Review Article Counting the Costs of the Nuclear Age
Review article Counting the costs of the nuclear age
THEO FARRELL
Atomic audit: the costs and consequences of US nuclear weapons since . Edited by Stephen I. Schwartz. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, . pp. Index. .
America’s NBC radio was suitably dramatic in its report of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. ‘Anglo-Saxon science has developed a new explosive , times as destructive as any known before’, it announced. The broadcaster went on to warn that ‘For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein! We must assume that with the passage of only a little time, an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us.’ As things turned out, the United States had indeed created a nuclear monster, which consumed huge amounts of public resources and quickly grew to threaten the very existence of humanity. Throughout the Cold War, the true costs and dangers of the nuclear age were hidden behind a veil of secrecy. However, recent years have seen far greater access to archival and interview material on this highly sensitive area of national security. This, in turn, has enabled scholars to construct a far more accurate and terrifying picture of the dangers faced in the nuclear age. Now with Atomic audit we also have a better idea of how much it cost: $. trillion for the American taxpayer alone.
Cited in Paul Boyer, By the bomb’s early light: American thought and culture at the dawn of the atomic age (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, , nd edn, p.. The key works here are Bruce Blair, The logic of accidental nuclear war (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, ); Scott D. Sagan, The limits of safety: organizations, accidents, and nuclear weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ); and Richard Rhodes, Dark sun: the making of the hydrogen bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, ). In an appendix it is noted that the costs for the Soviet Union are impossible to calculate with any accuracy. Partial costs are provided for the British, French, Chinese and South African nuclear programmes, while no mention is made of the Indian, Pakistani, North Korean, Iraqi, Israeli and Swedish nuclear programmes. Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic audit: the costs and consequences of US nuclear weapons since (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, ), pp. -. Information on the nuclear programmes of all these states may be obtained from The High Energy Weapons Archive at:
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So what does this new nuclear history tell us? We now know that there was nothing inevitable about the development of large offensive nuclear forces by the superpowers. Rather, superpower dependency on nuclear weapons was socially constructed by political actors. It has also been revealed that nuclear weapons intensified Cold War crises to a greater extent than previously appreciated, and created situations where accidental nuclear use could easily have occurred. This review article discusses each of these points in turn. It concludes by examining a number of imperatives for a new assessment of the nuclear age, namely, pressure for post-Cold War reductions in defence expenditure, the desire to apply Cold War lessons to new nuclear powers, and the gathering momentum for comprehensive nuclear disarmament.
Making the nuclear monster The nuclear age was so costly and dangerous during the Cold War because the United States and Soviet Union each developed very large offensive nuclear force structures. By , a mere two years into the Cold War, America already had committed itself to developing super-powerful hydrogen bombs and was building up a massive fleet of strategic bombers to deliver them. There was nothing inevitable about this. Rather, a powerful social network containing US air force officers, senior officials in the Truman administration, and unilateralist Republicans in Congress constructed the need for offensive nuclear forces and mobilized the resources necessary for their development. Air force and administration officials exaggerated the scale and immediacy of the Soviet military threat in order to generate domestic political support for an American military build-up.4 The favoured scheme of President Harry Truman for Universal Military Training, which would provide a cheap and ready source of military manpower, was defeated in Congress by a coalition led by unilateral Republican senators.5 Another alternative, for America to rely on strategic defence, was never seriously considered not because it was believed to be technologically unfeasible, but because the air force led a successful campaign to discredit personally anyone who advocated strategic defence.6 This left only one option, namely, to build up offensive nuclear forces. In his masterful study of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme, David Holloway shows how it was spurred on by US nuclear developments. America’s
David Alan Rosenberg, ‘American atomic strategy and the hydrogen bomb decision’, Journal of American History :, , pp. –; Matthew Evangelista, ‘Stalin’s postwar army reappraised’, International Security : , /, pp. –; Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the war scare of (New York: St Martin’s, ); Jack Snyder, Myths of empire: domestic politics and international ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), pp. –. Lynn Eden, ‘Capitalist conflict and the state: the making of United States military policy in ’, in Charles Bright and Susan Harding, eds, Statemaking and social movements (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, ), pp. –. David Goldfischer, The best defence: policy alternatives for US nuclear security from the s to s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). David Holloway, Stalin and the bomb (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, ).
