The Missile Gap Flap

Just as sure as Washington's cherry trees produce cherry blossoms, the Kennedy Administration was bound to be embarrassed by a first flap. The wonder was that the flap came so soon and exploded out of such a well-marked booby trap. The misfortune was that it involved a basic problem of national defense: the world view of the relative missile strength of the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

The trouble began when well-intentioned Defense Secretary Robert McNamara called Pentagon correspondents to his office for a background briefing. McNamara had done some of his homework well: he made an impressive presentation of the current state of U.S. nuclear forces. Then, like Republican Defense Secretaries Neil McElroy and Tom Gates before him, honest Bob McNamara tried to explain that merely counting missiles is not the way to assess U.S. or Russian military strength. All other weapons must be taken into account. The important thing, said McNamara, is that there should be no "destruction gap." Then, casually, he added that today the Russians probably have no more intercontinental ballistic missiles than the U.S.

Grand Deception. McNamara did not deny that during the next three years a nose count of Russian ICBMs may find the Soviets moving ahead. But the next day's papers headlined stories focused on the proposition that the "missile gap," which has worried the nation since Sputnik I shot spaceward in 1957, no longer exists.

The uproar soon echoed through the White House, President Kennedy conferred with McNamara and with Defense Department Controller Charles Hitch, learned that the study he had ordered of U.S. defense posture was not yet completed, and decided on his own defensive strategy. Press Secretary Pierre Salinger's regular news conference was delayed an hour and a half while tactics were threshed out in the President's oval office. Then Salinger announced that since no study had been completed, there could be no conclusion that the missile gap had disappeared. The newspaper stories, said Salinger, were "absolutely wrong." At his own press conference next day, John Kennedy at first seemed to deny that there had been any McNamara meeting with the press ("if such a meeting took place"), stated that until his audit of U.S. defense forces was complete, he could make no comment on the missile gap.

But the gap flap was not easily silenced--and for good reason. During the campaign Candidate Kennedy had played heavily on the possibility of a dangerous missile gap. "We are facing a gap on which we are gambling with our survival," he said on the Senate floor a year ago. Lyndon Johnson had clucked that "the missile gap cannot be eliminated by the stroke of a pen." Missouri's Senator Stuart Symington, the Democrats' chief defense specialist had charged: "A very substantial missile gap does exist and the Eisenhower Administration apparently is going to permit this gap to increase." Ike found the attacks so galling that in his final message to Congress last month he said: "The bomber gap of several years ago was always a fiction, and the missile gap shows every sign of being the same."

Republicans on Capitol Hill took up last week where Ike left off. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (who pronounces "missiles" as "mizzles") wrote to McNamara asking for details of the briefing that had touched off the trouble. The Republican National Committee's newspaper Battle Line got out an extra explaining that the missile gap was the "grand deception of the 1960 campaign."

Meaningless Drill. In all the loud, repetitive argument, politicians and public lost sight of the fact that evaluation of enemy missile strength is a complex exercise, and honest experts may produce wildly varied estimates. As Secretary McNamara has learned, counting intercontinental ballistic missiles to measure a missile gap is a meaningless drill in arithmetic. For a country like the U.S., dedicated to the proposition that it will not strike the first blow, the problem is to build a retaliatory force capable of surviving any sneak attack. U.S. strategy requires that the very existence of that force deter aggression. If there is no deterrent gap, a mere missile gap is insignificant.

The question that faces Jack Kennedy, as it faced Dwight Eisenhower before him, is how to build a satisfactory deterrent. Air Force partisans argue that what is necessary is a counterforce. This would require not only protection for people and industry at home, but a nuclear delivery system (planes, missiles, submarines) capable of wiping out not only the enemy's military establishment but civilian centers as well. The more missiles an enemy builds, the more missiles a counterforce would call for. Thus the judgment of what is adequate is based on a relationship between the estimated Communist missiles and the number of U.S. missiles.

Army and Navy strategists insist that what is needed is a finite deterrent, a retaliatory force designed to prevent nuclear war, not to "win" it. Enough Polaris subs lurking beneath the sea ("enough" is estimated at 30), enough Minuteman missiles riding the country on railroad trains or at the ready in underground silos, enough intermediate-range missiles scattered across Europe, say finite-deterrent backers, will convince a potential enemy that even a successful surprise assault promises terrible and intolerable retaliation. Here the relationship is between the number of U.S. missiles and the number of important Communist targets. Somewhere between the two extremes, the U.S. must construct its defenses.

"Claims & Confusions." Today, while the political argument about a possible missile gap rages, the practical situation finds U.S. intelligence estimating that the Russians now have some 50 ICBMs ready to go, presumably zeroed in on U.S. targets. The U.S. boasts only ten large, liquid-fueled Atlases, no more than five ever operational at one time. These are backed up by 60 Thors in Britain, 30 Jupiters now being installed in Italy and 15 in Turkey. All are virtually unshielded and painfully vulnerable to attack. But two Polaris submarines with 16 missiles apiece are already on patrol. A third will soon be on station; three more will be finished next year. Nine subs and 144 missiles will be at sea by the end of 1963. The swiftly moving Minuteman program (TIME, Feb. 10) may put 150 missiles on the rails some time next year. Plans call for a total force of 500 Minutemen coming off production lines at the rate of 30 a month beginning in 1962. SAC planes (soon to be equipped with nuclear-tipped Skybolt missiles) based both in the U.S. and abroad, along with naval air power, round out a substantial deterrent.

Perhaps the greatest danger to the U.S. defense establishment is that it can bog down in partisan squabbling. In the midst of last week's flap, both sides would have done well to remember some earlier words of President Jack Kennedy: "To the extent possible, I want to avoid the conflicting claims and confusions over dates and numbers. These largely involve difference of degree. I say only that the evidence is strong enough to indicate that we cannot be certain of our security in the future, any more than we can be certain of disaster ... If we are to err in an age of uncertainty, I want us to err on the side of security."

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