The Foreign Service Journal, February 2013

32 FEBRUARY 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL assigned to the mainly military team that wrote the report. This is what we said: “The United States must always be prepared for the worst case; namely, that of a Soviet-initiated nation-killing attack: Vital to such a situation would be a high assurance of being able to destroy the USSR, no matter what degree of surprise the Soviets might achieve. … “In the event of a nation-killing attack, the implementation of a sophisticated response capability, attempts at war management in order to limit the total effects of war, or attempts to negotiate the termination of the war, would have little chance of success. Any implementation of these concepts under such circumstances therefore must not be permitted to risk the degradation of our capability to destroy the Soviet Union.” There is a good deal of cognitive dissonance in those chilling sentences, but such was the logic of mutual assured destruc- tion. That’s precisely what a “full retaliatory response” implied. The escape clause for Kennedy would have been whether a few nuclear explosions constituted “a nation-killing attack.”The use of nuclear weapons in Cuba by Soviet troops based there might not have been seen as such—perhaps. The NSC issued its assessment in 1963, long before each side began building and stockpiling tens of thousands of thermonu- clear weapons, and the doctrine of “protracted nuclear war” was enshrined in President Jimmy Carter’s war plans. The rationale for the study was based, in large part, on the hope that nuclear war could be managed and that the perceived ability to do that would reinforce nuclear deterrence. Thankfully, that thesis was never tested. Yet although our com- mand and control systems today are light-years ahead of what they could do in the 1960s, the question stands. Should a two- sided (or more) nuclear war begin, would reason prevail before it was too late? Two decades after the Cuban episode, President Ronald Reagan said that a nuclear war could not be won and must never be fought. For that reason, he favored eliminating all nuclear weapons—and was roundly criticized by the experts for daring to say this. But he was strongly supported by his Secretary of State, George Shultz. Three decades after that, Reagan’s legacy continues in four Americans leaders from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama have embraced the conviction that humans can shape their destiny. James E. Goodby, currently a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, retired from the Foreign Service in 1989 with the rank of career minister. His diplomatic career included assign- ments as deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs (1974-1977) and Bureau of European Affairs (1977-1980); ambassador to Finland (1980-1981); vice chair of the U.S. delega- tion to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty talks (1981-1983); and head of the U.S. delegation to the Conference on Confidence-Building Measures in Europe (1983-1985). In 1993 Ambassador Goodby was recalled to serve as chief negotia- tor for nuclear threat reduction agreements (1993-1994); special representative of the president for the security and dismantlement of nuclear weapons (1995-1996); and deputy to the special adviser to the president and Secretary of State for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (2000-2001). Amb. Goodby has taught at Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown and Syracuse, and is the author of At the Borderline of Armageddon: How American Presidents Managed the Atomic Bomb (Rowman & Little- field, 2006) and Europe Undivided (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1998). knew the answer. Moscow had already successfully concealed one shipment of nuclear warheads to Cuba, and another shipment, also undetected, would arrive there the very next morning. Had JFK heeded the advice he received to respond by invading Cuba, some of those weapons almost certainly would have been used, with terrible consequences. Managing Nuclear War Soon after that near-catastrophe, a Harvard professor named Thomas Schelling (later a Nobel Prize laureate) persuaded Walt Rostow, chairman of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, and McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, to undertake a study of how, once begun, a nuclear war could be ended. It was the first project of its kind. And thus, in 1963, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee of the National Security Council was directed by the highest authorities in the U.S. government to examine the concept of management and termination of war with the Soviet Union. That study produced a top-secret, limited-distribution report that is now declassified. As a member of Rostow’s staff, I was