The Cold War (68 page)

So far, I have said little about accuracy, but it was a key element in the strategic equation. ICBM accuracy was commonly (and mistakenly) expressed as circular error probable—by definition the diameter of the smallest circle that can be drawn around half the impact points of a series of firings at the same target. The other component of accuracy was bias, the distance of the center of the circle from the target. The mistake lies in the common assumption that the center of the circle defining CEP was, in fact, the target. From the beginning of the missile race, there was a direct relationship between perceived accuracy and warhead size: The larger the CEP, the larger the warhead. Also from the beginning, American ICBMs had significantly smaller CEPs than their Soviet opposites. The Soviets compensated by installing larger warheads,
and—frighteningly—the disparity in warhead size and yield increased as the Cold War dragged on.

Another pivotal factor was intelligence or, perhaps more to the point, the lack thereof, particularly early on. Both the Soviets and Americans focused on engineering development of the ICBM, but the interplay between missile range and accuracy, warhead size, and intelligence had an impact on strategic decisions that was at least as great as the outcome of the race to be first on the pad. These factors came together in crisis or near-crisis proportions on at least two occasions. The first was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; the ensuing confrontation was rendered more dangerous by the characteristics of the missiles in question: kerosene and red fuming nitric acid-fueled R-4 IRBMs (NATO designation SS-4 Sandal) with a range of only 1,200 miles, indifferent accuracy, and an extended and vulnerable launch sequence. Lacking the range and accuracy to pose a credible threat to the American ICBM or bomber force, the missiles made sense only as vehicles for a preemptive strike on American cities. Fortunately, heads cooler than Khrushchev's prevailed.

The second came in the 1980s, most specifically in the war scare of 1983, as U.S. intelligence, tracking Soviet missile tests by electronic monitoring and satellite imagery, noted a steady shrinkage of CEPs from miles to hundreds of meters. Soviet launch trajectories, tracked by American radar and radiomonitored telemetry, became steadier, and the dispersion of impact points of dummy warheads in the Soviet Pacific test range, tracked through satellite photographs, became smaller. In American eyes, the stability of mutual nuclear deterrence at that point depended in large measure on the ability of the silobased ICBM force to ride out, and therefore deter, a Soviet first strike. As CEPs shrank, the number of warheads needed to target a Minuteman or Titan silo with a high expectation of destroying it steadily diminished, placing a preemptive Soviet first strike within the realm of possibility, or so it seemed. The appearance of mobile, solid-fueled Soviet ICBMs, deployed operationally in 1985–87 but detected earlier, heightened concern, accelerated development of the MX—the last American ICBM—and led to serious discussion of elaborate and expensive basing modes. One option actually endorsed by the Carter administration involved a network of mobile launchers and multiple shelters covering most of Utah and Nevada. Another option seriously considered, at least by newspaper columnists, political analysts, and their sources in the Pentagon, was to concentrate the bulk of the silo-based ICBM force in a single, tightly packed missile field to exploit the fact that multiple nuclear warheads cannot be used simultaneously
against targets close to one another, since the first warhead to detonate will trigger subcritical reactions in the others, causing them to fizzle. The doomsday finality of this scheme, termed “dense pack” with unintended appropriateness, speaks for itself and is all the more intimidating for having been based on a false premise: that CEP and accuracy were one and the same.

But the impact of ICBM technology went far beyond dry strategic considerations to embrace the human dimension of war at its most elemental level. The interaction took place at the critical intersection between nuclear warhead and command and control. For the ICBM deterrent to be credible, the missiles had to be launched on extremely short notice. They also had to be launched by human decision, for no machine could be trusted to unleash Armageddon. But neither could a single human, and from that awareness arose an elaborate series of safeguards and procedures. In American practice, a missile crew could initiate the launch sequence only after receiving a coded launch order from the commander in chief or his designated representative. After the crew authenticated the message with headquarters and a computerized database, the code would be loaded into the launch console. Then, and only then, could the launch crew commander and his (or, later, her) deputy insert two launch keys into firing locks, physically separated so that a single individual could not turn both keys. Launch was accomplished by turning the two keys at the same time, typically within two seconds, a short enough interval so that one person could not reach the second key after turning the first, and long enough to accommodate normal reflexes. If any step in the procedure was missed or botched, the missile would not fire. Soviet practice was probably similar—we can still only speculate—with the second key belonging to a member of the KGB assigned to ensure political control. In American practice, and surely Soviet practice as well, crews were carefully screened for psychological stability and repeatedly drilled to ensure that they would execute a launch order if one ever came. Mercifully, none did.

