Crossing the nuclear threshold

...Pointing nuclear weapons at military targets, and thereby emphasizing their nature as weapons, marks the beginning of a sea-change in the psychology of RussianAmerican confrontation, a gradual acceptance of the possibility of war...

...In McNamara's formulation the peace was stable so long as neither side could do anything to protect itself...

...It is also argued, but somewhat more tepidly, that we can preserve our deterrent--that is, our power to retaliate crushingly--by switching to a policy of launch on warning...

...PD 59 isbound to cause them very great concern, since it openly avows what we only suspected them of planning...

...Accurate MIRVs have...

...The fact that the decision would be in the hands of a computer, subject to sudden electronic twitches, makes this approach unattractive...

...The second, which we can assume to be deeply rooted in the modern psyche, is the broad popular desire to believe that nuclear war is too terrible to happen...

...THESEIMPLICATIONSof PD 59 all make it a significant document...

...an intention is not a definite thing...

...In the past it was assumed such a war would be terrible but soon over...

...It would be helpful if we might read it in full...

...Catholics, of course, must seek to understand the specific responsibilities which are theirs as contemporary Christians, but they also need to examine the requirements which rest on them as successful, strategically situated Americans...

...It's impossible to say just how far down this road we will go, but it's sobering to remember that an Air Force Chief of Staff in the 1960s strongly recommended to President Kennedy that the United States deploy 10,000 Minutemen, ten times the number McNamara eventually decided would be enough...

...TAICE A RVJNNING LEAP KT HISTORY, MY FATHER BELIEVES Singers of family tales PAUL H. CONNOLLY Home is where one starts from...

...From the day of Hiroshima forward it has been apparent that nuclear weapons meant trouble for humanity...

...The American military and many civilian strategists have been arguing for years that the Russians have been building a first-stfike capacity, whether or not they really intended to carry out such a strike...

...If Hiroshima introduced the first era of nuclear weapons (that of the bomber-dropped bomb, with its threat of isolated acts of terror), and the advent of missiles circa 1961 marked the second era (with its threat of wholesale terror), then PD 59 marks the third era (with its full-scale return to Clausewitz, and the domestication of nuclear weapons as tools of war like any other...

...With it we pass into a new era of nuclear history...

...But the fourth implication, already suggested, is the most important of all...

...Others may argue all they like that we've still got plenty of deterrent, and that the Russians will continue to be cowed by it...

...The survivors' natural sorrow for wh~t has been lost will be all but overwhelmed by fear of its repetition...

...The great appeal of MAD--to use the acronym coined by the civilian strategist Donald Brennan--was that it appeared to guarantee no more wars, or at least no more big ones...

...The same is likely to be the case now...

...Eliot, "East Coker" DURINGMYFIRSTyear of graduate study at the University Iof Virginia, I was assigned two roommates, one but a brief acquaintance who transferred at semester's end...

...But in any event the arguments have now become moot...

...McNamara ensured the survivability of American missiles by putting them in concrete-hardened underground silos and hiding them in submarines beneath the sea...

...This disparity between offensive capacity and defensive vulnerability--the ability to destroy, the inability to prevent one's own destruction--suggested a kind of permanent stand-off, a stable peace based on the "impossibility" of war with such catastrophic consequences...

...As soon as various technical surveillance systems detected a major Russian launch our own missiles would be fired automatically, thus escaping destruction on the ground...

...But we have not been very successful in negotiating arms agreements anyway, Commonweal: 558 so the practical implications of PD 59 in that regard are probably not important...

...It is not hard to imagine a war in its third or fourth day, with both nations all but totally ruined hulks, while some small residual force on either side continues to haul out weapons from the secure strategic reserve and fire them at the enemy...

...No short article can possibly do the subject justice...

...The new strategic policy, laid out in a document called Presidential Directive 59, comes in response to a decade of debate about Soviet military intentions, but its real cause is not a sudden revival of early Cold War fears of global ambition in Moscow...

...I THOMASPOwERsreceived the Pulitzer Prizefor national reporting in 1971...

...His plow did not even have a metal tip...

...For that example, all Americans have reason to be grateful to Drinan...

...The long o~ly serious drawbackabout bringing this weapon into production is that it ralght bring civilization, as we know it, to an end," I0 October 1980:557 argument about the U.S.-USSR strategic balance has finally focused down onto a purely military question--what their weapons can do to our weapons--and our response, embodied in PD 59, is a purely military one...

...The scale of their destructiveness was well-suited to large targets like cities, while the weapons themselves could be hidden or protected...

...The horror of nuclear weapons was recognized from the beginning but their military utility took longer to identify...

