The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II

The Second World War ineluctably altered the position of the United States in the world. At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States was still a careful and often reluctant player in international politics; by 1945 the Americans had taken a major role in the defeat of Germany, had brought Japan to its knees, and had developed the most daunting military arsenal the world had ever seen. The preeminent symbol of America’s new role was the long-range bomber coupled with the atomic bomb. This pairing, which enabled monstrous destructive power to be delivered anywhere on the globe, was the nucleus of what would become the American postwar strategic force—poised to deter aggression or, in case of war, to inflict prompt and massive damage upon vital enemy assets. This essay will examine the evolution of that force over time, and the assumptions, influences, and bureaucratic dynamics shaping it.

The phrase “strategic forces” has not always been defined consistently and, especially since the end of the Cold War, has been the subject of debate. But perhaps the best way to bring clarity to the category is to place it in the context of Thomas Schelling’s pioneering analysis of the use of force, and define it as “coercive force” that can be applied directly and promptly over long distances.¹ In other words, strategic forces offer their owners the power to hold at risk—from standoff distances—highly valued enemy assets. In the era predating heavier-than-air flight, powerful navies could sometimes attain this kind of coercive power through blockade (or the threat of blockade). The advent of long-range aircraft, however, created a new class of weapon that held the promise of threatening, directly and immediately, an enemy’s most dearly held and important assets.

During the First World War, air power advocates touted the possibilities inherent in the “strategic bombing” of enemy “vital centers” (Americans at first called it “strategical bombing”) in order to inflict direct pain on an enemy and induce his surrender via the threat of further pain.² The phrase “vital centers” was principally a euphemism for “cities,” since modern conurbations held the valuable populations, factories, and communications/transport nets of industrial societies. In the Second World War the Anglo-Americans in particular utilized large strategic bombing fleets to batter enemy assets in an effort to induce the Germans and the Japanese to surrender.

After World War II, American strategic forces became synonymous with nuclear forces. Facing a daunting Soviet army that appeared to threaten Western Europe, and a growing Soviet arsenal that soon contained nuclear weapons, American decisionmakers countered by holding Soviet assets hostage to American nuclear forces. As the Soviets developed their own nuclear arsenal, the Americans had to respond in terms of targeting and doctrine. But even purely counterforce nuclear weapons (those aimed at Soviet nuclear weapons) were designed to ensure that the United States could continue to offer a credible, direct coercive threat to the Soviet enemy. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, American strategic forces were no longer associated principally with nuclear weapons. But there was—and is—no need to change the label, since the definitional underpinning remains: present-day strategic forces are those with the ability to threaten highly valued enemy assets, and to do so promptly, directly, and from long range. Indeed, United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM), the post–Cold War successor to Strategic Air Command (SAC), has been invested with the responsibility for developing and overseeing a Global Strike Plan, including both nuclear and non-nuclear assets, “to deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic [nuclear and conventional] and non-kinetic [elements of space and information operations] effects in support of theater and national objectives.”³

The nature of the predominant threat to American interests has, of course, been the principal factor determining the shape of American strategic forces. From the end of the Second World War through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that threat was perceived to be the Soviet Union and its communist ideology. The U.S.-Soviet rivalry became the focal point of American grand strategy, and the catalyst for the expansion and consolidation of American military might. Once that expansion commenced, it took on its own dynamic and was driven by domestic influences as well as external ones. The size and structure of American strategic forces was, and continues to be, influenced by prevailing ideas about the employment of military force, the development of science and technology, economic considerations, institutional preferences, bureaucratic momentum and conservatism, and interservice rivalries. These various elements have combined in different ways over time, but they have always been operative in setting parameters and shaping outcomes.

For American statesmen, a deep-seated desire to find stability and rationality in the American relationship with the Soviet Union was paralleled by an equally deep-seated mistrust of the closed, autocratic, “Godless” system of governance that took hold behind the Iron Curtain. This mistrust of the intentions of Soviet leaders, coupled with nagging anxiety about whether the Soviets might steal a march on the United States and gain an exploitable advantage in weaponry, was as much a driver in the Cold War arms competition as the actual size, shape, and nature of Soviet forces.

Over time, the U.S.-Soviet competition in strategic arms gained momentum and took on a life of its own, developing its own language and grammar, and its own self-sustaining elements. As time passed, this competition had less to do with the weapons themselves than with the larger political context around them. In other words, the weapons became a primary medium through which a grand narrative of intense political competition was played out. But this led to paradox and irony. If the internal logic of nuclear deterrence theory remained operative—if it remained the paradigm within which defense analysts and planners functioned—its connection to actual warfighting scenarios (and their political underpinnings) grew more tenuous over time, and ultimately became quite strained.⁴ The more powerful and deadly the weapons became, the less useful they became, as weapons of war, to those who might have been inclined to use them. Yet the cost of developing, fielding, and updating this arsenal counted to mount and reached breathtaking heights. Between 1940 and 1996, the U.S. alone spent an estimated $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and their related delivery systems.⁵

In the United States, concerted efforts were made to provide for “limited strike” scenarios that would preserve options for the president in the event of a crisis, but these efforts were only partly successful at best. And, all through the Cold War, critics of nuclear policy understood not only the disconnect between rhetoric and reality, but also the crisis instability inherent in the structure of the nuclear arsenal. Fears of another 1914—the miscommunication, the reflexive mobilization, and the descent into disaster—weighed heavily on many minds. But none of this, however sobering, could rein in a competition that had gained so much momentum as to be unstoppable.

As the weapons lost value as weapons, per se, they continued to have value as symbols: of prestige, of technological prowess, of national power and identity. They implied “greatness” and thereby reinforced an identity of greatness for populations on both sides of the U.S.–Soviet divide. They reassured allies (even as they sometimes unnerved them), and they influenced domestic politics as the size of one’s arsenal was read as evidence of “being ahead” or “falling behind.” The overall political influence that was achieved by the possession of a vast nuclear arsenal is difficult to measure, but neither the existence of that arsenal nor the use of modern strategic bombers in non-nuclear roles prevented the United States from enduring a long and unpopular war in Korea in the 1950s, or from suffering a humiliating withdrawal, in 1975, from a war in Vietnam in which it had been directly involved for more than a decade.

From the earliest days of long range bombing, its advocates were inclined to assert or imply that it would be capable of winning wars on its own. But as recent history has shown, modern warfare is an immensely complex endeavor, and no single instrument of power on its own—either military or nonmilitary—is as effective in bringing about resolution as is an intelligent combination of several military and nonmilitary instruments. The “precision era” of strategic weaponry, which had its initial test during the 1991 Gulf War, renewed hopes that long range strike might become an omnipotent tool in war. Surely, conventional precision strike is proving to be infinitely more usable than nuclear weapons ever were, but the early returns—from the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq—introduce problems and complications into the idea that even an updated, high-tech form of strategic air power can be an independent war winner. It is too soon to say that the argument has been settled, though, and the more strident advocates of strategic air power surely will continue to work hard to prove their case, even as the U.S. Air Force continues to adjust to the joint warfighting environment facilitated by the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act.

Though we will never know if nuclear weapons were responsible for putting a boundary around the U.S.–Soviet antagonism, we must acknowledge that the United States and the Soviet Union never fought one another directly during the long years of the Cold War. As instruments of deterrence, U.S. nuclear systems had value. But this came at a cost, not only in terms of opportunities forgone but also in terms of domestic and international anxiety. Managing the U.S.–Soviet nuclear relationship was never easy, and at times—especially in moments of crisis—the beast seemed dangerously liable to escape its cage.

The sudden unraveling of the Soviet empire, commencing in 1989, necessitated a rethinking of the purpose, nature, and shape of American strategic forces. That process of rethinking and restructuring was only partially underway when a new, aggressive threat to American security emerged in the form of al-Qaeda–sponsored terrorism—terrorism animated by an opposition to modern Western ideals and American global influence. As this essay is being written, the work of transforming American grand strategy and strategic forces to meet this new threat is still in its early stages. Like the policymakers who struggled to understand the real nature of the Soviet threat in the immediate postwar years, American decisionmakers today are struggling to comprehend an enemy that is—in its motives and methods—alien and confounding. But understanding the enemy is the essential foundation of strategy, and is thus central to the shaping of future strategic forces.

By the time the United Nations conference convened in April 1945, the United States was already in the midst of a brewing conflict with the Soviet Union. The Soviets had been wary allies of the Anglo-Americans: while the urgent threat of fascism had pushed Stalin into a marriage with the world’s leading capitalists, there were few shared interests to hold the relationship together once the crisis had passed.

During the war, American military planners had identified their Soviet ally as the next likely threat to American security, but, in 1945–1946, hope still existed for a reasonable U.S.–Soviet relationship, and for a functioning, effective United Nations.⁶ As the war in the Far East drew to a close, Americans at home longed for nothing so much as the return of troops still overseas, and the restoration of a normal, peacetime economy. Concerned about the stability of that economy, President Harry S Truman cut the defense budget radically. From a high of $81.6 billion in 1945, U.S. defense spending declined to $44.7 billion in 1946, and to $13.1 billion in 1947.⁷ The demobilization reflected domestic political pressures and echoed past practice in a nation that still had large moats guarding its flanks. And the drastic paring back of the defense budget bespoke fears of recession in a nation whose memories were, understandably, still fixed on the recent experience of searing economic depression.

But these drastic cuts unnerved a military establishment that saw an ever-expanding array of international responsibilities falling into U.S. hands, especially as the British withdrew from a leading role in international affairs. The vast gap between funds and obligations led to fierce fights among the service chiefs for military resources. Debates over the size and strength of the military continued through the early interwar years, and events such as the crises in Greece and Turkey, the Czech coup, and the Soviet blockade of Berlin gave them added urgency. This clear evidence of a troubled and ever-deteriorating relationship with the Soviet Union placed an unusual focus on the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Although the Soviets had maintained a large postwar Soviet army (much of it for occupation duty), which was worrisome to postwar planners who assumed it might readily be redirected toward Western Europe, American strategists banked on the idea that this standing force might be offset to some degree by the existence of the U.S. atomic arsenal.⁸

Prior to 1948, however, that arsenal was small. The production of atomic weapons was extremely laborious and resource-intensive, and the meager output of such bombs was held as the nation’s most closely guarded secret. In fact, the U.S. had only two atomic weapons in its stockpile at the end of 1945, nine in July 1946, thirteen in July 1947, and fifty in July 1948. These were bulky, 10,000 pound implosion bombs that were inefficient to deploy since they took thirty-nine men more than two days to assemble. They required a special pit and hoist for loading into aircraft that had been specially modified to carry them. Through 1948 the number of such modified craft was merely thirty—all based at Roswell Air Force Base in New Mexico.⁹

In a nation that was unwilling for political and economic reasons to maintain a large standing army, the strategic air force took on particular significance: it offered a way to trade American technological prowess for manpower. The idea of influencing events and fighting wars from the air was immensely appealing to a nation that had no armies on its borders and had great bodies of water to its east and west. To many Americans, air power seemed to offer a more efficient and effective way to fight (or deter) a war than the slower, more cumbersome (and more bloody) style of ground armies. And air forces seemed to come with few of the political risks and economic costs associated with large standing forces. All of this worked to the advantage of the U.S. Air Force, created in 1947, as it fought for influence—and for scarce dollars—in the late 1940s.

Strategic thinkers wasted no time in exploring and explaining the ways that both military planning and the use of force would be affected and indeed permanently changed by the advent of atomic weapons and long-range bombers. Bernard Brodie, an analyst at the newly born RAND Corporation, was one of the first to articulate the larger meaning of what he termed the “absolute weapon.” The primary purpose of military forces would no longer be to win wars, Brodie argued, but rather to deter them. The old principles would have to be rethought and recast into a doctrine of nuclear deterrence.¹⁰ But deterrence had to rest upon a credible threat of use. And forces had to be structured, as well, to accommodate the possibility that deterrence might fail. The military services knew well that the baton would be passed to them if the work of the diplomats and politicians came to naught, or if the enemy struck without warning. The lessons of the failed appeasement and tardy rearmament policies of the interwar years had not been lost on the leaders of the postwar world. All this meant that crucial decisions were required about the future structure, organization, and equipping of the American armed forces.

The new technologies of the twentieth century, and the additional ones on the horizon, caused heated competition for primacy with regard to the “roles and missions” of postwar armed services. Compromises were hard to reach, and nerves were easily frayed. Air Force leaders believed that they had established a firm hold on the strategic bombing role during World War II, and they had no desire to give it up or share it. After the test explosions of atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll in 1946, naval engineers concluded that they would need to construct new “flush deck” aircraft carriers that would minimize damage from the high winds of an atomic blast. The first flush deck was to be in a class by itself: a “supercarrier” bigger than any ship afloat, with the ability to launch aircraft weighing up to 100,000 pounds.¹¹ To the young Air Force, this looked like a potential encroachment into its own realm of responsibility. And, indeed, the Navy’s most aggressive spokesman on the issue, Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery, wanted to prove that the Navy could become “the principal offensive branch of the national defense system, the one that will actually deliver the knock-out blows.”¹² In the end the Navy did not manage to wrest the strategic bombing role from the Air Force, but if the Air Force remained the premier nuclear service during the early Cold War years, the Navy retained access to nuclear weapons for missions of special importance to sea warfare—and these missions would grow in the coming years.

In the nuclear age the Air Force rose quickly from a subordinate branch of the Army to the focal point of the American defense posture. Like the other services, it suffered from the rapid demobilization and decommissioning of equipment after 1945, but it began its climb to prominence in 1948 when the Berlin airlift brought it attention, and when, later that year, General Curtis LeMay took over the leadership of Strategic Air Command (SAC), the long-range bomber arm of the Air Force and home of the American nuclear deterrent. LeMay, who had been a prominent World War II field commander and then had overseen the Berlin airlift, transformed SAC from its desultory “hollow force” posture of the early postwar years into a highly capable organization with outstanding operational readiness.¹³

The notable prominence of SAC in the years after 1948 was suggestive of how Americans expected future wars to be conducted: they wanted their wars fought efficiently—exploiting American technological strength—and at a distance. As historian Lawrence Freedman has noted: “The requirements for effective punishment of an aggressor also pointed to an unambiguous and certain sanction capable of disabling any offender, inflicted with ease and at minimal cost to the forces of law and order. For both of these purposes airpower, combined with the added strength of atomic weapons, seemed eminently suitable.”¹⁴ As LeMay developed the capability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent, academic strategic thinkers, including Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, and Thomas Schelling, continued to work out the foundations of a full theory of nuclear deterrence and nuclear warfighting.¹⁵

By the autumn of 1947 nuclear planning had started in earnest; about a hundred urban centers in the Soviet Union were identified by military planners as potentially viable targets. Had air crews been asked to implement these early plans, however, they would have faced a host of difficulties. Intelligence was poor and maps of the vast Soviet territory were out of date. Crews would have had to fly into Soviet territory under cover of darkness and bad weather; they would have lacked weather data and would have faced featureless stretches of snow-covered tundra. Cities were the only targets that air crews would have had any hope of finding and striking.¹⁶ In 1949 an ad hoc committee headed by Air Force Lieutenant General H. R. Harmon reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that even if all the bombs in the plan detonated on their aim points, it would not destroy the roots of communism, weaken Soviet leadership, or seriously impair the ability of the Soviet Union to take “selected areas” of Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East. Nonetheless, the Harmon Committee concluded that since this was the only available way of “inflicting shock and serious damage to vital elements of the Soviet war making capacity … the utility of its early use would be transcending.”¹⁷ LeMay understood what he was up against, and he sought to find every possible way to improve the readiness of his force, the intelligence element of war-planning, and, generally, the odds for his bomber crews.¹⁸ If his SAC force was first and foremost to be a deterrent, it had to be a credible one. And it had to be an operational force in the event of war.

