FOUR
ARSENALS AND ACCIDENTS
A reader who has gotten this far into the book may be wondering if all this policy talk really matters.1 Treaties, agreements, dialogues, debates—who cares? Didn’t the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War mark the end of the nuclear threat? Nothing could be further from the truth. There are multiple nuclear nightmares still out there. On any given day, we could wake up to a crisis that threatens our country, our region, our planet. If we ignore these nuclear nightmares, we do so at our peril.
The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate the enormous thermonuclear energies of the sun on the surface of the earth—with catastrophic consequences. But it might be nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with a few hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke and particulates, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts, massive crop failures, and mega-famines.
The nuclear age is now in its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. In 1957, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting toward Australia from a Northern Hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7,000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the U.S. stockpile outnumbering the Soviet Union’s ten to one.
By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” antimissile system was originally intended to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5,000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. “These bombs,” Schell wrote, “were built as ‘weapons’ for ‘war,’ but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man.”2
The threat of a global thermonuclear war today is low. The treaties negotiated in the 1980s, particularly the START agreements, which began the reductions in U.S. and Soviet strategic arsenals, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear-tipped missiles, began a process that accelerated with the end of the Cold War. Between 1992 and 2012, the nuclear weapons carried by long-range U.S. and Russian missiles and bombers decreased by 74 percent.3 And the number of all the nuclear weapons in the world (short- and long-range, deployed and nondeployed) has been cut by almost three-quarters, from a Cold War high of more than 65,056 in 1986 to about 17,200 as of March 2013. What has not changed is the concentration of these weapons. The United States and Russia at the beginning of 2013 had over 95 percent of all these weapons, or about 16,200, with seven other countries holding the remaining 1,000 or so.4
The U.S. and Russian stockpiles are on track to decline for at least the rest of this decade. As their numbers come down, so does the risk of nuclear war. But the risk is not zero. Even a small chance of nuclear war each year, for whatever reason, multiplied over a number of years sums up to an unacceptable chance for catastrophe.
These are not mere statistical musings. We came much closer to Armageddon after the Cold War ended than many realize. In January 1995, a global nuclear war almost started by mistake. Russian military officials mistook a Norwegian weather rocket for a U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missile. Boris Yeltsin became the first Russian president to ever have the “nuclear suitcase” open in front of him. He had just a few minutes to decide if he should push the button that would launch a barrage of nuclear missiles. We believe his senior military officials advised him that he had to launch. Thankfully, he concluded that his radars were in error. The suitcase was closed.
Such a scenario could repeat today. The presidents of Russia and the United States are still followed everywhere they go by an aide carrying a suitcase (or the “football” as the White House calls it) with the codes and communications that could launch Armageddon. The Cold War is over, but the Cold War weapons remain. And so do the Cold War postures that keep thousands of these weapons on hair-trigger alert, ready to launch in under fifteen minutes. As of January 2013, the active U.S. stockpile contains nearly 4,650 nuclear warheads. About 1,950 of them are deployed atop Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles based in Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota; the rest are deployed in a fleet of fourteen nuclear-powered Trident submarines that patrol the Pacific, Atlantic, and Artic oceans and at air force bases housing the long-range B-2 bombers in Missouri and the B-52s in North Dakota and Louisiana (see table 4.1). The United States also has approximately 3,000 intact warheads in storage awaiting dismantlement, for a total inventory of some 7,700 warheads.
Russia has more than 4,500 warheads in its active stockpile, with 2,484 atop its SS-18, SS-19, SS-25, and SS-27 missiles deployed in silos in six missile fields arrayed between Moscow and Siberia (Kozelsk, Tatishchevo, Uzhur, Dombarovskiy, Kartalay, and Aleysk); on eleven nuclear-powered Delta submarines that conduct limited patrols with the Northern and Pacific fleets from three naval bases (Nerpich’ya, Yagel’Naya and Rybachiy); and on Bear and Blackjack bombers stationed at Ukrainka and Engels air bases (see table 4.2). Russia also retains an estimated 4,000 intact warheads in storage awaiting dismantlement, for a total stockpile of some 8,500 weapons.5
Though the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Russian and American presidents now call each other friends, Washington and Moscow continue to maintain and modernize these huge nuclear arsenals. In July 2007, just before President Vladimir Putin of Russia vacationed with President George W. Bush at the Bush home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Russia successfully tested a new submarine-based missile. In operation, the missile would carry six nuclear warheads and could travel more than 6,000 miles; that is, it is designed to strike targets in the United States, including, almost certainly, targets in the very state of Maine that Putin visited. For his part, President Bush’s administration adopted a nuclear posture that included plans to produce new types of weapons; begin development of a new generation of nuclear missiles, submarines, and bombers; and expand the U.S. nuclear weapons complex so that it could produce thousands of new warheads on demand. President Barack Obama, as noted in previous chapters, has updated this strategy, but it still retains many of the nuclear-war-fighting aspects that could lead, by intention, miscalculation, or accident, to a thermonuclear exchange.