...The first was from the California coast, and for him Virginia's red clay, pecan pie, and well-bred women spoke not of ante-bellum mint juleps on a white verandah but of Eastern senescence and the slow smokeless burning of decay...

...To the new language of human rights and liberation which comes to them from the church universal, they must add the traditional language of the common good, once the central theme in discussions of social justice...

...It takes long study just to gain familiarity with the words, and after that it requires a sustained effort of the moral imagination to keep hold of what the words mean...

...changed nuclear weapons from the hammer-like to the rapier-like--if anything with such pronounced side-effects (called "collateral damage" by the military) can be likened to a rapier...

...He had a short, alliterative name, and after he had seen his first snow, he finished his M.B.A...

...Within a year or two the land-based missiles of both sides will be fully vulnerable to surprise attack...

...Technical studies saggested that 400 one-megaton warheads could do the job...

...Specters are in the eye of the beholder...

...Accurate MIRVs make it possible for missiles to destroy small, well-protected targets, which tend to be military in nature...

...For one thing, there are a great many potential military targets besides an enemy's missiles...

...etc.--are more than enough to dissuade any prudent Russian government from attacking us...

...The changes implicit in PD 59 do not come from the choice of military targets, but from the primacy to be given Russian missiles, the direction of new weapons' development toward greater power and accuracy, and the commitment to a practical ability to fight a nuclear war one stage at a time, instead of jumping to the final holocaust or spasm-war stage fight at the start...

...Can launch on warning be far behind...

...More important is the fact that security of offensive capacity can be guaranteed only by the factor of MIRVs...

...As we grow older The worm becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living.T.S...

...Exactly when the inherent instability of such a situation will assert itself is impossible to say, but it ought to be clear that the better "prepared" we are, the more we have got to fight a war with, the worse it will be...

...But thirty-five years is a long time to keep something in mind...

...Today Catholics and other Americans face unacceptable choices in the election of their president...

...While I watched, two Egyptian air force jet fighters screamed by overhead...

...From one point of view the advent of military targeting for nuclear weapons is more shadow than substance, because targeting, as a practical matter, has always tended to concentrate on military and industrial sites chosen by the Pentagon...

...in L.A...

...But departures have a seismic signature all their own, and the tremor was unmistakably underfoot in August of 1980, when a new strategic policy was announced by Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, a man who has spent his entire professional life designing nuclear weapons and deciding what to do with them: Brown insisted the policy was not new at all but only an ' "evolutionary development" in American theories of how to keep the peace...

...The ultimate arbiter of military planning is Commonweal: 556 what an enemy can do...

...The great open questions of nuclear weapons--what to point them at, and why?--were finally answered by the world's military men, not the civilian strategists who had long sought paradoxical shelter in the prospect of Armageddon...

...If they will open themselves to the possibilities contained in their tradition and in the rich human resources of the contemporary church, perhaps they can reshape those options and the entire landscape of American political'culture...

...One convenience of the doctrine of mutual assured destruction was that it suggested the possibility of "enough"--enough destructive power to guarantee McNamara's 25 and 50, which, if 25 and 50 were truly "unacceptable," and were truly assured, would be enough to prevent a war, no matter how many weapons the other side might have...

...A generation ago, John Cogley asked if Catholics were always to be standing in judgment on their country, as if its failures were not their failures, as if its problems were not their own...

...At the very least it implies no more international arms agreements, since monitoring a reserve would require inspection on the ground, which the Russians have been adamant in refusing to allow...

...PD 59 doesn't make the situation completely unstable, just more unstable...

...Accurate Russian MIRVs which can destroy them have been a long time in coming, but they are here now and PD 59 is a form of recognition of that fact...

...It turned vulnerability into a source of serenity, rather than fear...

...For the moment nothing seems changed...

...If anything it is taken even more firmly for granted by defense professionals who have been paying attention to the details...

...At least four broad changes in the military situation are implicit in PD 59, although it is difficult to say which will have the severest practical results...

...They were especially wrong when trying to answer any question beginning with when...

...We shall probably begin a civil defense program (since that is the clearest evidence of willingness to fight a limited nuclear war, which Brown says is the point we are trying to get across...

...If we could hit all their missiles--submarine-based missiles too--the situation would really be unstable...

...The prolongation of nuclear war is something else again...

...But they will now certainly adopt a military targeting policy of their own to match ours, if they have not done so already...

...We will protect our weapons in ways which precludearms agreements...

...Military and civilian leaders will of course go on saying their purpose is to prevent war, but there is a vast difference between saying that war is inherently too terrible to happen, and that we are too strong and alert t~ be challenged successfully...

