Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

Slemon immediately felt relieved. The Soviet Union was unlikely to launch an attack that would kill the first secretary of its Communist Party. Twenty minutes passed, and no Soviet missiles landed. The three businessmen were let out of the small office, glad to be alive. When news of the false alarm leaked to the press, the Air Force denied that the missile warning had ever been taken seriously. Percy, who later became a Republican senator from Illinois, disputed that account. He recalled a sense of panic at NORAD. A subsequent investigation found the cause of the computer glitch. The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.

Both of America’s early-warning systems were deeply flawed — and, as a result, the most reliable indicator of a Soviet attack might be the destruction of those systems by nuclear blasts. Bomb Alarm System sensors would be placed at the SAGE direction centers and at Thule. By the time those bomb sensors went off, however, the president might already be dead. Of the fourteen potential successors, as specified by Congress, only the vice president and the secretary of defense would have any familiarity with the SIOP. If all fourteen were in Washington, D.C., during a surprise attack, they would probably be killed or incapacitated.

Amid the confusion, it might be impossible to determine who was America’s commander in chief. Everyone on the presidential succession list had been given a phone number to call, in case of a national emergency. The call would put them in touch with the Joint War Room at the Pentagon. But telephone service was bound to be disrupted by a nuclear attack, the Pentagon might no longer exist — and even if it did, the first person to call the war room might be named president of the United States, regardless of whether he or she was next on the list. WSEG Report No. 50 outlined the problem:

There is no mechanism for nor organization charged with locating, identifying, and providing essential defense communications to the senior, non-incapacitated member of that list in the event of a nuclear attack presumed to have removed the President from control…. The possibility exists that the man to wield Presidential authority in dire emergency might in fact be selected by a single field grade military officer.

The idea of a “decapitation” attack, aimed at America’s military and civilian leadership, didn’t seem entirely far-fetched. Indeed, it was the most plausible scenario for a Soviet attack on the United States. And it had the best chance of success. “No other target system can at present offer equal potential returns from so few weapons,” the report said.

McNamara subsequently discovered that the command-and-control problems were hardly limited to the United States. “We have been concerned with the vulnerability of our defense machine in the U.S.,” a Pentagon task force informed him, “but it is nothing compared with the situation in Europe.” All of NATO’s command bunkers, including the operations center inside the Kindsbach Cave, could easily be destroyed, even by an attack with conventional weapons. Although NATO maintained fighter planes on a ground alert, ready to take off within fifteen minutes, it lacked an early-warning system that could detect Soviet missiles. It also lacked a bomb alarm system. At best, NATO commanders might receive five or ten minutes of warning that a Soviet attack had begun — not enough time to get those planes off the ground. And that warning would most likely never be received, because the NATO communications system was completely unprotected. Its destruction would prevent NATO from transmitting messages not only within Europe but also between Europe and the United States. Once the fighting began, the president could not expect to reach any of NATO’s high-ranking officers or to give them any orders. And they wouldn’t be able to communicate with one another.

The Pentagon task force found that NATO had done little to prepare for the devolution of command in wartime:

It is imperative that each commander knows when a higher headquarters has been erased or isolated from command; that he knows his own responsibilities as the situation degrades; that he knows the status of similar commands at his level elsewhere; and that he knows the status of lower echelons, and what responsibilities they can assume. It appears that this is not the case in Europe today.