Real-World Nuclear Deterrence: The Making of International Strategy

Real-World Nuclear Deterrence: The Making of International Strategy David G. Coleman Joseph M. Siracusa PRAEGER SECURI...

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Real-World Nuclear Deterrence: The Making of International Strategy

David G. Coleman Joseph M. Siracusa

PRAEGER SECURITY INTERNATIONAL

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REAL-WORLD NUCLEAR DETERRENCE

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Praeger Security International Advisory Board Board Cochairs Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Public and International Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Georgia (U.S.A.) Paul Wilkinson, Professor of International Relations and Chairman of the Advisory Board, Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St. Andrews (U.K.) Members Eliot A. Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies and Director, Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University (U.S.A.) Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, Center for Strategic and International Studies (U.S.A.) Thérèse Delpech, Senior Research Fellow, CERI (Atomic Energy Commission), Paris (France) Sir Michael Howard, former Professor of History of War, Oxford University, and Professor of Military and Naval History, Yale University (U.K.) Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy, USA (Retd.), former Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Headquarters, Department of the Army (U.S.A.) Paul M. Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History and Director, International Security Studies, Yale University (U.S.A.) Robert J. O’Neill, former Chichele Professor of the History of War, All Souls College, Oxford University (Australia) Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland (U.S.A.) Jusuf Wanandi, co-founder and member, Board of Trustees, Centre for Strategic and International Studies (Indonesia) Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek International (U.S.A.)

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REAL-WORLD NUCLEAR DETERRENCE THE MAKING OF INTERNATIONAL STRATEGY

David G. Coleman and Joseph M. Siracusa

PRAEGER SECURITY INTERNATIONAL Westport, Connecticut r London

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coleman, David G. Real-world nuclear deterrence : the making of international strategy / David G. Coleman and Joseph M. Siracusa. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–98098–7 (alk. paper) 1. Nuclear disarmament. 2. Security, International. I. Siracusa, Joseph M. II. Title. JZ5665.C655 2006 2006015091 355.02 17–dc22 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2006 by David G. Coleman and Joseph M. Siracusa All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006015091 ISBN: 0–275–98098–7 First published in 2006 Praeger Security International, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents Preface and Acknowledgments

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Arming for Peace

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Extending Nuclear Umbrellas

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The Credibility Gap

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Bridging the Gap

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The Numbers Game

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Keeping the Lid On

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The Spread of Nuclear Weapons

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Notes

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Selected Bibliography

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Index

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Preface and Acknowledgments The bomb still matters. Although an atomic bomb has not been used in anger in over sixty years, concerns about its potential use have remained conspicuously present on the world stage. As President Bill Clinton’s first secretary of defense, Les Aspin, put it: “The cold war is over, the Soviet Union is no more. But the post–cold war world is decidedly not post-nuclear.” For all the sincere desire for nuclear stockpiles to be built down to zero, for the foreseeable future, the bomb is here to stay. Gone, fortunately, are the days when living with the bomb meant, in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, “Each night we knew that within minutes, perhaps through a misunderstanding, our world could end and morning never come.”1 But if the threat of global thermonuclear war has receded, it has not disappeared. Sixty years into the nuclear age, the prospect of a global post–nuclear age has not progressed much further than wishful thinking. In this book, we dissent from the view that nuclear deterrence became irrelevant with the end of the cold war. To be sure, the centrality of nuclear deterrence in American foreign policy is much diminished, and rightly so. In an age when laser-guided missiles, fitted with cameras, can strike targets with pinpoint accuracy and customized explosive power, it becomes increasingly difficult to envisage a military contingency where conventional weapons will not do the job, and do it with better effect.2 American conventional military might has advanced so far ahead that it now has greatly enhanced deterrent power of its own. But nuclear deterrence has always been about more than preventing global thermonuclear war through

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assured destruction—it is about pursuing and protecting national interests and preventing limited conflicts, a point emphasized three decades ago by Alexander George and Richard Smoke in their important study of deterrence in American foreign policy.3 Nuclear threats remain fundamental to relations between many states and threaten to become more important. Even as U.S. military policy moves slowly and fitfully toward a post-nuclear posture, the proliferation of nuclear weapons—the single greatest danger confronting the international community in the foreseeable future—will likely spawn two potentially calamitous effects. The first is the nuclear nightmare that terrorists will get their hands on nuclear weapons, a threat that has come into stark relief since September 11, 2001. In rare agreement in an otherwise highly polarized 2004 presidential election campaign, President George W. Bush and the Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, both singled out that threat as the most important confronting U.S. security policy.4 A second effect of the proliferation of nuclear weapons will be the proliferation of threats to use them. Whether those threats are implicit or explicit, that potentiality threatens to greatly complicate the global security situation and is in many respects harder to undo. As more states join the nuclear club to enhance their prestige or overcome insecurity—perceived or imagined—they will undergo their own nuclear learning curve, a process for which, as the nuclear experience of the past sixty years has shown, there is no clear road map. The likelihood of missteps along the way is only too real. For these reasons, a fresh look at how states have grappled with the problems of nuclear deterrence in practice remains timely and useful. When the atomic bomb was unleashed on the world stage in a devastating tempest of sound and fury in the closing stages of World War II, it was immediately apparent that this was not just another weapon; Hiroshima was not the kind of watershed moment that can only be seen in retrospect. President Harry Truman described them to a startled world as a “harnessing of the basic power of the universe.”5 Atomic scientist Robert J. Oppenheimer, widely regarded as the father of the atomic bomb, was moved to spiritual analogies. Recalling Hindu scripture, he reflected that “I am become death” even before the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Before two decades had passed, two sworn enemies, the United States and the Soviet Union, which Oppenheimer likened to “two scorpions in a bottle each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life,”6 had assembled so much latent firepower that they could, quite literally, make humanity extinct. The primary mission of these nuclear forces has been—and remains— deterrence. At its most basic level, nuclear deterrence is about preventing threats by convincing the adversary that the costs of action would be too high.7 The U.S. department of defense has distilled the definition to “the prevention from action by fear of the consequences. Deterrence is a state of mind brought about by the existence of a credible threat of unacceptable

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counteraction.”8 More simply still, it is the fear of reprisal. And of all the paradoxes inherent with nuclear weapons, none has been so compelling as this one: the real power of nuclear weapons lies not in their actual use but in the threat of their use. It is a paradox peculiar to these weapons, famously coined the “absolute weapon” by one of the earliest nuclear strategists, Bernard Brodie.9 They are perhaps the definitive weapons of mass destruction in their own right, but their significance has been amplified greatly by the value invested in them by others through terror and fear. In short, their primary purpose is political, not military. Our objective in this book is to provide an accessible discussion of some of the most important, common, and recurring questions of nuclear weapons policy. The volume of material written on nuclear issues over the past sixty years is vast and spans highly technical math-based international relations theory, economic games theory, psychology, and numerous other perspectives.10 The theory of nuclear deterrence has engaged some of the world’s brightest minds in informed speculation about how deterrence does and should work. But nuclear deterrence is more than a theory, and often operates differently in the real world than it does in theory. This book’s approach is historical—we are more concerned with the question of how nuclear deterrence has worked rather than how it should work. The past rarely provides a perfect model for the present. But if past and present are imperfectly aligned, they are aligned nonetheless. A central conclusion resulting from our examination is that making of nuclear weapons policy often has surprisingly little relationship with any objective rendering of what works and what does not. The making of nuclear policy is a remarkably imperfect process. It is a complex, fluid bargaining process subject to the tides of politics, budgets, threat perception, ideology, technology, parochial service rivalries, flawed information, and sometimes just plain wishful thinking.11 Expert opinion on how best to keep the peace is more often used to justify policy than devise it.12 By its very nature nuclear deterrence strategy has always been highly speculative and what might work has often been more important than what has worked. A further conclusion is that functional deterrence is highly dependent on individual circumstances. Real world international affairs are often messy, rarely bearing much resemblance to the neat confines imposed by theory. Nuclear deterrence often works, but usually in unpredictable ways, in combination with the fluid bargaining process that produces nuclear policy, which makes nuclear deterrence as a centerpiece of a state’s foreign policy a losing proposition. This book is not designed as a comprehensive accounting of the history of nuclear deterrence, an undertaking that would probably require many thousands of pages and would still be bedeviled by the gaps in the available evidence.13 Rather, we have selected some of the core, recurring problems of learning how to live with the bomb—issues that remain as relevant today—and subjected them to new scrutiny based on new evidence and

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new perspectives. To that end, the chapters revolve around a key question related to the history of nuclear deterrence. The first chapter focuses on the making of national nuclear deterrents, finding that the earliest nuclear powers learned that an existential deterrent, which is the notion that the mere existence of the bomb is enough to deter an adversary, has rarely proven effective and that in fact the possession of such weapons often became a substitute for serious thinking about what to do with them. The second and third chapters focus on the question of how wide a range of threats a nuclear deterrent can protect against. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union all explored so-called extended deterrence, where nuclear guarantees were made to international allies, spanning the globe. All three powers found that it was an imperfect idea that could be stretched too far. The fourth chapter looks at attempts to redress that overextension through a more balanced deterrent force with enhanced credibility. The fifth chapter looks at the question of “How many nuclear weapons are enough?” and finds that the answer to that question often has little bearing on actual policy. No U.S. president or Soviet leader wanted a massive arms race, and yet they proved powerless to stop it. The sixth chapter discusses the issue of controlling the escalation of hostilities between nuclear powers—“Is there such a thing as a winnable nuclear war?” And the concluding chapter discusses the perennial and complicated problem of the spread of nuclear weapons and how that will increase the relevance of nuclear deterrence for the foreseeable future. In this book, we draw on a wide array of new archival records, interviews with former policymakers, and the best new scholarship. In light of these new sources, old and enduring questions about the making of nuclear policy warrant a new look, and we have found that they often suggest new interpretations. Thanks to the diligent efforts of archivists, individual scholars, and organizations devoted to dissemination of recently declassified documents like the National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project, that body of evidence continues to grow. Nevertheless, it will always be suggestive rather than conclusive. Nuclear secrets are among the most closely guarded of state secrets and there is often little incentive for state leaders to engage in candid articulation of how they themselves reacted to threats. Indeed, it may not even be entirely understood by the decision makers themselves. For historians, disentangling the threads of the decision-making process is often a messy business, made all the more difficult by the fact that every government goes out of its way to shroud nuclear decision making in a heavy blanket of official ambiguity. The very nature of nuclear deterrence usually pivots on that calculated ambiguity to give the enemy pause, which is the point after all. As one of the leading thinkers on deterrence issues, Robert Jervis, has written, “Deterrence succeeds or fails in the mind of the attacker.”14 Who can say for sure why someone decided not to do

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something, especially when that person has a vested interest in concealing the reasons? Nevertheless, we have striven in the following pages to identify the most important threads going into the making of nuclear deterrence policy over the past sixty years. In keeping with our objective of providing an accessible discussion, we have intentionally restricted the use of technical jargon. Much of the nuclear debate over the past sixty years has been weighed down by notoriously arcane jargon that has often done more to obscure than clarify. A dizzying array of acronyms and technical terms have been applied layer upon layer, and there has often seemed an open license to create new acronyms at will; the term “acronymphomania” has been aptly coined only partially in jest and one commentator notably referred to a “nuclear priesthood,” replete with its own “catechism.”15 In this book, we have avoided as much jargon as possible, striving instead for plain language. Even a small, selective sample of statistics of the nuclear age provides a sobering reminder of the scale of the problem. Upwards of 128,000 nuclear weapons have been produced in the past sixty years, about 98 percent of which were produced by the United States and the Soviet Union.16 The eight or nine current members of nuclear club—Russia, the United States, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan, China, Israel, and perhaps North Korea— still possess about 27,000 operational nuclear weapons between them.17 At least another fifteen countries currently have on hand enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon.18 The United States alone has spent about $7.6 trillion on nuclear weapons programs, which averages out to about $115 billion per year or the second highest expenditure after social security; since 1940, nuclear weapons have consumed over a quarter of all U.S. military spending.19 The costs of the British nuclear program, a much smaller undertaking, are even more difficult to quantify owing to layers of governmental secrecy. One informed observer estimates that between 1947 and the late 1980s the British government spent from £40 to £50 billion on its nuclear weapons program.20 During the cold war, the Soviet Union conducted approximately 715 nuclear tests and the United States 1,054.21 Of those tests, about 400 were atmospheric tests, split roughly between them. Although atmospheric testing ceased in 1963, the effects linger as a public health issue. A 2002 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that a legacy of those tests is that virtually every person who has lived in the United States since 1951 has been exposed to radioactive fallout and that that exposure, although at relatively low levels, could be responsible for up to 11,000 cancer deaths in the United States.22 Clearly, even the United States has not emerged unscathed from its own nuclear past. The history of nuclear deterrence demonstrates beyond peradventure of doubt that nuclear weapons have power and utility and will continue to do so. It behooves us, therefore, to better understand the strengths and

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weaknesses of how that power has been wielded. Those who ignore the history of the nuclear experience do so at their own peril. However, unlike the nations that rolled the dice in 1914 and hoped for the best, this time we are unlikely to survive our common fate. Many people and organizations have contributed in one way or another to this book. The archivists of official government archives such as the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, the presidential libraries, and the U.K. National Archives perform an invaluable and unheralded service to all students of government policy, and we thank those with whom we have had the privilege of working. In the past decade and a half, a number of organizations have led the way in unlocking previously closed documentary records relating to nuclear history. The National Security Archive, an independent research and archive institute on international affairs based at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, has long led the way in prying loose closed records from the United States Government and making the fruits of those efforts available digitally. Dr. William Burr, in particular, has headed an effort to compile an archive of documents related to nuclear history; it has proved invaluable to our research. The Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars performs a similar service with a focus on records from “the other side” of the former iron curtain and a newer group, the Parallel History Project, with its focus on NATO and the Warsaw Pact, has made several relevant collections online and through publications. We have benefited greatly from the work of both centers. In addition, the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs has pioneered efforts to make accessible the formerly secret White House recordings of the six U.S. presidents who secretly taped their meetings and telephone calls. (One of the authors has been privileged to be a member of the PRP). Through their efforts in making the documentary record accessible, all of these organizations have made valuable contributions to deeper understanding of the issues discussed in this book. We also thank our editor, Heather Staines, for her patience and support with what became a much longer project than we ever intended. David Coleman: I thank the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for generously allowing me the flexibility to undertake this project. I have had the pleasure and privilege to work with a remarkable group of scholars at the Miller Center and thank them for contributing each in their own way to this project. In particular, I also thank Tim Naftali, Kent Germany, Marc Selverstone, Philip Zelikow, and Frank Gavin. Chuck McCurdy, in the University of Virginia’s History Department, has been very supportive of my teaching on nuclear history and in other important ways. My students have provided new perspectives—Susan Dunham and Kerry O’Brien, in particular, have made important contributions to the research we draw upon in this book.

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My coauthor, mentor, and friend Joe Siracusa, has long provided model and inspiration for my explorations in history, for which I am eternally grateful. And Kate has been an unwavering source of support, encouragement, and good cheer. Joseph Siracusa: Before all else—but not above all else—I am grateful for the support of my colleagues in the School of Global Studies, Social Science & Planning, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. The RMIT University, in Melbourne, has, in every sense, proved to be a congenial workplace. At the personal level, I thank my children—Hanna, Tina, and Joseph—whose generation will have to deal with the problems their father’s generation left behind; I also thank Candice for her support and assistance in the preparation of this manuscript. Finally, I acknowledge my indebtedness to my old friend and coauthor, David Coleman, who deserves the lion’s share of praise for his initiative, relentless research, and mastery of synthesis. David G. Coleman Charlottesville Joseph M. Siracusa Melbourne

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1

Arming for Peace Atomic bombs are meant to frighten those with weak nerves. Joseph Stalin, September 1946

What does a nation do with the bomb once it has it? It is a question all members of the nuclear club have confronted at one time or another. Most state bomb programs thus far have had as their objective simply having the bomb, not using it.1 Putting it to use for peaceful purposes has usually come as an afterthought. Why divert so much in the way of national resources to developing a weapon that is theoretically never to be used? Security and prestige are the most frequently cited justifications for national nuclear ambitions and neither of those ends is served by actual use—in fact, in the post-Nagasaki era, the bomb has acquired such a stigma that both objectives would likely be rapidly undone for any nation that broke the nuclear taboo and actually used an atomic or nuclear bomb against an adversary.2 Whether the bomb has been a force for peace over the past sixty years is debatable. Even sixty years after the beginning of the cold war—and a decade and a half after its end—there is still no unanimity on how important nuclear weapons have been in keeping the peace. For the forty-five years of the cold war, what historian John Lewis Gaddis called “the long peace,” there was not an outbreak of direct, major conflict between the major powers, an unprecedented accomplishment.3 But how much of that peace was due to nuclear weapons and how much despite them?

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Real-World Nuclear Deterrence

Political scientist John Mueller stirred controversy in 1988 by suggesting that nuclear weapons were “essentially irrelevant” to keeping the peace, that even without these new, devastating weapons, war had simply become too costly for any rational power to enter into.4 It is an argument that goes against the grain of most thinking on the cold war. Cold war statesmen certainly believed that they were relevant and that that fundamentally altered their policies and decisions. As more and more documents and records become available in international archives, the conclusion that the bomb had profoundly influenced the course of international history over the past sixty years is inescapable. Scholars nevertheless disagree on the nature of that influence. As historian John Lewis Gaddis put it, “prior to that moment, improvements in weaponry had, with very few exceptions, increased the costs of fighting wars without reducing the propensity to do so.”5 Marc Trachtenberg has written that “The nuclear revolution was like a great earthquake, setting off a series of shock waves, that gradually worked their way through the world political system.”6 By contrast, Michael Mandelbaum has argued that although nuclear weapons were revolutionary in several important respects and had significant effects on political behavior, “They have not produced a revolutionary change in the international system” and had “not produced a political revolution comparable to the technical revolution they represent.”7 Like many of the major issues concerning nuclear weapons, then, the debate about nuclear weapons have helped or hindered the cause of peace remains unresolved. Enhancing the perception of national security through an independent nuclear deterrent has been the driving force for pursuing the bomb in many cases, especially Great Britain, France, Pakistan, India, Israel, and China. But putting the atomic bomb to use for deterrent purposes was not part of the calculation for the earliest bomb programs. Operating in the geopolitical context of all-out war, the Manhattan Project, a joint undertaking by the American, British, and Canadian governments, was premised on not letting the enemy, in this case Nazi Germany, win an advantage that might tilt the tide of the war. The calculation on whether to go ahead with the atomic bomb program was informed almost entirely on fears that Germany might develop the weapon first.8 One Manhattan Project scientist forecast that if Hitler got the bomb first, “the war will be over in two weeks.”9 As it turned out, that fear was based on flawed assumptions—for a variety of reasons, the German bomb program was much smaller and less capable than it was feared at the time and there was never any chance that the Germans would win the “battle of the laboratories,” as Truman dubbed the contest.10 Nevertheless, it was a shared mistake. The same motivation— beating the Germans to the bomb—lay behind the Soviet Union’s early explorations of the weaponization of the atom (although the motivation later shifted to having the bomb because the United States had it).11 In each case, the fear was not having the bomb when Germany had it, a motivation

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Arming for Peace

that evaporated with the end of the Second World War. The American and Soviet bomb programs therefore faced the same question that has at one point or another challenged every successful nuclear program to date: “What now?” American defense intellectual Bernard Brodie provided one of the earliest efforts at a coherent answer. In a seminal book titled The Absolute Weapon published in 1946, Brodie defined the essence of what came to be called nuclear deterrence. In future, Brodie argued, the cost of retaliation in kind would be too high for any nation to contemplate the use of atomic weapons as traditional weapons of war. Brodie argued that the only and real value of atomic weapons lay not in their actual use in war but rather in the threat of their use. “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars,” he wrote. “From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.”12 Brodie’s prediction of a peace guaranteed by the fear of atomic reprisal was a neat summation and was in many respects an attractive theory. If the bomb were to exist at all and efforts at international control of the bomb remained elusive—as they did for much of the cold war—then it should exist to guarantee the peace. But the formulation’s simplicity was deceptive and proved idealistic. It seemed to imply a kind of low-maintenance way to ensure that the Second World War was indeed the war to end all wars. After all, what rational government would risk national suicide in a world with atomic weapons? Brodie had labeled the atomic bomb as “the absolute weapon,” but in the day-to-day reality of practical international politics, it proved less than absolute. His formulation implied a kind of existential deterrent—that the very existence of atomic bombs would be enough to deter. The reality proved much more complex as the new nuclear powers found that nuclear deterrents were not necessarily self-evident; simply having the bomb did not necessarily mean that others would be deterred. Rather, it had to be backed up by real capabilities, viable doctrine, and credible declaratory policy. The history of nuclear deterrence is the story of a search for that balance. HOLLOW THREATS Standing on the steps of 10 Downing Street on the afternoon of September 23, 1949, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee read a brief, vague statement: “His Majesty’s Government have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion has occurred in the USSR.” Apart from a call for greater effort toward international control of atomic weapons, the statement offered no further explanation. The announcement did not say when and where the explosion had taken place or how it had been detected, although it later came to light that the announcement came nearly a full month after the actual explosion—the test had been conducted on August 29 of a plutonium-type

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bomb—and had been detected after the fact by spy aircraft taking air samples.13 None of that was revealed at the time, though. Journalists frantically trying to flesh out the story found other government officials equally tight-lipped. The public reception of the news was remarkably subdued. When the BBC led off its evening news broadcast with that news, the report was typically matter-of-fact.14 Across the Atlantic, President Harry Truman issued a similar statement more or less simultaneously. It, too, offered few details but tried to preempt a domestic political outcry with reassurances that the inevitability that the Soviets would someday develop the bomb “has always been taken into account by us.”15 The implications were uncertain but the message was clear. The Soviets had the bomb. The American atomic monopoly was over sooner than most serious observers expected. For the British people, it was a reminder that their small, densely populated islands were highly vulnerable to the new weapons. For the American people, protected by time and space, the sense of imminent peril was always going to be less immediate. The development had come before nearly everyone expected, but the capability was not in and of itself a cause of shock. Western forecasts for when the Soviets would cross the atomic threshold varied widely, reflecting the dearth of hard evidence on the Soviet atomic program. The first CIA estimate on the issue, dated October 31, 1946, predicted that the Soviets would produce a bomb “at some time between 1950 and 1953.” Later estimates put greater emphasis on the latter end of that time span. Just five days before the Soviets exploded their first bomb, the CIA predicted that the “earliest possible date” that the Soviets would be able to develop the bomb was mid-1950, but the “most probable date” was mid-1953.16 Several policymakers contributed their own guesses. The American ambassador in Moscow, Walter Bedell Smith, who later became director of central intelligence, told James Forrestal at the height of the Berlin blockade in September 1948 that it would be at least five years before the Soviets developed the bomb. “They may well have the ‘notebook’ know-how,” he told Forrestal, “but not the industrial complex to translate that abstract knowledge into concrete weapons.”17 Sir Henry Tizard, head of the British Atomic Energy Program, placed the date at 1957 or 1958. Some argued that it would be later. Others argued that the Soviets would never surmount the technological difficulties of the process. Even the worst-case scenarios envisaged by groups within the U.S. air force projected that it would be 1952 or 1953.18 The announcement was covered extensively in the world press, but generally the popular reaction was relatively calm. Some even used the absence of detailed information to question whether the Soviet explosion had really taken place. The public announcements of the bomb had refused to give any information on how the blast had been detected, which in turn fueled claims from radical isolationists in Congress, such as Senator Owen Brewster (R-Maine), that the Soviet Union did not, in fact, have an atomic

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Arming for Peace

bomb, insinuating that it was a fabricated story designed to scare Congress and the American people into supporting the Truman administration’s cold war foreign policy. Not until over a year later, was the story explained in a column by the Alsop brothers who benefited from some highly explicit and accurate leaks of classified information.19 Doubters were aided by the absence of a follow-up performance by the Soviets. Not until two years later did the Soviets test their second atomic device. On September 24, 1951, the air force’s Atomic Energy Detection System picked up unusually intense acoustic signals within the Soviet Union, which were later confirmed to be another atomic explosion.20 Reevaluations of Soviet atomic capabilities in light of the news were that the Soviet stockpile would rise from about two a month to a total of about five or more a month by the end of 1950. That would reap, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, a growth from approximately 10–20 atomic bomb stockpile that the Soviets were likely to have by mid-1950 to about 200 by mid-1954. That figure constituted something of a critical threshold in American military planning. American defense planners had decided that once the Soviets had the capability to deliver approximately 200 atomic bombs to targets in the United States, they would be able to take out many of the most critical American targets and thereby inflict devastating blows to U.S. war-fighting ability. The United States moved surprisingly slowly in the early cold war to articulate a coherent strategic policy linking military planning to foreign policy objectives. For just over four years the United States had enjoyed an atomic monopoly. During that time, Washington, along with their closest transatlantic allies, especially Great Britain, had failed to craft a coherent doctrine that brought the awesome power of atomic weapons into the service of Western foreign policy even as the consensus grew that the West was in a new kind of war with the Communist regime in the Soviet Union, a “cold war” in columnist Walter Lippmann’s felicitous expression. All they could muster were relatively hollow threats on an ad hoc basis. It was an approach U.S. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal complained was “a patchwork job.”21 Having formally adopted the concept of the “containment” of Soviet Communism in late November 1948, most policymakers within the Truman administration simply assumed—or perhaps hoped is a better word—that the American atomic monopoly would somehow intimidate the Soviets from breaches of the peace for fear of precipitating an all-out war. That expectation probably figured to some extent even in Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although historians disagree on the extent to which that figured in the decision.22 But if that was Truman’s intention, it did not appear to work. The bomb was supposed to be the “winning weapon,”23 but by 1948 it was abundantly clear that the West was neither winning the cold war nor preventing Moscow from repeatedly challenging Western interests. The Soviets

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seemed to have the initiative on all the fronts that mattered. French strategist Raymond Aron wrote in 1954 that “When one surveys the entire period since the Hiroshima explosion, it is difficult to resist the impression that the United States has lost rather than gained by its famous atomic monopoly. It has been of no use in the cold war.”24 The political crises just seemed to keep coming: Yugoslavia, Iran, Greece, Italy, France, and Germany. And underpinning the entire debate on whether the bombed would be used was the issue of whether or not it could be used. Although the dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 had demonstrated that atomic weapons were technologically and militarily feasible, since then the weight of political and public opinion weighed against using them. If the function of the bomb was to protect national security, it was not clear how it was contributing to that. That prompted a number of leading policymakers to explore ways of making the implicit nuclear deterrent more explicit. A central element to that effort was building a real atomic capability. Political pressure to bring the boys back home and create a smooth economic transition from war footing to peace led to a massive demobilization in the wake of the Second World War. There were higher domestic priorities than gearing up for another war. In the perennial guns-or-butter debate, guns lost out—at least initially.25 For those most concerned about the emerging threat of the Soviet Union, such as James Forrestal, the demobilization went too far. Anxiety was becoming prevalent amongst American military planners that the postwar demobilization had left the United States military barely able to maintain its existing commitments; if the Soviets forced military action in another theater, there were simply not enough Western forces to stop them.26 The limits were political, not economic or logistical. In contrast with most of the other great powers, the United States had emerged from the Second World War on a solid economic footing; its territory was unharmed and its fabric of society intact. All it took to reverse the weakening of American defense forces, critics of the Truman administration’s low defense spending limits argued, was the political will to do so. A by-product of the postwar demobilization was that the U.S. atomic program was placed in what amounted, for all practical purposes, as stasis. In his announcement of the bombing of Hiroshima, Truman implied that atomic bombs were rolling off the assembly line: “In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.”27 While not technically incorrect, it was deliberately misleading. In fact, the Americans had only a handful of bombs then and through the early cold war, the result of political decisions taken in Washington rather than any logistical limits. By the end of 1945, the United States had built only six atomic bombs; by 1947, only 32; by 1948, 110. By the end of 1949, when the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb, the United States had 235 weapons. The stockpile grew at much faster rates after 1950, when

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Truman authorized a massive military buildup on the back of the Korean War and the NSC 68 decision.28 Building more bombs would accomplish little without devising viable nuclear doctrine and declaratory policy. The first cold war crisis to test these elements was the crisis in Berlin in 1948, the first of the cold war’s genuine nuclear crises.29 One observer claims that in view of the precedent it was setting, “it is clear beyond any shadow of doubt that this was the most critical crisis of the cold war.”30 When Stalin blockaded Berlin in mid-1948, it seemed to provide the tangible proof that was hitherto lacking from the warnings of Forrestal and others that not only did the Soviets have a conflict of interests with the United States, but they were also willing to act upon those interests. In response, Truman made a remarkable commitment to maintain the presence in Berlin, although he had little idea how he would accomplish this. The most famous response to the challenge was the Berlin airlift, an ingenious effort to supply the 2 million residents of the Western sectors of the city by air. But Truman never regarded the airlift as anything more than a delaying tactic, albeit one that ultimately paid off when Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had made it abundantly clear that there was no way to win a conventional war in Europe against the Red Army. Although some top secret American war plans tried to incorporate the use of atomic bombs, it remained unclear how the new weapons could best contribute to the effort. Military planners hoped that the atomic bomb would be a “distinct advantage” in war with the Soviet Union at the same time as recognizing that the geography and structure of the Soviet Union offered relatively few high value targets. Targeting cities such as Moscow and Leningrad was logistically viable but offered many disadvantages with little gain—against a country that had lost on the order of 27 million lives in the Second World War, the shock value was likely to be muted and the move was unlikely to contribute to victory.31 The Second World War had shown the value in attacking the enemy’s war making potential with strategic air power, but the Soviet Union was vastly different than Japan or Germany. The Soviet transportation system, identified by planners as “the most vital cog in the war machine of the USSR,” spanned vast distances with relatively few dense hubs; it was simply too spread out to be a viable target for the relatively few atomic bombs the United States possessed during the period. Soviet military industries were also dispersed, and only the country’s petroleum supplies appeared vulnerable to strategic bombing.32 Not until 1956 did the National Security Council believe that the United States had the capability to carry out a “decisive strike” against the Soviet Union, largely the result of greater numbers of more powerful nuclear weapons.33 The postwar demobilization had seriously depleted the practicable options available to the President to exploit the atomic monopoly and it was further hampered by the extreme secrecy surrounding information related

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to atomic weapons. Not even the President was able to get a straight answer on how many weapons were in the U.S. stockpile and what they could do. Catalyzed by the apparent military impotence revealed by the absence of any good options to deal with the Berlin blockade, the Joint Chiefs of Staff undertook to review the defense posture of the United States, beginning with nuclear strategy. Forrestal and the Joint Chiefs of Staff used the blockade in their efforts to thwart Truman’s tight defense budgets, seizing the opportunity to argue that relying on a perception of strength was not enough; it had to be backed up by tangible military capabilities. At the height of the Berlin blockade, frustrated by Truman’s reluctance to commit to “whether or not we are to use the A-bomb in war,” Forrestal took it upon himself to authorize the Joint Chiefs to base their war planning on the assumption that nuclear weapons would be used. Furthermore, the blockade demonstrated the inadequacy of American nuclear strategy when Washington was forced to improvise an atomic deterrent by sending B-29 “atomic” bombers to Britain and Germany. Despite efforts to inflate the significance of this deployment as “the ultimate expression of air-power strength,”34 the bitter debate then raging in Washington over the respective merits of civilian or military custody of the atomic stockpile thwarted efforts to place atomic weapons on British soil. And without the necessary infrastructure, and more particularly without having been converted to carry atomic payloads, the effectiveness of these planes in practical terms was severely limited. Moreover, an ongoing dispute over the AngloAmerican consultation process—even if there was to be one—further limited the deterrence value of this deployment.35 It was—not to put too fine a point on it—a bluff. And few had thought seriously about how to wage atomic war. Winston Churchill, notoriously succumbing to military bravado, suggested presenting the Soviets with an ultimatum threatening that if they did not retire from Berlin, abandon East Germany, and retreat to the Polish border, U.S. atomic bombers would raze Soviet cities. The U.S. Commander in Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, took a similar line by telling Forrestal that he “would not hesitate to use the atomic bomb and would hit Moscow and Leningrad first.”36 British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin was also enthusiastic for the opportunity to show Moscow “we mean business.”37 As tempting as it was to lash out at Moscow, Washington was inclined to tread lightly. As official British government policy put it, it seemed doubtful that the West could add the “scorpion’s sting” to such nuclear threats, a point that U.S. policymakers quietly conceded.38 Accordingly, it remained difficult to justify talk of atomic weapons until the threat became absolute. That Stalin had provocatively blockaded Berlin in the first place, despite the American atomic monopoly, was clear evidence that a deterrent had to be manufactured and explicit; the mere existence of atomic weapons was not enough. Moreover, the United States, many feared, had made commitments

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that exceeded its military capabilities. In short, it appeared that fiscal restraint had led to strategic bankruptcy. Thus, the blockade was the first in a series of shocks—along with Communist victories in Czechoslovakia and China, the Korean War, and the first detonation of a Soviet atomic device— that confronted U.S. policymakers during the tumultuous period from 1948 to 1950 and forced a reevaluation of broader cold war strategy, including nuclear policy. THE SOVIET BOMB Stalin publicly professed indifference to the deterrent effect of the bomb. It was a premonition of the wide gap between Soviet and American understanding of nuclear deterrence that became entrenched in following decades.39 “The atomic bomb,” he claimed in remarks published in Pravda in September 1946, “is intended to frighten people with weak nerves, but it cannot decide the fate of a war.”40 Instead, he maintained an unshakable faith that so-called permanent operating factors would ensure that the Soviet Union prevailed in any future war as they had in the last.41 It was a view initially shared by Chinese leader Mao Zedong who was similarly skeptical that the atomic bomb had changed fundamental political and military realities. Like Stalin, Mao saw war in terms of attrition; it was not a question of technology or hardware but one of the people using it. “I don’t see the reason for the atomic bomb,” he said in 1958; “Conventional weapons are still the thing.”42 He had waged war in Korea, with some success, without the Americans finding a way to win outright. And he faced down American nuclear threats in the Taiwan Straits. He provocatively described the atomic bomb as “a paper tiger.”43 In January 1955 he told the Finnish ambassador to Moscow that “even if the American atom bombs were so powerful that, when all dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, although it might be a major event for the solar system.”44 After China successfully exploded its own bomb on October 16, 1964, Mao expended considerably less effort in debunking the significance of atomic weapons. Stalin’s calculated indifference was a strategic gambit. It was useful politically and diplomatically, but intentionally masked reality.45 Behind this public facade Stalin’s private comments and directions showed a more nuanced understanding of the potential impact of the atomic bomb on international relations. His spies and scientists had alerted him by May 1942 that the British and Americans might be jointly seeking an atomic bomb— in fact, he knew about the Manhattan Project even before Harry Truman did—but he was slow to grasp the import of the novel new weapon.46 He had been skeptical at first that such a weapon was significant; when his intelligence directorate informed him that some reports indicated that the

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British and Americans were collaborating on an atomic bomb, he voiced suspicions that it was part of a deliberate misinformation program.47 Once convinced—paradoxically, by the suspicious absence of scientific information appearing in journals from Anglo-American government efforts to keep information from the Germans rather than any positive confirmation—Stalin clearly grasped the import of the new weapon.48 Pavel Sudoplatov, a former Soviet spy, claims that when a senior Soviet scientist suggested in October 1942 simply asking Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt about the program, Stalin responded that “You are politically na¨ıve if you think that they would share information about the weapons that will dominate the world in the future,” a comment as interesting for its evident suspicion of his allies as for his recognition of the revolutionary potential of the atomic bomb.49 The Soviets had started a bomb program in 1943 out of fear that the Germans might get to the bomb first, but the resources devoted to it fluctuated at a time when there were so many other pressing issues. It was, after all, a massive and expensive risk—only the United States had the luxury of territorial security, natural resources, and two billion dollars to spend on the program.50 Only after Hiroshima did atomic weapons become a top priority of the Soviet government. Prior to then, Stalin seems to have grossly underestimated the scale of destruction wrought by the new weapon—that changed with the dramatic evidence of the atomic bombings of Japan.51 But if there were any doubt that Stalin came to appreciate the potential of the bomb to alter international politics it is clear from his orders to Lavrenti Beria and the Soviet Union’s leading atomic scientist Igor Kurchatov to spare no resources in ramping up the Soviet bomb program “on a Russian scale.” Stalin promised that the atomic scientists would be given unprecedented freedom in their work and all the material support the state could muster.52 “Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The balance has been broken,” he told his scientists. “Build the Bomb—it will remove the great danger from us.”53 He also mobilized the Soviet intelligence services. In this “golden age” of Soviet espionage, spies played an important role in the development of the Soviet bomb. While the Manhattan Project devoted most of its early security resources to protecting against German espionage, the Soviets benefited from a steady stream of detailed information—including specific blueprints—spirited out of the program by Soviet sympathizers and agents on the inside such as Klaus Fuchs. Most were fellow travelers, seduced by the Communist cause. Thousands of pages streamed in through the Soviet intelligence service and were channeled directly to the Soviet scientists by Lavrenti Beria’s organization.54 This stream of intelligence directly accelerated the Soviet bomb program. Stalin’s decision to mobilize Soviet resources to acquire the bomb had far-reaching effects on the development of a modern Soviet militaryindustrial complex, effectively laying the groundwork for his successors to a

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massive nuclear program that would establish practical strategic parity with the West within two decades.55 During the Stalin years, Soviet military doctrine essentially ignored nuclear weapons as offensive weapons. But there were active efforts to defend against American long-range bombers that might be armed with atomic bombs. Around 1948, antiaircraft defenses were assigned a higher priority, around the same time that Soviet scientists and the Ministry of Defense first began looking into the technology of both intercontinental ballistic missiles and antiballistic missiles.56 In part because of the inherent secrecy of the Soviet regime, efforts to determine whether Stalin was deterred by the American bomb are complicated. Available evidence is mixed, and suggests that the Soviet leader’s views, like that of most of the leaders of the nuclear club, evolved over time. One of the leading historians of Soviet foreign policy, Vladislav Zubok, has speculated that: If somebody had asked Stalin after Hiroshima in 1945 and again at the end of his life in late 1952, whether he believed the bomb would affect the likelihood of war in the future, he might have given two different answers. In 1945, he would probably have said that the US atomic monopoly encouraged America’s drive for world hegemony and made the prospects of war more likely. In early 1950, after the first Soviet test, he was ready to say that after the first test of the Soviet bomb, the correlation of forces shifted again in favour of the forces of socialism and peace.57

Winston Churchill insisted that America’s atomic bomb was all that held Communist advance at bay. “Nothing stands between Europe today and complete subjugation to Communist tyranny but the atom bomb the Americans possess,” he told an audience in Wales in 1948. It was a refrain he repeated often. Given the nature of the Soviet regime and its extreme suppression of information, a definitive explanation of what held the Red Army at bay in the early cold war will probably remain elusive. THE MISSED OPPORTUNITY In retrospect, it is surprising that the world’s sole atomic power, the United States, did not take more aggressive moves to prevent others from developing the bomb. That is not to say that the idea was not hotly debated. The prospect of military action to prevent the Soviets from acquiring their own atomic arsenal had long been discussed in classified circles. Some argued that the United States had squandered its advantage, that America’s greatest military asset had been wasted, a decision that could have catastrophic consequences.58 James Forrestal wrote in late 1947 that the remaining years of the monopoly, however long that would be, would be the West’s “years of

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opportunity.”59 As early as January 1946, General Leslie Groves, the military commander of the Manhattan Project, raised the prospect of preventive strikes against the Soviet Union’s atomic ambitions. Just months after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and a month before George Kennan sent his famous explanation of Soviet expansionist ambitions, the so-called “long telegram,” Groves wrote in a classified memorandum discussing the military implications of the atomic bomb that “If we were ruthlessly realistic, we would not permit any foreign power with which we are not firmly allied and in which we do not have absolute confidence, to make or possess atomic weapons.” “If such a country started to make atomic weapons we would destroy its capacity to make them before it had progressed far enough to threaten us,” he continued.60 Such thinking was by no means confined to the radical fringe, although the U.S. government never came close to implementing a preventive war strategy and the most powerful government officials did not support the idea.61 Nevertheless, talk of preventive war was real and it was widespread. As Marc Trachtenberg has shown, the sense of foreboding ran deep in policymaking circles about what the Soviets might do if they had the bomb, leading to a full range of prescriptions.62 Talk of preventive war was controversial but held a mantle of respectably that peaked in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a respectability that faded rapidly in the midst of the thermonuclear revolution of hydrogen warheads and long-range missiles. If one accepted the notion that when the Soviets mastered the atom, it would lead inevitably to an arms race, which, in turn, would lead inexorably to war, might not a preventive war before Stalin had his own bomb be a lesser evil? There were many who thought so. Although the American public remained decidedly cool to the idea of preventive war—various polls in the early 1950s pegged public support for preventive war against the Soviet Union at between 10 and 15 percent63 —support for the idea of waging war on the Soviets before Stalin built up his own large atomic arsenal enjoyed remarkably wide—if publicity-shy—support in official Washington, and Moscow knew it.64 Some of this was predictable. The air force and the RAND Corporation, a Santa-Monica based think-tank close to the air force acted as locus for the idea and remained havens for the idea long after it had been discredited in other circles. But in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when there was still an apparent window of opportunity, support for preventive war also came from less expected quarters. Leading atomic scientist Leo Szilard reportedly advocated preventive war as early as October 1945.65 George Kennan and fellow state department Kremlinologist Charles Bohlen, both relative moderates in terms of cold war military policy, found the logic compelling.66 There were a number of reasons why such arguments never won the day. To begin with, it was a question of national character. America was not in the habit of starting wars. Having been on the receiving end of the surprise

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attack at Pearl Harbor, U.S. policymakers—and the American public—held U.S. foreign policy to a higher standard. Although the United States has long reserved the right to take preventive military action, actually doing so would first have to overcome deeply held national convictions that starting wars was not the best way to behave in the international arena.67 More importantly, though, were doubts that preventive war against the Soviet Union would be successful.68 The postwar demobilization placed severe limits on U.S. military capabilities and the Western European allies were in no position to make any meaningful military contribution to the effort. The Red Army had a clear run to the English Channel. The United States, then, was neither capable nor inclined to wage a preventive war against the Soviet Union to prevent a communist bomb. THE THERMONUCLEAR REVOLUTION Clearly, Moscow was not awed by the American atomic monopoly. And now that that monopoly had been broken, many observers were convinced that the Soviets would become even more dangerous. Informed opinion, including the intelligence community, recognized that it would still take time for the Soviets to develop a usable stockpile—by 1950 the Soviets had approximately five atomic weapons to the United States’ 369.69 The United States faced two potential paths. One was to seize the opportunity to push for bilateral disarmament. The Soviets had balked at early efforts at international control of atomic weapons on the basis that they would be relinquishing the right to develop their own atomic capability while the United States retained its arsenal. Now that both powers had the bomb, it would in effect be a mutual sacrifice. The other potential path was to engage in full-scale competition and an arms race. For a variety of reasons mostly derived with the cold war mindset, the administration chose the latter course. It was a watershed moment. One leading arms control advocate argues that “This was the crucial fork, the road wrongly taken that effectively institutionalized a policy of nuclear one-upmanship.”70 Nevertheless, hawks inside government and out who had been calling for more aggressive foreign and defense postures used the alignment of cold war setbacks to push their agenda. James Forrestal had long complained that the tight budget ceilings imposed by President Truman were forcing “a minimum, not an adequate strategy.”71 His successor, Louis Johnson, was ideologically inclined toward fiscal restraint and not overly inclined toward challenging his commander-in-chief’s budget directives. Given the string of cold war setbacks—especially the Soviet atomic test, and the “loss” of China to Mao Zedong’s communist party, both in 1949—political pressure and policy prudence eventually pushed Truman toward reconsidering defense spending and the strategy to go along with it. By the end of the process defense spending increased by 458 percent by FY 1952 over the budget for

