The "D" Word VI C: More Notes on Certainty and Reliability
There’s a bit more to the story of what we have done to achieve the certainty and reliability of our “nuclear deterrent.”
For one thing, we worked hard and spent a lot of money to develop systems that would warn us if we were about to be attacked. The systems kept having to change.
During Eisenhower’s first term, we built a line of radar stations up on the border with Canada to detect the Soviet bombers we expected would come down through Canada because that would be the shorter route. Later, we built a second line quite a bit farther north across Canada and into Alaska. The second one was called the DEW line, for Distant Early Warning.
When those radars told us the bombers were coming, we would send jet fighters up to intercept and shoot them down.
Unfortunately, it had been pretty well accepted among military leaders for a long time, since before World War II, that “some bombers always get through.” Also unfortunately, one bomber getting through with a strategic nuclear bomb would be like hundreds getting through with conventional strategic bombs.
We also developed air-to-air missiles for our fighters. That should help. We also developed ground-based anti-aircraft missiles called Nikes (pronounced “nigh-keys”). Those Surface to Air Missiles might be even more effective against bombers than the fighters. Still, probably not 100% effective.
We got to work on a nuclear warhead that could be put on the Nikes as well as on the air-to-air missiles for the fighters, the W25. It would weigh a few hundred pounds but would yield the equivalent of 3,400,000 pounds of TNT. That’s nuclear weapons for you.
We got the W25 into service in 1957. Those Soviet bombers better not come now in a massed formation like the ones we used in World War II.
But 1957 was also the year the Soviets launched something called an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. We’d been working on ICBMs too for a while but hadn’t yet gotten one ready to go. This shook us up. Now we really got after it.
We tried to convert some of our Nike anti-aircraft missiles into Anti-Ballistic Missile missiles but soon saw they wouldn’t be able to get the job done. We had nothing just then that would get the job done against incoming ICBMs.
We still don’t.
Nobody else does either.
We’re making progress, we’re told. By the contractors working on this.
I doubt it. Not enough progress.
At the end of the Eisenhower administration, we did go ahead and start to build and deploy more powerful radars for a Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. ICBMs would arrive not hours after they were launched, like the bombers, but thirty minutes after they were launched. Our BMEWS might, however, give us as much as twenty minutes warning so we could launch any ICBMs we might have before the warheads from their incoming ICBMs struck.
We hoped we’d have enough time to launch our ICBMs. For deterrence, we certainly needed the Soviets to think we did. Back then and today we thought that if the other side thought our warning systems would give us enough time to retaliate, they might be, you know, deterred from conducting a first strike.
Not because their attack wouldn’t destroy us but because our return attack would destroy them.
The Soviets didn’t attack us during the Eisenhower administration with bombers or ICBMs, not even when they had an ICBM and we didn’t. Was that because our deterrence was working? Or because they had other fish to fry? Or because of something else? Maybe they had developed an ICBM not to attack but only to deter us? No way of knowing, I guess.
Maybe we just got lucky.
Starting in the 1960’s, we managed to get into orbit space satellites that were able to detect the heat from missiles being launched. These infrared satellites might give us a few more minutes warning, we thought.
Today, in 2022, we’ve got even more infrared satellites up there to detect the heat from the launches of missiles in Russia. Some are looking at the oceans to spot launches from their submarines, which would of course arrive in less than thirty minutes. Too quickly, it might be, for us to launch our land-based ICBMs.
But after 1960, we had missile submarines too, you know. They wouldn’t have to launch right after a warning because they weren’t vulnerable to a first strike. They could wait to be sure the warning from the BMEWs or the satellites wasn’t a false alarm. And then decide. Using whatever information they were able to get out there from wherever.
Bombers parked on bases were obviously vulnerable to a surprise first strike and so not useful for deterrence. Unless you could get them into the air before the attacking bombers or missiles arrived. Or unless they were already in the air.
When General Curtis LeMay was the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command (1948-57), he had calculated that if he could get the bombers that were being kept “cocked” (fueled up and loaded with nuclear weapons) on runway alert to take off in 15-second intervals after the alarm came in, he’d be able to get enough up in time to retaliate seriously. Maybe the interval between take-offs could be reduced even. He worked his airmen hard practicing with SAC’s B-52s and tankers what was called Minimum Interval Take Offs (MITO). It was terribly risky business.
In 1957, after we had the Soviet ICBMs to think about, a new Commander of SAC, General Thomas Power, started something called “airborne alert.” The plan here was to keep some B-36 and then B-52 bombers always in the air, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, loaded with strategic nuclear bombs. The bombers would take off from bases in the U.S. and fly over to close to the borders of the Soviet Union, getting refueled in the air on the way, and loiter over there for a while. When they were relieved by the next bomber, they would come back to the U.S., getting refueled again in the air on the way back.
Accidents happened. The last two were one that happened over Spain in 1966 and one over Greenland in 1968. The B-52 flying over Spain collided on its return leg with the tanker that had come up to refuel it. In the one over Greenland, a fire in the cockpit had forced the airmen to eject. That bomber flew on for a while and then crashed on the sea ice.
In both of these accidents, the bombers shed all four of the strategic B28 bombs they were carrying.
None of the bombs went off, I’m glad to say. And all were found, eventually. But after the crash in Greenland in 1968, SAC decided not to take the chance anymore. Airborne Alert was canceled that year.
Not to worry. For eight years now, we’d had our own Intercontinental and Submarine-launched Ballistic Missiles on alert.
We still kept in the air over our own country the Looking Glass airplanes we’d had there 24/7 since 1961. These were airborne command posts that could launch our ICBMs even if the command posts on the ground had been destroyed. That also, we thought, should help with deterrence.
If you were alive in those years, did you know about the airborne alerts that were going on? At the time of the crash in Spain, I was alive, in my first year of law school, and I hadn’t heard about them.
After the crash in Spain, we got to see in the newspaper a photograph of the actual B28 hydrogen bomb that had fallen into the Mediterranean and been lost for a while and then found, lying on the deck of the recovery ship. That was the first time I had seen a hydrogen bomb, the first time most of us had, I bet. It looked like an overgrown cigar cannister. With a big dent in the nose.
It hadn’t gone off, but if it had, and if the others had, each would have yielded the equivalent of a hundred Hiroshima bombs.
Occasionally our warning systems have sent false alarms saying that an attack had begun. Theirs have too. So far, the watchers on alert have realized they were false alarms before acting on them.
In systems as complicated as our nuclear weapons warning systems, it’s a statistical certainty, I understand, that we’ll get false alarms from time to time.
Let’s hope the watchers always catch them before we “retaliate.”
Next: Last Tenets of Deterrence Theory