Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The most intractable problem was finding a way to keep the president alive. The National Emergency Airborne Command Post was placed on full-time alert at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. But the plane would need at least ten or fifteen minutes to take off. And it would need another ten minutes to fly beyond the lethal range of a thermonuclear explosion. At least half an hour of warning might be necessary for the president to reach Andrews, get into the airborne command post, and escape the blast. Traveling by helicopter to the National Emergency Command Post Afloat, a Navy cruiser kept off the coast, would take even longer. And a Soviet missile attack might come with little or no warning.

After considering a variety of options, Secretary of Defense McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk supported the construction of the National Deep Underground Command Center. McNamara described the bunker as a “logical, survivable node in the control structure… a unified strategic command and control center under duly constituted political authorities.” It would be located beneath the Pentagon, at a depth of 3,500 feet. High-speed elevators, a light-rail system, and horizontal tunnels more than half a mile underground would link it to the White House. It would hold anywhere from fifty to three hundred people, depending on whether Kennedy chose to build an “austere” version or one of “moderate size.” It was designed to “withstand multiple direct hits of 200 to 300 MT [megaton] weapons bursting at the surface or 100 MT weapons penetrating to depths of 70-100 feet.” If the Soviets attacked on that scale and the new bunker met those design goals, the president and his staff could expect to be the only people still alive in Washington, D.C.

Amid all the consideration of how to protect the president and the Joint Chiefs, how to gather information in real time, how to transmit war orders, how to devise the technical and administrative means for a flexible response, little thought had been given to an important question: how do you end a nuclear war? Thomas Schelling — a professor of economics at Harvard, a RAND analyst, proponent of game theory, and adviser to the Kennedy administration — began to worry about the issue early in 1961. While heading a committee on the risk of war by accident, miscalculation, or surprise, he was amazed to learn that there was no direct, secure form of communications between the White House and the Kremlin. It seemed almost unbelievable. Schelling had read the novel Red Alert a few years earlier, bought forty copies, and sent them to colleagues. The book gave a good sense of what could go wrong — and yet the president’s ability to call his Soviet counterpart on a “hot line” existed only in fiction. As things stood, AT&T’s telephone lines and Western Union’s telegraph lines were the only direct links between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both of them would be knocked out by a thermonuclear blast, and most radio communications would be, as well. The command-and-control systems of the two countries had no formal, reliable means of interacting. The problem was so serious and so obvious, Schelling thought, everybody must have assumed somebody else had taken care of it. Pauses for negotiation would be a waste of time, if there were no way to negotiate. And once a nuclear war began, no matter how pointless, devastating, and horrific, it might not end until both sides ran out of nuclear weapons.

“Mankind must put an end to war — or war will put an end to mankind,” President John F. Kennedy told a gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, on September 25, 1961. Dag Hammarskjöld, the beloved secretary-general of the United Nations, had recently died in a plane crash, and to honor his memory Kennedy gave a speech that called for world peace and stressed the U.N.’s central role as a peacekeeper. He also revived the hope that nuclear weapons could be outlawed through an international agreement:

Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us…. The events and decisions of the next ten months may well decide the fate of man for the next ten thousand years. There will be no avoiding those events. There will be no appeal from those decisions. And we in this hall shall be remembered either as part of the generation that turned this planet into a flaming funeral pyre or the generation that met its vow “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

Instead of an arms race, Kennedy challenged the Soviets to join the United States in a “peace race,” a series of steps that would lead to “general and complete disarmament” under the supervision of the U.N. He proposed a ban on nuclear testing, an end to the production of fissile material for use in nuclear weapons, a prohibition on the transfer of nuclear weapons to other countries, and the destruction of all nuclear weapons, as well as their delivery systems. Kennedy had no illusions about the perfectibility of mankind, only a desire for its survival:

Such a plan would not bring a world free from conflict or greed — but it would bring a world free from the terrors of mass destruction. It would not usher in the era of the super state — but it would usher in an era in which no state could annihilate or be annihilated by another.

The abolition of nuclear weapons couldn’t be postponed any longer. “Together we shall save our planet,” he said, “or together we shall perish in its flames.”

During the same week that Kennedy appealed for an end to the arms race at the United Nations, he met with a handful of military advisers at the White House to discuss launching a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. General Thomas Power encouraged him to do it. According to notes of the meeting, held on September 20, Power warned that the United States now faced the greatest danger, ever, of a Soviet nuclear attack. “If a general atomic war is inevitable,” he argued, “the U.S. should strike first.” Power was not the only high-ranking officer having such thoughts. Kennedy had just received a memo from General Maxwell Taylor, summarizing how an American first strike might proceed. Taylor didn’t recommend it — or rule it out. “There are risks as well as opportunities in this approach,” he wrote.

The United States and the Soviet Union were, at the time, engaged in their most serious confrontation since the Berlin airlift of 1948. And once again, Berlin was at the center of the crisis. Sixteen years after the defeat of the Nazis, the city was still divided among four occupying powers: the British, French, and Americans in the West; the Soviets in the East. The division was economic, as well as political. While Communist East Berlin stagnated, capitalist West Berlin thrived. But it was a fragile prosperity. Located deep within East Germany, linked to West Germany only by air and a 110-mile stretch of highway, the free sectors of Berlin were surrounded by troops from the Soviet bloc. NATO forces in the city were vastly outnumbered. America’s nuclear weapons were all that protected West Berlin from being overrun.

Since 1958 the Soviet Union had been threatening to sign a treaty with East Germany, hand over the eastern part of the city to its Communist ally — and block NATO access to West Berlin. The threat was forcefully repeated at a summit meeting between President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961. The Soviet Union seemed ascendant, having recently launched the first man into space. And Kennedy’s stature had been greatly diminished by the Bay of Pigs invasion, a failed attempt to overthrow the Communist government of Cuba. Khrushchev thought the new president was young and inexperienced, perhaps too timid to provide air support for the CIA-backed army pinned down on the beaches of Cuba. Kennedy had hoped that the summit would lead to warmer relations between the two superpowers. Instead, Khrushchev confronted him with an ultimatum: if the United States did not agree to the creation of a “free” and demilitarized Berlin, the Soviets would sign a treaty with East Germany by the end of the year and severely limit NATO’s rights in the city. When Kennedy made clear that would be unacceptable, the Soviet leader didn’t back down.