Preface. If you are not worried about nuclear war anymore, you should be. We have accidentally come close so many times.

You may not be nervous about Trump, but you should be. Here is some of what this book had to say about him, and there is more below:

“To discuss military strategies, a briefing was delivered to Trump and Steve Bannon by Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Trump grew noticeably impatient, as did his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who despised the whole roomful of “globalists”—his expletive for the denizens of the “swamp” that he and Trump had said they would drain in their term of office. During the question period, both of them spewed complaints, asking why we weren’t winning in Afghanistan, why we still needed to support those freeloaders in NATO, what was so important about keeping troops in South Korea.

The big-gulp moment came when one of Dunford’s aides displayed a chart showing the dramatic reduction in American and Russian nuclear weapons over the decades. It was presented as a success story about arms control, stability, and the declining dependence on weapons of catastrophic destruction. But Trump viewed the chart from a different perspective, telling the group that he wanted more nuclear weapons. He pointed to the graph’s peak year, 1969, when the United States had 32,000.

Trump asked why he didn’t have that many weapons now. Mattis and Tillerson talked him down, noting the legal restrictions, the practical obstacles, the enormous cost, and the fact that the roughly 2,500 nuclear weapons in the active U.S. arsenal today were better suited to perform their missions than the much larger force of a half-century earlier. After a few more raucous exchanges, Trump and his entourage left the room. Seconds later, Tillerson sighed and said, under his breath but loudly enough for many who’d stayed behind to hear, that the president of the United States was a “fucking moron.

Trump seemed to have grasped, momentarily, why the nation didn’t need 30,000 nuclear weapons. But a few weeks later, at a meeting in the Oval Office with his national security adviser, Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, Trump brought up that chart again. As long as we have enough nuclear weapons to inflict unacceptable damage on our adversaries, we’re fine, he assured the president. If we build too many weapons, our enemies might think we were amassing a first-strike capability, which, in a crisis, might prompt them to launch a preemptive strike against us. Again, Trump seemed to understand. But a month or so later, he asked, still again, why he couldn’t have a nuclear arsenal as big as what previous presidents had.”

There have been generals in the past and generals today who think a nuclear war can be won.  But the latest research shows that at least 5 billion people could be killed in the ensuing nuclear winter (see the posts on that topic this here).

I would rank nuclear war at the top of all the existential threats floating out there, more than climate change — though it would certainly cool the planet down for a while! And magnify the other threats to extinction of biodiversity loss and more.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Kaplan F (2021) The Bomb: Presidents Generals and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Simon-Schuster.

In those decades when most of us chose to forget about the bomb—as global tensions calmed and fallout shelters crumbled and we turned our gaze to other problems and pleasures—the nuclear war machine continued to rumble forth in the beyond-Top-Secret chambers of the Pentagon, the Strategic Command headquarters in Omaha, the weapons labs in various parts of the country, and the think tanks whose denizens never stopped thinking about the unthinkable.

 

Over the years, officers and officials have described America’s nuclear policy as second-strike deterrence: if an enemy strikes us with nuclear weapons, we will retaliate in kind; this retaliatory power is what deters the enemy from attacking us. In reality, though, American policy has always been to strike first preemptively, or in response to a conventional invasion of allied territory, or to a biological or large-scale cyber-attack: in any case, not just as an answer to a nuclear attack.

Most presidents have been skeptical of this vision—morally, strategically, practically—but none of them have rejected it. Some have threatened to launch nuclear weapons first as a way of settling a crisis. The few who considered adopting a “no first use” policy, in the end, decided against it.

Hiroshima, obliterated almost five square miles and killed 150,000 people.

Truman said that is a terrible thing to order the use of something that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had. His reaction was “You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this thing differently from rifles and cannons and ordinary things like that.”

Much of the history of the bomb over the subsequent 70 years, and doubtless beyond, is the story of the generals—and many civilian strategists, as well—trying to make it a “military weapon” after all.

If the Cold War heated up to a shooting war, as seemed likely, better, many believed, to win it quickly by slamming the Communists with A-bombs than to send millions of American boys back to the grueling battlefields of Europe from which they’d only recently departed.

By 1952, a mere three years after the admirals’ revolt, all of the Navy’s new combat planes were designed to carry nuclear weapons. The Army and even the Marine Corps were equipping their battalions and brigades with short-range nuclear missiles and even nuclear artillery shells to help repel an invasion

In March 1954, the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the top officers of all the branches of the armed forces—declared in a Top Secret document, “In a general war, regardless of the manner of initiation, atomic weapons will be used at the outset.” Generals Nathan Twining, Admiral Arthur  Radford, General Matthew B. Ridgway, General Lemuel Shepherd, and Admiral Robert Carney to be exact. The term “general war” was defined as an armed conflict that pitted American and Soviet forces directly against one another. In other words, a war between the world’s two new superpowers would be, from the first salvos, a nuclear war.

This would be the case “regardless of the manner of initiation.” Any armed Soviet incursion into territory deemed vital to U.S. interests—even a tentative crossing of the East-West German border—would spark an instant, all-out nuclear response.  This wasn’t exclusively the military’s position.

Eisenhower had no hunger for another land war. His most popular campaign pledge had been to end the war in Korea, a bitter stalemate that had gone on since 1950, killing more than 35,000 American troops. He ended the war, so it seemed, by threatening to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union—which, along with the new Communist government of China, had backed North Korea in its invasion of South Korea. An armistice was signed six months after he took office.

He worried that weakening the U.S. economy would weaken its defenses—and that a rising federal budget, even if much of it was spent on troops and weapons, would hurl the nation’s economy and thus its defenses into a tailspin. So the solution that Eisenhower and his group devised—the essence of the great equation—was to rely a lot more on the nuclear bomb.

Dulles gave a speech titled “The Strategy of Massive Retaliation,” that portrayed an enemy—the Sino-Soviet bloc—bent on exploiting weaknesses in every crevice of the Free World. If we played the enemy’s game, we would wind up sending troops to shore up defenses everywhere, thinning our forces, straining our alliances, and going bankrupt in the process. Instead, he announced, the United States would now pursue “maximum protection at a bearable cost”—meaning it would “depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing.” In other words, it would retaliate, at the start of a war, with nuclear weapons.

Army generals and Navy admirals argued that the military should at least try to push back a Soviet or Chinese invasion with conventional forces in the first rounds of battle—a strategy that would mean, among other things, larger budgets for their services. On the other side of this interservice rivalry, Air Force generals pushed for the pure Mitchell-Douhet vision: relying entirely on nuclear weapons and winning the war by annihilating Russia.

General LeMay derided any other form of armed strength, and any other strategy, as obsolete. An aide to Lyndon B. Johnson, the Senate’s top Democrat, wrote in a memo after the hearing that LeMay “is not just calling for more bombers and more H bombs. He is calling for nothing but heavy bombers and H bombs.

The results were grim, for both sides. An attack by the United States destroyed the USSR as a society. But an attack by the Soviet Union hardly left America unscathed: the federal government would be wiped out; the economy would undergo near-total collapse, with no recovery of any sort for at least six months; two thirds of the population would require medical care, and most of them would have no way to obtain it.

LeMay had already written his own orders. Labeled SAC Emergency War Plan 1-49, it called for slamming the Soviet Union with “the entire stockpile of atomic bombs” in “a single massive attack,” dropping 133 A-bombs on 70 cities within 30 days.

SAC headquarters was located at Offutt Air Force Base, just outside Omaha, Nebraska, more than a thousand miles west of Washington, D.C. LeMay turned isolation into a strength. It allowed him to ignore orders when they contradicted his ideas about modern warfare. So he ignored Vandenberg’s nuclear war plan and continued to work on his own.

In preparation for LeMay’s plan, his staff drew up a list of roughly 100 targets to hit, mainly the largest Soviet cities. As SAC’s budget swelled, and as the labs churned out more bombs, LeMay’s intelligence officers came up with more targets. The work took on a self-serving circular logic: more weapons drove the need to find more targets; more targets propelled a need to buy more weapons. The list of targets grew 14-fold—and continued to grow each year through the end of the decade.

Over the same time span, the Navy also expanded its arsenal of nuclear weapons, most of them strapped under the wings of combat planes, which, in a war, would take off from supersized aircraft carriers as they steamed near Soviet and Chinese shorelines. Some of these planes would hit the same targets as SAC bombers. To LeMay, this was a nuisance, but not much more than that.

Since the collapse of their revolt at the start of the decade, the Navy’s admirals had never stopped resenting the Air Force for usurping the defense budget—nor had they stopped looking for a path to regain their own dominance. Since the collapse of their revolt at the start of the decade, the Navy’s admirals had never stopped resenting the Air Force for usurping the defense budget—nor had they stopped looking for a path to regain their own dominance. In

In 1956, Admiral Arleigh Burke, the newly named chief of naval operations, thought he found it. As the Navy’s top admiral, he jump-started funding for a similar, more modern sub capable of carrying 16 long-range ballistic missiles, each tipped with a half-megaton nuclear warhead. The missile would be called the Polaris. They could roam beneath the ocean’s surface, undetectable and therefore invulnerable. The Polaris missiles were proving in tests to be inaccurate, but that didn’t matter much: a half-megaton blast would flatten buildings across a radius of five miles. the Polaris could do what SAC’s bombers would do—and without the bombers’ vulnerability, which practically invited the Soviets to launch a preemptive attack.

Naval Warfare Analysis Group. NAVWAG’s main thesis was that, once the Soviets had their own nuclear arsenal, the notion of winning a nuclear war was absurd and any plan to launch an American first strike was suicidal. Therefore, the only sensible purpose of nuclear weapons was to deter an enemy attack. The only way to deter an enemy attack was to develop a nuclear arsenal that could answer an enemy attack with a devastating counterblow to the enemy’s cities.

Under this doctrine, it didn’t matter if the Soviets kept building more and more nuclear weapons. As long as the United States had enough weapons to destroy the Soviets’ cities—Burke thought that the missiles in forty submarines, or 640 missiles in all, would be sufficient—and as long as those weapons couldn’t be attacked, there was no need for the United States to respond in “an eternal, strength-sapping” numbers contest.

By contrast, the only way to compensate for the vulnerability of SAC’s bombers’ missiles was to build more bombers and missiles—and to keep building more as the Soviets built more. This approach, the NAVWAG study noted, was “a prescription for an arms race” and “an invitation to the enemy for preventive-war adventurism.

Dulles’s doctrine lacked credibility: the Kremlin wouldn’t believe that an American president would attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons in response to an incursion in Asia or even an invasion of West Germany—because the Soviets would respond by launching a nuclear attack on the United States. Kaufmann recommended, instead, a strong buildup of U.S. conventional forces to deter and repel a Soviet invasion on the Kremlin’s own terms.

In an era when both sides have nuclear weapons, it would be suicidal to launch a nuclear first strike on the other side’s cities. But, he observed, there were other kinds of targets, even for nuclear bombs. For instance, if the Soviets invaded West Germany, and if we were unable to mount a conventional defense, we could launch a small number of nuclear weapons against the USSR’s military forces, especially its nuclear bomber bases and missile sites—deliberately leaving its cities untouched. Then, the American president could tell the Soviet premier: Stop your invasion, or I’ll launch my remaining nuclear weapons against your cities. Neither White nor LeMay was keen on the notion of a “limited” nuclear attack; it rubbed against what they saw as the main appeal of nuclear bombs—the immensity of their destructiveness.

SAC’s officers drew the target circles on the map in such a way that the bomb’s blast would destroy the military site and a large chunk of a nearby city. In this view, the resulting civilian damage—the number of urban factories destroyed and people killed—wasn’t something to avoid; to the contrary, it was touted as a “bonus.

There was a cruelty to Genera Thomas Power’s zest for bombing cities. Even LeMay privately referred to his protégé as a “sadist.” When Bill Kaufmann briefed him on the counterforce strategy at SAC headquarters, Power reacted with fury. “Why do you want us to restrain ourselves?” he screamed. “Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards!” After a bit more of this tirade, Power said, “Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!

