MARSHAL OGARKOV ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND FUTURE WAR

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• Document Release Date: April 19, 2012
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Marshal Ogarkov on Nuclear Weapons and Future War
Authoritative Soviet writings define military doctrine as
the state's official views on the nature of potential future
warfare, plans for employing the armed forces in the event of
war, and the tasks of preparing the nation and its military
establishment for such eventualities. Military doctrine has two
sides or aspects--the sociopolitical and the military-technical.
?
The sociopolitical side of doctrine, which is
from the state's sociopolitical and economic
(communism, capitalism, etc.), sets the basic
derived
system
framework
of national security policy, and is formulated by the
state's political leadership.
?
Within this framework, the military-technical
side of
doctrine focuses on the structuring of the armed forces,
their provisioning and training, and planning for the
conduct of war. It takes into account the conclusions
of military theory and practice, and is largely the
preserve of the professional military leadership.
Marshal Nikolay Ogarkov's writings have stipulated that the
sociopolitical side of doctrine is its main component and
determines the "defensive orientation" of Soviet military
doctrine in accordance with the "peace-loving" nature of Soviet
foreign policy. His own primary focus, however, has been on the
military-technical side of doctrine. In his 1982 Victory Day (9
May) article in Izvestiya, for example, he wrote:
The military-technical side of Soviet military doctrine
defines the specific ways of achieving the goals and tasks
set by the sociopolitical side . . . . It lays down that, in
the event of aggression, our armed forces will not simply
defend themselves passively and wage purely defensive
operations, but will resolutely smash the aggressor if he
dares to attack our country, going so far as to completely,
destroy him, as was the case in the Great Patriotic War.
Because Soviet writings are not normally labeled as
statements of doctrine, it is not always clear when they are
intended as authoritative expressions of officially sanctioned
positions. In Ogarkov's case, this difficulty is compounded by
the ring of advocacy in much of his writings. This paper will
examine the evolution of Ogarkov's public statements over the
past decade on four interrelated issues:
? the probable consequences of nuclear war;
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the prospects for keeping nuclear war limited;
? the stability of nuclear deterrence;
? the possible nature of a future world war.
Is Victory in Nuclear War Possible?
Ogarkov's article on "'Military Strategy" published in the
Soviet Military Encyclopedia, volume 7 (September 1979), was his
first extended public discussion of the possible nature of a
future world war. In keeping with long-established tenets of
Soviet military doctrine, he depicted such a war as a "decisive
clash between two opposing world socioeconomic systems" that
would be global in scope and would involve multimillion-strong
coalition armies. Ogarkov asserted that this war would be
conducted "without compromise" and would he prosecuted with "all
the military, economic, and spiritual strength" of the
belligerent states.
Ogarkov expressed belief that a world nuclear war would be
"relatively short," but he allowed that it might become prolonged
due to the enormous military and economic resources at the
disposal of the combatant coalitions. The Soviet Union and its
allies, he continued, would possess "definite advantages" in such
a war, deriving from the "just goals" they would be pursuing and
the allegedly "advanced" nature of the socialist system. These
advantages, he asserted, create "objective possibilities for
achieving victory," but they require "timely and comprehensive
preparation of the country and its armed forces" to be
realized. This conditional statement is the closest Ogarkov is
known to have come to claiming that "victory"--however defined--
is possible in a nuclear war. His more recent writings express
greater skepticism in this regard.
In the 1979 encyclopedia article, Ogarkov also first
indicated, albeit indirectly, his belief that a major East-West
conflict might not necessarily involve the use of nuclear
weapons. Soviet military strategy, he stated, "acknowledges that
a world war may he started and conducted for a certain period of
time with conventional weapons, alone." The expansion of these
conventional military operations, he continued, "may result in
its escalation into general nuclear war." [emphasis added]
Ogarkov asserted that Soviet strategy is "based on the
proposition" that the USSR will not use nuclear weapons first.
While portraying this as opposition "in principle" to the use of
"weapons of mass destruction," Ogarkov in effect signaled Soviet
preference for avoiding nuclear escalation in the event of
conventional conflict with the West. At the same time he warned
that "a nuclear missile attack" on the Soviet Union or its allies
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would trigger "a crushing retaliatory strike," a warning clearly
directed at deterring the United States and NATO from their
publicly declared policy of limited use of nuclear weapons should
conventional war in Europe go against the West.
