To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction. Edward Kaplan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.

A recent Strategy Bridge review of Fred Kaplan’s The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War highlights a number of points that can be usefully thought of in comparison with a similar but more narrowly focused book written in 2015: To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Paige Cone’s excellent review of The Bomb brings up a number of relevant points over which the two Kaplans might disagree as well as some potential areas of agreement. First, Cone describes Fred Kaplan’s arguably Whiggish view—the assumption of positive historical progress toward a better understanding of nuclear weapons—as follows: “U.S. presidents and generals alike have ‘figur[ed] out the best way to maneuver around [nuclear weapons] or to reconcile with them.’”[1] Edward Kaplan likely would disagree with this approach, as will be explored in this review.

Cone also explains that U.S. nuclear strategy appears not “to have been based on determining the best methods of deterrence, but rather came together as a product of competing bureaucratic interests,” a position with which Edward Kaplan more likely would agree. She similarly notes that an increasing strategy of overkill resulted from a desire to ensure “...that funding continued for weapons development.”[2] Edward Kaplan’s empathetic perspective of Air Force officers challenges Fred Kaplan’s more cynical interpretation, although it certainly does not put it to rest.

Edward Kaplan’s To Kill Nations is a fascinating work that packs a thermonuclear punch of ideas and arguments into 223 pages of dense but readable text (260 including endnotes, etc.). The work is suitable for anyone from advanced undergraduates to experts in the field. Edward Kaplan is a retired Air Force intelligence officer who obtained his PhD from University of Calgary and has extensive teaching experience at the U.S. Air Force Academy. This review examines his work before returning to three key areas of comparison between the two Kaplans.

There are so many themes, plots, and subplots within this text that it is difficult to distill the work, but the main argument is that the U.S. Air Force incrementally developed an atomic air strategy from 1945 until the strategy fell apart after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kaplan’s narrative relies heavily on this event to sever the interconnected pieces of atomic strategy and air strategy once the popular imagination began to view atomic weapons as unusable.[2]

Prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, by contrast, this atomic air strategy focused primarily on a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. In this scenario, the Air Force response to invasion required the employment of an overwhelming number of bombers to confuse Soviet air defenses to get enough nuclear bombs on the Soviet homeland. What the Air Force believed it should target, though, changed over time. Early on, for example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff envisioned a heavy focus on Soviet industry.[3] But the development of ballistic missiles and thermonuclear weapons greatly compressed reaction time while increasing the consequences of nuclear warfare, and strategists realized that attacks on industry might be irrelevant in a short war. Increasingly, based on its Korean War experiences, the Air Force sought to blunt opposing Soviet air forces.[4] Thus, plans for war with the Soviet Union began to look less like a repeat of World War II and more like a faster, more devastating type of war that required the application of an overwhelming offensive. As a result, ideas about preemptive warfare became more common, a relevant theme in regard to discussions of today’s nascent technologies like hypersonics and artificial intelligence.

Air Force strategy aligned with the interests of civilian leadership, more or less, until just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Kennedy administration put the Air Force out of a secure job. At that point, nuclear weapons became something to avoid rather than something to use in the pursuit of victory. In other words, having stood on the brink of nuclear war, John F. Kennedy and his closest advisors could no longer consider the possibility of using nuclear weapons because of the cost to the homeland. As a result, the U.S. came to desire stability more than victory as its desired end state.

