Excerpted from Deborah Shapley's Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1993.
From Chapter 10, "Untying the Knot"
[pp. 187-192]
[After the Cuban Missile Crisis, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara gave an interview to Stewart Alsop which appeared in a December 1, 1962 Saturday Evening Post article.]
The article purported to explain the counterforce-no cities nuclear policy McNamara had announced publicly at Ann Arbor in June, which Alsop dubbed the "Doctrine of Controlled Response." In point of fact, McNamara had been backing off the policy practically since he first articulated it, having encountered nothing but problems. They started with London's and Paris's outrage that through it, Washington was trying to nix their independent control of their respective nuclear forces.
The main problem with counterforce-no cities was that it made McNamara sound as though he were really planning a preemptive first strike, despite official disclaimers. The Kremlin and other critics astutely asked why Washington would wait for the Soviets to attack before it launched its countermilitary attack to disarm Soviet forces. According to military logic, Washington should try to disarm Soviet forces preemptively, before they could begin a strike against the United States.[2]
A second problem was the defense budget for fiscal 1964, then in preparation... The Air Force asked for added Minuteman missiles and for the B-70 bomber and RS-70 reconnaissance version. The generals also wanted to continue the Skybolt nuclear missile, to be launched from U.S. and British bombers against Soviet ground targets, although McNamara had doubts Skybolt would work. In short, the military was using McNamara's counterforce strategy to justify increases in U.S. offensive forces and even a first-strike strategy, just when McNamara realized that his strategic buildup had to stop.[3] Strategic forces were costing $15 billion, one third of the $45 billion defense budget and one sixth of the federal budget.
But the overarching problem with the doctrine was psychological. The Berlin crisis and Kennedy's promotion of civil defense on television and in the pages of Life awakened in the public a gut-level awareness of how horrible nuclear war would be.... Berlin and Cuba caused a shift in perceptions of the new age.[4]
In this climate it was politically unwise for the U.S. secretary of defense to adopt the language of "megadeath" and "controlled and deliberate response." McNamara had been saying publicly that if each side followed a limited counterforce strategy and avoided hitting the other's cities, 25 million Americans would die instead of 75 million in an all-out attack, and that the figure of 25 million was "preferable" to the 75 million. He did not insert the word "only" in front of the reference to 25 million dead Americans, but it could be read there by implication... McNamara's larger figures for Western European deaths played no better on the other side of the Atlantic, where a similar shift of mood was under way. Europeans were often schizophrenic: They called loudly for U.S. displays of nuclear willpower (some German leaders were blaming Kennedy for not having gone to war over Berlin and letting the wall stand) while being privately terrified at the prospect of nuclear war.[5]
McNamara sensed the inappropriateness of his fine-tuned strategy even as he tossed around its cold-blooded terms with Alsop. Thus McNamara was parting company with the formal strategists at the very moment he was most publicly identified with them.
The crosscurrents were ironic. McNamara decided privately during the Cuban crisis that one Soviet warhead from Cuba on one American city was unacceptable just when Herman Kahn, the most controversial of the formal strategists, attained his greatest notoriety.[6] Even among the earliest group of superbright Rand mathematicians and economists, Kahn stood out as a crazy genius. He started work on the mathematical problems of the hydrogen bomb but was soon fascinated with analyzing nuclear war.
The combination of Kahn's provocative personality and deadly subject matter resulted in a series of books that discussed nuclear war scenarios with weird abandon. For example, Kahn conceived of a Doomsday Machine, which he claimed was technologically feasible. It would be a giant computer wired to thousands of H-bombs. When the Soviets committed some unacceptable act, the machine would go to war and fire thousands of bombs, covering the earth with fallout and killing everybody. The Doomsday Machine sounded absurd, but it was only a slight exaggeration of military reality, the top-secret Sunday Punch nuclear war plan that SAC improved throughout the 1950s.
Kahn's deeper point was that the Doomsday Machine was a terrible idea. As the alternative, he worked up scenarios for limited nuclear war. His master plan, which drew the most attention, had the combatants starting small, with a few nuclear bombs, and working their way up forty-four "rungs" of a "ladder of escalation," while the two sides bargained to call the whole thing off.
Kahn lectured widely. On Thermonuclear War was published in 1960 and sold thirty thousand copies in hardcover. In 1962 he issued another ghoulish and hypnotic tome. Thinking About the Unthinkable became a new buzz phrase for what Alsop had called the "oddly fascinating reality" of nuclear strategy. Kahn's writing inspired the 1964 movie hit Dr. Strangelove...
