A nuclear priesthood gave order to the earth after World War II. It derived its authority from a truth: not since Nagasaki had one country ever used a nuclear weapon against another. This understanding may well have been a contingent fact, the product of historical accidents, not political intentions, but it instantiated a sacred aura to the product of forty years of secret knowledge, game theory, and technological determinism. In America, the doctrine of the elect was a military document colloquially referred to as the SIOP, which stood for Single Integrated Operational Plan. It was written and revised by a small set of colonels and civilians attached to the Strategic Air Command. Few others ever got to read it, even as it controlled the daily lives of millions and as its execution could destroy a world of billions.
Everything nuclear was subordinated to the SIOP; it had the right of the crown to every piece of nuclear anything the United States had ever built. Forces, fleets, missiles, reconnaissance planes, and hundreds of thousands of troops were all said to be SIOP-committed, which meant that no one else could use them. And of course, the SIOP was designed not just to fight a war but to posture against one. Its size and ambit would deter the Soviet Union from nuclear aggression, but nuclear aggression instigated by Moscow was unlikely because the Soviet Union felt itself under siege and surrounded since its incipient revolution in 1917 and had lost far more in war than any other nation on earth. The SIOP, therefore, was designed to fight an improbable war, and its immense power constrained the choices of American presidents. (“Forget the SIOP and all that crap” is what Richard Nixon said, without irony, and with considerable frustration, when his generals would tell him they were having trouble filling his orders to bomb North Vietnam because they’d have to divert SIOP resources.)
If John F. Kennedy had succumbed to the pressures of his military and decided to launch a nuclear strike against Cuba, or decided to take a Soviet nuclear submarine that been trawling American surface ships off the Atlantic coast, about twenty minutes would elapse between the moment he began to authenticate his order and the moment an ICBM nose cone left its silo, or a bomber with its nuclear arsenal enabled flew itself into position.
Our basic model for decision making in nuclear emergencies is still quite incomplete. There are hundreds of books written about the Cuban crisis. New documentaries seize on scraps of new evidence and fragments of audio to re-create in real time the decisions made by the Excom in the White House. For the sake of official history and American lore, it’s an ideal crisis in many ways. Both the Soviets and the United States were aware of what was happening while it was happening, and that maximized the chances that politicians would be able to step in and resolve it. We can live with the Cuban Missile Crisis because, in our mythology, the United States came out of it with a win, and the world did not combust. We learned lessons about how not to escalate crises, and these lessons took, so much so that it created an expectation that any future nuclear crisis could not be as bad as the Cuban Missile Crisis ever became. It seemed like the theory of mutually assured destruction, the belief that nuclear war was so inherently destructive, absurd even, that no side would ever win if both sides had an equally sized deterrent and could signal properly.
But we forget that Cuban Missile Crisis is far from the only time when nuclear forces went on worldwide alert; it happened in October 1969, when Richard Nixon decided to try to scare the Russians by pretending he was a madman and, willy-nilly, authorized the Strategic Air Command to increase its readiness—in our metaphor, the safety was removed from its gun deliberately—to confuse and frighten the North Vietnamese and their Soviet masters.1 This was his protest against the confining strictures of the Single Integrated Operation Plan, or SIOP, which he believed limited his options as commander-in-chief.2
The propensity for personality and politics to intrude into the sacred realm of nuclear decision-making outside of the narrow lane provided for by the law is one reason why the system was engineered to be guns-ready.
The truth, as revealed by a number of enterprising historians and authors, including Bruce Blair, a former nuclear missile launch officer who has spent more than thirty years studying the subject, is that nuclear command and control was built from the bottom up and exhibits at its core a fundamental tension that in crisis will only practically be resolved by choosing the course that biases the president toward a launch before a nuclear detonation on US soil.3
Watery motivations attend to the concept of a “side,” in any discussion of nuclear war. Countries are elaborate constructs, full of people with genetic, familial, and cultural ties to one another, the type of ties that throw up biological obstacles to empathy or compassion. Leaders are elected or anointed to, first, protect their own tribes. A nuclear weapon is real, a fact of nature, caring nothing about anything, and certainly not respectful of human political contraptions or responsibilities. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, politicians have bought into the necessary fallacy that this invention can be controlled. Do you blame them? I don’t. What other choices were there? An arms race was the logical extension of the way humans organized themselves in the twentieth century.