Deep budget cuts and the heavy emphasis placed on nuclear weapons assured that when the Soviet Union exploded its own nuclear device in the late summer of 1949, the event would be viewed by Americans as a particularly pressing crisis. So long as the Americans had been able to hold a rough balance between their own nuclear arsenal and the large Soviet army, there was some hope for uneasy accommodation in Europe. But the Soviet A-bomb seemed to endanger not only that tenuous balance of power, but also American territorial integrity and homeland security. In the summer of 1950 the Joint Chiefs would add a new, first priority target set to its planning: “the destruction of known targets affecting the Soviet capability to deliver atomic bombs.”¹⁹

The Soviet bomb, which made its appearance sooner than most Americans had anticipated, came in the wake of high tensions over Berlin and the failure of a final political settlement for Germany. It was followed, in short order, by the fall of the Chiang Kai-shek government in China, and the ascendance of Mao’s communists. In the United States, this succession of deeply unsettling events led not only to domestic instability in the form of McCarthyism, but also to the creation of an extraordinary document—National Security Council paper number 68—which would set the terms of American participation in the ever colder Cold War.

The tone of NSC 68 was grave. State Department planner Paul Nitze, the document’s principal author, argued that the United States was in the midst of an unavoidable and profoundly consequential struggle against an implacable, omnivorous foe. The opening section, titled “Background of the Present Crisis,” noted ominously, “The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself. They are issues which will not await our deliberations. With conscience and resolution this Government and the people it represents must now take new and fateful decisions.”²⁰

The solution proposed in NSC 68 was a major expansion of American strength, in terms not only of nuclear weapons, but of conventional weapons as well. In his summary, Nitze wrote: “we must, by means of a rapid and sustained build-up of the political, economic, and military strength of the free world, and by means of an affirmative program intended to wrest the initiative from the Soviet Union, confront it with convincing evidence of the determination and ability of the free world to frustrate the Kremlin design of a world dominated by its will.” He added: “Such evidence is the only means short of war which eventually may force the Kremlin to abandon its present course of action and to negotiate acceptable agreements on issues of major importance.”²¹ Interpreting the famous document, historian Marc Trachtenberg has explained: “The policy of NSC 68 was, in its own terms, a “policy of calculated and gradual coercion”; the aim was “to check and to roll back the Kremlin’s drive for world domination.” To support such a policy, it was important to go beyond merely balancing Soviet power and build up “clearly superior overall power in its most inclusive sense.”²²

The Korean War, which began in June 1950, seemed to confirm American fears of Soviet influence around the globe, as well as the picture NSC 68 had painted of an aggressive Soviet foe. At the outset of the war, SAC bombers were moved overseas to reinforce the Far Eastern Air Force (FEAF), under the overall control of General Douglas MacArthur. The commander of SAC’s Fifteenth Air Force, Major General Emmett O’Donnell, requested MacArthur’s permission to firebomb the industrial centers of northern Korea. He thought MacArthur should announce that the communists had forced him, against his wishes, to use “the means which brought Japan to its knees.”²³ This approach reflected traditional air force warfighting concepts, as well the experience of the World War II Army Air Forces in the Far East: fire raids would undermine the enemy’s will and capacity to fight, and waging them immediately would intensify their psychological effect.²⁴

But MacArthur chose not to escalate so dramatically, and O’Donnell chafed under orders that “diverted” his bombers to tactical support of ground troops. In late summer of 1950, bomber missions were expanded to include interdiction strikes, and attacks on North Korean industry. Following the Chinese entry into the war in November, MacArthur permitted attacks on a wide range of targets—including fire raids on North Korean cities—in order to do everything possible to stem the tide of Chinese advance. Incendiary attacks on Pyongyang in early January 1951 burned out 35 percent of the city. Training for atomic missions went forward, but authority for actual use of A-bombs was withheld.²⁵ The wider use of bombers, however, did not translate into discernible progress toward victory, and as time passed American B-29s became increasingly vulnerable to North Korean air defenses.²⁶

Airmen were frustrated by the constraints and politics of the limited war, which kept enemy supply sources outside North Korea (in China and the Soviet Union) permanently off the target lists. After the war LeMay would argue, “We never did hit a strategic target.”²⁷ Though MacArthur’s successor, General Matthew Ridgway, generally restrained the use of bombers, he continued to use them to maintain pressure on Chinese troops. But negotiations made little headway, and in the meantime overworked air crews began to suffer morale problems and high abort rates.²⁸ LeMay’s lament highlighted a development that would occur over and over for airmen: weapons designed for strategic missions would be repeatedly pulled into battlefield use in American wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

In May 1952 Ridgway was replaced by General Mark Clark, who was interested in using aircraft to compel movement in the negotiations. Clark authorized a FEAF-designed “air pressure” campaign designed to destroy military targets so situated as to have a “deleterious effect upon the morale of the civilian population actively engaged in the logistic support of enemy forces.”²⁹ The first targets were the North Korean hydroelectric power plants; FEAF destroyed 90 percent of North Korea’s hydroelectric potential in less than a week. Still, however, negotiations dragged on, with little apparent change in the enemy’s determination to hold out.

The campaign’s last phase was particularly dramatic. In March 1953 FEAF targeters began to study North Korea’s irrigation system. His patience exhausted, Clark told the Joint Chiefs that he was prepared to breach twenty dams, which would flood areas producing approximately 250,000 tons of rice. In the event, the campaign went forward more modestly, with mid-May attacks on three dams situated near railway lines. (Officially, these could be designated “interdiction” attacks against those railway lines—although neither FEAF planners nor the communists perceived them that way.) The raids flooded nearby villages and rice fields. The North Koreans worked vigorously to repair the Toksan dam site in particular. Two more dams were struck in June, and planners anticipated further strikes. These, however, were delayed pending the outcome of armistice negotiations. Those talks resulted, shortly thereafter, in a truce.³⁰

There has been no consensus on the dam raids’ actual impact on the conclusion of the war. If the impact of the raids was hard to specify, however, its effect on Korean civilians was not. In 1954 Brigadier General Don Z. Zimmerman, FEAF Deputy for Intelligence, argued, “The degree of destruction suffered by North Korea, in relation to its resources, was greater than that which the Japanese islands suffered in World War II.” He believed that “these pressures brought the enemy to terms.”³¹ But the events bearing on North Korea’s eventual acceptance of armistice terms have been debated at length by historians and political scientists. Many have been inclined—both at the time and afterward—to interpret President Dwight Eisenhower’s implied nuclear threat to North Korea as the key to war termination. But other historians have argued that the impact of the threat has been exaggerated, and that it was more likely the death of Stalin in March 1953 that ultimately cleared the way for an accommodation between the North Koreans, the Chinese, and the United Nations.³²

USAF planners wished to put the experience of the Korean War, which they viewed as an aberration, behind them. FEAF’s 1954 final Report on the Korean War argued that the Korean conflict contained so many unusual factors as to make it a poor model for planning. In particular, the USAF wished to distance itself from the close air support operations that had been a main a feature of the war. The report stated: “Because FEAF provided UN ground forces lavish close air support in Korea is no reason to assume this condition will exist in future wars.”³³

The Korean War had served to make manifest many of the recommendations called for in NSC 68. This meant not only a build-up of American military forces across the board, but an institutionalization of them—including a formalization of the bureaucracy for running them.³⁴ At the same time, the American nuclear arsenal continued to develop in important ways. After President Truman had concluded, finally, that the prospects for the international control of nuclear weapons (embodied in the failed Baruch Plan) were negligible at best, he decided that the alternative lay in a strong nuclear arsenal. By the autumn of 1949 he had approved a first round of significant increases in the size of the arsenal; a year later, in the early stages of the Korean War, he approved a second increase. In January 1952 Truman approved yet another increase, “amounting to a 50 percent increase in plutonium production and 150% in uranium 235.”³⁵

Prior to the war, and in response to the Soviet test of an atomic bomb, Truman had ordered work to proceed on a potentially much more powerful “hydrogen” bomb. This decision was made despite the protests of some prominent scientists, including Robert Oppenheimer, the principal architect of the first atomic bomb. But Truman felt that since he could not prevent the Soviets from going ahead on such a project, he had to ensure that the United States would keep pace. The Americans exploded their first hydrogen device in the Pacific in 1952.

Hydrogen bombs introduced a revolutionary change into the U.S. weapons arsenal, since “fusion” allowed for the creation of far larger bombs than did the “fission” principle of plutonium and uranium weapons. What Oppenheimer considered a dangerous and unnecessary ramp-up in the early nuclear arms race, Truman found politically necessary. Even if it was difficult to conceive of political stakes that would justify the use of such massive and destructive bombs, Truman felt he could not afford to place the United States in the psychologically disadvantageous position of not having them if the Soviets did. The logic and internal dynamics of nuclear deterrence thus began to take on their own momentum—a momentum that would be increasingly at odds with objective, Clausewitzian analyses of interests and stakes in war.³⁶

Not wishing to be left out of the nuclear revolution, the U.S. Army devoted considerable effort and funding to guided missile research and atomic energy programs; in particular, the Army was interested in tactical surface-to-surface missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons.³⁷ Indeed, there was no small amount of competition between the services over who would own ballistic missile programs. While the Navy poured its attention and resources into the Polaris submarine project, the Army focused on a liquid-propelled intermediate range missile called the Jupiter. Because of the constant and sometimes heated arguments between the Army and Air Force over ballistic missile ownership, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson would impose, in 1956, a range limit of 200 miles on future Army-based missile systems.³⁸

Critiquing the Truman Administration’s willingness to open the floodgates by late 1950, Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis has observed: “There was in the administration very much a sense of direction without destination—of marching forthrightly forward into unknown areas, without any clear sense of what the ultimate objective was, how long it would take to achieve it, or what it would cost.”³⁹ Dwight D. Eisenhower would bring a different mindset to the creation of U.S. national security policy, and the structuring of national military forces.

Eisenhower had been deeply displeased by the radical swings—from severe austerity to overindulgence—in the Truman Administration’s defense budgets, and he was determined that, during his tenure, national security would be placed on a more predictable and consistent foundation. Eisenhower’s key concern was that the nation might divert so much of its economic might and attention to defense as to turn itself into a “garrison state”; ultimately this would corrode and undermine the very wellspring of American robustness and success. To avoid this outcome, Eisenhower opted for a “New Look” in defense: a policy that would place heavy reliance on a combination of nuclear strength, strong intelligence, and covert operations against American enemies.⁴⁰

Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, articulated the nature of the new defense posture in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in 1954. He argued that the best way to deter aggression was to “depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate instantly by means and at places of our own choosing.”⁴¹ The press began to refer to the Eisenhower policy as one of “Massive Retaliation.” This was the administration’s means of coping with a serious threat while watching the fiscal bottom line—the latter being a task that Eisenhower believed his predecessor had signally failed to do.

In the early 1950s the Soviet threat was considered so dangerous that the administration, the Joint Chiefs, and the Air Force all examined—on several occasions—the possibility of waging preventive war against the Soviets.⁴² The weighty concern underlying such deliberations was the fear that the Soviets would, as soon as it was feasible, attack the United States with nuclear arms. And this fear was itself derived from the ideological rhetoric of the Soviet Union, which preached that the dynamics of class conflict would force a battle between communism and capitalism—a battle that was inevitable and unavoidable. In the end, though, the Eisenhower Administration rejected all preventive war options. It did not, however, rule out preemptive attack against the Soviets. Indeed, NSC 68 had condoned preemption, arguing that it was the only feasible way of reliably deterring nuclear war or fighting it in such a way as to preserve—to the greatest extent possible—American territory and the American people. A March 1955 National Security Council report would offer a list of indicators that were to be interpreted as specific evidence that a Soviet attack on the United States was “certain or imminent.” President Eisenhower repeatedly made clear that Russia must not be allowed to strike the first blow.⁴³

Technological prowess would allow for a reduction of expensive manpower-oriented defenses. Eisenhower’s predilection stemmed from an instinctive fiscal conservatism, and a faith in his own abilities as military commander and political leader. The Eisenhower defense budgets remained steady at about 9 percent of GNP throughout the president’s two terms, much of the funding going to the Air Force—and SAC in particular.⁴⁴ As political scientist and defense analyst Scott Sagan has pointed out, “SAC’s capability to strike rapidly—preempting Soviet nuclear attacks against the United States and Western Europe—was absolutely critical” to the successful implementation of the 1955 nuclear war plan.⁴⁵

After Korea, Air Force leaders were anxious to reassert their priority: preparing for strategic air war against the USSR. The funding allotted to the services as a result of the Korean War had greatly increased SAC’s size and strength; now, more than ever, SAC’s mission reigned supreme in the USAF. General LeMay was appointed Vice Chief of Staff in 1957 and Chief of Staff in 1961; in 1964 three-quarters of the Air Staff ’s upper echelon came from SAC. Between 1954 and 1962 the United States’ total nuclear arsenal underwent phenomenal growth, from 1,750 to 26,500 weapons. SAC, which controlled the majority of them, planned to deliver them in a “massive pre-emptive bomber assault.” Other contingencies received little attention. Despite the political upheaval in Southeast Asia in the 1950s, the Air University Quarterly Review published (in the whole of the decade) only two articles relating air power to insurgency movements there.⁴⁶

Especially because many planners feared, initially, that the aggression in Korea in 1950 might be a feint or a prelude to a Soviet move in Europe, the Korean War had the effect of galvanizing and institutionalizing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Eisenhower administration also expanded the number of nuclear weapons available to NATO commanders: between 1952 and 1958 that number grew from 80 to more than 3,500. In 1956, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson directed that the Joint Chiefs should plan that, “in a general war, regardless of the manner of initiation, atomic weapons will be used from the outset.” A year later, President Eisenhower had begun the process of providing for “predelegation”: pre-authorization for theater commanders to employ nuclear weapons under a range of emergency conditions. Eisenhower believed that deterrence would be bolstered by maintaining the threat of unconstrained nuclear war, and by leaving to the imagination of Soviet policymakers the kinds of situations that might prompt such a response from the Americans.⁴⁷ In preparation for possible nuclear war in Europe, the U.S. Army reorganized itself into “pentomic divisions” designed for greater dispersal on the battlefield. The U.S. Army in Europe focused on a single goal: to fight off any advance by the Soviets beyond the limits of the Iron Curtain. The tactical and operational guidance for carrying out that task would occasionally shift over the years, but the goal itself would remain steady and unquestioned.

