THINKING ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Feiveson, H. A.
The German physicist and philosopher C. F. von Weizsacker once asked Martin Buber why all the Church's appeals for an end to the nuclear arms race were so ineffectual. Buber's reply was that the...
...flight testing is done east to west (from California to a point in the Pacific) and in a manner where various geophysical anomalies peculiar to a specific flight path can gradually be accounted for...
...Our strategic forces also must deter nuclear attacks on smaller sets of targets in the U.S...
...But with our doctrines and deployments tuned to the use of nuclear weapons, it may then be too late to avert catastrophe...
...How is the accuracy of Soviet systems deter185 mined...
...Although the outcry in all these cases began as a "backyard" protest, it also led citizens to think harder about what nuclear weapons really are for...
...But when it comes to the technicalities of the arms race, he is on different territory, on territory where the experts rule...
...In principle, we can imagine secret information that would affect significantly the attractiveness of a specific weapons system or arms-control measure...
...the Soviet leadership must be convinced by the U.S...
...There must also be a public challenge to the pretense that nuclear weapons can be used by rational persons for rational ends...
...Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977) p. 278...
...PD59, which codifies and refines a U.S...
...the Soviets would not have enough warheads to destroy a sufficiently high fraction of the missile force...
...As long as vulnerability is treated as a technical finding not to be further questioned, it seems ominious...
...9 Doctrine TECHNOLOGY PLACES A BARRIER between the experts and the public, but nuclear doctrine, I believe, has an equally stifling impact on public debate and a still more important influence on the arms race...
...But under examination, it begins to appear fanciful and unconvincing—even leaving aside the question whether such vulnerability is relevant at all, given the likely survival of U.S...
...The nuclear experts really do imagine fighting a nuclear war, a theme reflected in our doctrines, forces, and rhetoric—doctrines of selected attack and first use, projected deployments of thousands of accurate cruise missiles, and a suffocating use of language: "TNF [Theater Nuclear Forces] provide a wide range of options designed to allow the U.S...
...The citizens' demand addressed to their government is therefore usually formulated as a negotiating proposal—say, a freeze on all nuclear systems for both superpowers...
...18 George Kennan, Address on the occasion of receiving the Albert Einstein Peace Prize, Washington, D.C., May 19, 1981...
...Harold Brown, "Remarks Prepared for Delivery at the Convocation Ceremonies for the 97th Naval War College Class, Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, August 20, 1980," Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense, Public Affairs, No...
...On the contrary, a whole range of Soviet military targets could be struck—there are over 20,000 such targets in the U.S...
...In a further ring, to the 10-mile radius, many residential and apartmenttype structures would have been severely damaged and many fires started (as also, of course, at closer location) by the incendiary effects of thermal radiation, by electrical short circuits, and as a result of broken gas pipes...
...It would be difficult to claim that this phenomenon was not relevant to a full assessment of the need for nuclear and missile-flight testing and to armscontrol measures to restrict such testing...
...So it became necessary for the nuclear strategists to invent a "scenario" to show how the Soviets could politically exploit the vulnerability of U.S...
...The former chief scientific adviser to the British government, Lord Zuckerman, has explained this as follows: The normal run of political leader, whatever his ambitions, has inevitably been nurtured in an environment of politics...
...The Citizen's Responsibility to Choose THE NUCLEAR STRATEGISTS, diplomats, analysts, defense scientists, and others who are charting our destiny are intellectually and politically hobbled...
...landbased missiles would provide the Soviets with important political advantages...
...See, for example, William Broad, "Nuclear Pulse: Awakening to The Chaos Factor," Science, May 29, June 5, June 12, 1981...
...And so the citizens turn to the experts in part because they appear to possess an esoteric technical and political knowledge, including secret information not available to the lay public...
...26, pp...
...Finally, from the point of view of the Soviet planner, there must always be the vexing uncertainty that some of the U.S...
...would not have to respond to a "limited" Soviet attack on its land-based missiles by an all-out assault on Soviet cities...
...The Effects of Nuclear War, Office of Technology Assessment, U.S...
...We cannot do without the experts and without detailed analyses of weapons systems and arms limitation agreements...
...Think-tank analysts can set levels of "acceptable" damage well up in the tens of millions of lives...
...At Dresden, fatalities were estimated at 25,000 to 135,000...
...Of course, a lack of experience doesn't always discourage strong and loud opinions...
...They have become the alchemists of our times...
...If so, we shall doubtless have to reply in kind, for that may be the price of survival...
...Imagine the debate within the U.S...
...one bristling with nuclear weapons...
...For a coordinated attack on U.S...
...This paradox of nuclear deterrence—that "nuclear weapons are politically and militarily unusable only because and insofar as we can plausibly threaten to use them in some ultimate way...
...But to imagine such an accuracy repeated with nary a mistake under real operational conditions requires several heroic assumptions...
...and its allies to deny the enemy his objectives at conflict levels below all-out nuclear war, while at the same time threatening escalation to general nuclear response...
