DID YOU WORK ON THE WEAPONS SYSTEMS STUDY CALLED WSEG-50 THAT CAME UP WITH THE CONCLUSION THAT MINIMUM DETERRENT WAS THE WAY TO GO?

No, I didn't work on that particular study...

BUT YOU WERE A BELIEVER IN FINITE TERMS?

Yes.

CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THAT, WHAT THIS MEANS?

Well, what it means is that the power of a nuclear weapon... After working on a variety of weapons systems, offensive systems, missiles, airplanes, air defense systems, I became convinced that there was no military use for nuclear weapons. That its only use was to threaten, to prevent somebody else from using them, and that it didn't take very many secure weapons, weapons that could survive an attack to be an adequate deterrent. For example I've been in the habit of saying a hundred bombs on a hundred cities would be more than adequate deterrent, it would wipe out a hundred American cities. If you look for a hundred in either the United States or the Soviet Union that's worth a bomb, a megaton bomb, it's hard to find a hundred. And if you try to imagine what this civilization would be like, after our hundred largest cities and railroads and terminals and shipyards and ports had been wiped out, it wouldn't be much of a country. And the same thing is true of the Soviet Union. And I believe that people realize this. Certainly people in power realize it. I think presidents that I've worked with all realize that the they wouldn't risk the destruction of their major cities unless they felt that it was the only way that they could prevent even more serious damage to the country. Mr. McNamara claims that he told both President Kennedy and President Johnson that they shouldn't respond even if a bomb fell somewhere on our country, they should try to find out what had happened, because the consequences of responding are so much worse than having a single city destroyed. So I became convinced that you didn't need these thousands of airplanes and missiles and so on, you needed a few that were secure, even if the other side, let us say the Soviet Union had 10,000, if we had a hundred missiles or two hundred missiles that we're sure would survive any attack and that they could be aimed properly and land where we wanted them to, this would be more than adequate deterrent for the Soviet Union. And therefore we didn't have to waste all this money and build this complicated and dangerous system that can, runs the risk of being fired by itself. I think the same thing applies to the Russians. I've said this to the Russian leaders. Two of them. I think it's a symmetrical problem. I think we're running an arms race that becomes increasingly dangerous and has no hope of becoming anything less...

CAN YOU REPEAT THE STORY... WHAT NUMBER OF WEAPONS... AND THE NUMBER OF MISSILES THAT THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ULTIMATELY REQUESTED AND WHAT PRESSURES WERE UPON HIM TO REQUEST THIS LARGER NUMBER?

Well, I guess, at the beginning of the Kennedy administration we had to make a decision about what the military forces would be. We inherited the Eisenhower system and we inherited an Eisenhower budget and the decision was how much we should add to that. We had, we being the democratic, the Kennedy group had campaigned in spite of my misgivings on a missile gap program and the, had they succeeded in convincing the country that we were in very serious position. We early learned that this was all wrong, that the Russians had not built a large number of missiles and they deployed them, that there was no missile gap. Mr. McNamara made, had a press conference very early in the administration which he said that. But it came time to build up forces or decide on the Kennedy budget and what forces, all the pressures that had been generated particularly on the Congress but in industry and in the newspapers and in the public expectations were such that people felt that it would be wrong to not add something and so, the question was what. I tried first to argue that we should stick with the Eisenhower missile build-up, my argument being the simple one, namely that the Russians would probably match us at any level that we chose to build and so we should decide what we wanted the Russians to build. But nobody would take me seriously. So initially I argued for two hundred and then I was joined by Carl Kaysen and the two of us argued for four hundred. The Secretary of Defense was getting a push from the other side where there were rumors that the Air Force wanted 30,000 Minutemen and the Joint Chiefs had cut that down to a thousand or to three thousand and the in the end he advocated a thousand and when pressed on why he wanted that number he said he thought that was the smallest number that we could possibly ask for and not find ourselves in serious political trouble after the campaign. Now coming to a thousand missiles was a, represented a major philosophical change for him because if you wanted something like 30,000 missiles it meant you wanted a real first-strike capability by the time you came to a thousand you were really dealing with a retaliatory force. And I think in fact that's indeed what had changed is he had listened to the arguments and his analysts had given him various options.

DID THE AIR FORCE WANT A FIRST-STRIKE, IS THAT WHY THEY WANTED 30,000 MISSILES FOR FIRST-STRIKE CAPABILITY?

