By the way it's... an intruder, are you focusing on the nuclear, cause I, that was the best thing that McNamara did. One of the best was the ending of massive retaliation, you know on a, and so, and I was his representative on the Acheson Committee to do that.

THIS, DOCTOR WOHLSTETTER, WHAT WAS YOUR BACKGROUND? YOU WEREN'T A GENERAL OR A SOLDIER, WHAT, WHAT...

No, I sure wasn't. No, I had been a pure mathematical logician, concerned with that and with the logic of science. And during the war I... since my doctoral thesis had had an application to quality control and manufactured products, the mathematics of it, I found myself in charge of a quality control department, and then ultimately a factory producing... electrical and electronic products like hand cranked... generators and that sort of thing.

WHAT DID YOU GET YOUR DEGREE IN?

It was in... my work was in mathematical logic, that was essentially what it was, yes.

WHAT CAN YOU...

So I had not... of combat equipment, but no experience... otherwise.

DO, DO YOU WANT DOCTOR WOHLSTETTER TO SPEAK UP A LITTLE BIT?

All right, sure. All right.

NOW, WERE YOU WORRIED IN THE FIFTIES ABOUT A NUCLEAR PEARL HARBOR, AND WHY?

Well, I didn't start by being worried about anything like a nuclear Pearl Harbor, but I was concerned... I guess beginning with August 1945 when I heard Truman's announcement of the A-bomb, about... about a possibility of a nuclear war. And I had... and I undertook the study that I did partly as a way of understanding better what I regarded as... obviously one of the great perils of our time. The possibility of a... of a devastating nuclear conflict. I didn't begin by thinking about Pearl Harbor or anything of that sort, but just about nuclear weapons.

IS, IS PEARL HARBOR—PEARL HARBOR IS SORT OF INGRAINED IN THE NATIONAL PSYCHE AS THE, THE PRIME EXAMPLE OF A SURPRISE ATTACK. NOW, THAT WAS IN THE DAYS OF CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS. IS, WHEN YOU, WHEN YOU GET INTO THE MISSILE AGE, ARMING MISSILES WITH HYDROGEN BOMBS, IS THERE, WAS THERE A CONCERN IN THE FIFTIES ABOUT A, A NUCLEAR PEARL HARBOR?

Oh, yes. Yes. The characteristic of Pearl Harbor was that before it, we thought of, of having a fleet in Honolulu as a deterrent to Japanese attack. Specifically the Japanese attack on the Philippines and on Dutch Indonesia, and so on. In fact, because the fleet was very vulnerable, it was not a deterrent but an invitation to attack. It was an obstacle which the Japanese felt they had to eliminate. And when you... when you had a serious adversary with expansionary plans not to occupy the United States, but with an interest in expansion in Eurasian periphery, it's a possibility that he might find us an obstacle, and an obstacle that could be eliminated by a surprise attack, therefore was a serious one. So that, Pearl Harbor understood properly, had a continuing relevance, specially in an age when so much power could be concentrated in... in a... in an initial blow, it was relevant because if you didn't take care, you could be very vulnerable.

WHAT WAS YOUR CONCERN ABOUT OUR VULNERABILITY IN THE, IN THE EARLY FIFTIES?

Yes. Well I began not with just... with a concern about... simply about vulnerability, but with trying to understand the problem of how of... what sorts of strategic force we should have, within the... and how you would operate the sorts of strategic force that was then possible to acquire. And this would face not the problem simply of bomber attack, but problems of penetrating enemy defenses, and just the problem of getting there. Because the sorts of... of bombers that was available, were of a very short radius. So I didn't begin by assuming with... the problem of vulnerability, as we understand it now.

STOP THE TAPE. STOP THE TAPE.

A little, not at where I started, but where I... I reached somewhat later... later. I found that...

YOU SHOULD LOOK AT... WE WANT YOU TO PUT YOUR BEST FOOT FORWARD.

Alright... alright...

ARE YOU GUYS READY? YEAH, WE'RE ROLLING. OKAY. WHAT, LET ME ASK THIS QUESTION. WERE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT, THAT OUR FORCES IN THE FIFTIES, WERE VULNERABLE?

Well we found they were. That was the... what we found is that our forces were vulnerable. If you looked at an attack that the So... that an adversary might make which was designed specifically to destroy your strategic forces. The attack... the reason this hadn't been observed very much is that people were generally looking at an attack that... in which all sorts of targets were... were... were gone after. Detroit, steel, aluminum, and any number of things that had no time urgency. And incidentally, a small number of... a small proportion of the attack was devoted to attacking SAC, but the attack was so large, that it had to be that it... it didn't gain surprise. And so we looked at attacks in which they didn't attack anything that didn't have to be attacked early, but were just designed to destroy SAC before it got off. And we found that it turned out very differently from the attacks that people had... had been considering up to that time.

WHAT, WHAT DID YOU FIND IF, IF PEOPLE ATTACKED THE... IF THE ADVERSARY'S INTEREST WAS STRICTLY IN, IN ATTACKING THE STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND, LET'S CALL IT THAT.

Yes, yes. The Strategic Air Command. Well what we found out, we found is that if they used a force which... which was... consisted only in quite... in varied bombers of quite primitive design. Dutch copies of our B-29's, and used a fraction of the number of bombs and low... rather low-yield bombs, 40 KT Bombs... a fraction of the... of the number that was attributed to them by... by intelligence, that by following routes that just avoided our warning system, that they could catch SAC on... on base and destroy a very large proportion of it. And then SAC's plan was to go overseas, and that was like going from the fire pan into the fire. Because it had... it was supposed to set up for continuous operation overseas which was a very elaborate and complex job of transporting. And there, on the overseas bases they were much more vulnerable because they were closer and had no warning at all. So what we found then was that the.. that even taking very optimistic assumptions from our standpoint, an attack that was designed to destroy SAC could do it. And could do it at successive stages.

UHH...

Or strategic forces, I should say...

GIVE ME A SUMMARY OF THAT AGAIN. IS THAT LIKELY WHAT WE MEAN BY SUCCESSIVE STAGES...

Yes, they could destroy... they could... they could...

THE SOVIETS...

The Soviets could circuiting on... by avoiding our warning system, catch a lot of our strategic forces on the ground in the United States.

