The End of the World

August 10, 1984: A small group of Soviet leaders is sitting around a felted conference table in a mountain bunker 60 miles outside Moscow. They agree that the European war has been going well. One of them worries: "Too well." It was easier than their strategists had predicted. It started purely as a political ploy: a modest thrust at Berlin in response to the American invasion of Panama. But how do you disengage, now that the point is more than made? The military senses victory. The ideologues are suddenly sounding like Mao: "The Americans are paper tigers."

But the cautious Russians in this room are terrified. Western Europe is under the American nuclear umbrella. The United States cannot--and will not--permit the Soviets to discredit 35 years of promises to NATO. What will Washington do? the Russian premier wonders. Both sides have been building nuclear weapons accurate enough to wipe out not only population and industry but missiles in hardened underground silos. If the United States is allowed to strike first, most of the Soviet retaliatory force, perhaps as much as 70 percent, will be destroyed before it can be launched. The American President just might do it. He has been under intense pressure. He apparently went into Panama in the first place to help divert attention from his political troubles at home. The hotline is ominously silent. The premier wants to talk, but it is for the President to make the first contact. After all, the Russians are "winning."

The premier knows that neither side can win a nuclear war. But at least theoretically, the side that attacks first will have a somewhat better chance of surviving and rebuilding over time. The side that waits. ... So the Soviet leaders are driven inexorably, by the logic of the nuclear equation, to a pre-emptive strike. The world finally makes it to Armageddon.

There could be other routes. The final war could come as easily through an American first strike, launched by essentially the same logic. Europe is, after all, the most widely discussed case where the United States has contingency plans for a "first use" of nuclear weapons. Or the nuclear weapons in Korea that, in a President's casually given word, might be used against the North, could be used by a future Administration to redeem that earlier President's "solemn promise," as it may come to be called. Otherwise, as Henry Kissinger might say, who could ever believe us again? Which would miss the point that nobody would be left to believe--or to care--if the Soviets took a nuclear assault on North Korea as a signal that they had better fire their missiles at the United States before the United States, now clearly willing to employ nuclear weapons, decides to neutralize those missiles.

Most Americans have learned to live with the bomb; we have become resigned to the fact that a very few people have our survival at their finger tips, though we may be unnerved a little when David Frost shows us the dangerous Nixon who was behind the Presidential mask. There have been attempts to challenge the Pentagon, but the complex debates in Congress rarely command public attention. Even modest amendments to trim the arms budget or postpone super-weapons generally lose by lopsided margins. On the whole, the power of decision has been left to the experts in the Pentagon. We were frightened by Seven Days in May, amused by Dr. Strangelove, and now most of us hardly worry about the thin margin of our continued existence.

But now the situation has changed, growing even more dangerous. Until recently, there was a macabre stability to the delicate nuclear balance. Neither side could hope to gain any advantage from nuclear war; either could respond to any attack by reducing the other to rubble. This made it less risky, though very expensive, to let the Dr. Strangeloves and the Curtis LeMays dream, design and build new and better ways to do what no rational leader would ever do anyway. And after all, it did create jobs. In the past three years, however, a new factor has been added to the nuclear equation: so-called counterforce weapons and strategies that, in effect, put a hair trigger on our nuclear warheads and bombs. A retired American diplomat, who also happens to be a conservative Republican and a veteran hawk on Vietnam, told me last fall that he was glad he was an old man. "I will probably be able to the a natural death," he said. "But my children won't."

How we reached this suicidal point is essentially a story of the insatiable military appetite for more weapons in search of a rationale. The development of counterforce began with the very different notion of deterrence. The American strategy was that to deter a Russian attack, we had to be able to inflict "unacceptable damage"; also that we had to be able to do it many times over, in several ways, just to be sure. Thus, we have 1000 Minuteman and 54 Titan missiles on land, plus 656 Polaris and Poseidon missiles on submarines, plus 418 strategic bombers with dozens of missiles and bombs on each.

