To understand how we got to where we are today, with a POTUS who's made it clear he would like to dismantle the US nuclear arsenal while madmen in Pyongyang and Teheran - or are they mad??? - work to acquire thermonuclear weapons and threaten by their actions to pass tactical nukes to terror groups, it helps to know how close we came - or how close some thought we came - to serious nuclear annihilation during the Cold War.
David Hoffman's 2009 book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy recounts in detail threats the public remained unaware of at the time, and the slow dance towards strategic arms control agreements. Hoffman, a WaPo investigative reporter whose book greeted the newly installed Adminstration, favors disarmament. But do the remedies advanced by either the Left or the Right during and just after the Cold War address the threats we face today?
Hoffman's account leaves out some important history. In the 1950s the Soviet army vastly outnumbered that of the US. The Eisenhower administration's response was to announce massive nuclear retaliation for any Soviet hostilities anywhere, since the US couldn't respond with conventional forces to as many fronts as the Soviets might attack simultaneously.
Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles thought the idea of nuclear strike would be too horrible to contemplate and assumed that their announced policy would therefore deter Soviet aggression.
However Herman Kahn, who had contributed to US fusion weapons design and who was a key early analyst at Rand, argued that an "all or nothing" approach actually made nuclear attacks more likely, not less. Applying game theory and scenario planning, Kahn suggested one could both contemplate survival of nuclear war and reduce the likelihood of things getting to that point by identifying and countering enemy geopolitical moves in convincing ways.
The Left was horrified by the publication of Kahn's Thinking About the Unthinkable and On Thermonuclear War. The Right embraced the idea of strategic planning but paid less attention than they might have to Kahn's warnings about sober evaluation of the escalation path. Instead, both the US and the Soviets embarked on a major strategic arms race -- bigger and more numerous weapons, ICBM delivery systems, communications and rapid improvements in monitoring technologies (especially by the US).
By 1980 there were enough strategic nuclear weapons in the major powers' stockpiles to wipe out every large city on Earth, many times over.
But nuclear strike wasn't the only mass destructive threat that had emerged during the arms race. In 1979 a Soviet bioweapons lab accident just east of the Ural mountains released weaponized anthrax, killing over 100 people and numerous livestock. Later, Soviet scientist Kenneth Alibek would defect, but not before leading bioweapons programs that developed highly virulent strains of multiple pathogens, in direct violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention the Soviets had signed.
Hoffman's account starts with the anthrax leak at Sverdlovsk and with tensions in the early 1980s as the Soviets grew increasingly concerned about the US land and sea-based ICBM capability. He documents the hesitant, on-again/off-again attempts by leaders on both sides to find a way out of escalating arms development, with Thatcher and Reagan playing key roles in the West and Gorbachev doing the same in the East. Gorbachev was deeply concerned about what he saw as the corruption, bureaucratic lethargy and stupidity of the Soviet apparatus, as evidenced by the failure to act promptly and appropriately in response to the accident at Chernobyl -- a failure that suggested the country could not respond to a military attack effectively, either.
One system was allegedly in place for such an event, however. Code named Dead Hand it was intended to automatically, or semi-automatically, launch the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal at once towards the US if a series of events suggested that the Soviet leadership had been killed, according to Valery Yarynich, a Soviet expert who joined discussions in 1991 between US and Soviet civilians on nuclear command and control issues. His confidant, Bruce Blair, was a key member of the Brookings Institute, a leading liberal think tank on strategic matters.
Thus began an intense, high stakes dance at multiple levels: negotiations of arms limitation agreements and subsequent cat and mouse games in which the Soviets in particular made many attempts to avoid having their significant violations of those agreements be provably documented.
Earlier attempts at strategic arms limitations -- the SALT I and SALT II treaties -- had collapsed when the US withdrew due to blatant Soviet cheating and aggressive moves in Afghanistan and Cuba. A new 1991 SMART treaty did institute limits on nuclear stockpiles and a formal inspection regime.
However, treaties are negotiated between states and in 1991 the Soviet Union was unraveling. Sen. Sam Nunn, who had just visited Moscow, believed social chaos was imminent in the USSR. He consulted both Blair and also physicist Ashton Carter of Harvard, who stressed that nuclear safeguards were reliable only when there was social stability in a given country. Nunn approached the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Les Aspin, to jointly introduce a bill that would offer massive economic aid to Russia to forestall chaos they feared would lead to dispersal of the thousands of tactical nukes the Soviets had manufactured and stored all over the USSR. But Aspin's history of gleeful and publicity-seeking attacks on the Pentagon caused significant resistance to the bill, both by Pres. George H.W. Bush and by much of the public.