START AGAIN WITH, WITH THE SOVIETS...

All right listen, all right well, perhaps I should just say that, one thing as a preface to it. The plan, we had very short radius bombers. They were based in the United States. And the plan, the so-called mobility plan, was to... at the outbreak of war, move them from their bases in the zone of the interior of the United States overseas, to bases in England, and a variety of places, North Africa and so on. And that, they would then operate continuously from those overseas bases. What we found is that a Soviet attack that was designed specifically to attack only the urgent things, the things connected with our strategic force, could catch SAC on base before it could take off, because it was not... it was generally not ready to take off and it, for many hours, and it didn't have hours... many hours of warning. And then if the remainder that was not destroyed, went overseas in accordance with the mobility plan, they could destroy it over there. So that the... at those two phases then they could... they would be subject to attack on the ground, and then of course it was half the problem of penetrating defenses with as much reduced ragged force.

SO, SURPRISE ATTACK WAS A CONCERN?

It was indeed.

CAN YOU SPEAK OF... LET'S GET TO THE HIGH NOON...

I could just make the statement, just don't use it if you don't like. The result was surprising because the sorts of attack that had been considered at that time, was an attack that dealt with a lot of traditional strategic targets which were more or less a reflection of the kinds of targets that we attacked, but not in a surprise. Attacks on cities, attacks on war-supporting industry it couldn't affect things for many months, and with very little of it, with only a small fraction of it devoted to SAC, but with... they had to be attacks so large, that they weren't directly over the pole through the warning system and gave many, many hours of warning. And therefore, people hadn't... hadn’t... in looking at the consequences of such an attack, discovered how vulnerable SAC was, if in... if instead, an adversary made... designed his attack specifically to destroy SAC, rather than as an incident in a... in a more generalized attack on industry and so on.

IF SAC WERE VULNERABLE THEN IT'S ALMOST AN INCENTIVE TO A, A SURPRISE ATTACK...

Yes.

THE GUY THAT GOES FIRST IS... IT ENCOURAGES GOING FIRST...

Yes...

THERE'S NO ADVANTAGE AT ALL IN DOING IT.

Yes, what it said was, an invulnerable SAC can be a deterrent, and a vulnerable SAC is an invitation. And in a crisis where alternatives look desperate to an adversary, it might be an urgent invitation.

IT'S SORT OF LIKE HIGH NOON.

Yes.

THE DETERRENT...

Yes, yes, yes. If you ran into a situation in which you had both sides able to destroy the others... the other, provided only that it struck first, it would be something like the situation of the classic gun duel in the... at least in the western movies.

... GOING TO ASK YOU NOT TO LEAN FORWARD IN THE CHAIR BECAUSE OF...

I see...

STAND BY FIVE SECONDS.

I would stress that... I would stress that in my view, and in the view of the... my colleagues, Fred Hoffman and Harry Rowan, we never thought of... we never of the problem as one that... of the... of a sort of bolt out of the blue in which the Soviets for no reason other than that they'd had nothing better to do in the... that morning, would launch an attack. We thought of deterrents as something that would have to work when an adversary might have... might see all of his alternatives as bad. For example if he were involved in a war on the periphery of Europe, and he would look... if he looked like being defeated, he might then regard... regard it as safer to eliminate our most powerful opposing force, than to leave it staid, just as the Japanese found it... felt it was safer to eliminate the fleet in Honolulu while they expanded to the South than just to leave it there. So we thought of deterrents as a matter of risks, of presenting... of making attacking us look riskier than the alternatives of not attacking us. Even when that alternative might look pretty bad, as they would in the case that I've cited.

HOW, HOW CAN WE EXPRESS THE... THE VULNERABILITY TO A SURPRISE IN TERMS OF THE CLASSIC GUN DUELS?

It just depends on who got in the first shot. If in the classic gun duel, as... as it appeared at least in the Hollywood movies, the... either side... either side could win provided it got in the first... the first shot. And that made a premium on getting in that shot. If on the other hand... if on the other hand, you were behind a shield or a well protected fort, that was not an invitation to attack. And the problem was that we were in the nineteen fifties extremely vulnerable simply because we hadn't... we hadn't devoted our attention yet to this... right to this problem.

SO WHAT WAS THE ANSWER?

The answer was to reduce the vulnerability of our strategic forces to... to find another method of operating which would not... which would make us able to respond to warning without committing ourselves to war. By getting off, as it turned out, in a way that we would be willing to repeat. Go on alert, ground alert, strip alert if necessary, and actually take off in return, unless it turned out that it was an actual attack. But it turned out... but actually the move on the basis of ambiguous warning... but move in a way that we could afford to repeat. You can't repeat, say launching an ICBM, that’s... you can't launch that fail-safe. And it involved changing our method of operating overseas. Instead of operating overseas continuously, it meant using them essentially as refueling stations on the way... especially on the way back from... from targets, and just being on them very briefly.

FIVE SECONDS...

All right, we needed a force that we could operate with in peacetime responsibly. That means that it would not liable to go off on false alarms, it couldn’t be trigger happy, it would have to be able to... if it was going to use warning, which is always ambiguous, you’d have to be able to respond to false alarms without... without starting a war. So you needed a method of response then, which would enable you to exploit such warning, repeatedly. And that was the method of, eventually as it was formulated, of taking off on the basis of ambiguous but serious indications, not just something... a bird flying into the radar. But very serious indications... take off, but with instructions to return unless... unless there was a command from the National Command Authority to go forward which would be done only if an attack had been confirmed. So the... what you needed... to do, was to be able to have a force that you'd be able to buy and operate with in time of peace. And which was not liable to destruction by sudden surprise... something that you'd be able to use. You also needed a force that would be able... you’d be willing to use. That meant that it would not be a force, which was just...would go off on a mission of suicide, not just for the bombers, but also for the nation.

WE, WE NEED A SECOND STRIKE CAPABILITY... FIVE SECONDS, PLEASE...

A force cannot deter an attack, which it cannot survive. And that was the key. What we found is that we had a force which we were thinking vaguely as a deterrent, but it couldn't survive the sorts of attack that we had designed. So it couldn't deter those attacks. And these were plausible attacks, they were not extreme. They were attacks which were estimated very optimistically from our standpoint. Because we didn't want to... we didn't want to raise foolish alarms.

