“7. Preponderance Lost” in “America’s Cold Warrior”
CHAPTER 7 Preponderance Lost
Under President Lyndon B. Johnson, Paul Nitze rose to the highest-ranking position he would ever achieve in government: deputy secretary of defense. However, as with President John F. Kennedy, Nitze never penetrated Johnson’s inner circle. He spent the first three and a half years of LBJ’s presidency in the lesser position of secretary of the navy. During that time, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara made crucial decisions about the future of US nuclear forces.
McNamara and Nitze interpreted the legacy of the Cuban Missile Crisis in different ways. For McNamara, Soviet leaders realized the stupidity of placing missiles in Cuba; both sides stepped back from the brink of nuclear war, and neither side had any incentive to risk that again. For Nitze, US nuclear superiority and its superior conventional forces surrounding Cuba forced the Soviets to back down. The lesson Nitze took was to continue his quest to sustain US nuclear forces while also building up its conventional capabilities. In other words, nothing about the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis (and the Berlin Crisis) challenged the fundamental conclusion that Nitze had drawn from the US experience in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941: US weakness invited foreign aggression.
To Nitze, it was evident that drawing the wrong lessons from a crisis would beget failure and create vulnerabilities. Soviet leaders would capitalize on the loss of the US position of strength—especially now in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia—where they might not have done so otherwise. That, in turn, would lead to the erosion of the ideals of human freedom and human dignity that NSC-68 propounded in 1950. By 1968, which saw the collapse of the Cold War consensus, these fears appeared to have been well founded. The United States lost the preponderance of power that Nitze was convinced had forced the Soviets to back down in October 1962.
Secretary of the Navy
In the fall of 1963, Nitze reluctantly accepted JFK’s offer to be secretary of the navy. Certain senators had expressed reservations about his attaining his preferred post: as successor to Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatrick. He survived a confirmation hearing in which Congressman Donald Rumsfeld and Senator Strom Thurmond accused him of being soft on communism. Sworn in on November 29, 1963, one week after the assassination of the commander-in-chief in Dallas, Nitze faced a dubious staff. The officer corps knew the new secretary had never served in uniform—let alone in the navy—and word spread that in the Pacific Summary of the Strategic Bombing Survey, he had criticized the navy’s performance in World War II (he had criticized all the services). Early on, Nitze heard that the chief of navy materiel was slow-walking his policy guidance, and telling staffers, “Secretaries of the Navy come and go.” Nitze fired him.1
Nitze initially gained a favorable impression of President Lyndon Johnson, about whom Dean Acheson spoke highly.2 However, summoned to meet with him in the Oval Office, Nitze sat across from Johnson while the latter went about his calls and stole glances at Nitze to see if he was impressed. Paul was not.3 This was not how Clarence Dillon, Will Clayton, or other great men in Nitze’s life acted upon receiving him.
Even though he was no longer routinely attending meetings of the NSC, Nitze worked on nuclear policies and wartime contingencies, such as developing plans for a maritime blockade of the Soviet Union in the event of yet another Berlin Crisis. He savored matters such as anti-submarine warfare, which entailed vast numbers and complexity. Tracking Soviet submarines and formulating plans to repel them presented a quantifiable challenge—one on a grander scale than those Nitze had encountered in bond issuances in the 1930s and the Selective Service and Strategic Bombing Survey in the 1940s.4
Anti-submarine warfare spoke directly to one of the fundamental riddles of nuclear weapons in the Cold War: Should the United States unilaterally forego some areas of advantages to assure the Soviets that it was not seeking a “first strike” advantage? So long as Soviet nuclear submarines were “survivable” in the event of a “nuclear exchange,” that prospect of a “second strike” would deter any US president from launching an attack on Soviet nuclear forces or cities. The perception that Soviet submarines could be vulnerable, however, could motivate Soviet leaders to fear preemptive US attacks and restore “balance” by compensating elsewhere. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets were resolved never again to confront the Americans from a position of weakness.
Nitze downplayed the notion that US unilateral advantages in anti-submarine warfare (or any other category) destabilized the nuclear balance. Such thinking “ignores the point when we had an absolute monopoly of nuclear capability, and we had a stable situation because they are on the political offensive and we are not,” he declared at a meeting of the Navy Policy Council on February 18, 1966. He went on: “therefore it does not contribute [to instability] for us to have nuclear superiority.”5 This did not mean that he opposed agreements to restrict testing or limit arms; it simply meant that any deal had to guarantee US superiority, which was for Nitze the most stabilizing influence conceivable.
