There are more cold war nuclear weapons stories that I want to tell you, before we get to the SIOP and circle back to the insanity that is about to happen, as the US attempts to establish global nuclear hegemony. That sounds dramatic, I know, but people need to understand that the US is preparing to win a nuclear war. The US has always been preparing to win a nuclear war. Most of that stuff about defensive counter-strikes, etc. – that’s all lies.
Claiming “that’s all lies” sounds extreme but it really is the truth. When you start studying the capabilities that the US has built out, and when they built them, it’s the unavoidable conclusion. It doesn’t appear as though it was a consequence of an organized grand strategy, so much as an emergent conspiracy – as the various military branches each sought for an excuse that would allow them to build an arsenal, thereby enlarging their importance and increasing their budgetary allotment – there were some pretty spectacular strategic mistakes that could have resulted in the eradication of humanity. A lot of it was due to good old-fashioned American bloody-mindedness. The US nuclear ‘defense’ apparatus could have been built for a small fraction of what was spent, had its object actually been deterrent instead of global hegemony. The US Government or Department of Defense will never say this, but the ballistic missile submarines are enough of a deterrent to fulfill mutually assured destruction; they are enough.
Really, what was going on where the taxpayers couldn’t hear about it, was a massive battle for budget and importance between the US Air Force and the US Navy, about who got to kill the world. Every president has had to dance around inter-service rivalry, and many of them – including president “Oooh, there is a military-industrial complex!” Eisenhower – mostly ‘resolved’ the rivalry by giving each service its head and let it build a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons. Basically, you can picture a group of bratty boys pouting and whining that their brother got a new B.B. gun and now they want one, too. Guns, for everybody! But those characters were not nice people; in fact, they were very scary people, indeed. And, some of them were bloody-minded, murderous, incompetent blockheads.
Curtis LeMay was the commander of US Bomber Command during World War II. He was great at that: he cared just enough about his men to make the whole operation work, but didn’t care one tiny bit about what happened to the Germans. LeMay commanded Bomber Command during the Pacific war, too, and was the commander who oversaw the burning of Tokyo and the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima. During the Korean War, LeMay commanded the bomber forces that bombed every target in North Korea, civilian or military, for three years after the North Koreans (who had nothing that could touch US bombers) stopped fighting. One of the things that drives me nuts about American nuclear policy is the occasional discussion along the lines of “should we really have used nuclear weapons on Japan?” because everyone’s approach to the question inevitably presupposes that there was someone commanding the US forces who did not actively want to just kill everyone in Japan that he could. The president might have had some qualms but not Curtis LeMay. In order to ponder whether or not it was a moral decision, you’d have to actually think that it was a question in the first place. LeMay was a profoundly scary person, a fundamentalist christian nihilist death cult-worshipping ultra-nationalist. With nuclear weapons.
And he was pretty stupid and incompetent. He was good at getting bombers into the air against undefended targets, but when the Germans actually were still shooting back, he expended his bomber pilots lives lavishly.
There are lots of stories about LeMay when you study nuclear weapons, but usually the worst aspects of Le May’s character are downplayed. He’s part of that cold war history what’s been whitewashed.
You can’t fight in here – this is the War Room
When LeMay was placed in charge of the newly forming Strategic Air Command (who else could the president put in charge? LeMay was like the J. Edgar Hoover of blowing entire countries up) the SAC did a lot to market itself as the great new force that was keeping America safe; it was a huge pile of propaganda. But they did have cool things like great big bombers and a giant castle built under a mountain, etc.
It turned out that LeMay didn’t understand how bombing works, if you’re in the possible position of having an enemy that might be able to fight back. It turned out that LeMay only knew how to successfully prosecute a bombing war against an enemy that was supine.
When SAC began to build out, and the inter-services rivalry began, eventually the problem of nuclear war came to the attention of very intelligent people. There were lots of very intelligent people involved – unfortunately a lot of them at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore Labs (the labs also competed for prestige and budget) – in a previous piece on nuclear weapons I described Jim Walsh, [stderr] another crazed christian ultra-nationalist death-loving nihilist. But Walsh was small potatoes next to LeMay.
