The Doomsday Machine
Page 1
To those who struggle for a human future
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Papers on the War
Risk, Ambiguity and Decision
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Contents
Prologue
Introduction
Part I: The Bomb and I
1: How Could I? The Making of a Nuclear War Planner
2: Command and Control: Managing Catastrophe
3: Delegation: How Many Fingers on the Button?
4: Iwakuni: Nuclear Weapons off the Books
5: The Pacific Command
6: The War Plan: Reading the JSCP
7: Briefing Bundy
8: “My” War Plan
9: Questions for the Joint Chiefs: How Many Will Die?
10: Berlin and the Missile Gap
11: A Tale of Two Speeches
12: My Cuban Missile Crisis
13: Cuba: The Real Story
Part II: The Road to Doomsday
14: Bombing Cities
15: Burning Cities
16: Killing a Nation
17: Risking Doomsday I: Atmospheric Ignition
18: Risking Doomsday II: The Hell Bomb
19: The Strangelove Paradox
20: First-Use Threats: Using Our Nuclear Weapons
21: Dismantling the Doomsday Machine
Glossary
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
A Note on the Author
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
—Albert Einstein, 1946
Madness in individuals is something rare;
but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Prologue
One day in the spring of 1961, soon after my thirtieth birthday, I was shown how our world would end. Not the earth itself, not—so far as I knew then, mistakenly—nearly all humanity or life on the planet, but the destruction of most cities and people in the northern hemisphere. What I was handed, in a White House office, was a single sheet of paper with a simple graph on it. It was headed “Top Secret—Sensitive.” Under that was “For the President’s Eyes Only.”
The “eyes only” designation meant that, in principle, it was to be seen and read only by the person to whom it was explicitly addressed—in this case, the president. In practice, it usually meant that it was seen by one or more secretaries and assistants as well: a handful of people, instead of the scores to hundreds who would normally see copies of a Top Secret document, even one marked “sensitive,” which meant that it was to be especially closely held for bureaucratic or political reasons.
Later, working in the Pentagon as the special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense, I often found myself reading copies of cables and memos marked “Eyes Only” for someone, even though I was not the addressee. And by the time I read this one, as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, it was already routine for me to read Top Secret documents. But I had never before seen one marked “For the President’s Eyes Only.” And I never did again.
The deputy assistant to the president for national security, Bob Komer, showed it to me. A cover sheet identified it as the answer to a question that President Kennedy had addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff a week earlier. Komer showed their response to me because I had drafted the question, which Komer had sent in the president’s name.
The question to the Joint Chiefs was this: “If your plans for general [nuclear] war are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?”
Their answer was in the form of a graph. The vertical axis showed the number of deaths, in millions. The horizontal axis showed the amount of time, in months. The graph was a straight line, starting at time zero on the horizontal, with the vertical axis indicating the number of immediate deaths expected within hours of our attack, and then slanting upward to a maximum at six months—an arbitrary cutoff for the deaths that would accumulate over time from initial injuries and from fallout radiation. The representation below is from memory; it was impossible to forget.
The lowest number, at the left of the graph, was 275 million deaths. The number on the right-hand side, at six months, was 325 million.
That same morning, I had drafted another question to be sent to the Joint Chiefs over the president’s signature, asking for a total breakdown of global deaths from our own attacks, to include not only the Sino-Soviet bloc but all other countries that would be affected by fallout as well. Komer showed it to me a week later, this time in the form of a table with explanatory footnotes.
In sum, another hundred million deaths, roughly, were predicted in Eastern Europe, from direct attacks on Warsaw Pact bases and air defenses and from fallout. There might be a hundred million more from fallout in Western Europe, depending on which way the wind blew (a matter, largely, of the season). But regardless of the season, another hundred million deaths, at least, were predicted from fallout in the mostly neutral countries adjacent to the Soviet bloc and China, including Finland, Sweden, Austria, Afghanistan, India, and Japan. Finland, for example, would be wiped out by fallout from U.S. ground-burst explosions on the Soviet submarine pens in Leningrad.
The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed at the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact satellites, and China, would be roughly six hundred million dead. A hundred Holocausts.
I remember what I thought when I first held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, This piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project ever. There should be nothing on earth, nothing real, that it referred to.
One of the principal expected effects of this plan—partly intended, partly (in allied, neutral, and satellite countries) undesired but foreseeable and accepted “collateral damage”—was summarized on that second piece of paper, which I held a week later in the spring of 1961: the extermination of over half a billion people.
From that day on, I have had one overriding life purpose: to prevent the execution of any such plan.
Introduction
There was a secret well-kept during the two years I was under indictment for copying the Top Secret Pentagon Papers and during the two years of Watergate investigations that followed—and for more than forty years since. On my defense team during the trial, it was known, aside from by me, only by my principal attorney, Leonard Boudin. Not by his associate lawyers; not by my co-defendant, Tony Russo; not even by my wife, Patricia.