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atomic bombing of Japan impressed upon Stalin the importance of nuclear weapons to world politics, and led the Soviets to pour ever more scarce resources into developing nuclear weapons. Interestingly, even at this early stage in the game Stalin realized that nuclear weapons were primarily useful as symbols of power rather than military instruments of power. This raises the all-important question: would American restraint have prevented a nuclear arms race? The United States had two opportunities to show nuclear restraint before superpower relations collapsed into Cold War. First was a proposal by Niels Bohr (the Danish physicist) for America to share some of its nuclear secrets with the Soviets prior to use of the atom bomb against Japan. Prompted by Winston Churchill’s suspicions of Stalin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected Bohr’s suggestion. In succeeding Roosevelt, Truman, supported by his new hard-line Secretary of State, James Byrnes, also decided to keep the Soviets in the dark. Truman merely hinted at America’s invention of a new powerful weapon in a private discussion with Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in late July , just a few weeks before the use of the bomb. In fact, the American nuclear programme was riddled with Soviet spies (to the extent that the first Soviet atomic bomb was of American design). Since Stalin knew all about the American bomb, he was also fully aware of the extent of America’s deception. The other opportunity for American restraint was the plan, presented before the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission in June by US spokesman Bernard Baruch, for all military applications of nuclear energy to be placed under the control of the UN while allowing individual states to develop peaceful uses. The Baruch Plan was rejected by the Soviet Union because it enabled the United States to retain its monopoly in nuclear weapons expertise (backed up by the threat of UN-sponsored military force). What if the Americans had trusted the Soviets with the wartime secret of the atomic bomb’s existence? What if the Baruch Plan had been more fair? Would the Soviets have reciprocated? Probably not, according to Holloway. In Soviet eyes, the very fact that America had the atomic bomb meant that the Soviet Union also had to have it, regardless of what America did. Holloway also claims that nothing could be done to prevent the Soviets developing hydrogen (or thermonuclear) weapons either. Realizing that the hydrogen bomb could be up to one thousand times more powerful than the
The symbolism of nuclear weapons is explored in Robert Jervis, The meaning of the nuclear revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), pp. –. The arms race is a useful metaphor only in the loose sense that some kind of competitive dynamic may exist in the armament patterns of rival states. How individual states actually arm is shaped by a combination of factors internal as well as external to the state. See Theo Farrell, Weapons without a cause: the politics of weapons acquisition in the United States (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ). For an effective critique of the ‘arms race’ concept, see Colin S. Gray, ‘Arms races and other pathetic fallacies: a case for deconstruction’, Review of International Studies : , , pp. –. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and survival: choices about the bomb in the first fifty years (New York: Random House, ), pp. –. Holloway, Stalin and the bomb, pp. –.
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atomic bomb, American policy-makers debated whether or not to develop it. A few even suggested that America should negotiate a thermonuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets. However, in Truman decided to push on with development of thermonuclear weapons, leading two years later to a small Pacific island being wiped off the map by the test detonation of a megaton hydrogen bomb. In , the Soviets followed suit with their own thermonuclear test. Holloway points out that, unlike the Americans, the Soviets never made any qualitative distinction between atomic and hydrogen weapons. America hesitated in developing the hydrogen bomb because some (in particular scientists) saw it as a weapon of genocide. Lacking this appreciation, Soviet scientists and policy-makers relentlessly pursued the development of more powerful nuclear weapons. By the mid-s, the Soviets had strategic bombers as well as hydrogen bombs. This gave added influence to the social network that supported the expansion of America’s offensive nuclear forces. It formed the basis of the air force’s infamous tales of evolving Soviet military superiority: the ‘bomber-gap’ and ‘missile-gap’ myths of the mid to late s. Thus the pattern was set for the remainder of the Cold War. The requirement for continued expansion and modernization of America’s offensive nuclear forces was socially constructed by a network of air force (and later navy) officers, administration officials, and their supporters in Congress. This can clearly be seen in the ‘window of vulnerability’ scenario that occupied US policy-makers in the late s and early s. This was the belief that the Soviets were on the verge of being able to destroy the entire US land based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force, and through such a knock-out blow would be able to intimidate America in crises and war. This scenario was pure fantasy, for it ignored the fact that most of America’s nuclear weapons were on bombers and in submarines and so largely invulnerable to pre-emptive attack. The various technical solutions that were dreamt up were equally fantastical; they included placing ICBMs in planes, on boats, or on specially built rail systems. The point is that both the threat and technical fixes were socially constructed. Indeed, the ‘window of vulnerability’ was closed not by some new basing system for American ICBMs, but by a group of ‘experts’ merely asserting that the threat was not so worrisome after all.
