OK, SO CAN WE START. CAN YOU DESCRIBE FOR US AS BRIEFLY AS YOU CAN, WHAT HAPPENED ROUND ABOUT THE MID-50S THAT SUDDENLY MADE THE POLARIS SYSTEM IN SUBMARINES SEEM ATTRACTIVE AND HOW YOU DECIDED WHAT TO DO WITH IT?

That's quite a big...

START OFF WITH DESCRIBING THE WOODS HOLE REVELATIONS.

Well, I think I better go back just a little bit for that, because we were, we had been talking about putting a nuclear ballistic missiles to sea, and had been struggling with a monstrous uh, infection that was called the Jupiter S, which was a, it was a joint Army-Navy enterprise to put a Jupiter missile at sea which was so big that we, that we couldn't even find ships that it would fit into very well. And the idea of a submarine was almost totally, although we did some, some awfully wild speculations about what a submarine would look like if you put the Jupiter S into it. And they uh, there was a...group that convened at, at Woods Hole in the summer of what was it again, we had a number for that?

1956, I THINK IT WAS. SO IF YOU JUST START THE SENTENCE AGAIN. THERE WAS A SUMMER...

There was a summer study group in the summer of about 1956 in which uh, at Woods Hole, in which a bunch of the Navy's uh technical uh, people got together and discussed the future of, of missiles in, in the Navy. And in, in particular of, of missiles like the Jupiter S and that kind of thing. But uh and in the place of this, since they were not very well educated on nuclear weaponry, they asked uh, Edward Teller to come and give them a, you know, a briefing on what was going on in the, in the atomic weapons development business. And he came and sat and listened for a little while, and then he said, you know, you guys are not doing the right thing. You're designing your missiles to carry a weapon which is available now and uh, the missiles aren't going to be available for some several years of development time. We can, if you'll specify it for us, we can develop a weapon for you at the same development interval that the missile is uh, going to require that'll make a much more practical missile available to you. And uh, oh, this was an insight that anybody in his right mind should have been able to think of...

CAN WE STOP THERE? I THINK THE IMPORTANT THING...

I see. I see what you mean.

IT'S IMPORTANT THAT THAT'S CLEAR, THAT'S WHAT HE WAS SAYING IS, YOU KNOW, WE CAN GIVE YOU THE SAME EXPLOSIVE BLAST IN A MUCH SMALLER WARHEAD. OK? SO LET'S JUST TAKE IT AGAIN FROM...AND, IF YOU COULD, FOR THE BENEFIT--...I WOULDN'T MIND PICKING IT UP AGAIN FROM TALKING ABOUT THE SUMMER MEETING IN '56 AND IF YOU COULD SPECIFY WHERE WOODS HOLE IS, I'M NOT SURE, IS IT MASSACHUSETTS IS IT?

Yeah, it's in Massachusetts, OK.

LET'S JUST TRY THAT ONCE AGAIN.

The Navy had convened a summer study group of its uh, senior technical people at Woods Hole, which is on Cape Cod, this well, in fact, it's right near Hyannis Port, uh, in the summer. And uh, to discuss all kinds of Navy missiles, the future of missiles in the Navy I think may have been the, may have been the title of the uh, of the, of the uh, study group. And they asked Mr. Teller uh, Dr. Teller to come and tell them about nuclear weapons since nuclear weapons were not awfully well known by the technical people in those days, they were very highly classified. Teller told them that uh, they were kind of dumb to build a missile around the heavy weapons which were then available to them and which they had been told about. That if uh, he was asked, he could provide them a much lighter weapon, like maybe a quarter of the weight that would bring this missile size requirement down from this monstrous uh, gibberish kind of...down to something that could uh, be a lot cheaper and a lot easier to find a house for in a, in a submarine in particular, but also in a ship. And uh, this uh, this was a considerable disclosure. Uh, just within hours after Teller's lecture, why, you know, people were calling us up from Woods Hole, the people who hadn't been invited to the meeting, like me, telling us about this new, uh, this new fact of life. And people out in the laboratories came up with new designs of missiles just within a, within, within a week there was any number of little candidates. And immediately uh, very soon after this uh, Admiral Burke asked uh, Red Raborn, who was in charge of Navy missile development there's a distinction between a missile and the platform that they're put on, whether it's submarine or surface ships or not is, it was always kind of there...Raborn was the missile czar of the Navy in those, in those days. And they asked him to convene a group to absorb this new disclosure and to find ways of exploiting this new fact. And within uh, and in our group, we were asked to, to do a study of what the initial specifications ought to be and what kind of platform it ought to be, whether on ships or submarines or what kind of range it ought to have, uh, and other, whatever other characteristics we ought to... we, we ought to be put into its initial specifications. And on the first of uh, the year, after that uh, uh, sometime in January, we produced a study which persuaded this Chief of Naval Admiral Burke, that he wanted to, in fact it would be the recommendation that there was...time to think about this thing unless it was a deterrent weapon system up to that time, we'd been, we'd been constrained by the Key West agreements to talk about...

