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From International Socialism, No. 67, March 1974, pp. 19–22.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
THE ARMS RACE has been seen as something fairly remote by most people in recent years. It has seemed that the days were long since past when the two super-powers were likely, at the drop of a switch to set humanity on a course leading to nuclear destruction.
Yet in the last few weeks, the decision of the American government to push for a record peacetime arms budget and the announcement that the Russians have tested giant new SS-19 missiles have shown that the arms race is far from dead Indeed, recent developments mean that the world is on the road to a new stage in arms escalation, more dangerous and more terrifying than any we have yet seen.
THERE WAS a decline in the likelihood of nuclear war in the 1960s. But not because there was any reduction in the means of destruction at the disposal of the great powers. The missile stocks of both the Russians and the Americans grew continually during that period, and the Chinese began to enter the field, in a limited way, for the first time. But there was a ‘balance of terror’ which made it unlikely that either of the two major powers would deliberately start a war. Each knew that its rival had sufficient arms to retaliate in kind if attacked. This ‘second strike capacity’ (as the experts called it) ensured that any war would devastate both powers equally whoever attacked first and reduced the temptation for either of them to do so.
In 1970, however, a new factor entered the situation. The US government decided to deploy Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABMs) – weapons meant to explode enemy missiles before they reached their target. This decision, ‘threatened to undermine the basis of East-West military stability – the balance of terror, or the power to assure each other’s destruction in any circumstances, regardless of who struck first.’ [1] If ABM systems worked, the power that started a war would be in a position to win it by preventing enemy missiles launched in retaliation from reaching their destination. It would be able to destroy the enemy without being destroyed itself. But only if it struck first. ‘Second strike capacity’ would be superseded by ‘first strike capacity’.
Once the decision to go ahead with ABM construction had been taken, the pressure on both powers to increase the scale of their missile armoury increased sharply. As Mike Kidron pointed out at the time,
‘... since the cheapest and most effective way to neutralise a missile defence is to overwhelm it, any ABM deployment, however feeble and rudimentary, presents an irresistible argument to the other side to multiply hugely its strike force.
‘It can do so by increasing its missile armoury, as the Russians have been doing since 1966. More significantly it can do it – as both sides are – by arming its missiles with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) and other devices to amplify their effect.’ [2]
A single MIRVed missile carries several warheads, which separate and head for different targets as it approaches the destination.
The new arms systems had a logic of their own. Each power felt compelled to develop them for fear that the other would first. The agreement that came out of the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT 1) two years ago did little to alter the picture. It merely provided an upper limit to the number of ABMs actually deployed. Development and testing of more sophisticated ABMs, and of more accurate and expensive missiles, has continued almost unchecked. And in any case, the agreement only lasts until 1977.
The construction of ABM systems and the proliferation of MIRVs has made obsolete the old ‘second strike’ strategy. The US government has found the idea of a ‘first strike’ strategy, of developing the arms needed for a pre-emptive attack which would prevent Russian retaliation, increasingly attractive.
But the new strategy has two draw backs. Firstly, if it is feasible for the US it is feasible for the Russians too. And, in the second place, it is very expensive.
WITHDRAWAL from Vietnam should have enabled the US to cut its defence budget without in any way reducing its ability to fight a nuclear war. But the defence budget is actually increasing. Next year sees America’s biggest military expenditure since the closing year of World War II. It is increasing by 7½ per cent on the 1974 figure to a record 85.8 billion dollars-equivalent to two-thirds of Britain’s total national income. What is more, the proportion of the spending which is on strategic arms (long range bombers, missiles, nuclear submarines, and so on) has gone up. The running down of the war in South-East Asia has clearly been used as an opportunity to increase significantly America’s offensive capacity. [3]
All this has taken place behind a smokescreen of White House and Pentagon verbiage. The US secretary of defence, Schlesinger, told a news conference at the end of last year that ‘sufficiency’ in nuclear weapons was no longer enough, for the US now required ‘true equality’. [4] His explanation was that
‘... in order to maintain equality of strategic force we need not only assured second strike capability, but we will need to have symmetry with regard to the ability to have selected strikes against military targets and we would not desire to be in a position of inferiority with regard to the ability to inflict major damage on the military components of another state relative to the damage that other states might be able to inflict on the military components that we possess.’ [5]
In other words, the US already has a second strike capability, but it wants something more; and that unspecified something can only be a first strike capability. The reference to ‘symmetry’ is an interesting example of words being used to mean ‘just what I choose it to mean’ (as Humpty Dumpty put it). For, American missiles are far more accurate than Russian ones and, what is more, considerably more numerous. The Russians compensate for the inaccuracy of their missiles by equipping each one with a far larger warhead, but even so, an American 50 kiloton warhead right on target does far more damage than a Russian warhead, 20 times larger, that misses by a couple of miles. Symmetry, to the US government, means having a larger number of more accurate missiles carrying a total payload equivalent to the Russians’ total nuclear payload.