DO, DO YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE SAYING THAT THE FORCE CANNOT DETER AN ATTACK, THAT IT CANNOT SURVIVE, AND THIS MEANT THAT WE HAD TO RETHINK OUR FORCE STRUCTURE TO MAKE...

Yes, yes, yes. That's... and what we found then when we looked at adversary attacks is that it meant we had to redesign our whole method of operating with the force.

START AGAIN WITH THE, A FORCE CANNOT DETER, JUST REPEAT THAT...

A force cannot deter an attack which it cannot survive. When we found that our other force, as it was designed to operate, could be destroyed by very plausible attacks, that meant that we had to find other ways of operating the force, which would do... which would enable it to strike back after being attacked, and being able to strike second.

IN 1961 IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE KENNEDY ADMISTRATION IT SEEMS THAT THEY ACTED ON THESE PRINCIPLES. AND PUT THE BOMBERS ON ... FIFTEEN MINUTE ALERT, OR TOOK THAT SERIOULY AND STRESSED THE PRODUCTION OF INVULNERABLE MINUTEMAN, AND POLARIS, AND ... GOT RID OF A LOT OF BOMBERS AND SOFT MISSILES AND SO ON, WHAT, WERE YOU PLEASED WITH THOSE DECISIONS? HOW...

Oh yes...

WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION TO THAT?

Yes, yes. They, Kennedy... the decisions made in the first twenty months or so of the Kennedy administration, in my view, were extremely important and very good decisions. The clear emphasis on getting forces which were less vulnerable, on getting a Minuteman Force in silos and getting submarine... submarine forces, and perhaps even more important and much less notice, the great stress on trying to improve the ability of a responsible command and control to survive. This was looked at several things were done about this... an airborne with command post, a seaborne command that was mobile. This was looked at more seriously than it had ever been done before. Another thing that made it... that was quite... that was at least equally important in view, was that the Kennedy administration took us a long step back from the almost total reliance on nuclear weapons to deter or respond to an invasion of Europe with. At the... at the beginning of the Kennedy administration there was... there was... a committee of the... responding to the National Security Council headed by Dean Acheson, that was looking at our policy for Europe. I was Robert McNamara's representative on that committee and therefore worked with Dean Acheson on it. And the essentials of it was to... to try to... try to raise the threshold beyond which we would have to use nuclear... nuclear weapons. And this was... this was a move which did not win immediate approval from moral eyes, it took an... it took some six years later, before the NATO approved the so-called flexible response policy. But it was... it was of major importance. Long overdue.

WHAT WAS...

And that was... that was related to it, because we were in the position... it related to the problem of... of nuclear deterrents, because remember, my own view of deterrents is that you shouldn't think of deterrents as something abstract, just related to bolts out of the blue, to unmotivated attacks, you should think of deterrents as something that would work when the alternatives that an adversary faced were very bad. And for example if he were losing, if he wanted to affect the outcome of a conven... of a war in Europe. By improving the conventional forces you reduced the likelihood that the... that there would be an invasion of... in Europe, or in some part of Europe, and that meant that the occasions on which you would be testing your deterrent. The shocks that the deterrent would have to sustain would be... would be reduced. So that it was important for that reason as well.

DID YOU HAVE CONFIDENCE THAT NATO COULD ADEQUATELY DETER THE WARSAW PACT, AFTER ALL, THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM HAD ALWAYS BEEN THAT, THAT THE WARSAW PACT WAS ALWAYS SO MUCH SUPERIOR.

Well, once again, I... I was always skeptical of the canonical sorts of attacks that we considered for NATO. Ones in which you have the Soviets attack all of NATO. That's regarded as the worst case, and in some sense it is, but it's the case in which it's easiest for NATO countries to... to make the decision to respond, because they're attacked. The more dangerous case is where the Soviets... and where the much more plausible one is, where the Soviets make their attack at some weak point and give NATO countries the opportunity to opt out. Again, any sort of... I don't... I've never believe the Soviets are eager to get into any sort of war. However, the possibility of some... of an attack, especially on a NATO flank, strikes me as being a serious one, and it struck me then as being an important contingency.

YOU, YOU WEREN'T INVOLVED IN THE REEVALUATION OF THE WARSAW PACT... CAPABILITIES, WERE YOU?

I... only as one element of my work with the Acheson Committee. I drafted... did the draft of the Acheson Report on the military. But Alain Enthoven and Harry Rowan had done some important work on reevaluating the... the Warsaw Pact forces. They did not assume therefore, that there was no... there was no conventional threat. What they assumed was that the conventional threat was something that could be met, conventionally. That you could raise the conventional threshold and that was my own conclusion as well. The argument had been made that we had to rely on nuclear weapons because you... because we were so badly outnumbered, that we had no choice. And this is always one of the great dangers. People want a cheap, easy way out, and they try to make... sometimes will exaggerate a threat in order to take... to exclude a possibility of responding to it which would be expensive but sober and responsible. Use a cheap but rather irresponsible way of responding to it. And nuclear weapons always seemed like our way of answering the Soviet conventional superiority to many people. I've never thought we're... That... that we had... we haven't had a monopoly on nuclear weapons since 1949 but we frequently have acted as if we did.

WELL, THE, THE MCNAMARA PENTAGON REJECTED THE WHOLE NOTION OF MASSIVE RETALIATION AND TRIED TO RAISE THE NUCLEAR THRESHOLD IN ONE WAY BY CHANGING THE WAR PLAN SO THAT CITIES DIDN'T NEED... NEEDED TO BE HIT... DIDN'T HAVE TO BE HIT AND THAT MILITARY TARGETS COULD BE HIT AND THAT COUNTRIES COULD BE SEPARATED OUT, ONE FROM ANOTHER. MCNAMARA ANNOUNCED THIS AT ANN ARBOR IN 1962.

