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Insufficient Information v. Lying: Explaining the Sources of the National

Misperception of a Missile Gap

Paper prepared for delivery at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association

Boston August 29-September 1, 2002

Jane Kellett Cramer University of Oregon

jkcramer@darkwing.uoregon.edu

Draftnot to be cited without permission of the author.

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Insufficient Information v. Lying: Explaining the Sources of the National Misperception of a Missile Gap

Jane Kellett Cramer

For a decade after Sputnik, however, the public mood in the United States was one of support for almost anything proposed in the name of national security. During this

period, the Secretary of Defense was under constant pressure to spend more money than he believed necessary. In practically every conflict between the Secretary of Defense and

the Congress over spending, the Congress wanted to spend more. The Armed Services Committees were rarely challenged by the rest of the Congress. Their main theme was

that the military leaders are the experts; they know best what the nation needs for national defense; any reduction from what they recommend means risking the nations security; and such shortfalls must be exposed and attacked as such. Enthoven and Smith, How

Much is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961-1969, p. 1.

The national misperception of a missile gap formed after the Soviets launched

Sputnik on October 4, 1957. This public fear had a profound influence on U.S. policy for

many years. Fears of a possible missile gap forced President Eisenhower to spend more

on defense than he thought necessary or prudent in the late 1950s.1 The public fear of

U.S. vulnerability also helped to defeat the Republicans at the polls, as the Democrats

were able to capitalize on the missile gap issue and regain the White House in 1960.2

Even after the gap was found definitely to be in the U.S.s favor in 1961, President

Kennedy was pressured to spend more on missiles than he believed necessary. Even

though his advisers thought 1,000 Minuteman missiles were too many, they also believed

it was politically impossible for him to ask for fewer in the political atmosphere of the 1 President Eisenhower thought it was prudent to studiously maintain U.S. retaliatory capability, but he also thought his pre-Sputnik programs had accomplished this already. Eisenhower had given highest priority to all four missile programs in 1955. He was fully engaged in a major effort to meet the new Soviet missile challenge well before Sputnik . McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years , (New York: Vintage Books, 1988) p. 327. 2 David L. Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War, (Columbus: Ohio State

University Press, 1999) p.181.

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time. This extensive missile build-up by the U.S. greatly provoked the arms race for the

next few decades. 3 What caused the national misperception of a missile gap?

Recent scholarship has argued that the quantity and quality of U.S. intelligence at

the time was inadequate and thus the fears of U.S. vulnerability of the period were

reasonably caused by insufficient information. 4 Other scholars have emphasized that the

U.S. overestimated the threat from the Soviet Union during the Cold War because of

intentional exaggerations of the threat by U.S. leaders at the beginning of the Cold War,

but that later leaders unintentionally exaggerated the threat because of blowback or

because of a prevailing strategic culture.5 While all of these explanations have some

merit, they all fail to recognize the central role of intentional elite exaggerations of the

threat at the time of the formation of the national misperception of a missile gap. This

paper argues that it is imperative to recognize that intentional elite exaggerations played a

key role in causing the misperception of a dangerous missile gap. These exaggerations

3 National Security Archive interview with Robert McNamara, Episode 8: Sputnik, The Cold War, November 15, 1998. Available at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-8/mcnamara1.html accessed 6/28/2002. 4 Peter J. Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) p. 31. 5 Jack Snyder argues that blowback might best explain the exaggerations of the Soviet threat during the Cold War after elites in the early Cold War (1947-1950) intentionally exaggerated the threat in order to mobilize the public. Blowback comes from propaganda when mobilizing elites inadvertently social[ize] successor elite generations to believe in the propaganda they used to justify their imperial expansion. Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition . (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) pp. 41-42. Charles Kupchan argues that strategic culturethe product of elite efforts to garner domestic support for their extremist policieslater entraps elites politically and affects them cognitively, emotionally and organizationally so that policies consistent with strategic pragmatism do not even receive serious consideration. Charles A. Kupchan, The Vulnerability of Empire (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994) pp. 87-102. While I agree that there was a lot of influence from blowback and strategic culture in this period, the extreme exaggeration of the missile gap was not at all a foregone conclusion and was resisted by many and intentionally created by others. Because the missile gap myth was the product of an extensive, intentional, renewed propaganda campaign on the part of many interested elites while other elites resisted (however feebly) and lost the propaganda battle of this period, blowback and strategic culture do not explain the causes of this misperception. Blowback and strategic culture made the work of exaggerators easier, but did not control the actual beliefs of many key elites.

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were the primary cause of this misperception and they possibly could be cured, and

hence costly and possibly dangerous national misperceptions could be avoided.

In this paper I show two things: 1) that insufficient information does not

adequately explain the fears of a missile gap, 2) that intentional elite exaggerations were

central to causing the fears of a missile gap. First I show how insufficient intelligence led

to a great deal of uncertainty just after the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and early 1958 and

this helped cause the initial fears of a missile gap. I then explain how uncertainty about

the Soviet missile program sharply decreased as more info rmation became available and

as the U.S. acted to decrease its vulnerability. After the spring of 1958 it became more

and more clear that the U.S. was not facing a period of high vulnerability to a disarming

first strike as the missile gap fear supposed. Because of this decline in uncertainty

about the threat (and decline in magnitude of the possible threat to the point where the

U.S. did not need to fear a missile gap,) we should see a corresponding decline in

public fear throughout the missile gap period (1957-1961). Instead, we see overall

public fears increase during this period, and the specific fear of the missile gap

significantly helped Senator Kennedy win the White House in 1960.6 If insufficient

information about the threat truly explained these fears, fears should have declined as

uncertainty, and indeed the threat, declined.

6 Soon after President Kennedy took office, Robert McNamara discovered that there was no missile gap and said so to the press in a background briefing. This led Senator Dirksen, the Republican minority leader of the Senate, to charge that the election had been a fraud and he asked that it be re-run. National Security Archive interview with Robert McNamara, Episode 8: Sputnik, The Cold War, November 15, 1998. Historians record an overall increase in public fear which is loosely captured by the public opinion polls that record the publics expectation of war in five years. 33% of the public expected world war in five years in December 1957, this fell to 24% in April 1958, and then rose 34% in May 1960 and 47% in July 1960. See data compiled by Russett, Bruce et. al., "Did American's Expectations of Nuclear War Reduce Their Savings?," International Studies Quarterly 38 (1994), p.592.