The Soviets began to frantically produce a nuclear weapons delivery platform and arsenal for themselves, and smart people like Daniel Ellsberg from RAND Corporation began to think about the problems of starting and stopping nuclear wars, and how to coordinate targeting, etc. Some of the RAND folks looked at the problems inherent in getting the weapons back and forth in time – what if a Soviet strike was inbound, how many bombers could get into the air and far enough away from the exploding remains of the US, and rain deterrent death on the Soviets?
By the way, it was around that time that the RAND folks started asking questions like: “If the Soviets launch a preemptive strike on us, we’re going to all die. Is it a moral decision to make them all die, too? What, the actual fuck, are you guys thinking?” They began to ask questions like “how do you surrender in a nuclear war, anyway, when your command/control structure is gone and everyone is dying? Is there a point to all this?” And, as I’ve described elsewhere, the RAND systems analysts began to realize that the US ‘strategy’, such as it was, made no sense and actually had a great big flaw in it. The flaw was to do with the vulnerability of bombers: RAND systems analysts realized that the Soviets could use ICBM and medium-range ballistic missiles on SAC bases, which were relatively ‘soft’ as targets go. They did some modelling and came to the conclusion that a Soviet first strike could effectively kill the SAC, leaving the US flaming, and supine – and nobody knew how to surrender.
From the 1961 movie Fail Safe
Basically, the RAND guys also did not understand Curtis LeMay, because they didn’t realize that LeMay was completely incapable of worrying about anything other than slaughtering supine, helpless, enemies. From The Wizards of Armageddon here is Curtis LeMay at his best: [am]
Sprague had served on surprise-attack panels before, and knew roughly the time it would take for a Russian bomber to get from the DEW [Distant Early Warning] line to each SAC base in the United States. The bombers could take off with fairly short notice, at least theoretically, and each SAC base was assigned three auxiliary civilian bases where the bombers could land and disperse in the event of a warning. But Sprague also knew that the bombers would only have limited crews, limited fuel loadings, and no atomic weapons on board. The bombs were stored on SAC bases, separated from the planes; they were not protected from the overpressures of blast and it would take some time to load them onto the bombers. In other words, they were highly vulnerable. And there were no atomic bombs on the auxiliary bases. In short, the SAC bombers might get off the ground, but they would have nothing to drop on Russian territory, nothing with which to carry out the national policy of “massive retaliation.”
Looking at the numbers on the big map at SAC headquarters, which showed the time it would take for the bombers to get off the ground fully loaded, Sprague calculated that in nearly instance they exceeded the time it would take for a Russian bomber to fly from the DEW line to the bases. The only exception was the base in Morocco, holding about a dozen SAC bombers. Sprague was geniunely frightened. That exercise in Colorado Springs was no anomaly; the conclusions of Wohlstettler’s R-290 were not theoretical; a surprise Soviet attack might well destroy America’s ability to respond in kind and therefore, once the Soviets acquired the means to launch such an attack, the United States might no longer be able to deter nuclear war and win the war if the Soviets provoked one.
Sprague pointed all this out to LeMay, who calmly responded that this didn’t scare him. He told Sprague that the United States had airplanes flying secret missions over Soviet territory twenty four hours a day, picking up all sorts of intelligence information, mostly communication intelligence from Soviet military radio transmissions. He offered to take Sprague into the office where this data was sent and stored. All those statements the Soviets periodically made about American spy planes penetrating Russian air space were true. We always said the incidents were accidental, but they were not; they were very deliberate.
“If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack,” LeMay continued, “I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.”
Sprague was thunderstruck by the revelation. This was knowledge that only a very, very small number of Americans possessed or knew anything about. Most startling was LeMay’s final bit of news, that he would order a preemptive attack against Soviet air bases.
