Sleepwalking With the Bomb Read online

  Between 1957 and 1967 the superpowers raced to close the window of nation-ending catastrophic vulnerability the new technologies had opened. They hid their intercontinental ballistic missiles underground in storage cylinders, encasing underground launch pads, all bearing the gentle agrarian name of “missile silos.” They hid intermediate-range ballistic missiles under the oceans in submarines, and they retained air bases for their strategic bombers. As technology improved, this “triad” of nuclear systems (a nuclear “system” is a weapon plus the platform on which that weapon is mounted) reduced each side’s vulnerability to a surprise nuclear first strike, what nuclear strategists call the “bolt from the blue.”

  In the first quarter century of nuclear weaponry, five nations conducted hundreds of above ground tests. Almost half came in 1962 alone, the peak of worldwide nuclear testing. Most of these were U.S. tests in Nevada and in the Pacific Ocean on the Marshall Islands. A few were British tests in the Australian outback and on Christmas Island. France tested in Algeria. China tested its devices in its vast western interior, and the rest were Soviet tests in Kazakhstan or in the Arctic at Novaya Zemlya. Amid rising awareness of nuclear fallout, the U.S., Soviet Union, and Great Britain agreed in the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 that they would confine future tests to shots fired deep in underground testing caverns.

  To reduce the risk of nuclear war between the two superpowers, a quarter century of intense efforts at arms control followed the all-out race. Arms control became a dominant theme in 1967 when the United States announced it would unilaterally freeze—that is, freeze without Russia’s participation—the number of offensive nuclear weapons platforms it deployed. Arms control acquired iconic status in 1972 with the U.S.-Soviet agreement known as SALT I. Superpower arms-control agreements became central strategic policy. Many politicians and analysts treated arms control as uniquely important among national security issues.

  The 1973 Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War brought the superpowers close to nuclear war again—notwithstanding their arms-control talks of the previous year. Soviet and American naval ships drifted into a tense confrontation in the Mediterranean, as the U.S. declared the highest nuclear alert since the Cuban Missile Crisis. As in 1962, cooler heads prevailed, and catastrophe was averted.

  How limited was the influence of arms talks became clear as the Soviet Union began aggressively backing Third World Marxist movements, often with gifts of sophisticated conventional weapons. The Soviets induced Cuba to send soldiers to fight “wars of national liberation” in Africa. These actions revived a policy that strategists called “linkage.” More and more, American politicians and diplomats called for linking strategic arms negotiations to the increasingly bellicose geopolitical conduct of the Soviet Union. Total Soviet warheads surpassed America’s in 1978, with America’s number declining and the Soviets’ count climbing (to a peak in 1986). After the 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, ardent arms controllers found that their position—that nuclear arms control is of unique and overriding importance and can be divorced from other considerations—had become politically untenable. “Linkage” became enshrined as a bedrock principle of superpower relations.

  President Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative restored missile defense as a legitimate option to limit the destructiveness of a nuclear attack. In 1987, the U.S. and USSR signed the first true arms-reduction treaty, eliminating their intermediate- and medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles (those that can reach targets roughly 600 to 3,500 miles away). The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, symbolizing liberation of Eastern Europe from Moscow’s jackboot. Just before the breakup of the Soviet Union on the last day of 1991, the superpowers negotiated the first major strategic nuclear-warhead-reduction accord—that is, one involving long-range weapons such as ICBMs. The next year, the U.S. unilaterally ended warhead modernization.

  But as the U.S. was making this momentous decision—and as superpower arsenals were plunging, from a peak of 12,000 deployed nuclear warheads in 1992 to 2,200 by 2002—there was a parallel acceleration in what is known in strategic parlance as nuclear proliferation. India (which had in 1974 set off what it called a “peaceful” nuclear explosion) in May 1998 tested a series of nuclear weapons beneath the sands of the Thar Desert near Pakistan. Pakistan followed a fortnight later with its own series of tests within a mountain in the foothills of its west Afghan border, becoming the first nuclear-armed Islamic nation. Nearby, Iran continued its clandestine nuclear weapons program begun in the 1980s. So did North Korea.

  In the middle of this period of nuclear proliferation came the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, whose success raised plausible fears that terrorists could someday strike America using weapons of mass destruction. Such fears were only heightened by North Korea’s first nuclear test in October 2006 (at an underground location not far from its northernmost coast), while Iran continued its march towards nuclear weapons capability. Enemy states like these, recognizing no restraints on what they do, are fertile soil for nuclear proliferation. Spreading nuclear-weapon-capable technology—for example, to Libya and Syria—has been the hallmark of Pakistan and North Korea.

  Proliferation, however, can sometimes be staved off. The crumbling of the former Soviet Union posed a great danger, as new and not necessarily stable states found themselves the possessors of Soviet weapons stored within their borders. But a massive and largely successful effort over the past 20 years brought all far-flung ex-Soviet weapons back to Russia. Remarkably, this time of upheaval saw no known theft of nuclear-weapons-grade material.