As briefly set forth earlier, some of the key points brought out in Paige Cone’s review of The Bomb bear consideration in light of To Kill Nations, particularly regarding Fred Kaplan’s claim that “U.S. presidents and generals alike have ‘figur[ed] out the best way to maneuver around [nuclear weapons] or to reconcile with them.’” Fred Kaplan’s Whiggish statement shows a tendency for leaders to improve and progress in regard to nuclear strategy. But the Air Force, Edward Kaplan argues, never sought to—as Fred Kaplan contends—“maneuver around” them or “reconcile with” nuclear weapons because Air Force officers did not view them differently than conventional weapons. Kaplan never adequately explains why, but the answer can be found in Michael Gordin’s Five Days in August. Gordin shows how powerful narratives quickly eclipsed the actual employment of the weapons against Japan, resulting in a divide between military officers who continued to equate nuclear weapons with big conventional weapons while civilians increasingly shuddered at the prospect of using them.[5] This view also challenges Kaplan’s neat division of strategic thinking into the time before and after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Having accepted the usefulness of nuclear weapons, the Air Force devoted itself to strategizing about how to employ them. But Edward Kaplan wants the reader to appreciate the overlaps and disconnects between “declaratory policy”—what a nation says it will do—and “action policy”—how a nation plans to employ these weapons.[6]

A nation must synchronize the two or risk instability and other serious strategic failures, as Edward Kaplan argues occurred under Kennedy, who wanted a menu of nuclear options and also wanted to use the threat of them to communicate to likely adversaries. By 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with significant input from the Air Force, had implemented an action policy known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan. This plan assumed one could use atomic weapons in warfare to achieve victory, and it used overwhelming force to ensure it succeeded in meeting those desired ends. But Kennedy changed the desired end to stability after the Cuban Missile Crisis, placing the Air Force in an impossible position of being unable to respond quickly enough to support the administration’s declaratory policy if America wanted to employ these weapons in a limited conflict.

This reality remains important, Edward Kaplan argues, especially when considering new nuclear powers. He insists the "best predictor of how a new nuclear power may use its weapons will be found in which organization is responsible for them." One must not only consider how the Iranian government, for example, might use them, but also how the Iranian military conceptualizes warfare. As such, "abstract nuclear theory” is “only important to the degree it is actively adopted by those whom it claims to govern. Deterrence is not the only valid way to think about nuclear forces: indeed it may only have been accepted by Western forces from 1963."[7] Thus, Edward Kaplan probably disagrees with Fred Kaplan that the U.S. has “figur[ed] out the best way to maneuver around them or to reconcile with them,” because the narrative of stability is, in his opinion, dangerous and conducive to the mirror imaging of one’s potential opponent.

Fred Kaplan also makes the point, according to Cone, that U.S. nuclear strategy congealed not in regard to “the best methods of deterrence, but rather came together as a product of competing bureaucratic interests.” This is an important area of overlap with Edward Kaplan.

Some of the historiography on the Air Force in the Cold War—and that is Edward Kaplan’s aim—is too narrowly focused on how the Air Force sought to mold Strategic Air Command into an institution capable of deterring the Soviets and defeating them if necessary.[8] The value of To Kill Nations is its focus on the Air Force in tension with the other services, presidents, Secretaries of Defense, civilian thinkers, and various relevant individuals, and in this way it complements Fred Kaplan’s work.

Edward Kaplan expands this perspective by highlighting how the services worked together—even as some of them simultaneously fought bitterly for money—to plan the action policy to wage atomic warfare together. For readers interested in the making of strategy, this work explores how difficult it is to create an ideal strategy when one must reconcile so many competing interests.

In Kaplan’s estimation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had the military knowledge and leadership ability to keep a “pit bull” on a leash. In other words, in terms of civil-military relations, Eisenhower happily allowed military officers to posture because he believed they made his threats to use nuclear weapons credible. Eisenhower’s declared and action policy reinforced each other.

That alignment, though, disintegrated under a less experienced President John F. Kennedy who sought a “pack of Dobermans—quiescent until commanded.”[9] One may quibble with Edward Kaplan’s discussion of dog breed characteristics even as one may appreciate his ability to make a discussion of nuclear strategy relatable. 

Meanwhile, a frustrated General Curtis LeMay wondered privately if the Kennedy administration might better off with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as Secretary of Defense rather than Robert McNamara, who continually pushed back against Air Force strategy.[10] The congealing of declaratory and action policy fell apart under Kennedy.

