Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The new missiles, bombers, and subs gained the most attention in the press. But the “highest priority element” of Reagan’s strategic modernization program was the need to improve the command-and-control system. “This system must be foolproof in case of any foreign attack,” Reagan said. A handful of limited-war options would finally be included in the SIOP, and the ability to fight a protracted nuclear war depended on the survival of command-and-control facilities for days, weeks, or even months. The Pentagon also sought greater “interoperability” — a system that could quickly transmit messages between civilian and military leaders, between the United States and NATO, even between different branches of the American armed services. General Richard Ellis, the head of SAC, told Congress that, at a bare minimum, the command-and-control system had “to recognize that we are under attack, to characterize that attack, get a decision from the President, and disseminate that decision to the forces prior to the first weapon impacting upon the United States.”

The Reagan administration planned to make an unprecedented investment in command and control, spending about $18 billion on new early-warning radars and communications satellites, better protection against nuclear weapon effects and electromagnetic pulse, the creation of a Global Positioning System (GPS) to improve weapon guidance and navigation, upgrades of the bunkers at SAC headquarters in Omaha and at Site R within Raven Rock Mountain, and an expansion of Project ELF, the extremely low frequency radio system for sending an emergency war order message to submarines. Three new ELF antennae would be built in upper Michigan — one of them twenty-eight miles long, the others about fourteen miles long. Project ELF was a scaled-down version of SANGUINE, a plan that had been strongly backed by the Navy. It would have buried six thousand miles of antenna, four to six feet deep, across an area covering almost one third of the state of Wisconsin.

One of the principal goals of the new command-and-control system was to ensure the “continuity of government.” The vice president would assume a larger role in the planning for nuclear war and would be swiftly taken to an undisclosed location at the first sign of a crisis, ready to serve as commander in chief. New hideouts for the nation’s leadership would be built throughout the country. And mobile command centers, housed in tractor-trailer trucks and transported by special cargo planes, would provide a backup to the National Emergency Airborne Command Post.

During the Kennedy administration, the problems with America’s command-and-control system were deliberately hidden from the public. But as President Reagan prepared to adopt an updated version of “flexible response,” the issue of strategic command was discussed in newspapers, books, magazines, and television news reports. Desmond Ball, an Australian academic, made a strong case that a nuclear war might be impossible to control. John D. Steinbruner — who’d helped to write a top secret history of the nuclear arms race for the Pentagon in the 1970s — reached much the same conclusion, warning that a “nuclear decapitation” of America’s leadership could be achieved with as few as fifty warheads. Steinbruner had read the classified studies on decapitation that so alarmed Robert McNamara, but did not mention them in his work. Bruce G. Blair, a former Minuteman officer, described how the command-and-control systems of the United States and the Soviet Union were now poised on a hair trigger, under tremendous pressure to launch on warning if war seemed likely. Paul Bracken, a management expert at Yale University, wrote about how unmanageable a nuclear exchange would be. And Daniel Ford, a former head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, revealed that, among other things, the destruction of a single, innocuous-looking building in Sunnyvale, California, located “within bazooka range” of Highway 101, could disrupt the operation of Air Force early-warning and communications satellites. Although many aspects of Reagan’s strategic modernization program provoked criticism, liberals and conservatives agreed that a robust command-and-control system was essential — to wage nuclear war or to deter it.

In the fall of 1981, Secretary of Defense Weinberger announced the retirement of the Titan II. The missile was increasingly regarded as a relic of another nuclear era. Testifying about the Titan II before the Senate, Fred Iklé cited “its low accuracy and its accident-proneness.” The enormous yield of a single W-53 warhead had become less important. The one hundred Peacemaker missiles scheduled for deployment would carry one thousand warheads — almost twenty times the number carried by the remaining Titan II missiles. And the secrets of the Titan II had recently been compromised. Christopher M. Cooke, a young deputy commander at a Titan II complex in Kansas, had been arrested after making three unauthorized visits and multiple phone calls to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. Inexplicably, Cooke had been allowed to serve as a Titan II officer on alerts for five months after his first contact with the Soviet embassy was detected. An Air Force memo later said the information that Cooke gave the Soviets — about launch codes, attack options, and the missile’s vulnerabilities — was “a major security breach… the worst perhaps in the history of the Air Force.”

Despite the obsolescence of the Titan II, its decommissioning would proceed slowly. The last missile was scheduled to go off alert in 1987. In order to save money, the Air Force decided to cancel some of the modifications recommended by the Titan II review group after the accident in Damascus. Funding would not be provided for a new vapor detection system in the silo, additional video cameras within the complex, or a retrofit of the W-53 warhead with new safety mechanisms. Upgrading the warhead to meet “modern nuclear safety criteria for abnormal environments” would have cost about $400,000 per missile.

THE SOVIET INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN, the breakdown in détente, the tough rhetoric from the White House, and the impending arrival of cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles created widespread fear of nuclear war in Western Europe. The fear was encouraged by a Soviet propaganda campaign that sought to stop the deployment of America’s new missiles. But the apocalyptic mood in Europe was real, not Communist inspired, and loose talk by members of the Reagan administration helped to strengthen it. Thomas K. Jones, an undersecretary of defense, played down the number of casualties that a nuclear war might cause, arguing that families would survive if they dug a hole, covered it with a couple of doors, and put three feet of dirt on top. “It’s the dirt that does it,” Jones explained. “Everyone’s going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around.”

In Great Britain, membership in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament soon increased tenfold. A quarter of a million CND supporters attended a demonstration in London’s Hyde Park during the fall of 1981, and a well-publicized Women’s Peace Camp grew outside the Royal Air Force Base Greenham Common, where American cruise missiles would soon be housed. In Bonn, a demonstration against the Pershing II missile also attracted a quarter of a million people. The sense of powerlessness and dread, the need to take some sort of action and halt the arms race, led to a nuclear version of the Stockholm syndrome. Throughout Western Europe, protesters condemned American missiles that hadn’t yet arrived — not the hundreds of new Soviet missiles already aimed at them.

The New Yorker magazine ran a three-part article in February 1982 that catalyzed the antinuclear movement in the United States. Written by Jonathan Schell and later published as a book, The Fate of the Earth revived the notion that nuclear weapons confronted the world with a stark, existential choice: life or death. Schell tried to pierce the sense of denial that had seemingly gripped the United States since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the refusal to face the threat of annihilation. “On the one hand, we returned to business as usual, as though everything remained as it always had been,” Schell wrote. “On the other hand, we began to assemble the stockpiles that could blow this supposedly unaltered existence sky-high at any second.” He called for the abolition of nuclear weapons, offered a chilling description of what a single hydrogen bomb would do to New York City, and presented the latest scientific evidence on how nuclear detonations could harm the ozone layer of the earth’s atmosphere. Later that year the astronomer Carl Sagan conjured an even worse environmental disaster: nuclear winter. The vast amount of soot produced by burning cities would circle the earth after a nuclear exchange, block the sun, and precipitate a new ice age. Sagan warned that the effects of nuclear winter would make victory in a nuclear war impossible; a nation that launched a first strike would be committing suicide.