INTRODUCTION

A nuclear sword, we all know, hangs over the earth. But where does the danger of nuclear war come from? What makes it worse? How can we reduce it?

For many years, a striking consensus has reigned: the nuclear arms race between the superpowers is the main source of danger. The arms race is "the central concern of the closing years of the century," the cause célèbre of our time. A U.S. senator says that "the very survival of our planet, the survival of the human race, is at stake," a common view.^[1]

The right, the center, and the left disagree, of course, about how the United States should run the arms race. The right urges us to build weapons like the MX missile, the Stealth bomber, and "Star Wars"; the center, to sign arms control treaties like INF and START with the Soviet Union; and the left, to stop and then reverse the arms race through a test ban, a "freeze," and huge reductions in nuclear arsenals. But all focus on the hardware, the weapons themselves. Most of the nuclear debate concerns which weapons should be deployed and which destroyed.

But short of near-total nuclear disarmament, we believe that no change in the arms race can in fact make a profound difference. MX, Star Wars, INF, a freeze, or even a 90 percent reduction in nuclear arsenals cannot reliably change the horror of a nuclear war. They cannot much affect the risk that the nuclear states will plunge us into that horror. They cannot make the world much safer or more dangerous than it already is.

The nuclear danger is real—even more ominous, as we will show,

than most people appreciate. But the fixation on weapons has obscured the real menace: the political conflict and violence raging around the world that could one day burn out of control and set off a nuclear cataclysm. As the world debates largely irrelevant missiles and arms control treaties, the superpowers are fanning the flames of conflict and war from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, Lebanon to Cambodia. Forty years of history reveal that such conflicts can suddenly veer out of control and even erupt into open superpower confrontation. Yet in a time of unprecedented public concern about nuclear war, few—even in the peace movement—protest the nuclear hazards of their governments' foreign intrigues and interventions.

Those of us concerned with the nuclear threat have long been like the apocryphal drunk who searches for his lost keys hour after hour under a lamppost—because it's light there. The giant weapons systems are seductive, the obvious place to look for answers to the nuclear peril. The light there is good. But there is little to be found. If we want the keys to a safer world, we must turn the light to the real conflicts and battlefields where the superpowers and their clients confront each other every day, often hidden from public view, and where they periodically collide in terrifying crises that threaten to provoke worldwide catastrophe.

The Absolute Weapon

Public issues generally develop a "culture," a consensus about the key questions, the level of analysis, and the language of debate. Since these assumptions are shared, they rarely come up for discussion.

The common perspective that guides discourse on nuclear war and peace is what we call the "weapons paradigm." It magnifies the importance of the weapons themselves far beyond their real significance. It views weapons as the basic source of security or insecurity, power or weakness, peace or war. It pegs the arms race as the problem and some change in that race as the solution.

If nuclear weapons were like conventional ones, then their number and technical characteristics would of course matter. But nuclear weapons are different. They are so powerful that both superpowers long ago acquired the means to utterly destroy each other along with much of the rest of the planet. For decades the arms race and arms control have changed only the number of times that we can bounce the radiating rubble of the world.

Those who imagine that more missiles or fewer missiles can really

change the nuclear peril simply do not appreciate the destructive power of what Bernard Brodie called, in 1946, "the absolute weapon."^[2] In Hiroshima,

of the city's 76,000 buildings, 90% were destroyed along with most of their occupants. After the mushroom cloud formed, an oily, highly radioactive "black rain" fell for thirty to sixty minutes, bringing death to thousands outside the firestorm and the shockwave. Out of a resident population of 245,000 over 110,000 were killed….

In the weeks, months, and years that followed, deaths continued. Leukemia, a variety of tumors, cataracts and cancers, diffuse hemorrhage, infection, uncontrollable vomiting were soon commonplace. Grotesque skin excrescences appeared, mental retardation, children were born with small heads. In the five years following the bomb, as many died in Hiroshima from cancer via radiation as were killed on that fateful morning. Thirty-five years after the explosion, 2,500 still die annually from the bomb's radiation.

The Hiroshima bomb was tiny by modern standards. Imagine that a large, twenty-megaton, warhead is dropped on Boston:

Within a radius of four miles … the city will literally disappear. It will be replaced by rubble. More than 750,000 will die outright, from concussion, heat, or fire. Many of them will be vaporized. Fire-wind storms … will originate in a fireball hotter than the sun, and will sweep a radius of twenty miles. Within that radius 2,300,000 will die outright. Another 500,000 will be disabled and in shock … anyone who looked at the explosion from a distance of forty miles or less will likely be blinded.

Epidemic disease, carried by radiation-resistant flies and mosquitos and by hunger-crazed animals, will end the suffering of more than 25% of the weakened survivors. In the judgment of several authorities, such diseases from the past as polio, dysentery, typhoid fever, and cholera will reappear.