“But General LeMay,” Sprague said, “that’s not national policy.”
“I don’t care, LeMay replied. “It’s my policy. That’s what I’m going to do.”
“The bombers could take off with fairly short notice, at least theoretically, and each SAC base was assigned three auxiliary civilian bases where the bombers could land and disperse in the event of a warning.” – planning to use human shields, as SAC appears to have done, is a war crime.
The R-290 report was a readiness test conducted by RAND, in which they timed an alert drill and discovered that the SAC bombers were unable to get off the ground in anything close to the time they were supposed to be able to do. Basically, the SAC was a sitting duck.
The battle over budget and inter-service rivalry probably was a greater threat to world destruction than anything the Soviets ever offered. Because the SAC bombers were so vulnerable, they eventually took to keeping a wing of bombers in the air, constantly, armed with the largest hydrogen bombs in the US inventory. (That was the wing that Stanley Kubrick set Doctor Strangelove‘s premise in) Accidents happen: several B-52s and bombs were lost in run of the mill system failures. In 1961, for one example, a B-52 crashed near Goldsboro, North Carolina, carrying 2 3 megaton bombs. The bombs hit the ground so hard that they buried themselves fairly deep in the soil. When they were recovered, it was determined that one was in an armed condition and should have gone off but failed. The Air Force, naturally lied about the incident and classified the whole thing Top Secret. [wik]
Accounts I have read about the budget battles are surreal and terrifying. Literally, things like: Air Force general officers in meetings taunting Navy admirals “Ha! We are going to kill off your Polaris program and you can do nothing to stop us!”
These guys actually succeeded in killing some Russians. Far fewer than they would have liked though. After Americans dropped bombs on Japanese cities, Russians freaked out and decided that they must build their own nuclear bombs as quickly as possible. Between 1945 and 1948, in great hurry, they built the Mayak plant. No consideration was paid to worker safety or responsible disposal of waste materials. After all, that’s what “being in a hurry” means. Thus a bunch of Russians died.
Let’s begin with the fact that Mayak used a primitive open-cycle cooling system, which contaminated the nearby lakes (Lake Kyzyltash and Lake Karachay). Lake Kyzyltash was rapidly contaminated via the open-cycle system. Lake Karachay was just used as a dumping ground for large quantities of high level radioactive waste. Of course, nearby rivers were polluted as well.
And then, in 1957, the Kyshtym Disaster happened, causing widespread contamination of the entire Mayak area. Authorities kept this whole crap secret; evacuation of nearby villagers was delayed.
Of course, there were also Russians who spent decades living nearby the Mayak plant and having no clue whatsoever about the fact that the place is dangerous to live in.
Conclusion: there are plenty of ways how to kill some enemies. You can just scare the shit out of them and then happily watch how they kill themselves.
This is why I wasn’t sweating North Korea having nukes. “But crazy Kim Jung-un!” No. He’s not a good man, but I have no reason to think he’s insane or has a death wish. He does have eyes though and has seen what happened to Iraq and Libya, and what’s happening with Iran. What’s throwing a wrench in everything though is a buffoon has somehow stumbled into the US presidency, one who is giving every appearance of being willing to have a nuclear war because it makes him look strong.
At some point the American empire is going to collapse and the best that we can hope for is that it doesn’t kill millions of people in its death throes.
The American nuclear program has killed plenty of Americans, too, and others around the world. The above-ground tests raised the background radiation level markedly, and it’s still well above the pre-Alamogordo level. I think the calculated death toll is in the hundreds of thousands.
There has been such a high level of WTF surrounding nuclear weaponry (and, to an extent, nuclear power) that it’s pretty remarkable we’ve managed to avoid an extinction-level disaster so far.
Not nuclear related, but if you want to see a great movie about the kind of incompetence that goes on in the US MIC, watch ‘The Pentagon Wars’. It’s a movie (that’s disturbingly hilarious) about the ‘development’ of the Bradley fighting vehicle.
