CHAPTER 6 Bargaining Chips

Richard Nixon resigned from office on August 9, 1974, to preempt impeachment—which the House of Representatives was about to pass—for his abuses of power and obstructions of justice in the Watergate scandals. His vice president, Gerald Ford, took his place and, soon after, fired James Schlesinger, mainly for his arrogance, and pulled the last Americans out of Vietnam. But he also pardoned Nixon for any and all crimes that he may have committed, and, in part for that reason, lost the 1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia and a prosperous but frugal peanut farmer who rode an anti-establishment wave to the White House, promising, among other things, never to tell a lie.

Senior military officers eyed Carter with suspicion from the start. A devout Christian, he’d campaigned on a platform to cut the defense budget and to wipe the moral blight of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. The Air Force distrusted Carter for an additional reason: he had graduated from the Naval Academy and spent several years as a protégé to Admiral Hyman Rickover, the architect of the nuclear submarine program. Like many Navy veterans of this background, Carter thought that nuclear war could be deterred with nothing more than a small number of missile-loaded submarines—that bombers and missiles, the Air Force’s stock in trade, were unnecessary at best.

Carter deepened the officers’ apprehensions a few days before taking office, when, along with a few senior aides, he sat through a briefing from the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the Soviet-American military balance, clenching his teeth in what some may have seen as a smile but acquaintances knew was anything but. After the final slide, he asked the Chiefs how long it would take to cut the arsenal of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles down to 200. At the time, the United States had 1,054 ICBM.

The JCS chairman, Air Force General George Brown, didn’t quite understand the question. Did the president-elect want to know how long it might take to negotiate a reduction of that scope with the Russians?

No, Carter replied. He wanted to know how long it would take the military to cut down to that small a force unilaterally.

A stunned silence draped the room.

Carter’s new secretary of defense, Harold Brown (no relation to the general), wrote a memo to the president soon after the inauguration, explaining why such a drastic cut would be unwise. Brown, a nuclear physicist, had been the Pentagon’s director of research and engineering under Robert McNamara; he’d supervised Glenn Kent’s study concluding that efforts to “limit damage” in a nuclear war were futile and that, therefore, deterrence—as defined by McNamara’s Assured Destruction doctrine—was the only valid purpose of nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, even Brown thought that whittling down the ICBM force to just 200 missiles was extreme. The Soviets—who by this time had more than 1,300 ICBMs, some loaded with multiple warheads—were unlikely to follow suit and, with such a massive edge, they might be tempted, in a crisis, to launch a first strike. Finally, Brown argued, even if an arsenal of 200 ICBMs seemed sufficient to deter the Soviets from attacking the United States, it might not be enough to assure the NATO allies that we had their security covered too.

The last argument persuaded Carter, and he dropped the matter.

Once in the White House, for all his antipathy toward the whole business of nuclear weapons, Carter immersed himself in its intricacies more deeply than any previous president. The Joint Chiefs ran periodic simulations of a Soviet nuclear attack, with assistant secretaries and other aides role-playing their bosses. In the first two of these exercises during his term, Carter played himself, an act that both impressed and unnerved the officers in the room; he soon after learned that he was the first president ever to take part in the exercise, a fact that astonished him. Why, he wondered, wouldn’t a president want to rehearse what he would have to go through in the face of the gravest crisis imaginable?

During the simulation, Carter read from a document called the Black Book—literally a black binder, about an inch thick, prepared by the J-3, the operations division of the Joint Staff, laying out the president’s options and how to order each one. Carter, who may also have been the first president to leaf through the Black Book, complained that the options were too complex, the language too dense with jargon.

“I’m pretty smart,” he said, in his clipped Georgian drawl, “and I don’t understand any of this.” By the time of the next exercise, the J-3 had simplified the text.

Carter also ordered impromptu drills of the White House Emergency Procedures, the steps to be taken in the event of an attack—where the president and other officials should go, how they should get there, and how quickly. He ordered the first of these drills at nine o’clock on a February night, just weeks after taking office. It did not go well: the helicopter didn’t arrive on the White House lawn in time; most of the officials to be evacuated couldn’t be located. He repeated the drills, at random hours, with no advance notice; the response times improved. In all these briefings and drills, he took care to involve his vice president, Walter Mondale—another first: remarkably so, given that, in a nuclear war, the president might be killed and the vice would have to step into his shoes immediately.

After the first, disastrous test of the White House Emergency Procedures, Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, decided to take a closer look at the broad planning for nuclear war.

Brzezinski was an anomaly in the upper ranks of the Carter administration, an intellectual and a hard-line hawk on foreign and defense policy. Some called him Carter’s Kissinger, and there was something to the comparison. Both were immigrants from totalitarian powers: Kissinger, a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany; Brzezinski, the son of a Catholic Polish diplomat who had taken refuge during World War II while posted to Canada. Both were educated at Harvard, where they then taught international relations, rising through the faculty as rivals. At the end of the 1950s, the department had room for just one Central European scholar of a Realpolitik bent, and the tenured slot went to Kissinger. Brzezinski decamped to New York, where he became a star at Columbia University.

