U.S. Strategic Nuclear Policy, An Oral History, Part 1

this is a documentary an oral history of US strategic nuclear policy those who played a part tell the story they summarized the evolution of a 60 year history from the dawn of nuclear weapons to the 21st century the speakers address two fundamental questions first what has been the purpose of US nuclear weapons and second how have the policy the weapons and the war plans evolved for most this is a history of nuclear deterrence the deterrent role of nuclear weapons has remained constant throughout the evolution of policy world events war plans and nuclear delivery systems this is not a comprehensive history but rather a primer to stimulate further thought about strategic nuclear policy and about the broader question of national security strategy there are significant aspects not covered in this series the role of the legislative branch the development of non strategic nuclear forces specific weapons technologies and the role of the nuclear laboratories and the production complex these are stories for another time history tells us where we've been and it can provide us some valuable insight for the future this oral history is intended to provide a foundation for discussing some very important questions what truly will be the role of nuclear weapons what will be the requirements in the future for u.s. nuclear forces for the stockpile and for the nuclear weapons complex the Bombers of the u.s. ate their fourth invaded marienburg today two flying fortresses were shot down [Music] when the US Army 8th Air Force arrived in Britain in 1942 a doctrine of daylight high altitude precision bombing developed around the Norden bombsight then we thought that we were going to be able to hit military targets and never hit civilian targets we thought we could hit a pickle barrel from 18,000 feet the British said you can't do that because you're never that accurate and if you fly by daylight you'll lose too many planes to German interceptors they bomb by night aiming entire cities it was an allied bomber offensive with both the British and the Americans adapting different doctrines and bombing in different ways it was much shorter distances that the Bombers had to fly and it was against a different set of defenses than you had in the Pacific air war in the Pacific was more catches catch-can in the way we had to adapt to it Japan was understood as a special case the Air Force was willing to do area bombing when it couldn't do what they were counting as precision bombing which also wasn't that precise but it was a different operational setup and it was a different way of understanding what they were doing the basic question was whether or not you would be able to break industrial structures aircraft production plants engine production plants petroleum refineries electrical grids things like that whether you'd be able to destroy those with your bombing campaign in Germany factories were highly concentrated and often segregated from residential areas making them targetable by precision bombing while in Japan war industries were dispersed rather than concentrated and they were often intertwined with densely populated residential districts the Japanese target complex prompted the operational commander general Curtis LeMay to change tactics when LeMay decided to take the b-29s which were really very elegant bombers lots of equipment he took long equipment out so they could fly with more bonds more incendiary bombs and sent them over by night in a night attack rather than by daylight so they wouldn't run into any Japanese interceptors LeMay was the most effective combat commander of any service that I met in the three years I was in the Air Force he had one objective that was to destroy targets and associated with that the objective of reducing the number of crew members lost per unit of target destruction if you see LeMay in Europe and if you see LeMay in the Pacific Tommy power is always there it is my own belief that Tommy Power was probably more the strategist than LeMay but I think that those two men work very well together in terms of getting the most out of their equipment and their men [Music] he tried out this approach very similar to the British in Europe of just lobbing out all of Tokyo in one attack maybe if you burn an entire city which in the case of Tokyo and 100,000 people being killed the Japanese will quit the first and the fiercest of these urban area attacks came on March 9th 1945 LeMay had abandoned the doctrine of high-altitude daylight bombing against military assets and reverted to the urban area fire bombing strategy practiced by the British against Germany [Music] a half a world away from the carnage in the high desert of New Mexico scientists from Los Alamos made preparations to test a new and more lethal device an atomic bomb the foundation of strategic nuclear policy would arise from a confluence of this revolutionary new capability and the air war strategy practiced over Japan [Music] in July 1945 the US was facing a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland hospitals were being set up there was 120 thousand been hospital on Tinian where I was stationed alone we could look across and see 1600 ships in the harbor at Saipan preparing for the invasion as American planners prepared to maximize direct military pressure upon the Japanese government and the population President Truman issued his final approval to the Secretary of War for the release of the atomic bomb [Music] the atomic bombings were the culmination of the great fire bombing of Tokyo a strategy that copiously provided that military pressure it was such a shock to the Japanese to see eighty to a hundred thousand people killed when Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the most brutal way that that they reacted to it more than they did I think to the the firebombing although the extent of the fire bombing is not well recognized and I have never seen an analysis of whether the nuclear could have been avoided if LeMay had been allowed another few weeks to carry on the firebombing s at one point he I think was suggesting when I went to Tokyo it was just absolutely devastated the damage in Tokyo was a result of thousands of raids thousands of sorties by thousands of bombers whereas in the case of of the atomic bomb there was one airplane and one bomb and people were totally unprepared for what happened whereas the dropping of the second bomb even though the extent of the damage in Nagasaki was less than Hiroshi the fact that there was a second bomb and then the implication was that there were more I think that's that's what finally tipped the scales the Japanese didn't surrender in two days after Nagasaki because their military capability had been introduced very much they surrendered because they had the vision that this could happen every week and they couldn't stand to have all the cities destroyed and in nuclear deterrence if spades get killed we can call that incidental damage of collateral damage but many people said that's what really is basis of deterrence that the other side can't stand having that many people feel Hiroshima and Nagasaki assured in the need to think differently about war with atomic weapons with the u.s. adopt a de facto policy of urban area atomic bombardment were the cities of an adversary to be held hostage as a deterrent to aggression how would the targeting of urban industrial areas be reconciled with the tradition of precision bombing and as the accuracy of nuclear weapon systems improved would more precise targeting introduce new concerns about the prospect of nuclear war fighting these questions and many others would inform the evolution of a strategic nuclear policy over time policy would be derived from the influence of successive presidential administrations dynamic world events as well as the evolutionary development of nuclear weapon systems [Music] the mobilization and conventional weapons filled a nuclear fuel are very parallel in both cases civilian needs trumped any military need but one big differences we kept secret what was happening in nuclear labs [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] like most Americans in 1945 the scientists and their families at Los Alamos were anxious to put the war behind them many returned to universities leaving behind a scientific enterprise that faced an uncertain future and a new body of knowledge which continued to be shrouded in great secrecy there were very few people who actually understood the atomic bombs as they existed in the period right after World War two the security restrictions were still intense the development of atomic bombs nuclear bombs was still in an early phase everyone understood kind of outside of their official capacity that the atomic bomb was a weapon of extraordinary devastation so they they had this this tool this weapon on the one hand and the knowledge that they were the knowledge base that they were building was for much more discriminant force on the other hand there had to be assumptions it would be made that would guide military planning would you or when you use the atomic bomb a commander's job is to demonstrate how to prevail in a war and therefore how to plan for that war and as such nuclear weapons pretty much from the beginning had been treated as instruments of war these weapons were simply looked upon as being essentially larger conventional weapons I think that Truman in particular had a very personal understanding of the damage that these weapons could do and I believe that Truman really didn't want to use them private reflections were quite apprehensive about what the implications of this were for the future of humanity in terms of his public pronouncements he of course associated the bomb with victory in World War two and and also for a brief time period at least Truman and the Truman administration seemed to seriously explore possibilities of international control if they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been clean on the earth even as President Truman issued a final ultimatum before the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki he promised to redirect atomic power towards the maintenance of world peace the stage was set for the development of a proposal for the International control of atomic energy by an expert Board of consultants that included robert Oppenheimer who had led the development of the atomic bomb in less than a year Bernard Baruch a successful Wall Street speculator was appointed as the US representative to the UN Atomic Energy Commission there he presented the American proposal which came to be known as the Baruch plan almost immediately the Soviet delegation raised objections to the plans proposed controls on fissionable materials and an on-site inspection regime that threatened ongoing secret work deep inside Russia the Soviet position was that you know we were going to expect another world war in say 20 years so we need to start preparing for it now at the end of the war the Soviet leaders made a number of