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The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy pp 259–277Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Operational Nuclear Strategy

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Abstract

For all the many discussions of the big issues of nuclear strategy at the highest levels of policy, in think-tank reports and academic treatises, the only nuclear strategy that would matter in practice was the one constructed at the USAF’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. In March 1956, the NSC concluded that nuclear weapons would be ‘used in general war and in military operations short of general war as authorized by the President’. Preventive war was still rejected as policy, but it did recognize the need for pre-authorization for use for certain contingencies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Rosenberg, ‘Overkill’, op.cit., p. 42.

  2. 2.

    Eisenhower, The White House Years, I:453.

  3. 3.

    See: Minutes of Third Target Committee Meeting, May 28, 1945. In key respects, questions about the appropriate authority for atomic use mimicked the problem of authority for chemical weapons use. See John Ellis van Courtland Moon, ‘Chemical Weapons and Deterrence: The World War II Experience’, International Security, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Spring, 1984), pp. 3–35. NSC 30, ‘United States Policy on Atomic Warfare’, September 10, 1948. Text can be found in FRUS, 1948, General; The United Nations, Vol. 1, Part 2, p. 628.

  4. 4.

    See, for instance: Christopher J. Bright, Continental Defense in the Eisenhower Era: Nuclear Antiaircraft Arms and the Cold War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

  5. 5.

    LeMay, America is in Danger, pp. 82–3.

  6. 6.

    Cited in Bret J. Cillessen, ‘Embracing the Bomb: Ethics, morality, and nuclear deterrence in the US air force, 1945–1955’. The Journal of Strategic Studies, 21:1 (1998), p. 105.

  7. 7.

    Fn 54, p. 128 of Cillessen.

  8. 8.

    John Rubel, Reflections on Fame and Some Famous Men (New Mexico, 2009), pp. 65–6. Quoted in Ellsberg, p. 113.

  9. 9.

    Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

  10. 10.

     Ibid.

  11. 11.

    Eric Schlosser, Command and Control, pp. 253–4.

  12. 12.

    There are a number of discussions of the 1960 SIOP in addition to Ellsberg, including Rosenberg, ‘Overkill’, and Bundy, Danger and Survival.

  13. 13.

    Bundy, 97.

  14. 14.

    Ellsberg, 103.

  15. 15.

    Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, p. 246.

  16. 16.

    Norman Moss, Men Who Play God: The Story of the Hydrogen Bomb (London: Penguin, 1970), p. 260.

  17. 17.

    Ellsberg, pp. 131–2.

  18. 18.

    Thomas J. Schoenbaum. Waging Peace and War: Dean Rusk in the Truman, Kennedy and Johnson Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 330; Reeves, Profile of Power, p. 230; Gilpatric, oral history.

  19. 19.

    Memorandum of Conference with President Kennedy, 6 February 1961, FRUS, VIII, pp. 27–30.

  20. 20.

    Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, in the Senate, August 14, 1958. Available online at: https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/United-States-Senate-Military-Power_19580814.aspx.

  21. 21.

    Memorandum of Conversation, April 29, 1961. FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. XXIV, Laos Crisis, Doc. 67. Available at: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v24/d67.

  22. 22.

    For early discussions of this, see: ‘Memorandum of a Conversation Between the Counselor of the Department of State (MacArthur) and the British Ambassador (Makins), Department of State, Washington, February 29, 1956’ and ‘Progress Report from the SEATO Military Advisers to the SEATO Council, March 10, 1957’ in, FRUS, 1955–1957, East Asian Security; Cambodia; Laos, Volume XXI. Documents 84 and 138.

  23. 23.

    Hilsman, To Move a Nation, p. 129.

  24. 24.

    Hope M. Harrison, “New Evidence on the Building of the Berlin Wall,” Introduction, annotation and translation of a conversation between East German leader Walter Ulbricht and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, August 1, 1961, Cold War International History Project e-dossier No. 23, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (August 12, 2011).

  25. 25.

    Introduction, Günter Bischof, Stefan Karner, Barbara Stelzl-Marx, ed., The Vienna Summit and Its Importance in International History (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014), p. 20.

  26. 26.

    Garthoff. “Berlin 1961”, p. 152. Beschloss, Kennedy versus Khrushchev, p. 334.

  27. 27.

    Ausland. Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Berlin-Cuba Crisis, p. 41.

  28. 28.

    Christopher A. Preble, ‘“Who Ever Believed in the ‘Missile Gap’?”: John F. Kennedy and the Politics of National Security’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 33: 4 (Dec., 2003), 801–26.

  29. 29.

    Dino A. Brugioni, Eyes in the Sky: Eisenhower, the CIA and Cold War Aerial Espionage (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010), Monte Reel, A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA’s Secret War (New York: Doubleday, 2018).

  30. 30.

    See Freedman. U.S. Intelligence, pp. 69–71.

