U.S. Strategic Nuclear Policy, An Oral History, Part 1

This is a documentary An

oral

history

of US

strategic

nuclear

policy

Those who played a role Tell the story Summarized the evolution of 60 years of

history

from the dawn of

nuclear

weapons to the 21st century Speakers address two fundamental questions first what has been the purpose of American nuclear weapons and, second, how have weapons policies and war plans evolved for the majority. This is a story of nuclear deterrence. The deterrent role of nuclear weapons has remained constant throughout

policy

evolution. World events. War plans and nuclear delivery systems. is not a comprehensive history but rather an introduction to stimulate further reflection on

strategic

nuclear policy and on the broader question of national security strategy.

There are important aspects that are not covered in this series. The role of the legislative branch. The development of specific weapons for non-strategic nuclear forces. technologies and the role of nuclear laboratories and the production complex these are stories for another time history tells us where we have been and can provide us with valuable information for the future this

oral

history aims to provide a basis for discussing some very important topics Important questions: What really will be the role of nuclear weapons? What will be the requirements in the future for the United States? nuclear forces for the arsenal and for the nuclear weapons complex bombers of the United States.

Today we ate their fourth invasion of Marienburg. Two flying fortresses were shot down when the US Army's 8th Air Force arrived in Britain in 1942. A daylight high-altitude precision bombing doctrine was developed around the Norden sight, so we thought that we were going to be able to attack the military. targets and never hit civilian targets we thought we could hit a barrel of pickles from 18,000 feet the British said you can't do that because you are never that accurate and if you fly in daylight you will lose too many planes to German interceptors. night bomb targeting entire cities was an Allied bomber offensive in which both the British and Americans adapted different doctrines and bombed in different ways the bombers had to fly much shorter distances and it was against a different set of defenses than they had in the Pacific the air war in the Pacific was more cheating in the way we had to adapt to it.

Japan was understood as a special case. The Air Force was willing to carry out area bombing raids when it could not do what they expected. precision bombing, which also wasn't that precise, but it was a different operational configuration and it was a different way of understanding what they were doing. The basic question was whether industrial structures, aircraft production plants, engine production plants, oil could be broken. refineries, power grids, things like that, if you could destroy them with your bombing campaign in Germany, the factories were highly concentrated and often segregated from residential areas, making them attackable with precision bombing, while in Japan the war industries They were dispersed rather than concentrated and were often intertwined with densely populated residential districts, the Japanese target complex prompted operational commander General Curtis LeMay to change tactics when LeMay decided to take the B-29s, which were very sleek bombers indeed.

Lots of equipment. He took out long gear so he could fly with more attaches more incendiary bombs and sends them at night in a night attack instead of in daylight so they don't collide with any Japanese interceptors. LeMay was the most effective combat commander of any service I encountered in the three years I was in the air. Force, he had an objective which was to destroy targets and associated with that, the objective of reducing the number of crew members lost per unit of target destruction. If you see LeMay in Europe and if you see LeMay in the Pacific, Tommy's power is always there.

My own belief is that Tommy Power was probably more of a strategist than LeMay, but I think those two men work very well together in terms of getting the most out of their team and their men. He tried this approach very similar to that of the British in Europe. just bomb all of Tokyo in a single attack, maybe if you burn an entire city, in the case of Tokyo and 100,000 people dead, the Japanese will abandon the first and most ferocious of these attacks on urban areas occurred on March 9, 1945 LeMay had abandoned the doctrine of high-altitude daytime bombing raids against military assets and turned to the urban area bombing strategy practiced by the British against Germany half a world away from the massacre in the high desert of New Mexico.

Scientists at Los Alamos made preparations to test a new and more lethal device: an atomic bomb, the basis of strategic nuclear policy would emerge from the confluence of this revolutionary new capability and the air war strategy practiced over Japan in July 1945. The United States faced a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland. Hospitals were being established. There were 120,000 hospitals on Tinian, where I was stationed alone. We could look across and see 1,600 ships in Saipan harbor preparing for invasion as American planners prepared to maximize direct military pressure on the Japanese government and population. President Truman issued his final approval to the Secretary of War for the dropping of the atomic bomb the atomic bombings were the culmination of the great bombing of Tokyo a strategy that copiously provided that military pressure it was a shock to the Japanese to see between eighty and one hundred thousand people murdered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the most brutal way, who reacted more than to the firebombings, although the extent of the firebombings is not well recognized and I have never seen an analysis of whether nuclear power could have been avoided if LeMay had been would have allowed him a few more weeks to continue the bombing.

I think at one point I think I was suggesting that when I went to Tokyo I was absolutely devastated. The damage in Tokyo was the result of thousands of raids, thousands of raids by thousands of bombers, whereas in the case of the atomic bomb there was a plane and a bomb and people were not at all prepared for what happened, while the dropping of the second bomb, although the magnitude of the damage in Nagasaki was less than Hiroshi, the fact that there was a second bomb and then the implication was that there were more. I think that's what finally tipped the balance.

The Japanese did not surrender two days after Nagasaki because their military capabilities had been introduced so much. They gave up because they had the vision. that this could happen every week and they couldn't handle all the cities being destroyed and in nuclear deterrence, if swords die, we can call that incidental damage or collateral damage, but a lot of people said that's really the basis of deterrence than the other side I can't stand that so many people feel that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are secure in the need to think differently about war with atomic weapons with the United States. adopt a de facto policy of atomic bombing of urban areas if an adversary's cities were taken hostage as a deterrent to aggression, how would the attack on urban industrial areas be reconciled with the tradition of precision bombing and as the accuracy of nuclear weapons systems?

More precise targeting would introduce new concerns about the prospect of nuclear war. Fighting these issues and many others would inform the evolution of a strategic nuclear policy over time. The policy would derive from the influence of successive presidential administrations. Dynamic world events as well as evolutionary development. Of nuclear weapons systems, mobilization and conventional weapons filled with nuclear fuel are very parallel in both cases, civil needs outweighed any military needs, but we kept secret one big difference: what was happening in nuclear laboratories like the Most Americans in 1945, scientists and their families at Los Alamos were eager to leave the war behind, many returned to the universities, leaving behind a scientific enterprise that faced an uncertain future and a new body of knowledge that remained shrouded in great secret;

There were very few people who really understood atomic bombs for what they were. existed in the period immediately after World War II security restrictions were still intense the development of atomic bombs nuclear bombs were still in an initial phase everyone understood, outside their official capacity, that the atomic bomb was a weapon of extraordinary devastation, so If I had this tool, this weapon, on the one hand, and the knowledge that they were the knowledge base that they were building, it was for a much more discriminating force, on the other hand, there had to be assumptions that were they would make and guide military planning.

When the atomic bomb is used, the job of a commander is to demonstrate how to prevail in a war and therefore how to plan that war, and as such, nuclear weapons practically from the beginning had been treated as instruments of war, these weapons were simply considered to be essentially larger conventional weapons, I think Truman in

part

icular had a very personal understanding of the damage that these weapons could cause and I think Truman really didn't want to use them. His private reflections were quite apprehensive about what the implications of this would be for the future of humanity in terms of his public pronouncements, of course he associated the bomb with victory in the Second World War and also for a brief period at least Truman and the Truman administration appeared to seriously explore possibilities of international control if they do not do so now.

If they accept our terms, they can expect a rain of ruin from the air the likes of which has never been clear on Earth, even as President Truman issued a final ultimatum before dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki, promised to redirect atomic energy towards the maintenance of world peace the stage was set for the development of a proposal for the international control of atomic energy by a board of expert consultants that included robert Oppenheimer, who had led the development of the atomic bomb in less than a year. Bernard Baruch, a successful Wall Street speculator. He was appointed representative of the United States to the UN Atomic Energy Commission, there he presented the American proposal that became known as the Baruch plan, almost immediately the Soviet delegation raised objections to the plans, proposed controls on fissile materials and a regime of on-site inspection that threatened ongoing secret work deep in Russia the Soviet position was that we were going to expect another world war in say 20 years, so we should start preparing for it now, at the end of the war, the Soviet leaders gave a series of speeches setting out their vision of how international relations would develop after the war and Stalin said that Lenin's theory of imperialism was still in force and that as long as imperialism existed there would be wars when George Kennan, the American envoy in Moscow, reported on Stalin's official speech in Washington.

