Living with Mega-Death

• Share

(10 of 13)

pre-emptive attack. But there is no way that the Kremlin leaders could be sure that the U.S. would leave those missiles in the ground once it was certain that Soviet warheads were on their way. The Kremlin leaders would have to reckon with the possibility that during the 30 minutes' warning that the U.S. President would have from satellites, radar and other means, he would decide to shoot the works.

Even if the President, for whatever reason, chose to "absorb" a Soviet first strike, thereby sacrificing most of his ICBMs, the destruction sustained by the U.S. would be immense—as many as 20 U.S. would be immense—as many as 20 million killed, and perhaps twice that number wounded. Would the President consider that a "surgical, Limited strike" and respond accordingly? Or would he order a devastating retaliation from his missile-firing submarines? At least 15 of those boats would be untouched and undetectable, deep at sea, each carrying at least 16 missiles, each missile tipped with eight to ten warheads, each warhead almost four times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Two of those American subs could destroy every major city in the U.S.S.R.

How would such a war start? Most experts now dismiss the once fashionable "bolt-out-of-the-blue" scenario. William Hyland, a longtime strategic specialist for the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations and now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, fears that World War III might begin not as World War II did, with a Nazi blitzkrieg in the West and a Japanese sneak attack in the East, but as World War I did, with a combination of bumbling, inadvertence, events getting out of control and just plain bad luck. Says he: "If there is ever a nuclear war, it will be like August 1914—a gradual losing of control. There would be rival alerts, no one backing down, no one wanting to fight, but a mounting confrontation that could lead to fighting."

Says former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, "Strategic war is so obviously catastrophic to all engaged in it that it is only under enormous political stress, provocation and escalation-probably from lower levels of conflict— choices. it has any chance of happening." Adds James Schlesinger, "A nuclear war would probably get started only by miscalculation."

In keeping with the Reaganauts' generally demonological view of the Soviets, a key official of the present Administration, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Fred C. Ikle, does not rule out the possibility of a nuclear Pearl Harbor. Yet he can imagine such a thing only if future changes in the Soviet leadership produce a regime that is not as "cautious and conservative" as the current one. Meanwhile, he admits, "attention to the possibility of nuclear war by miscalculation is at least as important as to deliberate attack."

Raymond Garthoff, a leading expert on Soviet military strategy who is now at the Brookings Institution, believes that the Soviets would consider trying to get the drop on the U.S. with nuclear weapons only if they were convinced that the U.S. was about to reach for its own holster: "If they really concluded that the U.S. had decided to attack them, they would preempt. This would be in a situation of crisis and high alert."

The headlines make it