Opinions vary as to whether the Soviet Union has accepted the concept of deterrence in formulating its national security policy. In the author's opinion, the Soviet Union may have in the past rejected deterrence theory as developed in the United States, but it has not only accepted the classical meaning of deterrence as defined by George and Smoke, but also such a concept has until recently become the foundation of its military policy. This article attempts to trace the evolution of Soviet deterrence policy since World War II.
During the post-war Stalin period (1945-1953), Soviet deterrence policy was determined by two factors: belief in the inevitability of war and strategic inferiority. Stalin believed that the United States would start a war against the Soviet Union by launching a surprise nuclear attack, and that such a war could be prevented only by raising the cost that the US would have to pay in such an eventuality. Stalin thus took three specific measures to deter such war: he developed Soviet nuclear weapons, took an offensive strategy against Western Europe with the superior Soviet conventional forces, and strengthened strategic defense.
The second period was a transitional period, in which Stalin's military doctrine was attacked from two directions. First, the theory of the inevitability of war was rejected by the political leadership. The rejection of this Marxist cannon was first proposed by Malenkov, but later taken up by Khrushchev. The long process of decimation of the Marxist approach to war had thus begun. Nevertheless, Khrushchev attempted to salvage Marxist orthodoxy by insisting on the Soviet quest for military superiority as the guarantee of peace and on belief in victory in nuclear war. Secondly, Stalinist military doctrine was attacked by military theorists who began to assess positively the role of a surprise attack with the use of nuclear weapons at the beginning of war.
The crack created in Stalinist military doctrine in the transitional period led to the nuclear revolution in the third period (1959 to 1966/67). Nuclear weapons were recognized as the most decisive weapons in modern warfare, while the Strategic Rocket Force was created. During this period, however, Soviet deterrence policy moved in the opposite direction of that of the US, in a direction that emphasized deterrence through damage limitation by adopting a first-strike counterforce strategy.
The Soviet recognition of the possibility of limited war around 1966/67 had a profound impact on the evolution of Soviet strategy. For the first time there emerged a possibility of sparing the Soviet homeland from a US attack even in case of a world war. This led to the idea of keeping its strategic weapons as strategic reserves to be used as second-strike retaliatory weapons. Also, this contributed to lowering the importance of strategic defence, leading to the Soviet acceptance of ABM ban. These factors set the stage for arms control with the US. At the same time, however, Soviet NATO strategy began to move in a more offensive direction. This time, Soviet strategy envisaged destruction of NATO theater nuclear weapons by conventional means, while leaving its own theater nuclear weapons as reserves in case NATO decided to go nuclear.
In the last half of the 1970s, the Soviet leadership moved to accept mutual deterrence by removing the two pillars of Khrushchev's military doctrine: the quest for military superiority and the belief in victory in nuclear war. Yet, the notion that the correlation of forces was inexorably moving in favor of the Soviet Union led the Soviet Union to overemphasize the military factor in its foreign policy and to pursue an activist policy in the Third World, whereby contributing to the perception of a Soviet threat among its adversaries.
Brezhnev's policy invited a backlash from the West. Particularly, the US decision to deploy INF in Europe and to launch SDI threatened what the Soviets had gained in the pr
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