War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Interview with John Coyle, 1986

Come we stop. Could you describe for us as briefly as you can what. Will happen around about the mid 50s to suddenly make the Palau's system in submarine seem attractive and and how you decide what to do with it quite a bit describing the Woods Hole revelations. Well I think I've got to go back just a little bit for that because we were we had been. Talking about putting nuclear ballistic missiles to sea and had been struggling with a monstrous confection that was called the Jupiter ass which was a joint Army Navy enterprise to put a Jupiter missile at sea which was so big that the we couldn't even find ships that would fit into very well. And the idea of a submarine was sort of almost totally B although we did some some awfully wild speculations about what a submarine would look like if you put the Jupiter into it. And. There was a

study group that convened at Woods Hole in the summer of what was it. Again we had a number for that. It's not a 66 I think it was I think just started on a guy there was a sense that there was a sorrow's study group in the summer about 1956 in which at Woods Hole in which a bunch of the navy's. Technical people got together and discuss the future of missiles and in the Navy. And in particular of missiles like the Jupiter S and that kind of thing. But. And in the course of this since they were not very well educated on nuclear weaponry they asked Edward Teller to come and give them a briefing on what was going on in the atomic weapons development business. And he came and sat and listened for a little while and then he said you know you guys are not doing the right thing you're designing your missiles to carry a weapon which is

available now. And the missiles are going to be available for some several years of development time we can if you'll specify it for us we can develop a weapon for years. The same development interval that the missile is going to require that'll make a much more practical missile available to you. And this was an insight that anybody right point should have been able to think of. I see I see more now that that's clear that's what he is saying is you know we can we can give you the same explosive blast of the missile that will have you know. OK. Let's just take it again from there. And if you could. For the band going to go back through the media or do you want to just talk about Mr. what Mr. talers. I told him just while I wouldn't mind taking it up again from talking about the summit meeting in 56. And if you could specify where Woods Hole is I'm not sure was it Massachusetts is it. Yeah it's in Massachusetts. OK. Just try that once again.

OK we are told that the Navy has convened a summer study group of its. Senior Technical people. At Woods Hole which is on Cape Cod just affected right near Hyannis Port. This summer and. To discuss all kinds of Navy missiles the future of missiles in the Navy I think may have been that may have been the title of the the study group. And they asked Mr. teller doctor tell her to come and tell them about nuclear weapons since nuclear weapons were not awfully well known by the technical people in those days or very highly classified. Teller told them that they were kind of dumb to build a missile around the heavy weapons which were then available to them in which they had been told about. That if he was asked he could provide them a much lighter weapon like maybe a quarter of the weight that would bring this missile size requirement

down from this monstrous Jupiter kind of scantlings down to something that could be a lot cheaper and a lot easier to find us find a house for in a submarine in particular. But also on a ship and. This this was a considerable disclosure just within hours after teller's lecture where you know people were calling us up from all the people that hadn't been invited to the meeting like me and telling us about this new this new fact of life and people out in the laboratories came up with new designs of missiles just within within within a week. There were just any number of little candidates. And immediately. After this admiral Burke asked red ray Barnett who is in charge of Navy missile development logistics train the missile and the platform that they're put on whether submarines or surface ships or not is that it was always kind of there the minute the Rayburn was the

missile. Czar of the Navy and US in those days and I asked him to convene a group to absorb this new disclosure and to find ways of exploiting this new fact. And within. A. And in our group we were asked to do a study of what its initial specifications ought to be and what kind of platform it ought to be whether on ships or submarines or what kind of range it ought to have. And other of whatever other characteristics we ought to we ought to be put into its initial specifications. And on the first of the year. After that until sometime in January we produced a study which persuaded this chief of naval admiral Burke that he wanted to make the recommendation that there was kind of dumb to think about this thing unless it was a deterrent weapon system at that time he'd been he had been constrained by the Key West

