Sleepwalking With the Bomb (7 page)

A properly designed force, Wohlstetter wrote, could increase what strategists call “crisis stability”: the ability of a nuclear state to ride out an attack would obviate the need to launch missiles instantly—either during a crisis, or upon (potentially fallible) warning of an attack, or during the attack itself—before damage assessment has been done. In contrast, forces vulnerable to a surprise attack would leave leaders with a “use or lose” proposition in times of extreme tension between nuclear-armed powers, encouraging them to fire when otherwise they might not do so.

Herman Kahn attempted to bring nuclear strategy to the educated lay pubic with his massive tome,
On Thermonuclear War
(1960). In it Kahn pointed out that in the early 1950s as few as one dozen well-placed Russian nuclear bombs could have wiped out America’s tiny and vulnerable surface-based arsenal. In event of war America’s B-29s were to fly to Fort Hood and get their A-bombs—after completing paperwork!—then fly to New England bases, and from there head to Russia. Kahn’s provocative arguments stirred up considerable controversy, with people recoiling at his analytical treatment of horrific prospects. In
Thinking about the Unthinkable
(1962), Kahn tried to explain why the issue could not be avoided: dangers do not disappear just because one ignores them; on the contrary, they may increase.

But the lay public was not getting its information about nuclear weapons and strategy from Wohlstetter or Kahn. They were reading various popular nuclear-war-themed books, at least five of which were written in the six years from Sputnik to the Cuban Missile Crisis. These include Peter Bryant’s 1958 novel,
Red Alert
, the source material for the acclaimed 1964 Stanley Kubrick black comedy
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.
³
However, amid the exaggerations of popular fiction, some fictional assertions were close to the truth. The cliché that pushing one button could start a war by launching strategic weapons was true of the Soviet Union at the time of
Strangelove
. That soon changed. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet leadership made intensive efforts to reduce the risk of accidental war, and, starting in 1967 a series of upgrades were put into place. The U.S. had strict controls on arming most nuclear weapons from the start.
⁴

Strangelove
features a secret Russian “doomsday device” that, upon a U.S. attack, automatically triggers an all-out Russian nuclear counter-strike. No such automatic system existed. However, two decades later, the Soviets built a semiautomatic system, known as “Dead Hand,” in which a small cadre of duty officers, sheltered in a deep underground bunker, could decide to launch an all-out retaliatory strike. Dead Hand was tested late in 1984 and activated January 1, 1985.

D
ECADES BEFORE
Dead Hand (and years before
Strangelove
) the Kennedy administration thought the Dulles policy—of all-out nuclear response to any kind of Soviet attack—unrealistic, and sought a more credible deterrent. “Flexible response” became the order of the day: the options ranged from conventional forces only to battlefield nuclear use to strategic nuclear use. Instead of making a threat of all-out war that might well not be believed, flexible response enabled the U.S. to decide what level of force would be needed on a case-by-case basis.

The Western powers had agreed never to launch a nuclear “first strike” but retained the option of “first use” of nuclear weapons given a conflict already under way. That was essential to prevent the Soviets from overrunning Western Europe by sheer weight of numbers. As Winston Churchill put it in 1948:

Nothing stands between Europe today and complete subjugation to Communist tyranny but the atomic bomb in American possession.… What do you suppose would be the position this afternoon if it had been Communist Russia instead of free enterprise America which had created the atomic weapon? Instead of being a somber guarantee of peace and freedom it would have become an irresistible method of human enslavement.

Proof of this was provided in 1948, at the outset of the Berlin Airlift. President Truman let word leak that U.S. bombers capable of carrying A-bombs were deployed to Britain. Duly warned, Stalin dared not shoot down Allied planes dropping supplies to Berliners.

The first test of the Kennedy administration’s resolve came right away. In April of 1961 the infamous “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba was easily crushed by the forces of the charismatic revolutionary Fidel Castro. At a crucial moment during the operation, Kennedy lost his nerve and abandoned the Cuban exiles that had landed on the beach. They were slaughtered or imprisoned by Castro’s forces.

