#23 MORT WANTS TO KNOW: George W.'s Wise Policy on Nuclear Weapons

 

Keeping Our Forces on Hair-Trigger Alert Is Dangerous and Stupid

Morton Mintz is a former chairman of the Fund for Investigative Journalism. He was a Washington Post reporter for nearly thirty years before departing in 1988.

Editor's Note: Before every presidential and congressional election, journalists should but often fail to ask candidates about a wide range of issues that powerfully affect us all -- our safety, our health, our pocketbooks, our very lives. To help improve press performance this time 'round, TomPaine.com commissioned Mort to ask the questions journalists have been neglecting. Click here to read Mort's earlier articles. This is his latest piece.

Question: There are hair-trigger alerts on the 2,000 or so nuclear warheads atop the intercontinental ballistic missiles targeted by Russia at the United States, on the 2,000 nuclear warheads on the ICBMs targeted by the U.S. at Russia, and on the approximately 1,000 nuclear warheads on the submarine-based missiles targeted by the two nations at each other. The 5,000 warheads have a combined destructive power equivalent to 100,000 times the power of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima.

Would you argue that a National Missile Defense would do more or less to safeguard the people of the U.S. -- and of the world -- from nuclear destruction than would working with the Russians to remove the hair-trigger from these missiles?

Background: Hair-trigger alert means this: The missiles are armed and fueled at all times. Their targets have been programmed by internal computers. They will launch on receipt of three computer-delivered messages. Launch crews -- on duty every second of every day -- will send the messages on receipt of a single computer-delivered command.

In a few minutes -- "two, at the most, if all would go well," says Bruce G. Blair, who has been acclaimed as the country's foremost authority on nuclear command and control -- Russia or the United States could launch missiles at the predetermined targets: Washington, New York; Moscow, St. Petersburg. The early-warning systems on which the launch crews rely would detect the missiles within minutes, causing the intended -- or accidental -- enemy to scramble to mount retaliatory strikes. "Within a half-hour there could be a nuclear war that would extinguish all of us," Blair declares. "It would be, basically, a nuclear war by check-list, by rote."

Blair described the possibility of a check-list nuclear war in a talk at the Aspen Institute in Colorado in July and in subsequent interviews. De-alerting being of supreme importance to the survival of the planet, it's worth pausing a moment to look at his credentials as an expert on U.S. and Russian security policies.

Blair served in the Air Force as a Minuteman ICBM launch control officer and as a support officer for the Strategic Command. He has a doctorate degree in operations research, was awarded a Russian Language Institute Fellowship at Yale, has studied the Russian military-industrial economy extensively, and taught security studies as a visiting professor at Yale and Princeton. In 1999, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his leadership in de-alerting. In March, after thirteen years as a Brookings Institution Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program, he became president of the Center for Defense Information.

If the possibility of nuclear attack on the United States is to be eliminated, "nothing is more important" than for the U.S. to seek to remove the hair-trigger alert on Russian nuclear missiles -- that is, lengthening the time needed to launch from "minutes to weeks or even months," Blair said. That the Russians would not agree to de-alert their missiles unless we agree to de-alert ours goes without saying, which is "why the United States and Russia must jointly undertake de-alerting." (Russia also has on hair-trigger alert a relatively small number of strategic nuclear missiles targeted at other NATO countries and China.)

But de-alerting has a long way to go to win official favor in Washington. Neither Bill Clinton nor Democratic presidential contender Al Gore has provided leadership in seeking it. Few legislators support de-alerting, either. Among the most prominent backers are three leading Democrats, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (South Dakota), retiring Senator Bob Kerrey (Nebraska), and former Senator Sam Nunn (Georgia), who was chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

By contrast, Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush gave de-alerting an important boost in a May 23 speech, which was later reflected by strong language in the GOP platform, and which surely merited more press and pundit attention than it got. "[T]he United States should remove as many weapons as possible from high-alert, hair-trigger status -- another unnecessary vestige of Cold War confrontation," the governor declared. He went on to say:

Preparation for quick launch -- within minutes after warning of an attack -- was the rule during the era of superpower rivalry. But today, for two nations at peace, keeping so many weapons on high alert may create unacceptable risks of accidental or unauthorized launch. So, as president, I will ask for an assessment of what we can safely do to lower the alert status of our forces. ... There is a precedent that proves the power of leadership. In 1991, the United States invited the Soviet Union to join it in removing tactical nuclear weapons from the arsenal. Huge reductions were achieved in a matter of months, making the world much safer, more quickly.