speeches setting out their view of you know how international relations would develop after the war and Stalin said that Lenin's theory of imperialism was still operative and that as long as imperialism existed there would be Wars when George Kennan the American chargee in Moscow reported on Stalin's speech official Washington first began to regard the Soviets as a threat Ken's long telegram was meant to do several things one to alert Americans that Russia was not going to be easy to live with secondly if we wait and wait and hold them in the long run communism might lose its expansionist self-confidence no cannons containment doctrine so that if you keep the Russians contained keep them from expanding they will look at their own article of scientific analysis that says the world is bound to have come under communist control and see that it's wrong but throughout 1946 the Soviets consolidated political power in a series of buffer states forming what Winston Churchill would call an Iron Curtain with the onset of the Cold War symbolized by Churchill's speech increasingly the emphasis was on maintaining nuclear supremacy preparing America and the West militarily for this long and desperate struggle Churchill's suspicions of Joseph Stalin at the end of World War two had been confirmed and he cautioned to Truman to protect and maintain the American monopoly of the atomic bomb the fact that that came more or less simultaneously with the other effort to promote international control I think shows the ambivalence of that period as he contemplated the possibility of an emerging Soviet nuclear capability Truman was also determined to maintain civilian control of the bomb and appointed David lilienthal chairman of the newly created Atomic Energy Commission in April 1947 its first report warned of serious weaknesses in the situation from the standpoint of the national defense and security one thing we really don't know today is how much did the Soviets know about how few functional atomic bombs we had 1946 and 47 by many measures we had none what we had was on a shelf in a state that would take weeks to get it ready for use these were would have been very manpower intensive nuclear weapons that had to be kept ready and we weren't doing that because there wasn't the motivation to do it and we weren't expecting the Cold War weren't expecting to use weapons against the Soviet Union in 1947 the Truman Doctrine ensuring the independence of Greece and Turkey drew a line preventing further Soviet expansion in Europe is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from you have to remember that the United States was doing something that was revolutionary through World War two and immediately beyond we were making decisions that we would enter and remain engaged in the world in a way that we had never done before and the United States had loaned Europe about 11 billion dollars in various aid programs to kind of kickstart the French British economies and in late 46 early 47 economic progress begins to slow and so there's this growing sense of emergency [Music] in 1948 the collapse of Czechoslovakia to communist rule shook us up in that Czechoslovakia had been the only democracy in Eastern Europe between the wars and it seemed like this is the last kind of straw but I think it's the Berlin crisis that really begins to give this a kind of military edge but when Stalin imposed the blockade I mean he was resisting what he saw as moves to create a separate West Germany the blockade of Berlin shook us up more as the second blow within a short period of time in 1948 and it directly involved American forces it seemed to be an attempt maybe to set dominoes going to affect all of Germany [Music] we mainly bet on a non-military approach we were using military transports to fly coal and food to West Berlin but as a backup for that we also did make a big move of American bombers to Brittany I think it's fair to say that the contingency planning by 46 and 47 was focused on the fear that you may have a war with the Soviet Union we warned the Soviets that if they did some things they could easily do shoot down our airline our planes or sent tanks into Berlin that we were moving allegedly the nuclear forces into I think sending the b-29s to Europe was the kind of reminder that the US had the atomic bomb but but Stalin knew that he didn't need to be reminded to stop the airlift he'd have had to escalate the situation I think that's what he didn't want to do he knew there were limits to the confrontation just the mere existence of atomic bombs in 1948 I think helped restrain him the American hits at using nuclear weapons in 1948 shows that when you have a monopoly you can lightly play with nuclear threats and get some results with the prospect of conflict on the horizon in Western Europe it had become clear to the Truman administration that there was now a critical need for some fundamental policy guidance about the use of atomic weapons the Berlin crisis of 1948 was the first of several critical drivers of US strategic nuclear policy as they prepared contingency war plans the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought guidance on the use of atomic weapons I don't think there's really any defined clearly defined US policy toward whether nuclear weapons will be used and and how they might be used before the autumn of 1948 and that is what makes NSC 30 and at the NSC 20 series so important because be they begin to come to grips with some of those issues NSC 30 declared that the US was prepared to use atomic weapons in the event of war and the decision to do so would rest with the president the president will decide to use them when he wants to he'd hate to use them ever ever again but if it's necessary he will NSC 31st established a deterrent role for atomic weapons as a counterbalance to Soviet forces in Eastern Europe the National Security Council also developed NSC 20/4 but what we now had is we're settling down into the rhythm of the Cold War's we're now settling down into the Soviet Union is the enemy as we're now settling down into the United States strategy for deterring the Soviet Union if deterrence fails having to fight a war with the Soviet Union being based around nuclear weapons we're settling down into that rhythm where there's a process that guidance flows into the planning system and that guidance is going to come out of the National Security Council mechanism both White Vandenberg who was chief of staff of the Air Force and the Joint Chiefs themselves are beginning to ask question if we had to execute the contingency war plans that we have tomorrow what would happen teams were sent out to look at the readiness of Strategic Air Command they came back with very negative reports so Vandenberg looked around the senior wark World War two leadership is sort of gone the acres the spots ha's and Lemay's head and shoulders above everybody else so he gets the call LeMay was a brilliant operator and I think probably fair to say a brilliant commander very dynamic very energetic and he wanted a force that could in fact fight a nuclear war LeMay was continually concerned about the lack of photographic intelligence they began the atomic targeting based on maps and some captured German reconnaissance photographs so they took the analytical inputs and they sat down and said you know the weapon will go here it will go here here's how we're going to get there and that you would also employ the same ideas that have been used during World War two for deep interdiction strategic bombing and that is to take out the enemy's industrial capacity now of course industrial capacity was also co-located with cities and so there you would have a tremendous amount of disruption using nuclear weapons on those targets [Music] Lemay's primary objective was to ensure that sac would have the capability to deliver a single massive attack and for this he would require a force of new long-range bombers Harry Truman came to office without a lot of experience certainly no experience in foreign affairs to speak of the one thing that he brought to the White House was a very fine-tuned look at how you did budget making and he insisted that Forrestal stick within very very tight constraints James Forrestal became the nation's first secretary of defense in the midst of a brutal budget battle among the newly formed Joint Chiefs Forrestal tried but failed to resolve the differences in February 1949 Eisenhower was brought in to mediate the dispute over budget priorities that favored the Air Force's new b-36 atomic bomb the Navy saw this as a threat to its ability to project power from aircraft carriers in them they saw the airforce perhaps as threatening the control of Navy sea based aviation the Navy is is posing some very serious questions about American nuclear strategy and reliance on strategic bombing and that to me is kind of the more important dimension to the Admirals revolt because what they're saying in a sense is what some people in the Air Force itself had admitted general Hartmann did us did an analysis of the strategic bombing campaign and concluded that it'll do serious harm serious damage to the Soviet Union but it's not an assured war winning strategy soon decisions would be made by Forrestal successor Louis Johnson ensuring that sac would get its atomic bombers in early summer 1949 they represented the only u.s. strategic capability to deter the Soviets in July the Senate would ratify the NATO treaty and now atomic weapons would underpin article 5 of this new security commitment one month later an event unfolding deep inside the Soviet Union would seriously challenged this deterrent capability [Music] on September 3rd 1949 especially equipped b-29 flying east of the come chat copan insula detected the presence of radioactive residue from the blasts of Joe one the first Soviet atomic test only months before the AEC had deployed a system for the sampling and analysis of evidence from an above-ground nuclear detonation some of us were not surprised some ones thought that they would be right on our heels so to speak and clearly they were there are other people primarily in the government that thought it would take them along much longer time there were a couple of important people who said it would take a long time general groves and Vannevar Bush but even an EVA bush said it'll take 20 years unless they give it the highest priority which is exactly what they did so we underestimated the speed with which they could move we fail to understand the degree of assistance in 1948-49 that the Soviets had obtained from spies in the West the detection of the test I immediately put in train a number of actions by the president in the next month for example he approved a request for the JCS to very largely increase the capability for producing nuclear materials the approval of the special advisory committees recommendations set in motion a series of events increased production of fissile material at the plutonium processing facility in Hanford Washington accelerated production of the new mark for