Just want to chime in with agreement on one important point:
Ballistic missile submarines, in those cases where the submarine’s missiles carry fission or fusion explosive payloads (read: the current US), are more than sufficient as a deterrent entirely on their own. This would be true so long as you have about 3 submarines (to ensure at least one is always at sea: 1 in dry dock & the other two at sea more than they are alongside a pier) and each sub carried either one very reliable missile or 2-3 missiles with good but imperfect reliability. No one wants a single nuclear payload to blow up even a single city. Sure, maybe a country as physically large as Mexico or Argentina, if it has a decent industrial base, could still “win” a war against such a country, losing only its most populous metro area. But this is deterrent, remember? What government would believe it could stay in power if it launched a war against a nuclear-armed country that resulted in losing multiple-millions of citizens along with its most valuable real estate and a good portion of its most valuable infrastructure to a weapon that makes it impossible to reclaim that real estate for decades to come?
Heck, with only two warheads on a single MIRV launcher or a mere 2 missiles, you could configure one blast for EMP by detonation above the atmosphere*1 and take out not only the densest population center, but also play complete hell with communications and electrification infrastructure through the entire country. You’d also see the loss of irreplaceable data and the consequent economic effects of the loss of data, communication, and electric power. There’s no way a government who launched a war that resulted in those effects for their own country could stay in power. None at all.
I’m not saying the nuke-users wouldn’t also pay a price on the international stage, but that wouldn’t benefit the government that launched the war in the first place.
Therefore, as a deterrent, a single EMP warhead + a single large (fusion) air-bursting warhead would be an adequate deterrent against any nation that couldn’t reliably, effectively eliminate your subs before you could respond.
Now consider that the US has a couple dozen nuke-armed subs, and no US missile sub has had fewer than 16 missiles in its silos. The earliest soviet missile subs had 3 missile silos each, which very quickly became armed with MIRVs – not sure, but I think it was 3 warheads per missile. There’s no reason today to start out with a missile that delivers fewer than 3 warheads. Why waste the R&D time on a single-warhead front end when a missile carrying 3 or even more can be developed for the same money?
The thing is, with a good range, patrol areas don’t even need to be secret: you just keep good ASW assets around your SSBNs, ping away with active sonar, and let the submariners laze about topside using the deck as a steel beach unless and until either weather is bad, tensions rise, or a potentially hostile ship closes in. Few bombs can penetrate 800 feet of ocean to do serious damage to an SSBM, and no bomb can do so with a horizontal delivery error of a mile or so.
While silence and secrecy are the US Navy way with regards to SSBNs, the ability to deny real-time localization better than a mile or so combined with the sheer mass of water between an incoming weapon and a sub 800 feet down is more than good enough to make an enemy question their ability to conduct a successful first strike against your deterrent force.
In sum, 3 subs with the capabilities of a 1960 Soviet submarine, save for a more modern, less intensive maintenance schedule, with a total of 9 missiles and 27 warheads would nearly guarantee that any country launching a war against you would lose its government. That means the government leaders of almost any nation in the world would be deterred.
It’s really not more difficult than that. I’ll actually grant that that isn’t easy – I can’t design a nuclear reactor – but with the resources of a nation state, it’s not a big ask, and it’s certainly less expensive than the dozens of ships and hundreds of warheads that the US has put to sea.
There is no way you can explain the US military as a deterrent force.
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*1 although I guess that warhead would no longer be accurately described as an “RV” at that point.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden@#5:
Just want to chime in with agreement on one important point:
I appreciate that. Sometimes I worry that I’m going to sound like one of those conspiracy types. The way that the US military, particularly, has positioned its nuclear war-fighting doctrines, it’s shameless lies – and if you start talking about that, you’re going against the New York Times (which prints whatever the DoD tells them about nuclear strategy) and lots of Serious-sounding People.
As far as I can see, it’s lies all the way down, except for about the basic points, such as that: H-bombs work.