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Second, I demonstrate that intentional elite exaggerations were central to the

creation and growth of this national misperception across the period. It has been pointed

out before that the Air Force and the Democrats (those with the most to gain,) were

central to the creation of the missile gap fear.7 However, many people have excused the

exaggerations from these sources as still consistent with the possible dangers of the time.8

Scholars have argued that it is not certain that leaders were intentionally misleading the

public. Instead, many have maintained that there was great uncertainty at the time that

could be reasonably interpreted two ways. This argument suggests there were many like

President Eisenhower who were optimistic in his threat assessments which did not fear

a possible missile gap, and then there were those like the Democratic Senators and the

leaders of the Strategic Air Command of the Air Force who were pessimists in their

threat assessments and did reasonably fear a possible missile gap. These arguments

emerged and became the popular interpretation of this period before it was known that

there was smoking gun evidence to show there were intentional, unreasonable

exaggerations by Senator Stuart Symington who was central to creating the fears of a

missile gap. There has long been circumstantial evidence to indict a number of key

officials especially from the Air Force and among the Democratic Senators who were

presidential hopefuls. However, the evidence presented here about Senator Symingtons

exaggerations shows that he was not simply being pessimistic in his interpretation of

the evidence; it shows that he was intentionally exaggeratingmaking unfounded claims

in public in clear contradiction with how he logically interpreted the available evidence in

7 Edgar M. Bottome, The Missile Gap: A Study of the Formulation of Military and Political Policy, (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971); James C. Dick, "The Strategic Arms Race, 1957-1961: Who Opened the Missile Gap?" Journal of Politics 34 (1972). 8 McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, (New York: Vintage Books, 1988).

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private. Further, I argue his exaggerations were very important because he had

expertise and claimed to have special intelligence to support his claims. These claims

allowed other leaders to contradict the administrations intelligence findings and argue

for a missile gap based on Senator Symingtons assertionsmost importantly it has

been argued that Senator Kennedy believed in a missile gap because of Senator

Symingtons assertions.9

Why is this important? There has been a long-standing argument that

misperceptions are largely unavoidable because they are caused by insufficient

information or biases in the perceptual lenses of decision makers. If this is not true, as I

show it is not true in this important case, then large misperceptions could be cured at

least theoretically. For example it may be possible that more openness about intelligence

assessments or better handling of worst-case analyses might go a long way toward

avoiding or mitigating large national misperceptions.

I proceed by first explaining a brief history of the missile gap period. Second I

show how uncertainty declined sharply during this period, and how the possibility of a

dangerous missile gap evaporated between 1958 and 1960, even though it never really

existed at all. I discuss how the misperception was upheld by exaggerated claims

combined with mishandling worst-case analyses. Third I show how Senator Symington

was central to the missile gap fear, recognized in private that there was no evidence to

support the claim that the Soviets were ahead of the U.S. in missile production in 1958,

but in 1959 and 1960 continued to publicly put forward unfounded, highly exaggerated

9 National Security Archive interview with Robert McNamara, Episode 8: Sputnik, The Cold War, November 15, 1998.

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projections of Soviet missile capabilities. Finally, I offer some broad conclusions from

these findings.

A Brief History of the Missile Gap

The public fear of a missile gap began to form after the Soviet launching of

Sputnik on October 4, 1957. The press leak of the alarmist Gaither Report in December

1957 helped to define the meaning of Sputnik and establish the fear that the US was in

the gravest danger of its history.10 This secret report to the president was strongly

reinforced when leading Democratic Senators launched hearings to investigate why the

U.S. was so far behind in the missile race in the spring of 1958. Additionally, leaks to the

press of Air Force estimates of future Soviet missile developments helped to define the

threat supposedly posed by the Soviet achievement of Sputnik.11 It was alleged that

because the Soviet Union was so far advanced in their development of intercontinental

ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as demonstrated by Sputnik, the Soviets would soon be able to

acquire huge numbers of missiles (500 by 1960, 1,000 by 1961, 1,500 by 1962 and 2000

by 1963). It was further alleged that the Soviets would be armed with this huge force

before the U.S. was able to catch up in missile production, and thus there would be a

period of extreme danger (1960-1962)a missile gap periodwhen the supposedly

highly vulnerable U.S. bomber forces would be in grave danger of a disarming first strike

by the Soviet Union.

10 Chalmers M. Roberts, First rough draft: a journalist's journal of our times, (New York: Praeger, 1973) pp. 149-150. 11 Most famously, see these articles: Joseph Alsop, The Washington Post, July 30 1958, p. 17; Joseph Alsop, The Washington Post, August 1 1958, p. 19; Joseph Alsop, The Washington Post, August 3 1958, p. 5.

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We know with hindsight that the dreaded missile gap never materialized. By

the end of 1960 and the end of the Eisenhower Administration, the Soviets total arsenal

of functional ICBMs consisted of only four unprotected and highly visible, first-

generation SS-6 Semyorka missiles based at a single site.12 The U.S. had deployed six

Atlas missiles on open launch pads at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in 1959.

By the end of 1960, the U.S. had deployed two squadrons of Atlas missiles, with nine

missiles in each squadron. The second squadron was placed in concrete bunkers that

offered some protection at Warren Air Force Base outside Cheyenne, Wyoming.13 Also

in 1960, the U.S. deployed its first Polaris submarine with 16 missiles. So by the end of

1960, the U.S. had 18 ICBMs and 16 SLBMs, while the Soviets had 4 ICBMs.

By the end of 1962, the U.S. had deployed thirteen Atlas squadrons and six Titan

squadrons. The second-generation Minuteman missiles had become operational, giving

the U.S. about two hundred missiles. Additionally the U.S. had nine Polaris submarines

carrying 144 missiles. The Soviets had less than 100 ICBMs at that time. By 1965, the

U.S. had 821 Minuteman and 59 Titan II ICBMs and 464 Polaris SLBMs, and the Soviets

had fewer than 200 deployed ICBMs (See table below).14

12 Gaddis, We Now Know , p. 240; Steven J. Zaloga, Target America: The Soviet Union and the

Strategic Arms Race, 1945-1964 (Novato, CA.: Presidio Press, 1993), pp. 150-154; Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, ed. Strobe Talbot, trans. Strobe Talbot (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), pp. 46-48.

13 Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, pp. 194-195.

14 Ibid., p. 195.; Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration (Berkeley: 1980), p. 50, 51.

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The Missile Gap in Hindsight: U.S. and Soviet ICBMs, 1959-1965

U.S. SOVIETS

1959 6 0

1960 34 4

1961 44-47 4

1962 344 100

1965 880 ICBMs 464 SLBMs

~170 ICBMs

The fact that a missile gap never materialized does not mean that fearing a

possible missile gap was a misperception. There were three main possibilities: 1) the

U.S. feared a missile gap that posed an unavoidable danger; 2) the U.S. feared a

missile gap that posed a possible dangera preventable danger; or 3) the U.S. feared a

possible missile gap that posed no real danger. Of these possibilities, only the third

represents the situation in which there would have been a misperception at the time if it

was true. If a possible missile gap posed a possible danger (a deterrence gap), even

though a missile gap never materialized, it still would have been appropriate to fear a

possible missile gap.