Yes, well actually before the Ann Arbor speech, there were some changes just in the... in the non-nuclear forces. We... because we had for years been so fixed on a nuclear response to conventional attack, we didn't even have conventional bomb racks on our fighter-bombers. It was just assumed in... in the NATO... in a NATO decision of the NATO Military Committee, fourteen slash two, is what it was called, that if there were any... any incursion into the... into the NATO territory, by the Warsaw Pact, even a local one, so long as looked... it looked as if it was meant to stay, that this would mean the use of nuclear weapons, and in fact, World War III. This was... this was... this was essentially the one embodiment of the policy of massive retaliation. We didn't consider that we would... we could respond to a non-nuclear attack up to some level, with non-nuclear means, and the most important thing the the Acheson Report did, was to end our... the policy that was embodied in this decision of the military committee. It said that what we should do is build up our capability to respond to an attack in force, without using nuclear weapons, and that we should use nuclear weapons only if they use nuclear weapons, or if we were subject to an overwhelming defeat, in conventional arms.

IN 1961 WHEN KENNEDY TOOK OFFICE THERE WAS NO CAPABILITY FOR, THERE WERE NO CONVENTIONAL BOMB RACKS IN...

On fighter-bombers, that’s right. There was... people just had... there had been a policy decision to use nuclear weapons to make up for our inferiority in conventional force, so it wasn't contemplated that we would fight a conventional war for any... any serious length of time. Even if it was as I say, a local incursion, provided that it was intended to stay. We would just use nuclear weapons. And what the... and what the Acheson Report did, was to change this. It just... just abolished that as a policy and it said that we would... we would prepare a respond to a conventional attack at its own level, and would use nuclear weapons only if the... we were going to be overwhelmed by conventional force. That we were... we had been unable to... but we would increase our capability to... to respond to a conventional attack.

I WANT TO GET ANOTHER SHORT STATEMENT OF THIS... VERY SURPRISED OF THIS, THE NOTION OF THE BOMB, THE BOMB RACKS WEREN'T THERE. THOSE WE...

There were many... because we had a policy of responding even to quite small attacks, so long as they were persist... they were calculate to persist, with nuclear weapons, we had not... we were not even prepared to use our fighter bombers with conventional high explosives. They didn't have... they did not have bomb racks for conventional bombs. And one of... that’s just an example of the fact we were just not... we were not equipped and deployed in... to use conventional force, because that was not the policy...

DID THIS SURPRISE YOU?

Well, I’d learned about it and I believe since the mid 1960's that this was one of the things that we should change. That... that it was terribly important to end the policy of massive retaliation because it seemed to me not to be credible. And policies which threaten things that would be of enormously high cost to us, as well as to an adversary, which had disproportionate to the... to the attack that you're responding to, have always struck me as being... as being very dangerous. There are things which are likely to be incredible, you might not actually respond, and an... an adversary might not believe that you would.

HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT MCNAMARA'S SPEECH AT ANN ARBOR WHERE HE BACKED AWAY FROM MASSIVE RETALIATION...

Well that was another aspect of it. The most important backing away from massive retaliation that occurred in the Kennedy administration in 1961, was the Acheson Report. What the McNamara Athens speech, which was essentially the same speech as he gave a little later in Ann Arbor, did was describe how nuclear weapons would be used, and what he said was that we would use nuclear weapons against military targets, rather than just as one would use other... as the United States would... would use other weapons.

HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT THIS, DID YOU...

I believed and believe today, that that's the only prudent thing to do, and I think also it's the only moral thing to do. I don't believe that you should ever attack cities. And that you... that there's no excuse for that.

IF MASSIVE RETALIATION WASN'T CREDIBLE, WHAT ABOUT ANN ARBOR, LET'S PICK...

All right, all right... Ann Arbor... the Ann Arbor speech announced a policy that I think made sense, because what essentially it was saying is that we would respond in a way that would be in our national interest. We'd respond against military targets, rather than against a population, and we would respond in a way that it would at least give an adversary some stake in trying to confine damage as much as he could to military targets. It makes even more sense today, however, because the Ann Arbor speech came at a time when our nuclear weaponry was very ill adapted to... to a policy of discriminate use. It's a... do you want... would you like me to expand a little on that? A point was bombs were fifteen times as large in yield in 1957 as they became... and by the late 1970's...

I WOULD... WE CAN'T GET INTO TODAY, 'CAUSE WE'RE MARCHING THROUGH...

All right, okay.

BUT I, I WOULD LIKE TO GET INTO, YOU KNOW UH, LET'S TAKE THROUGH, LET'S GO THROUGH THE EVOLUTION OF MCNAMARA'S STRATEGY, AND GET YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT, AND WHEN WE GET TO THE END, WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT THE... WELL, THEN WE CAN TALK ABOUT SOME OF THESE...

All right, sure. Now I haven't said what I think happened to McNamara when he went... when he changed his policy...

NO, WE'RE NOT ON THAT YET... WELL, YOU ARE THE... CONSIDERED THE FATHER OF THESE NOTIONS OF DETERRENTS AND OF HAVING A SECURED SECOND... A STRIKE RETALIATORY CAPABILITY AND NOT RELYING ON MASSIVE RETALIATION. MCNAMARA ANNOUNCED THIS AT ANN ARBOR, DID YOU FEEL THIS HELPED OUR DETERRENCE?

Well, I believe the policy that he was describing was something that would make our deterrent more believable. The... it was never because of the intervention of the Cuban Missile Crisis and subsequent things that Bob McNamara decided on and announced, which were incompatible with it... it was never fully implemented. But no one has been able to get away from that completely and you had under Secretary Laird, and then Schlesinger and Rumsfeld and then under Harold Brown, a return in this sort of thing. And you've... and... because the policy...

LET...

Let them... alright.

AT THE END OF OUR TALK WE COULD TALK ABOUT THE FUTURE A LITTLE BIT. BUT, DO YOU BELIEVE, WERE YOU ENCOURAGED IN 1962 BY THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF A COUNTERFORCE CITY AVOIDANCE STRATEGY?

Yes, yes. I don't use the word counter force. Let me just say, the statement that we were going to try to confine damage to military targets seemed to me to be right. And I was... so I was encouraged by that. It was something that I advocated. And so I... I thought that was... that that was an important speech, and I believe that it should have led to some things which unfortunately were delayed by intervening events. But it was a good policy. The speech itself, I don't give much to... I don't want to put too much weight on a speech. The question is what's done about the policy. I think that the speech announced a good policy. It was dealt with in a very half-hearted way, however, as policy.