Nuclear Strategy After the Cuban Missile Crisis
Nitze’s statement in February 1966 shows his detachment from crucial developments in the strategic arms competition between the Soviet Union and the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. In 1963, the Soviets started constructing a missile defense system (Galosh) to protect Moscow. Meanwhile, Washington was also investigating the possibility of a plan to shoot down any incoming ballistic missiles. In his secretary of the navy confirmation hearing, Nitze stated that the development of such a system “should be prosecuted with all urgency, and I believe it is being prosecuted with all urgency.”6 However, going from ISA to the navy kept him out of the loop on such planning.
It is important to note that ABM systems in the 1960s (as well as 1970s) were blunt instruments. They consisted of nuclear-tipped SAMs that one side would launch at incoming missiles based on rough coordinates provided by large radar systems. They could provide either “area defense” of cities or “point defense” of an array of missile silos. It did not comfort residents of New Jersey to hear that the Pentagon was considering installing ABM launchers that would make targets of their neighborhoods and leave a nuclear cloud above New York City.7
Even had Nitze become deputy secretary of defense under McNamara, his supposedly airtight logic on ABM would have met the harsh reality of “not in my backyard.” As a result, with McNamara as secretary of defense neither the Kennedy nor Johnson administrations moved forward with any urgency. They focused instead on building a US fleet of Minuteman IIIs, which featured three multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) and were scheduled to be ready in the 1970s. This was meant to overwhelm any potential ABM system that the Soviets fielded.
Nitze and McNamara believed that the United States needed a secure retaliatory capability. Yet, Nitze thought this capability to be potent enough to convince Soviet leaders that the United States would retain strategic superiority even after a Soviet first strike. Such a reserve force, as he later put it, “would be a stronger deterrent to Soviet leaders than the risk of losing large numbers of their population.”8 The Soviets had weathered staggering losses during World War II—some twenty-seven million. Based on Nitze’s firsthand 1955 encounter seeing components of the Moscow subway designed to evacuate civilians, he was sure that they would withstand a nuclear attack. “Therefore, it seemed to me that the strongest deterrent to the Kremlin’s initiating a nuclear strike was for them to see for themselves that our capabilities were such that the Soviet Union would come out second-best after the initial phases of a nuclear exchange, even if they struck first.”9 On this point (and many others), Nitze’s views would remain consistent throughout the 1960s.
McNamara’s changed. In 1962, he announced a “no cities” plan. This stressed “counterforce,” and it limited targeting to Soviet military infrastructure. But he realized the immense financial costs this would entail. Such a doctrine required large arsenals of very accurate missiles that could penetrate “hardened” (heavily fortified) missile sites and an intelligence apparatus that could identify all of them. Targeting cities—a “counter value” approach—was cheaper. In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, McNamara regarded as unlikely the prospect of a direct nuclear confrontation with the Soviets. A central tenet of MAD was that both sides had now glimpsed what nuclear war would entail.
Nitze saw no need to revisit his assumptions based on the Cuban Missile Crisis. He continued to believe that the United States required a counterforce capability with which it could preemptively strike Soviet forces before leaders in Moscow could order their launch. Counterforce differed from a “first strike” capability—though the distinctions were sometimes murky. A fundamental asymmetry in the Cold War, at least from Nitze’s perspective, was that US presidents would never accept massive losses when it came to American civilians—yet they could have no confidence that Soviet leaders would not sacrifice a few of their cities in deciding to launch a first strike. Otherwise, why would Moscow have its own ABM system and elaborate evacuation plans? By this logic, MAD was flawed. The United States should not accept it as policy, as McNamara did. Nor was it a “fact of life,” independent of any policy decision—as the eminent political scientist Robert Jervis would later contend.
Neither should it bear upon potential threats outside of the Soviet Union. On May 11, 1963, Nitze wrote McNamara about US nuclear doctrine toward Northeast Asia. While his enclosed paper remains classified, the gist of the covering memo is that the United States needed to approach the use of nuclear weapons in Asia the same way as it would in Europe. In both instances, it ought not to shortchange conventional forces and rely solely on nuclear weapons simply because General Maxwell Taylor said, “we should not permit ourselves to become engaged with the hordes of China.” Such weapons needed to stay on the table as the United States contended with a nuclear-aspirant People’s Republic of China. There was also no substitute for a robust conventional deterrent. “We can’t foretell the exact relationship between Peiping [Beijing] and Moscow that will emerge,” wrote Nitze, “but to my mind it is equally doubtful, or more doubtful, that the U.S.S.R. would stand aside while we defeated China with nuclear weapons, than if we did so with non-nuclear weapons.” The more salient point was the same critique that Nitze had previously lobbed at John Foster Dulles over massive retaliation: “that the Soviets might have less reason to restrain the Chinese in aggressive action if our only possible response were a nuclear response which the circumstances might make politically difficult for us and thus of dubious credibility.”10 Whether on nuclear or nonnuclear capabilities, the United States needed to maintain its ability to project strength globally.