Kaufmann snapped back, “You’d better make sure that they’re a man and a woman.

The final draft of the SIOP specified seven targets that had to be destroyed with 97% assurance, 213 targets with 95% confidence, 592 targets with a 90% chance, and 715 targets with 80%. These rules dramatically inflated the number of nuclear weapons that would be “required” for an attack. A fair number of bombs and missiles would veer widely off course; some of them wouldn’t explode; some bomber planes would be shot down enroute to their targets.

SIOP assigned an average of 2.2 nuclear weapons—each unleashing an explosive force of several megatons—to each and every target across the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. And, in keeping with LeMay’s philosophy of modern war, these weapons would be launched in waves as massive and rapid as possible.

Daniel Ellsberg

The previous year, Ellsberg had conducted a highly classified study of the military’s nuclear command-control network. He was one of the very few civilians ever to immerse himself in the nuts and bolts of the nuclear war-making machinery, and he emerged from his probe with deep alarm over the rigidity of the system: not only how easily a small conflict could escalate into all-out nuclear war, but how the system had been designed to ensure escalation.

He noted the suicidal consequences of SIOP-62’s “spasm” attack, “in which we fire off everything we can” all at once. He proposed instead a “doctrine of controlled response” to Communist aggression, giving the president the option of hitting only Soviet or Chinese military targets, refraining from hitting Soviet cities—refraining from hitting China altogether if that country wasn’t involved in the war—and holding back a secure “reserve” of nuclear weapons, which the president could threaten to launch against Soviet cities if the Kremlin didn’t back down. The explicit goal here was not merely to end the war quickly, before it spiraled out of control, but to end it in a way that didn’t leave the U.S. military inferior to the Soviet military after the first volley of attacks: to give the United States a means of “prevailing”—not just surviving but, in some meaningful sense, winning—a nuclear war. To Ellsberg, and to many of his colleagues, counterforce was both a more humane approach to nuclear war and a shrewder strategy.

General Lemnitzer replied with a brief memo, speaking on behalf of all the Chiefs, dismissing the whole notion of “controlled responses” and “negotiating pauses” in a nuclear war. First, he argued, it was impractical. U.S. nuclear forces were too vulnerable to risk holding back a large number of them once a war had begun; a Soviet strike would disable this so-called reserve force, so, as a practical matter, we had to use it or lose it. Second, there was a conceptual problem. The alleged advantages of “limiting” our attack were plausible only if the Soviets cooperated—that is, if they limited their attack too—and that premise, he wrote, “does not now appear realistic.

Kaysen wrote, seemed to be based on “the old estimate of the probable development of Russian missile strength.” If we look at “the newer estimates,” he went on, “we find we can accept a significantly smaller force.” Kaysen was referring to the fact—awkward to discuss but enormously pertinent all the same—that, in the first few weeks of the new administration, the “missile gap” proved to be a myth. It was an awkward fact because Kennedy had built much of his election campaign on the charge, which he drew from Air Force Intelligence estimates, that there was a missile gap.

In August 1960, three months before Kennedy’s election victory, the Eisenhower administration launched the first photoreconnaissance satellite, The satellite had traversed the entire length of the Soviet Union, along every road and railroad track—any passageway that could support a gigantic missile and its launching gear. Before this, Air Force Intelligence had claimed that the Soviets had 200 ICBMs; Army and Navy Intelligence had put the number at 50. In fact, the Discoverer photos revealed that they possessed just four long-range missiles.

The main issue, as Kaysen saw it, wasn’t merely one of waste. In setting the size of our nuclear arsenal, he wrote, “we must always consider the possibility of interaction” with the Soviets. If we built many more missiles than we needed for deterrence, the Russians might take that as a sign that we were striving for “a full first-strike capability”—and, in response, they might order a crash buildup of their own, setting off an arms race.

If McNamara’s proposal for a “large increase” were approved, Kaysen asked, “how great is the risk that we will push the Russians over to another strategic concept?” At a meeting with Bundy and Kaysen, McNamara acknowledged that this analysis was sound. But, he said, he couldn’t recommend any fewer than 1,000 Minutemen without provoking a rebellion from the Chiefs. He reminded the two White House officials that the Air Force had wanted 2,300 missiles; he’d managed to cut that request by more than half.

Not only was the Soviet arsenal much smaller than previously believed, but its missiles weren’t loaded with warheads, the bombers weren’t on alert, and the early warning network was riddled with gaps, which would make it hard to detect a U.S. bombing raid, especially if the pilots flew in at low altitudes.

The NSC’s update of what would happen after an all-out nuclear exchange for Eisenhower was updated five years later for Kennedy. It was no less gloomy: tens of millions dead in the United States, the Soviet Union, and China; millions more sick and left with “hopelessly inadequate” medical care; half of all factories and residences ruined; the “shattering” of “the political, military and economic structure of the country.” After the briefing, the room was stunned into silence. Turning to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was sitting beside him, Kennedy said, “And we call ourselves the human race.”

Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a veteran diplomat of reticent bearing, spoke up. The Western world, he said, was not ready to make decisions that would pave a clear path to general war; there needed to be many options for action—economic sanctions, naval blockades, airlifts—before going nuclear.

American military forces surrounded the Soviet Union, and now he knew that Kennedy knew that the Kremlin had very few—really, next to no—weapons with the range to hit U.S. territory in response to an American first strike. Despite the rhetoric about sausages, the Soviet ICBM program was in doldrums. But Khrushchev did have a fair number of medium-range missiles, and the idea struck him that placing some of those missiles in Cuba—the revolutionary island nation that had recently declared itself a Soviet ally and that sat just 90 miles off American shores—would have the same effect as a crash buildup of ICBMs.

Kennedy fixed on the idea. Wondering aloud why Khrushchev had taken this wild gamble of putting missiles in Cuba, he figured that they must be part of some diplomatic bargaining scheme and that, to get rid of them, he might have to let Khrushchev save face. “The only offer we would make, it seems to me, that would have any sense of giving him some out would be our Turkey missiles.”

General Maxwell Taylor opened by saying that the Chiefs were unanimously recommending an immediate air strike on Cuba. At the start of his presidency, Kennedy might have kowtowed to this row of combat-decorated four-stars, all of whom had been senior officers during World War II, when he was a mere PT boat commander. But 21 months into his term, Kennedy, feeling vindicated by his approach in one superpower crisis, wasted no time taking charge. “Let me just say a little, first, about what the problem is, from my point of view,” he said calmly. If we attack the Soviets’ missiles in Cuba, “it gives them a clear line to take Berlin.” He went on, “We would be regarded as the trigger-happy Americans who lost Berlin.” The Soviets would respond, probably by forcibly taking Berlin. “Which leaves me only one alternative,” Kennedy said, “which is to fire nuclear weapons—which is a hell of an alternative.

On Friday, October 26, Khrushchev sent Kennedy a telegram, offering a deal: if the United States pledged never to invade Cuba, he would pull out the missiles. By this time, the CIA was reporting, all 24 of the Soviets’ medium-range ballistic missiles were fully operational.

Then, the next morning, Saturday the 27th, Khrushchev changed his terms, probably under pressure from Politburo hard-liners to wrangle a better deal. In the new message, which he made public, the Soviet premier said he would withdraw his missiles from Cuba only if the United States removed its missiles from Turkey—which, he noted, threatened the Soviet Union as much as the missiles in Cuba threatened America.

Once Khrushchev put it on the table, he was quick to grab it. His advisers tried to knock down the deal as a danger to the Western alliance.

The attack plan, which the Chiefs had drawn up and McNamara had endorsed, called for 500 air sorties, dropping conventional bombs on the Soviet missile sites and air bases and radar and communications (“the works,” as LeMay had said), followed, seven days later, by a land invasion of Cuba.

President Kennedy said, reflectively, “I’m just thinking about what we’re going to have to do in a day or so… 500 sorties… and possibly an invasion, all because we wouldn’t take missiles out of Turkey. And we all know how quickly everybody’s courage goes when the blood starts to flow, and that’s what’s going to happen in NATO.” Then the Soviets will “grab Berlin, and everybody’s going to say, ‘Well, this Khrushchev offer was a pretty good proposition.’

McNamara then put forth a byzantine proposal to remove the missiles from Turkey, but only as a prelude to attacking not just the missiles in Cuba but Soviet targets elsewhere in the world.

At this point, one of the advisers joined the president’s side of the argument. George Ball, the undersecretary of state (who would emerge, a few years later, as the sole high-ranking dissident on the Vietnam War), endorsed Khrushchev’s offer. Several submarines armed with Polaris nuclear missiles were scheduled for deployment to the Mediterranean in a few months; they would provide Turkey with a more secure defense than vulnerable land-based missiles. “These things,” Ball said of the Jupiters, “are obsolete anyway.

President Kennedy sent his brother to the Soviet embassy with a message for Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin: he would accept the trade, but only if it is never publicly revealed. (Kennedy apparently agreed with Bundy that an open trade might irritate the NATO allies.) The official announcement, Bobby told Dobrynin on his brother’s behalf, must be worded along the lines of Khrushchev’s offer Friday night: a withdrawal of the Soviet missiles in exchange for an American promise never to invade Cuba.

Kennedy seemed to think this pledge would be enough to let Khrushchev claim victory to his critics in the Kremlin. (It wasn’t; Khrushchev was ousted two years later, in part, as his successors put it, for his “hare-brained scheme” in Cuba.)

The next day, Sunday, October 28, Khrushchev announced that he was withdrawing the missiles. Within six months, all the missiles—Soviet and American—were gone from Cuba and Turkey. Decades later, Khrushchev’s former advisers would reveal that 43,000 Soviet soldiers had been hiding on the island to defend the missiles in case of an invasion. Kennedy was right: if the United States had attacked, he would have been at war with the Soviet Union.

Kennedy told just six advisers about the secret missile trade: McNamara, Bundy, George Ball, Ted Sorensen, Roswell Gilpatric, and Llewellyn Thompson, the State Department’s leading Soviet expert. Kennedy called them into the Oval Office after Saturday’s ExComm session to tell them what he’d ordered his brother to do. He also told them to keep the deal secret. If anyone found out that he’d compromised with the Russians, he’d be denounced as an appeaser and might be defeated in the next election.

A quarter-century after the crisis, McGeorge Bundy admitted in his memoir that hushing up the missile trade produced pernicious consequences. “We misled our colleagues, our countrymen, our successors, and our allies” into believing “that it had been enough to stand firm on that Saturday.” Among the misled advisers was Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson, who was never told the true story about the trade and who followed the false lesson of the Cuban missile crisis—stand firm, never negotiate—in his decision to escalate the war in Vietnam.

With that, Kennedy summarized the basic dilemma of nuclear strategy: a minimal arsenal of city-busting weapons might be adequate to deter a nuclear attack—this was the Navy’s strategic rationale for the Polaris—but, “if the deterrent fails,” if the threat had to be carried out, no president would want to attack Soviet cities, kill millions of their people. On the other hand, the alternative—destroying the Soviet missile sites, the essence of the counterforce strategy—would require matching the Soviet buildup, which might spur them to build more weapons still, which would require another buildup to match that buildup, and onward and upward the spiral would go. In short, the logic of counterforce sparked the dynamics of an arms race.

Then there was another matter, which McNamara kept largely secret at the time and for the subsequent quarter-century: he deeply opposed the first use of nuclear weapons, and advised Kennedy—as well as, later, President Johnson—never to initiate nuclear war, under any circumstances, not even in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. This was why, from the outset of his tenure in the Pentagon, McNamara had pushed for a buildup of conventional forces in Europe—so that, in case of an invasion, the president would have some means of repelling the assault before resorting to a nuclear strike. Any use of nuclear weapons would escalate to “total war, total annihilation for the Europeans” and, from there, to general war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

“You must tell no one outside this suite what Secretary McNamara has told you,” Yarmolinsky said. If the Chiefs or the allies or Congress knew he felt this way, they would panic, and pressure would build for his dismissal. Neither of them had to spell out the reason for discretion. It was the unquestioned premise of Cold War policy that deterrence required persuading the Soviets that the American president would use nuclear weapons first, in response to aggression against U.S. allies. Once that premise was accepted, the logical corollary became hard to resist: to persuade the Kremlin that he would use nuclear weapons first, the president had to develop the ability and display the will to use them first.

Kennedy believed that, while a conventional defense of Berlin was worth trying, a Soviet incursion across the East-West German border would escalate almost immediately to nuclear war. So he needed to find a way of defusing the tensions that might someday trigger an incursion.

Brown asked Kent to write a study on the relationship between a Soviet attack and the full array of “damage-limiting” programs the United States might fund—including ABMs, counterforce weapons, and the fallout shelters of a civil defense program. In January 1964, Kent finished the study: a series of twenty-nine graphs, showing that, no matter what measures the United States took, the Soviets could overwhelm them with only a slight increase in their offensive forces. For each dollar that the Soviets spent on more offense, the U.S. would have to spend at least three dollars on damage-limiting efforts—at which point, the Soviets could overwhelm those measures, forcing the U.S. again to spend three times as much as the Soviets, and on it would go in an arms race that would drain America’s resources far more quickly than it would drain the Soviet Union’s. And this calculation assumed that the damage-limiting programs actually worked, when, in fact, the ABM systems in particular had a poor test record of actually shooting down targets in space.

The Chiefs were outraged by the study. Curtis LeMay accused Kent of selling out the Air Force. McNamara, on the other hand, was impressed. He sent the study to Bundy, with a cover note outlining how to brief President Johnson on its implications.

LeMay at first opposed the idea. Breaking down a payload into several warheads meant that each warhead would be smaller. LeMay wanted his nuclear warheads as big and as powerful as possible. But other officers convinced him that the MIRV might be just the trick to maneuver around McNamara’s restriction on how many missiles they could buy. One MIRV’ed missile carrying three warheads could hit just as many targets as three single-warhead missiles. Under these circumstances, McNamara’s cap of 1,000 ICBMs wasn’t much of a cap at all.

In public, McNamara said the MIRV was designed to saturate Soviet ABMs, but this was false; the old MRVs—multiple warheads aimed at the same area—would suffice for that task. Moreover, McNamara knew it was false. The very existence of MIRVs created a hair-trigger situation, in which both sides might feel an incentive to strike first. The 1960s started with a chance to halt the arms race before it got under way, with the discovery that the Soviet Union’s alleged superiority in nuclear weapons—the “missile gap,” which had rationalized the U.S. military’s desire for a nuclear arms buildup—was, in fact, a myth. But the buildup proceeded anyway.

The report by the Net Evaluation Subcommittee a year later, in September 1963, confirmed an unalterable stalemate in the nuclear contest between the two superpowers, and both their leaders not only recognized this fact but started carving a path to relax tensions accordingly. But by the end of the decade, with Kennedy killed, Khrushchev overthrown, and new technologies promising to restore an edge in the arms race, the arsenals swelled beyond numbers ever previously imagined, and plans for fighting—and possibly winning—a nuclear war emerged as too tempting to pass up.

By the time Nixon entered the White House, the SIOP had been modified, a little bit, to allow for three “attack options”: Alpha, which would fire a portion of the arsenal at Soviet and Chinese nuclear weapons sites; Bravo, which covered other military facilities and political-control centers located outside of cities; and Charlie, which would destroy all other military sites, regardless of their location, as well as 70 percent of the industrial floor space inside Soviet and Chinese cities. There was also a sub-option to exclude Moscow and Beijing from Alpha and Bravo strikes. Otherwise, the nuclear war plan offered the president no other choices, and the smallest of those choices—Alpha with the Moscow-Beijing exemption—would fire 1,750 nuclear weapons: hardly a “limited” attack. Nixon was visibly horrified. Kissinger was at least startled. The author of several notable books and articles on nuclear strategy,

Kissinger had been among those who had criticized John Foster Dulles’s all-or-nothing strategy of “massive retaliation.” More pertinently, he had been a White House consultant in the first year and a half of the Kennedy administration. He knew of McNamara’s efforts to inject smaller attack options into the SIOP. He assumed that, in the years since, the war planners at Strategic Air Command had made some changes; he was surprised that they hadn’t.

The Europeans, Kissinger noted, didn’t fully understand that the “nuclear umbrella”—the assurance, at the heart of the NATO alliance, that an American president would respond to a Soviet conventional invasion by firing nuclear weapons at the USSR—depended on a first-strike capability; his attack on the USSR, after all, would be a nuclear first strike. That capability—that foundation of assurance—had now crumbled; the Soviets might think they could get away with an act of aggression.

In October, Nixon and Kissinger staged an alert of strategic nuclear forces—one of the largest alerts in SAC history. Kissinger’s military assistant, Colonel Alexander Haig, wrote to his counterpart in the Pentagon, Colonel Robert Pursley, that the alert should be “unusual and significant”—“discernible to the Soviets” without “threatening” their existence. The intent was to warn the Kremlin’s leaders that Nixon was about to take serious military action against North Vietnam, possibly against the Soviet Union—and that, to ward off calamity, they should pressure their allies in Hanoi to submit to his terms at the Paris peace talks. The alert was kept extremely secret; only a handful of officials in Washington knew what was going on and why.

As with Nixon’s earlier and more direct stab at applying the Madman Theory to Vietnam, it had no effect—perhaps because the Soviets and the North Vietnamese knew that Nixon wasn’t a madman, perhaps because they didn’t quite know what his signals were conveying, perhaps because they didn’t care.

Over the next few years, Nixon played Madman a few more times, during various Middle East crises, moving the Sixth Fleet and two extra nuclear-armed aircraft carriers into the Eastern Mediterranean when Iraq and Syria seemed on the verge of invading Jordan, and raising SAC’s alert status when the Soviets made noises about intervening in the 1973 Yom Kippur War—all, again, to little or no effect. The Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, observed at the time: “Americans put forces on alert so often that it is hard to know what it meant.

The Air Force and RAND participants all realized that Bill Kaufmann’s counterforce doctrine—which they’d championed a few years earlier—had become obsolete. The idea of counterforce was to keep a nuclear attack limited—aimed strictly at the USSR’s military targets, sparing its cities, so that, if the Soviets retaliated, they might spare American cities too. But in the post-Khrushchev era, the Soviets had deployed several hundred ICBMs; to destroy all of them in a counterforce strike, the United States would have to launch more than a thousand nuclear bombs or warheads. That would constitute a massive attack, and the Soviets would retaliate massively. McNamara had reached the same conclusion and, as a result, had lost interest in all plans for a nuclear first strike. By contrast, the NU-OPTS members took the premise as a springboard to explore new concepts of nuclear warfighting—new ways to make nuclear weapons usable. They were driven by two motives: first, they wanted to keep the deterrent credible in an era of Soviet-American parity; second, and especially prominent in the minds of the officers, they wanted to maintain the bureaucratic preeminence of the Air Force—to make a case for buying more Air Force bombers and missiles.

“Selective Attack Options.” Over the next several months, a somewhat wider team of Air Force officers and RAND analysts produced a detailed three-volume study, laying out dozens of slices for dozens of scenarios, each jammed with calculations on the optimal targets, the optimal weapons for hitting each target, and the optimal flight routes if the weapons were dropped by bombers. All the scenarios began with a Soviet invasion or land grab—in northern Norway, the Middle East, or Central Europe—followed by a small-scale U.S. nuclear attack against either the invading troops or some vital target inside the USSR, depending on the desired outcome.

The project went on for nearly two years, but to no one’s satisfaction. The uncertainties were daunting, the assumptions dubious, slamming into the same analytical obstacles that plagued the architects of the first-strike plan during the Berlin crisis or, for that matter, all the real-life musings on the theory of counterforce: Would the Soviets read the signals correctly? Could they respond in kind, if they wanted to—and would they want to? What if they retaliated with a larger nuclear attack, or with no nuclear attack at all? What would the next move be? How does a president or a commander end the war on favorable terms? No one knew the answers, or even how to go about finding them.

The Major Attack Options (MAO) contained a twist: the targets would be chosen not with the aim of killing people and destroying factories for their own sake, but rather to impede the enemy’s ability to recover—as a military, economic, and political power. That, the plan’s authors thought, was what national leaders most valued—and what they would most fear losing.

Kissinger had noted that, given the parity in the nuclear balance, the president could no longer assume that the Soviets would back down before a crisis turned violent. Yet, in such a crisis, the president might feel paralyzed if he had no nuclear options short of the SIOP’s all-out attack. How, he asked his staff, more in frustration than in hopes of finding a good answer, do you most effectively deter nuclear war? Failing that, how do you limit nuclear war once it broke out—what sorts of targets would you need to hit, and what sorts of weapons would you need to fire? These were the questions that Kissinger’s predecessors had been exploring for the entire quarter-century of the nuclear age. No one had come up with good answers.

The SIOP was still a “horror strategy,” as Kissinger had called it after his exposure. In fact, it had grown deadlier still, since, under Carter’s PD-59, the plan now also targeted Soviet “leadership,” which SAC interpreted as firing nuclear weapons at the offices, residences, summer dachas, and relocation bunkers of every Soviet commissar, minister, regional governor, and oblast chief.

Sitting in the White House Situation Room, Reagan heard the briefers from the Joint Staff calmly tell him that, in a Soviet attack, about 5,700 nuclear weapons would explode on American soil, destroying three quarters of the U.S. strategic nuclear forces and killing 80 million Americans.

Nothing was said about the small-scale Limited Nuclear Options, which Nixon and Carter had called for and which SAC had never taken seriously. Very little was said about “withholds” (sparing certain categories of targets from attack) or a “reserve force” (holding back certain missiles as a signal of restraint), neither of which SAC had ever thought plausible if the Soviets struck first.

McNamara came to a more profound realization: even if the ABM system worked flawlessly, the Soviets could overwhelm it by building—and launching—a few extra missiles, and they could keep building more offensive missiles, more quickly and cheaply than the U.S. could keep building defensive interceptors. At best, then, ABMs would spawn an offense-defense arms race, which the offense—the Soviets—would win.

Senior officials in Reagan’s Pentagon soon liked Star Wars. Neither Weinberger nor Perle believed for a minute that such a weapon would work; but they figured the Soviets might think it would work, and in that case SDI could add another pound of pressure to push the Kremlin’s regime over the edge. And so they—and, after a while, other administration officials—touted the program as avidly as their straight faces allowed. The more exotic branches of the military also jumped on the bandwagon, slapping the “SDI” label on as many projects as possible, in order to win them larger budgets. Reagan’s Star Wars speech kicked off the most intense year of the Cold War since the Cuban missile crisis.

False alerts, in the United States and the Soviet Union, were more common than most people knew. In Jimmy Carter’s final year as president, three “false missile warning incidents,” as they were called, occurred in a two-week period from late May to early June, all caused by a computer error.

In two of the incidents, senior officers ordered SAC pilots to board their planes and start their engines.

The Soviet Union’s false warning on September 26 came at a time of intense nervousness. As it happened, the chief air defense officer on duty, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, figured that the radars had to be mistaken and decided, entirely on his own judgment, not to notify his superiors. If Petrov had been less sure of himself and sent an emergency message alert to the next level—in other words, if he’d been more like his comrades who shot down KAL Flight 007 a month earlier under similar circumstances—World War III might have started that day.

Even a little before Reagan took office, the Navy and the NSA, in a joint program called Ivy Bells, were sending specially built mini-submarines into Russian harbors, where they tapped into the undersea transmission cables of Soviet nuclear subs returning to port. Air Force and CIA spy planes were routinely crossing into Soviet airspace on intelligence-gathering missions, to test the readiness of Soviet air defense crews, provoke them into turning on their radar, then record everything about the radar’s emissions.

