U.S. Strategic Nuclear Policy, An Oral History, Part 2

[Music] the Soviet Union built an ABM system around Moscow known as the goulash system and it's interesting that in the early strategic writings they give enormous way to the mission of ballistic missile defense this is absolutely critical because unless they can you can solve that problem in a way it's going to be very difficult to win a nuclear war they had built earlier a very expensive air defense system around Moscow the Soviet Union was thinking about how you would wage a nuclear war how you would survive a nuclear war and prevalent in nuclear war but the revelation of the actual defense system made a parade it was great concern that defense systems of this sort we're going to be built in large numbers and spread around the Soviet Union we assume that they wouldn't just offend Moscow they would extend it across all of all of Russia or the Soviet Union and we had to think about how would we respond to that for McNamara a Soviet ABM system would challenge the policy of assured destruction constrained by budget McNamara's dilemma was to choose between developing new offensive systems to penetrate galosh or to develop anti-ballistic missile defenses to guard against Soviet ICBMs an offensive ballistic missile has three phases of flight the boost phase the mid-course phase in the terminal phase and you can try to shoot it down in any one of those phases early missile defense efforts were largely in the terminal phase because it wasn't possible with the technology of the time to see the missiles in the early part of their flight let alone to attack them the Nike X was a revolutionary concept revolutionary in the radar it was a phased array a large a perimeter acquisition early warning radar and then two different kinds of missiles a long-range missile spartan and a short-range missile sprint it actually exploded out of those two they were not ever destined to be completely successful one could think of a way to frustrate those defenses by bringing in ballistic missiles in line to the same target to defend cities against nuclear weapons delivered by missiles means you have to intercept high up in the atmosphere when you made the first intercept you would create a fireball which would block out communications over a vast volume the other missiles would continue to fly in their line and emerge your defense system would see it it would move out to intercept it and you would have another fireball in a blacked-out region but of course these are now stacking closer and closer to the target [Music] they can ladder down in order to hide incoming warheads behind other war deaths and for those reasons we've never been able to implement a defensive cities and that's the real problem to defend our values against nuclear attack McNamara was confronted with technical challenges to ballistic missile defense as well as its cost effectiveness in 1964 a study of Defense's was prepared for Harold Brown the director of Defense Research in engineering at the VINs state of ballistic missile defense it didn't make sense to mount a big ballistic missile defense program no matter how much you do in the way of ballistic missile defense the other side can by spending considerably less effort overcome what you do both sides would tend to build up their offensive forces to overcome any deployed ABM system even though those ABM systems on both sides were likely to be ineffective so the buyer of the defense didn't get anywhere spend his money on a lousy defense and all he got was to face more offense it was this race that went on for decades between the offense and the defense if you think of Defense's hardening and mobility as well as and I'm missile as well and Minh seemed to have the edge at times others seems to have the edge McNamara reached the conclusion that the offense had the advantage the proper responses expansion of our offense murrs that could substantially increase our offensive capability was one way of doing it the approach that was taken by the Navy was to develop a very small re-entry vehicle reentry body carrying a small nuclear warhead that could be put in large numbers on the front end of a submarine-launched missile this was a birth of what we called Poseidon multiple reentry vehicles evolved into multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles Merv's would essentially multiply the number of nuclear warheads the US could deliver in a strategic attack by August 1968 Merv's were successfully tested with the air force's Minuteman I initiated or at least approved the research development of merv technology and I think I was wrong McNamara thought he was wrong because he was worried about an arms race between the superpowers what he called an action reaction phenomenon despite his budgetary efforts to limit the growth of nuclear weapon systems pressure continued to mount for an anti-ballistic missile defense president johnson felt that something had to be done to protect the people the president called for the deployment of sentinel sentinel was to provide area coverage of the u.s. the arguments against it were based mainly on the recognition that the Soviet forces were so numerous that any defense deployment of The Sentinel type was likely to be overwhelmed the announcement to deploy Sentinel launched a new debate experts from outside the Pentagon weighed in on the deficiencies of ABM underscoring that no such system could provide a leak-proof area defense of cities the conclusions were that mid-course intercept our ballistic missiles really doesn't work because there are too many countermeasures that is you can put warheads in balloons you can have additional boons that in the vacuum of space look like warheads and so you're pushed to defense terminal defense that's fine if you're terminally defending your missile silos that system even with that relatively limited mission not trying to defend people wasn't very effective renamed safeguard the broad vision of an area population defense against nuclear weapons was traded for a point defense of Minuteman silos but even in this truncated form ABM was destined to be short-lived and would soon be overshadowed by new and competing policy initiatives [Music] the decade of the 1960's is a crucial one for the public responses to nuclear weapons we have a series of crises the Berlin crisis in 1961 when Kennedy advocates renewed intensified programme of civil defense and fallout shelter construction then the Cuban Missile Crisis when the nation seems to come very close to nuclear war and then the Test Ban Treaty of 1963 [Music] arrest it is all test ban agreement has been initialed in Moscow the test ban treaty was perhaps simply the first step in a series of treaties and negotiations with the Soviet Union but once the issue of atmospheric testing was dealt with by the by the 1963 treaty then deterrence theory and the whole the whole strategy that flowed from deterrence theory I think did have a reassuring effect at least at some level [Music] but nuclear strategy and public responses to nuclear issues were not unfolding in a vacuum by 67 the Vietnam War was very much underway and public attention and activist energies were increasingly focusing on Vietnam [Music] and when people thought of McNamara they didn't think of nuclear strategic innovations they thought of Vietnam in 1967 McNamara and Johnson were confronting the failure of their strategy of graduated response in Vietnam on a daily basis at the same time McNamara was struggling to navigate competing interests among the Joint Chiefs General Earl wheeler chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for increased tactical support in Vietnam while Air Force chief of staff general Curtis LeMay pressed for the continued growth of US strategic nuclear forces McNamara thought that there was sort of no end to the appetite for more nuclear weapons he wanted to basically say I can cap the problem we have enough stuff we got all kinds of capability here we can assure that we can destroy them no matter what they do to us we can right out of first strike and then our retaliatory capability we could destroy everything of value to them that's enough for McNamara and the arms control community mutual assured destruction became almost a catechism it was a way to reduce the incentive for a first strike on either side while ensuring a stable us nuclear force posture for deterrence let's make each side the hostage of the other so neither side has to build up its defenses neither side has to truly worry about a first strike because it's retaliatory forces will be sufficient to wipe out the other side so I think that assured destruction as a device for putting a lid on the arms race was totally compatible with arms control they kind of went hand in hand historic Holly bush in Glassboro New Jersey where east meets west President Johnson with aides Ruska McNamara awaits his first of two summit talks with Soviet premier Kosygin kosygin's arrival marks the first in-person meeting of the two world leaders mutual assured destruction became the foundation of an initial effort to engage the Soviets in strategic talks while the meeting yielded no agreement Glassboro was the beginning of a period of de tante in January 1969 d tot would become the centerpiece of the Nixon administration the new president and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger sought to reduce Cold War tensions by increased diplomatic commercial and cultural contacts with the Soviets and especially through strategic arms control Nixon and Kissinger were very concerned that we needed negotiated arms control not just a set of a peaceful world but to use it as a diplomatic tool to slow down the growth of Soviet systems because we were not going to match them therefore it's very important to maintain stability and how do you maintain stability you maintain stability by trying to have a workable relationship for the other side and that's what the table was within three years arms control negotiators in Geneva hammered out an anti-ballistic missile treaty that significantly limited defensive systems the talks also yielded salt 1 otherwise known as the interim agreement temporarily capping the numbers of offensive missile launchers the ABM Treaty was designed to enshrine to institutionalize as it were mutual assured destruction but it included one additional element it included an estimate of technology that both sides basically had concluded that at that time deployments of ABM systems was not going to be militarily effective I think they taught was an attempt to both calm things down and also to allow strangely enough to allow us to keep on building systems [Music] the interim agreement was largely thrown together Nixon Kissinger at the summit it was intended to be a cap on the ICBM and SLBM forces of the two sides at the level at which they then were once we had an arms control treaty which limited missile carriers rather than warheads then it was inevitable that we move towards Merv's and did we moved forward with arms control