...It is he who has succeeded over the years in equating, and so confusing, nuclear destructive power with military strength, as though the former were the single and a sufficient condition of military success...
...has never successfully fired an ICBM from an operational launcher), with the real capacity of U.S...
...political leadership of the claim that our land-based missiles had suddenly—or would soon—become vulnerable to a Soviet first strike...
...These sentiments perfectly reflect the common sense of the citizenry—that nuclear weapons cannot be considered for any wartime role whatever, with the single exception of a measured repayment in kind...
...cities...
...Let US use as a cautionary tale the acceptance by the U.S...
...intelligence believes it was able to establish that the Soviets were testing a new guidance package and to estimate the accuracy achieved for the test missiles over the test range by this package...
...They feel they must defer to experts and professionals...
...4, August 1980 (November 8, 1979), pp...
...In the event of a nuclear catastrophe, who in principle could be held responsible...
...At present, the helplessness of Soviet critics of nuclear policy—Sakharov preeminent among them—imposes a further caution on the American public...
...1,650 tons on Tokyo on March 9; 1,800 tons on Nagoya on March 11...
...We have in fact become too used to thinking favorably of weapons systems that can destroy the other country's cities...
...Hence they have struggled to be "prudent," defining national security in narrow and excessively cautious ways, always hearing "the murmur of the most distant drums before the cry of a hungry child...
...From such observations of a dozen or so flight tests in 1977-78, U.S...
...The Problem of Relying on the Experts IN THIS CAPTURE BY THE EXPERTS, the political leader is as much a victim as the general public...
...The staggering energy density achieved by nuclear weapons causes "a corresponding and appalling increase in the ease and cheapness— the casualness, even—with which [destruction] could be imposed...
...To support the PD59 concepts, several new systems are now being developed or planned, including very accurate cruise missiles in numbers much beyond what might be justified by simple deterrence, new and accurate land-based (MX) and sea-based (Trident 2) missiles, and expanded command and control systems—all of which could be used to target hardened, difficult-todestroy Soviet weapons and command posts...
...or on U.S...
...But most commonly the judgments are cast in simple terms—whether the defense budget should be increased or not...
...Assuming a steady moderate west-by-south wind, the cloud would drift over Long Island...
...A public debate on nuclear doctrine would force us to choose among the conflicting concepts of nuclear use...
...But as explained by Harold Brown, secretary of defense under Carter: Deterrence must restrain a far wider range of threats than just massive attacks on U.S...
...Similar calamities could be inflicted on the Soviet Union and Western Europe...
...They cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary...
...Those arguing the possibility of the Soviet first strike have therefore tended to minimize the number and significance of the casualties to be expected...
...In some measure, the elaborate PD59 theology is merely a rationalization after the fact of new weapons technologies—improved accuracies, more compact propulsion systems, greater numbers of MIRVs, etc...
...Presidents and politburos . . . may not themselves be persuaded by the refined calculations of the nuclear gamesman—but they do not find it prudent to expose them for the political irrelevance they are...
...has 1,000 land-based Minuteman ICBM launchers and 52 older Titan missile launchers in several fields in the Midwest, South, and Southwest...
...At present the U.S...
...In a revealing and tortured response to a congressional inquiry relating to PD59, recently declassified, the Carter administration noted that "Secretary Brown's point that nuclear war is not a 'deliberate' instrument of policy means that we realize nuclear war cannot be an affirmative instrument of U.S...
...And yet, does anyone supporting our present course believe we will be more secure by the end of the century...
...ICBMs would be destroyed in a first strike...
...Technology and politics beget the new doctrines, and then the doctrines in their turn generate new technical requirements—a vicious circle forcing weapons systems to higher and higher levels...
...Some reassurance...
...However, if on average these warheads could be delivered within only 1,000 feet (less than two city blocks) after a journey of over 6,000 miles, the "kill probability" of one warhead against one ICBM launcher would be sufficiently low to make an attack on all the launchers impossible...
...to do nothing in retaliation...
...192 This scene repeated a hundred times—or a thousand times—as it would be in an all-out Soviet attack on U.S...
...For it is the man in the laboratory—not the soldier or sailor or airman—who at the start proposes that for this or that arcane reason it would be useful to improve an old or to devise a new nuclear warhead...
...Most of them are hobbled by selfinterest, caught in a snare where it is rewarding, professionally and psychologically, to go along with the prevailing wisdom, and where even if they did not, they do not believe they could make much difference...
...missiles, the guidance package—where the slightest error due to unanticipated changes in temperature, humidity, or vibration could degrade the accuracy catastrophically—would have to behave reliably and almost perfectly in a thousand different cases...
...1° Desmond Ball, "Counterforce Targeting: How New...
...maintain a full range of nuclear-war fighting options, including a capability to strike Soviet hard targets, a doctrine now embodied in Presidential Directive 59, signed by President Carter on July 25, 1980...
...The inevitable emphasis on negotiability also underscores the importance of Soviet dissidents to the strategic debate...
...1, p. 39...