...NOW THE IMPORTANT THING TO GET ACROSS IS, IF YOU CAN BRIEFLY SAY THAT THERE'D BEEN DISAGREEMENT WAY BACK IN THE '40s THAT THE NAVY WOULDN'T GO INTO STRATEGIC TARGETING, SO YOU'D HAVE TO HAVE ALL THESE ABSURD TARGETS THAT HAD NAVAL IMPLICATIONS... ALL RIGHT? AND THAT IN '57 YOU MADE THIS RECOMMENDATION WE SHOULD GET RID OF ALL THAT, AND WHAT WE NEED IS A RANGE THAT WILL REACH MOSCOW FROM WHEREVER. OK? SO CAN YOU DESCRIBE FOR US THE WAY IN WHICH NAVAL TARGETING POLICY CHANGED AS A RESULT OF THE STUDY THAT YOU MADE?

Yes, uh. We had been uh, of course we had kind of been in the business of nuclear uh, carriage for some years, and with uh, first starting with airplanes and, and through the uh, the cruise missiles. But the uh, we had not been targeting um, strategic like targets, ah, before there had been tactical things, and we hadn't ah, it was during the Jupiter S period, kind of ah, when we first started talking about carrying long range ballistic missiles at sea, we started talking about targeting, ah, trying to find some...in effect, I guess, trying to find some use for them, but the thing had been, this, ah, I shouldn't be digressing I suppose to say that this is a classic case of the capability driving requirements, looking for...

LET'S TAKE THAT THOUGHT AGAIN. I MEAN WHAT KIND OF, ALRIGHT, WHICH CAME FIRST IN A SENSE. WAS IT THE WEAPONS, DID YOU HAVE WEAPONS AND YOU WERE LOOKING FOR TARGETS OR DID YOU HAVE TARGETS AND YOU WERE LOOKING FOR WEAPONS THAT COULD HIT THE TARGET?

Well, we had, of course, during the, we had a clear operational requirement for tactical like weapons, which we'd been living with for years and had no problem about ah, up until that time. The idea of having a nuclear weapon that would ah, well, in the first place, having a nuclear weapon at all was kind of a, was kind of a shock. But we could see some tactical targets for nuclear weapons, like, you know, sort of a large task force or something like that. But to ah, ah, find some use for weapons that had, had long range and could penetrate deep into enemy territory, was a, was a sort of a new project for us. And we didn't really do very well at it. We, we were told by the Key West Agreements, that since the Air Force was in charge of strategic bombing ah, we had to do quote, targets of naval interest unquote, and it was kind of hard to find targets of naval interest in, ah, of, any particular sense, and we would, we did find, we did have several people made studies of, of where factories that made naval related equipment were located and those were places that we could aim at. And we ended up doing studies which were elaborate ways of matching a nuclear weapon to a, to a submarine battery plant somewhere in the middle of Russia that didn't make any sense when you looked at them. And the um, ah, impact of the, of the new disclosure about um, about a practical ship base missile, ah...the out of the outcome of the Key West, of the ah, of the ah, Woods Hole, ah, exercise, made it ah, put a somewhat new, new, ah, coloration on this because up to then we hadn't really been seriously thinking about naval weapons at all. The Jupiter S was such a preposterous thing that we, we were just playing games. Now that we could actually see carrying a nuclear weapon, we could see that we had to ah, we had to be a little bit more serious about what it might be used for. And the only way we could do that was to take over the some of the missions that the Air Force had been assigned which was the deterrent mission. It, it just didn't make any sense to use it for any other purpose. And this put a new coloration on our own, our own philosophy about our own concept of operations for the Navy, which led us to recommend in the CNO to accept the idea that we ought to be biting off this Air Force mission for a change. And this was done in the um, ah, first in ah, in his endorsement of a study that said this ought to be done. The, the this study determining the ah, the ah, kinds of characteristics that ah, the introductory...ballistic missile ought to have. It's range, the yield of it's warhead and the ah, kind of basing it ought to be.

