To be quite plain here, I am talking about the madness of the strategy and planning I personally laid out in the spring of 1961: my draft adopted word for word by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as his official guidance to the JCS for their operational planning for general nuclear war. I didn’t question the appropriateness and need for damage-limiting counterforce strikes against military targets. SAC planners never had any problem identifying enough “military” targets—hundreds, actually—within or in the vicinity of Moscow and all other cities that a presidential decision at the onset of central war to “withhold” attacks on command and control or on cities—in the interests of “intrawar deterrence,” “bargaining,” terminating the war, or simply limiting civilian casualties—would have been entirely vitiated. The results from either a preemptive or a retaliatory U.S. attack315 supposedly based on “my” guidance for “coercive war” would have been indistinguishable from those of SIOP-62.†
That was what Nixon and Kissinger found316 they had inherited from Johnson and McNamara, when they were introduced in 1969 to estimates of eighty to ninety million deaths from immediate effects of the “smallest” attacks available to them. Obviously these estimates reflected attacks that burned all the major urban areas, even when population was not targeted “per se.” (No one knew then that these firestorms would cause global nuclear winter, as had actually been true not only in the sixties but ever since large numbers of atomic bombs had become available in the early fifties for use against cities.)
Both the predicted results and the actual, unrecognized climatic effects remained at these same catastrophic levels when Nixon and Kissinger left office, and throughout the Cold War, despite efforts as delusional and abortive as mine and McNamara’s by defense secretaries and their aides317 under Ford, Carter, and Reagan to compel SAC to provide operational plans for “limited nuclear options” in war with the Soviet Union.
Not that I or anyone else would ever have been blamed for the omnicidal results if our plans were actually carried out, in the way and on the scale that SAC prepared to carry them out. No one would be left to hold anyone accountable, since the result would have been the near extinction of our species.
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Here is what we know now: the United States and Russia each have an actual Doomsday Machine. It is not the same relatively cheap system that Herman Kahn envisioned (or Stanley Kubrick portrayed), with their warheads buried deep and set to explode in their own territories, producing deadly global fallout. But a counterpart nevertheless exists for each country: a very expensive system of men, machines, electronics, communications, institutions, plans, training, discipline, practices, and doctrine—which, under conditions of electronic warning, external conflict, or expectations of attack, would with unknowable but possibly high probability bring about the global destruction of civilization and of nearly all human life on earth.
These two systems still risk doomsday: both are still on hair-trigger alert that makes their joint existence unstable. They are susceptible to being triggered on a false alarm, a terrorist action, unauthorized launch, or a desperate decision to escalate. They would kill billions of humans, perhaps ending complex life on earth. This is true even though the Cold War that rationalized their existence and hair-trigger status—and their supposed necessity to national security—ended thirty years ago.
Does the United States still need a Doomsday Machine? Does Russia? Did they ever?
Does the existence of such a capability serve any national or international interest whatsoever to a degree that would justify its obvious danger to human life?
I ask the questions not merely rhetorically. They deserve sober, reflective consideration. The answers do seem obvious, but so far as I know they have never been addressed. There follows another question: Does any nation on earth have a right to possess such a capability? A right to threaten—by its simple possession of that capability—the continued existence of all other nations and their populations, their cities, and civilization as a whole?
Robert F. Kennedy’s Thirteen Days, based on his personal diaries and recollection, offered an account of the Cuban missile crisis that he drafted in the summer and fall of 1967. RFK’s murder in 1968 prevented him from rewriting and completing it prior to publication. At the end of the book, Theodore Sorensen, who edited the memoir, added this note:
It was Senator Kennedy’s intention318 to add a discussion of the basic ethical question involved [in the crisis]: what, if any, circumstance or justification gives this government or any government the moral right to bring its people and possibly all people under the shadow of nuclear destruction?
I know of no other occasion on which a former official, in or out of office, ever raised this particular question of moral right, whether in memos, internal discussions, or memoirs. But once posed in these terms, is it really so hard a question to answer?
Arguments made for the necessity or desirability of continued possession of some nuclear weapons by nuclear weapon states (NWS) do not remotely apply to maintaining doomsday arsenals on the massive scale of the superpowers—thousands of first-strike weapons each. That’s true even when these pro-nuclear arguments do seem plausible to many as reasons for maintaining a small deterrent force.
Thus, for example: “You can’t uninvent nuclear weapons.” That has been a widespread and effective argument against a total unilateral abolition over the past seventy years. True, you can’t eradicate the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons and delivery systems. But you can dismantle a Doomsday Machine. And that, at minimum, is what we must hasten to do. There is no need or justification for us to wait for the Russians to do it to theirs first or in step with us, though that global imperative applies just as well to them.
