A constructed Peace The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963

This was in line with the old Eisenhower policy, but the new Kennedy administration did not find this concept the least bit attractive, and it very much disliked the idea of deploying MRBMs on European soil. Land-based missiles, it was frequently argued, "would be subject to seizure or use in an emergency by the national Governments in whose territory they were deployed." Even if these missiles were assigned to NATO, even if the warheads remained officially in American custody, there was a serious risk that the MRBMs would fall under de facto national control. "Since the warheads would be contained in the missiles," it was argued, "each country could fire off at will missiles which were capable of striking the USSR," and "nominal commitment of the missiles to SACEUR would not prevent this." U.S. custody would consist of American technicians "whose 'second key' was required to fire those missiles," but those technicians could easily be overpowered. "A nation that had reached the stage of desperation in which it contemplated national use of nuclear weapons," Gerard Smith wrote, "would hardly boggle at revoking a paper commitment to SACEUR or seizing a key from the US technician." It was therefore clear, as Henry Owen, another key U.S. official, argued in a memorandum to Acheson, that "we don't want these missiles deployed in Europe." A deployment there would amount to "placing these strategic missiles (with mated warheads) in European hands."¹¹²⁰

Acheson did not need much convincing. His March report on NATO made the same sort of argument about the danger of MRBMs in Europe, even if they were officially committed to NATO, being diverted "to national purposes," and it came down hard against any policy that would lead to effective "national" (i.e., European) "ownership or control of MRBM forces," or which would weaken "centralized" (i.e., American) "command and control over these forces." This language was carried over into the April 21 Policy Directive.¹¹²¹ But the issue remained unsettled, so in July Acheson returned to the charge. In a long memorandum to McNamara, he developed the case against land-based MRBMs. Again, the key argument was that the European national forces, especially German forces, would be able to get control of the weapons. There were "physical gadgets," he said (meaning the PALs), which could "help maintain centralized SACEUR control." But he thought the Europeans would be able to devise counter-measures, and indeed that was the first thing the French, and probably the Germans as well, would do if the MRBMs were deployed on their territory.¹¹²² This soon became the official State Department view.¹¹²³

So the American government began to back away from the idea of land-based MRBMs. Owen thought U.S. representatives needed to engage "in a certain amount of soft-talk, in order to explain our position to the Europeans in a way that will not appear a direct repudiation of SACEUR." But the purpose of the soft-talk was "to let the MRBM proposition down easily," not to leave it alive "as a topic for further inter-agency haggling within the U.S. Government."¹¹²⁴ And in fact the American line in 1961 was that the issue of a land-based MRBM force was being put on the back burner--that there were more important things to worry about in the military area, and that the military requirement, such as it was, could be met on an interim basis by the assignment of a number of U.S. Polaris missile submarines to SACEUR.¹¹²⁵ The goal here was clear enough. U.S. leaders wanted to avoid an MRBM deployment in Europe, but they did not want to appear "to completely overthrow the actions of their predecessors." So they simply adopted the tactic of saying that they gave this issue "very low priority."¹¹²⁶

Instead of a land-based MRBM force, American officials pushed the idea of a seaborne MRBM force, owned and operated on a thoroughly multinational basis. The idea of a multilateral force had originally emerged at the end of the Eisenhower administration, but the goal at that point had been to create a NATO force, not subject to American veto, as a bridge to a truly independent European nuclear force.¹¹²⁷ Under Kennedy, however, the fundamental goal was radically altered. The United States was now determined to retain a veto over use of the force.¹¹²⁸ The American government did not openly insist on the maintenance of the veto until 1963.¹¹²⁹ The line in 1961 and 1962 was that other arrangements might be considered, and that it was up to the Europeans to propose them.¹¹³⁰ But this was just a tactic, a "debating trick," as Bundy later called it.¹¹³¹ The Europeans, Rusk and McNamara agreed, "would not be able to settle on any other controlling agent than the President." The State Department thought, however, that it was "most important" that the Europeans reach this conclusion on their own. That was why it was considered very unwise to state flatly at the outset "that we insist on unilateral U.S. control." If the Europeans reached that conclusion themselves, they could not then say that America was dictating to them and deliberately trying to keep them down.¹¹³²

The military authorities disliked the MLF and would have preferred to deploy land-based missiles in Europe. Norstad was particularly outspoken on these matters. "All this talk about a multilateral force," he said in December 1962, "is meaningless and confusing," and indeed America's whole "nuclear policy toward Europe had been silly."¹¹³³ But Norstad's views were ignored. He was not even consulted before the American ambassador to NATO made a major statement in June 1962 laying out US views on the MRBM question.¹¹³⁴

