The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  SIX MANY LITTLE MONSTERS

  SAM NUNN’S GRANDFATHER fought in the Civil War. People find that hard to believe, he says, but his father, Samuel Augustus Nunn, Sr., was fifty-one when Sam was born, in 1938. Nunn senior was a lawyer and part-time farmer who had trained and worked as a pharmacist to pay his way through night law school. He’d been a member of the state board of education and a Georgia legislator, and for the first eight years of Sam’s life he was mayor of the small town of Perry, Georgia, Sam’s birthplace, one hundred miles southeast of Atlanta. Samuel Augustus Nunn grew peanuts, cotton, soybeans, corn, pecans, and sorghum on his farm, but his great love was purebred cattle, a hobby among Southern gentlemen in those days—“We never made any money on them,” Sam Nunn notes.1 Sam grew up around farming, lawyering, politics, and small-town life. He participated in 4-H, the Future Farmers of America, and Scouting, and played high-school basketball well enough to be offered scholarships to several small colleges around the state. He preferred Georgia Tech, which had an accelerated undergraduate program for students going on to professional schools, and when the Tech coach encouraged him he registered there without a scholarship and played freshman basketball.

  “My father was in very bad health by then,” Sam Nunn recalls, “and I knew the clock was ticking. I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to get my military service done as quickly as possible because I wanted to go to law school, and I also wanted to go to Washington.” Nunn’s great-uncle was Carl Vinson, who had been a member of the U.S. House of Representatives since 1914 and for many years was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “He had said to me that if I ever wanted to come to Washington to work for him for a few months or a couple of years to let him know, so I had that very much on my mind.” Nunn finished Georgia Tech in three years, trained for six months in the Coast Guard Reserve, and got back to Georgia in time to start law school at Emory University in early 1960. In those days student lawyers took their bar exams before they graduated; when Nunn finished law school, in June 1962, he was ready to look into Washington.

  His Washington experience, as a young lawyer on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee, only lasted nine months, because by then his mother needed help with family affairs, but it set him on the course of working on military issues, particularly nuclear policy, which he pursued throughout his Senate career. One day in October 1962 the committee counsel asked if Nunn would replace him at the last minute on an Air Force-sponsored tour of NATO installations. Nunn at twenty-four had never been out of the country and jumped at the chance. The first week of the tour was uneventful. The next two weeks were consumed by the Cuban Missile Crisis:

  Everybody at NATO, including me, had Top Secret clearances, so we were briefed every day by the Air Force, shown pictures every day. Right at the peak of the crisis, when it looked like the world was going up in smoke, at a dinner with top-ranking Air Force people at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, I happened to be sitting next to the commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe. His responsibilities included what’s called forward-based air, the first planes that would deliver a nuclear package against the Soviet Union in the event of war. The Soviets knew that, so the planes and their bases were also the first Soviet targets. In the course of the dinner, he told me that he had something like a minute and a half to get the planes off the ground if he got the orders. He had all the pilots sitting in their planes; they knew their mission would be one-way. That made a permanent impression on me. I recognized how serious it was, I realized the importance of warning time and the absence of warning time and the terrible, terrible stress of short decision times when the whole world is at stake.

  Nunn practiced law in Perry through the 1960s. In 1968 he won election to the Georgia state legislature. He intended to run next for the U.S. House, but the death of Georgia’s Senator Richard Russell, in 1971, opened up one of Georgia’s Senate seats and Nunn won it in 1972, when he was thirty-four. “I said to the people of Georgia even during the primary that my goal was to get on the Senate committee on armed services. When I won the primary, I asked Uncle Carl, who had retired in 1965, to go to Washington with me. He was about ninety-three then. He didn’t like to fly. So we got on the train and went up to Washington and we called on several of the senators he knew. They all said they would help me get on the Senate committee, which they did.”

