The Role of Congress in the Strategic Posture of the
United States, 1961 – 1969
Flexible Response, Assured Destruction,
and the Strategic Triad
Peter Pry
National Institute for Public Policy
November 2009
The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect
the official policy or position of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency,
the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.
This report is approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.
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Table of Contents
Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1
The Congressional Record: A Neglected Resource .............................................................3
The Clash of Strategic Cultures Over Nuclear Doctrine .....................................................7
Flexible Response ..............................................................................................................15
Assured Destruction ...........................................................................................................24
The Strategic Triad ............................................................................................................32
Strategic Defenses ..............................................................................................................47
The Great Missile Defense Debate ....................................................................................52
Conclusions ........................................................................................................................62
Endnotes .............................................................................................................................68
The Role of Congress in the Strategic Posture of the United States, 1961-1969:
Flexible Response, Assured Destruction and the Strategic Triad
Introduction
This is the first in a series of three papers to examine the role of the Congress in
the development of the doctrinal and material strategic posture of the United States over
three decades: the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. “The Congress” as used in this paper refers
collectively to the legislative branch of government, including the Senate, the House of
Representatives, and their respective committees. The chronology of this paper is geared
to the House of Representatives and its biannual “congresses.” So this first paper covers
the period of the 87th through 91st Congresses, spanning the years 1961-1969, which
coincide with the single most important decade in the development of the U.S. strategic
posture.
Even today, some 50 years in retrospect, the controversies over nuclear strategy
that inflamed the 1960s are still relevant, still very much alive, and by no means of
merely antiquarian interest. This paper pioneers the long-neglected examination of the
role of Congress in the development of the U.S. strategic posture, does not pretend to
represent a definitive or comprehensive intellectual history of the debate over nuclear
strategy in the 1960s, but rather is an exploratory expedition and but one possible
interpretation of the rich and underutilized data available to scholars in the congressional
records. If this modest first effort inspires or provokes further research and
interpretation, the paper will have served its purpose.
Most histories of U.S. nuclear doctrine and the strategic posture focus
overwhelmingly on the executive branch, as if the Congress were merely a rubber stamp
to executive decisions, and played little or no important role. The thinking and views of
the president, his National Security Council staff, the secretary of defense, the
Department of Defense, and the armed services dominate most histories, and appear to be
the primary or solitary actors in building the U.S. strategic posture. Even academic
theorists tend to get more attention than the Congress in making intellectual contributions
to the evolution of the strategic posture. One of the rare exceptions to the tendency to
neglect the role of Congress is Keith Payne’s recently published book, The Great
American Gamble: Deterrence Theory and Practice from the Cold War to the TwentyFirst Century.1 Those more interested in the role of the executive branch than of
Congress in the evolution of the U.S. nuclear posture during the 1960s are referred to
Payne’s penetrating history or, for a typical example of histories focused on the executive
branch, the History of the Strategic Arms Competition, 1945-1972, a study sponsored by
the Office of the Secretary of Defense and partially declassified in the early 1990s.2
However, the Congress played and continues to play a role in the U.S. strategic
posture at least as important as that of the executive branch. That Congress must have
been very significant in shaping the strategic posture should be self-evident from the
Constitution, which empowers Congress with authorization, appropriations, and oversight
for all government programs and executive branch activities, including all matters
concerning the armed services and national defense. Yet most histories of the evolution
of U.S. nuclear strategy and nuclear weapons give the impression that wings of bombers,
2
land-based missiles, and fleets of ballistic missile submarines were built, and plans for
their use developed, with hardly any congressional interest.
One measure of the significance of the Congress is that—as this paper shall
show—had congressional views prevailed in the 1960s, to the same extent during those
crucial years as congressional views prevailed in later decades, the strategic posture of
the United States probably would have been very different, then and today.
The Congressional Record: A Neglected Resource
The neglect of Congress by scholars is all the more curious because of the
existence of congressional records on the development of strategic forces and ideas about
their employment that are available to anyone. Hearings before the House and Senate
Armed Services Committees, for example, provide a vast and meticulous historical
repository of unclassified, primary source material on the views of Congress, the
Department of Defense, and the services on the purpose and development of strategic
nuclear forces. Indeed, every single bomber and missile ever built, and those under
development but never built, are discussed in the congressional record.
Moreover, the value of the congressional record as an authoritative source on the
views of Congress, the Department of Defense, and the services cannot be
overemphasized. The executive branch is constitutionally obligated to answer to the
Congress, to explain—fully and truthfully—its reasons for seeking authorization and
appropriations for military programs. Lying to Congress is a crime that can and has
compelled resignation of executive officials, criminal prosecution, and imprisonment. It
3
is no accident that Congress during official hearings refers to speakers as “witnesses”
who offer “testimony” as in a court of law, and sometimes requires testimony to be given
under oath. Thus, testimony of defense officials before Congress is carefully prepared
and coordinated to provide an accurate and thorough representation of institutional views
of the Department of Defense and the military services.
Likewise, the statements and questions of senators and congressmen in the
congressional record are a good guide to the views and thinking of Congress as an
institution, and of factions within that institution. For example, a statement or question
by the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) in a hearing with the
secretary of defense or with a service chief, is almost always carefully prepared in
advance by congressional staff. So too, statements or questions by individual senators
and congressmen usually result from consultation with committee staff and personal staff,
and typically are prepared in advance. Questions by senators and congressmen are often
intended to promote some policy or other agenda.
Congress probably invests as much time and effort preparing questions for its
witnesses as the witnesses do preparing testimony. As the constitutional purpose of a
hearing is for the Congress to elicit information from the executive branch, to help guide
decisions by Congress on executive requests, much of a congressional hearing is
dedicated to questions from the Congress for the executive branch representatives. Yet
congressional questions are often a formalism for promotion of the views of Congress.
The hearing process of (usually loaded) questions from the Congress and answers from
the executive branch officials really constitutes a dialogue between the two branches.
Hearings on nuclear forces and nuclear policy, then, are a great resource for strategic
4
thinking concerning agreements and disagreements between the sides. The “score” in the
strategic debate between Congress and the Department of Defense can also be discerned
from the congressional record of strategic programs, favored by one side or the other, that
were canceled or survived.
This paper will “keep score” for key defense programs figuring in the debate
between Congress and the Department of Defense, giving the bottom line of program
outcomes. But as this paper is about the intellectual and policy contributions of the
Congress, and is not a programmatic history, the focus will be on the ideas and debates
over the strategic posture.
If the role of Congress in the development of the U.S. strategic posture has been
neglected by historians, the executive branch, for reasons constitutional, legal, and
budgetary, has had no alternative but to recognize the role of Congress. As Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara was compelled to acknowledge before Senator Richard
Russell, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a 1963 hearing:
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: I believe, Mr. Chairman, that at the time
we present to the Congress a request for approval of a particular military
force structure, and the associated financial budget, we should lay out for
the Congress the strategy which served as the foundation for the
determination of the force structure and the financial budget. This I have
endeavored to do in this statement before you, perhaps more fully than has
been discussed with the Congress in the past.
I will outline the strategy that underlies our strategic nuclear forces, for
example, and I will outline the strategy that underlies our tactical forces,
ground, sea, and air, this because I believe it is impossible for you to make
intelligent decisions regarding the quantity of forces or the type of forces
or the schedule in which they should be supplied unless you do have a
clear statement from the administration of the strategy which served as a
foundation for its force plans.
5
CHAIRMAN RUSSELL: Am I to understand from your response that
you believe Congress is entitled to play more than merely a passive role in
reviewing the decision of strategic policy?...
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: Yes.3
The congressional record, and its great debates between Congress and the
Department of Defense on the strategic posture, should be of special interest to scholars
because the records are largely unclassified. Equivalent debates within or between the
White House, the Department of Defense, and the armed services—although much has
been declassified—are still not fully as transparent as the records of Congress.
This paper is based on the congressional records that have been underutilized by
scholars. Four major themes emerge from even a cursory examination of the
congressional record:
First, the 1960s was the crucial decade in the development of U.S. ideas and
capabilities to cope with the problem of nuclear war. During the 1960s, the doctrines of
“flexible response” and “assured destruction”—and the development of the strategic triad
to implement these new doctrines—established the intellectual and material foundations
for the U.S. strategic posture in future decades, continuing today.
Second, the doctrines of flexible response and assured destruction represented the
triumph of a new strategic culture that rejected the values of the classical strategic culture
then deeply embedded in the Congress. The new strategic culture rejected as
impracticable and unwise the classical strategic goals, still espoused by Congress in the
nuclear age, of striving for military superiority in peace and achieving victory in war.
Third, the strategic triad, with its emphasis on the new technology of offensive
missile forces, while eschewing deployment of new technology for advanced bombers
6
and strategic defense, represented the triumph of assured destruction in the strategic
posture. Congress supported missiles but wanted heavier reliance on the “proven”
technology of bombers, the development of new technology to make possible strategic
defense, and the development of plans and means for prevailing in a nuclear conflict.
Congress did not prevail. But if it had, the strategic posture of the United States would
have been very different, in the 1960s and today.
Fourth, the outcome of the debate between old and new strategic cultures, and
over programmatic issues that shaped the strategic posture, was determined by the efforts
of a handful of individuals. Secretary McNamara was the chief intellectual spearhead
and spokesman for the Department of Defense. In Congress, about a dozen senators and
representatives were the loyal opposition.
The Clash of Strategic Cultures Over Nuclear Doctrine
From 1945 to 1960, during the 15 years after World War II, United States military
theory for the role of nuclear weapons in national security policy largely followed the
principles of classical military theory, informed by the experiences of the Second World
War, and by the new technology represented by nuclear weapons. Simultaneously,
almost immediately after the first use of nuclear weapons in 1945, an alternative school
of thought arose in academia. Some scientists and intellectuals such as Bernard Brodie,
J. Robert Oppenheimer, P.M.S. Blackett, and Bertrand Russell argued that nuclear
weapons changed fundamentally the nature of war and statecraft, and some criticized
U.S. nuclear strategy for following what they viewed as the now-irrelevant classical
7
military tradition. A minority view in the 1940s and 1950s, these dissenters laid the
intellectual foundations for arms control theory and the new strategic thinking that would
prevail in the 1960s.
Thucydides, Clausewitz, and other prenuclear students of war would probably
readily understand and approve of the logic and rationales for U.S. nuclear strategy and
operational plans during the years immediately after World War II..4 Nuclear weapons
were viewed by many U.S. political and military leaders as certainly a new technology,
but still as weapons in the classical sense, like very powerful versions of conventional
weapons that could be used, with potentially decisive effect on the battlefield or against
industrial centers, to achieve victory in war. To the generation of political and military
leaders who had been at the helm through World War II, many who had witnessed or
managed the strategic bombing campaigns that left the cities of Europe and Japan in ruins
and inflicted well over a million civilian casualties, the notion of using nuclear weapons
to achieve the same results more quickly and decisively seemed a logical extrapolation
from classical military tradition and the experience of 1939-1945.5
Consequently, during the period 1945-1960, U.S. military doctrine and
operational planning called for the employment of nuclear weapons against Soviet cities
and military forces for the purpose of achieving victory. For example, PINCHER, the
first U.S. nuclear war plan, adopted in 1946, proposed using 50 atomic bombs against 20
cities in the USSR as a response to a Soviet invasion of Europe. FLEETWOOD,
developed in 1948 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) as part of the U.S. emergency war
plan during the Berlin crisis, proposed striking 70 Soviet cities with 133 A-bombs over a
one-month period. Counter-city targeting was adopted in early U.S. strategic planning to
8
achieve classical military objectives—destroy war-supporting industries, transport
facilities, ammunition and fuel depots, and inflict massive civilian casualties. The aim
was to cripple Soviet capabilities and morale, and so stop or weaken a USSR invasion of
the still-weak Western European countries, whose economies and armies were only
beginning to recover from the ravages of World War II. The small number of nuclear
weapons available, their limited accuracy and yield, and the nonexistence of
reconnaissance means to pinpoint moving divisions, all conspired to encourage U.S.
strategists to aim their modest nuclear stockpile against Soviet cities, as these were large,
fixed, and assuredly valuable targets.6
In 1949, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal convened the Harmon Committee
to review U.S. nuclear war plans. Critical of FLEETWOOD, the Harmon Committee
concluded that, although FLEETWOOD would destroy 30-40 percent of Soviet industry
and kill 2.7 million people, this injury would not necessarily deny the USSR victory
against Western Europe, the Middle East, and Far East, or “destroy the roots of
communism or … weaken the power of the Soviet Leadership to dominate the people.”7
DROPSHOT was a requirements study conducted in 1949 in response to the
findings of the Harmon Committee. With more U.S. nuclear weapons available, the new
plan de-emphasized the targeting of cities, focusing instead on military targets whose
destruction was judged more likely to weaken a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
DROPSHOT provided for the destruction of some 700 possible targets, requiring 300 Abombs and 20,000 tons of conventional bombs to destroy the whole target set, which
comprised:8
•
stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the facilities for their production,
and means of delivery;
9
•
•
•
key governmental and control centers;
lines of communication, military supply lines, troop concentrations and naval
targets; and
important elements of Soviet and satellite industrial economy.
Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb in 1949 led the United States to reevaluate
upward its strategic nuclear requirements in National Security Council study NSC-68,
completed in the spring of 1950, which concluded in part:
The forgoing analysis indicates that the probable fission bomb capability
and possible thermonuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union have
greatly intensified the Soviet threat to the United States. This threat…is
more immediate than had previously been estimated. In particular, the
United States now faces the contingency that within the next four or five
years the Soviet Union will possess the military capability of delivering a
surprise atomic attack of such weight that the United States must have
substantially increased general air, ground, and sea strength, atomic
capabilities, and air and civilian defenses to deter war….9
On October 30, 1953, the National Security Council completed another paper
entitled “Basic National Security Policy” (NSC-162/2) that defined the central problem
of national security as “meeting the Soviet threat” while simultaneously avoiding
“seriously weakening the U.S. economy or undermining our fundamental values or
institutions.” This study became the basis of President Dwight Eisenhower’s “New
Look” defense policy that sought to lower the cost of defense by reducing the size of
expensive conventional forces, while increasing their firepower with nuclear weapons.
NSC-162/2 recommended that, “In the event of hostilities, the United States will consider
nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions.”10 Under the New Look,
U.S. armed forces were provided with nuclear artillery, other tactical nuclear weapons,
and plans were developed to reorganize ground forces into “Pentomic Divisions” capable
of fighting and winning on an atomic battlefield.11
10
“Massive retaliation” entered the lexicon of U.S. nuclear declaratory policy
during this period with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ attempted explanation of
NSC-162/2 and the New Look, which he was not deeply involved in developing.