As it turned out, many argued the missile gap was inevitable, and posed an

unavoidable danger. As late as 1961, Henry Kissinger in The Necessity for Choice

argued this when he wrote: The missile gap in the period 1961-1965 is now

unavoidable and the vulnerability of our retaliatory force will create major

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opportunities for Soviet nuclear blackmaileven to the extent of threatening direct

attacks on the United States.15 With hindsight, we know this turned out not to be true

a missile gap was not unavoidable because it never happened. In fact a missile gap

in reverse happened as the U.S. quickly took a commanding lead in the missile race. So

to argue it was unavoidable was a misperception.

Many advocates of the missile gap hypothesis argued that it posed a serious

danger, but the danger was preventable. These critics argued that President Eisenhower

was not acting to prevent a possible dangerous missile gap. In response, President

Eisenhower argued that any gap or possible lag of U.S. missile production behind the

Soviets posed no danger. President Eisenhower argued U.S. retaliation would remain

certain (U.S. forces were too numerous and dispersed for the Soviets ever to launch a

coordinated attack that would eliminate them all simultaneously), and thus the Soviets

would never have an opportunity to launch a disarming first strike. President Eisenhower

argued that if the Soviets launched a first strike it would be suicide for them, thus they

would remain deterred from launching a first strike. President Eisenhower said about

Sputnik, As far as the satellite itself is concerned that does not raise my apprehensions,

not one iota.16

These opposing arguments lead to the question of was it reasonable to fear the

missile gap? Did a possible missile gap ever pose any real danger? If a missile gap

did pose a real danger--a possible deterrence gap--then to fear a missile gap was not

a misperception. But if there was no real possibility of a deterrence gap, then fearing a

15 Henry A. Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice: Prospects of American Foreign Policy (New York:

Harper & Brothers, 1961) pp. 26, 39; Bundy, Danger and Survival, p. 348. Also famously, at an earlier time, making similar arguments of how it would be very difficult to avoid a dangerous missile gap period was Albert Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," Foreign Affairs 37 (1959). 16 Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, p.6.

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missile gap was a misperception. Finally, it is also possible that it was reasonable to

fear a possibly dangerous missile gap early in the missile gap period (1957-1961), but at

some point it became unreasonable to fear a dangerous missile gap.

In the following section I will briefly argue that there never was a real danger of a

deterrence gap, so to fear a missile gap was a misperception. However, there was great

uncertainty about Soviet capabilities at the end of 1957 and early 1958, so it was most

reasonable to fear a possible missile gap in that period. It became much less reasonable

to argue for a dangerous missile gap by the end of 1958. It then became highly

unreasonable to fear a missile gap in early 1960 as U.S. intelligence increased about

Soviet capabilities, U.S. missiles came on-lineincluding invulnerable Polaris

submarinesand other U.S. forces became less vulnerable as they dispersed to more

bases and approximately one-third of some 600 SAC bombers were on 15 minute runway

alert.

Insufficient Information and Uncertainty in the Missile Gap Period

The fear of a missile gap was characterized by two different phases; concerns

over uncertainty about Soviet capabilities differed between the early period and the late

period of the missile gap. In the early period, shortly after the launch of Sputnik until

mid-1958, the intelligence community, like the nation at large, believed that the Soviets

possibly had a major lead over the U.S. in missile technology. This led to concerns about

how soon? and how fast? the Soviets could deploy ICBMs. With little hard

evidence to work with, the estimates of what the Soviets could possibly do were ominous;

there was widespread fear that the Soviets could obtain a substantial ICBM capability

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before the United States was able to build an ICBM capability, and that the United States

vast bomber capability would be highly vulnerable to the new Soviet missiles. By mid-

1958, and increasingly thereafter, better intelligence led to a further and further

downgrading of these early estimates. In the second phase of the missile gap period,

fears were no longer centered on the Soviets having an overwhelming number of missiles

before the U.S. could deploy missiles, but rather fears centered on the Soviets being able

to deploy more highly capable missiles while the U.S. might have inadequate warning

systems to detect a missile launch.

The chart below shows a sample of the CIAs official National Intelligence

Estimates (NIEs) between 1957 and 1960. This chart also shows the figures widely

reported in the press in 1958, probably leaked by the Air Force because they match Air

Force projections. The projections made by the Air Force were thought by the rest of the

intelligence community to be too high (even ridiculous). Finally, for perspective, this

chart shows projections from 1958 of what the U.S. planned to produce in the future, and

shows what the U.S. actually produced. The concern of a missile gap centered on the

fact that the U.S. was planning to produce fewer missiles than what was estimated the

Soviets could possibly produce.

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Table 6. Projections of a Missile Gap17

CIA

Jan. 1958 AF

Press 1958

CIA Dec. 1958

CIA- Feb. 1960 U.S. Plans U. S. Actual

mid-1959 100 100 0 0 0 6

mid-1960 500 500 100 35 30 34

1961 --- 1,000 --- --- 70 44-47

1962 --- 1,500 500 ~200 130 344

1963 --- 2,000 1,000-1,500 350-450 130 631

By the end of 1958, two important things had happened. First, it became more

and more clear that the Soviets were not pursuing a crash programit was decided

they were pursuing an orderly program instead. The most important underlying

evidence for this finding was that there was no firm evidence of any significant

deployments of missiles.18 It was believed that if the Soviets were pursuing a crash

program they would need to be doing construction of launch padsconstruction of some

typeand they found no evidence for this (U-2 overflights were the main source of this

17 Office of the Historian, Headquarters, Strategic Air Command, 21 March 1976, Development of Strategic Air Command, 1946-1976; CIA. "Intelligence Aspects of the "Missile Gap"," 1968; Intentions and Capabilities: Estimates on Soviet Strategic Forces, 1950-1983. Edited by Donald P. Steury. (Washington D.C.: History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1996); Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration , (Berkeley, 1980); Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap.

18 No deployments were firmly detected, nor were any suspected deployment sites even thought probable or likely, beyond the deployments at testing sites. As it turned out, there were no deployments beyond the test sitesso the intelligence community did not fail to detect any actual deployments. See Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 240.

