Ex-Official’s Novel on Nuclear Security Poses Hard Questions

I am in possession of a nuclear weapon from the United States Atomic Stockpile. There is no PAS associated with the weapon and I am in a position to fire it without a Release Hour Message, the permissive Link Action Codes, or an Authenticator.

If you don’t know what I am talking about Dr. Loggerman will. I will contact him in twenty-four hours about the next step in this operation. If you have any doubts about the seriousness of this call, you can use that time to confirm that the weapon is missing.

How would Ronald Reagan react to such a telephone call?

Would Reagan--or any other President--have the sagacity to cope with such a threat? Could any President make sense of the cacophony of advice from scheming White House staffers and from experts on the other end of the telephone lines who are total strangers?

Could the Pentagon determine--overnight--if just one of America’s 25,000 nuclear weapons, some of them small enough to fit into a backpack, was missing?

Those unanswerable questions provide the plot for “State Scarlet” (Putnam’s: $18.95), the latest brink-of-World-War-III thriller. But while this is fiction, the novel differs from others of the genre because it was written by a former National Security Council staffer, David Aaron, who served both the Nixon and Carter White Houses.

Aaron was there when the Carter Administration planned its failed raid to free the hostages in Tehran, when America negotiated Salt I and II with the Soviets, when Carter practiced his nuclear command duties.

Aaron peoples the book with both fictional characters and real people--such as Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus--doing fictional things. But he isn’t saying who Dr. Karl Loggerman, his novel’s manipulative National Security adviser, is based on: his old boss, Zbigniew Brzezinski, or Henry Kissinger or maybe even Gen. Alexander Haig. “Let each of them figure it’s him,” Aaron said.

Aaron, 48, graduated from Occidental College in 1960 with a degree in diplomacy and world affairs. He is scheduled to speak at the Eagle Rock school’s June 14 commencement, where he will receive an honorary doctorate.

After Carter’s term ended, Aaron left the capital for Wall Street, where he worked in mergers and acquisitions for the investment banking house Oppenheimer & Co. Aaron and his wife, Chloe, grew up in Los Angeles. She is the former senior vice president of programming at PBS and now runs her own Manhattan firm producing public television programs. They have one son in college. But Aaron has since withdrawn to the quiet of Weston, Conn., to consult and write novels.

“I start in the morning and go until my brains turn to bean dip,” he said of his writing. He is working on his second novel, a thriller about Washington and Wall Street, for Putnam’s.

Both Henry Kissinger and Air Force Gen. David C. Jones, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have sent Aaron laudatory notes. Brzezinski said he has read parts of the book and finds it “very engaging.”

Richard V. Allen, Reagan’s first National Security adviser, said he may read the book this weekend in Florida, even though he is livid about one page of the novel that Aaron insists is based on fact and that Allen calls pure fiction.

The book also benefits from gushing dust-jacket blurbs by journalists who cover affairs of national security, including the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, CBS’ Lesley Stahl and Leslie Gelb, Carter’s director of the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs and now the deputy editorial-page editor at the New York Times.

Aaron thinks the prospects for nuclear war in our time grow daily and that at the highest levels our government is ill-prepared to deal with a less than global nuclear war--say an exchange of atoms between the Iranians and the Iraqis or the Indians and the Pakistanis, or even, as his novel posits, a disgruntled U.S. military officer ripping off a small nuclear field device he is supposed to be guarding in Europe.

“Mutual deterrence is extremely stable and extremely strong, but I am worried that it may be brittle,” Aaron said, “that a shock, some sudden unexpected series of events, could set off a political chain reaction that could lead to a nuclear war.

“Remember, what we today would call a terrorist incident started World War I,” Aaron said, recalling how the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, sparked “the war to end all wars.”

“Just put yourself in the position of thinking that maybe one of our nuclear weapons is missing,” Aaron said. For those Americans to whom it might seem a big leap from living room to Oval Office, Aaron suggests it is hardly any leap at all.

“These are just people like you and me. They may have had more experience with leadership, but in the end they have kids and wives and loved ones and fears. Maybe their parents treated them badly. They have their own phobias.

“The crushing burden of that responsibility will make some people rise to the occasion. Others would be completely devastated. Some people would become more rational and clearer thinking, others would get muddled. Some would focus on the most trivial because their mind won’t let them see the bigger picture and the stakes. Some would take it personally. Others would become more far sighted and become entirely self-less.

