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Gilpatric quote that once implied scepticism about limited nuclear war
in Europe. But, hell, Paul Nitze was writing for years and years about
limited nuclear war in Europe and even has some favorite proposals for how
to use nuclears without the thing getting out of hand. The civilian
echelon of the Pentagon has initiated very extensive studies of the use
of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, recognizing fully the distinction
between tactical and strategic use. Enthoven did indeed say, as even
Schelling has often said, and as Bernard Brodie agrees, and as I am sure
a
Kissinger agrees, that even the smallest nuclear weapon is in the distinguishable
category. I think he is right that once a dividing line is crossed, no
obvious firebreak exists. You probably agree with that too, although both
you and I can think of some important possible firebreaks that, although not
obvious, may be made to serve the purpose. One thing is sure, you have
agreed with McNamara about the"ill-defined threshold of strategic exchange."
You have pointed out many of the difficulties with SACEUR's force because,
it has strategic and tactical missions that over-lap, some of which could
be cleaned up by removing longer-range weapons from the theater, some of
which probably could not. It is an ill-defined threshold. You happen to
feel, as you say somewhere around here, that territorial limits are the pre-
eminent limits, even more viable and appealing than the distinction between
nuclear and conventional weapons. I think that may be true of some ter-
ritorial limits, not others; and in a particular case, one has to look and
see whether the most viable territorial limits are limits which make tactical
sense. But I see no reason for you to discourage the nuclear-conventional
distinction unless you plan to oppose some exaggerated statements of Pentagon

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[Y]

officials with some exaggerated statements of your own. Many of my friends
do that, but I can never believe that it serves either the national purpose
or their own.

On page 21 you say that the implication of the highest officials of
the Defense Department seems to be that the nuclear establishment on the
continent is both dangerous and useless. In all of my contact with any
civilian official in the United States government, in the Defense Department
or elsewhere, I don't recall meeting anyone who I ever thought believed
that our nuclear establishment on the Continent should be withdrawn,
and I don't believe that I ever met anyone who thought that we never should
have had some nuclear establishment there in the first place. You believe,
evidently, that some of the nuclear weapons we have on the Continent are
both dangerous and useless. Many civilians in the Defense Department think
that some of the nuclear weapons we have there are both dangerous and useless.
You and they might draw the line differently, but as far as I can tell,
with
your views about the kinds of weapons, particularly/respect to ranges and
targets that ought to be under SACEUR's control, are about as extreme in
the direction of withdrawal as the views of anybody I have talked to in the
Pentagon. Your own chapter documents that the Thor and Jupiter missiles
in Turkey and Italy should have been withdrawn, or should not have been there
in the first place, even though you disliked the manner in which they were
withdrawn. I really do not see how you can get away with imputing to the
Defense Department the views that you do.

Page 23, You say that two methods of employing demonstration are
available, and you then mention two that on the whole I don't find very
interesting. I can think of half-a-dozen, of which you have listed two of

the least appealing. I do not believe that this subject can be responsibly disposed of in four lines. I also do not believe that if Kissinger were in charge of the campaign that he would ignore the possibility of a demonstration, or limit himself to the two methods of employment that are listed here.

Page 24, you have the Soviets responding with a counterblow intended to shock us into stopping the war. Do you mean that they will hit some cities, displaying a sophisticated understanding of flexible response, limited general war, controlled war, or whatever you call it? Or do you mean that the Soviets would be so incredibly stupid as to do the one thing that would come nearest of all to guaranteeing that every weapon in the possession of SAC would go into what is euphemistically called "the destruction of Soviet society." You devote in this paragraph two sentences to a subject that, at least for the Soviets, is more important than the MLF. You have the Russians suddenly inventing controlled response, which you earlier denied they either acknowledged or could possibly be rationally interested in. I don't believe that any one should use "tit for tat" as a term that has some obvious meaning/adequately describes a strategy of nuclear interaction. Nevertheless, whatever you mean, it is flexible response of a kind more extreme than has ever been pinned on Secretary McNamara. Your last sentence, that an all-out counterforce blow, seems less risky than a limited one in almost any foreseeable situation is one that I flatly disagree with, and I could cite Kissinger against you. You cast doubt in Chapter II on the likelihood that we could continue to have a counterforce capability as promising as the one which Secretary McNamara claimed a couple of years ago, and you pointed out that even Mr. McNamara seems to be having

elimination you will have it your way. No good.