and date hunt on the one hand while on the other hand going right ahead with merged missiles and going through several generations of merge missiles then the side that deployed burbs would gain a huge advantage over the side that did not have him and so both sides ended up deploying them and we weren't very very short amount of time from a thousand warheads to 10,000 warheads primarily as a direct consequence of this all treaty prior to salt 1 you had basically an unrestrained arms race after salt won the arms race just went in another channel that of missile growth and Merv's and improved accuracy and that sort of thing the search for a new strategic arms limitation agreement began in 1974 as both sides quietly continued to modernize their nuclear forces we were determined that drafting the American version of what would be the salt 2 treaty that we would try to correct some of these things the concept of assured destruction and the fact of daytime did low people into feeling that the nuclear arms race wasn't that dangerous and there wasn't really any need to pay much attention to it if the threat of war with with Russia is diminished that means the threat of atomic destruction global thermonuclear war is diminished as well so date on is crucial to understanding America's nuclear history in the 70s [Music] how do you distinguish between the validity of that stance and the argument of dr. Kissinger for what he calls sufficiency here again I think the semantics may offer an inappropriate approach to the problem our objective is to be sure that the United States has sufficient military power to defend our interest I think sufficiency is a better term actually than either superiority or parity when they announced the policy of strategic sufficiency in January 1969 Nixon and Kissinger appeared to accept that nuclear parity with the Soviets was a fact of life immediately following the announcement Kissinger launched several interagency studies evaluating US military posture and the balance of power the objective was to develop alternative military strategies I mean I think that Kissinger was in the camp that was skeptical of assured destruction because the short destruction creates the impression of a kind of static situation notes once I have enough I don't have to think about it anymore but this is an evolving situation it's dynamic the defects of mutual assured destruction were quite clear even beforehand the studies that we did it Rand emphasized that the capacity for extended deterrence was diminishing simply because we would be self deterrent in you to talk about a massive SIOP like strike at the Soviet Union there was a real question over whether as the goal put at the US would risk and destruction of Washington in New York and let her to save Paris or Berlin in response to this question Schlessinger argued that traditional answers are no longer satisfactory and he recommended exploring the sub SIOP class of options so the notion was one would use nuclear weapons to strike in a limited area that would convey to the Soviets that indeed we were serious and we were ready to respond shots injure as an analyst at the RAND Corporation was much more of the view that nuclear weapons had to be finely calibrated he was very highly differentiated in his views of nuclear weapons meanwhile at the National Security Council Kissinger recommended additional study for the kinds of situations which the president might actually face in a crisis specifically it should examine more discriminating options than the president's eye on when we were consulting with Henry Kissinger in 1969 we argued that they ought to have a presidential reserve force which would be these limited options the top leadership everybody including Schlesinger all was thought in terms of limited options and and always had a struggle with that because the planning and the hardware were set primarily by the big options I think there was a desire from the earliest psyops to have smaller options and so there were quote smaller options but they contain many hundreds of weapons and so they were not small at all and so the structure of the SIOP itself was was such that you had small options but they were embedded within larger options embedded within larger options and so at multiple hundreds of weapons and the small options there was every chance of bringing a massive response if you're the Russians and a small option were executed you had a strike by ICBMs and then five hours later you had the SLBMs and then 18 hours later the Bombers came roaring and it looked like three separate attacks for us it might seem very you know very specific very carefully calibrated for them it might look like we were going to take out the entire society fears about a diminished us capacity for extended deterrence would soon be addressed by improvements in the accuracy of Minuteman we had been pressing for more accurate weapons so that we could be assured that we could pluck out this target or that target without a major impact on the surrounding life what was generally referred to as collateral damage technologists love this because the idea now was to make weapons that were more accurate faster to fire I think the technologists have driven a lot of this stuff I mean we could make this kind of a ballistic missile therefore we did therefore the policy people said gosh this would fit in very well with how we're thinking but the improvements of accuracy were were a normal consequence of the technology and of the military views about what's valuable and they didn't derive from any strattera great strategic thinking many other people read the improvements in accuracy in a different way I remember the day in June of 1970 when the United States announced that it was going to go ahead with moves we came to a fork in the road where we could go with assured destruction on arms control and limits or we were going to push forward with nuclear war fighting the Merve technology initiated by McNamara had come to fruition providing target planners with a significant increase in the number of available warheads [Music] the rapidly retarget able and highly accurate birthed Minuteman 3 also contributed to a revival of counter force and strategic thinking I think a combination of the increase in numbers and the change in the quality being ever better for attacking military targets and that was kind of sinking through that it wasn't just assured destruction On January 10th 1970 for the now Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger introduced the policy underlying national security decision memorandum 242 or NIST of 242 the new policy was quickly dubbed the Schlessinger doctrine the selective strikes that I emphasized were intended to convey to the Soviet leadership that the United States would not be self-determined initiate the use of nuclear weapons against Soviet territory and that they should have that firmly in mind in making their plans we had for the first time an open statement by a US Secretary of Defense that the United States did not nearly have a mutual assured destruction policy but actually wanted to have and did heven was trying to acquire and improve warfighting capabilities the war fighting capability it was not intended to fight a war it was intended to strengthen deterrence within a month of Schlesinger's public announcement miss de Mayo prompted for major actions to increase the options available to the president the new declaratory policy also briefly renewed public fears of thermonuclear war but concerns about a shift toward a posture of nuclear war fighting were overshadowed by the administration's continued progress in arms control and the promise of detox some people are always thought that this was like the priesthood just debating among themselves it really had no operational significance others said no you're not right that this will have an effect on thinking in key elements of the civilian and military leadership and it will make the use of nuclear weapons more likely making war more likely that was not our view we thought that it would make war less likely if one wants to preserve the peace as I think President Washington said planned for war for many the signing of the anti-ballistic missile treaty and the interim agreement in 1972 came to symbolize the essential stillness of the Cold War where each nuclear adversary sought to limit the strategic arsenal of the other US efforts at arms control together with changes in strategic nuclear policy were based on the idea that the Soviets shared u.s. beliefs about deterrence and about fighting a nuclear war if deterrence should fail I think there was a view which was very widespread and pervasive that the Soviet Union must think about nuclear war in the same way as the United States in the mid-70s the United States had fallen into a trap intellectually we had fall into a trap of thinking about what would deter us and we mirror-image that on to the Russians it's important to recognize that that it's what the other side thinks that deters the other side not what you think right after the Moscow summit in 1972 the number of tests of Soviet missiles just expanded exponentially and they began to introduce Merve capability and more accurate guidance the fear was that they could put large numbers of warheads on those same missiles and that then they could effectively threatened our land-based deterrent so you began to get real worries not only about the capabilities of the new systems but about the thinking that lay behind these deployments what were they really thinking President Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger thought they knew what the Soviets were thinking when they met with Leonid Brezhnev and his advisors in November 1974 Gerald Ford continued to invest heavily in strategic arms control and the salt talks continued a pace during his short-lived administration in the months following the upset victory of Jimmy Carter as president progress on arms control slowed as the mood in Washington shifted away from daytime and toward defense in early 1977 Paul Nitsa the consummate cold warrior who had written NSC 68 now led the committee and the present danger the committee posed frightening hypothetical scenarios that would leave a u.s. president self deterred in the face of a Soviet counter force attack then get the argument developing about a window of vulnerability in which Soviet first strike could destroy the u.s. ICBM force the committee argued that the remaining US nuclear forces the Bombers and the ballistic missile submarines would not be effective in counter force operations so that that sort of forced the u.s. back to an assured destruction attack primarily against cities us retaliation with you know slbms would be deterred by the fact that the Soviet Union could then retaliate against American cities there would be strong pressures for us to halt the conflict before either side launched their final forces and in which case we would have lost because most of our nuclear force would be destroyed such a an approach which