The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

by Daniel Ellsberg

Four missiles in 1960–61 was strategically equivalent to zero, in terms of such an aim. They could have hit Washington and SAC headquarters, but that would neither have disarmed nor paralyzed SAC’s ability to annihilate them in response. The Soviets could hit a city or two, striking first. Suicidally. They had no second-strike missile capability at all against the continental United States. Their four operational missiles, at one fixed site aboveground, were thin-skinned and liquid-fueled, with highly volatile fuel that couldn’t be stored and that would take hours to load. A single U.S. missile warhead, landing several miles away, would destroy all four with near certainty. In 1961, at the high point of the Berlin crisis, in terms of actual survivable missile capability against the United States, the Soviets had no deterrent at all. Khrushchev had been totally bluffing