...Later calculations raised these estimates 2 million to 22 190 million or greater, depending on wind and fallout patterns and the actual pattern of attack, a hundred to a thousand-fold increase over Schlesinger's estimates...
...landbased missiles: "I am talking here about casualties of 15,000, 20,000, 25,000,—a horrendous event, as we all recognize, but one far better than the alternative...
...First, to a radius of about a third of a mile, there would be the crater...
...A Gallup poll during June 1981 found that one American in five believes the United States is "very likely" to get into an all-out nuclear war in the next ten years!' The Exclusion of the Public THE SENSE OF EXCLUSION and helplessness felt by the public is rooted in an almost total lack of relevant experience...
...This picture has permeated the world view of the Reagan administration as well, and to some extent its strategic weapons deployment decisions...
...9 Frank von Hippel, "The Emperor's New Clothes," Physics Today, July 1981, p. 34...
...In this manner, U.S...
...Department of Defense studies have resulted in fatality estimates for such an attack in the millions to tens of millions—"which means nothing is really known about them except that the number is likely to be very large...
...228-39...
...land-based missile forces and missile submarine bases...
...17 J. Carson Mark, "Global Consequences of Nuclear Weaponry," Annual Review of Nuclear Science, 1976, vol...
...the experts, for reasons to be explored below, insist that they can be used...
...The fundamental objective of PD59 is said to be deterrence...
...research and development establishes the technical parameters of the Soviet threat...
...Similarly, it is clear that the Reagan and Carter administrations both have wanted large, accurate land-based missiles able to threaten Soviet hard targets simply because the Soviets had such missiles, with the strategic justification for such counterforce symmetry tagging along later...
...Harold Brown, "Remarks . . . ," p. 6. 12 George Kennan, "International Control of Atomic Energy," Department of State Atomic Energy Files, Foreign Relations, 1950, vol...
...In my remaining pages I will look more closely at the three areas that have seemed to bar an active public participation in the past—the technical character of the nuclear debate, the doctrinal mysteries of nuclear strategy, and the general ignorance of the public regarding the effects of nuclear weapons...
...and various submarine and naval bases and shipyards) is often referred to as a "limited" nuclear attack...
...land-based missiles are "vulnerable...
...The pessimists pro186 vide their own proof for the power of nightmares...
...Only from the outlying suburbs on the mainland would evacuation to the north offer a reasonable prospect for any appreciable fraction of the population...
...land-based missile force by several thousand nuclear warheads, the nuclear effects of the first many blasts wouldn't degrade significantly the accuracies of the slightly later arriving reentry vehicles...
...Over 2,000 tons of explosive bombs were dropped on Dresden on February 13-14, 1945...
...to run the gauntlet of radiation (of unknown intensity) in order to reach hospital facilities and medical care, or take one's chances with what might be at hand...
...deterrent would thus itself be deterred, and the U.S...
...They fail to take account of the ultimate responsibility of men for one another and even for each other's errors and mistakes...
...An actual missile attack, by contrast, would have to be south to north over the pole, a virgin flight path where there may be unanticipated anomalies degrading accuracy...
...The Effects of Nuclear Weapons THE WILLINGNESS of people to contemplate doctrines of nuclear-war fighting thrives, I believe, on an abstract and arid vision of what such a war would look like...
...intelligence through observation of flight paths and evidently also from interception of Soviet telemetry during the tests...
...In principle, the public is asked to make judgments on budget outlays for nuclear weapons systems and, every four years, on the nuclear policies of the presidential candidates...
...In fact, there is a limit to worst-case imaginings...
...Lord Zuckerman, "Science Advisers . . . ," p. 13...
...would be compelled to back down in a confrontation with the Soviets...
...On no issue so vital have citizens felt so excluded and so unclear about their responsibility...
...The seeming inaccessibility of arcane and secret technologies is then compounded by the doctrine of deterrence, where the objective effectiveness of the weapons—as difficult as this is to comprehend— is less important than the adversary's perception of the likelihood that they will actually be used...
...However, the accuracy even of U.S...
...The issues are often far simpler than the technical jargon that surrounds them...
...Perhaps the most compact and compelling of these studies appeared as an article in the 1976 Annual Review of Nuclear Science and was written by J. Carson Mark, then director of the Division of Theoretical Physics at the Los .Alamos Scientific Laboratory...
...However, the debris cloud when fully developed would overcast all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, as well as the Bronx on the mainland...
...A point made most forcefully in Herbert York, Race to Oblivion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970...
...government, one group relying upon subjective judgments of human and political behavior to argue the implausibility of a Soviet attack, the other looking only at the worst-case "facts...
...In the real world of real political leaders— whether here or in the Soviet Union—a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder...
...The limited test-ban treaty led to a sharp increase in (underground) nuclear tests...
...So the decisions that have marked the strategic arms race have been made with little democratic input or reaction...
...In West Germany, the publication in a popular magazine of the locations of U.S...
...it is easy to assume that even if a large technical organization doesn't know what it is doing, its mistakes must be of a type too subtle for a non-expert to detect...