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FY 1951 and the level of manpower in the Defense Department was raised to nearly 5 million from a 1951 level of 2.2 million.72 During the winter of 1949–1950 a highly classified debate had been raging in defense and scientific circles over whether to proceed with a new generation of weapon, this one exploiting the energy released when hydrogen atoms were fused rather than split, as they were in an atomic bomb. The new kind of weapon, variously termed a hydrogen, thermonuclear, or just nuclear bomb was informally dubbed “the super,” a reference to its potential to dwarf even the explosive power of an atomic bomb. Preliminary research into such a weapon had been undertaken within the Manhattan Project by a team of scientists headed by physicist Edward Teller. But with no hope of immediate success and with military budgets shrinking in the postwar economic environment, the research was halted. Based on theoretical data, Teller predicted that a hydrogen bomb would be several hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, capable of devastating an area of hundreds of square miles, with radiation traveling much farther. The debate was on whether such a weapon was needed, the morality of its manufacture, and the impact its development would have on relations with Moscow. Eventually reaching a quite bitter temper, the debate split not only the policymakers but also the atomic scientists themselves. In January 1950, Truman received a delegation headed by Dean Acheson, now secretary of state, which advocated development of the hydrogen bomb. After a meeting lasting only seven minutes the President decided to press ahead with the research, despite the fact that there was no hard evidence that the hydrogen bomb would ever become a reality, and a number of scientists claimed that it couldn’t be done. Many more others, including James Conant and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had led the Los Alamos team during the Manhattan Project, argued that it was unnecessary.73 Even Albert Einstein, who had helped convince President Franklin Roosevelt to start the atomic bomb project in the first place, came out publicly against developing the hydrogen bomb: “The idea of achieving security through national armaments is, at the present state of military technique, a disastrous illusion. . . . The armament race between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., originally supposed to be a preventive measure, assumes hysterical character.”74 The Atomic Energy Commission’s own advisory committee emphasized that the hydrogen bomb lent itself to genocide but not much else: “The use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives; it is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semimilitary purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations.”75 Despite these misgivings being expressed in influential quarters, Truman decided for development. Truman’s statement announcing his directive betrayed none of the drama of the top-secret debate behind the scenes,

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particularly government fear of the damage done to American secrets by Soviet espionage.76 In a brief, spare statement that included the usual call for greater international control of atomic arms, Truman announced that: It is part of my responsibility as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor. Accordingly, I have directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb. Like all other work in the field of atomic weapons, it is being and will be carried forward on a basis consistent with the overall objectives of our program for peace and security.77

It was a momentous decision, paving the way for the thermonuclear revolution and the arms race that went along with it. The sense of urgency forced quick action. A few weeks after Truman’s announcement, Louis Johnson, at the prompting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, requested “immediate implementation of all-out development of hydrogen bombs and means for their production and delivery.”78 By early March 1950, the thermonuclear weapon program had been ramped up to “a matter of the highest urgency”79 and by November 1952, American scientists were ready to test their first thermonuclear device. The same day that Truman authorized development of the hydrogen bomb, he instructed Acheson and Louis Johnson to reassess the Soviet threat in light of the Soviet Union’s nascent atomic capability and recent cold war developments. Under the direction of Paul H. Nitze, Kennan’s successor as director of the state department’s Policy Planning Staff, a group of state and defense officials formulated a comprehensive statement of a national security strategy and submitted it to the president in early April 1950. Known by its bureaucratic designation as NSC 68 “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” the document was deliberately alarmist and made the case for a massive buildup in resources and a hardening of strategy to go along with it.80 With its alarmist tone and blunt, hawkish policy prescriptions, the document reflected a change in direction in policy terms, but its substance expressed the mood of many Washington policymakers that had been brewing for some time. NSC 68 was fundamentally concerned with the problem of weapons of mass destruction (and first introduced the term to policy documents).81 It estimated that “within the next four years, the U.S.S.R. will attain the capability of seriously damaging vital centers of the United States, provided it strikes a first blow and provided further that the blow is opposed by no more effective opposition than we now have programmed.” It warned that once the Soviet Union “has a sufficient atomic capability to make a surprise attack on us, nullifying our atomic superiority and creating a military situation decisively in its favor, the Kremlin might be tempted to strike swiftly

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and with stealth.” In these circumstances, and estimating the prospects of the international control of atomic energy as negligible, Nitze and his associates suggested that the United States had little choice but to increase its atomic and, if possible, its thermonuclear capabilities as rapidly as possible. The atomic stockpile should be rapidly increased and the hydrogen bomb program continued at a greatly accelerated pace. NSC 68 also warned of the dangers of “piecemeal aggression” whereby the Soviets could threaten American interests without resorting to direct military confrontation. By exploiting Washington’s unwillingness to use its atomic weapons unless directly attacked, Moscow might pose a military threat by other, more abstruse methods, which could potentially throw American defense policy into disarray and bypass whatever limited effect the atomic deterrent might be having. When North Korean troops marched on South Korea on June 25, 1950, at the height of the internal administration debate over NSC 68, it posed what was in many ways a novel challenge; it was not a scenario anticipated by existing Western strategy. In the words of one leading French strategist, Raymond Aron, “The Korean War had taught world leaders that there are more things in heaven and earth than in models.”82 The Soviet preponderance of conventional military forces, compounded by a new-albeit incipient-atomic capability, which included a “probable fission capability and possible thermonuclear capability,” posed a serious challenge for which military planners strove to account. Consequently, it provoked a comprehensive reappraisal of U.S. national security assumptions and seemed to lend weight to arguments for embracing NSC 68.83 The decision had at once profound effects on nuclear weapons development and nuclear policy. The atomic arsenal received new emphasis with American science and technology engaged in producing smaller and cheaper atomic warheads that permitted the U.S. army to deploy thousands of tactical atomic weapons on the battlefield. Nuclear research and development was boosted by the desire of each branch of the armed services for a piece of the action. During the 1950s, the army turned its attention to intermediaterange, land-based, ballistic missiles, and the navy, first, to aircraft-carrierbased atomic bombers and then to nuclear-powered and armed submarines. But the mainstays of U.S. strategic forces continued to be the bombers of the Strategic Air Command. More importantly, work was accelerated on the H-bomb project and on October 31, 1952, less than a month after the British detonated their first atomic device just off the coast of Australia, the United States detonated its first thermonuclear device in the Pacific. “Mike” as the bomb was designated, exploded with a force 500 times greater than the bomb detonated over Hiroshima, in the process completely vaporizing the small island on which the test was conducted. The explosion was the culmination of an extraordinary effort on the part of Truman administration to maintain its ascendancy over the Soviet Union

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on the nuclear ladder and provided a watershed for deterrence. With the opening phases of the thermonuclear revolution now a reality, policymakers struggled to comprehend the scale of destruction of the new technology. Edward Teller had predicted in 1947 that the new weapon would be capable of devastating an area of three or four hundred square miles and that radiation could well travel much farther.84 In terms of military strategy, such a regional scale clearly changed the whole nature of the weapon. But it didn’t take long to grasp that such a weapon might well transform the nature of war and peace themselves. As Churchill put it with uncharacteristic somberness: “The atomic bomb, with all its terror, did not carry us outside the scope of human control or manageable events in thought or action, in peace or war. But . . . [with] the hydrogen bomb, the entire foundation of human affairs was revolutionized.” As another observer put it more colorfully, “The advent of the hydrogen bomb on the international scene seemed at first like the introduction into chess of a new move that consists of kicking over the chessboard.”85 While recognition of this exacerbated psychological gap between strategic weapons and victory prompted a sharpened focus of strategic thought that lasted at least for a decade and a half, U.S. policymakers were forced to deal with its consequences on a more immediate level.86 Seasoned war leader Dwight D. Eisenhower declared that with the existence of employable thermonuclear weapons, “War no longer has any logic whatever.”87 In short, thermonuclear weapons could have no other purpose than strategic deterrence and their very existence, even more so than that of atomic weapons, was largely responsible for a discernible shift in many world leaders’ views on the role of nuclear weapons and war to further political objectives. Thermonuclear weapons—far more than atomic weapons had done—pushed deterrence well over the threshold to the abstract. For the first time, it seemed, there were weapons that were reasonably served by the maxim, “I exist; therefore I deter.”88 The development was in some respects ironic. For the duration of the American atomic monopoly, the Truman administration had anticipated that its atomic force would so awe the Soviets that it would keep Moscow from engaging in adventurism. That hope had now been dashed. While American scientists had delivered a weapon so mind-bogglingly powerful that it seemed a natural fit for Bernard Brodie’s label “the absolute weapon”—along with the expectation of existential deterrence that went along with it—the Soviets had hustled their way into the nuclear club. The United States would have to find new ways to maintain an effective nuclear deterrent.

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Extending Nuclear Umbrellas [I]t may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation. Winston Churchill, March 1, 1955

“A curious paradox has emerged,” in which “the worse things get, the better,” an eighty-year-old Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on March 1, 1955. Despite his age, he had lost none of his gift for crafting eloquent rhetoric. The cause for his latest concern was the hydrogen bomb, which, Churchill said, had revolutionized the entire foundation of human affairs and placed mankind in a predicament “both measureless and laden with doom.” Its explosive power was immense; its creeping “fall-out” was even more devastating and could be transmitted slowly and silently even through food. “The imagination stands appalled,” he confessed. There were palliatives, but no defense. Protection, he argued, lay in “successful deterrents operating from a foundation of sober, calm and tireless vigilance.” The sheer, unimaginable power of the H-bomb rendered the geographical spread of the target essentially meaningless. The sprawling Soviet Union was finally as vulnerable as the compact and densely populated United Kingdom. “Then it may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.” For

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all the Churchillian grandiloquence, it was a remarkable summation of the paradox of nuclear deterrence. The terrifying reality that underlay Churchill’s comments was the development of the hydrogen bomb, which represented a quantum leap in destructive power. The American BRAVO test in March 1954 had not only surprised its minders with the power of the explosion but had also ignited a firestorm of controversy when Japanese fishermen aboard the Lucky Dragon, who had been well clear of the declared danger zone of the blast, were exposed to heavy doses of radioactive fallout. Another twenty-eight American servicemen and 236 Marshall Islanders were also exposed to dangerous levels of radiation.1 The shock of public comprehension of the reality of the threat of exposure to fallout was magnified by the public recognition of just how powerful hydrogen weapons could be. When a journalist asked Lewis Strauss, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, about the explosive limits of the new weapon, Strauss confirmed that there were no known theoretical limits—it could be as large as one liked. A bomb could be built to take out a city of almost any size. At around the same time, the British Cabinet had received a secret briefing from scientific experts confirming as much. A single H-bomb, they were told, could take out much of London. That Cabinet briefing in Whitehall had caused private consternation, but Strauss’s public comment sparked off a furore. It was carried on the front page of the New York Times and fueled a worldwide public debate on the development of thermonuclear weapons that included widespread calls for the cessation of all nuclear testing in the atmosphere.2 Through the 1950s, each of the three nuclear powers sought in its own way to harness this power to a greater extent in its pursuit of its foreign policy objectives. Each did so with the stated intent of reducing the economic burden of projecting power. First the British, then the Americans, and later in the decade the Soviets, devised and implemented approaches to the problem that contained many common elements. Each reevaluation came at the nexus of efforts to reduce and reprioritize government spending and new capabilities provided by the technological breakthroughs of the thermonuclear revolution and the new reality of atomic plenty. Each new look at defense strategy was framed by constraints on money and resources, defined negatively by what was not possible rather than any new conviction about what was ultimately more the effective deterrent. There was nothing new in the expectation that atomic weapons might be used to deter attack against the homeland. Before the radioactive dust had settled in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Prime Minister Clement Attlee had appreciated the deceptively simple quid-pro-quo that might hold the ultimate key to the homeland’s security: “The answer to an atomic bomb on London is an atomic bomb on another great city.”3 What was new was that each of the three nuclear powers looked to the bomb as a way to project power. By extending nuclear umbrellas over areas in the periphery, more Korea-like

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campaigns might be avoided at a bearable long-term cost. All that was required, in theory, was to publicly define vital interests, thereby establishing a line any adversary dare not cross. At least, that was the hope and objective. In practice, it proved more difficult, however. What Dwight Eisenhower called “the great equation,” a sustainable balance between fiscal realities and security needs, remained politically contentious and elusive. BRITISH REAPPRAISAL It was the British who first grappled formally with the problem of adjusting its global security policy to better match the emerging cold war reality. Two developments shaped this strategic reevaluation. Firstly, it was becoming evident that the struggle with communism, and the Soviet Union in particular, was likely to be a long-term affair. Britain’s acting Ambassador to Moscow, Sir Frank Roberts, had warned as much in 1946; developments since then had borne out his warning.4 Secondly, Britain was itself on the cusp of becoming a full-fledged member of the atomic club. The strategic reevaluation of 1951–52 settled on a solution of extending nuclear umbrellas over areas around the globe where it defined its vital national interests engaged. By doing that, it was expected that it would open the way to reductions in conventional forces, which in turn would ease the pressure on the nation’s economy. With Britain’s empire crumbling and its global power waning, the atomic and H-bomb appeared to offer salvation. Domestic politics also played an important role. Having campaigned on a platform that placed new emphasis on progressive social economic policies, when the Conservatives, led by Winston Churchill, won the 1951 general election they immediately placed a high priority on tackling the lingering issues of postwar reconstruction. In the face of housing shortages and the rising costs of living, voters demanded that the rearmament program be curtailed. With conventional military forces spanning the globe continuing to consume a sizeable portion of the national budget, they became an early and easy target for cutting costs. The strategic landscape had changed drastically since Churchill had last lived at 10 Downing Street. But even out of government, he had been vocal with his opinions on the bomb, reflecting his special interest in matters atomic that had dated from his early collaboration in the creation of the Manhattan Project; as one leading scholar put it, Churchill retained a “propriety interest in nuclear matters.”5 Having arrived at the decision that Britain should develop its own independent deterrent force, the Attlee government had shouldered the heavy lifting in the development of a British bomb. Churchill himself was surprised—with a mixture of annoyance and admiration—to learn that the Attlee government had managed to spend nearly £100 million on the atomic program without informing Parliament. Under Attlee’s stewardship, the British atomic program had overcome a

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series of obstacles and was well on its way to realizing its objective of a homegrown atomic bomb. It fell to the new Churchill government to find a way to capitalize on its “nuclear inheritance.”6 That was a responsibility Churchill relished. It also came at a time when British officials were reviewing the terms of the so-called special relationship with the United States. Churchill had long been a leading proponent of American global power, but by the early 1950s even he was moved to publicly question that faith. The transatlantic alliance was never going to be an equal nuclear partnership, but Churchill could be forgiven for expecting better; as Margaret Gowing put it, Britain had been “midwife” to the first atomic bomb and Churchill himself had helped convince Roosevelt to begin work.7 After a promising start, the Americans had shown themselves to be unreliable collaborators on atomic and thermonuclear technology. The McMahon Act of 1946 particularly epitomized the problem. It had excluded even Britain and Canada from atomic collaboration in information and materials. Each had made vital contributions to the development of the bomb by the Manhattan Project—but both Britain and Canada found themselves bluntly excluded from further collaboration. In 1948, Washington “revoked” the Quebec Agreement, effectively removing London’s nominal veto on the use of American atomic weapons.8 Washington was also proving reluctant to divulge war plans and share strategy. Washington could not be persuaded to continue with a combined chiefs of staff after the Second World War, and intelligence collaboration was also scaled back drastically. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Washington repeatedly denied British requests for access to American war plans. The British chiefs argued that such access was essential if Britain’s planning was to complement American strategy. Without it, the result was that British nuclear planning proceeded “from distinctly British conceptions and strategic priorities,” as two experts in the field put it.9 From the prevailing British view, the refusal of the Americans to cooperate and consult effectively ruled out the prospect of interdependence and made necessary a policy of independent nuclear capability.10 In the summer of 1952, while the American presidential campaign was in full swing across the Atlantic, the British chiefs of staff informed Whitehall that they had settled on a new Global Strategy Paper. The process of its drafting had begun late in the previous year, instigated by the Prime Minister himself. Facing economic crisis and embroiled in the aftermath of global overextension, Churchill instructed his government to devise ways of reducing expenditures at the same time as retaining or increasing Britain’s global influence even as its real power diminished. Churchill charged the chiefs of staff with cutting costs without compromising security; ideally, he wanted them to find a way to increase British security at less cost. At his suggestion, they sequestered themselves in Greenwich unencumbered by extensive staff support. After several weeks the chiefs emerged with a new paper that

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signaled a significant turning point in British defense policy and, they hoped, for NATO defense policy. The combination of geography and population density made the British Isles especially susceptible to atomic attack. The defense correspondent of the London Times observed in a 1947 column that “few uses are likely to be more effective than of dropping them on this country.”11 Now that the Soviets had their own bomb, that became an urgent operational concern complicated by the fact that there was no effective defense against such an attack. Accordingly, the chiefs argued that it was imperative to reduce the scale of the attack to which the United Kingdom would be subjected in the event of hostilities. The only real hope of doing that, they concluded, was a long-range strategy bombing to strike the source of the attack. “There is one way, and one way only,” they wrote in the Global Strategy Paper, “in which this can be done during the first critical days of war. That is by direct attack on the enemy air force and its bomber bases.”12 This emphasis on strategic bombers reflected Churchill’s growing inclination toward deterrent forces of strategic air power, conforming to a widely held belief that allied air power had been decisive in the European theater of World War II. In a 1949 speech in Boston, Churchill had argued that “For good or ill, air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power, and fleets and armies, however necessary, must accept a subordinate rank.”13 Not surprisingly, this emphasis on air power was shared by Sir John Slessor, the chief of the air staff, who had become one the chief architects of the allies’ air strategy in Europe during World War II. Given the opportunity to exert his influence at the Greenwich conference, Slessor became the foremost champion of what he called “the Great Deterrent.”14 Slessor argued that the capability to deliver atomic bombs on Moscow and Beijing offered a way to counter the much larger standing army of the adversaries. It also reclaimed for the West some of the initiative, “instead of always dancing to the enemy’s tune.”15 And, perhaps most importantly, it was sustainable. The West needed a strategy viable for the long haul, he said, and reliance on strategic air power offered an opportunity for doing that.16 Developing this strategic bombing capability would also help Britain with its America problem, the chiefs suggested. They argued that placing undue reliance on the United States could well lead to disaster. Because the Soviets still lacked an effective intercontinental bomber force, the attraction of Britain as a retaliatory target was intensified. If the Americans were the only Western power with a strategic bomber force, there would be nothing to prevent them from triggering off a war at any time they believed to be most advantageous to their national policy. In such an event this country would most certainly be at the receiving end of Russian thermonuclear weapons, and we would be in no position to make any arrangement with the Soviets to stay out of a war which was not of our

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Real-World Nuclear Deterrence seeking. On the other hand, if we had a small but powerful bomber force, capable of delivering our own H Bombs on Russia, we might well persuade them to lay-off attacking our centres of population, in the event of us being in the war at the start, or not to bomb us at all should the Americans decide “to go it alone.”17

The new emphasis on strategic air forces also reflected the influential arguments being made in senior government circles of the bomb’s costeffectiveness. British proponents of H-bomb development cited costs of £1.5 to £2 million per bomb, a relatively modest price compared with the disproportionate expense of maintaining large conventional forces overseas.18 In Washington, the National Security Council (NSC) was told that the “bangfor-the-buck” equation was heavily in favor of atomic weapons: a ton of TNT cost about $1,700, while the same explosive power could be wrought from fissionable material for the cost of about $23.19 For political leaders, and military leaders under immense pressure to cut costs, the apparent economy of nuclear weapons was compelling. ORIGINS OF THE NEW LOOK When Slessor ventured to Washington to present the paper in July 1952, he received a cool reception in official Washington. Only General Hoyt Vandenberg, the air force chief of staff, welcomed the proposal. The objections of the other chiefs were not so much calling into question the effectiveness of air power—the Korean War had once again demonstrated that, and the JCS and Atomic Energy Commission even authorized in October 1951 a 50 percent expansion of air force goals.20 Rather, the chiefs of the navy and army disagreed vehemently that an expansion of air power would render navy and army forces less important.21 It was a perennial tension within the Pentagon but was brought into sharper than usual focus with the advent of atomic weapons. The invention of atomic weapons seemed purpose built to bolster the role of the air force by building on the strategic bombing mission that had become increasingly important during the Second World War.22 The new British strategy document was, in effect, a repudiation of the rearmament process then in full swing under the auspices of NSC 68. The British proposal was also viewed with suspicion in Washington by many who saw it as an attempt by Churchill to renege on the commitments made in February 1952 at a meeting of the NATO allies in Lisbon, Portugal. At that meeting, NATO had collectively agreed to an ambitious—and ultimately unattainable—goal to build up the existing thirty-five divisions to nearly ninety divisions within two years. It was envisioned that by 1953 there would be seventy-five NATO divisions and 6,500 aircraft available, more than half

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of which would be combat-ready at all times.23 The goals also planned for twelve divisions from the Federal Republic of Germany, involving the bitterly contentious issue of German rearmament.24 The Germans ultimately did field their twelve divisions, but the other goals were unrealistic. If he hoped to convince the Pentagon, Slessor’s timing was poor. He was unlikely to be able to convince the architects of NSC 68, who still occupied positions of power in Washington, to renounce the contentious policy, especially in the midst of a hotly contested presidential election campaign, and he returned to London without having secured Washington’s endorsement. Within six months, however, the political climate in Washington had shifted markedly. Recognizing that the Europeans were never going to fulfill their Lisbon goals, the administration concluded that its own military economy needed adjusting. The new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was eager to implement his own campaign promises of reining in the federal budget and had already identified the deterrent power of the bomb as an important catalyst for implementing Republican economic policies. As with the British reevaluation of cold war strategy, the Eisenhower administration sought to place defense spending on a tight fiscal leash. But whereas the British shift in policy was conducted relatively quickly and quietly, the Eisenhower administration’s “New Look,” as it was soon dubbed, was publicly contentious, prolonged, and evolved in phases. As McGeorge Bundy later observed, “This New Look was not a quick look.”25 It was also more ambitious. Extending well beyond just military policy, it embodied, political, economic, and psychological warfare aspects as well.26 The Eisenhower administration’s approach to nuclear weapons policy was indelibly branded “massive retaliation,” an adaptation of language used by Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. But the label was as misleading as it was persistent. The phrase was a rhetorical flourish that gave the false impression of a neatly packaged set of decisions where there was none. Massive retaliation did not reflect an agreed administration position. Moreover, it ultimately became a self-drawn caricature that offered an easy target for political attacks later in the decade. Eisenhower himself never used the phrase publicly, nor was he convinced that it constituted prudent policy. Shortly after Dulles publicly called for such a doctrine in an April 1952 article in Life, Eisenhower wrote privately to Dulles that he had concerns with the idea. “What should we do if Soviet political aggression . . . successively chips away exposed portions of the free world? . . . To my mind this is the case where the theory of ‘retaliation’ falls down,” Eisenhower wrote.27 Nevertheless, the label proved resilient and was used then and since as a shorthand for the primacy of nuclear retaliatory power in the Eisenhower administration’s defense posture. In many respects, massive retaliation marked the high-water mark of faith in the nuclear deterrent to serve a range of foreign policy goals.

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The neatness of the massive retaliation moniker belied the complexity of the underlying strategy. In reality, the Eisenhower administration’s approach to nuclear policy was a complex milieu of evolving thinking on nuclear weapons, constantly shifting capabilities, and fiscal conservatism. More important was the underlying effort to devise a sustainable long-term strategy, which came to be known as the New Look. The New Look was less revolutionary than it sounded. It was not the result of an epiphany in strategic thought or a significant shift in philosophic conviction. It was primarily a combination of the administration’s attempt to grapple with what Eisenhower called “the great equation,” a sustainable balance between fiscal realities and security needs. It was devised with the geopolitical situation still in an uncertain transition period from total mobilization from World War II, demobilization in the War’s aftermath, and a massive and sudden rearming again in response to cold war fears. As one contemporary observer wrote, “Eisenhower did not dream up this strategic concept. What he did was to pluck a maturing idea from the cockpit of Pentagon politics and firmly reshape the U.S. military structure around it.”28 Nevertheless, largely for political reasons the new administration touted its New Look as a sharp break with the Truman administration, the classic “distancing” act. Playing to Eisenhower’s strengths, the Republicans pushed national security to the forefront of campaign issues in the 1952 presidential election. It was not an automatic choice. Certainly Eisenhower, and to some extent Dulles, were closely identified with the Truman–Acheson foreign policy, at least more so than the Democratic candidate, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson.29 Nevertheless, with Eisenhower’s personal convictions seeming to fit well with the growing body of Republican thought on foreign policy, and with the Democratic camp lacking a strategic voice with military credentials and personal prestige and stature comparable with Eisenhower, the Republicans’ prospects for regaining the White House for the first time in two decades appeared good. Korea had devolved into a hard-fought stalemate that undermined American military might, was a significant economic drain, and had resulted in at least 50,000 American dead; Korean casualties—North and South—numbered in the millions. And yet the “lessons” taken from it diverged widely. Some, such as Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, Jr., argued that the great military lesson of Korea was that strong ground forces “as still indispensable to success in an era of guided missiles, intercontinental bombers and atomic bombs.”30 Overall, it was a hard sell. In Republican circles, the call for “no more Koreas” had become a rallying call. The central critique was not just the expense and apparent stalemate in Korea itself, but that it had come as part of a string of crises and challenges where the Soviets seemed to hold the initiative, among them Berlin, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Iran, and then Korea. Taken in tandem with the explosion of the Soviet atomic explosion of August 1949, it provoked Republican circles to political

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action with the critique that American forces, under a United Nations flag, were bogged down in Korea. It was a small conflict on the periphery of U.S. strategic interests that was resulting in a disproportionate drain on American strategic reserves. And all the while, the Soviet forces remained unscathed and growing. The criticism was not that the Truman administration had overextended its commitments—the isolationism that had been championed by Senator Robert A. Taft (R-Ohio) and others in the late 1930s and early 1940s had become an instant casualty of Pearl Harbor and the victories in both the European and Pacific theaters of World War II. Foreign policy was no longer optional.31 Republicans themselves had led the twin charges against the Truman administration that it had invited the Korean war by conspicuously defining the Korean peninsular outside of U.S. interests and that it had “lost” China to Communism through incompetence and neglect. The party that had fanned the flames of public dissatisfaction on these fronts and then successfully translated it into electoral progress was in no position to draw down U.S. commitments globally. In effect, Republicans charged that the Truman administration had not been ambitious enough, that its implementation of the containment strategy was dangerously passive and defensive. The Truman administration’s incarnation of containment, the critique went, ceded to the Communist camp the initiative of challenging the West on its own terms in areas where they held the tactical advantage. During the 1952 presidential campaign, corporate lawyer John Foster Dulles, at that time a leading foreign policy advisor to Republicans, became the principal spokesperson for the critique of the Truman administration’s policies. He had emerged in a unique position politically. He had been the Truman administration’s special envoy on the Japanese Peace Treaty and the ANZUS (Australia-New Zealand-United States) Treaty but had also appealed to both the centers of power in the Republican Party.32 He was supported by both Senator Taft from the isolationist wing of the Republican party and Governor Thomas Dewey, who had become a strong supporter of the Truman administration’s cold war policies toward Europe. “At a time when 800 million people—one-third of all the people there are—are subject to ruthless, terroristic despotism and being whipped, by fanatics, into a force for aggression, we talk of ‘containment’ and ‘stalemate’ as satisfactory goals,” Dulles complained.33 As a counter strategy, Republican circles were developing ideas of seizing the cold war initiative and exploiting Western strengths. Like NSC 68, that involved a two-pronged strategy. The ideas were not new per se; the difference lay in emphasis. As spelled out by Dulles, the first challenge was to win the war of ideas and thereby win hearts. Part of that strategy involved an effort to roll back communist influence in Eastern Europe. Foremost in his “Bill of Complaints” against the Truman administration, Dulles said, was that it “seems unable to inspire the dynamic spirit” required to counter

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Soviet Communism. “We have poured out money lavishly,” he said, “[b]ut the peoples of the world no longer look to us as a creative, dynamic force.” The Communists were getting “further with ideas than with bombs,” he said.34 Eisenhower himself told an audience in San Francisco in October 1952 that “we should see in this ‘cold war’ a chance to gain a victory without casualties, to win a contest which can quite literally save peace.”35 Rollback, as the most aggressive element of this strategy became known, failed the test of reality in the East Berlin riots of June 1953 and more notoriously and decisively in Hungary in 1956.36 It made for inspiring rhetoric but led to misguided policy. In April 1953 Eisenhower set the motif and tempo of his administration’s national security policy. Within hours of meeting at the White House with senior advisers and Republican legislators, Eisenhower announced at an April 30, 1953, press conference, “The program we are presenting is a long-term program, calling for a steady and adequate flow of men and materials to present a position of genuine strength to any would-be aggressor.” Claiming his proposal represented a “radical” change in policy, he attacked the notion that defense policy should be focused on a speculative “year of maximum peril,” a motif notably coined in the Truman administration’s NSC 68 report. Critics sometimes derided the notion as a “magic date.” That label, with its derisive overtones, constituted a misrepresentation of the existing planning process, but Eisenhower used it to contrast his approach to defense policymaking with those of Truman. Eisenhower said that “We reject the idea that we must build up to a maximum attainable strength for some specific date theoretically fixed for a specified time in the future. Defense is not a matter of maximum strength for a single date. It is a matter of adequate protection to be projected as far into the future as the actions and apparent purposes of others may compel us.”37 A week previously, he had offered a blunter version: “[F]or anybody that is in the defensive position—strategically or tactically, or anything—who bases his defense on his ability to predict the day and the hour of attack, is crazy. There is just no sense to it. If you are going on the defensive, you have got to get a level of preparation you can sustain over the years.”38 The objective, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Arthur Radford explained later, was to neutralize the military component of the cold war struggle. “Recurring local situations—hot-spots—are going to be with us for a long time to come,” he warned. “Unless we are in a position to handle them positively and quickly, these hot-spots will be serious and may be frequent. If we maintain a strong armed posture . . . a counteroffensive capability along with mobile, combat forces in readiness . . . it should convince the men in the Kremlin that neither a global nor a localized war will be to their advantage. Then, they will be limited to seeking their objectives through political, economic, ideological, and subversive actions.”39

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AN ENDURABLE STRAIN Eisenhower’s election was accompanied by grand expectations. The new President had promised “to go to Korea,” the presumption being that he would personally see what that the problem was and “bring the boys back home,” reduce government spending, cut taxes, and balance the federal budget. These expectations all played a role to some degree in how Eisenhower approached the government’s national security strategy. At almost 60 percent of total federal expenditures the defense budget was an obvious target for cost-cutting efforts. Compared with the defense budget, said Eisenhower’s Special Adviser for National Security Affairs, Robert Cutler, all the other government programs were “chicken feed.”40 Like the earlier British reappraisal, then, the Eisenhower administration’s New Look was prompted in large measure by economic concerns in a formulation Eisenhower frequently tagged as “security with solvency.” During World War II, General Eisenhower had been able to draw on almost limitless resources to execute the war, but as president his careful adherence to the principles of fiscal responsibility was apparently an expression of a combination of his own personal conservative convictions and pressures emanating from party machine politics. Robert Cutler explained that “The President’s thinking was from the beginning heavily influenced by concern that any serious prolongation of the huge military programs of the kind then under way and in contemplation must inevitably turn the U.S. into a garrison state.”41 It was a delicate balancing act. Given the wide range of possible positions, each largely untestable, and each with its own vocal advocates, it is a perennially contentious issue. Shortly after having left his position as director of the Bureau of the Budget in order to become secretary of the army, Frank Pace, Jr., described the delicate maneuver as “like the tricky job of riding a rubber horse in a swimming pool. When you push the head down the tail flies out of the water, and when you push the tail down the head flies up.”42 Eisenhower had promised to find a way to balance both head and tail, and the personal prestige he brought to the office led many to suspect that he just might do it. Since World War II, Eisenhower had stressed security through solvency. During his first State of the Union message, just a fortnight after his inauguration, Eisenhower laid out the challenge: Our problem is to achieve adequate military strength within the limits of endurable strain upon our economy. To amass military power without regard to our economic capacity would be to defend ourselves against one kind of disaster by inviting another.43

The emphasis on cutting national expenditures also offered a convenient common ground between the Republican nominee and his still powerful

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rivals within the party, especially Taft. Despite having failed, again, to best his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Taft retained considerable political capital—he was still widely viewed as “Mr. Republican” and the conservative wing of the party controlled the writing of the platform to vilify everything about the Truman administration, especially its foreign policy.44 Although still an outspoken advocate of isolationism, he had shifted significantly from the kind of isolationism he had touted in the lead up to American entry into World War II.45 Taft, was, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted at the time, “a man in transition, an Old Isolationist trying hard to come to terms with the modern world.”46 Eisenhower had served notice in his inaugural address that the party must revise its traditional isolationist views, but the Taft wing remained powerful even as it struggled against what Schlesinger called the “the internationalist euphoria of the last decade.” High priorities for those centers of power in the party were implementing significant tax cuts at the same time as drastically reducing federal expenditures, which they charged were ballooning uncontrollably under Truman. Criticism of the soaring defense costs was not limited just to partisan politics. There were well-founded fears that the atomic program was playing fast and loose with its budgets and lacked sufficient oversight. The strict compartmentalization of access to detailed and current information on atomic energy programs meant that it constituted a large target of federal funds but that even the Bureau of the Budget had insufficient access to assess the budget requests of the Joint Chiefs for their ever-growing appetite for new atomic weapons.47 “The main difficulty,” Truman confessed in relation to one major Atomic Energy Commission construction project, “is that it is such a top secret project that everybody is afraid to look at it.” The AEC program, the President said, “is full of dynamite and unless some concrete check can be made on the manner in which they handed the funds turned over to them we might find ourselves in trouble in two or three years.”48 But not even Truman was prepared to take on that fight. NSC 68 had been deliberately crafted in an alarmist tone, and it was adopted during a period of fast-paced developments—the Soviet atomic bomb and the outbreak of the Korean War, in particular—that raised the specter that the Soviet Union was on the verge of pressing its advantage. There were over 300,000 U.S. troops in South Korea and over a third of all U.S. forces were deployed overseas, a level not repeated until 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War.49 And yet the Soviets still seemed to hold the upper hand. NSC 68 had been approved in the belief that drastic measures were required. One of the most contentious aspects of defense planning of the period, the significance of which was often overstated in political debate, was the designation of a notion a “magic date” or “year of maximum peril.” For a variety of reasons, that title was often pinned on the year 1954: it was

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the year that the Soviets were expected to have built up an atomic arsenal and long-range bombers to inflict significant damage to the United States; it was the target date used at the Lisbon meeting for NATO to reach its goal of nearly 100 active divisions; and it was the period in which the Soviet equipment that had been born in the 1946–1947 period of significant rearmament would start becoming obsolete according to standard cycles of military procurement—Soviet leaders would therefore be facing a “use it or lose it” decision.50 But the rapid buildup essentially gambled that a showdown with the Soviets was imminent. But if that wasn’t the case, if the Soviets were prepared to bide their time for the perfect opportunity, then a short-sighted, panicked buildup could actually backfire. The Eisenhower administration ostentatiously abandoned basing defense planning on a notional date of peril. It also shifted its intelligence estimate accordingly.51 By late 1951, several voices spoke out for moderation in defense spending. Voices sympathetic to the air force, who had watched the massive investment in ground forces to cope with the Korean War, led the way, pointing out for good measure the relative economy that could be offered by better-funded air power. Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Finletter pointed out what was becoming obvious: “It won’t do any good to have a force which is good for five years and then soggy for the next five.”52 Senator Brien McMahon (D-Conn.), Chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy with a reputation for being sympathetic to the air force, said as early as September 1951 that a way to “bring peace at bearable costs” was to rely more heavily on the deterrent power of the new weapons promised by the thermonuclear revolution.53 But the critique was not just the symptom of interservice rivalry. AEC Chairman Gordon Dean and Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett both endorsed McMahon’s sentiments.54 Even though the miserly Louis Johnson had become victim of the public’s frustration with his efforts at trimming the defense budget while North Korea threatened to push the U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula, his successors recognized that the massive increase in defense spending in FY 1952 was unsustainable.55 Lovett, and to some extent his predecessor, General George C. Marshall, had moved in late 1951 to slow down the defense buildup, fearing that through economic exhaustion the nation would create a self-inflicted vulnerability over the long term. Lovett himself, sensing that the huge military buildup was proceeding at an unsustainable pace and all-too-aware of the natural cycles of fading military readiness after full mobilization had begun calling for an approach that had as its objective “a plateau of strength” that could be sustained for a greater period of time rather than a buildup that imagined a particular moment to peak—a moment of maximum danger—after which readiness would naturally decline.56 Nevertheless, the Truman defense buildup, and especially its associated budget, became an easy target for partisan attacks. The defense budget had

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ballooned to over a third of the federal budget, but had still failed to bring a decisive end to the war in Korea. The massive investments in manpower and armaments put in motion by NSC 68 were barely coming to fruition and were not yet having any real influence on the nation’s security. Influential power brokers in the Republican Party, therefore, ensured that any new president would force budget cuts as an early priority. Senator Taft, in particular, laid out a plan whereby the federal budget, then running at about $80 billion, could be cut in the 1953–1954 FY to $70 billion, and to $60 billion in the 1954–1955 FY in anticipation of significant tax cuts of around 12 or 13 percent across the board.57 His views were shared by George M. Humphrey, the powerful and charismatic secretary of the treasury. Through his place at the cabinet table, Humphrey was able to exercise considerable influence. Eisenhower could not simply ignore Taft and Humphrey. At a widely publicized conference with Senator Taft shortly after his nomination, Eisenhower endorsed Taft’s approach. Because the defense budget accounted for over a third of the overall federal budget, Eisenhower said, it was the place where the largest savings in government expenditure could be made. He insisted, though, that this could be done without any degradation in U.S. defensive capabilities.58 Eisenhower promptly inserted fiscal responsibility in defense spending as a core part of his stump speech. “The foundation of military strength is economic strength,” Eisenhower recited frequently. Implicitly recalling Vladimir Lenin’s prediction that capitalist countries would spend themselves in bankruptcy, Eisenhower asserted that “A bankrupt American is more the Soviet goal than an American conquered on the field of battle.” Despite Eisenhower’s insistence that significant cuts could be made in the defense budget and that not only could they be done without compromising the nation’s security—primarily through investment in strategic striking power—but could actually also increase combat readiness, critics charged that this was the wrong way to craft an effective defense policy. New York Times columnist Hanson Baldwin contended that it was treasury department rather than the Pentagon that was dictating military policy. The administration, he said was “putting a price tag on national security.”59 The administration countered that that was not the case at all; Robert Cutler said that never “was there any thought of putting the dollar sign before national security.”60 Eisenhower himself took great pains to emphasize that the bomb did not constitute defense at bargain price.61 Nevertheless, cutting costs was clearly a central goal of the new administration. Eisenhower had inherited the FY 1954 from Truman, who had transmitted the budget to Congress just days before Eisenhower’s inauguration. The Eisenhower administration had played little role in its development, although some Eisenhower advisors had acted as observers in the process.62 Truman’s budget had requested $41.3 billion out of a total federal

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budget of $72.9 billion.63 There was no time for a wholesale rewriting of the budget—much of it would have to be accepted by the new administration— but there was the opportunity for some revision in an attempt to reduce the ballooning deficits and reduce the national debt, then running at over $265 billion. “From now on out,” Humphrey told the NSC, “this government must pay its own way.”64 Nevertheless, the process proved more difficult than expected. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson was repeatedly frustrated and baffled in his attempts to find ways to carry out the President’s desire for instituting large-scale savings. By the end of April, after intensive review by the NSC, the defense budget had been whittled down by about $3 billion, to $43.2 billion, with further significant reductions scheduled for the following years until the budget was down to $35 billion in FY 1956.65 By the time the revised budget request was delivered to Congress, several administration officials and fellow fiscal conservatives expressed disappointment that the process had yielded a budget that fell well short of initial ambitions and that the cuts were not deep enough. When it became clear that the revised budget had delayed the balancing of the budget, Senator Taft reacted with hostility, lashing out at the military. “I have no confidence whatsoever in their judgment or their ability to break away from recommendations they have made in the past,” he charged.66 On the other side of the aisle, Democrats charged that the cuts had been too deep and that the administration was risking the nation’s security. At the same time, some Democrats also took the administration to task for not fulfilling the central plank of Eisenhower’s election platform and for failing to translate peacetime prosperity into a balanced economy. Particularly revealing was how those cuts were divided amongst the services. The Eisenhower defense budgets broke the convention of a roughly 1:1:1 division of defense money amongst the services. By elevating the air force, with its so-called air-atomic power, to a higher level, the intention was to create an opportunity for significant cuts to ground forces, especially the army. Given Pentagon culture, where parochial service loyalties play a very real role in defense policy, this was somewhat unexpected. As of June 30, 1953, there were 3,555,000 men and women in uniform in the U.S. armed services. The department of defense employed another 1.3 million civilians in support roles. Despite considerable resistance, that number was reduced by a quarter of a million within a year, a reduction justified in large measure by the cessation of hostilities in Korea.67 Even after that Eisenhower kept the pressure on Wilson to reduce the size of the army after Korea, reportedly telling the secretary of defense that “I’ve been in the Army, Charlie—I know what I’m talking about. You’ve got a lot of people in the Army who just don’t have useful employment.”68 The army, therefore, bore the brunt of personnel cuts. In the revised FY 1954 budget, tabled as NSC 149, the army was instructed to reduce its noncombat personnel by 125,000, the navy by 75,000, and the air force by

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50,000.69 Nevertheless, the cuts to the air force became highly contentious in committee. Senators McMahon and Stuart Symington (D-Missouri.), both ardent supporters of the air force, amplified the concerns expressed by outgoing air force chief of staff General Hoyt Vandenberg. A heated argument ensued lasting months. A NEW OFFICIAL NUCLEAR DOCTRINE This review of the budget situation took place against an international backdrop that continued to be fluid. Stalin had died on March 5, 1953, and his successors had begun a “peace offensive” against the West. The Korean armistice talks had stalled. Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was deposed, with CIA covert assistance, in August.70 The French were clearly on the verge of defeat in Indochina. American assessments of Soviet intentions remained unchanged from the Truman administration. The prevailing view was that the Soviet Union, fueled by a basic and unchangeable hostility, harbored expansionist ambitions.71 But if Soviet intentions remained unchanged, their capabilities were undergoing a period of rapid growth. There was little doubt in Western capitals that despite Stalin’s professed indifference to atomic weapons, the Soviet scientific and industrial sectors were investing heavily in atomic and nuclear development. The atomic test in August 1949 and the explosion of a hybrid thermonuclear device less than four years later, in August 1953, had both exceeded Western intelligence estimates by considerable margins. In terms of quantity, the Soviet Union still lagged far behind the Americans— by 1953 the Soviets had about 120 atomic weapons against 1,436 American weapons—but the rate of the Soviet crash program was a cause of serious concern. There seemed little doubt that the Soviet government could and would direct considerable resources at building up a Soviet arsenal, which if ignored would inevitably tilt the strategic balance.72 The administration still had to devise a strategy that matched its rhetoric. Having made cost cutting a central part of its political philosophy and mandate, the Eisenhower administration was not inclined to engage in a bomb-for-bomb arms race. Thomas K. Finletter, who later became the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, argued that short of launching a preventive war, which he said was anathema to not just morality but would be a betrayal of what the United States stood for, “we cannot stop the Russians from reaching this level of absolute air-atomic power. But we can stop them from using it.”73 A worrying development was the quiet unveiling of two new kinds of Soviet long-range bombers. Despite having been pioneers in strategic bombers decades before, by the late 1940s the Soviets had fallen well behind the West in the field. But by the mid-1950s, they were catching up. For

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Western intelligence analysts, it was yet another example of the Soviet’s unnerving knack of exceeding Western intelligence estimates. The Soviet fleet of World War II vintage bombers were analogous to American B-29s, Soviet military engineers having copied a U.S. army air force B-29 shot down in July 1944 in Manchuria. Slow and with a limited range, they were deemed effective against Western Europe, but were not serious threats beyond that range.74 A new generation of Soviet bombers was unveiled in the fall of 1953. Their unveiling was not accompanied by any public chestbeating, but Western analysts took careful, if quiet, note. Charles Ritchie, the Canadian ambassador in Washington, wrote to Canadian foreign minister, Lester Pearson, that the development changed the strategic equation and dispelled a major cause for some temporary comfort. The consensus to that point, he said, was that since the Soviets lacked the capability to take out both Western Europe and the United States in one massive effort, they “would have to take two bites at the cherry” by first turning Western Europe into a kind of massive beachhead and then launching a separate war against the United States itself. By overcoming this technical hurdle, Ritchie wrote, “[n]ow the Soviet Union might conceivably believe that it would have the capability of defeating the West in one war.”75 The bitter debate over the revisions to the FY 1954 military budget had barely ended when new controversy erupted over the direction of drafting of the FY 1955 budget. The same congressional pressures pushing for further deep cuts, a balanced budget, and tax cuts, remained. In developing the FY 1955 budget, Eisenhower instructed Wilson to place manpower levels “on an austerity basis.”76 Defense budgets were one important part of the security policymaking process, but to place the defense budget in a broader context and to give it the weight of formal government policy, Eisenhower convened a small group of key advisers to devise a grand strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union. Dubbed the Solarium Project after the location of its first meeting (in the White House solarium), the purpose was to take a top-down look at U.S. basic national security policy, question underlying assumptions of existing policy, and explore possible alternatives.77 Eisenhower had cultivated a deliberate image of geniality and calm that implied an aloofness or disengagement from policymaking decisions. Behind the scenes, however, Eisenhower was a deft manager. One observer notably labeled it the “hidden-hand presidency.”78 Much earlier, Vice President Richard Nixon had claimed that Eisenhower “was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized.”79 Journalist Murray Kempton put it this way: “He was the great tortoise upon whose back the world sat for eight years. We laughed at him; we talked wistfully about moving; and all the while we never knew the cunning beneath the shell.”80 The Solarium Project exemplified this. The group convened quietly. Its frames of references were

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personally guided by Eisenhower. And it exerted profound influence on the direction of American strategy.81 Convening from May through July 1952, the Solarium group provided the intellectual foundation of the NSC’s review of basic national security policy that became embodied in NSC 162/2, a document approved by the president on October 30, 1953. Like NSC 68 before it, the new strategy document was an attempt to diagnose the nature of the threat as well as provide comprehensive prescriptions for countering it. Unlike NSC 68, which focused on identifying specific areas of threat and prescribed aggressive means to push back, NSC 162/2 was mostly about finding ways to maintain the commitments that the United States had already made since 1945.82 The drafting process was complex and accompanied by intensive, often heated debate.83 But for all the effort aimed at establishing a formal drafting process, NSC 162/2 remained a compendium of viewpoints that were not always blended coherently. As Saki Dockrill wrote, the document “was not a definitive conclusion of an extensive security review conducted by the administration.”84 NSC 162/2 painted a bleak picture of the Communist threat. Its prescriptions reflected the middle ground of compromise consensus. In terms of nuclear strategy, the influence of Radford’s argument that threats of long-range atomic attack provided cover for a redeployment of forces from overseas back to a central, mobile striking force. It also included the deceptively simple statement that “the United States should use special weapons whenever they are required by the national security.” That statement was a negotiated middle ground between the State Department’s desire for a more qualified statement on the use of atomic weapons and the Joint Chiefs’ pressure for broad authority to use nuclear weapons whenever it became technically advantageous to do so.85 A main argument used by the military to resist further cuts was that the political guidance on what kind of war they were to plan for was unclear. The Joint Chiefs took a united stand that any further cuts under existing circumstances would be dangerous and would be the full responsibility of civilian leaders.86 There were only two possible ways to justify further reductions they argued. Either U.S. commitments had to be scaled back or some kind of assurance needed to be forthcoming that they could plan to use nuclear weapons when and if it became technically advantageous to do so. Radford, the most vocal advocate of predelegated nuclear authority, pointed out that in the absence of a clear understanding on the possible use of nuclear weapons, the Joint Chiefs were necessarily planning for a whole range of military contingencies, from local conventional war, all-out nuclear war, or even a globe-spanning conventional war. In short, because they could not count on the use of atomic weapons, the Joint Chiefs were trying to “do everything at once.”87 Army Chief of Staff General Matthew Ridgway had joined the JCS united front in making these arguments, but once it became clear that Eisenhower

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was willing to offer some kind of assurance that the JCS could count on him authorizing the use of nuclear weapons if necessary, the army chief of staff backed away, again resisting a nuclear policy because it was being used to justify further cuts in army forces.

