For Khrushchev there was also a political risk inherent in his plan. The memorandum distributed before the meeting barely masked his concern that this approach made him vulnerable to political attack for being too soft on the United States: “Perhaps I cannot foresee everything. But it seems to me that these proposals of mine, if we implemented them, would not cause any damage to our country and would not threaten our defense capabilities vis-à-vis the enemy forces, but would rather enhance our international prestige and strengthen our country.21 In the meeting itself Khrushchev spoke of the need for a campaign to sell this plan to the military commands in the field and to the various military committees in the Kremlin.22 He expected opposition, especially from among the ranks of those who would lose their jobs and older retired military officers. To steel the determination of his military men and colleagues and perhaps to hide his own insecurities, the Soviet leader vowed no mercy for these military hawks. “[Let’s] knock the bragging out of them…expel [them] from the party, act on the offensive.”23
DWIGHT EISENHOWER probably would have flashed one of his trademark grins had the CIA been able to report that Khrushchev now wanted to “knock the bragging” out of Soviet military hawks. For years Khrushchev had been the biggest braggart of them all about the alleged military superiority of the Soviet Union. Since Sputnik those claims always involved the rate of production of missiles that could reach the U.S. mainland. In February 1959 Khrushchev had reported to Communist Party officials from across the USSR that “serial production of intercontinental ballistic rockets has been organized.”24 Then, in November 1959, he had told journalists that “now we have such a stock of rockets, such an amount of atomic and hydrogen weapons, that if they attack us we could wipe our potential enemies off the face of the earth…. [I]n one year, 250 rockets with hydrogen warheads came off the assembly line in the factory we visited.”25
President Eisenhower had seen through these claims. “They also said that they invented the flying machine,” he told a group of journalists with tongue in cheek, “and the automobile and the telephone and other things.” For Eisenhower it was essential not to become an alarmist on the subject of Soviet power. “If we react violently to every new development such as Sputnik,” he later advised the Kennedy administration, “then we’re licked.”26 From his long military service, Eisenhower understood how much militaries cost, and he refused to let fear force the United States to overspend just because Moscow had been the first to fire a long-range missile. What mattered was whether the Soviets had the actual missiles to back up these claims. Everything he had seen from the CIA and other sources failed to prove to him that they did.
Eisenhower had a fine grasp of the trade-off that his adversary faced. In early 1959 he had taken time to look closely at Khrushchev’s seven-year plan and the demands that it would make on the Soviet economy.27 The CIA pointed out to him that the Kremlin’s projected rates of economic growth were unrealistic. Labor productivity was “a big problem,” and apparently Moscow could not acquire the fertilizer and machinery that would make Soviet agriculture efficient enough to satisfy the plan.28 The only way for Khrushchev to achieve greater food production would be to redirect investment to agriculture and increase labor productivity or to increase the number of workers. Eisenhower understood better than anyone in his administration that it would be impossible for the Kremlin to pursue this domestic agenda while simultaneously building the huge nuclear force predicted by Washington doomsayers and bragged about by Khrushchev.
The president’s cool response was in no way representative of public attitudes in the United States toward national security. Despite the positive aspects of the Khrushchev visit, nerves first frayed by Sputnik remained sensitive to evidence of U.S. military vulnerability. For many Americans, even those friendly to Eisenhower’s defense posture, the entire balance of power in the late 1950s hinged solely on the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in each country’s arsenal. The administration had opened itself to criticism by deciding as a cost-cutting measure to try to leapfrog missile technologies. The military had purchased fewer Atlas and Titan missiles in favor of waiting for the solid-fuel Minuteman, a more efficient ICBM, to be developed. The deployment of the first Minuteman was not expected until 1962, leaving a few years when it was feared the Soviets would have many more missiles than the United States. The White House’s decision not to buy more Atlas missiles had been especially controversial with the Convair division of the General Dynamics Corporation, the primary contractor for the Atlas, which wasted no opportunity to try to influence the public debate and compel lawmakers to overturn Eisenhower’s penny-pinching.
