The Dead Hand

by David E. Hoffman

  1 Bernard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and the World Order (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1946).

  2 Albert Carnesale, Paul Doty, Stanley Hoffmann, Samuel P. Huntington, Joseph S. Nye Jr., and Scott D. Sagan, Living with Nuclear Weapons (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 31–32.

  3 Admiral G. P. Nanos, “Strategic Systems Update,” Submarine Review, April 1997, pp. 12–17. Nanos quoted another admiral but affirmed this was a “reasonable, unclassified scale.” See “The Capabilities of Trident Against Russian Silo-based Missiles: Implications for START III and Beyond,” George N. Lewis, Theodore A. Postol, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Feb. 2–6, 1998.

  4 David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill, Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 113–181. Also see William Burr, ed., “The Creation of SIOP-62: More Evidence on the Origins of Overkill,” EBB No. 130, doc. 23, “Note by the Secretaries to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Strategic Target Planning,” Jan. 27, 1961.

  5 McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 354.

  6 “History of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff: Preparation of SIOP-63,” January 1964. “New Evidence on the Origins of Overkill,” TNSA EBB No. 236, doc. 2. Also see McNamara commencement address at the University of Michigan, June 16. McNamara may have been influenced by the fact that, through improved satellite intelligence, the United States had obtained the first comprehensive map of the Soviet missile bases, submarine ports, air defense sites and other military installations. Desmond Ball and Jeffery Richelson, eds., Strategic Nuclear Targeting (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 65. Also see Alfred Goldberg, “A Brief Survey of the Evolution of Ideas about Counterforce,” Rand Corp., Memorandum RM-5431-PR, October 1957, rev. March 1981, p. 9. DNSA, No. NH00041.

  7 Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much Is Enough?: Shaping the Defense Program, 1961–1969 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), rev. ed. (Santa Monica: RAND Corp., 2005), pp. 67 and 207.

  8 The acronym was advanced by Donald G. Brennan of the Hudson Institute to capture what he thought was the folly of the idea of MAD. Brennan was an advocate of missile defense and finding a way out of mutual vulnerability. See “Strategic Alternatives,” New York Times, May 24, 1971, p. 31, and May 25, 1971, p. 39.

  9 Arnold L. Horelick and Myron Rush, “Deception in Soviet Strategic Missile Claims, 1957–1962,” RAND Corp., May 1963. DNSA NH00762.

  10 An exception to this was Europe, where the Soviets knew that tactical nuclear strikes were possible early in any war, and they planned for preemptive nuclear attack. See Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne, eds., A Cardboard Castle: An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005), pp. 406–412.

  11 John Hines, Ellis M. Mishulovich, John F. Shull, Soviet Intentions 1965–1985, BDM Federal Inc., for Office of Secretary of Defense, Sept. 22, 1995, offers a good overview of Soviet thinking based on interviews with Soviet participants. See Vol. I, An Analytical Comparison of U.S.-Soviet Assessments During the Cold War. Also see Aleksander Savelyev and Nikolay Detinov, The Big Five: Arms Control Decision-making in the Soviet Union (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), pp. 1–13.

  12 The end result of the competition was a turn toward hardened silos and reliance on a retaliatory posture, which Keldysh favored. Hines, Vol. II, p. 85; Savelyev, pp. 18–19; Vitaly Katayev, unpublished memoir, Some Facts from History and Geometry, author’s possession; Pavel Podvig, communication with author, March 27, 2009; and Podvig, ed., Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

  13 The plan still incorporated the counterforce idea. Task Alpha would use 58 percent of the arsenal to hit Soviet forces. By contrast, task Charlie—cities and industrial targets—was to use only about 11 percent of the weapons. See “The Nixon Administration, the SIOP, and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969—1974,” TNSA EBB No. 173, doc. 3.

