Air University Review, May-June 1986

Deterrence In The
High-Technology Era:
A Speculative Forecast

Dr. Stephen M. Millett

In one of his last papers, which was published in 1976, Bernard Brodie summed up decades of research by observing:

In the last quarter of the twentieth century one need not belabor the point that technological change in the instruments of war, and in all those instruments of peace that are used in war, have had a profound effect on military strategy and hence on the use of war and of threats of war in diplomacy.¹

Brodie had been one of the earliest commentators on the strategic and political implications of nuclear weapons. As early as 1946, he had asserted that the huge and indiscriminate destructive power of atomic bombs would fundamentally change military doctrine and international policies. He became one of the first advocates of deterrence, or the policy of avoiding war rather than waging it through the inhibiting fear of nuclear holocaust. His often-quoted declaration rings as true today as it did thirty-eight years ago:

Thus, the first and most vital step in any American security program for the age of atomic bombs is to take measures to guarantee to ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind… Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.²

It was the very physical nature of nuclear technology that molded the national policies and defense postures of the nuclear weapon nations. American decision-makers came to realize that nuclear weapons, for all their great destructive power, offered very limited opportunities for application. As a means of national defense by threat of retaliation, nuclear weapons were the ideal tools of preserving the peace and national security. As a means of power projection, they were virtually useless because of their awesome effects. Nuclear weapons caused too much damage to have much military utility beyond the very limited, and extremely important, case of total war.

For example, in the winter of 1947-48 the U.S. Air Force Directorate of Intelligence studied industrial and other economic targets in the Soviet Union for a U.S. strategic bombing plan if total war were to occur. It concluded that a vast proportion of such targets were aggregated into about seventy Soviet cities, each of which could be totally destroyed by one or a few atomic bombs. As Colonel Grover C. Brown recalled, "I think it was a sort of a shock to a lot of people when a few began to talk about bonus effects and industrial capital and particularly when some began to ask what was a city besides a collection of industry."³ It was at this time that the U.S. strategic countervalue ("city busting") strategy emerged as the military doctrine of nuclear retaliation and deterrence.

Since the late 1940s, a major thrust of nuclear weapon research and development has been toward smaller yields and limited effects for damage control. Yet in addition to the minikiloton yield weapons, there are the gigantic multimegaton bombs and warheads with far greater destructive yields than those calculated by the Air Force Directorate of Intelligence in 1948. By 1963, the Department of Defense had developed a strategic plan that called for the minimum "assured destruction" of the Soviet Union with 400 one-megaton-equivalent deliverable warheads, which would eliminate 30 percent of the Soviet population (about seventy-four million killed) and 76 percent of total Soviet industrial capacity.⁴ From relatively small battlefield weapons to super "city buster" bombs, the United States has deployed tens of thousands of nuclear weapons to assure its retaliatory capabilities.

Each nuclear weapon, regardless of its yield, produces the same physical effects (to one degree or another): blast (or overpressure), heat, and radiation. Much has been written about blast effects, which are most important for "hard" (reinforced) counterforce targets. More recently, there has been a growing concern about the effects of heat and the fires that detonations would cause. And there is continued fear of long-term, residual radiation. For all the discussions of nuclear "war waging" and "war winning," the cumulative effects of uncontrollable fires and radiation poisoning might well be sufficient to induce the dreaded "nuclear winter" that would adversely affect the whole planet.⁵

The physical properties of nuclear weapons have had an enormous impact on the policies and strategies of ever having to use them. The principal impact has been fear—the fear of their horrendous damage potential—which is the keystone of the doctrine of deterrence. One wonders how the Soviet-American rivalry after 1945 might have been managed without the mutual restraints imposed by the nuclear fear.

Now new weapon technologies are in research and development with physical characteristics entirely different from those of nuclear energy. These are the "high technologies" of advanced computers, data processing, electro-optics, infrared and microwave sensors, and laser-guided munitions. These are not the exotic, visionary weapon technologies of "Star Wars" or "Buck Rogers" but are emerging technologies incorporated in the first generation of precision-guided munitions (PGMs) that are being deployed in tactical systems and that will most likely be upgraded for strategic systems. High-technology weapons do not offer greater destructive power. On the contrary, they promise greater assurance of target destruction through accurate kinetic explosions. If these high-technology weapons are applied eventually to strategic systems, they may have doctrinal implications of great significance.

