Sleepwalking With the Bomb (9 page)

In 1934 the Japanese began breaking out of the ship size limits of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, which had limited, with a few grandfathered exceptions, single-ship tonnage to 35,000 and gun bore widths to 16 inches. Japan built the two largest battleships ever to ride the high seas: the 70,000-ton leviathans
Yamato
and
Musashi
. They carried nine 18.1-inch guns, the largest ever mounted on a ship; the guns’ recoil was so powerful that all nine could not be fired at once, lest the ship roll over. They could hurl a 3,200-pound projectile—a half-ton heavier than an American 16-inch shell—26 miles with unmatched accuracy.

Disarmament efforts fared no better with Nazi Germany. The June 18, 1935, Anglo-German Naval Treaty limited the German Navy to 35 percent of the British Royal Navy’s tonnage. But on July 1, 1936, the keel of the super battleship
Bismarck
, a 45,000-ton behemoth to be fitted with eight 15-inch guns, was laid. By September 1938—as British prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich proclaiming to his countrymen that he had achieved “peace in our time”—the
Bismarck
was complete to the upper deck level, and it was launched a few months later. The keel of her sister ship,
Tirpitz
, was laid in November 1936, and the 47,000-ton ship was launched in April 1939. Hitler denounced the treaty on April 28, 1939, having already swallowed up the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. In the event, neither the German nor Japanese super ships played a decisive role in maritime combat during the war.
⁶

World War II rendered ship size limits moot. Yet the prewar arms-control concepts endured—limits upon platform size (ships then, submarines and bombers today), explosive payload (shells then, bombs and warheads now), and finally sites (bases then, silos now). They would return to bedevil arms-control efforts after the war, because the complexity of modern strategic systems made setting appropriate benchmarks nearly impossible.

T
HE NEAR-NUCLEAR
miss of the Cuban Missile Crisis spurred renewed efforts to secure superpower disarmament. During arms negotiations between the U.S. and the USSR, much was made about the folly of adding yet more weapons to already gigantic stockpiles. Was their sole utility to “make the rubble bounce” after Armageddon? These talks were based upon what Western arms controllers presumed was a common interest with the USSR in reducing massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons and potential vulnerability to surprise attack.

The “rubble” metaphor was superficially appealing but misleading. A “bolt from the blue” attack could be totally successful (and thus inviting) if a country did not have enough armaments remaining to retaliate afterwards. (Recall the previous chapter’s discussion of why the ability to absorb a surprise first strike, with enough force left to retaliate, is so important.) The attacked country’s entire force, then, must incorporate a multiple of the requisite destructive retaliatory power needed. If, as some strategic planners feared early on, the Soviets in a best-case attack possibly could destroy 90 percent of America’s land-based ICBMs, half of America’s submarines sitting in port, and 90 percent of the bombers, the small portion that survived would have to cover all targets.
⁷

Pessimistic estimates presented to President Eisenhower were based in part on reconnaissance flights showing Soviet missiles being deployed; the United States estimated that the Soviets would deploy 100 ICBMs by 1960. At the time, both sides based missiles above ground, leaving them highly vulnerable.

The “nuclear strategic triad” doctrine held that each leg of the triad—land, sea, and air—must itself be able to accomplish full postattack retaliation, to guard against Russian breakthroughs that neutralized the other two legs. Such secure, survivable forces would remove any temptation the Soviets might feel to launch such an attack, thus strengthening deterrence. In other words, no one intended to “make the rubble bounce.”

In November 1969, the new Nixon administration met with the Soviets in Helsinki for the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, known by the acronym “SALT.” The talks were from the outset muddled by fundamental cultural differences in the way American and Russian negotiators approached their complex task. Henry Kissinger, who superintended the Nixon and Ford administration arms talks, explained the problem in his memoirs.