During my trial in Los Angeles I was often asked by reporters, in particular Peter Schrag, who was writing a book about the case, “How much time did you spend copying? How long did it take?” I always answered vaguely and changed the subject. A realistic estimate would have indicated that it was a lot longer than was necessary to copy the Pentagon Papers alone. It would have led to a question that I wanted to avoid then: “What else did you copy?”
The fact is that from the fall of 1969 to leaving the RAND Corporation in August 1970, I copied everything in the Top Secret safe in my office—of which the seven thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers were only a fraction—and a good deal more from my several safes for files classified Secret or Confidential, perhaps fifteen thousand pages in all. I made several copies of each. I intended to disclose it all, not just the Pentagon Papers. That intent, along with the nature of these other documents, was the secret kept from the time of my copying until now.
Many of these other documents1 also had to do with Vietnam, including Top Secret work I
had done in late 1968 and early 1969 for Henry Kissinger after president-elect Richard Nixon had named him as the assistant for national security affairs. But most of what else I copied—“the other Pentagon Papers”—consisted of my notes and studies on classified nuclear war planning, the command and control of nuclear weapons,2 and studies of nuclear crises. They included verbatim extracts or copies of critical documents, past war plans (none of which were, at the time, current), cables, and studies by me and by others, including some on nuclear policy3 by Kissinger’s National Security Council staff.
Most of those who have heard my name at all in the past forty-seven years have known me only in connection with my release of the Top Secret study of U.S. decision-making in the Vietnam War that became known as the Pentagon Papers. They may also know that I came to have access to that study because I had helped produce it, and that I had earlier worked on Vietnam escalation in the Pentagon and then for the State Department in South Vietnam.
What is less known is that for years before that, I had worked as a consultant from the RAND Corporation at the highest levels of the U.S. national security system on completely different issues: deterring and averting—or if necessary, however hopeless the attempt, trying to control, limit, and terminate—a nuclear Armageddon between the superpowers. RAND (an acronym for Research and Development) was a nonprofit organization incorporated in 1948 to do mainly classified research and analysis for the Air Force.
In the spring of 1961 I drafted the Top Secret guidance4 issued by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) for the operational plans for general nuclear war. That January I had briefed McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s assistant for national security, on the peculiarities and risks of the existing nuclear planning in his first weeks in office in the White House. It was soon after that I was given access in the White House to the Top Secret estimate of casualties expected from our planned nuclear attacks.
The following year I was the only person to serve on two of several working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) during the Cuban missile crisis. A year later, just before I joined the Defense Department full-time at the highest civilian supergrade level5† († indicates additional information is available in the endnote). I was the sole researcher in an interagency study of past U.S. nuclear crises—including Korea, Cuba, Berlin, Quemoy, Lebanon, and Suez—with classified access several levels above Top Secret. All these functions gave me an unusual knowledge, at that time almost unique for a civilian, of the nature of the plans and operations of the nuclear forces and the dangers these posed.
It was a closely held secret, until now, that soon after I had begun to copy the Pentagon Papers and other Vietnam documents from my office safes at the RAND Corporation (to which I had returned from my government service in Vietnam), I had decided that it was even more important to release the other contents of my safes: those bearing on nuclear matters. I wanted to reveal to Congress, to my fellow citizens, and to the world the peril that U.S. nuclear policies over the last quarter century had created. Almost no other person known to me had the experience—let alone the will—to expose the breadth and intensity of those dangers, with documents as well as notes as detailed as mine. The documents, I felt, were essential to the credibility of what were otherwise almost unimaginable secret realities.
I told just one person6 what I was doing in this respect and what I intended to do: Randy Kehler, whose example of draft resistance had set me on this course a month earlier. He was due to report to prison shortly when I spoke with him in San Francisco in November 1969. I wanted to let him know, before he disappeared into prison, how much his example had meant to me and that it would have a tangible effect. And I wanted his advice as an activist.
His judgment was the same as mine on the relative importance of the nuclear data versus the Vietnam study that was later to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In fact, he urged me to forget about disclosing the latter at all. “By this time, we know all we need to know about Vietnam,” he said. “What you reveal about that won’t make any difference. From what you tell me, you’re the one person who can warn the world about the dangers of our nuclear war plans. That’s what you ought to put out.”
I said, “I agree with you when it comes to the importance, but Vietnam is where the bombs are falling right now. If I put it all out now, including the nuclear material, the press won’t pay any attention to the history about Vietnam. I think I have to give that as much of a run as I can first, for whatever difference it might make to shorten the war. Then I’ll turn to the nuclear revelations.”