Only six weeks after this embarrassing failure in Cuba came another test, a summit in Vienna with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to discuss divided Berlin. U.S. intelligence described the Soviet premier as a “chronic, optimistic opportunist” with “resourcefulness, audacity, a good sense of political timing and showmanship, and a touch of the gambler’s instinct.” Khrushchev had survived Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s and the power struggle after Stalin died; he denounced Stalin in his landmark 1956 “Secret Speech” and consolidated his grip on power. The summit was to have fateful consequences.

Author Frederick Kempe, in his magisterial
Berlin 1961
, recounts how nuclear risks played a crucial role in the Berlin Crisis, from run-up to conclusion and thereafter.

At 2 a.m. on the first day of 1960, late into a Kremlin New Year’s Eve party, Khrushchev had cut loose with a drunken tirade in which he threatened to start World War III if he did not get his way on Berlin, scaring the wits out of U.S. ambassador Llewellyn Thompson. Khrushchev boasted that he had 30 nuclear weapons aimed at France, and 50 each aimed at West Germany and Britain, plus a “secret” number targeting the United States. Six hydrogen bombs could destroy Britain, Khrushchev told the British ambassador six months later, and nine could destroy France. “Berlin,” said the notoriously earthy Khrushchev on an equally diplomatic visit to West Germany, “is the testicles of the West. Each time I give them a yank, they holler.”

At that point, East Germans were crossing the border into West Berlin—and on into West Germany—by the thousands daily, and the Soviets wanted to seal off this access. West Berlin, 200 miles inside East Germany and connected to the rest of West Germany by only a single highway, would be easy to blockade. That the Potsdam Treaty guaranteed the four occupying powers—the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—full right of access to the whole city mattered little to Khrushchev or to the East German dictator, Walter Ulbricht, who was seeing his country’s population shrinking daily.

West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and French president Charles de Gaulle wanted Kennedy to guarantee that if necessary to stop a Russian takeover of Berlin, the U.S. would escalate to nuclear war. But Kennedy told de Gaulle he understood why France sought an independent nuclear force—the French leader had earlier said that he did not believe the U.S. would sacrifice New York for Paris or Berlin. Former secretary of state Dean Acheson, a close adviser of Kennedy’s, was convinced that a U.S. threat to use nuclear weapons against the Soviets over the status of Berlin might not suffice to deter Khrushchev. Famed columnist Walter Lippmann interviewed Khrushchev before the Vienna summit. “[T]here are no such stupid statesmen in the West to unleash a war in which hundreds of millions would perish” over the status of Berlin, the Soviet premier told the columnist. “Such idiots have not yet been born.”

On June 1, two days before the meeting in Vienna, Kennedy had told his aides it was “silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a reunified Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunified. But we’re committed to that agreement, and so are the Russians, so we can’t let them back out of it.” During the summit, Kennedy raised the prospect of miscalculation leading to nuclear war, but the Soviet dictator brushed it aside contemptuously: “All I ever hear … is that damned word ‘miscalculation!’… [W]e will not start a war by mistake.… You ought to take that word ‘miscalculation’ and bury it in cold storage and never use it again.”

Khrushchev threatened war if he did not get his way, and convincingly suggested his indifference to the devastating toll a nuclear exchange would take. Kennedy yielded, allowing Khrushchev to treat East Berlin as if it were Soviet territory. The result, beginning on the night of August 13, 1961, was the sudden, swift erection of the Berlin Wall, which virtually shut down cross-border traffic. The Soviets’ plan, at least as understood by Bobby Kennedy, the president’s brother and attorney general, was to “break our will in Berlin [so] that we will never be good for anything else and they will have won the battle in 1961.… Their plan is … to terrorize the world into submission.”

