[Mb-hair] MUST READ!!! FW: Apocalypse Soon By Robert S. McNamara Foreign Policy

[Michael Butler]

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From: Michael Butler <michael at michaelbutler.com>
Date: Thu, 05 May 2005 16:47:04 -0700

    Apocalypse Soon
    By Robert S. McNamara
    Foreign Policy

    May/June 2005 Issue

    Robert McNamara is worried. He knows how close we've come. His counsel
helped the Kennedy administration avert nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Today, he believes the United States must no longer rely on
nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. To do so is immoral, illegal and
dreadfully dangerous.

    
(Photo: foreignpolicy.com)
    
    It is time - well past time, in my view - for the United States to cease
its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. At
the risk of appearing simplistic and provocative, I would characterize
current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily
unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous. The risk of an accidental or
inadvertent nuclear launch is unacceptably high. Far from reducing these
risks, the Bush administration has signaled that it is committed to keeping
the US nuclear arsenal as a mainstay of its military power - a commitment
that is simultaneously eroding the international norms that have limited the
spread of nuclear weapons and fissile materials for 50 years. Much of the
current US nuclear policy has been in place since before I was secretary of
defense, and it has only grown more dangerous and diplomatically destructive
in the intervening years.

    Today, the United States has deployed approximately 4,500 strategic,
offensive nuclear warheads. Russia has roughly 3,800. The strategic forces
of Britain, France, and China are considerably smaller, with 200­400 nuclear
weapons in each state's arsenal. The new nuclear states of Pakistan and
India have fewer than 100 weapons each. North Korea now claims to have
developed nuclear weapons, and US intelligence agencies estimate that
Pyongyang has enough fissile material for 2­8 bombs.

    How destructive are these weapons? The average US warhead has a
destructive power 20 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Of the 8,000 active
or operational US warheads, 2,000 are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be
launched on 15 minutes' warning. How are these weapons to be used? The
United States has never endorsed the policy of "no first use," not during my
seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared to
initiate the use of nuclear weapons - by the decision of one person, the
president - against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe
it is in our interest to do so. For decades, US nuclear forces have been
sufficiently strong to absorb a first strike and then inflict "unacceptable"
damage on an opponent. This has been and (so long as we face a
nuclear-armed, potential adversary) must continue to be the foundation of
our nuclear deterrent.

    In my time as secretary of defense, the commander of the US Strategic
Air Command (SAC) carried with him a secure telephone, no matter where he
went, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The telephone of
the commander, whose headquarters were in Omaha, Nebraska, was linked to the
underground command post of the North American Defense Command, deep inside
Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado, and to the US president, wherever he
happened to be. The president always had at hand nuclear release codes in
the so-called football, a briefcase carried for the president at all times
by a US military officer.

    The SAC commander's orders were to answer the telephone by no later than
the end of the third ring. If it rang, and he was informed that a nuclear
attack of enemy ballistic missiles appeared to be under way, he was allowed
2 to 3 minutes to decide whether the warning was valid (over the years, the
United States has received many false warnings), and if so, how the United
States should respond. He was then given approximately 10 minutes to
determine what to recommend, to locate and advise the president, permit the
president to discuss the situation with two or three close advisors
(presumably the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff), and to receive the president's decision and pass it immediately,
along with the codes, to the launch sites. The president essentially had two
options: He could decide to ride out the attack and defer until later any
decision to launch a retaliatory strike. Or, he could order an immediate
retaliatory strike, from a menu of options, thereby launching US weapons
that were targeted on the opponent's military-industrial assets. Our
opponents in Moscow presumably had and have similar arrangements.

    The whole situation seems so bizarre as to be beyond belief. On any
given day, as we go about our business, the president is prepared to make a
decision within 20 minutes that could launch one of the most devastating
weapons in the world. To declare war requires an act of congress, but to
launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes' deliberation by the
president and his advisors. But that is what we have lived with for 40
years. With very few changes, this system remains largely intact, including
the "football," the president's constant companion.

    I was able to change some of these dangerous policies and procedures. My
colleagues and I started arms control talks; we installed safeguards to
reduce the risk of unauthorized launches; we added options to the nuclear
war plans so that the president did not have to choose between an
all-or-nothing response, and we eliminated the vulnerable and provocative
nuclear missiles in Turkey. I wish I had done more, but we were in the midst
of the Cold War, and our options were limited.