On the basis of that tactical judgment, I had separated all the nuclear notes and documents from the Vietnam material and given them to my brother, Harry, to keep for me at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, in Westchester County, New York.
I thought of these two sets of documents as essentially separate, to be subject to two distinct acts of disclosure, the nuclear documents later. From the time I was indicted in 1971, after nineteen newspapers had published parts of the Pentagon Papers in the face of four federal injunctions, I was saving the nuclear material for after my trial. That was why I didn’t want to be asked “What else did you copy?” during the trial. I didn’t want to be forced to release the nuclear documents until the Vietnam material had run its course.
I might also have waited until after the second trial we were expecting for the distribution of the Pentagon Papers. The charges in Los Angeles focused on the copying and retention of the documents by me and my friend and “co-conspirator” Tony Russo, who had made possible and initially helped me with the copying. A separate, secret grand jury7 was meeting in Boston to investigate the distribution and publication of the Pentagon Papers. It was preparing to indict me again—Tony was not involved in these later stages—along with New York Times reporters such as Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith, and perhaps others with whom I had shared some of the documents, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Richard Falk.
I expected that my third trial—for putting out the nuclear secrets I was determined to expose—was going to be the killer for me. I wouldn’t beat that one. It would nail down the prosecutors’ efforts to give me a life sentence—which had actually started with the first trial—and they would almost surely succeed this time, if not on the earlier attempts.
Things didn’t turn out that way, for rather extraordinary reasons. First, after I had spent nearly two years in court facing a possible sentence of 115 years, the twelve felony counts in my initial trial were dismissed with prejudice (meaning, I couldn’t be tried again on these charges), after exposure of White House criminal misconduct against me during the prosecution.
It turned out eventually that President Nixon had secretly been informed8 that I had copied material beyond the Pentagon Papers from his own National Security Council. He plausibly feared that I could reveal and document his secret threats to North Vietnam of escalations, including nuclear attacks, aiming essentially to win the war. To avert my possible exposure of his secret demands and threats—which had already prolonged the war for two years, widened it to Cambodia and Laos, and which would ultimately add twenty thousand American names to the Vietnam Memorial—he had set in motion a variety of criminal steps to keep me silent about his secret policy.
These crimes against me9—including warrantless wiretaps, burglary of my former psychoanalyst’s office seeking blackmail material, illegal use of the CIA, and an abortive effort to “totally incapacitate” me—when they were revealed, were a critical part of the impeachment proceedings that led to Nixon’s resignation, which made the war endable nine months later. Since these same crimes would have tainted a second prosecution for distribution of the Pentagon Papers, the Boston grand jury was abruptly terminated, and the second trial was averted.
Yet in the end, it wasn’t the White House, or its crimes, that stopped me from disclosing to the world in the mid-seventies, or after, the thousands of pages
of notes and documents on a possible nuclear holocaust that I had begun to copy from my safe at RAND four years earlier. It was an act of nature: a tropical storm. An act of grace, my wife, Patricia, calls it, since—though it frustrated my deepest plans and caused me great anguish—it allowed me to sleep next to her, in loving embrace, for the last forty years instead of in prison.
After I had entrusted my nuclear papers to Harry, he kept them for almost two years, until June 13, 1971, in the basement of his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, where he lived with his wife, Sofia.
Then, when the New York Times and the Washington Post were enjoined from publication and a manhunt was on for me and Patricia, Harry buried this material in a compost heap in his backyard, in a cardboard box inside a green garbage bag.
During the next thirteen days,10 while the FBI was still searching for us—as Patricia and I, with the help of friends and a pickup team of antiwar recruits (a “Lavender Hill Mob,” as I thought of them, in honor of Alec Guinness) were putting out other copies of the Vietnam history to seventeen more newspapers—Harry transferred them again. It was good that he did. The very next day, his neighbor told him that she had observed men in civilian clothes probing his compost heap with long metal rods.
Just in time, Harry had buried the box, inside its bag, in the town trash dump. He had dug out a space for it into the side of a bluff rising above the dirt road that bordered the dump. There was an old gas stove resting on the bluff just above the burial spot, to identify it.
But that summer, not long after I had been indicted, a near-hurricane (tropical storm Doria) hit Hastings-on-Hudson. The bluff and its contents collapsed over the roadway and down the slope below it. The stove was blown down and rolled a hundred feet or more from its last position. Harry didn’t tell me right away, not until he had spent days and then weeks trying to find the lost box.
Then he and his friend Barbara Denyer and her husband spent weekend after weekend searching. At one point they rented a backhoe bulldozer to turn up the dirt in the dump. (The driver, a town employee, got in trouble when it came out that he had allowed the bulldozer to be used for a private purpose. Barbara had told him she was looking for a thesis manuscript that had been put in the trash by mistake.)