First he began to view the Soviets as a threat. Ken's long telegram was intended to do several things: first, alert Americans that Russia would not be easy to live with; second, if we wait and wait and hold them back for the long term, communism could lose its expansionist self-confidence, no-cannon containment doctrine, so if you keep the Russians contained and prevent them from expanding, they will look at their own scientific analysis article that says the world surely came under communist control and they will see that it is wrong, but throughout 1946 the Soviets consolidated political power in a series of buffer states that formed what Winston Churchill would call an Iron Curtain;

With the onset of the Cold War symbolized by Churchill's speech, increasing emphasis was placed on maintaining nuclear supremacy, militarily preparing the United States and the West for this long and desperate war. Churchill's suspicions about Joseph Stalin at the end of World War II had been confirmed and he warned Truman to protect and maintain the American monopoly on the atomic bomb, the fact that this occurred more or less simultaneously with the other effort to promote international control. Truman was also determined to maintain civilian control of the bomb and appointed David Lilienthal chairman of the newly created Atomic Energy Commission in April 1947.

His first report warned of serious risks. weaknesses in the situation from a defense and national security point of view one thing we really don't know today is how muchDid the Soviets know about the few functional atomic bombs we had in 1946 and 47, by many measures we didn't have any, what we had was on a shelf in a state that would take weeks to prepare for use, these would have been nuclear weapons requiring a lot of effort. manpower and they had to be kept ready and we were not doing that because there was no motivation to do it and we did not expect the Cold War we did not expect to use weapons against the Soviet Union in 1947 the Truman Doctrine that guaranteed the independence of Greece and Turkey drew a line that prevented further Soviet expansion in Europe is the creation of conditions in which we and others We have to remember that the United States was doing something that was revolutionary during World War II and immediately afterwards we were making decisions that we would enter and remain engaged in the world in a way that we had never done before and the United States had lent Europe around 11 billion dollars in various aid programs to revive the French and British economies and in late '46 and early '47 economic progress begins to slow down and that is why there is a growing sense of emergency in In 1948, the collapse of Czechoslovakia under the communist government shook us because Czechoslovakia had been the only democracy in Eastern Europe between the wars and it seemed that this was the last straw, but I think it is It's the Berlin crisis that really starts to give this a sort of military advantage, but when Stalin imposed the blockade, I mean, he was resisting what he saw as moves to create a separate West Germany, the Berlin blockade shook us more like the second coup in a short period of time in 1948 and directly involved American forces, seemed to be an attempt perhaps to set dominoes that would affect all of Germany.

We mainly opt for a non-military approach. We were using military transports to bring coal and food to West Berlin, but as backup we also made a large movement of American bombers towards Britain. I think it's fair to say that the contingency planning of 46 and 47 focused on the fear that there could be a war with the Soviet Union, we warned the Soviets that if they did some things they could easily do, shoot down our airline, our planes or send tanks to Berlin where we were supposedly moving nuclear forces. I think sending the B-29s to Europe was the kind of reminder that the United States had the atomic bomb, but Stalin.

He knew that he didn't need to be reminded to stop the airlift. He would have had to escalate the situation. I think that's what he didn't want to do. He knew that confrontation had limits. Just the mere existence of atomic bombs. 1948 I think it was helped to stop it by the American successes in the use of nuclear weapons in 1948 showing that when you have a monopoly you can play lightly with nuclear threats and get some results with the prospect of a conflict on the horizon in Western Europe, there was It became clear to the Truman administration that there was now a critical need for some fundamental policy guidance on the use of atomic weapons.

The Berlin Crisis of 1948 was the first of several critical drivers of US strategic nuclear policy. As they prepared contingency war plans, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought guidance. on the use of atomic weapons, I don't think there was really any clearly defined American policy on whether nuclear weapons would be used and how they could be used before the fall of 1948 and that's what makes the NSC 30 and NSC 20 series so important because if they start to address some of those issues, NSC 30 stated that the United States was prepared to use atomic weapons in the event of war and that the decision to do so would rest with the president, the president will decide to use them.

Whenever he wants, he would hate to use them again, but if necessary, he will. NSC 31 established a deterrent role for atomic weapons as a counterweight to Soviet forces in Eastern Europe. The National Security Council also developed NSC 20/4, but what we had now is that we are adapting to the pace of the Cold War. we are now adapting to the Soviet Union is the enemy, as we are now adapting to the United States' strategy to deter the Soviet Union if deterrence fails. having to fight a war with the Soviet Union based on nuclear weapons, we are adapting to that rhythm where there is a process where guidance flows into the planning system and that guidance will come out of the National Security Council mechanism, Both White Vandenberg who was the chief of staff of the Air Force and the Joint Chiefs of Staff themselves are beginning to wonder if we would have to execute the contingency war plans that we have tomorrow.

What would happen? Teams were sent to check the readiness of the Strategic Air Command. They came. I returned with very negative reports, so Vandenberg looked around the World War II high command. The WWII leadership is gone, Acres, Points and Lemay are head and shoulders above everyone else, so he gets the call. LeMay was a brilliant operator and I think it's probably fair to say that. a brilliant commander, very dynamic, very energetic, and he wanted a force that could actually fight a nuclear war. LeMay was continually concerned about the lack of photographic intelligence. They began atomic target selection based on maps and some captured German reconnaissance photographs, so they took analytical input. and they sat down and said you know the weapon is going to go here, it's going to go here, this is how we're going to get there and you would also employ the same ideas that have been used during World War II for deep interdiction strategic bombing and that is to eliminate the enemy's industrial capacity now, of course, the industrial capacity was also co-located with the cities, so there would be an enormous amount of disruption using nuclear weapons on those targets.

Lemay's main objective was to ensure that Sac had the ability to launch a single massive attack and to do this he would need a force of new long-range bombers. Harry Truman came to power without much experience, certainly no foreign affairs experience to speak of. The only thing he brought to the White House was a very keen look at how the budget was made and he insisted that Forrestal stay within very, very strict constraints. very strict. James Forrestal became the nation's first defense secretary amid a brutal budget battle between the newly formed Joint Chiefs. Forrestal tried but couldn't.

Resolve differences In February 1949, Eisenhower was hired to mediate the dispute over budget priorities favoring the Air Force's new B-36 atomic bomb. The Navy saw this as a threat to its ability to project power from aircraft carriers. In them they saw the Air Force. perhaps as a threat to the Navy's maritime aviation control, the Navy is raising some very serious questions about American nuclear strategy and reliance on strategic bombing and that to me is the most important dimension of the U.S. revolt. admirals because what they are saying in In a sense, some people in the Air Force itself had admitted that General Hartmann did an analysis of the strategic bombing campaign and concluded that it will cause serious damage to the Soviet Union, but it is not a strategic sure to win the war.

It would be done by Forrestal's successor, Louis Johnson, ensuring that Sac obtained its atomic bombers in the early summer of 1949. They represented the only American. strategic capability to deter the Soviets in July, the Senate would ratify the NATO treaty and now atomic weapons would underpin Article 5 of this new security commitment a month later, an event that unfolded deep in the Soviet Union would challenge seriously on September 3, 1949, a specially equipped B-29 flying east of Copan Island detected the presence of radioactive residue from the Joe explosions in the first Soviet atomic test just a few months before the AEC would have deployed a system for sampling and analyzing evidence from a land surface. nuclear detonation some of us were not surprised, some of us thought it would be on our heels, so to speak, and clearly it was, there are other people, mainly in the government, who thought it would take much longer, there were a couple of issues important. the people who said it would take a long time, General Groves and Vannevar Bush, but even an EVA bush said it will take 20 years unless they give it top priority, which is exactly what they did, so we underestimated the speed at which they could move.

