The "D" Word VII: Trying to Wriggle Out of MAD
The atomic weapon used twice by the United States in Japan in 1945 had appeared, at first, to some people, to be something that would prevent all war. Then, after a few years, when it was clear it wouldn’t do that, of insuring our country’s security. Who was going to mess with us if we had the atomic bomb and were the only ones who did?
Immediately after World War II, however, a nuclear arms race took hold—as scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr said was certain to happen if we didn’t find a way to prevent it. Soon, because of developments in the nuclear arms race we hadn’t found a way to prevent, nuclear weapons were instead assuring us, and perhaps the whole world, of the most profound insecurity.
Today, they still do.
Unless, some think, the “stability” of “mutual assured destruction” is maintained. In MAD, if one side destroys the other, it also would likely be destroyed. That “stability” is supposed to deter each side from trying to destroy the other side. And there we are. For how long, it is hard to say.
Still, during the Cold War we and the Soviet Union kept trying to win the nuclear arms race, not just stay tied like this. We kept trying to develop weapons and delivery systems that would more assuredly assure the destruction of the other side, including their second strike capability.
During President Nixon’s administration, for example, he and Henry Kissinger decided we should go ahead and develop Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles. (I’ve not yet learned which weapons designer deserves credit for this idea.)
MIRVs would allow us not just to put three or more warheads on a single missile but to aim each warhead at a different target. That was like multiplying the number of missiles you had, wasn’t it?, and at much less cost. What a great idea!
We got MIRVs into service first, as with most weapons developments including the atomic bomb itself. Soon afterwards, however, as with most weapons developments, the Soviets matched us.
One of the few things the Soviets had beaten us to was the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, in 1957. But not to worry. Even though we didn’t manage to deploy our first ICBM until 1960, by 1961, we had ten times more ICBMs than they did. They had four. We had forty.
We stayed far ahead in number of ICBMs for more than ten years, but the gap kept closing. In the mid-70’s, the Soviets passed us in the number of ICBMs and nuclear warheads in their stockpile. Again, not to worry. By then, we’d actually stopped increasing every year the number of ICBMs and Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles and nuclear warheads in our stockpile. Someone had decided that for what we wanted to accomplish with them, we had enough. By the early 70’s, we had well over a thousand ICBMs and hundreds of SLBMs and over 28,000 warheads.
That, they decided, should be enough for what we wanted to do.
When the Soviets developed MIRVs, as they did soon after we did, it turned out their “heavy” ICBMs could carry more MIRVs than ours could. Oops. We decided then to try to agree with them not to employ MIRVs at all. At the end of the Cold War, we agreed on this and both of us “de-MIRVed” our missiles.
We might not be able wriggle out of Mutual Assured Destruction by developing new offensive weapons. Might we be able to wriggle out of it by developing an effective defense against them?
By building underground shelters maybe?
In the 50’s we began to build for our civilian and military leaders anyway big strong well-equipped underground shelters at places like Raven Rock, Pennsylvania and Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado and the Greenbriar Resort in West Virginia, and a few other places. Our Strategic Air Command had a huge facility deep underground at Offutt Air Force Base outside Omaha, Nebraska. While I was at Amherst College in Massachusetts from 1959-63, SAC built a big Alternate Command Center inside Holyoke Mountain, maybe fifteen miles from the college. None of us had a clue they were doing this. Maybe some of the workers on the facility did.
Amherst College owns the facility now. It’s being used for library storage.
These big strong well-equipped underground shelters were for our civilian and military leaders. President Eisenhower had decided, understandably, that building such shelters for all of us would simply be too expensive.
In the early 60’s, President Kennedy did urge the rest of us to build in our yards, if we had yards, “fallout shelters,” not to protect against the direct effects of the bomb, which we weren’t even sure the big shelters for our leaders could do, but to improve our chances of not being killed later by the radioactive “fallout” that would be produced by a nuclear exchange.
Some people did build such shelters. A few of us. Those who had yards and the means. Some were quite luxurious, I understand. With Rec Rooms. Equipped with guns, of course. Not to defend ourselves against the Soviets but against each other.
I think most of us just said “Why bother?”
For people in cities, JFK’s administration sponsored a project to identify big rooms where people could shelter if they could get to them in time. Supplies were put in them. Signs were put up outside. Some are of those signs are still up. Maybe you’ve seen one.
In 1954, three years before ICBMs arrived, President Eisenhower’s civil defense agency started something called Operation Alert. Once a year, across the country, alerts were declared, alarms sounded, and people in the cities were supposed to get into a shelter somewhere for 15 minutes.