Agreement to talk about this. I mean that's back to you too to talk about the study. Now the important thing I think to get across is and briefly say that there'd been this agreement way back in the 40s that he wouldn't go in strategic targeting So you had to have all these absurd targets that had naval applications. OK. And then he said and he made this recommendation we should get rid of all that. And what we need is a range that will reach Moscow from. OK. OK. So can you describe for us the the way in which naval targeting policy changed as a result of the study that you made. Yes. We had been of course as we have been in the business of nuclear carries for some. Years with the US starting with airplanes and

through the. Cruise missiles. But the. We had not been targeting strategic like targets before had been tactical things and we hadn't. It was during the Jupiter ass period kind of. When we first started talking about the long range ballistic missiles at sea we started talking about targeting trying to find some effect I guess trying to find some years farther with that they had been was like I shouldn't be digressing I suppose to say that this is a classic case of the capability driving requirements. Were looking for. Let's take that thought again. I mean what kind of. All right. Which came first. In a sense was it the weapons to get to have weapons and you have a target so you have

targets and you were looking for weapons that could hit the target. Well we had record stirringly of. It we had a clear operational requirement for certain tactical like weapons which we've been living with for for years and had no problem about. Up until that time the idea of having a nuclear weapon that would. Well in the first place for us having a nuclear weapon at all was kind of a kind of a shock when we could see some tactical targets for nuclear weapons like you know sort of a large task force or something like that. But to. Find some use for weapons that had had. Long range it could penetrate deep in enemy territory it was a it was a sort of a new project for us and we didn't really do very well at it. We were told by the Key West agreements that since the Air Force was in charge of strategic bombing we had to do quote targets of naval interest unquote. And it's kind of hard to find targets of naval interest in

any particular sense that we would. We did find we had several people made studies of of the where factories that made naval related equipment were located and those were places that we could aim at. And we ended up doing studies which were elaborate ways of matching a nuclear weapon to of to a submarine. Battery plant somewhere in the middle of Russia that didn't make any sense when you looked at them and the. Impact of the new disclosure about. About a practical ship based missile on the outcome of that key west of the of. The woods whole. Exercise made it

put a somewhat new new coloration on this because up to then we hadn't really been seriously thinking about naval weapons at all that Jupiter has such a preposterous thing that we were just playing games now that we could actually see a nuclear weapon we could see that we had to it had to be a little bit more serious about what it might be used for. And the only way we could do that was to take over the some of the mission of the Air Force had been assigned which was a deterrent mission. It just didn't make any sense to use it for any other purpose. And this put a new coloration on our own. Our own philosophy about our own concept of operations for the Navy which led us to recommand in this at all to accept the idea that we ought to be biting off this Air Force mission for a change.

And this was done in the first in a in his endorsement of a study that said this ought to be done studies determining. The kinds of characteristics that are the introductory fleet ballistic missile ought to have this Regius of. All of its warhead and the kind of basing it ought to be. STOP IT AGAIN. Let's go back to this question. What assuming that we explain the Key West agreement. What use was the Navy intending to put these these missiles to Originally I mean they say that the regular So the gave it as if it ever got to see. How the targeting. Given that you weren't allowed to go for strategic targets. Would we if we had been would have been

comfortable for years with tactical targeting and we knew how to how to assign weapons to targets and what kinds of fusing to use on them and and timing and all the operations were were very familiar to us. But when we had this new challenge of using a long range ballistic missile. We had that first with the Jupiter as we had it laid on us from from a higher authority that the Navy was supposed to be studying us and we did it as we were ordered to do but we couldn't take it very seriously because Jupiter was such a preposterous mess so it had was just nobody could in his right mind would have. Thought that it would even work for all that matter. But but to an operational thing it you know how would you target it. What would be good for we didn't have any idea. And we played along and did we did preposterous

things we found targets in the middle of Russia that had some kind of naval interest and which did not therefore violate the key west agreement lika a plant in Gorky that made made batteries for submarines. But it didn't we didn't take it particularly seriously and it was only after the the idea of came out of woods hole that we could have a serious missile that was that was more or less economical to make and would we could seriously carry and that could be made to go a long range that we started seriously thinking about what. On the earth could this be used for. And. At this point we we couldn't think of any any target of naval interest that this could be fired at. And it just occurred to us that the only way we could we could deal with this new.

