Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

his local congressman in Maine, David Emery, said that if he took the medal: Kennedy interview. See also John S. Day, “Behind an Effective Lawmaker — a Good Staff,” Bangor Daily News, March 19, 1982.

a “temporary medical leave by reason of disability”: Quoted in ibid.

Devlin got a check for $6,400: Devlin interview.

A study commissioned by the Air Force later questioned: Peurifoy interview.

“expedite the proposed retrofit of the 28”: “Letter, To Lieutenant General Howard W. Leaf, Inspector General, Headquarters, United States Air Force, From Harold P. Smith, Jr., President, the Palmer Smith Corporation, July 17, 1981” (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), p. 2.

Peurifoy quietly arranged for a unique signal generator: Peurifoy interview.

expected to cost approximately $1.5 trillion: Cited in “Economy Can’t Absorb Defense Increase,” Washington Post, October 18, 1981.

About $250 billion would be spent on nuclear weapon systems: Cited in ”Modernizing U.S. Strategic Offensive Forces: The Administration’s Program and Alternatives,” A CBO Study, Congressional Budget Office, Congress of the United States, May 1983, p. 1.

about fourteen thousand strategic warheads and bombs, an increase of about 60 percent: The Reagan administration planned to raise the number of warheads from 8,800 to 14,000. Cited in ibid., p. xvi.

a “super-sudden first strike”: See McGeorge Bundy, “Common Sense and Missiles in Europe,” Washington Post, October 20, 1981.

the “highest priority element”: Quoted in Pearson, WWMCCS: Evolution and Effectiveness, p. 264.

“This system must be foolproof”: “Text of the President’s Defense Policy Statement: ‘Our Plan’ to ‘Strengthen and Modernize the Strategic Triad …,” Washington Post, October 3, 1981.

greater “interoperability”: Statement of Donald C. Latham, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Communications, Command, Control and Intelligence), in “Strategic Force Modernization Programs,” Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces of the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, Ninety-seventh Congress, First Session, 1981, p. 239.

“to recognize that we are under attack”: Quoted in Bruce G. Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), p. 264.

an unprecedented investment in command and control: Iklé understood, more than most officials at the Pentagon, the fundamental importance of the nuclear command-and-control system. Once again, a new administration was greeted by the news that the United States lacked the ability to control its strategic forces after a surprise attack by the Soviet Union. A study conducted in the spring of 1981 by Dr. James P. Wade, Jr., an undersecretary of defense, found that the command-and-control system could not assure “an effective initial response to a nuclear attack on the United States”; could not fight a protracted nuclear war; and could not guarantee the “survivability, endurability, or connectivity of the national command authority function.” The implications of the Wade study were, essentially, the same as those of WSEG R-50 more than twenty years earlier: the only nuclear war that the United States could hope to win would be one in which it launched first. The quotations in my account of the Wade study are not from the actual document. They come from a summary of it in a document recently obtained by the National Security Archive. See “A Historical Study of Strategic Connectivity, 1950–1981,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Special Historical Study, Historical Division, Joint Chiefs of Staff, July 1982 (TOP SECRET/declassified), NSA, pp. 64–65.

spending about $18 billion: Cited in John D. Steinbruner, “Nuclear Decapitation,” Foreign Policy, no. 45 (Winter 1981–2), p. 25.

an expansion of Project ELF: For details of the Navy’s ambitious schemes, see Pearson, WWMCCS: Evolution and Effectiveness, pp. 287–89; and Lowell L. Klessig and Victor L. Strite, The ELF Odyssey: National Security Versus Environmental Protection (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980).

buried six thousand miles of antenna, four to six feet deep: The ELF antenna grid would have occupied 20,000 of Wisconsin’s roughly 65,000 square miles. See Klessig and Strite, ELF Odyssey, p. 14.

the “continuity of government”: For a brief description of the new programs, spearheaded in part by Colonel Oliver North, see Thomas C. Reed, At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), pp. 245–46.

Desmond Ball, an Australian academic, made a strong case: See Desmond Ball, “Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?” Adelphi Paper #169, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981.

John D. Steinbruner … reached much the same conclusion: See Steinbruner, “Nuclear Decapitation.”

Bruce G. Blair, a former Minuteman officer: See Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat.