Are They Useless? X. Well, there's still "pre-emption"
In 1949, when the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb and in 1955 when they tested their first true hydrogen bomb, “prevention” had to be taken off the table. You can’t prevent what’s already happened.
But were we still thinking about “pre-emption”? Oh yes.
The “New Look” policy announced by President Eisenhower’s administration in 1953, his first year in office, made something clear, or tried to. It said that the United States would maintain "a strong military posture, with emphasis on the capability of inflicting massive retaliatory damage by offensive striking power." We’d “defend” with “offensive striking power,” meaning, I guess, that we’d attack the attackers in their home country. We’d do this because they had attacked us, or more likely our allies in Western Europe, first. That would make them the aggressors.
It also said that “in the event of hostilities,” the United States would "consider nuclear weapons as available for use as other munitions." That meant we would be treating nuclear weapons as if they could have a military use. Did that mean we actually thought they could have a military use? Or had we just stopped caring about whether a use was military or not?
General Curtis LeMay had become Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command in 1948. Until he moved on in 1957, he argued that we should be developing in SAC the operational capacity for what he called “the strategy of pre-emptive counterforce.” A “counterforce” attack is one that would focus not on the Soviet Union’s cities, but on its military, especially its nuclear, assets. LeMay was confident that with our bomber force he could destroy enough of those assets in a surprise first strike to prevent a response. Not everyone else was sure he could.
The cities destroyed, and many would be, would be collateral damage. Which was allowed.
Then, in 1957, the Soviet Union showed it had developed an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile that could reach the United States. That could change things for those who had been promoting pre-emption.
John F. Kennedy followed Eisenhower as president in 1961. In his first year, he learned that our military still had plans in place for massive pre-emptive attacks on the Soviet Union with the many thousands of nuclear weapons we had in our stockpile by the end of Eisenhower’s administration and our own new ballistic missiles. The Soviets had atomic and hydrogen bombs now too, but in 1961 we had many times more than they did and much more effective means of delivering them.
We had the B-47 and B-52 jet bombers in bases at home and around the Soviet Union.
We had “tactical” jet fighters at bases in the Pacific that could carry the massive “strategic” nuclear bombs we now had that yielded the equivalent of more than a million tons of TNT.
We had Thor and Jupiter Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles with strategic thermonuclear warheads on them on alert in the UK, Italy, and Turkey, all within reach of Moscow.
In our Polaris submarines that were out there somewhere around the Soviet Union, we had those amazing missiles that could be launched while the submarines were submerged.
Just before JFK took office, we had put on alert our first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, the Atlas. Its warhead, the W49, yielded 1.44 megatons and we were working on on a warhead that yielded twice that.
JFK’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, no longer believed, however, that we could attack the Soviet Union with impunity, even if we conducted a surpise first strike, the way the Japanese had at Pearl Harbor.
In his first year in office, JFK got a briefing by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Lemnitzer on our plans for preemptively attacking the Soviet Union using our new Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) that had been drawn up during Eisenhower’s second term.
In answer to JFK’s question as to whether we might suffer some retaliatory damage after such a pre-emptive attack Lemnitzer said we would but that we would “prevail.” What that meant exactly wasn’t discussed in the briefing. In any case, millions would be killed on both sides.
It might have been after hearing this briefing that JFK had turned to his Secretary of State Dean Rusk and said, “And they call us human beings.”
We never did do either a “preventive” or a “preemptive” attack on the Soviet Union. We still had plans for a preemptive attack if we should decide they actually were about to attack us. But most of the time, we’d decided, it would be better to wait to be attacked and then retaliate. And hope that because of our nuclear deterrent we wouldn’t be attacked.
Now we had to be sure, or try to be sure, we could retaliate so they wouldn’t be tempted to try a surprise pre-emptive first strike of their own.
This meant we would have to have a “second-strike capability.”
The thing about a second-strike capability is that it isn’t something that will prevent the most appalling damage to us if we should be attacked. It is something we would want to be able employ to cause appalling damage back, which we’d want to be able to do even if we no longer existed as a nation or as people who could take some satisfaction in having done it.
Next: Are They Useless? XI-How About Korea? And Cuba?