Drift

While our nuclear-armed cruise missiles were growing leading-edge wing fungus in the subtropical moisture of Louisiana, other US military flying hardware was having rather the opposite problem: in the words of Defense Industry Daily, they “were about to fly their wings off—and not just as a figure of speech.” In 2006, the Air Force embarked on an emergency (and expensive, at $7 million a pop) upgrade of the nation’s fleet of C-130 aircraft. After heavy service moving cargo and flying combat missions as retrofitted gunships, the huge planes’ wing-boxes were failing. Wing-boxes are what keep the wings attached to the fuselage.

So take your pick of your maintenance priorities, Taxpayer: wings falling off enormous gunships in the Middle East and central Asia from constant use in the longest simultaneous land wars in US history, or sedentary nuclear missiles in Shreveport growing fungus. At least we can easily tally the twenty-first-century benefits where the C-130s were concerned; those airplanes have moved a bucketload of troops—along with “beans, boots, Band-Aids, and bullets”—to the various war zones we’ve kept humming since 2001. Operationally speaking, that workhorse fleet of no-frills, have-a-seat-on-your-helmet airplanes has been tremendously effective and cost- efficient.

The nuclear thing is harder to figure.

The United States, according to a 1998 study by the Brookings Institution, spent nearly eight trillion in today’s dollars on nukes in the last half of the twentieth century, which represents something like a third of our total military spending in the Cold War. Just the nuke budget was more than that half-century’s federal spending on Medicare, education, social services, disaster relief, scientific research (of the non-nuclear stripe), environmental protection, food safety inspectors, highway maintenance, cops, prosecutors, judges, and prisons… combined. The only programs that got more taxpayer dollars were Social Security and non-nuclear defense spending.

What do we have to show for that steady, decades-long mushroom cloud of a spending spree? Well, congratulations: we’ve got ourselves a humongous nuclear weaponry complex. Still, today. Yes, the Nevada Test Site is now a museum, and the FBI converted J. Edgar Hoover’s fallout shelter into a Silence of the Lambs–style psychological-profiling unit, but as atomic-kitschy as it all seems, the bottom line is this: twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a twenty-first-century year, we’ve still got thousands of nuclear missiles armed, manned, and ready to go, pointed at the Soviet Union. Er … Russia. Whatever. At the places that still have thousands of live nuclear weapons pointed at us.

Warheads, and the missiles that carry them, and all the nuts and bolts that support them from shelter to bomber wing and back again have been on the shelf for way too long. The nukes and their auxiliary equipment were generally designed to have a life span of about ten to twenty years. Constant manufacturing and modernization were the assumptions back in the glory days, especially with Team B’s armchair instigators kicking up all that magic fear dust. But by the start of the Barack Obama presidency, some of that hardware had been in service for forty or even fifty years.

Bad enough that missiles were growing wing fungus and storage containers were rusting through, but at least those problems were mostly solvable with Lysol and Rustoleum. For the more serious nuclear maintenance issues, we had by then started shoveling money into something called the Stockpile Life Extension Program, which—even if you avoid the temptation to call it SchLEP—is still essentially a program of artificial hips, pacemakers, and penile implants for aging nukes. How’d you like to be responsible for operating on a half- century-old nuclear bomb?

These were fixes that required real, hard-won technical nuclear expertise—expertise we unfortunately also seemed to be aging out of. Fuzes, for example, were failing, and there was nobody around who could fix them: “Initial attempts to refurbish Mk21 fuzes were unsuccessful,” admitted an Air Force general, “in large part due to their level of sophistication and complexity.” The fuze that previous generations of American engineers had invented to trigger a nuclear explosion (or to prevent one) were apparently too complicated for today’s generation of American engineers. The old guys, who had designed and understood this stuff, had died off, and no one thought to have them pass on what they knew while they still could.

Then there was the W76 problem. W76s were nuclear bombs based mostly on the Navy’s Trident submarines. By refurbishing them, we thought we might get another twenty or thirty years out of them before they needed replacing. The problem with refurbishing the W76s—with taking them apart, gussying them up, and putting them back together—is that we had forgotten how to make these things anymore. One part of the bomb had the code name “Fogbank.” Fogbank’s job was to ensure that the hydrogen in the bomb reached a high enough energy level to explode on cue. But no one could remember how to make Fogbank. It was apparently dependent on some rare and highly classified X-Men-like material conjured by US scientists and engineers in the 1970s, but no one today remembers the exact formula for making it. Very embarrassing.

The Department of Energy was not going to take this lying down; they promised the Navy, “We did it before, so we can do it again.” I like that can-do spirit! But sadly, no. It took more than a year just to rebuild the long- dismantled Fogbank manufacturing plant at the Oak Ridge nuclear lab, and from there, while a bunch of aging W76 warheads lay opened up like patients on an operating table, government scientists and engineers tried to whip up new life-extending batches of Fogbank. But even after years of trying, even after the Fogbank production program went to “Code Blue” high priority, the technicians were never able to reproduce a single cauldron of Fogbank possessed of its former potency. The Department of Energy, according to an official government report, “had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency.” The experts were gone. And nobody had bothered to write anything down!

Maybe this should have been a sign. When all the scientists and engineers are dead, or senile, or at least just fishing, and the know-how is gone with them, isn’t it fair to say that a destroy-the-world-thousands-of-times- over nuclear weapons program has run its course?

It’s not worth (at least here) querying the sanity of how we got all these nukes in the first place. There was a logic to it. In the Cold War, with the Soviet Union pointing Armageddon-making bombs in our direction, we answered in kind. The deterrent force of our nukes—you move to wipe us out, you’re going down with us—was rational, although kind of bizarre. The perfectly acronymed doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) required that we have whatever the Russians had, plus better, plus one. And the same for them toward us. Last superpower with a bullet in the chamber wins. At one remarkable moment in the completely MAD Atomic Age of the 1960s we possessed more than 31,000 armed nuclear warheads, scattered around the globe aboard submarines, in underground missile silos, or strapped on the underside of bomber wings. And most of the warheads in this sea-land-air triad were a simple key-turn away from launch. We had to be ready to fire those suckers in a hurry.

If your desire is to discourage (in the biggest way possible) imminent thermonuclear war with the Soviets, MAD at least theoretically justified keeping that many missiles ready to fly on the shortest possible notice. Once the Soviet Union dissolved, though, what was the remaining justification for our keeping an arsenal of that size on hair-trigger alert?

How about the fact that it is not a simple thing to walk away from a sixty-year, eight-trillion-dollar investment? Eight-trillion-dollar habits die hard. In 2005, Gen. Lance Lord, described as a “man with missile in his DNA,” said in a speech to a Washington think tank, “As the wing commander at F. E. Warren, routinely I was asked, ‘How does winning the Cold War change your mission?’ ” His answer: “It doesn’t.” Institutions have inertia. When the original justification for a huge investment goes away, the huge investment finds another reason to live. It’s not just the military; it’s true of pretty much all organizations. The more money and work and time it takes to build something, the more power it accrues, and the more effort it takes to make it go away.

But in the case of the nuclear arms race, what built it wasn’t just money (tons of money), work, and time, it was also a grab-you-by-the-throat existential urgency. To convince ourselves we needed a nationwide web of hair-trigger-alert nuclear weapons capable of destroying the earth thousands of times over, we had to commit ourselves to a beautifully apocalyptic theory of how we would not just possess but also use these weapons. We would push the button, maybe even hundreds of times. We’d do it because we’d need to—because an enemy was in the act of doing the same or worse to us.

After the Cold War, without the realistic threat of a massive, multistrike nuclear assault by the USSR, our