Back in 1970, I had the good fortune of taking a graduate seminar taught by Mort Halperin, who was then working on his book, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, with the help of a very bright research assistant, Arnie Kanter. A second edition of this fine book was published in 2006.

A key chapter, which also appeared as an article in the October 1972 issue of World Politics (“The Decision to Deploy the ABM: Bureaucratic and Domestic Politics in the Johnson Administration”) dealt with President Johnson’s decision to deploy a “light” ABM defense against a minimal Chinese ballistic missile threat.

The announcement of the Johnson administration’s decision came in one of the strangest speeches ever given by a Secretary of Defense – Robert McNamara’s address to the United Press International in San Francisco on September 18, 1967. Halperin was working in the Pentagon at the time, and had intimate knowledge of the pressures at work on McNamara and Johnson.

This was the speech in which McNamara railed against the “mad momentum intrinsic to the development of all new nuclear weaponry.” McNamara went on to say,

If a weapon system works – and works well – there is strong pressure from many directions to procure and deploy the weapon out of all proportion to the prudent level required. The danger in deploying this relatively light and reliable (sic) Chinese-oriented ABM system is going to be that pressures will develop to expand it to a heavy Soviet-oriented ABM system.

McNamara was strongly opposed to ABM deployments. So why go down this slippery slope? Because, as Halperin recounts, the Secretary of Defense “was not prepared to push the issue to the point of a break with the President” and because “the ABM was rapidly becoming a symbol of defense preparedness.” Since the Joint Chiefs unanimously supported deployments, as did defense-minded Members of Congress, Johnson and McNamara were in a bind. They didn’t want to destroy prospects for arms limitation talks with the Soviet Union, but neither could they allow the Kremlin to pursue BMD without a rejoinder. Johnson and McNamara threaded this needle by devising the thin veneer of an anti-Chinese deployment.

BMD architectures are especially suitable to hidden agendas – not just because for bureaucratic, domestic, and geopolitical reasons, but also because their symbolism can far exceed their capabilities.