy Relies on "˜Unbalanced Warfare' Tactics,"Navy League of the United States, (December 2006). Online. Available: http://www.navyleague.org/sea_power/dec06-14.php. Accessed: October 4, 2007.

[xi] Anthony Cordesman, Iran's Military Forces in Transition (Westport, Connecticut 1999).

[xii] "C-201 / HY-2 / SY-1 CSS-N-2 / CSS-C-3 / SEERSUCKER," FAS Military Analysis Network. Online. Available: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/c-201.htm. Accessed: April 9, 2008.

[xiii] E.R. Hooton, ed., Jane's Naval Weapon Systems(Alexandria: Jane's Information Group Inc., 2004), p. 298-300.

[xiv] GlobalSecurity.org, C-802 / YJ-2 / Ying Ji-802 / CSS-C-8 / SACCADEC-8xx / YJ-22 / YJ-82. Online. Available: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/c-802.htm. Accessed: April 9, 2008.

[xv] Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., James Phillips, and Wouldiam L. T. Schiran, "Countering Iran's Oil Weapon," Heritage Foundation, (2006).

[xvi] INSS.org, Iran. Online. Available: www.inss.org.il/upload/(FILE)1198577424.pdf. Accessed: April 29, 2008.

[xvii] E.R. Hooton, ed., Jane's Naval Weapon Systems (Alexandria: Jane's Information Group Inc., 2004), pp. 298-300.

[xviii] Anthony Cordesman, Iran's Military Forces in Transition (Westport, Connecticut 1999).

[xix] E.R. Hooton, ed., Jane's Naval Weapon Systems (Alexandria: Jane's Information Group Inc., 2004), pp. 298-300.

[xx] E.R. Hooton, ed., Jane's Naval Weapon Systems (Alexandria: Jane's Information Group Inc., 2004), pp. 295-297.

[xxi] Anthony Cordesman, Iran's Military Forces in Transition (Westport, Connecticut 1999).

[xxii] Thomas G. Mahnken, "The Cruise Missile Challenge," Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, (March 2005).

[xxiii] GlobalSecurity.org, Moskit SS-N-22 Sunburn. Online. Available: www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/moskit.htm. Accessed: April 9, 2008.

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• Speeches & transcripts

1979: The Soviet Union deploys its SS20 missiles and NATO responds

Video lecture by dr. jamie shea, deputy assistant secretary general for emerging security challenges.

• 04 Mar. 2009 -
• Last updated: 12 Dec. 2016 11:23

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon, fans of history and particularly of the history of NATO, very good to see you here today. This is the fourth in my series of lectures on critical turning points in the 60 years history of the Alliance. Today we come to the late 70s and the early 80s which makes me very comfortable, because I joined NATO in 1980. So, we pass from history as something studied and learned to history as something observed and experienced, particularly in my case.

The INF saga may have been a hardship test for NATO, but it proved to be a great opportunity for me personally in my career. Without all of the anti-nuclear protest movements on the streets in the early 1980s, which is what we’re going to talk about today, I would have probably spent my whole NATO career as a minute writer on the infrastructure committee and would never, ever have had the opportunity to get into public relations and communications by being given the job in NATO, in the early 1980s, of single-handedly taking on hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in the campaign for nuclear disarmament or the other protest movements.

So I have, if you like, a bittersweet recollection of the INF saga. INF of course standing for Intermediate Nuclear Forces, the whole issue of the cruise and Pershing weapons on the NATO side countering the SS20s on the Soviet side, which dominated very much NATO’s history at that time. But which as we will see, ladies and gentlemen, at the close did prove unexpectedly to be a critical turning point for the Alliance, and indeed the first step in the end of the Cold War.

But before we get to all of that, let me just remind you of what we discussed last time which is that the 1960s were a particularly difficult time for the Alliance. First of all externally, as we said last time, the 60s were a time when the Cold War was still very much alive. Ideology was still the motivating factor in the behaviour of both super powers. And ideology, of course, had two particular components. On the one hand, a sense of manifest destiny that our system was destined to be superior to the other system and history would prove that superiority in due course. Secondly, a worst case scenario: ideology led both the US and as well as the Soviet Union to suspect the worst motives, the most diabolic designs in the behaviour of the other. And as both super powers sensed that history was on their side, neither could accept the loss of prestige that could come from a reversal. Listen to Nixon in his famous so-called silent majority speech, during the Vietnam War on the 3rd of November 1969. He said, “For the US this first defeat in Vietnam, in our nation’s history, would result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership, not only in Asia, but throughout the world.” Kissinger, who was his National Security Advisor, often said that if the US could not defeat a fourth rate power in Vietnam, it would end up as a fourth rate power itself. In other words, American prestige could not suffer a reversal for fear of forfeiting its ideological edge in the Cold War struggle.

But, it was a similar story on the Soviet side. Marxist-Leninism had preached the dialectical process of history, which whereby impersonal historical forces would inevitably lead to the victory of socialism over capitalism. So the Soviet Union neither could afford the rebuttal of a reversal. It’s clear that the Soviets were not very keen on invading Czechoslovakia in August 1968. They postponed it as long as they possibly could. They called Dubček, the Czech leader to Moscow; they dressed him down, they tried to persuade him to change course. But eventually for fear of seeing a communist regime overturned by its own people, they intervened and established the famous Brezhnev Doctrine of the limited sovereignty of Allies of the Soviet Union.

A similar episode occurred, however in December 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. If you look at the memoirs of Foreign Minister Gromyko, it’s clear that for a year Gromyko advised Brezhnev and the Politburo not to invade Afghanistan. There were sentiments of what you hear in NATO today about Afghanistan. Gromyko pointed out that the country was very difficult to subdue. Even Alexander the Great had not managed it. The Soviet Union would get bogged down, the Soviet Union should not go in. But despite all of this, in December of 1979, the Soviet Union sent 75,000 troops into Afghanistan. Why?

To prop up a communist government after the murder of the communist ally Taraki in Kabul and his replacement by Amin from a different faction, a man who had been educated in the United States and who, it was claimed, was having secret talks with the Americans. The Soviet Union was distressed that as one famous KGB operative said, “that the Afghans were going to do a Sadat on us”; referring to the Egyptian leader Sadat, who in the late 70s switched from the Soviet side to the American side and took Egypt out of the Soviet camp into the Western camp. The Soviet Union simply couldn’t tolerate that the communist revolutions could be set into reverse and therefore they took the catastrophic decision to go to Afghanistan and paid the price.

The domino theory was that a setback in one place would immediately provoke a chain reaction of overall setbacks. So every local conflict – Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan – held the key to ultimate success in the Cold War. And the price for those who lost was very tough. Every Soviet leader after Khrushchev saw the lesson that Khrushchev had been deposed in 1964 because he had lost the Cuban Missile Crisis against Kennedy in October 1962. Everybody feared failure above everything else but brinkmanship therefore as it became known was equally an operating principle at that time. What it actually meant was that in public neither side could be seen to back down, but in private knowing the terrible consequences of a strategic nuclear war, both sides sought compromise where they could. As Kennedy famously said when he accepted the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” The back channel, in other words secret negotiations, between the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly in Cuba over the Cuban crisis in 1962 diffused many of a problem.

In other words as the Cold War developed, publicly neither side could be seen to be abandoning the struggle, but in private, both sides were more and more ready to accept that as long as neither side tried to challenge the empire of the other side – in other words, provided that there were no attacks across the dividing line – they would be prepared to accept the status quo. This is reminiscent of the great German Chancellor Bismarck, who at the time of the Ottoman Wars in Europe in the late 1870s was once asked what he was intending to do to help the Bulgarian Christians being persecuted by the Sublime Pot. He said “I pray for them in my dreams, but they do not form the substance of my policy.” Kennedy’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk later put it at the time of Czechoslovakia in 1968 when he said “It has never been an issue of war and peace between us and the Soviet Union however ignoble this may sound.”

So ladies and gentlemen, as we come into the 1970s we come into a period when much of the sting started to go out of the Cold War. Crises were less frequent, both sides were more conservative and more status quo oriented. In fact both camps began to experience more internal strains of problems than external rivalry and confrontation. Last week of course we focused very much on NATO, the partial withdrawal of France, arguments over detente, major arguments over the adoption of the flexible response strategy, which seemed to pledge the Europeans to accept conventional war fighting in Europe. It took many years before that new strategy was adopted. But by the 1970s ladies and gentlemen, it was also clear that the Warsaw Pact, the other camp, the communist bloc was experiencing internal strains as well. For example in 1978 Vietnam invaded Cambodia, the first war between two communist countries. That wasn’t meant to happen under the doctrine of the Socialist International.

