The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age

By Edward Kaplan

The End of Victory recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war—how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy—a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States.

Edward Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives.

Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks—and ones involving military force run grave ones—though they can rarely be known with precision.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501766138

Edward Kaplan

Terry Lamb is Professor of Languages and Interdisciplinary Pedagogy at the University of Westminster, London, UK. His most recent book is Insights into Language Education Policies (ed. 2020, Peter Lang, with M. Jiménez Raya and B. Manzano Vázquez).

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Introduction

By 1952, Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith had served over forty years in uniform. After being wounded at the Meuse-Argonne in 1917, Smith moved slowly up the ranks of the interwar army until he caught the eyes of two senior officers: Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall. For the remainder of the Second World War, Smith served as chief of staff in commands from Washington, DC, to the European Theater. In that role, he orchestrated the daily operations, plans, intelligence, and logistics of joint armadas on the offensive. Few American leaders understood as well as Smith how to weave together these essential threads of modern warfare for a commander. These talents led President Truman to appoint him the ambassador to the USSR and then, a year after he returned to the US in 1949, the third director of Central Intelligence (DCI).

Smith was an organizational expert, not an intelligence one, but his expertise was precisely what the nascent intelligence community (IC) needed. He reorganized the Central Intelligence Agency, addressing the concerns of the 1949 Intelligence Survey Group that had spotlighted the agency’s failings in coordination and production. One of Smith’s key reforms was establishing the Office of National Estimates, creating a regular system for IC-wide examination of crucial issues. In 1952, his new organization was producing key analysis to inform national security decisions, but in November, Smith’s reforms had hit a roadblock. The previous August, the National Security Council (NSC) had directed the CIA to prepare a report on the Soviet ability to damage the United States.¹ Smith was dissatisfied with the resulting study.² For the CIA to accurately determine how much damage the USSR could inflict on the United States, it had to know US war plans and capabilities. It was an inherently interactive problem based on the net damage that Soviet forces could inflict after accounting for US defenses. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), the authors and potential executors of the war plan, balked at sharing with the intelligence community. At an NSC meeting on November 26, the DCI reported that the CIA’s efforts had been frustrated by what he called a phase of the old argument between G-2 [intelligence] and G-3 [operations].³ In Smith’s army experience, intelligence and operations officers had hesitated to share with each other, fearing that vital information would be compromised. When he had been in uniform, the DCI had cajoled his intelligence and operations subordinates to cooperate. There was an analogy to that solution in the present situation. Smith suggested to the president and the assembled national security officials that the NSC itself was the only agency that could carry out such a study. The problem, according to the NSC’s memorandum summarizing the meeting, was too large and too complicated for any one government agency to solve by itself. It seemed obvious to General Smith that the NSC alone was the proper agency to guide and coordinate such studies.⁴ The Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC) came into being.

The NESC’s task was to determine what damage the USSR could inflict in a surprise attack. What would the cost be if US strategy failed catastrophically? By late 1952, the Cold War had been marked by both day-to-day ideological struggle and disputes from Berlin to Korea. The overwhelming size of the Soviet armed forces gave these crises gravity. Underlying the many variations of the United States’ grand strategy of containment was industrial superiority. Factories would convert the economic might of the US into military force that could defend the free world. Paired with that immense mobilization potential were US nuclear weapons. The US maintained a monopoly until the first Soviet atomic bomb test, but even after August 1949, it retained overwhelming quantitative superiority. US nuclear weapons—and the bomber and later the missile force to deliver it—gave the US a powerful tool to apply to its security interests. However, both US and Soviet forces multiplied throughout the 1950s. The US stockpile in 1952 was just under 850 devices; and in 1960 was over 18,000; the Soviet stockpile went from 50 to 1,600.⁵ How much damage could these Soviet weapons inflict? Was a net advantage, even a large one, for the United States meaningful? The answers to those questions depended not only on Soviet or US plans and capabilities, but on their interaction. Useful insights would depend on the result of a net evaluation. Directly subordinate to the president, the NESC became the most senior body in the government examining the problem of nuclear war.

