Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Within a few years, a series of international agreements clarified the legal status of Berlin, recognized the sovereignty of both German governments, promised to reduce the threat of nuclear war, and established a working relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union known as détente. The two countries signed the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty, allowing each side to defend two locations from attack; the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, limiting the size of underground detonations to 150 kilotons; and an Interim Agreement on Certain Measures with Respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, freezing the number of land-based ballistic missiles and permitting the deployment of new submarine-based missiles only when old ones were retired.

The advent of détente did not, however, end the nuclear arms race. The United States and the Soviet Union continued to modernize weapon systems and improve their accuracy. More than ever, nuclear weapons seemed important as totems of status and world power. Not long after taking office, President Nixon tried to end the Vietnam War by threatening the use of nuclear weapons, convinced that Eisenhower had employed a similar tactic to end the war in Korea. “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob,” Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.” The secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought it was a bad idea. But Nixon and Kissinger thought the plan might work. Ignoring the safety risks, the Strategic Air Command secretly resumed its airborne alert for two weeks. B-52s loaded with hydrogen bombs took off from bases in the United States and flew circular routes along the coast of the Soviet Union. Neither the Soviets nor the Vietcong was fooled by the bluff.

A few years later, at the height of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, nuclear weapons were once again utilized as a diplomatic tool. Concerned that the Soviet Union might send troops to Egypt, Secretary of State Kissinger and Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger placed American military forces throughout the world at DEFCON 3. The elevated level of readiness was a signal to the Soviet Union, implying that the United States was willing to fight a nuclear war over the issue. The Soviets didn’t intervene in the Mideast conflict, and Kissinger later attributed their reluctance to the administration’s bold diplomacy. Great leaders sometimes need to appear unbalanced, he thought: “What seems ‘balanced’ and ‘safe’ in a crisis is often the most risky.”

Fred Iklé served as the head of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Iklé brought to the job an extensive knowledge of nuclear weapons, deterrence theory, and the workings of the command-and-control system. He argued against the adoption of a launch-on-warning policy, worried that it could inadvertently prove to be disastrous. Nevertheless, the policy had a strong military and psychological appeal. “Launching the ICBM force on attack assessment is probably the simplest and most cost-effective way to frustrate a [Soviet] counterforce attack,” a classified RAND report noted. “But as a declared policy, we believe it would be vigorously opposed as both dangerous and unstable (an accident could theoretically precipitate a nuclear war).”

At a meeting of the National Security Council, Iklé expressed his opposition to launch on warning, calling it “accident-prone.” Secretary of State Kissinger disagreed, praising its usefulness as a deterrent. Kissinger felt confident that the command-and-control system could handle it and stressed that “the Soviets must never be able to calculate that you plan to rule out such an attack.” The national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, agreed with Kissinger. Reason now played a diminished role in nuclear strategy. “It is not to our disadvantage,” Scowcroft said, “if we appear irrational to the Soviets in this regard.”

Too much madness, however, could be dangerous. Since the days of Harry Truman, the president of the United States had been entrusted with the sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. It gave one human being the ability to destroy cities, nations, entire civilizations. The president was accompanied everywhere by a military aide carrying the “football” — a briefcase that held the SIOP Decisions Handbook , a list of secret command bunkers throughout the United States, and instructions on how to operate the Emergency Broadcast System. The SIOP Decisions Handbook outlined various attack options, using cartoonlike illustrations to convey the details quickly. It was known as the Black Book .

Eager to defend the civilian control of nuclear weapons from military encroachment, John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara had fought hard to ensure that only the president could make the ultimate decision. But they hadn’t considered the possibility that the president might be clinically depressed, emotionally unstable, and drinking heavily — like Richard Nixon, during his final weeks in office. Amid the deepening Watergate scandal, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger told the head of the Joint Chiefs to seek his approval before acting on “any emergency order coming from the president.” Although Schlesinger’s order raised questions about who was actually in command, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

One month after the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter, a member of his national security staff, General William E. Odom, attended briefings on the SIOP at the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Omaha. Odom was considered a staunch anti-Communist, one of the hard-liners in the new administration. He was a Soviet expert, fluent in Russian, who’d attended West Point and trained as a tactical nuclear targeting officer for the Army. His visit to SAC headquarters occurred in February 1977. Eight years had passed since Henry Kissinger began to push for more flexibility in the SIOP. Secretary of Defense Schlesinger had announced in 1974 that America’s war plans were being revised, that they would soon include “Limited Nuclear Options” and “Regional Nuclear Options” using fewer weapons. And yet General Odom could find no trace of those changes in the SIOP. Like others before him, nuclear initiates granted a secret knowledge, Odom was stunned by the SIOP:

At times I simply could not believe what I was being shown and told, causing me to doubt my own comprehension. It was an unnerving experience for me personally…. It was just a huge mechanical war plan aimed at creating maximum damage without regard to the political context. I concluded that the United States had surrendered political control over nuclear weapons to a deterministic theory of war that… ensured an unprecedented devastation of both the Soviet Union and the United States…. And the president would be left with two or three meaningless choices that he might have to make within 10 minutes after he was awakened after a deep sleep late some night.

A policy of launch on warning was “absurd and irresponsible,” and implementing the SIOP under any conditions would be “the height of folly.” The SIOP now called for the Soviet Union to be hit with about ten thousand nuclear weapons. But what disturbed Odom the most about the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff in Omaha was that they didn’t seem to have any postattack plans: “Things would just cease in their world about 6 to 10 hours after they received the order to execute the SIOP.”

President Carter was determined to end the arms race with the Soviet Union. And he knew more about nuclear weapons than any of his predecessors at the White House, except, perhaps, Eisenhower. Carter had attended the U.S. Naval Academy, served as an officer on submarines, and helped to design the first nuclear propulsion systems for the Navy. A few weeks before his inauguration, Carter had met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and asked them an unexpected question: How long would it take to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal to just one or two hundred ballistic missiles? The room fell silent — and no answer was given.