Planners Split on How to Meet Nuclear Threat

In 1957, just before Sputnik, two alarmed emissaries from President Dwight D. Eisenhower visited U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, in Omaha. Their calculations, they said, showed that virtually none of SAC’s bombers could escape a surprise Soviet air attack, even with the several hours of warning time that then was expected.

“You’re right,” LeMay agreed. But he was unconcerned, he explained, because U-2 spy planes were regularly flying over the Soviet Union and would give him a week’s warning for a preemptive strike if the Soviets began massing their planes for attack.

“I’ll knock the s--- out of them before they get off the ground,” he said.

“But Gen. LeMay,” one thunderstruck civilian objected, “that’s not national policy.” U.S. policy, laid down by Eisenhower, called for retaliatory strikes in response to Soviet aggression.

“No, it’s not national policy,” LeMay admitted. “But it’s my policy.”

The exchange, recounted for the Public Broadcasting Service by the two emissaries, industrialist Robert Sprague and educator Jerome Weisner, provides the earliest evidence of U.S. plans for launching its nuclear weapons in a preemptive attack when warned that an enemy is about to strike.

And more than that, it reflects a profound split that exists to this day between advocates of two very different strategies for achieving what is arguably the single most important goal of the U.S. government--positioning the nation so that the Soviets will find it unthinkable to start a war.

“There is an emerging crisis of confidence today in the theory of nuclear deterrence and its implementation,” said an experienced military strategist who asked not to be identified.

George P. Shultz, former President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, forecast as he left office in January that 20 years from now, “there will be something else in place” of the current deterrence doctrine. Some experts, including those who invented it, believe that the change will come even earlier.

Current doctrine represents a standoff between the two basic strategies for deterring a Soviet attack:

-- Retaliatory. This strategy, preferred by Eisenhower and most U.S. political leaders since, is based on the premise that the Soviets will never use their own nuclear weapons as long as they know that U.S. missiles are poised to annihilate their population centers and demolish their industrial base. It threatens maximum punishment for aggression.

-- War fighting, also known as counterforce. This approach, long favored by the U.S. military, holds that the best way to prevent an enemy attack is to strike Soviet missile sites and troop locations as soon as the Soviets prepare to launch their own weapons or while their weapons are en route.

A preemptive strike was LeMay’s approach, and the current SAC commander--although far more tightly constrained by presidential orders than LeMay was three decades ago--has much the same philosophy. “One of the first things you want to do in a war is shoot at what’s shooting at you,” Gen. John T. Chain Jr. said in an interview.

The counterforce strategy has the goal of bringing the United States out of any war in better shape than the adversary. One expert described it as “war fighting toward victory.”

It requires weapons that are quick and accurate. They must be launched rapidly to escape a surprise attack and arrive quickly to catch enemy forces on the ground. And they must be accurate enough to destroy fortified, or “hardened,” Soviet military installations.

Carrying Inherent Risks

But such weapons carry inherent risks. The larger and better they are, the greater their potential to carry out a surprise attack. And the more the Soviets worry about a surprise attack, the more likely they are to build comparable forces and to press their own nuclear button--to “use it or lose it,” in the vernacular of nuclear strategists--in a crisis. That, in turn, increases the risk of a deliberate or accidental nuclear war.

Declared official U.S. policy today is not to launch missiles merely upon warning of a Soviet attack but to be in a position to “ride out” any surprise strike before retaliating.

“The United States does not rely on its capability for launch-on-warning or launch-under-attack to ensure the credibility of its deterrent,” former Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci said shortly before leaving office in January. Carlucci was reflecting the policy determination that it would be foolhardy to launch missiles on the strength of signals from radar and other imperfect sensors that an attack is occurring.

The retaliatory strategy, compared with war fighting, is less expensive and demanding. Once called massive retaliation and later mutually assured destruction, or MAD, it requires fewer, less accurate weapons.

Retaliate With Certainty

But these weapons, if they are to deter aggressors from striking first, must be able to survive an enemy attack and retaliate with certainty. Their command network must be highly secure and reliable, to ensure that the order to retaliate will be transmitted from the surviving leadership to the military commanders.