He met Jimmy Carter in the early 1970s while setting up the Trilateral Commission, a rival of sorts to the Council on Foreign Relations, which sought to strengthen ties among the democratic, capitalist institutions in North America, Western Europe, and Japan. He wanted two governors to serve on the board, one from the West Coast, the other from the East, but not from any of the predictable northeastern states. He heard that the governor of Georgia had established trade offices in Brussels and Tokyo and figured this was the right man. He later learned that the trade offices had been set up by Carter’s predecessor, but no matter: Carter, whose grand ambitions were soon apparent, was eager to join and quick to learn. When he announced that he was running for president, he brought Brzezinski to stand alongside him, a move that lent the unlikely unknown a dash of credibility; and, soon enough, “Zbig”—as friends called him—became his chief foreign policy adviser.

After Carter won the election, his campaign manager, a voluble young southerner named Hamilton Jordan, told the press, “If, after the inauguration, you find Cy Vance as secretary of state and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of national security, then I would say we failed.” As it happened, Carter nominated precisely those men—emblems of the establishment that he’d pledged to tear down—suggesting that he might be a more complicated, less firebrand politician than some in his entourage imagined.

Brzezinski spent much of his first month in office studying the myriad aspects of nuclear war planning—the SIOP, the evolution of doctrine over the previous decade, the extent to which those doctrines aligned with what SAC was actually doing—and, like his predecessors who’d taken a similarly close look, he came away appalled. During a trip to SAC headquarters, he asked the commander, General Richard Ellis, what he envisioned happening thirty days after the war began. Ellis responded with vague bromides. Clearly there was no plan beyond the unleashing of the SIOP. And he discovered that the SIOP—despite the efforts of McNamara, Kissinger, Schlesinger, and their staffs—hadn’t changed much at all over the years.

In a March 31 memo to Carter, he wrote, “The SIOP, as you know, offers retaliatory options short of a full response, but they remain massive in both direct and collateral damage.” NSDM-242, the most recent presidential guidance on the subject, signed by Nixon three years earlier, had ordered SAC to devise some “limited nuclear options,” but, Brzezinski learned, no one had provided any rationales or procedures for these options—what political or military objectives they were supposed to accomplish—and, therefore, even if SAC had followed the guidance (which it hadn’t), the options would serve no purpose.

And so, like a scene in the movie Groundhog Day, yet another new administration rolled out yet another new set of documents, slogans, and acronyms in yet another stab at revising the nuclear war plan. In one memo penned by Brzezinski, Carter called for a “comprehensive net assessment” of the nuclear balance; in another, Harold Brown outlined the requirements of maintaining “essential equivalence” between the United States and the Soviet Union; in still others, their staffs explored new angles on nuclear targeting.

In the midst of this, President Carter faced his first international crisis—not a superpower standoff or some threat of nuclear war, but rather a dispute within NATO about new nuclear weapons in Europe.

Over the previous twenty years, the U.S. Army, Air Force, and, to a much lesser extent, the Marines had dotted the European landscape with a steadily swelling stockpile of nuclear weapons—7,000 of them by the time Carter entered office: short-range missiles, 8-inch and 155-millimeter artillery shells, atomic demolition mines, and a couple of hundred atomic bombs strapped to the bellies of FB-111 tactical fighter planes. The missiles and shells were short-range, relatively low-yield weapons, which would explode on the battlefield, killing Soviet soldiers and busting up their armored concentrations, in the event of an invasion across the East-West German border—or forcing those soldiers to disperse ahead of time, which would minimize the damage done by a nuclear explosion but also blunt the force of their offensive, thus further deterring the Kremlin from invading in the first place. President Kennedy and Robert McNamara had spent a lot of money upgrading NATO’s conventional defenses, in the hopes of reducing the need to use nuclear weapons in the event of a war in Europe. But under President Johnson, spare parts, ammunition stocks, supplies, and troops were diverted to Vietnam. The nuclear stockpile grew in importance—and in number.

The Soviets had also deployed a substantial number of atomic weapons in Eastern Europe, but in the mid-1970s they fielded something new—the SS-20 missile, which had the range to hit targets in Western Europe from launch pads inside the USSR. An older generation of missiles, the SS-4 and SS-5, could do this too; but the SS-20 was mobile, it was fueled by more reliable solid propellants, and each missile carried three MIRV warheads in its nosecone.

None of the nuclear-armed missiles in Western Europe had the range to strike back at targets in the Soviet Union. American diplomats told the NATO allies not to worry: the “nuclear umbrella” was solid; a Soviet invasion of West Germany would be answered by a U.S. nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, if necessary.

But de Gaulle’s fear, that an American president might not “risk New York for Paris,” still haunted some Western European leaders—and this worry intensified with the double whammy of the deployment of the SS-20 and the election of Jimmy Carter.

The Joint Chiefs’ concerns about Carter had seeped across the Atlantic and found particularly fertile soil in the mind of West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt. A centrist politician with a background as defense and finance minister, Schmidt straddled a delicate balance on the Cold War’s front line. With the Nazis’ militarism still a fresh memory, West Germany was constitutionally barred from building a large military; so Schmidt, even more than the other NATO allies, depended on Washington’s firm commitment and Moscow’s goodwill to keep the peace. But Moscow couldn’t be trusted as the sole foundation of security, and Schmidt didn’t trust Carter at all.

Schmidt’s few personal dealings with the new American president only deepened his worries. He saw Carter as an unworldly hayseed. Carter had pleaded with the chancellor to help solve the West’s financial difficulties by inflating his economy, seemingly unaware of the Germans’ deep phobia of inflation, dating back to the Weimar era, when hyperinflation helped trigger the rise of Nazism. Schmidt saw Carter waver and finally do nothing about Soviet activities in Ethiopia and Somalia. He heard reports of internal clashes within the administration—disputes among Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance, and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young—and of Carter’s disinclination to pick one side or the other. Finally, he read press reports—inaccurate, as it happened—about a secret presidential memorandum that advocated surrendering large swaths of West German territory in the event of war with the Soviet Union.