But Kahn's braggadocio, his linguistic abandon and effervescent personality, pushed him beyond the bounds of respectability as the public mood changed. He and his fellow Rand strategists were being responsible in trying to alleviate humanity's greatest threat. But Kahn seemed too detached from the terrible acts he described to a public for whom nuclear war was suddenly real.
McNamara shared Kahn's and his colleagues' ability to keep the emotional horror of nuclear war at arm's length by intellectualizing it. Their formalism and detached language were partly a crutch to control the fears the cataclysm aroused.
The containment of emotion was the precise appeal to McNamara of the Rand strategists as staff advisers and of counterforce-no cities as doctrine. McNamara needed both to prepare himself to act rationally and control his own intense emotions, if war ever came.
Kahn's third book, On Escalation, happened to be published in 1965, at the start of the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, an air campaign that McNamara and others designed on Kahn-like principles of escalation control and bargaining that seemed to work in the missile crisis. What McNamara's fascination with nuclear bargaining scenarios in 1961-62 had in common with his belief in a limited air campaign against North Vietnam in 1965 was that it offered him a way to keep the emotions of war under control.
"War always deeply involves the emotions," wrote the sage Bernard Brodie in 1959 in Strategy in the Missile Age. "The collapse of inhibitions in the transition from peace to war does not argue well for the containment of the succeeding violence."[7] It was this "collapse of inhibitions" that McNamara, in his adoption of both limited nuclear war theories and the strategy of controlled bombing of North Vietnam, was trying to check.
Yet by 1962 Kahn was coming to symbolize the irresponsible side of such strategems. Kahn was deeply stung when a Scientific American review of On Thermonuclear War called it "a moral tract on mass murder: how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it." Significantly, the managing editor of the journal, Dennis Flanagan, declined to print a rebuttal, telling Kahn, "Surely it is much more profitable to think about the thinkable."[8] Although McNamara never went as far as Kahn in his public language, he went far enough to be criticized for his Marquis of Queensberry rules for nuclear war. McNamara was finding that such talk was not proper for a political leader.
By the fall of 1962, U.S. strategic policy was in confusion. SIOP-63, the revised top-secret operational plan for how U.S. forces were to conduct nuclear war, was now operational and based on counterforce, as McNamara had ordered in February 1961. When he unveiled counterforce-no cities publicly at Ann Arbor, McNamara told the Kremlin that the United States would execute only a limited attack on Soviet forces in the event of nuclear war. But Kennedy, in his television address of October 22, had announced that if any of the missiles in Cuba were launched, the United States would carry out "a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union," a massive attack. Now talking to Alsop, McNamara confused matters worse. Of counterforce, he said, "I would want to be certain we had other options."[9]
Midway through his interview with McNamara, Alsop told him he possessed leaked information that the Soviets were "hardening" their missile sites to allow some of their ICBMs to survive a U.S. counterforce attack. If part of the Soviet force was sure to survive so it could hit the United States in return, were not the days of a U.S. counterforce strategy numbered? McNamara tossed a bombshell back at Alsop.
"His answer [to a Soviet second-strike capability] was in effect, 'the sooner the better,'" Alsop wrote. McNamara replied that the United States already had a secure second-strike capability. Once the Soviets also had forces able to survive a U.S. attack and hit back, "then you might have a more stable 'balance of terror,'" he said.
McNamara's "the sooner the better" view caused a sensation when Alsop published it. The right was aghast. Here was the secretary of defense of the United States, the man responsible for defending the entire free world, who had been eyeball to eyeball with Khrushchev when Soviet deceits brought the world to the brink of holocaust. How could such a man want the enemy to survive the decisive blow on its forces for which the Strategic Air Command and others had spent billions of dollars and more than a decade to be able to carry out? How could he want the enemy to be able to fire back? And "the sooner the better"![10]
McNamara's remark was not as bizarre as it sounded. Early the previous summer the president had ordered an intelligence review of Soviet nuclear forces.[11] The results, presented to Kennedy at a briefing on July 9, concluded that earlier estimates of Soviet ICBM strength, on the basis of which Kennedy and McNamara launched their strategic buildup, were grossly inflated.
The review also confirmed that the Soviets would make some of the ICBM sites "hard," that is, able to survive if a nuclear warhead hit nearby. It stated that the Soviets might build more ballistic missile submarines, which could be difficult for the United States to find and attack all at once. Finally, it said the American people could not really be protected by civil defense, which was still being actively promoted by the administration. A Soviet nuclear attack directed at U.S. cities could kill 88 million Americans, even with civil defense. Thus, both sides were moving toward "parity" in their second-strike ability, which diminished "the prospect of real victors emerging from any major nuclear war."
This review helps explain why McNamara said, when presented with the news of Soviet missiles in Cuba, "I believed, by the time of the Cuban missile crisis, that both sides had parity in their nuclear forces."[12]
The stability of the "balance of terror" was an idea as old as the nuclear age itself. Bernard Brodie had outlined it in Absolute Weapon, his earliest work on nuclear deterrence: Once both sides had secure, second-strike forces, each would be restrained from attacking the other first, creating stability. In addition, once such forces were in place, neither side would have an incentive to build more nuclear weapons. Rand's Albert Wohlstetter developed the definitive conditions for stability and popularized them in a Foreign Affairs article in 1959. But Winston Churchill expressed the concept best during Britain's parliamentary debate over whether to build an H-bomb, in 1955: "Then it may well be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation."[13]
**********************************************
From Chapter 10, "Untying the Knot"
[pp. 187-192]
[After the Cuban Missile Crisis, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara gave an interview to Stewart Alsop which appeared in a December 1, 1962 Saturday Evening Post article.]
The article purported to explain the counterforce-no cities nuclear policy McNamara had announced publicly at Ann Arbor in June, which Alsop dubbed the "Doctrine of Controlled Response." In point of fact, McNamara had been backing off the policy practically since he first articulated it, having encountered nothing but problems. They started with London's and Paris's outrage that through it, Washington was trying to nix their independent control of their respective nuclear forces.
The main problem with counterforce-no cities was that it made McNamara sound as though he were really planning a preemptive first strike, despite official disclaimers. The Kremlin and other critics astutely asked why Washington would wait for the Soviets to attack before it launched its countermilitary attack to disarm Soviet forces. According to military logic, Washington should try to disarm Soviet forces preemptively, before they could begin a strike against the United States.[2]
A second problem was the defense budget for fiscal 1964, then in preparation... The Air Force asked for added Minuteman missiles and for the B-70 bomber and RS-70 reconnaissance version. The generals also wanted to continue the Skybolt nuclear missile, to be launched from U.S. and British bombers against Soviet ground targets, although McNamara had doubts Skybolt would work. In short, the military was using McNamara's counterforce strategy to justify increases in U.S. offensive forces and even a first-strike strategy, just when McNamara realized that his strategic buildup had to stop.[3] Strategic forces were costing $15 billion, one third of the $45 billion defense budget and one sixth of the federal budget.
But the overarching problem with the doctrine was psychological. The Berlin crisis and Kennedy's promotion of civil defense on television and in the pages of Life awakened in the public a gut-level awareness of how horrible nuclear war would be.... Berlin and Cuba caused a shift in perceptions of the new age.[4]
In this climate it was politically unwise for the U.S. secretary of defense to adopt the language of "megadeath" and "controlled and deliberate response." McNamara had been saying publicly that if each side followed a limited counterforce strategy and avoided hitting the other's cities, 25 million Americans would die instead of 75 million in an all-out attack, and that the figure of 25 million was "preferable" to the 75 million. He did not insert the word "only" in front of the reference to 25 million dead Americans, but it could be read there by implication... McNamara's larger figures for Western European deaths played no better on the other side of the Atlantic, where a similar shift of mood was under way. Europeans were often schizophrenic: They called loudly for U.S. displays of nuclear willpower (some German leaders were blaming Kennedy for not having gone to war over Berlin and letting the wall stand) while being privately terrified at the prospect of nuclear war.[5]
McNamara sensed the inappropriateness of his fine-tuned strategy even as he tossed around its cold-blooded terms with Alsop. Thus McNamara was parting company with the formal strategists at the very moment he was most publicly identified with them.
The crosscurrents were ironic. McNamara decided privately during the Cuban crisis that one Soviet warhead from Cuba on one American city was unacceptable just when Herman Kahn, the most controversial of the formal strategists, attained his greatest notoriety.[6] Even among the earliest group of superbright Rand mathematicians and economists, Kahn stood out as a crazy genius. He started work on the mathematical problems of the hydrogen bomb but was soon fascinated with analyzing nuclear war.
The combination of Kahn's provocative personality and deadly subject matter resulted in a series of books that discussed nuclear war scenarios with weird abandon. For example, Kahn conceived of a Doomsday Machine, which he claimed was technologically feasible. It would be a giant computer wired to thousands of H-bombs. When the Soviets committed some unacceptable act, the machine would go to war and fire thousands of bombs, covering the earth with fallout and killing everybody. The Doomsday Machine sounded absurd, but it was only a slight exaggeration of military reality, the top-secret Sunday Punch nuclear war plan that SAC improved throughout the 1950s.
