McNamara also took the bolder step of scaling back the Minuteman ICBM program. In his previous three budget memos, he’d wavered between recommending 1,200 to 1,400 missiles by the end of the decade. Now he proposed keeping the total at 1,000. The Chiefs were apoplectic. They’d always distrusted McNamara; now they saw him as a saboteur. LeMay sometimes asked his colleagues, “Would things be much worse if Khrushchev were secretary of defense?” McNamara was touting a “doctrine” based entirely on threatening to launch U.S. nuclear weapons at Soviet citizens and industrial plants, knowing full well
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