DR. ENTHOVEN, WHAT DID YOU GET YOUR DOCTORATE IN?

In -- I got my doctorate in economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

YOU'RE NOT A GENERAL?

No. I'm an economist.

THAT'S HOW YOU CHARACTERIZE YOURSELF PROFESSIONALLY?

Yes, right.

LET'S AVOID THE "YESES" AND JUST –

Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, my professional training was in economics.

WE'VE BEEN LIVING IN THE MISSILE AGE FOR 30 YEARS NOW. WE TAKE IT FOR GRANTED. BUT WHEN YOU GOT INVOLVED IN YOUR WORK AT RAND AND THE PENTAGON, YOU WERE REALLY RIDING THE CREST OF A NEW AGE. AND WE FORGET THE REVOLUTIONARY DIMENSIONS OF IT. HELP US -- REMIND US OF WHAT THE NEW -- OF WHAT YOUR CONCERNS WERE, JUST IN BROAD TERMS.

Well, nuclear weapons introduced an entirely new dimension into warfare. Before the arrival of nuclear weapons, people fought for territory and tried to control territory. With the large scale availability of nuclear weapons, it's possible to destroy vast amounts of territory and vast populations. Nobody ever figured out how nuclear weapons could be used in a... in a rational way to accomplish traditional military purposes. So, the arrival of nuclear weapons made it necessary to do a complete rethinking of military strategy and to think through how would nuclear weapons and forces relate to the rest of our national defense posture.

YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS, WHAT ABOUT MISSILES?

Well I'm talking about nuclear weapons and all of the different ways to deliver them, which include missiles, aircraft. We used to say, we have missiles launched from submarines, we have missiles launched from aircraft, we have aircraft launched from missiles, aircraft launched from submarines and so forth and so on, and all the different possible combinations.

ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS YOU DID WHEN YOU GOT INTO THE PENTAGON WAS, AS I UNDERSTAND IT, WAS TO EXAMINE THE FORCE STRUCTURE. NOW, WHAT WAS THE MANDATE, THE BROAD MANDATE?

The military of the 1950s was based on two large perceptions. First, that the Soviets had a massive superiority in land forces in Europe. And second, that we had a massive superiority in strategic nuclear forces. So out of those two perceptions developed a strategy for the defense of Europe. Defense against the threat of invasion and against Soviet intimidation. And the strategy was, in effect, Russians, if you invade Europe, then we strike you and destroy you with our superior nuclear force. The strategy was often referred to as tripwire and massive retaliation, that is, our forces in Europe are a sort of tripwire, and if the Russians trip over that tripwire, it unleashes the Strategic Air Command. In his presidential campaign, President Kennedy criticized that strategy. While it might have made sense for the early 1950s, that when we did have the massive superiority in nuclear weapons, the President and many of us could see -- or the candidate Kennedy then, and many of us could see -- that was no longer true, that the Russians were acquiring missiles in submarines, for example, and ICBMs, that they could strike back and destroy many of our cities. So we were getting a strategy that was dangerous and ineffective, and not believable. It was vulnerable to what it gave us the choice, as Kennedy put it, of suicide or surrender. If the Russians put pressure on us in Europe, as Khrushchev was doing in the case of Berlin if the only response we had was a massive nuclear strike, our choice was suicide or surrender, holocaust or humiliation. We had young people in Europe saying, "It's better to be Red than dead." And we were thinking, "No, it's better to be alive and free." So, Kennedy campaigned on the inadequacy and inappropriateness of our then existing strategy. As I say, it might have suited the times earlier, but it was not going to be suitable for the 1960s, and we needed to come up with a wholly new strategy, in particular a whole new way of relating nuclear weapons to our national defense. The strategy of the Kennedy administration was, we want to make nuclear war unlikely, in two ways. First, we need to have survivable, invulnerable, strategic retaliatory forces, so that if the Soviets were to strike us, our forces would survive the attack and be able to strike back in retaliation. And that's why, right away, we stopped production on the bombers, stopped Atlas, stopped Titan I, stopped a whole lot of weapons systems that were vulnerable, and accelerated drastically the production of the Minuteman ICBM based in concrete and steel silos underneath the ground and missile-launching submarines with Polaris missiles. So that was part one of making nuclear war unlikely. That is, have survivable, invulnerable strategic retaliatory forces. Part two was, we shouldn't be in a position where because of weakness, we are forced to be the first to use nuclear weapons. Therefore, we should build up our conventional forces in Europe so that we have conventional forces that are strong enough that they can effectively oppose the Soviet forces, and therefore we would not have to rely on the threatened first use of nuclear weapons. Our view was, nobody can fight and win a nuclear war. Nuclear war is extremely dangerous and destructive. And you're not likely to be able to survive it. There are no winners. Therefore the thing to do is to avoid it.

IN YOUR FORCE STRUCTURE DECISIONS, WHAT DID YOU -- WERE B-52s INVULNERABLE? WHAT WAS YOUR CONCERN ABOUT B-52s?

Well, in our force structure decisions for strategic retaliatory forces, our main concern was survivability. The main problem with the B-52s as well as the B-47s, the B-58s and the B-70s, the bombers, was that they were soft, concentrated, parked wing-tip to wing-tip out there on the air base let's say 15 B-52s on a squadron base. And one or two Soviet ICBMs could knock out the base and destroy the bombers. Now, it's true that we had some of those bombers on alert, with warning systems, so that if warning of attack came, the -- maybe a third of the bombers could be launched. It would still be the case that was an awfully costly process to get one-third of the bombers launched, you lose the other two-thirds and the base. I mean, com -- so that you lose an awful lot of your force when the, when the bomber base is knocked out, compared to what you lose when one Minuteman silo is knocked out. I think we felt that reliance on warning was shaky and unreliable. The idea of launching hundreds of bombers in a crisis seemed dangerous and unreliable, threatening. The Russians wouldn't know whether we were attacking them or not. You know, in crises there's just a lot of uncertainty. And certainly launching a large number of bombers would threaten to exacerbate the crisis. We didn't see the ability to launch bombers in the face of warning as a very attractive alternative to, for example, Polaris missiles in submarines under the sea that could sit there calmly for months while we all sorted ourselves out.

WHAT SPECIFICALLY WAS WRONG WITH THE B-47?

Well, the B-47 was a product of an earlier age. In the 1960s, it was obsolete. It was expensive, had short range, required a tanker to refuel it. But it partook in the inadequacies of all the bombers. Mainly, it was invulnerable on the ground -- it was vulnerable on the ground.

WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THE B-58?

The B-58 was expensive and vulnerable on the ground.

WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THE B-70?

The B-70's problem is that it was extremely expensive, I don't believe it could have what was claimed for it. Vulnerable in the air because it's flying at three times the speed of sound up at 70,000 feet, an easy mark for a Soviet surface to air missile, and vulnerable on the ground. And terribly expensive.

WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THESE AIRPLANES?

Well McNamara ordered a phase-out of the B-47s, stopped production of the B-58, stopped production of the B-52, don't produce the B-70.

NOW, ATLAS WAS AN ICBM...

The Atlas was our first intercontinental ballistic missile. The first Atlas ICBMs were based above ground, soft and concentrated, vulnerable to a Soviet missile attack.

WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THEM?

Cancelled them. Phased them out.

THE THOR?

The Thor, an intermediate range ballistic missile, based in Britain, soft, concentrated, vulnerable, highly vulnerable to Soviet attack. What did we do? Phased it out.

THE JUPITER?

Well, the Jupiter same story as the Thor, basically, except that unfortunately the desire of President Kennedy to phase it out - the Jupiters were based in Turkey, and that got caught up in a whole complex, political thing a fear on the part of the Turks and possibly some of our other NATO allies that in some sense we would be withdrawing nuclear support. And, and so it got tangled up in the politics. But we felt the Jupiter out there made no sense. Completely vulnerable to a first-strike by the Soviets. Shouldn't have been there to begin with. It has no survivability, so its only use would be to threaten a first-strike and to irritate the Russians for no purpose.

THE SNARK?

The Snark was a unmanned airplane, combined some of the worst features of the bomber with the worst features of the missiles. Vulnerable on the ground, like the bomber; couldn't be launched subject to recall; and slow time to target; unreliable, like the missile.

WHAT'D YOU DO WITH IT?

Cancelled it.

REGULUS?

Regulus was an air-breathing submarine -- Regulus was an air-breathing, submarine-launched missile, that is, a little unmanned airplane. One of the problems was short range. It didn't have the range to reach Soviet targets which were far inland. It was quickly becoming obsolete and superseded by the Polaris, which was a very successful weapons system.

WHAT DID YOU DO WITH REGULUS?

Cancelled it.

DINOSAUR?

Dinosaur was to be a... let's see, how can I... sort of an airplane that would fly along on the outer edges of the atmosphere and then circle over the Soviet Union and be able to shoot missiles from the outer atmosphere down onto Soviet targets. Too expensive. Cancelled it.

SKYBOLT?

Skybolt was a got complicated in -- got very complicated in the, in the politics of the whole thing. But basically, Skybolt was a ballistic missile to be hanging on the wings of the B-52, so the B-52 would fly out to someplace not far from Russia, and then launch these ballistic missiles at targets in the Soviet Union. In our view in a different way from Snark, Skybolt combined the worst features of the bomber with the worst features of the missile. Vulnerable on the ground, like the bomber; slow time to target, like the bomber; expensive; it had the relative unreliability, inaccuracy and small payload of the missile. Should never have been started.

DIDN'T THE AIR FORCE PUT UP QUITE A STINK WHEN YOU STARTED CANCELLING THESE THINGS, PARTICULARLY THE BOMBERS?

Yes. The Air Force -- I'm going to start this one again -- The Air Force put up a great deal of resistance to this process of stopping bomber production, phasing out bombers and so forth, and replacing them with Minuteman missiles and Polaris missiles. I have a lot of sympathy for them. These were men who spent their whole careers developing bomber forces, developing, organizing and perfecting the intercontinental delivery of nuclear weapons. They did a magnificent job of organization. They loved flying. They built a, an outstanding, magnificent, beautifully organized flying organization, and the tragedy was that it became obsolete. It was all rendered obsolete by the arrival of the ballistic missile. I remember once Tommy Power, the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command talking to me, and saying, "Alain, we've built this magnificent flying organization, and now you're destroying it." I'd say, "I know, Tommy, and I think it's terrible. I really am sorry but the strategic requirements of the United States, the advancement of technology just demands that we go to survivable, protected, retaliatory power, and that appears to be best done with Minuteman missiles in concrete and steel silos underground, and Polaris missiles in submarines under the sea."

THE AIR FORCE DIDN'T FIGHT THE HARDENING OF MISSILES. MY GENERAL QUESTION IS, WEREN'T THEY CONCERNED ABOUT VULNERABILITY TOO? I WANT TO GET TO THE CONCERN ABOUT THE BOMBERS AND THE FACT THAT THEY LIKED TO FLY. I WANT YOU TO TELL THE HERMAN KAHN "SUC" STORY. THAT'S WHAT I WANT.

I don't think the Air Force was really concerned about the vulnerability of our strategic forces. Some Air Force officers clearly were. But I think the overview of the institution, if you like, was directed toward preserving the bombers and didn't like the implications of accepting the existence of the problem of vulnerability, which would mean you've got to do something to put bombers and missiles underground. And that's not very glamorous, that's not much fun. That's not why we went to flying school, to go underground.

DO YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE TELLING HERMAN KAHN'S STORY ABOUT THE STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND? IF YOU DO, I'D REFER TO HIM AS "MY COLLEAGUE, HERMAN KAHN."

The, the idea of putting the bombers and missiles underground just didn't have a lot of appeal. These are men who went to flying school, and were a part of leading us into the age of aviation. They were excited by it, they were brave, heroic pioneers, who put their lives into this, into this process. And now along comes some people who say, you've got to go underground. I remember once, my friend and colleague, Herman Kahn was back at the Strategic Air Command giving a briefing, and I was along with him. And, and he was explaining what he thought was the future of the Strategic Air Command. And he said, "I envisage that one day, instead of SAC -- Strategic Air Command -- we're gonna have SUC -- Strategic Underground Command. And there'll be a film about it, and it's going to begin with some people deep down in a deep underground shelter. And they're playing cards, and they're dealing, and suddenly there's kind of a big crash, and things rattle and shake. And one of the people says, 'What was that?' and the other one says, 'Oh, only about ten megatons.' And the third one says, 'Come on, deal.'" Herman was trying to conjure up the vision of the need for serious efforts to protect our forces from a first Soviet strike.

YOU WERE MCNAMARA'S EMISSARY TO SAC?

Yes.

