Nevertheless, during the crisis, the Americans again shied away from the controlled, deliberate use of nuclear weapons that would have been featured almost casually in a scenario written at the RAND Corporation. At one point, Dean Acheson came in and bellowed that we would have to knock out the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Someone asked what the Soviets would do in response.
“I know the Soviet Union well,” Acheson responded. “I know what they are required to do in the light of their history and their posture around the world. I think they will knock out our missiles in Turkey.”
“Well, then what do we do?” another queried.
Acheson replied, “I believe under our NATO treaty, with which I was associated, we would be required to respond by knocking out a missile base inside the Soviet Union.”
Came the inevitable question: “Then what do they do?”
Acheson paused. “That’s when we hope,” he answered, “that cooler heads will prevail, and they’ll stop and talk.”
It was a chilling conversation for everyone in the room. As in the Berlin crisis, despite overwhelming nuclear superiority, nobody was willing to “send signals” with nuclear weapons, nobody wanted to walk up an “escalation ladder” supported by limited nuclear strikes, nobody wanted to think much about using nuclear weapons rationally.
To the extent that nuclear weapons entered into the discussion at all, their image hardly matched that associated with theories of controlled and limited options. On Monday, October 22, President Kennedy proclaimed to the nation and the world: “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Kennedy and his advisers were gradually escalating their responses with conventional weapons, but no such distinctions were recognized, at any level of power, regarding nuclear weapons.
After the Cuban missile crisis, American superiority was obvious. It was in the aftermath of the crisis that the Kremlin made its first steps toward amassing a formidable arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Shortly after the missile crisis, Robert McNamara’s five-year defense plan called for eventually deploying 1,400 ICBMs. After the Soviets completed their crash missile program over the next decade, they ended up with 1,400 ICBMs. They also built a fleet of nuclear-missile submarines, emulating the American Polaris program, and they began to bury their land-based missiles in underground concrete silos similar to those of the American Minuteman.
The Berlin and Cuban crises represented the last time that either side could seriously contemplate a “splendid first-strike.” After then, he who struck first would have to expect hundreds, eventually thousands of enemy missiles thrown back on his homeland. Yet even in those halcyon days of “strategic superiority,” the most determined American officials, who had firmly believed in the counterforce strategy in theory, did not even contemplate taking the awesome risk of executing the strategy in practice.
21
SHELTER MANIA
ANOTHER CASUALTY of the Berlin crisis was the nonchalance with which many strategists had previously viewed the question of fallout shelters and civil defense.
It began to emerge as an issue in the opening months of the Kennedy Administration. In December 1960, the last full month of the Eisenhower period, the Office of Civil Defense Mobilization (OCDM) proposed a program that would provide shelter spaces, as well as training, shelter stockpiling, radiometers and postwar recuperation planning to everyone potentially endangered by fallout. Initially, Kennedy was wary of such a large-scale program, and he asked his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, to conduct a review of the issue.
Kennedy started to come under pressure to adopt some sort of program, however, in early May when the Conference of Governors met in Washington. The chairman of the Conference’s Committee on Civil Defense was New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller was a staunch proponent of fallout shelters. It was Rockefeller who had persuaded Eisenhower to constitute what became the Gaither Committee of 1957. Rockefeller had instituted an enormous fallout-shelter program involving tax incentives and matching grants in the state of New York. And it was widely thought that Rockefeller might be Kennedy’s Republican opponent in the 1964 election.
On May 9, Rockefeller met with Kennedy and Bundy to discuss civil defense, telling them that a strong program was needed to stiffen the public’s willingness to support the American use of nuclear weapons if necessary. Kennedy expressed skepticism. Advisers had told him that a nationwide fallout-shelter program might cost $20 billion. Over the long term, with bigger and bigger bombs, would any shelter program have value?
By this time, Bundy had given two of his assistants, Carl Kaysen and Marc Raskin, the task of reviewing the OCDM civil-defense proposal. Kaysen had several years earlier participated in a Cambridge “Summer Study” on civil defense and, in 1954, published an article in World Politics proposing a plan to reduce vulnerability to atomic attack by dispersing urban dwellers. He was initially receptive to the notion of fallout shelters.
Raskin was fervently opposed. He thought that a major civil-defense program would require a major federal propaganda effort to get public support, and he worried that such a campaign would engender a “garrison-state” mentality and transform the free and open nature of American democracy into an “authoritarian and regimented” society. He also thought that such a program would appear to the Soviets as a sign of first-strike intentions, thus accelerating the arms race and further heightening the chances of nuclear war.
The more Kaysen looked into the issue, the more skeptical he became as well, enough so to see many “troublesome questions,” as he delicately put it. Kaysen recognized that the optimistic fatality estimates in the civil-defense studies by the RAND Corporation and similar think tanks resulted not “from a war game analysis of what the Soviets could in fact achieve, but only [from] a set of assumptions about ‘reasonable attacks.’” But what if the attack was not “reasonable”? For example, if, instead of hitting only military targets, the Soviets diverted a mere fifteen missiles to cities, fatalities would increase by ten or twenty million even under the most favorable of assumptions regarding shelters.
There were other questions. Could the President get money from Congress for civil defense and his other defense priorities? Was building fifty-four million new urban fallout shelters really a good idea, since the effects of blast and fire from even a “modest” attack against cities would far exceed effects of fallout, thus negating the entire shelter plan? Conversely, building blast shelters on so grand a scale would cost tens of billions of dollars, and would not be effective against the damage from thermal heat and possible firestorms anyway.
Kaysen’s position was that Kennedy should not approve any civil-defense plan until these sorts of questions were answered; and even then, the program should be a much more “modest” endeavor than OCDM had proposed.
One sunny Saturday afternoon in mid-May, Bundy, Kaysen and Raskin met in Bundy’s office with Ted Sorensen, Sorensen’s deputy, Meyer Feldman, and Elmer Staats of the Budget Bureau to discuss the civil-defense review. Kaysen and Raskin made their dissenting points. Sorensen listened, but then told them that the President had made up his mind to go with some civil-defense program.