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information).19 Second, Soviet testing of ICBMs had stopped after April 1958 after only

six tests. Soviet testing of ICBMs did not resume for almost a year. This halting of

testing appeared to rule out a crash program that would require a lot of testing, and

most estimators interpreted the hiatus to mean that the Soviets were having difficulties

with their program. This hard evidence allowed the CIA to postpone deployment dates

and reduce production rates considerably with confidence.

In addition to figuring out more about the Soviet program in 1958, the U.S.

prepared to be better able to counter a possible early Soviet missile capability. As stated

above, President Eisenhower thought the U.S. deterrence was adequate for one simple

reasonthere were too many U.S. targets for the Soviets to successfully hit

simultaneously. To make sure U.S. retaliatory capability remained unquestionable,

President Eisenhower agreed to provide funds for more air bases to further disperse SAC

bombers, to increase the alert status of the bombers so that 33% of SAC bombers would

be on 15 minute alert by 1960, and he agreed to fund plans for implementing airborne

alert should it be required.

Was President Eisenhowers planning sufficient? A brief discussion of what the

threat was and what was required of the Soviets to achieve a disarming first strike will

allow the reader to better judge the situation during this period. At this time, the threat

was posed by the Soviet ICBM under development, the SS-6 missile, which was

estimated to have a reliability of 40%-60% and an accuracy of a CEP of 5 nautical

19 There were concerns that the Soviets could be disguising their deployments, but across time the test range data showed their first generation missiles were large and unwieldy so they would probably need to be deployed near the Soviet rail network, which had been significantly studied by the U-2 program and no deployments had been detected. CIA. "Intelligence Aspects of the "Missile Gap"," pp.17-25.

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miles.20 This meant that about half of the Soviet missiles would reliably take-off, fly

toward their target, and then successfully detonate once they arrived, and half of those

would land within five nautical miles of the target. This made estimators predict that the

Soviets would need at least four of these missiles to hit a military target (such as a SAC

base) to be on average certain of getting one missile within five nautical miles of the

target. However, since planners could not be certain that one out of every four missiles

would actually make it to each target (you could have four successes at one target, and

zero successes at another), U.S. estimators agreed Soviet planners would probably want

four to six missiles minimum per military target at this time.21

For a missile gap to be dangerous, it was argued that the Soviets would use SS-

6 missiles to successfully execute a disarming first strike. For the Soviets to achieve

this, four factors had to obtain simultaneously: 1) the Soviets had to execute a perfectly

coordinated attack against all U.S. forces simultaneously; 2) the Soviets had to provide

no more than tactical warning (15 minutes) of this attack to the U.S.; 3) the U.S. had to

20 A CEP is a circular error probable or the radius of the circle in which half of the missiles will land. These estimates of accuracy and reliability were consistent in this early period, see for example NIE 11-5-58 Soviet Capabilities in Guided Missiles and Space Vehicles in Intentions and Capabilities: Estimates on Soviet Strategic Forces, 1950-1983, ed. Donald P. Steury (Washington D.C.: History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1996), p. 67. In 1959 and 1960 the NIEs correctly forecast a smaller, follow-on ICBM having less bulk and greater flexibility than the first-generation system, but they failed to draw any particular implications about force programming. In other words, if they were right, and the Soviets were working on a second generation missile the way the U.S. was, because it was smarter to build better, cheaper missiles, instead of expensive, unreliable first generation missiles, then the CIA should have maintained that it was likely to take the Soviets longer to deploy these missilesthis would have eliminated a possible missile gap. CIA, "Intelligence Aspects of the "Missile Gap"," p.19.

21To be clear, U.S. vulnerability would be a problem when the Soviets could defeat the U.S. by launching a successful strikea disarming first strikeagainst U.S. retaliatory forces. Inaccurate and unreliable missiles are perfectly fine as a retaliatory force because the goal in retaliation would be to hit cities (soft targetsbig, easy to sufficiently hit) and the possibility of retaliation has a deterrent effect, even if less reliable. But it is difficult to launch a disarming first strike with inaccurate and unreliable missiles because a planner would want to be sure to eliminate the retaliatory capability. The first generation, liquid fueled, relatively inaccurate and unreliable missiles were believed by many to be highly questionable for a first-strike capability.

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have zero or very few planes on airborne alert; and 4) the Soviets had to be willing to

accept a minimum of 10-20 million dead in their own country, including most of their

major cities leveled by megaton or multi-megaton warheads. 22 Each of these factors

separately were formidable, all four had to happen at the same time for a first strike to be

successfully achieved. I will discuss each factor in turn.

If the Soviets failed to launch a perfectly coordinated attack then a large portion

of SAC bombers or other U.S. forces would escape destruction and be able to retaliate

against the Soviet Union--the Soviet Union would fail to disarm the U.S. How difficult

would it be to launch a perfectly coordinated attack? In 1957 the U.S. had more than

2,000 dispersed delivery vehicles capable of delivering a nuclear device.23 Some of these

vehicles were 1, 655 SAC long and medium-range bombers on 32 bases in the U.S. and

27 overseas bases. Hundreds of these vehicles were aircraft loaded with nuclear weapons

on 12-14 aircraft carriers at sea. The U.S. stockpile of 1957 included 5,420 nuclear

weapons, equaling 16, 300MT, 24 which meant that many of the weapons were 3-4MT

weapons.25 Each bomber that escaped the disarming first strike would have a chance of

eliminating a Soviet city with a 3-4 MT bomb. At the time, it was estimated that there

22 An example of other elites who recognized that U.S. retaliatory capability was sound at the time and

for the foreseeable future see the report put out by non-partisan experts at the end of 1959. The Johns Hopkins Report, 1959 argued that while it was possible that the Soviets could achieve a comprehensive missile capability first, and that this would make manned bombers highly vulnerable to surprise attack, they concluded that the unprecedented level of destruction an aggressor must expect to suffer in a thermonuclear exchange was still the principal stabilizing factor in the strategic equation and was likely to remain so for the decade ahead. The Johns Hopkins Report, 1959, p. 57 as cited in Bottome, The Missile Gap, p. 114. 23 Ibid., p. 37. 24 MT=megaton. One megaton is the equivalent of one million tons of TNT. 25 Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, p. 22.

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were fewer than 200 Soviet cities with a population over 50,000 people, and only a

handful of these had a population in the millions.26

Ten bombers could potentially kill 10-20 million people or more, but they would

have to get through Soviet air defenses, which it was estimated could eliminate

approximately 50% of attacking U.S. bombers.27 Most often it was argued that the most

perfectly coordinated attack could not eliminate more than 95% of SAC bombers,

which would leave approximately 82 bombers. To achieve this kind of success the

Soviets had to hit all of the bases and aircraft carriers simultaneously some as close as

500 miles and some as distant as 5,000 milesin order to provide no additional warning

to unhit bases by attacking some earlier. The Soviets needed to do this with first-

generation liquid-fueled rockets that were dangerous to handle and took at least 15

minutes to load with fuel; these factors would severely complicate any countdown

procedure.

