by Craig Nelson
Besides testing the effects of atomic bombs on various building materials and producing motion pictures so that American citizens could see paint being boiled away and edifices being thrown in one direction by the shock wave and then reversed by the pull of the rising mushroom cloud, the Federal Civil Defense Administration ran Operation Cue at the Nevada Test Site to determine the effects of nuclear attacks on the typical American family. Journalist Laura McEnaney: “They called them mannequin families and they dressed them up in JC Penney clothing and they positioned them in various rooms of the house. And in one room there was a child taking a nap, in another room there was a family dinner party, and one of the things they did, they placed families hiding underneath shelters. And they equipped each of these homes with refrigerators, typical appliances one would find in a home, the kinds of food one would eat, from baby food to adult food, and they exposed them to blast. These were sort of like morality tales. Each film, each brochure, was a morality tale. If you didn’t prepare, you have only yourself to blame for being wounded or killed. And it asked American families to think about themselves not just as friends, neighborhoods, family members, but as warriors of a cold war. And this really introduced a military purpose and practice into American family life.”
Post-Sputnik, Eisenhower’s Open Skies would come true through another avenue with Corona, the CIA’s surveillance-satellite program, which began to replace the U-2s in 1959, and which, using high-resolution, remarkably detailed 70 mm Eastman Kodak film, provided Washington with information about every aspect of Soviet and Chinese military power. Yet, even though the United States now knew how much weaker the Soviets were than previously believed, it reassured no one. At any minute, after all, the Red Army might surpass the red, white, and blue’s forces and achieve nuclear dominance. This never happened, but the Soviets did begin their own successful spy-satellite program, and fairly quickly the superpowers reached eye-in-the-sky reconnaissance parity. But oddly enough, neither deployed antisatellite weapons against the other, perhaps realizing that knowledge made for less frightened and less trigger-happy foes. Leaving each other’s satellites alone, it turned out, was a more brilliant strategy than Killing a Nation, Sunday Punch, Massive Retaliation, and Flexible Response combined.
By the time of the Eisenhower administration, LeMay’s SAC was a nuclear monopoly that threatened to swallow the whole of the DoD budget. Many advisers, including von Neumann, raised Wohlstetter’s fear of the USSR’s wiping out all of SAC in one blow. In 1955, Ed Teller suggested developing nuclear warheads small enough to fit on rockets launched from submarines and arranged for Livermore to outbid Los Alamos to research and develop such a system, giving the brilliant Admiral Hyman Rickover a nuclear role for his navy—a fleet of forty-five submarines, twenty-nine of them deployed 24-7, capable of launching atomic-warhead-tipped cruise missiles against 232 Russia targets, with a build cost of $7–$8 billion and annual operating expenses of $350 million. At the same time, von Neumann and the air force developed warhead-bearing rockets, and by 1967, America had a thousand Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles in underground silos. The Pentagon now wielded a global force of sub-ferried ballistic missiles, SAC-borne atomic bombs, and bunker-based ICBMs—the Triad Doctrine. Today, over two decades after the fall of the USSR, the United States maintains this Triad Doctrine for conducting a massive and overwhelming nuclear strike against the Soviets, even though there are no more Soviets. As early as 1958, the American nuclear arsenal was already so morbidly obese that, when exercises were conducted to assess operations, they revealed more than two hundred incidents in which bombers and missiles overlapped, meaning that, during nuclear war, they would be blowing up each other instead of the enemy.
In 1961, RAND created the Single Integrated Operational Plan or SIOP-62, a revision of Massive Retaliation/Sunday Punch, as it would release the whole of the American nuclear arsenal if the country was provoked. One billion people would eventually die from fire and radiation, with 285 million in the ellipsoidal target from China to Eastern Europe perishing in the initial blast. From about 1961 to 1968, the concomitant strategy of Furtherance meant that, if the United States was attacked and the president died or disappeared, secret instructions would be sent to military commanders giving them authorization to launch the nation’s nuclear arsenal, meaning an automatic “full nuclear response” against both the Soviet Union and China. When Marine Corps chief David Shoup asked SAC chief Thomas Power at a 1960 briefing if, in the event China had nothing to do with the attack, they could be spared, Power replied, “Well, yeah, we could do that, but I hope nobody thinks of it because it would really screw up the plan.”
