Desmond Ball Interview: Conversation with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Dr. Ball, welcome to Berkeley. There's a lot of talk these days about nuclear war and the possibility of fighting and winning a nuclear war. General David C. Jones, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recently told the Washington Post, "I don't see much of a chance of nuclear war being limited or protracted. I see great difficulty in keeping any kind of exchange between the U.S. and the Soviets from escalating." Do you agree with that statement?
I think that's probably an understatement. The range of problems, difficulties, in keeping a nuclear war under control really is quite immense. That doesn't mean, though, that the administration is not putting a lot of effort and a lot of resources into planning to try to, in the first instance, keep a war limited, but if it does escalate, to try to prevail, in the sense of coming out on top. The U.S. would emerge, in some sense, better off than the Soviet Union after a very prolonged nuclear exchange.
What are the vulnerabilities in our command and control structure that constrain the possibility of successfully fighting, and then successfully terminating, a nuclear war?
If any nuclear conflict is going to remain limited, then it's going to depend on a variety of different command and control systems. And, it turns out that, for various reasons, the command and control systems are more vulnerable than the forces that they're designed to support. You can do a number of things to the forces to protect them. You can make them mobile; you can proliferate them. That's why you have submarines under water and a thousand Minuteman missiles. You can harden them, like the Minuteman missiles, in underground silos. You can disperse them; you can do a lot of things with them.
In general, you can't do those with the command and control systems. Certain elements of the command and control structure cannot be proliferated, like the national command authority -- you just have one president and one secretary of defense, and a certain, very finite number of commanders in chief. Some of the other systems cannot be hardened in any meaningful way, like the very large, very low frequency radio systems for communicating with the U.S. missile-carrying submarines. The very large early warning radars are necessarily very soft. You cannot camouflage these by definition. They're emitting at very high power levels, very definite and specific frequencies which are very easy for the other side's signals intelligence to monitor.
So in general, your command and control system is going to be much softer, much more vulnerable, and much smaller in terms of the number of targeting points than the strategic forces. And, to be more specific, you can look at various nodal points in the command and control system which really, in the end, pull the rug out from under any attempt to fight a limited nuclear war. One is the vulnerability of the national command structure itself. There are only about ten targets if you include the White House, the Pentagon, the alternative national command post, the airborne system which is available to the president, and half a dozen other for the service commanders in chief. You've got the vulnerability of the airborne systems. Virtually all of the U.S. command and control system is dependant on airborne backup systems, and those airborne systems could not last more than, in most cases, about twelve hours. In the case of the 747 Boeing system for the president, perhaps seventy-two hours. You've got the vulnerability of all the satellite systems, which are very critical to U.S. command and control, and you've got a very specific series of vulnerabilities in the case of the submarine command and control systems. So in the end, I doubt if you could be confident that the U.S. command and control could last for, say, longer than about twelve hours, or could survive more than about fifty nuclear detonations, if the Soviets tried to take it out that way. So it's really a very vulnerable system.
In this interview, General Jones spoke of the "bottomless pit" of trying to fund defense programs in which, let's say, you could be in a position to fight and win a limited nuclear war. The Reagan administration has allocated large amounts of money for correcting, or attempting to correct, these command and control vulnerabilities. Are those positive steps? Are any of them likely to help in the efforts to secure these systems?
The administration's plans for so-called "modernizing" the strategic forces amount to just on $180.3 billion. Now of that, $18 billion for the next six years is devoted to the command and control communications, the "C-3," in the jargon. That's just on 10 percent, which is quite a large amount. Most of that, at least as presently programmed, is fairly difficult to quarrel with. It's concerned with correcting what are real deficiencies at the moment, deficiencies in survivability and the fact that the whole system can be taken out with just, say, fifty detonations. The Reagan program intends to change that so that, instead of only requiring fifty detonations to destroy the whole thing, it will require something between 200 - 250, which might not be all that meaningful given that a Soviet SS-18 ICBM has ten warheads. Only ten or so SS-18s can probably take our the whole of this increase. And it tries to make the system endure for longer than the current twelve hours, out to, say, about seventy-two hours. There are some aspect of the current program which, I think, are less desirable. But the real problem is what they do after they correct those deficiencies. There, the emphasis is going to be on devoting the resources to enable the U.S. to fight a protracted nuclear war up to, perhaps, about six months. And once you try and design a command and control system which can endure for six months, then you literally do have a bottomless pit. You can pour a lot of money into there and, in the end, it's really not going to come up with anything that's useful.
