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By Root 401 0

with LeMay that dated back to World War II. The two men had their own rich history. If by the 1960s their thinking about war had diverged, they had once been close collaborators. During the latter stages of World War II, McNamara, then a young army air corps staff officer, worked for LeMay, serving as (in McNamara’s words) “part of a mechanism” that proffered advice on how to inflict the greatest amount of damage on Japanese cities with the greatest efficiency.12 McNamara’s considerable analytical prowess had facilitated the killing of several hundred thousand noncombatants. Whether the result qualified as harsh but necessary or as a war crime—late in life, McNamara inclined toward the latter—the new defense secretary’s fingerprints were all over the bombing campaign that had reduced Japan’s cities to ashes and that LeMay viewed as the model for how to wage war against the Soviet Union.

The ensuing contest between the two centered on the composition, size, and anticipated employment of America’s nuclear strike force, with its stockpile of existing weapons now exceeding eighteen thousand. During the previous decade, LeMay had played a dominant role in determining these matters. In the new decade, McNamara intended that he, acting as the president’s agent, would do so.

When it came to the composition of the force, the contest centered on the future of the B-70 Valkyrie, a supersonic, long-range bomber then under development. LeMay viewed the Valkyrie as essential to ensuring SAC’s ability to penetrate Soviet air space. Fielding the B-70 was his—and therefore, the air force’s—top priority.

Given the growing capabilities of land-based and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, McNamara was not persuaded, especially with the subsonic B-52 less than a decade old and the B-70 expected to cost $20 billion over ten years. Concluding that the United States really didn’t need the Valkyrie, McNamara decided to kill it, sending LeMay into a rage. The air force general found especially intolerable “the Secretary’s saying ‘No’ to something the military wished to do and giving a military reason for his action.” While devaluing genuinely professional advice, “he and his coterie were setting themselves up as military experts.”13 LeMay dialed up his friends on Capitol Hill and persuaded them to appropriate enough funds to keep the B-70 program alive. McNamara simply refused to spend the money: The B-70 was dead. McNamara had seemingly won the first round on points.14

McNamara and LeMay next locked horns over the size of the U.S. strategic arsenal: How much was enough? The ability of the United States to produce nuclear weapons along with the means to deliver them had become essentially limitless. When it came to the silo-based Minuteman ICBM, Gen. Thomas Power, LeMay’s successor at SAC, was pressing for a force of ten thousand missiles. The air force was formally requesting three thousand. McNamara’s analysis persuaded him that even Eisenhower’s planned force of six hundred ICBMs was probably too large; a few hundred missiles should suffice. Yet with Kennedy having vowed to close an ostensibly dangerous, but actually nonexistent “missile gap” invented by his campaign and with Congress unhappy with the defense secretary’s highhanded disposition of the B-70, analytical rigor took a backseat to politics. McNamara arbitrarily declared that the nation’s security required 1,200 Minutemen, giving the air force less than it wanted, but enough to keep its supporters happy.15 Score round two for LeMay.

Finally, there was the matter of thinking the unthinkable: envisioning how to wage actual nuclear war. Here, McNamara managed to tie himself in knots while essentially affirming the status quo. SIOP-61 reflected LeMay’s preference for an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and most of the communist world. McNamara recoiled from the prospect of cold-blooded slaughter on such a scale. He sought an approach to nuclear war offering the president (and himself) choice, flexibility, and the ability to discriminate.