Under Reagan, these sorts of programs were stepped up. In August and September of 1981, an armada of 83 U.S., British, Canadian, and Norwegian ships sailed near Soviet waters, undetected. In April 1983, 40 U.S. warships, including three aircraft carriers, approached Kamchatka Peninsula, off the USSR’s eastern coast. As part of the operation, Navy combat planes simulated a bombing run over a military site 20 miles inside Soviet territory. The ships and the planes maintained radio silence, jammed Soviet radar, and transmitted false signals; as a result, they avoided detection, even by a new Soviet early-warning satellite orbiting directly overhead. An internal NSA history noted, “These actions were calculated to induce paranoia, and they did.

The simulated bombing run, in particular, incited Yuri Andropov—the former KGB director who had ascended to the Kremlin’s top post after Leonid Brezhnev died toward the end of 1982—to issue an order authorizing air defense units to “shoot to kill” any foreign aircraft intruding into Soviet airspace. Though neither Reagan nor any other senior U.S. official made the connection at the time, this order set the stage for the shoot-down of KAL 007 four months later. In fact, just hours before the Boeing passenger plane mistakenly flew across the border, an American spy plane, sporting a similar radar profile, had been spotted in the same area. (Of course, even if Flight 007 had been a spy plane, shooting it down would have been an extreme reaction.)

Robert “Bud” McFarlane, Reagans national security adviser, showed him Oleg Gordievsky’s reports of Soviet activities during an exercise, suggesting that Soviet leaders really thought the United States was getting ready to launch a nuclear first strike under the cover of an exercise—a report that Reagan received with “genuine anxiety,” McFarlane later recalled. Reagan had been pushing hard against the Kremlin, in hopes that the pressure might bring down the system; but “it did bother him” that the Soviets could seriously entertain “the very idea” that he would launch a first strike. In his memoir, Reagan wrote about “some people in the Pentagon who claimed a nuclear war was ‘winnable,’?” adding, “I thought they were crazy.” He may have forgotten by then that he had signed a National Security Decision Directive, declaring that, if nuclear war broke out, the United States “must prevail.” He may not have known that American generals had pushed and planned for a first-strike capability ever since the dawn of the nuclear age.

What these officials—American and Soviet—missed in their critiques and hesitations was that Reagan and Gorbachev were aiming not for some optimal refinement of the military balance but for the end of the Cold War, a goal that the officials viewed as naive fantasy but that, in fact, the two leaders had begun to bring about. In the decades since, partisans have debated whether to credit the Cold War’s end to Reagan’s hostile rhetoric and arms buildup in his first term or to his turn toward détente and disarmament in his second term. In fact, it took both—Reagan the super-hawk and Reagan the nuclear abolitionist—and, at least as important, the rise of Gorbachev as his collaborator. They were the most improbable leaders of their respective nations, and the great change could not have happened without the doubly improbable convergence of their reigns. Gorbachev needed to move swiftly if his reforms were to take hold; Reagan exerted the pressure that forced him to move swiftly and offered the rewards that persuaded his Kremlin rivals and skeptics to take the risks.

History sometimes moves in serendipitous patterns. If Yuri Andropov’s kidneys hadn’t given out, or if Konstantin Chernenko’s heart had kept ticking a few years longer, Reagan’s bluster would have come to naught and might even have exacerbated tensions; the Cold War could have raged on for years. Similarly, if Reagan hadn’t been president in 1985—if Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale had defeated him, or if Reagan had died and his vice president, George H. W. Bush, had taken his place—Gorbachev would not have received the push that he needed; those other American politicians were too traditional, too cautious, too sensible, to have pushed for such radical arms reductions or to take Gorbachev’s radicalism at face value.

Ohlert confirmed Miller’s concerns about the disconnect between Washington’s directives and Omaha’s plans. Essentially, he said, all those interesting documents that Miller had been reading—the directives on strategic doctrine by Harold Brown, James Schlesinger, Robert McNamara, and their aides—were fiction; the officers in the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, the branch of SAC that actually wrote the war plans, ignored the documents. Sometimes the Joint Chiefs helped the officers cover their tracks:

For all practical purposes, Ohlert told Miller, the war plan contained only one option that was thoroughly conceived and rehearsed: MAO-4, the ultimate Major Attack Option—the option to destroy as many targets, with as many nuclear weapons, as quickly as possible. To the extent some smaller attacks were written into the plan, they weren’t “limited” by any reasonable definition of the word: the Soviets would interpret it as an all-out attack and retaliate accordingly.

Sometimes JSTPS would play word games to protect the plan. Since McNamara’s first revision to the SIOP, in 1962, every defense secretary had ordered an option that let the president refrain from attacking Soviet or Chinese cities. But, Ohlert told Miller, if a nuclear war happened and if the president selected that option, he would wind up bombing cities anyway. There were two reasons for this. First, the actual “no-cities” option, as devised by JSTPS, excluded just 24 “urban areas”—described as Soviet and Warsaw Pact “regional political centers”—from the target list. That meant lots of other, very large cities, besides those 24, would still get hit. Second, even those exempted cities would get hit to some extent because the JSTPS defined an “urban area” as a circle within which 95% of a city’s population lived. However, in many cities, the factories, military facilities, and government buildings—the prime targets—were located away from most residences; so the bombs and warheads could pummel those targets without hitting “urban areas.”

There was another semantic sleight of hand that allowed the JSTPS to understate the damage done by the war plan. When the officers calculated how many people would be killed and how many buildings would be destroyed, they took into account only the blast of the bombs. They ignored the other effects of a nuclear explosion—heat, fire, smoke, radioactive fallout—rationalizing that those effects couldn’t be measured precisely, since they depended on wind, weather, and other variables. Tens of millions of civilians would die from those effects, even if the president had expressly ordered that their lives be spared.

The database revealed that the disparity between Washington’s orders and Omaha’s plans was even wider than Miller had thought. One of the most blatant instances turned out to be the planning for Limited Nuclear Options. Miller asked an analyst in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s own intelligence bureaucracy, how many discrete objects the Soviets’ early warning systems could track—how many incoming missiles it could detect as individual missiles—before they all merged into a vague blob on the radar screens. The answer was 200. In other words, on the Soviets’ radar screens, 200 missiles and 2,000 missiles looked exactly the same. And yet in SIOP’s smallest “limited” attack option, the United States would launch nearly 1,000 missiles. To Soviet air defense officers, this would look like an all-out attack.

Worse still, in every limited option, SAC would launch weapons from all three legs of the Triad—ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles, and bombs dropped by B-52 airplanes. It was a case of bureaucratic politics run amuck: the missile commanders, the submariners, and the bombardiers had all demanded a piece of every attack option—and they each got their piece. As a result, if there were a war, the missiles would land a half-hour after the president’s order, while the much slower airplanes wouldn’t start dropping bombs until several hours later. Even if the Soviet leaders were inclined and able to distinguish between a limited and an all-out attack, they would interpret such a prolonged series of strikes—from the air, land, and sea, over a stretch of many hours—as an all-out campaign.

Then came a moment of serendipity. A lieutenant colonel from JSTPS, who’d been given a two-year assignment to Miller’s office (as much, it was suspected, to keep an eye on Miller as to assist him in his work), handed him a copy of the Blue Book. The Blue Book was very different from the Black Book, the thin binder that the president would use to review his attack options in case of nuclear war. The Blue Book, which was as thick as an epic Russian novel, was essentially the owners’ manual for the SIOP, laying out the formulas and the premises of the calculations for what kinds of weapons would be aimed at which targets, how many were needed to inflict various levels of damage—everything that SAC’s war planners needed to know and, more to the point, everything that Cheney wanted Miller to find out.

Armed with Cheney’s mandate and the Blue Book’s insights, they could now do what no one outside SAC—and no civilians anywhere—had ever done. They would conduct a zero-based, bottom-up, target-by-target review of the SIOP—then construct an all-new SIOP, indicating which targets really needed to be destroyed, and how many weapons were really needed to destroy them, under the guidelines set in the nuclear policy documents signed by the secretary of defense and approved by the president. In a Soviet bomber base in Tiksi, inside the Arctic Circle. It wasn’t even a primary base; it was a dispersal base, where Soviet planes would land after dropping their bombs on American targets, and the climate was so forbiddingly cold and windy that the base couldn’t be used for more than half the year. And yet, it turned out, the SIOP called for firing 17 nuclear weapons at a five-mile radius around the base—regardless of the season—including three Minuteman II ICBMs, each carrying a 1.2-megaton warhead.

He was especially struck by the way the plan went after the Soviet army’s tanks. The SIOP aimed a lot of weapons not only at the tanks themselves, but also at the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore.

Klinger asked why they needed to destroy the entire production chain. His liaison officer told him that, if they left any part of the chain intact, the Soviets could reconstruct the factory and rebuild tanks. Never mind that thousands of American bombs and warheads would have just reduced the entire country to a smoldering radioactive ruin.

One of these analysts told Klinger, when they first met, “We’ve been waiting for you for a long time.” From talking with these analysts and perusing the Blue Book, Klinger unraveled the mystery of why the SIOP laid down 725 nuclear weapons on the Soviet transportation network. It turned out that JSTPS had decided, for unclear reasons, to launch nuclear weapons against all railroad yards above a certain metric capacity and all railway bridges that stretched for longer than a certain distance. But, as the Defense Intelligence Agency’s logistics specialists told them, this standard was completely arbitrary; it had no bearing on the military value of a target. Some long bridges and large railroad yards weren’t used by the military at all;

Bridges on roads weren’t targeted at all.  The poster child for this phenomenon was the Soviets’ anti-ballistic-missile site near Sheremetyevo Airport on the outskirts of Moscow. The SIOP called for pummeling all the elements of the site—the control center, the radars, and the interceptors—with a total of sixty-nine nuclear warheads and bombs. The rationale, it turned out, was that the guidance called for destroying the site with near-total certainty. SAC Intelligence estimated that each of the Soviet interceptors had a high probability of shooting down an incoming warhead.

This was insane.  So at the end of their work, after drastically paring down the SIOP’s requirements, there were still 69 warheads aimed at this complex. (After the Cold War was over and Western inspectors got a look, they discovered that the ABM system at Sheremetyevo was worthless; it couldn’t have shot down a single warhead coming straight at it.)

A print out the latitude and longitude of all the targets in the SIOP database was requested. He then asked the graphics department to plot all those points on a huge map of the Soviet Union and draw circles around each point, signifying the area that would be destroyed by the specific weapon aimed at each target. The result was a vivid, color-coded display of massive death and destruction. It showed a staggering number of bombs and warheads hitting nearly every city in overlapping density.

Klinger wondered how many weapons were aimed at Moscow and its environs. On the map, he drew a 50-mile circle around the capital and counted the number of weapons that were aimed at targets within the circle. There were 689 of them, many releasing more than a megaton of explosive power.

Few officers, even inside JSTPS, had known the full scope of their war plan’s bloat. The colonels and generals in the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, who had so fiercely resisted Miller’s intrusions, were stunned; they hadn’t realized how much they didn’t know—how much their brother officers at SAC, whose shroud they’d been protecting, had misled them.

JSTPS was prohibited from setting requirements or analyzing whether a certain kind of attack, with a certain number of weapons, would be militarily effective. This prohibition had been laid down in 1960, with the first SIOP, when Navy admirals feared that Air Force generals would use the war plan as a tool for controlling the Navy’s arsenal and budget. Klinger was astonished. The officers who drew up the war plan didn’t know—weren’t allowed to figure out—how many weapons they needed to protect the nation? What did they do then? The officer replied that they take all the weapons that are assigned to SAC and aim them at all the targets on their list.

