CHAPTER 6 Nuclear Crises, 1961–1963

President John F. Kennedy

From his position at SAIS at the start of the 1960 Democratic presidential primary, Nitze favored Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey. His donation to the senator’s campaign paid the salary of Humphrey’s principal foreign policy adviser, Ernest W. Lefever, a former SAIS postdoctoral fellow. When Humphrey withdrew after losing to JFK in the West Virginia primary, Nitze threw his support behind the senator from Massachusetts. “It was a charmed circle, a charmed group, entitled to the charmed life by virtue of beauty and grace,” Nitze later said of the Kennedys and their entourage. “[W]ere they really that beautiful, witty, and graceful?” Forty years later, he was uncertain.¹

Nitze’s esteem for JFK increased when he testified before then-senator John F. Kennedy’s Subcommittee on African Affairs in 1959. “I was impressed by John at that first meeting,” Nitze later recounted. “He listened carefully, absorbing information and ideas for use when the occasions arose.” In addition, JFK was “young, intelligent, attractive, and energetic,” and Nitze admired these attributes.²

On November 9, 1960, one day after JFK defeated Vice President Richard Nixon in the presidential election, Nitze submitted a report, “Basic Strategic Judgments,” which he had coauthored at Kennedy’s behest.³ The portion dealing with nuclear weapons was drawn from a talk he had given in Asilomar, California, in 1960.⁴ This report posed the question—one easier to ask than answer—of whether the United States should secure a “win” capability or merely seek to deny the Soviets from achieving that advantage. “Basic Strategic Judgments” also called for a top-level appointee on nuclear matters who would report to the president through the secretary of state. William Foster would come to fill just such a position when Congress authorized the creation of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) in 1961.

President-elect Kennedy arranged for Nitze to work out of an office in the Department of Treasury and monitor a plunge in the dollar’s value. He also tasked Nitze to lead a small team that included the outgoing secretaries of state and defense, Christian Herter and Thomas Gates, to evaluate a proposal for “Missile X,” a road-mobile system for intermediate-range missiles that NATO operators would drive on highways in West Germany, Belgium, and Holland. “Mr. Kennedy asked me to hold the hands of Gates and Herter,” was how Nitze remembered the circumstances. “We came to the conclusion that [Missile X] was a bad idea.”⁵

Nitze also influenced the selection of JFK’s cabinet, a process led by President Harry Truman’s fixer Clark Clifford and the highly respected former defense secretary, Robert Lovett, who had supported Nitze during his prior tenure as undersecretary of state. For the position of secretary of state in 1961, Nitze advocated for his friend Dean Rusk, the former assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. As president of the Rockefeller Foundation during the Eisenhower administration, Rusk had authorized a grant to establish the Foreign Affairs Research Center at SAIS—obviously a Nitze project. Emblematic of the close nexus among policy makers and private foundations, Lovett, the chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, saw to it that Rusk—who, unlike many of his Cold War peers, grew up poor—received a “generous termination allowance.”⁶

President-elect Kennedy initially offered Nitze to choose among the posts of undersecretary of state for economic affairs, national security adviser, or deputy secretary of defense. Nitze rejected the position of undersecretary of state for economic affairs because he held the equivalent office during the Truman administration. He turned down national security adviser, believing it to be a position of little importance (JFK’s second choice, McGeorge Bundy, turned it into one of the most influential positions in the US government). Nitze chose deputy secretary of defense. However, when the incoming secretary of defense Robert McNamara insisted that the choice of deputy was his to make, he favored Roswell Gilpatrick. Robert Lovett called Nitze to offer him the consolation prize of assistant secretary of defense for international affairs.

ISA

Nitze seemed unperturbed by this downgrade to the same position that John Foster Dulles had offered him in 1953. (The earlier offer had been withdrawn owing to conservative backlash.) While it undoubtedly displeased Nitze that Lovett—rather than the president-elect—made the phone call, he soldiered on. As always, Nitze stayed close to those wielding the levers of influence. His job title was of less consequence.

The Pentagon’s Office of International Security Affairs, or ISA, had gained a reputation as a miniature hybrid of the Departments of State and Defense. Crafting military assistance packages for those countries that the United States deemed susceptible to communist penetration, for instance, required diplomatic engagement with foreign counterparts on top of defense planning and bureaucratic maneuvering. In later years, as the Office of the Secretary of Defense grew even larger, the position would become subordinate to the under secretary of defense for policy, which was created in 1978. In 1961, leading ISA meant that Nitze enjoyed a direct line to McNamara, accompanied him to the White House for meetings of the NSC, and managed a team equivalent in size to that which he had directed on the Policy Planning Staff during the period 1950–53.

Meanwhile, the new holder of Nitze’s previous job directing the Policy Planning Staff, MIT professor Walt Rostow, had recently written The Stages of Economic Growth: A Noncommunist Manifesto and now set out to write a basic US national security strategy. Though Nitze took pride in his grasp of economic matters, he steered clear of debating. At ISA, he directed his energies toward nuclear policy and its implications for US alliances. But that was not all. Nitze regarded ISA as the focal point of national security policy, following in the lineage of forerunners such as the War Department’s Operations and Plans Division during World War II and the Joint Staff and Policy Planning Staff during the early Cold War. This would supplant what Nitze considered to be the “ad hoc” manner of John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower, and Charles Wilson during the previous eight years.

“During Mr. Kennedy’s regime, policy was really made—well, it wasn’t made by the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department,” Nitze later recounted. “It was not really made by ‘Mac’ Bundy and the NSC staff, and it was not being made by the [military] services. Therefore—We in the ISA would have to supply the missing component when it was necessary, and we would try to do that by working as closely as we could with people in the State Department, either the Policy Planning Staff or people in the regional bureaus, and with the military—the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff], the Joint Staff—the Joint Strategic Survey Committee, and relying on information from the CIA.”⁷ Nitze answered to no one except his immediate boss, Secretary of Defense McNamara, who, in turn, answered to the president.