Schmidt decided to go public with his anxieties. On October 28, in a speech before the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, amid the standard boilerplate about economic interdependence and the scarcity of key resources, Schmidt lit the fuse of a political bomb. The key line was his declaration that the “principle of parity”—equal levels of nuclear armaments between East and West—“must apply to all weapons,” not just to those based in the United States and the Soviet Union. He further asserted that the parity in intercontinental strategic arms “magnified the significance of disparities” on the European continent. Therefore, Schmidt urged the United States to deploy a new generation of theater nuclear weapons having the range to hit Soviet targets from inside Western Europe—in short, missiles that matched the capabilities of the Soviet SS-20s.

The implication was not merely that America’s nuclear umbrella had leaks, but that it was broken.

Schmidt’s speech prompted a series of interagency meetings in the Situation Room in the West Wing of the White House. In the months before the speech, several defense analysts had been pushing for precisely the kind of new weapon that Schmidt was requesting. Most of these analysts were members of the European-American Workshop, a low-key group chaired by Albert Wohlstetter, a charismatic consultant who had written some influential studies in the 1950s at the RAND Corporation. The author of Schmidt’s speech, Walter Stützle, director of the German Defense Ministry’s planning office, was an active member of the workshop. Other members had contacts inside the American defense bureaucracy.

By the time the interagency review began, a doctrinal rationale for the new missile had come into being. Brzezinski hadn’t given the issue much thought, but his deputy, David Aaron, who’d held a similar post under Kissinger, was an ardent advocate. The SS-20s, Aaron said at one meeting, were creating a “gap in the escalation spectrum”—an odd phrase that was circulating in NATO circles as a result of the workshop’s influence. The premise behind the concept was that the United States needed to match Soviet deployments at every step along the “escalation ladder,” to invoke another metaphor.

Lieutenant General William Y. Smith, assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, touted two new weapons under development that would fill the gap: the Ground-Launched Cruise Missile, which could home in on a target with impressive accuracy, exploding just a few feet away; and a ballistic missile, the Pershing II (an upgrade of the Pershing, one of the long-standing nuclear weapons in Europe), nearly as accurate as the cruise missile and much faster. The Chiefs preferred an all–Pershing II force, since the cruise missile was slow and might be shot down by Soviet air defenses, but they were fine with fielding both. (Though Smith didn’t say so, their position was driven by the fact that the Pershing II was an Army project and the cruise missile was funded by the Air Force; buying both would avoid interservice tensions.) Either way, Aaron and others on the NSC thought that these weapons would prevent the Soviets from thinking that they could fight a “sanctuary war”—hitting Western Europe with missiles launched from the USSR, with the United States unable (or unwilling) to strike back.

Leslie Gelb, the assistant secretary of state for politico-military affairs, was skeptical. Gelb had been the Pentagon’s chief arms control analyst under McNamara, during the Johnson administration, then spent four years as a diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times. Immersed in the debates over nuclear weapons and deterrence theory from various angles, he felt uncomfortable with this notion of a gap in the escalation spectrum. On a strategic level, he considered it overly abstract, doubted that it had anything to do with the way real decision makers thought about war and peace. On a geopolitical level, he worried that even talking about the concept, and appearing to take it seriously, would heighten suspicions that America was canceling its NATO obligations altogether—“decoupling” its defense from that of Western Europe.

The technical and strategic debates went on for weeks, at several meetings in the Situation Room, with little sign of resolution. Then came an event that settled the matter.

All that fall, much controversy swirled around another new weapon called the enhanced radiation warhead, popularly known as the neutron bomb. Nuclear explosions released several effects—blast, heat, X-rays, gamma rays, neutron radiation, and radioactive fallout. The ERW was designed to minimize blast and maximize neutrons: specifically, it released about 1 kiloton of blast but the same amount of radiation as an ordinary nuclear bomb ten times as powerful. The military planned to build the weapon in three sizes—as an 8-inch artillery shell, a 155-millimeter shell, and a new warhead for the aging Lance missiles—seeing them as ideal for stopping a Soviet invasion of Western Europe without damaging the surrounding structures. Brzezinski and Harold Brown supported the program, which was classified, as a routine line item in the defense budget.

Then the Washington Post ran a story with a blazing headline about this new “killer warhead.” Suddenly, critics denounced it as “the ultimate capitalist weapon”—killing people while sparing property. From a more analytical angle, arms control advocates saw it as a destabilizing weapon, blurring the distinction between a conventional and nuclear weapon, thus lowering the threshold between conventional and nuclear war, and thus increasing the chance that some president might actually use it.

The ensuing debate was symptomatic of the schizophrenia induced by thinking about the bomb: on the one hand, you wanted the Soviets to think you’d actually use these things, in order to deter them from aggression; on the other hand, you didn’t want to make a weapon too easy or tempting to use if war broke out.

