Nuclear confrontation is fundamentally a form of communication — even after the first blows fall. Some in government see it as a language and revel in its complexity. This has been so ever since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 and the Soviet Union responded by testing its own device four years later. The ensuing dialogues have, with varying degrees of subtlety, involved tests, bans on tests, arms agreements, embargoes, clandestine and nonclandestine technology transfers and the occasional grand speech — a high-stakes conversation in which all sides have understood the fearsome price of miscommunication. These exchanges echo around the edges of a devil’s spiral. At the top of the spiral stand the preparations meant as deterrents. At the bottom stands all-out nuclear war.
The descent — in the language of nuclear war, an escalation — is shaped by grave uncertainties. How well do my enemies understand me, and how well do I understand them? Furthermore, how does my understanding of their understanding affect their understanding of me? These and similar questions stand like the endless images in opposing mirrors, but without diminishing in size. The threat they pose is immediate and real. It leaves us to grapple with the central truth of the nuclear age: The sole way for humanity to survive is to communicate clearly, to sustain that communication indefinitely and to understand how readily communications can be misunderstood. Crucial to handling the attendant distrust are fallback communications integral to the art of de-escalation — an art that has been neglected and is now dangerously foundering.
After the Cold War, the two great powers paid less attention to the matter. Surprise attacks were their main concern, but they assumed that the existing warning systems and retaliatory capabilities were sufficient to ward off such events. At the Pentagon, ambitious officers chose some other track to advance their careers. Terrorism, cyberwarfare, even global warming — that’s where the action lay.
But the conversation continued. Britain, France, China, Israel, India and Pakistan had already made their voices heard, then North Korea joined in, with Iran seemingly poised to follow, with all the chatter multiplying the opportunities for miscommunication. Now China, after years of contenting itself with a diminutive retaliatory arsenal, has changed its mind and is striving to rival the United States and Russia. All three countries are investing heavily in improvements to their nuclear arsenals, introducing new warheads and delivery vehicles, expanding into the fight into orbital space, integrating conventional weapons and cybertools into their nuclear warfighting capabilities, worrying about electromagnet pulses and stirring in heaps of subterfuge. Key arms-control treaties have expired or been abandoned, and there is little immediate hope for new ones. Having fallen from 70,000 warheads at the height of the Cold War to about 12,000 today, the global arsenal has begun again to grow, according to the Federation of American Scientists. The emphasis now is on smaller, more precise nuclear weapons meant to limit radioactive fallout and civilian deaths — just the sorts of warheads that countries might be tempted to use during a conventional battle and that also, when coupled with cyberattacks and advanced surveillance systems, arouse worldwide concerns that particularly the United States may achieve a practical first-strike capability. Whether justified or not, these concerns are destabilizing. They make adversaries distrustful. They undermine the conversation. They compress the spiral.
No one knows exactly how a war would unfold, only that the sort of “bolt from the blue” surprise attack around which all three great nuclear powers have built their deterrent structures is unlikely because of the strength of those very structures. The critical challenge now is not how to ward off a sneak attack but how to control an escalation that occurs in plain sight — for instance, a conventional conflict that goes wrong, leading to nuclear saber rattling, leading to the first use of a few small nuclear weapons on the battlefield, leading to the counteruse of small nuclear weapons, leading to much of the world sliding uncontrollably into extinction.
The best available model of such an event is an ultrasecret 1983 Pentagon war game called Proud Prophet. That game was a nuclear test of sorts, and it provided critical lessons that remain crucial today. It was unique in that by design it was largely unscripted, involved the highest levels of the U.S. military and its global warfighting commands and used actual communication channels, doctrines and secret war plans. One of its great strengths was that unlike any other war game involving the possibility of small-yield nuclear weapons, it ran freely and was allowed to play out to its natural conclusion: global devastation.
The conclusion was a shock. The lesson drawn from it — that nuclear war cannot be controlled — had a decades-long effect on American strategy and therefore, in a world of opposing mirrors, on global strategies. It may be that someday in the future a survivor will be able to look back at our times and observe that the greatest tragedy in all of human history is that among current leaders in Russia and the United States, and perhaps other countries, the lesson was forgotten.