American negotiators ardently seek agreement, and thus look for ways to break deadlocks with initiatives, find some compromise. They even at times urge far-reaching concessions to reach a provisional accord, secure that other officials will oppose them and thus temper the final result. They continually seek to convince their opposite numbers of America’s good intentions, in hope of getting a reciprocal conciliatory gesture. Soviet negotiators were almost the polar opposite in approach and temperament. Their diplomacy “substitute[d] persistence for imagination.” They derived no reward for making proposals or concessions. They could sit rigid for years without any domestic pressure, and wait for the other side, under heavy domestic pressure, to give in. (So can Russian negotiators today. Neither their bargaining culture, nor ours, has changed.)

The SALT treaties followed the regnant doctrine of the day: mutual assured destruction—founded on the idea that holding mass populations hostage better preserved deterrence than protecting them by shelters or missile defense, given vast amounts of offensive weapons. The Nixon administration enshrined MAD in SALT I, via the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The ABM Treaty—which the Senate ratified 88 votes to 2—sharply limited the deployment of missiles designed to intercept and destroy other missiles in flight. Of the many objections to this treaty, three were most salient:

1. The vast throw-weight (payload deliverable over distance capability) of Russia’s missiles, concentrated in highly accurate, land-based ICBMs.

2. The inability to verify actual numbers of Russian warheads.

3. The limits the treaty placed on missile defense.

Russia had deployed huge missiles—far larger than any in the American arsenal. The missiles possessed the requisite combination of accuracy and yield so that they could plausibly destroy large numbers of American missiles inside their silos. Russia’s monster SS-18 ICBM had seven to eight times the payload capacity of America’s mainstay Minuteman III ICBM. Its multiwarhead SS-19 missile, taking advantage of loose treaty language, replaced a far smaller (and less accurate) single warhead missile (SS-11); its monster SS-9 missile was topped with a 25-megaton warhead, the largest ever deployed on an ICBM. The SS-18 was the 1970s equivalent (on a vastly more destructive scale) of Japan’s leviathan battleships armed with 18-inch guns. Just as those guns could hurl a heavier shell farther than a U.S. 16-inch bore, so the throw-weight of Russia’s largest missiles was superior to anything in America’s forces.

The Soviets refused to consent to on-site inspections, and would not even tell the United States how many warheads and missiles they had or confirm U.S. estimates. So the treaty was based upon our counting what could be verified—silos in the ground, detectable by surveillance satellite cameras.
⁸
As to things that could not be seen, like warheads inside a missile nose cone, the United States devised “counting rules”—based upon the observed size of nose cones—to apply limits.
⁹
SALT I limited
launchers
, not missiles or warheads, for precisely this reason. A complex technical and strategic calculus underlay judgments as to the balance between offensive and defensive systems.
¹⁰

As to missile defense, SALT I limited each side to radar to protect one major city and one ICBM base, a compromise designed so that the Russians could keep their primitive systems protecting Moscow and one missile base. (The United States briefly deployed an ABM under treaty rules, but scrapped it later in the 1970s.) The treaty decreed that ABM radars could be deployed only on the periphery of the country. This was to prevent them from being used for the “battle management” of a national missile defense system—that is, for the countrywide detection and interception of incoming hostile objects (and damage assessment after a hit). In the 1980s the Soviets deployed a massive battle-management radar installation in central Russia, in violation of the treaty, but denied it until the Cold War ended. SALT I’s Standing Consultative Commission regulating treaty implementation was a two-party affair with no final outside arbiter (none existed). Thus the U.S. could not force the Soviets to comply.

