Command and Control (61 page)

On June 12, 1982,
perhaps three quarters of a million people gathered in New York's Central Park, demanding a different kind of freeze—a worldwide halt to the production of nuclear weapons. The
New York Times
called it “
the largest political demonstration in American history.” The Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign gained the support of mainstream groups like the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National Council of Churches, and the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike the European antinuclear movement, it called upon both the United States and the Soviet Union to disarm. But the campaign threatened the Reagan administration's strategic modernization plans, and opponents of the freeze claimed that it was being
orchestrated by “KGB leaders” and “Marxist leaning 60's leftovers.” By the end of 1982,
about 70 percent of the American people supported a nuclear freeze. And
more than half worried that Reagan might involve the United States in a nuclear war.

•   •   •

N
INETEEN
EIGHTY
-
THREE
PROVED
TO
BE
one of the most dangerous years of the Cold War. The new leader of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov, was old, paranoid, physically ill, and staunchly anti-American. A former head of the KGB, Andropov had for many years played a leading role in the suppression of dissent throughout the Soviet bloc. The election of Ronald Reagan persuaded him that the United States might seek to launch a first strike. The KGB began an intensive, worldwide effort to detect American preparations for a surprise attack,
code-named Operation RYAN. Andropov's concerns were heightened by
the Reagan administration's top secret psychological warfare program, designed to spook and confuse the Kremlin. American naval exercises were staged without warning near important military bases along the Soviet coastline; SAC bombers entered Soviet airspace and then left it, testing the air defenses. The Soviet Union played its own version of the game, keeping half a dozen ballistic-missile submarines off the coast of the United States.

On March 8, 1983, at the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, President Reagan called the Soviet Union “
the focus of evil in the modern world . . . an evil empire.” Two weeks later, Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative, soon known as Star Wars, a long-range plan to defend the United States by shooting down enemy missiles from outer space. The technology necessary for such a system did not yet exist—and Reagan acknowledged that it might not exist for another ten or twenty years. But Star Wars deepened the Kremlin's fears of a first strike. An American missile defense system was unlikely to be effective against an all-out Soviet attack. It might, however, prove useful in destroying any Soviet missiles that survived an American first strike. Andropov strongly criticized the plan and warned that it would start a new arms race. “
Engaging in this is not just irresponsible,” Andropov said. “It is insane.”

The Pershing II missiles were supposed to arrive in West Germany at the end of November, and anxieties about nuclear war increased throughout Europe as the date approached. On the evening of September 1, Soviet fighter planes shot down a civilian airliner, Korean Airlines Flight 007, killing all 269 of its passengers. The Boeing 747 had accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace, not far from a missile test site, and the airliner was mistaken for an American reconnaissance plane. The Kremlin denied that it had anything to do with the tragedy—until the United States released audio recordings of Soviet pilots being ordered to shoot down the plane. President Reagan called the attack “
an act of barbarism” and a “crime against humanity [that] must never be forgotten.”

A few weeks later
alarms went off in an air defense bunker south of Moscow. A Soviet early-warning satellite had detected five Minuteman missiles approaching from the United States. The commanding officer on duty, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, tried to make sense of the warning. An American first strike would surely involve more than five missiles—but perhaps this was merely the first wave. The Soviet general staff was alerted, and it was Petrov's job to advise them whether the missile attack was real. Any retaliation would have to be ordered soon. Petrov decided it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that the missile
launches spotted by the Soviet satellite were actually
rays of sunlight reflected off clouds.

During the third week of October,
two million people in Europe joined protests against the introduction of Pershing II missiles—and a team of Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and U.S. Marines led an invasion of Grenada, a small island in the Caribbean. The invasion had ostensibly been launched to protect the lives of American citizens and restore order amid the aftermath of a military coup. It also achieved another goal: the overthrow of a Communist regime backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba. Nineteen American soldiers, twenty-five Cubans, and forty-five Grenadians were killed in the fighting. The Soviet Union condemned Operation Urgent Fury as a violation of international law. But it was enormously popular in the United States, boosting President Reagan's image as a strong, decisive leader. A long time had passed since Americans had been able to celebrate a military victory.

The invasion of Grenada, however, revealed a number of
serious problems with the World Wide Military Command and Control System. The Army's radio equipment proved to be incompatible with that of the Navy and the Marines. According to a Pentagon report, at one point during the fighting, unable to contact the Navy for fire support, “
a frustrated Army officer used his AT&T credit card on an ordinary pay telephone to call Ft. Bragg, NC [the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division] to have them relay his request.”

The week after the invasion, NATO staged a command-and-control exercise,
Able Archer 83. It included a practice drill for NATO's defense ministers, simulating the procedures to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. The KGB thought that Able Archer 83 might be a cover for a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. The timing of such an attack—a few weeks before the arrival of the Pershing IIs—seemed illogical. Nevertheless, “
the KGB concluded that American forces had been placed on alert,” a Soviet agent later wrote, “and might even have begun the countdown to war.”
A number of the Soviet Union's own war plans called for using military exercises as a cover for a surprise attack on Western Europe. While NATO played its war game, Soviet aircraft in Poland and East Germany prepared
to counterattack. Able Archer 83 ended uneventfully on November 11—and NATO's defense ministers were totally unaware that their command-and-control drill had been mistaken for the start of a third world war.

