Abstract
In January 1969 Richard Nixon was inaugurated as President, ending eight years of Democrat administrations for most of which Robert McNamara had served as Secretary of Defense. In the nuclear area McNamara’s legacy was formidable. A series of propositions had come to be embedded in American thinking about nuclear strategy that influenced the early policies of the Nixon Administration. These propositions were soon challenged and over the course of the 1970s they were qualified in significant ways but never quite discarded.
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- 1.
John M. Collins, American and Soviet Military Trends since the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington, DC: The Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, 1978).
- 2.
Enthoven and Smith, How Much is Enough?, p. 184. This did not stop McNamara shifting the indicator for measuring military strength from numbers of delivery vehicles, where the Soviet Union was catching up, to numbers of warheads, where the US was about to move ahead.
- 3.
Laurence Martin, ‘The utility of military force’, in Francois Duchêne (ed.), Force in Modern Societies: Its Place in International Politics (London: IISS, 1973), p. 16. For an early discussion of the issue, see Klaus Knorr, On the Uses of Military Power in the Nuclear Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
- 4.
J. I. Coffey, Strategic Power and National Security (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971).
- 5.
See Walter Slocombe, The Political Implications of Strategic Parity (London: IISS, 1971), Appendix II; Benjamin Lambeth, ‘Deterrence in the MIRV era’, World Politics (January 1972), pp. 230–3.
- 6.
The most important book, blending theory with research, was Alexander George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).
- 7.
Ibid., pp. 560–1. For similar observations see Patrick Morgan, Deterrence: A Conceptual Analysis, Chapter Six, Stephen Maxwell, Rationality in Deterrence (London: IISS, 1968), p. 19. The ‘third wave’ of deterrence theory is discussed by Robert Jervis in ‘Deterrence theory revisited’, World Politics, XXXI:2 (January 1979), pp. 289–324.
- 8.
Slocombe, op. cit., p. 25. Lambeth argued, after a review of various crises, that: ‘The lesson of the examples thus seems to be that the overall nature of the objective rather than strategic “superiority” ultimately determines which protagonist will prevail in a crisis’, op. cit., p. 233.
- 9.
Albert Wohlstetter, ‘Strength, interest and new Technologies’, in IISS The Implications of Military Technology in the 1970s (London: IISS, 1968); D. G. Hoag, ‘Ballistic-missile guidance’, in B. T. Feld et al. (eds.), Impact of New Technologies on the Arms Race (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1971):pp. 81, 90.
- 10.
See Ted Greenwood, Making the MIRV: A Study in Defense Decision-Making (Cambridge, Mass: Ballinger, 1975).
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Freedman, L., Michaels, J. (2019). The McNamara Legacy. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_28
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