
Book Review: Limited Strategic (I.e. Nuclear) War Knorr/Read - daly
Knorr, Klaus; Read, Thornton (eds) &quot;Limited Strategic War&quot; Frederick A Praeger NY (1962)<p>Well, this is a chilling book. It contains 8 essays, including one by Schelling (The Strategy of Conflict, (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;elcenia.com&#x2F;iamapirate&#x2F;schelling.pdf) also a must-read book)<p>The essay by Burns (Chapter 6) &quot;The Problem of Alliances&quot; sets up an all-too-real China-Australia conflict (China gets most of its coal from Australia). This could make the South China Sea Nine-Dash line into a &quot;bit of a kerfluffle&quot; (to use British understatement).<p>This is a collection of essays on limited nuclear war. In chapter 5, p156 we see:<p>&quot;The effort to distinguish sharply between &quot;conventional&quot; and nuclear weapons is necessarily an effort to impede such reprisals, as in Khrushchev&#x27;s contention that nuclear war necessarily must be all-out nuclear war. If he can convince us that he really believes this, he effectively deters us from resorting to nuclear reprisals. We might be able to meet this in part by effectively establishing limited nuclear retaliation as official policy before a war occurs. This would have the additional advantage, were it politically feasible, that the strategy would not be initiated during the heat of a losing war, when the newness of the policy and the lack of defined limits might make the coordination of expectations more difficult than if the policy were enunciated in advance. Moreoever, failure to enunciate the policy in advance that any use of nuclear weapons will be opposed -- for example, by double retaliation -- thus making the coordination of expectations more difficult.&quot;<p>Note that &quot;establishing limited nuclear retaliation as official policy&quot; JUST occurred. The Pentagon published &quot;Nuclear Operations&quot; https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fas.org&#x2F;irp&#x2F;doddir&#x2F;dod&#x2F;jp3_72.pdf<p>So if you&#x27;re sitting around thinking that Nukes will never be used, you need to read this book.
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smacktoward
_> Note that "establishing limited nuclear retaliation as official policy"
JUST occurred._

Ehhh, limited nuclear retaliation was the keystone of the "flexible response"
doctrine that was in place for most of the Cold War (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_response](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_response)).

It was probably inevitable that it would be so. The core strategic problem the
West faced in that period was that the Soviets had substantially larger
conventional military forces, and Western public opinion wouldn't tolerate the
kinds of measures (truly universal conscription, 10%+ of GDP dedicated to
defense, etc.) that would have been needed to match them. So the only way out
of the dilemma was to apply deterrence by threatening to meet any Soviet
conventional attack with a small-scale nuclear response.

This is also why administrations of both parties consistently rejected the
demand of the anti-proliferation movement for a "no first use" pledge
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use))
-- they knew that, in any real shooting war, NATO would almost certainly
_have_ to bring out its nukes first, simply because it had no other realistic
way to stop the much larger Soviet armies from steamrolling across Europe.

~~~
daly
Watch "Inside the War Room"
[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3q8go9](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3q8go9)