Domestically, the Army took on a major responsibility for homeland defense through the nike air defense program. The technology for this grew out of the air defense systems developed during the Second World War. By the early 1950s the Army was fielding the nike ajax missile, but concerns about whether this would provide adequate protection against a massed Soviet attack led to the authorization of a new missile, the nike hercules, in 1953. By 1958 the Army was fielding the new system. At the height of this air defense program in the 1960s, the Army deployed 145 nike hercules batteries, which were run by both Regular Army and National Guard units. These sites were phased out as the system was inactivated in the 1970s.⁴⁸

Once the Soviets had achieved their own nuclear capability, the central problem for American defense planners was to make the U.S. defense posture as credible and robust as possible. The development of a Soviet strategic air force and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program posed increasingly complex challenges to U.S. defense planners. From the first, the Soviets had expressed deep interest in the science of ballistic missiles; indeed, the Soviets had been close observers of German rocketry during World War II.⁴⁹

In the early Cold War years the Soviets sought to catch up as quickly as possible in the realm of atomic weapons, and to master the technology that would allow such weapons to be placed on powerful long range missiles. They had no wish to find themselves held hostage to the Americans, politically, because of the American nuclear arsenal. They desired a force capable of deterring American aggression, and they spared no effort or expense to achieve it. Soviet spies penetrated the Manhattan project, thus providing vital information that would speed the production of a Soviet bomb. In addition, the Soviets worked hard to master the science of the hydrogen bomb.⁵⁰

In the absence of any trust between the two superpowers of the postwar era, the situation quickly evolved into a classic “security dilemma,” wherein any action taken by one party to improve its defensive posture is perceived by the other party as provocative, aggressive, and offensive in nature.⁵¹ As the Soviets developed their arsenal, the Americans felt it necessary to prevent them from achieving a “first-strike” capability by maintaining a credible “second-strike” force able to survive an incoming Soviet attack and deliver a retaliatory blow. This meant preventing the Soviets from being able to launch an attack on American strategic forces that would be so devastating as to preclude the possibility of equally devastating return fire. This posture, which the Soviets naturally sought as well, became the bedrock of nuclear age deterrence. But the inescapable dynamic in this situation—the ongoing need to prevent an enemy first-strike capability in an environment defined by the instability inherent in the “security dilemma”—was bound to create pressure for continual advances and improvements in weapons and capabilities. And this would establish a spiral bounded only by technological limits and economic constraints.

Two major U.S. studies done in the 1950s, the Killian Report of 1955 and the Gaither Report of 1957, both focused on the need for a robust, survivable nuclear deterrent. Dispersal of bombers, alert systems, acceleration of ballistic missile programs, and overlapping responsibilities through the emerging “strategic triad” all helped to accomplish this aim.⁵² In general, Eisenhower and his advisers were convinced that the Americans had strategic superiority over the Soviets. Others in the strategic community were not so sanguine about that, however. The Killian report, named for its chairman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology President James R. Killian, was the work of the Technological Capabilities Panel (of the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee). It warned in February 1955 of a potential weapons gap between the U.S. and the USSR, and drew attention to the increasing Soviet ICBM program.⁵³ In response, in August 1955, the National Security Council recommended that the ICBM be identified as a “research program of the highest national priority, second to no others unless modified by future decision of the President.”⁵⁴ The report also helped to spur the creation of a sophisticated spy plane, the U-2; in just eighty days, twenty-three Lockheed design engineers had created a high-altitude reconnaissance plane that would be invulnerable to Soviet antiaircraft fire.⁵⁵

The Gaither Report of 1957 was set in motion by the president’s desire to assess the strategic situation. Early in the year, the Soviets had added two bombers to their inventory, the Bison and the Bear; in addition, the general dynamic of the tense Cold War struggle seemed to call for ongoing assessment. Chaired initially by H. Rowan Gaither of the Ford Foundation, the panel’s work was completed under Robert Sprague, a veteran of the Killian panel. The distinguished scientists participating predicted that if the situation were not addressed, the Soviets might bring themselves into a position to achieve a first-strike capability through their ICBM program. They recommended increased missile development, research into defensive programs, and a campaign to provide fallout shelters and increased public awareness of the nuclear threat.⁵⁶

Both of these reports made it more difficult than it otherwise would have been for Eisenhower to hold diligently to his own instincts in the nuclear realm, and to expand American forces at a careful and deliberate pace. And it was surely the case that the Soviet launch, in October 1957, of the Sputnik satellite provoked a domestic outcry in the US that resulted in the acceleration of a great number of defense, and defense-related, programs. Historian Walter McDougall has observed astutely: “Sputnik challenged the assumptions of American military and fiscal policy, and thus seemed to have scary implications for American security and prosperity. It involved a romantic but eerie enterprise—space travel—that Americans had come to associate, thanks to Hollywood science fiction, with sudden and irresistible horrors.” He added, “Therefore, the response to Sputnik was not just random clamor, or a manipulated panic, but the chaotic product of several waves, their crests and troughs overlapping to reinforce alarm one week and confused inertia the next.”⁵⁷

There is no question that the events of the 1950s—and, more importantly, the interpretation of them by American policymakers—created responses that would have a long lasting effect. Writing in the early 1980s, the authors of the Harvard Nuclear Study Group would observe: “These shocks prompted momentous and rapid changes in U.S. nuclear forces and strategy. Twenty years later U.S. nuclear forces and strategy remain largely in the mold set in the early 1960s.”⁵⁸

By the late 1950s, the U.S. investment in intercontinental ballistic missiles had begun to pay dividends. Despite technical challenges (including some spectacular flight-test failures), halting progress was made—fueled by the fear that the Soviets might otherwise gain a disproportionate advantage in this realm. The final years of the Eisenhower administration saw the extensive undertaking that was the ICBM launch-site construction program. During the second week of September 1959, after a SAC crew had successfully launched an Atlas training missile—the Air Force declared the ICBM program operational, and one of the three missiles then located at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was placed on strategic alert.⁵⁹ The administration proceeded apace with its long-range missiles, even if that pace was never quite as quick as the public, the media, and the Congress would have preferred. Although the U-2 flights were “irregular and spotty” in their photographic coverage of Soviet territory, they indicated no deployed Soviet ICBMs at all.⁶⁰ Even so, the pressure of events in the 1950s meant that the general trajectory charted by Paul Nitze in NSC 68 would be followed, even if Eisenhower had taken issue with aspects of that crucial report. The tendency for Americans to seek security through the possession of arms—especially strategic arms—would be reinforced, expanded, and intensified.

In the 1950s, the Navy felt that it had to pay attention to the ever-expanding Soviet submarine threat to the sea lanes between the U.S. and Europe in particular. A brilliant naval engineer named Hyman Rickover led the way to an increasingly nuclear-powered U.S. Navy. In 1952 the keel of the first nuclear powered submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus was laid; she went to sea in January 1955. By the end of the decade the Navy was working on the Polaris system for submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The first Polaris vessel, the George Washington, set out on her first operational deployment in November 1960. By the summer of 1962, Congress had authorized construction of more than forty ballistic-missile launching submarines. The initial program was the precursor to the equally successful Poseidon and Trident missile systems.⁶¹ Though the submarine fleet certainly broke with the traditional set of naval functions, submarine-based ballistic missiles gave robustness to the American nuclear deterrent. Since they were very hard to detect and hit, they guaranteed that the United States would retain a strong second-strike nuclear capability even if the Soviets proved able to launch a successful first strike against land-based U.S. bombers and missiles.

As time passed, strategic planners sought to field increasing capabilities for “blunting” Soviet nuclear systems so as to reduce the ability of the Soviets to damage or destroy American nuclear assets. In light of improved intelligence, SAC targeting was, by the mid-1950s, increasingly oriented to “counterforce” targets—specific military and industrial installations, as opposed to “countervalue” targets—enemy cities. But it was not until the end of the decade that SAC had all the technology and intelligence necessary to implement a true counterforce strike. Until then, SAC targeting combined a concentration on critical counterforce targets with important industrial and governmental centers. Planners believed that holding these assets at risk would deter the Soviets and, in the event of war, the destruction of these targets would undermine the enemy’s ability and will to fight. LeMay sought to find a warfighting doctrine that would allow him to do the maximum amount of damage to the Soviet military-industrial complex in the shortest possible time, thus maximizing both surprise and shock.⁶²

Some of LeMay’s critics have suggested that he was so determined to keep SAC from being caught on the ground in war, and so distrustful of civilian authorities, that he was prepared—in a crisis—to take into his own hands the decision to launch his force. Some have even asserted that he was looking for an excuse to go to war, and was deliberately provocative with SAC overflights of Soviet territory.⁶³ These criticisms stem from concerns that are not wholly unfounded. LeMay did worry a great deal about the ability of his force to react instantly to a Soviet launch, and he did have antagonistic relationships with some civilian authorities. In addition, U.S. overflights of Soviet territory were a source of profound irritation and anxiety to the Soviet Union. LeMay was surely prepared to be aggressive with the Soviets, and to accept as much responsibility as the national command authorities were willing to give him. But it is useful to remember, too, that LeMay respected the principle of civilian control of the military, and that he had, as a World War II field commander, sent constant letters of condolence back home to grieving parents. A desire to avoid being surprised by war is not the same thing as a desire to start a war. LeMay was faced with a profound challenge: he had to maintain a strike force on the tiptoe of readiness, and yet keep it reined in—well inside the political constraints on national strategy. This tension made his job the most demanding and difficult one in the U.S., save for that carried out by the U.S. president.⁶⁴

By 1955, when the U.S. nuclear stockpile was 2,280 bombs, an American atomic attack was expected to cause the loss of 118 out of 134 Soviet cities, and to kill 60 million people. In the late summer of 1960, the Eisenhower administration created the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (JSTPS) to consolidate the military services’ nuclear war-planning efforts. The Staff ’s Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) was completed in December. It called for a massive strike using some 2,244 bombers and missiles, carrying 3,267 weapons yielding more than 7,800 megatons. Execution of the plan would have killed approximately 285 million people in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.⁶⁵ As historian David Rosenberg has pointed out, “SIOP-62 represented a technical triumph in the history of war-planning. In less than fifteen years the United States had mastered a variety of complex technologies and acquired the ability to destroy most of an enemy’s military capability and much of the human habitation of a continent in a single-day. SIOP-62 incorporated operational choices that aimed to reduce the friction of war, coordinate and protect bomber forces, and integrate bomber and missile forces at the cusp of two eras in warfare.” But, Rosenberg added, it was also inflexible, and “with little basis in political and military realities.”⁶⁶

SIOP-62 was a manifestation and culmination of the principles that Le-May had inculcated into SAC, and that had come to guide U.S. nuclear planning. It was designed to ensure effective deterrence, and to provide for a prompt and massive assault on the Soviet Union in the event that a war did come. LeMay had been asked to prepare to fight and win a nuclear war if necessary, and this was how he planned to do it. He was determined that his crews would not be caught on the ground, and that they would successfully find their way to as many Soviet targets as possible. But if the plan looked daunting to the Soviets, it very likely would have proven unwieldy and “self-deterring” to American policymakers in a moment of crisis. The dynamics that drove the SAC planning process took nuclear war-planning in a direction that gave statesmen few options other than a massive strike—a strike that would have had grave consequences for all the world’s peoples.

From 1945 to 1974 the United States had no detailed national nuclear weapons employment policy. NSC 30, the 1948 U.S. guidance on atomic warfare, concluded that, “in the event of hostilities, the National Military Establishment must be ready to utilize promptly and effectively all appropriate means available, including atomic weapons, in the interest of national security and must plan accordingly.” It pointed out that the “decision as to the employment of atomic weapons in the event of war is to be made by the Chief Executive when he considers such decision to be required.”⁶⁷ This very general guidance gave the military the authority to plan for nuclear war—planning that was embodied in a special annex to what became the annual Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan (JSCP). Under President Eisenhower, guidance remained general and vague; indeed, the Eisenhower administration discouraged the development of constraints on nuclear war-planning.⁶⁸ General LeMay was happy to take advantage of the leeway that his commander-in-chief was willing to give him.⁶⁹

As plans for nuclear war grew more complex and more dependent on the timing of attacks and bomber routes to targets, any assumption that presidential control could be fully maintained grew less and less robust. There is no doubt that, even under the best circumstances, launch procedures would have been liable to confusion brought on by the need to make profoundly consequential decisions under exceptionally tight time constraints. It is surely not inconceivable that events might quickly have slipped from the control of politicians and into the hands of the military—just as they had during the First World War under the demands of complex mobilization schedules. The operational details of the war plan would have affected its execution. This circumstance, which did indeed allow LeMay to concentrate authority in his own hands, was unsettling in that it pulled war-planning further and further from the political realities that shape the way states actually enter into wars. SAC’s desire to prevail led to war plans that were large and unwieldy, and contained few options for limited strikes.

Defense analysts, policymakers, and military officers became increasingly concerned that enemy states might be able to slide underneath the nuclear threshold and compromise American interests and security. Indeed, three prominent Army officers, Generals Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor (both former heads of the Eighth Army in Korea and, later, Chiefs of Staff), and Lieutenant General James Gavin, a talented officer serving as the Army’s director of research and development, expressed their disagreement with Eisenhower’s strategic policy in books they wrote.⁷⁰ Other analysts raised their voices as well; of Henry Kissinger’s widely read 1957 book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Gordon Dean wrote, “the book was perhaps the first to examine the postwar world comprehensively, applying an understanding of nuclear technology and military strategy to political questions and showing the interrelationship between force and diplomacy.”⁷¹

As it was, Eisenhower had in fact begun to bolster American forces across the board by the end of his presidency. But the shift did not prevent John F. Kennedy from making defense an important campaign issue in 1960, or from arguing, ultimately, that the U.S. required a program of “Flexible Response” in order to continue to deter the Soviets effectively and indefinitely.

Kennedy also was able to argue that the U.S. was facing a “missile gap” with respect to the Soviets, who, as we have noted, had invested heavily in ballistic missiles as a delivery system for nuclear weapons. Soviet claims to have outpaced the U.S. in this realm were an attempt, through blustery rhetoric, to try to close the frustrating distance between themselves and the Americans with respect to nuclear arms production. But Eisenhower would not contradict the missile gap thesis in any detail because he did not wish to reveal the extent of his knowledge about the Soviet nuclear systems—to do so would have been to compromise the valuable, highly-secret U-2 reconnaissance overflights of the Soviet Union. Indeed, it was the protection of this secret that prompted Eisenhower to insist, initially, that the U-2 aircraft shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 was merely a “weather plane.”⁷²

Kennedy was able to capitalize on the missile gap issue, as well as growing concern about the credibility of a “Massive Retaliation” strategy in a complex strategic environment, including scenarios where the use of nuclear weapons would have been unwarranted and irrational. Eisenhower’s critics made several key points. First, they argued that a stable deterrent balance was emerging between the Soviet Union and the United States (and its NATO allies), and that this stability should be accepted and promoted to the greatest extent possible. Second, they argued that at the level below nuclear weapons, a similar sort of balance should be kept: the U.S. should maintain substantial conventional forces in being to deter the use of Soviet conventional forces—and also to cope with threats to U.S. interests clearly below the nuclear threshold. The latter would preclude the president having to make a choice between resorting to nuclear weapons or doing nothing at all. This call for a spectrum of forces was designed to give U.S. policymakers the widest possible range of tools for deterring enemies and defending American interests.⁷³

When President John F. Kennedy entered the White House in January 1961, he wanted to introduce some important changes to American policy making. One of the realms he sought to reform was the Pentagon. He brought into his cabinet, as Secretary of Defense, the young Robert McNamara—a former chief executive at Ford Motors who had applied sophisticated managerial skills to bring success to that company. The bright and energetic McNamara plunged into the pressing issues of American security, and, in line with the premises of Flexible Response, he sought a nuclear deterrent that would be credible and robust without being destabilizing. In addition, he sought to develop the kinds of forces that could operate beneath the nuclear threshold, and thereby prevent the Soviets from gaining influence through limited wars, intimidation, or blackmail of American allies.⁷⁴

McNamara was discomfited by the nuclear war plans presented to him early in his tenure. The growing Soviet weapons arsenal, the increased ability to locate specific targets in the Soviet Union, and the expanding array of American technologies and delivery systems all had combined to produce nuclear war plans that guaranteed large strikes against the Soviet Union and China. McNamara found the result unsettling, and he set out to impose some changes. He sought, first of all, to improve the national command and control system that linked national authorities to the forces in the field. Specifically, he sought a strategic force “to be of a character which will permit its use, in event of attack, in a cool and deliberate fashion and always under the complete control of the constituted authority.”⁷⁵ If the terms “cool and deliberate” were overly optimistic regarding what was possible in the throes of crisis, they nonetheless highlighted what Mc-Namara believed was a pressing problem inside the world of war-planning. His initial efforts in this regard would find echoes later as subsequent secretaries of defense would try to develop similarly controlled options for the presidents they served.

