Launch on warning is different from MAD, and amounts to a residual counterforce option:
A National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book
William Burr, Editor*
April 2001
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The Bush administration is in the midst of a nuclear posture review. In his May 1 speech, President George W. Bush announced his support for missile defense and cuts in weapons, but his announcement did not refer to the alert posture of U.S. strategic forces. In a major campaign speech on nuclear weapons policy that he delivered in May 2000, then-presidential candidate Bush addressed concerns about the instant-reaction status of U.S. strategic nuclear forces. Declaring that "the United States should remove as many weapons as possible from high-alert, hair-trigger status," Bush argued that the capability for a "quick launch within minutes of warning" was an "unnecessary vestige of cold-war confrontation." Not only was the quick-launch posture outdated, it was dangerous: "keeping so many weapons on high alert may create unacceptable risks of accidental or unauthorized launch."1
These remarks echoed the troubling questions that defense analysts such as Bruce Blair (director, Center for Defense Information) have raised about the alert postures of the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and Russia. Both countries, Blair has argued, have come to rely on a dangerous hair-trigger alert posture for their land based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). For example, Minuteman missiles are ready to launch within seconds of a warning of attack; theoretically, if adversary missiles are aimed at Minuteman silos, by the time they arrive, they will be striking empty holes in the ground. The Soviet Union also adopted the same posture during the Cold War but has not abandoned it during the post-Cold War era.2
Under the circumstances of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, a launch-on-warning capability was a logical consequence of nuclear planning. Many Soviet targets were "time urgent" military ones that would have to be destroyed quickly. By the early 1950s, soon after Moscow began producing nuclear weapons, those Soviet nuclear facilities and nuclear delivery systems that could be detected became a prime target for U.S. nuclear war planning. Because those forces posed the great threat to the United States and its allies, U.S. military commanders and intelligence agencies looked closely for signs that the Soviet leadership might be preparing them for use in a surprise attack. By the mid-1950s, the commanders of U.S. strategic nuclear forces readily assumed that if they received "strategic warning" of an impending Soviet attack, it would be essential to stage a quick preemptive launch of SAC bombers on Soviet strategic nuclear and command and control targets. Consistent with this, the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), approved by President Dwight Eisenhower in the fall of 1960, included preemptive and retaliatory options for massive nuclear attacks on the most threatening Soviet targets.3
The development of Soviet ICBM forces, although initially slow, also raised pressure for the early launch of U.S. strategic forces. To structure them so that they could put to rapid use in a crisis and elude a surprise missile attack, in 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower approved SAC proposals creating the "Positive Control" system for the strategic bomber force.4 Under "Positive Control," national authorities could order the launch of nuclear-armed bombers, which would orbit at designated "failsafe" locations in the Arctic circle, not far from Soviet territory until they had received orders to bomb targets or return to their bases.5
When the U.S. Air Force began to deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles during the late 1950s, they envisaged a strategic force that could deliver enormously destructive nuclear weapons almost immediately. The "Minuteman" ICBM embodied the idea of a rapid reaction force. A solid-fueled delivery system, it could be launched in seconds, compared to the first generation liquid-fueled systems, which had a relatively slower reaction time (up to 15 minutes). That missiles could be launched quickly meant that ideas of nuclear preemption remained part of the conceptual apparatus of national policymakers. Of course, there could be no "positive control" system for ICBMs: once launched, they could not be recalled.
Yet with the Soviets developing their own ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles as well, notions of preemption became less practical (leaving aside the ethical and political obstacles). One of President John F. Kennedy's last recorded statements about nuclear strategy occurred during a grim briefing by the National Security Council's secret Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC) in September 1963. Analyzing the consequences of U.S. and Soviet preemptive nuclear attacks, the NESC study introduced U.S. casualty figures---30 million--that were higher than Kennedy had ever heard before. With the devastating U.S. losses from Moscow's response to a U.S. preemptive strike, Kennedy observed that such an option was "not possible for us."6
Despite Kennedy's misgivings, a preemptive strategic option remained embedded in the SIOP through the early 1970s and undoubtedly later. For military planners at the Pentagon and elsewhere, basing U.S. strategy on the idea of a retaliatory blow after absorbing a Soviet first strike was wholly unacceptable. But preemption depended on a strategic warning that was unlikely to be available. Nevertheless, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, strategic planners recognized that if tactical warning information was available, there was another position that was just short of preemption but avoided "retaliation after ride-out." As White House science adviser and MIT professor Jerome Wiesner noted in mid-1959, once U.S. electronic sensors were able to detect the launch phase of a Soviet ICBM attack, they will could provide the "[warning] time necessary to ready our missiles so that they can be fired before they are destroyed."7
What Wiesner was pointing to was the possibility of a launch-on-warning capability. As the documents that follow indicate, such a posture was evident to U.S. government officials during the late 1950s and early 1960s. With the deployment of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), a rudimentary capability for launch-on-warning began to emerge; BMEWS gave command authorities fifteen minutes notification of a missile attack. A launch-on-warning option became more robust in the early 1970s with the deployment of the satellite-based electronic warning system originally known as the Missile Defense Alert System (MIDAS) but later camouflaged with the designation Defense Support Program (DSP).8 As documents from the late 1960s and the 1970s suggest, once DSP satellites were being tested and deployed, officials and experts at the National Security Council, the State Department, and the U.S. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks [SALT] delegation, not to mention the Soviet SALT negotiators, became keenly aware of the possibility of launch-on-warning. Although some looked favorably at the prospects of a launch-on-warning capability, others raised the same doubts that President Bush and others have reprised more recently, the danger of a false warning that could produce a terrible cataclysm.
The false warning problem has never been a hypothetical one. During the Cold War and after, both the United States and Russia received mistaken warnings of attack. One of the most alarming incidents took place during 1980 when National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski received a middle-of-the-night phone call reporting that warning systems indicated a Soviet all-out attack of 2,200 ICBMs. Just before he was about to call President Carter, who would have had about three to seven minutes to make a decision, Brzezinski learned that other warning systems showed that there was no attack; it was a false alarm. Someone had inserted a tape for a military exercise into a warning system computer. The warning systems were finally accurate, but the danger and possibility of error was never more evident.8a
The history of the launch-on-warning capability is a complex one and the declassified record is sparse, no doubt because of the issue's great sensitivity. Precisely when launch-on-warning became a specific option in U.S. nuclear planning remains classified. The documents that follow shed light on the purposes that led to the launch-on-warning option as well as the doubts about its propriety that were raised from the beginning. They include the first declassified discussions of the possibility of launch-on-warning as well the first confirmation that a specialized launch-on-warning option entered into the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the U.S. nuclear war plan, in 1979.
This collection also shows the limits of the available documentation on launch-on-warning. Most of the declassified material is from civilian agencies and records discussion by mostly civilian officials. Major military organizations, however, played critically important roles in making launch-on-warning an operational capability. Unfortunately, records from the 1960s and early 1970s of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Strategic Air Command, among others, remain largely classified despite Executive Order 12958's twenty-five year rule. More on launch-on-warning may be learned if and when military records are declassified.
How long high-alert strategic forces and a launch-on-warning posture will persist as basic elements of U.S. nuclear planning remains to be seen. Significantly, President Bush is constrained under law from changing unilaterally the alert posture of U.S. strategic forces; since 1996 defense authorization legislation has prohibited executive branch decisions to de-alert the missile force. Unless the President challenges the constitutionality of Congressional edicts, any White House decisions on the U.S. nuclear posture will require efforts to build a consensus on Capitol Hill.9
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