Occupants of shelters will die in assorted ways. By crushing if the shelter is vulnerable to bomb blast. By incineration if the shelter is reached by firestorm, or by asphyxiation if the firestorm absorbs all available oxygen. By starvation or dehydration in the likely absence of radiation-free food or water. By radiation if the air within the shelter cannot be continuously filtered. Appearance outside a shelter for more than three minutes will produce fatal third-degree burns from intense ultraviolet light.

Of Greater Boston's 6,000 doctors, 5,100 will be incapacitated or dead…. Doctors will have to treat the maimed where they lie, in the radioactive rubble. And with little more than bare hands. There will be no anesthesia, no bandages, few drugs.

A one-megaton nuclear bomb "equals half of the total destructive power of all bombs used by the Western Allies in Europe during all of World War II…. It would take a train 300 miles long to transport the equivalent dynamite." If one such bomb is dropped on New York City,

it is estimated that 2,250,000 will die, 1,000,000 of them within eleven seconds. Most will be vaporized. About 3,600,000 will suffer crushing injuries and ruptured internal organs.

The fireball, hotter than the sun, will be about one-and-one-half miles in diameter. The resulting firestorm will cover about 100 square miles. Third-degree burns are likely for those within a radius of 8 miles of the burst, second-degree burns will be common over an additional 250 square miles. Shelters in that area will become ovens, incinerating their occupants.

Skyscrapers will topple. It is unlikely that a single metropolitan hospital will remain standing. The city will be replaced by acres of highly radioactive rubble. There will be no communication, no transport, no medicines, no edible food, no drinkable water.

Some species will survive, notably cockroaches. They will be blind but they will continue to reproduce.

For any human survivors, other consequences over the years will include "genetic damage, abnormalities in new births, psychological trauma of every description, mental retardation, and concentration of plutonium in testicles and ovaries (for 50,000 years)." A twenty-mile-an-hour breeze "can carry lethal fallout hundreds of miles from the burst."^[3]

A single Trident submarine, carrying twenty-four seven-warhead missiles, could destroy 168 Russian cities, "with each receiving at least ten times the megatonnage that fell on Hiroshima." According to a Pentagon estimate, only one hundred nuclear warheads "could immediately kill 37,000,000 and destroy 59% of Soviet industrial capacity." What would happen over the following days, weeks, years, and even generations, we can only guess. Independent studies recently confirmed that as few as "one hundred one-[megaton] weapons … could devastate the urban areas of either 'superpower.'"^[4]

Today the United States and the Soviet Union each have about twenty-five thousand nuclear weapons. Would it matter if each had a million? Or only a thousand? Or if one side had a million and the other a thousand?

A Guide to the Book

The thesis of Part I is that the arms race has not much affected the nuclear threat for more than twenty-five years. Chained as it is to the pre-nuclear weapons paradigm, our thought just has not caught up with the power of our weapons. "The unleashed power of the atom," as Albert Einstein warned, "has changed everything save our modes of thinking."^[5]

Chapter 1 explains in brief why the superpower arms race no longer matters. Chapters 2–5 (which some general-interest readers may want to skip) address common counterarguments that are strikingly parallel in the thinking of both the right and the left. Chapter 2 discusses the fear that "first-strike" weapons are destabilizing deterrence and in a crisis could tempt one side to try a massive knockout blow against the other. Chapter 3 takes up the purported need for new weapons to ensure the credibility of deterrence and the logically parallel fear that those same weapons can dangerously narrow the "firebreak" between conventional and nuclear war. Chapter 4 examines the argument that national leaders might irrationally think new weapons matter, which of course would make the weapons matter. Chapter 5 asks if the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars—presently the most hotly disputed weapons program—is an exception to the irrelevance of new weaponry, if it is really the nuclear savior or the nuclear devil that many claim it to be.

"A page of history," as a lawyer once wrote, "is worth a volume of logic."^[6] To find the real sources of nuclear danger, we must consult the relevant historical record—not the chronology of the arms race that often passes for the history of the nuclear age, but the actual occasions on which the nuclear sword threatened to drop on humanity. As the review of those occasions in Part II reveals, since 1950 the arms race has rarely if ever endangered the world. But the same is not true of the superpowers' violent efforts to bring much of the planet under their political and economic control. Aggression, intervention, and threats by both the United States and the Soviet Union have regularly produced crises and confrontations that, as leaders on both sides have openly admitted, could have spun out of control and even ignited a final holocaust.

Danger loomed in Europe until the early 1960s and to an extent still does. But the main tinderboxes for nuclear war have always been in what is called the Third World—the real prize of the Cold War and the site of almost all actual superpower collisions. Chapter 6 reviews those shocking events in the Third World. Chapter 7 explains why local Third World conflicts with limited stakes have so often blown up into global crises and how such crises could degenerate into perilous confrontation and even nuclear war. Chapter 8 examines the worst nuclear crisis yet, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, in the light of the argument of this book. "Those who do not remember the past," wrote George Santayana, "are condemned to relive it."^[7] We do not remember, and we have not learned. The nuclear dangers lurking in the Third World today, as we will see, seem no less ominous than in the past.