This implies moving in the opposite direction from the programs of Presidents Obama, Trump, and Putin319 to reconstruct their entire machines, with their first-strike characteristics, with “modernized” replacement components.† In reality, such a program seems nothing other, in either country, than a further subsidy to the military-industrial-legislative complexes that each of them have or are: a boon to profits, jobs, votes, campaign donations (kickbacks). Good, solid, traditional political incentives, but very far from legitimate justifications for maintaining or rebuilding a Doomsday Machine.
No state ever set out intentionally to acquire a doomsday capability. Nor does the existence of one such machine compel or even create a tangible incentive for a rival or enemy to have one. In fact, having two on alert against each is far more dangerous for each and for the world than if only one existed. If the two existing machines were dismantled (in terms of their doomsday potential), there would never be any strategic rationale for anyone to reconstruct that capability, any more than there was a conscious intention in the first place.
The good news is that dismantling the Doomsday Machine in one country or both would be relatively simple in concept and in physical operation (though politically and bureaucratically incredibly difficult). It could be accomplished quickly, easily within a year. But it would mean—and here’s where institutional resistance would be strong—giving up certain infeasible aims and illusory capabilities of our nuclear forces: in particular, the notion that it is possible to limit damage to the United States (or Russia) by means of a preemptive first strike, targeted on the adversary’s land-based missiles, its command and control centers and communications, its leadership (“decapitation”), all other military targets and war-supporting resources, including urban-industrial centers, transportation, and energy.
In other words, it would mean totally discarding the present strategy and criteria for covering targets in our strategic nuclear war plans and discarding most of the forces deployed to carry out these aims and plans. This would mean dismantling all the land-based missile forces (Minuteman missiles), most or all strategic nuclear bombers, most of the current fourteen Trident submarines, and most of the warheads on remaining submarine-launched ballistic missiles in remaining Tridents.<
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Actually, there were sound, almost equally compelling reasons to dismantle all the above items no later than half a century ago, when the feasibility of a “damage-limiting” strike against a large Soviet force of hardened missile silos and sub-launched missiles became a delusion and hoax. That was true even before there was any awareness of the dire danger of triggering a nuclear winter.
But that potentially widespread awareness today gives every person, institution, and nation in the world an unprecedentedly compelling and urgent basis for demanding that such capabilities and planned “options” be immediately dismantled.
However low the probability might be of the United States or Russia carrying out its current strategic contingency plans against the other with the effect of causing nuclear winter and near human extinction, it never will be zero, so long as Doomsday Machines of the present type exist.
Just how high does such a risk have to be to make the prospect of it intolerable? What risk of nuclear winter happening—whether by panicked reaction or unstable leadership or unauthorized action—is “acceptable” as the price of maintaining our current strategic forces, and of any benefits that can supposedly be claimed for that? Five percent over the next forty years? One percent? Three in a million?
Why is anything other than zero remotely acceptable? Fortunately, it can be zero. The major risks could even be eliminated by executive decision alone, in constitutional principle: though in practice, politically, there would have to be considerable support for this in Congress and the public, and in the military-industrial complex, reluctant as the latter would be. Although Donald J. Trump seems more willing to use presidential power than his predecessor, even beyond constitutional limits, the likelihood has always been slim that he would use it in this direction, and now even less than before talk of impeachment commenced. The same appears to apply to Putin. Nevertheless, it is true for both superpowers: the current danger of Doomsday could be eliminated without the United States or Russia coming close to total nuclear disarmament, or the abandonment of nuclear deterrence, either unilaterally or mutually (desirable as the latter would be).
Just for contrast, the risk that one city will be destroyed by a single (perhaps terrorist) nuclear weapon in the next year or the next decade cannot, unfortunately, be reduced to zero. But the danger of near-extinction of humanity—a continuous possibility for the past sixty-five years—can be reduced to zero by dismantlement of most existing weapons in both the United States and Russia (and smaller dismantlement in all the other NWS).
This dismantlement of the Doomsday Machines is not intended as an adequate long-term substitute for more ambitious, necessary goals, including total universal abolition of nuclear weapons. We cannot accept the conclusion that abolition must be ruled out “for the foreseeable future” or put off for generations. There will not be a truly long-run human future without it. In particular, it seems more naïve than realistic to believe that large cities can coexist indefinitely with nuclear weapons. If human civilization in the form that emerged four thousand years ago (in Mesopotamia, Iraq) is to persist globally even another century or two, a way must be found to make the required transformations ultimately practical.
Thus, it is urgent for the nuclear weapon states to acknowledge the reality that they have been denying, and the non-nuclear weapon states have been proclaiming, for almost fifty years: that in the long run, and that time has arrived, effective nonproliferation is inescapably linked to nuclear disarmament. Eventually, indeed fairly soon, either all nations forgo the right to possess nuclear weapons indefinitely and to threaten others with them under any circumstances, or every nation will claim that right, and actual possession and use will be very widespread.
