McGoverning

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A Strategy of Arms II: How the McGovern Moment Learned to Parse the Bomb

In 1946, after he'd returned from the most destructive war in the human experience to pick up a BA cum laude from his hometown alma mater Dakota Wesleyan University, George Stanley McGovern also went on to win South Dakota's State Peace Essay competition. (There's this interesting little moment in the late 1940s when, in the wake of the second world war to happen in a quarter-century and the coming of the Bomb, a bipartisan lot of folks decided things like peace essays might be a good idea.) McGovern's essay was called "From Cave to Cave." In it, from a left-Wilsonian and Christian Left perspective, he warned against the arc of human progress reaching up out of the caves of prehistory only to sail too close to the false sun of nuclear weapons and end up with irradiated survivors hiding in caves yet again. Which is to say that George McGovern and the nuclear age have a history.

Reckoning with nuclear weapons, with the consideration of potential nuclear warfare as a matter of Cold War policy, plus the big topic and great liberal hope of arms control, weave together with McGovernment in a variety of ways. Here's a smattering, before we turn around and come at the subject matter in a systematic way:

• While he's otherwise eminently capable - dutiful, methodical, and thorough - as Secretary of Defense, Cy Vance is so personally revulsed by the issues involved in nuclear targeting policy that he largely cedes his role in the work to his deputy, Tim Hoopes, who collaborates with the likes of national security adviser Paul Warnke, DCI Pete McCloskey, UnderSec for Intelligence Ted Van Dyk, and the relevant uniformed commanders
• Paul Warnke is an arms control maven with a variety of significant ideas inbound with the administration: one of the most articulate advocates for a MIRV freeze; an advocate for interlinked stair-step arms control processes, with the metaphor of climbing down from the top of a tree one branch at a time; one of the creators of the "comfort doctrine," creating conditions in arms control agreements where each side believes it has enough of what it needs to accept and then sustain the agreement; and a strong advocate for a largely sea-based deterrent, shaped around requirements of baseline deterrence rather than other nuclear-warfighting-theory propositions or goals
  • Both Warnke and UnderSec for Policy John Holum are big believers in the concept of "finite deterrence" born out of Adm. Arleigh Burke's argument at the turn of the 1960s against the primacy of SAC's (Strategic Air Command) overkill-for-bureaucratic-supremacy approach: Burke wanted a fleet of 45 ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) with a little over half at sea at any given time (you get there by double-crewing each boat, so an individual crew only goes to sea for one out of every four deterrent patrols), targeted to decapitate some key military and bureaucratic command resources while also destroying upwards of three quarters of Soviet industry (plus perhaps forty percent of the Soviet population), blows Burke argued no Soviet commissar would ever countenance because it would collapse the industrialized, centralized society they'd built and prized
• Once again, the McGovern Moment appears to the liberal contingent in Congress as a moment where One of Theirs has made his way to the top; there have, then, high hopes and somewhat stern expectations for a new era of arms control, of wrestling control over overkill and runaway arms production

A smattering of interesting data and things to consider.

Now we'll go about things more systematically. We'll start with a look at where US and Soviet strategic forces stand as the McGoverners get on the job in 1973, with emphasis on the different visions of Soviet intentions and nuclear strategy on the part of the McGoverners and the uniforms, and how the two groups' visions for a disposition of US forces and potential modernization reflect the two groups' (McGoverners and uniforms) priors.

After that we'll take a side route through the dismantling of the monstrosity of SIOP. Then, for the remainder of the post, we'll explore where, how, and why nuclear force strategy/modernization interweaves with arms control, in the form of McGovernment's big get with CART, the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty of 1975.


Disposition of Forces - McGovernment, Moscow, the Uniforms, and the Balance of Terror

Where do American nuclear weapons, both sheer numbers and strategic or theater/tactical forces, stand when McGovernment takes office? Pretty much like this.

For strategic weapons, and based on system conversions already funded/underway when George signs in as POTUS, US strategic forces will arrive at a state of

• 41 ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), of which twenty-three (when funded conversions are finished) would be equipped with the UGM-73 Poseidon C3 sea-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), sixteen with the UGM-27 Polaris A3 SLBM, and two with the older single-warhead Polaris A2
  • Polaris was the Navy's original SLBM; the A3 (technically A3T in service) was the most advanced version, with the best (though only moderate) accuracy of the Polaris series and three "smaller" (still 200-kiloton, so slightly more than eight times the Nagasaki blast) warheads that would fall around a target in a cluster to approximate the destructiveness of a single one-megaton warhead of a less-accurate type (NB: increases in warhead accuracy by a statistical order of magnitude can increase the blast effect on the actual target by up to a factor of four, hence the American quest for accuracy)
  • The Poseidon system was the first MIRVed SLBM (multiple independent reentry vehicles), with generally ten warheads (though up to fourteen at a range penalty due to the heavier payload) that were smaller (just 40kt apiece) but designed to hit differing designated targets over a wide geographic range and to saturate any Soviet anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense with a density of warheads (can't hit them all) delivered at higher velocity (harder to time an effective hit)
    • The Poseidon C3 missile was also the first stage of a longer term project/process/concept called ULMS, for Undersea Long-Range Missile System: MIRVed C3 was the first stage, ULMS I, to be followed by ULMS II with a C4 missile (Nixon's folks called it Trident I for their own reasons; the McGoverners re-christen it Poseidon II because that's what it really is) with considerably longer range and fewer (eight per missile) but larger (100kt) warheads, then by ULMS III that first would produce a new, larger (to include two dozen missile tubes rather than sixteen) and even less detectable submarine class, plus then an SLBM with the range of ICBMs and accuracy to match or outdo ICBMs (for reasons we'll get into below)
• Fifty-four older Titan II ICBMs (land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles) each with a single, massive 9-megaton warhead, plus the 1000-missile Minuteman force that, when already-funded conversions were complete, would deploy 500 Minuteman II missiles, 100 Minuteman Is, and 400 Minuteman IIIs
  • The older Minuteman I and II systems, of which the original Minuteman I was the least accurate, had a single warhead in the 1-megaton range (the II's W56 warhead was actually rated at a 1.2 Mt yield), while the Minuteman III was the first MIRVed ICBM with three considerably smaller but more accurate warheads that could be "thrown" at targets across a wide area, again intended to defeat Soviet ABM defenses
• A strategic bomber fleet made up of 397 B-52s of various types (some 295 of them of the late-model B-52G and B-52H types, at that point just over a decade old) plus 71 FB-111 enlarged versions of the F-111 strike aircraft (vanilla F-111s were already, for practical purposes, light bombers; the FB-111 had longer wings, a longer fuselage that housed more powerful engines, and was designed as a "low-altitude penetrator" to fill that role until a new all-'rounder American bomber was designed)

Beyond that, there were a lot of battlefield and theater (more range than a battlefield weapon but a lot less than an intercontinental one) nuclear weapons in the US arsenal in the early Seventies. More than twenty seven thousand total US nuclear explosives at that point because of the madness that building that many (1) covered all possible contingencies for employing nuclear weapons including some sickeningly batshit ones (hi, Davy Crockett launcher!) and (2) functioned as a madman's version of an industrial policy, like a lot of military construction. In fact there were so many weapons in service at that time that even the stodgy, cautious, "we don't have the resources to win against the Soviets" service chiefs wanted to scrap several thousand that either/both had become obsolescent or had dubious wartime value.

So that's where that is at the start. We'll look next at the intelligence estimates on the Soviets as of 1973 - what the US was up against in the nuclear arena - then, respectively, at the forward-looking plans of the McGoverners and the uniforms, especially at where those diverge.

Keeping up with Ivan

So what's the nature of the grim news from Langley and from UnderSec for Intelligence Ted Van Dyk during 1973? Up to that time the US had enjoyed first - during the 1950s and 1960s - an absolute advantage in nuclear weapons (numbers, availability, accuracy, etc.) and later on a continued qualitative advantage thanks to the ability to put more warheads, ones that could get through a Soviet ABM defense, onto US missiles than the Soviets could on their own missiles. By 1973, that's in the process of change

