The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

  Serious White House and JCS consideration, in August 1980,288 of the possible imminent use of tactical nuclear weapons if a secret Soviet buildup on the Iranian border led to a Soviet invasion of Iran, followed by the expression of explicit, secret nuclear warnings to the Soviet Union (a hidden episode, spelled out in a professional military journal and by articles in the New York Times, that remains virtually unknown to the U.S. public and even scholars, though presidential press secretary Jody Powell was quoted as describing it as “the most serious nuclear crisis since the Cuban missile crisis”).†

  The Carter Doctrine reaffirmed in essence,289 including its nuclear component, by President Reagan in January 1981.

  Formal threats by the George H. W. Bush administration290 of possible U.S. nuclear response to various possible “unconscionable actions” by Iraq in Operation Desert Storm in January 1991.

  Explicit, secret threats by the Clinton administration291 of nuclear use against North Korea in 1995 on its nuclear reactor program (following the near-launch of an American conventional attack in 1994).†

  Public warning of a nuclear option by Clinton’s secretary of defense292 William Perry against Libya’s Tarhuna underground chemical weapons facility in 1996.†

  It follows from this listing (and more recent threats discussed below) that there has been no seventy-year moratorium on the active consideration and use of nuclear threats to support “atomic diplomacy.”293 Whatever the inhibitions about pulling the trigger—and the record suggests that these have been strong, even in stalemated wars like Korea and Vietnam—there is no basis whatever for speaking of a “taboo” against nuclear weapons’ use,294 whether in threats or actual attacks. Contrary to what has often been said about nuclear weapons, there is no “tradition of non-use.”295 It is fair to say that, to our extreme good fortune, there has been a long tradition of no nuclear attacks.

  For whatever reasons, and without doubt varying ones, none of the nuclear threats or plans above since 1945 have been carried out. Does that mean they were all either bluffs or successes? Almost surely, some of them were conscious bluffs. Some others, hard to know. However, on the basis of finally released internal discussions, I definitely do not believe all of them were bluffs, in particular for Eisenhower and Nixon. I’m glad that no experience proved that to be correct. But presence on the list above reflects no judgment as to whether the president definitely intended to carry out the threat or plan “if necessary,” or what he would actually have done if a threat were defied. Evidence on these matters often does exist, but it varies in strength and in no case is it conclusive one way or another; these are questions that even the presidents might find it hard to answer to themselves.

  Were some successful? There’s no way to know for sure. In some cases, the adversary may never have intended to act otherwise than they did; in others, there may have been a change of course for reasons entirely unrelated to the nuclear warning. Still, in several cases it is at least plausible that the threats were effective. What is more relevant here is that most of these threats were seen by some high administration officials as effective, whether or not their adversaries would corroborate this conclusion.

  For example, fatefully, this was true of the second example in the list above, when Truman sent B-29s, publicized at the time as “atomic bombers,” to Britain early in the 1948 Berlin blockade. This was almost surely a conscious bluff; the bombers initially sent had not been modified to carry atomic weapons, and none of the bombs in our relatively small arsenal then were outside the United States. But cabinet officials under Truman concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the Soviets’ failure to accompany their ground blockade by cutting off our aerial resupply of West Berlin (commanded by General Curtis LeMay) with Soviet fighter planes or antiaircraft artillery based in East Germany was due to the threat represented by the B-29s, like the two that LeMay had recently sent over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As historian Gregg Herken puts it,

  Even [Secretary of State George] Marshall296—who throughout the year had been concerned that the United States not “provoke” the Russians into military action—now expressed optimism for the future. His change in attitude had been partly motivated, he confided to [Secretary of Defense James] Forrestal, by his belief that “the Soviets are beginning to realize for the first time that the United would really use the atomic bomb against them in the event of war.”

  Later, when Khrushchev renewed threats of blockade of West Berlin in 1958–59 and again in 1961–62, the American arsenal of now-thermonuclear weapons was no longer limited, and thousands of them were in Europe. It seems inescapable that the prolonged frustration of Khrushchev’s desire to change the status of West Berlin, surrounded by Soviet divisions, must be attributed to his fear that military moves to force this risked at least the possibility of nuclear war. But the price of this particular undoubted success in keeping West Berlin from coming under the control of the Soviet satellite regime that surrounded it was the construction and maintenance of an American Doomsday Machine, eventually evoking a comparable Soviet/Russian machine, with the continuous possibility, to this day, that one or both will end most human life on earth.

  What I wish to focus on here is that several presidents believed their threats had succeeded; and all of them since 1945 have acted throughout their time in office as if they believed that current or future first-use nuclear threats would be legitimate, could be effective, and might be necessary. That is true even of those who may have personally and privately abhorred the notion of launching nuclear weapons under any circumstances—I believe this includes John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson (along with Robert McNamara, who served both as secretary of defense), and probably others—but who have felt obliged, partly from their personal experience in office and partly from pressure by foreign policy elites, some allies, and potential domestic rivals, to maintain and increase the credibility and effectiveness of nuclear threats they or others might make in the future.

