Abstract
The stress on the improvements in conventional forces reflected the Kennedy Administration’s conviction that there was no good way to fight a nuclear war and that this would be as evident in Moscow as it was in Washington. Threats to use nuclear weapons first, even in the most tentative way, therefore lacked credibility. But building up conventional forces was going to take time. The Europeans seemed wedded to massive retaliation and reluctant to increase their defence budgets.
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Notes
- 1.
Shapley. Promise and Power, p. 119.
- 2.
Transcript of 1982 interview cited in Ibid. McNamara repeated the same claim a number of times. See Robert S McNamara. “The Military Role of Nuclear Weapons.” Foreign Affairs 62.1 (October 1983) (1983): 59–80., p. 76 and Shapley. Promise and Power, pp. 123–5. Bundy believes that this came well after the most tense months of the Berlin crisis. Bundy, Danger and Survival, p. 376.
- 3.
Bundy to Kennedy, 30 January 1961, FRUS, VIII, pp. 18–9. He refers to the ‘view of nearly all your civilian advisers.’ Desmond Ball. Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980., pp. 34–8. Kaplan, Wizards, p. 260.
- 4.
McNamara to Kennedy, ‘Memorandum on Review of FY 1961 and FY 1962 Military Programs and Budgets’, 20 February 1961, FRUS, VIII, p. 35.
- 5.
Ellsberg, Doomsday, pp. 166–7.
- 6.
Kaysen, Memorandum, 11 October 1961, NSA/Nuclear 433. See also Kaysen to Kennedy, 22 November 1961, FRUS , VIII, p. 210.
- 7.
Beschloss, Kennedy versus Khrushchev, p. 344.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 127.
- 9.
The McNamara Ascendancy, pp. 296–7.
- 10.
To House Armed Services Committee in February 1961. Quoted in Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 53.
- 11.
Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 75.
- 12.
The speech is reprinted in Bobbit et al., US Nuclear Strategy. Kaufman suggests that Kennedy approved it against the objections of Bundy. Interview William Kaufman, Jeremy Issacs Productions. “Cold War.”, 1997.
- 13.
The McNamara Ascendancy, pp. 305–6.
- 14.
Enthoven, and Smith. How Much is Enough?, p. 128.
- 15.
The McNamara Ascendancy, pp. 315–6.
- 16.
See Ball, Policies and Force Levels.
- 17.
The Times (London), 4 July 1962.
- 18.
Morton Halperin, ‘The “No Cities Doctrine”’, New Republic (8 October 1962). This was one of four articles in New Republic which discussed the new strategy. The others were an editorial on ‘McNamara’s strategy’ (2 July 1962); Michael Browner, ‘Controlled thermonuclear war’ (30 July 1962); and Robert Osgood, ‘Nuclear arms: uses and limits’ (10 September 1962).
- 19.
Schelling, Arms and Influence, p. 25. See also Thomas Schelling, Controlled Response and Strategic Warfare (London: IISS, June 1965).
- 20.
Stewart Alsop. “Kennedy’s Grand Strategy.” Saturday Evening Post 31 March 1962.
- 21.
Beschloss, Kennedy versus Khrushchev, p. 371.
- 22.
See Halperin, ‘The “no cities” doctrine’, p. 19.
- 23.
Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, Statement on the Defense Budget for Fiscal Years 1964–1968, Defense Program and 1964 Defense Budget (27 January 1963), p. 41.
- 24.
Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky, Soviet Military Strategy (2nd edn), p. 88.
- 25.
Cited in Browner, op. cit., p. 12.
- 26.
Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006).
- 27.
Pravda, July 11, 1962.
- 28.
Testimony of Secretary McNamara, House Armed Services Committee, Hearings on Military Posture (1963), p. 332.
- 29.
US Air Force, This is Counterforce, dated 7 February 1963 (from IISS files). By the time this document was prepared the doctrine was at its most refined.
- 30.
Ball, op. cit., p. 290.
- 31.
Claude Witze, ‘Farewell to Counterforce’, Air Force Magazine (February 1963). Compare this to the approving tones of John Loosbrock in ‘Counterforce and Mr. McNamara’ in the same magazine in September 1962.
- 32.
The McNamara Ascendancy, p. 312.
- 33.
See George Quester, Nuclear Diplomacy, p. 246.
- 34.
Notes on the Cuban Crisis, October 28, 1962. The basic purpose of the memorandum appears to have been to ensure that Kennedy’s non-invasion pledge on Cuba left open the possibility of supporting the Cuban resistance to Castro, which they expected to grow as a result of the crisis. A version of this was later published as Controlling the risks in Cuba, Adelphi Paper 17 (London, ISS, April 1965).
- 35.
Talk at RAND, May 1963, quoted by Barry H. Steiner, Bernard Brodie and the American Study of Nuclear strategy (Unpublished Paper: California State University) p. 338.
- 36.
Escalation and the Nuclear option, pp. 34, 43, 57, 71, 88, 118.
- 37.
See for example the essays in Klaus Knorr and Thornton Read, Limited Strategic War (Praeger, 1962). Morton Kaplan, for example, had identified as early as 1959, something he described as ‘a reprisal process’. Morton A Kaplan, The Strategy of Limited Retaliation, Policy Memorandum No. 19 (Center of International Studies: Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, April 1959). By 1962, this was referred to as an escalation process in terms of a graduated series of acts, rather than as a process running out of control. ‘Limited Retaliation as a Bargaining Process’, in Ibid.
- 38.
Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 72.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 185.
- 40.
On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (London: Pall Mall, 1965), p. 281.
- 41.
Arms and Influence, pp. 164–5.
- 42.
Charles Bohlen, hand-written memorandum to Rusk, 17 October 1962.
- 43.
James Nathan, ‘The heyday of the new strategy: The Cuban missile crisis and the confirmation of coercive diplomacy’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 3:2 (1992), p. 331.
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Freedman, L., Michaels, J. (2019). No Cities. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_20
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