Sleepwalking With the Bomb

by John C. Wohlstetter

  President Obama’s utopian rush towards nuclear abolition ignores the vital lessons nuclear-age history teaches. His abject failure to support the Iranian uprising of June 2009 by leading an allied coalition to impose strong sanctions then, instead of pursuing talks that had no plausible chance to succeed, exemplifies why we are sleepwalking towards an avoidable nuclear catastrophe. Equally risky is his desire to “set an example” for other nations to follow in reducing nuclear arms, when our adversaries are more likely to increase their arsenals instead, in pursuit of greater power and influence.

  History’s Twelve Vital Nuclear-Age Lessons

  TWO-THIRDS OF a century offer up twelve guidelines for leaders in public office.

  1. Arms control cannot be viewed in isolation, but rather must be considered along with an adversary’s conduct.

  2. Arms agreements must be based upon genuine, not presumed, commonality of strategic interest.

  3. Revolutionary powers cannot be contained; they must be defeated.

  4. Nuclear weapons give nations a “dying sting” capability that virtually precludes preemptive action and confers near-total survival insurance.

  5. The nuclear balance matters if any party to a conflict thinks it matters, and thus alters its behavior.

  6. Civilian nuclear power inherently confers military nuclear capability.

  7. Intelligence cannot reliably predict when closed societies go nuclear.

  8. Ally proliferation can be prevented only by superpower constancy.

  9. Popular pressure for unilateral disarmament can prevail unless Western governments explain its hidden, grave dangers.

  10. Disarming hostile powers cannot be done by negotiations alone.

  11. Never allow single or low-number points of catastrophic vulnerability.

  12. Nuclear policy must be fundamentally defensive: its goal is to avoid the apocalyptic trinity of suicide, genocide, and surrender.

  In applying these lessons it is supremely important to distinguish between three classes of adversary states: rivals, rogues, and revolutionaries. Rivals, like China and Russia, do not desire our outright destruction; their interests are too intertwined with our survival to allow for that. But they do desire to displace us in primacy of influence in world affairs. China desires to attain the supreme position it enjoyed for most of the past two millennia as the world’s preeminent power; it is beginning this quest by seeking to become primary power in the western Pacific region. For its part, Russia desires to regain the territories it controlled before the end of the Cold War. Rivals, however, may aid rogue regimes by transferring military and nuclear technology.

  Rogues, like North Korea, do not necessarily seek to dominate a region. Rather they seek to ensure their own survival. Towards this end, nuclear weapons are the best survival insurance policy their leaders can purchase.

  Revolutionaries, like Iran, seek not merely to adjust their position in the existing global order, but to overturn that order and establish a new one. Iran’s leaders are militant Islamists who ardently desire the destruction of Great Satan America and Little Satan Israel. These regimes are least likely to be peacefully persuaded to change their course.

  Of the 12 lessons history offers as to nuclear policy, lessons 3, 6, and 11 are those that address the most immediate threats facing the civilized world: a revolutionary Iran in hot pursuit of nuclear weapon status (3); the danger of more rogue proliferation through careless diffusion of civilian nuclear technology (6); and the risk of nuclear blackmail if leaders leave their country open to potentially catastrophic single-point strikes from hostile powers willing to take extreme risks (11). Failure to fully meet these challenges would present civilized peoples with apocalyptic choices, with the least bad achievable outcome a Pyrrhic victory.

  Over the medium term, the possibility of a nuclear crisis between major powers is also growing. Russia’s immense modernization program, encompassing diverse advanced technologies, is not consistent with a desire to move towards nuclear zero. China’s stunning half-century surge in strategic forces is hugely inconsistent with a focus on reductions. Its vast network of cavernous Underground Great Wall tunnels, clearly intended to house China’s advanced nuclear arsenal and shelter its leadership cadre, is way out of proportion to direct war threats China faces. We must convene an outside “B-Team,” one free of the intelligence community’s bureaucratic tendencies, to reliably ascertain the size of China’s nuclear arsenal before considering more disarmament. A “B” Team should also look at Russia’s broad range of nuclear modernization programs, especially risks of breakout via hidden nuclear assets.