In October 2012, many organizations and experts marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union almost started a global thermonuclear war. But this crisis was not the only time we almost used or exploded nuclear weapons; it is only the most well known. Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, compiled a list that month for Foreign Policy magazine of twelve other near misses—or one for each month of the year—in his article “Nightmare on Nuke Street.” It was not hard to do. The Department of Defense, Lewis noted, has a report documenting thirty-two nuclear weapon accidents between 1950 and 1980. These include incidents where a total of six nuclear weapons were lost and never recovered. The department also tallied up 1,152 “moderately serious” nuclear false alarms between 1977 and 1984—or roughly three per week. “I kind of get the feeling that if NORAD went more than a week without a serious false alarm,” Lewis quipped, “they would start to wonder if the computers were ok.”6
Examples of crises provided by Lewis, who also edits the popular blog ArmsControlWonk.org include:
image  A November 1979 incident when someone at North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) “played a training tape showing a massive Soviet attack … NORAD issued warnings that went out to the entire intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force and put the president’s airborne command post in the air.”
image  Several accidents involving B-52s armed with nuclear weapons that crashed in 1962 (Goldsboro, North Carolina), 1966 (Palomares, Spain), and 1968 (Thule, Greenland). “After the third crash, the Air Force finally figured out that it’s a terrible idea to keep nuclear armed bombers in the air at all times.”
image  A 1958 incident where a B-47 crew accidentally dropped a hydrogen bomb that landed near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina—and exploded. “Fortunately, only the high explosives detonated. But the impact crater can still be seen today.”
image  Three different false alarms from June 3 to June 6, 1980, caused by new software and a faulty forty-six-cent computer chip that failed in NORAD headquarters that “showed different Soviet attacks from one moment to the next,” alarming “many officials in the Carter administration.”
image  A 1956 bomber crash at Lakenheath Air Base in Britain where a B-47 plowed into nuclear weapons storage “igloos,” killing the crew and scattering Mark Six nuclear warheads. General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, cabled back home: “Preliminary exam by bomb disposal officer says a miracle that one Mark Six with exposed detonators didn’t go off.”
image  A 2007 incident where “a weapons crew at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota mistakenly loaded six nuclear-armed cruise missiles onto a B-52 bomber, which then flew the nuclear weapons across the country to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The nuclear weapons were unsecured for 36 hours.” Crew in Barksdale eventually noticed that the missiles hanging from the bomber’s wings were nuclear, not conventional, weapons. Officials at Minot did not know the weapons were missing until the alarmed officers in Louisiana notified them.
As the 1995 and 2007 incident demonstrates, the dangers from the accidents, miscalculations, and misunderstandings involving the existing nuclear arsenals are not confined to the Cold War past. For example, although much was made at the time of the 1994 joint decision by Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin to no longer target each other’s countries with their weapons, this announcement had few practical consequences. Target coordinates can be uploaded into a warhead’s guidance systems within minutes. The warheads remain on missiles on a high-alert status similar to what was maintained during the tensest moments of the Cold War. This greatly increases the risk of an unauthorized or accidental launch. Because there is no time buffer built into each state’s decision-making process, this extreme level of readiness enhances the possibility that either side’s president could prematurely order a nuclear strike based on flawed intelligence.
Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman launch officer who is now a leader of the Global Zero movement, says, “If both sides sent the launch order right now, without any warning or preparation, thousands of nuclear weapons—the equivalent in explosive firepower of about 70,000 Hiroshima bombs—could be unleashed within a few minutes.”7
Blair describes the scenario in dry but chilling detail:
If early warning satellites or ground radar detected missiles in flight, both sides would attempt to assess whether a real nuclear attack was under way within a strict and short deadline. Under Cold War procedures that are still in practice today, early warning crews manning their consoles 24/7 have only three minutes to reach a preliminary conclusion. Such occurrences happen on daily basis, sometimes more than once per day. If an apparent nuclear missile threat is perceived, then an emergency teleconference would be convened between the American/Russian President and his top nuclear advisers. On the U.S side, the top officer on duty at Strategic Command in Omaha, Neb., would brief the president on his nuclear options and their consequences. That officer is allowed all of 30 seconds to deliver the briefing.
