Command and Control

The Australian scholar Desmond Ball was also responsible for groundbreaking research on American nuclear strategy and targeting. His study of how the alleged missile gap affected subsequent defense spending — Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) — shows how domestic concerns, not military necessity, established the number of ICBMs that the United States would deploy for the next thirty years. A book that Ball edited with Jeffrey Richelson, Strategic Nuclear Targeting (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), explains the thinking behind where those missiles were aimed. The work of another influential scholar, David Alan Rosenberg, reveals how the American nuclear arsenal became so much larger than it needed to be. Two of Rosenberg’s essays—“The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy 1945–1960,” International Security, vol. 7, no. 4 (1983), pp. 3–71, and “‘A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours’: Documents on American Plans for Nuclear War with the Soviet Union, 1954–55,” written with W. B. Morse, International Security, vol. 6, no. 3 (1981), pp. 3–38—show how little would have been left after an attack by the Strategic Air Command.

The ongoing dispute about the merits of civilian or military control of nuclear weapons is addressed throughout the official history of the Atomic Energy Commission: The New World, 1939/1946: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Volume I written by Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962); Atomic Shield, 1947/1952: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Volume II, by Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969); and Atoms for Peace and War, 1953/1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission, a History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Volume III, by Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). A fascinating declassified report traces how the military gained the upper hand—“History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons: July 1945 through September 1977,” Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Atomic Energy), February 1978 (TOP SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/FORMERLY RESTRICTED DATA/declassified). The best academic studies of the issue have been written, wholly or in part, by Peter D. Feaver, now a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University. In Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), Feaver explores not only the tension between civilian and military control, but also the always/never dilemma governing how that control would be exercised. And in an earlier work written with Peter Stein, Feaver gave the first detailed account of why the Kennedy administration took such a strong interest in coded, electromechanical locks: Assuring Control of Nuclear Weapons: The Evolution of Permissive Action Links (Cambridge, MA: Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and University Press of America, 1987).