Massive retaliation was more a product of the press than of the government, has come to
eclipse the New Look in history books, and in its most extreme construction alleged that
the United States planned to respond to any communist aggression with a nuclear attack
upon the enemy’s homeland.12 Nonetheless, although massive retaliation was not
officially a U.S. strategy or policy, the idea as enunciated by Secretary Dulles reflected
an attempt to make sense of nuclear weapons as useful strategic instruments, in the
classical military tradition represented by the New Look. Something akin to massive
retaliation was successfully utilized by President Eisenhower, when he successfully
terminated the Korean War by the threat to use nuclear weapons.
From 1945 to 1960, while the U.S. government was developing doctrine and
operational plans for the employment of nuclear weapons consistent with traditional
military theory, simultaneously another school of thought was developing in the
academic community. From the first invention and use of atomic bombs in 1945, some
scientists and academics saw the world of statecraft as profoundly changed, believing that
nuclear weapons were so destructive that the Clausewitzian dictum “War is the extension
of politics by other means” could no longer be true if mankind were to survive. Some of
the world’s most highly respected scientists, such as Albert Einstein, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, Niels Bohr and Karl Compton—who were largely credited
with inventing the atomic bomb that inaugurated the new nuclear age—warned that
nuclear war would be catastrophic for all humanity. They and other eminent scientists
11
and scholars claimed that victory in such a war could not be achieved in any meaningful
sense. New international behaviors and institutions were needed to resolve state conflicts
and to control, or abolish, nuclear weapons.13
These ideas percolated in academia and in think tanks like RAND during the 15
years after 1945, developing by 1960 into an alternative doctrine on nuclear weapons—
“arms control theory.” Arms control theory was as sophisticated in its way as the New
Look, but based on fundamentally different, even opposite, premises. Nuclear war could
not be won. Nuclear weapons might be “used” in diplomacy or, in the sense prescribed
by the new science of game theory, to deter aggression and so prevent war. Nuclear arms
should be weapons of last resort, not weapons of first resort. The strategic posture and
operational plans should reflect the reality that nuclear weapons, instead of being a
“silver bullet” for defeating communist aggression on the battlefield, are really a threat to
the existence of all mankind, a technology of utter annihilation that needed to be
controlled. “Arms control”—the notion of regulating the strategic posture in ways
optimized to prevent nuclear war—was born.14
Arms control theory was not only or even primarily about negotiations and
treaties to limit nuclear arms, but a technocratic worldview that saw nuclear weapons
themselves as a threat to the existence of civilization, perhaps a greater threat than the
Soviet Union. Arms control theory rejected classical notions of building a strategic
posture to achieve “superiority” and “victory,” instead advocating “strategic stability” for
war avoidance. Basic tenets of arms control theory for achieving strategic stability
included: arms races are to be avoided, as costly and destabilizing; first-strike capabilities
are to be avoided, as a destabilizing incentive for starting wars; strategic defense of cities
12
is impractical (and, if practical, destabilizing), while mutually vulnerable homelands
enhance deterrence and stability; and survivable retaliatory forces are a stabilizing
disincentive to aggression and war.
President John F. Kennedy and his administration drew heavily upon Harvard
University and other Ivy League schools for advisors and brought to Washington
academia’s new ideas about nuclear weapons enunciated in the theory of arms control.
Arms control theory rapidly replaced a more classical approach to strategic thinking in
the Kennedy administration, represented by, for example, Secretary of Defense
McNamara’s 1962 Ann Arbor speech, where he called for avoiding nuclear attacks on
cities to attack military forces instead.
Spearheaded by Secretary McNamara, the Kennedy administration replaced the
New Look with a new strategic doctrine. The new strategic doctrine, consistent with the
tenets of arms control theory, was also designed to cope with the realities that the United
States no longer enjoyed a monopoly in nuclear weapons, that Soviet intercontinental
bomber and missile forces posed a growing threat to the United States, and that budgetary
realities imposed a limit on the extent to which the United States could afford to increase
both its nuclear and conventional forces. The new doctrine was represented first by
flexible response and later assured destruction:
•
•
flexible response sought to decrease U.S. reliance on nuclear weapons by
building up U.S. and allied general-purpose forces, so that aggression by the
Soviet Union or China could be resisted by nonnuclear means. At the same
time, flexible response incorporated additional nuclear attack options to cope
with increasing Soviet nuclear capabilities and perhaps contain a nuclear
conflict at lower levels of escalation.
assured destruction advocated a strategic posture designed to deter nuclear
war by assuring that both sides could deliver unacceptable damage upon
society and war-waging capabilities, and neither side could avoid assured
destruction by striking first, developing defenses, or any combination of these.
13
Assured destruction was more rhetorical than a real nuclear war plan. Its real
purpose was budgetary and programmatic, to impose a ceiling on investment
in strategic capabilities.15
Initially, Congress fiercely resisted flexible response, assured destruction, and the
whole new strategic philosophy represented by arms control theory. This thinking
premised an “end of history” with the invention of nuclear weapons, and rejected
classical military theory and the experience of World War II as a useful guide to the
future. Notions of achieving superiority in nuclear weapons, defending the homeland
from nuclear attack, and prevailing in nuclear war dominated congressional thinking until
the late 1960s. However, by 1969, arms control theory and its strategic worldview came
to prevail in the halls of Congress.
The balance of this paper shall demonstrate this long arc of change in the views of
Congress on nuclear weapons, as reflected in the debate between Congress and the
Department of Defense, first over flexible response, then over assured destruction, and
finally over the Safeguard strategic missile defense system. The record shows that, in
1961 and later, Congress was highly critical of flexible response and assured destruction.
However, by 1969 and the controversy over Safeguard, Congress was even more
enamored of arms control theory than the Department of Defense that first championed
the doctrine.
The congressional record speaks loudly and most eloquently of this history and
will be allowed to speak for itself, needing but a modest interlocutor.
14
Flexible Response
From its first year in office, beginning in 1961, the Kennedy administration
introduced the new strategic policy of flexible response to replace the New Look.
Whereas the New Look relied on nuclear firepower to decrease the size and increase the
effectiveness of U.S. general-purpose forces, flexible response advocated increasing the
strength of general-purpose forces so that resort to nuclear weapons could be made less
necessary or avoided altogether.
Flexible response foreshadowed assured destruction in its premises. Implicit in
flexible response was the view, propounded in academia since 1945 and more recently by
some in think tanks like RAND, that nuclear weapons were inherently different from
general-purpose forces, that the effects of these weapons were so destructive as to make
impractical their use for prevailing on the battlefield and achieving victory in war. Under
flexible response, the primary purpose of nuclear weapons would be not to fight wars, but
to prevent them by deterrence. If deterrence failed, flexible response included plans for
battlefield and theater use of nuclear weapons that might give a president options other
than an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet homeland.
The word “deterrence” was not new to Congress. But new was the notion of an
innovative and sophisticated doctrinal system—“deterrence theory”—developed partially
from the new science of game theory in academia, that sought to redefine the way the
United States should think about nuclear weapons and their role.16 Flexible response was
the intellectual spearhead for deterrence theory.
15
Congressional leaders responsible for overseeing the development of U.S. nuclear
forces and strategic policy were, on the whole, critical of flexible Response. The new
doctrine was being introduced close on the heels of controversies over a “bomber gap”
and “missile gap” allegedly favoring the Soviet Union that played a role in the 1960
presidential campaign. The Congress by and large wanted U.S. strategic superiority over
the USSR, and saw flexible response as settling for a “nuclear stalemate.”
Flexible Response Versus the New Look
Seven months into the Kennedy administration, during a July 1961 hearing before
the Senate Armed Services Committee, Secretary of Defense McNamara went before
Congress to ask for additional procurement funding to buy the increased nonnuclear
military capabilities for flexible response. McNamara stated, “The great bulk of the
expenditures, the highest percentage of the men to be added and the major emphasis, will
be placed on our non-nuclear forces.” The secretary proceeded to present a shopping list
that clearly shifted emphasis away from the New Look and reliance on nuclear weapons
toward flexible response and rebuilding the general-purpose forces “to insert military
alternatives prior to the potential use of nuclear weapons.”17
In the course of Secretary McNamara’s testimony, Chairman Richard Russell
noticed a “small” item in McNamara’s statement, the provision of a conventional
warhead for the Nike-Hercules air defense missile that previously carried only a nuclear
warhead. This triggered an explosive debate over the merits of flexible response, where
the Senate committee overwhelmingly condemned the new policy for moving away from
reliance on nuclear weapons. An exception was Senator Henry Jackson, who applauded
16
flexible response for introducing “flexibility” so that U.S. military commanders would
have a broader range of options, including nonnuclear options:
CHAIRMAN RUSSELL: On these Army missiles here, I notice you have
a very small item that deals with the NIKE and the NIKE-HERCULES. I
believe you testified that that was to use a conventional warhead where we
would not be forced to resort to the use of atomic weapons.
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: Yes, sir. It will permit us to have an
optional use of either conventional or nuclear….
SENATOR JACKSON: What is the reason for the change of policy? The
Army certainly places great reliance on the validity of HERCULES with
the nuclear warhead.
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: Yes….
SENATOR JACKSON: And the whole trend was for the nuclear
warhead. Now it seems like we are going back.
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: It is only to permit us to use non-nuclear
warheads in the event we do not wish to, at that particular moment of
combat, run the risk of having the use of nuclear weapons serve as a
foundation for escalation into nuclear war which might otherwise not be
our objective.
SENATOR JACKSON: Well, I am glad to see it. Some of us raised the
question some time ago, and there did not seem to be much acceptance of
that degree of flexibility that you are now asking for, and that is why I
asked the question. …What you are saying is in a theater where there is
limited war in the sense of not using nuclear weapons of any kind, you
would not want to introduce nuclear warheads for defensive purposes.18
However, more representative of the Senate view than Jackson was Chairman
Russell, who at the same hearing declared that flexible response was a “terrible mistake.”
Chairman Russell questioned the Kennedy administration’s willingness to use nuclear
weapons. The senator denounced the new nonnuclear policy as a “humanitarian
approach to war” that might convince Moscow that Washington was afraid to use nuclear
17
weapons and embroil the United States in a conventional war that could only be won at
great sacrifice:
CHAIRMAN RUSSELL: I think we are making a mistake in not stressing
more our nuclear capability. I do not want to be the first man to use a
nuclear bomb, but I also do not want to be the fellow saying that we are
not going to use it. I think it is a terrible mistake.
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: I think it is a serious error to ever make
such a statement. …At various times the President and others have stated
that we will use whatever weapons are required….
CHAIRMAN RUSSELL: I hope that you will continue to stress that
because there is no time in the foreseeable future, from my standpoint, that
we are going to be able to, without enormous sacrifices, defeat Russia in a
war waged with conventional weapons. …Many people think it would be
foolish to think ever of fighting Russia on the ground. I think we could do
it if we ever had to do it. But, in my opinion, a great deal of Mr.
Khrushchev’s truculence and belligerency stems from the fact that we
have talked too much about our humanitarian approach to war, that we are
not going to use this nuclear weapon, and if he is convinced that we will
fight in accordance with his own terms, he will get tougher and tougher
until we do get into a conventional war. I do not believe he wants to be
destroyed any more than we do. ….But if they do not believe we are going
to hit them with nuclear weapons, they will soon have us picked off at a
conventional war, where we will be fighting at a particular disadvantage.
SENATOR [Howard] CANNON: Mr. Chairman, I would like to associate
myself with those remarks too.19
The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) had a similar negative reaction to
flexible response. At a 1961 hearing before the committee, Congressman Durward Hall
pointedly criticized Secretary McNamara for relying on nuclear weapons primarily for
deterrence, instead of for defense by means of their offensive use:
MR. HALL: Mr. Chairman: It seems that we are shifting from a policy of
the best defense and hence offense, to perhaps one of deterrence and then
even one of pure defense. Realizing that the problem between the great
powers today is who can first shoot down an ICBM far enough away to
protect ourselves, what is our concept, since we don’t have that possibility,
other than to go on and strike while we will have theoretical superiority
ourselves? I realize our people wouldn’t stand for that and you must be
18
governed by that, and the decision of the Commander in Chief is based on
that purpose. …But aren’t we going to pass the point of no return on a
purely defense basis, and, if so, have we evolved into that posture?20
At the same hearing, Congressman Samuel Stratton preferred the use of nuclear
weapons for “counterforce” as opposed to the “finite deterrent” that he associated with
Secretary McNamara’s flexible response policy. Congressman Stratton also pressed
McNamara on the need, not only to “assure” survival of retaliatory forces to destroy the
attacker, as McNamara put it, but to protect the survival of U.S. citizens and military
personnel. Secretary McNamara surely disappointed Stratton in admitting that the
Department of Defense had no provisions for sheltering civilians, as they were not a
department responsibility, or military personnel, who were.21
Flexible Response Tied to Nuclear Disarmament
Senators at the 1961 SASC hearing were suspicious that there was an ideological
continuity between flexible response and the Kennedy administration’s initiative to
establish a new government agency, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
(ACDA), dedicated to the pursuit of another new idea, “arms control.” In the context of a
hearing on authorizing additional monies for conventional forces to support flexible
response, Senator Sam Ervin denounced ACDA (not a subject of the hearing) as, along
with flexible response, further evidence of defeatism:
SENATOR ERVIN: I think the whole trouble is that the Americans are
required to believe that there are easy steps which will bring us to our
hopes of lasting peace. We should be reading the poem of Rudyard
Kipling that he wrote at the beginning of the First World War. The
American people might well learn that the only way they are going to
survive is not only to have an adequate defense but to have the spirit
which makes them prefer to die on their feet rather than live on their
knees. Legislation to establish a department on disarmament, and other
poppycock such as that, leaves the impression with Russia that we won’t
19
fight. …If we had not assured Khrushchev time and time again that we
were not going to use nuclear weapons, but had let him understand that if
he started anything we would use whatever weapon we had at hand, if
necessary, to prevent his conquering the world, he would not be acting the
way he is now.22
Chairman Russell concurred with Senator Ervin that President Kennedy’s move to
create a “disarmament agency,” while also asking for more money for conventional
forces to support flexible response, was sending the Soviet Union a wrong and
contradictory message and should not be supported by any “sane person.” Chairman
Russell: “If there ever was a government headed both ways at the same time, it is by
proposing a disarmament agency and then breathing fire and brimstone, and asking for
additional funds to defend the rights and security of our people. I am glad that somebody
else is suffering from the same infirmity as mine of being unable to comprehend how a
sane person can support such conflicting objectives.”23 Senator Jackson concurred with
Chairman Russell and also criticized setting up a “disarmament agency....right after we
have appropriated over $4 billion” for flexible response.24
Flexible Response Criticized for Eroding Extended Deterrence
Congressional views of flexible response did not warm after the 1962 Cuban
missile crisis. In a 1963 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Senator Margaret
Chase Smith sought to impress upon Secretary of Defense McNamara that U.S. nuclear
superiority accounted for the successful outcome in Cuba through a line of questioning
designed to point to that conclusion.25 Senator Smith’s continued cross-examination of
McNamara carried the critique of flexible response to the defense of NATO, where Smith
clearly communicated that, in her view, lessened reliance on nuclear weapons was
dangerous:
20
SENATOR SMITH: Up until now our defense of Western Europe has
been based on our overwhelming nuclear superiority, both in terms of
tactical nuclear weapons in Europe and in terms of our strategic retaliatory
power. Despite great disparities in conventional forces between the Soviet
bloc and NATO, the Communists have been deterred from military
aggression in Europe. Now you propose to build the conventional strength
of Europe to the point where it could cope with a Communist assault
without resorting to nuclear weapons. Do you think this policy increases
the risks to the Russians? If the worst they might suffer would be a
repulse back to their initial lines (under a strictly containment policy),
would they not find this an attractive risk?26
Most in Congress questioned the effectiveness of flexible response as a way of
upholding extended deterrence to U.S. allies. At the same SASC hearing, Senator Stuart
Symington questioned Secretary of Defense McNamara on this point at length, using the
device of an article critical of flexible response. Symington suggested that the Kennedy
administration was insufficiently committed to the nuclear defense of Europe and to
maintaining U.S. nuclear superiority. Citing the article, Senator Symington accused
Secretary McNamara’s new flexible response policy of giving up on U.S. “strategic
superiority” over the Soviet Union and settling instead for “nuclear parity”:
SENATOR SYMINGTON: Now, the article continues…The Republican
congressional committee charged last week that Mr. McNamara outlined
what amounted to plans to pull the nuclear teeth of American defenses. In
the view of some authorities the new strategy well could invite a Soviet
attack in the not too distant future and seriously limit our response.