Later on there was another fight between two communist countries when in 1979 China and Vietnam clashed along the border. There were scissions within the communist camp, it was clear already in 1962 at the 22nd Party Congress in Moscow that China was beginning to split away from the Soviet Union. In the late 50s Tito took Yugoslavia outside the Soviet orbit although he maintained of course a communist state. Albania did not join the Warsaw Pact but went the way of China. Even those two great monoliths of the communist bloc themselves, China and the Soviet Union, clashed along the Ussuri River border in 1969.

So in other words, the Soviet model was no longer seen as universal. There were different paths towards socialism: Yugoslavia under Tito, Albania under Enver Hoxha, China itself, continuing unrest as evidenced in the Czechoslovak Prague spring of 1968. It was in these years that the old Socialist International, the body directed from Moscow to uphold and export the revolution - which was originally called the First International, then the Second International, then the Comintern in the 1930s and after the Second World War the Cominform - it was at this period that that organization disintegrated. The Soviet Union increasingly lost control of its ability to police its own camp.

On the other hand from the US point of view, some of the dire prognostications about the decline of US power, the domino theory that followed the US retreat from Vietnam in 1973 didn’t happen. One of the great arguments of Johnson, as we saw last week for waging the Vietnam War, had been that if we didn’t defend against communism in Hanoi or in Saigon, we would have to do it in Waikiki Beach, Hawaii or even on the beaches of California. It’s true that Laos and Cambodia fell to communism in 1975, but the dominoes did not fall. They did not fall in the Philippines, they did not fall in Thailand, they did not fall in Indonesia.

So ladies and gentlemen, as we move into the 1970s we enter a period where both super powers became more modest in their aspirations, more realistic about their need to work out a modus vivendi for how they were going to live together – something that Brezhnev later called a peaceful co-existence – and were increasingly also aware that if they could not happily co-exist they would nonetheless accept detente not through choice, but more through necessity. Listen to Kissinger writing in 1972. “Our relative position,’ he said “was bound to decline as the USSR recovered from World War Two. Our military and diplomatic position was never more favourable than in the very beginnings of the containment period in the 1940s.”

Kissinger was convinced that detente was the management of relative American decline in the world. Listen to him again, this time writing in October 1973. “The attempt to impose absolute justice by one side will be seen as absolute injustice by all the others. Stability depends upon the relative satisfaction and the relative dissatisfaction of all the sides.” In other words, detente is about managing compromise on both sides. Each super power has to be prepared to accept less than optimal outcomes. The United States felt that it had to accept its limitations. The impact of the Vietnam War was considerable, both on American society and the American economy. It costed the United States 167 billion dollars, which doesn’t sound very much during today’s credit crunch when governments seem to be injecting those amounts into the banks virtually every week, but back in 1973 it was a colossal amount of money. The United States, the Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973 which clipped the wings of the American President in terms of his ability to be able to send US troops into action. Later on after the scandals with the CIA in Chile, Congress again put limitations on the ability of the United States to fund foreign forces or foreign agents sympathetic to its goals.

The United States in the 70s felt a very, very long way from Kennedy’s great inauguration speech of 1961 when, you recall, he promised to bear any burden in the struggle of freedom. The US was forced to accept nuclear parity with the Soviet Union, particularly enshrined in the basic principles that were accepted in 1972 along with the SALT I Treaty which recognized the Soviet Union as equal in every respect. Arms control increasingly became the mode of managing the super power competition using arms control, not just as a way of codifying numbers of warheads and missiles, but also conducting a permanent strategic seminar between the United States and the Soviet Union in such a way that they would not take each other by surprise. They would be transparent, they would try increasingly to produce nuclear weapons – if this doesn’t sound too much of a paradox – that was stabilizing rather than destabilizing. Ask me in questions what that means if it’s not clear to you now.

And indeed, the early Nixon years saw a flurry of agreements. There was SALT I, there was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, again which paradoxically declared that defence was bad and offence was good and that MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) was better than MAS (Mutually Assured Survival), and as I said, basic principles. The United States rather than confront the communist block militarily, decided that the best thing to do was to divide it diplomatically. This was the background of course to Nixon’s famous visit to China in 1972, what later became known as a policy of triangulation, that he who could have two out of the three in one camp, would reduce the other one to an isolated one and therefore dominate global politics.

The ideological battle ladies and gentlemen, had always been based on the assumption that the other system was fundamentally rotten and would ultimately collapse. As I’ve said, you just had to give it time, that’s Kennan’s containment policy of the 1940s. But by the 1970s, frankly, both super powers seemed to be doing surprisingly well, whether that be militarily, whether that be economically speaking. Growth levels were comparatively similar, the command economy in the East seemed to be producing the goods just as effectively as the free market economy in the West. The struggle was destined to go on for decades or centuries even at the time the division of Europe was the permanent status of affairs and therefore NATO Allies in the mid-70s turned their attention to how to make the situation more acceptable.

If the division of Europe was set to last, if the only way to change it radically was through military force, which was unacceptable, could you not at least open some windows into the communist bloc? That became known as the Helsinki Process which ultimately produced, as I’m sure you know, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe starting in the early 70s culminating in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 which was a genuine magna carta of European security. It contained a number of radical proposals, first of all a basket on military confidence building measures. For the first time NATO personnel were actually able to go through the Iron Curtain without being shot to pieces and to observe, albeit from very fixed positions which didn’t really give them a bird’s eye view of what was going on, but observe the military manoeuvres of the Warsaw Pact and for the first time you saw Soviet generals turn up in West Germany to observe NATO’s annual Reforger Exercise.

But by far, the most toxic part of the package was basket three of the CSCE, devoted to human rights and the free movement of peoples. At the time the Soviet Union believed that it could totally disregard basket three of Helsinki. Gromyko reassured Brezhnev, I quote “Don’t worry, we are masters in our own house.” In other words, this is just eye wash, we’ll never implement it and nobody will ever expect us to do so. We now know of course, that basket three was the beginning of the people’s popular movements in Eastern Europe: Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, Echo Glasnost in Bulgaria, the German Lutheran churches, which was to prove so detrimental to communism in 1988/1989 leading up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It didn’t look like that at the time, but Henry Kissinger did say later that “rarely has a diplomatic process so illuminated the limitations of human foresight.” We didn’t know it.

Therefore 1970s we seem to be in a situation, as I’ve said before, where gradually the two blocs would come together. The great doctrine at the time was the so-called Sonnenfeldt Doctrine named after Helmut Sonnenfeldt, who was an aid to Henry Kissinger, who gave a speech which became a sensation which was basically the convergent theory. The West was becoming more social democratic as the years went by with the creation of the welfare state. Even the communist parties in the West, particularly Italy with the reform communist under Enrico Berlinguer were giving up the struggle and accepting the system. On the other hand in the East, communism was gradually opening up as it felt more reassured about its permanence to allowing more West to West contacts, more economic exchanges, and so as a result eventually the two systems would merge one day. The ideological struggle would disappear because we would all be social democratic, there would be more capitalism in communism, there would be more socialism in capitalism. It seemed like an extremely attractive process, indeed a sensation of sensations was a World Bank report dated 1977 which actually claimed that the German Democratic Republic, East Germany, was the world’s 10th largest economy ahead of the United Kingdom. There’s a famous story here, which I will go back into when we do 1989 next time.

But when Gorbachev turned up in October 1989 at the 40th anniversary of the GDR about one month before its collapse and disappearance, Honecker, the East German leader, in his public statement repeated that assertion from the World Bank that East Germany was the world’s 10th largest economy ahead of many of the west European countries. Gorbachev laughed. He was right to do so. It was a total hoax but it seemed at the time to be true. When Jimmy Carter became President of the United States in the late 70s, he also believed it was time to call the Cold War to an end. He gave a very famous speech at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 1977 when he warned his countrymen against the inordinate fear of communism. In other words, communism was no longer a danger. It was just an ism like any other ism. He cancelled the B1 Bomber Program, he reduced the American defence budget. The 1970s were a sleepy time at NATO with detente and what seemed like to be the gradual winding down of the Cold War, as we increasingly would converge.

Indeed in the 1970s if you spoke about security to a NATO member state it would probably focus more on domestic problems. The Greeks were focusing on the Turks; the Turks were focusing on the Greeks. The biggest headache for NATO in the mid-70s ladies and gentlemen, was not the Warsaw Pact or the Soviet Union Operation F, it was the Greek coup in Cyprus in 1974 and the Turkish invasion of the north which divided the island in a way which remains true to this day. Britain was worried mainly about Northern Ireland and the human rights, Catholic human rights movement in the North. Germany was worried about the Baader-Meinhof groups shooting up German bankers and politicians. Italy was worried about the Red Brigades. Homeland security seemed to be more important.

