The Dead Hand (4 page)

But this achievement in power and deadly accuracy inspired a profound dread among those who might one day have to press the button launching those missiles.

In the United States, a master plan for carrying out a nuclear war was first drafted in 1960, at the end of President Dwight Eisenhower’s term.
The scope of the Single Integrated Operational Plan was awesome. Given adequate warning time, the United States and allies would launch their entire strategic force of about 3,500 nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, China and satellite states. Eisenhower dispatched his science adviser, George B. Kistiakowsky, to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Offutt, Nebraska, on November 3–5, 1960, to study the newly drafted plan. Kistiakowsky reported back that the plan would “lead to unnecessary and undesirable overkill.” Eisenhower confided to Captain E. P. “Pete” Aurand, his naval aide, that the estimates—the sheer number of targets, the redundant bombs for each—“frighten the devil out of me.”
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President John F. Kennedy was no less unsettled. Briefed on the war plan on September 14, 1961, he commented afterward to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.”
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Kennedy and his defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, were uneasy with the Eisenhower-era idea of massive retaliation. They felt the threat of a single, enormous nuclear strike did not fit the more fragmented and complex competition they faced with the Soviet Union as tensions flared first over Berlin and then over Cuba. When the war plan was revised in the spring and summer of 1962, the new plan gave the president more flexibility and choices in waging a possible nuclear attack, including the ability to hold back forces in reserve, to avoid population centers and industry and to leave out some countries as targets. A key feature of the new plan, put into effect just before the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, was to aim largely at Soviet weapons, and not at cities and industry, an idea known as
counterforce
. If one thinks of cocked pistols aimed at each other, counterforce was an effort to shoot the gun out of the hand of the enemy.
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It seemed to be more humane to aim at missiles rather than cities, but counterforce also raised deeply disturbing questions. Could it make the use of nuclear weapons more tempting, since it implied a limited nuclear strike was possible? And to be successful, would the counterforce option have to be carried out first—to shoot before you were shot, to preempt an attack? This was the haunting fear of many decades to come, the idea of a disarming, bolt-from-the-blue first strike.

While Kennedy wanted to spare the cities, McNamara realized over time that it was impossible to aim at every Soviet weapon without unleashing an expensive new round of the arms race, an escalation with
no end in sight. As a result, McNamara shifted to a strategy that he called “assured destruction,” which required building the number of weapons needed to destroy 20 to 25 percent of the Soviet population and 50 percent of the industrial base. McNamara capped the number of Minuteman missiles to be built at one thousand. His analysts concluded, “The main reason for stopping at 1,000 Minuteman missiles, 41 Polaris submarines and some 500 strategic bombers is that having more would not be worth the cost.” McNamara hoped that the Soviets would also reach a plateau—and stop building.
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A critic of McNamara proposed adding “mutual” to “assured destruction” and the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction, known pointedly as MAD, was born. For many Americans, this idea of equal vulnerability and mutual deterrence came to define the Cold War.
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Locked in global confrontation, the United States and the Soviet Union were each rooted in centuries of radically different history, geography, culture and experience. Peering through a veil of suspicion, the superpowers often wrongly judged each other’s intentions and actions. They engaged in deceptions that only deepened the dangers. As the Harvard professors observed in 1983, “The United States cannot predict Soviet behavior because it has too little information about what goes on inside the Soviet Union; the Soviets cannot predict American behavior because they have too much information.”

An early but telling example was the so-called missile gap. The Soviet Union announced on August 26, 1957, the first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile at full range, and successfully launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit on October 4. For the next four years, Premier Nikita Khrushchev misled the West with claims that the Soviet Union was turning out missiles “like sausages,” that super-missiles were in “serial production” and “mass production.” John F. Kennedy raised alarms about the “missile gap” in his 1960 campaign, but found out that it didn’t exist.
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Khrushchev had concealed weakness—by bluffing.

A disaster was narrowly averted in the Cuban crisis of October 1962, when Khrushchev took an enormous gamble by stationing nuclear weapons and missiles on the island. The brinksmanship ended as both Kennedy and Khrushchev exercised restraint. But long after Khrushchev
withdrew the weapons, and after his ouster in 1964, the Cuban crisis lingered in the minds of Soviet leaders, who feared inferiority to the United States. Starting in the mid-1960s, Soviet missile production zoomed upward; hundreds were rolled out every year.

The Soviet Union, looking through an entirely different prism than the United States, saw nuclear weapons as a blunt instrument for deterrence. If attacked, they would respond with crushing punishment. By many accounts, in the early decades they did not adopt the limited nuclear options that were embraced in the United States; they thought that the use of even one atomic bomb would trigger escalation, so they prepared for all-out war.
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They did not put much stock in the American idea that mutual vulnerability could lead to stability. They feared both powers would be constantly striving to get ahead, and they threw their resources into the quest. When the Soviet Union finally reached approximate parity with the United States in the early 1970s, the thinking began to change. Instead of threatening a preemptive first strike, as in the earlier years, they moved toward a posture of preparing for assured retaliation, a second strike. At this time they also began the first strategic arms control negotiations with the United States, and détente blossomed.
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The Soviet buildup was driven by a powerful and hidden force, the defense industrialists. Leonid Brezhnev ruled by consensus over a dysfunctional group of aging sycophants, and by the mid-1970s, Brezhnev was in such ill health that he largely ceased to lead. The industrialists filled the vacuum. They had great influence over what weapons would be produced, by some accounts even more than the military. A striking example was the climax of an intense internal conflict over the next generation of intercontinental ballistic missile. In July 1969, at a vacation lodge near Yalta, a vexed Brezhnev assembled his top military leaders and missile designers. The competition pitted two of the most storied designers, Mikhail Yangel and Vladimir Chelomei, against each other. Yangel proposed a four-warhead missile, the SS-17, designed to fit in newly constructed, hardened silos, best to ensure retaliation if the Soviet Union were attacked, but expensive. Chelomei had initially proposed to upgrade his older SS-11 missile in existing silos, which were not hardened, but offered the military more warheads more cheaply, perfect for threatening a preemptive first strike at the enemy. At the time of the Yalta meeting, Chelomei shifted gears and proposed a new missile, the
SS-19, with six warheads, which would also require new, expensive hardened silos. Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences, who had Brezhnev’s confidence, was appointed to head a commission to resolve the dispute. At Yalta he took the floor and lamented that in all the rush to build missiles, the country had not even decided on a strategic doctrine: whether the purpose was to threaten a first strike, or to preserve the force for retaliation. But Keldysh could not settle the rivalry. In the end, all three missile options were approved at great cost, the kind of decision that would eventually bankrupt the Soviet Union.
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In the 1970s, the United States began to deploy a Minuteman III missile that could carry up to three warheads instead of just one. The new device was called a Multiple Independently-targetable Re-Entry Vehicle, or MIRV, and it would allow each of the three warheads to aim at separate targets, leading to a new surge in the size of the arsenals. The Soviets matched and surpassed this technology, and in the mid-1970s began the deployment of a new generation of land-based missiles. One of them, the SS-18, could carry a payload seven to eight times as large as the American missile. In fact, there were plans at one point to put as many as thirty-eight warheads atop each giant SS-18.

As the arsenals grew, so did the complexity of the U.S. war plan. On January 27, 1969, a week after taking office, President Richard Nixon went to the Pentagon for a briefing on the Single Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP). “It didn’t fill him with enthusiasm,” recalled Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s national security adviser and later secretary of state. In the event of nuclear war, Nixon was told, he would have three functional tasks: Alpha, for strikes on the most urgent military targets; Bravo, for secondary military targets; and Charlie, for industrial and urban targets. If the president ordered an attack of Alpha and Bravo, urban areas would be spared. All three would mean total war. But the choices Nixon would face in an emergency were mind-numbingly complex. There were five attack options constructed from the three main tasks, and as many as ninety lesser variations.
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On May 11, 1969, Nixon flew on the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, a Boeing 707 filled with communications gear, and participated in a nuclear war exercise. His chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, wrote in his diary, “Pretty scary. They went through the whole intelligence and operational briefings—with interruptions, etc. to make it realistic.” Haldeman added that Nixon
“asked a lot of questions about our nuclear capability and kill results. Obviously worries about the lightly tossed-about millions of deaths.”
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The same fears troubled Soviet leaders. In 1972, the General Staff presented to the leadership results of a study of a possible nuclear war after a first strike by the United States. They reported: the military had been reduced to one-thousandth of its strength; 80 million citizens were dead; 85 percent of Soviet industry was in ruins. Brezhnev and Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin were visibly terrified by what they heard, according to Adrian Danilevich, a general who took part. Next, three launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles with dummy warheads were planned. Brezhnev was provided a button in the exercise and he was to push it at the proper moment. Defense Minister Andrei Grechko was standing next to Brezhnev, and Danilevich next to Grechko. “When the time came to push the button,” Danilevich recalled, “Brezhnev was visibly shaken and pale and his hand trembled and he asked Grechko several times for assurances that the action would not have any real world consequences.” Brezhnev turned to Grechko and asked, “‘Are you sure this is just an exercise?’”
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Recognizing the overwhelming destructive power of nuclear weapons, Nixon decided in 1969 that the United States would renounce biological weapons. In 1972, more than seventy nations, including the Soviet Union and the United States, signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, a four-page international agreement banning the development and production of biological weapons, and the means of delivering them. The treaty entered into force in 1975. But the Soviet Union promptly betrayed its signature on the treaty. Brezhnev approved a secret plan to covertly expand Soviet germ warfare efforts under the cover of a civilian enterprise. The Soviet program grew and grew into a dark underside of the arms race.

The biological weapons treaty came at the peak of détente, Nixon’s policy to wrap the Soviet Union in a web of new international agreements and
understandings that would make the Cold War manageable and less threatening. A centerpiece of détente was the signing of the SALT I agreement in Moscow on May 26, 1972, by Nixon and Brezhnev. The most significant part of this agreement was the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, which effectively ended the prospect of an expensive arms race in missile defenses.
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But on offensive arms, the long-range missiles that were growing in size and destructive capacity, the SALT I agreement was basically just a stopgap measure. It froze fixed
launchers
for land-based and submarine-based missiles on each side, but included no precise numbers of missiles or warheads to be frozen. The core argument for the SALT I treaty and détente was that equal levels of missiles and launchers were not as important as the overall strategic balance, and in that the two sides were roughly equal. If the United States stopped the cycle of building new missiles, the reasoning went, it was likely the Soviets would too. Kissinger said, “And one of the questions which we have to ask ourselves as a country is what in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?”
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Détente foundered in the late 1970s, in part on fears in the West that the Soviet Union was reaching for strategic superiority. A small band of defense policy conservatives and hawkish strategists in the United States raised alarms about Soviet intentions and actions. Albert Wohlstetter of the University of Chicago published a series of influential articles questioning whether the U.S. intelligence community had underestimated Soviet military spending and weapons modernization. Paul Nitze, who for a generation had been one of the “wise men” of the U.S. government, an arms control negotiator on SALT I and former secretary of the navy, wrote an article in
Foreign Affairs
in January 1976 that warned the Soviets were not satisfied with parity or essential equivalence in nuclear weapons, but “will continue to pursue a nuclear superiority that is not merely quantitative but designed to produce a theoretical war-winning capability.”
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