Berlin 1961 (63 page)

Kaysen began his paper by noting the flaws in the so-called Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP-62, the existing blueprint determining how Kennedy would use strategic striking power in the case of war. SIOP-62 called for sending 2,258 missiles and bombers, carrying a total of 3,423 nuclear weapons, against 1,077 “military and urban-industrial targets” through the “Sino-Soviet bloc.” It estimated that the attack would kill 54 percent of the Soviet population (including 71 percent of the urban population) and destroy 82 percent of its buildings “as measured by floor space.” Kaysen thought SIOP-62 actually underestimated casualties, as it was making estimates only for the first seventy-two hours of war.

Kaysen maintained that two circumstances required that SIOP-62 be replaced or significantly altered. First, he worried about a false alarm, which could arise from a “deliberate feint” from Khrushchev or a “misinterpretation of events” by either side. He argued that “if the present state of tension over Berlin persists over a period of months, it is likely that, at some point, a Soviet action will appear to threaten an attack on the United States with sufficient likelihood and imminence” to trigger nuclear response.

Kaysen asserted that the problem would come if Kennedy, following a nuclear decision, decided he wanted to recall the force because he had either been mistaken or misled. Kaysen said the current plan left him little capability to do that. A recall would also require a stand-down of about eight hours for the part of the force that was launched, providing Moscow a “period of degradation” that it could exploit.

Kaysen believed the larger problem—reinforced by Kennedy’s August inaction over Berlin—was that the president would never accept the level of massive nuclear retaliation that would be demanded of him to repulse any Soviet conventional attack on West Germany or West Berlin. He asked bluntly: “Will the president be ready to take it? Soviet retaliation is inevitable; and most probably, it will be directed against our cities and those of our European allies.”

The clear message was that Kennedy, some ten months into his administration, was facing a Berlin crisis that threatened to worsen and a strategic plan to address it that he was unlikely to use. Kaysen was asserting that the ongoing Berlin crisis made it necessary not only to theorize but to get specific about a first-strike plan if matters turned against the U.S. on the ground.

“What is required in these circumstances is something quite different,” he said. “We should be prepared to initiate general war by our own first strike, but one planned for this occasion, rather than planned to implement a strategy of massive retaliation. We should seek the smallest possible list of targets, focusing on the long-range striking capacity of the Soviets, and avoiding, as much as possible, casualties and damage in Soviet civil society.”

The idea as well was to “maintain in reserve a considerable fraction of our own strategic striking power.” The author’s logic was that such a force would deter Khrushchev from unleashing his surviving forces against American population centers. Kaysen was wagering as well that U.S. efforts to minimize Soviet civilian casualties might also reduce the enemy’s lust for revenge that could broaden the war. Kaysen then provided in vivid detail a “more effective and less frightful” plan than SIOP-62 if the current crisis over Berlin resulted in a “major reverse on the ground in Western Europe.”

It gave the president what he had been asking for throughout most of the year: a more
rational
nuclear war. It would allow him to destroy the Soviet Union’s long-range nuclear capability while limiting damage to the United States and its allies.

Kaysen then laid out the details of a plan that Kennedy would read and reread before responding. U.S. strategic air forces—in small numbers, using wide dispersal and low-altitude penetration to avoid interception—would strike an estimated forty-six home bases for Soviet nuclear bombers, the bombers’ twenty-six staging bases, and up to eight intercontinental ballistic missile sites with two aiming points for each site. The total targets for the first strike would be eighty-eight.

Kaysen reckoned that the first strike could be executed by fifty-five bombers, particularly B-47s and B-52s, assuming a 25 percent attrition rate that would leave the required forty-one planes. One could succeed with so few aircraft, he said, as they would “fan out and penetrate undetected at low altitude at a number of different points on the Soviet early-warning perimeter, then bomb and withdraw at low altitude.”