For what it’s worth, my understanding of this is from a long interest in nuclear strategy that goes back to when I was in high school in the 70s. Some of the stuff I’ve learned, I picked up in single references, and since the internet came along, I try to cross-check them. Facts build up and I’ve found that the stuff that leaks out about nuclear weapons and warfare tends to not contradict, much, at all. That’s important – this is not subject matter like the John F. Kennedy assassination, where there are dozens of contradictory conspiracies. In several cases, the information keeps leaking out, but (again) it’s not contradicted. So, for example, a friend of mine told me a decade ago that “there is more to the story of the North Carolina bombs than the Air Force is telling.” Imagine my surprise when Schlosser mentioned as an aside in Command and Control that the bomb they recovered was in an armed condition – the bomb’s fusing system failed. When I encounter stories with a hole in them, and a puzzle piece later fits perfectly, I consider it more likely to be true (since a conspiracy story would have to be consistent with a huge back-catalogue of other facts)
There are lots of stories I still hope pieces drop on. Specifically, whether John Bordne’s story about the missiles of Okinawa is true. I’m inclined to think it is because there are some parts of Bordne’s story that he himself flagged as weird in light of what was known then about US missile-targeting practices, but check out correctly with what we know now about how things were done at the time. Was Bordne a liar, or were the others in his battery lying to protect the Air Force’s legacy? We need another puzzle-piece or two before we can say. There are also many things about A.Q. Khan that would be nice to know.
A reasonable selection of books to start on, if you’re interested in the topic would be [this is a subset of my archive]:
Richard Rhodes (all of his books on the topic are excellent)
Reed The Nuclear Express (about policy) and At the Abyss – I consider Reed to be an unreliable source – he’s an ultra-nationalist
Kaplan – The Wizards of Armageddon – full of fascinating quotes and puzzle pieces
Khan – Eating Grass
Richard Feynman – Los Alamos stories
William Perry – At the Brink
Daniel Ellsberg – The Doomsday Machine
Duncan – Rickover and the Nuclear Navy
Narang – Nuclear Strategy
Hershey – Hiroshima
El Baradei – The Age of Deception
And I forget its name but there’s another book that is an extremely weird book on internals of specific weapons, down to great levels of detail. The problem is confirming it. None of it conflicts with what I already know, but it appears that the weapons designers at the labs have through plentiful head-fakes into the process, so that anyone who tries to start a nuclear research program is going to stumble into attempting to obtain unobtanium, which sets of search alarms (i.e.: asking for a ‘slap wire detonator’ instead of a krytron/exploding bridge-wire detonator)
By the way, many of the books above do not explicitly mention that the US’ nuclear forces were never deployed as anything but preparations for a first strike. It appears that writers like Reed and Stillman either knew and turned their brains off, or simply didn’t think about it.
In sum, 3 subs with the capabilities of a 1960 Soviet submarine, save for a more modern, less intensive maintenance schedule, with a total of 9 missiles and 27 warheads would nearly guarantee that any country launching a war against you would lose its government.
That’s correct but “lose its government” is putting it mildly. Some simulations I’ve seen put it that you’d need 24 1mt warheads to put England back to the iron age. 32 would kill almost everyone. Los Alamos researchers tried to answer the question “how many bombs would it take to wipe out humanity?” when Teller was arguing for the ‘super’ and they came up with the number: 100. [los] Reports such as the Los Alamos report were read at the highest levels of government, yet the US did a massive build-out, anyway.
There is no way you can explain the US military as a deterrent force.
The formerly classified term they are using now is “full spectrum dominance” – i.e.: the US rules the waves, the air, the land, near space, cyberspace, software, the media, and also has a “wipe out the world” nuclear punch in case we need to be sore losers.
Absolutely. I just focus on the government because the government is where the decision to go to war is made. If you could contrive a war such that your population was wiped out but you ended up wealthier and more power – or just as powerful – then even the types who actively seek power and thus would fear to lose it (and those are the ones who end up in government) might actually be willing to try a war that kills their citizenry.