Everyone found dealing with McNamara taxing. Nitze once confided to a friend that McNamara caused him to spend a week in the hospital. Nevertheless, they started with similar outlooks. Both had worked the statistics side of US strategic bombing during World War II and shared faith that the rigorous application of logic could solve seemingly intractable problems. In his memoir and elsewhere, Nitze told a story that encapsulates the compatibility of his way of thinking with that of McNamara—whether or not they came to the same conclusions. While attempting to reconcile competing positions on how to set up sensor arrays to monitor nuclear explosions (in support of a potential approach to the Soviets on a test ban treaty), Nitze lamented to McNamara that different scientists were giving him different answers. McNamara recommended that he write down fifty important issues on the back of fifty notecards, gather together every expert on each topic, and then make fifty decisions. Nitze complied. “Policy evolved ineluctably from the decisions on the cards,” he would later put it—though he would also admit that a number of the resultant decisions later proved to be wrongheaded.⁸

Nitze’s role in national security did not change much from the eight years he spent “outside” of government. He worked on many of the same topics. And because he had participated in many governmental study groups during the Eisenhower administration, he was better prepared than McNamara, Rostow, or Bundy, especially regarding US intelligence and military capabilities. Moreover, he continued to oversee the preparation of reports about threats and opportunities. The main difference was that now he wrote primarily for the president via the secretary of defense.

Nitze never ingratiated himself with the Kennedys. Nor did he become a friend to the chiefs of the armed services who distrusted Kennedy and disliked McNamara. Chief of staff of the US Air Force Curtis LeMay never forgave Nitze for his work on the Strategic Bombing Survey in which he criticized the US air campaign against Japan that LeMay himself had designed. While visiting Strategic Air Command Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, Nitze apparently lectured LeMay about Bernard Brodie’s central thesis in The Absolute Weapon—that atomic weapons would deter wars, not win them.⁹ “This fellow Paul Nitze is one of our greatest headaches,” stated an “unnamed general”—potentially LeMay—in Newsweek a short time later. “He wants to throw the A-bombs out and fight with bayonets. That’s what all that limited-war talk is about.”¹⁰

Nitze was not proposing to throw out atomic weapons. US strategic (i.e., nuclear) superiority was, he thought, necessary but not sufficient to waging—and ultimately winning—the Cold War. Only from a position of strength could US presidents repel Soviet efforts to isolate West Berlin, encourage revolutionary nationalism in Africa and Southeast Asia, and—most importantly—create a forward base on the island of Cuba. Building up strength meant sustaining nuclear and nonnuclear capabilities to deter any conceivable form of Soviet risk-taking.

Bay of Pigs

On January 22, 1961, Paul Nitze attended a principals-level meeting about Cuba, where Fidel Castro had seized power in 1959 and later proclaimed himself the leader of a socialist revolution in league with Moscow.¹¹ Two days later, Nitze met with President Kennedy, National Security Advisor Bundy, and Secretary of State Rusk to discuss the situation in Laos, where the United States was supporting General Nosavan Phoumi’s faltering efforts to defeat the communist-led Pathet Lao. (The new president faced the decision of whether the United States should intervene.)¹² Finally, when it came to the Congo, where Patrice Lumumba had been executed on January 17, 1961, the uranium-rich country teetered on the brink of civil war while Moscow and Beijing vied for the support of its left-wing factions. Here Nitze favored strengthening the UN mandate. He endorsed the position of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States could intervene militarily without jeopardizing its commitments to Europe and Asia, and recommended devising a “fall-back position” for measures short of US military involvement.¹³

When it came to Cuba, Nitze supported swift action. CIA officer C. Tracy Barnes relayed to Deputy Director Richard Bissell: “A comment by Paul Nitze to me on 23 February to the effect that as far as he was concerned, we should go ahead and do it.”¹⁴ While “it” is unclear, one possibility is the plan that Barnes—who had crafted the Eisenhower administration’s successful efforts to topple Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in 1954—was developing to overthrow Castro.

Had Nitze reservations about Operation Zapata, codename for the Bay of Pigs invasion, he did not convey them to the president in a meeting on April 4 at which Senator William Fulbright expressed his own skepticism.¹⁵ He later recalled that counterinsurgency expert Edward Landsdale had told him it was “badly organized, poorly prepared, and, on its current course doomed to failure.”¹⁶ The infamous effort, which would prove damaging to Kennedy, went ahead on April 17.

Neither Nitze, nor apparently anyone else in the new administration, considered the spectacular failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion to prompt a scaling back of an ongoing campaign to weaken Castro. On April 24, Nitze sent McNamara a memo in response to a series of proposals from Policy Planning director Walter Rostow, among which Nitze supported the following: “(a) to quietly build up the internal capabilities of Latin American countries, (b) to develop all possible intelligence on the Castro regime, (c) to exploit this intelligence, (d) to develop a contingency plan, and (e) to think again before acting in the old grooves.”¹⁷ While Nitze opposed making public US intentions toward the island, he was committed to ongoing attempts to degrade or destroy the Castro regime. Asked by the president to chair an interagency task force on Cuba, Nitze submitted a report on May 4 citing the dangers that Castro posed to Central America and evaluating measures to contain Castro or drive him back to the hills whence he came. In an NSC meeting on May 5, Nitze reported to President Kennedy that “the Navy could blockade the island but results would not be immediate but rather long-range, and in the course thereof unfavorable world reaction would probably accrue.”¹⁸ As Admiral Arleigh Burke concluded in his readout of that meeting: “It was decided that sooner or later we probably would have to intervene in Cuba, but that now is not the time.”¹⁹

Vienna Summit

When the two men met in Vienna in June 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev lambasted President Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs. The Kennedy administration’s ongoing attempts to destabilize Castro likely contributed to Khrushchev’s sense that he needed to escalate over both Berlin and Cuba—starting with verbal belligerence. In 1958, Khrushchev had triggered the so-called Berlin Crisis by threatening to sign a separate treaty with the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) that would abrogate the rights of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to maintain troops in West Berlin. When Kennedy met with Khrushchev in Vienna, his thinking was that the United States and its NATO allies could not credibly pledge to defend West Berlin using only conventional forces.

