Rethinking the Unthinkable

By Burton Pines

Carter revises the new game plan for fighting a nuclear war

At the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., this week, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown is to unveil officially the nuclear age's ultimate contingency plan. To some critics, it is a doomsday scenario, an outline for atomic war that could lead to the destruction of the human race. But to U.S. defense policymakers, Brown's speech represents an unavoidable rethinking of the unthinkable: bringing up to date U.S. strategic plans for deterring nuclear war.

Some details of the policy changes that Brown plans to announce have already been leaked, and they have drawn sizzling denunciations from Moscow. Thundered TASS: "Madness," "Maniacal." Cried Pravda: "Nuclear blackmail." But NATO allies of the U.S. welcomed the change. Said a British official crisply: "We agree with it. It enhances deterrence." Said a French official: "We are in favor of anything that improves U.S. credibility."

What Brown was set to announce is Presidential Directive 59, which was signed on July 25 by Jimmy Carter. In it, the Administration modifies the doctrine of how the nation plans to respond to a Soviet nuclear strike. Brown is expected to say that in the future, more of the Pentagon's land-based Minuteman ICBMS and B-52 bombers will be targeted at Soviet military installations and political and military command centers, as well as at major cities. Arms experts call this targeting concept "counterforce" because it is designed primarily to destroy the enemy's forces rather than large numbers of civilians. In a note to the NATO allies two weeks ago, outlining the policy, Brown explained: "It is a strategy designed [to make clear] that we have both capabilities and plans for use of our forces if deterrence fails. That means that no plausible outcome of such a war could be a victory for the U.S.S.R., however they may define victory."

Some elements of counterforce have been part of U.S. strategy for decades. But the U.S. has relied largely on what policymakers term "mutual assured destruction" (MAD). The theory is that the U.S.'s ability to retaliate against a Soviet attack by obliterating the residents and factories of Moscow and other major cities would deter the Kremlin from launching a nuclear strike against America. In turn, the Soviet capability to destroy U.S. cities has been seen as deterring Washington from attacking the U.S.S.R. Because such a situation in effect holds hostage the population centers of both superpowers, theorists call the strategy a "balance of terror" and have credited it with preventing nuclear holocaust--so far.

The trouble with this policy, which was adopted during the Eisenhower years, is that the conditions upon which it rests have changed, primarily because of the relentless buildup of Soviet strategic forces and the vast improvement in the accuracy of the Kremlin's nuclear warheads. The Soviets have achieved at least strategic parity with the U.S.; at the current rate of increase, the Kremlin is certain to attain clear-cut superiority in just a few more years. And despite its outcry against the Presidential Directive, Moscow has already deployed a very sizable counterforce arsenal of its own against U.S. Minuteman sites and other U.S. bases.

In addition, Soviet military literature has been emphasizing a "warfighting" nuclear doctrine--something missing from U.S. strategy. Explains a U.S. defense planner: "The Soviet view has been that the world does not stop when the two nuclear forces are released."

As a result of these developments, U.S. strategists have concluded that threatening massive retaliation against the U.S.S.R. may no longer be enough to deter a Soviet attack. For example, if the Soviets destroyed a couple of U.S. missile sites with atomic missiles, would the President be willing to order a counterstrike on Soviet cities, knowing that he was thereby inviting a full-scale reprisal by Moscow against American population centers? Some U.S. strategists fear that the Soviets may not believe that a U.S. President would take such a risk. Thus the threat of massive American retaliation becomes no longer a credible deterrent to a limited Soviet nuclear strike.

To retain its credibility, argues the Administration, the U.S. must be able to respond in land to a Soviet attack. A strike against a U.S. missile site, for example, would be answered by a U.S. counterblow against a Soviet military installation. Though the language of Presidential Directive 59 has the highest security classification and will not be made public, officials acknowledge that it calls for U.S. counterstrikes against military targets on whose survival the Soviet Union depends to continue fighting and eventually to capture and hold Western territory after a nuclear exchange. These targets include civilian and military commands, control and communications centers, troop concentrations, supply depots and transportation hubs. Says a senior official: "The Presidential Directive is an effort to create a situation in which we are not faced with the choice of apocalypse or giving in."

To complement the U.S. counterforce strategy, Carter has signed two other Presidential Directives, Nos. 53 and 58. They order the drafting of plans for an improved wartime communication network and new emergency measures for the rapid evacuation from Washington of top civilian and military leaders. Though current arrangements for protecting U.S. leaders during military crisis are secret, experts concede that they are frighteningly inadequate, especially in an age when there would be only ten minutes' warning before missiles fired from Soviet submarines off the East Coast struck Washington.