By Nitze’s recollection, McNamara was set on minimizing the prospect of a confrontation with the Soviets after the Cuban Missile Crisis. That meant avoiding decisions about US strategic forces that might appear provocative. Nitze regarded this approach as “in conflict with a policy of maintaining a credible deterrent.”11 He saw no reason to reconfigure the US approach to the Cold War in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. From his perspective, neither McNamara nor Kennedy appreciated long-term strategic planning. “As it was,” he recalled in his memoir, “we tended to be in a perpetual state of reaction to one crisis after another rather than working toward long-term goals.”12
Nitze strove to distinguish himself at navy in the hope that he could return to a position with regular access to the secretary of defense and president. In the fall of 1963, Nitze had worked with Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt to produce a long paper, “Considerations Involved in a Separable First Stage Disarmament Agreement,” which they completed on October 1—shortly before he left ISA. Intended to harmonize the imperatives of safeguarding the United States’ primary national security while sketching out an arms control agreement, it was the genesis for Nitze’s ambition to incorporate offensive and defensive arms into a deal with the Soviets that would preserve US superiority.13 Recovering from a hernia operation, Nitze had scribbled a few pages for bilateral arms negotiations aimed not to limit nuclear testing, which had been the focus of prior failed endeavors, but to constrain strategic nuclear delivery vehicles. The starting point for any negotiations should be that Moscow—not Washington—needed a deal. That, in turn, required the United States to sustain high military spending. Pursuing arms control would require additional US strength and its codification.
McNamara did not act on Nitze’s collaboration with Zumwalt or scribbled notes. As Vietnam increasingly diverted the Johnson administration’s attention and resources, the secretary of defense capped US production of Minuteman missiles at one thousand. Nitze was not part of a team to debate this decision; he merely received notice of it. On May 16, 1964, McNamara wrote Nitze, as well as the secretary of the air force and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the strategic retaliatory force requirements of the United States should be based on two objectives: (1) “Assured Destruction,” or the ability to inflict unacceptable damage to the Soviet Union even after the United States had absorbed a Soviet first strike; and (2) “Damage Limiting,” which relied on a counterforce capability that could neutralize enough Soviet forces to reduce the damage to the American homeland in the event of a Soviet attack.14
Nitze was convinced that limiting Minuteman III at one thousand was a mistake. In the arms control proposal that he and Admiral Zumwalt had worked up, strategic nuclear delivery vehicles were the “units of account” (i.e., the things each side would agree to limit or reduce). Setting a limit of one thousand—or any other number—made sense only if the Soviets reciprocated by building up to that number and stopping. However, there was no indication that this was their intent. Entering into negotiations might lead them to initiate restraint—even before agreeing to a treaty. In an arms negotiation, however, unilateral restraint upfront provided no incentive for the Soviets to agree to a deal.
Bilateral arms control did not top the Johnson administration’s priorities list while Nitze was secretary of the navy. Instead, nonproliferation among nonnuclear states took precedence. The January 21, 1965, “Report by the Committee on Nuclear Proliferation,” overseen by former deputy secretary of defense Roswell Gilpatrick, warned of a “tipping point of no return” regarding the spread of nuclear weapons among states that did not already possess them.15 While the report nominally called for a freeze and reduction of Soviet and US strategic forces, its chief consequence was to set the Johnson administration’s push for the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) into motion. Nitze did not work on these matters, and never devoted much energy toward combating the spread of nuclear weapons to other states.
Far more pressing was his concern that the Soviets had embarked on a massive nuclear buildup and US preponderance was lost. Restoring US preponderance was essential to reduce the Soviet propensity to take risks in Cold War hotspots. It was also essential in allowing US policy makers to take risks—notably, by the 1960s, in the so-called periphery of East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Only from a position of strength could US leaders hope to bring the Soviets to the table.
However, each component of US strength was essential. Were that not the case, the Soviets understood, the US Congress would not authorize money for it. An enduring dilemma in Nitze’s strategic thought during the early and mid-1960s was how to bargain effectively when nothing could be sacrificed at the table. Even when the United States held a nuclear monopoly, and then astounding ratios of nuclear advantage, Soviet leaders would not agree to much of anything. Nitze continued to think that such US strength could be sufficient to compel the Soviets to come to terms.
Vietnam
Nitze’s tenure as secretary of the navy placed him outside the room for the Johnson administration’s escalation of the United States’ military commitment to South Vietnam. When Nitze participated in debates, he claimed it was out of a sense of responsibility either to “his marines” or the crewmembers on surface ships. This is not entirely accurate. He weighed in on Vietnam vigorously, despite never entering LBJ’s inner circle, seldom offering plausible alternatives to the policies he criticized. In the summer of 1964, according to one of his sons, Nitze was adamant that the United States not get bogged down in Vietnam. He informed McNamara in June 1964 that the United States could win the war using exclusively air and naval forces. President Johnson and his top advisers were also keen not to get embroiled in Vietnam in the summer of 1964.16 Had Nitze remained assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, he might have found more traction for his ideas about Vietnam. Yet it is unlikely they would have had much impact in slowing the United States’ ill-fated commitment to South Vietnam.
