Command and Control (28 page)

Iklé believed that, at the moment, the risk of accidental war was small. He thought the leadership of both the United States and the Soviet Union would carefully investigate the cause of a single detonation before launching an all-out attack. And he felt confident that America could withstand the loss of a major city without much long-term social or economic upheaval. But an unauthorized detonation in the United States or Western Europe could have “
unfortunate political consequences.” It could fuel support for disarmament and neutrality, increase opposition to American bases overseas, weaken the NATO alliance, and facilitate “
a peaceful expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence.” Indeed, the military and political benefits to the Soviet Union would be so great that it might be tempted to sabotage an American weapon.

“
The U.S. defense posture could be substantially strengthened by nuclear weapon safeguards that would give a nearly absolute guarantee against unauthorized detonations,” Iklé concluded. He urged that more research be conducted on nuclear weapon safety, that new safety mechanisms be added to warheads and bombs, that Air Force personnel be screened more thoroughly for psychiatric problems. And he offered one solution to the problem of unauthorized use that seemed obvious, yet hadn't been tried:
put combination locks on nuclear weapons. That way they could be detonated
only by someone who knew the right code. None of these measures, however, could make weapons perfectly safe, and the United States had to be prepared for accidental or unauthorized detonations.

In a subsequent RAND report, Iklé offered suggestions on how to minimize the harm of an accidental nuclear explosion:

If such an accident occurred in a remote area, so that leakage to the press could be prevented, no information ought to be made public. . . . If the accident has been compromised and public statements become necessary, they should depict the accident as an occurrence which has no bearing on the safety of other weapons. In some circumstances it might be treated as if it had been an experiment. . . . Internally, of course, information about the accident should not be suppressed.

An official “board of inquiry” should be established, headed by military experts and prominent politicians, as an “important device for temporizing.” Ideally, the board would take a few months to reach any conclusions:

During this delaying period the public information program should provide the news media with all possible news about rehabilitation and relief. There is always a strong and continued interest in such news after a disaster. Within a relatively short time the interest in rehabilitation tends to crowd out reports about destruction and casualties.

If an American bomber launched an unauthorized attack on the Soviet Union, Iklé argued that the United States should “
avoid public self-implication and delay the release of any details about the accident.” Then it should begin secret diplomatic negotiations with the Soviets. Amid the tensions of the Cold War, thanks to a military strategy that made the United States and its NATO allies completely dependent on nuclear weapons, Iklé's thinking reached a perverse but logical conclusion. After the accidental detonation of an atomic bomb, the president might have a strong incentive to tell the Soviet Union the truth—and lie to the American people.

•   •   •

F
RED
I
KLÉ
'
S
REPORTS
ON
nuclear weapon safety were circulated at the highest levels of the Air Force and the Department of Defense. But his work remained unknown to most weapon designers and midlevel officers. In 1958, Bob Peurifoy was a section supervisor at Sandia, working on
the electrical system of the W-49 warhead. Development of the W-49 was considered urgent; lightweight and thermonuclear, the warhead would be mounted atop Atlas, Thor, and Jupiter ballistic missiles. During the rush to bring it into production, Peurifoy was surprised to read some of the language in a preliminary safety study of the W-49. “
This warhead, like all other warheads investigated, can be sabotaged, i.e., detonated full-scale,” the Air Force study mentioned, in passing. “Any person with knowledge of the warhead electrical circuits, a handful of equipment, a little time, and the intent, can detonate the warhead.” Peurifoy hadn't spent much time thinking about nuclear weapon safety; his job at Sandia was making sure that bombs would explode. But the ease with which someone could intentionally set off a W-49 seemed incredible to him. It was unacceptable. And so was the Air Force's willingness to rely on physical security—armed guards, perimeter fences, etc.—as the only means of preventing an unauthorized detonation.

