The Return of the Doomsday Machine?Please don't count on me to save the world again.
Posted Friday, Aug. 31, 2007, at 3:52 PM ET
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUpon"Kosvinsky came online recently," Blair wrote in 2003, "which could be one explanation for U.S. interest in a new nuclear bunker buster."
Blair also suggested that the Bush administration's recurrent interest in funding the development of nuclear "bunker buster" bombs was at least in some respects designed to give them the capacity to destroy the dead-hand device buried deep in a Kosvinsky bunker, an argument that, if true, would suggest the dead-hand doomsday device was still thought to be operational. And perhaps you've heard something about its deactivation, but I haven't found any evidence of it.
Blair, who has written previously on the extremely rickety structure of presidential nuclear decision-making, believes that the current U.S. contingency plan is itself a "doomsday strategy":
President Bush's nuclear guidance doubtless instructs the Pentagon to plan the destruction of Yamantau and Kosvinsky, along with 2,000 other targets in Russia and hundreds more in China. But such targeting requires very high-yield weapons, typically 10 to 100 times more destructive than the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. We are talking about a doomsday plan in which Yamantau and Kosvinsky are struck as part of an all-out nuclear exchange that would kill hundreds of millions of people.
There's some ambiguity in Blair's use of "doubtless": Does it imply that Bush's "nuclear guidance" includes only one all-out, 2,000-target response, or "merely" the capability of it? But shouldn't we know at least that in a genuinely "doubtless" way?
Blair's primary recent concern is not the prospect of a deliberate, ideological, Cold War-type nuclear war, but accidental war caused by the continued deadly presence of all-too-easily triggered Cold War arsenals. In four fascinating papers on the subject (all available online, and well worth reading), Blair describes the "launch on warning" bias built into our nuclear command structure, and foresees the possibility of a doomsday that results from our attempt to pre-empt their doomsday plan, all of which might be touched off by accident, mistake, or malfunction on either side.
Blair is not a wild-eyed Cassandra raising unsupported suspicions. Colleagues in his field regard him as a serious and cautious scholar raising real questions. Stephen M. Meyer, an expert on the Russian military at MIT, told the Times that Blair "requires of himself a much higher standard of evidence than many people in the intelligence community."
Blair's troubling papers, along with his book The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, serve as a reminder that the illogic, irrationalities, and vulnerability to catastrophic error of our Cold War nuclear war command and control mechanisms were never resolved or fixed, just forgotten when the Cold War ended. His analysis suggests that during the Cold War, we may have escaped an accidental nuclear war by luck rather than policy.
It was Blair who pointed out, in congressional testimony, another continuing problem with nuclear launch posture, this one involving the much-ballyhooed "de-targeting"—a process by which the United States and the former Soviet Union purportedly reduced the risk of accidental nuclear war by insuring that their missiles were—after the fall of the Soviet Union—not still targeted at each other. Blair told Congress that, especially on the Russian side, detargeting was only "cosmetic and symbolic," and easily reversible, implemented in name only.
What drove Blair? I was particularly fascinated by one of Blair's other papers, his more personal "Nuclear Recollections," which might have been called "Memories of a Minuteman Missile Crewman," and describes his period of service in a missile silo at the Malmstrom, Mont., Air Force Base, hundreds of feet beneath the Great Plains.
Especially because I'd been there! Down in one of those silos, under the bleak landscape of the Great Plains (this one in Grand Forks, N.D.), interviewing missile commanders like Blair (for a Harper's story), only a few years after Blair resumed life aboveground and retired.
In the course of talking to Minuteman commanders down in their underground launch capsules, I'd glimpsed what they might be called upon to do. They had the ability to launch from their underground pods up to 50 missiles able to kill 200,000 or 300,000 people each. You do the math.
They certainly had, and it showed beneath their black-humored jokes about coming above ground after a nuclear war and finding "only huge mutant bunny rabbits alive."
When Congress Sends a Bill to the President, Do They Use E-Mail?
Gov. Haley Barbour's Strange Habit of Pardoning Murderers Who Work on His House
Slowpoke Directors Explained: Why It Took 12 Years to Make Avatar
The Surprising Reason Banks Are Suddenly Repaying Their TARP Funds
How Come You Don't Hear About the "War on Christmas" Anymore?
