Khrushchev threatened war if he did not get his way, and convincingly suggested his indifference to the devastating toll a nuclear exchange would take. Kennedy yielded, allowing Khrushchev to treat East Berlin as if it were Soviet territory. The result, beginning on the night of August 13, 1961, was the sudden, swift erection of the Berlin Wall, which virtually shut down cross-border traffic. The Soviets’ plan, at least as understood by Bobby Kennedy, the president’s brother and attorney general, was to “break our will in Berlin [so] that we will never be good for anything else and they will have won the battle in 1961…. Their plan is… to terrorize the world into submission.”
Kennedy’s advisers put to him a graduated plan for the August 1961 Berlin showdown. If the Soviets were not stopped by allied conventional forces, the U.S. would consider three nuclear options: a demonstration shot to establish will to use such weapons, a limited use on the battlefield, and all-out general war. A top Kennedy defense official, Roswell Gilpatric, warned in a speech that the U.S. would not allow itself to be defeated over Berlin. At least one senior American official, arms negotiator Paul Nitze, believed Berlin more dangerous than Cuba.
Kennedy had designated U.S. General Lucius Clay to command the Berlin crisis with White House supervision. Clay unilaterally sent forces up the Berlin access road, daring the Soviets to prevent their entry into Berlin. Exceeding his orders, Clay also sent tanks to the Berlin Wall, where they confronted Soviet tanks a few hundred yards away across the dividing line. No shots were fired.
The confrontation at the “Checkpoint Charlie” crossing point took place with Soviet forces under a first-ever nuclear alert. In the end, Khrushchev succeeded, and the status of Berlin was changed, with access to the eastern sector cut off despite the postwar treaty. Kennedy told a senior aide, Kenny O’Donnell, that only if the freedom of all Western Europe were at stake would he risk nuclear Armageddon. The Wall stayed, undercutting stern U.S. warnings over Berlin. The day the Wall went up Kennedy stated: “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
Khrushchev took what proved to be the wrong lesson from Berlin. He told Soviet officials: “I know for certain, that Kennedy doesn’t have… the courage to stand up to a serious challenge.” In September 1962 the earthy Soviet dictator told interior secretary Stewart Udall, “It’s been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy. Now we can swat your ass.” He told his son Sergei that over Cuba Kennedy “would make a fuss, make more of a fuss, then agree.”
That the subsequent 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis ended with neither an all-out war nor a city-trade was dismissed as a lucky accident by many observers. Luck was indeed involved, but so were the two sober leaders Kennedy and Khrushchev, both wounded on wartime battlefields and bereft of family members killed in combat. It was Cuban dictator Fidel Castro who asked Moscow to launch an all-out nuclear strike. Moscow warned Fidel that Cuba would be made to disappear—American B-47 bombers based in Florida during the crisis carried 20-megaton H-bombs, a single one of which would have erased Havana. Castro was not moved. Seething with hatred of the United States as his main tormentor, he wanted the strike launched anyway. In 2010, wiser at age 84, Castro admitted that he had made a mistake in urging that contingent course of action in 1962.
In reality, while accidental war was chillingly possible during the Cold War, the superpower leaders were too sober to deliberately launch a nuclear strike. During the Cuban Missile crisis a Russian submarine commander almost launched a nuclear torpedo to sink a U.S. destroyer that was trying to force his diesel sub to surface, using depth charges. Had he done do, does anyone really think that Kennedy would have launched an all-out nuclear strike at the Soviet Union, in the act dooming more than 100 million Americans to incineration? However, fifty years later, as newer powers join the nuclear club, with some possibly led by hotheads like the young Castro, the risk of what Herman Kahn called “spasm war” will grow.
Cold War, Cool Heads, a “Mad” Freeze
AFTER THE close shave of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States turned towards arms control. But Kennedy’s assassination and the escalation of the Vietnam War delayed any action until June 1967, when, in Glassboro, New Jersey, President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin laid the final political groundwork for negotiating superpower arms limitation agreements. The Soviet Union’s August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, however, again derailed such efforts, and for the remainder of LBJ’s administration. Tanks rumbling through Prague provided poor political video to accompany simultaneous arms talks.
The 1967 U.S.-Soviet summit, in the midst of the Vietnam War, coincided with a remarkable decision made by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: freezing the U.S. nuclear arsenal at 1967 numerical levels. In a speech in San Francisco in September of that year, McNamara presented his “assured destruction” doctrine. The McNamara view assumed that each side would deliberately hold its own civilian population hostage to the other side’s offensive forces. Deterring a nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies was “the cornerstone of our strategic policy,” he explained:
We do this by maintaining a highly reliable ability to inflict unacceptable damage upon any single aggressor or combination of aggressors at any time during the course of a strategic nuclear exchange, even after absorbing a surprise first strike. This can be defined as our assured-destruction capability.
McNamara had helped General Curtis LeMay plan his firebombing campaign of 1945 against Japanese cities and was in the midst of rethinking the course of the Vietnam War. He decided that America’s 1967 arsenal—able to destroy roughly a quarter of the Russian population and half of Russian industry—was powerful enough as it stood.
Strategist Donald Brennan appended “mutual” to McNamara’s phrase “assured destruction” to create an acronym indicating how mad the policy seemed to him and other critics. In its grisly logic of deterrence by mutual suicide pact, MAD meant that each side would deliberately keep its own civilian populace without protection—in effect, hostage to the other side’s nuclear striking forces—while protecting commanders and retaliatory forces. (McNamara’s policy prescriptions to the president, however, did not actually focus only on civilian destruction but also included options for targeting Soviet missiles and bombers.) On their side, the Soviets clearly did not believe that mutual assured destruction would be enough to deter a U.S. attack. They ran a massive civil defense program, building underground shelters that could keep millions alive after a strike, while U.S. civil defense efforts, even before MAD, were minimal.
Soon after proclaiming the MAD policy, McNamara left office. Between 1967 and 2009, the U.S. reduced its stockpile of nuclear warheads from 31,255 to 5,133, an 84 percent drop. Russia, meanwhile, continued its own arms buildup for some two decades after the U.S. froze its arsenal—the U.S. call having been made based upon intelligence estimates that were egregiously optimistic.[5]
Despite this reduction, the U.S. could not stop developing new weapons. America was faced with the plausible prospect that Russian ICBMs, if not countered, would create catastrophic U.S. vulnerability. It was a risk that the U.S. could not prudently take, and thus a bipartisan domestic consensus supported ICBM development.
Such a consensus required support for H-bomb deployment, because only the hydrogen weapon packed sufficient explosive power to enable a megaton warhead to fit on a missile. In the 1950s and early 1960s warhead delivery accuracies were measured in miles. Megaton yields were essential to destroy surface targets a few miles away. As missile accuracy improved, thermonuclear warheads could be shrunk in physical size, while ratcheting their yield down to a few hundred kilotons for U.S. warheads; for underground targets like missile silos, improvements in accuracy were vastly more important than increasing yield.