bomb at Los Alamos and construction of nuclear weapons storage facilities around the country and then they increase everything they not only increase the production of u-235 and plutonium they began a vigorous exploration of the Colorado Plateau to find more uranium I think they were making it up as they went along we were all making it up as we went along the executive branch on the one hand and the legislative on another there's not no question I mean it was a very revolutionary time this is we were dealing with something that nobody had ever had before the Soviet possession of the atomic bomb ended the United States nuclear monopoly this would profoundly affect defense policy and war planning the military strategy depended completely on the capacity for our monopoly of the nuclear weapons to deter and counterbalance the very large conventional forces which the Soviet Union had as early as August 1947 the joint war plans committee began drafting a series of contingency war plans that authorized an ever increasing role for atomic weapons half-moon was the first of these plans approved during the Berlin crisis of 1948 they're saying you know witch's brew of names that you have from those days as you move from half moon to Trojan to off-tackle to what-have-you and then all the supporting more plans etc etc basically you have a joint outline war plan and you have supporting plans for it in the juke joint outline war plan that the JCS approved will take whatever the strategic concept is and put it into play in the absence of detailed higher-level guidance those involved in nuclear war planning carried over what they knew from World War two including a sense that we they were involved in an enterprise of precision targeting they carried over the the same sense of target categories they carried over the same sense that nuclear weapons were primarily blast weapons a nuclear weapon has an addition radiation fire which are difficult to predict they are difficult to calculate the planning of nuclear weapons attends not to include these effects simply because they are so difficult to calculate but they're they're the earliest weapons of course were uranium bombs fission bombs these were delivered by high altitude long-range bombers but the accuracies of these early systems were measured in terms of large fractions of a nautical mile or maybe even a couple of nautical miles so the suitable targets had to be large large area targets in late 1949 a new emergency war plan dubbed off tackle called for attacks on 104 urban targets with 220 atomic bombs plus a reott ACT reserve of 72 weapons the prime targeting objective was to disrupt the Soviet will to wage war the targeting categories were completely consistent with with tarting philosophy and some operations in world war ii the first one was bravo which stood for blunting of nuclear forces and nuclear capability the second one was Delta which stood for destruction of the urban industrial base and the third one was Romeo which stood for retarding an enemy's ability to mobilize this was our short-term war plan and within the next 18 months there was nothing other than the air offensive and within the air offensive specifically the nuclear component of it which carried any chance of affecting the outcome be or early on what impact would this have on the defense of Western Europe would the president be more cautious in the face of Soviet provocation by the end of 1949 Truman was forced to re-examine national security policy in light of a nuclear-armed adversary with the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb the United States felt vulnerable really for the first time how much is enough for deterrence her Bjork in his book says that logically it would have been enough to have fish and weapons and I believe that but politically it is not enough especially when you say the other side because we can think of a super weapon they might think of a super weapon and build it the primary reason for the development of the super favored alternately instituting a fairly aggressive program to develop the super was fear of the Russians people who a year so before had been committed to the idea of international control of atomic weapons now have made a dramatic shift toward the idea of keeping ahead of the Russians knowledge of the super as the hydrogen or thermonuclear bomb was first known was closely held in the fall of 1949 its development was the focus of a bigger estate among fewer than 100 people in the US government senator Brian McMahon chairman of the powerful Joint Committee on atomic energy and General Omar Bradley chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff were among those who supported building a super bomb and believed that we should get ahead as quickly as possible Truman also heard from those who opposed its development well the Atomic Energy Commission itself that is the five Atomic Energy commissioners were divided on the subject the president set up a special subcommittee to study the question the special committee of the National Security Council consisted of AEC chairman David Lilienthal Secretary of Defense Lewis Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Acheson that committee met for two months and then the end of January reported to Truman and essentially recommending that he go forward with the development of the hydrogen weapons that was something that was very much contested and argued about debated within the administration but nevertheless the committee recommended it and President Truman in about seven minutes approved yeah no doubted his method that has to be done if it works the idea that something is too good for us to work on Jesse don't make any sense to him he never said that but that is my feeling of you he also directed his principal advisers on security to produce for him a study as to how US strategy would be affected by this new development it looked at the larger question of what should we do about our relations and policy toward the Soviet Union delivered to the president on April 5th nineteen 50 NSC 68 was a Seminole policy document on US national security written largely by Paul Nitsa NSC 68 reaffirmed the character of the Soviet threat contained in the earlier NSC 20/4 but now the threat was seen as imminent a 1954 was called a year of national danger it assumed that they would have about 200 weapons and this would be quite sufficient to do tremendous harm to the United States which in my view was greatly exaggerated because you know various ethnicities estimates then before that and after that about where the Russians were and where they were going to be where all of them greatly exaggerated Paul Nitze who was a very skilled in fighting bureaucrat in the way that he conducted NSC 68 he talks about it freely in several of his books NSC 68 was delivered Dean Acheson as Secretary of State basically with nitsa made the fundamental decision that they didn't want to lay the budget figures out of in front of Truman so NSC 68 was kind of the start of a debate when it gets delivered to the White House in the spring of 1950 but Truman wasn't about to take Nitsa or Acheson z' word for it and said about evaluating the implications as well as the probable cost for the massive nuclear and conventional build-up called for in NSC 68 within two months however this careful and deliberative effort would be cut short by a new military imperative by the middle of 1950 the North Koreans had a fully trained and equipped army the Russians had seemed to that the day came when it was revealed but it all along then the Communists plan the invasion and seizure of South Korea the invasion got underway on the morning of Sunday June 25th 1950 the invasion of South Korea was a surprise like the Berlin Blockade of 1948 and the Soviet atomic test of 1949 individually these events prompted the evolution of US strategic nuclear policy taken together they sparked a massive buildup of the nation's nuclear and conventional forces many people attach that build-up to NFC 68 I myself have never been sure that there was quite that close the connection we had a war on our hands we had tremendous concern and sense of and of danger in Europe the Korean War hit and the nature of the decision-making process becomes different almost overnight an NSC 68 it's one of those peculiarities of history that had happened to be available at the time it did but it was really the shock of the Korean attack which led Romer immediately to take the lid off of the defense budget in the United States there had been great shock that first that war had come about and there was shock in Europe as well because it looked as though the Soviets might be on the March that's when the European countries decided to ask the United States to send Eisenhower to be the commander in the fall of 1950 intelligence assessments delivered to Truman suggested that a window of vulnerability had now opened with the u.s. become more vulnerable while it was increasingly drawn into the Korean conflict and before rearmament could restore the strategic balance the prospect of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe now deeply concerned Truman and Eisenhower why Whitter the UN forces based once again the possibility of being driven after we poured basically all the ready forces we had available into the Korean Conflict it was anybody's call as to where Korea was going to go at that point whether we'd lose the war whether the Soviet Union would intervene things of that so it was a very desperate situation there was a good deal talk about trying to estimate what was called the date of maximum danger many proposals were in the air that if this is going to happen it should be headed off after the Soviets tested in 1949 it was understandable that the United States began to contemplate whether it be appropriate and indeed necessary for national security to attack Soviet nuclear targets but Harry Truman rejected the notion that the United States would deliberately precipitate a war against the Communist adversary at the same time there are a number of military officers who ejected Truman's view and so people like LeMay and others in the early fifties when we were way ahead of the Russians in the development of bombs and in the accumulation of them said it took the view that a war is inevitable and the longer we wait to before it comes the worse were worse off we're going to be now Stuart Symington who was the chairman of the you know Security Resources Board had previously been the first secretary of the air force delivered a report to the National Security Council recommended policies and actions might of the grave real situation did in the fall of 50 or 51 the calls for preventive war that the serious calls that would be getting considered at the National Security Council was NSC 100 in my estimation any further Soviet aggression in areas to be spelled out would result in the atomic bomb movement of Soviet Russia itself declaratory policy atomic bomb Merdan automatic the closest you get to a call for preventive war is this