Nikolai Luzin closes his introduction with a dateline: "The Author May 1979". Everything that matters about this book is contained in the distance between that line and the 1981 on its spine.
In May 1979 the SALT II treaty had not yet been signed. The NATO foreign and defence ministers had not yet met at Brussels. There were no Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan was a candidate. By the time an English reader could buy Nuclear Strategy and Common Sense in a Progress edition, all four of those things had changed, and the world the book describes — a world in which détente is real, reversible only by American bad faith, and defended by a Soviet Union with nothing to answer for — had ceased to exist.
Some of that gap was closed before printing. The book is not a pure 1979 text: a thin later layer was worked into it, and it can be dated almost to the month. SALT II and the Vienna summit of June 1979 are treated at length, clause by clause. The NATO decision of December 1979 is there, in a section headed "Missiles Against Detente". The Brezhnev–Schmidt meeting of "the summer of 1980" is there. Presidential Directive 59, which Carter signed in August 1980, is there, and Luzin notes that it came "on the eve of the 1980 presidential elections". That is where the updating stops. Reagan's name does not appear in this book at all — not once, in eighty-two thousand words about American nuclear strategy, published in the year he took office. Neither does the 26th Congress of the CPSU, which met in February and March 1981 and which no Soviet foreign-policy book published after it would have failed to quote. The revision layer closes somewhere around September or October 1980: after PD-59, before the American election result, well before the Congress.
So this is a book of the last months of détente, written by a man who did not yet know détente was over, lightly patched by someone who suspected it might be, and shipped to English readers in the year of Reagan's inauguration, Solidarity, and the first great Euromissile demonstrations. Progress did this habitually. The companion volume in this series, Radomir Bogdanov's The US War Machine and Politics, is a 1983 monograph in a 1986 jacket. Luzin's is a 1979 monograph in a 1981 jacket. The export operation was always about eighteen months behind the world it was arguing with.
Now the finding that organises everything else.
Luzin's revision layer reaches into December 1979 and reports what happened there:
In mid-December 1979, NATO foreign and defence ministers yielded to Washington pressure and agreed to the manufacture and deployment in Britain, the FRG and Italy of new types of US medium-range nuclear weapons—108 Pershing-2 launching sites and 464 Tomahawk cruise missiles.
That is accurate — the double-track decision was taken on 12 December 1979, and the figures are right. The revision therefore demonstrably had access to events of that month. On 25 December 1979 the 40th Army crossed the Amu Darya and Soviet forces entered Afghanistan. The word "Afghanistan" occurs exactly once in this book, and the occurrence is this: "Soviet Russia was the first country to recognise Afghanistan's independence and to support the Turkish national liberation movement." It is a sentence about 1919.
A book about nuclear danger, revised through the summer of 1980, which can report the NATO ministers' meeting of December 1979 and cannot report the Soviet invasion of the same month, is not suffering from a publication lag. It is doing something else.
That has to be said before anything more, because the case Luzin is making is largely true and he makes it with some distinction. He was a soldier. He was at the Elbe in April 1945 or writes as though he was — the book opens with the Soviet and American armies meeting there, the swapped buttons and cap stars, Bradley's jeep and Konev's Don stallion — and he returns to his own war repeatedly. Whatever else this is, it is not a committee product. It has a first person and a temper.
His account of the evolution of American nuclear doctrine from 1945 to 1960 is drawn from American sources and holds up. He traces the air-power strategy to Douhet by way of Mitchell, notes the Air Force's independence in 1947 and the presidential commission of 1948, sets out the vocabulary the Americans themselves used — total war, unlimited war, spasm war — and quotes Brodie's own definition of preventive war as "a premeditated attack by one country against another, which is unprovoked". He observes, correctly, that Dulles's "massive retaliation" of January 1954 renamed an existing strategy rather than inventing one, and he has Kissinger and Brodie in the footnotes conceding the point. On Hiroshima he takes the position that the bombing was militarily unnecessary and directed at Moscow rather than Tokyo — contested then and contested now, but a serious position held by serious people, and he argues it from Groves, Stimson's memorandum of 11 September 1945, and Maxwell Taylor.
His treatment of SALT II is the most useful thing in the volume and is now genuinely rare. He goes through the treaty provision by provision — the freeze on fixed ICBM launchers, the launch-weight and throw-weight ceilings, the fourteen-warhead limit on submarine-launched missiles, the ban on rapid-reload systems, the protocol undertaking on air-to-surface ballistic missiles — with an evident professional pleasure in the drafting. The treaty was signed in June 1979 and never ratified. A careful, sympathetic, contemporary exposition of what it actually contained, written before anyone knew it was dead, has documentary value that has only increased.