I do not understand the degree of help that in 1948-49 the Soviets had obtained from spies in the West. The detection of the test immediately set in motion a series of actions by the president in the following month, for example, approving a request for the JCS to greatly increase the capacity to produce nuclear materials approving the recommendations of the special advisory committee set in motion a series of events increasing production of fissile material at the plutonium processing facility at Hanford Washington accelerated production of the brand new bomb at Los Alamos and construction of nuclear weapons storage facilities around the country and then they increase everything, not only do they increase the production of u-235 and plutonium, they began vigorous exploration of the Colorado Plateau to find more uranium.

I think they were making it up as they went along. Throughout we were all making it up as we went along, the executive branch on the one hand and the legislative branch on the other, there's no doubt about it, I mean, it was a very revolutionary time, we were dealing with something that no one had had before the Union Soviet. The possession of the atomic bomb ended the nuclear monopoly of the United States. This would profoundly affect defense policy and war planning. Military strategy depended entirely on the ability of our nuclear weapons monopoly to deter and counter the enormous conventional forces that the Soviet Union had as In August 1947, the joint war plans committee began drafting a series of war plans. of contingency that authorized an increasing role for atomic weapons.

The crescent was the first of these plans approved during the Berlin crisis of 1948. They say you know the witches' brew. of names that you have from those days as you go from crescent to Trojan to deal with what you have and then all the support plans, etc., etc., you basically have a joint war plan and you have support plans to it. In the juke joint war plan that the JCS approved will take any strategic concept and put it into play in the absence of detailed high-level guidance, those involved in nuclear war planning carried over what they knew about World War II, including a sense that we, they were involved in a precision targeting enterprise, they had the same sense of targeting categories, they had the same sense that nuclear weapons were primarily explosive weapons, a nuclear weapon has additional radiation, fire , which are difficult to predict, are difficult to calculate, planning for nuclear weapons implies not including these effects simply because they are very difficult to calculate, but they are the first weapons, of course, they were uranium bombs, fission bombs, they were launched by long-range high-altitude bombers, but the accuracies of these early systems were measured in terms of large fractions of a nautical mile or perhaps even a couple of nautical miles, so suitable targets had to be large-area targets. .

In late 1949, a new emergency war plan called off tackle called for attacks on 104 urban targets with 220 atomic bombs plus a Reott ACT stockpile of 72 weapons. The main objective was to alter the Soviet will to wage war. The target categories were completely consistent with Tarting's philosophy and some operations in World War II. The first one was brave. which meant mitigating nuclear forces and nuclear capability, the second was Delta, which meant the destruction of the urban industrial base, and the third was Romeo, which meant delaying the enemy's ability to mobilize. This was our short-term war plan and within the For the next 18 months there was nothing but the air offensive and within the air offensive, specifically the nuclear component of it, that had any chance of affecting the outcome or what impact this would have on the defense of Western Europe.

Would the president be more cautious in the face of Soviet provocation, in late 1949 Truman was forced to reexamine national security policy in the face of a nuclear-armed adversary; With the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb, the United States felt truly vulnerable for the first time. much isenough to dissuade her Bjork in her book says that logically it would have been enough to have fish and guns and I think that but politically it is not enough, especially when it is said on the other side because we can think of a super weapon they could think of a super weapon and build it the The main reason for developing the super favored alternatively instituting a fairly aggressive program to develop the super was the fear of the Russian people who a year earlier had committed themselves to the idea of ​​international control of atomic energy.

Weapons have now taken a dramatic turn toward staying ahead of the Russians. Knowledge of the super bomb, as the hydrogen or thermonuclear bomb was first known, was closely held in the fall of 1949 and its development was the focus of a larger ownership among fewer than 100 US government people. In the US, Senator Brian McMahon, chairman of the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were among those who supported building a super bomb and believed we should move forward as quickly as possible. Truman also heard from those who opposed its development, the Atomic Energy Commission itself, that is, the five Atomic Energy commissioners, were divided on the issue.

The president created a special subcommittee to study the issue. The National Security Council special committee consisted of AEC Chairman David Lilienthal, Secretary of Defense Lewis Johnson, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson met for two months and then, in late January, reported to Truman and essentially recommended that he move forward with the development of hydrogen weapons, something that was greatly questioned and discussed. within the administration, but the committee still recommended it and President Truman approved it in about seven minutes. Yes, there is no doubt about the method of it, which should be done if it works. The idea that something is too good for us to work on Jesse doesn't make any sense.

He never said that, but that's my feeling towards you. He also ordered his top security advisers to prepare a study for him on how US strategy would be affected by this new development. He looked at the broader question of what we should do about it. our relations and policy toward the Soviet Union delivered to the President on April 5, 1900 50 NSC 68 was a Seminole policy document on U.S. national security written largely by Paul Nitsa NSC 68 reaffirmed the character of the Soviet threat contained in the previous NSC 20/4 but now the threat was seen as imminent, 1954 was called a year of national danger, it was assumed that they would have around 200 weapons and this would be more than enough to cause tremendous damage to the United States, which in my opinion was very exaggerated because you know. estimates from various ethnicities before and after about where the Russians were and where they were going to be where they all greatly exaggerated Paul Nitze, who was very skilled at fighting the bureaucrats in the way he ran the NSC 68.

He talks about it freely in several of his books. NSC 68 was given to Dean Acheson as Secretary of State basically. with nitsa they made the fundamental decision that they did not want to lay out the budget figures in front of Truman, so NSC 68 was sort of the beginning of a debate when it was delivered to the White House in the spring of 1950, but Truman did not No No I'm going to take Nitsa or Acheson z's word for it and said about assessing the implications, as well as the likely cost, of the massive nuclear and conventional buildup called for in NSC 68 two months from now;

However, this careful and deliberative effort would be interrupted by a new military imperative in the mid-1950s, the North Koreans had a fully trained and equipped army, the Russians seemed to have arrived the day it was revealed, but all along the communists planned the invasion and takeover of South Korea. The invasion began on the morning of Sunday, June 25, 1950. The invasion of South Korea was a surprise, as was the Berlin blockade of 1948 and the Soviet atomic test of 1949. Individually, these events drove the evolution of US strategic nuclear policy. together they caused a massive explosion buildup of the nation's nuclear and conventional forces many people attribute that buildup to NFC 68 I myself have never been sure there was such a close connection we had a war on our hands we had tremendous concern and sense of danger in In Europe, the Korean War hit and the nature of the decision-making process becomes different almost overnight.

An NSC 68 is one of those quirks of history that was available at the time it was made, but it was really the impact of the Korean attack that led Romer to immediately uncover the defense budget in the United States there was a huge commotion. due to the fact that that war had occurred first and there was also commotion in Europe because it seemed that the Soviets could be on the march and that was when European countries decided to ask the United States to send Eisenhower as commander in the fall of 1950. Intelligence assessments given to Truman suggested that a window of vulnerability with the United States had now opened. become more vulnerable as it became increasingly drawn into the Korean conflict and before rearmament could restore strategic balance the prospect of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe now deeply concerned Truman and Eisenhower why Whitter UN forces based a We poured basically all the ready forces we had available into the Korean conflict, anyone could decide where Korea would go at that time, whether we would lose the war, whether the Soviet Union would intervene, things like that, like that which was a very desperate situation.

