Ron Rosenbaum - How the End Begins

and collapse of Soviet Union, 215

doomsday machine of, 87–93, 107, 112

eliminating nuclear weapons and, 29, 211, 213, 229–35

Ellsberg and, 75

on EMPs, 107

in encounters with U.S. bombers, 99–100

and fear of decapitation and surprise attack, 7, 112–16

Georgia invaded by, 11, 27, 202–5, 235

Iran and, 3, 167, 170

Israel and, 3–4, 220

lowered nuclear threshold of, 204

Minot mistake and, 14–15

missile defense systems and, 9, 12–13, 27, 205–6, 211

Monte Carlo runs and, 113–15, 124

nuclear optimism and, 128

nuclear submarines of, 257

nuclear taboo and, 246, 252, 255

nuclear war casualties and, 76–77, 79, 81

in nuclear war games, 199–201, 207

nuclear weapons acquired by, 168, 248

and nuclear weapons command and control, 52–53, 59–60, 82, 90–94, 98, 100, 104, 107, 110–11, 120, 216

nuclear weapons modernization and buildup of, 13–14

nuclear weapons treaties and, 209, 211

in “100 Nuclear Wars” plan, 121–23

in preventing accidental use of nuclear weapons, 118–20, 123

and reducing number of nuclear weapons, 12–13, 44

strategic flights of, 9–12, 14–15, 27, 100

Syrian nuclear facilities and, 3–4

U.S. cooperation with, 93–94, 111–12, 116–18

U.S. secret reconnaissance on, 98–100

“Russia’s Nuclear Renaissance” (Mizin), 13–14

Rwandan genocide, 139, 148

Samson Option, 21–22, 141–42, 148

Schell, Jonathan, 49

Schelling, Thomas, 73, 158

Schlesinger, James, 35–36, 220

Scientific American, 77–78, 128

“Second Holocaust Will Not Be Like the First, The” (Morris), 136–37

Sheidlower, Jesse, 240

Shultz, George, 212, 215, 229–30

Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), 22, 92–93, 222, 238

Blair and, 93, 97, 99

Ellsberg and, 74–76, 82

Six Day War, 127, 136

Smith, P. D., 88–90, 92

Spectator, The, 1–2, 4, 113, 179

Spiegel, Peter, 209–10

spoon-and-string maneuver, 62–63, 71, 83, 101, 158–59, 245, 248

Star Wars system, 55, 230

State Department, U.S., 135, 171, 194, 204, 228–29

Steiner, George, 86

Strategic Air Command, see Strategic Command

Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START), 12–13, 27, 116, 121, 123, 209–12, 228–29, 233, 244

Strategic Command (STRATCOM), 10, 44, 54, 69, 210, 220

and nuclear weapons command and control, 36, 38, 46, 50, 57–63, 103–4

Qwest Center deterrence symposium and, 30, 45, 50

Rosenbaum’s visits to, 45–50, 57–63, 75

secret Russian reconnaissance of, 99–100

war room of, 46–47

Strategic Command and Control (Blair), 96, 220

“Subterranean World of the Bomb, The” (Rosenbaum), 48–50

Supreme Court, U.S., 34–35, 37, 147

supreme emergencies, 152, 155–57, 159–60, 163

Suri, Jeremi, 100

Syria, 21

nuclear facilities of, 2–5, 8, 11, 15–16, 113, 134, 140, 145–46, 168–92, 194–97, 199, 202, 208, 258