Only the threat of using nuclear weapons could defend Berlin. This reality provided the Soviets with a propaganda advantage—they could legitimately contend that the West would be the first to use nuclear weapons in a potential war. This, in turn, could hamstring US efforts to shore up even its own hemisphere. A key factor behind the indecisiveness over the Bay of Pigs—i.e., whether to provide US air support—was that nearly everyone in the Kennedy administration expected that Khrushchev would respond to a full-out invasion of Cuba by taking action in West Berlin. During a moment that Soviet notetakers purposely left out of the transcripts, Khrushchev dared Kennedy to act: “If the US wants to start a war over Germany, let it be so; perhaps the USSR should sign a peace treaty right away and get it over with.”²⁰

At the Vienna Summit, Nitze represented the Department of Defense in a meeting between Secretary of State Rusk and the Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko over whether a “troika” of nuclear monitors (the United States, Soviet Union, and one neutral country) could verify an agreement on limiting nuclear testing. Gromyko stonewalled. From witnessing this and picking up on Khrushchev’s badgering of Kennedy, Nitze intuited that the Soviets were emboldened to take risks because conventional and nuclear balance trends favored their side. US capabilities had to reinforce Kennedy’s stated positions. When Nitze saw a memorandum of a conversation between Kennedy and Khrushchev, he scribbled next to a reference to US objectives: “This would not be possible if there were a further shift in the balance of power to the Soviet side.”²¹

The “further shift” was deliberate. In the first six years of the Eisenhower administration, Nitze witnessed what he considered a capitulation: lax planning for strategic capabilities. He took at least some credit for improvements made in the final two years. This did not mean that the United States had lost its position of strategic superiority: it foretold that the Soviets expected that to happen by the end of the 1960s. While Nitze had made similar assessments in 1946, 1950, and 1957—incorrectly as it turns out—that did not necessarily mean he was wrong in 1961. Nor was he an outlier within an administration led by a president who famously stated in his inaugural address: “only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.”²²

Nitze welcomed President Kennedy’s acknowledgment of the present danger. But he did not, himself, have to face voters. Consistent with his views from earlier years—in which he led the crafting of the Summary Report (Pacific War), NSC-68, and the Gaither Report—Paul Nitze insisted that Americans could and ought to pay much more for a defense posture to deter the Soviets from attacking Berlin or anywhere else. Neither tax cuts nor domestic spending on public works or health care resonated with him. As before, Nitze’s reports landed on the desks of publicly elected officials who had to stand before their constituents and assure them that their taxes yielded tangible results. After eight years of the Eisenhower administration that built thousands of nuclear weapons and succeeded in balancing the budget and reducing military expenditures, the Kennedy administration passed a large tax cut and asked for more troops to defend West Berlin. The objective was to stimulate economic growth and pivot away from massive retaliation. By Nitze’s chains of logic, these measures were wholly inadequate to meet the challenge the Soviet Union posed to the American way of life.

Berlin Crisis

Diplomacy was plausible, but only if the Kennedy administration ruled out any concessions to Soviet negotiators. “My position was that we should go to great lengths to avoid war, general or limited, over Berlin,” Nitze later recounted. “But if we were to be routed out of a rightful position, we should not legitimize the act through a negotiated agreement.” To back down over Berlin, under such circumstances: that could hardly be termed a “negotiation,” it would be a surrender.²³

In March 1961, President Kennedy asked former secretary of state Dean Acheson to lead a study of the Berlin situation and develop contingency plans. Acheson relied on Nitze to write the report, which linked US global prestige to the fate of the divided city. If the Soviets drove the Americans (and the United Kingdom and France) out of West Berlin, other European countries would reorient themselves toward Moscow, and it would embolden national liberation movements in Asia and Africa. The message would be that the United States backed down; this would encourage further Soviet probing and propensity to take risks. Based on Nitze’s report Acheson recommended that the president call for a large supplemental for the defense budget and declare a national emergency.

Secretary of Defense McNamara tasked Nitze with drafting contingency plans to keep a military conflict over Berlin below the threshold of nuclear war.²⁴ With vigor, Paul tackled such questions: “If access to Berlin is blocked, do we undertake an airlift? Do we immediately probe? What if the probe is turned back? What is the capability of the military force available?”²⁵ Meanwhile, on July 15, 1961, he lunched with Soviet ambassador Mikhail Menshikov at the Metropolitan Club and warned him that nuclear war was a real possibility. “The computations were not difficult to make of what would happen to Russia if a thousand megatons were dropped, if 7,000 megatons were dropped, if 10,000 megatons, or even if 20,000 megatons were dropped,” Nitze coldly observed to his guest, who was heading home for a month’s vacation.²⁶

At that moment, President Kennedy’s inner circle was more cautious about how tough to get over Berlin. “I believe there is general agreement in the steering group that a national emergency is not now necessary,” National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy wrote JFK, “but a hard wing of the Kohler group [working the Berlin issue], led by Acheson and Nitze, disagrees.”²⁷ When President Kennedy met with the task force on July 26, Nitze and Acheson did not press their case for declaring a national emergency. Later that day, the president announced an additional $3.2 billion in defense spending yet declined to make the giant spectacle that Acheson had recommended and which Nitze supported.²⁸

The question of what to do about Berlin was tightly linked to the United States’ commitment to extended deterrence within the rest of NATO, which the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) joined in 1955. To preserve the alliance, the US president needed to convince his Soviet counterpart that he was willing to use nuclear weapons in the event of an attack on Western European allies. So long as leaders in the Kremlin considered this threat to be credible, it should deter them from launching an attack. And, so long as leaders in NATO countries believed both things, it would keep them from seeking a separate accommodation—as French president Charles de Gaulle seemed to be doing in his overtures to Moscow.²⁹

Nitze savored this problem, to which his “tension between opposites” model was clearly applicable. By the logic of extended deterrence, stability rested upon a US commitment to wage nuclear war and invite a counterattack on the US homeland in response to any attack on another country. While such a commitment vastly exceeded anything Woodrow Wilson had proposed at Paris in 1919, Congress had duly ratified the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949, before the advent of hydrogen bombs on ICBMs. To prevent an active conflict over Berlin from escalating to the point where one side used nuclear weapons, Nitze was sure that the United States needed to establish conventional capabilities to deter a conventional Soviet attack—or, should deterrence fail, combat Soviet forces long enough for Kremlin leaders to reconsider their plans. However, building conventional troops strong enough to deter a conventional Soviet attack might also broadcast to NATO allies that US leaders were ultimately unwilling to use nuclear weapons to defend them—a prospect that had led the United Kingdom and France (and, by 1961, US and allied leaders were concerned, potentially also West Germany) to pursue their independent arsenals. No such concerns would arise if the United States sustained strategic and conventional superiority.

