The publicised mishaps — they should not be called scandals — in recent years by Air Force and Navy personnel in charge of nuclear weapons give the White House and Congress a chance to rethink the US deterrence mission before returning airmen to those buried missile silos or sending sailors off on new strategic submarine patrols.
Last Friday, US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel announced plans to spend billions over the next five years to remedy what he called “systemic problems” in the US nuclear deterrent. That consists of more than 2,000 land and sub-launched missile warheads and bombs on hundreds of ageing delivery systems. The US also plans to modernise the delivery systems and warheads to keep them operational, safe and secure far into the future.
Hagel recited a mission statement developed for the Cold War, 60 years ago: “Our nuclear triad deters nuclear attack on the United States and our allies and our partners, it prevents potential adversaries from trying to escalate their way out of failed conventional aggression, and it provides the means for effective response should deterrence fail.”
While the numbers have dropped significantly over the years, it is past time to rethink how many delivery systems and warheads are needed. Today, the US Air Force and Navy personnel assigned to carry out the nation’s strategic nuclear mission see their greatest risk from inspections by Pentagon and congressional entities — not from a surprise nuclear attack.
“Because inspection results have more gravity than mission success, a culture has developed where inspection is the mission,” said the Independent Review of the Department of Defence Nuclear Enterprise, an outside panel of experts appointed by Hagel and chaired by retired Air Force General Larry Welch and retired Admiral John Harvey.
The inspection mania started in 2007, when an Air Force B-52 flew from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana without the crew realising that the plane was armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Since then, there have been almost annual failures, including weaknesses exposed during safety and security inspections and cheating on proficiency tests.
The Welch-Harvey report found that in 2013, “inspection and inspection-like activities at the 91st Missile Wing at Minot ... totalled 32 and encompassed more than 100 days of that year, and a total of 293 leadership days (squadron-level commanders and above). This did not include the 59 ‘visits’ to the unit, ranging from Congressional delegations to the [US Strategic Command] Commander to a French delegation”.
The Navy’s Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific at Bangor, Washington, where nuclear weapons for submarines are stored, was this year “involved in outside agency inspections for five consecutive weeks,” the report noted.
Despite senior officials paying lip service to the nuclear mission as central to US security, the military personnel working in nuclear jobs know that those assignments have no future.
Intercontinental ballistic missile “operators experience uncertainty regarding their futures even before they enter initial training,” the report said. Even senior Pentagon officers consider the nuclear programme a backwater.
The Welch-Harvey panel said leadership in the two services did not adequately train, staff or equip nuclear-focused units. At the Defence Department, responsibility for nuclear weapons has dropped in importance from the assistant secretary to the deputy assistant level and has been mixed with other responsibilities.
Irrationality has been a hallmark of nuclear weapons planning since August 1945, when atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war with Japan, but set off an arms race worldwide — and even within America’s own military. In the 1950s, the Army developed eight-inch and 155-milimetre nuclear artillery shells, atomic demolition mines and nuclear anti-aircraft weapons. The Air Force created hundred-kilotonne and megatonne bombs and nuclear air-to air missiles; the Navy went for sub-launched nuclear missiles, nuclear-armed torpedoes and atomic depth charges.
It was never clear how these thousands of weapons would have been deployed, but America was in an arms race with the Soviet Union and numbers counted — at least America thought so. By the 1990s, thanks to arms agreements with Moscow, most were deactivated, although many of those have yet to be destroyed.
Nonetheless, the Americans and Russians each still have those 2,000 operational nuclear warheads, most ready to launch within minutes but currently, by agreement, not aimed at any particular target.
The most ridiculous element of the Cold War was the idea of a “first strike” by the Soviets on the US. So America built more warheads. The Russians, fearing America’s capability for missile defence and aware of talk in Washington of a first strike, reacted by building more warheads of their own.
Today’s standoff is still based on all that first-strike idiocy. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current warlike positions do not rise to the nuclear threat level, though some see it that way. Decades after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, former defence secretary Robert McNamara told me about the night he explained to the then president John Kennedy that no one could forecast what would happen if one nuclear weapon was used, because the US and the Soviet Union each had more than 100.
At that time, around 1995, McNamara said 500 US nuclear warheads, adequately protected, would be enough for deterrence in a post-Cold War world. He was right then, and he is right today.
— Washington Post
Walter Pincus reports on intelligence, defence and foreign policy for the Washington Post and writes the Fine Print column.
