Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

Daniel Ellsberg, Norman Solomon, The Nation

Land-based nuclear weapons are world-ending accidents waiting to happen

The single best option for reducing the risk of nuclear war is hidden in plain sight. News outlets don’t mention it. Pundits ignore it. Even progressive and peace-oriented members of Congress tiptoe around it. And yet, for many years, experts have been calling for this act of sanity that could save humanity: Shutting down all of the nation’s intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Four hundred ICBMs dot the rural landscapes of Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Loaded in silos, these missiles are uniquely—and dangerously—on hair-trigger alert. Unlike the nuclear weapons on submarines or bombers, the land-based missiles are vulnerable to attack and could present the commander in chief with a sudden use-them-or-lose-them choice. “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled,” former Defense Secretary William Perry warns.[1]

“The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.”

The danger that a false alarm on either side — of the sort that has occurred repeatedly on both sides — would lead to a preemptive attack derives almost entirely from the existence on both sides of land-based missile forces, each vulnerable to attack by the other; each, therefore, is kept on a high state of alert, ready to launch within minutes of warning. The easiest and fastest way for the US to reduce that risk — and, indeed, the overall danger of nuclear war — is to dismantle entirely its Minuteman III missile force. Gen. James E. Cartwright, a former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had been commander of the Strategic Command, teamed up with former Minuteman launch officer Bruce G. Blair to write in a 2016 op-ed: “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.”[2]

But rather than confront the reality that ICBMs — all ICBMs — are such a grave threat to human survival, the most concerned members of Congress have opted to focus on stopping new ones from taking the place of existing ones. A year ago, the Air Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $13.3 billion “engineering and manufacturing development” contract for replacing the current Minuteman III missiles with a new generation of ICBMs named the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent.[3]

Northrop Grumman was the only bidder for GBSD after Boeing decided to drop out of the competition.

Current projections peg the overall cost over the next five decades at $364 billion. Northrop Grumman calls the GBSD “the modernization of the ground-based leg of the nuclear triad.” But if reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg — not modernize it.

Many arms-control advocates, while understanding the inherent dangers of ground-based nuclear missiles, have largely stuck to opposing the GBSD. Instead of challenging ICBMs outright, a coalition of organizations has concentrated on aiming a fiscal argument at Capitol Hill, calling the GBSD program a “money pit” that would squander vast amounts of taxpayer dollars. But the powerful chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith, executed a deft end run around that strategy in early summer when he declared that “Minuteman extension, as it is currently being explained to us, is actually more expensive than building the GBSD.”

The same Congressman Smith said less than a year earlier, “I frankly think that our [ICBM] fleet right now is driven as much by politics as it is by a policy necessity. You know, there are certain states in the union that apparently are fond of being a nuclear target. And you know, it’s part of their economy. It’s what they do.”

Senators from several of the states with major ICBM bases or development activities—Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, [Nebraska, Colorado,]and Utah — continue to maintain an “ICBM Coalition” dedicated to thwarting any serious scrutiny of the land-based weaponry. Members of the coalition have systematically blocked efforts to reduce the number of ICBMs or study alternatives to building new ones. They’re just a few of the lawmakers captivated by ICBM mega-profiteers. In a report issued this year by the Center for International Policy, nuclear weapons expert William Hartung gives readers a detailed look “Inside the ICBM Lobby,” showing how ICBM contractors get their way while throwing millions of dollars at politicians and deploying battalions of lobbyists on Capitol Hill.[4]

As the recipient of the sole-source contract to build the proposed new ICBMs, Northrop Grumman has joined with other top contractors to block efforts to reduce spending on these dangerous and unnecessary systems — or even simply to pause their development.

When opponents of the GBSD decline to challenge the currently deployed Minuteman III missiles, the effects are counterproductive if their ultimate goal is to get rid of ICBMs. Tacit acceptance of the Minuteman missile force while attempting to block the GBSD sends a message that the ICBM status quo isn’t so bad. Such a tactical path might seem eminently pragmatic and realistic. But sooner or later, the extraordinary dangers of keeping any ICBMs in place must be faced, exposed, explained to the public — and directly challenged.

Getting trapped in an argument about the cheapest way to keep ICBMs operational in their silos is ultimately no-win. The history of nuclear weapons in this country tells us that people will spare no expense if they believe that spending the money will really make them and their loved ones safer — we must show them that ICBMs actually do the opposite. Unless arms-control and disarmament groups, along with allied members of Congress, change course and get serious about addressing the fundamentals of why ICBMs should be eliminated, they’ll end up implicitly reinforcing the land-based part of the triad.

“First and foremost,” former Defense Secretary Perry wrote five years ago, “the United States can safely phase out its land-based [ICBM] force, a key facet of Cold War nuclear policy.[5] Retiring the ICBMs would save considerable costs, but it isn’t only budgets that would benefit. These missiles are some of the most dangerous weapons in the world. They could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”

Contrary to uninformed assumptions, discarding all ICBMs could be accomplished unilaterally by the United States with no downside. Even if Russia chose not to follow suit, dismantling the potentially cataclysmic land-based missiles would make the world safer for everyone on the planet. Frank von Hippel, a former chair of the Federation of American Scientists and a cofounder of Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security, wrote this year: “Eliminating launch on warning would significantly reduce the probability of blundering into a civilization-ending nuclear war by mistake. To err is human. To start a nuclear war would be unforgivable.”