In this situation there was a lot of talk about trying to estimate what was called the date of maximum danger. There were many proposals in the air that if this was going to happen, it should be avoided after the Soviets tested it in 1949. Understandably, the United States began to contemplate whether it would be appropriate and truly necessary for national security to attack Soviet nuclear targets. , but Harry Truman rejected the idea that the United States would deliberately precipitate a war against the communist adversary, at the same time that there are several military officers who expelled Truman's opinion and therefore people like LeMay and others in the early 1950s , when we were far ahead of the Russians in developing bombs and accumulating them, they said that he took the view that a war is inevitable and the longer we wait before it comes the worse comes, where worse are we going to be now Stuart Symington, who was the chairman of the Security Resources Board, you know, had previously been the first secretary of the air force and he delivered a report to the National Security Council recommended policies and actions that could the actual dire situation made in the fall of 50 or 51 the calls for a preventive war the serious calls that would be considered in the National Security Council were NSC 100 in my estimation, any new Soviet aggression in areas to be defined would result in the movement of the atomic bomb from the Soviet Russia same declarative policy automatic Merdan atomic bomb the closest you get to a call for preventive war is this document last nation and the National Security Council discussion makes it clear that even the main author of the document or this main sponsor The author of the document did not call for a preventive war, it is now a very different question, as we move into the Eisenhower years, of how best to psychologically use the United States nuclear arsenal so that, as the weapons nuclear weapons become more firmly rooted in US defense policy, their growth in performance would be central to the psychology of deterrence the natural power of the universe is harnessed in the new atomic bomb its tremendous possibilities are explained in this graph in only a few years after 1949 we had weapons pure fission weapons 50 killer tons instead of 10 to 20 kilotons they were very fine nuclear weapons and we didn't need to have a hydrogen bomb or a super bomb and besides we didn't know how to make them, other people felt that we had to have enormously superior power to be able to destroy.

The policy of the Soviet Union, as I understood it, was a clear understanding that one purpose was one of details that we should be ready with something more powerful. Some nuclear weapons had a deterrent effect. To a large extent, the development of the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos was

part

of a much larger project. effort to expand our entire nuclear weapons program, including materials production, uranium mining, etc., in 1950 there were eight sites and 55,000 employees, there were 20 sites, three years later, 142,000 and this very dramatic growth continued in the fifties, sixties, immediately after detection. After the first Soviet atomic test, President Truman authorized successive expansions of the nuclear weapons complex, which included plans for a second laboratory in Livermore, California, while at Los Alamos, Edward Teller and his colleagues fervently sought a practical design for The hydrogen bomb based on a fusion reaction within liquid for Tyrion there were contributions from several people, but the driving force was the cashier.

I mean, he was relentless and took on everyone he could interact with. Stan Ullom came to see him at Los Alamos. Stan, a mathematician who had been on the bus almost for quite a while and said, you know Edward, if we compress this liquid deuterium we can make it work, the reaction speed will be faster and the whole idea was to put a nuclear weapon inside a container and by for a few moments the container will contain not only the bomb but the energy it produces and that energy can be used for other things like maybe compressing a secondary ATM he said well it won't work but if you were going to do it and you should use the radiation because all the energy comes from often of radiation, thermal radiation and that goes faster, it can be adapted more simply, at that time I presented a new design in which I had full confidence, we needed the power of the concentrated energy of a primary to make the compression a time it was done. the secondary ones were much better and that was a whole secret now the cashier asked me to come up with an experiment to prove that this concept would work by July 25, 1951.

I had a big sketch but it turned out to be Mike, there were no new ideas but it was very competent. We wrote about the actual proposal and how it should manifest itself and showed that the test microphone was tested in November 1952, just a few months after Livermore was established. Livermore, of course, had nothing to do with it, although the press often informed us. credit and we were not allowed to deny it for reasons of secrecy so weaponization was carried out entirely at low levels development of an emergency capability based directly on Mike's deliverable version success seems so certain that it is considered a test test one of the emergency-capable weapons emergency-capable weapons were sometimes produced by the Atomic Energy Commission before the concept was proven, which was so urgent that they felt they had these capabilities that, if a test was successful, then they would have had the weapons in the arsenal capable of firing after Mike, we had operation Dirks where we went through the development of the Jughead shrimp, the runts, when Rut worked so well, that was our first deliverable thermonuclear device in 2010, when it was They first developed thermonuclear weapons, what that did was give you more megatons for the liability, so to speak, before and in the early stages of the thermonuclear weapon, the focus was on the large released yields of energy available;

In fact, the impact of the thermonuclear weapon was not that of enormous yield, but rather that of making it possible to have much more weapons with a limited stock of uranium-235 or plutonium-239. In 1950 there were approximately 300 weapons in the arsenal. A decade later there were twenty-two. thousand there was a decision to build more coming from Truman there was a decision to generate power there was the invention of more powerful versions that came from Mike and and and other things related to my The great growth that we saw in the 1950s and 1960s was driven primarily by the resort capacity and not really by requirements, was our policy at the time. time to not wait for the requirements of the military but to discover through the available technologies what would be the art of the possible technology offers opportunities offers possibilities we did not understand what the objectives should be we did not know what type of policies or even what plans and programs should be established to achieve them we face the threat not with fear and confusion but with confidence and conviction we consider that the first task of statecraft is to develop the force that will deter the forces of aggression and promote theconditions of peace white eisenhower assumed the presidency in the months following the detonation of the world's first thermonuclear device at any time we spoke throughout the campaign Eisenhower had promised to reexamine the balance between security and solvency but the new president's initial concern and his advisors would be resolving the Korean issue shortly after Eisenhower took office and began the process of developing a fabric of security policies and plans in the Soviet Union.

Generalissimo Stalin died when he dies, there is an almost immediate change of policy in Moscow, which is discussed with the North Koreans who say that we now take a series of measures to try to end the war. Both sides agreed to a ceasefire in July 1953 by expelling North Korean forces from South Korea. The United States had produced the status quo. Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, promised that there would be no more Koreas in dollars from people who thought there was a need for a coherent strategy and decided that they would launch a major study on alternative policies toward the Soviet Union.

Union in order to hear, oh, they really thought about alternative possibilities, they decided that in the solarium of the White House mansion, so it took the name solarium as a result of that and actually three approaches were proposed, each assigned to one. The A-team working group was supposed to consider the prospects of a containment policy. B was called out drawing the line that if they took any steps to expand they would risk a massive response and C was essentially tasked with advocating a rollback policy. about the idea of ​​trying to force the Soviet Union to capitulate through coercion, at the end of our work that lasted five weeks in complete secrecy here in Washington, we met in the White House library and each of the teams had an Es time for a full presentation of his case, at the end Eisenhower jumped up and said: Now I would like to summarize and comment on what we have heard and spoke for 45 minutes without a note, putting the whole thing together. so he showed us intellectual ascendancy over all the men in the room most of the qualities that the press then simply dismissed in the end Eisenhower reaffirmed a policy of containment the president had no illusions about what a nuclear war with the Soviets would be like As it was a war of absolute devastation, the Jo4 explosion in August 1953 had a great psychological impact on us.

The details were secret, so the entire American public and almost every member of Congress and other American leaders knew that it was the Russians who exploded the hydrogen bomb at the National Security Council, the detonation of a Soviet thermonuclear bomb underscoring the urgency of preparing a new national security policy, all together in the fall of 1953, in a set of decisions that led to NSC 162/ - wanted to pay as much attention as possible to how the psychology of nuclear weapons could be taken and turn them into such a deterrent and possible strategy. Now I was also reading.

I think the Soviets were a fairly conservative group of decision makers. He didn't believe they wanted war either. NSC. 162/- emphasized a nuclear response in the event of hostilities the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions a statement whose true intent would be debated for decades the defense strategy had two purposes one was to deter In February In 1952, NATO defense ministers met in Lisbon and agreed to commit 96 divisions in An Advanced Defense of Western Europe, much less than a year after making that commitment in Lisbon, it became clear that NATO had neither the resources nor the political will to deploy a force of that size.

Eisenhower would use an increasing number of nuclear weapons, both strategic and tactical, to deter. The Soviets in Western Europe in November 1953 directed Admiral Bradford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to implement the new look, a military strategy that relied heavily on long-term nuclear weapons. Eisenhower decided that we were spending too much in the Department of Defense, they reduced the planned level of spending, this was the From a new perspective, in the administration's view, we could not cope with the hordes of Soviet soldiers who would be sent against the West and, Therefore, nuclear weapons were a substitute for maintaining massive conventional forces.