To its critics, the retaliatory strategy is immoral and not credible: immoral because it targets cities with huge civilian populations; not credible because it would not satisfy U.S. allies in Europe.

The European matter is complicated. Because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization lacks sufficient conventional forces, its policy has long been to use U.S. nuclear weapons to counter a Soviet invasion, even one that used only conventional weapons.

But such U.S. nuclear retaliation against Soviet society in turn would assure a Soviet nuclear attack on U.S. cities, an outcome that no U.S. President would want to invite. Europeans doubt that the United States, in fact, would “commit suicide” by striking the Soviet homeland with nuclear weapons in this situation and thus consider the purely retaliatory strategy not credible.

In an effort to allay this fear and yet extend its deterrence umbrella over Western Europe, the United States and NATO have adopted an uncertain mixture of the retaliatory and war-fighting doctrines. The compromise strategy is called “flexible response.”

Under it, the United States would respond, with nuclear weapons if necessary, to any Soviet aggression, conventional or nuclear. The response would consist of small, carefully tailored strikes beginning at the battlefield level, but not aimed immediately at Soviet urban targets. These attacks would escalate to bigger and deeper strikes--and eventually to an all-out exchange of intercontinental weapons, if the war were not halted.

Flexible response, first spelled out by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara in 1965, has been the basis of successive U.S. nuclear war plans since then.

Its first priority is to be capable of inflicting “unacceptable damage on an attacker,” defined as destroying at least one-fifth of the Soviet population and one-half of Soviet industry. McNamara calculated that such damage would take 400 one-megaton weapons (one megaton is the equivalent of 1 million tons of TNT.) That feature of flexible response is retaliatory.

Counterforce Option

Its second priority is to limit damage to the United States and its allies, if war should come, by striking at least some enemy weapons that had not yet been launched. That is essentially the counterforce option.

Based on these principles, the current version of the Single Integrated Operations Plan, called SIOP-6, allocates 12,000 to 13,000 warheads and bombs in the U.S. strategic arsenal to Soviet targets in the following order of importance:

-- Nuclear forces. These include 1,386 Soviet ICBM silos in about 30 missile fields, plus about 300 missile command centers, 500 airfields suitable for long-range bombers and at least three submarine bases in the Arctic and the North Pacific.

-- Conventional military forces. Among them are about 170 infantry and armored division bases, 16 air defense command headquarters, five naval fleet headquarters, about 70 military radio stations that handle low-frequency or satellite communications and various other non-nuclear military targets.

-- Military and political leadership. At least equal priority is given to several hundred command-and-control facilities for top Soviet leaders, including the deep bunkers and hardened shelters that have been built for tens of thousands of the Soviet Communist Party and management elite.

-- War-supporting industrial-urban sites. Chief among these are about 200 urban complexes containing 50% of key Soviet industry and six rail transshipment yards that load 80% of rail cars. Beyond that, about 700 Soviet cities have populations of more than 25,000. Then there are electrical power stations, steel mills and other facilities associated with war-making potential.

While most of these targets are dictated by a counterforce strategy, SIOP-6 also encompasses the key element of the retaliatory strategy: It is designed to allow the United States to absorb a surprise Soviet attack, with or without warning, and still respond with assured destruction.

If an attack caught U.S. forces operating at their normal level of alert, between 3,500 and 5,000 weapons, mostly from submarines and bombers, could still be launched in retaliation, according to Edward L. Warner III and David Ochmanek of the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, writing in “Next Moves.” If the United States were alerted in advance by intelligence information, twice as many weapons--8,000 to 10,000--could respond.

From the beginning, even before McNamara formalized the doctrine of flexible response, U.S. nuclear strategy has reflected the opposing tugs of the retaliatory and counterforce strategies, shifting back and forth over the years, emphasizing one but never excluding the other.

The old adage, that generals prepare to fight the last war, carried over into the nuclear age. Initially, U.S. nuclear war plans were an extension of the Army Air Corps’ strategic bombing campaign of World War II and called for a spasm of total destruction on Soviet cities.