As Nitze had come to understand during the late 1940s, Europeans expressed even more reticence than Americans regarding increased military spending. The postwar economic recovery that took off after the Marshall Plan and lasted throughout the 1950s had not altered that enduring reality. From the perspective of Nitze and other national security practitioners, the perception of détente between East and West often sapped the will of democracies to divert resources from social programs to pay for military capabilities that visibly conveyed toughness and cohesion—even as those capabilities were deemed necessary to induce the Soviets to seek a relaxation of tensions.

Deterrence rested on the credibility of threats. When it came to nuclear weapons, the United States needed a clear plan for how it would employ nuclear weapons in the event of war. In late July 1961, McNamara and Nitze traveled to NATO’s Supreme Headquarters to consult with its “Live Oak” unit about plans to maintain access to Berlin in the event of Soviet denial of such access. Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, General Lauris Norstad, expressed understandably grave concerns about what would happen in the event of war. The sequence of planned actions made no sense to Norstad, who considered the Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) useless.

Earlier that month, on July 5, 1961, the acclaimed game theorist Thomas Schelling wrote JFK laying out how the president should respond to a Soviet closure of the allies’ access to Berlin. First, the president should send a small force down the autobahn from West Germany to Berlin. Then, should that force meet resistance, the president should escalate by employing “nuclears”—in tandem with simultaneous messages and accompanying restraint—to bargain with Soviet leaders. “It is not likely that the Soviets would allow a precedent for US unilateral use of nuclears,” Schelling concluded. “Because time will be short, there must be imaginative advance exploration of what Soviet responses, nuclear and verbal, to anticipate and how to interpret them. (The possibility of Soviet initial selective use in a bargaining strategy must also be explored, so that we can interpret it and respond appropriately.)”³⁰ According to Bundy’s notation, this memo reached Kennedy in Hyannis Port the weekend of July 21 and made a “deep impression” on the president. Deep impression notwithstanding, Schelling’s plan offered up more questions than practical answers for how to deal with the problems at hand and how to prepare for ones that could emerge in a war over Berlin.

Neither the doubt expressed by General Norstad nor the game plan proposed by Schelling instilled confidence that the Kennedy administration had good options for responding to Soviet aggression. Meanwhile, Nitze was vacationing with his family on Mount Desert Island in Northeast Harbor, Maine (August 13), when word came that the Volkspolizei (East German police) had set up a wall made out of barbed wire and assorted rubble. As with the attack on Pearl Harbor and Korea’s outbreak of war, Nitze hurriedly returned to the nation’s capital. This time, the president and secretary of defense looked to him for answers.

East German authorities had yet to pour concrete in the first days of the Berlin Wall; allied troops could easily have knocked down the barriers. Such action would have precipitated a likely Soviet response, potentially leading both sides up the escalation ladder. Moreover, intelligence reports indicated that East German and Soviet divisions were surreptitiously moving to encircle Berlin. Nitze took this to mean they were not bluffing. Had the Soviets and East Germans intended merely to intimidate the United States and its NATO allies, he reasoned, they would have made a more public demonstration. Nitze felt that knocking down those temporary barriers was too great a risk.

Nitze acted as both a policy adviser and diplomat during this time. In addition to representing the Department of Defense on the Berlin Task Force, he also led a subgroup on military planning for the Washington Ambassadorial Group, which consisted of the United States, Great Britain, and France. Through the Washington Ambassadorial Group, he discerned the allies’ concerns; through the Berlin Task Force, he incorporated these concerns into a practical strategy. The result, “Poodle Blanket,” laid out a sequence of graduated responses and applicable procedures to simultaneously de-escalate a military conflict over Berlin and position US and allied forces to respond to additional Soviet escalation.

On October 3, 1961, President Kennedy queried his advisers whether a nuclear war over Berlin would remain limited or lead inexorably to a general nuclear war.³¹ The mood was grim. According to Nitze’s notes, the usually taciturn secretary of state, Dean Rusk, called for “pulling down the house, because the house is lost anyway.”³² On October 9, Nitze went to the Soviet embassy in Washington to meet with Soviet ambassador Dobrynin. To his claim that the Soviets could destroy Germany within ten minutes, Nitze countered that the United States could just as quickly take out Moscow or Leningrad.³³

At 11 p.m. on October 10, President Kennedy assembled his national security team in the Cabinet Room to consider Nitze’s “Poodle Blanket” paper, at one point asking “whether in fact there was much likelihood that IV. A. and B. could be undertaken without leading to IV. C,” which was general nuclear war. On this, Nitze disagreed with his boss, Robert McNamara, in front of the president, contending that “since IV A. and B. would greatly increase the temptation to the Soviets to initiate a strategic [nuclear] strike of their own, it would be best for us, in moving toward the use of nuclear weapons, to consider most seriously the option of an initial strategic strike of our own.” He went on to say “that with such a strike, we could in some real sense be victorious in the series of nuclear exchanges, while we might well lose if we allowed the Soviets to strike first in the strategic battle.”³⁴

In other words, Nitze was saying that there was no way to wage a successful limited nuclear war: if the United States struck first—which, in the dire scenario of an imminent nuclear war, it should do—it needed to strike hard at Soviet missiles and bombers before they reached US allies in Europe and the American homeland. This is as explicit a conversation in the White House about using nuclear weapons against the Soviets as is on record during the Cold War. In the parlance of nuclear theorists, Nitze advocated for “damage limitation” and “counterforce” as the only alternatives to a conventional defense of West Berlin. Victory was possible in a nuclear exchange only if the United States preempted a Soviet attack with a large wallop of its own. Soviet consideration of US strategic superiority—which was diminishing yet still viable—ought ultimately to lead them to back down.

