For the Common Defense

by Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski

  In 1955 Eisenhower assigned missile development the highest priority in military research and development. In part, the president had been persuaded by the report of his own Technical Capabilities Panel, chaired by Dr. Killian, which emphasized the growing Soviet nuclear threat and recommended a major American effort. The Air Force had already anticipated the change by establishing a special office to develop two ICBMs, the Titan and Atlas. The key specifications for the missiles were that they have a 5,500-mile range and carry a 1-megaton warhead. With Defense Department approval, the Air Force also went ahead with its intermediate-range missile and intercontinental cruise missile programs. Technically these programs were more advanced than the ICBM program and produced the Thor IRBM for deployment in 1958 and the Snark cruise missile in 1957. The Army pressed ahead with its own IRBM, Jupiter, which also passed its tests in the same period. The Air Force was already at work on a second-generation ICBM, called Minuteman, which was designed to use solid fuel, have a fully developed inertial guidance system, and be built strongly enough to place in deep, survivable concrete silos. The first-generation ICBMs, IRBMs, and Snark had the same disadvantages as the bomber force: They took time to ready for firing, and they had to be launched above ground, making a tempting target for a first strike. By 1960 the Air Force had twelve Atlas ICBMs and thirty Snarks based in the United States and four Thor squadrons stationed in England. Work on the promising Minuteman continued with ample funding.

  The Navy slipped into the nuclear deterrence mission by winning official approval of its own IRBM program in the 1955 decision to give missiles high priority. The Navy, of course, had demanded nuclear weapons in the late 1940s but had thought primarily in terms of arming its carrier aircraft. Its post-Korea carriers, six vessels of the Forrestal class and the nuclear-powered Enterprise, had been designed for a flight deck compatible with a new aircraft, the Douglas A 3 D Skywarrior, a true nuclear bomber. In 1954 all the Navy’s deployed carriers bore nuclear weapons to strike Soviet ports and naval forces.

  In the mid-1950s the Navy changed course. For one thing, it had a launch platform that met the test of survivability—the nuclear-powered submarine. Driven by Hyman G. Rickover, an engineering officer of genius and irascibility, the Navy had built its first nuclear-powered submarine, Nautilus, operational in 1955. An expert at bureaucratic politics, Rickover had built a nuclear power coalition that included his own Navy staff, the Atomic Energy Commission (in which he also held office), Congress, and the Westinghouse and General Electric corporations. Rickover saw “his” nuclear submarines as weapons to attack ships, but a new chief of naval operations, Arleigh A. Burke, saw the nuclear submarine as a missile carrier for submerged strikes at land targets. The Navy, however, did not have a missile, since it had worked primarily on the Regulus cruise missile for both warships and surfaced submarines. In 1957 Burke redirected the Navy IRBM program toward a solid-fueled missile that could be launched from a submerged submarine. For the missile he followed the Air Force model and created a Special Projects Office, whose staff, the AEC, and the Lockheed Corporation produced the 1,500-mile Polaris missile by 1960. Because the missile had a limited payload and accuracy, its warhead could destroy only an area target. Nevertheless, the relative invulnerability of the launch platform made the fleet ballistic missile (FBM) an attractive addition to the deterrent force.

  The White House and the Russians assisted Burke. To review the effectiveness of America’s nuclear posture, the Science Advisory Committee to the Office of Defense Mobilization had established a special “security resources panel” in April 1957. When this group, known as the Gaither Committee, made its report the following November, the Sputnik crisis gave its study special importance. The Gaither Committee report emphasized the nation’s vulnerability to a nuclear attack and the pitiable state of its air-defense and civil defense programs. The only thing that stood between the United States and atomic Armageddon was SAC’s bombers. The Gaither Committee did not think SAC should bear the burden alone. When the Navy in 1957 proposed that it develop three missile submarines, the administration authorized five submarines and moved the operational date forward from 1962 to 1960. Rickover cooperated in supporting the construction of fleet ballistic missile submarines, as long as they were nuclear-powered. In 1960 the first George Washington–class fleet ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) went on patrol with sixteen Polaris sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM).

  More military miracles occurred in the cloistered Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos laboratories of the Atomic Energy Commission. In less than a decade after the first fusion explosion, nuclear scientists and engineers discovered ways to reduce dramatically the size of nuclear weapons. The first fusion device had been 22 feet long; the nuclear warhead for the Army’s Davy Crockett mortar was only 2 feet long and 12 inches in diameter. The redesign of the gun-type trigger and the use of extremely dense metal alloys permitted chain reactions with diminishing amounts of radioactive material. At a time when the published minimal amount of radioactive material for a weapon was around 50 pounds, the real minimum was probably around 12 pounds of plutonium and 22 pounds of enriched uranium. Smaller warheads meant a wider variety of delivery vehicles—ground- and air-launched ballistic and cruise missiles, depth charges, torpedoes, artillery shells, rockets, and mines. Behind the imprecise rhetoric of “massive retaliation” rested an awesome fact: The United States could manufacture literally thousands of nuclear warheads for its armed forces. Between 1953 and 1959 the number of warheads soared from 1,161 to 12,305.

