I lived with this doomsday potential for the rest of my military career. First as a pilot with the mission of dropping the bomb, and then with the task of training and leading other pilots in this somber undertaking. From there I went on to command ships whose magazines were configured to store “perhaps a hundred” nuclear bombs. Then later, as a flag officer and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, my duties included consulting with the secretary of defense (SecDef) on nuclear-weapons treaty agreements and, at the same time, serving as an advisor to the president of the United States on the operational decision for the release of nuclear weapons to be used against an enemy. This latter responsibility included command post exercises (CPXs) with President Carter in the war room of the Pentagon, simulating crises that rehearsed the procedures and decisions for the release of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons to the armed forces for nuclear strikes against the USSR. Having several times viewed the films of the Bikini H-bomb tests and witnessed the virtual vaporization of the atoll and the fleet of warships anchored in the lagoon, I found that all aspects of our nuclear-warfare planning could not help but be depressing.
At the beginning of the Cold War, the balance of nuclear capabilities lay totally with the United States. The United States had exploded two atomic bombs against the Japanese in World War II and was producing additional, and more-refined, weapons before the Russians had their first nuclear device. But Stalin, determined to catch up, made development of nuclear weapons his highest priority. From their standing start, the Soviets did well. Their first atomic explosion took place four years after our successful test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, but the first Soviet hydrogen bomb followed our H-bomb tests at Bikini by only nine months. By 1964 the United States had about six thousand nuclear weapons in the stockpile and the Soviets six hundred. By the mid-1970s the Russians had caught up. Although the inventories of bombs, missiles, rockets, warheads, reentry vehicles, and delivery systems differed between the two powers, in terms of effective destructive power the USSR had achieved what we referred to at the time to as essential equivalence.
THE TRIAD
Although the U.S. nuclear strategy underwent some evolutionary changes during the Cold War, the elements of our strategic nuclear posture remained essentially the same. The strategy was based upon a triad: manned bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. As individual service chiefs and in our consolidated role as the JCS, we recognized the interdependent synergy of the individual triad elements. There was no service parochialism here. Each component of the triad brought to the equation a unique capability, and when combined, they constituted an enormously powerful, devastating, and invulnerable force against which the Soviets could never completely defend.
The manned bomber force, which numbered as many as seventeen wings, had as its strong points the enormous mega-tonnage the bombers could carry and the fact that the planes could be launched with nuclear weapons on board, kept on airborne alert, but still be recalled if the crisis abated. Its weaknesses were that the bomber bases were vulnerable to ballistic missile attack and the bombers themselves could be shot down en route to their target.
The land-based missile component had as its main advantage the quality of virtually instant response. With all of the silos located in the continental United States, communications between the National Command Authority (NCA) and these missile sites were principally by landline — immediate, secure, and reliable. The disadvantage of the land-based system was that, being in silos at fixed geographic locations, they were vulnerable to being targeted by enemy missiles and taken out in a surprise preemptive attack. The authorized inventory of deployed missiles stabilized at about thirteen hundred in the 1970s.
The quality of the submarine-launched ballistic missile system that made it so important to the strategic balance was its invulnerability. That is not to say that submarines are invulnerable, but neither side ever had the ability to prevent all deployed ballistic missile submarines from firing out their full loads after receiving the launch command. The critical link for the submarine-launched missile force was the relative slowness of communications. Contact with a submarine was maintained by ultra-low-frequency radio signals that can penetrate the depths of the water down to three or four hundred feet, but the transmission times are very lengthy. In order to achieve 100 percent reliability in getting the message through, a very slow send rate and a high number of iterations of the message are necessary. Although this ensures 100 percent reliability of communications, it might take minutes rather than seconds to get a firing authorization signal through to a submarine.
The fact remains that the submarine-launched segment of the triad did represent an invulnerable system, and the only invulnerable component of the triad. As such, it became the principal deterrent on both sides against the initiation of a preemptive nuclear strike. With the advance of multiple reentry vehicle technology, the submarine force gained an enormous mega-tonnage capacity. The Trident missile submarines, for example, were equipped with twenty-four Trident III missiles with sufficient range to reach targets in the Soviet Union with the submarine in its homeport in CONUS. Furthermore, each missile had multiple warheads, each of which could be individually targeted. By the end of the Cold War, the ballistic missile submarine force of eighteen Ohio-class Tridents represented approximately half of the missile mega-tonnage in the nuclear arsenal of the entire triad.
In addition to the stockpile of strategic nuclear weapons that were targeted on major military objectives, industrial complexes, and population centers, both superpowers had developed smaller, more portable, but almost equally destructive weapons that were referred to as “tactical nukes.” The U.S. Army’s weapons inventory included nuclear land mines, artillery shells, and short-range rockets. The U.S. Air Force (USAF) arsenal was made up of a wide array of nuclear and thermonuclear bombs designed for delivery by tactical fighters. In the U.S. Navy, virtually every major combatant had a nuclear-weapons delivery capability: Attack submarines had nuclear antiship rockets, cruisers had available nuclear antiaircraft missiles, patrol planes could deliver nuclear antisubmarine depth charges, and the carrier’s attack aircraft were capable of carrying nuclear and thermonuclear bombs for their embarked strike aircraft. Whether these nuclear weapons were actually in the magazines of a particular ship at a specific time was deliberately obscured by the Navy’s policy of freely admitting which ships and squadrons had the capability of delivering nuclear weapons but refusing to “confirm or deny” the presence of nuclear warheads aboard any ship at any given time.
NUCLEAR SAFEGUARDS
In spite of the large number of nuclear weapons of all varieties deployed to the operating forces, those of us directly involved with their military employment had a high level of assurance in our system of safeguards for the control and release of nuclear weapons and for the provisions that were designed to prevent their inadvertent use. The system was well conceived and rigorously carried out. I can also say that we had confidence in the Soviets’ system of nuclear-weapon control. Any rational person who understood the terrible power of the bomb was bound to have an abiding respect for its safeguards.