...And when we move into the nuclear world, I would go further and submit that military chiefs, who by convention are the official advisers on national security, merely serve as a channel through which the men in the laboratories transmit their views...
...At the root of the current debate there is, I believe, this division: ordinary citizens, insofar as they are engaged, mostly believe that nuclear weapons can never rationally be used...
...Out to 5 miles almost all buildings would have been destroyed, or suffered considerable damage, and most of the occupants would have been injured—many fatally...
...It has provoked the development of intercontinental and submarinelaunched ballistic missiles and the development of a wide array of battlefield nuclear weapons...
...They produce technical reports that often are not read at all, in which the authors remain anonymous, and where there is, in striking contrast to serious scientific work, little survival value in being right, little stigma in being wrong...
...It is a view that has led in two directions: first, to the demand for less vulnerable basing of landbased missiles (such as the ill-fated MX system proposed by the Carter administration...
...Congress, 1979...
...1,730 tons on Osaka on March 13...
...In the next few paragraphs I sketch a summary of Mark's analysis...
...6; also William Kincade, "Missile Vulnerability Reconsidered," and Kosta Tsipis, "Precision and Accuracy," both in Arms Control Today, May 1981...
...10-11...
...51-87...
...over 2,000 tons on Nuremberg on February 20 and 1,800 tons on February 21...
...Furthermore, since Soviet ICBM flight-testing is done west to east, from European Russia to Kamchatka, Soviet planners must worry about a variety of systemic errors in the model of the atmosphere, magnetic drift due to unknown electronic charges, or other uncorrected and unforeseen anomalies that would affect the path of missiles shot north over the pole...
...In all the strategic literature, there is virtually nothing on what a less hostile world might look like...
...Even if one grants the vulnerability of U.S...
...and, given a new missile, a new system within which it has to fit...
...In retaliation, the U.S...
...In an analysis of PD59 presented in Aviation Week, the widely read journal of the defense industry, an unnamed high U.S...
...attack Soviet cities for fear of retaliation against U.S...
...The worst cases that have bureaucratic power appear to be those that can be ameliorated only by new and expanded weapons systems, and that can be confounded mainly by appeals to the humanity or common sense of the enemy, never by hard evidence...
...15 "US—USSR Strategic Policies," Hearings before the Subcommittee on Arms Control, International Law, and Organization of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, March 4, 1974, p. 19...
...Indeed, with this scenario clearly understood, the Soviets would not actually have to undertake the attack in the first place to achieve their aims...
...Second, the U.S...
...As pictured, both Manhattan and Long Island, with their 8.5 million inhabitants, escaped with very little direct damage...
...Within the hour fallout would begin to arrive over most of this area...
...There are, in short, many extreme and dangerous contingencies of varying degrees of plausibility to guard against, and how one orders these dangers is crucial to strategic policy...
...As the number of warheads in the U.S...
...urban-industrial centers is commonly estimated to kill 100 million persons...
...There have in recent years been a few efforts to convey clearly to the public the effects of these weapons, notably by the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S...
...ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history, and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable...
...Nuclear strategy thus becomes an exploration of the enemy's mind and soul, requiring still more arcane knowledge and turning weapons debates into an inquiry into the psychology and character of the Soviet leadership...
...The March 9 raid on Tokyo killed over 80,000 civilians...
...Senate, 96th Congress, 2nd Session, on Presidential Directive 59, September 16, 1980, p. 38...
...The worst-case strategists cannot be permitted to throw out political judgment...
...strategists that effective deterrence against a Soviet attack cannot be based solely on the capacity to inflict unacceptable damage in retaliation, and therefore that the vulnerability of U.S...
...It gives to small and medium-sized countries the potential to develop a destructive capacity far beyond that expended by all countries during World War II...
...We seek to deter any adversary from any course of action that could lead to general nuclear war...
...For most citizens and policy-makers, it is not a casual view of nuclear war that dulls judgment so much as it is the abstractness of the whole idea...
...But U.S...
...They are happy to construct elaborate strategic embroidery about the concept that nuclear wars can actually be fought without assuming individual responsibility for the costs and risks of that path...
...Soviet missile accuracies may also be determined through direct monitoring of Soviet missile flight tests...
...Lord Zuckerman, who has been in a position to understand the uses of technical arguments in nuclear debates, has noted: The longer term view of the top advisers—that the arms race feeds itself, that there is no technical solution to the problem of defense against nuclear weapons—that view is too difficult to put across, strangely, I believe, not because it sounds soft and defeatist, but because it is too simple and too logical, and because the basic facts have become submerged in a sea of acronyms and numbers, a sea of MIRVs, of particle beams, of "throw-weights," and so on.' Nevertheless, there are technical questions that one has to get straight if one is to think sensibly about the arms race, and this imposes a special obligation on scientists—above all, scientists not beholden to the defense industry— to inform themselves and then the public...
...9-10, 13...
...In an instructive instance of this, in March 1974, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger commented at a Senate hearing about the aftermath of a full Soviet attack on all U.S...