  A second trip to NATO, this time as a freshman senator, left a further imprint on Nunn of concern about nuclear command and control. The chairman of the Senate committee on armed services, John Stennis, asked the young senator in 1972 to inspect NATO for the committee. Nunn focused on storage and deployment sites for the thousands of tactical nuclear weapons that the U.S. shared with its NATO allies in Europe. “I remember very well,”2 he said later, “visiting with U.S. generals who explained to me that all of our tactical nuclear weapons were secure. Everything was wonderful. We had perfect security. There was no problem.” Unfortunately for the generals, a sergeant in one of the bunker complexes where the weapons were stored surreptitiously passed Nunn a note when they shook hands. Nunn pocketed the note and read it afterward in private. It asked the senator to meet the sergeant at his barracks that evening. Nunn did. “He and three or four3 of his fellow sergeants related a horror story to me, a story of a demoralized military, a story of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, a story of U.S. soldiers actually guarding tactical nuclear weapons while they were stoned on drugs. The sergeants thought that it would take no more than a group of six to eight well-trained terrorists to gain control over one of our tactical nuclear compounds in the middle of Western Europe. The horror stories went on and on for over two hours. I came out of that session thoroughly shaken and determined to do something about the matter.”

  What Nunn did about the matter was to take it up with President Gerald Ford’s secretary of defense, James Schlesinger. Demoralization wasn’t the only problem Nunn had found in Europe; another was the forward positioning of NATO’s tactical nuclear weapons. Nunn was concerned that NATO would ask that the weapons be released for use at the outset of even a conventional conflict with the Soviet Union—so that they wouldn’t be overrun by Soviet forces and because the NATO leadership assumed a presidential authorization would take three or four days. The solution Schlesinger proposed for both problems was reducing the number of forward-based tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.4 According to the American diplomat James Goodby, however, Henry Kissinger (at that time Ford’s national security adviser) judged that “withdrawal of significant numbers5 of nuclear weapons from the Federal Republic of Germany would leave so few deployed there that they would become an easy prey for antinuclear activists seeking to make West Germany a nuclear-free zone.” Ford agreed; he found Schlesinger condescending and difficult in any case, and soon asked for his resignation, replacing him with the hawkish Donald Rumsfeld. The tactical weapons, all seven thousand of them, stayed in Europe.

  Nunn’s tour of NATO left him convinced, he said, that “we had a major problem, one that grew out of the psychological trauma of the Vietnam War, and it was a problem that was not being acknowledged.”6 He worked the problem of a deeply demoralized military further in the eight years after Vietnam when he chaired the Armed Services’ manpower subcommittee. That experience, in turn, prepared him to recognize the even deeper demoralization that he saw in the Soviet military in the aftermath of the August 1991 coup. “The problems we had,” he told me, “were based on Vietnam and getting out. The problem they had was that their whole way of life, the system they had believed in for seventy-four years, had come apart. I had spent all that time on the manpower subcommittee understanding that when the military has been demoralized, not only conventional capabilities are at risk but also nuclear capabilities. The two were connected.” When he returned to Washington from Moscow in early September, he concluded that the Soviet Union was in great peril. “In particular, I believed7 that we needed to do everything we could to help the Soviet authorities gain control and keep control over their nuclear
weapons.”

  While Nunn was in Moscow, his counterpart in the House of Representatives, Wisconsin Democrat Les Aspin, an economist and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had publicly proposed allocating a billion dollars from the Defense Department budget to help feed the Soviet people that winter. “Civil war in a country8 with thirty thousand nuclear weapons,” Aspin announced to the media on 28 August, “is too grim a prospect to contemplate.” He called his humanitarian aid package “another form of defense9 spending. It is defense by different means.” Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney disagreed. He called the proposal “foolish”10 and “a serious mistake.” Cheney said he didn’t foresee a situation, “certainly [not] under current circumstances, where we would be prepared to write out large checks or send large amounts of cash to the Soviet Union.” President George H. W. Bush called the Aspin proposal “premature.”11 He wasn’t going to “cut into the muscle of defense12 of this country,” he told the press at his compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, on 2 September, “in a kind of an instant sense of budgetary gratification so that we can go over and help somebody when the needs aren’t clear and when we have requirements that transcend historic concerns about the Soviet Union.”

