If ever in the history of the nuclear arms race, before or since, one side had unquestionable superiority over the other, one side truly had the ability to devastate the other side’s strategic forces, one side could execute the RAND counterforce/no-cities option with fairly high confidence, the autumn of 1961 was that time. Yet approaching the height of the gravest crisis that had faced the West since the onset of the Cold War, everyone said, “No.”
At the same time that a handful of high officials were contemplating the Rowen-Kaysen first-strike study, the Pentagon was sponsoring a huge simulation war game at Camp David, run by Thomas Schelling, a RAND strategist and Harvard professor. Two games were played, over the weekends of September 8–11 and September 29–October 1. Several high government officials played the leaders of “Blue” (representing the U.S.) and “Red” (the U.S.S.R.)—among them Rowen, Kaysen, John McNaughton, Henry Kissinger, Alain Enthoven, DeWitt Armstrong, McGeorge Bundy, Robert Komer, and Seymour Weiss.
Both games started with a series of threats and counter-threats between Blue and Red over Berlin. Initially, neither side wanted to escalate the conflict. Schelling turned up the heat, creating provocative scenarios. Blue starts flying East German refugees out of Berlin; Red tells Blue to stop; Blue persists; Red shoots down some Blue airplanes, killing dozens; riots erupt in East Berlin, all through East Germany; West Berlin students join in; two Soviet divisions cut Berlin off from the rest of East Germany, proceeding “brutally and successfully”; a battalion of Blue troops breaks through the barriers; Red aircraft attack the troops.
On it went like this for three days, the team members taking their roles and the game very seriously, getting in only a few hours of sleep each night. Yet for all the outlandish provocations that Schelling hurled into the game, against both sides, all the players, Blue and Red, civilian and military, did all they could to clamp things down, to defuse the kegs of dynamite that Schelling had lit and thrown their way. Schelling simply could not get a war started, could not get either side to consider seriously the use of nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, reality was reflecting art, so to speak, in a quadripartite military planning group set up to deal with the crisis.
In the early fall of 1961, Paul Nitze, his Berlin aide, Colonel DeWitt Armstrong, Harry Rowen, Seymour Weiss, Bill Kaufmann and a few others started to meet with military representatives from the allied countries (U.K., France and Germany) to try to agree on a set of responses to Soviet provocation in Berlin. The idea was to see if they could jointly plan a series of responses to a wide variety of contingencies, so that Western moves could be taken with expediency and mutual authority.
The premise was a condition of extreme crisis in which the Soviets had cut off access to Berlin. Phase One involved the allied response. Phase Two began with the assumption that the Soviets or East Germans or both persist in their activities and have repelled the allies’ Phase-One resistance. Phase Three asked the question: what do we do if the Soviets continue to persist? There were several answers on which the allies agreed for Phase Three operations: send three armored divisions up the Autobahn toward Berlin, smash East European (but not Soviet) airfields with (conventional) fighter-bombers, and other similar steps designed to demonstrate Western resolve and to buy time for the further mobilization of troops.
Then came Phase Four. The Warsaw Pact forces come back and destroy those three divisions and counterattack with, say, ten or fifteen divisions of their own. Meanwhile, they have the advantage of local superiority with ground troops. Now what is to be done? The answer involved using nuclear weapons—not necessarily shooting off SIOP-62, not even necessarily pulling a counterforce first-strike, but rather engaging in something like low-level tactical attacks, using nuclear weapons on the battlefield to repel the onslaught of Soviet divisions, or perhaps a “demonstration shot” to indicate Western resolve, such as setting off a big nuclear blast over one of the U.S.S.R.’s own nuclear-weapon test sites. But nobody, especially not the Europeans, wanted to talk about Phase Four, to discuss the matter of using nuclear weapons. Phases One through Three were cluttered with many different options and counterresponses. For Phase Four, the quadripartite group merely filled in, “Call Washington.”
The Europeans had dissented from the Kennedy Administration’s campaign to build up non-nuclear forces, objecting that conventional forces were too expensive, that the threat of using nuclear weapons, especially in the French case their own nuclear weapons, would be sufficient to deter the Soviet hordes. Now, in their own “moment of thermonuclear truth,” the European allies were refusing to make any sort of commitment or assent on the first use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances.
Tentative steps toward the brink were taken in the latter half of 1961. Shortly after the Wall went up in August, the Soviets closed off all but one border crossing into Berlin. At one point, an American battalion was let in the entry checkpoint, and for several hours was not allowed out the other end. On October 27, Soviet and American tanks faced each other, at short range, along one Berlin checkpoint. After sixteen hours, the Soviet tanks finally backed off, to everyone’s relief. Toward the end of the year, the crisis faded away. There were negotiations; Khrushchev backed off, for the second time in two years, from his demand for a six-month deadline on coming to terms with an East German peace treaty.
The crisis ended partly because the United States displayed more will and determination not to let Berlin go than Khrushchev had anticipated. Another reason was that all along, Khrushchev had been managing his Berlin initiatives on the assumption that the Americans believed the Soviets were ahead in the arms race; he himself had made many public statements encouraging this delusion. But now he knew the game was over, and so did his foes in the Kremlin who had long expressed skepticism of his dangerous policy of aggression backed by bluff. He knew now that the U.S. might not be taunted by his nuclear threats, might not be afraid to use nuclear weapons as a final resort themselves. The Soviets were in no position to play that game, and so Khrushchev was forced to bow out of the crisis that he had precipitated.
What Khrushchev could not possibly have known is that the Americans were not willing to go first with nuclear weapons either, that they too assessed the risks as too high, that even while they realized their own superiority they could find no practical way to exploit it.
The same phenomenon occurred a year later, during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Under considerable pressure to achieve diplomatic victory and realizing that bluff could no longer support policy, Khrushchev started to move SS-4 and SS-5 intermediate-range missiles into Cuba—enough to boost the number of Soviet missiles capable of hitting U.S. territory by roughly half. For thirteen days, October 16 through 28, the crisis engulfed everything. For the last six days, an Executive Committee of Kennedy’s advisers met to debate what to do. Eventually, this crisis abated as well. The United States dispersed the SAC bombers, instituted a naval blockade in the Caribbean, and concentrated an enormous amount of non-nuclear firepower in southern Florida—tripling the number of fighter aircraft on alert, transferring Marines to the point of crisis from both coasts, moving elements of the 1st Armored Division from Fort Hood, Texas, to Fort Stewart, Georgia. On Saturday, October 27, Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor were urging that steps be taken to prepare for an invasion of Cuba, McNamara stating that an invasion was “almost inevitable.” Indeed, had the Soviets not caved in on Sunday, American troops were ready to invade the island on Monday. Khrushchev’s gamble was an atrocious mistake: the combination of geography, conventional superiority and nuclear superiority forced him to back down.