The United States, of course, blames the Soviet Union for most Third World conflict and violence, just as the Soviet Union blames the United States. In reality, both superpowers and many other states and political movements regularly contribute to the tensions and conflicts that are ravaging the Third World and could one day destroy the whole world. The United States, however, has long been the leading world power, allied with some of the most violent, unstable, and repressive regimes in the Third World and, as the record will show, has with few exceptions demonstrated far more nuclear recklessness than the Soviet Union. Just as important, Americans can hope to influence the actions of our own government more than those of any other, especially since our democracy affords significant opportunities for public influence over foreign policy. Whether one supports or opposes U.S. actions in the Third World on political grounds, their dangers in the nuclear age should be the focus of the nuclear debate, in the United States at least. We hope that this book will help inspire citizens to learn about their government's role in perpetuating the nuclear threat and to organize to do something about it.

Part III discusses this and other political implications of our study. Chapter 9 considers the implications of Part I, asking if arms control can help make a safer future. Though the superpower arms control agenda, including the INF and START treaties, can do little to diminish the nuclear threat, another kind of arms control could—by reversing the pervasive nuclearization of the conventional fighting forces of both sides that (hard as it may be to believe) could allow an artilleryman, a ship's captain, or a jet pilot, in the chaos and horror of some future battle, to fire a shot truly heard 'round the world. Chapter 9 also examines the economic impact of arms control and asks whether treaties like INF actually do help prevent nuclear war, as widely assumed, by promoting better superpower relations or by paving the way for nuclear disarmament. Chapter 10 turns to the real challenge of the nuclear age: the changes in foreign policy required to prevent the kinds of Third World crises that have tempted fate so often in the past.

Logic and history both suggest that the arms race matters little to the danger of nuclear war. But it does of course matter in other ways. The arms race undermines us morally, as individuals and as a society, continually leading us to build weapons that, if used, would slaughter millions of innocent people and much of the natural order. The arms race wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on redundant weapons while millions starve, cities crumble, and the earth's environment succumbs to industrial

assault, perhaps beyond redemption. The arms race prompts us to mass-produce pound after pound of radioactive substances that can kill in the most minute amounts; inevitably, some escapes—sometimes intentionally, as in the era of open-air nuclear test explosions and in the decades of planned radioactive releases at U.S. nuclear weapons plants, a policy finally acknowledged by the U.S. Department of Energy in 1988. Dr. John Gofman, director of biology and medicine at the Lawrence Radiation Center of the University of California, states that if only 2 percent of the plutonium manufactured by the year 2000 is released into the environment, "assuredly, we can give up on the future of humans."^[8]

The arms race is vile. But concerned citizens must abandon the delusion that controlling, stopping, or even reversing it—whatever the other benefits —could help reduce the threat of nuclear war.

We do not try to explain the origins and history of the arms race or of the Third World policies of the superpowers. After reading this book, those who seek to prevent a final calamity will, we hope, want to learn more about the true nature of the Cold War, the record of and interests behind U.S. foreign policy, and the role the United States government plays in the Third World, topics well covered elsewhere.^[9]

Nagging Doubts

Despite a near consensus that identifies the problem of nuclear war not with the violence actually occurring in the world but with the size, accuracy, and throw weight of redundant missile systems, a few voices have always raised doubts about the conventional wisdom. Bernard Brodie, the father of nuclear strategy, knew as early as 1946 that "margins of superiority in nuclear weapons or the means of delivering them might count for little or nothing in a crisis so long as each side had reason to fear the huge devastation of its peoples and territories by the other," a notion that "any reflective observer of the time would have found more or less self-evident." In 1978, near his death, he wrote: "I could never accept … that the balance of terror between the Soviet Union and the United States has been or ever could be 'delicate.'" To take another early example, in 1956 even Secretary of the Air Force Donald Quarles suspected that war had become an "unthinkable catastrophe" from which "neither side can hope by a mere margin of superiority in airplanes or other means of delivery to escape."^[10]

As the arms race has produced ever more redundant increments of

destructive power and technological wizardry, more nagging doubts have occasionally surfaced. For example, at the beginning of his 1983 book on nuclear command and control, Paul Bracken notes that "the arsenals of both countries are now so large that reductions in nuclear armaments, even deep reductions, would leave so many remaining weapons that the difference might be negligible should a war break out." His approach, far more reasonable than those focusing on the weapons hardware itself, is to analyze the "management of nuclear forces at the moment they would go on alert, and as they would perform during a war," with the hope that one could thereby "identify potential flash-points and triggers that might lead to catastrophe."^[11]