Senator Thurmond…says that the new policy abandons “strategic
superiority” for “nuclear parity.”....Mr. McNamara’s top advisers say he
has defense, not disarmament, on his mind. But many of his supporters
believe the new policy will in fact lead to low-risk disarmament. If we
cannot destroy the Russian hidden weapons even with a force three times
larger than that planned, as Mr. McNamara has said, then we need not
build even on the planned scale, the disarmament argument goes. Would
you comment?27
Many in Congress judged that flexible response was, in fact, actively failing the
mission of extended deterrence, manifest in the French pursuit of an independent nuclear
21
deterrent. Senator Symington, for example, believed “that had something to do with the
decision General de Gaulle made to create his own national nuclear forces.”28 Senator
Smith likewise suggested to Secretary McNamara that the French nuclear effort was a
failure of flexible response:
SENATOR SMITH: Your new policy for Europe seems to assume that
the Soviets would not introduce the use of tactical nuclear weapons. But
are not their units equipped with these weapons?
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: There is no assurance that the Soviets will
not initiate the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and they do possess these
weapons….
SENATOR SMITH: What is the basis for your assumption that that they
would not use them if it were to their advantage to do so?
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: If it were to their advantage, we must
assume they would. However, the assumption would seem to be contrary
to fact….
SENATOR SMITH: Do you see the present French position on an
independent nuclear deterrent as related to French rejection of the U.S.sponsored strategy for the defense of Europe?
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: It is useful to recall that the French
nuclear weapons program was begun by the fourth republic in the mid1950s for reasons that were not particularly connected with the strategy
for Europe’s defense….
SENATOR SMITH: Our old policy for NATO was known as the swordand-shield policy, with conventional forces in Europe serving as the
shield—and with nuclear forces, principally U.S., serving as the sword.
The Nassau communiqué described the old sword-and-shield in reverse
with the new emphasis on POLARIS. In your estimation, what has
changed in Europe; what has changed in the way of Allied forces; what
has changed in the Communist threat—to justify applying the old swordand-shield policy in reverse? In other words, why are 30 NATO divisions,
which formerly were regarded as sufficient only as the shield against
Communist non-nuclear assault, now considered an adequate sword?29
22
Flexible Response Versus Soviet Nuclear Doctrine
Most Congressional leaders were concerned that the Soviet Union did not share
the Kennedy administration’s views on nuclear weapons, deterrence theory, and
assumptions implicit in flexible response that through “escalation control” a major war
might remain nonnuclear. For example, Senator Strom Thurmond, in a 1963 SASC
hearing, pointed out to Secretary of Defense McNamara that Soviet nuclear doctrine did
not mirror flexible response:
SENATOR THURMOND: Mr. Secretary, in a work entitled Military
Strategy edited by Marshal Sokolovsky, and published in Moscow in
1962, the Soviets discussed strategy in any major conflict which might
occur between the Western and Communist camps. This dissertation on
Soviet strategy indicates that the Soviets do not even consider the
possibility of any major military action which is non-nuclear. Is this
statement of Soviet strategy taken into account in our strategic policy and,
if so, in what way?
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: Well, it is taken into account of in the
sense that we recognize it as one of the alternatives open to the Soviets.
That particular volume does not treat the Soviet strategy with the
consistency required to properly understand it. That volume, for example,
makes clear that the Soviets plan to maintain a military force, including
3,200,000 men approximately, at the same time that it states—I have
forgotten the exact words—I think they are approximately as you outline
them.
SENATOR THURMOND: No major military action.
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: No major military action. It is not
described exactly that way in that volume, but very close to that. No
major military action would be carried out without the use of large
numbers of nuclear weapons. These two policies appear as somewhat
inconsistent. You would not think they would maintain a military force of
3,200,000 men if they planned to use large numbers of nuclear weapons in
any major military action….
SENATOR THURMOND: This volume does hold the Soviets do not
even consider the possibility of any major military action which is
non-nuclear, does it?
23
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: I believe that is a theme running
through the entire volume.
SENATOR THURMOND: Mr. Secretary, the Soviets stated in
their text on military strategy that the reason for their maintenance
of massive ground forces is to ensure that substantial numbers
of ground forces are left for internal control preparatory for
occupation and tactical missions after the initial period of hostilities,
utilizing nuclear weapons.30
Flexible response introduced to the Congress strategic ideas related to arms
control theory: the concepts that forces and plans, the strategic posture, could and should
be structured to avoid or limit nuclear war; that such restraint might be more important
than victory; and that “victory” as traditionally understood might not be achievable.
Flexible response was the first battlefield between the new strategic vision represented by
Secretary McNamara’s Department of Defense and the traditional strategic views of
Congress, and so prepared the ground for the next clash, over assured destruction.
Assured Destruction
The first integrated nuclear war plan, the SIOP (Single Integrated Operational
Plan), came into being in 1960 under the Eisenhower administration. The first SIOP
called for strikes on all major Soviet and other communist cities in the event of war, but
also provided for attacks on other targets. The plan did not provide for alternative
options or for strategic reserve forces.31
The Kennedy administration inherited this SIOP and performed major revisions
that provided for a spectrum of attacks, only one of which involved direct strikes on
cities. The revised options were: 1) preemptive attack against enemy nuclear forces (with
24
strikes against national-level military controls withheld); 2) preemptive attack against
enemy nuclear and conventional forces (while avoiding strikes on people and industry);
3) attack against enemy nuclear forces on tactical warning of a first strike; 4) attack
against enemy nuclear and conventional forces on tactical warning; and 5) attack against
enemy military forces and urban-industrial targets on tactical warning.32 Defense
Secretary McNamara declared the military orientation of U.S. targeting policy in his
famous Ann Arbor speech at the University of Michigan, where he noted that the object
of U.S. war plans would “be the destruction of the enemy’s military forces, not of his
civilian population.” McNamara:
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 the more conventional military operations have
been regarded in the past. That is to say, the principal military objective,
in the event of a nuclear war stemming from a major attack on the
Alliance, should be the destruction of the enemy’s military forces, not of
his civilian population.33
McNamara later retreated from this public position in statements to Congress and
left the impression that, for both the U.S. and the USSR, general nuclear war would
primarily be about “countercity” targeting of the population. Several reasons account for
this changed emphasis in declared policy.34
First, the Air Force was using the declaratory policy that provided for
counterforce and other options to justify large increases in funding for nuclear weapons,
competing with funding for conventional forces needed to implement flexible response.
Countercity targeting for assured destruction of the Soviet Union provided a simple
means for defining, and capping, U.S. strategic force requirements.35
25
Second, McNamara feared that the Air Force would misinterpret the counterforce
options as a mandate to develop a costly, and in his view dangerous, first-strike
capability. Arms control theory warned that the pursuit of such capabilities would lead to
arms racing and strategic instability, a view shared by the defense secretary in a 1963
Draft Presidential Memorandum for President Lyndon Johnson. Here McNamara
endorsed and defined “assured destruction” as a key criterion for evaluating the
effectiveness of U.S. strategic nuclear forces:
An essential test of the adequacy of our posture is our ability to destroy,
after a well planned and executed Soviet surprise attack on our Strategic
Nuclear Forces, the Soviet government and military controls, plus a large
percentage of their population and economy (e.g., 30% of their population,
50% of their industrial capability, and 150 of their cities). The purpose of
such a capability is to give us a high degree of confidence that, under all
foreseeable conditions, we can deter a calculated deliberate Soviet nuclear
attack. The calculations used to test this ability are our best estimates of
the results of possible Soviet calculations of what we could do to them in
retaliation if they were to attack us. The calculation of the effectiveness of
the U.S. forces is not a reflection of our actual targeting doctrine in the
event deterrence fails. I will call this objective “Assured Destruction.”36
Secretary McNamara and arms control theorists believed that the Soviet Union, as
a rational actor, would make calculations similar to those of the United States, come to
similar conclusions, and develop a similar nuclear doctrine that endorsed as the ultimate
guarantor of Soviet security an ability to inflict “assured destruction” upon the United
States. Thus, when both sides had an assured destruction capability, both sides would be
deterred from nuclear war.37
Keith Payne observes that McNamara and the arms control community belief that
both the United States and the Soviet Union would subscribe to assured destruction, and
that a stable “balance of terror” would result, “reflected the technological determinism
that was central to balance of terror thinking. Here was a nuclear deus ex machina that
26
ensured the mutual deterrence of deliberate attack.” Payne notes that this new thinking,
unorthodox for classical military theorists or those who participated in World War II,
provoked as a rebuke to assured destruction theory its famous acronym—“MAD.”
According to Payne, “The balance of terror was said to be mutually inescapable, which
led McNamara’s critics to label his approach to deterrence, ‘Mutual Assured
Destruction,’ and pejoratively shorten that title to MAD.”38
Congress was among the early critics of assured destruction, which was perceived
as exchanging nuclear superiority and the prospect of prevailing in war for a nuclear
“stalemate.” Senator Smith in a 1963 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing
reflected the views of many on this point in this critical line of questioning:
SENATOR SMITH: Do you think that when the Soviets reach
the point of being able to wreak unacceptable damage on the United
States, we are in a state of “nuclear stalemate”? What would you call
“unacceptable damage”? Do the Soviets have that capability now?
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: …The extent of damage which the United
States would be willing to accept must, in my judgment, always be related
to the degree to which her security interests are involved in any given
issue….
SENATOR SMITH: If a point of nuclear stalemate is reached, would we
in any way have a “decisive margin of superiority” and if so, in what form
would it be—and of what significance would it be? Are you confident
that the Soviets will be satisfied with a nuclear stalemate—or will they
constantly strive for a technological breakthrough to upset the balance in
their favor?
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: As indicated above, I do not consider that
a point of “nuclear stalemate” will be reached but rather that both sides
will continue to improve their capabilities to damage one another. In the
absence of effectively verified arms control agreements…I think it
obvious that both sides will constantly strive to exploit their respective
weapon technologies….
SENATOR SMITH: If a nuclear stalemate exists, with the admitted
strong conventional forces of Russia facing Western Europe—in the event
27
that NATO forces should be faced with overwhelming defeat in Europe by
conventional forces, where does that leave NATO and us if we have
accepted the doctrine of nuclear stalemate?
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: …The forces under the control of the bloc
and of the free world have a dynamic relationship to the national interests
for which they are created. We will use such weapons, non- nuclear or
nuclear, as are needed to attain our military and political objectives….
SENATOR SMITH: Never before in the memories of Americans have
we considered ourselves less than superior…to any other power in the
world. The stalemate concept negates this. It seems to me that the
stalemate doctrine can have serious long-term effects on our national will,
our courage and our determination to resist attacks on our way of life.39
More than a few in Congress saw the outcome of the Cuban missile crisis as
resulting from the Kennedy administration’s subscription to a philosophy of “strategic
stalemate” represented by the assured destruction doctrine. Congressman Hall wondered,
in a 1963 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, why the United States did
not follow up on the Soviet retreat from Cuba and achieve victory over communism, at
least there. The congressman asked Secretary McNamara, “Can you tell the committee
why we did not finish the job when we had everything going for us? ...Mr. Secretary,
what I want to know is; did we not do it because of fear of a general nuclear war…?”40
In a 1963 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Senator Smith attacked Secretary
McNamara’s assured destruction policy for retreating from a “counterforce” strategy
since McNamara’s Ann Arbor speech.41
During a 1963 House Armed Services Committee hearing, Congressman Bob
Wilson questioned the wisdom of assured destruction in assuming a meeting of minds
and “telegraphing our punch to the Russians.” This criticism seemed lost on Secretary
McNamara, who according to Lawrence Freedman, “was said to be delighted at the
number of copies of [the annual posture statements] purchased by the Soviet Embassy in
28
Washington. The greater the convergence of doctrine and mutual understanding, the
better the chances of managing U.S.-Soviet relations.”42
MR. WILSON: We have had so many discussions here about
telegraphing our punch to the Russians, in effect saying, “Well, don’t
worry about bombers, after a given period, and don’t worry about certain
kinds of missiles.” I wonder if this is in the best national interest, for us to
be quite so specific in our utterances or even going a step further…I
wonder if we might put our best foot forward a little more than we are
doing and telling the public, and the enemy, about what we have in mind
for the future?....
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: …It is for this reason, for example, that
we have given as much information as we have to the press on our future
missile procurements and POLARIS system….43
The notion that both sides embraced assured destruction was regarded with
skepticism in Congress. In a 1965 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee,
Senator Thurmond noted to Secretary McNamara that the Soviets appeared to base their
nuclear war plan on a first strike:
SENATOR THURMOND: Mr. Secretary, your testimony stated that you
believe that the United States and the Soviet Union had the same general
strategic objectives. Do you not think that the Soviet strategy is more
inclined toward a first preemptive strike than is the U.S. strategy?
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: I do not believe I stated that we had the
same strategic objectives…I think I said that each of us has a requirement
for our strategic forces, one, assured destruction….44
At the same hearing, following up on his theme critical of assured destruction,
Senator Thurmond pressed counterforce targeting on an evasive Secretary McNamara.45
Senator Jack Miller, in another 1965 SASC hearing, expressed his fear that flexible
response and assured destruction were undermining deterrence by reassuring the Soviets
that the United States would not use its nuclear weapons, a view widely shared in the
Congress:
29
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: Well, the great danger for miscalculation
and the extent to which they are susceptible to it is illustrated, I think, in
their actions in the Cuban missile crisis when they introduced missiles into
Cuba and made a serious error.