It strains the mind to imagine a purpose for which an American President or a Soviet Politburo would be willing to sacrifice even a few major cities. Obviously, we would not take lightly the incineration of New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, nor would the Russians likely trade away Moscow, Leningrad or Odessa for, say, Berlin. The Soviet Union has 219 cities with populations of over 100,000. A few warheads would level each one. If we can do that, it hardly seems probable that they will be more deterred if we can also wipe out the smaller villages and towns. Yet we can do that, too. Our land-based and sea-based missiles now have clusters of warheads that can be released separately to hit individual targets as the missiles themselves make course changes in flight. These clusters are called MIRVs, an acronym for multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles. With MIRVs, we have not a few but 41 nuclear warheads on station for each Soviet city of 100,000 or more people. Or we could drop nine warheads on each city of more than 20,000. Or we could space them still more widely and hit every village and town of 5000 and up. There are 8500 warheads and bombs in the arsenal. They have a combined explosive power of more than three billion tons of TNT--about 1500 pounds of explosive for every man, woman and child on the planet. By any stretch of war gaming, the capacity to deter a Russian attack was abundantly secured many missiles ago.

But that did not deter the Pentagon planners. They discovered a new need. If the job of deterrence was done, the next demand was for a "flexible response." Initially, this made sense. The theory was that if the only answer to any nuclear attack were massive retaliation, the Soviet Union might not be convinced that we really would retaliate at all if it launched a limited nuclear strike, perhaps against an ally or American shipping at sea. The remedy was to retarget some American missiles, aiming them at the Soviets' military installations, so their population and industry could be spared and we could respond in proportion to a modest Soviet attack. Beginning in 1973, retargeting provided the United States with a credible deterrent to small nuclear threats as well as total ones.

Suddenly, the planners needed another argument for more overkill. So they invented counterforce. If the American arsenal could hit military bases as well as cities, they asked, what could be more logical than to aim at knocking out the Russian missiles themselves, at countering the very forces with which the Kremlin could wage nuclear war? It was a chance to move beyond deterrence to preemption: Instead of retaliating against cities after a Soviet attack, the United States might deprive the Russians of their nuclear capability before they could use it. Soon American warheads will be able to destroy the Soviet Union's land-based missiles even in hardened-concrete-and-steel silos underground.

This development raises the specter of tripping into nuclear war whenever a European or Korean crisis reaches a relatively low boiling point. If both sides have silo-busting weapons, it is not hard to conceive of circumstances in which the leaders of either the United States or the Soviet Union--convinced that they might be attacked--would attack first.

MIRVs made counterforce possible. If it was missile for missile, the race for a pre-emptive capacity was senseless. All the Russians had to do was keep adding missiles to preserve their deterrent, one new one for each one our forces could wipe out. But in 1970, we started MIRVing our land-based missiles. Each can hit at least three different targets. Five (continued on page 196)End of the World(continued from page 126) hundred fifty Minuteman missiles now have MIRV warheads; together, they can blast as many as 1650 targets--which is more than the number of land-based missiles the Russians have. We have also been MIRVing our submarine missiles, with ten to 12 warheads on each of the 16 missiles on each boat.

A number of us in the Senate tried in 1970 to suspend the MIRV program, pending an attempt to ban MIRVs as part of an arms-control agreement. We pointed out that there was no military necessity for MIRVs, that the Russians were at least five years behind in this technology and that multiple warheads would make it hard to verify compliance with any arms-control agreement. Satellites can count missiles, submarines and airplanes, but they cannot count how many warheads are in a nose cone. Nixon insisted on installing MIRVs immediately, in a little-noted decision that may ultimately prove to be the most disastrous of all his deeds, including Vietnam, Cambodia and Watergate. The Russians are now catching up in MIRVs, a development that is shamelessly cited by the same strategists who resisted any restraint seven years ago as the latest excuse for speeding up the arms race. In a 1974 background briefing, Secretary of State Kissinger lamely wished that he "had thought through the implications of a MIRVed world more thoughtfully in 1969 and 1970 than I did."

A MIRVed world is bad enough. But silo busting requires a fatal combination of accuracy and explosive power--a big warhead delivered close to the hardened target. Neither of those features is needed to blow away cities. The weapon's effect in such cases is so devastating that a miss--even by more than a mile--is as good as a hit. But for counterforce against missile silos, high accuracy is essential.

We are now close to pinpoint accuracy. Last October, the United States refitted 550 Minuteman III missiles with the NS-20 guidance system. (The Pentagon has a way of detoxifying the apocalypse by assigning it innocuous names and numbers.) NS-20 doubled the accuracy of the 1650 MIRV warheads on those missiles, giving them even odds to land within 600 feet of any Soviet silo, setting off a blast roughly nine times as big as the one that destroyed Hiroshima. And that is only phase one. In fiscal 1978, the Pentagon intends to start mounting the MK-12A warhead on Minuteman missiles. It will double the size of the yield. After those two "advances," each of the 1650 Minuteman warheads will have more than an 80 percent chance of killing any Russian missile at which it is aimed.

