Although Kennedy and McNamara now understood the urgency of America’s command-and-control problems, little had been done to rectify them. Barely six months had passed since the inauguration, and much more time would be needed to make fundamental changes in the system. As the Berlin crisis deepened, the commanders of NATO units were ordered not to use their nuclear weapons without the explicit approval of General Norstad. But locks had not been installed in those weapons — and McNamara soon agreed to equip American troops on the front line with Davy Crockett atomic rifles. They were likely to be the first weapons fired at an invading Red Army.
More important, the SIOP remained the same. It had officially become the nuclear war plan of the United States in mid-April, although Kennedy hadn’t even received a formal briefing on it. His national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, thought that an alternative to the SIOP was needed, now that a war with the Soviets seemed like a real possibility. “[T]he current strategic war plan is dangerously rigid,” Bundy informed the president, “and, if continued without amendment, may leave you with very little choice as to how you face the moment of thermonuclear truth.” One of Bundy’s aides, Carl Kaysen, was given the task of quickly preparing a new war plan. During the Second World War, Kaysen had selected bomb targets in Germany. He later worked at RAND and served as a professor of economics at Harvard. Kaysen thought that NATO should rely increasingly on conventional weapons and that Germany should eventually become a nuclear-free zone. Nevertheless, he enlisted help from one of McNamara’s aides, Henry Rowen, to come up with a nuclear war plan that the president might actually use. The “spasm war” demanded by the current SIOP, they agreed, was a “ridiculous and unworkable notion.”
Just after midnight, on August 13, without any warning, East German troops began to string a barbed wire fence between East and West Berlin. For weeks, thousands of people had fled East Germany through the city, the last stretch of the border that hadn’t been militarized. NATO troops now watched helplessly as the fence became a wall.
After an initial, tentative response, on August 18 President Kennedy ordered a battle group of 1,500 soldiers to travel the autobahn from West Germany to Berlin. McNamara had opposed the move, afraid that it might start a nuclear war. The Soviets didn’t challenge the convoy. When it arrived in West Berlin, the American troops were greeted by hundreds of thousands of cheering Germans and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who felt relieved. Twelve days later, the Soviet Union surprised the Kennedy administration again, unilaterally ending the moratorium on nuclear tests. As a show of strength, within the next month, the Soviets detonated twenty-six nuclear weapons.
Carl Kaysen’s war plan was ready by the first week of September. It was designed for use during the Berlin crisis. “We should be prepared to initiate general war by our own first strike,” Kaysen wrote. “We should seek the smallest possible list of targets, focusing on the long-range striking capacity of the Soviets, and avoiding, as much as possible, casualties and damage in Soviet civil society.” If President Kennedy launched the current SIOP, the United States would have to kill more than half of the people in the Soviet Union — and millions more in Eastern Europe and China — just to maintain the freedom of West Berlin. Doing so would be not only morally questionable but impractical. The scale of the military operations required by the SIOP was so large, it would “inevitably” tip off the Soviets that a nuclear strike was coming. It would give them time to retaliate. Kaysen proposed a surprise attack that would use just forty-one American bombers, approaching at low altitude, to destroy roughly twice that number of long-range missile and bomber bases in the Soviet Union. The whole thing would be over “no more than fifteen minutes” after the first bomb dropped.
Following the attack, Kaysen suggested, “we should be able to communicate two things to Khrushchev: first, that we intend to concentrate on military targets unless he is foolish enough to hit our cities; secondly, that we are prepared to withhold the bulk of our force from the offensive… provided that he accepts our terms.” Instead of killing hundreds of millions, the raid would probably kill “less than 1,000,000 and probably not much more than 500,000.”
