Command and Control (95 page)

about fourteen thousand strategic warheads and bombs, an increase of about 60 percent
:
The Reagan administration planned to raise the number of warheads from 8,800 to 14,000. Cited in ibid., p. xvi.

a “super-sudden first strike”
:
See McGeorge Bundy, “Common Sense and Missiles in Europe,”
Washington Post
, October 20, 1981.

the “highest priority element”
:
Quoted in Pearson,
WWMCCS: Evolution and Effectiveness,
p. 264.

“This system must be foolproof”
:
“Text of the President's Defense Policy Statement: ‘Our Plan' to ‘Strengthen and Modernize the Strategic Triad . . . ,”
Washington Post,
October 3, 1981.

greater “interoperability”
:
Statement of Donald C. Latham, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Communications, Command, Control and Intelligence), in “Strategic Force Modernization Programs,” Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces of the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, Ninety-seventh Congress, First Session, 1981, p. 239.

“to recognize that we are under attack”
:
Quoted in Bruce G. Blair,
Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), p. 264.

an unprecedented investment in command and control
:
Iklé understood, more than most officials at the Pentagon, the fundamental importance of the nuclear command-and-control system. Once again, a new administration was greeted by the news that the United States lacked the ability to control its strategic forces after a surprise attack by the Soviet Union. A study conducted in the spring of 1981 by Dr. James P. Wade, Jr., an undersecretary of defense, found that the command-and-control system could not assure “an effective initial response to a nuclear attack on the United States”; could not fight a protracted nuclear war; and could not guarantee the “survivability, endurability, or connectivity of the national command authority function.” The implications of the Wade study were, essentially, the same as those of WSEG R-50 more than twenty years earlier: the only nuclear war that the United States could hope to win would be one in which it launched first. The quotations in my account of the Wade study are not from the actual document. They come from a summary of it in a document recently obtained by the National Security Archive. See “A Historical Study of Strategic Connectivity, 1950–1981,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Special Historical Study, Historical Division, Joint Chiefs of Staff, July 1982 (
TOP SECRET
/declassified), NSA, pp. 64–65.

spending about $18 billion
:
Cited in John D. Steinbruner, “Nuclear Decapitation,”
Foreign Policy
, no. 45 (Winter 1981–2), p. 25.

an expansion of Project ELF
:
For details of the Navy's ambitious schemes, see Pearson,
WWMCCS: Evolution and Effectiveness
, pp. 287–89; and Lowell L. Klessig and Victor L. Strite,
The ELF Odyssey: National Security Versus Environmental Protection
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980).

buried six thousand miles of antenna, four to six
feet deep
:
The ELF antenna grid would have occupied 20,000 of Wisconsin's roughly 65,000 square miles. See Klessig and Strite,
ELF Odyssey,
p. 14.

the “continuity of government”
:
For a brief description of the new programs, spearheaded in part by Colonel Oliver North, see Thomas C. Reed,
At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), pp. 245–46.

Desmond Ball, an Australian academic, made a strong case
:
See Desmond Ball, “Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?,” Adelphi Paper #169, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981.

John D. Steinbruner . . . reached much the same conclusion
:
See Steinbruner, “Nuclear Decapitation.”

Bruce G. Blair, a former Minuteman officer
:
See Blair,
Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat.

Paul Bracken, a management expert
:
See Paul Bracken,
The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).

Daniel Ford, a former head of the Union of Concerned Scientists
:
See Daniel Ford,
The Button: The Pentagon's Strategic Command and Control System—Does It Work?
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).

“within bazooka range”
:
For the quote by a security expert, see Ford,
The Button
, p. 64.

“its low accuracy and its accident-proneness”
:
See “Strategic Force Modernization Programs,” p. 59.

on alerts for five months after his first contact with the Soviet embassy
:
See Richard Halloran, “Officer Reportedly Kept Job Despite Contact with Soviet,”
New York Times
, June 4, 1981.

“a major security breach”
:
Quoted in George Lardner, Jr., “Officer Says Cooke Lived Up to Immunity Agreement Terms,”
Washington Post
, September 9, 1981. In a legal case full of bizarre details, Cooke made a deal with the Air Force, confessed to the espionage, and received immunity from prosecution. At the time, the Air Force was more concerned about the possible existence of a Soviet spy ring than about the need to imprison this one young officer. But when it became clear that there was no Soviet spy ring and that Cooke had acted alone, the Air Force decided to prosecute him anyway. All of the charges against Cooke were subsequently dismissed by the U.S. Court of Military Appeals on the grounds of “prosecutorial misconduct.” See George Lardner, Jr., “Military Kills Lt. Cooke Case,”
Washington Post,
February 23, 1982, and “A Bargain Explained,”
Washington Post,
February 27, 1982.

Funding would not be provided for a new vapor detection system
:
See “Item 010: Toxic Vapor Sensors (Fixed and Portable)” in “Titan II Action Item Status Reports,” Headquarters, Strategic Air Command, August 1, 1982.

additional video cameras within the complex
:
The Air Force decided that the estimated $18 million cost of adding more cameras did “not justify the marginal benefits.” See “Item 0134: L/D TV Camera,” in ibid.

“modern nuclear safety criteria for abnormal environments”
:
The need to put “modern safety features” inside W-53 warheads had to be balanced against the cost: about $21.4 million for the remaining fifty-two Titan II missiles. Many of the missiles would be decommissioned before the work could be completed. And so none of the warheads were modified. They remained atop Titan II missiles for another six years. See “Item 090: Modify W-53,” in ibid.