ALL RIGHT, SO LET'S GO BACK TO THIS, I'LL ASK YOU THE QUESTION WHAT, ASSUMING THAT WE'D EXPLAINED PERHAPS THE KEY WEST AGREEMENT, WHAT USE WAS THE NAVY INTENDING TO PUT THESE, THESE MISSILES TO ORIGINALLY. I MEAN SAY THE REGULUS OR THE JUPITER S IF IT HAD EVER GOT TO SEA. HOW WERE YOU TARGETING IT, GIVEN THAT YOU WEREN'T ALLOWED TO GO FOR STRATEGIC TARGETS?

Yes. Well, we had been, we had been comfortable for years with tactical targeting and we knew how to, how to assign weapons to targets and what kinds of fusing to use on them and timing and all the operations were, were very familiar to us. But when we had this new challenge of, of, of using a long-range ballistic missile, we had, at first with the Jupiter S, we had it laid on us from, from higher authority that the Navy was supposed to be studying this and we did it as we were ordered, and, but we couldn't take it very seriously because the Jupiter S was such a preposterous missile. It had, it was, it, nobody could, in his right mind would have, would have thought that it, ah, it would, well, even work for all that matter. But as an operation thing, it ah, you know, how would you target it, what would be good for it, we didn't have any idea. And we played along and did, we did preposterous things. We found targets in the middle of Russia that had some kind of naval interest and which did not, therefore, violate the the Key West Agreement, like a plant in Gorky that made um, made batteries for submarines. But it didn't, we didn't take it particularly seriously. And it was only after the, the idea came out of the Woods Hole that we could have a serious missile that was, that was, more of less economical to make and would, and we could seriously carry, and that could be made to go long range...that we started seriously thinking about what on the earth could this be used for. And at this point, we couldn't think of any, any target of Naval interest that this could be fired at. And it just occurred to us that the only way we could, we could deal with this new thing was to take over, I'm still not doing this worth a damn am I? The only...

"IT OCCURRED TO US"... JUST DO IT FROM THERE.

It occurred to us that this strategic.

[INTERRUPTION AND RESTART]

It occurred to us that this strategic deterrent tasking, which the Key West Agreement said assign to the Air Force, was the only ah...rational employment of a weapon of this kind. And that we'd have to bite off this piece if we were going to ah, going to have any kind of a decent rational ah, that would fit such a weapon. And once we, once this occurred to us, everything just fell into place. It was easy. The ah, the initial weapons were going to, to ah, not be very many therefore they could ah, they'd obviously be assigned the most important targets. There was only one really super important target and that was Moscow in this new mission. And we knew where that was. We knew where the oceans were. We could calculate the range as being, what it turned out to be, 1,150 miles distance between Moscow and the nearest navigable water that wasn't so constricted that they'd be able to just sit there and wait for us. And the um, yield, of course, had to be something that would be ah, that would take care of threatening Moscow, which was, we already ah, there was the kind of thing that nuclear weapons were characterized by anyhow, and ah, the question of whether it was, how it was to be based, whether on a submarine or a surface ship agonized us for, you know, for quite awhile, but not too long because the ah, initial ah, single deployment of a surface ship, the first surface ship to go out, would be so vulnerable and visible that it would not be very credible as a threat. And ah, whereas the first submarine could sneak up and ah, the first submarine would be an effective threat. So the first deployment of a submarine with a nuclear capability against Moscow would weigh in the strategic balance in a way that was, that we thought was pretty hard to, to knock. And this was our recommendation that we take over the Air Force task and we put the first one into a submarine. Now, it's still not very...

OK, LET'S LEAVE THAT. NOW, SO THE POLARIS SYSTEM WENT AHEAD AND IT WENT PRETTY WELL. NOW IN THE SUMMER OF '57, DO YOU THINK OR AT ANY RATE, AT SOMETIME IN THE MID- TO LATE '50S, YOU WERE ASSIGNED A DIFFERENT TASK WHICH WAS TO LOOK AT THE SAC WAR PLAN WHICH BECAME AVAILABLE TO THE ARMY AND THE NAVY TO ANALYZE. WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION WHEN YOU FINALLY GOT A LOOK AT THAT SAC WAR PLAN.

WHAT'S YOUR REACTION TO WHEN YOU GOT A REAL GOOD LOOK AT THE SAC WAR PLAN?

This is not too relevant to the, first the the actual Polaris which was going on independently. This was a totally different, um, it took us quite a long time after... I'm not sure quite how, what sort of background we really need for this...

IF YOU CAN ANSWER THE QUESTION DIRECTLY.

