In an effort to prove his point, he asked a question only slightly different from that which George Rathjens had posed when he toured SAC with George Kistiakowsky the previous November: using the JSTPS methodology, how much was “needed” to do the same damage that a 12.5-kiloton bomb had done against Hiroshima at the end of World War II? A quick calculation revealed that SIOP-62 would have “laid down” three eighty-kiloton weapons. Herbert York, a physicist who had been involved in work on the H-bomb during the early days of the Livermore Lab, interjected to explain that three eighty-kiloton bombs carried about the same explosive power as a single half-megaton bomb.
There was something else that troubled NcNamara. What SAC labeled “Plan 1-A” of SIOP-62—suggesting that it was the basic plan—called for an all-out preemptive first-strike against the U.S.S.R., Eastern Europe and Red China, in response to an actual or merely impending Soviet invasion of Western Europe that involved no nuclear weapons at all. That was the crux of SIOP: a first-strike plan that held back nothing, that killed hundreds of millions of people, just because they lived under Communist rule, without any Communist government’s having so much as scratched a square inch of the United States. As much as anyone else who had witnessed this spectacle, if not more so, Robert McNamara was horrified.
The capper came from General Tommy Power. Not the least appalling detail of SIOP-62 was the virtual obliteration of the tiny country of Albania—even though it had dramatically dissociated itself from the policies of the U.S.S.R.—simply because within its borders sat a huge Soviet air-defense radar, which, according to the SIOP, had to be taken out with high assurance. As Power was leading McNamara and his entourage outside the briefing room after finishing the presentation, he smiled at McNamara and said, with a mock straight face, “Well, Mr. Secretary, I hope you don’t have any friends or relations in Albania, because we’re just going to have to wipe it out.”
McNamara stopped in his tracks for a moment and glared at Power with all the contempt he could muster.
The close look at SIOP-62 made McNamara far more receptive to William Kaufmann’s no-cities briefing one week later than he might otherwise have been. Kaufmann briefed McNamara on February 10. In the next few days, Charlie Hitch, Alain Enthoven and Marvin Stern gave McNamara the paper on strategic-nuclear-war forces and policy that McNamara had assigned them almost immediately upon arriving at the Pentagon. Their proposals included placing a premium on “survivable” forces and thus accelerating a program of hardening Minuteman ICBMs and building mobile Polaris missiles; slowing the procurement of—in some cases, phasing out—bombers; placing a higher percentage of bombers on airborne alert or in protective shelters; comparing the merits of forces generally according to their cost effectiveness; and, not least, adopting a new nuclear war plan that would emphasize destroying enemy military forces, avoiding their cities and protecting a ready reserve force aimed at their cities but withholding this force as a bargaining lever with which to coerce the enemy to end the war and come to terms favorable to the United States.
In short, the Hitch-Enthoven-Stern paper represented an amalgamation of the three main intellectual strands that had developed inside the strategic community at the RAND Corporation over the previous decade: the studies on SAC vulnerability by Albert Wohlstetter and his clique, of which Enthoven was a devoted member; the work in systems analysis started by Ed Paxson and elaborated extensively by, among others, Hitch; and the counterforce/no-cities strategy that grew out of Bernard Brodie’s work in the Air Staff in 1951, evolved through the sessions with Brodie, Hitch, Andrew Marshall and others in the RAND Strategic Objectives Committee through the mid-1950s, and climaxed with the counterforce briefing by William Kaufmann.
McNamara approved the whole package, using it as the basis for his first five-year plan on nuclear weapons systems, called “The General War Offensive Package,” written in late February. At this stage, however, the counterforce/no-cities idea was still littie more than a piece of paper in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and quite contrary to the spirit and substance of the official SIOP. Now the guidance for a new war plan had to be extended throughout the military.
Dozens of unsettled issues about defense policy were darting about in McNamara’s mind. On March 1, McNamara issued to the service secretaries, the Joint Chiefs, his own assistant secretaries and special assistants, his counsel and his director of research and engineering a thirteen-page document, which he drafted personally. It was a list of ninety-six projects and questions that McNamara wanted completed and answered, each assigned to a particular office, many of them with an unreasonably early due date specified. At the time, the Whiz Kids were known in military circles as “McNamara’s Band,” and so the list of assigned projects came to be called “The 96 Trombones.” (One week later, McNamara issued a revised list with only ninety-two questions, but the name “96 Trombones” stuck.)
The first two projects on the list were directly responsive to the issues raised in the Kaufmann briefing. The first: “Prepare a draft memorandum revising the basic national security policies and assumptions, including the assumptions relating to ‘counterforce’ strikes….” The second: “Prepare a ‘doctrine’ which, if accepted, would permit controlled response and negotiating pauses in the event of thermonuclear attack.” The first, due May 1, was sent to the Chairman of the JCS and to the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. The second, due April 17, was tasked only to the JCS Chairman, General Lyman Lemnitzer.
Lemnitzer replied to Project No. 2 on April 18, one day late, reporting “that we do not now have adequate defenses, nor are our nuclear retaliatory forces sufficiently invulnerable, to permit us to risk withholding a substantial part of our effort, once a major thermonuclear attack has been initiated.” Therefore, he concluded, “attempts at the present time to implement such a doctrine, or to declare such an intent, would be premature and could gravely weaken our deterrent posture.”
McNamara was in the process of ordering steps to make the strategic forces less vulnerable. Indeed, his motivation for doing so was not only to deter a Soviet first-strike, but also to do just what Lemnitzer said was nearly impossible to do in early 1961—“to permit us to risk withholding a substantial part” of the nuclear force as part of a “controlled response,” or “counterforce/no-cities,” doctrine.
But these fine points were not of much concern to Lemnitzer, nor to most other military officers dealing with nuclear policy. In truth, they simply wanted no part of, and wanted to do their best to frustrate, any work on doctrines promoting “controlled response” and “negotiating pauses.” The whole idea went against the grain of military thinking, which was much more in accord with the philosophy of SAC and SIOP-62: the bomb was massive and raw; that was its chief virtue; and you don’t frighten or, if necessary, destroy the Communists by restraining its power. Project No. 2 made some of the Chiefs and their aides uneasy, made them wonder whether this Secretary of Defense, as well as the President of the United States, who was also suspected of harboring queasy feelings about the massive destructiveness of the H-bomb, would really be man enough to use the thing if the Free World’s survival depended on it. The image that Kennedy and McNamara intellectualized war accentuated the feelings of distrust already alienating the military establishment from the Pentagon Whiz Kids. The distrust worked the other way, as welclass="underline" McNamara and his assistants were contemptuous of the military mind for treating the mind-boggling topic of nuclear war so crudely, for failing to comprehend that any such war would be a two-way war.