Command and Control (50 page)

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multiple warheads to its ballistic missiles, Pentagon officials began to worry about the vulnerability of America's nuclear forces. A Soviet surprise attack might wipe out not only the nation's command-and-control facilities but also its land-based missiles. To deter such an attack, the Strategic Air Command considered a new retaliatory option, known as “launch on warning” or “launch under attack.” As soon as a Soviet attack was detected—and before a single warhead detonated—the United States would launch its land-based missiles, saving them from destruction. A launch-on-warning policy might dissuade the Kremlin from attempting a surprise attack. But it would also place enormous demands on America's command-and-control system.

Missiles launched from Soviet submarines could hit Minuteman and Titan II bases in the central United States within about fifteen minutes; missiles launched from the Soviet Union would arrive in about half an hour. The president would have no more than twenty minutes to decide whether to retaliate—and would probably have a lot less time than that. With each passing minute, the pressure to “use it or lose it” would grow stronger. And the time constraints would increase the risk of errors. The reliability of America's early-warning system attained an existential importance. If the sensors failed to detect a Soviet attack, the order to launch might never be given. But if they issued an attack warning erroneously, millions of people would be killed by mistake.

The Pentagon decision to provide the United States with a nuclear hair trigger, capable of being fired at a moment's notice, oddly coincided with the warmest relations between the two superpowers since the end of the Second World War. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 hadn't raised tensions between the two Germanys, inspired massive demonstrations against the Soviet Union, or provoked much European revulsion toward communism. On the contrary, the overthrow of a moderate Czech government had encouraged Willy Brandt, the foreign minister of West Germany at the time, to seek closer ties with the Soviet Union. The
status quo in Europe, the division between East and West, would not be challenged.

Within a few years, a series of international agreements clarified the legal status of Berlin, recognized the sovereignty of both German governments, promised to reduce the threat of nuclear war, and established a working relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union known as détente
.
The two countries signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, allowing each side to defend two locations from attack; the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, limiting the size of underground detonations to 150 kilotons; and an Interim Agreement on Certain Measures with Respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, freezing the number of land-based ballistic missiles and permitting the deployment of new submarine-based missiles only when old ones were retired.

The advent of détente did not, however, end the nuclear arms race. The United States and the Soviet Union continued to modernize weapon systems and improve their accuracy. More than ever, nuclear weapons seemed important as totems of status and world power. Not long after taking office, President
Nixon tried to end the Vietnam War by threatening the use of nuclear weapons, convinced that Eisenhower had employed a similar tactic to end the war in Korea. “
I call it the Madman Theory, Bob,” Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.” The secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought it was a bad idea. But Nixon and Kissinger thought the plan might work. Ignoring the safety risks, the Strategic Air Command secretly resumed its airborne alert for two weeks. B-52s loaded with hydrogen bombs took off from bases in the United States and flew circular routes along the coast of the Soviet Union. Neither the Soviets nor the Vietcong was fooled by the bluff.

A few years later, at the height of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War,
nuclear weapons were once again utilized as a diplomatic tool. Concerned that the Soviet Union might send troops to Egypt, Secretary of State Kissinger and Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger placed American military forces throughout the world at DEFCON 3. The elevated level of readiness was a
signal to the Soviet Union, implying that the United States was willing to fight a nuclear war over the issue. The Soviets didn't intervene in the Mideast conflict, and Kissinger later attributed their reluctance to
the administration's bold diplomacy. Great leaders sometimes need to appear unbalanced, he thought: “
What seems ‘balanced' and ‘safe' in a crisis is often the most risky.”

Fred Iklé served as the head of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Iklé brought to the job an extensive knowledge of nuclear weapons, deterrence theory, and the workings of the command-and-control system.
He argued against the adoption of a launch-on-warning policy, worried that it could inadvertently prove to be disastrous. Nevertheless, the policy had a strong military and psychological appeal. “
Launching the ICBM force on attack assessment is probably the simplest and most cost-effective way to frustrate a [Soviet] counterforce attack,” a classified RAND report noted. “But as a
declared
policy, we believe it would be vigorously opposed as both dangerous and unstable (an accident could theoretically precipitate a nuclear war).”

