Abstract
In late April, the Jofnt Chiefs of Staff (jcs) will begin its annual assessment of a very elite team–the “nuclear battlestaff.” During two top-secret exercises–“Praetorian Guard” and “Crystal Monarch”–the battlestaff will be put through its paces, practicing procedures to launch nuclear weapons and fight a nuclear war.
The exercise scenarios are boilerplate Cold War–regional instability and tension lead to conventional conflict and terrorist attacks, followed by escalating hostilities between the major powers, and ultimately to nuclear war.
The nuclear command and control tests are laid out in a document called the “Nuclear C3 Scenarios”–known unofficially by the nuclear elite as the “13 Scenarios.”
According to jcs documents I obtained, in Praetorian Guard and Crystal Monarch, plausible “worst case” exercises test U.S. nuclear war “performance standards.” “The scenario needs to be realistic and credible, but will not necessarily be based purely on current policy and strategy,” says one jcs document. “In no way should [the scenario] be construed to represent events as they actually would occur in the real world.” Amen.
An inauguration usually provokes a flurry of media stories about the “football,” the president's briefcase that holds launch codes and the nuclear war options binder. But George W. Bush's handoff was hardly noticed. “The good news,” said P. J. Crowley, the National Security Council spokesman, “is that we are not in the same kind of hair-trigger situation that we were in in the Cold War.”
Hair trigger or not, the football is but one of a growing list of keys to the nuclear trigger. Despite the demise of the Soviet Union, there are still thousands of nuclear weapons, and the nuclear priesthood remains unwavering in its belief that the trigger must be ready every minute of every day.
Nuclear connoisseurs remember the good old days when we speculated about what would happen if the Capitol was blown up during an inauguration or the United States was attacked while the president was incapacitated, or how the president would be able to authorize the use of nuclear weapons if the once dreaded “bolt out of the blue” were to materialize. The praetorian guards thought of this stuff as well: In the 1950s they built bunkers like Site R on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, invented ship and airborne command posts as the number of weapons ballooned, and added redundant, “survivable” communications links to nuclear forces.
Much could be done to shore up holes in the system, but the fact that it took enemy missiles only 30 minutes to arrive never changed. Unless the nuclear elite could guarantee retaliation in those 30 minutes–come what may–deterrence was weakened.
As a result, each new president has approved ever more robust procedures enabling the military to launch a nuclear war on its own. This has culminated in a system in which a dozen or more faceless generals and admirals, some quite junior, have the means, and the provisional authority, to use nuclear weapons without the actual permission of the president or the defense secretary.
On any given day, duty officers at underground bunkers, in flying command posts, and on two “survivable” ground mobile command centers (built into specially configured 18-wheel tractor-trailers that reside in Nebraska and Colorado), brush off the seven-volume “Emergency Action Procedures,” particularly “Volume IV: Authority,” which sets out the procedures for nuclear retaliation should a worst case scenario ever occur.
Sure, the rules and conditions under which the battlestaff can usurp the president's authority are stringent. But the command posts have the means–that is, the codes–and every year the jcs tests and certifies them.
It seems farfetched, like a bad dream, to worry about nuclear war under such conditions. I worry more about whether the president is slave to the guards, and not master. That is the biggest continuing nuclear threat.