America's Doomsday Machine

By BRUCE VAN VOORST WASHINGTON

Just one of the 192 nuclear warheads aboard the U.S. missile submarine Tennessee, currently at sea, would be enough to flatten the Kremlin and every building within half a mile if detonated 6,000 ft. over Moscow. Up to two miles from ground zero, all but the toughest structures would be destroyed, and even as far as four miles away, wood and brick buildings would collapse and burst into flames. But that devastation is not sufficient for the Pentagon. U.S. nuclear-attack plans call for raining 120 warheads on Moscow alone -- a level of targeting, says veteran arms expert Peter Zimmerman, that "isn't strategy, it's pathology."

Massive retaliation has always seemed unreal, if not immoral. Now, as the cold war wanes and George Bush joins other NATO leaders in trying to reassure the Soviet Union of the U.S.'s peaceful intentions, critics point out that it is also profoundly dangerous. Veteran arms negotiator Paul Nitze says that despite the political changes sweeping Europe, the superpowers remain locked in an unstable, apocalyptic embrace. Georgia's Democratic Senator Sam Nunn has proposed a review of targeting doctrine, and Wisconsin Democrat Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, will probe the issue at hearings. The most determined critic is Delaware's Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, who urges a presidential review of nuclear plans to determine whether deterrence is now possible "at a greatly reduced level."

If no more than a third of the current U.S. arsenal of 12,000 warheads made it through the Soviet defenses, the nuclear punch would pulverize every Soviet city with a population of more than 25,000. Yet to satisfy Pentagon requirements for obliterating the Soviets' military and industrial capabilities, U.S. negotiators in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks have rejected Soviet proposals for drastic cuts in each side's arsenal of warheads.

Air Force officers are already complaining that even the agreed upon START level of 10,000 warheads would leave the U.S. short, with "more targets than weapons available to strike them." General John Chain, commander of the Strategic Air Command, insists that he must have 75 B-2 Stealth bombers, each carrying 16 weapons, to offset the START limit on missile-delivered nukes. "Forty-nine hundred missile-carried warheads," says Chain, "are not enough to destroy the Soviet Union."

The more than 15,000 sites targeted in the Soviet Union are outlined in what Arkansas Democratic Senator Dale Bumpers last week called the "most closely guarded secret in America" -- the Single Integrated Operational Plan. The so- called SIOP, or "doomsday book," designates facilities in the Soviet Union that are to be incinerated and the kinds of U.S. missiles and planes that will carry out each attack. It divides Soviet targets into four categories: nuclear forces; other military targets; 105,000 ranking members of the Soviet military, political and managerial elite; and war-supporting industries such as factories and depots.

An attack against even a fraction of these targets "would cause the Soviet Union to cease functioning as a society," says Stanford professor Scott Sagan, a former adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet arms expert Janne Nolan of the Brookings Institution contends that the "American political leadership is not aware of the enormous destruction envisioned in the military plans." The point is illustrated by official estimates of what would happen to the U.S. if the Soviets launched a surprise attack of 3,000 warheads, a mere quarter of their inventory. The Federal Emergency Management Agency says that between 70 million and 130 million Americans might be killed. After hearing figures like this, a reflective President John Kennedy muttered, "And we call ourselves the human race."

Nuclear targeting is admittedly a complicated business. Planners must calculate the reliability and accuracy of the missiles and nuclear warheads, measure them against Soviet defenses and make a judgment on what it actually takes to deter the Kremlin from launching a first strike. Still, the notion of raining down nuclear weapons on the U.S.S.R. -- "convincing every last Soviet official that he's the target," as one Air Force official put it -- is sufficiently outrageous to spur experts to speak out. In the quarterly journal International Security, national security scholars Desmond Ball and Robert Toth call the current version of SIOP "wasteful and dangerous" as well as "destabilizing to the nuclear balance."

Despite declarations that the U.S. would retaliate only after a Soviet attack, the Pentagon is building a force of fast, accurate missiles and aircraft that the Soviets may correctly view as a first-strike threat. As Bruce Blair, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, points out, the truly astronomical number of SIOP targets forces the U.S. into a situation in which, contrary to declared doctrine, launching first or on warning of a Soviet attack "becomes almost a necessity to do the job."

Reshaping the SIOP and reducing warheads also offer a real chance for money savings: with fewer targets, fewer aircraft and submarines are needed to launch warheads at them. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney told Congress that he has undertaken a "new look" at the SIOP, but given his cautious record, critics doubt how far-reaching this look will be. Nitze, hardly an advocate of unilateral disarmament, says the U.S. could make do with 3,000 or so warheads, while former Defense Secretary Harold Brown insists that a stable deterrence is achievable under certain circumstances with no more than 1,000 warheads.

But such levels can be reached only by rethinking SIOP. "The SIOP drives everything -- force levels, budgets and arms control," says Paul Warnke, former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. "Unless the SIOP changes, nothing else changes." Including the doomsday threat.