Abolition of nuclear weapons must come in stages, but if proliferation in the near future is to be averted, a real commitment to total abolition of nuclear weapons—banning and eliminating their use and possession—as the truly reigning international goal is no longer to be delayed or equivocated. We must begin now the effort to explore320 and to help bring about conditions that will make a world of zero nuclear weapons feasible. Thus, it is extremely deplorable that the nuclear weapons states and their allies, led by the United States, boycotted the recent negotiations at the United Nations toward a treaty banning nuclear weapons, even if none of them are yet ready to join the more than 120 nations that adopted the treaty321 on July 7, 2017.
But what I am proposing is an effort to mobilize international support for a shorter-run program to avert as quickly as possible an imminent and continuous threat to human survival. The logic of this program is relatively simple to comprehend. What needs to be done to reduce the danger is easily specified in terms of concrete steps.
The threat of full nuclear winter is posed by the possibility of all-out war between the United States and Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, probably the greatest remaining risk of this annihilating outcome is by a preemptive attack by one side or the other triggered by an electronic false alarm (which has repeatedly occurred on both sides) or an accidental detonation322 (which was a remote but real risk in a number of previous accidents).† The risk is not negligible of such an attack being triggered by an apocalyptic terrorist group, with the capability of creating a nuclear explosion in Washington or Moscow.
The danger that either a false alarm or a terrorist attack on Washington or Moscow would lead to a preemptive attack derives almost entirely from the existence on both sides of land-based missile forces, each vulnerable to attack by the other: each, therefore, kept on a high state of alert, ready to launch within minutes of warning.
The easiest and fastest way to reduce that risk—and indeed, the overall danger of nuclear war—is to dismantle entirely323 (not merely “de-alert”) the Minuteman III missile force (currently scheduled for “refurbishment”324†), the U.S. land-based leg of the nuclear “triad.” Former secretary of defense William Perry has argued325 precisely that, as has James E. Cartwright, former commander of the Strategic Command and vice chairman of the JCS. A second stage would be to reduce the Trident submarine-based ballistic missiles (SLBM) force to give up its capability to target and destroy the entire Russian land-based missile force (on which the Russians choose to rely far more than does the United States). Having first deprived the Russians of their high-priority, time-urgent targets for those forces by dismantling the U.S. Minuteman silos and their control centers, the remaining incentive for the Russians to launch their ICBMs on warning—to avert their being destroyed by U.S. SLBMs—would be eliminated. Launch on warning would no longer be susceptible of being rationalized strategically on either side.
All of the above propositions apply with equal force to the current, vulnerable opposing offensive nuclear forces of India and Pakistan, with the potential global catastrophe of their mutual launch roughly half the scale of the full nuclear winter produced by a United States/Russian nuclear war. The world’s interest in reducing these forces and avoiding their hair-trigger alert status—likewise for all currently expanding and “modernizing” nuclear arsenals—is wholly comparable and secondary only to the mutual confrontation of current superpower forces.
To suggest that these are relatively simple steps for the superpowers and others neglects the challenge of fundamentally altering the doctrine and strategy that have shaped the buildup of our strategic forces over the past sixty-five years. Contrary to public understanding, that strategy has not been a matter of deterrence of nuclear attack on the United States, but rather the illusionary one of improving first-strike capability. Specifically, this has involved the goal of “damage-limiting” to the United States in the event of a U.S. preemptive strike against Soviet/Russian nuclear capability, triggered by a warning of impending attack, possibly in the context of escalation of a conventional or limited nuclear war.
That strategy remains in force, although, as noted, the objective of limiting damage to the United States in large-scale nuclear war, or of keeping such a war with a nuclear state limited,
has been essentially a hoax, infeasible to achieve for about fifty of those years—ever since the Soviets acquired SLBMs and a large force of hardened ICBMs. Even striking first, it has not been feasible to avoid the effective total destruction of U.S. society (even earlier, that was not feasible for Western Europe), by blast, heat, radiation, and fallout alone from Soviet/Russian retaliation.
Now, in light of the phenomenon of nuclear winter precipitated from cities burning from our U.S. attacks alone (aside from Soviet retaliation), there can no longer be any fig leaf of pretense that a “damage-limiting” first strike by either side would be anything less than suicidal—as Alan Robock and Brian Toon have put it,326 “self-Assured Destruction” (SAD)—or, in fact, omnicidal. The changes I am describing mean giving up the pretense, and the supposed political and alliance advantages of maintaining the pretense, that it is possible for either superpower to limit damage to anyone or to everyone by attacking the other with nuclear weapons, whether first or second or in any circumstances or manner whatever.
The sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons should be to deter nuclear attack on the United States and its allies. That sole purpose can and should be accomplished with radically lowered numbers of U.S. nuclear weapons, almost entirely SLBMs, ICBMs having been dismantled as they should have been generations ago. This shift would not totally eliminate the dangers of nuclear war, but it would abolish the threat of nuclear winter.
The Doomsday Machine Page 42