At long last. In 1957, Admiral Burke managed to, and to gang up with the chief of staff of the Army and enforce on the Air Force that they submit their nuclear plans for review by the other services, as was done by conventionally with all the other war plans. And, ah, this plan was called the NX Charlie of the JSCAP. JSCAP is Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan. NX Charlie was the nuclear war annex and it had the targeting in it. It had the long list of weapons and each weapon was, was associated with the target it was going to hit. And the Army and the Navy assigned their working level people to a summer study, to a study of this plan which convened out at the, at the Army Map Service and we bused ourselves in under very high security for about six weeks and plotted on maps, the maps of cities and the maps of Russia, these 'laydown' of these weapons. And it was a, it was an exercise in unreality for us all. It was absolutely preposterous. We ended up finding...of course one way you plot a nuclear weapon impact is to draw a circle around the point of aim, and put some, that has some specification on it, you know, that ninety percent of targets of certain hardness will be destroyed within this circle, kind of thing. We drew these circles and sometimes we had overlapping circles as many as eight or ten times of a, ah, the downtown areas of cities in Russia and that kind of thing. And every once in a while there'd be one of these little Navy weapons would come in that had lower yield than the Air Force once did. There would be a little tiny, ah, bottle cap stuck down in the middle of this map that had circles the size of phonograph records. The multi-megaton weapons that they dropped on the airfield near the city but still covered the city and a good many of its industrial plants and its, and most of its population. And the whole thing was so, one of the high points of this, really was the analysis we did by picking weapons under whose circles appeared only the single target element of petroleum supplies. POL storage, it was technically called. And there were, every one of these weapons was, you know, most of them went after quite a few different targets elements at the same time and, so it was hard to know just what the justification for the weapon was. But in this case, the only justification was petroleum storage. And we found, I don't remember how many weapons, but a good many and a great many hundred of megatons that were targeted only against petroleum. And they diminished the Soviet petroleum supplies from some number. Again, I can't remember it precisely, but something like 61.5 down to 60 percent thereby. Something in that general order. But, it was a huge amount of petroleum, but had, you know, when put into that particular perspective, had absolutely no conceivable relevancy to the...winning of a war. And this whole thing was so, so dramatically unmilitary, irrelevant to any kind of a serious military concept, that it was a, it just flabbergasted us. And we, we've developed a briefing on it and were given the opportunity to brief this to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And this I, I still consider to be one of the highest points my professional career was sitting in the background. I was not doing the briefing. It was done by some of our Naval officer colleagues. Um, watching General LeMay, who was, I think at that time still the chief of SAC and was sitting in, an invited listener, as we were watching his cigar drift from one side of his mouth to the other. General LeMay, had, moved his cigar across his mouth with his tongue. He didn't use his hands. And he had a kind of a, it was known that his emotional state could be measured by the rate at which his cigar moved from one side of his mouth to another. Well he practically chewed it off listening to our, to our presentation, because we, the Air Force presentation was, was more or less routine pointing out all the different, all the amount of damage they were doing. Our presentation was one that pointed out that the important damage wasn't being done. That is was not a, it was not a reasonable thing to try to do. That they, even if they were totally successful in delivering their weapons they would not have accomplished anything that would have crippled the Russian capability beyond perhaps the sort of massive disruption that any kind of nuclear attack would do. But when it was measured in terms of target elements and how much was left over afterwards, they were, it was dumb. It didn't make any sense.

AT THE SAME TIME YOU WERE SAYING THAT THEY WERE DOING FAR TOO MUCH, WEREN'T YOU?

Well, they were destroying an awful lot of everything but they weren't doing it... the surviving capabilities measured the way they were measuring them were still enough to, still about enough to be as consequential as the ones that they started out with. They still had plenty of gasoline to drive their airplanes. Still had plenty of weapons still in their stockpile that had been missed by our attack. So the surviving capability was still, there and if they, all they were trying to do was to destroy the enemy's will to fight or something like that. Or to do a lot of damage, they could have done that with many fewer weapons, because the actual city attack had long been saturated. The, takes only a couple of hundred weapons at the very most to ah, kind of, just a few megatons to pretty much kill most of the population, the urban population. But they were laying down much more than that with the justification of these, of getting every last little drop of gas. Well, they weren't going to get any last little drop of gas. They were getting little incremental driblets of the residual gas that was still to be located. Most of the gasoline never was, didn't even know where it was. And indeed, the, the ah.

WHAT WAS YOUR OVERALL REACTION WHEN YOU FIRST SAW THAT PLAN? I MEAN YOUR OWN EMOTIONAL REACTION?

My own reaction was that we didn't think, we thought at least that all these things had been kept secret from us for so long that it would have made more sense. We were just, we really, we expected when we had gone in to be given a chance to look at this plan that we would have found something there. And all we found was, was crazy. It was insane.

WHAT WAS THE EFFECT OF THAT REPORT?