Peurifoy decided that the warhead should have an internal mechanism to prevent sabotage or human error from detonating it. Plans were already being made to incorporate a trajectory-sensing switch into the new Mark 28 bomb, and Peurifoy thought that the W-49 should contain one, too. The switch responded to changes in gravitational force. It contained an accelerometer—a small weight atop a spring, enclosed in a cylinder. As g-forces increased, the weight pushed against the spring, like a passenger pushed back against the seat of an accelerating car. When the spring fully compressed, an electrical circuit closed, allowing the weapon to be detonated. In the Mark 28 bomb, the switch would be triggered by the sudden jerk of the parachutes opening. Peurifoy wanted to use the strong g-forces of the warhead's descent to close the circuit. A trajectory-sensing switch would prevent the weapon from going off while airmen handled or serviced it, since
the necessary g-forces wouldn't be present on the ground. A skilled technician could circumvent the switch, but its placement deep within the warhead would make an act of sabotage trickier and more time consuming.

The Army didn't like Peurifoy's idea. A switch that operated as the W-49 warhead fell to earth, the Army contended, might somehow make the weapon less reliable. The Army also didn't like what Sandia engineers called the switch:
a “handling safety device” or a “goof-proofer.” Both terms implied that Army personnel were capable of making mistakes. Peurifoy thought that sort of thinking was sheer stupidity. But the Army ran the Jupiter missile program and had the final say on its fuzing and firing system. Under enormous pressure to complete the design of the warhead's electrical system, Peurifoy said “
to hell with it” and simply reversed the direction of the tiny springs. Now the switch would respond to the g-forces of the missile soaring upward—not those of the warhead coming down—and the Army couldn't complain that its control of the fuzing and firing system was being challenged. To avoid any hurt feelings, Sandia renamed the switch, calling it an “
environmental sensing device.”

At Los Alamos, the issue of one-point safety gained renewed attention as SAC began to fly planes with fully assembled weapons.
A young physicist, Robert K. Osborne, began to worry that a number of the bombs carried during airborne alerts might not be one-point safe. Among those raising the greatest concern was the Mark 28, a hydrogen bomb with a yield of about 1 megaton. Any problem with the Mark 28 would be a big problem. The Air Force had chosen it not only to become the most widely deployed bomb in the Strategic Air Command, but also to serve as a “tactical” weapon for NATO fighter planes. In December 1957 the Fission Weapon Committee at Los Alamos had struggled to define what “one-point safe” should mean, as a design goal. If the high explosives of a weapon detonated at a single point, some fission was bound to occur in the core before it blew apart—and so “zero yield” was considered unattainable.

A naval officer at the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project suggested that the yield of a nuclear weapon accident should never exceed the explosive force produced by four pounds of TNT. The four-pound limit was based on what might happen during an accident at sea. If a nuclear
detonation with a yield larger than four pounds occurred in the weapon storage area of an aircraft carrier,
it could incapacitate the crew of the engine room and disable the ship.
Los Alamos proposed that the odds of a yield greater than four pounds should be one in one hundred thousand. The Department of Defense asked for an even stricter definition of one-point safety:
odds of one in a million.

The likelihood of a Mark 28 producing a large detonation during a plane crash or a fire, Osborne now thought, was uncomfortably high. The one-point safety tests conducted in Nevada had assumed that the most vulnerable place on a weapon was the spot where a detonator connected to a high-explosive lens. That's why the tests involved setting off a single lens with a single detonator. But Osborne realized that nuclear weapons had an even more vulnerable spot: a corner where three lenses intersected on the surface of the high-explosive sphere. If a bullet or a piece of shrapnel hit one of those corners, it could set off three lenses simultaneously. And that might cause a nuclear detonation a lot larger than four pounds of TNT.

A new round of full-scale tests on the Mark 28 would be the best way to confirm or disprove Osborne's theory. But those tests would be hard to perform. Ignoring strong opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Eisenhower had recently declared a moratorium on American nuclear testing. He was tired of the arms race and seeking a way out of it. He increasingly distrusted the Pentagon's claims. “
Testing is essential for weapons development,” General Charles H. Bonesteel had argued, succinctly expressing the military's view, “and rapid weapons development is essential for keeping ahead of the Russians.” But Eisenhower doubted that the United States was at risk of falling behind. The Air Force and the CIA had asserted that the Soviet Union would have
five hundred long-range ballistic missiles by 1961,
outnumbering the United States by more than seven to one. Eisenhower thought those numbers were grossly inflated; top secret flights over the Soviet Union by U-2 spy planes had failed to detect anywhere near that number of missiles.

