Command and Control (60 page)

A few months later, at a ceremony in Little Rock, both men were given an Airman's Medal for Heroism, the highest peacetime honor that the Air Force can bestow. Kennedy didn't want to accept it. But
his local congressman in Maine, David Emery, said that if he took the medal, the Air Force would allow him to leave. Kennedy was given the medal by Verne Orr, the secretary of the Air Force, in a room full of reporters. Airman's Medals were also given to Rex Hukle, Don Green, Jimmy Roberts, and David Livingston's father. Intended to boost morale, the award ceremony was dismissed by the PTS crews. They thought it was a public relations stunt—and
couldn't understand why Jim Sandaker, who'd returned to the launch complex twice after the accident, didn't get the highest honor, too.

Jeff Kennedy was granted
a “temporary medical leave by reason of disability” three days after receiving his medal. Although the Air Force could recall him to duty in the future, Kennedy's military career was essentially over. He moved back to Maine, sued Martin Marietta for $7.5 million, and settled out of court for a much smaller sum.

Greg Devlin also left the Air Force within days of receiving the Airman's Medal. His term of enlistment was over. And his lawsuit was settled out of court, as well. After attorney fees, court costs, and other charges were deducted,
Devlin got a check for $6,400.

•   •   •

T
HE
ACCIDENTS
AT
G
RAND
F
ORKS
and Damascus had occurred during the same week, and Bob Peurifoy hoped that they would prompt a serious interest in weapon safety at the Pentagon. He traveled to Washington, D.C., and briefed a group of Air Force officials on the design flaws that could detonate a Mark 28 hydrogen bomb during a fire—and the need to retrofit the bombs with new safety mechanisms. The Air Force inspector general and the head of the Air Force Directorate of Nuclear Safety attended the meeting. But it had little effect.
A study commissioned by the Air Force later questioned the possibility of an accidental detonation and argued that the Mark 28 didn't need to be removed from bombers on alert. The study did, however, urge the Air Force to “
expedite the proposed retrofit of the 28 and, in the meantime, take extraordinary steps to prevent and ameliorate fires that might involve the unmodified 28s.” Neither of those recommendations was followed.

The Department of Defense had made its spending priorities clear: safety modifications on older weapons like the Mark 28, while desirable, could wait. But Peurifoy was determined to keep fighting the nuclear bureaucracy—and he was willing to engage in a bit of devious behavior, on behalf of weapon safety. After almost twenty years of fierce resistance, the Strategic Air Command had finally agreed to put locks in its bombs. The installation of permissive action links would require new control boxes in
the cockpits of SAC's bombers. Under a contract with the Department of Energy, those new control boxes would be produced by Sandia.
Peurifoy quietly arranged for a unique signal generator to be installed in the boxes, along with the coded switch necessary to unlock the PALs. The officials at the Air Force Logistics Command who handled the contract may or may not have understood the purpose of this special, added feature. It allowed all of SAC's bombers to carry nuclear weapons employing the latest safety devices. The planes would soon be ready—and now Peurifoy had to find a way to get those devices into the weapons.

•   •   •

T
HE
R
EAGAN
ADMINISTRATION
'
S
military buildup was
expected to cost approximately $1.5 trillion during its first five years.
About $250 billion would be spent on nuclear weapon systems. By the end of the 1980s, the United States would have
about fourteen thousand strategic warheads and bombs, an increase of about 60 percent. The Navy would get new cruise missiles and Trident submarines. The Air Force would get new cruise missiles, two new strategic bombers, and one hundred long-range MX missiles, now renamed “the Peacemaker.” The Carter administration's plan to hide MX missiles amid thousands of square miles in the American Southwest was soon abandoned. Instead, the missiles would be deployed in existing silos—defeating their original purpose and leaving them vulnerable to attack. The only military use of the Peacemaker would be a first strike on the Soviet Union.