Kennedy’s advisers put to him a graduated plan for the August 1961 Berlin showdown. If the Soviets were not stopped by allied conventional forces, the U.S. would consider three nuclear options: a demonstration shot to establish will to use such weapons, a limited use on the battlefield, and all-out general war. A top Kennedy defense official, Roswell Gilpatric, warned in a speech that the U.S. would not allow itself to be defeated over Berlin. At least one senior American official, arms negotiator Paul Nitze, believed Berlin more dangerous than Cuba.

Kennedy had designated U.S. General Lucius Clay to command the Berlin crisis with White House supervision. Clay unilaterally sent forces up the Berlin access road, daring the Soviets to prevent their entry into Berlin. Exceeding his orders, Clay also sent tanks to the Berlin Wall, where they confronted Soviet tanks a few hundred yards away across the dividing line. No shots were fired.

The confrontation at the “Checkpoint Charlie” crossing point took place with Soviet forces under a first-ever nuclear alert. In the end, Khrushchev succeeded, and the status of Berlin was changed, with access to the eastern sector cut off despite the postwar treaty. Kennedy told a senior aide, Kenny O’Donnell, that only if the freedom of all Western Europe were at stake would he risk nuclear Armageddon. The Wall stayed, undercutting stern U.S. warnings over Berlin. The day the Wall went up Kennedy stated: “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

Khrushchev took what proved to be the wrong lesson from Berlin. He told Soviet officials: “I know for certain, that Kennedy doesn’t have … the courage to stand up to a serious challenge.” In September 1962 the earthy Soviet dictator told interior secretary Stewart Udall, “It’s been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy. Now we can swat your ass.” He told his son Sergei that over Cuba Kennedy “would make a fuss, make more of a fuss, then agree.”

That the subsequent 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis ended with neither an all-out war nor a city-trade was dismissed as a lucky accident by many observers. Luck was indeed involved, but so were the two sober leaders Kennedy and Khrushchev, both wounded on wartime battlefields and bereft of family members killed in combat. It was Cuban dictator Fidel Castro who asked Moscow to launch an all-out nuclear strike. Moscow warned Fidel that Cuba would be made to disappear—American B-47 bombers based in Florida during the crisis carried 20-megaton H-bombs, a single one of which would have erased Havana. Castro was not moved. Seething with hatred of the United States as his main tormentor, he wanted the strike launched anyway. In 2010, wiser at age 84, Castro admitted that he had made a mistake in urging that contingent course of action in 1962.

In reality, while accidental war was chillingly possible during the Cold War, the superpower leaders were too sober to deliberately launch a nuclear strike. During the Cuban Missile crisis a Russian submarine commander almost launched a nuclear torpedo to sink a U.S. destroyer that was trying to force his diesel sub to surface, using depth charges. Had he done do, does anyone really think that Kennedy would have launched an all-out nuclear strike at the Soviet Union, in the act dooming more than 100 million Americans to incineration? However, fifty years later, as newer powers join the nuclear club, with some possibly led by hotheads like the young Castro, the risk of what Herman Kahn called “spasm war” will grow.

A
FTER THE
close shave of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States turned towards arms control. But Kennedy’s assassination and the escalation of the Vietnam War delayed any action until June 1967, when, in Glassboro, New Jersey, President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin laid the final political groundwork for negotiating superpower arms limitation agreements. The Soviet Union’s August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, however, again derailed such efforts, and for the remainder of LBJ’s administration. Tanks rumbling through Prague provided poor political video to accompany simultaneous arms talks.

The 1967 U.S.-Soviet summit, in the midst of the Vietnam War, coincided with a remarkable decision made by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: freezing the U.S. nuclear arsenal at 1967 numerical levels. In a speech in San Francisco in September of that year, McNamara presented his “assured destruction” doctrine. The McNamara view assumed that each side would deliberately hold its own civilian population hostage to the other side’s offensive forces. Deterring a nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies was “the cornerstone of our strategic policy,” he explained:

We do this by maintaining a highly reliable ability to inflict unacceptable damage upon any single aggressor or combination of aggressors at any time during the course of a strategic nuclear exchange, even after absorbing a surprise first strike. This can be defined as our assured-destruction capability.