  14 For Kissinger on Nixon, see TNSA EBB 173, doc. 22. H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), p. 55. Kissinger pushed for the creation of limited nuclear war options, saying that threats of a massive attack were just not credible. On January 17, 1974, Nixon signed National Security Decision Memorandum 242, a top-secret directive that laid out a desire for a “wide range” of limited nuclear war attack options. The directive was the result of Kissinger’s prodding. See TNSA EBB 173 and Burr, “The Nixon Administration, the ‘Horror Strategy,’ and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969–1972,” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, Summer 2005, pp. 34–78.

  15 Hines, vol. II, p. 27.

  16 The treaty limited each side to two sites with one hundred launchers. This was cut in 1974 to one site each. The United States built one around North Dakota missile fields, but later dismantled it. The Soviet Union built one around Moscow.

  17 Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 363. Kissinger press conference, July 3, 1974.

  18 Nitze, “Assuring Strategic Stability in an Era of Détente,” Foreign Affairs, January 1976, vol. 54, no. 2.

  19 Hines asked Soviet participants about key conclusions in the Team A-Team B experiment. While he found support for a Soviet desire for superiority, he also found U.S. assessments had overstated Soviet intentions as aggressive. Hines, pp. 68–71. For the Team B report, see “Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis: Soviet Strategic Objectives, An Alternative View: Report of Team ‘B,’” December 1976, DNSA SE00501. Pipes later claimed Team B’s conclusions were based on a deeper insight into Russian history and mind-set. See Richard Pipes, VIXI: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 137. For Team A, see “Soviet Forces for Strategic Nuclear Conflict through the Mid-1980s,” NIE 11-3/8-76, Dec. 21, 1976, Vol. 1, Key Judgments and Summary, p. 3. Also see Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Détente (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); and Cahn, “Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 1993, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 22–27. For evidence Team B erred, see Raymond L. Garthoff, “Estimating Soviet Military Intentions and Capabilities,” Ch. 5 in Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett, eds., Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 2003). Through the late 1970s and early 1980s, many hawks warned about the “window of vulnerability” for American land-based missiles. This argument, made by Nitze, Pipes and eventually Reagan, claimed that the larger number of Soviet missiles could wipe out the entire one thousand U.S. Minuteman missile force and fifty-four Titan missiles. But the SS-18s may have been less accurate than the United States thought. For example, NIE 11-3/8-78 estimated that had the Soviet Union initiated an attack on American missile silos in 1978, only about six hundred U.S. silo-based missiles would survive a one-on-one Soviet missile attack, and no more than about four hundred would survive a two-on-one strike. However, using flight test data from Katayev, Pavel Podvig estimated that 890 of the 1,054 U.S. silo-based missiles would have survived a one-on-one attack and 800 would have survived an attack in which each silo is targeted by two Soviet warheads. Podvig, “The Window of Vulnerability that Wasn’t: Soviet Military Buildup in the 1970s,” International Security, Vol. 3, No. 1, Summer, 2008. Bush, then CIA director, later told Congress the two teams reached the following conclusions: “1. Team A’s conclusions lead to estimates of ICBM accuracy which do not imply a severe threat to Minuteman until about 1980. 2. The Team B estimates of accuracy imply that such a threat could materialize much sooner.” See “DCI Congressional Briefing,” January 1977, Anne Cahn collection, TNSA. After the exercise was over, Team A pointed out that the Soviets lagged way behind the United States in theory, laboratory instrument quality and mass production of precision instruments such as g
uidance equipment needed for missile accuracy. See “Summary of Intelligence Community (‘A Team’) Briefing to PFIAB on Soviet ICBM Accuracy,” Cahn collection, TNSA. The document is undated but the briefing was in December 1976. Hines noted U.S. and Soviet experts used different assumptions about nuclear blast to judge whether missile silos were vulnerable. Hines, p. 70. Missile accuracy is measured by “circular error probability,” or CEP—the radius of a circle in which half the warheads fall. When the Soviets began deploying the first missiles with MIRVs in 1974, the U.S. intelligence consensus was they did not have a CEP better than 470 meters. These estimates were challenged by Team B, which suggested that Soviet missiles could become even more accurate (a smaller CEP). But according to Soviet flight test data, the CEP of the first-generation SS-18 was 700 meters; the SS-17 was 700 meters, and the SS-19 was 650 meters. The next generation of missiles, coming on line in the 1980s, were improved. The author is indebted to Pavel Podvig for these conclusions, based on Katayev, Hoover.