In June 1965, Nitze visited that country to inspect recently deployed US Marines. When he came home, he told McNamara that it would take another two hundred thousand men to achieve victory and that victory in Vietnam would not be worth the cost to achieve it. McNamara asked Nitze whether the communists would test the United States elsewhere after it pulled out of Vietnam. Nitze said yes. Could he foresee that situation being any more manageable? Nitze admitted: “No, I can’t.”
In a White House meeting about Vietnam on July 22, 1965, LBJ asked his secretary of the navy, “Paul, what is your view?” Nitze responded that if “we couldn’t beat the VC, the shape of the world will change.” The perception of a weakened United States would resonate in other Cold War hotspots—emboldening the communists. Citing the Philippines and Greece as recent examples where guerillas had lost, Nitze told the president that only by providing more men to counter insurgents in South Vietnam could the odds of success increase.17
In his memoir, Nitze portrayed himself as a Cassandra in Vietnam. He purported to have known from the start that it was a mistake and claimed his only failure was one of imagination. To his answer to McNamara’s question—“No, I can’t”—he regretted not following up: “But we can come up with contingency plans, just like in Berlin.” Elsewhere, Nitze acknowledged that he regarded the situation in Vietnam as dynamic and the conflict ultimately as winnable. “[I]n 1965 when I went out [to Vietnam],” he put it in interviews for the memoir, “I took a very pessimistic view of the situation. Then in 1966 when I went out, I was really very much surprised with the progress that the Marines had made, the Army had made.” The tide appeared to be turning. “It was tough work, but we were making much greater progress at it than I had thought in 1965 we would be able to make.”18
As with Secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown, Nitze was not involved in any of the operational decisions—yet McNamara respected the judgments of both and invited them to offer fresh ideas. “I fully recognize that as service Secretaries you are not in the chain of command with respect to the air operations against North Vietnam,” McNamara told them at one point. “But … I would like each of you separately to create a small task force of people you have confidence in in your respective services and take an independent look at the air campaign against North Vietnam.”19 Nitze selected a small team and threw himself at the challenge. Crunching numbers, useful in his earlier work on the Strategic Bombing Survey, made him less confident about coming up with a strategy to win expeditiously. “We could compute the number of sorties and the tonnage of ammunition that had to be dropped in relationship to the amount of tonnage on those trains. It turned out that you had to drop four tons of ammunition against those targets for every ton of war materiel you destroyed. You compute the cost of getting a ton of ammunition dropped against the antiaircraft and every other goddamn thing up there to get the figures, and you know it is a mug’s game.”20 There was no short-term solution. “With respect to the question of how long it would take to really defeat the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, I think our estimate was 7 years.”
On February 10, 1966, George Kennan delivered a day-long testimony to the Senate in opposition to the Vietnam War. Dapper and widely regarded as the mastermind behind the US containment strategy against communism, Kennan was no hippie. Whatever reservations he expressed, his testimony did not lead to different policy outcomes. Nitze regarded such remonstrations counterproductive. “Certainly in the later days of the Vietnamese war, we had a Congress and public that thoroughly disapproved of our policy in the Vietnamese war, and the upshot was disastrous,” as he later put it. “From the standpoint of what happened on the ground in Vietnam, I believe that war could have been won. The thing that made it impossible was, in fact, the lack of domestic support.”21 He singled out newspaper journalists and correspondents such as David Halberstam, whom he accused of ignoring the real story and writing The Best and the Brightest—perhaps the most famous book about US policy making and Vietnam—“based on every rumor” he had ever heard about McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and the rest of Nitze’s colleagues in government.
Missile Defense, Nuclear Weapons, and NATO
Paul Nitze was sixty years old on July 1, 1967, when he was finally promoted to the position of deputy secretary of defense. He inherited a more substantive portfolio on Vietnam and oversight of the Pentagon, which, in 2023, is still the largest office building in the world. Later that month, news came that the People’s Republic of China—what one scholar has termed the “rogue state” of its era—had tested a hydrogen bomb. US defense planners regarded the leaders of that country as irrational.22 At least Khrushchev had backed down in the face of superior strength and resolve in October 1962 rather than wage nuclear war; Mao inspired no such confidence that he would do the same. The perceived Chinese threat led McNamara to recommend—and President Johnson to sign off on—a “thin” missile defense system, Sentinel, which would hopefully protect the US homeland from a Chinese nuclear attack.
