In this sense, the committee reflected the basic assumptions of Air Force Intelligence, especially SAC Intelligence. LeMay had a phrase for the concept—“the gnome in the basement.” The gnome was Khrushchev or whoever might be dominating the Kremlin, aided by his own military planners. LeMay told his staff that they should picture their counterparts in Russia doing analyses, comparing forces, seeing what they could do, then coming outside, looking at the light, and saying, “No, we won’t attack today.” But one day, the gnome might step out and say, “Yes, the correlation of forces is right today. Let’s go.”
LeMay used the image primarily as a device to keep SAC crews ready at all times. It was a great device for maintaining morale at a constantly high level. But LeMay and his aides also believed it. And, for all their disdain toward Curtis LeMay, so in effect did most of the members of the Gaither Committee.
9
THE REPORT OF MAXIMUM DANGER
THAT THE RUSSIANS were gaining on the United States and were about to overtake us, that the age of the missile gap was upon us, that we were frightfully vulnerable, that the Russians might therefore one day threaten us with their nuclear weapons or actually fire them our way—these were the profound feelings, the firm convictions of the steering panel of the Gaither Committee. The report that they delivered to the White House in early November, entitled Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age, outlined the threat as they saw it and also some military programs to relieve the present danger.
Many of the recommendations were taken from Albert Wohlstetter’s influential R-290 report for RAND. But the committee went further than Wohlstetter and urged stepping up the nation’s missile programs, increasing the number of Atlas and Titan ICBMs to be initially deployed from 80 to 600, making them operational by 1959. They also wanted the Thor and Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles, IRBMs, placed in Europe by 1958, with an initial deployment of 240 instead of the 60 that were planned.
At RAND, Albert Wohlstetter heard that the committee was going to urge accelerated IRBM programs, and was disturbed. Wohlstetter thought that IRBMs were weak and even dangerous weapons for shoring up nuclear deterrence. It was the overseas-base problem, which Wohlstetter had diagnosed in 1953, all over again: the IRBMs would be close to the Soviet Union, but then so would the Soviets be close to the IRBMs; missiles in Europe, therefore, might weaken deterrence by presenting yet another temptingly vulnerable target for the Soviets to destroy preemptively. Wohlstetter and another RAND analyst, William Kaufmann, wrote the committee a letter, urging it to abandon the IRBM proposal, explaining the reasons why. But the letter went largely ignored. Maybe they would be vulnerable, the committee’s reasoning went, but if the Soviets had ICBMs and we had none, then we would have to have some sort of missile. The gap had to be closed, and quickly, before the year of maximum critical danger was upon us.
The committee also recommended a nationwide fallout shelter program. However, the committee divided its recommendations into two groups—“Highest Value Measures” and “Lower Than Highest Value Measures.” The steps to reduce SAC vulnerability and build more missiles—as well as to “augment forces for limited war capability,” one of Paul Nitze’s more forceful contributions to the group’s efforts—were classified “Highest Value”; the civil-defense program was ranked “Lower Than Highest Value.”
In all, the Gaither Committee proposed spending an additional $44,220,000,000 over the next five years—$19,090,000,000 for the Highest Value Measures, $25,130,000,000 for civil defense. The only question that remained was what the President of the United States, the man who ultimately would decide on all this, would say.
In the eyes of the Gaither Committee, things did not seem exceedingly hopeful. Dwight Eisenhower was famously tight with money—his own and the public’s. He was especially tight with money for defense. Shortly after he entered office in January 1953, Eisenhower cut the Truman defense budget for fiscal year 1954 from $41.3 billion to $36 billion, taking the largest share of the cut out of the Air Force. Most people did not know that Eisenhower was acting on the basis of a remark made in April 1953 by General Lauris Norstad, head of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, to the effect that Air Force personnel could be cut by 10 or 12 percent with no detriment to national security. But the Eisenhower cut set the tone for how his Administration would be perceived by those, like many on the Gaither Committee, who thought the United States should be spending much more.
Still, the cut did reflect Eisenhower’s basic attitude. He was on record as disparaging the sorts of analyses that geared the defense effort to some “single critical ‘danger date’ and… single form of enemy action….” Rather, defense must be developed over the long haul, requiring a “strong and expanding economy, readily convertible to the tasks of war.” He consistently opposed building up armed forces “excessively under the impulse of fear,” for that “could, in the long run, defeat our purposes by damaging the growth of our economy and eventually forcing it into regimented controls.” Privately, he often emphasized that the nation had to distinguish between “a respectable posture of defense and an all-out military buildup,” and that “an attempt to be completely secure could lead only to a garrison state, and even then could not succeed.”
A large meeting of the National Security Council, to consider the contents of the Gaither Report, was scheduled for Thursday morning, November 7, 1957. Three days before that session, Eisenhower and a few of his top security aides—Gordon Gray and Robert Cutler of the NSC staff, James Killian of the Science Advisory Committee, and Eisenhower’s staff secretary, General Andrew Goodpaster—met with the Gaither Committee’s advisory board and the three top members of the steering panel, Robert Sprague, William Foster and Rowan Gaither himself. Gaither had not served much on the committee since September, when he was hospitalized with cancer, but he had returned for the last few weeks of steering-panel sessions, and he presented the major findings of the committee at this relatively small November 4 conference with the President.
Eisenhower seemed interested, but said he thought Gaither was exaggerating the threat. Gaither had said, among other things, that a Soviet attack could kill or seriously wound half of the American population. Eisenhower remarked that when each superpower can inflict that sort of damage on its opponent, “we are getting close to absolutes,” and in those circumstances, the active defenses and civil-defense program urged by the Gaither Committee would probably serve little purpose, for “there is in reality no defense except to retaliate.” Eisenhower also said he thought SAC was stronger than the committee indicated, that the bases overseas provided a great capacity for dispersion, and that the free world held the periphery around the Soviet Union and could pose a threat from a multitude of points, whereas the Soviets had no such advantage in their ability to threaten the United States.