The atomic bomb’s effect on strategy is reflected in the struggle to adapt existing ideas and language to the nuclear age. Concepts whose meaning, if not generally and intuitively understood, was at least argued within accepted limits escaped their bounds. The raw destructive power of the atomic bomb and its thermonuclear successor raised fundamental questions, not the least of which was how to reconcile the incongruity of nuclear arms and political objectives. Even by the standards of a century that saw two global wars, the atomic bomb threatened utter ruin. But it took years, and a Soviet enemy with a credible atomic arsenal, for the full transformation of the nuclear age to become clear to US policy makers. In the intervening two decades of the early nuclear age, they struggled to fit the outsized means of atomic weapons into a coherent strategy that linked the use of force to achieving political ends. What did winning look like when the enemy had nuclear weapons that could reach the US homeland? The NESC’s studies, by quantifying the growing cost of victory, guided American leaders to recast their fundamental ideas about the utility of war.

The NESC was fundamental to the creation of US nuclear strategy, and its work is virtually unknown. The NESC’s story adds a layer of understanding to the well-known struggles of civilians to inform military-dominated early nuclear strategy and policy. Influential works such as Fred Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon look to outsized personalities like air force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke, and visible organizations like Strategic Air Command, as the key military sources of nuclear policy. This book documents that hidden in the shadows, and with the ear of the president, was another bastion of expertise. Working directly for and empowered by the White House, the NESC was not beholden to the services—only to the president and his national security concerns.

This book recounts the NESC’s story for the first time. For twelve years, the subcommittee quantified the cost of failure. Taken with the intelligence community’s assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC’s work framed the risks of US strategy. All policy decisions run risks, and ones involving military force run grave ones, but those risks can rarely be known with any precision. In nuclear war, from 1953 onward, US leaders chose to know as precisely as possible what would happen—how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain—if they failed. In the coldest years of the Cold War, it told Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy what the result of the worst failure of US strategy—a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States—would be, and where the two countries would stand relative to one another at the end of the attack. The NESC’s studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the goals of a war with the USSR, and the size and shape of US offensive and defensive forces. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments, and during day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC’s reports were the best estimates of the butcher’s bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives.

The reports show what Eisenhower and Kennedy believed were plausible outcomes of nuclear war and delineated what the presidents thought was achievable in fighting a nuclear war, as opposed to peacetime deterrence. Both men devoutly preferred deterrence to destruction, but they also believed that a nuclear war was possible and that being prepared required intense peacetime planning and reliable strategy. Eisenhower held that once an enemy began to fight, winning was the only valid aim. The United States had to break the enemy’s will to fight. Kennedy believed that reason had its place in nuclear operations and that an opponent could be coerced to stop fighting short of an all-out exchange. The NESC’s reports provided essential data to both leaders as they shaped the defense program and reinforced their belief that deterrence in peacetime had to be made to work. For Eisenhower, peacetime deterrence flowed from a public strategy of Massive Retaliation—with any war quickly escalating to unrestrained destruction—made crystal clear to the Kremlin. To his successor, peacetime deterrence relied on a credible ability to fight wars at any level of intensity. They were two different approaches to the same problem of maximizing peacetime deterrence, a task whose urgency, defined in destroyed cities and dead citizens, the NESC’s work undergirded.

The NESC studied whether a war started by a surprise Soviet attack could be fought to a successful conclusion. Before a credible Soviet nuclear threat to North America, this question was less urgent. An attack in Europe would leave the US intact to mobilize as it had twice in the twentieth century, to defeat the enemy in due course. Beginning in the early 1950s, however, enemy nuclear weapons meant that the opening move of the war might decide the outcome. Preparing for those decisive hours required years of organizing, training, and equipping. Thus, the NESC’s annual studies looked several years into the future, using the best intelligence about Soviet programs and intentions, combined with projected US military capabilities and plans, to determine what would happen when the two collided on the Kremlin’s terms.

The result delineated the cost of failure. Combined with the intelligence community’s estimates of the probability of attack, it estimated risk. Strategy seeks to align means with desired ends, and the alignment is always imperfect. Ends are usually ill defined or difficult to achieve. Means may be inadequate or inappropriate. Ways may be unacceptable. The misalignment is a form of risk that a decision-maker is asked to take. In the early 1950s, the United States was prepared to open a war with the USSR by launching an atomic-armed strategic bomber force at Soviet industry while mobilizing its economic power into military might—what the historian Andrew Erdman calls the Detroit Deterrent.⁶ As the Soviets built their own offensive atomic air force, the first task of US nuclear forces became preempting their Soviet counterparts, not through preventive war, but by decisive and effective strikes against an enemy as that enemy began a campaign. The NESC examined what would happen if this US force, prepared to strike first, was itself struck first. What risk was the president being asked to accept?

