Command and Control (39 page)

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W
HILE
DISAGREEMENTS
OVER
NUCLEAR
STRATEGY
continued at the White House and the Pentagon, the need for an improved command-and-control system was beyond dispute. For McNamara, it was the most urgent national security issue that the United States faced, “
a matter of transcendent priority.” A few weeks after his briefing on WSEG R-50 and the threat of a surprise attack, McNamara outlined the problem to Kennedy:

The chain of command from the President down to our strategic offensive and defensive weapon systems is highly vulnerable in almost every link. The destruction of about a dozen sites, most of which are soft, none of which is adequately hardened, would deprive U.S. forces of all high-level command and control. . . . Without the survival of at least some of these sites (including the one containing the President, his successor, or designated replacement) with their communications, there can be no authorized response in the event of a nuclear attack on the U.S.

The Soviet Union might not need a thousand missiles to prevail in a nuclear war; twenty or thirty might do. And the relative weakness of the Soviets, the small size of their missile arsenal, had oddly become a source of anxiety. It might encourage the Soviet Union to strike first. A decapitation attack, launched without warning, like a “bolt out of the blue,” might be the Kremlin's only hope of achieving victory.

A centralized, effective command-and-control system would ensure that the United States could retaliate—and that the order to do so would be given by the president. The demands placed on such a system would be enormous, if the Soviets attacked. The system would have to “
classify the attack, as large or small,” a Pentagon report later noted, “accidental or
deliberate, selective or indiscriminate, against cities or not, against high command or not . . . in order to support a decision as to an ‘appropriate' retaliatory response.” The system had to do those things in real time. And it had to maintain communications between the president, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and military commanders throughout a nuclear war.

After commissioning a number of studies on command and control, McNamara approved the creation of a new entity: the World Wide Military Command and Control System (WWMCCS). It would combine the radars, sensors, computers, and communications networks of the different armed services into a single integrated system. The challenges were formidable. Making the system work would require not only technological and administrative changes but also new ways of thinking about command. The task was further complicated by the efforts of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force to retain as much authority as possible over their own facilities and resist any centralized system run by civilians.

Although the bureaucratic struggle between the demands of centralization and decentralization proved difficult to resolve at the Pentagon, Paul Baran, a researcher at RAND, came up with an ingenious method of harmonizing the two within a digital communications network. Centralized and even decentralized networks—like those traditionally used to broadcast radio or television, to send messages by telegraph or telephone—could be shut down by the destruction of a few crucial nodes. Any hierarchical network would remain vulnerable at its apex, at the point where all the lines of communication converged. “
The first duty of the command and control system is to survive,” Baran argued, proposing a distributed network with hundreds or thousands of separate nodes connected through multiple paths.
Messages would be broken into smaller “blocks,” sent along the first available path, and reassembled at their final destination. If nodes were out of service or destroyed, the network would automatically adapt and send the data along a route that was still intact. Baran's work later provided the conceptual basis for the top secret communications networks at the Pentagon, as well as their civilian offshoot, the Internet.

The survival of America's military and civilian leadership would be
harder to achieve. As a subset of the World Wide Military Command and Control System, a new administrative structure was established. The National Military Command Center replaced the Joint War Room at the Pentagon. It would serve as the nation's military headquarters during a nuclear war. Since the Pentagon was likely to be destroyed at the beginning of that war, an Alternate National Military Command Center was formed at Site R, inside Raven Rock Mountain. It would have the data-processing and communications equipment necessary to manage the SIOP. It would be staffed year-round, twenty-four hours a day, awaiting the arrival of the president and the Joint Chiefs during an emergency. But fixed sites now seemed like easy targets for Soviet missiles. McNamara thought that the United States also needed mobile command centers that would be difficult to find and destroy. The Air Force wanted these command centers to be located on airplanes. SAC already had a plane, nicknamed “Looking Glass,” in the air at all times as a backup to its headquarters in Omaha. The Navy wanted the command centers to be located on ships. McNamara decided to do both, creating the National Emergency Airborne Command Post and the National Emergency Command Post Afloat.

None of these command posts would matter if there were no means of transmitting the Go code after a nuclear attack on the United States. The Navy began work on an airborne system for contacting its Polaris submarines. Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) planes would quickly get off the ground, climb steeply, and send an emergency war order on a very-low-frequency radio, using an antenna five miles long. SAC began to develop a Post Attack Command and Control System. It would rely on airborne command posts, a command post on a train, a command post at the bottom of an abandoned gold mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and a command post, known as The Notch, inside Bare Mountain, near Amherst, Massachusetts. The bunker in Cripple Creek was never constructed; airborne facilities were less expensive, and more likely to survive, than those underground. The Emergency Rocket Communications System provided another layer of redundancy. If SAC's airborne command posts somehow failed to send the Go code, it could be sent by radio transmitters installed
in a handful of Minuteman missiles. A prerecorded voice message, up to ninety seconds long, would be broadcast to bomber crews and launch crews, as the specially equipped missiles flew over SAC bases.