• The Soviets have two new ICBMs in the test process, produced by rival design bureaus, that will yield MIRVed missiles - the MR-UR-100 (NATO designation SS-17) and the UR-100N (NATO designation SS-19). Both had been conducting flight tests since 1971; by '73 the SS-19 was about ready to field-test its MIRV "bus" (the launch platform, internal to the missile, from which it would "throw" MIRVed warheads at specific targets) and indeed would do so in January 1974, with the SS-17 set to follow soon after. The SS-17 would work fine against "soft" targets in terms of its accuracy (good enough to lay waste civilian or unfortified military targets near to point of impact) and carry at last four warheads in the 400kt range, an answer to the Minuteman family. The SS-19, set to deploy in actual launchers just months after the MIRV test, was more accurate - nearly accurate enough to attack "hardened" targets - and would load out a half-dozen 750kt warheads, a qualitative advantage over the first iteration of Minuteman IIIs.
• The Soviets are also at work on a pair of MIRVed SLBMs, one intended to slot right in aboard their continuing production of what the West labels Delta-series submarines, especially the Delta IIIs (Soviet class label Kal'mar) set to cut steel in 1974.
• Big changes afoot for Soviet theater nuclear weapons as well
  • The road-mobile RSD-10 Pioner missile (NATO reporting designation SS-20), offspring of an abortive road-mobile ICBM (the SS-X-16 project), offers a revolution in Soviet theater capability. The SS-20s have the range to launch from deep within Soviet territory and strike targets throughout Western Europe - but not the range to hit American cities too. This poses a direct challenge to US nuclear guarantees to NATO: you'd have to retaliate deep into the Soviet Union in order to either chase those missiles or answer their proportional attack on European NATO, which directly tests the proposition that the US would risk Chicago or Miami in order to keep Hamburg or Antwerp (or Glasgow or Lyon) safe. Also the Soviets have nearly reached the point of testing a MIRVed configuration for the missile, which would potentially flood Western Europe with so many warheads that there almost wouldn't be a point in US retaliation - and thereby undermine reasons for Western Europe to resist Soviet encroachment.
  • Then there's the Tupolev Tu-22M (sometimes designated Tu-26) bomber. An evolutionary rather than revolutionary design, the bulky, supersonic, swing-wing Tu-22M (NATO reporting name Backfire) is like a hulked-out FB-111, only the Backfire can carry up to 53,000 lb. of conventional ordnance or several of the big, bulky Soviet anti-shipping nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. As a Soviet "low altitude penetrator" the Backfire adds to nuclear overmatch in the European theater and potentially the North Atlantic. Also, Western intelligence sources are deeply uncertain - and so, Because Cold War, deeply concerned - that Backfires with an air-to-air refueling probe in the nosecone might have intercontinental range and so rejuvenate the small, sclerotic Soviet bomber force intended to hit the States.
  • There are even advances at the battlefield level; for example the OGG MAKE SKY CANDLE GO FOOM tech of the (NATO designated) FROG-7 missiles that act as nuclear artillery for Soviet heavy divisions in Eastern Europe will be replaced by the more agile and versatile OTR-21 (NATO designation SS-21) and, at field army level, the OTR-23 (NATO designation SS-23) with a 500km range, a five-minute firing time turnaround, and the ability to damage, even destroy, hardened targets like NATO bunkers for aircraft and ordnance.
• The Soviets are at work on both long-range (on the order of 2500km/c. 1300 nautical miles) and short-range cruise missiles intended to hit targets on land, the first of which would make older, larger Soviet bombers useful again as standoff platforms against American targets, and the second of which would multiply the new Tu-22M's firepower like MIRVing the SS-20s.
• Now we get to the big - and I do mean big - kahuna
  • Since 1963, the Soviets have fielded versions of their R-36 missile (NATO reporting name SS-9 Scarp). A testament to the Soviet love of massive scale in engineering projects, the R-36s are the largest ICBMs in service. The element of their largeness that matters most is their exceptionally high throw-weight, e.g. they can load one or more really large and powerful warheads as payload. Western observers call the R-36s by their own name - modern large ballistic missiles (MLBMs). By the early seventies, most of the R-36s in a reported 268 Soviet launch silos have a single large warhead (Western intelligence thinks these may have a yield over twenty megatons, though Soviet sources claim they're 10 Mt warheads.) Some, like a version of Polaris A3 that horked pure creatine for weeks without stopping, carry three multi-megaton MRVs (not MIRVs, they're a cluster weapon not independently targeted) that can pepper a target with massively destructive explosive power. US analysts believe these are intended to knock out command and control for the United States' Minuteman missiles.
    • By the early Seventies, the Soviets are at work on a sophisticated upgrade of the R-36 to which NATO gives a whole new and deliberately ominous reporting designation - the SS-18 Satan. These purportedly will have improved accuracy and field a fully MIRVed missile - the version at the test stage of R&D by the time of McGovernment would have up to eight independently targeted 1.3 Mt warheads (in the long run, perhaps many more - upwards of a dozen even - smaller warheads plus various decoys and other "penetration aids"), each of which could potentially damage a hardened Minuteman missile silo enough to prevent its ability to launch, or hit at hardened command and control targets for American nuclear forces.

During the first half of 1973, that's the menu of suck laid out for the McGoverners in a long series of intelligence briefings, with emphasis placed repeatedly by the analysts and uniforms on the first-strike danger of the SS-18 system.

(We don't want to go too Dr. Strangelove here - oh, who am I kidding, we do - but it is simply impossible to whistle past the purely Freudian aspects of the R-36P/SS-18. The LONG THICK MISSILE GO BOOM MANY TIMES of it is really a whole thing, when you consider it was approved by a Politburo of aging commissars led by the Robert-Baratheon-level-horny Leonid Brezhnev. [Fun fact: Brezhnev was noted for bringing teams of agreeable young female "masseuses" with him on diplomatic trips abroad, and at his favorite dachas back home.] And the fact that folks like Scoop Jackson and Al Haig near-feverishly wanted an American equivalent to whip out and measure, well, that says a great deal too.)

"Guys? ... Guys? ... I think we broke Captain Subtext ..."

In many ways - as various McGoverners bring up during these meetings about intelligence data - the Soviet emphasis on/obsession with high throw-weight reflects a very Soviet (inherited from Tsarist Russian) view of the operational art of warfare. The Soviets favor massed, concentrated artillery fires to blast through opponents, or blast them away period, an approach allied to the old "Russian steamroller" model of throwing masses of low-to-medium-grade military forces at an objective to force a breakthrough by weight of numbers. It does, though, pose real issues for the US and perhaps even more so for the European NATO states.

Talk about "dropped in the Seventies soup" ... here McGovernment's confronted with Soviet strategic expansionism. A seemingly more robust Soviet economy fueled by oil revenues that go up with the Oil Shock (and were already doing all right beforehand), also Soviet involvement in more revolutionary movements around the Global South, potential for a Soviet naval "breakout," and here the chance that, by the early 1980s at the latest, Soviet nuclear forces might overmatch (and in Europe, simply overwhelm) the United States and its Western network of alliances. This is a different geopolitical landscape from the late Sixties; how both the McGoverners and the uniforms mean to respond bears consideration.

Off the Treadmill? McGovernment responds

Over IOTL, in 1975, Paul Warnke wrote an influential article in Foreign Policy titled "Apes on a Treadmill." In it he argued both Washington and Moscow were trapped in an endlessly forward cycle of nuclear weapons development and arms-racing, spurred by whatever the other side might do in a negative feedback loop. To get out would require one side to choose a halt for the time being, in order to see whether and how the other side might respond with reciprocal restraint, at which point some sort of more comprehensive arms control measures might become possible.

With a handful of only-partial exceptions, the McGoverners arrive in office with a firm belief in the fundamental value and central role of arms control. Part of the opportunity to govern, from their point of view, is the opportunity to arrest the arms race in some fundamental ways, even if that's incremental in practice. They do have some opening positions on what they'd prefer to see done, which we can review.

The senior McGoverners involved - Warnkes and Hoopeses and Vances, oh my - are willing to accept and proceed with the modernizations/conversions already appropriated by Congress, simply because a sudden halt would make it harder for them to patiently argue for and soft-pedal the changes they really want to pursue. It's also something of an earnest payment to the uniforms and the defense-industrial world that they'll reshape things incrementally. But the McGoverners do have changes they seek.

Some of that's based on a set of assessments about the Soviets

• The first assumption, which has two subsets, is that the Soviets view the strategy/operational art of nuclear weapons very differently from Western game-theory mavens
  • As a matter of "employment" (i.e. why and how you drop the Bomb) the Soviets view nuclear weapons as blunt instruments, to overmatch and overwhelm one's opponent in order to ensure victory
  • At the level of nuclear strategy, seen as a part of broader geostrategy, the Soviets generally don't believe in "strategic parity" (or that familiar line of the Permanent Pentagon about arms control, "essential equivalence") - the view in Moscow is that either you're dominant or dominated, so you want to at least have reason to believe you're dominant and hope the other guy thinks you are, too
• The second assumption is that even the most hardline Politburo member who's still medically sane can be deterred by an unstoppable American ability to destroy the urban-industrial fabric of the Soviet Union, because that's what those aging commissars, who remember the unparalleled devastation of the Second World War, worked so hard to build and it's the real source of their power, the reward for ideologically rigid central control

That's a base from which the McGoverners work. From there a troika of foreign policy principals around Paul Warnke, Cy Vance, and Sarge Shriver, backed by Tim Hoopes and John Holum, prefer an approach from there that looks like this

• Open the arms control bidding (and efforts to rein in US expansion under the rubric of modernization) with talks for a MIRV freeze (the already-appropriated conversions underway are a hedge against the full or partial failure of the proposal)
  • US offers a halt on further stages of ULMS (the bigger submarine that the Navy wants plus further missile development) and a new USAF bomber with related munitions (the B-1) as an opener for the Soviets to show their own restraint
    • If a blanket MIRV freeze can't be worked out, see if the Soviets will agree to MIRV only the SS-17s and -19s but not the Ginormous Nuclear Death Wang(TM) or SLBMs, in which case US will just finish Poseidon conversions (up to the 31 scheduled subs from the 23 done or underway) and replacing Minuteman I missiles with Minuteman IIIs, then work to negotiate an arms control framework from there
      • Also McGovernment will seek to scrap the Titan missiles along with other outdated systems already OK'd for the scrap heap by the uniforms, and retire the B-52Ds left after Vietnam from service as a first step to reduce the bomber force to 200 aircraft or fewer (a mix of late-model B-52s and FB-111s)
  • If the Soviets want to talk arms control in terms of "central systems" (ballistic missiles, possibly bombers) or even throw-weight but refuse to budge on MIRVing, then
    • US will slow Poseidon C3 conversions and instead accelerate transition to field 31 "boomers" (SSBNs) with the UGM-93 Poseidon II (ed. Trident I IOTL) plus the other ten smaller-tubed subs with Polaris A3s - but no new class of submarines because they're not necessary yet; move to a balance of 500 Minuteman IIs and 500 Minuteman IIIs - while still scheduling the withdrawal of the Titans; and push for development of standoff long-range cruise missiles for the smaller force of late-model B-52s all as a sufficient modernization program that may in fact be scoped down farther by whatever sort of arms control agreement McGovernment can achieve

The hope then would be to

• Achieve a break on the arms race closer to current levels, or
• Failing that, concentrate on high-quality, low-to-moderate cost improvements in the most survivable parts of the US deterrent, while still seeking a workable model for arms control

As for "employment," we'll come back around to that as we get towards SIOP. But as a precis they're still concentrated on a deterrence model centered on destruction of the Soviets' urban-industrial base and key central control capabilities on the hunch that this is an intolerable outcome for the Kremlin.