When JFK was briefed on SIOP-62 after taking office, he muttered, “And we call ourselves the human race,” while after his first atomic briefing in September 1953, Khrushchev “learned all the facts of nuclear power [and] I couldn’t sleep for several days. Then I became convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons, and when I realized that, I was able to sleep again.” Witnesses reported that two of his successors, Brezhnev and Kosygin, after learning that an American attack would annihilate 99.99 percent of the Soviet military, 85 percent of the nation’s industry, and kill 80 million Russians, were visibly shaken.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara announced on September 18, 1967, “The cornerstone of our strategic policy continues to be to deter nuclear attack upon the United States or its allies. We do this by maintaining a highly reliable ability to inflict unacceptable damage upon any single aggressor or combination of aggressors at any time during the course of a strategic nuclear exchange, even after absorbing a surprise first strike. This can be defined as our assured-destruction capability.” The strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction—MAD—was accompanied by the Pentagon’s Nuclear Utilization Target Selection: NUTS. In the nuclear arms race, “each individual decision along the way seemed rational at the time. But the result was insane,” admitted McNamara. “Each of the decisions, taken by itself, appeared rational or inescapable. But the fact is that they were made without reference to any overall master plan or long-term objective. They have led to nuclear arsenals and nuclear war plans that few of the participants either anticipated or would, in retrospect, wish to support. . . . Despite an advantage of seventeen to one in our favor, President Kennedy and I were deterred from even considering a nuclear attack on the USSR by the knowledge that, although such a strike would destroy the Soviet Union, tens of their weapons would survive to be launched against the United States. These would kill millions of Americans. No responsible political leader would expose his nation to such a catastrophe.”
Adding to MAD and NUTS was the Nixon administration’s Madman Theory, or “the principle of the threat of excessive force.” In the wake of so many ex-presidents and premiers admitting that they could never pull the nuclear trigger, Madman Theory was a strategy to convince foreign powers that one of the leaders of the United States was wildly aggressive, ruthlessly cold-blooded, and fearfully unpredictable. In the summer of 1974 when his impeachment was an open topic of conversation, Nixon idly mentioned to a group of congressmen, “I could go into the next room, make a telephone call, and in twenty-five minutes, 70 million people will be dead.” Afterward, Senator Alan Cranston asked Defense Secretary James Schlesinger about “the need of keeping a berserk president from plunging us into a holocaust,” and Schlesinger initiated a new procedure to have anyone in the nuclear chain contact him upon receipt of unusual commands or requests from President Nixon.
Soviet colonel Viktor Girshfield: “All of us, more or less, know that nuclear war would be the end. All our theoreticians say that there is no way of preventing nuclear war from escalating to the global level, that you cannot win a nuclear war. That is our general theoretical position. But from a professional military point of view, such a position is impossible. Can a professional military man say that nuclear war is inconceivable? No, because some fool of an American president may really start a nuclear war. A professio
nal military man must consider what to do in that event. . . . Consider the point of view of another professional, the doctor who knows that his patient is suffering from an incurable disease. He cannot for that reason abandon further efforts. . . . To make no plans for [a nuclear war] would be openly to proclaim our helplessness. It would be psychologically wrong.” Physicist Herbert York: “Let’s put it this way, in more understandable terms. All roads in the strategic equation lead to MAD [Mutual Assured Destruction]. All the other ones . . . are games, are window dressings, and they are window dressing for upmanship. . . . But when you take away all these layers of cloth, at the bottom of the thing, basically, is MAD, and no one likes it.”
