By Robert S. McNamara (Long Road to Reykjavik)

In the mid-1960s we had irrefutable evidence that the Soviets were deploying an antiballistic-missile system around Moscow--a system to defend their capital against our long-range missiles. We made the reasonable--but perhaps incorrect--assumption that they would deploy the system across the entire Soviet Union. Why would anyone put a system around one city and nowhere else? Were a nationwide Soviet ABM system to be put in place, it would require that we make major changes in our force levels.

The Congress believed that the proper response to a full-fledged Soviet antiballistic-missile network was for the U.S. to deploy its own countrywide ABM system. The Army had been working on such systems since the late 1950s, first the Nike-Zeus and later the Nike-X. In 1966, therefore, the Congress authorized and appropriated $167.9 million for production of a Nike system (when fully deployed, the weapons would probably have cost a total of $30 billion). President Johnson and I believed the system would provide little if any protection either to our population or our weapons. We refused to spend the funds that Congress had appropriated.

On Dec. 6, 1966, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and I went to Austin to meet with the President and Walt Rostow, special assistant to the President for national security affairs. Our purpose was to review with the President the defense budget for the fiscal year 1968, which was to be presented to the Congress in February 1967. Among the items to be considered was the recommendation of the Chiefs that the budget request include funds for production of an antiballistic-missile system. I explained to the President that the Chiefs had recommended the action, but that Cy and I strongly opposed it.

The President called on each of the five Chiefs in turn, and each one of them urged approval of the ABM program. Walt Rostow sided with the Chiefs. This was an extraordinarily difficult moment for President Johnson. I never hesitated to disagree with a unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs if I felt it was the wrong decision. In this case, however, Congress had already passed a law authorizing production of the ABM system. To continue to refuse to proceed in the direction that had been supported by the Congress, and to do so in the face of a unanimous recommendation by the Chiefs, put the President in an almost untenable position.