White House adviser Arthur Schlesinger wrote Kennedy, “Everywhere the shelter program seems to be emerging as the chief issue of domestic concern—and as one surrounded by an alarming amount of bewilderment, confusion and, in some cases (both pro and con) of near-hysteria.” Civil defense had “become the focus of all anxieties over foreign policy.” The do-it-yourself spirit of the present program was turning ugly, “at war with morality and at war with the sense of community cooperation which will be indispensable in the case of attack. It is an invitation to barbarism.” For some citizens, Schlesinger continued, the program was generating “a false sense of security—a belief that… a nuclear war will be no worse than a bad cold,” an illusion that will “encourage these people to become reckless in their foreign policy demands and to condemn negotiation and accommodation as appeasement.” For others, as “they begin to visualize nuclear war concretely for the first time,” they react “with horror and panic,” which could generate “an increase in the cry for unilateral disarmament and in the ‘better-red-than-dead’ nonsense.” The civil-defense campaign was also promoting a new industry “based on whipping up people’s fears to the point where they will rush to buy shelters.” As Ted Sorensen told Kennedy in a memo written on November 23, one day after Schlesinger’s, “Civil Defense is rapidly blossoming into our number one political headache.”
In this raving social context, many believed that the Yarmolinsky-Life fallout pamphlet would only serve to push whole factions of the population several steps closer to the brink of mass delirium. Ultimately, the Yarmolinsky pamphlet was heavily changed in substance and tone, and in the first week of December, twenty-five million copies were sent to 790 civil-defense offices and 30,954 post offices around the country. Kennedy decided not to give a TV speech and he firmly decided against sending the much-modified booklet to every household in America. He had begun to back off from his initial enthusiasm for the subject. First, much to everyone’s surprise, civil defense was turning into a political hot potato. Second, the Berlin crisis was cooling down, the sense of urgency was passing. Third, the critiques from the White House staff were starting to take their toll on Kennedy’s thinking. This process was accelerated the afternoon of November 29, when Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, paid a visit to the White House.
Teller was more fanatically devoted to shelters than even Rockefeller, and he came that day to persuade Jerry Wiesner, Kennedy’s science adviser, of their virtues. In his steely Hungarian accent, his thick eyebrows impressively jumping about, Teller narrated his scenario for a massive civil-defense program. First we will start with fallout shelters, he explained, but that won’t cover everybody, so we will then have to go to blast shelters. But that won’t cover everybody, either, so finally we will have to build fire shelters. And if the Russians build bigger bombs, then we will have to dig deeper.
In a perverse sense, Wiesner was delighted by this display. In the past few years, Wiesner had undergone a dramatic transformation from a hardline hawk to a passionate advocate of arms control and disarmament, and like Kaysen, Raskin and—increasingly—Bundy, he thought the shelter idea was dangerous and self-deluding nonsense.[5] He thought that Teller’s little lecture was mad, and he knew that any proponent who heard it would reexamine his own position and that anyone still unsure about civil defense would tip decisively to Wiesner’s position against it. With this in mind, Wiesner told Teller that his comments were just fascinating, and took him to see the President. With an excited gleam in his eye, Teller went through the same scenario with Kennedy. As Wiesner expected, Kennedy was half shocked, half bemused, incredulous of the spectacle before him.
After the meeting, Wiesner, again feigning enthusiasm, had Teller repeat the tale to Bundy. Two days later, Bundy wrote a memo to Kennedy: “I must say I am horrified by the thought of digging deeper as the megatonnage gets bigger, which is the notion of civil defense that Dr. Teller spelled out to me after your meeting with him the other evening. He thinks it can be done quite easily for $50 billion spent over a period of years. This is a position from which you will wish to be disassociated….” Bundy urged shifting to “a very low key and distinctly modest program.”
In December 1961, Kennedy had submitted a budget that included $695 million for civil defense. By the summer of 1962, Congress had it whittled down to $80 million, with scarcely a gesture of protest or dismay from the Administration. The civil-defense craze, like the Berlin crisis that prompted it, simply evaporated. It became all too clear that while shelters would save some lives, nuclear war would remain a catastrophic event, an unwieldly instrument for displaying “national will,” an irrational option. Moreover, either it proved impossible to get people seriously interested in civil defense—or, if a major crisis and a feverish propaganda campaign did whet their appetites, the unsavory aspects of modern democracy threatened to overwhelm the marketplace, disrupting the sense of community that sustaining nuclear war would require and the social bonds that civil defense was designed to protect.
From the fall of 1961 through the following spring, the idea of an effective, practical and implicitly popular civil-defense program—Herman Kahn’s vision of the urban population casually evacuating two or three times a decade to bolster national resolve—took a terrible and sobering beating. And so, with it, did another piece of the concept of a controllable nuclear war.
22
DAMAGE UNLIMITED
EVEN BEFORE Robert McNamara’s landmark speech of June 1962 in Ann Arbor, publicly declaring counterforce/no-cities as official U.S. policy, strands of the RAND strategy were already slowly starting to unravel. The speech itself set into motion a variety of reactions and reflections that made the workaday theories of the defense intellectuals still less attractive. The Russians denounced McNamara as a militaristic madman who was trying to create “rules for the holocaust,” Liberal arms-control advocates in the United States criticized the policy as one that would set off an ever-spiraling arms race and create incentives for preemptive first-strikes. But the response that concerned McNamara came from the Air Force.
The Air Force was emboldened by the Ann Arbor speech, telling McNamara in one report: “The Air Force has rather supported the development of forces which provide the United States with a first-strike capability credible to the Soviet Union, as well as to our Allies, by virtue of our ability to limit damage to the United States and our Allies to levels acceptable in light of the circumstances and the alternatives available.”
In his first Draft Presidential Memorandum to Kennedy of September 1961, McNamara had put counterforce targeting at the very heart of his strategic nuclear force planning; the ability to strike cities was relegated to a reserve force that was not to be used unless the Soviets struck American cities first. In the second DPM, handed to Kennedy on November 21, 1962, he wrote that the objectives in general nuclear war were “first, to provide the United States with a secure, protected retaliatory force able to survive any attack within enemy capabilities and capable of striking back and destroying Soviet urban society, if necessary, in a controlled and deliberate way.” The counterforce strategy was listed second. McNamara still favored counterforce, but said only that it “may succeed… and make a substantial contribution to the damage-limiting objectives” in “some circumstances.”
5
Wiesner began to change after serving on the Gaither Committee in 1957. The experience taught him that purely military solutions, to the security problem would only provoke Soviet responses and further problems, and so concluded that arms control was the only answer. A few others in the Gaither group reached the same conclusion over the next few years, among them William Foster, I. I. Rabi, Spurgeon Keeny, Herbert York, and Vincent McRae.