...capacity to fight a limited nuclear war that "no course of aggression by them that led to use of nuclear weapons—on any scale of attack and at any stage of conflict—could lead to victory, however they may define victory...
...A Soviet attack aimed only at U.S...
...missile silos to withstand nuclear explosions, or even with the operation of the U.S...
...And he can inspect the results—whether roads or power stations—with his own eyes...
...and if a new warhead, then a new missile...
...The abstractions of nuclear deterrence suddenly became concrete...
...Is it possible for the public to impose its common sense—to challenge the technical and doctrinal expertise of the high priests of nuclear theory...
...Thermonuclear weapons today allow another factor of 1,000 in the explosive yield contained in a single package, so that many warheads in the arsenals of the nuclear powers contain over 1 million times the yield of the great one-ton bombs of World War II...
...strategic forces (which include 46 SAC bases...
...would not wait for all the Soviet warheads to strike before launching some of its own missiles.6 In short, numerous detailed and specific assumptions, tied to a relatively few actual observations, are packed into the finding that U.S...
...Arms Control Today, February 1981...
...This is one reason why it is so important that the wider technical community, and the public more generally, participate in defense debates...
...The root common sense of most citizens is that nuclear war can never make political or moral sense but that, nevertheless, we have to threaten retaliation in kind, even including nuclear destruction of cities...
...they didn't want the things near their homes...
...And this is all surrounded by a razzmatazz of strategic theories and fanciful scenarios that, although mostly simple-minded and perhaps initially rationalizations of new technologies, soon begin to develop a reality of their own...
...military forces, and be a wall against nuclear coercion of, or attack on, our friends and allies...
...Shattering decisions would be called for...
...there is no picture of a world other than Notes The Gallup Poll, Released Princeton, N.J., August 2, 1981...
...Lord Zuckerman, "Science Advisers, Scientific Advisers, and Nuclear Weapons," Proceedings, the American Philosophical Society, vol...
...strategic targeting policy that has been evolving over the past decade, directs military planners to develop detailed targeting options for the use of strategic forces in limited nuclear strikes...
...As crises impended, no doubt, the horror of nuclear destruction would at last be propelled into public consciousness...
...In Aviation Week, for example, a nuclear weapons laboratory official is quoted as worrying about the amount of plutonium available for weapons: "There is a sufficient amount in the stockpile and in the projected supply for MX, but after we go through MX, Trident 2 warheads and cruise missile warheads, then we are in a bind...
...344-80...
...Like the adults in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, when the Emperor appears to be naked, we tend to assume that the problem is with our own eyes...
...But we cannot rely on these experts either...
...And aside from vulnerability, other grim futures can be constructed: for example, computer failures leading to a nuclear exchange by accident, unauthorized conspiracies to launch nuclear weapons (one missile-carrying submarine contains enough warheads to destroy over a hundred cities), or a preemptive attack during a time of crisis when one side mistakenly believes the other about to attack...
...The men in the nuclear weapons laboratories of both sides have succeeded in creating a world with an irrational foundation, on which a new set of political realities has in turn had to be built...
...In the inner half of this ring many streets would be blocked with wreckage and overturned vehicles...
...inventory has expanded and their accuracy become finer, plausible targets and uses for these weapons had to be dreamed up...
...battle deaths (3/4 million) in all wars from the American Revolution through Vietnam...
...They mostly talk to one another and read each other's studies...
...But what is negotiable...
...Nevertheless, this finding of a theoretical vulnerability flowing from extrapolations of Soviet missile accuracies has had a mesmerizing effect on recent administrations...
...Nor could the U.S...
...If these warheads can be relied on to land within about 300-400 feet of their targets on average, then a few thousand Soviet warheads could destroy almost all of the U.S...
...What is striking is how little these different concepts of nuclear use have been addressed by the public...
...Even near the outer part of this ring persons standing in the open, when struck by the blast wave sweeping out from the explosion, would be bodily impelled at such a velocity that collision with a wall or merely tumbling in the street would be extremely hazardous...
...I still think it vital to our own understanding of what it is we are about that we not fall into the error of initiating, or planning to initiate, the employment of these weapons and concepts, thus hypnotizing ourselves into the belief that they may ultimately serve some positive national purpose...
...The crucial question then becomes the accuracy of each individually targetable Soviet warhead...
...The alternative to nuclear-war–fighting doctrines is what I have called the common sense of the public, that nuclear weapons not be considered for any role whatever except possibly a measured repayment in kind: a strategy of minimal deterrence...
...could not strike the Soviet nuclear forces because our seabased missiles are not sufficiently accurate and our bombers too slow...
...that is, that the U.S...
...Deterrence of nuclear attack, however, is not the only reason that notions of nuclear-war fighting have gained such a grip on the imagination of experts in recent days...
...McGeorge Bundy, "To Cap the Volcano," Foreign Affairs, October 1969, pp...
...reach backward beyond the frontiers of Western civilization, to the concepts of warfare which were once familiar to the Asiatic hordes...
