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Highlights & Quotes Keith Payne, a longtime advocate of Strangelovian nuclear war-fighting strategies and missile defense, founded his National Institute for Public Policy in the early 1980s. In 2002, Payne was tapped to serve as assistant secretary of defense for forces and policy, a position he left in June 2003. His appointment followed the release of an influential NIPP study called “Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control,” which served as a model for George W. Bush’s controversial Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). (2) Following the suggestions of the study, the NPR called for expanding the number nuclear targets and the development of “usable,” low-yield nuclear weapons. Soon after the study was released, and before he was tapped for the Pentagon post, Payne was appointed chairman of the Deterrence Concepts Advisory Panel, a specialized Pentagon panel that was charged with implementing the policies outlined in the NPR.

Payne was not the only person who used the study, which was funded by the conservative Smith Richardson Foundation, as a springboard into the Bush administration. (4) Three other participants served alongside Payne in the Deterrence Concepts Advisory Panel: Kurt Guthe, an arms control expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who also worked with Payne on the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission to assess the ballistic missile threat; James Woolsey, the former CIA director, vice president of government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and current member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board; and Linton Brooks, an arms control expert who helped negotiate the START treaty with the Soviet Union and currently serves as undersecretary of energy for nuclear security. Other study participants included Stephen Cambone, a former analyst for the missile defense contractor SRS Technologies who was chosen by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to the be the first ever undersecretary of defense for intelligence and who also served on both the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission on the ballistic missile threat and the 2000 Rumsfeld Commission on space defense issues; and Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice’s deputy national security adviser.

One of Payne’s claims to fame is a 1980 Foreign Affairs article he penned with Colin Gray, also a NIPP researcher. The article, titled “Victory is Possible,” argued that the “United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally” and must develop “a plausible theory of how to win a war or at least insure an acceptable end to a war.” They also wrote: “The West needs to devise ways in which it can employ strategic nuclear forces coercively, while minimizing the potentially paralyzing impact of self-deterrence.” They urged the United States “to plan seriously for the actual conduct of nuclear war” and to develop a plan “to defeat the Soviet Union and do so at a cost that would not prohibit U.S. recovery.”

A proponent of national missile defense, Payne has testified before Congress on numerous occasions regarding missile threats and treaty issues. In 1997, he testified on ways to accommodate the ABM [antiballistic missile] Treaty to allow for a limited NMD system. However, he went on to say: “It is important to note that my preference ... is that the United States and Russia move away from a strategic deterrence relationship based ultimately on mutual nuclear threats, i.e., ‘mutual assured destruction,’ or MAD. We [his coauthors on an AMB accommodation study] are not satisfied with our outline for mutual accommodation that essentially revises MAD only to allow for limited NMD protection against rogue missiles. ... We are reduced to the hope that the mutual accommodation we outline can serve as a step toward the political relationship that ultimately will allow us to abandon MAD.”

Soon after becoming president, George W. Bush followed Payne’s advice and abandoned the ABM Treaty, despite the protestations of a chorus of former government officials and arms control experts who argued that the treaty served as a cornerstone to the country’s nonproliferation efforts.