Soviet armed forces, in their 1967 annual military parade, introduced a missile (the SS-9) more menacingly than anything ever before seen. US intelligence estimated that it could carry a warhead of twenty-five megatons. In subsequent monitoring of Soviet SS-9 tests with tests of their MIRVs, US analysts interpreted the targeting pattern as matching the layout of US Minuteman silos in the US heartland.23 In other words, the mission of the SS-9 appeared to be taking out the US land-based nuclear deterrent.
The appearance of the SS-9—not the narrow avoidance of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis—led the US side to get serious about bilateral arms control between Washington and Moscow. Throughout 1967, President Johnson attempted to persuade Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin to commence formal negotiations to curb the nuclear arms race. At a summit in Glassboro, New Jersey, that June, Johnson got nowhere by citing the Galosh defensive system around Moscow as an “escalation” in that arms race. Kosygin, who was still jockeying with Leonid Brezhnev for control of the Kremlin following their ouster of Nikita Khrushchev, had little incentive to move forward with arms control.24
Nitze opposed reaching out to the Soviets from such a position of weakness. Not only had the United States foregone a strategic advantage but, since the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it had also allowed the NATO alliance to deteriorate. Charles de Gaulle had taken France out of its unified command structure. By 1967, other Western European nations could quickly have decided to follow France’s example. In a Senior Interagency Group meeting on October 19, 1967, Nitze “stressed the importance of progress in reviewing the strength of the Alliance” and “agreed wholeheartedly with the conclusion … that a lack of action in December would be a major failure.”25
Ultimately, the Harmel Report—so named for former Belgian foreign minister Pierre Harmel—was approved on December 14, 1967. It listed specific guidance for strategic consultations, shared commitments to spend, and initiatives for East–West negotiations such as the Mutual and Balanced Forces Talks. These ingenuities helped sustain NATO over the long term. However, closer to home, the United States’ domestic strength was deteriorating. Two days after the Senior Interagency Group on the Harmel Report that October, Nitze found himself with the unlikely task of organizing the defense of the Pentagon against protesters attempting to perform an exorcism, levitate the building, infiltrate it, and incite a violent response that television cameras would capture. On November 29, President Johnson announced that he was nominating McNamara as the next director of the World Bank, effectively firing him as secretary of defense.
The Tumultuous 1968
Nitze regarded himself to be the natural contender to succeed McNamara. His unwillingness to cultivate LBJ made this impossible. On January 19, 1968, President Johnson nominated Clark Clifford for the post. “I could tell that he [Nitze] was exceedingly put out at having been passed over for the job that now fell to me,” Clifford later recalled. The new secretary “was all the more impressed by [Nitze’s] sense of duty.”26 Clifford’s longtime aide, George Elsey, later conceded that Nitze had been the more qualified—the problem was that Johnson did not like him.
Clifford was in for a tough stretch. On January 21, 1968, North Korean Commandos snuck south of the thirty-eighth parallel and attempted to raid the Blue House, the South Korean equivalent of the White House. Two days later, North Korean forces seized the USS Pueblo, capturing eighty US sailors and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment. At an NSC meeting that day, McNamara told Clifford, sitting in while awaiting confirmation: “this is what it is like on a typical day. We had an inadvertent intrusion into Cambodia. We lost a B-52 with four H-bombs aboard. We had an intelligence ship captured by the North Koreans.”27
Nitze had personally approved the ill-fated Pueblo mission and was now frantically coming up with options for how to respond. McNamara assured Johnson that Nitze and his team were engaging the problem. Not only was the fate of the US crew members at stake but there was also the prospect that the North Koreans would hand over to the Soviets the KW-7 encryption device onboard the ship. Particularly amid the recent North Korean attempt to decapitate the leadership of South Korea, a military rescue attempt could quickly escalate into a second US intervention on the Korean peninsula.
Nitze regarded North Korea’s actions as linked to the broader Cold War. He figured the communists were coordinating efforts to pressure Washington to “take a weaker position on Vietnam negotiations.” While the Johnson administration had been pursuing the so-called San Antonio formula that linked bombing pauses to peace overtures, Nitze insisted that US firmness be made clear. “Thus, it might be necessary for us to ask Congress for additional authority to take military action to make clear to the Soviets that they must not misunderstand our attitude toward the Pueblo incident.”28
Thinking it unwise to retaliate directly against the Soviets for something the North Koreans had done, Nitze was willing to risk escalation with North Korea, so long as the United States could present to the world a clear case for which side instigated the affair. The vessel had been operating in international waters, yet it was—after all—a spy ship. He proposed a plan that could justify taking action and was open to instigating a more explicit justification for the action. In an NSC meeting on January 25, Nitze suggested that President Johnson send a destroyer to where the Pueblo had thrown overboard its gear, and deploy divers to retrieve it. “This is completely legal and it is possible that the North Koreans would take action against this vessel,” he said. “If they did we would be in a good position in the eyes of world opinion to retaliate.” At the very least, the United States should take some action to get the ship back, and retaliate for its seizure.29 Failure to demonstrate resolve in this case would hinder the Johnson administration’s ability to do so elsewhere. That would encourage the Soviets and North Vietnamese to take further risks.