  31. 31.

    William Burr, ‘Soviet Cold War Military Strategy: Using Declassified History’. Cold War International History Project Bulletin. 4, 1994., p. 13.

  32. 32.

    See Ellsberg, Doomsday, pp. 164–6.

  33. 33.

    Roger Hilsman. The Cuban Missile Crisis: The Struggle over Policy (Westport, CT.: Praeger, 1996), pp. 7–8; Beschloss, Kennedy versus Khrushchev, pp. 329–30.

  34. 34.

    Bundy, Danger and Survival, p. 382.

  35. 35.

    Ellsberg, Doomsday, 175–7.

  36. 36.

    The interview was in Newsweek, 13 November 1961, cited in Ball. Politics and Force Levels, p. 98.

  37. 37.

    Thomas C Schelling, Nuclear Strategy in the Berlin Crisis, FRUS, XIV, pp. 170–2. Trachtenberg. History and Strategy, p. 224.

  38. 38.

    Norstad to McNamara, 16 September 1961, NSA/Berlin, 2482.

  39. 39.

    Schelling and Ferguson provided an account of the exercise at Harvard in 1988. NSA/Berlin, 2946. This can be accessed at: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/files/2017/01/Schelling-on-Berlin-games.pdf.

  40. 40.

    NSA/Berlin, 2946.

  41. 41.

    Kaplan, Wizards, p. 302. Memo for Taylor, 8–11 September, NSA/Berlin.

  42. 42.

    Kaysen to Kennedy, 22 September 1961, FRUS, XIV–VI, Supplement, Document 182. Interview with Carl Kaysen, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; At the Brink; Interview with Carl Kaysen, 1986, 03/20/1986. Available at: http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_926B527E1B30430D94B824360F9C6168.

  43. 43.

    Kennedy to Clay, 8 October 1961, FRUS, XIV, pp. 484–6.

  44. 44.

    Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, pp. 93–95.

  45. 45.

    Minutes of Meeting, FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. 14, Berlin Crisis, 1961–1962, Doc. 173. Available at: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v14/d173.

  46. 46.

    See Carl Kaysen’s study ‘Strategic Air Planning and Berlin’ attached to Memo from General Taylor, 6 September 1961. Available at: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB56/BerlinC1.pdf.

  47. 47.

    Kaplan, Wizards, pp. 209–30; Herken. Counsels of War, p. 160; Bird, Color of Truth, pp. 206–7.

  48. 48.

    Assistant Secretary of Defense, ISA (Nitze), Memorandum for JCS, 6 November 1961, NSA/Nuclear, 962. Nitze had developed the distinction between action policy and declaratory policy in the 1950s. See Paul Nitze. “Atoms, Strategy and Policy.” Foreign Affairs XXXIV.2 (1956).

  49. 49.

    For an overview of this literature, see: Jonathan Colman, The Cuban Missile Crisis, Oxford Bibliographies, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199743292/obo-9780199743292-0096.xml.

  50. 50.

    David Welch and James Bright, “An Introduction to the ExComm Transcripts”, International Security, Vol. 12: No. 3 (winter 1987/8).

  51. 51.

    Maxwell D Taylor, ‘Reflections on a Grim October’, Washington Post, 5 October 1982.

  52. 52.

    Telegram from the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, October 26, 1962. FRUS, 1961–1961, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, Doc. 65.

    It does not appear to have been this vivid language that impressed the Americans. McNamara expressed himself unimpressed by its rambling nature.

  53. 53.

    Stephen Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 2002), 87. See: Svetlana Savaranskaya, ‘Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Cuba: New Evidence’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 14/15. Available online at: https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/CMC50/SavaranskayaColdWarIntlHistBulletin2003TacticalNuclearWeaponsinCubaNewEvidence.pdf.

  54. 54.

    Yasmeen Serhan, ‘When the World Lucked Out of a Nuclear War’, The Atlantic, October 31, 2017. Available online at: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/when-the-world-lucked-out-of-nuclear-war/544198/.

  55. 55.

    The knowledge of the informal understanding on the Jupiter missiles in Turkey was not made publicized until the posthumous publication of Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days in 1969.

  56. 56.

    Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, pp. 840–1.

  57. 57.

    Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (Yale University Press, 1966), p. 166.

  58. 58.

    Under Secretary George W. Ball Addresses the NATO Parliamentarians Conference on “NATO and the Cuban Crisis”, U.S., Department of State Bulletin, Volume XLVII, no. 1223 (December 3, 1962), pp. 831–5. Reprinted in Larson (ed) Op. cit.

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  1. Department of War Studies, King’s College London, London, UK

    Lawrence Freedman

  2. Department of Defence Studies, King’s College London, London, UK

    Jeffrey Michaels

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Freedman, L., Michaels, J. (2019). Operational Nuclear Strategy. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_17

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