Finally, after all these months of trying to unscramble the oddities of the SIOP, Klinger decoded the mystery: the United States’ nuclear war plan was based on supply, not demand—on how many weapons the warriors happened to have, not on how many they needed.

Washington and Omaha were running on parallel, sometimes wildly divergent tracks—which had been General Curtis LeMay’s intention all along: he didn’t want civilians, or even rival branches of the military, meddling with his war plan, and he designed SAC explicitly to keep them out.

Their team wound up cutting the “required” number of U.S. strategic nuclear weapons by half—from about 12,000 to 5,888—and even that was after several compromises; a more stringent review could have cut more. Even so, it was the steepest reduction in Cold War history.

With Cheney’s orders, Powell’s endorsement, and cooperation from the JSTPS—removed all the targets that lay inside Eastern Europe. Those countries, once under Soviet rule but now independent, had housed hundreds of targets—mainly air defense sites, which American nuclear missiles would destroy in order to pave a “corridor,” allowing American bombers to fly toward their targets inside the USSR without getting shot down on the way.

In the end, they cut the requirements for another couple thousand bombs and warheads, leaving the number of strategic weapons at 3,500—the lowest number since 1962, when the nuclear arms race began.

Bush aligned himself completely with the new Russian leader and sought ways to signal America’s support for this new revolution. He saw clearly that Russia posed no threat to the West, and he wanted the Russians to know that the West posed no threat to them. The whole premise of the nuclear standoff was now shattered; having been briefed on the revised SIOP, Bush knew that massive cuts in nuclear weapons were not merely feasible but under way, and he wanted to make deeper cuts still. But he was frustrated with the bureaucratized arms control process; the latest round of negotiations, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, had been going on for nine years, since Reagan’s second year in office.

For 36 years, SAC had kept some of its bomber aircraft on runway alert, fully loaded, pilots in or near the cockpit, ready to take off in minutes; Bush was now ordering them to stand down and to taxi off the runways. He also ordered all nuclear weapons to be removed from surface ships, conventional subs, and tactical aircraft.

In outlining each step, Bush invited the Russians to reciprocate—which they did, in some cases, at least for a while—but he stressed that, even if they didn’t, his actions were in America’s interests.

Navy surface ship commanders had long been weary of carrying nuclear weapons on board, telling their superiors that the bombs and missiles hindered their mobility—made them think twice about entering contested waters—and barred them from docking at the ports of several allies. Army commanders in Europe had long despaired of having to maintain nuclear missiles and artillery rockets, seeing them as security burdens in peacetime and useless weapons of terror—sure to incite retaliation—in a conflict. Colin Powell, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs would expedite Bush’s commands, felt that way more than most.

By this time, in a separate series of moves, the United States had started to dismantle the MIRV’ed ICBMs unilaterally, canceling the ten-warhead MX missile and stripping the three-warhead Minuteman III so that its nosecone carried just one. The officers of Strategic Command assented to these moves, in part because Miller’s SIOP Review revealed that they had far more weapons than they needed.

On January 3, 1993, two and a half weeks before the end of Bush’s presidency, he and Boris Yeltsin signed the START II treaty, which prohibited land-based ICBMs from carrying more than one warhead apiece. The accord reversed the most destabilizing action in the history of the arms race. ICBMs loaded with MIRVs—multiple warheads, each of which could strike widely separated targets—were at once the most potent and the most vulnerable weapons in both sides’ arsenals. In a crisis, a desperate or risk-prone leader might be tempted to launch a first strike, if just to preempt the enemy from launching a first strike. In short, the very existence of MIRVs on ICBMs created a hair-trigger situation, in which both sides might feel an incentive to strike first. START II would remove that incentive.

But this dream was not to be. Some Russians, it turned out, were still distrustful. After several years of debate and delay, the Russian parliament ratified the treaty only on the condition that the United States formally reaffirm its adherence to the ABM Treaty—in short, only if Washington promised not to move ahead with the Strategic Defense Initiative. By this time, support for SDI had hardened as a shibboleth among Republicans and some hawkish Democrats as well. They refused the Russians’ demand, and the treaty—along with the ban on MIRV’ed ICBMs—collapsed. The nuclear arms race was not over after all.

William Jefferson Clinton entered the White House on January 20, 1993, caring little about foreign policy. The Cold War was over; hot wars and body bags seemed a plague of the past. In his early days as president, he often skipped his daily intelligence briefing, letting his national security adviser, Tony Lake, hear it instead. Beyond mere plans, Clinton ordered an advance team of 250 soldiers to set up a logistical headquarters, which could manage this massive influx of firepower if it was mobilized. These moves sent a signal that the United States was willing to go to war to keep North Korea’s fuel rods under lock.

But the North Koreans—whom he likened to “adolescents with guns”—possessed a large army and thousands of artillery rockets, some tipped with chemical shells, many of them within firing range of Seoul, South Korea’s capital, with a population of 10 million, just 35 miles south of the border. If they struck back, which the intelligence community believed they would, the assault could kill or injure 30,000 Americans—nearly as many casualties as produced in the three years of the first Korean War—in addition to a half-million South Korean soldiers and as many as a million civilians. And this estimate assumed that the North Koreans used no atomic bombs—though a minority view within the CIA considered it possible that they had built two bombs before the reprocessing was discovered during the Bush administration.

France was another matter. In 1954, President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, proposed sending the French two tactical nuclear weapons to stave off the North Vietnamese army at Dien Bien Phu. Three years later, he suggested at least letting, if not helping, the French build their own atomic arsenal. But Eisenhower wavered, and, in 1961, his successor, John Kennedy, fervently opposed the idea. In a telegram to British prime minister Harold Macmillan, Kennedy cited two reasons for rejecting France’s request for atomic assistance. First, the Germans, whose relations with Paris were still tense, might react by building their own bomb, a move that, just fifteen years after the defeat of the Third Reich, would “shake NATO to its foundations.” Second, Kennedy opposed “Nth-country” nuclear programs generally, a phrase referring to the theoretically countless number of countries, beyond the first three (the 4th, 5th, 6th…), that might develop their own bombs.

The bilateral face-off with the Soviet Union, frightening enough, was at least manageable; throw in a half-dozen other nations, each with their own interests, allies, and enemies, and not only would chaos reign, but the two big powers might get sucked into a nuclear war not of their making. For the same reason, Kennedy opposed Israel’s nuclear program, for fear that it would push the Arab countries into building their own bomb, possibly with Soviet help, thus fanning the flames of superpower conflict into the already-turbulent Middle East.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk had suggested that the selective spread of nuclear weapons could be a good thing: for instance, the United States might want to help India build a nuclear arsenal, as a deterrent to Chinese aggression. In their meetings, the members of the Gilpatric Committee vigorously discussed Rusk’s idea. But in their report, which was issued January 25, they rejected the notion, concluding unanimously that an expanded roster of nuclear powers—even if some of them were currently American allies—would “add complexity and instability to the deterrent balance between the United States and the Soviet Union, aggravate suspicions and hostility among states neighboring new nuclear powers, place a wasteful economic burden on the aspirations of developing nations, impede the vital task of controlling and reducing weapons around the world, and eventually constitute direct military threats to the United States.

Kim Jong-il was one of the world’s battier leaders. He consumed exotic cuisines and high-end cognacs, while his people starved. A cinephile with a library of some 15,000 movies, he once abducted a notable South Korean director and actress, imprisoned them, then forced them to make films of his own creation, to fulfill his dream of turning Pyongyang into the Hollywood of the Far East. (After eight years, the director and actress escaped.)

In Bush’s view, articulated openly by his vice president, Dick Cheney, to negotiate with an evil regime was to recognize that regime, legitimize it, and—if the talks led to a treaty—prolong its reign. Bush told a reporter, on the record, “I loathe Kim Jong-il.”

He, Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had already decided not only to isolate North Korea, in the hope that its regime would crumble, but also to ignore South Korea, in the hope that its next election would restore a conservative to power. Bush turned out to be the naive one. Kim Jong-il survived U.S. pressure, and KDJ was replaced by Roh Moo-hyun, a populist who ran on a campaign that was not only pro-sunshine but anti-American. Relations were further soured by Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address, in which he tagged North Korea, Iran, and Iraq as an “axis of evil.

When their approach to Richardson led nowhere, the North Koreans escalated the pressure. Over the next two weeks, U.S. spy satellites detected trucks pulling up to the site where the fuel rods were stored, then driving away toward the reprocessing facility. When Kim Il-sung threatened to take this step in 1994, Clinton warned that it would cross a “red line.” When Kim Jong-il actually did it in 2003, George W. Bush said and did nothing. Specialists inside the State Department and the Pentagon were flabbergasted. Once those fuel rods left the storage site, once reprocessing began, once plutonium was manufactured, the strategic situation would change: even if the North Koreans could be lured back to the bargaining table, even if they agreed to drive the fuel rods back to the storage site, no one on the outside could be certain that they’d completely disarmed; no one could ever know if they’d manufactured some plutonium and hidden it in a bunker.

One reason for Bush’s inaction, besides the inherent complications of an attack, was his invasion of Iraq, which also got under way in March; it would have been a stretch—in money, matériel, mental focus, and political support—to start preparing for a war in Northeast Asia too. In short, Bush took no military action because he couldn’t. And he took no diplomatic action because he didn’t want to.

Bush all but threatened war, saying in a speech, as if he were addressing Kim Jong-il, “You’re hungry, and you can’t eat plutonium.” The miscalculation was that, though the North Korean people were hungry (a famine in the mid-1990s had killed as many as two million), Kim and the rest of the ruling elite were eating quite well. And since the Kim dynasty had sealed off the country as hermetically as the twenty-first century allowed, he could sustain a crisis far longer than other leaders might.

Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld viewed their unwillingness to negotiate as a virtuous contrast to the Clinton administration’s keenness for diplomacy. Early on in the Bush term, an NSC memo stated the rationale for a no-talks policy: to preserve “moral clarity.” However, Clinton’s Agreed Framework had kept North Korea from acquiring a bomb for nearly a decade. Intelligence officials estimated that, without the accord, North Korea could have built dozens of atom bombs by the time Bush took office—to store as a deterrent, rattle for intimidation, sell to the highest bidder for much needed hard currency, or all three.

When Barack Obama entered the White House at the age of 47, the first black president in the nation’s history, he confronted a wall-to-wall disaster zone: two aimless unpopular wars, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the impending collapse of the auto industry. Yet, beyond dealing with those emergencies and passing a bill for universal health care, he found room on his plate for another grand task: the abolition of nuclear weapons.

In the journals and seminars of many arms control activists and scholars, one long-proposed way of doing this was to declare a policy of “no-first-use”—a pledge that the United States would never be the first country in a conflict to use nuclear weapons. This would mark a reversal of American policy dating back to the dawn of the nuclear age. Ever since then, military doctrine had stated, and every president had affirmed, that, if an enemy (especially the Soviet Union) attacked the United States or its allies, even if just with conventional weapons, the president reserved the right to respond with nuclear weapons. This was the essence of “extended deterrence” and the “nuclear umbrella”; it was the centerpiece of America’s treaty obligations, especially to the allies in NATO. The advocates of no-first-use argued that the Cold War was over, the Soviet Union was gone, the new Russia wasn’t going to invade Europe; and if some unforeseen conflict did take place, the new generation of high-tech conventional munitions—the GPS-guided drones and smart bombs, which exploded with pinpoint accuracy—would destroy targets that only nuclear weapons could have leveled in decades past. In short, it was hard to imagine a scenario in which the United States would need to use nuclear weapons first—and, given these changes in technology and geopolitics, still harder to imagine an American president deciding to use them first.

Finally, if the United States, the inventor of the atom bomb and the only country that had ever dropped one in anger, told the world that it no longer found the bomb useful, except to deter an attack by others, then maybe other countries—especially those that hadn’t yet built their own bombs—would steer clear of the nuclear genie.

