OFF WITH THEIR HEADS

...As Brzezinski learned, decapitating a nation's political leadership can be surprisingly easy...

...Brzezinski's reaction meant that Annex C was doomed...

...He looked so surprised...

...When sticky questions arose, Jimmy Carter was known to say, "Clear it with Brzezinski," or, "Has Brzezinski seen this...

...Young Brzezinski studied at Harvard, taught there, and eventually set up his own research institute on Soviet affairs at Columbia University...

...We wanted a forwardlooking Democratic governor who would be congenial to the Trilateral perspective...

...The idea, in other words, was to win...

...The Politburo, Secretariat, and 300-member Central Committee had always been prime targets, and in the 1960s the National Security Agency had begun an exhaustive effort to locate and target every regional Communist Party headquarters in the Soviet Union...

...A member of the White House security staff delivered a curt, competent briefing on the elaborate measures that had been planned to safeguard the President and his staff and evacuate them by helicopter in case of nuclear war...

...He reached for the phone and could hardly speak coherently when he demanded that the helicopter immediately come for a drill...

...A protege of David Rockefeller (much as Henry Kissinger was a protege of Nelson Rockefeller), Brzezinski rose rapidly within national-security circles...

...The President's adviser didn't care about killing Ukrainians or Bulgarians...

...On the return flight, after an embarrassing series of gaffes by the national-security staff, Brzezinski's helicopter limped back to the White House...

...A few months later, despite the President's proposal, the Chiefs bluntly reaffirmed the true strategy of the United States, nuclear-war fighting: "U.S...

...PD-59 represented a fundamental shift in U.S...

...The vulnerability of national command structures to decapitation was amply demonstrated on January 28, 1977...

...Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO, and T.A...

...In his book, Power and Principle, Brzezinski wrote: "I first met Jimmy Carter at one of the early meetings of the Trilateral Commission, which I directed in the early 1970s...

...Carter, a deeply religious man who always felt uncomfortable with nuclear weapons, traveled a long and tortuous road from proposing 200 warheads as minimum deterrence at the beginning of his Administration to embracing the full scope of first strike and decapitation...

...history, the chief purpose of nuclear weapons had always been to achieve superiority—to enforce a "policy of calculated and gradual coercion...

...nuclear policy...

...In a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Carter solemnly recommended that they slash the U.S...

...nuclear policy, and in some sense it never had been...

...He began by requesting a briefing on how the President and his staff would be evacuated in the event of nuclear war...

...To the war-fighters dominating four decades of U.S...

...When Jimmy Carter entered the White House in January 1977, he was determined to slice through decades of impasse on arms control...

...As a Presidential candidate in November 1976, Carter had declared, "There would be no possibility under the sun that a first-strike capability would be adequate in preventing the mass destruction of the country that initiated the strike...

...It didn't begin to answer the crucial quesMichio Kaku is a professor of nuclear physics at the City University of New York...

...Hedley Donovan, editor-in-chief of Time, Inc...

...But like any newly recruited member of an old club, Carter had to pass through a rugged initiation...

...With funding from Rockefeller, he founded the Trilateral Commission and helped shape its policies—particularly with respect to nuclear warfare...

...This article is adapted from their book, "To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret War Plans," published in December by South End Press...

...There is a physical resemblance...

...That decision ultimately contributed to the emergence of Presidential Directive 59, the landmark 1980 document in which the Carter Administration called for aggressive preparations to fight a nuclear war...

...nuclear strategy...

...Right now...

...The Carter Administration had just assumed office, and Brzezinski had a keen interest in testing and upgrading the command-and-control structure...

...nuclear stockpile down to 200 warheads...

...Carter had blundered in taking the idea of deterrence at face value...

...There is no way to prevent a massive retaliatory strike because, for all practical purposes, atomic subs are invulnerable...

...The national security adviser's crisp professionalism and aggressive anti-Soviet stance set him apart from the Georgian good of boys on Carter's staff, who soon began calling Brzezinski "Woody Woodpecker...

...It directed the armed forces to prepare for a variety of nuclear confrontations, including fighting both limited and protracted nuclear war and executing "decapitating" strikes on the Soviet leadership and command structure...

...Although he had squeaked into office by a perilously thin margin, he was convinced that he had a mandate to do something about the arms race...

...His father, a Polish diplomat who served in Canada during World War II, had decided when the communists came to power that there was no future in Poland for a person of his rank and status...

...The poor fellow's eyes...

...A staff member is conducting a briefing on Annex C of PRM 10...

...He spent time with Carter, talked to him, sent him books and articles, educated him...

...Philip Caldwell, chairman of the board of Ford Motor Company...

...I remember discussing his membership with my two principal Trilateral Commission colleagues, Gerard Smith and George Franklin...

...national-security establishment...

...He was one of the anticommunist emigres from Eastern Europe who are united by a deep-seated hatred of the Russians, and who command influence wholly disproportionate to their numbers...

...Daniel Axelrod is an associate professor of physics at the University of Michigan...

