ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

AS THE division of the world into Cold War blocs passes further into
history every day and the superpowers promise large reductions in their
weapons and armed services, we need to understand the forces that shaped
and sustained these arsenals. Above all, if the world is to remain a safer
place, we must appreciate how technology and politics interact in the planning
of nuclear war.

Such an understanding has to incorporate how things are seen by the
people who control the arsenals. They are the ‘nuclear insiders’, such as
missile designers, generals and defence officials. What they do and why
they do it often bear little relation to what the public is told. But in
the US at least, a documentary record of the early development of the nuclear
arsenal is beginning to emerge from the archives.

One technology crucial to the arms race has been missile guidance. Over
the past 30 years the accuracy of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)
has improved from a typical error of about 3 kilometres to one of about
100 metres. Soviet accuracy has always lagged American, and still does,
but the desire to make missiles more accurate exists on both sides.

The two main schools of nuclear strategy, retaliatory deterrence and
winnable war, have quite different attitudes to missile accuracy. In classical
nuclear deterrence, the targets are cities, to be destroyed in retaliation
for a previous attack. Because cities are large targets, and nuclear weapons
enormously destructive, accuracy matters little to this strategy. The 3-kilometre
accuracies of the early 1960s were adequate. The 1- or 1.5-kilometre figures
of both American and Soviet missiles by the mid-1960s were more than good
enough.

If, however, the targets are not cities but well-protected military
installations, such as command bunkers or underground missile silos, then
these ‘city-busting’ accuracies are not good enough. Such targets are designed
to survive a nuclear explosion as little as 1 kilometre away. For the best-protected
bunkers or silos, hostile forces need 100-metre accuracies to be reasonably
sure of destroying their targets. But missiles this accurate raise an uncomfortable
question that explains why governments seldom talk, even in general terms,
about their capability to annihilate opposing nuclear forces – a capability
they describe as their ‘counterforce capacity’. It clearly makes no sense
to destroy silos after the missiles have flown; so does the capability to
destroy missile silos not imply a preparedness to strike first in an effort
to win a war, rather than in retaliation? The British government prefers
to avoid the issue altogether, even as it prepares to bring into service
the extremely accurate Trident II missiles, which are due to be operational
by the mid-1990s. American strategists are more forthcoming. They postulate
a scenario in which the Soviet Union has attacked the US with only a portion
of its missile force, and the American President may want to try to destroy
the remainder rather than accept defeat. Their critics within strategic
studies – that is, the people who feel that deadly accurate missiles are
not essential for nuclear deterrence – find this an implausible scenario.
They argue that the strategy fails to address the destabilising effect of
arsenals containing deadly accurate missiles. If, in a crisis, either side
fears losing its deterrent to a nuclear first strike, say the critics, it
may be tempted to try to get its blow in first. For their pains, the critics
have been labelled advocates of ‘mutually assured destruction’, or MAD,
by more hawkish strategists who believe that one side could win a nuclear
war.

Despite the destabilising effect of extreme accuracy, the history of
missile guidance systems shows how relentlessly the armed forces have pursued
improvements in the accuracy of their nuclear weapons. There are many sources
of error in flight, from the moment a ballistic missile is fired, during
the separation of the warhead or warheads from the body of the missile,
and in the final plunge of the warheads through the atmosphere. Military
scientists and engineers have refined the sensors that control the flight
of a missile. They have also equipped missiles with powerful on-board com
puters to assist guidance. They have redesigned the warhead casings, streamlining
the shape and incorporating new materials, so that the warheads can make
a faster, and therefore more accurate, re-entry of the atmosphere. Some
areas of apparently ‘pure’ science, especially the study of the Earth’s
gravitational field, owe a lot to the search for greater missile accuracy.

