Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

General Maxwell Taylor’s book, The Uncertain Trumpet, and its call for a nuclear strategy of flexible response had greatly impressed Kennedy. He agreed with Taylor’s central thesis: in a crisis, the president should have a wide range of military options. Kennedy wanted the ability to fight limited wars, conventional wars — and a nuclear war with the Soviets that could be stopped short of mutual annihilation. “Controlled response” and “controlled escalation” and “pauses for negotiation” became buzzwords in the Kennedy administration. If the American military had the means to prevail in a variety of different ways, with or without nuclear weapons, the United States could resist Soviet influence throughout the world. “The record of the Romans made clear,” Kennedy later told his national security staff, “that their success was dependent on their will and ability to fight successfully at the edges of their empire.”

Despite the harsh, personal attacks during the presidential campaign, Eisenhower helped the new administration with its reappraisal of nuclear strategy. His science adviser’s memo on the shortcomings of the Single Integrated Operational Plan was forwarded to McNamara and Kennedy. The memo supported many of the arguments against the SIOP made by General Taylor and leading officers in the Navy. The chief of naval operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, warned that such a large, undiscriminating attack on the Soviet Union would deposit lethal fallout not only on American allies like South Korea and Japan but also on the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet. A reappraisal of the nation’s entire military stance now seemed urgent, and President Kennedy asked McNamara to lead it — to raise fundamental questions about how weapons were procured, what purpose they served, and whether they were even necessary.

Although a year older than the president, McNamara, at forty-four, was the youngest person, thus far, to head the Department of Defense. And he recruited a group of cocky and iconoclastic young men to join the administration, academics from Harvard and MIT, RAND analysts, economists, Rhodes scholars. Henry Rowen, a graduate of Harvard and Oxford who soon played a large role in nuclear planning, was thirty-six. Harold Brown, chosen to guide Pentagon research on new weapon systems and technology, was thirty-three. Alain Enthoven, an economist who rigorously applied cost-benefit analysis to the defense budget, was thirty. Later depicted as “whiz kids,” “defense intellectuals,” “the best and the brightest,” McNamara’s team was determined to transform America’s nuclear strategy and defense spending.

Three days after the Goldsboro accident, McNamara met with members of the Pentagon’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG). It had recently completed a study, WSEG Report No. 50, that described the Soviet forces the United States would most likely face by the mid-1960s and compared the merits of different tactics to oppose them. Eisenhower’s secretary of defense, Thomas B. Gates, had seen the report a few months earlier and thought McNamara should know about it. McNamara’s briefing on WSEG Report No. 50, scheduled to last a few hours, wound up occupying a full day. The authors of the report had measured the economic efficiency of various American weapon systems — explaining, for example, that the annual operating costs of keeping a B-52 bomber on ground alert was about nine times larger than the annual maintenance costs of a Minuteman missile. That was just the sort of data that Robert McNamara craved. But the authors of WSEG R-50 had also reached a conclusion that nobody in the Kennedy administration wanted to hear: America’s command-and-control system was so complex, outdated, and unreliable that a “controlled” or “flexible” response to a Soviet attack would be impossible. In fact, the president of the United States might not be able to make any response; he would probably be killed during the first moments of a nuclear war.