document last nation and the National Security Council discussion makes it clear that even the principal author of the document or this principal sponsor of the document self was not calling for preventive war now it's a very different question as we get into the Eisenhower years of how you best use the nuclear stockpile in the United States psychological to as nuclear weapons became more firmly rooted in United States defense policy their growth in yield would become central to the psychology of deterrence the natural power of the universe is harnessed in the new atomic bomb it's tremendous possibilities are explained in this chart in just a few years after 1949 we had weapons pure fission weapons 50 killer tons instead of 10 to 20 kilotons they were very fine nuclear weapons and we didn't have to have a hydrogen bomb a super and besides we didn't know how to make it other people felt that we had to have enormous ly superior power in order to destroy the Soviet Union the policy as I understood it was a clear understanding that a purpose was one of details that we should be ready with something more powerful some nuclear weapons made deterrence much the development of the hydrogen bomb in Los Alamos was part of a much bigger effort to expand our entire nuclear weapons program including the production of materials the mining of uranium etc in 1950 there were eight sites and 55,000 employees there were 20 sites three years later 142,000 and this very dramatic growth continued in 1950s in the 1960s immediately following the detection of the first Soviet atomic test President Truman authorized successive expansions of the nuclear weapons complex that included plans for a second laboratory in Livermore California meanwhile at Los Alamos Edward Teller and his colleagues fervently sought a practical design for the hydrogen bomb based upon a fusion reaction within liquid to Tyrion there were contributions from a number of people but the driving force was teller I mean he was relentless and took it up with everyone he could interact with Stan Ullom came in to see him that Los Alamos Stan who a mathematician who had been at bus almost for quite a while and said you know Edward if we compress this liquid deuterium we can make it work the reaction rate will be bigger and all that the idea was that you put a nuclear weapon inside of a container and for a few moments the container will contain not only the bomb but the energy it produces and that energy can be used for other things such as perhaps compressing a secondary teller said well it won't work but if you were going to do it and you should use the radiation because all of the energy comes often radiation thermal radiation and that goes faster can be tailored more simply at that time I presented a new design in which I had full confidence we needed the power for concentrated energy of a primary to make the compression once you made it the secondary were much better and that was a whole secret now teller asked me to devise an experiment to demonstrate that this concept would work by July 25th 1951 I had a big sketch but turned out to be Mike there were no new ideas but a very competent write-up as to the actual proposal and how it should manifest itself and we proved the test [Music] [Music] mic was tested in November of 1952 just a few months after Livermore was established the Livermore of course had nothing to do with it although the press often gave us the credit and we were not allowed to deny it for reasons of secrecy so the weaponization took place entirely at low levels the development of an emergency capability based directly on the deliverable version of Mike it success seems so assured that is considered a proof test one of the emergency capability weapons emergency capability weapons were sometimes produced by the Atomic Energy Commission before the concept was tested that was so urgent they felt to have these capabilities that if a test was successful then they would have had the weapons in the stockpile capable of delivering after Mike we had the Dirks operation where we went through the development the Jughead the runts shrimp [Music] when rut worked so well then that was our first so-called deliverable 2010 thermonuclear device when thermonuclear weapons were first developed what what it did was gave you more megatons for the buck so to speak before and in the early stages of the thermonuclear weapon attention was focused on the very large yields energy releases available in fact the impact of the thermonuclear weapon was not that of enormous yield it was to make it possible to have vastly more weapons with a limited stock of uranium-235 or plutonium 239 in 1950 there were approximately 300 weapons in the stockpile a decade later there was twenty two thousand there was a decision to build more coming from Truman there was a decision to build power there was the invention of more powerful versions coming out of Mike and the and and the other things related to my the large growth that we saw in the 1950s and 60s was primarily driven by the capacity of the complex and not truly by requirements it was our policy at that time not to wait for requirements from the military but to find out from the technologies than available what the art of the possible would be technology offers opportunities [Music] offers possibilities we didn't understand what the objectives ought to be we didn't know what kind of policies or even what plans and programs ought to be laid to achieve those [Music] we face the threat not with dread and confusion but with confidence and conviction we hold it to be the first task of statesmanship to develop the strength that will deter the forces of aggression and promote the conditions of peace white eisenhower assumed the presidency in the months following the detonation of the world's first thermonuclear device at any we talk throughout the campaign Eisenhower had promised to re-examine the balance between security and solvency [Music] but the initial concern of the new president and his advisors would be resolving the matter of Korea [Music] shortly after Eisenhower took office and had started the process of developing a fabric of security policies and plans in the Soviet Union Generalissimo Stalin died when he dies there's an almost immediate change of policy in Moscow which is discussed with the North Koreans which says we now take a series of steps to try to bring the war to an end both sides agreed to a ceasefire in July 1953 by driving the North Korean forces back out of South Korea the US had produced the status quo ante and an uneasy truce prevailed Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles vowed there would be no more Koreas both in dollars from people who thought you must have a coherent strategy they decided that they would put a major study of alternative policies toward the Soviet Union for the purpose of hearing oh really thought through alternative possibilities they decided on that in the solarium of the White House mansion so it took the name solarium as a result of that and there were really three approaches that were essentially put forward each assigned to one team task force a was supposed to consider the prospects of a containment policy B was called drawing the line that if they took any measures to expand they would run the risk of a massive response and C was given essentially the assignment of defending a policy of rollback on the idea of trying to force the Soviet Union to capitulate by coercion at the end of our work which went on for five weeks complete in complete secrecy here in Washington we met in the library of the a white house and each of the teams had a time for a full presentation of his it's case at the end of it Eisenhower jumped up and said now I'd like to summarize and comment on what we've heard and he spoke for 45 minutes without a note pulling the whole thing together in doing so he showed us intellectual ascendancy over every man in the room most of the qualities which the press later on simply disregarded in the end Eisenhower reaffirmed a policy of containment the president was under no illusions of what a nuclear war with the Soviets would be it would be a war of utter devastation the jo4 explosion in August of 1953 had a major psychological impact on us the details were secret so all the American public and almost of the members of the Congress and other American leaders knew was the Russians that exploded hydrogen bomb at the National Security Council the detonation of a Soviet thermonuclear bomb underscored the urgency of preparing a new national security policy all of us close together in the fall of 1953 into a set of decisions which lead to NSC 162 / - he wanted to pay as much attention as possible to how you could take the psychology of nuclear weapons and turn them into making the strategy as deterrent and possible now also was reading I think of the Soviets was a fairly conservative group of decision makers he didn't think they wanted war either NSC 162 / - emphasized a nuclear response in the event of hostilities the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions a statement the true intent of which would be debated for decades the defense strategy had two purposes one was to deter the Soviet Union the other was to reassure the NATO allies and therefore they required really a higher degree of certainty in order to be reassured and the Soviets did to be deterred in February 1952 the NATO defence ministers met in Lisbon and agreed to commit 96 divisions in a forward defense of Western Europe well within a year after making that commitment at Lisbon it became clear that NATO had neither the resources nor the political will to field a force of that size Eisenhower would use increasing numbers of both strategic and tactical nuclear weapons to deter the Soviets in Western Europe in November 1953 he directed Admiral Bradford chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff to implement the new look a military strategy that placed heavy reliance upon nuclear weapons for the long haul Eisenhower decided that we were spending too much on the Department of Defense they cut back the planned level of expenditures this was the new look we in the judgment of the administration could not stand up against the hordes of Soviet soldiers that would be sent against the West and therefore nuclear weapons were a substitute for maintaining massive conventional forces [Music] nuclear weapons got at the heart a NATO strategy very quickly from their initial deployment in 1953 although the exact role exactly how and when they were going to be used was often confusing and ambiguous NATO intelligence tended to exaggerate the Soviet threat over the years the prevailing presumption was a worst possible case to wit that the Soviet Union would be bending every resource to build up a military forces against the West as rapidly as possible and so a lot of our training and plans were geared on on that premise MC 14/2 massive retaliation or the tripwire strategy was basically that should this massive invasion occur