In addition, McNamara sought to pull the United States and the Soviet Union out of their increasingly deadly nuclear escalation. He announced, in June 1962, a policy of “city-avoidance.” He argued that planning for nuclear war ought to be approached in the same manner as would planning for conventional war, and that, to the greatest extent possible, the targeting of the enemy’s civilian population ought to be avoided. The Kennedy Administration hoped this would give the Soviets an incentive to avoid targeting American cities. The Pentagon estimated that U.S. casualties could be reduced by a factor of ten if the Soviets could be persuaded to avoid cities in the event of a nuclear exchange.⁷⁶ McNamara also revealed a strong early interest in “damage limitation”—an interest that led him to advocate, initially at least, civil defense measures, continental air defense, and ballistic missile defenses.⁷⁷

Ultimately, McNamara’s attempt to bring the planning and execution of nuclear war closer to that of conventional war was a failure—however well-intentioned it may have been. Some critics feared that it might lower the threshold for the use of nuclear arms in crisis. And the Soviets, who remained deeply wary of U.S. intentions, suspected it might be a strategy for a “first strike.” One Soviet strategist argued: “A strategy which contemplated attaining victory through the destruction of the armed forces cannot stem from the idea of a ‘retaliatory’ blow; it stems from preventive action and the achievement of surprise.”⁷⁸ The co-location of military bases and cities further confounded the problem. An additional headache to Mc-Namara was, ironically, the Air Force’s embrace of the new strategy. They had wanted, on their own, to move away from a city-oriented posture to one that held a very wide array of Soviet targets at risk; the endorsement of “no cities” by the Secretary of Defense seemed like a green light for the funding of a range of new (and expensive) “counterforce” programs.⁷⁹

McNamara remained intent on giving the chief executive some options in the event of nuclear war, even as he backed slowly away from the “nocities” rhetoric. During his tenure he also lost much of his early tendency to emphasize strategic defenses.⁸⁰ Instead, he increasingly stressed the mutually-deterring element of a situation in which two super-powers possessed nuclear weapons. He argued that nuclear parity, however rough, was a stabilizing element in the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. McNamara thus sought to place an emphasis on avoiding nuclear war entirely, rather than avoiding cities in the event of nuclear war. As historian Lawrence Freedman has pointed out, the new emphasis on “assured destruction” was embraced “to warn of the dangers of nuclear war rather than to describe how a nuclear war should be fought.” Just as importantly, McNamara would come to use the concept as a standard—a measurement of sufficiency—through which he might bring the escalation of the arms race under some degree of control within the Pentagon and the wider defense community.⁸¹

“Mutual Assured Destruction” (with the disturbingly ironic acronym MAD) is perhaps the strategic idea most strongly associated with the Mc-Namara era—even though the conditions leading to MAD had developed prior to McNamara’s tenure at the Pentagon, and would remain there after he had left. After the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, McNamara recognized that the very prospect of mutual suicide had done the most to ensure a peaceful outcome for this most dangerous of Cold War crises: the stakes were high, but the imperative to avoid nuclear war was even higher.⁸²

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had placed intermediate-range nuclear weapons in the Soviet satellite state of Cuba in an attempt to redress the imbalance of forces between the U.S. and the Soviet Union—particularly the embarrassment of U.S. Jupiter intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) on the Soviet doorstep, in Turkey, and the ongoing American threat to the communist, pro-Soviet regime of Fidel Castro. (The latter had been highlighted dramatically the previous year with the failed “Bay of Pigs” Operation.) IRBMs just off the coast of Florida would, Khrushchev assumed, make Castro largely invulnerable to U.S. hostility and threats, and would help to compensate for the Jupiters. Khrushchev’s plan was to slip the missiles into Cuba under the nose of U.S. reconnaissance and make them operational before they were discovered. It was a bold and risky plan, but one that appealed to Khrushchev’s propensity for high-stakes gambles. The gamble failed, however, as American intelligence officials discovered the Soviet plan through U-2 overflights.⁸³

Without question, the thirteen-day “Cuban Missile Crisis” was the most serious and dangerous face-off between the two superpowers during the long years of the Cold War. While the divided city of Berlin had been and would remain a serious irritant to the Soviets, and the cause of much East-West tension throughout the Cold War, U.S. strategic forces would be raised only once to the second-highest level on the “Defense Condition” scale (DEFCON 2)—and that was in October of 1962 in the midst of the Cuban crisis. Both sides sought a peaceful way out of the situation—but both needed to avoid capitulation, embarrassment, and loss of face. After intensive debate, Kennedy Administration officials chose to cope with the situation by imposing a naval “quarantine” on Soviet ships bound for Cuba. This sober approach, while hardly risk-free, was far more manageable than the air strike option that General LeMay and some other Kennedy advisers urged.

The sensible choice of a quarantine proved an enlightened response. That, and some important back-channel diplomacy promising the withdrawal of the Jupiters and a U.S. pledge not to attack Cuba in the future, brought a peaceful end to the crisis.⁸⁴ The fact that it could be resolved without shots being fired was a tribute to clear-headed statesmanship, ingenuity, good luck, and the sobering effect of worst-case scenarios. The episode highlighted the need for an overhaul of the U.S. command and control system for strategic forces, including improved communication with the Soviet Union. The establishment of a National Military Command Center in June 1962 was followed, after the October crisis, by an updating of the White House Situation Room’s command and control capabilities, including a direct link to the National Security Agency (the nation’s principal collector of communications and electronic intelligence) at Fort Meade, Maryland. Both the expansion of U.S. listening posts overseas and the advent of reliable satellite reconnaissance led to the coordination and enhancement of both intelligence and warning information.⁸⁵

If some of the consequences of this daunting crisis were salutary, some would contribute to further instability. The outcome was widely perceived as a “victory” for the United States; the Soviets saw it as unfavorable to themselves, and they emerged from it determined to make an exceptional effort to meet and even exceed U.S. levels of weapons development, procurement, and deployment: “Soviet leaders became determined never to let a humiliation like the Cuban Missile Crisis happen to them again. They began a substantial (3%-4% a year) and sustained increase in defense spending, strengthening their military capabilities across the board. In the late 1960s the Soviets carried out a dramatic increase in their nuclear forces comparable to what the U.S. had undertaken in the first half of the decade.”⁸⁶

For the Americans, maintaining a viable, credible second-strike force would continue to be the principal aim of U.S. nuclear strategy throughout much of the 1960s. Placing an emphasis on Assured Destruction enabled McNamara to try to bound the spiral of weapons procurement: he believed that once the Soviets and the Americans had reached a point where they could impose catastrophic damage on one another, large numbers of additional forces made little sense in terms of logic or strategy. Outside of McNamara’s attempts to keep nuclear planning grounded in logic and linked to a broader conception of strategy, however, were all the other imperatives that seemed to impel momentum in the U.S.–Soviet arms race. These included mistrust, misperception and cognitive error, competitive rivalry, cultural identity, domestic politics, the dynamics of the U.S. military industrial complex, the pace of technological change, and the paradoxical internal dynamic of nuclear deterrence theory. No work of history of the era has ever been able to capture these elements so brilliantly as filmmaker Stanley Kubrick did in 1964, with his silver-screen parody of the nuclear dilemma, Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

McNamara, who stayed on as Secretary of Defense after President Kennedy’s death in 1963, was able to persuade President Lyndon Johnson to cap U.S. strategic forces at a thousand Minuteman ICBM launchers and forty-one missile submarines. He canceled the Skybolt air-to-surface missile, resisted Navy proposals to develop a system to track and destroy Soviet Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs), and denied the Air Force authorization to proceed with a new, advanced, manned strategic bomber. On the other hand, McNamara authorized work on multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, (MIRVS) for some ICBMs and SLBMs, and agreed to keep some 600 of SAC’s B-52 bombers on active duty.⁸⁷ The Americans pursued MIRVs for essentially the same reasons that Truman had pursued a hydrogen bomb: to attempt to keep the United States ahead in the strategic arms race, and to preclude the possibility that U.S. strategic forces would be left in a disadvantageous position if the Soviets sought out the new technology on their own. With mutual distrust between the superpowers so entrenched, and with the Soviets consistently refusing to countenance domestic verification of any arms control arrangement, the scope for meaningful progress in this realm remained limited. Still, many critics have lamented the fact that the Americans never sought a comprehensive prohibition of MIRVs, arguing that the Soviets might have honored it since the effort to keep up with the U.S. technologically was costing them heavily.

Though the Kennedy-Khrushchev relationship was initially very blustery, some progress was made on a few fronts. In 1961 President Kennedy had established the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency to give a point of focus to efforts scattered across a variety of government offices. In August of 1963, following a famous speech by Kennedy (in June) on the need to find ways to cope with the arms race, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed. It outlawed nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, under water, or in outer space (underground testing was still permitted).⁸⁸

In the summer of 1964 President Johnson engaged U.S. forces directly in the Vietnamese civil war, fearing that a failure to do so would signal to allies and domestic political challengers that he was “weak on communism.” Johnson and his advisers counted on being able to quell the insurgency principally through the use of coercive air power. Thus, between 1965 and 1968 the “Rolling Thunder” bombing campaign worked in tandem with an increasing commitment of American ground troops. But sophisticated efforts to coerce and to punish through air power had little discernible impact, and the efforts of American ground troops to search for and destroy insurgency forces proved slow, costly, and frustrating. An ideological battle that pitted North Vietnamese communists and South Vietnamese insurgents against South Vietnam’s indigenous army and the American forces supporting that army, the war was, until its late stages, unconventional in nature—even though the Americans tried hard to fight it as a conventional war. The enemy did not rely on sophisticated industrial power, or on an advanced, mechanized army to achieve its aims. In addition, key enemy sources of supply came from the Soviet Union and China, both of which were off-limits to U.S. target planners, since Johnson had no wish to fight the war in a way that would risk expanding it into a direct conflict with the major communist powers.⁸⁹

If the Vietnam War was ultimately a losing cause for the Americans, it nonetheless tested American force projection capabilities, and placed heavy demands on American conventional forces. New technologies for precision bombing were honed. By 1972 the Air Force was in a position to use new precision-guided munitions, including electro-optically guided bombs and laser guided bombs. This development would profoundly affect future use of air power. These new munitions greatly increased accuracy, and, during the Linebacker I air campaign (from May to October 1972), they were used to attack bridges and other pinpoint targets. The Air Force also implemented an effective long range navigation system (LORAN) for North Vietnam. Like its precursor, the SHORAN system used in Korea, it enabled aircraft to determine their position with a high degree of accuracy. It was not, however, as effective as its Korean War predecessor since the distances from its transmitters in South Vietnam were longer than the distances covered by SHORAN in Korea.

Fighting an able and increasingly sophisticated opponent in the skies over Vietnam also pushed the Air Force to constantly refine its tactics and technology for penetration and survivability. Sophisticated jamming equipment helped neutralize the effect of improved North Vietnamese radar; and agile evasion tactics helped Air Force and Navy pilots evade SA-2 Surface-to-Air missiles (SAMs). Developments in electronic warfare, including the use of EC-121 aircraft and Navy ships, enabled U.S. forces to track Russian-supplied MiG fighters and alert pilots to their presence. Command and control, routing, and escort and support tactics evolved constantly.⁹⁰

But Vietnam’s bitter lesson was that technological overmatch does not always guarantee military and political victory. As was the case in Korea, the Air Force saw its most sophisticated aircraft, including strategic bombers, drawn down into the tactical fight. In North Vietnam there was no true “center of gravity” that American forces could readily attack and destroy. And interdiction against an enemy that needed little more than a few days’ supply of rice was an exercise in frustration and futility.⁹¹ The insurgents could control the pace of conflict: when the pressure was raised on them, they could simply merge back into the social fabric and wait for an opportune moment to resume their struggle. By late 1967 most of the targets on the Joint Chiefs of Staff ’s target list had been destroyed; by the end of the war the U.S. Air Force had dropped some 6,162,000 tons of bombs on Vietnam—vastly more than had been dropped by the Allies in all of the Second World War. None of this caused the insurgents to stop their efforts, or to modify their aims in ways that would have been politically acceptable to the United States.⁹²

Though preoccupied by the Vietnam War, the Johnson Administration nonetheless oversaw the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which obligated the U.S. and the Soviet Union to refrain from placing weapons of mass destruction into earth orbit, on the moon, or on other celestial bodies. (The Seabed Treaty of 1971 would set up a similar proscription against placing weapons on the ocean floor.) In addition, the Johnson Administration was able to celebrate the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968. This was an initial, high-priority attempt to gain some control over the worldwide spread of nuclear weapons. Non-nuclear signatories agreed not to obtain nuclear weapons, and nuclear signatories committed themselves to not providing them. Non-nuclear powers were promised help, however, in the development of nuclear power for peaceful purposes. A number of states chose not to sign the NPT, including France, China, Israel, Brazil, India, and Pakistan.⁹³

As the war in Vietnam progressed, the Soviets took advantage of American preoccupation to accelerate their own nuclear build-up, mentioned above. To address this, and to extend McNamara’s desire to impose some ceiling on the nuclear weapons spiral, President Johnson initiated a process that would pay dividends in the realm of arms control. For just a few hours in late June 1967, Johnson met with Soviet Premier Alexsei Kosygin, who was to address the United Nations. Meeting in New Jersey, the two men took the opportunity to discuss the issue of the strategic arms race. This brief “summit” put in place the initial groundwork for what would later become the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT).⁹⁴

Johnson had helped to lay a foundation in arms control that the administration of President Richard Nixon would build upon during its tenure in office. In 1972 an international convention was signed prohibiting the development, production, and stockpiling of biological weapons. Two years later the U.S. Senate ratified the convention and finally ratified the 1925 Geneva convention outlawing the use of (but not production or stockpiling of) chemical weapons.⁹⁵ The most important treaty of 1972, however, was one resulting from the initiative taken by President Johnson in 1967. In late May 1972, President Nixon met with his Soviet counterpart, Leonid Brezhnev, to sign the first treaty resulting from SALT.