The wisdom of waiting for the Minuteman missile seemed to rest on how many missiles the Soviets were expected to have by 1961. Eisenhower’s problem was that his critics were vocal and influential and professed to have the answer to this all-important question. Within the government, the air force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC), which was responsible for the country’s fleet of intercontinental bombers and ICBMs, was leading the fight for additional appropriations for Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles. SAC believed that by 1961 the Soviets would have 150 ICBMs, exactly the number needed to destroy all thirty SAC bases in the United States as well as twenty other key military and civilian targets, including Washington, D.C. SAC made a point of letting influential hawks, such as the syndicated newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop, know these calculations. In a letter to his friend retired General Lucius D. Clay, who had directed U.S. operations during the Berlin blockade, Alsop wrote approvingly that senior members of the SAC staff “do not think, and I do not think[,] that it is at all certain that the national estimates are wrong. They only believe, as I most firmly believe[,] that there is a considerable margin of possible error which gives one chance in three, or four, or five of the dreadful result I have described.”29
The loudest voice on Capitol Hill warning of a missile gap belonged to Senator Stuart Symington, a Democrat from Missouri. The former secretary of the air force in the Truman administration, Symington was positioning himself as a hawk for the presidential nomination of his party in 1960. When the Eisenhower administration tried to temper the public and congressional overreaction to Sputnik, Symington had charged that it was irresponsibly choosing a balanced budget over national security. “What do you do with a government,” he had said in September 1959, “which decides that money is more important than security?”30 In Senate hearings that same fall he had confidently predicted that by 1962 the Soviets would have three thousand ICBMs, punctuating this groundless prediction with “Let that be on the record.”31 As it turned out, the record showed that Senator Symington was off by a mere 2,938. No friend of Moscow, Symington had cracked during the Khrushchev visit that Truman would have been impeached by Congress had he dared invite Stalin to America. “Why is it today that many of us think Mr. Khrushchev’s visit may be helpful?”32
Symington was by no means the only Democratic presidential contender to sense the political utility of warning about a missile gap. All the major candidates spoke as if it were a given that between 1960 and 1964 Soviet nuclear missile stocks would significantly outnumber the U.S. arsenal. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, of Texas, fanned fears of a missile gap to show his command of foreign policy issues.33 Senator John F. Kennedy, of Massachusetts, also raised the specter of a U.S. window of vulnerability. As early as mid-1958 Kennedy had warned that the United States was fast approaching that period “in which our own offensive and defensive missile capabilities will lag so far behind those of the Soviets as to place us in a position of great peril.”34
Eisenhower could be excused if he felt a sense of déjà vu at this ill-informed debate over Soviet missile capabilities. Four years earlier almost the same groups had been arrayed to debate whether the Soviets had more intercontinental bombers than the United States. The alarmists had been proved wrong but deftly managed not to be discredited. They rescued themselves by arguing that Khrushchev
had unexpectedly decided to invest resources in building up missiles and not bombers.
The U-2 spy plane had played a role in exploding the myth of the Soviet bomber gap in 1956. But as of 1959 U-2 surveillance flights were not producing enough intelligence on Soviet missile production and deployment to settle the missile gap debate. All U-2 flights over the Soviet Union had been halted in 1958 because of Eisenhower’s concerns about the diplomatic risks of violating Soviet airspace, and in mid-1959 the president had approved only one flight. Meanwhile spies and intercepted Soviet communications were equally unable to provide enough detail to paint the complete picture. As a result, for two years U.S. intelligence analysts had been admitting to policy makers that they could not explain what was going on in Khrushchev’s rocket program. They had heard his boasting, but when they sent U-2s to photograph test sites or to pick up the electronic signals emitted by missile test flights, the numbers did not correlate with the huge program Khrushchev seemed to be talking about. It had taken the United States 115 missile test flights to achieve a production rate of six ICBMs per month.35 Yet between the summer of 1957 and May 1958 the CIA had detected only six Soviet tests, and the pace did not pick up significantly through the remainder of 1958 and 1959. Without anyone on the inside of the Soviet missile program or within shouting distance of the Kremlin, the CIA did not know of Khrushchev’s decision to leapfrog the R-7 program in favor of the R-16 and R-9.
Although the U.S. intelligence community lacked good information on the size and capability of the Soviet strategic missile arsenal, it was expected to issue an annual estimate of that arsenal to assist the Pentagon in budgeting American missile production. In the 1950s and 1960s the director of central intelligence supervised what were called national intelligence estimates (NIEs) on Soviet military power, and CIA officials were the principal drafters of these estimates. In Eisenhower’s second term the agency offered what it considered the middle ground between the exaggerated predictions of the U.S. Air Force about the size of the Soviet rocket force and the smaller projections of the U.S. Army. In 1958 that median estimate was that the Soviets would have ten R-7s by the end of 1959, one hundred a year later, and a grand total of five hundred sometime in 1962. Although the resulting NIE cautioned that these figures were selected “arbitrarily in order to provide some measure of the Soviet capacity” and “d[id] not [original emphasis] represent an estimate of probable Soviet requirements or stockpiles,” they became the benchmark for discussions of near-term Soviet capabilities. Taking this middle road was considered the sane response to the “Sky Is Falling!” approach of SAC, Joe Alsop, and the Democratic hopefuls.36 But even this moderate estimate far exaggerated Soviet capabilities.