...Is it "prudent" to think otherwise...
...The questions of accuracy and vulnerability have been discussed recently in several places...
...By emphasizing options other than massive attacks on the Soviet industrial base, it tries to increase the credibility of nuclear deterrence, while at the same time preserving the specter of all-out nuclear war as the "likely" outcome of any limited nuclear war "through a series of escalatory steps" (Harold Brown's phrase...
...It carried an explosive yield over 1,000 times that of the largest ordinance...
...This expansive view of deterrence requires "greater attention to how a nuclear war would actually be fought by both sides if deterrence fails...
...The number and radii of destruction of Soviet warheads that could in principle be used to attack these missiles can be estimated...
...This can be done...
...The choice that the U.S...
...He learns to take decisions within the limits of the resources at his disposal...
...almost 5,000 tons on Essen on March 11, and on Dortmund on March 12...
...At present, the U.S...
...Nor could a Soviet planner confidently assume that during a coordinated, virtually simultaneous, attack on the entire U.S...
...PD59 directs that these weapons and targets be matched in a variety of attack options or packages, some highly selective, some not, among which the authorities carrying out an attack can choose...
...and the Soviet Union to give up the idea that nuclear weapons can be used for purposes beyond deterrence...
...On Long Island it would first appear and be most intense in the region where all the bridges are located...
...missiles (the U.S...
...1,000 Minutemen silos located in six fields in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Missouri...
...We do not want to think of the weapons used either against us or by us...
...Through such sophisticated tightrope walking, it has turned the apparently simple deterrent idea of "repayment in kind" into a doctrine of nuclear-war fighting...
...Nevertheless, this scenario and others like it have persuaded many U.S...
...This is accomplished by U.S...
...These times of public intervention were all marked by the sense of ordinary men and women that they were going to be affected personally—fallout in the air, nuclear weapons in the suburbs, impact on water and land...
...Why were these technical judgments so compelling...
...And it would force us to think about where we want to end up, how far we are willing to relinquish the nuclear genie...
...The U.S...
...It happened again in the outcry against basing the MX system in the valleys of Utah and Nevada...
...the end of the MX-basing scheme for Utah and Nevada may lead to a still more provocative and dangerous deployment of the MX missile in fixed silos...
...triad...
...In consequence, the internal 184 politics of the strategic arms race has remained the prisoner of its technology....s The momentum of the arms race has been (momentarily) checked only when the public became involved in a direct and decisive way...
...In such an endeavor, both the scientists and the public may sometimes be hampered by not having access to security data...
...There is often no effective peer review in the bowels of the great technical bureaucracies, and this explains why the enormous resources available to them can so often 187 be misused...
...For example, at one point in the 1960s, when nuclear test bans were being debated, a few persons in the U.S...
...And indeed, the worst-case pessimists in such debates have one unanswerable argument— that, if they think a Soviet attack possible, imagine what their counterparts in the Soviet Union might think...
...Finally, it is clear that nuclear-war fighting doctrines have grown from an unwillingness by both the U.S...
...Is this possible...
...The worst case (and, indeed, its opposite, the wishful case) derive their force from treating technical issues as if they were locked within a black box...
...Almost all persons in the open would have been killed, or have suffered fatal injuries—from flash burns, being thrown about, or being hit with flying or falling objects...
...As long as this idea remains buried —as long as we are not forced to think of the anxiety, anguish, and terror of nuclear survivors— we can pretend that limited nuclear war is possible...
...The fateful impact of nuclear energy was that it enabled the explosive yields of these massive attacks to be achieved in a single weapon...
...Thus PD59 is in one respect a response to the nightmare scenario sketched earlier...
...But this scenario really is a far-fetched concoction...
...Only rarely will the public (or Congress) address the actual merits of a weapons system or argue about what the weapons are supposed to be for...
...much less of answering, "This much and no more...
...official was quoted to observe: "The overriding issue was and still is, do you reject nuclear war fighting capability as absurd or do you try to cope with it...
...They are in an unreal world...
...The targets, according to Defense Department testimony, have been divided into four major categories covering about 40,000 potential installations: 188 Soviet nuclear forces such as ICBM sites and submarine bases...
...strategic operational plan—causing damage to the Soviet Union commensurate with that suffered by the U.S...
...I will try to illustrate this through a continuation of the saga of missile vulnerability...
...conventional military forces, including supply depots, marshaling points, air fields, etc...
...In the race to be sure that there is no "options gap" and to match the adversary at all levels of conflict in all conditions of limited nuclear war, it is difficult to see any end...
...The weapons of mass destruction...
...land-based missiles, notwithstanding the strength of the sea and air components of the U.S...
...Experts and Technology HOW DO THE EXPERTS weave their spells...
...52 Titan silos located in bases in Arizona, Arkansas, and Kansas...
...It is highly implausible that the Soviets should ever consider with confidence that a first strike against U.S...
...This seems to me a fair assessment...
...and second, to the insistence that deterrence requires that the U.S...