Nikita Khrushchev’s son, Sergei: “For thousands of years peoples have resolved their conflicts by armed clashes. There was good reason for Karl von Clausewitz to write that war is a continuation of politics by other means. With the invention of nuclear weapons, politicians suddenly realized that war would no longer lead to victory, that both sides would lose. But they didn’t know how to behave differently. So they behaved the same way, but without going to war. War without war was called ‘cold war.’ . . . Thus the Cold War was a kind of transitional period from a disconnected world that used weapons as its main instrument for resolving world conflicts to some kind of different state of being—to a new world order, if you like.”
At RAND in the Kennedy era, Albert Wohlstetter was eclipsed both physically and theoretically by Herman Kahn, who was described as looking “like a prize-winning pear” and “a thermonuclear Zero Mostel.” Kahn was renowned for his two-day, twelve-hour lectures, which employed von Neumann’s game theory to “think about the unthinkable”—nuclear holocaust as a round of poker. In a world of strategies called MAD and NUTS and ever-more-deranged notions of atomic warfare, Kahn was the endgame.
Inspired by Wohlstetter’s 1959 Foreign Affairs article, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Kahn’s 1960 On Thermonuclear War analyzed and compared various apocalyptic scenarios, including hundreds of megadeaths—a unit invented by Kahn, one megadeath equaling 1 million murdered—and entire continents uninhabitable for centuries. It insisted that “despite a widespread belief to the contrary, objective studies indicate that even though the amount of human tragedy would be greatly increased in the postwar world, the increase would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants.” The elderly would be fine eating radioactive food since “most of these people would die of other causes before they got cancer.” In crafting defense in the Atomic Age, “any power that can evacuate a high percentage of its urban population to protection is in a much better position to bargain than one which cannot do this. . . . It might well turn out that US decision makers would be willing, among other things, to accept the high risk of an additional 1 percent of our children being born deformed if that meant not giving up Europe to Soviet Russia.”
Scientific American called On Thermonuclear War “a moral tract on mass murder: how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it.” Yet fundamentally, to launch the global annihilation of all-out nuclear assault, any leader from either side pushing the button had to agree with Kahn’s theses. National Security Council member Roger C. Molander attended one meeting at the Pentagon to discuss these new realities: “A Navy captain was saying that people here and in Europe were getting much too upset about the consequences of nuclear war. The captain added that people were talking as if nuclear war would be the end of the world when, in fact, only 500 million people would be killed. ‘Only 500 million people!’ I remember sitting there and repeating that phrase to myself: ‘Only 500 million people!’ ”
On Thermonuclear War was one of the key inspirations for Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove, with Peter Sellers’s title character being a mélange of Kahn, Teller, von Neumann, and Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun; his Austrian accent was inspired by Kubrick’s photographic consultant, Weegee. So much of Kahn’s book reappears in Dr. Strangelove—in such preposterous moments as George C. Scott’s general explaining, “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops, uh, depending on the breaks,” and the strategy of preserving the best of the American species in mine shafts, with two females for each male—that Kahn complained to Kubrick about being paid royalties. “It doesn’t work that way,” the director replied.
A key Strangelove plot point used Kahn’s invention the Doomsday Machine, a computer-run automatic response that was the ultimate in retaliation as it would destroy your foe, even though you, yourself, were already dead. If the only purpose of nuclear arsenals is deterrence, the machine was a great one—“The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!” Strangelove screams at one point at the Soviet ambassador. Stanley Kubrick: “The present nuclear situation is so totally new and unique that it is beyond the realm of current semantics; in its actual implications, and its infinite horror, it cannot be clearly or satisfactorily expressed by any ordinary scheme of aesthetics. What we do know is that its one salient and undeniable characteristic is that of the absurd.” An extraordinary number of the movie’s inventions came true, including the Moscow-Washington hotline, and the Soviet version of the Doomsday Machine. It was called Dead Hand.
