Yet the upshot of this game at RAND, as concluded by most of its players, was that the United States should supply the NATO allies with their own nuclear weapons. Kaufmann was appalled. He had concluded in his Princeton work that nuclear retaliation, in an age of potentially mutual destruction, was a fatuous response to conventional aggression; that all Clausewitzian principles of war would be thrown to the winds, that the scope of violence would exceed any objectives to be gained, that the war would no longer be subject to strategy in the traditional sense.
Kaufmann argued strenuously against the nuclear-sharing solution in the course of this game, but he had little to offer in the way of an alternative. The game did show Kaufmann just how serious was the issue the nuclear plan’s advocates were raising—not merely for Asia and the other “gray areas” of the world, but also for Western Europe. From that point on, Kaufmann felt that he had to find some way to maintain NATO’s credibility without having to resort to spreading nuclear weapons all over the globe.
It was through this concern that Kaufmann met Albert Wohlstetter. Wohlstetter had just completed his R-290 study, which revealed that SAC was highly vulnerable to an attack from the Soviet Union, a conclusion having enormous implications for the future of nuclear deterrence and the likelihood of war. Wohlstetter was passionately opposed to spreading nuclear weapons to allies abroad, but for reasons different from Kaufmann’s. He thought that such weapons would be exceedingly vulnerable to preemptive attack because of their proximity to Soviet territory. Still, their analyses mutually reinforced each other’s conclusions, and so a friendship was struck.
First with Wohlstetter and then with others, Kaufmann began increasingly to hover around the economics division at RAND. When Kaufmann first came to RAND, he thought that he would elaborate further on his ideas about limited war. At the time, he found nuclear war uninteresting: it seemed an almost totally unlikely event, given the massive nuclear arsenals on each side, which would deter the other from entertaining ideas of starting such a war; and if it did erupt, it could only lead to an “all-out war of nuclear annihilation,” he had written, for which “it is difficult to visualize any strategy at all, in the traditional sense.” But now he discovered, mainly within the economics division, a whole cadre of smart analysts working on the deterrence, targeting and strategy of nuclear war. They had fashioned the technique of “systems analysis,” which uncovered a new set of problems that practically redefined the nature of strategy in the nuclear age. In the mid-1950s, within this small strategic community, there existed that effervescent enthusiasm and intellectual excitement that Kaufmann remembered from his postgraduate days at Yale and that he had missed in his less happy tenure at Princeton. Moreover, the very existence of so talented a group within RAND suggested that maybe there was something worth exploring in the bizarre business of nuclear weapons after all.
Kaufmann began to immerse himself slowly in the mind-boggling morass of nuclear strategy. Yet, while doing so, he remained firmly anchored to the intellectual framework that he had constructed two years earlier in his Princeton essays on limited war, and he never veered too far from the problem that puzzled him in the Speier-Goldhamer game: how to assure the NATO allies of America’s commitment to their defense without either committing national suicide or spreading nuclear weapons abroad.
Over the next few years, Kaufmann was eventually to find the answer to the puzzle in a fusion between his own ideas on limited war and a tradition of thinking that had evolved at RAND among a mere handful of analysts since the very early 1950s. The result would be a fully formulated doctrine known variously as “no-cities strategy” or “war-fighting” or “counterforce.”
The pioneer in this RAND tradition was Bernard Brodie. Actually, the pioneering took place just before he went to RAND, in 1951, while working as special consultant to General Hoyt Vandenberg in the Air Force Staff. Reacting in horror to the purposeless destructiveness of the Strategic Air Command’s “Sunday Punch” war plan—essentially a swift, all-out atomic blow against every target in the Soviet Union, not much different from the “massive retaliation” doctrine that John Foster Dulles would advocate a few years later—Brodie devised a war plan that would be at once less destructive and more congruent with rational war objectives. The idea was that if the Soviets invaded, say, Western Europe, and if the United States were forced to use atomic weapons in response, the U.S. should avoid hitting any Soviet cities, at least in the first round. Instead, we should fire only a small number of our nuclear weapons on nonurban targets, maintaining a highly protected U.S. reserve force of atomic weapons, and using that reserve force as a bargaining lever, as an implicit threat to the Russians that unless they quit the war, we would up the ante and start destroying their cities, one by one, until they gave up. The important aspect of strategy, then, was not so much what to hit as what not to hit, and to use this combination of sticks and carrots as a means of coercing the Russians to surrender.
When Brodie got to RAND and told some of his new colleagues of his Air Staff work, he found some receptive listeners. In 1950, a few members of the social science division had done a study entitled “Warning and Bombing,” known as “The Warbo Study,” for short. The idea started with W. Philip Davison, a corporal in the Army’s psychological warfare branch during World War II who, when he first came to RAND’s Washington, D.C., office in late 1949, started poring over voluminous files at the National Archives on Nazi SS reports describing the popular mood in German-occupied territories. Davison came across one extensive report by the secret police stationed in a small Czech town in which almost everyone worked at the town’s single factory. One day, rumors spread that the British were about to bomb the town, and despite everything that the factory managers and town authorities could do to suppress the rumor, almost everyone evacuated. A couple of weeks after they all returned, the same rumor spread and nearly everyone evacuated again. In neither instance was the town attacked, and yet production had been slowed down considerably.
Davison was intrigued with this obscure wartime incident, and thought it suggested a policy that the United States might adopt deliberately in a future war: that warning the population before bombing it might be more humane but no less effective. In some instances, the act of warning alone could cause enough disruption that bombing would not be necessary. Davison composed a memo on the subject to Hans Speier, who was quite taken with the notion and assembled a team composed of himself, Davison, Andrew Marshall, Victor Hunt—all of the social science division—to look into it further.
When Bernard Brodie came to RAND and discussed his Air Staff work with Andy Marshall and Victor Hunt, it was only natural that they found his ideas attractive. Brodie had gone considerably beyond the ideas of the Warbo Study, in that he was proposing not hitting cities at all, while Warbo still assumed bombing factories in cities. Still, they were favorably disposed to the notion that not bombing certain areas might be equally important to bombing others.
Victor Hunt was associate director of RAND social science and, along with Brodie and Marshall, one of the few from that division to reside full-time in Santa Monica rather than at RAND’s Washington office. A humanist historian by training, an anti-militarist in sentiment, Hunt was particularly intrigued with Brodie’s idea of sparing cities in the initial phases of a war and of using the withheld reserve force to exert bargaining leverage over the enemy. But Hunt went a bit further than Brodie and suggested not only what targets should be avoided but also what targets should be hit. To Hunt, simply restraining from striking Soviet cities might impel the Soviets to show similar restraint toward American cities, but then again it might not. To ensure further that damage to our cities would be minimized, we should try to destroy those weapons that could do such damage, namely, the long-range bomber force of the Soviet Union.