by Bryan Walsh
Denialism was embedded in the very language used by nuclear strategists. A nuclear war was referred to as a “nuclear exchange,” as if Washington and Moscow were returning unwanted Christmas gifts, not potentially annihilating the world. Firing off intercontinental missiles that would kill hundreds of millions of people was termed a “nuclear expenditure,” as if it were a line item in a budget. The explosive power of a nuclear warhead was called its “yield,” the same word used to describe the product of farmland or the interest from a financial investment.
There was the occasional bit of nuclear terminology that said exactly what it was—like “megadeath,” the word for one million deaths from a nuclear strike. “Megadeath” was the invention of Herman Kahn, a systems theorist at the RAND Corporation, a Santa Monica, California–based think tank that was the nerve center of Cold War strategizing. Kahn was the author of 1960’s On Thermonuclear War, a book that if nothing else delivered precisely what its title promised. He identified different levels of American deaths from a nuclear war, ranging from two million to 160 million, and how long it would take for economic recuperation—at least according to his calculations. To Kahn there were, as he put it in his book, “Tragic but Distinguishable Postwar States.”40 (If that phrase sounds familiar, it’s because Stanley Kubrick lifted it almost verbatim for Dr. Strangelove.) To Kahn it was thinkable to fight a nuclear war, and thinkable to believe you could win it—which was why the title of his next book was Thinking About the Unthinkable.
Yet it wasn’t hawks like Kahn who truly understood what nuclear war would mean, but rare objectors like Daniel Ellsberg. Today Ellsberg is best known for leaking in 1971 what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a secret Defense Department study showing that successive presidential administrations had systematically lied to the American public about the country’s involvement in Vietnam. But years before he was both celebrated and vilified for his activism on Vietnam, Ellsberg was a strategist at the RAND Corporation working on theories of nuclear deterrence—just like Herman Kahn. Ellsberg took the possibility of nuclear war seriously, so seriously in fact that he didn’t bother paying into RAND’s generous retirement plan because he assumed he would be killed in a nuclear conflict before he could ever collect.41 Before his time at RAND, Ellsberg had been an infantry platoon commander with the U.S. Marines. Far from being a peacenik, Ellsberg was a red-blooded Cold Warrior who believed in the strategic importance of America’s nuclear arsenal.
What changed Ellsberg forever was the moment he was shown how the world could end. He was working as a consultant for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the spring of 1961 when he saw the answer to a question President John F. Kennedy put to the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “If your plans for general [nuclear] war are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?” The answer was stark: 325 million people. But that was just the beginning. Drilling down further, Ellsberg found out that the Pentagon expected an additional 100 million deaths in the communist states of Eastern Europe, perhaps another 100 million from radioactive fallout in the friendly nations of Western Europe, and an additional 100 million in adjacent nations like Finland, India, and Japan. Altogether the Pentagon estimated that roughly 600 million human beings would die, at a time when the global population was 3 billion. And those numbers assumed, somehow, that the United States would escape any nuclear retaliation from the Soviet Union in a nuclear war—almost certainly a fantasy.42
More than fifty years later, as he spoke to me from his home in Berkeley, California, I could still hear the horror in Ellsberg’s voice as he recounted what he read that day in 1961. It wasn’t just the numbers that appalled him, but the fact that this was the Pentagon’s only nuclear war plan. In response to any armed conflict with the Soviets, even a small conventional one, even a mistake, the war plan called for the firing—the expenditure—of America’s entire nuclear arsenal. There was no plan B, no room for a measured response. The strategy included targeting Chinese cities even if Beijing had nothing to do with the conflict. “It was insane,” Ellsberg told me. “No human could ever imagine doing such a thing in the history of our species—and here they were doing it, planning it. It goes beyond ordinary concepts of crime or even sin. It transcends any human concepts to be planning to kill hundreds of millions of people.”
This was Ellsberg’s moment of conversion, the first step on the path to becoming who he is today—an eighty-eight-year-old former national security insider who has spent decades fulminating against nuclear policy and government secrecy. In 1969, as Ellsberg began photocopying what would become the Pentagon Papers, he also copied those far more secret nuclear war plans, the ones marked “For the President’s Eyes Only.” He planned to leak these as well. That never happened—after the Washington Post began to publish the Pentagon Papers and it became clear that his arrest was only a matter of time, Ellsberg gave the nuclear war plans to his brother in upstate New York for safekeeping. Ellsberg’s brother buried them in a nearby trash dump, but the documents were destroyed in a freak tropical storm. It wasn’t until the publication of his book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner in 2017 that Ellsberg was able to fully describe what he had seen.
Ellsberg was and remains a person of rare moral courage, one who was willing to go to jail for years, even the rest of his life, to fight against the madness of war. Yet even today he wonders why the revulsion he felt toward America’s nuclear strategy was so rare, and why so many of his colleagues—the country’s best and the brightest—were willing to go along with a blueprint for mass murder. “It didn’t take a lot of thinking to say that this is madness and absolutely intolerable,” he said. “Yet they all recoiled from the opposition, from the Joint Chiefs, from Congress, and from the military-industrial complex, which involves so many jobs, profits, campaign donations, and everything else.”