SENATOR MILLER: Yes, and when President Kennedy, may I add, said
that let one nuclear-tipped missile land on the United States from Cuba
and there would be nuclear missiles on the Soviet Union, I might say I had
no particular concern there would be any miscalculation on their part
because I must say I had no concern that Mr. Khrushchev is about to
commit suicide. [deleted] I would hope that our thinking would not be so
restrained in our use of tactical nuclear weapons, and in our statement
about it, that it would in effect invite conventional warfare on the part of
the Soviet Union thinking that we would not dare or would be fearful of
escalating it into a limited tactical nuclear war. If we give them that
impression, I would be fearful that we might find ourselves subject to
nuclear blackmail.46
In 1967, the strategic policy debate between Congress and the Department of
Defense centered on missile defenses, on whether or not to pursue a treaty with the
Soviets limiting missile defenses, and on whether such defenses undermined assured
destruction and strategic stability. Senator Ervin was appalled, at a 1967 hearing of the
Senate Armed Services Committee, that Secretary McNamara preferred not to defend
U.S. cities:
SENATOR ERVIN: So in effect we are developing an offensive system
and have no defensive system except to the extent that the offensive
system acts as a deterrent?
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: This is quite true insofar as missiles are
concerned. For air defense we did have some defense.
SENATOR ERVIN: So from the standpoint of nuclear missiles, we are
practically defenseless?
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: Except insofar as our offensive forces
serve, as you suggest, as a deterrent.
SENATOR ERVIN: Before, however, we use our offensive forces, we are
going to suffer whatever nuclear holocaust might be inflicted on us?
30
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: Yes; that is correct.
SENATOR ERVIN: And your estimate is that that nuclear holocaust will
inflict on us a minimum of 100 million casualties.
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: I wouldn’t say a minimum, but it could
inflict 100 million….
SENATOR ERVIN: We would sit here in the absence of an antiballistic
missile system, with our population totally helpless, no defense whatever
against a hostile nuclear attack, and with the danger that a large part of our
retaliatory arsenal would be destroyed.
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: These are two entirely different points,
Senator Ervin. Protecting the people in one place won’t in the slightest
degree save the missiles located in another. So they have to be thought of
as separate requirements….
SENATOR ERVIN: I have seen press dispatches quoting you that the
NIKE system would cost $40 billion and that that is a useless and
prohibitive cost for us to bear. I don’t know whether those statements
reflect your views or not.
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: The footnote I read this morning, sir,
states exactly that….
SENATOR ERVIN: We scatter over the earth hundreds of millions of
dollars in foreign aid; certainly this Nation can afford to spend $40 billion
for such a program.47
At the same hearing, Senator Russell, chairman of the SASC, rebutted Secretary
McNamara’s chief argument against missile defense, that such defenses would inevitably
provoke a Soviet reaction and the “arms race” would “definitely escalate…at great cost
and no real gain to either side”:
CHAIRMAN RUSSELL: It seems to me that there would have been a
more marked reaction on their part to the development of the POLARIS
submarine than there would be to a purely defensive weapon. The
POSEIDON and the POLARIS are purely offensive and have tremendous
striking power, and the weapon we are talking about is a defensive
weapon. It would seem to me that an offensive weapon would be more
apt to disturb them and bring about a reaction.48
31
In addition, Senator Jackson, in a 1967 hearing of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, expressed concern that Soviet unilateral possession of missile defenses could
undermine the credibility of assured destruction and of extended deterrence to NATO.
Senator Jackson made these points at the hearing in an exchange with Dr. John S. Foster,
the Defense Department’s director of defense research and engineering:
SENATOR JACKSON: It seems to me the problem is to convince the
Soviets that our retaliatory striking force is as effective as we think it is. If
that can be done, they should be deterred. The question is do they believe
it. This is the heart of the whole ABM [anti-ballistic missile] controversy,
as I view it. It is a matter of credibility. A deterrent is only as good as the
credibility of its reliability. Even though we think ours is completely
effective as a retaliatory force but they do not, we do not have an effective
deterrent.
DR. FOSTER: Senator, I agree with you. That is why over the last
several years we have gone out of our way to try and tell the Soviets in
some detail of our strength….
SENATOR JACKSON: The number of warheads?
DR. FOSTER: The number of missiles [deleted] and given them enough
numbers so that by just simple arithmetic they can see that their defenses
will certainly be exhausted….
SENATOR JACKSON: And we also have to convince our allies of this
capability. If our allies believe the Soviets’ contention that they have
deployed an ABM system that can do this job, it makes our position in the
world more difficult than it would be otherwise.49
The Strategic Triad
The great debate over flexible response, assured destruction, and the clash
between old and new strategic cultures represented by these doctrinal disagreements
between the Congress and the Department of Defense were largely played out over
32
programmatic arguments about the future strategic posture that ultimately resulted in the
strategic triad of long-range bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and
submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). In 1961, when the debate began
between Secretary McNamara’s Department of Defense and the Congress, nuclear
weapons were still a new technology, scarcely 15 years old. Concepts for the role of
nuclear weapons in larger national security policy and for their specific operational
employment were still evolving. In 1961, ICBMs and ballistic missile submarines were
even newer technologies than nuclear weapons.
From the prospect of the present, and especially to those versed in current arms
control theory, it may seem strange that the Congress of the 1960s, that largely embraced
a classical military approach to nuclear strategy, preferred bombers over missiles. Today,
arms control theory holds that bombers as “slow flyers” are less threatening and more
stabilizing than ballistic missiles that are better suited for surprise attack and fighting a
nuclear war. However, this tenet of arms control theory did not emerge and gain wide
acceptance until the 1970s. From the 1940s to at least the mid-1960s, bombers were
widely perceived as the “ultimate” strategic weapon, including by many veteran senior
officers, such as General Curtis LeMay, who was Air Force chief of staff in 1961. The
strategic bombing campaigns of World War II and the Korean War were not yet “ancient
history” in the 1960s and had been personally experienced by many members of
Congress. The 1960s Congress was also very much aware of the many catastrophic
failures of the U.S. space and military missile programs. Congress supported and
encouraged the development of strategic missiles as a promising weapon of the future.
33
But Congress viewed ballistic missiles as experimental, an unproven technology for
fighting wars, and preferred instead strategic bombers.
Congress advocated developing a new generation of advanced, supersonic
strategic bombers based on the B-70 program, and eventually “space planes” based on the
Dynasoar program. If missiles were the future, as Secretary McNamara believed, then
Congress wanted the Skybolt air-launched ballistic missile to modernize the B-52 and to
turn future bombers into ballistic missile platforms. Congressional allegiance to strategic
bombers was motivated by economic as well as strategic considerations, as the aerospace
industry was a major and well-established employer in many congressional districts.
Ballistic missiles would eventually rival bombers as an employer, but in the early 1960s
the missile industry was not as well-established as the decades-old bomber industry. In
contrast, Secretary McNamara preferred ballistic missiles over bombers, believed that
strategic bombers were technologically obsolete, and preferred retaining the B-52 over
building the new generation of advanced bombers envisioned by Congress.
Strategic Bombers Versus Missiles
Accordingly, in 1961 hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee,
Senator Jackson cautioned Secretary McNamara not to rely too much on long-range
ballistic missiles, expressed concern about missile “reliability and survivability,”
underscored the limitations of missiles compared to strategic bombers, and stressed the
importance of Skybolt. Jackson told the defense secretary, “I am beginning to have
reservations about the reliability of our own ICBMs and, particularly, the capability that
will exist after they [the Soviets] have hit us first.”50
34
The House Armed Services Committee, in 1961 hearings, promoted the B-58
bomber over ballistic missiles. Committee chairman Carl Vinson cautioned generals
speaking for the Defense Department that he did not want the United States to be
dependent only on ballistic missiles by the 1970s. The chairman wanted bombers.51 In
the same hearing, Chairman Vinson expressed a clear preference for B-52s over the new
ballistic missiles through “questioning” a supportive witness, General Thomas White, Air
Force chief of staff:
CHAIRMAN VINSON: Now, an extra B-52 wing was considered by the
Department of Defense, but it was concluded in the OSD [Office of the
Secretary of Defense] staff studies reviewing the problem that an extra B52 wing compares very poorly with the extra MINUTEMAN missile that
could be purchased and operated at the same cost and in terms of overall
effectiveness. Now, did you mean to take the position that the reason why
you do not continue to contract for B-52s is due to the fact that the
MINUTEMAN missile will begin to come into production and take the
place of the military requirements of B-52s? Is that it?
GENERAL WHITE: I would say from a purely statistical point of view
the MINUTEMAN in the quantity spoken of presents a lower cost
effectiveness. But it completely, in my opinion from where I sit, omits
consideration of some of the political and psychological factors that I
mentioned the last time I testified here.
CHAIRMAN VINSON: Now, the MINUTEMAN is an ICBM missile,
but it will not be operational for 2 years?
GENERAL WHITE: That is correct, sir.
CHAIRMAN VINSON: Now, then, how long would it take you to get a
wing of B-52s? How many years?
GENERAL WHITE: [deleted]
CHAIRMAN VINSON: That is right. Now, then—
GENERAL WHITE: To build the wing of B-52s before the
MINUTEMAN becomes operational 2 years from now. You could begin
to get the aircraft if the order were given approximately now.…52
35
Congressional preference for bombers over missiles resulted in a 1961 HASC
hearing that showcased a briefing by the Air Force to explain the advantages of bombers,
a briefing that elicited concurrence and praise from Chairman Vinson.53
In 1963, Secretary McNamara explained to the Senate Armed Services
Committee his decision to cancel the Skybolt and the B-70 program, an act that took
Congress by surprise and provoked attacks on McNamara’s Minuteman and Polaris
ballistic missile programs:
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: Turning now to SKYBOLT. The final
issue related to the future of manned bombers is the cancellation of
SKYBOLT. It has been argued that SKYBOLT would be able to extend
the life of the B-52 force in an era of increasingly sophisticated enemy air
defenses, that is, even if the B-52 were to have trouble penetrating enemy
defenses, it could stand off at a distance and fire SKYBOLT. Viewed in
this role, it was clear that SKYBOLT could not make a worthwhile
contribution to our strategic capability since it would combine the
disadvantages of the bomber with those of the missile. It would have the
bomber’s disadvantages of being soft and concentrated and relatively
vulnerable on the ground and the bomber’s slow time to target. But it
would not have the bomber’s advantages usually associated with a manned
system. It would have the lower payload and poorer accuracy of the
missile—indeed, as designed it would have had the lowest accuracy,
reliability and yield of any of our strategic missiles—without the relative
invulnerability and short time-to-target of a MINUTEMAN or a
POLARIS.54
Senator John Stennis chastised Secretary McNamara for canceling Skybolt,
expressed concerns about the reliability of strategic missiles, and called for “building
some more B-52s.”55 Senator Stennis tried to impress upon the defense secretary that
ballistic missiles were an unproven technology:
SENATOR STENNIS: I am advised with reference to the
MINUTEMAN, for instance, considered a proven weapons system, that so
far there have been only two MINUTEMAN firings at Vandenberg Air
Force Base and that they have been both unsuccessful. Do you recall, is
that correct?
36
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: I understand there have been four, and all
unsuccessful….
SENATOR STENNIS: I understand further that you have had serious
problems, too, in the MINUTEMAN guidance system, and that of the
eight MINUTEMAN tests that were scheduled at Vandenberg to take
place between June 12, 1962, and February 15, 1963, that the actual
launchings were only two, and that they were both unsuccessful.56
Senator Smith in a 1963 SASC hearing criticized McNamara for overreliance on
missiles compared to bombers, claiming “the SKYBOLT cancellation…limit[s] the
variety and flexibility of our nuclear forces.”57 Senator Leverett Saltonstall suggested
that Congress should provide funds for the canceled Skybolt and B-70 anyway: “Where
there is a great difference of opinion, like…this year the SKYBOLT or the RS-70, or the
NIKE-ZEUS, that possibly it is wiser for Congress to carry out its responsibility under
the Constitution by providing funds for both or to go forward with both.…”58
Congress fought hard for its strategic vision, using its considerable powers to
promote deployment of more bombers and development of a new generation of advanced
bombers. For example, early in the Kennedy administration, in the fiscal year (FY) 1962
defense budget, Congress authorized and appropriated $514.5 million over and above the
administration’s budget in order to spur deployment of more B-52s and B-58s. Congress
also authorized and appropriated $85.8 million in additional FY 1962 funding, over and
above the administration’s proposed budget, for accelerated development of the
Dynasoar, a strategic space bomber designed to be launched into orbit by missile and
glide back into the atmosphere to deliver a nuclear weapon on target.
Secretary McNamara told Congress in October 1961 that the extra bomber
funding was unnecessary because the administration’s defense buildup was already
proceeding on an accelerated basis.59 Accordingly, he did not spend the extra monies
37
voted by Congress for bombers. Congress in hearings repeatedly cross-examined
McNamara, other Defense Department officials, and the services on whether
McNamara’s assertion was true and if more could be done for strategic bombers.
Bomber advocates in Congress, hoping to advance the progress of military aerospace, as
in the Dynasoar project, proposed at a hearing a supplemental aerospace project that
would use a manned space capsule to perform military missions, a project adopted by the
Air Force and dubbed “Blue Gemini.”60
Congress was suspicious, but not yet fully aware, that Secretary McNamara
regarded strategic bombers as an obsolete technology that would eventually be replaced
with ballistic missiles, that in his view were a more cost-effective means of achieving
assured destruction. McNamara used Blue Gemini to rival, instead of supplement,
Dynasoar, and ordered several internal studies of Dynasoar that questioned the purpose
and cost-effectiveness of the program quietly, with the intent of not alarming the
Congress.61 Nonetheless, rumors of a threat to Dynasoar reached Congress, which leapt
to its defense. For example, in 1963 hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee,
Congress continued to champion a future strategic posture based on strategic bombers,
and specifically the Dynasoar, as reflected in Senator Symington’s examination of a
friendly witness, Lt. General Thomas Gerrity, Air Force deputy chief of staff for systems
and logistics:
SENATOR SYMINGTON: Do you believe in the DYNA-SOAR?
GENERAL GERRITY: Yes, sir. I think this is a very important research
program we have underway to move from the air into space….