Yet just a few years later, again incredible turn around, just a few years later we no longer had that mood of optimism. By the early 1980s NATO was facing an existential crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating on the streets; NATO governments at the brink of resignation over the decision to install cruise and Pershing weapons. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in the United States having the nuclear clock to Armageddon, one minute to midnight on the front page of their magazine and a poll in Time Magazine of the under 30 showed that their greatest fear was the inevitability of nuclear war in their lifetime. Well, you ask, what happened to suddenly transform this situation? Well in these lectures I’ve tried from the very beginning, with all of the usual difficulty, to be as objective as I can, particularly in apportioning of blame or responsibility. But I think this time around, one has to be fair. It was the Soviet Union which unilaterally abrogated detente in the late 1970s. Why did it do so?

Well again I think there is a certain degree of the tail wags the dog which I referred to at the beginning. The Soviet Union, albeit it a conservative power, simply couldn’t sit on its hands if there was a communist ally that needed to be defended somewhere, because to allow communism to fail was to discredit the ideology. Brezhnev always made clear that when he spoke about peaceful co-existence he meant Europe, not what Jimmy Carter thought which was the rest of the world. The stalemate in Europe didn’t mean that places like Africa were not up for grabs. At the end of the 1970s Brezhnev made the mistake (Soviet politicians recognized it as a mistake later) of getting the Russians increasingly involved with the Cubans in African conflicts, support of the Cubans to Angola. Castro today mainly sends doctors around the world as part of Cuban foreign policy, but in the 70s it was troops. The Soviets got embroiled in a war between Somalia and Ethiopia. First of all they were on the side of the Somalis, then they switched to the side of the Ethiopians. The US Congress was in an uproar that the basic ground rules that Henry Kissinger had brilliantly seemed to design were suddenly no longer being respected. And yet as I said, because of the limits that Congress had put on the administration after the Chile Allende scandals, the Americans felt that their hands were tied in dealing with that.

Then came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. That, of course, had dire consequences. Jimmy Carter had to reverse himself. He said that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the most serious threat to peace since World War Two. He ordered immediately a boycott by the United States of the Moscow Olympics in the 1980s. The US Congress refused to ratify the SALT II Treaty which Nixon and then Ford and Carter had negotiated over a six year period. Zig Brzezinski, who is still very much alive and kicking, who was Carter’s National Security Advisor, came out with the very famous phrase, he said “SALT II died in the sands of the Ogaden [the Horn of Africa].” … Died in the sands of the Ogaden.

To be frank, the SALT II Treaty was already in trouble before Afghanistan because Congress was worried about verification, could you trust the Soviets for instance. But still, Afghanistan buried it once and for all. Carter immediately ordered increase in the American defence budget. Everybody thinks that that started under Ronald Reagan, wrong, it started already under Jimmy Carter. And then in 1977 and here we broached right the INF, out in this current environment with collapsing detente, a German leader called Helmut Schmidt, who was more known as an economist – he once called himself the Chief Executive Officer of Germany rather than the Chancellor – Helmut Schmidt was invited to give the Alistair Buchan Memorial Lecture at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. This proved to be a bombshell in the history of NATO.

Schmidt drew attention to the fact that the Soviet Union had deployed 200 so-called SS20 missiles on its territory. Why was he worried about this? Well, the SS20 was a new kind of missile. All of Europe was within its range which was about 2300 kilometres. The missile had three warheads and it was mobile so it could easily be moved around wherever the Soviets needed. Why was he worried? Well, Schmidt frankly was not a friend of Carter. I don’t think from a historical view I’m giving any insalubrious revelations by saying that. Schmidt felt badly let down by Carter. In 1977 Carter had had the idea of deploying a neutron bomb in Germany, which was very unpopular with the Germans. Brezhnev called it the capitalist bomb, because it destroyed people within electromagnetic waves but left property intact. This proved a very effective Soviet propaganda ploy.

But Schmidt being a good Atlantist, a good friend in the United States, got into a big fight with the left wing of his own party the SPD, finally to persuade the German Government to deploy the neutron bomb. Carter then cancelled the whole project leaving Schmidt feeling very much left out to dry. As the SS20s came on the scene, Schmidt in his speech suddenly worried that the strategic arms talks were bringing about a situation where the strategic weapons of the United States and Soviet Union were cancelling each other out. This meant that Europe therefore was left unbalanced. There was no similar intermediate range nuclear balance in Europe. What would happen if the United States did not want to use its strategic systems in order to stave off a Soviet conventional attack in Europe? Would there be a decoupling? What Schmidt seemed to want was the nuclear deterrent should apply at all levels: short range, intermediate range, strategic range. So Schmidt said we need a NATO response.

Carter organized a summit at Guadalupe with Giscard, with Jim Callaghan the UK Prime Minister at the time, with Schmidt, and himself and the Americans came up with the bright idea of deploying 464 GLCMs, Ground Launch Cruise Missiles and 108 Pershing Two systems. The Pershing Twos because of their short range, they only had a ten minute flying time to Moscow, could only be based in West Germany, nowhere else. They had to go as far west as possible. Of course, the Pershing Twos also scared the Soviet Union because they were 15 times more accurate than the SS20s. Schmidt said, look you know we can’t have Germany holding the baby here. Other Allies, European, continental Allies, have got to take these weapons as well. The burden has got to be shared. Eventually the UK agreed to base them at Greenham Common, the Netherlands agreed to base them at Vernstraight, Italy agreed to take some Ground Launch Cruise Missiles, as well as Germany. In 1979 in December NATO took the important decision, the so-called Dual Track Decision, to deploy these systems but only in 1983, in other words not immediately, to give the Soviet Union therefore a kind of four years notice. The idea being to use those four years to try to construct some kind of arms control treaty, which would either make the systems redundant or at least would reduce their numbers.

Now I think in any previous time ladies and gentlemen, this decision would have not excited a great deal of interest. After all NATO had periodically renewed its nuclear weapons every ten years throughout the 1950s. The Americans had put 7000 nuclear weapons into Germany in the mid-50s with barely a murmur or barely a newspaper article. So why was it different this time? Why did this NATO, the Dual Track Decision, lead to governments on the verge of collapse and massive anti-NATO protest movements? The answer, of course, is the arrival of Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980.

Of course now Ronald Reagan is idealized, even by the peace movements. He’s seen as perhaps the world’s greatest anti-nuclear campaigner; the man who perhaps did more than any other to bring the Cold War to an end. Reagan after he’d retired and before he tragically developed Alzheimer’s, was once asked by a journalist you know, what did you achieve in the White House? And Reagan in his typical western style said, well shucks folks say I won the Cold War, which may not in fact be a totally exaggerated claim. But those of you who are as old as I am, which doesn’t look like very many in the audience today, but will probably remember that that’s not the way it seemed at the time. Reagan seemed like an old fashioned 1940s ideologue and cold warrior. He in 1983 famously called the Soviet Union the evil empire. He said that the Soviet Union, I quote “used detente as a one way street to pursue its own aims, the promotion of revolution and a one world communist state.”

Indeed it wasn’t just Reagan. He’d come to power on a surge of anti-Carter neo-conservatism in the United States best propounded by the so-called Committee on the Present Danger, a very effective American lobbying organisation, which had people like Richard Pearl who later became very famous, Richard Pipes the Soviet historian at Harvard, Eugene Rustow who was a notable sceptic about arms control, and Casper Weinberger who then became Reagan’s Secretary of Defence. The Reaganites seemed set on confrontation with the Soviet Union. They did not believe that stability is a good thing. This is quite remarkable. They sensed that detente sort of legitimized the Soviet Union in a role which economically or socially it had no claim to have. They did not accept the principle of equality with the Soviet Union, particularly not in the moral field. Reagan indeed believed that communism was much weaker than Kissinger or Nixon had ever believed it to be and that therefore the time was ripe to put pressure on the Soviet Union, to test its weaknesses and to see to what degree the Soviet Union might collapse as a result.