Still greater wonders (or horrors) are on the horizon. As it stands now, a land base is the most reliable place from which to launch a precisely accurate missile. But the submarines are catching up. The best bet as a successor to MIRV is a device with an equally agreeable name--a MARV, a maneuverable re-entry vehicle. Unlike ballistic-missile warheads, which, by definition, can move only like a bullet, in the direction they are aimed, a MARV can change course in flight. It would be a marksman's dream--after firing wide, he could reroute the bullet to the bull's-eye. It could become the world's nightmare, inviting nuclear war by the very fact that it could threaten to disarm the other side in a sudden, sneak attack.

Our military planners are not oblivious to the alarm about these systems. They simply deny their plain implication and then blame the problem, as usual, on the Russians. Then--Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger told a Foreign Relations subcommittee in 1974: "We have no desire to develop a unilateral counterforce capability against the Soviet Union. What we wish to avoid is the Soviet Union's having a counterforce capability against the United States without our being able to have a comparable capability." Our counterforce, he pleaded, was just a responsible reaction to what the Russians might do. It sounded plausible. But Schlesinger was either misinformed or misleading the committee. There is no Russian counterforce program in being and, by the best estimates, they cannot achieve a counterforce capability until long after ours is already in place.

What the Soviets do have is big missiles with big warheads. But they have such size mainly because they lack the technical skill to build smaller, more efficient systems. To be alarmed by their throw weight--literally, the poundage of their comparatively crude and overweight ballistic warheads--is as simple-minded as preferring a radio console with tubes to a smaller portable model with transistors because bigger must be better.

The size of warheads is important. But if the goal is to knock out a single-point target such as a missile silo, size is meaningless without accuracy. Explosions are spherical, while targets are flat. Doubling the size of an explosion will double its total force, but much of the increase will be vented upward or absorbed downward into the ground, with only a marginal widening of the radius of destruction. For example, if the size of a bomb is multiplied ten times, it will have only a five-times-greater chance of killing a silo; but if the size is left alone and the accuracy is improved tenfold, the silo will be 100 times more likely to be killed.

There are mathematical formulas to account for all the variables--the hardness of the target, the reliability of the missile, the size of the warhead, accuracy, and so forth--and then measure how lethal each side's missiles are against the other's. Professor Kosta Tsipis of MIT has calculated that in 1974, the Soviet nuclear force was only one 20th of the way toward a fairly certain (97 percent) capacity to knock out all "enemy" land-based missiles in their silos. But the United States was more than halfway there.

Professor Tsipis then figured projections for the future, assuming that both sides would continue the improvements they were planning or developing. He concluded that the United States could threaten all Soviet silos with assured destruction by 1981 or 1982. The Russians would not be even a fourth of the way toward an ability to do the same thing to us. Other experts place them at least ten years behind.

Ultimately, they can do the same thing, of course. Yet, even then, our force will be the more threatening. The Russians now have a total of 4000 warheads to our 8500. But three fourths of their arsenal is mounted on land-based missiles--the kind that would be vulnerable to a counterforce attack. By contrast, less than one fourth of our warheads are on land-based missiles; the others are safe under water or on bombers that can be placed on alert and flown out of harm's way in case of an attack. Thus, by 1981 or 1982, the Russians will have to fear that we could launch a surprise first strike and wipe out most of their power to fight back.

The American lead is already commanding. We may be too far ahead for our own or the world's good. Yet in recent months, the country has been subjected to a barrage of scare stories, timed to influence the new Administration, contrived to convince the casual observer that unless we instantly spend tens of billions of dollars more on the military, we had all better start learning to speak Russian.

Some of the scaremongers have cited the momentum of the Soviet missile program and complained that the United States has been standing still. In fact, over the past ten years, we have spent almost 120 billion dollars to research and buy new nuclear weapons beyond the cost of maintaining the ones we already had.