What Bush implied but did not say was remarkable: He was flatly repudiating the long-standing position of his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill, many of whom were, Blair said, "motivated by hatred of Bill Clinton." Despite Senator Kerrey's best efforts, Republican majorities have by law, for four years, prohibited the president -- the Commander-in-Chief -- from undertaking any effort to de-alert our missiles. "Bush flew in the face of this law," Blair said.

The vehicle for the prohibition was the Defense Authorization Act. Initially in 1996 and annually since then, congressional GOP majorities wrote the prohibition into the act. They did this even though, Blair said, "it is probably unconstitutional, because it interferes with the right of a Commander-in-Chief to make decisions regarding the readiness of the armed forces."

"The general public is oblivious to this issue of truly transcendent importance, not completely, but mostly," Blair said. This is clearly the product of the meager attention paid to the issue by politicians and the press. Indeed the president, in announcing an agreement with Prime Minister Boris Yeltsin in 1994, asserted that Russia's missiles were no longer aimed at the United States, and ours no longer aimed at Russia. The president "completely misrepresented reality," Blair said.

The vice president, Blair continued, "has had many opportunities over many years to say something positive about de-alerting, but never did; and he criticized Bush for suggesting that the United States should reduce and de-alert U.S. nuclear forces, even unilaterally, on the grounds that it would weaken our security. Gore sounded like a reactionary Republican usually sounds on this kind of thing."

FALSE ALARMS

In an environment like this it's not surprising that four false alarms which put the planet on the razor's edge of catastrophe -- two in Russia, in 1983 and 1995, and two in the United States, both during the Cold War -- have pretty much vanished like pixels from the public screen.

Although the false alarms had twice put the United States and Russia each within minutes of a launch, the equality in numbers does not remotely warrant an assumption that a launch based on misinterpreted or misunderstood information is higher in the U.S. than in Russia. The reverse is true: the danger in Russia is higher by several magnitudes than it is here.

The primary reason is that the Russian military is "a complete disaster," Blair said. Eighty percent of the strategic rocket forces live below the poverty line, as compared with 50 percent of the population as a whole. Their ground radar and related early-warning facilities are "wearing out and increasingly susceptible to false alarms." Finally, their training to use those facilities is substandard, at a level the U.S. military would not tolerate.

It was only weeks after Blair pointed out these grim deficiencies that the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk sank, in a tragedy that validated his concerns. These were deepened by the Russian defense minister himself. In a nationally televised interview on August 21, the New York Times reported from Moscow, Marshal Igor D. Sergeyev, told his countrymen that "the armed forces of the once-powerful Soviet empire had been 'robbed and stripped' in the last decade and were operating on half the budget required."

The 1995 false alarm in Russia originated in a rocket that the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration had provided for a U.S. science experiment, which was directed by a Cornell professor, and which Norway launched under contract. Seeking information on the geomagnetic character of the Northern Lights, the scientists launched the rocket toward the North Pole from the island of Andoya in the Norwegian Sea.

The rocket had been cobbled together from various U.S. military missiles. As a result, it exhibited the same characteristics -- for example, the number of missile stages and trajectory -- as do missiles of the kind carried by U.S. Trident nuclear submarines. The Russian military were unaware of this when their radar detected the rocket moments after it was launched from Andoya.

Russian officers probably notified Yeltsin that an attack might be underway, possibly from a Trident submarine. High-level commanders and others in the nuclear chain of command, probably including launch crews, began their extremely short count-down for a counter-strike.