DO YOU HAVE ANY STORIES ABOUT WHEN YOU FIRST VISITED SAC, AND SAW THE SIOP FOR THE WAR PLAN...

Well... yes. I was I had sort of informally, you might say, the position of being Mr. McNamara's emissary to the Strategic Air Command. Of course, I'd been there a number of times before, when I was at the RAND Corporation. I remember once when I was at RAND, going with Herman Kahn, and he was, again, giving a briefing about the war plans to General Power, and said, "You know, General Power, you don't have a war plan. You have a wargasm. This is a spasm response. Surely it would make sense to be thinking about something more selective and deliberate, and we might want to have different choices as to which targets to shoot at." And when I started going out there in the 1960s, one of the things we were interested in working on was the concept of introducing some flexibility into the war plans. In particular, having options as to whether strategic attacks would be confined to military targets, to strategic targets, other military targets, or to include cities. And we introduced the idea of flexible, selective war plans.

WAS THERE ANY RESISTANCE BY THE STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND WHEN YOU WANTED TO CHANGE THE WAR PLAN?

I don't recall any strong resistance to the idea of introducing flexible war plans. I think that was -- the feeling was if that's what the Secretary of Defense wants, then we can provide that. The whole target planning process was very new in 1961 and '62. I think sometimes people today don't realize how new it was, the concept that the Secretary of Defense was in charge. I think it was as recent as 1959 or 1960, say, '59, that the Secretary of Defense ordered the creation of the Joint Strategic Target Planning staff. The idea was, prior to that, the Army had its own war plans, involving its Jupiters and other missiles. The Navy had its own war plans with its Polaris and Reguluses and carrier-based aircraft. And the Air Force had its plans. And so that each, if we went to war against the Soviet Union, would be fighting their own independent war. If nothing else, this might mean that a Navy plane is flying through a mushroom cloud created by an Air Force missile that's just gone off on the same target. So in 19 -- I believe it was 1959, the Secretary of Defense ordered that there should be created the Joint Strategic Target Planning where -- staff, where all of these target planning efforts would be done together, integrated and coordinated. That got a lot of resistance from the Navy. I understand that Admiral Burke appealed to the President to try to get that overturned. So this was quite a new concept that the Secretary of Defense would be giving such orders and directing such activities. However, I think that the idea of flexibility in war plans did not cause any particular resistance.

IN THE PLAN THAT YOU LOOKED AT, WE HAD EVERYTHING GOING OFF AT ONCE, DIDN'T IT? IT WAS THAT INDISCRIMINATE, EASTERN EUROPE, CHINA...?

Yes. Yes. The, the scenario for a war with the Soviet Union began with the Soviet Union attacking our allies in Western Europe, and then went to the next phase, which was a massive, all-out attack on then what was known as the Sino-Soviet Bloc that would just try to obliterate everything.

INCLUDING ALBANIA.

Including, I suppose, Albania. I'm a little hazy on some of the details now, 25 years later.

WHAT'S THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CHANGES IN THE FORCE STRUCTURE AND THE SIOP STRATEGY? WHAT COMES FIRST?

Well... there are intimate relationships between the war planning and the weapons systems. One problem is, for example, if you, if you are dependent on bombers, and you get into a nuclear war, you've got to use them. Because you have to assume that their bases are going to be destroyed by enemy missiles. Bomber bases are the obvious first target for the other side to shoot at. So you have the problem with bombers that they are not suitable for deliberation and control, waiting, selective use and so forth. Once you have submarine-launched missiles to go to the other extreme on this continuum you've introduced the possibility of deliberation, controls, flexibility in some kind of crisis. If we were attacked, we'd be able to, at least as far as the Polaris missiles are concerned, or the submarine-launched missiles, be able to withhold fire for weeks or months while waiting to figure out what's going on and so forth. I think it's important to understand, nobody has every figured out a rational or sensible way to fight a nuclear war. Nobody's figured out how to make sense of it. So, war planning has a certain very hypothetical, and abstract character to it. But it's certainly influenced by the weapons systems.

BUT YOU WERE -- WASN'T THE -- WASN'T THIS A CONCERN IN THE- HOW DID SECRETARY MCNAMARA COME TO ADOPT WHAT WAS CALLED A COUNTERFORCE, NO-CITY AVOIDANCE STRATEGY. I WANT TO GET INTO THE ANECDOTAL THING ABOUT THE KAUFMANN BRIEFING.

Hm-mm. Well... one of the big problems that McNamara was concerned about was, in the event of a nuclear war, how would these forces be used? Of course, let me emphasize, the main, overriding goal was to prevent nuclear war, to make it unlikely by having survivable, retaliatory forces and by having adequate conventional forces, so we're not relying on the first use of nuclear weapons, doing everything we can to make this ultimate disaster unlikely. Nevertheless, the question arises, if you find yourself in a nuclear war, what do you do? How do you use these forces? And what should the plans be? Bill Kaufmann who had been for a number of years with the RAND Corporation and was a good friend and colleague of mine, had been studying this whole question, and had developed a briefing on the concept of war planning and what the use of weapons ought to be. In 1961 and '62 Kaufmann made various briefings around the Pentagon. It was probably 1961 that he briefed McNamara -- it must have been in 1961—

IT WAS FEBRUARY '61.

Was it?

WHAT WERE THE GOALS OF THIS STRATEGY?

Well I think as I saw it, the goal was, the ultimate disaster was the destruction of millions, tens or hundreds of millions of people, of innocent civilians in cities. And so we should be trying to find ways of building as many effective fire-breaks as we could between where we are now and this ultimate disaster. And one of them could be that if nuclear war did break out that instead of automatically striking the other side's cities and therefore destroying any incentive they might have to refrain from attacking ours, that we should confine our attacks to military forces and avoid attacks on their cities, and hope that would give them incentive to avoid attacks on ours.

DID THEY BUY IT? I MEAN, THIS IDEA DEPENDS UPON COOPERATION. WAS THERE ANY INDICATION THAT THE SOVIETS WERE WILLING TO COOPERATE?

I don't think we, anybod -- I don't think anyone really had a very clear idea what the Soviets were thinking at that time, about all this.

DID YOU HAVE A SENSE THAT THIS COUNTERFORCE, CITY-AVOIDANCE STRATEGY WOULD -- WAS A SHORT-RANGE STRATEGY WHILE WE HAD SUPERIORITY OR WHETHER IT WOULD WORK BETTER IF THEY -- IF THERE WAS MORE OF A PARITY?

