Nitze’s estimate that only 3 or 4 percent of the Soviet population would be killed by American retaliation came from an official Soviet civil-defense manual. Had he forgotten about claims during the Berlin crisis that an American civil-defense program could save 97 percent of the population and how quickly those estimates had crumbled under even casual analysis? Nitze was also aware that the U.S. nuclear war plan called not for killing civilians, but rather for destroying military and industrial facilities. Even the submarine-launched missiles could destroy many of those—and the war plan had them doing so. McNamara may have said that the U.S. must have the ability to kill 25 percent of the Soviet population to deter nuclear war. But in the SIOP, at SAC, where it counted, there was no such requirement. There, civil defense played virtually no role in the strategic equation.
With the aid of his chief technical assistant on the SALT team, a hawkish engineer from the Boeing Company named T. K. Jones, Nitze attempted to state the strategic balance between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in mathematical terms. In a series of graphs that accompanied the Foreign Affairs article and in another called “Deterring Our Deterrent” in Foreign Policy, Nitze and Jones showed that after a counterforce first-strike by the Soviets and a counterforce second-strike by the U.S., the Soviets would end up with far more megatonnage, missile throw-weight, missiles and warheads than the United States. But did this mean that the President would—or, for that matter, could—carefully tote up the numbers left on both sides, see that he was behind and throw in the towel? The questions that had been asked, time and again, at the end of studies and exercises on U.S. counterforce and NU-OPTS strategies applied equally to the Soviet Union: What happens next? How does the war end? How do you fight a nuclear war?
Nitze’s articles hit new heights of abstraction in strategic thought. They reflected an absolute faith in the power and significance of theoretical calculations, and in the desire and ability of human beings, amid the passion and fog of war, to behave according to a standard of reason established by such calculations.
Yet over the next few years, Paul Nitze set the tenor and terms of the debate, both inside the government and out, over nuclear arms and strategy. He did this mainly through the vehicle of an organization that he helped set up called the Committee on the Present Danger. A few months before his Foreign Affairs piece appeared, Nitze met with some old friends—mainly Yale law professor Eugene Rostow (Walt’s brother), former Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard, former Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler and corporate lobbyist Charls Walker—who were also concerned about the growing Soviet threat and the apathy in the land. They thought about starting a nonpartisan organization that would awaken the people before it was too late. They were encouraged in their efforts by Secretary of Defense Jim Schlesinger, who thought that such a group would help rouse support for his defense budget.
In November, President Gerald Ford fired Schlesinger and replaced him with his friend Donald Rumsfeld. Henry Kissinger had convinced Ford that Schlesinger was out to torpedo SALT, and Ford had never felt comfortable with Schlesinger’s condescending style. The incident finally moved Nitze and Rostow to get their organization started. In March, the Committee on the Present Danger was formed. The title was Gene Rostow’s idea; he remembered another committee of that name that had been set up by eminent men during the Korean War to urge higher defense spending and a return to the draft.
Meanwhile, the leading contender for the Presidency in the 1976 Democratic primaries was turning out to be an unknown quantity named Jimmy Carter. Nitze hopped aboard Carte’s campaign even before the Iowa Caucus, Carter’s first electoral victory. Nitze sent Carter several of his speeches. When the two met in Washington, Carter told him that he had read not only those speeches but also a few that Nitze had not even sent him. Nitze was flattered. He sent Carter some more. In June, he and his wife each contributed $750 to the Carter campaign. After Carter won the election in November, Nitze joined his transition team.
But when Carter took office in January, Nitze was out. He was offered no job, and neither were his friends. Moreover, those who did get high positions under Carter held views diametrically opposed to Nitze’s. Paul Warnke, Cyrus Vance, Harold Brown, David Aaron, Leslie Gelb, Anthony Lake—all doves, men who had opposed counterforce, who thought that nuclear weapons had little utility beyond deterring war, who held a more sanguine view toward the Soviets than Nitze felt was responsible. To Nitze’s mind, dangerous men were in power at a perilous time. He began to loathe Jimmy Carter, his views on the issues, his judgment in people. He felt personally betrayed.
