U.S. vulnerability to nuclear first strike getting attention

Congressman Don Bacon, a retired Brigadier General of the US Air Force, believes that the United States has become highly vulnerable to a nuclear first strike by Russia or China. He ought to know. A member of the House Armed Services Committee, the Congressman previously served as the commanding general in LOOKING GLASS – America’s airborne command post – who would, in a nuclear war, take over the US Strategic Command if STRATCOM’s underground command post was knocked out. From 1961 to 1990, the LOOKING GLASS aircraft, airborne twenty-four-seven and relatively invulnerable to attack, provided the best possible guarantee that American nuclear forces would be able to retaliate after a first strike. With the end of the Cold War, it was decided that the airborne alert was no longer necessary. Instead, a smaller fleet of aircraft was maintained on a 15 minute ground alert, to be launched on warning of an attack. That is still the case today.

According to Congressman Bacon, it is now increasingly possible for Russia or China to destroy the aircraft on the ground at the same time as the underground command posts, and thereby effectively decapitate the United States. There are many reasons, he says, why the 15 minute ground alert – which might have been barely adequate in 1990 – can no longer ensure America’s ability to retaliate today. This is, he claims, the gravest deficiency in the national defense; and once the facts of the matter are considered, it is very difficult to disagree with him.

When the airborne alert was shelved in 1990, the situation was as follows. Soviet ballistic missile submarines patrolling off the US coast could hit the aircraft on the ground in as little as eight minutes, in which case the aircraft would not have time to escape. However, the submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) of the time were relatively poorly suited for attacking hardened targets, such as the Strategic Air Command (now STRATCOM) underground headquarters in Omaha, or the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. Destroying these harder targets with a high degree of confidence required the launch of land based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) from Russian territory, which would take thirty minutes to arrive and would be detected by US satellites soon after launch. The system made some degree of sense because the ground alert aircraft and the underground command posts complimented one another. If the Russians launched ICBMs to take out the underground command posts, the aircraft would have enough warning to escape; whereas if the Russians launched SLBMs to take out the aircraft, there would be at least fifteen minutes between the impact of the first warheads and the destruction of the underground command posts, during which the order to retaliate could be given. In neither case would the US be required to rely completely on its early warning systems, which might risk missing the attack if they were disrupted or start an accidental war if they gave a false alarm. […]

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