While Bundy may be right, I think we are going to have to publicly
establish a very strong case for whatever course of action we decide on.
That case should involve not only an examination of the small
submersible concept that Bundy mentions, but also a re-examination of
some Air Force concepts such as air mobile ICBMs which were discarded back when the deficiencies of
the trench and MAP schemes were less
well understood.
Further, given the rapidly building concerns about the Minuteman
vulnerability problem, the impact such concerns are having on SALT, and the corresponding interest in
getting started on a solution, we may have to buy the time required to
complete our search for an acceptable solution. This may involve
starting a common missile, or accelerating the cruise missile carrier,
or some other program.
The Minuteman vulnerability is probably the biggest defense issue you
will face this year; it will be the main focus of your upcoming mid-term
review of the Defense budget.
Tab A
Memorandum From McGeorge
Bundy to the President’s Assistant for National
Security Affairs (Brzezinski)2
SUBJECT
- The Next Strategic Nuclear Weapons System
In the last month or two, partly as a member of the President’s
General Advisory Committee and partly as a foundation executive
attending the annual summer seminar run by experts from the arms
control centers that the Ford Foundation helps to pay for, I have
had some exposure to the bothersome question of Minuteman
vulnerability, and what to do about it. I have reached the
conclusion that if I had your job again I would want to be sure that
the President is fully caught up on some of the troubles that seem
to be brewing. It looks to me as if both our basic deterrent posture
and SALT are headed for a lot of
trouble unless there can be a better solution than is currently
favored by any uniformed service. To put it another way, I believe
that we are headed for a dilemma which can be resolved only by the
President as
[Page 391]
Commander-in-Chief and that an early resolution, difficult as it may
be, is much more likely to be successful than a delayed effort to
patch things up.
The problem of Minuteman vulnerability is unpleasantly real. That is
not the preferred conclusion of many of my friends in the arms
control community, but the evidence from the Defense Department
seems to me persuasive. The combination of throw-weight, MIRVs, and increasing accuracy on the
Soviet side is producing a real vulnerability. The Nitze scenarios
are highly implausible,3 but the increasing
exposure of the Minuteman system is simply not what was aimed at
when it was built. It is not about to become worthless, but in less
than five years it will no longer be the secure second-strike system
it was designed to be. Nothing has happened since 1960 to change the
belief that such a secure second-strike capability is a highly
desirable element in each of our strategic systems taken alone, on
the obvious ground that survivable weapons are much better than
those which are open to effective preemption.
Minuteman belongs to the Air Force, and its habitat is the
continental United States. It follows that by natural bureaucratic
inertia the effort to replace it has focused on land-based missile
systems of one sort or another. The bad news is that none of these
systems is attractive on basic technical and economic grounds,
leaving aside the politics of large-scale ground-based deployments.
The currently favored MAP system
has the additional disadvantage of severely complicating SALT. Ironically, it is a system that
no one would have designed if it were not for the counting rules of
SALT. MAP is a bad plan, and a Soviet MAP would be a nightmare even for
moderates, because of the problem of verification. The more this
system is studied, the worse its consequences seem to be, and the
nuttier the requirements associated with the shell game which is its
theoretical raison d’etre. MAP is
the only weapons system I have heard of that makes the old MLF look
smart.
Harold Brown and Frank Press are certainly two of
the ten best men in the country, on the problems that lie at the
intersection between weapons systems and science. Both of them know
how hard this particular issue is, and both have had important
studies underway for a long time. Until this summer, no one had any
attractive ideas about alternatives to the mobile land-based
missile. Now the Jason Summer Study Group, with such stars as
Gell-Mann, Garwin, and Drell among its members, has found at least
one interesting alternative—a relatively simple in-shore system of
conventionally powered submersibles. The in-shore element is
critical, (1) to the kind of command and control that is an
attractive feature of Minuteman, (2) to the cost-effectiveness
[Page 392]
of the system, and (3) to
its distinctiveness, as a system sufficiently different from
Poseidon and Trident to require very different Soviet
countermeasures.
Those to whom I have talked, and I admit that they are only a small
sample, believe that this in-shore submersible system is much the
most attractive in sight technologically, economically and
militarily, if we think simply in terms of what a new secure
second-strike strategic system should be like. Unfortunately, it is
bureaucratically unattractive both because it offers no role for the
Air Force and because it relies on exactly the kinds of vessels and
capabilities that the Navy resists. As recent events have shown us
again, the Admirals like large ocean-going ships, preferably with
nuclear power, and they think in terms of insuring the survivability
of each of these monstrous units, rather than in terms of the
deterrent effect of a large set of small vessels that survives by
numbers, not by individual “invulnerability.”
If anyone can bend the uniformed bureaucracy to technical and
strategic reality it is the President, and if any President has the
intellectual and moral equipment for the task it is this President.
There is a world of difference between what a President can command
and what the ablest Secretary of Defense can manage.
Obviously, the technical and economic premises on which this
memorandum is based need to be tested. Judgments of this importance
cannot be rested on conversations in Colorado or on the hunches of
even the most gifted of civilian scientists. But it is equally
obvious that the service bureaucracies are not organized with a view
to providing the best possible solutions to problems of this sort;
they are organized for the survival of their own preferred symbols
of status. The secure and closely controlled second-strike weapon is
nobody’s favorite, except when it happens to be a manned bomber or
an ocean-going nuclear powered submarine. Minuteman itself is
serving well for twenty years, but it was not designed by military
men, and their bumbling efforts to replace it show that left to
themselves they will not get the job done.