Of the participants, a man named Paul Bracken, who is now 76, serves as the principal keeper of the flame. Bracken teaches at Yale, often on subjects related to systems analysis and business management, but he yields his greatest influence outside the academy, in U.S. military circles, where he is sought for his wisdom on matters of nuclear war. Until recently, he lived in the vanilla town Ridgefield, Conn., where he and his wife raised their three very smart children and he walked the pleasant downtown in vanilla anonymity. I told him that on first impression he looks like an insurance agent, and that in his profession it is probably a useful look to have. I meant a placid look. A peaceful look. “Funny,” he said, because his father had sold insurance.
That was near Philadelphia, where Bracken grew up. Afterward, he studied engineering at Columbia, went home for a stint in an Italian restaurant and almost by chance landed a Beltway job that awarded him his first security clearances. This was around 1972, when he was 24. Then he went to work for Herman Kahn — the iconoclastic head of the Hudson Institute, a think tank he founded in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. It is said that Kahn was a model for Dr. Strangelove, the crazed scientist in Stanley Kubrick’s war comedy of the same name. Kahn’s friends delighted in his sense of humor and thought he could have succeeded as a borscht-belt comedian. His critics did not agree. He was best known for his 1960 book “On Thermonuclear War,” which many regarded with dismay because of its dispassionate assessment of tolerable levels of civilian casualties, measured by the wholesale destruction of American and European cities and the deaths of multiple millions in the United States alone. The book’s central argument was that for a country willing to take the hit, nuclear war might be winnable. People believed that therefore Kahn was advocating such a war. He answered that, far from it, he was simply thinking the unthinkable because not to do so was to be unprepared, and to be unprepared was to create vulnerabilities that would invite attack and defeat.
Bracken did not buy into the winnable-war part. He was agnostic. But he believed, then as now, in the need to think clearly about such matters, and for a few years he became Kahn’s protégé. Over a decade working at Hudson, Bracken earned a Ph.D. from Yale in operations research, wrote a dissertation titled “The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces” that was subsequently published as a book and topped things off by accepting a teaching position at Yale. He was 35 and richly equipped with security clearances. It was 1983.
That March, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” To Moscow, such rhetoric seemed recklessly provocative. Two weeks later, Reagan doubled down by proposing to abandon the pact of mutually assured destruction upon which the peace had long relied. In its place, the United States would develop a hyperexpensive, multilayered shield against ballistic missiles. He called it the Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.). The press called it Star Wars. It remains far from possible even today, despite Donald Trump’s recent vow to expand on Israel’s modest and ultimately inadequate missile-defense system and build a comprehensive “Iron Dome” over the United States.
Reagan at least was not a huckster. He may have been naïve, but he was also sincere, and an avowed visionary. In the speech that introduced the concepts that would lead to Star Wars, he asked, “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” Then he called on the scientific community, “those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”
The nuclear weapons he seemed most immediately interested in rendering obsolete belonged to the Soviet Union. Certainly the Soviets thought so. Four days after Reagan introduced the initiative, the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, condemned it. Andropov said, “In fact, the strategic offensive forces of the United States will continue to be developed and upgraded at full tilt and along a quite definite line” — to acquire a first-strike nuclear capability that rendered the Soviet Union “incapable of dealing a retaliatory strike.” In short, missile defenses would be “a bid to disarm the Soviet Union in the face of the U.S. nuclear threat.”
Our dear Andropov. He worried too much. Reagan’s missile shield was not to be. Soviet leaders came to understand this and abandoned thoughts they may have had of overwhelming it physically. But the misunderstandings remained profound on both sides. Moscow suspected that Washington was preparing for a first strike, Washington suspected the same of Moscow and each, we now know, was wrong.