As with other existential risks, the desire for short-term political and economic gain sabotages attempts to focus on long-term threats. We now know that much of what America’s nuclear war strategy was based on was false. The plan Ellsberg saw in 1961 called for bombing China because Beijing and Moscow were seen as communist comrades, yet by then the two countries had all but split. That same year RAND estimated that the Soviets possessed hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles—yet it later turned out that the Russians in fact had just four missiles at the time.43 When Kennedy was elected in 1960—after running a campaign accusing the Eisenhower administration of letting the United States fall behind in the arms race—America had nearly twelve times as many nuclear warheads as the Soviet Union did.44 But it was in the political and economic interests of some to hype the Soviet nuclear threat, even though doing so arguably brought the world closer to a ruinous war.
We now know, nearly sixty years later, that the missiles never left their silos, that the Cold War never went nuclear. The world didn’t end. But this wasn’t because of a surfeit of wisdom on either side of the Iron Curtain. We were lucky—and few people know just how lucky we were than another national security insider turned renegade: William Perry.
If there’s an important post in America’s national defense establishment, chances are that William Perry has held it. He worked as a civilian expert in electronic intelligence in the 1960s, served as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering—where he was instrumental in developing the stealth technology that helped the United States win the Cold War—and ended his career in government service as President Bill Clinton’s defense secretary from 1994 to 1997. He served on the University of California’s board of governors for the laboratory at Los Alamos—where the first nuclear bomb was developed—and is currently the head of the board at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Even at ninety-one years old his voice still exudes authority, and his words demand attention in capitals around the world.
What makes Perry special, however, is that he is one of the last living American statesmen who saw with his own eyes just how
close we came to nuclear annihilation. And what he came to understand was that the real threat of nuclear war wasn’t from military competition, but from the way that simple misunderstandings and technical errors could spiral out into planetary catastrophe. It wasn’t the war in nuclear war that was so dangerous—it was the nuclear, the fact that thousands of megatons of explosive power kept on a hair trigger made any mistake irrevocable.
In the fall of 1962 Perry was working as director of Sylvania’s Electronic Defense Laboratories, in the San Francisco Bay area. He spent his time calculating missile trajectories and nuclear yields. One day that October Perry received a call from a friend in the CIA asking him to fly into Washington for a consultation—immediately. That was how Perry got involved in what would become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. In D.C. Perry pored over reconnaissance photos of Soviet missile sites in Cuba and helped write technical reports for President Kennedy and his staff. As the standoff between Washington and Moscow became increasingly tense—with Kennedy instituting a naval quarantine of Cuba and contemplating an invasion of the island if the Soviets wouldn’t remove the missiles—Perry became convinced that each day would be the last day of his life. And things were even worse than he knew. “Kennedy’s assessment was one chance in three of nuclear war,” Perry told me. “It was at least that in my judgment, because there were possibilities of that war starting from circumstances he wasn’t even aware of.”
Washington didn’t know it at the time, but tactical nuclear weapons—small-scale atomic bombs that could be employed on the battlefield—had already been placed in Cuba. Nor did they know that Soviet submarines operating off the island were armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes. Commanders on the ground in Cuba had been given the authority to use the tactical nukes in the event of an American invasion, and Soviet submarine captains had been given permission to fire their nuclear torpedoes without explicit commands from Moscow. Had Kennedy ordered an attack—as his hawkish military advisers were urging—those weapons would have been used, which would have quickly escalated to full-scale nuclear war between the superpowers.
This set the stage for the single moment in the modern age when the human race may have come closer to extinction than it ever has before or since. On October 27, 1962, as part of the U.S. naval quarantine of Cuba, American destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph managed to corner the Soviet submarine B-59. The U.S. ships began dropping small depth charges—underwater explosive devices—around the sub. The American commanders weren’t trying to sink the sub but rather to force it to the surface, an intention they had made clear to Soviet military leaders in Moscow.
What the Americans didn’t know was that the sub had been out of touch with Moscow for days. Its batteries were depleted, and without power to cool the sub or clean the air, temperatures inside B-59 rose to more than 113 degrees and the sailors began suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning. When depth charges began exploding around the sub, the crew had every reason to believe that World War III had begun. An exhausted Captain Valentin Savitsky gave the orders to prepare the sub’s nuclear torpedo for firing. A successful hit on the Randolph would have vaporized the aircraft carrier, which in turn could have put the U.S. nuclear war plan for total retaliation into play. Thousands of American warheads would have been on their way to targets in the Soviet Union, China, and other nations. The Soviets would have responded. The insanity Daniel Ellsberg glimpsed would have become real, and would have consumed us all.