The...the immediate effect as, soon after we gave this report to the Joint Chiefs, they started seriously considering, and, a project that we'd been trying to push for years which was to plan a retaliatory rather than in a preemptive mode, to plan for an attack that would be, that would be a retaliation against a Soviet attack rather than an attack that would be a first strike by the United States. Um, this had never been done. The Air Force, we knew that it hadn't been done because our, we'd been party to war games in which the Air Force always succeeded in laying down it's attack before they had been caught on the ground. And we felt that before deterrence, one ought to have a, the primary plan ought to be one which guaranteed to the Russians that whatever they succeeded in doing in the way of catching us by surprise or laying down a heavier attack or that sort of thing, we would guarantee that they'd hurt. That they'd get something, that they'd be punished and that that was the essence of deterrence. Deterrence, it was, not to do maximum damage, but to minimize the chance that the other side could find it reasonable to make an attack on us. And we had, we'd been arguing this for some time, and the impact of the report of the Budapest Study was to get this off the ground in the Joint Chiefs and to actually generate guidance for SAC to use in its NX Charlie that required them to do what was called an alternative undertaking. We would have preferred to have it to have it the primary undertaking but it didn't come out that way. The alternative undertaking was to be a targeting scheme for use if the Soviets managed to deliver their weapons before we did. It was for use by a, by a broken backed force, as we called it. A force that would have to, that would be reconstituted after the Soviets made good a nuclear attack. And we wanted the alternative undertaking to be, to take account of the considerations that would govern in a case like that. It would be a retaliatory attack, rather than a preemptive counter force attack. And this guidance was promulgated. It became the official JCS orders to Omaha, and I can't remember exactly, my memory was about three weeks before it was to take effect, the Secretary of Defense came up with a... which preempted everything, and we went back, in effect, to square one, with a...having, giving the Air Force license to go back to what they'd been doing before without any... alternatives whatsoever.

WHAT IN A NUTSHELL WAS ADMIRAL BURKE'S REAL OBJECTION TO SAC'S APPROACH TO STRATEGIC TARGETING?

Admiral Burke was a, a consummate military man. He was a, he was called "30-Knot Burke" because he knew how to drive destroyers around the Pacific during the war and he was the youngest CNO ever, up to that time, was, he was, he thought strategically and militarily. He thought things through to their, to their ultimate outcomes of what they would look like after you'd done them. And when he thought what the world would look like after the Air Force had done what it was they proposed to do, you could see no values, even for the United States in that...if you would use the word counterforce in his presence he'd kick you out of his office practically. He'd actually turn red, or start to bluster. The sound of the work, he had somehow, because he recognized that the counterforce, the preemptive idea was one that...it's kind of like, it amounted to saying that those ah, damn Soviets aren't going to be, they don't dare attack because if they do, we're going to catch them by surprise. We'll get the jump on them is what it amounted to and that's, you don't plan to get the jump on somebody over the long term as a deterrent against his getting the jump on you. It just doesn't make any sense at all.

YOU HAVE NO DOUBT THAT THAT SAC WAR PLAN THAT YOU EXAMINED IN '57, '58, THAT WAS ESSENTIALLY A FIRST STRIKE PLAN. THERE WAS NO QUESTION OF WAITING AND RETALIATING?

It didn't make any sense except as a first strike plan and it didn't make any sense as a first strike plan once you... it made sense as a first strike plan sort of in concept as you, as the way the Air Force talked about it before you could get to see the details of it. When you analyzed the details, it still, it didn't make sense even as a first strike plan, because it didn't accomplish the things that they had set themselves to accomplish.

CAN WE GO BACK TO THE POLARIS NOW. YOU WERE ASKED TO DO STUDIES ON HOW MANY OF THESE WEAPONS WERE GOING TO BE NEEDED. NOW WERE YOU...GIVEN A GO? WERE YOU TOLD WHAT NEEDED TO BE ACCOMPLISHED?

Well, we were told we were supposed to be a deterrent system and so we were supposed to, and the deterrence was defined as a threat to, of damage, unacceptable damage to the other side, and that this was, at that time was thought of as being a certain fraction of the, of the population under, to be killed. So, we made the unthinkable calculations and kept, you know, coming up with numbers. We developed some analytical procedures so that we could come up with numbers. And we'd send the numbers up the line as a form of a preliminary draft of a study, and they'd, come, be sent back down with one or another little criticism from somewhere up the line. And finally, we got, we came up with a number which amounted to 45 submarines being required, roughly, and that, and the criterion for that was defined as being able to destroy some fraction of the population with some assurance that it would be at least that many, and, which was a kind of mathematical criterion that we needed to do our calculations. And then I was reminded by some of my Naval officer colleagues that this was a magic number. That this was derived also from a, sort of a, I suppose you might call it a geopolitical kind of algorithm which said that you had to always have three squadrons in the Pacific and two in the Atlantic of any naval force. Two in the Atlantic because you had to have one in the Mediterranean and one, sort of across the seas and one back home. And three in the Pacific because you had to have one sort of in between the one that was deployed in the far east and the one that you had at home. And that submarine squadrons had nine submarines in them and so five times nine is forty five and that made the, made forty five a kind of comfortable number to have. And I've talked with Admiral Burke about this and he denies that this was his consideration. I've always felt that, I have accused Admiral Burke of having made the geopolitical calculation and then just waited around until our criticized study came up with the right number to justify this. The move from forty five to forty one came because, and I definitely remember this, although Admiral Burke still doesn't remember this, that there was an economy move at some point in there and they imposed a ten percent cut across the board on everything and that meant, moved our forty five down to forty one.

