At the height of the missile-gap period, Albert Wohlstetter decided to go public. It was an unusual thing to do among the RAND strategists. With few exceptions, they had stuck to the more restricted world of top-secret studies and high-level briefings. First, there was the matter of security: not much could be said without broaching regulations on classified materials. Second, there was the elitist notion, pervasive at RAND, that influencing military officers and Pentagon officials was what really counted, that airing views to the general public served little purpose and might, in fact, be seen as stepping out of bounds or displaying disloyalty to RAND’s sponsor, the U.S. Air Force. Third, at least in Wohlstetter’s case, there was the condescension toward “the essay tradition,” toward popular articles that lacked or failed to reflect the rigors of systems analysis.
Still, in May 1958, Rowan Gaither, Phil Mosley, a professor at Columbia who also sat on RAND’s board, and Jim Perkins, a former adviser to the Gaither Committee, asked Wohlstetter to give a talk on SAC vulnerability to the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Naturally, Wohlstetter accepted. Among the attendants was Hamilton Armstrong, editor of the Council’s influential quarterly, Foreign Affairs. Armstrong was impressed with the talk and asked Wohlstetter to write it up for the journal.
The article appeared in the January 1959 issue, and was titled “The Delicate Balance of Terror.” It was essentially a distillation of the two major works that Wohlstetter had directed at RAND, the overseas-base study and R-290. Yet unlike those analyses, “The Delicate Balance of Terror” was aimed at the “outsiders” taking part in the defense debate, the civilian “defense-intellectual” community in Washington and at Harvard and MIT, the denizens of the foreign-policy establishment who read and wrote for magazines like Foreign Affairs and who influenced the tenor and substance of the general discussion of all such issues.
It had been a nearly universal assumption among this outside community, even among those who vigorously disagreed about much else, that America’s ability to retaliate after a Soviet first-strike was pretty well assured. Wohlstetter’s article challenged that assumption. Without quantifying the argument, as he had in the classified report, he made the basic point that SAC was terribly vulnerable, that the U.S. might not be able to retaliate with enough power to deter Soviet aggression. The public debate, he wrote, was misleading on this score, tending to confuse deterrence “with matching or exceeding the enemy’s ability to strike first,” when the critical element was to build a nuclear force that could survive a Soviet first-strike and proceed to carry out a devastating second-strike.
That thesis had been around ever since Bernard Brodie wrote The Absolute Weapon in 1946, but it was news to most readers when Wohlstetter wrote that the “notion that a carefully planned surprise attack can be checkmated almost effortlessly, that, in short, we may resume our deep pre-Sputnik sleep, is wrong….” Correcting the problem of vulnerability and maintaining the delicate balance of terror will involve measures that “are hard, do involve sacrifice… and, above all… entail a new image of ourselves in a world of persistent danger.” He concluded, “It is by no means certain that we shall meet the task.”
The article created a huge sensation among the defense intellectuals along the Washington-New York-Cambridge corridor. Its language was somber, its logic compelling, its tone and argument confirming the general feeling among the foreign-policy establishment that Eisenhower was bungling the job miserably and putting the nation at great risk.
More critically, at a time when many feared that the Russians were surpassing the United States, Wohlstetter’s article helped create an intellectual framework in which this fear could be stated respectably. The danger was not the “international Communist conspiracy” or anything of an embarrassingly ideological or, for that matter, political nature. Rather, it was this almost mechanical concept of a very delicately balanced set of scales that once tipped even slightly off balance, threw the entire order of international relations out of kilter, placed the West in supreme danger, wiped out the deterrent power of America’s nuclear weapons and slid the world toward the precipice of a calamitously destructive war that the Soviet Union would almost certainly win.
Wohlstetter had diligently sought to avoid any connection between his article and the missile-gap thesis. Indeed, he explicitly stated in the piece that numerical comparisons between Russian and American missile arsenals were beside the point, that it was how much strength we had after a Soviet first-strike that counted. But his views were actually much closer to those of the missile-gap doomsayers than he cared to acknowledge. They were subtler and more sophisticated, but the assumptions in both were identical. They were based on the highly pessimistic intelligence estimates that lay at the heart of the missile gap. And they contained the same assumptions about Russian intentions, the same judgment that the Soviets would very likely threaten to attack the United States once they had, on paper, the technical ability to do so.
Wohlstetter’s contribution to the period was an escalation of the intellectual plane on which the missile gap could be blithely assumed and seriously discussed. The very phrase “missile gap” was coming to symbolize everything complacent, stultified, unforward-looking about the Eisenhower Administration. For those who sensed that merely comparing missile numbers might be a popularly potent but intellectually inadequate critique of Eisenhower’s defense programs, “The Delicate Balance of Terror” provided a new platform for attack. Among the critics who would inevitably have great influence in the next Democratic Administration, the RAND technique of how to assess the strategic balance and how to deter nuclear war—developed and calculated in detailed studies over nearly the past decade—triumphed.
Over that same decade, another thread of ideas was being spun at the RAND Corporation—ideas about not only how to deter nuclear war, but also how to fight one.
11
THE MASSIVE-RETALIATION SPEECH
ON JANUARY 12, 1954, almost exactly one year into the Eisenhower Administration, John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, delivered what was announced ahead of time as a major address before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. For many years after, it would be known simply as “the massive-retaliation speech,” and would serve as the fulcrum around which a great debate would revolve for at least the rest of the decade.
The speech began by criticizing the Truman Administration for having created a foreign policy geared almost entirely toward reacting to emergencies. “Emergency measures are costly; they are superficial; and they imply that the enemy has the initiative.” More important, Dulles said, was to look at national security from the perspective of a “long haul.” The “Soviet Communists are planning for what they call ‘an entire historical era.’” Dulles said, “and we should do the same. They seek, through many types of maneuvers, gradually to divide and weaken the free nations by overextending them in efforts which, as Lenin put it, are ‘beyond their strength, so that they come to practical bankruptcy.’ Then, said Lenin, ‘our victory is assured.’ Then, said Stalin, will be ‘the moment for the decisive blow.’”