The Dead Hand

by David E. Hoffman

  The Soviet Union, looking through an entirely different prism than the United States, saw nuclear weapons as a blunt instrument for deterrence. If attacked, they would respond with crushing punishment. By many accounts, in the early decades they did not adopt the limited nuclear options that were embraced in the United States; they thought that the use of even one atomic bomb would trigger escalation, so they prepared for all-out war.10 They did not put much stock in the American idea that mutual vulnerability could lead to stability. They feared both powers would be constantly striving to get ahead, and they threw their resources into the quest. When the Soviet Union finally reached approximate parity with the United States in the early 1970s, the thinking began to change. Instead of threatening a preemptive first strike, as in the earlier years, they moved toward a posture of preparing for assured retaliation, a second strike. At this time they also began the first strategic arms control negotiations with the United States, and détente blossomed.11

  The Soviet buildup was driven by a powerful and hidden force, the defense industrialists. Leonid Brezhnev ruled by consensus over a dysfunctional group of aging sycophants, and by the mid-1970s, Brezhnev was in such ill health that he largely ceased to lead. The industrialists filled the vacuum. They had great influence over what weapons would be produced, by some accounts even more than the military. A striking example was the climax of an intense internal conflict over the next generation of intercontinental ballistic missile. In July 1969, at a vacation lodge near Yalta, a vexed Brezhnev assembled his top military leaders and missile designers. The competition pitted two of the most storied designers, Mikhail Yangel and Vladimir Chelomei, against each other. Yangel proposed a four-warhead missile, the SS-17, designed to fit in newly constructed, hardened silos, best to ensure retaliation if the Soviet Union were attacked, but expensive. Chelomei had initially proposed to upgrade his older SS-11 missile in existing silos, which were not hardened, but offered the military more warheads more cheaply, perfect for threatening a preemptive first strike at the enemy. At the time of the Yalta meeting, Chelomei shifted gears and proposed a new missile, the SS-19, with six warheads, which would also require new, expensive hardened silos. Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences, who had Brezhnev’s confidence, was appointed to head a commission to resolve the dispute. At Yalta he took the floor and lamented that in all the rush to build missiles, the country had not even decided on a strategic doctrine: whether the purpose was to threaten a first strike, or to preserve the force for retaliation. But Keldysh could not settle the rivalry. In the end, all three missile options were approved at great cost, the kind of decision that would eventually bankrupt the Soviet Union.12

  In the 1970s, the United States began to deploy a Minuteman III missile that could carry up to three warheads instead of just one. The new device was called a Multiple Independently-targetable Re-Entry Vehicle, or MIRV, and it would allow each of the three warheads to aim at separate targets, leading to a new surge in the size of the arsenals. The Soviets matched and surpassed this technology, and in the mid-1970s began the deployment of a new generation of land-based missiles. One of them, the SS-18, could carry a payload seven to eight times as large as the American missile. In fact, there were plans at one point to put as many as thirty-eight warheads atop each giant SS-18.

  As the arsenals grew, so did the complexity of the U.S. war plan. On January 27, 1969, a week after taking office, President Richard Nixon went to the Pentagon for a briefing on the Single Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP). “It didn’t fill him with enthusiasm,” recalled Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s national security adviser and later secretary of state. In the event of nuclear war, Nixon was told, he would have three functional tasks: Alpha, for strikes on the most urgent military targets; Bravo, for secondary military targets; and Charlie, for industrial and urban targets. If the president ordered an attack of Alpha and Bravo, urban areas would be spared. All three would mean total war. But the choices Nixon would face in an emergency were mind-numbingly complex. There were five attack options constructed from the three main tasks, and as many as ninety lesser variations.13 On May 11, 1969, Nixon flew on the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, a Boeing 707 filled with communications gear, and participated in a nuclear war exercise. His chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, wrote in his diary, “Pretty scary. They went through the whole intelligence and operational briefings—with interruptions, etc. to make it realistic.” Haldeman added that Nixon “asked a lot of questions about our nuclear capability and kill results. Obviously worries about the lightly tossed-about millions of deaths.”14

  The same fears troubled Soviet leaders. In 1972, the General Staff presented to the leadership results of a study of a possible nuclear war after a first strike by the United States. They reported: the military had been reduced to one-thousandth of its strength; 80 million citizens were dead; 85 percent of Soviet industry was in ruins. Brezhnev and Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin were visibly terrified by what they heard, according to Adrian Danilevich, a general who took part. Next, three launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles with dummy warheads were planned. Brezhnev was provided a button in the exercise and he was to push it at the proper moment. Defense Minister Andrei Grechko was standing next to Brezhnev, and Danilevich next to Grechko. “When the time came to push the button,” Danilevich recalled, “Brezhnev was visibly shaken and pale and his hand trembled and he asked Grechko several times for assurances that the action would not have any real world consequences.” Brezhnev turned to Grechko and asked, “‘Are you sure this is just an exercise?’”15

  Recognizing the overwhelming destructive power of nuclear weapons, Nixon decided in 1969 that the United States would renounce biological weapons. In 1972, more than seventy nations, including the Soviet Union and the United States, signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, a four-page international agreement banning the development and production of biological weapons, and the means of delivering them. The treaty entered into force in 1975. But the Soviet Union promptly betrayed its signature on the treaty. Brezhnev approved a secret plan to covertly expand Soviet germ warfare efforts under the cover of a civilian enterprise. The Soviet program grew and grew into a dark underside of the arms race.

