ATTACK OF THE ATOMIC TIDAL WAVE

...well, sufficiently military...

...A million pounds of equipme.nt moving around a racetrack gives off noise, radiation, and about 30 other "signatures" that might make it easy for the Russians to pick the right shell...

...When you realize that the Tridents are easier to spot and easier to track than the Poseidon and Polaris subs we have used until now, it's not hard to understand the urgency of the Pentagon's desire to protect the other leg of the nuclear triad, the ICBMs...

...There was just one potential cloud on the military horizon, which is that Garwin and his allies had answers to the doubts the Pentagon was now raising...

...Then there's Lanchester's law...

...Comparison Shopping So it was that the small submarine came to be viewed as a threat by the Navy, the Air Force, and the Pentagon...

...In every technical and military respect~" declares Kostas Tsipas, an MIT physicist and Jason Group member, "the van Dorn effect is irrelevant to the small submarines...

...As for cost, the Air Force estimates a tidy $37 billion...

...coasts, then who needed the mammoth, globe-girdling Trident...

...The threat was a new weapon, superior in many ways to anything the Pentagon was building...

...Environmentalists are worried about damage to the 8,000 square miles of land that will be affected by the project, ranchers are worried about grazing access, and city fathers are concerned about schools and sewers for the 14,000 missile operators and their families...

...Most likely, they haven't found a way to catch a Trident yet-at least that's what the experts say-but it stands to reason that we are making the game a whole lot easier for them by having all our underwater nuclear eggs in twelve Trident baskets...

...Still, Hatfield was a member of the Appropriations Committee, through which any money for the racetrack would have to pass...

...It was the alternative that Rickover had vetoed-the small submarine...

...They have almost no chance if they come from Mark Hatfield, who is not on the Armed Services Committee, and who is about as close as you'll get in the U.S...

...Under Rickover's guiding hand, each generation of subs got bigger, fancier, and fewer...

...Garwin is regarded as a little quirky by the military establishment...

...To an even greater extent than the Air Force, the Navy had already set its course in nuclear warfarethe Trident...

...The third leg of the triad consists of long-range bombers, mostly B-52s...

...So among the admirals the little sub sank as if it had screen doors...

...And once you've decided to build your ship around a nuclear power plant, Rickover argued to a receptive Congress, you might as well go for economies of scale and load the thing to the gunwales...

...Senate to a genuine pacifist...

...Ever since America plunged into the nuclear sub business, Russia has invested a huge amount of basic research on ways of tracking down and destroying our subs...

...It's a game they win, because they can build warheads faster than we can build shelters, and while they don't have to shoot their warheads at the MX, we can't shoot our shelters at anything...

...They had, in fact, read the secret studies that Zeiberg revealed to the Post...

...In fact, he estimated that it would cost roughly half as much to have 100 little subs as to have 200 racetracks...

...From the Pentagon's point of view, Hatfield was a nearideal choice to be SUM champion...

...First came Nautilus, then Polaris and Poseidon, and finally the masterpiece of the Rickover mentality, a self-contained, 24-missile, 240-warhead submersible fortress the size of the Washington monument called the Trident...

...Instead, the Senate passed an amendment requiring the Air Force to keep its MX options open, which the Air Force has interpreted as meaning only land-based options...

...the contracts to build them got less competitive and more expensive...

...The Air Force knows these things...

...The project demands enough electricity for a new city of 180,000 people, and nobody yet knows where that is to come from either...

...In the Navy, SUM fared still worse, if that was possible...

...It was disconcerting to see Garn lecture Defense Secretary Harold Brown about the erosion of popular support for the racetrack, or to see Laxalt and Garn pledge, in a joint statement, "We are more determined than ever to find an alternative to the racetrack basing mode...

...The more Garwin and his think-tank colleagues thought about the alternatives to the Minuteman, the more one alternative began to look extremely attractive...

...The missile would have all the accuracy and firepower of the MX-it could, in fact, be the same missile-with an added virtue that no land-based sys'tem could hope to achieve: the ability to hide in the quarter-of-a-million miles of water close to our shores...

...In case the Russians get good at guessing, the system is also supposed to allow the missile, on its transporter, to "dash" from shelter to shelter even after the Russians have launched an attack...

