Command and Control

Much like China, India for many years embraced a strategy of minimum deterrence, building a small arsenal of weapons and vowing to use them only in retaliation. But India may be moving toward a more aggressive strategy, too. Pakistan has doubled the size of its arsenal since 2006. It now has about 100 nuclear weapons. It is the only nuclear power whose weapons are entirely controlled by the military. And the Pakistan army has not ruled out using them first, even in response to an Indian attack with conventional weapons. To make that sort of deterrent credible, the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons has probably been given to lower-level Pakistani officers, much like the United States once predelegated it to NATO commanders on the front lines.

Instead of making a war between India and Pakistan less likely, nuclear weapons may have the opposite effect. For most of the Cold War, the status quo in Europe, the dividing line between East and West, was accepted by both sides. The border dispute in South Asia is far more volatile, with Pakistan seeking to dislodge India from Kashmir. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have allowed it to sponsor terrorism against India, a much larger and more powerful nation, without fear of retaliation. Since the early 1990s the two countries have come close to nuclear war about half a dozen times, most recently in November 2008, after suicide attacks on India’s largest city, Mumbai.

The security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is now threatened not only by an attack but also by radical Islamists within the country seeking to steal weapons. The internal and external threats place competing demands on Pakistan’s command-and-control system. To protect against theft, the weapons should be stored at a handful of well-guarded locations. But to safeguard against an Indian surprise attack, the weapons should be dispersed to numerous storage sites. Pakistan has most likely chosen the latter approach. Although the warheads and bombs are said to be stored without their nuclear cores, the dispersal of Pakistan’s weapons makes it a lot easier for terrorists to seize one.

Islamic militants staged a bold attack on the headquarters of the Pakistan army in October 2009. They wore military uniforms, used fake IDs, penetrated multiple layers of security, and held dozens of hostages for almost a full day. The head of the Strategic Forces Command, responsible for Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, worked at that headquarters. Another attack penetrated a naval aviation base outside Karachi in May 2011. Most of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon storage facilities were built in the northwestern part of the country, as far as possible from India, to extend the warning time of a missile attack and to make a conventional attack on them more difficult. Unfortunately, that means the nuclear storage sites are located near the border with Afghanistan, Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, and the heart of its radical Islamist movement.

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Most of this book has been devoted to stories of accidents, miscalculations, and mistakes, tempered by a great deal of personal heroism. But one crucial fact must be kept in mind: none of the roughly seventy thousand nuclear weapons built by the United States since 1945 has ever detonated inadvertently or without proper authorization. The technological and administrative controls on those weapons have worked, however imperfectly at times — and countless people, military and civilian, deserve credit for that remarkable achievement. Had a single weapon been stolen or detonated, America’s command-and-control system would still have attained a success rate of 99.99857 percent. But nuclear weapons are the most dangerous technology ever invented. Anything less than 100 percent control of them, anything less than perfect safety and security, would be unacceptable. And if this book has any message to preach, it is that human beings are imperfect.

A retired Strategic Air Command general told me about the enormous, daily stress of his job during the Cold War. It involved, among other things, managing the nuclear command-and-control system of the United States. New codes had to be regularly obtained from the National Security Agency and distributed to missile sites, bombers, submarines. False alarms from NORAD had to be considered and dismissed, Soviet military transmissions carefully analyzed, their submarines off the coast tracked. Thousands of things seemed to be happening in the system at once, all over the world, subtly interconnected, and at any moment something could go terribly wrong. He compared the job to holding an angry tiger by the tail. And like almost every single Air Force officer, weapon designer, Pentagon official, airman, and missile maintenance crew member whom I interviewed about the Cold War, he was amazed that nuclear weapons were never used, that no major city was destroyed, that the tiger never got loose.