Ron Rosenbaum: How the End Begins

Finally, in case anyone needs convincing, Mizin asserts that all of this suggests “that the Russian generals still view a nuclear war with either the U.S. or NATO as theoretically possible…. On a very basic level nothing has changed since Soviet times.”

On the American side of things, in a sign that nukes seemed to be breaking out all over in the summer of 2007, there was the infamous Minot mistake. It took place in that same August in which Putin resumed the strategic flights. On August 31, an American nuclear-capable B-52 bomber took to the air from the Minot, North Dakota, Air Force Base with six—for some time the number was in dispute—nuclear-tipped cruise missiles suspended from one wing.

The bomber flew south to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana where it was discovered that the cruise missiles were nuclear-armed—the first time nuclear weapons had been flown over American territory in forty years.

It was all a big mistake according to several levels of investigation, which eventually played a part in the firing of the chief of staff of the air force. Nuclear weapons were supposed to be stored in special areas, painted different colors—not stacked next to the conventionally armed cruise missile as these had been. Some said there was a “management problem” and that certainly seems to be true. (The widening investigation by the Pentagon of the management of nuclear weapons disclosed that, in addition, four crucial nuclear fuses had been shipped mistakenly to Taiwan that year, [33] Josh White, “Nuclear Parts Sent to Taiwan in Error,” Washington Post, March 25, 2008, www.washingtonpost.com/wp=dyn/content/article/2008/03/25/AR2008032501309.html . no laughing matter to nuclear-armed China.)

But on another level it was almost as if the loss of dread that once surrounded nuclear weapons seemed to have been exposed. Once there had been a bright line between the nuclear and nonnuclear realm, as there had been between the nuclear and the nonnuclear storage stacks. It reflects the cultural and political view that no matter how small, a nuclear weapon occupies a different military, political, metaphysical category from other weapons.

The Obama administration announced it will pursue its version of the Bush Pentagon’s “Prompt Global Strike” plan to produce ICBMs tipped with highly lethal conventional explosives that would be capable of slamming powerful but nonnuclear warheads any place on earth within an hour (that “prompt”). The plan has raised both practical and philosophical questions. Won’t those nations who see an American ICBM heading for their capital (or wherever) assume it’s got a nuclear warhead despite all the “assurances” they may have received? And won’t that assumption make them more likely to use whatever nuclear weapons they have in their stockpile before finding out for sure? Even if the ICBM is equipped with a conventional warhead, if its lethality approaches nuclear strength—if this conventional missile is more lethal than a small nuke, say—should its use raise the same moral questions as a nuke?

Are nuclear weapons just very powerful and efficient explosive devices, exponentially more powerful, but when it comes to war just the most explosive, and capable of being used in the same way as conventional weapons of mass destruction? Or was there something particularly demonic, Faustian, insidiously evil—“exceptionalist”—about them? Was it the invisible long-lasting half-life of radiation that made nukes not just different in degree but in kind? The way nuclear weapons didn’t merely split the atom but somehow cracked the core of Newtonian being—the mechanistic, determinist way of explicating all events by iron rules of causality? Was it that they revealed the demon of unpredictability that reigns on the subatomic level. The ineradicable evil of ionizing radiation?

There was another aspect of the Minot mistake I found fascinating. Either inadvertently or not, coming two weeks after Putin’s strategic flights took off into the air, a U.S. strategic bomber “mistakenly” takes off, metaphorically flaunting U.S. nuclear weapons. (“We got ’em too, Vlad.”)

I don’t actually believe there was a deliberate decision to deploy this mistake to send a message to the Russians. But a message was sent. Nor did I buy into the frenzied biogospheric speculations [34] Here’s an example: www.newsfollowup.com/aipac-cheney.htm . that began by making a connection between the Minot mistake and all the talk of a possible U.S. or Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear enrichment centrifuges and the raid just one week later on the Syrian installation that purportedly brought us close to World War III. Barksdale, the conspiracists said, was a jumping-off place for U.S. flights to the Middle East. Ergo the nuclear missiles on the plane were meant for launch at Iran; the Syrian mission was merely a rehearsal for the bigger plan. The blogospheric conspiracy theorists—worth studying as the nightmare id of the second nuclear age—proceeded to conjure up out of thin air an “alternate nuclear chain of command” secretly created by Dick Cheney. (Not that there are no real chain of command issues, as we will see.)

But one didn’t need conspiracy theories to see the potential nuclear flashpoints approaching in 2007.

Pakistan has long been a regional nuclear war ready to happen. According to veteran New York Times foreign correspondent Raymond Bonner, “When Bill Clinton briefed President-elect George Bush at the White House in December 2000, he enumerated six major security threats facing the United States. Three were: Al Qaeda, nuclear tensions between Pakistan and India, and Pakistan’s links to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.” [35] Raymond Bonner, book review of Descent into Chaos, by Ahmed Rashid, New York Times, August 5, 2008. In other words: Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan.

Pakistan developed what it came to call the Islamic bomb in secret, using stolen and freely available Western technology assembled by the notorious Pakistani bomb maker A. Q. Khan, who has been called a “nuclear jihadist” (by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in a book by that name). [36] Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, The Nuclear Jihadist (New York: Twelve Books, 2007). Kahn’s “nuclear bazaar” delivered nuclear technology, fuel, and possibly assembled weapons to states like Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and an unknown number of “nonstate actors,” i.e., terrorists.

The Pakistani bomb was ostensibly designed as a deterrent to the Indian nuclear bomb, which had first been tested in 1974. Once the two bitter enemy states went nuclear, every troop movement or terrorist incident in disputed Kashmir—the vast northern province ruled by India despite its Pakistan-leaning Muslim majority—became the potential cause of a regional war. So was every terrorist incident, from the bomb that blew up the Indian Parliament in 2005 to the attack on Mumbai by Pakistan-linked terrorists in November 2008.

It doesn’t take very sophisticated war gaming to see how that regional war could turn into a global one: [37] For an example of profoundly confusing but, alas, not utterly implausible regional to global nuclear war scenario, see this obsessive amateur’s six nuclear war scenarios: www.carolmoore.net/nuclearwar/alternatescenarios.html .