SENATOR SYMINGTON: …We canceled the RS-70 on the grounds the
B-52 with the SKYBOLT was better. Now we cancel the SKYBOLT on
some ground, presumably that the POLARIS is better, and the
38
MINUTEMAN, and so forth. Now we are beginning to hear squeaks in
the door of the progress of the DYNA-SOAR. Some say however, that if
we now have the DYNA-SOAR canceled, we might as well cancel
manned aircraft and say, in effect, that is the end of the Air Force.62
Shortly after Senator Symington’s defense of Dynasoar, Secretary McNamara
surprised and enraged Congress by announcing the termination of the program on
December 10, 1963.63 U.S. and Soviet support of a United Nations resolution of October
17, 1963, calling on all states to refrain from introducing nuclear weapons into space,
provided an additional rationale and political cover for McNamara’s cancellation of
Dynasoar.64 In the aftermath of the cancellation of Dynasoar, Skybolt, and suspension of
B-52 and B-58 production, the Congress understood that its vision of a future strategic
posture based on advanced bombers would have to be realized over the opposition of the
Department of Defense, a view expressed by Senator Russell in a 1963 SASC hearing.65
Congress very nearly won its fight to save the advanced B-70 supersonic bomber.
Early in the Kennedy administration, in the FY 1962 defense budget, Congress
authorized and appropriated $180 million over and above the Administration’s proposed
budget for the B-70, expecting the additional money to accelerate B-70 development.
HASC Chairman Vinson pressed Secretary McNamara hard to invest the additional
monies to accelerate the B-70 and did not accept, and with Air Force testimony could
prove, contrary to McNamara, that the B-70 was not already advancing as quickly as
possible. Secretary McNamara and the Kennedy administration resorted to a claim of an
alleged tradition of executive privilege to refuse expenditure of funds authorized and
appropriated by Congress.
39
Chairman Vinson on March 7, 1962 drafted legislation “directing” Secretary
McNamara to spend the $491 million authorized by Congress in the FY 1963 budget for
the B-70 bomber. Vinson notified the Kennedy administration that Congress was willing
to make the B-70 a constitutional issue, and would go to the Supreme Court if necessary
to challenge the alleged executive authority to “impound” monies for the B-70 that
Congress authorized and directed be used. Chairman Vinson on March 14, 1962
convened a closed hearing of the House Armed Services Committee to “call on the
carpet” Secretary McNamara for impounding B-70 funds and opposing the bomber. Less
than a week later, on March 20, 1962, Chairman Vinson met President Kennedy at the
White House where the president agreed to the “Rose Garden Compromise” over the B70 that changed Vinson’s bill language so the word “direct” became “authorized,” but
otherwise appeared to concede victory to the Congress over the B-70.66
However, Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on the B-70 when an
internal turf war broke out between the House and Senate armed services committees on
one side, and the House and Senate appropriations committees on the other side, the latter
not having been fully consulted in the B-70 matter. Consequently, the HASC FY 1963
budget for the B-70 of $491 million was cut by the House Appropriations Committee to
$232 million. The SASC restored the $491 million, but this was challenged by the
Senate Appropriations Committee. A compromise between the committees was reached
in July 1962 resulting in $362 million in FY 1963 for six B-70s. However, the war
between the committees made the B-70 politically radioactive and Congress less willing
to challenge McNamara when he again “impounded” FY 1963 funding for the B-70.
More importantly, Secretary McNamara’s triumph on the B-70 resulted less from directly
40
confronting Congress and more from persuading, or coercing, the Air Force to abandon
the B-70 or submit to an across-the-board examination of the purposes and costeffectiveness of all the service’s strategic programs.67
In 1963, Secretary McNamara’s cancellation of the B-70 program, combined with
his decisions to cancel Dynasoar, Skybolt, and B-52 production, provoked a virtual
rebellion in the House Armed Services Committee. HASC Chairman Vinson, while
disagreeing with McNamara’s decision, reminded the chamber that Congress had legally
empowered the secretary to make such decisions when it passed legislation establishing
the Department of Defense.68 Nonetheless, in the aftermath of the cancellation of
Skybolt and the B-70, HASC members questioned the constitutionality and legality of
Secretary McNamara’s decision.69 McNamara was personally attacked for his veto of
Skybolt and the B-70.70 HASC Congressmen F. Edward Herbert and Leon Gavin
accused Secretary McNamara of being a “missile man” and urged him not to give up on
the manned bomber.71 Congressman Charles Bennett joined the chorus against
McNamara, explaining the virtues of bombers to the secretary at a 1963 HASC hearing.72
Bomber advocacy by Congress did not move the secretary of defense. In 1965,
McNamara testified at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee that bombers
were not needed, except as a “hedge” for missiles in their assured destruction role.
Secretary McNamara: “In summary, I see little merit to the argument that bombers are
needed in the assured destruction role because our missiles are not dependable. But I do
recognize that presently unforeseeable changes in the situation may occur against which a
bomber force might possibly provide a hedge.”73 At the same hearing, Senator Stennis
challenged McNamara for holding a misguided view of the relative merits of strategic
41
bombers compared to missiles. Stennis urged higher priority for developing an advanced
bomber.74
At a 1965 hearing of the Senate Armed Service Committee, Senator Stephen
Young continued to advocate for a supersonic bomber and warned that ballistic missiles
may be vulnerable to electromagnetic pulse effects. Senator Young: “How effective
would a hundred-megaton Russian bomb be against a missile wing? Some seem to think
it might destroy their electrical mechanism so that most of it would be ineffective.”75
McNamara’s decision to end B-52 production raised alarm in Congress that
strategic bombers would become increasingly vulnerable, as Senator Gordon Allott
warned in a 1965 SASC hearing.76 In the same hearing, Senator Miller articulated well
the view of the Congress that among the advantages over ballistic missiles offered by
strategic bombers was their flexibility for escalation control:
SENATOR MILLER: Mr. Secretary, you made the statement that no
bombers can replace missiles. But it is my understanding that one of the
arguments for the follow-on bomber is not to replace but to serve as a
supplement, perhaps to give us another option in an escalation problem….
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: I am not entirely sure I understand what
you mean by another option in an escalation problem.
SENATOR MILLER: So that without resorting to missiles we might use
bombers as clear evidence that this is not intended to be a full-scale
nuclear war.
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: No, sir; I know of no operational plan that
has ever been presented to me and makes any sense whatsoever that
involves a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union limited to the use of
bombers….
SENATOR MILLER: Well, might we not have a situation where we
might use a few of them, without any missiles at all, to indicate to the
enemy that we would not wish unless forced to do so to escalate into fullscale missile use?77
42
Senator A.S. Mike Monroney at the same hearing similarly contended that the
bomber was superior for escalation control:
SENATOR MONRONEY: I am afraid we didn’t have a very good
colloquy about the investment in the B-52s. I never did get around to the
question about the advisability of at least building a few supersonic
bombers which could have the capability for mach 3 delivery of nuclear
bombs. You apparently do not intend to program any of these because the
money that we appropriated last year has laid idle for almost a full year
without ever being allocated. I am afraid we are losing a lot of valuable
time in this delay when the possession of a limited number of supersonic
bombers could perhaps be the difference between the outbreak of
thermonuclear missile war and one that might be limited to the lower
threshold, perhaps by demonstrating your capability of delivering a
thermonuclear bomb by airplane and hitting a city before the missiles start
to fly.
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: Senator Monroney, I think that would be
the most dangerous kind of operation and it is one which no senior
military officer has ever recommended to me….
SENATOR MONRONEY: …just to take a hypothetical case, that Russia
would mobilize on the borders of West Berlin, and threaten and give
notice that they were going to take it. You can’t bluff with thermonuclear
[missile] weapons, you can’t say, “I am moving my finger two inches and
it is getting nearer the button.” Yet I do think if the ultimatum is given to
them to fall back 25 miles or our supersonic bombers would approach
their shores, say, at 1600 hours and if they would not give us assurance
that they were falling back by 1500 hours these bombers would be
unreturnable and we would have town X marked for obliteration as a
demonstration of the firmness of our resolve. I don’t care what your
senior military advisers think, I think it is worth a few squadrons of
supersonic bombers to test it. If the missiles are going to fly you are going
to know about it whether you have given them that one last opportunity to
withdraw as a result of an ultimatum….
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: You can’t bluff under these
circumstances.
SENATOR MONRONEY: Well, you can’t bluff with missiles, either.
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: No, and I don’t think you should be
bluffing with either one under these circumstances….
43
SENATOR MONRONEY: I know, but you are committing yourself to
all-out thermonuclear war. This gives you one ultimate chance of having
another response other than all-out missile warfare. I won’t argue the
point but I would just like to leave it on the record at this point and I do
feel it is something we could afford; something two squadrons of
supersonic bombers could achieve.78
Senator Thurmond joined the fray against McNamara on behalf of strategic
bombers, arguing that bombers equipped with air-to-surface missiles would be more
accurate than ballistic missiles and “would permit the destruction of military targets with
small-yield weapons and thereby involve far less incidental killing of people than would
be involved with the necessarily indiscriminate use of large-size warheads which would
be on ballistic missiles.” Thurmond queried Secretary McNamara, “Do you not think
that the capability of being selective in destroying military targets while limiting mass
destruction of civilians is a factor which should be given considerable weight in our
opinions for structuring our strategic forces?”79
In a 1965 SASC hearing, Senator Monroney warned of B-52 obsolescence—a
concern that would be raised by Congress many times over the next four decades—
predicting that the long-term consequences of McNamara’s decision to cancel Skybolt,
the B-70, and B-52 production would be reliance on an already aging B-52 bomber fleet.
“In your testimony that deals with man-piloted bombers your theory is that we can stretch
out this weary, tired, beaten up, obsolete, rehabilitated bomber time and time again with
more rehabilitation and keep the old B-52s, in some manner, somehow, war weary as
they are, flying in the skies,” the senator chided McNamara. “Now, a year ago, if I
remember correctly, Mr. Secretary…you found some kind of monkey glands or
something that is going to rejuvenate this old bird and keep her going [deleted] beyond
the time she should be in the junk heap.”80
44
Minuteman and Polaris
Congress, while supporting missiles, was skeptical of relying primarily on the
new technology of ICBMs and ballistic missile submarines from the very beginning of
the Kennedy administration, when Secretary of Defense McNamara’s preference for
these systems could be discerned in the first hearings before the Senate and House armed
services committees. Congressional views of the advantages offered by strategic
bombers over ballistic missiles have already been treated at length.
Congressional advocacy of bombers, and skepticism of ballistic missiles, also
manifested itself in challenges to the Defense Department’s plans for basing and
operating ballistic missiles. For example, in a 1961 hearing of the House Armed Services
Committee, Congressman Otis Pike proposed, instead of basing Minuteman in hardened
silos, developing a road-mobile version.81 A road-mobile Minuteman or ship-based
ballistic missile was also suggested by some in Congress as a substitute for Polaris,
Secretary McNamara’s favorite system.82
In 1963 hearings of the House Armed Services Committee, Congress questioned
whether Polaris could credibly extend deterrence to NATO allies, as provided in the
recently concluded Nassau Pact.83 Some in Congress challenged whether the Nassau
Pact was really a vote of confidence in the credibility of Polaris or concealed a quid pro
quo deal with the Soviets to remove Jupiter missiles from Europe in exchange for Soviet
removal of missiles from Cuba.84 In a 1963 SASC hearing, Senator Stennis questioned
the credibility of Polaris for extended deterrence to NATO, wondering if the Jupiter
theater missiles were being removed too precipitously.85
45
In 1963, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Secretary McNamara
declared Polaris “the foundation of our strategic missile force, because they are so highly
invulnerable.”86 McNamara’s support of Polaris was also based on concerns about
bomber survivability to Soviet attack, an issue raised by RAND and other studies, and
that partially motivated the Eisenhower administration to approve the Polaris program.
McNamara’s statement about the central role of Polaris in his vision of the future
U.S. strategic posture, coming in close proximity to his cancellation of Skybolt, B-70,
and ending B-52 production, provoked direct attacks from Congress on Polaris. For
example, Senator Barry Goldwater and Senator Symington at a 1963 SASC hearing
questioned the alleged “invulnerability” of Polaris:
SENATOR GOLDWATER: I hope I can be convinced that I am wrong,
as I think the POLARIS is a fabulous concept, but I honestly think it is
more of a sitting duck than any of us would like to think….
SENATOR SYMINGTON: Recently there has been a great deal written
and spoken about the vulnerability of airplanes. The sky is big also. We
try to follow these things, the repeated emphasis on the vulnerability of the
B-52 at 600 miles an hour, and the effort to establish complete
invulnerability for the POLARIS at 30 miles an hour, especially when
considering the fact that we are developing [deleted]. We have been
emphasizing the POLARIS invulnerability for 7 or 8 years anyway. I do
not see why we anoint the POLARIS with complete invulnerability, after
talking with various experts, and then emphasize and re-emphasize the
tremendous vulnerability of aircraft. It just does not add up to me. I hope
the A-3 develops more range. The first POLARIS missile was certainly
limited as to where it could fire from….
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: I think in view of your answer we should
schedule a complete review of it. There are—one of the things we preach
is the invulnerability of the POLARIS under present circumstances.
SENATOR GOLDWATER: I will not argue with the approach. That is
the great attractiveness of this weapon. But I cannot agree with either you
or General Taylor that the Soviets would not find those if they really
wanted to because you could almost, with a compass, figure out a line they
have to be on and then start looking, that is, if you have any idea at all of
46
the targets that the POLARIS has been assigned to.87 [Here Senator
Goldwater refers to General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff.]
Senator Stennis at a later hearing joined the skepticism about Polaris’
survivability raised by Senators Goldwater and Symington, and worried that McNamara
was “putting all eggs in the Polaris basket.”88 So too did Senator Smith question the
wisdom of overreliance on Polaris, and Minuteman, because the Soviets might develop
breakthrough technology to counter both: “To me it appears from your statement that we
are limiting our second-strike forces to two basic systems—POLARIS and
MINUTEMAN. If this is so, are we not taking a great gamble on our future security?”89
Widespread congressional concerns about the survivability of ballistic missile submarines
continued at least until the mid-1960s. At a 1965 Senate Armed Services Committee
hearing, Senator Symington was still raising this issue as a justification for preferring
strategic bombers.90
Strategic Defenses
Another major difference between Congress and the Kennedy administration in
visions for the future U.S. strategic posture concerned the role of strategic defense.
Secretary of Defense McNamara planned for a triad of strategic offensive forces—
ICBMs, missile submarines, and bombers—to deter war through the threat of assured
destruction. Secretary McNamara opposed a nationwide missile defense to protect U.S.
cities on grounds of technological feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and because arms
47
control theory held that such defenses would provoke arms racing and could prove
destabilizing in a crisis. This vision eventually prevailed.
However, had Congress had its way during this period, the triad would have
become a strategic “quadruped,” with the fourth leg comprising strategic defenses to
protect U.S. cities from Soviet bombers and missiles.
Strategic Missile Defenses
Differences between Secretary McNamara’s Department of Defense and the
Congress over the priority that should be accorded strategic missile defense resulted in an
earlier, but less well known, “great debate” over missile defense that preceded the famous
“great debate” over the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty at the end of the decade.