Khrushchev did back down. On October 17, 1961, the Soviet leader announced that he would no longer seek a separate treaty with East Germany by the end of that year. The Berlin Wall staunched the flow of East Germans fleeing westward, but the matter was hardly resolved. On October 23, President Kennedy signed off on the approach that Nitze called for in the “Poodle Blanket.” National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 109, “US Policy on Military Actions in a Berlin Conflict,” formalized categories of responses ranging from a naval blockade to selective nuclear strikes to general nuclear war.³⁵ Four days later, US and Soviet tanks faced each other down after an incident near the Berlin crossing. The prospect of war remained even after Khrushchev ended the immediate crisis he had commenced.

Throughout that fall, Nitze and McNamara prepared a “rationale” paper intended to bring NATO allies on board with NSAM 109. Nitze never ruled out the prospect of the United States using nuclear weapons.³⁶ He remained vehemently opposed to a limited nuclear strike intended to signal restraint—one of the approaches Schelling had suggested. There was no such thing for Nitze as a limited nuclear war. It was yet another reason for the United States and NATO allies to increase the conventional defenses of Europe. Americans needed to pay more, and Europeans especially needed to pay more. Only the Soviets needed to spend less on defense.

Overall US nuclear superiority may have been one of the factors behind Khrushchev’s decision to back down. Yet that advantage was not substantively different from the start of the Berlin Crisis back in 1958. Nor had it changed from the beginning of the summer of 1961, when Khrushchev signed off on the wall’s construction. Top scholars of nuclear history continue to ponder these issues. Those who approach the matter of nuclear weapons and politics from a quantitative lens see it as an example of a superior power compelling an inferior nuclear power to back down and thus concede victory to the United States.³⁷ Others argue that “coding” the resolution of the Berlin Wall as a victory or defeat presumes that it was actually a victory or defeat for one side.³⁸

There was no doubt about any of this in Nitze’s mind. As he said in a December 1961 speech to the Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the United States and its allies possessed “a definite nuclear superiority.” The United States believed “this superiority, particularly when viewed from the Soviet perspective to be strategically important in the equations of deterrence and strategy.”³⁹ US nuclear superiority was the prerequisite for Khrushchev’s backing down over Berlin. Demonstrating resolve, the Kennedy administration had impelled Khrushchev to abandon his pursuit of a separate treaty.

Strength and Resolve

The showdown over Berlin led to modest efforts to pursue arms control, and Nitze was skeptical of them. In meetings of the NSC Principals Committee throughout 1962, Nitze opposed formulas that would lock in Soviet advantages. On March 1, he stated that “an across-the-board cut of 30% in all armaments would freeze the inferiority of the United States in conventional armaments,” and he “wondered how our allies would react to such a freeze in US conventional inferiority vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.”⁴⁰

When the group met with President Kennedy, on March 9, Nitze suggested “a possible alternative proposal in which we would withdraw our offer of a moratorium [on testing] upon treaty signature but would agree to a complete ban without a threshold as soon as elements of the control system became operational.” He also “pointed out that this would maintain the laboratories during the period when Soviet intentions to fulfill the treaty were being tested.”⁴¹ Unfortunately, in these meetings and subsequent ones, Nitze and the other members of Kennedy’s team argued with each other about potential approaches to the Soviets without any urgency or any sense of optimism.

On April 13, 1962, Nitze met with West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer in Bonn and assured him that “Washington would do nothing on Berlin without [Adenauer’s] agreement.” He said “the US has conducted all of the talks with the Soviets about Berlin along the lines of papers mutually agreed upon among the four powers, without any concessions which deviate from these agreed papers, subject to certain reservations contained in them. The US wants a joint position with the FRG and the UK and, as far as possible, with France.”⁴² Preserving the Western alliance, in other words, was worth the wait on figuring out a long-term settlement on Berlin.

Far more important—at least from Nitze’s perspective—was continuing to build up sufficient conventional forces to deter the Soviets in Berlin and sustain the United States’ nuclear advantage that was holding the Kremlin in check. “It seems to me that the resulting position is too weak,” Nitze wrote McNamara in June 1962 after the secretary deleted a section of the draft Basic National Security Policy that linked a “stable military environment” to the ability of US strategic forces to leave the Sino-Soviet bloc’s forces “worsened drastically as a result of a general nuclear war.” “To say that our strategic forces should only be able to worsen the Bloc’s power position in a general nuclear war is to set too modest an objective,” Nitze asserted. “The ability to worsen the Bloc’s power position as the result of a general nuclear war would be easily satisfied in an absolute sense with a much less effective strategic retaliatory force than we provide for in our present 5-year plan.” The US ability to “worsen the Bloc’s power position” would not suffice the next time Khrushchev tested the resolve of the United States and its allies, whether over Berlin or Cuba or elsewhere. At the heart of the matter was the “concept of the relative strength of the US to that of the Soviet Union.”⁴³

Preserving US strength was the paramount objective for Nitze as the Kennedy administration undertook arms control initiatives under the auspices of the recently established ACDA. The number of warheads and delivery vehicles that Moscow and Washington controlled was only part of the challenge. “There are indications because of new inventions, that 10, 15, or 20 nations will have a nuclear capacity, including Red China, by the end of the Presidential office in 1964,” then-senator Kennedy had stated in one of his presidential debates with Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960. In a July 30, 1962, meeting of now-president Kennedy and his national security team, Nitze “discussed the situation during the next ten years in China, Sweden, India, Japan, Australia and South Africa, including the capabilities of these States to produce nuclear weapons and the restraints involved in their deciding to seek a nuclear capability,” and “acknowledged that in Germany and Italy pressure for nuclear capability was very great.” The cost of producing nuclear weapons over the next decade would drop drastically if the United States and Soviet Union continued testing and improving their weapons.⁴⁴ The best way to address the problem of proliferation was to strike a verifiable deal with the Soviets that preserved US nuclear superiority. The worst way was to allow the Soviets to attain nuclear supremacy.

