William Kaufmann, 90; MIT political scientist reshaped Kennedy's defense strategy

WILLIAM KAUFMANN (MIT Museum)

William W. Kaufmann, a longtime MIT political scientist and defense analyst who led an effort to reshape the Pentagon's Cold War nuclear defense strategy in the early days of the Kennedy administration, died Dec. 14 at Hearthstone at Choate, an Alzheimer's disease care center in Woburn. He was 90.

Serving as a special assistant to every defense secretary from 1961 to 1981, from Robert McNamara to Harold Brown, Dr. Kaufmann was a key adviser in the shadows of the Pentagon. He wrote speeches, advised on policy, and composed annual "posture statements," which explained defense expenditures and requests to Congress.

Later an analyst with The Brookings Institution, he would become a critic of bloated defense spending and even of the nuclear posture he helped formulate in the late 1950s.

In 1986, the journal Foreign Affairs called him "the man who may well be the most knowledgeable individual in this country on the defense budgets of the past quarter-century."

But it was his series of four-hour presentations to military and civilian officials at the dawn of the Kennedy administration, complete with 54 charts, that made him one of the most influential figures on the use of nuclear weapons.

Before John F. Kennedy took office, the policy of the United States called for a complete and overwhelming nuclear response to any direct conflict with Soviet troops. The United States would immediately launch all of its 3,423 nuclear missiles; every major city and military facility in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China would be targets. Such a retaliation would kill 285 million people, studies estimated.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles publicly described the approach as "massive retaliation" in 1954.

Dr. Kaufmann and many of his colleagues at the Rand Corporation think tank privately described the approach as insane, and possibly suicidal. "You're just signing your death warrant," Dr. Kaufmann later observed, "if you go through with this tremendous spasm attack."

Believing that a major war with the Soviets in the next decade was not only possible but probable, the group set out to establish an alternative.

Their plan called for a much more nuanced response: First, conventional weapons and forces must be bolstered to deter Soviet aggression, particularly in Europe. If the Soviets still attacked after such a buildup and Western forces were unable to halt them, the United States would launch a portion of its nuclear weapons, targeting only strategic military sites. Washington would then demand that the Soviets surrender, vowing to obliterate their cities one by one with reserve nuclear weapons if they did not. Instead of nuclear annihilation for both nations, the Soviets might be expected to, at most, retaliate with its nuclear weapons against only US military targets because they knew US superior tactical weaponry was more capable of wiping out major population areas, Dr. Kaufmann conjectured.

The drawn-out process would also give the adversaries several opportunities to step back from the brink.

Dr. Kaufmann and his Rand colleagues called their plan "Counterforce/No Cities." In hindsight, it was the first comprehensive articulation of what has become known as a limited nuclear war.

Kennedy's secretary of defense, McNamara, endorsed the plan after meeting with Dr. Kaufmann.

For others, however, it was a tough sell. Several generals of the Air Force, ascendant among the armed forces because of the reliance of "massive retaliation" on bombers, denounced the plan. General Thomas S. Power, commander of the Strategic Air Command, interrupted Dr. Kaufmann two minutes into his four-hour briefing: "Why do you want us to restrain ourselves?" Power bellowed, according to people who recalled the episode to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan. "Restraint! Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards!"

After several more minutes of the briefing, Power finally said, "Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!"

Dr. Kaufmann retorted: "Well, you'd better make sure that they're a man and a woman."

A native of Manhattan, William Weed Kaufmann was 10 when his father died. He was sent to Choate boarding school in Wallingford, Conn., where Kennedy was a classmate.

Dr. Kaufmann graduated from Yale University in 1939 and joined the Army Air Corps. World War II ended, however, before he was deployed. Returning to Yale, he earned a doctorate in international relations and became known as a leading scholar on campus.

After teaching at Yale for several years, he joined Princeton University, where he wrote an influential essay challenging conventional strategies and goals of modern warfare. Nuclear weapons, Dr. Kaufmann wrote, made the 20th-century notions of all-out war, decisive victory, and vanquished loser not only outdated, but delusional and dangerous. The specter of nuclear annihilation shadowed both the victor and the vanquished, he wrote. Instead, the military must develop strategies to fight limited nonnuclear wars to protect essential interests, wars in which a stalemate could be considered a success. That thinking would be one of the cornerstones of his adoption of the "counterforce" nuclear model. It also proved to be a basis for the proxy wars of the Cold War.

He served in the Pentagon for 20 years, shuttling between Washington and Cambridge, where he taught graduate students two days a week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1981, he joined The Brookings Institution, conducting rigorous analyses of defense budgets and strategies. Dr. Kaufmann was one of the first analysts who called for cutting the defense budget in half.

Among his MIT students were Kaplan, former federal counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke, and Charles A. Duelfer, who was the CIA's top weapons inspector in Iraq.

"The most powerful thing he instilled and promoted was the notion that analysis, rational analysis of defense policy and posture, was something that could be done and applied," Duelfer told The Washington Post. "The government spends vast quantities of money to buy defense stuff. What he would do was try to tie those allocations to defined purposes."

Reflecting on his career in 1983, Dr. Kaufmann criticized the defense policy world, likening it to a deep pit. "It was easy to get caught up in the whole nuclear business," he told Kaplan. "You could eat and breathe the stuff. . . . Then you move away from it for a while, look at it from a distance, and think, 'God, that's a crazy world.' "

His marriage to Sarah Myers ended in divorce. Dr. Kaufmann leaves his wife of 46 years, Julia Alexander Kaufmann of Cambridge.

A service will be held at 2 p.m. Jan. 31 in MIT Chapel.