...The Chiefs, who had spent their entire professional lives painstakingly building the U.S...

...Brzezinski's disapproval meant Annex C would have to be scrapped and a new targeting plan devised...

...By the time he left office, however, he had authorized the greatest commitment to nuclear war-fighting of any President...

...Patiently, the briefer explains that the war plans do not directly target "population per se," but that some 113 million Russians would die anyway...

...The Soviet transportation system is miserably inadequate, the briefer notes, and millions of Russians live in close proximity to the military installations targeted in Annex C. "No, no," says the impatient Brzezinski, "I mean Russian Russians...

...Annex C is the National Targeting Policy Review, which earmarks 25,000 targets in the Soviet Union for obliteration in the next war...

...But deterring a Soviet nuclear attack was not the sole objective of U.S...

...The Trilateral Commission was to be an alternative network representing the "liberal" wing of the Eastern Establishment...

...In fact, the United States was well on its way toward building the weapons which would give it a credible first-strike capability...

...The briefer is caught off guard...

...It was the Russians who ran the Soviet Union, who commanded its missile force—and who were to be targeted so that the Soviet Union could eventually be broken up into small, autonomous republics free of Great Russian domination...

...Wilson, chairman of the board of Boeing...

...stockpile could certainly be cut back to 200...

...practically popped," Brzezinski later recalled...

...Brzezinski came from a tightly knit subculture within the U.S...

...Brzezinski demanded a full-scale evacuation—immediately...

...He met the Trilateralists who would eventually staff his entire Administration and shape its nuclear policy—such powerful and influential men as Cyrus Vance...

...One of them noted that Jimmy Carter, the newly elected governor of Georgia, courageous on civil rights and reportedly a bright and upcoming Democrat, was interested in developing trade relations between his state of Georgia and the Common Market and Japan...

...arsenal to almost 30,000 warheads, were left speechless...

...It took roughly two-and-a-half times as long to arrive as it was supposed to," Brzezinski groaned, but the worst was still to come: White House security guards, sighting an unauthorized helicopter approaching, ordered an emergency alert, scrambled into position, and prepared to shoot down the potentially hostile craft with automatic weapons...

...Harold Brown of Cal Tech and the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab, and, of course, Brzezinski...

...If the only purpose of nuclear weapons was to deter the enemy, and if 200 warheads were enough to send the Soviet Union hurtling back to When Jimmy Carter entered the White House, he told his Joint Chiefs of Staff to slash the U.S...

...Indeed, scientists had pointed out for years that 200 warheads would suffice if deterrence were our national policy...

...off BY MICHIO KAKU AND DANIEL AXELROD It is August 1977, and Zbigniew Brze-zinski, President Carter's national security adviser, is chairing a high-level meeting on a top-secret matter: the Carter Administration's plans for fighting World War III, as set forth in Presidential Review Memorandum 10...

...Yes, right now...

...Zbigniew Brzezinski clearly left his personal mark on the war policies of the Carter Administration...

...At the Trilateral Commission, Carter for the first time rubbed shoulders with the nation's most powerful inner core of movers and shakers—such Trilateralists as Arthur Taylor, president of CBS...

...nuclear stockpile down to 200 warheads...

...The evacuation team was on twenty-four-hour alert and could swing into action on a moment's notice, the briefer said...

...It smacked too much of preserving the stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union...

...Many of its senior members had been discredited or even disgraced by these twin debacles...

...Paul Warnke, a founder of the Trilateral Commission...

...it was the ethnic Russians (who make up about half of the Soviet population) who were the enemy...

...Even before PD-59 made decapitation a distinct rung on the ladder of nuclear escalation, the war-fighting planners had placed a premium on destroying the political leadership of the Soviet Union...

...The Council on Foreign Relations, which had long served as the nation's foreign-policy elite, had fallen into disarray and was racked by internal divisions after the Vietnam and Watergate fiascos...

...For the stunned briefer, Brzezinski's comment was "the voice of 600 years of Polish history," one observer wrote later...

...I then said, 'Well, he's obviously our man.' " Leslie Gelb of The New York Times wrote that Brzezinski "was the first guy in the Community to take [Carter] seriously...

...How Zbigniew Brzezinski hawked the doctrine of nuclear decapitation With Their Heads tion, How do you actually fight and win a nuclear war...

...Painfully he learned that deterring a Soviet attack was not the sole objective of U.S...

...nuclear strategy maintains military strength sufficient to deter attack, but also in the event deterrence fails, sufficient to provide a war-fighting capability to respond to a wide range of conflict in order to control escalation and terminate the war on terms acceptable to the United States...

...Painfully Carter learned—from Brzezinski, the Joint Chiefs, and his Trilateral colleagues who now staffed key foreign-policy posts in his Administration—that the rhetoric of "deterring the Soviets" was largely for public consumption...

...the year 1600, the U.S...

...Brzezinski does not like what he is hearing, and suddenly he shoots a question at the briefer: "Where are the criteria for killing Russians...

...There must be some misunderstanding, some failure on Brzezinski's part to grasp an elementary point...