MASSIVE RETALIATION With NSC 162/2 official government policy, announcing it publicly was delegated first to secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, rather than secretary of defense, Charles E. Wilson. Dulles had been an early convert to the assumption underpinning massive retaliation. From his participation in the negotiations on the Japanese peace treaty, Dulles had become convinced that the nations on the periphery of the cold war need only have enough forces in being to quell insurrections and constitute a clear-cut threshold for escalation. Perhaps in the firm belief that atomic threats had helped coerce the Korean armistice and hoping to repeat the effect, Dulles’ Council of Foreign Relations speech was timed to play a diplomatic role in the deteriorating situation in Indochina. Dulles did so at a speech at New York before the Council of Foreign Relations on January 12, 1954. For Dulles, a former Fellow, it was a familiar audience. Having previously called for a “policy of boldness,” Dulles explained that the United States would no longer maintain the enormous conventional forces required to sustain the capability to fight so-called “brushfire” actions all over the world because, Dulles went on, “it is impossible to match your potential enemy at all points on a basis of man-for-man, gun-for-gun and tank-for-tank. If we try that we are going to go bust.” Rather, the United States would respond in a manner and place of its own choosing and explicitly reserve the option to respond with “massive retaliatory force.” The euphemism for nuclear weapons was thinly veiled but was there for all to see. On another occasion, Dulles invoked an analogy with law enforcement to explain the administration’s integration of nuclear deterrence so tightly with overall U.S. foreign policy. “We keep locks on our doors; but we do not have an armed guard in every home. We rely principally on a community system so well equipped to punish any who break in and steal that, in fact, would-be aggressors are generally deterred. That is the way of getting maximum protection at bearable cost.”88 But Dulles did not address a central problem of his analogy: who or what would enforce the protection? In the essentially anarchic environment of international relations, there was no central arbiter of the peace, no policeman or judge with the power to both convict and punish. Vice President Richard Nixon added his own interpretation that failed to be any more precise. In response to a question posed by Governor Adlai

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Stevenson, Nixon adopted a conspiratorial, and perhaps overly generous, interpretation of Soviet objectives. “We found,” he said, that economically their [the Soviets] plan, apparently, was to force the United States to stay armed to the teeth, to be prepared to fight anywhere— anywhere in the world—that they, the men in the Kremlin, chose. Why? Because they knew that this would force us into bankruptcy; that we would destroy our freedom in attempting to defend it. Well, we decided we would not fall into these traps. And so we adopted a new principle. And that new principle summed up is this: Rather than let the Communists nibble us to death all over the world in little wars we would rely in the future primarily on our massive mobile retaliatory power which we could use in our discretion against the major source of aggression at times and places that we chose.89

Listeners and readers of the time knew that the sources of aggression that Nixon was referring to were the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Nixon’s “clarification” betrayed a hard line and absolutist interpretation, a threat of total atomic warfare. Dulles’s actual speech had been far more nuanced, but also widely misinterpreted and the administration backed away from it rapidly, rarely using the phrase in public, leading to speculation in some quarters that it might have been no more than a slip of the tongue.90 Faced with criticism after his Council of Foreign Relations lecture, Dulles repeatedly emphasized the possibility of more limited military action, including the possible use of American ground troops.91 Dulles had defined massive retaliation as inflicting punishment to fit the crime, warning that any aggressor would lose more than it would gain. “He doesn’t have to lose much more,” Dulles clarified. “It just has to be something more. If the equation is such that the outcome is clearly going to be against him, he won’t go in.”92 THE KOREAN ARMISTICE Washington’s muffled threats to resort to nuclear weapons were widely credited in the early 1950s with coercing the Chinese to agree to a Korean armistice. The Truman administration had entertained the idea of using the bomb in Korea and many feared that a decision not to use atomic weapons in Korea, despite General Douglas MacArthur’s pleas, had the potential to undermine the credibility of American deterrence on the periphery.93 With things going poorly for UN forces, Truman speculated publicly during a November 30, 1950, press conference about using atomic weapons in Korea. Apparently extemporaneous, the comment was in any event an ill-considered comment and drew consternation from allies. British Prime

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Minister Clement Attlee rushed to Washington to urge Truman to dispel the possibility, extracting what he interpreted as an assurance of consultation on the use of nuclear weapons.94 The Canadian government made its dissatisfaction with the possibility known. Although bombing mainland Chinese cities might pay short-term tactical dividends, Canadian secretary of state for external affairs Lester Pearson argued, it would do so “at the risk of destroying the cohesion and unity of purpose of the Atlantic community.” He reminded Washington that deterrent effect of the bomb lay in large measure in the taboo on its use. “Once it has been used tactically, however, much of its force as a deterrent may disappear,” he argued.95 The outcry effectively ended the Truman administration’s consideration of using atomic weapons in Korea. The issue, having lain dormant for two years, was reawakened by Eisenhower. He had promised during the 1952 campaign that one of his first objectives was to find a way for American troops to withdraw honorably from Korea. The diplomatic path to truce negotiations seemed blocked and the Joint Chiefs had made clear that it lacked the materiél to supply any significant increase in South Korean military forces without depleting the forces in Europe.96 Upon his return from a preinauguration visit to Korea, in fulfillment of a campaign promise, the president-elect had warned China and North Korea that the United States would act “under circumstances of our own choosing.”97 That was followed by a string of signals channeled through low-level diplomatic contacts and international third parties to Beijing that the administration was actively considering the use of atomic weapons. The administration also redeployed some nuclear-capable forces in such a way that Chinese intelligence might detect the move. The signals were deliberately discreet, but they were probably also less clear than intended.98 Nevertheless, both Eisenhower and Dulles claimed that these hints were responsible for the eventual armistice and proponents of overt nuclear threats seized on it as an example of the potency of nuclear compellence. Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that he let the word go forth that “We would not be limited by any worldwide gentleman’s agreement,” and that once that message reached Soviet and Chinese ears “the prospects for armistice negotiations seemed to improve.”99 There had also been some meaningful preparations made for prepositioning components closer to Korea. On April 6, 1951, after the Chinese launched a major offensive on the Korean peninsula, Truman ordered nine nuclear capsules to Guam. There they joined the nonnuclear components that Truman had authorized to be sent the previous year, within a week of the outbreak of hostilities.100 The Chinese and North Koreans were mindful of American atomic capabilities and debated amongst themselves the likelihood that Eisenhower would use the bomb.101 But recent research casts much doubt on Eisenhower and Dulles’s claims that the resolve of their atomic threats were what brought

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peace to Korea. Historians have pieced together the evidence and found that that evidence is too circumstantial and scattered to credit atomic diplomacy with directly influencing Chinese and North Korean decisions to seek peace. In particular, it is unlikely that the messages Eisenhower and Dulles thought they were sending arrived in time to influence the decision, if they arrived at all. The new historical consensus is that the nuclear threats were largely irrelevant to the Korean armistice.102 Whatever role the atomic threats had, on the evening of July 26, 1953, Eisenhower told the American people that one of his two main election promises had been fulfilled. The fighting in Korea was over. As well as boosting Eisenhower’s personal prestige, it removed a large drain on military spending, opening new opportunities for a rationalization of American national security policy.103 IMPLEMENTING THE NEW LOOK Talk was all well and good, but would the New Look work in practice? An important objective of the New Look was to reduce the size and dispersal of U.S. forces overseas by pulling them back closer to the continental United States at the same time as actually increasing America’s long-term security. Cover would be provided for this by an extension and strengthening of the security umbrellas extended by the atomic striking power of the United States. American and British strategic assessments figured on two main antagonists: the Soviet Union and Communist China in the belief that they exerted puppeteerlike control over Communists everywhere. American and British nuclear strategy for both Europe and Asia, therefore, had as its ultimate targets Moscow and Beijing. This tendency to view the Soviet and Chinese as a single entity was strikingly illustrated in the strategic target lists prepared in the Pentagon. Manifested in the form of the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, in the 1960s, if activated this plan would have launched massive nuclear strikes against both the Soviet Union and China without distinction of where the original transgression had originated. The timing of Dulles’s Council on Foreign Relations speech was deliberately aimed to be signaling the administration’s intent as part of the diplomatic offensive toward the deteriorating situation in Indochina. It seemed to have little effect. In early May, the French forces capitulated at Dien Bien Phu, signaling the end of the French military effort. Eisenhower had earlier decided that sending in American troops to Indochina was no solution; some other way would have to be found. Central to the New Look was the notion of regrouping strategic forces closer to home in a mobile force, something akin to a strategic fire brigade. Radford had argued forcefully for such a strategy in response to what he saw was the risk of having large proportions of the U.S. military tied down in areas on the periphery, such as Korea. And it was Asian crises, Korea

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and Indochina, that had provided much impetus for the development and announcement of a new grand strategy. In South East Asia, the Eisenhower administration and the Eden government repeatedly resisted the efforts of the Australian government to draw permanent commitments of American and British land, sea, and air forces to the region. With memories of the vulnerability of the region during World War II still fresh and Korea and Indochina threatened, Canberra sought to augment the “continental defense” promised by the ANZUS treaty of mutual defense with a “forward defense” strategy under SEATO.104 As the British high commissioner in Canberra explained to his superiors in the foreign office in London, “It always has to be remembered that the Australians have a deep-seated awareness of the threat represented by the sheer numbers of the Chinese Communists. The idea of millions of Chinese creeping down through the [Malayan] peninsula like human ants is a permanent nightmare to them.”105 Neither the Americans nor the British could be convinced. The British predicament was most easily understood. With British military and economic power having suffered greatly during World War II and the bulk of the outposts of British colonial power had fallen in rapid succession, the prospect of committing land forces at anything like the kind of level that would be needed for a serious defense of the Malayan Peninsula, let alone the rest of South East, was pure fantasy. If Britain were to remain engaged militarily in the region in any significant way, relying on a nuclear umbrella was a necessity. The Americans adopted a similar line. Washington made it clear that it had no intention of earmarking troops for a conventional defense of South East Asia.106 Instead, it adopted the argument made repeatedly by Radford that a Korea-like defense of South East Asia was neither feasible nor desirable. The appointment of Radford to replace General Omar N. Bradley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been something of a coup for the Nationalist China lobby on Capitol Hill. As historian Norman Graebner noted, “Radford had made no secret of his belief that the Red China regime must be destroyed even if it required a fifty-year war to accomplish it.”107 As an admiral commanding aircraft carriers in the Pacific campaign of World War II, his motto had been “kill the bastards scientifically.”108 Accordingly, in assessing the options for a defense strategy for South East Asia, Radford argued that the only viable option was to holding Chinese cities and industrial centers hostage to atomic attack and hopefully deter Chinese action. If that deterrent failed and the Chinese advanced regardless, the strategy went, then atomic strikes against China’s logistical centers should halt the advance.109 For political reasons, Dulles sought to soften the tone of the message without changing its substance, but the government of Sir Robert Menzies in Canberra remained unconvinced that the strategy was anything but a way for the United States to minimize its commitment of resources to the region.

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It was an assessment shared in London. In October 1955, the British Joint Intelligence Council concluded that “In the case of a Chinese Communist advance starting from South China, the early delivery of nuclear weapons on to, at most, fifty selected targets in Southern China and North Vietnam would so delay the advance that the overt threat to Malaya would be very small.”110 The logic seemed just right. Atomic weapons were also designated for Europe’s defense. Eisenhower told the National Security Council in December 1954 that the only hope for victory against the Soviets “would be to paralyze the enemy at the outset of the war.”111 The Lisbon goals, agreed in February 1952, did not contemplate the use of atomic weapons. That changed quickly. Within three months, Eisenhower, at that time the supreme allied commander of American forces in Europe (SACEUR), delegated authority to General Lauris Norstad to oversee the introduction of atomic weapons in NATO. As part of that process, the U.S. Strategic Air Command set up a subheadquarters at NATO’s headquarters in Paris. Initial plans called for twenty atomic weapons to be available to NATO through SACEUR. Within two years that number had grown to 125.112 In the fall of 1954, NATO formally adopted a nuclear policy for the first time. NATO’s acceptance of the heavy emphasis on the use of nuclear weapons was, in the words of Marc Trachtenberg, “an event of enormous historical significance.”113 There was little choice. Even with the relatively modest goal of holding fast at the Rhine, the strength of NATO’s conventional forces simply were not enough. The Lisbon conference had set a goal of nearly 100 divisions. By 1954, that had been reduced to just thirty divisions. Without the immediate use of atomic weapons, NATO concluded, “we could not successfully defend Europe with the resources available. Any delay in their use even measured in hours could be fatal. Therefore, in the event of war involving NATO, it is militarily essential that NATO forces should be able to use atomic and thermonuclear weapons in their defense from the outset.”114 Ironically, given that a primary motive in its development was the oftcited need for sustainability, massive retaliation was short-lived. From the moment it was announced, its chief proponents were forced to back away from it. Underneath the veneer of slogans and impressive-sounding action plans lay complicated tensions that remained unsettled. But it also brought about significant changes in the way the Western atomic powers projected their power on the periphery of the cold war struggle with Communism. By extending nuclear guarantees to regional interests and employing nuclear threats in particular episodes, the Churchill and Eisenhower governments placed large portions of the globe under their nuclear umbrellas, from Western Europe, to Taiwan, to South Korea, and to the Malayan Peninsula. Serious threats to any one of these vital interests, they said, would provoke

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atomic strikes at the heart of the Communist world, Moscow and Beijing. Ironically, given the short lifespan of the massive retaliation doctrine as official U.S. policy, its fundamental principles remain operational in some of the most contested regions of the world. Of course, that is not necessarily a good thing. Does the United States really expect to use nuclear weapons to protect Taiwan from China, or Japan from North Korea? In a throwback to cold war thinking, the Bush administration’s 2002 Nuclear Posture Review threatened as much.115 Nevertheless, the results are not all bad. Some of the regional nuclear umbrellas extended first by the Truman and then by the Eisenhower administrations in the 1940s and 1950s remain intact—if in slightly modified character—and have had a surprising role in actually helping to suppress the spread of nuclear weapons. These guarantees, made explicitly to deter action, have to some extent helped support the proliferation status quo. The most notable examples are Japan and Taiwan, both of whom could develop nuclear capability relatively quickly and easily and both of whom fear threats to their very survival from regional rivals (in the case of Japan it is North Korea; in the case of Taiwan, it is China). So long as both countries are protected by American defense guarantees, including nuclear ones, they have resisted developing their own, independent, nuclear capabilities. If those nuclear guarantees were to be rescinded, many fear that the pressure for regional rivals to develop their own nuclear programs would become irresistible, leading to a chain reaction of proliferation in a historically volatile region of the world. The Eisenhower administration’s New Look was never a consensus strategy. It codified a compromise at a particular moment in time. But from the beginning, it faced scorching criticism even from within the administration. The army never accepted that the air force could render ground forces obsolete and spent the next decade devising a strategy it dubbed “flexible response” that aimed to reclaim the central role of ground forces in being to defend the nation’s interest. Dulles’s rhetoric or brinkmanship frankly frightened many people. Growing public awareness of the dangers of fallout and an increasingly vocal antinuclear movement fueled an ongoing public debate. And the New Look had been tainted by political partisanship from the beginning. All of these forces conspired by the mid-1950s to force a new look at the New Look.

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The Credibility Gap If it becomes a question of the atomic bomb and all-out war, or nothing, it may be, too often, nothing. Lester Pearson, February 2, 1954

The nuclear umbrellas extended by the Eisenhower administration and to a lesser extent the Churchill government were effective only so long as they were credible. By the mid-1950s, that credibility was seriously in question. From the moment of inception, doubts built up about massive retaliation. The administration’s apparent faith in an all-or-nothing approach to security inevitably raised the issue of bluffing. And it was not only America’s adversaries that harbored doubts; the NATO allies became increasingly skeptical. “If it becomes a question of the atomic bomb and all-out war, or nothing, it may be, too often, nothing,” warned Lester Pearson, the Canadian foreign minister, to Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent.1 British Labour MP, Denis Healey, pointed out that it would be understandable if the Americans responded with “nothing.” “If, in 1951, Europeans were prepared to abandon South Korea rather than themselves risk being occupied by the Red Army,” he asked, “how can we take it for granted in, say 1961, that Americans would not prefer to see Europe occupied by the Red Army rather than themselves risk thermonuclear annihilation?”2 It was a variation on a theme increasingly heard throughout the West and within the United States itself. Even Eisenhower himself, his presidency in the early stages of so-called second-term-itis on a number of fronts, conceded by 1957 that

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“the concept of deterrent power has gone as far as it can. In view of this incredible situation, we must have more fresh thinking on how to conduct ourselves.”3 Consciously adopting a position of calculated ambiguity invited skepticism—from friends as well as enemies—at the same time as denying the means to dispel that skepticism. It rested on an expression of political resolve. Would the United States really risk the threat of its own destruction to protect, say, West Berlin, Paris, or some tiny, largely uninhabited islands off the coast of Taiwan? The deterrent effect of massive retaliation rested squarely on the premise that the leaders in Moscow and Beijing were uncertain enough of the answer to believe that they just might. Khrushchev frequently voiced his doubts. But not even John Foster Dulles was prepared to offer a definitive statement—one way or the other. The Eisenhower administration was never able to shake the twin criticisms that it was putting a price tag on national security and that it was stubbornly sticking to an overly rigid faith in massive retaliation. Dulles’s new association with brinkmanship was easily latched onto by critics at home and abroad as dogmatic, reckless, and out of step with military and political realities. It revealed the administration’s “habit of putting salesmanship ahead of statesmanship,” charged one senator.4 During the course of the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration gradually backed away from its reliance on the retaliatory threat to deter threats to its national interests. Several elements conspired to force this new look at the New Look. Again, the pressures for change to the strategic doctrine came not from any new breakthrough in the theory of deterrence, but rather from more mundane pressures. The Soviets were rapidly developing their own atomic strike force. The European allies of NATO were adding pressure. Elements within the administration were arguing for change. And the dynamics of military politics were changing, as the army tried to reassert itself on American national security policy. By the late 1950s, these threads were intertwined, and massive retaliation had been watered down and qualified to the point that there was little resistance when a new strategic concept, “flexible response,” was formally adopted by the administration of John F. Kennedy. SOVIET TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGHS The first challenge was technological. The arms race that many had predicted had become a reality with a rapid succession of technological breakthroughs. On October 3, 1952, Great Britain formally entered the nuclear club when it detonated its first atomic device on an island off the coast of Australia. Only weeks later, on October 31, the United States detonated its first thermonuclear weapon and less than a year later, on August 12, 1953, the Soviet Union successfully detonated its first thermonuclear device. This accelerating pace of technological breakthroughs made it clear that the

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strategic balance was in a state of flux, which in turn affected thinking about deterrence. The core concept was that the vulnerability of U.S. and NATO forces was increasing. This realization was accompanied by a notable sense of alarm. Although the Soviets had successfully tested their first atomic device as early as 1949, thoughtful observers recognized that one successful test did not make a deployable arsenal. But in late August 1953, Soviet scientists shocked the West once again. Less than two weeks after a U.S. intelligence assessment estimated that Soviet scientists were unlikely to master nuclear fusion for at least another year, Soviet premier Georgi Malenkov announced that the “the United States has no monopoly on the production of the hydrogen bomb.” Western officials met his announcement with public skepticism5 and Dulles told reporters on August 12 that there was no evidence to support Malenkov’s claim and he was personally doubtful that it was true.6 That very day, the Soviets detonated their first thermonuclear device, announced by Pravda announced on August 20.7 Western intelligence analysts determined that the device was not a true hydrogen bomb and it was not in a weaponized form. Neither finding offered much solace. Even as Admiral Radford and President Eisenhower tried to play down the development in public, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, immediately grasped the significance of the development for U.S. security policy. Although the United States remained well ahead of the Soviets in science and production, he said, the U.S. atomic and nuclear arsenals no longer constituted “a complete deterrent to aggressive action.”8 That became a recurring theme for the remainder of the decade. The American claim to thermonuclear supremacy was finished. In private, Eisenhower’s reaction was more serious, pushing him to contemplate extreme measures. In early September, he asked Dulles to quietly revisit an extreme measure: preventive war. He tasked Dulles “to consider whether or not our duty to future generations did not require us to initiate war at the most propitious moment that we could designate.”9 A few weeks later, on September 24, he raised the prospect at a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC). The weight of the evidence suggests that Eisenhower never seriously entertained the prospect that he would order a preventive atomic strike against the Soviet Union—and he later formally ruled it out— but these inquiries at the top of the American national security establishment were symptomatic of the uncertainty caused by the dramatic pace of Soviet technological development. The Soviet H-bomb also acted as a catalyst for a fundamental reevaluation of the equation of Soviet intentions and capabilities. Nuclear parity, although not yet an absolute reality, appeared imminent, a fact that was soon reflected in official U.S. government policy. The NSC’s Basic National Security Policy paper prepared at the end of the 1954 acknowledged for the

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first time that the strategic equation had developed to a point of “mutual deterrence.” The outbreak of general nuclear war, the paper said, would bring about such extreme destruction as to threaten the survival of both Western civilization and the Soviet system. This situation could create a condition of mutual deterrence in which each side would be strongly inhibited from deliberately initiating general war or taking actions which it regarded as materially increasing the risk of general war.10

The balance of terror might at last become a reality. But now that it was here, few were inclined to accept that as an improvement. By 1955, Soviet scientists had largely overcome the initial four-year lag and, particularly in the field of thermonuclear weapons, was on a par with the West. The Soviets still lagged far behind the United States in both quantity and quality of nuclear weapons, but the former’s strategic arsenal was more than adequate to inflict considerable damage on the West and therefore to play its own deterrent role. For all practical purposes, the gap had been closed. The Soviets’ second great leap forward was Sputnik. With it, any lingering faith in the doctrine of massive retaliation was decisively wiped away. Sputnik announced in dramatic fashion the arrival of the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Geography, that great protector of the North American continent, was effectively neutralized. As one observer put it, “Rockets collapsed space and time. . . . Surprise attack from the air would always be possible, uncoupled from any specific crisis.”11 The next nuclear war might come without a moment’s notice. The Soviet lead in the space race translated directly to a lead in at least one important aspect of the arms race. The Sputnik shot was prefaced by successful missile tests of a new kind of Soviet missile, the R-7. On the morning of August 21, 1957, the Soviets’ troubled ICBM program finally had a success when an R-7 missile was fired from the Soviet Union and impacted in the Pacific nearly 4,000 miles away. The Kremlin publicly announced the successful firing in Moscow on August 26, but again the claim was received with much suspicion in the West.12 When Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces used the same kind of rocket two months later to propel the world’s first artificial satellite into space, any doubts were unequivocally dispelled. The Soviets’ technological lead had psychological ramifications in international politics. Launched on October 4, 1957, the satellite, Sputnik, was in itself harmless, being little more than a basketball-sized nitrogenfilled aluminum sphere fitted with a rudimentary transmitter that emitted a distinctive “beep” every few seconds. But for a little over three weeks, this “beep” reminded military radio operators and their amateur counterparts of the Soviet accomplishment. After about a hundred days in orbit the satellite fell from orbit and vaporized into the atmosphere. But the true power

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of Sputnik was not in its physical presence but in its symbolism. “Never before had so small and so harmless an object created such consternation,” observed Daniel J. Boorstin. It was, wrote another observer with only a hint of hyperbole, “the shock of the century.”13 Just as American’s nerves were returning to normal, the Soviets followed up with Sputnik II, larger than its predecessor and this one carrying life—a dog named Laika. For the people of the Soviet bloc, Sputnik was a source of great pride, a fact drummed home by the Soviet press. For the West, the suggestion that Soviet missile technology was ahead of the West’s was compelling and, for many, alarming, especially when contrasted with a spate of well-publicized American test failures.14 For many Americans, the great shock of the previous decade—Pearl Harbor—flashed to mind. The sense of alarm was not without some foundation. For several years, the vulnerability of the continental United States had been an acknowledged problem. Just before leaving office in mid-January 1953, President Truman had signed an NSC finding that warned that the government’s ability to defend the continent from atomic attack was “extremely limited.”15 The existing defenses constituted a piecemeal response to the problem. The vulnerability was a product of several factors, including the vestiges of the postwar demobilization, emphasis on forward defense strategies, and a traditional American expectation of invulnerability offered by geography. All of these had conspired to render continental defense less urgent in the range of military priorities. The new warning systems spanning the northern reaches of North America, established in collaboration with Canada, were designed to offer warning of incoming Soviet bombers, but coverage was patchy, systems untested, and lines of communication unclear.16 Indeed, even sixty years later, tracking the four hijacked commercial airlines on September 11, 2001, exposed some disconcerting shortcomings in the capabilities of the sophisticated networks of military and civilian warning systems.17 An incoming ICBM traveling in excess of 3,000 miles per hour offered a challenge exponentially more difficult. Ignorant of the technicalities, the American public were nevertheless all too aware of the general problem. In a poll completed just days before Malenkov announced the end of the American monopoly on the hydrogen bomb, George Gallup reported that according to his polling only one in six Americans thought that the Soviets would be able to “knock out” the United States with a massive surprise attack with atomic weapons.18 After Sputnik, those ratios had reversed. CIVILIAN STRATEGISTS As nuclear weapons increasingly became a central part of international affairs and as nuclear war became an all-too-real prospect, public concern with nuclear policy increased. For the first decade of the nuclear age, the American public—along with the British, French, and much of the rest of

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the Western alliance—had for the most part treated nuclear policy as “something best left to the experts,” but by the end of the 1950s nuclear strategy had become a topic of public debate led by a cadre of increasingly visible professional strategists. Often civilians associated with think tanks such as the RAND Corporation, these professional strategists began to assume a new place relative to the U.S. military hierarchy and, in turn, in the public imagination. Atomic scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and Werner von Braun had all become national figures through their contributions to the technology of the nuclear age and later through their vocal political engagement in the abolitionist debate.19 By the late 1950s civilian professional strategists like Bernard Brodie, William Kaufmann, Henry Kissinger, Albert Wohlstetter, and Herman Kahn became almost as famous for their theorizing about how to use the technology the scientists had developed. Although their fame most often came in the form of notoriety for their ability to discuss the absurdity of nuclear war in cold, calculating terms, they were nevertheless crucial for fueling the public debate. In the absence of hard evidence concerning Soviet decision-making, these strategists were forced to form judgments about nuclear war without having any experience to draw on; thus, they substituted deductive hypotheses derived from the fields of political science, psychology, mathematics, and economics for inductive historical experience.20 Dulles’s speech to the Council of Foreign Relations in January 1954 was interpreted by many of these civilian strategists as an opening to join the public debate. Yale professor and sometime RAND consultant, William Kaufman, became one of the earliest of these civilian strategists to offer a sophisticated and rational critique of massive retaliation. His core contention was that the Eisenhower-Dulles doctrine of massive retaliation failed to account for the growth in Soviet capabilities. Threatening massive retaliation had made some sense when the United States held a monopoly on atomic and thermonuclear weapons, he argued, but made no sense in an era when the Soviets could retaliate in kind. Massive retaliation would no longer be a one-way street. Whether that counter strike would be decisive became largely irrelevant; the United States would be made to suffer considerably. “We must face the fact that, if we are challenged to fulfill the threat of massive retaliation, we will be likely to suffer costs as great as those we inflict,” he warned.21 Kaufmann further argued that the Dulles plan for deterrence rested on assumptions about the adversary that were questionable at best and flawed at worst. He identified three main ones: firstly, that worldwide communism was controlled from Moscow and Beijing; secondly, that Soviet and Chinese leaders shared the same “cost-risk calculations” roughly comparable with those of Western leaders; and thirdly—and derivative of the first two assumptions—“that action on the periphery of the communist empire can be forestalled by forecasting to the enemy the costs and risks that he will run— provided always that the costs and risks of sufficient magnitude to outweigh

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The Credibility Gap

the prospective gains.”22 Kaufmann conceded that there remained a place for massive retaliation, but that that place was a relatively narrow range of contingencies. Too great a burden had been placed on the threat to respond with nuclear weapons, and the result was that the strategy was overextended and dangerously fragile.23 Moreover, nuclear stalemate might actually invite the adversary to resort to local action with conventional weapons, he warned.24 The fragility of the American nuclear strike force was something emphasized by another prominent civilian strategist, Albert Wohlstetter, a theoretical mathematician by training who joined the economics division of RAND in 1951 as a consultant.25 During the early 1950s, building on work begun by Bernard Brodie, Wohlstetter studied the basing system of Strategic Air Command (SAC) and concluded not only that it was ill-suited to the new strategic environment, but also that SAC forces were dangerously vulnerable to Soviet attack. Up to 85 percent of SAC’s overseas bomber force could be destroyed, while they sat on their bases, by a relatively small number of Soviet bombs.26 In 1959, Wohlstetter expanded upon this theme in a highly influential article in Foreign Affairs titled “The Delicate Balance of Terror.” Published in the wake of the Sputnik shots, the article’s central premise was that the vulnerability of American nuclear weapons to being destroyed or neutralized in the event of a Soviet first strike led to a precarious peace and, in fact, invited just such a strike.27 Countering the claims by some contemporary commentators that the solution lay in any single path, such as increases in the quantities or even this or that kind of new missile, Wohlstetter emphasized the complexity of the deterrence process. Although not entirely hopeful that the United States would be able to deter the Soviets from strategic war, he believed that “Deterrence in the 1960s is neither assured nor impossible but will be the product of sustained intelligence effort and hard choices, responsibly made.”28 Wohlstetter stated his prescription simply: “To deter an attack means being able to strike back in spite of it.”29 This deceptively simple equation of a second strike capability would become the crux of a vigorous debate on assured destruction that would rage with varying intensity for the remainder of the cold war. ALLIANCE POLITICS Placing an emphasis on atomic weapons had been pioneered by the British and largely accepted, to the extent that they were consulted, by the other NATO allies. At the same time, U.S. military planners expected allies to take more responsibility for their own local defenses. The 1952 meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Lisbon had set a goal of nearly 100 divisions to be in place by 1954. By 1954, the objective had been scaled back to thirty divisions and, in reality, even those forces were not at full combat strength. Massive retaliation had served to cover a reduction in Washington’s military spending on conventional forces, but the Americans

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soon found the argument turned back on them as the NATO allies picked up on the inherent contradiction between Washington’s insistence that more European conventional forces were needed and its professed faith in the deterrent power of its nuclear weapons. Why should Portugal, for instance, embark in a large and expensive conventional buildup when U.S. leaders were adamantly insisting that security lay in NATO’s nuclear guarantee? It was a conundrum that remained a frustration for U.S. administrations for decades. In this way, the arguments made in support of massive retaliation paradoxically undermined the very efforts to coax NATO allies to commit more of their resources to building up their conventional forces. By 1957, Washington was becoming more and more alarmed at the relative weakness of the NATO’s conventional forces. There was no longer any pretense that NATO’s shield forces could mount anything like an effective defense of Western Europe for very long. General Lauris Norstad, commander-in-chief of NATO forces, offered a striking analogy: The talk about paring down the deterrent strategy reminds me of a game I used to play as a child, a game called “Castle of Sand.” We put a penny in a tumbler, packed the tumbler with damp sand, and turned it upside down over a plate. Lift the tumbler, and there was the “castle,” with the penny on top. Now we took a knife, and each of us in turn had to pare away some sand, without bringing down the penny. It was easy at first. You could make bold slashes at almost no risk at all. But it all soon became dangerous to pare even a few grains. And eventually, of course, somebody made the fatal cut. Down fell the castle, penny and all, and the loser paid a forfeit.30

NATO was still some way away from such catastrophe, but documents released from former Warsaw Pact archives in recent years suggest that Norstad was right to worry, although it is not clear that the scale of buildup he advocated would have held the line for long. The Soviets alone had more than 175 divisions and more than 4 million men under arms. Moreover, Warsaw Pact forces were armed with tactical nuclear weapons and always prepared to use them; the Pact’s war plans called for a blitzkrieg through Europe, along with the first use of tactical nuclear weapons.31 NATO’s shield would likely have been dismissed with short shrift. It was a problem that probably should have been foreseen—the Americans had made the argument themselves. When the British first proposed in the summer of 1952 to put more emphasis on long-range bombers over local conventional defenses, the idea had been rebuffed by the Truman administration suspicious that it was an attempt by Churchill to renege on commitments recently made at the Lisbon meeting of the North Atlantic Council. And Eisenhower himself had placed heavy emphasis on defense

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The Credibility Gap

policy “that will keep our boys at our side instead of on a foreign shore,” as he put it during the presidential campaign.32 But bringing American troops closer to home meant that the allies were expected to fill the gap. That proved problematic. However much Washington might have wanted to withdraw or reduce its forces from Europe, the European allies had set the situation to ensure that they would in fact stay. “I feel that sometimes they place more burden on us than they’re entitled to,” Kennedy complained coyly to Eisenhower in September 1962. Eisenhower, who had just returned from a visit to Germany where he had met with German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, agreed.33 Designed ostensibly as a collective security measure, the shift to the massive retaliation doctrine dispelled any misconceptions any of the other participating parties might have had about collective decision making. It was a recurring and serious complaint made especially vocally and frequently in London, Paris, Ottawa, and other allies. In the August 1943 Quebec agreement, the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada had agreed that none of the three would use the atomic bomb against third parties without each other’s consent. Almost five years later, the United States had reneged and forced through an agreement that revoked such a promise. Unilateral American threats to use the bomb in Korea, first by Truman and then by Eisenhower, had prompted outspoken concern. Alarmed at the prospect that Truman might use the bomb in Korea, Clement Attlee had rushed to Washington to talk the President out of it. Truman had promised in these talks, in December 1950, that he would keep Attlee informed, but was deliberately vague and would not commit the understanding to paper. Attlee returned to London apparently believing that the United Kingdom would be consulted on the bomb’s use; in fact, Washington intended no such thing. Even Winston Churchill, not known to be timid with nuclear bluster, expressed his outright opposition to the American use of atomic weapons against Beijing. As Eisenhower recalled the exchange, Churchill emphasized that Britain “was a small crowded island; one good nuclear bombing could destroy it, and recklessness might provoke such a catastrophe.”34 Churchill had extracted a promise out of Truman in January 1952 that the use by American bombers of British airfields for launching atomic strikes would be a matter of joint decision. For a policy launched very much with Indochina in mind, Washington’s lack of consultation with its allies engaged in South East Asia was striking. Thomas K. Finletter, secretary of the air force in the Truman administration and later U.S. ambassador to NATO, identified this as one of the key flaws in implementing the policy. “Politically, the warning of massive retaliation was weak, for it revealed the failure of the United States to arrange a solid front of the powerful Western countries most interested in the area,” he complained in his 1954 book Power and Policy.35 For a policy that rested on credibility, that was a fatal flaw.

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4

Bridging the Gap What is it that will deter them? And [Charles] de Gaulle thinks what he’s got is going to be a big deterrent. And even what they had in Cuba alone would have been a substantial deterrent to me. John F. Kennedy, December 5, 1962

By the mid-1950s, the credibility of a massive retaliation was being widely questioned, not just by friends and enemies abroad, but also in American defense circles. As yet, however, none of the alternatives proposed had secured a critical mass of support. The common thread of the critiques through the mid- and late-1950s was that too much of a burden was being placed on the credibility that the West would respond to threats to its interests with nuclear weapons. Few doubted that Washington would respond with nuclear weapons to defend the continental United States, but would it really trade Chicago for Paris? A fundamental premise of the Eisenhower administration’s New Look was that defense of the homeland and defense of national interests elsewhere in the world were inseparable; so far as contingency and military planning was concerned, extended deterrence was treated the same as protection of the continental United States. Critics homed in on this aspect as a fundamental flaw in the strategy. On one end of the spectrum was inaction. On the other end was thermonuclear war. The area under dispute was the area between with the fear being that the Soviets (or Chinese) might be emboldened to act in ways and areas for which it believed the United States

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would decide were not worth its self-annihilation. In short, a growing chorus of critics said that deterrence had become overextended, risking its own collapse. The Eisenhower administration’s own actions sowed further doubts. Threats to use nuclear weapons to bring peace in Korea were conveyed halfheartedly. Communist forces managed to rout the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, while Soviet tanks quashed uprisings in Budapest and the Western allies bickered over how to handle the Suez crisis in 1956. Massive retaliation had been sold as a cure-all, a way to prevent not just strategic attack but also to deter lower-level threats to Western interests. In that latter respect, it seemed to be failing in practice. As British Labor MP Denis Healey put it in 1955, “It cannot be denied that the deterrent value of atomic striking power has seriously depreciated through the West’s proved reluctance to use it. From the experience of the last five years, it would appear that a general threat of atomic retaliation may well invite the Communists to probe western intentions by local military adventures.”1 The preoccupation became to find a way to close that gap, not to win advantage, but to close an exposed vulnerability. A number of observers came separately to the conclusion that the answer lay in some combination of conventional and tactical nuclear forces. In its rhetoric, the Eisenhower administration had repeatedly emphasized that a balanced defense force was necessary, one in which conventional forces supplemented the so-called nuclear-air-retaliatory power. “You don’t send in A-bombs to restore order when a riot occurs,” Eisenhower said.2 In an article published in 1954 under Dulles’s name but largely penned by the director of the state department’s policy planning staff, Robert Bowie, the secretary of state said that “it is important to have the flexibility and the facilities which make various responses available. . . . [The United States] must not put itself in the position where the only response open to it is general way.”3 Nevertheless, the criticism that the Eisenhower administration’s actual policies—as distinct from its rhetoric—had left a gaping vulnerability in U.S. conventional forces stuck. “Are we leaving ourselves the grim choice of inaction or a thermonuclear holocaust?” asked Governor Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 presidential campaign. Turning Richard Nixon’s words from four years earlier against the administration, he asked: “Are we indeed inviting Moscow or Peiping [Beijing] to nibble us to death?”4 Critics repeatedly pointed to Korea, Dien Bien Phu, and Quemoy-Matsu as instances where massive retaliation was failing to protect American interests and instances where American credibility might have actually been harmed by the unwillingness, when it came down to it, to follow through with using the bomb. Few argued that the bomb should have been used in those circumstances; most argued that there had to be some other way to deal with similar threats to U.S. interests without going to one extreme or the other—the response should match the threat.

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Bridging the Gap

The debate began in earnest in Europe in the mid-1950s but by the end of the decade it was dominated by American voices. And it was in the United States that the debate had its first real effects. American planners were exploring alternatives to massive retaliation that would offer a more robust deterrent. By the beginning of the 1960s, an alternative had emerged with a name (flexible response), solid intellectual credentials (thanks to civilian strategists), champions in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill (through the army and its allies), and the power and will of the White House to push the reform through (courtesy of the new Kennedy administration). Later in the 1960s, after much debate, NATO belatedly adopted flexible response as its own strategic posture. And, once again, the Soviets followed the American lead and began moving away from its reliance on threats of Armageddon to support its foreign policy objectives after new setbacks in the Berlin and Cuba crises exposed Nikita Khrushchev’s inflated claims of Soviet power and resolve. In all of these cases, movement was toward more balanced forces where once again a high premium was placed on conventional capabilities. And in all cases, efforts to revise nuclear doctrine amounted to acknowledgments that there were all-too-real limits on what the threat of using nuclear weapons could accomplish. As Eisenhower himself acknowledged by 1957, the limits of deterrence had probably been reached. Flexible response did not reject nuclear weapons—the doctrine’s champions were very clear on that point, and indeed some flavors of the strategy actually elevated the importance of tactical nuclear weapons—but it did place much greater emphasis on building up conventional weapons in order to provide for a much greater range of capabilities and therefore options. The doctrine of flexible response was sold publicly as a way to bridge the credibility gap that had grown ever wider and the new doctrine was widely associated with John F. Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor. While this is in some important respects fitting—it was, after all, the new Kennedy administration that implemented the doctrine when it assumed office in January 1961—flexible response’s roots were laid several years previously. Two main threads developed it, one political and one military. On the political front, forces within the state department, particularly the director of the Policy Planning Staff, Robert Bowie, had been building the case and for moving the administration’s policy away from the absolutist position implied by the public face of massive retaliation. The military thread originated in the army and, to a lesser extent, the navy. As part of its attempt to rebuild its stature after the deep cuts in funding and prestige following Korea, the army’s leadership boasted by 1960 that it had implemented a posture of flexible response and argued publicly for the posture to be expanded to the overall U.S. defense doctrine. Both threads gained traction as the credibility gap of massive retaliation widened and received a huge boost in the lead up to the 1960 presidential campaign, with Democrats looking for both a better security strategy and one that distanced it from that of the Eisenhower administration.

