The Nuclear Worrier
Thomas Powers
January 18, 2018 Issue
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
by Daniel Ellsberg
...By the time he received his first clearances to know official secrets about types and numbers of weapons, the handful of first-generation bombs, assembled one by one by hand at Los Alamos, New Mexico, had been replaced by more and better devices. Fat Man, the fission bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, was blimplike in shape, weighed about 10,000 pounds, and exploded with the energy of 20,000 tons of TNT. By the late 1950s the first few fission bombs had been replaced by ever-expanding numbers (soon to be thousands) of thermonuclear fusion weapons, small enough to fit in the nose cone of a missile or under a jet fighter, and roughly a thousand times more powerful than Fat Man. RAND did many studies for the Pentagon on the best way to defend America with these superweapons, and the best way to fight a war with them.
Ellsberg’s initiation into the secrets did not happen in a day, and it took him awhile to realize that there were many levels of clearances, each more secret, more tightly held, and shared with fewer people than the last. Beyond Top Secret, the highest clearance known to exist by the general public, were the code-word clearances for what is now called “sensitive compartmented information.” These permitted an individual to know certain specific secrets, like the fact that the United States had developed tools—spy planes and reconnaissance satellites—to photograph the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could carry thermonuclear warheads. The number of Soviet missiles was not the one hundred argued by Air Force alarmists in the Pentagon or the fifty claimed in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in June 1961.
In September of that year Ellsberg learned that the United States would not find it hard to destroy the Soviet missile force. Only four ICBMs were ready to go and they were all at the missile-testing site in Plesetsk, about five hundred miles north of Moscow and a hundred miles south of the White Sea. The four missiles were liquid-fueled and took a long time to prepare for launch. They were standing up in the open and were close enough together to get all four with a single nearby hit. To know this you had to have code-word clearances for Talent and Keyhole, the systems of overhead reconnaissance that filmed the vulnerable Soviet missile force.
There is a widespread belief, Ellsberg writes, that “everything leaks; it all comes out in the New York Times.” That, he says, “is emphatically not true.” Even analysts at the heart of the secret world are not cleared for many categories of secret information and are not cleared to know that they are not cleared. While Ellsberg was being initiated into these secrets he did not know that his own father had once enjoyed an early version of a code-word clearance, a “Q” clearance that protected the secret work on fusion weapons in the years after World War II. Ellsberg’s father told him this in 1978, when he also confessed that he had resigned in 1949 from a bomb-related engineering job—“the best job he’d ever had,” Ellsberg writes—because he wanted no part in building anything a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima...
The Doomsday Machine addresses three subjects. The first is the history of Ellsberg’s work at RAND on nuclear war planning just before and during the Kennedy administration, when he discovered what Air Force General Curtis LeMay, commander of the Strategic Air Command, had planned and prepared by 1960 to do to the Sino-Soviet bloc in the event of war...
The sudden and utter destruction of the Soviet Union was the goal of LeMay’s strategic thinking. The SAC’s actual plan never included one bomb big enough to destroy all of Russia, but it promised the same result with many, many bombs. When Ellsberg started to work at RAND the immensely complicated and seldom-changed American plan for nuclear war was spelled out in Annex C of a document called the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan (JSCP, pronounced Jay-SCAP). Annex C was very closely held by planners and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so closely that not even the secretary of defense or civilians in his office were ever shown or informed about the plan or told even the name of the document by order of the Joint Chiefs.
That was still the case when the Kennedy administration arrived in 1961. None of them had ever heard of the JSCP, Annex C, or its recent successor, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP, pronounced Sy-OP). The reasons for this secrecy had to do with service rivalries, technical complexities in executing the plan, and the personality of LeMay, who had made up his mind that he would know and decide when a nuclear attack on Russia was necessary, and what ought to be on the target list. Freedom from meddling was what LeMay wanted, and the Joint Chiefs had helped him to get and keep it.
