Sleepwalking With the Bomb (12 page)

This march towards nuclear weapons status—the most dangerous proliferation development in the post–Cold War era—highlights the importance of a Third Lesson of nuclear-age history: R
EVOLUTIONARY POWERS CANNOT BE CONTAINED; THEY MUST BE DEFEATED.

S
ITUATED ON
the eastern side of the volatile Mideast, Iran menaces traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz, 34 miles long and at its narrowest (“choke-point”) 21 miles wide, yet deep enough to handle super-tankers. Through its waters pass 15.5 million barrels of crude oil daily, about one-sixth of global daily oil consumption. Iran has threatened to close off the waterway, which could plunge the global economy into a deep recession. Were Iran a nuclear power, military options against it would virtually vanish.

The shah of Iran pursued a commercial nuclear power program in the 1950s, under President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace plan. But few doubted that the shah desired a nuclear weapons capability; the program was suspended when the shah’s regime fell in early 1979. Iran began a clandestine nuclear program in 1984. The Nonproliferation Treaty allows peaceful nuclear activity—commercial power and research, provided the country accepts safeguards and monitoring.
A clandestine program makes sense only if its objective is to develop nuclear weapons
.

According to investigative reporter Kenneth Timmerman, by 1991 nuclear-club member China was aiding Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran. One Iranian official publicly stated that Iran “was keeping its options open.” The feckless efforts to confront Iran over its nuclear program were perhaps best summed up that year by a comment from a German foreign ministry official. He responded to the Iranian official’s comment: “If you are a piano player, keeping your options open means you are practicing.”

The apparently successful 2010 Stuxnet worm—a malicious self-replicating program that spreads itself, computer to computer, throughout a network—inflicted considerable mechanical damage at key Iranian nuclear facilities. It cost Iran’s uranium enrichment program an estimated year. This cyber-sabotage was presumably the work of either Israel or the U.S. (or both).

But Iran is closing in on nuclear weapons capability. Specific and reliable intelligence as to when it will be ready to cross the nuclear threshold is nearly impossible to acquire. Those whose job it is to determine this have revised, even reversed, their assessments. The historical record shows that more often than not intelligence fails to predict when closed societies will acquire nuclear capability or test a nuclear device, the task being an exceedingly difficult one under the best of circumstances (see
chapter 9
).

I
RAN’S DETERMINATION
to develop nuclear weapons is the most dangerous proliferation development in the post–Cold War era (Pakistan’s ascendancy to nuclear membership was all but complete by 1984). Complicating efforts to confront the threat posed by a nuclear Iran are two factors:

1. Lack of a fully effective missile defense screen for Western nations within the potential reach of an Iranian arsenal.

2. Lack of confidence that Iran’s leaders will be as effectively deterred from starting a nuclear war as was the Soviet Union during the Cold War (and as are Russia and China today).

The U.S. failure to deploy an effective missile defense against a small-power attack is a product of superpower arms control. Arms-control constraints began with offensive missile systems. That approach changed in 1972, when the Antiballistic Missile Treaty severely limited missile defense design and deployment in the United States. Defensive system design since then has aimed not for the best products that technology and innovation can produce. Rather, system design has been governed by the maximum technological result deemed permissible under strategic arms-control principles as they have been narrowly interpreted since 1972. The result has been systems of perilously stunted capability.

The risks of a nuclear Iran getting into a war can be illustrated by historic examples: the two world wars and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. World War I shows how great powers can be drawn into utterly unanticipated suicidal carnage for failure to understand the real risks of a major conflict. World War II is an example of a war started in part because of efforts to appease rather than confront tyrants with Napoleon’s ambition for conquest, though far more brutal than Napoleon. The Cuban episode shows how a great-power gamble can lead to the brink of total catastrophe. All these elements can be in play if Iran goes nuclear.

The Two World Wars

Asked once how a world war would start, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who united Germany during his long late nineteenth-century tenure, is reputed to have quipped: “some damn fool thing in the Balkans.” On June 28, 1914, the assassination of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand by Bosnian Serb ultranationalist Gavrilo Princip set in motion a series of events that in five weeks triggered the Great War.