I never heard them say that so I don't know but, it's the only conclusion one can draw. The Air Force has generally wanted a first-strike capability that they had in the bomber force. They, LeMay made no bones about the fact that he thought the most effective force was a first-strike. Periodically our government has made believe it didn't believe in a first-strike, but when you look at deployments for example, there was no justifiable reason for the thousand MXs that were proposed in the Carter administration except as part of a first-strike capability. So what we frequently have had a public position in which we've said well, of course, Americans would never strike first, but we've had a first-strike capability and the argument in defense was this would persuade the Russians to be careful. Now, on the other hand if you were sitting and looking at these you might feel that the best way to deter a first-strike is to have one of your own. And I think this is what's been going on between the two countries.

YOU MENTIONED THAT THERE WERE SOME INCONSISTENCIES IN THE ANN ARBOR SPEECH AND YOU HAD BREAKFAST WITH SECRETARY MCNAMARA PRIOR TO THAT SPEECH. COULD YOU COMMENT ON THAT AND YOU MENTIONED TO HIM SOME OF THESE INCONSISTENCIES?

I told you earlier that I didn't want to talk about that speech.

WELL THEN COULD YOU TALK GENERALLY ABOUT THE INCONSISTENCIES AND THE WHOLE NOTION OF COUNTERFORCE IN THOSE CITIES...

Well the argument for counter force which really only applies in the missile era doesn't apply to the bomber here, is that you would assume or it's based on the assumption that an enemy striking at out forces would hold something back either as additional counter force strike or as one scenario that is very popular among the strategists is that the Soviets would strike only at our missile forces, would not hurt any people. It's hard to find a situation where that's the case. On the other hand a lot of planners think if you want to kill 5 or 10 million people that's not very serious and so if you look at some of these scenarios that's what the result is. That the Soviet Union would then hold back some part of its force. And this is plausible. And threaten us and say don't retaliate or we can retaliate or don't do X or we'll do X because we've still got something left. And so the counter force idea is that we would use what survived the initial attack to destroy the remaining Soviet forces if we're talking about the Soviet Union. Maybe their generals argue the same way. The trouble is that I don't believe our intelligence reconnaissance control system is good enough for us to know what we ought to hit. And so if they've fired three-quarters of their missiles and we've fired at everything three-quarters of what we fired at would be empty holes and both the Soviets and the United States do have missiles on submarines. We have many more than they do, but those tend to be invulnerable. So that they will remain as a retaliatory force as well, or a threat.

PUT YOURSELF BACK IN THE 1960S... IS COUNTERFORCE A FIRST-STRIKE DOCTRINE? AN EFFECTIVE COUNTERFORCE, IS IT NECESSARILY A FIRST-STRIKE CAPABILITY?

It's hard to distinguish between the two. One... There are subtle difference between a first-strike capability and a counterforce capability. A first-strike capability has to be large enough so that you can be certain of wiping out everything you attack and this sometimes means using two or three warheads to attack one silo, for example. A counter force strategy and sometimes counter force and first-strike are mixed up and used together but I think the professional in the business means a force that can be used to destroy what's remaining of the force that had not been used. Now, I think that's much more complicated problem because you have to know what hasn't been used and therefore it calls for a degree of responsiveness, intelligence and surveillance which I don't believe either side has.

...YOU'VE ALWAYS BEEN QUITE CONCERNED ABOUT THE ARMS RACE...IN THE 1960S DID YOU THINK THAT WHEN SECRETARY MCNAMARA ANNOUNCED THAT THE UNITED STATES WOULD ADHERE TO ASSURED DESTRUCTION AS A CRITERION FOR THE PROCUREMENT OF WEAPONS AND NUMBERS WAS THAT, DID THAT SATIFY YOU?

No, because I didn't know what it meant. I always from the 1960s on believed that we should all be striving for a minimal deterrent. And while this sounded like a step forward it was still—one could rationalize much too large forces by it. And also I've always felt that it was dangerous to make highly precise forces because they are more threatening. You don't need high precision to threaten to destroy factories or cities, you need very high precision to destroy a very hard missile site or a command post. And the high precision systems make the whole military system less stable, make it more threatening. Back in the '60s we had the pleasant situation of missiles that couldn't hit anything except cities. Therefore we didn't have to worry about the danger that the Russian missiles would destroy ours, or ours would destroy theirs. We knew they weren't capable of doing that, that we knew they were pretty powerful and were capable of doing an awful lot of damage but we, both sides have moved to highly precise guidance systems and now individual missiles have to be regarded as threatened.

DID THAT CAPABILITY EXIST BY 1965, 1966?

Well, I don't—I can't remember precisely when it began to--certainly by the '70s it existed and it was a continuous evolution and one didn't go suddenly from capability to another, that it involved a whole series of technical developments, improvements in the guidance system, improvements in the ability to control the rockets, many, many things went into this, it was the way in which the... nose cone came through the atmosphere and didn't get blown off course. So it's a very complicated technical problem.