The Army's Pershing II missiles and land-based cruise missiles were among the most controversial weapons proposed by the Reagan administration. They were to be placed in Western Europe, as a counterbalance to the SS-20 missiles recently deployed by the Soviet Union. The SS-20 was not considered a “strategic” weapon—and therefore not covered by existing arms control agreements—because its range was only three thousand miles. An SS-20 missile couldn't reach targets in the United States. But its three warheads could destroy NATO bases and European cities. The Army's cruise and Pershing II missiles were intended as a nuclear tit for tat. And yet the Soviet Union considered their deployment extremely provocative.
The Pershing II had a range of about a thousand miles and an accuracy of about two hundred feet. From bases in West Germany the Pershing II could destroy command centers in Moscow within five or six minutes. It would give the United States the capability to launch
a “super-sudden first strike.”

The new missiles, bombers, and subs gained the most attention in the press. But
the “highest priority element” of Reagan's strategic modernization program was the need to improve the command-and-control system. “
This system must be foolproof in case of any foreign attack,” Reagan said. A handful of limited-war options would finally be included in the SIOP, and the ability to fight a protracted nuclear war depended on the survival of command-and-control facilities for days, weeks, or even months. The Pentagon also sought
greater “interoperability”—a system that could quickly transmit messages between civilian and military leaders, between the United States and NATO, even between different branches of the American armed services. General Richard Ellis, the head of SAC, told Congress that, at a bare minimum, the command-and-control system had “
to recognize that we are under attack, to characterize that attack, get a decision from the President, and disseminate that decision to the forces prior to the first weapon impacting upon the United States.”

The Reagan administration planned to make
an unprecedented investment in command and control,
spending about $18 billion on new early-warning radars and communications satellites, better protection against nuclear weapon effects and electromagnetic pulse, the creation of a Global Positioning System (GPS) to improve weapon guidance and navigation, upgrades of the bunkers at SAC headquarters in Omaha and at Site R within Raven Rock Mountain, and
an expansion of Project ELF, the extremely low frequency radio system for sending an emergency war order message to submarines. Three new ELF antennae would be built in upper Michigan—one of them twenty-eight miles long, the others about fourteen miles long. Project ELF was a scaled-down version of SANGUINE, a plan that had been strongly backed by the Navy. It would have
buried six thousand miles of antenna, four to six feet deep, across an area covering almost one third of the state of Wisconsin.

One of the principal goals of the new command-and-control system was to ensure
the “continuity of government.” The vice president would assume a larger role in the planning for nuclear war and would be swiftly taken to an undisclosed location at the first sign of a crisis, ready to serve as commander in chief. New hideouts for the nation's leadership would be built throughout the country. And mobile command centers, housed in tractor-trailer trucks and transported by special cargo planes, would provide a backup to the National Emergency Airborne Command Post.

During the Kennedy administration, the problems with America's command-and-control system were deliberately hidden from the public. But as President Reagan prepared to adopt an updated version of “flexible response,” the issue of strategic command was discussed in newspapers, books, magazines, and television news reports.
Desmond Ball, an Australian academic, made a strong case that a nuclear war might be impossible to control.
John D. Steinbruner—who'd helped to write a top secret history of the nuclear arms race for the Pentagon in the 1970s—reached much the same conclusion, warning that a “nuclear decapitation” of America's leadership could be achieved with as few as fifty warheads. Steinbruner had read the classified studies on decapitation that so alarmed Robert McNamara, but did not mention them in his work.
Bruce G. Blair, a former Minuteman officer, described how the command-and-control systems of the United States and the Soviet Union were now poised on a hair trigger, under tremendous pressure to launch on warning if war seemed likely.
Paul Bracken, a management expert at Yale University, wrote about how unmanageable a nuclear exchange would be. And
Daniel Ford, a former head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, revealed that, among other things, the destruction of a single, innocuous-looking building in Sunnyvale, California, located “
within bazooka range” of Highway 101, could disrupt the operation of Air Force early-warning and communications satellites. Although many aspects of Reagan's strategic modernization program provoked criticism, liberals and conservatives agreed that a robust command-and-control system was essential—to wage nuclear war or to deter it.

