Command and Control (62 page)

A year later, at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, the discussion strayed onto a topic that alarmed many of Reagan's close advisers: huge reductions in the number of nuclear weapons. Secretary of State George P. Shultz was elated by the possibility. The recent accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had deposited radioactive fallout across much of Europe and the Soviet Union, reminding the world of the far greater danger that nuclear weapons posed. Reagan and Gorbachev seemed on the verge of reaching an extraordinary agreement, as a transcript of their meeting shows:

The President
agreed this could be sorted out . . . cruise missiles, battlefield weapons, sub-launched and the like. It would be fine with him if we eliminated all nuclear weapons.

Gorbachev
said we can do that. We can eliminate them.

The Secretary
[of State] said, “Let's do it.”

The euphoria that Reagan and Shultz felt didn't last long. Moments later Gorbachev insisted, as part of the deal, that all Star Wars testing must be confined to the laboratory. Reagan couldn't comprehend why a missile-defense system intended to spare lives—one that didn't even exist yet, that might never exist—could stand in the way of eliminating nuclear weapons forever. He refused to place limits on the Strategic Defense Initiative and
promised to share its technology. The Soviet Union was conducting exactly the same research, he pointed out, and an antiballistic missile system had already been built to defend Moscow. Neither Gorbachev nor Reagan would budge from his position, and the meeting ended.

Despite the failure to reach an agreement on the abolition of nuclear weapons, the Reykjavik summit marked a turning point in the Cold War, the start of a process that soon led to the removal of all intermediate-range missiles from Europe and large cuts in the number of strategic weapons. The all-out nuclear arms race was over. Gorbachev now felt emboldened to pursue reform in the Soviet Union, confident that the United States did not seek to attack his country. And the hard-liners in the Reagan administration breathed a sigh of relief, amazed that their president had come so close to getting rid of America's nuclear weapons. Margaret Thatcher, the conservative prime minister of Great Britain, and François Mitterrand, the socialist president of France, were furious that Reagan had questioned the value of nuclear deterrence, a strategy that had kept the peace since the Second World War. Although European protest marches had focused mainly on the United States for the previous six years, it was the leadership of Western Europe who most strongly opposed creating a world without nuclear weapons.

•   •   •

B
OB
P
EURIFOY
HAD
BECOME
a vice president at Sandia, and his new status enabled him to lobby more effectively for nuclear weapon safety. By 1988
almost half of the weapons in the American stockpile were fitted with weak link/strong link devices, and the safety retrofit of Mark 28 bombs had finally resumed. But SAC was still loading about one thousand Short-Range Attack Missiles onto its bombers on alert. Those planes were parked on runways nationwide, ready to take off from bases in California, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington State. As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union eased, the Air Force's willingness to risk an accident with a SRAM became harder to justify.

On February 26, 1988,
Peurifoy wrote to the assistant secretary for defense programs at the Department of Energy and invited him to Sandia for a briefing on the dangers of the SRAM. The assistant secretary never replied to the letter. The following month, the president of Sandia raised the issue with another official at the DOE, who suggested that the secretary of energy and the secretary of defense should be briefed on the matter. But nothing was done. A few months later an independent panel was commissioned to look at management practices at the Department of Energy, and Peurifoy was asked to serve as a technical adviser. Headed by Gordon Moe, a former member of Henry Kissinger's national security staff, the panel wound up using the SRAM's safety problems as a case study in mismanagement. Moe was shocked by the lack of attention to nuclear weapon safety and its implications. Almost fifteen years had passed since concerns about the SRAM were first expressed—and yet no remedial action had been taken. “
The potential for a nuclear weapon accident will remain unacceptably high until the issues that have been raised are resolved,” the Moe panel said in a classified report. “It would be hard to overstate the consequences that a serious accident could have for national security.”

John H. Glenn, a former astronaut and a Democratic senator from Ohio, visited Sandia on April 26, 1989. Peurifoy took the opportunity to give Glenn a briefing on nuclear weapon safety—and handed him a copy of the Moe panel's report. Glenn wanted to know more about the subject and asked whom he should contact at the Department of Energy to discuss it.

Peurifoy suggested that he skip the midlevel bureaucrats and raise the issue with the secretary of energy, James D. Watkins.

Glenn said that he'd be seeing Watkins the following week.

The bureaucratic logjam was broken. A well-respected senator—a national hero—planned to raise the issue of nuclear weapon safety with someone who could actually do something about it.

Secretary Watkins and his staff met with Senator Glenn, read the Moe panel report, got worried about the safety of older weapons in the stockpile, and contacted the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, about the issue. Instead of taking the weapons off alert, the Pentagon commissioned two more studies of the SRAM. One would be conducted by the Air Force, the
other by Gordon Moe—who was rehired by the Department of Energy to repeat his earlier work.

Almost another year passed. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Mikhail Gorbachev had visited the White House; signed major arms agreements; removed hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe; allowed Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to leave the Soviet bloc. By any rational measure, the Cold War was over. But every day, across the United States, Short-Range Attack Missiles continued to be loaded into B-52s on ground alerts.

During the spring of 1990, R. Jeffrey Smith, a reporter at the
Washington Post
, learned about the safety problems with some American nuclear weapons.
The
Post
ran a series of his articles, bringing public attention to the SRAM's flaws and to the W-79 atomic artillery shells' lack of one-point safety. Smith didn't divulge any classified information, but he did suggest that bureaucratic rivalries and inertia were creating unnecessary risks. A Pentagon spokesman defended the SRAM, claiming that the “
weapon meets all our current safety standards.” Secretary of Defense Cheney met with Air Force officials, Secretary of Energy Watkins, the heads of the three weapons laboratories, and General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to discuss the SRAM. On June 8, 1990, Cheney said that the SRAMs posed “
no safety hazards to the public”—but that they would immediately be removed from bombers on alert, until another safety study was completed.