Well, we were looking into the future and projecting that there would be a time when both sides would have large, protected missile forces. And we had to do our thinking and planning on the basis of the assumption that the Soviets would have survivable, retaliatory power of their own.

MCNAMARA SAID THE OTHER DAY, WHEN I WAS TALKING TO HIM, THAT THIS WAS A -- THIS MIGHT HAVE WORKED AT THAT TIME, BUT YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER AT THAT TIME WE HAD MASSIVE SUPERIORITY. ON THE OTHER HAND, IN THE INTERVIEW WITH STEWART ALSOP, HE SAID THAT A COUNTERFORCE WAR WOULD BE MORE LIKELY IF THE SOVIETS HAD AN ASSURED DESTRUCTION CAPABILITY. SO, DO YOU HAVE A SENSE THAT IT'S A -- IT WOULD SEEM TO ME IT'S MORE LIKELY IF THEY HAD AN ASSURED DESTRUCTION CAPABILITY. BECAUSE THEN BOTH SIDES CAN HAVE TIME TO BREATHE AND THINK.

Well, if we were dealing with a situation in which we had a massive superiority, were able to strike first and destroy their retaliatory power, then you might say the restraints on us from the point of view of incentive, of giving them incentives not to strike our cities would be much less. I think there would still be moral restraints. We have to look at the reasonableness of what we're doing. But, in a situation in which they do have survivable retaliatory power, and by the early 1960s they were getting that, then we have a very powerful incentive to avoid attacking their cities, which is, we want to leave them alive so that they have some good reason not to attack ours.

IS THIS -- DID THIS REMAIN THE SORT OF THE WAR PLAN OR DECLARATORY POLICY OR WHATEVER THROUGHOUT MCNAMARA'S YEARS IN THE PENTAGON?

Well, I think that this remained basically the plan or the concept, the basic guidance to -- for the pre-prep -- preparation of the SIOP did not change, for example. I think that in terms of public statements that there was a change in emphasis. I think that at the time of his Ann Arbor speeches -- speech, and his Athens speech, McNamara was working on this problem that we were all working on: How do you make the ultimate destruction of our societies unlikely? And in that context was interested in the doctrine of confining attacks to military forces. The problem with that, at the level, you might say, of public education, public perception and politics, was that it became counter-productive. Because it seemed to cloud the far more important message, which is, nobody wins a nuclear war, and our strategy must be to prevent a nuclear war. And if you start talking about fighting a nuclear war selectively, then you have other people coming along and stepping up and saying, "Yes, sir, that's right. We can fight and win a nuclear war." And actually, people like McNamara and I felt, "No, no, no. That's, that's not the that's not the point." You can't fight and win a nuclear war, when both sides have hundreds of large nuclear weapons that they can deliver on the cities of the other side, you're talking about the ultimate disaster. And we want to prevent that. But some people were saying, "If you're, if you're saying you can fight and win a nuclear war, that's right. And then you need all these fancy weapons systems to do that." And other people are saying, "That's right, and also you don't need the conventional forces, because we can rely on the threat of using nuclear weapons." Well, we didn't believe that. We felt you have to build up your conventional forces. You cannot rely on the threatened use of nuclear weapons. It's too dangerous, too risky, too destructive.

BUT NONETHELESS, YOU DID HAVE TO FACE THE QUESTION, WHAT HAPPENS IF DETERRENCE FAILS, AND YOU WANTED TO...

Well, yes. You do have to face the question, "What happens if deterrence fails?" But again, at the practical level of decision making on strategy, forces, dealing with the alliance, getting people to build up conventional forces and so forth, you have to put the emphasis on the right syllable. You have to, have try to keep the thing in perspective. And pursuing the fine tuning of nuclear war seemed to be counter-productive from that point of view.

HOW DID THE AIR FORCE REACT TO SECRETARY MCNAMARA'S ANN ARBOR SPEECH?

Well, my recollection was the reaction, "Sir, that's a great and to do that, you'll need the RS-70 and a whole lot of other expensive weapons systems." So my recollection was that the Air Force in effect converted that into a basis for an open-ended statement of requirements for strategic weapons systems. Which is not what Mr. McNamara had in mind.

WHAT WERE THEY ASKING FOR?

Well, the big, hot issue of the time was the B-70, which you might say is the predecessor to the B-1. That was a tremendously hot political issue. I remember at one point, we had a sort of mini-Constitutional crisis. The Congress had appropriated the money to go ahead and develop and produce this airplane, and the President and the Secretary of Defense were refusing to spend it. And then the Armed Services Committee in the House was proposing to pass a law ordering the secretary of the Air Force to go ahead and spend the money even against the orders of the Secretary of Defense and the President. And on one of those propositions somewhere along the way, we had a 99-1 vote against us in the Senate. So there was a lot of support for going along with the B-70, because people were still thinking in terms of the concepts of the 1950s. So, along comes Ann Arbor, and we were making the point about the B-70 that it's really no better than a missile. In fact, there had even been a book someplace calling it the "manned missile." And so then the Air Force, seeing that's true, the B-70 was being used just like a missile, striking a pre-programmed target decided that they'd have to improve the case by doing some product improvement on the B-70, and tied it in with this idea of selective attacks and came up with a concept that they called the RS-70 -- RS for Reconnaissance Strike. And the idea was this airplane would be flying at three times the speed of sound over the Soviet Union, there'd be radar operators in the airplane looking down at Russia and seeing targets that should be attacked, and then launching selectively air-to-ground missiles at those targets. It was a fantastic conception. I don't believe today, in the mid-1980s, it would be possible to put together such a weapons system that would actually work. It certainly couldn't be done then. But the -- so the Air Force's reaction was to try to convert that into a basis for weapons systems.

DIDN'T THEY WANT THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF MISSILES?

Well, I think that the Air Force request or proposal was for about 2,400 Minutemen ICBMs. So the Air Force was proposing a substantially larger ICBM force than the Secretary of Defense was willing to recommend to the President.

SO THE AIR FORCE GETS DEMANDING. HOW DO YOU COPE WITH THIS? HOW DO YOU FIGURE OUT -- WHAT DOES THE QUESTION THEN BECOME? I DON'T WANT TO SAY HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH, I WANT YOU TO SAY THAT.