For these reasons, examining or exploring a few of these high technologies and their potential political and military implications for the next twenty years may prove beneficial. The central question concerns how technological advances may impact deterrence. Will they tend to reinforce deterrence, or will they make it obsolescent? Will they make war more or less likely? While these questions cannot be answered precisely now, they need to be addressed so that American policymakers can appreciate the potential implications of the new high technologies.

Emerging High Technologies

High technologies in the private sector have been successfully applied to such popular consumer products as video games, personal computers, laser-cut audiovisual discs, and calculators the size of a credit card. These technologies are also being introduced to military systems. While there are many emerging high technologies for defense, we need to consider only a few related generally to accuracy in target acquisition and guidance (TAG) to find direct and profound implications for deterrence.

The miniaturization of computers will likely revolutionize weapon systems during the next twenty years. Like the transistor that changed the shape of radios two decades ago, the " superchips" will probably change computers into small, compact units with tremendous capabilities. The effect will be the creation of "smart weapons" with high speed, real-time data processing, and memory storage that will provide pinpoint TAG.

In 1979, the U.S. Congress authorized $680 million for the very-high-speed integrated circuit (VHSIC) program. Phase One, which consisted of three subprograms managed by each of the three primary armed services, began in 1981 and terminated in 1985. Because the objectives of Phase One were met as expected, Phase Two has begun. The goal is to achieve new generations of silicon superchips that will greatly improve military computers for weapon systems.⁶

The VHSIC superchips will condense 100,000 transistors and circuits within a diameter of 1.25 microns (or 1.25 millionths of a meter). Present chips are roughly 3.0 to 5.0 microns in diameter, or comparable to the diameter of a human hair at 4.0 microns. As building blocks, VHSIC superchips can be designed into very large-scale integrated circuits (VLSI). The objective is to produce relatively small computers with signal and data processing capabilities 50 to 100 times faster than present military computers. These new computers not only will operate faster but will be smaller, simpler to maintain, easier to program and reprogram, and more reliable. Immediate applications include advanced avionics, electronic warfare (EW), and PGMs, as well as improvements in command, control, communication, and intelligence (C³I) systems.⁷

In Phase Two of the VHSIC program, the goal is to reduce further the size of the superchips to 0.5 micron in diameter. This silicon chip could perform billions of arithmetic operations per second. The application to PGMs might mean virtual "zero CEP" (circular error probability). ⁸

Meanwhile, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is pursuing an alternative superchip technology with gallium-arsenide. If they can be made to work, such chips could allow faster electron flow with less voltage and higher frequencies than silicon chips. While much progress still needs to be made, gallium-arsenide chips theoretically offer performance standards in excess of any silicon chip.⁹

Another avenue being pursued by both the private sector and the U.S. government is advanced circuitry fabrication. Lasers may be used to cut ultrafine circuits directly on wafers without requiring wafer division into chips. This emerging technology is known as "waferscale integration" (WSI). If it works, WSI could combine hundreds of silicon chips and circuits into one wafer that could hold millions of transistors. The theoretical effect would be to reduce a room-sized mainframe computer to the size of a baseball.¹⁰

An excellent example of how computers can be applied to weapon systems is the American cruise missile. The development of this type of missile dates back to World War II, but such missiles were not effective weapons until the introduction of small on-board computers for enhanced guidance in the 1970s. Because they fly at relatively slow speeds, cruise missiles require about six hours of continual guidance for a range of 5000 kilometers. This guidance can be achieved by sensors and computerized maps. Cruise missiles contain three or more accelerometers on gyroscope-stabilizing platforms as an inertial guidance system. They also contain one of three computer course correction systems. One is terrain contour matching, or "Tercom." In this system, a downward-looking radar altimeter records terrain contours. The data are compared with up to twenty terrain maps stored in the computer, which correlates the data and maps and then sends messages to the autopilot for needed course corrections. The second system is area correlation, which relies on microwave (or infrared) reflectivity of the ground for course data. The third system is global positioning, which receives data from satellites for guidance. These three types of guidance are so effective that cruise missiles with either nuclear or conventional warheads can achieve remarkable accuracy.¹¹

Obviously, accuracy of the computer-stored maps and data processing is vital to the success of cruise missiles. The maps are obtained by computer-enhanced data from orbiting satellites. As the computers become smaller and more powerful, the quality and density of the maps and the data processing of the cruise missile computer will improve. If the current technological trend continues for another ten to twenty years, "zero CEP" may indeed become a reality. It is also possible that cruise missiles will be upgraded to mobile, intercontinental strategic missiles. Even in this decade, air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) from bombers, sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCMs) from submarines and surface ships, and ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) in Europe constitute quasi-strategic weapons.¹²