While the stakes were not nearly as high as in the Cuban Missile Crisis—even though eighty Americans were being held hostage—the Pueblo affair substantiated Nitze’s takeaways from October 1962 onward. The United States was now operating from a position of weakness, since it had unilaterally limited production of the mainstay of its nuclear arsenal, the Minuteman, and was attempting (unsuccessfully) to extricate itself from a seemingly unwinnable war in Vietnam. (It is clear that he felt no personal responsibility for the Pueblo incident.) The Pueblo affair dragged on for nearly a year, when US servicemen were released (and the ship remains, to this day, in North Korea). It was not even the administration’s most tremendous headache by the end of that week in January 1968. On January 31, North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces launched, in the midst of their Lunar New Year, the “Tet Offensive.” While this turned out to be a military defeat for them, the sheer scale of the offensive was shocking, raising expectations of further coordinated offensives.
LBJ’s political fortunes plummeted. In the New Hampshire primary on March 12, Senator Eugene McCarthy came within striking distance of winning—leading Senator Robert Kennedy to announce his own candidacy on March 16. Nitze bailed on LBJ. He wrote the president that day saying he would not testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At Clifford’s insistence, Nitze struck out the sentence in which he offered his resignation.
Johnson was understandably furious. He complained about Nitze to Senator Richard Russell in a phone call on March 22. “Refused to testify … said he didn’t believe in the policy. Did not think we ought to be in Vietnam. Just wouldn’t do it. Just insubordinate. Wrote me a letter.” Senator Russell proposed that Johnson fire Nitze. “Well, I would,” the president responded, “but Clifford said he just can’t do it so quickly by himself.”30 In a subsequent meeting with Generals Earle Wheeler and Creighton Abrams, Johnson cited Nitze as one of the “civilians … cutting our guts out.”31 On March 31, LBJ announced new efforts to scale down the US commitment to Vietnam and withdrew as a candidate for reelection.
Arms Control: SALT, ABM, and NPT
With McNamara gone and Johnson a lame duck, Nitze—still in office—embraced the prospect of shaping strategic arms policies. Shortly after taking over from McNamara, Secretary of Defense Clifford had asked Nitze to sketch out US goals in future arms negotiations with the Soviets. Nitze gathered together Secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown, General Royal Allison, an assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assistant secretary of defense for ISA Paul Warnke, and Nitze’s deputy on nuclear negotiations, Morton Halperin, a young Harvard professor who had studied with the renowned strategist Thomas Schelling.32 On a separate occasion, Nitze discussed the role of ABM with Albert Wohlstetter, the University of Chicago professor and longtime consultant to the RAND Corporation.
When it came to strategic defenses, Nitze expressed qualified support. Area defense was impossible. Point defense could enhance “strategic stability” by reducing Soviet incentive to launch an attack. In other words, the ability to defend US Minuteman silos against the new “counterforce” SS-9s would neutralize their perceived first-strike advantage. Without a rationale for heavy missiles, the Soviets might be inclined to negotiate to limit or reduce their number. US spending on ABM could pay dividends if it led to fewer Soviet heavy missiles, which, in turn, would mean fewer US missiles to counter them. During these preparatory discussions for what became SALT, Nitze chose not to go after MIRVs directly.
Congressional attempts to cut funding for ABM only emboldened Nitze to support it. He saw two reasons to keep it. The first was that the United States would be better off building a robust system. The second was that it could serve as a bargaining chip in negotiations to get the Soviets to reduce their strategic offensive forces. By 1968, Washington had few other scraps to offer. An acute awareness of that fact led Nitze to take a dim view of whether to ban testing nuclear weapons underwater in the 1968 NPT. He believed it vital for the United States to understand undersea “nuclear effects.” Given that, at a meeting of the Committee on Principals on May 14, 1968, Nitze asked “What kind of an area would the US want as a platform for its strategic nuclear delivery vehicles?” “Would we want it to be small, limited, and closer to cities?” The answer was probably no. Since the Soviet Union had a larger land mass and the United States had better access to the sea, the “sea was, therefore, a better place for the US to put nuclear weapons than for the Soviet Union.”33 Sympathetic to the need for a US position on this, Secretary Nitze said that more precise staff work was needed.