  The flood of nuclear weapons into America’s arsenal did not exhaust the military efforts to blunt the Soviet threat, for both the Air Force and Army searched for ways to create an effective air-defense system. The search was expensive and frustrating. As one Air Force chief of staff mused, “active air defense is a can of worms.” No one knew precisely how much the Defense Department put into air defense, but the figure probably reached $40 billion for the 1950s. When the Russian threat appeared to be a bomber strike, the air-defense planners managed to win sufficient funds for a plausible system, but the bureaucratic battle between the services for the mission gave air defense a sour flavor. In 1956 Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson ruled that the Air Force would handle area air defense, the Army point air defense. The decision actually reversed the services’ interests, for the Air Force wanted point air defense of SAC bases, while the Army argued that sufficient numbers of its “Nike” family of conventional and nuclear surface-to-air missiles could provide effective area air defense if assisted by Air Force supersonic interceptors. The growth of the Air Force’s own air-defense missile program, Bomarc, complicated the issue, which was then further confused when it became apparent that the threat would come from ICBMs, not bombers. The Army argued that a new missile, Nike-Zeus, could intercept ballistic warheads. The Air Force, however, wanted rapid development of a satellite-based air-defense system. The only clear area of agreement was that the nation needed a better warning system, and the administration started work on the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) in 1957.

  As the nation’s nuclear forces proliferated, defense planners became increasingly aware that they had no single plan for using these forces should deterrence fail. More important, it had become difficult to judge the relative utility of SAC’s bombers and missiles compared to the Navy’s carrier aircraft and SLBMs against the targets they had to threaten to make deterrence credible. A gnawing sense of costly redundancy plagued defense analysts. In 1960 Secretary of Defense Thomas S. Gates created the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (JSTPS) and charged it with building one plan from SAC’s “Emergency War Plan” and the Navy’s comparable documents. In part the JSTPS had to reconcile two different visions of nuclear deterrence. The Navy stressed the importance of holding Soviet cities hostage; the Air Force argued that Soviet strategic forces should be the primary targets, a position that meant that warhead numbers and accuracies should expand in proportion to an ever-increasing num
ber of Soviet military targets. When the JSTPS produced its first “Single Integrated Operational Plan” (SIOP) in 1961, the plan continued the Air Force emphasis on targeting Soviet nuclear forces. Russian war-related industry and its Warsaw Pact ground and air forces received lesser priority. In reality a SIOP strike would have also devastated many Soviet metropolitan areas, so “finite” or “countervalue” city-threatening deterrence might be assumed. No planner could predict what level of threat would really deter the Soviets.

  The Eisenhower administration did not view the New Look’s deterrent programs as the only method to assure the nation’s security, for the United States might profit from international arms control agreements. The major issues the administration addressed were nuclear proliferation, surprise attack, and testing. In December 1953 Eisenhower proposed that the peaceful use of nuclear power be encouraged by international cooperation and monitored by an international organization, eventually created as the International Atomic Energy Agency (1957). While such an arrangement could encourage the construction of nuclear power plants, it might also inhibit the spread of nuclear weapons. The administration believed that nuclear power projects would absorb much of the world’s uranium supply; new uranium discoveries confounded this hope. Inhibited by its fear of international verification, the Soviet Union slowed the UN-sponsored talks. The same problems impeded Eisenhower’s second arms control initiative, the “Open Skies” proposal of July 1955. Concerned about the threat of a surprise first strike, Eisenhower proposed that reconnaissance overflights be protected by international agreement. When the United Nations proved uninterested in the proposal, the United States and the U.S.S.R. opened bilateral negotiations, which produced no agreement on aircraft overflights but tacitly accepted the future deployment of reconnaissance satellites.

  The prospect of nuclear proliferation, plus growing evidence that atmospheric testing created health hazards, persuaded the administration to pursue UN talks on restricting nuclear tests. Once more the United States and the U.S.S.R. divided on the timing and extent of verification procedures. By 1958 the talks had shifted to international scientific meetings on the technical problems of detecting nuclear explosions. These meetings concluded that all but deep underground tests could be unambiguously identified, and seismograph experts believed they could soon tell the difference between an earthquake and even a small (20-kiloton) nuclear explosion. Frustrated by the complexities imposed by United Nations negotiations, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union pursued the talks on a trilateral basis in 1959 and within a year drafted a treaty banning atmospheric and water testing. The U-2 incident stalled the talks in 1960, but the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the threshold of their first major arms control agreement. As France and Communist China were quick to point out, the test ban imposed greater handicaps on the nonnuclear powers than the United States and Russia, but the limited test ban at least cleared the air of radioactivity, if not of international distrust. These negotiations introduced a new element in the U.S.-U.S.S.R. arms competition by suggesting that the risk of nuclear war might be reduced by agreement.