But there were many, in the State Department and the Pentagon, who opposed a no-first-use policy, and they suggested a slight but significant change in wording—a statement that, at most, retaliation against a nuclear attack was the “primary purpose” of these weapons.

Gates’s third point, which he raised in the chillingly even tone that he often mustered to close a deal, was that North Korea and a few other hostile countries possessed biological weapons; intelligence agencies were reporting that Russia had plans to load anthrax in some of the warheads on its SS-18 ICBMs. A large-scale biological attack could kill hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Americans. The United States had given up bio weapons long ago, so it couldn’t “retaliate in kind.” Certainly any president would at least want to consider responding to such a hideous attack with nuclear weapons, so shouldn’t we make that possibility clear to all potential aggressors from the outset—to deter them from contemplating such an attack? No one in the room offered a rebuttal to this final point.

Obama thought it was crazy for any American president to use nuclear weapons first, under any circumstances. For one thing, given the U.S. military’s conventional superiority, it wasn’t necessary. For another, he had read enough history to know that the “nuclear taboo,” as some called it, was real: the destructiveness of the bomb was too enormous; the risk of escalation to global catastrophe was too high. Still, Obama recognized the distinction between believing in no-first-use and declaring it as national policy, and, in that context, he saw that Gates had a point. Still, Obama was seeking some way to tell the rest of the world—and his own generals—that he really did mean to reduce the role of nuclear weapons.

Obama also wanted to push ahead with deeper cuts in Russian and American nuclear armaments. The question he faced was how deep the cuts could go, and that meant plowing into the question that previous presidents had asked, with varying degrees of intensity and resolution: how many nuclear weapons did the United States really need

Frank Miller had forced this question toward the end of the Cold War. The Joint Chiefs and the generals in Omaha wound up agreeing to 5,888 as the necessary number, slashing the number further, to 2,200, after the Soviet Union collapsed. Under the Obama-Medvedev New START, the generals put up no resistance to cutting that number further, to 1,550.

This absence of a protest suggested that there was still a lot of slack in the nuclear war plan’s “requirements”—still a lot of overkill, and so Obama ordered a detailed review of the SIOP.

If the “sole” or “fundamental” purpose of nuclear weapons was to deter an adversary from launching a nuclear attack on the United States and its allies, then there was plenty of leeway for miscalculation and error; you could pass up a lot of Russian targets, and therefore cut a lot of American weapons, without degrading deterrence. But if you were concerned about what happened if deterrence failed, if nuclear war erupted, then there might be less leeway; and, in that case, you had to figure out what you wanted to do—how you wanted to fight this nuclear war. If you wanted to destroy the enemy’s remaining nuclear weapons and other military sites, then you would have less room for error. Tell me what you want to do, Kehler said to the group on a few occasions. Then we can figure out how many weapons we need.

A few officials around the table during this latest review dissented from this premise, most outspokenly Vice President Biden’s chief adviser on nuclear issues, Jon Wolfsthal.

“minimum deterrence.” This was the idea that only a small number of nuclear weapons were needed to deter a nuclear attack; that those weapons should be aimed at the enemy’s cities, or its main economic resources, because they were what the Russians valued most. Trying to destroy the enemy’s military forces, by contrast, would require an enormous arsenal, spark an arms race, and send a futile signal in any case because, once nuclear missiles start flying, escalation to all-out war is all but inevitable

Wolfsthal was pleased that the deputies were making headway in finding rationales for cutting the nuclear arsenal, but they were snipping at the margins, not blowing out the core—executing the same old war plan, just more efficiently. To shake things up, Wolfsthal brought in a fifty-seven-page study, recently published by the Federation of American Scientists, a prominent arms control group, calling for a shift in nuclear war policy to “infrastructure targeting”—threatening to destroy neither the Russians’ military sites (the targets of a counterforce strategy) nor their cities (the targets of minimum deterrence in the 1960s) but rather their oil refineries, iron and steel works, aluminum plants, nickel plants, power plants, and transportation hubs. These comprised “the sinews of modern societies,” the study’s authors observed, and the prospect of their destruction would deter any Kremlin chief—any national leader—from launching a nuclear attack.

it was clear that Wolfsthal’s plea was going nowhere. Kehler’s staff officers were annoyed that this civilian was messing with the war plan.  After all the paring down of the excess and overkill, Kehler and the other officers in the room agreed that the United States could safely eliminate one third of its nuclear arsenal—that the New START limits of 1,550 warheads could be further reduced to 1,000.

But then Kehler and the Chiefs added a caveat that would likely nullify even that bit of progress: they would not endorse this reduction unless the Russians cut their arsenal by roughly the same amount in a follow-on treaty to New START. They made the point clearer still in a subsequent conversation with President Obama, saying they would publicly oppose unilateral cuts of this magnitude.

In its recitation of the core principles of nuclear deterrence and nuclear warfighting, the document was much the same as those produced by previous administrations. All three legs of the Triad would be maintained, as would some nuclear weapons in Europe. It called for the United States “to maintain significant counterforce capabilities against potential adversaries.” To rub the point in, and to rebut any notion—stemming from rumors or press leaks—that Jon Wolfsthal’s proposal had made a dent in official policy, the document stated that the United States “does not rely” on a “ ‘minimum deterrence’ strategy.

Although the SIOP Review had concluded that security requirements “would allow” reductions “by up to one-third” from the limits set by New START, the document stated that the Obama administration would be ordering no such cut.

Talks between Iran and the P5+1 group—the five permanent members of the Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France) plus Germany—were making slow but substantial progress. After two years of negotiations, they signed a meticulously detailed, 159-page accord with the most intrusive inspection procedures of any nuclear arms control pact in history, blocking all of Iran’s possible paths to a nuclear weapon. In exchange for dismantling its nuclear programs, the P5+1 nations would lift economic sanctions that they’d imposed on Iran after discovering its covert uranium enrichment plants, which were illegal under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On August 5, 2015, as part of his campaign to promote the deal against strenuous opposition from the Israeli government (though not most Israeli security officers), from Sunni Arab leaders (who, like the Israeli political leaders, wanted to wage war on the Shiite government of Iran), and from most Republicans in the U.S. Congress (who opposed any diplomatic triumph for the young, black Democratic president), Obama delivered a speech at American University in Washington, D.C., drawing parallels with President Kennedy’s speech there 52 years earlier. Obama portrayed the Test Ban Treaty, which grew out of that earlier speech, and his own Iran nuclear deal as examples of what Kennedy had called a “practical” and “attainable peace.”

In 2010, all of a sudden, the hawks in Congress were rolling out a grand list of new weapons—new ICBMs, bombers, submarines, air-launched cruise missiles, and a few different models of new warheads—carrying a total price tag of $1.3 trillion over the next thirty years. No one had mentioned these weapons back when Obama and Kyl reached their deal: the technical specifications for these weapons hadn’t yet been drawn up; no contracts had been issued. Yet the Senate Republicans were saying that Obama had signed on to the whole package, as part of the deal for New START. Obama was agitated. Even if he were inclined to green-light a new generation of weapons for all three legs of the Triad, the sticker shock would hold him back. Pentagon officials had recently outlined an array of conventional weapons, cyber war programs, and defenses against exotic but plausible threats that needed to be funded in the coming years. Now the generals and their allies in Congress wanted another $1.3 trillion as insurance against nuclear war, which Obama regarded as the least likely threat—and a threat for which the country was already amply prepared.

The rehashing of no-first-use was more rancorous still. Right out of the box, Ash Carter tried to cut off all discussion. This was a dangerous idea, he proclaimed. The allies relied on the nuclear option for their security; the Japanese were especially nervous about the notion, given their proximity to China and North Korea. John Holdren disagreed. He and Ash Carter had been colleagues at Harvard, fellow physicists and public policy scholars who had ambled down the career path of scientists pitching for nuclear arms control, though Holdren—a decade older than Carter—had never veered off course. Holdren told the room that he and Ash had argued about no-first-use for 20 years. To his mind, it was simply not credible that the United States would launch nuclear weapons in response to a conventional or biological attack. For one thing, there really was a nuclear taboo, and we weren’t going to be the ones to cross that line. For another, we didn’t need to cross that line, as we could repel any nonnuclear attack with modern conventional arms.

Wolfsthal and Holdren were outflanked. Carter, Moniz, and John Kerry opposed changing policy. Moniz had played a crucial role in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, but half of his department’s budget went to the U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise, and he vigorously protected its interests.

In Obama’s mind, no-first-use was the commonsense reality, but he understood it was also, still, the third rail of nuclear deterrence politics: it set off too many shocks and jitters to be discussed out loud, much less enshrined as policy.

The Russians—who already had 2,000 tactical nukes in Europe—were building more. Their officers had written doctrinal manuals spelling out scenarios in which these weapons might be used on the battlefield; and in military exercises, they’d simulated using them in just those ways. These exercises began with NATO invading Russian territory; Russia fires a very low-yield nuclear weapon to stave off the attack; the NATO armies, fearing escalation to all-out war, halt their invasion. The Russians referred to this tactic as “escalate to de-escalate”—they escalate the conflict in order to compel NATO to back down.

Haines called a Deputies Meeting of the NSC to play a game testing how the United States might act in an “escalate to de-escalate” scenario—testing whether Russia’s new nuclear strategy might thwart America’s ability to project power in the region. The scenario started out a bit differently: the Russians invade one of the Baltic countries; NATO fights back effectively; to reverse the tide, Russia fires a low-yield nuclear weapon at the NATO troops or at a base in Germany where drones, combat planes, and smart bombs were deployed. The question: What do U.S. decision makers do next?

The minute the Russians drop a nuclear bomb, he said, we would face a world-defining moment—the first time an atom bomb had been used since 1945. It would be an opportunity to rally the entire world against Russia. If we restricted our response to conventional combat and diplomatic ventures, we could isolate and weaken the Russian leaders, policies, and military forces. However, if we responded by shooting off some nukes of our own, we would forfeit that advantage and, more than that, normalize the use of nuclear weapons.

A consensus formed in the room—among the civilians and, though with mixed feelings, the military officers—that, at least as a first step, the United States should respond with conventional military operations.

A month later, the NSC’s Principals Committee—the group of cabinet secretaries and military chiefs, chaired by Susan Rice—played the same game, to a different outcome. The session began the same way as the Deputies meeting. The generals discussed operational details. Then a civilian challenged the premise that they should respond with nuclear weapons at all. In this case, the challenger was Adam Szubin, the acting undersecretary of the treasury, sitting in for his boss. Szubin’s specialty was counterterrorism and other national security matters, most of which involved blocking financial transactions and imposing sanctions. If the Russians used nuclear weapons, Szubin said, we could rally the entire globe against them—with sanctions, shutdowns, trade blockades, travel bans: the impact would be more devastating than any tit-for-tat nuclear response. Ash Carter fired back with the same temper that he’d unleashed against John Holdren in the meeting on no-first-use. It was crucial to meet a nuclear attack with a nuclear response, the allies would expect us to do this, and if we didn’t, that would be disastrous for NATO, the end of all our alliances, the end of America’s credibility worldwide.

General Dunford agreed with Carter, though in a more measured tone. So did Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary. Antony Blinken, the deputy secretary of state, sitting in for John Kerry, was undecided, saying he saw the logic on both sides.

The question then turned back to operational matters, specifically: where to aim the nuclear response? Someone suggested Kaliningrad, but it was noted that Kaliningrad was part of Russia; if the United States hit it with nuclear weapons, Russia might fire back at the United States. As for aiming a few nuclear weapons at the Baltics, to hit the Russian invaders, well, the bombs would also kill a lot of Baltic—which is to say, allied—civilians. Finally, the generals settled on firing a few nuclear weapons at the former Soviet republic of Belarus, even though, in the game, it had played no role in Russia’s incursion into the Baltics or in the nuclear strike. The game didn’t last beyond the first two moves. The majority of officials agreed with Carter that the crucial point was to demonstrate America’s will and ability to uphold the alliance and retaliate in kind.

