Assured Destruction by David W. Bath

Author:David W. Bath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Freefall

The first casualties of the Kennedy administration’s new attitude toward nuclear conflict were the Thor and Jupiter IRBMs.1 It is doubtful that Allied leaders on either side of the Atlantic ever considered these missiles as a long-term defense capability, as they were created to be a stopgap measure until the Atlas missile could become operational. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States quickly removed both types of IRBMs from Europe, planning to upgrade them in the future with improved land-based medium-range ballistic missiles when the new weapons were ready to fulfill their mission.

Thus, when presenting the fiscal year 1963 defense budget to Congress, McNamara included funds for “the development of ‘a new mobile, quick reacting, medium-range ballistic missile,’ which would fill the range gap between the Pershing and the ICBM’s. The missile was to be adapted for transport on a road net; in other words, it would be truck transported instead of rail transported as in the case of the mobile Minuteman.” When congressional leaders asked him why he proposed this missile, much like the mobile version of the Minuteman, which the Department of Defense had just abandoned, he responded “that the [mobile medium-range ballistic missile] MMRBM was in response to a requirement for an all-weather attack capability in overseas theaters. Since this weapon would be small enough to be hauled in a furniture van, it would be much cheaper than the mobile Minuteman; it would also have a high degree of survivability, great accuracy, a nuclear warhead and could be fired quickly from any point.”2

However, McNamara apparently changed his mind as, in a separate briefing to Congress, McNamara said the Thor missiles were British, so the United States had nothing to do with their replacement. In February 1963 Gen. Curtis LeMay testified before Congress that the British “never were very enthusiastic about Thor as a weapon system … [and] felt they would rather put their money into something else.” The British appear to support this perspective. During the height of the Cuban crisis, on October 26, British prime minister Harold MacMillan told Kennedy that he would dismantle the Thor missiles in England in a quid pro quo for the Cuban missiles.3

Either way, the Department of Defense never built the new mediumrange ballistic missiles. Instead, the Navy filled the gap with submarine-launched Polaris missiles, increasing the number of Polaris submarines from twenty in 1964 to forty-one in 1967, where it stayed until 1979. The first Thor squadron was closed early in 1963, and the last shut down in August of the same year.4

The Kennedy administration’s new perspective on potential nuclear conflict quickly sealed the fate of the Jupiter missiles as well. In the spring of 1961, even before the squadrons in Italy and Turkey had become operational, Department of Defense representatives consulted with NATO authorities about the need to replace the missiles, which they deemed obsolete. Therefore, in January 1963, soon after the crisis over Cuba was settled, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Turkey announced that they would be phasing out their IRBMs.

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