In the second scenario, corresponding to S AC’s Optimal Mix strategy, the Red Army attacks Western Europe. Conventional NATO forces cannot contain them, so SAC launches a full-scale attack against Soviet cities, airfields, missile sites, rail centers, shipyards, factories, all the targets. Several Soviet missiles and bombers escape the attack and rain destruction on as many American cities as they can. The results: half the industrial base of both countries is destroyed; 75 million Russians are dead, 110 million Americans.
The third scenario, the counterforce/no-cities strategy, produces entirely different results. The Soviets attack Western Europe. Conventional forces cannot hold them; the U.S. launches a nuclear attack against the U.S.S.R. but restricts the targets of attack to bomber fields, missile pads, submarine pens and control centers associated with the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. The Soviets retaliate against the United States, but, seeing that we have avoided their cities, find it in their interest to avoid ours as well, and so likewise confine their attack to SAC striking forces. We “mop up” their remaining air defenses and strategic forces, holding some of our weapons in a reserve force. We then send a message to the Russians, telling them to stop or else we will start picking off their cities one by one. The Soviets, clearly outgunned, surrender. The war is over. Only three million Americans have died, and only five million Russians.
In short, the work by Kaufmann, McGarvey and Trinkl revealed that if counterforce works, it could save 100 million lives in the event of nuclear war.
Parrish was thrilled. Kaufmann worked up a briefing and headed off to Washington for a two-week stint, delivering a summary of the study to a larger, broader and higher-level group of Air Force officers. Some of the officers had problems with Kaufmann’s conception of counterforce. What if our bombers are much less accurate than we think—won’t their explosive power kill more people? What if the Russians don’t fight according to the counterforce rules? What if the “loser” uses his remaining weapons to destroy the “winner’s” cities? If we emphasize counterforce in a second-strike, won’t many of our weapons hit empty air bases and launch pads, since the Soviets will already have fired their weapons? Won’t counterforce weaken the bedrock of nuclear deterrence and stimulate an arms race, with the results of heightened suspicion on both sides, higher danger of war by accident, miscalculation or preemption?
Many of these same questions had been posed at RAND by analysts in the social science division, who felt that Kaufmann’s emphasis on quantitative measures and nuclear-exchange scenarios ignored such important political issues as how the war began, over what sorts of political goals or values it is being fought. These were the very questions with which Kaufmann, in an earlier period, was preoccupied.
It was a “rolling briefing,” Kaufmann fielding these sorts of questions from Air Force officers, relaying them back to McGarvey and Trinkl for further calculation, formulating new rhetorical arguments on his own.
To the argument that counterforce weakens deterrence by making the costs and risks of attacking seem more acceptable to an aggressor, Kaufmann conceded the risk but contended that a policy of counter-city retaliation frightens us as much as it does the enemy, and that, therefore, such a policy is inadequate, especially for deterring attacks against allies. In this sense, counterforce could make deterrence more credible—the conclusion that so attracted Kaufmann to counterforce in the first place.
On the matter of accelerating the arms race, Kaufmann, familiar only with Air Force Intelligence numbers on the rate of Soviet missile production, could only argue that we were in an arms race already, with the Russians leading the way. Similarly, answering the problem of hitting lots of empty Soviet missile holes, Kaufmann reasoned that the Soviets would logically retain a substantial reserve force, and that therefore many live military targets would be hit.
Perhaps the most pertinent question was whether the Soviets would play along with the rules. On this, Kaufmann could only hope that the Soviets would see that their own best rational interests of saving their own cities from annihilation would prompt them to do so.
The issues were hardly settled. Kaufmann was the first to admit to a whole series of uncertainties over how the war would actually proceed or end. But he was convinced that the threat of blowing up Soviet cities was inappropriate and not very credible, now that the Soviets also had the power to blow up American cities. And in that context, counterforce appeared as the best hope in an awful situation.
Debate within the Air Staff came to a halt when General Tommy White, Air Force Chief, embraced Kaufmann’s briefing wholeheartedly. As late as June 1958, White had told an audience of national-security specialists that he was “disturbed” by the recent tendency among some analysts “to consider seriously self-restraints in nuclear weapons planning in the face of sure knowledge that no such restraints will be applied by the enemy. Our preoccupation with niceties in nuclear warfare… would, I am sure, delight the Kremlin.”
Only two years later White was endorsing without reservation a strategy that imposed just such “self-restraints” and that elevated to high wisdom the “preoccupation with niceties in nuclear warfare.” The key difference between the summer of 1958 and the summer of 1960 was that the Polaris had evolved into a much more serious threat to the Air Force. Since the Polaris could not perform counterforce missions and could do well only against cities, the counterforce/no-cities doctrine appeared suddenly very attractive.
White struck up a rather avuncular relationship with Bill Kaufmann, encouraged him to think through the issues further. He traveled out to Santa Monica when Kaufmann delivered the briefing before a RAND audience, his presence serving as a bulwark of official support.
On October 1, copying the Navy’s public relations strategy of propagating the “city-destruction” doctrine, the Secretary of the Air Force sent a “policy letter” to all Air Force commanders, urging that “your public speeches, briefings, Commander’s Calls and other presentations should (1) strongly stress the importance of our maintaining a proper strategy and (2) thoroughly explain counterforce.”
The briefing papers on positions to take at the upcoming Air Force Commanders’ Conference in mid-November stressed that “effective deterrence is achievable only through possession of a striking power that threatens destruction of substantially all of the enemy’s long-range nuclear delivery capability…. A threat to destroy a large number of Soviet citizens does not represent effective deterrence of a Soviet attack against the U.S. and it provides no deterrence to other forms of Soviet aggression such as an attack against another NATO country.”
Meanwhile, Noel Parrish, as the man through whom all public statements by Air Force officers must first filter, censored anything inconsistent with counterforce and, with White’s tacit permission, leaked to the press the findings of the Kaufmann briefing. Kaufmann’s philosophy emerged as official Air Force policy.
There was still one major obstacle: the Strategic Air Command. On paper, SAC was merely one of several commands under the Air Staffs wings; in truth, it was a fiefdom, not easily challenged much less defeated. And the commander of SAC in 1960, General Tommy Power, abhorred any departure from the strategic-bombing traditions of World War II. Power, too, had flown bombing sorties over Japan in 1945, and when LeMay was appointed SAC Commander, he selected Power as deputy. Power saw the virtue of the H-bomb in its stupendous size and power, and any strategy that deliberately diminished that was perverse, almost traitorous.