Well the military service, in this case the Air Force, is pressing for more weapons, and the Secretary of Defense has to answer the question, "How much is enough?" and make a recommendation to the President, who is of course ultimately deciding where the executive branch stands on this. Secretary McNamara sought information and advice, and advice from a number of sources, one of which was my office. And under his direction and that of Charlie Hitch, we created what became known as the Systems Analysis Office, which was a team of analytically trained people who could do studies in this case, for example, about the comparative outcomes of wars and deterrence situations comparing the situation when we had more and less missiles. And basically, what we found is what we came to characterize as a flat-of-the-curve situation. That is, if you picture you're sort of plotting a graph, and on the vertical axis you put targets destroyed, and on the horizontal axis you put number of dollars or number of missiles. And then you get a curve that goes up, and after a while it flattens out. And the point was, we were saying to McNamara, you know, if you could get a thousand or so Minutemen ICBMs along with all the other forces we have, then you're getting pretty close to the flat of the curve. And buying more forces is just not going to get you more target destruction. And McNamara could look at that, as he did, reach a judgment that about that much seemed to be enough.

THE WHITE HOUSE ADVISERS WERE SUGGESTING CONSIDERABLY FEWER WOULD BE ENOUGH. WHAT WAS...?

The White House advisers looked at our analysis, looked at the curves we were plotting, and came back to us and said, "Yes, indeed, you're arguing that the curve is flat from here on out, that is, you don't get much more from 1,000 to let's say 2,000 ICBMs, and we notice that the curve is sort of flat the other way, that is you're not getting much more when you go from 800 to 1,000." And we had to concede that they had a reasonable point. But, but pointed out that while we were rapidly building up Minuteman and Polaris, which was getting a lot of attention, they needed to recognize that we were stopping the Atlas program and phasing it out, stopping the Titan I program and phasing it out, stopping the Titan II at about 50 missiles, stopping Regulus, stopping, phasing out 1,500 B-47s and their tankers, etc., etc., etc. So we were-

YOU HAD POLITICAL PROBLEMS?

We had cutting back a lot of other forces in a context in which people perceived that we were being threatened by the Russians, and very concerned about a Soviet buildup. So, in that context, it's only reasonable to go so far in terms of cutting back.

When we came to presenting the defense budget and program to the White House each year, which we did in November we dealt with the Bureau of the Budget, Dave Bell and his people, with the President's science advisor, Jerry Wiesner and his people, and the National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy and Carl Kaysen. So we were dealing with all of them, and we would send over memoranda explaining the program, and then there'd be quite a few meetings where we'd follow up in detail and explain it. And they would scrutinize and analyze and challenge, and develop issues to bring to the President, exercising their staff responsibility to the President.

BUT IT WAS CARL KAYSEN WHO...

I recall Carl Kaysen as playing a prominent role in that. Carl put in a lot of effort to become knowledgeable about the defense program, and was astute about looking for holes in our case.

AT SOME POINT YOU BEGAN TALKING ABOUT, AFTER ANN ARBOR, ABOUT ASSURED DESTRUCTION. YOU DIDN'T TALK ABOUT COUNTERFORCE OR CITY AVOIDANCE ANYMORE. WHAT DID ASSURED DESTRUCTION MEAN?

Well... the tendency had been in the past to use what you might call Latin euphemisms for things. So in doing analyses about the outcomes of nuclear wars, people wrote and spoke about urban-industrial fatalities, which got abbreviated, "U.I. Fat." And you know, it was a way of kind of detracting your gaze from the, from the horror of what you were talking about. McNamara preferred to call a spade a spade. I think he had a preference for plain Anglo-Saxon language to get people to think about what they were talking about. And in that context, as I recall, he was the one who introduced the term, "assured destruction," say this is really the capability we were trying to have, is a capability that we could assure that if they attacked us, we could destroy their society, as a deterrent. He did, in various documents, make the distinction between assured destruction as a basis for calculating requirements, on the one hand, and a policy for how the weapons would be used if a war broke out. Those were two different things.

WAS IT A PROCUREMENT CRITERION?

Yes. Assured destruction was a criterion for determining the size of our forces. We wanted to have enough forces that they could survive a Soviet attack, strike back, and destroy their society.

SO THE WAR PLANS DIDN'T CHANGE WHEN HE STARTED TALKING ABOUT...

No. No.

DID, AS MCNAMARA BEGAN TALKING ABOUT ASSURED DESTRUCTION OR ASSURED DESTRUCTION AND DAMAGE LIMITATION, DID THIS INDICATE A -- THAT HE WAS MOVING AWAY FROM EFFORTS TO REFINE THE STRATEGIC ARSENAL? TO CONSIDER OPTIONS... WAS HE MOVING TOWARDS A DETERRENCE-ONLY POSTURE?

Of course, Mr. McNamara ought to speak for himself on this. My interpretation of what was going on was that the talk about selective use of nuclear weapons, of city-avoiding strategies and all that was proving to be counter-productive. That it was stirring up responses and ideas and debates that were detracting attention from our main idea, which was to make nuclear war unlikely by having survivable retaliatory forces, and by having adequate conventional forces so that we would not have to be the first to use nuclear weapons. I want to emphasize, that was the concept of overriding importance. How you would fight a nuclear war, if one arose, I think McNamara increasingly came to feel was something to which nobody had any sensible or rational answer. And so it was not something worth pursuing in great detail. But when he talked about city-avoiding strategies and all that it evoked at least a couple of counter-productive reactions. One was, some people started saying, "Yes, sir, that's right! You can fight and win a nuclear war, therefore, for example, we don't have to build up these conventional forces." And we just felt that was terribly wrong. Another group were saying, "That is very destabilizing if you're talking about confining your attacks to Soviet forces, then that looks to us like a first-strike strategy and that's going to destabilize the balance of terror, and that's wrong." And that school of thought, sometimes known as the minimum-deterrence school, argued in effect, we should limit and confine our attack on the Soviet Union to their cities. My reaction to that is like Albert Wohlstetter's, who said once, "Not even Genghis Khan deliberately avoided attacks on enemy military forces in order that he could save the fury of his attack to attack innocent civilian populations." That just seemed wrong also. In fact, I think that a ... if in retaliation we're going to strike back at what the Soviet government values, we would appropriately strike back at their military forces, which I think they probably see as much more important to them than their own people, who they have been willing to sacrifice at times in the past. But so all of this talk about the ways you might fight a nuclear war, while leading nowhere in terms of some deeper insight or better plans or better forces, was detracting attention from the issues of overriding importance that is how do we make nuclear war less likely?

