Abstract
Before these crises were upon him, McNamara was driven by the considerations outlined above, and others, from the position of the Ann Arbor speech to a modification of Controlled Response. Controlled Response had two elements, city withholding and damage limitation. The new doctrine, Damage Limitation, modified the ‘second strike counterforce option’ of the old doctrine standing alone. It was an attempt to serve the purposes of the city-withholding feature of Controlled Response which had been rendered implausible by the coupling of this feature with damage limitation, first-strike threats, and to preserve the counterforce elements of Controlled Response without its intensely destabilizing effects. The modifications embodied in Damage Limitation responded to concerns that the Russians were forced to fire for fear of losing their arsenal to a US first strike and were not deterred from attacking US cities by the US threat to destroy Russian cities. With Damage Limitation the US tried to protect US cities by means other than simply threatening Russian cities and sought the goals of counterforce targeting while loudly abjuring first strike intentions.
Cred’ io ch’ ei credette ch’ io credesse
(I think he thought I thought….)
Canto XIII, Inferno
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Notes and References
For the view that the strategic concepts underlying Assured Destruction originated with the work of Warren Amster, see Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy pp. 191–3. See W. Amster, A Theory for the Design of a Deterrent Air Weapon System (San Diego: Convair Corporation, 1955)
and C. W. Sherwin, ‘Security Peace through Military Technology’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (May 1956), p. 12, to which is appended a short piece by Amster, ‘Design for deterrence.’
See, e.g., C. Gray, Strategic Studies and Public Policy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), p. 148.
T. C. Schelling, Controlled Response and Strategic Warfare Adelphi Paper no. 19 (London, The Institute for Strategic Studies, June 1965), later a chapter in Arms & Influence.
The literature arising from this event is considerable. Standard accounts include R. F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1969)
E. Abel, The Missile Crisis (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966)
G. T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971)
A. Chayes, The Cuban Missile Crisis: International Crises and the Role of Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).
T. C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 82, n. 22.
Walter Slocombe, The Political Implications of Strategic Parity, Adelphi Paper no. 77 (London: The Institute for Strategic Studies, May 1971), p. 20.
MC 14/3 commits NATO to: ‘meet initially any aggression short of war with a direct defense at the level chosen by the aggressor; conduct a deliberate escalation if aggression cannot be contained and the situation restored by direct defense; and initiate an appropriate general nuclear response to a major nuclear attack.’ MC 14/3 (Military Committee document), Senate Foreign Relations Committee, US Security Issues in Europe: Burden Sharing and Offset, MBFR and Nuclear Weapons (Washington: GPO, 1973), p. 19; Communique, Ministerial Meeting of North Atlantic Council, 14 December 1967.
John Newhouse, Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973), p. 67. This overstates somewhat the counter-value elements in the new strategy.
Secretary of Defense R. S. McNamara, Fiscal Years 1964 to 1968 Defense Program and Defense Budget for Fiscal Year 1964 (Washington: GPO, 1963), p. 30.
Ibid. p. 29; see also R. S. McNamara, ‘Testimony Before the Committee on Appropriations,’ US House of Representatives, Department of De- fense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1964, 88th Congress, 1st Session, Part 1, 30 January 1963, pp. 111–12
compare R. S. McNamara, ‘Testimony Before the House Armed Services Committee,’ Military Posture and HR9637 Hearings 88th Congress, 2nd Session, January 1964, pp. 6919–21.
Secretary of Defense R. S. McNamara, Annual Defense Department Report, Fiscal Year 1965 (Washington: GPO, 1967), p. 12.
Secretary of Defense R. S. McNamara, Fiscal Years 1966 to 1970 Defense Program and Defense Budget for Fiscal Year 1966 (Washington: GPO, 1965), p. 39.
Secretary of Defense R. S. McNamara, Fiscal Years 1968 to 1972 Defense Program and Defense Budget for Fiscal Year 1968 (Washington: GPO, 1967), p. 38–9.
Secretary of Defense R. S. McNamara, Fiscal Year 1968 to 1973 Defense Program and Defense Budget for Fiscal Year 1969 (Washington: GPO, 1968), p. 47.
T. C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).
With the publication of Ronald Coase’s ‘The Problem of Social Cost’ in 1960 the Pareto standards of modern welfare economics were applied to the problem of liability rules in what proved to be a highly fruitful way. The Pareto standards hypothesized that a decision that improved the lot of one person whilst making no other person worse off was a superior decision to one that did not satisfy this criterion, and that an optimal arrangement would be one in which no one could be made better off without making some person worse off. By assuming no transaction costs (that is, assuming a world of perfect information and rational, sovereign decision makers whose acquisition of this information and use in bargaining required no expenditure), Coase attempted to show that resources would be allocated precisely as efficiently — i.e., applying the Pareto standards to determine ‘efficiency’ — regardless of which party in a tort claim bore the liability. In such a world, a series of bribes would be struck between injurors and the injured, polluter and those whose environment was polluted, the farmer and cow-man, and so forth, until a Pareto-optimal allocation had been achieved. Ronald Coase, ‘The Problem of Social Cost,’ Journal of Law and Economics vol. 3 (1960).
T. C. Schelling and M. Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961).
There is a vast literature on the shortcomings of microeconomic techniques as applied to strategic problems. For a particularly distinguished contribution, see Hedley Bull, ‘Strategic Studies and Its Critics’, World Politics XX (July 1968)
see also S. Maxwell, Rationality in Deterrence, Adelphi Paper no. 50 (London, The Institute for Strategic Studies, August 1968).
With the latter, cf. M. Howard, ‘The Classical Strategists’, Problems of Modern Strategy: Part I (London, The Institute for Strategic Studies, February 1969), pp. 18–32.
In that decade, Soviet procurement of strategic forces was about two and a half times that of the US. In 1970 the Soviet procurement level was about twice that of the US; by 1979, it was almost three times. Statement of William J. Perry, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Fiscal Year 1981 Department of Defense Program for Research, Development and Acquisition (Washington: GPO, 1980), pp. vi–11, 167; see also Charles Sorrels, ‘Limiting Strategic Forces’, in R. Burt (ed.) Arms Control and Defense Postures in the 1980s (Boulder: Westview, 1982), pp. 170–3
But see the work of F. D. Holzman for a contrary view focusing not on strategic forces but on overall defense expenditure. Franklyn D. Holzman, ‘Are the Soviets Really Outspending the US on Defense?’ International Security 4 (Spring 1980), pp. 86–105
Franklyn D. Holzman, ‘Is There a Soviet-US Military Spending Gap?’ Challenge (September/October 1980), pp. 3–9
Franklyn D. Holzman, ‘Dollars or Rubles: The CIA’s Military Estimates’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (June 1980), pp. 23–7.
See D. Ball, Can Nuclear War be Controlled?, Adelphi Paper no. 169 (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981).
T. C. Schelling, ‘Micro-motives and Macro-behavior’, in Analytical Methods and the Ethics of Policy, Discussion Paper no. 792 (Harvard Institute of Economics Research: Harvard University, 1980).
B. Brodie, War and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1973).
D. Ball, Targeting for Strategic Deterrence, Adelphi Paper no. 185 (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1983), p. 9.
D. N. Schwartz, NATO’s Nuclear Dilemmas (Washington, Brookings, 1983), pp. 174–5.
Henry S. Rowen, ‘Formulating Strategic Doctrine,’ in Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, Appendix K: Adequacy of Current Organization: Defense and Arms Control IV (Washington: GPO, June 1975), p. 220.
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Bobbitt, P. (1988). Assured Destruction and Strategic Sufficiency. In: Democracy and Deterrence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18991-5_6
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