Shortly afterward, with the help of Ash Carter, Nunn and Richard Lugar got Congress to permit $500 million to help Russians control their nuclear stockpile and convert weapons industrial capability to civilian uses. At the Pentagon, Carter found little sympathy from SecDef Dick Cheney, who told Carter he wanted the Soviets to be "in freefall". Carter thought that Cheney was naive about the dangers of Soviet implosion. He was convinced that Nunn and Lugar were right: the best policy for the US was to seek cooperative ways to handle the issue of Soviet weapons capabilities in the former soviet states and their satellites.
A SMART II treaty was signed with post-USSR Russia in 1993 under Bill Clinton. Skeptics, however, have deep concerns about the treaty's effectiveness for controlling tactical nuclear weapons in particular.
Biological weapons were an even more difficult matter. In 1994 Andrew Weber led an inspection team that visited Kazakhstan and came away with clear evidence of the extent of the Biopreparat program -- massive tanks for generating not only anthrax but virulent weaponized forms of plague, smallpox and other pathogens. Weber also found stacks of processed uranium in Kazakhstan standing unguarded in warehouses and idle facilities. The Russians steadfastly refused to allow US inspectors access to facilities handling highly enriched uranium or plutonium. But by 1994 not only was this material available across Russia -- it had begun to find its way to other countries such as Germany.
A covert operation, Project Sapphire, was organized to purchase the Kazakh fissile materials from that government and airlift them to Oak Ridge's Y-2 facility. Andrew Weber stood on the tarmac in the freezing weather until the last C5 cleared the ice and snow with the final load.
In 2007 Weber was approached by Lev Sandakhchiev, head of the Vector bioweapons research facility, who told him that the Iranians were attempting to purchase Soviet expertise in advanced biological agents. Russian scientists were becoming desperate to support their families. Salaries hadn't been paid in months and someone was going to transfer lethal capabilities soon. Weber managed to overcome distrust about misuse of US aid by Russians with long involvement in the secret Soviet programs and with several million dollars diverted the Vector facilities to civilian uses.
In 2009, a few months after Hoffman's book hit the stands, Dr. Ashton Carter was nominated and approved as Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics in the Obama administration. (He has since been promoted to Deputy SecDef.) Reporting to him was Andrew Weber as Assistant SecDef for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense. A congressional staffer who had also supported Nunn-Lugar activities, Kenneth Myers III, reports to Weber as head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, responsible for the US' counter Weapons of Mass Destruction capabilities. Myers is the first non-scientist, non-PhD to head DTRA or its predecessor agencies. The dominant policy promulgated by all three men, and by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, is the policy initiated by Nunn and Lugar, i.e. Cooperative Threat Reduction.
Herman Kahn urged US officials to examine possible geopolitical and military strategies, identify escalation paths and adopt stances that were designed to prevent escalation to strategic use of WMDs. Sometimes, he argued, those policies should intentionally escalate quickly so as to convince the other side that it was a losing policy to escalate fully. Scenario-based planning and game theory worked, more or less, during the Cold War because the players on both sides were nation states that were, more or less, rational actors.
Cooperative Threat Reduction is arguably a more tactical response, an approach that attempts to deal with the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons that threatened as a result of the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the USSR. Weber treated ex-Soviet scientists with respect and support and many of them responded by exposing and dismantling bioweapons and nuclear capabilities.
But one might ask whether either CTR or the version of Kahn's approach that dominates strategic military planning in the US today is adequate to deal with states that may not be rational actors -- or that wish to be seen as possibly non-rational actors in order to gain negotiating power. Pakistan, Iran and North Korea do not seem to be responding in the desired manner to the pre-emptive humility on which President Obama has based his international efforts. Is that because Obama and Clinton do not understand the escalation curve or the incentives for those players? Or because those states are not, in fact, rational actors? Or because those states already have capabilities not publicly acknowledged which US officials fear will also disperse if a CTR approach is not adopted?
Nor are nation states the only actors in this drama. Hoffman notes that Weber himself worries about the unknown threat -- the weapons and materials that were not cooperatively identified and neutralized in the ex-Soviet states.
The Dead Hand has little to say about Pakistan, or China, or religiously zealous terror networks and their own WMD aspirations. But neither Cold War strategies nor the post-Cold-War CTR tactics seem adequate to address threats we face today. Nor does Hoffman's book contemplate future threats: the imminent availability of bio-engineering capabilities that fit in a garage, for instance. As a record of the 80s and 90s, however, it does give insight into how we got where we are today.