As has frequently been the case in the evolution of American strategic plans since the beginning of the nuclear age, the latest refinement in the U.S. atomic war game plan has been adopted with the hope that its mechanism never would have to be set in motion. Wrote Brown to his NATO colleagues: "We have no desire to fight a nuclear war." He emphasized, however, something that long has been the most fundamental premise of American deterrence theory: "The surest way to avoid such a war is to make certain that the Soviet leadership can have no illusions about what such a war would mean for Soviet state power. Of course, the capabilities of our forces, not our words about them, are the strongest influence on Soviet views."

The main element of such a U.S. capability is a highly accurate intercontinental missile capable of surviving a surprise Soviet attack. Though the nation's 550 Minuteman Ills, most already fitted with the new Mk-12A warhead, can achieve the pinpoint accuracy necessary to carry out the counterforce strategy, there is wide agreement among defense experts that these ICBMS will soon be vulnerable to a pre-emptive Soviet strike. The U.S. Navy's missile-launching submarines, hiding quietly at great ocean depths, are safer from attack, but they are much more appropriate for striking cities than for destroying missiles encased in concrete deep in the ground; for one thing, they are not sufficiently accurate.

What offers both accuracy and, because it is mobile, the ability to survive a surprise Soviet blow is the MX missile. It is, however, a controversial system, not only because of its hefty $33.8 billion price tag (sure to grow with cost overruns) but because there are some doubts about how long it would be before Moscow would find a way to cripple the MX missiles in a pre-emptive strike. Most experts are confident, however, that because the missile will not be a stationary target and will be protected by various other measures still under consideration, it will remain virtually invulnerable for at least a couple of decades. This has been the life span of the Minuteman system.

In fact, because of the Minuteman's fast-approaching vulnerability to attack, the MX probably would be required by the U.S. in any case. But the weapon's counterforce role is likely to become one of the most important arguments for going ahead with it. This was one of the points stressed last week by the Carter forces at the Democratic Convention when they pushed successfully for an endorsement of the MX in the party's platform.

Harold Brown has emphasized that Presidential Directive 59 represents only an evolutionary change in U.S. strategic policy. As far back as 1962 Defense Secretary Robert McNamara flirted with the concept of counterforce but abandoned it mainly because it was too costly, given the state of technology in that era. Eleven years later, Pentagon Chief James Schlesinger strongly advocated the concept. As a result, Schlesinger now says, "80% of the [new] doctrine has been in place since the summer of '73."

The specific policy that Brown is to announce had its immediate roots in the opening months of the Carter Administration, when the President ordered a thorough review of U.S. strategic options. This eventually led to a top-secret report completed in early 1979. Details of the new directive were thrashed out in a long series of meetings of senior officials from the Pentagon and National Security Council staff. Throughout the proceedings, the NATO allies also were kept informed of the policy discussions. At NATO's Nuclear Planning Group meeting in Norway in June, Brown discussed the matter in detail with his allied counterparts and received their approval for the shift in strategic emphasis.

Not so well informed, apparently, was Edmund Muskie. Although State Department aides were advised of the doctrinal discussions at various times in the past year, the planning sessions had concluded before Muskie became Secretary of State in May, and he apparently had not been fully informed of the new policy's details when its general outlines were leaked to reporters early this month. By angrily making no secret of the fact that he felt he had been left in the dark, Muskie created a minor but embarrassing flap that fueled speculation about rivalries between his staff and that of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is responsible for coordinating the formulation of such policies. Was Brzezinski, it was asked, already trying to undercut the new Secretary of State? By week's end, however, Muskie seemed generally mollified.

The fact that the new counterforce policy is a modification of existing doc trine has raised questions about why Carter has dramatized the change by making it a Presidential Directive. Brzezinski was the chief advocate of the move, while Brown is thought to have favored keeping the policy an internal Pentagon matter. A number of critics believe that Carter wants to publicize the matter because he needs to appear tougher on defense is sues to blunt criticism from G.O.P. Nominee Ronald Reagan. Says Herbert Scoville Jr., former CIA deputy director for research and now a strong advocate of arms reduction: "They're playing politics with the thing." Observes former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: "I do not believe that the middle of an election campaign is the appropriate moment to announce a new strategy for conducting nuclear operations."

More important than the possible political reasons for Carter's action is the impact the policy may have at home and abroad. Doves are generally critical. Complains Scoville: "Anything that makes it easier to fight nuclear war is a step in the wrong direction." Even Har old Brown has had reservations about the counterforce strategy; he has been wor ried that once a nuclear exchange begins, no matter how limited, it will inevitably escalate into Armageddon. But Brown also believes that the U.S. must have the option of responding to a nuclear strike with something less than a full-scale atomic fusillade.

Brown's original hesitations about the policy seem valid, for there is a fundamental ambivalence involved in counterforce. Explains Lawrence Korb, director of defense studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington: "The irony of this doctrine is that it could make war either more or less probable. The threshold may be easier to go over, but if you do, you may be able to put the genie back in the bottle. It is stoppable, but because it is, it also is more startable." --

With reporting by Don Sider

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