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This chapter shows how Lyndon Baines Johnson and Robert McNamara attempted to reconcile the US emphasis on nuclear superiority with the administration’s new Great Society program and the consequent need to limit military spending. McNamara’s strategy of assured destruction tried to balance these imperatives by positing that the Soviet Union would not attempt to gain nuclear parity with the United States because it had forces sufficient to assure America’s destruction if it attacked the USSR. Assured destruction also left the United States’ antiballistic missile program in a state of perpetual research and development. This was partly due to its ineffectiveness, but also because the expense of deployment would endanger the administration’s budgetary priorities, particularly after the escalation of the Vietnam War. An unexpected Soviet nuclear buildup upset this balance between budgetary control and strategic coherence, necessitating an American diplomatic approach to the Soviet Union for talks on limiting strategic armaments.

Heroic symbolisms and gender bias have always afflicted politics. This chapter describes the representation of two cultural and political archetypes that inhabits the American political landscape—the cowboy and the welfare queen, which are simultaneously gendered and racialized. The cowboy iconography is recognized for good or ill, displaying characteristics associated with a mythic American heroic figure that tames the wilderness and crusades against outlaws. The welfare queen, in contrast, was a label that detractors gave to poor women, undeservedly growing fat off of government largesse. These represented constructions are the symbols of nation and anti-nation. The chapter sketches the expedition of these icons throughout the political history of America from the tenure of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Such representations had signaled national longings and fears for more than a century. The 2008 presidential election both reflected these icons and upended them with the distinctively non-cowboy persona of Barack Obama.

This chapter examines classified weather control techniques used for diplomatic and military purposes. The pyrotechnic delivery methods used in Project Stormfury had classified equivalents scheduled for use in the Vietnam War. However, the US Department of Defense wanted to try them in other parts of the world as well, and the devastating mid-1960s Bihar drought in India provided the opportunity to do so. Dubbed Project GROMET, US civilians flew unmarked planes in a mostly failed attempt to encourage pre-summer monsoon clouds to rain on the parched earth. But as the monsoon clouds appeared, the program was shut down to keep from inadvertently exposing the use of this same technology in Laos as a weapon of war in Project Popeye (the experimental phase) and Project Compatriot (the operational phase). During the Vietnam War, cloud seeding was used to wash out the Ho Chi Minh trail, disrupting the movement of men and materiel into South Vietnam, and North Vietnamese military emplacements. This chapter examines what members of the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration were thinking when they ordered the execution of these projects, and how that jibed with domestic programs to keep the home front strong.

This chapter presents three sets of images as together constituting a prehistory of environmental icons: advertisements against nuclear testing produced by SANE (the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy); the Daisy Girl and other TV commercials produced for the 1964 Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential campaign; and pesticide imagery that followed publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and culminated with the 1972 federal ban on DDT. These images depicted the temporality of the environmental crisis by portraying the long-term risks of radioactive fallout and pesticides to the environment and the human body. This chapter explains how popular images challenged the Cold War emotional style by picturing innocent children as the prime victims of environmental danger. From SANE ads to the DDT ban, images helped popularize notions of the ecological body by explaining the ways that Strontium-90 and pesticides could enter the food chain and thereby threaten fragile ecosystems and human health.

This chapter discusses the convention held by the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) to prepare for the 1968 presidential campaign and to “end the reign of Lyndon Baines Johnson.” From August 30 to September 4, 1967, the convention took over the famed Palmer House hotel in Chicago—symbolically important as the city of Johnson ally and “old politics” titan Mayor Richard J. Daley. More than 3,200 delegates from about two hundred political organizations attended to hammer out a strategy to defeat Johnson, perhaps through a third party led by someone deeply respected in the antiwar movement, such as King or celebrity pediatrician Benjamin Spock. Although a reluctant King did deliver the convention's keynote address, he made clear that he had no interest in running for office.

The conclusion summarizes the argument of the book as a whole, pointing to the central importance of domestic public and congressional opinion since the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and through the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of Richard Nixon’s administration, in the formulation of US nuclear strategy, even when such opinion diverges fundamentally from the views of the president. This forces presidents into playing a double game in their attempt to reconcile their personal beliefs on nuclear weapons with public expectations. The chapter argues that this dilemma is common across U.S. national security policymaking, but is especially acute in the case of nuclear strategy because of its extremely abstract nature. The chapter concludes by showing how the double game between presidents and their publics played out for the rest of the Cold War. It then offers a tentative prediction regarding its resurgence as the United States’ global commitments come under new pressure from Russia and China.

The introductory chapter outlines an established consensus that the United States’ shift from a policy of nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union to a policy that emphasized arms control, mutual assured destruction, and nuclear parity was the result of nuclear-strategic calculus. It then shows how declassified records of Nixon’s conversations with his advisors on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) disprove that thesis. It goes on to outline how Kennedy and Johnson administration officials also acted in ways that contradicted their private comments. Through brief summaries of the subsequent chapters, it then explicates the central argument of the book: that all three presidents were engaged in a double game to reconcile their personal doubts regarding the utility of nuclear weapons with the prevailing public and congressional mood during their administrations. It concludes by suggesting this dynamic is of enduring relevance to the formulation of American nuclear strategy.