FOR A WHILE, ASSURED DESTRUCTION AND DAMAGE LIMITATION WERE SORT OF LINKED AS A PERHAPS NOT A STRATEGY BUT A... OBJECTIVES IN DETERMINING FORCE REQUIREMENTS AND SO ON. AND THEN DAMAGE LIMITATION SORT OF WENT BY THE BOARDS. DID MCNAMARA GIVE UP ON DAMAGE LIMITATION?

In the early 1960s, in studying how much is enough, in offensive and defensive forces, we were looking at the twin objectives of assured destruction. That is, the capability to survive attack and strike back in retaliation and damage limitation, that is, to recognize that one of the purposes served by our offensive-defensive forces was to limit the damage that could be done to us in a nuclear war. As I recall, those objectives remained in the analysis and the basis for force planning. But in the mid-1960s we faced the question of whether to deploy the anti-missile missile. This was a proposition to spend what probably would have come to $40 billion or more in an attempt to defend the United States from Soviet ballistic missile attacks. We analyzed that issue very thoroughly. And basically, what we found was that if you could safely assume that the Russians would do nothing in response to our $40 billion weapons system, and kind of leave their missiles fat, dumb and happy, with single warheads, no penetration aids and the like then, indeed, this anti-missile missile could probably save tens of millions of lives. The problem with it was that in all probability, the Russians would do what we were doing. In order to be sure that we could defeat and overcome any Soviet anti-missile missile, and of course, they were developing an anti-missile missile also, we were doing things like developing and deploying multiple warheads and penetration aids. For example, we had something called "resonant dipoles," packets of little wires that would resonate on the frequency of the enemy's radar. And then when this gets out into space, you would set off a charge and go poof, and these would fill out -- you know, spread out all over space, and space would be filled with things that looked to the enemy radar like a warhead. And so the other side's defensive system couldn't tell which was the real warhead until all these objects came back down into the atmosphere. Well, when we went through the whole analysis, we found that if we spent the $40 billion and the Russians spent something like $5 billion with the kinds of things that we were sure were technically feasible, the net effect would be that we'd accomplish nothing. And McNamara, I think correctly, reached the conclusion that was a futile waste of money, and we shouldn't go ahead with the anti-missile missile. And, if you like, that sort of cast a pall on the whole objective of damage limitation as just -- just that it didn't look like it was going to be feasible.

HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT -- AT THE END OF YOUR TENURE IN THE PENTAGON, WHEN YOU SHARED THIS, PRESUMABLY, SHARED THIS SENSE OF BEING DISCOURAGED ABOUT DAMAGE LIMITATION EFFORTS. WHERE DOES THAT... WHERE DID THAT LEAVE YOU IN COMPARISON SAY TO WHATEVER THOUGHTS YOU MIGHT HAVE HAD ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS WHEN YOU CAME INTO THE PENTAGON?

Well, by the end of my years in the Defense Department, that is, at the end of 1968, I felt that it was inevitable that the Soviets would acquire a large, protected, intercontinental missile force at home, and a large, survivable submarine-launched missile force, and that the best that we and they could settle for --

HOW DID YOU FEEL, IN 1968, WHEN YOU WERE LEAVING THE PENTAGON, ABOUT THE STRATEGIC SITUATION?

When I was finishing my Pentagon tour in 1968, I felt that it was inevitable that the Soviet Union would acquire what we had, that is, a large, protected strategic retaliatory force, made up of intercontinental ballistic missiles based in concrete and steel underground silos and in missile-launching submarines, and that there was no question of either side acquiring a first-strike capability or a capability to intimidate, effectively intimidate the other side with the use of nuclear weapons , and that the best thing that we could settle for was, if you like, a stable balance of deterrence with a rough parity in forces, and that it was in those circumstances ever more important that we develop and maintain effective conventional forces, because the threat of the first use of nuclear weapons to defend Europe was simply not going to be believable in such circumstances.

THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE WHO CRITICIZED MCNAMARA IN THE LATTER YEARS FOR SORT OF GIVING UP ON OPTIONS, FOR NOT PUTTING MONEY INTO R&D TO DEVELOP, YOU KNOW, WHETHER IT'S USE OPTIONS IN CASE DETERRENCE FAILS, OR A MORE CREDIBLE DETERRENT. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THAT?

Some people were criticizing McNamara for not pursuing the further refinement of flexible options for nuclear war. I think McNamara correctly understood that the thing of overriding importance was to prevent nuclear war, and that it was a distraction of time and attention and something of a waste of resources to put a lot of resources, you might say, into fine-tuning nuclear war, when what we really needed to do was to figure out ways of strengthening and improving our conventional forces so that we would not be in a position that we would have to be the first to use nuclear weapons. The conventional forces are, you know, I would say the relevant cutting edge of military power in Europe.

THIS WHOLE NOTION OF MAD, IT REALLY GETS SOME PEOPLE MAD, WHEN YOU BRING IT UP THEY SAY THEY DON'T EVER WANT TO SEE IT USED BECAUSE THERE'S SO MUCH CONFUSION SURROUNDING IT. TELL US WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT ISN'T, AND WHAT SOME OF THE MYTHS ARE THAT SURROUND THE NOTION OF MAD.

Well, the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction, sometimes called MAD, I think characterizes a state of affairs that I believe in anything like the present or foreseeable technology is inevitable. That is, a situation in which we have and the Soviets have a large, protected strategic retaliatory force based on missiles underground, based on missiles in the ocean, and based on bombers that can be launched and subject to warning and so forth that are sufficiently large and powerful that in the face of an enemy attack, the survivors would be able to strike back and destroy the other society. I think that is an inevitable condition. And, now, some people don't like it, because they say, in that case we're depending on rationality by the Soviets that they will be deterred by us, and you know, we can't be sure of that. It would be a lot nicer if we could have weapons systems that could guarantee our own survival independent of Soviet action. And, while one might agree that it would be nicer, I think that both technologically and economically, such capability is infeasible. There is just no way, with anything like the technology we can foresee, that we could escape the dilemma of mutual assured destruction.

BUT THIS DOESN'T -- WHAT HAPPENS IN A WORLD WHERE EACH SIDE HAS THE CAPABILITY FOR ASSURED DESTRUCTION, WHAT HAPPENS WHEN DETERRENCE FAILS? IT DOESN'T MEAN YOU AUTOMATICALLY GO OUT AND DESTROY EVERYBODY.

