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On the Plateau. The Administration's answer is a plain, firm no. With its primary force of nuclear-armed bombers and fighter-bombers, plus its soon-to-come secondary force of offensive missiles, the U.S. can already, in the blunt words of a high Pentagon official, "destroy everything." The problem is not to increase that overwhelming destructive power ("overkill" in Pentagonese), but to keep modernizing the means of delivery so as to stay ahead of Soviet defense capabilities. As newer means of delivering nuclear punch are "phased in"—so runs Administration thinking—older means can be "phased out." Total destructive power will remain on a "plateau."
It would be dangerous to phase out obsolescent weapons too slowly. But it would be exceedingly wasteful to phase in too heavily the newer weapons that will soon be obsolete. The art of modern defense planning, combining security with fiscal responsibility, is to phase in and out at the right time, neither too late nor too soon. Looking ahead to the mid-1960s, when Minuteman and Polaris will account for most of the U.S.'s deterrent-retaliatory power, Administration planners are convinced that it would be wildly wasteful to build in the meantime a huge force of obsolescence-doomed Atlases and Titans to replace SAC bombers. So the Administration is partially leapfrogging the Atlas-Titan generation. During the early 1960s the U.S. will continue to rely for much of its retaliatory power on SAC's manned bombers. Meanwhile, SAC will be kept updated, with B-58s and B-70s gradually replacing B-47s.
The danger that Soviet progress in antiaircraft missiles will cancel out SAC's power has been largely overcome by U.S. progress in air-to-ground missiles, which will enable bombers to fire at targets hundreds of miles away. Most promising: the 500-mile nuclear Hound Dog. Under development are new Hound Dog versions with ranges up to 1,000 miles.
Urgent Tasks. So long as the U.S. can rely on SAC's destructive might, the ICBM gap of the early 1960s will not mean any gap in the U.S.'s retaliatory power. The missile gap, as Secretary McElroy argued, is no cause for alarm, much less panic.
But it is no cause for complacency either, and there was a complacent undertone in McElroy's assurances. Complacent acceptance of a 3-to-1 ICBM gap runs the risk that the actual gap will prove to be very much larger: Soviet technological progress has been underestimated before, can be underestimated again. And the existence of even a 3-to-1 gap could, without a shot being fired, shake the morale and twist the policies not only of neutralist nations but even of U.S. allies.
The argument that it would be needlessly wasteful to match Soviet ICBMs with Atlases and Titans is convincing, but if the U.S. is not going to match the U.S.S.R. "missile for missile" during the next few years, the Administration has two urgent tasks cut out for it. One is to convince the world—Communists, neutralists, allies and the U.S.'s own citizens —that the missile gap will not mean a defense gap. The other is to push Minuteman and Polaris as fast as funds and priorities can push them. If there must be a missile gap, however efficiently it is filled by SAC's bombers, the less time it lasts the better.