Achieving a perfectly coordinated attack might be technically possible, but it

had to happen secretly, without the U.S. having any more than tactical warning. SAC

General Curtis LeMay famously dismissed the possibility of the U.S. ever having only

26 Bottome, The Missile Gap, p. 57. 27 It was suggested in the press at the time that ten bombers getting through would be sufficient, and Wohlstetter acknowledges that it might be sufficient, but he credits Soviet air defenses as perhaps good enough to possibly eliminate all of U.S. bombers retaliating. He does basically assume (vaguely) that the U.S. would be able to retaliate enough to kill 10-20 million Soviets, but this could well be an acceptable number of casualties since it would be less than what the Soviets suffered in World War II. Wohlstetter was positing this worst-case analysis in 1959 for a future time when the U.S. would have Polaris missiles and ICBMs, but he largely dismissed these forces relative to SAC because these missiles would need penetration aids and they had smaller payloads than SAC bombers so would not be as effective if the Soviets built shelters. What is odd about this is there was no indication that the Soviets would have missile defenses (making penetration aids necessary) or extensive shelters, yet his argument of a delicate balance of terrorwhere it is difficult to maintain deterrence--hinges on the Soviets acquiring these capabilities to prevent significant retaliation. Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," esp. pp. 214, 220-221.

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tactical warning when it came to a bomber attack.28 He claimed the U.S. secretly had

spy planes flying over the Soviet Union 24 hours a day collecting intelligence

information, mostly communications intelligence from Soviet military radio

transmissions, and that he would know well in advance--at least 6 hours, enough time for

strategic warning-- if the Soviets were preparing to attack. It was highly likely these

same intelligence sources might notice preparations for a missile attack. It would be

easier for the Soviets to secretly coordinate a missile attack than a bomber attack, because

there would be no chance of seeing the Soviets amassing their planes. However, there

would need to be a flurry of activity to generally prepare the missiles simultaneously, to

coordinate the fueling of the missiles, and there would most likely need to be some

communications about a countdown to launch the missiles so that they were all perfectly

coordinated.

If the Soviets failed to achieve total surprise, by some estimates, every minute of

warning could allow forty more bombers to get off the ground- five minutes of warning

could mean 200 more SAC bombers in the air.29 Other studies argued that SAC needed

hours to get off the ground, but that was early in this period, and this situation was being

addressed before Sputnik because fears of a bomber gap had led to studies about SAC

vulnerability. Eisenhower further increased funding for better ground alert after Sputnik,

28 LeMay argued that when he saw the Soviets amassing their planes for an attack, he would launch a

preemptive attack, even if it were not national policy. He said: Its my policy. Thats what Im going to do. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, pp. 133-134.

29 This estimate is from a study presented to Eisenhower March 17, 1959 by Presidential science adviser James Killian and his aid, Brockway McMillan. Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, p. 55. Another study claimed that five minutes constituted the minimum that could be considered effective warning so that a substantial number of strike aircraft could take off and clear the blast area. See Weapons System Evaluation Group (WSEG) Report no. 35 of March 20, 1959, Defense against Sea-launched Missile Attack, Ibid., pp. 50-51.

19

as discussed above, so that by 1960, 33% of the SAC force was on 15 minute runway

alert.

Like Curtis LeMay, President Eisenhower also dismissed the possibility of having

only tactical warning, possibly because he had faith in U.S. intelligence capabilities, but

also because he believed wars do not start with a bolt from the blue. He believed wars

arise out of crisestimes of extremely high tensionand presumably at these times the

U.S. would put bombers on airborne alert to maintain an invulnerable retaliatory force.30

It could be argued that the Soviets could disguise an attack in a massive military exercise,

but it should be recognized that if the Soviets ever appeared to the U.S. to be preparing a

first-strike, they severely risked a pre-emptive strike. Thus they always had to be careful

not to provoke the U.S. by appearing ready to launch.

Worst-case analyses that assumed the Soviets could launch a perfectly

coordinated attack, without providing any warning to the U.S., also had to assume that

the U.S. had not placed any significant portion of its SAC force on airborne alert.

Airborne alert was the trump card the U.S. held against any rapid deployment of Soviet

missiles before the U.S. was able to build up its own missile force. The possibility of

putting SAC on airborne alert made the need for first-generation missiles as a stopgap

before Polaris and Minuteman were ready a non- issue militarilythey were not needed.31

SAC could be made invulnerable, at great expense, but definitely invulnerable if the

situation warranted it. Immediate airborne alert was proposed by Air Force Generals

Power and Thomas D. White when they testified before Congress in the spring of 1960

30 Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, p. 151. 31 Dick, "The Strategic Arms Race, 1957-1961: Who Opened the Missile Gap?," p. 1106.

20

and at that time they estimated it would cost $700 million for the first year and $1 billion

for each year after that.32 The costs were high, but certainly manageable if necessary.

President Eisenhower planned for implementing airborne alert, but resisted

actually implementing it not only because of high costs, but also because it increased the

risk of accidental war. American bombers would be fully loaded and constantly flying

toward the Soviet Union and then turning around and coming back. This would

automatically increase tensions with the Soviets. Most importantly, there was no need to

implement airborne alert at least until the Soviets had begun to deploy large numbers of

missiles. By 1960, it was estimated that the lead-time for Soviet deployment of a missile

would be at least twelve months from when the Soviets began constructing a launch pad,

until they finished installing a missile and training a crew to operate the missile.33 This

lead-time gave the U.S. time to observe deployment before the missiles would be

operational. As long as the U.S. had not observed any significant deployments there was

no need to implement airborne alert.

In addition to launching a perfectly coordinated attack, while providing no

warning, and counting on the U.S. to not implement an airborne alert, the Soviets had

also to be willing to accept 10 20 million casualties at a minimum after they had

launched a disarming first strike. This level of casualties represented their best-case

scenario. Soviet leaders could not risk giving warning to the U.S. so they could not

shelter their people or evacuate their cities before they launched their attack.

32 Bottome, The Missile Gap, pp. 128-129; Dick, "The Strategic Arms Race, 1957-1961: Who Opened

the Missile Gap?," p. 1104. 33 Ibid., p. 1105.