The most intractable problem was finding a way to keep the president alive. The National Emergency Airborne Command Post was placed on full-time alert at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. But the plane would need at least ten or fifteen minutes to take off. And it would need another ten minutes to fly beyond the lethal range of a thermonuclear explosion. At least half an hour of warning might be necessary for the president to reach Andrews, get into the airborne command post, and escape the blast. Traveling by helicopter to the National Emergency Command Post Afloat, a Navy cruiser kept off the coast, would take even longer. And a Soviet missile attack might come with little or no warning.

After considering a variety of options, Secretary of Defense McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk supported the construction of the National Deep Underground Command Center. McNamara described the bunker as
a “logical, survivable node in the control structure . . . a unified strategic command and control center under duly constituted political authorities.” It would be located beneath the Pentagon, at a depth of 3,500 feet. High-speed elevators, a light-rail system, and horizontal tunnels more than half a mile underground would link it to the White House. It would hold anywhere from fifty to three hundred people, depending on whether Kennedy chose to build an “
austere” version or one of “moderate size.” It was designed to “
withstand multiple direct hits of 200 to 300 MT [megaton] weapons bursting at the surface or 100 MT weapons penetrating to depths of 70-100 feet.” If the Soviets attacked on that scale and the new bunker met those design goals, the president and his staff could expect to be the only people still alive in Washington, D.C.

Amid all the consideration of how to protect the president and the Joint Chiefs, how to gather information in real time, how to transmit war orders, how to devise the technical and administrative means for a flexible response, little thought had been given to an important question: how do you end a nuclear war? Thomas Schelling—a professor of economics at Harvard, a RAND analyst, proponent of game theory, and adviser to the
Kennedy administration—began to worry about the issue early in 1961.
While heading a committee on the risk of war by accident, miscalculation, or surprise, he was amazed to learn that there was no direct, secure form of communications between the White House and the Kremlin. It seemed almost unbelievable. Schelling had read the novel
Red Alert
a few years earlier, bought forty copies, and sent them to colleagues. The book gave a good sense of what could go wrong—and yet the president's ability to call his Soviet counterpart on a “hot line” existed only in fiction. As things stood, AT&T's telephone lines and Western Union's telegraph lines were the only direct links between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both of them would be knocked out by a thermonuclear blast, and most radio communications would be, as well. The command-and-control systems of the two countries had no formal, reliable means of interacting. The problem was so serious and so obvious, Schelling thought, everybody must have assumed somebody else had taken care of it. Pauses for negotiation would be a waste of time, if there were no way to negotiate. And once a nuclear war began, no matter how pointless, devastating, and horrific, it might not end until both sides ran out of nuclear weapons.

M
ankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind,” President John F. Kennedy told a gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, on September 25, 1961. Dag Hammarskjöld, the beloved secretary-general of the United Nations, had recently died in a plane crash, and to honor his memory Kennedy gave a speech that called for world peace and stressed the U.N.'s central role as a peacekeeper. He also revived the hope that nuclear weapons could be outlawed through an international agreement:

Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. . . . The events and decisions of the next ten months may well decide the fate of man for the next ten thousand years. There will be no avoiding those events. There will be no appeal from those decisions. And we in this hall shall be remembered either as part of the generation that turned this planet into a flaming funeral pyre or the generation that met its vow “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

Instead of an arms race, Kennedy challenged the Soviets to join the United States in a
“peace race,” a series of steps that would lead to “general and complete disarmament” under the supervision of the U.N. He proposed a ban on nuclear testing, an end to the production of fissile material for use in nuclear weapons, a prohibition on the transfer of nuclear weapons to other countries, and the destruction of all nuclear weapons, as well as their delivery systems. Kennedy had no illusions about the perfectibility of mankind, only a desire for its survival:

Such a plan would not bring a world free from conflict or greed—but it would bring a world free from the terrors of mass destruction. It would not usher in the era of the super state—but it would usher in an era in which no state could annihilate or be annihilated by another.

The abolition of nuclear weapons couldn't be postponed any longer. “
Together we shall save our planet,” he said, “or together we shall perish in its flames.”

During the same week that Kennedy appealed for an end to the arms race at the United Nations, he met with a handful of military advisers at the White House to discuss launching a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. General Thomas Power encouraged him to do it. According to notes of the meeting, held on September 20, Power warned that the United States now faced the greatest danger, ever, of a Soviet nuclear attack. “
If a general atomic war is inevitable,” he argued, “the U.S. should strike first.” Power was not the only high-ranking officer having such thoughts.
Kennedy had just received a memo from General Maxwell Taylor, summarizing how an American first strike might proceed. Taylor didn't recommend it—or rule it out. “
There are risks as well as opportunities in this approach,” he wrote.

