Accessory to War
Page 34
That psychosis ruled the body politic for a couple of decades. From the time President Truman learned about America’s atomic bombs, in April 1945, he expected to use them. Though initially built to devastate Germany, which was now on the verge of surrender, the bombs would instead be deployed to shorten the war with Japan. As Cold War historian Walter LaFeber put it, “Roosevelt had built this bomb to be used. Truman was going to carry out Roosevelt’s policy. Billions of dollars had been put into the bomb project. Truman was not going to waste that money.”173
Three years later, in 1948, during the US airlift of supplies to West Berlin following Stalin’s blockade of surface traffic, Truman told his secretary of defense and secretary of state that while he “prayed the bomb would not have to be used,” nobody should think he wouldn’t order a bombing “if it became necessary.” By the early 1950s, America had four hundred nuclear bombs and a fleet of intercontinental B-29 bombers that could be refueled in midflight.174
Nor was this nuclear psychosis an exclusively American illness. On July 24, 1945, at the trilateral negotiations on reparations, postwar reconstruction, and borders that took place in Potsdam, Germany—just two weeks before the United States dropped “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—President Truman casually (he thought) dropped mention of the fact that the United States now possessed a horrible new weapon. Stalin’s response appeared so nonchalant that Truman thought he might not have understood the comment. Far from it. Stalin immediately ordered the USSR’s existing atomic project to accelerate its work. Whole forests were soon cleared to make way for laboratories. Electricity was redirected from civilian areas. “Just hours after the atomic age began,” writes LaFeber, “its arms race was escalating.”175 Soon US policymakers and generals were speaking out and strategizing in favor of maintaining a nuclear arsenal, not simply as a deterrent but as a commitment to act.
Hundreds of detonations followed forthwith. August 1949, Soviet, with an explosive yield equivalent to 22 kilotons of TNT. November 1952, US, 10.4 megatons. August 1953, Soviet, 400 kilotons. March 1954, US, 15 megatons. November 1955, Soviet, 1.6 megatons. November 1957, British, 1.8 megatons. February 1960, French, 70 kilotons. October 1961, Soviet, 50 megatons. October 1964, Chinese, 22 kilotons.176 The kiloton blasts were typically A-bombs, exploiting the fissionable properties of uranium and plutonium—elements named, by the way, for the planets Uranus and Pluto. The more deadly megaton blasts were H-bombs, which derive their energy from the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium. Same as the Sun’s been doing in its core for the past five billion years.
Seeing this proliferation of nuclear testing, the conservative public-policy group American Security Council, proponents of a full-spectrum US stance, demanded that “atomic test-ban negotiations at Geneva be discontinued and that underground nuclear tests be resumed immediately.”177 Some military strategists agreed. Nuclear weapons small enough to be transported on ballistic missiles were already available. The good news is that by the early 1960s, few in the US military saw the installation of nuclear bombs on a satellite as a reasonable option. After 1967 the option was dead.
Recalling his frame of mind just after World War II, the merciless general Curtis LeMay, commander of the singularly deadly firebombing of Tokyo and subsequently the first head of the US Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC), told interviewers:
SAC was the only force we had that could react quickly to a nuclear attack. It did not make much sense to me to be in a position of not being able to act because I had no weapons. . . . [W]hen I first came back from Germany [1948], there wasn’t any doubt in my mind that if we had to go to a full scale war, we would use nuclear weapons. . . . We didn’t consider any unit really combat-ready unless it had a nuclear capability [because] we were planning on a nuclear war.178
In 1953 the executive secretary of the National Security Council, James S. Lay Jr., issued a top-secret presidential directive, NSC 162/2, that warned of the Soviet Union’s intent to dominate the world, its growing nuclear stockpile, its suspicious peace gestures, and the possibility that it might soon be able to deal “a crippling blow to our industrial base and our continued ability to prosecute a war.” This multifaceted “Soviet threat” had led many US allies to regard negotiation as “the only hope of ending the present tension, fear and frustration.” Lay, on the other hand, downplays the usefulness of negotiation and stresses the need for deterrence through military might, as in paragraph 34, which states that the “risk of Soviet aggression will be minimized by maintaining a strong security posture, with emphasis on adequate offensive retaliatory strength and defense strength. This must be based on massive atomic capability.” Other factors would contribute to the posture, such as bases, a continental defense system, deployed forces, an effective intelligence system, superior scientific research, and “the determined spirit of the U.S. people.” But atomic capability headed the list. One cold sentence in paragraph 39b(1) sums up the US position: “In the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions.”179
The following year, General Bernard Montgomery, who had served as Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told a London audience, “I want to make it absolutely clear that we . . . are basing all our operational planning on using atomic and thermonuclear weapons in our own defense.”180
In 1956, the Strategic Air Command compiled a target list for a conceivable war three years later. The goal was “systematic destruction.” Eight hundred pages long, top-secret, and titled “Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959,” the list included 179 targets in Moscow, 145 in Leningrad, and 91 in East Berlin. Airfields, factories, infrastructure, government buildings, and agricultural equipment were prime targets; any unlucky humans who happened to be on the premises would become part of the target. In addition, one target in each city is simply listed as “Population.”181
In a 1957 document labeled MC 14/2 and often referred to as “Massive Retaliation,” NATO plainly states that “[i]n case of general war, therefore, NATO defense depends upon an immediate exploitation of our nuclear capability, whether or not the Soviets employ nuclear weapons” and declares its commitment to a ready-to-counterattack version of deterrence:
Our chief objective is to prevent war by creating an effective deterrent to aggression. The principal elements of the deterrent are adequate nuclear and other ready forces and the manifest determination to retaliate against any aggressor with all the forces at our disposal, including nuclear weapons, which the defense of NATO would require.182
Couldn’t be clearer. During the heyday of nuclear buildup, there was (and, given the “fire and fury” rhetoric of President Trump, probably still is) no line the United States will not cross in the name of security, real or imagined. There have always been and will always be powerful people in key positions who are willing to use any and every weapon against an enemy.
