From Glenn Kent, Damage Limiting
In short, the damage-limiting strategy would cost way too much, and would not prevent the devastation of American industrial society and the deaths of nearly 100 million citizens, if not more. Another interesting feature of the Kent study showed that the most cost-effective devices for limiting damage were fallout shelters. Without at least $5.8 billion for a full fallout-shelter program, the U.S. would have to spend two or three times as much money as Kent’s “damage curves” indicated to produce the same quite limited results. Yet by 1964, three years after the Berlin crisis and the shelter mania, it was impossible to get Congress or the public sufficiently interested to spend more than an obligatory $90 or $100 million annually on civil defense. McNamara used this fact and Kent’s conclusion about shelters as a rationale to deny extravagant funds for ABMs, air defenses or additional counterforce weapons. The Kent study settled all of McNamara’s doubts. Damage-limiting, he concluded, simply would not work.
Meanwhile, the Joint Chiefs were not only continuing their pressure for more weapons, but also attacking the Assured Destruction doctrine, seeing it as McNamara’s tool for beating back their demands. Looking over the Kent study, McNamara had a brilliant idea. Feigning serious interest in what mix of counterforce, ABM and civil defense would limit damage most effectively, McNamara would order a Pentagon-wide study elaborating on Kent’s initial work. Kent would supervise the project from DDR&E, but analytical inputs would come from officers in all the military services. On March 12, 1964, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric ordered that the services conduct such a study over the next six months. Kent integrated the five resulting studies into a single 175-page analysis, and delivered it to McNamara on September 8.
The services were initially pleased with the study. To them, it revealed that damage-limiting was feasible, that efforts made by all three services—Air Force on counterforce, Army on ABM, Navy on anti-submarine warfare—could, at reasonable cost, significantly limit damage from a Soviet nuclear attack.
But as McNamara expected, the study also revealed that if the Soviets reacted to U.S. damage-limiting measures by increasing their own offensive forces, the effects of damage-limiting would quickly reach the point of diminishing marginal returns and, in fact, that the Soviets could add to their offense far more cheaply than the U.S. could continue adding to its defense. McNamara drew conclusions exactly opposite to those that the officers involved in the study thought they had proved. And McNamara told them so.
The uniformed military was flabbergasted. LeMay accused Kent of selling the Air Force down the river and threatened to demote him to the rank of colonel. The military felt tricked by McNamara. McNamara sent the conclusions of the study to President Johnson and McGeorge Bundy, making sure that they understood his interpretation. For the next few years, as a rationale that the military could invoke to justify more weapons, damage-limiting was dead.
In his DPM of December 1964, McNamara backed off further still from counterforce, using the Kent studies as the main source of his arguments. His expressed skepticism about damage-limiting was more elaborate, his case against a new manned bomber and air-defense systems more powerfully presented than in earlier DPMs. It was in the 1964 DPM that McNamara reduced the Minuteman program from 1,400 to 1,000 ICBMs, where it remained permanently. And it was in that DPM that references to the “coercion strategy” disappeared entirely.
This was not to say, however, that counterforce disappeared from the actual targeting plan. Even in the 1964 DPM, McNamara noted that simply maximizing Soviet urban damage was not the best way to use nuclear weapons, that damage-limiting still had a role to play in that sense. As part of the compromise to reduce Minuteman to 1,000 missiles, he initiated a new Minuteman II missile program and a new inertial-guidance system that would improve the Minuteman’s accuracy and thus increase Minuteman’s ability to destroy “fully hardened targets,” such as enemy missile silos (then hardened to resist about 300 pounds per square inch of overpressure), by 50 percent. He also ordered research to begin on a program called MIRV, Multiple Independently targetable Re-entry Vehicles—fixing several warheads on top of a single missile, giving it the ability to strike several widely separated targets—and noted that this “would permit each missile the flexibility to attack a single heavily defended urban-industrial target, or a single hardened point target, or several undefended targets….”
But these points were buried in the DPM, easily overlooked. Moreover, the 1964 DPM, unlike all the others before it, contained no chart indicating how many U.S. weapons were aimed at what types of Soviet targets. Such a chart would have indicated that a counterforce strategy still ruled the actual war plan. And in his moment of bureaucratic victory over the JCS, McNamara wanted to keep that fact in low profile.
But these omissions also reflected McNamara’s quite firm conviction, by this time, that a counterforce or damage-limiting strategy would not work. As early as 1962, he had recognized that the concept counted on destroying the Soviets’ will to smash our cities, not their ability to do so. Now, if the Soviets could easily defeat our efforts to limit damage by building more offensive weapons, if whatever we did the Soviets could still inflict “unacceptable damage” to American civilians and industry, couldn’t they use that destructive power as a bargaining tool themselves? Would a U.S. counterforce strike that didn’t much affect the Soviets’ ability to devastate American society really give us so great an advantage in the game of “intrawar deterrence”? McNamara didn’t think so.
Neither, by this time, did most of the Whiz Kids. Partly through reading the Kent studies and partly through McNamara’s own highly persuasive powers over his staff, they began to lose faith in their old theories as well. Alain Enthoven and Harry Rowen followed McNamara in strenuous advocacy of Assured Destruction and denial that using nuclear weapons could bring any political gain. Bill Kaufmann never fully embraced Assured Destruction, but he too had grown tired and skeptical of his creation. Kaufmann had always viewed counterforce/no-cities as a way of trying to make the best of a desperate situation; now he wondered whether it was even that. He no longer really believed that nuclear war would start the way that the theory suggested, and seriously doubted that the war could so easily be controlled. Increasingly, Kaufmann shifted his attention to his much earlier interest in non-nuclear “limited war.”
As early as 1962, the Pentagon—thanks mainly to analysis that Kaufmann helped conduct, under the supervision of Alain Enthoven and Paul Nitze—had been coming around to realize that the Soviet Army was not ten feet tall, that its admittedly plentiful armed divisions were individually much weaker than NATO’s, that facing the Soviets with only conventional weapons on the European battlefield was not a hopeless proposition and that, therefore, depending on battlefield nuclear weapons was not necessary. Even while supporting counterforce, Kaufmann had always opposed the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield. His concept of “limited war” required rationality, mutual restraints, controlled responses and circumscribed limits on the intensity and boundaries of the conflict. If nuclear weapons came into play, limits would be much more confusing and difficult to establish; escalation would be made nearly inevitable; “limited war” would no longer be limited.