Through a long and circuitous route, Brodie had returned to the fundamental principle underlying his essays of twenty years earlier in The Absolute Weapon: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.”
The Vietnam War solidified Brodie’s departure from the RAND traditions and his return to basic principles. The failure in Vietnam deeply disturbed Brodie because it raised questions about whether his own profession of twenty-five years had much to offer. In Brodie’s mind, Vietnam was the Waterloo for the entire enterprise of strategic analysis. Vietnam demonstrated that options were not so manageable after all. The scenarios common to the everyday discussions of the strategic community “have almost universally assumed,” Brodie wrote in December 1967 at the peak of the war, “that the United States would be free to escalate, or deescalate, or make whatever other adjustments in policy that the President and his advisers might think desirable. Indeed, since we reached the level of some half a million troops in Vietnam, we have been essentially locked in… able neither to escalate nor to de-escalate in any meaningful fashion.”
Vietnam taught Brodie that options may be undesirable as well. It was, after all, the obsession with options that galvanized the U.S. to intervene in Vietnam to begin with. When Kennedy expanded conventional forces, he made it possible for Johnson to intervene without having to call up the Reserves. “It is an old story,” Brodie wrote, “that one way of keeping people out of trouble is to deny them the means of getting into it.”
This was the ultimate heresy, the final rejection of the RAND ethos. The idea of flexibility and options had made nuclear strategy possible; it allowed the element of choice, which was the essence of strategy. Yet Brodie had come, reluctantly, to conclude that flexibility and options were illusions in the face of the massive destructiveness of nuclear weapons and the ultimate uncontrollability of modern strategic warfare.
In the final years of his life, before he died of cancer in 1978 at the age of sixty-eight, Brodie could still actively engage in discussions about strategy. But friends noticed that he quickly faded out, from gloom or boredom, when the conversation drifted far from first principles. For Brodie had been forced to conclude that nuclear strategy itself—the body of thoughts that he himself had helped formulate—was something of an illusion. The nuclear strategists, not least of them Bernard Brodie, had tried to impose order on chaos, to introduce rational choice into an area of thinking once marked by extreme rigidity. But in the wake of the Vietnam failure and the train of thinking that followed, Brodie dismissed the effort as “simply playing with words.” The nuclear game could end only in stalemate. “The rigidity lies in the situation,” he stated, “not in the thinking.”
24
THE ABM DEBATE
AT A CONFERENCE in Chicago in June 1968, Albert Wohlstetter remarked that “of all the disasters of Vietnam, the worst may be the ‘lessons’ that we’ll draw from it.” So it was with most of the strategic community. By that summer, most of its members had given up hopes of winning the war, but still considered the RAND principles as the eternal verities, to be propagated, defended and fought for. For Wohlstetter, the battleground over the next few years was the great debate being waged over the antiballistic missile, the ABM.
The concept of the ABM—shooting down a missile with another missile—was nothing new. In May 1946, a board of scientists had recommended to the Army that one be built. In September 1956, Bell Telephone Labs declared that it was technically feasible. Two months later, the Army and the Pentagon’s research and development director ordered that an ABM system be developed, under the name Nike-Zeus.
The first ABM debate got underway in the spring of 1958, when a panel of engineers and other technicians in the Pentagon, called the Reentry Body Identification Group, or RBIG, submitted a report concluding that Nike-Zeus simply would not work against a dedicated enemy attack. Nike-Zeus consisted of a battery of interceptor missiles and a set of huge radars that would track incoming enemy warheads and guide the interceptors to destroy them in their path with a nuclear explosion. The RBIG calculated that if the Soviets merely fired one missile at each defended target, the Nike-Zeus would have a decent chance of shooting it down. However, if the Soviets built a missile fitted with several warheads that separated in outer space and landed in a fairly tight cluster, the ABM would be saturated and the target destroyed.
The United States was already developing such a missile, the Polaris A-3, often called “the Claw,” with just three warheads on board. In its calculations, the RBIG discovered that the Nike-Zeus would be defeated by the Polaris Claw. As William E. Bradley, director of the RBIG and formerly director of the ABM subgroup of the Gaither Committee of 1957, noted in a memorandum, “Such a weapon demands such a high rate of fire from an active defense system, in order to intercept the numerous re-entry bodies [warheads] which arrive nearly simultaneously, that the expense of the required equipment may be prohibitive,” Such a weapon, in short, raised the question of an ABM’s “ultimate impossibility.”
The group discovered still easier ways for the Russians to defeat Nike-Zeus. Instead of wasting extra warheads, they could send in “decoys”—metal chaff, balloons, dartlike objects—that could trick the system into thinking they were real warheads, forcing it to fire off all its interceptors, and then follow up with the real weapons. More simply, the Soviets could just attack the tracking radars, which were very large and so vulnerable that they would be disabled by a 100-kiloton bomb exploding two miles away. Without the radar, Nike-Zeus would be blind and could not function. If somehow the radar could be “hardened”—and nobody could figure out how to do that—there was another way to blind it. Earlier that year, scientists observing atmospheric tests of nuclear explosions discovered a surprising effect. At very high altitudes, the explosion’s fireball was so hot that electrons were released from their atoms, ionizing the air and thus bending and absorbing electromagnetic waves. The explosion’s radioactive debris, at such altitudes, also released beta rays, which were high-energy electrons that had the same effect. The upshot was that the explosion would “black out” radar systems for several minutes for miles around. Thus, the Russians could explode a missile at, say, 100,000 feet in the air, blinding the ABM’s radar, meanwhile sending in more missiles to their targets underneath. Or, even if the Soviets were not so clever, the first Nike-Zeus interceptor that exploded overhead could have the same effect. In short, the ABM was terribly vulnerable to a number of countermeasures that the Soviets could quite easily and cheaply prepare.
These conclusions were reinforced in May 1959, with the submission of a secret report by a panel of Eisenhower’s Presidential Science Advisory Committee, or PSAC. It was an impressively distinguished group, including Hans Bethe, director of the Theoretical Physics Division at Los Alamos during and shortly after World War II; Wolfgang Panofsky, director of the High-Energy Physics Lab at Stanford; Harold Brown, director of the Livermore Lab; Jerome Wiesner and Jerrold Zacharias of MIT; and William E. Bradley, director of the RBIG.
The Army was eager to get Nike-Zeus into production, but as a result of the reports of the two expert panels, the Pentagon kept the project in research and development only.