Kaysen conceded the need for more studies and exercises to test his assumptions. “Two questions immediately arise about this concept,” he said. “How valid are the assumptions, and do we possess the capability and skill to execute such a raid?” He answered that the assumptions were reasonable, that the U.S. had the military means, and that “while a wide range of outcomes is possible, we have a fair probability of achieving a substantial measure of success.”

If one could avoid bombing mistakes, Kaysen figured, Soviet deaths from the initial raid could be limited to no more than a million and perhaps as few as 500,000—still horrendous, but a considerable margin less than SIOP-62’s assumption that 54 percent, or more than a hundred million, of the Soviet population would perish.

In a White House that was unaccustomed to such cavalier discussion of carnage, Kaysen’s report came as a shock. Chief Counsel Ted Sorensen shouted at Kaysen, “You’re crazy! We shouldn’t let guys like you around here.” Marcus Raskin, a friend of Kaysen’s on the NSC, never spoke to him again after he got wind of the report. “How does this make us any better than those who measured the gas ovens or the engineers who built the tracks for the death trains in Nazi Germany?” he frothed at Kaysen.

Kennedy didn’t have the same misgivings, as he had been seeking precisely the analysis that he had been given. “Berlin developments may confront us with a situation where we may desire to take the initiative in the escalation of conflict from the local to the general war level,” the president wrote in the list of questions he wanted to discuss at a meeting on September 19 with General Taylor, General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Thomas S. “Tommy” Power, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command. The level of detail in his questions underscored the president’s increasing scrutiny and understanding of nuclear strike issues. Kennedy was preparing himself to wage war.

Question #1:
“Is it possible to get some alternatives into the plan soon, such as having alternative options for use in different situations?” Kennedy asked. He in particular wanted to know whether he could move away from the “optimum mix” of civilian and military targets and in certain contingencies exclude urban areas, or extract China or European satellites from the target list. “If so, at what risk?”

Question #2:
If Berlin developments confronted Kennedy with a situation where he wanted to escalate from a local conflict to a general war level, the president wanted to know whether a successful surprise first strike was feasible against the Soviet long-range capability.

Question #3
: Kennedy worried that a surprise attack on Soviet long-range striking power would leave “a sizable number” of medium-range missiles still poised to attack Europe. In short, he wanted to know the costs of protecting Europe as well as the U.S. He asked whether including these medium-range strike targets in the initial attack would “so enlarge the target list as to preclude tactical surprise.”

Question #4:
“I am concerned,” Kennedy said, “over my ability to control our military effort once a war begins. I assume I can stop the strategic attack at any time, should I receive word the enemy has capitulated. Is that correct?”

He posed four more questions along similar lines, wondering whether he could avoid “redundant destruction” and recall subsequent weapons if the first nuke aimed at a target achieved its “desired results.” If his decision to attack turned out to have been prompted by a false alarm, he wanted to know his options for recall.

The following day’s National Security Council meeting failed to provide clear answers to many of the president’s questions. It also showed how divided Kennedy’s advisers remained over the notion of a limited nuclear war. The Strategic Air Command’s General Tommy Power said, “The time of our greatest danger of a Soviet surprise attack is now and during the coming year. If a general atomic war is inevitable, the U.S. should strike first” after identifying the essential Soviet nuclear targets.

Power had directed the firebombing raids on Tokyo in March 1945 and was deputy chief of operations for U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific during the atomic bomb strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He had assisted General Curtis E. LeMay in building up the Strategic Air Command after he joined it in 1948, and under them it had become its own fiefdom. Brutal and easily angered, Power passionately believed the only way to keep nuclear-armed communists in check was if they believed they would be annihilated if they misbehaved.

When briefed on the long-term genetic harm done by nuclear fallout, Power once responded with perverse humor, “You know, it’s not yet been proved to me that two heads aren’t better than one.” National Security Advisor Bundy was thinking of Power when he warned Kennedy that a subordinate commander had authority “to start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative” if he couldn’t reach the president after a Soviet attack.