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THE MULTIPLE ORIGINS OF FLEXIBLE RESPONSE The time was ripe for someone to step up with an alternative deterrence posture. Several alternative ideas sprouted, but none immediately gained traction. By the mid-1950s, a variety of paths were being laid out. Some focused on conventional forces to counter subnuclear provocation. Others focused on nuclear weapons themselves that might be used in limited ways. It was a multilateral effort, and even non-nuclear allies did not shy away from trying to influence U.S. nuclear policy. Canadian Foreign Secretary Lester Pearson became an early critic of massive retaliation and an advocate for thinking beyond the all-or-nothing mindset it involved. In Britain, a country which, as one observer put it at the time, “has more to lose from a policy of massive retaliation than any other first-class power” thanks to its geography, several articulate thinkers emerged advocating so-called graduated deterrence, a term coined by British military historian and armored warfare specialist Basil Liddell Hart.5 One was Labor MP Denis Healey, who became a prominent parliamentary critic of the conservative government’s defense policies. Healey took particular issue with Winston Churchill’s “sublime irony,” his confident assertion that the world was entering a period of peace guaranteed through mutual vulnerability. Churchill’s rhetorical flourish, argued Healey, masked flawed logic. Healey contended that “What passes for stark political realism—this picture of a world at peace because each protagonist has a gun pointed at the other’s heart—looks after study of the evidence disturbingly like an exercise in self-deception.”6 Healey was not alone in this view. Colonel Richard Leghorn, an expert on aerial photography and reconnaissance who corresponded directly with many of the British advocates of graduated deterrence, published several articles through the mid-1950s arguing for a policy of no first use and for changing war plans so that they distinguished between military and civilian targets. Henry Kissinger, for his part, developed a highly controversial thesis that the United States needed to build up its tactical nuclear capabilities.7 Other like-minded souls included Helmut Schmidt in West Germany and British Rear Admiral Anthony Buzzard, former Director of Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty. Of those early advocates of a deterrence posture that put greater emphasis on the middle ground between the options of surrender and thermonuclear war, Buzzard proved among the most prolific and influential champions of graduated deterrence. Buzzard argued for a posture that would address several fundamental problems he identified with massive retaliation: that using atomic weapons against cities was immoral; that the very threat of massive retaliation alienated neutral opinion; and that it flew in the face of sound military theory that you should focus on the enemy’s warfighting capabilities—specifically, it’s armed forces—rather than its civilian population.8

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Bridging the Gap

Across the Atlantic, another group was making similar arguments for different reasons. Internal Pentagon politics played a central, and often underappreciated, role in undermining the credibility of massive retaliation and putting in place an alternative vision of U.S. national security policy. Through the mid- to late-1950s, after the cost-cutting of the first years of the New Look, the perennial jockeying and bargaining involved in negotiating the defense budget became even more intense and strident than usual. Each service offered its own vision of the nation’s path to security. And each service made it quite clear what it saw as the price for disregarding its views: global catastrophe. The Korean deadlock had been a prominent motivation behind the Eisenhower administration’s New Look. Despite having over 320,000 American troops making up the core of UN forces in South Korea in 1953, the situation had led to stalemate.9 Most of those troops were ground troops and there was a growing chorus of disappointment that those troops, despite their number and being among the best trained and supplied in the world, were still not able to win the war decisively. There was no getting around that it was a blow to army prestige, and the army took it to heart. That blow was felt even more acutely when it manifested itself economically. The New Look diverted emphasis and funding from ground forces to air forces. The relative newcomer to the defense forces of the United States, the air force, had become the new darling of the defense budget and on Capitol Hill, a development resented by the traditionally preeminent services, the army and navy. By the late 1950s, the air force had a greater number of personnel than the navy and only slightly fewer than the army. It was also attracting a disproportionate amount of publicity, prestige, and funding. Even the army’s pioneering efforts in ballistic missile technology were being transferred away when its star scientists and engineers, led by Werner von Braun, were seconded to NASA in 1959. Inevitably, the cuts in funding and diminished prestige provoked a reaction. Throughout the duration of the Eisenhower administration, both the army and navy worked to reclaim their stature relative to the air force. Army Chief of Staff General Matthew Ridgway and his successor, General Maxwell Taylor, spoke out forcefully against the administration’s nuclear policy. In May 1956, Taylor broke with the agreed view of the collective Joint Chiefs of Staff and urged the administration to change its reliance on nuclear weapons, to better take into account the fast-evolving reality of a U.S.–U.S.S.R. mutual deterrent. The key point of departure was the issue of escalation. Taylor, and his like-minded allies, suggested that war might come even without a deterrence failure; it might come without a single, deliberate, decision on the part of either side. Taylor argued that the growing Soviet nuclear capabilities made it far less likely that either side would deliberately resort to general war—indeed, that was the central premise of massive retaliation—but Taylor reasoned that that situation increased the prospect

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of “‘backing’ into it through a succession of actions and counteractions.”10 The current defense posture of the United States and that of its allies, he said, did not take that into account, leaving a dangerous gap in U.S. capabilities. Making that argument put Taylor fundamentally at odds with the prevailing official view. The majority JCS position held that the threat of nuclear war protected against these lower level contingencies. Eisenhower agreed. He argued that although it was becoming less likely that any nuclear state would deliberately choose nuclear war, it was still possible, and in that eventuality it was highly likely that the Soviet Union would resort to nuclear weapons in any conflict with the United States or NATO. U.S. strategy should therefore factor that possibility prominently into its planning. Moreover, Eisenhower argued in favor of incorporating more nuclear-capable, tactical weapons in the ground forces forward-deployed in Europe. Seizing the opportunity, Radford presented a plan for further dramatic cuts in American conventional forces, especially the army on the basis that tactical nuclear weapons could be used in lieu of large numbers of ground forces, and far more cheaply.11 Despite the apparent hostility to its interests, the army continued to modernize quietly while mounting an increasingly aggressive campaign to shift official thinking on defense policy. Claiming that there was a dangerous gap in the nation’s ability to contain and fight limited wars below the nuclear threshold, the army devised a five-point plan to overcome this shortcoming. An intentional byproduct of that program, of course, was that the army would once again become essential to U.S. defense posture on a global scale, although army leaders were always careful to note that it was proposing a balanced approach, with all three services playing vital roles. The plan consisted of modernizing equipment; improving strategic mobility of limited war forces; preplanning for airlift and sea-lift supply operations, including the forward stockpiling of supplies and equipment in critical strategic areas; greater synergy in planning and training with the other services; and a publicity blitz emphasizing the new capabilities of the United States to wage limited war as a way to deter subnuclear aggression.12 The air force took a starkly different line. It led to a direct clash of visions of deterrent posture. The air force continued to insist that the greatest threat to national security came from Soviet air and missile power. The Soviet arsenal was already “formidable” and was backed by a “dynamic scientifictechnological program,” air force Chief of Staff General Thomas White told Congress,13 and he warned against what he called a growing tendency to view forces that were less than capable of the total destruction of the Soviet strategic force as an adequate deterrent. The Soviets had not been deterred by tactical forces, he said, but only by the long-range air power of the United States. The United States therefore needed more missiles, more bombers, and more investment in new technology such as atomic-powered planes; it did not need more men with rifles. In a direct swipe at the army

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and navy arguments for developing greater capabilities to fight limited wars, White told Congress that to look upon limited war forces as a deterrent was “dangerous to national survival and continued United States leadership in the free world.”14 The air force got the better of the argument—temporarily, at least. Carrying momentum from the hard-won battles of 1953—1954 when the New Look was implemented, with powerful allies in Congress and the arms industry, and with an alarmist argument that appealed directly to people’s worst fears and insecurities, the air force’s argument that more money and resources needed to be poured into missile and bomber forces proved irresistible politically. Unable to shift official thinking on defense policy, Taylor resigned and took his dissent public, publishing his views in his 1960 book The Uncertain Trumpet in which he argued that U.S. defense spending needed to be reprioritized in order to increase the capabilities to control escalation. The book and its thesis became important to the 1960 presidential campaign, especially when the Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy, adopted Taylor’s ideas as part of his defense platform. Taylor’s resignation did not end the army’s five-point program, which it continued to develop. With the public battle temporarily lost, the army moved its campaign to the corridors and back rooms of Congress, forming key alliances that would pay off later when the Kennedy administration came to power. Eisenhower chose General Lyman Lemnitzer, Taylor’s deputy, to replace the outgoing chairman. Lemnitzer shared many of Taylor’s views about the role of the army but was less outspoken about them. When asked, during his confirmation hearing, what role he saw for the army in national defense, Lemnitzer replied that it was “To protect people on this earth you need to hold the land with forces on the ground. The addition of nuclear or thermonuclear types of weapons does not in any way replace the requirements for good manpower.”15 Army leaders repeatedly pressed the theme of the necessity of the foot soldier throughout the late 1950s. For all the new capabilities of high precision bombing, long range missiles, and other technological breakthroughs, they argued that being able to have sufficient boots on the ground remained as essential in the nuclear age as it had been before it. “GAMBLING SIMPLY WILL NOT DO” The Eisenhower administration itself was also moving quietly toward a remarkably similar conclusion, albeit with different motivations. From the moment of his Council of Foreign Relations speech in January 1954 effectively launching the massive retaliation doctrine, Dulles had tried to qualify and explain that his position was neither as absolute nor as reckless as his critics were characterizing it. But that process had, at best, mixed results. Behind the clarification effort was Robert Bowie, a Harvard professor whom

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Dulles had selected to replace Paul Nitze as director of the Policy Planning Staff. Bowie provided balance and intellectual heft to Dulles’s strategy and acted as a moderating influence on some of the secretary of state’s more extreme expressions of massive retaliation and brinkmanship.16 Bowie also played a direct role in the debate. He had been a principal participant in the Solarium Project and was an influential adviser to Dulles. Called back to service in 1959 by Dulles’s successor, Christian Herter, Bowie was tasked with studying NATO’s military future. He submitted his influential report to the Secretary in August 1960. Like William Kaufmann and Bernard Brodie, who had been arguing earlier in the decade that Soviet technological advances necessitated a new look at the New Look, Bowie argued that the new strategic reality of Soviet nuclear plenty must act as a catalyst for rethinking NATO’s strategic posture. Now that the Soviets had developed considerable strategic forces and dispersed them, there was no way to overcome the great uncertainty that the Strategic Air Command would be able to take out all Soviet strategic forces. Some Soviet strategic forces would almost certainly survive and strike their targets. The United States and its allies, therefore, could not be confident that threats of massive retaliation constituted a reliable deterrent. “And, where the stakes are so high,” Bowie said, “gambling simply will not do.” Nor would relying on tactical nuclear weapons solve NATO’s vulnerability. “Soviet nuclear plenty has rendered a NATO strategy based on tactical nuclear warfare very costly in peacetime and self-defeating in wartime,” Bowie argued.17 His classified report was widely distributed and proved influential for shifting the debate about NATO’s defense posture away from massive retaliation and toward a more balanced approach. In essence, Bowie was calling for a second phase of NATO strategy, where NATO would have real capabilities to influence the war on the ground without automatically defaulting to strategic strikes against the Soviet Union out of a lack of other viable options. NATO would not be able to win a ground war in Europe, but it might be able to hold the Soviets long enough to give them a pause, thus opening a window for negotiations.18 VICTORY VERSUS SECOND STRIKE By the time John F. Kennedy was sworn in, many of the foundations of his approach to foreign policy and defense issues had been set. That approach acted as a nexus for the separate threads of the defense debate calling for greater emphasis on conventional warfighting capabilities. It fell to Kennedy and his principal foreign policy advisors, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, to tie those threads together into a coherent nuclear policy for the United States. Not surprisingly, they shared Kennedy’s skepticism that massive retaliation was outdated and unrealistic.19

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During the campaign, Kennedy consciously surrounded himself with veterans of the Truman administration, reaching out to the likes of Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, Dean Rusk, Roswell Gilpatric, and David Bruce, most of whom later accepted positions in the new administration. Another veteran of the Truman administration, Eugene Zuckert, also an old friend of McNamara’s from business school, became secretary of the air force.20 Kennedy also made a concerted effort to reach out to academia, inviting groups of experts and academics to school him in issues of governance and prepare position papers on a wide range of issues. This brain trust featured prominently stars from the liberal, northeast academic establishment. “No politician in American history,” conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote, “not even Franklin D. Roosevelt—can match Sen. Kennedy in the sheer size of his brain trust.”21 Paul Samuelson from MIT, John Kenneth Galbraith and Seymour Harris from Harvard, and Richard Lester from Princeton briefed the candidate on economics. Harvard professors Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Zbigniew Brzezinski helped with political philosophy and foreign policy, respectively. Associating the campaign closely with these experts was in some respects just for show. It was also an effort to bring into the fold the liberal establishment from the intensely loyal Adlai Stevenson wing of the Democratic Party. But there was also a strong thread of sincerity to the effort. Well before the inauguration the Kennedy team had firmly demonstrated a welcoming disposition toward academia and the world of ideas. This was important for nuclear strategy because it created an environment where ideas, however theoretical or abstract, could reach the top levels of the administration. And perhaps more importantly, it created an environment in which these experts could exert direct influence in an official capacity when they came to work in Washington. Several leading members of the nuclear debate from outside the Northeast corridor, including, notably, members of RAND and other think tanks, accepted positions in the Kennedy administration. One notable absentee from Kennedy’s campaign team was Robert McNamara himself, a Republican businessman at that time heading the Ford Motor Company.22 After the election, Kennedy recruited McNamara to serve as Secretary of Defense. With his background in business and statistical analysis, McNamara left a strong mark on the Pentagon and became one of the most influential and controversial personalities to hold the office of Secretary of Defense. Vietnam, of course, figures prominently in that controversy, but other aspects of his tenure provoked intense, passionate controversy, nuclear policy among them.23 One of McNamara’s first tasks, at Kennedy’s direction, was to undertake a thorough review of U.S. defense strategy, an exercise not yet formalized as it would be in later years in the form of the Quadrennial Defense Review. McNamara’s last dealings with strategic bombing had been in World War II, when he together with other mathematicians applied their theoretical

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principles to General Curtis LeMay’s firebombing of Japan in order to make it more efficient. Since then, McNamara had spent stints in academia as a professor of business studies at Harvard and made his mark in the corporate world as a rising star of the Ford Motor Company. McNamara had therefore not been a participant in the nuclear debate through the 1950s. Once in office, though, he firmly adopted the President’s policy of flexible response and accepted the intellectual foundations developed by the RAND school and promulgated by Kaufmann, Alain Enthoven, and others.24 McNamara applied his business systems analysis approach to his new job, bringing with him several so-called whiz kids and establishing for the first time a systems analysis branch in the Pentagon to apply the rigor of the discipline to defense decision making.25 McNamara also set out to centralize control in the office of the secretary, a process that earned him much enmity. He increasingly saw the office of secretary of defense as the rightful center of responsibility for steering defense policy, rather than mainly acting as an arbiter of the armed services, which it had essentially been since the post–World War II reorganization that established the office. McNamara applied his business approach to defense strategy. McNamara’s instructions were to reappraise “our entire defense strategy, capacity, commitments and needs in the light of present and future dangers.”26 One of the fundamental problems McNamara found was that there were “too many automatic decisions made in advance instead of in the light of an actual emergency, and too few Pentagon-wide plans for each kind of contingency.”27 Although having played no role in the strategy debates since the mid-1950s, he absorbed the arguments for a reduced reliance on strategic strike forces as they were channeled through William Kaufmann, Alain Enthoven, and others who came from the world of RAND and systems analysis to hold important positions in the Pentagon decision-making schema. McNamara was a quick study. As he explained his recommendations in the review of defense posture he submitted to President Kennedy, the Pentagon’s mission should be to present the President with maximum options. Most pressingly, there was a need to shift policy emphasis and resources away from the spiraling arms race in strategic forces toward less drastic action. After all the debate about finding a middle path between nuclear war or nothing, it ultimately fell to McNamara to actually implement it. A priority was to rethink the purpose of American strategic forces. Rather than clinging to the unrealistic expectation that strategic strike forces might actually win a nuclear war, the administration’s strategic policy would be to use strategic forces solely to prevent a nuclear strike. Conventional forces could be used to deal with situations below an unspecified nuclear threshold. Adopting such an approach could mean that the United States could essentially check out of the arms race; matching the Soviets qualitatively and quantitatively would be much less urgent, thereby freeing up

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resources to be applied elsewhere. As McNamara explained his recommendations: The forces I am recommending have been chosen to provide the United States with the capability, in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack, first to strike back against Soviet bomber bases, missile sites, and other installations associated with long-range nuclear forces, in order to reduce Soviet power and limit the damage that can be done to us by vulnerable Soviet follow-on forces, while, second, holding protected reserve forces capable of destroying the Soviet urban society, if necessary, in a controlled and deliberate way.28

It became known as a second-strike capability, and it proved an effective way to impose a ceiling on the numbers of nuclear weapons that were required. It shifted the debate about force levels. A nominal victory was no longer the objective; rather, enough U.S. forces would survive a Soviet first nuclear strike that Washington could launch a devastating response. And importantly, the new strategy would give the United States the capability of holding off the point at which using strategic nuclear weapons became the only viable option. This move toward a second-strike capability was in many respects prescient. The United States still held a massive advantage over the Soviets in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); many more nuclear weapons could strike the Soviet Union than could strike the United States. But the new strategy explicitly acknowledged that that imbalance was unlikely to last, and indeed by 1966–1967 the Soviets had developed their own authentic strategic strike force. For all intents and purposes—if not technically—it meant strategic parity. By adopting a second strike posture, the United States adopted by choice a posture that would likely have been forced a few years later. ANNOUNCING THE NEW NUCLEAR DOCTRINE One of the first priorities was to nail down the estimates of Soviet strategic strength. A National Intelligence Estimate, dated September 21, 1961, which reflected the consolidated opinion or the U.S. intelligence community, put the number of Soviet ICBMs deployed on launchers at between ten and twenty-five. Substantially more warheads were expected to be available for delivery by long-range bombers.29 McNamara laid out the administration’s direction on nuclear issues in two key speeches in the spring of 1962, a classified one to NATO Foreign and Defense Ministers in Athens in May and a public one at the University of Michigan in June. For years, NATO’s nuclear strategy had been poorly understood even within NATO, largely a result of the reluctance of the member countries to agree to anything too specific. The confusion was, of

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course, compounded by the legal and policy barriers preventing the United States from sharing detailed nuclear information with its allies. McNamara therefore decided to address the problem and share with the NATO defense and foreign ministers a plainspoken assessment of NATO’s current nuclear capabilities and U.S. nuclear policy. The speech, drafted by William Kaufmann and Henry Rowen, was a military assessment deliberately avoiding being watered down by political niceties. McNamara’s objectives were, firstly, try to explicate what the realities of NATO’s nuclear capabilities were and, secondly, to dispel the confusion about what flexible response meant in the hope that NATO would then formally endorse the new American strategy. McNamara later claimed a third motive: to explain the counterforce strategy to the Soviets and hopefully influence them to adopt counterforce strategy as well.30 McNamara confirmed that the United States had officially adopted a counterforce strategy. “Our principal military objectives, in the event of a nuclear war stemming from a major attack on the Alliance,” he lectured the Europeans in the classified speech, “should be the destruction of the enemy’s military forces while attempting to preserve the fabric as well as the integrity of allied society.” With the improvements being made in U.S. nuclear technology, he said, it was increasingly possible for U.S. strategic forces to strike cities while preserving civilian targets. Through a string of statistical displays and an unprecedented level of detail on nuclear targeting, McNamara tried to impress upon his audience that Europe would pay dearly in the event of a nuclear exchange, something that it already knew too well. If the Soviets targeted urban-industrial American and European targets, he said, it would result in about 75 million American and 115 million European deaths. If the Soviet employed a policy of counterforce, the result would be roughly a third of those numbers.31 McNamara also criticized the sprouting independent nuclear forces, particularly the French. “Weak nuclear capabilities, operating independently, are expensive, prone to obsolescence, and lacking in credibility as a deterrent,” he warned. His prescription was centralized command of nuclear forces, presumably under American leadership, and a buildup of conventional military forces. McNamara’s Athens speech represented a departure from previous policy, but because it was a closed-door affair, it caused little stir. Harold Macmillan complained in his diary that McNamara’s elevation of U.S. forces while at the same time condemning European efforts to develop independent nuclear forces was delivered clumsily. THE BERLIN CRISES AND NATO STRATEGY The Berlin crisis, renewed in mid-1961 by Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit with Kennedy in June, highlighted all too clearly the limits of the nuclear deterrent. Over the course of a decade and a half, the Berlin problem

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had evolved into the cold war’s preeminent flashpoint. The first truly nuclear crisis had erupted in 1948 when the Soviets blockaded West Berlin. Since then, the issue had simmered, occasionally threatening to boil over. Khrushchev had issued an ultimatum in November 1958 that Germany’s World War II conquerors must finally sign peace treaties with East and West Germany or the Soviets would sign a bilateral peace treaty with the the German Democratic Republic. It was a threat that left the United States and its NATO allies without any good options. There were no nuclear weapons in Berlin, but the city nevertheless became the scene of some of the cold war’s most dangerous nuclear crises. Through a series of confrontations over the city, beginning in dramatic fashion with the Berlin blockade of 1948–1949, the city had repeatedly been thrust to front and center of the cold war struggle. The city had been imbued by both sides with symbolic value far beyond the city’s inherent worth. For the Soviets, it exposed in an uncomfortable fashion the limits of their power. The failure of Stalin and then Khrushchev to expel these Western outposts, lying deep within the Soviet sphere, was a perpetual embarrassment. It was also a real threat to East German security. The constant flow of refugees escaping through the escape hatch of West Berlin and the economic pressure exacerbated by the drain of some of East Germany’s most skilled people choosing to take that escape route compounded the embarrassment of being repeatedly being thwarted by the West. It was not that the Soviets were incapable of capturing West Berlin—their power in the region was undisputed and they could have seized the city within hours. For the West, and particularly the United States, which emerged as the leading advocate of defending the city, the Berlin problem became the quintessential test of extended deterrence. West Berlin was regarded as the test of resolve, the symbol of determination, and the superdomino; if West Berlin fell to the communist bloc, so the argument went, then it would spark a profound crisis of confidence in the West and lead inexorably to communist victory in the cold war. The problem was that there was no way to defend West Berlin—geography and the Soviet preponderance of military power that could be brought to bear in the region conspired to render unthinkable a conventional military defense of the city by the West. The only option, then, was to extend a nuclear guarantee to West Berlin, to deter the Soviets from acting through the threat of nuclear retaliation. That led to the standard reassurance of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, that West Berlin was as vital to U.S. national interests as New York or Chicago. That signal was sent clearly and often but had never been tested. It was, as Senator J. William Fulbright put it, a “strategic nightmare.”32 Few disagreed with his assessment. The Berlin problem figured prominently in the debate about devising an alternative to massive retaliation. Ironically, more than any other area, West Berlin owed its protection to the nuclear umbrella. But there was growing

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concern amongst some sections of the chattering classes, policymaking communities, and even NATO allies that the West’s nuclear guarantee to West Berlin was dangerously rigid, that nuclear war could be sparked at an absurdly low threshold such as whether the guard checking the papers of Western officials crossing into East Berlin wore Soviet or East German uniforms. The growing nuclear arsenals on hair-trigger alert combined with the apparently accelerating frequency of international crises, finding some way out of the deadlock appeared urgent. Khrushchev had his own ideas on how to do that, most of which had the effect of pushing the world closer to nuclear war. The Kennedy administration struggled to chip away at the calcified policy of the West to reduce the danger of nuclear war without reneging on its commitments to West Berlin. The Eisenhower administration had approached Khrushchev’s threats with a firm refusal to back down. Faced with the few viable options and the need to deal multilaterally with its NATO allies, the administration had responded to the Berlin crisis in 1958 with resolve backed up by the resurrection of the New Look: nuclear weapons featured prominently in the early stages of contingency plans to deal with a serious crisis. While careful not to provoke the Soviets, the administration and its NATO allies had ostentatiously defined West Berlin as a vital national interest squarely protected by the West’s nuclear umbrella. The Eisenhower administration had gone to great pains to convince its NATO allies that the United States would share equally the burden of nuclear damage in the event of a nuclear war over West Berlin. The Kennedy administration’s rhetoric continued that theme, but its policies undercut the message. Flexible response, as enunciated to the Western European allies by McNamara, appeared to perpetually insecure European allies to be a way for the United States to reduce its own exposure to nuclear destruction in the event of war over Europe. Central to implementing the flexible response doctrine was in building up conventional capabilities in Europe, a notion widely supported by national security experts in the United States, Dean Acheson prominent among them.33 Flexible response would therefore offer the capability to turn Europe into a battlefield, potentially sparing the continental United States. The question was whether the Kennedy administration would deliberately try to contain any conflict to Europe. European leaders used the issue to maintain pressure on Washington. Mutual suspicion delayed that. Washington remained convinced, to the point of resentment, that U.S. forces were being drawn into Western Europe unnecessarily, and that the Western Europeans were grossly exaggerating their own difficulties in meeting their commitments to build up their forces. Western Europeans harbored suspicions that the new emphasis on conventional forces and an implicit de-emphasis on nuclear weapons signaled a weakening in resolve on the part of the United States to protect Western Europe at the risk of its own destruction.34 Despite Washington’s

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protestations to the contrary, de Gaulle, Adenauer, and other Western European leaders remained convinced that flexible response amounted to a thinly disguised effort by the Kennedy administration to distance the United States from its nuclear guarantee of Western Europe. They insisted that for all of the flaws in the doctrine of Massive Retaliation, openly rejecting it in favor of flexible response was signaling to the Soviets that the United States was not willing to risk nuclear war for Western Europe. Both sides were caught in this self-perpetuating paradox. As Raymond Aron, the dean of French strategists of the era, put it: The greater the stability [deriving from parity] at the level of ultimate weapons, the more uncertain it becomes at the level of conventional ones. The more the gap between limited wars and conventional arms on the one hand and nuclear arms on the other is stressed in both word and deed, the less reason there is to fear escalation. The less reason to fear escalation, the greater the probability of limited conflict. Hence the tensions among allies, some of whom are mainly afraid of all-out war while others worry just as much about limited ones.35

Nevertheless, the Kennedy administration put the objections of its European allies down to misunderstanding rather than any fundamental flaw in the strategy and proceeded apace with the development of its conventional forces.36 Kennedy repeatedly expressed his frustration that the European powers were devoting insufficient resources to building up their own conventional forces, leading not just to a military problem, but also a massive balance of payments problem.37 For six years, NATO members argued amongst themselves. Finally, in 1967, NATO formally adopted flexible response as its strategic plan.38 The first practical test of flexible response came in the summer of 1961 when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev revived the Berlin crisis. The issue dated back to the division of Germany into occupation zones in 1945, at which time Berlin was assigned as a quadripartitely administered city. The problem was geography—Berlin lay 110 miles deep in the Soviet zone of occupation. Kennedy had originally hoped for time to develop a new strategy, but Khrushchev chose to renew his ultimatum by handing Kennedy an aide memoire on the issue at the Vienna Summit in June 1961. Khrushchev threatened to unilaterally sign a peace treaty with the German Democratic Republic (GDR), unilaterally revoking the Western powers’ rights of access to their beleaguered outpost in West Berlin. In response, Kennedy called for a rapid and large mobilization of conventional forces at home and abroad in order, in his words, “to have a wider choice than humiliation or all-out nuclear action.”39 The move was dramatic but its practical application was relatively limited. There was a considerable time lag between the announcement and the actual mobilization. The troops would not be in place for

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months. Calling up reserves created its own political problems at home, which worsened the longer the call-up lasted. More importantly, nuclear doctrine had not yet caught up with the political rhetoric. McGeorge Bundy warned Kennedy at the height of the Berlin crisis that “there is still a hideous jump between conventional warfare and a single all-out blast.”40 In other words, flexible response was not yet a practical reality. The threat to use nuclear weapons was still the foundation of West Berlin’s protection and the administration even quietly began exploring options such as launching a limited first nuclear strike against the Soviet Union that would exploit the U.S. advantage in strategic power to preemptively neutralize Soviet strategic forces.41 Khrushchev never carried out his Berlin threat so Kennedy never directly faced a bluntly nuclear choice.42 CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS Of all the nuclear crises thus far, the Cuban missile crisis stands alone for the level of scholarly attention and imagination that has focused upon it. It was dramatic and intense, it spanned a relatively brief period of time, and it was exceedingly well documented.43 Nuclear weapons were fundamental to the crisis, and yet the role they played in the crisis presents one of the least definitive examples of deterrence in practice. There is no single lesson for deterrence from the Cuban missile crisis; rather, there are many, and they are often contradictory.44 The Cuban missile crisis included both deterrence successes and deterrence failures. The crisis has been used as a cautionary tale in countless ways. In his 1995 book In Retrospect—a memoir of sorts— Robert McNamara issued his own call for dramatic nuclear disarmament. The Cuban missile crisis, he said, “makes clear that so long as we and other Great Powers possess large inventories of nuclear weapons, we will face the risk of their use.”45 On balance, the lessons of the crisis were mixed. Some aspects seemed to point to the fragility of nuclear deterrence; Khrushchev went ahead with the deployment of Soviet, long-range missiles to Cuba even after Kennedy explicitly and publicly warned of the grave risks of doing so. Conversely, though, the risk of nuclear war seemed to repel each side back from the brink. When the two sides were “eyeball to eyeball,” in Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s felicitous expression, they found a way to pull back. The Cuban missile crisis demonstrated all too vividly the shortcomings of command and control in times of crisis. Stanley Kubrik’s movie Dr. Strangelove had poked fun at the absurdity of nuclear deterrence through a fictional account. Little did he or the public know just how accurate it could be at times. In one secret exchange captured on his taping system, President Kennedy summoned senior national security advisers together just hours before he was scheduled to address the nation on the evening of October 22, 1962, effectively launching the public phase of the Cuban missile crisis.

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The stakes were unquestionably high, and Kennedy wanted to be sure that U.S. commanders in Europe would not fire their missiles without express orders from the President himself to do so. He did not want a nuclear war through miscalculation, a breakdown of communication with his own commanders, or excessive initiative on the part of those commanders. There was nothing unreasonable about the intention, but the ensuing discussion that was caught on tape provides a graphic reminder of the limits of information and how even the relatively simple effort could become frighteningly difficult. President Kennedy: . . . Italians and Americans in charge of our nuclear weapons there, that if they’re attacked, not to . . . McGeorge Bundy: And have that question mark. They haven’t got the answers. President Kennedy: Not to fire their weapons after that. George Ball: You raised that with Defense, didn’t you? Paul Nitze: McNamara and I wrote out a suggested instruction from him [President Kennedy] to the Chiefs and we took it up with the Chiefs. The Chiefs came back with a paper saying that those instructions are already out. President Kennedy: Well, why don’t we reinforce them because, as I say, we may be attacking the Cubans, and they may . . . a reprisal may come on these. We don’t want them firing [nuclear warheads] without our knowing about it. Dean Rusk: The ones in Turkey are not operational, are they? Nitze: Yes, they are. Rusk: Oh, they are. Roswell Gilpatric: Fifteen of them are on alert right now. President Kennedy: Can we take care of that then, Paul? We need a new instruction out. Nitze: All right. I’ll go back and tell them. President Kennedy: They object to sending a new one out? Nitze: They object to sending it out because it, to their view, compromises their standing instructions. You know you reinforce one standing instruction . . . Bundy: Let’s have a look at the existing order and see how definite it is, and then simply say: “The President directs your attention again to umpty-ump section . . . ” Rusk: You can send a personal message to the commander saying: “Be sure you fully understand paragraph so-and-so of your orders.” Bundy: Surely it can be done one way or the other. Nitze: They did come back with another point, and that is: NATO strategic contact [Soviet nuclear attack] requires the immediate execution of EDP in such events. President Kennedy: What’s EDP?

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Real-World Nuclear Deterrence Nitze: The European Defense Plan, which is nuclear war. Bundy: So that means an order . . . President Kennedy: Now that’s why we want to get on that, you see. Now that . . . Nitze: No. They said the orders are that nothing can go without the presidential order. President Kennedy: But you see, but they don’t know in Greece and Turkey—ah, Turkey and Italy—what we know. And therefore they don’t realize there is a chance there will be a spot reprisal. And what we’ve got to do is make sure these fellows do know, so that they don’t fire them off and think the United States is under attack. I don’t think we ought to accept the Chiefs’ word on that one, Paul. Nitze: All right. President Kennedy: I understand why they did that. These fellows think everybody knows as much as we know. And they don’t. Rusk: They might decide the nuclear war is already on. Nitze: Well, I’m sure that these fellows are thoroughly indoctrinated not to fire. I mean this is what McNamara and I went over to look into, and they really are indoctrinated on this point. President Kennedy: Well, let’s do it again, Paul. Nitze: I’ve got your point and we’ll do it again.46

The Cuban missile crisis had been sobering. Kennedy had seen firsthand some of the weaknesses in the command and control of nuclear weapons in time of crisis, and he had seen that seemingly rational advisers could give advice that openly risked thermonuclear war. The crisis therefore strengthened Kennedy’s inclination toward minimal deterrence. Not only did it make sound economic sense, but he now had some real-world experience to back it up. “What is it that will deter them?” he asked of some of his senior advisers in a secret meeting. Before they could begin to offer their own views, he lent his own experience toward formulating an answer. Referring to French efforts to stubbornly secure their own minimal but independent nuclear force, the so-called force de frappe,47 Kennedy made a rare confession, one he would never have dared make in public: “De Gaulle thinks what he’s got is going to be a big deterrent. And even what they had in Cuba alone would have been a substantial deterrent to me.”48

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5

The Numbers Game How many times is it necessary to kill a man or a nation? George McGovern, August 2, 1963

“I don’t see quite why we’re building as many as we’re building,” President John F. Kennedy complained in a top-secret defense budget meeting on December 5, 1962. The Pentagon already had over 27,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled. And yet they wanted more. Since the early 1950s, each service had developed its own claims on the large budget for nuclear weapons projects and tension had often arisen in the negotiations to divide the money for atomic weapons amongst themselves. Each service had come begging for money to increase its flagship strategic nuclear program. The air force wanted to build more than a thousand new Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) over the next three years. The navy wanted to build another six Polaris submarines, each of which could be outfitted with sixteen ICBMs. And the army wanted money to build Nike-Zeus, a new antiballistic missile system that had not yet been tested to intercept a reallife missile. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who decades later in a vastly different geopolitical landscape would declare that American nuclear weapons were “immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous,”1 proposed a simple yardstick. His advice was that Kennedy “buy twice what any reasonable person would say is required for strategic forces. I think it’s money well spent.” The risks involved in doing that,

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McNamara argued, were more palatable than the risks of being caught with too few. He conceded that it might not be an ideal situation, but argued that “for the minute we have to say that our policy is maintaining nuclear superiority. Now, we maybe can change that someday but we can’t change that today without seriously weakening the [NATO] alliance.” General Maxwell Taylor agreed. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had publicly broken with the Eisenhower administration over what he said was that administration’s overreliance on nuclear weapons, but he now argued that “there are too many imponderables for us to back away and go back to a very small force, which is invulnerable, which may be our eventual objective.”2 It had become routine for each service to imply that if its chosen program went unfunded or underfunded, it would leave the United States exposed and in the utmost peril. In the hands of the Pentagon’s allies on the Hill, such charges could become potent political weapons. Kennedy knew that game only too well. In the 1960 campaign he had become an expert on how to play the security card, relentlessly charging the Eisenhower administration with perilous neglect for allowing a so-called missile gap to develop. And it was a phenomenon not isolated in the Pentagon; Soviet military leaders used the same ploy to leverage money from the Kremlin. “Every commander has all sorts of very convincing arguments why he should get more than anyone else,” Nikita Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs. “They’re always ready to throw in your face the slogan ‘If you try to economize on the country’s defenses today, you’ll pay in blood when war breaks out tomorrow.’”3 Kennedy could certainly empathize with the predicament. Nuclear programs were expensive. The U.S. balance of payments was suffering badly as the American military commitment to Europe continued to drain gold stocks and the budget, all the while its West European allies in NATO continued to drag their feet in beefing up their own commitment of conventional forces in Europe to take some of the pressure off the U.S. military.4 More importantly, it was difficult to gauge whether all these weapons actually offered any more real security. They had just recently passed through the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age to that point, when the Soviets had stationed long-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, a crisis that could have all too easily sparked global thermonuclear war there or in Berlin. The key question was, “How much is enough?” No one doubted that U.S. nuclear forces were sufficient to deter the Soviets from doing something. The real issue, as McNamara articulated it, was, “what will they deter the Soviets from doing?”5 Force levels had become central to the nuclear debate. Several studies that the army and navy conducted in the 1950s concluded that between 100 and 200missiles that were relatively invulnerable from Soviet attack—either through mobility or hardening—would provide an adequate deterrent.6 Since then, expectations that a much higher number were required had taken hold.

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Any inclinations toward minimal deterrence ran up against a powerful counterargument that it was better, as Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett put it in December 1951, to err “on the side of too much rather than too little.” In asking the question “How much is enough?” Lovett said, “I do not believe that the Joint Chiefs of Staff could or would state categorically, at any time, that a stockpile of ‘X’ number of atomic weapons would be sufficient conclusively to ensure the security of the United States.”7 That elusive number always moved in one direction: up. Even Eisenhower conceded that the arms race was getting out of hand, and that there was little rationale for the nuclear buildup, and that it was being done more out of desperation than any confidence that it offered a path to security. “The United States is piling up armaments which it well knows will never provide for its ultimate safety,” he told the NSC in secret. “We are piling up these armaments because we do not know what else to do to provide for our security.”8 During the course of the cold war, the United States alone built on the order of 70,000 nuclear weapons. Precise figures on the global number of warheads built remain elusive, but the number is estimated to be over 128,000, with all but about 2 percent of those built by either the United States or the Soviet Union.9 The rate of the buildup was not constant; rather it ebbed and flowed, often responding to cold war tensions. After a relatively slow start, the Soviets built up their strategic and tactical forces significantly in the mid- to late-1960s under Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership. By around 1966–1967 they had created an authentic strategic force that presented strategic parity for all practical purposes despite some lingering qualitative and quantitative issues compared with the United States. The United States had two particularly intense periods of numerical increases in nuclear weapons production. One was in the early 1970s, when new records were set for production on the scale of about 5,000 new warheads in a year as the new generation of U.S. strategic weapons moved increasingly toward missiles with multiple warheads, or MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles).10 The other period of rapid numerical growth came in the early 1960s and came despite the efforts of President Kennedy and Robert McNamara to constrain the buildup. On Kennedy and McNamara’s watch, the U.S. nuclear stockpile grew at a breakneck pace. The strategic missile force reached its zenith in 1967, but as one student of nuclear strategy put it, “virtually all the strategic missile decisions which related to numbers of strategic missiles had been taken before 22 November 1963,” the date of Kennedy’s assassination.11 Original plans for a U.S. ballistic missile program during the Eisenhower administration had been for a force of twenty to forty missiles, and Eisenhower had repeatedly rebuffed pressures from the Pentagon and Congress for ever bigger programs. But an array of pressures during the mid- to late-1950s had conspired to push that number up drastically.12 By 1958, talk of a missile force numbering in the thousands had spilled out from the halls of

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the Pentagon to the public debate via influential columnists such as Joseph and Stewart Alsop.13 Between 1953 and 1960, the Soviet and American nuclear stockpiles both grew tenfold. In that period, the total American nuclear stockpile grew from 1,436 to 20,434, and the Soviet stockpile from 120 to 1,605. The only other nuclear power of the era, Britain, trailed far behind, stockpiling just thirty weapons by 1960 since its first in 1953.14 This buildup accelerated under Kennedy, partly as a result of programs initiated by the Eisenhower administration that were coming to fruition. In 1960, the U.S. arsenal consisted of approximately 18,000 nuclear warheads. By the midpoint of Kennedy’s presidency, the United States had a stockpile of over 27,000 nuclear warheads. The Soviets could muster just over one tenth as many.15 There was also a qualitative shift being introduced by the thermonuclear revolution, a combination of deployable hydrogen warheads and dramatic leaps in missile technology. Although the Strategic Air Command’s (SAC) bomber fleet still constituted the mainstay of the U.S. strategic nuclear force—of the total 3,267 strategic nuclear weapons deployed in the U.S. arsenal as of July 1961, some 2,938 were aircraft weapons, and most of those were under SAC—missile technology was widely recognized as the next great leap forward. But as of July 1961, reaching that potential was still some way off. There were only 188 operational, strategic ballistic missiles in the U.S. arsenal.16 But that was still about 180 more than that of the Soviet Union. All the trends, however, were overwhelming in one direction: more money, more weapons, and more firepower. Whatever Kennedy’s personal convictions about strategic force levels—and the available evidence is mixed on that score—he failed to rein in this massive buildup. Many of the forces contributing to that were outside of his control, but many were also of his own making. How many nuclear weapons are enough? It is a deceptively complicated question. The way in which governments have answered it has depended on a host of factors, but the most important of those is a domestic sense of vulnerability rather than strategic imperatives. Historical experiences suggest that the compulsion for arms races comes more from domestic political sentiment than strategic calculations. A sense of vulnerability and competition is required. The number of nuclear weapons has been set by a sense of security rather than any actual security. The Soviet-American arms race of the 1960s sheds light on how arms races come about. One authoritative estimate puts the number of nuclear warheads built around the world since 1945 at 128,000, a staggering number.17 Ninety-eight percent of those were developed by the Soviet Union and the United States. For the most part, these increases have not occurred through any rational calculation of security benefit. Very few policymakers believed that building more weapons actually increased security, and yet

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other forces colluded to pressure policymakers to increase stockpiles. Current public estimates judge that as of 2005 there are approximately 27,650 nuclear weapons still in stockpiles of the eight confirmed nuclear powers, with about 16,000 of those in the Russian stockpile and about 10,300 in the American stockpile.18 Not every nuclear power decides that more is better. The other six confirmed nuclear states combined have developed only 2 percent of the total number of nuclear warheads built since 1945. For decades, the Chinese made a political decision to keep their nuclear arsenal much smaller than their military and industry were capable of supporting. Although the Chinese military budget and capabilities remains shrouded in secrecy, estimates of nuclear stockpile suggest that the Chinese leadership has, over a long period, developed a tradition of nuclear restraint. From their first atomic bomb in 1964, the Chinese nuclear stockpile grew slowly but steadily over the next twenty years until it plateaued at an estimated 400 warheads, a level at which it has remained since 1994. Of that, the Chinese strategic ballistic missile force numbers only about 120. China has also had the technical capability since about the 1980s to develop MIRVs but has chosen not to do so. Its bomber force is also antiquated having skipped several planned generational upgrades. Likewise, Britain and France have placed caps on their buildups. The French successfully detonated their first nuclear device in 1964, the same year as the Chinese. The French nuclear stockpile peaked in the early 1990s at around 540 warheads but has since declined steady to its current estimated figure of 350. Despite their early start, having exploded their first atomic device in 1949, the British stockpile has also grown at a controlled rate. The British arsenal peaked at around 350 nuclear warheads in the mid-1970s but has since been reduced to around 200.19 SPUTNIK AND THE NUMBERS GAME During the 1950s, Kennedy had established himself as one of the most outspoken critics of official defense policy. His early criticism of the Truman and Eisenhower nuclear doctrines was focused on the issue of when nuclear weapons could and should (and should not) be used. It was, in effect, Sputnik that launched Kennedy’s presidential campaign. In dramatic and stark terms, Sputnik effectively ended the remarkably smooth “honeymoon” period of five years that the Eisenhower administration had enjoyed to that point. In the late 1950s, and particularly in the lead up to the 1960 presidential election, the critique of massive retaliation had spilled out from academic and defense circles to the mainstream public debate. Defense strategy, and its core nuclear strategy, hit the front pages as Democrats launched a partisan assault on the substance of the Eisenhower administration’s defense policy. The first Sputnik had been a shock,

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but it was the launching of Sputnik II less than a month later that provided incontrovertible proof that the Soviet feat was no fluke. Knowledgeable insiders predicted that the 85th Congress would be known as the “Sputnik Congress,” and that congressional leaders would likely ensure that the new priority of “finding immediate and long-term solutions to the ballistic missiles lag” would dominate the legislative agenda. As one reporter put it, “Many a domestic issue will be judged mainly by its bearing or lack of bearing on finding immediate and long-term solutions to the ballistic missiles lag.”20 Science and engineering became the patriotic choices for the nation’s best and brightest students and federal funding poured into scientific research institutions. The Sputnik Congress operated in a highly charged partisan atmosphere. New York Times journalist James Reston characterized the debate as: “Much of the political debate in this country, as all viewers of television know, sounds like the droning of two old bagpipes.”21 Some of it was fueled by a frustration on the left of the political spectrum at what they perceived to be a drifting national malaise during the Eisenhower years. Sputnik sparked a firestorm of controversy as those on the left charged the Eisenhower administration of negligence that could place the entire nation in peril, while even many of those on the right began to openly question the status of the nation’s security. Paul M. Butler, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, accused Eisenhower of placing a higher priority on golf than he did on defense policy and of offering empty palliatives. Butler charged that the administration had been “drugged with smug complacency,” and that the threat posed by imminent increases in Soviet missiles could not be “tossed out with quips and slogans, with tranquilizing phrases and golfcourse decisions.”22 It was a charge repeated over and over again in various forms. A specific charge that gained traction was that the Eisenhower administration, through neglect and incompetence, had allowed a so-called missile gap to develop. It was fueled by wildly off-the-mark estimates by U.S. intelligence analysts of projections of the rate of production of Soviet ICBM launchers; it was the best intelligence available, but it was dead wrong. A key problem was that there was very little hard data on actual Soviet weapons, so analysts focused on potential numbers. Analysts were basing the figures on what the Soviet Union could produce rather than what they were actually producing. That contributed to gross overestimations of current and future nuclear stockpiles. It was a systemic problem, not limited to estimates of just the Soviet inventory. For example, U.S. Pacific Command in the 1960s estimated that China could have 435 nuclear weapons by 1973, triple the number China actually developed by that time.23 Based on extremely fragmentary information, the February 1960 projection for Soviet ICBMs operational by mid-1962 was 250–350 ICBMs. By June 1961, that estimate for the same period had been reduced to 100. By

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the time mid-1962 came around, U.S. intelligence estimated that the Soviets had only about fifty ICBMs.24 These figures were, at the time, classified, and the public debate of the issue could simply not keep up with the latest intelligence. The controversy was compounded by the Eisenhower administration’s own vague and often contradictory responses to it. Even before Sputnik, Eisenhower himself had set the bar high. In the course of justifying continued U.S. nuclear testing, he said during a news conference on June 5, 1957 that the United States would be “foolish indeed to be behind anybody else” in nuclear weapons development.”25 And Eisenhower himself contributed to it. In his State of the Union Message of January 9, 1958, the president said “At this moment, the consensus of opinion is that we are probably somewhat behind the Soviets in some areas of long-range ballistic missile development.”26 The administration also repeatedly downgraded its estimate of Soviet strategic power, each time claiming improved intelligence. Overall, U.S. intelligence was overestimating Soviet strategic power and underestimating their abilities in several key areas. U.S. intelligence had developed a pattern of being caught by surprise at how the Soviets could make up for lost time when they applied themselves to it, particularly in the area of aircraft. Soviet production facilities had been rolling out medium-range and long-range bombers such as their new Bison bomber in quantity during the 1950s. This contrasted with the U.S. production effort, estimated at about a quarter of the Soviet rate and dogged by problems. When General LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, went before a Senate subcommittee on May 2, 1956, he revealed that of the fifty-seven B-52 bombers produced by the beginning of that year, the Air Force had rejected sixteen. Of the twenty-one B-52 produced between January and May of that year, only six were accepted.27 On another occasion, Thomas Gates, secretary of defense at the end of the Eisenhower administration, told congressional committees in 1960 that the Soviets “may enjoy at times a moderate numerical superiority during the next 3 years . . . to peak during the 1962 period” but insisted that there would nevertheless be no overall “deterrent gap.”28 The logical implication of the missile gap challengers was that the U.S. arsenal should be larger numerically than the Soviet one, or at the very least equal. In reality, though, there was widespread recognition that security was not a simple numbers game. It was widely recognized that by the end of the 1950s the Soviet Union would be making great strides in militarizing the technology they had so dramatically portended with the Sputnik shot. That development would, in turn, shift the strategic debate fundamentally. Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy warned that “We do not see a period of much greater peril than we will have from the time our opponent achieves a long-range ballistic missile capability. As of that time, this country will live in great peril until we develop a defense against it.”29 On an earlier occasion, he disputed the administration’s critics who were accusing the administration of negligence.