When LeMay made his own deterrent policy, the United States had overwhelming nuclear superiority and treated nuclear weapons as if they were just bigger TNT-filled bombs. As the Soviets developed nuclear weapons, U.S. targeting priority quickly switched from cities to aim at those weapons.

“The era of nuclear plenty” began in the 1950s. The 1948 Berlin Crisis and the Korean War of 1950-53 provided political spurs for a U.S. military buildup. At the same time, nuclear weapons became cheaper, promising “more bang for the buck,” and could be compressed into increasingly smaller packages.

From 50 to 18,000

From a mere 50 atomic bombs in 1948--bombs that took two dozen men two days to assemble--the U.S. arsenal grew to 1,000 bombs by the end of the Korean War. By 1960, the United States had 18,000 nuclear weapons: more than 3,000 strategic bombs and missile warheads and the rest smaller devices, from torpedoes to artillery shells, deployed throughout the world, most of them in Europe.

The age of technological spying had also dawned. Photographs from the U-2 plane and later from satellites, together with electronic eavesdropping, provided increasing intelligence on the size, location and character of Soviet forces. As the list of these potential targets grew, it was used to justify military requests for more and more weapons to attack them, a process known as “bootstrapping.”

Rivalries between the Air Force and Navy, and the overlapping responsibilities of the four theater commands with nuclear weapons--SAC and the Atlantic, Pacific and European theaters--led to enormous overkill, interference and conflicting attacks in the war plans prepared by each commander.

An All-Encompassing Plan

In an effort to bring some coherence to the nuclear war planning process, Eisenhower ordered that all the plans be coordinated into one all-encompassing Single Integrated Operations Plan to be drawn up by a special targeting staff at SAC headquarters in Omaha with presidential guidance. The director of the staff would be the SAC commander, who is always an Air Force general, with a Navy admiral as his deputy.

But the maze of competing bureaucracies provided then, and still provides today, an opportunity for the military to twist the SIOP’s guidance to its own ends, several authorities on targeting say. At times White House orders have been vague or inadequately thought out, these experts admit, but much of the distortion seemed intended simply to boost requirements for more and more weapons.

For example, Eisenhower directed in the first SIOP in 1960 that the first priority was to hit Soviet strategic nuclear weapons facilities, the second was to strike its military and government command centers and the third was to hit its urban-industrial centers. In fact, because there were so few targets in the first two categories, the urban centers were the main focus of the plan.

More Weapons Needed

The Pentagon, interpreting the President’s order, decided that there should be 75% assurance that all the targets would be hit. But the SIOP, prepared under SAC’s control, set the delivery assurance level much higher: well over 90% for more than half the 1,050 targets at the time. To achieve such high assurance, multiple strikes with high-yield weapons were required. Therefore, many more weapons were needed.

The result, complained George B. Kistiakowsky, Eisenhower’s science adviser, was a demand for “tremendous additional forces.” Equally appalling was the enormous overkill built into the plan.

For example, SAC allocated 300-kiloton weapons (equal to 300,000 tons of TNT) to do the same amount of damage as the 13-kiloton bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. About 60 weapons were to detonate within Moscow’s city limits, which would have left not a tree or building standing. Between 360 million and 450 million people in the Sino-Soviet bloc would have been killed if the first SIOP had been carried out.

The plan, said Eisenhower, “frightened the devil out of me.” But he signed it anyway.

President John F. Kennedy, also appalled at the Armageddon mapped out in the first SIOP, specified that priority in the next SIOP would go to targeting “the enemy’s military forces, not his civilian population.” That is, he wanted to emphasize counterforce doctrine.

Difficult and Expensive

But McNamara, his defense secretary, quickly learned that such a strategy was difficult and expensive to implement. To destroy each new Soviet weapon would require two or three accurate U.S. weapons. The Air Force, seizing the new opportunity, immediately asked for a force of 10,000 Minuteman ICBMs. The Joint Chiefs cut the request to 3,000, and McNamara approved only 1,000. That number has been considered sufficient to this day.

For political reasons, McNamara continued to publicly endorse the counterforce strategy, while inside the Pentagon, he sought to persuade the Air Force to de-emphasize it. But in the end he gave up trying to turn SAC targeters away from counterforce, and the result was that, through the 1960s, there was little real change in U.S. targeting practices.

