Just minutes into the speech, Kaufmann had McNamara explaining that “the U.S. has come to the conclusion that to the extent feasible, military strategy in general nuclear war should be approached in much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. That is to say, our principal military objectives, in the event of a nuclear war stemming from a major attack on the Alliance, should be the destruction of the enemy’s military forces while attempting to preserve the fabric as well as the integrity of allied society. Specifically, our studies indicate that a strategy which targets nuclear forces only against cities or a mixture of civil and military targets has serious limitations for the purpose of deterrence and for the conduct of general nuclear war.” Conversely, if deterrence fails and if the U.S. engaged “in a controlled and flexible nuclear response,” the Kremlin would have “very strong incentives… to adopt similar strategies and programs,” thus saving tens or hundreds of millions of lives on all sides and bringing the war to a rapid conclusion.
The problem, Kaufmann/McNamara concluded, with the notion of the Europeans building their own small, independent nuclear forces is that these arsenals would only be able to strike Soviet cities. (Indeed, statements by de Gaulle and such French strategists as André Beaufre and Pierre Gallois, among others, suggested that this was the essence of the French philosophy of deterrence.) And it would be “intolerable to have one segment of the Alliance force attacking the urban-industrial areas while, with the bulk of our forces, we were succeeding in destroying most of the enemies’ nuclear capabilities. Such a failure in coordination might lead to the destruction of our hostages—the Soviet cities—just at a time at which our strategy of coercing the Soviets into stopping their aggression was on the verge of success.” In sum, independent nuclear forces within NATO would, by nature, wreck the delicate strategy underlying the counterforce/no-cities concept.
Kennedy had emphasized to McNamara that in the speech he should “repeat to the point of boredom” that we would use nuclear weapons only in response to a major attack against the U.S. or the allies; that we were not contemplating preventive war; and that the Europeans should not believe that by firing off their own nuclear weapons they would drag the United States into a war, that we would withdraw our commitment to NATO first.
The British and especially the French found McNamara’s speech interesting but less than persuasive. They didn’t think that merely adopting the no-cities policy changed the new strategic equation that compelled them to deter war with their own nuclear forces; they didn’t really believe that the Soviets would play along with McNamara’s limited-nuclear-war game. De Gaulle had personally remarked to Paul Nitze, when Nitze had visited France nearly a year earlier, that the whole concept of “nuclear strategy” was absurd: nuclear weapons, he said, were bombs of mass destruction; you couldn’t rationally fight a war with them; you could only deter war. McNamara’s speech did not change many minds of that conviction.
Still, they were enthralled by the detailed rendering of U.S. strategic thought. So, when the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor invited McNamara to deliver the commencement address that June, he decided that he would read a trimmed-down, unclassified version of the Athens speech.
McNamara’s special assistant, Adam Yarmolinsky, prepared a first draft, Dan Ellsberg revised it considerably, and Bill Kaufmann added some final touches. Ellsberg and Kaufmann did their work reluctantly: they didn’t think that nuclear strategy should be discussed in detail so publicly; it would sound too grisly and macabre to the untrained ear. Also, along with many White House advisers, they thought it unwise to criticize the British and the French so directly in public. But McNamara was adamant on both counts. The gist of the counterforce/no-cities doctrine remained.
The days of massive retaliation and SIOP-62 were decisively finished. The age of flexible and controlled response and counterforce/no-cities options had unambiguously commenced. William Kaufmann, Charles Hitch, Alain Enthoven, Henry Rowen, Daniel Ellsberg and their colleagues in Santa Monica were gratified. More than a decade of development in the style of thinking at RAND, the attempt to impose order on the cataclysmic chaos of nuclear war, had been crowned with success.
But their triumph was short-lived. Over the next few years, the sharp vision of the New Strategy would gradually blur into an uncertain haze.
19
THE GAP THAT NEVER WAS
EVEN BEFORE Robert McNamara transformed the RAND philosophy into official U.S. policy, its underpinnings were beginning to collapse. The first sign that the RAND strategists may have been seeing things all wrong appeared in the very early days of the Kennedy Administration, when McNamara started to realize that the much vaunted and feared missile gap, which John F. Kennedy had ruthlessly exploited in the 1960 Presidential campaign, just might be a myth.
In the last year of the Eisenhower Administration, a great debate had erupted inside the intelligence community over the size of the Soviet ICBM force in the next few years, with estimates ranging from 50 to 200. Even these figures were little more than speculation, for the U-2 flights were picking up no evidence of ICBM deployment. Intelligence officials figured that there had to be some long-range missiles somewhere because they had long ago assumed that the Kremlin’s objective in nuclear war would be to launch a devastating attack, probably a preemptive one, against major urban and military targets in the United States. They attributed the lack of evidence of Soviet weapons to the U-2’s having photographed only a fraction of the Soviet landmass, and to the clouds and bad weather that often obscured a clear view.
On August 10, 1960, the U.S. launched the first fully successful orbit of a new strategic-reconnaissance satellite called the Discoverer. Many more launches followed. The Discoverer could take photographs from outer space, and its camera was so powerful and precise that when the pictures were dropped to earth, recovered and developed, an experienced photoanalyst could identify objects as small as thirty-six inches. The first photos were processed in November. They revealed the presence of four operational Soviet ICBMs at the missile-testing site at Plesetsk, in northern Russia. Communications intelligence and reports from spies had suggested that missiles were being deployed there, but the U-2 flights never had the chance to detect them; pilot Francis Gary Powers had been on his way to Plesetsk on May 1, 1960, when a Soviet surface-to-air missile shot him down. Aside from these four ICBMs at Plesetsk, however, the Discoverer found nothing. Through the winter and spring, Discoverer snapped thousands of photos, but still found nothing.
Among the very first things that Robert McNamara did upon being sworn in as Secretary of Defense on January 20 was to go with his Deputy Secretary, Roswell Gilpatric, a former Undersecretary of the Air Force and a true believer in the missile gap, up to the Air Force photo-intelligence office on the fourth floor of the Pentagon. They spent hours at a time, for several days over a period of three weeks, scrutinizing the Discoverer photos. Even Air Force analysts were embarrassed by the pictures. The images starkly rebutted the estimates of Air Force Intelligence. The Soviet ICBM, the SS-6, was monstrously huge, heavy, cumbersome, required an equally enormous support and security apparatus, and would have to be transported on railroad tracks or extremely heavy roads. Discoverer was peering all along and around the railroad tracks and major highways throughout the Soviet Union, and finding nothing.
By early February, McNamara concluded that there was no missile gap. Still unfamiliar with many aspects of Washington ways, he said as much to a group of reporters, in what he thought were off-the-record remarks, the evening of February 6. Headlines appeared the next day. Not three weeks into office, the Kennedy Administration that was propelled into office partly on accusations of a missile gap now appeared to be acknowledging what President Eisenhower had told the nation all along—that, in the words of his last State of the Union Address, “The ‘bomber gap’ of several years ago was always a fiction, and the ‘missile gap’ shows every sign of being the same.” McNamara responded to the headlines with qualifications and caveats, Kennedy announced that studies were still under way and it was too early to tell whether there was a missile gap or not, but the denials were rather tepid.