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

by Fred Kaplan

When Robert McNamara was secretary of defense, he and his whiz kids analyzed the ABM systems on the drawing board and found them wanting: the interceptors had failed their tests or, to the extent they seemed to pass them, it was because the tests were rigged. A few years into his tenure, McNamara came to a more profound realization: even if the ABM system worked flawlessly, the Soviets could overwhelm it by building—and launching—a few extra missiles, and they could keep building more offensive missiles, more quickly and cheaply than the U.S. could keep building defensive interceptors. At best, then, ABMs would spawn an offense-defense arms race, which the offense—the Soviets—would win. It was this realization that impelled Nixon and Kissinger to negotiate the ABM Treaty with the Soviet Union. McNamara first proposed limits on defensive as well as offensive arms at a 1967 summit in Glassboro, New Jersey, with Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin. Initially Kosygin was puzzled, finding the notion of limiting defensive weapons as not only absurd but “immoral.” Over time, though, he and others on the Politburo came to grasp McNamara’s logic and, by the time Nixon entered office, consented to pursuing a treaty.