At a meeting of the National Security Council, Iklé expressed his opposition to launch on warning, calling it “
accident-prone.” Secretary of State Kissinger disagreed, praising its usefulness as a deterrent. Kissinger felt confident that the command-and-control system could handle it and stressed that “
the Soviets must never be able to calculate that you plan to rule out such an attack.” The national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, agreed with Kissinger. Reason now played a diminished role in nuclear strategy. “
It is not to our disadvantage,” Scowcroft said, “if we appear irrational to the Soviets in this regard.”

Too much madness, however, could be dangerous. Since the days of Harry Truman, the president of the United States had been entrusted with the sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. It gave one human being the ability to destroy cities, nations, entire civilizations. The president was accompanied everywhere by
a military aide carrying the “football”—a briefcase that held the SIOP Decisions Handbook, a list of secret command bunkers throughout the United States, and instructions on how to operate the Emergency Broadcast System. The SIOP Decisions
Handbook outlined various attack options, using cartoonlike illustrations to convey the details quickly. It was known as the Black Book.

Eager to defend the civilian control of nuclear weapons from military encroachment, John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara had fought hard to ensure that only the president could make the ultimate decision. But they hadn't considered the possibility that the president might be clinically depressed, emotionally unstable, and drinking heavily—like Richard Nixon, during his final weeks in office. Amid the deepening Watergate scandal, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger told the head of the Joint Chiefs to seek his approval before acting on “
any emergency order coming from the president.” Although Schlesinger's order raised questions about who was actually in command, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

O
ne month after the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter, a member of his national security staff,
General William E. Odom, attended briefings on the SIOP at the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Omaha. Odom was considered a staunch anti-Communist, one of the hard-liners in the new administration. He was a Soviet expert, fluent in Russian, who'd attended West Point and trained as a tactical nuclear targeting officer for the Army. His visit to SAC headquarters occurred in February 1977. Eight years had passed since Henry Kissinger began to push for more flexibility in the SIOP. Secretary of Defense Schlesinger had announced in 1974 that America's war plans were being revised, that they would soon include “
Limited Nuclear Options” and “Regional Nuclear Options” using fewer weapons. And yet General Odom could find no trace of those changes in the SIOP. Like others before him, nuclear initiates granted a secret knowledge, Odom was stunned by the SIOP:

At times I simply could not believe what I was being shown and told, causing me to doubt my own comprehension. It was an unnerving experience for me personally. . . . It was just a huge mechanical war plan aimed at creating maximum damage without regard to the political context. I concluded that the United States had surrendered political control over
nuclear weapons to a deterministic theory of war that . . . ensured an unprecedented devastation of both the Soviet Union and the United States. . . . And the president would be left with two or three meaningless choices that he might have to make within 10 minutes after he was awakened after a deep sleep late some night.

A policy of launch on warning was “
absurd and irresponsible,” and implementing the SIOP under any conditions would be “
the height of folly.”
The SIOP now called for the Soviet Union to be hit with about ten thousand nuclear weapons. But what disturbed Odom the most about the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff in Omaha was that they didn't seem to have any postattack plans: “
Things would just cease in their world about 6 to 10 hours after they received the order to execute the SIOP.”

President Carter was determined to end the arms race with the Soviet Union. And he knew more about nuclear weapons than any of his predecessors at the White House, except, perhaps, Eisenhower. Carter had attended the U.S. Naval Academy, served as an officer on submarines, and helped to design the first nuclear propulsion systems for the Navy. A few weeks before his inauguration,
Carter had met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and asked them an unexpected question: How long would it take to reduce America's nuclear arsenal to just one or two hundred ballistic missiles? The room fell silent—and no answer was given.