massive nuclear forces would be used it would be all-out nuclear war it was all or nothing in the notes of a meeting prepared by Colonel Goodpasture the president's close personal aide Eisenhower laid out a deterrent Nuclear Posture that would set in motion a 20-year buildup of nuclear weapons deployed in Western Europe Goodpasture wrote he indicated his firm intention to launch a Strategic Air Force immediately in case of alert of actual attack he stressed that a major war will be an atomic war my reading was that if actual attack were made all our forces in Europe or in the United States the likelihood of escalation to nuclear war was very very high and the Soviets knew that [Music] [Music] the root word is tear a which means to frighten with an overwhelming fear and if you put the prefix de in front of it you get too frightened from carrying out acts it involves emotions as well of self-preservation preservation of regimes preservations of countries deterrence really rests on a strategy of war prevention not a strategy of war fighting the main purpose of the nuclear deterrent is to put an exclamation point on the end of the sentence that says if you do bad things to us we will do even worse things to you so you'd better not do it in the first place I think we're the nuclear weapon made its biggest difference in history was in Europe during the Cold War [Music] NSC 162 / 2 had formalized the concept of nuclear deterrence and extended that deterrent to Western Europe Eisenhower's challenge was to communicate this policy that the Soviets the NATO allies and to the American public Secretary of State Dulles delivered an address to the Council on Foreign Relations in January 1954 publicly announcing the administration's new national security policy that would depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate instantly by means and at places of our choosing massive retaliation the way Dulles and Eisenhower used it in a way was the suicide pact and said if the Russians invade Western Europe we're going to hit back with everything we have we're not going to waste a lot of resources on trying to build tank defenses against tanks and there's been no other time I think the US has ever believed that to an overwhelming conventional capability it's only response was to escalate to the use of nuclear the resulting controversy took Dulles and the president by surprise people were very skeptical about Dulles announcement about basically the credibility of the announcement that it would it was just not believable that you know if there was gonna be some incursion in what was that called French Indochina with communist forces with the United States plausible it would it really be plausible that the United States would use nuclear weapons on its bombers and destroy Moscow it just seems such a disproportionate response the introduction of nuclear weapons to deal with every possible contingency certainly struck me and I think a lot of other people is just being horrendous there were several reasons to the criticism that the most important was that unless the Soviets or the Warsaw Pact launched a massive attack it did not seem to justify a massive response on our part in 1954 William Kauffman was among an emerging group of civilian strategists who argued that the credibility of retaliation was the key element of deterrence there was certainly a problem in the NATO community about the probability that the United States would really let loose its nuclear capabilities in the event of a Soviet invasion if the US was there present in case of any attack it was bound to be involved because it's forces for involves but it was not a one-sided affair where we could just blow away some targets which were never specified and that would be no retaliation a massive retaliation was not seen by eyes nor as the panacea for all forms of military conflict on the contrary it was addressed primarily to the question of how to prevent or conduct general war if that should be forced upon him Eisenhower never really I think came seriously close to considering use of nuclear weapons so he was much more cautious we had advantages technology airpower nuclear weapons and they were trying to play to our strengths and I think it was fine with him to have in Dulles a pure ideologue someone who was gonna try to scare the hell out of people that's the Clara Tory policy whether it matches employment policy what you'd actually do is another matter Eisenhower by betting on massive retaliation made European economic growth continued on their fewer young men had to be in the military will which it today because we took that chance in the 1950s of betting on massive retaliation [Music] in the early 1950s much Lavar deterrent forced was based forward the b-47s which were based in morocco some of them were based in Saudi Arabia and those were felt to be quite vulnerable this was a time when not long after the Soviet Union had exploded its first nuclear weapon and the question inevitably came up will suppose the Soviet Union were to drop a bomb on these bases on each of these bases what would happen this question was pondered by researchers at the RAND Corporation populated by a unique cadre of top US scientific talent Rand was perhaps the first defense think-tank it was a project with a very broad charter very broad scope to look at challenges for Aeronautics space warfare from an Air Force perspective there's a lot of talented people some of whom were working on topics that were very relevant to to questions of the nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy one of those people was Albert Wolfe debtor who in 1954 issued a top-secret report warning that Sachs overseas bases were vulnerable to a Soviet first strike Albert will start a loan team at the RAND Corporation that looked closely at worst-case possibilities of could the Soviets catch all of our bombers on the ground and win World War three and he sort of convinced people that this was a real risk unless major reforms were made in the way sac Strategic Air Command was based and stationed Eisenhower's conception was that you might knock out some bases but you would not knock out enough of the capability altogether so that they were not faced with retaliation but a message was always said of one of their bombers gets in and gets over our base to destroy the whole base of 50 or 100 bombers and if they did that enough times they'd win were what we we do that to them we win World War 3 and that's very nerve-wracking Air Force people remembering the destruction in the Philippines and at Pearl Harbor always felt that if it was important to get in the first blow if one was coming to war don't let the enemy get in the first blow there's a very deep military logic that would argue for preemption it's better to get the enemy's forces before they are launched or get you that's one aspect of preemption another is that if your forces are not survivable you there's also a pressure to preempt Kirstin may once called the anticipatory retaliation the notion is that war is imminent it's unavoidable and you are simply getting the first blow in to be able to destroy an enemy's forces while they're being armed while they're being fueled LeMay was prompted to propose preemption for the same reason as a number of other thinkers were and that was the realization correctly that the only way to limit damage on the United States and the thermonuclear war is to go first the most unstable situation was a situation where either side can win depending on who strikes first and where neither side might want a war but aegis sign says I'd rather have the war I start than the war they start the Soviet Union having their forces vulnerable faced a similar dilemma they would feel in a major crisis that if they waited or a full American attack they might not be able to retaliate [Music] bomber crews racing out the takeoff was very exciting to watch makes great cinema very bad for the world close instability and that makes everybody tense makes everybody in the mood to strike first when in doubt and it's what we typically would call very low crisis stability or strategic stability soon ran would issue a new staff report anticipating a Soviet first strike with thermonuclear weapons against the SAC bomber force based in the US one proposed solution was to develop the capacity to retaliate after absorbing a full nuclear attack by the Soviets the concept of the second strike force was indeed developed at ranch but it was something that was inherent in the administration once the vulnerabilities of our force became clear in April 1954 Eisenhower asked James Killian of MIT to direct a study of how science and technology could address the nation's vulnerabilities the Killian report was very important particularly for the matter of assuring the survivability and the effectiveness of the nuclear deterrent first we must develop missiles as rapidly as possible the ICBM would be much less vulnerable than it was a airfield and a and a bomber a hypothetical Soviet strike at our bases led to an acceleration of the development of our missile programs both the Minuteman and the Polaris program and then came the development to put weapons at sea in the black oceans where they could not be found an attack the air force's dominance of strategic delivery had sidelined the Navy in the late 1940s but had not left it idle the world's first nuclear-powered submarine was launched in January 1954 the Nautilus was significant not only for its naval engineering but also for the relentless efforts of Admiral Hyman rickover to establish a nuclear Navy [Music] the capability to remain submerged for weeks and months at a time was essential to creating a survivable second strike platform for nuclear weapons now the challenge was to launch a missile the Navy Polaris program started out with the idea of mounting liquid fuelled missiles of a very large size on the outside of submarine which is of course kind of an abomination to sailors and this was sort of like a shotgun wedding between the Navy and the army the army had to missile the irbm Jupiter and the Navy was given the job of taking that missile adapting it and taking it to sea at both laboratories work proceeded on the development of lighter and smaller thermonuclear warheads specifically with missile delivery and mine and Livermore decided to see what was the smallest two-stage weapon we felt we could design there in the early 50s after a couple of false starts we at Livermore began to work on ways to reduce the weight of thermonuclear weapons to the point where they could go into modest-sized missiles we came up with an idea which I then presented to the Atomic Energy Commission we can get a Megaton in 600 pounds now that was an exaggeration but we were serious about it and that's a huge change and and since the the payload weight pretty much drives it the size of a missile that's going to carry it that offered the prospects that we could have a small missile hopefully solid propelled that could fit into a submarine home the Polaris submarine