The intelligence analyses disclosed that the Soviet strategic forces were in awful shape. The ICBMs and IRBMs were not loaded with warheads, and it would take at least six hours to get them loaded. None of their bombers were on any sort of alert. Almost all of their nuclear-missile submarines were in port, and those at sea had to surface before launching. Moreover, the Soviet early-warning network was riddled with gaps that would make it very difficult to detect a less-than-massive U.S. bomber attack, especially if the bombardiers flew in at low altitudes. Not only that, but the much-celebrated air-defense forces had little value: for all the surface-to-air missiles and fighter-interceptors, the Soviets lacked the ability to coordinate an air-defense campaign and shoot down very many bombers, especially if flight tactics were carefully planned.
The existing U.S. war plan required coordinating a massive attack, first knocking out air-defense sites, paving the way for the follow-on B-47 and B-52 bombers to strike their designated targets in the Soviet heartland unimpeded. But if those air-defense sites posed little danger to the U.S. bombers, as now seemed the case, then a relatively small U.S. bomber fleet could go in and virtually devastate the entire Soviet strategic force on the ground. And since the mission would require such a small number of airplanes, the U.S. could probably devise flight tactics that avoided tipping off Soviet early-warning radars to the attack. In short, the classic surgical strike might be feasible. The Kaufmann counterforce option took on an air of practicality that not even its progenitor could possibly have foreseen.
Nearly every high-ranking White House and Pentagon official was searching desperately for attractive options that spring, some stratagem that would, as Kennedy often phrased it, avoid the twin perils of “humiliation or holocaust.” It was clear that if the Soviets went all out in defending Berlin with conventional forces, they would win: they were much closer to the theater of battle, they could amass far more divisions, they could fight in tandem with the East German military, in whose borders West Berlin was trapped. NATO would have to launch what amounted to an invasion; and if it came to that, the Western powers simply lacked the conventional forces necessary to carry out an offensive of that scope.
On the other hand, Robert McNamara learned from the JCS in May that the U.S. military’s official contingency plans for Berlin called for sending a few brigades down the Autobahn from West Germany to Berlin. If the Warsaw Pact resisted those troops, the U.S. would move immediately to the all-out nuclear strike envisioned in the JSCP’s Annex C and in SIOP-62.
When Kaufmann showed the new intelligence data to Harry Rowen and carefully explained their significance, Rowen reacted very excitedly. Nobody had yet found the magical option that combined credibility and effectiveness, that could be presented to the President as something that he could do if the tentative probes of a confrontation exploded into full-scale war with the U.S.S.R.
Rowen took Kaufmann to meet Carl Kaysen, McGeorge Bundy’s assistant in the National Security Council, with whom Rowen had previously discussed the vexing challenge of credible options over Berlin. Kaysen too found Kaufmann’s discoveries most intriguing. He and Rowen spent hours discussing how the details of such an operation might be worked out.
In June, the Berlin crisis began to heat up. Kennedy and Khrushchev had their tense confrontation in Vienna during the first week of the month. At an NSC meeting on June 14, McNamara informed Kennedy that U.S. military forces in Berlin had enough ammunition and combat rations to hold out in a conventional conflict for only eighteen days. On the twenty-eighth, Dean Acheson’s get-tough memo, urging a strategy that by his own admission might result in nuclear war, was circulated throughout the national security bureaucracy.
The next day, Rowen and Kaysen met with Colonel DeWitt Armstrong, Paul Nitze’s Berlin adviser in the Pentagon’s International Security Affairs office, and Harvard Professor Henry Kissinger, a consultant in the NSC, to discuss the military contingency plan that the JCS had recently given McNamara. Kaysen described the plan in a memo to McGeorge Bundy written shortly after the meeting: “It is clear that the ‘general war’ which the JCS discussed is exactly the one-sided response with all our nuclear forces envisioned in SIOP-62.” Reporting on the meeting with Rowen, Armstrong and Kissinger, Kaysen continued, “The planning for several alternative limited target lists which might be relevant to the Berlin crisis has not begun. Rowen is drafting a request for such planning, a copy of which I expect to receive, but I think this should be considered as an urgent matter at higher levels.”
Some plan had to be devised quickly to create some limited nuclear options for dealing with the contingency of a Berlin crisis gone out of control, a plan quite free from the straitjacket of SIOP-62. The memo that Harry Rowen sent Kaysen was essentially an elaboration on the Kaufmann counterforce/no-cities option, based on the discoveries in the new intelligence data that Kaufmann himself had discovered a couple of months earlier.
On July 7, Bundy wrote a memo to Kennedy, noting that he, Kaysen and Kissinger “all agree that the current strategic war plan is dangerously rigid and, if continued without amendment, may leave you with very little choice as to how you face the moment of thermonuclear truth. We believe that you may want to raise this question with Bob McNamara in order to have a prompt review and new orders if necessary. In essence, the current plan calls for shooting off everything we have in one shot, and it is so constructed as to make any more flexible course very difficult.”
The next day, Saturday the eighth, Bundy, McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk met with Kennedy at his weekend beach house in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Kennedy asked McNamara to draw up plans to mobilize one million ground troops for a Berlin contingency.
On Tuesday night, July 25, Kennedy delivered a dramatic radio and television speech to the nation about the dangers facing freedom in Berlin. Based partly on McNamara’s answers to the questions he had posed at Hyannis Port, Kennedy said that he would ask Congress, the next day, for a $3.3 billion supplement to the defense appropriations bill, half of which would go for procurement of non-nuclear weapons and ammunition, an increase in the Army’s authorized strength from 875,000 to one million men, an increase of 29,000 and 63,000 in Navy and Air Force strength respectively, a doubling and tripling of draft calls, authority to call up the ready reserves and the National Guard, a delay in the deactivation of B-47 bombers and an acceleration in the nation’s civil-defense programs.
The emphasis was on building up conventional forces, but Kennedy realized their limitations in an area such as Berlin, where the Warsaw Pact would have the advantage of geography. When he had asked McNamara to draw up non-nuclear war plans for Berlin, he noted that the forces should be sufficiently large to indicate American resolve and to give the Russians time for second thoughts, to allow for what many called a “negotiation pause,” before the conflict escalated to nuclear war. He knew that if the Soviets did not balk, nuclear war was the only alternative to surrender.
On July 7, Bundy had advised Kennedy to broaden the options that would be available to him at his “moment of thermonuclear truth.” The next day at Hyannis Port, Kennedy read a critique of Dean Acheson’s report by Kissinger, State Department Counsel Abe Chayes and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., noting that Acheson’s paper “hinges on our willingness to face nuclear war” although “this option is undefined. Before you are asked to make the decision to go to nuclear war,” the critique continued, “you are entitled to know what concretely nuclear war is likely to mean. The Pentagon should be required to make an analysis of the possible levels and implications of nuclear warfare and the possible gradations of our nuclear response.” McGeorge Bundy’s notes on “JFK’s Berlin Agenda,” taken at a meeting of Kennedy’s Berlin Steering Group on July 19, indicate that there was discussion of “nuclear war—its flexibility.”