Any country that expects to fight a nuclear war should reflect on possible outcomes: mere survival, all-out victory, or something in between. By the mid-1960s, some US and Soviet military thinkers assumed that all-out nuclear war was in fact survivable, even though the traditional goal of victory was unachievable. Historians Richard Dean Burns and Joseph M. Siracusa describe the mind-set:
A nominal military victory, to many political leaders, no longer seemed possible; rather, with sufficient forces to survive a first nuclear strike, a badly mauled state could still launch its own devastating response, which should give an aggressor crucial pause before starting a nuclear conflict.183
War may be politics by other means, but politics drops out of the equation when countries and whole civilizations cease to exist. Yet with only occasional slackening, the design, manufacture, and stockpiling of nuclear armaments continued apace for decades and may again be on the upswing.
For diplomats, a cessation of testing these armaments seemed a feasible entry point into overall arms reduction. Late in the Eisenhower
years the United States initiated a three-year moratorium on nuclear testing. It didn’t last. By the end of 1961, the United States had resumed testing, and the Soviet Union had detonated its fifty-megaton Tsar Bomba in the air thirteen thousand feet above the Barents Sea, generating human history’s biggest explosion ever. Tsar Bomba unleashed fifteen hundred times the energy of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” combined, an explosion so powerful that its blast wave circled Earth three times. As intended, the Soviet Union had proved itself supremely capable and supremely dangerous.
Still, the question of survival remained sufficiently vital to force American presidents and Soviet leaders to sit in adjoining armchairs every once in a while and try to work something out. In the meantime, American and European citizens by the millions, Catholic bishops, former Cold Warriors, and even staunch anti-Communists began to press for an end to the arms race. By the fall of 1986, Gorbachev told his aides, “[O]ur goal is to prevent the next round of [the] arms race. . . . [T]he leitmotif here is the liquidation of nuclear weapons, and the political approach prevails here, not the arithmetical one.” By spring 1987, he and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, shocked the Cold Warriors by agreeing to an earlier American proposal known as the zero option (devised by Richard Perle in 1981 and never intended to be acceptable).184 It would cancel US positioning of hundreds of intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe if the Soviet Union would destroy its own arsenal of more than a thousand of the same. Now the Soviets also proactively offered to cut back on short-range missiles. And so, on December 8, 1987, in Washington, DC, Gorbachev and Reagan sat at the same table and signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.185 Some saw this as Soviet capitulation, others as a modest victory for humanity.
In our own day, the issue of nuclear victory has been recast as a duel around the “right” of first use. Both sides of this duel contend that their approach offers the stronger deterrent and therefore the stronger promise of peace. And remember: given the ever-mounting population of satellites, almost anything that anybody says about nukes in general applies to nukes in, through, and from space.
The United States has long refused to relinquish the option of being first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. “Success,” states a recent US Air Force doctrine document, Nuclear Operations, “depends upon air, space, and cyberspace superiority. They provide freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack [italics added]. This is as true for nuclear missions as it is for any other form of attack.” The Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review Report, after noting that the “massive nuclear arsenal we inherited from the Cold War era of bipolar military confrontation is poorly suited to address the challenges posed by suicidal terrorists and unfriendly regimes seeking nuclear weapons,” takes a position quite compatible with that of Nuclear Operations: “This does not mean that our nuclear deterrent has become irrelevant. Indeed, as long as nuclear weapons exist, the United States will sustain safe, secure, and effective nuclear forces.”186 Obama’s successor, not in an official document but in a pre-Christmas tweet shortly before the start of his presidency, declared, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes,” and followed that tweet the very next day with a boast on MSNBC: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” After one month in the White House, he said in an interview with Reuters:
I am the first one that would like to see everybody—nobody have nukes, but we’re never going to fall behind any country even if it’s a friendly country, we’re never going to fall behind on nuclear power.