  The biological weapons treaty came at the peak of détente, Nixon’s policy to wrap the Soviet Union in a web of new international agreements and understandings that would make the Cold War manageable and less threatening. A centerpiece of détente was the signing of the SALT I agreement in Moscow on May 26, 1972, by Nixon and Brezhnev. The most significant part of this agreement was the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, which effectively ended the prospect of an expensive arms race in missile defenses.16 But on offensive arms, the long-range missiles that were growing in size and destructive capacity, the SALT I agreement was basically just a stopgap measure. It froze fixed launchers for land-based and submarine-based missiles on each side, but included no precise numbers of missiles or warheads to be frozen. The core argument for the SALT I treaty and détente was that equal levels of missiles and launchers were not as important as the overall strategic balance, and in that the two sides were roughly equal. If the United States stopped the cycle of building new missiles, the reasoning went, it was likely the Soviets would too. Kissinger said, “And one of the questions which we have to ask ourselves as a country is what in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?”17

  Détente foundered in the late 1970s, in part on fears in the West that the Soviet Union was reaching for strategic superiority. A small band of defense policy conservatives and hawkish strategists in the United States raised alarms about Soviet intentions and actions. Albert Wohlstetter of the University of Chicago published a series of influential articles questioning whether the U.S. intelligence community had underestimated Soviet military spending and weapons modernization. Paul Nitze, who for a generation had be
en one of the “wise men” of the U.S. government, an arms control negotiator on SALT I and former secretary of the navy, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs in January 1976 that warned the Soviets were not satisfied with parity or essential equivalence in nuclear weapons, but “will continue to pursue a nuclear superiority that is not merely quantitative but designed to produce a theoretical war-winning capability.”18

  These claims—that the Soviet Union was seeking superiority over the United States and preparing to fight and win a nuclear war—could not be proven, but they gained a foothold in the United States at a time of deep uncertainty in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. In 1976, the Central Intelligence Agency carried out an extraordinary competition to examine Soviet intentions. It set up two separate teams to assess the available intelligence, pitting the agency’s own analysts against a team of outsiders. Both teams were given the same raw material. The CIA insiders were Team A, and the outsiders Team B. The outsiders were led by Richard Pipes, professor of history at Harvard, long a fierce critic of Soviet communism; the others on Team B were also drawn from critics of détente who had been warning of a Soviet quest for military superiority. When finished in November, the Team B report on Soviet intentions was unequivocal that Moscow was on a dangerous drive for supremacy, and that the CIA had badly underestimated it. Soviet leaders “think not in terms of nuclear stability, mutual assured destruction or strategic sufficiency, but of an effective nuclear war-fighting capability,” they wrote.19

  On the other side of the exercise, Team A did not share the shrill sense of alarm. They said the Soviets might want to achieve nuclear war-fighting capability and superiority, but that it wasn’t a realistic, practical goal. When completed, the overall yearly intelligence estimate hewed to Team A’s view that the Soviets “cannot be certain about future U.S. behavior or about their own future strategic capabilities relative to those of the U.S.” The State Department’s top intelligence official was even more cautious. Soviet leaders, he said, “do not entertain, as a practical objective in the foreseeable future, the achievement of what could reasonably be characterized as a ‘war winning’ or ‘war survival’ posture.”20

  In later years, many of the findings of Team B were found to have been overstated. Soviet missile accuracy and the pace of weapons modernization were exaggerated. But at the time, the conclusions seemed ominous, hammering another nail into the coffin of détente. In July 1977, Pipes wrote an article in the journal Commentary titled “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War.” Soon after work was finished on Team B, Nitze, Pipes and others helped to found an advocacy group, the Committee on the Present Danger, to raise public alarm about the Soviet military buildup. The committee’s board included Ronald Reagan, the former California governor, who had presidential ambitions and a base of support among social, economic and defense conservatives. The committee campaigned from 1977 to 1979 against a SALT II treaty, then under negotiation, distributing maps showing the American cities that could be destroyed by a single Soviet SS-18 missile.21

  The Soviet leadership, with Brezhnev ailing, blundered in this period, deploying the SS-20 Pioneer, a new generation of medium-range missiles in Europe, apparently not anticipating that this would lead to apprehension in the United States and among its allies. NATO responded with a proposal to negotiate, but also to deploy Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe as a counterweight. A new arms race was getting underway. The leaders in Moscow stumbled again with the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. President Jimmy Carter, who had signed the SALT II treaty with Brezhnev, pulled back the treaty from the Senate, and détente was dead.