Pakistani nuclear weapons and, 4, 17

in wars with Israel, 136, 163

Szilard, Leo, 89–90, 143

Taiwan, 14, 22, 227, 234–35

Taiwan Straits crises, 247

Tannenwald, Nina, 245–50, 255

Tepperman, Jonathan, 128–29

terrorism, 34, 110, 116, 212, 221

and collapse of Soviet Union, 215

cyber-, 23, 32–33

India–Pakistan relations and, 16–18

NATO’s preemptive strike option and, 26–27

on 9/11, 24, 47, 233, 253

nuclear, 51, 78, 81, 131, 233

nuclear forensics and, 64

of nuclear weapons, 1, 5, 8, 16, 18, 26, 51

and nuclear weapons command and control, 63–64, 103, 105

Traynor, Ian, 26

Truman, Harry, 241, 247

Turner, Stansfield, 6–7

Ulam, Stanislaw, 115

United Kingdom, 1–2, 10, 25–26, 88, 123, 171

in Cold War close calls, 7, 113

collision of nuclear submarine of, 248–49

and nuclear weapons command and control, 40–42, 158

supreme emergencies and, 156

Syrian nuclear facilities and, 2, 4–5, 179

United Nations, 29

Iran and, 20, 166, 180

and morality of retaliation, 67

and U.S. invasion of Iraq, 176

Vietnam War, 36, 71, 74–77, 98, 100, 247

Walker, Lucy, 49

Wall Street Journal, 19, 198, 209–10, 212

Waltz, Kenneth, 128

Walzer, Michael, 152–53, 155–57, 159

WarGames, 47

War in Human Civilization (Gat), 43

Warnke, Paul, 246

Warsaw Pact, 25, 112, 201, 252

in nuclear war games, 206–7

Washington Post, The, 23, 53, 219, 252

Weinberger, Sharon, 103

Weisman, Jonathan, 209–10

Whole World on Fire (Eden), 77

“Why No Retaliation?” (Lang), 150

“Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight & Win a Nuclear War” (Pipes), 113–14

Winfrey, Oprah, 252

“World Free of Nuclear Weapons, A,” 212

world holocaust, 258–60

Burke on, 239–40, 242–44

World War II, 117, 135, 140, 148

Burke in, 241–42

casualties in, 78

nuclear taboo and, 251, 254

nuclear weapons in, see Hiroshima; Nagasaki

supreme emergencies in, 155–56

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine, 218

Yao Yunzhu, 69

Yarynich, Valery E., 110–23

Blair’s relationship with, 93–94, 110, 119

and fear of decapitation and surprise attack, 112–16

Monte Carlo runs and, 111, 113, 115–16, 123, 125, 131

and nuclear weapons command and control, 94, 111–12, 117–21

“100 Nuclear Wars” plan of, 116, 120–23

PERIMETR and, 111–12, 116

on preventing accidental use of nuclear weapons, 118–21, 123

Yom Kippur War, 127, 163–64, 220–21

Zamoshkin, Yuri, 130–31

I’ve dedicated the book to ex-Major Harold I. Hering (Ret.), whose courage in asking a Forbidden Question about the efficacy and sanity of our nuclear command and control system first led me to begin reporting on these questions at the height of the Cold War.

I’d like to thank Lewis Lapham, legendary Harper’s editor, for supporting my two-year foray into “the subterranean world of the bomb” initiated by Major Hering’s question.

I would like to thank all those, such as Bruce Blair, who sought to reawaken the world to the danger of the second age of nuclear war we were entering and shook me out of my complacency sufficiently to make it my mission to try to map out the terra incognita (terror incognita?) of the new nuclear landscape.

Among them I’d include Cormac McCarthy, someone I’ve never met, but whose novel The Road, which came to my attention when reviewed in the same issue of the New York Times Book Review as my Shakespeare book, sensitized me to the continued potential for annihilation we faced. And recalled to me the exchange at the close of King Lear:

“Is this the promised end?”

“Or image of that horror.”

I’m grateful as well to those four signers of the Wall Street Journal nuclear abolition manifesto who demonstrated that the case for Zero was not some peeling peacenik bumper sticker, but a strategic goal worthy of debate. And to the president, who put nuclear abolition at the forefront of our foreign policy at a time when it had largely been forsaken or forgotten.

I’m indebted to researchers, writers, thinkers, and activists such as Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists and William Burr of George Washington University’s National Security Archive for uncovering shocking deficiencies of nuclear command and control in the first nuclear age that, they’ve demonstrated, persist into the second. To Dr. Jeffrey Lewis and his extremely well-informed cohorts at the armscontrolwonk.com blog, for penetrating the scrim of PR and euphemism that often masks the truth about our nuclear posture. And to intelligent skeptics of abolitionism such as Elbridge Colby, Anne Applebaum, Peter Berkowitz, and Bret Stephens, whose arguments challenged the Zeroistas and forced me to sharpen my thinking on the question. To authors such as Michael Dobbs and David Hoffman, who revealed just how precarious the supposed stability of the first nuclear age was.