Ogarkov, in the same essay, described US/NATO military
strategy as oriented primarily toward general nuclear'war, but
also as acknowledging the possibility of prolonged operations
employing only conventional weapons. He further noted the
provision in Western strategy for limited use of nuclear weapons
at the theater level. Ogarkov's failure here or elsewhere in
this article to reject the notion of limited nuclear war, or even
to warn of the risks of escalation, suggests that in 1979 the
Soviets saw at least some possibility of such limited use.
Ogarkov's subsequent writings portray a shift in his, and
presumably Soviet, views on this topic as well.
Sounding the Tocsin
Ogarkov's discussion of military strategy in the Soviet
Military Encyclopedia was intended primarily to educate
professional Soviet officers, hut it' was written with an
awareness that it would be closely read in the West. His next
major public statement, an article published in the Communist
Party's theoretical journal Kommunist in July 1981, was aimed
principally at a Soviet audience, warning of the increased
military threat posed by a new administration in Washington that
was openly dedicated to "rearming" America This article contains
fewer insights into Ogarkov's views on developments in military
affairs, and its depiction of a possible future war may be
distorted by its goal of sounding the tocsin.
Ogarkov's description of a world war carefully skirted the
issue of whether it would be nuclear or exclusively conventional
in nature but inescapably implied a general nuclear conflict. A
new world war, he wrote:
. . would be a decisive clash between two opposing social,
systems [that] would cover all continents of the world and
would be waged by coalition groupings of armed forces with
the most resolute objectives, using the entire arsenal of
means of armed struggle. Many hundreds of millions of
people would be caught up in its maelstrom. In terms of
ferocity and scale of potential destruction, it could be
compared with no wars in the past. The very nature of
modern weapons is such that, if they are put into use., the
future of all mankind would be at stake.
Despite this apocalyptic vision, Ogarkov urged a series of
measures to prepare the Soviet Union for protracted conflict,
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SECRET
including readiness to "shift the entire national economy onto a
war footing" and to mobilize trained and equipped reserves for
the armed forces. In this context Ogarkov made no direct
reference to the specific problems of overcoming the enormous
destructive consequences of thermonuclear strikes against urban
and industrial targets, nor to the threat of nuclear radiation
and fallout, and made only passing mention of civil defense.
Soviet planning has encompassed efforts to mobilize forces and
continue weapons production even in the midst of nuclear war.
Nonetheless, Ogarkov's advocacy of these measures in the
Kommunist article appears more plausibly linked to a prolonged
conventional war scenario. Once again, concepts of limited
nuclear war were ignored.
Limited Nuclear War Rejected
Ogarkov amplified his warning on the external threat facing
the USSR, and reiterated his call for preparedness in a booklet
issued by the Defense Ministry's publishing house in early 1982,
-Always Ready to Defend the Homeland. While more complete in its
presentation of Ogarkov's philosophy of unceasing technical
change in military affairs, the booklet offered little advance
from the previous year's Kommunist article in its description of
the nature of a possible future world war. Once again such a war
was defined as a "decisive" conflict between two antagonistic
social systems, global in scale and unprecedented in
destructiveness. Ogarkov placed still greater emphasis on
Western reliance on nuclear weapons, presumably reflecting what
had become the general Soviet perception of United States
strategy.
In keeping with this emphasis, Ogarkov for the first time in
print disparaged what he described as Pentagon conceptions of
limiting the use of nuclear weapons to the European theater,
asserting that "any sober-minded person" can see that "in
practice it is impossible to hold nuclear war within a certain
restricted framework." Citing party chief Brezhnev's November
1981 statement that once a nuclear war starts, "it would
inevitably and inescapably assume a worldwide character," Ogarkov
claimed that Western military and political leaders "are well
aware of 'this fact," and that their "true aim" is to use the
concept of limited nuclear war to "lower the vigilance of the
world's people" to the dangers of the arms race. As Ogarkov
depicted the notion of limited nuclear war in his 1982 booklet,
it was more a political ploy than a serious military option. He
did not discuss purely conventional war, or even the possibility
of a conventional phase at the beginning of a future world war.
