You Might Want to Know - ICBMs Arriving - VIII. "Survivability"
VIII. “Survivability”
We need to be clear about something. When it comes to nuclear weapons, discussions of “survivability” are about the survivability of the weapons, not the survivability of anything else. The idea is that if the missiles are “survivable,” we also may survive.
That’s the idea. It’s a theory. And unprovable, if you think about it. “A fearful faith” Jill Lepore has called it.
In any case, in the late 50’s, when the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles arrived—when they were invented, I mean—and thermonuclear warheads were developed that the missiles could deliver, survivability became a big issue.
The first thing we did to make our Atlas ICBMs more survivable was to lay them down on the surface or recessed into the surface in what were called “coffins.” Then, when we had missiles we could do this with, we inserted them upright in underground “silos.” We “hardened” the silos and launch control centers with thick reinforced concrete. Our North American Air Defense (NORAD) Command center and some of our Strategic Air Command centers were built inside mountains. The Strategic Air Command headquarters themselves had been buried down deep underground outside Omaha, Nebraska.
These measures would protect against attacks with conventional bombs, pretty certainly. It wasn’t as clear that they would protect against attacks with thermonuclear weapons. This wasn’t something that could easily be tested, was it?
We tried to make our B-52 bombers survivable by parking them on runways already “cocked,” that is, loaded with fuel and thermonuclear bombs. We would practice “launching” them into the air as quickly as possible after being warned of an attack. The goal was to get a whole squadron airborne in fifteen minutes. Talk about a risky operation. The bombers crashed sometimes during practice. Because it was practice, they weren’t carrying the thermonuclear bombs as they would be if it weren’t practice.
If we had enough warning, as we did during the Cuban missile crisis, say, we might “disperse” the bombers to different secret locations.
Then, in the 70’s, we invented Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicles, MIRVs for our ICBMs. We put three of these MIRVs with W62 warheads in them on our Minuteman IIIs. Then, pretty quickly, the Soviets learned how to make MIRVs. They put ten of them on one of their bigger ICBMs, their SS-18. Oops. That didn’t work out well.
MIRVs made the survivability of the missiles, theirs and ours, more dubious, you had to think.
When we learned about the Soviets’ MIRVed SS-18, President Carter ordered us to start working on an ICBM that would also be able to carry ten MIRVs. At first, it was called the MX, for “missile experimental.” President Reagan decided to call it the Peacekeeper.
During President Carter’s administration, a bunch of basing options were explored as we tried to think of something that might make the MX survivable. Thirty-three different options, I heard from an authoritative source. One option was rolling the missiles out of flying cargo planes. President Carter didn’t choose that one. He chose the option of digging out a huge underground rail network in Utah and Nevada with four-thousand separate launch sites spread throughout it.
When Ronald Reagan became president, he rejected that option in favor of what was called a “dense pack” of Peacekeepers to be installed in existing Minuteman silos at F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, just over the hill from Laramie, where I was then living. Still expensive but much cheaper than what President Carter had chosen.
In Summer 1984, we started building at F.E. Warren the support facilities for the Peacekeepers. In a couple of years, we’d start building the Peacekeepers right there in their silos. That’s how we’d be doing it this time instead of building the missiles somewhere else and loading them into silos we’d built separately.
In 1988, as President Reagan was about to leave office, we got the fifty Peacekeepers Congress had been willing to pay for ready to go and on alert in the dense pack at F. E. Warren. President Reagan had wanted more than a hundred Peacekeepers but quite a few members of Congress had doubted that in that dense pack these missiles would be “survivable.”
Congress were assured that the launch facilities for the Peacekeepers would be not just hardened but “super-hardened” to make the missile survivable. Some members of Congress hadn’t bought it. Maybe some had.
I don’t know if Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming actually bought it but he did strongly support having the Peacekeepers in Cheyenne. He might have supported them being there for reasons other than their survivability. Maybe for the boost they would give to Wyoming’s economy. And his chances of re-election.
You’d have to say, wouldn’t you, that the survivability of anything in a fixed site, like the Peacekeepers and the Minuteman IIIs, was questionable.
So what about this idea? The Union Pacific was now running tests of a rail garrison system designed for the Peacekeepers that would pull the missiles out of that dense pack and shuttle them around on our existing railroads.
The Russians had already thought of this. They already had a rail garrison system in operation for their SS-24 missile. The SS-24 was another ICBM they had now that was MIRV capable, ten warheads each yielding five-hundred fifty kilotons, a good bit more than the ten W87s on the Peacekeeper would yield. A W87 yielded only three hundred to four-hundred seventy-five kilotons. I’m not sure who knew this. I didn’t.
The Russians were also working on a road mobile missile, we learned—the Topol M. We decided we wanted one too. The year before President Reagan left office, we started to design one that would use the same guidance unit, reentry system and warhead as the Peacekeeper but be small and light enough to be moved around on our regular roads, on some kind of launcher-trailer pulled by a big tractor maybe. We called this missile the Midgetman. It was smaller but not small. It would be, after all, an ICBM.
These missiles wouldn’t be hidden out of sight in underground silos or rail cars. They’d be right up where we could all see them, rolling along over there on I-80 maybe. The point was that a moveable ICBM couldn’t be targeted as easily as the dense pack and our Minuteman missile fields could.
The Midgetman would carry only one W87 that would yield the same three-hundred or four-hundred seventy-five kilotons as it would have in the Peacekeeper. But with the kind of accuracy the guidance unit and reentry system would give it, we thought it could be used to attack any hardened targets the Russians had. After all, three-hundred kilotons is twenty Hiroshimas.
Would one W87 actually be able to destroy one of the Soviets’ hardened targets? I didn’t know. If it came to that, it might not matter much.
In any case, after the end of the Cold War in 1990, we dropped the rail garrison and the Midgetman programs. In a few years, we’d also be getting rid of the Peacekeepers.
Since just after the end of the Cold War, however, we’d had another new missile with ICBM range—the Trident II D5 Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile. The missiles could be launched from submerged submarines and the submarines could be anywhere. Or somewhere else. The D5s were MIRVed, eight- to even fourteen warheads. Some yielding up to four-hundred seventy-five kilotons. Twenty-four D5 missiles could be carried by every Trident submarine we’d built. We’d built fourteen.
Those Tridents on patrol underwater were pretty survivable, you had to think. Maybe that would be enough?
But here’s another thought. Is having “survivable” missiles all we need to think about here? Is that what is going to keep us safe? Some people like to call that the “realistic” view. But when it comes to nuclear weapons what would you say is the more realistic assumption : that if they exist, they will someday be used or that as long as they are survivable they never will be?
Next: False Start