...They would trot out arguments like Lanchester's Law, which holds that if you have twice as many weapons, they need only to be one fourth as effective...

...Arms control: For a project designed to accommodate the SALT II treaty (the shelter lids pop open for easy counting of missiles) the system is an arms controller's nightmare...

...Not counting its (current) $37-billion price tag, they include: • Resources: In a region perennially short of water, the military wants to dig deep wells and suck up 90 billion gallons over the next two decades-but the Pentagon is not sure that much water is there...

...It would simply turn over a submarine and destroy it," said Perry...

...You've got to be out of your mind...

...Everyone chuckled, and then Congress gave the Pentagon what it wanted...

...The proposallooked so promising that they chose to spend the next summer's session refinirig it...

...About 160 feet long, weighing 450 tons, and carrying a crew of 15, each vessel is one-fortieth the size of a Trident, and would cost around $30 million to build...

...The Air Force plans 200 missiles, chugging around 100 racetracks, connected by 10,000 miles of road, and occupying, by conservative estimate, about 8,000 square miles of land in the desert valleys of the American Southwest...

...Eventually they settled on the now-familiar "racetrack" system, in which each missile is to be tucked under the skirts of a huge metal shield-on-wheels and driven around a IS-mile oval of heavy-duty road, pulling up at a series of 23 hardened concrete shelters and secretly depositing the missile in one...

...This, coupled with the possibility of future technology-such as the "real time" surveillance of racetracks by satellite during a nuclear war-leads Garwin to assert flatly that "by the time the first MX missile is operational in a racetrack configuration, the racetrack will be regarded as more vulnerable than the Minuteman silos are now...

...The group then developed (on paper) the communications and guidance systems it would need...

...SUM Meets Irwin Allen And so the Pentagon, taking no chances, decided to act swiftly against the small sub threat...

...Where SUM was simple, the Air Force had proposed, and then discarded, a series of grandiose, complex schemes for making a land-based MX missile a moving target...

...Quietly at first, in closed-door briefings, defense officials began telling the appropriate committees about the van Dorn effect...

...Richard Garwin felt it was an "open question" whether the SUM system was superior to the Navy's Trident-open, because it had never been thoroughly studied...

...They had reckoned with that one last summer, when it was still a secret...

...One senator's aide, who had previously been interested in the sqlall submarines, shook his head and muttered, "It's sort of Buck Rogers, but that damn van Dorn effect has got to be reckoned with...

...At first, however, it didn't seem like much to worry over...

...But it was not an idea that ever held much sway with Admiral Hyman Rickover...

...Screen Doors By 1978, this issue of ICBM invulnerability was the hottest subject in the field of weapons research, and it was chosen as the topic for a three-week summer study session of about 40 academic scientists and Pentagon advisers known as the Jason Group...

...The Pentagon could count on reactions like the one I heard from a senator's defense adviser: "The racetrack is screwy...

...To guard against such detection, the Pentagon may have to cordon off thousands of extra square miles under tight security, which it has promised never to do...

...They were more skeptical this time, not so ready to accept a plan that would block off their land, drain their water, and disrupt their communities...

...Occasionally a member of these committees might propose an idea the Pentagon doesn't like and succeed in having it adopted-but such proposals stand little chance if they come from one of the liberal members of the committees, like Gary Hart...

...And even if you assumed that the subs were "vulnerable" during the time they crossed the shelf going to and from port, they could still spend enough time at sea on their two-week tours of duty to more than match the land-based MX in terms of invulnerability...

...Perry and Zeiberg, the Pentagon officials who made the March 25 attack on SUM, know them too...

...But Garwin points out that a Russian missile launched from an offshore submarine could hit the transporter (which "dashes" at 30 m.p.h...

...Later, when McKay, as chairman of the House Appropriations military construction subcommittee, decided a hearing was necessary to air the alternatives to the racetrack, the Pentagon decided to go public...

...Lying in wait under the seas, the submarines could survive any nuclear exchange-for the simple reason that they would be virtually impossible to find-and after the attack they could deliver their warheads to any point in the U.S.S.R...

...To over-simplify, they pointed out (a) that what the Soviets can hit in theory, they've never had to hit in practice and probably couldn't, and (b) they could not afford the risk that we'd empty our silos as soon as the attacking missiles appeared on our radar screens, a maneuver called "launch on warning" or "launch or lose...