President Carter grasped both sides of the conundrum, though his instinctive revulsion toward nuclear weapons colored his view. The previous spring, he had toured a nuclear submarine with his old mentor, Admiral Rickover, who confided that he wished the atom had never been split. Coming from the man who designed the first nuclear-powered submarine, the remark stiffened Carter’s commitment to bring down the number of nuclear weapons, if possible to zero. Carter knew, as he wrote in his diary, that the popular critique of the neutron bomb—that it killed people while protecting property—was a “gross oversimplification.” Yet, at the same time, he told Brzezinski he didn’t want to go down in history as the president who approved such a monstrosity. He decided that, if the NATO allies wanted it, they would have to ask for it. Schmidt took this as another sign of Carter’s insensitivity toward Europe’s—especially Germany’s—political dilemmas. Finally, though, Schmidt came through and, at the risk of alienating his party’s left wing, agreed to ask for the weapons as long as at least one other NATO nation on the continent did so, as well.

Then, on April 7, 1978, Carter canceled the project. Schmidt was furious. And since the Soviets had mounted a propaganda campaign against the neutron bomb throughout Europe, it looked as if Carter was caving in to the Kremlin.

At that point, the interagency debate over the cruise missiles and Pershing II screeched to a halt. Everyone agreed that another “neutron bomb fiasco” must be avoided, that these nuclear weapons programs had to go through. The tough questions were dropped because those who had been asking them feared there might be no answers; without answers, there might not be deployment; and without deployment, America’s leadership of NATO would be doubted, might dissolve—and that had to be prevented at all cost.

So, with Brzezinski’s approval and Carter’s consent, the NSC put forth a plan to build 572 of the new weapons—464 Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles and 108 Pershing IIs. A few European prime ministers—still battered by the neutron-bomb flap—were reluctant to go along unless the plan was coupled to an arms control proposal. The NSC offered two sweeteners to the deal. First, if the allies accepted the 572 medium-range missiles, the United States would immediately remove 1,000 of the 7,000 short-range nuclear weapons in Europe—and dismantle another 572 as the new missiles were installed. Second, the whole program would be canceled if the Soviets agreed to get rid of their SS-20s by 1983, the year when the new American missiles would be fielded.

On December 12, 1979, at a meeting in Brussels, the NATO ministers voted to approve the plan. It marked a rare political victory for Carter, even if its point was to erase the effects of a political near-disaster and even if the missiles in question lacked much military purpose. This wouldn’t be the last time Carter was forced to approve nuclear weapons that he abhorred for the sake of politics that he found distasteful.

Six months before the resolution of the NATO crisis, President Carter and Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty—SALT II, as it was known—the culmination of seven years of negotiations, through the previous two presidents, and the most ambitious nuclear arms control treaty to date. Yet to obtain the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s endorsement, which was necessary to win the Senate’s ratification, Carter had to fund what would be the biggest, most destabilizing missile in the U.S. arsenal.

This political tradeoff—an arms buildup in exchange for an arms treaty—had become standard practice by this time, a built-in feature of the arms control process that the Chiefs had honed to an art. It began under Nixon. At the same time that he and Kissinger were unfurling nuclear threats, they were also crafting a diplomacy of “détente,” a complex of forums and agreements to reduce tensions and build trust with the Kremlin—and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks formed the centerpiece of this effort. It led, on May 26, 1972, to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which limited each side to two ABM sites of 100 interceptors per site, and an interim accord on offensive weapons, which froze the number of both sides’ long-range missiles and bombers. The ABM Treaty was a significant accomplishment, which, for the next thirty years, blocked what would otherwise have been an unending arms race, with each side building more offensive weapons to penetrate the other side’s defenses, then more defensive weapons to block the other side’s offense. The interim accord, by contrast, triggered a dynamic in domestic politics that spurred an arms race of its own.

Kissinger publicly said that the purpose of SALT was “to create a vested interest in mutual restraint,” but in fact it did the opposite. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird gave senators a memo headlined “SALT-Related Adjustments to Strategic Programs.” But the “adjustments” amounted to requests for more nuclear weapons, not fewer. Among the demands: “Accelerate and complete development of site defense” for an ABM system, “Develop submarine-based cruise missiles,” “Develop improved re-entry vehicles [warheads] for ICBMs and SLBMs [submarine-launched ballistic missiles],” and increase spending ten-fold—from $100 million to $1 billion—for an accelerated Trident submarine program. Laird and the Chiefs told the senators that they would oppose the SALT agreements unless these requests were approved.

At a hearing on the accord, Senator John Stennis, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asked Laird, “Under this agreement, will any of the United States’ planned deployment programs for offensive missiles be affected?”

Laird replied, “They are not.”

Gerard Smith, the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the branch of the State Department that had negotiated the accords, went further, announcing that the United States would soon double its number of MIRVs, since SALT placed limits only on missiles, not on warheads.

Congress approved all of Laird’s “adjustments,” even though some of the new weapons hadn’t yet been tested; the Trident submarine wasn’t even fully designed. Some senators suspected they were being taken for a costly ride. “It seems to me,” Stuart Symington, a longtime defense hawk, observed “that these SALT talks are being used in an effort to sandbag the Congress into heavy additional arms expenditures when the hope of all of us… was that agreements… would make it possible for us to reduce armaments, certainly not to increase it.”

In 1974, Brezhnev and President Ford signed the Vladivostok Accords, which further constrained ABM deployments—each side was now allowed just one site with 100 interceptors—and limited each side’s offensive nuclear arsenal to no more than 2,400 strategic launchers (ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers), 1,320 of which could be equipped with MIRVs. However, these limits exceeded the number of launchers and weapons that each side possessed at the time. (The United States had 2,200 launchers and 820 MIRV’ed missiles; the Soviets had 2,375 launchers and no MIRVs.)