(Also we'll come around to shorter-range nuclear weapons, at least in bits and hints here, but especially in the upcoming post about NATO and McGovernment's strategic relationship with Europe.)

Everything New is New Again? The Uniforms counter

Of course the uniforms - the Chiefs led by Tom Moorer, the Joint Staff, the Strategic Air Command, various other interests and deliberative bodies - have their own ideas about the situation. From McGovernment's point of view the broad outlines - build more and build new - are predictable. But it's worth getting a little granular, not so much with "systems" though we'll see those briefly, but with the different aspects of nuclear conflict understood from the uniforms' point of view (and those of various think-tankers and natsec civilians who do this sort of thing for a long-term living.)

While they may disagree, sometimes testily, about other subjects, the Joint Chiefs have come together around a menu for modernization of US strategic forces which represents their counter-argument to the consensus McGovernment position

• They're willing to retire the Titan missiles, but in return want the 1000-missile Minuteman force converted to all MIRVed Minuteman IIIs, with R&D work started on an American MLBM for service in the 1980s
• Phase out the Polaris-only SSBNs (the five Ethan Allen-class boats and the five George Washington-class, between them the Navy's oldest and least advanced SSBNs) in favor of a ULMS-derived big sub class (IOTL that'd be the Ohio-class boats) and widespread deployment of the UGM-96 SLBM, followed in the 1980s by a bigger ULMS-derived SLBM with "hard-target kill" capability (i.e. the accuracy and firepower to knock out certain fortified/hardened Soviet targets, especially Soviet ICBM silos)
• Full speed ahead on the B-1 project and related tech/munitions for a bomber fleet of a little over 500 aircraft by the mid-Eighties (around 250 B-52s, a little over 200 B-1s, and 60-odd FB-111s hanging on because why not)
• This doesn't even get us into questions about theater weapons

Before we all just say "well of course they did," it's worth consideration of why the Chiefs endorsed this broad-based modernization offensive. That has to do with the way they understand the prospect of nuclear war, the aspects thereof that underpin uniformed logic.

Here it's important to examine key terminology of the often game-theory driven American nuclear-strategy priesthood, designed to make what could very easily turn into an uncontrolled forest fire of Armageddon instead into yet another form of chess-like strategic-level warfare where both sides make rational calculations to optimize their advantages even after the initial conflict. Here are some of those key terms:

• Damage limitation: By the time McGovernment arrives in office, though your average Joe Six-Pack in the street assumes nukes are targeted to destroy the other guy's society (cities, factories, ports, government complexes, and suchlike), in reality primary targeting priority goes towards the other side's military targets. Among those, of special importance, emphasis on damage limitation prizes knocking out as many of the Soviets' own nuclear delivery systems as possible (especially ICBM silos and air bases, also command and control nodes) in order to cut down on the Soviets' ability to devastate the United States. In that role "hard-target kill" is the coin of the realm - Soviet ICBM silos were theoretically designed to withstand the blast of a 1-megaton weapon right over them (some of them, purportedly, were hardened for much more than that) so you need sufficient firepower in sufficient numbers to hit their systems before launch. (Lest we think that's just a fool's errand - they'll just go to launch-on-warning soon as they see your missiles aloft, one might say - most Soviet ICBMs were still liquid-fueled so you could kid yourself that you'd whip off a quick strike while they tanked up for the journey.)
• Signaling: This is as game theory as it gets, and serenely un-dissuaded by the failure of a similar approach with conventional weapons in Southeast Asia. Nuclear-warfare theory was dominated by the desire to establish rational control over a process that could easily - readily -spiral out of control and destroy human civilization in, at the very least, the Northern Hemisphere. Theorists justified this because, among the various probabilities to do with nuclear war, there were at least some where efforts would be made to fight in a controlled, deliberate fashion in that very effort to not be eaten by the tiger you chose to ride, so it was important to work through the nature of those possibilities. That said, the concept of signaling strategy was cold-bloodedly clinical even by those standards. The gist was that you would select certain targets, from a range of possibilities, and also "withhold" targeting from other specific targets (withholding explosions? Hi, General Ripper, I didn't see you there!) as a kind of nuclear cipher, a decipherable code for Moscow about how you intended to prosecute the conflict, how you meant to control escalation while at the same time threatening the Soviets with unacceptable damage if the Kremlin didn't play ball, and if you got those calculations exactly right you could reach "conflict termination" - a ceasefire - at a level that either advanced, or at least did not harm, your interests. I should stress again that they intended to conduct this kind of meticulous game-language of intentions with strategic nuclear weapons. To do it properly, you'd need (1) a diversity of weapons systems to match systems to targets with the flexibility to go about your signals in a range of different ways, plus (2) a large enough inventory of weapons that you could hold back a lot in reserve for further "signaling" or a larger-scale shootout. (Also, of course, you'd need to ensure that you and your opponent spoke a mutually intelligible strategic language, something the McGoverners quite sensibly think is very much in doubt ...)
• Military advantage: This ties into one of the more interesting notions - because more plausible than most nuclear-strategy theories - about nuclear war advanced by some theorists: that in practice a nuclear conflict might turn out to be waged in dribs and batches against specific types of targets, especially those of actual military value, and not just the nuclear kind but conventional forces required to conquer and secure valuable territory or prop up a nuke-battered government. You'd then want a variety of nuclear-weapon resources, integrated with your conventional warfighting capacity, to make sure that you destroyed as much of your opponent's capacity to do old fashioned conquest or at least hang onto power at home, along with their capacity to threaten you and your allies over the long term if someone called a halt to the war before a general nuclear exchange. Doesn't take long to multiply the number and variety of nukes one might need for such an approach - just think about the sheer bulk and variety of conventional weapons the superpowers possessed. If both sides try to fight a war that includes some nukes yet somehow remains a war in the old-fashioned sense - rather than a "wargasm" of global atomic destruction - where the nukes become the "really big bombs" Curtis LeMay envisioned, then suddenly you need quantities and varieties not unlike many other, less extraordinary devices.
• Postwar recovery limitation: Here, at last, we arrive at what the McGoverners would recognize as the bedrock of deterrence. This is the "destroy enough of the other side's infrastructure, economy, and habitability that they can't stand it or recover from it" part. The nuclear priesthood frame this as prevention of the other side somehow bouncing back from the most utter devastation since the last extinction-level asteroid hit followed by a decade of global climate disaster. You want the resources for this, in among the clubs in your Armageddon golf bag, say the uniforms, but resources for various of the other buzzword-euphemisms is as or more important, on the assumption that leadership on both sides will still be there in their bunkers playing chess with split atoms in pursuit of something they can call long-term victory. The McGoverners, on the other hand, believe this is precisely the category of "nuclear weapons employment" that the Soviets can't bear, the thing that will deter war and keep the Kremlin from stepping over any red lines.
• Reserve force: Strap in, folks; this one's a lot. Nuclear employment theorists suggested that after a significant conflict with strategic nuclear weapons - even a "wargasm" level exchange - you would need to reserve a survivable, resilient, flexible reserve of nuclear weapons because there would be future confrontations and possibly another nuclear conflict down the line. In a world as thoroughly thrown asunder as one after a significant nuclear exchange, so the theorists argued, competition between the surviving command apparatus and infrastructure of the superpowers would be even more intense than before, since they presumed some intact, functional, rational command structure somehow would survive (VE MUST NOT ALLOW A MINESHAFT GAP! MEIN FUHRER - I CAN VALK!) You couldn't just fire off all your weapons, because what if the other side didn't and then used that leverage of residual nukes after the exchange to allow their glowing hulk of radioactive rubble to dominate your glowing hulk of radioactive rubble? On one hand it's an opportunity to see just how desperately white guys with elite educations at high levels of Cold War governance wanted to believe that something like nuclear Armageddon could be controlled rationally and not just gun it in the express lane straight to a new post-apocalyptic dark age; on the other hand it was at the time a compelling argument to maintain an arsenal large enough that you could hold something back just in case.

When you view nuclear warfighting as a matter of such complexity as this, it doesn't take long either to decide you'd want a large, balanced force, or to believe it needs to keep up with the times in order to prevent forms of block obsolescence that could swing the whole strategic balance in the other side's direction.

That brings us rather more directly to the topic of nuclear "employment," and how McGovernment tackles the horrors of SIOP. So let's get on to that.

George Says Relax: Against SIOP

McGovernment is neither the first political movement, nor the first presidential administration, to look at SIOP with undisguised horror and consider how to come up with something else.

