Things that Can and Cannot Be Said by John; Arundhati; Cusack Roy

public history. Very few people understand it. I’m at SAC headquarters, Strategic Air Command headquarters, in August of ’61 to see what the reaction is to the draft war plan that has just come to them from McNamara. And the question about the missile gap is changing their war plans enormously, radically. The chief of war plans deputy says, “The question is how many missiles do the Soviets have?” And he says, “You know what the Old Man thinks?” The “Old Man” was Thomas Power, who led the raid on Japan, the one that killed eighty thousand people in one night.
    AR : In Tokyo.
    DE: Yes, under LeMay. LeMay wasn’t allowed to go.
    AR: And McNamara was involved, too?
    DE: McNamara had recommended this raid.
    AR: Hmm.
    DE: He says, the Old Man says the Soviets have a thousand missiles. Now the CIA estimate at that time was, if I remember, one hundred and twenty, and State’s was higher than CIA’s, I think one hundred and sixty, and the air force was saying hundreds . That was in August. In September, they completed the satellite coverage.
    JC: So, what was the number? What was the real number?
    DE: Four.
    JC: So, the real number was four?
    ( Dan holds up four fingers )
    DE: Four.
    OU: In ’61.
    DE: In ’61. Four intercontinental missiles.
    ( Silence )
    DE: And it was a bad missile, very inaccurate, and very, very vulnerable. If you got over there fast, you could blow this thing over. They had these four missiles, liquid-fueled, thin-skinned missiles sitting on one side in Plesetsk. We had forty Atlases and Titans. They had four.
    JC: Jesus Christ. So, the entire Armageddon of the planet was predicated on no one exposing the lie that there were only four goddamn missiles.
    DE: Yeah . . . but here’s a little technical point that I wanted to make. There is a big difference between our assessments of the Soviets having either one thousand missiles, or one hundred and twenty missiles—the one thousand is two hundred and fifty times what they actually had. One hundred and twenty is thirty times the number they actually had. So that’s very, very significant. I went back and I told this to RAND at a top-secret briefing. Everybody had to be signed in, all the department heads were there. Herman Kahn used to say, “You must always have a chart in a briefing.” I never used charts. Everybody knows that I don’t use charts. This time I decided to make some charts. So, here are my charts. There were guards at the door, which you didn’t do in the Pentagon. My first chart—John, what was the name of the child in the Santa Claus letter?
    JC: Virginia. “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus . . .”
    ( Pause )
    DE: So my first chart said— Yes, Virginia, there is a missile gap.
    ( Laughter )
    DE: The second one said— It is currently running ten to one . No reaction. The third said: In our favor . As I said we had forty Atlases and Titans, four Soviet ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missile], and then I went through the rest of them. We had Polaris submarines, we had IRBMs [intermediate-range ballistic missile], we had something like two thousand bombers, strategic bombers, and one thousand tactical bombers in range of the Soviet Union, the Russians had one hundred and ninety-two.
    ES: People forget how massive the American industrial advantage was after World War II.
    DE: Yeah, but this wasn’t just industrial, you see. They hadn’t built anything. We thought the Soviets must want the capability to have a first-strike capability against us. We would bend every effort to get that capability if we were them. We estimate they must have it! So they neither had a first-strike capability nor were they going to have a first-strike capability, nor had they tried to have a first-strike capability.
    â€œ W e had something like two thousand bombers, strategic bombers, and one thousand tactical bombers in range of the Soviet Union, the