The Double Game

This book tracks the development of the United States’ first antiballistic missile system from the beginning of the John F. Kennedy administration through its almost total prohibition with the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which the United States and Soviet Union signed in May 1972. Historians generally interpret the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that led to the ABM Treaty as signaling the United States’ acceptance of strategic stability based on mutual assured destruction (MAD) and approximate nuclear parity between the superpowers. The book argues that this is mistaken, because declassified records indicate that Richard Nixon believed that the United States required nuclear superiority to maintain its national security commitments. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Nixon all engaged in a double game, in which they attempted to reconcile their personal feelings about the utility of nuclear weapons with the demands of maintaining a façade of strategic coherence to the American public and Congress. Kennedy and Johnson, who were personally far more skeptical than Nixon regarding the merits of nuclear superiority, were forced to adopt a public posture that emphasized its importance, because that was the prevailing public and congressional sentiment at the time. This only changed when the Vietnam War precipitated a collapse in the American domestic consensus behind superiority in 1969, forcing President Nixon to sign strategic arms limitation agreements, the philosophy behind which he profoundly opposed. The book thereby places domestic politics at the center of the formulation of US nuclear strategy.

The Great Society and the Politics of Assured Destruction, 1963–1966

This chapter shows how Lyndon Baines Johnson and Robert McNamara attempted to reconcile the US emphasis on nuclear superiority with the administration’s new Great Society program and the consequent need to limit military spending. McNamara’s strategy of assured destruction tried to balance these imperatives by positing that the Soviet Union would not attempt to gain nuclear parity with the United States because it had forces sufficient to assure America’s destruction if it attacked the USSR. Assured destruction also left the United States’ antiballistic missile program in a state of perpetual research and development. This was partly due to its ineffectiveness, but also because the expense of deployment would endanger the administration’s budgetary priorities, particularly after the escalation of the Vietnam War. An unexpected Soviet nuclear buildup upset this balance between budgetary control and strategic coherence, necessitating an American diplomatic approach to the Soviet Union for talks on limiting strategic armaments.

The emergence of cooperation: national epistemic communities and the international evolution of the idea of nuclear arms control

An American epistemic community played a key role in creating the international shared understanding and practice of nuclear arms control. In the absence of nuclear war, leaders' expectations of nuclear war and of its control were affected by causal theories and abstract propositions and models which, given their “scientific” and technical nature, were developed by an epistemic community. This study, which emphasizes the roles played by epistemic communities in policy innovation and in the diffusion of understandings across nations and communities, analyzes how the theoretical and practical ideas of the arms control epistemic community became political expectations, were diffused to the Soviet Union, and were ultimately embodied in the 1972 antiballistic missile (ABM) arms control treaty. In contrast to those studies that have concentrated primarily on the workings of international epistemic communities, this study stresses the notion that domestically developed theoretical expectations, which were worked out by a national group of experts and selected by the American government as the basis for negotiations with the Soviets, became the seed of the ABM regime. Moreover, by suggesting that the arms control epistemic community was really an aggregation of several factions that shared common ground against various intellectual and policy rivals, this study sheds light on the question of how much coherence an epistemic community requires. The political selection of new conceptual understandings, followed by their retention and diffusion at national and international levels, suggests an evolutionary approach at odds with explanations of international change advanced by structural realism and approaches based on it.