Nuclear weapons very quickly came to the center of NATO strategy. Their initial deployment in 1953, although the exact role, how and when they were to be used was often confusing and ambiguous, NATO intelligence tended to exaggerate the Soviet threat over the years, the prevailing assumption being the worst of possible cases, that is, that the Soviet Union was using all its resources to build military forces against the West as quickly as possible, so much of our training and plans were focused on that premise, the massive retaliation of the MC 14/ 2 or the trap strategy was basically that in case this massive invasion occurred. massive nuclear forces would be used it would be an all-out nuclear war it was all or nothing In notes from a meeting prepared by Colonel Goodpasture, the president's close personal advisor, Eisenhower laid out a Nuclear Deterrent Posture that would launch a 20-year buildup war of nuclear weapons deployed in Western Europe Goodpasture wrote that he indicated his firm intention to launch a Strategic Air Force immediately in case of warning of an actual attack.

He emphasized that a major war will be an atomic war. My reading was that if an actual attack was carried out, all of our forces in Europe or in the United States the probability of an escalation to a nuclear war was very, very high and the Soviets knew that the root word is to tear, that It means to scare with an overwhelming fear and if you put the prefix in front of it you become too scared when performing acts that involve emotions and also self-preservation preservation of regimes preservation of countries deterrence is really based on a war prevention strategy, not on a war fighting strategy The main goal of nuclear deterrence is to put an exclamation point at the end of the sentence that says if you do bad things to us we will do even worse things to you, so you better not do it in the first place.

I think we are the nuclear weapon that made the biggest difference in history. was in Europe during the Cold War NSC 162/2 had formalized the concept of nuclear deterrence and extended that deterrence to Western Europe. Eisenhower's challenge was to communicate this policy that the Soviets, NATO allies, and US Secretary of State Dulles delivered in a speech. to the Council on Foreign Relations in January 1954, publicly announcing the administration's new national security policy that would depend primarily on a strong ability to take instant retaliation by means and in places of our choosing, massive retaliation, the way in which Dulles and Eisenhower used them in a way that was the suicide pact and said that if the Russians invade Western Europe we are going to fight back with everything we have, we are not going to waste a lot of resources trying to build defenses against tanks and there has been no other time, I think.

While the US once believed that in the face of overwhelming conventional capacity its only response was to escalate to the use of nuclear energy, the resulting controversy took Dulles and the president by surprise. People were very skeptical about Dulles' announcement, basically about the credibility of the announcement that it would just not be credible that you know if there was going to be any incursion into what is called French Indochina with communist forces and the United States is plausible. Would it really be plausible for the United States to use nuclear weapons on its bombers and destroy Moscow?

It just seems. Such a disproportionate response, the introduction of nuclear weapons to deal with all possible contingencies, certainly caught my attention and I think a lot of other people are just being horrible. There were several reasons for the criticism, the most important being that unless the Soviets or the Warsaw Pact launched a massive attack that did not seem to justify a massive response on our part in 1954 William Kauffman was among an emerging group of civilian strategists who argued that the credibility of retaliation was the key element of deterrence; There was certainly an issue in the NATO community about the likelihood of the United States actually unleashing its nuclear capabilities in the event of a Soviet invasion, if the United States were there in the event of any attack it would surely be involved because its forces are involved, but It wasn't just one. bilateral issue in which we could simply blow up some targets that were never specified and that would not be retaliation, a massive retaliation was not seen by the eyes or as the panacea for all forms of military conflict; rather, it was mainly addressed to the question of how Eisenhower was never really close to considering using nuclear weapons, so he was much more cautious, we had technological advantages, air power, nuclear weapons and they were trying to take advantage of our strengths and I think it was fine for him to have a pure ideologue in Dulles, someone who was going to try to scare people.

That is Clara Tory's policy, whether it coincides with employment policy, what she would actually do is another question. Eisenhower by betting on a massive policy. The retaliation caused European economic growth to continue with fewer young men. They had to be in the military will, which today because we took that opportunity in the 1950s to go for massive retaliation in the early 1950s, much of the Lavar deterrent force was based on the B-47s , who were based in Morocco, some of them were based in Saudi Arabia and were considered quite vulnerable, this was a time when not long after the Soviet Union had exploded its first nuclear weapon and the question of If the Soviet Union was going to drop a bomb on these bases at each of these bases what would happen?

This question was pondered by researchers at the RAND Corporation populated by a unique group of the best American scientific talent. Rand was perhaps the first group of experts in defense was a project with a very broad charter objective very broad scope to analyze the space warfare challenges of aeronautics from the perspective of the Air Force there are many talented people, some of whom were working on issues that were very relevant to the issues of nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy, one of those people was Albert Wolfe, a debtor who in 1954 issued a top secret report warning that Sachs' bases abroad were vulnerable to a first Soviet attack.

Albert will start a loan team at the RAND Corporation that looked closely at the worst chances that the Soviets could capture all of our bombers on the ground and win World War III and sort of convinced people that this was a real risk. unless major reforms were made to the way the Strategic Air Command was based and stationed. Eisenhower's conception was that some bases could be destroyed, but they did not eliminate enough capacity so as not to face retaliation, but it was always said that one of his bombers would come in and pass over our base to destroy the entire base of 50 or 100 bombers and if They did it enough.

The times they would win was what we did to them, that we won World War III to them and that is very stressful. People in the Air Force who remember the destruction in the Philippines and at Pearl Harbor always felt that it was important to strike the first blow. if one were to go to war, don't let the enemy strike the first blow, there is a very deep military logic that would advocate prevention, it is better to capture the enemy's forces before they launch or trap them, that is one aspect of prevention, another is that If your forces cannot survive, there is also a pressure to get ahead.

Kirstin once called anticipatory retaliation. The notion is that war is imminent, it's inevitable, and you're simply taking the first hit so you can destroy an enemy's forces while they stand. being armed while being fed the most unstable situation was a situation where either side could win depending on who attacked first and where neither side wanted a war, but the aegis sign read: "I'd rather have the war that I start before the war that they start." The Soviet Union has its vulnerable forces. faced a similar dilemma, they would feel in a major crisis that if they waited or a full American attack they might not be able to retaliate the bomber crews ran out the takeoff was very exciting to watch makes great cinema very bad for the world instability nearby and that makes everyone tense makes everyone in the mood to strike first when in doubt and that's whatwould normally call very low crisis stability or strategic stability would soon release a new staff report anticipating a first Soviet strike with thermonuclear weapons against the SAC bomber force based in the United States, one proposed solution was to develop the capability to retaliate after absorb an all-out nuclear attack by the Soviets.

The concept of the second strike force was actually developed on the ranch, but it was inherent to management once the vulnerabilities of our force were recognized. became clear in April 1954 Eisenhower asked James Killian of MIT to lead a study on how science and technology could address the nation's vulnerabilities. The Killian report was very important, particularly to ensure the survivability and effectiveness of the nuclear deterrent that we must first develop. missiles as quickly as possible the intercontinental ballistic missile would be much less vulnerable than an airfield and a bomber a hypothetical Soviet attack on our bases led to an acceleration of the development of our missile programs both the Minuteman program and the Polaris program and then came the development of putting weapons at sea in the black oceans where no attack could be found, the Air Force's mastery of strategic delivery had sidelined the Navy in the late 1940s, but it had not left it inactive the first world's nuclear-powered submarine was launched in In January 1954, the Nautilus was important not only for its naval engineering but also for Admiral Hyman Rickover's tireless efforts to establish a nuclear Navy.

The ability to remain submerged for weeks and months was essential to creating a survivable second-strike platform for nuclear weapons. Now the challenge was to launch a missile. The Navy's Polaris program started with the idea of ​​mounting very large liquid fuel missiles on the outside of the submarine, which of course is kind of an abomination to sailors and this was kind of a shotgun wedding. between the Navy and the army, the army had to launch missiles at the Jupiter irbm and the Navy was entrusted with the task of taking that missile, adapting it and taking it to the sea in both laboratories, work was done on the development of lighter and more thermonuclear warheads small, specifically with missile launching and mine and Livermore decided to see what was the smallest two-stage weapon that we thought we could design there in the early '50s, after a couple of false starts, at Livermore we started working on ways to reduce the weight of thermonuclear weapons to a minimum.