The United States and the Soviet Union were, at the time, engaged in their most serious confrontation since the Berlin airlift of 1948. And
once again, Berlin was at the center of the crisis. Sixteen years after the defeat of the Nazis, the city was still divided among four occupying powers: the
British, French, and Americans in the West; the Soviets in the East. The division was economic, as well as political. While Communist East Berlin stagnated, capitalist West Berlin thrived. But it was a fragile prosperity. Located deep within East Germany, linked to West Germany only by air and a 110-mile stretch of highway, the free sectors of Berlin were surrounded by troops from the Soviet bloc. NATO forces in the city were vastly outnumbered. America's nuclear weapons were all that protected West Berlin from being overrun.

Since 1958 the Soviet Union had been threatening to sign a treaty with East Germany, hand over the eastern part of the city to its Communist ally—and block NATO access to West Berlin. The threat was forcefully repeated at a summit meeting between President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961. The Soviet Union seemed ascendant, having recently launched the first man into space. And Kennedy's stature had been greatly diminished by the Bay of Pigs invasion, a failed attempt to overthrow the Communist government of Cuba. Khrushchev thought the new president was young and inexperienced, perhaps too timid to provide air support for the CIA-backed army pinned down on the beaches of Cuba. Kennedy had hoped that the summit would lead to warmer relations between the two superpowers. Instead, Khrushchev confronted him with an ultimatum: if the United States did not agree to the creation of a “free” and demilitarized Berlin, the Soviets would sign a treaty with East Germany by the end of the year and severely limit NATO's rights in the city. When Kennedy made clear that would be unacceptable, the Soviet leader didn't back down.

“
It is up to the United States to decide whether there will be war or peace,” Khrushchev said.

“
Then it will be a cold winter,” Kennedy replied.

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D
URING
THE
E
ISENHOWER
ADMINISTRATION
,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff seemed to have few options if the Soviets tried to close the autobahn to Berlin. A convoy of American troops would most likely depart from West Germany on the road—and if they were attacked, the United States
would be under great pressure to launch a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Secretary of Defense McNamara hoped that a subtler response could be devised. He wanted a plan that would permit the gradual escalation of a conflict, and delay the use of nuclear weapons for as long as possible. But the French president, Charles de Gaulle, and the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had little confidence that West Berlin could be defended with conventional weapons. Any suggestion that the United States might not use nuclear weapons immediately, they worried, could weaken deterrence and encourage the Soviets to take risks.

General Lauris Norstad, the supreme allied commander of NATO, agreed with the British and the French. Norstad thought that once the fighting began, the escalation wouldn't be gradual.
It would be “explosive,” and NATO had to be ready for all-out nuclear war. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Norstad had persuaded McNamara to keep the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy. “
This is the time to create strength,” Norstad said, “not reduce it.”

As Khrushchev continued to make public threats against West Berlin and raise the specter of war, President Kennedy followed the advice of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. “
If a crisis is provoked,” Acheson had suggested, “a bold and dangerous course may be the safest.” The United States should raise the stakes, send more conventional forces to Germany, and show a willingness to fight. On July 25, Kennedy gave a televised address on the Berlin crisis. The Soviet Union had no right to restrict NATO's presence in West Berlin, Kennedy asserted, “
and we have given our word that an attack upon that city will be an attack upon us all.” He proposed a call-up of reservists and National Guard units, an expansion of the draft, the addition of more than 100,000 troops to the Army, a delay in the retirement of the Strategic Air Command's B-47 bombers—and a plan to build more civilian bomb shelters in the United States. Angered by the speech, Khrushchev asked John McCloy, a White House adviser who was visiting Russia, to pass along a message: “
Tell Kennedy that if he starts a war then he would probably become the last President of the United States.”

Although Kennedy and McNamara now understood the urgency of America's command-and-control problems, little had been done to rectify
them. Barely six months had passed since the inauguration, and much more time would be needed to make fundamental changes in the system. As the Berlin crisis deepened, the commanders of NATO units were ordered not to use their nuclear weapons without the explicit approval of General Norstad. But locks had not been installed in those weapons—and McNamara soon agreed to equip American troops on the front line with Davy Crockett atomic rifles. They were likely to be the first weapons fired at an invading Red Army.