Ogarkov's criticism of the concept of limited nuclear war
followed more than a decade of ambiguity in professional military
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writings on the likelihood of escalation should the nuclear
threshold be breached. Soviet military writings in the late
1960s had dropped earlier insistence that escalation to general
nuclear war would be inevitable and immediate, in favor of less
categorical statements that such escalation was "probable" or
"might" occur. The Soviets recognized, however, that NATO's
doctrine of "flexible response" to keep conflict limited would
benefit the United States more than the USSR if it were
successful in keeping a "l'imited" nuclear war confined to the
European conflict, and this contributed to their rejection of
this concept in the early 1980s.
Ambiguity on the Nature of Future World War
Ogarkov reintroduced a significant note of ambiguity on the
likely nature of a future world war in his 1983 Victory Day
article in Izvestiya. Without specifically citing the concept of
limited nuclear war, he warned of the dangers of escalation in a
manner suggesting that is what he had in mind. "It will not be
possible to confine military operations within some limited
framework, as Washington strategists advertise," he asserted,
because a major war "would inevitably embrace the entire
territories of the belligerents, making it hard to distinguish
front from rear." His extended discussion of the increased
importance and problems of the initial period of war was also
reminiscent of longstanding Soviet depictions of the impact of
nuclear weapons on strategy. Ogarkov pointed to the
"unprecedentedly intense, destructive nature" of operations at
the outbreak of war, and he noted that efforts to retaliate "in
the very first hours" could prove decisive.
Yet throughout his discussion of how such a war might be
fought, Ogarkov avoided direct references to the use of nuclear
weapons. In fact he implied elsewhere in this article that
nuclear weapons might no longer be the primary means of waging
war. These weapons "have been the decisive means of armed
struggle" since the 1950s, he acknowledged. But as nuclear
arsenals have grown and diversified, he wrote, quantitative
changes have led to a qualitative transformation: "what could be
achieved by nuclear weapons 20 to 30 years ago is now impossible"
because devastating retaliation is inevitable. The unstated
implication was that nuclear deterrence had become more stable,
to the point that it might even he effective within the context
of conventional war.
Ogarkov did not exclude the possibility of a major East-West
armed conflict. Pointing to the introduction of "highly
effective" new conventional weapons and research on "weapons
based on new physical principles," particularly those related to
space warfare, he argued that such developments "cannot fail to
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influence the nature of a probable war" as well as the forms and
methods of waging it. Ogarkov followed up with a stern warning
on the danger in military thought of inertia and the stubborn,
mechanical repetition of old ideas. This warning appeared to he
aimed not at traditionalist attachments to conventional warfare,
but rather was intended as an attack on perceptions that
possession of nuclear weapons precludes the need to develop
capabilities to wage a high-technology conventional war.
Disarming Strikes Impossible
Ogarkov's public depiction of the impact of the growth of
nuclear stockpiles on military affairs--and of its policy
implications--became more explicit four months later in a 23
September 1983 article published simultaneously in the official
government and military newspapers, a first for the Chief of the
General Staff. Conceding that two decades earlier the United
States "could still count to some extent" on the possibility of
executing a "disarming nuclear strike" against the USSR, he now
dismissed such notions as "pure illusion":
Given the contemporary development and spread of nuclear
arms in the world, the defender will always retain a
quantity of nuclear means capable of inflicting
"unacceptable damage," as former US Defense Secretary
McNamara used to characterize it, on the aggressor in a
retaliatory strike . . Hence under modern conditions,
only the suicidal can gamble on the initial nuclear
strike.
While this remark referred explicitly to the strategic
capabilities of the United States, implicitly the factors that
made a disarming nuclear strike impossible applied as well to the
Soviet Union.
Ogarkov accused the United States of spending "fabulous
sums" on strategic nuclear forces in an attempt to reacquire a
capability for a disarming nuclear strike. He further pointed to
Western efforts to create "qualitatively new conventional means
of warfare" and "weapons based on new physical principles." But
Ogarkov's comments elsewhere in the article suggest that he may
have seen no reason to duplicate all these programs, or
recognized that the Soviet Union could not afford to do so.
Given his invocation of something akin to the principle of
"mutual assured destruction," the implication was that the
existing Soviet strategic nuclear arsenal was now deemed
sufficient to deter any rational opponent.
