The Dead Hand

by David E. Hoffman

  Petrov and his men had watched many test launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and from Cape Canaveral in Florida, as well as Soviet test launches from Plesetsk in northern Russia. With the satellites, they could rapidly detect the rocket’s bright flare moments after it rose into the sky; they had seen a few tests fail, too.

  For all the years Petrov worked at the early-warning center, they had been rushed. The satellite system was put into service in late 1982, even though it was not ready. Petrov and his men were told: it was an important project for the country, don’t worry about the shortcomings. They will be fixed later, you can compensate for the problems, look the other way for now. Petrov knew why they were in such a hurry. The United States and the Soviet Union threatened each other with missiles on hair-trigger alert. The two superpowers had between them about 18,400 nuclear warheads poised to be launched from missiles in silos, on submarines hidden under the seas and from bombers. And there were many smaller, or tactical, nuclear weapons arrayed along the front lines of the Cold War confrontation in Europe. In the event of a nuclear attack, a decision whether to retaliate would have to be made in minutes, and enormous efforts were made by each superpower to gain precious time for warning. With ground-based radar alone, which could not see beyond the curvature of the Earth, the incoming missiles might not be detected until the final seven to ten minutes of their flight. But with the early-warning satellites, a launch could be spotted sooner. The Americans already had stationed their satellites to watch over the Soviet missile fields. The Soviet Union was in a hurry to catch up. They rushed to build Serpukhov-15 and launch their own satellites.

  A fear haunted the old men who ruled the Soviet Union, led by General Secretary Yuri Andropov, a frail and paranoid former KGB chief who in the autumn of 1983 was suffering from kidney failure. The fear was a sudden attack that might destroy the entire leadership in Moscow before they could leave the Kremlin. If they could be decapitated, wiped out without warning by a surprise attack, their threat to retaliate was simply not credible. That is why Petrov’s mission was so important. The satellites, the antennas, the computers, the telescopes, the map and the operations center—they were the night watch for nuclear war.

  Petrov heard the rhetoric, but he didn’t believe the superpowers would come to blows; the consequences were just too devastating. Petrov thought the Soviet leaders were pompous and self-serving, and—in private—he was disdainful of the party bosses. He did not take seriously their bombast about America as the enemy. Yet the furor in recent months had been hard to ignore. President Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” in March, and only a few weeks before Petrov’s night at the operations center, Soviet Air Defense Forces had shot down a Korean airliner in the Far East, killing 269 people.

  Petrov saw himself as a professional, a technician, and took pride in overcoming long odds. He understood the enormity of the task, that in early warning there could be no room for false alarms. His team had been driven hard to eliminate the chance for error. While they had tried strenuously to make the early-warning system work properly, the apparatus was still troubled. A system to make decisions about the fate of the Earth was plagued by malfunctions. Of the first thirteen satellites launched in the test phase from 1972 to 1979, only seven worked for more than one hundred days.12 The satellites had to be launched constantly in order to keep enough of them aloft to monitor the American missile fields. They often just stopped sending data back to Earth.

  At 12:15 A.M., Petrov was startled. Across the top of the room was a thin, silent panel. Most of the time no one even noticed it. But suddenly it lit up, in red letters: LAUNCH.

  A siren wailed. On the big map with the North Pole, a light at one of the American missile bases was illuminated. Everyone was riveted to the map. The electronic panels showed a missile launch. The board said “high reliability.” This had never happened before. The operators at the consoles on the main floor jumped up, out of their chairs. They turned and looked up at Petrov, behind the glass. He was the commander on duty. He stood, too, so they could see him. He started to give orders. He wasn’t sure what was happening. He ordered them to sit down and start checking the system. He had to know whether this was real, or a glitch. The full check would take ten minutes, but if this was a real missile attack, they could not wait ten minutes to find out. Was the satellite holding steady? Was the computer functioning properly?

  As they scrambled, Petrov scrutinized the monitors in front of him. They included data from the optical telescope. If there was a missile, sooner or later they would see it through the telescope. Where was it headed? What trajectory? There was no sign of it. The specialists who sat in the darkened room, also watching the telescope, spotted nothing. The computer specialists had to check a set of numbers spewing out of the hard-copy printer. Petrov scrutinized the data on his monitor, too. Could it be a technical error?

  If not, Petrov ran through the possibilities. If just one missile, could it be an accidental or unauthorized launch? He concluded it was not likely. He knew of all the locks and precautions—and just one person could not launch a missile. Even the idea of two officers conspiring to launch a missile seemed impossible. And if one missile was launched, he thought, what did that mean? This was not the way to start a nuclear war. For many years, he had been trained that a nuclear war would start only with a massive strike. He said it again, to himself: this is not the way to start a nuclear war.

  He had a microphone in one hand, part of the intercom system to the main floor. With the other hand, he picked up the telephone to call his commanders, who oversaw the whole early-warning system, including the separate radars. Petrov had to quickly reach his own conclusion; the supervisors would want to know what was happening. He had not completed his own checks, but he could not wait. He told the duty officer, in a clipped tone: “I am reporting to you: this is a false alarm.”

