When NSDM-242 was finished, nothing happened at first. Inside the NSC, Dave Aaron feared that the political consequences of the memorandum could be disastrous, that its language opened up the gates to those in the Pentagon who really wanted a counterforce first-strike policy, which Aaron considered highly dangerous. So for several months, Aaron sat on it, fidgeted with a few words here and there, raised doubts, tried to study it into oblivion.
But support for NSDM-242 was growing very strong in the Pentagon. For in July 1973, Nixon had appointed James Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense. While director of the CIA, Schlesinger had been told all about the Foster Panel’s work by his old friend Sy Weiss, and had also sat in on several sessions of Phil Odeen’s interagency group. He saw that throughout the national security bureaucracy, a constituency was developing for the ideas that he had helped formulate in the NU-OPTS project a few years earlier. Now was his chance to translate them firmly into policy. He hired his old friend and mentor from RAND, Andrew Marshall, to be director of the Pentagon’s net assessment office, whose formal task was to compare Soviet and American military forces but which Marshall turned into an intermediate contracting house that wrangled money from other divisions of the Pentagon and handed it out to consultants for studies of strategic ideas that interested Andy Marshall. One such idea was an “improved accuracy program” to develop new technology that would make the Navy’s submarine-launched missiles just as accurate as the Air Force’s ICBMs, that would extend counterforce power across the entire strategic arsenal. The idea would culminate in a new missile called the Trident II.
Schlesinger also brought on board, to be his speechwriter, special consultant and general adviser, William Kaufmann. In the early 1960s, Kaufmann visited his old haunts at RAND a few times each year, spent most of his time there with Andy Marshall and, in the process, met Schlesinger. When Schlesinger became national security director in the Budget Bureau, he hired Kaufmann as a special consultant. When he moved to the CIA, so, for a brief stint, did Kaufmann. It was only natural that he bring Kaufmann back to the Pentagon as well. Kaufmann had been out of the strategic nuclear game for several years, having returned to his earlier interest in NATO and conventional warfare, which he considered more tangible, more firmly rooted in history. In retrospect, Kaufmann saw that once he slipped into the deep, dark pit of nuclear strategy, it was easy to become totally absorbed, living, eating, breathing the stuff every hour of every day, but that once he departed from that realm for a while and scanned it from a distance, it seemed crazy, unreal. When Kaufmann joined Schlesinger in the Pentagon and Schlesinger decided to delve deeply into the nuclear world, he rekindled Kaufmann’s fascination with counterforce strategy—a flame that had never completely been extinguished—and Kaufmann slipped slowly into the pit once more.
Schlesinger was frustrated by the obstructions that the NSC was mounting against NSDM-242. So, on January 10, 1974, at a lunchtime press conference before the Overseas Writers Association, he announced that he was implementing a “change in targeting strategy” in order to develop alternatives to “initiating a suicidal strike against the cities of the other side,” that the old policy of assured destruction was no longer adequate for deterrence, that we needed “a set of selective options against different sets of targets” on a much more limited and flexible scale. In abbreviated form, Schlesinger was describing the strategy of NU-OPTS, the Foster Panel and NSDM-242. Henry Kissinger was infuriated by Schlesinger’s ploy of going public, but it worked. Exactly one week later, NSDM-242 was signed by the President.
Meanwhile, Schlesinger’s remarks were creating a furor in the press and in Congress. The inside history of nuclear strategy over the past decade had been kept largely hidden from even the most interested public. Almost everyone believed that assured destruction really was the official targeting policy, and Schlesinger’s pronouncements were taken as something utterly new and possibly dangerous. Schlesinger needed to wrap his ideas in some cloak of respectability, and that was where Bill Kaufmann always came in handy.
Kaufmann had been in Cambridge the day of the press conference, teaching at MIT, as he did every Thursday and Friday, and had no forewarning of what Schlesinger would be saying. Word reached him after the event, and he didn’t like it at all. Kaufmann had never found appeal in this small-strike, shot-across-the-bow business. He had argued about it with Tom Schelling in 1960 and with Schlesinger in later years. It was too abstract, it didn’t mean anything. At least counterforce was something that Kaufmann knew how to do; the targets made sense, the strategy had military precedent. If you were going to use nuclear weapons, Kaufmann thought, you might as well go for broke or forget about it.
Kaufmann went down to Washington and recast Schlesinger’s ideas in more presentable form. He emphasized that “flexibility” and the idea of bringing the war to a quick ending were nothing new, that they dated back to McNamara’s time, but that now we should make options more flexible still, a notion to which few could object in principle. Moreover, recent intelligence data indicated that the Soviets were beginning to test MIRVed ICBMs. The age-old red flag of SAC vulnerability could be waved with new vigor. Schlesinger could justify his “new” doctrine as a response to this growing Soviet threat. “The Soviet Union now has the capability in its missile forces to undertake selective attacks against targets other than cities,” Kaufmann wrote under Schlesinger’s name in the “posture statement” for fiscal year 1975, the official Pentagon document that justified the annual defense budget. “This poses for us an obligation, if we are to ensure the credibility of our strategic deterrent, to be certain that we have a comparable capability in our strategic systems and in our targeting doctrine….” Schlesinger repeated this rationale in testimony before congressional committees.
Actually, however, this was not what Schlesinger had in mind. Unlike those who were at RAND in the 1950s, Schlesinger carried no obsession with SAC vulnerability. Ever since the U.S. had dispersed its ICBMs, encased them in underground silos and put nuclear-missile submarines to sea, he had never taken the threat of a deliberate Soviet attack against Minuteman very seriously. Nor did Schlesinger believe that a full-scale counterforce attack—by the U.S. or the U.S.S.R.—was feasible.
During the NU-OPTS project, Schlesinger had talked a great deal with an engineer at RAND named Hyman Schulman, who had worked on ballistic missile guidance systems for many years. The ability to destroy blast-resistant targets, such as hardened ICBM silos, depended partly on a weapon’s explosive power but very much more on its accuracy. Strategic analysts generally measured accuracy according to a missile’s CEP, or “circular error probable,” the radius within which a missile will land 50 percent of the time. Yet Hy Schulman observed that random and systematic errors occurring along the flight path of a missile could throw it off course by some distance exceeding the CEP. For years, Schulman had devised mathematical models explaining the sources of error, and had helped adjust the gyroscopes inside the computer guidance systems in several missiles to correct these errors. But there was always some amount of error that the models could not explain. Nor could the source of this error be discovered and, therefore, corrected through some new equation. Only the most precise calibration instruments available could ferret out these mysterious errors, and those instruments were inside the missile, causing some of the errors themselves.