Early in the Kennedy administration, members of the House Armed Services
Committee advocated accelerated development of the Nike-Zeus interceptor missile to
protect U.S. cities, as called for by Congressman Gavin at a 1961 hearing of the House
Armed Services Committee.91 To the HASC’s disappointment, Secretary McNamara
claimed that more money would not accelerate Nike-Zeus, that the program was already
accelerated to the maximum.92 Congressional enthusiasm for missile defense was
expressed in a concrete way during a 1963 SASC hearing when a small Nike-Zeus
attitudinal engine was tested in Senate chambers.93
By the mid-1960s, Congress suspected that the Department of Defense was not
doing all it could to develop strategic missile defenses. In a 1965 hearing of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, Senator Saltonstall told Secretary McNamara that Congress
wanted more emphasis on defense and advocated giving higher priority to development
48
of the advanced anti-missile Nike-X. McNamara countered that assured destruction, and
therefore offensive capabilities, were his highest priority:
SENATOR SALTONSTALL: The NIKE-X is a defensive item. Do you
believe that this year, if we were going to make any changes in our
program that we should emphasize defensive more rather than the
offensive?
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: Senator Saltonstall, without question,
offensive capability or what I call the capability for assuring the
destruction of the Soviet Union is far and away the most important
requirement we have to meet.94
In 1967, Secretary McNamara made clear his opposition to strategic missile
defense for cities and presented calculations to demonstrate that the Soviets would always
find it less costly to attack cities than for the U.S. to defend them:
SECRETARY MCNAMARA: In short, the Soviets have it within their
technical and economic capacity to offset any further damage limiting
measures we might undertake, provided they are determined to maintain
their deterrent against us. It is the virtual certainty that the Soviets will act
to maintain their deterrent which casts such grave doubts on the
advisability of deploying the NIKE-X system for the protection of our
cities against the kind of heavy, sophisticated missile attack they could
launch in the 1970s. In all probability, all we would accomplish would be
to increase greatly both their defense expenditures and ours without any
gain in real security to either side.95
SASC Chairman Russell, reflecting the prevailing view in Congress, disagreed
vehemently with McNamara over Nike-X and providing strategic defense to cities, noting
that the Soviets were deploying such defenses:
CHAIRMAN RUSSELL: Mr. Secretary, on the antiballistic missile, I
can’t understand how our deploying that weapon system could provoke or
excite the Russians when they are already deploying it themselves. They
know what we do in this country. …I think it would be better to have
deterrence, to have as much or more of an offensive power as the other
man had, and a little better defense than he had.96
49
Senator John McClellan joined Chairman Russell in disparaging McNamara’s
opposition to strategic missile defenses, arguing that the absence of such defenses would
increase the possibility of nuclear war.97 The Senate Armed Services Committee, in a
1967 hearing, provided a platform for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to “shoot down” Secretary
McNamara for opposing strategic missile defenses for American cities.98
Congress and the Joint Chiefs formed a united front against McNamara and
President Johnson in order to deploy a Nike-X missile defense for cities, the Congress
using the power of the purse and the law to compel deployment, and the Joint Chiefs the
authority of their unanimous recommendation. Writing about the Nike-X affair many
years later, McNamara admitted that the combined pressures from Congress and the JCS
“put the President in an almost untenable position.” McNamara:
In the mid-1960s we had irrefutable evidence that the Soviets were
deploying an antiballistic-missile system around Moscow…. The
Congress believed that the proper response to a full-fledged Soviet
antiballistic-missile network was for the U.S. to deploy its own
countrywide ABM system. The Army had been working on such systems
since the late-1950s, first the Nike-Zeus and later the Nike-X. In 1966,
therefore, the Congress authorized and appropriated $167.9 million for
production of a Nike system…. We refused to spend the funds that
Congress had appropriated…. On Dec. 6, 1966…the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and I went to Austin to meet with the President…. The President called
on each of the five Chiefs in turn, and each one of them urged approval of
the ABM program….
This was an extraordinarily difficult moment for President Johnson….
Congress had already passed a law authorizing production of the ABM
system. To continue to refuse to proceed in the direction that had been
supported by the Congress, and to do so in the face of a unanimous
recommendation by the Chiefs, put the President in an almost untenable
position.99
McNamara’s solution was to “put a small amount of money in the budget for
ABM procurement, but state in the budget, and in my written report to the Congress, that
50
none of those funds will be spent and no decision will be made to deploy an ABM system
until we make every possible effort to negotiate an agreement with the Soviets, which
will prohibit deployment of defenses by either side and will limit offensive forces as
well.”100 So Secretary McNamara and President Johnson managed a confrontation with
Congress and the Joint Chiefs over Nike-X, and McNamara’s actions succeeded in
derailing missile defenses for U.S. cities. Congress continued to fund Nike-X, which
became the technological basis for the Safeguard ABM system that protected, not U.S.
cities, but U.S. missile silos from a Soviet first strike in order to preserve McNamara’s
assured destruction capability.101
Civil Defense
Another aspect of strategic defense—civil defense—never enjoyed enthusiastic,
sustained support by Congress or the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In a 1961
hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, Congressman Jefferey Cohelan
challenged why Secretary McNamara proposed protecting Minuteman missiles in
hardened silos, but protecting the civilian population in hardened shelters was not an
equally high priority.102 While a small faction in Congress pressed for civil defense, this
form of protection never equaled the popularity or enthusiasm accorded by Congress to
strategic missile defense. For example, in a 1965 hearing of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, Senator Thurmond called for mass construction of fallout shelters:
SENATOR THURMOND: Mr. Secretary, I am very interested in seeing a
fallout shelter program improved and implemented. I personally regret
that that you did not again this year request an additional program for
shelters. I seem to recall the study which greatly impressed me with the
need for shelters. After World War II, a study of Hiroshima effects in
terms of total casualties from the ground zero out was made….
Subsequently another study was made of the number of fatalities among
51
those persons at the time of the bomb detonation of Hiroshima that were in
any type of shelter. The contrast between those two curves when imposed
on the same graph made the most impressive case for a fallout shelter
program that I have ever seen.103
However, at the same hearing, Senator Thurmond’s advocacy of civil defense was
rebuked by several of his colleagues. Senator Stephen Young, a vociferous supporter of
supersonic strategic bombers, noted that civil defense was “unpopular” and even
criticized the allegedly high salaries paid to employees associated with civil defense
programs.104 Likewise Senator Saltonstall, a strategic bomber advocate and supporter of
Nike-X to protect cities, was critical of civil defense.105 Senator Allott explained frankly
that civil defense garnered little support in Congress because the public did not like it:
“Civil defense is, I think, the most difficult of all to elicit public or congressional support
or sympathy for. If you want to get your head bloodied, why just get into that one.”106
Consequently, because of a lack of support in Congress and the executive branch,
civil defense became an orphan to both. By the late 1960s, the civil defense program was
virtually nonexistent, comprising little more than metal signs on the basements of public
buildings.
The Great Missile Defense Debate
By 1969, the strategic views of the Congress had changed with startling rapidity,
the traditional strategic culture inherited from World War II and before transformed into
the new strategic culture represented by arms control theory which had been proselytized
to Congress by McNamara’s Department of Defense for nearly a decade. By 1969,
Congress had lost its long struggle to realize its vision of a “classical” strategic posture,
52
not unlike that of World War II modernized for the aerospace age, based on advanced
supersonic bombers and defended cities, as well as strategic missiles, a new “unproven”
technology. Skybolt, the B-70, the Dynasoar, and strategic missile defense for cities
were all dead. Secretary McNamara’s vision of the strategic posture as an offensive
triad—with ballistic missile submarines the most important leg, land-based missiles next
in importance, and aging B-52 bombers retained as a “hedge”—was the reality.
Several factors account for the triumph of arms control and its strategic
worldview in the halls of Congress.
The Cuban missile crisis alarmed Congress and the general public. The crisis
strengthened in both the faction that gave higher priority to preventing nuclear war, rather
than prevailing in nuclear conflict.
Perceptions of the geostrategic threat changed. Between 1945 and 1960,
Congress perceived that a unified communist bloc was determined to invade Western
Europe and prevail in a new world war. Between 1960 and 1969, communism divided
into a competing USSR and China, both pressing aggression in “brushfire” wars. The
utility of nuclear weapons as military instruments appeared to make much less sense in a
world of smaller-scale conflicts.
By the mid-1960s the strategic posture preferred by Congress, based on advanced
bombers, supplemented by the new “unproven” technology of ballistic missiles, and
missile defenses for cities, was defeated. The establishment instead of a strategic triad
premised on assured destruction, based primarily on offensive missiles, settled the
programmatic differences that sustained the ideological argument between Congress and
the Department of Defense.
53
But the transformation of the strategic culture in Congress had to do not only with
programmatic defeat, but also with generational, cultural, and political factors—including
youth activism and the movement against the Vietnam War—that jolted the political
center to the left and challenged many forms of tradition. The long slide toward defeat in
the Vietnam War, and the cultural revolution that fed in part on protests against the
Vietnam conflict, undermined traditional deference toward and belief in the wisdom and
competence of America’s political and military leaders. By 1969, many Americans,
certainly the most vocal Americans, did not even support successful prosecution of the
Vietnam War, let alone notions of prevailing in a nuclear conflict.
Just as support in Congress for the Vietnam War steadily eroded, so too
congressional attitudes toward the Cold War changed, becoming more questioning and
skeptical of the nuclear “arms race.” Congressional views toward nuclear weapons
reflected the changing mood of the nation. Many established opinion leaders on strategic
issues, like Senator Symington, once reputed as a “bomber superhawk,” changed their
views. New congressional opinion leaders emerged, enamored of arms control theory,
such as William Fulbright, Albert Gore, Sr., Jacob Javits, Edward Kennedy, Philip Hart,
George McGovern, Charles Percy, Mike Mansfield, Frank Church, and Mark Hatfield.
Simultaneously with these tides of change, arms control ideas percolated through
Congress for years. Time, generational change, and the Defense Department’s persistent
advocacy of the new strategic concepts—joined in that advocacy by the new Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency—eventually made the new ideas familiar to Congress.
Arms control theory became the common language of strategic discourse, endowing its
premises with familiarity and legitimacy.
54
Finally, the strategic culture of modern democracies—that place the highest value
on the survival of the people and the preservation of economic prosperity that sustains the
democratic polity—may be fundamentally inimical to classical military theory and the
aims of achieving superiority, practicable defense of cities, and victory in an age of
weapons of mass destruction. The destructive potential of nuclear weapons in large
numbers may preclude the expectation of a meaningful defensive capability and
correspondingly shift emphasis to strategies of deterrence and arms control. The period
1945-1960, when classical military theory dominated thinking about nuclear strategy,
may have been exceptional. Prior to the first and second world wars, in academia and
among political elites in the western democracies, there was the view that the
destructiveness of modern arms, and the vulnerability of the integrated global economy,
would make war unwinnable and unthinkable. Arms control theory reasserted and
continued this intellectual stream in the nuclear age, not least by injecting physicists,
political scientists, and other academics directly into the policymaking arena to influence
generals and political leaders. Arms control theory triumphed over the generals who
conceived the New Look, not necessarily on superior intellectual merits, but more likely
because it was a more comfortable fit with the American strategic culture. Other cultures
that did not share democratic values, like the Soviet Union, based their nuclear strategy
on continuity of classical military theory, subscribing to the virtues of nuclear superiority
and the objective of victory in nuclear war.107
By the late 1960s, arms control theory awaited only the coalescing influence of a
major national controversy over nuclear weapons and policy to emerge as the dominant
55
strategic culture in Congress. That controversy was the ABM Treaty and the Safeguard
ABM system.
Advocates of an ABM Treaty proposed that the United States and Soviet Union
should negotiate a legally binding agreement to limit missile defenses, especially to
eschew missile defenses that would protect much of the general population. Arms
control theory held that defenses for cities could prove destabilizing in a crisis by
encouraging either side to make a disarming first strike, in the hope that missile defenses
could shield the population from the enemy’s surviving retaliatory forces. Critics of
strategic missile defense for cities also rightly pointed out that there were serious
technological challenges to achieving workable missile defenses, and that an adversary
might be able to overwhelm missile defenses by building more offensive forces at lesser
cost.
The Safeguard ABM system, proposed by the Department of Defense, would
deploy missile defenses to protect Minuteman ICBMs from a disarming first strike that
was becoming increasingly credible because of Soviet deployment of a new generation of
more powerful and accurate missiles. Arms control theory held that missile defenses
could be stabilizing in a crisis by increasing the survivability of retaliatory forces, and so
eroding adversary confidence in the efficacy of a disarming first strike. Protecting U.S.
retaliatory capabilities, instead of cities, with a limited missile defense would also be
more technologically practical and less costly, or so proponents argued.
In 1969, Congress and the Department of Defense engaged in what even some
contemporaries termed a “great debate” over missile defenses, specifically over whether
the nation needed Safeguard and an ABM Treaty. Retrospectively, “great debate” was no
56
misnomer. This was, in fact, a pivotal moment in U.S. history that placed arms control
theory at the helm of future U.S. strategic policy. Both sides in the debate were
dominated by arms control supporters, in Congress and in the Department of Defense.
The debate was largely between those who shared the arms control worldview.
Significantly, the debate was largely conducted before the Senate and House
foreign relations committees, suggesting that the locus for the making of strategic policy
in Congress had shifted away from the armed services committees, signifying the
institutional triumph of arms control theory in Congress. The House Foreign Relations
Committee (HFRC), as part of the debate, dedicated an entire hearing to airing the views
of Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn. Schelling, a key academic progenitor of arms
control theory, embodied the new strategic culture that the Kennedy administration
brought to Washington at the beginning of the decade.108
Evidence of triumph by the new strategic culture of arms control theory in the
Senate and House is replete in the congressional record. For example, during a 1969
Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) hearing on Safeguard, Deputy Secretary of
Defense David Packard agreed with Senator Albert Gore, Sr. that protecting U.S. cities
would be destabilizing and could lead to “escalation of the arms race.” Gore’s argument
against ABM was doctrinaire arms control, warning that Safeguard would cause a new
cycle of arms racing:
SENATOR GORE: In my view it would clearly be in the interest of our
national security to defer the deployment of ABM and to seek promptly
negotiations with the Soviet Union, before time runs out. After another
cycle of action and reaction, there may well be no possibility of
negotiating a treaty that is capable of verification. In my view, our
retaliatory capacity is clearly sufficient to permit us to seize this
opportunity without imperiling the security of this nation.109
57
A 1969 hearing of the House Foreign Relations Committee on missile defense and
an ABM Treaty raised the importance of maintaining between the United States and
Soviet Union “strategic equilibrium”—a central arms control concept.110 Many senior
members of Congress now gave higher priority to achieving an arms control treaty than
to improving U.S. strategic offensive or defensive capabilities, a stunning reversal from
the days when Congress strove for nuclear superiority over the USSR. For example, in a
1969 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Claiborne Pell opposed
U.S. missile defenses because they could upset the “delicate balance of terror” and
threaten the opportunity to achieve a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty:
SENATOR PELL: We have to make the political judgment whether the
deployment of this system will increase or decrease the possibility of war.
