Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [29]
For assistance in this quest, McNamara turned not to the uniformed military, whose creative capacity he doubted, but to the fraternity of nuclear strategists. By the 1960s, these well-credentialed political scientists, economists, and mathematicians, installed in leading universities or at think tanks such as RAND, had carved out for themselves a comfortable niche as influential interpreters of the Washington consensus. Trafficking in jargon tricked out as profundities, these self-described policy intellectuals purported to bring to the study of nuclear warfare greater rigor than the likes of LeMay deemed either feasible or necessary.
Intent on investing the U.S. nuclear posture with greater “credibility” without being excessively provocative, they generated a dizzying array of obfuscating twaddle: finite deterrence, graduated response, controlled response, counterforce, counter-cities, counterforce no-cities, damage limitation, full first strike, decapitation, second strike, assured second strike, and assured destruction. Never, however, did this endeavor yield any definitive conclusions, ostensibly brilliant strategic insights becoming obsolete more quickly than the aircraft comprising SAC’s bomber force. To model nuclear war, they conjured up absurdly complex scenarios—Herman Kahn’s “escalation ladder” had forty-four rungs beginning with “Ostensible Crisis” and culminating with “Spasm or Insensate War.”16 They pondered such imponderables as how to create space for negotiating pauses in the middle of a nuclear exchange.
Intent on basing nuclear strategy on something other than the naked threat to obliterate large segments of humankind, McNamara waded into this murky thicket, almost immediately lost his bearings, and eventually emerged pretty much where he had entered. Whichever way he turned, McNamara ran up against the same conclusions: In any nuclear crisis, there was no way to guarantee that the other side would understand, agree with, or conform to whatever logic happened to inform U.S. actions.
The very notion of exercising carefully calibrated “options” to maintain “control” in a war gone nuclear was a mirage. Barring the absolutely certain and complete elimination of an adversary’s retaliatory capability, any use of a nuclear weapon against another nuclear weapons state would pose unacceptable risks to the attacker; victory, that is, was a chimera. Finally, any use of nuclear weapons would result in devastation on a scale impossible to justify; humanely waged nuclear war was an oxymoron.
Regarding massive retaliation as crude and brutal, while unable to imagine himself ordering such an extreme response, McNamara felt the Eisenhower approach lacked credibility. It was, therefore, “useless” as a basis for a strategy of deterrence.17 He pursued what he fancied to be a more rigorously analytical approach. His conclusion was this: Confronting the Kremlin with the prospect of assured destruction of one-quarter to one-third of the Soviet population and two-thirds of Soviet industry would prevent the Cold War from turning hot. He calculated further that the delivery of four hundred megatons of nuclear weapons—equivalent in destructive power to 26,600 Hiroshima-type bombs—would suffice to inflict that level of damage.18
As it happened, the U.S. nuclear arsenal had long since passed that plateau. The strategic forces being expanded at McNamara’s behest already had many thousands of megatons at their disposal. To bring his revised strategy into alignment with these already existing capabilities (and undoubtedly with an eye to satisfying various political and bureaucratic interests), McNamara declared that each of the three major components of the U.S. strategic strike force—the long-range bombers, the land-based ICBMs, and the submarine-launched ballistic missiles—needed to be independently