Part of this was simply out spending the Soviet Union. Reagan pushed the American defence budget up to 7 percent of GDP, a figure that it hasn’t been since the end of the Korean War or ever since for that matter. He de-mothballed the B1 Bomber. He introduced a large number of new nuclear weapons programs, notably the MX, the Peacekeeper, you’re familiar with all of those. In fact, Reagan famously said “The West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism. It won’t bother to denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose final pages are even now being written.” This of course, for Europeans who were wedded to Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik , to the CSCE, to reaching out to the East, to the convergent theory, to the expectation that life was going to get better, this of course was a truly cold shower. Therefore the missiles, the cruise and Pershing, no longer seen simply to be the reflection of a deteriorating East-West relationship, they seemed at the time to be the cause of that East-West relationship. And of course, Reagan added salt to the wounds in March 1983, when he came up with his famous speech on SDI, the Strategic Defence Initiative.

Because this was based on the fact that he believed A) that we should rid the world of nuclear weapons and B) that it was moral and the right thing to do to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Europeans, as I said in previous weeks, had always been in the paradoxical position. They didn’t exactly like nuclear weapons, but they always believed that nuclear weapons were the one thing that stopped Europe from being safe from a conventional war. They wanted – look at Schmidt with the Alistair Backen lecture – they wanted a visible American nuclear deterrent. So, when Reagan started to declare nuclear weapons immoral and declare that the SDI in fact would lead to a situation where they would become redundant, whether you believed it was technically feasible or not to put laser beams in space, you know, to shoot missiles down in the atmosphere, the actual basis, the actual strategic principles seemed to be highly dubious.

The result was instantaneous: massive protest movements on the streets of all European capitals. 300,000 in Bonn in 1983 listening to Willy Brandt, the former German Chancellor, denounced cruise and Pershing. In Germany the famous Krefeld Appeal of 1983 which gathered 2.7 million signatures against cruise and Pershing. The revival of the CND movement in the United States, sorry United Kingdom, the ground zero, the freeze movement, even the US House of Representatives passed a freeze resolution. It wasn’t just opposition to the missiles themselves. The INF saga actually started a whole debate about the morality of nuclear deterrence.  

We had church leaders weighing in on the principle of whether NATO should abandon the first use principle of nuclear weapons. NATO would never be the first to use force, but it always reserved the right to be the first to use nuclear weapons if attacked first. The churches felt that nuclear deterrence was immoral, it was contrary to the teachings of Christ. Fortunately for us, there were a few pro-NATO, pro-deterrence churchman like Bishop Leonard of London, who entered the fray as well. The question is, is can you use any weapon no matter how repulsive if it serves the cause of preventing war or peace? It is morally just to hold a whole population hostage to nuclear holocaust if that is the only way you have to preserve peace? So it was a debate about nuclear weapons and not just about how many cruise and Pershing to deploy. Governments started to wobble. In the Netherlands, eventually Helmut Schmidt himself lost a vote of no confidence in the Bundestag in 1983. The Liberals deserted him, he couldn’t control the left wing of his own party and that opened the door for Helmut Kohl, the very famous Helmut Kohl, to become Chancellor of Germany.

NATO was helped though, despite the fact that we suddenly had for the first time since the end of the Cold War the collapse of the pro-NATO political consensus between right and left, NATO was helped by some unlikely Allies: President Mitterrand of France. He went to the Bundestag in January 1983 and he gave a very famous speech where he said to people, hey, as he said in French ‘ les missiles sont à l’est, les pacifistes sont à l’ouest ’. Interesting. Missiles are in the East, peace campaigners in the West. He basically said to the Germans, you have to get to be good NATO Allies and keep your promise and deploy the Pershing Twos and the cruise. That coming from a country, France - which had not participated in the Twin Track Decision, which had its own independent nuclear deterrent after de Gaulle’s partial withdrawal - this may strike you as being a bit rich, yes? But at the time it was of fantastic importance in keeping NATO together.

France saved the day, almost, because for the Germans to hear this from the United States was one thing. To hear this from their special partner in building the European Union, France, was, particularly from a socialist President of France, now that was something completely different. So the 1980s were a period when NATO seemed to be wobbling. The problem of course was that nobody expected Ronald Reagan’s zero – zero option to work. Reagan in late ‘81 had proposed in an effort to capture the moral high ground, the zero – zero option: NATO would not deploy its cruise and Pershing and in return the Soviets would get rid of their SS20s. Nobody believed it. Everybody said that this is just propaganda, this is not serious, you know, this is just a diversion. How can you expect the Soviets to give up weapons which they have deployed, for weapons that NATO isn’t going to start deploying for another few years and probably will never be able to deploy because of all of these protest movements? Indeed, the peace movement seemed to be right because when the first cruise missiles went in to the UK in 1983, the Soviets walked out of the so-called INF negotiations in Geneva and we really did seem to be back to the height of the 1950’s Cold War.

Well I’m glad to tell you ladies and gentlemen, but I think you know it already, that all of this saga has a happy ending in the shape of Gorbachev who became, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader in 1985, in March 1985. Even today, you know historians are really at a loss to explain how a system so known, you know for lack of vitality, for lack of innovation, for fear of creativity, how that system which had elected just before Reagan – Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko. Reagan used to joke that the reason why he didn’t have a summit with a Soviet leader in his first term is that every Soviet leader died on him and there is some truth in this. How suddenly out of that system somebody like Gorbachev could emerge? Even George Kennan, the famous Sovietologist, when he was asked about this on American TV said “I really can’t explain it.” He was at a loss for words.

But it wasn’t only Gorbachev. By the early 1980s the Soviet Union was beginning to understand that all was not well. As Hamlet said, “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”; something was rotten in the Soviet Union. Georgi Arbatov of the US Canada Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he said, you know “we were arming ourselves like addicts without any apparent political need.” As the famous American Defence Secretary Harold Brown said, “When we build, the Soviets build. When we stop building, the Soviets build.” Or Henry Kissinger again put it, “Absolute security for the Soviet Union means absolute insecurity for everybody else.” But it was people around Gorbachev that were beginning to realise that simply building up weapons was leading the system into a dead end. Indeed, we now know that by 1980 the Soviet defence burden was three times that of the United States with a GDP one sixth of that of the US.

Secondly, it was the KGB not Gorbachev who were becoming aware of an increasing economic break down in the Warsaw Pact. Whereas the system seemed to be working in the 70s, by the 80s countries like Poland, Hungary and the GDR were getting themselves into fantastic debt. I’ve got some figures here. In 1971, the combined debt of the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact countries was 6.1 billion dollars. By 1980 it had gone up to 66.1 billion; by 1988 it had gone up to 95.6 billion dollars. This was loans from the West mainly used to produce consumer goods to keep the population happy, what became known under Kadar in Hungary as ‘goulash communism.’ In 1988 Poland was spending one third of its credit line on consumer goods. In other words the Soviets were increasingly aware, particularly as their own deficit was 56 billion dollars by 1980, that they would not be able to bail out Eastern Europe. The problems in Afghanistan, they lost 15,000 dead – fortunately today, thank God, NATO is still a very, very long way from that figure – before they withdrew. The Soviet Union, once the bread basket of Europe, in 1914 the Soviet, Russia under the Czars had the highest GDP in Europe 20 percent, Germany 19 percent, UK 17 percent. In 1914! By 1980 of course the Soviet Union was importing food from China. Japan had overtaken it as the second largest producer of goods and services. So it’s not just Gorbachev the personality, although yes we can’t discount the creativity of his mind, it’s also what Brezhnev would have called the correlation of forces, objective factors which led to a change.

But I also think that Reagan has to take some of the credit here. It takes two to tango. Because Reagan was facing a choice: continue a policy of confrontation, outspend the Soviet Union, condemn it as he famously said “to the ash heap of history”, keep the confrontation going or having rebuilt American strength – he increased the US defence budget twice between 1980 and 1985 – then negotiate from strength. And fortunately for Reagan, fortunately for us, Reagan listened to George Schultz, Jim Matlock and Paul Nitsay more than he listened on this to Daniel Pipes, Casper Weinberger and Richard Pearl. Reagan decided to negotiate and the result was the INF Treaty, the zero - zero option which was finally signed in 1987.

There had been some wobbles before that. For example in Reykjavik at 1986 one of the most incredible meetings in the whole of human history, Reagan and Gorbachev left to themselves over a dinner had decided to eliminate all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. The Europeans were horror struck that this could be done – even American and Soviet advisors were horror struck. In fact, one American advisor afterwards, and I love this, famously quoted a Russian who had commented on a meeting between Czar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1905, when again in a dinner they had settled all outstanding differences and the advisor of the Czar quoted had said “One should never forget that a discussion between two Princes is propitious only when it confines itself to the weather.” But it’s also … in other words, bureaucrats like Sir Humphrey Appleby in the Yes Minister series on British TV hate it when their politicians decide things when they’re not there or against their advice. But Reagan had not agreed to Gorbachev’s request to give up the Strategic Defence Initiative as a quid pro quo for getting rid of all nuclear weapons, so Reykjavik, although it came very close to being a transcendental summit, ultimately was a failure.