In addition to advanced computer designs, software is being developed to accommodate the increased volume of data and to improve user capabilities. The most exciting emerging technology in programming is artificial intelligence (AI), or the development of "smart" computers with reasoning powers. Currently, the Department of Defense is the largest funder of AI research in the United States. One of its contractors, TRW, has already introduced a first-generation, although rudimentary, AI capability in a battlefield intelligence analysis system called BETA.¹³

Computers are not the only high technology available to enhance the accuracy of weapon systems. Sensor technologies, such as laser, infrared, microwave, and optical guidance systems, are being developed and deployed. These high technologies are now being applied to tactical weapons, and in the next ten to twenty years they are likely to be applied to strategic weapon systems, too. Improvements in these high technologies added to advancements in computer capabilities will sum to virtual "zero CEP."

While President Reagan's Star Wars proposal for high-energy lasers as weapons in space has captured public attention, small lasers for TAG are revolutionizing tactical systems. As early as 1972, the Pave Way program of laser-guided Mk 82 and Mk 84 bombs from U.S. aircraft was remarkably successful against enemy bridges in Vietnam. The Air Force claimed a "CEP no greater than twenty-five feet; guidance reliability at least 80 percent." Since then, laser-guided munitions have been greatly improved. They have been applied to the U.S. Maverick, Rockeye, and Bulldog air-launched antitank missiles; U.S. 155-mm and 8-inch howitzers; and experimental West German mortars.¹⁴

Infrared guidance relies on heat-seeking sensors to home on a target. It is particularly effective against targets that radiate considerable amounts of heat in the infrared spectrum, such as aircraft and tanks. Infrared guidance has been applied to a new version of the Maverick antitank missile, the TOW surface-to-surface antitank missile, and the Redeye surface-to-air missile.¹⁵

A recent successful application of infrared guidance is the U.S. conventional missile to intercept incoming enemy nuclear warheads. The U.S. Army tested such a missile in June 1984. The success of the intercepting missile (and its fifteen-foot umbrella-like device that collided with and detonated a test replica of an incoming warhead) was attributed to its high-speed data processing computer and its heat-seeking sensors. The sensor was reported to be able to detect the heat of a human body from 1000 miles away. ¹⁶

Other high-technology guidance systems include microwave, electro-optical, TV, and advanced radar. Several of these, along with lasers and infrared, have been combined on the same missile or bomb. Examples are versions of the Maverick (TV camera, laser, and infrared), the Walleye I and II air-to-surface missiles (electro-optical/TV camera), and the Redeye, Chaparral, and Stinger surface-to-air missiles (optical and infrared). These are but a few among many U.S. weapon systems that promise to achieve pinpoint accuracy through high-technology TAG.¹⁷

Beyond the high technologies of computers, sensors, and electro-optics emphasized here—which will unquestionably have profound impacts on weapon systems—are other high technologies that may also affect weapon systems. One area suggesting promise is the high technologies of materials, including composites, polymers, and ceramics. Revolutionary innovations could occur in the structure of aircraft and missiles, resulting in lighter, faster, and perhaps cheaper weapon delivery vehicles. Technological advances are also occurring in ordnance design to provide greater explosive power from nonnuclear substances.

During the next twenty years, high technologies will most likely be applied to quasi-strategic and strategic weapon systems. Cruise missiles have already been fitted onto long-range bombers, and many of them will likely be deployed by the United States on forthcoming B-1B bombers. The Air Force may also attempt to mount cruise missiles on other types of aircraft. It is currently deploying ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe. The Navy is now in the process of acquiring cruise missiles for aircraft, submarines, and surface ships. The United States does not consider cruise missiles as strategic weapons, but improved performance may well make them such in the future. One very significant implication is that U.S. aircraft may not be required to attempt to penetrate enemy air defenses in the future but rather could perform as standoff launch platforms for cruise missiles and "smart" ordnance. Even at intercontinental ranges, missiles and their warheads are likely to become more reliable and more accurate as high-technology guidance systems are applied.

