Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability - Part 1

in 1953 united states started to deploy nuclear weapons in Europe to support NATO against a growing Soviet threat this deployment provided the impetus for an unprecedented effort to provide security for these weapons of last resort as early as 1960 it was clear that innovative safety and control devices would be necessary to meet US and NATO political and military requirements it was critical that nuclear weapons would always be available for use if and only if authorized by the President and they must never be subject to unauthorized use and must never detonate in an accident the design features to ensure the safety security and reliability now associated with the US nuclear weapons did not happen overnight it's a significant role of the National Laboratories and that deliberate process is the subject of this documentary always never the assumption was Europe could be defended in one and only one way and that was through the use of nuclear weapons then to lagoon land and nuclear bomber crashed and if that had led to a nuclear explosion beyond just a scattering of nuclear materials we would have been very close on the edge of nuclear war by accident the initial weapons that were deployed were for the 280 millimeter cannon and then shortly after that there was quite a variety of weapons that were deployed that included not only the nuclear artillery but the surface-to-surface missiles now they were dual capable aircraft there were air defense artillery and there was also atomic demolition nation's nuclear weapons got at the heart of NATO strategy very quickly from their initial deployment in 1953 although the exact role exactly how and when they were going to be used was often confusing and ambiguous an historic day for America in 1953 President Eisenhower would make nuclear weapons the centerpiece of national defense and the defense of Western Europe Eisenhower decided that we were spending too much on the Department of Defense and cut back the plant level of expenditures this was the new look we in the judgment of the administration could not stand up against the hordes of Soviet soldiers that would be sent against the West and therefore nuclear weapons were a substitute for maintaining massive conventional forces the nuclearization of NATO was codified at MC 48 a seminal planning document declaring that NATO forces would be able to initiate immediate defensive and retaliatory operations including the use of atomic weapons MC 48 also called for the development of forces in being underscoring the importance of a German contribution memories of world war ii were very fresh and so for nato to make that decision to allow germany - we are it was very difficult it almost took the whole world to bring Jeremy down in 1945 and it is this huge huge weight in the balance of power and and East and West are just really really worried about which way that that power that country is going to go that was the linchpin of the Cold War was where the rest Germany would stay firmly in the Western camp or perhaps have some degree of movement toward a sort of a date aunt with the Warsaw Pact and with the Soviet Union but the Allies remained committed to a Germany friendly to the west by integrating West Germany within a system of European defense based on American nuclear power NATO believed that German power could be contained in October 1954 the Allies agreed to make West Germany a member of NATO and in May 1955 bound by treaty Chancellor Konrad Adenauer vowed that the Federal Republic of Germany would not produce or possess nuclear weapons and our job was to ensure that they felt that we could deter or saw Pact attack to assure that the prospect of the war fighting would not be so frightening that the political support for deterrence and for NATO would erode NATO Air Force's must be alert at all times to give them realistic training Avast maneuver is held in June exercise carte blanche in the skies over western Germany 3,000 aircraft from 11 nations take part NATO's first war game involving tactical nuclear weapons was intended to demonstrate us resolve and commitment the defending tactical air force are hit four of them by simulated atomic bomb instead the exercise exposed inherent contradictions of the nuclear battlefield the course of the exercise there were 335 nuclear weapons drop there was an estimated 5 million casualties most of these in Germany I used to fly over it with some of the Seventh Army people it would be bad enough with so-called conventional capabilities but nothing compared to what would happen if we had started using nuclear weapons a difficulty of course was that those battlefield nuclear weapons would be used on German soil and over time the Germans would get increasingly Restless about the way we were protecting them the contradictions of the Cold War were well established by Eisenhower's second inaugural nuclear weapons would come to be seen as the glue that held NATO together while their deterrent role would remain confusing and ambiguous soon a second generation of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons would be dispersed in NATO raising concerns not only about strategy but also about nuclear safety and control a new Middle East crisis arises as President Nasser of Egypt tells a wildly cheering crowd in Alexandria that Egypt has seized the internationally owned Suez Canal encircled by units from 15 red armored divisions that have poured into Hungary patriots fight to the last ditch this is the death of Liberty in Budapest against a backdrop of increasing east-west tensions and despite deep ambivalence toward battlefield nuclear weapons NATO planning proceeded apace and in May 1957 the North Atlantic Council approved a new strategic document MC 14/2 the massive