Better sooner than later, members of Congress will need to face up to the horrendous realities about intercontinental ballistic missiles. They won’t do that unless peace, arms-control, and disarmament groups go far beyond the current limits of congressional discourse — and start emphasizing, on Capitol Hill and at the grassroots, the crucial truth about ICBMs and the imperative of eliminating them all.

— Daniel Ellsberg is a former American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national uproar in 1971 when he released The Pentagon Papers, the US military’s account of activities during the Vietnam War, to The New York Times. The release awakened the American people to how much they had been deceived by their own government about the war. Ellsberg has continued as a political activist, giving lecture tours and speaking out about current events.

— Norman Solomon is the Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, the author of War Made Easy, and a cofounder of RootsAction.org.

— This article originally appeared in the Oct. 17, 2021 edition of the Nation. Copyright (c) The Nation.

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Notes, not original with the authors, added by the editor:

[1] William J. Perry, “Why It’s Safe to Scrap America’s ICBMs,” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/opinion/why-its-safe-to-scrap-americas-icbms.html

[2] “End the First-Use Policy for Nuclear Weapons,” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/opinion/end-the-first-use-policy-for-nuclear-weapons.html

[3] “Northrop Grumman receives $13.3 billion contract to develop next-generation ICBM,” Space News online, Sep. 8, 2020; https://spacenews.com/northrop-grumman-receives-13-3-billion-contract-to-develop-next-generation-icbm/

[4] “Inside The ICBM Lobby: Special Interests or The National Interest?” https://3ba8a190-62da-4c98-86d2-893079d87083.usrfiles.com/ugd/3ba8a1_89fe183f8a164e22a2fa29d4d6381d7b.pdf

[5] Wm. Perry, note 1

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2021

By John LaForge

Of the 300 doctors in Hiroshima at the time of the explosion, the Red Cross says 90% were killed or injured. Of the 1,780 nurses, 93% suffered the same fate.

— From the essay “‘Why Did You Do This To Me?’: Medical Perspectives on the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima,” by Ben Stanley, August 4, 2020

Hiroshima was “a military base.” The US atomic bombings “ended the war,” and they “prevented an invasion and saved lives.” Our government’s tests of atomic weapons on people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 76 years ago were rationalized using these myths which transformed indiscriminate destruction into a “good thing.” This mythology stands as a roadblock to the elimination of nuclear weapons.

The “good bomb” story is still believed by many in the United States because of decades of deliberate myth-making started by President Truman. He announced after Hiroshima, “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” Some 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima, another 70,000 in Nagasaki. Almost all were civilians. The bombs were dropped miles from the nearest military base in both cases.

The incurious can be excused for accepting this cover-story — even though it was publicly rejected at the time by great thinkers and writers including Albert Camus and Dorothy Day — because documents that prove the president and his administration lied were kept secret for decades.

One is the April 1946 US Strategic Bombing Survey, led by Dr. Paul Nitze who would later become Navy Secretary and later still a presidential advisor to Ronald Reagan. Nitze’s extensive official government study demolished Truman’s whitewash, concluding, “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated,” according to The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth by historian Gar Alperovitz.

Likewise, the 1946 report of the Intelligence Group of the War Department’s (now Pentagon’s) Military Intelligence Division — only discovered in 1989 — concluded that atomic bombings had not been needed to end the war. The Intelligence Group “judged that it was ‘almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war,’” according to The Decision.

The judgment of Major General Curtis LeMay made six weeks after Nagasaki was more emphatic. Gen. LeMay headed the 21st Bomber Command and directed the firebombing of Osaka, Tokyo and 58 other Japanese cities. LeMay said September 20, 1945, at a New York press conference reported in The New York Herald Tribune, “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.” A surprised reporter asked, “Had they not surrendered because of the atomic bomb?” and LeMay answered, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

So for 76 years debate has raged about whether the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was ethical. Truman’s shrewd deception that mass destruction “saved lives” has long obscured the (previously classified) historical record, as well as the voices of high-level critics who rejected the big lie.

In 1945, Brig. General Bonnie Feller wrote, “Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan’s unconditional surrender.”

President Eisenhower said, “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s Chief of Staff, said later in life, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”

Returning to Paul Nitze, after 43 years in government spent promoting nuclear weapons he went from the Strategic Bombing Survey’s crushing of Truman’s Hiroshima myth in 1946, to obliterating all the remaining excuses for nuclear weapons in 1999. He wrote in The New York Times:

I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them … adds nothing to our security. … I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the US to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us.

Today, the global clamor for abolition is invigorated by the entry-into-force of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. With it, we have a new opportunity to renounce fairy tales about the atrocities of August 6 and 9, to eliminate the needless costs of perpetual nuclear threats (“deterrence”), to cease our radioactive terrorism, and to finally scrap our nuclear arsenal.

— A version of this comment was syndicated by PeaceVoice.info.