Finally, one last point between Edward Kaplan and Fred Kaplan centers on Fred Kaplan’s cynical suggestion that “overkill was borne out of ensuring that funding continued for weapons development.” Indeed, Edward Kaplan’s inclusion of numerous examples where Air Force officers advocated for using nuclear weapons can seem horrific to many modern readers. How, one wonders, could Air Force officers have been so cavalier in advocating for the use of these weapons, especially in cases where the Soviet Union or its allies had not directly threatened the U.S.?

Edward Kaplan argues that deterrence could not work if Air Force officers did not show themselves absolutely “dedicated to winning a game of ‘Chicken’ by throwing the steering wheel out of their car as it hurtled down the road toward the Soviets.”[11] Meanwhile, the Soviets only gained in capabilities to attack the US, making deterrence ever more important.

In highlighting how the action of Air Force officers made deterrence credible, Edward Kaplan seeks to keep them from being demonized.[12] In his telling, the infamous Curtis LeMay did not suffer from cognitive dissonance or an obsession with strategic bombardment. Rather, his “willingness to fight a nuclear war was a significant reason why one never was fought.”[13]

Edward Kaplan’s larger point is not just to exonerate the Air Force from its notorious connection to powerful Cold War-esque movies like Doctor Strangelove but to show how those ideas remain relevant today. Kaplan worries the West has uncritically accepted the idea that nuclear weapons should not be used in the wake of the consensus about stability that sprung up after the Cuban Missile Crisis that has “naturalize[d] the idea that this is the ‘only way of conceiving of nuclear weapons.’”[14] Kaplan worries, however, that the U.S. tends to mirror image its thoughts about nuclear weapons onto others.

Conclusion

Kennedy’s response to the Cuban Missile Crisis cleaved the Air Force’s air atomic strategy into air strategy and atomic strategy. If nuclear weapons—around which the institution had wrapped up its whole existence for twenty years—could not be used, what purpose did the institution serve? This identity crisis resulted in the Air Force shifting from a strategy of brute nuclear force to one of precision conventional force. This point is problematic, however, because the Air Force had a strong precedent for seeking to bomb precisely in the inter-war period, even if it did not come to fruition during World War II.

It is also difficult to reconcile the emphasis on identity in a work that bookends the concept in some of the introductory and concluding pages but then largely ignores it in the rest. The Air Force’s culture does not run strongly enough throughout this book. In other words, Kaplan seizes upon identity when it works for his argument, but then ignores it when it might lead to unflattering interpretations of the Air Force officers he is trying to redeem. It is difficult to have one’s realist actor cake and one’s constructivist cake and eat them, too.

Still, this work is impressive for the kind of explosiveness it packs into 223 pages. Although it occasionally offers muddled explanations, it generally steers the reader along gently. Yet Edward Kaplan simply tries to do too much, emulating the example of his Cold War warriors and their tendency to adopt a strategy of overkill because of the high stakes of getting it wrong.

Heather Venable is an associate professor of military and security studies at the U.S. Air Command and Staff College and teaches in the Department of Airpower. She has written How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not represent the official position of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: The war room from Dr. Strangelove (Youtube)

Notes:

[1] Quoted in Paige Cone, Review of The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, Strategy Bridge, June 29, 2020; https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2020/6/29/reviewing-the-bomb.

[2] Edward Kaplan, To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 2.

[3] Kaplan, 15.

[4] Kaplan, 75 and 79.

[5] This is the subject of Michael Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Lawrenceville: Princeton University Press, 2015).

[6] Kaplan, 19.

[7] Kaplan, 221.

[8] See, for example, Phil Meilinger, Bombers: The Formation and Early Years of Strategic Air Command (Maxwell Air Force Base: Air University Press, 2012).

[9] Kaplan, 182.

[10] Kaplan, 171.

[11] Kaplan, 4.

[12] Kaplan, 4.

[13] Kaplan, 220.

[14] Kaplan, 2.