By early spring, the Discoverer had photographed virtually every square foot where the Soviets might possibly be testing, deploying or supporting ICBMs. In June, the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that the Soviets might already have 50 or 100 ICBM launchers and that they could have 100 to 200 by the following year. There was no evidence supporting this claim in the Discoverer photos or elsewhere. However, such an estimate still allowed the intelligence community to maintain its assumption concerning the basic Soviet strategy. With that many missiles, the Soviets could still destroy virtually all of the bases of the Strategic Air Command. However, the Army and the Navy footnotes to the Estimate, even more dramatically than before, contested that assumption, dissenting that the Soviets had “no more than a few” ICBMs either in mid-1961 or in the coming year. Finally, by the end of the summer, the CIA and even Air Force Intelligence were forced to give in entirely. The assumption that the Soviets were planning to use their nuclear weapons to launch a devastating preemptive strike against SAC and other important targets in the continental United States had corrupted intelligence estimates for six years. In 1956, when some CIA economic analysts had challenged the NIEs that predicted a “bomber gap,” their evidence was dismissed, largely because it failed to conform to this basic assumption about Soviet strategic goals—until, one year later, the Soviets appeared to shift tactics from bombers to ICBMs, at which point Air Force Intelligence could admit that the CIA was correct but that the basic assumptions of the Air Force, indeed of the entire intelligence community, were still valid, and that the Soviets would now pursue their aims through a massive missile buildup. As evidence of a missile buildup failed to materialize, the analysts made excuses. But then came the Discoverer satellites and still nothing materialized. Now they had to admit there was no bomber gap, no missile gap, no gap.
Only the officers of SAC Intelligence held out, for they had a critical interest in depicting an enormous Soviet threat. Without it, they would have a harder time justifying their own plans for thousands of U.S. bombers and 10,000 Minuteman ICBMs, plans that McNamara and his Whiz Kids were already jeopardizing. General James Walsh, SAC Intelligence chief, and his assistant, General George Keegan, put together a briefing meant to frighten the daylights out of anyone who heard it. Tommy Power himself delivered the briefing several times to Pentagon officials and panels composed of weapons scientists. On these occasions, Power unilaterally downgraded the classification level of some Discoverer photos to illustrate his point that the Russians were hiding ICBMs all over Russia. Photos of medieval towers, agricultural silos, a Crimean War memorial were depicted as cleverly disguised missile sites.
Nobody was convinced. All the hard evidence contradicted SAC’s claims.
On September 6, the CIA issued a special NIE reporting new data leading the CIA to “believe that our present estimate of 50–100 operational ICBM launchers as of mid-1961 is probably too high.” The Agency now believed that the Soviets “deliberately elected to deploy only a small force of first-generation ICBMs in 1960–1961, even though they had the capability to deploy ICBMs in considerably greater quantity.” Finally, the special NIE admitted that “the present Soviet ICBM capabilities, along with those of bombers and submarines, pose a grave threat to U.S. urban areas, but a more limited threat during the months immediately ahead to our nuclear striking force.”
How many ICBMs were the Soviets now thought to have? Not 500 or 200 or 100 or even 50, but four—just four SS-6 missiles. Another twenty newer SS-7 and SS-8 sites were under construction, but none of them, nor any more SS-6s, would be deployed for the rest of the year. In other words, there was a missile gap, even a deterrent gap, and the ratio in forces was nearly ten to one—but the gap was in our favor.
The official intelligence estimates and the nation’s leading strategic analysts who relied on these estimates had consistently made a whopping error. It was an error not merely of degree, but of fundamental, central importance to the conclusions of their analyses and studies. Four missiles meant that the Soviets could have done virtually no damage to SAC, and suggested that they had decided to forgo a first-strike capability.
In short, the Discoverer photos shattered the assumptions underlying the NIEs of more than half a decade, as well as the assumptions underlying many of the strategic analyses produced over the same period by the RAND Corporation.
The end of the missile gap crushed the assumptions behind much of the theorizing about counterforce strategies as well. The counterforce/no-cities idea, at least by the time it fell into William Kaufmann’s hands, had been seen as a strategy that could cleverly exploit the vulnerabilities of an enemy with a superior force. Had it been known that the Soviets possessed only a handful of missiles with intercontinental range, virtually no one would have stopped to wonder whether the threat of “massive retaliation” or SAC’s “optimum-mix” strategy could serve as a sufficiently “credible” deterrent or a devastatingly “war-winning” policy.
Yet in another sense, the disappearance of the missile gap suddenly made the counterforce strategy much easier to execute than anyone had previously imagined. With so few Soviet missiles—that is, so few counterforce targets—a successful attack would require far fewer American weapons and could tolerate much less thorough and precise coordination. In the first major crisis that faced the Kennedy Administration, several high-ranking officials in the Pentagon and the White House viewed a disarming, damage-limiting counterforce strike as an attractive option indeed.
20
THE CRISES
AS EARLY AS 1959, in the opening period of his run for the Presidency, Senator John Kennedy predicted that sometime in the next few years, the Soviets would stage an ultimatum over Berlin that would climax in a “test of nerve and will” between East and West. Since the hottest days of the Cold War, Berlin had served as the main arena of conflict in the continuing struggle between the superpowers. And it certainly appeared, by the time Kennedy took office, that that struggle was about to intensify.
Shortly after the Allied powers defeated Germany near the end of World War II, they divided the country into four zones separately occupied by the U.S., England, France and the U.S.S.R., corresponding to the position of each nation’s land armies at the time of Nazi surrender. They likewise divided the capital city of Berlin into four separate sectors. As Soviet-Western relations worsened and tensions flared, the administrative arrangements in Germany were strained to intolerable degrees. Finally, Germany was divided into two nations—a Communist-ruled East Germany in what had been the Soviet zone of occupation, and a West Germany created by the merger of the three Western zones. When the Soviets blockaded all roads and waterways leading into West Berlin in 1948, the United States mounted a massive airlift, delivering supplies to the city by parachute for more than 300 days. The airlift forced the Soviets to halt the blockade, and the four powers signed an agreement allowing the Western nations free access to West Berlin.