JCS misgivings were also swept aside. In April 1962, the Chiefs denied the claim that "there was no military requirement for MRBMs."¹¹³⁵ But McNamara dismissed the idea that there was a military need for these missiles. Those who said there was--and that included the JCS--did not understand the "nuclear control problem," and this "was in itself dangerous."¹¹³⁶ What he meant was that the real issue was political, that there was an overriding need to make sure that the host countries did not get control of these strategic nuclear weapons. This was also what Rusk had in mind when he later noted that SACEUR's MRBM "requirement" had been "downgraded for political reasons."¹¹³⁷ Since land-based MRBMs were politically undesirable, the line had to be that they were militarily unnecessary. McNamara therefore claimed that the Chiefs had agreed with the official line that MRBMs were not urgently needed. But, as General Taylor pointed out, this simply was not true.¹¹³⁸

Taylor soon took over from Lemnitzer as JCS chairman. But the Chiefs' position on the MRBM question did not change--that is, until McNamara forced them to change it. On May 1, 1963, the JCS met and reached certain conclusions. They could not state that it was "militarily advisable" to go ahead with the MLF. A "more prudent" course of action, in their view, was to proceed with arrangements involving national MRBM forces committed to NATO. McNamara and his deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, got wind of what was being decided. They met with the Chiefs the next day and a very different JCS position emerged. The JCS, taking political considerations into account, now agreed that the MLF was feasible and would be "militarily effective."¹¹³⁹ The Chiefs had thus been made to give their formal approval to a policy which McNamara himself saw as foolish.¹¹⁴⁰

Once again, the German nuclear question played the key role in shaping American policy in this area. The whole point of the MLF was to head off the pressure for national nuclear forces, and above all to absorb and deflect the pressures which, if unchecked, would lead sooner or later to a German nuclear capability. As Nitze put it, it was "in the main" to deal with the problem of eventual German nuclear ambitions that the MLF had been proposed.¹¹⁴¹ The MLF had been designed in particular as an alternative to a land-based MRBM force, and the land-based MRBMs had been opposed mainly because it was felt that they could fall too easily into the hands of host country, and especially German, forces. The problem Kennedy faced here had to do with the American veto. Under Eisenhower, the assumption had been that the MLF would eventually devolve into an independent European force; the Kennedy administration, however, was dead set against the idea of a force not subject to American control. But if the use of the force would be subject to an American veto, it was hard to see how such a force would do more for Europe than the much larger forces under direct American control. Top U.S. officials were quite clear in their own minds that the MLF was therefore of no real value--that, as Kennedy himself put it, it was "not a real force but merely a façade."¹¹⁴² If the MLF had no real strategic value, how then could it ultimately serve any real political function? Were the Europeans so much stupider than their American counterparts that they would be unable to see through all the talk and grasp what was actually going on? Kennedy certainly did not think so, and was therefore strongly tempted to junk the whole project.

What held him back in 1962 was a sense that if the MLF were abandoned, the United States would probably have to face the issue of a German nuclear capability head on. And this he was reluctant to do. In the long run, the Germans would be more likely to accept a non-nuclear status if they were not being discriminated against too overtly. A permanent non-nuclear status, with all that it implied about the allies' continuing distrust of Germany, the Federal Republic's dependence on her allies and the limits on her political freedom of action, was a bitter pill for any German government to swallow. If the Germans were to accept this sort of status, it had to be packaged in the right way. It had to be presented as part of a more general policy which, on the surface at least, had little to do with the German problem as such. The MLF might be useful in this context; the State Department seemed convinced that this was the case. So whatever his misgivings, Kennedy was willing to give the MLF lobby a chance, but always in his mind with the proviso that if the policy turned out to be bankrupt, he might have to try another approach.

There is one final element in this picture of the U.S. government's new NATO policy, and this has to do with the Kennedy administration's new strategy for general nuclear war. If one were to believe the rhetoric, it seemed that the new administration believed that a controlled nuclear war might actually be possible. The official claim now was that with a new strategy, a strategy of "controlled and discriminate general nuclear war," nuclear deterrence would get a new lease on life. Even with the growth of Soviet nuclear capabilities, the United States, thanks to this strategy, could rationally take the initiative and launch a major nuclear strike on the USSR in the event of a massive Soviet attack on western Europe. The European allies could therefore continue to rely on the American nuclear deterrent and need not build nuclear forces of their own.