Thing was to take over. I've still not done this where I am am I the only. It just occurred to us that it occurred to us that the that the strategic. Kurtosis the strategic deterrent task in which the Key West Agreement said Sign of the air for us was the only rational employment of a weapon of this kind. And that we'd have to bite off this piece if we were going to going to have any kind of a decent rationale. That would fit such a weapon. And once we heard just everything just fell into place it was easy. The of. The initial weapons were going to. Not be very many therefore they could they'd obviously be assigned the most important targets. There was only one really super important target that was

Moscow in this new mission we knew where that was we knew where the oceans were we could calculate the ranges being what turned out to be a 750 miles distance between Moscow and the narrowest of navigable water. That wasn't so constricted that they'd be able to just sit there and wait for us and the yield of course had to be something that would be. That would take care of threatening Moscow which was already it was kind of thing that nuclear weapons were characterized by anyhow. And. The question of whether it was how was to be based whether on a submarine or a surface ship agonized for you know for quite a while but not too long because the initial a single deployment of a surface ship the first surface ship to go out would be so so vulnerable and visible that it would not be very credible as a threat. And the first submarine could sneak up and the first submarine would be an effective threat.

So the first deployment of a submarine with a nuclear capability against Moscow with way and the strategic bombers in a way that was that we thought was pretty hard to to to knock. And this was our recommendation that we take over the air force task and we put the first one into a submarine. I asked on that break. OK let's leave that now. So the system what it had and it went pretty well. Now in the summer of 67 you think or at any rate at some time in the 50s you are sort of different task which was to look at. The cycle time it became available to the Army and Navy to analyze what was your reaction when you finally got your reaction to that when you first got a real good look at that war plan. You know this is not too relevant to the first. The actual Polaris which is going on independently This is wholly different.

It took us. Quite a long. Time after. Us. I'm not sure quite how what sort of background we really need for this exist right now. Why about that just just if you can answer the question or at long last the 1957. Admiral Burke managed to end the gang up with the chief of staff of the Army and Air Force on the air force that they submit their nuclear plans for review by the other services as was done conventionally with all the other war plans and the plan was called annex Charley of the japes gap Jaysh gap is joint strategic capabilities plan and Charlie was a nuclear war annex and it had the targeting and it had had a long list of weapons and each

weapon was was associated with a target that was going to hit and the army in the Navy assigned their working level people to a summer study or to a study of this plan which convened out at the the army map service and we boxed ourselves in under very high security for about six weeks and plotted on a match live and maps of cities and maps of Russia. These quote lay down unquote of these of these weapons. And it was a. It was a exercise in unreality for us all it was it was absolutely preposterous. We ended up finding. Well of course one way you plot a nuclear weapon impact is to draw a circle around the point of aim and put on that has some specification on it you know that 90 percent of targets have certain

hardness will be destroyed within that circle kind of thing. We drill in circles and sometimes we had overlapping circles as many as eight or ten times on it on the downtown areas of cities in Russia that kind of thing. And every once in a while he'd be one of these little navy weapons would come in that had lower yield of the Air Force was dead there'd be a little tiny bottle caps stuck down in the middle of this of this map that had circles the size of phonograph records at it. This is a multi megaton weapons that they dropped on the on the airfield near the city but still covered the city and a good many of its industrial plants and its most of its population. And the whole thing was so were one of the high points of this really was the analysis we did by picking. Weapons under whose circles appeared only the single target element of petroleum supplies. Peak oil storage. It was technically called and there were

these weapons was never very. Most of them went after quite a few different target elements at the same time and so it was hard to know just what the justification for the weapon was. But in this case the only justification was petroleum storage. And we found I don't know how I can remember how many weapons but a good many and a good great many hundreds of megatons. That were targeted only against petroleum and. They diminish the. Soviet petroleum supplies from some number again I can't remember precisely what something like 60 wanted to half down to 60 percent there but we also have something of that sort of general order but it was a huge amount of petroleum but had not been put into that particular perspective had absolutely no conceivable relevancy to the winning of a war. This whole thing was so so dramatically unmilitary are irrelevant. To any kind of a

serious military concept that it was. It just flabbergasted us. And we've. We've developed a briefing on it and we're given the opportunity to brief this to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And this I got I still considered to be one of the highest of the highest points in my professional career was sitting in the background I was not doing the briefing it was done by some of our naval officers colleagues of watching General of May who was I think at that time still the chief of SAC and was sitting in the ER as a midwife and listener as we were. Watching his cigar drift from one side of his mouth to the other general may have removed his cigar across his mouth with his tongue he didn't use his hands and he had a kind of a of it was known that