Controlling the nuclear monster In his famous formula, John Lewis Gaddis re-labelled the Cold War ‘the Long Peace’. In explaining why the superpowers avoided major war, Gaddis concluded ‘that the development of nuclear weapons has had, on balance, a
The definitive account is Richard Rhodes’s, Dark sun. Fred Kaplan, The wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, ), pp. –. David H. Dunn, The politics of threat: minuteman vulnerability and American national security policy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ).
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stabilizing effect on the postwar international system.’ This view was provocatively challenged by John Mueller who advanced the thesis that the absence of major war between the superpowers was not due to nuclear deterrence, but to a more general appreciation in the developed world that major war of any kind (nuclear or otherwise) was no longer a conceivable, let alone feasible, policy option. The new nuclear history supports a third view: that the lack of superpower war owed much to plain dumb luck. Far from stabilizing the superpower competition, nuclear deterrence made Cold War crises more likely and more intense. The critical case-study here is the Cuban missile crisis of October , which was triggered by the Soviet deployment of nuclear armed missiles and bombers in Cuba. Nuclear deterrence led US policy-makers to be completely surprised by this development. The Soviet Union had assured America that it would not deploy offensive weapons in Cuba and, given America’s overwhelming strategic nuclear superiority, the Kennedy administration just assumed that the Soviet Union would not dare to break its pledge. Deterrence conceives of aggression as driven by opportunity. However, the Soviets acted out of fear for Cuba’s security (believing that nuclear weapons would prevent an American invasion of the island). Deterrence led the Kennedy administration to misread the situation and view the Soviets as aggressive opportunists. American policy-makers consequently formed an exaggerated picture of the threat presented by the Soviet action. This, in turn, created political pressure for decision-makers to be seen to stand firm in the eyes of friends and foes alike (at home and abroad). In the absence of a deterrence mindset, US policy-makers would have been more likely to see the defensive motivations behind the Soviet action and not to have overreacted as they did. Throughout the Cold War, scholarly attention was focused on how different types of nuclear strategies affected the risk of deliberate nuclear war. For some, strategies which promised mutual destruction were least likely to trigger a nuclear war, whereas others maintained that one had to prepare to fight a nuclear war in order to avert one. In contrast, the new nuclear history identifies far greater risks associated with accidental nuclear war. The two key works here are Scott Sagan’s The limits of safety and Bruce Blair’s The logic of accidental nuclear war.
John Lewis Gaddis, The long peace: inquiries into the history of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. . John Mueller, Retreat from doomsday: the obsolescence of major war (New York: Basic Books, ). Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We all lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ). See also Len Scott and Steve Smith, ‘Lessons of October: historians, political scientists, policy-makers and the Cuban missile crisis’, International Affairs : , , pp. –; and John Lewis Gaddis, We now know: rethinking Cold War history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. -. For discussion see Marc Trachtenberg, History and strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), pp. –. A notable example is Robert Jervis, The illogic of American nuclear strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). On the MAD vs. nuclear war-fighting debate, see Charles L. Glaser, Analyzing strategic nuclear policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ). Bradley A. Thayer, ‘The risk of nuclear inadvertence: a review essay’, Security Studies : , , pp. –.
