Beyond Atomic Holocaust the Reds See Victory

WHAT THE RUSSIAN GENERALS THINK

THE West's military leaders have long understood that their Soviet counterparts were thinking along lines quite different from postwar Western military thought. This difference was condescendingly put down to a time lag on the part of the Russians; they were believed frozen in the experience of World War II, unable to face the implications of the new nuclear weapons. This week, in a coldly penetrating study* of modern Soviet military doctrine, Russian-speaking Raymond L. Garthoff, 29, Defense Department analyst and specialist on Soviet military writings, enters a strong dissent. Since the death of Stalin in 1953, says he, Soviet military doctrine "has made a quantum jump from the bayonet age to the thermonuclear age."

This jump has not brought the U.S.S.R.'s generals closer to current U.S. military doctrine. It has in fact taken them in an independent direction. Garthoff, whose book is authoritatively studded with hundreds of references to Soviet military periodicals, backed up by personal conversations with Soviet officers, sums up the "Soviet image of future war" thus:

"The initial strategic strikes by modern jet bombers, intercontinental and intermediate range rockets and missiles, and submarine-launched missiles, will wreak devastation upon both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and upon their chief allies. But does mutual devastation spell mutual defeat? The Soviets answer: no. The priority strikes will destroy the enemy's strategic air and missile bases insofar as these are known. Major cities and industrial centers, on a lower level of priority, will also suffer heavily. Radiological and bacteriological weapons may be used. But this enormous mutual destruction will probably consume the major portion of the respective long-range air and missile forces. Thus the efforts of these forces would in a sense cancel each other out.

"This is a crucial phase of the war, one which a weak or ill-prepared power could lose. But it is not the decisive stage of a war between well-prepared major powers; it does not determine the final outcome of the war between them.

" 'Tactical' air power and rockets, those forces designated to attack the enemy's military forces up to roughly a 1,000-mile range from the starting borders, would similarly engage in mutual nuclear strikes. But here the Soviets do not see a mutual stalemate. The heart of such a capability is the ground forces--trained for nuclear war, armed with nuclear weapons--and here the war would begin with a serious imbalance: a preponderance of Soviet forces.

"Moreover, in the Soviet view, their mobilization and dispatch of ground forces would be much less critically disrupted than would ours by the nuclear exchange, due to their larger force-in-being and to its deployment. The surviving Soviet land armies are thus expected to be capable of defeating the proportionately weakened enemy forces on the ground.

"Thus the Soviets would strive to achieve at least a favorable 'draw' by occupying the Eurasian continent, and exploiting such resources as might still be available to restore some of the Soviet Union's losses. The shrunken and devastated Free World would be entirely relegated to the Western Hemisphere."

The First Hurdle. Predominant U.S. military imagination tends to stop at the point of reciprocal nuclear holocaust. Why does the Soviet imagination leap this hurdle? Through continued ignorance of the effects of thermonuclear weapons? This can hardly be the explanation, now that the Russians have had years in which to test and ponder their own weapons. Garthoff suggests two other explanations:

1) "The massive military loss undergone by the Soviet Union in 1941, in a relatively brief span of time, was more comparable to the loss from a nuclear assault than anything else experienced by a great power in modern times. The Soviets lost from their control 40% of their population, 40% of their grain production, approximately 60% of their coal, iron, steel and aluminum output, and 95% or more of certain key military industries, such as ball-bearing production. They lost 4,000,000 soldiers, dead, wounded or prisoners, and over two-thirds of their tanks and aircraft." A nuclear holocaust might be worse, but Russia has survived a military disaster of the same order of magnitude--survived and won.

2) The U.S. military purpose is to "deter and defeat attack." Russian military objectives are shaped by a fundamental objective: "To advance the power of the Soviet Union in whatever ways are most expedient so long as the survival of the Soviet power itself is not endangered."

The Soviets do not see how they could occupy and/or control the U.S. But they do see how their conquest of all Eurasia would leave them at the end of the war in a position vis-`a-vis the U.S. better than their present position. It is this vision not Nikita Khrushchev's present position. It is this vision that gives confidence to Russian spokesmen and drive to Russian diplomacy.

The Basis of Flexibility. Because the Russians see how they might fight a big war, it does not follow that a big war is what they want. There are other kinds of wars in which they might gain, with less risk to Soviet survival. They have not allowed nuclear weapons to overshadow conventional arms, and have thus retained their enormous superiority to fight non-nuclear wars, big or little. They say publicly that limited nuclear wars are impossible, but Garthoff believes they have, in theory and in practice, the capability of fighting these too.

The flexibility of the Russian theory may be illustrated by this difference: many Western military men believe that nuclear weapons in the hands of the infantry reduce the need for manpower because they increase firepower per man. This belief leads toward nuclear-armed ground forces so small that they could fight only nuclear war. But Russian generals believe that nuclear infantry weapons increase the manpower requirements because more soldiers will be needed to replace the heavier casualties. This leaves the Russians with large numbers of soldiers who can fight either nuclear or non-nuclear war.

Another difference is in civil defense. The U.S. has.not even got around to thinking seriously about a nuclear shelter program. Garthoff is convinced that the Russians are taking the far more radical step of decentralizing their industry to minimize damage of nuclear attack. He thinks Khrushchev's program of industrial management decentralization is accompanied by physical decentralization for military purposes.

Soviet military theory may turn out to be wrong. But on Garthoff's showing, it is not backward. The Soviet generals have examined carefully the new weapons in the light of the political objectives set by their leaders. They think they know how to survive and how to expand. This gives confidence to their diplomats--who are today expanding Soviet power with less cost and less risk than actual war.

*Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age; Praeger; $4.50.

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