Then the U.S or Russian president would have to decide whether to retaliate, and since the command systems on both sides have long been geared for launch-on-warning, the presidents would have little spare time if they desired to get retaliatory nuclear missiles off the ground before they—and possibly the presidents themselves—were vaporized. On the U.S side, the time allowed to decide would range between zero and 12 minutes, depending on the scenario. Russia operates under even tighter deadlines because of the short flight time of U.S. Trident submarine missiles on forward patrol in the North Atlantic.8
Russia’s early-warning systems remain in a serious state of erosion and disrepair, making it all the more likely that a Russian president could panic and reach a different conclusion than Yeltsin did in 1995.9 As Russian capabilities continue to deteriorate, the chance of an accident only increases. Limited spending on the conventional Russian military has led to greater reliance on an aging nuclear arsenal whose survivability would make any deterrence theorist nervous. (See more on this in chapter 5.) Yet the missiles remain on the same launch status that began in the worst days of the Cold War.
As Blair concludes, “Such rapid implementation of war plans leaves no room for real deliberation, rational thought, or national leadership.”10 Former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn agrees: “We are running the irrational risk of an Armageddon of our own making.… The more time the United States and Russia build into our process for ordering a nuclear strike the more time is available to gather data, to exchange information, to gain perspective, to discover an error, to avoid an accidental or unauthorized launch.”11
U.S. NUCLEAR FORCES
As of early 2013, the active U.S. stockpile contained approximately 4,650 nuclear warheads. This included about 2,150 deployed warheads: 1,950 strategic warheads and 200 nonstrategic warheads, including cruise missiles and bombs. Approximately 2,650 additional warheads were held in the reserve or inactive/responsive stockpiles or awaiting dismantlement.
Table 4.1 image U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2013
NAME/TYPE
LAUNCHERS
WARHEADS
ICBMs
  450
    500
SLBMs
  288
1,152
Bombers
  113
    300
Total Strategic Weapons
  851
~1,950
Tomahawk cruise missile
      0
        0
B-61-3, -4 bombs
   N/A
    200
Total Nonstrategic Weapons
   N/A
    200
Total deployed weapons
1,702
~2,150
Total non-deployed weapons
~2,500
Total retired awaiting dismantlement
~3,000
Total Nuclear Weapons
~7,700
Source: Hans M. Kristensen, “US Nuclear Forces,” in SIPRI Yearbook (Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2013), 286.
RUSSIAN NUCLEAR FORGES
As of March 2013, Russia had approximately 4,500 operational nuclear warheads in its active arsenal. This included about 2,484 operational strategic warheads and approximately 2,000 nonstrategic warheads, including artillery, short-range rockets, and landmines. An additional 4,000 warheads were believed to be in reserve or awaiting dismantlement, for a total Russian stockpile of approximately 8,500 nuclear warheads.12
GLOBAL ARSENALS
The arsenals of the other nuclear-weapons states under the NPT are miniscule compared to the U.S. and Russian arsenals. France has the next largest arsenal, totaling approximately 300 weapons, deployed on bombers and a small SSBN (submarine) force.13 China’s arsenal is not as transparent, but independent experts estimate its force at no more than 240 warheads total, approximately 138 on land-based missiles and 20 on bombers. Although the Chinese have built two submarines, neither is operational. An additional 62 Chinese warheads were either built for the submarines or are slated for dismantlement.14 The British have the smallest nuclear deterrent of the original five nuclear-weapons states with 225 total warheads; 160 are deployed on four SSBNs with an additional 25 in reserve.15
Table 4.2 image Russian Nuclear Forces, 2013
NAME/TYPE
LAUNCHERS
WARHEADS
CBMs
326
1,050
SLBMs
160
   624
Bombers
  72
   810
Total Strategic Weapons
558
2,484
Total Nonstrategic Weapons
~2,000
Total Active Weapons
~4,500
Total Retired Weapons
~4,000
Total Nuclear Weapons
~8,500
Note: Russia has approximately 2,484 strategic warheads assigned to 558 launchers. However, because several nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines are in overhaul and do not carry their allocated missiles and warheads, and bombers under normal conditions are not loaded with nuclear weapons, approximately 1,490 of Russia’s strategic warheads are deployed on 434 operational missiles. Russia’s nonstrategic weapons are said to be in central storage. The number of ICBN launchers is up slightly from the 322 in 2012 because some assumed SS-25 retirements did not occur. The number of SLBM launchers is higher than the 144 from 2012 because the Borei SSBN entered service.