  Our peril grows as America’s pool of nuclear weapons experts drastically shrinks. Declining steadily over the past two decades, American expertise may be entirely gone from government labs in five years. The great nuclear scientists who retired take with them a matchless trove of expertise gleaned from decades conducting and assessing sophisticated nuclear tests. Unless their knowledge is captured and a sustainable growth path for nuclear weapon expertise is created, America in a decade or two may find itself with less overall nuclear weapon expertise than resides elsewhere. There is plenty of work for designers to build a replacement generation of safer, more reliable nuclear weapons. These would be more credible as deterrent weapons, and thus less likely to be used.

  It is only in the long term—almost certainly decades, if not generations—that any decisive move towards nuclear zero might responsibly be countenanced. Premature disarmament can plunge the civilized world into a nightmare world order dominated by the most ruthless states and leaders on the planet.

  If reelected President Obama must reverse his present course, or his successor must reverse course before it is too late. Else the nuclear Doomsday Clock likely will strike midnight once and for all, and the world will never be the same.

  APPENDIX 1:

  FICTION’S WAR AGAINST NUCLEAR REALITIES

  THE COLD WAR SHAPED PUBLIC ATTITUDES FOR 55 YEARS. BUT THE focus on superpower nuclear war shifted dramatically after September 11, 2001, and attention turned to the possibility of terrorists using nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, attitudes implanted by fiction a half-century old persist in the public mind.

  Nuclear tests above ground etched the mushroom cloud image indelibly on the public mind. Nuclear war became perceived in the public consciousness as inevitably an all-out exchange of the kind that ended Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The 1964 film was loosely based upon Peter Bryant’s 1958 novel, Red Alert, which had a happier, peaceful ending. Nuclear scientists and generals were portrayed in the film as lunatics, and the misleading image of one mistake triggering all-out superpower war became a staple. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) posited a global war fought with “cobalt bombs”—nuclear devices laced with intensely radioactive cobalt-60—in which survivors in Australia live out mankind’s last days. The war in that novel was started by Albania, and spread to larger powers until Russia and China exchanged massive cobalt-bomb salvoes, unleashing lethal radiation that atmospheric wind currents eventually spread worldwide. In Alas Babylon (1959) Pat Frank based all-out war on a single air-to-air missile with a conventional warhead fired by a U.S. Navy flier that missed its Russian target and slammed into a Russian military depot in Syria.

  The novel Fail-Safe (published in 1962 and set in 1967) posed a scenario in which the American president avoids all-out destruction after the accidental obliteration of Moscow by consenting to a deliberate destruction of New York, equally without warning. And the thriller Seven Days in May (1962) featured a liberal president whose arms-control treaty induces a right-wing Caesar-general to attempt a coup; the general, readers and viewers were led to believe, would have unleashed a first strike against the Soviet Union.

  A later, more credible take on nuclear peril was the 1980 thriller by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, The Fifth Horseman, which has Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, at the time insti
gator of numerous terrorist acts against the West, developing a three-megaton hydrogen bomb via stolen French technology. The device is smuggled into New York City, where its detonation could kill nearly 7 million people. The weapon is disarmed seconds before it is to detonate, thanks to intrepid detective work. In fact, since the mid-1970s Qaddafi had made a standing offer to purchase nuclear weapons from any seller.