The 1983 Russian false alarm was also "pretty serious," Blair said.

HAIR-TRIGGERS: HOW THEY WORK

The principal Russian early-warning facilities are near Moscow; ours are in the Cheyenne Mountains near Colorado Springs. The United States has fifty-five two-person launch crews -- some including women -- on constant alert. They control 550 missiles tipped with 2,000 nuclear warheads. The launch facilities are in six states. All of the missiles are aimed at Russia, just as Russian missiles with 2,000 nuclear warheads are aimed at the U.S. (Some additional U.S. nuclear missiles hat are not on hair-trigger alert are aimed at other countries, including China.)

Russian and U.S. launch procedures are essentially similar. Blair described those that would be set in motion were the U.S. early-warning system to detect what would be feared or believed to be an incoming Russian missile:

The crew on duty would execute its standing orders to determine, within three minutes, whether the attack was real or phantom. Then it would notify the Pentagon "war room," where a general is in command at all times (several back-up war rooms are scattered around the country).

The general would alert the president immediately, whereupon an emergency telecommunications conference involving him and his top advisors would be convened. During this missile-attack conference, as it is called, the Strategic Command officer in charge in Omaha, Nebraska, would brief the president on his nuclear response options and their consequences. The officer is allowed thirty seconds to do this.

A president's order to launch would be relayed by the war room to duty launch crews. Each crew would follow this simple sequence, which would take, Blair said, "two minutes at the most":

1. The crew would send a short message simultaneously to all of the missiles it controls. On receipt of the message, probably consisting of two digits, such as "23," each missile would know where to fly. "It's like sending an e-mail," Blair said. "It literally takes a few seconds." (The fact that the missiles know their targets exposes the falsity of President Clinton's public interpretation of his 1994 agreement with Yeltsin.)

2. The crew would dial the eight numbers that tell the missile to unlock its safeguards against an unauthorized launch signal, thus freeing it to receive the authorized signal.

3. The two crew members would each take a key, normally kept in a safe, and turn it simultaneously in a special lock. This would be the "launch vote" -- the authorized signal.

As is chillingly apparent, the process from start to finish would take about as much time as preparing a continental breakfast: three minutes for the determination whether the incoming missile is real, a few more minutes for presidential briefing and decision-making, then the instant transmission of the launch order, and, finally, a couple of minutes for the launch crews to carry out the order.

When Boris Yeltsin was told of the rocket supposedly heading toward his homeland, his military began a countdown for a retaliatory strike against the United States. The Russian protocol from time of initial detection to time of presidential decision is ten minutes, eight of which were used. The U.S. time-line is similar. Both sides, however, would adjust their time-lines as needed to ensure that they would be able to send the launch order once it's determined just when enemy missiles are expected to hit.

Within the deadline to launch before incoming missiles would destroy U.S. missiles, a president of the United States could take a maximum of twelve minutes. Under some scenarios, an attack from Russian submarines close to the United States, for example -- currently this is not a threat -- the time for decision could be effectively zero.

It was only because the Russian leaders waited for what was, in this context, an eternity that they were able to see that the trajectory of the suspect rocket was not taking it to Russia.

What set off the two U.S. alarms were, Blair said, "false indications of a massive Soviet attack." The alarms occurred despite great precautions. Our early-warning and launch facilities are state-of-the-art and meticulously maintained. Our crews are scrupulously screened to assure their expertise, fitness and professionalism. They are extremely well-trained. Their sole mission is to evaluate any and every indication of a possible nuclear attack.

In 1979 and again in 1980, the duty crew in Cheyenne Mountain -- the same crew -- saw what it feared were indications of an incoming nuclear missile, but followed the protocol of contacting the U.S. early-warning ground facilities. Two years in a row, the sensors had detected nothing to confirm the indications.

As would happen a few years later in Russia, the duty crew exceeded the allowed time to determine whether the alarm was true or false. What made the alarms false, Blair said, was "human error" in interpreting indications of an attack, which in one case were themselves generated by human error, and in the other by a faulty computer chip. The Air Force fired the crew.