Ogarkov uncharacteristically complained in this article
about the cost of weapons programs, stating that "it is beyond
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question" that the arms race "inhibits countries' social and
economic development," an accurate depiction of the problems
facing the USSR in resource allocations. More significantly, he
rejected the notion of matching the West system for system and
weapon for weapon, an even greater departure from his usual
approach. While warning that "we must make an appropriate
response to the growth of the nuclear threat" confronting the
Soviet Union--an allusion to impending NATO INF deployments--he
cautioned that this did not mean "the USSR intends to compete
with the United States in the military sphere or blindly imitate
it in a senseless arms race." The Soviet Union would not allow
the United States to achieve military superiority, he vowed. But
"guided by Soviet military doctrine" and the levels achieved in
science and technology, he continued, "we will follow OUR OWN
PATH on questions of strengthening the country's defense
capability." [Ogarkov's emphasis]
The Red Star Victory Day Interview
Ogarkov's views on nuclear weapons and future war were
advanced still more explicitly in a Victory Day interview
published in the Soviet Defense Ministry newspaper Red Star in
May 1984. The placement of this interview in the paper's center-
spread (podval) normally reserved for major statements on
doctrine and theory, and the frontpage photo in the same issue
singling out Ogarkov for special honor, seemed intended to
emphasize the authority and significance of his views. In this
interview Ogarkov identified three fundamental trends in the
development of military affairs since World War II: the
expansion and diversification of nuclear arsenals; improvements
in conventional weaponry; and the impending emergence of weapons
based on entirely new technologies.
He began by asserting that the expansion of nuclear arsenals
over several decades had led to a qualitative change in the
conditions and possibilities of their use. Both the Soviet and
American stockpiles of nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles were
now sufficient to destroy all the important targets on the
opponent's territory many times over. Further buildup of these
arsenals had already become "senseless," Ogarkov claimed, but
through the fault of the United States, the arms race was
continuing.
Ogarkov termed the result a paradox: while the destructive
capacity of the weapons held by the nuclear powers continues to
rise, the potential for an aggressor to carry out a "disarming
strike" is declining at an even sharper rate:
With the number and variety of nuclear missile weapons
available, it has already become impossible to destroy those
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of the enemy with a single blow. A crushing retaliatory
strike against the aggressor--a strike in which even the
limited number of warheads left to the defender would
inflict unacceptable damage--is inevitable under present
conditions.
Ogarkov went on to reject the concept of limited nuclear war
as a purely Western construct:
Calculations of strategists. across the ocean that are based
on the possibility of waging a so-called "limited" nuclear
war now have no foundation whatever. They are utopian: any
so-called limited use of nuclear weapons will inevitably
lead to the immediate employment of the entire nuclear
arsenals. Such is the terrible logic of war. Even more
groundless are their discussions about the possibility of an
"unanswered limited nuclear strike" against the primary
centers and control points of the enemy. Such discussions
are pure fantasy.
Ogarkov's statement indicated that the Soviets no longer
regarded, if they ever truly did, limited nuclear war as a viable
option. Geostrategic considerations, noted earlier in this
paper, doubtless played an important part in Soviet rejection of
the notion of a nuclear war limited to the European theater. But
Ogarkov's writings as well as contemporaneous statements by, for
example, Defense Minister Ustinov suggest that Soviet strategists
see command and control problems, as well as the lack of any
obvious firebreak once nuclear weapons are used, as
insurmountable obstacles.
Ogarkov also drew attention in this interview to two
additional developments in military affairs that constituted
fundamental changes since the war.
? Rapid developments in the power and accuracy of
conventional means of warfare are bringing such weapons
closer to the destructive potential of nuclear weapons,,
while increasing their range to encompass almost all of
an opponent's territory.
? The emergence of "weapons based on new physical
principles" should be expected "in the very near
future," causing radical changes in established notions
about warfare and even the nature of a state's military
strength.
The views Ogarkov advanced in his Red Star Victory Day
article accorded closely with positions he set forth in a
classified forum while serving as Chief of the General Staff. In
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that classified statement, Ogarkov:
? reiterated that the growth and diversification of nucler
arsenals now precluded either side from carrying out a
disarming first strike;
? asserted that the victim's inevitable retaliatory strike
not only would cause "unacceptable damage," but also
would deprive the aggressor of the ability to wage
military operations, thus foreclosing the possibility of
achieving victory in nuclear war;
? acknowledged that the concept of limited nuclear war
until recenly had had a place in Soviet military
thought, but asserted that it was now seen as an
illusion, since any use of nuclear weapons inevitably
will escalate to all-out nuclear war;
? emphasized the stability of nuclear deterrence, even to
the point of claiming that such deterrence could
continue to operate within the context of a major East-
West conventional conflict;
? concluded therefore that a prolonged world conventional
war is now possible, one that would be waged with high
technology conventional weapons which, through their
range, speed, accuracy and destructive power, approach
the capabilities of nuclear weapons.