Is greater missile accuracy then simply the natural result of technological
progress? Yes, say defence commentators – but they are wrong. Over the past
20 years there have been several exciting advances in the basic components
of navigation systems used in fields other than missile guidance. Any self-contained
system (one not relying on external inputs such as radio signals) needs
to be able to detect changes in the orientation of the vehicle carrying
it. Traditionally, this task was performed by mechanical gyroscopes, essentially
just sophisticated variants of the child’s spinning toy. These respond with
a regular and predictable motion, known as precession, to changes in their
orientation.

Over the past 10 years, aircraft manufacturers have been replacing mechanical
gyroscopes with laser gyroscopes. In these, two beams of coherent light,
which have the same frequency and pass in opposite directions round a cavity
in a solid block, detect changes in orientation. If the gyroscope turns
around the axis perpendicular to the block, the frequencies of the clockwise
and counterclockwise beams diverge by an amount determined by the speed
of rotation. When the two beams cross, the divergence in frequency produces
a regular pattern of alternate light and dark bands, or ‘beats’, and these
are detected by a photoelectric cell.

Laser gyroscopes are becoming standard equipment in navigation systems
of civilian aircraft, such as the Boeing 757 and 767. According to the manufacturers,
laser gyroscopes cost about the same as mechanical gyroscopes, but they
are much more reliable because they have fewer moving parts, so they are
cheaper to operate. The armed forces have begun to fit laser gyroscopes
to military aircraft but they will not use them in strategic missile guidance
systems; mechanical gyroscopes have been retained, even for the US’s proposed
Small ICBM. This missile is due to enter service in the mid-1990s though
it is currently bogged down in political controversy and may be cancelled.
The laser gyroscope was considered and rejected for the Small ICBM. The
chief reason is that the Pentagon believes that though the laser device
is accurate enough for aircraft, it is not good enough to guide nuclear
missiles that have been dispatched on counterforce strikes.

The gyroscope is only one of the technologies that are necessary to
make missiles accurate. In a self-contained guidance system, acceleration
needs to be measured as well as changes in orientation. Although a variety
of simpler designs are available, the accelerometers used in the American
MX ICBM, currently the most potent counterforce weapon the US possesses,
are traditional mechanical devices, which are expensive to produce to fine
tolerances – they are also deadly accurate. According to a report last year
in Aviation Week and Space Technology, these accelerometers fail on average
within a year, and then require six months and $300,000 to repair. Despite
the known history of trouble with the device, a similar accelerometer will
help to guide the Trident II missiles, including those bought by Britain
from the US.

Neither the American nor the Soviet military establishment has ever
been satisfied with a nuclear strategy that is merely retaliatory. In the
US, the matter was clouded by the desire to appear peace-loving; the government
did not want the public thinking that the US might strike the first blow
and start a nuclear war. But nuclear insiders were explicit. On 13 September
1961, for example, General Lyman T. Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, briefed President Kennedy on the US’s nuclear plan. His briefing
survives in the Records of the Joint Chiefs in the US National Archives.
Lemnitzer told Kennedy that the war plan ‘may be executed . . . (1) in retaliation
to a Soviet nuclear strike of the US, or (2) as a pre-emptive measure’.

When to strike first

Pre-emption, as the term was used by nuclear insiders such as Lemnitzer,
did not mean a bolt-from-the-blue attack on the Soviet Union. What American
strategists envisaged was an East-West crisis, perhaps involving a clash
of conventional forces in Europe. They anticipated that they would receive
intelligence warning of the Soviet Union preparing for an attack on the
US. Most importantly, their high-flying U-2 spy planes would be able to
spot the Soviet Union’s short-range nuclear bombers of the day being massed
at transit bases in the Arctic. This was the moment for the US to get its
blow in first, they said.

Pre-emption received similar emphasis in Soviet strategic writing. During
the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet capacity to launch a pre-emptive attack
on the US far from matched the American capacity to attack the USSR. In
both the US and the Soviet Union, however, the armed forces stored their
bombers and early land-based missiles above ground, with scarcely any protection
against a surprise blow, and they could not launch them quickly if early-warning
radars detected an attack. Soviet submarines of the time had to come close
to their targets and then forgo the ocean’s protection by surfacing before
launching their missiles.

Both sides remedied vulnerabilities such as these during the 1960s and
1970s. They improved early-warning systems, deployed missiles in underground
silos and devised systems for launching missiles from submerged submarines.
Yet this did not cause nuclear insiders to abandon the search for a means
of destroying the other side’s forces. As targets became better protected,
money was poured into making missiles more accurate. As the two sides deployed
greater proportions of their arsenals in submarines, they spent more time
developing techniques of antisubmarine warfare – an area where the American
lead has been even greater than in missile accuracy, although quieter Soviet
submarines may recently have eroded it (‘An ear to the sea’, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´,
14 October 1989).

Senior military officials, such as the leaders of the three American
armed services, are not all of one mind, however. Indeed, it is their disagreements
that help to expose the debates. Though there are disputes within different
branches of the same armed service, the most important controversies, in
terms of the information they yield about military thinking, are between
them. The clashes have sometimes shaped nuclear strategy and nuclear technology
at least as much as the potential conflict between East and West. Some of
the flavour of these clashes at their most intense is conveyed in transcripts
of tape-recorded comments of Arleigh A. Burke, Chief of Naval Operations
in the US in the late 1950s. Referring to the US Air Force, Burke said:
‘This is just like Communism being here in the country. (The leaders of
the Air Force) are smart and they’re ruthless . . . They have no feeling
at all that they are responsible for anything but the Air Force. . . they
will wreck the United States.’

What caused Burke’s ire was a typical fight over bureaucratic turf.
In the late 1950s, the Air Force was trying to gain control of the Navy’s
new missile, the submarine-launched Polaris. The Air Force proposed the
establishment of a single organisation for nuclear war planning, a body
that it would dominate. Burke’s furious reaction to the idea started the
only real challenge of the period to pre-emptive nuclear strategy. The US,
argued Burke, should abandon the belief in pre-emption, and should instead
commit itself to retaliatory deterrence. His view was not shaped by altruism,
however. He foresaw that Polaris, invulnerable under the ocean but not very
accurate, would then dominate the nuclear arsenal of the US. This would
dispense with the need for the vulnerable but more accurate bombers and
land-based missiles of the Air Force.

The outcome in 1960 was a classical bureaucratic compromise. The Single
Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) for nuclear war – Lemnitzer’s summary
for Kennedy was the contemporary version of it – contained elements of both
traditional deterrence and pre-emption. It still does. American nuclear
forces settled into their current form of a stable weapons ‘triad’: the
long-range, land-based missiles and bombers, controlled by the Air Force,
and the submarine-launched missiles, controlled by the Navy. The Army was
excluded from the triad; it had lost an earlier battle with the Air Force,
and was not allowed to deploy missiles with a range of more than 400 nautical
miles.

The compromise dampened the Navy’s ambitions: for a long time, it did
not seek to rival the accuracy of Air Force missiles. Though some Navy officers
chafed at this caution, those most involved in missile design feared sparking
another round of inter-service conflict. As a result, the US Navy rejected
stellar-inertial guidance – the technology where a missile takes a star
sighting as it coasts in space before releasing its warheads – for more
than a decade. The missile uses this sighting to correct errors that have
built up in the guidance system.

For a submarine-launched missile the greatest errors are caused by lack
of precise knowledge of the missile carrier’s position and orientation at
launch. Though these were the very factors that had seemed to condemn submarine-launched
missiles to be less accurate than land-based ones, the Navy was not convinced
of the need for stellar-inertial guidance. It remained committed to Admiral
Burke’s vision of purely retaliatory deterrence, and therefore gave a low
priority to enhanced accuracy.

This left the field open for the Soviet armed forces to take the lead
in guidance technology. The Soviet Union first deployed missiles using stellar-inertial
guidance in 1973. It was only in 1979, with Trident I, that the Americans
did likewise.