What became known as “SALT I” had several parts. It prohibited the deployment of antiballistic missile systems except at two sites, each containing no more than 100 intercepter missiles. And for a period of five years it limited the U.S. to 1,054 ICBMs and 44 SLBM boats. The Soviets were likewise limited to 1,618 ICBMs and 62 SLBM boats. The tradeoff for the higher limits afforded the Soviets was that there would be no limit placed upon U.S. bombers or forward-based systems. Within these constraints, each side was allowed to substitute newer weapons for older ones, and was able to mix weapons (SLBMs for ICBMs, for instance) within constraints. SALT I was perhaps more meaningful as an initial step in an important direction than as a detailed agenda for serious constraint. But a wary U.S. Senate, concerned that the Nixon Administration had been too generous, ratified SALT I only after Senator Henry Jackson (D, Washington) introduced an amendment demanding that in follow-on agreements the two sides would have to adhere to the principle of “essential equivalence.”⁹⁶

Many commentators have argued that the United States missed a key opportunity to impose meaningful limitations on nuclear weapons at this point by failing to prioritize and push for a ban on MIRV tests at the time of the first SALT agreement. While Richard Smoke acknowledges that it was not clear how interested the Soviets were in this, he has argued that they had expressed some interest in MIRV limitation, and that therefore it might have been possible to hammer out a “package agreement, restricting ABMs and halting MIRV tests.” He has explained too, though, that the nature of the U.S. military industrial complex would have made this an uphill climb because the Poseidon and Minuteman III test programs were by then underway: “Thousands of people, billions of dollars, and huge organizations were committed to pushing them as rapidly as possible.”⁹⁷

NATO never seriously attempted to match the Soviet conventional threat in terms of manpower. Instead, it relied on the U.S.-provided “nuclear umbrella” to deter the Soviets by threatening the security of their homeland. Worried that the Soviets would not find a U.S. nuclear threat credible in all contingencies, the Americans lobbied for European acceptance of “Flexible Response.” After determined efforts by Robert McNamara, NATO adopted this as its strategic posture in 1967, although only reluctantly, since members feared doing so might lower the bar to war. NATO and the Warsaw Pact engaged in “Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction” (MBFR) talks through the 1970s, but to little useful end. Enhanced technologies were envisioned as a potential solution to imbalance; some of these were embraced, including a new generation of anti-tank guided missiles, but others, like the “enhanced radiation weapon,” (“neutron bomb”) were not.⁹⁸

As the Vietnam War drew to a close, Nixon understood that the public mood gave him little scope to argue successfully for the maintenance of clear nuclear superiority. As a result, he opted for what he termed “strategic sufficiency,” which, as historian Steven Rearden has pointed out, was “an elastic term that strategic planners in the Pentagon interpreted as including all the elements required to achieve their basic objective of assured destruction.”⁹⁹ Like Kennedy, Nixon did not want to be left in a position in which large attacks on Soviet cities (and the resulting mass casualties) would be his only strategic option if faced with a serious nuclear challenge. Even though McNamara had sought to provide the president with a range of options, there remained none below the level of a major counter-force attack, and such an attack would itself have been massive. Nixon also wished to address a number of other concerns he had with nuclear strategy, in particular the maintenance of credible “extended nuclear deterrence” to NATO partners in Europe, and the possibility that Assured Destruction might ultimately be threatened if the Soviets combined strategic defenses with highly potent offensive forces.¹⁰⁰ Some of this was folded into the SALT process. But the issues needed to be addressed doctrinally, and through force modernization as well.

All of this resulted, ultimately, in National Security Decision Memorandum 242 (NSDM 242) of January 1974, presented by Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger and thus known as the “Schlesinger Doctrine.” It offered “a series of measured responses to aggression which bear some relation to the provocation, have prospects of terminating hostilities before general nuclear war breaks out, and leave some possibility for restoring deterrence.”¹⁰¹ In the fashion of McNamara, Schlesinger was making another attempt to bring real options—in the form of planned, limited nuclear strikes—to the President. If NATO partners largely accepted the Schlesinger Doctrine as a necessary updating of extended deterrence, some in the United States argued that the further development of limited options would be destabilizing and would lower the threshold to nuclear war. But Schlesinger countered that nuclear deterrence would remain robust only if the forces involved were actually usable forces; if the U.S. nuclear posture remained so large and unwieldy as to be unusable, its value as a deterrent would be unacceptably undermined. He argued further that his doctrine was not destabilizing because it did not offer meaningful “damage limitation”—the kind that would raise Soviet suspicions that the Americans were seeking a first-strike capability.¹⁰²

Once again like McNamara, Schlesinger moved forward with the U.S. MIRV program, extending it to large portions of the ICBM and SLBM forces. This was tied in part to another pillar of Schlesinger’s thinking: the attack on Soviet industrial assets, and, concomitantly, the prevention of Soviet economic recovery in the aftermath of an attack. As Scott Sagan has pointed out, the “counter-recovery” strategy provided clear guidance to planners: the capability to destroy 70 percent of the Soviet industry that would be needed to achieve economic recovery after a nuclear exchange. It would, for the next six years, remain the “highest priority” for war planners.¹⁰³

NSDM-242’s quest for a secure deterrent that would also provide options for control in the event of a nuclear exchange would be updated again in 1980, as Presidential Directive 59 (PD-59) drawn up by Secretary of Defense Harold Brown for President Jimmy Carter. Like NSDM-242 before it, this new directive sought to offer a range of options for the “controlled” application of nuclear power against a “broad spectrum of targets.” If, privately, Brown was not entirely convinced that nuclear war could be controlled once it had been unleashed, he nonetheless felt—like those before him—that he had an obligation to provide the president with options that fell somewhere between capitulation and all-out countercity warfare. PD-59 also attempted to incorporate into nuclear targeting an increased focus on Soviet perspectives and political vulnerabilities, in particular the Soviet command and control infrastructure central to the coherence and cohesion of the regime.¹⁰⁴

When President Nixon left office following the Watergate scandal, President Gerald Ford took up the set of international responsibilities that included arms control. In November 1974 he met with Brezhnev to sign the Vladivostok accord, pledging numerical ceilings (to be specified in accordance with future negotiations) for all strategic launch vehicles and vehicles carrying MIRVs. The ceilings were disappointingly high, but the two leaders felt they had set the foundation for a new accord, in particular because they reached a compromise allowing the inclusion of heavy bombers in exchange for the exclusion of forward-based systems (U.S. nuclear systems based in NATO nations). But the good intentions of the Vladivostok accords did not, however, translate into prompt progress at the negotiating table: U.S.-Soviet negotiations stumbled and stalled, and the plan for a second SALT accord, which would be in force until 1985, receded into the distance.¹⁰⁵ In the end, an accord was not signed until June of 1979—and then was never ratified by the U.S. Senate. Cruise missile technology, a new Soviet bomber (the “Backfire” bomber), and the Soviet deployment of MIRVs placed hurdles in the path of the negotiators. Despite the “détente” of the early 1970s, mistrust and competitiveness continued to hinder the U.S.–Soviet relationship. Equally frustrating was the failure to put any qualitative constraints on the arms race, so new weapons simply became faster, more accurate, more lethal, and more numerous. As Richard Smoke has pointed out: “Thanks to MIRVS, the number of separate nuclear warheads that each side could rain down on the other side increased from between one and two thousand as SALT was getting underway to approximately ten thousand in the 1980s.”¹⁰⁶

Gerald Ford, who had pardoned Richard Nixon and thus still seemed to have a faint air of Watergate about him, lost his bid for the presidency in 1976. The new President, Jimmy Carter, was committed to arms control and gave his new Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, full rein to engage in talks with the Soviets with renewed energy and vigor. But Vance’s intensified efforts were unable to move the SALT process forward quickly. SALT II was finally submitted to the Senate in the summer of 1979; it was a long and complicated accord that seemed to fully satisfy no one. Its main provision limited the U.S. and the Soviet Union to an aggregate of 2,400 launch vehicles each (bombers, ICBMs, and SLBMs) to the end of 1981. Thereafter they would be limited, to 1985, to 2,250 each.¹⁰⁷ American liberals felt that it was only a half-hearted effort, while conservatives complained that it conceded far too much to the Soviet Union. A group of moderates in between was prepared to fight for the treaty, but their prospects were hurt by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979. Early the next year, the administration withdrew the treaty from Senate consideration, and forbade American athletes from competing in the Moscow Olympic games, scheduled for July. Carter, however, announced that he would honor the terms of the agreement. When the new U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, came into office in January 1981, he also announced that he would uphold the terms of the treaty (even though he had pledged, during his campaign, that he would not resubmit it to the Senate).

The fate of the SALT II treaty was due largely to the growing concerns in the American defense analytic community about the Soviet strategic weapons build-up through the 1970s. Even though the Soviets had participated faithfully in the SALT process, they had—within the wide bounds of the initial treaty—continued a process of weapons expansion and modernization that had commenced in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. At the time SALT I was signed, the U.S. and the USSR had rough parity in strategic systems. As the decade wore on, though, that began to change. First, the Soviets produced four new ICBM models, three of which were deployed in number. One of these, the SS-18, was immense: it carried eight MIRVs (as opposed to the three carried by U.S. Minuteman missiles). The Soviets had not yet mastered miniaturization technology, and so they needed large warheads, and a large vehicle (“bus”) for carrying them. Second, the Soviets built and deployed two classes of sophisticated submarines (Delta and Typhoon) that were capable of carrying advanced warheads—the latter MIRVed. In addition, the Soviets deployed the long-range “Backfire” bomber, and by the end of the decade they were producing nearly double the number of tactical aircraft as the USAF. Finally, the Soviets began super-hardening some of their missile silos, and continuing with the kinds of civil defense preparedness programs that the U.S. had abandoned long ago.¹⁰⁸

NATO planners remained concerned by what they perceived as an ongoing imbalance between their forces and those of the Warsaw Pact. Western anxiety increased in 1976 when the Soviets deployed the SS-20 intermediate range missile. It could reach any target in Western Europe (in minutes) with accurate, MIRVed warheads. The European-based Pershing I missiles belonging to the United States did not have the range or quick-launch features of the SS-20. In response to divided opinion within the Alliance, NATO members opted to pursue a two-track decision on IRBMs: they would seek an arms control agreement, but if such negotiations failed, they would deploy a new, highly accurate and longer range Pershing II missile, along with newly developing ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs).¹⁰⁹

Many explanations were proffered for the Soviet behavior, including increased tensions with the Chinese. But conservatives focused on worst-case scenarios and demanded a bolder response than either the Ford or Carter administrations had offered. The conclusions of the “Committee on the Present Danger’’ (headed by Paul Nitze, the principal author of NSC 68) were a major cause of opposition to SALT II inside the Senate. Richard Pipes, a Sovietologist who would later become a high-ranking official inside the government, published (in 1977) a high-profile article titled: “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War.”¹¹⁰

The Soviet humiliation in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis had led to a build-up that, by the late 1970s, had given American conservatives an apparent reason to beat an alarmist drum. The result was a domestic political debate that could be interpreted, generously, as more evidence of the inescapable “security dilemma,” or, instead, as further evidence of a need within the collective American psyche to appear more powerful and formidable—in every realm—than the Soviets. And this need, all the more apparent following the undignified U.S. exit from Vietnam, was manifested in the enthusiastic response to the tough-talking rhetoric of 1980 presidential contender Ronald Reagan.

The hardening of the Soviet ICBM force and their lead in the number of launchers also created deep unease among many close observers of U.S. national security policy. According to the Committee on the Present Danger, this situation left open a “window of vulnerability” that the Soviets might exploit before an improved U.S. missile system could be put in place. But it was not at all clear how the Soviets might exploit this “window,” since any attempt to do so would have brought down upon them a devastating response that would far outweigh any potential gain they might have achieved. Indeed, the U.S. second-strike capability had only increased in the 1960s and 1970s.¹¹¹

Writing at the time of Reagan’s election, defense analyst Warner Schilling argued that the United States “has already built the forces it needs to deter attacks or threats by the Soviet Union and to deny the Soviet Union any meaningful advantage … from a nuclear exchange. But Washington is nonetheless seized with the worry that the Soviet Union or other states might be led to contrary judgments by examining the charts and graphs (all supplied by the United States) that compare the forces of the superpowers in terms of various static and dynamic measures: numbers of warheads, delivery vehicles, equivalent megatons, countermilitary potential, or the ratio of post-exchange warheads, or megatons, etc.”¹¹² Language itself, and methods of measurement, provided a platform on which to build a debate that had become, in many ways, a social construction of the defense analytic community. And this platform was seized once again by those who mistrusted the Soviets so much as to deny them a margin in any category of strategic forces.

Their rhetoric was politically resonant in the United States and, when elected, President Reagan would pursue an across the board built-up of weapons that was not unlike the one begun by the Truman administration in the early 1950s. In their search for a way to close the “window of vulnerability,” defense planners sought to come up with a new basing mode that would foil Soviet efforts to target it with certainty. It would be designed to convince the Soviets that they simply could not achieve their aims in a nuclear war. This meant, in the end, a mobile basing. But how would the mobility be provided? All kinds of options were examined by the services and the defense analytic community, including moving the missiles around by truck on interstate highways, and even moving them by airships (blimps).

When first elected, President Carter had deferred approval of a mobile “MX” (Missile Experimental) system pending further study and research; he had hoped that the SALT negotiations might make the system unnecessary. The Air Force preferred a “racetrack” basing system that would have allowed missiles to move around at random (from one hardened shelter to another) on a specially built highway system in Nevada and Utah. Under increasing pressure from conservatives, and in an ultimately failed effort to win Senate approval of SALT II, the Carter Administration sanctioned the future construction and deployment of the MX system. Disillusioned with the SALT process, and disturbed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter took an increasingly hard line with the Soviets by the end of his presidency.¹¹³

PD-59 (outlined above) was a major statement of declaratory policy regarding nuclear weapons. Impelled by the same perspective as NSDM-242, PD-59 sought a continuum of options against a wide array of targets. It also included a close look at Soviet nuclear doctrine, which resulted in a new target category, designed to reflect Soviet priorities (and vulnerabilities): “counterpolitical” targets, sometimes called “counterleadership” targets. These included top-tier elements of the Soviet command and control system, such as governmental and Communist Party headquarters, and military command posts. If these targets were not new to U.S. nuclear policy, the heightened emphasis on them was, along with a sense that specific Soviet efforts to shelter political leaders in wartime were revealing of their centrality to Soviet will and cohesion. What Brown would call the “countervailing strategy” would require upgrades in the U.S. command, control, communications, and intelligence system in order to be fully implemented. It also placed a renewed emphasis on counterforce targeting—of Soviet nuclear and conventional forces, and favored the direct and specific targeting of key industries, instead of NSDM-242’s more general guidance designed to inhibit Soviet economic recovery following a war.¹¹⁴

But Carter’s harder line came too late in the eyes of most Americans. Critics of the administration who sounded alarms over the Soviet buildup had begun to have a significant impact, and a severe downturn in the economy—including high fuel prices, inflation, and high energy costs—demoralized the American people. All of this heightened the sense that the United States had slipped to second place status vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The final blow to the Carter presidency came late in 1979 when the Iranian revolution created a hostage crisis that intensified the sense of American demoralization. President Carter allowed the Shah to enter the country in October for cancer treatment, and this enraged the Iranians. Militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took sixty-nine Americans hostage (ultimately they kept fifty-nine).¹¹⁵

Ronald Reagan brought with him an assertive approach to rivalry with the Soviet Union. Since there had been no accommodation on intermediate range missiles and the threat posed by the Soviet SS-20, Reagan decided to go forward with the Pershing II/GLCM deployment that had been part of NATO’s previous dual-track decision. In March 1983 he announced that he wanted the United States to pursue a “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI) that would result, ultimately, in the creation of a ballistic missile shield over U.S. air space. To many liberals, Reagan’s rhetoric—and apparent challenge to the stable logic of MAD—seemed like gratuitous antagonism of a dangerous enemy. They worried that his words and his ideas might bring about a return to the anxious, frosty environment of the days before SALT and détente.¹¹⁶

The Europeans were especially outspoken about Reagan’s unapologetic anti-communist rhetoric, which they worried might raise the prospect of a clash—perhaps even a nuclear war—with the Soviet Union. Vast popular protests cropped up across Western Europe on the eve of the Pershing II deployment, while back home critics derided SDI as a fanciful and irresponsible leap toward an unproven set of technologies that would provide little real protection while costing billions in research and development funds. They also worried that it would signal U.S. rejection of Mutual Assured Destruction and thus set in train a major new arms race. But Reagan remained firm.