Another scare story is that the Soviet emphasis on civil defense is a sure sign that they are preparing a nuclear-war fighting and winning capability. In fact, Soviet civil-defense spending per person averages approximately the same amount our Western European allies spend. The Russian people take a less Strangelovian, more realistic, if morbid, view than the scaremongers who regard nuclear war as a thinkable, even practical proposition. A popular joke in Moscow goes, Question: "What do you do when you hear the alert?" Answer: "Put on a sheet and crawl slowly to the cemetery." Q.: "Why slowly?" A.: "So you don't spread panic."

In 1976, the CIA commissioned a group of largely non-Government hardliners to reinterpret the national intelligence estimate, which until then showed the United States in a secure position. The group, as expected, concluded that the Soviet Union was determined to achieve strategic superiority over the United States. In fact, as already noted, any superiority in quality and deadliness lies entirely on the American side; on the other hand, if both sides have enough warheads to inflict "unacceptable damage," then terms like superiority have no practical meaning. More warheads would only sift the dust finer.

A new Committee on the Present Danger, including members of the CIA group, has warned that unless we escalate our defenses, our "military capacity will become inadequate to ensure peace and security." In fact, one of the greatest dangers facing the country is the presence and influence of that committee. For it is replaying a well-worn scenario that in the past was fed hundreds of billions of tax dollars and now threatens, in the parlance of the Vietnam GIs, to waste the planet itself. The nation had an alleged bomber gap in the early Fifties, Sputnik and a phony missile gap soon after, and now the missile-size or throw-weight and civil-defense gaps of the Seventies. Each time, the gaps have produced a panicked spasm of military spending. Each time, the alarms have turned out to be wildly exaggerated; each time, the new arms build-up based on inflated American fears has later been copied by the Soviet Union, thus bringing into real being, though belatedly, the very threat that had previously existed only in the Pentagon's imagination. Thereupon, the Paul Reveres congratulate themselves for their foresight and think up the next thing the Soviet Union might do, so they can sound the alarm and get us to do it first.

Paul Warnke, now director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and chief of our delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, described the process a few years ago as two "apes on a treadmill." The metaphor ruffled some feathers--or fur--and caused him some trouble in winning Senate confirmation. It sounded as if he were comparing arms experts to apes; and, as everyone knows, apes are comparatively feeble-minded. But the analogy expressed the reality exactly. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union has had the elementary sense to get off the treadmill. Now the United States is out front, straining to make the treadmill go faster.

Yet the process is not as mindless as it seems. Behind it, there is a world view that has the same sort of logical coherence that many of the insane can claim once their assumptions are granted. A small cabal of influential American hardliners begins with the premise that we have far greater financial and technological resources than the Soviet Union. An arms race costs the Russians relatively more. They have to divert a higher percentage of scarce resources than the United States does from domestic programs that might strengthen their society, such as investments in agriculture. By the same token, stopping the race would free up relatively more of their resources. Through the prism of certain right-wing true believers, including some members of the Congress and Pentagon officials, along with their allies in the arms industries and elements of organized labor, the arms race looks like simply a way, short of war, to tire out and bring down the Soviet system. They envision a process of mutual exhaustion in which the Russians will collapse internally while the United States is still staggering along, its defenses bristling while its economy is only almost depleted.

Representing perhaps a tenth of the electorate, such hard-liners exert a disproportionate influence on arms policy. They plan it that way. They carefully function as "inside" sources for reporters. Excerpts from last year's hard-line intelligence estimates quickly leaked to the press, even though they were highly classified. With the help of Richard A. Viguerie, once Governor George Wallace's direct-mail organizer, the hardliners stirred enough mail and other protest to pressure 40 Senators into voting against Warnke for arms-control negotiator, apparently because he was too much in favor of achieving results. The message was loud and clear: Forty votes are more than enough to deny the ratification of any arms-control treaty, which would require approval from two thirds of the Senate.

The military supplies willing help, but mostly. I think, out of innocence and incompetence in what is essentially a political realm. It is their job to imagine the worst threats, push for the best weapons and seek the maximum funds. Typically, they plan and propose weaponry on the assumption that arms control will not happen. In his last report in early 1977, retiring Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld summed up the Pentagon view: "It must be recognized that precisely because technology is dynamic, the contributions of arms control to stability may well be modest and may be overtaken on occasion by events." He did not mention that it was our technology and our events that have been doing the overtaking.