Since then, the US Navy has quickly improved the accuracy of submarine-launched
missiles, leaving the Soviet Union, with its weaker technological base,
far behind. Part of the reason for the change of mind was that counterforce,
the strategy founded on the possession of deadly accurate missiles, became
respectable. Hawkish strategists – some openly proclaiming that nuclear
war was winnable – gained ascendancy in Washington during the late 1970s
and early 1980s. The Air Force’s problems in finding a site for its land-based
MX missile reinforced the Navy’s new resolve. Local protesters defeated
the establishment’s favourite solution, a series of bases across Utah and
Nevada between which the missile transporters would shuttle in the event
of a conflict. With the MX missile blocked, the bureaucratic barriers to
the Navy developing an ultra-accurate missile crumbled. The result is Trident
II: this weapon threatens every stationary target in the Soviet Union, however
well protected.

While the major participants in nuclear strategic planning are the armed
services, other organisations are important too. Large corporations with
financial stakes in weapons R&D are central to what President Eisenhower
first called the ‘military-industrial complex’; but in the case of the development
of missile guidance in the US, however, their role was eclipsed by academia,
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Instrumentation Laboratory.
Only in 1973, following campus protests against designing nuclear missile
guidance systems, did MIT end its official association with the laboratory.
The unit became the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, named after its founder,
an MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics, who died in 1987.

Draper’s influence on the armed services was considerable. Large numbers
of Navy and Air Force officers earned MIT higher degrees through his laboratory,
and some at least became his partisans on their return to the services,
forming what they themselves describe as a ‘guidance mafia’. He was single-minded
in his determination to stay on his chosen path of technological development.
In an interview in 1984, he said he had not supported those within his laboratory
who, in the 1960s, wanted to devote resources to improving the recently
invented laser gyroscope: he was committed to increasing the accuracy of
traditional mechanical gyroscopes. He opposed the idea of making missile
guidance systems more accurate with the help of external sources of information
such as star-sightings. This he saw as an unsatisfactory compromise, a deviation
from the desirable path of the continuous refinement of self-contained systems.
According to proponents of stellar-inertial guidance, Draper’s opposition
to the system helped to delay its development and introduction.

Extrapolating conclusions from past experiences is notoriously dangerous,
especially when the context has radically changed, as it has with the thaw
in the Cold War since the rise of Gorbachov, in 1985. But the history of
the development of nuclear weapons does seem to provide some lessons about
the arms race, and one of the most important illustrates a phenomenon that
is familiar to sociologists. This is the way that an organisation, set up
for a particular purpose, often takes on a life of its own, for example
by constructing a new rationale for its existence, when its original goal
has become irrelevant.

The pursuit of the capacity for pre-emptive attack is an example. In
the early 1960s, American strategists claimed the US might just win a nuclear
war against the Soviet Union with a pre-emptive attack: they based the claim
on the calculation that ‘only’ between 2 and 15 million Americans would
die in the USSR’s ragged retaliatory attack. By the late 1960s, few strategists
believed even that questionable success would be possible, and yet the armed
forces still sought throughout the 1970s and 1980s to increase their capacity
to stage pre-emptive strikes, employing an ever-extending fabric of dubious
rationales.

The world of the nuclear insiders and their organisations indeed has
a life of its own. Its private goals and domestic rivalries are often more
important than anything the ‘enemy’ might be doing – perhaps even than whether
there is an ‘enemy’ at all.

The problem posed to humanity by nuclear weapons cannot be solved by
a handshake between Gorbachov and Bush, or even by the opening of the Berlin
Wall.

Donald MacKenzie is Reader in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh.
His research has been funded by the Nuffield Foundation and now by the Economic
and Social Research Council.

Further Reading: Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear
Missile Guidance, by D. MacKenzie, to be published by MIT Press, July 1990.
‘SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy’, by Scott
Sagan, published in International Security, Summer 1987 edition. The Wizards
of Armageddon, by F. Kaplan, published by Simon and Schuster, 1983.