As a concept, Massive Retaliation was simplicity itself. As an actual strategy, however, it lacked clarity and credibility. The most obvious and logical question centered on the nuclear threshold. What might trigger U.S. retaliation? An invasion of Europe, certainly, but beyond that? Aggression in Indochina? Soviet abuse of its own allies? Proxy warfare conducted by a third power? Massive Retaliation was a hammer, not a scalpel, and it could not be tailored for anything much less than a direct, punishing attack on the Soviet Union. The Americans themselves were not sure where the nuclear lines were drawn, as there were simply too many scenarios to contemplate. It is one thing to induce uncertainty in the opponent; it is another entirely to share that uncertainty. (As we will see in Chapter 4, the United States replicated this mistake four decades later in trying to gain political leverage from its nuclear arsenal against rogue states after the Cold War.)
The true Achilles’ heel of the whole strategy, however, was that it rested on the inherently unsustainable condition of U.S. nuclear superiority. Massive Retaliation, a deeply flawed concept from the outset, could only last until the USSR developed the ability to retaliate in kind. Soviet leaders accordingly developed a missile-centric doctrine focused on a swift and secure retaliatory capability. In 1960, the USSR established the Strategic Rocket Forces, described by the Soviet defense minister at the time as “unquestionably the main service of the Armed Forces.”10 America’s threats of nuclear punishment after 1960 would now have to be made in the teeth of an inevitable Soviet nuclear response, and Soviet-era authors themselves accurately described Massive Retaliation as defunct by 1960.
Massive Retaliation, never fully conceptualized and never executed, in short order became obsolete in the face of new Soviet capabilities. In the end, “Massive Retaliation” was less a strategy than an expression of desperation, and it could not last into the missile age.
The 1960s and the Rise of the Strategists
As the Soviet arsenal grew in both size and capability, U.S. leaders tried to salvage some sense of purpose for their own rapidly increasing nuclear stockpile. The American capacity to destroy the USSR with impunity was out of reach by the time President John F. Kennedy took office in 1960; he was told bluntly (and correctly) by his military advisors that even if the United States launched everything it had at every possible Soviet, Chinese, and Eastern European target, some portion of the Soviet arsenal was certain to survive and inflict horrifying amounts of damage on North America.11 Accordingly, nuclear strategy became a more evenly matched, two-sided game between the United States and the Soviet Union.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was determined in this period to wrest control of nuclear issues away from the military, whose approach to nuclear strategy consisted largely of making operational plans to match weapons to targets.12 Nuclear targeting was no small enterprise in itself; by the mid-1970s, U.S. nuclear war planners had marked 40,000 potential targets for nuclear destruction in the Soviet bloc.13 But targeting is not the same thing as “strategy,” and McNamara wanted decisions over nuclear issues vested in a growing class of civilian defense analysts and policy intellectuals. This set the stage for the rise of the U.S. nuclear strategists, who would generate the many scenarios and strategies that dominated American nuclear thinking well into the 1980s.
Military control of nuclear strategy was undesirable, but the arrival of the civilian strategists was no less problematic. Soon, the nuclear enterprise represented the worst of both worlds, with both military officers and civilian analysts melded into a single community of nuclear experts. To be sure, the Americans (and others) needed to develop greater expertise on nuclear questions, but the unique tribe of defense specialists that emerged in the 1960s soon developed their own language, culture, and customs, which contributed to a growing gulf between theory and policy.
The dispassionate analysis of the use of nuclear weapons, for example, required a new vocabulary, a kind of nuclear Newspeak. Expressions such as “launch on warning” and “counterforce” entered the lexicon, and terms such as “collateral damage” took on significantly amplified meaning. As Kaplan put it, the strategists “performed their calculations and spoke in their strange and esoteric tongues because to do otherwise would be to recognize, all too clearly and constantly, the ghastliness of their contemplations.”14 Much like taking a person through the classic stages of grief, thinkers such as Herman Kahn insisted that Americans had to move past denial and anger, and reach acceptance of the nuclear age. This process entailed calmly thinking through horrific scenarios in which millions of people would die and entire nations would be pulverized.15 Kahn and other strategists pressed U.S. policymakers to think about the question posed in academic articles and quickly satirized in pop culture landmarks such as Dr. Strangelove: do we prefer 20 million dead or 100 million dead?
As soulless or amoral as it might appear, this kind of strategic theorizing served the necessary purpose of allowing ordinary human beings to think about extraordinary situations. Just as euphemism and scientific language assist medical doctors and other professionals in studying their specializations even as they wrestle with the heartbreaking suffering and eventual death of their charges—“pain management” and “end-of-life issues,” as they are now gently called—so too did the detached and clinical language of the new strategists enable the contemplation of conflicts of a scale that would dwarf all the wars ever fought in human history.
There was, however, both a moral and an intellectual corrosiveness to this increasingly professionalized approach to nuclear strategy. It may have been necessary to “think about the unthinkable,” but soon what was once unthinkable became an ordinary part of U.S. and Soviet national security policies. Military officers and civilian bureaucrats routinized the work of nuclear war planning, often in isolation from the rest of the defense community. This insularity, as Kaplan later wrote, allowed the nuclear theologians to avoid the reality that their efforts always led back to the same dead-end:
In the absence of any reality that was congenial to their abstract theorizing, the strategists in power treated the theory as if it were reality. For those mired in thinking about it all day, every day, in the corridors of officialdom, nuclear strategy had become the stuff of a living dreamworld. This mixture of habit, inertia, analytical convenience and fantasy was fueled by a peculiar logic as well. It was, after all, only rational to try to keep a nuclear war limited if one ever broke out…. Yet over the years, despite endless studies, nobody could find any options that seemed practical or made sense. [emphasis original]16
Much like the aridity that came to characterize too much of the social sciences after they embraced “scientific” approaches in the 1970s, so too did the analysis of nuclear strategy quickly become distanced from what policymakers could reasonably comprehend. Looking back at the various briefings and scenarios for war presented to U.S. leaders, Senator Sam Nunn later said: “You can sit around and read all the analytical stuff in the world, but once we start firing battlefield nuclear weapons, I don’t think anybody knew.”17 The theorists could pontificate and the war gamers could run their exercises, but as the numbers of weapons grew, the mathematics of nuclear war soon defied the imagination, just as the choices involved challenged the limits of moral reasoning.18
Both superpowers accelerated their acquisition of nuclear arms at remarkable rates. The United States alone managed to construct more than 30,000 weapons by 1967, only twenty-two years after the first nuclear test. The Soviet arsenal, too, was growing almost geometrically,