Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

In that moment, President Carter had revealed himself to be an advocate of “minimum deterrence,” a strategy that the Navy had endorsed in the late 1950s, as the Polaris submarine was being developed. He thought that one or two hundred missiles might be sufficient to deter the Soviets. And if both superpowers reduced their strategic forces to those levels, neither could launch a successful first strike. During his inaugural address, Carter spoke about his ultimate goal: “the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth.” To make sure the issue was never far from his mind, he kept wooden miniatures of Soviet and American missiles on his desk in the Oval Office.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff regarded Carter with suspicion. The new president not only supported minimum deterrence, he also sought a ban on all nuclear testing. He proposed large cuts in military spending. He sincerely wanted new arms control agreements, world peace, friendship with the Soviet Union. And he appointed Harold Brown — one of McNamara’s former whiz kids — to serve as secretary of defense. Brown thought that the United States hadn’t fallen behind the Soviets and that new strategic weapons, like the B-1 bomber, weren’t urgently needed. Within weeks of taking office, Carter found his plans opposed by most Republicans, many Democrats, the armed services — and even the Soviets. At the Kremlin, his proposal to accelerate the reduction of ballistic missiles seemed like an attempt to gain favorable publicity, and his criticism of human rights violations in the Soviet Union were regarded as insulting. The Soviet leadership much preferred dealing with Nixon and Kissinger, who never mentioned the repression of dissidents.

A new organization, the Committee on the Present Danger, soon attacked the Carter administration for being weak on defense and endangering the security of the United States. The group’s membership included academics, defense intellectuals, former government officials, and retired military officers. They warned that within a few years the nation would face a “window of vulnerability,” a period in which the Soviets might be able to launch a surprise attack that spared American cities but destroyed all of its land-based missiles. The president would then face an agonizing choice: accede to the demands of the Soviet Union and save American lives — or launch submarine-based missiles at Soviet cities and cause pointless, mutual annihilation. The committee’s views were succinctly expressed in an essay by Richard Pipes, a history professor at Harvard and one of the group’s founders: “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War.” The Soviets were violent, deceitful, authoritarian, and cunning, Pipes argued, and they’d already shown a willingness to commit mass murder on behalf of communism. The downfall of the United States now seemed within their grasp and would be pursued, regardless of the cost.

The window of vulnerability — like the bomber gap and the missile gap before it — provided a strong rationale for increased spending on defense. And like those other scares, it was based more on fear than on facts. A successful surprise attack on America’s land-based missiles wouldn’t be easy to pull off. To achieve a 95 percent certainty of wiping them out, at least two Soviet warheads would have to be aimed at each silo. Those warheads would have to land in precisely timed intervals, so that the blast effects of one didn’t destroy the other. And the Soviets would have to prevent the Strategic Air Command from launching its missiles on warning. Even if the surprise attack were successful, disabling every single Minuteman and Titan II, the fallout from the nuclear blasts would kill somewhere between two million and twenty million Americans. And the United States would still have thousands of nuclear warheads, mounted on submarine-based missiles, ready to seek revenge.

President Carter’s idealistic vision soon collided with the reality of the late 1970s. He had to contend with gasoline shortages, high unemployment, and inflation; anxieties about the decline of American power; the arms buildup in the Soviet Union, its crackdown on dissidents, its use of Cuban troops as proxies in Ethiopia and Angola. The Senate refused to approve another arms control treaty, and détente became a thing of the past. Instead of cutting the defense budget, Carter increased it for the first time in more than a decade. Instead of adopting a strategy of minimum deterrence, he endorsed a “countervailing strategy” that would allow the president to use limited nuclear strikes in a variety of situations. Instead of eliminating strategic weapons, he backed the development of entirely new ones — the MX long-range missile, the Pershing II medium-range missile, cruise missiles that used jet engines instead of rockets to fly low and evade Soviet radar, the B-2 bomber, the Trident submarine.

The MX missile system embodied the strategic thinking of its time. To avoid destruction in a surprise attack, the MX would be mounted on a two-hundred-foot-long truck. The missile would constantly be moved between twenty-three protective concrete shelters, like a pea in an immense shell game. The Soviet Union would never know which shelter housed a missile. The shelters would be a mile apart. Twenty-two of them would contain fake missiles — and those decoys would also be moved constantly by truck. If the scheme worked, the Soviets would have to use at least forty-six warheads to destroy a single MX missile.

President Carter approved the deployment of two hundred MX missiles in the Great Basin area of Utah and Nevada. The missiles would be scattered across roughly fifteen thousand square miles of federal land, most of it closed to the public. Eight thousand miles of new roads would be built for access to the MX sites. About a hundred thousand workers would be required to construct the system and about half that number to run it. The total cost of the project was estimated to be at least $40 billion. The new weapon was designed not only to close the window of vulnerability for the United States but also to open one for the Soviet Union. Each MX would carry ten highly accurate warheads, thereby placing Soviet missiles at risk of destruction during an American first strike.

AT ABOUT ELEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning on November 9, 1979, the computers at the NORAD headquarters inside Cheyenne Mountain said that the United States was under attack. The huge screen in the underground command center at SAC headquarters showed that Soviet missiles had been launched from submarines off the West Coast. The same message was received by computers in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon and the Alternate National Military Command Center at Site R inside Raven Rock Mountain. And then more missiles appeared on the screen, launched not only from submarines but also from sites within the Soviet Union. It was a massive attack, and warheads would begin to hit American targets within five or six minutes.

Whenever NORAD’s early-warning sensors detected signs of a possible missile launch, a Missile Display Conference was held. It happened about four times a day; the infrared sensors on the Air Force satellites could be triggered by forest fires, volcanic eruptions, and other sources of heat. The officers on duty would discuss whether the threat seemed real or merely a false alarm. The commander in chief of NORAD would decide if a Threat Assessment Conference had to be arranged, bringing the head of SAC and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff into the discussion. That type of conference happened once or twice a week. And if missiles truly seemed to be heading toward the United States, a Missile Attack Conference would be set up. It would give the president a chance to speak with senior officers, listen to their advice, and decide whether to launch missiles in retaliation. A Missile Attack Conference had never been held.