We got to a point where they could make missiles of modest size. We came up with an idea that I then presented to the Atomic Energy Commission: now we can get a megaton in 600 pounds. That was an exaggeration, but we took it seriously and that's a big change. and since the weight of the payload practically makes it the size of the missile that is going to carry it, that offered the possibility that we could have a small, hopefully solid-propelled missile that could fit on a submarine. The Polaris submarine was developed in 1960 before This does not happen very often in military weapons development and I have often said that Admiral Reborn deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for publishing it when he did, because it required a lot of attention and a lot of of anxiety.

In the nuclear confrontation with Polaris, the president was free to make a deliberate decision whether, in the event of an attack, he could wait and make sure that it was exactly what was needed when the blister-type missile submarine changed strategic policy because it became in the first days in the incarnation. of the notion of countervalue instead of counterforce and definitely those missiles were countervalue missiles that someone once asked if they were already born if a missile fired from the ocean would be accurate enough and their answer was that if it even hits dry land, not good. enough and what he really meant was that I'm not aiming at a military target.

I don't pretend to be precise. I am only causing harm to the other side and they know it beforehand and then the war will never happen in the first moment. Firstly, if you're going to shoot in retaliation in cities, you put a lot of importance on getting some kind of communication, but basically you need a very simple message, shoot, don't shoot, and you don't care much about how long it takes to get there. because you will survive is key to Polaris' viability as a deterrent force. If improvements in command control and communications developments in very low frequency radio technology provided secure and constant communications at sea, by 1960 it was clear that Polaris would represent a strong force and second strike retaliation force capable of survival the advent of strategic submarines certainly brought a new dimension to survivability and clearly has allowed us to have a significant portion of our strategic submarine force at sea in a relatively relaxed posture but in a survivable posture and that ability to Survival really allows Basically, you will always be able to attack second and that is what deterrence really does.

It is about that response capacity not to attack first but to always be able to attack second. Arcane debates about strategic vulnerabilities preserving crisis stability and survivable nuclear weapons systems like Polaris remained top secret and out of public view in 1955. Its alert operation in 1950 was what made waves. public imagination was the fear of a thermonuclear attack by Soviet bombers, the intelligence community hypothesized that they would build as quickly as possible and it was this assumption of maximum potential production that led to ideas about the Balma gap Returning from the Moscow Air Show in July 1955, Air Force Chief of Staff General Nathan Twining reported seeing dozens of new Soviet Bison intercontinental bombers in 1956.

Air Force intelligence, using the assumption of maximum potential production, he predicted that in five years the Soviets could have up to 800 bombers, entire cities could be destroyed. With bombs dropped by planes, what are you doing well? you try to do air defense you look at producing more nuclear weapons improved nuclear weapons I think what's notable is that it was a natural inclination at the time to defend the entire country one of The first defenses to protect US cities were Nike Ajax, a surface-to-air guided missile system equipped with a high-explosive conventional warhead. In 1958, the Nike Hercules system coupled a more precise missile with a nuclear warhead.

There were Nike locations all over the country. very extensive defense systems against aircraft, so everyone, by natural instinct, was in favor of defending themselves when the civil defense program began, which was a natural inclination and the emphasis was essentially on individual citizen action, individual preparation , civil defense is a component of the doctrine. of massive retaliation on the one hand we are sending signals to the Russians if they attack us we will be prepared we are taking measures to prepare and defend our people on the other hand if they attack us they will experience total destruction we will respond massively with the white house in the background Washington as one of the The nation's most important air force in the mid-1950s, the nation along with the president and senior government officials participated in Operation Alert.

This nationwide civil defense drill included a top-secret command center in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia. and there were broadcast facilities there where the president could address the people, so the idea was continuity of government in the event of the destruction of Washington, we are here to determine the emergency of the government to continue the functions of the government so that we do not there is interruption. the only business that must be transferred, but even as Eisenhower practiced with the nation, he understood that civil and anti-aircraft defenses were no match in a war with thermonuclear weapons. The Atomic Energy Commission began testing multi-megaton thermonuclear weapons in February 1954.

The Bravo test series served to galvanize public attention. The yield was almost three times the most likely value. Unfortunately, the effects of the shrimp were felt beyond From our test range we followed the fault to the east and relatively intensely for several hundred miles. The radioactive fallout from those tests was much greater than scientists had anticipated with the Bravo test, the issue of radioactive fallout really took hold. the public's mind. Eisenhower thought deeply about the thermonuclear weapon and began to see it as something that went beyond any experience in traditional warfare, I think, in that period.

The mid-1950s to early 1960s sees a process of gradually increasing public apprehension and awareness. Eisenhower had a big conundrum about how he was working on how we talk about national security and, in particular, how we talk about nuclear weapons issues through the American public. or on the one hand you're not scaring them to death and saying everything is so hopeless it's impossible, but on the other hand you're not sugarcoating it, they're just not talking about it, make sure you have here to give. the people, the facts, sure of what they can do to get the federal leadership to get the participation of the states and municipalities without terrorizing the people during his administration.

I think he tried to find the right balance. We had three main instruments for our security diplomacy, deterrence and real defense. Actual military operations Eisenhower faced conflicting intelligence estimates about a bomber gap, a public alerted to the dangers of thermonuclear weapons, and a defense community urging him to spend billions more. His promise of reliable security led him to rely on nuclear weapons for national security, but at the UN Eisenhower also initiated a diplomatic path to address widespread fears of thermonuclear war. The United States promises to you and therefore to the world his determination to help solve the terrible atomic dilemma his stopping the speech was a step towards trying to control nuclear energy technology so that it can be used peacefully I think it is a very good speech and an important initiative, but it had little to do with it. do with gun control.

The Eisenhower administration did not really address gun control as a policy and concept until the moratorium. the nuclear testing moratorium of 1958 and that was just the beginning, but, as I see it, that was the beginning as he worked to calm public fears about thermonuclear war with a new generation of weapons and delivery systems. Eisenhower was about to receive a very unpleasant surprise. The launch of Sputnik on a Soviet SS-6 ICBM set in motion a host of political and technological forces that would challenge Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation, but it will be some time before we or Soviet forces have a missile capability of long range equivalent to even a small fraction of the total destructive power of our current bomber force.

President Eisenhower saw the full picture and explained that this was a tremendous achievement of the Soviet system. He showed they could launch missiles, of course, but that didn't change our basis. deterrence Isner still thought that nuclear confrontation governed the damage that would be done because it was so obvious and so great that the Soviets were not likely to initiate such a conflict for a minute that Khrushchev wanted a nuclear war. I think it was perfectly clear that this would be devastating, that's what his own scientists told him and I think he thought Eisenhower believed exactly the same thing what he thought was happening was a war of nerves after Sputnik a new report came to the president warned of a hasty Soviet technological advantage an ICBM capability that could threaten the first strike as early as 1959 people who had dire views on national security said of course the Soviets are ahead they did a better job with German engineers they have more missiles that we have a missile gap, but he said they haven't told me anything that I haven't spent nights awake thinking about for all these years.

Two years earlier, the Killian report had recommended acceleration of the United States' missile programs. The United States also made another equally important proposal to improve U.S. intelligence gathering. This spurred the development of a high-altitude spy plane to monitor the deployment of Soviet missiles and allow Eisenhower to check areas where they might be producing these weapons and make sure that in fact they were not. They were still in a position to manufacture them, but even with the benefit of new intelligence, an improved early warning system, and the promiseWith survivable retaliation systems on the horizon, many felt that Eisenhower's massive retaliation policy was losing credibility, the rapid development of the h-bomb caused several American strategists, particularly at Rand, to recognize that this was going to be a Two-sided play was ultimately very uncertain, but one could certainly try to limit those types of operations by dealing only with targets that were military objectives when the opposing force emerged.

