The Foster Panel, as the group called itself, first met in January 1972 and worked on the problem for nearly eighteen months. The main actors were Martin, Wood, Tucker, Foster and Foster’s deputy for strategic systems, Air Force General Jasper Welch, who had helped Foster design weapons at Livermore in the early 1950s. Members of the Joint Chiefs’ staff and other offices also participated, though more aloofly.
A year into the project, Foster decided that someone from the State Department should be brought on, but someone whom Foster could trust to keep it a secret and be sympathetic. Foster’s choice was an old friend named Seymour Weiss, deputy director of State’s policy planning staff. Weiss fit in perfectly. In the early 1960s, working in State’s politico-military bureau, Weiss was particularly troubled about NATO, concerned that the growing Soviet arsenal of nuclear arms made the American commitment to defend Western Europe with the threat of nuclear retaliation less credible. As State’s chief liaison with the Pentagon, Weiss met and befriended such defense analysts as Paul Nitze, Alain Enthoven, Harry Rowen and Bill Kaufmann, who told him all about the counterforce/no-cities strategy. Like Kaufmann, who had embraced the strategy for the same reason, Weiss saw that the concept of limited options would help revitalize the credibility of the U.S. deterrent and the cohesion of the North Atlantic alliance. Over the next several years, Weiss made several trips out to the RAND Corporation, where in the late 1960s he also became intrigued with the small-strikes idea that James Schlesinger was developing in the NU-OPTS project.
And so, among its prime movers—Weiss, Martin, Wood and Foster—the Foster Panel became a forum in which the RAND ideas of the 1950s and 1960s re-emerged as respectable in high officialdom. While these ideas were being discussed, Sy Weiss regularly met with Jim Schlesinger to debrief him and ask for further advice. By this time, Schlesinger was living in Washington. Nixon had appointed him, first, director of the national security division at the Bureau of the Budget, then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, then—in February 1973, as the Foster Panel entered its final months—director of the CIA.
That summer, Henry Kissinger found out about the Foster Panel and, in August, transformed it into an interagency group chaired by Philip Odeen, a former Pentagon systems analyst who now sat on the NSC staff. Virtually all that was left for Odeen to do was to ratify what the Foster Panel had already done. In line with the backgrounds and interests of its members, the Foster Panel had worked out a general perspective that was essentially a mixture of counterforce/no-cities and NU-OPTS.
In the fall of 1973, Odeen’s group finished its work and wrote a single-spaced twenty-page document—called the NUWEP, or Nuclear Weapons Employment Plan—that provided detailed targeting guidance to the JCS, and a shorter, more general memorandum for the White House. This work was in response to an order written the previous summer by Henry Kissinger, known as NSSM-169, and became the basis for a Top Secret National Security Decision Memorandum, to be signed by the President, entitled Planning the Employment of Nuclear Weapons, and labeled NSDM-242.
NSDM-242 was a fair reflection of the work by the Foster Panel. Its premise was that the U.S. needed “a more flexible nuclear posture,” especially one that “does not preclude U.S. use of nuclear weapons in response to conventional aggression.” In the event of conflict, the goal was “to seek early war termination on terms acceptable to the United States and its allies, at the lowest level of conflict feasible.” Doing so “requires planning a wide range of nuclear employment options which could be used in conjunction with supporting political and military measures (including conventional forces) to control escalation.” These options “should enable the U.S. to communicate to the enemy a determination to resist aggression, coupled with a desire to exercise restraint.” The way to accomplish this feat was to “(a) hold some vital enemy targets hostage to subsequent destruction by survivable nuclear forces, and (b) permit control over the timing and pace of attack execution, in order to provide the enemy opportunities to reconsider his actions.”
It was the same conclusion that had been reached by a dozen panels before it. The work by the Foster Panel and the Odeen group was similar to these previous analyses in another sense as welclass="underline" in a crunch, nobody could quite figure out how to translate the theory into practice. MIRVs and more accurate missiles made the task a bit easier than the NU-OPTS project had envisioned: since bombers would no longer have to be used, the war planners would not have to worry about the implications of sending in extra airplanes to suppress enemy air defenses. However, the fundamental problems remained. How do we know the enemy will read the signal properly? How do we know they will, or can, or want to, respond accordingly? What happens next? How do we manage to coerce them any more than they coerce us? How do we end the confrontation? In short, how does one fight a nuclear war?
Meanwhile, the same problems were bothering Henry Kissinger in the White House. During the 1970 Jordan crisis, he had been particularly frustrated that the SAC war plan contained nothing with which the U.S. might threaten the Soviets in some limited fashion. In the spring of 1974, Kissinger asked the JCS to devise a limited nuclear option that the President might order in the hypothetical case of a Soviet invasion of Iran. A few weeks later, two JCS generals briefed the results to Kissinger and a few of his aides, including an arms-control analyst named David Aaron and a former Pentagon systems analyst named Jan Lodal. The JCS solution was to fire nearly 200 nuclear weapons at military targets—air bases, bivouacs and so forth—in the southern region of the U.S.S.R. near the Iranian border.
Kissinger exploded. “Are you out of your minds?” he screamed. “This is a limited option?” It involved way too many weapons. Kissinger told them to go away and come back with something smaller.
A few weeks later, the generals returned. There were two roads leading into Iran from the U.S.S.R. The new proposal called for exploding an atomic demolition mine on one of the roads and firing two nuclear weapons at the other. Again, Kissinger’s eyes impatiently rolled toward the ceiling. “What kind of nuclear attack is this?” he demanded. The U.S. takes the terrible risk of going nuclear and then uses only two weapons? Kissinger told Dave Aaron that if the United States carried out such a plan and if he were Brezhnev, he would conclude that the American President was “chicken.”
It was the perennial dilemma: how to plan a nuclear attack that was large enough to have a terrifying impact but small enough to be recognized unambiguously as a limited strike. Kissinger frequently complained to his aides that the Pentagon’s options weren’t sensible, that they had to press the people over there to come up with something better. Jan Lodal, who was generally put in charge of such tasks, would pliantly tell Kissinger that he was absolutely right and proceed to carry out his orders.
Lodal’s personal view, however, was that there was no conceivable circumstance under which using nuclear weapons would create an advantage. He had read Bernard Brodie’s 1946 book, The Absolute Weapon, and the more engrossed he became in nuclear strategy, the more he agreed with Brodie’s fundamental conclusion: that there could be no winners. But Lodal also felt that a nation had to behave as if it really would use nuclear weapons, or else the credibility of its power to deter aggression against allies might erode in a crisis. And so the analysts had to keep going back to the problem over and over again, even if the problem could never be solved. Besides, Lodal knew that nobody wanted to be the man to step forward in the middle of a ghastly conflict with the Russians and say to the President of the United States, “I’m sorry, sir, but there are no good options in a nuclear war, and there is nothing that you can do about it.”