The NESC’s estimates guided adjustments to US strategy. The studies looked at modifications to means, such as new weapons systems and fallout shelters, but the most profound shifts were to ends and ways. The studies showed the increased cost of winning. Toward the end of the 1950s, the United States’ aim in war with the USSR was still winning, but not in the form of a traditional victory. Instead, the goal was survival—to prevail. The NESC’s studies measured what prevailing looked like and put a price tag on achieving it. As the war’s goal evolved, so did the plan for carrying it out. As the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, starting in mid-1960, (nominally) took control of nuclear war planning from the air force’s Strategic Air Command, theater commanders worldwide, and the navy’s new Polaris submarine force, it wrote the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP).

The first SIOP lay at the center of intense internecine fighting among the military’s senior leaders.⁷ The plan dictated which targets would have to be hit, with which weapons, carried by what platforms. The target list dictated the relative capabilities of the services needed to carry out the plan, and therefore their all-important budgets. When the service chiefs proved unable to decide the basis of the new plan’s target list, Eisenhower assigned the task to the NESC, and here lay an important element of the story. The historian David Rosenberg’s pathbreaking 1980s work firmly established the importance of SIOP-62 to US nuclear strategy and how it developed in the context of deep interservice tensions. In Rosenberg’s telling, the NESC’s role in the SIOP was consequential but only peripheral. Its 1958 annual study catalyzed Eisenhower’s closer examination of targeting, while the subcommittee’s special 2009 report cut the Gordian knot of high-stakes interservice rivalry by producing an optimum mix target list that the president adopted as the SIOP’s basis. What can now be seen more clearly is that the NESC’s status as long standing, well trusted, and independent of the services made it essential to the SIOP’s development. Without the NESC, Eisenhower would have been hard pressed to parse the tangled and self-serving arguments of the air force and navy and might not even have launched the effort at all. The first iteration of that plan was just a beginning.

With an NESC-grounded SIOP in force, but any conceivably survivable war becoming more implausible, the Kennedy administration shifted away from winning in either form and toward a focus on war termination—that is, to convince an enemy to stop its attacks while leaving it in an inferior position to the United States. The latter goal speaks to a major change in strategic ways. The Kennedy administration shifted the basis of nuclear operations from what Thomas Schelling calls forcible action to coercion.⁸ Coercion has two forms. Compellence is causing an enemy to take an action he does not want to take; deterrence seeks to make him refrain from an action you do not want him to take. In the 1950s, the military’s peacetime role was to convince Moscow that it could not win if it attacked, and to defeat it—through forcible action—if it did. In the 1960s, coercion was still the peacetime objective; the difference was in wartime operations, where coercion would continue.⁹ The goal of nuclear operations was for the Kremlin to agree to end the conflict on acceptable terms. That outcome required careful calibration of strikes and negotiations, directed by civilian authorities. The NESC’s studies took a hard look at the practical difficulties of controlled response and of the potential decision points in conflict. As in the 1950s, it gave depth to abstract ideas and helped the most senior national security figures find their way in fraught terrain. Moreover, its analysis adds a new dimension to our understanding of controlled response, an issue that echoed throughout US nuclear strategy until the end of the Cold War.

This assessment of the cost of failure came at a pivotal time in the history of US national security, between 1950 and 1965 as the Cold War’s most direct confrontations between the superpowers occurred, and the NESC is a key to understanding that moment. The subcommittee is historically important because it examined modern war as it threatened to engulf the United States and became so destructive that seeking unconditional surrender—a classical form of victory—became unworkable. The NESC measured that transition with studies marking two revolutions. The October 1957 launch of the first satellite, Sputnik, starting the space age, was the second revolution. A rocket capable of launching a satellite into space could also loft a nuclear warhead across space onto a target in the United States in a matter of minutes. Ballistic missiles altered the strategic calculus by compressing the timeline of a war. The first revolution is less well known. The missing element, documented by the NESC, was Soviet thermonuclear plenty in the years before Sputnik. Moscow’s arsenal expanded dramatically from its inception in 1949. While atomic bombs, with an explosive power equivalent to an entire raid of Second World War B-29 bombers, could destroy US cities and air bases, thermonuclear weapons were of an entirely different order of magnitude. Each of these new weapons had as much firepower as every bomb dropped by the US in both theaters of war from 1941 to 1945. The NESC’s studies, looking a few years into a future where the Soviets would have hundreds or even thousands of such weapons, forecast the consequences: the US could not remain intact after a nuclear exchange, even if Washington attacked preemptively.¹⁰ Because Soviet thermonuclear plenty made preemption fruitless, it was actually more important than missiles in shifting the United States’ wartime aim from victory to prevailing.