Because the counterforce arose in Russia, then you wanted to try to do something about it, so it became natural to try to attack the emerging Soviet nuclear capability, no one could guarantee that if you counterforce and not against the city, it would work, but it was worth having a chance. There is a dividing line between people in the nuclear age because some believe that nuclear weapons do not fit into this. Nuclear weapons will only produce such horrific and massive destruction that no political objective could be achieved through the use of nuclear weapons. Others believe. that they could be if used in a calibrated manner if they were low-yield if they were proportional to aggression Eisenhower continued to adopt a policy of deterrence by threatening to inflict unacceptable damage on the Soviets a new strategic concept proposed to the president in The National Security Council advocated greater flexibility, but Eisenhower viewed the strategy of gradual retaliatory coercion as akin to fighting with nuclear weapons, but the power of ISIL would have known that he was adamantly opposed to the idea of ​​incremental commitment.

I certainly believe that it is an experienced commander that Eisenhower in World War II had the idea that the fog of war would simply erase the nature of the signals you were sending. We all know that weather started deliberately or accidentally. Global war would leave civilization in a farce. This is as true of the Soviet system as it is of any other nuclear war in which there can be no winners, only losers. Eisenhower was a very complicated man with complicated thoughts; In his view, if we had a bold, fully stated position, that would be part of deterrence itself.

For Eisenhower, the fleet's ballistic missile submarine embodied the very notion of nuclear deterrence, a survivable weapons system. which ensured strategic stability, but the deployment of Polaris would create serious new operational challenges beginning in the late 1950s. A technological push drove the development of American ballistic missile systems at high speed. This growth would exceed national policy and operational planning. The Minute Man flew on December 63, 1961. Sam Phillips was a young brigadier general. His bosses told him that he had to fly this thing in 1961. We were all at Cape and this missile. it wasn't ready to fly in 1961, so I said to Sam, look, we'll take this calendar, put it in the blockhouse and extend December until we can fly, so we actually flew it in a summer of '63 to D which was the flight test missile 401 with that data we knew would work a year before the successful Minuteman one test the Navy commissioned Polaris and developed separate targeting plans for its a1 ballistic missile a submarine-launched ballistic missile would now greatly complicate the process of nuclear planning in the late 1950s she had different commanders, they specified sig sac commander several unified commanders that you can group together, etc. each of them developed their nuclear weapons plans independently of each other the theater commanders were identifying targets that the strategic commander also believed it was necessary to attack in a way that applied more than one weapon to a target, when perhaps only one was needed or two.

The planners recognized that at the interface between deliveries, fratricide was likely to occur, which we would be killing. our own forces, not just the enemy forces, and yet the Air Force and Navy did not have the ability to undo their different war plans. Eisenhower referred to the lack of integration as an eyesore. In 1958, General Nathan Twining, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had proposed improving the nuclear planning process with a unified joint command. Admiral Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, said: He vigorously opposed the idea and feared losing control of the Navy's Polaris. He was certainly well aware that to have an effective integrated plan he was going to have to make the Navy comfortable with this process; the previous interlocking had pushed for some kind of structured and coherent planning process, the compromise, so to speak, was that each of the forces would control its own delivery systems, but that targeting had to be combined into a joint staff on August 11, 1960 Eisenhower. formally approved the proposal for the formation of the joint strategic objective planning staff the J STP envisioned by General Twining the decision was made late in the Eisenhower administration to create this new body from a joint strategic objective planning staff in Omaha The first thing the joint strategic planning staff did was develop a single integrated operational plan.

The single integrated operational plan identifies targets, assigns weapons to targets, and decides how those weapons are delivered to those targets. The SIOP is based on written guidance that begins with the president and is refined by the Secretary of Defense and then further elaborated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This is an extraordinarily elaborate task in SIOP 62 was the first attempt to do it in a very compressed time period. It was an inflexible plan in the sense that it didn't have many options built in, psyops sixty two seemed to have several options, I think there were 14, but there weren't any, there was no difference, it was all how the forces were generated, as they were generated.

They generated more forces. you had what seemed like different options, each option included all the countries in the Sino-Soviet bloc, giving the president virtually no ability to differentiate. Eisenhower himself began to doubt the wisdom of having only large-scale nuclear attack options. Eisenhower's scientific advisor came out and I took a look at SIOP 62 and it was being prepared and I came back and said it was too inflexible. I think Eisenhower would have agreed with that. I think it's fair to say that when Kennedy took office, he and many of his top civilian advisors were quite surprised to find the kind of war plans they had inherited from the Eisenhower administration; in fact, Kennedy received a memo in July 1961. from George Bundy who said, in essence, that the current plan calls for firing everything we have at once and that it is constructed in a way that can make more flexible course very difficult the history of nuclear weapons has again been the effort always avoid giving the President of the United States flexibility to choose what attack options what uses of nuclear weapons he could choose in a crisis the importance of the relationship between the leaders of civilian policy and the military personnel who implemented that policy in the SIOP is perhaps the most significant story of the period from 1960 to 1990.

Cold War tensions in West Berlin would begin a search for flexible nuclear options by a new administration, a search that would draw on many of the strategic theories about war. John Kennedy campaigned on fears of a missile gap with the Soviets - a gap that later turned out to be more symbol than substance: The Soviets had negligible forces. At one point, they only had four ICBMs, which was not enough for a major attack against the United States. President Eisenhower offered Kennedy or some of his advisors a view of the highly classified information, but Kennedy and his team refused to have any official knowledge of this. and when they entered they discovered that the missile gap was in the other direction and that we had no problem, in this way Kennedy surrounded himself with what the Joint Chiefs of Staff would call the boy geniuses and the main one of them was his 44-year-old Secretary.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara McNamara recruited people like Charles Hitch, who became the Defense Department's budget chief, to Rand. Alain Enthoven, who had a systems analysis officer. Kauffman himself, who had been in Run, were people who applied quantitative methods to solve some of the problems. Problems McNamara wanted to solve and McNamara was a big supporter of these techniques being applied to military problems. The connection between Rand and the Kennedy administration worked very well and was very close. Rand's geniuses had new ideas about nuclear strategy and operations that were united by the notion that the president should have options.

When he was initially told about the SIOP he had no options. Kennedy was so furious about this that he said he would never participate again. in any of these exercises and that he made it very clear to McNamara that he wanted options. The only thing that surprised me almost nothing else about the SIOP plans that I reviewed in March 1961 at SAC, was that we basically worked our way through the Warsaw Pact countries to reach our SIOP objectives in the Soviet Union and I remember thinking, my God, what are we going to do to Poland? Furthermore, there is no differentiation in these attack plans between attacking nuclear targets, conventional military targets, and urban industrial targets.

Macca Maya was originally enacted. There is no city strategy, don't go after cities, go after forces and do it in such a way that the amount of damage is limited and there is no point in killing people just to kill them, that is not the point of this, the approach of not cities was In an attempt to follow some ideas that some of the rand experts had brought with them, the only way I could see that one could use nuclear weapons but still have some kind of control over how the exchange could evolve was avoiding cities.

We asked Sac to develop greater flexibility in its programs. there are plans to provide retention capabilities. I thought it was very important to provide other options to the president when a review of planning guidance for nuclear weapons was launched in the summer of 1961. McNamara was briefing the president about a new crisis in West Berlin in July the NSC was considering a variety of military responses to a renewed blockade of West Berlin including the use of nuclear weapons in Central Europe the world is not fooled by the communist attempt to label Berlin as a hotbed of war today there is peace in Berlin the source of the problems worlds in tension it is Moscow, not Berlin and it begins it will have started in Moscow and not in Berlin one of the most important events was a Soviet attempt to take West Berlin at that time, of course West Berlin was isolated from the rest of NATO located in Germany of the East, but at that time I called SAC, his email ID commander, who was the general of the North, back to Washington and said, look, Larry, today we were, they saw that we were.

How this is going to evolve The flexible response doctrine began when Kennedy and his advisors recognized that the Berlin crisis was dangerous and that the complete lack of flexibility in nuclear war plans made it even more dangerous. In September 1961, a wall separating West and East Berlin reduced immediate tensions, but would remain an enduring symbol of the Cold War for the next 28 years after the crisis. McNamara issued his first draft presidential memorandum which provided new guidance for SIOP 63 which for the first time included a secure reserve force aloft 63 what needed to be done was to create pre-planned lower level options so as not to do this with an eye to the moment. so as not to have civilian officials improvising a nuclear war plan SIOP 63 was a plan that included five main attack options designed to be executed under various contingencies of prevention or retaliation, the plan allowed for withholding attacks in different ways and focused on the destruction of Soviet forces, while maintaining a secure reserve force capable of devastating psychological operations in Soviet society. 63 was the first effort to control escalation of In a nuclear war, the military tended to oppose notions of, say, escalation control, which prevents complications to the war plan.

