Command and Control

Four years after announcing the policy of massive retaliation, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was having doubts. “Are we becoming prisoners of our strategic concept,” he asked at a meeting of Eisenhower’s military advisers, “and caught in a vicious circle?” A defense policy that relied almost entirely on nuclear weapons had made sense in the early days of the Cold War. The alternatives had seemed worse: maintain a vast and expensive Army or cede Western Europe to the Communists. But the Soviet Union now possessed hydrogen bombs and long-range missiles — and the American threat of responding to every act of Soviet aggression, large or small, with an all-out nuclear attack no longer seemed plausible. It could force the president to make a “bitter choice” during a minor conflict and risk the survival of the United States. Dulles urged the Joint Chiefs of Staff to come up with a new strategic doctrine, one that would give the president a variety of military options and allow the United States to fight small-scale, limited wars.

General Maxwell D. Taylor, the Army’s chief of staff, wholeheartedly agreed with Dulles. For years Taylor had urged Eisenhower to spend more money on conventional forces and adopt a strategy of “flexible response.” The Army hated the idea of serving merely as a trip wire in Europe; it still wanted to bring the battle back to the battlefield. The need for a more flexible policy was backed by RAND analysts and by a young Harvard professor, Henry A. Kissinger, whose book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy had become an unlikely bestseller in 1957. Kissinger thought that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union didn’t have to end in mutual annihilation. Rules of engagement could be tacitly established between the superpowers. The rules would forbid the use of hydrogen bombs, encourage a reliance on tactical nuclear weapons, and declare cities more than five hundred miles from the battlefield immune from attack. Unlike massive retaliation, a strategy of “graduated deterrence” would allow the leadership on both sides to “pause for calculation,” pull back from the abyss, and reach a negotiated settlement. Kissinger believed that in a limited war — fought with a decentralized command structure that let local commanders decide how and when to use their nuclear weapons — the United States was bound to triumph, thanks to the superior “daring and leadership” of its officers.

The Navy had also begun to question the thinking behind massive retaliation. It was about to introduce a new weapon system, the Polaris submarine, that might revolutionize how nuclear wars would be fought. The sixteen missiles carried by each Polaris were too inaccurate to be aimed at military targets, such as airfields. But their 1-megaton warheads were ideal for destroying “soft” targets, like cities. The Polaris would serve best as a retaliatory, second-strike weapon — leading the Navy to challenge the whole notion of striking the Soviet Union first.

Admiral Arleigh Burke, the chief of naval operations, became an outspoken proponent of “finite deterrence.” Instead of maintaining thousands of strategic weapons on Air Force bombers and land-based missiles to destroy every Soviet military target — a seemingly impossible task — Burke suggested that the United States needed hundreds, not thousands, of nuclear warheads. They could be carried by the Navy’s Polaris submarines, hidden beneath the seas, invulnerable to a surprise attack. And they would be aimed at the Soviet Union’s major cities, in order to deter an attack. Placing the nation’s nuclear arsenal on submarines would eliminate the need for split-second decision making during a crisis. It would give the president time to think, permit the United States to apply force incrementally, and reduce the threat of all-out nuclear war. Burke argued that a strategy of massive retaliation no longer made sense: “Nobody wins a suicide pact.” A decade earlier the Navy had criticized the Air Force for targeting Soviet cities, calling the policy “ruthless and barbaric.” Now the Navy claimed that was the only sane and ethical way to ensure world peace.