A New Tone in Ogarkov's Writings
On 6 September 1984, four months after the publication of
his interview in Red Star, Ogarkov was removed from the post of
Chief of the General Staff. The circumstances of his removal--he
was given no honors and his new position was not announced--
indicated that he had been forced out rather than routinely
transferred. The reasons for this move against him have never
been given publicly, and the incident remains controversial.
Some two months after his demotion, however, issue 21 (November
1984) of the military-political journal Kommunist Vooruzhennykh
Sil (Communist of the Armed Forces) published an article
attributed to him that differed significantly in tone from his
previous writings. Much of it consisted of a boilerplate history
of the Soviet-German war; another substantial section contained a
standard diatribe against "imperialism." The final third was an
extended discussion of "sociopolitical and military-technical"
factors said to contribute to the preservation of peace and to
constitute "real objective preconditions for the elimination of
war from the life of society."
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This discussion of social and political forces was a radical
departure in tone and substance from Ogarkov's public statements
over the previous decade. In keeping with his past writings, it
began by asserting that Soviet economic and military strength,
together with the armed forces' high combat readiness, constitute
"the main restraining factor and insurmountable harrier"
deterring aggression. He now went on, however, to invoke a
melange of nonmilitary international political forces--Communist
parties abroad, the nonaligned countries, the "national
liberation" and "antiwar" movements--as contributing to peace by
"considerably restricting the freedom of action" of those who
might unleash war. While civilian Soviet commentators have often
cited these political forces, they are largely ignored by Defense
Ministry spokesmen. The assessment that sociopolitical factors
are helping to neutralize the threat of war also departed
markedly from Ogarkov's typical alarmism, and even contrasted
with the general tendency of Soviet media since 1980-81 to
emphasize an increasing danger of war.
Only in its discussion of what were termed "purely military
preconditions restricting imperialism's opportunity to unleash
new wars," did the November article strike a distinctly
Ogarkovian tone. Here he reiterated the argument advanced in the
May interview that the increased number and variety of nuclear
weapons had paradoxically increased the sides' destructive
potentials, while decreasing the possibility of carrying out a
disarming first strike:
An immediate crushing response using even the limited
quantity of nuclear weapons remaining to the defending
side--a response making it impossible for the aggressor
thereafter not only to wage war but even to conduct any
serious operations--becomes inevitable under present
conditions.
As in his Victory Day interview, Ogarkov dismissed the
concept of limited nuclear war, once more terming it "the
terrible logic of war" that any limited use of nuclear weapons
would inevitably lead to the immediate employment of the entire
nuclear arsenals of the belligerents. Once again he denounced
the levels reached in stockpiling nuclear weapons, asserting that
"from the military viewpoint these are already truly absurd," and
that, given the existing state of approximate parity, "further
stockpiling becomes simply pointless" and even dangerous:
.Excessively large stockpiles of nuclear weapons not
only do not guarantee security and impunity for any
aggressive state but rather the reverse--they increase
the danger that it will be subjected to crushing
retribution from the victim of aggression.
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Ogarkov's discussion of the impact technical change has on
contemporary military affairs meanwhile omitted two key points
that he had featured in his May 1984 Red Star interview:
advanced conventional weapons and weapons based on new
technologies. Instead there was an atypical questioning of the
continued expediency of war as a means of achieving political
goals:
The grim reality of our day is that, in contrast to the
past, the very relationship between such highly
important concepts as "war" and "policy" has changed.
Only when you definitely have lost your sense of reason
can you try to find arguments or to define goals that
would justify unleashing a world nuclear war.
Quoting from a 1981 speech by party leader Chernenko, Ogarkov
concluded that "it is criminal to view thermonuclear war as a
rational, almost 'legitimate' continuation of policy."
While Chernenko's statement had been consistent with
official public portrayals of Soviet policy, a central tenet of
Soviet military-political orthodoxy--derived from both Clausewitz
and Lenin--is that any. war, even nuclear war, is a continuation
of policy in the sense that it is the product of the policies
pursued by the combatant sides. That proposition had been
debated in the Soviet press several times in the past two
decades, and its continued validity was reaffirmed in the 1984
edition of the authoritative text Marxist-Leninist Teachings on
War and the Army. Ogarkov is the only senior Soviet military
leader known to have repeated Chernenko's caricature of this
dogma.