High technologies will be applied to other military systems besides offensive PGMs. Many will have applications throughout the range of C³I. Advanced computers will afford much greater depth of data processing and communications. Sensors will make satellite surveillance even more sophisticated than it is now. The combination of computers and sensors will allow many aircraft and ships to perform complicated C³I functions that they cannot perform well today. Thus, high technologies will provide the United States more reliable and more thorough warning and detection against attack as well as improved capabilities to communicate and control weapon systems.¹⁸

While many other high technologies and their potential military applications might be mentioned, even this brief survey demonstrates how high technology could change military hardware in fundamental ways.

The Implications
for Strategic Missions

The application of high technologies for improved guidance and control of strategic weapon systems may have profound implications for strategic missions over the next twenty years. Many of these implications are not now obvious and will emerge only with time, but three areas already seem likely to be affected: countervalue missions, counterforce possibilities, and the strategic defense in Europe. Another possible application could be the strategic defense of the United States itself, but that realm appears to require a huge research and development effort and is doubtful to produce operational systems before 2004.

As the Air Force Directorate of Intelligence concluded by 1948, nuclear explosions have such great destructive power that just one of them can level a whole district of a city, if not a whole city. Nuclear explosions cannot differentiate between factories and residential neighborhoods or between property and people. The countervalue strategy of knocking out enemy industrial and economic targets with nuclear weapons necessitates killing thousands of civilians regardless of whether that result is desired or not. In addition, the collateral effects of uncontrollable fires and downwind radiation will pollute the atmosphere and endanger life miles downwind. The cumulative effects of nuclear detonations, therefore, pose many moral, humane, environmental, and political dilemmas beyond strictly military concerns.

On the other hand, the precision guidance of the high technologies may make countervalue targeting with conventional explosions far more plausible than with nuclear weapons. Highly accurate cruise missiles, bombs, and other high-technology ordnance might hit industrial and economic targets in an enemy urban area with high assurance of "target kill" and relatively few collateral effects. The killing of thousands of people might be avoided. High-technology precision weapons would not require saturation bombing like that which the Allies inflicted upon German and Japanese cities in World War II. Such a strategy of precision bombing would require hundreds, if not thousands, of ordnance units and many launch vehicles, however. If the United States were to go to this strategy, it would have to have an arsenal of weapons significantly greater in number than the relatively few strategic nuclear delivery vehicles and warheads currently relied on.

To return to Brodie's 1946 observation concerning the utility of atomic bombs, the destructive power of nuclear weapons is so great as to limit their use to a very few high-consequence situations. The development of high-technology weapons, however, could change the doctrine of war avoidance to war waging. Such weapons will offer many kinds of military uses, both tactical and strategic, in addition to their value for deterrence. By reducing the fears of nuclear warfare, high technology may make strategic countervalue missions more "attractive" from a military operational perspective. At the least, high-technology weapons may prove more applicable for limited war and power projection than nuclear weapons are.

As the accuracy of strategic weapons improves, so too will the "hard target kill" capabilities of strategic counterforce weapons. The trend of the last twenty years has been to decrease the yields of nuclear weapons as accuracy has improved. The lower the CEP, the lower the explosive yield required to destroy a hard target. High-technology strategic TAG may allow the possibility of destroying some hard military targets—perhaps even intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos and reinforced command centers—with small nuclear warheads (maybe ten kilotons or less) or maybe even conventional ordnance. Any nuclear warhead will produce some fallout, but the amount of residual radiation could be greatly reduced if warheads with smaller yields were used.

Currently, a major counterforce nuclear attack on ICBM silos would release enough fallout to endanger the lives of millions of civilians as far away as a thousand miles downwind of the targets. For example, a Soviet nuclear attack on American silos in Wyoming would probably produce enough radiation (450 rems) to endanger the populations of Chicago and Detroit. A similar attack on silos in Kansas and Missouri would threaten the residents of Kansas City, St. Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, and perhaps even Washington, D.C.¹⁹ Similarly, if the United States launched a major counterforce attack on Soviet missile silos in the western U.S.S.R., it might produce enough radioactive fallout to kill thousands, if not millions, of people in the vicinity of Minsk, Kiev, and Moscow.²⁰ Because of such collateral radiation effects on civilian populations, no purely counterforce strategy with current nuclear weapons is possible. With high technologies, however, pinpoint accuracies and low yields or no nuclear yields may allow a nearly pure counterforce targeting option.

With high-technology TAG, conventional explosives could be used for dozens of relatively "soft" enemy military targets, such as shipyards, ports, surface ships, airfields, army posts, depots, tank formations, troop concentrations, transportation lines, and communications networks. Resorting to nuclear weapons for many such military targets may not be necessary.