YOU WORKED ON DEFENSE SYSTEMS IN THE 1950S... BUT BY THE 1960S YOU HAD BECOME DISCOURAGED ABOUT THE OF AN ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE, COULD YOU TALK ABOUT WHY YOU BECAME DISCOURAGED..?

Well... there were two, there were three things that I had worked very hard on both air defense and on missile defense systems, in fact at one point I was the person in the White House that followed the development of anti-ballistic missile systems. I became discouraged in the end because of a concatenation of different things each of which it seem unlikely and together made the probability very, very small. First of all there was a terrible cost factor. If we were trying to defend the country, we had to defend every place, whereas if it worried about an attacker could attack a few places, so there was a disparity between the rate at which the defense went up and the number of missiles went up. We if the Russians doubled the number of missiles we had to provide defense for every place in the country that would match the—double number and so there was a cost problem. I became convinced that the decoy problem was very serious and would cause to have to make even a more elaborate system. And talking with the engineers who were developing the rockets and the computers and so on, I found them discouraged about the individual components and their ability to perform, so that when put altogether, it seemed to me that there were several different reasons why the system was likely to be unfeasible and so I became convinced that the whole thing was just a foolish way to proceed and spend money.

DID YOU TELL PRESIDENT KENNEDY--DID YOU BRIEF PRESIDENT KENNEDY IN 1961 AS TO THE FLAWS IN THE ABM SYSTEM, DO YOU RECALL THAT?

I recall that but I did a different thing. I knew of a Pentagon study, actually done by the Weapon Systems Evaluation Group on the ABM that tended to be negative and I said rather than have me give my view, although I had views and we had technical studies made in PSAC, I said, why don't be give you the best Pentagon view that there is. And I asked Dr. Jack Ruina who had been in charge of that to come over and brief the President and he did. And—and I didn't have to say anymore. I tried whenever possible to use really good solid studies that had been made rather than give opinions.

WERE YOU AT THAT BRIEFING?

Yes.

WHAT WAS THE PRESIDENT'S REACTION TO DR. RUINA'S EVALUATION?

I can't remember. I don't—certainly, let me start over. Presentation that Dr. Ruina and other presentations that Kennedy listened to, convinced him that the anti-ballistic missile system was not a good investment...

...MEETING AT THE WHITE HOUSE WITH PRESIDENT JOHNSON ON THE ISSUE OF ABM?

Yes, well. All of the presidents had to cope with the problem of the ABM and after I'd left the government I was invited by Lyndon Johnson to come to a large meeting in the White House to discuss the, whether or not his administration should support an anti-ballistic missile system. There was a proposal then to deploy what was called a thin system which would be much cheaper and his rationalization was that it would be used to defend us against missile firings from China or an accidental missile firing from China. And this proposition was put forward at the meeting where all the former science advisers and the defense directors of research and engineering Mr. McNamara who is still the Secretary of Defense and General Wheeler, the President and probably some others that I don't remember and the President wanted to know what we thought about this anti-Chinese system and everybody rather smiled. And then he went around the table and each of us said we didn't think it would be effective even in that case because you wouldn't have adequate warning, but we all, most of us expressed skepticism about the likelihood that the Chinese would achieve a bomb in the foreseeable future. And the only person who said he thought it was a good idea was General Wheeler. And one of us asked General Wheeler if he believed that this was all the system one would ever build, would he be for it or was he saying yes because he thought was a start toward a much bigger system and he swallowed hard and said he was for it because he thought it was a start for a much bigger system. So the general consensus that, I think most of us came away from the meeting with was that the President should have been convinced that there was no point in making anti-ballistic missile systems, that we were very much surprised when Secretary McNamara made a speech in California announcing that the administration was going to make the thin system. He went through an elaborate rationalization that made no sense and the only conclusion that I could come to is that the Republicans were attacking Lyndon Johnson for not doing it. And at that point he still thought he was going to be a candidate for the presidency and it was President Johnson's back that was being defended not the United States.

DID YOU FEAR THAT AN ABM SYSTEM WOULD UNLEASH AN ARMS RACE? THAT IF YOU BUILT AN ABM SYSTEM YOU WOULD GET INTO A SITUATION?

Well many people argue that an ABM system would automatically cause both sides to build more missiles. I was never sure what the consequence would be because it's seemed so likely that one could make counter measures-decoys that you might not have to build extra missiles. What actually happened was as we began to study counter measures, we found that to make them realistic you had to make them heavier and heavier and pretty soon they began to look like nose cones and that somebody had the brilliant idea of putting a warhead in them and presto, we had invented MIRV, which was probably the worst thing that's ever been done.