Nitze presumed that the Soviets would seize upon any loophole, no matter how small. “Under the Outer Space Treaty, the Soviets could orbit everything but the nuclear warhead,” he warned at a meeting on June 3. “Under the [ACDA] proposal, the Soviets could deploy the weapon system on the seabed, to be armed with nuclear weapons at a time of their choosing—without (until the moment of arming) there being a violation of the treaty. They could aim for a first strike capability.” Unlike the Department of Defense’s support for the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which “was to avoid further contamination of the atmosphere,” Nitze suggested that any potential restrictions on underwater would lock in Soviet advantages.34 His bottom line was that the US side could not countenance anything in the NPT that restricted its freedom of action. “I believe it would be unwise to take a definite position on an arms control proposal banning weapons of mass destruction until we have a clearer determination of what kind of proposal, if any, is in the best interests of the United States,” Nitze wrote ACDA director William Foster on June 7, 1968.35
On July 1, 1968, sixty-two countries signed the NPT. As self-declared nuclear powers, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union agreed not to help nonnuclear powers develop such arsenals. They also made a broad commitment to reducing their nuclear stockpiles. With momentum building for bilateral strategic arms negotiations, Nitze continued to press for a firmer articulation of US and allied objectives. “Deputy Secretary Nitze emphasized that we must understand all the facts on any positions before they are adopted,” according to notes of a July 8 meeting. “For example, the proposal to freeze land-based ICBMs was, in fact, freezing the launch holes. Since the Soviet holes are larger than the US holes, they could exploit these to Soviet advantage.” Even though “verification might be difficult, throw weight might be a better criterion for control than launchers,” he said. “One must assume that in time the US would lose its technological advantage.”36
On August 16, 1968, Walt Rostow submitted to President Johnson an initial SALT proposal (to which Nitze had assented) to “require cessation of the initiation of construction of any additional strategic offensive land-based missile launchers as of September 1, 1968.” The Soviets would still be permitted to complete any launchers under construction as of that date. However, “Under no circumstances would either side be permitted to deploy more than 1,200 ICBM launchers.”37 The aspirational calculation was that the Soviets would accept the logic of the US side that setting limits on equal launchers enhanced strategic stability.
The problem was that the United States had no room to maneuver. It could not give up numbers or classes of weapons. It had already capped its Minuteman production. And, excepting Polaris, which was regarded as vital to maintaining a second-strike capability, the United States was not building new systems. That the prospective US negotiators had few cards to play proved to be a moot point. On August 20, 1968, Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia, making it exceedingly unlikely that bilateral arms negotiations between Washington and Moscow would commence that year.
In an August 22 meeting of the ExComm, Secretary of State Dean Rusk conceded that prospects were grim for the commencement of SALT that year. “[I]t was not the purpose of the Executive Committee meeting to consider that [the situation in Czechoslovakia made negotiations impossible],” but rather “to give the President the necessary material to go ahead with the talks if and when he desired.” Considerable obstacles remained. The intelligence community had little insight into which Soviet antiaircraft systems could be upgraded to an ABM capability. “Mr. Foster asked whether the Soviets informing us that it was not an ABM would satisfy us,” according to the record of the conversation. “[Deputy] Secretary Nitze said it might be useful for them to tell us this, and Secretary Brown said there might be some questions which could be answered which would give us increased confidence.”38
Even if LBJ had prioritized talks after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, internal discussions such as those on August 22 hardly inspired confidence that his administration would have been prepared for them. For example, “Secretary Rusk asked whether we would be in favor of an agreement that banned all ABM’s [sic] if the Soviets offered this. Secretary Clifford said not necessarily, since we had to worry about China. [Deputy] Secretary Nitze said it might be in our interest, but that was not obvious at this time.”39 More than five years after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US side still was not ready to articulate what it wanted to achieve from strategic arms negotiations with the Soviets—should they commence.
Meanwhile, Nitze’s relationship with Clifford was rapidly deteriorating. The latter reversed his initial fervor for winning the war in Vietnam and sought a peace agreement. Tensions boiled over at a September 16 meeting in which Clifford recounted LBJ’s plans to reach out to Kosygin on strategic arms negotiations if “Czech stays quiet for a week”—and to encourage the Soviets to press the North Vietnamese to reciprocate actions when LBJ halted the bombing. “Nitze at this pt. explodes!” according to George Elsey’s notes. “It’s asinine—it’s ‘pissing’ away an advantage we have! It’ll undo the N.Atlantic alliance if LBJ gets into bed with Kosygin.” Elsey went on to record:
CMC [Secretary Clifford] expresses astonishment at Nitze’s objections—“You, Paul, wanted to get the Russians into [the] act.”
“Yes,” says Nitze, “but that was before Czechoslovakia & before NVN [arms] started to move!!!”
Elsey & Warnke argue that this won’t work because timetable won’t work; it’ll take too long. We’ll have an election before you can get the Russians in!