BUT WASN'T THAT PARTLY BECAUSE IF THE AIR FORCE PERCEIVED IT WAS OUR OBJECTIVE TO CONCENTRATE ON ENEMY MILITARY CAPABILITIES, THEN WE WOULD NEED MORE HARDWARE TO DO SO.

Well, that's the way the argument developed. And that was just a very, unfortunate, I think that Bob McNamara... the Air Force had the reaction, yes that means we'll need more forces, but the Air Force would have that reaction in almost any change. That means we'll need more forces. The answer to that was, we're not talking about just getting huge, indiscriminate attacks, what we're talking about... and we're not talking about attacking all military targets in an encyclopedic inventory of all possible targets, we're talking about responding in a way that's proportionate to the provocation and this might be very small. It isn't the number that you need, it's the type of thing you need. I think that Bob McNamara made a mistake in the way he responded to it. He didn't have to say, in that case, you're not going to get any of it and we're going to invent a new criteria, namely what's necessary, in order to destroy twenty to twenty-five percent of the population and that will be the way to determine our forces. That was unnecessary and it was... it was a debating point, and it was as bad a response as the Air Force going in position, in fact worse.

... IF YOU WERE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, WOULDN’T YOU WANT TO ASK THAT QUESTION HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH WHEN YOU CAN’T KEEP BUYING HARDWARE FOREVER

Well, I would never phrase it in that way because it's... that's sort of like the question in which your little... little boy or little girl asks: how high is up? It... if phrased in that way, it's just much too general. The question is what sorts of forces would you need for the realistic contingencies that you'd face, and what... and you'd have to take a look at those. To take as criterion well, what we need is enough to destroy twenty to twenty-five percent of the population in the Soviet Union, is... is a perfectly arbitrary thing and it's... and in fact it makes no sense, because McNamara went on to indicate at that time, that that isn't what we'd... the way we'd use the force. That we'd use that as a criterion for what we buy, but in fact if deterrents failed, we'd actually attack military forces and...

SO YOU, YOU HAVE NO QUARREL WITH HIM FOR...

I have a quarrel with him for using that as a crit... using the... using as a criterion for what you bought, the ability to destroy twenty to twenty-five percent of the population. One of the reasons for that is not just the fact that this... that the implications of it for numbers, much more important was that the... if you're talking about destroying a population, they may be different sorts of forces. They could be inaccurate forces, large-yield forces. And instead what we want is a response which would be... which would try to confine damage to military targets. You just get different forces. So I didn't like the Air Force's statements as to what they'd need, and I sure didn't like McNamara's, debate with... they seemed to me to be off the point.

WHAT, DO YOU THINK MCNAHARA GAVE UP ON REFINING THE FORCES, MAKING THEM MORE DISCRIMINATING. HE GAVE UP ON SENSIBLY USED OPTIONS?

Well, let me put it this way. He paid much less serious attention to it.

YOU, YOU'VE GOT TO SAY MCNAMARA, WE CAN'T...

Well I think that McNamara paid much less serious attention to it. After that formulation than he would have if he hadn't been tempted by this debate to adopt a very arbitrary and irrelevant criterion. When it's suggested that we actually wanted to destroy the Soviet population and wanted the capability to do just that. It made no sense.

I HAVEN'T TALKED TO HIM YET, BUT HE WOULD SAY, AND PEOPLE WHO WORKED WITH HIM WOULD SAY, THAT THIS WAS A PROCUREMENT CRITERION AND HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW THESE FORCES WOULD BE USED. IT WAS NOT ACCOMPANIED BY ANY NEW ORDERS TO OMAHA.

Yes, that's true, but then the question is then why do you have a criterion on what you'd buy which is... was irrelevant to how you'd use it. I think that the problem is that if you... he was trying to limit numbers, well there are other way of limiting numbers. That was just a bad way to do it. But in fact what it meant was that it took attention away from the real... the real changes that that policy required, which was to push the state of the art of discrimination. Of confining damage. Now some of that went on just as... automatically as the result of the changes in technology for... that were going on for other purposes. You were getting... you were using air-to-surface missiles, rather than gravity bombs. And they tended to be smaller so you'd have lower yields. And just... you were improving you're accuracies, also. But that could've done... that technology could have been pushed much more rapidly if we understood that what we wanted to do was to confine damage more selectively to things that we wanted to eliminate. And try to keep it from just innocent bystanders whose destruction only endangered our own innocent bystanders by making the whole thing get out of control. So I believe that that was a bad move on McNamara's part, and it's the sort of thing that happens frequently in government. You get a polemic. You get a debate within the government and people really forget what the point of it all is. They're scoring debating points. And... and that's what I think McNamara and the chiefs, and SAC in particular got into.

WHEN MCNAMARA LEFT OFFICE HE FORESAW THE POSSIBILITY THAT EACH SIDE WOULD HAVE... THE SOVIET UNION AND THE U.S. WOULD EACH HAVE THE... A SECURE... RETALIATORY CAPABILITY. AND HE'D GIVEN UP ON ABM, ON MAJOR DAMAGE LIMITATION POSSIBILITIES. NOW, HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THIS?

Well, I felt that... then, and I've said in many places, that against an attack... an ICBM attack which was... a major ICBM attack which was designed to destroy as many civilians as possible, that we did not have the technology... the state of the art did not commit us to get something that would keep damage very low. And you'll find many statements of mine saying they'll still be able to kill forty million people and so on. Given the state of the art. Now I think that that... that that was not a very sensible sort of attack for the Soviets to make, I think it was a preposterous sort of attack, and we were spending too much time thinking about it. So I supported what was within... which was much more hopefully within the state of the art, the use of a ballistic missile defense to defend military forces and specifically the silos. Now one of the reasons I did that was that Fred Hoffman and I had been the ones who had recommended the silos and we expected them to be good into the seventies, but we expected that they would be good only against the early generations of ICBMs, which were very inaccurate, but that eventually the Soviets would get missiles that were accurate enough to seriously endanger the silos, and then if you were going to keep the silos, you'd have to do something else. Some people suggested, well we'd just launch our missiles before the Soviet missiles arrived on warning. That struck us as being totally irresponsible. And what we'd... and what was an attractive alternative, was to develop active defenses which would help you defend the... defend the silos. But that seemed to me to be more the problem, rather than a Soviet attack on cities and our way of trying to get a defense against that which was... which would be good against an all out unrestrained attack simply designed to destroy civilians. I didn't think that was a sensible attack for them. And I didn't think that we could get a defense against it.