The decision to launch a nuclear weapon on board the Soviet sub had to be authorized by three officers. Ivan Maslennikov, the deputy political officer, said yes. But Vasili Arkhipov, Savitsky’s second in command, refused. He convinced Savitsky to instead bring the sub to the surface, where a U.S. destroyer ultimately allowed the ship to return to Russia.45 That same day, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sent a letter to the White House proposing that the USSR would dismantle its missiles in Cuba in return for the United States removing medium-range ballistic missiles from its NATO ally Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union. After a day of deliberation, Kennedy accepted the offer, though the missiles in Turkey weren’t moved until months later, to avoid the appearance of a quid pro quo. The crisis—this crisis, at least—was over, but if not for Kennedy’s prudence and Arkhipov’s courage under fire, a nuclear war may well have begun. And then, as Ellsberg told me, “you and I would not be having this conversation.”
Vasili Arkhipov holds a special place of honor in the field of existential studies. There is an Arkhipov Room at Oxford’s FHI,46 and fifty-five years to the day after his actions aboard sub B-59, Arkhipov was posthumously honored with the inaugural Future of Life award from the Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Future of Life Institute (FLI). As FLI president Max Tegmark said at the ceremony, “Vasili Arkhipov is arguably the most important person in modern history, thanks to whom October 27, 2017, isn’t the 55th anniversary of World War III.”47
But the Cuban Missile Crisis is only the best known of many, many times when World War III was almost triggered by accident, as the writer Eric Schlosser has shown in his magisterial book, Command and Control. Perry himself lived through one when he was serving in the Department of Defense in 1979 and was awakened in the middle of the night by a watch officer at NORAD who said his monitors were showing two hundred Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) en route to the United States. It turned out to be a computer error. Less than a year later, on June 3, 1980, military computers showed thousands of Soviet missiles headed toward the States. Then–national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was about to recommend a counterattack until he was told at the last minute that the alarm had been generated by a faulty computer chip—one that cost all of forty-six cents.
Perhaps the closest the world came to nuclear war after the Cuban Missile Crisis was in 1983. President Ronald Reagan entered office promising to confront the Soviet Union. He modernized the U.S. nuclear arsenal, asking Congress for billions for civil defense efforts and calling for a missile shield—the Strategic Defense Initiative—that would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” Reagan genuinely wanted to reduce the risk of nuclear holocaust, but to the Soviet Union he seemed to be preparing to fight and win a nuclear war. The USSR was on edge, and by the summer of 1983 its forces had a “shoot to kill” order if the U.S. military crossed into Soviet territory. That tension led to tragedy on September 1, 1983, when a Soviet pilot, convinced a South Korean passenger airliner was actually on an espionage mission for the United States, shot it down, killing 269 people, including 63 Americans.
It was against that dire backdrop that the Soviet early warning system on September 26, 1983, reported the apparent launch of several ICBMs from the United States. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty that night, and his job was straightforward: register the missile launch and report it to Soviet military and political command. An ICBM takes half an hour to reach its target,48 which meant Petrov had only minutes to authenticate the apparent attack in time for the Soviets to launch a counterattack—and given how close the superpowers were to all-out war, they may well have. Yet Petrov judged that the United States would not launch a first strike with only a handful of missiles, so he instead reported a system malfunction. And then he waited. “Twenty-three minutes later I realized that nothing had happened,” Petrov told the BBC in 2013. “If there had been a real strike, then I would already know about it. It was such a relief.”49
Petrov, too, has a room named for him at the Future of Humanity Institute. Nick Bostrom has said of Petrov and Arkhipov that “they may have saved more lives than most of the statesmen we celebrate on stamps.”50 This is almost certainly true. But what made Petrov’s and Arkhipov’s heroism necessary—and what made the many close calls of the Cold War so dangerous—is inherent in the nature of nuclear deterrence.
During the Cold War, and even today, the nuclear powers had a policy of mutually assured destruction, which meant that each was restrained from attacking the other b
ecause they knew they would be attacked and destroyed in turn. In one sense this worked perfectly—fear of nuclear war kept the Cold War from going hot, and the second half of the twentieth century proved far less violent than the first. But the side effect of nuclear-enforced peace was the creation of existential risk for the entire species. Every year, every day, every moment, global catastrophe could strike at the push of a button. The very speed of a nuclear exchange, the doctrine of total retaliation, meant that any mistake could result not in a battle, not even a war as we had known war before, but the end of the world. “Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable,” President Kennedy told the United Nations in 1961. “Every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”51 And we live under that sword still.
Something else happened in 1983 that drove home the existential nature of the nuclear threat. As the top-secret plan that Ellsberg saw showed, military and political leaders on both sides knew that nuclear war would result in mass death the likes of which the world had never experienced. But even at the height of the Cold War—when the strategy of “overkill” meant that the two superpowers had built up massive nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the other many times over52—hundreds of millions of people would still survive the missiles, enough to hopefully rebuild civilization after the nuclear fires were quenched. Radioactive fallout was a further threat, but not one capable of killing off everyone who survived. As Herman Kahn might write, there were “tragic but distinguishable” differences between hundreds of millions of deaths and human extinction.