The Reagan Administration’s response to the Soviet arms build-up had been to open up the coffers and spend extensively on defense. This was the major pillar of Reagan’s larger attempt to restore a sense of optimism and pride to Americans in the aftermath of Vietnam. In addition to unlimited investment in the SDI program, the Reagan Administration reversed an earlier Carter decision and went ahead with the B-1 strategic bomber for the Air Force as well as investing heavily in cruise missiles and the Trident nuclear submarine program, which received a bigger and more accurate reentry vehicle, the D-5 RV. Though it abandoned the controversial racetrack system, the Reagan Administration (following the findings of a commission led by retired Air Force Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft) decided to deploy one hundred MX missiles in existing Minuteman silos. The administration reengineered the KC-135A aerial tanker force and deployed four National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP) aircraft for use by the National Command Authorities. The Reagan administration raised the defense budget’s rate of growth from five percent to over eight percent annually; much of the increase went to conventional forces, but strategic forces were increased as well.¹¹⁷

In addition to the restoration of American primacy following Vietnam, Reagan seems to have been driven by two overriding aims—neither of which was completely apparent at the time, and neither of which was easily accommodated by the more simplistic portraits of him sometimes painted by his critics. First, Reagan’s willingness to spend lavishly on defense programs appears to have been part of a calculated effort to further stretch the threadbare fabric of the Soviet economy by forcing the Soviets to keep up with a new round of American weapons systems. The idea was not a new one; its provenance could be traced all the way back to NSC 68, and elements of it—outspending and outbuilding the Soviets in both offensive and defensive systems—had been suggested by Earle J. Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in his statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee regarding military procurement for fiscal year 1968. But the budgetary demands of the Vietnam War had made it impossible for President Johnson or his successors to entertain this idea.¹¹⁸

Second, Reagan genuinely loathed the nuclear dilemma that defined the Cold War world, and hoped to use the Strategic Defense Initiative as a mechanism for forcing both serious dialogue and a paradigm shift in the U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations. As Paul Lettow has recently argued, “Reagan’s nuclear abolitionism, which grew out of his deeply-rooted beliefs and religious views, resulted in some of the most significant—and least understood—aspects of his presidency.”¹¹⁹

The members of the Reagan Administration did not continue the specific language of the countervailing strategy, but in most respects they cleaved to it with few significant changes. The administration continued to place a heavy emphasis on targeting the Soviet leadership and key industrial facilities. Naturally this required a continued focus on acquiring the C³I capabilities that would make such targeting realistic.¹²⁰ Though the Reagan administration held initially to the terms of the SALT II agreement, they did not resubmit it to the Senate, or consider any new arms control plans for a year after entering office. In the spring of 1982 the President announced a new initiative: moving away from the tainted acronym SALT, he proposed new “Strategic Arms Reduction Talks,” or START. As an opening gambit he proposed that the Soviets and the Americans each cut their number of ballistic missile warheads to 5,000, with no more than 2,500 on land-based missiles. The Soviets agreed to recommence arms control talks, but dismissed Reagan’s plan as disproportionately advantageous to the United States, which had the bulk of its ballistic missiles on submarines. The START process got underway in Geneva, but the Soviets walked out of the talks in November in protest of Reagan’s resolve to deploy Pershing IIs and GLCMs after the Soviets turned down the “zerozero” option calling on them to remove their SS-20s in exchange for a promise that the Americans would not deploy the new generation intermediate range missiles in Europe.

Following the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982, the Soviets went through a leadership crisis. Throughout this tumultuous period, Reagan pushed hard regarding SDI, START, and nuclear arms in Europe. Upon Reagan’s reelection in 1984, the Soviets accommodated themselves to a new attempt at arms control. Beginning in March 1985, this new round of talks addressed European, strategic, and ballistic missile defense issues. At this point Reagan surprised his critics: he changed course and met with his Soviet opposite number five times in three years. Mikhail Gorbachev, the new Communist Party chairman, was a compelling, dynamic individual interested in interaction with the West, and a revitalization of the moribund Soviet economy; he and Reagan would develop a useful working relationship, and a genuine mutual respect.¹²¹

At a summit held in Reykjavik, Iceland, in the autumn of 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan went well beyond the expectations of their advisers by seriously discussing the possibility of significant weapons reductions, including the prospect of removing Soviet and U.S. intermediate range weapons from Europe. A deal in the offing ultimately was killed by Gorbachev’s insistence that the United States give up its SDI program. But Reykjavik offered clear evidence that these two men—for their own individual reasons—might be prepared to enact sweeping changes, and to place the U.S.–Soviet relationship on a whole new footing.

The changes foreshadowed in Iceland came increasingly to pass. In December 1987, Gorbachev and Reagan signed the INF treaty in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Senate ratified it quickly. The treaty provided that both sides would eliminate all ground-launched and cruise missiles (deployed and not-yet deployed) with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. This did not mean that the Soviets and Americans had no capacity to use nuclear weapons in Europe: nuclear-capable aircraft remained, and strategic systems on both sides could be retargeted for the European theater. Nonetheless, it was the first treaty ever to eliminate an entire class of weapons, and it was the first U.S.–Soviet treaty ever to embrace thorough verification measures for each side. The willingness of Soviet officials to agree to these terms revealed the extent to which Gorbachev had already instigated a revolution in Soviet domestic affairs.¹²²

The issues surrounding the long-range nuclear systems were every bit as complex as those in Europe. Increased Soviet investment in long range systems yielded important fruit in the 1980s when the Soviets began deploying two new ICBMs (in the West called, SS-24s and SS-25s). The former carried ten MIRVed warheads, and could be moved by special railroad cars. By July 1991 the Soviets had deployed nearly one hundred SS-24s, and over three hundred smaller SS-25s. The earlier improvements to the Soviet bomber and submarine forces, noted above, also created hurdles to progress in arms control.¹²³

The alarmist language of the early Reagan administration had been partly countered, in April 1983, when a blue ribbon commission under General Scowcroft had downplayed the “window of vulnerability” rhetoric that had held such a central place in the President Reagan’s first electoral campaign. But this dismissal of the highly publicized worries of the Committee on the Present Danger had not led to stagnation in U.S. strategic systems. As noted above, American submarines were equipped with highly accurate Trident II D-5 missiles, and upgraded MX (“Peacekeeper”) missiles were deployed in existing silos as the U.S. debate over a mobile system continued, unresolved. And the Scowcroft Commission’s preferred, single-warhead “Midgetman” missile system—an alternative solution to the problem of hard-target kill against land-based systems—went forward too, ultimately with the support of presidential administration of George H. W. Bush in the late 1980s.¹²⁴

At the end of the day it would be the winding down of the Cold War that would lead to genuine progress in limiting long range nuclear systems. If the arms competition had gained a life of its own, it was nonetheless an extension of Cold War politics. The reforms that Gorbachev had introduced took hold and gained momentum—leading, in the end, to an unraveling of the old Soviet political system. Increasingly confident that Gorbachev would not intervene and support the forces of conservatism, proponents of change in Eastern Europe began to stir their respective political pots. In early 1989 the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland regained its legal status and helped to frame a new representative constitution; in June it won control of the new parliament, and two months later installed the first noncommunist prime minister in the state since 1940. Also in June 1989 the Hungarians celebrated the reburial of their hero from the 1956 revolt, Imre Nagy. In early November the Berlin Wall came down, and later in the month five hundred Czech students marched toward Wenceslas Square in Prague, calling for the rights of free speech and assembly.¹²⁵

The speed and sweep of these changes left statesmen on both sides of the Iron Curtain breathless. Even as the revolution gained early momentum, no one anticipated the range and the degree of the changes that would so quickly transform the strategic landscape both outside and inside the Soviet Union. In the United States, planners and analysts were left reeling as the context—the Cold War paradigm—in which they had worked for decades transformed itself, seemingly overnight.

In light of the changing nature of the international environment, SAC had begun planning, by early 1987, for a dual role: strategic operations that would include nuclear and/or conventional operations. By January 1989, when Ronald Reagan turned the White House over to his former vice president, George H. W. Bush, the world of the old Cold War Strategic Air Command was gone for good. But new challenges lay ahead.

On August 2, 1990, armies under Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded the neighboring, oil-rich state of Kuwait. With the strong support of Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Bush froze Iraqi assets, promised to send troops to Saudi Arabia, and demanded that Iraq withdraw unconditionally from Kuwait. Days later, U.S. aircraft began arriving in Saudi Arabia; they were the first American assets deployed in what would become a massive commitment (Operation Desert Shield) to protect Saudi Arabia and its vast oil reserves. When diplomatic and economic pressure failed to eject Saddam, Operation Desert Shield became, for the Americans, Operation Desert Storm. American troops made up the great bulk of what became a vast multinational effort to liberate Kuwait.¹²⁶

The “Persian Gulf War,” as it came to be called, saw the first extensive use of post–Vietnam era U.S. troops and equipment. U.S. Army General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the military operation, envisioned it in four phases: (1) a strategic air campaign against Iraq; (2) an air campaign against Iraqi forces in Kuwait; (3) an attrition phase to neutralize the Republican Guard forces and isolate the Kuwaiti battlefield; (4) a ground attack to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. The first three would be carried out by coalition air forces, and the final phase would be conducted by ground forces.¹²⁷ The strategic air campaign over Iraq was designed to directly pressure and coerce Saddam’s regime.

A primary intellectual influence on the strategic air campaign was Colonel John A. Warden III, USAF, who had been in charge of the Deputy Directorate for Warfighting Concepts within the Air Staff Directorate of Plans. A strong advocate of independent air operations, Warden had conceived of a targeting theory based on five principal categories, envisioned as five concentric rings (like the rings in a bull’s eye) that increase in value as they approach the center. The focal point—his designated “center of gravity”—was the enemy leadership. Just outside of that, in the position of second priority, was the enemy state’s energy sources, advanced research facilities, and key war-supporting industries. Beyond that, in the third ring, was enemy infrastructure, such as transportation systems. The fourth ring contained the enemy’s population, and the fifth ring designated the enemy’s fielded military forces. Warden’s ideas, which he promulgated effectively and energetically, brought back to the surface some heated service debates over the primacy that should be accorded to independent air operations.¹²⁸

The plan that Warden and his staff developed for the crisis in the Middle East focused on strategic air attacks on Iraqi centers of gravity; it was designed to pit American strengths against Iraqi weaknesses while minimizing U.S. casualties, collateral damage, and civilian deaths. Warden sought to target the heart of Saddam’s regime—the key structures, institutions, and resources that facilitated his control of the state. Though modified somewhat before implementation, the main objectives of Warden’s plan remained, and these “continued to emphasize leadership; electrical, nuclear, biological, and chemical facilities; and the other target sets derived from the five rings.”¹²⁹

Following in the tradition of some of the World War II air power advocates who believed that strategic bombing might preclude the need for a ground campaign, Warden believed that his plan could stand alone. Schwarzkopf, following in the tradition of World War II ground commanders, saw the air plan as the first phase of a larger, integrated air-ground liberation of Kuwait. The seven hundred aircraft that were ready on the eve of war, would, Warden hoped, achieve Coalition political aims essentially on their own. But even though the aircraft coming into the theater comprised the vast majority of the USAF’s precision delivery capability at the time, the force was not ideally suited to the task Warden had set for it. Technological evolution throughout the Vietnam War had yielded some promising results in highly precise, guided bomb technology, but the USAF had been leisurely in appropriating it and integrating it into doctrine and mission statements: most of the combat aircraft procured between 1972 and 1990 (the F-15C, F-16, and A-10 series) did not include guided bomb unit-delivery capability.¹³⁰ Still, the USAF had the capacity to employ air-delivered precision-guided munitions, and this would become a centerpiece of its war effort. A dramatic new delivery system in the U.S. arsenal was the F-117A “Stealth” fighter, introduced to the public in late 1988.

The air war plan underwent updating right through the opening hours of the war on January 17, 1991. Many hours before bombs began falling over Baghdad, seven hulking B-52Gs took off from Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, to begin a 14,000 mile round-trip delivery of air-launched cruise missiles into Iraq. The Air Force, anxious to prove its “Global Reach,” did not wish to be overshadowed by the Navy’s ship-based Tomahawk missiles about to launch from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Thoughout Iraq, coalition forces struck command and control targets (including Baath Party headquarters), electrical facilities, and Scud missile launchers. Anti-radiation missiles homed in on radar facilities and antiaircraft defenses while both British and American planes cratered the runways on Iraqi airfields. Iraqi oil refineries and storage facilities came under attack as well. At the end of only two nights, coalition aircraft had struck nearly half of 298 identified strategic targets. The stealth fighter-bombers proved their worth early on: one F-117A with two bombs could do the same work as more than 100 World War II-era B-17 bombers carrying nearly 650 bombs.¹³¹

But the aerial pounding alone did not deliver the coalition war aims, and the ground campaign, which had been planned all along as the final phase of major combat operations, finally kicked off on February 23.¹³² Simultaneously, coalition aircraft struck Iraqi airfields, aircraft, and bridges near the front. Strategic raids continued to target leadership, and industrial facilities in Iraq. Newly developed GBU-28 penetrator bombs were used against high-priority targets, including the Al Taji command bunker. Iraq, which had fought a long and draining war with Iran, owned the fourth largest army in the world. In the United States there had been much hand-wringing over the idea that the ground war might be bloody. But the well-trained and well-equipped Americans were able to overwhelm the opposition in a matter of days.

In a turn of events that would have seemed ironic to the old SAC bomber hands, B-52s were used primarily to hit Iraqi ground forces in Kuwait, while the F-117A fighter-bombers took on strategic targets in Iraq proper. The B-52s proved to be the real workhorses of the campaign, dropping nearly a third of the coalition’s total tonnage (although they made up only three percent of its total aircraft) and contributing mightily to the unraveling of Iraqi ground troops. But the stealth fighters and the other precision bombing platforms garnered most of the attention and acclaim. The Air Force liked the results of high precision, and subsequently accelerated its investment in the systems and weapons that could provide it.

The central role that SAC had once played in the U.S. strategic construct had been eroding for some time. Missiles had long overtaken bombers as the core of the U.S. deterrent threat, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles were the most robust and invulnerable weapon in the arsenal; over time, the latter had become increasingly accurate. Other trends pushed toward change. As it became clear that the Soviet threat really had receded, and that it would not reemerge, Americans began to look forward to a reduction in defense expenditure and the “peace dividend” that it would yield. On June 1, 1992, the Air Force inactivated SAC; a new “Air Combat Command,” headquartered in Langley, Virginia, received SAC’s bombers and missiles, and fighter aircraft belonging to the former Tactical Air Command (also inactivated). Also on that date, a new joint command, the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) took wartime responsibility for nuclear deterrence functions. STRATCOM was headquartered at the old home of SAC, Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska.¹³³

The nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union had developed their own momentum and their own logic over the long years of the Cold War, and this momentum continued on, even as world politics changed, albeit more slowly than in the past. As noted above, the Soviets had deployed some 300 SS-25s and nearly 100 SS-24s by mid 1991, and they had retired old missiles to keep their overall numbers within the SALT II ceilings. (The Reagan administration had ignored the SALT II ceilings once the five-year term of the unratified treaty had expired.) President George H. W. Bush had come into office interested in deploying a mobile ICBM system, and the first rail system infrastructure was delivered to a Wyoming site in 1990. A year later, though, as the Cold War continued to wind down, Congress backed away from any elaborate mobile system, and the expensive Midgetman program was canceled. The American Trident SLBM program continued to receive steady support and funding from Congress, however, and the Soviet Navy, likewise, continued to build submarines for purposes of nuclear deterrence. Moreover, the Soviets deployed a new, high-yield, accurate SLBM. Both sides also had growing inventories of air- and sea-launched cruise missiles, and tactical aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons.¹³⁴

The U.S. SDI program had been the main barrier to any real progress in arms control during the Reagan administration: the Soviets tried to link every arms control initiative to slowing or halting American work on SDI, and the president had consistently refused.¹³⁵ SDI’s relationship to the ABM treaty was unclear, even within the administration, and the confusion surrounding the issue surely heightened the domestic debate over the expensive and highly experimental program. After the dramatic events at Reykjavik and the breakthrough of the INF treaty, it seemed the time was right for deep cuts in intercontinental systems. But Reagan left office still committed to the construction of a space defense system. His successor, however, did not feel so strongly, and some guarded progress was made in this realm.