he his emotional state could be measured by the rate at which his cigar from one side of his mouth to another which he probably chewed off was due to our to our presentation because we were there therefore presentation was was more or less routine playing out all the different all the amount of damage they were doing our presentation was one that pointed out that the important damage wasn't being done that it was not a. It was not a reasonable thing to try to do that day. They know that they were totally successful in delivering their weapons they would not have accomplished anything that would have crippled the Russian capability beyond perhaps the sort of massive disruption that any kind of a nuclear attack would do. But it was measured in terms of target elements and what how much was left over afterwards. They were. It was it was dumb. It was just didn't make sense. Same time he was saying that they were doing 40 knots and they're doing too much. I

mean they just laying down. Well they were labored to strike an awful lot of everything but they weren't doing it. They were surviving. Capability is measured the way they were measuring them were still enough to still about enough to be as consequential as the ones that they started out with. They still had plenty of gasoline to try their airplanes. So it probably had weapons still in their stockpile that had been missed by our attack. So this is the surviving capability was it was still there and if they were all they were trying to do is to destroy the enemy's will to fight or something like that or to do a lot of damage they could have done that with many fewer weapons. Because of the actual city attack it long been saturated. It's only a couple of hundred weapons a great most to of just have you know sort of very few Megatons to to pretty much kill most of the population of the urban population.

But they are laying down much more than that against with the justification of this of getting every last little drop of gas. They were getting a last little draft gas they were getting incremental driblets of the residual gas that was built to be to be located most of the gasoline never was even we didn't even know where it was. And indeed the the. Overall reaction that when you first saw that plan I mean you're out of Mosul. I think our reaction was that we didn't think we thought at least that all these things had been kept secret from us for so long it would have made more sense if we were just we were really really expected when we had gone in to have been given a chance to look at this plan that we would find something there and all we found was was was crazy.

It was insane. What was the effect of that report. The. The immediate effect as we said soon after we gave this report to the Joint Chiefs they started seriously considering and. A project that we'd been trying to push for years which was to plan a retaliatory rather than preemptive mode to plan for an attack that would be that would be a retaliation against a Soviet attack rather than an attack that would be a first strike by the United States. This had never been done in the air force and we knew that it hadn't been done because our we'd been party to war games in which the Air Force always succeeded in laying down its attack before they had been caught on the ground. And. We felt that for deterrence one ought to have the primary plan ought to be one which guaranteed to the Russians that whatever they succeeded doing the

way of catching us by surprise or are laying down a heavier attack or that sort of thing. We would guarantee that they'd heard that they'd get something that they'd be punished and that that was the essence of deterrence it was deterrence was not to do maximum damage but to minimize the chance that another so that the other side could find it reasonable to make an attack on us. And we had done. It we've been arguing this for some time and the impact of the report of the Budapest study was to get this off the ground in the joint chiefs and to actually generate guidance for the SEC to use in its Sonic's Charlie. That requires them to do what was called an alternative undertaking. We would have preferred to have it the primary undertaking but it did go out that way. The alternative undertaking was to be a targeting scheme for use if this Soviets managed to deliver their weapons before we did.

It was for use by us by a broken backed force as we call it a force that would have to be reconstituted after the Soviets had made good a nuclear attack. And we wanted the alternative undertaking to be to take account of the considerations that would govern in a case like that it would be a retaliatory attack rather than a preemptive counterforce attack. And this guidance was. Was promulgated it became the official Chasey us of orders to move to Omaha. And of I can't remember exactly what my memory was about three weeks before it was to take effect. The secretary of defense came up with a sign up which pre-empted everything and we went back in effect to square one. With the sign up having of. Giving the airforce license to go back to what they had been doing before without any any alternatives whatsoever.

Well in a nutshell was Admiral Burke's real objection to SAC's approach to strategic policy. That will Burke was a consummate military man. He was a he was he was called 30 not Burtt because he knew how to drive destroyers around the Pacific during the war and he was a he was the youngest CNO ever up to that time was a he was a he thought strategically and militarily the thought through things through to there to their. Are ultimate outcomes of what they would look like after you had done them. And what he thought what the world would look like after the Air Force had done what it was they proposed to do. He could see no value in it for the United States in

that. If he would use the word counter-force in his presence he kicked out of his office practically. He actually turn red. To bluster at the sound of the word he had somehow because he recognized that the counter-force of the preemptive idea. Was one that. It is kind of like. It amounted to saying that those of. Them Soviets aren't going to be don't dare attack because if they do we're going to catch them by surprise. But got to jump on him. That is what it amounted to and that's you don't plan to get the jump on somebody over the long term as a deterrent against his getting to jump on you. It just doesn't make any sense at all that that cycle time that you examined in 57 58 and it was that was essentially a FirstLight plan. There was