Kahn's deeper point was that the Doomsday Machine was a terrible idea. As the alternative, he worked up scenarios for limited nuclear war. His master plan, which drew the most attention, had the combatants starting small, with a few nuclear bombs, and working their way up forty-four "rungs" of a "ladder of escalation," while the two sides bargained to call the whole thing off.
Kahn lectured widely. On Thermonuclear War was published in 1960 and sold thirty thousand copies in hardcover. In 1962 he issued another ghoulish and hypnotic tome. Thinking About the Unthinkable became a new buzz phrase for what Alsop had called the "oddly fascinating reality" of nuclear strategy. Kahn's writing inspired the 1964 movie hit Dr. Strangelove...
But Kahn's braggadocio, his linguistic abandon and effervescent personality, pushed him beyond the bounds of respectability as the public mood changed. He and his fellow Rand strategists were being responsible in trying to alleviate humanity's greatest threat. But Kahn seemed too detached from the terrible acts he described to a public for whom nuclear war was suddenly real.
McNamara shared Kahn's and his colleagues' ability to keep the emotional horror of nuclear war at arm's length by intellectualizing it. Their formalism and detached language were partly a crutch to control the fears the cataclysm aroused.
The containment of emotion was the precise appeal to McNamara of the Rand strategists as staff advisers and of counterforce-no cities as doctrine. McNamara needed both to prepare himself to act rationally and control his own intense emotions, if war ever came.
Kahn's third book, On Escalation, happened to be published in 1965, at the start of the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, an air campaign that McNamara and others designed on Kahn-like principles of escalation control and bargaining that seemed to work in the missile crisis. What McNamara's fascination with nuclear bargaining scenarios in 1961-62 had in common with his belief in a limited air campaign against North Vietnam in 1965 was that it offered him a way to keep the emotions of war under control.
"War always deeply involves the emotions," wrote the sage Bernard Brodie in 1959 in Strategy in the Missile Age. "The collapse of inhibitions in the transition from peace to war does not argue well for the containment of the succeeding violence."[7] It was this "collapse of inhibitions" that McNamara, in his adoption of both limited nuclear war theories and the strategy of controlled bombing of North Vietnam, was trying to check.
Yet by 1962 Kahn was coming to symbolize the irresponsible side of such strategems. Kahn was deeply stung when a Scientific American review of On Thermonuclear War called it "a moral tract on mass murder: how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it." Significantly, the managing editor of the journal, Dennis Flanagan, declined to print a rebuttal, telling Kahn, "Surely it is much more profitable to think about the thinkable."[8] Although McNamara never went as far as Kahn in his public language, he went far enough to be criticized for his Marquis of Queensberry rules for nuclear war. McNamara was finding that such talk was not proper for a political leader.
By the fall of 1962, U.S. strategic policy was in confusion. SIOP-63, the revised top-secret operational plan for how U.S. forces were to conduct nuclear war, was now operational and based on counterforce, as McNamara had ordered in February 1961. When he unveiled counterforce-no cities publicly at Ann Arbor, McNamara told the Kremlin that the United States would execute only a limited attack on Soviet forces in the event of nuclear war. But Kennedy, in his television address of October 22, had announced that if any of the missiles in Cuba were launched, the United States would carry out "a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union," a massive attack. Now talking to Alsop, McNamara confused matters worse. Of counterforce, he said, "I would want to be certain we had other options."[9]
Midway through his interview with McNamara, Alsop told him he possessed leaked information that the Soviets were "hardening" their missile sites to allow some of their ICBMs to survive a U.S. counterforce attack. If part of the Soviet force was sure to survive so it could hit the United States in return, were not the days of a U.S. counterforce strategy numbered? McNamara tossed a bombshell back at Alsop.
"His answer [to a Soviet second-strike capability] was in effect, 'the sooner the better,'" Alsop wrote. McNamara replied that the United States already had a secure second-strike capability. Once the Soviets also had forces able to survive a U.S. attack and hit back, "then you might have a more stable 'balance of terror,'" he said.
McNamara's "the sooner the better" view caused a sensation when Alsop published it. The right was aghast. Here was the secretary of defense of the United States, the man responsible for defending the entire free world, who had been eyeball to eyeball with Khrushchev when Soviet deceits brought the world to the brink of holocaust. How could such a man want the enemy to survive the decisive blow on its forces for which the Strategic Air Command and others had spent billions of dollars and more than a decade to be able to carry out? How could he want the enemy to be able to fire back? And "the sooner the better"![10]
McNamara's remark was not as bizarre as it sounded. Early the previous summer the president had ordered an intelligence review of Soviet nuclear forces.[11] The results, presented to Kennedy at a briefing on July 9, concluded that earlier estimates of Soviet ICBM strength, on the basis of which Kennedy and McNamara launched their strategic buildup, were grossly inflated.