[One] view is that it will decrease it. This is really where we have a
question of judgment and a question of disagreement. We do know, as
brought out this morning, that to go ahead with this system we can
certainly not move ahead with a complete or comprehensive nuclear test
ban treaty until the system is installed in 1973.
That, to my mind, would be one retrogressive step. The other political
judgment to make is what would be the effect in the Soviet Union. …It is
human nature, I think, if the Soviets were superior to us or had greater
strength than we had we would not negotiate until we caught up. I think
they feel the same way.
At the same time, they agree and we agree that we are in a moment of
parity, a delicate balance of terror. Those of us who are concerned with
this do not want to do anything to change that balance, and this is the basic
political decision we have to make.111
Likewise, in the same hearing, Senator Frank Church made clear to Melvin Laird,
President Richard Nixon’s secretary of defense, that his concern was that “deterrence” be
upheld and not undermined by defenses, a point of view that would have been alien to the
Congress in 1961, when Congress saw no contradiction between deterrence and defense:
58
SENATOR CHURCH: Mr. Secretary…deterrence is a substitute for
defense. I have been always told it had taken the place of defense, in the
lexicon of the military, and the whole idea of the deterrent is to persuade
the would-be enemy, in advance never to attack because of the certainty of
utter destruction in the retaliation that would immediately follow such an
attack. The question we keep coming back to—the point that the ABM is
going to improve the credibility of our deterrent—I think is the unproven
part of your case.112
In stark contrast to the views of Congress just a few years earlier, by 1969 many
members of Congress saw missile defenses as endangering strategic equilibrium by
strengthening the U.S. posture.113 Congressman Donald Fraser expressed this view in a
1969 hearing of the House Foreign Relations Committee. Fraser did not trust the
Department of Defense to deploy even a “thin” missile defense, fearing it might be a
backdoor to a stronger “thick” ABM system, and declared, “I have come out strongly
against the ABM because I have seen in its origins the work of those who advocated the
general deployment of an ABM as a major increment to our strategic nuclear posture.”114
Congressman James Fulton argued in a 1969 HFRC hearing that missile defense
manifested “a historic concept that is now out of date.” According to Fulton, the
proposed Safeguard ABM system reflected thinking so primitive as to be “tribal.”
Congressman Fulton: “As a matter of fact, it would be returning to the tribal level, that
anything you couldn’t identify or find out what it was within the area of reference in
which your tribe operates or in that geographic area should be killed.”115 The witness,
Dr. George Kistiakowsky, a prominent arms control theorist from academia, agreed.116
In contrast to the Congress in previous years, many in the Congress of 1969
equated U.S. strategic superiority with less security, not more. At a Senate Foreign
Relations Committee hearing on Safeguard and an ABM Treaty, Senator Albert Gore, Sr.
argued that Safeguard was unnecessary, and further modernization of U.S. missile forces
59
with multiple warheads was dangerously destabilizing to the strategic equilibrium with
the USSR because the United States already had “overkill.” Senator Gore reinforced
these points with several charts inserted into the congressional record.117
Members of Congress who in 1961 were so enamored of the strategic bomber and
skeptical of missile technology, in 1969 declared “the POLARIS submarine today is the
greatest strategic weapon in the world,” in the words of Senator Symington.118 Now the
prevailing view in Congress was that the submarine was invulnerable and obviated the
need for further strengthening of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. This view was captured in
testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Congressman William
Anderson: “I think that the POLARIS is such a remarkable weapons system, such a
remarkable breakthrough, that we can count on it certainly today and…very definitely for
the future.”119
By 1969, many members of Congress gave higher priority to arms control than to
even the perception that the United States might enjoy strategic superiority over the
USSR, as evidenced by this rebuke from Senator Fulbright to Senator Gore during an
SFRC exchange with Deputy Secretary of Defense Packard:
SENATOR GORE: Mr. Secretary, I don’t find myself in agreement with
you that we have comparable strength. My information is that the United
States is ahead in all respects.
MR. PACKARD: You have to look at the specific areas. You can’t talk
just about total warheads.
SENATOR GORE: Let’s begin: How many submarines do we have?
MR. PACKARD: We are well ahead in submarine launched missiles.
SENATOR FULBRIGHT: But if the Senator will allow me, I don’t want
us to persuade the Soviets not to negotiate. They have already indicated
60
they are willing to. I don’t want you to make such a strong case that they
will back out if you persuade them they are at a disadvantage.120
By 1969, many in Congress, probably the majority, believed that the greatest
threat to the United States was not any particular strategic vulnerability, such as the
growing capability of Soviet missiles, but the mutual threat posed by “arms racing.” For
example, Senator Gore warned in a lengthy formal statement to the SFRC that U.S.
missile defenses would escalate the “arms race” and trigger an “inevitable actionreaction” cycle, a key theme of arms control theory.121 Similarly, a House Foreign
Relations Committee hearing raised the alarm about the greatest threat, as indicated by
arms control theory, the threat from “arms racing.”122
By no means were all members of Congress converts to the new strategic culture
of arms control by 1969. During HFRC hearings, Congressman John Buchanan warned
that technological surprise could still upset the strategic balance to the detriment of the
United States.123 Congressman Paul Findley worried that a strategic equilibrium with the
USSR, instead of being desirable, could undermine extended deterrence to NATO.124
Congressman Vernon Thompson wondered why the Soviets would condemn the United
States for pursuing missile defenses for U.S. cities, when the Soviets already had them.125
Even Congressman Fulton, who tended to support arms control, had doubts about the
“logic” of nuclear deterrence: “If you take the whole superstructure of nuclear war and
reduce it to these simplistic terms of permutations, combinations and logic, then aren’t
you taking out of it most of the sum and substance of it, the human people?....You have
taken the wrong postulate to begin with.”126
Nonetheless, a new era had begun. The traditional strategic culture that
dominated Congress in 1961 was a minority view by 1969, eclipsed by a new strategic
61
culture, as innovative as the times, that no longer equated strategic superiority or defense
with increased security, and that no longer conceived of victory as the object of war.
Arms control theory, the view that nuclear weapons fundamentally changed everything
and made irrelevant traditional notions of security, would dominate the thinking and
language of strategic debate in Congress and administrations in future decades.
Conclusions
Congress ultimately lost the great debate with Secretary McNamara’s Department
of Defense over the future strategic posture of the United States. Nonetheless, the
potential power of Congress to shape the U.S. strategic posture was demonstrated by the
length and duration of that debate, as well as by the constitutional prerogative of
congressional committees to compel the Department of Defense to justify every policy,
program, and penny related to the posture. The 1970s and 1980s would see the Congress
more often winning the argument.
The role of Congress in shaping the strategic posture was at least as important as
that of the military services and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The services and the Joint
Chiefs, at least through the mid-1960s, were more closely aligned with the traditional
strategic culture in Congress than with the new strategic culture in Secretary McNamara’s
Department of Defense, embodied in the theory of arms control.
Arms control theory concerned not just or even primarily negotiations and
treaties, but a technocratic philosophy or worldview that saw nuclear weapons themselves
as the threat, and that assumed logic and science would lead Washington and Moscow to
62
make similar strategic calculations: that victory is impossible and the goal should be
strategic stability for war avoidance; that arms racing is costly and destabilizing and
should be avoided; that first-strike capabilities are destabilizing and to be avoided; that
strategic defense of cities is costly and destabilizing, and so stability is best served by
vulnerable homelands; and that survivable retaliatory forces are stabilizing and so highly
desirable. These tenets of arms control theory were the core beliefs of Secretary
McNamara, and drove the strategic policy of his Department of Defense.
Congress often represented the still classical views of the services and Joint
Chiefs, who tended to advocate for strategic superiority and defended cities, contrary to
the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Congress could speak for the services and the
Joint Chiefs to their superiors in the Department of Defense, and to its secretary, with
more authority and less deference. Indeed, Congress often provided the services and the
Joint Chiefs with a highly visible public platform to challenge the secretary of defense
and his vision of the strategic posture, and with political cover for doing so.
So the role of Congress in the strategic posture should not be judged only by
defeat. The services and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who certainly were and are powerful
actors in the debate over strategic posture, also shared defeat with Congress in the debate
with Secretary McNamara. Contrary to some modern critics, the Congress did not play a
merely passive role, but had a reasoned and independent vision of what the strategic
posture should be, and fought hard for that vision.127
Yet neither should the consequences of the Congress losing its argument with
Secretary of Defense McNamara be minimized. The 1960s were the decisive decade in
shaping the future U.S. strategic posture. The theory of arms control prevailed as the
63
intellectual basis for thinking about the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security
policy, and about the numbers and characteristics of forces necessary to implement that
policy. The theory of arms control, writ large, encompassed the belief that nuclear
weapons changed everything, and that to talk about fighting and winning a nuclear war
made no sense; that strategic superiority was unattainable and would only result in costly
arms racing and growing risk; and that the strategic and budgetary realities of trying to
sustain a credible deterrent in Europe and elsewhere could not rely on a massive nuclear
threat only, but required flexible options, including nonnuclear options, so that a
President would not be limited to a choice between suicide and surrender.
Congressional defeat in the doctrinal debate had profound implications for the
U.S. strategic posture. Congress wanted primacy given to a new generation of advanced
strategic bombers, supplemented by the “unproven” technology of offensive missiles, and
missile defenses for cities. Instead of a “sword” of supersonic bombers and a “shield” of
missile defenses for U.S. cities, as preferred by Congress, Secretary of Defense
McNamara got his version of the strategic triad, with primacy given to ballistic missiles,
especially submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and no missile defenses for U.S. cities.
More profound than defeat of the strategic force posture preferred by Congress
was the intellectual conversion of Congress to the new strategic culture represented by
arms control theory. Future strategic arguments would be more one-sided, with most
parties sharing similar strategic views, based on arms control theory. Traditionalists,
those who thought nuclear weapons had not completely changed the game—those who
saw more continuity than discontinuity with classical military theory and the experience
of military history—became a distinct minority.
64
This outcome, the defeat of Congress in the debate over strategic posture and the
eclipse of the traditional strategic culture in Congress, probably was not inevitable.
Both sides, Secretary McNamara’s Department of Defense and the Congress, and allies
of the Congress in the services and the Joint Chiefs, offered reasons and evidence to
support their points of view that were compelling and persuasive.
A lesson to be learned from the 1960s great debate over strategic posture is that
the outcome, momentous though it was, turned on the efforts of a very small number of
individuals. Between Congress, the Department of Defense, the services, and the Joint
Chiefs, there were probably less than a score of primary actors. Secretary of Defense
McNamara spoke, literally, for the Department of Defense. In Congress, there were
about a dozen chief combatants, including committee chairmen, ranking members, and
activist members, who carried on the fight. This does not mean that the other members of
Congress, numbering hundreds, were uninterested. Rather, then and today, Congress has
a tradition of reliance on and deference to the opinions of the congressional leadership
and expert individual members to guide its judgments, even on matters as vital as nuclear
weapons and strategic policy.
Therefore, the differing strategic visions of Secretary McNamara and the
Congress were not yet so deeply embedded in their respective institutions as to make
bureaucratic inertia the deciding factor. Since the strategic direction of the nation turned
on the efforts of a few, willpower was the decisive factor. If Congress stood its ground
and persisted in using the power of the purse to enforce its will, if SASC Chairman
Russell acted as determinedly as Secretary McNamara, or if McNamara weakened, the
outcome might well have been very different. But there is another tradition in Congress,
65
that of deference to the executive on military matters, that places Congress at an
institutional disadvantage, especially when confronted by a resolute secretary of defense.
This tradition of deference to the military was stronger in that generation of members of
Congress who experienced World War II than it is today. In the end, the struggle
between strategic cultures may well have been decided by something as ephemeral as a
single individual’s forceful personality.
Today, vital strategic issues can still be decided by the exertions of a single,
determined member of Congress. For example, recently the Department of Defense
reversed its long reluctance to protect military forces from electromagnetic pulse and is
implementing the recommendations of a congressional commission—the Commission to
Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack—that
was established to achieve this purpose, largely through the efforts of one man,
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett.128 Similarly, a single member of Congress, chairing a
crucial subcommittee, is widely credited, or blamed, with thwarting the efforts of the
George W. Bush administration to add a new earth-penetrating nuclear warhead and,
later, the Reliable Replacement Warhead to the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The educational role of Congress is often overlooked as a factor in making the
U.S. strategic posture. Here Congress did surpass Secretary McNamara and the
Department of Defense and, in a way, triumphed.
Open hearings on nuclear weapons and strategy before the various congressional
committees put out an enormous amount of unclassified material—ranging from matters
as broad as assured destruction to minutiae as narrow as missile accuracies—and became
a major source, perhaps the primary source, of information for the press and public. Most
66
importantly, the press often relied on the commentary of members of Congress and the
public testimony of officials to synthesize—and greatly simplify—the technically
complex and intellectually nuanced arguments. Consequently, a caricature of the policies
espoused by Secretary McNamara, and certainly of the strategic thinking of such theorists
as Schelling and Kahn, often resulted. For example, even today it is widely believed,
even among policymakers, that MAD is not a pun, but the official name of an actual
strategic and targeting policy of the United States.129
Congressional views of the new strategic thinking based on arms control theory,
as espoused and opposed in open hearings, often lacking the intellectual nuances of the
original theorists, and sometimes just wrong, became the common understanding among
the people, the press, academia, and elites. For good or ill, the version of the new
strategic culture based on arms control theory as expressed in Congress became the
intellectual foundation for debates about nuclear weapons and policy in future decades.
67
Endnotes
1
Keith B. Payne, The Great American Gamble: Deterrence Theory and Practice from the Cold War to the
Twenty-First Century (Fairfax, Va.: National Institute Press, 2008). More typical is Lawrence Freedman,
The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), that pays very scant attention to
the Congress, briefly mentioning its existence but ten times, usually in passing, in a book 500 pages long.
2
Ernest R. May, John D. Steinbruner, and Thomas W. Wolfe (Alfred Goldberg, ed.), History of the
Strategic Arms Competition, 1945-1972, Parts I and II (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the
Secretary of Defense, March 1981) (Top Secret/Restricted Data/No Foreign Dissemination; declassified in
part).
3
Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), Military Procurement Authorization Fiscal Year 1964, 88th
Cong., 1st sess., February 19, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1963), pp. 4-5.
4
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (El Paso Norte Press, 2007); Carl von Clausewitz, On War
(New York: Penguin Classics, 1968).
5
See, for example: NSC-30, “United States Policy on Atomic Weapons,” September 10, 1948, reprinted in
Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, eds., Containment: Documents on American Policy and
Strategy, 1945-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), pp. 176-189; United States Air Force
Air Staff, “Strategic Implications of the Atomic Bomb on Warfare,” February 3, 1947, quoted in Freedman,
The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, op. cit., p. 53; and Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Evaluation of Current Air
Offensive Plans,” December 21, 1948, reprinted in Etzold and Gaddis, Containment, op. cit., pp. 357-360.
