Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

More than one fourth of the crew on the USS Nathan Hale , a Polaris submarine with sixteen ballistic missiles, were investigated for illegal drug use. Eighteen of the thirty-eight seamen were cleared; the rest were discharged or removed from submarine duty. A former crew member of the Nathan Hale told a reporter that hashish was often smoked when the sub was at sea. The Polaris base at Holy Loch, Scotland, helped turn the Cowal Peninsula into a center for drug dealing in Great Britain. Nine crew members of the USS Casimir Pulaski , a Polaris submarine, were convicted for smoking marijuana at sea. One of the submarine tenders that docked at the base, the USS Canopus , often carried nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles. The widespread marijuana use among its crew earned the ship a local nickname: the USS Cannabis .

Four SAC pilots stationed at Castle Air Force Base near Merced, California, were arrested with marijuana and LSD. The police who raided their house, located off the base, said that it resembled “a hippie type pad with a picture of Ho Chi Minh on the wall.” At Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina, 151 of the 225 security police officers were busted on marijuana charges. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations arrested many of them leaving the base’s nuclear weapon storage area. Marijuana was discovered in one of the underground control centers of a Minuteman missile squadron at Malmstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls, Montana. It was also found in the control center of a Titan II launch complex about forty miles southeast of Tucson, Arizona. The launch crew and security officers at the site were suspended while investigators tried to determine who was responsible for the “two marijuana cigarettes.”

The true extent of drug use among American military personnel with access to nuclear weapons was hard to determine. Of the roughly 114,000 people who’d been cleared to work with nuclear weapons in 1980, only 1.5 percent lost that clearance because of drug abuse. But the Personnel Reliability Program’s 98.5 percent success rate still allowed at least 1,728 “unreliable” drug uses near the weapons. And those were just the ones who got caught.

Before assuming command of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing at Little Rock Air Force Base, Colonel John Moser had supervised a major drug bust at Whiteman Air Force Base, near Knob Noster, Missouri. More than 230 airmen were arrested for using and selling drugs there. Many were responsible for guarding and maintaining nuclear weapons. Some admitted to using marijuana, cocaine, and LSD on the job. Two of the three officers who were arrested had highly sensitive jobs at the base: they entered target information into the guidance systems of Minuteman missiles. When Moser arrived at Little Rock to assume command of the 308th, another drug bust was unfolding. Marijuana had been found in the control center at a Titan II complex. But the arrests didn’t end the drug use. The Strategic Air Command wasn’t immune to larger social forces, in an era before mandatory urine tests. Although launch officers rarely condoned illegal drug use, they spent alerts underground, without video cameras to reveal what was happening throughout a launch site. Their ability to command and control had its limits. Every so often, PTS crews would sit outside at a Titan II complex, light up a joint, crack open a few beers, and unwind at the end of a long day.

HENRY KISSINGER HAD TRIED to get rid of the Titan II. He considered the missile “inaccurate and unreliable.” It was a weapon system, he later explained, “which the Pentagon had been wanting to scrap for years and I had kept in service for trading purposes.” In 1972, while serving as the national security adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, Kissinger had offered a deal to the Soviet Union: the United States would decommission its Titan II missiles, if the Soviets agreed to retire their SS-9 missiles. The deal would eliminate a powerful threat to Moscow. And the Soviet missile was similar in a number of respects to the Titan II, employing the same type of fuel and oxidizer. But the SS-9 was also newer, larger, and capable of delivering a much heavier payload. The Soviet Union declined the offer. The Nixon administration was stuck with the Titan II — getting rid of fifty-four ballistic missiles, without getting anything in return from the Soviets, made little sense in the midst of an arms race.

The failed attempt to decommission an aging weapon system reflected the new balance of power. Robert McNamara had assumed that once the Soviet Union felt confident about its ability to destroy the United States in any nuclear exchange, it would stop building new missiles. But the Soviets didn’t share McNamara’s faith in mutually assured destruction. After the humiliation of the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of their diplomats had told an American counterpart, “You Americans will never be able to do this to us again.” In a rivalry where a nation’s power was measured numerically in warheads and bombs, the Soviet Union now sought to gain the upper hand. Within a decade of removing strategic weapons from Cuba, the Soviet Union increased the number of its long-range, land-based missiles from about 56 to more than 1,500. Its arsenal of submarine-based missiles rose from about 72 to almost 500. By the early 1970s, the Soviets had more long-range missiles than the United States. An elaborate antiballistic missile system had been created to defend Moscow. And a network of underground bunkers had been constructed beneath the city to protect the leadership of the Communist Party. Linked by secret subway lines, the bunkers could house thousands of people.

Although the United States possessed fewer ballistic missiles than the Soviet Union, it still had more nuclear weapons. McNamara had imposed a limit on the number of missiles that the United States would deploy — but not on the number of warheads that each missile could carry. Before leaving office, he’d approved the development of “multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles” (MIRVs). Publicly justified as a method of overwhelming a Soviet antiballistic missile system — adding more warheads to a single missile was less expensive than building more missiles — MIRVs also increased the number of Soviet targets that the United States could destroy in a first strike.

The Minuteman III missile, introduced in 1970, carried three warheads. They were housed on a post-boost vehicle, nicknamed the “bus,” that had its own rockets and guidance system. The bus separated from the missile and released each warhead over a different target, delivering them one after another, like a school bus dropping off children after school. The Poseidon missile, first deployed on American submarines in 1971, could carry fourteen warheads.

Kissinger was considered one of America’s leading authorities on nuclear strategy. For more than a decade his writing had helped to shape the national debate on the subject. He had served as an adviser to the Kennedy administration during the Berlin crisis. He knew as much as any civilian about the competing theories of nuclear warfare. And yet Kissinger was astonished by his first formal briefing on the SIOP. The smallest attack option would hit the Soviet Union with almost two thousand weapons; the largest with more than three thousand. The vast scale and inflexibility of the SIOP led Kissinger to describe it as a “horror strategy.” At a national security meeting in the Situation Room of the White House, he later wondered “how one rationally could make a decision to kill 80 million people.” President Nixon was equally appalled.

Most of the targets in the SIOP were still part of the Soviet war machinery — missile sites, air bases, command centers, ports. But the desire for assured destruction of the Soviet economy inspired calculations that made Fred Iklé’s theories about urban bombing seem like a relic of the Stone Age. RAND had developed a computer model to provide speedy estimates of the casualties and deaths that would be caused by different nuclear attacks. It was called QUICK COUNT. The types of weapons to be used in an attack, their targets, the prevailing winds, and the density of the local population were entered into an IBM-7090 computer — and then QUICK COUNT produced graphs, charts, and summaries of the potential carnage. It predicted the consequences of various attacks not only on the Soviet Union, but also on Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and the United States. And it included, as a bonus, an “Urban DGZ Selector” that helped war planners maximize the destruction of cities, allowing them to select the desired ground zeros likely to kill the most people.