Not everyone in the Carter Administration was fully convinced of the wisdom of these steps. There were several skeptics on the NSC staff, in the State Department, the CIA, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. And there was the Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown.
Brown accepted the premises, the logic and the subsequent programs dictated by the principles of PD-59. But he still felt less than completely comfortable with them. He remembered the studies by General Glenn Kent on “damage-limiting” from the McNamara years, and knew that any counterforce campaign was bound to run into unanticipated problems. In his Pentagon “posture statement” for fiscal year 1981, for example, amidst several pages (written chiefly by William Kaufmann) outlining the rationale for nuclear-war plans that called for more flexible and limited war-fighting options, Brown personally inserted two sentences of his own: “My own view,” he noted, “remains that a full-scale thermonuclear exchange would constitute an unprecedented disaster for the Soviet Union and for the United States. And I am not at all persuaded that what started as a demonstration, or even a tightly controlled use of the strategic forces for larger purposes, could be kept from escalating to a full-scale thermonuclear exchange.” Then, adding a “But” to the next sentence, he let the Kaufmann-composed passages roll on—just as, despite his undoubtedly sincere reservations, he let the strategists who had been pushing these ideas for more than two decades roll on more mightily than at any time in the previous eighteen years.
For Brown agreed with the principle of options, and by this late date, the road of options was a steep and slippery one. It had already been marked and paved by the tightly knit coterie of intellectuals who by now dominated strategic thinking deep inside that hidden infrastructure of the government that every day dealt with matters of the bomb. Once Brown started down that road, he found himself inexorably propelled to its very end.
If during the Carter years the only missing element in the renewed triumph of the RAND tradition was an enthusiastic frame of mind among the highest-ranking officials, that was quickly provided when Ronald Reagan won the White House in the 1980 election. For decades, Reagan had spoken out against the perils of the Soviet threat and in favor of much higher defense spending. The men he chose as his national security advisers leaned in the same direction. Thirty-two members of the new Reagan Administration, including the President himself, had been members of the Committee on the Present Danger. Among them were two of its founders, Eugene Rostow, whom Reagan appointed as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and—back in power at last—Paul Nitze, chosen to head the U.S. delegation to negotiate with the Soviets on reducing nuclear weapons in Europe. Ironically, upon taking power, the Reagan national-security team took such a hard line toward the Russians and against arms control that Rostow and Nitze emerged as moderates by comparison. Rostow was forced out in the first year, in part because he took his title as Arms Control director too seriously. Nitze’s power was trimmed back when he worked out an arms-control formula with his Soviet counterpart behind the scenes in Geneva, and was forcefully rebuffed by his political superiors.
To Reagan and his national security managers, counterforce and its various accoutrements were to be celebrated, not rhetorically qualified. They could openly express their sentiments on this matter because the RAND traditions had long ago become the conventional wisdom, its premises and conclusions accepted almost universally throughout the national security bureaucracy. There was still a large minority, especially in Congress, that criticized such new and expensive weapons systems as the MX missile and the B-1 bomber. And in the first year of the Reagan Administration, many critics took great umbrage when the President or one of his staff let slip too blatant a remark about the possibilities of winning a nuclear war. But even among the critics, practically no one any longer took issue with the fundamentals of counterforce or the theories about SAC vulnerability. If such vital tools for counterforce as the MX missile were criticized, it was because many considered its basing scheme ludicrous or infeasible—not because the Soviet first-strike threat was widely discounted or because the missile itself, with its counterforce power, was in disfavor.
In early 1982, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, signed a Top Secret document known as the “Defense Guidance,” which outlined the Administration’s official strategy. It called for the U.S. to have nuclear forces that could “prevail and be able to force the Soviet Union to seek earliest termination of hostilities on terms favorable to the United States… even under the condition of a prolonged war”—in short, to fight and win a protracted nuclear war. Lying at the heart of this guidance was the old “coercive strategy”: hurt the enemy and make him quit by threatening to hurt him more with a durable reserve force held securely at bay.
This was no mere coincidence. The chief authors of this document were Andrew Marshall, the RAND veteran who had worked on counterforce studies since the early 1950s and who was, from the time Jim Schlesinger appointed him there in 1973, still director of the Pentagon’s net assessment office; Fred Iklé, another former RAND strategist, now Undersecretary of Defense for Policy; and Richard Perle, onetime defense aide to Senator Henry Jackson, now Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. Perle had not come from RAND, but he did receive his first—and seminal—lessons on strategy in the early 1960s, when as a teenager in Los Angeles he held many discussions on the subject with his girl friend’s father, Albert Wohlstetter. Later, during the ABM debate of 1969, Perle was hired as chief research assistant for the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, an outfit that Wohlstetter, Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson set up in Washington to counter the anti-ABM campaign waged by several famous scientists and the arms-control community. After that, he went to work for Jackson, became notorious for whipping up opposition to SALT treaties and grew increasingly close to the group of conservative Democrats who formed the Committee on the Present Danger. Perle was definitely a member of the club.
The policy-makers were heavily assisted by the scientists inside the Pentagon: the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Richard DeLauer, not a strategist but a longtime vice-president of TRW, Inc., a corporation that manufactured many of the high-tech devices that helped make counterforce seem technically feasible; his principal deputy, James Wade, who, in his own words, “learned strategy at the feet of Paul Nitze” as his senior adviser during the SALT I negotiations, and who played an active role in the Foster Panel and the sessions that formulated NSDM-242; and DeLauer’s deputy for strategic and theater nuclear forces, T. K. Jones, technical assistant to Paul Nitze during SALT I, the engineer who drew the graphs and divined the calculations for Nitze’s influential articles in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, and who gained notoriety on his own as a fervent enthusiast for civil defense, telling one reporter that in the event of nuclear attack, Americans should “dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top… If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.”
With Reagan and his men in power, the rules of the strategic community became the rules of the nation, and Pentagon strategy and weapons policy were geared toward total conformance to those rules. Still, there was one awkward and imposing reality: nobody knew how to follow the rules while playing an actual game—nobody really knew how to fight a protracted or limited or coercive nuclear war. This conclusion had been reached before, over and over through the years; and there had since been no new data, studies or grand technological leap to warrant any other. Yet the difference in the Reagan Administration—the difference that frightened so many otherwise apathetic citizens that a popular, broad-based anti-nuclear movement suddenly grew up apparently out of nowhere—was that no one in power seemed to have truly grasped this conclusion.