It would be wonderful, a dream would be that no country would have nukes, but if countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack.187
Official and off-the-cuff US policy may still embrace the option of first use, but many former officials now decry that option. During the throes of the 2016 election campaign, two of them made their case in the New York Times. One is a former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former commander of the US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOMM), the other a former USSTRATCOMM officer and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution:
[N]uclear weapons today no longer serve any purpose beyond deterring the first use of such weapons by our adversaries. . . . [B]eyond reducing [the] dangers, ruling out first use would also bring myriad benefits. To start, it would reduce the risk of a first strike against us during global crises. Leaders of other countries would be calmed by the knowledge that the United States viewed its own weapons as deterrents to nuclear warfare, not as tools of aggression.188
Writing for a blog rather than for the “paper of record” a few days after the end of the 2016 Republican National Convention, an oft-cited analyst in the fields of nuclear disarmament and outer-space security, Michael Krepon, was more blunt:
The United States is not going to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. Allies who believe otherwise are attached to a fiction and a psychological crutch. . . . Nuclear deterrence works best in the abstract. It relies on ambiguity and uncertainty. The belief system built around nuclear deterrence implodes once the first mushroom cloud appears. Since one nuclear detonation is very likely to lead to the next, prospects for escalation control depend on No First Use.189
Of course, the discussion doesn’t stop at the US border, and a pledge of no first use is not synonymous with disarmament, even if every country were to make that pledge. NATO still firmly subscribes to keeping a stockpile of nuclear weapons: “Deterrence, based on an appropriate mix of nuclear and conventional capabilities, remains a core element of our overall strategy. . . . As long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance.” Today the global nuclear situation is a patchwork of warring fears, goals, and commitments: Brazil’s constitution commits the country to only peaceful uses of nuclear energy; Iran has nullified its capacity to quickly produce nuclear weapons; whereas Pakistan, traditionally at odds with its giant neighbor India, has the world’s fastest-growing stockpile of such weapons. In July 2017 North Korea test-launched two intercontinental ballistic missiles, alarming not only its near neighbors but also the distant United States. A North Korean ICBM capable of delivering a nuclear bomb to San Francisco is now a near-term possibility. Also in July, at the UN General Assembly in New York City, 122 countries agreed on the language of a treaty to ban nuclear weapons forevermore. Not one of the world’s nine nuclear-armed nations participated in drafting it. The treaty prohibits all signatories from developing, testing, producing, possessing, transferring, deploying, stationing, using, or even threatening to use “nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” Once fifty countries have signed and ratified the treaty, it will become law.190
Writing for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists three weeks after Krepon’s blog post appeared, Ramesh Thakur, a former UN assistant secretary-general, characterized the global situation as precarious, especially in Asia:
[U]nlike the superpower tête-à-tête of the last century, the second nuclear age features a multiplicity of nuclear powers with crisscrossing ties of cooperation and conflict, fragile command-and-control systems, critical cyber vulnerabilities, threat perceptions occurring among three or more nuclear-armed states simultaneously. . . . This is a situation that needs all the de-escalation measures it can get.191
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, by the way, is the home of the Doomsday Clock. The cover of its June 1947 issue featured a schematic clock set at seven minutes to midnight, indicating “the urgency of nuclear danger.” Since then, the clock’s hands have been moved twenty-one times in accordance with “whether events push humanity closer to or further from nuclear apocalypse.” Seventeen minutes to midnight, in 1991, was the safest the world has been. Today, climate change and other potential threats influence the clock. In January 2015 the hands were moved to three minutes to midnight, the most dire setting since the height of the Cold War. They remained at
three minutes to midnight until January 26, 2017, when they were moved half a minute closer. One year later—because “major nuclear actors are on the cusp of a new arms race,” because of the “momentum . . . of nations’ investments in their nuclear arsenals,” because of “reckless language in the nuclear realm heat[ing] up already dangerous situations”—they were moved half a minute closer still.192
Reshaping a military for potential nuclear holocaust was a foreground political project of an earlier era. Reshaping an air force for the potential deception, disruption, denial, degradation, and destruction of unfriendly space assets is a foreground military project of the present one. But let’s be clear, the current project incorporates the earlier one. Ever since the triumph of the intercontinental ballistic missile, it’s been one long unified endeavor, in which nuclear weapons have never disappeared from the catalogue of options and satellites have become ever more indispensable to the practice of war.
Simply because it exists, a lavish and partly nuclear arsenal purports to serve as a powerful deterrent. The bigger, deadlier, more diverse, more agile, and more numerous the weapons, the stronger the deterrence. Scare people enough, and they’ll cower and retreat. Not that people don’t disagree on the dynamics of deterrence and the best means of achieving (or ruining) it. But the proponents of biggest-arsenal-as-strongest-deterrent have generally held the bullhorn. As the US Air Force’s doctrine document Nuclear Operations puts it, “Although nuclear forces are not the only factor in the deterrence equation, our nuclear capability underpins all other elements of deterrence.”