21

According to one report issued in 1959 that analyzed SAC vulnerability in 1962,

if the Soviets built what the NIEs projected they could possibly build by 1962, and under

the most disadvantageous circumstances where SAC had no warning, it was projected to

be possible that less than 5% of SACs 1,710 bombers might survive a surprise Soviet

attack, and of these 71 bombers it was estimated that only 50% would be able to

penetrate Soviet air defenses, which meant that only 35 SAC bombers might retaliate

against the Soviet Union. 34 Each SAC bomber carried more explosive power than used

during all of World War II. That meant that the Soviets, when carrying out this surprise

attack, had to be willing, at an absolute minimum, to withstand the rough equivalent of 35

World War IIs on their homeland. That was the best they could hope for. This report

concentrated on SAC vulnerability and set aside the complications and possible further

destruction that might be caused by the 60 U.S. intermediate range ballistic missiles

(IRBMs) that were operational in Europe after June of 1959 (with 45 more in Italy and

Turkey by 1961), the hundreds of nuclear-armed aircraft on U.S. aircraft carriers, the

invulnerable Polaris missiles that would be deployed on submarines (32 in 1960, 80 in

1961, 144 in 1962), and the U.S. based ICBMs that would be deployed (6 in 1959, 12 in

1960, 63 in 1961, 224 in 1962).35

34 Citing Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG) Staff Study no.77, and explaining how dire the

conditions appeared for SAC, see Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, pp. 56-57. For a U.S. IRBM deployment, see Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, p.193. For U.S. ICBM and SLBM deployments and IRBM numbers, see Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration, pp. 50-51, 90.

35 Why set these aside? Roman explains: Little comfort could be gained from the WSEGs exclusion of U.S. ICBM and SLBM forces since the bomber force would still be by far the largest, most accurate, and destructive leg of the strategic nuclear triad in 1962. -a weak reason when these other forces would certainly complicate the Soviets perfectly coordinated attack, if not be a sizable deterrent on their own. See Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, p. 57.

22

These daunting factors of achieving a perfectly coordinated attack, with no

more than tactical warning, no U.S. planes on airborne alert and accepting millions of

casualtieswould face any Soviet planner contemplating launching a first strike. During

this period, as projections of Soviet forces were downgraded, and U.S. capabilities were

better understood, fears of a possible missile gap should have completely subsided.

However, there was a second phase of the missile gapthe renewed missile

gap, especially in the spring of 1960.36 The downgrading of the estimates of Soviet missile

production afforded little comfort to some because these critics argued that the U.S. could

not be certain about the specific capabilities of Soviet missiles. Could the Soviets be

developing better missile technology, perhaps making more accurate and reliable first-

generation missiles? There was no indication from hard evidence that this was true

(because it was not), but this possibility led to the consideration that the Soviets might not

need large numbers of missiles to achieve a disarming first strike at an early date before the

U.S. had deployed many missiles. Increased accuracy and reliabilty, combined with

increased concerns about not having adequate warning time in the face of a Soviet missile

attack, led some to argue that the U.S. still faced a problem of serious vulnerability in the

near future. Was this a reasonable argument?

Two observations can readily be made about those who put forth dire predictions in

this second phase: 1) they exaggerated possible Soviet deployments of missiles, and 2) they

underrated U.S. deployments of missiles and other forces beyond SAC. If you examine the

chart above, you will notice that the Soviets are projected as having 35 ICBMs in 1960,

36 Peter Roman discusses this second phase and finds the uncertainty of the period to be a plausible explanation for the fears at the time. I find that all leaders arguing for a dangerous missile gap in this period to be exaggerating projections of Soviet capabilities while understating US capabilities. See Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, chapter 2.

23

while the US was planning on having 30 missiles and actually built 34 (including 16 Polaris

SLBMs). The CIA then projects that the Soviets could possibly achieve approximately 200

ICBMs by 1962, while the US had programmed 130 missiles in 1958, but had since

accelerated those programs and actually achieved 344 by 1962. This was not perfectly clear

in early 1960, but U.S. forces were going to be well over 130 unless there were unforeseen

delays, so there is no missile gap there. Recall also that if there were unforeseen delays the

U.S. could always quickly implement airborne alertso where is the danger?

The danger is only found in exaggerated worst-case scenarios such as this

famous one presented by the Commanding Officer of the Strategic Air Command,

General Thomas S. Power, in a speech he gave to the Economic Club of New York on

January 19, 1960. This speech got a lot of publicity at the time, and was investigated by

the Congress in Joint Hearings in the spring of 1960. General Power stated:

[I]t would take an average of three missiles in their current state of development, to give an aggressor a mathematical probability of 95 percent that he can destroy one given soft target some 5,000 miles away. This means that, with only some 300 ballistic missiles, the Soviets could virtually wipe out our entire nuclear strike capability within a span of thirty minutes.37

37 "Missiles, Space and other major Defense Matters," in Committee on Armed Services, Preparedness

Investigating Subcommittee in conjunction with the Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, Joint Hearings, U.S. Congress, Senate (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960), p. 4; Bottome, The Missile Gap: A Study of the Formulation of Military and Political Policy, pp. 118-119. While General Power put forth this worst-case scenario succinctly, and it got a lot of publicity, similar worst-case scenarios had been put forward in many places. One very specific one from a year earlier is useful to compare. It was from Life magazine and it predicted the period of maximum vulnerability to be 1961-1963. It argued:

The current U.S. defense posture takes too long to react. The present SAC system is premised on the assumption that the United States will have six to eight hours of warning time of a Soviet attack, which would be the case if the Soviets used only bombers.

In that time, 700 or so SAC bombers could get off the ground, and given the state of Soviet air defenses, 350-400 B-52s and B-47s would reach their targets. Additionally, the Navys 150 or so planes would be launched, but only about half would reach their targets on the edge of the Soviet Union and satellite areas. Given this state of readiness, SAC bases in forward deployment must be disregarded because they can already be hit with Soviet IRBMs.

24

Power includes in his analysis that the Soviets could have already developed (as of 1960)

higher capability weapons than those the NIE overall at the time credited the Soviets with

having, but the NIE allowed the Soviets could possibly have these capabilities in the next

few years (by 1963). Powers analysis relied on an Air Force study, but even granting his

higher estimates of Soviet capabilities, he knew the Soviets did not have any known missiles

at the time, and yet was projecting they could have 300 before the U.S. would have a

significant capability. Further, like most worst-case analyses of the time, Power focused

only on SAC vulnerability, setting aside the option of airborne alert, and arguing as if SAC

made up the entire U.S. retaliatory capability. SAC was the largest part of the U.S.

retaliatory force, but aircraft on U.S. carriers, IRBMs after mid-1959, small numbers of

ICBMs starting in 1959, and Polaris missiles after September 1960 had to greatly

complicate any Soviet plans of a disarming first strike. Some observers quickly dismissed

the IRBMs and carriers because they were possibly vulnerable, but this does not allow for

the fact that they would have to be included in the perfectly coordinated attack. Arranging

to eliminate 60 IRBMs and finding and attacking 12-14 moving carriers without giving

more warning to the U.S. would be a difficult proposition--greatly complicating an attack.

