Presidential Predicaments – V. JFK: Should He Pre-empt?
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After his election, JFK had quickly learned what the rest of us still didn’t know--that there was no “missile gap” and no “bomber gap” between us and the Soviet Union, or rather that the gap was very much in our favor. In both areas.
But the Soviet Union did have ICBMs now, we all believed that. During my junior year of high school, we’d all heard their Sputnik satellite beeping in that maddening way as it made its orbits of the earth. JFK knew now that at the moment they had only four ICBMs but he also knew that four thermonuclear warheads would do hideous damage if they came down in our cities. We would have known that too, some of us.
Maybe we shouldn’t wait to be attacked by the Soviets but instead launch a “preventive” or “preemptive” first strike on them? Even before the Soviets got an atomic bomb of their own, our military had drawn up plans for doing such a preventive attack. The plans had not been executed, we know that now. Should they have been? The Soviets now had hydrogen bombs and four ICBMs to deliver them against which there was no defense.
Some military leaders still thought a preemptive attack might be the way to go. The latest plan they’d made for a preemptive attack on the Soviets said it should be executed before 1963 because after that the Soviets would be able to retaliate too much. Could we execute a preemptive first strike attack now, in 1961, without ourselves suffering any retaliation at all? Maybe not quite, the military’s thinking was.
During his first year in office, JFK learned about the current plans our military had for a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, on all the Communist countries actually because China and Warsaw Pact countries would be included whether or not it seemed they were going to attack us. In July of 1961, three months after his tough summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, JFK got a briefing on this from a group called the Net Evaluation Subcommittee of the National Security Council. President Truman had established the NES in 1953 to assess the Soviet Union's capacity to inflict damage on the United States and its overseas installations. The subcommittee’s reports, even its existence, were top secret.
In the briefing JFK got from the NES in July 1961, he was told that at this stage of the game, if we did a preemptive attack, we would not escape damage. We would, however, he was told in the briefing, likely “prevail.” What “prevail” meant wasn’t explained.
What “prevail” meant to General Thomas Power, the Commander in Chief of our Strategic Air Command at the time, was revealed by General Power when he was being briefed by William Kaufman, a RAND employee and one of JFK’s advisors, about the modifications to the guidelines for the new SIOP JFK and Secretary of Defense McNamara wanted that would have us begin with counterforce attacks, sparing cities. At first. Maybe.
“Restraint?,” General Power said. “Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!” We prevail.
In the briefing by the NES, JFK asked what would be the consequences on the Soviet Union of a preemptive attack by us. The general giving the briefing said he’d get back to the President on that.
JFK might already have had pretty good idea. Here’s why.
In Spring 1961, Daniel Ellsberg, an ex-Marine and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, was employed by the RAND Corporation, a private, prestigious, and secretive think-tank that did frequent consulting for our Air Force. When JFK took office, Ellsberg had been made a special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense. In that capacity, he had drafted a question to be sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the President’s signature: “If your plans for general [nuclear] war are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?”
When Presidents ask questions, they usually get answers. The answer that came back, quickly—this wasn’t something that had to be studied up by the planners, they knew the answer already--was two-hundred seventy-five million people killed in the first spasm with three-hundred twenty-five million dead after six months from radioactivity and other injuries. Almost six times the total number of people killed on all sides in all of World War II.
Ellsberg then drafted a follow-up question that was sent over the President’s signature: How many deaths, not just in the Sino-Soviet Bloc, but in the other countries that would affected by the fallout? Answer: one-hundred million in Eastern Europe. Another one-hundred million in Western Europe, where our NATO allies were. And another one-hundred million in the neutral countries surrounding the Soviet Union, like India. The radioactivity from the ground-bursts on the Soviet submarine pens on Russia’s north coast would wipe out Finland.
The people killed in the Sino-Soviet bloc might or might not be actual Communists—only some of the people in the Soviet Union were members of the Communist party—but the vast majority would certainly be civilians, people who might be on the way to the store to buy bread. Outside the countries of the Sino-Soviet bloc, two-hundred million of those killed would be people associated in no way with the Communists.
Were these numbers right? No one knew what the numbers would actually turn out to be, of course. If an actual attack with nuclear weapons took place, no one would know either, of course. But these were what the Joint Chiefs thought could reasonably be predicted. And they were, as Ellsberg notes in his 2017 book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, okay with it.
At this stage of the game, how many of us in the United States would be killed in a Soviet retaliation after our first strike? This was less clear to the Joint Chiefs. It would depend on how effective our first strike had been. Some millions of us, probably, in any case. Not as many people as our first strike would have killed, for sure.
These were the numbers for what would happen if we executed a “preventive” first strike. What if we were retaliating for a preventive first strike they had conducted? In that case, our numbers killed would be quite a bit higher, theirs would be lower. Still many millions, just not so many many millions.
Our military estimated, then, that roughly six hundred million people would be killed if our operational plan for general nuclear war—our SIOP—were executed in a first strike. They apparently considered this number of deaths acceptable, as long as we might say we “prevailed” in the exchange. That’s what JFK had been told in the NES briefing.
Three months after the NES briefing, in September, JFK got another briefing, this time on the SIOP itself, the actual nuclear war plan that Eisenhower had had drawn up that had become operational on July 1, at the beginning of the fiscal year, six months after JFK took office. This time the briefing was done by General Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs were the leaders of our armed forces and advisers to the President on military matters.
After one of these briefings on our nuclear war plans--it’s not clear which one--, JFK turned to Dean Rusk, his Secretary of State, and said, according to Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.”
We don’t know for sure what JFK learned in these briefings in his first year in office that made him say this. The briefings of the NES (the NES was abolished during the Johnson administration) and the SIOPs (which have been replaced by OPLANs) on our operational plans for nuclear war are still classified.
But it’s clear that the surprises JFK was getting now in these briefings were not pleasant ones.