The central ideas of the nuclear strategists—that nuclear war could be calculated with precision, that SAC vulnerability was the central threat of our time, and that the U.S. had to build up a strong counterforce capability—emerged as the conventional wisdom.
The Carter Administration was headed in this direction already. When he first became President, Jimmy Carter spoke of reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world to zero. His Defense Secretary, Harold Brown, was skeptical about the wisdom of counterforce. In a speech to the Moscow Institute of U.S.A. Affairs in March 1975, while he was president of the California Institute of Technology, Brown proclaimed that “only deterrence is feasible,” that nuclear war-winning or coercive strategies were impractical.
Yet in the four years of the Carter Administration, options for nuclear war-fighting were set in policy more firmly than ever before. Carter’s switch was popularly explained, at the time, as a product of his campaign to appease the hawkish right wing of the Senate so that its most influential members would vote to ratify the SALT II arms-control treaty that he had negotiated with the Soviets. Also a powerful force was the influence of Carter’s Polish-born Russophobic national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Columbia University academic and a perennial hardliner toward Moscow. And there were the Russians themselves: their continued testing of advanced MIRVed ICBMs, their probing maneuvers in unstable areas of the third world, their invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
But more critical than any of these factors in turning the Carter Administration around was activity going on behind the scenes—the wave of momentum started by the Foster Panel, which at this point had reached so mighty a crest that Carter could not help but be carried along with it. At first, both Carter and Brown wanted to scrap the whole approach of NSDM-242. But then Brown was briefed on the work of the Foster Panel and the Odeen group by officials who had participated in the studies. Brown also retained the consulting services of William Kaufmann and discussed the issues with him. Before long, Brown recognized what McNamara had concluded nearly two decades earlier: that having options was better than having no options, that however unlikely it may be that a nuclear war could be kept limited, “it would be the height of folly,” as Brown told a congressional committee, “to put the United States in a position in which uncontrolled escalation would be the only course we could follow,”
Once that assumption was accepted, the rest was almost inevitable. On August 24, 1977, Carter signed Presidential Directive No. 18, or PD-18, which reaffirmed NSDM-242 and the NUWEP as national policy. In 1978, a new targeting study was ordered, called the Nuclear Targeting Policy Review. The end result was an official document called PD-59, signed by Jimmy Carter on July 25, 1980. It ordered options that were still more limited, a withheld reserve force that was slightly larger, a greater emphasis on using nuclear weapons to destroy conventional military targets of the Soviet military as well as its nuclear targets, including targets that might be moving on the battlefield; and it planned more explicitly for the possibility of fighting a nuclear war over an extended period of time—days, weeks or longer—a task requiring vast and highly expensive improvements in the nation’s command-control-communications network, especially in satellite systems that could survive a nuclear war.
Many weapons scientists thought that the mission was impossible, that some communications facilities could be “hardened” to resist nuclear effects, but only to a degree, and that degree would not be enough to withstand the blast, radiation and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion. The communications systems were like the President’s eyes and ears; if they or their transmission links were zapped, fried or blown up, he would have no way to control the war. The notion of continuing to use nuclear weapons in a fine-tuned fashion, sending subtle signals and gauging the opponent’s response, would become practically impossible; and the likelihood of escalation to all-out holocaust would therefore be very high. Still, “protracted nuclear war-fighting” was the mission and the Pentagon would spend tens of billions of dollars trying to accomplish it.
Moreover, this time around, the Strategic Air Command was cooperative. The same colonels and generals who had taken an interest in the theories of RAND in the 1960s had infiltrated SAC by the 1970s. General Russell Dougherty, who had played a role in the NU-OPTS project, was SAC Commander from 1974 to 1977, and he was followed by another NU-OPTS veteran, General Richard Ellis, who held the post when PD-59 was signed. Ellis had his doubts whether something like PD-59 could be carried out with existing technology, but—in contrast with a Curtis LeMay or a Tommy Power—he had no arguments with the wisdom of its principles.
Fundamentally, there was nothing new about PD-59. It was merely an elaboration of NSDM-242, which grew out of the Foster Panel, which was explicitly based on McNamara’s SIOP-63 guidance of 1961–1962, which was modeled on a decade of analysis at RAND. The Nuclear Targeting Policy Review, which led to PD-59, was handled in part through the Pentagon’s office of net assessment, still run by Andy Marshall. It was ultimately directed by a Pentagon analyst named Leon Sloss, who had worked on the Foster Panel under Seymour Weiss at the State Department. Sloss hired dozens of consultants to work on specific aspects of the review. Among the consultants who made the deepest impression on Sloss’s own thinking about the broad strategic issues were Albert Wohlstetter, Harry Rowen and Herman Kahn—the father, son and holy ghost of the spirit of the RAND Corporation. They had been among the prophets, and now they at last saw their commandments carved into stone.
26
DANCING IN THE DARK
BY THE TIME Jimmy Carter and Harold Brown left office, then, every tenet of the RAND philosophy was set in place as official U.S. policy. Counterforce was endorsed with an affirmation and refinement that exceeded even the pronouncements of James Schlesinger. Moreover, the Carter Administration made every effort to make the philosophy more practical. Carter approved the production of 200 MX missiles, which the Air Force had proposed a few years earlier as the ideal weapon for killing “hard targets,” such as the latest Soviet ICBM silos. He also ordered that each of the missiles would be moved about among twenty-three silos, as in an elaborate carnival shell game, so that the Soviets could not know just where the missile was, forcing them to go to much greater efforts—firing at 4,600 holes in the ground instead of 200—if they wanted to launch a counterforce first-strike themselves. This multiple-shelter plan, reflecting a fear of “SAC vulnerability” pushed to its extreme limits, was to be put into effect at a cost of well over $40 billion.