Henry Kissinger had tried to get rid of the Titan II. He considered the missile “inaccurate and unreliable.” It was a weapon system, he later explained, “which the Pentagon had been wanting to scrap for years and I had kept in service for trading purposes.” In 1972, while serving as the national security adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, Kissinger had offered a deal to the Soviet Union: the United States would decommission its Titan II missiles, if the Soviets agreed to retire their SS-9 missiles. The deal would eliminate a powerful threat to Moscow. And the Soviet missile was similar in a number of respects to the Titan II, employing the same type of fuel and oxidizer. But the SS-9 was also newer, larger, and capable of delivering a much heavier payload. The Soviet Union declined the offer. The Nixon administration was stuck with the Titan II — getting rid of fifty-four ballistic missiles, without getting anything in return from the Soviets, made little sense in the midst of an arms race.
The failed attempt to decommission an aging weapon system reflected the new balance of power. Robert McNamara had assumed that once the Soviet Union felt confident about its ability to destroy the United States in any nuclear exchange, it would stop building new missiles. But the Soviets didn’t share McNamara’s faith in mutually assured destruction. After the humiliation of the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of their diplomats had told an American counterpart, “You Americans will never be able to do this to us again.” In a rivalry where a nation’s power was measured numerically in warheads and bombs, the Soviet Union now sought to gain the upper hand. Within a decade of removing strategic weapons from Cuba, the Soviet Union increased the number of its long-range, land-based missiles from about 56 to more than 1,500. Its arsenal of submarine-based missiles rose from about 72 to almost 500. By the early 1970s, the Soviets had more long-range missiles than the United States. An elaborate antiballistic missile system had been created to defend Moscow. And a network of underground bunkers had been constructed beneath the city to protect the leadership of the Communist Party. Linked by secret subway lines, the bunkers could house thousands of people.
Although the United States possessed fewer ballistic missiles than the Soviet Union, it still had more nuclear weapons. McNamara had imposed a limit on the number of missiles that the United States would deploy — but not on the number of warheads that each missile could carry. Before leaving office, he’d approved the development of “multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles” (MIRVs). Publicly justified as a method of overwhelming a Soviet antiballistic missile system — adding more warheads to a single missile was less expensive than building more missiles — MIRVs also increased the number of Soviet targets that the United States could destroy in a first strike.
The Minuteman III missile, introduced in 1970, carried three warheads. They were housed on a post-boost vehicle, nicknamed the “bus,” that had its own rockets and guidance system. The bus separated from the missile and released each warhead over a different target, delivering them one after another, like a school bus dropping off children after school. The Poseidon missile, first deployed on American submarines in 1971, could carry fourteen warheads.
Kissinger was considered one of America’s leading authorities on nuclear strategy. For more than a decade his writing had helped to shape the national debate on the subject. He had served as an adviser to the Kennedy administration during the Berlin crisis. He knew as much as any civilian about the competing theories of nuclear warfare. And yet Kissinger was astonished by his first formal briefing on the SIOP. The smallest attack option would hit the Soviet Union with almost two thousand weapons; the largest with more than three thousand. The vast scale and inflexibility of the SIOP led Kissinger to describe it as a “horror strategy.” At a national security meeting in the Situation Room of the White House, he later wondered “how one rationally could make a decision to kill 80 million people.” President Nixon was equally appalled.