If the antagonists agreed on one thing, it was the advantage of shooting first, and perhaps — to avoid that regrettable step — the need to brandish survivable retaliatory arsenals. Despite those shared realizations, though, there was now one important difference. The Soviets had come to believe that their nuclear arsenal, though central to the country’s survival, was useful exclusively as a political tool. The Americans, by contrast, had been waffling over a wealth of choices. Bracken notes a few of them: attack pre-emptively to decapitate the enemy; launch on warning; launch under attack with enemy warheads exploding; escalate “horizontally” by shifting a war in Europe to Asia; create a two-front war by getting China to attack the Soviet Union; pre-position weapons in space; invade Eastern Europe with NATO armies; or of course, the new plan, to coolly execute a nuclear escalation with the goal of controlling and winning a limited nuclear war.
Those had been the eight main bright ideas for a little while. Each had vigorous proponents, none of whom meant to propose suicide, but some of whom were baldly opportunistic. People were grandstanding for the new Reagan administration. Turf fights within the Pentagon further complicated the scene. For whatever reason, the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not decide between the competing strategies, and the new secretary of defense, Casper Weinberger, came under fire for allowing chaos to reign.
Weinberger sought a way through the morass. He turned to an experienced hand in such realms, a horseman and former Marine named Phillip Karber, who today — bearded, gruff, cigar-smoking — teaches military matters at the National Defense University between forays to the front lines of Ukraine. Karber, in turn, engaged a Harvard professor named Thomas Schelling, who began setting up a secret war game. Schelling was an influential economist and future Nobel Prize winner best known then for his work in game theory, particularly as it applied to great-power rivalries and nuclear war. He had worked at Rand alongside Herman Kahn and Daniel Ellsberg, where among his other pursuits he had run a string of tabletop crisis games. The Rand games were thinking exercises closer to chess matches than to the blackboard musings and applied mathematics of formal logic, let alone to realistic war games.
The war game that Weinberger proposed was something new — an ambitious setup meant primarily to educate him and the most senior decision makers in the United States. Based in offices at Fort McNair in Washington, it was to be played round the clock for two weeks, continue longer if necessary, stretch globally through classified communication channels to major American commands, involve hundreds of active-duty officers and civilian officials and use the actual ultrasecret war plans and vulnerability assessments to examine competing strategies in as realistic a manner as possible. Unknown to nearly all of the participants, Weinberger himself would be included, playing his authentic role as the leader of what would be called the blue team — though behind a stand-in who would obscure Weinberger’s presence by pretending to confer with lower-ranking advisers before reacting to events. Likewise, Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would secretly join the exercise behind another stand-in.
The blue team would of course confront a Soviet red team, made up primarily of Pentagon officials, along with experts from the C.I.A. and the academic community. The third key player was a control team. The players would make their moves via connected computer terminals, paper communiqués or in-person meetings. The setup would allow the red team to see everything the red team did, and the blue team to see everything the blue team did. Only the control team would be able to see what both sides did. For instance, if the red team launched a strike, it would be up to the control team to take that in, make a damage assessment and communicate the assessment to both sides. Then play would proceed.
Paul Bracken was brought in to serve as a chronicler, with full access to wander the game and write down his observations. The designers could not have picked a better person for the job. Bracken saw the setup as genius, much as he saw its chief architect, the great Thomas Schelling himself. Speaking to me about Schelling, he said: “Tom always said that for generating situations you don’t anticipate, gaming is the best method. Why? Because somebody else is playing the enemy, and you’re not having to think up, ‘Here’s what the enemy might do.’ The problem is you can never surprise yourself.”
On June 13, 1983, the curtain went up. The game’s rules had been worked out, and hundreds of players were in position at Fort McNair and military bases around the globe. The control team, overseen by Schelling, informed the blue team of the situation. Soviet forces were maneuvering inside Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia in what appeared to be a giant training exercise — but drifting westward toward West Germany. Ominously, residents of Bonn, the seat of the West German government, were starting to sicken mysteriously. Had the red team covertly released biological agents against them? Weinberger hesitated, awaiting further intelligence. He refused to embarrass himself, even within the game, by going to World War III in reaction to a medical scare.
