Abstract
During 1963 McNamara moved abruptly away from avoiding cities to threatening their certain destruction. Damage limitation was confusing the deterrence message and it made more sense to reinforce deterrence than prepare for deterrence failing. Instead of seeking alternatives to targeting cities now it seemed to be suggested that no other targets were worth considering.
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Notes
- 1.
The McNamara Ascendancy, p. 311.
- 2.
Enthoven and Smith, How Much is Enough? p. 174.
- 3.
Ibid., pp. 177–8. See also Freedman, US Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat, pp. 84–6.
- 4.
Fred Iklé, Can Nuclear Deterrence Last Out the Century? (Santa Monica, Calif.: Arms Control and Foreign Policy Seminar, January 1973) pp. 13, 34.
- 5.
Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, & Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
- 6.
Enthoven and Smith, op. cit., pp. 207–8.
- 7.
James Trainor, ‘DOD says AICBM is Feasible’ Missiles and Rockets, 24 December 1962.
- 8.
Address at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 19 December 1962. This speech is quoted at length in Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy, pp. 138–47.
- 9.
Stewart Alsop, ‘Our new strategy: the alternatives to total war’, The Saturday Evening Post 1 December 1962.
- 10.
See Robert Gilpin, American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1962).
- 11.
President Kennedy’s Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, May 25, 1961.
- 12.
Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
- 13.
Memorandum prepared by Marcus Raskin, Comments on Attached Study, October 13, 1961.
- 14.
FRUS, VIII, p. 378; Kaplan, Wizards, pp. 311–4.
- 15.
Henry Rowen, ‘Formulating strategic doctrine’, Appendices to the Report of the Commission on the Organization of Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, Vol. IV, Appendix K (Washington DC: GPO, 1975), p. 227.
- 16.
Dee Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
- 17.
Kosta Tsipis, ‘Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle: MIT Faculty and Nuclear Disarmament’. MIT Faculty Newsletter, Vol. XXIV No 1 (September/October 2011). http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/241/tsipis.html John Clearwater, Johnson, McNamara and the birth of SALT and ABM Treaty, 1963–1969 (Dissertation.com, 1999), pp. 37–8.
- 18.
- 19.
Herbert York and Jerome Wiesner, ‘National security and the nuclear test ban’, Scientific American (October 1964).
- 20.
Hanson Baldwin, ‘Slow-down in the Pentagon’, Foreign Affairs (January 1965).
- 21.
The Reporter, 12 August 1965.
- 22.
See Edward Randolph Jayne, The ABM Debate; Strategic Defense and National Security (MIT Center for International Studies, June 1969), Morton Halperin, ‘The decision to deploy the ABM’, World Politics, XXV (October 1972) and Freedman, US Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat, Chapter Seven.
- 23.
Secretary of State, Robert S. McNamara, ‘The dynamics of nuclear strategy’, Department of State Bulletin, LVII (9 October 1967). Morton Halperin drafted the speech.
- 24.
Richard L. Garwin and Hans Bethe, ‘Anti-ballistic missile systems’, Scientific American (March 1968). Reprinted in York (ed.), Arms control, p. 164.
- 25.
Deborah Shapley, ‘A Lesson From the Glassboro Summit’, Washington Post, October 9, 1986.
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Freedman, L., Michaels, J. (2019). Assured Destruction. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_21
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