As nonnuclear ordnance with high-technology TAG replaces nuclear warheads, American military planners may consider the redistribution of strategic forces. Currently, U.S. strategic nuclear delivery vehicles (SNDVs) number about 1900 and are concentrated in ICBM silo fields, U.S. air bases, and strategic submarines. Under one option, some SNDVs may be converted to nonnuclear weapons while remaining relatively centralized in deployment and intercontinental in range. Under another option, however, there may be little need for centralized strategic vehicles because thousands of fighters, fighter-bombers, cruise missiles, and nonnuclear ballistic missiles will become capable of strategic missions against the Soviet Union.

Another arena for high-technology systems is the defense of Western Europe. One champion of high-technology conventional war-waging capabilities is General Bernard W. Rogers, who has been the Supreme Allied Commander Europe since June 1979. In 1982, he stated:

We must not delude ourselves—NATO’s continuing failure to fulfill its conventional needs means that we now must depend upon the use of theater nuclear weapons to accomplish our missions of deterrence and defense.²¹

General Rogers then offered a possible solution to the dilemma of Western reliance on nuclear weapons for the security of Western Europe:

There is a more acceptable alternative to this posture, namely to acquire a conventional capability that would provide a good prospect of success in the forward defense of Europe.... The concept for the conventional destruction of the [Warsaw] Pact follow-on forces has been developed by the Supreme Allied Command (SHAPE). ... Meanwhile, major efforts must be expanded to encourage nations to develop and procure the advanced technological targeting and weapon systems that will make the application of the concept most effective.²²

Along with high-technology weapon systems, General Rogers advocates a strategic modification that is known as Deep Strike. This is an early example of shifts in military strategy due to the new high technologies. In this strategy, NATO forces not only would attempt to halt invading Soviet forces but also would counterattack with PGMs against the enemy's deep rear to disrupt supplies and reinforcements. General Rogers asserts that the high-technology weapon systems and the Deep Strike strategy are needed to deter war, wage it if necessary, and place the burden of escalation to nuclear weapons on the shoulders of the Soviet bloc rather than on NATO.²³

In April 1984, the NATO Conference of National Armament Directors agreed to concentrate efforts on eleven new defense systems, including electronic aircraft reconnaissance systems for TAG and computerized nonnuclear munitions. However, the list did not include certain "emerging technologies" (ET) advocated by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and associated with the Deep Strike strategy, which has become somewhat controversial in Western Europe.²⁴ The debate concerns the issues of "decoupling" the defense of Western Europe from that of the United States (i.e., breaking the link between deterring a Soviet attack upon Western Europe and upon the United States itself). On the one hand, the Europeans want nuclear weapons to deter the Soviets, but on the other hand they do not want nuclear weapons ever to be used in Europe. Even some American defense analysts have challenged the effectiveness and political desirability of high-technology weapon systems and the Deep Strike because they may stray too far from the goal of deterrence, which is now firmly based on nuclear weapons.²⁵

In the meanwhile, NATO is reducing the number of deployed tactical nuclear weapons. In October 1983, NATO decided to replace nuclear-tipped Nike Hercules missiles with a conventional Patriot antiaircraft missile. There will also be reductions in nuclear mines and nuclear 155-mm and 8-inch artillery shells. In all, the United States will phase out approximately 1400 nuclear warheads in Europe. These reductions are not so much related to unilateral disarmament as they are to the early deployment of high-technology conventional weapon systems.²⁶

The doctrinal dispute concerning high technology weapons in NATO is indicative of the uncertainty of their impacts on deterrence. If the United States were to reduce its nuclear arsenal in favor of high-technology conventional weapons, would it be reducing also the fear of nuclear war that is the essence of deterrence? Could there be deterrence with few or no nuclear weapons? Do high-technology weapons make a major war more or less likely to occur? These questions need to be addressed in order to assess the implications of high-technology weapons and missions for deterrence and the future security of the United States.

Implications for Deterrence

In his 1976 paper, Brodie observed:

In short, there seems not to be any direct proportionality between technological change and military-political consequences, even though we acknowledge that historically there has been a close relationship between the one and the other.²⁷

Brodie's conclusion was that military doctrine and strategic thinking usually trail technological innovations and they change much more slowly than the instruments of warfare. If his generalization holds for high technology, then the new systems are likely to be developed and deployed before the doctrine and strategy of how to use them mature. Thus, the concept of deterrence is likely to remain (although it may be modified) during the next twenty years, while high-technology systems are tested and refined.