...CAN YOU JUST REPEAT THAT THOUGHT?

Well...we had to...facing what it was that we saw when we looked at the Air Force plan we, among other things we had to recognize that there wasn't any room for the Navy's concept of a a limited destruction because it was preempted by the fact that if a war was started at all, the Air Force would take it's massive damage as we'd already seen in Project Blue Pass where we laid down the Navy attack on top of the Air Force one and found it was just totally nonexistent. There's the strategy of how you are going to deal with...with deterrence on one hand and whether it's going to be uh...or a war fighting plan if you're going to have to the war on the other hand is uh...can't be done independently by one force in the presence of another force that dominates the situation. We felt that deterrence was very hard to contemplate in the face of an Air Force posture which was so vulnerable to preemption on its side that it could uh...that the incentive to attack was somehow stronger on the Soviet side than...than the fear of retaliation. And that in effect, if we were going to have a beneficial impact on national strategy and make it, the world safer for our grandchildren, we had to do something to counter the...what we consider to be the insanity of the Air Force concept. And so we were in competition with the Air Force. We did have a parochial of interservice controversial what we consider to be a proper mission of interservice controversy in the... against the Air Force concept. Now, this was not popular in the Navy, because most of the Navy would rather just leave the whole thing alone. Most of the Navy were, felt that they just felt sort of the whole unthinkable was not for them to think. And uh...there was only a rather small group in the Navy and we weren't particularly popular. Nobody in our group ever made higher office in the Navy.

I THINK WHAT PEOPLE WOULD FIND HARD TO UNDERSTAND IS HOW THE NAVY THOUGHT IT WAS GOING TO IMPROVE MATTERS GIVEN ITS CRITICISM OF SAC WAS THAT IT HAD FAR TOO MANY WEAPONS ALREADY, HOW WAS IT GOING TO IMPROVE MATTERS FOR THE NAVY TO HAVE A WHOLE LOT MORE WEAPONS?

Well, we would have to, in the context that the weapons were going to be deployed, we would rather have them deployed in a form that didn't invite Soviet, urgent Soviet attack. Preemption. And so in effect we were competing on several grounds. We were competing on several grounds. We were taking the...the as in fact Admiral Miller used to say that uh...'cause he felt sort of guilty about this. Why are we, Miller was offering to dumb things. He said that. If you order us to, if this is the task that you lay down, we're able to do it better, safer. Not necessarily cheaper, but even cheaper. Because if we do it, it's not going to be an invitation to Soviet either on the one hand to attack, on the other hand a build up of nuclear attack capability which is what that is. We mentioned often that the threat of an arms race if we were to continue the Air Force uh...posture which invited Soviet counterforce deployments which ended up being what we're, situation we're in today.

SO WHAT THE NAVY REALLY WANTED, DEEP DOWN, WAS TO TAKE OVER THE WHOLE OF THE STRATEGIC...

We didn't want to take it over. We wanted to... we wanted to impose on the strategic uh...posture a concept that would not be the invitation to an arms race. To a counterforce confrontation. And we did a lot of recommending of...of Air Force systems. We...we supported uh...mobile minutemen and other, and airborne weaponry and things like that. We were not you know, we felt that our Navy capability was an example and was the best available at the time. But we were not at...we recognized or at least some of us did. here were others of course who were purely parishioners, but uh...I claim, anyway, to have recognized that the Navy didn't not only didn't want to, but should not be allowed to take it over totally by itself. That we ought to — The thing we were trying to push was the idea that we didn't want to be in a preemptive provocative posture that invitee Soviet counter nuclear developments.

BUT FROM YOUR POSITION THEN, IN THE LATE '50s, EARLY '60s, DID IT MAKE ANY SENSE TO YOU THAT THE UNITED STATES SHOULD END UP WITH A TRIAD SO CALLED WITH A TRIO OF FORCES EACH OF WHICH COULD ACCOMPLISH THE DESTRUCTION OF AT LEAST HALF THE SOVIET POPULATION ON ITS OWN?