  In his State of the Union address in 1984,297 Ronald Reagan advanced the resounding and profoundly true proposition that “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” What he did not say, and like every other president, never acted as if he meant, was, “A nuclear war must never be threatened, or prepared for.” Preparation for preemption or for carrying out threats of first use or first strike remains the essence of the “modernization” program for strategic nuclear weapons for the last seventy years—prospectively being extended by Presidents Obama and Trump to one hundred years—that has continuously benefited our military-industrial-congressional complex.

  The felt political need to profess, at least, to believe that the ability to make and carry out nuclear threats is essential to U.S. national security and to our leadership in our alliances is why every single president has refused to make a formal “no-first-use” (NFU) commitment. They have rejected it when it has been urged, repeatedly, by China—which announced its own NFU commitment at the time of its first test in 1964, as did India at its second test298 in 1998—and by the Soviet Union from 1982 until 1993.299 In particular, Mikhail Gorbachev, on October 5, 1991, in what proved to be his last months in office, reiterated this commitment and proposed the United States join it, only to have it rejected, as usual, by the Bush administration, though a number of his other proposals on that day were accepted.

  Likewise, the United States has tenaciously resisted the pleas of most other nations in the world to make a NFU pledge as an essential basis for stopping proliferation, including at the Nonproliferation Treaty Extension Conference in 1995 and the Review Conferences since 2000. Moreover, the United States has demanded that NATO continue to legitimize first-use threats by basing its own strategy on them, even after the USSR and the Warsaw Pact had dissolved (and most of the former Pact members had joined NATO). Yet this stubborn stance—along with actual threats of possible U.S. nuclear first use in more recent confrontations with Iraq, North Korea, and Iran—virtually precludes effective leadership by the United S
tates (and perhaps anyone else) in delegitimizing and averting further proliferation and even imitation of U.S. use of nuclear weapons.

  Few Americans are aware of the extent to which the United States and NATO first-use doctrine has long isolated the United States and its close allies morally and politically from world opinion. Nor are they familiar with the sharpness of the language used by large majorities in the U.N. General Assembly in resolutions condemning the first-use policies on which NATO has long based its planning and the readiness to initiate nuclear war expressed or demonstrated by every U.S. president since Truman.

  U.N. Resolution 36/100,300 the Declaration on the Prevention of Nuclear Catastrophe, was adopted on December 9, 1981, in the wake of Reagan’s endorsement of the 1980 Carter Doctrine—openly extending U.S. first-use threats to the Persian Gulf—which this resolution directly contradicted and implicitly condemned. It declares in its preamble: “Any doctrine allowing the first use of nuclear weapons and any actions pushing the world toward a catastrophe are incompatible with human moral standards and the lofty ideals of the UN.”

  The body of U.N. Resolution 36/100 declares: “States and statesmen that resort first to nuclear weapons will be committing the gravest crime against humanity. There will never be any justification or pardon for statesmen who take the decision to be the first to use nuclear weapons.” Eighty-two nations voted in favor of this declaration. Forty-one, under heavy pressure from the United States, abstained; nineteen opposed it, including the United States, Israel, and most NATO member nations.

  To say that some of the threats by the U.S. government of what the majority of nations have identified as “the gravest crime against humanity” were only implicit, as in the case of the Carter Doctrine, generally applies only to statements by the presidents themselves, who rarely spell out the nuclear nature of a threat in full explicitness even when the warning is public. That job is left to aides, other officials, and especially to journalists to whom the “real meaning” of the policy statements and deployments is authoritatively leaked. A good illustration of this was in January 1981, when Carter’s outgoing secretary of defense, Harold Brown, told interviewers—in words reiterated by President Reagan a month later—that what would keep Russia (which had invaded Afghanistan in late 1979) from moving into northern Iran or other parts of the Middle East in the 1980s was “the risk of World War III.” (Warning signals like these from the Reagan administration in 1981 evoked U.N. Resolution 36/100 later that year.)

  But although President Carter, unlike Reagan, had not used such language explicitly a year earlier in his State of the Union message announcing his “doctrine” for the Middle East, there had been no lack of corroborating elucidations of the nuclear component to the policy. In the weeks before and after the speech, the White House almost jammed Washington talk shows and major newspaper pages with authorized leaks, backgrounders, and official spokesmen all carrying the message that the president’s commitment to use “any means necessary, including military force” against a further Soviet move into the Persian Gulf region was, at its heart, a threat of possible initiation of tactical nuclear warfare by the United States.

  Just after Carter’s speech on January 23, 1980, Richard Burt of the New York Times (later a high Reagan official) was shown a secret Pentagon study, “the most extensive military study of the region ever done by the government,” which lay behind the president’s warning. It concluded, as he summarized it, “that the American forces could not stop a Soviet thrust301 into northern Iran and that the United States should therefore consider using ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons in any conflict there.” (I well remember from my days at the RAND Corporation that classified simulation war games there in 1959–60 had all reached exactly this same conclusion.)