no question of waiting in the battalions. It didn't make any sense except as a first strike plan did it and it didn't make any sense as a first strike plan once you. It made sense as a first strike plan sort of in concept as used as the way the Air Force talked about it before you could get to see the details of it. But when you analyze the details it still it didn't make any sense even as a first strike plan because it didn't accomplish the things that they had set themselves to accomplish. OK can we go back to the Palazzo now. You when you were asked. To do studies on how many of these weapons were going to be needed now you cited what were you giving a go. I mean we told what needed to be a contest. How did that work out. Well we were told we were supposed to be a deterrent system and so we were supposed to have been and the deterrence was defined as a threat to the level of damage unacceptable damage to the other side and that this was at that

time was thought of as being a certain fraction of the. Population under ladders to be killed. And so we made the fun table calculations and kept coming up with numbers we developed some analytical procedures so that we could come up with numbers and. We'd send the numbers up the line in the form of a preliminary draft of a study and they'd be sent back down with one or another little little criticism from somewhere up the line. And. Finally we got. It we came up with a number which amounted to 45 submarines being required roughly and and that the criterion for that was defined as being able to. Destroy some fraction of the population with such as some assurance that it would be at least that many. And that is a kind of mathematical criterion that we needed to do our our

calculations. And then I was reminded by some of my naval officer colleagues that this was a magic number that this was this was derived also from a sort of a I suppose you might call it a geopolitical kind of algorithm which said that you had to always have three quarters of the Pacific to the Atlantic of any naval force in the Atlantic because you had to have one in the Mediterranean or one sort of across the seas one back home and three in the Pacific because you had to have one star in between the one that was deployed in the Far East and the one that you had at home and that submarine squadrons had nine submarines and so five times nine is 45 and that made the made 45 a kind of a comfortable number to have and all oh and I've talked to several Berka about this and he denies that this was his consideration.

I've always felt that I've always have been accused Burke of having made the geo political calculation and then just wait around until our criticized studies came up with the right number to justify the move from 45 to 41 came because. And I definitely remember this although Admiral Burke still doesn't doesn't remember it that there was a of an economy move at some point in there and they imposed a 10 percent cut across the board on everything that moved our. 45 down to 41. Repeat that for now. We had to be. Facing what it was that we saw when we looked at the Air Force plan. Among other things we had to recognize that there wasn't a run for it for the Navy's concept of a limited limited destruction in that because it was preempted by the fact that if it were restarted all the air

force would would take its massive damages we'd already seen in a project put it past where we laid down the Navy attack on top of the Air Force. What if it was just totally nonexistent. Is the strategy of how you are going to deal with it with deterrence on the one hand whether it's going to be a. Or a war fighting plan if you're going to have to fight the war on the other hand is can be done independently by one force in the presence of another force that dominates this situation. We felt that deterrence was very hard to contemplate in the face of an air force posture which was so vulnerable to preemption on its side. That it could double the incentive to attack was somehow stronger on the Soviet side and hence the fear of retaliation. And that in effect if we were going to

have to have a beneficial impact on national strategy and make it world safer for our grandchildren we had to do something to counter the weakness of the insanity of the Air Force concept. And so we were in competition with the Air Force. We did have a parochial Interservice controversial. What we consider to be a proper mission of Interservice controversy against the Air Force concept that this was not popular in the Navy because most of the Navy would rather just leave the whole thing alone most of the Navy. Felt that the. It just felt sort of that whole is unthinkable it was not for them to think and it was only a rather small group in the Navy and we weren't particularly popular. Nobody in our group ever ever made higher higher office in the Navy

but I do want to see them. I think what people would find it hard to understand is how the Navy thought it was going to improve NASA's given its criticism of SAC was it had far too many weapons already. How is it going to improve matters for the Navy to have a whole lot more weapons. Well you'd have to in the context that the weapons were going to be deployed we would rather have them deployed in a form that didn't invite Soviet urgent Soviet attack preemption. And so in effect we were competing on several grounds we were taking the fact that Miller used to say that because he felt so guilty about this why are we offered to deploy more dumb things. He said that if you order us to if if this is your task that you lay down we're able to do it better safer. Not necessarily cheaper but even cheaper because if we do it it's not going to be an invitation to Soviet either.