Schlesinger, then, is raising the US’s stakes. But he realises that trying for a first strike capability is a desperate gamble. Even with a much higher level of military expenditure than that currently planned, the US might not be successful. Neither side has as yet found a guaranteed method for destroying the other’s missile submarines, and the ABMs are not likely to prove completely effective against MIRVed missiles. And so the US government is spending large amounts in an attempt to develop an anti-submarine system: the US Navy alone is spending 2.5 billion dollars a year on anti-submarine research. [6]
At the same time it is hedging its bets by spending an even larger amount on its own second-strike forces. The old fleet of submarines carrying Polaris missiles are being converted to carry the new ‘Poseidon’ missiles. Poseidon is a MIRV missile; each one carries ten separate warheads, and each submarine carries sixteen missiles. Part of the 1975 increase in defence spending is to convert a further four Polaris submarines to bring the total number of Poseidon submarines up to twenty-six. So by 1975 the US navy will have a submarine fleet capable of launching just under 4,500 nuclear warheads. Of course, Poseidon warheads are much smaller than Polaris ones, only 50 kilotons as against one megaton. But 50 kilotons is more than double the size of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even Poseidon is recognized as only a stopgap measure, as it is to be superseded by the Trident submarine now under construction. Each Trident submarine is to carry 24 missiles; these missiles are each to have 17 independently targeted warheads (making more than double the number of warheads that the Poseidon can carry). The drawback is once again the cost, for each Trident is now estimated at 1.3 billion dollars, without allowing for any cost overruns. This makes it the most expensive weapon ever developed.
But the bulk of US strategic expenditure continues to be on land and air-based weapons: missiles in ‘hard’ (defended and underground) silos, bombers, and missile-carrying aircraft. In 1975 increased expenditure is planned for new types of weapons, including the so-called MaRV (Manoeuvrable Re-entry Vehicle) which could be re-targeted while in flight and would be an important part of any first-strike arsenal. A further 500 million dollars is also set aside for the massive B-1 bomber currently under development. This is planned as the centrepiece of the US Air Force for the 1980s; each is to carry four one-megaton bombs and twenty short-range air-to-surface missiles (SRAMs) equipped with 200 kiloton nuclear warheads. The USAF hopes to have 250 B-1s by the end of the decade.
THE IMPACT of these new arms programmes internationally is easy to predict. They will decrease the chances of successful détente between East and West and they will increase global insecurity by making nuclear war (perhaps on a limited scale) more likely. International relations at a superpower level will become more strained, and this is sure to permeate down to the relations of smaller states.
Arms expenditure by the US and the USSR is likely to increase even more. The military planners on each side will argue, with some truth, that to threaten the other side with the beginnings of a first strike capability, without finishing the job, is worse than having no first strike capability at all.
The current hard core of strategic spending will come to be regarded at best as an irreducible minimum, at worst-woefully inadequate.
The high stakes of direct conflict between East and West will lead to increased indirect conflict. The South Asia region, for example, may well become the Middle East of the seventies, as Russia arms India, the US arms Pakistan and Iran, and both increasingly make their presence felt in the Indian Ocean. Direct conflicts cannot be ruled out either. As Russia steps up its naval patrols the US is expanding its facilities too (in 1975 the US is to spend 23 million dollars expanding its naval base on the British island of Diego Garcia).
The increased American and Russian tensions will force up arms expenditure elsewhere. The consequences will be particularly burdensome for the weak economies of third world countries. Instead of being able to cut their arms spending so as to aid economic development; the trend is going to be quite the other way. Their arms competitions with each other and their participation in the military rivalry of the great powers is going to make it still more difficult for them to break out of backwardness.
THE COST of these programmes on the US economy is also likely to be high. It is true that in the past arms spending was the major factor in preventing post war capitalism from experiencing the old slump boom patterns in all its intensity. But today the economically beneficial effects of arms spending are on the decline.
