Command and Control

In the United States, the nuclear abolition movement has failed to generate much popular support. The retired officials who jump-started the debate in 2007 had an average age of seventy-nine. Many of the issues at stake seem hypothetical and remote. Almost half of the American population were not yet born or were children when the Cold War ended. And support for the abolition of nuclear weapons is hardly universal. The administration of President George W. Bush not only sought to develop new warheads and hydrogen bombs but also broadened the scope of the OPLAN. Bush’s counterforce strategy, adopted after 9/11, threatened the preemptive use of nuclear weapons to thwart conventional, biological, and chemical attacks on the United States. A pair of liberal Democrats, former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and former director of the CIA John M. Deutch, criticized the “nuclear disarmament fantasy” from a different perspective. Nuclear weapons can never be un-invented, Brown and Deutch argued, and countries that secretly violate an international ban might achieve unchecked power. The temptation to cheat would be enormous. In their view, utopian proposals shouldn’t distract attention from practical measures to reduce the nuclear threat and avoid armed conflicts: “Hope is not a policy, and, at present, there is no realistic path to a world free of nuclear weapons.”

Between the extremes of a counterforce strategy requiring thousands of nuclear weapons always on alert and an agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons, there lies a third course. Promoted by the U.S. Navy in the late 1950s, when its submarine-based missiles were too inaccurate to hit military targets, the strategy of minimum deterrence has lately gained strong support, even in some unexpected places. In 2010 a group of high-ranking Air Force officials, including its chief of strategic planning, argued that the United States needed only 311 nuclear weapons to deter an attack. Any more would be overkill. The arsenal proposed by these Air Force strategists would contain almost 200 fewer weapons than the one recommended by the National Resources Defense Council and the Federation of American Scientists, a pair of liberal groups that also support minimum deterrence.

Bob Peurifoy advocates a similar strategy. He considers himself a realist and thinks that a world free of nuclear weapons is unattainable. He would like the United States to get rid of its land-based missiles, take all its weapons off alert, give up the notion that a counterforce strategy might work, and retain a few hundred ballistic missiles securely deployed on submarines. To avoid accidental launches and mistakes, the subs shouldn’t be capable of firing their missiles quickly. And to dissuade foreign enemies from attacking the United States, Peurifoy would let them know in advance where America’s warheads might land on their territory. That knowledge would deter any rational world leader. But the problems with a strategy of minimum deterrence have changed little in the past fifty years. It cannot defend the United States against an impending attack. It can only kill millions of enemy civilians after the United States has already been attacked.

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Launch Complex 374-7 was never rebuilt. The underground passages were disassembled. The land around it was cleared of debris. Toxic waste was pumped from the silo, and then the silo was filled with gravel and dirt. The Air Force returned the land to Ralph and Reba Jo Parish, from whom it had been taken through eminent domain. Seeing the place today, you would never think that one of the most destructive weapons ever built once lay beneath the ground there. Nature has reclaimed the site. It’s covered with grass, surrounded by woods and farmland. A large mound covers the spot where the missile stood. The paved access road is now dirt. Quiet, peaceful, bucolic — it could not feel more removed from international diplomacy, Washington politics, nuclear strategy. The only hints of what happened there are patches of concrete overgrown with weeds and a few scattered pieces of metal, lying on the ground, that have been bent and deformed by tremendous heat.