Schlesinger’s Limited Nuclear Options

A massive Soviet ICBM buildup had fatally undercut the nuclear policy of “assured destruction,” and Washington needed options “other than suicide or surrender.” So wrote Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger in a famous Cold War declaration. He reported that DOD was creating “selective and discriminating options” for responding to a limited attack—options lying somewhere between “doing nothing” (surrender) or launching a massive second strike that would plunge the superpowers into general war (suicide).

This change was highly controversial. Dovish critics claimed it made the unthinkable—nuclear war—dangerously thinkable. The consensus today, however, is that Schlesinger actually strengthened deterrence by adding credibility to the US threat of retaliation. Schlesinger hinted at the “limited options” idea in a January 1974 speech, but its full force was driven home in his DOD annual report, in which four lucid sections explained the change.

During the early 1960s, it was stated quite clearly by President Kennedy … that the United States needed alternatives other than suicide or surrender, that it needed options which did not imply immediate escalation to major nuclear war. If anything, the need for options other than suicide or surrender, and other than escalation to all-out nuclear war, is more important for us today … because of the growth of the capabilities possessed by other powers. …

The Soviet Union now has the capability in its missile forces to undertake selective attacks against targets other than cities. This poses for us an obligation, if we are to ensure the credibility of our strategic deterrent, to be certain that we have a comparable capability in our strategic systems and in our targeting doctrine. …

The war plans provide the National Command Authorities—the President and his advisors—with well-thought-out, detailed sets of options. In the past, most of those options—whether the principal targets were cities, industrial facilities, or military installations—have involved relatively massive responses. Rather than massive options, we now want to provide the President with a wider set of much more selective targeting options. Through possession of such a visible capability, we hope to reinforce deterrence by removing the temptation for an adversary to consider any kind of nuclear attack. Therefore, the changes we are making in our strategic planning this year are specifically intended to shore up deterrence across the entire spectrum of risk. …

If, for whatever reason, deterrence should fail, we want to have the planning flexibility to be able to respond selectively to the attack in such a way as to (1) limit the chances of uncontrolled escalation, and (2) hit meaningful targets with a sufficient accuracy-yield combination to destroy only the intended target and to avoid widespread collateral damage. … In order to protect American cities and the cities of our allies, we shall rely into the wartime period upon reserving our “assured destruction” force and persuading, through intrawar deterrence, any potential foe not to attack cities. …

This adjustment in strategic policy does not imply major new strategic weapon systems and expenditures. We are simply ensuring that, in our doctrine, our plans, and our command and control, we have—and are seen to have—the selectivity and flexibility to respond to aggression in an appropriate manner. We do not intend that the Soviet Union should have a wider range of options than we do. …

[The Soviet ICBM buildup could give Moscow] a major one-sided counterforce capability against the United States ICBM force. This is impermissible from our point of view. There must be essential equivalence between the strategic forces of the United States and the USSR. …

President Nixon underlined the drawbacks to sole reliance on assured destruction in 1970, when he asked: “Should a President, in the event of a nuclear attack, be left with the single option of ordering the mass destruction of enemy civilians, in the face of the certainty that it would be followed by the mass slaughter of Americans? Should the concept of assured destruction be narrowly defined, and should it be the only measure of our ability to deter the variety of threats we may face?”…

Since we ourselves find it difficult to believe that we would actually implement the threat of assured destruction in response to a limited attack on military targets that caused relatively few civilian casualties, there can be no certainty that, in a crisis, prospective opponents would be deterred from testing our resolve. …

Today, such a massive retaliation against cities, in response to anything less than an all-out attack on the US and its cities, appears less and less credible. … What we need is a series of measured responses to aggression which bear some relation to the provocation, have prospects of terminating hostilities before general nuclear war breaks out, and leave some possibility for restoring deterrence. It has been this problem of not having sufficient options between massive response and doing nothing, as the Soviets built up their strategic forces, that has prompted the President’s concerns and those of our allies. …

We are determined … to have credible responses at hand for any nuclear contingency that might arise and to maintain the clear ability to prevent any potential enemy from achieving objectives against us that he might consider meaningful. The availability of carefully tailored, preplanned options will contribute to that end. They do not invite nuclear war; they discourage it.