After four days, the control team confirmed the blue team’s suspicions. The red team had indeed released biological agents against Bonn. War was coming to Europe.
The blue team moved NATO troops swiftly into defensive positions along a 440-mile front that stretched from the Baltic to the Austrian border and beyond. The shooting started, and things began moving faster still. The control team determined that German and American troops were fighting well enough in the center and the south to hold the line. But then the Soviets fired a salvo of chemical weapons against Ramstein and other nearby NATO air bases west of the Rhine, significantly slowing the sortie rate for close air support against the advancing Soviet armor. In the north, Belgian and Dutch contingents began to bow backward under the pressure.
So far, the Soviets had refrained from using even the smallest of their nuclear weapons in the hope that the Americans might do the same. But on the fifth day, as Soviet troops neared the suburbs of Hamburg and it seemed that the Belgians and Dutch were about to be overrun, the blue team reached for the only tool it had in such circumstances, and Weinberger took a step he had hoped to avoid: he authorized the first limited use of “tactical” nuclear weapons.
These were nuclear artillery rounds. Altogether only 11 shots were fired. They produced subkiloton detonations that were much smaller than the 15- to 25-kiloton detonations that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki but involved some “enhanced radiation” warheads. They complicated the Soviet push and steadied the nerves of the NATO commanders. The first use looked like this:
The blue team’s goal at first was to control escalation, and apparently the red team agreed, although one should keep in mind that it consisted of Americans just pretending to be Soviets. Anyway, the red team fired back into the same central battlefield with its own low-yield nuclear artillery. The exchange was such that each team fired over its own forward positions toward the enemy’s positions on the far side, then widened incrementally to interfere with reinforcements advancing from the enemy’s rear. The effect was to thicken the line, though on the scale of Europe the exchange remained highly localized. By the end of the first day of nuclear war, the Soviet advance had paused, and Europe looked like this:
Phillip Karber, having laid the game’s foundation, served as Weinberger’s stand-in during the action. The initial nuclear stage lasted for more than two days. The period was surprisingly stable. In a 2022 video interview from his home in Virginia with an admiring scholar in Warsaw, Karber said of the initial nuclear artillery shells, “They made such a mess of everything, they turned Blitzkrieg into Sitzkrieg.”
The hesitation suggested that restraint might prevail and led Karber at the time to posit that within the game the short-range exchanges might not automatically force an escalation to full-scale nuclear war. But the hesitation did not last. “What happens,” Karber said, “is that people start using longer-range systems. And once you go longer range against airfields — Katie, bar the door.”
As Proud Prophet ground on through the days and nights at Fort McNair, and the nuclear artillery duels stretched farther up and down the German front line, both sides started using missiles and jets to drop nuclear devices of greater destructive power onto the enemy’s rear. The devices were “theater” warheads, not yet the big boys, though many packed about three times the destructive punch of the Hiroshima bomb. Airports, harbors, depots, supply routes, command bases and communication infrastructure. These were fair game. By the end of Day 3, Europe looked like this:
The docks of Hamburg and Rotterdam were gone, as were all the regional NATO and Warsaw Pact air bases, and Bonn, and the city of Hamburg itself, and dozens of bridges that crossed Poland’s Oder River near the East German border. Karber is no peacenik, but he said in the interview, “I myself had a very radical conversion to realizing and understanding the danger of escalation.”
Bracken, for his part, was armed only with the authority to move through the game’s firewalls, and the chance this had afforded him at any given moment to observe the thinking on the opposing sides. There were intervals when each side thought simultaneously that it was winning, and times when each side thought simultaneously that it was losing, and only Bracken and the control team knew it at the time.
Between the two sides, a dedicated text-based hotline had been established in emulation of the famous hotline between Washington and Moscow, which as history would have it was an earlier Schelling brainchild. The Proud Prophet hotline was in daily use during the game, but distrust prevailed. During his 2022 interview, Karber said that Bracken observed that “when we hit the Soviets, they hadn’t the slightest idea of what our limitations were. All they knew was they were getting reports of a bunch of dets” — nuclear detonations. The battlefield had become opaque. “You’re operating at best at 50 percent of knowledge of what’s really happening,” Karber said.