The review also confirmed that the Soviets would make some of the ICBM sites "hard," that is, able to survive if a nuclear warhead hit nearby. It stated that the Soviets might build more ballistic missile submarines, which could be difficult for the United States to find and attack all at once. Finally, it said the American people could not really be protected by civil defense, which was still being actively promoted by the administration. A Soviet nuclear attack directed at U.S. cities could kill 88 million Americans, even with civil defense. Thus, both sides were moving toward "parity" in their second-strike ability, which diminished "the prospect of real victors emerging from any major nuclear war."
This review helps explain why McNamara said, when presented with the news of Soviet missiles in Cuba, "I believed, by the time of the Cuban missile crisis, that both sides had parity in their nuclear forces."[12]
The stability of the "balance of terror" was an idea as old as the nuclear age itself. Bernard Brodie had outlined it in Absolute Weapon, his earliest work on nuclear deterrence: Once both sides had secure, second-strike forces, each would be restrained from attacking the other first, creating stability. In addition, once such forces were in place, neither side would have an incentive to build more nuclear weapons. Rand's Albert Wohlstetter developed the definitive conditions for stability and popularized them in a Foreign Affairs article in 1959. But Winston Churchill expressed the concept best during Britain's parliamentary debate over whether to build an H-bomb, in 1955: "Then it may well be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation."[13]
**********************************************
[2] Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 213. Enthoven lists some problems with the doctrine in "1963 Nuclear Strategy Revisited," in Ford and Winters, Ethics and Nuclear Strategy, 75, 76. One reason he gives is that "the goal of destroying enough of the Soviet strategic forces to make an appreciable difference in the number of Americans surviving a Soviet retaliatory attack generated an open-ended requirement for more strategic weapons" (75, 81).
[3] The right came out of the missile crisis convinced that U.S. nuclear superiority was the reason Khrushchev backed down, and therefore it renewed the fight for more missiles and bombers. See Claude Witze, "Farewell to Counterforce," Air Force, February 1963, pp. 27-29. Air Force "requirements" are shown in RSM, "Memorandum for the President...DRAFT," November 21, 1962 (hereafter cited as DPM, November 21, 1962). The "first strike" report quoted in Kaplan, Wizards, 315, is dated October 1962, National Security Archive, Nuclear History Collection.
[4] David Halberstam explains the public's change well: "The age was changing, and McNamara sensed the shifts," The Best and the Brightest, 245, 296. Alsop's December 1 Saturday Evening Post article shows the growing public doubts about nuclear war fighting. He quotes a "critic" of RSM's saying, "How can you rely on a weapon as your chief instrument of power when you know that using it will cost you at least twenty million dead?"
[5] Of a large literature, the best description is still Kelleher, Germany and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons. European military attitudes are explored in Steinbrunner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision, and Schwartz, NATO's Nuclear Dilemmas.
[6] Kahn profile --- Kaplan, Wizards, 220-231.
[7] Brodie was a teacher of the Rand nuclear theorists, but unlike most of them, he had started with the study of real wars. Brodie's work is reflective and detached, which sets it apart from much other Rand literature. The quote is from Weigley, The American Way of War, 434, 435, and appeared in Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age, 307.
[8] Kaplan, Wizards, 228; interview, Dennis Flanagan. The review appeared in Scientific American, March 1961.
[9] Stewart Alsop, "Our New Strategy: Alternatives to Total War," Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962; interview, RSM. RSM relates that Alsop said he got the information from the CIA. See RSM, Blundering into Disaster, 46, 47.
[10] Washington News, November 27, 1962; WP, November 26, 1962; Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1963; War/Peace Report, January 1963.
[11] This review was declassified, published, and analyzed in Garthoff, Intelligence Assessment and Policymaking. He notes that hardly anyone considered reducing the planned size of the U.S. strategic forces, despite ever-lower estimates of the present and likely Soviet force in this period --- "the fact of such superiority...was of little relevance at the time," Garthoff writes at 24. See also 1-5.
[12] RSM, Blundering into Disaster, 52-57.
[13] Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age; Kaplan, Wizards, 235; Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror." Churchill is quoted in Schwartz, Nuclear Dilemmas, 47, and taken from Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th ser., vol. 537 (1955), cols. 1893-2012.
