exploding nuclear weapons—some as large as five megatons—high in the atmosphere to wipe out the armada of warheads falling onto North America from space.
The Americans concluded early on that there was no way these systems could defend anything but the most hardened targets such as missile silos, and even those stood little chance of survival under most circumstances. But as Kaplan later observed, “once a few billion dollars are spent on any weapons program, the chance of stopping it from going into production is practically nil.”32 The Soviets, of course, had enough weapons to overwhelm any such defense easily, and could always build more. This early Cold War missile defense enterprise finally ended up resting on a half-hearted rationale based on stopping a putative (and at the time, nonexistent) Chinese ballistic threat. The idea was too seductive to abandon completely, but too impractical to defend with any semblance of technological seriousness. One of McNamara’s deputies casually asked him if he really wanted to make the case that the United States needed a defense against a future ICBM threat from Asia: “China bomb, Bob?” McNamara muttered in reply: “What else am I going to blame it on?”33 Eventually, the whole idea was shelved, at least for the time being.
American strategists in the late 1960s, under Lyndon Johnson and then President Richard Nixon, continued the quest to find political meaning in a strategic nuclear exchange even as they increasingly doubted whether such meaning existed. The Soviets, for their part, as disciples of both Clausewitz and Lenin, continued to insist, at least publicly, that even nuclear war would have a political character and that a meaningful victory was possible. This Soviet obstinacy was a challenge for the Americans, because a stable deterrent relationship requires that both sides have some sort of common understanding of the threat and of what each has at stake. The Americans hoped that an East-West agreement not to engage in mutual hemispheric suicide implied a more lasting foundation for cooperation and understanding between Moscow and Washington. The Soviets, however, had agreed to no such thing and were having none of it, choosing instead to regard the strategic nuclear standoff as a license to engage in various kinds of mischief so long as they avoided the risk of general war.34
MAD might have been an unarguable fact in terms of describing a strategic nuclear stalemate, but as a policy it was far more contentious. Supporters of an assured destruction doctrine would claim that all MAD was ever supposed to do was to prevent a global disaster, and that by the mid-1970s it was performing that task admirably. Critics countered that the concept had done little more than self-deter the United States from confronting an increasingly aggressive Soviet Union, and had done little to stop a dramatic expansion of Soviet power that the Kremlin itself extolled with considerable pride. For a growing number of these skeptics, MAD looked more like an unholy bargain than a guarantee of global peace.
The Countervailing Strategy and the Collapse of MAD
The 1970s were not kind to the United States. From the defeat in Vietnam to the economic shock of an oil embargo, the Americans and their NATO allies were reeling from a loss of confidence at a time when the USSR was surging in power and influence. America was retreating from its alliances and partnerships, while the Soviet presence around the world was growing rapidly. Worse, the Soviets made no pretense of caring what the United States or the hapless Europeans thought about anything. As former Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin described in his memoirs, the Soviet leadership would discuss their advances and plans in various regions without so much as a passing reference to the United States.35
Soviet adventures were difficult enough to handle while the United States enjoyed nuclear superiority, but with the arrival of Soviet-American nuclear parity, nuclear war plans were even less use to U.S. leaders in 1972 than they had been in 1962. The Pentagon, in trying to unite a number of various operational plans for each part of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, by the early 1960s had factored them all into a giant “Single Integrated Operational Plan” (SIOP) for nuclear war with the USSR, but they still envisioned horrendous amounts of destruction. President Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, were as dissatisfied with these war plans as McNamara had been before them, especially because of their inflexibility and their massive human costs. “Nixon,” historian William Burr has written, “was plainly troubled by the SIOP, especially the huge number of projected fatalities.”36
During Nixon’s second term in office, Kissinger finally ordered a complete review of strategic nuclear policy. At a meeting in summer 1973, Kissinger noted that Nixon had not been provided with any other nuclear options other than a full briefing on the SIOP “three or four years” earlier, which “did not fill him with enthusiasm.”37 The object, yet again, was to provide Nixon with more flexibility in the new conditions of Soviet parity and Mutual Assured Destruction so that he, or any U.S. president, would be able to deter the Soviets with something less than catastrophe. In a way, the new condition of parity created the old dilemmas of Massive Retaliation all over again.
The targeting process, as always, was still out of civilian control. Kissinger noted that the SIOP given to Nixon did not “distinguish between retaliation and first strike,” because it was an inflexible plan that required hitting every target in the USSR. At the outset of the 1973 meeting, Kissinger needled the Joint Chiefs representative, Vice Admiral John Weinel: “We have been discussing this topic for four years and have come to no conclusions. This is probably by JCS design.”38 (“You give us undue credit,” Weinel shot back, and Kissinger then pointedly noted that he had expected to see the JCS chairman, not a deputy, at the meeting.)
Kissinger wasn’t far wrong. As Burr points out, the Joint Chiefs had resisted coming up with more limited scenarios because they “believed that multiple options would degrade the war plan.”39 Jasper Welch, an Air Force general who was the Defense Department’s staff director for the review, protested that the Pentagon was assigning nuclear weapons to objectives according to what it thought the civilian leadership wanted: “The current SIOP calls for [nuclear] attacks on conventional forces. These have not been heavily targeted in the past because we had fewer warheads. As the MIRVs [multiple-warhead missiles] have come on line, and we get more warheads, the targets have grown. In current policy they will grow even further. SIOP is revised every six months and the planners have done what they could within the bounds of legality. I want to dispel any illusions anyone might have that there has been any lack of progress.”40 Kissinger answered, “We are not sitting in judgment here,” but there was no way around the political math: the military had been mechanically piling up targets regardless of civilian concerns. In his 1974 final report to Nixon, Kissinger stressed that “until now, there has been no Presidential guidance on how the U.S. should plan for a nuclear conflict.”41 A week later, Nixon issued National Security Decision Memorandum (NSDM) 242, ordering the defense and intelligence communities to generate plans for more limited scenarios.42
As Kissinger handled the White House end of things during the review in the summer of 1973, James Schlesinger became the first civilian professional strategist to lead the Defense Department. Unlike his predecessors, he held a doctorate in economics and had spent his career at the RAND Corporation, rather than in business or law. Schlesinger, too, understood the mismatch between the need to control escalation and a nuclear force designed to inflict large and immediate strikes across the Soviet Union at the first sign of trouble.
The search for the more variegated set of nuclear options called for in NSDM-242 led to a menu of scenarios for nuclear use that was briefly called “the Schlesinger Doctrine.”43 This was less a “doctrine” than it was a purely declaratory attempt to squeeze credibility out of the existing strategic arsenal, and it did not produce any serious change in the nuclear force itself.44 This resistance from the nuclear establishment was not the first time—nor would it be the last—that the Pentagon would smother orders to develop plans for contingencies other than all-out war, even at the regional level.45 When Henry Kissinger, for example, asked the U.S. military for a “limited” nuclear option to deal with a notional Soviet invasion of Iran in 1974, the Joint Chiefs put forward
