Abstract
US nuclear strategy in the 1950s culminated in the first Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP),1 promulgated in 1960. Massive Retaliation logically required the unification of nuclear targeting among the services, the reconciliation of their missions and the coordination of launches, if necessary, to enable a single spasm. This coordination was the purpose of the SIOP, which replaced the various separate plans generated by the services. Targeting was unified in the Optimum Target Mix (OTM), a single target set composed of high priority military, industrial and political targets. NATO doctrine was similarly brought into line: MC 14/2 called for a nuclear response to any, even local, Soviet intrusion if it continued.2
Ed elli a me: ‘Ritorna a tua scienza, che vuol, quanto la cosa é più perfetta, piǹ senta il bene, e così’ la doglienza’.
(And he answered me: ‘go back to thy science, which requires that in the measure of a creature’s perfection it feels more both of pleasure and of pain.’)
Canto VI, Inferno
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Notes and References
A. J. Wohlstetter, F. S. Hoffman, R. S. Lutz, and H. S. Rowan, Selection and Use of Strategic Bases, R-266 (Santa Monica: The RAND Corporation, April 1954).
Albert Wohlstetter, ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror,’ Foreign Affairs 37 (January 1959), p. 211.
L. D. Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 236–7 (summarizing the views of Wohlstetter and RAND analyst Andrew Marshall).
H. A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Marper, 1957).
L. D. Freedman, US Intelligence and The Soviet Strategic Threat (London: Macmillan, 1977); see also Cordesman, Deterrence in the 1980s pp. 6–7.
H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 559–60.
Initial work on the SLOP revision was done by Daniel Ellsberg and Frank Trinkle under the supervision of Alain Enthoven; all were former RAND analysts. Ball, Deja Vu, p. 12; before becoming Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, himself a RAND analyst, observed, ‘The McNamara Strategy embodied the basic ideas of the Air Force and RAND Corporation in ferment since the mid-fifties,’ i.e., since the Wohlstetter Report. James R. Schlesinger, ‘The Changing Environment for Systems Analysis’, in S. Enke (ed.) Defense Management (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 105.
W. W. Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), pp. 44–75.
Robert S. McNamara, ‘Defense Arrangements and the North Atlantic Community’, Address given at the University of Michigan, 16 June 1962, Dept of State Bulletin 47 (9 July 1962) pp. 67–8.
See, e.g., P. Pringle and W. Arkin, SLOP: Nuclear War from the Inside (London: Sphere, 1983), p. 89.
Leonard Beaton, The Western Alliance and the McNamara Doctrine, Adelphi Paper no. 11 (London: The Institute for Strategic Studies, August 1964), p. 6.
David N. Schwartz, NATO’s Nuclear Dilemmas (Washington: Brookings, 1983), p. 80.
Alastair Buchan, The Multilateral Force: An Historical Perspective Adelphi Paper no. 13 (London: The Institute for Strategic Studies, October 1964) p. 4. Compare Alastair Buchan, ‘The Coming Crisis on the MLF’, Confidential Memo, 23 June 1964 declassified 1979, National Security File, Box 23, Lyndon B. Johnson Library; see also ‘Early History of the MLF,’ which gives a detailed, chronology of Presidential decisions on MLF in three Administrations declassified 1977, National Security File, Box 23, Lyndon B. Johnson Library.
George Ball, Speech to NATO Parliamentarian’s Conference in Paris, 16 November 1962; for further confirmation of the argument that Controlled Response implied the MLF, see Cable 03840, Circular 927, 16 November 1962. Dept. of State, National Security File, Box 218, J. F. Kennedy Library (directing background to the Ball address, ‘Speech was essentially a reaffirmation of… McNamara Ann Arbor’); for discussion of Ball role, see G. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 274.
T. C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 207.
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© 1988 Philip Bobbitt
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Bobbitt, P. (1988). Controlled Response. In: Democracy and Deterrence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18991-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18991-5_5
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