Command and Control (66 page)

Instead of making a war between India and Pakistan less likely, nuclear weapons may have the opposite effect. For most of the Cold War, the status quo in Europe, the dividing line between East and West, was accepted by both sides. The border dispute in South Asia is far more volatile, with Pakistan seeking to dislodge India from Kashmir. Pakistan's nuclear weapons have allowed it to sponsor terrorism against India, a much larger and more powerful nation, without fear of retaliation. Since the early 1990s the two countries have come close to nuclear war about half a dozen times, most recently in November 2008, after suicide attacks on India's largest city, Mumbai.

The security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is now threatened not only by an attack but also by radical Islamists within the country seeking to steal weapons. The internal and external threats place competing demands on Pakistan's command-and-control system. To protect against theft, the weapons should be stored at a handful of well-guarded locations. But to safeguard against an Indian surprise attack, the weapons should be
dispersed to numerous storage sites. Pakistan has most likely chosen the latter approach. Although the warheads and bombs are said to be stored without their nuclear cores, the dispersal of Pakistan's weapons makes it a lot easier for terrorists to seize one.

Islamic militants staged
a bold attack on the headquarters of the Pakistan army in October 2009. They wore military uniforms, used fake IDs, penetrated multiple layers of security, and held dozens of hostages for almost a full day. The head of the Strategic Forces Command, responsible for Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, worked at that headquarters.
Another attack penetrated a naval aviation base outside Karachi in May 2011. Most of Pakistan's nuclear weapon storage facilities were built in the northwestern part of the country, as far as possible from India, to extend the warning time of a missile attack and to make a conventional attack on them more difficult. Unfortunately, that means the nuclear storage sites are located near the border with Afghanistan, Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, and the heart of its radical Islamist movement.

•   •   •

M
OST
OF
THIS
BOOK
has been devoted to stories of accidents, miscalculations, and mistakes, tempered by a great deal of personal heroism. But one crucial fact must be kept in mind: none of
the roughly seventy thousand nuclear weapons built by the United States since 1945 has ever detonated inadvertently or without proper authorization. The technological and administrative controls on those weapons have worked, however imperfectly at times—and countless people, military and civilian, deserve credit for that remarkable achievement. Had a single weapon been stolen or detonated, America's command-and-control system would still have attained
a success rate of 99.99857 percent. But nuclear weapons are the most dangerous technology ever invented. Anything less than 100 percent control of them, anything less than perfect safety and security, would be unacceptable. And if this book has any message to preach, it is that human beings are imperfect.

A retired Strategic Air Command general told me about the enormous, daily stress of his job during the Cold War. It involved, among other things,
managing the nuclear command-and-control system of the United States. New codes had to be regularly obtained from the National Security Agency and distributed to missile sites, bombers, submarines. False alarms from NORAD had to be considered and dismissed, Soviet military transmissions carefully analyzed, their submarines off the coast tracked. Thousands of things seemed to be happening in the system at once, all over the world, subtly interconnected, and at any moment something could go terribly wrong. He compared the job to holding an angry tiger by the tail. And like almost every single Air Force officer, weapon designer, Pentagon official, airman, and missile maintenance crew member whom I interviewed about the Cold War, he was amazed that nuclear weapons were never used, that no major city was destroyed, that the tiger never got loose.

The challenges that the United States has faced in the management of its arsenal should give pause to every other nation that seeks to obtain nuclear weapons. This technology was invented and perfected in the United States. I have no doubt that America's nuclear weapons are among the safest, most advanced, most secure against unauthorized use that have ever been built. And yet the United States has narrowly avoided a long series of nuclear disasters. Other countries, with less hard-earned experience in the field, may not be as fortunate. One measure of a nation's technological proficiency is
the rate of industrial accidents.
That rate is about two times higher in India,
three times higher in Iran, and
four times higher in Pakistan than it is in the United States. High-risk technologies are easily transferred across borders; but the organizational skills and safety culture necessary to manage them are more difficult to share. Nuclear weapons have gained allure as a symbol of power and a source of national pride. They also pose a grave threat to any country that possesses them.

In recent years an international movement to abolish nuclear weapons has arisen from an unlikely source: the leadership of America's national security establishment during the Cold War. In January 2007, two former Republican secretaries of state—George Shultz and Henry Kissinger—along with two prominent Democrats—former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and Sam Nunn, the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee—wrote an op-ed for the
Wall Street Journal
that
spelled out their goal: “
A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” Sidney Drell had given the group not only technical guidance but also encouragement to take a bold stance. “
The world is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era,” they warned. The end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear terrorism, and the spread of nuclear weapons to countries like North Korea rendered long-standing notions of deterrence obsolete. The use of nuclear weapons had become more, not less, likely. And
the two nations that control about 90 percent of those weapons—the United States and Russia—had an obligation to remove their missiles from hair-trigger alert, minimize the risk of accidents, reduce the size of their arsenals, and pursue abolition with the collaborative spirit that reigned, briefly, at the 1986 Reykjavik summit.

The campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons was subsequently endorsed by a wide variety of former Cold Warriors, including Robert McNamara, Colin Powell, and George H. W. Bush. It became part of America's foreign policy on April 5, 2009. “
Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked—that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction,” President Barack Obama said that day, during a speech before a crowd of twenty thousand people in Prague. “
Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.” Obama committed his administration to seeking “
a world without nuclear weapons,” warning that the threat of global nuclear war had gone down but the risk of a nuclear attack had gone up. Later that year, the United Nations Security Council voted to support abolition. The idealistic rhetoric at the U.N. has not yet been followed, however, by the difficult steps that might lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons: passage of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty by the U.S. Senate; major reductions in the Russian and American arsenals; arms control talks that include China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel; strict rules on the production and distribution of fissile materials; and harsh punishments for countries that violate the new international norms.

