Annihilation from Within

by Fred Charles Iklé

  In any event, I felt the workings of deterrence were becoming a rather crowded field of inquiry, and that it might be more useful to explore the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe that deterrence could not prevent. Might a nuclear weapon be detonated accidentally, or a missile launched because of an unauthorized act? With the help of RAND’s weapons experts, I was able to demonstrate that in many situations just one person (with authorized access) could trigger an unauthorized detonation, either “by accident” or “by design”—however much the design was conceived in madness. Together with Gerald Aronson, a brilliant psychiatrist who consulted for RAND, I reviewed then-current procedures for selecting personnel with access to nuclear weapons, as well as medical statistics on the occurrence and types of dangerous mental disorders among active military personnel. Aronson and I concluded that existing personnel procedures could not prevent mentally unstable individuals from gaining access to nuclear controls. Special personnel screening would help, we suggested, but it could not guarantee complete protection. Hence our recommendation: that two people always be in charge of the truly critical controls, and that coded safety locks be placed on all weapons and missiles exposed to the risk of unauthorized launch.

  RAND endorsed these findings, and I was sent to Washington to brief a sizable audience of Air Force generals. As a young researcher at my first high-level Pentagon briefing, I delivered my rather simple message with trembling knees. But the next day, General Curtis LeMay, then Vice Chief of the Air Force, had heard about my study and asked for it. General LeMay is justly famous for having built the U.S. Strategic Air Command into the world’s most formidable nuclear deterrent; yet he also became known for his injudicious pugnacity regarding the use of nuclear weapons. We at RAND expected him to oppose locks that might slow down his use of his weapons. Yet we learned that LeMay had commanded a blizzard of actions. He ordered the Air Force to adopt our recommended personnel screening procedures and the two-man rule for critical nodes. He also urged the nuclear laboratories to work on the coded locks we advocated, and prompted the Army, Navy, and Defense Department installations to take similar steps. My memory insists on placing this experience in the “success” column of my life’s ledger.7

  The unauthorized use of nuclear weapons is not the only way in which a cataclysm might be initiated by accident. Although the United States deployed thousands of nuclear missiles that could be launched almost instantly—in a single salvo—some influential missile experts feared the enemy could destroy our whole force before it got off the ground. Accordingly, they urged that the “retaliatory” salvo ought to be launched upon receipt of warning that an enemy attack had been started—the “warning” in this case being an interpretation of radar screens and perhaps other signals that an attack appeared to be on its way. Many advocates of this perilous “launch-on-warning” policy misrepresented it as arms control. They argued that the United States and Soviet Union would be condemned to an indefinite arms race unless the situation was “stabilized” by threats of mutual assured destruction—which became known as MAD—meaning each side could instantly inflict devastating retaliation and thus always deter an attack.8

  The doctrine held that (1) defenses against missiles had to be banned lest they prevent retaliation, and (2) each side had to keep its missiles poised for instantaneous launch lest they might be destroyed on the ground. This double-barreled position—“yes” to launch-on-warning, “no” to missile defense—became the accepted dogma for quite a few liberal politicians.9 I am convinced both ideas are deeply flawed.

  At the time these arguments were gaining currency, I was Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1973–1976) and could use my inside-the-government position to stress the danger of launch-on-warning. Shortly before President Nixon nominated me to head the agency, I had published an article on this danger.10 (The article almost cost me Senate confirmation because it had somewhat unflatteringly quoted an endorsement of launch-on-warning by Senator William Fulbright, then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.) I had further encounters with this issue when I served President Ronald Reagan as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 1981 till 1988. One of my areas of responsibility in support of Defense Secretary Weinberger was nuclear strategy. During those years in the Pentagon, I learned a good deal more about the far-flung U.S. command-and-launch system and its complex interactions with what the Soviets were doing. Bruce Blair has written compelling warnings about these risks of accidental nuclear war.11 I was appalled to learn how close the Carter administration came to relying on launch-on-warning procedures as an acceptable way to make mutual deterrence more “stable.” And I became more convinced than ever that my earlier condemnation of launch-on-warning was prescient.