• Robert McNamara planned out a different model of deterrence targeting as a start to unmaking SIOP but with his usual feet of clay didn't follow through
• The Nixon administration was considerably more active
  • The Dick himself, in one of his interesting occasional moments of being a real human boy, was revulsed that SIOP was his only set of nuclear options and pressed vigorously for reform
  • Mel Laird, Nixon's SecDef, worked up a variety of differing nuclear strategies together with Kissinger's National Security Council staff as a basis from which to work on an alternate targeting regime
  • The Nixon administration launched a major interagency study of nuclear "employment" in 1972 that was designed to lead to a programmatic reform of SIOP

That study matters a lot here, because McGovernment inherits that study in progress - already well underway - when they hit the ground in January 1973. It carries on while the McGoverners get on with other institutional aspects of defense reform, then drops as a completed project in May (IOTL it arrived on my first birthday, June 8, 1973, but McGovernment's keen interest pushes the delivery date slightly to the left.)

The study looked at a wide range of nuclear policy, though centered on the employment issue:

• Employment policy - how to target and presumptively use current nuclear weapons in a range of conflicts
• Deployment policy - how the US deploys such forces, at home and overseas
• Acquisition policy - planning criteria to develop and procure future systems
• Declaratory statements - how policy gets described to the public, to allies, to Moscow
• Arms control - how that integrates with the other elements to lower overall nuclear risks and stabilize the balance of terror

Of special note, this observation on nuclear policy from the OTL version that's substantively the same in the McGNU: "If deterrence fails, to stop conflict at the lowest possible level with minimum loss to the United States and its allies, and to deny the enemy the objective he seeks when vital US interests are involved."

Let's step back for just a moment and remind ourselves of some of the more egregious features of SIOP before we turn to the revisions proposed in the nuclear forces study.

• The very short list of SIOP options (low single digits) operated largely on the "wargasm" model: a massed attack on pretty well every plausible target in the Soviet Union all at once, without discriminating between targets on any thoughtful strategic basis, and with no effort to limit the scope of the conflict in order to reach an eventual ceasefire
• At least a couple of SIOP options involved attacking China and other third-party targets in addition to the USSR even if those nations were not involved in a conflict between the US and the USSR
• SIOP was built on overkill, on finding excuses to hit ever more targets and to hit them with ever more ordnance in order to keep up a perpetual flow of resources (big yearly budgets, busy nuclear-weapon production lines, many bases, many personnel and staff offices under SAC's command) that would make the Strategic Air Command the most powerful bureaucratic element of the armed services, regardless of the actual military merit of such decisions

That's a few of the biggest sins listed off right there.

So how does the nuclear policy report draw up a new model for modes and circumstances of nuclear employment? We'll just copy in the graphic from the original report itself here

As you can see (I still kind of marvel at how they did tidy graphics like that in the era before laser printers; there's a lot of valuable past craft and technology that's not only lost to us now but that we simply forget existed) the four-layer model seeks to do a couple of things at once

• Break down the "wargasm" model of SIOP into a series of calculated attack options each intended to serve some specific sort of purpose that involves (1) a strategy to (a) gain advantage in a nuclearized conflict where possible and (b) hopefully steer it towards conflict termination - ceasefire - at a non-apocalyptic level (and even the apocalypse-adjacent types of Major Attack Options should be designed to serve a strategic purpose, not just-because nuke the other guys until they glow)
• Also operate at the nuclear micro level, to design and manage the use of tactical/theater-level nuclear weapons in a major war or the potential use of nukes in a purely regional conflict, so that one applies deliberate strategy, rather than reactive, empirical ad hocery meeting localized crises with nuclear fires

(Quick note: see also under MAOs the decoupling of attacks on the Soviets and China, one of the easiest but also most necessary things that could be done to make SIOP less awful.)

For the report, and its proposed new model for nuclear employment, escalation control is the name of the game: deliberate, planned choices that serve deliberate ends, even though the proposed approach preserves a capacity to go all-in if that fails. In the event of a general exchange it would seek to put the Soviets in a worse position post-war by targeting a deliberate range of (1) bureaucratic, military, and technocratic command and control targets, (2) the Soviet urban-industrial base, plus (3) those (frequently conventional) military forces on which the Soviets might rely to hold their irradiated post-conflict patchwork together or intimidate enemies and neighbors.

When you get to the acquisition angle - what sort of nuclear forces best serve a model like this - the report argues that form should follow function, design and field what works best for the model, within the constraints of economic conditions and maintaining a stable balance of terror with the Soviets. As for how you finesse the plan in public so it doesn't look to much like a "how to fight and win a nuclear war" exercise, you talk about it in terms of being smart and seeking control rather than heedless escalation, linked to detente and arms control specifically as a constellation of means to prevent a fully apocalyptic nuclear slugging match.

So that's what lands on the McGoverners' desks. Where do they go from there? That gets interesting

• First, at the very least, and acknowledged by all the key McGovern policy players below George level, it lays out an alternative strategy-policy targeting/force employment model to SIOP where it's possible to revise forwards from there
• That said, they have some specific and significant criticisms that start with the Selected Attack Options quadrant of the model
  • The McGoverners' belief that the Soviets speak a different strategic language about nuclear weapons makes large-scale "signaling"/attack-pattern ciphers like the SAO model suspect in their (McGoverners) view
    • Indeed, they argue, significant attacks on a variety of Soviet military targets, or indeed any really significant attack (out past a bare handful of weapons) that proceeds against the Soviets will make Moscow fear a decapitation strike - because Moscow fears loss of central control - so they'll respond with a general release in an effort to make the US worse off post-conflict
  • Even if the Soviets responded in a relatively measured way there's no guarantee the Soviets would (1) first read and (2) then accept whatever message was encoded in US target selection so it's essentially a waste of resources
• The critique of/instinctive dislike of the SAO quadrant of the proposal links to the fact that McGovernment principals - especially the "big four" of Warnke/Shriver/Vance/McCloskey, each and together, believe that the purpose of deterrence is, well, deterrence - that with only partial exceptions counterforce/damage limitation, also trying to "signal" a Kremlin that speaks a different strategic language from a different culture, are in both examples a mug's game that detracts from the clarity and surety of the threat to blow up the Soviets' painstakingly built civilization as the guarantee that Moscow won't do anything funny
• The McGoverners - led in this case by a John Holum/Jeffrey Record combo along with DCI McCloskey, want to parse the LNOs/RNOs a bit
  • On one hand, the McGoverners here accept the argument from the Chiefs, notably from Tom Moorer, that there's only so much you can do to pre-plan battlefield-to-theater nuclear options because the granular details of any given conflict will be different from others due to a host of variables
  • On the other hand, those same McGoverners - especially Jeff Record - think it's worth delineating actual strategies (in the proper sense of the term) about why you would use non-strategic nuclear weapons, how they're meant to contribute to a strategic goal, and how you'd try at least to limit their use in order to mitigate the risk of escalation
    • Those McGoverners - again Record's a key player here, along with David Aaron over at State - also want to explore how theater-level weapons can present the Soviets with potential losses they'd find unacceptable at the level of a theater exchange, in an effort to move deterrence farther down the escalation ladder
    • The rule sets/limits part applies especially to RNOs where planners might consider whether, when, and how to use tacnukes against non-nuclear regional opponents, in an effort to rein in a possibility that could blow back badly against the US
• For Major Attack Options (MAOs) a consensus of McGoverners wants two approaches
  • One should concentrate on a full assault (one plan for the USSR and potential related targets, one for the PRC and potential related targets) with the range of control, urban/industrial/infrastructure, and military targets
  • A "two-shot" model where an initial strike would target across the full range of targets (unlike SAOs' emphasis on military targeting) to hit the top third or so of the full target list in order of priority, as a threat that the punishment the Soviets would suffer would be harsh enough already that they should consider not crossing that line and then, if such an attack proceeds and the Soviets escalate rather than seek a ceasefire, more US weapons would finish the job in a second strike
    • This would replace the complex nuclear chess of SAOs with something like a layered-deterrence model, where the initial threatened strike would be of an assured severity that Moscow might be ready to bear but, if the Soviets crossed that line, would leave them with at least something worth saving
      • That's then a blend of an escalation control model and the deterrence model, on the grounds that McGovernment pretty uniformly thinks it's the deterrence model that works

Over the remainder of 1973 then, in a varied series of memos and reports, the natsec McGoverners move collectively towards a new post-SIOP model that looks like

• A "playbook/rulebook" model of instructions for LNOs/RNOs designed and written expressly in terms of how the use of such weapons should further American geostrategy - rather than a map for how to use them in specific combat conditions - with a "rules" emphasis especially on RNOs in an institutional effort to box in and constrain those by prohibiting certain options/approaches
• A new system of MAOs that would replace SIOP
  • A pair of "pure" MAOs each to choose from for the Soviets and Chinese respectively (one each), as the principal deterrent option, but drained at the granular level of target-choice overkill (not using nukes to destroy railway crossings in rural Siberia, for example) and "assurance" overkill (i.e. how many nukes you sling at an individual target to make sure it's destroyed)
    • Nota Bene: One of the goals of revision in these MAOs is to massively shrink the National Target Base, the Strategic Air Command's database of all conceivable targets for nuclear weapons that really was created as a grotesque exercise in covering every wildly conceivable base and creating permanent work for (1) SAC targeters and (2) the semi-nationalized industry that constructed nuclear weapons; during OTL's 1980s there were over sixteen thousand potential targets in the NTB - this is the sort of thing McGovernment wants, quietly, to dig out at the roots
  • Also a pair of "two-shot" MAOs each for the Soviets and Chinese (two Soviet, two Chinese) on the principles laid out above with some specific variations in target sets (one weighted somewhat more towards command/military targets, the other somewhat more to urban/industrial/infrastructure targets)
  • Additionally a framework - again phrased in general strategic terms - for what a "strategic warning shot" would/could look like (expressly not an SAO, the weapons released to number in the low single digits or even one, as what the French call a "final warning shot"), though the McGoverners would prefer any "warning shot" concept to be executed with theater-level weapon(s) against a target(s) of strategic value they will still map out a basic set of options to indicate a situation poised at the strategic nuclear firewall

Within their first year in office, then, the McGoverners have a plan. Question then is how you implement it.