Despite the Democratic attacks on his administration and dire warnings of a missile gap, President Eisenhower thought it was more important to preserve the secrecy of America's intelligence methods than to refute his
critics. The nuclear test ban was voluntary, but he hoped to make it permanent. In the words of one adviser, Eisenhower had become “
entirely preoccupied by the horror of nuclear war.” The harsh criticism of his policies—not just by Democrats but
also by defense contractors—led Eisenhower to believe in the existence of a “
military-industrial complex,” a set of powerful interest groups that threatened American democracy and sought new weapons regardless of the actual need.

The Air Force was in a bind. The hydrogen bomb scheduled to become its workhorse, deployed at air bases throughout the United States and Europe, might be prone to detonate during a plane crash. And full-scale tests of the weapon would violate the nuclear moratorium that Eisenhower had just promised to the world. While the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission debated what to do, the Mark 28 was grounded.

Norris Bradbury, the director of Los Alamos, recommended that a series of tests be secretly conducted. The tests would be called “
hydronuclear experiments.” Mark 28 cores containing small amounts of fissile material would be subjected to one-point detonations—and more fissile material would be added with each new firing, until a nuclear yield occurred. The largest yield that might be produced would be roughly equivalent to that of one pound of TNT. None of these “experiments” would be done without the president's approval. Eisenhower was committed to a test ban, disarmament, and world peace—but he also understood the importance of the Mark 28.
He authorized the detonations, accepting the argument that they were “
not a nuclear weapon test” because the potential yields would be so low. At a remote site in Los Alamos, without the knowledge of most scientists at the laboratory, cores were detonated in tunnels fifty to one hundred feet beneath the ground. The tests confirmed Osborne's suspicions. The Mark 28 wasn't one-point safe. A new core, with a smaller amount of plutonium, replaced the old one. And the bomb was allowed to fly again.

•   •   •

F
OUR
YEARS
AFTER
ANNOUNCING
the policy of massive retaliation, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was having doubts. “
Are we becoming prisoners of our strategic concept,” he asked at a meeting of
Eisenhower's military advisers, “and caught in a vicious circle?” A defense policy that relied almost entirely on nuclear weapons had made sense in the early days of the Cold War. The alternatives had seemed worse: maintain a vast and expensive Army or cede Western Europe to the Communists. But the Soviet Union now possessed hydrogen bombs and long-range missiles—and the American threat of responding to every act of Soviet aggression, large or small, with an all-out nuclear attack no longer seemed plausible. It could force the president to make
a “bitter choice” during a minor conflict and risk the survival of the United States. Dulles urged the Joint Chiefs of Staff to come up with a new strategic doctrine, one that would give the president a variety of military options and allow the United States to fight small-scale, limited wars.

General Maxwell D. Taylor, the Army's chief of staff, wholeheartedly agreed with Dulles. For years Taylor had urged Eisenhower to spend more money on conventional forces and adopt
a strategy of “flexible response.” The Army hated the idea of serving merely as a trip wire in Europe; it still wanted to bring the battle back to the battlefield. The need for a more flexible policy was backed by RAND analysts and by a young Harvard professor, Henry A. Kissinger, whose book
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy
had become an unlikely bestseller in 1957. Kissinger thought that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union didn't have to end in mutual annihilation.
Rules of engagement could be tacitly established between the superpowers. The rules would forbid the use of hydrogen bombs, encourage a reliance on tactical nuclear weapons, and declare cities more than five hundred miles from the battlefield immune from attack. Unlike massive retaliation,
a strategy of “graduated deterrence” would allow the leadership on both sides to “
pause for calculation,” pull back from the abyss, and reach a negotiated settlement. Kissinger believed that in a limited war—fought with a decentralized command structure that let local commanders decide how and when to use their nuclear weapons—the United States was bound to triumph, thanks to the superior “
daring and leadership” of its officers.