Brodie had first conceived the idea of avoiding Soviet cities in nuclear strikes, but when Victor Hunt and others on the RAND Strategic Objectives Committee extended that concept to avoiding cities and going after Soviet military targets, Brodie expressed pessimism about its feasibility. Calculations suggested that even with a purely countermilitary attack, two million people would still die, a horrifyingly high number.
But Kahn, by this time fully participating in committee sessions, put a novel twist on this observation. To Kahn, such a calculation made the two types of targeting all the more distinctive: as Kahn phrased it, only two million people would die. Alluding almost casually to “only” two million dead was part of the image that Kahn was fashioning for himself, the living portrait of the ultimate defense intellectual, cool and fearless, asking the questions everyone else ignored, thinking about the unthinkable.
Kahn’s specialty was to express the RAND conventional wisdom in the most provocative and outrageous fashion imaginable. At a briefing to high-level SAC officers, Kahn flailed away at their official war plan, with its “Sunday Punch,” the all-out nuclear holocaust, the absence of any conception of a reserve force or the city-avoidance and force-withholding strategy worked out by Bernard Brodie and others at RAND. Brodie, deeply fascinated with Freud and undergoing psychoanalysis himself, had written a short, internally circulated memorandum on the analogies between war plans and sex—the no-cities/withhold plan that he had conceived was likened to withdrawal before ejaculation, while the SAC war plan was like going all the way.
With this in mind, Kahn told the assembled officers at SAC, “Gentlemen, you don’t have a war plan, you have a war orgasm.”
Brodie, Marshall, Loftus, Digby, Kaufmann and other RAND analysts had already talked and written about the dangers of a massive-retaliation war plan in an age when the Soviets had their own nuclear arsenal. Kahn tried to express the critique more graphically. With mock sincerity, Kahn proposed what he called a “Doomsday Machine.” It would be a vast computer wired up to a huge stockpile of H-bombs. When the computer sensed that the Soviet Union had committed an act defined as intolerable, the machine would automatically set off the Doomsday bombs, covering the earth with sufficient radioactive fallout to kill billions of people. Along with an engineer at RAND, Kahn had figured out on paper that such a Doomsday Machine was technologically feasible.
As Kahn half expected, not a single military officer liked the idea. Yet the Doomsday Machine was only a slightly absurd extension of existing American and NATO policy: the Soviets do something provocative, and we blow up most of their citizens, which provokes them to blow up most of ours.
To Kahn, the answer was clear. The war plan should contain many options other than the all-out strike. The U.S. had to be able to “control” the war, to exercise “intrawar deterrence,” to deter the enemy from advancing its aggression after the war had started (a concept taken from Bernard Brodie’s early work). In later years, during the early-to-mid 1960s, Kahn would work out an elaborate theory of “escalation,” conceiving of 44 “rungs of escalation” from “Ostensible Crisis” to “Spasm or Insensate War,” with the rungs in between including “Harassing Acts of Violence,” “Barely Nuclear War,” “‘Justifiable’ Counterforce Attacks,” “Local Nuclear War—Exemplary,” “Constrained Disarming Attack,” and “Slow-Motion Countercity War.”
Kahn saw himself as the grand systematizer, the one-man think tank, the high priest of nuclear rationality.
To “control” the war, the military needed above all what Kahn called a Credible-First-Strike Capability (which he later semantically modified to Not-Incredible-First-Strike Capability), so that we could suppress Soviet strategic forces in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion against Western Europe that conventional forces alone could not repel. And it needed Tit-for-Tat capability, the ability to launch very small nuclear salvos in the event of Soviet provocations of a lesser order.
With his penchant for labels, Kahn called the pure-deterrence strategy Type I Deterrence, the Not-Incredible-First-Strike Capability Type II Deterrence, the Tit-for-Tat Capability Type III Deterrence. In an era of continuing crises, Types II and III Deterrence were, to Kahn’s mind, essential. Without them, the U.S. would be terribly vulnerable to “nuclear blackmail” by the Russians.
“If the Soviet [aggressor] is reasonable,” Kahn would write, “he will avoid the defender’s cities, civilians and recuperative capability in order to maximize his postattack blackmail threats.” He will attack, or threaten to attack, America’s SAC bases. Then, he would use his remaining weapons as blackmail devices, telling us, in effect, that if we fired back at Soviet cities he would use the Soviet reserve force to clobber our cities, which is all we could do if we had only Type I Deterrence.
In short, Kahn’s view of the nature of the Soviet strategic threat was the mirror image of the counterforce/no-cities/bargaining-lever strategy that Bernard Brodie and others in the RAND Strategic Objectives Committee had suggested as the rational nuclear strategy for the United States to employ in dealing with the Russians.
In the late 1950s, when it was popular to speak of a missile gap, Kahn called the threat of Soviet nuclear blackmail a “Deterrence Gap” or an “Operational Gap.” These gaps were highly dangerous because, to Kahn, a perilous world of crisis after crisis lay ahead, a series of Soviet-imposed Munichs or Pearl Harbors. With Type I Deterrence only, the U.S. would try to get the Soviets to back down in a crisis of the early 1960s, Kahn imagined in the late 1950s. But “our negotiators would be afraid to spell out our threat, for nothing that they could present would be both credible and effective.” Indeed, Kahn predicted that “however the next crisis is touched off, the Soviets do not have to back down because of fear of an attack by the United States—but we may.”
Kahn was not advocating preventive war or surprise attacks on the U.S.S.R. However, he was very explicitly promoting the first use of nuclear weapons in the face of provocations that could not be deterred or answered by means short of that. Doing so would require a crash buildup of (Air Force) missiles and bombers, more “limited-war” forces as well, and a massive civil-defense program.
It was the civil-defense proposal that gained Kahn his most scabrous notoriety. To Kahn, the purpose of a gigantic civil-defense system was not so much to protect civilians against a Soviet first-strike, which was how many other civil-defense advocates of the day viewed such a program. “The whole purpose of the system,” he wrote, “is to enable the U.S. to take much firmer positions” in hot and cold wars, to allow the President to engage in first-strikes (Type II Deterrence) and tit-for-tat threats (Type III Deterrence) of his own.
“Any power that can evacuate a high percentage of its urban population to protection.” Kahn wrote, “is in a much better position to bargain than one which cannot do this.” Indeed, international politics of the 1960s and beyond would be so racked with tension and crises that, to Kahn’s mind, it was “perfectly conceivable… that the U.S. might have to evacuate two or three times every decade.”
In fact, Kahn felt that having a good civil-defense system made the act of going to the nuclear brink an altogether salutary thing to do on occasion. To those, both in and out of RAND, who objected that this Credible-First-Strike Capability might convert a limited, peripheral war into a strategic nuclear war, Kahn responded: “Insofar as the civil defense program gives us the ability to convert at our discretion, it should be a good thing.”