“It is not unlike the kinds of pressures that one sees in a combat situation except you don’t have the release of physical action and real combat. You just sit there in your suit and tie with after-shave lotion and all you get to do is talk and you have to make decisions not only about yourself but about the whole world.”

Of course, Aaron’s characters aren’t Mr. Average American. There’s a daring-do operative from The Company, called back from disgrace to run the whole operation to find the would-be bomber while dashing about Europe with lightning speed and no sleep.

And there’s Dr. Loggerman, a power-hungry man with soles by Gucci who is the National Security adviser to the TV anchorman-cum-President. Loggerman is so unprincipled he sees the looming danger of global thermonuclear war as yet another opportunity to gain power for himself.

Those are not exactly the kind of guys who people the average office building or factory.

The women in Aaron’s first novel, by the way, are pretty much ornaments who exist only to arouse, or fulfill, men’s momentary passions.

Aaron claims that “a lot of thriller fiction is extremely unrealistic when it comes to the decisions that are made by real people at the highest levels of our government, and what I try to capture is the real human dramas and ambition and, in some cases, ignorance that exists at the highest level.”

The best known book of this genre is “The Hunt for Red October,” a previously unpublished Maryland insurance salesman’s novel about disaffected Soviet naval officers who steal one of their nuclear submarines and want to deliver it to Washington, nearly setting off WW III. It was the best selling paperback novel of 1986.

Aaron doesn’t want to talk about how realistic Tom Clancy’s book might be. “He is with Putnam and his editor is my editor. I don’t want to criticize a fellow author.”

Aaron doesn’t mind, though, criticizing Richard Allen, Reagan’s first National Security adviser. On Page 278 he writes of a fancy Electronic Situation Room that “glowed in four colors providing a schematic of the US command, control, communications and intelligence system” and included such amenities as heavy silk brocaded drapes and a “broad mahogany conference table with brass antique inkwells at each place . . . .”

The room, Aaron writes in his novel, was intended to greatly enhance Allen’s power. But Aaron writes that Allen made two mistakes. One was locating it on the Third Floor of the Old Executive Office Building, the massive antebellum stone structure next to the White House, a place so close to the center of power and yet so distant that Walter Mondale once called it “Baltimore.” The other mistake was letting the Pentagon, CIA and the diplomatic bureaucrats at Foggy Bottom know he intended to centralize communications there in a crisis. They refused to cooperate and so it fell into disuse, acquiring the moniker “Allen’s Folly.”

“There’s no room like that, at least there wasn’t one built on my watch,” declared Allen, now a Washington business consultant.

Allen said he did put up $37,500 from his budget to finance half the cost of creating a briefing room on the Third Floor of the Old Executive Office Building.

But that simple room, Allen said, was for briefing “others in government, visitors and, God forbid, journalists. It was not an Electronic Sit Room and if I had built one it wouldn’t have been on the Third Floor of that building. Absolutely no security, despite those thick walls . . . . I would have put it deep down, deep underground.”

Aaron insists his description is right on target, although Brzezinski said he has never heard of such a room or the term “Allen’s folly.”

Aaron said the consensus he hopes to achieve with his novel is “very simple: Presidents have to be made to realize that nuclear command is their most solemn responsibility. They have to practice it. They have to pay attention to it.”

He said Jimmy Carter’s one-time practice of his nuclear command duties early in his administration included a mass conference call. “Suddenly Carter was confronted by all these voices, most of which he had never heard before, from people who were going to give him life and death advice whom he had never met. Pretty frightening.”

Aaron says he has not violated any security agreements and his realistic sounding jargon is made up, but insists his novel’s discussion of weapons and their capabilities is realistic.

But it is hard to tell when Aaron is being dead serious or having fun, as when he said the federal government is working on a “brain bomb,” a nuclear weapon “which would produce primarily microwaves because intense microwaves make people stupid. I think it is possible the brain bomb has already been invented and has gone off over Washington.”

As for a nuclear threat from someone other than the Soviets, Aaron said:

“Every President is going to face the same limitations of a vast bureaucracy, a huge number of weapons that could be involved, an atmosphere of suspicion that the Soviets are somehow behind it--which is legitimate--and basically a great unfamiliarity with the nuclear command and control system that he is supposed to operate. That is a formula for a really serious disaster.”