Sleepwalking With the Bomb Read online

  How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?

  … A nuclear war couldn’t be won by either side. It must never be fought. But how do we go about trying to prevent it and pulling back from this hair-trigger existence? (Emphasis in original.)

  As recounted by the Andersons, on September 25, 1983, Lieutenant Stanislav Petrov, the duty officer on watch, decided to ignore an alarm showing five U.S. ICBMs headed for Russian soil. The Soviet command protocol dictated immediate launch on warning, but Petrov ignored the rule book, figuring that a real American attack would involve more than five missiles. It turned out that the Soviet satellite had misread sunlight glinting off clouds over a U.S. missile site. This amazing near-Armageddon—turning on one mid-level officer’s instant judgment—underscored the wisdom of nuclear doctrine calling for an ability to absorb a surprise first strike, with an assured second-strike response. But Soviet forces were concentrated in land-based offensive missiles, and thus more vulnerable to a first strike: the U.S. had a greater share of its forces based at sea, better able to ride out a surprise attack. The Soviets’ posture of relying primarily on the most accurate silo-killing missiles despite their own greater vulnerability suggests that the Soviets valued the ability to threaten U.S. forces more than they feared a U.S. first strike.

  Reagan entered office in 1981 stating publicly that the Soviets enjoyed strategic nuclear superiority. Yet Hoffman notes that Reagan concluded by late 1983 that Soviet fears of a U.S. first strike were not made up. Reagan wrote in his memoirs:

  Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. In fact, I had difficulty accepting my own conclusion at first.

  Lieutenant Petrov was not the only Soviet officer to decline to fire missiles upon instrumental signals showing an attack, and U.S. officials behaved in similar fashion in refusing to launch on signal warning. Put simply, both sides desired to survive and worked hard to avoid accidental Armageddon.

  Reagan had in fact declared war against the Soviets, but not a shooting, let alone nuclear one. In 1983 he issued a presidential directive for conducting what amounted to political and economic war against the “evil empire.” It sought to aggravate internal political pressures against the Soviet regime, and subject it to increasingly severe economic straits as well.

  Paul Nitze wrote in 1956 about the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War beyond deterring a war or waging one, using Russian chess prowess as metaphor: “The atomic queens may never be brought into play. But the position of the atomic queens may still have a decisive bearing on which side can safely advance a limited-war bishop or even a cold-war pawn.”

  Nitze’s assessment reinforces the lesson of this chapter: ARMS CONTROL CANNOT BE VIEWED AS SUPREME IN RELATIONS WITH ADVERSARIES. The full spectrum of an adversary’s conduct must be taken into account in formulating policy.

  __________________

  3. Appendix 1 discusses how novels distorted public perceptions of nuclear risks.

  4. Appendix 2 discusses the evolution of command and control over nuclear weapons.

  5. Appendix 3 discusses intelligence failures as to arms deployments.

  4.

  AMERICA: THE LIMITS OF WHAT ARMS PACTS CAN ACCOMPLISH

  We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing each other, but only at the risk of his own life.

  J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, 1953

  AMERICAN ARMS CONTROL AGREEMENTS DATE BACK TO THE EARLY days of the American republic. The first U.S. arms agreement, the Rush-Bagot Treaty with Great Britain, was signed after the War of 1812 and limited armaments on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain. (Each side got one or two 100-ton vessels carrying a cannon with an 18-pound shell.) In 1871 the U.S. and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Washington, which called for complete demilitarization along the U.S.-Canadian border. The agreement has been periodically modified and is still in force.

  In the two centuries since Rush-Bagot, and in particular in the last 40 or so years as nuclear arms agreements have been reached, the United States has had ample opportunity to see what types of agreements, signed in what circumstances, are effective. It is in the months and years after agreements are signed that the Second Lesson of nuclear-age history emerges: ARMS AGREEMENTS MUST BE BASED UPON GENUINE, NOT PRESUMED, COMMONALITY OF STRATEGIC INTEREST.