  The growth and diversification of American and Russian strategic forces, paired with the administration’s cautious arms control initiatives, popularized deterrence theory, developed largely by civilian writers. The accumulated effect of the civilians’ analysis was to question the simple vision of deterrence by city-threatening retaliation inherent in massive retaliation. The Gaither Committee report was but one of a series of skeptical studies. Asked to examine SAC basing, the RAND Corporation questioned bombers’ survivability and stressed the importance of invulnerable, nonprovocative second-strike weapons capable, if necessary, of destroying Soviet strategic forces. The doctrine of “counterforce-no cities” emerged in additional RAND analyses, a report by the secretary of defense’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, some Air Force studies, and an open study of defense policy sponsored by the prestigious Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The president’s Scientific Advisory Committee became part of the coalition of strategic revisionists, and within the military Army Chief of Staff Maxwell D. Taylor found common cause with the scientist-engineers and social scientists who emerged as the principal theorists. Among the latter were Bernard Brodie, Albert J. Wohlstetter, William W. Kaufmann, Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger, Charles Hitch, Henry S. Rowen, and Herman Kahn.

  The civilian “defense intellectuals” of the 1950s created a body of thought that became politically influential among the Senate critics of the New Look. The appeal of deterrence theory rested in part on the academic credentials of the principal theorists, almost to a man Ph.D.s in the social sciences. Another factor was the persuasiveness of analytical techniques based on economic theory; numbers spoke louder than words. An additional influence was the growing belief that traditional strategic thought, as developed by military professionals, had no application in a world of nuclear weapons. Some of the new deterrence theory did, in fact, make traditional defense calculations appear obsolete. One concept was that only force survivability really counted and that the Soviets had to perceive that survivability to make deterrence work. Yet the prestrike force should not appear threatening, thus inviting a preemptive attack. Just how a force could be large enough to survive and attack Soviet military targets and not also appear threatening proved an elusive calculation. Another concept was that should deterrence fail, the goal of strategic forces should be to limit the war, thus providing negotiating time. Phrases like “escalation control” and “damage limitation” soon entered the strategic lexicon. Analysis by game theory, psychological modeling, and the measurement of marginal utility further brought strategic analysis by analogy to a high art form. It also provided the intellectual foundation for the dramatic expansion of American strategic forces in the 1960s.

  Reorganization and Alliances

  From its first days in office the Eisenhower administration believed it could organize away some of its defense problems. Even moderate Republicans thought the “failures” of FDR and Harry Truman were linked to their “unorganized” leadership styles. Another article of faith was that the greatest obstacle to economical defense planning was interservice rivalry. Angered that the JCS had supported Truman’s Korean War policies, congressional Republicans pressed Eisenhower to eliminate the “Democratic chiefs,” a policy the president followed by not reappointing the incumbents when their terms expired. The thrust of the New Look’s reorganizational efforts brought increased centralization to the office of the president, the office of the secretary of defense, and the Joint Staff that supported the JCS. But the reforms stopped well short of any true revolution in defense planning, for the Congress did not vote itself out of its shared constitutional responsibilities. The Eisenhower administration’s two fits of reorganization did not make the hard decisions easier. They only increased the number of voices in the process.

  No stranger to organizational problems, Eisenhower struck swiftly in 1953 to strengthen interagency coordination in national security planning. Although he could not announce all his goals, the president sought to limit congressional interference with what he considered presidential business. Eisenhower first institutionalized the National Security Council by making weekly meetings a fixture. More important, he gave his special assistant for national security affairs the power to create a staff. Part of the staff’s function was to prepare weekly agendas and then manage the flow of NSC business through two interagency committees, the Policy Planning Board and the Operations Coordinating Board. The NSC staff in effect became a small, unofficial amalgam of the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA, emboldened by its proximity to the president.

  From his experiences as an Army elder statesman during the Truman administration, Eisenhower concluded that the service departments presented the major barrier to effective defense planning and management. His predispositions received sanction from a Rockefeller Commission study that subsequently served as the basis for Reorganization P
lan No. 6, a mix of executive and congressional reforms enacted in 1953. The Rockefeller study urged reorganization in the name of “maximum security at minimum cost, and without danger to free institutions.” For the JCS the reform meant enhanced power for the chairman, who received control over the role of the enlarged Joint Staff. The office of the Secretary of Defense expanded its influence even more dramatically. Six new assistant secretaries of defense and a general counsel joined the secretary’s deputy and existing three assistant secretaries, thus giving the secretary a staff that could contend with the service departments in all defense functions.

  In five years of testing the Eisenhower administration found the 1953 reforms wanting, and in 1958, once again supported by the findings of a Rockefeller-sponsored study, the administration proposed even more centralization. The reforms bore heavily upon the JCS. The chairman received formal authority to vote on JCS matters, and the individual chiefs found themselves outside the operational chain of command, which now ran from the president to the secretary of defense to the principal military commanders in the field. (The latter were the heads either of “unified” geographic commands or single-function “specified” commands like SAC.) Congress, however, refused to designate the chairman as the principal military adviser to the president and the secretary, and it allowed the service chiefs to retain their right as individuals to see the president and testify before Congress. Eisenhower called the latter power “legalized insubordination.” The assistant secretaries of defense, on the other hand, profited from the secretary’s new power to transfer and consolidate service functions and activities—except “major” operational missions—because they could now issue binding orders in their functional areas.