...On defense matters, most senators defer to the "experts" on the committees governing military affairs...

...But he had little doubt that SUM stood up as an alternative to the racetrack MX...

...Vulnerability: The whole fuss is about "ICBM vulnerability," we're told...

...But the General Accounting Office says it is "an unresolved issue" whether the military can really hide its missiles in this shellgame arrangement...

...Listen, I've never had a contract yet to study something where I didn't know what the outcome was supposed to be...

...The official characterizes the Air Force's basic analysis like this: "Put some of our missiles underwater...

...But Garwin is an acknowledged genius in the field of weapons systems, and the Pentagon is willing to pay for his ideas, maintain his access to classified material, and tolerate his creative eccentricities...

...In the early seventies, the decision was made: where there were 41 missile-carrying submarines in service, America's nuclear deterrent would be packed into a dozen of these $1.65-billion monsters...

...And he was, as they say, doing his homework-collecting material from Garwin, mastering tongue-twisters like "prompt hard target kill capability...

...Over at the Pentagon, officials seemed as proud of their little revelation as if they had just bagged a brace of Soviet ICBMs...

...Congress was so impressed with the Russian threat, in fact, that it decreed the new missiles would somehow have to be made invulnerable...

...Soviet missiles were getting accurate enough to "theoretically" destroy the silos containing our Minuteman missiles...

...Among the group's members is an IBM physicist and Harvard professor named Richard Garwin...

...But not much...

...According to an Air Force official who was privy to ICBM planning at the highest levels, the SUM proposal was treated from the start as a nuisance...

...And the subs (with two missiles each) could be deployed two to three years sooner...

...There is, for example, the question of missile range...

...This great breaker, called the "van Dorn effect" (after the Defense Department scientist who discovered its potential), would destroy all vessels in its path and, incidentally, smash coastal cities into so much driftwood...

...Off the East Coast, this underlip of the North American continent juts out an average of 50 miles, and in some places up to 200 miles...

...before it had gotten even a quarter of the way around the racetrack...

...I can't tell you how big," a Pentagon PR man later confided in a hushed voice, "but it starts out at a height not unlike that of the Empire State Building...

...These men could normally be counted on as loyal supporters of Pentagon plans, and, indeed, they were firmly behind the MX missile itself...

...But if SALT II falls through, the Soviets can simply build many more warheads, in response to which the Pentagon plans to toss up more shelters, and so on in a wild game of nuclear leapfrog...

...At the end of the session, the Jason Group sent the Pentagon a secret paper on what they called th~ "water-based MX...

...The motion failed, but the vote was 15 to 9-too close for comfort, even if Hatfield's support was "soft" and his proposal got only II votes from the full Senate when the MX came up on the floor last November...

...But what else is there...

...Defense officials concede, for example-if pressed-that the van Dorn -effect only really applies to the continental shelf...

...The first sign of trouble came when Hatfield made a motion in the Appropriations Committee to strike the MX budget for the year and fund a full-scale study of SUM...

...They christened their baby SUM (for Shallow Underwater Mobile) and sent their study to the Pentagon, along with Garwin's arguments that SUM would be far cheaper, would have greater strategic value, and would create none of the environmental problems of the alternatives being considered by the Air Force...

...Unfortunately for the Pentagon, the Air Force's chosen ICBM strategy, the "racetrack" MX, is so awesomely flawed that even diehard hawks don't like it...

...As one lieutenant colonel in the Air Force MX public affairs office summed ~hem up: "Once you get into these small submarines, you have to tell me the . Navy's been doing the wrong thing for 30 years...

...There were, of course, those who questioned this widely publicized concept of "Minuteman vulnerability...

...The complex maintenance required by the Trident is the major reason why an estimated 50 percent of all Tridents will be out of commission at any given time (which means, remember, only six Tridents at sea)-yet the Pentagon applied the 50-percent figure to SUM's conventional subs, which can be expected to stay at sea for a far higher proportion of their time...

...says Michael McGuire, a British expert in maritime and strategic studies (and a small sub advocate), now at the Brookings Institution...