  Nunn felt the same urgency about helping the Soviets secure their nuclear arsenals as Aspin did about preventing social chaos. They got together. To prepare the way, Nunn published an op-ed in The Washington Post on 15 September laying out his proposal “to assist the Soviet Union13 and the republics to dismantle the Soviet military-industrial complex and apply its vast resources to civilian needs.” Aspin, for his part, released a white paper that reviewed his argument for immediate humanitarian relief. (It also offered the earliest statement I have seen of the idea that nuclear terrorists might not be deterrable the way nations are believed to be,14 an idea that would emerge to importance after the World Trade Center and Pentagon terror attacks of 11 September 2001.) The problem for their joint effort, Nunn explained, was that “both the House and the Senate15 had already passed the defense authorization and appropriation bills. Our committees were already in conference on our respective defense authorization bills. Les and I decided to do something very unusual. We decided to try to put his humanitarian aid package and my concerns about weapons of mass destruction together in a conference initiative, even though nothing of this nature appeared in either the House or the Senate bill.”

  IN THE MEANTIME, Bush had decided on an alleviation of his own, a unilateral initiative that may have been the finest act of his presidency. He recognized its importance and called it “the broadest and most16 comprehensive change in U.S. nuclear strategy since the early 1950s.” During a discussion among principals at a National Security Council meeting on 5 September 1991, Cheney, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Colin Powell, each contributed ideas for reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal in response to the diminished threat that the beleaguered Soviet Union seemed to present. Afterward, Scowcroft refined the ideas into a package.

  “Cheney’s distaste for17 negotiated arms control,” he recalled, “together with several issues relating to tactical nuclear weapons, gave me an idea. Perhaps we could take advantage of the situation to solve a number of tactical-nuclear-weapons questions at the same time.” NATO tactical weapons on German soil were now superfluous as well as dangerous, since East and West Germany had reunited. The presence of tactical weapons aboard U.S. Navy ships caused problems with countries such as Japan and New Zealand that refused to allow nuclear-armed ships to enter their ports. And although South Korea wanted the U.S. to withdraw its nuclear weapons, Scowcroft had been reluctant to recommend doing so without the camouflage of other such removals, “concerned that the North18 might take our actions as the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal.” (One analyst would call the Korean removals “largely a gesture,”19 since U.S. nuclear submarines could always stand offshore with their devastating arsenals of ballistic missiles.) The sum of all these issues, Scowcroft concluded, “led me to suggest that we unilaterally declare we were getting rid of all tactical nuclear weapons (except air-delivered ones).”

  Bush liked the idea but asked Scowcroft to review it with Cheney. Cheney was predictably skeptical. He signed on only when Scowcroft agreed that a large share of the tactical weapons to be withdrawn would not be dismantled but kept in reserve. Across September, Cheney and Powell moved the new initiatives through the Pentagon. When they were ready for public presentation, Bush sent Gorbachev a letter about them and followed up with a phone call. He announced them from the Oval Office in a speech to the nation on the evening of 27 September.

  With the changes in the Soviet Union, Bush said, he was “directing that the United States20 eliminate its entire worldwide inventory of ground-launched short-range, that is, theater nuclear weapons.” Nuclear artillery shells and short-range ballistic-missile warheads would be shipped home, although air-delivered nuclear weapons would remain in Europe because they were “essential to NATO’s security.” The U.S. would withdraw all tactical nuclear weapons from its surface ships and attack submarines and from land-based naval aircraft. Tomahawk nuclear cruise missiles would come off ships and submarines, as would bombs from aircraft carriers. “The bottom line,” Bush said, “is that under normal circumstances, our ships will not carry tactical nuclear weapons.” Many of the withdrawn weapons would be destroyed, the president added, but Cheney would get his reserve: “Those remaining will be secured in central areas where they would be available if necessary in a future crisis.”