Still detente continued and Gorbachev went to the United Nations and made his famous speech in which he declared that everybody had freedom of choice and announced a unilateral withdrawal of half a million Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. And as I’ve said in December 1987 the INF Treaty was signed. It not only eliminated, ladies and gentlemen, the cruise and the Pershing and the SS20s, it eliminated the SS4s, the SS5s, the Pershing Ones. In fact, the Soviet Union withdrew 2700 weapons as a result of that treaty and the United States eventually ended up destroying about 800 all told. It was the first ever arms control agreement in history, which had not simply reduced numbers but eliminated a whole class of nuclear weapons, but more importantly it provided for massive information sharing and inspections. In other words, if the Soviet Union was finally allowing the United States to go on its soil or to fly over its territory to inspect the destruction of missiles, then the Soviet Union no longer feared the United States at all. In other words, although we didn’t know it then, the INF Treaty was the first indication not just that we were being able to negotiate with the Soviets, but that the Cold War, as we’d known it, was really coming to an end.

In retrospect how did NATO pull it off despite all of the tensions? I think first of all clear US leadership. Reagan knew what he wanted. He was somebody who built up strength for a purpose, not just to be strong but in order to be able to negotiate. He had an idea and he stuck to it. He was able to accommodate ideology to practical reality in a way that few leaders are able to do. We have those who have good tactics with no visions and those who have vision but no tactics. Reagan was rare. He had both and he had the personal ability to communicate Gorbachev over the head of his officials and to strike deals.

Secondly, NATO had a clear strategy. Deployments on the one hand, but linked to arms control and of course the willingness to actually deploy the weapons to show the Soviet Union that we were really serious as the sine qua non for getting the Soviets to be ready to make concessions. If you like, we had to go through the pain of deployments before we got the gain. Thirdly, realizing that the only way that you’re going to win the argument is to carry out your strategy. Before the deployments there were two camps: those who said – ah, this is going to bring about World War Three, and those who said – no, no, no, deploying these weapons will persuade the Soviet Union to negotiate. How could you win that argument? By deploying. As Napoleon used to say, ‘ on s’engage et puis on vois .’ We engage first and then we see.

This happened afterwards ladies and gentlemen, in the 90s with NATO enlargement where people again said that NATO enlargement will lead to a new world war with the Russians and other said – no, no, no, the Russians will accept this and it will stabilize Europe. How did we win the argument? By doing it. You cannot win intellectual arguments without creating facts. And then, a lesson very much that applies to today and Afghanistan: strategic communications. We had a big problem with the peace movement but in a way, frankly, which I’ve never seen since the early 80s, NATO governments actually got behind the communications effort. Maybe it was, you know, the thought of my imminent hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully yes? But the UK set up a special department called DS-19 to take on the CND, ministers went out making speeches, governments funded in my country organizations like Peace Through NATO or the Coalition for Peace Through Security, NGOs, to get the arguments out. They pushed brochures out and so on and again, you know we lament so much today in Afghanistan that we’re not getting the message across, but I see nothing comparable to the mobilization of government information efforts that was made in the 1980s.

And finally, smart NATO diplomacy. A special consultative group in NATO worked day and night. The Americans came to brief constantly on what they were up to in negotiations with the Soviet Union. The Americans made sure that they had NATO blessing for every new proposal before Maynard Glitman, the American negotiator, took it to Geneva to the Soviets. The Alliance really felt that it was in the same boat. I suppose it was like Benjamin Franklin, either we all hang together or we hang separately. But again that is very much a lesson for the modern day that only united did we have a chance of succeeding, but if we went alone following our own national agendas we would certainly fail.

So ladies and gentlemen in conclusion the INF saga, as difficult as it was at the time, marked the first instance of what I call catastrophic success. In other words, what happens to NATO when you get what you want? Remember the Chinese curse: give somebody what he wants is the quickest way to destroy him. We had this again in 1989, we’ll talk about this next time, catastrophic success, the wall comes down. What happens when you succeed beyond your wildest dreams? At the time I must say, particularly as Reagan left office and George Bush (not George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, number 41, not number 43) as he took over there was a great mood of scepticism towards Gorbachev. You know this Gorbamania in Europe, this Gorbasm, as one German commentator called it, you know, was it really a trick by Gorbachev? Was he sort of a devilishly clever new sort of Stalin like Soviet leader who was going to sort of de-nuclearize Europe, neutralize Europe through charm rather than through threats but with the same idea of driving the Americans out?

You know Gorbachev just looked too good to be true and the early Bush administration was much more suspicious about what he was up to and therefore perhaps not as willing to take him at face value as Reagan had been. This reminded me of Tallymoore, who famously said when he heard of the death of the Russian Ambassador “I wonder what his intention is.” But it very quickly became clear as the INF Treaty gave way to the CFE Treaty on Conventional Forces, more summits between Bush and Gorbachev, the gradual loosening of Soviet control in Central and Eastern Europe, that catastrophic success was going to pose as many questions for the future of NATO in a world in which we no longer had an enemy as it would pose for the Soviet Union. I come back in my concluding remark today to Georgi Arbatov, of the US Canada Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, who was going around the conference circuit very gleefully after 1987, after INF, saying, “We have done something terrible to you: we are taking away your threat.” Thank you. Any questions?

Questions and answers

Q:   The picture you have drawn from Ronald Reagan was rather a positive one, but a couple of months ago, I don’t know if you are aware of this Able Archer story and this spy story Topaz, it’s a very famous spy which was disclosed in the 90s I think, and then was sentenced to prison for a couple of years. But it was thanks to him that we did not end up in a third world war because he was a spy at NATO and I wanted to know more about this if you know anything about this spy story.

Dr. Jamie Shea: Well, Topaz, Rainier Rupp was somebody who worked two offices from me back in the 1980s and he used to give me financial investment information every day and I looked upon him as a financial guru because he had several houses, apartments in Brussels, and I thought how can somebody on a NATO salary have several houses and apartments in Brussels. He must be a financial genius! You know in terms of investing on the stock market and so I looked upon him as people looked upon, look today upon Warren Buffet, you know the sage of Omaha, you know as a guru on investments. And of course when he was unmasked as the famous Topaz it was a genuine surprise because, but it also meant that all of the financial tips he’d given me were nonsense because you know he’d financed the apartments out of money from the Kremlin, not out of his own acumen. It was a great disappointment.

Yes, it’s absolutely true. We have had repeatedly in NATO, during the Cold War, spy scandals. Topaz was the most famous but there were, there were many others. But incidentally we now know of course that there was a phenomenal amount of Soviet and East bloc penetration of Western society. The main aide to Willy Brandt, Gunter Guillaume, was unmasked as a GDR spy. We later learned after the collapse of the Berlin Wall that the Stasi had employed 25 German members of the Bundestag to give them information. If you go to that building in East Berlin, which houses the Stasi files, they extend 174 kilometres in length. One in every six East German had a file on him and quite a few foreigners as well. A friend of mine at Oxford, who is a very, very famous commentator on East-West relations called Timothy Garten Ash, he lived in East Berlin during the Cold War and was in love with an East German woman. And after the wall fell and he got access to his file, he inevitably discovered that his East German girlfriend was a Stasi agent spying on him. He later wrote a very good book on it called The File which I recommend to you, it’s a fantastic sort of vignette on communism.

But anyway what I’m telling is, yes, there was a fantastic effort by the East bloc to buy that information, to buy those agents of influence. Did it make any difference in the long run? It was embarrassing at the time, it compromised things at the time, but did it really interfere with NATO political decisions or the overall strategic debate? I’m not so sure, frankly. I’m not personally so convinced of the value of spies. Stalin had fantastic spies. He had probably the best spy since Markus Wolf, the head of the East German Intelligence Service, in the history of spying called Richard Sorge. And Richard Sorge, who was a German, got all of the news about Operation Barbarosa, in other words that Hitler was going to invade the Soviet Union. Stalin just didn’t believe him and discounted it with the results that you know. So I don’t know. It’s embarrassing. I think for propaganda purposes of course one side always loves to be able to turn somebody or to have somebody on the inside. But I find little historical evidence that spying or the results of spying have really influenced broader strategic trends.