...Oh, there were studies," said a former defense official, now a consultant, who was involved in the Pentagon's handling of the issue, "And everyone was bullshit...

...Sub for a Hero The threat had been present for decades, ever since we began putting our nuclear missiles to sea in subs...

...Later, for some lawmakers, there was a film illustrating the tidal wave's effects with the scale models used to depict similar calamities in disaster movies...

...It is hard to know where to begin listing its problems...

...The Hawks Squawk These were troubling questions, all right, but not too troubling-because, as long as no one except the Jason Group was seriously proposing SUM as an alternative to the land-based MX, they might never have to be answered...

...When the tube is released, it bobs to the surface and fires, and the missile is steered to its target by a combination of satellite and on-shore guidance systems...

...ATTACK OF THE ATOMIC TIDAL WAVE Sighted S.U.M., Sank Same by Bill Keller On March 25, the Defense Department dramatically disclosed in public one of the ghastly secrets of modern nuclear strategy...

...William Perry, the Pentagon's undersecretary for research, and Seymour L. Zeiberg, deputy undersecretary for strategic systems, went before the McKay committee and testified, in graphic d,etail, how nuclear explosions in shallow water would ricochet off the ocean floor, creating the vast wave that would demolish any small vessel...

...But they are making no great efforts to correct Perry's testimony...

...The big advantage of longrange nuclear subs is their ability to maneuver close to their targets...

...The Jason Group wasn't convinced...

...As Garwin put it, more drily, in a recent paper, "organizations which derive most of their funds in contracts from the United States Air Force or United States Navy are reluctant to imperil their future by accepting modest study contracts whose success may expose to criticism or termination large programs important ·to their chief sponsors...

...It was an uncharacteristic performance for the Pentagon, not an organization famous for its dedication to the public's right to know the latest military secrets...

...To military laymen-and I am certainly one-the idea has an obvious simplicity and appeal that is almost irresistible...

...The logic of the missile-carrying subs had always seemed to lend itself to a philosophy of "small is beautiful," at least to a minority in the defense establishment...

...If the missile gets longer and longer in range, the submarine doesn't need much range at all, does it...

...it was cheaper, more effective, and invulnerable...

...The Jason Group picked out a small German submarine that could be modified for their purposes...

...The Air Force requested a bigger missile with more warheads, known as the MX, so that whatever survived a Soviet attack could deliver a more crushing counterpunch...

...The small sub did find one advocate, in Senator Mark Hatfield...

...About the only thing it had going for it were the tireless lobbying efforts of Garwin, and the disturbing fact that it can apparently do everything the MX and Trident can do, more effectively, at a fraction of the cost...

...He once proposed a cheap defense system for missile sites which involved simply blowing up trenches full of ball bearings and scrap metal in the face of _onrushing enemy missiles, sort of a Popular Mechanics Anti-Ballistic Missile...

...Surprisingly, many military supporters of the MX, including several whom I have interviewed, agree with this critique: no real military need for the MX, except to bolster America's sagging confidence...

...That meant nuclearpowered submarines...

...The van Dorn effect...

...It was the only sure way to eliminate what they perceived as a threat to America's two most expensive nuclear weapons-the Trident submarine and the land-based MX missile...

...The fact that small submarines are easier to hide (they present smaller profiles to enemy sonar) seemed to strengthen the case...

...With the Trident eating up a huge share of the Navy budget, nobody was going to propose another strategic submarine...

...Those alternatives did present quite a contrast to the Jason Group's thinking...

...It's expensive...

...But the same improve.ments in range and accuracy that allow the Russians to threaten our silos have been applied to our own weapons, to the point where the newest family of Trident missiles will be capable of hitting Moscow from San Francisco Bay...

...The idea was simple: take a fleet oflittle, diesel-powered, no-frills submarines-say 100 of them...

...Strap to either side a tube containing a missile...

...As a finishing touch, the Defense Department hinted at an uncirculated report on SUM that-had raised questions about its durability and cost...

...And in the fall of 1979, most of the Senate's "doves," resigned to the need to buy off the critics of SALT with whatever form of MX they wanted, weren't wasting much energy looking for practical alternatives...

...And their answer had been simple: The van Dorn effect only applies to the shallow waters of the continental shelf...