  There was more. The Strategic Air Command would immediately stand down its fleet of bombers, grounding a potent symbol of the high Cold War. ICBMs destined for destruction under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that Bush and Gorbachev had signed in July 1991 would be taken off alert as well and destroyed under an accelerated schedule once START was ratified. The huge U.S. Peacekeeper missile, seventy feet long and weighing almost two hundred thousand pounds, capable of carrying ten warheads and delivering them with unparalleled accuracy on ten different targets, would be cancelled in its mobile mode, although the silo-based model would continue to be deployed. Bush also asked “that the U.S. and the Soviet Union seek early agreement to eliminate from their inventories all ICBMs with multiple warheads,” which he called “the single most unstable part of our nuclear arsenals.” A nuclear short-range attack missile then under development would be cancelled. Command-and-control systems, then duplicated by each service, would be combined into a new U.S. Strategic Command. To all these proposals, Bush added appeals to the Soviet Union for a comparable response. A week later, Gorbachev responded enthusiastically with proposals of his own. “There were some differences21 in our positions,” Bush wrote, “but on balance it was very positive and forthcoming.”

  One reason for eliminating U.S. tactical nuclear weapons was to give Gorbachev cover for removing at least tactical weapons from the increasing number of Soviet republics that were declaring their independence in the wake of the August coup. By the time of the coup, tactical weapons had already been quietly removed to the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe. Removing the weapons from former Soviet republics to Russia would take longer, until summer 1992. Bruce Blair described the process:

  Prior to shipment to Russia,22 each warhead was mechanically disabled to preclude the possibility of a nuclear explosion, and no more than two warheads were carried in each rail car. When trucks were used, each vehicle was loaded with one warhead. A convoy was heavily guarded using air cover and armored personnel carriers between each truck; public roads were closed when more than three warheads were transported. By all accounts the general staff custodians who have supervised the transfer experienced no lapses of security and suffered no serious accidents.

  A U.S. government security analyst told Blair that disabling “involved removing tritium23 bottles from each warhead before shipping them to Russia.… The arming and fusing mechanisms on the warheads also could have been readily disabled
in the field.” (Tritium, a hydrogen isotope, is used to boost the yield of fission weapons; without tritium boosting, the weapons would have low-single-digit kiloton yields.) The care with which the warheads were handled indicates both their value and their great destructiveness. Only by comparison with city-busting strategic weapons are tactical nuclear weapons considered low-yield.

  “WE RAN INTO A BUZZ SAW,”24 Les Aspin reports of his and Nunn’s unorthodox effort to draw off a billion dollars from the defense budget in conference. “When it was brought up,” Nunn told me, “most people were against it.” The chairman of the House budget committee, California Democrat Leon Panetta, opposed the amendment out of concern that it would violate the budget agreement then in effect between Congress and the administration. Other legislators feared that drawing on defense money for nondefense purposes would empower Aspin’s committee. A special Senate election in Pennsylvania delivered the killing blow: Democrat Harris Wofford, campaigning under the slogan “It’s time to take care of our own,” successfully upset the expected favorite, the Republican former governor and U.S. attorney general Richard Thornburgh. “The results of that election,”25 Aspin wrote, “were heard in Washington like a thunderclap.… Overall, a climate was created in which it was tough for anything that smacked of foreign aid, especially aid to the same people we’ve been preparing to fight for a couple of generations.” Public and private appeals to the Bush administration “for a sign … that it supported and would use this authority and these funds” got nowhere; “There was no sign.” In mid-November, rather than sink the entire defense budget, Nunn and Aspin withdrew their amendment.