We know more fully now. By Day 5, this was what had become of Europe:
The two large circles on the upper right side of the map indicate heavy American “strategic” warheads in use, apparently against a small naval base in Baltiysk, one of Russia’s few Baltic ports, and a bit farther inland against a nuclear-armed air base on the near outskirts of long-suffering Kaliningrad. These were the first strikes against Russian soil, albeit in a formerly German enclave separate from Russia proper. In an arc to the south, meanwhile, NATO was using “theater” nuclear warheads to hit most of the 30 bridges that spanned the Vistula River in Poland. NATO faced two associated problems. The first was that bridges are resilient when tapped from above. Notably, most of the bridges of central Hiroshima survived the 1945 atomic bombing. The second problem was that many of the bridges stood in cities, so large numbers of civilians had to die.
Over the hotline, the Americans explained that the Polish bridges, and not the cities, were the targets, and the Russians explained the same about the Dutch and German docks . Neither side found such explanations reassuring. Both sides tried to minimize civilian casualties, but they also accepted that the large-scale annihilation of bystanders would follow.
On Day 7, Europe looked like this:
Even then, all of the strikes were meant to be exclusively against military installations, or “counterforce” targets, as the jargon goes. However, the definition of “counterforce” was under pressure now to include the annihilation of the other kind of targets, called “countervalue,” which more commonly are known as cities. Karber said that by Day 7 no one was focusing much on the distinction anymore. The game was nearing the end. With Bracken looking on, the players at Fort McNair had bought in and grown genuinely angry. Paris, London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Brussels were already gone. Every major German city was gone. Every major Polish city. And many others. Beyond the strikes shown on the map above, Sweden had been hit, as had Belarus, the Baltics, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and American appendages including Hawaii and Alaska.
Care had been taken to spare continental United States and European Russia, but casualties had already exceeded those of World War II, and this was when the fighting still remained mostly “tactical.” Surrender was out of the question for either side. NATO’s use of nuclear weapons had adhered to NATO doctrine, proceeding through the first two required stages, formally listed as Direct Defense and Deliberate Escalation. It had now met the requirements for the third and final stage, a full-on spasm attack that is known as a General Nuclear Response and officially defined as “massive nuclear strikes against the total nuclear threat, other military targets and urban-industrial targets as required.” In other words, the end of history.
Proud Prophet finished when no one remained to fight over nothing. Communication had utterly failed. The final use of the hotline was a message sent by Weinberger. Addressed to Moscow, it read, “May you burn in hell like you are going to burn here.”
“The reaction of people,” Bracken says now, “was shock that it had gone all the way.” The details remain secret, but the shock appeared to emanate from the game’s center — the duo of Weinberger and Vessey — and spread through the war councils of the United States, where talk of controlling nuclear escalation fell from favor and the Reagan administration turned to the expensive nonnuclear military buildup that was already underway with the hope of providing for an effective conventional response to a Soviet offensive. Suddenly it was all about emergency deployments to Germany. A thousand airplanes and 10 divisions in 10 days, the mantra went.
Bracken tries not to overstate the importance of Proud Prophet. This may be why he maintains that despite its name, the game was not meant to be prophetic. But anyway, Ronald Reagan mellowed. Tensions eased. Nuclear war did not break out. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, and by mutual agreement the United States and the Soviet Union began steep reductions of their nuclear arsenals, from historic highs of about 70,000 warheads combined down ultimately to the current level of about 5,500 each for the United States and Russia. These remaining 11,000 warheads (topped by an additional 1,500 warheads belonging to seven other countries) still yield the possibility of mass extinction and are currently being improved at the start of what has become a new arms race. But at the time, the Cold War had ended, overnight, and the United States had won as if by divine intervention. Americans then looked away and coasted. Various wars came, some to stay, but none were even potentially nuclear. NATO spread eastward like a hungry blob absorbing one country after the next right up to the Russian border. The Russians were in no condition to resist. In America, the apparatus of nuclear war remained in place, but the subject came to occupy the sleepiest corners of the military complex. Paul Bracken lamented the change. He told me that after the Cold War, the smart money lay elsewhere.
