In his landmark book, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, author Michael Dobbs writes that in 1962 the Pentagon estimated the Soviets had 86 to 110 ICBMs (versus our own 240), but that the actual Soviet total was 42. Surely a contributing factor was Khrushchev’s public bluffing as to how the Soviets were growing ICBMs like sausages, while privately telling his son Sergei that the USSR had little of either product.
However, Paul Nitze explained that there was a second gap: Russia led in medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. These were the main spearhead of Russian missile deployments in Cuba. The threat posed by these missiles guided U.S. policy during the 1962 crisis. Nitze also cited a Soviet budget expert’s assessment that the beginning of a 25-year Soviet strategic force buildup began at least a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis. The early intelligence overestimates of Soviet ICBM deployments surely were a large factor in later intelligence underestimates, via the classic pendulum swing that often follows major organizational failures.
Nitze points out that the theory of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) is that they look to non-U.S. capabilities only, and do not attempt “net assessments”—those based upon comparing forces. Yet forward net assessments became what most NIEs did, due to bureaucratic biases in favor of trying to look ahead. It was a task rarely done well, due to biases built into assumptions.
APPENDIX 4:
MISSILE DEFENSE VERSUS MULTIPLE WARHEADS
THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF NUCLEAR ARMS CONTROL WERE developed in the West long before small powers of questionable stability came into possession of nuclear weapons. Calibrated to the threat from a hostile superpower, decisions taken 40 years ago created a mindset that persisted past the demise of that superpower 20 years ago.
Failure of the U.S. to deploy an effective missile defense against a small-power attack is a product of superpower arms control. Binding arms-control constraints began with SALT I in 1972. The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty severely limited missile-defense design and deployment in the United States. Defensive system design since then has aimed not for the best products that technology and innovation can produce. Rather, system design has been governed by the maximum technological result deemed permissible under strategic arms-control principles as they were understood forty years ago. The result has been systems of perilously stunted capability, making a successful strike by a small power achievable.
Just how this came to pass teaches a crucial lesson in arms-control efforts: how limitations that to many appeared reasonable in one strategic context—the Cold War face-off against a massively armed superpower—proved obsolete and even dangerous decades later, when emerging powers in possession of or seeking small arsenals of far less sophistication menace the free world. Missile defense against 1,000 ICBMs might never work within the limits of existing technologies; defense against 10 or 20 ICBMs might work.
Missile defense became inextricably intertwined with MIRV—multiple independently targeted vehicles (warheads). Put simply, the more warheads could be directed at targets, the harder it would be for defensive systems to intercept them. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, missile defense systems increasingly faced offensive systems whose growing size and hence payload capacity enabled carrying initially lightweight decoys and then, as warhead sizes drastically shrunk, multiple warheads. As attacking warheads increased, the burden on missile defense increased commensurately. As decoys confused sensors, the task of shooting down warheads became far more daunting.
These large offensive systems with multiple warheads were first deployed in 1964 on the U.S. Navy’s Polaris A-3 submarine-launched ballistic missile. Soon after, it became possible to design a missile that dispensed a series of independently targeted warheads. The navy was first to deploy these MIRV systems in 1971. MIRV developments in America and Russia went along roughly in parallel—most American officials were convinced that American restraint on MIRV would not be reciprocated by the Soviets.
Missile defense capabilities deployed to date cannot intercept ICBMs, which travel at four miles per second (nearly equal to the five-mile per second orbital velocity of satellites), twice the speed of intermediate-range missiles and about four times the speed of a short-range missile (like the Scud). Such superfast warheads cannot be tracked and intercepted by existing defensive systems.
But the Russians feared that America would be able to surmount missile defense limitations. When U.S. Secretary of Defense McNamara lectured Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin on the dangers of missile defense at the 1967 Glassboro (New Jersey) Summit, Kosygin countered him with Occam’s Razor (a rule of preference for the simplest explanation): “When I have trouble sleeping, it’s because of your offensive missiles, not your defensive missiles.” McNamara was focused on defensive missiles because he accepted MAD. There is no credible evidence that the Soviets accepted MAD, except, perhaps, as Mainly America’s Destruction. The Soviet Union’s extensive civil defense program indicated a desire to save its population, which is utterly inconsistent with MAD. Even if the shelters would have proven useless, the government’s intention in building them was to protect the very people MAD was supposed to hold at risk. (Nor did America fully accept MAD, as noted in the text.)
As arms talks progressed in the Nixon administration, domestic opposition to ABM—an acronym of Cold War origin that denotes anti-ballistic missiles, still used by many—began to build. Such systems were far more widely known than MIRV, and thus became the primary focus of arms-control attention.
The ABM/MIRV case was a classic example of strategic systems whose development was so closely linked that the “action-reaction” cliché often used by arms controllers—that each side’s programs were primarily driven by similar moves by the other side—held an initial measure of validity. That theory, however, suggested that American restraint would have been reciprocated. By the mid-1970s it became clear that far from emulating American decisions, the Soviets were continuing their massive military buildup despite considerable American restraint, including freezing offensive forces at 1967 numbers. This should not have come as a surprise, in that American and British restraint during the 1920s and 1930s pursuant to the interwar naval treaties did not dissuade Nazi Germany and militarist Japan from rushing pell-mell to build far beyond the limits they had nominally agreed to accept. Nor have the post-1967 proliferators—India, Pakistan, South Africa, North Korea, and nuclear-club wannabe Iran—followed U.S. nuclear restraint.
The 1972 ABM Treaty did not halt development of MIRV. The price of gaining broad support for the first arms-control treaty between the U.S. and USSR included deployment of several modern strategic systems, including those incorporating MIRV. The rationale driving deployment was that as Soviet missiles became more accurate a smaller number of missiles would survive a surprise attack, and these would need enough warheads to be able to fully retaliate and thus preserve deterrence.