Well, it made sense that we should have a, what we used to call an optimum mix. The triad never, was something else again. We wont' go into that now, unless you want me to. The optimum mix would be a mixture of capabilities each of which would be a hedge against the development of some kind of decisive counter-measure against the other. Recognizing that every system is very military development of any importance has always had a limited life before it became obsolete. So to hedge against that, we wanted a mix of systems. So that's why even within the Navy we...we wanted in our little tight group of strategic interested people, we wanted surface ships to be in there as well. And of course, now they are finally, with the...with the cruise missiles being deployed on surface ships. But that took a long time. And they... the only thing that got them deployed was they weren't really thought of as competing with the with the Poseidon and the Polaris. And so we wanted competition, both from the Air Force and within the Navy itself. We were...we had a hard time dealing with the missilers in the Navy who didn't want to think strategically either. They just, they liked the money that they were getting except they didn't want to do anything except drive their submarines. And for example, when we talked about uh...about limited control response, where you might have to launch a single weapon to do a demonstration to tell the enemy that you're serious about things, they wouldn't like to do that because that would expose a submarine to detection and things like that. And they...they preferred to stay inside this spasm war, what we called the 'wargasm' of the...of the Air Force concept. And preferred to fit into that nicely and not to have any flexibility.

DO YOU THINK, LOOKING BACK ON THAT WHOLE ERA...DO YOU THINK LOOKING BACK THAT THERE WAS ANY REAL SENSE, MILITARY AND STRATEGIC SENSE IN THE STRATEGIC ARSENAL THAT THE UNITED STATES ENDED UP WITH BY THE BEGINNING OF THE 1960s?

Very little.

COULD YOU EXPAND ON THAT?

The uh...in the concept of deterrence which other people have called MAD for not too irrational reasons, the threat of retaliation. That's the kind of military capability that doesn't, never has made sense except as a well the force major kind of thing where you're presumably lining up in front of the enemy force with enough with enough superior force that he decides to back down uh... This was usually done with armies that had uh...that actually were plausible to fight with. And when you start talking the nuclear deterrence where there's something where it...the whole moral and political and uh...economic impact of...of laying the thing off in a real instance of...of, you know, of actually fighting the war, this doesn't make any sense. There's nothing you can accomplish by doing that much damage that...that makes any sense. There's threat of it makes sense if you can somehow make the threat uh...act to prevent the other side making the choice to make the attack. But that's... that threat is somehow uh...lessened somewhat by the plausibility, the lack of plausibility that it could ever be used. If you could ever get the President to...to go that far as to pull the button. I'm sure that people out in Omaha are ready to push that button and one suspects every now and then that they uh... that they don't really rely on the President to tell them whether to push it or not. Uh... and of course, we occasionally have movies that... that dramatize that...that aspect. And it's... that's a hard thing to live with. There's some you know, there's some strategic merit to there being an uncertainty in the Soviet mind about whether it might be pushed or not. But then again, there's a very strong, and I think even stronger strategic uh...uh...handicap in having them think that, because it makes them trigger-happy too. And the chance of the actually lighting off a nuclear war are increased by some of these...some kinds of these uncertainties. The chance of anyone wanting to are...are diminished b: the uncertainties with the chance of its happening anyhow, whether they want it or not, are somewhat increased. Because the fact that it might happen, that the idea that there may be somebody ready to push, you know, to trigger it off by... by just being uh...crazy or something or being under such pressure that he can't think of anything left to do or for some kind of an urgent crisis where his perceived alternatives are narrowing down to nothing but that make it uh... rational for somebody to uh...devise schemes that uh...that'll operate under those circumstances. You know, to actually plan to have some irrationality built in. Like Herman Kahn made a little talk about uh...the rationale of irrationality which is...you know, makes a certain amount of strategic sense. It's the same rational of the hijacker that gets on the airplane with a with a hand grenade and holds it up to his chest and says, I'm going to blow my everybody up unless you turn around and head for Cuba or something like that. And it makes sense, you know. It's a, if you can persuade the guy that you're mad enough to do that, well you might be able to highjack the airplane. But...to have our government the United States government rely on strategies like that is a little, a little uncomfortable.

DO YOU REMEMBER YOURSELF THINKING THESE KINDS OF THINGS AT THE TIME, DURING THE 1950s? WAS IT YOUR IMPRESSION THAT THERE WAS SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE OR A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO WERE LOGICALLY, METHODICALLY WORKING OUT WHAT SORT OF FORCE WE NEEDED AND HOW TO GO ABOUT GETTING IT? OR WHAT SORT OF IMPRESSION DID YOU HAVE ABOUT THE WAY THESE THINGS WERE BEING THOUGHT ABOUT?