In the first place, arms spending is inflationary. The wages paid in the arms industry inject into the economy a large amount of purchasing power without creating any consumer goods for which it can be exchanged, and this is irrepressibly inflationary.
In the past this was compensated for by the ‘spin-off from arms production, advances in technology that could be applied to civilian industry, reducing its costs and increasing its productivity. So military spending partly paid for itself through its side effects. But as military technology has become more and more specialised, its usefulness to the rest of industry has declined. The computers that IBM develops for programming and reprogramming missile guidance systems (a job that once took 36 hours and now only takes 20 minutes) have remarkably few uses for civilian industry. The result is that military spending is much more inflationary than that of the past.
At the same time, the shift in military expenditure has been away from man-power and towards high technology hardware, employing a smaller, more highly skilled labour force. So arms spending creates fewer and fewer vacancies for unskilled labour, and increases the pressure on certain highly skilled and already scarce occupations. Certain sections of skilled workers are able to bid up their wage rates (making the military projects still more expensive), and the unions to which they belong succeed in ‘spilling over’ the wage increases into other skilled and semi-skilled occupations. This will make it all the more difficult for US capitalists to fight inflation by attacking workers’ living standards, since it will stiffen the unions’ resistance to the erosion of their wages. But it will do nothing to alleviate overall unemployment (expected to rise one and a half million to a six million total this year). Above all it will leave untouched regional and ethnic pockets of unemployment. Most skilled workers are white and most black workers are unskilled, while the arms industries are concentrated in certain states (most importantly Florida, California and Massachusetts). Unemployment is hard to alleviate in an economy that is devoted more and more to the production of waste.
So the US arms expenditure is adding another vital twist to the inflationary spiral and allowing unemployment to climb while making more difficult the successful holding down of real wages. This can only increase the internal tensions within US society.
The ramifications of this increased instability cannot be confined to the US itself. The US arms economy has been the main source of economic instability for the rest of the western world in the last 25 years: export led growth has only been possible for countries like Japan because the US has been able to absorb many of their exports. Now the other western states are bound to suffer from the less beneficial side effects of the arms economy. International trade and the multi-national companies will ensure that increased inflation in the US is matched by increased inflation elsewhere. And the US government will do its utmost to make others pay the cost of dealing with its problems – attempting to lever them to increase their own arms spending (witness the increase in the British arms budget this year), trying to impose on them its solutions to problems facing all the western economies (as with the ‘energy crisis’).
Within the Russian bloc, the effects of escalating arms spending are likely to be just as important. The failure of the harvest last year showed how catastrophic can be the long term effects of diverting resources from agricultural and consumer goods investment to heavy industry and arms. For a Russian ruling class trying desperately to find the resources to buy off some at least of the discontent within the working class, the economic impact of the new arms race can be devastating.
Yet neither the American nor the Russian ruling class dare drop out of the race. The first to do would risk the other forging ahead until it was able to impose its terms over issues of vital political and economic importance.
What is more, within each ruling class are very powerful interests which rejoice in the new arms race. In the US there are the major US corporations involved in arms production and the huge chunk of the state bureaucracy based upon the Pentagon; in Russia there are the bureaucrats who run the military machine, heavy industry and arms production. Those who preside over the rival ‘military-industrial complexes’ gain in power and prestige compared to-the rest of their respective ruling class every time there is increased arms expenditure. Each has an interest in heightening the scale of international rivalry by inflating the scale of armaments of the rival power, so pressuring the rest of its own ruling class to release more resources for arms.
As the ruling classes of East and West are driven to engage on ever more massive arms programmes, the level of international tension is bound to rise and with it the danger of a nuclear holocaust. But class antagonisms within each society will also become more intense. The key question is whether they explode before the bombs do. The next few years are going to see the alternatives of socialism or barbarism posed as never before.
1. Mike Kidron, Western Capitalism Since the War, Penguin books, London 1970, pp. l50–152.
2. ibid.
3. As Kidron predicted in ibid.,
‘For the growing queue of military contractors, armed forces strategists and Congressional lobbyists, impatient for new weapons systems, Vietnam was a distraction from the essential American interest ... As early as January 1969 the Department of Defence was blocking escalation in the field by shifting 3.5 billion dollars of its budgetary requests from Vietnam to expenditure on the new weapons.’
4. Reported by David Fairhall in The Guardian, Next Lap in the Arms Race, 27 December 1973.
5. ibid.
6. Time, 11 February 1974.
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