was developed in 1960 ahead of schedule that doesn't happen too often in development of military weapons and I've often said Admiral reborn deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for getting it out there when he did because it took an awful lot of attention an awful lot of the anxiety out of the nuclear confrontation with Polaris president was free to make a deliberate decision if in the event of an assault he could he could wait and make certain it exactly what what was needed when blister missile submarine changed strategic policy because it became in the early days the embodiment of the notion of counter value rather than counter force [Music] and definitely those missiles were countervalue missiles that somebody once they asked to have already born whether a missile fired from the ocean would be accurate enough and his answer was if it even hits dry land it's not good enough and what he really meant was I'm not aiming at a military target I'm not pretending to be accurate I'm just imposing damage on the other side and they know that in advance and then the war will never happen in the first place if you are going to shoot in retaliation at cities you place a great premium on getting some kind of communication through but basically you need a very simple message shoot don't shoot and you don't much care how long it takes to get there because you're gonna survive key to the viability of Polaris as a deterrent force were improvements in command control and communications developments in very low frequency radio technology would provide secure and constant at sea communication by 1960 it was clear that Polaris would represent a robust and survivable second strike retaliatory force the advent of the strategic submarines certainly brought a new dimension to survivability and clearly has enabled us to have a significant portion of our strategic submarine force at sea in in relatively relaxed posture but in a survivable posture and that survivability really enables you to essentially always be able to strike second and that's really what deterrence is about it's that responsive capability not to strike first but to be able to always strike second arcane debates about strategic vulnerabilities preserving crisis stability and survivable nuclear weapons systems like Polaris remained top secret and well out of public view in 1955 it's operation alert 1950 what stirred the public's imagination was the fear of thermonuclear attack by Soviet bombers the intelligence community had the hypothesis that they would build as rapidly as possible and it was this presupposition of maximum potential output that led to notions about the Balma gap returning from the Moscow Air Show in July 1955 Air Force chief of staff general Nathan twining reported seeing scores of new Soviet bison intercontinental bombers by 1956 Air Force intelligence using the presupposition of maximum potential output predicted that within five years the Soviets could have as many as 800 bombers whole cities could be destroyed by bombs delivered by airplanes what do you do well you try to make an Air Defense you look to the production of more nuclear weapons improved nuclear weapons I think what's notable is that it was a natural inclination at that time to defend the entire country one of the earliest defenses to protect US cities was Nike Ajax a surface-to-air guided missile system equipped with a conventional high-explosive warhead by 1958 the nike hercules system married a more accurate missile with a nuclear warhead you had Nike locations all around the country very extensive defense systems against aircraft and so everybody as a natural instinct was in favor of defending themselves when the civil defense program started that was a natural inclination as well the emphasis was essentially on individual citizen action individual preparation civil defense is a component of the doctrine of massive retaliation on the one hand we're signaling to the Russians if you attack us we will be prepared we are taking steps to prepare and defend our people on the other hand if you attack us you will experience utter destruction we will respond massive with the white house in the background Washington as one the nation's greatest air throughout the mid-1950s the nation together with the president and top government officials participated in operation alert this nationwide civil defense drill included a top-secret command center in White Sulphur Springs West Virginia and there were broadcast facilities there where the president could address the people and so the idea was continuity of government in the event of the destruction of Washington we're here to determine the government emergency to continue the functions of government so there shall be no interruption the only business that must be carried over but even as Eisenhower practiced with the nation he understood that civil defenses and anti-aircraft defenses were no match in a war with thermonuclear weapons the Atomic Energy Commission began testing deliverable multi Megaton thermonuclear weapons in February 1954 the Bravo test series served to galvanize public attention the yield was almost three times the most probable value unfortunately the effects of shrimp were felt beyond our proving ground we followed miss to the east and relatively heavy for several hundred miles the radioactive fallout from those tests was much greater than the scientists had anticipated with the Bravo test the issue of radioactive fallout really gripped the public mind Eisenhower gave deep thought to the thermonuclear weapon he began to see it as something going beyond anything that had been experienced in traditional warfare I think in the period from the mid 50s through the early 60s you see a process of gradually increasing public apprehension and awareness Eisenhower had a grand conundrum that he was working how do you talk about national security and in particular how do you talk about nuclear weapons issues through the American public or in the one hand you're not scaring them to death and saying that everything is so desperate that it's impossible but on the other hand you're not sugarcoating it they're just not talking about it make sure you have here is to give people the facts sure what they can do get the federal leadership get the participation of the states and municipalities without terrifying people all right through his administration I think he tried to find that right balance we had three main instruments for our security diplomacy deterrence and actual defense actual military operations Eisenhower grappled with conflicting intelligence estimates about a bomber gap a public aroused to the dangers of thermonuclear weapons and a defense community urging him to spend billions more his promise of security with solvency led to a reliance upon nuclear weapons for national security but at the UN Eisenhower also initiated a diplomatic track to address widespread fears of thermonuclear war the United States pledges before you and therefore before the world its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma the having ceased speech was a step toward attempting her to the control to nuclear technology in a way that it could be used peacefully I think there's a very good speech and an important initiative but had little to do with arms control the Eisenhower administration did not really come to grips with arms control as a policy and a concept until the moratorium the 1958 nuclear test moratorium and that was just the beginning but that was as I see it anyway the beginning [Music] as he worked to ass wage public fears about thermonuclear warfare with a new generation of weapons and delivery systems Eisenhower was about to receive a most unwelcome surprise the launch of Sputnik atop a Soviet SS six ICBM set in motion a series of political and technological forces that would challenge Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation but it will be some time before either we or the Soviet forces will have long-range missile capacity equal to even a small fraction of the total destructive power of our present bomber force President Eisenhower had an entire vision and he explained that this was a tremendous accomplishment of the Soviet system he showed that they could launch missiles of course but it didn't change our basic deterrence Isner continued to think that the nuclear confrontation was governing the damage that would come from that was so apparent and so great that the Soviets were not likely to initiate such a conflict not for one minute that Khrushchev want a nuclear war I think he was perfectly clear that this would be you know just devastating that's what his own scientists were telling him and I think he thought that Eisenhower believed exactly the same thing what he thought was going on was a war of nerves on the heels of Sputnik came a new report to the president warning of a precipitous Soviet technological advantage an ICBM capability that could threaten the first strike as early as 1959 people who had dire views of national security said of course the Soviets are ahead they did a better job with the German engineers they have more missiles than we there's a missile gap but he said they haven't told me a thing I haven't been staying awake nights thinking about for these many years two years earlier the Killian report had recommended the acceleration of United States missile programs it also made another equally important proposal the improvement of US intelligence gathering this spurred the development of a high-altitude spy plane to monitor Soviet missile deployment the you to enable Eisenhower to checked areas where they might be producing these weapons and to ensure himself that in fact they were not in a position yet to manufacture them yet even with the benefit of new intelligence an improved early warning system and the promise of survivable retaliatory systems on the horizon many felt that Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation was losing credibility the rapid development of the h-bomb caused a number of American strategists particularly at Rand to recognize that this was going to be a two-sided game ultimately it was very uncertain but you could certainly try to limit those kinds of operations by dealing only with targets that were military targets the counter force arose because the counter force arose in Russia so you wanted to try to do something about that so it became natural to try to target the emerging Soviet nuclear capability nobody could guarantee that if you did counter force and not counter city that it would work out but it was worth a chance there is a dividing line of people in the nuclear age because some believe that nuclear weapons don't fit this the nuclear weapons only will produce such massive horrific destruction that no political objective could be achieved by actually using nuclear weapons others believe that they could be if they were use in a calibrated fashion if they were low yield if they were proportionate to the aggression Eisenhower continued to embrace a policy