Star Spangled Security: Applying Lessons Learned over Six Decades Safeguarding America

1. Oh, Say Can You See: The View from the Top

1 1 Oh,SayCanYouSee the view from the top I watched more than a dozen atmospheric nuclear tests, all of them before I became secretary of defense. Only one other secretary of defense (Charlie Wilson) may have seen one. I wanted to see the work of which I’d been part and to make sure the devices did work. At a test in 1956 of a ten-megaton thermonuclear weapon, I was billeted in a cabin on Eniwetok while the test ran on Bikini, 200 miles away. I was in my late twenties. The test occurred an hour before sunrise. The sky was pitch black. In the Marshall Islands, so close to the equator, there is little in the way of dawn. The sun comes straight up. In the predawn darkness the bomb made a light so bright that for twenty seconds I could have read the newspaper on that beach. On another occasion I viewed the detonation of a six-megaton bomb from an aircraft thirty miles away. I saw the immense fireball expand to a thousand yards in diameter. About two minutes later I felt the shock wave. The fireball expanded into a hot cloud within the first minute and kept changing color as its temperature rose. When the cloud reached the stratosphere, it spread into the well-known mushroom shape. My reactions watching tests were mostly scientific and professional. I was gratified when designs I’d overseen worked and disappointed if they fizzled. There was a component of deep concern about their power of destruction and a component of satisfaction that convinced me—as it still does—that I was contributing to U.S. security. By the sixth multi-megaton bomb I had no poetic or religious or inspirational sort of reaction. We 01-2382-0 ch1.indd 1 9/6/12 4:05 PM 2   |   Oh, Say Can You See needed nuclear weapons as a deterrent to their use. After viewing their destructive power, I was determined that so far as I could influence matters , we would never be confronted with the decision to use them. One way to make sure that the Soviet Union wouldn’t use nuclear weapons was to ensure we could deliver our own. For that purpose new designs were necessary. Emotions could not be substituted for actions. I do not pretend to know what a full-scale nuclear war would be like. I remain utterly convinced that it would be dreadful beyond imagination. During the 1960s and 1970s we coined new jargon in the Cold War: “rapid deployment forces” and “power projections” and “deterrence.” America faced an existential threat. There was widespread concern that the United States might be falling behind the Soviet Union in strategic nuclear weaponry. Most Americans were aware of and feared the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Few citizens knew or wanted to know the terrifying extent of weaponry that the Soviet Union and the United States kept at the ready and how the arsenals grew through the 1970s. By 1979 the total Soviet nuclear stockpile numbered about 28,000 weapons, the U.S. nuclear stockpile numbered about 24,000.1 The potential devastation that could be caused by these thousands of nuclear arms would be catastrophic. When I became secretary of defense in 1977, the military services, most of all the army, were disrupted badly by the Vietnam War. There was general agreement that the Soviet Union outclassed the West in conventional military capability, especially in ground forces in Europe. Soviet leaders were convinced that they had conventional warfare superiority in Europe and were committed to increasing their influence in Western Europe. I concluded that America and its allies needed to be able to deny or at least reduce Soviet confidence that it could roll over Western Europe in thirty days. We thought that given more than a month of fighting, the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact alliance would fray. The disparity in conventional forces loomed over political relations between the United States and our European NATO allies. Because of it we still needed to rely on the threat that we would use tactical nuclear weapons to deter or blunt any conventional Soviet attack in Europe. We had to accept the possibility that our use of those weapons could escalate to a full-blown nuclear war that would destroy the United States, the 01-2382-0 ch1.indd 2 9/6/12 4:05 PM Oh...