(Hearings, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, U.S.-U.S.S.R. Strategic Policies, March 4, 1974, pp. 15–17.)
375 “fratricide”: Schlesinger, Annual Defense Department Report, FY 1976 and 197T, p. 1–14; see also John Steinbruner and Thomas Garwin, “Strategic Vulnerability: The Balance Between Prudence and Paranoia,” International Security, Summer 1976.
376 “flexibility”: Schlesinger, Hearings, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, op. cit., pp. 7, 9.
376 framework of response to Soviets: Ibid., pp. 7, 18; Hearings, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Mar. and Apr. 1974, p. 192; Schlesinger, Annual Defense Department Report, FY 1975, pp. 4, 6, 28; FY 1976 and 197T, pp. I–13, 16, II–4, 5; and interviews.
376 “perceptions”: Schlesinger, Annual Defense Department Report, FY 1975, p. 28; FY 1976 and 197T, p. II-8; and interviews.
377 allies had no such perceptions: Lynn Etheridge Davis, “Limited Nuclear Options: Deterrence and the New American Doctrine,” Adelphi Paper #121 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, Winter 1975–76), pp. 11–13.
377 “to pursue”: Nitze, “Assuring Strategic Stability in an Era of Détente,” Foreign Affairs, Jan. 1976, p. 207.
377 “three or four”: Ibid., p. 212.
378 American fatalities: The analysis was done for the Senate by the Office of Technology Assessment in response to a claim by Schlesinger that as few as 25,000 Americans might be killed by a Soviet counterforce attack. Schlesinger estimate: Hearing, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, U.S.-U.S.S.R. Strategic Policies, p. 19. OTA estimate: Report for Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Analyses of Effects of Limited Nuclear Warfare, Sept. 1975; cf. OTA, The Effects of Nuclear War, June 1979, especially pp. 85–86.
378 Soviet civil defense: An unclassified summary of an extensive CIA study on the Soviet program concluded: “We do not believe that the Soviets’ present civil defenses would embolden them deliberately to expose the U.S.S.R. to a higher risk of nuclear attack.” (CIA, “Soviet Civil Defense,” July 1978.) For other skeptical assessments, see Rep. Les Aspin, “The Mineshaft Gap Revisited,” Congressional Record, January 15, 1979; Fred Kaplan, “The Soviet Civil Defense Myth—Parts I and II,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Apr. and May 1978.
379 T. K. Jones assistance: Nitze, op. cit., p. 225. Jones later gained notoriety for claiming that 97 percent of the Soviet population could survive nuclear war, and so could we with enough dirt and shovels. See Jones, Hearings, Joint Committee on Defense Production, Defense Industrial Base: Industrial Preparedness and Nuclear War Survival, Pt. I, Nov. 17, 1976; Robert Scheer, interview with T. K. Jones, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 16, 1982.
379 graphs: Nitze, op. cit., pp. 224, 225; Nitze, “Deterring Our Deterrent,” Foreign Policy, Winter 1976–77, pp. 201–03.
379 Committee on the Present Danger: William Delaney, “Trying to Awaken Us to Russia’s ‘Present Danger,” Washington Star, Apr. 4, 1977; Jerry Wayne Sanders, “Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Legitimation of Containment Militarism in the Korean War and Post-Vietnam Periods,” Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1980, pt. 2.
380 $750 each: Public Records, U.S. Federal Election Commission, Washington, D.C.
380 “principal threat”: Committee on the Present Danger, “Common Sense and the Common Danger,” pamphlet, Nov. 1976.
382 “bomb-damage computer”: An example is D. C. Kephart, Damage Probability Computer for Point Targets with P and Q Vulnerability Numbers, RAND R-1380-PR, Feb. 1974.
382 “only deterrence”: Brown, “Strategic Force Structure and Strategic Arms Limitation,” Mar. 1975, reprinted in Hearings, Joint Committee on Defense Production, Civil Preparedness and Limited Nuclear War, Apr. 28, 1976, p. 130.
383 “it would be”: Brown, Hearings, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, The SALT II Treaty, Pt. 1, July 1979, p. 113.
383 PD-18: Desmond Ball, “Counterforce Targeting: How New? How Viable?,” Arms Control Today, Feb. 1981, p. 2.
383 PD-59: Ibid. PD-59 received enormous attention in the press, but nearly everyone treated it as a completely new departure from the so-called American strategy of assured destruction. For an account of this, see Fred Kaplan, “Going Native Without a Field Map: The Press Embraces Limited Nuclear War,” Columbia Journalism Review, Jan./Feb. 1981.
383 communications vulnerability: See Desmond Ball, “Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?” Adelphi Paper #169 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, Fall 1981); William J. Broad, “Nuclear Pulse—Parts I, II, III,” Science, May 29, June 5 and 12, 1981; Broad, “A Fatal Flaw in the Concept of Space War,” Science, Mar. 12, 1982.
26: DANCING IN THE DARK
385 200 MX missiles and shell game: See Harold Brown, DoD, Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1981, Jan. 29, 1980, pp. 127–30.
385 “My own view”: Ibid., p. 67.
386 despite reservations: It should be noted that, after quitting the Pentagon in 1980, William Kaufmann, once again let out of the nuclear-strategy pit, started to express reservations himself about the practicality of war-fighting theories. See especially Kaufmann, “The Defense Budget,” in Joseph Pechman, ed., Setting National Priorities: The 1983 Budget (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1982); and Kaufmann, quoted in Fred Kaplan, “Nuclear War Strategy Not New—Or Practical,” Boston Globe, June 13, 1982.
386 Thirty-two members: Information from Committee on the Present Danger, Washington, D.C.
387 criticism of MX basing plan: Reagan scrapped the multiple-shelter plan after taking office, partly because it was Carter’s plan and he had campaigned vigorously against Carter’s defense program; partly because his good friend Sen. Paul Laxalt of Nevada pressured Reagan to drop it after learning that the residents of Nevada, where many MX missiles would be based, did not want it there; partly because Defense Secretary Weinberger realized the obvious, that even with 4,600 shelters, the Soviets could build enough warheads to destroy each shelter. After many starts and stops, Reagan announced a plan called “Dense-Pack” or “Closely Spaced Basing,” in which 100 MX missiles would be put in “super-hardened” shelters spaced very closely together, so close that the attacking Soviet warheads would have to re-enter the atmosphere along a very narrow corridor of sky. The effects of “fratricide”—the first warhead killing its brother warheads through its radioactive debris, blast and wind velocity—would prevent all the other warheads from destroying the MX silos. By late 1982, many officials were beginning to see serious problems with this plan as well. Finally, Weinberger said that the MX would simply be placed in existing Minuteman missile silos. All talk of a “window of vulnerability” ceased. In 1983, Congress funded production of the MX only because Reagan struck a deal agreeing to be more “flexible” in his statements on arms control if Congress agreed to approve money to start building MX missiles. By the spring of 1984, support for MX was evaporating, especially in the House of Representatives. Even so, most of the critics were opposed because a satisfactory basing solution—an answer to the window of vulnerability—had not been found, not because the MX was a counterforce weapon.