Q:   Well firstly thank you because that gave a very good overview of those two decades and I have to say that during those two decades it sounds like there were, whether it was strategy, whether it was by accident, there was some success, at least from the Western point of view in terms of fighting the enemy in that sense. My question has to do with what, looking at those lessons learned and I think you’ve mentioned a few of them and we can see how dialogue actually fit a lot into this, how can we take that and now that NATO is again being tested in 2009 in terms of its reach outside of Europe really in this, I’m talking about Afghanistan in that sense. What lessons learned can we take from these decades and now start to apply again because now we’re fighting a different ism as you were saying before, so?

Dr. Jamie Shea:   Yes, thank you, that’s a very good question. The first thing I would say is that what happened after de Gaulle took France out of the integrated structure in ‘66, what happened after we had the pressure of the anti-nuclear protest movements in the 80s, was that NATO subject to pressure pulled together. We also had this to some degree in Bosnia, which we’ll come to in the final lecture, in the 90s when again NATO was very divided, things weren’t going very well and then one day Warren Christopher came here. He was the US Secretary of State under Clinton, and Christopher, I remember this in 1994 said, “Okay, NATO is more important to us than Bosnia.” You may disagree with that but he said it. What he meant that at the end of the day, unity in the Alliance, keeping NATO going, working with the Allies is so important that if we have to compromise we will.

So in other words in previous times of difficulty NATO has pulled together. It may sort of be like the wagons circling the wagons, but we’ve done it. What worries me about Afghanistan today is that at a time of difficulty instead of pulling together as an Alliance, understanding each other, finding a strategy we can believe and working together, there is obviously too much of a tendency to say – no, no, no, my national position is right, your position is wrong, I’m here to defend my national position and not to forge a compromise. The unity of the Alliance is no longer the greatest value.

I’m not saying that that will happen on Afghanistan, I hope it will not. The Strasbourg Summit we’ve got in a few weeks for the 60th anniversary, when Afghanistan will be key, the idea of making a bigger effort, hopefully is going to sort of change that situation around. But of course that would be my major conclusion there that times of difficulty we’ve got to pull together as an Alliance, be prepared to compromise and so on. That is the condition of success. Not all believe that the difficulty proves that I’m right, my analysis is right, you’re analysis is wrong and, and blame each other and drive apart. Of course, the Alliance was much smaller in those days, we only had 15, 16 members. Of course today we are nearly double that number of 28, but I don’t believe it’s impossible. But it certainly means that leadership of the Alliance, somebody taking the lead in the way that happened in the 60s, happened in of course to some degree with Reagan at the end in the 80s, pulling the Allies together is key. This is not an alliance that runs on automatic pilot. Things don’t just naturally happen. NATO is not a naturally stable organization because it’s democratic, countries have their own views. So somebody has got to pull things together and so that’s why I emphasize the leadership.

I emphasize strategic communications, particularly as I mentioned because that subject has now come back with Afghanistan but in an optimistic sense. I too often hear the view, oh you know we can’t out communicate the Taliban, oh, it’s too difficult, you know, oh, our publics are never going to support this. Well, you know we had much more public pressure in the 80s, we had millions of people on the streets, so believe me, we had those marches being led not just if you like by the alternative lifestyle people, but by serious well-known politicians, I mentioned Willy Brandt. And yet governments still showed, that if they devoted resources and a bit of will to the effort, they could turn the situation around somewhat. So I think there was a lesson there as well. It would be little value for me quite frankly doing this historical series if there weren’t some kernels of lessons there to be applied to today’s situation.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m very grateful to you for attending today and in a couple of days’ time we’ll have the next lecture which will really start bringing us into a period that even you, youngsters that you are will associate with, November 1989 and the fall of the wall. Thank you.

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Soviet Cruise Missile Submarines of the Cold War

A crucial and unique part of this “anti-carrier” force was its many submarines armed with anti-ship cruise missiles, equaling about 64 nuclear and 16 diesel boats of 8 classes, including the 29 “Echo II” class. These were based on the 5 “Echo I” class boats which used a cruise missile like a small jet airplane for strategic nuclear attack, much like our “Regulus.” Both worked but were a blind alley, with both the missile and the submarine surfaced to launch being vulnerable to detection and interception. The Russians developed this missile into the anti-ship “Shaddock,” used to arm the Echo II’s and diesel “Julietts” which, with long range missile-carrying “Bear,” “Badger,” and “Backfire” bombers, comprised the main striking elements of the anti-carrier force. Its weak spots were that it depended on the Tu-95 Bears for reconnaissance and targeting, and on radio communications between the Bears, subs, and a central control center to relay target information and commands. The carriers’ “secret weapon” that defeated them was AEW (Airborne Early Warning) and the E-2 Hawkeye, which, with the F-14 and its long range Phoenix missile, made it possible to intercept the Bears outside their own targeting range without giving away the carrier’s position electronically. The Russian solution was an enormous investment in a system of radar-reconnaissance satellites to replace the aircraft. They were huge and expensive, required an on-board nuclear reactor to meet their power needs, and the low orbits required meant short lives and limited areas of coverage, so continuous, complete Atlantic coverage was not possible. The book gives a brief description of this system, but not much analysis of its effectiveness.

It is interesting how alien to US sub design philosophy the Echo IIs and Julietts were. Versus our single-hulled boats, with almost everything contained within the highly streamlined pressure hull, these were double-hulled, with large superstructures containing retracting missile tubes and a large antenna for receiving targeting data from the aircraft – rather resembling the rare attempts to create “submersible warships” in the past, like the Surcouf, and the British X-1 and K-class. They were followed by the “Charlie” class in the 1970’s, streamlined, quiet, able to launch their missiles submerged, but still vulnerable, now because of the short range of their missiles. Finally, in the 1980’s the huge ”Oscar” class “heavy submarine rocket cruiser” began to appear, with a displacement of 12,500 tons, 100,000 SHP and a submerged speed of 32 knots, the second-largest type of submarine ever built. It combined a heavy battery of long-range anti-ship missiles with the ability to launch them submerged, and hopefully undetected. How well these powerful, capable ships would have actually worked tactically is open to question. They had the speed to keep up with carrier groups, but could they have actually used it without making enough noise to reveal their presence? Their long missile range brought back the requirement for long-range reconnaissance and external targeting, for which the new “Legenda” satellite system was essential. But how well did it work? And it proved impossible to keep it functioning after the end of the Soviet Union.

The creation of this force of anti-carrier submarines was a remarkable technological achievement that placed the US Navy under great pressure throughout the Cold War, and helped keep alive the credibility of a decisive Soviet land offensive into Western Europe (or in the 1980’s, into a restive Poland) for a long, long time. By the late 1980’s, however, the carriers’ defenses clearly had the upper hand. Countering the missile and submarine threat to our carriers went a long way to winning the Cold War or rather inducing the Soviet military to give up, when it chose to refuse to support the coup against Gorbachev in 1991.

This book is only 48 pages, one of the numerous Osprey New Vanguard series, but it covers its topic comprehensively and clearly, as the Osprey booklets generally do very well. They typically serve as an excellent introduction to a specific topic for both the beginner and the scholar looking to fill in a gap in his knowledge, as well as serving as a reference handbook with complete and accessible facts on the topic – here essentially the subs themselves and their missiles. This book serves both purposes very satisfactorily. The missing element is that space makes it impossible to go into peripheral issues in any depth. But this book provides a short but excellent bibliography. Besides the essential Russian works, the small number of English works it lists, by Friedman, Polmar, Herrick, Winkler, are the place to start, to gain a fuller knowledge of the technological, historical, and policy backgrounds.

Soviet Cruise Missile Submarines of the Cold War By Edward Hampshire, illustrated by Adam Tooby, Osprey Publishing Ltd., Oxford, (2018).

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A Look at Iran’s Military Capabilities

The direct military confrontation between Iran and Israel has brought renewed attention to Iran’s armed forces. What are they capable of?

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By Farnaz Fassihi

• Published April 12, 2024 Updated April 14, 2024

The start of a direct military confrontation between Iran and Israel has brought renewed attention to Iran’s armed forces. Early this month, Israel attacked a building in Iran’s diplomatic compound in the Syrian capital, Damascus, killing seven of Iran’s senior commanders and military personnel .

Iran vowed to retaliate, and did so about two weeks later, starting a broad aerial attack on Israel on Saturday involving hundreds of drones and missiles aimed at targets inside Israel and the territory it controls.

Here’s a look at Iran’s military and its capabilities.

Why is Iran’s military relevant right now?