At a press conference, Ford proclaimed that the accords “put a cap on the arms race.” But when asked whether he would build up to the maximum allowed limits, he replied that he had an “obligation” to do so.

With the SALT process, two rationalizations for new weapons systems came into being: the need to maintain the “perception” of power, regardless of how many weapons were really needed; and the need for “bargaining chips,” so that U.S. diplomats could “negotiate from strength” in the next round of arms talks. These arguments could be summoned to justify any weapon, and once the weapons came into being, they were rarely bargained away. Kissinger later admitted that he’d pushed for the sea-launched cruise missile, which no admiral had requested, as “a bargaining chip,” not realizing that “the Navy would fall in love with it.”

Negotiations for SALT II got under way soon after Nixon and Brezhnev signed the interim agreement and the ABM Treaty. Brzezinski was skeptical of Nixon and Kissinger’s détente—he distrusted the Russians, thought they were exploiting good relations with Washington as a cover for continued aggression in the Third World—but Carter found support for his enthusiasm in his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and his arms control director, Paul Warnke. The talks between Soviet and American diplomats were inherently complex. By this time, the two military establishments had built very different nuclear arsenals: the Americans emphasizing smaller, more accurate missiles, a substantial fleet of submarines, and high-tech adjuncts like cruise missiles; the Soviets placing a premium on larger, more powerful missiles, with the bulk of them based on land, where the commissars could keep them under close watch. It was difficult, even with good intentions, to devise formulas for “parity” when the arsenals were so asymmetrical.

Still, they managed to work out tradeoffs, and, on June 18, 1979, Carter and Brezhnev signed the treaty. It built on the Vladivostok Accords and went further, addressing at least some of each side’s concerns about the other. But the Joint Chiefs adamantly refused to endorse it—which would doom the treaty in the Senate, where ratification required a two-thirds majority—unless Carter fully funded a new ICBM called the MX missile.

The MX—for Missile Experimental (it would be called, in a Strangelovian touch, the Peacekeeper, when deployed a few years later)—was conceived by the Air Force back in 1971. It would be a land-based ICBM, armed with ten nuclear warheads, each twice as powerful and twice as accurate as the warheads on the Minuteman III—making it powerful and accurate enough to destroy Soviet ICBMs in their blast-hardened underground silos. That was the explicit mission of the MX: to maintain America’s first-strike capability in an era when the Soviets were building more ICBMs.

The Soviets were deploying their own MIRV’ed missiles, matching what the Americans had started fielding five years earlier. And while each Minuteman III carried three warheads, the Soviet models—the SS-17, SS-18, and SS-19—carried between four and ten warheads apiece. Harold Brown’s staff calculated that, by 1983, a mere 308 of these missiles would be able to destroy nearly 90 percent of America’s one thousand Minuteman missiles.

From that calculation, several defense analysts warned that the early 1980s would open a “window of vulnerability”—a time, reminiscent of what some had called a “year of maximum danger” back in the 1950s amid fears of a looming missile gap—when the Soviets might exploit their momentary edge and launch a first strike.

Chief among those sounding the alarms was Paul Nitze, the protégé of Dean Acheson during the Truman administration and one of the more hawkish senior officials under Kennedy and Johnson. Nitze had been the author of the Gaither Report, which popularized the missile gap and introduced the phrase “the year of maximum danger.” A few years earlier, in 1950, he had written NSC-68, the seminal Cold War blueprint that portrayed the Soviet Union as an implacable foe bent on world domination, requiring a massive U.S. military buildup. In 1976, the year before Carter took office, as the Soviets began MIRV’ing, Nitze helped form an organization called the Committee on the Present Danger, which produced articles, pamphlets, and op-ed pieces on what they saw as a growing imbalance of power between the superpowers.

Nitze wrote two highly influential articles around this time, in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, arguing that the SALT II treaty—which was in negotiation—would not block the Soviets from pursuing “a nuclear superiority” that could give them a “war-winning capability.” Nitze laid out a nightmare scenario: the Soviets launch an attack on America’s ICBM silos, using only a fraction of their own missiles to do so; the U.S. is left with only its submarine-launched missiles, which lack the accuracy to hit anything except cities; if the president retaliated with those missiles, the Soviets would launch their remaining missiles against American cities; therefore, the president doesn’t dare retaliate. The title of Nitze’s Foreign Policy piece was “Deterring Our Deterrent.”

This was the mirror image of the scenario that Bill Kaufmann had run in his counterforce briefing and that Carl Kaysen and Harry Rowen had played out in their first-strike plan during the Berlin crisis—except, in those explorations, it was the United States that was seen as launching the first strike, then threatening to follow up with more strikes, to deter the Soviets’ deterrent. Nitze well knew this, having taken part in the internal debates on that briefing and that plan.

But the context of first-strike schemes and threats had changed dramatically in the decade and a half since the original scenarios were hatched. In the Kaysen-Rowen plan of 1961, SAC was seen as having a good chance of disarming the Soviet nuclear arsenal by sending a mere fifty-five bombers to hit eighty-eight targets. For the Soviets to mount the attack that Nitze envisioned in 1976, they would have to launch enough missiles to hit 1,000 American ICBMs. Because they’d have to fire at least two warheads against each missile, to make sure that one hit, this would mean firing 2,000 warheads; and because the ICBMs were in underground, blast-resistant silos, the warheads would have to explode on the ground, not in the air, thus kicking up a lot more radioactive fallout.

