The result, unsurprisingly, was a huge influx of funding for ICBMs. Much of this went to Atlas and Titan, which were considerably farther along, but by 1958, the Air Force had Minuteman in high gear, too. By 1960, the Boeing Airplane Co., which had won the contract to assemble and test the missile, had nearly 12,000 workers on the job in a new Utah assembly plant. And on February 1, 1961, the first successful Minuteman launch took place at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The special resource study quotes one engineer's reaction to this dazzling spectacle: "Brother, there goes the missile gap," he said.

n Public declarations of nuclear strategy may be misleading. By 1963, for example, [Robert S. McNamara] had backed off his public support for counterforce in favor of what he called "assured destruction," the essence of which was deterrence. Yet it's not clear what changed besides the label. One of the principal counterforce theorists, William Kaufmann, once told a National Security Archive interviewer that McNamara's assured destruction policy was "a white lie," designed to combat endless Air Force demands for more nuclear weapons by putting some kind of theoretical lid on the number required. The nuclear targeting options, Kaufmann said, remained the same. A decade later, when James Schlesinger became secretary of defense, "he threw out the whole notion of assured destruction" and publicly endorsed counterforce again.

Schlesinger did this at a press conference on January 10, 1974, hyping it as "probably the greatest change in U.S. nuclear missile strategy in a decade." The devastation of Soviet cities shouldn't be our only option, he said; we should have a broader range of "limited nuclear options"--from knocking out a single missile silo or destroying a particular Soviet industry, to a full-scale targeting of the Soviet military. His announcement triggered a burst of congressional and public controversy. It also piqued the interest of a 26-year-old Air Force officer named Bruce Blair.