Meanwhile, Berlin remained unsettled a year after the wall went up. At an NSC meeting on August 29, 1962, JFK and his advisers discussed whether to continue allowing Soviet troops periodic access to the war memorial in the Tiergarten inside West Berlin. “The Soviet Union is pushing the Western Powers out of East Berlin, and at the same time striving to make West Berlin a Four-Power city in which they have an active role,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it. He continued: “The problem on which we must shortly make a decision is thus whether we should not begin to head off the Soviet efforts to increase their role in West Berlin.”⁴⁵ Nitze agreed. The issue was whether the United States would “control the terms on which they could come to Berlin.” If not, the United States was on a trajectory toward a “Four-Power West Berlin.”

Whatever the president decided, Nitze said, “we must be prepared to respond to Soviet refusal to accede to it.” He proposed to “block their access to West Berlin if they do not accede to whatever request we think appropriate.” The president expressed reluctance to take action over what Secretary Rusk noted was ultimately a “symbolic” matter. Nitze urged immediate action—“it was better to take the risks of action now than to defer them.”⁴⁶ His views failed to carry the day.

Nitze was concerned that Khrushchev’s self-confidence and appetite for risk were intensifying. The previous week, on August 23, Rusk, McNamara, CIA director John McCone, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer sent the president a joint report on the implications of recent Soviet intelligence estimates. These came from the interagency working group on defense policy led by Nitze. Given what we now know was happening—unbeknownst then to the Americans—ninety miles off the coast of Florida the report’s conclusion #3 was playing out. “The Soviets previously were willing to act only with caution on the basis of a capability which they knew existed mainly in their opponents’ minds,” the report stated. “Their appraisal of risks may change now that their capability has become real and is growing.” Still, it was doubtful that Soviet leaders would “abandon caution in Soviet–American confrontations, including Berlin.” Ultimately, they “recognize that there are limits to the challenges which they can pose without incurring the risk of military response by the US.”⁴⁷ Meanwhile, throughout that summer, just as Nitze was growing increasingly impatient with President Kennedy’s reluctance to take action over Berlin, the Soviets were shipping medium and intermediate-range nuclear missiles to Cuba.

Cuban Missile Crisis

On August 31, 1962, Senator Frank Keating of New York delivered a speech on the Senate floor alleging that he had been “reliably informed” that the Soviets were constructing missile bases in Cuba. While the Kennedy administration publicly denied these charges—which came from West German intelligence, although Keating’s source became a long-standing Cold War mystery—they paid attention to them.⁴⁸ On September 14, 1962, Paul Nitze participated in a meeting of the Special Group that included National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. When the conversation turned to Cuban reconnaissance, CIA deputy director Marshall Carter referred to “special efforts … to identify certain installations the nature of which is not clear at present.”⁴⁹ Senator Keating had gotten it right.

On the evening of Monday, October 15, Nitze found himself at the State Department dinner for the West German foreign minister. Secretary of State Rusk took him aside, ushered him onto the eighth-floor terrace overlooking the National Mall, and told him that photos from a US U-2 spy plane showed Soviet missiles in Cuba. Both men knew at the time that US contingency plans for Soviet weapons in Cuba consisted of an air attack and an invasion, and realized that these U-2 images likely portended war.

As part of the effort to keep the news secret, Kennedy administration officials attended their scheduled events, which for Nitze meant speaking in Knoxville, Tennessee, on Tuesday, October 16 (incredibly) on civil defense. When he returned to Washington, Nitze joined the now-fabled ExComm, at the meetings of which he took copious notes. Apart from JFK and RFK, participants knew nothing about a taping system that the president had installed. But this technology did not catch all relevant conversations. Those held at the State Department, with neither the president nor his brother in attendance, were not recorded.⁵⁰ Thus, the “Kennedy Tapes” do not tell the entire story of the US side of the Cuban Missile Crisis nor the Kennedys’ role in it.

Nitze was as prepared as anyone on ExComm to deal with a nuclear crisis. While the photos of missiles were clear, other intelligence was murky. CIA director John McCone was abroad. To this emergency, Nitze brought his Korean War experience, where he had had to weigh the possibility of an escalation that might have led to the use of nuclear weapons. He had, as well, a command of the technical components and concepts from his work ranging from the Strategic Bombing Survey to the Gaither Commission. He was the only one in the room at these October 1962 meetings who had visited Hiroshima after the atomic attack. He may or may not have been the only one to have crafted a plan to win World War II without using the atomic bomb.

This is not to say that Nitze had the answers. He knew that someone needed to take command. Initially, JFK did, pressing for a quick invasion. After four days—to Nitze’s intense frustration—the president equivocated. Not until the arrival of his old boss, Dean Acheson, did members of the ExComm take action—at least, according to Nitze. Acheson cut through the idle chatter and swatted down the State Department legal adviser’s line of argument that international law prohibited cutting off outside access to Cuba.⁵¹ Acheson’s proposed blockade—euphemistically called a “quarantine”—galvanized the ExComm and anchored the sequence of events around the speech that JFK planned to give to the American people on Monday, October 22.

While the other ExComm members continued talking, Nitze and Deputy Undersecretary of State for Policy Alexis Johnson took action. S Day (or P Day), named for the president’s Monday speech, became the D-day of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Whereas members of ExComm had argued with each other over whether to launch a blockade, bombing campaign, or invasion, JFK’s planned announcement of the quarantine “liquidated the conflict between the three because you didn’t have to decide,” according to Nitze. “You did the minimum one first and then if that didn’t work, you did the second, and if that didn’t work, you did the third.”⁵² Johnson and Nitze shared confidence that the Soviets would not “escalate in the face of our nuclear superiority.” That power dynamic—and the swiftness with which the US side acted—outweighed all other considerations. “Now the rest of them never consciously came around to the same view that Alexis and I had,” Nitze recalled twenty-five years later. “The logic of the case didn’t permit them to take a different view,” such as allowing the missile installations to become the new status quo. “What were they going to suggest—that we not be prepared to take these missile sites out in the event that the quarantine didn’t work and the Russians were in fact getting their weapons in there and were to strike New York?”⁵³