Israeli officials had said they would respond to any attack by Iran with a counterattack, which could prompt further retaliation from Iran and possibly expand into a wider regional war. There is even a chance that a conflict of that sort could drag in the United States, although Washington has made clear it had nothing to do with the Damascus attack.

Analysts say that Iran’s adversaries, primarily the United States and Israel, have avoided direct military strikes on Iran for decades, not wishing to tangle with Tehran’s complex military apparatus. Instead, Israel and Iran have been engaged in a long shadow war via air, sea, land and cyberattacks, and Israel has covertly targeted military and nuclear facilities inside Iran and killed commanders and scientists.

“There is a reason Iran has not been struck,” said Afshon Ostovar, an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and an expert on Iran’s military. “It’s not that Iran’s adversaries fear Iran. It’s that they realize any war against Iran is a very serious war.”

What sort of military threat does Iran pose?

The Iranian armed forces are among the largest in the Middle East, with at least 580,000 active-duty personnel and about 200,000 trained reserve personnel divided among the traditional army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to an annual assessment last year by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The army and the Guards each have separate and active ground, air and naval forces, with the Guards responsible for Iran’s border security. The General Staff of the Armed Forces coordinates the branches and sets the overall strategy.

The Guards also operate the Quds Force, an elite unit in charge of arming, training and supporting the network of proxy militias throughout the Middle East known as the “axis of resistance.” These militias include Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, militia groups in Syria and Iraq and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

Power by Proxy: How Iran Shapes the Mideast

A guide to the armed groups that let Iran extend its influence throughout the region.

The commander in chief of Iran’s armed forces is the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on all major decisions.

While the proxy militias are not counted as part of Iran’s armed forces, analysts say they are considered an allied regional force — battle ready, heavily armed and ideologically loyal — and could come to Iran’s aid if it was attacked.

“The level of support and types of systems Iran has provided for nonstate actors is really unprecedented in terms of drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles,” said Fabian Hinz, an expert on Iran’s military at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Berlin. “They could be viewed as part of Iran’s military capability, especially Hezbollah, which has the closest strategic relationship with Iran.”

What kinds of weapons does Iran have?

For decades, Iran’s military strategy has been anchored in deterrence, emphasizing the development of precision and long-range missiles, drones and air defenses. It has built a large fleet of speedboats and some small submarines that are capable of disrupting shipping traffic and global energy supplies that pass through the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has one of the largest arsenals of ballistic missiles and drones in the Middle East, Mr. Ostovar said. That includes cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles, as well as ballistic missiles with ranges up to 2,000 kilometers, or more than 1,200 miles. These have the capacity and range to hit any target in the Middle East, including Israel.

In recent years, Tehran has assembled a large inventory of drones with ranges of around 1,200 to 1,550 miles and capable of flying low to evade radar, according to experts and Iranian commanders who have given public interviews to the state news media. Iran has made no secret of the buildup, displaying its trove of drones and missiles during military parades, and has ambitions to build a large export business in drones. Iran’s drones are being used by Russia in Ukraine and have surfaced in the conflict in Sudan.

The country’s bases and storage facilities are widely dispersed, buried deep underground and fortified with air defenses, making them difficult to destroy with airstrikes, experts say.

Where does Iran get its weapons?

International sanctions have cut Iran off from high-tech weaponry and military equipment manufactured abroad, like tanks and fighter jets.

During Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, few countries were willing to sell weapons to Iran. When Ayatollah Khamenei became Iran’s supreme leader in 1989, a year after the war ended, he commissioned the Guards to develop a domestic weapons industry and poured resources into the effort, which was widely reported in the Iranian news media. He wanted to assure that Iran would never again have to rely on foreign powers for its defense needs.

Today, Iran manufactures a large quantity of missiles and drones domestically and has prioritized that defense production, experts said. Its attempts to make armored vehicles and large naval vessels have met with mixed results. It also imports small submarines from North Korea while expanding and modernizing its domestically produced fleet .

How do other countries see Iran’s military, and what are its weaknesses?

Iran’s military is viewed as one of the strongest in the region in terms of equipment, cohesion, experience and quality of personnel, but it lags far behind the power and sophistication of the armed forces of the United States, Israel and some European countries, experts said.

Iran’s greatest weakness is its air force. Much of the country’s aircraft date from the era of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who led Iran from 1941 to 1979, and many have been disabled for lack of spare parts. The country also bought a small fleet from Russia in the 1990s, experts said.

Iran’s tanks and armored vehicles are old, and the country has only a few large naval vessels, experts said. Two intelligence gathering vessels, t he Saviz and Behshad, deployed on the Red Sea, have aided the Houthis in identifying Israeli-owned ships for attacks, American officials have said.

Will Israel’s attack disrupt Iran’s military?

The assassinations of the senior military officials are expected to have a short-term impact on Iran’s regional operations, having eliminated commanders with years of experience and relationships with the heads of the allied militias.

Nevertheless, the chain of command for the armed forces inside Iran remains intact, experts say.

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a group in the Gaza Strip. It is Palestinian Islamic Jihad, not Islamic Palestinian Jihad.

How we handle corrections

Farnaz Fassihi is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the organization, and also covers Iran and the shadow war between Iran and Israel. She is based in New York. More about Farnaz Fassihi

What Iran’s attack on Israel revealed about its weapons arsenal

Iran’s first direct attack on Israel overnight Saturday demonstrated the country’s military might and the advances of its domestic weapons program, analysts said, while also revealing the limitations of its arsenal.

With more than 300 drones and missiles launched in a layered onslaught, it was Iran’s largest-ever conventional show of force . That it inflicted only minimal damage was due in part to the choreographed nature of the attack — giving Israel and the United States ample time to prepare air defense systems — but may also be attributed to shortcomings in its medium- and long-range capabilities.

“The operation showed that our armed forces are ready,” Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi told crowds gathered Wednesday in Tehran to mark Army Day. Parades in the Iranian capital featured many of the same munitions used in the attack on Israel.

What Iran used against Israel

110 ballistic

Iranian drones

These drones can deliver small payloads of explosives in self-detonating attacks.

Length: 11.5 ft.

Width: 8 ft.

Max. take off weight: 440 lb.

Max. speed: 115 mph

Range: About 1,100 - 1,500 miles

Its nose contains a warhead and can be equipped with a camera.

Length: 8 ft.

Width: 7 ft.

Max. take off weight: 300 lb.

The Shahed-131 is an earlier version of Shahed-136 with a similar principle of operation. The layout and aerodynamics are also identical.

Ballistic missiles

KHEIBAR SHEKAN

The Kheibar Shekan MRBM is a solid-propellant ballistic missile designed by the IRGC.

Length: 34 ft.

Diameter: 2.6 ft.

Max. range: 900 miles

Warhead weight: 1,100 lb.

Introduction: 2022

The Emad MRBM is an Iranian-designed, liquid-fuel ballistic missile based on Shahab-3.

Length: 54 ft.

Diameter: 4.1 ft.

Max. range: 1,056 miles

Warhead weight: 1,650 lb.

Introduction: 2015

The Ghadr-1 MRBM seems to be an improved variant of the Shahab-3A. It is also referred to as the Ghadr-101 and the Ghadr-110.

Max. range: 1,211 miles

Warhead weight: 1,760 lb.

Introduction: 2007

Cruise missile

Max. range: 1,025 miles

Introduction: 2023

What Iran did not use

The Sejjil-1 Iranian MRBM is a two-stage, solid-propellant, surface-to-surface missile.

Length: 60 ft

Max. range: 1,243 miles

Warhead weight: 1,540 lb.

Introduction: 2011

The Shahab-3 is a MRBM developed by Iran and based on the North Korean Nodong-1.

Diameter: 4.1 or 4.5 ft.

Max. range: 808 miles

Warhead: Single or multiple

with 5 warheads of 617 lb.

Introduction: 2003

Sources: OE Data Integration Network (ODIN),

CSIS Missile Defense Project

120 ballistic

120 ballistic missiles

30 cruise missiles

Overhead view

1,211 miles

1,056 miles

Max. range:

Warhead weight:

Introduction:

Sources: OE Data Integration Network (ODIN), CSIS Missile Defense Project

Raisi hailed the attack as a resounding “success,” but was also quick to qualify the strikes as “limited” and “not comprehensive.”

“If it was supposed to be a large-scale action, nothing would have been left of the Zionist regime,” he said. And if Israel retaliates, Raisi pledged, “they will be dealt with fiercely and severely.”

Yet after analyzing the munitions used in Saturday’s assault and the success of regional defense systems, researchers say it’s unclear how Iran could inflict greater damage on Israel through conventional military means.

