On August 13, a few minutes past midnight, East German troops occupied the border line separating East from West Berlin and constructed the first layers of brick and barbed wire that built the Berlin Wall. In retrospect, the Wall represented, in some ways, a solution to the crisis, especially to the refugee problem that plagued East German authorities. But it came as a complete shock and surprise to the West, and American officials took the move as antagonistic, another escalation in the spiralling crisis.
The next day, Kennedy wrote a memo to McNamara: “With the weekend’s occurrences in Berlin there will be more and more pressure for us to adopt a harder military posture…. I would appreciate it if you would plan to discuss this matter with me this week….”
It was around this time that Kennedy asked McNamara to look into the question of “flexible response” with nuclear as well as non-nuclear weapons—not necessarily to advocate their use, but to examine the possible consequences if they were used. When McNamara turned to his Whiz Kids for assistance, Rowen already had something of a plan in the works.
It was in August that the fascinating intellectual puzzle took on more serious and official overtones. Kaysen consulted with General Maxwell Taylor on getting the Joint Chiefs on board this sort of operation. Rowen set up a small task force in the Pentagon to deal with the details of the contingency plan. It was a very tightly held business. Henry Kissinger was not involved at all. Kaufmann was shunted off to the far sidelines. Enthoven, Hitch, Nitze, Seymour Weiss and one or two other officials from State, McGeorge Bundy of NSC and Dean Acheson, as a senior consultant in the White House, played very peripheral roles. General David Burchinal and a few others in the Air Staff fed Rowen information on the precise location of Soviet counterforce targets and on how many bombers, carrying what kinds of bombs, it would take to destroy them with high confidence. Frank Trinkl cranked Burchina’s numbers into a mathematical model that calculated how many Americans the surviving Soviet forces would kill, using the same methodology that he and Dave McGarvey had employed in the summer of 1960 back at RAND to support Kaufmann’s counterforce study. Only now the exercise was for real, having an impact on high-level analysis and, if the worst came, maybe on policy.
The study was finished in mid-September, shortly after release of the special National Intelligence Estimate revealing that the Soviets had only four operational ICBMs. The paper was written mostly by Rowen, who passed it on to McNamara, who in turn gave it to Kennedy. Only five names appeared on the memorandum—Kennedy, McNamara, Maxwell Taylor, McGeorge Bundy and Carl Kaysen. It was highly detailed, down to specifying the altitudes and general flight tactics of the attacking bombers. It concluded that a counterforce first-strike was indeed very feasible, that we could pull it off with high confidence.
Ted Sorensen, the chief White House counsel and speech writer who had been with Kennedy since his earliest Senate days, was outraged when Kaysen told him about the study, shouting, “You’re crazy! We shouldn’t let guys like you around here.” Even more appalled was a friend of Kaysen’s on the NSC staff named Marcus Raskin. Raskin had served as foreign policy adviser to a few liberal Democratic Senators and had been hired by Bundy as the token leftist. Raskin was horrified by the very existence of such a study. “How does this make us any better than those who measured the gas ovens or the engineers who built the tracks for the death trains in Nazi Germany?” he hollered at one point. Raskin never spoke with Kaysen again.
Not just the liberals and leftists on board found the study dissettling. For the study also concluded that a few Soviet bombs and missiles would almost certainly survive—owing to the inaccuracy or failure of some of our own bombs, the chance that a few of the bombers might crash before making it to the target or, especially in the case of the few nuclear-missile submarines that the Soviets had, the chance that we might not be able to find all the targets. Frank Trinkl calculated that in the best case, if the Soviets retaliated, two or three million Americans would die; in the worst case, as many as ten or fifteen million might die.
At the RAND Corporation, the attack plan would have been heralded a monumental success. Not just Herman Kahn but virtually the entire strategic community would have considered two, three, or even ten million fatalities, in the abstract, “acceptable,” or anyway certainly not “unacceptable,” losses under the circumstances. But now, in the real world, in the context of a real crisis with real political decision-makers, the reaction was much different. Nearly everyone was aghast.
Among the most fiercely opposed was Paul Nitze. It was, in some ways, ironic. Nitze, author of NSC-68, coauthor of the Gaither Report, was certainly a hardliner. He had swung back and forth on the issue of counterforce. In a speech that he wrote in April 1960, for a major national-security conference at Asilomar in Monterey, California, Nitze concluded that the U.S. should develop a secure mobile deterrent force, scrap the land-based missiles once that’s accomplished, then “multilateralize the command of our retaliatory systems by making SAC a NATO command,” and finally “turn over ultimate power of decision on the use of these systems to the General Assembly of the United Nations,” inviting the Soviets to do the same, specifying that a U.N. order to use the weapons would be honored only in retaliation to a direct nuclear attack by an enemy. The speech stood out from the annals of Paul Nitze’s writings as an anomaly. Nobody at Asilomar liked the speech. All of his friends in the Air Force, at RAND, in the academic and think-tank world hated it. One month after writing the speech, he delivered another at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, concluding quite differently that we had to develop a first-class counterforce capability.
Like many others in the national security field in the late 1950s and very early ’60s, Nitze was searching for an alternative to the suicide of massive retaliation, the dreamworld of “general and complete disarmament,” and the potential infeasibility of a totally disarming first-strike. In the winter of 1960, just before Kennedy took office, Nitze heard Bill Kaufmann’s counterforce/no-cities briefing, and was impressed with the possible solutions it offered.
Now, in the early autumn of 1961, when the United States had preponderant nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union, when a virtually disarming counterforce strike appeared technically feasible and when it looked like the United States might have to bring atomic weapons into play, Paul Nitze balked. What if things didn’t go according to plan? What if the surviving Soviet weapons happened to be aimed at New York, Washington, Chicago—in which case, even under the best of circumstances, far more than a few million would die? There were just too many things that could go wrong. And even if they went right, two or three million were a couple of million too many.
Then there was Western Europe to consider. The memo on the first-strike plan conceded that the location of all the short- and medium-range nuclear missiles, of which the Soviets had hundreds, was a much less certain matter. We would certainly miss many of these, and the number of European fatalities could be as high as in the “low tens of millions.” To Nitze and to his mentor, Dean Acheson, who considered NATO his own personal creation, that was an even stronger reason to reject the first-strike option entirely.