The major discontinuities between Ogarkov's writings as
Chief of the Soviet General Staff and his first published
statement after having left that post in the fall of 1984 have
the unmistakable ring of positions imposed upon him by higher
authorities. These changes did not involve any significant
repudiation of views on the nature of war that he had expressed
earlier. They did, however, entail substantial moderation in his
heretofore alarmist tone; an'entirely new emphasis on the
strength of the international political as well as economic and
military forces contributing to the preservation of peace; and an
almost total neglect of those areas of future Soviet force
structuring to which Ogarkov had previously accorded priority.
The net effect was to undercut nearly all the arguments Ogarkov
had been making in support of devoting an increasing share of
Soviet resources to defense.
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History Teaches Vigilance
Ogarkov subsequently was allowed another opportunity to set
forth his views on technical change and developments in military
affairs in a 95-page booklet entitled History Teaches Vigilance,
issued by the Defense Ministry's publishing house in the spring
of 1985. The new monograph had much in common with his 1982
pamphlet, but it was no mere update. The laws of dialectical
materialism were given still more prominence, while the
indictment of imperialism was as harsh as ever.
Nonetheless, the compromises that had been imposed on
Ogarkov's public expressions were readily apparent. Advances in
,conventional weapons that brought them closer in their effects to
nuclear weapons and "weapons of mass destruction based on new
physical principles" were mentioned, but only in the context of
several dangerous measures the West was taking in pursuing the
arms race. There was no clarion call for the USSR to follow suit
or stay abreast in what Ogarkov heretofore had treated as
essentially an autonomous evolution in which scientific and
technical advances were naturally applied to military hardware.
Concurrently, although Ogarkov's 1982 booklet had devoted nearly
a chapter to measures to mobilize Soviet society, harden the
economy, and improve the preinduction preparation of Soviet
youth, his 1985 booklet had only a single sentence noting that
these issues are "closely linked" to the military-technical
aspect of doctrine.
The 1985 booklet also appeared to mark a return to ambiguity
in defining the nature of a possible future world war. While
stating that "determining the nature of potential armed conflict"
is "one of the fundamental provisions" of the military-technical
aspect of doctrine, Ogarkov avoided direct discussion of the
issue of the use of nuclear versus conventional weapons. He
employed phraseology traditionally associated with Soviet
depictions of nuclear war:
A modern world war . . . will acquire unprecendented
spatial scope, encompass entire continents and ocean
expanses and unavoidably drag into its orbit the
majority of the countries of the world. It will have
an unprecedentedly destructive nature. Military
operations will be carried out simultaneously in vast
zones, will be distinguished by unprecedented ferocity,
will be highly maneuverable and dynamic, and will
continue until total victory over the enemy.
But Ogarkov in fact had expressly denied that military operations
could he conducted in the wake of a major nuclear exchange.
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Logically, then, the only "wageable" and "winnable" world war
should be a conventional world war.
Meanwhile the booklet repeated with very few changes the
discussion of the "sociopolitical and military-technical" factors
now deemed capable of preventing war that had been introduced to
Ogarkov's writings for the first time in the November 1984
article in Kommunist Vooruzhennykh Sil. The only potentially
significant change in the handling of the "purely military"
aspects of nuclear deterrence was an expansion of the warning
against large nuclear arsenals to specify that their existence
"increases the possiblity of even an accidental, unsanctioned, or
provocative nuclear launch or strike from imperialist 'hawks,"'
thereby bringing down a crushing retaliatory strike on the
initiator. At the same time, the possibility that sociopolitical
and military factors could preclude world war was extended to
encompass potential elimination of local wars as well.
Where Ogarkov Stands
Despite the substantial moderation in his public posture
since leaving the post of chief of the General Staff, Ogarkov's
depiction of the impact of the growth of nuclear weapon
stockpiles on military affairs, and of the potential nature of a
future world war appears to have remained unchanged from what he
had set forth while occupying that position:
Nuclear arsenals have grown and diversified to the point
that a disarming first strike is now impossible, and a
retaliatory strike causing "unacceptable damage" is
therefore inevitable. Initiation of nuclear war can
serve no conceivable political goal, and as a result has
become irrational.