left things unequal worried some people the mood in Washington recalled earlier periods of increasing vulnerability the first Soviet atomic test the launch of Sputnik and the worries of a missile gap that followed the u.s. watched as the Soviets exploited local conflicts in Angola Mozambique and Ethiopia and as they expanded their political and economic influence [Music] then in October 1977 the soviets alarmed the europeans with the deployment of the highly accurate SS 20 merv irbm aimed at NATO military targets West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt publicly declared that the Soviet SS 20s represented a major new threat to NATO which demanded a response others like the Committee on the present danger asserted that the deployment of SS 20s created a broader imbalance in theater or tactical nuclear forces the Soviets saw the future military balance as something they were tilting in their own favor there was a famous article by Richard pipes called by the Soviet Union thinks that confined and win a nuclear war and which he argued you know they didn't accept the theory of deterrence in the last analysis when you're in the depths of a crisis what really would deter them and some people would say the only thing that would deter them is the knowledge that they would be defeated [Music] much more important was growing evidence that they had built very heavily protected deep underground shelters in the Moscow area and it did become clear that at least the leadership was planning seriously to survive Jimmy Carter entered office championing arms control and challenging the Joint Chiefs to consider a minimum deterrent nuclear force consisting of fleet ballistic missile submarines he had been an officer on a nuclear submarine one of the first questions he asked during the first presidential briefing on nuclear plans why don't we just have a survivable force of 200 missiles I think may have been the beginning of the end of his credibility with the military within his first year in office the president confronted an increasingly aggressive Soviet adversary now in the face of new and worrisome intelligence estimates Carter issued presidential directive 18 that launched a review of US targeting policy Leon sloths who had a long tenure with the State Department led a seminal study called the nuclear targeting policy review I think a critical driver was a reassessment of Soviet strategic objectives and then we also assessed how they were building and deploying their forces they believed that they could survive a nuclear war they could control in every war what's losses study came out and said was you're dealing with people who look at nuclear war differently they build deep bunkers they plan for reloads and re firings of ICBMs these guys have a different view and what you need to do if you're going to have an effective deterrent is get into the mind of the Soviet leadership figure out what they value and hold it at risk obviously their own their own lives were important their control over the various constituents of the Soviet Union and their own political control therefore the countervailing strategy concentrated on those targets the countervailing strategy I woke up one morning and said for the posture statement we needed something a little bit different to help secretary Brown and get him some publicity and I said why don't we call it countervailing instead of counter force or something and so I I can't even remember whether I discussed it with Harold or whether I just put it in the posture statement but it it went over not a thing changed PD 59 Yarber had an important breakthrough it was an attempt to look at deterrence through Soviet eyes and that became the basis for the notion of having many options of having them nested I was discouraged to discover that there was a notion that we might attack the Soviet political leadership and if we did so the all possibilities of restraint would be destroyed at that time on the other hand if they leadership on the other side is convinced that well things may go badly but we'll survive in the end that's not as much of a deterrent as we thought that if things go badly and if we can't reach a settlement before almost everybody yes before tens of millions of people get killed you're not going to be able to survive personally this is the Harold Brown we're not going to win a nuclear war we know that we need to make sure the Soviet leaders understand the same thing in an era of strategic nuclear equivalents the u.s. sought to deny the Soviets any possibility of victory by remaining capable of fighting successfully PG 59 signaled a decisive shift away from the policy of mutual assured destruction toward a posture of nuclear war fighting but it was very clear in our Brown's mind that the purpose of this was to influence the Soviet decision maker not to fight a nuclear war I never read P D 59 to say we expected to win we read P D 59 as saying that we were to terminate hostilities on circumstances favourable to the United States that's quite different from winning 1975 a snapshot would reveal two superpowers armed to the teeth with the Soviet Union having more momentum than the u.s. the nuclear buildup that began in the mid-70s was in response to the perception that the Soviet Union was pulling ahead of the United States and we saw a comparative advantage being in technology so we were always pushing our technological imperative in an age of sophisticated technology the computer plays an increasingly large part in DNA's program computer generated code described the nuclear blast and thermal environment and predict the effect on weapon the neutron bomb was something that was actually first developed for the sentinel system and this was a warhead which would killed by strong flux of 14 million pump neutrons but once one realized that the kill was produced by neutrons people began to think about the possibility of killing people and not equipment or not facilities particularly in relation to the hypothetical use selectively in Western Europe tests were aimed at defining and solving the problems of tactical nuclear warfare could troops and vehicles move through the terrain in the wake of a tactical weapons blast the problem there was how do you defeat mass tank divisions without destroying all the villages which about a mile or so apart throughout Central Europe actually do it with neutrons the idea was you can go to much lower yield and leave the villages and the inhabitants unscathed relatively speaking none of this would be very clean and still get at the tank whose it's making nuclear weapons seem less threatening if they come to see more like conventional weapons and and actually can be used in theater operations rather than just to destroy cities in June 1977 the Carter administration's defense budget included the production of enhanced radiation nuclear warheads the so called neutron bomb was to be deployed on NATO bases and was described as the first in a new generation of tactical mini nukes by early 1978 Jimmy Carter found himself at the center of a heated debate that played out in the streets of Western Europe and at NATO headquarters protesters alleged that the neutron bomb would kill people leaving property intact at the same time NATO defence ministers feared being decoupled from the US strategic deterrent leaving Europe to become a nuclear battlefield under intense public pressure Carter suspended production and deployment of Neutron weapons the neutron bomb in terms of public opinion was definitely a non-starter and it contributed to what was a new wave of anti-nuclear activism Brussels December 1979 an unusual joint meeting of NATO defence and foreign ministers on December 12th 1979 NATO agreed to modernize its nuclear forces going forward with plans to deploy new intermediate-range nuclear missiles the fear was that the Soviets could strike Western Europe from their homelands and we had no comparable system and so NATO embarked on the so-called two-track strategy it would modernize to have a comparable capability by deploying ground launch cruise missiles in five countries and by deploying a modified Pershing to missile in Germany and it would seek to eliminate the SS 20s through negotiations [Music] but no sooner had the two-track decision been made the Soviets then invaded Afghanistan it began on Christmas Eve with 350 transport planes shuttling a Soviet Airborne Division into Kabul Airport three days later the main invasion force followed 50,000 troops crossed the Soviet Afghan border the Kremlin had committed its forces to a long and costly occupation neither the United States nor any other nations which is committed to world peace and stability can continue to do business as usual with the Soviet Union the invasion led to a suspension of talks with the Soviets on intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe and it forced Jimmy Carter to withdraw salt - from consideration by the US Senate the treaty had been the centerpiece of carter's efforts to reinvigorate to taunt its withdrawal delta sharp blow to the President and I think Carter just saw that it was hopeless and rather than suffer a defeat which I think he felt would be harmful to arms control itself he was through the treaty without a strategic arms limitation agreement Carter was left with the largest peacetime military buildup in history which he had initiated with the 1980 defense budget for many Americans the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan marked the end of tataat and the beginning of a second cold war with a new and more virulent nuclear arms race I had this image in my mind of successive generations of increasingly sophisticated war fighting systems we were not rejecting nuclear deterrence we were not necessarily rejecting neutral assured destruction we were only rejecting the tightening of a tripwire that was actually being created to make nuclear war more likely deliberately with the proposal by forsberg of a nuclear freeze freeze it in place had the wonderful appeal of simplicity it was it was easy to grasp it was such a moderate appeal for a radical campaign and it was contrasted with this radical rhetoric of the president how do you do mr. president what do you see is the long-range intentions of the Soviet Union I don't have to think of an answer as to what I think their intentions are they have repeated it that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause meaning they reserved under themselves the right to commit any crime to lie to cheat in order to attain that and that is moral when his administration came in the Reagan people said no you know this is an evil empire the only way you can deal with it is through strength initially the response of the Reagan administration must be to be suspicious of arms control do not have an interest in it and the argument was we are inferior to the Soviets in nuclear weapons we cannot negotiate from a position of inferiority Ronald Reagan led a neoconservative contingent into office in 1981 like himself many of his advisers were former members of the Committee on the present danger and they continued to believe that the u.s. remained strategically vulnerable Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger moved quickly to establish a program of strategic modernization adding 33 billion to Jimmy Carter's record defense budget part of the Reagan campaign was to convince the Congress who had to appropriate the money Soviet military power used colorful prose and he used the worst possible case indeed stretching some points about what the Soviet Union was doing nothing was underestimated I am announcing today a plan to revitalize our strategic forces and maintain America's ability to keep the peace well into the next century first I have directed the Secretary of Defense to revitalize our bomber forces by constructing and deploying some 100 b-1 bombers second I have ordered the strengthening and expansion of our sea based forces third I've ordered completion of the MX missiles Ronald Reagan had made the MX missile the centerpiece of the largest military buildup in US history meanwhile massive anti-nuclear demonstrations were occurring throughout Western Europe in protest of NATO's plans to deploy new intermediate-range us missiles public protests in Europe had a tremendous effect in pushing in the United States forward to pursue an IMF agreement the United States is prepared to cancel its deployment of Pershing two and ground launch missiles if the Soviets will dismantle their SS 20 SS 4 and SS 5 missiles this would be an historic step the proposal known as zero option was praised in some quarters as bold and politically brilliant but others saw it is disingenuous the administration was asking the Soviets to dismantle hundreds of new weapons in return for a u.s. agreement not to deploy a missile force that had not yet been built the American and Russian ambassador's have decided that they'll meet alternately at each other's mission initially twice a week the INF talks began in late 1981 but made little progress by the spring of 1982 the nuclear freeze movement was spreading across the United States and culminated with a rally in New York Central Park that many would call the biggest protest in American history to understand what took place in the Reagan I think you have to understand that by that time there were very very strong forces at work within the government President Reagan Hayden over weapons President Reagan would like to have been the president that went down in history as getting rid of nuclear weapons the Secretary of Defense Aidid any kind of concession to the Soviets the secretary defense thought we needed more nuclear weapons the Reagan administration I think was dissatisfied who would have thought that the u.s. might not win a thermonuclear war there was certainly a rhetorical change in that Reagan and secretary Weinberger talked about prevailing [Music] from the beginning the hallmark of the Reagan administration was peace through strength even as calls for a nuclear freeze grew louder in the fall of 1981 Ronald Reagan directed changes in top-secret guidance for the use of nuclear weapons national security decision directive 13 stated that we must be prepared to wage war successfully and that the United States and its allies must prevail NSD d13 was not that different from pd 59 but we didn't want to be justifying the largest buildup in history based on jimmy carter's strategic policy there is not that much difference it alters the priority of the targets if the other thing about NS DD 13 is that it had some unfortunate rhetoric it had this very chest thumping if there's a nuclear war we're going to prevail even though these were very classified documents and nobody ever intended them to see the light of the day there was nonetheless great attention paid to the rhetoric by which you expressed things physical became the basis for how you talked about nuclear weapons in public discourse in the spring of 1982 the Reagan administration's increasingly harsh public rhetoric about the Soviet Union served to fuel public fears the image of Russian militarization and the Russian military and the possibility of war between the two sides it just seemed like there was a kind of war mongering administration the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people as Reagan was denouncing the Soviets the Pentagon's defense guidance was leaked to the New York Times the combination of harsh public rhetoric and secret guidance about the possibility of a protracted nuclear war in which American nuclear forces must prevail made for a combustible mixture we worked very hard to get declaratory policy down right that was the year of the nuclear freeze the nuclear protests we had to explain what we were doing to our own people nobody knew what prevailing meant and when it finally became an issue in the context the nuclear freeze President Reagan began using the phrase that we worked out with secretary Weinberger you know a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought while the Reagan administration softened the language of declaratory policy a war of words and images continued between a president who sought to confront the Soviet Union here they are the focus of evil in the modern world and those seeking to portray the fearsome result of that confrontation the danger was described in very vivid very emotional terms and even if significant portions the human population survived the initial cataclysm of war the long-term ecological effects would be absolutely devastating the nuclear winter thesis as advanced by Sagan who was basically wrong the effect was vastly overblown and the model which they used was clearly wrong it wasn't so much that people thought that there wouldn't be a nuclear winter but that he really overstated it pretty seriously so once you put in realistic assumption about targeting and realistic assumptions about what the climate would do you came up with a potential of cooling of possibly some of the ocean a few months over certain parts of the world not a trivial effect but nothing like what was originally described I think that the nuclear winter debate intensified the images that people had about what a nuclear war would do to the world and why a nuclear war fighting policy didn't make any sense he was facing in public he did not us that the Soviets will pursue a peaceful cause he felt strongly he had to ensure the survival of the lack of people on the fever will goddesses Edward Teller had long advised Ronald Reagan on matters of Defense and now urged the President to abandon mutual assured destruction for a doctrine of assured survival in the fall of 1982 teller pressed Reagan to mount a breakthrough effort for a nuclear Strategic Defense Reagan was receptive to tell her as well as two other proponents of non-nuclear defenses at the high frontier group Reagan was searching for a way to challenge the Soviets that did not rely upon offensive weapons or arms control and technology was a very good way of challenging them because this was our strong suit all of us came together and Reagan without very many people knowing he announced what became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative I call upon the scientific community in our country those who gave us nuclear weapons to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete the origin of SDI was President Reagan's antipathy to nuclear weapons and he wanted a defense a non-nuclear defense against nuclear weapons which somehow he argued would render nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete shield laser based technologies new exciting new technologies that can render us safe from any possible nuclear attack and he painted a very compelling image of the power of American technological know-how the supporters of the SDI in the Technical Community and there weren't actually that many of them but they believed and rightly that technology had changed substantially and that it was worth taking another look maybe we could we'll brighter lasers higher intensity lasers maybe x-ray lasers pumped with nuclear weapons and so forth that was fine on paper there was not ever to my knowledge laser system that could be deployed that made any sense whatever lasers in space would have been extraordinarily expensive and extraordinarily vulnerable and not assured of performance we really never had a defense we had a policy to build a system but that was only to do the research and development twenty five billion dollars within the first five years fifty billion dollars 75 billion dollars over a period of ten years and then we would decide whether to go ahead with the construction so suddenly almost overnight people aren't debating nuclear arms-control or nuclear freeze proposals they're debating the technological effectiveness of the Strategic Defense Initiative and I think for a brief while there was some significant hope among the population at large but I believe that that was pretty quickly put to rest by the sort of traditional arms control community argument that was made right away and repeatedly and I think very effectively that there simply wasn't any way to have a comprehensive defense we had some nice technology from SDI but no way you could have the leak-tight system the initial euphoria over SDI subsided in the months following the president's speech Reagan's initiative would evolve into an extensive research and development effort and the theme of us technological superiority would clearly resonate with the Soviets Reagan believed he had offered a way out a technological solution to the nearly 40-year old dilemma surrounding nuclear weapons in May 1983 a pastoral letter by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops reframed this dilemma in moral terms casting doubt upon the very premise of nuclear deterrence not as an end in itself but is a step on the way toward a progressive disarmament but events in late 1983 would push the goal of arms control virtually out of reach the September shoot down of a Korean passenger jet by Soviet defenses was followed in November by the delivery of intermediate range nuclear missiles to NATO prompting the Soviets to withdraw from arms control negotiations altogether us-soviet relations were probably at that moment at the lowest point in many years it was a true nadir we have lost our New York City radar sources confirm the explosion of nuclear devices there in New York and up and down the East Coast we interrupt this program at the request of the White House at the end of 1983 the threat played out on television in dramatizations that were many crystallized the fear of sudden and catastrophic nuclear war they're on their way to Russia the nuclear danger was encapsulated with the image of global thermonuclear [Music] all of this popular culture material feeds into shaping a public mood that in turn creates the framework within which the strategists and the diplomats and the clinical leaders must operate and it was within this complex framework of emotional moral and international security issues that the president now found himself it was a very uncertain time [Music] [Music] strategic nuclear policy is inherently presidential and so in every administration that I'm familiar with there's been a formal highly classified document that sets forth nuclear policy one of the things that happened in the 80s was that the Omaha process and the guidance process had grown apart so that decisions were being made in Omaha that didn't belong in Omaha when we separated that decision authority and the responsibility for target selection we set the stage for what ultimately happened a target set that that grew beyond any sense of rationality in my estimation the phrase was coined that the high priests of targeting in Omaha were targeting every pop stand on the trans-siberian highway and there was a very strong belief outside of the building that that was going on and in that that the target ears were out of control if you will all the warheads were used there were never any spare warheads and and so warheads were being used against targets probably that they should not have been used against this targeting was a result of a nuclear strategy which declared that the United States and its allies must prevail issued in October 1981 Ronald Reagan's nuclear guidance would be refined by the office of the secretary of defense into the nuclear weapons employment policy or new f82 and then further elaborated into the nuclear annex of the joint strategic capability plan or J scape by the Joint Chiefs of Staff from there the joint strategic target planning staff in Omaha would develop the SIOP what the jst PS does is from a huge huge target list they apply the Jace cap guidance we would be given characteristics of damage that we should strive to achieve on a particular target set a ICBM silo would be given a word picture description of how severely that silo should be deformed or crushed or whatever the criteria was for that particular thing and then damaged expectancy would compute the probability of achieving that criteria now damage expectancy is the product of the probability of arrival of the weapon at the target and then assuming that the weapon gets to the target the probability of damage damage expectancy was not specified in the guidance but there was a tacit understanding that the planner should achieve the highest value for this commonly accepted metric of the plan the logic would be that if a specific set of targets were selected and that we achieved a specified level of damage on those targets that would be meeting the policy objectives stated from the civilian policy community the issue of what becomes enough really depends on what the response is when you take that provision report back each year and of course your results never satisfied all of the guidance that is the civilian leadership and for time the military leadership would look at the fact that the SIOP did not produce the desired levels of de against all of those target categories and that was used to declare we didn't have enough warheads when I came into this arena when I was the director of j5 with responsibility for annex II and the J scab I was astonished to realize the true extent of the target base how it was broken down and how the attack went down [Music] and so at that point my awareness began that something was quite wrong here and that was really the beginning of my deeper relationship with Frank Miller who was one of those civilians in the room who obviously had a deeper grasp of these things but I could sense his frustration there was no reason for anybody in Omaha to ever throw a target off the list there were lots of weapons and there was no analytic scrutiny brought to bear that said why are you hitting this instead of that each of these evolutions of the strategy expanded the demands was when we added limited nuclear options we didn't do away with the major attack options and that's where this breakdown this dissociation of target planning and policy came most immediately into play and in the period 85 to 88 what I did was to lead a small team of people which gradually uncovered tremendous discrepancies between the NSD d13 guidance and the war plan there was a young navy commander named ed Eilert who first brought insight into the gross disjuncture between urban avoidance small options and secure reserve force issues and one issue at a time we changed the war plan so that it in fact began to resemble and reflect presidential guidance and what we did was simply bind together all of the solutions that we had created in the three years eighty five six and seven into new f80 seven and that for the first time actually put some strictures on the planning process new weapon provided the war planners in Omaha with highly detailed OSD guidance but this was only the first phase in an effort to improve the nuclear planning process in the spring of 1989 Richard Cheney the representative from Wyoming would bring a new energy and awareness of operational planning to the office of the secretary of defense secretary Cheney was far more knowledgeable about nuclear planning than anybody gave him credit for secretary Cheney and I had a relationship we knew each other professionally before he came into the building and it was in the context that relationship that we'd often talked about nuclear policy and nuclear planning secretary Cheney then goes out to Omaha and I'm briefing him on the plant about all the good work we've done in the past several years about how we fixed the gross morphology and he starts looking at some of the SIOP de numbers that we have and he says well why is this happening and why is that happening so by the fall of 89 we understand the SIOP needs to be overhauled secretary Cheney ordered an urgent review of strategic nuclear weapons targeting that would require a highly cooperative effort between the Defense Department the Joint Chiefs and the war planners in Omaha and so we start this work in the first phase is to examine and then deconstruct the target Basin say what are we hitting and why are these valid targets and should this number of weapons be used against this kind of targets and the answer in many cases was no but also there was a much more realistic assessment of from a targeting standpoint of what were the key critical targets that really mattered and and what were a reasonable damage expectancies associated with those targets in in to a certain extent when was enough enough [Music] in June 1991 secretary Cheney sought to formalize the new relationship that had emerged during the target review to forge even stronger links between the policy community and the war planners in Omaha Cheney established the nuclear planning working group what that new relationship was was that OSD policy now had sigh of clearances now could look at the details of the war plan and could verify that the policy goals were in fact being implemented in the war plan and it became more of a collaborative effort between OSD policy and the folks at Omaha that were were developing the war plan so all of this reentry salted in in the kind of dialogue that we would ultimately like to see take place across our defense establishment where OSD and Joint Staff and a combatant commander staff are engaged in a useful and important dialogue on how policy becomes implemented in war plans the strategic targeting review of the late 1980s was not a one-time effort but the beginning of a continuing process that resulted in a more collaborative working environment in which to build this ion but this was just one of many changes during this dynamic period changes were occurring on several fronts including technology with the continued rapid development of US nuclear weapon systems [Music] during the Cold War there was a lot of technology push and since that innovation kept presenting strategic options that's what technology is all about presenting in sometimes sudden and unexpected ways new possibilities by the early eighties we really had a fundamentally different set of capabilities when we began then to introduce yet a new class of nuclear weapons that not only had large yield but had very high accuracy we then had a significant breakthrough with the deployment of the Trident to mission because Trident to missile had both throw weight and accuracy so with the high yield w88 warhead the Trident 2 forced the Navy into thinking beyond the notions of counter value the accuracy of Trident 2 permitted the planners to plan the employment of that system in exactly the same way is they planned the employment of their the intercontinental ballistic missiles in 15 minutes from launch you had a fair chance of being able to destroy land-based ballistic missile systems as well as bomber bases Reagan's modernization program which included significant improvements to command control and communications was getting the Kremlin's attention in the first week of November 1983 the US tested its command and control systems and nuclear weapons release procedures during a NATO exercise called April Archer the Soviets responded by going on high alert wary that Reagan was practicing for a pre-emptive nuclear attack for Reagan the Soviets fearful overreaction was sobering 1984 was a year when Reagan and his advisors would take stock of powerful new offensive weapon systems coming online the promise of strategic defenses as well as continuing public fears of thermonuclear confrontation as he prepared for his reelection campaign Reagan began to soften his language toward the Soviets for those differences are differences in governmental structure and philosophy the common interests have to do with the things of everyday life for people everywhere it was the time when day taught was getting back on track Gorbachev was coming to power and the Soviet Union and dramatic dramatic changes were unfolding that ultimately would lead to the end of the Cold War Gorbachev was brought in by the old men of the Kremlin not to overthrow communism but to rev a PHY revived the Soviet Union make it make it stronger Gorbachev was prepared to do things that no Soviet leader ever had even been willing to think about much less dude when Gorbachev and Reagan meant for the first time some 3600 journalists had assembled in Geneva for what many described as the most unpredictable summit in two decades while there was little substantive discussion of arms control the two leaders set the stage for continued negotiations on intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe and new talks on reducing strategic arms even more importantly Gorbachev and Reagan agreed to meet again Geneva was important I suppose for the personal relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev but then Reykjavik was the meeting at which Gorbachev agreed to the principle of intrusive on-site inspection for the INF treaty later transposed to start we couldn't have had either those treaties without that decision by the Soviet Union gorbachev approached reagan with proposal after proposal for dramatic reduction and even the elimination of strategic weapons but SDI was the price [Music] and to preserve SDI mr. Reagan did not agree with mr. Gorbachev in Gorbachev's willingness to abandon all nuclear weapons they did not come to an agreement there we didn't have to reduce our nuclear weapons SDI Reagan's fantasy was untouched the SDI program and Reagan's persistence and refusal to back off on it played a pivotal role and first bringing the Soviets back to the table secondly getting them to negotiate seriously about offensive reductions and finally I think in deciding that they simply could not compete neither a superpower had much luck in trying to push militarily and the real competition at that point where the economic and political and that's a per competition with the Soviet Union lost never lost a NATO a competition they lost the economic and political competition we can last a cold peace really while negotiators met in Geneva and the Soviet economy buckled under the strain of its military buildup Reagan assailed the very symbol of the Cold War mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall few could imagine what would be called a year of miracles change that would sweep across Eastern Europe and into the Soviet state Maxim is Dovie I know probe I trust but verify most Lucchino antipas distributable today you repeat that at every meeting [Music] for the people of Western Europe the end of the Cold War began with the agreement to remove all intermediate-range nuclear forces the soviet SS 20s had been deployed to ensure a partitioned europe their dismantlement gave rise to what President George Bush would call a new world order it seemed to me that development in the mid eighties when Gorbachev came into power and basically ended the prime reason for the Cold War namely the division of Europe and President Reagan had the width and the acumen to recognize that the situation had profoundly changed and to say so and to convince the American people that it had done so which is I think was his best contribution [Music] when we came into office in 1989 it was a period of significant change or at least changed rhetoric and so on so we decided it was time to reevaluate US policy around the world we looked around and we saw no change in Eastern Europe no change other than the rhetoric of Gorbachev and we said no that is not enough not since the closing days of World War two not since the East German riots of 1953 have crowds gone wild like this young East Germans dashed the last 100 meters to the wall and were hauled into the West by West Germans who'd climbed on top at the end of the year of miracles in November 1989 change came with the elimination of the seemingly intractable symbol of the Cold War we've imagined it but I can't say that I foresaw this development at this state now I didn't foresee it but imagining it yes the wall coming down was partly a surprise not as nearly as much to us as it was to Gorbachev Gorbachev always intended to reform the system he didn't intend to do away with it it turned out he underestimated the the power of the forces he was unleashing reeling from internal economic reforms Moscow systematically withdrew military support from the eastern bloc unraveling the Warsaw Pact when the Berlin Wall came down it presented the first instance of us for us where targets were rapidly being removed from the plan as in we would send a message out and in delete' particular sorties and not have an alternative sortie for those weapons for a period of months at times especially with the reunification of Germany we would want to make changes in our own nuclear posture other changes that we were prepared to do but only if the Soviet Union would reciprocate amid the rapidly changing political landscape Bush and Gorbachev met to concretize the new orientation in Europe the shipboard summit led to an agreement on reductions in conventional forces and soon a new strategic arms reduction treaty would be complete with a profound impact on nuclear planning the idea in start was to seek overall quality and to capture real military capability in a way that we had not done before start was significant for the new complex counting rules it placed on warheads and delivery vehicles as well as for its intrusive verification regime but as Gorbachev was embracing an agreement to ensure peace and stability with the West he would soon confront a rejection of his own economic and political reforms at home within hours tanks and armored personnel carriers had appeared on the streets of Moscow it was inevitable but as the day wore on the White House would become the focus of resistance to the coup the unsuccessful coup attempt of late summer ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union but the autumn of 1991 would continue to be a dynamic time for arms control decrees issued by the Council on illegal we went through a period where it was obvious the Soviet Union was collapsing that made start one ratification somewhat complicated but it gave us opportunities to look at things we never looked at before when President Bush did under a series of things called presidential nuclear initiatives he took our bombers off alert canceled our mobile ICBM programs took nuclear weapons off Navy surface ships and submarines eliminated ground launched nuclear weapons from Europe and withdrew them to the United States two years ago I began planning cuts and military spending that reflected the changes of the new era but now this year with Imperial communism gone that process can be accelerated in his final State of the Union address President Bush announced a series of additional nuclear initiatives that would reduce US nuclear forces around the world as well as restructure the nuclear command we started the restructuring of strategic forces to make them more resilient and more stable so that they would not in themselves precipitate a war concomitant with those reductions it seemed appropriate to reorganize the command to focus on those smaller nuclear forces which would now be used in different ways than one single superpower confrontation I was tasked to develop a blue sky reorganization of the combatant forces to rewrite national military strategy and a draft to be debated by the Chiefs which removed the Soviet Union as our principle in the first time they had ever been done so what I could see on the horizon was not just a train a change in the strategic setting most importantly but in addition to that a change in attitudes toward strategic forces nuclear weapons and the budget strategic command has actually created through two different impulses lee butler as he's working for Colin Powell and he's the j5 comes up with a plan for his commander in chief strategic we up in OSD looking at the lack of a requirements process and the lack of an individual who puts together war plans and weapons platforms and numbers of warheads and arms control say this is what we need to make sure this never happens again one individual had never been given command control and therefore insight understanding and the ability to form judgments about how they totality and the force operated seeing that for the first time allowed me to have a complete picture of nuclear forces he was the driving force in planning a new command a command that would not be as Air Force focused as was the Strategic Air Command they elevated the joint strategic target planning staff which had been a joint force to now become the Strategic Command [Music] [Applause] as plans were being made to stand up the United States Strategic Command the proud mission of the Strategic Air Command was coming to a close 46 years sac held in its hands the ultimate deterrent to war the ultimate enforcer and insurer of the peace to debt we owe to the airmen of the Strategic Air Command and to the men and women of the joint strategic target planning staff is a special debt Ford was you and all who went before you who were charged with the most vital task of all it was you and your buddies at sea in our missile submarines who were entrusted with America's most powerful and most important weapons of war in 1992 the Strategic Air Command was disestablished and its missions divided up amongst several Air Force commands and the new Strategic Command the most important features of the new Strategic Command were indeed the target planning capabilities which are unique in the world secondly is the ability to guarantee the nuclear command control system that would configure and operate those forces if they were required those missions remained intact as a key part of the new US Strategic Command the ramparts of the Cold War were already anachronism to most Americans by 1992 the presidential campaign of that year no longer rang with the rhetoric of geopolitics and geo strategy but pivoted on matters of global finance and economics Bill Clinton's defeat of George Bush at the polls was widely interpreted as a result of his commitment to a new social agenda and the public's disaffection with the economic status quo the new president's vision for national security policy was not widely understood the Cold War now seemed long ago and far away this is a clarion call for our country to face the challenges of the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the next century [Applause] [Music] [Applause] in one of his last official acts President Bush put a close on one nuclear era while a second was just beginning to emerge throughout the 1990s differing political imperatives unforeseen international tensions and disturbing new intelligence would change the nuclear equation as we were leaving office it was clear that the structures of the Cold War were no longer appropriate and indeed Dewart there were a lot of calls from the Congress again the Cold War is over what are you going to do with this enormous structure you have the United States there is no longer any need for the United States as an equaliser against other powers les Aspin and others in Congress argued that nuclear weapons now had to be considered in light of dramatic advances in conventional weapons systems the 1991 Persian Gulf War had demonstrated an overwhelming u.s. conventional military superiority and one which adversaries could not directly challenge in a symmetrical way Desert Storm made that absolutely clear so they find a symmetrical ways of contending with the United States the a symmetrical ways some of them could be to go to nuclear weapons as he prepared to assume the presidency Bill Clinton announced his new cabinet appointees that included congressman les Aspin as Secretary of Defense Aspen's immediate concerns were those he shared with senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar about the threat of proliferation by so-called loose nukes in the former Soviet Union - the breakup of the Soviet Union given there were 15 separate Republic's and the four of these had nuclear weapons who we wanted to control the proliferation of those weapons the fissile material and the nuclear know-how Cooperative Threat Reduction helped to secure fissile materials and consolidate the nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union under the control of the new Russian Federation the nunn-lugar program the loose nukes issue that was the problem of the day not our own nuclear weapons posture not arms control in the spring of 1993 with an eye on the budget Aspen initiated the bottom-up review evaluating US conventional force requirements later that fall Aspen would charge his assistant Ashton Carter with the task of conducting an internal Department of Defense review of the role of nuclear forces they decided the nuclear part should be split off it was actually split off and performed later nearly as an afterthought I believe mostly because of how difficult those issues were well les Aspin started off the Nuclear Posture review and he believed that the world had fundamentally changed the wall had come down and we should rethink the role of nuclear efforts our thinking at that time was that first of all the importance of nuclear weapons was dramatically downgraded the Nuclear Posture review dealt with two great issues the first issue was how to achieve the proper balance between what I would call leading and hedging the US would try and lead the way to lower numbers of offensive strategic nuclear why at the same time we would hedge by keeping in reserve a certain number of weapons which could be brought back into the active stockpile if they were required in a briefing to President Clinton the 1994 Nuclear Posture review reaffirmed the viability of nuclear deterrence while ensuring a continued dialogue with the new Russian Federation we shaped our programs in both Russia and the United States based on the limits set forth in start - it was never ratified but it became part of our program planning expectations for the ratification of start - remained high however and effectively constrained US and Russian nuclear forces throughout the decade in the u.s. the start to force levels were also adopted in the face of a dwindling defense budget and a contracting nuclear weapons production complex in 1988 responding to environmental problems and the need for consolidation the Department of Energy began closing down some of its production facilities by the mid-1990s a complex which had produced more than 50,000 nuclear weapons had shuttered many of its aging production plants and ceased the Assembly of new warheads altogether more than three decades of underground nuclear testing came to an end in September 1992 when Congress imposed a nine-month moratorium on testing which was subsequently extended by the Clinton administration the following year the Department of Energy launched the stockpile stewardship program doing our best to try and simulate the performance of weapons without actually setting off a nuclear weapon weapons were designed to last as a nominal twenty years the basic nuclear Kalpana seemed to be holding up very well but clearly weather last 30 years 40 years 50 years nobody knows hopefully by then we will have a capability for manufacturing in 1994 when William Perry succeeded les aspin as Secretary of Defense the process of securing the former Soviet nuclear arsenal was well underway early in his tenure Perry began articulating a policy of preventive defense so Perry wanted us looking out into the future not becoming complacent just because things were good we had won the Cold War nobody could match us he said let's think about what the future threats could be for more than 40 years an uneasy armed truce had prevailed on the Korean Peninsula [Music] in May of 1994 a crisis would test US policy and plans when the North Koreans ordered UN inspectors to leave the young beyond nuclear facility now the potential of a nuclear-armed North Korea threatened this delicate balance the best way to protect ourselves from that kind of a threat is preventive defences preventing the terror group from getting the nuclear bombs in the first place preventing the rogue nation from getting the nuclear capability in the first place at first a strategy of economic sanctions was imposed when North Korea threatened to turn Seoul into a sea of flames u.s. contingency war plans were set in motion when action appeared imminent a freeze on nuclear activities was brokered by former President Jimmy Carter that led to the agreed framework I personally believe that the crisis is over and I personally believe that Kim il-sung wants to be sure that the crisis is over these developments mark not a solution to the problem but they do mark a new opportunity to find a solution the agreed framework is a very valuable agreement for the United States security it did not solve the problem of North Korean aspiration for nuclear weapons but it certainly delayed it the last bastion of hardline communism at its most spectacular in a massive display of national pride as the decade progressed the expression rogue nation was becoming part of the public lexicon while the threat of proliferation was being realized by so-called nuclear-capable states and yet the presidential guidance for nuclear weapons remained unchanged under the broad rubric of NS DD 13 we were able to completely transform the sigh up in terms of what it hit and and what it went after and how it did it as a result of some conversations between gel shalikashvili and President Clinton there came down the order that we needed to relook at the guidance and and that's how pdb 60 came out Pina D 60 came out and that all of the the ridiculous rhetoric of NS DD 13 was gone in advance of the 1997 Helsinki summit with Boris Yeltsin the Clinton administration removed all references to being able to prevail in a nuclear war while reasserting the traditional deterrent role for nuclear weapons [Music] but the character of the threat now facing the US and its allies was continuing to change Ramsdale commission had a very simple mission and the nine of us were asked to assess the ballistic missile threat to the United States the major problem comes from three rogue states North Korea Iran and Iraq we said that any of them if they had sufficient technology support from other countries and an urgent and well financed program could maintain secrecy and have an ICBM within five years we judged the strategic threat to be nuclear warhead payloads and biological warfare agent payloads within six weeks of the report the North Koreans launched a three-stage missile the successful test of an ICBM dramatically confirmed the Commission's findings prompting Congress to revive national missile defense [Music] by the new millennium active defenses were experiencing a revival as the nation prepared itself for the emergence of a new and as yet ill-defined threat a threat that would be manifestly different and less stable than the Cold War experience of a nuclear-armed Soviet adversary [Music] unlike the cold war today's most urgent threat stems not from thousands of ballistic missiles in the Soviet hands but from a small number of missiles in the hands of these states states for whom terror and blackmail are a way of life in such a world cold war deterrence is no longer enough we are much less interested in deterring a substantial foe like the Soviet Union and much more interested in deterring less of Powis that gradually may acquire weapons of mass destruction we need to build a relationship with Russia which puts the nuclear adversarial relationship in the past we're not worried about arms races anymore we're worried about minimizing the day to day size of the forces to presidents one Texas country road and an awful lot of cattle today they went to Crawford High School and seemed like new best friends George and Vladimir you know the president's inclination was to reduce US forces unilaterally and call on the Russians to do the same President Putin wanted a treaty we have done a treaty but I think that's the last treaty which will be central to us-russian relations pretty and Moscow limits operationally deployed strategic warheads between 1700 and 2200 on each side it is directed that we will drawdown he operationally deployed nuclear arsenal in accordance with the presidential direction and is codified in the Moscow treaty but the the underpinning of all of that the assumptions the other side to that is the creation of advanced conventional capabilities of a much more robust infrastructure of a much better integrated Intelligence Surveillance reconnaissance and planning capability than the nation has ever had before but it also assumes that over time we will create additional capabilities to supplement that drawdown and that's the balance that we're working to maintain available to the nation's leadership [Music] so we must have both conventional and nuclear capabilities and Stratcom is of course planning on having both by the spring of 2001 the new Bush administration was engaged in a reassessment of defense policy the administration's policy would ultimately be reflected in the quadrennial defense review the Nuclear Posture review the national security strategy and the planning guidance for nuclear weapons taken together with dramatic changes in strategic planning this new policy would reignite the nuclear debate what our rogues what are the threats they pose can they be deterred the very root of the term rogue state is based on the inability to predict what their actions would be what's rogue are the intentions of the leadership that happens to currently be in power and that's changeable and oftentimes we try and change it in ways that will lead them away from enmity toward friendship without a war on the other hands one must recognize that nuclear weapons are spreading that there may be a degree of anonymity in attacked nations which we are sometimes called rogue nations when they say how can we contend with the United States today I think he only in terms of a symmetrical warfare which is going to weapons of mass destruction going to guerrilla warfare going to supporting terror as the Arsenal in the hands of rogue states particularly with chembio and now some of them having nuclear weapons require us to take a different look at how we deter I don't think classic deterrence works in these situations because we are dealing with individuals who's thought processes and motivations are very foreign to us we've never really understood what deters or the degree to which that nuclear standoff of the Cold War in any way resembles any relationship that we would have with any other country it seems to me the traditional threats still hold against state actors they control territory they're in power and most of them don't want to lose power [Music] in the summer of 2001 deterring rogue regimes remained an open question as the Bush administration began a review of US nuclear forces and strategy the 2001 Nuclear Posture review would reaffirm the continued utility of nuclear weapons as the principal deterrent force but their role would be subsumed within a larger and more flexible strategic posture in my personal view its miss named it should have been called the strategic posture review because it addresses things on a much broader scale than just