Command and Control (36 page)

By launching a surprise attack on five targets—the White House, the Pentagon, Camp David, Site R, and High Point—the Soviet Union had a good chance of wiping out the civilian leadership of the United States.
None of the bunkers at those locations would survive the blast from a multimegaton weapon. And two of the emergency command posts, Site R and High Point, weren't regularly staffed with high-ranking officers.
By hitting nine additional targets, the Soviet Union could eliminate America's military leadership. The destruction of America's command-and-control system could be achieved, with
a 90 percent chance of success, through the use of
only thirty-five Soviet missiles.
Four would be aimed at the White House and five at Camp David, to ensure that the president was killed. “
Under surprise attack conditions, there can be little confidence,” the report concluded, “that the Presidential decision would be made and military execution orders be received by the combat elements of the strategic nuclear forces before the high command is disrupted.”

Moreover, the command bunkers built during the Eisenhower years lacked the communications equipment that would allow the controlled escalation of a nuclear war or pauses for negotiation with the Soviets—even if the president survived the initial attack. The high-frequency radio system used to communicate with SAC's bombers and the very-low-frequency system used to contact the Navy's Polaris submarines relied on a handful of terminals that could easily be destroyed. According to one classified account, the Eisenhower administration had installed “
a one-shot command, control, and communication system.” It hadn't been designed to fight a limited or prolonged nuclear war. The SIOP required only that a Go code be transmitted, and after that, nothing needed to be said—because nothing could be done to change or halt the execution of the war plan. The underground command posts were little more than hideouts, where military and civilian leaders could ride out a nuclear attack and then emerge, perhaps, to rebuild the United States.

America's early-warning systems were also woefully inadequate. The DEW Line of radar stations stretching across the Arctic, the SAGE direction centers, the mighty IBM computers—built with great urgency, at enormous expense—had been designed to track Soviet bombers. They could not detect Soviet missiles. The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, created for that task, was just becoming operational. At best, the BMEWS could spot missiles launched from the Soviet Union roughly
fifteen minutes before they hit the United States. But if the missiles were launched from Soviet submarines off the coast,
the warning time would be zero. The BMEWS couldn't detect missiles approaching at such a low altitude. And the reliability of the system, McNamara learned, still left much to be desired.

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D
URING
A
TOUR
OF
NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a few months earlier, Peter G. Peterson, the executive vice president of the Bell & Howell Company, had been allowed to sit in the commander's chair. Peterson was visiting the facility with Bell & Howell's president, Charles H. Percy, and Thomas J. Watson, Jr., the president of IBM. The first BMEWS radar complex, located at Thule Air Base, Greenland, had come online that week, and the numerical threat levels of the new warning system were being explained to the businessmen.

If the number 1 flashed in red above the world map, unidentified objects were traveling toward the United States. If the number 3 flashed, the threat level was high; SAC headquarters and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to be notified immediately. The maximum threat level was 5—a computer-generated warning, with
a 99.9 percent certainty, that the United States was under attack. As Peterson sat in the commander's chair, the number above the map began to climb. When it reached 4, NORAD officers ran into the room. When it reached 5, Peterson and the other executives were quickly escorted out and put in a small office. The door was closed, and they were left there believing that a nuclear war had just begun.

The vice commander of NORAD, Air Marshal C. Roy Slemon, a dapper Canadian with a small mustache, managed to track down the head of NORAD, General Laurence S. Kuter, who was in an Air Force plane above South Dakota.

“
Chief, this is a hot one,” Slemon said.

The BMEWS indicated that the Soviets had launched an all-out missile attack against North America. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were on the phone, awaiting confirmation. The United States had only minutes to respond.

“
Where is Khrushchev?” Slemon asked his officers.

Khrushchev's in New York today, at the United Nations, NORAD's chief of intelligence said.

Slemon immediately felt relieved. The Soviet Union was unlikely to launch an attack that would kill the first secretary of its Communist Party. Twenty minutes passed, and no Soviet missiles landed. The three businessmen were let out of the small office, glad to be alive. When news of the false alarm leaked to the press, the Air Force denied that the missile warning had ever been taken seriously. Percy, who later became a Republican senator from Illinois, disputed that account.
He recalled a sense of panic at NORAD. A subsequent investigation found the cause of the computer glitch. The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.

Both of America's early-warning systems were deeply flawed—and, as a result, the most reliable indicator of a Soviet attack might be the destruction of those systems by nuclear blasts. Bomb Alarm System sensors would be placed at the SAGE direction centers and at Thule. By the time those bomb sensors went off, however, the president might already be dead. Of the fourteen potential successors, as specified by Congress, only the vice president and the secretary of defense would have any familiarity with the SIOP. If all fourteen were in Washington, D.C., during a surprise attack, they would probably be killed or incapacitated.

Amid the confusion, it might be impossible to determine who was America's commander in chief. Everyone on the presidential succession list had been given a phone number to call, in case of a national emergency. The call would put them in touch with the Joint War Room at the Pentagon. But telephone service was bound to be disrupted by a nuclear attack, the Pentagon might no longer exist—and even if it did, the first person to call the war room might be named president of the United States, regardless of whether he or she was next on the list. WSEG Report No. 50 outlined the problem:

There is no mechanism for nor organization charged with locating, identifying, and providing essential defense communications to the senior, non-incapacitated member of that list in the event of a nuclear attack
presumed to have removed the President from control. . . . The possibility exists that the man to wield Presidential authority in dire emergency might in fact be selected by a single field grade military officer.

The idea of a “decapitation” attack, aimed at America's military and civilian leadership, didn't seem entirely far-fetched. Indeed, it was the most plausible scenario for a Soviet attack on the United States. And it had the best chance of success. “
No other target system can at present offer equal potential returns from so few weapons,” the report said.

