“If you really believe in the present SIOP,” Stern told them, “then you agree that we should fire all the generals, because everything’s worked out ahead of time. We’re just going to fire off everything, and no generals have to be around to make decisions. But as you know, wars don’t happen that way. We need generals to make decisions.”
The appeal was transparent to the entire audience but it worked. Besides, they knew that they would get no more money for Minuteman until they did what Stern—and, obviously, McNamara—wanted. They gave in, changed the command-control electronics and added “selective-launch” and eight “target-selection” features to each Minuteman, at a total cost, eventually, of $840 million.
Early that fall, to help him justify his defense budget to President Kennedy, McNamara asked Alain Enthoven to compose what he called “Draft Presidential Memorandums,” or DPMs, one crisply written, fully detailed Top Secret exposition for each major segment of the budget. In 1961, there were only two DPMs—one for Strategic Nuclear Forces, one for General Purpose (non-nuclear) Forces. By 1968, there would be sixteen, including Mobility Forces, Land Forces, Tactical Air Forces, Theater Nuclear Forces and so forth. Throughout the McNamara years, the DPMs represented the most authoritative, analytical articulation of the rationale behind the defense budgets, policies and strategies. When a reporter once asked him if he planned to write memoirs, McNamara replied that he had already done the DPMs. “They’re a far better source than any personal memoirs,” he said.
The first DPM sent to President Kennedy, dated September 23, 1961, urged halting production of the B-52 bomber after 630 had bean built and phasing out the B-47s and B-58s entirely, reasoning that missiles were more cost-effective than bombers, that missiles also had “greater survival potential and endurance in the wartime environment,” and that because of their higher vulnerability, bombers “cannot be held in reserve to be used in a controlled and deliberate way.” He lauded the Polaris submarine-launched missiles as weapons “ideal for counter-city retaliation” that “do not have to be launched early in the war… [and that therefore] can be held in reserve and used in a controlled and deliberate way….”
In general, he rejected both “the extremes of a ‘minimum deterrence’ posture on the one hand”—which WSEG-50 had promoted—“or a ‘full first-strike capability’ on the other”—which Plan 1-A of SIOP-62 had so explicitly ordered. Rather, wrote Enthoven, with McNamara’s approval, “The forces I am recommending have been chosen to provide the United States with the capability, in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack, first, to strike back against Soviet bomber bases, missile sites and other installations associated with long-range nuclear forces, in order to reduce Soviet power and limit the damage that can be done to us by vulnerable Soviet follow-on forces, while, second, holding in protected reserve forces capable of destroying the Soviet urban society, if necessary, in a controlled and deliberate way.” These forces and this strategy, he continued, “should provide us with a capability to achieve a substantial military superiority over the Soviets even after they have attacked us.” He made the same points one month later in a shorter budget memorandum to Kennedy that was also Top Secret but circulated more freely in the White House and Bureau of the Budget.
Several of Kennedy’s White House and budget aides opposed the counterforce/no-cities idea, thought it would lead to an excessively large arsenal, and leaned instead toward a “minimum deterrence” position. But Kennedy had nearly absolute trust in Bob McNamara and shared his horror at the military’s all-out SIOP-62 and the casual attitude that many military officers displayed toward the prospect of global destruction. Kennedy’s brother Robert, who also tremendously admired the Secretary of Defense, once remarked only half jokingly, “Bob McNamara is the most dangerous man in the Cabinet because he is so persuasive and articulate.”
By early 1962, McNamara and associates were ready to make the new strategy public. A few of the Whiz Kids, with some aid from McNamara himself, had already leaked its general outlines to Richard Fryklund, a reporter from The Washington Star to whom General Noel Parrish had leaked the Kaufmann briefing in 1960. In January, McNamara testified before congressional committees that a “major mission of the strategic retaliatory forces is to deter war by their capability to destroy the enemy’s warmaking capabilities,” and that the forces were being programmed so that Russian cities could be hit or spared.
On February 17, before the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, McNamara described his plan to protect command-control facilities, which would allow nuclear forces to “be used in several different ways. We may have to retaliate with a single massive attack. Or, we may be able to use our retaliatory forces to limit damage done to ourselves, and our allies, by knocking out the enemy’s bases before he has had time to launch his second salvos. We may seek to terminate a war on favorable terms by using our forces as a bargaining weapon—by threatening further attack. In any case, our large reserve of protected firepower would give an enemy an incentive to avoid our cities and to stop a war.”
The ultimate triumph of the RAND philosophy came in the spring and summer of 1962. It began when McNamara made plans to deliver a major policy address before the semiannual meeting of NATO’s foreign and defense ministers in Athens on May 5. McNamara gave the job of writing the speech to Harry Rowen, who turned it over to his friend and consultant Bill Kaufmann. The only guidance Kaufmann received was that it should deal with initiatives in U.S. defense policy that concerned Europe, but he felt emboldened by McNamara’s increasingly open advocacy of his own counterforce/no-cities strategy and so decided to base the speech on that theme.
There was another reason Kaufmann wanted to focus on counterforce. The British and especially the French were making loud noises about building their own independent nuclear-deterrent forces. French President Charles de Gaulle, in particular, was publicly raising disturbing doubts as to whether the United States could really be trusted to protect Western Europe with nuclear weapons if need be. The Russians, too, now had a nuclear arsenal. If the Soviets overwhelmingly invaded Europe, and if the U.S. responded by attacking Soviet cities with nuclear weapons, the Soviets would strike back at American cities. De Gaulle wondered whether the American President really would sacrifice Chicago for Bonn, New York for Paris. He doubted they would, and so sought to build up his own national arsenal, independent of the U.S. or NATO.
General de Gaulle’s plans to let the Europeans have control over their own bombs reminded Kaufmann of the Speier-Gold-hamer NATO game that he had played at RAND when he first came to Santa Monica in 1956. It was during that game that Kaufmann first found himself attracted to the counterforce/no-cities strategy: if we attacked the Soviets in such a way that we hit their military forces and explicitly avoided their cities, then the problem of America’s credible commitment to NATO might be brushed aside; we wouldn’t be sacrificing American cities for European cities because we would be trying to keep cities out of the war altogether. Kaufmann felt that McNamara’s speech in Athens would be the ideal forum for conveying this same message to NATO ministers.