In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, to build some kind of anti-ballistic-missile system. McNamara was opposed to an ABM. He'd recently ordered a study that concluded an ABM would be futile because the Soviets could counter our defensive missiles by just slightly increasing the number of their offensive missiles. But an order was an order, so McNamara gave a speech in which he outlined all the reasons an ABM was a bad idea—then concluded that we needed one anyway, to defend against an attack by China. Paul Warnke, at the time an assistant secretary of defense, walked into McNamara's office later that day and asked, "China bomb, Bob?" Warnke told me many years later that McNamara looked down at his desk, shuffled some papers, and muttered, "What else am I going to blame it on?" (This story is recounted in Chapter 3 of my book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power.)