The Committee on the Present Danger was galvanized by the Carter Administration. Its members printed dozens of pamphlets, issued press statements, gave speeches and raised plenty of money, warning the land that the “principal threat to our nation, to world peace, and to the cause of human freedom is the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup” and that the “Soviet Union has not altered its long-held goal of a world dominated from a single center—Moscow.” It was the essential message of NSC-68, the Cold War blueprint that Paul Nitze had authored twenty-five years earlier, combined with the analysis of his Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy articles on how the Russians could deter our deterrent.
When Jimmy Carter signed the SALT II Treaty with the Russians in June 1979, Nitze went on the warpath. SALT II was a modest treaty; its advocates maintained that it put a limit on how many warheads the Soviets could load onto their ICBMs and how large their ICBMs could be and that it constrained the expansion of their overall forces while placing virtually no constraints on the weapons that the U.S. wanted to build at the same time.[6] But to Nitze, the treaty was a disaster because it left the Soviets with a huge superiority in the megatonnage and throw-weight of their missiles, creating an imbalance and endangering Minuteman. Nitze testified passionately against the treaty, lambasted it in speeches and debates and on TV talk shows across the nation. For a man of seventy-two, it was a remarkably energetic crusade.
In the process, Nitze dominated the debate. That summer, during the SALT II hearings before Congress, senators, journalists and ordinary citizens got caught up in a whirlwind of esoterica on throw-weight ratios, single-shot kill probabilities, counterforce targeting and nuclear-exchange calculations. The Carter Administration contributed to the atmosphere, going along with Nitze’s terms and arguments, hoping to buy off conservative senators by admitting to potential imbalances and promising to boost the budget and fix the problems if they voted for SALT II. For many observers, it was the first time that they had heard these concepts discussed in any detail, and they found the technology, strategies and calculations endlessly fascinating. They also found out that virtually anyone could do the calculations to determine Minuteman vulnerability. All one needed was a “bomb-damage computer,” a circular slide rule readily available from RAND and other think tanks. You just assumed the explosive power and CEP of a bomb and the blast-resistance of its target—data that were commonly discussed in the SALT debate. You then spun the plastic wheels of the bomb-damage computer until the arrows lined up with those numbers. Then you looked at the appropriate window, and there was the “kill probability.” If it read 0.9, that meant that 90 percent of Minuteman could be killed by a Soviet first-strike. It was easy, all too easy.
6
SALT II would have, among other things, limited both sides to 2,400 strategic missile launchers. Of them 1,320 could be either MIRVed missiles or bombers capable of firing air-launched cruise missiles, but no more than 1,200 of the 1,320 could be MIRVed missiles. At the time, the U.S.S.R. had 2,504 missile launchers while the U.S. had only 2,283. (The U.S. had more warheads, however.) Both sides had well under 1,200 MIRVed missiles. The treaty would also have limited the number of “heavy” MIRVed ICBMs, such as the U.S.S.R.’s SS-18, to 308—the exact number that the Soviets had at the time—and would have limited the number of warheads that could be placed on such missiles to ten, even though the Soviets could have loaded many more, if they so desired, without the treaty. The U.S. had no heavy missiles, nor did its military see a need for any. (The proposed MX was too light to qualify for “heavy” status, although it could do all the things that a ten-warhead SS-18 could.) In these and many other provisions, the U.S. could continue to do pretty much whatever it was planning to do already, while slight restraints were imposed on the Soviets.
After a succession of political scares in 1979—reports of Soviet troops in Cuba, the revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—along with the ascension of the Committee on the Present Danger, Jimmy Carter, seeing that he would not get the two-thirds majority needed to pass a treaty, declined to present SALT II to the U.S. Senate. Nevertheless, two years later, even the hawks in the new Ronald Reagan Administration who had attacked the treaty in the Carter years decided it was worthwhile to abide by the provisions of this signed but unratified treaty.