    The United States and our NATO allies faced a strong Soviet and Warsaw
Pact conventional threat. Many of the allies (and some in Washington as
well) felt strongly that preserving the US option of launching a first
strike was necessary for the sake of keeping the Soviets at bay. What is
shocking is that today, more than a decade after the end of the Cold War,
the basic US nuclear policy is unchanged. It has not adapted to the collapse
of the Soviet Union. Plans and procedures have not been revised to make the
United States or other countries less likely to push the button. At a
minimum, we should remove all strategic nuclear weapons from "hair-trigger"
alert, as others have recommended, including Gen. George Lee Butler, the
last commander of SAC. That simple change would greatly reduce the risk of
an accidental nuclear launch. It would also signal to other states that the
United States is taking steps to end its reliance on nuclear weapons.

    We pledged to work in good faith toward the eventual elimination of
nuclear arsenals when we negotiated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT) in 1968. In May, diplomats from more than 180 nations are meeting in
New York City to review the NPT and assess whether members are living up to
the agreement. The United States is focused, for understandable reasons, on
persuading North Korea to rejoin the treaty and on negotiating deeper
constraints on Iran's nuclear ambitions. Those states must be convinced to
keep the promises they made when they originally signed the NPT - that they
would not build nuclear weapons in return for access to peaceful uses of
nuclear energy. But the attention of many nations, including some potential
new nuclear weapons states, is also on the United States. Keeping such large
numbers of weapons, and maintaining them on hair-trigger alert, are potent
signs that the United States is not seriously working toward the elimination
of its arsenal and raises troubling questions as to why any other state
should restrain its nuclear ambitions.

    A Preview of the Apocalypse

    The destructive power of nuclear weapons is well known, but given the
United States' continued reliance on them, it's worth remembering the danger
they present. A 2000 report by the International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War describes the likely effects of a single 1 megaton
weapon - dozens of which are contained in the Russian and US inventories. At
ground zero, the explosion creates a crater 300 feet deep and 1,200 feet in
diameter. Within one second, the atmosphere itself ignites into a fireball
more than a half-mile in diameter. The surface of the fireball radiates
nearly three times the light and heat of a comparable area of the surface of
the sun, extinguishing in seconds all life below and radiating outward at
the speed of light, causing instantaneous severe burns to people within one
to three miles. A blast wave of compressed air reaches a distance of three
miles in about 12 seconds, flattening factories and commercial buildings.
Debris carried by winds of 250 mph inflicts lethal injuries throughout the
area. At least 50 percent of people in the area die immediately, prior to
any injuries from radiation or the developing firestorm.

    Of course, our knowledge of these effects is not entirely hypothetical.
Nuclear weapons, with roughly one seventieth of the power of the 1 megaton
bomb just described, were twice used by the United States in August 1945.
One atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Around 80,000 people died
immediately; approximately 200,000 died eventually. Later, a similar size
bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On Nov. 7, 1995, the mayor of Nagasaki
recalled his memory of the attack in testimony to the International Court of
Justice:

    Nagasaki became a city of death where not even the sound of insects
could be heard. After a while, countless men, women and children began to
gather for a drink of water at the banks of nearby Urakami River, their hair
and clothing scorched and their burnt skin hanging off in sheets like rags.
Begging for help they died one after another in the water or in heaps on the
banks.Š Four months after the atomic bombing, 74,000 people were dead, and
75,000 had suffered injuries, that is, two-thirds of the city population had
fallen victim to this calamity that came upon Nagasaki like a preview of the
Apocalypse.

    Why did so many civilians have to die? Because the civilians, who made
up nearly 100 percent of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were
unfortunately "co-located" with Japanese military and industrial targets.
Their annihilation, though not the objective of those dropping the bombs,
was an inevitable result of the choice of those targets. It is worth noting
that during the Cold War, the United States reportedly had dozens of nuclear
warheads targeted on Moscow alone, because it contained so many military
targets and so much "industrial capacity."

    Presumably, the Soviets similarly targeted many US cities. The statement
that our nuclear weapons do not target populations per se was and remains
totally misleading in the sense that the so-called collateral damage of
large nuclear strikes would include tens of millions of innocent civilian
dead.

    This in a nutshell is what nuclear weapons do: They indiscriminately
blast, burn, and irradiate with a speed and finality that are almost
incomprehensible. This is exactly what countries like the United States and
Russia, with nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, continue to threaten
every minute of every day in this new 21st century.

    No Way to Win

    I have worked on issues relating to US and NATO nuclear strategy and war
plans for more than 40 years. During that time, I have never seen a piece of
paper that outlined a plan for the United States or NATO to initiate the use
of nuclear weapons with any benefit for the United States or NATO. I have
made this statement in front of audiences, including NATO defense ministers
and senior military leaders, many times. No one has ever refuted it. To
launch weapons against a nuclear-equipped opponent would be suicidal. To do
so against a nonnuclear enemy would be militarily unnecessary, morally
repugnant, and politically indefensible.