retaliation strategy was all-out nuclear war it was nothing short of that so there was no distinction between tactical and strategic everything was going to be used US nuclear weapons deployed in Europe and closely coupled with forces of the strategic air command would provide NATO with extended nuclear deterrence extended deterrence was challenged from Europe by Charles de Gaulle and others when Charles de Gaulle said will the Americans sacrifice New York for Hamburg but it was the goal or the British were the the Germans who didn't really believe that they could count on us for that sort of thing America wouldn't be able to rely on the threat of deliberately consciously launching a full-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union indefinitely today a new moon is in the sky a 23 inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket one of the great scientific feats of the age I think people felt that the Soviets were speeding ahead of us in some sense during the Suez venture Khrushchev threatens to rain rockets down on Paris and London well he didn't have the rockets to rain down on them at the time but the Soviets were engaged in exaggerating their capabilities and to some extent that influenced our perception to a large extent that influenced our perception it was very easy to move to a worst-case mentality and think oh my god they are going to go into production very rapidly and soon have a very large ICBM force top secret reconnaissance of the Soviet Union would gradually undermine cruise jeff's boasts of missile superiority and bolster Eisenhower's confidence in the US strategic deterrent but lacking this new intelligence NATO political and military leaders shared the public's alarm Eisenhower didn't want America to be the protector of Europe so anything that pointed toward an independent strategically independent unified Europe you know fit in with the Eisenhower policy now that clearly meant that the Europeans would have to be armed with nuclear weapons the idea was to share the nuclear burden and and also complicate the planning of four Soviet first strike and be that much harder for them to overrun NATO if the nuclear retaliation capacity was spread across from countries at the 1957 emergency summit Eisenhower agreed to establish a NATO atomic stockpile and offered a station intermediate-range ballistic missiles at European bases these irbm would be capable of reaching targets in the Soviet Union and were to be a stopgap until America's intercontinental ballistic missiles were ready Congress had authorized this nuclear development on the curvy so that US would maintain custody of the nuclear weapon but what did custody mean if the nuclear weapon was hanging under the wing of a German airplane piloted by a German pilot sitting on the tarmac ready to go and on those bases we had weapons are weapons and they were on over what was called a quick reaction alert for airplanes were supposed to be when they got the word be airborne in five minutes in every case where weapons were deployed to a specific NATO site there was a u.s. custodial presence a few individuals generally young custodians that had canet were the legal control of the weapons embedded with the say the German army I can remember in the tour of NATO around 1958 that it would be very easy for the host nation or some faction in that nation to take over the nuclear facility it was concern what foreign nationals but also about commanders that might use them without proper authority and of course European commander who was an American commander was eager to have them under his own control but if nuclear war was fought it would be fought with central u.s. systems in according to plan and not in reaction to an event of the theater in order to be sure of that there had to be something a little bit better in a crisis situation in 1958 as john foster advanced the concept of use control at Livermore Frederick lay was presenting a confidential report to his colleagues at Rand on the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation about that time we started to alert of our bomber force because of the fear of surprise attack that the bombers could be destroyed on the guard before they took off but then it occurred to me you know the deliberate attack is only one problem we have if there's a accidental nuclear launch you cannot dissuade an accident from happening you have to prevent the accident we had two basic recommendations one was a two-man war at that time one authorized sergeant from the Air Force could move around a bomb that he could have brought to detonation he might be psychotic he might be alcoholic he might be going through a terrible divorce he may be sleep-deprived and make a mistake in the way he's carrying out nuclear weapons safety rules you need a second person to ensure that these kinds of normal natural human foibles don't cause some kind of nuclear accident or launch so we recommended that not just relying on screening of the people in a two-man rule but also on safety locks to put it simply it was a lock that would in turn this otherwise ready to go nuclear weapon into a dumb bomb until a code was inserted and so it is a electrical break or a functional break of critical functions that are in the weapon an acute need for change in nuclear safeguards and security was emerging independently within the defense community by 1960 US nuclear weapons were widely deployed to Europe and Strategic Air Command was preparing for a full time airborne alert mission this posture of extended deterrence and high readiness carried with it new risks soon action by Congress and the White House would crystallize around the concept of a coded lock for nuclear weapons that became known as the permissive action length there were three groups that separately stumbled their way on to