Power argued to Kennedy that the Soviets were concealing “many times more” missiles than CIA spy photos revealed. He complained that he lacked intelligence on Soviet ICBM sites, and added that he believed the U.S. had only 10 percent photographic coverage of the Soviet Union. He told the president that twenty ICBM pads had been located, but that many times more might be in unmonitored areas. Lacking crucial data on the extent of the Soviet missile force, Power strongly recommended to Kennedy that he resume the U-2 flights he had promised Khrushchev he would prohibit.

Kennedy brushed aside Power’s advice. Instead, he was fixated on getting the answer to his question of whether he really could launch a surprise strike on the Soviet Union without devastating retaliation. He also tasked the generals “to come up with an answer to this question: How much information does the Soviet Union need, and how long do they need to launch their missiles?”

Martin Hillenbrand, director of the Office of German Affairs at the State Department, noticed that with each additional day Kennedy lived through the Berlin Crisis, “he became more and more impressed with its complexity and its difficulties.” For previous presidents, war was a cruel but desirable alternative to matters like Nazi viciousness or Japanese aggression. But for Kennedy, in Hillenbrand’s view, war had become “almost identical with the problem of human survival.”

With that sense of moment, on October 10 Kennedy called together top administration officials and military commanders in the Cabinet Room to finalize nuclear contingency plans for Berlin. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze brought with him a document entitled
Preferred Sequence of Military Actions in a Berlin Conflict
.

Cool and rational, at age fifty-four Nitze had already become perhaps the most crucial U.S. player behind the scenes influencing policies that guided the development of nuclear weapons and governed their control. Reflecting on the failure of well-meaning actors to avoid conflict, he never forgot his experience as a young boy when he witnessed the beginning of World War I while traveling through his ancestral home of Germany, where he saw Munich crowds cheer the coming disaster.

Assigned by presidents Roosevelt and Truman to survey the impact of World War II strategic bombing, Nitze saw German big cities in ruins and scrutinized the impact of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, nothing shaped his views about the importance of U.S. nuclear capability more than a preoccupation with strategic vulnerability that had grown out of his study of Pearl Harbor.

As Truman’s chief of policy planning after the war, replacing the fired George Kennan, Nitze was the principal author in 1950 of the pivotal paper
United States Objectives and Programs for National Security
, or NSC 68. In a world where the U.S. had lost its nuclear monopoly, NSC 68 provided the rationale for significantly increased defense spending and formed the core of U.S. security policy for the next four decades, with its warning of the “Kremlin’s design for world domination.” Nitze believed that if Truman had not approved the development of the hydrogen bomb in that year, against considerable opposition, “the Soviets would have achieved unchallengeable nuclear superiority by the late 1950s.”

As two Democratic hawks, Acheson and Nitze were chairman and vice chairman of the party’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, which laid the foundation for Kennedy’s defense stance and notions of “flexible response” after his nomination.

Like Acheson, Nitze considered Berlin a proving ground for broader communist objectives to psychologically defeat the West by showing its impotence in the face of increased Soviet capabilities. Thus, he agreed with Acheson that the notion new talks could defuse the crisis was nonsense.

On August 13, Nitze had been at first furious that the U.S. had failed to respond in any way to the Berlin border closure. However, as the Pentagon further considered its response, he saw intelligence indicating that three Soviet divisions and two East German divisions had encircled Berlin. This suggested that Moscow was setting a trap in which the U.S. might knock down the barrier only to see the Soviets occupy all of Berlin. The Pentagon opted not to recommend a move against the Wall for fear it would bring a general war for which the U.S. was unready.

Now it was Nitze’s task to sketch out how the U.S. should get ready in preparation for another Berlin confrontation. After August 13, he was asked to bring together military representatives from Britain, France, and West Germany to agree on how to respond to the next Soviet provocation in Berlin.