A poignant irony of the nuclear era is that during the past decade – the first decade of the post Cold War era – the nuclear powers managed to lower, instead of raise, the nuclear threshold.  By dint of the doctrines they adopted and of other actions they took, or failed to take, the nuclear powers lowered the threshold for both the deliberate and the accidental use of nuclear weapons. 

Russia increased its reliance on the early first use of nuclear weapons in a crisis, which lowered the threshold for deliberate use.  Russia also tolerated the rapid deterioration of its command and early warning system, which increased the prospect of a failure of control that could lead to the mistaken or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons.  Although on paper Russia has a control system that is vastly superior to its U.S. counterpart, in practice the system has not been properly maintained. 

The United States also did its part to lower the nuclear threshold.  During the 1990s, we restored China to the strategic war plan and allowed nuclear tensions with that country to grow.  We also expanded the roles and missions of nuclear weapons in dealing with chemical and biological threats.  We moved further away from no-first-use, lowering the nuclear threshold not only for ourselves but also for other nuclear powers who drew the conclusion that it is legitimate to resort to nuclear weapons to deal with non-nuclear threats. 

In Asia, China, Pakistan and India did their part to lower the nuclear threshold.  All three followed in the footsteps of Russia and the United States by further weaponizing their arsenals and moving closer to the day when nuclear warheads are mated to missiles and bombers, and poised for immediate launch despite grossly inadequate command and control systems.  In South Asia in particular, the threshold dipped lower for both intentional and unintentional use. 

Then, finally, after 9-11, we have to consider anew the possibility that terrorists could manage to cross the nuclear threshold.  More on this later. 

This is the backdrop for the Back From the Brink Campaign to get or keep the world’s nuclear arsenal’s off of hair-trigger alert.  The campaign claims that global zero alert is crucial to our security, crucial to raising the threshold for using nuclear weapons.  Deep de-alerting would inhibit their intentional or accidental use by reducing reliance on them, by eliminating the technical ability to mount a deliberate sudden first-strike, and by eliminating the risk of a mistaken or unauthorized launch. 

The Bush administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) unfortunately did little to advance this campaign agenda – by and large the review perpetuated the negative trends mentioned earlier.  It utterly failed to grasp the point articulated so well 10 years ago by Les Aspin – that the United States would be far better off in a nuclear free world.  The point was reinforced on 9-11 but remained lost on the NPR drafters. 

The NPR does have a couple of bright spots – it went in the right direction in downgrading the Russia threat, and in laying plans to take a large number of U.S. strategic weapons off of hair-trigger alert.  Although the Pentagon says it rejects the idea of de-alerting, the fact of the matter is that de-alerting is the crux of the Bush plan to downsize the strategic arsenal from its current START I level of 7,000 to its Crawford level of 2,200.  I derive some satisfaction from this embrace of de-alerting in spite of the snail’s pace and incompleteness of its implementation. 

Under the Bush plan, 10 years from now the United States will have 880 strategic warheads on hair-trigger alert.  That’s less than half the number currently on alert, but its still a large number.  It’s clear the Pentagon will still be preparing to fight a large-scale nuclear war with Russia, and possibly China, on a moment’s notice.  

The new U.S.-Russian partnership deserves far better than this.  We obviously have a big new nuclear agenda to work out, and in my view accelerating and expanding de-alerting should be a major item on it.  

In a nutshell, the United States and Russia should quickly stand down all of their nuclear forces so that none are poised for immediate launch, and we should together strive to establish zero alert as the international norm of operational safety in all countries around the globe.  

While striving for global zero alert, the U.S.-Russian discussion should also address the size of the off-alert force – the so-called “responsive reserve.” 

Senior Russian military officials say they could live with 1,000 but not 4,000 U.S. strategic weapons in reserve.  Although the number should be as low as possible, I personally cannot see how it makes any difference in terms of strategic stability.  The resilience of Russia’s strategic deterrent will not depend at all on the size of the U.S. reserve arsenal.  It will depend instead on the extent to which U.S. forces are removed from alert, on the effectiveness of Russia’s command and early warning system, on the quality of Russia’s combat training (e.g., bomber pilots need for more than 10 hours of flight training per year), on the vulnerability of Russia’s submarines to anti-submarine warfare, and on the effectiveness of America’s national missile defenses. 

These topics represent a very rich agenda for future talks devoted to raising the nuclear threshold for deliberate and accidental nuclear use.  We should be concentrating on reassuring each other through confidence-building measures and transparency in the areas of anti-submarine warfare, shared early warning, storing/securing and verifying warheads, (i.e., de-alerting), national missile defense (i.e., to prove that it is not armed at Russia), and nuclear terrorism.  We need to reveal a lot more to each other about our hardware, software, plans and intentions. In depth information needs to be exchanged on a host of nuclear-related matters. 

Let me close by calling on U.S. and Russian specialists to jointly investigate the ability of terrorists to compromise the system of control over strategic forces on launch-ready alert, and the value of de-alerting those forces to prevent their capture and authorized use. 

We hear repeatedly about the need to shore up the security of Russian weapons and fissile materials in storage, (and recently about our own as well), but almost nothing about the physical and electronic integrity of the control system for forces kept on high combat alert.  For example could terrorists (with or without insider help), seize physical control of a mobile intercontinental nuclear rocket moving around the field on a truck – and possibly circumvent the safeguards to fire it at the United States? 

I realize these types of scenarios sound really far-fetched.  The specter of cyber-terrorists hacking into and compromising the electronic control of missiles seems especially far out.  But we need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of our nuclear control systems both to allay unwarranted fears and to identify real deficiencies.  It’s a matter of calming nerves, but its also a fact that we never find all the deficiencies in nuclear control systems.  Consider, for example, that an intense Pentagon review of nuclear safeguards just a few years ago concluded that terrorist hackers could possibly gain back-door access to the U.S. submarine broadcast communications network, seize control electronically over radio towers such as the one in Cutler, Maine, and illicitly transmit a launch order to U.S. Trident submarines.  

The vulnerability was deemed so serious that Trident launch crews had to be given elaborate new instructions for confirming the validity of any launch order they receive, in some circumstances requiring them to reject an order that, prior to the recent change of procedures, would have been accepted and immediately carried out, with the result that up to 200 nuclear warheads per boat would have been launched. 

You know what, de-alerting would have been a better fix for this and a host of other deficiencies in nuclear command and control.

By Dr. Bruce G. Blair CDI President bblair@cdi.org

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