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“This situation is not the result of anything we, alone, have done or failed to do,” he said. “It is the inevitable consequence of the explosive progress in science and technology which is making available a succession of weapons of ever-increasing destructiveness and speed of delivery.”30 “Just matching your competitor, missile for missile, is not the answer,” asserted McElroy’s successor, Thomas Gates. Hitting back at those who seemed intent on reducing the nation’s security to a clean-cut numerical equation, he pointed out that, “The simple piling up of ever larger numbers of a single weapon, without regard to their ability to survive a surprise attack or to perform effectively under a wide range of conditions, would not only be enormously costly but would not assure our security.”31 The fact that he was right failed to quieten the administration’s critics; conversely, such misguided attempts at calming fears ultimately backfired. All of this left a gaping window of opportunity for political attack. Senators Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas), and Stuart Symington led the Democratic charge on the issue. Symington’s shrill warnings were in a sense ironic; in 1949 while Secretary of the Air Force, Symington had been vocally against exploiting the announcement that the Soviets had exploded an atomic device lest it develop what he called “a dangerous snowball of fear.”32 A decade later, he was guilty of doing just that. A serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, Symington capitalized on the public’s perception that he was an authority on the issue. With close ties to the air force and missile contractors, Symington was also receiving a constant stream of background information, much of it reflecting the air force’s alarmist line. Symington charged the Eisenhower administration with manipulating intelligence: “The intelligence books have been juggled so the budget books may be balanced,” and that the Soviet Union had a lead in missiles of three-to-one and growing, he charged.33 As he emerged as the Democratic candidate, Kennedy naturally assumed the leading voice. Recalling the shock of Sputnik, Kennedy charged that the Eisenhower administration had led the United States to be “second in space—second in missiles.”34 “The missile lag looms larger and larger ahead,” Kennedy warned later. To rectify it, “We need to put our Strategic Air Command on an air alert and under wide dispersal—improve our systems of continental defense—step up our anti-submarine warfare effort— increase the thrust of our rocket engines—harden our missiles bases— and modernize our outdated Pentagon research, organization and weapons evaluation.”35 Once he secured the Democratic nomination, Kennedy accused the administration of withholding information from him, saying that what he was being offered was less than he received as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.36 In laying out the Democratic platform for the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy confirmed that national security was a central issue. Charging that the Eisenhower administration had squandered American military

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superiority, the Democratic platform statement charged that “our military position today is measured in terms of gaps—missile gap, space gap, limited war gap.” On another occasion, Kennedy said that “[i]n an age of space and missiles, this Nation is at the wrong end of the space gap and the missile gap.”37 Kennedy went on to call for an overwhelming second-strike capability, now a principle staple in Democratic circles. “So long as both nations can preserve their retaliatory force through an initial attack,” Dean Acheson argued in his 1958 book Power and Diplomacy, “a strategy of unlimited attack is a strategy of mutual suicide.”38 Kennedy echoed this. The United States, Kennedy said, should have “deterrent military power such that the Soviet and Chinese leaders will have no doubt that an attack on the United States would surely be followed by their own destruction.”39 Through these repeated calls for more American nuclear weapons, Kennedy became a chief proponent of the massive missile buildup of the 1960s, paradoxically limiting his own options once he had assumed the presidency. It was a self-inflicted pressure he came to regret. POST-MORTEMS OF THE MISSILE GAP Kennedy came to regret his role in the missile gap controversy. The notion that the Soviets were ahead in missiles was not just a myth: it was proven to be a misguided one. Within months of Kennedy taking office, it became clear that the advantage was with the United States in terms of strategic striking power, especially ICBMs—massively so, in fact. The bottom line, McNamara observed well after the debate had passed, was that the missile gap myth “did great harm to the nation,” Kennedy agreed with him.40 The explanation for the creation of the myth varied. There was no doubt that the political climate had sharpened the public debate, but there was more to it than just political spin. Information from within the government, some of it official and much of it leaked, fueled the political fire. As one former CIA official observed, “Our findings were sufficiently scary that those who wanted a new administration to be elected were finding support in our Estimates.”41 In a series of classified National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) in the period 1957 through 1960, the consensus view of the intelligence community was that a Soviet missile advantage was imminent. The first post–Sputnik NIE, distributed in December 1957, warned that Moscow had embarked on a “crash program” that would yield up to 500 operational ICBMs by 1963 at the latest.42 Just over two years later, the rhetoric and estimates had toned down, but the core contention remained. A 1959 NIE posited that “if the U.S. military posture develops as presently planned, the USSR will in 1961 have its most favorable opportunity to gain a decided military, political, and psychological advantage over the United States by the rapid deployment of operational ICBMs.”43

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McNamara himself had played no part in the missile gap controversy, but later ascribed it to “emotionally guided but nonetheless patriotic individuals in the Pentagon.” In particular, the air force had taken a relatively alarmist view, and its conclusions were broadcast publicly by General Nathan Twining, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The air force had taken the view, distributed in several highly classified NIEs circulated to top policymakers, that the Soviet leaders were actively seeking a decisive superiority that would give the Soviet Union the capability to wipe out the United States.44 KHRUSHCHEV’S NEW LOOK It is unclear what Khrushchev and his colleagues made of the missile gap controversy, but one can surmise that he was pleased that the Americans were finally taking the Soviet military threat seriously. In his memoirs, smuggled out of the Soviet Union after he was deposed in October 1964, the former Soviet premier expressed satisfaction that “our accomplishments and our obvious might had a sobering effect” on the Western allies.45 From his prediction in 1956 that “we will bury [outlast] you” through the so-called kitchen debate with Vice President Richard Nixon in Moscow in 1959, Khrushchev had repeatedly been frustrated by what he perceived to be the West’s refusal to take the Soviet Union’s technological and industrial potential seriously. The stunning successes of the Sputniks and Yuri Gagarin’s maiden flight into earth’s orbit in April 1961 provided hard evidence of the progress Soviet scientists were making in applying that potential to missile technology. Khrushchev had launched his own “new look” at Soviet military doctrine, diverting resources from domestic programs toward military spending. He later recalled that “If I hadn’t put such a high priority on our military needs, we couldn’t have survived. I devoted all my strength to the rearmament of the Soviet Union.”46 In fact, however, Khrushchev was a late convert to the concept of relying on nuclear weapons to cover reductions in conventional arms. During the power struggle following Stalin’s death, Georgi Malenkov emerged as the Premier. Basing his arguments purely on communist doctrine, Malenkov argued for an increased reliance on nuclear weapons and a corresponding reduction of expenditures on ground forces. By contrast, Khrushchev argued for continued emphasis on conventional ground forces and investments in extensive and expensive heavy industry.47 By 1960, now having emerged as undisputed leader, he quickly reversed this position. The drama of Sputnik and the West’s overreaction to it undoubtedly played a role in changing Khrushchev’s mind, but it was also tied to the broad effort of de-Stalinization. Stalin had dismissed the value of atomic weapons; Khrushchev inflated it. It also seems likely that Khrushchev recognized that the modernization program, begun in the

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mid-1950s under successive Ministers of Defense, Georgi Zhukov and Rodion Malinovsky, could be very useful in his diplomatic strategy. Khrushchev elevated the place of nuclear weapons to such an extent in Soviet planning, doctrine, and spending priorities that historian Dale R. Herspring referred to it as a process of “deification” of nuclear weapons in the Soviet strategic view.48 In January 1960, Krushchev declared “a revolution in military affairs” had placed nuclear weapons at the forefront of Soviet military posture.49 The associated posture put more emphasis on Soviet rockets and less on ground forces. To carry that out, the previous year Khrushchev had established a new service, the Strategic Rocket Forces, making it clear that it was the premier element of the Soviet defense structure.50 That shift was backed up by an array of written works emanating in the Soviet Union explaining the new doctrine. The most famous of these was by Vasiliy Sokolovksy, whose 1962 book Military Strategy became the must-read book in defense policy circles of 1963, when the English translation was published in the West. The rarity of detailed Soviet statements of nuclear policy meant that an unusual amount of time and effort was spent trying to decipher it.51 The new emphasis on nuclear weapons in the Kremlin’s priorities was implemented laterally as well as vertically. Malinovksy oversaw the program to expand this modernization program into the Warsaw Pact, thereby expanding the Bloc’s military capabilities as well as its geographical base. From its inception in May 1955 until the early 1960s, the Warsaw Pact served as a largely symbolic entity in military terms. It had been hastily convened as a response to NATO’s efforts to include a rearmed West Germany in its ranks. Its founding charter emphasized its temporary nature and the Pact lacked a sound organizational structure. Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviets led an effort to rectify those problems by implementing a process of integration and modernization that not only built up military capabilities and reformed the command structure of the Pact, but also transformed it into something more closely resembling a partnership, an alliance in more than just name. East European militaries were designated concrete roles and regular consultations at the highest levels were institutionalized.52 Agreement to undertake such a wide-ranging reform of the Warsaw Pact was formalized at a March 1961 meeting in Moscow of Warsaw Pact leaders, but the military modernization program didn’t start moving into full gear until the following year.53 The effort, in the words of the CIA, transformed the Pact from a “paper organization” to a fundamental part of Moscow’s European policy and military planning.54 Soviet heavy artillery dating from the Second World War was gradually replaced by state-ofthe-art heavy armor such as T-54 and T-55 tanks, new generation MiG fighters, and self-propelled guns. Significantly, the modernization program also included tactical nuclear forces.55 Nuclear-capable, short-range battlefield rockets first became integrated into Soviet ground forces at about the

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same time that the West German Bundeswehr started to receive American Matador and Honest John tactical nuclear delivery vehicles.56 In each case, the nuclear warheads for these delivery vehicles remained firmly under the control of either Soviet or American control but could be deployed at short notice by specially trained commando units who would be rushed in time of crisis to deliver the warheads, arm the weapons, and take command of their use.57 Documents recently uncovered by historians Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne show that during the 1960s, the Warsaw Pact war plans envisaged that the Soviets would resort to first use of tactical nuclear weapons in the event of war in Europe, reflecting a growing disposition toward “nuclear romanticism.”58 The net effect was that Soviet weapons of massive destruction grew greatly during Khrushchev’s premiership. And these new capabilities of Soviet rocket forces emboldened Moscow to pursue risky adventures and engage in its own nuclear brinkmanship. PURSE STRING STRATEGY Western intelligence services watched this rapid Soviet growth of the Soviet nuclear force with intense interest. Surveillance from U-2 flights over the Soviet Union, together with and the new, highly classified, CORONA satellite photography program, was able to count missile bases and monitor physical deployments. A widening network of signals intelligence bases maintained by the National Security Agency around the periphery of the Soviet Union, in Turkey, Japan, Norway, Greece, Pakistan, and even Ethiopia were able to monitor the telltale signs of Soviet nuclear testing.59 Results from that surveillance showed that the Soviets had a maximum of eight deployed ICBMs, that their bombers were dangerously exposed and parked in neat, easy to strafe, lines on runways, and air-defense batteries were unlikely to be as effective as feared.60 Other sources of intelligence complemented the picture, especially the information passed on by highlevel defector, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who provided detailed information on specifications and policy.61 This new confidence in the limits of Soviet strategic strike capabilities appeared to offer support to the argument for finite deterrence. The Gaither report of 1957 had warned that what was more important for effective than overall numbers of weapons was the force which would survive a Soviet attack.62 Many of those around Kennedy after his election had played a role in the Gaither report and shared its conclusion that the United States should aim for an invulnerable strategic force. Many of Kennedy’s senior foreign policy advisers in the interregnum and early days in office, especially Paul Nitze, John McCloy, and Jerome Wiesner, subscribed to the notion that U.S. strategic forces should aim for invulnerability.63 Robert McNamara became the most vocal and powerful advocate of such an approach, having been convinced by Albert Wohlstetter’s argument that the key to a successful

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strategic deterrent lay in having a second-strike force. The numerical quantity of weapons was only part of the equation for that. It also came through a combination of hardening existing forces, developing mobile forces, and better command, communication, control, and intelligence—so-called C3I. Another adviser, Walt Rostow, who became the director of the state department’s Policy Planning Staff, had been responsible for inserting references in Kennedy’s campaign speeches that clearly reflected Wohlstetter’s views.64 The challenge remained to settle on a number. Just how many weapons were required to ensure a second-strike capability? According to Alain Enthoven, one of McNamara’s influential deputies at the Pentagon, the benchmark they established was simple: “We agreed that enough is when we don’t have to use nuclear weapons first.”65 But the rapid advances in technological innovation were multiplying the factors to consider—and multiplying the number of possible answers. The debate was ostensibly based to an increasing extent on known knowns, to adapt a phrase later used by secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. But rather than simplifying the debate, this new intelligence and the new technological breakthroughs were making the assessment of what constitutes a “safe” level of nuclear forces more complicated and increasingly abstract. Kennedy and McNamara recognized that there was no way to settle the debate on its own terms and that it could not be won by presidential fiat alone. There were simply too many interests, people with too much at stake, and enormous amounts of money up for grabs in the form of government contracts and studies. The armed services, each of which had developed its own nuclear weapons program, had their own interests to protect and had powerful allies in Congress. This growing “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” was a problem famously identified by Eisenhower in his farewell address.66 The Defense Reorganization Act of 1958, crafted and guided by Eisenhower, had tried to address some of these issues by beefing up the secretary of defense’s role and power and overhauling military command structure and civilian organization.67 The solution devised by Kennedy and McNamara was to seize a tight grip on the purse strings. McNamara viewed the defense budget as a quantitative expression of operating plans.68 By keeping a closer watch on how the Pentagon spent its money—and more importantly, questioning how it proposed to do so—the aim was to bring the Pentagon’s capabilities in line with a coherent strategic doctrine. Kennedy himself had accused the Eisenhower administration of yet another gap, this one between military capabilities and actual requirements. “Under every military budget submitted by this Administration, we have been preparing primarily to fight the one kind of war we least want to fight and are least likely to fight,” he charged during the campaign.69 Kennedy and McNamara were not the first to identify problems in defense budgeting practices—one of the main recommendations of the 1958 Rockefeller Report was to bring the defense budget process more in

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line with a coherent strategic doctrine—but they were the first to implement the approach with such effect.70 The innovation proved enduring. Up until that point, each of the services had each operated largely as a separate entity, with the secretary of defense essentially playing the role of arbiter. As two former Kennedy administration officials put it later, the defense budget had been “essentially a book-keeping device for dividing funds between Services and Accounts in a blunt instrument for keeping a lid on defense spending.”71 James V. Forrestal, the nation’s first secretary of defense, had tried unsuccessfully in mid-1948 to use itemized spending as a way to convince Truman to break through his self-imposed budget ceiling of $14.4 billion. McNamara used itemized spending in a different way—to rein in spending. He drew on his background in systems analysis and cost efficiency and installing like-minded systems analysts in key positions of power in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Most importantly, McNamara proved perfectly willing to question the military brass when they said a particular weapon fulfilled a military requirement.72 McNamara’s new, intrusive oversight of military budget decisionmaking was much publicized and highly controversial, especially amongst the military brass who complained frequently that McNamara micromanaged military affairs, but it irreversibly changed the way in which defense budgets in the United States were crafted. After Sputnik, the pressure to spend money on defense was immense. Congress had pushed defense spending even above the levels proposed by the White House and the Pentagon. McNamara installed (instated is a word but not much used anymore) an office of Systems Analysis, explicitly charged with relating force requirements and strategy. “You cannot make decisions simply by asking yourself whether something might be nice to have,” which, he said, seemed to be the guiding principle of defense budgets up to that point. “You have to make a judgment on how much is enough.”73 The rationality introduced by McNamara and his so-called whiz kids put the onus on the services to justify their expenditures, an approach that has since become standard procedure. As two veterans of the Pentagon’s Systems Analysis branch put it: “[A]t the strategic level there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ military requirement, only alternatives with varying risks and costs attached.”74 At McNamara’s behest, the Systems Analysis branch was charged with quantifying the threat and devising a range of options on that basis. The abstruse analysis behind these “yardsticks of sufficiency” infuriated the military brass but proved an important change, even if it still was not entirely successful.75 THE BLUEPRINT FOR NUCLEAR WAR By developing a formal economic case for its view of defense requirements, Kennedy and McNamara were in part striving to counter another

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formal case developed in the Pentagon that was having the side effect of inflating military requirements in such a way that was difficult to question. In 1960, the Pentagon had begun codifying the overall strategic war plan in the form of a Single Operational Integrated Plan, or SIOP. A novel idea at the time, it amounted to the first comprehensive nuclear war plan developed by the U.S. government. Prior to that, each separate command had developed its own nuclear plans and the JCS was exercising little oversight of the process. Curtis LeMay did not brief the Joint Chiefs on his 1951 SAC war plans until 1955, and only then when Air Force Chief of Staff, Nathan Twining, insisted.76 The inevitable result of this amorphous and disjointed process was duplication of targeting and a reduction in the overall effectiveness of U.S. strategic forces. The SIOP, therefore, was designed explicitly to consolidate these nuclear strike plans to maximize the overall effectiveness of nuclear forces.77 The objective was beyond reproach; the implementation was highly contentious. It called unleashing massive amounts of firepower within the first twenty-four hours of war. Successive presidents have found the plan’s rigidity and scale unnerving. It shocked even Eisenhower; it “frighten[ed] the devil out of me,” was his response to being briefed on it.78 “We’ve got to get this thing right down to the deterrence,” he told his naval aide.79 Nonetheless, he approved it, and it went into effect on April 15, 1961.80 Kennedy’s reaction was no less dramatic and was compounded by the fact that he had inherited the plan in whose development he had played no role. When Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were first briefed on the SIOP, Nixon was appalled and Kissinger described it as a “horror strategy.” It prompted them to seek ways to undertake a fundamental revision to inject greater flexibility into the war plans.81 The plan covered retaliation but also permitted preemption if possible.82 The key problem, as McGeorge Bundy described it, was that “in essence, the current plan calls for shooting off everything we have in one shot, and is so constructed as to make any more flexible course very difficult.” That meant that the entire force of 3,267 weapons would be fired in a massive strike against the Communist bloc. The SIOP’s list of fourteen options were not really options at all. “The current war plan is dangerously rigid,” Bundy complained, “and, if continued without amendment, may leave you with very little choice as to how to face the moment of thermonuclear truth.”83 It ran directly counter to the Kennedy administration’s declared intention to develop flexible options for response to communist threats. And chillingly, it provided no guarantee that the United States would be completely safe from incoming Soviet strikes. In retrospect, the fundamental flaw of the SIOP, and the “overkill” mentality from which it was spawned, was that its founding premise that nuclear strategy should be derived from the military needs to defeat the enemy. It was symptomatic of entrenched military culture to prepare to

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defeat enemy capabilities. Even in the early 1950s, the Joint Chiefs argued that there were up to 6,000 targets if Soviet war-making potential was to be destroyed, pointing out, for good measure, that “it would be impossible to accomplish this task unless many more bombs were available.”84 The bombs were well on the way and the SIOP codified a way to put all of them to use. But what constituted a target? The debate about targeting polarized into arguments about what kind of nuclear force was required for use, and by derivation, for deterrence. On the one side of the debate was the argument typified by the air force chief of staff and commander of the Strategic Air Command, General Curtis LeMay, who argued that the United States should have the capability to launch a massive first strike on the enemy that would cut drastically the enemy’s ability to retaliate. On the other side of the argument was the view that U.S. interests were best served by maintaining a minimal deterrent—just enough to retaliate against a nuclear attack by inflicting massive damage on urban population centers, but which probably would not be enough to take out enemy military capabilities as well. Maxwell Taylor had argued in print that “finite deterrence” should be the objective of the U.S. military forces and that for that, “a few hundred reliable and accurate missiles” would suffice.85 The SIOP reflected the maximal approach. During the 1950s the rapidly growing number of potential targets built into the war plan was compounded by redundant targeting, the practice of designating several bombs or missiles for each distinct target. It was designed as a way to ensure that Soviet defenses were overcome and that at least one missile would make it through the Soviet defense net. The effect, though, was to lead to heavily inflated forces to fit the targeting list. The result was aptly named overkill. A further contentious tangle of targeting was whether or not to designate nuclear weapons to hit cities where they would inevitably kill thousands, perhaps even millions, of people in each strike. If the Soviets were to target American cities, the Pentagon envisaged American casualties numbering up to 70 million. Moreover, it was clear that the civil defense effort to identify and create a massive network of fallout shelters spanning the country, despite massive expenditure and much bureaucracy, was still largely dysfunctional. McNamara had already been converted to the idea of a “no cities” approach by William Kaufmann, a strategist at the RAND Corporation.86 It was an idea also influential in the strategy developed a decade later by Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, James R. Schlesinger. In Kennedy’s mind, the issue of saying that they would target Soviet cities as a means of deterring the Soviet leaders was quite separate from the actual practice of doing it, should it come to that. As he explained his thinking to some of his top military advisers, including Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, “The only targets seem to me that really make any sense are at their missiles firing in order to lessen to the degree that we can the

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amount of megatonnage the United States receives. That makes some sense to us.” He supported the idea of publicly suggesting that they would strike Soviet cities because that would act as a deterrent to the Soviet leadership, “but as a practical matter, if the deterrent fails and they attack, what we want to do is to fire at their missile sites. Beyond that these targets don’t seem to me to make much sense.”87 By settling on a second strike capability, the Kennedy administration formalized a new deterrence strategy, one that threatened an adversary with certain catastrophe, without any pretense of actually winning a global thermonuclear war. It also placed a cap on how many nuclear weapons would be required. The Kennedy administration’s effort to grapple with the number game had two results. One, the force levels set during the Kennedy administration for a second strike capability remained largely in place for two decades; and, second, the administration had overseen the cold war’s largest and most intense nuclear buildup.

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6

Keeping the Lid On No one should have the idea that in a nuclear war one could enjoy a cup of coffee in Paris five or six days later. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, June 11, 1986

“I am beginning to think that there is no such thing as ‘limited war,’” British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan reflected in December 1959. “There is ‘global war’ or ‘all-out war,’ and then there are punitive actions or police actions.” “In other words,” he continued, “there can either be Test Cricket, or Village Cricket, but County Cricket is out.”1 Macmillan’s sports analogy may not have translated well beyond the Commonwealth, but the underlying sentiment was widely understood—that the day of the long, drawn-out war fought with “old-fashioned weapons” was over. That argument, however, was not universally accepted. Technology made limited nuclear war possible, but the real issue remained whether it would be politically desirable. A heated debate lasting decades erupted from the mid-1950s over the level of inevitability that a conflict would escalate to absolute war once the nuclear threshold was crossed. The argument peaked periodically in the mid-1950s, the late-1960s, the 1970s, and early 1980s, and resurfaced in the vastly different strategic landscape of the twenty-first century. By the mid-1970s, limited nuclear war had become embedded in the official nuclear doctrine of both the Soviet Union and the United States. As the Carter administration’s policy put it, the objective was to be capable of fighting a war at “any level of intensity” across the full spectrum of conflict.2

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The debate about whether such a policy actually makes war more or less likely remains unresolved even as the prospect of uncontrolled escalation to global annihilation has receded with the end of the cold war. But with the proliferation of weapons states and precisely because the perceived risk of uncontrolled escalation has receded, the prospects of the use of nuclear weapons in limited war may have increased. At its heart, it is a question of the utility of nuclear weapons. Limited war is defined primarily by what it is not; it is not the kind of eruption of violence on a global scale that engaged entire societies. And, most importantly, it is not the kind of all-out nuclear war that became an all-too-real possibility after the thermonuclear revolution. In short, limited war assumes that the participants will and can pull back after war has already broken out; that a lid can be kept on war.3 Tactical nuclear weapons have been central to the debate. The categorization of nuclear weapons into strategic and tactical classes has always been a subjective exercise. Tactical nuclear weapons spanned the spectrum of explosive power, often blurring the line between conventional and tactical weapons. Some tactical nuclear weapons are indistinguishable from their strategic counterparts in explosive power and only differentiated by their designated role. The United States and NATO have traditionally employed the criteria of range to make the distinction. Soviet and Warsaw Pact doctrine placed more emphasis on the role of the weapons in doctrine and war planning.4 Ironically, this latter definition seems better suited to contemporary times where nuclear rivals can be neighbors—for instance, India and Pakistan—where even short-range weapons can be cast in a distinctly strategic role. For the most part, tactical nuclear weapons have limited deterrent value largely because those deploying them placed more emphasis on their military role than their political role. Deployments of tactical nuclear weapons or delivery vehicles have often been carried out secretly, preempting any presumed deterrent effect. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviets secretly deployed tactical nuclear weapon systems in East Germany and Cuba. Around the same time, the United States deployed them to West Germany and other NATO countries. A further factor confusing the issue is that many tactical nuclear weapons are in fact dual-use weapon systems that can be fitted with different types of warheads, including nuclear, high explosive conventional, biological, or chemical warheads. The wide proliferation of these delivery vehicles—without special warheads—during the cold war has left a complicated legacy of wide dispersal of dual-use delivery vehicles around the world. Short-range, dual-use rockets and missiles were dispersed by the Soviets to precisely the areas of greatest proliferation threat in more recent years: Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, and Belarus, among other countries.5 Various American-developed dual-use systems were widely dispersed through Western Europe and Israel, in particular. Several of these

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countries have taken the original designs and improved on them to build new generations of missiles.6 In addition to these dual-use systems, tens of thousands of tactical nuclear weapons were deployed in the field; indeed, to this day, US-NATO forces retain hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe and the Russian arsenal contains a much higher number.7 Limited war has been divided into two main types. The first is defined by its geographic spread; it is constrained from escalating horizontally. In his 1963 book Limited War in the Nuclear Age, Harvard political scientist Morton Halperin defined those as “local wars.” As he defined the term, it was military conflicts “in which the United States and the Soviet Union saw themselves on opposing sides but in which the homelands of the two major powers did not come under attack.”8 The Korean War of 1950, the Vietnam Wars, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, and the Gulf War of 1991 are prime examples. In each case, the conflict could have all too easily widened geographically had it not been for deliberate efforts and tacit understandings to confine the conflicts. The second type of limited war involves a nuclear exchange that stops short of total war through political decision, military contingency, or preplanned firebreaks; its vertical escalation is frozen before the conflict becomes all-out war. It is in this type of limited conflict where nuclear weapons have had the greatest influence. Initially, the debate was driven by technological advances, first in deployable tactical nuclear weapons and later with improved command, control, communications, and intelligence, or so-called C3I. With the advent of battlefield nuclear weapons with short ranges and armed with warheads of relatively modest explosive power, the prospect of a limited nuclear war became a technical possibility. The question was whether, if such weapons were used, the conflict could then be confined from becoming an all-out war. Tactical nuclear weapons occupy disputed territory on the ladder of escalation. Some commentators have argued that tactical nuclear weapons still cross the nuclear threshold and their use would be the tipping point in any conflict, leading inexorably to all-out nuclear war. Others have argued that the use of tactical nuclear weapons provides a better alternative to the early use of strategic weapons, and introduce opportunities to prevent the conflict from escalating uncontrollably. The contention is that the combatants would exercise restraint, limiting their strikes and using the least destructive weapons available. Some charged that that was nothing more than wishful thinking. In the debate about developing a “clean” nuclear bomb that minimized fallout, Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-Minnesota) charged in 1957 that such talk was “an absurdity of monumental proportions” that “makes us look ridiculous all over the world.” “If it ever came to all-out war with large nuclear weapons it would be a war to the very death, and the largest and dirtiest and most terrible weapons would be employed.”9 Tactical nuclear weapons pose their own problems in the nuclear debate. If small nuclear weapons could be used in a local war that could stay

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contained, it would seemingly make them more attractive to actually use them, a development that greatly alarmed the growing antinuclear movement and other opponents of nuclear weapons. That has been one of the leading cases used against the George W. Bush administration’s efforts to develop a new generation of utility nuclear weapons, especially the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, a weapon designed explicitly for use against deeply buried underground bunkers such as those encountered in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the moment such weapons were used, the decades-long tradition of nonuse—and the so-called nuclear taboo—would be broken, potentially lowering the bar for others to use nuclear weapons.10 The debate over limited nuclear war as a policy option has raged most visibly in the United States and Western Europe. The foundations of that debate have shifted over time, especially with the collapse of the Soviet Union. On one side of the controversy was the contention that a nuclear war could be controllable and, by implication, winnable. According to proponents of that argument, a policy should be set to take that into account by building up capabilities and changing war plans; not to do so would leave a vulnerability. On the other side was the argument that there was no realistic way to control the escalation of nuclear war, and once that threshold had been crossed, it would lead inevitably toward global annihilation. The policy implication of this was to minimize the role of nuclear weapons in planning and diplomacy. Neither proposition was testable without catastrophic consequences. For that reason, the debate remained highly speculative, but ultimately had very real effects on nuclear doctrine with changes made in the 1970s and 1980s. IMPROBABLE PRECISION As counterintuitive as the notion of precise nuclear weapons may have seemed to many people who had become accustomed to news footage of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and American nuclear tests, from the mid-1950s, both the Soviets and the Americans invested heavily in the development of battlefield nuclear weapons. The effort was motivated as much by the fact that small nuclear weapons could be built as any compelling argument that they were needed. Many technology developments of the twentieth century were aimed at miniaturization and nuclear technology was no different. By having more explosive power in smaller packages, the challenges of delivering the weapon to target were reduced. But a corollary to that is that the smaller the weapons and the more tightly they are bound to a specific battlefield role, the more anxiety they have provoked that they might be used. So-called mininukes have been the hardest to justify as contributors to the nuclear deterrent. By blurring the line between nuclear and conventional weapons, they also blur the line between a deterrent and utilitarian role. In the post–cold war era,

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it is these mininukes that have created unanticipated problems for nonproliferation and provoked the fears of security experts—and increasingly the public imagination. The smallest of the weapons developed was the American Davy Crocket in the 1950s, especially notable as the first deployed artillery shell for a mobile cannon. With a yield as low as one-tenth of a kiloton (the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts were somewhere between ten and twenty kilotons) and a range of between two and four kilometers, it was designed for use against troop formations. By the end of the cold war, when development of new nuclear weapons effectively came to a halt, both sides had developed a full spectrum of tactical nuclear weapons that included short-range missiles, artillery shells, antishipping cruise missiles, and air-to-air missiles. In 1997, it was revealed that the Soviets and American each even developed smallyield nuclear weapons that could fit in suitcases or duffel bags and be hand delivered.11 In 2005, the Bush administration’s plans to investigate the viability of developing so-called bunker busting bombs (more formally known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator) was brought to an abrupt halt when Congress rescinded funding for the program, but it was not before provoking widespread debate and anxiety about the consequences of developing a new generation of nuclear weapons, especially ones with a clearly defined military purpose. THE NUCLEAR THRESHOLD These technological developments introduced new challenges to thinking about the nature of deterrence. In a military sense, tactical nuclear weapons were introduced to fill the gap between long-range, strategic rockets, and traditional battlefield artillery forces.12 But by blurring the threshold of nuclear weapons, potentially rendering some nuclear weapons as ordinary weapons of war, some commentators feared that the overall deterrent effect would be undermined. In effect, it would downgrade the unthinkable to thinkable. The question became, where was that line? At a press conference in March 1954, President Eisenhower dismayed the growing peace movement when he said that if nuclear weapons could be precise enough to use against strictly military targets for strictly military purposes, they should be used. “I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else,” he said.13 Just months previously, in calling for international agreement to control the spread of nuclear weapons, Eisenhower himself had lamented the blurred lines between conventional and nuclear weapons. “The development has been such that atomic weapons have virtually achieved conventional status within our armed services. In the United States, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps are all capable of putting this weapon to military use,” he said.14 That sentiment was also built into his administration’s

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formal strategy, but it was contradictory to the central thrust of the massive retaliation doctrine—that nuclear weapons were special, so destructive as to make nuclear war the ultimate catastrophe to be avoided to the last. Massive retaliation relied on a consensus nuclear taboo at the same time as denying that such a taboo would in any way restrict the administration’s freedom of action. It was a paradox that Eisenhower never fully overcame. Contrasting with the view of Eisenhower and Dulles, Kennedy put little faith in tactical nuclear weapons. Even though they lacked some of the indiscriminate nature of strategic weapons and could be targeted more precisely against military targets, he did not believe that tactical nuclear weapons were a viable way of bridging shortfalls in conventional forces. “I’ve no moral feeling against it,” he said in the 1960 presidential campaign, making a distinction for the benefit of his critics skeptical of his independence from the Vatican. “When a solider puts on a uniform, he assumes responsibility of putting to death opposing troops,” he said.15 Rather, Kennedy argued that his objection was practical. Tactical nuclear weapons “suffer from much the same handicaps as large atomic weapons,” he said on another occasion during the campaign.16 The larger problem, he argued, was that even tactical nuclear weapons crossed the nuclear threshold, and would lead inevitably to strategic nuclear war. They were not, as some had argued during the 1950s, a viable weapon of war. Kennedy, ever the pragmatist, was painfully aware that the underlying assumption of the nuclear doctrine of flexible response, that escalation could be controlled, was probably unrealistic in real-world situations.17 Once the tipping point was reached, it would be impossible to pull back however desirable it might be to do so. As he put it during on top secret meeting he clandestinely recorded in the White House, “I think the chance of using these weapons is . . . socially circumscribed, but the chance of using conventional [weapons] are not.”18 Time and again, he challenged the utility of nuclear weapons. But he also recognized that they had a strong effect on his own decision-making and could not be simply dismissed. The key problem with American defense strategy, as Kennedy saw it, was how fragile control over the process of escalation was. Time and again he expressed frustration that defense strategy was so rigid that it left him without options. The “nuclear option” was a misnomer; rigid operating procedures, necessary for even the semblance of realism in the potential to respond, in fact left no option at all. In a revealing, secretly recorded conversation with Marine Commandant David Shoup and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George Anderson on October 29, 1962, just a day after Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had capitulated in the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy elaborated on his concerns about the tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba. Although replete with unfinished thoughts and allusions, the exchange reveals that Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs took seriously the problem of tactical nuclear weapons

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in Cuba and were thinking hard about the very real risks those weapons posed. David Shoup: The question is . . . the $64 question is, whether they would use the tactical nuclear weapons . . . President Kennedy: Nuclear weapons? Shoup: . . . at that point, because they would deal bloody hell with Guantanamo, of course. If nuclear weapons start down there, I’d say we’re ´ at nuclear war. We couldn’t afford to let them do that. I mean they’re not . . . [unclear]. President Kennedy: But my guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, that everybody would use nuclear weapons. The decision to use any kind of a nuclear weapon, even the tactical ones, presents such a risk of it getting out of control so quickly, that there’s a . . . Shoup: But Cuba’s so small compared to the world [chuckles] President Kennedy: Yeah. Shoup: If that joker [Castro] ever had the control [of the tactical nuclear weapons], now . . . Of course they’re [the Soviets] telling us they got the keys, like we’ve got the keys . . . President Kennedy: I’m sure they do. I’m sure they do. Shoup: The Russians say [to the Americans]: “We got the keys and you got the keys. You trust us; we trust you” . . . President Kennedy: No, we don’t trust each other . [light laughter] But we figure that they’re never giving them to the Cubans, anymore than we’d give them to, you know, the Turks. George Anderson: No. President Kennedy: Because we know that . . . I don’t think anybody wants that weapon to escape from their control. It’s just too . . . 19

Kennedy’s comments were in accord with the reasoning of Harvard economist Thomas Schelling, who argued that “the important thing in limited war is to impress the Soviet leadership with the risk of general war—a war that may occur whether we or they intend it or not.” In an influential memo passed along to Kennedy at the height of the Berlin crisis in July 1961, Schelling argued that Limited and localized nuclear war is not . . . a “tactical” war. However few the nuclears used, and however selectively they are used, their purpose should not be “tactical” because their consequences will not be tactical. With nuclears, it has become a war of nuclear risks and threats at the highest strategic level. It is a war of nuclear bargaining.20

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara took a different line, insisting to his NATO colleagues that the prospect of a contained, localized war in

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Europe involving tactical nuclear weapons was a fallacy—a tactical nuclear war was still a nuclear war, and the chances of containing it were illusory.21 The notion that there could be a “firebreak” between tactical nuclear warfare and general nuclear war was a false hope. McNamara’s skepticism was based in large measure on the mundane realities of command and control logistics once C3I became consumed by the fog of war. Put simply, once hostilities broke out, compressed decision-making timelines and fallible systems would make it futile to try to control the course of a nuclear war. As McNamara later outlined the presidential decision procedures during his time at the Pentagon in the 1960s: [T]he commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) carried with him a secure telephone, no matter where he went, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The telephone of the commander, whose headquarters were in Omaha, Nebraska, was linked to the underground command post of the North American Defense Command, deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado, and to the U.S. president, wherever he happened to be. The president always had at hand nuclear release codes in the so-called football, a briefcase carried for the president at all times by a U.S. military officer. The SAC commander’s orders were to answer the telephone by no later than the end of the third ring. If it rang, and he was informed that a nuclear attack of enemy ballistic missiles appeared to be under way, he was allowed 2 to 3 minutes to decide whether the warning was valid (over the years, the United States has received many false warnings), and if so, how the United States should respond. He was then given approximately 10 minutes to determine what to recommend, to locate and advise the president, permit the president to discuss the situation with two or three close advisors (presumably the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and to receive the president’s decision and pass it immediately, along with the codes, to the launch sites. The president essentially had two options: He could decide to ride out the attack and defer until later any decision to launch a retaliatory strike, and from a menu of options, thereby launching U.S. weapons that were targeted on the opponent’s military-industrial assets.22

The process verged on the absurd; and yet these were procedures upon which the fate of the world quite literally depended. STRIKING FIRST Nevertheless, the Kennedy administration could not afford to dismiss options out of hand. During the Berlin crisis of 1961, President Kennedy

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and his aides discussed the option launching a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.23 The central premise was that the United States could press its nuclear advantage to wipe out the bulk of the Soviet strategic forces in a preventive strike. In essence, it was a plan to win a nuclear war with a surprise attack designed to neutralize the enemy’s ability to strike back. It was spurred by newfound confidence, thanks to the new CORONA satellite photos and information passed to the West by Soviet spy Colonel Oleg Penkovksy that the Soviet strategic force was much smaller than was feared in the West and boasted by Khrushchev. The results of the CORONA program were extremely tightly held within the administration, but they were shared with some of the most trusted Pentagon consultants at RAND. Importantly, William W. Kaufmann learned of the new data and quickly grasped its implications. It was on Kaufmann’s initiative that Bundy’s national security team began rethinking the options of a nuclear first strike.24 Harvard Professor Henry Kissinger, recruited by McGeorge Bundy on an ad hoc basis to assist Kennedy’s national security team, reported in a July 1961 memo that in the event of a Berlin crisis, the President would be forced to make an early decision on whether to use nuclear weapons or not. “It would therefore seem to me essential that the nature of our nuclear options be defined now,” he said, and recommended that the President should request from the Pentagon a plan for “graduated nuclear response” that included more flexible options than the SIOP.25 Carl Kaysen, Bundy’s deputy, was tasked with preparing an options paper. Submitted on September 5, about three weeks after the Soviets had sealed West Berlin and begun construction of the Berlin Wall, the memorandum reported that if the SIOP were executed in its current form, 54 percent of the Soviet population would be wiped out along with over 80 percent of Soviet buildings. While that may have been the only option in the event of a full-scale Soviet strike on the United States, Kaysen questioned whether it was an appropriate response to the likely scenarios of the Berlin crisis. Was it really an appropriate next step to a border clash along the line dividing East and West Germany, he asked. More importantly, given that the inevitable Soviet response would be nuclear strike against American and West European cities, “Will the President be ready to take it?” Kaysen proposed something quite different.26 In his memorandum to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor, Kaysen argued that We should be prepared to initiate general war by our own first strike, but one planned for this occasion, rather than planned to implement a strategy of massive retaliation. We should seek the smallest possible list of targets, focusing on the long-range striking capacity of the Soviets, and avoiding, as much as possible, casualties and damage in Soviet civil society. We should

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Real-World Nuclear Deterrence maintain in reserve a considerable fraction of our strategic striking power; this will deter the Soviets from using their surviving forces against our cities; our efforts to minimize Soviet civilian damage will also make such abstention more attractive to them, as well as minimizing the force of the irrational urge for revenge.