thinking we needed something like a permissive action link one was the labs themselves then there was the executive branch and the third group was in Congress the Joint Committee on atomic energy and the fortunate thing is they all came together at the same time the late 50s early 60s 57 to 62 was a period of a drastic change to the nuclear arsenal particularly after weapons were placed on quick reaction alert in Europe and in the United States the customer the military wanted smaller devices lighter lighter devices and so the Los Alamos folks invented the idea of a sealed pin when we develop a recall seal fit weapons these are weapons where the fissile material was an integral part of the high-explosive assembly mechanism with sealed pits you then were in a situation where the bomb was always ready to go now as designs evolved and we went to seal pit when all of the energy sources necessary were in one place we didn't at first recognize the implications of the electrical system we need some mechanism to protect us from that electrical energy that stops the flow of electrical energy directly into your charging system in 1958 nuclear safety was an emerging discipline at the Atomic Energy Commission laboratories and designers at Sandia were challenged to ensure the handling safety of the new sealed pit weapons this pioneering effort in safety would pave the way for the first permissive action link one of the things that was done was to try to include in the weapons some device that would determine the weapon was in the actual use environment that is a device that would maintain a degree of electrical isolation within the warheads electrical system until such time as the weapon sees a unique delivery environment there was a class of weapon type called ADM atomic demolition munitions these munitions were implanted just like a landmine they had no environment to sense the storage environment and the use environment were the same they were just sitting there and so the Army and the Marines chose to use a three-digit coded lock well that also required someone to come up to the weapon to unlock it and Sandia was asked to develop an electrical switch a pattern controlled switch that could be installed in the ADM and operated from a distance at that time they were not thinking about crypto it was the safety concept which was then converted over to a pelvic interface it appeared to be that once the nascent pal technology existed coupled with growing concerns about accidental or unauthorized use that change would be at hand it was in October in 1916 we talked to our group and it consisted mostly of majors in lieutenant Colonel's after we finished the demonstration one of them said well that's an interesting solution but we don't have a problem that goes with it one group was not pushing for this and that was the military the military by and large were satisfied with the procedures in place in the 1950s the US military tended to believe that it was necessary to have very high readiness for the sake of deterrence civilians often believed that but often were also ready to sacrifice some readiness for the sake of operational safety or operational security Eisenhower was much more concerned with operational readiness than he was with issues of civilian control and readiness meant the control could not be too tight what the Kennedy administration had inherited with regard to the control Arrangements they made him may have been quite surprised in Washington senator Kennedy announces his choice for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the weeks preceding Kennedy's inaugural before he and Robert McNamara confronted the hard reality of nuclear geopolitics members of the Joint Committee on atomic energy inspected the custody and control of US nuclear weapons in NATO Los Alamos physicist Harold Agnew was invited to join this congressional tour everybody was in the act with our bombs all deployed all over Europe and theory we were supposed to have control over the weapons which were deployed with other NATO forces in fact it was a token custodial arrangement we've been changing the nuclear arsenal and the NATO deployments drastically since 57m and there was reason to pause have we done everything right what the Joint Committee on atomic energy discovered in December 1960 was wildly more delegated than professional staffers had intended now that NATO really has physical control of the delivery systems and this is what to qra the warheads that are on those delivery systems are those control elements possible it was on one of those trips to one of those installations where I was on an airfield with moms hung under the wing one bomb for airplane I guess what got me was I saw this great big black German Cross on the side of it I walked up to the custodian 1gi he wasn't even 20 years old and I asked him what are you gonna do if these guys come running out and they're gonna take off and no one has told you that it's all right he wasn't quite sure what he should do and I said well what you ought to do is just shoot at the bombs there are four of them they're hanging on shoot those things and don't worry about it this idea of a custodian really wasn't very realistic could that really be viewed as as presidential control of the US asset that's when elements of the United States Congress began to question whether we were operating legally within the framework of these programs of cooperation the tour of NATO nations marked a turning point in the history of permissive action links familiar with the advanced work underway at sandia Harold Agnew filed his trip report in January 1961 Harold Agnew was familiar with some of this work because of his association with don Cotter and others at Sandia and Harold had been to many briefings at Sandia were MC 1541 of this ADM solution was discussed