BACK IN THE bad old days of the Cold War, both the United States and the USSR
maintained thousands of nuclear weapons, ready to be launched at a moment’s notice.
Only one person had the authority to unleash America’s nuclear forces: the president
of the United States. He could do so at any time, without consulting Congress or the
military or anyone else save his own conscience. Although the mechanism for doing so
never actually consisted of pushing a button, that became the popular metaphor for setting off doomsday.
It was a precarious state of affairs, but there was a certain cold reasoning, or perhaps
rationalization, behind it. If the U.S. was attacked, went the argument, there would
be no time for careful consideration before nuclear blasts began going off on American
soil. Retaliation would have to be immediate. The only way to assure deterrence was
to maintain the unquestioned ability for immediate retaliation. So wherever the
president went, a military aide followed close behind, carrying the “football,” a special
briefcase containing all the secret codes and communication equipment needed
to launch World War III at any time.
BOOK REVIEW — “The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power From Truman to Trump,” by William J. Perry and Tom Z. Collina (BenBella, 335 pages).
Almost 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, little has changed. American and Russian nuclear arsenals, while reduced in numbers due to significant arms control agreements (which have been largely abandoned), still remain on hair-trigger alert, poised to respond to the nonexistent threat of a surprise “bolt from the blue” attack. And the man with the football, the only individual who can order the use of U.S. nuclear weapons, remains the president of the United States: Donald J. Trump. As William J. Perry, former defense secretary in the Clinton administration, and Tom Z. Collina, policy director of the Ploughshares Fund, a nonprofit nuclear disarmament foundation, note in “The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power From Truman to Trump,” “the U.S. president can still unilaterally launch a nuclear war in about the same time it takes to order a pizza.”
Perry and Collina’s book is actually the second volume with a similar title to deal with nuclear weapons and warfare. The first, Daniel F. Ford’s “The Button: The Pentagon’s Command and Control System — Does It Work?,” was published in 1985 at the height of Cold War tensions and focused mostly on the precarious state of U.S. early warning systems and their ability to assure retaliatory capacity, even as they increased the danger of false alarms and accidental war. Revisiting those same issues 35 years later,
Perry and Collina’s work demonstrates that instead of improving with the end
of the Cold War, matters have actually become far more dangerous.
The book appears at some important historical and contemporary junctures. 2020 is
the 75th anniversary of the birth of the atomic bomb at the Trinity site in New Mexico,
and its first and (so far) last use against human beings in war at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It also comes as the only remaining major nuclear arms agreement, the 2010 New
START Treaty, is set to expire in February 2021. The treaty can be automatically
extended for another five years by mutual agreement between President Vladimir Putin
of Russia and President Trump. Putin has already agreed. Trump has not.
The abandonment of international treaties by the Trump administration is only one
aspect of the book’s carefully reasoned and clearly articulated argument. For younger
generations to whom talk of megadeaths and megatons seems like ancient history, Perry
and Collina have a message: “If you missed out on the first nuclear arms race and feel
like you’ve been passed over, you’re in luck. It’s back.”
Casting aside treaties and any logical military necessity, the U.S. and Russia are gearing
up for a second nuclear arms race more dangerous than the first, developing new
weapons and “modernizing” old ones while extending the potential battlefield into the
previously sacrosanct realm of outer space. Yet their rationales remain essentially
unchanged from the Cold War, and just as invalid. Rather than a nuclear Pearl Harbor,
“The greatest danger of a nuclear exchange during the Cold War came not from a
deliberately planned attack, but through bad information, unstable leadership, or
false alarms,” Perry and Collina write, chronicling a wide variety of historical examples,
some from Perry’s personal experience in the Pentagon.
“We have been focused on the wrong threat,” they note, which coupled with the policy
of presidential sole authority, makes the U.S. as well as the rest of the world more
vulnerable to nuclear catastrophe. “We are preparing for a first strike from Russia that is very unlikely; what is not so unlikely is that we will blunder into a nuclear war. Yet
by preparing for the surprise first strike, we actually make the blunder more likely.”
And there’s a new wrinkle that didn’t exist during the Cold War: the threat of
cyberattacks directed at nuclear weapons command and control systems. As detailed
in the book, we had something of a sneak preview of this possibility back in the
1970s and ’80s when computer glitches resulted in faulty missile attack warnings
that came close to triggering war on several occasions, but these weren’t the result
of deliberate hacking attempts. Now, however, cyberwarfare is infinitely more
subtle and sophisticated, raising the specter of targeted attacks to spoof or cripple
U.S. and Russian systems. “What if hackers could take control of U.S. nuclear
weapons — to launch them, or to prevent their launch when so ordered?” the
authors write. “Cyber threats,” they continue, “dramatically increase the danger
of accidental nuclear war and could undermine deterrence itself.”
Perry and Collina depict just such a nightmare scenario in the preface of “The Button,”
in which an unnamed U.S. president is interrupted on the golf course by a nuclear
attack warning and impulsively orders massive retaliation without waiting for
confirmation, only to find out too late that the attack was a false alarm created by a
hacking attack on Strategic Command computers. Such a possibility only magnifies
the risks of placing nuclear authority in the hands of a single individual who would
have only minutes to make the decision to launch.
Far from being an idealistic polemic pleading a noble but unrealizable case for the
total abolition of nuclear weapons, “The Button” sets out practical, well-defined,
well-explained steps for reducing the dangers, including ending the policy of
presidential sole authority to order nuclear weapons use, prohibiting launch on
warning and first use, and retiring all land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles
(while still retaining a more-than-adequate and invulnerable deterrent capacity
with our submarine and bomber forces). Aside from greatly reducing the threat of
accidental or inadvertent nuclear war, Perry and Collina point out another considerable
advantage: saving $1.7 trillion that could be redirected to other more urgent
national needs.
“The United States needs to learn the right lessons from the Cold War,” they
conclude. “We need to change gears and design a nuclear force and policies
to minimize this danger. This will save money, prevent a new arms race, and
make us all safer.”
There’s still time, but it’s running out. “We are all on the atomic Titanic, and
the ship is headed for a hidden iceberg.”
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