“It's the dirt that does it”
:
Quoted in Ronald L. Soble, “Cranston Demands Official Justify View That U.S. Could Survive a Nuclear War,”
Los Angeles Times
, January 22, 1982.

membership in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament soon increased tenfold
:
Cited in Lawrence S. Wittner,
Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 131. Wittner is the foremost historian of the international effort to eliminate nuclear weapons.

A quarter of a million CND supporters
:
Cited in Leonard Downie, Jr., “Thousands in London Protest Nuclear Arms,”
Washington Post
, October 25, 1981.

In Bonn
,
a demonstration . . . also attracted a quarter of a million people
:
Cited in John Vinocur, “250,000 at Bonn Rally Assail U.S. Arms Policy,”
New York Times
, October 11, 1981.

“On the one hand, we returned to business as usual”
:
Jonathan Schell,
The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 149.

Carl Sagan conjured an even worse environmental disaster
:
Sagan became concerned about the atmospheric effects of nuclear war in 1982, and it seems almost quaint today—as global warming looms as a pending threat—that a generation ago Americans worried that the world might get dangerously cold. But the threat of a nuclear winter never went away. And recent calculations suggest that the detonation of fifty atomic bombs in urban areas would produce enough black carbon smoke to cause another “Little Ice Age.” For the summation of Sagan's work on the issue, see Carl Sagan and Richard Turco,
A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race
(New York: Random House, 1990). For the latest findings on the global environmental impact of a nuclear war, see Alan Robock, “Nuclear Winter Is a Real and Present Danger,”
Nature
, vol. 473 (May 19, 2011).

perhaps three quarters of a million people gathered in New York's Central Park
:
The estimates of the crowd varied, from more than 550,000 to about 750,000. See Paul L. Montgomery, “Throngs Fill Manhattan to Protest Nuclear Weapons,”
New York Times,
June 13, 1982; and John J. Goldman and Doyle McManus, “Largest Ever U.S. Rally Protests Nuclear Arms,”
Los Angeles Times,
June 13, 1982.

“the largest political demonstration in American history”
:
See Judith Miller, “Democrats Seize Weapons Freeze as Issue for Fall,”
New York Times,
June 20, 1982.

orchestrated by “KGB leaders” and “Marxist leaning 60's leftovers”
:
Quoted in Wittner,
Toward Nuclear Abolition
, p. 189.

about 70 percent . . . supported a nuclear freeze
:
Ibid., p. 177.

more than half worried
:
Cited in Frances FitzGerald,
Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War
(New York: Touchstone, 2001), p. 191.

one of the most dangerous years of the Cold War
:
In
The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
(New York: Doubleday, 2009), David E. Hoffman does a masterful job of conveying the threat that year, as an aging, paranoid Soviet leader faced a self-confident and seemingly bellicose American president. The events of 1983 are depicted in pages 54 to 100.
Robert M. Gates offers an insider's perspective; he was the deputy director for intelligence at the CIA that year. See “1983: The Most Dangerous Year,” a chapter
in
From the Shadows,
pp. 258–77.

code-named Operation RYAN
:
For another perspective on the events of 1983 and the KGB's role in them, see Benjamin B. Fischer, “A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare,” Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997.

the Reagan administration's top secret psychological warfare program
:
See “Cold War Conundrum”; and Peter Schweizer,
Victory: The Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994). As Fischer notes,
Victory
may not provide a convincing explanation for why the Soviet Union collapsed, but the book seems to give an accurate description of the Reagan administration's covert activities against the Soviets.

“the focus of evil in the modern world”
:
Quoted in Francis X. Clines, “Reagan Denounces Ideology of Soviet as ‘Focus of Evil,'”
New York Times
, March 9, 1983.

“Engaging in this is not just irresponsible”
: Quoted in Fischer, “Cold War Conundrum.”

“an act of barbarism” and a “crime against humanity”
:
Quoted in Flora Lewis, “Leashing His Fury, Reagan Surprises and Calms Allies,”
New York Times
, September 11, 1983.

alarms went off in an air defense bunker south of Moscow
: See Hoffman,
Dead Hand
, pp. 6–11.

rays of sunlight reflected off clouds
:
See David Hoffman, “‘I Had a Funny Feeling in My Gut'; Soviet Officer Faced Nuclear Armageddon,”
Washington Post,
February 10, 1999.

two million people in Europe joined protests
:
Cited in Joseph B. Fleming, “Anti-Missile Movement Vows to Fight On,” United Press International, October 23, 1983.

serious problems with the World Wide Military Command and Control System
:
See Pearson,
WWMCCS: Evolution and Effectiveness,
pp. 315-17; and “JTF Operations Since 1983,” George Stewart, Scott M. Fabbri, and Adam B. Siegel, CRM 94-42, Center for Naval Analyses, July 1994, pp. 23-31.

“a frustrated Army officer used his AT&T credit card”
:
“JTF Operations Since 1983,” p. 28.

Able Archer 83
:
See Gates,
From the Shadows,
pp. 270-73; Hoffman,
Dead Hand
, pp. 94-95; Fischer, “Cold War Conundrum.
”

“the KGB concluded that American forces”
:
The agent was Oleg Gordievsky. He worked not only for the KGB but also for British intelligence. His quote is from Fischer, “Cold War Conundrum.
”