In this case - for those who might remember Chapter 15 - change comes somewhat from below. The much-decorated USAF Major Harold Hering gets turfed out of his missileer training (training to be a Minuteman ICBM launch silo operator) in late 1973 for asking whether there's an assurance that his launch order came from a sane president. In the McGNU, thanks to people who know each other, his case becomes a cause celebre quickly, in early 1974, and for President George McGovern as much as anyone, who insists on Hering's reinstatement with the Air Force for doing what George Himself wants servicemen to do more often, which is ask patriotic questions about whether their country is doing it right.

Among other things of course this prompts the McGNU's Twenty-Eighth Amendment, which requires a POTUS to seek concurrence from "an officer of the government appointed by advice and consent of the Senate" before using weapons of mass destruction, in an effort to check the possibility of "crazy preznit fall down go boom" and also inject that Congressional-war-powers element back into the command/consent mix. But it's also a jumping-off point for how McGovernment comes at SIOP.

At that point McGovernment takes a three-pronged approach to SIOP reform that becomes notable as a policy approach of the administration. It's just in time, too - uniformed authorities argue that it'll take at least two years to superimpose a new nuclear employment strategy/system over what was old-school SIOP, and a slow walk might take even longer which brings you up against the end of McGovernment's current guaranteed time in office. It is, then, important to move quickly.

• The White House issues a pair of presidential directives that find SAC security rules, which could be interpreted to deny both the members of the Joint Chiefs and potentially the President from engagement with nuclear targeting details, violate the Constitutionally-mandated chain of command (including related Congressional enabling legislation that gives the Joint Chiefs their own, respective, role) and therefore also the Uniform Code of Military Justice and must therefore be revised ("revised" is the only bone thrown to SAC in that process)
• President McGovern appoints an expert commission, cleared for the role, of ex-serving military and intelligence officers plus other key figures from the nuclear priesthood (both the strategy community and the R&D physicist/engineers who actually built the weapons) to examine the NTB's approach to target selection and "assurance" criteria - blandly called the Nuclear Executive Oversight Commission, or NEOC, Beltway wags christen it the "Now Eliminating Overkill Committee"
• As part of the Hoopes Commission's rationalization of unified/specified commands, McGovernment drives a stake through SAC directly and replaces it with United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) a few decades ahead of OTL: still at Offutt AFB, still with a lot of its staff and substructures inherited from SAC, but crucially now a command that will rotate between supreme commanders from the USAF and the US Navy, as the two services that control strategic nuclear weapons
  • In that, with the summer of 1974 when changes of command take place, McGovernment headhunts the boss of United States Pacific Command, Admiral Noel Gayler (pronounced GUY-ler) to be USSTRATCOM's inaugural boss
    • Gayler has more experience with nuclear weapons testing and targeting than any other Navy officer; he's also a closet nuclear disarmer, so he's quite happy to re-weight the force/bureaucratic balance of Air Force and Navy nuclear contingents and to go at target/weapon overkill from the inside

Thus McGovernment makes the big SIOP play. In terms of Cold War government reform it's one of their biggest, really. And George Himself knows that it entails a political cost - if the right could call Nixon a pinko for the same attitude and ideas, there's potential for even more trouble for The Goddamn Hippie Lovers. We'll get into how the drive for reform interacts with one of McGovernment's biggest foreign policy goals - meaningful arms control - in this last section.

Adm. Gayler will be played either by Burt Lancaster or
Charlton Heston in the movie version


CART Before the Force?: Arms control and modernization

McGovernment inherits two significant arms control documents from Dick Nixon's attempted "year of peace" in 1972

• The ABM Treaty, which limits the US and USSR each to the rights to two anti-ballistic missile sites, one to protect the national capital and one to protect a specific ICBM installation
• The Interim Agreement on Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, also known as SALT I for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (begun in 1969) from which it emerged
  • The Interim Agreement does the following
    • Exists in force until the summer of 1977
    • Limits the US to 1054 and the USSR to 1618 fielded ICBMs
    • Limits the US to 710 and the USSR to 950 SLBMs; above existing 1972 levels of 656 US and 740 Soviet SLBMs new missiles must substitute for older ones

That's where the arms control situation stands as of 1973. As you would expect in the course of their jobs, the Joint Chiefs developed a considered, consolidated guidance on a long-term agreement that represented their professional opinion about the nature of a long-term agreement. This they did in late 1972, and reiterated it to the McGoverners on their arrival.

• Equal aggregates of "central systems" (ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers all taken together) somewhere in the 2200-2500 range (the Chiefs had programmed plans to deploy up to 2146 central systems, the Soviets around 2550)
• For heavy bombers, the central-system limits should apply to B-52s, Tu-16s, and Tu-95s; whether to apply to B-1s and/or Backfires could be haggled out over time, but US-based FB-111s shouldn't count because of their limited size and range
• Ban land-mobile ICBMs if possible, but if the Soviets won't play ball on that they must be counted in the aggregate
• No constraints on non-ABM air defenses, which would be nearly impossible to verify anyway
• No restrictions on forward-based systems (e.g. American theater/tacnukes in Western Europe or Northeast Asia, also Polaris-armed subs in Europe and at Guam) but a formula that would prevent those from being used to circumvent strategic-arms restrictions would be ok

Let's take a brief detour for a bit of political fun before we go on with the serious stuff - this will appear in the revised/final version of the relevant chapter. Early in 1973, Scoop Jackson makes a play to replace Lt. Gen. Royal Allison, the Assistant to the Chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] for Strategic Arms Negotiations (ACSAN) - the uniformed man-in-the-room for the SALT delegation - who'd been on the job since the SALT talks started in 1969. Scoop is especially snippy about an incident in 1972 when Lt. Gen. Allison rebutted Scoop, point by point, when Scoop tried to argue that without ABMs the Minuteman force wouldn't survive a Soviet first strike. Scoop puffs up that barrel chest and comes at the White House, saying that Allison has gone native serving so long among "the disarmers" and that Scoop needs "his man" on the committee - who would in fact be Lt. Gen. Edward Rowny from the Army, at that time on an assignment with NATO's politico-military infrastructure. George, in turn, tells Scoop to fuck right the fuck on off.

This comes at an interesting point: around early March the Vietnam withdrawal has wound up, George and McGovernment generally wants to get on with things like the Food & Farming Renaissance Act (FFRA), the Demogrant revival with H.B. 1, the Revenue Reform Act, doing something about health care, on and on. In general George wants to figure out how to build productive relationships on the Hill because his gang of scoobies really needs that, even to accommodate - on defense/natsec issues for example, by then he's already accepted that the F-15 (built in St. Louis) will have to happen in order to keep Stuart Symington and Tom Eagleton on-side for major domestic legislation. If, say, Barry Goldwater had tried this Rowny stunt, George'd have sat down with Goldwater for coffee - or even something stronger - in the Oval Office and talked through the why-not of it in pleasant conversation, because George and Barry had a surprisingly cordial relationship for ideological opposites.

But here's the thing: George does not fucking like Scoop. He knows Scoop was the great white hope of the right-Regulars at the Miami convention, what Scoop was up to in the effort to hijack George's nomination, and that Scoop wants to put the upstart "His Accidency" McGovern in his "place" on Proper Cold War Attitudes. George also, with eminent cause, considers Scoop a pompous, second-rate, Boeing-whore asshat, and would probably say so to intimates after a second scotch. (This is in stark contrast to Scoop's Washingtonian partner in the Senate, Warren "Maggie" Magnusson, who's one of George's most loyal partners on the Hill. It kind of pains Maggie to see the rift there, but he gets it for what it is.) So George hears of Scoop's pitch, and tells Tom Moorer to do not a damn thing, not lift a finger in response, while George meets Scoop's bluster in public with a frigid, Midwest Nice silence. Scoop knows what's up, and intends to keep score. Meanwhile, Royal Allison serves out the last months of a four-year hitch as ACSAN, replaced in the summer of '73 by Vice Admiral Frederick Michaelis, a naval aviator who'd commanded the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and also been a Deputy Director of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, aka the guys who put the NTB together. That choice gets made because George wants to offer a favor - picking Michaelis - to Tom Moorer and especially to Bud Zumwalt who pushes Michaelis for the role. (A Navy guy also fits with George's philosophical "finite deterrence" roots.)

Back to the serious stuff.

Between roughly late February of 1973 and late March of 1974, three phenomena dominate McGovernment's arms control process

• Rounds, for a time prolific, of memos about a position for a MIRV freeze, or at least a partial MIRV freeze, generated especially by the non-DoD players in the arms control process while Tom Moorer continues to insist that you cannot stop the SS-18, you can only hope to contain it. Sarge Shriver takes a version of the "partial MIRV" proposal (Soviets do SS-17/SS-19 but not the rest) with him to Geneva in November right before the talks recess for much of the winter. For a week or two there seems to be life in it before military interests in the Soviet Union put the kibosh on. For a time at the new year there's consideration of a de-MIRVing approach with extant systems, but that's done with by early February based on intelligence info that Moscow will deploy MIRVed SS-19s within months and remains at work on the other systems.
• The Soviets put forward proposals designed to test how far the US would be willing to come in a Soviet direction, one or two of them fairly disingenuous. Initial Soviet delegation interest in aspects of some American proposals gets tamped down quickly because of the veto power of conservative marshals within the Soviet military. The military veto resides especially with that grim, nuke-happy old cavalryman, Minister of Defense Andrei Grechko, who appears to be a thorn in Brezhnev's desire to design and conclude a treaty.
• The DoD's own uniforms are themselves uniformly cautious (see what I ... is this thing on? ...) about progress towards a treaty. They really just want a cap on expansion with equal aggregates and minimal hindrance to their drive for across-the-board modernization. In February, for example, Bud Zumwalt puts forward an entirely untenable negotiating position/proposal as the Navy's official view, which the McGoverners read as an effort to spike the talks until there's some sort of systemic change.