Well, what happens when deterrence fails, I want to emphasize again that the goal of overriding importance is to prevent nuclear war by having a solid deterrent and by not -- through weakness -- being in a position where one is forced to be the use -- the first to use nuclear weapons in a sort of act of desperation. So, I don't want to let anyone pass over lightly this make this assumption, when deterrence has failed, as if, well, that's when the action begins, and that's all there is to talk about. I would say, when deterrence fails is a relatively minor piece of the action. The important thing is having a strategy that keeps us alive and free and that avoids either side being in a position where it feels it must resort to the first use of nuclear weapons.

LET'S TALK ABOUT NATO FOR A MINUTE. WERE YOU INVOLVED WITH THE REEVALUATION OF THE WARSAW PACT?

I was deeply involved in the reevaluation of the Warsaw Pact --

WE HOPE TO TALK TO NITZE ABOUT IT, BUT...

I spent all eight of those years deeply involved in that issue because it was of primary importance to the development of our strategy, and perhaps in part because my office introduced a whole new kind of capability into the thought process of United States defense decision making. Before my office came along, you have to understand the concept was the -- all the military strategic thinking is done by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and they think about military requirements, and they don't think about dollars, and all the thinking about money is done by the controller, and he's supposed to think about money, but not to think about military strategy. And my office was charged with integrating these two. So my analysts had all the intelligence clearances they needed to look at the basic intelligence information, and one day they were looking at what the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency were saying about the Soviet forces, and another day they'd be in budget hearings, where they were listening to our Army, Navy, and Air Force saying what they needed in order to be effective. And they would start finding things like the following: our Air Force one day in hearings would say, "We need to have our pilots fly 25 hours a month, and we need to have these kinds of accurate air-to-ground rockets, and we need this and that, spare parts, etc., etc." All of which cost a lot of money, "and we must have that in order to be effective." And then the next day they'd be going over there and looking at the in detail at the intelligence situation and finding that the Soviet tactical air force had very little of all that good stuff, they weren't spending the money on that. And so, we started finding that when you, when you really put that all together, that there were major discrepancies between what the two sides were saying, if you like. For example, we found that the army said for what it called a Division Force, that is a division with its backup support, the artillery and the other combat support that goes around it, that in peacetime they needed to have something like 30,000 men in Europe, and in wartime they'd beef that up to about 45,000 men, whereas a Soviet division with its surrounding support was less than half that large. Yet we found in the force comparisons that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were doing, that they'd compare one -- you know, they'd add up the score, there'd be -- one Soviet division would count like --

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM HAS ALWAYS BEEN THAT NATO CANNOT COPE WITH THE WARSAW PACT, THAT IT WOULD BE OVERWHELMED, THAT THE WARSAW PACT HAS SO MANY MORE DIVISIONS. NOW, WHAT GAVE YOU CONFIDENCE THAT NATO COULD BE THE CUTTING EDGE?

In the 1950s, our whole strategy was based on two ideas, or two perceptions. One, that we had an overwhelming superiority in nuclear weapons. The other that the Soviets, with the Warsaw Pact, had an overwhelming superiority in conventional forces, particularly in land forces. There were some people who doubted that, and who expressed their doubts publicly, Paul Nitze and Bill Kaufmann being two prominent examples. In the late 1950s, when General Maxwell Taylor wrote his book, The Uncertain Trumpet, he questioned it also, asked, how could this be that you know, they're not so huge they don't have that many more people than we do, etc., how could they have such an absolutely vast army? With the arrival of McNamara and company, and the creation of my office, a whole new analytical capability, if you like, was introduced into the process. Before McNamara, the concept for the organization and management of the Defense Department was, all things military -- military requirements, strategy and all that -- was done by military people and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on one side, and they didn't mess around with dollars, they just looked at military requirements. And on the other side, you had the Controller, who was only concerned with money and was not supposed to mess around in military requirements. When my office was created, what we called the Systems Analysis Office, we were charged by the Secretary of Defense with understanding both U.S. forces, budgets, and requirements and Soviet forces, budgets and requirements. So, I had analysts working for me who had all the necessary intelligence clearances who might one day be working with the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency looking at what the Soviets have and what they say they have and so forth, and another looking at U.S. forces and listening to our statements of budget requirements. For example the people working on tactical aircraft might be hearing one day from the U.S. Air Force "In order to ready and effective, our pilots have to train 25 -- or fly 25 hours a month; they have to have accurate air-to-ground rockets: they have a lot of spare parts mechanics, etc." And we'd be persuaded that made sense. Then on the next day, my analysts would be over looking at the Soviet forces, and they'd find they do little -- very little flying, they don't have all these terrific air-to-ground rockets and so forth. So there'd be a major discrepancy. In the case of the for example, our army said "To, to maintain a division in Europe in peacetime, we need 30 thousand men for what's called a division force" -- that is, the division plus the surrounding artillery engineers and other kinds of support -- "and in wartime that would have to be increased to 45 thousand." While, when we looked at the Soviet divisions, we could see they were considerably less than half as large. Yet, in the force comparisons and in these charts and tables and graphs, on the basis of which strategic thinking was being done, the suggestion was that one Soviet division counted for one U.S. division. So, throughout the 1960s we dug into that and studied it and analyzed it in greater depth. The intelligence community to gather more detailed, better information, to turn intelligence resources onto that, to clarify and deepen our understanding. As time went -- went by, the picture that unfolded was there had been tremendous exaggeration of the Soviet forces. For example, the Soviet Union, the army was about two million, compared to the U.S. army of about one million. But it was alleged that with this two-million-man army they could produce something like 175 divisions, whereas with our one-million-man army we had 16 divisions. It just didn't make sense. Etc. So we started saying, "Look, let's quit counting divisions. Count men, guns, tanks, weapons, actual things. And as we started doing that, what we found was that in the center region of Europe, that we -- NATO, they -- the Warsaw Pact, had about the same number of soldiers, and the same number of military personnel. And in fact, if you went to worldwide, NATO had about the same number, perhaps a few more, military personnel than the Warsaw Pact. However for various reasons to do with domestic politics and everything else, our forces were not organized for maximum efficiency were not deployed for effective conventional defense, and in particular weren't even being armed and equipped. For example, the British didn't want to give the British army on the Rhine more than about three days of ammunition. I remember once Denis Healey saying to me, "There's no point, because in giving them more than three days of ammunition, because the war'll be over in three days." And I replied, "Well, Denis, if you only give them three days of ammunition, you can be damn sure it'll be over in three days." And what we wanted to do was to have at least three, perhaps six, months of ammunition stockpiled so that our forces would have enough ammunition to be able to fight effectively. I found persuasive what General Bernie Rogers, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, has recently said, that for something like a four percent increase in spending and some real effort to eliminate inefficiency and so forth, we could produce a conventional defense that could effectively oppose the Soviet Union. Then the question might come up, why is it important to do that? The Russians aren't going to invade us tomorrow anyway? I think it's important to do that because the Soviet forces are there to intimidate our European allies, to change their foreign policy, to put them in a mindset where they want to appease the Russians, where they want to conduct their foreign policy in a way that will be sort of friendly and non-threatening to the Russians instead of conducting in a free, independent foreign policy. I think I think sort of Soviet intimidation that leads Germans to want to make long-term loans to the Russians at interest rates below the inflation rate and so forth. And I think our interest -- it's not that war is actually going to happen, although that could happen but, our interest is in seeing to it that our European allies perceive themselves as being strong and well defended so they're not vulnerable to Soviet intimidation.

