The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

Schmidt’s speech prompted a series of interagency meetings in the Situation Room in the West Wing of the White House. In the months before the speech, several defense analysts had been pushing for precisely the kind of new weapon that Schmidt was requesting. Most of these analysts were members of the European-American Workshop, a low-key group chaired by Albert Wohlstetter, a charismatic consultant who had written some influential studies in the 1950s at the RAND Corporation. The author of Schmidt’s speech, Walter Stützle, director of the German Defense Ministry’s planning office, was an active member of the workshop. Other members had contacts inside the American defense bureaucracy. By the time the interagency review began, a doctrinal rationale for the new missile had come into being. Brzezinski hadn’t given the issue much thought, but his deputy, David Aaron, who’d held a similar post under Kissinger, was an ardent advocate. The SS-20s, Aaron said at one meeting, were creating a “gap in the escalation spectrum”—an odd phrase that was circulating in NATO circles as a result of the workshop’s influence. The premise behind the concept was that the United States needed to match Soviet deployments at every step along the “escalation ladder,” to invoke another metaphor.