In this season of second looks, Avril Haines, Jon Wolfsthal, and Ben Rhodes asked Obama if he would like to make a speech—perhaps his Farewell Address—assessing the status of the Prague agenda, his pledge at the start of his presidency to take “concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons.” Such an address could also serve to tee up the issues of the reviews on nuclear policy—the reexaminations of no-first-use and modernization—for his successor, who seemed certain to be the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Then came the election and the shocker: Clinton lost to Donald Trump. It was uncertain whether Clinton would have taken the second looks seriously, in any event; as secretary of state in Obama’s first term, she’d sided with Bob Gates and the generals on almost every issue. But with Trump in the White House, the chances of change dropped to near zero.

To discuss military strategies, a briefing was delivered to Trump and Steve Bannon by Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Trump grew noticeably impatient, as did his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who despised the whole roomful of “globalists”—his expletive for the denizens of the “swamp” that he and Trump had said they would drain in their term of office. During the question period, both of them spewed complaints, asking why we weren’t winning in Afghanistan, why we still needed to support those freeloaders in NATO, what was so important about keeping troops in South Korea.

The big-gulp moment came when one of Dunford’s aides displayed a chart showing the dramatic reduction in American and Russian nuclear weapons over the decades. It was presented as a success story about arms control, stability, and the declining dependence on weapons of catastrophic destruction. But Trump viewed the chart from a different perspective, telling the group that he wanted more nuclear weapons. He pointed to the graph’s peak year, 1969, when the United States had 32,000.

Trump asked why he didn’t have that many weapons now. Mattis and Tillerson talked him down, noting the legal restrictions, the practical obstacles, the enormous cost, and the fact that the roughly 2,500 nuclear weapons in the active U.S. arsenal today were better suited to perform their missions than the much larger force of a half-century earlier. After a few more raucous exchanges, Trump and his entourage left the room. Seconds later, Tillerson sighed and said, under his breath but loudly enough for many who’d stayed behind to hear, that the president of the United States was a “fucking moron.

Trump seemed to have grasped, momentarily, why the nation didn’t need 30,000 nuclear weapons. But a few weeks later, at a meeting in the Oval Office with his national security adviser, Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, Trump brought up that chart again. As long as we have enough nuclear weapons to inflict unacceptable damage on our adversaries, we’re fine, he assured the president. If we build too many weapons, our enemies might think we were amassing a first-strike capability, which, in a crisis, might prompt them to launch a preemptive strike against us. Again, Trump seemed to understand. But a month or so later, he asked, still again, why he couldn’t have a nuclear arsenal as big as what previous presidents had.

Trump’s cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons raised eyebrows and rang alarm bells, because it looked as if his words might spill over into actions. Trump was eager to get out of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal—against the advice of all his advisers, who argued that it at least reduced the chance of another war with another Muslim nation in the Middle East. And he was directly, swaggeringly, threatening to go to war against North Korea.

On the Fourth of July, in what he called an Independence Day “gift to American bastards,” Kim launched a missile that, had it followed a different flight path, could have hit the West Coast of the United States.

Kim Jong-un, he said, “has been very threatening, beyond a normal state, and, as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which the world has never seen before”—repeating the line, almost word for word, as if he’d rehearsed it after being told that this was how President Harry Truman described the effects of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima. It was a message far different from America’s policies of deterrence dating back to President Eisenhower. Trump wasn’t saying that he would rain fire and fury on North Korea, should Kim dare to launch an attack on the United States or its allies. He was saying that he would attack North Korea if Kim were merely to “make any more threats.” Nor was Trump saying that he would launch a preemptive strike, responding to warnings that North Korea was about to attack. Rather, Trump was threatening to launch a preventive strike, to prevent North Korea from so much as developing the ability to attack the United States.

 

On September 19, Trump went further, using his address before the United Nations General Assembly to berate Kim as “Rocket Man” (in later speeches and tweets, he expanded the putdown to “Little Rocket Man”), adding that, if America were “forced to defend itself or its allies,” it would “have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” This was another departure from U.S. deterrence policy, which no longer threatened to annihilate entire populations—especially one, like North Korea’s, enslaved by a dictatorial regime and in no way accountable for its actions.

 

To an extent unseen in 64 years, millions of people shook in fear that—as a result of miscommunication, out-of-control escalation, or deliberate provocation—war might actually erupt on the Korean Peninsula.

 

Military officers, including those who wrote the plan, were not so confident that Kim would simply reel. They thought it more likely that he would retaliate, against South Korea or Japan, possibly against American military units in either or both of those countries—forcing the president to hit back, and so the conflict would spiral upward, eventually escalating to all-out war.

 

Military commanders and the Joint Chiefs urged the president to take no action unless and until he was ready to go the full distance, H-bombs included.

 

At first, Mattis ignored the request from the White House to work up a new war plan. The request came early on in Trump’s term, after intelligence revealed that the North Koreans were about to test an intercontinental ballistic missile. Mattis wasn’t keen on preventive war; nor was he confident that the first blow in such a war would be the final blow. He’d read the war plans on the shelf, and he’d seen—just as his predecessors under Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama, and the two Bushes had seen—that, if the North Koreans retaliated (and there was every reason to think they would), hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of civilians would die in South Korea and Japan, including American citizens in Seoul and elsewhere, who couldn’t be evacuated quickly enough. In short, Mattis didn’t think there were any good military options in Korea, and he didn’t want to foster the illusion that there were.

 

There was another reason for nervousness about war. On October 11, while appearing on his favorite Fox News show, hosted by Sean Hannity, Trump said, “We have missiles that can knock out a missile in the air 97% of the time, and if you can send two of them, it’s going to get knocked down.” No one knew where Trump got this figure. Not even the most fervid supporter of the U.S. missile defense program would have made such an extravagant claim.

 

The most recent report by the Pentagon’s Office of Testing and Evaluation concluded that the program had demonstrated “a limited capability” to defend against “small numbers” of medium- to intermediate-range missiles and only “a fair capability” against short-range missiles. The one system designed to shoot down intercontinental missiles, aimed at the United States, had worked in only 10 out of 19 tries.

But if Trump believed what he was saying, he might believe that he could get away with launching an attack on Kim’s regime, basking in the unfounded confidence that if rocket Man fired back, America’s missile defenses would work miracles.

Amid this spiraling war rhetoric, the draft of a new Nuclear Posture Review was leaked to the press. The document declared, as a “bedrock truth,” that nuclear weapons play “a critical role” in deterring not only a nuclear attack but other kinds of aggression too—an explicit reversal of the Obama review, which asserted that deterring a nuclear attack was the “fundamental” (if not quite the “sole”) purpose of nuclear weapons. The Trump administration’s Posture Review also called for “a flexible, tailored nuclear deterrent strategy,” in which all the military services and combatant commands would “plan, train, and exercise to integrate U.S. nuclear and non-nuclear forces.”  And, although the authors denied that this was intended to enable “nuclear war-fighting,” that was precisely what it did. Finally, the document laid out plans “to replace” the current Triad of strategic weapons with new nuclear-armed ICBMs, submarines, bombers, and cruise missiles. They marked a major expansion from the Obama administration.

Many commentators linked the language of the review to Trump’s rants against North Korea as part and parcel of the same phenomenon—a reckless, headlong gallop by the current president to the brink of nuclear war and possibly beyond. But Trump had nothing to do with the Nuclear Posture Review; it was written almost entirely inside the Pentagon, as previous reviews had been, with still less direction or input than usual from the White House. The new review reflected a resurgence of the nuclear establishment, a decades-long style of thinking, which Obama had tried, but not quite managed, to push aside. But the timing of this revival, its convergence with the rise of Trump, put a dangerous new spin on the game.

Trump chose Jim Mattis as his secretary of defense because he’d heard that Mattis’s nickname, as a Marine commander, was “Mad Dog.” Trump thought that America wasn’t winning wars because the people in charge were too soft. To him, wars were about killing bad guys; therefore, a general named Mad Dog would pour the heat on mercilessly. At one rally during the transition between the election and inauguration, Trump announced that “Mad Dog Mattis” would be his defense secretary—prompting whoops and cheers from the crowd—and boasted that he was loading his cabinet with “the greatest killers”.

He was surprised, then, to learn that Mattis opposed torture as a way to get detainees to talk, telling Trump that, in his experience, he could eke out more information with “a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers.” Mattis, it turned out, was a soldier-scholar, an intellectual bachelor with a library of some 7,000 volumes, who, while in combat, carried a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations in his rucksack. Mattis had famously told his troops in Iraw, “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.” Like most modern generals, he was loath to start a war that couldn’t be won or wasn’t necessary.

In January 2015, Mattis testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and raised questions about a wide range of national security issues, including nuclear weapons. “Do they serve solely to deter nuclear war?” he asked. “If so, we should say so, and the resulting clarity will help determine the number we need.” Another question he posed: “Is it time to reduce the Triad to a Dyad, removing the land-based missiles? This would reduce the false-alarm danger.

This provoked eight of the previous nine commanders of U.S. strategic nuclear forces to write a letter to the Wall Street Journal, urging the retention and upgrading of all three legs of the Triad as vital for national security.  The one commander who didn’t sign was General George Butler, who was so appalled by the excesses in the past that he publicly called for the elimination of not only the ICBMs but all nuclear weapons.

On January 27, one week after his inauguration, Trump signed a memo to Mattis, ordering an updated Nuclear Posture Review. Over the next five months, Mattis toured the nuclear weapons complex—missile silos, bomber bases, submarine pens, and, of course, StratCom headquarters, where he got the full SIOP briefing. It didn’t take long for him to absorb the arguments for retaining the Triad, including the land-based missiles. Most of the arguments had been around for decades, ever since the unplanned creation of three types of nuclear weapons—corresponding to the three branches of the armed forces—had transmogrified into strategic doctrine, then dogma. The three legs of the Triad, the arguments went, would complicate an enemy attack and provide a hedge against technical mishaps or unexpected vulnerabilities.

If the U.S. kept its 400 ICBMs, the Russians would have to fire at least 400 (probably more like 800) warheads to destroy them (the sponge theory)—and that would constitute, by any measure, a “major attack.” Any American president would have to retaliate, and the certainty of that prospect would deter the Russians from attacking in the first place.

Mattis asked Perry about the sponge theory. Perry had never heard the argument before, and it took him a while to process its logic. In the 1970s, when Perry was the Pentagon’s chief scientist, hawks had warned that the Soviets might launch 2,000 nuclear warheads, in order to destroy the 1,000 ICBMs that the U.S. had at the time, on the premise that the president wouldn’t retaliate because this was a “limited” attack and because, if he did, the Soviets would strike again. Now people very similar to the hawks of 40 years before were arguing that the Russians would not launch warheads against 400 ICBMs because the president would see that as a large attack. To Perry, the two positions—mutually exclusive, across generations—had one thing in common: they were both contrived to justify the perpetuation of land-based missiles. Perry objected to three other aspects of the theory. First, even if there were something to the logic, 400 ICBMs seemed excessive; a couple dozen would probably serve as a sufficiently daunting sponge. Second, whatever the scenario, the U.S. would still have more than 1,000 warheads on submarines at sea; no Russian leader could casually assume that the American president wouldn’t launch them. Finally, Perry dismissed the premise that the Russians would be eager, however desperate the circumstances, to launch a nuclear first strike at the United States. Mattis, however, found the theory compelling—enough so to dissuade him from getting rid of land-based missiles.

By midsummer, Mattis was phoning Perry less and less frequently. Perry sighed that his friend and former assistant had “gone over to the dark side,” succumbing to the “nuclear mafia.