and he and others recognized that this which if it had as an output an encrypted code could be used to put presidential authority back in the release process I went back to the Joint Committee and with Don Kotter we made a breadboard outfit which we demonstrated to the Joint Committee as to what we were going to do the embryonic Cal technology that Sandia had been working on really as a as a safety enhancement was seized upon as a solution to the legal dilemma another 18 months would pass before the new Kennedy administration would issue a presidential directive on pal the matter of sharing us nuclear weapons with NATO allies was a hot topic in the Kennedy White House the president and his national security adviser McGeorge Bundy immediately undertook a review of nuclear command and control when the Kennedy administration got alerted the whole question got opened up and passed and it became an entirely different concern not one of custody but of presidential release but the president wants to have it both ways he wants to be able in the 1960s to use nuclear weapons first if he feels it is absolutely necessary to protect the United States and our allies but he wants to make sure that no one else makes that decision for him maintaining the cohesion of the Atlantic Alliance was a top priority for the new president yet in spring 1961 Kennedy approved a Department of Defense recommendation that no further nuclear weapons should be allocated for support of non US forces ongoing dispersals to NATO were halted pending the results of further study a US president since the ill-starred conference with President Eisenhower in Paris the talks go on for two days and while they came to a limited agreement on Laos there still appears to be sharp disagreement on Berlin in early June 1961 when Kennedy and Khrushchev first met the issues of custody and release Authority for nuclear weapons in NATO were at once overshadowed and propelled by the crisis in West Berlin the attention of an ancient world is focused on East and West Germany and Berlin at the time of course West Berlin was isolated from the rest of the NATO located in East Germany one of the most important events was a Soviet attempt to take West Berlin at the start of the crisis the National Security Council met to discuss a memo on Berlin by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson the NSC also discussed steps to strengthen u.s. physical custody of warheads in NATO as well as preparing war plans for the use of nuclear weapons in Central Europe the Berlin task force was basically saying well we would have a nominal response of US forces and then we would have to appeal to nuclear weapons that scared everyone including probably the Soviets who had spies on the channels and realized that we were contemplating that I called the SAC your supreme Allied commander who was general Norse dad back to Washington and I said look Larry day-to-day we did be they did see we did be how this thing kind of Bob he said well they'll do he will do after L do G will do H they'll do I and I said what do we do then he said well he said I guess we have to use nuclear weapons that was that kind of a situation a situation in which Khrushchev sought to reverse the balance of nuclear power in Soviet favor by detonating a new super bomb as Kennedy responded to the crisis he continued to contemplate the prospect of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation the basic thrust of the kennedy policy which the pals were a component was to make sure that control was exercised by the political leadership that unless they could be controlled by the president the president was going to consider pulling all nuclear weapons out of europe an accident or an incident at one of those basis even though it may not be full nuclear or launched it just wasn't in the national interest the point was we needed something besides just the custodial team with their sidearms to to invoke control Kennedy remained focused on the stability of NATO and nuclear weapons were central to maintaining that alliance on the occasion of Charter Day in March 1962 the president toured Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory where he saw promising new pal technology I think that had an impression on President Kennedy but you need several people providing to the leadership to the management some confidence that this is a serious problem and here is a solution to deal with it we were able to provide prototype working hardware that that people could understand and get a feel of what it would be in terms of the impact upon the weapons and the weapon systems a consensus emerged to assure against unauthorized use the never concept of nuclear weapons a presidential directive was issued in June 1962 calling for pals to be installed on all nuclear weapons dispersed to NATO commands for both non-us and US forces overall there was an urgency to equip the NATO stockpile was something that interrupted critical electrical functionality inside the weapon and prevented the normal use of the of the nuclear device we had pounds in weapons in Europe coded switches installed starting in September of that year NATO was involved in installation of these weapons and the generation of the code management system this was really their their show Pal is only an enabling hardware the first generation pal devices were motorized versions of the sergeant Greenleaf lock that we used to find on all of our safes it was literally a combination lock attached to a system of motors and gears that would allow you to remotely manipulate the lock mechanism as opposed to twisting it with your fingers MC 1541 represented the technology that we had at the time which was electromechanical it was a clockwork you would put in a code and that would then shift around to see it does that