On July 25, 1980, Jimmy Carter signed presidential directive PD-59, which replaced the Sunday Punch–styled SIOP—which had been in effect since Kennedy was disgusted by it—with a strategy of nuclear combat that would directly target and attack Soviet leaders. A sequel to Killing a Nation, this was known as Decapitation, and its logic was explained by a Foreign Policy article, “Victory Is Possible”: “The United States should be able to destroy key leadership cadres, their means of communication, and some of the instruments of domestic control. The USSR, with its gross overcentralization of authority, epitomized by its best bureaucracy in Moscow, should be highly vulnerable to such an attack. The Soviet Union might cease to function if its security agency, the KGB, were severely crippled. If the Moscow bureaucracy could be eliminated, damaged, or isolated, the USSR might disintegrate into anarchy.” By the end of 1980, a Tomahawk cruise missile in a test struck within sixteen feet of its target, meaning Decapitation was feasible.
Oppenheimer had once compared the US and USSR to scorpions in a bottle, but the Cold War superpowers acted more like a rapid-fire version of evolution between predator and prey. The Soviets responded to Decapitation by engineering an automatic attack, run by computers, which, after their society’s head had been cut off, could be triggered by a small band of surviving Russians from an underground bunker—this strategy called Perimetr, or Dead Hand. Minuteman officer Bruce Blair explained that if Dead Hand “senses a nuclear explosion in Russian territory and then receives no communication from Moscow, it will assume the incapacity of human leadership in Moscow or elsewhere and will then grant a single human being deep within Kosvinsky Mountain the authority and capability to launch the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal. . . . Communication rockets, launched automatically by radio command, would relay fire orders to nuclear combat missiles in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. The doomsday machine provides for a massive salvo of these forces. Weapons commanders in the field may be completely bypassed. Even the mobile missiles on trucks could fire automatically, triggered by command from the communications rockets.”
Dead Hand became operational in 1985, just one more ingredient in the superpowers’ nuclear operations that might bring Dr. Strangelove’s accidental Armageddon to life. Several times in the 1950s, American defense forces’ alarms warned of incoming Soviet missiles, which turned out to be flocks of Canada geese. In 1960, nuclear alerts were sounded over meteor showers, and radar reflections. In 1997, Soviet defense forces set off an alarm over incoming US missiles, which turned out to be a Norwegian weather satellite. On at least three occasions in 1980 alone, US forces were set on combat alert when the nation’s early-warning computer system
failed. These errors were so egregious that the KGB announced they must be CIA plots to create avenues of surprise attack. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was woken from a dead sleep at 3:00 a.m. on November 9, 1979, to be told that 220 Soviet missiles had been first-strike fired against the United States. Brzezinski said he would wait for a second confirming call before informing President Carter, and that call came immediately. But the confirmation call said the first was mistaken; it was not 220 missiles, but 2,200 incoming missiles—a Soviet Killing a Nation. Brzezinski sat quietly in the dark for some time not waking his wife, assuming that they would both be dead in about thirty minutes anyway. Mere seconds before Brzezinski was going to telephone President Carter, there was a third call. Someone had put training videos into the system without informing the watch crew. It was all a mistake.
In 1961 during the Kennedy administration, NATO installed medium-range Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy pointing at Moscow and Leningrad—missiles that needed so much prep work before launch that they could not be used reactively, but only to attack. In a February 1961 meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Albert Gore Sr. told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that these were a “provocation. . . . I wonder what our attitude would be” if the Soviets put similar missiles directed at US cities, say, in Cuba?
When in the autumn of that year, the United States told the Soviets that a missile gap had been discovered by American spy satellites—a gap in favor of the United States—Nikita Khrushchev combined this revelation with the recent American-led Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to believe that Kennedy was threatening him. His response was exactly as Senator Gore had predicted, installing Soviet missiles pointing at America from Cuba. Nikita Khrushchev: “We had no desire to start a war. On the contrary, our principal aim was only to deter America from starting a war. We were well aware that a war which started over Cuba would quickly expand into a world war.”