Even the fairly pristine American first strike of 1961 would have killed a half-million to a million Russians—more, if some of the bombs went astray. The hope—a dubious one—was that this toll would be low enough for the Kremlin to refrain from seeking revenge by bombing U.S. cities. By contrast, the “collateral damage” of a Soviet first strike, as envisioned by Nitze in 1976, would kill tens of millions of Americans, possibly more than 100 million—and the strike would destroy only the ICBMs, leaving thousands of nuclear weapons on U.S. submarines and whatever bombers had taken off from their runways in time. It was a stretch to assume that a Soviet premier would believe that an American president would simply surrender—would stand down the subs and the bombers and not retaliate at all—after absorbing a death toll unprecedented in human history.

But Nitze’s scenario plumbed still wilder improbabilities. In the Foreign Policy article, he and his coauthor, an engineer at the Boeing Company named T.K. Jones, produced a series of graphs showing that after a Soviet counterforce first strike and an American counterforce second strike, the Soviets would end up with more missiles, warheads, megatonnage, and throw-weight than the United States—and could, therefore, declare victory. The implication was that the American president would—and could—tote up the numbers of weapons left on both sides, see that the U.S. was behind, and accept defeat.

Nitze’s articles scaled new heights of abstraction in strategic thinking, yet they served—and were intended—as ammunition in the election year campaign to brush aside Kissingerian détente and revive Cold War rearmament.

Around the time his articles were published, Jimmy Carter was emerging as the unlikely front-runner in the Democratic primaries. Nitze had hopped aboard his campaign early on, even before his victory in the Iowa caucuses. He sent Carter several of his speeches and articles. When the two first met in Washington, Carter said that he’d read them all as well as several more that Nitze hadn’t sent him. Nitze and his wife each contributed $750, the maximum legal amount, to the Carter campaign. When Carter won the general election in November, Nitze joined the transition team. But then, when Carter took office, Nitze was shut out, offered no job. More demeaning, those who did get plum posts held views diametrically opposed to his. Cyrus Vance, Paul Warnke, Harold Brown—all men whom Nitze had known for years—were doves, skeptics of counterforce, adherents of minimum deterrence, with more sanguine views about Soviet intentions than he felt was responsible. Nitze came to loathe Jimmy Carter. He felt personally betrayed. And so, he fought back.

When Carter submitted SALT II to the Senate for ratification, Nitze billed himself as the star witness for the opposition. The treaty’s advocates portrayed it as a modest but significant achievement: it limited how large Soviet ICBMs could be and how many warheads they could carry; it constrained the size of their nuclear arsenal overall while barring no weapons that the United States was planning to build. But to Nitze, SALT II was a disaster because it left the Soviet missiles with superior megatonnage and throw-weight, creating an imbalance and endangering the Minuteman. Nitze, remarkably energetic at age seventy-two, lambasted the treaty in congressional hearings, speeches, debates, and on TV talk shows.

In private, the Air Force generals didn’t much care that the Minuteman ICBMs might be vulnerable to a first strike; they figured, as did their brethren going back to the days of LeMay, that, if the Soviets did launch an attack, the SAC commander would launch his missiles on warning, before the Soviet warheads landed.^I But many members of Congress were convinced that the numerical imbalances posed an imminent danger. As the MX entered full-scale development, the Senate passed an amendment, refusing to fund the missiles unless they were placed on some sort of mobile platform (the specifics of which could be determined later). So, in public, the generals went along, testifying that they too were concerned about the impending “window of vulnerability,” and even pretended that the vulnerability of America’s ICBMs—not their own desire to keep Soviet ICBMs vulnerable—was the rationale for the MX.

The White House pretended too. In response to letters from several lawmakers, scholars, and arms control advocates, protesting that the MX would destabilize the nuclear balance, Brzezinski replied, “I do not share your conclusions,” adding, “The MX will not give us a first strike capability nor is that our strategy.” He wrote this, even as the authors of a major Pentagon review of nuclear targeting plans, which Brzezinski was closely following, wrote, “We don’t have prompt hard-target-kill capability”—the vernacular for an ability to destroy blast-hardened targets, such as Soviet ICBM silos, with the speed of a ballistic missile—“but MX and Trident II will give it to us.” (The Trident II was a new submarine-launched missile, about to be deployed, which also had the explosive power and accuracy to destroy hardened targets; the Navy too was now shifting to a counterforce strategy.)

Carter despised the whole charade. In his diary, he described the MX as “nauseating” and a “gross waste of money.” Harold Brown noted in a memo that the vulnerability of the ICBMs was “not synonymous with the vulnerability of the United States” nor with the loss of our ability to deter a nuclear attack. But, he added, it did create a problem “in the perception of the military balance.”

From the outset of his term, Carter had relied on a crew of national security advisers who rarely agreed, and often clashed, with one another. Sometimes he went with one faction, sometimes with the other; sometimes he’d play one side off the other and split the difference. Les Gelb, the State Department’s assistant secretary for politico-military affairs, worried that this time Carter would side with Cy Vance, his boss, in favor of SALT II and against the MX missile, skirting the plain fact that he needed the latter to get the former. Gelb wasn’t keen on the MX either, but he understood that it was necessary to pass SALT II, which he considered vital to the peace. Gelb was friendly with Lieutenant General Willie Y. Smith, assistant to General David Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He and Smith put together a meeting—the two of them, along with Vance and Jones—to hammer out a deal: the Chiefs would support SALT II, and the State Department would support the MX. They knew that Carter wouldn’t overrule both State and the JCS. And, in fact, he did wind up approving the missile as the price for the arms control treaty.