    I reached these conclusions very soon after becoming secretary of
defense. Although I believe Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson
shared my view, it was impossible for any of us to make such statements
publicly because they were totally contrary to established NATO policy.
After leaving the Defense Department, I became president of the World Bank.
During my 13-year tenure, from 1968 to 1981, I was prohibited, as an
employee of an international institution, from commenting publicly on issues
of US national security. After my retirement from the bank, I began to
reflect on how I, with seven years' experience as secretary of defense,
might contribute to an understanding of the issues with which I began my
public service career.

    At that time, much was being said and written regarding how the United
States could, and why it should, be able to fight and win a nuclear war with
the Soviets. This view implied, of course, that nuclear weapons did have
military utility; that they could be used in battle with ultimate gain to
whoever had the largest force or used them with the greatest acumen. Having
studied these views, I decided to go public with some information that I
knew would be controversial, but that I felt was needed to inject reality
into these increasingly unreal discussions about the military utility of
nuclear weapons. In articles and speeches, I criticized the fundamentally
flawed assumption that nuclear weapons could be used in some limited way.
There is no way to effectively contain a nuclear strike - to keep it from
inflicting enormous destruction on civilian life and property, and there is
no guarantee against unlimited escalation once the first nuclear strike
occurs. We cannot avoid the serious and unacceptable risk of nuclear war
until we recognize these facts and base our military plans and policies upon
this recognition. I hold these views even more strongly today than I did
when I first spoke out against the nuclear dangers our policies were
creating. I know from direct experience that US nuclear policy today creates
unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own.

    What Castro Taught Us

    Among the costs of maintaining nuclear weapons is the risk - to me an
unacceptable risk - of use of the weapons either by accident or as a result
of misjudgment or miscalculation in times of crisis. The Cuban Missile
Crisis demonstrated that the United States and the Soviet Union - and indeed
the rest of the world - came within a hair's breadth of nuclear disaster in
October 1962.

    Indeed, according to former Soviet military leaders, at the height of
the crisis, Soviet forces in Cuba possessed 162 nuclear warheads, including
at least 90 tactical warheads. At about the same time, Cuban President Fidel
Castro asked the Soviet ambassador to Cuba to send a cable to Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev stating that Castro urged him to counter a US attack with
a nuclear response. Clearly, there was a high risk that in the face of a US
attack, which many in the US government were prepared to recommend to
President Kennedy, the Soviet forces in Cuba would have decided to use their
nuclear weapons rather than lose them. Only a few years ago did we learn
that the four Soviet submarines trailing the US Naval vessels near Cuba each
carried torpedoes with nuclear warheads. Each of the sub commanders had the
authority to launch his torpedoes. The situation was even more frightening
because, as the lead commander recounted to me, the subs were out of
communication with their Soviet bases, and they continued their patrols for
four days after Khrushchev announced the withdrawal of the missiles from
Cuba.

    The lesson, if it had not been clear before, was made so at a conference
on the crisis held in Havana in 1992, when we first began to learn from
former Soviet officials about their preparations for nuclear war in the
event of a US invasion. Near the end of that meeting, I asked Castro whether
he would have recommended that Khrushchev use the weapons in the face of a
US invasion, and if so, how he thought the United States would respond. "We
started from the assumption that if there was an invasion of Cuba, nuclear
war would erupt," Castro replied. "We were certain of thatŠ. [W]e would be
forced to pay the price that we would disappear." He continued, "Would I
have been ready to use nuclear weapons? Yes, I would have agreed to the use
of nuclear weapons." And he added, "If Mr. McNamara or Mr. Kennedy had been
in our place, and had their country been invaded, or their country was going
to be occupied Š I believe they would have used tactical nuclear weapons."

    I hope that President Kennedy and I would not have behaved as Castro
suggested we would have. His decision would have destroyed his country. Had
we responded in a similar way the damage to the United States would have
been unthinkable. But human beings are fallible. In conventional war,
mistakes cost lives, sometimes thousands of lives. However, if mistakes were
to affect decisions relating to the use of nuclear forces, there would be no
learning curve. They would result in the destruction of nations. The
indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons carries a
very high risk of nuclear catastrophe. There is no way to reduce the risk to
acceptable levels, other than to first eliminate the hair-trigger alert
policy and later to eliminate or nearly eliminate nuclear weapons. The
United States should move immediately to institute these actions, in
cooperation with Russia. That is the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    A Dangerous Obsession