DID YOU AGREE WITH THE NOTION OF HIS ACTION AND REACTION THEME, THAT ANYTHING THAT WE'D DO...

No.

THEY'RE GONNA...

No, that in fact, I spent a lot of time looking at. And that was... that was simply wrong. When McNamara talks about a law, an iron law of action and reaction, it suggests that if we undertake some development, inevitably the Soviets will... will take a counter development, which will cancel its value. I think this is simply wrong. There were many counter examples of it, in fact McNamara gave a good illustration of it. The Soviets were developing an... a ballistic... a ballistic missile defense, of their population, it appeared. McNamara didn't say, therefore we have to spend a huge money or, or do exactly the same thing as they're doing. He said it's a very easy thing to penetrate. No arms race there, we could just use penetration aids. And it won't work against... it won't work. That was an illustration of the fact that you don't have to respond in a way that starts some sort of exponential arms race. But I'd... what I did do was, I looked at the what... at the actual developments that we had taken, and I found that... that it wasn't true that we... that we had been in an action-reaction spiral which meant that each side was exponentially increasing its budgets. In fact, I found that the US strategic budget had in real terms been declining at the rate of eight percent a year. While the Soviet budget had been going up just about as rapidly, and that they had... we... they had tripled their strategic budgets in real terms, while we were cutting ours to one third of what it had been at the beginning of the 1960's. So the whole arms race notion seemed to me to be a very... crude way of talking about competition between the two sides. And that it lead to just false statements about just what had happened. The... if you have an adversary who is seriously opposed to you and who might under some circumstances attack you or one of your allies, then obviously you're in a competition and you have to do something to counter, you have to be prepared for it and to have weapons which will defeat him and defeat this attempt. But that doesn't mean that... that you're going to have exponentially increasing budgets, and they... our experience has been... has been that nothing of the kind has occurred. So I thought that his... the action-reaction theory of the arms race was again a debating point. And it did no reference to reality.

LET ME POSE A QUESTION. YOU WERE... ALWAYS BEEN INTERESTED IN A CREDIBLE DETTERRENT. NOW, WHEN MCNAMARA BACKED AWAY FROM THE COUNTERFORCE AND STARTED TALKING IN TERMS ASSURED DESTRUCTION, HE WAS SAYING WE HAVE AND WILL ALWAYS HAVE A SECOND STRIKE CAPABILITY THAT CAN INFLICT UNACCEPTABLE DAMAGE ON THE SOVIET UNION. DIDN'T THIS SATISFY YOU?

No, I... when McNamara said that we'll have a second strike capability to destroy a quarter to one fifth of the rural and urban population of the Soviet Union, I was pleased that he wanted to have a second strike capability. I thought it was wrong, however, to measure... it to suggest that the adequacy of that capability should be measured in terms of the number of people killed. Of innocent bystanders killed. There was nothing in the second strike notion which suggested that... that we had to destroy innocent bystanders, rather than military forces. The Soviets value military forces enormously. Power grows out of the barrel of a gun, is the famous statement of Mao to which Lenin would have... would have subscribed. It's enough to indicate that you'd destroy their military power, it's not necessary to say that you'll destroy the population. Moreover, it's important that you don't suggest that that's what you're going to do, for several reasons. One, you're, suggesting that you're going to do something which he may believe you'd never do, because it would expose your own population to the same thing. If you define unacceptable damage, and you try to make that in terms of population, then you shouldn't have to say, I'm going to administer unacceptable damage, therefore you're not going to accept it, therefore you're not going to act, and you're not going to act because you know that I would accept unacceptable damage, in response. That's the mistake, it’s saying that you're going to act in a way that would not be in your interest at the time... maybe, maybe he'd believe it. But it's risky, because we're no talking about deterring some sort of idle fortive attack, we’re talking about deterring a man who is facing bad alternatives. Who maybe... have started a conventional war where he's very much at risk. And where he's looking for a way out. It's at that point you want him to believe that you'd respond in a way that would be in your... in your own interest. And that that would be bad for him.

COULD YOU, COULD YOU HAVE AS A PROCUREMENT CRITERION... WELL, IF YOUR GOAL WAS TO INFLICT UNACCEPTABLE DAMAGE ON THE SOVIET MILITARY FORCES, COULD YOU DO THAT WITHOUT HAVING AN ENDLESS PROCUREMENT OF HARDWARE?

Oh yes. The... remember... in fact I think it's kind of... it says how far you can get from reality sometimes when you talk about nuclear weapons. It was... no one has ever said that we can... we should attack villages, that an army, for example... our armies in World War II should only attack villages, because if we attacked tanks, the Germans would... or whatever enemy we had at the time, could always buy more tanks. Then we'd have to buy still more things to attack the tanks with. The notion that the... that if you attacked military forces, this got you into an exponential arms race makes no sense. Because that's in general what military forces have been about. They haven't been about attacking villages, or what not, they’ve been about attacking other military forces. And yet we haven't gotten into exponential arms races.

WHAT...

Yeah, I'm sorry, I look.

DO YOU FEEL AT THE END OF THE MCNAMARA YEARS, THAT HE HAD ADEQUATELY ADDRESSED THE QUESTION OF WHAT DO WE DO IF DETERRENCE FAILS?

No, I think that he evaded it more...

NO HE'S...