  We must keep in mind that this dangerous Cold War legacy is still with us: highly destructive U.S. and Russian missiles remain capable of being launched within minutes. Over the years, there have been false U.S. radar signals indicating a Soviet nuclear attack, errors in the use of critical computers (illustrated by the mistaken Pentagon warning in 1980 of an incoming Soviet missile attack), and more hidden problems of unauthorized acts. Dangers have surfaced even from routine maintenance procedures (illustrated by the Chernobyl accident). In 1995, a bizarre incident occurred in Moscow when President Boris Yeltsin reacted with public bluster to an innocent Norwegian missile used for weather research.

  Lastly, there is a persistent disconnect between, on the one hand, the specialists who know how to design and maintain different nuclear weapon systems, and on the other, the authority to examine the overall system in its entirety and, if needed, to order remedial action. The few most senior officials who would have the authority to look into every facet of this far-flung system have neither the time nor technical understanding to do so. But a review commission of subordinates large enough to include all the required expertise is unlikely to get full access to every piece of this secretive domain. To my knowledge, the various commissions tasked to conduct a “complete” review could never get to the bottom of all serious problems. The members either were not given access to, or were not told about, this or that arcane risk. For example, applying locks on missile launch controls or on the detonation mechanism of weapons is a frequently praised safety measure (which my 1958 RAND study had first recommended). These locks—it is said reassuringly—can only be opened with a numeric code that is available to no one but to the highest national authority. In reality, however, these codes have to be installed and maintained by many technicians, some of whom might inadvertently, or deliberately, leave some weapons or missiles unlocked. So far, luck has been with us.

  Lesson Four: What Reagan Taught

  Ronald Reagan had a different philosophy about the nuclear peril: he was deeply troubled by the risk of mistakes or accidents that could lead to Armageddon. I was a foreign policy advisor in his election campaigns (from pre-primary to the final campaign), and in July 1979 I participated in a small meeting that my friend Richard V. Allen had arranged with Reagan to review nuclear strategy. As we addressed the vulnerability of our missile forces to Soviet attack, Reagan heard us out patiently and then remarked that an acquaintance of his (whom I knew as a frantic industry executive) had told him there was no vulnerability problem at all—we could simply launch our missiles as soon as we had warning of an attack. Reagan paused briefly to let the point sink in (while I anxiously held my breath) and then added with firm conviction: “But I think, this is the wrong thing to do!” He had made my day.12

  Reagan’s judgment on this issue was not a casual reaction. It reflected an understanding of nuclear weapons that was at once realistic and humane. His views contrasted favorably with the self-proclaimed expertise of many defense intellectuals who are prone to what Alfred North Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” The same philosophical underpinnings explain Reagan’s decision—taken over the objection of the State Department—to endorse Weinberger’s recommendation that we seek a U.S.-Soviet agreem
ent to get rid of all intermediate nuclear missiles deployed in Eastern and Western Europe. The State Department wanted to negotiate a lower, common level for these missiles that would—in the euphemism of mutual deterrence theory—“stabilize” a new nuclear confrontation between East and West. Reagan liked the idea of eliminating all these new missiles. As Weinberger later wrote: “Contrary to virtually all of the popular myths about him” Reagan “actually was very unhappy with the need to rely on nuclear weapons…. All of the required briefings, exercises, and the ‘Doomsday’ scenarios new Presidents have to be given, simply reinforced his own beliefs.”13 The proposal to reduce both the Soviet and the U.S. intermediate range missiles to zero was Richard Perle’s idea. He served as Assistant Secretary of Defense during most of the years when I served as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and he managed NATO affairs and arms control issues with brilliant inspiration and hard-knuckled bureaucratic skills. Would that more Americans willing to serve in government possessed both Perle’s creative intellect and his ability to translate good ideas into effective government policies.