More important, the SIOP remained the same. It had officially become the nuclear war plan of the United States in mid-April, although Kennedy hadn't even received a formal briefing on it. His national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, thought that an alternative to the SIOP was needed, now that a war with the Soviets seemed like a real possibility. “[
T]he current strategic war plan is dangerously rigid,” Bundy informed the president, “and, if continued without amendment, may leave you with very little choice as to how you face the moment of thermonuclear truth.” One of Bundy's aides, Carl Kaysen, was given the task of quickly preparing a new war plan. During the Second World War, Kaysen had selected bomb targets in Germany. He later worked at RAND and served as a professor of economics at Harvard. Kaysen thought that NATO should rely increasingly on conventional weapons and that Germany should eventually become a nuclear-free zone. Nevertheless, he enlisted help from one of McNamara's aides, Henry Rowen, to come up with a nuclear war plan that the president might actually use. The “
spasm war” demanded by the current SIOP, they agreed, was a “ridiculous and unworkable notion.”

Just after midnight, on August 13, without any warning, East German troops began to string a barbed wire fence between East and West Berlin. For weeks, thousands of people had fled East Germany through the city, the last stretch of the border that hadn't been militarized. NATO troops now watched helplessly as the fence became a wall.

After an initial, tentative response, on August 18 President Kennedy ordered a battle group of 1,500 soldiers to travel the autobahn
from West Germany to Berlin. McNamara had opposed the move, afraid that it might start a nuclear war. The Soviets didn't challenge the convoy. When it
arrived in West Berlin, the American troops were greeted by hundreds of thousands of cheering Germans and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who felt relieved. Twelve days later, the Soviet Union surprised the Kennedy administration again, unilaterally ending the moratorium on nuclear tests. As a show of strength, within the next month, the Soviets detonated twenty-six nuclear weapons.

Carl Kaysen's war plan was ready by the first week of September. It was designed for use during the Berlin crisis. “
We should be prepared to initiate general war by our own first strike,” Kaysen wrote. “We should seek the smallest possible list of targets, focusing on the long-range striking capacity of the Soviets, and avoiding, as much as possible, casualties and damage in Soviet civil society.” If President Kennedy launched the current SIOP, the United States would have to kill
more than half of the people in the Soviet Union—and millions more in Eastern Europe and China—just to maintain the freedom of West Berlin. Doing so would be not only morally questionable but impractical. The scale of the military operations required by the SIOP was so large,
it would “inevitably” tip off the Soviets that a nuclear strike was coming. It would give them time to retaliate. Kaysen proposed a surprise attack that would use just forty-one American bombers, approaching at low altitude, to destroy roughly twice that number of long-range missile and bomber bases in the Soviet Union. The whole thing would be over “
no more than fifteen minutes” after the first bomb dropped.

Following the attack, Kaysen suggested, “
we should be able to communicate two things to Khrushchev: first, that we intend to concentrate on military targets unless he is foolish enough to hit our cities; secondly, that we are prepared to withhold the bulk of our force from the offensive . . . provided that he accepts our terms.” Instead of killing hundreds of millions, the raid would probably kill “
less than 1,000,000 and probably not much more than 500,000.”

General Lyman Lemnitzer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not overly impressed by the plan. At a meeting the following week, Lemnitzer told President Kennedy that the United States still lacked the command-and-control capabilities for a limited nuclear attack. Any forces withheld from a first strike might never be available for a second one. And there was
no guarantee that Khrushchev would understand, amid the chaos of nuclear war, that only his military targets had been attacked. Kaysen's plan left the Soviet Union's medium-range and intermediate-range missiles untouched—and if Khrushchev didn't get the message and capitulate, Great Britain and most of Europe would be destroyed. Lemnitzer opposed any changes to the SIOP:

The plan is designed for execution as a whole, and the exclusion of attack of any category or categories of target would, in varying degree, decrease the effectiveness of the plan.

General Curtis LeMay wholeheartedly agreed with Lemnitzer. Indeed, if war came, LeMay thought the Soviet Union should be hit by more nuclear weapons, not fewer, to guarantee that every strategic target was eliminated. Despite strong political and philosophical differences, President Kennedy had recently promoted LeMay to Air Force chief of staff, out of respect for his operational skills. “
If you have to go, you want LeMay in the lead bomber,” Kennedy later explained. “But you never want LeMay deciding whether or not you have to go.”

The underlying logic of both nuclear war plans was inescapable: kill or be killed. General Lemnitzer said that regardless of how the SIOP was executed, “
some portion of the Soviet . . . nuclear force would strike the United States.” By the fall of 1961, the Soviet Union had
about 16 long-range missiles, 150 long-range bombers, and 60 submarine-based missiles that could hit North America. It would be hard to find and destroy every one of them. Kaysen estimated that the number of American deaths stemming from his plan, “
while small percentage wise—between three and seven percent [of the total U.S. population],” would nevertheless range between 5 million and 13 million. Just a handful of high-yield weapons, landing on New York City and Chicago, could produce that many deaths. “
In thermonuclear warfare,” Kaysen noted, “people are easy to kill.” But the alternative to launching a surprise attack on the Soviet Union might be a lot worse. A Soviet first strike could
kill as many as 100 million Americans.