No, I think that towards the end of the McNamara years, McNamara didn't look at the most plausible cases where deterrence might fail, and ask himself what would we do in that case. The most plausible cases that deterrence would fail, would be... where the So... where we were engaged with the Soviets on the periphery of the Soviet Union, the Eurasian periphery. And where they might have undertaken an invasion which failed. In that circumstance, they might use nuclear weapons. They might use it against an ally, they might use it against an ally like Norway, or against Turkey. Now what was... you have to ask yourself, what would we do in that case? I'm deliberately talking about a nuclear attack on these... on these countries, because like Bob McNamara and even for a longer period, I've been in favor of improving our conventional forces. But what would you do if the Soviets used nuclear weapons against an ally to whom we've given a nuclear guarantee? Would you respond indiscriminately? Would you... against Soviet cities? Would you... would you respond in a way that you thought would unleash an uncontrollable destruction? I don't think you would. So that if you don't think seriously of such contingencies, then it seems to me you don't face the problem of deterrence where it's most poignant. How do you deter attacks that are the most plausible sorts of attacks that the Soviet... nuclear attacks, that the Soviets might make. The most plausible things that would occur on the most plausible occasion, as far as using nuclear weapons. And how do you do that in a way that would be in your national interest? How do you make threats to respond, that are believable, if you're... if you were saying that you were going to respond by unleashing uncontrollable destruction that would engulf you as well.

YEAH, NOW MAC BUNDY, AND GLEN KANT AND MCNAMARA, AND MORT HALPERIN AND ALAIN ENTHOVEN WOULD SAY WE... THAT MAY HAVE BEEN A THREAT, BUT WE WOULDN'T HAVE BEHAVED THAT WAY.

Well, what I'm saying is... all right then let me go back. When you threaten to do something, and then say, of course, I'm, I’m only kidding, that isn't what I'm going to do, then you're... it's a curious kind of threat. It's a threat in which you say I'm not serious about. In that case, why don’t we make a threat that we're serious about. One that we'd be willing to implement. It all goes back to the desire, to the polemic between McNamara and the Air Force here, and it was an unnecessary polemic. There are other ways of constraining forces than by saying... pretending you're going to do something you'd never do.

LET ME ASK YOU ONE... ANOTHER QUESTION ABOUT THE FIFTIES. DID YOU, DID... THE COMMITTEE, THE GAITHER REPORT, WHAT WAS YOUR... WHAT ADVICE DID YOU GIVE THEM?

Well, the... Rowan Gaither, who was chairman of the Gaither panel, was also chairman of the RAND Board of Trustees. And the Gaither... when the... the Gaither panel, when it... in its origins, was to look at a very large-scale civil defense program. He called me, I'm sure I'm not the only he called, to ask what he thought... what I thought the terms of reference had best be. What would be most fruitful for them to look at. And I said I that I thought it was important to broaden the terms of reference, to look at the problem of how you get a deterrent force which would be viable given the sorts of changes in the state of the art that were then in process in the Soviet Union and ourselves. And given the fact that we, as he knew, having heard earlier studies, reports of two earlier major studies that I had been involved in with Harry Rowan and Fred Hoffman, and in one case Bob Lutz, that... that in fact we had very serious problems in... in the survivability of our forces, and that therefore, this would be something which a group at so high a level could focus attention on.

AND... WHAT DID YOU RECOMMEND?

I recommended then... so he asked me then, and I was asked to come give a briefing, and what I recommended then was essentially the list of things that we had... we had come up with, as the result of our second major study on protecting our... our power to strike back in the fifties and the sixties. And that meant looking at... that meant the... a list of measures like the silo, fail-safe methods of response, improvements in command and control, a list of some fifty measures, all of which would give us a more credible capability to respond to the sorts of Soviet attacks which, which could come in the... for exam... in the era of missiles.

DID YOU RECOMMEND A CHANGE IN OVERSEAS BASING?

We had... the major changes in overseas basing has already been implemented. What had not been done was the... to... as the result of the first study that we had completed in '53 and briefed for about... for almost a year... there were some parts of that study, those affecting the... how the method of operation in the continental United States, which had not been fully implemented and moreover we found that the command and control, in particular, had many vulner... further vulnerabilities and so the... our recommendations for the way of operating in the continental United States, especially, needed change. This change. And changes in procurement as well. So... and we did recommend that and the Gaither Committee adopted those measures among many others 'cause it also went on with the big Civil Defense Program, the big ABM Program which, which was not part of our recommendation.

DID YOU FIND IN THE FIFTIES THAT WHEN YOU WERE... WHEN YOU BRIEFED SAC ON YOUR VULNERABILITY CONCERNS... WERE THEY RECEPTIVE OR WERE THEY HOSTILE? ARE THERE ANY STORIES OF THEM NOT WANTING TO LISTEN TO THIS...

Well, on the whole, I think both SAC and the Air Force as a whole, acted very... behaved very well in response to it. I did not expect to... that we would go to... go to the... to Omaha and go to Washington and the various commands and immediately be greeted with, but of course, why hadn't we thought of this? Let's go right ahead. We were... we were suggesting a hundred and eighty changes, in some respects. And they had every reason to want to see how we had arrived at these conclusions. Some of which were not intuitive. And so they subjected it to very detailed scrutiny. The reactions... the very first reactions were very favorable. People were obvious... were impressed that it was a very serious study on an... a subject of greatest importance. But it didn't get immediate ascent, and it shouldn't have gotten immediate ascent. It was briefed, ultimately I guess, over ninety times, and it was debated in the Air Force Council for several weeks in my presence. So that it... it didn't, and shouldn't have gotten immediate ascent, but it was given very serious and detailed and responsible scrutiny by the people whose lives and responsibilities it affected.

I WANT TO GO BACK AND DO THE GUN FIGHTER THING ONE MORE TIME. COULD YOU, YOU'RE WARMED UP.

Alright...

HOW CAN, I DON'T KNOW HOW THE...

You didn't... alright

THE METAPHOR OF THE GUN FIGHTER AS ONE OF VULNERABILITY THAT INVITES A FIRST-STRIKE.

Yes...

AND HOW THIS DEMANDS OUR RESTRUCTURING OUR FORCES SO THAT... WE HAVE A SECOND-STRIKE CAPABILITY THAT'S WHAT I WANT TO GET AT. IMAGINE, START OFF WITH IMAGINE. AND THIS IS WHERE WE... THIS IS WHERE...

Yeah, yes

IMAGINE TWO GUN FIGHTERS.