number correspond to a stored position of a code wheel and then you would move to the next digit and do the next code wheel and finally when you get down to the fourth digit and you've got all four code wheels lined up it would allow a geek to come down which would press on another switch which would then allow electrical current to flow to the left now the pile device is integrated into the system it's embedded and buried within the weapons system and so on adversary would have to find his way down into the weapon system to be able to circumvent or bypass the powell device the pal of course is the device to permit administrative control by means of codes that code could be held separate from the weapon indeed could be held by the US Command Authority and shared with the NATO ally only at the very last moment so you separated the holders of weapons the people that had did the daily care and feeding from those that authorized it but the people who had to operate those systems initially took it kind of personally as a besmirching of their loyalty and their responsibility you don't trust us there was a reflection on faith so to speak our trust we had in them and the other which was really I found amusing was what if we don't get the message what if we don't get the codes there were a number of operational issues that had to be addressed because this is a system that required external interaction with weapons support personnel by the fall of 1962 the first permissive action links were installed on US nuclear weapons in NATO including those dispersed the US forces on Quick Reaction alert both the Army and the Air Force immediately challenged pals reliability there were problems in terms of the instructions as well as the hardware for charging batteries and storing batteries and those kind of things I was sent to Europe to understand the specific nature and scope of the problems that the military was having not with the hardware that was in the weapons the permissive action links but the rest of the system that allowed that to work we did not make proponents immediately out of their services but we certainly did defuse the level of anger and resentment in a democracy like the United States civilian control of the military means civilians must also control the use of nuclear weapons what the POW did is separated possession of the weapon from ability to make a nuclear detonation you could possess the weapon and yet not be able to detonate it at least not until you had received the POW code initially permissive action links were intended just for the weapons that would be shared with our NATO allies but over time the POW concept migrated through the rest of the Arsenal seven failsafe box mistake Omaha the situation of concern is a sac bomber crew launches nuclear capable aircraft under positive control flies out somewhere into northern Canada or into the Arctic and flies a turnaround pattern there until he receives a go directive from sac headquarters and at some point they would reach the failsafe line and that line was generally drawn just outside of the air defense radar detection their standing rule was to turn around and come back home if they had not received orders to proceed to target the thought was the high-frequency communications that were available at the time were not totally reliable the crew is out there thinking that nuclear war is beginning or may have already begun and in fact may be responsible for the fact that they can't seem to talk to their headquarters here was a situation where people could imagine that the crew might work in concert and decide that they were going to execute the mission without ever having received the presidential authorization the air force was intensely focused on the nuclear mission particularly in the 60s so when you have those huge numbers of weapons out there you have to have two concerns your primary concern is somebody accessing a weapon that intends to do you harm from the outside but you also have the insider problem one of the concerns in use control is being able to deal with an insider threat and that's a very difficult thing to deal with and that was to provide protection against unauthorized releasing of an armed weapon deerforce believed that they had in place sufficient controls they always saw pal as a complication to the always an impediment to them doing the job they were they were hired to do and in fact they had great faith in their commit their own command control system regardless of how much you trust your own people and regardless of what kind of personnel reliability programs you have if you got that many weapons out there and that many people involved then you have both the malicious insider concern and then you have the careless insider concern many within the defense community questioned whether dependence upon sacs personnel reliability program and administrative controls were sufficient to prevent an unauthorized release in 1967 after a high-level DoD review sac was directed to equip its bombers with a code enabling switch the Kootenay blinks which was really designed to prevent unauthorized action by an aircraft crew prior to their landing anywhere because the code enabling switch was positioned in the location that it would be very difficult for the crew to get to all the airplane was in flight if you recall what the function of a pal is a pal is to break critical arming and firing lines it's buried deep within the system a bomber coded switcher CES is just another variant of a pal is located in the aircraft and it breaks critical power lines to the weapon by 1970 bomber coded switches were being fielded in sac b-52s and a new generation of permissive action links was evolving to meet the needs of NATO nuclear policy as well as a changing threat environment at a time when the Europeans were again