The nuclear calm was so profound that in April 2009, in front of a crowd of thousands in Prague, the newly elected Barack Obama dared to call for the total elimination of nuclear weapons — an initiative known as Global Zero that was gaining ground, with such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and George Shultz signing on. It seems that Obama was sincere. He acknowledged that full disarmament would be difficult and might not be achieved in his lifetime. He presented the idea in part to strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and more as an aspiration than a plan, but he believed that the moment had come to take the first steps and that the whole world would be better off without the bomb. The crowd cheered. But the rest of the world expressed little enthusiasm for the project, perhaps because to live in the 21st century in a world stripped of nuclear weapons would be to live under the thumb of the United States, with its conventional military superiority. Independent nuclear arsenals guarantee independence. This was one reason the countries had acquired nuclear arsenals in the first place. Moreover, it was lost on no one that the United States, which had acquired a taste for armed interventions, had never invaded a nuclear-armed state no matter how obnoxious it was seen to be. The lesson drawn was that short of war, a standing nuclear arsenal can be uniquely useful.
Several months after Obama’s speech, Thomas Schelling (father of Proud Prophet and by then a Nobel laureate) published an article in the quarterly Daedalus in which he cautioned against rushing toward a mirage before considering the possible consequences. He noted, for instance, that in a nuclear-disarmed world, “former” nuclear powers would become “latent” nuclear powers, each with the ability to reconstitute its arsenal quickly in the event of a crisis. In the resulting race, the winner, enjoying a brief advantage as the world’s sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the midst of a crisis, would be strongly motivated to use them.
But no worry. Global Zero was never to occur. Beyond Prague, after signing a modest nuclear-arms-reduction treaty with the Russians (named New START), Obama came up in 2010 against a group of hard-nosed senators, tough old politicos strengthened by Pentagon players and backroom lobbyists, who trapped him in his rhetoric and forced him to launch a broad nuclear-modernization initiative as their price for agreeing to the treaty. Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s brilliant national-security deputy, ruefully admitted to me that the White House had been played. Within weeks of the ratification, Obama requested $80 billion to pursue the modernization — the start of an estimated $1.7 trillion long-term investment that continues today. Modernization is code for improvements in the resilience, accuracy and overall lethality of the arsenal. So, superficially it was strange. Even while complying with a treaty that required reductions in the number of deployed strategic warheads, the United States moved to improve its nuclear warfighting capability. Official mention of a nuclear-free future faded away. The American people remained mostly disengaged, because nuclear war had come to seem obsolete and somehow unreal.
But close observers were concerned. The United States was not the only country investing in modernization. In 2012, Paul Bracken published a book-length warning titled “The Second Nuclear Age.” In it, he described the blossoming of a multipolar nuclear world — the anarchic jungle that 12 years later we fully inhabit today. Adding to the complexity of the landscape — with uncharted possibilities for confusion in countries like North Korea, Pakistan and Iran — is the huge strategic complication of China’s arrival as a major power.
The Chinese are tight-lipped about the program, so their reasoning is not entirely clear to outsiders, but it seems likely that they had grown concerned about what amounted to revolutionary advances in the American arsenal: drastic improvements in remote sensing and real-time intelligence gathering; drastic improvements in targeting accuracy; the accompanying reduction of required explosive yields; the subsequent reductions in radioactive fallout; the integration of conventional “smart” weapons, stealth, cyberwarfare and advanced technologies of many sorts into offensive strategic capabilities both in space and on the ground. From China’s perspective, mutual destruction was far from assured.