The stakes could not have been higher. In Nitze’s ISA file is a Standing Committee paper, dated Thursday, October 18, 1962 (four days before President Kennedy’s Monday, October 22 speech to the nation), laying out “Attack Plan 3,” one that would “almost inevitably escalate into an invasion of Cuba through either attacks by air or sea on US territory, attacks on Guantanamo, or internal uprisings of the Cuban people to which we would be compelled to respond.” In the scenario of a full-out US invasion of Cuba, “it would be difficult for the Soviets to resist pressures to retaliate, preferably in kind as in Turkey.” US forces would surely kill Soviets in Cuba, “and an attack on Turkish bases is almost sure to involve killing Americans.” Such actions would make it “very difficult to avoid an escalation into general nuclear war.” Retaliation against Berlin “would be equally difficult to accept.” Prospects were grim. “If NATO were forced to choose between defeat in Berlin or disgrace in Turkey on the one hand, or nuclear war on the other, because of 200-sorties against Cuban facilities which might have become a nuclear threat against the US of the sort the Europeans have long lived with, the alliance would be put under serious strain indeed.”⁵⁴

On the afternoon of Monday, October 22, a few hours prior to JFK’s scheduled address to the nation, Nitze led a briefing of the president and ExComm in his capacity as head of the Berlin Planning Group. Kennedy was justifiably concerned that the Soviets might respond to the announcement of a quarantine around Cuba with similar action encircling West Berlin. Even more worrisome was the prospect that the quarantine might lead to a shooting war—unintended or intended—and that a subsequent US assault on Cuba would lead the Soviets to launch strikes against US bases armed with Jupiter missiles in Turkey. Finally, in a calamitous scenario, local US commanders in Turkey, upon receiving early warning of incoming Soviet intermediate-range missiles (of the same class as were in Cuba) from somewhere in Eastern Europe, might launch the Jupiters at targets inside the Soviet Union. General nuclear war would therefore have commenced absent any presidential order. This entirely plausible sequence negated anything Tom Schelling or anyone else had to say about nuclear signaling.

During the briefing, Kennedy interrupted Nitze to press him on the point that the Joint Chiefs needed to reiterate orders to local US commanders that no one could launch missiles without specific authorization from the commander-in-chief. JFK’s concern followed a frustrating conversation with Curtis Lemay the previous Friday, October 19, in which the air force chief of staff appeared unfazed by the prospect of an unintended thermonuclear war. “Can we take care of that then, Paul? We need a new instruction out,” JFK told Nitze, who responded that reminding the Joint Chiefs of the established chain of command was unnecessary. The hint of frustration came from the otherwise unflappable and exceptionally polite JFK: “I don’t think we ought to accept the Chiefs’ word on that one, Paul.” When Nitze continued to argue with the president, stating that he and McNamara had already gone over with “these fellows” not to fire, President Kennedy responded: “Well, let’s do it again, Paul.”⁵⁵ Nitze complied.

This would not be the last awkward interaction between Nitze and the president during the acute phase of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which saw Soviet ships approaching the US quarantine line that Kennedy had announced Monday evening. On Wednesday, October 24, JFK asked the ExComm what would happen if US forces sank a Soviet ship. Answering his own question, the president speculated that the Soviets would respond aggressively in Berlin. Then what? Nitze replied that the logical next step was for the United States to shoot down Soviet planes over Berlin. The president wanted to hear a different answer. Fortunately, several hours after this conversation, word came that the Soviets had turned back their ships—though, unbeknownst to the ExComm, Khrushchev had given the order twenty-four hours before that moment.⁵⁶

Nitze continued to hold meetings of his subcommittee looking at contingency planning on Berlin, yet it was increasingly clear that the ExComm was absorbing all NSC deliberative functions. In a discussion of Nitze’s group on Thursday, October 25, the Jupiters in Turkey came up again, this time in the context of Walter Lippmann’s proposition in that morning’s edition of the New York Herald Tribune that Washington and Moscow agree to take out missiles from both Cuba and Turkey. Whether or not Nitze was aware that the proposal was likely a trial balloon originating from JFK or RFK, he was indignant at the idea of withdrawing the Jupiters from Turkey under such conditions. “Not that we love these things,” he told Under Secretary of State George Ball in the late afternoon of Friday, October 26. “We wanted to get rid of it before.” As he elaborated elsewhere, the problem was that every other NATO country would get the message that the Soviets could take provocative steps. Washington would trade away their security to diffuse a crisis. Only superior US strength and resolve would cause the Soviets to back down. “We take a very dim view,” as Nitze put it to Ball. “We have to contemplate now, in this kind of a thing, negotiations apart from Cuba would just ruin us all the way around.” Ball said, “The [State] Department is no happier about it than you are.”⁵⁷

Over the next thirty-six hours, as is well known, Khrushchev sent a conciliatory letter to Kennedy Friday evening and broadcast a message Saturday morning demanding the removal of the Jupiters on top of a pledge not to invade Cuba. In addition, a surface-to-air missile (SAM) site in Cuba shot down a US U-2 plane on Saturday afternoon. President Kennedy decided to respond to the letter, offering a pledge not to invade Cuba in exchange for the Soviet withdrawal of missiles and permission for UN inspectors to verify the exit. That evening, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy met with Soviet ambassador Dobrynin and affirmed that the United States would withdraw Jupiters from Turkey but that the Soviets were not allowed to say it was a “quid pro quo” (though it remains unclear what would have happened had they proclaimed it to be so).

With the Cuban Missile Crisis seemingly resolved, media outlets reported Khrushchev’s decision. That Sunday morning, the Kennedys attended Mass. Nitze, exhausted as was everyone else on ExComm, received little time to rest. The president called to ask that he fly to India, which China had invaded on October 20. Nitze was to express US support for this neutralist country that sometimes tilted toward Moscow. Nitze’s respite from Cuba was to spend twenty hours on a cargo plane only to emerge from the darkness and be greeted by Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, with whom he was never close.

When Nitze returned to the United States, he again worked on the matter of Soviet offensive missiles that remained in Cuba. He pondered what pressure the United States could apply on Castro in light of Kennedy’s “anti-invasion guarantees” expressed in his October 27 letter to Khrushchev. Continued aerial surveillance, economic forces, propaganda designed to overthrow Cuba, and the return of civilian refugees all appeared to be on the table. Food and supply drops—as well as a “Bay of Pigs-type operation”—were “doubtful,” yet not “included” in the anti-invasion guarantee.⁵⁸ Continued aerial surveillance was essential since Castro had refused to abide by Khrushchev’s pledge to Kennedy to allow UN inspectors to enter Cuba.

