Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Far from being grounds for celebration, the absence of a missile gap became a potential source of embarrassment for the Kennedy administration. Many of the claims made by the Democrats during the recent presidential campaign now seemed baseless. Although General Power still insisted that the Soviets were hiding their long-range missiles beneath camouflage, the United States clearly had not fallen behind in the nuclear arms race. Public knowledge of that fact would be inconvenient — and so the public wasn’t told. When McNamara admitted that the missile gap was a myth, during an off-the-record briefing with reporters, President Kennedy was displeased.

At a press conference the following day, Kennedy stressed that “it would be premature to reach a judgment as to whether there is a gap or not a gap.” Soon the whole issue was forgotten. Political concerns, not strategic ones, determined how many long-range, land-based missiles the United States would build. Before Sputnik, President Eisenhower had thought that twenty to forty would be enough. Jerome Wiesner advised President Kennedy that roughly ten times that number would be sufficient for deterrence. But General Power wanted the Strategic Air Command to have ten thousand Minuteman missiles, aimed at every military target in the Soviet Union that might threaten the United States. And members of Congress, unaware that the missile gap was a myth, also sought a large, land-based force. After much back and forth, McNamara decided to build a thousand Minuteman missiles. One Pentagon adviser later explained that it was “a round number.”

WHILE DISAGREEMENTS OVER NUCLEAR STRATEGY continued at the White House and the Pentagon, the need for an improved command-and-control system was beyond dispute. For McNamara, it was the most urgent national security issue that the United States faced, “a matter of transcendent priority.” A few weeks after his briefing on WSEG R-50 and the threat of a surprise attack, McNamara outlined the problem to Kennedy:

The chain of command from the President down to our strategic offensive and defensive weapon systems is highly vulnerable in almost every link. The destruction of about a dozen sites, most of which are soft, none of which is adequately hardened, would deprive U.S. forces of all high-level command and control…. Without the survival of at least some of these sites (including the one containing the President, his successor, or designated replacement) with their communications, there can be no authorized response in the event of a nuclear attack on the U.S.

The Soviet Union might not need a thousand missiles to prevail in a nuclear war; twenty or thirty might do. And the relative weakness of the Soviets, the small size of their missile arsenal, had oddly become a source of anxiety. It might encourage the Soviet Union to strike first. A decapitation attack, launched without warning, like a “bolt out of the blue,” might be the Kremlin’s only hope of achieving victory.

A centralized, effective command-and-control system would ensure that the United States could retaliate — and that the order to do so would be given by the president. The demands placed on such a system would be enormous, if the Soviets attacked. The system would have to “classify the attack, as large or small,” a Pentagon report later noted, “accidental or deliberate, selective or indiscriminate, against cities or not, against high command or not… in order to support a decision as to an ‘appropriate’ retaliatory response.” The system had to do those things in real time. And it had to maintain communications between the president, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and military commanders throughout a nuclear war.

After commissioning a number of studies on command and control, McNamara approved the creation of a new entity: the World Wide Military Command and Control System (WWMCCS). It would combine the radars, sensors, computers, and communications networks of the different armed services into a single integrated system. The challenges were formidable. Making the system work would require not only technological and administrative changes but also new ways of thinking about command. The task was further complicated by the efforts of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force to retain as much authority as possible over their own facilities and resist any centralized system run by civilians.

Although the bureaucratic struggle between the demands of centralization and decentralization proved difficult to resolve at the Pentagon, Paul Baran, a researcher at RAND, came up with an ingenious method of harmonizing the two within a digital communications network. Centralized and even decentralized networks — like those traditionally used to broadcast radio or television, to send messages by telegraph or telephone — could be shut down by the destruction of a few crucial nodes. Any hierarchical network would remain vulnerable at its apex, at the point where all the lines of communication converged. “The first duty of the command and control system is to survive,” Baran argued, proposing a distributed network with hundreds or thousands of separate nodes connected through multiple paths. Messages would be broken into smaller “blocks,” sent along the first available path, and reassembled at their final destination. If nodes were out of service or destroyed, the network would automatically adapt and send the data along a route that was still intact. Baran’s work later provided the conceptual basis for the top secret communications networks at the Pentagon, as well as their civilian offshoot, the Internet.

The survival of America’s military and civilian leadership would be harder to achieve. As a subset of the World Wide Military Command and Control System, a new administrative structure was established. The National Military Command Center replaced the Joint War Room at the Pentagon. It would serve as the nation’s military headquarters during a nuclear war. Since the Pentagon was likely to be destroyed at the beginning of that war, an Alternate National Military Command Center was formed at Site R, inside Raven Rock Mountain. It would have the data-processing and communications equipment necessary to manage the SIOP. It would be staffed year-round, twenty-four hours a day, awaiting the arrival of the president and the Joint Chiefs during an emergency. But fixed sites now seemed like easy targets for Soviet missiles. McNamara thought that the United States also needed mobile command centers that would be difficult to find and destroy. The Air Force wanted these command centers to be located on airplanes. SAC already had a plane, nicknamed “Looking Glass,” in the air at all times as a backup to its headquarters in Omaha. The Navy wanted the command centers to be located on ships. McNamara decided to do both, creating the National Emergency Airborne Command Post and the National Emergency Command Post Afloat.

None of these command posts would matter if there were no means of transmitting the Go code after a nuclear attack on the United States. The Navy began work on an airborne system for contacting its Polaris submarines. Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) planes would quickly get off the ground, climb steeply, and send an emergency war order on a very-low-frequency radio, using an antenna five miles long. SAC began to develop a Post Attack Command and Control System. It would rely on airborne command posts, a command post on a train, a command post at the bottom of an abandoned gold mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and a command post, known as The Notch, inside Bare Mountain, near Amherst, Massachusetts. The bunker in Cripple Creek was never constructed; airborne facilities were less expensive, and more likely to survive, than those underground. The Emergency Rocket Communications System provided another layer of redundancy. If SAC’s airborne command posts somehow failed to send the Go code, it could be sent by radio transmitters installed in a handful of Minuteman missiles. A prerecorded voice message, up to ninety seconds long, would be broadcast to bomber crews and launch crews, as the specially equipped missiles flew over SAC bases.