He is right about forward-based systems. The Western accounting that set Soviet medium-range missiles against the British and French forces while omitting the American aircraft, carriers and submarines assigned to the European theatre was a real piece of arithmetic sleight-of-hand, and Luzin names it: "Therefore, the Atlantic strategists point to a mote in another's eye but do not or refuse to see a beam in their own." He is right that Pershing II and the Tomahawk, able to reach deep into Soviet territory from Western Europe, were strategic weapons in everything but the treaty definition — "The medium-range missiles deployed within the Soviet Union are not designed for, and are incapable of, hitting targets in the United States, while US medium-range missiles can be used for striking targets deep inside the Soviet Union." He is right that Eugene Rostow and the Committee on the Present Danger needed the Soviet threat to be larger than it was, and he quotes Rostow to that effect.
On the neutron bomb he is very good indeed. The Pentagon called the weapon clean because its blast radius was small:
Using the same logic it could have called potassium cyanide clean, too, for it does not harm the suit of the person who swallows it.
And his demolition of the "limited nuclear war" concept in PD-59 is the best passage in the book. He points out that the doctrine requires the enemy to cooperate:
It is too "iffy": if I strike first and the enemy fights by the rules, if I am first to destroy enemy nuclear weapons, if I can strike with surgical precision and prevent a retaliatory strike.
Then he brings his own war to bear on the counterforce planners:
no matter how thoroughly you planned an attack or how intensively artillery and air force prepared it, pockets of resistance always remained
That is a real argument, made from real knowledge, and the American strategic-studies community was making the same one at the same time. He goes on to note that the distinction between military and civilian targets is arbitrary because defence plants sit in cities, that multi-megaton counterforce strikes kill across a vast radius regardless of accuracy, and that Harold Brown had himself conceded that a controlled exchange might escalate. All correct. A reader who wants the Soviet case against American first-strike doctrine at its strongest will find it here, and will find it better argued than in most of what Progress printed.
Two pages after the accurate account of the NATO decision, Luzin explains why the Western justification for it is false:
But first, in the past decade not a single medium-range nuclear carrier has been added to the number already stationed in the European part of the Soviet Union. Nor does the USSR deploy any such weapons on foreign soil. Second, the updating of some Soviet tactical weapons neither upsets the balance of forces in Europe nor alters the strategic situation in the region or in the world.
This is not a matter of interpretation. The RSD-10 Pioner, which NATO designated the SS-20, entered service in 1976. It was a mobile, solid-fuelled, three-warhead MIRVed intermediate-range ballistic missile with a range of around five thousand kilometres, replacing the fixed, liquid-fuelled, single-warhead SS-4 and SS-5. By the time Luzin's revision layer closes, deployment ran to roughly two hundred launchers. It is the reason the December 1979 meeting happened. Luzin describes it — without naming it, because the designation "SS-20" does not occur anywhere in this book, nor do "SS-4" or "SS-5" — as "the updating of some Soviet tactical weapons".
A five-thousand-kilometre missile is not a tactical weapon, and Luzin knew what a tactical weapon was: on the same page he correctly lists Honest John at forty kilometres, Lance at a hundred and twenty, Sergeant at a hundred and forty, Pershing-1 at seven hundred and forty. He had the ranges in front of him. He simply declined to put the Soviet system on the same table.
The consequence is that the reader is handed a causal chain with its first link amputated. NATO decides, in December 1979, to deploy 572 missiles, for no reason but American appetite and West European servility. The Pioner deployment that preceded it by three years is gone; the phrase "Soviet missiles" does not occur in the book at all. Whatever one thinks of NATO's response — and there was a serious left case that Pershing II and cruise were a first-strike programme dressed as a counter-deployment — the argument cannot be made honestly by deleting the thing being responded to. Luzin's version persuades only a reader who has no other source.