The NESC forecast the net effect of both missiles and thermonuclear weapons. While each was important in giving the Soviets a new capability, what was vital—and what the NESC was the only body in the US government capable of accurately studying—was the net effect at the intersection of these new Soviet technologies and the US idea of preemption. The subcommittee discerned the shape and severity of the problems and gave the president the data he needed to adjust the course of US strategy.

The history of the NESC is relevant across the wider field of strategic studies. Thermonuclear plenty and the space age, among the other changes of the period, were not the sole domain of the government. From the mid-1950s, the NESC was looking at issues being explored and examined simultaneously in the nascent strategic studies community. It thus offers key insight into the way in which strategic studies make their way into policy. The vulnerability of manned aircraft, the need for more rapid alert procedures, and the efficacy of civil defense are only three examples of issues studied by government and civilians alike. But the subcommittee probed these problems with the data and experience available only at the highest levels of government.

The subcommittee’s reports went directly to the decision-makers. In the 1950s and 1960s, a group of talented civilian intellectuals, often from the field of economics, began to apply their skills to the problem of war. Bernard Brodie, already known in military circles for his contributions to naval strategy, became a major thinker in the first generation of nuclear strategists. He was among the first to identify the new emphasis on the military’s deterrent role brought about by nuclear weapons. Albert Wohlstetter, a prototypical mathematically oriented analyst at the RAND Corporation, highlighted the vulnerability of Strategic Air Command bases in early 1950s studies.¹¹ In fact, RAND fostered a generation of nuclear thinkers in the 1950s, such as Charles Hitch and Alain Enthoven, many from the rigorous economics field.¹² Perhaps the most prominent of that generation of strategists was also a Harvard economist and professor, Thomas Schelling.¹³ Schelling’s ideas on coercion and force became a vital framework for understanding nuclear strategy both in the civilian strategic community and in the new Kennedy administration. All of their intellectual contributions slowly began to shape thinking about nuclear weapons. Then, in the early 1960s, under the Kennedy administration, many of these men entered the government, bringing with them the knowledge, ideas, and concepts they had developed in the academic and think tank environments that had initially supported them.¹⁴

The NESC continued to study the same ideas as the civilian strategists, and in at least one case in direct response to them. The NESC’s reports show how ideas with origins in the strategic studies community were considered by a group with long and practical experience in looking at the same problem. The NESC became a conduit for these ideas, tempered by analysis, to enter debate and decision-making in the White House. Finally, when civilian strategists became decision-makers, they found many military officers who had been thinking deeply about the same issues of nuclear strategy that concerned them. The interrelationship—and friction—between these groups shaped the development of nuclear strategy with increasing intensity starting in the early 1960s.

The NESC’s subordination to the civilian commander in chief, while the subcommittee was composed and led by military officers, raises interesting questions for organizational behavior and civil-military relations. The individual armed services in the 1950s engaged in fierce rivalry. Hierarchical position in the NSC and presidential sponsorship placed the NESC above the fray, yet the group’s military composition made it susceptible to the same cultural problems as the services from which it drew its members. In the 1960s, the military composition put the group in the awkward position of working for the NSC but generating studies that were sometimes at odds with a powerful defense secretary bent on building the civilian analytical functions of his department. The 1960s Defense Department made analysis more general, more civilian, less dependent on qualitative expertise, and arguably more rigorous. For the first time, the Defense Department housed general-purpose analytical organizations that could examine complex questions independent of the services. The history of the NESC is a case study of how specialized organizations try to adapt to growing competence in a generalized bureaucracy, in this case defined in part by professional distinctions.

The NESC’s story and its reports also put the strategic decisions of key decision makers, including Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Robert McNamara, in a richer context. Understanding these decisions, the assumptions on which they rested, and the broader topic of nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s requires historical empathy. Modern researchers and readers live in an age that has internalized the nuclear taboo as an accepted normative prohibition against use.¹⁵ Nuclear weapons are objects of study, deterrence, prestige, and other functions save one—usable violence. Looking at a period where declared national strategy held nuclear weapons as a usable and decisive asymmetrical US advantage can require effort. The NESC documented, even in its studies with the least devastation to the United States, a magnitude of damage realized in modern conflict only in the most devastating campaigns of the Second World War. What the subcommittee examined was not what was desirable, but what was plausible if the existing strategy went wrong. Leaders in the midcentury had lived through two global wars. They had just emerged from one conflict believing that the incomplete victory of 1918 sowed the seeds of war in 1939. US security officials faced perceived totalitarian danger and the recent experience of unconditional victory (grounded in a certainty that there was no room for compromise with such threats). And they held a decisive superiority in the most destructive weapons ever created. Informed by the NESC, they acted in that strategic moment, only over time transforming the basis of US security from reliance on nuclear weapons to a more diversified set of strengths. The modern reader should be careful of anachronistically reading today’s nuclear taboo back to that period and judging contemporary leaders by it.

