That was already in my mind when I decided to take the trip to Kunsan described earlier. Disturbing as I found that base commander’s expressed readiness for conscientious insubordination, it seemed more in sync with the looseness of nuclear control in the Pacific than I would have thought possible, had I not learned of the widespread practice of delegation.
Moreover, it occurred to me that arrangements made to allow an authorized initiation of nuclear attacks under emergency conditions, at a given level of command below Washington, could be exploited to permit an unauthorized initiative at that same level, either by an aberrant commander or perhaps by one of his subordinates, in the absence of a real emergency. (A few years later, that was the basic plot element in the film Dr. Strangelove.)
But what now seemed more likely was that one or another sane and conscientiously loyal commander might have reason to believe that he was authorized to start a nuclear war under not-uncommon circumstances: possibly on the basis of ambiguous or false tactical warning during a failure of communications with higher command. Moreover, indications of a possible imminent attack on his own forces would put great pressure on such a commander to take steps to protect them from destruction, as well as to preempt the enemy attack and limit damage to other U.S. forces and the population.
I felt that this sub-delegation was a situation that the president should know about. I suspected strongly that he didn’t. I couldn’t believe that he would have wanted or allowed authority to start World War III to be as widespread as it appeared to be. If so, then once informed, he might want to reconsider the initial delegation to theater commanders. Or more likely, since that seemed incompatible with the deterrence of a decapitating strike, he could take special pains to keep them from extending the authority to initiate nuclear war far down the command chain (and truly enforce measures to prevent unauthorized action, such as introducing Permissive Action Links).
In 1960 I didn’t know what I could do about this problem. How, to whom, and through what channels I might raise it were delicate questions. It wouldn’t serve anything if the main reaction to my reporting and recommendations was consternation that I knew and was conveying this sensitive information, along with an effort to track down and punish the people who had confided it to me. Since I was working for CINCPAC precisely on command and control of nuclear operations, the officers who had told me could argue that they felt I had a “need to know.” But it was harder for me to make that case for telling someone outside the Pacific Command unless they were above CINCPAC in the chain of command. Who in Washington had the authority to investigate and perhaps change this situation?
Obviously, the president, but at this point I wasn’t working for anyone in the White House on these matters, nor was anyone at RAND. It was hard to contemplate getting to the president or any staff person close to him without revealing what it was that needed urgent attention. The secretary of defense? Same problem. Yet to reveal it to anyone who didn’t know it already (that is, to almost anyone) was to open myself to subsequent charges of extreme indiscretion, a major breach of security. That could quickly knock me, and RAND as well, out of the chance of remedying this or any other situation.
I wasn’t sure how to manage it, but I was determined to find some way to bring this issue to the president’s attention.
CHAPTER 4
Iwakuni
Nuclear Weapons off the Books
In my fieldwork for CINCPAC, I found yet another case where considerations of safety and even of alliances and rights to U.S. bases abroad yielded to a command’s preference for fast action. In this case it represented a conflict with higher authority covered by secrecy and lies that amounted to insubordination and even to treaty violation. It was one more example of the surprising—and alarming—looseness of control of nuclear weapons in the Pacific Command.
In PACOM’s GEOP, a number of the bases scheduled to deliver nuclear weapons in the event of general war were located in Japan. But U.S. plans for using these bases collided with a central Japanese policy, which renounced and forbade the development, possession, or introduction of nuclear weapons in Japan. A legacy of Hiroshima was what U.S. planners called Japan’s nuclear “allergy.” A major provision of Japan’s mutual security treaty with the United States in 1960 was the explicit agreement that no nuclear weapons would be stationed in Japan. Any abrogation of this agreement could easily have cost us our major Asian ally and our most strategically important bases in the East.
In practice the United States acted as if there were one exception to this agreement. It was, I was told, known to some high officials in Japan, but it was never acknowledged publicly by either side. American warships that came into Japanese ports for R&R—rest and recuperation visits, which were very important to maintaining Navy morale in the Pacific, and thus reenlistment—virtually all had nuclear weapons aboard. This didn’t apply only to the carriers, which were loaded with nuclear bombs for their planes. As Admiral Eugene LaRocque later testified,55 nearly every Navy ship that could carry a nuclear weapon of some kind did so, down to destroyers that had nuclear torpedoes and antisubmarine weapons. None of them ever offloaded these weapons before they came into a Japanese harbor.
The Department of Defense had and still has a policy that they will not acknowledge the presence or absence of nuclear weapons on any particular warship or base anywhere in the world. A major purpose of this policy is to avoid having either to lie explicitly or to admit having nuclear weapons aboard these ships in Japanese ports whenever the political opposition in Japan or antinuclear activists raised the question, which they did regularly. When high-ranking Japanese officials were asked this question, they said (falsely) they were confident no nuclear weapons were present on these ships, since they had not been notified otherwise by the United States, nor had there been the prior consultation required by the security treaty.
The United States could justify its failure to notify the Japanese otherwise on the grounds that Japanese officials didn’t want to be told officially, thereby enabling them to continue giving this answer without demonstrably lying. And if the truth ever came out, the United States could say that its understanding of the agreement didn’t require it to notify the Japanese of the presence of weapons that were not “stationed” in Japan but were merely in transit, on temporary visits.