First, in Germany, France, and Russia, poisonous ultranationalist sentiments incited popular support for a war expected to last at most a few weeks. The same sentiments drove the conflict even after the calamtous carnage of the opening months alerted leaders to the monstrous destructive power at their command.

Second, individual leaders—Winston Churchill notably excepted
¹⁷
—lacked meaningful understanding of the destructive power of emerging military technologies, especially the artillery barrage and machine-gun fire. The resulting futile sanguinary conflict was prolonged by the public’s desire to see revenge exacted from the enemy for inflicting mass casualties. Commanders shockingly indifferent to the fate of their subordinates sent them in endless charges across no-man’s-land moonscapes, unable to imagine anything beyond premodern notions of martial spirit to counter massive firepower.

Third, and perhaps most significant of all, technologies of destruction had simply outrun technologies of command, communications, and control. Once troop trains left their home depots, those authorizing departure could not reverse their passage. Between the trenches messengers sprinted on foot or rode on horseback, as had been done for thousands of years. There were limited telegraph lines suitable for fixed installation for intermittent communications with battlefield commanders, and virtually no radio communications to allow true real-time communication.

A fourth factor—the intense revulsion over war following the devastation of World War I—is also instructive for Western nations looking towards the Middle East today. The failure to control arms during battle led to attempts to control arms via diplomacy, and to an international organization, the League of Nations, charged with keeping peace. Those attempts were trampled under the jackboots of totalitarian Axis tyrants who armed for and ultimately started wars, while the memories of modern war’s grisly toll paralyzed the leaders of the free world.

1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis

The most worrisome problem posed by hostile states—Islamic or otherwise—is the mental state of their leaders and the fear that deterrence may not work against millenarian zealots. During the Cold War the Soviet leaders were, in the main, rational calculators. While ruthless adversaries, they were acutely cognizant of the potential consequences of starting a nuclear war. Even Joseph Stalin, paranoid mass murderer of tens of millions, confined his strategic goal to victory without fighting a war.

Later Soviet leaders were similarly deterred. Leonid Brezhnev seriously considered a preemptive nuclear strike against China in 1969, when the two countries engaged in a series of bloody clashes along their Ussuri River border. At the time Russia’s arsenal vastly exceeded that of China, whose nascent program had produced perhaps 25 to 40 bombs. But Brezhnev decided to pass. Had Brezhnev struck China first, his chance to get a strategic arms pact with America would have evaporated. America’s immense arsenal troubled him more than China’s relatively puny one at the time.
¹⁸

Once indeed the world did come to the very brink of a shooting nuclear war, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Let us return to 1962, and see what context this story can give us to apply to Iran today. That August, U.S. reconnaissance planes discovered that Russian construction teams were placing intermediate-range ballistic missiles at bases in the Cuban countryside. In response, the Kennedy administration imposed a naval “quarantine” (blockading contraband supplies only) around the island.

On October 15, Kennedy convened an executive committee of 13 “wise men” to suggest ways to resolve the crisis. Their firmly shared belief was that it was unacceptable to have Russian missiles armed with nuclear warheads sitting 90 miles south of Florida. One of them, Paul Nitze, wrote later that at the outset nearly all “ExComm” members—including the president and his brother Robert—believed that military action to remove the missiles was almost inevitable. In his Cuban Missile Crisis history,
Nine Minutes to Midnight,
Michael Dobbs superbly described what happened next.

On October 27, which the White House dubbed “Black Saturday,” things nearly spun out of control. A U.S. U-2 spy plane was downed and its space-suited pilot killed, by a Soviet surface-to-air missile at Castro’s orders. Another U-2 pilot on an Arctic surveillance mission was tricked by an intense aurora borealis (“Northern Lights”) into taking a wrong turn, penetrating 300 miles into Soviet airspace. That spy plane eluded Russian interceptors and by a major miracle made it back to friendly territory. This was not a true fail-safe scenario (inability to recall in time a hostile plane carrying bombs), as the plane was unarmed, but a shoot down would hardly have helped resolve the crisis.

