lov, 
Does the Soviet Union consider a powerful navy a cost-effective 
instrument for the protection and promotion of Soviet state in- 
terests in peacetime? (i.e., excluding the role of defending the 
homeland). 
What utilities does the Soviet Union ascribe to the purposive 
and the preventive uses of military force outside Russia’s national 
security zone? 
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE WEST 
A noticeable feature of Soviet naval policy since the war is how 
closely it has reflected changes in the Soviet perception of the threat 
of assault on Russia from the sea. We see the initial postwar mass- 
construction programs to meet a misperceived threat inferred from 
the capitalists’ war-inflated navies and a Marxist prognosis of history; 
the savage cuts in shipyard allocation when the likelihood of seaborne 
invasion was realized to be low; the heavy investment in nuclear 
submarine construction facilities, responding to the new and correctly 
perceived threat from carrier-borne nuclear strike aircraft, and to 
the need to operate in Western-dominated waters; and most recently 
the radical reaction to the correctly perceived threat from 
Polaris/Poseidon, involving the navy’s shift to forward deployment, 
while some more effective solution was sought within a broader na- 
tional strategy. 
I am alert to the dangers of monocausal explanations and over- 
reliance on the action/reaction thesis.17* But on the threat side it 
is hard to ignore the scale of Western naval superiority during most 
of this period, the offensive nature of NATO strike fleet exercises, 
and the stream of Western pronouncements concerning the naval con- 
tribution to launching nuclear weapons at Russia. And on the Soviet 
side we have the mutually supporting evidence of the patterns of 
operational employment and interfleet deployment, the task-specific 
ship characteristics, the radical alterations to the building programs 
to match the changes in threat assessment, as well as what the Rus- 
sians say themselves. Since the shift to forward deployment, for obvi- 
ous reasons the evidence is less clear cut, but we do know that 
the navy’s primary mission is still to counter the West’s sea-based 
strategic nuclear delivery systems. 
With the benefit of hindsight, it can be argued with some plausibility 
that, if the United States had not concentrated on developing attack 
carriers with a long-range strategic strike capability, then the Soviet 
leadership would not have been willing to allocate scarce resources 
to doubling the construction rate of nuclear submarines. And if the 
United States had not suddenly increased its strategic weapons pro- 
grams in 1961 and sharply accelerated Polaris procurement, then there 
would have been no corresponding buildup in Soviet ICBM and the 
Soviet Navy would not have been made to move forward in strategic 
defense at considerable economic and political cost.. It is, of course, 
this last development which has brought particular discomfort to the 
West with its vital interest in use of the sea. And it is relevant 
to ask whether the West has in fact gained more from their past 
initiatives than they lost from the Soviet response. 
'74] address this whole question of primary determinants of naval policy, and in the process cover 
my flank against accusations of ‘“‘monocausal explanations” or “‘rational actor models” in “The Turn- 
ing Points of Soviet Naval Policy,’ Soviet Naval Developments, pp. 176-209. 
