Rathjens made these points in testimony before Senator Albert Gore’s Foreign Relations subcommittee on March 28 and before Senator John Stennis’ Armed Services Committee on April 23. Appearing on the same panel before the Stennis committee was Albert Wohlstetter. Rathjens had told the Gore subcommittee that even if the Soviets had 500 MIRVed SS-9s with accuracy and reliability comparable to American ICBMs, one-quarter of the Minuteman force would still survive an attack. Wohlstetter challenged these figures and discovered that Rathjens had assumed that the blast resistance of Minuteman silos was two-thirds higher than the official classified data indicated. Rathjens had also assumed that the SS-9’s payload could hold four warheads of one megaton each when, in fact, data publicly released since Rathjens had appeared before Gore suggested that the SS-9 actually held three warheads of five megatons each—a payload much more lethal to Minuteman silos. Wohlstetter calculated that if these two assumptions were corrected, only 16 percent, rather than 25 percent, of Minutemen would survive. Like most defense analysts, Rathjens had assumed that 20 percent of Soviet missiles would fail before detonation; but, Wohlstetter noted, had he assumed that half of those failed on the launch pad, allowing the Soviets to fire other missiles in their place, then only 5 percent of Minutemen would survive.
Wohlstetter was a fervent supporter of Safeguard, even more than he had been of Sentinel. Its mission was right up his alley—to rectify the vulnerability of SAC. Wohlstetter increasingly saw the ABM debate not so much as a dispute over the feasibility of Safeguard, but rather as an argument of principle over the sorts of calculations that he had devised in R-290 and “The Delicate Balance of Terror”
Wohlstetter took up the battle against Rathjens the next day in the Stennis hearings, telling the senators that Rathjens’ calculations on Minuteman vulnerability were based on false assumptions concerning the SS-9’s payload and the resistance of Minuteman silos, and also failed to take into account “familiar, well-known methods of arranging it so that you can reprogram missiles to replace a very large proportion of your failures….” Rathjens replied that even if he were wrong about the assumptions, this was only a minor portion of his argument: there wasn’t much difference—in terms of destroying the Soviet Union in a retaliatory attack and thus deterring the Soviets from attacking in the first place—between 250 surviving Minutemen and 50 surviving Minutemen, especially considering the many hundreds of weapons surviving on Polaris submarines and alert B-52s. Furthermore, Wohlstetter’s argument said nothing about whether Safeguard could defend Minuteman if the ICBMs were vulnerable; and besides, there was no basis for believing that either the Soviets or the U.S. actually had this reprogramming technique.
But Wohlstetter relentlessly waged his battle. That fall, he convinced Tom Caywood, a fellow Chicagoan and president of the Operations Research Society of America, an organization of which Wohlstetter was a prominent member, to conduct an investigation into the uses of operations research in the ABM debate, especially into the distortions committed by Rathjens and others in calculating the vulnerability of Minuteman.
Caywood wrote to Rathjens, Jerry Wiesner and an MIT physics professor named Steven Weinberg, another anti-ABM scientist, to inform them of the pending investigation. On December 22, they wrote back denouncing the project as “absurd.” The ABM controversy, they said, “was not a debate between ourselves and Mr. Wohlstetter, or between any fixed group of scholars with recognized spokesmen. Rather, the burden of proof for the Safeguard deployment was carried primarily by members of the Administration, and it was their frequently shifting and contradictory statements with which ABM opponents had to deal.” Any such investigation ought also, therefore, to examine the shifting rationales and selective uses of intelligence data by Melvin Laird, David Packard and Johnny Foster. And far more crucial in the debate were the analyses of Safeguard’s feasibility and effectiveness, especially in the face of likely Soviet countermeasures. They also found it a bit unethical for ORSA to investigate analysts who were not even members of the Operations Research Society.
The ORSA committee’s final report was approved, amid great intercouncil conflict, in a six-to-five vote on May 5, 1971, and was published in the Society’s journal, Operations Research, in September. The majority report adopted Wohlstetter’s position on every issue, and condemned the anti-ABM scientists for producing analyses that were “often inappropriate, misleading and factually in error.” Every mathematical mistake made by the anti-ABM forces, however minute, was catalogued in detail; yet on the charge, for instance, that Wohlstetter’s pivotal assumption concerning missile reprogramming had no empirical basis, the committee excusingly replied that Wohlstetter “does not claim that either we or the Soviets have such techniques now, but only that they are not difficult to achieve”—itself a dubious point—“and should be considered a real possibility if a force has a significantly greater effectiveness with them.” On the broader issues—whether the intelligence data on the Soviet threat were valid, whether Minuteman vulnerability degraded the deterrent power of the U.S. arsenal, whether Safeguard would work—the committee, following Wohlstetter’s definition of the problem to a T, said not a word.
Months before ORSA released its report, the Administration was already conceding several of the points made by the critics. Most notably, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird admitted in hearings, as early as February 20, 1970, that the Soviets could easily build a force that “could actually turn out to be considerably larger than the Safeguard defense is designed to handle.” By April, George Rathjens and Herbert York wrote, “The Administration now recognizes that the radars are the Achilles’ heel of the Safeguard defense of Minuteman.”
The nationwide ABM system that the Soviets were alleged to be building never materialized; they had only sixty-four ABMs around Moscow. The SS-9 turned out not to be a MIRVed missile, nor was it nearly as accurate as Safeguard’s proponents had claimed. Not until late 1974 would the Soviets deploy MIRVs—almost five years after the first American MIRVed ICBMs had been fielded. By 1971, the Administration was selling Safeguard to Congress mainly for its value as a “bargaining chip” in the ongoing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviets. The Senate continued to fund Safeguard, but by very narrow margins. Finally, on May 26, 1972, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. concluded the SALT I Agreement and signed the ABM Treaty, which limited each side to two ABM sites of no more than 100 missiles each. Two years later, they revised the terms to allow one site of no more than 100 missiles. Shortly after that, the U.S. dismantled its single site altogether; the Soviets never deployed more than the sixty-four ABMs around Moscow. Both sides had evidently concluded that the ABM didn’t work well enough to justify its exorbitant cost.
Yet the ABM debate had consequences far more enduring than the immediate issue of Safeguard. It marked the first time that experts outside the Pentagon were extensively consulted on defense issues, a precedent that has since become the norm. And it also influenced what kind of expertise emerged as “respectable”—an expertise dependent on manipulation of quantitative detail often secondary, at best, to the central issues at stake. In the latter stages of the debate, even Rathjens spent so much time contending on Wohlstetter’s own turf that the larger points were often left in the background.