In that moment, President Carter had revealed himself to be an advocate of “minimum deterrence,” a strategy that the Navy had endorsed in the late 1950s, as the Polaris submarine was being developed.
He thought that one or two hundred missiles might be sufficient to deter the Soviets. And if both superpowers reduced their strategic forces to those levels, neither could launch a successful first strike. During his inaugural address, Carter spoke about his ultimate goal: “
the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth.” To make sure the issue was never far from his mind, he kept wooden miniatures of Soviet and American missiles on his desk in the Oval Office.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff regarded Carter with suspicion. The new
president not only supported minimum deterrence, he also sought a ban on all nuclear testing. He proposed large cuts in military spending. He sincerely wanted new arms control agreements, world peace, friendship with the Soviet Union. And he appointed Harold Brown—one of McNamara's former whiz kids—to serve as secretary of defense. Brown thought that the United States hadn't fallen behind the Soviets and that new strategic weapons, like the B-1 bomber, weren't urgently needed. Within weeks of taking office, Carter found his plans opposed by most Republicans, many Democrats, the armed services—and even the Soviets. At the Kremlin, his proposal to accelerate the reduction of ballistic missiles seemed like an attempt to gain favorable publicity, and his criticism of human rights violations in the Soviet Union were regarded as insulting. The Soviet leadership much preferred dealing with Nixon and Kissinger, who never mentioned the repression of dissidents.

A new organization, the Committee on the Present Danger, soon attacked the Carter administration for being weak on defense and endangering the security of the United States. The group's membership included academics, defense intellectuals, former government officials, and retired military officers. They warned that within a few years the nation would face a “window of vulnerability,” a period in which the Soviets might be able to launch a surprise attack that spared American cities but destroyed all of its land-based missiles. The president would then face an agonizing choice: accede to the demands of the Soviet Union and save American lives—or launch submarine-based missiles at Soviet cities and cause pointless, mutual annihilation. The committee's views were succinctly expressed in an essay by Richard Pipes, a history professor at Harvard and one of the group's founders: “
Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War.” The Soviets were violent, deceitful, authoritarian, and cunning, Pipes argued, and they'd already shown a willingness to commit mass murder on behalf of communism. The downfall of the United States now seemed within their grasp and would be pursued, regardless of the cost.

The window of vulnerability—like the bomber gap and the missile gap before it—provided a strong rationale for increased spending on defense.
And like those other scares, it was based more on fear than on facts. A successful surprise attack on America's land-based missiles wouldn't be easy to pull off.
To achieve a 95 percent certainty of wiping them out, at least two Soviet warheads would have to be aimed at each silo. Those warheads would have to land in precisely timed intervals, so that the blast effects of one didn't destroy the other. And the Soviets would have to prevent the Strategic Air Command from launching its missiles on warning. Even if the surprise attack were successful, disabling every single Minuteman and Titan II, the fallout from the nuclear blasts would kill
somewhere between two million and twenty million Americans. And the United States would still have thousands of nuclear warheads, mounted on submarine-based missiles, ready to seek revenge.

President Carter's idealistic vision soon collided with the reality of the late 1970s. He had to contend with gasoline shortages, high unemployment, and inflation; anxieties about the decline of American power; the arms buildup in the Soviet Union, its crackdown on dissidents, its use of Cuban troops as proxies in Ethiopia and Angola. The Senate refused to approve another arms control treaty,
and détente
became a thing of the past. Instead of cutting the defense budget, Carter increased it for the first time in more than a decade. Instead of adopting a strategy of minimum deterrence, he endorsed
a “countervailing strategy” that would allow the president to use limited nuclear strikes in a variety of situations. Instead of eliminating strategic weapons, he backed the development of entirely new ones—the MX long-range missile, the Pershing II medium-range missile, cruise missiles that used jet engines instead of rockets to fly low and evade Soviet radar, the B-2 bomber, the Trident submarine.

The MX missile system embodied the strategic thinking of its time. To avoid destruction in a surprise attack, the MX would be mounted on a two-hundred-foot-long truck. The missile would constantly be moved between twenty-three protective concrete shelters, like a pea in an immense shell game. The Soviet Union would never know which shelter housed a missile. The shelters would be a mile apart. Twenty-two of them would contain fake missiles—and those decoys would also be moved constantly
by truck. If the scheme worked, the Soviets would have to use at least forty-six warheads to destroy a single MX missile.

President Carter approved the deployment of two hundred MX missiles in the Great Basin area of Utah and Nevada.
The missiles would be scattered across roughly fifteen thousand square miles of federal land, most of it closed to the public.
Eight thousand miles of new roads would be built for access to the MX sites.
About a hundred thousand workers would be required to construct the system and about half that number to run it.
The total cost of the project was estimated to be at least $40 billion. The new weapon was designed not only to close the window of vulnerability for the United States but also to open one for the Soviet Union. Each MX would carry ten highly accurate warheads, thereby placing Soviet missiles at risk of destruction during an American first strike.

