When John Kennedy came to office, the Army, aided by Maxwell Taylor, made a big push for deployment of an enormous Nike-Zeus system: seventy batteries with 7,000 missiles defending twenty-seven areas in the U.S. and Canada. Initially, Robert McNamara endorsed Nike-Zeus, though on a lesser scale, calling for twelve batteries with 1,200 missiles defending six cities. McNamara accepted the judgment that it could never defend against a massive Soviet attack, but he thought a limited deployment might increase Soviet uncertainty, thus further deterring them from an attack. Also, it might do well against accidental attacks and discourage nuclear blackmail from smaller powers, such as China or Cuba.
Meanwhile, Jerome Wiesner, chairman of PSAC’s 1959 ABM panel, was now Kennedy’s science adviser, and started to educate Kennedy on the limitations of the ABM in the face of saturation, multiple warheads, radar blackout and all the rest. Wiesner talked a great deal with Kennedy’s budget director, David Bell, as well, who reinforced this viewpoint in memos to the President. And Kennedy was briefed by Jack Ruina, a member of the 1958 Reentry Body Identification Group and now director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. By November 1961, Kennedy had decided against any deployment of Nike-Zeus.
At the same time, the Army was coming up with a better ABM, incorporating a new “phased-array radar,” which could scan a much wider area of the sky, and a dual missile system—a long-range ABM that came to be called Spartan, which would intercept incoming missiles in space, and a short-range one called Sprint, which would shoot down missiles once they entered the atmosphere. The Sprint would make the “decoy” problem more manageable, since once decoys—which are lighter than real warheads—hit the atmosphere, they descend at a different velocity, thus allowing tracking radars to distinguish them from the real objects of danger. The Army put this new technology in a new package and called it Nike-X. Still, the scientists pointed out that the fundamental problems remained.
McNamara was changing his mind about the wisdom of ABMs generally, but pressures for some sort of ABM were mounting, from the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff and from their powerful friends on Capitol Hill. McNamara found it politically impossible to kill Nike-X outright, so he tried to buy its advocates off by feeding them big money for research and development—nearly $500 million a year—but continually denying them funds for production.
The tactic was bound to lose. Once a few billion dollars are spent on any weapons program, the chance of stopping it from going into production is practically nil. By 1966, the Army had been given enough to develop an ABM system geared for widespread deployment. All the Joint Chiefs vigorously favored such a plan; Congress put money in the budget for ABM production, even though McNamara had not requested it. President Lyndon Johnson was clearly in a political bind, torn between the arguments of his Secretary of Defense and the judgment of the entire military establishment. On December 6, 1966, at a critical meeting in Austin, Texas, with Johnson, Walt Rostow, Cyrus Vance and the Joint Chiefs, McNamara offered a compromise: spend some money on preproduction tooling and procurement for Nike-X, but defer a decision on deployment and try to reach an arms-control accord with the Soviets to prohibit all ABMs. Johnson agreed.
In January 1967, McNamara arranged for Johnson to meet with every past and present Presidential Science Adviser and Director of Defense Research and Engineering. As McNamara anticipated, they all argued that defending against a massive missile attack was impossible. In June, Johnson and McNamara met with Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, to discuss arms control. McNamara lectured Kosygin on nuclear strategy and on how ABMs would only prompt an offense-defense arms race. But Kosygin didn’t understand. “When I have trouble sleeping nights,” he told McNamara, “it’s because of your offensive missiles, not your defensive missiles.”
Time was running out, and Johnson finally ordered McNamara to fund production of Nike-X. Still, McNamara wanted to shape the decision in such a way that it would retard any efforts to expand production into a full-scale nationwide system.
On July 3, McNamara called one of his aides, Morton Halperin, into his office to have him draft a speech on the ABM. The speech should say that it was futile to spend billions on a massive ABM system because the Soviets could, at less expense, counter all such efforts with an increased offensive-missile program; that, in fact, an ABM would compel the Soviets to do so, which would prompt us to respond, which would lead to an uncontrolled arms race with no greater security for us in the end; that our greatest deterrent against a Soviet first-strike was not a thick ABM shield that could easily be penetrated anyway, but rather a surviving second-strike capability, which we had with great assurance.
Halperin, briskly taking notes, was elated. He agreed with all of it. This would be the greatest speech that anyone had ever heard, he thought. But then McNamara dropped the punch line. After that, McNamara said, explain why we have to build an ABM to defend against an attack by Red China. Halperin’s dream was suddenly shattered. He looked up. “Are you sure you want that last section in?” he faintly asked.
“Yes,” McNamara replied.
Halperin walked back to his office and told his boss, Paul Warnke, who had replaced John McNaughton as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, about the meeting. When Warnke saw McNamara later that day, he asked, “China bomb, Bob?”
McNamara looked down, shuffled some papers around on his desk and muttered, “What else am I going to blame it on?”
As early as 1961, before he turned against the ABM, McNamara had offered the Chinese threat as a possible rationale. Since then, he had never taken it very seriously. But when pressures mounted in 1965 to spend money on Nike-X production, McNamara cited the Chinese peril once again as something against which the system might be feasible. His strategy was to make sure that if production were forced on him, the official rationale would support only limited deployment. Johnson had forced him to approve an ABM, and McNamara was determined to open that door only so wide. By this time, McNamara also thought the Chinese-threat rationale was intellectually unsupportable; there simply was no such threat. Citing it in public, he hoped, might spur additional opposition to the whole project.
McNamara delivered the speech to a conference of United Press International editors and publishers in San Francisco on September 18, 1967. Among the intended audience back in Washington, it prompted just the confusion that McNamara had desired. Five months later, when McNamara left the Pentagon and compiled his major speeches into a book entitled The Essence of Security, he placed only the first part of the San Francisco speech in the main body of the book. The last part, the part calling for an anti-China ABM, the part that served his purposes as a bureaucrat under pressure but embarrassed him as an intellectual, he buried in an obscure appendix at the back.
For the military and its congressional guardians, McNamara’s China rationale was the first step toward the multibillion-dollar nationwide system for which they had pined. To several in the strategic community, defense against Chinese attack was, in its own right, a laudable objective. Among this group, Albert Wohlstetter was most adamant and influential.
In the early 1960s, Wohlstetter was fired from the RAND Corporation, basically for all too willingly helping his former acolytes in McNamara’s Office of Systems Analysis, which often helped kill many an Air Force weapons system. He moved on to the University of Chicago and later joined the Stanford Research Institute, SRI, the Army’s think tank.