For most of the Cold War, three words dictated the game theory outcomes behind military strategies: mutually assured destruction. At any moment, the United States and its NATO allies could volley nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union, destroying the Russians in the process. The Soviets, however, could do the same to the Western powers. If either side acted, the other would have ample time to react. Who shot first would hardly matter, as in the end, we’d all suffer the same fate.
Which is exactly what Richard Nixon counted on.
On October 10, 1969, the United States military was ordered to prepare for war. As the Boston Globe would recount three and a half decades later, “nuclear armed fighter planes were dispersed to civilian airports, missile countdown procedures were initiated, missile-bearing submarines were dispersed, long-range bombers were launched, targeting was begun.” The American military was ready to start World War III.
But if America was about to defeat the Communists, it didn’t make headlines; the country was more interested in the New York Mets’ ultimate triumph over the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. The average citizen had little knowledge of the ramp-up to war. The same could be said for the servicemen involved, for that matter. Very little context, if any, was provided—America was not provoked in any meaningful way leading up to the readiness alert, and no rationale for this upsurge in activity made its way down the chain of command.
And then, things got even crazier. On October 27, the U.S. Strategic Air Command dispatched bombers armed with thermonuclear warheads, ordering them to fly over Alaska and toward the Soviet Union. For three days, the bombers circled around the Arctic, just out of Soviet airspace, awaiting further instruction. Stateside, few people—and nearly no civilians—had any idea this was going on. But it certainly caught the attention of the powers-that-be in Moscow.
Nixon’s gambit was an attempt to make the Soviet Union think he was crazy. His strategy, later termed the “madman theory,” was based on the idea that even the slightest provocation by the Soviets would result in Nixon blowing a figurative gasket, tossing nukes at the USSR as a sign of American strength, and not really giving a you-know-what about the consequences. The Soviets could be convinced of his own irrationality, Nixon surmised, and the odds of Soviet aggression would be greatly reduced.
It is unlikely that the “madman theory” ended up paying dividends. For much of 1969, the Soviet Union and China were engaged in a border dispute, a culmination of the ongoing deterioration of Soviet and Chinese relations. While the incipient conflict wound down in September of that year, negotiations over the delineation of the two nations’ borders again heated up at around the same time Nixon feigned madness. More likely than not, Soviet leadership saw America’s bombers not as the evidence of insanity that Nixon hoped, but rather that of a strategic decision to support China in case the two Communist nations went to war.
Lyndon Baines Johnson occupied the White House just before Richard Nixon did, and LBJ may have had the better resume when it came to faking people out. According to the National Park Service, LBJ would drive guests around in his blue car and, while rolling down a hill toward a lake, scream that the brakes were out and that he and his passengers were about to be in big trouble. But the joke was on his guests—the blue car was an Amphicar, a German-made amphibious automobile designed to float on the water’s surface.