Source: Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “NRDC Nuclear Notebook, Russian Nuclear Forces, 2013,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, forthcoming.
Four countries have nuclear weapons programs but are not members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty: India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea (which joined then left the NPT). Israel has a nondeclaratory policy, meaning it does not officially acknowledge or deny its nuclear weapons; however, it is widely estimated that the country possesses 80 to 100 nuclear weapons deployed on land-based missiles and aircraft.16 There is also a high probability that their fleet of three submarines is armed with nuclear-capable cruise missiles.17
India and Pakistan both have rapidly growing arsenals. Based on the amount of plutonium it has produced, Kristensen and Norris estimate India has 80–100 warheads. India can deploy nuclear weapons on missiles and bombers and is expected to have an operational nuclear-armed submarine within a decade.18 Similarly, Pakistan is also estimated to have between 90–110 warheads on a range of missiles and bombers. Both arsenals are examined in more detail in chapter 8.
Finally, North Korea has tested three nuclear devices; however, there are no signs of operational delivery vehicles, despite the regime’s claims to have intercontinental ballistic missiles that could bring “a sea of fire” down on the United States, and no publicly available information that the nation has operationalized its nuclear devices.19 The tests in late 2012 indicated that North Korea has made progress in both its missile and weapon capabilities. The nation may have enough material for between three and ten nuclear weapons. Iran is often mentioned as having nuclear weapons, but it does not. The best available intelligence is that Iran is constructing facilities that could allow it to build nuclear weapons, but it has not yet made a decision to do so. It would likely take Iran two to three years to produce an operational nuclear warhead that could fit on a missile. The programs in Iran and North Korea are explored further in chapter 10.
No other nation has nuclear weapons or is suspected of programs that could build nuclear weapons. Indeed, the vast majority of the world is nonnuclear. One hundred and eighty-four nations have signed the NPT as non-nuclear-weapons states and have pledged never to develop or possess nuclear weapons. With the possible exception of Iran, all seem to mean it. Many of these nations do not have the economic or technical ability to build nuclear weapons. But many do. Several dozen nations, such as Japan, Germany, and Brazil, could build nuclear weapons if they wanted to—some quite quickly. They have decided not to.
Table 4.3 image Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 2013
United States
   7,700
Russia
   8,500
France
      300
China
      240
United Kingdom
      225
Pakistan
90–110
India
80–100
Israel
        80 a
TOTAL
~17,200
Note: Figures include estimates of total warheads, including strategic and nonstrategic, deployed and non-deployed weapons, as well as those awaiting dismantlement. All figures except Israel are from Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris’s “Nuclear Notebook” series in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, at http://bos.sagepub.com/cgi/collection/nuclearnotebook; and Federation of American Scientists, “Status of World Nuclear Forces,” December 18, 2012, http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html.
a Estimate from Shannon N. Kile, Phillip Schell, and Hans Kristensen, “Israeli Nuclear Forces,” in SIPRI Yearbook (Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2012), http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/nbc/nuclear.
Whether these countries and others will continue to decide not to proliferate depends a great deal on what happens with the existing nuclear arsenals in the world. The Stanford University professor Scott Sagan warns in his 2012 “A Call for Global Nuclear Disarmament” that fifty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, “we live in a nuclear world that has not just two superpowers but nine nuclear-weapon states, with new ones looming on the horizon. The governments of these emergent nuclear states may not make the same mistakes that Russia and the United States made during the cold war, but they will make others.”20 Sagan, like many other experts, favors a step-by-step approach to disarmament that lowers the levels of existing arsenals, starting with the United States and Russia and then folding in the other nuclear nations. His plan would also curtail national uranium-enrichment and plutonium-reprocessing facilities that have civilian uses but can be used to make bomb-grade materials and turn countries into “latent nuclear-weapons states.” He acknowledges the skepticism about reaching full abolition of nuclear weapons:
The strategic challenges we face are daunting and we may end up with small nuclear arsenals rather than attain the global-zero landmark. But even that would be a much safer world than the one we live in now. If we fail to work together to achieve nuclear disarmament, the world we are heading towards—bristling with nuclear-weapons states, with more nuclear weapons, and the ever-present threat of nuclear terrorism—is even more fraught with danger.21
Whether we can move steadily toward that world depends, in part, on how seriously nations calculate the threat from the existing arsenals. That is the subject of the next chapter.