limited nuclear options

limited nuclear options (LNO), military strategy of the Cold War era that envisioned a direct confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers (i.e., the Soviet Union and the United States) that did not necessarily end in either surrender or massive destruction and the loss of millions of lives on both sides. The limited nuclear options (LNO) approach allowed a country’s military commanders to shift the targeting of nuclear missiles from enemy cities to enemy army installations, thereby limiting the effects of such a war. It was argued that such a restrained conflict would be unlikely to escalate, with the belligerents maintaining open lines of communication at all times.

The LNO strategy grew out of the concept of a limited war, which acquired widespread currency in U.S. political and military circles in the late 1950s. Limited war meant that the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union could be perceived as something other than a zero-sum game. In other words, the two countries could face each other on the battlefield—as many feared they inevitably would—without unleashing a nuclear Armageddon that would make a final victory largely irrelevant.

Political theorists such as Basil Liddell Hart, Robert Endicott Osgood (author of Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy [1957] and Limited War Revisited [1979]), and Henry Kissinger claimed that an all-out war could not be used all that effectively, even as a mere threat. The Soviets were fully aware that no U.S. president could easily make a decision to drop a nuclear bomb on a heavily populated area simply because of communist provocations. Advocates of limited war argued that U.S. interests would be better served if U.S. nuclear strategy allowed for a series of attack options that would constitute a credible threat to the Soviets yet allow the two sides to fight a limited war, if it ever came to that.

In January 1974 Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger (in the administration of Pres. Richard Nixon) publicly announced that U.S. nuclear doctrine had ceased to abide by the concept of mutual assured destruction (in which a first strike by the Soviets would be met with a catastrophic nuclear counterattack). Instead, the country would adopt a “limited nuclear options” approach. The shift in policy was presented as a serious effort to ensure that a conflict between the two superpowers would not end up destroying the entire planet.

Critics were quick to point out that the policy of mutual assured destruction had made a nuclear strike taboo—a transformation that Schlesinger’s announcement had reversed. It was now permissible, critics argued, for the superpowers to use small nuclear bombs in regions other than their own. If one country did not expect a disastrous response from the enemy, both were then free to wage “little wars” that might not directly affect U.S. or Soviet civilians but would have a terrible impact on other populations. In spite of those assessments, the Cold War eventually came to an end in the early 1990s, without the need for a nuclear war—either limited or total—to designate a victor.