Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

“It is up to the United States to decide whether there will be war or peace,” Khrushchev said.

“Then it will be a cold winter,” Kennedy replied.

DURING THE EISENHOWER ADMINISTRATION, the Joint Chiefs of Staff seemed to have few options if the Soviets tried to close the autobahn to Berlin. A convoy of American troops would most likely depart from West Germany on the road — and if they were attacked, the United States would be under great pressure to launch a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Secretary of Defense McNamara hoped that a subtler response could be devised. He wanted a plan that would permit the gradual escalation of a conflict, and delay the use of nuclear weapons for as long as possible. But the French president, Charles de Gaulle, and the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had little confidence that West Berlin could be defended with conventional weapons. Any suggestion that the United States might not use nuclear weapons immediately, they worried, could weaken deterrence and encourage the Soviets to take risks.

General Lauris Norstad, the supreme allied commander of NATO, agreed with the British and the French. Norstad thought that once the fighting began, the escalation wouldn’t be gradual. It would be “explosive,” and NATO had to be ready for all-out nuclear war. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Norstad had persuaded McNamara to keep the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy. “This is the time to create strength,” Norstad said, “not reduce it.”

As Khrushchev continued to make public threats against West Berlin and raise the specter of war, President Kennedy followed the advice of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. “If a crisis is provoked,” Acheson had suggested, “a bold and dangerous course may be the safest.” The United States should raise the stakes, send more conventional forces to Germany, and show a willingness to fight. On July 25, Kennedy gave a televised address on the Berlin crisis. The Soviet Union had no right to restrict NATO’s presence in West Berlin, Kennedy asserted, “and we have given our word that an attack upon that city will be an attack upon us all.” He proposed a call-up of reservists and National Guard units, an expansion of the draft, the addition of more than 100,000 troops to the Army, a delay in the retirement of the Strategic Air Command’s B-47 bombers — and a plan to build more civilian bomb shelters in the United States. Angered by the speech, Khrushchev asked John McCloy, a White House adviser who was visiting Russia, to pass along a message: “Tell Kennedy that if he starts a war then he would probably become the last President of the United States.”

Although Kennedy and McNamara now understood the urgency of America’s command-and-control problems, little had been done to rectify them. Barely six months had passed since the inauguration, and much more time would be needed to make fundamental changes in the system. As the Berlin crisis deepened, the commanders of NATO units were ordered not to use their nuclear weapons without the explicit approval of General Norstad. But locks had not been installed in those weapons — and McNamara soon agreed to equip American troops on the front line with Davy Crockett atomic rifles. They were likely to be the first weapons fired at an invading Red Army.

More important, the SIOP remained the same. It had officially become the nuclear war plan of the United States in mid-April, although Kennedy hadn’t even received a formal briefing on it. His national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, thought that an alternative to the SIOP was needed, now that a war with the Soviets seemed like a real possibility. “[T]he current strategic war plan is dangerously rigid,” Bundy informed the president, “and, if continued without amendment, may leave you with very little choice as to how you face the moment of thermonuclear truth.” One of Bundy’s aides, Carl Kaysen, was given the task of quickly preparing a new war plan. During the Second World War, Kaysen had selected bomb targets in Germany. He later worked at RAND and served as a professor of economics at Harvard. Kaysen thought that NATO should rely increasingly on conventional weapons and that Germany should eventually become a nuclear-free zone. Nevertheless, he enlisted help from one of McNamara’s aides, Henry Rowen, to come up with a nuclear war plan that the president might actually use. The “spasm war” demanded by the current SIOP, they agreed, was a “ridiculous and unworkable notion.”

Just after midnight, on August 13, without any warning, East German troops began to string a barbed wire fence between East and West Berlin. For weeks, thousands of people had fled East Germany through the city, the last stretch of the border that hadn’t been militarized. NATO troops now watched helplessly as the fence became a wall.

After an initial, tentative response, on August 18 President Kennedy ordered a battle group of 1,500 soldiers to travel the autobahn from West Germany to Berlin. McNamara had opposed the move, afraid that it might start a nuclear war. The Soviets didn’t challenge the convoy. When it arrived in West Berlin, the American troops were greeted by hundreds of thousands of cheering Germans and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who felt relieved. Twelve days later, the Soviet Union surprised the Kennedy administration again, unilaterally ending the moratorium on nuclear tests. As a show of strength, within the next month, the Soviets detonated twenty-six nuclear weapons.

Carl Kaysen’s war plan was ready by the first week of September. It was designed for use during the Berlin crisis. “We should be prepared to initiate general war by our own first strike,” Kaysen wrote. “We should seek the smallest possible list of targets, focusing on the long-range striking capacity of the Soviets, and avoiding, as much as possible, casualties and damage in Soviet civil society.” If President Kennedy launched the current SIOP, the United States would have to kill more than half of the people in the Soviet Union — and millions more in Eastern Europe and China — just to maintain the freedom of West Berlin. Doing so would be not only morally questionable but impractical. The scale of the military operations required by the SIOP was so large, it would “inevitably” tip off the Soviets that a nuclear strike was coming. It would give them time to retaliate. Kaysen proposed a surprise attack that would use just forty-one American bombers, approaching at low altitude, to destroy roughly twice that number of long-range missile and bomber bases in the Soviet Union. The whole thing would be over “no more than fifteen minutes” after the first bomb dropped.

Following the attack, Kaysen suggested, “we should be able to communicate two things to Khrushchev: first, that we intend to concentrate on military targets unless he is foolish enough to hit our cities; secondly, that we are prepared to withhold the bulk of our force from the offensive… provided that he accepts our terms.” Instead of killing hundreds of millions, the raid would probably kill “less than 1,000,000 and probably not much more than 500,000.”

General Lyman Lemnitzer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not overly impressed by the plan. At a meeting the following week, Lemnitzer told President Kennedy that the United States still lacked the command-and-control capabilities for a limited nuclear attack. Any forces withheld from a first strike might never be available for a second one. And there was no guarantee that Khrushchev would understand, amid the chaos of nuclear war, that only his military targets had been attacked. Kaysen’s plan left the Soviet Union’s medium-range and intermediate-range missiles untouched — and if Khrushchev didn’t get the message and capitulate, Great Britain and most of Europe would be destroyed. Lemnitzer opposed any changes to the SIOP: