By Bruce Blair, President, World Security Institute, and Victoria Samson, Senior Analyst, Center for Defense Information.

Background

At the end of the Cold War, both the United States and Russia retained their nuclear operational practices that kept about one-third of their strategic forces on launch-ready alert. They still have not been stood down, which means that today these forces could still be fired within a couple of minutes after the order to launch them is issued. Both former rivals thus continue to possess the capability to initiate a sudden large-scale attack by missiles whose flight times to targets anywhere in the world would range from twelve to thirty minutes after launch. If either of these ex-rivals is the target of such a sudden first strike, it is fully prepared to rapidly fire a large-scale retaliatory strike soon after detecting the opposing missiles during launch and flight. The procedure for “launch-on-warning” strives to detect an enemy missile strike in progress, assess the attack, decide upon a retaliatory response, and implement the response in less time than the enemy missiles need to reach their targets. Launch on warning thus requires a warning, decision, and execution process under a deadline of less than the twelve to thirty minutes in circumstances of dire threat and stress, whether the incoming attack indicators are true or false.

This launch-ready posture—reflecting vestigial presidential directives on both sides requiring their forces to be prepared to fight a large-scale nuclear war with each other on a moment’s notice—carries significant risk. It creates the distinct possibility of leaders misreading a situation and making fatefully bad calls. The tight time-lines at all levels of the chain of command do not allow adequate margins for technical malfunctions or human error in the early warning network, the decision-making apparatus, and the executing forces.

The hair-trigger configuration of the missiles themselves — missiles that are armed, fueled, targeted, and ready to fly instantly upon receiving a short stream of computer signals — creates an irreducible risk of accidental launch, and a larger risk that unauthorized actions from within or without the nuclear command system, including actions by cyber-terrorists, could spark a nuclear strike and nuclear war.

The U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals should be reciprocally de-alerted in order to buy a real margin of safety against inadvertent or unauthorized nuclear strikes, to eliminate the threat of sudden deliberate attack, to align their nuclear arsenals with the normalization of their relations after the end of the Cold War, and to take a serious step toward the elimination of nuclear weapons as required by their obligation under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

A Dangerous Legacy

Because of this legacy posture of launch-ready forces and reliance on launch-on-warning by both the American and the Russian sides, the nuclear command systems from top to bottom — from the presidential level to the field commanders in underground launch centers and submarines—operates in a quasi-automatic mode. There is little or no scope for rational deliberation, and national leadership. The time-lines and complex operations needed to execute a coherent plan involving thousands of nuclear weapons reduce the decision process to reflexes, rote decision-making, and checklists. This tightly wound and checklist driven process possesses, on a given normal peacetime day, the ability to unleash within minutes an extreme amount of firepower: 2,300 high-yield nuclear warheads (roughly equally divided between U.S. and Russian forces), or the explosive equivalent of approximately 100,000 Hiroshima-size bombs. The history of the Cold War records a spate of nuclear false alarms, a number of which were quite serious and brought the world to the brink of accidental nuclear war. The most recent example, if the public record is complete, involved a U.S. research rocket launched in January 1995 from an island near Norway that caught Russia by surprise. Initially fearing that it could be a missile launched by a U.S. submarine to decapitate Moscow, Russia’s “nuclear suitcase” was activated for the first time and the retaliatory launch procedure begun, until Russia’s ground radar network determined that the rocket was not a threat. This potential for mistakes still exists, given the decrepit state of Russian early warning systems (though they are being modernized), and the situation in certain respects is becoming more dangerous. As additional nuclear states and weapons proliferate around the world, they will present more chances of command and early warning system failures in their own as well as other nations’ systems.

Even with the decades of experience in managing nuclear forces, the United States has made some serious mistakes lately in controlling its nuclear arsenal. In August 2007, a B-52 bomber accidentally flew across the United States with six nuclear-armed cruise missiles: for 36 hours, no one even noticed that they were missing. In March 2008, it was reported that the United States had accidentally shipped to Taiwan four fuses intended for nuclear warheads two years earlier, and hadn’t realized the extent of the mistake until Taiwan brought it to the Defense Department’s attention.

Partially as a response to the deterioration of the U.S. Air Force’s nuclear command and control, in June 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates fired Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley, saying that the two incidents characterized “a degradation of the authority, standards of excellence, and technical competence within the nation’s ICBM force.”

A new concern has arisen about nuclear command and control: the prospect of a cyber-attack. Cyber intrusions are becoming more common and have even moved into the playbook for conventional warfare (witness the cyber-attacks on official Georgian computers prior to Russia’s offensive in South Ossetia and Georgia in August 2008). Keeping nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert implies an absolute faith in the computer security safeguards on these weapons, and in the early warning data that decision-makers receive — unwarranted or at least unproven leaps of faith in an era of increasingly sophisticated cyber-penetration.