Meanwhile, a U.S. destroyer was dropping depth charges to force a quarantine-breaking Russian diesel submarine to surface. Unbeknownst to the destroyer crew, the sub was armed with a 10-kiloton nuclear-tipped torpedo, some 70 percent as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Its commander was under strict orders not to fire a nuclear device without direct authorization from Moscow, but only by surfacing could the sub exchange messages with the authorities. But after being tracked by U.S. ships continuously—and being forced to stay below despite tropical conditions inside the sub—the Soviet commander was ready to fire his nuclear torpedo. His crew prevailed upon him to surface instead, noting the lack of authorization from Moscow. The sub surfaced to find itself in the midst of four U.S. destroyers. Moscow ordered the sub to depart the area, and the U.S. did not try to stop its departure. Had the submarine commander used his nuclear torpedo in 1962, it is inconceivable that Kennedy would have responded with an all-out attack over the loss of one of four small ships. It is hard to credit assertions that the USSR would have chosen mutual annihilation either.

Unknown to Kennedy and his advisers then was how many nuclear warheads and types of nuclear-capable delivery systems were on the island, or what command and control arrangements were in place between the Soviet and Cuban strategic forces. Dobbs writes (surely accurately) that Cuba’s nuclear arsenal “far exceeded the worst nightmares of anyone in Washington.” Specifically, deployed or en route to Cuba by ship were no less than 158 warheads. Ninety were already on the island, including 36 one-megaton warheads that could be hurled almost 1,300 miles and 36 14-kiloton warheads (Hiroshima-size) mounted on small tactical nuclear missiles. An estimated 150,000 American troops were to be sent to take the island, and 1,397 separate targets had been marked for destruction as part of the invasion. The Russians were prepared to send tactical bombers carrying Hiroshima-size A-bombs to annihilate any major invasion force.

Even without nuclear missile strikes on American soil, the instant carnage that would have been inflicted by the invasion force alone—by some 45,000 Soviets armed with atomic weapons, plus a much larger volunteer Cuban contingent—would have been the worst in American military history. The invasion force had the potential to suffer in a single day the death toll of Americans killed by enemy fire in the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

En route on ships were 68 warheads, including two dozen for ballistic missiles, which could deliver one megaton 2,800 miles away (roughly the distance from Havana to Seattle). Khrushchev recalled these to Russia—weapon security on Cuba was dicey. The island heat made storage hotter than was safe for the warheads; accidental megaton-level ground detonation was a serious possibility. Without trigger locks, most nuclear weapons on Cuba could be released by the local commander—in some cases, a lieutenant—ignoring orders to the contrary from Moscow. Had an invasion come, as one Russian former soldier stationed in Cuba then put it, “You have to understand the psychology of the military person. If you are being attacked, why shouldn’t you reciprocate?” Ironically, the minimal level of perimeter and site security at the Bejucal nuclear storage bunker led CIA analysts to conclude that the facility did not house nuclear weapons.

Things were better, but far from secure, on the U.S. side. Pilots had unilateral release discretion for nuclear-armed air-to-air missiles, designed to vaporize strategic bomber squadrons. During the course of the 1950s and 1960s, several nuclear-armed strategic bombers crashed. One was carrying a pair of hydrogen bombs, each able to wipe out a major city. A crash cannot detonate a modern nuclear bomb, but such events are extremely dangerous nonetheless, in that any explosion can scatter highly radioactive nuclear material.

America’s fighter jets also could carry nuclear bombs. A nuclear-armed F-106 interceptor, armed with the MB-1 Genie air-to-air missile (a one-kiloton device that could be armed and fired at the pilot’s sole discretion), had a near mishap taking off. Designed to destroy all enemy planes within a quarter-mile radius, it was called by one pilot “the dumbest weapons system ever purchased.” F-102 interceptors had similar armament, and F-100 Super Sabres based in Europe carried hydrogen bombs to drop inside Russia. A young Navy pilot named John McCain sat in his A-4D Skyhawk jet on the aircraft carrier
Enterprise
, awaiting orders to drop A-bombs on selected Cuban targets.