More generally, as the world comes to grips with the full complexities of the Second Nuclear Age,¹⁶ and as it reenters an era of great power competition, the careful studies of the NESC and the strategic insights that flowed from them hold great value. The ideas, definitions, concepts, and dilemmas have echoes that are again useful as we walk back into the fraught terrain of nuclear deterrence and nuclear war fighting. From fundamental questions such as that of the ends sought in nuclear war and the meaning of winning to the complexities of command-and-control and halting escalation, the NESC’s work speaks to the contemporary nuclear world.

Although the NESC was a key element of US nuclear strategic formulation in the 1950s and early 1960s, it has been largely absent from the historiography. Its very existence was a closely guarded secret while it operated and for decades thereafter. The committee made only three copies of its reports. The president’s was the only one preserved in full with its annexes. During the 1950s, the summary volume of a second copy went into the disaster file, for continuity of government operations. The NESC initially retained the summary of the third copy in its Pentagon office files. After the committee dissolved in 1965, the NSC kept the president’s and NESC’s copies. Unlike almost every other record from the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the White House retained physical possession of the reports rather than send them to the archives in the presidential libraries in Abilene and Boston. This fact alone is remarkable, as the presidential libraries, part of the National Archives and Records Administration, routinely hold the full breadth of information from a presidency, from the highly classified to the mundane. Along with a few other intelligence files, the NSC and White House deemed the NESC’s studies too sensitive to leave their physical control. Few senior officials outside the NESC and NSC principals had ever seen the reports, and the subcommittee faded from memory.¹⁷ Only with the diligent efforts of dedicated Cold War historians, who unearthed the NESC’s work and tirelessly pursued its declassification, have the key parts of the NESC’s studies become available since 2014, and can the subcommittee’s story be told.

This book follows the NESC’s history chronologically. Chapter 1 focuses on how the subcommittee came to exist as an outgrowth of NSC 68, a key enunciation of grand strategy for the early Cold War. It articulated the contemporary nexus of air and atomic strategy that underlay the key question for the NESC to examine. Chapter 2 looks at the first two years of the subcommittee’s work in 1953 and 1954, when victory seemed possible. The NESC measured the potential cost if plans went awry and the Soviets struck first. Taken together with intelligence estimates of the probability of an attack, the NESC’s work helped a new president estimate the risk that the United States was running: casualties on the scale suffered by the USSR in the Second World War. Chapter 3, looking at the 1955 study, marks the end of victory. Soviet thermonuclear plenty became the first of two revolutions to drive this change.

The effects of thermonuclear plenty and the missile age that began soon after is the subject of chapter 4. As missiles compressed time, the NESC became more sophisticated in its analysis for the 1956, 1957, and 1958 reports. These studies sketched the outlines of what it meant to prevail in a nuclear war. The US could still win, but only by preparing for and limiting the initial devastation. Only after recovery could it try to dominate the USSR in a shattered world. As Eisenhower’s second term closed, the NESC expanded its studies beyond the consequences of surprise attacks to different kinds of targeting. Winning might be rendered plausible if targeting shifted from a focus on the enemy’s military to undermining his long-term economic and societal recovery. Chapter 5 examines the optimum mix targeting study that became the basis of the first SIOP, and the 1959 annual report that turned its attention to paralyzing the USSR, foreshadowing the counterrecovery targeting of the Nixon administration.

Chapter 6 examines the Kennedy administration’s fresh approach, controlled response, which attempted to coerce an enemy during nuclear operations. The NESC’s project 12 aided long-term decision-making in the McNamara Defense Department, though friction with the secretary and his systems analysts soon became apparent. The subcommittee’s 1961 annual study, presented during the Berlin Crisis, reinforced the costs of failure to the new administration. As it had assessed the consequences of failure for Eisenhower’s nuclear strategy in the 1950s, the subcommittee explored the shortcomings of controlled response with its 1962 and 1963 reports, the subject of chapter 7. Chapter 8 focuses on a new and final direction for the NESC’s reports, as it discerned when a nuclear war might end, short of an all-out exchange, in a study of war termination. This and the 1964 annual report marked the end of the NESC’s existence, as an empowered Defense Department took over its analytical role.