This new doctrine differed fundamentally from the Eisenhower strategy. During the Eisenhower period, there had been no attempt to create a force that could fight a controlled or protracted nuclear war. Quite the contrary: the goal had been to work out a single, precise and well-rehearsed operational plan "that could be implemented with a simple unambiguous decision, almost without further command intervention." As JCS Chairman Twining had put it, operations would be "pre-planned for automatic execution to the maximum extent possible and with minimum reliance on post-H-hour communications." The SIOP--the basic plan for general nuclear war--had been designed at the end of the Eisenhower period with these goals in mind. This plan "incorporated a comprehensive set of individual strategic strikes, prescribing tasks, targets, tactics, timing, and other operational particulars in minute detail, and demanding utmost precision in execution by earmarked forces." The procedure was to transmit a single "go code" to the strike forces "giving them the signal to carry out previously designated assignments to deliver prescribed weapons in a specified manner against preselected targets, all in quasi-automatic fashion that reduced communications and other command requirements to the barest human and technical minimums." Once the go code had been received, there was in fact "no way to stop" the attack from running its course. Indeed, the targets assigned to each carrier were the same "whether our strike is preventive or retaliatory."¹¹⁴³

Top officials in the Kennedy administration intensely disliked this sort of strategy and sought to introduce more flexibility into the plan for general nuclear war. The issue was discussed at great length, and by the spring of 1962 it seemed that a new formal strategy had officially been adopted. McNamara laid out the new doctrine in a top secret speech to the NATO Council at Athens in April and then in a public address at Ann Arbor in June. The American nuclear guarantee of Europe, he insisted in the Athens speech, remained intact: McNamara explicitly noted here that if NATO's defenses were overwhelmed, the West would have to escalate the war and "initiate the use of nuclear weapons." It was extremely important in such circumstances--and indeed crucial to the credibility and thus to the effectiveness of the new strategy--that the Soviets not retaliate with whatever survived the attack. They therefore had to be given a very strong incentive--the desire to preserve the bulk of their own society intact--for holding their remaining forces back. Soviet cities were to be spared, the Soviet population kept alive for its hostage value. The United States would focus instead on military targets, and especially on the Soviet nuclear force; urban-industrial targets would be avoided. The western attack would be discriminate. Yields would be matched to targets. Accuracy would be improved so that yields could be reduced. One could rely more on airbursts than on groundbursts so as to limit the amount of fallout. The aim was to "reduce damage to civilians": "the more discriminating the attack, the less the damage."¹¹⁴⁴

The goal, in other words, was to be able, in the event of war, to "engage in a controlled and flexible nuclear response": the "counterforce no-cities" strategy, as it was called, was thus a strategy for controlled nuclear war. To operate such a strategy, McNamara pointed out, a survivable command and control system was essential. But there was more to such a system than underground bunkers, airborne control centers and the like. What was vital, McNamara said, was "unity of planning, executive authority, and central direction." Control within the alliance had to be "indivisible":

There must not be competing and conflicting strategies in the conduct of nuclear war. We are convinced that a general nuclear war target system is indivisible and if nuclear war should occur, our best hope lies in conducting a centrally controlled campaign against all of the enemy's vital nuclear capabilities. Doing this means carefully choosing targets, pre-planning strikes, coordinating attacks, and assessing results, as well as allocating and directing follow-on attacks from the center. These call, in our view, for a greater degree of Alliance participation in formulating nuclear policies and consulting on the appropriate occasions for using these weapons. Beyond this, it is essential that we centralize the decision to use our nuclear weapons to the greatest extent possible. We would all find it intolerable to contemplate having only a part of the strategic force launched in isolation from our main striking power.¹¹⁴⁵
So there it was. Independent use of European forces was "intolerable." Indeed, McNamara went on to argue that "relatively weak nuclear forces," targeted on cities, were not "likely to be adequate to perform the function of deterrence." A small force would invite preemptive attack; to launch it "would be tantamount to suicide."¹¹⁴⁶ A force of that sort would not be a credible deterrent.

American spokesmen, both official and semi-official, now repeatedly argued along these lines. Rusk, for example, developed these points with top German leaders in June 1962. The idea that a "relatively small national nuclear force" might be used independently of the Alliance was "frightening." Deterrence, he and other U.S. officials declared over and over again, was "indivisible": an attack on Europe would warrant the same response as an attack on the United States; the Europeans could therefore safely leave the burden of nuclear deterrence in American hands; indeed, it was somewhat insulting for them even to suggest that America might abandon them in the end rather than see her own cities destroyed. The term "indivisibility" was used so frequently in the American attack on national nuclear forces that Bohlen, now ambassador to France, finally urged the U.S. government to drop it. "To any European," he wrote, it was now taken simply as a "euphemism for absolute American control."¹¹⁴⁷

How is all this to be taken? Was the policy of opposing nuclear forces under European control rooted, to any important extent, in the sort of thinking McNamara laid out in the Athens speech? Or is the strategic doctrine to be understood primarily in instrumental terms, as a way of getting the Europeans to accept arrangements the Americans wanted for essentially political reasons? Was the strategy, in other words, driving the policy, or vice versa?