Disenchantment with SALT I did not stop the arms-control process—the new Carter administration unilaterally cancelled the strategic B-1 heavy bomber in 1977.
¹¹
The next year, Carter did away with the proposed battlefield weapon known colloquially as the “neutron bomb.” Formally termed the “enhanced radiation, reduced blast” warhead, it combined intense neutron radiation with relatively limited explosive and heat energy. Covering a small area—typically, within a quarter-mile radius of the bomb’s low-altitude airburst detonation, half the physically destructive radius of the Hiroshima bomb—the highly lethal neutron radiation penetrated tanks and buildings, killing personnel inside (or outside) within hours. As any tank battle in Germany would have to take place close to heavily populated cities, German chancellor Helmut Schmidt had staked his prestige on the deployment of this weapon, and was enraged at Carter’s unilateral cancellation of it.
¹²

The Carter administration signed the SALT II treaty in June 1979, essentially freezing new missile development at levels that left the Soviet heavy-missile arsenal intact. Its ratification—already an acrimonious subject in the Senate—became impossible when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve.

T
HE ADVENT
of the Reagan administration in 1981 bid fair to change the arms-control picture. Reagan had campaigned against the SALT II treaty as a symbol of the deteriorating military balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Despite never ratifying the treaty, as president he informally adhered to its limits, for want of congressional support to build beyond them. In Paul Nitze’s view, by not seeking Senate ratification of SALT II Reagan allowed future arms talks to begin from scratch, rather than be treated as a continuation of SALT II and thus bound by SALT II’s foundation principles.

While a Republican Senate from 1981 to 1986 gave President Reagan support for new weapon systems, a Democratic House of Representatives and the tug of arms-control politics severely limited his options. The House shrunk the domestically unpopular MX “Peacekeeper” program—200 missiles with 10 warheads each, shuttling on railroad tracks between 4,600 launching points in vast western rural tracts—down to 50 missiles in existing silos. Russia could deploy large numbers of such land mobile missiles because its populace had no say in such matters. Strong domestic political opposition—NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard—made mobile missile ICBMs politically toxic in America.

Ronald Reagan dramatically changed arms-control direction. On March 23, 1983, he called for the development of a comprehensive missile defense system to protect the entire population—the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or “Star Wars” to its critics)—in a decisive rejection of MAD. In truth, even though MAD had been public-official declaratory doctrine since 1967, no president ever fully accepted it. Richard Nixon attempted to deploy missile defense but critics crippled the system, which was finally done in by SALT I. Gerald Ford’s years saw James Schlesinger’s tenure as secretary of defense, during which Schlesinger pushed for “limited nuclear options” short of all-out retaliation. In effect, this was a refinement of Kennedy’s flexible response doctrine, seeking options between all-out mutual suicide and total surrender.

Even dovish Jimmy Carter authorized targeting leadership cadres, who were exempt from targeting under a pure MAD doctrine.
¹³
Carter’s defense secretary, Harold Brown, endorsed limited nuclear options, telling Congress that even if it were likely that an initial nuclear exchange would escalate to all-out nuclear war, “it would be the height of folly to put the United States in a position in which uncontrolled escalation would be the only course we could follow.” But these refinements were easily swamped in sound-bite public political debate, and thus stayed in the shadows.

Reagan—unafraid to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and to trumpet “we win, they lose” as his Cold War philosophy—supported stringent high-technology embargoes, and even sabotage, against the Soviet Union. In 1982, with the help of “Farewell,” a rare high-level mole placed by the French inside the top Soviet leader circle, the U.S. arranged for defective computer chips to be sent to Russia for use in its biggest natural gas pipeline. The malicious software in the defective chips caused system malfunctions that led to a massive conventional explosion—at three kilotons, more powerful than small nuclear devices—that destroyed key parts of the pipeline and set Moscow back years.

Reagan formed his view of the Soviets in the early years of the Cold War, which Brezhnev reinforced with a memorable speech in 1973 at a major Communist party conclave in Prague. The Soviet leader predicted:

We are achieving with détente what our predecessors have been unable to achieve using the mailed fist.… Trust us comrades, for by 1985, as a consequence of what we are now achieving with détente, we will have achieved most of our objectives in Western Europe.… A decisive shift in the correlation of forces will be such that come 1985, we will be able to extend our will wherever we need to.