...And—an important point neglected by the purveyors of first-strike imagery—it permits so many means of delivery, including clandestine delivery by suitcases, packages, etc., that no country can ever again be immune from nuclear devastation no matter how elaborate and sophisticated its first-strike offensive forces and its ballistic missile and air defenses...
...It happened later in a crucial prelude to SALT I when citizens in several large cities that were to be defended by ABM systems rose up against the systems...
...Out to one and one-half miles the fireball, which would have stopped growing at about that radius, would bathe the surface in an atmosphere of incandescent air with temperatures of a few thousand degrees centigrade for the first 15 seconds or so until it started to rise clear of the ground...
...The Mormon Church, for example, which opposed the MX on many parochial grounds, noted finally the irony that the area in which the Mormons intended to "establish a base from which to carry the gospel of peace" had been selected for a "mammoth weapons system potentially capable of destroying much of civilization...
...technical advances, one way is to project for the Soviet Union accuracies that it is believed the U.S...
...There were by comparison 70,000 fatalities in Hiroshima, 40,000 in Nagasaki...
...government and weapons laboratories came to realize that our missile guidance systems might be vulnerable to radiation from very high-altitude bursts...
...3 And so the experts have slowly moved from thinking about the hypothetical uses of nuclear weapons to thinking that the weapons can actually be used...
...Unfortunately, these protests have been too narrowly cast...
...has continually to make has never been put more clearly than by George Kennan in 1950: Here the crucial question is: Are we to rely upon weapons of mass destruction as an integral and vitally important component of our military strength, which we would expect to employ deliberately, immediately, and unhesitatingly in the event that we become involved in a military conflict with the Soviet Union: Or are we to retain such weapons in our national arsenal only 189 as a deterrent to the use of similar weapons against ourselves or our allies and as a possible means of retaliation in case they are used...
...command and control network, all issues central to missile vulnerability...
...4 McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser under President Kennedy and President Johnson, made the same point in a slightly different way: . . . There is an enormous gulf between what political leaders really think about nuclear weapons and what is assumed in complex calculations of relative "advantage" in simulated strategic warfare...
...But in regard to nuclear weapons, the radical ignorance of the citizens is impossible for them to ignore...
...land-based launchers...
...The vulnerability of urban centers to mass destruction from the air did not begin at Hiroshima...
...In general, defense experts are not driven to get even the technical facts straight or to put them in as broad and sensible a context as possible...
...Over much of this area the 96-hour exposure would exceed 3,000 r. To avoid radiation injury with serious early effects, a person must keep his total exposure during any period as short as a few days below 150 or 200 r. . .. At standard rates, among the 7 million persons huddled in shelters on Long Island, there would be one birth every 41/2 minutes, and from cardiovascular causes alone, one death or ominous attack every 15 minutes...
...Even within this restricted view of nuclear weapons, there are many possible emphases, for example, a nofirstuse policy, a city-avoidance policy, and so on...
...And it is immoral to make threats of that kind'"—also, I believe, makes the public want to look away from the reality of nuclear weapons...
...and economic and industrial targets, such as defense factories, petroleum refineries, electric generating plants, coal and steel plants...
...land-based force would be launched on warning...
...See also York, Race to Oblivion, pp...
...In about 5 or 6 hours it would have moved off to the east, but by that time enough fallout would have accumulated on Manhattan and the whole of Long Island to provide a radiation exposure greater than 1,000 r [a fatal dose] in the 96-hour period following the explosion...
...With a portion of their own ICBM forces, the Soviets could (the scenario assumes) destroy most of the U.S...
...Since for many strategic weapons technologies— nuclear submarines, sub-launched ballistic missiles, and multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles—the Soviets have eventually matched very sophisticated U.S...
...has approximately 10,000 independently targetable warheads available for strategic attack...
...policy, not that nuclear weapons cannot be used deliberately as an element of broader deterrence" (i.e., deterrence against conventional attacks...
...But perhaps most important, after such a "limited" attack with thousands of nuclear warheads causing untold millions of casualties, it is absurd to suppose that Soviet planners could count on a cool decision by the U.S...
...Though some hundreds of thousands of tons of the displaced material would have been vaporized and incorporated into the rising cloud, most of it would have been thrown into a ridge extending to a radius of about half a mile and having a maximum height of about 175 feet (14 stories...
...can achieve...
...It is entirely possible that war may be waged against us again, as it has been waged against us and other nations within our time, under these concepts and by these weapons...
...command posts and communication facilities...
...Congress," and by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, a public interest group founded with the intent to analyze and describe in detail the medical consequences of nuclear war...
...At best, through careful observation of missile flight tests, an accuracy over the test trajectory can be estimated...
...From this picture of a "window of vulnerability" grew the elaborate shell game, in which 200 large (MX) missiles would be deployed amidst 4,600 concrete shelters, embraced by the Carter administration...
...The potential citizen-critic is further disarmed by the fact that the weapons policies of one's own country are hostage to those of the enemy's...
...United States Military Posture for FY 1982, Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1981, p. 76...