The pattern extends. Against a book that counts American warheads, bases and budgets with precision, set the following returns, all of them nil or near-nil:
There is no figure anywhere in this book for Soviet military expenditure — not in roubles, not as a share of national income, not as a share of the state budget. Luzin uses the budget metric well and repeatedly on the United States: "the US military budget is a mirror of military strategy," he writes, and he is right. He never turns the mirror round. This is the same fault as in Bogdanov's The US War Machine and Politics, but one degree worse: Bogdanov at least gives the American figure — 5 to 13 per cent of GNP, over 25 per cent of federal spending — and simply omits the comparison. Luzin gives no Soviet number at all to omit. Two books, two authors, two decades apart in composition, the same hole in the same place. That is a genre rule, not an oversight.
There is no Soviet military-industrial complex. There is a section headed "People Versus the Military-Industrial Complex", and it is entirely about America. The nine Soviet defence-industrial ministries, the Military-Industrial Commission of the Council of Ministers, their first call on the country's best plant and best engineers, their representation in the Central Committee — none of this exists in the book, though the whole argumentative apparatus Luzin builds for the American case would apply to it without modification.
There is no "launch on warning", no "no first use", no SIOP or NSDM by name, and no Sakharov — who in January 1980, inside the revision window, was seized in Moscow and exiled to Gorky for objecting to the invasion the book does not mention.
And there is no Warsaw Pact intervention, ever. Czechoslovakia appears thirteen times — as Hitler's victim in 1938 and 1939, as a signatory of the treaties of the early 1970s, as a participant in the Vienna force-reduction talks, and as the butt of a Chinese joke about nuclear casualties — and never once in 1968. Hungary appears twice, both times in lists of signatory states. Instead there is this, quoted approvingly, from Andrei Gromyko in 1975:
in the twenty years of the Treaty its members, individually or jointly, have not initiated a single conflict nor acted to aggravate tensions in any region of the globe
Luzin adds: "It is quite obvious that the Warsaw Treaty is inherently defensive." Five Warsaw Pact armies had entered Czechoslovakia seven years before Gromyko said this, and Luzin was writing five years after he said it, with Soviet divisions in Afghanistan while he wrote.
The most revealing omission is not a missile. This book was published in 1981. In 1981 the European peace movement was the largest street mobilisation in postwar European history: some 300,000 in Bonn on 10 October, "the largest demonstration in West Germany since World War II" as Intercontinental Press reported it, and more than 400,000 in Amsterdam on 21 November. Luzin uses the phrase "peace movement" seven times, and every single time he means something else. He means the movement "inaugurated at the First World Congress for Peace in April 1949 in Paris" — his own footnote — with its Stockholm Appeal of 1950, its World Congress of Peace Forces in Moscow in 1973, and its World Peace Council maintaining "working contacts with UN bodies". He means the apparatus. And of that apparatus he writes:
The time has passed when the peace movement was regarded as a "hand of Moscow".
The World Peace Council was funded and directed from Moscow. That was not a Western slander; it was the arrangement. The sentence is an unusually pure specimen of the book's method, which is to state the thing that would be convenient and move on.
Two more sentences of the same family. On the CPSU's authority: "The implementation of the decisions of Party congresses is obligatory for all organs of state power and that is why, as distinct from Western democracy, words and deeds are never at variance in the USSR." And, in the closing chapter, on why Soviet peace proposals are not better known abroad: "They are well known to people in the USSR and other socialist countries, but unfortunately not to people in the West." Luzin's whole peroration is a call to the ordinary citizen to inform himself, march, petition, and vote for peace candidates. He does not notice that he has just described a country where the information flows freely and the marching does not, and put it on the wrong side of the line.
There is one further detail, offered by the author himself and left standing without comment. In an author's note to the references he explains that "Article 71 of the Penal Code of the RSFSR envisages a prison sentence of three to eight years with or without exile of two to five years, for war propaganda." It is presented as evidence of Soviet seriousness about peace. He does not ask what a state that sends people to camps for the wrong speech about war does to people who make the wrong kind of speech about peace. Two years after this book appeared, the Moscow Group for the Establishment of Trust between the USSR and the United States would find out.
Everything this book could not say was in print, in English, in the years it was written and shipped, from a left that opposed both alliances.
The closest thing to a contemporary answer is the resolution "Imperialist remilitarization and the struggle against austerity, for peace and socialism", passed by majority vote of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in October 1981 and printed in Intercontinental Press, vol. 20, no. 4, 8 February 1982. It reaches most of Luzin's conclusions about the United States — the militarisation of a crisis-ridden capitalist economy, the neutron bomb, the Rapid Deployment Force, the reorganisation of the American command structure. Then it does what Luzin will not:
In the same way, the deployment of arms such as the SS-20, aimed at China and Europe and incapable of reaching the United States, is not founded on the point of view of the defense of the USSR and provides an excellent pretext for imperialism to justify its rearmament drive among the masses in the West.