U.S. Secretary of State James Baker met with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in the autumn of 1989, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; the latter agreed to talk about missile reductions even while research on SDI continued. (Shevardnadze knew, by this time, that Bush held a different level of commitment to SDI than his predecessor.) He also acknowledged that the Soviet radar at Krasnoyarsk—long a sticking point with the Reagan Administration—had been a violation of the ABM treaty. Later in the year, Bush and Gorbachev met at Malta and agreed to prioritize progress on strategic arms control. The commitment led ultimately to the START treaty, signed in Moscow in late July 1991.¹³⁶

The START treaty put some broad boundaries around permissible numbers of strategic nuclear weapons; it was designed to begin a process of overall drawdown. It allowed each side 1,600 strategic delivery vehicles and up to 6,000 accountable warheads; up to 4,900 of the latter could be placed on ballistic missiles—and of those only 1,540 on heavy ICBMs and 1,100 on mobile missiles. In two separate documents (not part of the treaty but nonetheless considered binding), the two parties agreed that “Backfire” bombers would not have intercontinental range, and that both sides would limit submarine-launched cruise missiles to 880. These numbers represented a roughly 25 percent cut in the total strategic nuclear forces of the two powers at that time. This was substantial progress compared to what had been achieved in the past, and it was the first ever reduction in superpower strategic nuclear forces. In light of the changed political circumstances, however, it was more modest than it might have been. And, as it turned out, the treaty drew little sustained attention from the public.¹³⁷

More important than the START treaty’s numbers were its elaborate provisions for inspection and verification. These arms control elements had stymied superpower progress throughout the Cold War, because of the powerful, mutual lack of trust between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1991, however, both sides agreed to inspection provisions more intrusive than those developed for the INF treaty. President Bush followed this initiative with unilateral cuts, the removal of all bombers (and all ICBMs scheduled to be decommissioned) from “alert” status; and the removal of all short-range nuclear weapons from abroad, and from Navy ships.¹³⁸ Gorbachev accepted President Bush’s invitation to follow suit, but the precise details of Soviet progress were muddied by internal political unraveling in what was soon to be the “former” USSR.

In the meantime, a young Democrat named Bill Clinton swept Bush out of office in the November 1992 U.S. presidential election. But the new administration continued to proceed carefully; it kept the START framework intact, carefully observed the Russian Federation’s attempts to structure its own post–Cold War nuclear posture, and sought to track fissile materials in the midst of rapid political change behind the old Iron Curtain. Clinton and Russian Federation president Boris Yeltsin signed START II in 1993, which had as one of its goals the limitation of both sides to between 3,000 and 3,500 warheads by January 2003. In May 1995 the U.S. and Russia agreed to a “Joint Statement on Transparency and Irreversibility” intended to lock in the reductions of START I and II.¹³⁹

Though the U.S. Senate ratified START II in 1996, the Russian Duma refrained from doing so. This reluctance was fueled in part by new concerns over the ABM treaty, and hostility toward the expansion of NATO. In 1997 a START II protocol was signed, which delayed the completion of phases I and II of force reductions (to 2004 and 2007, respectively) in order to ease the cost to Russia of dismantling weapons. In addition the U.S. agreed to commence START III as soon as START II entered into force—the overall aim being to bring the total number of warheads down to 2,000–2,5000 by 2007.¹⁴⁰

Political disarray in the former Soviet Union and the war in Chechnya became obstacles to continued arms control progress in Europe, following the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty of the early 1990s. Indeed, it was not until November 1999 that an agreement came into existence on the “Adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.” One of the biggest problems facing the Clinton administration through the 1990s was the political deterioration inside the former Soviet Union, and the challenges this posed for securing and destroying nuclear material. The nuclear arsenals that had been bought at such great cost and that were so highly valued were now a physical liability: nuclear sites had to be guarded, material had to be safely destroyed, and the environmental impact had to be responsibly considered. Economic strain put the Russian scientific community into a state of “protracted crisis” that “gave Russian scientists both greater incentives and greater opportunities to sell their knowledge to governments or terrorist organizations that harbor hostile intentions toward the United States and other Western democracies.”¹⁴¹

In 1991 Senators Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) and Sam Nunn (D-Georgia) developed the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to lessen the nuclear threat at its source by deactivating and destroying weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the former Soviet Union, and to help former Soviet weapons scientists retrain and work for peace. Since that time, resources provided by Nunn-Lugar have helped to deactivate or destroy more than 6,700 nuclear warheads. In 2003 Congress adopted the Nunn-Lugar Expansion Act, which authorized work outside the Soviet Union to address proliferation and WMD security threats. And in November 2005 Senators Lugar and Barak Obama (D-Illinois) introduced legislation to find and secure vulnerable stockpiles of conventional weapons, and also to aid U.S. allies in finding and interdicting WMD.¹⁴² Despite U.S. efforts to address these problems, however, the issues of weapons proliferation, technology transfer, and, especially, “loose nukes” are likely to remain high on the national security agenda; indeed, they are a principal concern of scientists, diplomats, and statesmen.¹⁴³

In general, the 1990s saw both progress and frustration in arms control. Though the Nonproliferation Treaty was extended indefinitely in 1995, nuclear and non-nuclear states continued to spar over the pace of disarmament. In addition, the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of 1998 aroused considerable discomfort around the world, and revealed problems in the global nonproliferation regime. In 1999 the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) lacked a binding verification and compliance agreement. Finally, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) of 1997 had a bumpy reception around the world, with several key Middle Eastern states choosing to remain outside its reach.¹⁴⁴

As the Cold War drew to a close, several policy analysts argued that the global political landscape might now include more tension, strife, and war than had been the case during the Cold War years. Events proved them correct, as troubles erupted in a range of locations around the globe, including the ethnically mixed regions of what had been the nation of Yugoslavia. Tensions boiled over into conflict, and on two occasions the Western powers intervened with air strikes, using them in an effort to change the behavior of ethnic Serbians toward Bosnian Muslims, and later Kosovar Albanians. In the former case air power was used (in 1995) as a lever with which to help bring recalcitrant forces to the negotiating table. In the latter case—the brief but troubled Kosovo War of 1999—NATO used strategic air power to try to stop the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign being waged against Kosovar Albanians. The Kosovo War will not be remembered as one of the landmark events of the late twentieth century: the war that had started in March was over by June, and NATO was able claim victory in its first-ever test in actual battle against a far weaker opponent. Nonetheless, this odd little war, which may garner only a couple of paragraphs in as yet unwritten general histories, may well be studied in detail by those who seek to understand strategic bombing as a tool of war.

The success of precision bombing in the Gulf War of 1991 had prompted the Air Force to shape its future with an eye fixed upon precision capability. By the end of the decade the service had developed a bombing force of unprecedented accuracy. The United States had no true strategic stake in Kosovo, but the very existence of the air power tool may have tempted the Clinton administration to intervene—and to do so in a way that would minimize the risk to U.S. combatants (and thus, so it was assumed, minimize the potential domestic opposition to war). In the event, the air campaign did not halt the ethnic cleansing, and, indeed, probably accelerated it. But Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic finally capitulated—and did so prior to any NATO ground forces being deployed. The outcome naturally enabled air advocates to claim that air power had won a war on its own. But the course of the war raised difficult questions about the use of coercive force from high altitude.¹⁴⁵

Serbian troops were able to offset the power of U.S. precision weapons by using cover, concealment, and deception; after many weeks of heavy bombing, the Serb forces (including infantry and tanks) had endured only minimal damage. Frustrated by the lack of progress, NATO planners increasingly targeted Serbian industrial and economic infrastructure in order to raise the level of public pressure on Milosevic. Naturally this meant attacking locations frequented by noncombatants. And the results of these attacks—including such things as the collapse of the electrical power grid—involved suffering for noncombatants, especially among those who are most vulnerable in such situations: children, the infirm, and the elderly.¹⁴⁶ In addition, the reasons for Milosevic’s capitulation remain unclear, and the course of the war suggests that it would be unwise to draw a simple straight line from bombing to victory.¹⁴⁷

In 1999 and 2000 George W. Bush had run a presidential campaign that emphasized reorienting American foreign policy away from humanitarian intervention, and, especially, away from nation-building. Instead, the administration was interested in developing a ballistic missile defense system to help cope with threats posed by a wide array of potential adversaries, and leveraging new technologies for security. In particular, the new Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was prepared to pit himself against entrenched Pentagon interests to create a smaller, lighter, and more nimble American military centered on high technology. But the administration barely had had enough time to move the nation in a new direction when a handful of al-Qaeda terrorists redirected the entire U.S. national security agenda by flying airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Shortly thereafter the administration sent troops to Afghanistan to take down the Taliban regime that had been harboring al-Qaeda operatives within its borders. While the administration felt compelled to strike at al-Qaeda right away, it chose to do so using the force structure preferences emphasized by Rumsfeld. His insistence on a slimmed-down, high-tech use of military means meant reliance on long range, precision stand-off weapons employed with the aid of U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) for the support of indigenous ground troops (the Northern Alliance) operating against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Because of the shadowy nature of al-Qaeda, targeting information was slim. The U.S. Air Force struck such infrastructure as there was in Afghanistan. When this did not coerce the various elements of the Taliban (including al-Qaeda), the USAF joined the effort to use ground-based SOF—working in conjunction with indigenous friendly forces in Afghanistan—to attack elements of the enemy dispersed through various regions of the country. The operation in Afghanistan was generally considered a success, and was surely interpreted that way by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, even though some key al-Qaeda leaders escaped across the Afghan border into Pakistan.

While the Afghanistan campaign was ongoing, the Bush Administration was at work modifying and updating the formal, written “National Security Strategy” (NSS) of the United States. The September 2002 document acknowledged the “profound transformation” of the security environment for the United States following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but pointed to the “deadly challenges” emerging from rogue states and terrorists. While recognizing that the new threats did not control the same overall destructive power as the Soviets did, the NSS authors argued that the “greater likelihood” of terrorists and rogue states to use weapons of mass destruction made the existing security environment “more complex and dangerous.”¹⁴⁸

Significantly, the new NSS argued that since “deterrence based only on the threat of retaliation” was unlikely to work in the new security environment, the United States would have to reserve for itself the right to take preemptive action against imminent threats. This was not new; as we have seen, NSC 68 reserved the same right. But the “preemption” passages in the new NSS drew a lot of attention, and made many observers—especially foreign observers—uneasy, since it was not clear how Americans would define “preemption” in the post 9/11 world. This kind of speculation grew more voluble as it became clear that many in the Bush Administration were increasingly intent upon bringing down the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. For a variety of reasons—including, most prominently, the widespread assumption that Saddam possessed WMD and was likely to transfer them to terrorists—the momentum toward a preemptive attack on Iraq grew, facilitated in part by the emphasis given to it by Bush’s powerful vice president, Richard Cheney. An invasion of the country was launched in March 2003.¹⁴⁹

The invasion plan integrated air, ground, and naval attacks. The opening stages of the battle, however, saw aerial pyrotechnics over Baghdad—a display of American precision bombing that seemed like a made-for-TV event, right down to its oft-repeated media moniker: “shock and awe.” At the same time the Air Force waged an attack on the Dora Farms complex when real time intelligence indicated that Saddam Hussein might be located there. But Saddam was neither killed nor, apparently, shocked, and the war moved into its next phase, which saw the Air Force cripple enemy air defenses, and degrade enemy communications. Due to American strength and preponderance, the USAF was able to attack a wide range of targets simultaneously, and was able to continue to hammer enemy forces, even as weather halted the ground offensive for a time.¹⁵⁰

One of the major ongoing debates about the future use of strategic air power pits proponents of the Warden systems approach (with its heavy emphasis on leadership) against proponents of battlefield effects. In his recent book, Air Power, Stephen Budiansky has argued that operations in Afghanistan and in Iraq (2003) have largely discredited the Warden theory, or any “shock and awe” approach, and have instead validated the idea that air power’s greatest contribution is to be made on the battlefield against fielded forces.¹⁵¹

This debate has taken place alongside another one that examines the use of overwhelming military force against enemies that choose to fight via guerrilla and terrorist tactics. This discussion has shadowed the unfolding of events in Iraq following the brief and successful invasion phase of the war. High hopes for the emergence of a model democracy have been slowly trampled by a low-intensity but ever-expanding civil war that has seen resistance by a Sunni minority against the Shi’ite and Kurdish populations—and, more recently, a split within the Shi’ite community that has further aggravated a deteriorating situation.

The American nuclear arsenal—a structure built and repeatedly remodeled during the Cold War—was in place so long that it became part of the strategic landscape. The assumptions and mechanisms for operating it became so embedded that they have been resistant to change; only slowly and carefully have analysts and operators begun to pull themselves away from the familiar tropes and routines that were designed to provide stability in the bipolar world of the post-1945 era. Careful steps and a policy of watchful waiting characterized the approach taken by both the Bush (1989–1993) and Clinton (1993–2001) administrations. Even today the U.S. and Russia maintain launch-ready arsenals of more than seven thousand nuclear warheads; when both nations pare back to the 2,000-weapon goal of the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) of 2002, the result will be little more than a scaled-down version of the former paradigm.¹⁵² And SORT, as one nuclear analyst has pointed out, allows for large non-deployed reserves of nuclear weapons, “some of which could be re-deployed in hours.”¹⁵³

These most recent reductions, agreed to by Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush, should continue; indeed, keeping them on track is a worthwhile goal. But provisions to merely dismantle the weapons rather than destroy them speaks to a kind of psychological dependence that is more about habit than about the strategic realities of the twenty-first century. Arguments for deep cuts in the arsenal have been presented by a wide array of politicians and strategic thinkers, including—among other members of the military—General Lee Butler, a former head of Strategic Air Command. These arguments rest on several assumptions about the potential effect of deep cuts: (1) they would not adversely affect U.S. security; (2) they would eliminate weapons that have little military use and have been stigmatized by the international community; and (3) they would reduce the risk of accident, and the built-in instability of “launch on warning” policies.¹⁵⁴

The Bush Administration’s “Nuclear Posture Review” (NPR) of January 2002 responded to the events of 9/11 by asserting a new blueprint designed to integrate nuclear and non-nuclear forces for the purpose of deterring a wide range of future threats.¹⁵⁵ Animated by a sense of urgency, Bush Administration planners began seeking out ways in which the existing arsenal (and a modified future arsenal) might be used to bolster deterrence against two classes of enemies: (1) adversaries who have acquired or are attempting to acquire nuclear weapons; and (2) adversaries who have the capability (or potential capability) to produce and use chemical and biological weapons. The NPR sought to translate into the nuclear realm the shift—articulated earlier in the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review—from “threat-based planning” to “capabilities-based planning.” In its style, intent, and tone it remained squarely within the American tradition, articulated clearly in NSC 68, of seeking to deter and manage enemies by outgunning and overwhelming them. In addition, the Bush administration went forward with the creation of a ballistic missile defense system. Though the system currently deployed is designed to meet a limited, near-term ballistic missile threat, the administration envisions expansion and evolution of the program as the technologies develop to support a more elaborate defensive shield.¹⁵⁶

The NPR asserted a “new strategic triad” of offensive strike systems (nuclear and non-nuclear), passive and active defenses, and a revitalized infrastructure including improved command, control, and intelligence. It promised doctrinal innovation, most prominently the integration of nuclear and non-nuclear strike forces in order to deter a wide range of threats. Going beyond the well-established concept of deterring nuclear attacks by threatening nuclear retaliation (potentially massive in scale), the NPR’s authors argued that the United States should be prepared to use nuclear weapons in a wide range of scenarios, including conflicts with “emerging threats,” to include Iran and North Korea. While the available portions of the NPR do not outline the details of any probable employment of nuclear weapons, they surely retain the option of nuclear strikes (either preemptive or retaliatory) against enemy weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including chemical and biological weapons (CBW).