the nuclear element of it the Cold War triad of nuclear land-based sea based and bomber forces would become part of a new triad integrating nuclear with non-nuclear strike capabilities defenses and a responsive infrastructure but this new construct begged a question what role will nuclear weapons play in the future nuclear weapons have no military utility other than to deter a nuclear equipped opponent from utilizing his nuclear weapons so long as anyone on the planet has the capability to destroy the United States in 30 minutes that's the deterrent job that I know we have to do and I know that that deterrent job requires that they never be able to believe that they can achieve that there is a wider question that we must consider and that is what are the messages that will be given to history by the use are the non use of nuclear weapons in a particular conflict there is a half-century long tradition of no use of nuclear weapons the only Asian to every use one and anger was the United States are we gonna be the first to do that again Eisenhower thought we could deter a conventional war and we hung on to that hope in spite of the Korean War up until the early until the late 50s and even the notion of limited nuclear warfare that that was close to preposterous in his view I cannot conceive of any responsible president initiating they were fighting nuclear action the situation even today has not changed I mean the main use of nuclear weapons remains to deter the use of nuclear weapons by others that has wide support within the defense community everything else is controversial the world has changed a lot over the years of the Cold War various nations have been trying to remove their valuable targets from being addressed by conventional weapons and unless you're holding the targets most valued at risk deterrence will fail there are an increasing number of types of targets and types of adversaries for which the current stockpile is ill-suited there's no doubt about that and if we are ill-suited or ill configured to deal with those threats it can it might convince potential adversaries that we would never use those those capabilities and whether we like it or not then it loses its deterrent value in my view the development of these kinds of capabilities for the in extremis situation for that target is not because we think that developing the weapon is going to deter that target in the first place I don't believe that for a minute I think it is simply having the capability to destroy it in the event we reach a point where the president is convinced that we have no other alternative but it's all tied back to what has been the constant from 1950 to 2020 that is the purpose of the deterrent is to be credible enough to convince anyone that can destroy the United States that they can't possibly win by doing that that's the constant the familiar east-west confrontation that once sustained a broad-based consensus supporting nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence had by the mid-1990s given way to an unfamiliar landscape in a world of uncertain and unpredictable threats attitudes toward nuclear weapons and even the efficacy of deterrence had become widely divergent but amidst this disagreement there were shared fears of nuclear proliferation an event in late summer of 2001 would suddenly and shockingly refocused debate [Music] [Music] on September 11th 2001 the world was surprised the US was not prepared for an audacious and catastrophic ly destructive active terror on its soil in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center debate centered on the question can non-state actors be deterred it's by no means clear to me that non-state actors have the same set of values that enabled us to you practice deterrence against them if you expect to go to heaven and in such a situation you're not going to be deterred by the threat of going to heaven we all have to recognize that to the degree threats present themselves to us like Al Qaeda which are stateless and which which which come from quasi governments that don't possess territory the nuclear threat becomes almost irrelevant the trouble today is we don't know how to deter the sub-national and terrorist groups such as al Qaeda from using the weapons in alliance with these rogue states who have developed the weapons and seemed to have a few barriers to transferring them and therefore the idea of preemption of such capabilities achieves a significance and becomes an option for more than 50 years the United States had practiced deterrence against adversaries who threatened the nation and its allies with weapons of mass destruction the political objective of containment was underpinned by the knowledge that the Soviets and the Chinese had something to lose and I think in the mid-50s the the unacceptability of all-out nuclear war became common knowledge between the US and the Soviet leaders but that kind of common knowledge doesn't exist with potential rogue states or non-state actors you're kind of unsure what it is they think about this and if that's the case then it's very difficult to be sure that deterrence will operate and if you're not sure deterrence will operate then you become even more afraid of their acquiring these weapons this for me would be my policy nightmare when the moment comes that we have conclusive evidence that they have are about to be of this kind of capability to the terrorist organization the separated plutonium the weapons Petunia and the highly enriched uranium those materials are the principal danger around the world it fell the country olotele group gets a hold of them it's no great trick to make nuclear weapons take some time and some skill but it's not enormous trick to make us a primitive weapon there are those that argue that today's non-state actors can't be deterred I don't believe that I think everyone has the ability to be deterred and even if they the zealots can't be deterred the structures the the national elements the the host nations that support them are susceptible to more classic elements of deterrence this is a much bigger work assignment than has ever been assigned for planning nuclear or non-nuclear attacks in the past and the goal is to try to put that within a single command that can support such operations around the globe [Music] nuclear weapons would remain a key deterrent if there were in emergent China or a resurgent Russia but they would be given a new emphasis rogue nations and Islamic terrorists with weapons of mass destruction I think nuclear deterrence will continue to play a fairly significant role for the future the size of that role depends upon a number of factors one is the degree to which we are in fact successful in bringing Russia into the West and the degree to which China begins to perceive itself as a status quo power as opposed to an aggressive upwardly mobile power a second has to do with whether or not major countries who would make themselves our adversary continue to deploy nuclear weapons therefore requiring us to have nuclear weapons to deter nuclear attack in the first place when you now shift the focus to only a few nuclear weapons being used it becomes exceedingly important for you to do the calculation do I have to use a nuclear weapon for each of those or could I substitute some combination of advanced conventional weapons information operation attacks on those particular targets rather than only considering a nuclear attack this is not a cookie cutter problem that one size fits all we need to think through what would deter North Korea would deter potentially the terrorist organization there is certainly a need for a much wider spectrum of options that are made available to the nation's civilian leadership both in the deterrent character and if the requirement presents itself for employment our nuclear policy today I believe is based on maintaining our warfighting capability we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons to respond to and therefore to deter chemical or biological use weapons of mass destruction you cannot simply say we will deter without being able to execute in wartime on the other hand if we introduce nuclear weapons we won't be the only ones to do so all parties involved and most especially the president have to realize the consequences of that act you invite proliferation you're basically suggesting that it would be a good idea for threatened countries to get nuclear weapons and strike fear in the hearts of other people and that's what I think we do when we say we're gonna need these nuclear weapons in perpetuity but you don't need them the only role for nuclear weapons should be to deter the use of nuclear weapons by others which means a no first use doctrine I would never renounce first use of nuclear weapons because it seems to me that part of maintaining a reasonably stable world is the good part of nuclear weapons and I think however we say it however we do it and most of the world won't like it we need to say no more nuclear weapons States but the nuclear weapons States they are will be Guardians with the system we need nuclear weapons to convince any potential aggressor not to attack us and to understand that we have means to retaliate in an overwhelming fashion should we or our allies be attacked the US has only considered nuclear weapons to be blunt weapons of lest resort but all of us understand the horrific nature of nuclear weapons and the fact that they are not and will never be considered as just another kinetic option available to the nation's leadership serious debate about the efficacy and relevance of nuclear deterrence began almost with the dawn of the Atomic Age the debate was often framed by starkly contrasting views about the dangers and risks posed by nuclear weapons compared with the benefits of a stable world since 1992 a new formula for deterrence has struggled to emerge from that which was forged in the context of the Cold War the terms of the debate have not changed but the context has the very existence of the Arsenal's and the technologies of nuclear weapons themselves demand a new construct for deterrence what you have to do though at the end of the day to have a real nuclear deterrent is you have to have a policy and you have to have a plan and you have to have the forces and you have to have the wherewithal to carry out the plan and the will to do so at the end of the day if you don't have all of that then you don't have a nuclear deterrent if you manifestly make clear that you have a nuclear capability and would be prepared to use it under certain circumstances your deterrent is enhanced it's up to succeeding generations as to whether they will be able to meet those tests [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sandia National Labs

Views: 231,503

Rating: 4.6256938 out of 5

Keywords: Sandia National Laboratories, deterrence, nuclear deterrence, strategic nuclear policy, nuclear policy, United States nuclear policy

Id: cA_8I5hjNO0

Length: 119min 45sec (7185 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 03 2018