WHEN YOU ANNOUNCED YOUR FLEXIBLE RESPONSE STRATEGY FOR NATO IN 1962, WHAT -- HOW DID NATO REACT TO THAT? HOW DID EUROPEAN PARTNERS LIKE IT?

Well, when we announced our ideas in 1961 and 1962 with respect to NATO strategy, of course, as would inevitably there was a lot of controversy, a lot of different points of view. And and a lot of disagreement. I think you have to look sort of country by country in detail to see why, because I think different countries responded differently. In the case of France, there was General de Gaulle, whose whole idea was to assure the independence of France. He didn't want France to be part of an entangling alliance. He wanted France to be independent, pure and able to defend itself. And so he wanted to go ahead with the Force de Frappe, the French Strategic Retaliatory Force. Our view was that would be small, ineffective, a diversion of resources, and that it would be better if the French put their defense budget into conventional forces that would be ready and effective and contribute to the defense of Europe. But that's the problem we ran into there, and so our thinking about the rational strategy for NATO ran at cross-purposes with General de Gaulle's goals to assure the independence of France. I guess we felt that the NATO allies have to hang together in order to be able to defend themselves, that there isn't a realistic possibility for France or any other country to maintain its freedom independent from its allies. The British, well you had a different set of problems there. I think in part ... a change is always difficult to bring about, because then, in effect, it's implicitly admitting that what you were doing before was inappropriate, although we tried to emphasize that we're trying to adapt to changing conditions. The strategy of the '50s might have been OK for at least part of the '50s. It just wasn't going to work in the, in the 1960s. But again, I think the British were trying to cut down on defense spending, and were not eager to embrace a concept that might put pressure on them to increase their defense spending. And so it goes.

IN THE EARLY '60S, OR WHEN YOU FIRST CAME INTO THE PENTAGON, WERE YOU WORRIED ABOUT... I MEAN, KHRUSHCHEV WAS MAKING THREATENING NOISES, WARS OF NATIONAL LIBERATION AND THREATENING AN INDEPENDENT TREATY WITH THE EAST GERMANS, THREATENING BERLIN. DID YOU THINK NATO COULD COPE? WERE YOU WORRIED?

In the early 1960s, of course, say in '61, '62 our relations with the Soviets were extremely troubled. They were talking about wars of national liberation they were threatening our access to Berlin, they were talking about a separate peace treaty with East Germany and so forth. And in particular, Khrushchev was threatening to cut us out of Berlin. We perceived that as an extremely dangerous situation because if Khrushchev could cut us out of Berlin, that would be an unmistakable signal to our European allies that we couldn't protect them. That would be a perfect illustration of the concept of salami-slice aggression, that they can slice the aggression small enough that it's not going to be worth a nuclear war, we're not going to risk the destruction of all of our cities to save a little piece of German territory, for example. But the symbolism of that was enormous. And so we were enormously concerned. Decisions had to be made in the face of tremendous uncertainty, because there had been this great exaggeration of Soviet forces -- I don't think anybody really had a very clear idea what the military balance was. But President Kennedy called up some of the reserves and deployed substantial increases in forces to Europe as a signal to the Soviet Union that we understood the danger in Berlin, and we were willing to fight to prevent that. Those were very troubled times in our relations with the Soviet Union, I think in part because Khrushchev believed that with the development of his ballistic missile force and this large perceived superiority in conventional forces, that he had the upper hand and he could really be pushing us around with it. And in order to overcome that, it was necessary for us to build up our strength, in particular, improve our conventional forces and convey to them that we were ready to stand and fight if they tried to take military action to destroy the rights of any of our allies in Europe.

DID THE CRISIS IN '61, SUMMER OF '61, HOW DID IT MAKE YOU FEEL ABOUT WHAT YOU'D BEEN THINKING EARLIER BUT HADN'T REALLY HAD A CHANCE TO IMPLEMENT, THE WHOLE NOTION OF THE IMPORTANCE OF CONVENTIONAL FORCES?

Well, I think that the crisis in 1961, the recurring Berlin crises, underlined and emphasized the validity and importance of the notions that President Kennedy had been campaigning on. That is, that the threat to resort to thermonuclear war as a way of dealing with something like a Berlin crisis, was just not effective and just not credible. It was just not likely that the Soviets were going to believe that we were going to start World War III and see the destruction of Europe and the United States, or you know, of tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people destroyed, just to hold onto this piece of territory. So that emphasized the importance of having conventional forces adequate to defend our positions in Europe without resort to the first use of nuclear weapons.

LET ME ASK YOU -- LET'S DEAL WITH FIRST PRINCIPLES, THESE ARE TERMS THAT WE THROW AROUND THAT I JUST WANT TO TALK ABOUT. DETERRENCE, WAS THIS A NEW CONCEPT IN THE MISSILE AGE? OR WHY DO WE DISTINGUISH BETWEEN DETERRENCE AND THE WHOLE NOTION OF DEFENSE?

Well, the concept of deterrence was developed by various writers in the 1950s, and the notion was that instead of relying on conventional forces to repulse the forces of the other side trying to capture territory, that we would simply deter that by the threat of some kind of massive retaliation. Wohlstetter, Rowen and company at the RAND Corporation developed the idea of deterrence at the strategic nuclear level and their work on the selection and use of strategic air bases they had to think through, what is the purpose of these strategic forces anyway? And they developed the idea that's now become commonplace and accepted, that -- but was new at the time -- that the first purpose of these forces is to be able to survive an attack intended to destroy them and to be able to strike back in order to deter the attack in the first place.