“Iran basically threw everything it had that could reach Israel’s territory,” said John Krzyzaniak, a researcher who studies Iran’s missile programs at the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. Like other analysts interviewed for this story, he has spent the past several days studying launch videos, imagery of debris and interception information to identify the Iranian munitions.

His conclusion is that Tehran “used some of every system they have.” And experts said it made sense that the Sejjil-1 and Shahab-3 missiles were excluded from the attack.

Shahab-3 “wasn’t used because it’s so old,” said Fabian Hinz, an Iran analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Berlin. “The Sejjil is a bit of a mysterious missile,” he said, adding that Iran has “used it very, very little during maneuvers.”

Other analysts noted the Sejjil was expensive to produce and may no longer be in production.

The quantity of munitions used also provides new insights into Iran’s capabilities. The deployment of over 100 ballistic missiles in a single wave suggests that previous estimates that Iran has about 3,000 ballistic missiles stockpiled are probably accurate, and could even be on the low end.

“If this is just round one of an unknown number of rounds to come, you wouldn’t fire a significant fraction of what you have just in the first round,” Krzyzaniak said.

The firing of over 100 ballistic missiles in the space of a few minutes suggests Iran has at least 100 launchers, he added — a new data point for researchers.

“This shows that Iran has really faced no limitation in domestically producing missiles and launchers,” he said.

Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, the largest of any country in the Middle East, is almost entirely homegrown. In recent years Iran has demonstrated the ability to upgrade some systems, improving their range and precision.

The spokesman for Iran’s armed forces, Abolfazl Shekarchi, said the munitions used in the strikes against Israel only represented “a fraction of” the country’s military’s might, according to a statement published on state-run media.

The evolution of Iran’s

missile program

In the mid-1980s, Tehran acquired Scud missiles from Libya, Syria and North Korea and also began adapting the technology for their own missile variants. During the eight-year war with Iraq, Tehran countered primarily with Scud B missiles, which have a range of 185 miles.

Shahab-1 , 186 miles

1994 to 2001

Iran developed its own version of the Scud B, the Shahab-1, and from 1994 to 2001 fired it at bases in Iraq used by the opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq.

A new generation of missiles

After 16 years without firing new missiles, Iran showed its technological advances in 2017 striking on an ISIS command center with 6 Zolfaghars with a range of 430 miles. In early 2024, it launched strikes against Islamic State targets in northwest Syria using Kheibar Shekan missiles that travelled 745 miles from Iran to Syria.

Fahteh 110 , 181 miles

Fahteh 313 , 310 miles

Zolfaghar , 435 miles

Qiam 1 , 497 miles

Kheibar Shekan , 900 miles

IRAN ATTACKS

Against ISIS

6 ballistic missiles

Deir ez-Zor, Syria

Against Kurdish dissidents

7 ballistic missiles

Abu Kamal, Syria

Against Oil fields and facilities

18 drones + 7 cruise missiles

Abqaiq, S. Arabia

Khurais, S. Arabia

3 cruise missiles

Against U.S. forces

Erbil, Iraq

1 ballistic missile

Ain Al Asad, Iraq

15 to 22 ballistic missiles

Against “Israeli strategic centers”

At least 10 ballistic missiles

73 launches + at least 20 drones

and suicide drones

Sulaimaniyah,

Against IS targets

Harem, Syria

Israeli “spy headquarters”

Against Jaish ul Adl

Balochistan,

Missiles and drones

Against Israel

120 ballistic missiles,

170 drones,

Sources: United States Institute of Peace, CSIS, IDF

The evolution of Iran’s missile program

IRAN TARGETS

KNOWN MISSILE

Zolfaghars,

Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia

Khurais, Saudi Arabia

Zolfaghars and

potentially

Ballistic missiles and suicide drones

Sulaimaniyah, Iraq

Kheibar Shekan

Balochistan, Pakistan

Missiles and drones against Jaish ul Adl

170 drones, 30 cruise missiles

Before the attack on Israel, Iran’s most significant use of ballistic missiles was in 2020, after a U.S. drone attack killed the powerful Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.

Iran launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles at two U.S. military bases in Iraq, one in the country’s west and one in the north. While there were no fatalities, dozens of U.S. service members suffered traumatic brain injuries.

Iran also used ballistic missiles in strikes this year on Pakistan, Syria and Iraq.

Iranian ballistic

missile ranges

1,240 miles

Locations of Iranian

missile strikes

INDIAN OCEAN

But the attack on Israel suggests that many of Iran’s munitions are of low quality. Israel’s military said 99 percent of the missiles and drones launched by Iran were intercepted or failed to launch.

“We saw that accuracy and precision are a work in progress,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has written extensively about Iran’s missile program. “These weapons alone won’t win a war for Iran.”

Iranian drones made up the first wave of the attack. Cheap, effective and easy to produce, Iranian drones have been used in attacks across the Middle East for years. Iran has also supplied drones to Russia for its war in Ukraine , where they have been deadly.

During the attack on Israel, the slow-moving drones were probably deployed to occupy air defenses and allow more advanced munitions to get through. All the drones were shot down before entering Israeli airspace, the Israel Defense Forces said.

Ali Hamie, a Lebanese military analyst, said Iran had probably gleaned important lessons about Israel’s aerial defenses. Commentators on Iranian state television have made similar points.

“It could be a testing attack,” Hamie said, “and the Iranians got what they want. Making it past the air defenses is not only a symbolic victory, but real victory.”

One of the few missiles to make it through the interceptors hit an Israeli air base in the Negev desert. Images of the strike were run on loop on many state-run Iranian broadcasters in the days after the attack. Israel characterized the damage as minor.

General location of missile strikes

that reached the ground.

Beirut—

Populated areas

Haifa—

Tel Aviv—

—Amman

—Jerusalem

An emad missile

was found here.

The barrage of

missiles from Iran

included targeting

the Nevatim

General location of

missile strikes that

reached the ground.

Mediterranean

General location of missile

strikes that reached the

In addition to analyzing Israel’s air defenses, Tehran will probably also be studying the problems with its missile systems that reportedly led to failures at launch and in flight, according to Afshon Ostovar, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in California.

“Another attack could be more effective,” he said. But ultimately the kind of approach demonstrated in Saturday’s attack “is not really sustainable over a long-term conflict.”

Even if Iran changed the tempo of attacks and adjusted the munitions used, “they would still have to launch quite a lot of stuff for just a few [munitions] to get through,” he said.

Some Iranian officials have suggested they have held back their most dangerous weapons.

“We are prepared to use weapons we have never used before. We have plans for every scenario,” said Abolfazl Amoui, a parliamentary national security spokesman, in an interview with Lebanese broadcaster Mayadeen.

But analysts say it’s unlikely that any one type of munition could be a game changer. Rather, it’s more likely Iran would use the same kinds of munitions in a future attack, but in a different way: giving less warning, or launching the barrage in concert with allied militant groups in the region. The country’s proxy forces, from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen, played little role in Saturday’s assault.

As Israel mulls its response , Tehran has warned that a counterattack would come in “a matter of seconds.”

“Iran will not wait for another 12 days to respond,” Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani said Monday.

While the United States and Israel have celebrated the thwarting of Saturday’s attack, analysts are urging humility.

“The number of munitions it took to repel the attack was enormous, costly and could be difficult to replicate,” said Tom Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Israel may have gotten lucky and Iran may have gotten very unlucky.”

William Neff and Suzan Haidamous contributed to this report.

Israel-Gaza war

The Israel-Gaza war has gone on for six months, and tensions have spilled into the surrounding region .

The war: On Oct. 7, Hamas militants launched an unprecedented cross-border attack on Israel that included the taking of civilian hostages at a music festival . (See photos and videos of how the deadly assault unfolded ). Israel declared war on Hamas in response, launching a ground invasion that fueled the biggest displacement in the region since Israel’s creation in 1948 .

Gaza crisis: In the Gaza Strip, Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars , killing tens of thousands and plunging at least half of the population into “ famine-like conditions. ” For months, Israel has resisted pressure from Western allies to allow more humanitarian aid into the enclave .

U.S. involvement: Despite tensions between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some U.S. politicians , including President Biden, the United States supports Israel with weapons , funds aid packages , and has vetoed or abstained from the United Nations’ cease-fire resolutions.

History: The roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and mistrust are deep and complex, predating the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 . Read more on the history of the Gaza Strip .

• Israel strikes Iran, Israeli official says; White House declines to comment on attack April 19, 2024 Israel strikes Iran, Israeli official says; White House declines to comment on attack April 19, 2024
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