In effect, Kaysen was arguing against relying on the deterrent in the long run, but relying on a kind of deterrent internal to the conflict to prevent escalation. The argument against striking cities sat well with McNamara’s emerging strategic vision. In reality, the idea of reserving military forces for military targets was not new—it was a traditional practice that long predated the nuclear revolution. McNamara’s advocacy of that notion was implicitly an argument that nuclear weapons might not be so “absolute” after all. At Ann Arbor in June 1962, McNamara revealed publicly that the “no cities” approach had become official U.S. policy. The U.S. has come to the conclusion that, to the extent feasible, basic military strategy in a possible general nuclear war should be approached in much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. That is to say, principal military objectives . . . should be the destruction of the enemy’s military forces, not of his civilian population.27

At first glance, it may seem in sync with the Eisenhower’s official policy of treating nuclear weapons just like any other weapon. But there were new, important distinctions. The key phrase in McNamara’s distinction was “in a possible general nuclear war.” McNamara was modifying the way it would approach a nuclear war once it had already started. By aiming for something less than the total destruction of the Soviet Union and its population, he was aiming for limiting nuclear war. By contrast, Eisenhower’s policy had threatened to make the lines between conventional and nuclear war meaningless. Available evidence suggests that Kennedy read Kaysen’s memorandum and followed up by posing a series of probing questions to Maxwell Taylor. In these questions, he showed his own skepticism about his options once war began. “I am concerned over my ability to control our military effort once a war begins,” he wrote to Taylor, and he said he wanted assurances that his order to stop a strategic attack once word came through of the enemy’s capitulation would in fact be carried out. From the documentary record, he apparently received no such assurance.28 The plan was never carried out, of course, but the fact that it was apparently taken seriously was one of the earliest formal discussions at their highest levels of potential preemptive or preventive nuclear war.

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PLANNING TO WIN A NUCLEAR WAR If deterrence failed initially or war resulted through miscalculation or accident, should the objective be to win the war or stop it? Was it even possible to control the escalation? They were hotly contested questions. The concept of limited war hinged on the assumption that the warring powers would act with mutual restraint. In turn, that depended on that restraint being conveyed successfully to the enemy. Both elements were dogged by uncertainty. That the enemy would receive the signals, interpret them correctly, believe them, and then reach the decision that was expected rested on a series of compounded assumptions about the other’s interests and values. Moreover, historical experience demonstrates that understandings to keep war limited are often intensely dependent on context, highly complicated, and dependent to some extent on luck.29 In short, such successful bargains are difficult to replicate. But if even limited war broke out, the two or more combatants would, by definition, be enemies and normal decision-making process would be placed under the severe stress of wartime. Could their decision-making process therefore be relied upon to perform as expected? Those who argued for a limited war posture bet that it could. Others were less certain. As so often has happened in the making of nuclear policy, the ideas were playing catch-up to the reality. Technological and procedural solutions to fighting a nuclear war were implemented early. Because missiles reduced to minutes the time available to respond to a nuclear strike, conceivably the side that struck first would have an advantage if it could neutralize the enemy’s retaliatory capability in that strike, the concept underlying Robert McNamara’s advocacy of settling on a second-strike posture. Well before second-strike became the thrust of American official doctrine, the Eisenhower administration implemented new procedures to protect its retaliatory capability. Beginning in 1952, SAC’s primary strike forces were on twentyfour-hour alert, in order to guard against surprise attack and so-called failsafe procedures had been implemented. In highly classified Chrome Dome missions, B-52 Stratofortress bombers flew to within striking distance of enemy targets and waited for a signal to proceed. If no signal came, the planes returned to base. The procedures were designed partly to improve the response time of the nuclear strike force, but more importantly to ensure that the strike force could not be destroyed in Soviet first-strike attacks on airfields. Scattered and airborne, the strike force was less vulnerable. The same principle was also applied to command and control procedures. To reduce the risk that a Soviet first strike on a few central underground command centers might disable the entire U.S. nuclear strike force—possibly an incentive for a Soviet preemptive first strike—a fleet of air force planes were specially outfitted with command and communications equipment to be able to take control of the American nuclear arsenal in the event the central

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underground command center was destroyed or disabled. From February 3, 1961, through July 24, 1990, a Looking Glass plane was in the air at all times. Protected by mobility, these Looking Glass missions, along with the Chrome Dome missions, became key elements of the U.S. deterrent in the missile age by protecting the America’s second-strike capability. The undercurrent of these fail-safe procedures was to preserve command, control, communications, and intelligence—known in jargon as C3I—in order to be able to preserve the ability to continue the war in the event war actually broke out. Through the 1960s, some strategists proposed putting these technical innovations and procedures to a different use: preserving the ability to stop a war once it had started. The possibility that nuclear war could be conducted on the basis of selected targeting seemed to open new possibilities in nuclear posture. Some advocated exploiting these opportunities in the internal dynamics of war in an effort to determine the course of the war. The objective was to win a nuclear war. But for deterrence to work internal to a conflict the sides needed to create incentive for the other side to restraint. That was the foundation of changes to strategic targeting that abstained from striking enemy cities, at least in the early stages. It was mostly a calculating strategic decision rather than any moral or ethical judgment. “Sparing” the enemy’s cities was a euphemism for holding them hostage in the hope and expectation that that would force a political decision by the enemy to restrain its forces once nuclear war had already broken out. The idea was to build so-called firebreaks, opportunities to stop and change course, without necessarily engaging in an all-out orgy of firing off everything at once. Through that, war itself might have internal deterrence dynamics. Robert McNamara and his successor, Clark Clifford, had both spoken of extending flexible response to nuclear forces but their main energies had been focused elsewhere. In December 1962, in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton had spoken of implementing “firebreaks against escalation of conflict” in order to ensure that war did not continue through miscalculation.30 It was one thing to make that argument when the United States held a huge strategic advantage over its adversary, as it did when Carl Kaysen drafted his first strike memo; it was quite another to make it when that advantage had been neutralized and prevailing wisdom held that a stable balance of mutual assured destruction was the path to peace. The Schlesinger Doctrine, so-called after its chief proponent, Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger (although Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, had also been instrumental in the process of strategic review), rejected mutual assured destruction. With its new emphasis on war planning, it seemed to critics to be intent on making nuclear war thinkable and winnable. To its defenders it was a way of bolstering the American deterrent and making nuclear war less likely.

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Keeping the Lid On

Schlesinger was uniquely positioned to revise American nuclear policy. His experience seemed tailor-made for the position having been an economics professor at the University of Virginia, where he had published The Political Economy of National Security (1960), a book that had tackled the issue of how to spend the nation’s resources to protect its interests. “National security is the problem of our age,” he had written.31 Schlesinger moved to RAND during the early 1960s where he was initially a consultant and later became Director of RAND’s strategic department, where he worked closely with leading strategists like Albert Wohlstetter, William Kaufmann, and Bernard Brodie. Nixon appointed Schlesinger as Secretary of Energy in 1970, a post in which he served for three years before replacing Melvin Laird as Secretary of Defense in 1974. Schlesinger also assumed the post at a critical moment in Washington’s political climate. The White House was intensely distracted by the Watergate scandal and the view on the Hill of the U.S. military had sunk drastically as a result of Vietnam. With the possible exception of Admiral Hyman Rickover, who retained many friends on the Hill, the leverage the armed services were able to exert on the Hill had never been lower since the Second World War. Claiming that Soviet gains in the Brezhnev-era buildup had once again diminished the credibility of the deterrent, especially the extended deterrent in Western Europe, Schlesinger successfully pushed through changes to American nuclear war planning, with Kissinger’s help. From the mid-1970s, official U.S. deterrence posture was premised on the notion of a survivable, controllable, and winnable nuclear war. Schlesinger and like-minded allies argued that the aim was not to make nuclear war more likely, but less, by strengthening an existing vulnerability in America’s and NATO’s capabilities.32 What was needed, Schlesinger argued, was “a series of measured responses to aggression which bear some relation to the provocation, have prospects of terminating hostilities before general nuclear war breaks out, and leave some possibility for restoring deterrence.”33 The underlying premise of the Schlesinger Doctrine was that through adjusting war plans, it would be possible to insert a kind of firebreak into the outbreak of nuclear war. Rather than simply launching everything at the outset in one massive strike, as envisaged in the SIOP, the new war plans would be flexible and would allow for limited strategic strikes against Soviet targets that would demonstrate resolve at the same time as signaling that a pause was possible. Since 1971, President Nixon had spoken repeatedly that a counterforce strategy, one that targeted military sites rather than cities, was desirable. On January 10, 1974, during a speech to foreign affairs correspondents just days before the Pentagon delivered a record $85 billion budget request to Congress, Schlesinger announced that he was finally making it a reality. He revealed that although the United States would retain the ability to launch devastating strikes at Soviet cities, some of the Pentagon’s Minuteman

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ICBMs would be reprogrammed to target Soviet military targets such as missile silos. The objective, he said, was that striking cities should “not be the only option and perhaps not the principal option.”34 By increasing the range of options available to the President, and specifically by refraining from striking the enemy’s cities, the purpose was “to maintain the capability to deter any desire on the part of an opponent to inflict major damage on the United States or its allies.”35 This was not an excuse to build even more nuclear weapons, even though the Soviets were known to be building at least four new kinds of land-based ICBMs and a new generation of nuclear submarine armed with SLBMs. Because the Nixon administration’s quantitative objective was essential equivalence, “we have sufficient forces now,” he said.36 Nevertheless, the United States would continue to work on making its missiles more accurate and efficient. The announcement was accompanied by relatively little fanfare in the West, but its real audience was Moscow. It was, in effect, a three-pronged message to the Soviet leaders. The first prong was an implicit invitation to adopt a similar stance in the hope of sparing cities on both sides. The final, and most prominent, prong was to bolster the credibility that the United States would and could resort to nuclear strikes. It now had more nuclear options than all-or-nothing and official U.S. doctrine, as endorsed by President Nixon on January 17, 1974, held that nuclear war was winnable.37 THE SOVIET VIEW The Soviets remained tight-lipped in public about their views or doctrine of limited nuclear war. Declaratory policy explicitly denounced the possibility of controlled escalation and emphasized that the use of any nuclear weapons would lead inexorably to all-out nuclear war. At the same time, they clearly invested heavily in development of tactical nuclear forces and deployed them widely. One RAND strategist, Nathan Leites, offered in 1982 a convincing explanation for the apparent inconsistency: “It is perhaps just because the Soviets are so interested in the distinction between deterrence and war fighting that they have kept silent about it. The war not being yet begun, this is the hour of deterrence: deterrence by the prospect of a maximum initial strike, of preemptive, and of the none-or-all character of nuclear war. Once the war is on, the authorities may adopt that ‘controlled’ conduct about which the West [talks].”38 More recent evidence prised from East European and Soviet archives suggest a more worrying development, that in fact the Soviets put too much faith in their planning and exercises that a limited nuclear war was winnable and could even be exploited. Soviet planners harbored increasingly fanciful expectations of what the reality of nuclear war would be like; as one former Soviet general dubbed it, it was a dangerous case of “nuclear romanticism.”39

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Keeping the Lid On

The Soviets built up their tactical nuclear capabilities. The Soviets had stationed their first tactical nuclear weapons in East Germany as part of its Warsaw Pact modernization program of the late 1950s and early 1960s. With rapid advances in military technology, especially in thermonuclear weapons and missile technology, Warsaw Pact capabilities needed to be brought into line with the adopted military strategy of a blitzkrieg advance through Western Europe.40 A key component of that strategy was theater combat. In the event of hostilities, Warsaw Pact war plans called for Europe to be transformed rapidly into a thermonuclear battlefield by widely employing tactical nuclear weapons. This meant that tactical nuclear delivery systems had to be forward deployed. In practice, this meant giving dual-use delivery systems to the countries in the Warsaw Pact. In order to counter NATO’s arming of West Germany with Honest John and Matador tactical nuclear missiles, the Soviets designated its first shipments of its Luna rockets to the GDR. Luna rockets were capable of delivering a nuclear warhead of between two and twenty kilotons to a range of ten to twenty-five miles.41 In May 1962, at around the same time the Presidium endorsed Khrushchev’s plan to send strategic nuclear missiles to Cuba, the first tactical nuclear missile launchers began arriving in the GDR. The initial deployment was operational by September 30, 1962, and completed by May 1963.42 Although no specific evidence has so far come to light that Western intelligence services detected these specific deployments, there was a general recognition that it was a possibility, even a probability. As the CIA put it, “While we believe that the Soviets will not give East European forces nuclear weapons in peacetime, in the event of war those weapons would probably be made available under strict Soviet control.”43 The CIA estimated right; nuclear warheads for the Luna rockets remained under Soviet control. Soviet standard procedure was to provide launchers and missiles for forward deployment to host countries, but for the missiles to remain under tight Soviet control. In times of heightened alert, special Soviet commando units would deliver the warheads to the missiles and supervise their deployment and use.44 When the Luna rockets in the GDR were put on alert during the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet forces presumably carried out this standard operating procedure. To complement these forward-deployed systems, Soviet planners began putting greater emphasis on exercises in which nuclear weapons would be used. As two historians Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne put it, Soviet war planners “presumed that the advancing forces would be able to blast their way quickly through Western Europe while dozens of bombs would be detonating all around, and even benefit from the devastation.”45 “It was like in the fairytale,” recalled a former Polish general.46 It fell to Mikhail Gorbachev to dispel the fairytale by undermining the reliance on military security. Security “cannot be built forever on a fear of retribution,” he told

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the party Congress in February 1986, and proclaimed that “the task of ensuring security increasingly is a political task, and can only be resolved by political means.” Two months later, the meltdown at Chernobyl spewed a radioactive cloud over vast regions of the Soviet Union. It was a graphic warning of the reality of nuclear war and exposed the fantasy world of Soviet war plans anticipating a winnable nuclear ground war in Europe. In the wake of the catastrophe, Polish leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski reflected on its lessons of planning for a limited nuclear war in Europe: “No one should have the idea that in a nuclear war one could enjoy a cup of coffee in Paris five or six days later.”47

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7

The Spread of Nuclear Weapons [T]he more numerous and terrible the retaliatory weapons possessed by both sides, the surer the peace . . . and that it is actually more dangerous to limit nuclear weapons than to let them proliferate. General Pierre Gallois, 1960 We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. Condoleezza Rice, October 2002

Does the spread of nuclear weapons make the world safer or more dangerous? Many people have an intuitive response to that question: of course, it makes things more dangerous. It might seem surprising, therefore, that not all experts agree and the debate remains unresolved.1 Like so many of the issues relating to nuclear weapons, the debate is built largely on speculation and ambiguous historical experience. Nuclear weapons remain attractive to states. In regional rivalries such as the subcontinent, East Asia, and the Middle East, the bomb has influence. For better or worse, nuclear status still connotes prestige and power. The nuclear club has grown slowly and steadily to eight or nine members since 1945, and there has not yet been another use of atomic weapons in anger since Nagasaki.2 Since 1945, many influential voices have expressed alarm that the spread of nuclear weapons will inevitably lead to world destruction. So far, that prediction has not been proved right. But is that because of effective efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, or just plain luck?

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Nuclear proliferation remains an urgent problem not only because of the risk of a terrorist organization getting its hands on nuclear weapons, but because the proliferation of weapons also means a proliferation of nuclear deterrents. Nuclear weapons have long been a force multiplier, able to make up for imbalances in conventional military power. Paradoxically, then, the unassailable lead of the United States in military power and technology, thanks largely to the so-called revolution in military affairs of precisionguided conventional munitions and advanced battlefield and strategic intelligence, might invite other nations to acquire the bomb as a way to influence or even deter American foreign policy. The lesson of the relative ease of victory for the American-led coalition in the first Gulf War, one Indian general is reported as saying, is that you don’t go to war with the United States without the bomb.3 It is a lesson American policymakers have been concerned about for some time, and one for which no easy solution seems likely. Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense, Les Aspin, outlined the problem in announcing a Defense Counter-proliferation Initiative in December 1993: During the cold war, our principal adversary had conventional forces in Europe that were numerically superior. For us, nuclear weapons were the equalizer. The threat to use them was present and was used to compensate for our smaller numbers of conventional forces. Today, nuclear weapons can still be the equalizer against superior conventional forces. But today it is the United States that has unmatched conventional military power, and it is our potential adversaries who may attain nuclear weapons.

Chillingly, Aspin concluded, “We’re the ones who could wind up being the equilizee.”4 As John F. Kennedy acknowledged in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, even a small number of nuclear weapons can sometimes deter even the most powerful of states. A central element of the proliferation debate revolves around the perceived effectiveness of nuclear deterrence. If deterrence works reliably, as deterrence optimists argue, then there is presumably less to be feared in the spread of nuclear weapons. But if nuclear deterrence does not work reliably, deterrence pessimists posit, more nuclear weapons states, each replete with its own deterrence matrix based on its own security concerns, will presumably lead not just to a more complicated international arena but a far more dangerous one. While very few responsible commentators see nuclear proliferation, as the spread of nuclear weapons has come to be known, as something to be encouraged and aided, some have made rational, well-argued cases that fears of catastrophe inevitably ensuing are exaggerated and unfounded. Some go even further and argue that proliferation may actually increase global stability.5 It is an argument peculiar to nuclear weapons, as it does not apply and is not made with regard to other so-called weapons of mass destruction

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such as chemical and biological weapons. Nuclear weapons are simply so destructive, the argument goes, that using them is such a high bar that it would make for an irrational decision against a nuclear-armed foe. “There is no more ironclad law in international relations theory than this: nuclear states do not fight wars with each other,” calculates Devin Hagerty in his meticulous study of the India-Pakistan nuclear rivalry.6 In the lead-up to the Iraq War, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt confronted the Bush administration’s contention that Saddam Hussein was undeterrable and that therefore a preventive war against Iraq was necessary. Mearsheimer and Walt did not suggest that it would be a good thing if Saddam acquired nuclear weapons, but they argued that “The historical record shows that the United States can contain Iraq effectively—even if Saddam has nuclear weapons—just as it contained the Soviet Union during the Cold War.” Deterrence works, they argued, and Saddam Hussein in particular had proven to be “eminently deterrable.”7 The argument that proliferation is not necessarily a dire threat has also been made in expansions both lateral—to other countries—and vertical—in the growth of nuclear stockpiles. Michael Mandelbaum has written that “Since 1945, the more nuclear weapons each has accumulated, the less likely, on the whole, it has seemed that either side would use them.”8 Others have made similar arguments, combining both lateral and vertical elements. Kenneth Waltz maintains, for example, that nuclear weapons preserve an “imperfect peace” on the subcontinent between India and Pakistan. Countering the news that all Pentagon war games involving India and Pakistan always end in a nuclear exchange, Waltz argues that “Has everyone in that building forgotten that deterrence works precisely because nuclear states fear that conventional military engagements may escalate to the nuclear level, and therefore they draw back from the brink?”9 It was an idea frequently debated during the cold war. French military strategist General Pierre Gallois observed in 1960, at a time when France was making its case for its own independent nuclear force, that the path to greater stability lay in the increased proliferation. “Few people are able to grasp that precisely because the new weapons have a destructive power out of all proportion to even the highest stakes, they impose a far more stable balance than the world has known in the past,” he said. “Nor is it any easier to make people realize that the more numerous and terrible the retaliatory weapons possessed by both sides, the surer the peace . . . and that it is actually more dangerous to limit nuclear weapons than to let them proliferate.” 10 Gallois made this argument in the context of justifying the French bomb and increasing NATO nuclear capabilities. “These,” Gallois said, “are the realities of our time, but no one is willing to accept them at first blush.” As it turns out, not at second blush either. Notwithstanding a few notable proponents of the “proliferation can equal more security” argument, the weight of opinion is mainly in the other direction. It has become an

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accepted norm—heightened especially with the growing capabilities of terrorist organizations exemplified by the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States—that the spread of nuclear weapons is a bad thing. The greater the number of nuclear weapons in the world and the greater the number of nuclear powers, the more opportunities for disaster, whether deliberate or accidental. Scott Sagan has highlighted the ways in which organizations and communications can fail; rather than being anomalies, accidents are an inherent part of organizations. When nuclear weapons are thrown into the mix, the risks of catastrophic accidents are chilling.11 Sagan argues that a fundamental level of risk is inherent in all nuclear weapons organizations regardless of nationality or region. It is an element that further compounds the problem of nuclear weapons in regions still embroiled by centuries old religious, cultural, and ethnic tensions. All of these elements combine in a barely controllable milieu of states’ nuclear weapons policy. TACKLING THE SPREAD OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS How does a nation—or a community of nations—prevent the spread of nuclear weapons? Since the question was first raised during the closing stages of World War II, a wide range of answers have been given and tried, ranging from legislative, through international norms and treaties, and even preventive military action. No particular approach has yet proved entirely satisfactory. Early efforts focused on countering the problem with international agreements and tied nonproliferation with disarmament. Not two months had passed since Hiroshima when President Truman told Congress is October 1945 that “The hope of civilization lies in international arrangements looking, if possible, to the renunciation of the use and development of the atomic bomb.”12 It was a view widely shared by influential atomic scientists. The Franck Report, named after the chairman of the committee issuing the report, recommended in June 1945, before the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, that since a perpetual U.S. monopoly would likely be impossible to maintain, the elimination of nuclear weapons would have to be realized through international agreements.13 Those sentiments lay behind the U.S. proposals made to the United Nations in June 1946. Known as the Baruch Plan after its chief American negotiator Bernard Baruch, a financier and friend of President Harry Truman, the plan’s objective was to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons by securing atomic technology and materials under the control of the newly created United Nations. Under the plan, a UN authority would supervise and control the mines and production facilities of the raw materials for atomic weapons and be responsible for any production. Under the plan, the United States would give up its atomic weapons and facilities in a phased transition.

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In presenting the plan to the United Nations on June 14, 1946, Baruch employed a melodramatic allusion to America’s wild west past: “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead. . . . If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of Fear. Let us not deceive ourselves: We must elect World Peace or World Destruction.”14 The fundamentals of the Baruch Plan were easy for the public to grasp. Baruch proposed the creation of an International Atomic Development Authority whose sole duty would be to oversee all phases of the development and uses of atomic energy; the key to the successful operation of such an agency would be its effectiveness in controlling and inspecting atomic energy activities—for then and only then would the United States be prepared both to cease the manufacture of atomic bombs and dispose of its stockpile. The Soviet response came five days later in an address delivered by Andrei Gromyko. Sidestepping the American case for atomic peace, Gromyko instead called for an international convention aimed at the immediate prohibition, production, and destruction of atomic weapons. Like the Baruch Plan, the Gromyko Plan, too, was easy to grasp. What was not so easy to grasp was the mutual incompatibility of the essential points of both plans. All in the end was undermined by nascent cold war tensions: Washington refused a Soviet proposal to disarm prior to the establishment of an international control authority, while Moscow refused an American proposal that would compel it to relinquish any hope of its own nuclear program and that Washington would act in good faith in disarming.15 Whereas the Baruch Plan equated controlling the atom and disarmament, President Dwight D. Eisenhower managed to separate the two in his 1953 proposal known as “Atoms for Peace.” The focus of the proposal was on stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, not on disarmament. In a speech to the United Nations on December 8, 1953, Eisenhower called for a renewed emphasis on peaceful uses of atomic energy,16 with its emphasis on providing commercial incentives for reaping the benefits of atomic energy.17 The price was that all fissile material would be placed under the custody of a United Nations agency. Again, the initiative met with mixed success. On the positive side, it contributed directly to the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in July 1957, a autonomous body based in Vienna and charged with monitoring and encouraging the safe use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, while acting as an international, neutral watchdog of nuclear weapons transfers and development.18 The IAEA remains influential today, but its power depends heavily on international political tides. The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed in 1968, stands out as the high-water mark of multilateral global efforts to establish an enforceable regime to curb the further spread of nuclear weapons. The treaty established formal agreements and contributed to international norms to prevent nuclear states from sharing sensitive information, technology, and materials with

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nonnuclear states. The NPT has had a troubled history—not all the known nuclear powers have signed the treaty and negotiating its renewal in recent years has often proved intractable. But by the time the NPT was signed, the nuclear club already had five members: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China. Each new addition was met with varying degrees of concern depending on the level of threat perceived. American policymakers engaged in serious discussion about launching preventive military action against both the Soviet and Chinese nuclear programs before each successfully exploded its first atomic device, in 1949 and 1964 respectively.19 The Indian government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi seriously considered, but ultimately rejected, plans for preventive military attacks on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities in the early 1980s.20 Israel actually carried out a military strike against an Iranian nuclear power facility on June 7, 1981. Less aggressive measures have also had a mixed record of success. American efforts to thwart the British nuclear program consisted mainly of cutting off the flow of information and materials from their erstwhile atomic partners.21 The French were in point of fact actively discouraged from developing an independent nuclear option and offers were made for a European nuclear force instead.22 None of these efforts has worked. Not every nuclear and prospective nuclear state has regarded the NPT and its subsequent indefinite renewal (in 1995) positively.23 The NPT is specifically designed to freeze the status quo of the military uses of nuclear weapons. The leading nuclear states party to the treaty—the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia—regarded this a positive status quo because it preserved their status while retaining their freedom with respect to modernizing and building their own nuclear arsenals. But other countries, such as India, not a signatory to the treaty, see it as exclusionary on the part of the established nuclear powers and has bristled at what it perceived as a continuation of the effort to keep it as a second-tier nation.24 COLD WAR LEGACY Since the end of the cold war the problem of the spread of nuclear weapons has become more complicated, not less. The legacy of the cold war has played an important role. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire, the first challenge was to dismantle what Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev referred to as the “infrastructure of fear”25 that had dominated global security relations during the cold war. In declaring the arms race over with the signing of the START Treaty in Moscow in August 1991, Gorbachev spoke for many when he said, “Thank God, as we say in Russian, that we stopped this.”26 Stopping it was one thing; reversing direction was quite another.

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Although much more can and needs to be done to build down to zero and it is hard to find anyone who can offer a convincing argument as to why the United States and Russia both still need thousands of operational nuclear weapons in their stockpiles, with some on hair-trigger alert ready to go at a moment’s notice, fifteen years after the end of the cold war there are still far too many nuclear weapons in the world. But that is not to say that there has not been important progress in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the former cold war enemies. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, there were between 28,000 and 35,000 nuclear warheads in the former Soviet arsenal.27 The current Russian arsenal is judged to be a total of around 12,000 nuclear warheads, of which about 7,200 are considered operational.28 In 1991, the United States nuclear stockpile consisted of around 18,300 warheads. As of the beginning of 2006, that stockpile is judged to consist of roughly 10,000 nuclear warheads, but only 5,735 of those are active and deployed. The rest have reserve or inactive status and some are scheduled to be dismantled.29 Those numbers, however, do not tell the whole story. The problem was not just the size of the U.S. and Soviet stockpiles, but that many of those weapons had been widely dispersed around the globe during the cold war as part of a forward defense and prepositioning strategies, the idea being that having the weapons deployed in the field would greatly reduce the time it would take to respond to an attack. One of the most pressing concerns of security experts and policymakers in the early 1990s was to secure the weapons of the former Soviet Union while that empire crumbled. The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 left nuclear weapons in the former Soviet states of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. These newly independent states, each of which was “born nuclear,” were ultimately convinced to give up their inherited weapons and all of those nuclear weapons were repatriated to Russia, but not without much anxiety in security policy circles. That the new states would simply give up these powerful bargaining chips was no foregone conclusion. One New York Times columnist speculated, only partly in jest, that “if one of the dissident republic got control of an ICBM, it might more likely fire it at the Kremlin than the United States.”30 The sheer numbers of nuclear weapons even combined with this relatively modest dispersal illustrated the problem of command, control, and security in an environment of deteriorating military infrastructure. Whether a cash-strapped military complex might look to liquidate its assets or the compromising of security measures allowed theft, the threat to U.S. interests was acute.31 The problem seemed even more worrying with those weapons dispersed further afield. During the cold war, both sides deployed tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and nuclear-capable delivery vehicles beyond their own borders in the name of forward defense and prepositioning. The list of locations beyond the continental United States to which American nuclear

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weapons were dispersed is surprisingly long: Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Guam, Hawaii, Japan, Johnston Island, Kwajalein, Midway, Morocco, Philippines, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, United Kingdom, and West Germany.32 In Europe alone, thousands of American nuclear weapons had been deployed since September 1954 in a constantly rotating inventory of obsolescence and replacement, peaking at approximately 7,300 in 1971.33 The number of American nuclear bombs deployed overseas has been reduced markedly since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush ordered the withdrawal of all ground- and seabased tactical nuclear weapons from their overseas bases.34 But the United States remains as the only country to continue basing land-based nuclear weapons beyond its own borders (other countries continue to deploy seaand air-based weapons). As of the end of 2004, one authoritative estimate pegged the number of American nuclear weapons still based in Europe at about 480, a level authorized under the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review of 1995 and formally authorized by a presidential directive signed by Bill Clinton in November 2000.35 ADAPTING DETERRENCE FOR THE POST–COLD WAR ERA The breakup of the Soviet Union, George H.W. Bush told the nation during a televised address in September 1991, augured in a new reality in which “The prospect of a Soviet invasion into Western Europe, launched with little or no warning, is no longer a realistic threat.”36 Mikhail Gorbachev shared the sentiment, describing it as a revolution in strategic thinking; no longer should the deterrent to war be the threat of war. “Our next goal,” he said, “is to make full use of this breakthrough to make disarmament an irreversible process . . . Normal human thinking will have to replace the kind of militarised political thinking that has taken root in the minds of mind.” “Doctrines of war-fighting must be abandoned in favour of concepts of preventing war,” he said, revealing just how fundamentally Soviet nuclear planning had shifted over previous decades.37 By the time Bill Clinton assumed the Presidency, the euphoria of the end of the cold war was giving way to more sober analysis. It had become increasingly apparent that the problems associated with nuclear weapons had not faded away—they had changed. Rather than opening an era of global peace and security as many had hoped, the end of the cold war paved the way for instability and the surfacing of regional issues that had long been suppressed. Nevertheless, the Clinton administration pressed ahead with its efforts to align nuclear policy with new circumstances. In late 1993 it announced that the U.S. government had adopted a new understanding of “deterrence.” A wide-ranging and thorough “Bottom Up Review” conducted by the

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Pentagon during 1993 identified four key threats to U.S. national security. Foremost among them was the increased threat of proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. The new “deterrence,” therefore, would be aimed at deterring not only the use of nuclear weapons but also the acquisition of atomic technology and materials. By employing significant military and economic disincentives the administration hoped to neutralize some of the chief threats to stability such as North Korea, Iraq, and Libya. But the central thrust of U.S. nuclear policy remained the potential of a resurgent Russia. Boris Yeltsin’s token gesture of retargeting Russian ICBMs away from American cities brought small comfort to the Pentagon, which continued to regard Russia as the primary potential threat to U.S. interests. The challenge was now complicated by threats brought about by the consequences of the Russian political and economic upheaval rather than necessarily a direct military threat. Yeltsin’s market reforms were weak from the outset, and the Pentagon looked to the military threat posed by a governmental collapse, which seemed entirely possible in the wake of the August 1991 Soviet coup. In such a situation, command and control measures over the Russian nuclear stockpile would be thrown into chaos. And, of course, there was the perennial fear that hard-line communist forces could regain control in Moscow and would presumably seek to enhance their political fortunes by reviving the common enemy. In keeping with this redefinition of “deterrence,” the Clinton administration announced in September 1994 that it was adopting a new nuclear doctrine. The doctrine of mutual assured destruction, or MAD, which had become obsolete with the collapse of the Soviet Union, was to be replaced with a policy of mutual assured safety, or MAS, aimed primarily at Russia itself.38 This served a dual purpose: firstly, to provide leadership for continuing reductions in nuclear weapons, and secondly, to provide a hedge against a reversal of the reform process in Russia. Although it remained unlikely that Russia’s weak economy could rebuild a conventional force of the magnitude that it had sustained during the cold war, U.S. defense planners predicted that nuclear weapons might offer an attractive, cheaper option. It would be considerably less time-consuming and less expensive for any radical elements that might seize power in the Kremlin to reverse its existing nuclear weapons policy and rebuild warheads. Certainly the technology, experience, and infrastructure were there. But through mutual assured safety, Washington sought to make such a process more difficult—or, ideally impossible—by making Russia’s nuclear inferiority irreversible. In November 1997, Clinton issued a Presidential Decision Directive describing in general terms the purposes of U.S. nuclear weapons and providing broad guidance for developing operational plans. Based on a Quadrennial Defense Review document, it was the first such presidential directive on the actual employment of nuclear weapons since the Carter administration. It

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was notable in that Washington finally abandoned the cold war tenet that it must be prepared to fight a protracted nuclear war. The directive also noted that strategic nuclear weapons played a smaller role in the U.S. security posture than at any other point during the second half of the twentieth-century, but that they were still a vital part of U.S. efforts as a hedge against an uncertain future. But for those that believed that deterrence was a thing of the past, Clinton’s directive served as a sharp reminder that things had not changed that much. In words still ringing from the height of the cold war, the Clinton administration declared: Deterrence is predicated on ensuring that potential adversaries accept that any use of nuclear weapons against the United States or its allies would not succeed. . . . A wide range of nuclear retaliatory options are required to ensure that the United States is not left with an all-or-nothing response. . . . The United States will retain sufficient ambiguity of use that an adversary could never be sure that the United States would not launch a counter-attack before the adversary’s weapons arrive.39

At the same time, Aspin’s successor, Secretary of Defense William Cohen wondered aloud whether a smaller nuclear force made it a more attractive target and deliberately cultivated the ambiguity upon which deterrence rested. And to this day, the United States stands firm in its refusal to adopt a “no first use” policy, instead preferring to maintain a calculated ambiguity. Fifteen years after the end of the cold war, U.S. nuclear policy has still not fully transitioned to a coherent post-cold war posture. Publicly, the United States now considers Moscow an ally, and yet the Pentagon continues to war game scenarios involving Moscow as the primary enemy.40 For its part, Russia maintains a nuclear force of considerable size, in large measure to make up for the deterioration of its conventional capabilities. “Russia’s military cling to nuclear weapons as talismans of past imperial glory,” writes one observer. “It is, by and large, a Potemkin village in a fictive world.”41 It is difficult to imagine a conflict scenario where either country makes a rational, strategic judgment that using any nuclear weapons is in its best interests and that of its allies. Nevertheless, both countries maintain arsenals of thousands of nuclear weapons and have proved reluctant to fundamentally redraw their nuclear doctrines. EFFECTIVENESS OF NONPROLIFERATION EFFORTS Nonproliferation efforts in recent years have enjoyed mixed results. But assessing the success or failure remains problematic in part because it is essentially proving a negative and in part because of the multiple layers of secrecy and misinformation that haunt anything to do with specific information on nuclear weapons. On the one hand, nuclear stockpiles have

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been reduced markedly, with some of that fissile material being converted to peaceful purposes by blending down bomb-grade plutonium and uranium to lower-grade versions more suitable for nuclear power production. “One out of every ten light bulbs in the United States is powered by a former Soviet bomb,” claims Ambassador Linton Brooks, administrator of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration.42 On the other hand, the risk of nuclear weapons or fissile materials falling into the wrong hands seems greater than ever. That is only partly the result of the phenomenon of heightened perception of the problem since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The key challenges have evolved over time. For much of the nuclear age, the costs of building of nuclear bombs have been prohibitive in terms of material, labor, and expertise, so that only the most powerful of states were capable of building the bomb, and even then, only after a sizeable commitment of resources. Over time, those once daunting problems have become less. It has been recognized for decades that expertise and knowledge are no longer insurmountable obstacles. In 1978, a 22-year-old Harvard University student devised highly credible nuclear designs, and new technologies like the Internet now make the dissemination of information and knowledge infinitely easier.43 The last, best hope of controlling the spread of nuclear weapons seems to be controlling fissile materials such as enriched uranium and plutonium. But even there, the record has been mixed. As of September 2005, there have been 220 cases of nuclear smuggling confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency since 1993. Eighteen of those cases involved highly enriched uranium.44 There are ongoing fears about Russian accountability for small, suitcase-sized bombs after former Russian national security adviser Alexander Lebed made a startling public claim in 1997 that up to 100 of those bombs were unaccounted for. Originally envisaged for use by spies by enemy lines for sabotage and demolition in the event of war, the weapons were designed to be highly portable, self-contained, and possibly with short-cuts in their arming and detonation procedures. In short, they are the Holy Grail for a terrorist organization such as al Qaeda. “[M]ore than a hundred weapons out of the supposed number of 250 are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia,” Lebed said in a September 1997 interview on American television program 60 Minutes. “I don’t know their location. I don’t know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they’ve been sold or stolen, I don’t know.” Immediately denied by the Russian Defense Ministry—which also denied that the Soviet Union had ever built suitcase-sized atomic bombs—and questioned by the U.S. State Department, Lebed’s claims have been the subject of vigorous debate.45 The issue is more than historical curiosity. On October 11, 2001, just one month after terrorists struck in New York and Washington, CIA Director George Tenet briefed President George W. Bush that, according to a CIA source, al Qaeda had stolen a small nuclear bomb from the

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Russian arsenal. That bomb, according to the source, was then in New York City.46 The larger and longer range problem, however, is of the spread of nuclear weapons to weak or failing states. Illustrating the immediacy of the problem was the case of the international trafficking of atomic technology and materials set up by Pakistani atomic scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, better known as A.Q. Khan. It amounted to “one stop shopping network for nuclear weapons,” as Robert Joseph, the U.S. under secretary for arms control put it.47 Khan’s network was a highly sophisticated supply and production network spread from Pakistan to Libya, North Korea, Iran, Malaysia, and elsewhere.48 Shutting it down had immediate, flow-on effects. Khan’s network had played a crucial role in Libya’s nuclear ambitions. Within months of the network being shut down, Libya had renounced its nuclear program, allowed international inspectors into the country, and given up much of the supporting technology. It was a proliferation breakthrough of unusual drama. But it was also sobering; the network was sophisticated, effective, and had operated undetected for several years. The dismantling of the A.Q. Khan network was a notable success of aggressive nonproliferation efforts and led directly to tangible counterproliferation progress in compelling Libya to abandon its nuclear ambitions and its advanced weapons programs. At first glance, the Libyan case seemed a model of successful deterrence, but first appearances proved deceptive. Encouraged by the coincidence of timing with the invasion of Iraq and the heated domestic political environment, early news reports of Libya’s decision to end its nuclear ambitions implied that deterrence had played a key role, that in the wake of the demonstration of American resolve in invading Iraq, Colonel Qadafi had feared that Libya might face a similar fate. The later exposition of Libya’s reliance on the A.Q. Khan network put events into a better perspective. While Qadafi might have been deterred to some extent, it was not the primary driving force behind Tripoli’s decision. Libya had been caught red-handed flaunting international rules against the trafficking of nuclear technology and materials. Confronted with undeniable evidence of its wrongdoing and deprived of its principal source for continuing the nuclear program, it saw more advantages in confessing and renouncing nuclear weapons than in denials. Besides, Qadafi, a survivor par excellence, seized the opportunity to throw off his pariah mantle. Another complication in controlling proliferation is the blurred lines between civilian atomic energy programs and weapons programs. Much effort in recent years has been directed toward establishing clear demarcation lines between them, but it always remains possible for a civilian atomic energy program to migrate to a nuclear weapons program. Civilian atomic energy programs build expertise, contribute technology, and produce material. It is a characteristic recently exploited by two of the three countries President George W. Bush famously identified as part of “an axis of evil.”49 Iran has

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long insisted that its nuclear ambitions lie only in civilian atomic energy reactors; the international community, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, remains unpersuaded.50 By agreements concluded with the Clinton administration, North Korea was allowed to maintain a strictly civilian atomic energy program. Indications in recent years are that North Korea used its energy reactors instead to enrich uranium, the key ingredient required for an atomic weapon. Indeed, intelligence estimates of North Korea’s atomic stockpile are based on its production of enriched uranium. Whether North Korea actually has the bomb (and if it does, how many?) remains unclear because North Korea has never conducted a test and its nuclear status is self-declared and unsubstantiated.51 Efforts to roll back the India-Pakistan nuclear arms race have been notably less successful. Admittedly, the problem has been handled very differently from the Libyan case. India joined the nuclear club with a successful test on May 18, 1974, having begun its program in response to the border clash with China in November 1962 and China developing its own bomb two years later.52 Since then, India maintained a “dual front” approach to is defense planning, with Pakistan and China as notional rivals. But it is the India-Pakistan front that has been the cause of intense global concern since things heated up considerably in mid-1998. The two countries have a distinguished history of conflict during the relatively short life of the Pakistani nation. It is a rivalry fueled by many cultural and security issues, and it has a ready-made flashpoint in the contested territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Since 1947, when Pakistan was carved off India by the British, serious military conflict has broken out between the two sides at least four times. Each time India has won. The injection of nuclear weapons into that volatile mix has naturally led to widespread concern.53 On May 11 and 13, 1998, India tested five nuclear weapons. Before the month was out, Pakistan had hastily responded with six nuclear tests of its own. Each side engaged in saberrattling rhetoric and tension has built up on several occasions since, most notably in brinkmanship of dual mobilizations in 2002. The tests provoked widespread international condemnation aimed at both parties.54 Whether nuclear weapons stabilize or destabilize the India-Pakistan rivalry remains controversial. Deterrence optimists argue that the risks of even a small-scale nuclear exchange on the subcontinent, where the urban environments would almost certainly lead to millions of deaths, should force each side back from the brink. Former Indian Minister of External Affairs Jaswant Singh fell in that camp, arguing that those who were condemning India’s nuclear policies loudest were engaging in what amounted to “nuclear apartheid.” “If deterrence works in the West—as it so obviously appears to,” he argued, “by what reasoning will it not work in India?”55 The Pakistani foreign minister professed similar optimism. “A nuclear conflict can have no victor,” he said. “In South Asia, nuclear deterrence may, however, usher in an era of durable peace between Pakistan and India, providing the

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requisite incentives for resolving all outstanding issues, especially Jammu and Kashmir.”56 Deterrence pessimists argue that such a view places too much trust in the organizational integrity of the respective military establishments. Could either side actually control the escalation of a crisis even if they wanted to? Many security experts fear not.57 Many experts on the subject argue that the underlying approach of creating rigorous international norms and inspection by supervisory regimes remains the most effective way of controlling nuclear threats. Mohamed ElBaradei, Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency and winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize avers that “We cannot respond to these threats by building more walls, developing bigger weapons or dispatching more troops. These threats require primarily multinational cooperation.”58 Others argue precisely the opposite. The George W. Bush administration’s policies are informed by a robust skepticism of the actual effectiveness of international controls and have often emphasized more aggressive counterproliferation efforts, turning its attention more and more to deterring the acquisition of atomic technology and materials. Bush has revealed himself to be a deterrence pessimist of the first order. In justifying the invasion of Iraq, Bush declared: “I acted because I was not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands of a madman. I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein.”59 The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was therefore presented mainly as an effort to destroy Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs, for fear that Saddam could not be deterred and, implicitly, that he might try to turn the tables on the United States and its allies. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” then national Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in October 2002 in the lead up to the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.60 It turns out that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, paradoxically reinvigorating the argument that inspection regimes such as the one imposed on Iraq during the 1990s can indeed be effective instruments in slowing or stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.61 The Bush administration has taken another controversial path toward its counterproliferation efforts with National Missile Defense. NMD, as it is known, is a scaled-down descendant of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly referred to as the “Star Wars” program (after the blockbuster science fiction film series), and publicly justified as a way to reduce the value of nuclear weapons to potential enemies or “rogue states” and thereby take the nuclear option “off the table.” It is an expensive option, costing so far upwards of $49 billion.62 Bush, like Reagan before him, is convinced that the means for an effective ballistic missile defense system is close at hand. Skeptics complain of the President’s determination to scrap the 1972 ABM Treaty, concerned that this move together with the precipitous deployment of an unproven system, at substantial costs, could do more harm than good in bringing America and its allies a step closer to Armageddon. For,

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in addition to heating up the arms race with the Russians and the Chinese, who see the NMD as a potential shield against their own long-range ballistic missile, it may well accelerate the destabilization of the North Koreans and the Iranians. They also fear that when later incarnations of NMD are ultimately deployed in regional areas to protect U.S. allies in East Asia and the Middle East, it will provoke even more intense arms races. But its supporters argue that a NMD is a worthwhile and necessary investment in the nation’s security, despite the fact its costs are open-ended and there is little evidence that it will work properly. What keeps it going is the growing fear that in the next ten years, the world faces fairly good odds that there will be a nuclear attack, possibly originating with the new nations who will be added to the nuclear weapons club.63 In this and in other ways the specter of nuclear war that hung over the lives of those who fought and won World War II remains with us today.