In the fall of 1981, Secretary of Defense Weinberger announced the retirement of the Titan II. The missile was increasingly regarded as a relic of
another nuclear era. Testifying about the Titan II before the Senate, Fred Iklé cited “
its low accuracy and its accident-proneness.” The enormous yield of a single W-53 warhead had become less important. The one hundred Peacemaker missiles scheduled for deployment would carry one thousand warheads—almost twenty times the number carried by the remaining Titan II missiles. And the secrets of the Titan II had recently been compromised. Christopher M. Cooke, a young deputy commander at a Titan II complex in Kansas, had been arrested after making three unauthorized visits and multiple phone calls to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. Inexplicably, Cooke had been allowed to serve as a Titan II officer
on alerts for five months after his first contact with the Soviet embassy was detected. An Air Force memo later said the information that Cooke gave the Soviets—about launch codes, attack options, and the missile's vulnerabilities—was “
a major security breach . . . the worst perhaps in the history of the Air Force.”

Despite the obsolescence of the Titan II, its decommissioning would proceed slowly. The last missile was scheduled to go off alert in 1987. In order to save money, the Air Force decided to cancel some of the modifications recommended by the Titan II review group after the accident in Damascus.
Funding would not be provided for a new vapor detection system in the silo,
additional video cameras within the complex, or a retrofit of the W-53 warhead with new safety mechanisms. Upgrading the warhead to meet “
modern nuclear safety criteria for abnormal environments” would have cost about $400,000 per missile.

•   •   •

T
HE
S
OVIET
INVASION
OF
A
FGHANISTAN
, the breakdown in détente
,
the tough rhetoric from the White House, and the impending arrival of cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles created widespread fear of nuclear war in Western Europe. The fear was encouraged by a Soviet propaganda campaign that sought to stop the deployment of America's new missiles. But the apocalyptic mood in Europe was real, not Communist inspired, and loose talk by members of the Reagan administration helped to
strengthen it. Thomas K. Jones, an undersecretary of defense, played down the number of casualties that a nuclear war might cause, arguing that families would survive if they dug a hole, covered it with a couple of doors, and put three feet of dirt on top. “
It's the dirt that does it,” Jones explained. “Everyone's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around.”

In Great Britain,
membership in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament soon increased tenfold.
A quarter of a million CND supporters attended a demonstration in London's Hyde Park during the fall of 1981, and a well-publicized Women's Peace Camp grew outside the Royal Air Force Base Greenham Common, where American cruise missiles would soon be housed.
In Bonn, a demonstration against the Pershing II missile also attracted a quarter of a million people. The sense of powerlessness and dread, the need to take some sort of action and halt the arms race, led to a nuclear version of the Stockholm syndrome. Throughout Western Europe, protesters condemned American missiles that hadn't yet arrived—not the hundreds of new Soviet missiles already aimed at them.

The
New Yorker
magazine ran a three-part article in February 1982 that catalyzed the antinuclear movement in the United States. Written by Jonathan Schell and later published as a book,
The Fate of the Earth
revived the notion that nuclear weapons confronted the world with a stark, existential choice: life or death. Schell tried to pierce the sense of denial that had seemingly gripped the United States since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the refusal to face the threat of annihilation. “
On the one hand, we returned to business as usual, as though everything remained as it always had been,” Schell wrote. “On the other hand, we began to assemble the stockpiles that could blow this supposedly unaltered existence sky-high at any second.” He called for the abolition of nuclear weapons, offered a chilling description of what a single hydrogen bomb would do to New York City, and presented the latest scientific evidence on how nuclear detonations could harm the ozone layer of the earth's atmosphere. Later that year the astronomer
Carl Sagan conjured an even worse environmental disaster: nuclear winter. The vast amount of soot produced by burning cities would circle the earth after a nuclear exchange, block the sun, and precipitate a new ice age. Sagan
warned that the effects of nuclear winter would make victory in a nuclear war impossible; a nation that launched a first strike would be committing suicide.