On the evening of November 20, American fears of nuclear war reached their peak, as ABC broadcast
The Day After,
a made-for-television movie. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, starring Jason Robards, and set in Lawrence, Kansas, the film
combined melodrama with a calm, almost documentary account of how the world might end in 1983. Some of the most powerful images in
The Day After
had nothing to do with mushroom clouds, radiation sickness, or the rubble of a major American city. When Minuteman missiles first appear above Kansas, launched from rural silos there and rising in the sky, the film conveyed the mundane terror of nuclear war, the knowledge that annihilation could come at any time, in the midst of an otherwise ordinary day. People look up, see the missiles departing, realize what's about to happen, and yet are powerless to stop it.
About 100 million Americans watched
The Day After
, roughly half of the adult population of the United States. And unlike most made-for-television movies, it
did not have a happy ending.

•   •   •

T
HE
P
ERSHING
II
MISSILES
ARRIVED
in West Germany, and the Soviet Union's response was purely diplomatic. Its negotiators walked out of arms control talks and didn't return. The relationship between the two superpowers had reached its lowest point since the dangerous events of 1962. And while billions of dollars were being spent on new strategic weapons in the United States, the safety problems with older ones continued to go unaddressed. Earlier in the year,
another B-52 had caught on fire on a runway at Grand Forks Air Force Base. It was undergoing a routine maintenance check, at 9:30 in the morning, when fuel suddenly ignited, created a large fireball, destroyed the plane, and killed five young maintenance workers. No nuclear weapons were involved in the accident. But similar B-52s were being loaded with Mark 28 bombs and Short-Range Attack Missiles every day.

A program to add new safety devices to the Mark 28—weak links and
strong links and a unique signal switch—was begun in 1984. But
the retrofits were halted a year later, because the program ran out of money. Thousands of the bombs remained unmodified. And the safety problems with the Short-Range Attack Missile were worse than originally thought. The high explosives used in the primary of the SRAM were found to be vulnerable to fire. As the missiles aged, they also became more hazardous. The propellant used by their rocket motors had to be surrounded at all times by a blanket of nitrogen gas. When the gas leaked, the propellant became a “contact-sensitive explosive” that could easily be set off by flames, static electricity, or physical shock. If the SRAMs were poorly maintained, simply dropping them on the ground from a height of five or six feet could make them explode—or take off. “
The worst probable consequence of continuous degradation . . . is spontaneous ignition of the propellant in a way similar to a normally initiated burn,” an Air Force nuclear safety journal warned. “
Naturally, this would be a catastrophe.” The journal advised its readers to “
follow procedures and give the weapons a little extra care and respect.”

Bill Stevens retired from Sandia in 1985. His job had been redefined during a management shake-up, and he lacked enthusiasm for bureaucratic infighting. He was disappointed that most of the weapons in the stockpile still didn't possess the safety devices his team had pioneered. But Stevens felt proud of his recent contribution to the safety of the Pershing II. Hoping to eliminate human error during launch exercises with the missile, the Army had decided to computerize the procedure. At Pershing II bases in West Germany, crews would install the warhead, erect the missile, remove the pin that locked the missile onto its launcher, run the countdown until one second before launch—and then stop the exercise. The countdown would be controlled by a computer. Stevens felt uncomfortable with the idea; in fact, he thought it was crazy.
A software glitch could launch a Pershing II missile. And the Army's software, written in 1980, was unlikely to be bug free.

Stevens refused to sign off on the nuclear weapon system study of the Pershing II missile, citing the risk of a DUL—a deliberate, unauthorized launch. In response to his criticisms, a safety device was added to the
first-stage rocket motor. It required a separate code, entered manually, before the missile could take off. The warhead atop the Pershing II contained a permissive action link and wouldn't have detonated after an accidental launch. But the Soviet Union wouldn't have known that fact, as the missile on their radar screens headed toward Moscow.

•   •   •

R
ONALD
R
EAGAN
, despite all his tough rhetoric, had long harbored a fear of nuclear war. His first years in the White House increased that fear. During a command-and-control exercise in March 1982,
Reagan watched red dots spreading across a map of the United States on the wall of the Situation Room. Each dot represented the impact of a Soviet warhead. Within an hour the map was covered in red. Reagan was shaken by the drill and by how little could be done to protect America. Although some members of the administration viewed the Strategic Defense Initiative as a clever response to the growing antinuclear movement, an attempt to show America's aims were peaceful and defensive,
Reagan's belief in the plan was sincere. He thought that a missile defense system might work, that it could save lives, promote world peace, render nuclear weapons “
impotent and obsolete.” Reagan had a sunny, cheerful disposition, but watching
The Day After
left even him feeling depressed. With strong encouragement from his wife, Nancy, he publicly called for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Reagan's criticism of the Soviet Union became less severe, and his speeches soon included this heartfelt sentiment: “
A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

The deaths of Yuri Andropov and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, brought Mikhail Gorbachev to power. Gorbachev represented a dramatic break from the past. He was youthful and dynamic, the first Soviet leader since Vladimir Lenin who'd attended a university. Although Gorbachev's attempts to change the Soviet Union were tentative at first, he was committed to reforming its stagnant economy, allowing freedom of speech and religion, ending the war in Afghanistan, rejecting the use of force against other nations, linking the Soviet bloc more closely to the rest of Europe, and abandoning the pursuit of nuclear superiority. Although many of his
views were radical, compared to those of his predecessors, Gorbachev did not seek to betray the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. He hoped to fulfill them.

In age, temperament, background, education, political orientation, Gorbachev and Reagan could hardly have been more different. And yet they were both self-confident, transformational leaders, willing to defy expectations and challenge the status quo. During their first meeting, at a Geneva summit conference in November 1985, the two men established a personal rapport and discussed how to reduce the nuclear arsenals of both nations. Gorbachev left Geneva viewing Reagan not as a right-wing caricature, a puppet of the military-industrial complex, but as a human being who seemed eager to avoid a nuclear war.