Ellsberg began to pierce the veil of secrecy while working on a study of war preparations in the Pacific. The plan he discovered was basically the Strategic Air Command’s plan, which was essentially LeMay’s. Herman Kahn’s term for it was “wargasm.” As drawn up by LeMay’s team the first SIOP called for nuclear strikes on just about every city in Russia and in China. Why China, too, if the war was with Russia? The answer, stripped to plain language, had nothing to do with politics: one plan was all the planners could handle at a time.
The first SIOP in December 1960 planned an overwhelming knockout blow. Moscow alone was targeted with at least eighty nuclear weapons, and every Russian city with a population greater than 25,000 would be hit by at least one. China would get the same, for no particular reason. Ellsberg was surprised to discover that the planners had not been afraid to add up the probable number of dead. Over the first six months following the initial strike they estimated that about half the population of Russia and China would die of radiation effects alone—a total of about 380 million people. Three things about this plan convinced Ellsberg to do what he could to stop it: its magnitude, its all-or-nothing character, and the fact that General LeMay had reserved to himself the power to decide when to order the attack...
TThe first day of the Cuban Missile Crisis caught Ellsberg by surprise, just as it did almost everybody else. What alarmed him most was President Kennedy’s threat to respond to any launch of a missile from Cuba on any country in North or South America with “a full retaliatory response on the Soviet Union.” Ellsberg knew what was in the SIOP. “I wondered if the speechwriter had any idea what he was saying,” he writes. Scores of millions would die in a day, hundreds of millions within six months or a year. Ellsberg called up his friend Harry Rowen in the Pentagon, flew to Washington the next day from California, and joined the analysts and officials trying to think their way through the challenge raised by Nikita Khrushchev’s secret move to base thirty-eight Soviet missiles in Cuba. What follows is Ellsberg’s rich personal account of the crisis, including many new details, to join the others already published.
The big new thing in Ellsberg’s book, the important contribution he makes to our thinking on the danger that never goes away, began with a conversation with Rowen about odds: What had been the real chance that we would go to war in 1962? In the first few days of the crisis Ellsberg had convinced himself that the chance was really quite small. Khrushchev, in Ellsberg’s view, was in a box—if push came to shove in the Caribbean he couldn’t win, and if he chose to fight anyway Russia would be reduced to a vestigial state.
Ellsberg had been arguing about this with Rowen and Herman Kahn and many others for two years, and the logic was clear—you can’t use nuclear weapons if your victim can come back at you, which the United States was prepared to do to the Soviet Union in overwhelming fashion. Khrushchev was facing something like a desperation move in chess; he could push that last piece out there but the American response would be check and mate. So Khrushchev had to back down, in Ellsberg’s view. Rowen thought the same thing, and so did the Joint Chiefs and Paul Nitze, one of the principals on the Executive Committee making the decisions. “At thirty-one,” Ellsberg writes, “I was overconfident that a leader who was outgunned would back down under threat.”
In fact, that’s the way it worked out. Khrushchev backed down. When things were still tense Rowen had remarked that he thought the Executive Committee, which included the president and his top advisers, had been putting the chance of war too high—maybe even ten times too high—not one in a thousand (Rowen’s estimate) but one in a hundred. Then a day after the crisis ended Rowen told Ellsberg he had been way off. Nitze had confided to Rowen that he had been guessing the chance of war at “one in ten,” and he was the optimist on the committee—other members thought the chance was even higher than that.
Ellsberg’s first reaction was “puzzlement.” Nitze knew the facts and he understood the logic of nuclear confrontation. War couldn’t possibly make sense in Khrushchev’s position. But then Ellsberg’s eyes opened to the thing that has obsessed him ever since: the Executive Committee had chosen a course of action that they believed risked a one in ten chance of a nuclear war that would kill hundreds of millions of people [emphasis added].''..
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/01/18/daniel-ellsberg-nuclear-worrier/