  Thus the nonstop all-out arms race so often portrayed is sharply at odds with the more complex history of nuclear policy since 1945. What began as an all-out superpower technology race morphed into a protracted period of superpower bargaining, and finally was superseded by proliferating smaller powers, most of them hostile to the West.

  The emerging era in which less stable powers obtain nuclear weapons will create an international environment more dangerous than that of the Cold War. This danger will be especially acute if the traditional calculus of deterrence fails to impress a new breed of leaders, who may prefer a fanatical calculus to more traditional approaches. By learning how events unfolded in the past and which choices made by leaders were sound versus faulty, perhaps we can minimize the risk of nuclear catastrophe in the future.

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  2. In an 80-day period in 1944, 2,300 V-1s hit London. In their best day, the British defenders—using ground-based anti-aircraft guns and pursuit planes like the Spitfire—shot down all but four 4 of 101 incoming V-1s. As the strategist Bernard Brodie later observed of that day’s tally, “But if those four had been atomic bombs, London survivors would not have considered the record good.” Of 4,300 V-2s launched at London, 1,200 landed within the 30-mile target area.

  3.

  RUSSIA: LINKING ARMS CONTROL TO AN ADVERSARY’S CONDUCT

  We do not want war any more than the West does, but we are less interested than the West in peace, and therein lies the strength of our position.

  JOSEPH STALIN, WHO HAD JUST ANNEXED EASTERN EUROPE BY FORCE, TO AMERICA’S AMBASSADOR TO RUSSIA, WALTER BEDELL SMITH, IN 1949

  THE COLD WAR SAW SUPERPOWER COMPETITION TAKE CENTER stage. At the heart of this epic struggle were two features: Soviet “adventurism” in aggressively pushing to extend Moscow’s sphere of geopolitical influence and deployment of massive strategic and tactical nuclear arsenals. Adventurism saw Moscow attempt to choke off West Berlin in 1948 then succeed in sundering Berlin in 1961. It would authorize its North Korean client state to wage a war of conquest against South Korea, and later support North Vietnam’s successful conquest of the South. It would crush serial rebellions in Eastern Europe, including an especially brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. It would also support Marxist movements in the Third World, as well as a wave of transnational terror directed against the West. The Soviet drive for Third World dominance culminated in the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.<
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  The U.S. was caught flat-footed by Moscow’s push. Massive demobilization had left America’s armed forces denuded and under-prepared. America’s military roster plummeted from 12 million under arms in June 1945 to 1.5 million two years later. Symptomatic of this sudden shift was a 1948 exercise called the Dayton Raid: the Air Force conducted a test, ordering its strategic bombers to electronically “bomb” Wright-Patterson Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio. Taking off from Omaha, Nebraska, was every single strategic bomber in the U.S. inventory. Not a single plane successfully completed its mission.

  The Soviet Union’s conduct during the Cold War teaches the First Lesson of nuclear-age history: ARMS CONTROL CANNOT BE VIEWED IN ISOLATION, BUT RATHER MUST BE CONSIDERED ALONG WITH AN ADVERSARY’S CONDUCT. Had the United States made arms control the paramount good, it would have given tacit approval to Soviet policies very much counter to America’s interests.

  Superpowers and “Super” Bomb: The Arms Race Begins

  WHEN THE new president, Harry Truman, told Joseph Stalin about the successful first atomic test in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, he thought he was breaking news to the Soviet dictator. But strategic arms competition was already underway between the two ostensible allies even before World War II ended. Spies—including Ted Hall, an American, and Klaus Fuchs, a German who had recently escaped to Britain—had brought Stalin the precise details of the Manhattan Project. During the chaos at the end of the war, captured German scientists also aided the Russian program. The Russians kidnapped scientists they found in their sector and kept them in Russia for six years before allowing them to return to Germany in 1952. America, too, got help from German scientists (most notably, chief German rocketeer Wernher von Braun, who led the American space program through the 1969 moon landing).

  The Soviet goal was not just to have an atomic bomb. Fuchs and others had alerted the Soviets that the Americans mulled over a program to build an even mightier bomb, known around Los Alamos as the “Super.” In fact, no program was begun, as all effort at Los Alamos was directed towards finishing the atomic bomb project as soon as possible, so as to hasten the end of the war.

  President Truman directed at the start of 1950 that the Super be built, not knowing if Russia had an H-bomb program. Paul Nitze (who during the 45 years of the Cold War served in more senior national security capacities than anyone else) recalled that Truman’s decision to build the Super was guided ultimately by fear that Stalin would go ahead if advised such a device were technically feasible. In fact, Stalin had authorized the Russian H-bomb program two months after the Soviet Union’s first atomic test, and three months before Truman authorized the American one.