In the United States, the nuclear abolition movement has failed to
generate much popular support. The retired officials who jump-started the debate in 2007 had
an average age of seventy-nine. Many of the issues at stake seem hypothetical and remote. Almost half of the American population were not yet born or were children when the Cold War ended. And support for the abolition of nuclear weapons is hardly universal. The administration of President George W. Bush not only sought to develop new warheads and hydrogen bombs but also broadened the scope of the OPLAN.
Bush's counterforce strategy, adopted after 9/11, threatened the preemptive use of nuclear weapons to thwart conventional, biological, and chemical attacks on the United States. A pair of liberal Democrats, former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and former director of the CIA John M. Deutch, criticized the “
nuclear disarmament fantasy” from a different perspective. Nuclear weapons can never be un-invented, Brown and Deutch argued, and countries that secretly violate an international ban might achieve unchecked power. The temptation to cheat would be enormous. In their view, utopian proposals shouldn't distract attention from practical measures to reduce the nuclear threat and avoid armed conflicts: “
Hope is not a policy, and, at present, there is no realistic path to a world free of nuclear weapons.”

Between the extremes of a counterforce strategy requiring thousands of nuclear weapons always on alert and an agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons, there lies a third course. Promoted by the U.S. Navy in the late 1950s, when its submarine-based missiles were too inaccurate to hit military targets, the strategy of minimum deterrence has lately gained strong support, even in some unexpected places.
In 2010 a group of high-ranking Air Force officials, including its chief of strategic planning, argued that the United States needed only 311 nuclear weapons to deter an attack. Any more would be overkill. The arsenal proposed by these Air Force strategists would contain
almost 200 fewer weapons than the one recommended by the National Resources Defense Council and the Federation of American Scientists, a pair of liberal groups that also support minimum deterrence.

Bob Peurifoy advocates a similar strategy. He considers himself a realist and thinks that a world free of nuclear weapons is unattainable. He would like the United States to get rid of its land-based missiles, take all its
weapons off alert, give up the notion that a counterforce strategy might work, and retain a few hundred ballistic missiles securely deployed on submarines. To avoid accidental launches and mistakes, the subs shouldn't be capable of firing their missiles quickly. And to dissuade foreign enemies from attacking the United States, Peurifoy would let them know in advance where America's warheads might land on their territory. That knowledge would deter any rational world leader. But
the problems with a strategy of minimum deterrence have changed little in the past fifty years. It cannot defend the United States against an impending attack. It can only kill millions of enemy civilians after the United States has already been attacked.

•   •   •

L
AUNCH
C
OMPLEX
374-7 was never rebuilt. The underground passages were disassembled. The land around it was cleared of debris. Toxic waste was pumped from the silo, and then the silo was filled with gravel and dirt. The Air Force returned the land to Ralph and Reba Jo Parish, from whom it had been taken through eminent domain. Seeing the place today, you would never think that one of the most destructive weapons ever built once lay beneath the ground there. Nature has reclaimed the site. It's covered with grass, surrounded by woods and farmland. A large mound covers the spot where the missile stood. The paved access road is now dirt. Quiet, peaceful, bucolic—it could not feel more removed from international diplomacy, Washington politics, nuclear strategy. The only hints of what happened there are patches of concrete overgrown with weeds and a few scattered pieces of metal, lying on the ground, that have been bent and deformed by tremendous heat.

I first heard about the accident at Damascus in the fall of 1999, while visiting Vandenberg Air Force Base. I was interested in the future of warfare in space, the plans to build laser beam, particle beam, and directed energy weapons. The Air Force Space Command invited me to watch the launch of a Titan II missile, and it seemed like an opportunity that shouldn't be missed. The payload of the missile was a weather satellite. During the long delay of the scheduled launch, I spoke to officers who'd served on missile combat crews. They told me Cold War stories and showed me footage of warheads arriving at the Kwajalein Test Site in the South Pacific. A Peacekeeper missile had been fired from Vandenberg at night, and as one warhead after another fell from the sky and landed precisely within their target circles, it was an oddly beautiful sight. They looked like shooting stars.

The evening before the Titan II launch, I rode an elevator to the top of the tower and got to see the missile up close. I could just about reach out and touch it. The Titan II seemed a living, breathing thing, attached to all sorts of cables and wires, like an angry patient about to be released from intensive care. The tower hummed with the sound of cooling units. Looking down the length of the missile, I could hardly believe that anyone would be brave enough and crazy enough to sit on top of it, like the Gemini astronauts did, and ride it into space.

The next morning I signed a waiver, promising not to sue the Air Force for any injuries, and received training in the use of a Scott Air-Pak. I carried the breathing apparatus in case the Titan II misfired on the pad. The officer who served as my host had never been allowed to stand so close to a launch. When the missile left the ground, you could feel it in your bones. The blast, the roar, the sight of the flames slowly lifting the Titan II upward—they suddenly affected me. They were more visceral and more powerful than any Cold War story. I had grown up in the 1970s hearing about missiles and warheads, throw weights and megatons, half believing that none of those weapons really worked, that the fears of nuclear Armageddon were overblown and based on some terrible fiction. The Titan II hesitated for a moment and then really took off, like a ten-story silver building disappearing into the sky. Within moments, it was gone, just a tail of flame somewhere over Mexico.