All right. Imagine the old western gun duel. In which you have two... two gun fighters, either one of which... either one of who can destroy the other, provided he gets in the first shot. That's an extremely stable... unstable situation that they're... if they come into the same saloon, and that was the sort of situation that concerned... that was of concern to me, when I'd... and to all of us, when we found that in fact. SAC pow... packed a pow... the most powerful punch in history, but that it was one that could not be delivered. If it didn't get... if they didn't get it in first. There was no... no indication that anyone really had been thinking about striking first, on the contrary, everything we saw suggested that nobody was thinking of that. But that... but unfortunately we had developed a capability which could only be used first.

YOU, YOU HESITATED TOO MUCH, I THINK THIS IS, I WANT TO...

I see.

(TECHNICAL DISCUSSION)

All right.

THE KEY WORDS, THE KEY PHRASES ARE, YOU KNOW A SECOND-STRIKE CAPABILITY AND THE...

Yes, yes.

SO YOU KNOW, I THINK YOU HAVE TO.

Yes you wanted, yes, I...

THIS, HAD, THIS, THIS LEAD US TO IT, OR WHAT WE HAD TO, WAS TO DEVELOP THE INVULNERABLE SECOND STRIKE CAPABILITY.

Yes. We had, yes.

IMAGINE THAT YOU...

Yes, if... we had the capability to do enormous harm to an adversary, provided we struck first. Unfortunately we found that we could do that only if we struck first. So that it was... it would be just possibly like the old fashioned gun duel where... if... who... who emerged at all, depended on who got in the first shot. It seemed essential for us therefore, that we get a capability that didn’t depend on getting in the first shot. That was a capability to strike second, not just first. There was no intention that we ever saw, that... a serious intention in the leadership of the United States to get in a first... to get in the first strike. But just... there just hadn't been... adequate consideration of how you'd design an attack at... of response, which could survive an attack that was designed to prevent this from responding.

OKAY, AS A RESULT OF THE SOVIET BUILD UP IN THE SIXTIES, A CONDITION AROSE IN THE... PROBABLY IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES BUT IT COULD BE FORESEEN IN THE SIXTIES, MCNAMARA FORESAW IT, WHEN EACH SIDE WOULD AN ASSURED DESTRUCTION CAPABILITY, AND THIS GAVE RISE TO THE ACRONYM MAD, WHICH WAS, MANY PEOPLE SAY IS SIMPLY A CONDITION OF MUTUAL DESTRUCTIVE CAPABILITIES.

Yes.

NOW, DO YOU AGREE WITH THAT ... MAD IS A CONDITION?

Well, it's frequently said that MAD is a condition rather than a policy. These terms are somewhat vague, but I've... but I believe that that's something of a cop-out. When you... when you talk about mutual assured destruction, it sounds that... it sounds as if no matter what we do, the laws of physics mean that both sides will be totally destroyed. That will be a certainty in the event that nuclear weapons are used. I don't think that that's the case. It's quite true that a destruction is possible. But to say that that can't be affected by the will of either side, as to whether it will actually occur in a war, seems to me to be a grave error. And this is illustrated by, in many ways, both in the kinds of policies that have been advocated by... by people who talk of using threats of mutual assured destruction. Both... unilateral defense policies and policies on agreements. Ambassador Smith who was the chief negotiator of the ABM Treaty has just said for example, that the genius of the ABM Treaty, was that it meant that each side agreed to be defenseless. Now if MAD were a matter of physics. If it were a condition rather than a policy, what would it mean to be saying that we agreed to implement these laws of physics. We don't agree to... we don't have any agreement to abide by the law of... the second law of thermodynamics. We don't agree to follow the principle of gravitation. In fact, MAD is a policy. It's a policy which discourages our ability to contain any disaster. It... it discourages our ability to discriminate and to confine damage to military targets, or to defend... or to defend a population. And in that sense, it... it seems to me to be very wrong. It seems to me to be unconvincing as a deterrent 'cause it says that we'll be... we'll be threatening to commit suicide. And it also seems to me to be just wrong, period. Because it suggests that we would attack... we would bring about the destruction of... of innocent civilians deliberately. I therefore think that MAD is a policy... threats of mutually assured destruction, as a policy which is a bad policy and it leads to many... many wrong policy recommendations. There are sorts of agreements that we could make which are much more consistent with the tradition of... of arms control and disarmament in the past, in which we actually discourage attacks on civilians. There are... there are unilateral policies that we can make that would increase our power to keep things under control. These are the sorts of things that I think we should be doing. And MAD, people who advocate the use of MAD threats, seems to me to be discouraging them.

WHAT DO YOU THINK? THERE IS ALSO THE QUESTION OF... AND WHAT IMPLICATIONS DID IT HAVE? IN TERMS OF THE STRATEGIC ... OF THE UNITED STATES SUBSEQUENTLY. I'M LEADING YOU TO THE DECISIONS OF THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION...

Yeah, yeah. Some were made during the Eisenhower administration by the Air Force itself, actually. The notion of deterrents of course, is an ancient one. You'll find it in Thucydides, and you... it did have discussions of deterrents in the nuclear age, and for example, you'll find it mentioned in the... in the Finn letter report on policy in the... policy in the air age. However, these were very general sorts of statements, and they were not linked to the notion of a capability to... of a capability for a second-strike with the... with the... your nuclear force. Strategic forces had generally been... had as their traditional targets, war-supporting industry in an era when that was theoretically, separable from... from population. And definitely separable from the strategic forces themselves. That was what they were thought of as doing. In the course of World War II, the distinction between war supporting industry and population tended to be blurred as we saw in Dresden and in many other places. And the kind of thing that people were thinking of was... about strategic forces, was... illustrated in some of the early writings on it. Country A, that famous country, would strike the cities of Country B at nine o'clock and three hour... hours later, Country B would strike the cities of Country A. Well that's not related to getting a nuclear force that could survive attack. What was... what was new was the... was the recognition that an attack that was designed specifically to surprise and destroy your nuclear force, could be effective, could deprive you of the capability of striking second, and therefore, if you had a force that was subject to obliteration in that way, in a surprise attack, you would be inviting rather than deterring attack. And it was the look, which was a detailed empirical look at how that might... that might happen, under very optimistic assumptions even, from our standpoint, with a force that was then... that we then had, and with the forces that we were likely to have for a long time to come. That was the new departure. That was the difference.

THAT'S GOOD.