The NESC, cloaked in secrecy, disappeared from the history of nuclear strategy. It had charted the nation’s journey from seeking victory in a one-sided nuclear war to avoiding Armageddon. The subcommittee’s role in informing strategic decision-making during the early Cold War can now be told, filling a lacuna in our understanding of this most dangerous time.

1. Record of Action No. 543 of the National Security Council: A Project to Provide a More Adequate Basis for Planning for the Security of the United States, in The Intelligence Community, 1950–1955 , FRUS 1950–55, 1951, doc. 86, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d131 .

2. CIA, SE 14: Soviet Capabilities for a Military Attack on the United States before July 1952, October 23, 1951, CREST, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/0000269259 .

3. NSC, Memorandum for President Truman of Discussion at the 126th Meeting of the National Security Council, in The Intelligence Community, 1950–1955 , FRUS 1950–55, 1952, doc. 138, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d138 .

4. NSC, 126th Meeting, 370.

5. Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, 1945–2010, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 66, no. 4 (July 1, 2010): 77–83, https://doi.org/10.2968/066004008 .

6. Andrew P. N. Erdmann, ‘War No Longer Has Any Logic Whatever’: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Thermonuclear Revolution, in Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy since 1945 , ed. John Lewis Gaddis, Philip Gordon, Ernest May, and Jonathan Rosenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 87.

7. For greater detail, see the essential works by David Rosenberg, such as A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours, International Security 6, no. 3 (Winter 1981–82): 3–38; and The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960, International Security 7, no. 4 (1983): 3–71.

8. Here, the pioneering work of the historian Fred Kaplan (no relation to the present author) presents a colorful and well-researched view of the shift to coercion. For an account of this period not informed by the NESC’s role, see his The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983). Schelling introduces the term forcible action in chapter 1 of Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), though he expounds on it beginning on page 80.

9. Peacetime coercion in the 1960s gained an element of deterrence by punishment. This sprang from the Kennedy administration’s adoption of assured destruction, whose underlying threat was inflicting unacceptable pain. This differed from the 1950s deterrence by denial. This is perhaps made clearest by using the example of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Deterrence by denial would seek to prevent the USSR from attacking by convincing Moscow that it could not conquer the continent. Its armies would be defeated if it tried, and so it should not try at all. Deterrence by punishment, by contrast, sought to prevent the Kremlin from invading by threatening to exact a cost that outweighed the gains of a successful takeover of Europe. Denial would convince the Soviets that an invasion could not succeed; punishment would convince them that an invasion would not be worthwhile.

10. This does not mean that Soviet retaliation with even one atomic bomb against US preemption would not be devastating. But there was a distinction between a damaging Soviet attack— perhaps even equivalent to the damage the USSR itself suffered in the Second World War—and a Soviet attack that forced the collapse of US society.

11. For example, Albert Wohlstetter, Fred Hoffman, R. J. Lutz, and Henry S. Rowen, Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases , doc. R-266, RAND Corporation, April 1954, RAND Corporation Archives, Santa Monica, CA, https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R0266.html .

12. For example, Charles Hitch and Roland McKean, Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

13. Most notably in Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966).

14. Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

15. Nina Tannenwald draws the important distinction between a simple norm of nonuse and a taboo. She describes the latter as a particularly forceful kind of normative prohibition that, according to the anthropological and sociological literature, deals with ‘the sociology of danger.’ It is concerned with the protection of individuals and societies from behavior defined or perceived to be dangerous and typically refers to something that is not done, said, or touched. I suggest that the taboo can also influence research and scholarship. Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Normative Basis of Nuclear Non-use, International Organization 53, no. 3 (1999): 436; Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-use of Nuclear Weapons since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

16. Toshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes, eds., Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age: Power, Ambition, and the Ultimate Weapon (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012).

17. Previous scholarship has used information about then-unreleased NESC studies as evidence for arguments about nuclear history and politics. Among the earliest works to reference the NESC was Desmond Ball’s Politics and Force Levels (1980). In the absence of archival information, Ball used interviews to write about two special reports on targeting: 2009 and project 12. He examined the impact of the studies on major acquisition programs of the early 1960s, including Minuteman, Titan, and the B-70. When the State Department completed the Eisenhower administration’s national security volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States in 1984, they contained the authorizing directives for the NESC, the first report, and some redacted notes from NSC meetings at which the subcommittee had presented subsequent studies. This represented the first, and for two decades the only, documentary evidence of