ABSTRACT
Limited-war strategy in the early 1960s applied preeminently to local conventional war, since this was the kind of limited war that the United States (US) had experienced in Korea, that was congruent with the US emphasis, in military doctrine and organization, on firepower and attrition. The strategy of conventional local war raised several questions to which there could be no definitive answers, with or without an empirical test. The feasibility of a large-scale local war was not only a question of military effectiveness, however, it was also a question of whether such a war could really be limited. The European allies remained impervious to the logic of controlled strategic war. From the US standpoint West Europeans should have welcomed any strategy that made a nuclear first strike in their behalf more credible by strengthening the US president's will to carry it out.
