pressed U.S. policymakers to think about the question posed in academic articles and quickly satirized in pop culture landmarks such as Dr. Strangelove: do we prefer 20 million dead or 100 million dead?
As soulless or amoral as it might appear, this kind of strategic theorizing served the necessary purpose of allowing ordinary human beings to think about extraordinary situations. Just as euphemism and scientific language assist medical doctors and other professionals in studying their specializations even as they wrestle with the heartbreaking suffering and eventual death of their charges—“pain management” and “end-of-life issues,” as they are now gently called—so too did the detached and clinical language of the new strategists enable the contemplation of conflicts of a scale that would dwarf all the wars ever fought in human history.
There was, however, both a moral and an intellectual corrosiveness to this increasingly professionalized approach to nuclear strategy. It may have been necessary to “think about the unthinkable,” but soon what was once unthinkable became an ordinary part of U.S. and Soviet national security policies. Military officers and civilian bureaucrats routinized the work of nuclear war planning, often in isolation from the rest of the defense community. This insularity, as Kaplan later wrote, allowed the nuclear theologians to avoid the reality that their efforts always led back to the same dead-end:
In the absence of any reality that was congenial to their abstract theorizing, the strategists in power treated the theory as if it were reality. For those mired in thinking about it all day, every day, in the corridors of officialdom, nuclear strategy had become the stuff of a living dreamworld. This mixture of habit, inertia, analytical convenience and fantasy was fueled by a peculiar logic as well. It was, after all, only rational to try to keep a nuclear war limited if one ever broke out…. Yet over the years, despite endless studies, nobody could find any options that seemed practical or made sense. [emphasis original]16
Much like the aridity that came to characterize too much of the social sciences after they embraced “scientific” approaches in the 1970s, so too did the analysis of nuclear strategy quickly become distanced from what policymakers could reasonably comprehend. Looking back at the various briefings and scenarios for war presented to U.S. leaders, Senator Sam Nunn later said: “You can sit around and read all the analytical stuff in the world, but once we start firing battlefield nuclear weapons, I don’t think anybody knew.”17 The theorists could pontificate and the war gamers could run their exercises, but as the numbers of weapons grew, the mathematics of nuclear war soon defied the imagination, just as the choices involved challenged the limits of moral reasoning.18
Both superpowers accelerated their acquisition of nuclear arms at remarkable rates. The United States alone managed to construct more than 30,000 weapons by 1967, only twenty-two years after the first nuclear test. The Soviet arsenal, too, was growing almost geometrically, and both sides soon commanded a host of delivery options that ranged from artillery shells to multiple-warhead ballistic missiles based on land and under the sea.
At these levels of numbers, what use were nuclear threats? Ironically, since every scenario for a major exchange led down the same path of annihilation, the U.S. and Soviet heartlands were now safer from direct assault, since neither side could chance a first strike. The sneak attack scenario feared in the 1950s—the so-called “BOOB,” or “bolt out of the blue,” attack—was no longer possible: a first-strike could neither disarm the victim nor save the attacker. The much greater complication, with North America itself now vulnerable to Soviet weapons, was not whether the United States could defend itself, but whether the Americans would risk nuclear war for their allies in NATO.
The attempt to protect one group of nations with the nuclear weapons of another is the problem of “extended deterrence.” To kill in self-defense, or in defense of the family or group, is a common human instinct. Dying for others requires overcoming the instinct for self-preservation with altruism and a notion of a greater good. It may well be, as the New Testament teaches, that there is no greater love than that “a man lay down his life for his friends,” but U.S. leaders realized early on in the Cold War that to risk the lives of entire nations and the peace of the world itself on behalf of others was a more complicated proposition, especially after the two world wars had taught humanity a bloody lesson in what the defense of alliances could mean. The Soviets might not doubt that the Americans would make a brave last stand and use nuclear weapons to protect the North American homeland. But could the United States make an equally credible nuclear threat on behalf of their friends in Europe?
The United States was in a painful bind. Washington could hardly back away from a nuclear guarantee for NATO without seeing the Alliance crumble, first politically and then militarily, under the Soviet conventional threat. There was no alternative to defending Europe, but in the face of Soviet conventional superiority, the defense of Europe was impossible without keeping nuclear weapons in play.
When the United States held a nuclear monopoly, a strategy such as Massive Retaliation could more credibly threaten to punish the Kremlin for aggression against NATO. Holding the nuclear trump card lowered the cost to the Americans of making threats on Europe’s behalf, not least because the consequences of any test of that resolve would fall almost entirely on the Soviet Union. But once the USSR obtained a secure retaliatory capability, that guarantee would now have to extend to the point of being willing to place the continental United States squarely in the Soviet nuclear crosshairs. Thus, extended deterrence was an immense gamble: it rested not on the intuitive understanding of self-defense, but increasingly on the imponderable question of whether a U.S. president would really risk trading Chicago for Bonn or New York for Paris.
Accordingly, the first order of business for U.S. strategists in the early 1960s was to scrap Massive Retaliation, ending its short tenure within only a few years of its announcement. Future U.S. presidents and their advisors would need more options to deal with a full spectrum of Soviet aggression other than the single choice of incinerating the USSR. A strategy such as Massive Retaliation could not serve the goals of extended deterrence, because it would require the Soviets to believe that an American president would be so steely—or so unhinged—that he would escalate directly from conventional hostilities in Europe to central nuclear war between the United States and the USSR. The key to strengthening the Western deterrent thus relied on showing the Soviet leaders that their American counterparts would, in effect, be left with no other way out but nuclear conflict. A new strategy would have to chart a path, one the Soviets could understand, that would credibly link a crisis to a catastrophe, and therefore induce caution in Moscow.
In order to establish the requirements for a more credible deterrent, Western thinkers began to explore the actual steps to nuclear war. In 1957, for example, Henry Kissinger published his seminal work, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, and the generation of strategists McNamara would later call upon were already working through these problems at research centers such as the RAND Corporation in California. It was at RAND that Herman Kahn first conceptualized the escalatory “ladder” described in his 1960 opus, On Thermonuclear War. Kahn’s ladder was not a guide to nuclear war itself; rather, it was a detailed examination of various steps each side might take before finding themselves, willingly or not, propelled from a cold peace to complete destruction. Each rung of the ladder, such as “limited evacuation of cities” or “barely nuclear war,” was a stop along the way toward the final step of “spasm” or “insensate” war.19 Massive Retaliation was not credible because it was a threat to make an intentional leap from the lowest rungs of the ladder of escalation to the very highest. The challenge for U.S. policymakers trying to craft a new deterrent in its place, then, was to reduce the distance between each of these rungs by inserting realistic options that did not require momentous or even irrational decisions.
Shortly after arriving in Washington, the Kennedy administration set about trying to construct a more durable U.S. deterrent, both conceptually and materially. The first trial balloon from the Kennedy White House, however, was a hopelessly optimistic “no-cities” strategy, in which Washington