While the most dangerous phase of the Cuban Missile Crisis appeared to be over, the worrisome prospect of a shooting war over Soviet missiles in Cuba remained. ExComm persisted in its routine meetings. On November 7, Nitze distributed to its members contingency plans for scenarios where Soviet or Cuban forces downed, or even just shot at, another US plane. He thought President Kennedy, in any case, needed to state the case that the Soviets had not upheld their end of the agreement. Clearly, Soviet weapons “capable of offensive use” remained in Cuba even after the public resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

If a SAM site shot down a U-2, Nitze recommended that US bombers destroy the SAM site—the very thing President Kennedy had declined to do during the so-called Black Saturday (October 27) of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Likewise, if a MIG fighter shot down a U-2, US fighters should remove the MIG. Suppose subsequent Soviet and Cuban actions failed to acknowledge the gravity of the situation. In that case, the United States should respond by reimposing the quarantine and strengthening it to include petroleum and lubricants.⁵⁹ The bottom line was that the United States could expect additional Soviet probing over Cuba, and it was incumbent on US leaders to match that with a forceful response. While the two sides had just gone to the brink of nuclear war, it was no time for the Kennedy administration to go soft. “A combination of carrot and stick pressures should be so played as to force out the offensive weapons and Soviet military presence while weakening the Cuban Communist regime,” Nitze wrote to the ExComm on November 14.⁶⁰

Around this time, President Kennedy asked Nitze to devise plans to prevent a rekindling of the Berlin Crisis. Nitze’s idea, which went nowhere, was to carve up parts of Germany and exchange them with the Soviets.⁶¹ But, according to Nicholas Thompson, Nitze also wrote a memorandum, “Basis for Substantive Negotiations,” in which he proposed limiting NATO and the Warsaw Pact to five hundred nuclear missiles each in exchange for which the Soviet Union would hand over East Germany to West Germany. While that proposal also went nowhere, these early sketches would become relevant later as Nitze realized his ambition to craft a grand bargain on nuclear armaments between East and West.

As 1963 got underway, Nitze worked on creating a Multilateral Force for NATO that would deal with potential West German nuclear aspirations and contribute to Kennedy’s redoubled efforts to pursue a limited nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets. However, he never stopped working on Cuba for as long as he led ISA. Nitze could not accept a status quo that allowed Castro to remain in power and continue his campaign to make the United States look weak. On May 10, 1963, Nitze and Alexis Johnson submitted a contingency study summarizing how the United States could exploit the prospect of Cuba’s shooting down a US surveillance plane to nullify the anti-invasion pledge of October 1962.

By this point, the Kennedys had little use for Nitze. On June 10, at American University, the president delivered perhaps the most conciliatory speech of any Cold War leader. On August 5, US and Soviet delegations signed the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, Outer Space, and Under Water. The US Senate then ratified this on October 10. Apart from avoiding a nuclear war over Berlin or Cuba, the Partial Test Ban Treaty was the outstanding foreign policy achievement of JFK’s presidency, which ended tragically on November 22, 1963.

The Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis served to confirm Nitze’s steadfast conviction that the United States needed to possess overriding strength. The Soviets backed down over Berlin because they acknowledged US strategic superiority, and over Cuba in the face of US conventional superiority there and remaining strategic superiority. Handwringing was unnecessary, Nitze was sure, the concessions superfluous. Nothing about his interpretation differed from how he understood the lead-up to Pearl Harbor or the origins of the Cold War.

In later years, Nitze stated that the United States had been “too weak in the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Even after Khrushchev had agreed to withdraw the missiles, the Soviet leader did not follow through on all his promises. “We didn’t have the sense of follow-up [or] follow-through pursuit,” according to Nitze.⁶² President Kennedy and top advisers such as Robert McNamara were concerned about the dangers of pushing the Soviets too hard. “I didn’t have any worry about that last point,” Nitze acknowledged. “I was convinced we ought to push them hard.”⁶³ In his estimation, trading away the Jupiter missiles in Turkey created the very circumstance he had warned against: fear on the part of NATO allies that the United States would ultimately not support them in a crisis. In subsequent years Nitze never departed from this view.

A US invasion of Cuba in October 1962—something Nitze supported—would have been costly. Likely the Soviets would have responded with tactical nuclear weapons against US forces. Even though Kennedy had been briefed on Soviet short-range missiles, the reality did not sink in: that US landing troops would be incinerated on the beaches.⁶⁴ The Kennedy administration would have responded to that by obliterating any missile installations in Cuba. A short path followed to general nuclear war. Given the nuclear balance—in sheer terms of the numbers of weapons that could hit military or civilian targets—many more Soviets than Americans would have died under such circumstances. Never again would Soviet leaders tolerate such a disparity. “You’ll never do this to us again,” a Soviet official informed John McCloy, a member of the ExComm.⁶⁵

“I think the situation was rather similar to that of the British when they really had control of the seas,” Nitze later recalled, thinking of the period after October 1962. “The moment anybody started to threaten that control after the Napoleonic wars, they went to great lengths to demonstrate a margin of superiority and maintain it even at great cost.” Likewise, the United States could have maintained its margin of superiority concerning the Soviet Union in the nuclear era, but its leaders chose not to. “[W]e began to go downhill, I think right after the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Nitze averred. “From that point on the relationship [between the United States and the Soviet Union] deteriorated.”⁶⁶

In other words, Nitze’s understanding of stability in the US–Soviet relationship rested on a clear mutual recognition of US strategic superiority. Instability resulted from a bipolar nuclear order. As the next chapter will demonstrate, Nitze and McNamara differed over the fundamental meaning of preserving peace in the nuclear age as the nation’s focus turned from Berlin and Cuba to the trauma of Vietnam. MAD became synonymous with the nuclear balance during this period. Yet for national security practitioners working on strategic affairs and the emerging field of arms control, it was never simply a fact of life.