questioning us resolve the Nixon administration considered ways to strengthen NATO's nuclear options my view was that selective nuclear strikes would persuade the Soviet Union that the United States would not be deterred from using nuclear weapons against Soviet territory the threat of their use would condition how the Warsaw Pact forces would have to fight conventionally in such a way as to give us a conventional advantage NATO's policy of flexible response required the capability of the Selective release of nuclear weapons unlocking a few but not all the multiple code capability of a new category deepal was an enabler of flexible response cap deepal was the first implementation for multiple codes for selective release they could release a small set of weapons or they could have the option for release for a theater wide response the evolution of kal devices followed both an increasing desire to provide operational flexibility and a desire to address vulnerabilities now if you think about denying use to personnel that are not supposed to have access if they ever get access it's a little bit different problem use denial was absolutely important when you looked at taking a weapon from a storage location and now putting it on to a target platform itself during the Cold War the main focus was always on the adversary and we would run drills on having to launch we would run drills on being at a ground attack by the 1970s US nuclear weapons were a mainstay of European defense use control systems part of the never of nuclear weapons had evolved to assure against unauthorized release but also had to address the question of enemy overrun and the answer to that was what was called nonviolent disablement critical elements of the nuclear weapon are irreversibly damaged reconfigured in such a way that the weapon systems would not be functional without a major reconstruction effort the function of PAL is to maintain control until custody can be regained there's no guarantees but they do provide protection and delays from ABC headquarters just outside the Olympic Village in Munich West Germany the piece of would have been called the serene Olympics was shattered just before dawn this morning about five o'clock when Arab terrorists went to the headquarters of the Israeli team and immediately killed one man it was the first real on terrorism event that caught public attention armed dedicated team well-thought-out well-planned willing to die well that's different than what we'd been dealing with before we were dealing with with enemies over running our territory the possibility that terrorists might attempt to steal a u.s. nuclear weapon or even occupy a weapons storage site grew in its importance the scenario you had to protect against there is a terrorist that seizes a nuclear weapon and then as days even weeks to overcome the use control devices ways will looked at for making the disruption or disablement automatic an autonomously operating system that senses intrusions into the weapon and invoke disablement automatically by 1979 the terrorist threat loomed large and NATO planning studies of nuclear security were undertaken and systems were developed to thwart the actions of terrorists and assaulting forces the lab engineers kept pace with the evolving threat and by the 80s the pals that were being deployed on the new weapons were highly robust against tampering or seizure by terrorists so the Pala gave us a longer delay time if someone got access to a weapon that shouldn't have access to it but it also gave you much more comfort that unless people were using the right processes the right procedures and were fully authorized and we're doing everything they were supposed to do now that the weapon was more secure always to go off when you do need them never to go off at any other time these of course stress the command and control system and the history of the nuclear age has been civilians and military wrestling with what civilian control of nuclear weapons means in coming to different understandings in different times shaped by events of the day and shaped by the evolution of Technology the triangles are their primary targets these squares are their secondary targets the aircraft began penetrating Russian radar cover within 25 minutes general turgidson I find this very difficult to understand I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons that's right sir you are the only person authorized to do so and although I hate to judge before all the facts are in it's beginning to look like general Ripper exceeded his authority dr. Strangelove crystallized the always neighbour problem in the civil military tension that underlay it and the Strangelove scenario sketches a fanciful and absurd really way in which the military might go off the reservation I want you to transmit plan R R for Robert to the wing is it that bad sir looks like it's pretty hairy it was about a commander who had been authorized to use nuclear weapons under certain circumstances believing that those circumstances had come about took actions against the wishes of the American president and the American Secretary of Defense that was not an entirely far-fetched it was an unlikely event but was not an impossible event at all the president arrives at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida for a display of aerial mics by general Curtis LeMay he sees a display of manned weapons there was a fear on the part of some that the military might be reckless that they might be prepared in a crisis to use nuclear weapons Eisenhower had a very different attitude towards this problem than did Kennedy Eisenhower is a former military commander he had a great deal of trust in the US military and would often delegate authority down to lower-level commanders the Eisenhower policy of pre delegation had led to