Ron Rosenbaum - How the End Begins

The nuclear command and control culture has tried to get around the problem of succession with a novel concept: pre-delegation. It means that if the government itself is incapable of issuing orders, the military will know what to do under a system of decisions that have been agreed to by everyone in advance. Pre-delegation is an attempt to strike the right balance between a centralized system with a single person authorized to make launch decisions (with the risk of an unbalanced president ordering one) and the risk that this system will be vulnerable because it is so easy to decapitate, leaving no one in charge.

But if you decentralize the system, and delegate in advance the authority to launch nuclear weapons, haven’t you created another beast? Haven’t you put the ability to start a nuclear war in the hands of regional commanders who might turn out to be lone madmen like Kubrick’s Colonel Jack D. Ripper? This solution just multiplies Major Hering’s sanity question. As it is, since it is assumed that it is possible to destroy communication with silent-running nuclear-armed submarines, their captains must have some way to launch on their own authority if they believe the chain of command has been decapitated and retaliation is necessary. But if true, the actual mechanism is one of the best-kept secrets of our deterrent system. Mel Halbach, who served on a nuclear-armed submarine between 1975 to 1980, told me that crewmen were always discussing this challenge and found no answers, but that the responsibility of a launch weighed heavily on his captain. [74]Such delegation authority is a problem that cuts two ways: it ensures that a decapitating attack would be answered. But it also makes a mockery of centralized control of nuclear weapons and puts us at the mercy of a nuclear sub commander or a crew member who may want to make his own foreign policy.

Two years ago, I learned of a new twist on the pre-delegation concept. It is the one used by the U.K., the one known as the Letter of Last Resort. [75]In late 2008, the BBC’s Radio 4 broadcast a documentary about a handwritten letter penned by every new prime minister as soon as he takes office. Four copies of it are dispatched to the U.K.’s nuclear submarine fleet (the U.K. has gone to an all-submarine nuclear force). The sealed letter is to be locked inside a safe, which itself is locked inside a safe on the sub’s control room floor. Both safes and the letter were only to be opened during certain specified conditions that indicate a nuclear attack has cut the submarine off from home island guidance. The prime minister’s letter—the last resort for his decision on retaliation to prevail—is to tell the sub commander what he thought he should do with his nuclear weapons and under what circumstance he should fire them.

There is something seductive about this sort of ultimate secret hidden within a safe, something primal, mythical Grimm’s fairy tale about it. And a safe within a safe redoubles the grimnoire quality of it all. But think about the complications: if the letter orders him to retaliate, then retaliate against whom? How massively? The submarine commander and his second in command, who were both authorized to read the Letter of Last Resort, could disagree with the prime minister, or with each other. And would any prime minister, any human being, write a letter ordering the unnecessary deaths of tens of millions of people, knowing he and his government and nation were most likely obliterated and genocidal punishment would not bring them back to life.

There are other complications. If the Letter of Last Resort is written by the prime minister upon accession to office, how would the prime minister know who is a likely attacker and why? And if the letter is only to be opened when the prime minister and a designated second are killed, how would a submarine commander know for sure that silence equaled death? London’s Daily Mail reported that “there is a complicated series of checks that the submarine commander must perform to establish the true situation, one of which, curiously, is to determine whether Radio Four is still broadcasting.” [76]Oh great. The radio goes off the air and it’s time to launch. I’m oversimplifying, I know. But again, when we hear of “checks and balances” we should (metaphorically) check for our wallets.

I asked David Murtagh, a senior officer in Her Majesty’s Navy whom I’d met at the National War College seminar on deterrence, for confirmation that the Letter of Last Resort existed. This is what he eventually wrote me after he’d returned to the U.K.: “The U.K. MOD [Ministry of Defence] acknowledges that these letters exist but will not discuss them. On the chain of command issue, the U.K. MOD line is: ‘As a relatively small country, the U.K. has a different requirement for an assured second-strike capability compared to other nations with nuclear weapons. The U.K.’s minimum nuclear deterrent, as the ultimate guarantor of national security, must be able to function irrespective of any preemptive action that may be taken by a potential aggressor. Critically, this must include an overwhelming “strike out of the blue.” Such a strike might conceivably disable the Government’s immediate ability to use communications links to exercise normal command and control.’” [77]

Beneath this bland nondenial, in the submarine-depth subtext, was the assumption that the letters are instruments of deterrence invariably ordering retaliation. They give credibility to the threat of retaliatory attack and act as the “ultimate guarantor of national security,” as the MOD puts it. The assumption of the British government in this statement is that no captain or crew would ask Major Hering’s questions about the sanity or morality of such an order. There was no room for the possibility that a prime minister might write a letter saying he personally opposed wreaking pointless vengeance on tens of millions of people, or even that he was leaving it up to you, commander, or to you and your crew.

The response from the Ministry of Defence left me with more questions than answers about the U.K.’s chain of command and its nuclear intentions. Why would a nation with the Official Secrets Act allow this to leak unless it wanted it to? Did it believe that it reinforced deterrence? It seemed to be a deliberate attempt to create ambiguity that would cause a potential foe to ask: “Do I feel lucky?” It further obscured in uncertainty—to its own citizens—what its government was going to do in the event of nuclear war. To cite another movie: “You can’t handle the truth.”

In any case, in addition to Major Hering’s question about the president’s sanity, we now have the question raised by the Letter of Last Resort about the sanity of two dozen submarine commanders in the U.K. and the U.S. Because although the Pentagon refused to comment when I asked whether we have our own version of the Letter of Last Resort, some workaround seemed likely to be the case if our own Ohio-class submarines, the ones carrying nuclear missiles, are to act as deterrents. Otherwise we are inviting a decapitating strike.

The 2008 leak of the Letter of Last Resort’s existence was another reminder that Major Hering’s questions were not left behind with the end of the Cold War. In fact, thirty-five years after he asked them, they invite the Larger Sanity Question: What does all this say about the nature not just of our sanity but of our species? Is Faust our fate? Was there a tragic rendezvous between the DNA molecule and the unstable interior of the uranium nucleus? Was our scientific curiosity radioactive? Are the seeds of our own self-destruction encrypted in the intellectual genome? Is there something encoded in the schizoid nature of our collective consciousness that was destined to sync up with the fissile nature of the uranium nucleus so we could go crazy together? Is there something embedded in our very inquisitiveness that was destined to drive us to find some infallible, ineradicable way of making self-destruction possible?