AS KHRUSHCHEV had hoped, he grabbed the Eisenhower administration’s attention with his announcement of unilateral troop reductions at a public meeting of the USSR Supreme Soviet on January 14, 1960. The announcement impressed Eisenhower as serious and positive. Not all of the president’s advisers agreed. But Eisenhower was confident that Khrushchev was trying to lessen international tensions. When Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles downplayed the significance of the speech at a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) on the same day of the speech, Eisenhower contradicted him. “[This was a] very tough speech,” the president insisted, “especially from the military point of view.”37 In Eisenhower’s eyes, Khrushchev’s dramatic move was an act of real disarmament that was consistent with the ideas that the Soviet leader had described at Camp David. It had to be viewed as a constructive first step.38
Within a week the CIA came around to the view that Khrushchev’s initiative was an act of significant disarmament. From its monitoring of public speeches by Kremlin officials in the wake of the Khrushchev’s announcement, the agency detected significant opposition within the Soviet military. At least 250,000 officers were about to be retired early, and many were displeased. At the NSC meeting on January 21, DCI Dulles went even further. He informed the president that they were possibly witnessing a sea change in the Cold War. Khrushchev’s decision to push ahead with these deep conventional cuts, he argued, “seems to exclude general war as a deliberate Soviet policy.” Khrushchev’s statement also forced the agency to revise downward its estimates of the Soviet Army’s size. For three years the intelligence community had refused to accept published Soviet numbers for its conventional forces, which it considered too low. But given the data the agency had acquired in and around Khrushchev’s speech, it appeared that he was cutting 1.2 million from a smaller base than had been assumed. Moscow could not hope to occupy Europe with a force this size.39
There was a significant difference between Eisenhower’s and the CIA’s hopeful interpretation of Khrushchev’s proposed action and the conventional wisdom outside the White House. The Soviet announcement had no perceptible effect on the intense public debate over the supposed missile gap. In fact some of the other sections in Khrushchev’s January 14 speech may actually have hurt his case. In announcing the troop cuts, he had reaffirmed his belief in nuclear deterrence and boasted of the Soviet Union’s superior missile technology. A careful reader of his speech would have also seen that he was now saying that a successful first strike was impossible in a world where both sides had missiles and bombers. A careful analyst might also have understood that the language was designed to smooth any domestic feathers ruffled by this surprise unilateral cut. But the missile gap lobby in the United States looked past that and ignored the conventional cuts altogether. More impressive to them was the successful launch four days after Khrushchev’s speech of an R-7 with a dummy warhead that traveled more than seven thousand miles from Soviet Central Asia to a point in the Pacific just south of Hawaii. This test, the first of its kind, occurred on the eve of a major congressional debate concerning the 1961 defense budget.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Staff Nathan Twining and the defense secretary-designate Thomas Gates ran into a chorus of suspicion on Capitol Hill when they tried to downplay the existence of a missile gap in testimony on the 1961 defense budget. They explained that even if the Soviets had more ICBMs than the United States, the United States retained more nuclear firepower on long-range bombers and submarines than the Soviet Union. There might be a missile gap, but there was no deterrence gap, and it was the latter that spelled the difference between peace and war.40 Nevertheless, congressional assumptions would not be set aside that easily. Expressing the view of many powerful lawmakers, the chairman of the Armed Forces Committee, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, told Eisenhower’s defense team, “I can’t accept the statement that there is no missile gap. I think there is.”41
A Democratic Congress could be expected to be skeptical of a Republican administration. The real problem for Eisenhower was that like his adversary Khrushchev, he faced dissension in his own military. Only four days after Khrushchev’s speech, General Thomas S. Power, the head of the Strategic Air Command, had delivered a speech at the Economic Club of New York that contradicted the administration’s statements.42 He had spoken of a future in which the Soviets “might accumulate enough missiles to destroy this nation’s retaliatory missiles and bombers before they could be fired or take off.” He had then given a number that defined what the Soviets needed to achieve a successful first strike capability: “With only 300 ballistic missiles the Soviet Union could virtually wipe out this country’s entire retaliatory capability in thirty minutes.” Power had called for strategic bombers to be kept aloft at all times to be able to retaliate, in case Khrushchev launched first. At the time the U.S. Air Force estimated that fifty bombers would have to be in the air at any given moment to ensure U.S. security. Incoming Defense Secretary Gates tried to downplay Power’s estimate. It “is unrealistic,” he told Congress, but he did not persuade many people.43
From Khrushchev’s perspective the most unnerving development in the missile gap debate that he saw played out in U.S. newspapers was the start of a highly influential series of articles by Joseph Alsop that s
eemed to wrap all the prevailing missile gap lore together with a bow. Over six columns starting on January 23, Alsop laid out the case for believing the Soviets were well ahead in missile development.44 He built his argument on Power’s premise that with 150 ICBMs and 150 intermediate-range missiles firing on European targets, the Soviets could destroy all of NATO’s nuclear weapons. He then set out to explain that if the Soviet missile factories were as efficient as the factory that produced SAC’s Atlas rockets, then Khrushchev would have 150 ICBMs in ten months. Alsop charged the Eisenhower administration with playing Russian roulette in refusing to accelerate the arms race because of lack of firm proof that the Soviets had as many missiles as they could have. “[N]o intelligence service on earth can be absolutely certain that the closed Soviet society, using all the resources of the Soviet economy, has not produced a number of weapons equal to a mere ten months of capacity production in a single American factory.”45 In the absence of certainty about an enemy’s capabilities, Alsop believed that one had to assume the worst about both his capabilities and his intentions. Unfortunately for the country and the world, Alsop’s thesis proved to be more persuasive than President Eisenhower’s calm.
Khrushchev's Cold War Page 34