President Kennedy: MAD & the Lessons of Berlin and Cuba

Nuclear weapons and the deterrent strategy accompanying their deployment are sometimes poorly understood. For the general public that is understandable given the complexities of preventing nuclear war. What is most worrisome are those “experts” who widely seek the abolition of nuclear weapons but are often confused about the real American nuclear deterrent necessary to prevent war.  

In August 1961, for example, Kennedy had previously told the Soviet leader that a threatened Russian attack on the American military garrison in Berlin meant nuclear war. We had significant (3900) battlefield nuclear forces in Germany. But we also had a newly deployed strategic sea-launched long-range missile aboard submarines which Kennedy thought saved the day and which he later would personally thank the Lawrence Livermore team for developing. Thus, Khrushchev knew Kennedy meant business. Although the General Secretary eventually didn’t attack, he went and built the Berlin Wall, an off ramp critical to standing down from nuclear war. 

Bu the USSR leader wasn’t done. A year later, October 1962, U.S. intelligence determined the Soviets had placed nuclear armed missiles in Cuba. On that very day, coincidentally, the USAF had just deployed the very first Minuteman ICBMs in Montana. A key to the crisis resolution was a secret deal. Kennedy then knew Minuteman meant the U.S. no longer needed the U.S. medium range missiles in Turkey---close enough to strike key targets in the Soviet Union. The new Minuteman missiles could also reach Moscow. Kennedy later declared that “Minuteman was my ace in the hole” as he secretly traded away the U.S. missiles based in Turkey for the Soviets removing the close-in missiles in Cuba.

In both cases, the U.S. avoided nuclear war. Deterrence held, albeit with some fortuitous help.

But could we continue to rely on just in time new technologies that saved the day or the good sense of our adversaries? How best to continue?

According to nuclear expert Frank Miller, since the very beginning of the Truman administration, it was American strategy to go after key overall Soviet military capabilities. Over time, as missile accuracy improved, U.S. strategy was to go after Soviet military systems themselves such as missile silos. The key reason the U.S. needed such flexible nuclear firepower was that President Eisenhower knew it would have bankrupted the USA to build the conventional force necessary to match the Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional forces. The Kennedy administration emphasized the targeting of Soviet warmaking assets, despite Secretary of Defense McNamara later shielding the U.S. move toward keeping at risk Soviet military assets by falsely claiming the U.S. still operated under the strategy of MAD.

The U.S. thus from the very early years of the nuclear age had response options other than simple massive retaliatory strikes on urban areas. Eventually the deterrent strategy the U.S. adopted, in place now for decades, held at risk those elements of power of great importance to the leaders of the Soviet Union and China, for example and explicitly took off the table city busting. And after the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S., in an extraordinary technological feat built both a submarine and a companion sea launched ballistic missile by 1960, and an ICBM silo-based missile called Minuteman by 1962 to carry out just such a strategy as eventually adopted.

Why is this important? Without a U.S. capability to target the military forces of the USSR or China, their war forces would be in a sanctuary from which they could attack the United States or its allies with impunity. Having only the capability to deliver MAD is not a credible deterrent as President Kennedy warned.

As Miller writes, such a flexible strategy has been U.S. policy since at least the Truman administration when U.S. policy was to destroy the capability of the USSR to “wage aggressive war,” and destroy those elements of the Soviet military that would “halt aggression.” Thus, 14 American Presidents from 20 administrations, over 75 years have used such a strategy to avoid direct military conflict between nuclear armed powers.

Now the U.S. unilaterally got rid of over 90% of its theater nuclear weapons in 1991 as the Cold War was over, and as we thought at the time, a Russian led assault on Western Europe was no longer a threat. The U.S. also reduced our strategic nuclear forces from roughly 10,000 to 1550, as we assume Russia did too in three landmark arms deals (START I, the Moscow deal and New START.)

At the time of the 1991 Presidential Nuclear Initiative, (PNI) the Europeans insisted the U.S. have an insurance policy---leave behind, a small extended nuclear force in Western Europe. The U.S. did so with a few hundred gravity bombs in Europe. This was not any plan to start or initiate a nuclear war, contrary to some recent muddled commentary. It was to give the President options other than the threatened all-out use of strategic long range nuclear forces to deter adversaries from attacking the U.S. and Europe in the first place. It has turned out not to be enough.

The Russians in 1991 did not follow suit with a PNI of their own, and the Russians kept at least 2000 and as many as 4000 such “battlefield” nuclear forces.

Then on April 30, 1999, a new nuclear policy was crafted by a small group of top Russian officials. President Yeltsin in a secret meeting of the Politburo called for Russia to develop highly accurate and very low yield nuclear weapons able to be used on the conventional battlefield. Mr. Putin as President put the decree into force. The strategy has variously been described as “escalate to win” or “escalate to de-escalate,” or the use of such battlefield nuclear forces to exercise blackmail, coercion or actual terror, and swiftly change the direction of conventional conflicts toward Russia’s favor.

While the U.S. does have a small number of theater nuclear forces now in Great Britain, the U.S. needs more flexible forces to better hold at risk our adversary’s military capability. Although it is not explicitly known, the lack of sufficient U.S. and allied deterrent choices at the regional/battlefield level may have been a factor in the Russian decision in 2014 and 2012 to invade Ukraine, as well as previous aggression against Georgia and Moldova. Despite declaring that the independence of Ukraine is an existential issue, NATO has not sent its own forces to fight the Russians but only some conventional weapons delivered to Ukraine. To many in Russia, that “inaction” by NATO means NATO is deterred especially as Putin and officials within the Russian Federation routinely threaten the use of such theater nuclear weapons against Ukraine and NATO forces should Ukraine or its allies deploy certain kinds of weapons or attack certain Russian targets.

The Strategic Posture Commission concluded in 2023 that the United States needed additional regional or theater nuclear forces that were survivable, mobile, and prompt to deter Russian from escalating a conventional conflict to the nuclear level. The support was both bipartisan and unanimous. The deployment of a Navy nuclear armed sea-launched cruise missile is an added theater capability that can deliver deterrence and help keep the peace. It is supported by the U.S. Navy and funded by Congress. Such forces give the President options other than ending the world and have nothing to do with “starting” a nuclear war. True, the folks in Moscow and Peking see such theater/battlefield weapons as instruments of war that make aggression possible. But the U.S. and its allies believe nuclear and conventional forces are to deter and prevent war. That is how U.S. nuclear modernization and a flexible response capability will keep the nuclear peace.

Peter Huessy is President of Geostrategic Analysis and Senior Fellow at NIDS and the Gold Institute and a weekly nuclear policy guest on the John Batchelor Show. 

image:  A naval rocket is exhibited in Moscow's Red Square past a banner of Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx during the annual May Day parade in the Soviet Union in May 1, 1963. Under the shadow of the Cold War's threat of "mutually assured destruction," 1963 was the year of dawning arms control between the U.S. and the Soviet Union; they signed a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. (AP Photo/File)