Stranger_On_A_Train:
Kissinger once claimed that Nixon was tearing around on a drunken rampage and he had to instruct the Joint Chiefs not to accept any orders from him. Of course, Kissinger also likes to spin outrageous stories for his own entertainment. But it wouldn’t have been totally out of character for Dick to have a profane discussion about nuking China, “but of course we wouldn’t do that .”
The real story concerns Schlesinger, the SecDef and is very telling on several levels. I found an account which is quite readable .
In April of 1974, Joseph Laitin, a public-affairs official who had served in the Johnson White House, telephoned Schlesinger. Although Laitin was a liberal Democrat, the two had become friends early in the Nixon Administration, after Laitin was reassigned as a press official in the Bureau of the Budget, where Schlesinger was in charge of analyzing defense and intelligence programs. They had remained close as Schlesinger moved up in the government—to chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1971, director of the Central Intelligence Agency in February of 1973, and to the Pentagon in May. Laitin broached some of his fears: Was it possible for the President of the United States to authorize the use of nuclear weapons without his secretary of defense knowing it? What if Nixon, ordered by the Supreme Court to leave office, refused to leave and called for the military to surround the Washington area? Who was in charge then? Whose orders would be obeyed in a crisis? “If I were in your job,” Laitin recalls telling Schlesinger, “I would want to know the location of the combat troops nearest to downtown Washington and the chain of command.” Schlesinger said only, “Nice talking to you,” and hung up.
Schlesinger did not need Laitin to provoke his suspicions of the President and the men immediately around him. He had watched, while serving in the Bureau of the Budget, as Nixon and Kissinger, invariably using Haig as their executive agent, repeatedly bypassed Melvin Laird, then secretary of defense. Laird would simply be eliminated from the chain of command, as combat orders for the war in Vietnam would go directly from the White House to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At one point early in the Administration, Schlesinger had expressed his concern about such practices to Haig, who shrugged it off.
This is an interesting study in how power worked in the Nixon White House, and shows how people interact on the cabinet and JC levels.
AK84
October 10, 2012, 9:12am
22
Gray_Ghost:
Thanks for the link. I am not familiar with SASSI, but their wiki entry makes it look like they’re fairly closely aligned with Pakistan, given they were founded on a grant from Pakistan’s National University of Science and Technology and their other office (besides their London one) is in Islamabad. Still, I found your link interesting and the cites within it look promising if one wants to delve deeper into the subject.
A simple google search for Pakistan nuclear C&C yields a bunch of different papers looking at the matter. Here ’s a 30,000 foot view on the subject from the Asia Times in late 2011.
Which is the exact reason why I posted a link from them. To rebut Strangers assertion that Command and Control was somehow not known. The fact is that there have been continuous public discussions on this issue since about 1998.