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Sagan’s book examines the ability of complex organizations to handle nuclear weapons and is noteworthy in two respects. First, Sagan uncovers frightening new evidence of a number of accidents and near accidents during the Cold War involving the US early warning system and its nuclear weapons. Second, from this Sagan concludes that the very safety features designed to prevent and contain nuclear accidents, at best did not work and at worst actually generated accidents. For instance, reliance on trial and error learning from past mistakes, which is central to avoiding future accidents, was impeded because of faulty reporting and cover-ups by the US military. Thus, many of the system errors and nuclear accidents that occurred in , , , and were repeat performances! More worrying still, redundant back-up safety measures actually produced a more complex and tightly coupled system which was more prone to break-down. For example, attempts by the United States to jerry-rig some additional radars for its early warning system during the Cuban missile crisis produced greater probability of overall systems failure. And, indeed, the new radars misidentified an American ICBM which was amazingly test launched at the height of the crisis. Blair’s work is no less hair-raising. Throughout the Cold War, it was assumed that the United States would only launch a nuclear strike after it had suffered nuclear attack. In other words, that the United States would ride out a Soviet first strike, and only then retaliate. Blair calls this ‘one of great myths of the nuclear age’. He shows that, in fact, the US nuclear forces switched to a launch-on-warning (LOW) posture around the late s and early s. This was because the US nuclear command and control system was highly vulnerable to nuclear attack, and without it the US military could not destroy the full Soviet target base as required in its war plan. Thus, it adopted the only obvious solution, that is, to prepare to launch an all-out pre-emptive nuclear strike on warning of an impending Soviet first strike. The Soviets followed by adopting a LOW posture in the early s. Ironically, LOW did little to improve the vulnerability of the US command and control system as missiles launched from Soviet submarines would have hit their targets about fourteen minutes later. This meant that ‘under the best of conditions, a president would have had only three to four minutes to get briefed and reach a decision to retaliate before Washington disintegrated.’ More importantly, as Blair notes, this ‘hair-trigger’ situation created two related hazards. First, faulty intelligence could have led either side to launch a nuclear strike in the mistaken belief that it was about to come under nuclear attack. Second, the LOW posture created additional pressure to pre-delegate authority to launch nuclear weapons down the chain of command. The Soviets managed to resist this pressure but the US political
Sagan, The limits of safety. Blair, The logic of accidental nuclear war, p. . This requirement has always been central to US nuclear war planning. David Alan Rosenberg, ‘The origins of overkill: nuclear weapons and American strategy, –’, International Security : , , pp. –. Bruce G. Blair, John E. Pike and Stephen I. Schwartz, ‘Targeting and controlling the bomb’, in Schwartz, ed., Atomic audit, p. .
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leadership ‘widely dispersed the physical control over the unlocking and firing of nuclear weapons’ to numerous military commands. Sagan’s and Blair’s studies need to be read in conjunction to appreciate the full scale of the danger we faced during the Cold War. The LOW postures made each side incredibly sensitive to early warning of enemy attack. Yet, at the same time, these early warning systems were prone to malfunction. It is no exaggeration to say that the US and Soviet ‘nuclear postures were accidents waiting to happen’.
Killing the nuclear monster This new assessment of the Cold War by American scholars has fuelled, and been fuelled by, at least three imperatives. First, the end of the Cold War, combined with the rising federal budget deficit, led the US Congress to reinterpret national security as a ‘normal’ area of public policy. Previously Congress had not been too bothered by the huge costs of programmes such as the MX ICBM, which were deemed crucial to national defence. This all changed in 1990. A dramatic improvement in US–Soviet relations, combined with a continuing budget crisis, led Congress to make deep cuts in strategic force modernization (the B-2 Stealth Bomber programme was almost terminated on the spot).28 We can expect a similar fiscal awareness to inform a revisionist interpretation of the nuclear age. This is evident in Atomic audit: ‘A central finding of this book is that government officials made little effort to ensure that limited economic resources were used as efficiently as possible so that nuclear deterrence could be achieved at the least cost possible.’ Second, the emergence of new nuclear powers, with technical capabilities and strategic circumstances similar to those of the superpowers in the early- to mid-Cold War period, gives added significance and urgency to learning the lessons of that period. Pessimists worry that the militaries in resource-strapped new nuclear states are likely to invest in offensive nuclear forces rather than strategic defence and that this, in turn, will create incentives for them to use pre-emptively their small nuclear arsenals rather than risk losing them. Furthermore, it is feared that the primitive command and control systems of new nuclear states are even more likely to fail under this intense operational pressure than the sophisticated US command and control system which did fail during the Cold War.