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A
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in the morning on November 9, 1979,
the computers at the NORAD headquarters inside Cheyenne Mountain said that the United States was under attack. The huge screen in the underground command center at SAC headquarters showed that Soviet missiles had been launched from submarines off the West Coast. The same message was received by computers in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon and the Alternate National Military Command Center at  Site R inside Raven Rock Mountain. And then more missiles appeared on the screen, launched not only from submarines but also from sites within the Soviet Union. It was a massive attack, and warheads would begin to hit American targets within five or six minutes.

Whenever NORAD's early-warning sensors detected signs of a possible missile launch, a Missile Display Conference was held. It happened
about four times a day; the infrared sensors on the Air Force satellites could be
triggered by forest fires, volcanic eruptions, and other sources of heat. The officers on duty would discuss whether the threat seemed real or merely a false alarm. The commander in chief of NORAD would decide if
a Threat Assessment Conference had to be arranged, bringing the head of SAC and
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff into the discussion. That type of conference happened once or twice a week. And if missiles truly seemed to be heading toward the United States, a Missile Attack Conference would be set up. It would give the president a chance to speak with senior officers, listen to their advice, and decide whether to launch missiles in retaliation.
A Missile Attack Conference had never been held.

As the computer screens at NORAD filled with Soviet missiles, a Threat Assessment Conference was called. Although the pattern of the attack seemed to fit with the Pentagon's assumptions about Soviet war plans, its timing made little sense. Tensions between the superpowers weren't particularly high, and nothing in the news seemed to warrant a “bolt from the blue” attack on the United States. Duty officers at NORAD contacted the radar and ground stations whose sensors were relaying information about the launches. None of them had detected signs of any missiles. The NORAD computers seemed to be providing an erroneous—but highly realistic—account of a Soviet surprise attack.

As a precaution, the Klaxons were sounded at SAC bases nationwide. Bomber crews ran to their planes, and missile crews were put on heightened alert. Fighter-interceptors took off to look for signs of a Soviet attack. The National Emergency Airborne Command Post left Andrews Air Force Base—without President Carter on board. And air traffic controllers throughout the country prepared to clear America's airspace for military flights, warning every commercial airliner that it might soon have to land.

As the minutes passed without the arrival of Soviet warheads, it became clear that the United States wasn't under attack. The cause of the false alarm was soon discovered.
A technician had put the wrong tape into one of NORAD's computers. The tape was part of a training exercise—a war game that simulated a Soviet attack on the United States. The computer had transmitted realistic details of the war game to SAC headquarters, the Pentagon, and Site R.

The computers at NORAD had been causing problems for more than a decade. Although they were perhaps the most important data-processing machines in the United States—responsible for compiling and assessing
information from all its early-warning radars and satellites—
the Honeywell 6060 computers were already obsolete when NORAD installed them within Cheyenne Mountain. A 1978 investigation by the General Accounting Office (GAO) found that budget cuts and bureaucratic inflexibility during the Nixon administration had forced NORAD to buy the computers—
despite protests from the head of NORAD that they lacked sufficient processing power for crucial early-warning tasks. NORAD's computers were frequently out of commission, the GAO reported, “
due to the lack of readily available spare parts.”
Many of the parts hadn't been manufactured by Honeywell for years.

The morale at NORAD, like its aging computers and software, left room for improvement. A couple of months after the false alarm,
twenty-three security officers assigned to the Combat Operations Center inside Cheyenne Mountain were stripped of their security clearances. According to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the security force responsible for protecting the nerve center of America's command-and-control system was using LSD, marijuana, cocaine, and amphetamines.

“
FALSE ALARM ON ATTACK SENDS FIGHTERS INTO SKY
” was one of the headlines, when news of the training tape incident leaked. Pentagon officials denied that the missile warning had been taken seriously. But the technical and human errors at NORAD felt in keeping with the general mood of the country. An accidental nuclear war didn't sound inconceivable to most people—America seemed to be falling apart. A few months earlier a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania had suffered a partial meltdown, largely because a worker at the plant had turned off an emergency cooling system by mistake.