Many military officers, when asked to engage in more limited nuclear options, have reservations about protecting Soviet cities in the hope that the Soviet Union will not attack our cities felt that this was abstract theorizing by American civilians and that They didn't want to have anything to do with her.Theories about escalation control would also be complicated by the rapid increase in the number of Soviet strategic nuclear forces capable of inflicting unacceptable damage on the United States, so the attempt to avoid that publicly discussed policy of limiting damage to each side was considered impractical and we moved away from it very, very quickly and away from it towards what became known as flexible response.

McNamara went from damage limitation to flexible response, flexible responses basically. To say that we have to keep our options open, we need what we need for many different options and let's not lock ourselves into a particular type of strategy and use the minimum force necessary to achieve our objective, in a sense was a flexible response. a holding strategy, we would only use a part of our force in the hope that the Soviets would only use a part of theirs, the same thing he supports today. Nuclear weapons should never be used unless others use them first, which we should support um.

There is no first use policy. The Western European allies we had did not like it at all and the Europeans said: well, you will fight a conventional war here and destroy Western Europe with non-nuclear munitions or we will be invaded, not that. The Europeans preferred to have at least one public debate that emphasized nuclear weapons and NATO policy would in effect be supported by an increase in the number of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. Today we have a flexible combat team ready. In dealing with any threat, whether large or small, we are superior to the communists and nuclear energy and we intend to stay that way.

In fact, there were 7,000 tactical nuclear weapons in Western Europe. McNamara introduced these weapons as a way to assure Europeans that he was prepared to use nuclear weapons. I'm not sure he ever used them; It was not his nature, but it was part of a symbol of American support despite my belief and President Kennedy shared that he would be contrary. It was in the interests of the US and NATO to ever initiate the use of nuclear weapons, that was still NATO's publicly stated policy and it was NATO's underlying war policy and plans that in some ways look very similar. to what was the official policy in recent years. year of the ion administration that we can try to stop them without using nuclear weapons but then we can bring nuclear weapons here and there there was a policy that was clear as mod deliberately clear as mud that was smoked by the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe work of nurse Falls To insult personally, I mean, Khrushchev in this way was like Stalin, he wanted to appear stronger instead of weaker, so this was a political game with high stakes, but I think in his opinion, nuclear war was out of the question, so it was this, you know, who would blink first in a crisis, since the heady days of Sputnik Khrushchev had impressed the West with its claims about Soviet technological prowess, but five years later the Soviet leader turned bolder in October 1962, the United States had Jupiter missiles at NATO bases in Britain, Italy and Turkey and their flight times.

Two targets in the Soviet Union were measured in minutes. In Khrushchev's eyes, the United States had altered the strategic balance of power. One of the explanations for Khrushchev's action in Cuba is to close the gap in strategic forces. by deploying systems that limit the U.S. On October 14, a reconnaissance plane returns with the first compelling photographic evidence indicating the presence of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba. Greater surveillance is immediately ordered. The discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba tested the strategic nuclear policy of the United States at a time when it possessed overwhelming nuclear superiority by a ratio of almost seventeen to one, but the execution of the pre-planned nuclear options contained in SIOP 63 alone was remotely considered within XCOM, the executive committee established by Kennedy to deal with the crisis.

I agreed that we had to remove them because they had been introduced under the cover of deception, but I said that we had to be clear about one thing: they did not change the military balance, although everyone agreed that action was necessary, there was no consensus on the impact of missiles in Cuba on the strategic balance that the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that Soviet missiles 100 miles off the coast were massively intended to stabilize the entire Western Hemisphere from Hudson Bay to Lima, Peru is within their range with the facts that are now before him. President Kennedy continues to meet with his top advisors and I said what the hell would I do if a missile was launched from 100 miles offshore or 5,000 miles offshore before they put them there, you knew damn well that if we launched the first strike, they would launch the let him survive on his strength and we have all agreed that it would be enough. to deter us from launching a first strike, so before they put those missiles there we didn't have a capable first strike, but we did have a clear capability to deter, now that they put those missiles there in Cuba we still don't have a first strike.

Strike, nothing has changed, but we still have a twist, they realized they were very close to a nuclear war because, looking at the possible outcomes at the heart of that crisis, it didn't look very good, XCOM never really raised the question of what we do with our nuclear forces, the only thing that made them think differently was when I pointed out to them that bag with forces moving downwards within the range of the Cuban missiles and at that moment they began to recognize that this was a military issue as well. of policy during the five or six days that we debated two main alternatives, one was a quarantine and the other was an air strike that it was recognized would have to be followed by a sea lion invasion while Kennedy reviewed the options.

The last time you asked General Sweeney, the operational commander, if an airstrike would destroy all the missiles, he said that Mr. President, I can guarantee you that we will destroy more of those missiles than any other Air Force, but I can guarantee you that there will not be one left in the Earth, five. No, at that moment it was clear in my mind that Kennedy was not going to do it. support the attack which president would initiate an action that would almost certainly be resolved with the detonation of two or five nuclear warheads in some of its main cities, stop this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine is being initiated on all offensive military equipment sent to Cuba .

These offensive military preparations thus continue to increase the threat to the hemisphere. New actions will be justified. I have ordered the Armed Forces to prepare for any eventuality. This will be the policy of this nation with respect to any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere. as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response against the Soviet Union. I think ultimately it was McNamara's sheer hara of contemplating serious nuclear war that led him to retreat towards the notion of assured destruction as such. enough to keep the Soviet Union at bay, this had an immense impact on my thinking about the use of nuclear weapons and I have often said publicly that the Cuban missile crisis was the best managed foreign policy or defense crisis in the last 50 years, but in the end we avoided nuclear war by a very narrow margin due to luck, all of this influenced my thinking about nuclear strategy, nuclear force levels and particularly my advice to President Johnson, so later Mackinaw began to emphasize that the ultimate deterrent was assured destruction capability, not just as a minimum deterrent, but the essence of deterrence because he wanted it to be a restraining force after absorbing a Soviet first attack and an American attack. ability to destroy 25 to 30% of its population and 50% of its industrial and military capacity, then the technicians said 400 megaton weapons in Russian cities and industries.

The capacity would do the job, so from then on the design objective for force construction was to have 400 weapons assured of delivery despite their destruction before launch despite their possible wear and tear through the defenses at their peak in 1962 with 283 thousand troops and 3,400 aircraft. exerted considerable influence over decisions on nuclear force requirements. McNamara's initial guidance supporting a flexible response policy had led the first PS to identify many more military targets. Flexible response boosted inventory. If you wanted to have a flexible response, you wanted to have a large number of arm as you want and develop new types of weapons the air force immediately not only rejoiced but saw the opportunity to expand its capabilities especially intercontinental ballistic missiles Minuteman proposed purchasing 10,000 MacNamara each McNamara believed that the threat of massive retaliation would deter him and assumed that the Russians would feel the same, but I think there was a serious misunderstanding about how leaders The Soviets thought about nuclear weapons and especially the way the military thought about nuclear weapons, which was in terms of waging a war and you know, because that was sort of their mission, they tend to be very tough-minded. in these things they were always interested in much more force than they might need, they are very conservative in that sense, that is their own history and I think there was a substantial period of time in which the Soviet Union built up strategic forces by reasons that had to do with internal Soviet politics and internal resource allocations, nuclear theory and nuclear strategy have made a big difference in the way we aim weapons, but they haven't made as much of a difference as we like to claim. in the amount of weapons we had and I think that's almost certainly true for the Soviet Union.

Harold Brown once said that when we build, they build and when we stop, they build.