...This remains in doubt...

...If each Russian missile could destroy five American missiles, for example, we would have to have something more than five times as many to ensure some would always be left...

...This is more than merely a shift in emphasis...

...They also felt peace was to be found through strength, and that war would never begin so long as all sides knew what they were up against...

...When the military is truly alarmed about something--not just faking it to beef up the budget--it is eventually going to get its way...

...A strategy which seeks to bring forth real dialogue about the dangers and opportunities which now confront the nation and the world, a dialogue based on the ongoing reflection in faith on human experience in parishes, apostolic movements, every place where Catholics gather, alone will enable the promise of renewal to bring about a world responsive to the will of the Father and alive to his promises...

...Given the historic location of Catholic voters in this most crucial of nations at this point in history, they can make a difference...

...His family was by no means landed gentry, but he knew each corm on his Carolina roots like he knew turnip from kohlrabi...

...This is not limited to laymen...

...A third I~road implication of PD 59 is that a major nuclear war would not necessarily end in a matter of hours or days, as once seemed likely to be the case...

...In some ways the secure strategic reserve is the most frightening aspect of PD 59...

...The second result of PD 59 will be more weapons...

...Some see them, and some don't...

...THEOPPONENTSof the new strategy implicit in PD 59 argue that the Russian missiles aren't really all that accurate, and that our submarine-based missiles--not to mention our B-52 bombers, tactical weapons in Europe, bombs which might be delivered by carrier-based Naval aircraft, etc...

...This amounts to a silent crossing of what is now called the nuclear threshold, and its proximate effect over time will be the absorption of nuclear we/lpons as one more item in the military inventory...

...Military men and many civilian strategists have been brought to a state of quite agitated alarm by the prospect of a Russian capacity to destroy American land-based missiles in a surprise attack...

...Others argued the Russians would never have enough missiles, accurate enough, to threaten Minuteman...

...I once stopped by a field in Egypt to watch a man plowing with two oxen and a wooden plow...

...If war was too terrible to happen, it wouldn't happen...

...More weapons will be more expensive, of course, but the really troubling aspect of more is that there will be more to go off when war comes...

...After the First and Second World Wars, which all but wrecked Western civilization to no purpose, the promise of no more big wars probably reached about as deep into the human soul as it is possible for official words to go...

...They were wrong...

...Discussions of the problem posed by nuclear weapons in the immediate postwar period all recognized the extreme danger, even the likelihood, we would do ourselves severe damage-they saw the future clearly enough for that, just as we can--but at the same time they were groping, inexact, and often wide of the mark when it came to details...

...59 Crossing the nuclear threshhold THOMAS POWERS THE BIGTHINGSin history tend to start off in small ways...

...It might even be argued that no one has felt truly light-hearted since...

...We will be subject to heightened tension whenever the United States and Russia edge towards a serious crisis, as we do every two or three years...

...And when he talked of Great-aunt Cassandra or of Cousin Ruby, twice removed, you could taste the stock in his soup...

...One can think of nothing more necessary to restoring the vitality of American politics than a courageous pursuit of the real issues of the contemporary world in a context of dialogue and accountability between public officials and the electorate...

...It is the weapons, in fact, which have been leading the way, not we the weapons...

...But like the other large things in history, precisely where it's taking us will all be more apparent in retrospect...

...The military approach borrows all the language of deterrence, while attempting to balance forces in the manner of the great European powers before 1914...

...These necessarily lie in the future, which we can see only dimly...

...If we are to threaten Russia with assured destruction of the sort which makes wars too terrible to happen, we can't do it anymore with land-based missiles...

...One side might destroy the other's cities, but not his missiles...

...PD 59 ensures the agony will be prolonged...

...But within a very few years things will be quite different...

...As a practical matter the United States deployed 1,054 landbased missiles and 656 submarine launchers, a good deal more than enough to guarantee McNamara's unacceptable 25 and 50, but this did not alter McNamara's basic concept of a nuclear peace enforced by mutual Russian and American vulnerability to nuclear horror...

...He is the author of The Warat Homeand The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (Knopjg.II The result is a return to Clausewitzean concepts of warfare, which identify the object of military operations as destruction of an enemy's military forces...

...It is a long and honorable tradition of Catholic politics that particular justice requires general justice, that specific reforms of economic, social, and cultural life depend upon and relate to the overall structure of economics, politics, and culture, the way of life, within which that structure exists...

...It's easy to miss them, or to read them wrong, or to point them out before they're really there...

...Darden Asbury Pyron was the second roommate, and his three surnames were a honeyed syllabic porridge borne in sacred testimony/ to his southern birthright...