Further, completely dismissing 32 to 80 invulnerable Polaris missiles on the basis that it is

In 1960, the Soviets will also have 100 ICBMs, and a year later they will have 500 ICBMs,

more than enough to take out the 43 SAC bases in the United States, which would have at best fifteen minutes of warning. Warning time at this point cannot be extended because true reconnaissance satellites cannot be in orbit until at least 1964. Airborne alert, while a possibility, has not been budgeted in 1959 by Eisenhower (despite a plan from Gen. Thomas Power), and under the most favorable circumstances, it would be difficult to keep more than 100 bombers on air alert, meaning that only about 50 bombers would reach their targets.

See Shepley, "Life-And-Death Debate Over Missile Program" . Notice that in this scenario only 50

SAC bombers reach their target, but also 75 Navy planes reach their target on the edge of the Soviet Union if they want to be able to return to their carrier. There is no mention of the intermediate range missiles (IRBMS)94 of them in 1960that the US had deployed, or of the planned US ICBMs.

25

only a small force defies reality. By one conservative calculation of U.S. destructive

capabilities, 80 Polaris missiles would kill approximately 8 million peoplethis would not

be an easily dismissed force by Soviet planners.38

President Eisenhower was right throughout the entire period of the missile gap

U.S. deterrence was strong and the U.S. never possibly faced danger from a deterrence

gap. However, grave uncertainties about Soviet capabilities and widespread lack of

understanding about U.S. capabilities make it understandable that the U.S. feared a

missile gap briefly after the shock of Sputnik. After Soviet capabilities were better

understood and downgraded, and U.S. preparations were reviewed and increased, it took

implausible exaggerations of worst-case scenarios to sustain the myth of a missile gap.

Intentional Exaggerations and Senator Stuart Symington

Senator Stuart Symington was the most vocal of President Eisenhowers critics,

the one who had special clout because he had expertise and access to the most

information (from the Air Force and from the CIA on orders from President Eisenhower),

and he was the one who made the most outrageous claims. Symington promoted the

missile gap thesis with hyperbole from the beginning of this era and constantly

throughout. Shortly after Sputnik he characterized the Soviet satellite as proof of

growing Communist superiority in the all- important missile field.39 He persisted in

arguing that it was a fact that the U.S. was behind despite the fact that when he was

questioning Secretary of Defense McElroy during Congressional hearings in April 1958

38 Wohlstetter calculates it would take five half-megaton warheads, Polaris or Minuteman missiles, to destroy half the population of a city of 900,000. Of course if instead of concentrating five on one city, one placed 3 per city, or hit more heavily populated cities, destruction would be greater. See Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," p. 221.

39 Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, p. xv.

26

about the missile strength of the United States compared to the Soviets, McElroy replied,

We have no positive evidence that they [Russia] are ahead of us in long-range missiles.

We are conducting ourselves on the assumption that they are, but our intelligence gives

us no positive evidence that they are.40 The intelligence community was clear on this

it was possible the Soviets were ahead, but there was no evidence to support the claim

that they were ahead.

Senator Symington had clout when argued about military matters with the

administration because he had formerly been the Secretary of the Air Force under

Truman. President Eisenhower attempted to allay some of Symingtons concerns by

giving him special briefings by intelligence officials. In July 1958, Allen Dulles allowed

Symington to speak with members of the CIA's Board of National Estimates. He was the

first legislator to do so, yet this special briefing did not allay Symingtons doubtshe

was not satisfied.41 Symington had another special briefing with Dulles on August 6,

1958. Symington had prepared his own estimates in order to contest the CIA estimates.

Symingtons primary source of information was Thomas Lanphier, who had been

Symingtons aide when he had been Secretary of the Air Force under Truman. Lanphier

apparently had close ties with Air Force intelligence. However, Lanphier was also Vice-

President of Convair Corporation, the aerospace company that was building the Atlas

missile. Convair stood to gain or lose dramatically according to any alteration in the

projection of Soviet missiles. The more acute the threat, the more quickly the U.S.

needed to deploy ICBMs, specifically the Atlas because it was the missile most ready for

deployment. However, any downgrade in the threat meant not only that fewer Atlas

40 Bottome, The Missile Gap, p. 79. 41 Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, p. 83.

27

missiles might be deployed, but also possibly that the Atlas might be cancelled. This

would be true because the U.S., if given more time, would rationally choose to deploy the

far superior second-generation Minuteman missiles instead of the Atlas. Minuteman

missiles were not produced by Convair.42 If Symington had been concerned about the

accuracy of his estimates, he could have considered the vested interests of his sources and

attempted to evaluate the information they provided him, rather than accepting their

information and flatly rejecting any other sources of information.

At the August 6, 1958 meeting, Dulles told Symington that in total only six ICBM

tests had been conducted by the Soviets and that none had been conducted since May

when Sputnik III was launched. With so few tests, the CIA estimates predicted that the

Soviet Union would have the capability to deploy 500 ICBMs by 1962 or maybe even

1961. Lanphier, who was accompanying Symington, contested the CIAs claim of only

six tests and said that the Soviets had actually conducted somewhere in the area of fifty-

seven to eighty ICBM tests and thus were capable of deploying far more missiles far

sooner than the CIA predicted. Lanphier would not reveal his sources, claiming they were

still classified (as if Dulles did not have clearance!), yet they were "sufficiently different"

and "much more alarming." Dulles responded by saying that this was merely intelligence

gossip and that Major General Walsh, the head of Air Force intelligence, was unable to

convince the CIA to use the Air Force estimates and, consequently, he was using

Symington in a bureaucratic maneuver.43 Symington rejected Dulles arguments and

decided to take his concerns directly to President Eisenhower.

42 Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, p. 129. 43 Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, p. 179; Licklider, "The Missile Gap Controversy," p. 605.

28

On August 29, 1958, Symington met with Eisenhower. He gave Eisenhower a

letter that detailed his specific concerns, primarily his disagreement with the CIA claims

that there had only been six ICBM tests. Symingtons central claim used the following

logic: How can the Soviets be planning five hundred ICBMs after only six tests when in

comparison, the United States is planning one hundred tests for just 64 Atlas missiles?