Then on Christmas Eve 1979, Soviet paratroopers landed in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, on the USSR’s southern border, followed in the coming days by a full-blown invasion. President Carter denounced it as “the greatest threat to world peace since World War II.” In a New Year’s Eve interview on ABC News, he admitted, “My opinion of the Russians has changed more drastically in the last week” than in his entire time as president. Across Washington, and much of the world, détente was declared dead. Carter canceled wheat sales to Russia, barred U.S. athletes from competing in the Olympics (which were about to take place in Moscow), and—in what he later described as “the worst disappointment to me personally”—withdrew SALT II from the Senate’s ratification process (though both countries would continue to abide by the treaty’s terms).

In the intramural clashes of the national security bureaucracy, Brzezinski, the hard-line Russophobe, felt triumphant. He seized the moment to renew his campaign to revise the nuclear war plan.

Senior and midlevel White House and Pentagon officials had been working on the war plan all along. Back in September 1977, Walter Slocombe, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, wrote a memo, on behalf of Harold Brown, calling for a Nuclear Targeting Policy Review (later abbreviated as the NTPR), including an assessment of the need for a hard-target-kill capability.

Slocombe, who’d been immersed in nuclear issues since the start of the Nixon administration, when he was a twenty-seven-year-old NSC staffer, ran the review along with Andrew Marshall, a former RAND strategist dating back to the 1950s, who’d come to the Pentagon when Jim Schlesinger was defense secretary. Schlesinger created a job specifically for him—the director of net assessment, a job that, with his mastery of bureaucratic politics, Marshall would hold through eight presidents, until 2015, when he retired at the age of ninety-three.

The NTPR was Brzezinski’s initiative. His predecessors, dating back to John Kennedy’s time, had all concluded that the president needed more options and flexibility than the nuclear war plan offered, but they’d barely nudged SAC in that direction. The problem, Brzezinski thought, was a failure to think through the issues strategically. The key question, he told Slocombe, was what did the Soviet leaders most value—what assets or capabilities would they dread losing most? Threaten those assets, and that would deter them more than threatening to burn their cities and military garrisons. The Nixon-Kissinger-Schlesinger doctrine, NSDM-242, which grew out of the Foster Panel and RAND’s NU-OPTS study, had asked a similar question, but Brzezinski didn’t buy their answer. Slowing down the Soviet Union’s recovery as an economic and military power may have seemed well grounded, but on scrutiny, it didn’t mean much: SAC’s officers didn’t know how to translate the goal into a set of targets that were any different from the targets they’d hit if their orders were simply to blow up factories and cities; it was, in effect, massive retaliation under a fancier name.

Slocombe and Marshall commissioned a RAND analyst named Leon Sloss to write a paper outlining different goals. His conclusion seemed conceptually elegant: to deter the Soviet leaders, he suggested threatening not just their tools of military power—their nuclear arsenal, command centers, and so forth—but also the leaders themselves and the things they personally cherished. But this raised a slew of other questions. If the whole idea was to launch a limited strike that had a chance of ending the war early, with minimal destructiveness, wouldn’t you want the Soviet leaders to survive, so that they could negotiate a cease-fire and make sure their subordinates obeyed it? The dilemmas were discussed at length, inside the Pentagon and at interagency meetings in the White House. Sloss, Slocombe, and others finessed the issue by proposing an option that would let the president withhold attacks on senior political and military leaders, if he wanted.

They also put some flesh on Schlesinger’s concept of “limited nuclear options,” to give the options political purpose. For instance, it was becoming obvious that the Kremlin’s leaders feared rebellion from the ethnic nationalities in some of the Soviet republics; so they proposed an option to attack the political centers that controlled those republics. Tensions were also building between Moscow and Beijing; so another option called for launching some nuclear missiles at Soviet military garrisons on the USSR’s eastern border, leaving a huge swath of territory open to incursions by China. Other limited options were studied: for example, the possibility that the Soviets might be sufficiently deterred by threats to destroy a key handful of oil refineries or the transmission centers of their electrical power grids.

Finally, there was a new technical feature to consider. Thanks to digital transmissions, which had replaced parachuted photo packets, the images from spy satellites could now be viewed in real time. This raised the possibility of attacking targets on the move—for instance, Soviet armored battalions as they invaded Western Europe. The idea of fighting a war with nuclear weapons—of erasing the distinction between nuclear and conventional warfare—took on an air of plausibility.

Brzezinski’s military assistant, an Army colonel named William Odom, was particularly intrigued, even obsessed, with this idea. Odom was a longtime intelligence officer, with a specialty in Soviet affairs, who had earned a PhD from Columbia, where he’d studied under Brzezinski and formed an intellectual bond with the man who would later be his boss, both of them deeply hostile to Communism and suspicious of détente. Even more than Brzezinski, Odom found SAC’s war plan, with its premium on destroying Russian cities, not only horrifying but puzzling. If the Soviets invaded Western Europe, a better use of nuclear weapons, Odom argued, would be to deal with the direct threat—to destroy the Red Army on the battlefield—and this new digital technology presented a chance to do that. Odom took part in the Nuclear Targeting Policy Review with an intense verve. One of his ideas was to scuttle the SIOP, with its rigid preplanned attack options, and to turn SAC into an improvising organization, adapting to scenarios as they developed in a real battle, in real time, and using nuclear weapons in the same way that the Army used artillery or the Air Force amassed tactical fighters for air support of troops on the ground.