Blair, The logic of accidental nuclear war, p. . Under a agreement, all US and Russian ballistic missiles are aimed at the Arctic Ocean. But each side retains its Cold War targets in computer memory, and is able to switch missiles from Ocean to military targets within seconds. Blair, Pike and Schwartz, ‘Targeting and controlling the bomb’, p. (fn. ). Blair, The logic of accidental nuclear war, p. . Randall B. Ripley and James M. Lindsay, eds, Congress resurgent: foreign and defence policy on Capitol Hill (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, ); Paul N. Stockton, ‘The new game on the Hill: the politics of arms control and strategic force modernization’, International Security : . , pp. –. The MX and B- cases are discussed in Farrell, Weapons without a cause, pp. –. Michael H. Armacost, ‘Foreword’, in Schwartz, ed., Atomic audit, p. viii. Scott D. Sagan, ‘The perils of proliferation: organization theory, deterrence theory, and the spread of nuclear weapons’, International Security : , , pp. –.
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Finally, it is assumed that the volatile civil–military relations in such states are likely to make it difficult for safety-conscious civilian policy-makers to impose their concerns on offensive-minded military officers. Optimists argue that smaller nuclear arsenals might be easier to handle, and primitive command and control systems (because they are loosely coupled) might be less likely to fail. They also note that new nuclear systems may not act in the same way now as they did for the superpowers during the Cold War. Pessimists remain to be persuaded, and rightly so. Third, greater knowledge of the dangers and costs of nuclear weapons gives added urgency to comprehensive nuclear disarmament. The call for nuclear abolition has been given some momentum by a number of recent developments, including the extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in , the International Court of Justice ruling on the legality of nuclear weapon use, and the Canberra Commission Report on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. In addition, in early December , the former commander-in- chief of US Strategic Air Command, General Lee Butler, and former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Andrew Goodpaster, publicly called for rapid and comprehensive nuclear disarmament. This was backed up the following day by a joint statement from retired American and Russian generals calling for the abolition of all nuclear weapons. However, US–Russia disarmament has reach an impasse. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) II, which would leave each side with around ,–, warheads, has been ratified by the US Senate but is held up in the Russian Duma. Negotiations on START III cannot proceed until START II comes into force. Progress in disarmament will also come at huge cost. The United States has so far spent around $ billion dismantling nuclear weapons, and will spend over ten times that amount cleaning up military nuclear waste over the next years. Nevertheless, the new nuclear history gives us added cause to push for comprehensive nuclear disarmament, whatever the cost. Otherwise, Franken- stein may yet come back to haunt us.
Peter D. Feaver, ‘Command and control in emerging nuclear nations’, International Security : , /, pp. –. This work draws on Feaver’s superb Guarding the guardians: civilian control of nuclear weapons in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). David J. Karl, ‘Proliferation pessimism and emerging nuclear powers’, International Security : , /, pp. –; Jordan Seng, ‘Less is more: command and control advantages of minor nuclear states’, Security Studies : , , pp. –. Peter D. Feaver, ‘Neooptimists and the enduring problem of nuclear proliferation’, Security Studies : , , pp. –. International Institute for Strategic Studies, Strategic Survey / (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. The ICJ found nuclear weapons use to be generally illegal, although the Court could not say whether it would be illegal under situations of extreme self-defence. This controversial ruling is explained in Theo Farrell and Hélène Lambert, ‘National norms vs. international law in American nuclear use’ (ms. under review). Craig Cerniello, ‘Retired generals re-ignite debate over abolition of nuclear weapons’, Arms Control Today : , , pp. –, . Arjun Makhijani, Stephen I. Schwartz and Robert S. Norris, ‘Dismantling the bomb’, and Makhijani, Schwartz and William J. Weida, ‘Nuclear waste management and environmental remediation’, both in Schwartz, ed., Atomic audit, pp. –.
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