  The 1979 study in question was known in the Pentagon as the Wolfowitz Report. (Yes, that Wolfowitz—Paul D.; at the time a deputy assistant secretary of defense for regional programs under President Carter; later, as deputy secretary of defense in 2001–5 under President George W. Bush, a promoter and mastermind of the invasion of Iraq.) Reportedly, the Wolfowitz study contemplated “delivering tactical nuclear warheads by cruise missiles302 fired from ships in the Indian Ocean.”

  For all the talk and posturing, for all the military analyses, plans, and recommendations, even the deployments listed above, the question remained in 1980, as before and after: Could the Russians, could anyone, come to believe that the president of the United States, if challenged, might really carry out such nuclear threats, accepting the prospects at best—if the war, improbably, stayed regionally limited—of annihilating the local population along with the opposing troops? Was it really conceivable that an American president could choose to order such a massacre?

  It was the official function of William Dyess, assistant secretary of state for public information, to interpret Carter’s meaning to the public in the week following the speech, and to address just these questions. In an arresting exchange on television one day after Burt’s leak of the Pentagon study, Dyess answered both questions303 crisply and correctly:

  Q: In nuclear war are we committed not to make the first strike?

  DYESS: No sir.

  Q: We could conceivably make an offensive …

  DYESS: We make no comment on that whatsoever, but the Soviets know that this terrible weapon has been dropped on human beings twice in history and it was an American president who dropped it both times. Therefore, they have to take this into consideration in their calculus.

  The Soviets could indeed be counted on to remember those two attacks vividly. From August 6, 1945, on, they had believed, with good reason, that these first uses of atomic weapons had been aimed for purposes of intimidation at themselves as much as at the Japanese. And beyond this, they also knew better than most a good deal about subsequent past uses of U.S. nuclear weapons. The Soviets (unlike the American public) knew this because they were made to know it by American officials—sometimes by explicit threats from the Oval Office, even when White House consideration of the use of nuclear weapons was secret from other audiences—since they or their allies or client states were the intended targets of these preparations and warnings.

  Moreover, the Soviets recalled that the U.S. Strategic Air Command was established in early 1946 with the function of delivering nuclear attacks on Russia when so directed, at a time when it was publicly proclaimed by the president and high military that the Soviet Union was not expected to possess operational nuclear weapon systems for a decade or longer. SAC’s only mission in that initial period—which included the formation of NATO—was to threaten or carry out a U.S. first strike against the Soviet Union (possibly to protect Middle East oil, as well as Berlin and Western Europe). It was not at all to deter or retaliate for a nuclear attack on the United States or anywhere else, which was not then a physical possibility.

  It is not the Russians but the rest of us who need to learn these hidden realities of the nuclear dimension to U.S. foreign policy. As the last three examples in the list above indicate, from the nineties, that dimension did not disappear with the ending of the Cold War. Nor did it end with the twentieth century. Let us turn to the present one.

  In 2005–2006 there were articles304 by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Seymour Hersh and the former CIA station chief Philip Giraldi regarding U.S. contingency plans, on the directive of Vice President Richard Cheney, for a “large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons.”† On April 10, President George W. Bush described Hersh’s New Yorker article, which had appeared that day, as “wild speculation.” But on April 18, 2006,305 the following exchange took place in a presidential press conference, reflecting the international commentary that Hersh’s report about nuclear planning aroused†:

  REPORTER: Sir, when you talk about Iran, and you talk about how you have diplomatic efforts, you also say all options are on the table. Does that include the possibility of a nuclear strike? Is that something that your
administration will plan for?

  PRESIDENT BUSH [emphatically]: All options are on the table.

  From that time on, that formula as used by others about responses to Iran’s nuclear program lacked ambiguity. Others who used it during the 2008 presidential campaign306 included the three leading Democratic candidates for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards;† and five of the nine Republican candidates taking part in a debate307 televised by CNN on June 5, 2007: Rudolph Giuliani, Governor Mitt Romney, Congressman Duncan Hunter, Virginia governor James Gilmore, and Senator John McCain. (Representative Ron Paul, at 1 percent in the polls, alone rejected it heatedly, as did, on the Democratic side, Representative Dennis Kucinich, also a 1 percenter.)

  The question the Republicans were asked was “their readiness to authorize a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran if that was what it would take to prevent the Islamic Republic from having a nuclear bomb”; their repetition of the slogan about keeping options on the table was in specific response to questions about tactical nuclear weapons. Although no one noticed, except perhaps the Iranians, in taking this position they were supporting the president’s use of our nuclear weapons in his “negotiations” with Iran.

  Nor did his Democratic opponents (except for Kucinich) fail to support this use. It was reported that when the Democratic front-runner in August 2007, Hillary Clinton, was first told that her rival Barack Obama had taken the nuclear option off the table for attacking Pakistan, a “slight smile” crossed her face before she moved in confidently for the kill. So far in the campaign she had been charging Obama with being too naïve and inexperienced to be trusted with the presidency, and, as she realized immediately, he had just proved her point.