...This does not necessarily increase the likelihood of war, but it will certainly affect the course and scale of war when it comes...

...But these could be MIRVed as well, so the Russians would need five times that many for the same reason we need five times as many as they...

...Where I live, that is less than the distance between the New York Public Library and Grand Central Central Station--roughly two city blocks...

...Of course, if we can hit their weapons at all--which PD 59 explicitly says we intend to be able to do--then we can hit them fu'st, out of the blue...

...Is this the sort of thing the Russian or American military will contemplate with equanimity...

...The real cause of PD 59, which calls for pointing American strategic weapons at Russian military targets, rather than industrial and population centers, is technical improvement of missile guidance systems, coupled with development of Multiple Independently-targetable Re-entry Vehicles, known as MIRVs...

...This worked until the Russians developed new missiles like the SS-18, which can deliver ten separate MIRV warheads--each with an explosive power equal to morethan a million tons of TNT-- within one-tenth of a nautical mile of the intended target...

...a lot of new arguments finally lost out to an old argument...

...Military targeting isdestabilizing because it suggests we can limit damage to ourselves by destroying their weapons with our weapons (or vice versa), and further that we can destroy all of their weapons (or at least their land-based missiles) with only part of our weapons (or vice versa...

...One aspect of the new policy calls for provision of a "secure strategic reserve," by which is meant a stock of weapons buried so deep, or hidden so well, the Russians cannot possibly destroy them...

...The first was that it recognized, and made use of, the disparity between offense and defense...

...each one cost millions of dollars and I thought.of the terrible distance between the world of the pilot and the world of the plowman, and wondered a bit at that aspect of the human fate which always guarantees the millions will go for better planes rather than better plows...

...The first and most obvious is that military, targeting is what nuclear strategists refer to as "destabilizing...

...In fact the world came full circle...

...the other, an enduring friend...

...We shall deploy .different kinds of weapons in different kinds of ways...

...Doubtless the Russians will match this capacity too...

...Military targeting does away with all such limits...

...This means that American Minuteman missiles are no longer" survivable...

...This was just talk...

...The United States has 1000 missile silos dotted about the Great Plains which are small, well-protected targets of precisely this sort...

...Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense between 1961 and 1968, took this de factostandoff, gave a name to the f~ar which sustained it--"mutually assured destruction"--and then saw to it that U.S...

...strategic weapons would be sufficiently invulnerable ("survivable") to threaten "unacceptable" damage to Russia in the event worse came to worst...

...There is much which might be argued against a notion of "security" based on men's common-sensical reluctance to do something really stupid, but the argument which has finally closed the era of MAD is a military one...

...The pressures for it will certainly be very great...

...Even at the height of McNamara's tenure as Secretary of Defense, the assurance of 25 and 50 would have been the result of missiles dropped on military bases and industrial districts, rather than on population centers per se...

...If all this is to be done, if Catholic lparticipation in the 1984 election is to be more intelligent and significant than it can possibly be in 1980, then Catholics are going to have to help reshape the options before the American people...

...The McNamara doctrine had two great strengths as a strategic concept...

...Fear of consequences would make men prudent...

...I THE IMPLICATIONS OF P.D...

...10 October 1980:559...

...PD 59 is not a step in the direction of safety or peace...

...What I have written here is the barest outline of the argument which led to PD 59, and of the consequences we may expect from it...

...It ought to be pointed out here that Russia depends much more heavily on its now-vulnerable land-based missiles than we do...

...The military will not be reassured by anything short of an ability to destroy their hard silos too...

...young men have grown old and died since 1945, while the problem has grown steadily more complicated and intractable as technical progress has made the weapons more versatile...

...The guarantee of "mutually assured destruction" made war "crazy," so crazy that sober fear could be counted upon to override all the traditional proximate causes of war...

...we are still prepared for Armageddon, both psychologically and militarily...

...No hardened missile silo could survive a hit that close...

...The bedrock of mutually assured destruction was the "survivability" of one'sretaliatory forces...

...Argument about intentions is by its nature inconclusive...

...I never had much confidence in the long-term efficacy of the first approach, but at least it encouraged a sober frame of mind...

...They can do so only if they transcend single issue politics and demonstrate concern for the public interest across a wide variety of issues In a very real way, the challenge of the 1980s for Catholics in the United States is situated at the intersection of faith and politics...

...He figured Moscow would consider the loss of a quarter of its people and half of its industry as unacceptable...

...We are never again going to have enough...

...This will naturally heighten the tensions in a serious crisis, because both sides will grow jittery that the other side may decide to strike first for whatever marginal advantage is offered...