McNamara subsequently discovered that the command-and-control problems were hardly limited to the United States. “
We have been concerned with the vulnerability of our defense machine in the U.S.,” a Pentagon task force informed him, “but it is nothing compared with the situation in Europe.”
All of NATO's command bunkers, including the operations center inside the Kindsbach Cave, could easily be destroyed, even by an attack with conventional weapons. Although NATO maintained fighter planes on a ground alert, ready to take off within fifteen minutes, it lacked an early-warning system that could detect Soviet missiles. It also lacked a bomb alarm system.
At best, NATO commanders might receive five or ten minutes of warning that a Soviet attack had begun—not enough time to get those planes off the ground. And that warning would most likely never be received, because
the NATO communications system was completely unprotected. Its destruction would prevent NATO from transmitting messages not only within Europe but also between Europe and the United States. Once the fighting began,
the president could not expect to reach any of NATO's high-ranking officers or to give them any orders. And they wouldn't be able to communicate with one another.

The Pentagon task force found that NATO had done little to prepare for the devolution of command in wartime:

It is imperative that each commander knows when a higher headquarters has been erased or isolated from command; that he knows his own responsibilities as the situation degrades; that he knows the status of similar commands at his level elsewhere; and that he knows the status of lower
echelons, and what responsibilities they can assume. It appears that this is not the case in Europe today.

The absence of early-warning capabilities, the poor communications, and the lack of any succession plan at NATO posed a grave, immediate risk. “
Not only could we initiate a war, through mistakes in Europe,” McNamara was told, “but we could conceivably precipitate Soviet pre-emptive action because of a loose C & C [command and control] in Europe.” The situation was made even more dangerous by the predelegation authority that Eisenhower had secretly granted to the military. NATO units under attack were permitted to use their nuclear weapons, without awaiting presidential approval. The new national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, succinctly explained the rules to President Kennedy: “
A subordinate commander faced with a substantial Russian military action could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you (by failure of the communication at either end of the line).”

Any use of nuclear weapons in Europe, McNamara now believed, would quickly escalate to an all-out war. And the more he learned about America's nuclear deployments in Europe, the more he worried about such a catastrophe. Three weeks after the Goldsboro accident, Congress's Joint Committee on Atomic Energy sent Kennedy and McNamara
a top secret report, based on a recent tour of NATO bases. It warned that the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation in Europe was unacceptably high—not just in wartime, but also during routine NATO maneuvers. NATO's command-and-control problems were so bad, the bipartisan committee found, that in many respects the United States no longer had custody of its own nuclear weapons. Within months the NATO stockpile would include atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, thermonuclear warheads, nuclear artillery shells, nuclear depth charges, nuclear land mines, and the Davy Crockett, a recoilless rifle, carried like a bazooka by an infantryman, that fired small nuclear projectiles. But none of these weapons, except the land mines—formally known as Atomic Demolition Munitions—had any sort of lock to prevent somebody from setting them off without permission. And the three-digit mechanical locks on the land mines, like those often found on
gym lockers, were easy to pick. According to one adviser, when Secretary of Defense McNamara heard that hundreds of American nuclear weapons stored in Europe were poorly guarded, vulnerable to theft, and unlocked, “
he almost fell out of his chair.”

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T
HE
J
OINT
C
OMMITTEE
on Atomic Energy had been concerned for almost a year that NATO's custody arrangements were inadequate—and in violation of American law. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 strictly prohibited the transfer of nuclear weapons, as well as classified information about them, to foreign countries. The act was amended in 1954 so that NATO forces could be trained to use tactical weapons. After the launch of
Sputnik
, President Eisenhower asked Congress to change the law again and allow the creation of a NATO atomic stockpile. “
I have always been of the belief that we should not deny to our allies,” Eisenhower said, “what your potential enemy already has.” His proposal was opposed by many in Congress, who feared that it might be difficult to retain American control of nuclear weapons based in Europe. The Soviet Union strongly opposed the idea, too. Hatreds inspired by the Second World War still lingered—and the Soviets were especially upset by the prospect of German troops armed with nuclear weapons. In order to gain congressional approval, the Eisenhower administration promised that the weapons would remain, at all times, under the supervision of American military personnel. The nuclear cores would be held by the United States until the outbreak of war, and then the cores would be handed over to NATO forces. Secretary of State Christian A. Herter assured the Soviet Union that “
an essential element” of the NATO stockpile would be that “custody of atomic warheads remains exclusively with the United States.”

On January 1, 1960, General Lauris Norstad, the supreme allied commander in Europe, placed all of NATO's nuclear-capable units on a fifteen-minute alert, without consulting Congress. Every NATO air squadron was ordered to keep at least two fighter planes loaded with fuel and a nuclear weapon, parked near a runway. And thermonuclear warheads were mated to the intermediate-range Jupiter missiles in Italy and the Thor missiles in
Great Britain. The new alert policy had the full support of President Eisenhower, who thought that NATO should be able to respond promptly to a Soviet attack. Eisenhower had faith in the discipline of NATO forces. And he had, most likely,
a private understanding with Norstad similar to the one made with LeMay—granting the permission to use nuclear weapons, if Washington, D.C., had been destroyed or couldn't be reached during a wartime emergency. The supreme commander of NATO reported directly to the president, not to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Norstad was fiercely protective of his authority. He disliked General Thomas Power, the head of the Strategic Air Command, and wanted to preserve NATO's ability to destroy the Soviet Union without any help from SAC. The thermonuclear warheads atop NATO's Jupiter missiles were aimed at Soviet cities. With those missiles, and the hundreds of other nuclear weapons under NATO command, Norstad could conceivably fight his own war against the Soviets, on his own terms.