The West has gone uncannily calm about last month's military take-over in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Could it be embarrassment, that it hasn't delivered on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty -- an essential ingredient in the grand bargain of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that states that the old established nuclear powers will make significant progress in disarmament in return for the rest of the world -- 95 percent of it in fact- abjuring manufacture of their own nuclear weapons? Or is it just carelessness that takes its cue from US President Bill Clinton's lack of conviction on the urgent necessity for nuclear disarmament?
It is a quite extraordinary silence. Nowhere else in the world does the military -- so blatantly at least -- have its finger directly on the nuclear trigger. There has always been, right through the darkest days of the Cold War, the buffer of civilian authority. Even when the Soviet Union was overthrown and the newborn Russian federation fell heir to its nuclear arsenal, and for the first time in history the nuclear baton was passed, it was done in a careful and responsible manner from civilian to civilian.
Or could it be perhaps that the West knows that in practice civilian control has never been quite what it was made out to be? The so-called sophisticated civilian-headed command and control system, wrapped up in the mystique of "deterrence," that was supposed to work by making sure by mutual fright that an order to press the button would never be given, has been all along only a half-baked story meant more to reassure an anxious public than to reflect reality.
In the early 1970s Bruce Blair, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was a US Air Force launch control officer for Minutemen nuclear missiles. He observed that there was a profound discrepancy between the drills that he was rehearsing and the publicly declared policies of the government. Deterrence was the public policy and this was supposed to mean that the US armory was capable of surviving a Soviet attack and then retaliating. Blair realized how rarely he was asked to drill for such an eventuality. The drill was to fire even though no Soviet attack had yet occurred, either launching the missiles for a pre-emptive strike or else on receiving a warning that Soviet missiles had been launched.
Once demobbed, Blair went on to become what The Washington Post has described as America's "leading expert on nuclear command and control". His later research deepened his earlier conviction that deterrence theory was severely holed, below the water line. The command and control apparatus was so vulnerable to being decapitated by a nuclear strike that it was very doubtful in practice if the US could deliver a single, prompt, retaliatory attack. Indeed, this is why his military superiors had insisted on the training and drilling they gave. The emphasis on being prepared to launch on warning, a dangerous, hair-trigger posture, was at least a practical and doable one.
Of course, this pressed decision making down to minutes -- for the president, about three. Blair's later work showed that the Soviet president was in a similar predicament. Moreover, since the end of the Cold War the situation has worsened, owing to the steadily increasing accuracy of the missiles, not to mention the simultaneous deterioration of the Russian radar and other detection and warning devices.
RSS