  “Big Ships Cause Big Wars”: Arms Control before World War II

  IT IS instructive to begin this consideration of nuclear arms agreements with a look at agreements preceding the development of nuclear weapons, following the First World War. The ghastly carnage in the trenches of Europe spurred calls for global disarmament. Fifteen million were dead—the “Lost Generation.” The Big Four victorious Allies—the U.S., Britain, France, and Italy—drew up the treaty, a spectacularly unsuccessful one. The harsh terms it imposed on Germany fueled the resentments of, among others, one Corporal Adolf Hitler. The boundary lines it laid down spawned wars in Europe, the Mideast, and Africa. The League of Nations it founded was totally ineffectual. The U.S. Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, keeping America out of the new organization and guaranteeing that its writ would be ignored worldwide. However, there is little reason to believe that things would have been different had the U.S. ratified the treaty—as shown by experience with the League’s successor, the United Nations.

  But in the short term, the deep revulsion against war among the victorious Allies spurred further arms-control efforts. The modern idea of disarmament was an invention of liberal Western societies. Either adversaries were coerced to participate after a military defeat, or they voluntarily participated while pursuing secret strategic advantage. The 1922 Washington Naval Treaty set limits on naval ship size for the United States, Great Britain, France, and Japan. Three subsequent treaties (1930, 1935, and 1936) further limited ship sizes for the signatory powers. (Japan signed only the 1930 pact. Germany only the 1935 pact.) A regnant maxim of the day succinctly captured the idealism driving disarmament: “Big ships cause big wars, little ships cause little wars, and no ships cause no wars.” President Warren Harding, in presenting the treaty to the Senate for ratification, described the negotiation as “a conference of friends, proceeding in deliberation and sympathy, appraising their friendly and peaceful relations and resolved to maintain them.”

  Between the two world wars, the idea that fewer arms are always safer was common currency, among leaders as well as with the general public. Thus Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes (whom President Wilson had defeated in 1916 with the slogan “He kept us out of war”) said of arms limitation: “How was it possible to stop this mad race? By an international agreement for the limitation of armaments.”

  Staunch conservative president Herbert Hoover went even further. He endorsed the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact between the U.S. and France, which expressly outlawed war as an instrument of national policy and sought reductions—not just limitations—in arms.

  In June 1933, as Hitler took power, two future prime ministers squared off in Parliament. Winston Churchill presciently called for Britain and France to rearm, and Anthony Eden opposed rearmament in order “to secure for Europe that period of appeasement which is needed.” The British Peace Pledge Union formed and collected 10 million “Peace Ballots” (from a British population of 46 million), with 87 percent of those casting ballots voting to totally disarm and have the League of Nations keep world peace. Yet another future prime minister, Clement Atlee, told the House of Commons on December 21, 1933: “We are unalterably opposed to anything in the nature of rearmament.”

  But the leaders of the world’s democracies were to discover that treaties with German nationalists and Nazis, and with Japanese militarists as well, could and would be broken. Put simply, they learned that with arms accords it matters greatly whether your partners are friends, neutrals, or adversaries.

  In 1934
the Japanese began breaking out of the ship size limits of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, which had limited, with a few grandfathered exceptions, single-ship tonnage to 35,000 and gun bore widths to 16 inches. Japan built the two largest battleships ever to ride the high seas: the 70,000-ton leviathans Yamato and Musashi. They carried nine 18.1-inch guns, the largest ever mounted on a ship; the guns’ recoil was so powerful that all nine could not be fired at once, lest the ship roll over. They could hurl a 3,200-pound projectile—a half-ton heavier than an American 16-inch shell—26 miles with unmatched accuracy.