6
David Alan Rosenberg, “‘A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours’: Documents on American
War Plans for Nuclear War with the Soviet Union, 1954-55,” International Security, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Winter
1981/82); and David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy,
1945-1960,” International Security, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Spring 1983).
7
“Evaluation of the Effect on Soviet War Effort Resulting from the Strategic Air Offensive” (the Harmon
Report), May 11, 1949, reprinted in Etzold and Gaddis, Containment, op. cit., pp. 360-364.
8
Joint Chiefs of Staff, “DROPSHOT,” 1949, reprinted in Anthony Cave Brown, DROPSHOT: The
American Plan for World War III Against Russia in 1957 (New York: Dial Press, 1978); and Steven T.
Ross, American War Plans, 1945-1950 (London: Frank Cass, 1996), p. 124.
9
Department of State Policy Planning Staff, NSC-68, “A Report to the National Security Council by the
Executive Secretary on United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” April 14, 1950,
reprinted in Etzold and Gaddis, Containment, op. cit., pp. 385-442.
10
National Security Council, NSC-162/2, “Basic National Security Policy,” October 30, 1953, reprinted in
The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam,
Senator Gravel edition, Vol. 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 412-429.
11
John P. Rose, The Evolution of U.S. Army Nuclear Doctrine, 1945-1980 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1980), pp. 62-79; and Major J.H. Cushman, “Pentomic Infantry Division in Combat,” Military
Review, Vol. 37, No. 10 (January 1958), pp. 19-30.
12
John Foster Dulles, “A Policy of Boldness,” Life, May 19, 1952, p. 151; Dulles, Council on Foreign
Relations speech reprinted in “The Evolution of Foreign Policy,” Department of State Bulletin, Vol. 30
(January 25, 1954), pp. 107-110; and Dulles, “Policy for Security and Peace,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 32, No.
3 (April 1954), pp. 353-364. On “massive retaliation” misrepresenting the New Look, see Freedman, The
Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, op. cit., Chapter 6, especially pp. 84-88; and Martin C. Fergus, “The
Massive Retaliation Doctrine: A Study in United States Military Policy Formation,” Public Policy, Vol. 17
(1968).
68
13
Immediately after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many prominent Manhattan Project
scientists formed committees, petitioned the president, and held university conferences promoting the
theme that the invention of nuclear weapons necessitated international control of the technology and radical
changes in the international system. See Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp 749-754, 644-645.
14
The arrival of arms control as a developed theory is usually credited to the book, Arms Control,
Disarmament, and National Security (New York: George Braziller, 1961), edited by Donald G. Brennan,
that is a collection of essays by leading arms control theorists; many of the essays appeared earlier in a
special edition of the journal Daedalus, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Fall 1960). Earlier intellectual progenitors of arms
control include: Bernard Brodie, The Atomic Bomb and American Security, Memorandum No. 18 (New
Haven: Yale Institute of International Studies, 1945); Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power
and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946); J. Robert Oppenheimer, “International Control of
Atomic Energy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 2 (January 1948), pp. 239-252; P.M.S Blackett, Fear, War
and the Bomb (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949); Oppenheimer, “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,”
Foreign Affairs, Vol. 31, No. 4 (July 1953), pp. 525-535; Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign
Policy (New York: Harper and Brothers for the Council on Foreign Relations, 1957); Bertrand Russell,
Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1959); and Charles E. Osgood, “A
Case for Graduated Unilateral Disarmament,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 16, No. 4 (April 1960),
pp. 127-139; and Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1960).
15
Henry S. Rowen, “Formulating Strategic Doctrine,” in Report of the Commission on the Organization of
the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, Vol. 4, Appendix K (Washington, D.C.: GPO, June
1975), pp. 227, 231-232.
16
On the role of game theory, see, for example, Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, op. cit.; Freedman, The
Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, op. cit., Chapter 12; Morton Kaplan, “The Calculus of Nuclear Deterrence,”
World Politics, Vol. 11, No. 1 (October 1958), pp. 20-43; and Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games, and
Debates (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Michigan University Press, 1960).
17
Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), Authority For Ordering Ready Reserves To Active Duty,
Extension Of Enlistments, And Additional Appropriations For Procurement, 87th Cong., 1st sess., June 27,
1961 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1961), pp. 3, 7, 8-9, 11, 14.
18
Ibid., pp. 23-24.
19
Ibid., pp. 24-25.
20
House Armed Services Committee (HASC), Authorizing Appropriations For Aircraft, Missiles, And
Naval Vessels For The Armed Forces, 87th Cong., 1st sess., April 11, 1961 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1961),
p. 1283.
21
Ibid., pp. 1297-1298.
22
Ibid., p. 26.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
25
Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), Military Procurement Authorization Fiscal Year 1964, 88th
Cong., 1st sess., February 20, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1963), pp. 83-85.
26
Ibid., p. 86.
27
Ibid., pp. 107-108.
28
Ibid., pp. 101-102.
69
29
Ibid., p. 87.
30
Ibid., p. 145. See also V.D. Sokolovskii, ed., Soviet Military Strategy, translated and annotated by
Herbert S. Dinerstein, Leon Gouré, and Thomas W. Wolfe (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963).
31
History and Research Division, Headquarters, Strategic Air Command, History of the Joint Strategic
Target Planning Staff: Background and Preparation of SIOP-62 (Offutt Air Force Base, Neb.: Strategic
Air Command, n.d.) (Top Secret; declassified in part); Capt. Mark Mariska, USA, “The Single Integrated
Operational Plan,” Military Review, Vol. 52, No. 3 (March 1972), pp. 32-39; and Peter Pringle and William
Arkin, SIOP: The Secret U.S. Plan for Nuclear War (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1983), Chapter 5.
32
History and Research Division, Headquarters, Strategic Air Command, History of the Joint Strategic
Target Planning Staff: Preparation of SIOP-63 (Offutt Air Force Base, Neb: Strategic Air Command,
January 1964) (Top Secret; declassified in part).
33
Robert S. McNamara, “Defense Arrangements of the North Atlantic Community,” Department of State
Bulletin, Vol. 47 (July 9, 1962), pp. 67-68; and Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, op. cit., p.
235.
34
Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, op. cit., pp. 239-246.
35
Ibid., p. 243.
36
Quoted in Payne, The Great American Gamble, op. cit., p. 103.
37
Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, op. cit., pp. 247-249.
38
Payne, The Great American Gamble, op. cit., p. 97.
39
SASC, Military Procurement Authorization Fiscal Year 1964, op. cit., p. 89.
40
House Armed Services Committee (HASC), Hearings On Military Posture And H.R. 2440, To Authorize
Appropriations During Fiscal Year 1964, For Procurement, Research, Development, Test, And Evaluation
Of Aircraft, Missiles, And Naval Vessels For The Armed Forces And For Other Purposes, 88th Cong., 1st
sess., January 30, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1963), pp. 275-276.
41
SASC, Military Procurement Authorization Fiscal Year 1964, op. cit., p. 317.
42
Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, op. cit., p. 248.
43
HASC, Hearings On Military Posture And H.R. 2440, To Authorize Appropriations During Fiscal Year
1964, op. cit., pp. 383-384.
44
Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) and Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on
Defense (SAC-D), Military Procurement Authorizations, Fiscal Year 1966, 89th Cong., 1st sess., February
25, 1965 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1965), p. 246.
45
Ibid., p. 274.
46
Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) and Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on
Defense (SAC-D), Military Procurement Authorizations, Fiscal Year 1966, 89th Cong., 1st sess., 26
February 1965 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1965), p. 329.
47
Senate Armed Services Committee, Authorizing Appropriations During Fiscal Year 1968 For
Procurement Of Aircraft, Missiles, Naval Vessels, And Tracked Combat Vehicles, And Research,
Development, Test, And Evaluation For The Armed Forces, 90th Cong., 1st sess., March 20, 1967
(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1967), pp. 260-262.
48
Ibid., p. 252.
49
Ibid., p. 486.
50
SASC, Authority For Ordering Ready Reserves To Active Duty, op. cit., p. 50.
70
51
HASC, Authorizing Appropriations For Aircraft, Missiles, And Naval Vessels For The Armed Forces,
op. cit., pp. 1588-1589.
52
Ibid., p. 1586.
53
Ibid., pp. 1593-1597.
54
SASC, Military Procurement Authorization Fiscal Year 1964, op. cit., p. 44.
55
Ibid., p. 92.
56
Ibid., p. 95.
57
Ibid., p. 321.
58
Ibid., p. 91.
59
Mark Wade, “Dynasoar,” Encyclopedia Astronautica, available at
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/dynasoar.htm; and Robert Godwin, ed., Dyna-Soar: Hypersonic Strategic
Weapons System (Ontario, Canada: Collector’s Guide Publishing, 2003).
60
Wade, “Dynasoar,” op. cit.; and House Science and Astronautics Committee, Report: Astronautical and
Aeronautical Events of 1962, 88th Cong., 1st sess., June 12, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1963), pp. 1718.
61
Wade, “Dynasoar,” op. cit.
62
SASC, Military Procurement Authorization Fiscal Year 1964, op. cit., p. 986.
63
Wade, “Dynasoar,” op. cit.
64
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Arms Control and Disarmament Agreements (Washington,
D.C.: Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1982), p. 49.
65
SASC, Military Procurement Authorization Fiscal Year 1964, op. cit., p. 1021.
66
Peter J. Roman, “Strategic Bombers over the Missile Horizon,” in John Gooch, ed., Airpower: Theory
and Practice (London: Frank Cass and Routledge, 1995), pp. 218, 222-224, 227; and Norman Friedman,
The Fifty-Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2007),
pp. 292.
67
Roman, “Strategic Bombers over the Missile Horizon,” op. cit., pp. 224-227.
68
HASC, Hearings On Military Posture And H.R. 2440, To Authorize Appropriations During Fiscal Year
1964, op. cit., p. 328.
69
Ibid., pp. 336-337.
70
Ibid., pp. 361-364.
71
Ibid., p. 366.
72
Ibid., p. 387.
73
SASC and SAC-D, Military Procurement Authorizations, Fiscal Year 1966, op. cit., p. 221.
74
Ibid., pp. 227-228.
75
Ibid., pp. 232-233.
76
Ibid., pp. 239-240.
77
Ibid., p. 244.
78
Ibid., pp. 329-330.
71
79
Ibid., pp. 352-353.
80
Ibid., p. 261.
81
HASC, Authorizing Appropriations For Aircraft, Missiles, And Naval Vessels For The Armed Forces,
op. cit., p. 1305.
82
Ibid., p. 1306.
83
HASC, Hearings On The Military Posture And H.R. 2440, To Authorize Appropriations During Fiscal
Year 1964, op. cit., pp. 281-282. The Nassau Pact, also known as the Kennedy-Macmillan Agreement,
concluded at Nassau, the Bahamas, on December 22, 1962, offered Polaris missiles to Britain that London
promised to use as part of a multilateral NATO deterrent.
84
Ibid., pp. 283-284.
85
SASC, Military Procurement Authorization Fiscal Year 1964, op. cit., p. 312.
86
Ibid., p. 100.
87
Ibid., pp. 73-74.
88
Ibid., p. 313.
89
Ibid., p. 321.
90
SASC and SAC-D, Military Procurement Authorizations, Fiscal Year 1966, op. cit., p. 237.
91
HASC, Authorizing Appropriations For Aircraft, Missiles, And Naval Vessels For The Armed Forces,
op. cit., pp. 1288-1289.
92
Ibid., p. 1288.
93
SASC, Military Procurement Authorization Fiscal Year 1964, op. cit., p. 1005.
94
SASC and SAC-D, Military Procurement Authorizations, Fiscal Year 1966, op. cit., p. 229.
95
SASC, Authorizing Appropriations During Fiscal Year 1968, op. cit., p. 238.
96
Ibid., p. 284; see also pp. 252-253, 283.
97
Ibid., p. 289.
98
Ibid., pp. 249-252.
99
Robert S. McNamara, “Long Road to Reykjavik,” Time, June 21, 2005, available at
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1075203,00.html.
100
Ibid.
101
Friedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, op. cit., p. 293.
102
HASC, Authorizing Appropriations For Aircraft, Missiles, And Naval Vessels For The Armed Forces,
op. cit., pp. 1301-1302.
103
SASC and SAC-D, Military Procurement Authorizations, Fiscal Year 1966, op. cit., p. 248.
104
Ibid., pp. 255-259.
105
Ibid., p. 230.
106
Ibid., p. 240.
107
See, for example, Sokolovskii, Soviet Military Strategy, op. cit., passim; General P. A. Zhilin, The
History of Military Art (Moscow: Institute of Military History, Ministry of Defense, 1986), especially Part
72
IV; and General D.A. Volkogonov, Marxist-Leninist Teaching On War And The Army (Moscow:
Voyenizdat, Ministry of Defense, 1984).
108
House Foreign Relations Committee (HFRC), Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific
Developments, Strategy And Science: Toward A National Security Policy For The 1970s, 91st Cong., 1st
sess., March 18, 1969 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1969), pp. 88-162.
109
Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), Subcommittee on International Organization and
Disarmament Affairs, Strategic And Foreign Policy Implications Of ABM Systems, 91st Cong., 1st sess.,
March 26, 1969 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1969), pp. 304-305.
110
HFRC, Strategy And Science, op. cit., pp. 17-18.
111
SFRC, Strategic And Foreign Policy Implications Of ABM Systems, op. cit., pp. 244-245.
112
Ibid., p. 250.
113
HFRC, Strategy And Science, op. cit., p. 17.
114
Ibid., pp. 25, 27.
115
Ibid., pp. 80-81.
116
Ibid., p. 81.
117
SFRC, Strategic And Foreign Policy Implications Of ABM Systems, op. cit., pp. 300-302.
118
Ibid., pp. 335-336.
119
Ibid., p. 335. Representative Anderson was considered by Congress an authority on nuclear submarines
because as a Navy captain he commanded the first nuclear submarine to navigate beneath the North Pole.
120
Ibid., p. 282.
121
Ibid., p. 302.
122
HFRC, Strategy And Science, op. cit., p. 140.
123
Ibid., p. 31.
124
Ibid., p. 138.
125
Ibid., p. 78.
126
Ibid., p. 154.
127
For example, a Brookings Institution study claims that during this period Congress was largely ignorant
or indifferent to strategic issues and mostly “rubber-stamped” Pentagon preferences. See Stephen I.
Schwartz, “Congressional Oversight of the Bomb,” in Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and
Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998),
pp. 486-491.
128
See Dr. William R. Graham, Chairman, Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United
States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, Volume I: Executive Report (Washington, D.C.: EMP
Commission, 2004).
129
As an aside, it must be conceded that confusing the official “assured destruction” with the mythical
“Mutual Assured Destruction” is understandable, since the MAD emphasis on mutual vulnerability
describes more accurately than the official name the essence of the actual policy.
73