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Notes PREFACE 1. Madeleine Albright’s remarks, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C., September 16, 1999. At http://secretary.state.gov/www/ statements/1999/990916.html. 2. Michael E. O’Hanlon, Defense Policy Choices for the Bush Administration, second edition (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2001), 148. 3. Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 1. 4. Transcripts of the first George W. Bush–John Kerry debate on September 30, 2004, and the Dick Cheney–John Edwards Vice-Presidential debate on October 5, 2004. At http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004a.html, and http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004b.html. 5. Truman statement, August 6, 1945, Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1945 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 197. 6. J. Robert Oppenheimer, “American Weapons and American Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, 31 (July 1953): 529. 7. For an excellent, concise treatment of nuclear deterrence, see Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). 8. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. At http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/. 9. Bernard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946). 10. For some examples, see Paul C. Stern, Robert Axelrod, Robert Jervis, and Roy Radner, eds., Perspectives on Deterrence (New York: Oxford University Press,

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Notes 1989); Frank C. Zagare and D. Marc Kilgour, Perfect Deterrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960); Thomas C. Schelling, Choice and Consequence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 11. Lynn Eden, for instance, has recently highlighted how flawed assumptions and information can become codified in fundamental issues of war planning. Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). For a small sampling of other works that addressed the issue of how nuclear policy is made, see Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980); Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security Policy, 1953–1961 (London: Macmillan, 1996); Janne E. Nolan, Guardians of the Arsenal: The Politics of Nuclear Strategy (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 12. Glenn C. Buchan, “How Relevant is Nuclear Strategy? A Primer for Heretics,” Rand Corporation, February 1985. 13. The most comprehensive treatment is Lawrence Freedman’s authoritative study The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, third edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 14. Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 125. 15. Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, second edition (New York: Longman, 1999) 197; Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs 12 (Summer 1987): 687–718. 16. Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2002,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 58, 6 (November/December 2002): 103–104. 17. Joseph Cirincione, Jon Wolfsthal, and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Threats, second edition (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), 8. 18. Ben Bain, “Fissile Facts,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Fissile Facts, December 15, 2005. At http://www.carnegieendowment.org/npp/ publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=17788. 19. These figures are in 2005 dollars. Joseph Cirincione, “Lessons Lost,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 6 (November/December 2005): 42–53. That figure is an update of an authoritative estimate through 1996 of $5.5 trillion. Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), 3. 20. Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, revised and updated edition (London: Penguin, 2003), 45. 21. Robert S. Norris and William M. Arkin, “Soviet Nuclear Testing, August 29, 1949–October 24, 1990,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 54, 3 (May/June 1998): 69–71. 22. New York Times, March 1, 2002, A12.

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Notes CHAPTER 1 1. Nonstate organizations such as large terrorist groups might not conform to this rule. The general consensus is that if terrorists acquired nuclear weapons they would use them. As yet no terrorist group has demonstrated atomic capability, but fears have heightened since September 11, 2001. Anthony H. Cordesman, Terrorism, Asymmetric Warfare, and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Defending the U.S. Homeland (Westport: Praeger, 2002); Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Times Books, 2004). 2. Nina Tannenwald, “Stigmatizing the Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo,” International Security 29, 4 (Spring 2005): 5–49. 3. John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Robert Jervis, “The Political Effects of Nuclear Weapons,” International Security 13, 2 (Fall 1988): 80– 90. 4. John Mueller, “The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World,” International Security 13, 2 (Fall 1998): 55–79. 5. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997), 85. 6. Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 146. 7. Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics before and after Hiroshima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 8–9. 8. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). 9. Harold Urey quoted in Arjun Makhijani, “Nuclear Targeting: The First 60 Years,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 59, 3 (May/June 2003): 60–65. 10. On the German atomic program, see Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Truman used the “battle of the laboratories” phrase in his announcement of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Statement, August 6, 1945, Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman: 1945 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), 197. 11. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 116ff. 12. Bernard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and the World Order (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946); Barry H. Steiner, Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991); Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983); Gregg Herken, Counsels of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 8–10. 13. Michael S. Goodman, “British Intelligence and the Soviet Atomic Bomb, 1945–1950,” Journal of Strategic Studies 26, 2 (June 2003): 142; New York Times, September 23, 1949, 2; Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 196–223. 14. New York Times, September 23, 1949, 2. 15. Statement by President Truman, September 23, 1949, Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1949 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 485.

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Notes 16. ORE 3/1, “Soviet Capabilities for the Development and Production of Certain Types of Weapons and Equipment,” October 31, 1946; and OSI/SR-10/49/1, “Status of the USSR Atomic Energy Project,” MORI2319524, August 1949, both quoted in Donald P. Steury, “How the CIA Missed Stalin’s Bomb,” Studies in Intelligence (unclassified edition), 49, 1 (2005). At http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/ vol49no1/html files/index.html. 17. Forrestal’s record of a conversation with Walter Bedell Smith, September 24, 1948, Forrestal Diaries, 495–496. 18. W. Stuart Symington to Louis Johnson, November 8, 1949, PSF, Box 175, Subject, NSC-Atomic, Atomic Energy: Russia, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 19. Joseph and Steward Alsop, “How Red A-Blast was Detected,” Washington Post, December 31, 1950. The leak of information behind this article prompted Truman to order the FBI to launch an investigation. Truman to Attorney General, January 4, 1951, PSF, Box 175, Subject, NSC-Atomic, Atomic Energy: Russia, Truman Library. 20. H. Marshall Chadwell to Allen Dulles, October 1, 1951, PSF, Box 175, Subject, NSC-Atomic, Atomic Energy: Russia, Truman Library. 21. James V. Forrestal, The Forrestal Diaries, edited by Walter Millis (New York: Viking, 1951), 451ff. 22. The literature on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is voluminous. The argument over the role that deterrence played in the decision was sparked by Gar Alperovitz, who argued that so-called “atomic diplomacy” aimed at Moscow was a central consideration in Truman’s decision. Others have taken issue with that interpretation. Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (New York: Penguin, 1985); Robert Maddox, Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995). For a useful distillation of the literature and a treatment that falls somewhere between the extremes, see J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 23. Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980). 24. Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War, translated by E. W. Dickes and O. S. Griffiths (London: Derek Verschoyle, 1954), 154. 25. Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 69–118. 26. David Alan Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,” Journal of American History 66, 1 (June 1979): 63. 27. Truman statement, August 6, 1945, Public Papers: Truman, 1945, 197– 200. 28. Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2002,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 58, 6 (November/December 2002): 103–104. 29. On the context of the cold war in Europe, see Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 86–91; Gaddis, We Now Know, 26–53.

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Notes 30. Avi Shlaim, “Britain, the Berlin Blockade and the Cold War,” International Affairs (London) 60, 1 (Winter 1983–1984): 1. 31. Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,” 65. 32. Ibid., 64. 33. David Alan Rosenberg, “U.S. Nuclear War Planning, 1945–1960,” in Strategic Nuclear Targeting, edited by Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 45. 34. Carl Spaatz, “The Era of Air Power Diplomacy,” Newsweek (September 20, 1948). 35. Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952 (London: Macmillan, 1974), Vol. 2, 310–311; Simon Duke, U.S. Defence Bases in the United Kingdom (London: Macmillan, 1987), 15–38; Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 220–229; Stephen Twigge and Len Scott, Planning Armageddon: Britain, the United States and the Command of Western Nuclear Forces, 1945–1964 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000); John Slessor, Command and Control of Allied Nuclear Forces: A British View, Adelphi Paper No. 22, Institute for Strategic Studies (London), August 1965. 36. Forrestal diary entry, November 13, 1948, Diary, Forrestal Papers, Mudd Library; Clay to Bradley, June 27, 1948, Box 177, Central Decimal 1948–1950, RG 218, National Archives, College Park, MD; Bradley to Clay, June 28, 1948, Ibid. 37. R. D. Coleridge to Gruenther, June 30, 1948, Ibid.; MemCon, Marshall, and Sir Oliver S. Franks, July 14, 1948, Ibid.; MemCon, Leahy, Vandenberg, Bradley, Moore, et al., June 30, 1948, Ibid. 38. Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS) 1948, 2:890, 896– 897, 899–900. 39. See particularly Raymond L. Garthoff, Deterrence and the Revolution in Soviet Military Doctrine (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1990), 6–28. 40. Pravda, September 25, 1946. 41. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 224–252; Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 75–76; Honoré M. Catudal, Soviet Nuclear Strategy from Stalin to Gorbachev: A Revolution in Soviet Military and Political Thinking (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1988), 31–35. 42. Quoted in Shu Guang Zhang, “Between ‘Paper’ and ‘Real Tigers’: Mao’s View of Nuclear Weapons,” Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy since 1945, edited by John Lewis Gaddis, Philip H. Gordon, Ernest R. May, and Jonathan Rosenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 198. 43. Quoted in John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 6. 44. Quoted in Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 190. 45. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 224. 46. Vladislav M. Zubok, “Stalin and the Nuclear Age,” in Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb, edited by John Lewis Gaddis, Philip H. Gordon, Ernest R. May, and Jonathan Rosenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 42.

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Notes 47. Stephen J. Zaloga, Target America: The Soviet Union and the Strategy Arms Race, 1945–1964 (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993), 11. 48. Gaddis, We Now Know, 93. 49. Pavel Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), 119. 50. Zubok, “Stalin and the Nuclear Age,” 43. 51. Ibid., 44. 52. Personal notes of I. V. Kurchatov, reproduced and translated in Cold War International History Project Bulletin (hereafter CWIHP), 4 (Fall 1994): 5; Vladislav Zubok, “Atomic Espionage and its Soviet ‘Witnesses’,” Ibid., 52; Gennady Gorelick with Antonina W. Bouis, The World of Andrei Sakharov: A Russian Physicist’s Path to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 104–112. 53. Quoted in David Holloway, “Entering the Nuclear Arms Race: The Soviet Decision to Build the Atomic Bomb,” Social Studies of Science (May 1981): 159–197. 54. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 222–223; Gorelick, The World of Andrei Sakharov, 104–112. 55. Zubok, “Stalin and the Nuclear Age,” 39, 45. 56. Jennifer G. Mathers, The Russian Nuclear Shield from Stalin to Yeltsin (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 4–5. 57. Zubok, “Stalin and the Nuclear Age,” 53. 58. Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 100–152. 59. Quoted in Herken, The Winning Weapon, 6. 60. Quoted in Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, 100. 61. Ibid., 103, 107. 62. Ibid., 100–153. 63. Ibid., 100, n. 2. 64. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 255–257. 65. Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, 103–104. 66. Ibid., 104. 67. Melvyn P. Leffler, “Bush’s Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy (September/ October 2004): 22–27. 68. Gaddis, We Now Know, 89. 69. Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2002,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 58, 6 (November/December 2002): 103–104. 70. Joseph Cirincione, “Lessons Lost,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 6 (November/December 2005): 47. 71. Millis, The Forrestal Diaries, 451ff. 72. Lawrence J. Korb, The Joint Chiefs of Staff: The First Twenty-Five Years (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), 102. 73. Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Atomic Shield: 1947–1952 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); George H. Quester, Nuclear Diplomacy: The First Twenty-Five Years, second edition (New York: Dunellon, 1973), 69; Warner R. Schilling, “The H-Bomb Decision: How to Decide without Really Choosing,” Political Science Quarterly 76, 1 (March 1961): 24–46; Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,” 62–87.

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Notes 74. Albert Einstein, “Arms Can Bring No Security,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March 1950): 71. 75. Quoted in Barton J. Bernstein, “Truman and the H-Bomb,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March 1984): 13. 76. Joseph M. Siracusa, “The ‘New’ Cold War History and the Origins of the Cold War,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 47, 1 (2001): 150. 77. Truman statement, January 31, 1950, Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1950 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), 138. 78. Quoted in David Alan Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,” : 62. 79. Ibid. 80. NSC 68 “U.S. Objectives and Programs for National Security,” April 14, 1950, FRUS 1950, 1:248. See Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 265–314; Joseph M. Siracusa, Into the Dark House: American Diplomacy and the Ideological Origins of the Cold War (Claremont, CA: Regina, 1998), 57–90. 81. Siracusa, Into the Dark House, 213. 82. Raymond Aron, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, translated by Christine Booker and Norman Stone (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 322. 83. P. A. Karber and F. A. Combs, “The United States, NATO, and the Soviet Threat to Western Europe: Military Estimates and Policy Options, 1945–1963,” Diplomatic History 22, 3 (1998): 399–429; Raymond L. Garthoff, “Estimating Soviet Military Force Levels: Some Light on the Past,” International Security 14, 4 (1990): 93–116; Siracusa, Into the Dark House, 57, 61–62. 84. Edward Teller, “How Dangerous are Atomic Weapons?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (February 1947): 35–36. 85. Norman Moss, Men Who Play God: The Story of the H-bomb and How the World Came to Live with It (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 218. 86. Marc Trachtenberg, ed., Development of American Strategic Thought, 6 vols. (New York: Garland, 1988), Vol. 4, 444 87. Andrew P. N. Erdmann, “‘War No Longer Has Any Logic Whatever’: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Thermonuclear Revolution,” in Gaddis, et al., Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb, 87–119. 88. Lawrence Freedman, “I Exist; Therefore I Deter,” International Security 13 (1988): 177–195.

CHAPTER 2 1. Lorna Arnold, Britain and the H-Bomb (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 19. 2. Hennessey, The Secret State, 51; Arnold, Britain and the H-Bomb, 20; K. K. Pathak, Nuclear Policy of India: A Third World Perspective (New Delhi: Gitanjali Prakashan, 1980), 208. 3. Quoted in Hennessy, The Secret State, 46. 4. Siracusa, Into the Dark House, 31–56. 5. Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 79.

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Notes 6. Gowing, Independence and Deterrence, 405–406; Lawrence Freedman, Martin Navias, and Nicholas Wheeler, Independence in Concert: The British Rationale for Possessing Strategic Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear History Program, Occasional Paper 5, Center for International Security Studies at Maryland School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, 1989. 7. Gowing, Independence and Deterrence, 1; Jonathan Rosenberg, “Before the Bomb and After: Winston Churchill and the Use of Force,” in Gaddis, et al., Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb, 177–180. 8. Twigge and Scott, Planning Armageddon, 35; Kimberley Gail Johnston, “Not Equal Partners: Anglo-American Nuclear Relations, 1940–1958,” Dissertation, University of Queensland, 2001. 9. Twigge and Scott, Planning Armageddon, 22, 28–29. 10. Gowing, Independence and Deterrence, 1: 63ff. 11. The Times (London), September 26, 1947. 12. Quoted in Twigge and Scott, Planning Armageddon, 68. 13. Quoted in John Slessor, Strategy for the West (New York: William Morrow, 1954), 75. 14. Ibid., 107; Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 79–80. 15. Sir John Slessor, “The Place of the Bomber in British Strategy,” International Affairs 29, 3 (July 1953): 302–303. 16. Slessor, Strategy for the West. 17. Quoted in Twigge and Scott, Planning Armageddon, 68–69. 18. Hennessy, The Secret State, 55. 19. Memorandum of Conversation of the Special Committee of the National Security Council on Atomic Energy, January 16, 1952, FRUS 1952–54, 2:854. 20. Snyder, “The ‘New Look’ of 1953,” 386. 21. Snyder, “The ‘New Look’ of 1953,” 388. 22. Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). 23. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 456–463; Snyder, “The ‘New Look’ of 1953”; Robert S. Jordon, Norstad: Cold War NATO Supreme Commander: Airman, Strategist, Diplomat (London: St. Martin’s, 2000), 84. 24. David Clay Large, Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 25. Bundy, Danger and Survival, 246. 26. Richard M. Leighton, Strategy, Money, and the New Look, 1953–1956 (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2001), 184. 27. Eisenhower to Dulles, April 15, 1952, quoted in Douglas Kinnard, President Eisenhower and Strategy Management: A Study in Defense Politics (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1977), 11. 28. Charles J. V. Murphy, “The Eisenhower Shift: Part III,” Fortune (March 1956): 111. 29. Norman A. Graebner, The New Isolationism: A Study in Politics and Foreign Policy since 1950 (New York: Ronald Press, 1956), 97. 30. Frank Pace, Jr., “Your Army in the Atomic Age,” address in New York, May 8, 1952, Pace Papers, Box 15, Truman Library. 31. James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 474–496.

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Notes 32. Siracusa, Into the Dark House, 130–133. 33. John Foster Dulles, “A Positive Foreign Policy,” address at the World Affairs Forum of the Foreign Policy Association of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 15, 1952, Box 63, John Foster Dulles Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Library, Princeton University. 34. John Foster Dulles, “A Positive Foreign Policy,” address at the World Affairs Forum of the Foreign Policy Association of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 15, 1952, Box 63, John Foster Dulles Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Library, Princeton University. 35. Quoted in Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 139. 36. David G. Coleman, “Eisenhower and the Berlin Problem, 1953–1954,” Journal of Cold War Studies 2, 1 (Winter 2000): 3–34; Christian F. Ostermann, “The United States, the East German Uprising of 1953, and the Limits of Rollback,” Working Paper No.11, Cold War International History Project, Washington, D.C., 1994. 37. Press Conference, April 30, 1953, Public Papers of the Presidents: Diwght D. Eisenhower, 1953 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 242. 38. Press conference, April 23, 1953, Ibid., 209. 39. Arthur W. Radford, address before the National Press Club, Washington, D.C., December 14, 1953, Box 74, John Foster Dulles Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Library, Princeton University. 40. Quoted in Leighton, Strategy, Money, and the New Look, 72. 41. Quoted in Charles J. V. Murphy, “The Eisenhower Shift: Part III,” Fortune (March 1956): 112. See also Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 42. Address by Pace in Akron, Ohio, May 20, 1950, Frank Pace, Jr., Papers, Box 15, Speeches 1950, HSTL. 43. State of the Union Message, February 2, 1953, Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 12–34. 44. Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 366. 45. See Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans (New York: Doubleday, 1951). 46. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The New Isolationism,” The Atlantic (May 1952). 47. The shroud of secrecy placed over military plans regarding atomic weapons became a constant source of complaint for successive directors of the Bureau of the Budget. See, for example, James E. Webb to Truman, July 22, 1948, PSF, Box 174, Subject, NSC—Atomic, Atomic Energy-Budgets, HSTL; Frank Pace, Jr., to Truman, April 5, 1949, Ibid.; Frank Pace, Jr., to Truman, May 19, 1949, Ibid. 48. Truman to Brien McMahon, January 28, 1952, PSF, Box 174, Subject, NSC—Atomic, Atomic Energy-Budgets, HSTL. 49. Tim Kane, Troop Deployment Dataset, 1950–2003, The Heritage Foundation, Center for Data Analysis, October 2004. At http://www.heritage.org/Research/ NationalSecurity/cda04-11.cfm.

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Notes 50. Snyder, “The ‘New Look’ of 1953,” 402–403. 51. Raymond L. Garthoff, Assessing the Adversary: Estimates by the Eisenhower Administration of Soviet Intentions and Capabilities (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991), 13–14. 52. Thomas K. Finletter Speech, West Point, June 3, 1952, Finletter Papers, Box 13, Truman Library. 53. Brien McMahon, “Atomic Weapons and Defense,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 7, 10 (October 1951): 297. 54. Robert Gilpin, American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 124. 55. Lawrence J. Korb, The Joint Chiefs of Staff: The First Twenty-Five Years (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), 100–103. 56. Charles V. J. Murphy, “The Eisenhower Shift: Part III,” Fortune (March 1956): 112. 57. Richard H. Rovere, “Letter from Washington,” The New Yorker (December 6, 1952): 171. 58. Glenn H. Snyder, “The ‘New Look’ of 1953,” in Warner P. Schilling, Paul Y. Hammond, and Glenn H. Snyder, Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 389. 59. Quoted in Norman A. Graebner, The New Isolationism: A Study in Politics and Foreign Policy since 1950 (New York: Ronald Press, 1956), 132. 60. Charles J. V. Murphy, “The Eisenhower Shift: Part III,” Fortune (March 1956): 110. 61. David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” International Security 7, 4 (Spring 1983): 3–11. 62. Leighton, Strategy, Money, and the New Look, 1953–1956, 66. 63. Ibid., 65. 64. Quoted in Ibid., 68. 65. Ibid., 81. 66. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 130. 67. Department of Defense, Semiannual Report of the Secretary of Defense, January 1 to June 30, 1953 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), 2, 34; Department of Defense, Semiannual Report of the Secretary of Defense, January 1 to June 30, 1954 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954), 3. 68. Charles J. V. Murphy, “The Eisenhower Shift: Part III,” Fortune (March 1956): 234. 69. Leighton, Strategy, Money, and the New Look, 82. 70. Francis J. Gavin, “Politics, Power, and U.S. Policy in Iran, 1950–1953,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, 1 (1999): 56–89. 71. Raymond L. Garthoff, Assessing the Adversary: Estimates by the Eisenhower Administration of Soviets Intentions and Capabilities (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991), 4–5. 72. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 253ff; Norris and Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2003,” 103–104. 73. Thomas K. Finletter, Power and Policy: U.S. Foreign Policy and Military Power in the Hydrogen Age (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954), 26.

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Notes 74. Steven J. Zaloga, Target America: The Soviet Union and the Strategic Arms Race, 1945–1964 (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993), 63–74. 75. Ritchie to Pearson, October 5, 1953, quoted in Buckley, Canada’s Early Nuclear Policy, 111. 76. Quoted in Leighton, Strategy, Money, and the New Look, 168. 77. Raymond L. Garthoff, Assessing the Adversary: Estimates by the Eisenhower Administration of Soviet Intentions and Capabilities (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991), 8–9. 78. Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (New York: HarperCollins, 1982). 79. Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 161. 80. Murray Kempton, “The Underestimation of Dwight D. Eisenhower,” Esquire 68, 2 (September 1967): 156. 81. Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 123–138; Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security Policy, 1953–1961 (London: Macmillan, 1996), 33–35. 82. Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security Policy, 43. 83. Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 128–138; Leighton, Strategy, Money, and the New Look, 1953–1956, 184–204. 84. Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security Policy, 42. 85. Leighton, Strategy, Money, and the New Look, 195. 86. Snyder, “The ‘New Look’ of 1953,” 425. 87. Ibid., 433. 88. John Foster Dulles, “The Evolution of Foreign Policy,” Department of State Bulletin 30 (January 25, 1954). 89. Nixon’s radio broadcast, March 13, 1954, quoted in New York Times, March 14, 1954. 90. Paul Peeters, Massive Retaliation: The Policy and Its Critics (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959), x. 91. Thomas K. Finletter, Power and Policy: U.S. Foreign Policy and Military Power in the Hydrogen Age (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), 146. 92. Quoted in Norman A. Graebner, The New Isolationism: A Study in Politics and Foreign Policy since 1950 (New York: Ronald Press, 1956), 234. 93. Denis Healey, “The Bomb that Wouldn’t Go Off,” Encounter 5, 1 (July 1955): 5–6. 94. Several documents related to Attlee’s visit have recently been made available online by the National Security Archive at http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/ NSAEBB/NSAEBB159/. 95. Lester Pearson to Dulles, December 4, 1950, quoted in Brian Buckley, Canada’s Early Nuclear Policy: Fate, Chance, and Character (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2000), 89. 96. Richard H. Rovere, “Letter from Washington: November 26,” The New Yorker (December 6, 1952): 175–176. 97. New York Times, December 15, 1952. 98. Bundy, Danger and Survival, 239–241. 99. Eisenhower, The White House Years, 1:181. 100. Robert S. Norris, William M. Arkin, and William Burr, “Where They Were,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 55, 6 (November/December 1999): 35–36.

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Notes 101. Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 164–167. 102. Mark A. Ryan, Chinese Attitudes toward Nuclear Weapons: China and the United States during the Korean War (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989); Bundy, Danger and Survival, 239–245; Roger Dingman, “Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War,” in Nuclear Diplomacy and Crisis Management, edited by Sean M. Lynn-Jones, et al., (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 127; William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 67; Rosemary J. Foot, “Nuclear Coercion and the Ending of the Korean War,” International Security 13, 3 (Winter 1988–1989): 92–112; Lewis and Xue, China Builds the Bomb, 13–16. 103. Douglas Kinnard, President Eisenhower and Strategy Management: A Study in Defense Politics (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1977), 4. 104. Coral Bell, Dependent Ally: A Study in Australian Foreign Policy (Melbourne: Allen & Unwin, 1993), 52. See also, Siracusa, Into the Dark House, 128–133; Joseph M. Siracusa and Yeong-Han Cheong, America’s Australia– Australia’s America (Claremont, CA: Regina, 1997), 26–34. 105. Quoted in Matthew Jones, “The Radford Bombshell: Anglo-AustralianU.S. Relations, Nuclear Weapons and the Defense of South East Asia, 1954–1957,” Journal of Strategic Studies 27, 4 (December 2004): 654. 106. Jones, “The Radford Bombshell,” 642. 107. Norman A. Graebner, The New Isolationism: A Study in Politics and Foreign Policy since 1950 (New York: Ronald Press, 1956), 155. 108. Quoted in Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1973), 194. 109. Jones, “The Radford Bombshell,” 641. 110. Quoted in Ibid., 651. 111. FRUS 1952–54, 2 : 805–806. 112. Lauris Norstad, SACEUR’s Briefing of NATO Council at SHAPE, January 26, 1961, Lauris Norstad Papers, Subject Series, Box 107, NAC Meetings (3), Eisenhower Library. 113. Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace, 158. 114. Quoted in Ibid., 159. 115. Roger Speed and Michael May, “Dangerous Doctrine,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 2 (March/April 2005) : 38–49. CHAPTER 3 1. Pearson to St. Laurent, February 2, 1954, quoted in Buckley, Canada’s Early Nuclear Policy, 116. 2. Quoted in Alastair Buchan, “Toward a New Strategy of Graduated Deterrence,” The Reporter (December 1, 1955): 26. 3. MemCon, 309th Meeting of the NSC, January 11, 1957, FRUS 1955–1957, 19: 409. 4. Senator Herbert Lehman (D-NY), April 12, 1954, quoted in Paul Peeters, Massive Retaliation: The Policy and its Critics (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1959), 79.

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Notes 5. New York Times, August 9, 1953, 1; Washington Post, August 11, 1953, 1. For a summary of reaction from British newspapers, see New York Times, August 10, 1953. 6. New York Times, August 13, 1953, 4; Washington Post, August 14, 1953, 47. 7. New York Times, August 20, 1953. 8. Quoted in Leighton, Strategy, Money, and the New Look, 125. 9. FRUS, 1952–1954, 2 (Part1): 460–463. See also, Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill.” 10. NSC 5440, December 14, 1954, FRUS 1952–1954, 2: 808–890. 11. Sharon Ghamar-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 50. 12. Zaloga, Target America, 144–145. 13. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americas: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973); Paul Dickson, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (New York: Walker, 2001). 14. Paul Dickson, Sputnik: Shock of the Century (New York: Walker, 2001); Zaloga, Target America, 145–148. 15. Quoted in Leighton, Strategy, Money, and the New Look, 114. 16. Joseph T. Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs: Canada, the United States, and the Origins of North American Air Defence, 1945–1958 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987). 17. The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 14– 34. 18. George Gallup, Washington Post, August 13, 1953, 21. 19. Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1945–1947 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Herbert York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, & The Superbomb (San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman, 1976). 20. See particularly Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon; Herken, Counsels of War; Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 21. William W. Kaufmann, “The Requirements of Deterrence,” Memorandum Number Seven, Center for International Studies, Princeton University, November 15, 1954. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. See also Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, 186–194. 24. William W. Kaufmann, “Force and Foreign Policy,” in Military Policy and National Security, edited by William. W. Kaufmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 237; Herken, Counsels of War, 88–90. 25. Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, 97. 26. Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, 99. 27. Albert Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Foreign Affairs 37, 2 (January 1959): 211–234. 28. Ibid., 211. 29. Ibid., 213. 30. Norstad address in London, February 11, 1957, Lauris Norstad Papers, Box 92, Eisenhower Library.

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Notes 31. Vojtech Mastney and Malcolm Byrne, eds., Cardboard Castle?: An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005). 32. New York Times, September 17, 1952. 33. Meeting between President Kennedy and President Eisenhower, September 10, 1962, The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, vols. 1–3, The Great Crises, edited by Philip D. Zelikow, Ernest R. May, and Timothy J. Naftali (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 2:120. 34. Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 1:248. 35. Thomas K. Finletter, Power and Policy: U.S. Foreign Policy and Military Power in the Hydrogen Age (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), 144. CHAPTER 4 1. Denis Healey, “The Bomb That Didn’t Go Off,” Encounter 5, 1 (July 1955): 6. 2. Press conference, March 23, 1955, Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1955. 3. Dulles, quoted in Paul Peeters, Massive Retaliation: The Policy and Its Critics (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1959), 99. 4. Adlai Stevenson, March 6, 1954, quoted in Ibid., 99. 5. Alastair Buchan, “Toward a New Strategy of Graduated Deterrence,” The Reporter (December 1, 1955): 26–27. 6. Healey, “The Bomb That Didn’t Go Off,” 5. 7. Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957). 8. Buzzard, Anthony W. “Massive Retaliation and Graduated Deterrence,” World Politics 8, 2 (January 1956): 228–237; Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 112–113. 9. Tim Kane, “Troop Deployment Dataset, 1950–2003,” The Heritage Foundation, Center for Data Analysis, October 2004 at http://www.heritage.org/Research/ NationalSecurity/cda04-11.cfm. 10. Memorandum of the conversation with the President, May 24, 1956, quoted in Jane E. Stromseth, The Origins of Flexible Response: NATO’s Debate Over Strategy in the 1960s (New York: St. Martin’s 1988), 15–16. 11. Ibid., 16–17. 12. New York Times, January 5, 1959, 5. 13. New York Times, January 27, 1959, 1. 14. New York Times, January 27, 1959, 1. 15. Quoted in James L. Binder, Lemnitzer: A Soldier for His Time (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1997), 237–238. 16. Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace. 17. Robert Bowie, “The North Atlantic Nations Tasks for the 1960’s: A Report to the Secretary of State,” August 1960, Lauris Norstad Papers, Box 98, Eisenhower Library. 18. Ivo H. Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response: NATO Strategy and Theater Nuclear Forces since 1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1.

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Notes 19. Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategy Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration (Berkely, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 25; Thomas J. Schoenbaum, Waging Peace and War: Dean Rusk in the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 328–329. 20. Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert S. McNamara (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1992), 112. 21. Robert D. Novak, “Kennedy’s Braintrust,” Wall Street Journal, August 1, 1960, 1. 22. See Shapley, Promise and Power. 23. Ibid.; Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy, 2–3. 24. Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy. 25. Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961–1969 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy, 168–203. 26. Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1961, 229. 27. Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 603. 28. Quoted in Scott D. Sagan, Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 29. 29. NIE 11-8/1-61, “Strength and Deployment of Soviet Long Range Ballistic Missile Forces,” September 21, 1961, National Security Archive, Digital Collection, Soviet Estimate. 30. Shapley, Promise and Power, 144. 31. Ibid., 143. 32. See David G. Coleman, “‘The Greatest Issue of All’: Berlin, American National Security, and the Cold War,” Dissertation, University of Queensland, 2002. 33. Fred Kaplan, “JFK’s First Strike Plan,” The Atlantic Monthly (October 2001). 34. Ironically, Robert Bowie had used the supposed appeal of a “flexible response” type posture to the NATO allies as a key persuasive point for Dulles. Andrew P. N. Erdmann, “The Intellectual and Bureaucratic Origins of Flexible Response: The Policy Planning Staff, 1953–1961,” Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Princeton University, June 25, 1999. 35. Raymond Aron, The Great Debate (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 215. 36. Stromseth, Origins of Flexible Response. 37. Francis J. Gavin, Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958–1971 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 38. Stromseth, Origins of Flexible Response. 39. For Kennedy’s July 25, 1961, nationally televised speech, see Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1961 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office), 442–444. 40. Bundy to the President, July 21, 1961, NSF, Box 318, Index of Weekend Papers, Kennedy Library. 41. Kaplan, “JFK’s First-Strike Plan.” See Chapter 6. 42. On Kennedy and the Berlin crisis, see particularly Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace, 283–351; Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 45–122.

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Notes 43. For some of the best recent scholarship on the crisis, see Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, concise edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002); Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd edn. (New York: Longman, 1999); Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 225–237. 44. Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, 235–260. 45. Robert S. McNamara, with Brian VanDeMark, In Restrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times, 1995), 338. 46. The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, 3: 33–35. 47. Erin R. Mahan, Kennedy, de Gaulle, and Western Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 67–84. 48. Meeting on the Defense Budget, December 5, 1962, The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, Vol. 5, edited by David Coleman and Marc Selverstone (New York: W. W. Norton, forthcoming). CHAPTER 5 1. Robert S. McNamara, “Apocalypse Soon,” Foreign Policy (May/June 2005): 28. 2. Meeting on the Defense Budget, December 5, 1962, The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, Vol. 5, edited by David Coleman and Marc Selverstone (New York: W. W. Norton, forthcoming. 3. Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, edited and translated by Strobe Talbott (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1970), 519. 4. Francis J. Gavin, Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958–1971 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Gregory F. Treverton, The Dollar Drain and American Forces in Germany (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978). 5. McNamara’s testimony to the House Committee on Armed Services, January 30, 1963, Armed Services Papers, 1963–1964, 4 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), 415. 6. Ball, Politics and Force Levels, 81. 7. Robert A. Lovett to the Executive Secretary of the NSC, December 11, 1951, PSF, Subject, National Security Council—Atomic, Atomic Energy-Expansion of the Atomic Program, Truman Library. 8. MemCon, January 26, 1956, FRUS 1955–1957, 20: 297. 9. Norris and Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2002,” 103– 104. 10. Author’s interview with James R. Schlesinger, September 29, 2005, Arlington, VA. 11. Ball, Politics and Force Levels, xxi. 12. Ibid., 43. 13. Ibid., 44. 14. Norris and Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2002,” 103–104. 15. Ibid.

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Notes 16. Scott D. Sagan, “SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy,” International Security 12, 1 (Summer 1987): 25. 17. Norris and Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2002.” 18. Joseph Cirincione, Jon Wolfsthal, and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Threats, second edition (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), 8. 19. Norris and Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2002”; Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “French Nuclear Forces, 2005,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 4 (July/August 2005), 73–75; Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2003,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 59, 6 (November/December 2003): 77–80. 20. Robert C. Albright, “‘Hill’ Will Revolve Around Sputnik,” Washington Post, November 17, 1957, E1. 21. James Reston, March 2, 1958, quoted in Peeters, Massive Retaliation, 142. 22. Washington Post, November 9, 1957; Washington Post, November 18, 1957. 23. Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2003,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 59, 6 (November/December 2003): 77–80. 24. Sherman Kent to Acting Director (Gen. Carter), “Changes in National Intelligence Estimates on Soviet ICBM Forces,” September 10, 1962, NSF, Box 298, Missile Gap 2/63-5/63, JFKL. 25. Presidential News Conference, June 5, 1957, The Public Papers of the Presidents: 1959. 26. State of the Union Message, January 9, 1958, The Public Papers of the Presidents: 1958. 27. Peeters, Massive Retaliation, 135–136. 28. Gates’s testimony to the House Appropriations Committee, 1960, quoted in Robert McNamara to President Kennedy, “The Missile Gap Controversy,” March 4, 1963, NSF, Box 298, Missile Gap 2/63-5/63, Kennedy Library. 29. Secretary McElroy’s testimony at the Hearings on Department of Defense Appropriations for 1960, January 23, 1959 (cited on p. 50). 30. Statement of Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy before the Subcommittee on Department of Defense Appropriations of the House Committee on Appropriations on the Fiscal Year 1959 Defense Budget, June 27, 1958 (cited on p. 6). 31. Statement of Secretary of Defense Thomas S. Gates before the Subcommittee on Department of Defense Appropriations of the House Committee on Appropriations for the Fiscal Year 1961 Defense Budget, January 13, 1960 (cited on p. 7). 32. Symington to Louis Johnson, November 8, 1949, PSF, Box 175, Subject, NSC-Atomic, Atomic Energy: Russia, Truman Library. 33. Jack Raymond, “Juggling of Missile Data is Charged by Symington,” New York Times, January 28, 1960, 1. 34. Quoted in Ball, Politics and Force Levels, 16. 35. Ford Eastman, “Kennedy Creates Defense Planning Group,” Aviation Week and Space Technology (September 5, 1960): 29. 36. Sorensen, Kennedy, 676; John L. Helgerson, CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952–1992 (Washington, D.C.: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1996), 56.

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Notes 37. Patrick Donaghy, “The New Frontier: An Exclusive Interview with Senator John F. Kennedy,” Catholic World (November 1960). 38. Dean Acheson, Power and Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 37. 39. Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1960, 776. 40. Meeting on the Defense Budget, December 5, 1962, The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, Vol. 5. 41. John L. Helgerson, Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952–1992 (Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1996), 57. 42. SNIE 11–10–57, “The Soviet ICBM Program,” December 10, 1957, National Security Archive, Digital Collection, Soviet Estimate. 43. NIE 11–8-1959, “Soviet Capabilities for Strategic Attack Through Mid1964,” February 9, 1960, Ibid. 44. Quoted in Helgerson, Getting to Know the President, 57. 45. Nikita S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, edited and translated by Strobe Talbott (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1970), 517. 46. Ibid., 516. 47. David M. Glantz, The Military Strategy of the Soviet Union: A History (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 172–173. 48. Dale R. Herspring, The Soviet High Command, 1967–1989: Personalities and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 32. See also Robert Dickson Crane, ed., Soviet Nuclear Strategy: A Critical Appraisal (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic Studies, Georgetown University, 1963); Glantz, The Military Strategy of the Soviet Union, 173–180; Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne, eds., Cardboard Castle?: An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005); Zaloga, Target America, 107ff; Robbin F. Laird and Dale R. Herspring, The Soviet Union and Strategic Arms (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984). 49. David M. Glantz, The Military Strategy of the Soviet Union: A History (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 188–189. 50. Laird and Herspring, The Soviet Union and Strategic Arms, 9. 51. See, for example, Crane, ed., Soviet Nuclear Strategy. 52. Condoleezza Rice, The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948– 1983: Uncertain Allegiance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 93–96. 53. Matthias Uhl, “Nuclear Warhead Delivery Systems for the Warsaw Pact, 1961–1965: Documents from the Russian State Archives of Economics and the German Federal Military Archives of the Reorganization and Modernization of the Armed Services of the Soviet Bloc,” Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact Paper, September 2002, Parallel History Project, at http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/documents/collection 8/texts/intro.htm. 54. CIA, NIE 12–65, “Eastern Europe and the Warsaw Pact,” August 26, 1965, Parallel History Project, at http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/documents/collection 7/ docs/nbb36 1.pdf. 55. John Erickson, “The Ground Forces in Soviet Military Policy,” Strategic Review 6 (Winter 1978): 66, 72, 75; Rice, The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 96.

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Notes 56. The Military Balance, 1974–1975 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1974), 73. 57. Uhl, “Nuclear Warhead Delivery Systems for the Warsaw Pact, 1961– 1965.” 58. Mastny and Byrne, A Cardboard Castle?. 59. John Prados, The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelligence Analysis and Russian Military Strength (New York: Dial, 1982), 104–05. 60. Kaplan, “JFK’s First Strike Plan.” 61. Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War (New York: Scribner, 1992); 62. FRUS 1958–1960, 3. 63. Ball, Politics and Force Levels, 26–27. 64. Ibid., 39–40. 65. Enthoven, quoted in Stromseth, The Origins of Flexible Response, 56. 66. Eisenhower address, January 17, 1961, The Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, 1035–1040. 67. Robert J. Watson, Into the Missile Age, 1956–1960 (Washington, DC: Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1997), 243–292. 68. Korb, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, 95. 69. John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allan Nevins (New York: Harper, 1960), 184. 70. Rockefeller Brothers Fund, International Security: The Military Aspect (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 58. 71. Enthoven and Smith, How Much is Enough?, 11. 72. Fred Kaplan, “The Doctrine Gap,” Slate.com, July 6, 2005, at http://www.slate.com/id/2122010/. 73. Robert S. McNamara, 20 April 1963. 74. Enthoven and Smith, How Much is Enough?, 2. 75. Ibid., 197. 76. David Alan Rosenberg, “U.S. Nuclear War Planning, 1945–1960,” in Strategic Nuclear Targeting, edited by Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 45. 77. For a comprehensive study on the making of the SIOP, see Desmond Ball, “The Development of the SIOP, 1960–1983,” in Ibid., 57–83. 78. Quoted in Sagan, Moving Targets, 25. 79. Quoted in Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill,” 8. 80. Ibid., 3; Watson, Into the Missile Age, 473–495. 81. William Burr, “The Nixon Administration, the ‘Horror Strategy,’ and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969–1972: Prelude to the Schlesinger Doctrine,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, 3 (Summer 2005): 34–78. 82. Sagan, Moving Targets, 25. 83. Bundy to Kennedy, July 8, 1961, NSF, Box 81, Germany, Berlin, General, Kennedy Library. 84. Memorandum of Conversation of the Special Committee of the NSC on Atomic Energy, January 16, 1952, PSF, Box 174, Subject, National Security CouncilAtomic, Atomic Energy-Expansion of the Atomic Energy Program, Truman Library.

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Notes 85. Maxwell D. Taylor, The Uncertain Trumpet (New York: Harper, 1960), 158. See also Ball, Politics and Force Levels, 81. 86. Ball, “The Development of the SIOP, 1960–1983,” 62. 87. Meeting on the Defense Budget, December 5, 1962, The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, Vol. 5.

CHAPTER 6 1. Macmillan minute for Sandys, M.521(59, December 24, 1959, PREM 11(2945, National Archives of the U.K (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO). 2. Robert A. Doughty, et al., Limited Warfare in the Nuclear Age (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1996), 23. 3. Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy; Morton H. Halperin, Limited War in the Nuclear Age (New York: John Wiley, 1963). 4. Raymond L. Garthoff, Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age, revised edition (New York: Praeger, 1962), 107–112. Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., and Amoretta M. Hoeber, Soviet Strategy for Nuclear War (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1979), 7–13. 5. See, for instance, at http://www.carnegieendowment.org/npp/ ballisticmissilechart.cfm. 6. Cirincione, et al., Deadly Arsenals, 83–118. 7. Ibid. 8. Morton H. Halperin, Limited War in the Nuclear Age (New York: John Wiley, 1963), 1. 9. Senator Hubert Humphrey, July 19, 1957, quoted in Peeters, Massive Retaliation, 86. 10. Nina Tannenwald, “Stigmatizing the Bomb: The Origins of the Nuclear Taboo,” International Security 29, 4 (Spring 2005): 5–49. 11. Video footage of the American Special Atomic Demolition Munition, or SADM, was broadcast by PBS in 1997. At http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ shows/russia/suitcase/. 12. Stephen M. Meyer, “Soviet Theatre Nuclear Forces, Part II: Capabilities and Implications,” Adelphi Papers 188 (London: IISS, 1983), 15; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Tactical Nuclear Weapons: European Perspectives (London: Taylor & Francis, 1978), 134, 151–152; John Erickson, “The Ground Forces in Soviet Military Policy,” Strategic Review 6 (Winter 1978): 66, 72, 75. 13. Press conference, March 16, 1954, The Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954. 14. Address to the United Nations, December 8, 1953, The Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953. 15. Position and Briefing Papers—Defense Policy, 1960 Campaign Files, Box 991, Prepresidential Papers, Kennedy Library. 16. Kennedy quoted in Philip Nash, “Bear Any Burden? John F. Kennedy and Nuclear Weapons,” in Gaddis, et al., eds., Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb, 123.