By asserting that the United States would use nuclear retaliation against chemical or biological attacks, the authors of the NPR hoped to preserve and indeed bolster the strategic ambiguity that aids deterrence. NPR authors and supporters took the view that adversaries might be deterred from creating or using CBW if they believe that such use might bring nuclear retaliation. NPR critics, however, have argued vigorously in another direction, pointing out that threatening the use of nuclear weapons against enemy CBW would provide little or no additional deterrent effect, and—by emphasizing the military utility of nuclear weapons—would compromise nonproliferation conventions that the U.S. has championed over the years. Critics have insisted that the U.S. instead can deter CBW attacks (and strike CBW arsenals) with its formidable existing array of conventional weapons. Other commentators, however, have distinguished between retaliatory use and preemptive use of nuclear weapons, arguing that to own a capability and threaten to use it is not equivalent to condoning the use of that capability preemptively. While the latter would violate international norms, and perhaps encourage proliferation, the former would do neither.¹⁵⁷

Another controversial element of the NPR document has been its focus on precision strike capabilities, including the construction of low-yield, highly accurate nuclear weapons designed to destroy heavily hardened and deeply buried targets, including CBW arsenals and command and control bunkers. Those envisioning the new earth-penetrating weapons (EPW) believe that they would enhance deterrence against emerging threats, and that, if employed, they would be able to attack buried targets with more limited fallout than traditional nuclear weapons. Critics have decried the prospect of the United States getting back into the realm of nuclear testing in order to design a new generation weapon with specialized properties; they fear that such activity would undermine the prevailing moratorium on testing. Other commentators, while seriously questioning whether EPWs would in fact produce less fallout, have argued that it would be possible to construct them based on existing warhead designs, thus sidestepping the requirement for a resumption of nuclear testing.¹⁵⁸

Even before 9/11 the Air Force had begun to assimilate and consolidate the most productive developments and adaptations emerging from the first Gulf War and the conflicts in the Balkans. At the top of the priority list were: time-critical targeting, all-weather precision, restrictive rules of engagement (ROE), collateral damage control, and access to enemy air space. In addition, the USAF took particular note of the utility of integrating air and space operations—a lesson made widely apparent in both the Gulf War and Balkan operations.¹⁵⁹ In 1985 the Joint Chiefs had established U.S. Space Command as a new unified command; this move recognized and confirmed the increasing utility of space assets for military operations. Over the next fifteen years, the Air Force continued to draw linkages between air warfare and space assets. With a particular focus on guaranteeing access to enemy airspace, the USAF inaugurated the Global Strike Task Force (GSTF) as the service’s contribution to the nation’s “kick-down-the door-force.” In 2001 Air Force Chief of Staff, General John Jumper argued that “GSTF will rapidly establish air dominance and subsequently guarantee that joint aerospace, land, and sea forces will enjoy freedom from attack and freedom to attack. It will combine stealth and advanced weapons with a horizontally integrated command, control, control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C²ISR) constellation that provides lethal joint battle-space capability.”¹⁶⁰

After 9/11 the “Global Strike” concept gave teeth and operational planning support to both deterrence and long-range strike options, including the preemptive attack concepts outlined in the declaratory policy asserted in both the 2002 NPR and NSS. In October 2002, the Department of Defense merged U.S. Space Command with STRATCOM; this produced what was functionally (if not in name) a new command “intended to synergize the best of both previous commands to yield a flexible, globally focused command with a disciplined planning underpinning.”¹⁶¹ In January 2003 President Bush asked STRATCOM to take on four new responsibilities: global strike, missile defense integration, Department of Defense Information Operations, and C⁴ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance).¹⁶² Earlier in the year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had issued updated planning guidance that directed the military to prepare to undertake “unwarned strikes … from a position of forward deterrence.” This evolution of the Global Strike concept, analyst William Arkin explains, “was partly in response to the realization that the military had no plans for certain situations. The possibility that some nations would acquire the ability to attack the United States directly with a WMD, for example, had clearly fallen between the command structure’s cracks.” It resulted in CONPLAN 8022–02, for “imminent” threats from such states as North Korea and Iran.¹⁶³

An updated National Security Strategy of March 2006 reaffirmed the Bush Administration’s commitment to preemption. In light of history, this should not be surprising; after all, the right to preemption claimed by the Bush Administration is one that Americans claimed in NSC 68, and retained (if sometimes in low profile), thereafter. And the rhetoric of the Global Strike concept (“a rapid-reaction, leading edge, power-projection concept that will deliver massive around the clock firepower”) is of a piece with the overwhelming dominance ideas articulated in NSC 68—ideas that are resonant with Americans, and that have come to define U.S. responses to national security threats. But to recognize that these ideas are inside a preferred American paradigm is not to condone them. In writing about “Global Strike,” William Arkin has called for a national debate on it, not only because public articulation of the plan might enhance its deterrent aspects, but also because the plan in general—in particular the nuclear component—deserves to be thoroughly examined, for all the reasons that past U.S. nuclear doctrine was examined in the public realm. “Though CONPLAN 8022 suggests a clean, short-duration strike intended to protect American security,” Arkin wrote, “a preemptive surprise attack (let alone one involving a nuclear weapon option) would unleash a multitude of additional and unanticipated consequences. So, on both counts, why aren’t we talking about it?”

In the years right after the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union circled one another warily. American atomic weapons and an expanding basing program for strategic forces worried the Soviets, just as the large Soviet ground army and expansionist, ideological Soviet rhetoric worried the Americans. The Czech crisis of 1948, and the Berlin Crisis of the same year signaled a worsening relationship. Following the shocks of the Soviet atomic bomb and the fall of China in 1949, Paul Nitze of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff found that the time was right to articulate and argue for an aggressive U.S. national security policy that called for a major commitment to defense spending, and to the development of large conventional and nuclear forces. The following summer the war in Korea prompted a reluctant President Truman to begin implementing this blueprint.

In many ways, the United States has never departed from NSC 68’s call for across-the-board dominance as a means of providing for national security. Once the incentives and institutions were in place to support and undergird the architecture of the plan, they became difficult to modify—even when modification was warranted. And once the rhetoric of an aggressive, dominance-seeking Soviet Union had taken hold in the American mind, it became very easy, politically, to trumpet new calls to arms to ward off weakness, or second-class status in the superpower clash of the titans. Given the reality of the particularly pernicious security dilemma produced by postwar bipolarity, a dramatically different outcome may not have been possible. But one must wonder, nonetheless, if the Americans did not manage to give a self-sustaining quality to the competition—and the arms race born of that competition—because of the particular nature of our political and economic systems. And one must wonder, as well, if our own elaborate charts, graphs, and equations did not help to paint our fears in bright colors—and thus make them seem more vivid and more daunting. In 1981 Warner Schilling speculated that, “Given the complexities involved, it is plausible that the actual military capabilities which the United States has maintained during the past decade in the name of strategic equality owe more to the end products of the bureaucratic and Executive-Congressional politics of acquisition policy than they do to the formal guidelines for employment policy that have been associated with the strategic doctrines of sufficiency, equivalence, or countervailing power.”¹⁶⁴ It was a prescient observation.

The nature of the nuclear arms race took a particularly unusual and ironic direction. The dynamics that caused both sides to continue to build up arms in response to one another, led—ultimately—to weapon systems that were so absurdly powerful as to have no utility outside the role of deterrence. There was no political stake for which superpower nuclear warfare was a suitable or reasonable instrument of attainment. And yet the race—and the arms build-up—continued, obtuse to reason beyond its own internal logic. We are fortunate that the potential consequences of nuclear war did not escape policymakers on either side of the Iron Curtain. Though there were surely tense times and some close calls, decision-makers picked their way through a decades-long minefield—perhaps with the heightened sensory awareness that comes when one knows that a single false step could be one’s last.

But as we breathe a sigh of relief at having survived the most tense moments of the Cold War, we must acknowledge the general failure of efforts to provide the commander-in-chief with more genuinely limited nuclear warfighting options—and more comprehensive forms of command and control—than those produced by the bureaucratized war-planning mechanisms of the various military services. The dilemma that so troubled Secretary McNamara in the early 1960s never went away entirely; should war have come, this monstrous problem would have been exacerbated by the inherent limits to rationality posed by the problem of having to respond within an absurdly short decision cycle, and in the environment of imperfect information that always characterizes wartime. The latter has not changed, despite the “information revolution” of recent decades. Ever-improving command and control capabilities, including space assets, are likely to tempt future presidents toward the direct control of the U.S. strategic arsenal. But the Dora Farms strike in the opening phase of the 2003 Iraq War might serve as a cautionary tale in this regard. The ability to attain information is not a guarantee that the information will be reliable.

Clearly, a case can and should be made for maintaining a capacity to hold enemy assets at risk through strategic weapons that can be employed immediately and from a long distance. And a case can be made, as well, for retaining some portion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Several regional powers, including North Korea and Iran, have nuclear ambitions and interests opposed to those of the United States, and China surely has the potential to pose a major threat to U.S. interests in the future. Deterrence against enemies with no return address is more difficult, but the Bush Administration’s efforts to leverage what it can against these enemies is hardly misplaced. What is essential, though, is that the strategic arsenal—including the chemical and biological arsenal—be tailored to the requirements of deterring a new kind of enemy while not furthering trends toward proliferation, or creating regional or crisis instability. If the Americans managed to pick their way through the many hazards of the Cold War, they did so by constantly debating their choices and revisiting their assumptions. The contemporary threats posed to U.S. security deserve the same priority; the discussion about them needs to be open and wide-ranging—and it should command the attention of the best minds in the nation.¹⁶⁵

In addition, the record—since 1945—of the warfighting use of strategic air forces (armed with conventional weapons) should provide guidance and insight to administrations tempted to use this tool in the future. In the realm of air warfare there has always been a propensity to discount the past as any sort of guide to the future. Airmen were, after all, a self-selected population who kept their focus forward on the horizon.¹⁶⁶ But if ongoing improvements in precision, intelligence, target acquisition, and strike capability continue to refine and empower the strategic air mission, they cannot—of themselves—force warfare to become a less complex and confusing business, immune to human emotion and calculations that fall entirely outside the realm of rationality. The lessons that Carl von Clausewitz taught in the nineteenth century still hold, even for the high-tech strategic warriors of the new millennium.

1. See Thomas Schelling’s analysis of “coercion” and “brute force” (and also the distinctions and overlap between them) in Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), esp. pp. 1–34 (“The Diplomacy of Violence”). Coercion is the use (by a state or political actor) of a threat in order to achieve an aim. The threat to inflict pain operates like blackmail; it exploits an enemy’s fears and needs. It operates best when it is held in reserve, but the power to hurt—to inflict harm on enemy assets—can also be communicated by some performance of it. By contrast, “brute force” involves taking what one wants by sheer force. It operates best when it is used, can be directly measured, and is associated principally with armies. There is no clear divide between coercion and brute force in war (the act of long range bombardment involves both coercion and brute force, for instance), but the two operate by distinct mechanisms. Strategic forces, by threatening to inflict prompt and direct pain on an enemy, can structure an enemy’s motives and thus influence its political behavior.

7. See James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford, 1996), 121–22. And, in line with past practice, Truman demobilized the wartime military quickly. On V-J day U.S. armed forces consisted of 91 Army and 6 Marine divisions (combat ready), a vast array of aircraft organized into 213 combat groups, and 1,166 combat vessels in the Navy. Twenty-two months later, the armed forces had shrunk down to ten under-strength Army divisions (only two of which were combat ready), two under-strength Marine divisions, an air service with only eleven operational groups (out of 63 total), and a Navy of 343 combat ships.

34. The militarization of American foreign policy, American politics, and American life generally is traced brilliantly in Sherry’s In the Shadow of War. On the early Cold War see in particular, 123–87 (and, on the impact of the Korean war, 183–87). For a continuation of this argument in a more recent context, see Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

40. Gaddis offers an expert analysis of Eisenhower’s perspective in, Strategies of Containment, 127–36; see also McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival, 236–318; Scott D. Sagan, Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 18–24; Richard Immerman and Robert Bowie, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Aaron Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

57. Ibid., 142. On 145 he adds: “A national primer on the mechanics of spaceflight arrived on millions of doorsteps two weeks after the fact [of Sputnik] in the pages of Life magazine. But among the scientific stories and charts was editorial material that instructed the American people to panic and told them that their wiser neighbors already had.” (Italics in original.)

69. On command and control issues generally, see Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Bruce G. Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1985); Peter D. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

106. Smoke National Security and the Nuclear Dilemma, 159. He argues that the United States missed another opportunity to place serious constraints on MIRVs, right as SALT I was being signed. On nuclear issues in the 1970s, see also Warner Schilling, “U.S. Strategic Nuclear Concepts in the 1970s” International Security 6 no. 2 (Fall 1981) reprinted in Steven E. Miller ed., Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 183–214; also, generally, Jerome H. Kahan, Security in the Nuclear Age (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1975).

117. Smoke, National Security and the Nuclear Dilemma, 211–12; Rearden, “U.S. Strategic Bombardment Doctrine” p. 445. Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski have written: “Reagan understood that his strategic grand design required grand budgets. Communicating his proposals with a relaxed, jocular militancy that soothed his constituents and frightened the rest of the world, the President proposed and Congress accepted—without major alteration—six years (FY 1980–FY 1985) of increased defense spending, the longest sustained peacetime investment in the armed forces in the twentieth century.” See Millett and Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America, rev. ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 615–16.

119. In his robustly argued book, which is based in part on extensive interviews with Reagan’s advisors, Lettow adds: “He intended that SDI would catalyze the total elimination of nuclear weapons. An effective missile defense, he believed, would make not just ballistic missiles but all nuclear arms negotiable.” See Lettow’s introduction, esp. ix–x (quoted material at x).

133. Daniel Haulman, One Hundred Years of Flight: USAF Chronology of Significant Air and Space Events (Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 2003), 141. By 1998 the USAF was in the midst of further change, moving toward implementation of a plan that would divide its combat strength, and the elements supporting that strength, into ten “Aerospace Expeditionary Forces” (AEFs). This shift was undertaken in order to enhance joint operations, and to make the service more responsive to the international environment and changing national strategy. See Richard G. Davis, Anatomy of a Reform: The Expeditionary Aerospace Force (Washington, D.C.: The Air Force History and Museums Program, 2003).

145. Many of the most important questions are addressed in Andrew J. Bacevich and Eliot Cohen, eds. War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). For an overview of the air war, see the essay by William Arkin “Operation Allied Force” (pp. 1–37); on the political appeal of precision bombing, see the essay by Eliot Cohen, “Kosovo and the New American Way of War” (pp. 38–62).

147. More work remains to be undertaken on this issue, but a start has been made by: Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000); Benjamin Lambeth, NATO’s Air War for Kosovo (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001); and Stephen Hosmer, Why Milosevic Decided to Settle When He Did (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001).