And on the cost, which Luzin never prices: the Soviet bureaucracy "has a defense policy that is exceptionally costly for the Soviet masses and in the end not very effective from the point of view of defending the workers states themselves." (In fairness, and because this series applies its standards in both directions: the same resolution misdates the NATO double-track decision to "November 12, 1979". Luzin's "mid-December 1979" is the correct one, and Intercontinental Press itself printed the right date — 12 December 1979 — in its report of the Amsterdam demonstration.)
The sharpest single document is the declaration of the International Marxist Group, the West German section of the Fourth International, published in Was Tun on 9 June 1983 and translated in Intercontinental Press, vol. 21, no. 13, 11 July 1983, under the headline "No new SS-20s!" It concedes what should be conceded — that without Soviet nuclear weapons imperialism would probably have used its own against China, Indochina and Cuba — and then refuses to stop there:
The answer of the Soviet bureaucracy to the imperialist arms buildup must nevertheless be perceived by the peace movement and the workers movement in Eastern Europe and in the West as a threat. It is neither suited to defend the Soviet Union against imperialism, nor prevent a nuclear war.
Its answer to Gromyko is direct. The professions of peace, it says, come from "the same ruling state and party apparatuses that ordered the tanks to roll against the workers in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland" — and that supported "the bloody occupation of Afghanistan". Its slogans were "No new nuclear weapons in the West or East!", solidarity with the independent peace movements of East Germany and the Soviet Union, and "For a nuclear weapon-free Europe from Portugal to Poland!"
Nor was this a sectarian eccentricity. Robert Went's report of the Amsterdam demonstration of 21 November 1981, in Intercontinental Press vol. 19, no. 46, 14 December 1981, records that the demand for withdrawal of both sets of missiles was carried at the rally by the Dutch Communist Party's own member of parliament. The movement Luzin was hoping would do Moscow's work for it had already declined the job. It is worth adding, because the reply corpus was not monolithic either, that Intercontinental Press's own news analysis took a different view: Will Reissner wrote on 30 November 1981 that "The NATO missile plan, in fact, has nothing to do with Soviet SS-20s," treating the deployment as a first-strike programme for which the Pioner was merely a pretext. One could hold that and still name the missile. Luzin could not name the missile.
On Afghanistan the answer was immediate. The United Secretariat's declaration, adopted at its meeting of 26–29 January 1980 and printed with two minority resolutions in Intercontinental Press vol. 18, no. 8, 3 March 1980, condemned the intervention, rejected the argument that demanding withdrawal would serve imperialism — "We, for our part, maintain just the opposite" — and predicted with some accuracy that "The Kremlin is in the process of getting bogged down in a war that it can never complete".
And for the underlying method — the reduction of a mass movement to foreign manipulation, which is how Luzin's book handles every inconvenient actor from Western journalists to the Chinese leadership — the answer is Ernest Mandel's reply to Felix Kouznetsov in the first issue of the International Marxist Review (vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1982), which printed the Soviet article and the rebuttal side by side. Against the thesis that a few dozen dissidents had manipulated nine million Solidarity members, Mandel wrote: "For Marxists it is social existence that determines consciousness, it is not 'manipulated consciousness' which determines existence." That is the objection to a whole style of argument, and this book is written in it.
Read Nuclear Strategy and Common Sense for its subject and against its author. On the archaeology of American nuclear doctrine, on the fraud of the "clean" neutron weapon, on the incoherence of counterforce, on the forward-based systems the West kept off the ledger, and on the text of SALT II, Luzin is a competent and sometimes eloquent guide, and the moral premise he starts from — that a nuclear war would have no victor and must not be fought — was true then and is true now. He was not wrong to say it. Millions of people in Western Europe were saying it at the same moment, and rather more effectively, without him.
Read it also as a demonstration of what that premise costs when it is held by a state rather than a movement. Luzin's argument requires that only one side of the world be examinable. Every analytical instrument he owns — the budget as the mirror of strategy, the institutional interest in threat inflation, the range table, the causal chain — works perfectly, and he uses every one of them on a country he has never governed. Turned homewards they would have produced a different book, and a Soviet publishing house would not have printed it. That is the real information in this volume, and it is not in the argument. It is in the December that is missing.