The Nixon Administration spent six years trying to rein in the Pentagon. It did so in 1974 by creating a new category of targets--economic facilities whose loss would impede the enemy’s “ability to recover.” The move would turn out to be a massive mistake.

No one knew which industries were critical to the Soviets’ recovery from war. So virtually all facilities that might contribute to economic recovery were targeted. Fertilizer plants, for example, were on the list because fertilizer increases crop yields.

Quadrupling of Targets

This led to a quadrupling of industrial targets in the SIOP. Then it was discovered that too little was known about how economies recover from war even to attempt the counter-recovery mission.

Five years later, after the SIOP had been badly skewed by the economic recovery mission, the Carter Administration dropped that category from the plan in favor of “war-supporting industry,” a narrower category that still encompasses urban-industrial targets.

Its targeting guidance, known as Presidential Directive 59, issued in July, 1980, also gave renewed emphasis to a war-fighting strategy and drew attention to two new types of targets: Soviet political leaders and the emerging Soviet mobile missile force.

The Reagan Administration, putting Carter’s guidance into effect in 1982, was even more inclined to war fighting and to the two new target sets. And it built enthusiastically upon PD-59’s orders to “go after” Soviet leaders and mobile targets.

Today’s superpower arsenals “did not result from any coherent, calculated plans,” said John D. Steinbruner, a Brookings Institution analyst. Such a claim, he has written, is “an exercise of rationalization after the fact.”

Rather, the arsenals are the products of military appetites, political competition and technological breakthroughs.

The U.S. nuclear “triad” of forces consists of land-based missiles, submarine-based missiles and bombers.

The 1,000 land-based ICBMs are quick-starting and quick-arriving weapons that carry a total of 2,450 highly accurate warheads. These missiles are best suited for counterforce targeting against “hardened” Soviet missile silos and command and leadership facilities.

The submarine-based leg of the triad consists of 608 missiles carrying 5,312 warheads. Because of communication difficulties with submarines and because these warheads are less accurate than those on ICBMs, these weapons are primarily part of a retaliatory strategy. Many of them are aimed at non-nuclear military targets such as airfields and army bases. The new Trident 2 missiles will have accuracies rivaling ICBMs and will be increasingly used for counterforce targets.

The Last to Arrive

The 318 nuclear bombers carry about 2,500 bombs, 1,600 air-launched cruise missiles and 1,100 short-range attack missiles. Because they would be the last to arrive, these weapons have largely retaliatory missions, although the newer bombers, such as the B-1 and eventually the B-2 stealth, will be targeted on mobile missiles and leadership bunkers inside the Soviet Union.

Many U.S. civilian analysts argue that the overly secretive U.S. plan for waging nuclear war has been beyond the control of civilian political leaders for decades and that this, in turn, has resulted in the wasteful overproduction of warheads and bombs, missiles and bombers.

Robert C. McFarlane, Reagan’s national security adviser from 1983 to 1985, said that White House officials had to go to extraordinary lengths just to get a small grip on the targeting procedures.

“Reagan didn’t have enough personal interest in targeting doctrine to insist that we get access,” McFarlane said in an interview. So, McFarlane said, he pushed for deep weapons cuts in arms control negotiations with the Soviets as a way to outflank the military’s opposition to civilian oversight.

‘Grossly Inflated Needs’

“That way,” he said, “we could keep the Pentagon’s grossly inflated needs for deterrence from getting completely out of hand.”

The military, to justify resistance to White House control over the targeting process, recalls the confusing and amateurish efforts by President Lyndon B. Johnson to select individual bombing targets during the Vietnam War. “We don’t want a nuclear Vietnam,” one general said fiercely.

Nonetheless, a civilian-run strategic review was ordered by the Reagan Administration, and it found telling cases of warhead waste--three nuclear weapons targeted on an oil refinery, for instance, when one or at most two would do--and long-overdue reforms were ordered.

Targeters were told that they did not need to destroy 70% of every single factory of a selected industry in order to destroy 70% of the overall industry, for example. And they were directed to calculate the destructiveness of a weapon based not only on its immediate blast effects but also on its tremendous heat and radiation effects.