WHEN THE DECISION WAS MADE TO BUILD DEFENSE SYSTEM AND IN YOU KNOW ESSENTIALLY GET AWAY FROM FACTS AS A POLICY IS THAT WHEN WE MOVED INTO MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION AS A STRATEGIC POSTURE IN THE UNITED STATES OR WAS MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION A FACT OF THE SOVIET, OF THE SOVIET-AMERICAN RELATIONSHIP?

Well, I think mutual assured destruction was talked about by McNamara before this ABM decision. But in my view mutual assured destruction became a fact as soon as the Soviets acquired enough capability to damage American, a number of American cities. Historically as one looks at the record, the United States has always had a considerably stronger force, at least until very recently, than the Soviet Union and certainly in that period of time, we were very much stronger. So that the moment of mutual assured destruction occurred when they acquired the capability of doing damage to us in spite of what we did.

AND AN ABM EFFECTIVE MISSILE DEFENSE, WOULD THAT HAVE BEEN A WAY OUT OF THE CONDITION OF MUTUAL DESTRUCTION?

Well it, people keep asking the question, would an effective anti-ballistic missile system have gotten us out of the situation we were in, and people asked that question today, when they say will as Star Wars shield do any good? The answer is if you can make an effective anti-missile system it would certainly make a difference. But by an effective anti-missile system, it has to be one that might do, intercept 99 percent of the missiles, if you're trying to protect cities. Obviously if you're trying to protect missiles, a smaller number would do. And the same thing applies to Star Wars, a system that will protect, will intercept 20 percent of the missiles coming in, may give a little more assurance to the survival of your own forces, but it doesn't do anything to protect people. And even a system that's 90 percent effective leaves 10 percent of the people vulnerable and 10 percent of our population is 200 million or 20 million. So that these abstract numbers I think are played with without people looking at them in terms of what they mean and as far as human suffering and human life is concerned.

CARL KAYSEN TOLD ME THAT YOU HAD BECOME OPPOSED TO, OR DISCOURAGED ABOUT, CIVIL DEFENSE; THAT YOU OPPOSED EVEN A LIMITED FALLOUT SHELTER LIKE THE ONE HE HAD PROPOSED. DID YOU IN FACT OPPOSE CARL KAYSEN'S PROGRAM FOR CIVIL DEFENSE?

No. I was somewhat skeptical about a modest fallout shelter program. But what happened, what I opposed, I sometimes think I opposed effectively, sometimes I think the budget did. I opposed a massive build-up. We had gone from the notion that we should have some preparedness, some shelters and some filters and some water to an enormous plan of fallout shelters and I had been through this once before in the Gaither Study and had come to realize how it would change the total character of our civil, of the American civilization and how frightening it would be to the Europeans and the Russians and how damaging it would be to the US budget and so what I fought very, very hard against was the enormous build-up of civil defense that followed the initial suggestion by Kaysen and Kennedy that we consider a modest fallout program. I never opposed that although I was never quite sure what it would do. It was so inexpensive that it didn't seem to me, it was serious compared to other problems I was worrying about.

YOU MADE ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE B-70 BOMBER IN A MEETING WITH PRESIDENT KENNEDY WHEN THE DECISION WAS MADE TO CUT BACK ON THE B-70, DO YOU RECALL THAT MEETING AND THE ARGUMENTS YOU MADE AGAINST B-70?

Well, it wasn't well... Very early in the administration I had told Kennedy that there were a number of very bad weapon systems that had been sustained for a long time because of their political force, and that if we move quickly maybe we could get rid of some of them, and he asked me to give him a list of them. And I included the "Dinosaur," I included the B-70--and the B-70 had in fact been turned off by President Eisenhower and political pressure had made him turn it back on. It was a very bad airplane. And I also opposed, and we succeeded in getting rid of, probably the worst boondoggle the Pentagon and AEC had ever been involved in, which was the nuclear powered aircraft.

WHY WAS THE B-70 A BAD AIRPLANE?

It had a number of technical defects...B-70 was a poor aircraft because its payload was low, its range was modest, its supersonic dash capability consumed so much fuel that it was very compromising so that in terms of what one would have liked to have as a modern bomber it fell so far short that it seemed like a very bad investment.

THEN WHY WAS LEMAY SO GUNG-HO FOR IT? DID HE KNOW THAT THIS WAS NOT A GOOD BOMBER?

I never asked him.

THAT'S FAIR ENOUGH...