“You must tell no one outside this suite what Secretary McNamara has told you,” Yarmolinsky said. If the Chiefs or the allies or Congress knew he felt this way, they would panic, and pressure would build for his dismissal. Neither of them had to spell out the reason for discretion. It was the unquestioned premise of Cold War policy that deterrence required persuading the Soviets that the American president would use nuclear weapons first, in response to aggression against U.S. allies. Once that premise was accepted, the logical corollary became hard to resist: to persuade the Kremlin that he
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