  Public perceptions were fueled by factual inaccuracies and outright absurdities in the fictional works. In Strangelove American bombers, once aloft, proceed to their targets when not recalled to base before they reach their designated standby stations aloft; in reality the opposite has been true for over 50 years, with bombers turning back unless given an affirmative order to proceed from authorized commanders.55 In Fail-Safe the pilots fly bombers at speeds of 2,000 mph at impossibly low altitudes, skimming terrain in the dead of night; they also are instructed to disregard a recall order coming even from the president, as his voice might be faked. And Moscow refuses for hours to accept information on how to destroy the bombers headed its way out of national pride! None of this was or is true or plausible. Alas Babylon’s escalation scenario has the Russians launch an all-out strike because a single base is damaged with one conventional warhead. On the Beach posits nuclear-armed states launching weapons in such massive numbers so as to destroy the human race. Only an entire collection of Armageddon-inspired fanatics might do this. As for Seven Days in May, its coup scenario is utterly implausible, because America’s military has a civilian command structure and a deeply entrenched culture of deference to civilian authority.

  Later scenarios were based upon more realistic prospects. In Blink of an Eye, former secretary of defense William Cohen sketched out a scenario involving a possible terrorist nuclear bomb. His real-world senior-level crisis management experience lent gripping realism to his account of how government officials would act in extreme crisis.

  Yet in the end, a nuclear crisis will arise in a context likely unforeseen in many aspects, and will impose stress upon leaders and world politics of a kind never seen in human history. Nuclear events might well prove stranger than nuclear fiction.

  __________________

  55. Albert Wohlstetter was instrumental in conceiving the “fail-safe” protocol. Perhaps due to the film and its notoriety, it later was renamed “positive control.”

  APPENDIX 2:

  IMPROVING CONTROL OVER NUCLEAR WEAPONS

  IN 1961 A B-52G CRASHED IN GEORGIA WITH A PAIR OF HYDROGEN bombs. By one account, recovery teams discovered that five of six safety switches had been flipped on one of the two hydrogen bombs it carried. That bomb was perhaps 1,000 times more powerful than the Nagasaki bomb. The plane crashed in a rural area. Still, had the bomb gone off, it would have caused massive loss of life in several states, via dispersal of millions of tons of lethal fallout.

  This particular account, however, has been disputed. The alternate version holds that because the bombs were equipped with Permissive Action Links (PAL) trigger locks, a random series of stresses could not have flipped five of the six switches needed to detonate the weapon. This version appears more likely correct, as later-model bombs were equipped with PALs.

  Either way, such a scary mishap showed how far the U.S. had to go in protecting its nuclear weapons from accidental detonation. Efforts to control use of bombs had begun not long before with behavior protocols, as L. Douglas Keeney details in 15 Minutes. In 1956 the Atomic Energy Commission instituted a “two-man rule” for control of every nuclear weapon: “A minimum of two authorized persons, each capable of detecting incorrect procedures… will be present during any operations requiring access to the weapon.” In 1957 aircrews of nuclear bombers began carrying envelopes printed with a code word. When the Strategic Air Command base station gave a two-word code, the pilot opened the envelope. If the word inside matched the SAC’s second word, it meant to continue past the fail-safe point.

  A second 1957 innovation was the “sealed-pit” bomb. Before, when a flight crew heard the authorization to proceed, its members had to insert the core of a bomb into its canister. In a sealed-pit bomb, the bomb canister already contained the core.

  In all, the U.S. ultimately implemented 24-link, chained safeguards, each of which must be surmounted to detonate a weapon. There are weak and strong links, as Keeney explains. An electrical “capacitor” that can send an electric signal to detonate the bomb would be an example of a “weak link.” The heat of a plane crashing and burning would melt the capacitor, disabling the bomb. A mechanical switch that has to be physically closed before detonation can proceed would be an example of a “strong link.”

  During the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. control was modest at best and Soviet control virtually nonexistent—local commanders could ignore Moscow’s orders, and communication channels were minimal and slow. There was no technological control, only the human nuclear chain of command. Both superpowers saw that to reduce the risk of war by accident or by a field commander’s impulsive act in a crisis, better arrangements for control over weapons of mass destruction were essential.

