U.S. and Soviet Strategic Force Levels: Problems of Assessment and Measurement

The problem of measuring the strategic balance has been viewed by some as a meaningless exercise, by others as a matter of comparing simple static indicators, and by still others as a complex process of assessing likely war outcomes. As the strategic power of the Soviet Union has grown, there has been a trend toward the latter view. To assess likely war outcomes, one must go substantially beyond the standard static indicators, such as warhead count, equivalent megatons, and hard target kill capability, into problems of command and control, long-term endurance, and the dynamics of escalation. To assess the likely outcomes of extended nuclear exchanges which stop short of all-out attacks on cities, it is necessary to employ fairly detailed war games. The use of such games to measure the strategic balance raises problems of how to report the results and how to use the games in posture design.