a situation where the sac commander could because of a failure on the phone lines between Washington and Omaha could authorize the use of nuclear weapons in an offensive manner against the Soviet Union leading to a full-scale nuclear war President Kennedy unlike President Eisenhower did not want that risk to remain and the permissive action links were a way of establishing clear presidential control in our academic world we refer to that as the tension between positive control do what you're told and negative control don't do it and we tell it until we tell you it is very hard to assure both sides of that dilemma always and never at the same time and in fact the command and control system at any given point in time and at any given period in the nuclear history has favored one side or the other perhaps no single commander and military organization embodied they always never problem more than the enigmatic general Curtis LeMay and his vaunted Strategic Air Command in 1958 LeMay listened with interest to Freddie clays Rand report on accidental or unauthorized use almost by accident then vice chairman of the Air Force general Curtis LeMay heard about the briefing and he says I want to get the briefing should there be a nuclear accident in the United States that is blamed on our own forces what would happen to his Air Force afterwards and so he was known as the hardline or as a guy who wanted to have his bombs ready to retaliate massively but he also knew that this kind of a risk had to be reduced or eliminated general LeMay dramatized a different problem with nuclear command and control system what do you do if all of the civilian leaders are gone you could design the commander control system so that in such a case it would fail impotent or you could design the system that says in that case the military can retaliate with nuclear weapons regardless and general LeMay argued for the latter system and LeMay said the pilots an American he'll know what to do for general LeMay the quantum leap in the destructiveness of nuclear weapons was profound and he was determined to protect the United States from a bolt from the blue like that which struck on a clear hot summer morning what some would call an absolute weapon focused the tension between military and civilian objectives immediate availability versus deliberative decision-making about nuclear weapons in the year following its use in world war ii the foundations of nuclear policy were established president truman transferred authority for this uniquely destructive weapon from military to civilian hands while reserving the ultimate decision for its use to the president even at the very beginning many of the themes that operated during the Cold War and still operate as we consider what to do with nuclear weapons were present the first and most important one was a recognition that nuclear weapons were different from other military tools a uniquely destructive weapon that had to be handled in a very different way the spirit of the arrangement at that time was to keep nuclear weapons under civilian control and separated if you will from the operational military commands it would ultimately use them if they were to be used to assure that a wide range of views would be brought to bear on everything having to do with nuclear weapons in which there was a division of responsibilities between those who were charged with designing developing producing and manufacturing and those who were charged with executing them in military operations the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 created a civilian-led Atomic Energy Commission that would administer civilian and military uses of US atomic power the Act also established clear civilian authority over the use of nuclear weapons vested in the President and presidential authorization for use has continued to this day as the central feature of nuclear weapon command control over time the balance between assertive presidential control and its delegation to the military varied with each administration in 1987 President Reagan formalized nuclear command and control policy assuring authorized use of nuclear weapons and assuring against unauthorized or inadvertent use during the Cold War it was our overriding concern that our forces be survivable to a first-strike in order to manage that risk we had to accept other risks you know I mean this this business is all about risks doing that you have to consider the that weapons would always be ready to maintain deterrence but this should never be available for unauthorized use or never be subject to an accident political leaders need to think about where do they feel comfortable in this continuum between safety and reliability and that's the delicate balance during the Cold War to manage the risks and strike a balance between always and never the three Atomic Energy Commission nuclear laboratories continually evolved new technologies improving the safety control reliability and performance of nuclear weapons historically developments in these different areas were often out of step with one another and with operational realities as an agent of both always and never technology would create new capabilities and spawn unexpected challenges

Channel: Sandia National Labs

Views: 110,085

Rating: 4.78125 out of 5

Keywords: Sandia National Laboratories, Safety (Quotation Subject), Security (Quotation Subject), History Of Science (Field Of Study), Stockpile Stewardship

Id: DQEB3LJ5psk

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Jungleradio]

If you all haven’t yet, I highly recommend reading Command and Control by Schlosser. The stories/anecdotes and overview of nuclear weapon safety is amazing.

[u/SyrusDrake]

I just recently watched this again. It's one of my favorite documentaries. Make sure to check out the other parts too.