A final point emphasizes the awesome threat posed by ICBMs, as well as their central place in the deterrent balance of terror at the strategic heart of the Cold War: Both the Soviet Union and the United States were so terrified of the threat of an ICBM attack and, paradoxically, so determined to preserve the stabilizing deterrent power of the threat that—at least so far as the public record shows—no missile was ever launched from an operational ICBM silo, nor was an ICBM ever fired with a live nuclear or thermonuclear warhead aboard.

JOHN PRADOS

For four decades and more, we lived in perpetual fear of war. The nuclear doomsday clock appeared to be forever stuck at one minute to midnight, the witching hour for the world. Several times the long hand moved forward by several alarming seconds. To put the feeling another way, it was like walking around with collective aneurysms in our brains that could burst all at once and kill without warning. We might forget about the danger as we went about our daily routines; we knew with certainty that it would never go away. The confrontation between East and West had taken on the aura of permanence.

Those of us who lived through the Cold War—in this age of terrorism, it already feels like ancient history—can number the moments when the clock inched visibly ahead toward the sinister joining of its hands. Most (but not all) of those moments happened during the 1950s and the 1960s, the period of maximum peril. Did we come closest to nuclear catastrophe with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962—three or four seconds short of it, let us say? There were other dicey confrontations, too many of them and too close for comfort: the Berlin Blockade, when a new land war in Europe seemed imminent just when another had been concluded; the GDR's Soviet-approved erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, when, for a few tense hours, American and Soviet tanks faced off muzzle-to-muzzle at Checkpoint Charlie; the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev threatened to nuke Paris and London if the British and French troops occupying the Suez Canal didn't withdraw; the simultaneous Soviet invasion of Hungary, when Russian tanks rolled over the democracy of a week; the Soviet-backed Chinese intervention in Korea during the fall of 1950 that David Holloway in his preeminent study,
Stalin and the Bomb, calls “the most dangerous point in postwar international relations.”

Most historians will argue now, however, that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the turning point of the Cold War, even if two thirds of the East-West standoff still stretched ahead of us. That seems a bit like putting the dramatic climax of a three-act play at the end of the first. In the lengthening view of history, it may be accurate; but it is not the way so many on both sides felt at the time. And as John Prados tells us in the essay that follows, one of the most dangerous near-misses took place in 1983, a mere six or seven years before the Soviet Union and its empire abruptly began to crumble. If we think of a Cold War thermometer that goes from room temperature (the breach of the Wall in 1989) all the way up to boiling, the war scare that fall was only slightly less fraught with explosive potential than the Cuban crisis. That human frailty was involved, the frailty of the sclerotic paranoids who ruled the Kremlin, made the 1983 episode, if anything, more full of risk.
Dr. Strangelove
had come to life. But the scariest part was that even as the Soviet leadership elevated their alerts, their American counterparts seemed not to have a clue what was happening.

JOHN PRADOS is a Washington-based author and a senior fellow at the National Security Archive. He is the author of fourteen books and a contributor to many others. His most recent works include
Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War; Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby;
and
Inside the Pentagon Papers
(edited with Margaret Pratt-Porter). Prados lectures widely on intelligence, national security, military history, and combat simulation design.

P
“ERHAPS NEVER BEFORE,”
intoned the Russian official, “has the at mosphere in the world been as tense as it is now.” The speaker, Grigory Romanov, a leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) apparatus in Leningrad and a member of the Soviet Politburo, knew the inner fears of the Kremlin. “Comrades,” Romanov thundered, “the international situation at present is white hot, thoroughly white hot.” This speech marked the anniver sary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Just seven months earlier, Georgi Arbatov, Russia's leading Americanist, had told a reporter that “the situation is worse now than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Nothing that happened in the interval between Arbatov's April 1983 interview and Romanov's November 7 speech had done anything to reassure people on the state of Russian-American relations. Negotiations on controlling nuclear weapons were going nowhere, with American conservatives pressing the Reagan administration to abrogate the arms agreements that already existed. Russians and Americans were both proceeding with new missile deployments, including a fresh generation of nuclear weapons in Europe that terrified local populations. Cold War covert actions initiated by one side or the other were under way in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. To end the summer with a bang, on the last day of August a Korean civilian airliner, flight KAL 007, blundered into Russian airspace, to be pitilessly shot down with 269 passengers on board. President Ronald Reagan himself declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and the “focus of evil in the modern world.”

These events took place in the open, apparent to everyone. But behind the scenes the Cold War was even hotter; in fact, practically boiling. One or both sides had miscalculated, and in a nuclear age, misunderstanding and misinterpretation
could lead to the unthinkable. There was a quiet crisis in the early 1980s, the ramifications of which we do not yet understand. It is possible that the Cold War might have ended sooner but for the prevailing atmosphere of confrontation. It is also possible that the critical international situation steeled subsequent Soviet leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev in their determination to end the superpower struggle. On the other hand, it is equally possible that the end of history could have come right then, in nuclear annihilation. In the spring of 1948, when the government of Czechoslovakia fell to a Russianbacked factional coup, beginning an escalation of tension that culminated with the Berlin Blockade, people spoke of a “war scare of 1948.” Today we can begin to consider the untold story of the war scare of 1983.

Reagan administration officials in 1983 were intensely focused upon an ideological competition with the Soviet Union over arms control and the so-called Euromissiles, intermediate-range missiles that both sides were deploying in Europe then. The Americans downplayed the military threat to the Russians posed by the quick-reacting Pershing II missiles that formed part of their own deployment program, and spoke of Soviet “disinformation” attempts to affect the opinions of Western Europeans living with Euromissiles in their midst. (There are, in fact, documents, including annual KGB reports from this period, revealing Russian claims to have influenced peace movements in Western Europe.) Some former U.S. officials still argue that the Soviets conjured an apocalyptic vision of the American threat, then somehow succumbed to it themselves, believing that “the Americans were coming.” This much is beyond dispute: The Soviets were fearful in 1983, and Reaganauts were so wedded to their own propaganda messages that they were oblivious to the signs of discomfiture in Moscow. Moreover, unlike 1948, in 1983 fingers on both sides of the Cold War divide rested upon nuclear hair triggers.

The strategic situation in 1983 was not what appeared on the surface, at least from the Soviet point of view. Americans were used to the rhetoric of the “window of vulnerability,” a slogan current in the 1980 election, which denoted a time frame in which the United States was supposedly in special danger of being disarmed by a nuclear missile attack. But readers might be surprised to learn that during the final months of the Carter administration, it was the Russians who came to the Americans with a detailed briefing from their own secret data, showing a substantial and growing U.S. threat to Soviet nuclear forces. Beyond the exaggerations and the real meaning of the data (that both sides
were vulnerable, depending on who went first), the point is that in 1981, going into the Reagan administration, Moscow had already demonstrated concern over U.S. military intentions.

American weapons programs lent some weight to these concerns. On its Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the United States was installing a new guidance system called the NS-20, as well as higher-yield warheads. The new instrumentation greatly reduced the time necessary to change an ICBM's target; held more targets in constant memory; and substantially improved accuracy. In combination with the increased power of the nuclear weapons it carried, each Minuteman III warhead would have excellent prospects against even the most deeply dug-in Russian missile silos. The Peacekeeper, a bigger ICBM carrying ten warheads (there were three in the Minuteman), stood on the verge of deployment. In submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), the Americans were developing an improved Trident missile warhead called the D-5 that made sea-based missiles as deadly as ICBMs against hardened targets. As for Russian SLBMs, American designers were seeking new ways to target missile submarines. Meanwhile, American war planners were “gaming out” flexible response scenarios that allowed for the limited use of nuclear weapons, potentially lowering the nuclear threshold.