Then, of course, Marshal Grechko bites the Marxist-Leninist big one, and the landscape changes

• In March, George and Leonid communicate with one another that they'd really like to get on with this treaty process
• By the start of April, an initiative out of State and ACDA has taken hold - a new kind of arms control conference that (1) isn't just about strategic nukes but ropes in a range of significant topics (whatever agreements emerge will be patchworked together into a treaty) and (2) that involves the United Kingdom and France also (an invitation - refused - goes out to China as well)
• At first the uniforms can be contented that the grand-conference approach seems stalled, but then SARGE! works his magic with Pompidou and the French, 'til then holdouts, decide they'll do it if they can host and offer a conference at Rambouillet in suburban-metro Paris

At first the cautious, small-c conservative Permanent Pentagon hopes the sheer diversity of the Rambouillet Talks - the range of topics, the multiple delegations on the Western side - will be its undoing. But then, inspired by a comment from George Himself, Jeremy Stone formulates the warhead-cap approach and the talks head in a new direction.

The fundamental shift from regulating "central systems" to a total-arsenal warhead cap has a number of dramatic effects

• At a stroke, it
  • Bypasses many of the most complex and gnarly technical issues involved in a central-systems regulation approach - the relative capabilities of various systems - by designating a maximum stockpile size of warheads within which the "Rambouillet sides" must figure out how to mix
  • It means that neither side can afford to over-egg their deployed force with any one favored system because they'd have to make major cutbacks in other weapon systems that they need or at least want (though some low-priority, mostly obsolescent, systems would indeed disappear in order to make way for priority items)
  • It makes the mechanism and the purpose of this approach - real cuts in the grotesque overkill of the superpowers' nuclear arsenals - clear to man-in-the-street types, who get how this agreement would Do A Thing
  • By moving the nuclear element of the arms-reduction talks forward with a quantum leap, it frees up some time and energy for the effort to nail down other topics

Of course there are still issues -subsections and codicils - to the nuclear agreement that take from that heady high summer into 1975 to sort out

• Making sure the sublimit of 250 MLBMs doesn't derail anything
• Also the ban on further upgrade/modification of systems specifically enumerated in the treaty, over and above listed capabilities (NB the treaty plans an end-state for 1985, when everything should be deployed as described, and other extant systems from 1975 have been eliminated)
• Drawing up the most complex, multi-element inspection regime yet tried for any arms control agreement
• Then there's the matter of the two sides' nuclear stockpiles: drawing up how many warheads, for how many of what systems, they'll enumerate in the treaty so that inspectors know what they're looking for to (1) prevent "breakout" cheating and (2) as they verify weapons to be dismantled/destroyed in the big stockpile reductions against what's supposed to stay in service

So, by late summer of '74, that means designing a force to enumerate in the treaty (alongside all the other items that'll be eliminated in front of outside, including Soviet, observers) becomes a live process. This is the opportunity, for both McGoverners and uniforms, to play for all of the nuclear marbles.

We should take a moment here and introduce another uniform.

General George Scratchley Brown was as or more prepared to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Tom Moorer's retirement in the summer of 1974, than any of his recent predecessors. An Army brat turned West Point cadet, Brown volunteered for the Air Corps on graduation in 1941 and ended up in the same part of the world as one George Stanley McGovern in those days, flying B-24 Liberators on missions across the Mediterranean. During a major raid on the Ploesti oil fields in Romania, the commander of Brown's bomber wing was shot down - Brown took over and under relentlessly dense anti-aircraft fire brought those B-24 squadrons over the target successfully. He carried through other high-risk missions, winning medals from three Allied countries, until his tour was up and he rotated home as CO of a flight training squadron. After the war and up through the early Sixties he served in a variety of command and staff jobs, including aide to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and then military assistant to Eisenhower's last Secretary of Defense, Thomas Gates, with brief service under Gates' Kennedy-era successor Robert McNamara. After more field commands, as a three-star general, Brown became assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. In 1968, Brown took over Seventh Air Force, the command that supplied USAF combat and support aircraft in Southeast Asia. There he was thick as thieves with the generalissimo of Military Assistance Command Vietnam, the Army's Gen. Creighton "Abe" Abrams. After a stint sorting out complex Air Force project-management and procurement problems at Air Force Systems Command, Brown became Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Though he loved the work and traveled extensively (usually piloting his own executive jet) to meet Air Force personnel where they worked, Brown wasn't long in the job - Tom Moorer had tapped Brown as Moorer's successor chairing the Joint Chiefs.

Brown's vigorous, a hard worker, blunt, but also good natured and pragmatic, arguably better than Moorer at handling an apolitical military’s relationship with partisan politics, and at balancing relations between and among the Chiefs. He takes breakfast nearly every morning with Joint Staff leadership, who are largely devoted to him, and works closely with both the Chiefs and the National Security Council staff of the White House. He also has a stronger inclination than Tom Moorer did to build not just professional relationships with the civilian principals, but friendly ones where he can - Brown figures with some justice that he can develop greater leverage that way. Brown gets that cracking jokes with Paul Warnke before and after (sometimes during) SPG or PRC meetings, also playing on the fact Brown's an Old Liberator Jockey like President McGovern, all adds up to political capital.

Brown knows where to spend that capital, too: an arms control agreement that'll want a statement of where US strategic forces stand in 1985 is the battleground on which to hash out near-term force modernization. That comes on several specific fronts.

A lot of folk in the upper-middle ranks of the policy process (folks like Les Gelb, Morton Halperin, Jeremy Stone, David Aaron, and Jeffrey Record), and some above them too (like the US special ambassador at Rambouillet himself, Clark Clifford), recognize that a likely condition of the big overall cuts in the United States' nuclear stockpile - both the actual "physics package" explosives and the weapons on which they're loaded - is that there will be some measure of modernization, a "fewer but newer" move in at least general terms, for a couple of reasons. The first would be, in some cases, practical: with non-strategic weapons especially, a lot of extant systems aren't fit for purpose with the employment strategies McGovernment would prefer, and would be sufficiently insecure in wartime (often based so close to the front lines that Soviet or Soviet-allied forces might overwhelm them quickly) that a "use 'em or lose 'em" approach might take hold. Something will have to be done to correct for that. There are a few, though fewer, similar issues with strategic weapons also. The second driver for modernization is institutional politics and negotiation: key interests will trade support for the bold, big-tent architecture of CART in return for the deployment of certain systems they favor, because inside the Beltway logrolling never goes out of style.

Non-strategic weapons

Two pressures act on McGovernment to modernize with regard to battlefield and theater nuclear weapons. The first is external, most commonly from the continental European NATO states led by West Germany, also and a little more obliquely from South Korea. All these partners play key roles in the global aspect of McGovernomics, and with non-military geostrategy for McGovernment. Their firm insistence that the US must do something to address potential strategic imbalances in those nations' backyards will not go away just because McGovernment would prefer not to cope with yet another call for military spending or opportunity to compromise some of its arms-reduction principles. The second pressure is internal and practical: as observed above, the weapons that the US already has mostly aren't fit for the purposes that McGovernment wants to exercise when it comes to theater-level deterrence. And if they can't credibly perform that deterrent role they would actually detract from the security and durability of any arms control that McGovernment was able to work out. So there'll have to be some changes made, especially as the sheer numbers of such weapons (battlefield and theater-level) plummet dramatically under the CART warhead-stockpile ceiling. For tacnukes/theater weapons it's very, very definitely "fewer", so effective utility/deterrence counts that much more.

SLBMs

The seaborne leg of the US's nuclear triad is where the McGoverners choose to use force modernization to their advantage. They move to keep all 41 of the Navy's SSBNs in service - though still with no new funding for a ULMS-project submarine - and accelerate funding/project timelines for the development of the UGM-96 missile and its payload, with UGM-96s to load out on 31 of the boomers by the 1980s. (The remaining ten SSBNs would continue to field Polaris A3s from forward bases - more on that in a later post - in an essentially theater-weapon role.) This is a significant move in the direction of a sea-based deterrent, one of the natsec McGoverners' long-term goals. It's buttressed by a forward plan to design a ULMS III submarine and accompanying large missile during the 1980s to enter service towards the end of the decade, with considerably longer range than the UGM-96 C4 plus warheads that can individually "service" hard targets - a move, so say the position papers turned out of the National Security Council staff and DoD's Policy shop, likely to push the Soviets towards a sea-based deterrent themselves or at least mobile missiles on land less vulnerable to a first strike. It's McGovernment's bid for a different strategic nuclear model pared down over future arms control agreements (a little more on that in a bit) to a sustainable at-sea deterrent with more provocative and vulnerable elements pruned away over time through bureaucratic/diplomatic good judgment. The "sure we'll modernize - on our terms" of the process.


