Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

In 1959, Rubel sent a copy of Red Alert to every member of the Pentagon’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles. He thought that the Minuteman launch control system needed much stronger safeguards against unauthorized use, as well as some sort of “stop-launch” capability. The committee agreed with him. But the Air Force fought against any modifications of the system, arguing that they would be too expensive and that the Minuteman, America’s most important land-based missile, was “completely safe.”

Rubel’s concerns were taken seriously by the Kennedy administration, and an independent panel was appointed to investigate them. The panel found that Minuteman missiles were indeed vulnerable to unauthorized use — and that an entire squadron could be launched, accidentally, by a series of minor power surges. Although that sort of mistake was unlikely, it was possible. Two young SAC officers might be sitting innocently at their consoles, on an ordinary day, their launch keys locked away in the safe, as small fluctuations in the electricity entering the control center silently mimicked the pulses required by the launch switch. The crew would be caught by surprise when fifty Minuteman missiles suddenly left the ground.

“I was scared shitless,” said an engineer who worked on the original Minuteman launch control system. “The technology was never to be trusted.” Secretary of Defense McNamara insisted that a number of command-and-control changes be made to the Minuteman, and the redesign cost about $840 million. The new system eliminated the timer, allowed missiles to be launched individually, and prevented minor power surges from causing an accidental launch. Minuteman missiles became operational for the first time during the Cuban Missile Crisis. To err on the side of safety, the explosive bolts were removed from their silo doors. If one of the missiles were launched by accident, it would explode inside the silo. And if President Kennedy decided to launch one, some poor enlisted man would have to kneel over the silo door, reconnect the explosive bolts by hand, and leave the area in a hurry.

WHILE THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE publicly dismissed fears of an accidental nuclear war, the Cuban Missile Crisis left McNamara more concerned than ever about the danger. At a national security meeting a few months after the crisis, he opposed allowing anyone other than the president of the United States to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. A secret memorandum on the meeting summarized his views:

Mr. McNamara went on to describe the possibilities which existed for an accidental launch of a missile against the USSR. He pointed out that we were spending millions of dollars to reduce this problem, but we could not assure ourselves completely against such a contingency. Moreover he suggested that it was unlikely that the Soviets were spending as much as we were in attempting to narrow the limits of possible accidental launch…. He went on to describe the crashes of US aircraft, one in North Carolina and one in Texas, where, by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted. He concluded that despite our best efforts, the possibility of an accidental nuclear explosion still existed.

The supreme commander of NATO should not be granted any type of predelegation “to fire nuclear weapons,” McNamara argued — and even the president should never order their use without knowing all the details of a nuclear explosion, whether it was deliberate or accidental, “whether or not it was Soviet launched, how large, where it occurred, etc.” Secretary of State Rusk agreed with McNamara. But their views did not prevail. The head of NATO retained the authority to use nuclear weapons, during an emergency, on the condition that “every effort to contact the President must be made.”

The elaborate nuclear strategies promoted by RAND and embraced by McNamara now seemed largely irrelevant. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, a “no cities” policy lost its appeal. Newspapers had criticized it, NATO allies had repudiated it, and the dispersal of SAC bombers to commercial airports had blurred the distinction between civilian and military targets. And as the Soviet Union built more long-range missiles, a counterforce strategy would require the United States to deploy more missiles to destroy them. The arms race would become never ending. The hope of eliminating the Soviet threat with a first strike and defending America from attack now seemed illusory. Thousands of new missiles, the construction of more bomb shelters, or even an antiballistic missile system couldn’t change what appeared to be an unavoidable fact for both superpowers: launching any nuclear attack would be suicidal.

Within weeks of President Kennedy’s assassination, McNamara formally endorsed a strategy of “Assured Destruction.” The idealism and optimism that had accompanied Kennedy’s inauguration were long gone. The new strategy was grounded in a sense of futility. It planned to deter a Soviet attack by threatening to wipe out at least “30 % of their population, 50 % of their industrial capacity, and 150 of their cities.” McNamara’s staff had calculated that the equivalent of 400 megatons, detonated above the Soviet Union, would be enough for the task. Anything more would be overkill. Informed by a reporter that the Soviets were hardening their silos to protect the missiles from an American attack, McNamara said, “Thank God.” The move would improve “crisis stability.” Once the Soviets felt confident that they could retaliate after being attacked, they’d feel much less pressure to strike first. Leaving the cities of the United States and the Soviet Union vulnerable to annihilation, McNamara now thought, would keep them safe. The strategy was soon known as MAD: “mutually assured destruction.”

The strategic thinking at the White House and the Department of Defense, however, didn’t correspond to the targeting policies at SAC headquarters in Omaha. The gulf between theory and practice remained vast. Although the SIOP had been revised during the Kennedy administration, General Power had blocked significant changes in weapon allocation. The new SIOP divided the “optimum mix” into three separate target groups: Soviet nuclear forces, conventional military forces, and urban-industrial areas. The president could decide to attack only the first group, the first two groups, or all three. Moscow, China, and cities in the Eastern bloc could selectively be spared from destruction. The SIOP could be launched as a first strike or as retaliation. But all the attack options still required that the Soviet Union be hit by thousands of nuclear weapons, far more than were necessary for “assured destruction.” The three target categories of the SIOP — Alpha, Bravo, Charlie — were the same as those in the attack plan proposed by SAC in 1950. And the new SIOP was almost as destructive, inflexible, and mechanistic as the previous one. A war plan that seemed too horrible to contemplate when Kennedy and McNamara first learned of its existence had become institutionalized.

By the time Robert McNamara retired from the Pentagon in February 1968, the command-and-control system of the United States had been improved. The new Missile Defense Alarm System — satellites with infrared sensors that could detect heat from the launch of missiles — promised to give as much as half an hour of warning, if the Soviets attacked. SAC’s Looking Glass command post, airborne twenty-four hours a day, increased the likelihood that a Go code could be sent after the United States was hit. New computer and communications systems were being added to the World Wide Military Command and Control System. But many of the underlying problems hadn’t been solved.