In addition to traditional military doctrinal conservatism, there are two reasons why deterrence will probably continue for the next two decades. One is that new technologies are most often developed to fulfill established mission requirements faster and better than available technologies. It is only after new technologies are deployed that their capabilities suggest new applications and missions. In this case, new missions for the high technologies being developed may not be apparent for one or two decades. In the meanwhile, the doctrine of deterrence is most likely to remain largely intact.

The second reason for the maintenance of deterrence to 2005 is the continuation of national defense objectives and policies. The high technologies are not likely to change basic American values in the short run. The United States will still wish to preserve its national security, to maintain peace in its relationship with the Soviet Union, and to contain Soviet political and territorial aggrandizement. General Rogers’ desire—to make high-technology weapon systems serve to strengthen the spectrum of deterrence against all degrees of Soviet military provocations—might well be affirmed as a national goal.

In the short range, to 2005, high technology may change the implementation of deterrence, however. High technology will probably affect countervalue and counterforce targeting strategies. It may also alter NATO defensive plans. In addition, it could decrease nuclear delivery vehicles and warheads but also greatly increase the numbers of nonnuclear weapon systems and bombs.

If high technology were to change the concept of deterrence, it is much more likely to occur after 2005 than before. It is still too early to estimate what doctrinal changes may occur, but the central question is whether strategic high technologies will cause radical departures from deterrence. The present expectation is that they will not. There are six reasons for believing that high technology may alter missions and tactics but not make the waging of war more desirable than maintaining security and peace through deterrence.

The first reason for the continuation of deterrence past 2005 is the expectation that high technology strategic weapon systems will never fully replace nuclear weapons. Initially, high technology weapons will be deployed to replace low-technology tactical and theater systems. Then they will be deployed in larger numbers to supplement strategic weapons. Finally, they will probably replace significant numbers of strategic nuclear weapons. But they are not likely to replace all nuclear weapons. The United States and the Soviet Union, too, will probably retain some nuclear systems just to guard against the ultimate challenge. General Rogers recognized this situation when he commented in 1983 that "we would always want to preserve the possibility of a nuclear response in order to convince a potential aggressor that the risks of aggression outweigh any potential gains."²⁸

High technology will have a substantial impact on nuclear arms control. It already has. Cruise missiles created numerous negotiation problems between the United States and the Soviet Union in SALT II, which resulted in a compromise to count nuclear cruise missiles as multiple warheads rather than as strategic nuclear delivery vehicles.²⁹ The difficulty in verifying compliance on numerical limits on cruise missiles is that conventional ones appear externally the same as nuclear ones. If high-technology weapons were to replace some nuclear systems and their external configurations were to remain the same, then they will greatly complicate nuclear arms control. On the other hand, to the extent that they replace nuclear weapons and appear different, high-technology systems may facilitate nuclear arms control. It is possible that, by 2005, the ceiling on strategic nuclear delivery vehicles may drop to relatively low levels, but the total number of nonnuclear strategic delivery vehicles will probably increase greatly.

A second reason for the continuation of deterrence in the high-technology era might be the maintenance of a technology balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Although the United States appears to be ahead in several high technologies, especially advanced computers, the Soviets undoubtedly will strive to match American advancements. Currently, they are catching up in cruise missiles and infrared sensors. They have been working on high-energy and laser weapons for years. The Soviets have already indicated a strong interest in conventional high-technology weapons and their strategic implications, especially in Europe.³⁰ The technological balance between the United States and the Soviet Union has been an important component of deterrence, and it will likely remain so in the high-technology era.

A third circumstance that may contribute to continued deterrence is the likely development of high-technology defenses and countermeasures. Brodie asserted as early as 1946 that defenses against nuclear weapons were unlikely to be effective. Although some progress has been made in that area in the last four decades, Brodie was largely correct. But this lack of progress in the defensive areas will not necessarily characterize high-technology weapons. Indeed, some of the high technologies were developed as defensive systems. Laser, infrared, and microwave systems can be used to counter other weapons. Computers will be used both offensively and defensively. Other measures are now being developed to confuse and distract high-technology TAG, such as smoke screens, radar and heat decoys, optical and electronic jamming, etc.³¹ The potential balance between high-technology offensive and defensive systems may deny a net military advantage to either the United States or the Soviet Union and thereby perpetuate deterrence.