  In the summer of 1980, Carter was facing a reelection challenge from Reagan and deepening tensions with Moscow. He approved two secret directives on nuclear war. Presidential Directive 58, signed June 30, called for a multibillion-dollar program to protect the president and other government leaders from a nuclear attack. Presidential Directive 59, signed July 25, put into effect a revised and expanded list of targeting choices a president would have at his disposal in the event of nuclear war. The new plan focused on attacking the Soviet political leadership, as well as military targets and war-supporting industry, and it envisioned limited nuclear strikes as well as a protracted conflict. Carter ordered upgrades for communications and improved satellites that would allow a president to choose military targets in real time after a nuclear exchange had begun. According to a senior Pentagon official, Presidential Directive 59 was developed in part to let the Soviet leadership know something very specific and frightening: they had been personally placed in the American nuclear crosshairs.22

  By 1982, the combined strategic arsenals of the superpowers held the explosive power of approximately 1 million Hiroshimas. Even with their huge arsenal, Soviet leaders feared they could perish in a decapitating missile attack before they had a chance to respond. They drew up plans for a system to guarantee a retaliatory strike. They envisioned a fully automatic system, known as the Dead Hand, in which a computer alone would issue the order to launch. But they had second thoughts, and instead created a modified system in which the decision to launch all the land-based missiles would be made by a small crew of duty officers surviving deep underground in a globe-shaped concrete bunker. The system was fully tested in November 1984 and placed on duty a few months later. At the climax of mistrust between the superpowers, one of them had built a Doomsday Machine.

  The book is based on interviews, memoirs, diaries, news accounts and archival materials. An invaluable source was a collection of internal documents from the Defense Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Revealed here for the first time, these papers shed new light on the decisions and thinking of key Soviet participants in the Gorbachev years. They show how Gorbachev stood up to the generals and the powerful military-industrial complex, and also how the Soviet Union concealed the germ warfare program. The papers were collected by Vitaly Katayev, an aviation and rocket designer by training. In 1974, Katayev was transferred from the missile complex in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, to become a staff man on the Central Committee, in the heart of the Kremlin decision making, where he remained for almost two decades, often writing meticulous entries in his journals and preserving sheaves of original documents. Katayev knew the missiles, the designers and the political leaders. Like many others in this story, he came to realize, from his own experience, that the arms race had become a competition of colossal excess.

  After the Soviet collapse in 1991, new and unexpected threats surfaced almost immediately. Rickety trains hauled nuclear warheads back from Eastern Europe and Central Asia into Russia; tons of highly enriched uranium and plutonium lay unguarded in warehouses; microbiologists and nuclear bomb designers were in desperate straits. This book traces the struggle of individuals to seize the moment and contain the danger. They were only partly successful. Today, the weapons to destroy civilization, the legacy of the Cold War, are still with us. They are the Dead Hand of our time, a lethal machine that haunts the globe long after the demise of the men who created it.

  ————— PART —————

  ONE

  ————— 1 —————

  AT THE PRECIPICE

  On July 31, 1979, Ronald Reagan walked through a pair of twenty-five-ton blast doors at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command. Behind the doors were four and a half acres of chambers and tunnels surrounded by granite two thousand feet thick to shield it from an atomic bomb. Constructed of carbon steel plates, the fifteen buildings inside rested on 1,319 giant springs, each weighing approximately one thousand pounds, to cushion against shock. Built in the early 1960s, the complex was the nerve center of a system of satellites and radar for monitoring against a nuclear attack.1

  Reagan, who sought the Republican nomination in 1976 but lost to Gerald Ford, was preparing to run for president again. He had flown from Los A
ngeles for briefings about nuclear weapons. Martin Anderson, a policy adviser to the campaign, accompanied Reagan that day, along with Douglas Morrow, a screenwriter and producer who had known Reagan in his Hollywood days and suggested that Reagan see the facility.2 From the outside of the mountain, at the North Portal, entering a one-third-mile-long tunnel, Anderson recalled they didn’t think the complex looked very impressive. But once deep inside the mountain, standing in front of the huge blast doors, they began to sense the enormous scope. They were given briefings on the relative nuclear capabilities of the United States and the Soviet Union, and shown the command center, a room with a giant electronic map of North America. Anderson asked Air Force General James Hill, the commander, what would happen if a Soviet SS-18 missile were to hit within a few hundred yards of the command center. The Soviets had already deployed the SS-18 and an upgraded version was in flight tests. “It would blow us away,” Hill replied. When he heard this, “a look of disbelief came over Reagan’s face,” Anderson recalled. “The discussion continued, and we pressed the issue of what would really happen if the Soviets were to fire just one nuclear missile at a U.S. city.”

  Hill replied that “we would pick it up right after it was launched, but by the time the officials of the city could be alerted that a nuclear bomb would hit them, there would be only ten or fifteen minutes left. That’s all we can do. We can’t stop it.”

  On the flight back to Los Angeles, Reagan was deeply concerned. “He couldn’t believe the United States had no defense against Soviet missiles,” Anderson recalled. Reagan slowly shook his head and said, “We have spent all that money and have all that equipment, and there is nothing we can do to prevent a nuclear missile from hitting us.” At the end of the flight, Reagan reflected on the dilemma that might confront a U.S. president if faced with a nuclear attack. “The only options he would have,” Reagan said, “would be to press the button or do nothing. They’re both bad. We should have some way of defending ourselves against nuclear missiles.”3