ICBMs

Here the McGoverners would've preferred simply to do something by doing really very little. Sure, they say, we'll complete the process of replacing older Minuteman Is with Minuteman IIIs. Then, at 500 each Minuteman IIs and IIIs, we'll call a halt. They're a straightforward system, cheap at the strategic-nukes price, sustainable in the near term, and now supported by an updated infrastructure of early-warning systems, airborne controls, redundant layers of warning and launch controls, all to make sure that there's no actual "window of vulnerability" where the Soviets' Ginormous Nuclear Death Wang(TM) could reach out and cripple the Minuteman force. Therefore, the ICBMs can continue to fulfill two useful roles that allow McGovernment to argue against costly modernization projects: (1) they provide a residual hard-target capability for whatever scenarios where that might have some utility and (2) more to the McGovernment point, they can neatly and usefully hit the great majority of deterrence/"postwar recovery limitation" targets, which would allow the US to preserve much of its submarine- and bomber-based forces for other targets or as a reserve. Simple enough.

But. The Air Force, through George Brown's successor as CSAF David Jones (more on him another time), decides to make a stand (eagle soars overhead, single tear falls) for counterforce/hard-target kill/damage limitation/whatever you want to call hitting the Soviets' nukes first in this generation of weapons. So we want to set out a portion of just over 2000 warheads (you add in a handful of spares for technical testing or to replace any faulty ones) for the Minuteman fleet, says Jones (that'd be 500 x 1 warheads for the Minuteman IIs and 500 x 3 warheads for the IIIs.) Well, instead you could have 200 mobile or really well-fortified/hidden MLBMs from the M-X research and development project that USAF is just jonesing to build and deploy, all with the accuracy and punch to clobber the other guys' silos plus various other targets. We'd be well under the 250 limit on MLBMs - and we know the Soviets plan to field up to all 250 of their slots. It would give us the optimal land-based force and did we mention that many of the Conservative Coalition senators who might try to filibuster this whole CART thing are functionally horny about the M-X idea?

This, though, is a non-starter. George Himself thinks the UGM-96 deployment is a pragmatic good idea - it's just the best version of an existing system (Poseidon) and it moves the goal of sea-based finite deterrence closer to long-term reality. There are things that he'll horse-trade to get to the goal of CART ratification when that time comes. But then, then there are issues where POTUS himself is a stubborn, idealistic Irishman who will not be moved. At a philosophical, moral level the M-X project revulses George: there will be no Ginormous Murka Death Wang (TM) on his watch. Besides which, as George the old foreign policy hand points out, it only further destabilizes the balance of terror as both sides anxiously wait to see who'll whip out a Death Wang first. Over time, says George buttressed by position memos from NSC, ACDA, and DoD Policy staff, the Soviets either will figure out that their SS-18s can't really catch the Minuteman force napping, or ULMS development will make the SS-18s too vulnerable themselves.

Just to spice things up, spurred by Les Gelb (who was at McNamara's Pentagon during the STRAT-X study), several Policy folk go back to the big STRAT-X study of potential future nuclear systems from the Sixties and find an alternative. That would be a road-mobile, lightweight ICBM with a single but comparatively high-yield warhead. (Basically OTL's later MGM-134 Midgetman project, which did in fact trace roots back to STRAT-X, just as M-X did.) Discussions with Harold Brown at Resources & Procurement go into how such a lightweight missile could be made hard-target accurate, and with that tucked in the "future programs" back pocket, George and his principals counter the Air Force by saying M-X would be too expensive and too cumbersome by comparison.

Bombers

Here, things get quite interesting.

A number of key natsec McGoverners viewed the bomber "leg" of the US nuclear triad as a residual, if not vestigial, element. There was general agreement with John Holum's view put forward in the Alternate Defense Posture that the bomber force could be reduced to a couple hundred airframes, a mix of some late-model B-52s and FB-111s, with attention to developing a long-range standoff cruise missile that could launch from the larger aircraft. This would have some real utility: cruise missiles with their very low altitude coupled with a low radar cross-section and thermal signature were nearly guaranteed to penetrate Soviet air defenses. And, for example, the 80 B-52Hs (the newest BUFFs) in frontline squadrons could each carry up to twenty such missiles, which added up to a notional total volley of 1600 ALCMs (air-launched cruise missiles), a non-trivial contribution to the force.

This is where George Brown seizes his opportunity. McGovernment has budged readily on sea-based systems, a bit more hesitantly but eventually with purpose on tactical/theater weapons in an effort to make a relatively small stockpile effective and map out conditions for their use in an effort to at once optimize and constrain them. McGovernment from George on down won't budge on M-X, and will proceed with the relatively-low-cost improvements for the Minuteman family to keep them in service. That leaves an opening. Brown churns out a full report on the advantages of on-target, penetrative bombing and asks if the administration fully wants to sacrifice that capability as it goes forward, laced of course with that unspoken concern: that the Chiefs, especially David Jones still sore about M-X and the whole McGovernment outlook on counterforce/damage limitation, might undersell CART in testimony before the Senate and endanger the treaty's ratification.

George Brown, as is his wont, puts this all in friendly terms: he's here to help the services and the civilian principals reach common ground, to make all this work for everyone as a way forward. As Brown points out, there are a number of things for the Chiefs to like in CART: the cap on the arms-race escalator for the Soviets (intelligence projections say the Soviets will have more weapons in their inventory than the US without a treaty, perhaps as many as 30,000 by the early 1980s - which is right about in line with OTL's reality), a workable MLBM limit for a "first treaty," freedom to mix inside the warhead totals (with the two conditions respectively against mobile ICBMs, which the Chiefs wanted, and against improving systems over and above what goes into CART, which they can live with), an inspection regime intended to constrain both sides (which Clark Clifford has sold to the Soviets as a check against a future, more reactionary American administration that might try breakout cheating), that sort of thing. But, adds Brown, the total-force ceiling that CART's nuclear aspect relies on also means that it's incumbent on the US to maintain the greatest quality and flexibility within that force-ceiling constraint that the US can. Bombers, like submarine-based missiles, represent that kind of flexible response and have the second-best survivability after the largely undetectable "boomers" at sea. A bomber force that combines a thicket of standoff cruise missiles with effective penetrators would be a highly effective "second leg" after the subs.

When the McGovernment civilians begin their own slow walk considering Brown's proposals, Brown plays his best card. He offers what amounts to an internal arms control agreement between the uniforms and McGovernment. In order to complement the B-52Hs and their cruise missiles with a penetrator force of sufficient size, Brown will consider a proposal that reverts the Minuteman IIIs in service to a single warhead each, in order to make the overall warhead ceiling numbers work. (That'll take a new warhead for the Minuteman IIIs too, higher-yield than their initial W62s, so Brown bakes that small lesser-included win for the military-industrial complex into the concept.) At one and the same time, the McGovern administration will be able to tell its most liberal allies that it reversed the qualitative arms race in one third of the US triad, and diminished the most vulnerable third of that triad in long-term importance, while the McGoverners can also say that they've bitten the bullet and accepted force modernization - in a manner signed off on by the Chiefs - with regard to the UGM-96 SLBM and the B-1 bomber. Improvements in the bomber force might also convince McGovernment's most strident critics in the Senate that they haven't neglected the multiple ways to ensure a survivable nuclear reserve force. USSTRATCOM will use the B-52/cruise and B-1 combination as the strategic force and in a few years relocate the FB-111s to Europe in order to contribute to NATO defenses, says Brown. I can whip the Chiefs into shape with this, says Brown.

And George Himself listens. There's so much packed into CART of significance, in the McGNU easily the largest and most, well, comprehensive arms control agreement yet floated

• A protocol for inspections to give some teeth to the 1972 bioweapons ban (this could be stronger, but the Western "Rambouillet side" views it as a start)
• A five-year process to eliminate British and French chemical weapons and halve the superpowers' arsenals thereof
• A threshold test ban of pretty much the same character as OTL's
• The long nuclear section under the warhead/arsenal-cap and inspection regime(s)

Unlike the Ginormous Murka Death Wang(TM), George was a bomber guy himself in the war, he gets that bombers have broader utility than just dropping the Bomb. And a robust aerospace industry can eventually be converted to civilian projects, especially when Rockwell (who designed and would build the B-1) live principally in California, the state with the most electoral votes and one that George nearly must win to stay in office. Like we say, unless he responds to a situation in a purely morally reactive fashion (for which see Death Wang), George learned the Beltway way trading horses in the Senate. If he needs to logroll with the Chiefs, he'd rather buy a bomber with multiple uses that serves survivable deterrence better than a heedlessly large missile aimed at missiles.

That's not quite the end of the matter: John Holum and Harold Brown both have Questions about whether the initial B-1 design is really the best outcome in terms of its characteristics and capabilities to face evolving Soviet air defenses. George Brown can work with that. Brown sits a Harold Brown "murder board" down with the relevant uniformed offices involved in the B-1's engineering and doctrinal development and works up a series of improvements. That results in a proposal more or less like OTL's B-1B, simply because those are the obvious things to do: make sure you've designed its ECM (electronic countermeasures) and radar and targeting systems for plug-and-play improvements in tech by the time the bomber actually enters service; make further reductions in its radar cross-section and thermal signature; jack up the MTOW (maximum takeoff weight) so it can get in the air faster (shorter takeoff roll even than the initial version) and fly at nearly transonic speeds "on the deck" (very low altitude) in return for an overall weight penalty on top speed; etc.

Despite some grumbling, this is broadly a price the McGoverners are willing to pay for George Brown getting the uniforms in lock step on CART testimony. CART itself would be an enormous achievement, but beyond that the most dedicated McGoverners want to kick off the work of CART II talks before they run out of the presidential term they have to work with. That would let them

• Take a shot at substantive reductions in long-term nuclear stockpiles: they've constrained them the first time around, now there'd be a shot at strategic cuts especially
• A full nuclear test ban, worked forward step by step from the threshold ban in CART
• Opportunities for any left-leaning British government to try and negotiate its arsenal down in return for reciprocal Soviet cuts
• A shot at regulating and reducing global arms sales, possible declaration of nuclear-free zones, etc.