However, since it work work that way, since the government will fall and the decision makers are almost guaranteed to pay a heavy personal price, the people who actually need to be deterred (i.e. not the common citizenry) are more effectively deterred by the loss of their own privileges and power, not necessarily and certainly not only by the loss of citizen’s lives. (After all, in easy living memory of WWI you had folks kicking off WW2 – they had to know that would cost a huge number of citizens’ lives. They just didn’t think it would cost them, personally.)
Deterrence always has to target the decision makers.
All this is to say, I’m embarrassed that my language seemed so dismissive of the inevitable human catastrophe, but it came as a result of discussing the nature of deterrence, with nukes as a specific case, rather than the nature of nukes, with deterrence roped in.
Your account of “slap wire detonator” as a tripwire alarm is the first time I’ve heard of a real-world occurrence of “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons”, from Cordwainer Smith’s short story of the same name. Smith, or rather Linebarger, was “perhaps the leader practitioner of ‘black’ and ‘gray’ propaganda in the Western world”, and from the same era as the first generations of weapons development. (I’m not saying he was connected, only that that concept was not foreign to that era.)
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden@#7:
I just focus on the government because the government is where the decision to go to war is made. If you could contrive a war such that your population was wiped out but you ended up wealthier and more power – or just as powerful – then even the types who actively seek power and thus would fear to lose it (and those are the ones who end up in government) might actually be willing to try a war that kills their citizenry.
Thank you for that observation; it just helped a bunch of trains of thought collide in my brain, and it’s nearly of Epicurean beauty. Seriously.
Cecile Fabre, in her book on the morality of defensive warfare, points out that it is inappropriate to kill citizens that are not supporting the war – she gives an interesting thought experiment regarding whether or not it’s moral to put a bomb in troops’ canteen : most of them can be assumed to be supporting the war, however the troops in the canteen are, technically, non-combatants while they are there. Or, there may be “green” troops. She makes a pretty solid argument that the troops who can be shot in self-defense are those that are doing the actual combat roles in an aggressive war.
That fits well with Noam Chomsky’s reply, when people ask him “why do you complain about the US so much, and why not complain about other more repressive regimes?” Chomsky says, “because my taxes pay for the US military.”
Deterrence always has to target the decision makers.
If there’s anyone deserving a pre-emptive strike, it’s the decision-makers, too.
Crimson Clupeidae@#4:
Not nuclear related, but if you want to see a great movie about the kind of incompetence that goes on in the US MIC, watch ‘The Pentagon Wars’. It’s a movie (that’s disturbingly hilarious) about the ‘development’ of the Bradley fighting vehicle.
Kelsey Grammar is great in that one. The problem with it being so funny is that it’s easy to miss the fact it’s a documentary. The Bradley suffers from some of the same problems as the F-35: the features that crept have special features. During the gulf wars it basically was hand-carried by the M-1s – the Iraqi tanks actually would have had a chance against the Bradleys, so the M-1s cleared the field of opposition and the Bradleys were mostly slaughtering Iraqis that tried to run. You’ll notice there are seldom photos of them in a battle area where ATGM are likely to be present. They’re seldom spotted in battle areas where there are RPGs, for that matter – it’s amazing that America managed to produce such a slab-sided high-riding thing given, um, every country ever’s experience with armor.
Epicurean in its beauty?
You can’t know how amazingly pleased I am to receive this specific compliment.
Or there may be conscripts who were given a choice between these two options: (1) go to war, (2) refuse, and we will put a bullet in your brain right here and now.
This all reminds me of an old question: Is it actually unethical (by whatever standard, don’t worry about it) to target the civilian leadership of another country? They’re the ones making the decision to go to war, after all. As such, they’re part of the military command structure. Isn’t that a legitimate target?
For that matter, assuming a properly democratic country (don’t laugh, it’s a thought experiment), doesn’t that make the general population legitimate targets also?