I'd like to pursue with you your thoughts on the likely scenario for the onset of nuclear war so we can then look at the decision-making process. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see difficulties in Europe unwinding and leading to a conflict? Or more, a Third World confrontation, a Middle East situation where the superpowers are brought in? And then, what kind of nuclear exchange might follow?
I think that the more likely scenarios involve Europe, rather than the Third World. In the Third World, both the United States and the Soviet Union would be very hesitant to be drawn into any conflict. Whereas in NATO and the NATO/Warsaw Pact area, they already are right up against each other and that, if anything goes wrong there, political breakdowns or whatever, then necessarily they have to be right at each other's throats. There are many ways in which they could avoid doing that and, I think, would try to avoid it in the outer areas. So one really does have to look at the NATO/Warsaw Pact area as the most critical one, and the principal reason that that could go nuclear quite easily is because of the deficiency in the U.S. conventional forces. For a number of decades now, the decision has been made and then repeatedly confirmed that the United States, and NATO in general, would rely for deterrence on the ability to use tactical nuclear weapons first in Europe, and then to threaten limited strategic use in Europe, rather than to try to offset the Soviet Union by conventional means. And it's either in the tactical nuclear area or in the use of strategic weapons for demonstration purposes, the execution of the so-called nuclear options or selective nuclear options in the U.S. war plans, which really are the most dangerous.
Now, under such circumstances, if we were to use weapons first -- we have not repudiated the first-use notion and our defense of Europe probably will require it -- what then is the likely Soviet response? Do you see possibilities of a "one-shot" on both sides occurring? What follows from such an outbreak of war?
The U.S. plans are based on a gradually escalating conflict, starting off with demonstration strikes involving perhaps, one, two, or certainly no more than five weapons, going through limited counter-force attacks, which may be aimed at, say, the Soviet second echelon forces in Eastern Europe or in the western part of the USSR, or attacks on the petroleum field, again in that part of the USSR. Or other specific counter-force areas. And then escalating up more through comprehensive counter-force strikes against the whole of the Soviet ICBM bomber bases, and those ports which house the Soviet nuclear missile carrying submarines. And then, further on, into an all-out industrial exchange.
The Soviets don't seem to share that view of how a nuclear war might unfold at all. And they don't have the capabilities, in general, to fight that sort of nuclear war. Soviet planning seems to be based on the notion that if it looks like a nuclear war is imminent and serious, in the sense of, perhaps, not an isolated detonation at sea or somewhere, [but] one which is really going to involve a major nuclear exchange, then they will use everything that they've got as soon as [possible] in order to try and limit damage to themselves, knowing that they're still going to get a lot of damage, but that they will get less by trying, in a massive strike, to decapitate the U.S. and to knock out the American and NATO command and control, to knock out as many American missiles and bombers and submarines as they can. And, at the same time, to hit the war-supporting industry and the government ministry centers.
So in other words, while they might not respond to a single demonstration strike in this way, I think it's very clear that you don't have to go very far up this escalation ladder before they do pull all stops out.
Of course, once the Soviets have done that, there definitely would be command and control problems but, on the American side, do these command and control vulnerabilities begin at the onset of the process of our first use in Europe? You're talking about a technical problem from the very first steps, even if both parties are trying to limit the escalation.
Yes. One of the problems with the command and control system in the U.S. at the moment is that it's not only vulnerable to direct Soviet attack; more dangerously, it is vulnerable to the incidental effects of nuclear detonations elsewhere. At the moment, very few of the elements of the command and control system are hardened against electromagnetic pulse. And yet relatively few detonations can seriously disrupt the electronic systems, radars and communications, and command centers in the U.S. The disturbances to the ionosphere would affect high-frequency radio communications and radars, such as the Horizon radars, which use high frequencies. Many of the command systems that would be required in controlling a nuclear war are co-located with other targets, so that even if the Soviet Union did not want to destroy them, they would be incapacitated anyway. And, in the overall worldwide network that the U.S. has, large elements of those are in Europe and are used for controlling NATO forces. So even a war which the Soviet Union and the United States were trying to limit to Europe would, in the end, disrupt those systems which were containing it to Europe, so that there would be technical incentives for it to spill over.
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