  Disarmament efforts fared no better with Nazi Germany. The June 18, 1935, Anglo-German Naval Treaty limited the German Navy to 35 percent of the British Royal Navy’s tonnage. But on July 1, 1936, the keel of the super battleship Bismarck, a 45,000-ton behemoth to be fitted with eight 15-inch guns, was laid. By September 1938—as British prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich proclaiming to his countrymen that he had achieved “peace in our time”—the Bismarck was complete to the upper deck level, and it was launched a few months later. The keel of her sister ship, Tirpitz, was laid in November 1936, and the 47,000-ton ship was launched in April 1939. Hitler denounced the treaty on April 28, 1939, having already swallowed up the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. In the event, neither the German nor Japanese super ships played a decisive role in maritime combat during the war.6

  World War II rendered ship size limits moot. Yet the prewar arms-control concepts endured—limits upon platform size (ships then, submarines and bombers today), explosive payload (shells then, bombs and warheads now), and finally sites (bases then, silos now). They would return to bedevil arms-control efforts after the war, because the complexity of modern strategic systems made setting appropriate benchmarks nearly impossible.

  How Much Is Enough?: Early Cold War Arms Talks

  THE NEAR-NUCLEAR miss of the Cuban Missile Crisis spurred renewed efforts to secure superpower disarmament. During arms negotiations between the U.S. and the USSR, much was made about the folly of adding yet more weapons to already gigantic stockpiles. Was their sole utility to “make the rubble bounce” after Armageddon? These talks were based upon what Western arms controllers presumed was a common interest with the USSR in reducing massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons and potential vulnerability to surprise attack.

  The “rubble” metaphor was superficially appealing but misleading. A “bolt from the blue” attack could be totally successful (and thus inviting) if a country did not have enough armaments remaining to retaliate afterwards. (Recall the previous chapter’s discussion of why the ability to absorb a surprise first strike, with enough force left to retaliate, is so important.) The attacked country’s entire force, then, must incorporate a multiple of the requisite destructive retaliatory power needed. If, as some strategic planners feared early on, the Soviets in a best-case attack possibly could destroy 90 percent of America’s land-based ICBMs, half of America’s submarines sitting in port, and 90 percent of the bombers, the small portion that survived would have to cover all targets.7

  Pessimistic estimates presented to President Eisenhower were based in part on reconnaissance flights showing Soviet missiles being deployed; the United States estimated that the Soviets would deploy 100 ICBMs by 1960. At the time, both sides based missiles above ground, leaving them highly vulnerable.

  The “nuclear strategic triad” doctrine held that each leg of the triad—land, sea, and air—must itself be able to accomplish full postattack retaliation, to guard against Russian breakthroughs that neutralized the other two legs. Such secure, survivable forces would remove any temptation the Soviets might feel to launch such an attack, thus strengthening deterrence. In other words, no one intended to “make the rubble bounce.”

  In November 1969, the new Nixon administration met with the Soviets in Helsinki for the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, known by the acronym “SALT.” The talks were from the outset muddled by fundamental cultural differences in the way American and Russian negotiators approached their complex task. Henry Kissinger, who superintended the Nixon and Ford administration arms talks, explained the problem in his memoirs.

  American negotiators ardently seek agreement, and thus look for ways to break deadlocks with initiatives, find some compromise. They even at times urge far-reaching concessions to reach a provisional accord, secure that other officials will oppose them and thus temper the final result. They continually seek to convince their opposite numbers of America’s good intentions, in hope of getting a reciprocal conciliatory gesture. Soviet negotiators were almost the polar opposite in approach and temperament. Their diplomacy “substitute[d] persistence for imagination.” They derived no reward for making proposals or concessions. They could sit rigid for years without any domestic pressure, and wait for the other side, under heavy domestic pressure, to give in. (So can Russian negotiators today. Neither their bargaining culture, nor ours, has changed.)

  The SALT treaties followed the regnant doctrine of the day: mutual assured destruction—founded on the idea that holding mass populations hostage better preserved deterrence than protecting them by shelters or missile defense, given vast amounts of offensive weapons. The Nixon administration enshrined MAD in SALT I, via the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The ABM Treaty—which the Senate ratified 88 votes to 2—sharply limited the deployment of missiles designed to intercept and destroy other missiles in flight. Of the many objections to this treaty, three were most salient:

  1. The vast throw-weight (payload deliverable over distance capability) of Russia’s missiles, concentrated in highly accurate, land-based ICBMs.

