It is all unthinkable, so Quaid doesn’t think about it. “I really don’t,” he insists. He says he trusts Higher Authority. Besides, he adds, “I figure if I’m sitting down here, no one can mess with me.” Hearing his own mild bluster, he smiles sheepishly. Quaid, who is 26, about the same age as the missiles in the silos around him, says he has seen the usual apocalypse movies (“Dr. Strangelove,” “The Day After”) but finds them “bogus” because the technical details are wrong. “I guess I miss the message,” he says, shrugging.
Lieutenant Quaid lives in a land that time forgot. He is one of 220 officers of the 91st Missile Wing who safeguard 150 Minuteman IIIs hidden in a missile field roughly the size of Massachusetts, spread across 8,500 square miles of farmland outside Minot, N.D. Despite the end of the cold war, and notwithstanding all the arms-control talks and treaties over the past two decades, the United States still has roughly 7,000 nuclear weapons programmed against targets in the former Soviet Union, more than 10 times the number it needs to utterly destroy its former enemy. And Russia has as many that can reach the United States.
The threat of Armageddon, mercifully out of mind after the end of the superpower standoff, isn’t what it used to be. With political tensions dramatically re duced between the two sides, the risk of deliberate nuclear attack is more remote than ever. Since 1990 U.S. and Russian strategic forces have been cut by close to a half, and U.S. nuclear spending has shrunk by 75 percent. And the Kremlin has docked most of its missile subs and locked up its mob fie ICBMs in garages and railroad yards.
Yet the risk hasn’t gone away. Ironically, the crumbling state of Russia’s arsenal heightens a new danger: the chance of nuclear war by accident (sidebar). As the Soviet empire disintegrated, the Kremlin lost most of its early-warning radars, making those who control the weapons jumpy. Because its missiles are now fixed targets, the military has just 15 minutes in an attack to either use them or lose them. With its conventional forces vastly reduced, Russia now views its nuclear weapons as a first line of defense–not weapons of last resort. The Kremlin warns that it will “launch on warning” rather than lose its whole arsenal to afirst strike. To U.S. officials, talk of a first strike is absurd, but Russia’s leaders clearly fear the possibility. In 1995 an atmospheric-research rocket from Norway triggered a full-scale alert. Russian leader Boris Yeltsin and his commanders had begun the process of activating the launch codes before they realized the incoming blip was harmless.
The Clinton administration has done little to address this risk, other than to urge the Russians to ratify START II, which would commit both sides to reduce strategic arsenals to about 3,500 warheads. But Clinton’s decision to expand NATO probably wrecks any chance the Russian Parliament will ratify the treaty. So, in the absence of some new initiative, the nuclear standoff will continue.
Which, in some ways, is fine with the U.S. military. At the Omaha headquarters of Stratcom–Strategic Command, America’s nuclear forces–there is a certain nostalgia for the old days. A sign on the desk of the Stratcom commander, Gen. Eugene Habiger, declares that here sat Curtis LeMay, the legendary cigar-chomping air force commander who wanted to bomb Russia “back into the Stone Age.” Out at Minot Air Force Base, old “buff”–B-52–pilots miss the days when a blaring klaxon would sent them running to their bombers.
But for the missileers on permanent alert–24 hours a day, 365 days a year-be-neath the Dakota plain, it might as well still be 1963. Called “cone heads,” they don’t joke around like aviators in a ready room on a carrier. Missileers tend to be earnest, diligent, squared away. Their doomsday mission occasions no gallows humor.
The risk of a nuclear incident might have been sharply reduced had the United States taken bolder steps to stand down its own forces during the 1990s-and talked the Russians into similar moves. As the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s, some Washington policymakers began to see the absurdity of planning for Armageddon. When Dick Cheney became secretary of defense in 1989, he was shown a computerized demonstration of the Pentagon’s blueprint, known as the SIOP (Single Integrated Operations Plan), to flatten Russia. Cheney watched as red dots, representing nuclear explosions, obliterated Moscow. “Why are we doing this?” he asked with some impatience. “Sir,” answered a general, “we’re doing this because it’s your policy.” Cheney decided to change the policy. At his command, the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, began asking some basic questions, like why the United States was still targeting Poland-when it was now an elective democracy. Eastern Europe was soon removed from the SIOP.
The general then in charge of the nuclear forces, Lee Butler, knew the SIOP was a “product of madness.” He had been to Russia and seen the state of decay of its armed forces. “They couldn’t even make the runway lights work,” he told NEWSWEEK. Butler began marching through the SIOP “like Sherman through Georgia,” said a colleague, eliminating targets and taking the B-52s off alert. Butler even wanted to begin standing down ICBMs.
Butler’s ideas were deemed too radical. Fearful of congressional Republicans and uneasy about taking on the military, President Clinton has done little to ease the nuclear confrontation. In 1993 he and Yeltsin did agree to “de-target” their ICBMs–to aim them harmlessly at the ocean-but the deal was entirely symbolic; both sides can restore the original targets in a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is midway through spending $5 billion to modernize America’s 580 ICBMs–so they will strike within 100 yards of their targets.
The administration has even found a new use for nuclear weapons. Stratcom is now targeting suspected nuclear, chemical and biological weapons plants in “rogue nations” like Iran and Libya. The Pentagon has developed a new nuclear bomb-the specially reinforced B-61 mod. 11–capable of boring deep into underground facilities like the one Muammar Kaddafi has tunneled in Libya to make chemical weapons.
Lee Butler, who retired as Stratecom commander in 1994, says his former comrades are “frantically resting about for a new rationale for nuclear weapons.” Nuclear weapons are a kind of addiction, hesays. “Everyone becomes enthralled. It’s time to break the spell.”
After all, nobody really wants them used. That’s why, figuring mistrust is more likely to make the Russians push the button, the Pentagon has begun inviting its former foes for good-will visits. A few months ago Gen. Igor Sergeyev, then commander of Russian Rocket Forces (and now defense minister), was welcomed into Stratcom’s CommandCenter, 60 feet below Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha. The bland room apparently failed to impress Sergeyev. “Where is the real one?” he asked. His hosts asked him for his address in Moscow. On one giant screen, up popped a targeting map so detailed that the Russian general was shown the street corner his apartment overlooks. It is doubtful Sergeyev rested more easily after his tour. Who would?
Arms treaties have cut into the United States’ nuclear stockpile, but the nation still has rouhly 7,000 warheads at its disposal. A look at the military bases where the nukes are: U.S.-BASED NUCLEAR WEAPONS* TOTAL Minuteman III missiles 525 Peacekeeper (MX) missiles 50 C-4 missiles on submarines 192 D-5 missiles on submarines 216 Nukes carried on aircraft 1,800 *Weapons can contain multiple warheads