On the one hand attack on the other hand build up of nuclear attack capability which is what that is as we mentioned often the threat of an arms race if we were to continue the Air Force. Posture which invited Soviet counter force deployments which ended up being what were the situation we're in today. And they really want the done was to take over the whole of this treaty. We didn't want to take it over. We wanted to we wanted to impose on the strategic posture a concept that would not be the invitation to an arms race to a counterforce confrontation. And we we did a lot of recommending of Air Force systems. We we supported mobile Minuteman and. Other airborne weaponry and things like that.

We were not. We felt that our Navy capability was an example and was the best of available at the time but we were not and we recognized or at least some of us did encourage others who were pure parishioners but I claim any way to have to recognize that the Navy didn't I didn't want to but should not be allowed to take it over wholly by itself that we ought to. The thing we were trying to push was the idea that we didn't want to be in a preemptive. Provocative posture that invited Soviet counter nuclear developments. But from your position that in the late 50s early 60s didn't make any sense to you that the United States should end up with a triad so cold with a trio of forces each of which could accomplish the destruction of at least half the Soviet population on its side.

Well it made sense that we should have a what we used to call an optimum mix. The. Triad never. What was it was something else again we weren't aware that the rush of water to the mix would be a mixture of capabilities each of which would be a hedge against the development of some kind of a decisive countermeasure against the other. Recognizing that every system is every military development of any importance has always had a limited life before it became obsolete sort of hedge against that. We wanted a mix of systems and that's why even within the Navy we were we wanted in our little tight group of strategic interested people who we wanted surface ships to be in there as well and of course now they are finally with the with the cruise missiles being deployed on surface ships that took a long time and they the only thing that got him deployed was they weren't really thought of as competing with the with the Poseidon and the Polaris. And so we we wanted

competition both from the air force and within the Navy itself. We were we had hard time dealing with the missileers in the Navy who didn't want to think strategically either. They just they like the money that they were getting what they didn't want to do things that drive their submarines. And for example when we talked about a limited control response where you might have to launch a single weapon to do a demonstration to tell the enemy that you're that you're serious about things I wouldn't like to do that because I would expose a submarine to it to detection and things like that. And if they preferred to stay inside the spasm war or what we called the war gas some of the of the Air Force concept and preferred to fit into that nicely. And not to have any flexibility. Think looking back on that whole era you want to stop and stop.

Do you think looking back that there is any real sense military strategic sense. In the strategic arsenal the United States ended up with by the beginning of the 1960s very little early in the concept of deterrence which is other people have called mad for not to hear it just the. The threat of retaliation. That's the kind of. Military capability that doesn't. That never has. Made sense except as a as a.. Well the first measure kind of thing where you are presumably lining up in front of the enemy force with enough is enough

superior force that he has the size to back down. It was usually done with armies that had actually were plausible to fight with. And when you start talking nuclear deterrence with something where the whole moral and political and economic impact of lighting the thing off in a real instance of the house of actually fighting the war. It just doesn't make any sense. There's nothing that you can accomplish by doing that much damage that that makes any sense. The threat of it makes sense if you can somehow make the threat act to prevent the other side of making the choice to make the attack. But that's that threat is somehow. Lessened somewhat by the plausibility the lack of plausibility that it could ever be used that you can ever get the president to go that far as to push the button. Now

I'm sure that people out in Omaha are ready to push that button. And. One suspects are you know that they they don't really rely on the president to tell them whether to push it or not and because we occasionally have movies that dramatize that aspect and it's that's a hard thing to live with there's some there's some strategic merit to there being an uncertainty in the Soviet mind about whether it might be pushed or not. But then again there's a very strong I think even stronger strategic handicap in having them think that because it makes them trigger happy to and that chance of actually lighting off a nuclear war increased by some of these kinds of these uncertainties the chance of anyone wanting to are are diminished by the uncertainties with the chance of it's actually happening anyhow whether they want it or not are somewhat increased because the fact that it might happen that the idea that there may be somebody ready to push it you know triggered off by just being

crazy or something or B being under such pressure that he can't think of anything left to do or it means some kind of urgent crisis where his his perceived alternatives are narrowing down and nothing but that make it rational for somebody to. Devise schemes that will operate under those circumstances. He actually planned to have some rationality built in. I Terman Khan made a little talk about the rationale of irrationality which is know makes a certain amount of strategic sense. It's the same rationale of the hijackers that gets on the airplane with it with a hand grenade and hold it up to his chest and says I'm going to blow everybody up unless you turn around and head for Cuba or something like that. That makes sense. You know if you can persuade the guy that you're mad enough to do that well you might be able to hijack the airplane but it had to have our government. To.