He argued that the contention that the Soviets would put such a complex weapon into

production with so few tests did not make sense. Of course the Soviets would want to

prove the missiles performance thoroughly before putting it into production. Therefore,

the CIA must have "heavily underrated Soviet missile development to date, as well as

planned capabilities. In other words, Symington was arguing, the U.S. must have missed

testsintelligence must be underestimating Soviet development; he did not believe the

estimates for deployment could be too high. In fact, he argued, they must be too low!

Furthermore, Symington was concerned that regardless of which estimates were

used the CIAs lower estimates or his higher estimates for production- the Soviets

would still have more ICBMs than the 130 that the U.S. was planning to deploy by 1962,

leaving the country vulnerable to Soviet aggression. Eisenhower denied all of

Symington's claims, although he did admit that the U.S. was behind the Soviets in terms

of missile production but only because the U.S. was waiting for smaller H-bomb

warheads before continuing.44 For Eisenhower, the possibility of fewer missiles did not

mean a deterrence gap- U.S. retaliatory capability was assured even if the U.S. did not

match the Soviets missile- for-missile.

44 Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, p. 179.

29

Dulles took Symingtons criticisms under review and in October asked the CIA's

Guided Missile Intelligence Committee to restudy the Soviet missile program looking for

the following: 1) Were any Soviet missile tests missed? 2) Is it possible that the Soviets

had fooled the CIA with concealed tests? 3) How many tests would the Soviets need to

deploy 500 or so ICBMs by 1961-1962 and 4) did the apparent lack of tests indicate

"serious difficulty or delay in their missile program?45

In early December 1958 the CIA revised the NIE to resolve the conflict between

the number of projected Soviet ICBMs and the actual number of tests. They resolved the

conflict by revising the projected number of Soviet ICBMs down, predicting only 100

ICBMs in 1960 (one-fifth of the June NIE), three hundred by 1961 (seven hundred less

than the June NIE), five hundred for 1962 (one-third of the June NIE) and anywhere

between one thousand and fifteen hundred for 1963 (down from 2,000 in the June NIE).

The CIA Guided Missile Intelligence Committee concluded that the CIA had not missed

any tests and that the Russians were experiencing unknown difficulties.46

On December 16 1958, Dulles briefed Symington on the December NIE.

Lanphier was asked to leave first. Dulles told Symington that there had still only been six

successful ICBM tests, with two failures in July and, therefore, the CIA was downgrading

its estimates. There was no evidence of Soviet ICBM production, nor was there any

ICBM base construction. Symington pointed out that the CIA was suggesting that the

45 Ibid., p. 180-1; Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, p. 218. 46 Prados, The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelligence Analysis and Soviet Strategic Forces, p. 83;

Freedman has an excellent discussion of how the possible production rate of 500 missiles a year was unsupportable, and yet this was the real source of the missile gap controversy. If the USIB had recognized that such an all-out commitment would be extremely difficult if not impossible bureaucratically in the USSR (as the British argued), and that it would have been observable by the Wes t, then the inflated claims that the Soviets were going to have a massive missile capability overnight could have been curbed. See Freedman, U.S. Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat , pp. 74-80.

30

Soviets had been way ahead of us but were slackening up in the ICBM race. An Air

Force intelligence officer, General Walsh, who was present, pointed out that the Soviets

might have "gone back to the drawing board to fix something up." After Lanphier was

permitted to return, he admitted that his information about Soviet testing was "floating

around the intelligence hierarchy" and that he had inflated the numbers to test the CIA.

Symington argued that even accepting the new estimate of 500 Soviet missiles in 1962,

the Russians would need to conduct many more tests. It didnt make sense, Symington

argued, to estimate so much production in a short time with so little testing.47

Even though Symington was thoroughly briefed on the available intelligence and

privately concluded there was no support for predicting high production rates, Symington

continued to accuse the CIA of revising the numbers to please the President's budget

constraints. He also continued to voice his concern that the numbers of tests and

estimated production did not logically relate to each other. Symington went public with

his disagreements, and in February 1959 he claimed that the downward revision of the

latest NIE was an attempt to lull the American people into a state of complacency not

justified by the facts.48 Also in February of 1959 he called for immediate airborne alert

for SAC bombers and predicted that the Soviet Union would have a four-to-one missile

advantage within the next several years.49

In March 1959 during the joint hearings, Symington made his most dire

prediction: Now I want to make this prediction to you: In three years the Russians will

47 Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, p. 182. 48 Bottome, The Missile Gap, p. 97. 49 Ibid., p. 92.

31

prove to us that they have 3,000 ICBMs. Let that be on the record.50 He made this

prediction after being briefed on the facts that the Soviets had conducted only six tests,

after seeing that the intelligence community had no evidence of production or

deployment, and after his own source of information (from Convair Corporation)

admitted he had inflated his claims to test the CIA. Symington continued to exaggerate

the threat by making unwarranted claims and unfounded predictions throughout the

period. As mentioned above, Senator Symington was central to purveying the myth of

the missile gap because other Senators, most notably Senator Kennedy, got their

information from him.

Conclusions

The national misperception of a dangerous missile gap was not caused by

insufficient information or by blowback or by the strategic culture of the Cold War.

Instead, this important national misperception was caused by intentional elite

exaggerations of the threat at the timeby lying about the threat in order to gain power

(Democratic Senators who were Presidential hopefuls)51 or to increase budgets (Air Force

and the CIA)52. It appears that experts who understood the threat very well were able to

successfully exaggerate the threat to the public (and to other elites) because they

50 Ibid., p. 97.

51 I did not mean to suggest above that all of the blame can be placed on Senator Symington. The other Senators knew Symington, his personality and his likely sources of information, and their speeches betray sophisticated understandings of the strategic balance, so they each participated knowingly in exaggerating the threat. It is likely that Senator Kennedy, for example, was truly more interested in advancing flexible response and did not actually fear a disarming first strike, but he was willing to exploit the fear of a missile gap in order to mobilize the public o maintain U.S. superiority as much as possible. 52 Air Force interests are clear. CIA budgets would also increase if the threat was large and needed to be better understood. A recently released study of the CIA, done by the CIA, argues this pointthat Dulles exaggerated the threat to the Congress to get more money for the CIA from Congress. See John L. Helgerson, Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952-1992. Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1996.

32

controlled the intelligence information that could be used to assess their claims. This

type of important national misperception could possibly be remedied with more openness

about intelligence, and perhaps more important, by increasing support for outside civilian

analysts of the threat. This is not a new observation or an original claim, but old disputes

about the sources of the missile gap can be better assessed in light of more recently

revealed evidence. Further, it appears that this problem has not gone away as in the

current climate it appears that certain leaders hype the missile threat from rogue states

to justify large amounts of urgent money for national missile defense.

33

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