The Harvard Nuclear Study Group similarly cautions that "it is usually misleading to concentrate one's attention on the numbers of nuclear weapons when analyzing the likelihood of war." The group criticizes the "widely assumed" notion that "changes in the numbers of weapons in the superpower arsenals—either upward or downward—are the major determinant of the risks of war." But like Bracken and almost all other analysts, these authors attach great importance to the characteristics of new nuclear systems even though they recognize the irrelevance of raw numbers. Thus the "vulnerability of weapons" and other technical factors are central considerations. Indeed, despite their annoyance at the "common fixation on numbers of weapons," by far the greatest part of their book is about the composition of U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals.^[12]

A later Harvard book on the nuclear problem exhibits a similar schizophrenia. The editors were quoted in the press as deeply critical of approaches that emphasize "the weapons themselves." The dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Graham Allison, asked rhetorically, "If the United States and the Soviet Union cut their nuclear arsenals in half, or if their arsenals were twice as large, would either of those events fundamentally change the shape of the problem?" Nevertheless, at least half of the book's "principles of avoiding nuclear war" entail proposals about nuclear weapons systems. There is no examination of the history or dangers of U.S. policies in the Third World or, with the exception of the Middle East, of the many international conflicts involving the United States that could spin out of control and result in a direct confrontation with the Soviets.^[13]

In a few cases the doubts raised about the importance of weapons have been less nagging and more serious. Robert Jervis's book, The Illogic

of American Nuclear Strategy, is a rigorous rebuttal to the idea that the "countervailing" nuclear strategy of the United States can escape the "nuclear revolution" that has made all societies existentially vulnerable to nuclear destruction regardless of the conventional or nuclear forces available for use. Jervis argues that both the nuclear balance between the superpowers and their meaningless quests for nuclear superiority no longer matter much to the actual conduct of international affairs.^[14] In this respect Jervis has formalized a position already staked out, as we will see, by McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and other former high-level officials. But in directing their ire at nuclear weapons policy and strategic doctrine, even such astute critics further obscure the real point: that these no longer make much difference in a world of mutual mega-overkill.

By far the most forceful critique of nuclear "weaponitis," as we call it, has come from George Rathjens of MIT, a longtime distinguished member of the arms control community. In a courageous but little-noticed rebuttal to this mainstay of the establishment anti-nuclear war agenda, he argues that arms control's focus on weapons

is deceptive to the point of almost being a gigantic fraud: there is the implicit suggestion that controls on weapons of the kind that have been tried will solve the problem—or at least make a big difference—when there is no real reason for so believing…. The negotiations have been predicated on a belief that numbers and detailed performance characteristics of weapons are important [and as a result] the importance of differences in capabilities have been exaggerated to the point where political leaders and the public have been led to believe that such differences could be exploited militarily, when almost certainly they could not be.^[15]

To take one final example, in 1986 the noted military historian Michael Howard delivered a speech to the Council for Arms Control blasting the notion that arms control can substantially remedy the nuclear danger. Is it not, he asks, "the modern equivalent of the alchemist's search for a philosopher's stone which will turn the lead of international relations into the gold of perpetual peace?" Howard disputes the notion that "'arms races' build up to war" and that "arms reductions … lead to peace." He argues that the profound benefit supposedly derivable from nuclear arms treaties is understood by those in government as no more than a Platonic "noble lie," a generous characterization.^[16]

The nuclear hazards of conventional Third World militarism are slowly coming to light too. Appalled by the U.S. peace movement's silence

about the U.S.-armed Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the considerable international dangers it entailed, the American Friends Service Committee brought together in 1982 a group of intellectuals and political activists to discuss the "deadly connection" between military intervention and nuclear war. This conference led to the publication of an important volume.^[17] Covering the Middle East, Central America, southern Africa, Southeast Asia, Korea, and elsewhere, the participants discussed some of the past occasions on which Third World intervention moved toward a superpower showdown and warned that numerous conflicts around the world posed similar dangers today. Much of the U.S. antinuclear movement, including the largest organization, SANE/ Freeze, has since adopted the "deadly connection" analysis as part of its official program. Despite widespread public opposition to U.S. military activities in Central America, southern Africa, and elsewhere, however, few protest the potential nuclear dangers of American involvement in regional conflicts around the world. Even obviously dangerous actions, such as outright U.S. interventions in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf, elicited little opposition. And numerous "covert" operations, such as American aid to the guerrilla coalition dominated by Pol Pot in Kampuchea and to the Islamic fundamentalist segment of the Afghan resistance, are rarely debated.

We hope this book will help transform the doubts that have long nagged nuclear scholars and activists into a basic shift in thought and action: from the details of redundant nuclear weapons to the real conflict and violence that could bring those weapons tragically into use.