The thought of such big opportunities counsels some compromises the first time around.


But of course there are other big defense issues beyond the nuclear

• How the defense (and the deescalation) of Europe fits into the larger relationship between Washington and the rest of "the West"
• What McGovernment seeks to do with rank-and-file services like the Army and Marines whose personnel cultures were badly dented by Southeast Asia
• How to approach the military-industrial complex, stuff like buying off dictators with guns and planes, etc.

that we'll look into in future updates. I don't want to speak too soon and hamstring myself, but it's possible that next we might see the fabled Return of Narrative (said possible, not certain) but there will be more of this bonus content ahead too.

 

[THE OBSERVER]

I don't want to speak too soon and hamstring myself, but it's possible that next we might see the fabled Return of Narrative (said possible, not certain) but there will be more of this bonus content ahead too.

Thank You!

 

[Yes]

Because AH folk love them some listy goodness, we'll take a moment here to mention the senior personnel/inner circle of the US delegation to the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Talks at Rambouillet. Of course there are a few dozen support personnel of various kinds from the respective entities involved, but these are the "room where it happens" team members, as it were.

Because of their prolific reports and memos and telegrams back to DC, and his own classical Philips Exeter education (so he knew the Greek root "-graphy" for writing), Deputy Secretary of Defense Townsend "Tim" Hoopes nicknamed the bunch of them "the CARTographers," and the monicker stuck in the upper echelons of McGovernment. (Paul Warnke was a notable fan of the term.)

Special Ambassador to the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Talks - Clark Clifford (the very appointment of Clifford was George's sign that he wasn't fucking about with this opportunity; Clifford took it from there)
Deputy Special Ambassador to the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Talks - Warren Christopher (in the role of loyal deputy and organizer of legalisms and paperwork)
Deputy Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency - Jeremy Stone (the ideas man, Clark Clifford's real right hand in the process)
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs for arms control matters - Walter Slocombe (another of McGovernment's young guns)
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs for arms control - Lynn E. Davis (the only woman in the inner circle, with a steel-trap mind for nuclear weapons issues)
Special Representative for the National Security Council - Strobe Talbott (Paul Warnke's man in the room)
Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs for Strategic Arms Negotiations - Vice Admiral Frederick Michaelis USN (George Brown's man in the room)

Other figures of note on the Western "Rambouillet side" include
Sir Frank Roberts - Head of the UK delegation called out of retirement for the job; among many other posts in a long and distinguished Foreign Office career he'd been HMG's ambassador to the Soviet Union 1960-62 (to cap several other postings to the Soviet Union over his career) and to West Germany 1963-68
Minister of State for Defence Bill Rodgers - Essentially like a deputy secretary only also a sitting MP, Rodgers is Secretary of State for Defence Tony Crosland's man in the room
Brigadier (ret.) Pierre-Marie Gaillot - The military-technical adviser to the French delegation, former Armee de l'Air brigadier who played a pivotal role in the development of France's own approach to deterrence and France's nuclear weapons program generally

Just a quick list of dramatis personae.

 

[Yes]

This will not be a piece to match the length of some recent ones. But it will cover, in brief, some very important material, the kind that Watsonian historians, political scientists, and economists inside the McGNU itself would pore over and argue about in the decades after McGovernment has gone on its way.

We've heard several questions from among the Careful Readers about the broad strokes of McGovernment - and broader Western-world - policy during McGoverning: how much they resemble or differ from American policy during OTL's Seventies, whether and where they relate to the emergence of neoliberalism, what distinguishes them both from OTL's later Neoliberalization of Everything or the specific kinds of consensus statism common to the postwar era, and so on.

During the hard work of 1974 that ties various threads together, and into 1975, there emerges - in the McGNU - something that later Watsonian scribes could call "the Cambridge Consensus." This is of course a reference to the Cambridge Group, the McGNU's version of the genesis of a Group of [FUNGIBLE NUMBER] at the policy core of First World/"Western industrial"/Global North international political economy. It's not, however, limited to the mechanics of international trade and finance or tweaking domestic GDP. It stretches beyond that into domestic constitutional politics, also to Global North/South relations, superpower relations, and how to mitigate the Cold War through individual and collective detente. Together the elements create broad precepts that are broadly - not always specifically, sometimes contentiously, but broadly - in common within the Group, though that's especially true, by 1975, of a troika represented by McGovernment in the US, the Lib-Lab coalition in the United Kingdom, and the SPD/FDP coalition in West Germany (in a more mercurial way with Canada, where you have an inherently big tent of more-urban red liberals and high-Liberal Grits all inside the Liberal Party, headed by that ideological chameleon Pierre Elliott Trudeau.) What's true is that, in broad strokes, it mostly represents a blend of social democracy (with state-socialist touches) with things that either are or approximate watered-down anglophone liberalism. So definitely not bright Red, but sort of "blood-orange" (the Left's red with the yellow of Liberalism, with a tinge more of the former) in its principles and practices.

So what are characteristics of that Cambridge Consensus? Let's bullet

• Work to achieve commercial price stability and relative currency stability around the Group (that's especially stable values relative to each other inside the "community float" that can be flexibly resilient as a whole, when it needs to be)
  • This involves especially action on actual prices/wages of various kinds (sometimes centrally-directed controls, sometimes more indirect - often tax-based - incomes policy), to include international diplomacy about oil and other commodities (eg getting Moscow and Tehran among others to open the taps in order to gain market share, against the Saudis under-producing so they can use inflation to help elect a GOP president in '76), plus higher progressive taxes to keep a tight fiscal rein despite the sorts of investments described in the next main bullet point
  • Also more government efforts to influence/direct the broad economy, to include regulation of transnational corporations, working out new management-labor settlements plus increasing workplace democracy where possible, and targeted supports/investments where the best opportunities for global competitiveness seem to be (more on the Japanese, or even Italian, model than the German one)
• Domestic investment in industrial modernization, infrastructure, public goods like health care in some cases (hi, MECA!), and in domestic energy independence which in a majority of Group nations (hi, France! Hi, Japan!) involves a goodly dose of nuclear power (also the start of real resistance to nuclear power in places like the Bundesrepublik and the US, also off the edge of the Group in Italy) - this investment approach also helps equalize the balance of payments with the new petrodollar powers of OPEC
• Pushes - really specific to that US/UK/FRG troika - for varied forms of domestic democratization and equity in the domestic political economy especially where and when those domestic political economies have been fundamentally unequal for various reasons (UK riven by class stratification, also regional and sectarian chauvinism along with growing racially based anti-immigrant bigotry; the foundationally American racial caste system, and the ways class and gender/sexual politics entwine with that caste system)
• Establishment, under American guidance, of a working North-South compromise with the New International Economic Order movement that emerged out of the Nonaligned Movement, in the interest of
  • stable development paths (plus continued Northern access to Southern markets with less commodity-boycott warfare)
  • financial stability across the North-South divide (with loans denominated in local currencies and instruments/facilities designed to encourage Southern borrowers to go through official/regulated channels rather than the Eurodollar market)
  • along with Northern powers who'll share food bounty and technological progress with the South in exchange (hi, Secretary Shriver!) for progress on internal equity/democratization within Southern nations (linkage of accepting left-wing, or right-wing, political settlements in return for rights/freedoms for the individual and internally marginalized groups - this is a fractious point bc the French want to keep their neoimperialism in the patrimoine thanks very much while the Japanese and Germans just want to do business advantageously)
• A trifold approach to the Soviet Union and the Cold War generally that includes
  • big emphasis on arms control (especially the nuclear component, where with CART you have the warhead-stockpile cap plus enumeration of surviving weapons/systems so inspection can prevent breakout cheating and slow the biggest engine of the arms race)
  • selective modernization of Western nuclear systems in order to maintain the credibility of deterrence (with an emphasis on deterrence - or at the very least "warfighting as deterrence" eg theater-level strikes designed to inflict specific kinds of unacceptable loss as much or more than to win battles - rather than on "nuclear utility" eg planning/equipping to fight a nuclear war as if it were just any other kind)
  • growing economic and cultural engagement/interchange with Moscow and the Eastern Bloc generally in an effort to deescalate and reintegrate Cold War Europe (especially low-hanging integration fruit like Hungary, in some ways Romania, and Poland)

Those are the biggest internal features. The biggest structural feature, of the whole of the thing, is that it represents in variations among Group members an active renovation and defense of the big, interventionist national state that developed out of the world wars and some responses to the Depression or to postwar recovery. Which is one of the things that most attracts the attention of its critics, who are happy to tell a Big Lie about the postwar boom - that the boom was an outcome of capitalism's recovery, rather than of multiple direct interventions by dynamic national states (not least social welfare and military Keynesianism during the Cold War) plus limited labor mobility.

 

[Prof Yoshie]

Wonderful timeline so far can't wait to see how the 80s go

 

[King of the Uzbeks]

second-rate, Boeing-whore asshat,

Look Scoop was many things, but when it cams to being a Boeing-whore asshat he was first rate.

see also under MAOs the decoupling of attacks on the Soviets and China,

Sometimes coindicence is a wonderful thing.

 

[Yes]

Look Scoop was many things, but when it came to being a Boeing-whore asshat he was first rate.

Fair.

Sometimes coindicence is a wonderful thing.

Oh very much so.