The nuclear age was entering another phase of abstraction. How many “options” were necessary to deter a nuclear attack? Was the balance of power as delicate as these scenarios portrayed it to be? Was Putin, or any other leader, so keen to find an opening, some gap in the escalation spectrum, that allowed him to launch a nuclear attack—that made nuclear war seem more tempting than an alternative course of action? And if he was disposed to play the extremely refined form of limited nuclear war that this scenario laid out, how would he know that the American low-yield nuclear warhead was, in fact, low-yield?

The language of this discourse also obscured the fact that the “low-yield” Trident II warhead wasn’t, in the scheme of world history, so low. In fact, it would wreak more destruction than most people alive had ever witnessed from a single explosion. The conventional bombs that leveled buildings in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the first two decades of the twenty-first century had the explosive power of 2,000 pounds of TNT. The low-yield Trident II warhead would explode with the blast power of 8 kilotons—meaning 8,000 tons, or 16,000,000 pounds—plus the heat, smoke, and radiation that would spread like toxic wildfire.  [ BUT WAIT, that is not the name of the current missile]

When Jim Mattis went up on Capitol Hill to request funding for the low-yield Trident II, he was met with apprehension. Not because of the cost—the price tag for modifying a few dozen warheads was $65 million, a pittance in a defense budget exceeding $700 billion. Nor were many lawmakers concerned about this new weapon per se. Rather, they were concerned about the man who had the power to launch it. Arms control advocates had long argued that low-yield nuclear weapons were destabilizing because they lowered the threshold between conventional and nuclear war. They seemed to be—they were designed to be—more usable as weapons of war, and, therefore, some president, in a crisis, might feel more tempted to use them. The human factor was key: some presidents might resist the temptation; others might risk all. Donald Trump wasn’t the first president who inspired mistrust on this score.

Many on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees did not trust President George W. Bush with such a weapon, so they tacked on an amendment to that year’s defense budget, prohibiting the “testing, acquisition, or deployment of a low-yield nuclear weapon”—and barring the Department of Energy from even conducting research or development for such a weapon—without the advance approval of Congress.

Among those senators who knew how unchecked the president’s powers were on launching nuclear missiles was Bob Corker, the committee’s Republican chairman. Corker, a businessman from Tennessee, was deeply conservative, but he was also agitated by stories he’d been hearing about Trump’s mental state. Recently Corker had made a stir by tweeting that the White House was like an “adult day care center” and telling a reporter that Trump’s reckless threats toward other countries were paving a “path to World War III.

After the hearing on whether Trump could launch a first strike without consulting any members of Congress, Corker told his staff that he was “riled up” by the issue of nuclear command-control and wanted to hold a separate hearing on the subject as soon as possible—“something real sober,” as he put it, “pointing out that the President has the power to basically destroy the world, the first hearing on this topic in 41 years of whether the President could really order a nuclear attack without any controls.

When Kehler, former StratCom commander under President Obama was asked about this, he said  “I don’t know exactly. Fortunately, we’ve never—these are all hypothetical scenarios. I mean, they’re real.  “This is the human factor in our system. The human factor kicks in.”

And that opened the door to the question of what happens to all the legal principles when the human is Donald Trump. Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, raised the point in the starkest terms. “Let me just pull back the cover for a minute from this hearing. We are concerned that the President of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear-weapons strike that is wildly out of step with U.S. national security interests. Let’s just recognize the exceptional nature of this moment in the discussion that we are having today.

Peter Feaver, a special adviser to President George W. Bush ultimately acknowledged, the “decision authority”—the legal power to launch nuclear weapons—“resides with the President.”

Senator Markey, who had prompted the hearing, then made what he considered the central point: Absent a nuclear attack upon the United States or our allies, no one human being should have the power to unilaterally unleash the most destructive forces ever devised by humankind. Yet, under existing law, the President of the United States can start a nuclear war without provocation, without consultation, and without warning. It boggles the rational mind. I fear that, in the age of Trump, the cooler heads and strategic doctrine that we once relied upon as our last best hope against the unthinkable seem less reassuring than ever.

The hearing came to a close after a few hours—by contrast, the 1976 hearing on the same subject had lasted four days—with no consequences. Markey’s legislation had no more chance of passing than similar bills put forth in the past, such as Senator Fulbright’s 1972 amendment to the War Powers Act that prohibited the president from launching a nuclear first strike without congressional approval. It was voted down, 10 to 68.

Few in Congress had ever wanted the responsibility of making weighty decisions on war and peace. Few Republicans at this hearing even took much interest in exploring the dilemmas. Most of them used their time not to ask probing questions but as Marco Rubio put it “to warn against the dangers of letting a bunch of bunker lawyers decide that they are going to disobey any order that they disagree with.”

It was sobering to some senior officers who watched the hearing that not a single senator, not even any of the Republicans, bothered to dispute the claim, openly expressed by some of the Democrats, that President Trump was “unstable” or that his very presence in the Oval Office—his everyday access to the button—made nuclear war more possible.

General Kehler may have been the most upset of all. It was up to Congress to set the rules on procedures and safeguards for the use of nuclear weapons. If the members of congress thought the President was unfit to command, then they needed to take responsibility and change the procedures, not just toss it in the laps of the military.

There was no safety switch in place, no circuit breaker that someone could throw, if the human turned out to be crazy.

Daniel Ellsberg, the nuclear war planner turned antiwar activist, counts 25 instances—before Trump entered office—of American presidents threatening to use nuclear weapons since the end of World War II.

Trump declared, after the summit, that there was “no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea” and hailed Kim as a “good friend” and “great leader.” For more than a year afterward, he touted his relationship with Chairman Kim. “He wrote me beautiful letters,” Trump gushed at one rally. “We fell in love.” The rest of the world, including many American officials and experts, gasped in dismay and puzzlement.

Months before his summit with Kim, Trump had withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, a highly detailed accord that blocked the mullahs of Tehran from every possible path toward acquiring a nuclear weapon, calling it “the worst deal ever,” even though Jim Mattis, after reading the text three times, characterized its verification protocols as “robust” and even though the International Atomic Energy Agency attested, repeatedly, after several inspections, that Iran was abiding by its terms. Not long after junking that deal, Trump pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had signed, as a Cold War coda, in 1987. Trump accused the Russians of cheating, as had President Obama. The treaty barred both countries from testing ground-launched missiles having a range of 500 to 5,000 kilometers; the Russians had tested a cruise missile within the prohibited range. But withdrawing from the treaty gave the Russians what they wanted. The Russian military had abhorred the INF Treaty from the moment Gorbachev signed it. When George W. Bush was president, Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, implored Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld three times to make a deal allowing both sides to get out of the treaty. Rumsfeld ignored the request, knowing that there was no appetite, in the U.S. or Western Europe, for bringing back these sorts of missiles. Killing the treaty would help only the Russians, giving them free rein to build as many of these weapons as they liked and to blame the breakdown on the Americans, while doing nothing for the West. Trump was falling in the trap that Rumsfeld had skirted.

New START, the treaty signed by Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, will expire in 2021, and neither Trump nor Putin has taken a single step toward negotiating an extension or a sequel. New START placed limits on Russian and American strategic nuclear weapons—the missiles and bombers aimed at each other’s territory. Both countries have abided by this treaty’s terms; not even implacable foes of arms control have claimed otherwise.

But if it disappeared, the lid would blow off: generals on both sides could press for more weapons, to satisfy more “requirements” and to fill “gaps” in fanciful scenarios; if East-West relations remained tense, the nuclear arms race, after decades of winding down, could rev up for another brutal round.

Trump certainly accelerated these trends, sometimes willfully, ripping up treaties, shrugging off alliances, scrambling the arrangements of the global system that the United States had created and helped lead, to its benefit, since the end of World War II. He came to the White House believing that the world was a mess because his predecessors didn’t know how to make good deals—and that he would clean things up because making deals was his specialty. In June 2018, shortly before his first summit with Kim Jong-un, Trump met in the White House with Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister. Abe proposed that he and Trump get their respective national security teams to work out a joint negotiating strategy. H. R. McMaster, who’d heard the suggestion ahead of time, was enthusiastic about the idea, as was much of his staff: the two teams had similar views; the two countries had common interests. But Trump waved away the idea. There are two things you need to know, he told Abe. First, he said “I am the greatest negotiator in the history of the White House.” Second, when he was about to make a big deal, he didn’t prepare with a lot of documents; he went into the room and let his gut take a reading of the guy across the table.

For Abe, this was a turning point; he suddenly realized that, as long as Trump remained president, Japan could no longer count on the United States as a reliable ally.

When they held their second summit in Hanoi, eight months later, both men approached it with misconceptions: Kim believed that Trump was so desperate for a deal, he’d agree to anything; Trump believed that he and Kim could settle all their disputes in one grand bargain—Trump lifting all economic sanctions if Kim dismantled his entire nuclear program—strictly on the strength of what he saw as their deep friendship. The summit ended disastrously, without a closing lunch, much less a signing ceremony. If anyone still believed that Trump was a master in the art of the deal, Hanoi shattered the illusion.

Most presidents come to realize that nothing in their lives has quite prepared them for the weighty rigors of the Oval Office. Most react to the shock by hunkering down with their briefing books, listening to experts, convening their top advisers, consulting their predecessors, asking questions, balancing options, and developing a keen awareness of their own styles of thinking: their strengths and limits. Trump seemed never to reach that moment of awakening. He never thought he needed to learn much beyond what he already knew.

The bomb—the weapon of fire and fury that Trump threatened to rain down on North Korea to punish its leader and obliterate the entire nation—has coexisted with humanity for three quarters of a century with no catastrophes, as yet, since the two explosions, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that set the nuclear age in motion. Still, all along, the generals and their aides have kept churning out war plans and calculating the consequences on our side versus their side—the targets destroyed, the cities ravaged, the millions of people killed—spinning them in a way that might yield some kind of victory. They have seen this as their job: to seek ways to make these weapons usable, in case the commander-in-chief wanted to use them.

Yet throughout this history, when crises occur and the generals haul out their war plans and serious men and women discuss their options, weighing the costs and benefits of going nuclear, every president has decided that the risks are too enormous.

One fear during the Cold War was that a “clever briefer,” in Washington or Moscow, might persuade the American president or the Soviet premier that the calculations and scenarios in their nuclear war plans were grounded in something real—that the balance of power and the alignment of circumstances made it possible to pull off a nuclear first strike, to fight and win a nuclear war—and that, in a desperate crisis, one leader or another might give it a go. One concern about Donald Trump, a man who believed he knew a lot but in fact knew very little, and who lacked the impulse or curiosity to learn more, was that he seemed more susceptible to the wiles of a clever briefer than any of his dozen predecessors in the age of the bomb. This was why the fear of nuclear war resurfaced with his rise to power.

At the dawn of the nuclear age, Harry Truman wrested control of the bomb away from the generals, entrusting it to the top civilian authority, because he understood that, as he put it, “this isn’t a military weapon.” But neither Truman nor anyone since devised checks or balances to the fears, whims, or impulses of the unenlightened statesman whose rise Madison feared as inevitable.

With the spread of the bomb came a logic—a stab at a strategy—on how to deter its use in warfare. The logic involved convincing adversaries that you really would use the bomb in response to aggression; part of that involved convincing yourself that you would use it, which required building certain types of missiles, and devising certain plans, that would enable you to use them—and, before you knew it, a strategy to deter nuclear war became synonymous with a strategy to fight nuclear war. And when crises arose, the logic encouraged, almost required, escalating the cycle of threats and counterthreats, just up to the point where deterrence and war converged, in order to maintain credibility. The compelling, and frightening, thing about the logic was that, once you bought into its premises, you fell into the rabbit hole; there seemed no exit. The presidents who fell deep into this hole, who faced the abyss where the logic led, avoided its end point—avoided war—by scrambling out of the hole, snapping out of the logic, like snapping out of a bad dream.

Some incalculable mix of shrewdness and sheer luck has kept the holocaust at bay; who knows how many wars we can dodge before an alignment of slow-wittedness and misfortune tips the balance the other way.