Page 25, you refer to the probability of escalation, but you ought
to talk about the probability of how much escalation.
If you mean escalation
all the way, you should say so. Bernard Brodie has recently written that
most people are careless in the use of the word, usually implying escalation
of total war but sometimes taking refuge in lesser definitions if it serves
the purpose. I think you should be careful here in how you use it.

Page 26, you say that the worst that could happen if nuclear weapons are
used tactically is what is certain to happen in case of general nuclear war,
however limited, is begun. I doubt that, particularly if you mean it to
apply to each individual country, possibly including Germany. Among other
things you have to consider the character of escalation if the worst does
happen, and whether the possibility of keeping strategic war/limited is
far
used tactically, we lose the theater war in Europe, and when limited strategic
war is begun, the Soviet advance is halted within the hour. I may not be
able to persuade you, but there is no way for you to demonstrate that you are
right. And there are some important reasons why a strategic war might be much
more susceptible to conscious control and orderly termination, in a way that
tactical use might not.

You say on page 26 that if a standstill in military operations can be
objective of the
forced, the major/defense will be achieved. I see you have a very strong
prejudice for paying main attention to what happens on the ground within the

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theater. I am very doubtful that in case tactical nuclear weapons are used
according to the Kissinger criteria, and the Soviet army is stopped, we
will/go back to the status quo ante, proud of having achieved our major
objective. It's very hard to tell what will happen to our objectives in
the course of such a war, one of them may well be that nothing short of
unconditional surrender of the Soviet Union will satisfy us. Incidentally,
you ought to spell out your well-defined geographic limitations. It is
not clear whether you refer to a strip ten miles wide, just this side of
the Iron Curtain, or include B-47 bases in Britain. Nor is it clear
what geographic limitations you imput to the Soviets in this process,
and how likely it is that we and they will converge on some well-defined
limitations in the course of this rather noisy war. If they hit our NATO
air bases, is that still the well-defined limited war you are talking about,
or is that a strategic attack? What about cities and how far away from
cities must they keep their weapons in order not to be accused of "demonstration" or "punitive" attacks? And how do we respond to demonstrations or
punitive attacks? Do we use air-to-air weapons in Soviet air space to protect
the reconnaissance flights we might consider essential in order to police
what the Soviets are doing while this limited war is going on? Is the Navy
involved, in the Mediterranean or elsewhere, and do we blockade the Soviets
anywhere? If the Hungarians revolt, do we count them on our side and, if so,
do we use nuclear weapons to defend them and if so, where? I have the
impression that you are back in that football game that I described in my
other letter, and by reducing the war to a bit of 19th Century choreography
you support a lot of very dubious propositions, which you express with a

definiteness which really astounds me.

I guess you know that the sentence that begins at the bottom of
page 26 and ends at the top of 27 is one that I totally disagree with
that it is hardly worth saying why here. So let me jump to page 28
and say that I think an MLF of strategic weapons poses hypothetical
questions of control that exercise the commentators, but not very serious
questions of real control. The tactical weapons really involved a
control question. At least they do unless you are willing to confine your-
self to one particular strategy, which is that anybody can use nuclear
weapons any time he needs to, as long as he pretends at the outset to be
observing appropriate territorial limitations. The idea, though, that we
would want Germans or Danes or Turks or French or anybody to set off
nuclear weapons in warfare and take us as much by surprise as much as they
took the Russians, is to me highly preposterous. It means giving to people
who have no awareness of the strategic context, or XXXXX access to strategic
intelligence about the Soviet Union, no access to American plans about the
contingency of general war, to start a process that may be extraordinarily
disruptive on the Western side even more than it is to the Soviet advance.
I have never been convinced that there are serious genuine problems of
controlling the weapons of the MLF with a few hundred polaris missiles. Make
it a few tens of thousands of battlefield weapons, and I suspect your control
problem is nearly hopeless. Especially if you have got a lot of influential
Americans supporting the XXXXXX Europeans in their disparagement of even
modern techniques of nuclear control, like electronic locks and all of that.