The first point to note in this context is that American leaders at this point did not really believe that the United States would be able to launch a first strike under any circumstances--not for more than a year or two at any rate. McNamara's argument at Athens was that the American nuclear deterrent was still effective because if the Soviets attacked Europe, the United States, under the new strategy, could still rationally launch a first strike; the claim that European nuclear forces were pointless and indeed dangerous was based on this fundamental contention. But McNamara himself did not think that the United States could rationally strike first with nuclear weapons, even if Europe was being overrun. Indeed, he insisted in an important memorandum for the president in late 1962 that the "coercive strategy"--that is, the sort of strategy he had outlined in the Athens speech--was not an option, unless the Soviets had already launched a nuclear attack on America and the United States was "trying to make the best of a bad situation." The United States, he thought, should under no circumstances be the first to launch a major nuclear attack. And the views laid out in this November 21, 1962, memorandum had not suddenly popped into his head on November 20; he had been thinking along these lines for some time--probably even as early as February 1961.¹¹⁴⁸

Kennedy, however, did not see things exactly the same way, and it was only in September 1963 that he concluded that a first strike would no longer be possible.¹¹⁴⁹ The president had not ruled out a preemptive attack in 1961 or 1962. In the early Kennedy period, a limited nuclear strike aimed simply at destroying the Soviet nuclear force had been viewed as a serious option. An attack of this sort, it was thought, could destroy the great bulk of the Soviet retaliatory force--the Soviets, that is, would not be able to do really heavy damage (to America at least) with whatever survived the attack--and a certain amount of planning for such a strike actually took place at the time. But this was not a strategy for controlled or protracted nuclear war. A limited strike was conceivable only because it was felt that there was a very good chance that the attack would essentially wipe out the USSR's strategic nuclear capability, and that the war would then end very quickly.¹¹⁵⁰

If, however, substantial Soviet forces were to survive the attack--and this, of course, was the situation which the leaders of the Kennedy administration knew was just a year or two away--an American first strike, it was assumed, would not be a viable option. Once the Soviets had survivable forces, an attack would become too risky; there was too great a chance that the war would become uncontrollable. The rhetoric was one thing, but neither Kennedy nor his closest advisors ever really believed in the strategy of "controlled and discriminate general war." And in fact by early 1962 they had learned that such a strategy was not feasible for technical reasons. The command and control system in place in 1961 could not support this sort of strategy--that is, it could not survive a nuclear attack and function in a nuclear environment--and the kind of system that could support it was for all practical purposes beyond reach.¹¹⁵¹ There was also the related question of whether the Soviets would be able to control their surviving forces and keep them from attacking western cities, even if they wanted to, after the Americans had launched their attack.

For these and other reasons, the political leadership did not insist on a really fundamental reworking of operational strategy or on a radical rebuilding of the American nuclear arsenal in line with the thinking laid out in the Athens speech--that is, with the goal of minimizing collateral damage. And, as noted above, the impact of the new thinking on the nation's basic plan for general nuclear war was evidently a good deal more limited than the rhetoric implied.¹¹⁵²

What all this means is that the sort of strategy laid out in the Athens speech is not to be taken at face value.¹¹⁵³ It simply did not reflect the real thinking of the leaders of the Kennedy administration. Kennedy and his closest advisors knew that the United States would soon no longer be in a position to launch a first strike, and that NATO strategy could therefore not permanently be built on the premise that the United States in the final analysis could rationally launch a first strike if Europe were attacked; and yet the strategy laid out in the Athens speech was supposed to provide the basis for a permanent change in policy. This was a strategy which assumed that the United States would retain a meaningful strategic edge, even after the Soviets had developed a survivable force; and yet the real feeling of top U.S. officials from Kennedy on down was that as soon as the Soviets had acquired a such a force, the United States would not have a politically meaningful strategic advantage no matter what strategy was adopted--and that, in particular, the "coercive strategy" would not give U.S. strategic superiority a new lease on life.

Kennedy and his main advisors leaned toward what was later called the "finite deterrence" or "existential deterrence" approach to nuclear issues--toward the idea that relative numbers, beyond a certain point, are not terribly important, and that relatively small forces could deter much larger ones. Kennedy understood, for example, that even a small Chinese nuclear force would largely neutralize America's enormous nuclear power. The old idea that the Communists had to be prevented from taking over countries like Laos and Vietnam because of the domino effect no longer had much point, he said, because "the Chinese Communists are bound to get nuclear weapons in time, and from that moment on they will dominate South East Asia."¹¹⁵⁴ The assumption here was that as soon as the Chinese developed a nuclear force, no matter how small, American nuclear power would no longer be able to keep China at bay. As long as the risk of nuclear escalation was real, that risk was bound to affect political behavior. Even a relatively small risk, even the prospect of having to absorb a relatively limited number of nuclear attacks, would have a major deterrent effect. The twenty missiles that the Soviets had in Cuba, as Kennedy noted after the missile crisis, "had had a deterrent effect on us," and this, he pointed out, meant that small nuclear forces were not without real deterrent value.¹¹⁵⁵