    On Nov. 13, 2001, President George W. Bush announced that he had told
Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States would reduce
"operationally deployed nuclear warheads" from approximately 5,300 to a
level between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next decade. This scaling back would
approach the 1,500 to 2,200 range that Putin had proposed for Russia.
However, the Bush administration's Nuclear Posture Review, mandated by the
US Congress and issued in January 2002, presents quite a different story. It
assumes that strategic offensive nuclear weapons in much larger numbers than
1,700 to 2,200 will be part of US military forces for the next several
decades. Although the number of deployed warheads will be reduced to 3,800
in 2007 and to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012, the warheads and many of the
launch vehicles taken off deployment will be maintained in a "responsive"
reserve from which they could be moved back to the operationally deployed
force. The Nuclear Posture Review received little attention from the media.
But its emphasis on strategic offensive nuclear weapons deserves vigorous
public scrutiny. Although any proposed reduction is welcome, it is doubtful
that survivors - if there were any - of an exchange of 3,200 warheads (the
US and Russian numbers projected for 2012), with a destructive power
approximately 65,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, could detect a
difference between the effects of such an exchange and one that would result
from the launch of the current US and Russian forces totaling about 12,000
warheads.

    In addition to projecting the deployment of large numbers of strategic
nuclear weapons far into the future, the Bush administration is planning an
extensive and expensive series of programs to sustain and modernize the
existing nuclear force and to begin studies for new launch vehicles, as well
as new warheads for all of the launch platforms. Some members of the
administration have called for new nuclear weapons that could be used as
bunker busters against underground shelters (such as the shelters Saddam
Hussein used in Baghdad). New production facilities for fissile materials
would need to be built to support the expanded force. The plans provide for
integrating a national ballistic missile defense into the new triad of
offensive weapons to enhance the nation's ability to use its "power
projection forces" by improving our ability to counterattack an enemy. The
Bush administration also announced that it has no intention to ask congress
to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and, though no decision
to test has been made, the administration has ordered the national
laboratories to begin research on new nuclear weapons designs and to prepare
the underground test sites in Nevada for nuclear tests if necessary in the
future. Clearly, the Bush administration assumes that nuclear weapons will
be part of US military forces for at least the next several decades.

    Good faith participation in international negotiation on nuclear
disarmament - including participation in the CTBT - is a legal and political
obligation of all parties to the NPT that entered into force in 1970 and was
extended indefinitely in 1995. The Bush administration's nuclear program,
alongside its refusal to ratify the CTBT, will be viewed, with reason, by
many nations as equivalent to a US break from the treaty. It says to the
nonnuclear weapons nations, "We, with the strongest conventional military
force in the world, require nuclear weapons in perpetuity, but you, facing
potentially well-armed opponents, are never to be allowed even one nuclear
weapon."

    If the United States continues its current nuclear stance, over time,
substantial proliferation of nuclear weapons will almost surely follow.
Some, or all, of such nations as Egypt, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and
Taiwan will very likely initiate nuclear weapons programs, increasing both
the risk of use of the weapons and the diversion of weapons and fissile
materials into the hands of rogue states or terrorists. Diplomats and
intelligence agencies believe Osama bin Laden has made several attempts to
acquire nuclear weapons or fissile materials. It has been widely reported
that Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, former director of Pakistan's nuclear
reactor complex, met with bin Laden several times. Were al Qaeda to acquire
fissile materials, especially enriched uranium, its ability to produce
nuclear weapons would be great. The knowledge of how to construct a simple
gun-type nuclear device, like the one we dropped on Hiroshima, is now
widespread. Experts have little doubt that terrorists could construct such a
primitive device if they acquired the requisite enriched uranium material.
Indeed, just last summer, at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences,
former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said, "I have never been more
fearful of a nuclear detonation than now.Š There is a greater than 50
percent probability of a nuclear strike on US targets within a decade." I
share his fears.

    A Moment of Decision

    We are at a critical moment in human history - perhaps not as dramatic
as that of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but a moment no less crucial. Neither
the Bush administration, the congress, the American people, nor the people
of other nations have debated the merits of alternative, long-range nuclear
weapons policies for their countries or the world. They have not examined
the military utility of the weapons; the risk of inadvertent or accidental
use; the moral and legal considerations relating to the use or threat of use
of the weapons; or the impact of current policies on proliferation. Such
debates are long overdue. If they are held, I believe they will conclude, as
have I and an increasing number of senior military leaders, politicians, and
civilian security experts: We must move promptly toward the elimination - or
near elimination - of all nuclear weapons. For many, there is a strong
temptation to cling to the strategies of the past 40 years. But to do so
would be a serious mistake leading to unacceptable risks for all nations.

 


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