TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071690/0716108.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6KB | 129 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 19

America's Doomsday Machine


The spirit of Dr. Strangelove still survives in the 12,000 U.S.
nukes aimed at the Soviet Union

By BRUCE VAN VOORST/WASHINGTON


    Just one of the 192 nuclear warheads aboard the U.S. missile
submarine Tennessee, currently at sea, would be enough to
flatten the Kremlin and every building within half a mile if
detonated 6,000 ft. over Moscow. Up to two miles from ground
zero, all but the toughest structures would be destroyed, and
even as far as four miles away, wood and brick buildings would
collapse and burst into flames. But that devastation is not
sufficient for the Pentagon. U.S. nuclear-attack plans call for
raining 120 warheads on Moscow alone -- a level of targeting,
says veteran arms expert Peter Zimmerman, that "isn't
strategy, it's pathology."

    Massive retaliation has always seemed unreal, if not
immoral. Now, as the cold war wanes and George Bush joins other
NATO leaders in trying to reassure the Soviet Union of the
U.S.'s peaceful intentions, critics point out that it is also
profoundly dangerous. Veteran arms negotiator Paul Nitze says
that despite the political changes sweeping Europe, the
superpowers remain locked in an unstable, apocalyptic embrace.
Georgia's Democratic Senator Sam Nunn has proposed a review of
targeting doctrine, and Wisconsin Democrat Les Aspin, chairman
of the House Armed Services Committee, will probe the issue
at hearings. The most determined critic is Delaware's
Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, who urges a presidential
review of nuclear plans to determine whether deterrence is now
possible "at a greatly reduced level."

    If no more than a third of the current U.S. arsenal of
12,000 warheads made it through the Soviet defenses, the
nuclear punch would pulverize every Soviet city with a
population of more than 25,000. Yet to satisfy Pentagon
requirements for obliterating the Soviets' military and
industrial capabilities, U.S. negotiators in the Strategic Arms
Reduction Talks have rejected Soviet proposals for drastic cuts
in each side's arsenal of warheads.

     Air Force officers are already complaining that even the
agreed upon START level of 10,000 warheads would leave the U.S.
short, with "more targets than weapons available to strike
them." General John Chain, commander of the Strategic Air
Command, insists that he must have 75 B-2 Stealth bombers, each
carrying 16 weapons, to offset the START limit on
missile-delivered nukes. "Forty-nine hundred missile-carried
warheads," says Chain, "are not enough to destroy the Soviet
Union."

    The more than 15,000 sites targeted in the Soviet Union are
outlined in what Arkansas Democratic Senator Dale Bumpers last
week called the "most closely guarded secret in America" -- the
Single Integrated Operational Plan. The so-called SIOP, or
"doomsday book," designates facilities in the Soviet Union that
are to be incinerated and the kinds of U.S. missiles and planes
that will carry out each attack. It divides Soviet targets into
four categories: nuclear forces; other military targets;
105,000 ranking members of the Soviet military, political and
managerial elite; and war-supporting industries such as
factories and depots.

    An attack against even a fraction of these targets "would
cause the Soviet Union to cease functioning as a society," says
Stanford professor Scott Sagan, a former adviser to the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. Yet arms expert Janne Nolan of the Brookings
Institution contends that the "American political leadership
is not aware of the enormous destruction envisioned in the
military plans." The point is illustrated by official estimates
of what would happen to the U.S. if the Soviets launched a
surprise attack of 3,000 warheads, a mere quarter of their
inventory. The Federal Emergency Management Agency says that
between 70 million and 130 million Americans might be killed.
After hearing figures like this, a reflective President John
Kennedy muttered, "And we call ourselves the human race."

    Nuclear targeting is admittedly a complicated business.
Planners must calculate the reliability and accuracy of the
missiles and nuclear warheads, measure them against Soviet
defenses and make a judgment on what it actually takes to deter
the Kremlin from launching a first strike. Still, the notion
of raining down nuclear weapons on the U.S.S.R. -- "convincing
every last Soviet official that he's the target," as one Air
Force official put it -- is sufficiently outrageous to spur
experts to speak out. In the quarterly journal International
Security, national security scholars Desmond Ball and Robert
Toth call the current version of SIOP "wasteful and dangerous"
as well as "destabilizing to the nuclear balance."

    Despite declarations that the U.S. would retaliate only
after a Soviet attack, the Pentagon is building a force of
fast, accurate missiles and aircraft that the Soviets may
correctly view as a first-strike threat. As Bruce Blair, a
scholar at the Brookings Institution, points out, the truly
astronomical number of SIOP targets forces the U.S. into a
situation in which, contrary to declared doctrine, launching
first or on warning of a Soviet attack "becomes almost a
necessity to do the job."

    Reshaping the SIOP and reducing warheads also offer a real
chance for money savings: with fewer targets, fewer aircraft
and submarines are needed to launch warheads at them. Defense
Secretary Dick Cheney told Congress that he has undertaken a
"new look" at the SIOP, but given his cautious record, critics
doubt how far-reaching this look will be. Nitze, hardly an
advocate of unilateral disarmament, says the U.S. could make
do with 3,000 or so warheads, while former Defense Secretary
Harold Brown insists that a stable deterrence is achievable
under certain circumstances with no more than 1,000 warheads.

    But such levels can be reached only by rethinking SIOP. "The
SIOP drives everything -- force levels, budgets and arms
control," says Paul Warnke, former director of the Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency. "Unless the SIOP changes, nothing else
changes." Including the doomsday threat.