In 1960, in New York City, a group of young mothers organized a protest against Operation Alert that attracted attention. Their motto was “Peace is the only defense against nuclear weapons.”
Some of us stopped participating in Operation Alert.
Operation Alert was canceled in 1962.
Might we be able to develop something that would be able to shoot down incoming ICBMs? That would be better.
In the 50’s, we had developed surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles called Nikes (pronounced “Nigh-kees”) that seemed to work well. As usual, we developed these SAMs first. By 1960, at the end of President Eisenhower’s years in office, we knew the Soviets had developed effective ones too, though, because they shot down one of our U-2 high altitude photoreconnaissance planes. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, they shot down another U-2.
We had quickly realized, however, that anti-aircraft missiles would be utterly ineffective against ICBM warheads that would be much smaller than airplanes and coming in much too fast, at many times the speed of sound.
Both sides started to work on Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems that we hoped would be able to shoot down the nuclear warheads that would be coming in at many times the speed of sound. This obviously wouldn’t be easy to do. It might not be possible.
Even with bombers, it had been pretty well agreed among military people you wouldn’t be able to get all of them. What chance would any system have of shooting down 100% of a bunch of smaller nuclear warheads coming in at many times the speed of sound?
And then maybe a second wave?
Just in case, though, in the 60’s, both of us began to equip our re-entry vehicles with “penetration aids.” Like chaff and balloons that would be thrown off the re-entry vehicles for the warheads as they came in that could confuse the radars. Maybe we could also design warheads that didn’t come straight in but were maneuverable. That would make hitting them even harder. We were both working on that, you could be sure.
Many respected scientists, Hans Bethe for one, said the effort to develop an Anti-Ballistic Missile system was a fool’s errand. Any such system would always be much more expensive than an offensive missile system. To defeat it, all you’d have to do would be to send over more missiles.
Even so, the Soviets said our having ABM systems would be “destabilizing.” Even if the systems didn’t work that well—which I think almost everyone on both sides knew they wouldn’t—, they might appear to be able to limit the effectiveness of a second strike just enough to tempt someone to try a first strike.
It would undermine, then, the deterrence offered by the condition of mutual assured destruction.
When we learned in the 70’s that the Soviets were digging an extensive system of bomb shelters around Moscow, we thought that also was destabilizing. It might allow them to think enough of them would survive a second-strike and that they could risk a first strike.
For mutual destruction to work to deter the use of nuclear weapons, it became clear, it had to be embraced, not avoided.
In 1972, President Nixon and the Soviets signed an Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. We both agreed to stop working on ABM systems.
In the later 1980’s, President Reagan had allowed himself to be convinced by his wishful hard-line advisors, against the advice of scientists like Hans Bethe, that we would be able to build a “shield” against ICBMs. He and Congress began to fund a very expensive “Strategic Defense Initiative.”
SDI hadn’t worked out, even after whole lot of money was spent on it. Billions and billions of dollars.
President Reagan’s successor, President George H.W. Bush, had pretty much shut down the SDI program, which quite a few of us had begun call “Star Wars.” “Star Wars” was a very popular movie of the time that I never got around to seeing. The movie was certainly a great success. Good versus evil, I think, with good triumphing. It was fiction, of course.
In 2002, thirty years after the ABM treaty was signed, ten years after President Bush’s father shut down Star Wars, President Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, repudiated the treaty. When President George W. Bush took us out of the ABM treaty, Russia MIRVed its missiles again. A reasonable response, you’d have to say.
We again started to spend lots of money trying to develop an ABM system that would work. Maybe against some short- and medium-range missiles at least.
Today, twenty years after George W. Bush repudiated the ABM treaty, we read occasional reports from the military and defense contractors that progress is being made in developing missiles that will be able to stop incoming ICBMs. We aren’t there yet, clearly. From what I can tell, we still don’t have anything that could be expected to work against even, like, five ICBMs.
If someone decides to attack us, who’s going to send over only five missiles?
Here’s a recent article from Center for Strategic and International Studies that puts the best face it can on the matter.
If we could think of a way to survive a large-scale attack with nuclear weapons and keep our country and our world liveable, we could relax.
We haven’t been able to.
Another way to relax might be not to think about it.
Even that may not be possible. In the 80’s, Martin Amis, a British novelist and essayist of the time, wrote, “If we think about nuclear weapons, we feel sick. If we don’t think about them, we feel sick and don’t know why.”
Next: Deterrence and Rationality I