CMC grows irritated! “I’m for anything that will get the Pres. to stop the bombing!”
Nitze—“No, I’m not!! Not if it means doing things contrary to our national interest! Wrecking NATO by playing footsie with Kosygin wld do so!”
Nitze explodes again: “I feel passionately, not to jeopardize US boys, ever, any time, any place & there is no need now to play into Soviet hands & it would terribly … to do so!”40
On November 3, 1968, three days before the presidential election, Clifford expressed exasperation with Nitze’s claim that the South Vietnamese had been promised to hold out for a better deal under Nixon. The meeting dissolved in frustration: the war in Vietnam had consumed all the energy and brought down Johnson’s presidency. “(The longer CMC talks the madder [Clifford] gets at S.V.Nam—he’s disgusted & ready to dump SVNam. ‘Screw You’ is all he says he’d tell them.),” according to Elsey’s notes. He continued, “I do not believe we ought to be in V Nam,” “I think our being there is a mistake,” and Thieu’s backtracking “demonstrates to me why I think it was a calamity.” Nitze responded, “I thought it was a mistake in 65 & I said so, but that’s irrelevant history. But we are there & we have had 29,000 men killed & we have a military success [sic] & now I don’t want to throw it away by angry, ill-chosen reactions!”41
Nitze felt no outward remorse about the fracturing of the United States during eight years of the Democratic administrations in which he served. Three of his children participated in a protest that surrounded the Pentagon in 1967—during which Nitze was tasked with coming up with a defense of that very building—yet he did not dwell on the personal side of the United States’ upheaval. “The student revolts of the sixties were a worldwide phenomenon comprising many subgroups with a wide range of asserted grievances,” Nitze later recalled. “The words that excited many of the young of those days are now meaningless even to those who said them twenty years earlier. The vaguely Marxist authors whom they considered inspirational, such as Dr. Herbert Marcuse and Noam Chomsky, are no longer read.”42
During his time as deputy secretary of defense, Nitze focused on Vietnam and arms control. He also oversaw over a million employees and represented the Pentagon in interagency efforts ranging from Africa to the Perkins Report on Foreign Aid, to negotiating fighter jet sales to Israel after the 1967 war, to environmental matters dealing with the continental shelf.
There was also sensitive intelligence work during an era when the executive branch operated basically without inhibition. Nitze collaborated smoothly and represented the Department of Defense on a par with director of the CIA Richard Helms in the “303 Committee,” which oversaw covert actions. “I think you can emphasize that this is one of the less cumbersome, more effective, tight working groups in government with Rostow, Bohlen, Nitze, and Helms, men who have worked closely over the years and understand each other’s problems. There is no friction and [instead] a sense of accomplishment,” NSC staffer Jessup wrote Rostow in June 1968.43 While it remains unclear precisely what they did, Nitze intimated later that he worked closely with Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher to oversee computer databases used to profile and discredit radical leaders in the anti-war effort. While the details are murky, they appeared to be running a sort of domestic surveillance operation.
Contrary to Paul Nitze’s assertion, college students still read the work of Noam Chomsky. Nitze was not famous enough to find himself in the crosshairs of the US counterculture in the 1960s. Yet he was the living embodiment of the architecture of the Cold War consensus that the Tet Offensive shattered in January 1968. Back in 1950 he had crafted NSC-68, which called for a global and militarized Cold War and stuck around through its implementation. He felt no remorse for Vietnam and its consequences—most notably a fractured United States. Nitze had been left out of the inner circle that decided to increase the United States’ commitment to South Vietnam. Then, when he devised plans that he was sure would turn the tide, he failed to persuade.
Richard Nixon’s November 5, 1968, victory did not allow Nitze to rest. As with the election of 1952, he considered his national security work above politics. He was also deeply frustrated by the trajectory of the Johnson administration—just as he had been by the end of the Truman administration. For Paul Nitze the highest tragedy was not Vietnam but rather that the United States had failed to preserve the strategic advantages that forced the Soviets to back down in the Cuban Missile Crisis. This allowed the Soviets to seize the opportunity of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam to continue a buildup that he was convinced began even before October 1962.
The lesson from failure in 1963–68 was the same as from crises in 1961–63: US strength brought stability; US weakness brought instability. Individuals working in the field of national security should apply these lessons toward the execution of better policies. The United States had lost its preponderance of power and could restore it only through imaginative approaches to nuclear matters. Here Nitze relied on his vast knowledge of US nuclear history for the remainder of his career—a decade and a half in government, even after he turned sixty. With the possible exception of Henry Kissinger, when it came to nuclear weapons and US national security, Nitze was the closest to being in the middle of concentric circles of theorists, academics, and policy makers. And, while Kissinger’s portfolio was about to expand exponentially beyond it, Nitze’s narrowed exclusively to nuclear weapons.
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