How Much Is Enough? A Statement from “The Committee on Eternal Danger”

There is an increasingly widespread feeling in Congress, among informed sectors of public opinion and, surprisingly, even among many strategic analysts, that U.S. nuclear forces have grown far beyond any rational purpose, that we have far more than we need for deterrence—that, as it sometimes is vulgarly put, our strategy is one of “overkill.” However popular this view may be, it is quite wrong; it reflects a frighteningly unsophisticated assessment of the mutual deterrence relation of the United States and the Soviet Union. The truth is that our security requires far, far more strategic forces than we now have.

The current American strategic posture is one of mutual assured destruction: lately critics have labeled this “MAD.” For brevity’s sake, I will adopt this acronym here, but certainly without pejorative connotations. MAD is a product of the mid-1960s, particularly of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara’s reasoning was that we should design an American nuclear force capable of deterring any Soviet attack against either the United States or Europe so long as Soviet leaders were even minimally rational. The key assumption of the McNamara analysis was that an American force that would kill at least 25 percent of the Soviet population and destroy 50 percent of its industrial capacity would meet this criterion.

The figures may seem somewhat arbitrary, but they were based in part on the fact that the Soviet Uni...