It may be scant comfort, but Trident submarine launch procedures take a long time, relatively speaking: about twelve minutes, or some ten minutes longer than land-based launches. Four Tridents -- two in the Atlantic, two in the Pacific -- are always on full alert. Each is assigned 200 nuclear warheads although actually carrying 150, Blair said. Unlike ground-based missile launch facilities, which each side targets, the submarines are invulnerable.

ALL TOO HUMAN

For many decades, most Americans assumed that "someone" was taking care to assure the safety of their medicines; they learned, in 1962, that the Food and Drug Administration had come extremely close to approving the marketing of thalidomide, a sedative/tranquilizer that turned out in other countries to have caused the birth of thousands of armless, legless, and limbless babies. The FDA had many months to deliberate over whether to release thalidomide.

Americans are inclined to make a similar but infinitely more optimistic assumption about control of nuclear weapons in an emergency: there's a careful, deliberative process in place to protect us. The reality is something else. On receiving a report of a Russian nuclear attack, perhaps in the middle of the night, our Commander-in-Chief must decide whether the report is true or false and whether to order a retaliatory strike that would shatter life on earth, and he must do so in mere minutes.

"Even if such reports turn out in the end to be false alarms, they powerfully bias the president to launch our missiles before missiles possibly aimed at us hit," Blair said. "It's easy to see our leaders being swept away in all of this. So the optimism is misplaced."

Enormous benefit to the United States -- indeed, to the entire planet -- would flow from an American pledge to undertake serious negotiations with the Russians to achieve a comprehensive de-alerting program. Blair described the benefits this way:

1. "By precluding an unauthorized launch or a mistaken launch even on strong warning of an incoming missile, the United States and Russia would buy a huge margin of safety for themselves."

2. "By creating an international norm of operational safety for nuclear weapons, the United States and Russia would be saying to the world that no country should have or strive to have nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. The norm would most urgently affect India and Pakistan, where the great issue is no longer nuclear proliferation, but the desire in both countries to follow in the footsteps of U.S. hair-trigger-alert procedures."

3. "The United States and Russia would strengthen and validate their appeal to other nations to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty."

4. "Extensive de-alerting would be a major step toward the abolition of nuclear weapons everywhere, for these reasons: De-alerted missiles would be put in storage. Military planners would write them off, making it a lot easier to get rid of them altogether. That's because of the time needed to remove the missiles from storage and put them on hair-trigger alert: days or weeks for a few, but about three years to reconstitute the warheads for the entire arsenal.

   "By comparison, it would take perhaps as little as six months to begin producing nuclear bombs in quantity (probably to be delivered by aircraft if all missiles had been eliminated). I myself could devise deep de-alerting measures that would take as long to reverse as it would take to manufacture nuclear weapons if we were to abolish them completely."

[#14 in this series, posted in February, pointed out that the United States spends tens of billions of dollars annually to maintain a nuclear arsenal sufficient to destroy every major city in the world ten times over; to destroy those cities only four times over would save $15 billion a year. In fact, Blair said, the 5,000 strategic nuclear weapons that the United States and Russia target at each other and that are on hair-trigger alert constitute less than half of the two nations' inventories of these weapons.

[George W. Bush addressed the size of our nuclear arsenal in his May 23 speech: "The premises of Cold War nuclear targeting should no longer dictate the size of our arsenal. ... I will pursue the lowest number consistent with our national security. It should be possible to reduce the number of American nuclear weapons significantly further than what has been agreed to under Start II ... We should not keep weapons that our military planners do not need. These unneeded weapons ... do nothing to make us more secure." The GOP platform was specific: "We can safely eliminate thousands more of these horrific weapons."]

NMD AND HAIR-TRIGGERS

Criticisms of National Missile Defense (NMD) having been widely reported, I need but summarize them here in order to be able to turn quickly to two additional points that are of extreme importance but that are not widely perceived:

• The basic rationale for NMD -- that it was needed to intercept and down nuclear missiles not from China or Russia, but from North Korea -- has all but evaporated, as has the bitter enmity between North Korea and South Korea (see #20 in this series). It's simply implausible that a North Korea which has become friendly with South Korea (at last) is a nuclear threat to the United States.