of deterrence by threatening to inflict unacceptable damage upon the Soviets a new strategic concept proposed to the president at the National Security Council argued for greater flexibility but Eisenhower regarded the strategy of graduated retaliation coercion as something akin to fighting with nuclear weapons but ISIL power would have known he was adamantly opposed to the idea of incremental engagement certainly I think that is an experienced commander from World War two Eisenhower had a little truck with that the fog of war would just wipe away the nature of the signals you were sending all of us know that weather started deliberately or accidentally global war would leave civilization in a sham this is as true of the Soviet system as of all others in a nuclear war that can be no victors only loser Eisenhower was a very complicated man with complicated thoughts in his view was that if we had a bold totally stated position that that was part of deterrence in and of itself for Eisenhower the fleet ballistic missile submarine embodied the very notion of nuclear deterrence a survivable weapon system that ensured strategic stability but the deployment of Polaris would create serious new operational challenges [Music] beginning in the late 1950s a technological momentum drove the development of US ballistic missile systems the speed of this growth would overtake national policy and operational planning [Music] Minute Man one flew on the 63rd of December in 1961 Sam Phillips was a young Brigadier General his bosses that told him you have to fly this thing in 1961 we were all down to Cape and this missile wasn't ready to be flown in 1961 so I said to Sam look we'll take this calendar we'll put it in the blockhouse will extend December till we get the thing flown so we actually flew it on a 63 to D summer that was flight test missile 401 with that piece of data we knew the thing would work a year before the successful test of Minuteman one the Navy commissioned Polaris and developed separate targeting plans for their a1 ballistic missile a submarine-launched ballistic missile would now greatly complicate the nuclear planning process in the late 1950s she had different commanders they specified commander sig sac various unified commanders you can pack on and so forth each of them developing their nuclear weapons plans independent of one another the theater commanders were identifying targets that the strategic commander also believed needed to be struck so that you had more than one weapon being applied to a target when perhaps only one or two that weapons was necessary there was recognition among planners that that the interface between deliveries that fratricide was likely to ensue that we'd be killing our own forces not just enemy forces and yet the Air Force and the Navy did not have a capability to disengage their different war plans Eisenhower referred to the lack of integration as a monstrosity in 1958 general Nathan twining chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff had proposed improving the nuclear planning process with a joint unified command Admiral arleigh Burke Chief of Naval Operations vigorously opposed the idea and feared losing control of the Navy's Polaris general twining was certainly well aware that to have an effective integrated plan that he was going to have to make the Navy comfortable with this process [Music] twining earlier had pushed for some kind of a structured coherent planning process the compromise if you will was that each of the forces would control their own delivery systems but that targeting had to be combined in a joint staff on August 11 1960 Eisenhower formally approved the proposal for the formation of the joint strategic target planning staff the J STPs envisioned by General twining the decision was taken late in the Eisenhower administration to create this new body out an Omaha joint strategic target planning staff the first thing that the joint strategic target planning staff was going to do was put together a single integrated operational plan single integrated operational plan identifies targets it allocates weapons to the targets and it decides on how those weapons are delivered to those targets the SIOP is based upon the written guidance that begins with the president and is refined by the Secretary of Defense and then further elaborated upon by the Joint Staff this is an extraordinarily elaborate undertaking in SIOP 62 was the first attempt to do that in a very compressed timeframe it was an inflexible plan in the sense that it didn't have a lot of options built into it psyops sixty two appeared to have a number of options I believe it was 14 but they weren't there was no difference all it was was how generated the forces were so as more forces became generated you had at what looked like a different options each option included all countries in the sino-soviet bloc giving the president virtually no capability to differentiate Eisenhower himself began to doubt the wisdom of having only large-scale nuclear attack options Eisenhower's science adviser went out and took a look at SIOP 62 and it was being put together and came back and said it's too inflexible I think Eisenhower would have agreed in that I think it's fair to say that when Kennedy came into office he and many of his senior civilian advisors were quite shocked to find the kind of war plans that they had inherited from the Eisenhower administration indeed Kennedy was given a memorandum in July 1961 from it George Bundy that said in essence the current and plan calls for shooting off everything we have in one shot and it is so constructed as to make any more flexible course very difficult the history again of nuclear weapons has been the ever-elusive effort to give the President of the United States flexibility in a choice about what attack options what uses of nuclear weapons he could choose in a crisis the significance of the relationship between the civilian policy leadership and the military personnel who implemented that policy into the SIOP is perhaps the most significant story of the period from 1960 1990 Cold War tensions in West Berlin would launch a search for flexible nuclear options by a new administration a search that would tap many of the strategic theories about nuclear war which had been percolating at Rand throughout the 1950s this administration is responsible [Music] [Applause] [Music] John Kennedy campaigned on fears of a missile gap with the Soviets a gap which later turned out to be more symbol than substance the Soviets had paltry forces at one point they had only four ICBMs that was not enough for a major attack on the United States President Eisenhower offered Kennedy or some of his advisors a view of the highly classified information but Kennedy and his team declined to have any knowledge official knowledge of this and when they got in discovered that missile gap was in the other direction that we didn't have a problem in that way Kennedy surrounded himself with what the Joint Chiefs would refer to as the whiz kids and chief among them was his 44 year old Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara McNamara recruited from Rand people like Charles hitch who became the chief budget figure at the Defense Department Alain Enthoven who had an officer systems analysis Kauffman himself who had been at ran and these were people who applied quantitative methods to solve some of the problems that McNamara wanted solved and McNamara was a major supporter of these techniques being applied to military problems the connection between rand and the kennedy administration worked out very well and was very close the whiz kids from Rand had new ideas about nuclear strategy and operations which were unified by the notion that the president should have choices when he was briefed initially about the SIOP didn't have any choice at all Kennedy was so furious about this that he said he'd never sit in on any one of these exercises again and he made it very clear to McNamara that he wanted choices the one thing that shocked me almost weren't anything else about the SIOP plans that I reviewed as March of 1961 at SAC was we essentially blasted our way through Warsaw Pact countries in order to get to the targets of our SIOP in in the Soviet Union and I I remember I thought my god what are we gonna do to Poland moreover there's no differentiation in those attack plans between attacking nuclear targets conventional military targets and urban industrial targets [Music] Macca Maya was originally promulgated they ain't no cities strategy don't go after the cities go after the forces and do it in such a way as to limit the amount of damage and no point killing people just to kill them that's not the point of this the no cities approach was an attempt to pursue some thoughts that some of the rand experts had brought with them the only way I could see that one could use nuclear weapons but still have some kind of control over the the way in which the the exchange might evolve was by avoiding cities we asked sac to develop greater flexibility in their programs there are plans to provide withholding capabilities I thought it was very important to provide other options to the president as a review of planning guidance for nuclear weapons got underway in the summer of 1961 McNamara was briefing the president about a new crisis in West Berlin by July the NSC was considering a variety of military responses to a renewed blockade of West Berlin including the use of nuclear weapons in Central Europe the world is not deceived by the communist attempt to label Berlin as a hotbed of war there is peace in Berlin today the source of world trouble in tension is Moscow not Berlin and it begins it will have begun in Moscow and not Berlin one of the most important events was a Soviet attempt to take West Berlin at the time of course West Berlin was isolated from the rest of the NATO located in East Germany but about that time I called the SAC your email ID commander who was general north dad back to Washington and I said look Larry they today we did be they did see we did be how this thing going to evolve the flexible response doctrine began when Kennedy and his advisors recognized the Berlin crisis was dangerous and that the utter lack of flexibility in nuclear war plans made it even more dangerous by September 1961 a wall separating West and East Berlin reduced the immediate tensions but it would stand as an enduring symbol of the Cold War for the next 28 years after the crisis McNamara issued his first draft presidential memorandum that provided new guidance for SIOP 63 which for the first time included a secure reserve force what's high up 63 was a plan to do was to create lower-level options pre-planned not to do this thinking on the spot not to have civilian officials ad-libbing a nuclear war plan SIOP 63 was a plan that included five primary attack options designed to be executed under varying contingencies of preemption or retaliation the plan allowed for withholding attacks in a number of different ways and focused on the destruction