  20 Soviet Forces for Strategic Nuclear Conflict Through the Mid-1980s, NIE 11-3/8-76, Dec. 21, 1976, Vol. 1, Key Judgments and Summary, p. 3.

  21 Eugene V. Rostow, the Yale law professor, was committee chairman. Dozens of members eventually held appointments in the Reagan administration, including Nitze and Pipes. Charles Tyroller II, ed., Alerting America: The Papers of the Committee on the Present Danger (Washington: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1984).

  22 Brzezinski became concerned about weaknesses in the command and control system when an exercise to simulate evacuating the president on Jan. 28, 1977, went awry. Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor, 1977–1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1983), pp. 14–15. Brzezinski asked William E. Odom, then a colonel general on the White House National Security Council staff, to study the chain of command and control of nuclear weapons. The study revealed weaknesses in the system. The two presidential directives were an outgrowth of the study. Odom interview, Feb. 3, 2006; Odom, “The Origins and Design of Presidential Decision-59: A Memoir,” in Henry D. Sokolski, ed., Getting Mad: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice (Carlisle, Pa.: U.S. Army War College, 2004). On targeting the Soviet leadership, see Hines, vol. 2, p. 118. Andrew W. Marshall, the director of the Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, told Hines that “PD-59 was developed to reinforce deterrence by making it clear to the Soviet leadership that they would not escape destruction in any exchange. The objective was to clarify and personalize somewhat the danger of warfare and nuclear use to Soviet decision-makers.”

  CHAPTER 1: AT THE PRECIPICE

  1 See www.cheyennemountain.af.mil.

  2 Morrow later promoted NASA programs. See Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York: Free Press, 2003), p. 107.

  3 Martin Anderson, Revolution: The Reagan Legacy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), pp. 80–83.

  4 Reagan radio address, May 29, 1979, “Miscellaneous 1,” reproduced in Reagan in His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America, Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, Martin Anderson, eds. (New York: Free Press, 2001), p. 104. The treaty was signed by Carter and Brezhnev in Vienna on June 18.

  5 Draft copy, “Policy Memorandum No. 3,” August 1979, author’s possession. Anderson knew Reagan had in earlier years disagreed with President Nixon’s decision to limit missile defenses in the 1972 ABM treaty. “We bargained that away in exchange for nothing,” Reagan had said. See “Defense IV,” Sept. 11, 1979, Reagan in His Own Hand. Anderson interview, Sept. 10, 2008.

  6 In his memoir, Reagan wrote: “Nothing was more important to mankind than assuring its survival and the survival of our planet. Yet for forty years nuclear weapons had kept the world under a shadow of terror. Our dealings with the Soviets—and theirs with us—had been based on a policy known as ‘mutual assured destruction’—the ‘MAD’ policy, and madness it was. It was the craziest thing I had ever heard of: Simply put, it called for each side to keep enough nuclear weapons at the ready to obliterate each other, so that if one attacked, the second had enough bombs left to annihilate its adversary in a matter of minutes. We were a button push away from oblivion.” Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 13.

  7 Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), June 7, 1981.

  8 Martin Anderson, presentation, Oct. 11, 2006, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, “Implications of the Reykjavik Summit on Its Twentieth Anniversary.” Also, communication with author, Sept. 10, 2008.

  9 Tony Thomas, The Films of Ronald Reagan (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1980), pp. 98–99.

  10 Laurence W. Beilenson, The Treaty Trap: A History of the Performance of Political Treaties by the United States and European Nations (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1969), pp. 212, 219–221.