There is also a sort of surrealism at work. I recall the early debate in 1964 over whether or not the United States should spend upwards of 100 billion dollars to build an antiballistic-missile system. There were doubts about whether or not it would work; one skeptic observed that it was like trying to build an "antibullet bullet." But the Pentagon figures contended that without the system. 100,000,000 Americans would the in a nuclear war; with it, fatalities might be held to "only" 80,000,000. One Senator asked how anyone could be against a system that would save 20,000,000 lives. It was hard to know whether to laugh or to cry. The over-all consequences of nuclear war are so incredible that they are ignored. Instead, it is assumed that the war will happen and the consequences are dealt with in bits and pieces. Writing war games becomes literally a game--an exercise that is out of touch with the most important truth of all, that the only rational reason for having these weapons is not to fight nuclear war but to prevent it.

In 1945, an American scientist was on an observation flight over the first atomic target, Hiroshima, shortly after it was attacked. He described the carnage:

We circled finally low over Hiroshima and stared in disbelief. There below was the flat level ground of what had been a city, scorched red in the same telltale scar. But no hundreds of planes had visited this town during a long night. One bomber, and one bomb, had, in the time it takes a rifle bullet to cross a room, turned a city of 300,000 into a burning pyre.

Even the smallest of today's strategic nuclear weapons has several times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. If one were to explode at midday in Manhattan, the shock wave would kill 5,000,000 unprotected people within four or five miles and would demolish buildings almost as far away as the Connecticut border. And that would be just the beginning of the end: Only 20 percent of the fatalities at Hiroshima were caused by the blast. A nuclear explosion over Manhattan would generate temperatures of tens of millions of degrees centigrade, radiating out like the sun's rays. The heat and the fire storm would be deadlier than the shock. So would the short- and long-term radiation effects. The familiar mushroom cloud would draw up and contaminate tons of earth and debris, to settle back and kill millions of people hundreds of miles away.

And while we know what a single warhead will do, we are less certain of the combined effect of thousands going off at once. There would be a massive depletion of stratospheric ozone, which filters the sun's ultraviolet rays. That, in turn, could burn crops and animals and disrupt the climate in ways we cannot predict accurately. The National Academy of Sciences has concluded that if just half of the U.S. and Soviet arsenals were fired, human beings and other living forms would, indeed, survive in considerable numbers--but mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, assuming, of course, that the war took place north of the equator. The Northern Hemisphere would have some life, of a sort: Insects, relatively immune to radiation, would multiply and infest that half of the earth. The president of the academy has suggested that an attacking country would be devastated even if the other side did not strike back.

I once believed that Congress could halt the mad race; but after years of frustration on this issue, I now think that the only chance rests with the President--and if he fails, with the American people themselves. When scientists say something can be done, the President must make a hard judgment whether or not it should be. The President can tell the Pentagon that an exotic new war-fighting scenario makes no sense--that counterforce, for example, is counterproductive, tempting the disaster it claims to prevent. When hard-liners inflate the threat and cry for excessive weapons to thwart arms control, the President has to have the courage to say no and to defend that decision in the public arena. And the President, who proposes the budget, can rearrange the priorities that allocate to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency a third of what the Army spends on brass bands.

As for the people, Vietnam taught me one lesson: When their leaders insist on perpetuating a blunder, they can change the direction of events. On nuclear policy, as on the war, the 80 percent of Americans who see the sense of arms control must stop trusting the experts, assuming that they know best and that the matter is too complicated for a democratic decision. In fact, the basic question of nuclear arms does not require an encyclopedic comprehension of strategic options and specific weapons. It does not require a great expertise but ordinary intelligence to sense the insanity of nuclear war, to grasp the ungodly power we have to commit humanocide--insights to which the experts themselves often seem blind.

Of course, the Vietnam example also teaches that it would take time for the people to make the politicians see the light. This issue probably would be harder to organize and win on: Instead of the reality of weekly body counts, there is "only" a threat--of an entire nation of casualties. This issue also goes to the heart of what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. Vietnam was their error, but their interest was peripheral. But someone, Jimmy Carter or John Q. Public, has to act. The few dissenters in the Congress will not prevail if they continue to be alone.

Though it will take time, I think and hope that we have a few hours left on the nuclear clock. We have seen the dawn of doomsday. Perhaps we can stop the race to high noon.

"The weapon's effect is so devastating that a miss--even by more than a mile--is as good as a hit."