After an ICBM was fired in tests many times, the systematic errors could be measured and the gyroscopes could be tweaked and adjusted to minimize the CEP in future tests. However, Schulman noted that the U.S. tested its missiles on a flight path from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to the Kwajalein Islands in the Pacific Ocean, in other words from east to west. Similarly, the Soviets tested their missiles on a course from west to east. Yet in a real nuclear war each side would get only one shot, and the missiles would have to sail over the North Pole. The problem here was that along different flight paths, the earth’s gravitational pull varied, and so did the degree of systematic error. One could theorize about the direction and the magnitude of error across totally untested trajectories, but one could never really know what they would be.
In short, determining a missile’s counterforce power by observing its CEP was like gauging a marksman’s talents by measuring how tightly grouped his bullet holes were on a target board, without measuring their distance from the bull’s-eye. If several ICBMs were fired at the same point, they might form a nice, tight circle where they landed, but the circle might lie a good distance away from the target.
The problems of systematic error would be partly relieved by shooting two missiles at each counterforce target, but then there would be the additional problem called “fratricide.” The effects of a nuclear explosion included not just blast, heat and radiation, but also scattered neutrons, considerable debris, amazingly high wind velocity, and a thick radioactive cloud of various particles swooped up from the ground. If another warhead came in shortly after the first, it would probably explode prematurely, be blown off target, be eaten away by the neutrons or be destroyed in some other fashion.
Schulman’s work had had a substantial impact on Schlesinger, and had reinforced his long-standing antipathy toward strategies entailing large-scale counterforce attacks. Schlesinger felt that launching a few nuclear weapons against an aggressor using conventional weapons would probably shock him into stopping and coerce him to the negotiating tables, but that if many more weapons beyond that were used, it was all over: escalation to all-out holocaust was virtually inevitable.
In short, Schlesinger really wanted a more refined ability to use nuclear weapons first. But in early 1974, the SALT I arms-control agreement less than two years old, détente with the Russians was popular, and sentiment in Congress and among the public against the straggling Vietnam War—and, by extension, against the military establishment—was at a peak. It was hardly the time for Schlesinger to state very clearly his true intentions on this score. So, although he did tell Congress of his desire for “flexibility and selectivity… to shore up deterrence across the entire spectrum of risk” and for nuclear options “limiting strikes down to a few weapons,” he always placed this desire in a framework of the United States responding to the development of new strategic weapons, or to a possible limited first-strike, by the Soviets.
The result, however, was exactly what McNamara had experienced after the Ann Arbor speech and what David Aaron had predicted would happen if NSDM-242 were signed: advocates of new bombers and missiles and bigger warheads were given a tremendous boost. The Air Force in particular, along with its technocratic allies in the Pentagon’s R&D directorate, pushed with new vigor and legitimacy its case for a new manned bomber, the B-1, accurate cruise missiles and a new ICBM called the MX with supposedly much-improved accuracy and ten MIRV warheads, each of an explosive power twice that of the three warheads on the Minuteman III.
Even though Schlesinger had told Congress and the press that his strategy would not require additional weapons, he had no objections to funding new systems. He believed that “perceptions” were an important element of international relations. The essence of his strategic ideas was to reassure the allies of our commitment to their defense and to ensure that the Soviets understood this reassurance. If it was perceived that the Soviets were ahead of the United States in megatonnage, number of MIRVed missiles, missile throw-weight or whatever indicator one might wish to perceive—no matter whether these leads gave the Soviets any meaningful military advantage—then, Schlesinger thought, it was important to reverse these perceptions and build up our strategic force accordingly. That these perceptions had been created by analysts like Schlesinger in the first place—that throw-weight ratios didn’t bother the allies a bit until some Americans told them that they ought to be bothered—went unnoticed.
Schlesinger’s pronouncements affected not only weapons policy but also the direction of the strategic debate, revitalizing the arguments of those nuclear strategists who had been warning of a Soviet threat to SAC and advocating a first-class American counterforce capability for decades. The most prominent of those was Paul H. Nitze, author of NSC-68 and the Gaither Report, a man who consistently foretold the years of maximum danger for the West in the perpetually near future. Nitze had been a member of the U.S. SALT delegation since 1969 and had been chiefly responsible for negotiating the ABM Treaty of 1972. In June 1974, he quit the delegation. The Watergate scandal was nearing climax and Nitze felt that the pressures were driving Nixon to cave in on SALT just to get a politically popular treaty. Second, Nitze saw danger in the new Soviet MIRVs and thought the forthcoming SALT II treaty was not dealing with the threat. Nitze felt that he could have more impact on the outside.
His first major public statement was a widely read article in the January 1976 issue of Foreign Affairs, in which he argued that the SALT II treaty would not prevent the Soviets from continuing “to pursue a nuclear superiority” that was “designed to produce a theoretical war-winning capability.” The Soviets were deploying MIRVed ICBMs with sufficient megatonnage and accuracy to destroy the bulk of American ICBMs in their silos; at the same time, they had a major civil-defense program. Nitze described a nightmare scenario. If the Soviets evacuated their cities and then attacked SAC with a fraction of their ICBMs, the U.S. would be left mainly with submarine-based missiles, which lacked the accuracy to hit much besides cities. Since the cities would have been evacuated, a retaliatory attack would kill only “three or four percent of the total [Soviet] population.” We would probably not dare to retaliate, since the Soviets would have enough warheads in a reserve force to devastate American cities.
It was essentially a replay of the “nuclear blackmail” scenario that Herman Kahn had laid out in On Thermonuclear War—which was, in turn, a mirror image of the counterforce/no-cities strategy that, a few years earlier, the RAND Strategic Objectives Committee, of which Kahn was a member, had devised as a policy that the United States should adopt.
It was all rather odd. During the 1961 Berlin crisis, at a time when the U.S. had vast nuclear superiority over the Soviets, when the Soviets had only a few strategic weapons, all of them highly vulnerable, when America was in the grip of a civil-defense frenzy, Paul Nitze had been the official most adamantly opposed to exploiting this superiority in any manner. He had voiced the loudest objections to Harry Rowen and Carl Kaysen’s counterforce first-strike plan. At the quadrapartite meetings where the British, French, Germans and Nitze outlined possible joint responses to Soviet moves, he had refused even to talk about using nuclear weapons—not even a few, not even hypothetically. Fifteen years later, he was envisioning leaders in the Kremlin coldly contemplating firing a first-strike against the American ICBM and bomber bases, an attack that would involve at least 2,000 megaton warheads, all the while knowing that the U.S. would, under the brightest of circumstances from their point of view, still have several thousand surviving warheads in its submarines alone. The Soviets would also know, from analyses done by American scientists, that their “surgical” counterforce strike would kill, mainly through radioactive fallout, anywhere from two million to twenty-two million—and, most likely, at least ten million—American civilians. Nitze was arguing that the Soviets could destroy not America’s ability to retaliate, but its will to do so. Yet could he really predict—more important, could the Soviets believe with any confidence—that after thousands of nuclear warheads had exploded on American soil, after millions of Americans had been murdered, the President of the United States would do nothing?