  11 The author covered the Reagan campaign as a reporter for Knight-Ridder newspapers, and never picked up on Reagan’s nuclear abolitionist views. Yet his thinking was expressed in earlier years. See Reagan’s 1963 speech text, “Are Liberals Really Liberal?” in Reagan in His Own Hand, and Reagan’s address to the 1976 Republican National Convention, Anderson, pp. 69–71.

  12 Reagan, “Peace: Restoring the Margin of Safety,” address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, Chicago, August 18, 1980.

  13 David Hoffman, “Reagan’s Lure Is His Optimism,” Detroit Free Press, Summer 1980.

  14 Reagan, An American Life, p. 267.

  15 Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (New York: Times Books, 1995), p. 484.

  16 Lou Cannon, Ronald Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), pp. 299–301. Reagan’s diary for April 23 includes one version of what he calls a “script” of a letter written by hand. This is a short letter. In An American Life, pp. 272–273, Reagan reprints a broader version of the handwritten letter, apparently reflecting revisions by the State Department and others.

  17 James A. Baker III, “Work Hard, Study…And Keep Out of Politics!” (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2006), p. 163.

  18 Reagan, An American Life, p. 273.

  19 Thomas C. Reed, At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), pp. 266–270.

  20 Gus Weiss, “The Farewell Dossier,” Studies in Intelligence, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, vol. 39, no. 5, 1996.

  21 Pelton volunteered information about the program as early as his first contact with the Soviets on Jan. 15, 1980, and received $20,000 from them in October. He received another $15,000 in 1983. Pelton was arrested in 1985 and convicted of spying in 1986. See United States of America v. Ronald William Pelton, Indictment, U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Dec. 20, 1985, case no. HM-850621.

  22 Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (New York: PublicAffairs, 1998), p. 230.

  23 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 583.

  24 Thomas C. Reed communication with author, Nov. 21, 2006.

  25 Richard Halloran, “Pentagon Draws Up First Strategy for Fighting a Long Nuclear War,” New York Times, May 30, 1982, p. 1.

  26 Charles Mohr, “Preserving U.S. Command After Nuclear Attack,” New York Times, June 28, 1982, p. 18.

  27 Thomas C. Reed, interview, Dec. 4, 2004.

  28 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 354.

  29 Reed, p. 236.

  30 Gaddis, p. 354.

  31 Reagan diary, March 26, 1982.

  32 NSDD 32 is dated May 20, 1982. But the next presidential directive, NSDD 33, is dated a week earlier, May 14. Reed said Clark put it into the syste
m the day before he was to deliver a public speech, on May 21, describing the new approach.

  33 Reagan admitted having trouble. “Some of the journalists who write so easily as to why we don’t sit down and start talking with the Soviets should know just how complicated it is,” he wrote. Reagan diary, April 21, 1982.

  34 Reagan, An American Life, p. 553. See Dobrynin, pp. 502–503. In November 1981, Reagan had unveiled another arms control proposal, for intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe. This was his “zero option,” proposing that the United States would forgo deployment of the Pershing IIs and GLCMs if the Soviets dismantled their Pioneers. Although it seemed one-sided at the time, it later proved to be the template for the 1987 treaty eliminating this entire class of weapons.

  35 Reagan diary, May 24, 1982.

  36 Carl Bernstein, “The Holy Alliance,” Time magazine, Feb. 24, 1992, pp. 28–35.

  37 George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 441, and note 13, p. 905.

  38 Steven R. Weisman, “Reagan, in Berlin, Bids Soviet Work for a Safe Europe,” New York Times, June 12, 1982, p. 1; and Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 461.

  39 George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), p. 5.

  40 This assessment was made in 1979 by Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering William J. Perry before the House Armed Services Committee. Also see Strategic Command, Control and Communications: Alternative Approaches for Modernization, Congressional Budget Office, October 1981.

  41 Reed communication with author, Nov. 21, 2006.

  42 NSDD 55. http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/index.html.

  43 James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), Ch. 9.

  44 Reagan diary, Nov. 13, 1982. Dobrynin, pp. 511–512.