  In the mid-1960s, the first major technical control steps followed the ideas of behavioral protocols. The installation of the Hot Line after the Cuban Missile Crisis created a channel of instantaneous long-distance direct Teletype and telephone communication between super-power leaders for the first time, enabling them to gauge risk of conflict and escalation more acutely and take steps to minimize it. With the new technology of built-in trigger locks (PALs), leaders were finally able to restrict final authorization to a small level of senior commanders acting upon direct instructions from the president. Within U.S. missile silos, two launch keys 12 feet apart had to be turned within a two-second period to fire a missile. The U.S. made security technologies and techniques available to the Soviets, to improve their secure storage and thus reduce the risk of accidental or unauthorized nuclear war.

  But the Soviets, to the end of the Cold War, relied upon human controls—orders from superiors. Since then they have adopted technical controls as well. In August 1991, during the coup that toppled Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet military officials made sure the rebels did not have control over nukes. When Boris Yeltsin emerged, control was given to him.

  Nuclear safety locks use methods such as limiting the number of tries to a few (like password log-ins on computers), with astronomically large possible codes to defeat “brute force” crunching of every possible combination. Environmental sensors are implanted inside U.S. missile warheads—the warhead locks unless the sensors have detected stresses comparable to those in ballistic missile or air-dropped bomb flight.

  A distant commander must authorize the launch—the President or such senior commanders as the Commander-in-Chief designates. With U.S. weapons based in NATO countries, independent authorization to launch must be received by the host government as well. This situation leads to some interesting results. In the case of Eastern European NATO countries, it undermines Russian assertions that defensive missiles based in Eastern Europe might be fired at Russia. The prospect that approval would be granted by any sane Eastern European leader, given the certitude of an apocalyptic Russian response, is virtually nil. No order thought insane by its recipients would be obeyed.

  The case of Western European NATO countries during the Cold War was the mirror image of Eastern Europe today. Both British prime minister Thatcher and West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt turned down a U.S. offer of a “dual key”—a trigger lock allowing them to veto a launch from their soil. Both feared that the Soviets might conclude that the weapons would never be launched, because the host country would not fire U.S. missiles at Russia, thus weakening the credibility of U.S. “extended deterrence” of possible Soviet attacks against its allies. The allies wanted U.S. consultation before launch, but not a power embedded in technology to veto a launch outright.

  In the 1950s, the Strategic Air Command introduced the Special Weapons Emergency Separation System (SWESS). If an aircrew wer
e disabled during an attack while over enemy territory, SWESS would automatically release bombs on board, once the plane fell below a specified altitude. This became known as the “dead-man’s switch.”

  For 30 years the Strategic Air Command kept an airborne command post aloft, originally named National Emergency Airborne Command Post, or NEACP (pronounced “kneecap”), and ultimately called Looking Glass. This ever-flying patrol enabled the U.S. to retaliate, even after a surprise attack. When the Cold War ended, so did the 24-hour airborne command post patrols.

  APPENDIX 3:

  INTELLIGENCE BIASES AND THE NUCLEAR BALANCE

  MUCH HAS BEEN MADE OF THE “ACTION-REACTION” INTERPLAY OF the superpower arms race and of imaginary missile gaps allegedly invented to spur the U.S. arms buildup. The truth is more complex: what many observers (and even some senior-level policy makers in various administrations) thought was conspiracy was in fact, as is usual in human affairs, a case of blunder.

  In 1976 Albert Wohlstetter proved that American intelligence estimates consistently underestimated Soviet deployments, with even high-end estimates often below the actual Soviet numbers. Far from improving with experience, these estimating errors grew worse with time. Convenient assumptions guided intelligence policy, rather than logical inferences from incoming evidence.

  Intelligence underestimates beginning in the mid-1960s are best understood against the earlier overestimates of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Then, the focus was on a “missile gap”—the idea that the United States, with some 200 ICBMs, had fewer than the Soviets. Because these early overestimations of the Soviet arsenal have been a huge marker in nuclear policy debates for half a century, they merit closer examination.