of Soviet forces while maintaining a secure reserve force capable of devastating the Soviet Society psyops 63 was the first effort to control the escalation of a nuclear war the military tended to object to notions of let's say escalation control withholds complications to the war plan many military officers when asked to engage in more limited nuclear options have with holds to protect Soviet cities in the hope that Soviet Union would not attack our cities felt that this was abstract theorizing by American civilians and that they did not want to have any part of it theories of escalation control would also be complicated by rapidly increasing numbers of Soviet strategic nuclear forces capable of inflicting unacceptable damage upon the United States so the attempt to avoid that publicly discussed policy of limiting damage to each side was considered impractical and we moved away from it very very quickly and we moved away from it to what became known as flexible response McNamara shifted from damage limitation to flexible response a flexible responses basically saying we have to keep our options open we need what we need to have for lots of different choices and let's not lock ourselves in to one particular kind of strategy and let's use the minimum force necessary to achieve our goal a flexible response in a sense was a withholding strategy we'd only use a portion of our our force hoping that the Soviets would only use a portion of theirs same kind of thing he endorses today nuclear weapons should never be used unless the others are use them first that we should endorse um no first use policy the West European allies we had didn't like that at all and the European said well you're gonna fight a conventional war here and destroy Western Europe with non-nuclear munitions or we are going to be overrun that does not sound like a very good to turn the Europeans preferred to have the at least the public discussion emphasizing nuclear weapons and NATO policy in effect would be supported by increasing the numbers of both strategic nuclear weapons and tactical nuclear weapons today we have a flexible fighting team ready to deal with any threat whether it be large or small we are superior to the Communists and nuclear power and we intend to stay that way indeed there were 7000 tactical nuclear weapons in Western Europe McNamara introduced those weapons as a way to reassure the Europeans that he was prepared to use nuclear weapons I'm not sure that he would ever have used them that was not his nature but it was part of a symbol of American support despite my belief and it was shared by the president President Kennedy that it would be contrary to the interests of the USA and NATO to ever initiate the use of nuclear weapons that was still the publicly stated NATO policy and it was the policy and underlying NATO's war plans which in some ways is a lot like what was the official policy in the last year's the ion ministration that we may try to hold you back without using nuclear weapons but then we may bring nuclear weapons here and there was a policy that was clear as mod deliberately clear as mud [Music] who was smoked of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe nurse job Falls to personal insult I mean Khrushchev in this way was like Stalin he wanted to seem stronger rather than a weaker so this was a pretty high stakes game of politics but I think to his mind you know nuclear war was just out of out of the question so it was this you know see who would blink first in a crisis since the heady days of Sputnik Khrushchev had impressed the West with his claims for Soviet technological prowess but five years later the Soviet leader grew bolder in October 1962 the United States had Jupiter missiles on NATO bases in Britain Italy and Turkey and their flight times two targets in the Soviet Union were measured in minutes in Khrushchev's eyes the US had altered the strategic balance of power one of the explanations for Khrushchev's action in Cuba is to plug the gap in strategic forces by deploying systems that constraint the u.s. on October 14 a recon plane returns with the first hard photographic evidence indicating the presence of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba immediately increased surveillance is ordered the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba tested US strategic nuclear policy at a time when it possessed an overwhelming nuclear superiority at a ratio of nearly seventeen to one yet the execution of pre-planned nuclear options contained in SIOP 63 was only remotely considered within XCOM the executive committee established by Kennedy to deal with the crisis I agreed we had to get them out because they'd been introduced under the cloak of deceit but I stated we should be clear on one thing they did not change the military balance while all agreed that action was necessary there was no consensus about the impact of the missiles in Cuba upon the strategic balance the Joint Chiefs believed that Soviet missiles 100 miles offshore were massively to stabilizing all of the Western Hemisphere from Hudson Bay to Lima Peru is within their range with the facts now before him President Kennedy continues to meet with his top advisors and I said what the hell difference would make whether a missile is launched from 100 miles off the shore or 5,000 miles off the shore before they put those there you knew damn well that if we launch the first strike they would launch whatever survived of their force and we have all agreed that it would be sufficient to deter us from launching a first strike so before they put those missiles there we didn't have a first strike capable but we did have a clear capability to deter now they put those missiles there in the Cuba we still don't have a first strike it hasn't changed a bit but we still have it a turn they realized that they were very close to a nuclear war because as they looked at the potential outcomes in the heart of that crisis they didn't look very good the XCOM never really raised the issue of what do we do with our nuclear forces the only thing that made them think differently was when I pointed out to the that sack with moving forces down within range of the Cuban missiles and at that point they began to recognize that this was a military as well as a political issue during the five or six days we debated two major alternatives one was a quarantine and the other was an air strike which was recognized would have to be followed by a sea lion invasion as Kennedy reviewed the options one last time he asked general Sweeney the operational commander if an airstrike would destroy all the missiles he said mr. president I can guarantee you we will destroy more of those missiles than any other Air Force could but can I guarantee you there won't be one to earth five left no now at that moment it was clear in my mind that Kennedy was not going to support the attack what president would initiate action that almost surely would resolve in one two or five nuclear warheads detonating on some of his major cities the halt this offensive build-up a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated should these offensive military preparations continue thus increasing the threat to the hemisphere further action will be justified I have directed the Armed Forces to prepare for any eventuality it shall be the policy of this nation regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response on the Soviet Union [Music] I think that ultimately it was the sheer hara to mcnamara of contemplating a serious nuclear war that led him to back off to the notion of assured destruction as sufficient to hold the soviet union at bay now this had an immense impact on my thinking about the use of nuclear weapons and i have often said publicly the cuban missile crisis was the best managed foreign policy or defense policy crisis for the last 50 years but in the end we avoided nuclear war by the narrowest of margins because of luck all of this influenced my thinking regarding nuclear strategy nuclear force levels and particularly my advice to President Johnson so later on Mackinaw began to stress the ultimate deterrent the assured destruction capability as not just a minimum deterrent but as the essence of deterrence because he wanted that to be a constraining force after absorbing a Soviet first strike a u.s. capability of destroying 25 to 30% of their population and 50% of their industrial and military capability then the technical people said 400 Megaton weapons on Russian cities and industrial capacity would do the job so that from then on was the design goal for building forces to have 400 weapons assured of delivery despite their destruction before launch despite their possible attrition and going through defenses at its peak in 1962 with 283 thousand personnel and 3400 aircraft sac exercised considerable influence upon decisions about nuclear force requirements McNamara's initial guidance supporting a policy of flexible response had prompted the jst PS to identify many more military targets flexible response was driving the inventory if you wanted to have flexible response you wanted to have a large number of weapon as you want and develop new kinds of weapons the airforce immediately not only rejoiced but saw the opportunity to expand their capabilities especially the Minuteman ICBMs proposed buying 10,000 [Music] MacNamara increasingly during his tenure in the pentagon became consumed was fine to put a lid on the nuclear forces for McNamara assured destruction became a rationale for sizing retaliatory forces of the SIOP as well as a declaratory policy of deterrence McNamara believed that he would be deterred by the threat of massive retaliation and he assumed that the Russians would feel the same but I think that was a grave misunderstanding of how the Soviet leaders thought about nuclear weapons and especially about the way in which the military thought about nuclear weapons which was in terms of fighting a war and you know because that was in a way their mission they tend to be very tough minded about these things they were always interested much more force than they might ever need they're very conservative that way that's their own history and I think that there was a substantial period of time when the Soviet Union built strategic forces for reasons that had to do with internal Soviet politics and internal resource allocations nuclear theory and nuclear strategy has made a lot of difference in the way we pointed weapons but it has not made nearly as much difference as we like to claim in how many weapons we had and I believe that is almost certainly true for the Soviet Union [Music] [Music] Harold Brown once said when we build they build and when we stop they build

Channel: Sandia National Labs

Views: 505,144

Rating: 4.5477495 out of 5

Keywords: Sandia National Laboratories, deterrence, nuclear deterrence, strategic nuclear policy, nuclear policy, United States nuclear policy

Id: Qz0Dg5gIjhw

Length: 118min 54sec (7134 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 03 2018