  2. The inability to verify actual numbers of Russian warheads.

  3. The limits the treaty placed on missile defense.

  Russia had deployed huge missiles—far larger than any in the American arsenal. The missiles possessed the requisite combination of accuracy and yield so that they could plausibly destroy large numbers of American missiles inside their silos. Russia’s monster SS-18 ICBM had seven to eight times the payload capacity of America’s mainstay Minuteman III ICBM. Its multiwarhead SS-19 missile, taking advantage of loose treaty language, replaced a far smaller (and less accurate) single warhead missile (SS-11); its monster SS-9 missile was topped with a 25-megaton warhead, the largest ever deployed on an ICBM. The SS-18 was the 1970s equivalent (on a vastly more destructive scale) of Japan’s leviathan battleships armed with 18-inch guns. Just as those guns could hurl a heavier shell farther than a U.S. 16-inch bore, so the throw-weight of Russia’s largest missiles was superior to anything in America’s forces.

  The Soviets refused to consent to on-site inspections, and would not even tell the United States how many warheads and missiles they had or confirm U.S. estimates. So the treaty was based upon our counting what could be verified—silos in the ground, detectable by surveillance satellite cameras.8 As to things that could not be seen, like warheads inside a missile nose cone, the United States devised “counting rules”—based upon the observed size of nose cones—to apply limits.9 SALT I limited launchers, not missiles or warheads, for precisely this reason. A complex technical and strategic calculus underlay judgments as to the balance between offensive and defensive systems.10

  As to missile defense, SALT I limited each side to radar to protect one major city and one ICBM base, a compromise designed so that the Russians could keep their primitive systems protecting Moscow and one missile base. (The United States briefly deployed an ABM under treaty rules, but scrapped it later in the 1970s.) The treaty decreed that ABM radars could be deployed only on the periphery of the country. This was to prevent them from being used for the “battle management” of a national missile defense system—that is, for the countrywide detection and interception of incoming hostile objects (and damage assessment after a hit). In the 1980s the Soviets deployed a massive battle-management radar installation in central Russia, in violation of the treaty, but denied it until the Cold War ended. SALT I’s Standing Consul
tative Commission regulating treaty implementation was a two-party affair with no final outside arbiter (none existed). Thus the U.S. could not force the Soviets to comply.

  Disenchantment with SALT I did not stop the arms-control process—the new Carter administration unilaterally cancelled the strategic B-1 heavy bomber in 1977.11 The next year, Carter did away with the proposed battlefield weapon known colloquially as the “neutron bomb.” Formally termed the “enhanced radiation, reduced blast” warhead, it combined intense neutron radiation with relatively limited explosive and heat energy. Covering a small area—typically, within a quarter-mile radius of the bomb’s low-altitude airburst detonation, half the physically destructive radius of the Hiroshima bomb—the highly lethal neutron radiation penetrated tanks and buildings, killing personnel inside (or outside) within hours. As any tank battle in Germany would have to take place close to heavily populated cities, German chancellor Helmut Schmidt had staked his prestige on the deployment of this weapon, and was enraged at Carter’s unilateral cancellation of it.12

  The Carter administration signed the SALT II treaty in June 1979, essentially freezing new missile development at levels that left the Soviet heavy-missile arsenal intact. Its ratification—already an acrimonious subject in the Senate—became impossible when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve.

  A Search for Common Interests: Late Cold War Arms Talks

  THE ADVENT of the Reagan administration in 1981 bid fair to change the arms-control picture. Reagan had campaigned against the SALT II treaty as a symbol of the deteriorating military balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Despite never ratifying the treaty, as president he informally adhered to its limits, for want of congressional support to build beyond them. In Paul Nitze’s view, by not seeking Senate ratification of SALT II Reagan allowed future arms talks to begin from scratch, rather than be treated as a continuation of SALT II and thus bound by SALT II’s foundation principles.