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Notes 17. See Francis Gavin, “The Myth of Flexible Response: American Strategy in Europe during the 1960s,” International History Review 23, 4 (December 2001): 847–875. 18. Meeting on the Defense Budget, December 5, 1962. 19. Off-the-record Meeting on the Military Situation in Cuba, October 29, 1962, in Naftali and Coleman, eds., Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, Vol. 4. The audio recording of this meeting is on tape 43, President’s Office Files, Presidential Recordings Collection, JFKL. 20. T. C. Schelling, “Nuclear Strategy in the Berlin Crisis,” July 5, 1961, NSF, Box 81, Germany-Berlin-General, 7/1/61-7/6/61, JFKL. 21. See Stromseth, Origins of Flexible Response, 45–46. 22. Robert S. McNamara, “Apocalypse Soon,” Foreign Policy (May(June 2005): 30. 23. Kaplan, “JFK’s First-Strike Plan.” 24. Ibid. 25. Quoted in Ibid. 26. In a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly in response to Kaplan’s article, Kaysen emphasized that he was not advocating that the plan be carried out, but that the United States should have it as an option. Kaysen later repeated that point in an interview with one of the authors. Author interview with Carl Kaysen, October 12, 2005, Cambridge, MA. 27. Quoted in Ian Clark, Limited Nuclear War: Political Theory and War Conventions (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982), 152. 28. Kaplan, “JFK’s First-Strike Plan.” 29. James Hershberg and Chen Jian, “Informing the Enemy: Sino-American Signaling and the Vietnam War, 1965,” Miller Center of Public Affairs. American Political Development Program Colloquia on Politics and History, University of Virginia, November 11, 2005. 30. McNaughton address, University of Michigan, December 19, 1962. 31. James R. Schlesinger, The Political Economy of National Security: A Study of the Economic Aspects of the Contemporary Power Struggle (New York: Praeger, 1960), 255. 32. Terry Terriff, The Nixon Administration and the Making of US Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Nolan, Guardians of the Arsenal, 117–125; Ivo H. Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response: NATO Strategy and Theater Nuclear Forces since 1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 106–158; Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, revised edition (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994), 466–467. 33. Quoted in Lynn Etheridge Davis, Limited Nuclear Options: Deterrence and the New Nuclear Doctrine, Adelphi Paper 121, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1976, 1. 34. New York Times, January 11, 1974, 6; Washington Post, January 11, 1974, A1. 35. Quoted in Terriff, The Nixon Administration and the Making of US Nuclear Strategy, 1. 36. New York Times, January 11, 1974, 6. 37. Terriff, The Nixon Administration and the Making of US Nuclear Strategy.

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Notes 38. Quoted in Laird and Herspring, The Soviet Union and Strategic Arms, 77. 39. Ibid. 40. See the documents and analyses compiled by the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact, “Taking Lyon on the Ninth Day? The 1964 Warsaw Pact Plan for Nuclear War in Europe and Related Documents,” May 23, 2000, Parallel History Project at http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/collections/coll 1. htm. 41. NATO designed these rockets as FROGs (Free Range Over Ground). See David Coleman, “The Missiles of November, December, January, February. . . . : The Tactical Nuclear Missiles in Cuba.” (forthcoming). 42. Uhl, “Nuclear Warhead Delivery Systems for the Warsaw Pact, 1961– 1965,” 4. 43. CIA, NIE 12–65, “Eastern Europe and the Warsaw Pact,” August 12, 1965, National Security Archive, Digital Collection. 44. Uhl, “Nuclear Warhead Delivery Systems for the Warsaw Pact, 1961– 1965,” 4. 45. Mastny and Byrne, eds., A Cardboard Castle? 21. 46. Ibid. 47. Quoted in Ibid., 61.

CHAPTER 7 1. A very useful synthesis of the main threads of the debate can be found in Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003). 2. The known nuclear states are: Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel. North Korea has declared itself to have the atomic bomb, but its claims have not yet been substantiated. 3. Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 412. 4. Aspin address at the National Academy of Sciences, December 7, 1993, at http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/policy/aspi1207.txt. 5. During the 1950s and 1960s, the spread of nuclear weapons was often referred to as “diffusion” and efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons as efforts toward “nondiffusion.” 6. Devin T. Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from South Asia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 184. 7. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “An Unnecessary War,” Foreign Policy (January/February 2003): 50–59. 8. Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics before and after Hiroshima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 115. 9. Sagan and Waltz, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 109. 10. Pierre Gallois, “NATO’s New Teeth,” Foreign Affairs 39, 1 (October 1960): 73. 11. Sagan, The Limits of Safety; Sagan and Waltz, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 46–87. 12. Special Message to Congress on Atomic Energy, October 3, 1945, Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1945.

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Notes 13. Susanna Schrafstetter and Stephen Twigge, Avoiding Armageddon: Europe, the United States, and the Struggle for Nuclear Nonproliferation, 1945–1970 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 13. 14. Address to the United Nations, June 14, 1946, reproduced at Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, NuclearFiles.org at http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/ key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/arms-control-disarmament/baruch-plan 1946– 06–14.htm. 15. Joseph Cirincione, “Lessons Lost,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 6 (November/December 2005): 46–47; Shrafstetter and Twigge, Avoiding Armageddon, 2–3. 16. Eisenhower’s speech to the United Nations, December 8, 1953, Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953. 17. Schrafstetter and Twigge, Avoiding Armageddon, 4. 18. See Sonny Lee, “A Made-in-America Product: Eisenhower, Atoms for Peace, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1953–1957,” Dissertation, University of Queensland, 1999. 19. Francis J. Gavin, “Blasts from the Past: Proliferation Lessons from the 1960s,” International Security 29, 3 (Winter 2004/05): 100–135; Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, 100. 20. Sagan and Waltz, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 93. 21. Gowing, Independence and Deterrence, 92–123. 22. Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace, 146ff. 23. Schrafstetter and Twigge, Avoiding Armageddon, 2. 24. George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 3; K. K. Pathak, Nuclear Policy of India: A Third World Perspective (New Delhi, Gitanjali Prakashan, 1980). In a controversial move in July 2005, the Bush administration pledged to loosen the export restrictions so that India would be able to buy American civilian nuclear parts and technology. See Jai Singh, “Bomb-Grade Bargain,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 6 (November/December 2005), 16–18. 25. Quoted in New York Times, August 1, 1991, A11. 26. Quoted in New York Times, August 1, 1991, A1. 27. Norris and Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2002,” 103–104; Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Russian Nuclear Forces, 2005,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 2 (March/April 2005): 70–72. 28. Norris and Kristensen, “Russian Nuclear Forces, 2005,” 70–72. 29. Norris and Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2002,” 103–104; Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2006,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 62, 1 (January/February 2006): 68–71. 30. Tom Wicker, “Big Tickets Revisited,” New York Times, August 29, 1991, A29. 31. Alexei G. Arbatov, “Military Reform in Russia: Dilemmas, Obstacles, and Prospects,” International Security 22, 4 (Spring 1998): 83–134; George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 542–547. 32. Robert S. Norris, William M. Arkin, and William Burr, “Where They Were,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 55, 6 (November/December 1999): 26– 35; Robert S. Norris, William M. Arkin, and William Burr, “How Much Did Japan

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Notes Know?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 56, 1 (January/February 2000): 11–13, 78–79. 33. Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe, 1954–2004,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 60, 6 (November/December 2004): 76–77. 34. Bush’s televised address to the nation, September 27, 1991, Public Papers of the Presidents: George H.W. Bush, 1991. 35. Norris and Kristensen, “U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe, 1954–2004.” 36. Bush’s televised address to the nation, September 27, 1991, Public Papers of the Presidents: George H.W. Bush, 1991. 37. Quoted in New York Times, August 1, 1991, A11. 38. Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 414–418. 39. William S. Cohen, Annual Report to the President and the Congress, 1998, at http://www.defenselink.mil/execsec/adr98/index.html. 40. William M. Arkin, “Russia Nukes the United States,” Early Warning, WashingtonPost.com, October 31, 2005, at http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/ earlywarning/2005/10/russia nukes th.html#more. 41. Stephen J. Cimbala, Nuclear Strategy in the Twenty-First Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 93. 42. Brooks’s comments during “Sixty Years of Trying to Control the Bomb,” 2005 Carnegie International Non-Prolifeartion Conference, broadcast on National Public Radio, November 8, 2005, at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=4994158. 43. David Burnham, “A Student’s Bomb Design,” New York Times, March 23, 1978, A18. 44. Joseph Cirincione, “Lessons Lost,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 6 (November/December 2005): 52 45. Robin Lodge, “Missing N-Bomb Claim Backed,” The Australian, September 24, 1997; Phil Reeves, “Lebed Stokes Up Fears over Russia’s Suitcase A-bombs,” The Independent, November 21, 1997, 14; Washington Post, September 14, 1997, A23; 46. Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Times Books, 2004), 1. 47. Robert Joseph, “Meeting the Challenges of WMD Proliferation,” Charlottesville, Virginia, December 9, 2005, at http://www.state.gov/t/us/rm/57874.htm. 48. William Langewiesche, “The Wrath of Khan,” Atlantic Monthly (November 2005). 49. State of the Union, January 29, 2002, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/ news/releases/2002/01/20020129–11.html. 50. See, for instance, Mohamed ElBaradei, “Report to the IAEA Board of Governors: Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” November 18, 2005, at http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/ Board/2005/gov2005–87.pdf. 51. Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “North Korea’s Nuclear Program, 2005,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 3 (May/June 2005): 64–67. 52. Allen Whiting, The Chinese Calculus of Deterrence: India and Indochina (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1975); Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972).

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Notes 53. Michael Krepon, Rodney W. Jones, and Ziad Haider, eds., Escalation Control and the Nuclear Option in South Asia (Washington, D.C.: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2004). 54. Strobe Talbott, “Dealing with the Bomb in South Asia,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 1999). 55. Jaswant Singh, “Against Nuclear Apartheid,” Foreign Affairs 77, 5 (September/October 1998). See also Michael Krepon, “The Stability-Instability Paradox, Misperception, and Escalation Control in South Asia,” in Escalation Control and the Nuclear Option in South Asia, edited by Krepon et al. 56. Shamshad Ahmad, “The Nuclear Subcontinent: Bringing Stability to South Asia,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 1999). 57. See Krepon, Jones, and Haider, eds., Escalation Control and the Nuclear Option in South Asia. 58. Quoted in New York Times, December 11, 2005. 59. George W. Bush’s comments at Pease Air National Guard Base, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, October 9, 2003, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/ 2003/10/20031009–9.html. 60. Condoleezza Rice’s comments on CNN, September 8, 2002, at http:// archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/08/iraq.debate/. 61. Charles Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Adviser to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD, September 30, 2004, at http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/ iraq wmd 2004/. 62. Congressional Budget Office, “Budgetary and Technical Implications of the Administration’s Plans for National Missile Defense,” April 2000, at http://www. fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/2000 r/000425-cbo-nmd.htm. 63. See Richard G. Lugar, The Lugar Survey on Proliferation Threats and Responses, Washington, D.C., June 2005.

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Selected Bibliography MANUSCRIPT ARCHIVES Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO; Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS; John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA; Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, TX; National Archives, College Park, MD; The National Archives (Public Record Office), London; National Security Archive; WGHB Archives, Boston, MA; Seeley G. Mudd Library, Princeton, NJ.

SECONDARY SOURCES Acheson, Dean. Power and Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. Adomeit, Hannes. Soviet Risk-Taking and Crisis Behavior. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982. Ahmad, Shamshad. “The Nuclear Subcontinent: Bringing Stability to South Asia.” Foreign Affairs (July/August 1999). Allison, Graham. Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. New York: Times Books, 2004. Allison, Graham and Philip Zelikow. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. 2nd edn. New York: Longman, 1999. Alperovitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power. New York: Penguin, 1985. Arbatov, Alexei G. “Military Reform in Russia: Dilemmas, Obstacles, and Prospects.” International Security 22, 4 (Spring 1998): 83–134.

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Selected Bibliography Arnold, Lorna. Britain and the H-Bomb. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Aron, Raymond. The Century of Total War. Trans. E. W. Dickes and O. S. Griffiths, London: Derek Verschoyle, 1954. ———. Clausewitz: Philosopher of War. Trans. Christine Booker and Norman Stone, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. ———. The Great Debate. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965. Ball, Desmond. Politics and Force Levels: The Strategy Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980. Ball, Desmond and Jeffrey Richelson, eds. Strategic Nuclear Targeting. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Bell, Coral. Dependent Ally: A Study in Australian Foreign Policy. Melbourne: Allen & Unwin, 1993. Bernstein, Barton J. “Truman and the H-Bomb.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March 1984). Binder, James L. Lemnitzer: A Soldier for His Time. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1997. Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americas: The Democratic Experience. New York: Random House, 1973. Botti, Timothy J. The Long Wait: The Forging of the Anglo-American Nuclear Alliance, 1945–1958. New York: Greenwood, 1987. Bowie, Robert R., and Richard H. Immerman. Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Brands, H.W., Jr. Cold Warriors: Eisenhower’s Generation and American Foreign Policy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Brodie, Bernard, ed. The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946. Buchan, Alastair. “Toward a New Strategy of Graduated Deterrence.” The Reporter (December 1, 1955). Buchan, Glenn C. How Relevant is Nuclear Strategy? A Primer for Heretics. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1985. Buchan, Glenn C., David Matonick, Calvin Shipbaugh, and Richard Mesic. Future Roles of U.S. Nuclear Forces: Implications for U.S. Strategy. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003. Buckley, Brian. Canada’s Early Nuclear Policy: Fate, Chance, and Character. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. Bundy, McGeorge. Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years. New York: Random House, 1988. Burlatsky, Fedor. Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring. Trans. Daphne Skillen. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991. Burr, William. “The Nixon Administration, the ‘Horror Strategy,’ and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969–1972: Prelude to the Schlesinger Doctrine.” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, 3 (Summer 2005): 34–78. Bush, George H.W., and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Bush, Vannevar. Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949.

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Selected Bibliography Buzzard, Anthony W. “Massive Retaliation and Graduated Deterrence.” World Politics 8, 2 (January 1956): 228–237. Catudal, Honoré M. Soviet Nuclear Strategy from Stalin to Gorbachev: A Revolution in Soviet Military and Political Thinking. Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1988. Chen Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Cimbala, Stephen J. Nuclear Strategy in the Twenty-First Century. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. Cirincione, Joseph. “Lessons Lost.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 6 (November/December 2005). Cirincione, Joseph, Jon Wolfsthal, and Miriam Rajkumar. Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Threats. 2nd edn. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005. Clark, Ian. Limited Nuclear War: Political Theory and War Conventions. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982. Cohn, Carol. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs 12 (Summer 1987): 687–718. Coleman, David G. “Eisenhower and the Berlin Problem, 1953–1954.” Journal of Cold War Studies 2, 1 (Winter 2000): 3–34. Coleman, David G. “‘The Greatest Issue of All’: Berlin, American National Security, and the Cold War.” Dissertation, University of Queensland, 2002. Cordesman, Anthony H. Terrorism, Asymmetric Warfare, and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Defending the U.S. Homeland. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Crane, Robert Dickson, ed. Soviet Nuclear Strategy: A Critical Appraisal. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic Studies, Georgetown University, 1963. Daalder, Ivo H. The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response: NATO Strategy and Theater Nuclear Forces since 1967. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Davis, Lynn Etheridge. Limited Nuclear Options: Deterrence and the New Nuclear Doctrine. Adelphi Paper 121, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1976. Dickson, Paul. Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. New York: Walker, 2001. Dingman, Roger. “Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War.” In Nuclear Diplomacy and Crisis Management, ed. Sean M. Lynn-Jones, et al. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Dobrynin, Anatoly. In Confidence. New York: Times, 1995. Dockrill, Saki. Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security Policy, 1953–1961. London: Macmillan, 1996. Donaghy, Patrick. “The New Frontier: An Exclusive Interview with Senator John F. Kennedy.” Catholic World (November 1960). Doughty, Robert A. et al. Limited Warfare in the Nuclear Age. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1996. Douglass, Joseph D., Jr., and Amoretta M. Hoeber. Soviet Strategy for Nuclear War. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1979. Duke, Simon. U.S. Defence Bases in the United Kingdom. London: Macmillan, 1987. Eastman, Ford. “Kennedy Creates Defense Planning Group.” Aviation Week and Space Technology (September 5, 1960).

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Selected Bibliography Eden, Lynn. Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Einstein, Albert. “Arms Can Bring No Security.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March 1950). Eisenhower, Dwight D. The White House Years. New York: Doubleday, 1965. Enthoven Alain C., and K. Wayne Smith. How Much is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961–1969. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Erickson, John. “The Ground Forces in Soviet Military Policy.” Strategic Review 6 (Winter 1978). Finletter, Thomas K. Power and Policy: U.S. Foreign Policy and Military Power in the Hydrogen Age. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954. Foot, Rosemary J. “Nuclear Coercion and the Ending of the Korean War.” International Security 13, 3 (Winter 1988–1989): 92–112. Forrestal, James V. The Forrestal Diaries, ed. Walter Millis. New York: Viking, 1951. Freedman, Lawrence. The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. 3rd edn. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ———. Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. Deterrence. Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2004. ———. “I Exist; Therefore I Deter.” International Security 13 (1988): 177–195. Freedman, Lawrence, Martin Navias, and Nicholas Wheeler. “Independence in Concert: The British Rationale for Possessing Strategic Nuclear Weapons.” Occasional Paper 5, Nuclear History Project, Center for International Security Studies at Maryland School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, 1989. Friedberg, Aaron L. In the Shadow of the Garrison State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Fursenko Aleksandr, and Timothy Naftali. “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Gaddis, John Lewis. The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. ———. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gaddis, John Lewis, Philip H. Gordon, Ernest R. May, and Jonathan Rosenberg. Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Gallois, Pierre. “NATO’s New Teeth.” Foreign Affairs 39, 1 (October 1960). Garthoff, Raymond L. Assessing the Adversary: Estimates by the Eisenhower Administration of Soviet Intentions and Capabilities. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991. ———. Deterrence and the Revolution in Soviet Military Doctrine. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1990. ———. Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age. Rev. edn. New York: Praeger, 1962. ———. Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan. Rev. edn. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994.

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Selected Bibliography ———. “Estimating Soviet Military Force Levels: Some Light on the Past.” International Security 14, 4 (1990): 93–116. Gavin, Francis J. Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958–1971. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. ———. “Politics, Power, and U.S. Policy in Iran, 1950–1953.” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, 1 (1999): 56–89. ———. “The Myth of Flexible Response: American Strategy in Europe during the 1960s.” International History Review 23, 4 (December 2001): 847–875. ———. “Blasts from the Past: Proliferation Lessons from the 1960s.” International Security 29, 3 (Winter 2004/05): 100–135. George, Alexander L., and Richard Smoke. Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon. The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Gilpin, Robert. American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. Glantz, David M. The Military Strategy of the Soviet Union: A History. London: Frank Cass, 1992. Goncharov, Sergei N., John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai. Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Goodman, Michael S. “British Intelligence and the Soviet Atomic Bomb, 1945– 1950.” Journal of Strategic Studies 26, 2 (June 2003): 120–151. Gorelick, Gennady, with Antonina W. Bouis. The World of Andrei Sakharov: A Russian Physicist’s Path to Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Gowing, Margaret. Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952. London: Macmillan, 1974. Graebner, Norman A. The New Isolationism: A Study in Politics and Foreign Policy since 1950. New York: Ronald Press, 1956. Greenstein, Fred I. The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader. New York: HarperCollins, 1982. Gribkov, Anatoli I., and William Y. Smith. Operation ANADYR: U.S. And Soviet Generals Recount the Cuban Missile Crisis. Chicago, IL: Edition Q, 1994. Hagerty, Devin T. The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from South Asia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Halperin, Morton H. Limited War in the Nuclear Age. New York: John Wiley, 1963. Healey, Denis. “The Bomb that Wouldn’t Go Off.” Encounter 5, 1 (July 1955). Helgerson, John L. CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952–1992. Washington, D.C.: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1996. Hennessy, Peter. The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War. Revised and updated edn. London: Penguin, 2003. Herken, Gregg. Brotherhood of the Bomb. New York: Henry Holt, 2002. ———. Counsels of War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. ———. The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980. Hershberg, James G. James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.

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Selected Bibliography Herspring, Dale R. The Soviet High Command, 1967–1989: Personalities and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Hewlett, Richard C., and Francis Duncan. Atomic Shield: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1947–1952. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. Hogan, Michael J. A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. ———. “Entering the Nuclear Arms Race: The Soviet Decision to Build the Atomic Bomb.” Social Studies of Science (May 1981): 159–197. Hoopes, Townsend. The Devil and John Foster Dulles. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1973. Jervis, Robert. “The Political Effects of Nuclear Weapons.” International Security 13, 2 (Fall 1988): 80–90. ———. Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1976. Jervis, Robert, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence. Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Jockel, Joseph T. No Boundaries Upstairs: Canada, the United States, and the Origins of North American Air Defence, 1945–1958. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987. Johnston, Kimberley Gail. “Not Equal Partners: Anglo-American Nuclear Relations, 1940–1958,” Dissertation, University of Queensland, 2001. Jones, Matthew. “The Radford Bombshell: Anglo-Australian-U.S. Relations, Nuclear Weapons and the Defense of South East Asia, 1954–1957.” Journal of Strategic Studies 27, 4 (December 2004). Jordon, Robert S. Norstad: Cold War NATO Supreme Commander: Airman, Strategist, Diplomat. London: St.. Martin’s, 2000. Kahn, Herman. On Thermonuclear War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960. Kaplan, Fred. The Wizards of Armageddon. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. ———. “JFK’s First Strike Plan.” The Atlantic Monthly (October 2001). Karber, P.A., and F.A. Combs. “The United States, NATO, and the Soviet Threat to Western Europe: Military Estimates and Policy Options, 1945–1963.” Diplomatic History 22, 3 (1998): 399–429. Kaufmann, William W., The McNamara Strategy. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. ———, ed. Military Policy and National Security. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956. ———. “The Requirements of Deterrence.” Memorandum No. 7, Center for International Studies, Princeton University, November 15, 1954. Kempton, Murray. “The Underestimation of Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Esquire 68, 2 (September 1967). Kennedy, John F. The Strategy of Peace, ed. Allan Nevins. New York: Harper, 1960. Khrushchev, Nikita. Krushchev Remembers, ed. and trans. Strobe Talbott. London: André Deutsch, 1971.

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Selected Bibliography ———. Krushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, ed. and trans. Strobe Talbott. London: André Deutsch, 1974. ———. Krushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, ed. and trans. Jerrold L. Schecter and V. Vyacheslav. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1990. Kinnard, Douglas. President Eisenhower and Strategy Management: A Study in Defense Politics. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1977. Kissinger, Henry. Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. Korb, Lawrence J. The Joint Chiefs of Staff: The First Twenty-Five Years. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976. Krepon, Michael, Rodney W. Jones, and Ziad Haider, eds. Escalation Control and the Nuclear Option in South Asia. Washington, D.C.: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2004. Laird Robbin F., and Dale R. Herspring. The Soviet Union and Strategic Arms. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984. Large, David Clay. Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Lebow, Richard Ned, and Janice Gross Stein. “Deterrence and the Cold War.” Political Science Quarterly 110, 2 (1995): 157–181. Lee, Sonny. “A Made-in-America Product: Eisenhower, Atoms for Peace, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1953–1957.” Dissertation, University of Queensland, 1999. Leffler, Melvyn P. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. ———. “Bush’s Foreign Policy.” Foreign Policy (September/October 2004): 22–27. Leighton, Richard M. Strategy, Money, and the New Look, 1953–1956. Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2001. Lennon, Alexander T.J., ed. Contemporary Nuclear Debates: Missile Defense, Arms Control, and Arms Races in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Lewis, John Wilson, and Xue Litai. China Builds the Bomb. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Maddox, Robert. Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Mahan, Erin R. Kennedy, de Gaulle, and Western Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Makhijani, Arjun. “Nuclear Targeting: The First 60 Years.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 59, 3 (May/June 2003): 60–65. Mandelbaum, Michael. The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics before and after Hiroshima. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Mastny, Vojtech. The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Mastny, Vojtech, and Malcolm Byrne, eds. Cardboard Castle?: An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005. Mathers, Jennifer G. The Russian Nuclear Shield from Stalin to Yeltsin. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.

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Selected Bibliography Maxwell, Neville. India’s China War. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972. McNamara, Robert S., with Brian VanDeMark. In Restrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times, 1995. McNamara, Robert S. “Apocalypse Soon.” Foreign Policy (May/June 2005): 28–35. Mearsheimer John J., and Stephen M. Walt. “An Unnecessary War.” Foreign Policy (January/February 2003): 50–59. Meyer, Stephen M. “Soviet Theatre Nuclear Forces, Part II: Capabilities and Implications.” Adelphi Papers 188 (London: IISS, 1983). Moss, Norman. Men Who Play God: The Story of the H-bomb and How the World Came to Live with It. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Mueller, John. “The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World.” International Security 13, 2 (Fall 1998): 55–79. Murphy, Charles J.V. “The Eisenhower Shift: Part III,” Fortune (March 1956). Nitze, Paul H. From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989. ———. “The Development of NSC 68.” International Security 4, 4 (Spring 1980): 170–176. Nixon, Richard M. Six Crises. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962. Nolan, Janne E. Guardians of the Arsenal: The Politics of Nuclear Strategy. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Norris, Robert S., and William M. Arkin. “Soviet Nuclear Testing, August 29, 1949– October 24, 1990.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 54, 3 (May/June 1998): 69–71. Norris, Robert S., and Hans M. Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945– 2002.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 58, 6 (November/December 2002): 103–104. ———. “French Nuclear Forces, 2005.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 4 (July/August 2005): 73–75. ———. “Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2003.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 59, 6 (November/December 2003): 77–80. ———. “Russian Nuclear Forces, 2005.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 2 (March/April 2005): 70–72. ———. “U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2006.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 62, 1 (January/February 2006). ———. “U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe, 1954–2004.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 60, 6 (November/December 2004). ———. “North Korea’s Nuclear Program, 2005.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 3 (May/June 2005). Norris, Robert S., William M. Arkin, and William Burr. “Where They Were.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 55, 6 (November/December 1999): 26–35. ———. “How Much Did Japan Know?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 56, 1 (January/February 2000). O’Hanlon, Michael E. Defense Policy Choices for the Bush Administration. 2nd edn. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2001. Oppenheimer, J. Robert. “American Weapons and American Foreign Policy.” Foreign Affairs 31 (July 1953). Osgood, Robert E. Limited War Revisited. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979.

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Selected Bibliography Ostermann, Christian F. “The United States, the East German Uprising of 1953, and the Limits of Rollback.” Working Paper no.11, Cold War International History Project, Washington, D.C., 1994. Pathak, K. K. Nuclear Policy of India: A Third World Perspective. New Delhi: Gitanjali Prakashan, 1980. Patterson, James T. Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Peeters, Paul. Massive Retaliation: The Policy and Its Critics. Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1959. Perkovich, George. India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. Prados, John. The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelligence Analysis and Russian Military Strength. New York: Dial, 1982. Quester, George H. Nuclear Diplomacy: The First Twenty-Five Years. 2nd edn. New York: Dunellon, 1973. Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986. ———. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Rice, Condoleezza. The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948–1983: Uncertain Allegiance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Rockefeller Brothers Fund, International Security: The Military Aspect. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Rosenberg, David Alan. “U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, 1945 to 1950.” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (May 1982): 25–30. ———. “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945– 1960.” International Security, 7 (Spring 1983): 3–71. ———. “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision.” Journal of American History, 66, 1 (June 1979): 62–87. ———. “US Nuclear Strategy: Theory vs. Practice.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (March 1987): 20–26. Ryan, Mark A. Chinese Attitudes toward Nuclear Weapons: China and the United States during the Korean War. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989. Sagan, Scott D. Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. ———. “SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy,” International Security 12, 1 (Summer 1987). Sagan, Scott D., and Kenneth N. Waltz. The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Schecter, Jerrold L., and Peter S. Deriabin. The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War. New York: Scribner, 1992. Schelling, Thomas C. The Strategy of Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. ———. Choice and Consequence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Schilling, Warner R. “The H-Bomb Decision: How to Decide without Really Choosing.” Political Science Quarterly 76, 1 (March 1961): 24–46.

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Selected Bibliography Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. “The New Isolationism.” The Atlantic (May 1952). Schlesinger, James R. The Political Economy of National Security: A Study of the Economic Aspects of the Contemporary Power Struggle. New York: Praeger, 1960. Schoenbaum, Thomas J. Waging Peace and War: Dean Rusk in the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988). Schwartz, Stephen I., ed. Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998. Schwartz, Thomas Alan. Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Shapley, Deborah. Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert S. McNamara. Boston: Little, Brown, 1992. Sherry, Michael. The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. Shlaim, Avi. “Britain, the Berlin Blockade and the Cold War.” International Affairs (London) 60, 1 (Winter 1983–1984). Shu Guang Zhang. “Between ‘Paper’ and ‘Real Tigers’: Mao’s View of Nuclear Weapons.” Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy since 1945, ed. John Lewis Gaddis, Philip H. Gordon, Ernest R. May, and Jonathan Rosenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Singh, Jai. “Bomb-Grade Bargain.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61, 6 (November/December 2005). Singh, Jaswant. “Against Nuclear Apartheid.” Foreign Affairs 77, 5 (September/October 1998). Siracusa, Joseph M. Into the Dark House: American Diplomacy and the Ideological Origins of the Cold War. Claremont, CA: Regina, 1998. ———. “The ‘New’ Cold War History and the Origins of the Cold War.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 47, 1 (2001). Slessor, John. Command and Control of Allied Nuclear Forces: A British View, Adelphi Paper no. 22, Institute for Strategic Studies (London), August 1965. ———. “The Place of the Bomber in British Strategy.” International Affairs 29, 3 (July 1953): 302–303. Smith, Alice Kimball. A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1945–1947. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Sorensen, Theodore C. Kennedy. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Spaatz, Carl. “The Era of Air Power Diplomacy.” Newsweek (September 20, 1948). Steiner, Barry H. Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991. Stern, Paul C., Robert Axelrod, Robert Jervis, and Roy Radner, eds. Perspectives on Deterrence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Steury, Donald P. “How the CIA Missed Stalin’s Bomb.” Studies in Intelligence (unclassified edition) 49, 1 (2005). Stimson, Henry L. and McGeorge Bundy. On Active Service in Peace and War. London: Hutchinson, 1948.

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Selected Bibliography Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Tactical Nuclear Weapons: European Perspectives. London: Taylor & Francis, 1978. Stromseth, Jane E. The Origins of Flexible Response: NATO’s Debate Over Strategy in the 1960s. New York: St. Martin’s 1988. Stueck, William. The Korean War: An International History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Sudoplatov, Pavel, with Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona P. Schecter. Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1994. Taft, Robert A. A Foreign Policy for Americans. New York: Doubleday, 1951. Talbott, Strobe. The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy. New York: Random House, 2002. ———. “Dealing with the Bomb in South Asia.” Foreign Affairs (March/April 1999). Tannenwald, Nina. “Stigmatizing the Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo.” International Security 29, 4 (Spring 2005): 5–49. Taylor, Maxwell D. The Uncertain Trumpet. New York: Harper, 1960. ———. Swords and Plowshares. New York: W.W. Norton, 1972. Teller, Edward. “How Dangerous are Atomic Weapons?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (February 1947): 35–36. Terriff, Terry. The Nixon Administration and the Making of US Nuclear Strategy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Trachtenberg, Marc. History and Strategy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. ———. A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. ———, ed. Development of American Strategic Thought, 6 vols. New York: Garland, 1988. Treverton, Gregory F. The Dollar Drain and American Forces in Germany. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978. Truman, Harry S. Year of Decisions, 1945. New York: Da Capo, 1955. ———. Years of Trial and Hope, 1946–52. New York: Da Capo, 1956. Twigge, Stephen, and Len Scott. Planning Armageddon: Britain, the United States and the Command of Western Nuclear Forces, 1945–1964. Amsterdam: Harwood, 2000. Walker, J. Samuel. Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Walker, Mark. German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939– 1949. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Watson, Robert J. Into the Missile Age, 1956–1960. Washington, DC: Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1997. Whiting, Allen. The Chinese Calculus of Deterrence: India and Indochina. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1975. Williamson, Samuel R., Jr., and Stephen L. Reardon. The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, 1945–1953. New York : St. Martin’s, 1993. Wohlstetter, Albert. “The Delicate Balance of Terror.” Foreign Affairs 37, 2 (January 1959).

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Selected Bibliography York, Herbert. The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb. San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman, 1976. Zagare, Frank C., and D. Marc Kilgour. Perfect Deterrence. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Zaloga, Stephen J. Target America: The Soviet Union and the Strategy Arms Race, 1945–1964. Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993.

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Index Acheson, Dean, 14–15, 26, 63, 68, 81 Adenauer, Konrad, 53, 69 Albright, Madeleine, vii Anderson, George, 96 ANZUS (Australia-New Zealand-United States) Treaty, 27, 41 Arab-Israeli War, 93 Arms race, 46–49, 73–90 Aron, Raymond, 6, 16, 60 Aspin, Les, vii, 108, 116 Atomic Energy Commission (U.S.), 20, 31 Atomic Energy Program (U.K.), 4 Atoms for Peace, 111 Attlee, Clement, 3, 20–21, 30, 53 Australia, 27, 41, 46 B-29, 8, 35 Baldwin, Hanson, 32 Baruch, Bernard, 110–111 Beria, Lavrenti, 10 Berlin Blockade, 4, 7–8 Berlin Crisis, 66–70, 98–100 Bevin, Ernest, 8

Bohlen, Charles, 12 Bowie, Robert, 56–57, 61–62 Bradley, Omar, 41 Braun, Werner von, 50, 59 Breshnev, Leonid, 75 Brewster, Owen, 4 Brodie, Bernard, 3, 17, 50–51, 62, 103 Brooks, Linton, 117 Bundy, McGeorge, 25, 62, 70–72, 87, 90, 99 Bush, George H.W., 114 Bush, George W., 94–95, 117, 119–120 Buzzard, Anthony, 58 Canada, 2 Carter, Jimmy, 91 Center for Disease Control and Prevention, xi CIA, 4, 81 Chiefs of Staff (U.K.), 22–23 China, xi, 2, 9, 27, 112, 119 Churchill, Winston, 8, 10–11, 17, 19, 22–24, 53, 58 Clay, Lucius, 8 Clifford, Clark, 102

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Index Clinton, Bill, vii, 108, 114–119 Cohen, William, 116 containment, 5 CORONA (spy satellite), 84, 99 Cuban Missile Crisis, 70–72, 92, 96, 102, 105, 108 Cutler, Robert, 29, 32 Czechoslovakia, 9

Hart, Basil Liddell, 58 Healey, Denis, 45, 56, 58 Herter, Christian, 62 Hiroshima, 5–6, 12, 14, 94 Humphrey, George M., 32 Humphrey, Hubert, 93 Hydrogen bomb: U.S., 14–20; U.S.S.R., 46–47

Deterrence: existential, 17; extended, 19–54 Dewey, Thomas, 27 Dr. Strangelove, 70 Dulles, John Foster, 25–28, 37–38, 40, 46, 50, 61, 96

India, 2, 92, 108–109, 112, 119 Indochina. See Vietnam. ICBMs, 48, 65, 73–79, 81, 84, 103–104, 113 IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), 111, 117, 119–120 Iran, 6, 34, 118, 121 Iraq, 92, 94; invasion of, 100, 115, 118, 120 Israel, 2, 92–93, 112 Italy, 6, 26, 72, 114

East Germany, 92 Eden, Anthony, 41 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 17, 21–61, 67–80, 85–87, 95–96, 100, 110–111 Enthoven, Alain, 64, 85 Finletter, Thomas, 31, 34, 53 Flexible response, 46 Forrestal, James V., 4–8, 10–11, 13, 86 France, xi, 2, 6 Frank Report, 110 Fuchs, Klaus, 10 Fulbright, J. William, 67 Gallois, Pierre, 107, 109 Gaddis, John Lewis, 1–2 Gates, Thomas, 79–80 de Gaulle, Charles, 69, 72 Germany, 2, 6, 10; Federal Republic (West Germany), 25, 83–84, 92; German Democratic Republic (East Germany), 67–70. See also Berlin Crisis; Berlin Blockade. Gorbachev, Mikhail, 105–106, 112, 114 Great Britain (see United Kingdom) Greece, 6, 26, 72, 84, 114 Groves, Leslie, 12 Gulf War (Persian), 93 Halperin, Morton, 93

Japan, 7, 10, 20, 27, 37, 43, 64, 84, 110, 114 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 106 Johnson, Louis, 13, 15, 31 Johnson, Lyndon, 80 Joint Chiefs of Staff (U.S.), 7–8, 15, 24–39, 50, 71, 75, 82–88, 98–99 Joseph, Robert, 118 Kahn, Abdul Qadeer, 118 Kahn, Herman, 50, 62, 64, 88, 103, Kaufman, William, 50–51, 62, 64, 66, 88, 99, 103 Kaysen, Carl, 99–100, 102 Kennan, George, 12, 15 Kennedy, John F., 46, 53–89, 96–100, 108 Khrushchev, Nikita, 46, 66–70, 74, 82–84, 96, 99, 105 Kissinger, Henry, 50, 58, 87, 99, 102–103 Korea, North, 16, 31, 39–40, 43, 92, 115, 118–119, 121 Korean War, 9, 16, 26–27, 29, 38–39, 53, 59, 93; armistice, 38–40 Kurchatov, Igor, 10

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Index Laird, Melvyn, 103 Lebed, Alexander, 117 Leghorn, Richard, 58 Leites, Nathan, 104 LeMay, Curtis, 64, 79, 87–88 Lemnitzer, Lyman, 61 Lenin, Vladimir, 32 Libya, 115, 118–119 Limited nuclear war, 91–106 Lippmann, Walter, 5 Looking Glass, 102 Lovett, Robert, 31, 75, Lucky Dragon, 20

Nixon, Richard, 35, 37–38, 82, 87, 103–104 Non-proliferation, 107–121 NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty), 111–112 Norstad, Lauris, 42, 52 NATO, 24–25, 42, 46, 51–53, 62, 74, 92; Berlin Crisis, 66–70; flexible response, 69 NSC 162/2, 35–37 NSC 68, 7, 15–17, 28 Nuclear testing, 20 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 14, 50

Macmillan, Harold, 66, 91 Malenkov, Georgi, 47, 49, 82 Malinovsky, Rodion, 83 Mandelbaum, Michael, 2, 109 Manhattan Project, 2, 9–14, 21, 22 Mao Zedong, 9, 13 Marshall, George C., 31 Marshall Islands, 20, 31 Massive Retaliation, 37–38, 42, 51 McElroy, Neil, 79–80 McGovern, George, 73 McMahon Act, 22 McMahon, Brien, 31 McNamara, Robert, 62–75, 81, 84–86; Athens speech, 65–66; and limited war, 97–100 McNaughton, John, 102 Mearsheimer, John, 109 Menzies, Robert, 41 Military-industrial complex, 85 Missile defense, 49. See also National Missile Defense. Missile gap, 74, 78–82 Mueller, John, 2 MIRV (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles), 75, 77 Nagasaki, 1, 5–6, 12, 20, 94–95, 107 National Missile Defense, 120–121 National Security Council (NSC), 7, 24, 47 New Look, 24–53, 59, 68 Nitze, Paul, 15, 63, 71–72, 84

Pace, Frank, Jr., 26, 29 Pakistan, 2, 84, 92, 102, 109, 112, 118–119 Pearson, Lester, 35, 39, 45, 58 Penkovksy, Oleg, 84 Policy Planning Staff (PPS), 15, 85 Preventive war, 11–14, 34, 47, 90, 100, 109–110, 112 Proliferation, 92–93 Qadafi, Muammar, 118 Radford, Arthur, 28, 36, 40–41, 47, 60 RAND Corporation, 12, 50–51, 64, 99, 103–104 Rice, Condoleezza, 107, 120 Rickover, Hyman, 103 Ridgway, Matthew, 36, 59 Ritchie, Charles, 35 Roberts, Frank, 21 Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, 94 Rockefeller Report, 85 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 10, 14, 22, 63 Rostow, Walt, 85 Rowen, Henry, 66 Rumsfeld, Donald, 85 Rusk, Dean, 62–63, 70–72 Russia, 77, 93, 112–113, 115, 116–117, 121 Saddam Hussein, 109, 120 Sagan, Scott, 110

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Index Schelling, Thomas, 97 Schlesinger, James, 88, 102–103 Schmidt, Helmut, 58 Shoup, David, 96–97 SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan), 40, 87–89, 99, 103 Slessor, John, 23–25 Smith, Walter Bedell, 4 Sokolovsky, Vasiliy, 83 Solarium Project, 35–36, 62 Southeast Asia, 41, 53, 119, 121. See also Vietnam. Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, 83 Soviet Union. See U.S.S.R. Sputnik, 48–51, 77–82, 86 Stalin, Joseph, 1, 8–12, 34 Stevenson, Adlai, 26, 37–38, 63 Strategic Air Command, 16, 42, 51, 76, 79–80, 87; alert procedures, 98, 101–102 START (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), 112 Strauss, Lewis, 20, 47 Symington, Stuart, 34, 80 systems analysis, 64, 86 Szilard, Leopold, 12

Terrorism, 27, 108, 110, 117–118 Thermonuclear revolution, 12–17 Tizard, Sir Henry, 4 Trachtenberg, Marc, 2, 2, 42 Truman, Harry, 2, 4–17, 26–34, 43, 49–53, 63, 67, 77, 86, 110 Twining, Nathan, 82, 87

Taft, Robert A., 27, 30, 32–33 Taiwan, 42–43, 46, 114 Taiwan Straits Crisis, 9 Taylor, Maxwell, 57, 59–61, 74, 88, 99–100 Teller, Edward, 14, 17

Yeltsin, Boris, 115 Yugoslavia, 6, 26

United Kingdom, 2, 5, 8, 22, 19–23, 112–114; independent deterrent, 16, 21–24, 46, 76–77; and Manhattan Project, 22 Vandenberg, Hoyt, 24, 34 Vietnam War, 30, 42, 40, 53, 56, 63, 93, 103 Walt, Stephen, 109 Warsaw Pact, 83–84, 92; war plans, 52, 104–106 White, Thomas, 60–61 Wiesner, Jerome, 84 Wilson, Charles, 33–37 Wohlstetter, Albert, 50–51, 84–85, 103 World War II, 2–3, 6

Zhukov, Georgi, 83 Zubok, Vladislav, 11 Zuckert, Eugene, 63

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About the Authors DAVID G. COLEMAN is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs where he is Deputy Director of the Presidential Recordings Program. He is a specialist on nuclear history and international foreign policy and has written extensively on nuclear policy, U.S.-German relations, cold war foreign policy, and John F. Kennedy. He is coauthor (with Joseph M. Siracusa) of Depression to Cold War. JOSEPH M. SIRACUSA is a specialist in presidential politics, diplomacy, and security issues at the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning, RMIT University, Melbourne. He is internationally known for his writings on nuclear politics, American diplomacy, and modern United States history. Dr. Siracusa is also a frequent political affairs commentator in the Australian media, including ABC Radio National. Among his numerous books are A History of United States Foreign Policy; Depression to Cold War (with David G. Coleman); and Presidential Profiles: The Kennedy Years.

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