Everybody knows that the Cold War is over, that all those thousands of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles mothballed and the nuke-bearing bombers and ballistic-missile subs put on permanent stand-down years ago, right? Wrong. Although the numbers have been cut by 50%, all the same weapons and alert systems, the same hair-trigger launch protocols are still in place, 20 years after the dissolution of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. They've just been relegated to a smaller presence in our collective consciousness, and a virtually nonexistent one in the daily news cycle. But they continue to hold the entire population of the earth hostage, in constant danger of genocide on a unimaginable scale.
Journalist Ron Rosenbaum has been writing about his obsessive fascination with nuclear war since the mid-Seventies. In 1978, his long investigative piece for Harper's, "The Subterranean World of the Bomb," for which he was allowed unprecedented access to highly restricted military facilities, including the SAC War Room Command Balcony and a Minuteman silo launch capsule, is widely considered to be a classic of its genre. That he should have to continue writing about this subject 33 years later, long after the fall of these weapons' intended target nation, is, to say the least, troubling. In fact, it's downright terrifying.
How the End Begins reprises one of the Harper's article's central themes: the question first posed by Air Force Major Harold Hering, a decorated Vietnam veteran in training for a job as a ICBM "missileer," namely, "What safeguards exist to prevent a launch officer from receiving an unlawful launch order, such as one given by an insane Commander-in-Chief or an enemy infiltrator into the command and control system?" For merely asking this question, Major Hering was forced into early retirement by a disciplinary panel. The question, posed in 1974, has never been adequately answered, or even addressed.
Rosenbaum goes on from there, explaining the logical paradox behind "Deterrence Theory"--Would you retaliate in response to a first-strike nuclear attack that has already destroyed your country and thus risk causing the total annihilation of humanity?--a question to which either answer gives your enemy a rationale to strike you first. He talks to military brass, think-tank analysts, ethicists about deterrence, the morality of civilian slaughter, fail-safe points, "dead-hand" mechanisms. He outlines several real historical situations in which nuclear war almost did happen, including a NATO war game in West Germany in 1983 that was misinterpreted by the Soviets, and the Israeli bombing of a Syrian breeder reactor that nearly spiraled into World War III, which occurred in September 2007--yes, 2007! He discusses the many ways in which human or electronic error or subterfuge could spark a launch, as well as a number of geopolitical "hot spots"--Israel/Syria/Iran, Pakistan/India, China/Taiwan, the Koreas--in which a small-scale regional nuclear exchange could easily escalate into full-blown global holocaust. And he outlines the beliefs and goals of groups representing a broad spectrum of thinking, from the abolitionist Global Zero Initiative to the nuke-happy deterrence theorists of STRATCOM (the United States Strategic Command, the successor to SAC), and some locales in between these extremes; most striking among these being the recently declassified position papers of JCS Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, who argued in vain--in 1959, before the prairies became dotted with missile silos--that the best deterrence model was for each side to deploy a small nuclear force based entirely on submarines, which were undetectable and mobile and effective only as a defensive retaliatory threat, rather than to build hidden launch stations on each country's own territory, which invited a deadly hail of retaliation upon a civilian population. The Air Force won with their silos and bomber bases, and the US and USSR were locked into a 30-year genocidal standoff.
This is a fascinating and important book, though I will warn you that it has the unwelcome side effect of Bomb-anxiety-induced insomnia, the kind I imagined we should no longer have any reason to suffer. But the threat is still there; the Doomsday Clock still reads one minute to midnight.