  He didn’t know for sure. He only had a gut instinct.

  “Got it,” the officer replied. Petrov was relieved; the officer did not ask him why.

  The phone was still in his hand, the duty officer still on the line, when Petrov was jolted again, two minutes later.

  The panel flashed: another missile launched! Then a third, a fourth and a fifth. Now, the system had gone into overdrive. The additional signals had triggered a new warning. The red letters on the panel began to flash MISSILE ATTACK, and an electronic blip was sent automatically to the higher levels of the military. Petrov was frightened. His legs felt paralyzed. He had to think fast.

  Petrov knew the key decision-makers in a missile attack would be the General Staff. In theory, if the alarm were validated, the retaliation would be directed from there. Soviet missiles would be readied, targets fed in and silo hatches opened. The Soviet political leadership would be alerted. There would be only minutes in which to make a decision.

  The siren wailed. The red sign flashed.

  Petrov made a decision. He knew the system had glitches in the past; there was no visual sighting of a missile through the telescope; the satellites were in the correct position. There was nothing from the radar stations to verify an incoming missile, although it was probably too early for the radars to see anything.

  He told the duty officer again: this is a false alarm.

  The message went up the chain.

  ————— INTRODUCTION —————

  This book is the story of people—presidents, scientists, engineers, diplomats, soldiers, spies, scholars, politicians and others—who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race. They recoiled from the balance of terror out of personal experience as designers and stewards of the weapons, or because of their own fears of the consequences of war, or because of the burdens that the arsenals placed on their peoples.

  At the center of the drama are two key figures, both of them romantics and revolutionaries, who sensed the rising danger and challenged the established order. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet
Union, abhorred the use of force and championed openness and “new thinking” in hopes of saving his troubled country. Ronald Reagan, fortieth president of the United States, was a master communicator and beacon of ideals who had an unwavering faith in the triumph of capitalism and American ingenuity. He dreamed of making nuclear weapons obsolete, once and for all.

  They were not alone. Many others with imagination, determination, guile and conscience sought to rein in the danger. The goal of the book is to tell the story of how the Cold War arms race came to an end, and of its legacy of peril—and to tell it from both sides. Too often in the past, the history has been obscured by American triumphalism, which reflected only one side, or by secrecy and disinformation in Moscow, which masked what really happened inside the Soviet Union and why. With fresh evidence, it is now possible to see more clearly the deliberations that unfolded behind closed doors in the Kremlin during Gorbachev’s tumultuous rule. It was there, in arguments, meetings, documents and phone calls, that Gorbachev, deftly maneuvering and cajoling, faced off against the entrenched and powerful forces of the military-industrial complex and began a radical change in direction. It was there Gorbachev decided to abandon whole missile systems; turn the Soviet Union away from global confrontation; cut military spending and troops in Europe; and take the blueprint for a colossal Soviet “Star Wars” missile defense system, which designers and engineers had laid on his desk, and bury it in his bottom drawer. It is also possible with the new evidence, especially diaries and contemporaneous documents, to see more clearly how Gorbachev and Reagan viewed each other, how their perceptions fed into actions and how they wrestled with their own internal conflicts, ideology and an enormous stockpile of mistrust to lead the world, haltingly, out of the years of confrontation.

  While nuclear weapons were the overwhelming threat of the epoch, another frightening weapon of mass casualty was being grown in flasks and fermenters. From 1975 to 1991, the Soviet Union covertly built the largest biological weapons program in the world. Soviet scientists experimented with genetic engineering to create pathogens that could cause unstoppable diseases. If the orders came, Soviet factory directors were ready to produce bacteria by the ton that could sicken and kill millions of people. The book explores the origins and expansion of this illicit, sprawling endeavor, for which Russia has yet to give a full accounting.

  Much of the writing about the end of the Cold War stops at the moment the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, or when the Soviet flag was lowered on the Kremlin in December 1991. This book attempts to go further. It begins with the peak of tensions in the early 1980s, leads us through the remarkable events of the Reagan and Gorbachev years and then shows how the Soviet collapse gave way to a race against time, an urgent search for the nuclear and biological hazards that were left behind.

  ———

  The book will begin with the “war scare” of 1983, a period of confrontation, anger and danger. But to understand it, we must first see the gathering storm in the decades that preceded it, a great contest of wills, a duel of deterrence. The atomic bomb was never used in combat in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, 1947–1991. Rather, the two sides held each other in a balance of terror by deploying thousands of nuclear weapons on missiles, submarines and strategic bombers. Over decades, the danger intensified as the weapons were invented and reinvented to carry enormous destructive power, enhanced by ever-faster delivery, superaccuracy and invulnerability.