Potential for Abuse

Critics who have been inside the targeting process insist that there is still much potential for abuse.

“A young captain or major can decide from a photograph that a target has some dirt on it that could provide additional protection,” one expert explained, “and then he will lay down a second weapon to make sure it is destroyed. Then, because of the possibility that one of those weapons may fail on launch or misfire, the kid decides he has to ‘in-line’ a third weapon to get the high damage expectancy that is required.”

Another expert on SAC targeting said that targeters, who are ordered to avoid debris from earlier blasts that would tear apart an incoming warhead, once assumed that the stem of the nuclear dust cloud would be empty.

‘Full of Debris’

“In the real world, of course, the cloud would be a maelstrom full of debris,” he said. “But they decided to ‘fly’ a warhead down the ‘empty stem.’ Crazy. And this was not just an idea being studied. Those orders were actually going into missile guidance systems when they were caught.”

Critics are not yet satisfied that the abuses have been corrected.

“Targeting is still done like old artillery men would do it,” complained one expert. The process has been automated, he said, but that just means that “instead of moving red circles on a plastic map overlay, now soft-copy image processors are used.”

Ashton B. Carter of Harvard University, another acknowledged expert on targeting, said that SAC’s modernization efforts represent “only superficial appliques to the way they were doing business back in the 1950s.”

McNamara himself, the author of today’s nuclear strategy, flatly predicted recently that, “by the end of the century, the flexible response doctrine will be over or modified beyond recognition.”

But how it will be modified remains far from clear. Some of the alternatives are relatively utopian.

One is deterrence built around anti-missile defenses, as epitomized by Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, known as “Star Wars.” The technology is still decades away, however.

Another is total nuclear disarmament. But virtually no U.S. leader except Reagan has seriously envisaged a world in which the superpowers discard their nuclear weapons, in part because other nations, including an increasing number in the Third World, possess the weapons or are developing them.

Nuclear weapons technology cannot be disinvented. Both the United States and the Soviet Union will need a nuclear arsenal to deter mischief by the “lesser” nuclear powers as well as to balance the significant nuclear forces possessed by China, Britain and France.

Eroding Soviets’ Claim

Even the Soviets do not really want zero, according to Arnold Horelick, director of the RAND Corp.-UCLA Center for Soviet Studies, even though their president, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, has repeatedly called for a world without nuclear weapons. Eliminating nuclear weapons, Horelick said, would greatly erode the Soviet claim to superpower status.

This is not to say that no changes are on the way. The component of the flexible response doctrine that is most vulnerable today is the counterforce strategy, in large part because it requires enormous arsenals.

“We’re at a crossroads with respect to counterforce targeting,” said Leon Sloss, a respected strategist who directed the Carter Administration’s nuclear review. “There are three alternatives. Either we have a massive (counterforce) effort to get at mobile targets, or we get away from counterforce and back toward some form of massive retaliation. Or we have to shift emphasis to targeting Soviet general-purpose military forces rather than nuclear forces.”

A Possible Consensus

A consensus may be forming around the concept of a minimal retaliation capability--two or more multiples of McNamara’s 400 one-megaton weapons, for example--plus minimal counterforce capability that make credible some limited use of nuclear weapons as long as the Soviets have superior conventional forces in Europe. But this will still mean arsenals of at least 2,000 or 3,000 strategic weapons on both sides.

So it is clear that for many years to come, deterrence will rest on the threat of nuclear offensive weapons in the superpower arsenals. But the overall size of these forces on both sides can still be greatly reduced in a stable manner to lessen their cost and the risk of accidental or panicky use in a crisis.

America’s Growing Nuclear Arsenal The evolution of the major categories of U.S. nuclear weapons through eight Presidents. Chronology is read from bottom to top, warhead totals are read horizontally. Harry S. Truman 1949: First Soviet Nuclear Test 1952: First H-bomb Test John F. Kennedy 1962: Cuban Missile Crisis 1963: Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Lyndon B. Johnson 1969: Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Begin (SALT) Richard M. Nixon 1970: Multiple Warhead Missiles Introduced Ronald Reagan 1984: Air-Launched Cruise Missiles Introduced