...Most of us have not had to take a position on nuclear weapons, to define our own individual responsibility...
...land-based missiles must be taken seriously...
...Buber's reply was that the appeals have failed to state what one's individual responsibility is...
...Of course, many considerably "richer" targets—of larger population density— could easily be found...
...We have sleepwalked from decision to decision with no clarity about what nuclear weapons are for and how they are to be used: Kennan's image is "like men in a dream, like lemmings headed for the sea, like the children of Hamelin marching blindly along behind their pied piper...
...Whether these possibilities are made more or less likely by planning to forestall the conventional worst case of a premeditated Soviet attack is usually not addressed...
...124, no...
...This common sense of the nuclear age, however, has never been fully accepted by the nuclear powers...
...There, in a series of rings around the point of burst, particular effects would have resulted in various kinds and degrees of damage...
...Those most worried about "windows of vulnerability" appear seldom to concern themselves with the reliability of U.S...
...183 The experts who have made the decisions— the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the stationing of ballistic-missile nuclear submarines in the deep ocean, the development of multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs), the stationing in Europe of thousands of nuclear artillery shells and other short-range nuclear weapons, the development of high-accuracy guidance packages, the proposed deployment in Europe of cruise missiles and medium-range ballistic missiles— have of course done so under many of the same drawbacks that have excluded the public: lack of relevant experience, uncertainty and fear of what the Soviets may be scheming, and, simply, the awesomeness of the weapons...
...In his 1980 State-of-the-Union speech, President Carter sought to reassure Congress and the American people by reminding them that just one U.S...
...missile-firing submarine could "destroy every large and medium-sized city in the Soviet Union...
...This happened, for example, at the time of the limited test-ban treaty—the product, in part, of widespread anxiety about radioactive fallout...
...cities, which had hitherto been spared...
...So outsiders may sometimes not have the full story and insiders may be unable to put the full truth before the public.' This, however, is far from an argument that scientists outside the defense bureaucracy should never challenge the experts...
...The number of fatalities in this phase of this single engagement could exceed the number of U.S...
...weapons sites set off a storm of protest against the government's policies...
...First, for reasons already suggested, Soviet planners could never be confident that all U.S...
...One should not be too modest...
...It is his business to appreciate what the public wants...
...The U.S., for example, has consistently threatened to use nuclear weapons to repel a conventional invasion of Western Europe and has steadfastly refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons in the Persian Gulf—why not keep the enemy guessing...
...Even those who believe there will be nuclear war in the next few years carry on with business as usual...
...bombers and missile-firing submarines (a question I will examine presently...
...Nuclear War Strategy," Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S...
...How Viable...
...Within the logic of our current expert view of nuclear weapons, we have been incapable of asking, "How much is enough...
...The nightmare scenario central to the vulnerability logic, for example, depends upon the view that the Soviet first strike against U.S...
...This too is the realm of the expert...
...The vulnerability of the U.S...
...The quest for nuclear-war fighting options also has the attraction of providing justification for all kinds of new weapons systems...
...They can assume that the loss of dozens of great cities is somehow a real choice for sane men...
...land-based missiles to a Soviet first strike, this would not appear particularly worrisome so long as the United States could rely on submarines and strategic bombers to inflict massive damage in the Soviet Union in retaliation...
...The scenario imagines a "limited" Soviet attack on all U.S...
...Readable starting points are James Fallows, National Defense (New York: Random House, 1981), chap...
...the ABM treaty and SALT I led to a dangerous expansion of strategic offensive forces by both the United States and the Soviet Union...
...ICBMs could be achieved, but can one be quite sure that some Soviet planner wouldn't whisper the possibility to the Soviet leadership...
...And strategic forces, in conjunction with theater nuclear forces, must contribute to deterrence of conventional aggression as well...
...Our present policies appear to 193 assume a never-ending nuclear arms race...
...missiles is not so simply determined...
...191 A feature of the Carson Mark analysis, mentioned on page 191, is a careful, dry, and ultimately shattering account of the effects a 15 MT explosion would have on the surface a few miles west of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and approximately 20 miles south of lower Manhattan: Gruesome disaster would have struck in New Jersey...
...forces...
...The experts and insiders who have pioneered new paths within the government—the designers of the SALT agreements, for example— are also hobbled by being forced not to stray far from the conventional wisdom as the price of being listened to in the corridors of power...
...We enter here the land of "worst case...
...For successful deterrence requires credibility...
...land-based missiles would in fact be "limited"—that relatively few persons would be killed...
...The Hiroshima bomb, with an explosive energy equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, produced damage equivalent to the greatest thousand-plane raids of World War II...
...If the momentum of the nuclear arms race is ever to be checked, the public will have to become more deeply and consistently involved than in the past, more willing to examine the specific issues, and more passionate...
...and political leaders are willing to go along or perhaps better are carried along with the experts' bluff...
...It is important that the public look into the black box to understand how plausible and how extreme are the technical conclusions drawn from it...
Vol. 29 • April 1982 • No. 2