  In the words of one of the early nuclear strategists, Bernard Brodie, the atomic bomb was the “absolute weapon” that would change warfare forever.1 The bomb greatly increased the chance that it would be regular people who would die at the start. As a group of six Harvard professors put it in a study in 1983: “For the first time in history, nuclear weapons offer the possibility of destroying a country before one has defeated or destroyed its armed forces.” And nuclear war would certainly come faster than any war in history. It might be over in a matter of hours. It might start before leaders could rethink their decisions or change their minds. It could lead to the death of millions of people even before a false alarm was discovered to be false.2

  At the outset of the Cold War, the United States threatened the Soviet Union with a single, devastating blow aimed at cities and industry. The first American nuclear weapons each weighed thousands of pounds, and were to be carried by lumbering strategic bombers that would take hours to reach their targets. By contrast, a half century later, the warhead on a missile could be delivered across oceans in thirty minutes. Rear Admiral G. P. Nanos, director of Strategic Systems Programs in the U.S. Navy, said in 1997 that if one drew a circle with a radius the length of the Trident submarine—560 feet—the warheads on a Trident II D5 missile could be accurately targeted into that circle from a distance of four thousand nautical miles.3

  But this achievement in power and deadly accuracy inspired a profound dread among those who might one day have to press the button launching those missiles.

  In the United States, a master plan for carrying out a nuclear war was first drafted in 1960, at the end of President Dwight Eisenhower’s term. The scope of the Single Integrated Operational Plan was awesome. Given adequate warning time, the United States and allies would launch their entire strategic force of about 3,500 nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, China and satellite states. Eisenhower dispatched his science adviser, George B. Kistiakowsky, to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Offutt, Nebraska, on November 3–5, 1960, to study the newly drafted plan. Kistiakowsky reported back that the plan would “lead to unnecessary and undesirable overkill.” Eisenhower confided to Captain E. P. “Pete” Aurand, his naval aide, that the estimates—the sheer number of targets, the redundant bombs for each—“frighten the devil out of me.”4

  President John F. Kennedy was no less unsettled. Briefed on the war plan on September 14, 1961, he commented afterward to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.”5

  Kennedy and his defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, were uneasy with the Eisenhower-era idea of massive retaliation. They felt the threat of a single, enormous nuclear strike did not fit the more fragmented and complex competition they faced with the Soviet Union as tensions flared first over Berlin and then over Cuba. When the war plan was revised in the spring and summer of 1962, the new plan gave the president more flexibility and choices in waging a possible nuclear attack, including the ability to hold back forces in reserve, to avoid population centers and industry and to leave out some countries as targets. A key feature of the new plan, put into effect just before the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, was to aim largely at Soviet weapons, and not at cities and industry, an idea known as counterforce. If one thinks of cocked pistols aimed at each other, counterforce was an effort to shoot the gun out of the hand of the enemy.6 It seemed to be more humane to aim at missiles rather than cities, but counterforce also raised deeply disturbing questions. Could it make the use of nuclear weapons more tempting, since it implied a limited nuclear strike was possible? And to be successful, would the counterforce option have to be carried out first—to shoot before you were shot, to preempt an attack? This was the haunting fear of many decades to come, the idea of a disarming, bolt-from-the-blue first strike.

  While Kennedy wanted to spare the cities, McNamara realized over time that it was impossible to aim at every Soviet weapon without unleashing an expensive new round of the arms race, an escalation with no end in sight. As a result, McNamara shifted to a strategy that he called “assured destruction,” which required building the number of weapons needed to destroy 20 to 25 percent of the Soviet population and 50 percent of the industrial base. McNamara capped the number of Minuteman missiles to be built at one thousand. His analysts concluded, “The main reason for stopping at 1,000 Minuteman missiles, 41 Polaris submarines and some 500 strategic bombers is that having more would not be worth the cost.” McNamara hoped that the Soviets would also reach a plateau—and stop building.
7 A critic of McNamara proposed adding “mutual” to “assured destruction” and the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction, known pointedly as MAD, was born. For many Americans, this idea of equal vulnerability and mutual deterrence came to define the Cold War.8

  Locked in global confrontation, the United States and the Soviet Union were each rooted in centuries of radically different history, geography, culture and experience. Peering through a veil of suspicion, the superpowers often wrongly judged each other’s intentions and actions. They engaged in deceptions that only deepened the dangers. As the Harvard professors observed in 1983, “The United States cannot predict Soviet behavior because it has too little information about what goes on inside the Soviet Union; the Soviets cannot predict American behavior because they have too much information.”

  An early but telling example was the so-called missile gap. The Soviet Union announced on August 26, 1957, the first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile at full range, and successfully launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit on October 4. For the next four years, Premier Nikita Khrushchev misled the West with claims that the Soviet Union was turning out missiles “like sausages,” that super-missiles were in “serial production” and “mass production.” John F. Kennedy raised alarms about the “missile gap” in his 1960 campaign, but found out that it didn’t exist.9 Khrushchev had concealed weakness—by bluffing.

  A disaster was narrowly averted in the Cuban crisis of October 1962, when Khrushchev took an enormous gamble by stationing nuclear weapons and missiles on the island. The brinksmanship ended as both Kennedy and Khrushchev exercised restraint. But long after Khrushchev withdrew the weapons, and after his ouster in 1964, the Cuban crisis lingered in the minds of Soviet leaders, who feared inferiority to the United States. Starting in the mid-1960s, Soviet missile production zoomed upward; hundreds were rolled out every year.