Jeff Bridges Gives the Performance of the Year in Crazy Heart
Remarks from the Fray:
During the 50s, 60s and 70s, the clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reminded us of how close we were to a holocaust. The clock got as close as 2 minutes to midnight, after the H-bomb was developed, and has never been set earlier than 11:43 (in 1991, at the end of the Cold War).
Today, it sits at 11:55. This partly is because the Bulletin now considers other threats, including global warming, but most of the changes since 1991 have come because of proliferation and the threat of a nuclear terrorist attack. Even when the clock was set at 11:43, though, it recognized a substantial danger of catastrophe because of a mistake.
The real point of the clock is to remind us of the fragility and instability of our current world. Before the 1950s, it was inconceivable that people could do anything that would, in essence, end the world. Nuclear weapons made us realize that it was possible, perhaps even probable. And, oddly, that realization, along with works like Silent Spring, may have made it possible for us to understand longer-term threats, like global warming.
Of course, people react in different ways to the uncertainty of the modern world. Vladimir Putin and, I fear, some of our leaders, may think that security lies in making it dangerous for others to threaten you, rather than in making it more difficult to threaten others in the first place. These things seem to run in cycles, though, so perhaps cooler heads will prevail. I just hope it happens before the clock strikes twelve.
--randy-khan
(To reply, click here.)
I'm a little over thirty years old, which is old enough to remember going to sleep at night genuinely, legitimately worried that you might not wake up... because of that five-megaton airburst above a known target ten miles up the road.
When the Iron Curtain rusted apart, we celebrated, but not because we really gave much of a damn if the Czechs could elect a poet or the Germans could run Oktoberfest without that pesky wall through the middle. We cheered because we knew that something resembling a democratic government in Russia was much less likely to engage in global military chest-thumping which might trigger nuclear escalation. We could go to bed at night, not half-expecting the nuclear alarm-clock to wake us up.
Today I am... not really worried in the same way I was in my youth, but I can see the possibilities out there. If Russia under Yeltsin resembled a democratic government, Russia under Putin these days resembles a Soviet-style government-by-bureaucracy pretending (very badly) to resemble a democracy. It's not quite alarming yet, and if Putin really steps down as his second term ends there's a chance that the next leader will have the wisdom to step back, to build something better than the kleptocracy that Russia has become... and maybe Dubya will withdraw from Iraq before his second term ends.
Yeah, right.
Even a non-democratic Russia need not be our enemy, but it could become one in a real hurry, and my fear is that the utter inefficiencies in their joke of an economy will leave them permanently poor and resentful...and sitting on a legacy of nuclear weapons from the "glory years" of the previous era. The one positive is at least they lack the conventional military power to project enough force to make direct confrontation an inevitability. Soviet conventional strategy always emphasized quantity, but back in the day they were seldom more than a decade behind in technological terms. The Russian military today is a joke with a lot of badly-trained manpower and no credible way it can attack anyone (except with its nukes) who's not a next-door neighbor.
If we're not shooting at them or their immediate proxies, the Russians will never have adequate reason to push the button. Even the proverbial gung-ho military commander under the mountain with all of Russia's nuclear might at his fingertip will not be inclined to punish the US if it was the Chechens who did Moscow.
--ked
(To reply, click here.)
Do Aeschylus some justice: Cassandra's curse for failing to bear Apollo a child was to tell the truth but never to be believed. She foretells in gruesome detail the murder of Agamemnon, as she had foretold the fall of Troy, but she was not believed in either case.
In the Agamemnon, Cassandra gives her prophecy to the chorus, which can be understood to represent the common people of a nation. Had they believed her, or had they been more decisive, the murder of the king may have been prevented--but she was not, and they were not, and Agamemnon was axe-murdered in his bath by his not-so-loving wife. This is significant because it shows just how out-of-touch Mr. Rosenbaum's comparison is here: apart from being unfair to Cassandra, perpetrating her curse in the form of a shallow stereotype, he suggests that Blair is not a prophet telling truths to deaf ears, which runs counter to the rest of this piece.
--Joe M.
(To reply, click here.)
(9/2)