The House Armed Services Committee had already appointed a panel of three eminent physicists to investigate the safety of America's nuclear weapons. Charles H. Townes was a Nobel laureate who had advised the Department of Defense for many years. John S. Foster, Jr., was a former director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who'd served in high-level posts at the Pentagon during the Johnson and Nixon administrations—an expert not only on nuclear weapon technology but also on targeting strategies. Sidney Drell, the chairman of the panel, was a theoretical physicist, long associated with the Stanford Linear Accelerator, who for many years had served as a JASON—a civilian granted a high-level security clearance
to help with sensitive defense matters. Drell, Foster, and Townes didn't always agree on nuclear weapon policies. Drell had opposed the MX missile; Foster had supported it. But they shared a mutual respect, and their expertise in the field was unsurpassed. Peurifoy was asked to serve as a technical adviser.

The Drell Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety submitted its report to the House Armed Services Committee in December 1990. The report confirmed what Bill Stevens and Bob Peurifoy had been saying for almost twenty years: America's nuclear arsenal was not as safe as it should be. Recent improvements in computing power, the report noted, had led to “
a realization that unintended nuclear detonations present a greater risk than previously estimated (and believed) for some of the warheads in the stockpile.” The Drell panel recommended that every nuclear weapon should be equipped with weak link/strong link devices, that every weapon carried by an airplane should contain insensitive high explosives and fire-resistant nuclear cores—and that the Pentagon should “
affirm enhanced safety as the top priority of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.”

A separate study on nuclear weapon safety was requested by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The study was conducted by Ray E. Kidder, a Lawrence Livermore physicist, and released in 1991. It gave a safety “grade” to each nuclear weapon in the American stockpile. The grades were based on their potential risk of accidental detonation or plutonium scattering.
Three weapons received an A. Seven received a B. Two received a C plus. Four received a C. Two received a C minus. And twelve received a D, the lowest grade.

•   •   •

O
N
J
ANUARY
25, 1991, General George Lee Butler became the head of the Strategic Air Command. During his first week on the job, Butler asked the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff to give him a copy of the SIOP.
General Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had made clear that the United States needed to change its targeting policy, now that the Cold War was over. As part of that administrative process, Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully
scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction.
Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow—dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city. During his previous job working for the Joint Chiefs, Butler had dealt with targeting issues and the damage criteria for nuclear weapons. He was hardly naive. But the days and weeks spent going through the SIOP, page by page, deeply affected him.

For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “
With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled. “I came to fully appreciate the truth . . . we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”

Butler eliminated about 75 percent of the targets in the SIOP, introduced a targeting philosophy that was truly flexible, and decided to get rid of the name SIOP. The United States no longer had a single, integrated war plan. Butler preferred a new title for the diverse range of nuclear options:
National Strategic Response Plans.

•   •   •

M
IKHAIL
G
ORBACHEV
WAS
ON
VACATION
in the Crimea on August 18, 1991, when a group calling itself the “
State Committee for the State of Emergency” entered his house and insisted that he declare martial law or resign. After refusing to do either, Gorbachev was held hostage, and the communications lines to his dacha were shut down by the KGB. His military aides, carrying the nuclear codes and the Soviet equivalent of a “football,” were staying at a guesthouse nearby. Their equipment stopped functioning—and the civilian leadership of the Soviet Union lost control of its nuclear weapons.

Two other Soviet officials possessed nuclear codes and footballs: the minister of defense and the chief of the general staff. Both of them supported the coup d'état. It has never been conclusively established who
controlled the thousands of nuclear weapons in the Soviet arsenal during the next few days. The head of the air force later claimed that he, the head of the navy, and the head of the Strategic Rocket Forces took over the command-and-control system, preventing anyone else from launching missiles at the United States. After the coup failed on August 21, communications were restored to Gorbachev's dacha, and the football carried by his military aides became operable once again.

Eager to reduce the risk of an accidental war and encourage deeper cuts in the Soviet arsenal,
President George H. W. Bush announced a month later that the United States would unilaterally make large reductions in its nuclear deployments. It would remove all of the Army's tactical weapons from Europe, destroy half of the Navy's tactical weapons and place the rest in storage, take 450 Minuteman II missiles off alert—and end the Strategic Air Command's ground alert. For the first time since 1957, SAC's bombers wouldn't be parked near runways, loaded with fuel and hydrogen bombs, as their crews waited for the sound of Klaxons.

The Soviet Union ceased to exist on Christmas Day, 1991. The following June, the Strategic Air Command disappeared, as well. General Powell and General Butler thought that SAC had outlived its original purpose. The recent war against Iraq had demonstrated the importance of close collaboration between the armed services—and future wars were likely to be fought with conventional, not nuclear, weapons. The Strategic Air Command and its institutional culture no longer seemed relevant. SAC's aircraft were divided among various Air Force units. America's land-based missiles and ballistic-missile submarines were assigned to a single, unified command—to be headed, alternately, by an officer from the Air Force or the Navy. The fierce interservice rivalry to control America's nuclear weapons largely vanished, as those weapons played an increasingly minor role in the Pentagon's war plans. But many SAC veterans were outraged that what had once been the most powerful organization in the American military was being disbanded. They thought it was a mistake, regarded General Butler as a turncoat, and felt that the legacy of Curtis LeMay was being dishonored.