A Precedent for Action

De-alerting U.S. nuclear forces has occurred before. President George H.W. Bush unilaterally de-alerted a large portion of the U.S. strategic arsenal in September 1991, by deciding to fully stand down all of the alert U.S. strategic heavy bombers (downloading their nuclear arms and placing them in storage) and 450 Minuteman II missiles and many Poseidon submarine-launched ballistic missiles. This move was quickly followed by comparable steps in Russia at the direction of President Mikhail Gorbachev.

There is a groundswell of support for removing nuclear forces from launch-ready alert. In a pair of Wall Street Journal op-eds by former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former Senate Armed Services Chairman Sam Nunn (“A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” Jan. 4, 2007; and “Toward a Nuclear-Free World,” Jan. 15, 2008), these former cold warriors called for taking nuclear weapons off of hair-trigger alert. In 2007, they called for “Changing the Cold War posture of deployed nuclear weapons to increase warning time and thereby reduce the danger of an accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon.” A year later, drawing on the analysis provided them by the author, they called upon the leaders of the U.S. and Russia to “Take steps to increase the warning and decision times for the launch of all nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, thereby reducing risks of accidental or unauthorized attacks.”

Talking points

➤ The end of the Cold War warranted, but did not lead to, the removal of strategic nuclear arsenals from launch-ready alert. This step is long overdue, as are related safety and security steps needed to eliminate the risks of inadvertent or unauthorized nuclear weapons release.
➤ Keeping large numbers of nuclear weapons on launch-ready alert is “overkill.” U.S. and Russian deterrence requirements, realistically assessed, no longer demand reliance on hair-trigger postures. These postures unnecessarily harm U.S. and international security by creating real risks of unauthorized or accidental launches, and otherwise undermining the rational and secure management of nuclear operations, for the sake of an outdated purpose.
➤ Launch-on-warning is a vestige of the Cold War that is not aligned with modern political relations Peace and Security Initiative

If all strategic missile forces are taken off of launch-ready alert, removing the threat of a offensive nuclear first-strike, then the threat projected by U.S. missile defenses in Europe would decline.

Previous action by the President and Congress

George W. Bush spoke about the need to de-alert in a campaign speech made in May 2000. He said, “The United States should remove as many weapons as possible from high-alert, hair-trigger status—another unnecessary vestige of cold war confrontation … For two nations at peace, keeping so many weapons on high alert may create unacceptable risks of accidental or unauthorized launch. So, as president, I will ask for an assessment of what we can safely do to lower the alert status of our forces.” However, he never followed through on this campaign promise. De-alerting was not part of President Bush’s 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, for example.

In fact, the alert status of U.S. nuclear forces has become such a non-issue for the Bush administration that Christina Rocca, the U.S. representative to the United Nations Conference on Disarmament, told the other delegates in October 2007, “U.S. nuclear forces are not and have never been on hair-trigger alert.”

Congress has not been any more active on this issue. In August 1999, Representative Edward Markey (Democrat of Massachusetts) sponsored a sense of Congress resolution that the United States and Russia should take their nuclear weapons off of hair-trigger alert. Nothing has happened, in terms of legislation, since then.

Recommendations for 2009

There are two near-term efforts for de-alerting that should be followed in 2009, and two recommendations that may take longer to implement but whose groundwork should be laid in 2009. In the near-term:
1. Coordinate the mutual elimination of launch-on- warning from the U.S. and Russian nuclear command system operating procedures.
2. Take the nuclear weapons themselves off of hair-trigger alert by isolating land-based nuclear missiles from external launch control, and by separating critical launch components from nuclear submarine missile tubes. Both of these moves could be reversed in a day, should the need arise.

In the meantime, they could be verified to increase transparency and trust between the United States and Russia.

In the longer term:
3. Coordinate with Russia the separation of nuclear warheads from their delivery vehicles, placing the two in separate and heavily-protected positions, and strive to do this by the end of 2012 (which is when nuclear reductions that are part of the 2002 Moscow Treaty are supposed to be completed).
4. Over the next four to six years, move all deployed nuclear warheads to central storage facilities in the United States and Russia, and institute stringent monitoring and verification of these moves.

Additional Resources

Contacts
Dr. Bruce Blair, President, World Security Institute, (202) 332-0600, bblair [at] worldsecurityinstitute [dot] org

Dr. Harold Feiveson, Senior Research Policy Scientist, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, Program on Science and Global Security, (609) 258-4676, feiveson [at] princeton [dot] edu

Publications
Bruce Blair, Bruce Blair’s Nuclear Column, Center for Defense Information.

Bruce Blair, “Increasing Warning and Decision Time (‘De- Alerting’): Achieving the Vision of a World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” International Conference on Nuclear Disarmament, Oslo, Norway, Feb. 26-27, 2008.

Arms Control Association, Subject Resources: Strategic Policy, www.armscontrol.org/subject/66/date.

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, 2007.

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, “Toward a Nuclear-Free World,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 15, 2008.