Limited nuclear war, once thought possible, is now an
illusion. No major nuclear power would allow a nuclear
strike against itself or its primary allies to go
unanswered in kind, while any theater use of nuclear
weapons would escalate--perhaps immediately--to the full
employment of the combatants' entire nuclear arsenals.
? Given the irrationality of all-out nuclear war, and the
impossibility of keeping it limited, there is a
substantial possibility that an East-West conflict
initiated with conventional weapons would remain at the
conventional level. The nuclear arsenals possessed by
each side could continue to deter one another's use,
even to the point of one side accepting a measure of
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defeat rather than resorting to a suicidal nuclear
exchange.
? While there remains a significant risk that a future
world war would involve the massive exchange of nuclear
strikes, there is a growing possibility that a future
East-West conflict would he waged with conventional
weapons alone. Taking into account the increased
destructiveness,,accuracy, and range of advanced
conventional weapons, however, a future world war,
whether nuclear or conventional, would be global in
scope, would involve multimillion-man coalition armies,
and would lead to destruction unprecedented in scale.
Ogarkov's treatment of the possibility of a conventional
world war in a sense marks the culmination of a trend in Soviet
professional military writings dating back almost two decades.
In the early 1960s, Soviet writings on the nature of future war
had postulated that it would inevitably involve an inter-
continental nuclear exchange that would probably occur at the
very outbreak of the war. By the late 1960s, however, the
Soviets perceived that the shift in the correlation of forces
embodied in achieving strategic parity promised some hope of
averting nuclear strikes on the USSR in the event of war. The
third (1968) edition of Sokolovskiy's Military Strategy, for
example, dropped the references to the inevitability of
intercontinental nuclear strikes contained in the first two
editions (1962, 1963), and included reasoned discussions rather
than dismissive attacks on such Western concepts as flexible
response and limited nuclear war. The notion of a substantial
conventional phase was added, and subsequent Soviet writings
noted that the armed forces had to be prepared to wage both
nuclear and conventional war.
This shift in Soviet thinking is acknowledged in the book
M. V. Frunze--Military Theoretician written by Colonel General M.
A. Gareyev, a deputy chief of the General Staff, and issued by
the Defense Ministry publishing house in 1985. Gareyev asserts,
that in the two decades since the publication of Military
Strategy, "not all of the provisions of this book have been
confirmed." Gareyev casts doubt, in particular, on the 1960s
beliefs that world war would inevitably he nuclear and that
conventional warfare would be limited to a "brief episode at the
start of a war."
Much like Ogarkov, Gareyev notes the catastrophic
consequences of massive employment of nuclear weapons and points
to the emphasis in NATO on modernizing conventional weapons.
Gareyev indicates agreement with what he terms Western
assumptions that "there will be a greater opportunity for a
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comparatively long war employing conventional weapons,"
especially new types of advanced technology systems. He reduces
the likelihood of nuclear war to merely "not excluded."
In his 1984 Red Star interview, Ogarkov had drawn the
conclusion that the Soviets needed to devote considerably more
effort to modernizing their conventional warfighting
capabilities. Additional resources would have to he devoted
especially to developing and producing advanced conventional
weapons and "weapons based on new physical principles." In view
of his removal as Chief of the General Staff and the moderation
in the tone of his later public writings, it is not certain to
what extent current Soviet defense programs reflect the weapons
acquisition priorities he had championed prior to his demotion.
The Gareyev book and other military writings suggest, however,
that Soviet planners are continuing to devote substantial
attention to the military requirements posed by the possiblity of
prolonged conventional conflict.
One implication of Ogarkov's subsequent writings is that the
Soviet leadership, while continuing to give priority to averting
nuclear war, would prefer to generalize the principles of nuclear
deterrence Ogarkov described to cover conventional East-West
conflict as well. Another is that the political leadership
believes in addition that there are political forces in the
international community able to reinforce and perhaps extend the
impact of purely military factors in preventing war, whether
nuclear or conventional. In any case, Soviet leaders probably
would prefer to evade the economic consequences of Ogarkov's
corollary argument for an expensive buildup of conventional
military capabilities. Although clearly sharing the leadership's
desire to avert nuclear war, Ogarkov's writings over the past
decade cast doubt on his belief in these extensions of his
views. Nonetheless, he has been willing to pay public fealty to
these notions as the price for continuing to air his opinions on
the role of technological change in the evolution of military
affairs.
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