  When South Korean President Kim Dae Jung "returned from his three-day televised love fest in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, he was able to announce that, for the first time since World War II, there was no longer any danger of a war between the two Koreas," Bill Mesler wrote in the September Progressive. "[T]he rapprochement has been so rapid that recent polls show the South Korean public now holding a 90 percent favorable rating of North Korea."

• Numerous qualified civilian and military experts say that NMD can't work, or doubt that it can be made to work, or predict that by the time it could be made to work possible enemies would have developed decoys and other effective defenses. Indeed, fifty American winners of the Nobel Prize wrote to President Clinton to warn that "any movement toward [NMD] deployment would be premature, wasteful and dangerous."

• Professor Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was a missile advisor in the Reagan administration, suggested skullduggery in NMD tests. The Department of Defense, he alleged, concealed certain results that questioned the system's feasibility by stamping them "classified." Assigning a security classification to a document to hide fraud and wrongdoing violates the law. Led by Representative Dennis Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat, fifty-three members of Congress have formally requested the FBI to investigate what they labeled "well-documented and serious allegations of fraud."

• There have been only three hits of missiles in eighteen NMD test firings since 1983. On July 7 -- after Postol had alleged skullduggery -- the current system failed the second of three tests.

• China and Russia have from the start viewed NMD as destabilizing of relations among the major powers, and many critics -- including Americans -- have seen NMD as a violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to which the U.S. and the Soviet Union were the original signatories.

  On July 18, China and Russia joined in condemning NMD as a U.S. attempt to dominate the world and in pledging to act together in defiance of American power. Three weeks later, leading news organizations carried profoundly disturbing stories on a highly classified intelligence report on the impacts of a U.S. decision to proceed with NMD. The report "warns," Steven Lee Myers wrote in the New York Times, "that deploying an American national missile defense could prompt China to expand its nuclear arsenal tenfold and lead Russia to place multiple warheads on ballistic missiles that now carry only one." In other words, NMD threatens a new arms race.

• NMD would cost (or waste) an estimated $60 billion, much of it corporate welfare for military contractors. Sixty billion dollars could go very far to provide health care and shelter for millions who don't have it, rebuild schools, and meet a host of other pressing needs (as was documented by #22 in this series).

Influenced by the foregoing concerns, President Clinton announced on September 1 that he had decided not to deploy a limited NMD. Although Gore defended the decision, the Washington Post reported, he had "remained largely noncommittal on the subject"; although Bush attacked the decision, his dilemma was "[h]ow to criticize Clinton for failing to push ahead with a system that Republicans have denounced as insufficient."

Now to the two additional objections to NMD. The first is this: even if eventually successful, NMD would be impotent against non-missile means of attack. "A nuclear bomb that could easily wipe out Manhattan and kill 100,000 people is a ball of plutonium weighing about fifteen pounds," Blair pointed out. "It is a little bigger than a softball. One such bomb could be carried into the United States in a suitcase, and if one could, many could."

The second objection is directly related to the main thrust of this article. NMD and the endless discussions and disputes it has incited have inadvertently obscured if not buried the more urgent issue of de-alerting those 5,000 missiles with a destructive power 100,000 times that of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima.

LOOKING FOR A FEW GOOD MEN OR WOMEN

I would close by rephrasing the ending of #21: If it isn't asking too much of the generals, colonels and majors who mobilized 15,000 journalists for the Republican and Democratic national conventions, and if volunteers do not step forward, perhaps they would muster a few good reporters to ask a question like this of our presidential, vice-presidential and House and Senate candidates:

Would a National Missile Defense do more or less to safeguard the American people and the planet from nuclear destruction than would working with the Russians to remove the hair-trigger alert on our combined total of 5,000 nuclear warheads?

Published: Sep 07 2000