...If that doesn't work, of course, they still have other arguments in reserve...

...It was senators like Paul Laxalt of Nevada and Jake Garn of Utah, and representatives like Utah's Gunn McKay- prominent "hawks" from the Western states where the racetrack complex was to be built...

...If it is, much of it will be mixed with concrete (twice the amount poured into Hoover Dam) that is also in short supply...

...But, as the hearings wore on, it became clear that our top defense planners had come to believe they had little choice but to reveal the secret in all its terrifying details...

...Wilson dutifully reported this information to his readers the next day, in an article headlined "Pentagon Gives a Picture of Tidal Assault on Subs...

...This was no time to worry about the RussiansCongress was talking about building small submarines...

...The idea did not strike the Pentagon as...

...But it won't...

...And the van Dorn effect is still the first thing they throw at an inquiring reporter, or anyone else, who expresses some curiosity about SUM...

...Since the virtue of subs was that they were hard to track down, it followed that many small subs would be preferable to a few large ones...

...The residents of Utah and Nevada had believed the Pentagon once before, when it said there was no danger of radiation exposure from above-ground atomic ·tests in the area...

...Rickover wanted submarines that could range the world, fast and deep, staying submerged for long periods without the need to refuel...

...The Air Force wasn't about to hand over its prestigious leg of the sacred triad to the Navy...

...These groups will have ample opportunity to press their case in the courts-under the nine major and dozens of minor laws controlling federal land use-along with the Shoshone Indians who claim much of the land as their own...

...During a break in the hearings, Zeiberg confided to Washington Post reporter George C. Wilson that the Defense Nuclear Agency "had conducted exhaustive studies on underwater explosions, studies that the advocates of the coastal submarine did not know about...

...It's unpopular...

...Testifying before a House subcommittee, Pentagon officials revealed that an enemy could barrage our coastal waters with nuclear warheads timed to explode under the ocean, creating an immense tidal wave...

...It wasn't senators like Hatfield, or the chance that SUM might actually win a surprise vote...

...They were, however, feeling pressure from their constituents...

...The Pentagon's job was to figure out how...

...All that the small submarine needs to do to avoid Russian-made tidal waves is slip out beyond the continental shelf, where even if the Russians decided to sink their arsenal into American waters, they could not hope to destroy more than a fraction of the submarines...

...Meanwhile, as the Navy was committing itself t.o the Trident, in defiance of Lanchester's Law, the Air Force was running into problems with its leg of the nuclear "triad," the land-based ICBMs...

...But there was more danger ahead...

...When I talked with congressmen and their staffs after the tidal wave story had hit the papers, it was clear that the military'S gamble had worked...

...For example, the study assumes that the bases for SUM will cost as much as bases for the nuclear Trident, despite the fact that small diesel subs do not need the Trident's deepdraft locks or the elaborate facilities to refit its nuclear power plants...

...Off the West Coast, where coastal mountains plunge deep into the sea, there is hardly any shelf at all...

...Admiral Rickover told me in the 1960s that the Navy would never again build a nori-nuclear-powered submarine," Garwin recalls...

...The Air Force, which was making loud public noises about analyzing every possible alternative for the MX, had to give the Jason Group's plan some consideration...

...Troubling, indeed, for while by 1979 there were plenty of Navy officers who now wished the Trident program had never been started, none was ready to endorse an alternative that might sink the program in midstream...

...Still, none of these concerns would justify blocking the project if we needed it-if it really did remove the threat of Russian nuclear attack...

...In fact, the van Dorn effect was precisely the sort of secret you might expect the generals to want to keep, on the off chance the Soviets hadn't heard of it...

...Back in 1975, Senator John Culver, then a newcomer on the Armed Services Committee, listened to this argument about "psychological insurance" and suggested the Pentagon could save a hell of a lot of money by just hiring a good PR man...

...nor was it about to embark on a submarine program of its own...

...And then there was a more disturbing, unspoken thought: if SUM worked, if the MX missile really could be launched effectively from cheap, undetectable vessels lurking just off U.S...

...The point of having 4,600 shelters is that the Soviets would exhaust their arsenal in search of our missiles...

...As for the uncirculated study which purported to show that an effective SUM would cost as much as the racetrackGarwin had answers for that one too...