Still, the fact that these weapons would be present in Japanese ports for days to weeks at a time on a given ship, and that at any given time there was usually one or more such ships somewhere at anchor in Japanese harbors, meant that Japanese coastal cities surely constituted high-priority targets in Soviet nuclear war planning, just as if they had had nuclear weapons permanently stationed there. And since these weapons were on ships, the chance of a collision or an accident detonating the high explosives on one of these weapons or otherwise releasing radioactive materials in the vicinity of a Japanese city was not zero, and it was higher than it would have been if the weapons had been stored ashore.
That possibility also applied to the nuclear reactors on nuclear-powered ships and submarines. Eventually, the Department of Defense hoped to be able to bring Polaris submarines into Japanese waters, with their additional risk of an accident involving a nuclear weapon, as was also true of the nuclear bombs on carriers or other ship-based weapons. A high-explosive detonation could conceivably lead to a partial or full nuclear explosion, but even without that unlikely result, the dispersion of radioactive material in a populated area would be a spectacularly bad way of announcing to the Japanese public the presence of U.S. nuclear weapons in their waters. But the risk, compared with the convenience of using Japanese ports, seemed small enough to be worth taking.
Apart from this arrangement, however, I was always told that we didn’t violate the agreement to the extent of actually basing weapons ashore in any of our U.S. Air Force bases in Japan. Planes on these bases were assigned a very sizable number of nuclear targets in the Vladivostok area and China in the event of general war, but their weapons w
ould have had to be delivered from Okinawa or Guam. There were KC-97 tankers on alert in Okinawa loaded with nuclear weapons for these Japanese bases. The operation involving them was code-named High Gear. If there was an order to execute war plans or a launch on warning, these planes would take off for Japan.
In principle, we were to get the approval of the Japanese government before any weapons could be landed in Japan or launched from Japanese bases. But the alert plans called for the transport planes, once launched from Okinawa on warning, to land on bases in Japan and deliver their weapons whether or not permission had yet been granted from the Japanese. There was no provision for them to return to their bases on Okinawa with bombs aboard if the warning turned out to be a false alarm, or if the Japanese failed to grant permission during the several-hour flight to Japan.
So a false warning, as well as a true one, could have resulted in U.S. nuclear bombs landing in Japan, in violation of the treaty. That was a possibility explicitly allowed in our planning, though it was kept secret from the Japanese. If that possibility had become known to the Japanese public, the effect might have been almost as bad as if they had become aware that the plan had been carried out. But it seemed unlikely that the Japanese would learn of this planning. The risk was regarded as acceptable. And if a false alarm did occur, the planes would be landing at U.S. bases, so the Japanese were unlikely to become aware of a temporary violation.
The sensitivity of these plans was a tribute to the fact that the treaty provision was actually taken with considerable seriousness. Everyone understood that a known violation of that provision was likely to lead to an abrogation of the security treaty, and probably to the fall of any pro-U.S. government in Japan and its replacement by a government that might entirely change its relationship with the United States and China. Almost certainly it would lead to the loss of U.S. bases both in Japan and Okinawa.
Given these stakes, there was apparently no pressure from the Air Force to have nuclear weapons stored on their bases in Japan, risking discovery by the Japanese of U.S. violation of the treaty. SAC already had nuclear forces stationed in Okinawa and Korea, so having marginally more forces in Japan didn’t justify the danger of losing Japan as an ally.
However, in early 1960 I was told in great secrecy by a nuclear control officer in the Pacific that one small Marine air base at Iwakuni in Japan had a secret arrangement whereby its handful of planes with general war missions would get their nuclear weapons very quickly in the event of a general war alert. In contrast to all the other planes on Japanese bases, the Marines at Iwakuni would have nuclear weapons within minutes instead of hours. Because of the special relation of the Marines to the Navy, there was a flat-bottomed ship for landing tanks on a beach (LST, for Landing Ship, Tank), anchored just offshore Iwakuni with nuclear weapons aboard, loaded onto amphibious tractors, just for the small group of planes on this base.
This LST, the USS San Joaquin County, had a cover mission as an electronics repair ship. It was permanently stationed not just inside the three-mile limit of Japanese territorial waters but anchored a couple of hundred yards from the beach, in the tidal waters. By any standards it was stationed within the territory of Japan. And so were its nuclear weapons.
In a nuclear emergency, the San Joaquin County would operate as it was designed to do in an amphibious landing. It would haul anchor and come straight ashore. The front of the ship would open up like a clamshell, and amphibious tractors loaded with nuclear weapons would come down a ramp into the water or directly onto the beach, then head on land straight to the airstrip where the weapons would be loaded onto the Marine planes.
Thus, this handful of planes would have nuclear weapons some six to ten hours in advance of the other hundreds of Air Force planes on bases in Japan. If they made use of this head start and launched their missions immediately, they would be among the first planes in the world, along with planes on Korea, to release bombs on Russian (or Chinese) targets. Since they were so few and their targets so peripheral, the main effect of this would be to alert Communist forces worldwide of the onset of general war, if they had not launched first. But presumably in most cases, the Marine planes would be held back to be launched with other forces, so that the effect of their having weapons sooner would be imperceptible.
