196 
bated.** Now, if one has turned down the withholding option—and 
the 1964 Belli work would seem to suggest that the Soviets had 
considered and rejected that option—it makes sense to stress SSBN 
vulnerability, depending on one’s reasons for not wanting to withhold. 
Unlike the enemy, you might have insufficient iand- and sea-based 
missiles together for launching the former and withholding the latter, 
or you might feel your SSBNs are more vulnerable than the enemy’s. 
To avoid giving him a psychological advantage, you insist that all 
SSBNs are vulnerable, meaning that his are vulnerable if they are 
withheld, while your are unaffected, since you have no intention of 
withholding. Or the Soviets might think there was a real technological 
perspective for ASW and they would not want to foreclose that option 
until they had gone the research route. So they claim SSBNs are 
vulnerable, meaning they will be when Soviet R. & D. is successful. 
Gorshkov takes a quite different line in his 1972-73 series. Instead 
of the vulnerability of the submarine, he stresses its “‘great survivabili- 
ty” in comparison with land-based launch facilities; moreover, this 
great survivability theme appears in a context in which “deterrence” 
is being discussed literally, not as a peacetime mission, but as a 
“role in modern war.’’® (And this is precisely what a withholding 
strategy would amount to—deterrence in war.) 
However, Gorshkov is not content simply to assert the great surviva- 
bility of submarines; he looks at the other side of the relationship 
between the submarine and its adversary, depreciates the cost-effec- 
tiveness of ASW in past wars and directly contends that the showing 
of ASW against modern nuclear-powered submarines will be even 
poorer. He does admit that, in both world wars—and in spite of 
the great cost—ASW was ultimately successful, but he insists this 
was because the submarines were not given adequate protection. The 
conclusion is repeatedly drawn: The ‘“‘combat stability” of the “main 
arm” of the fleet—today this is the submarine, the main component 
of which is the SSBN—must be maintained through support forces 
(now aviation and surface ships). If the Soviets intend to fire off 
all their SLBMs at the beginning of a war, it is difficult to understand 
the suddenly magnified attention given to platform survivability; they 
would not need to concentrate on this. But they would need to in 
a protracted struggle with hostile ASW in a wartime environment, 
given their geographical disadvantages (which Gorshkov himself points 
out) ®* the more advanced state of Western ASW and the less ad- 
vanced state of Soviet SSBN-quieting technology (which he ignores). 
Perhaps enough evidence has been adduced to suggest a wartime 
withholding doctrine for the Soviet Navy. The evidence has all been 
drawn from historical examples and generalizations in the main body 
of the Gorshkov text. However, in addition to the requirement to 
test the hypothesis with more and better data, including from other 
fields, certain questions remain from the Gorshkov series itself. The 
Soviets may have a fleet-in-being role for some of their SSBNs, but 
is this a main mission or a secondary one, for the SBNs themselves 
and for the navy as a whole? And if the withheld SSBNs have to 
be given protection, are the necessary support forces to materialize 
from mission reallocations or new allocations? Gorshkov’s historical 
*4Tbid., 80-81. 
5 Tbid., 81-87. 
66 Gorshkov in MS, No. 2, 1973, pp. 24-25. 