In other words, 30 years after the catastrophic end to Proud Prophet, the specter of “limited nuclear war” had returned. The worry now for China was that the United States seemed to be on the cusp of gaining such superiority that it could succeed with a sudden disarming attack that would destroy China’s meager arsenal without worry that China could shoot back. Speaking of America’s new capabilities as if addressing not just China but all of our nuclear-armed opponents, Bracken said to me: “Please don’t assume this is a plan to kill you. We are in the midst of a crazy revolution.” But an ominous one too. The writer and former Rand analyst Benjamin Schwarz made the parallel point to me that whether the American pursuit of nuclear dominance was intentional or the unplanned effect of a bureaucracy’s just doing its thing, dominance is the opposite of deterrence, and the outcome has been destabilizing. It hardly matters that the United States has no intention of striking first. What matters between nuclear powers, Schwarz said, is what the other guy thinks.
Then there is the MAGA factor. The Obama and Biden administrations were creatures of convention, and plenty dangerous as such, but they were therefore steady as well. The problem with Donald Trump, at least in terms of preventing nuclear Armageddon, is not that he is a warmonger, but that he is supremely unsteady.
Ronald Reagan famously said, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Trump’s own views on the matter have long been subject to interpretation, or misinterpretation. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book “Peril,” China was becoming increasingly concerned about the prospect of a secret U.S. strike in the run-up to the 2020 election. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, called his Chinese counterpart to assure him that no such plans were in effect. But during the waning days of the Trump administration, after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Milley had to call his Chinese counterpart again, this time to assure him that despite Trump’s apparent instability, the United States itself remained stable. Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House and second in line to the presidency, called Milley with her own questions: What precautions were available to prevent an unstable president from initiating hostilities or accessing nuclear launch codes? Milley convened a meeting and advised officers in the nuclear chain to inform him immediately of any orders to launch nuclear weapons.
Playing the nuclear madman is a risky but sometimes rational ploy in international communications. Richard Nixon used it in his futile attempt to stave off the American rout in Vietnam. His adversaries were not convinced. But no matter how distrusted Nixon may have been, no matter how immoral or sad or self-destructive, no one could have believed that he was irrational or crazy. Trump is different. In 2017, he traded schoolyard insults with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and publicly threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Coming from him, this seemed less bluff than threat, and dangerously self-aggrandizing. It has since been reported, in a book by the Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt, that Trump also discussed a pre-emptive nuclear strike. His idea, he told his aides, was to blame some other country for the act. He was talked down by his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general. The clear communications required to tamp down nuclear escalation require consistency, focus, trustworthiness and coherence. These are traits that seem to be absent in Trump’s makeup. As an isolationist, he may be less likely than others to rush into a war, but he is also demonstrably ill equipped to manage the crisis once an unintended war breaks out.
Bruce Blair, an Air Force missileer turned nuclear critic who died in 2020, highlighted the distinction between deterrence and warfighting. In a 2020 essay for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the role of the president in fighting a nuclear war, he wrote: “Enabling the president to intelligently determine a course of action does not mean that a warfighting strategy of escalation dominance can or should be pursued. The basic challenge is to build capacity to assure an appropriate response to nuclear aggression. This would buttress basic deterrence. Exquisite nuclear warfighting is the stuff of armchair strategists living in some parallel universe, not the real world.”
The danger, as Blair knew, is that many of those armchair strategists occupy offices in the Pentagon. Blair was an idealist, an abolitionist and one of the founders of Global Zero. He was also a missileer who knew the score. He understood that the first order of business has to be the avoidance of nuclear war, an imperative that — cruel irony — requires a credible threat of nuclear retaliation. Nuclear retaliation is not quite the same as nuclear warfighting, but it deploys all the same tools. The dilemma is inherent. A related problem is that deterring a nuclear war requires orderly preparations for the fight, and the fight when it comes is never orderly.
Paul Bracken explained the manner in which preparations for nuclear deterrence and war are crafted in Washington. He described the process as a ritual. First, he said, you draw up plans specifying the delivery systems — for instance, the ever-popular triad of bombers, submarines and silo-based heavy missiles. You add a mix of warheads and the communication channels that allow the weapons to be used. You also establish a formal chain of command and a scheme for the continuity of government.