Oh, I did a lot of thinking about that and we had lots of arguments about it. And the question well the question, well, one of the interesting questions was the question of whether the imployment plan, whether you actually, the plan, the actual war plan that you actually were going to fight should be the same as the declaratory policy which is what you were threatening to do. And generally uh...and this distinction between, you know, the declaration, and the actual operating plan and the...was...was not very clearly made, but became more and more interesting and important as especially in the early '60s as we started to recognize that that was an important distinction. And indeed, McNamara, when he...he laid down this triad, not the triad, but the mix which ended up being the triad uh...as a...as a procurement policy. The imployment policy was this whole separate thing. That was what was going on out in Omaha. And he didn't interfere with their, with their counterforce planning out in Omaha except to try to make it more flexible. He... he recognized that the planning in Omaha was not the, it was not to accomplish the things that he had laid down as a kind of specification requirement of what he wanted to achieve in the procurement of forces. He wanted to procure forces that had this independent capability. But...but a war fighting plan was to be written somewhat differently.

I'M GOING TO LEAVE THAT NOW AND ASK YOU ONE MORE QUESTION. THAT IS IF YOU CAN TRY AND DESCRIBE THE WAY PROCUREMENT HAPPENED IN THE 1950s, ESPECIALLY IN SAC?.

Of course, even though we weren't allowed to see the SAC plan we were...we were uh...there was always a budget exercise every year so we, each service was allowed to criticize the other service's budget proposals. And the way the Air Force uh...presented them to us was that I can't remember the interval, I think it was like uh they presented an alternation between a thing called the AWP which stood for the Air Weapons Plan and something for bombers-- I can't remember exactly what it was called, but a bomber procurement plan. Were not given at the same time. They were given in alternation of each other and each was sort of… relied on the other as a kind of a bootstrap. The last approved AWP would...involve the...the procurement of so many nuclear weapons and uh...then they would come uh...come up at the time they brought they brought up their bomber plan, they would say, Now if we're going to get these weapons, and they're scheduled to come on line in such and such a date, we're going to have to buy some...some more airplanes to... to carry them. And so they would uh...use the uh...they'd argue the airplane procurement thing until they got a good uh...program buy of airplanes. Next time the air weapons uh...the AWP would come around, why they would say, You've got all these airplanes coming off the ground, we got to buy some more weapons to fill up their bomb bays. And uh...this uh...this uh...boot strap uh...policy was one that we'd become quite aware of. In fact it was exercise with that...that gave us sort of a feeling of uh... of uh...of some of the Air Force thinking that uh... I think my have sort of colored some of our... given us a little more enthusiasm when we...when we actually could catch them uh... uh...with their hands on the tail, which we occasionally did, especially at...at Budapest.

OK, LET'S CUT IT THERE.

...During the mid-'50s, during the major build up of the Air Force uh...bomber force, the strategic force, we were faced uh...alternately with the...uh...in the interservice arena where we were given the chance to sort of argue the budget uh... competitions, with an Air Force uh... claim for having... having a requirement for so many weapons because they had bombers that were...had empty bomb bays in them that they could put the weapons into. And then a few months later they would face us with another requirement that we were for aircraft. And the way they paced these things, we...dealt with only one at a time. So we were not really allowed to take them both...in... together. We were faced when we were buying aircraft with their requirement for finding aircraft that...to carry the weapons that were going to be coming off the line. And when buying weapons with finding weapons to fit into these expensive airplanes that otherwise would be going idle.

SO IT WAS A CIRCULAR.

So it was a circular process that we, which they very cleverly kept us, and this was before they'd ever let us actually see the plan of what they were going to do. Kept us from ever pressing the issue in any really very cogent way. It was always a fait accomplis that we'd already approved so many weapons or we'd already have approved so many bomb bay spaces.

WHO WAS ACTUALLY MAKING THE DECISION FINALLY ON PROCUREMENT? WAS IT A COMMITTEE IN THE JSC...

No, no procurement decisions were made by the Defense Department and we were, in effect, just arguing the JCS recommendations. The JCS was always allowed to comment and it was nice for a service to be able to get the concurrence of the other chiefs in that JCS recommendation. So we were each given a chance to and there was a certain amount of quid pro quo. You know, a certain amount of bargaining on the table. You approve my thing and I'll improve yours. But in that case there was uh...we had quite a lot of Navy uh...misgivings about the way the Air Force was escalating this matter, boot strapping this matter, one on top of another.