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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.