Then comes the operational stage. This is where you try to practice what you preach, testing the hardware that you have acquired and rehearsing the procedures that you have put in place. You get fluent with executions — for instance, missile launch procedures, or coordinated force deployments large and small, or the emergency evacuation of a surrogate cabinet. Privately, you may harbor doubts, but you do not write them up. Unstressed, the machinery seems impressive.
Then comes reality. Unexpected things happen, and lessons are learned from them but the conclusions are not necessarily discussed. People speak frankly around the hallway water cooler, but if they are ambitious, they do not pass their opinions up the chain. Why risk sounding naïve when you can assume that your superiors already know? Take command and control, the theoretically resilient communications network at the heart of the entire nuclear construct. Bracken points out that with the country under attack during the relative pinprick events of Sept. 11, 2001, the system failed and left the commander in chief, George W. Bush, to wander the skies aboard Air Force One, cut off from communication with Washington, unable even to make phone calls and dependent on intermittent reception of local television stations for the news. Bracken characterized the national security response to the attacks as “mashed potatoes.”
Communications are said to be better now, but Bracken seems quietly unconvinced. Such skepticism is widespread but generally hidden. There is a sense that it would be perilous to express doubts about even the most obvious of our nuclear weaknesses. Take, for example, our insistence on the right of nuclear first use to defend our allies. This is supposed to be the glue that holds the world together, part of “extended” deterrence — our proffered nuclear umbrella. But does anyone truly believe that the United States would follow through? In 1961, John F. Kennedy went to France to discuss, among other matters, Charles de Gaulle’s decision to build an independent nuclear arsenal. America was asking why the nuclear deterrence that it generously offered was seen to be insufficient. De Gaulle answered with a related question: Was America really willing to trade New York for Paris?
More important, did the Soviet really believe that to be true?
“That is the problem with extended deterrence,” Christopher Layne, a professor of international affairs at Texas A&M University, told me. “You have to assure your allies that you will do something incredibly irrational and risk committing national suicide. And you have to deter your adversaries by making them believe that you’re willing to take these risks to protect not your homeland but someone else’s homeland. Or in the case of Japan, some worthless rock piles in the southeast part of the East China Sea. I mean, we say we will defend the Senkaku Islands, but will we? Will we defend Taiwan? At the risk of our cities? Nobody really knows.”
Bracken flagged what he called the “transcendental madness” of the whole enterprise. He said: “Sometimes the only way to deal with it is with humor. ‘Dr. Strangelove’ started out as a serious movie about nuclear war, and Kubrick just couldn’t do it. So he turned it into a dark comedy.” But Bracken is not laughing. He believes that the nuclear modernization currently underway is necessary but misguided. He said, for instance: “Building a harder command-and-control system using blockchain so we can get the ‘go’ code to the missile forces is an improvement on one of the most fantastically unlikely scenarios that anyone can dream up. I’m at least looking at real-world threats and dangerous pathways to nuclear war. I don’t think a bolt from the blue is one of those. So I’m looking at the right problems, with inadequate skills perhaps, but the Pentagon is applying high levels of skills to the wrong problem.”
History shows that deterrence often fails and that countries can maneuver themselves into corners where they have no choice but to enter into wars they cannot win, wars of assured self-destruction. Now we are entering an era where nuclear arms control is an open question, nonproliferation has failed, conventional conflicts are spreading, overwrought nationalism is on the rise, the use of small nuclear weapons again seems possible, deterrence is weakening and fools dream of managing nuclear escalation in the midst of battle. Nuclear war in some form seems to be coming to the neighborhood. There is little sign that changes are being pursued to lower the risk. There is no reason to panic, but Katie, bar the door.
William Langewiesche is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of many classics of nonfiction narrative, including “American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center,” “Aloft: Thoughts on the Experience of Flight” and “The Atomic Bazaar: Dispatches From the Underground World of Nuclear Trafficking.” Pablo Delcan is a designer and art director from Spain. In 2014, he founded Delcan & Co., a design studio based in New York. Danielle Del Plato is an illustrator who works on still-life retouching, large-scale photo composites and 3-D rendering.
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