  It may seem counterintuitive, but I believe that one must be something of a wimp to endorse a confrontation of missile forces primed, day and night, year after year, to execute mutual genocide. Failure to grasp the magnitude of this gamble betokens a lack of emotional strength. No one can be certain that any such “mutual deterrent” will never fail. Fortunately, Reagan understood that reliance on the mutual nuclear threat was “a sad commentary on the human condition,” and with his Strategic Defense Initiative of March 23, 1983, he boldly swept aside decades of mistaken theorizing. He reached this decision knowing the arguments on both sides of the issue, thanks to his many discussions during his presidential campaign. His chief foreign policy advisor Richard V. Allen had organized these tutorials, expertly gathering the best strategic thinkers representing a wide range of views.

  Yet it took another eighteen years for Washington and Moscow to overcome the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction. The catalyst for change was George W. Bush’s decision in 2001 to withdraw from the treaty banning missile defenses—a move that infuriated diehard supporters of MAD thinking. But George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin realized that the genocidal implications of MAD would harm useful cooperative relations between their two nations, and President Putin understood this better than the European and American arms control aficionados. They firmly predicted that ending this treaty would force Russia to expand its missile force, and almost felt betrayed by Putin when he did no such thing.

  Reagan was not the first conservative statesman to distrust the concept of mutual deterrence. Winston Churchill had strongly supported America’s initial nuclear advantage in the fall of 1945, when he was the leader of the opposition. But by 1953 the Eisenhower administration’s apparent insouciance about putting atomic weapons “to military use” deeply troubled Churchill (who had again become Prime Minister).14 Even more important in reshaping Churchill’s thinking at that time was the impact, emotional and intellectual, of the recent thermonuclear weapon tests. On March 1, 1954, after the Soviet Union had demonstrated that it could build a thermonuclear bomb, the U.S. test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific resulted in a yield of 15 megatons (equivalent to fifteen million times the largest conventional bombs of World War II), and—unforeseen by the designers of that test—spread radioactive contamination over the ocean that would have been fatal to unprotected people within an area of some 7,000 square miles.

  Churchill, who always prided himself on his careful attention to scientific knowledge, was particularly moved by the data on the power of thermonuclear bombs made public by the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Committee. He wrote to Eisenhower on March 9: “You can imagine what my thoughts are about London. I am told several million people would certainly be obliterated by … the latest H-bombs.” He urged Eisenhower to agree to a U.S.-British summit meeting with the new Soviet leaders, a proposal he had already made after Stalin’s death the year before. Eisenhower remained opposed, and with hindsight one might judge him right since no great opportunity for arms control was missed at that time. Only after Gorbachev had revolutionized the political thinking in the Kremlin could Reagan and George H. W. Bush reach agreements with the Soviet Union to eliminate whole classes of nuclear weapons.

  It must be granted, though, that Churchill’s timing made some sense. The Soviet leaders, too, had changed their views of nuclear war. It appears that even Communist dictators could be moved by the emotional impact of H-bomb tests. Before 1954, the Kremlin held to the thesis of the “inevitability of war” between East and West. Twelve days after the 1954 American H-bomb test, Georgii Malenkov, the new Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, made a statement opposing “the policy [read: Stalin’s policy] of preparing [for] a new world war, which with modern weapons means the end of civilization.”15

  I see these reactions by government leaders as another instance of emotional hindsight emboldening foresight—giving statesmen the courage and foresight to fear nuclear weapons. A personal experience can strengthen this courage. Churchill had suffered a stroke less than a year before his letter to Eisenhower, and surely knew that he was close to the end of his career. This might have illuminated for him, with transcendent clarity, the reasons for the shallow public reaction to the searing facts about the thermonuclear bomb. As he put it:

  The reason is that human minds recoil from the realization of such facts. The people, including the well-informed, can only gape and console themselves with the reflection that death comes to all anyhow, sometime. This merciful numbness cannot be enjoyed by the few men upon whom the supreme responsibility falls. They have to drive their minds forward into these hideous and deadly spheres of thought. All the things happening now put together, added to all the material things that ever happened, are scarcely more important to the human race.16

  Lesson Five: Beware of “Peaceful Use”

  The Cold War bequeathed the world a frightening detritus: thousands of nuclear weapons and tons of fissile material suitable for making bombs—mainly in the United States and in Russia. Because of Moscow’s fiscal and administrative turbulence, control of Russia’s inherited detritus is of special concern. To safeguard it, the United States and European nations have provided assistance for a cooperative program with Russia, a farsighted effort conceived and initiated in 1991 by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar.17

  But leftover Cold War weapons are not the only curse that technologies of mass destruction have placed on mankind. The know-how and wherewithal to make atomic bombs is spreading to more and more countries, including some of the worst dictatorships—and is likely to spread beyond the control of national governments. Endlessly aggravating this process is the “curse of dual use”: the fact that many of the most destructive technologies also have innocent, peaceful purposes, which provide the cover and excuse for dispersing them hither and yon.

  As if hexed by a mischievous fate, arms control initiatives meant to limit the proliferation of weapons technology have themselves turned into agents accelerating proliferation. There is an echo of Greek tragedy in this phenomenon. In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles’ finest Greek drama, the parents of Oedipus sought to escape the horrible prophesied fate by contriving a frantic scheme to defeat the prophecy. Yet precisely that scheme became the means—almost the only possible means—to make the prophecy come true. Since the 1950s, the Oedipus tragedy has played out before the world’s uncomprehending gaze: multilateral agreements meant to control dual-use nuclear technologies have worked instead to further weapons proliferation.

  The tragic course of events can be traced back to the Atoms for Peace program launched by President Eisenhower in 1953. It was meant to enlist international support for curbing the spread of the atom bomb by offering peaceful benefits of atomic energy to the world at large. Yet countries that were offered an agreement to receive technological assistance exclusively for peaceful uses managed to create loopholes enabling them to divert the assista
nce to their nuclear weapons program. As in the Oedipus tragedy, capricious developments made the prophesized fate come true. Henry Sokolski’s book, Best of Intentions, offers striking evidence of the errors that drove the United States to spread nuclear assistance so generously without insisting on tight controls. The generally hard-nosed John Foster Dulles and Lewis Strauss (Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission) ordered the U.S. negotiators to accept with minimal restrictions the demands of India and other countries that wished to receive nuclear technology. By yielding to nations that wanted the agreement made easier to cheat—India comes to mind—the United States demonstrated lack of conviction in opposing nuclear proliferation. The Cold War prism through which U.S. officials viewed the perils of proliferation aggravated this weak negotiating strategy. Senior officials believed in the 1960s that America’s interests would only be threatened if a nation could amass a vast stockpile of weapons, enough to destroy the United States.18 We have since learned otherwise. This history of how competent officials can become trapped in a mistaken, yet well-intentioned policy ought to be compulsory reading for all who believe international agreements are the way to control the dark side of technological progress.

  No other U.S. policy, no multilateral policy, no United Nations activity has done more harm than the Atoms for Peace program in hastening and expanding the spread of nuclear know-how for building bombs. And once the United States had legitimized the worldwide transfer of nuclear reactors, England, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union began to compete with the American exports. Reactors, either for “research” or for electric power, were thrust upon less-developed countries all over the globe, and these gifts enabled the recipients to acquire nuclear materials and know-how. The recipients included Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, the Congo, and even Laos. In recent years, we have witnessed a “multiplier effect” of this largesse. China has helped Pakistan to build nuclear bombs, and the developer of Pakistan’s bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, has helped North Korea, Libya, Iran, and possibly others with their nuclear weapons program. It is far too late now to close these loopholes of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The treaty mandates a review conference every five years, but despite the growing concern about nuclear proliferation, the month-long review held in May 2005 ended in failure.