Odom’s ideas attracted interest but no following. Other military officers, especially those with SAC experience, explained that nuclear planning was a complex business: bomber runs had to be carefully timed, an attack’s expected damage and collateral damage couldn’t be calculated so easily, missiles couldn’t be retargeted on a moment’s notice—the process took days (a few years earlier, it had taken weeks). Then there was the strategic question: Where did deterrence enter into Odom’s picture? Was it such a good idea to turn the nuclear bomb—the ultimate weapon—into a mere tactical adjunct of a conventional defense? Even those who endorsed a shift away from a pure deterrence policy thought Odom was going too far.

On April 4, 1979, Brzezinski convened a meeting of senior officials to discuss the NTPR. Brown outlined the conclusions of Leon Sloss’s study: its focus on hitting leadership targets and mobile tank columns on the battlefield; some of the ideas for limited nuclear options, such as disrupting Soviet troops on the Chinese border; and, another new element, the idea of “endurance” as a strategic goal—nuclear forces (and especially command-control networks) that could survive and continue functioning through days, even weeks, of back-and-forth attacks.

At the same time, Brown made clear that he didn’t quite believe any of this. He had traveled some distance from his view, when he first joined the Carter administration, that deterrence was the sole purpose of nuclear weapons; he now accepted the need for limited options and controlled escalation, in case deterrence failed. But, he said, he still thought that, if there were a nuclear war, it would probably escalate to all-out war very quickly.

Brzezinski disagreed, saying that the most important aspect of the new policy was its shift from a policy of “spasm war.” Brown conceded the point, but added that spasm war was the most likely possibility, given the unlikely possibility of nuclear war in the first place. Brzezinski replied that spasm war was more likely to happen if that was the only option we had.

At this point, Stansfield Turner, the CIA director, interjected to ask the officials around the table a fundamental question: What did they think deterred the Soviets the most?

Brzezinski replied, “Threats to the population.” Vance agreed. In context, it was an extraordinary response: the senior national security officials were discussing nuclear war in a baroquely intricate fashion, parsing which limited options would most dampen the Soviet leaders’ incentive to go to war—yet, pressed on the matter, the most insistent advocate of these options acknowledged that the most potent dampener was the most basic: an all-out attack on their largest cities.

More than a year passed before the Pentagon and the NSC pieced together a new presidential directive on nuclear targeting—which became known as PD-59—and the Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy that spelled out its principles in greater detail. Both documents incorporated most of the ideas in the Nuclear Targeting Policy Review from nearly two years earlier: the emphasis on hitting targets important to the Soviet leaders, an enduring nuclear warfighting capability, more tailored nuclear options. But Brown managed to weave in some of his own skepticism. There was no talk of “winning” or even “prevailing” in a nuclear war, as in similar documents of the past. Instead, he wrote, the best outcome was to “terminate the war on acceptable terms that are as favorable as practical.” And the main goal was to make the likelihood of nuclear war “even more remote” by remaining capable, in all scenarios, of fighting successfully so that the adversary would perceive that, if he engaged in “military adventurism,” he could not achieve his objectives and would suffer “unacceptable” losses.

Still, the contradictions between deterrence and warfighting remained unresolved: such phrases as “acceptable terms” and “as favorable as practical” remained undefined; and the officers at SAC and the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff were at a loss for how to translate such concepts as “leadership targets” and “endurance” into actual procedures and attack plans.

By this time, President Carter’s interest in nuclear strategy had dwindled, his attention subsumed by the more pressing matters of a hostage crisis in Iran, a covert war in Afghanistan, and a campaign to win a second term in the White House—all of which were going badly. He didn’t even attend the final NSC meeting on PD-59, settling instead for a debriefing by Brzezinski. Still, on July 25, he signed the directive, satisfied that, if a nuclear war ever happened, the resulting new plan would lay more weapons down on Soviet military targets and fewer on Soviet cities.

There was one exception, though no one outside Strategic Air Command headquarters, in Omaha, knew it at the time. By the end of Carter’s presidency, SAC controlled nearly 11,000 strategic nuclear warheads and bombs. The war planners in the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, also at SAC headquarters, were always seeking more weapons to hit targets—and more targets to justify weapons. PD-59 had called for hitting “leadership” targets; in response, JSTPS revised the SIOP so that hundreds of nuclear weapons were aimed at the headquarters of every government ministry—even the homes and vacation dachas of every government minister—not just on the national level but in every oblast throughout the Soviet Union. Although these weapons would not be aimed at “population per se” (a phrase often invoked in nuclear-targeting documents), those targets were in or near large towns or cities, and so many more hundreds of thousands of people would be killed.

Even here, in this unintended consequence of an attempt to reduce the ravages of nuclear war, Jimmy Carter’s dreams were thwarted.

I. By this time, LeMay’s influence, even within Air Force circles, had otherwise diminished. He retired from the military in 1965, campaigned as the running mate of segregationist candidate George Wallace in the 1968 presidential election, and, at one rally, promised to bomb North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.” LeMay died in 1990 at the age of eighty-three.