As President Bush today considers the historical significance of an American president reviewing the procession of Russian troops and armaments in Red Square, I wonder if he will also consider the irony of the fact that as he and President Putin shoot the breeze, they still hold the anachronistic, but no less dangerous, threat of mutual nuclear annihilation over one anothers' heads. The danger may not be a direct one - no-one seriously expects a pre-emptive strike from the Russians anymore - but thousands of nuclear warheads are still nevertheless on hair-trigger alert, waiting for someone to decide that some danger is so threatening that it is worth destroying the world for.

Robert McNamara, secretary of defense in the Kennedy and LBJ administrations, and thus a key figure in determining American nuclear strategy in a period including the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam war, writes a piece in the current issue of Foreign Policy entitled "Apocalypse Soon". The article could well be subtitled "How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate the Bomb". McNamara sternly criticises Bush's investigation of new alternative types of nuclear weapons to add to existing stockpiles and the lack of American leadership in reducing the number of active nuclear warheads:-

The average U.S. warhead has a destructive power 20 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Of the 8,000 active or operational U.S. warheads, 2,000 are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be launched on 15 minutes’ warning...On any given day, as we go about our business, the president is prepared to make a decision within 20 minutes that could launch one of the most devastating weapons in the world. To declare war requires an act of congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes’ deliberation by the president and his advisors. But that is what we have lived with for 40 years...What is shocking is that today, more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, the basic U.S. nuclear policy is unchanged. It has not adapted to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Plans and procedures have not been revised to make the United States or other countries less likely to push the button...Keeping such large numbers of weapons, and maintaining them on hair-trigger alert, are potent signs that the United States is not seriously working toward the elimination of its arsenal and raises troubling questions as to why any other state should restrain its nuclear ambitions.

One does have to ask the question as to why exactly there is the need to be able to destroy the world so many times over. Would halving the megadeath quotient in mutual agreement with the Russians really be such a bad thing, especially if tied to commitments from some of the "outposts of tyranny"? Meanwhile the US looks to invest $2 billion in upgrading its weapons, pushing ever more closely towards a total US military expenditure to match that of the rest of the world combined, and even Tony Blair can't resist jumping on the bandwagon.

And as for keeping so many weapons on hair-trigger alert, is that really such a good idea when a flock of birds or a rainstorm can cause the President to scurry into his bunker?

Of course, in reality we know that there are considerable safeguards in place to ensure that no nuclear strike is authorised without due consideration by the President and his advisors. However, recent revelations have shown that any such faith in failsafe procedures to avoid unnecessary armaggeddon (as opposed to all those necessary armaggeddons) is seriously misplaced.

Bruce Blair, a retired ICBM launch officer, has published astonishing revelations demonstrating how the safeguards have been overridden in practice without the knowledge of those at the top of the chain. His comments also perhaps reveal what triggered McNamara to publish his concerns regarding nuclear security:-

Last month I asked Robert McNamara...what he believed back in the 1960s was the status of technical locks on the Minuteman intercontinental missiles...McNamara replied...that he personally saw to it that these special locks...were installed on the Minuteman force, and that he regarded them as essential to strict central control and preventing unauthorized launch.
...
What I then told McNamara about his vitally important locks elicited this response: “I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?” What he had just learned from me was that the locks had been installed, but everyone knew the combination.
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The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard...Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.

This amazing state of affairs was remedied in the seventies, but demonstrates how readily the military can, and will, override authority in order to maintain control of the agenda. In another article Blair quotes Air Force General George Lee Butler, who illustrates how control over the decision whether to retaliate would in practice be wheedled out of the hands of the President in a potential nuclear launch scenario:-

"Notwithstanding the intention of deterrence as it is expressed at the policy level – as it is declared and written down – at the level of operations those intentions got turned on their head, as the people who are responsible for actually devising the war plan faced the dilemmas and blind alleys of concrete practice. Those mattered absolutely to the people who had to sit down and try to frame the detailed guidance to exact destruction of 80 percent of the adversary’s nuclear forces. When they realized that they could not in fact assure those levels of damage if the president chose to ride out an attack, what then did they do? They built a construct that powerfully biased the president’s decision process toward launch before the arrival of the first enemy warhead."

Bruce Blair intimates that the situation has not improved since General Butler made his comments. Presidents still don't get into the detail of the protocols, and thus do not get to see where the devil resides. Let's all pray for plenty of blue, birdless skies until sanity is restored and the hair-trigger warheads are stood down.