Know the United States government rely on. Strategies like that is a little uncomfortable. You remember yourself thinking these kinds of things at the time during the 1950s. Was it your impression that it was somebody somewhere or a group of people that J.C. whoever would logically have thought actually working out what sort of force we need and how to go about getting it or what sort of impression did you have about the way these things are being thought about. Well I did a lot of thinking about that. And we had lots of arguments about it. The question. No question. Well one of the interesting questions was the question of whether the the employment plan whether you actually the plan that the actual war plan if you're going to fight should be the same as the declaratory policy which is what you are threatening to do. And generally this distinction between the you know the Declaration and the actual operating plan and the was

was not very clearly made but became more and more interesting and important as as especially in the early 60s as we started to recognize that that was an important distinction. And indeed McNamara when he he laid down this triad the triad but the mix which ended up being the triad as a as a procurement policy the employment policy was a whole separate thing that was what was going on out in Omaha and he didn't interfere with their their counter-force planning out in Omaha except to try to make it more flexible. He recognized that the planning in Omaha was not that it was not to accomplish the things that he had laid down as a kind of a specification a requirement of what he wanted to achieve in the in the procurement of Forth. He wanted to procure forces that had this independent capability. But when they were a warfighting plan

was to be written somewhat differently. Now I just ask you one more question and that is if you can describe to me as best you understand it the second way in which procurement happened in the 1950s especially in Sac. Yes we of course even though we were led to see this plan we wish we were there was always a budget exercise every year so we the service was led to criticize the other services budget proposals and the way the air force presented them to us was it that I can't remember the interval I think it was like he was actually they presented an alternation between the thing called the AWP which stood for the air weapons planned something for bombers. I can't remember exactly what it was called it a bomber procurement plan. We're not going at the same time they were given an alternation of each other and each was sort of relied on the other as a kind of a bootstrap the

last proved AWP would volved the the procurement of so many nuclear weapons and. Then they would come up at the time they brought up their bomber plan they would say now if we're going to get these weapons and they're scheduled to come on line in such such a day we're going to have to buy some more airplanes to carry them. And so they would use the They'd argue the airplane procurement thing until they got a good program buy of airplanes next time the air weapons there. WP would come around why they would say we've got all these airplanes coming off the ground we got to buy some more weapons to fill up their Bombays. And what this. This bootstrap. Policy was one that we'd become quite aware of. In fact it was exercised with that that gave us sort of a feeling of some of the Air Force thinking that I think may have

colored some of our giving us a little bit more and more enthusiasm when we when we actually could catch them with their hands of the tell which we occasionally did especially at that Budapest. OK that's kind of where you are during the mid 50s right during the major build up of the Air Force Air Force that is strategic for us. We were faced alternately with the in the Interservice arena where we were given a chance to sort of argue the budget of competitions with an air force. Claim for having having a requirement for so many weapons because they had bombers that were empty Bombay's and them that they could put the weapons into. And then a few months later they would face us with another. Requirement that we were for air craft.

And the way they paced these things we dealt with only one at a time. So we were not really allowed to take them both and together we were faced when we were buying aircraft with their requirement for finding aircraft to carry the weapons that were going to be coming off the line and then buy weapons was finding weapons to fit into these expensive airplanes that otherwise would be going idle. So it was a circular process that we were very cleverly kept us and this was before they'd ever let us actually see the plan or what they were going to do kept us from ever addressing the issue in any really very cogent way. It was always a fait accompli that we'd already approved so many weapons or we'd already approve so many Bombay's spaces. It was actually making a decision finally on procurement I mean was it was it a committee in the J.C yes or no procurement was a decision made by the Defense Department and we were in effect just arguing that J.C as recommendations as was always allowed to comment

and it was nice for. For a service to be able to get the concurrence of the other chiefs that J.C. has recommendation. So we were each given a chance to have a certain amount of quid pro quo and although a certain amount of bargaining on the table you approved my thinking I'll approve yours. But in that case there was of we had quite a lot of navy misgivings about the way the Air Force was escalating this matter. Bootstrapping this matter went on tough. Another