However, the effect of the Japanese discovering the permanent presence of these weapons would be very perceptible indeed. It might well have blown the United States out of Japan. If the Japanese government had become aware of the situation, and more particularly if the political opposition had become aware of it, the United States would have been likely to lose all its bases in Japan. There could even have been a total rupture of diplomatic relations between the countries. Japan might possibly have shifted toward the Chinese.
For all these reasons, this was regarded, so I was told, as a super secret from the Japanese and was relatively little known even among U.S. Air Force and Navy planners. Yet the arrangement was apparently fairly well known at the base itself, and the LST was said to occasionally rehearse landing the tractors and bombs. What was known to the pilots, the tractor crews, and the LST crew at the base was potentially knowable to some fraction of their Japanese girlfriends in the region. In fact, the planners to whom I spoke about this, at Seventh Fleet in Japan and back in Hawaii, tended to assume that Communist spies must already know of the situation and were waiting for the right time and opportunity to reveal it to biggest effect.
RAND studies of the possibilities of sabotage suggested to me what that way could be. It would be no trick for Communist frogmen, Japanese or others, to swim out to that ship and plant limpet mines on its side. An explosion on what purported to be an electronics repair ship would at the least raise public questions about its nature and provoke an official investigation, which could quickly reveal its cargo of nuclear weapons. If the saboteurs were lucky and used a big enough mine, they might even detonate the high explosive on one or more of the nuclear weapons aboard, scattering radioactive material in the Iwakuni region (which happens to be not far from Hiroshima), or even conceivably cause a partial nuclear explosion. There would be no way of telling, in any of these cases, that the explosion had been caused by outsiders as opposed to an accidental explosion of American weapons stationed aboard the ship. The actual cause of the explosion that destroyed the battleship Maine in Havana harbor, propelling the United States into war more than a hundred years ago, was controversial for seventy-five years.
The stationing of these weapons in Japanese tidal waters, to no tangible military benefit whatever, was one of the most irresponsible actions imaginable. That’s how it seemed to all the nuclear planners who were in on the secret. But they didn’t know what to do about it, since they presumed it had been accepted by CINCPAC, a Navy admiral. Did any civilian authorities or military commands higher than CINCPAC know about it? These officers didn’t know, and only at great risk to their own careers could they try to find out or alert higher levels bypassing the intermediate levels of command and CINCPAC.
That may be why one officer told me about it in the first place, and why others told me about their concerns. As a RAND consultant, someone not permanently wired into their chain of command, I could alert higher levels or other agencies without paying the same price they would have faced. And they could justify telling me because of the general instructions that they could tell me anything for purposes of my research.
Still, just as with the issue of sub-delegation in the last chapter, I wasn’t sure what to do with the information, since I didn’t then have contacts in the Office of Secretary of Defense, the State Department, or the White House. I told high officials at RAND about it, and they in turn, I was told, passed it on to a general in Air Force Plans. Richard Goldstein, a RAND vice president, brought the word back to me that Air Force officers agreed that this situation was extremely serious but that it wasn’t easy for them to do anything about it because it was a Navy matter. For many years there had been a working alliance between the Nav
y and the Air Force to emphasize the strategic importance of nuclear weapons, a principle that worked to the budgetary disadvantage of the Army. It would be a delicate matter, threatening this alliance, for the Air Force to raise questions about where and how the Navy was storing its nuclear weapons.
For the same reasons as in the case of delegation, I had to proceed carefully.
CHAPTER 5
The Pacific Command
From the beginning of our study group’s work in Hawaii, I had urged that we needed to know the nature of the war plans that an Execute order would set in motion. I was assigned this part of the study. To this end, I asked for and was granted access to the Top Secret “cage” in the Plans section of CINCPAC headquarters. This was literally a cage covered by heavy wire netting, guarded by a warrant officer and another guard who was also a librarian. Inside, the cage was the size of a small library room, with many shelves of documents and a filing system. My access was apparently unique for a civilian.
I spent days, nights, and weekends in the cage, poring over current nuclear plans. I soon learned the structure of the overall U.S. nuclear war plan, up and down the chain of command. These all flowed from the CINCPAC’s GEOP, which outlined the broad objectives and principles of U.S. nuclear capability in the Pacific and was the basis for the Army, Navy, and Air Force plans, which in turn formed the basis for the plans of fleets, divisions, squadrons, carriers, and even individual pilots down various branches of the chain of command.
In reading these plans, and later as I visited command centers, aircraft carriers, and airstrips throughout the Pacific, I began to notice what seemed to me a startling omission. I presumed without question that at the highest level of nuclear planning, provision was made for conflicts that involved only the Soviet Union: arising, for example, over access to West Berlin or a Soviet attack on Europe or the United States. Yet, I soon discovered that in the plans of Pacific forces, from top to bottom, there was no provision at all for attacking only the Russian targets in their sphere. In every plan for war with the Soviet Union, Chinese targets (including every major city in China) were also struck.
The Doomsday Machine Page 10