  For decades the myth persisted that if only the U.S. had refrained from developing the hydrogen bomb, the Russians might well have reciprocated. But the memoirs of Andrei Sakharov, the so-called father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later a prominent antinuclear weapons advocate, demolish that theory. Sakharov makes clear that had America held back, Stalin and his legendarily sadistic secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria would have exploited such restraint:

  The Soviet Government (or, more properly, those in power: Stalin, Beria and company) already understood the potential of the new weapon, and nothing could have dissuaded them from going forward with its development. Any U.S. move toward abandoning or suspending work on a thermonuclear weapon would have been perceived either as a cunning, deceitful maneuver or as evidence of stupidity or weakness. In any case, the Soviet reaction would have been the same: to avoid a possible trap, and to exploit the adversary’s folly at the earliest opportunity. (Emphasis added.)

  American diplomat George Kennan, a senior official serving in Russia during much of Stalin’s tenure, gave this grim assessment of Stalin:

  His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable and sensible; indeed, often they were. An unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious façade.

  The need to raise public awareness of the challenge posed by Stalin prompted Winston Churchill’s famous words in his March 5, 1946, address at Fulton, Missouri: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

  Kennan, for his part, writing in 1947 under the pseudonym “X” for the influential journal Foreign Affairs, literally defined America’s post-war “containment” strategy:

  The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.…

  Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographic and political points.

  The U.S. won the race to detonate a thermonuclear device. “Ivy Mike” was exploded November 1, 1952, on a Pacific atoll named Elugelab. It demolished the atoll and yielded an awesome 10.4 megatons, 700 times more powerful than the yield of the Hiroshima bomb and 500 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. But the device was, at 62 tons, not deliverable as a practical weapon.

  The first Russian H-bomb test followed on August 12, 1953, 16 days after North and South Korea signed their armistice. Yet America did not test an operational H-bomb, carried by a bomber, until May 1956. The official American reaction to early nuclear bomb milestones was to treat potential nuclear war as merely souped-up conventional conflict. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, propounded his “massive retaliation” policy at the beginning of 1954: any kind of attack launched by the Soviet Union would be met—at least, in theory—with an all-out nuclear response. In October 1953 President Eisenhower authorized full-scale production of the B-52 Stratofortress strategic heavy bomber in anticipation of America deploying a deliverable H-bomb. The massive eight-jet plane, designed to reach the Soviet Union at high subsonic jet speed and deliver H-bombs without refueling, entered service in 1955 and remains in the U.S. inventory today.

  The prime consequence of these thermonuclear weapons has turned out quite different from what was originally forecast. The early bombs’ massive devastation gave them, as noted by the eminent strategist Herman Kahn, the plausible potential to literally destroy civilizations, not just to level small cities, as atom bombs could. Uranium or plutonium atomic bombs produce explosive yields in kilotons—the equivalent of thousands of tons of conventional explosives like TNT. (The Hiroshima device was estimated to yield 14 kilotons.) But hydrogen bomb yields are theoretically without limit. The largest devices yield megatons (millions of tons of TNT), whereas the highest yield ever achieved with an A-bomb is 500 kilotons. (The 1961 test of Russia’s Tsar Bomba produced a stupefying yield of 50 megatons.) Though that huge bomb—too large to fit in a bomb bay, let alone inside a missile warhead—was not deliverable as a weapon, a 25-megaton H-bomb was—still is—very deliverable.

  Yet the longer-term impact of H-bombs was to enable packing more explosive power into smaller, lighter warheads and not to destroy the largest possible area. Miniaturization was driven by the need to maximize firepower carried by bombers and missiles and, in the West, to reduce collateral casualties—especially arising from use of tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Western Europe, which might have had to be fired against targets on Allied soil.

  In a 1959 article, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter evaluated strategy in a world containing such devastating weapons. In the early 1950s, he had led a team at a new research-and-development think tank for the armed forces (the storied RAND Corporation, founded in 1948), which had stunned air force brass in its evaluation of the extreme risks posed by Soviet A-bombs to U.S. forces overseas—risks that early warning systems, hardened shelters for bombers, and more intelligent basing of bombers and ballistic missiles could drastically reduce. In his seminal article, Wohlste
tter concisely laid down the theoretical foundation for strategic nuclear force structure. He saw that a force should be designed to deter first strikes by promising effective retaliation if deterrence failed.

  For that strategy to work the American force had to be able to survive a massive nuclear attack and still retain enough forces to retaliate. Nuclear submarines, because they are exceptionally hard to detect and track, provided the ideal missile bases—especially as the range of submarine-launched ballistic missiles increased, enabling the subs to cruise underneath ever-larger portions of the world’s oceans. Eventually their range would reach 6,000 miles, making the job of locating them almost impossible. On land, missile silos could be “hardened”—with concrete and powerful shock-absorbing springs between the missile canister and the outside walls of the underground silo—to radically improve their ability to withstand a nuclear near miss.

  A properly designed force, Wohlstetter wrote, could increase what strategists call “crisis stability”: the ability of a nuclear state to ride out an attack would obviate the need to launch missiles instantly—either during a crisis, or upon (potentially fallible) warning of an attack, or during the attack itself—before damage assessment has been done. In contrast, forces vulnerable to a surprise attack would leave leaders with a “use or lose” proposition in times of extreme tension between nuclear-armed powers, encouraging them to fire when otherwise they might not do so.