As soon as the Soviet Union developed an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States, the R-7 Semyorka, which boosted Sputnik into orbit in 1957, nuclear war plans, strategies, and deterrence theories became educated hedges at best. The first country to fire weapons would likely be the first country to destroy the others’ nuclear arsenal.4 So a president would be forced to decide quickly, almost always in the absence of reliable information, whether to retaliate, if only to ensure that the physical stuff of deterrence itself—the nuclear-tipped missiles and weapons—were available to him after the adversary’s first strike.5 Decent intelligence, as much as good sense, was the nuclear priesthood’s binding force. Its clergy liked to tell itself that “under attack,” or “warning,” meant that there would be unambiguous evidence that missiles were on their way: there was a glimpse of the moral high ground in knowing that, at least, the other side actually fired first.
If the Soviets convinced themselves that the West was on the precipice of a surprise decapitation attack, the Soviets would move first. Or it would move further toward the brink. That was doctrine. That was logic. The Soviets called it “retaliatory meeting;” the Americans called it “launch under attack.”6 The cutting-off-the-head part was key. In the Soviet Union, the Politburo made decisions about war and peace. If the US could wipe out the leadership at the beginning of a war, it could dictate the terms for its termination; the US could really win, the Soviets could really lose. The reverse was true, too. If the Soviets could easily knock out the president and his successors, there would be no real reason for either side to bargain in good faith, aside from good faith itself, which neither side had. A survivable presidency was essential for peace.
It was clear to Ronald Reagan from very early in his presidency that he could not actually fight a war against the Soviet Union and win it unless he was prepared to strike first. At the same time, he had inherited the heavy saddle of the SIOP, a document that the nuclear theorist Herman Kahn once bitingly referred to as a war orgasm.7 Kahn was a heterodox thinker. He disdained nuclear orthodoxies, but he worried that even the smartest among his fellow scientists would not be able to transcend herd instincts. He thought that nuclear war was a possibility and, with the right preparations, actually manageable. He did not know Ronald Reagan. Most Americans did not know what Ronald Reagan would really do when thrown into the unpredictable stew of a crisis. Would he think and reason as a leader, cultivating a more critical faculty that granted him the imagination to think beyond the reciprocal interests that bind flocks to their clergy and clergy to their flocks?
From the fall of 1983 to the spring of 1984, the tail end of Reagan’s first term, the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, already flying low, spiraled into the sea. Misunderstandings, the consequence of trying to control the uncontrollable, hurtled the world toward a conflict that not one single thinking person on either side ever wanted.
The vast intelligence-gathering sensors of the Soviet Union had turned up their gain to indications that the West was planning a nuclear attack. They found what they were looking for. Soviet fears about the exercise of which Lee Trolan was a major participant, Able Archer 83, were as genuine as they turned out to be mistaken, very real but not, in the end, true. And so, the Soviets prepared to strike first.
They moved nuclear weapons from secret storage locations to vaults near alert aircraft. They confined their troops to their garrisons. They dispersed mobile nuclear missile launchers. They gave front-line infantry troops real ammunition and food that would last for two weeks.
If the Soviets truly went on secret combat alert because the Americans were holding a nuclear exercise, the elaborate system of physical constraints, procedural safeguards, and geopolitical understandings that held the nuclear arsenals of both countries in check had somehow hollowed out.
This book explains the origins of this brittle brinksmanship. It recounts the scary series of close encounters that tested the limits of the ordinary men and powerful leaders alike. And it shows how supple, flexible, and compassionate political leadership ultimately triumphed over the strife of interests, helping the two countries sue for a fragile peace.