For the Senate subcommittee, Pavlov reviewed how the several levels of the Soviet control system worked together:
″...Let me describe … one possible scenario of attack under the conditions of the coup. The early warning system detects a missile attack and sends signals to the subsystems that assess the threat. It is a process that immediately involves the president of the country, the minister of defense, chief of the general staff and the commanders in chief of the three branches of strategic nuclear forces.
“Then the chief of the general staff and commanders in chief of strategic nuclear forces form a command and send it down to the subordinate units. In essence, this command is meant to inform troops and weapons systems about a possible nuclear attack, and this command is called a preliminary command.
“The preliminary command opens up access by the launch crews to the equipment directly controlling the use of nuclear weapons and also gives them access to the relevant special documentation. However, launch crews do not [yet] have the full right to use the equipment of direct control over the use of nuclear weapons.
“As a more accurate assessment of the situation is made, a message is received from the early warning systems confirming the fact of nuclear attack, and the decision to use nuclear weapons may be made at that point. It can be carried out according to a two-stage process.”
The first stage of this two-stage process, Pavlov continued, once again involved the top leadership in a political decision—whether or not to generate a “permission command” that would be sent to the CICs. Then, during the second stage, the CICs and the chief of the general staff would decide as military leaders whether or not to generate a “direct command” ordering launch crews to fire their weapons. Even then, the direct command had to pass through an ordeal of what Pavlov called “special processing42 by technical and organizational means to verify its authenticity.” Each of these actions had time limits, and if the time for an action expired, the blocking system that normally prevented weapons from being launched automatically reactivated.
Cumbersome as the Soviet system seemed from their descriptions, Blair pointed out, it was “actually devised … to streamline43 the command system to ensure that they could release nuclear weapons within the time frame of a ballistic missile attack launched by the United States, that is to say, within 15 to 30 minutes.” And despite its complexity, Blair added, a nuclear launch by the coup leaders might still have been possible had they persuaded the general staff to issue Yanayev a Cheget and had one or more of the CICs gone along. “There is an important lesson44 here,” Blair concluded. “No system of safeguards can reliably guard against misbehavior at the very apex of government, in any government. There is no adequate answer to the question, ‘Who guards the guards?’”
That November, the Republican Party won a landslide victory in the Clinton midterm elections, the first Republican legislative majority in forty years. Democrats lost fifty-four seats in the House of Representatives. Newt Gingrich, the new House speaker, announced his Contract with America. The new crowd of representatives brought a highly parochial perspective to government, Christian Alfonsi noted:
“Many of the new Republicans37 on Capitol Hill were young enough to have avoided Vietnam entirely; and most of those who had not been young enough had received deferments. Never before had the American people elected a congressional majority so few of whose members had served in the military. Perhaps the most striking attribute of the new House membership, though, was its startling lack of familiarity with the world outside America’s borders. Fully a third of the new Republican House members had never set foot outside the United States. In the main, many of them considered that a good thing; or if not, then certainly not a deficiency to be rectified. The deep suspicion of the UN reflected in the Contract with America was an accurate reflection of these individuals’ deep distrust of the foreign, in all senses of that term.”
And:
There was a battle as well within the U.S. weapons and defense bureaucracies over allowing tests up to some yield limit—Perry proposed five hundred tons—but Clinton agreed to support stockpile stewardship with an initial budget of $4 billion in tacit exchange for zero yield. (Not everyone was happy with the quid pro quo. Graham visited Los Alamos and found a hostile if generally polite audience. “Several of them,” he told me, “said the government had betrayed them. ‘They made a deal with us,’ one said, ‘that we would be able to work on nuclear weapons for our entire careers and they betrayed us.’ That didn’t seem like a very rational argument to me. Right at the end of the questioning, Sig Hecker stood up and made a really gracious speech. He said, ‘The CTBT is national policy, a moratorium is national policy, there are good reasons for it, and here’s what they are and we should support it.’ I went to lunch with him afterward and told him, ‘You know, Sig, I strongly support the CTBT, but you may recall that a predecessor of yours, Harold Agnew, used to complain that people had forgotten what nuclear weapons are like because we don’t have atmospheric tests any more. I wouldn’t be against having an internationally supervised atmospheric test once every five years or so. To remind people how awful these things are.’ Sig said, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking the same thing.’”)
And:
Time published an article by Scowcroft and [George Bush Sr.], called “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam.” In it the two men predicted disastrous results of a cavalier invasion—results that in fact would occur:
“We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well… Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different—and perhaps barren—outcome.”
And:
By mid-October twelve people had been exposed to anthrax, five of whom would eventually die. The U.S. government deployed military units nationwide to guard nuclear power plants, water supplies, oil refineries, airports, railroad terminals, the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn and Golden Gate bridges. Then a letter arrived at the Senate offices of the Democratic majority leader Tom Daschle containing not the low-grade form of anthrax included in the first round of letters mailed to Florida and New York but a highly purified, military-grade aerosolized powder that was ten times as deadly. The Senate shut down the next day, 16 October, the House the day after that. Twenty-eight staffers were found to have been exposed. The Senate office building attacks made front-page world news and sowed panic throughout Washington.
But something else happened that week in Washington that had an even greater impact on George Bush and Dick Cheney’s thinking. Special sensors that detect chemical, biological, or radiological agents had been installed in the White House to protect the president. On Thursday, 18 October, they went off while Cheney and his aides were working in the Situation Room. “Everyone who had entered10 the Situation Room that day,” the journalist Jane Mayer reported, “was believed to have been exposed, and that included Cheney. ‘They thought there had been a nerve attack,’ a former administration official, who was sworn to secrecy about it, later confided. ‘It was really, really scary. They thought that Cheney was already lethally infected.’” Cheney had recently been briefed about the lack of U.S. defenses against a biowarfare attack, Mayer revealed. Thus, “when the White House sensor11 registered the presence of such poisons less than a month later, many, including Cheney, believed a nightmare was unfolding. ‘It was a really nerve jangling time,’ the former official said.”
And:
No nuclear weapons are known to have been stolen in any country since their first development by the United States in 1945. Whether this fact is testimony to the quality of the security that nuclear weapons are rightly accorded in every country that has them, or whether thieves judge attempting to acquire such complicated, dangerous, and well-guarded explosives not to be worth the risk remains to be seen. U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons are outfitted with complicated physical and electronic locking mechanisms with defensive features that may be deadly; weapons in countries such as Pakistan are protected the way South Africa’s were, by being stored partly disassembled, with their fissile components divided among several locations in guarded bunkers or vaults. The theft of a nuclear weapon anywhere would activate every resource the international community could muster, with shooting on sight the minimum rule of engagement.
Because nuclear weapons are well protected, national-security bureaucracies have postulated that a terrorist group that wants to acquire a nuclear capability will be forced to build its own bomb or bombs. Enriching uranium or breeding plutonium and separating it from its intensely radioactive matrix of spent fuel are both well beyond the capacity of subnational entities. The notion that a government would risk its own security by giving up control of a nuclear weapon to terrorists is nonsensical despite the Bush administration’s use of the argument to justify invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. A nuclear attack on United States interests by a terrorist group using a donated bomb would certainly lead to a devastating nuclear counterattack on the country that supplied the weapon, provided the supplier could be determined—a near certainty with nuclear forensics and other means of investigation.
From Rhodes’ Twilight of the Bombs:
More (#1) from Twilight of the Bombs:
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