2. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 53.
3. U.S. Department of State, Committee on Atomic Energy, A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946), 32. The Acheson-Lilienthal report became the basis for the Baruch Plan, which addressed more explicitly the refractory problem of verification and enforcement and became the definitive U.S. position that Bernard Baruch presented to the United Nations.
4. Historical research based on archival documents, and memoirs that have become available since the end of the Cold War, make it clear that Stalin would never have agreed to the intrusive international controls that the American proposal required; he relied entirely on the Soviet Union’s own nuclear weapons program. See David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); and Bundy, Danger and Survival, 179–82.
5. Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 70.
Jacob Viner taught economics at the University of Chicago. His article, “The Implications of the Atomic Bomb for International Relations,” appeared in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (January 1946): 53–58.
Alfred North Whitehead explained the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” in Process and Reality (New York: Harper, 1929), 11 and 200. Herman E. Daly deserves credit for pointing out how relevant this fallacy is in contemporary academic theorizing.
6. American and Russian research on the Cuban missile crisis, based on newly available documents, reveals how close this crisis came to triggering a massive nuclear war. Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision (New York: Longman, 1998).
Keith Payne has written some of the most penetrating assessments of the hazardous reasoning about nuclear deterrence so rampant during the Cold War. One of his recent books is The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001).
7. My report has been declassified (and can be purchased from the RAND Bookstore): Fred C. Iklé, with Gerald J. Aronson and Albert Madansky, On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation, U.S. Air Force Project RAND RM-2251 (Santa Monica: The RAND Corporation, 1958).
Peter Wyden, in a story on “The Chances of Accidental War,” Saturday Evening Post (June 3, 1961), provides considerable detail on the concerns about an accidental use of nuclear weapons and safety measures taken at that time. He wrote that my investigations in 1957 were “the first systematic thinking” about this problem. The coded locks for nuclear weapons were called “Permissive Action Links” (or PALs) by the Pentagon in order to convey that these devices are meant to make the weapons useable when permitted, not just to lock them up. The introduction of PALs proceeded slowly until 1961 when the Kennedy administration vigorously emphasized nuclear safety. See Dan Caldwell, “Permissive Action Links,” Survival (May–June 1987): 224–38.
8. It was Donald Brennan who coined the acronym MAD for the strategy that embraces this thinking: “The concept of mutual assured destruction provides one of the few instances in which the obvious acronym for something yields at once the appropriate description for it; that is, a Mutual Assured Destruction posture as a goal is, almost literally, mad” (National Review, June 23, 1972, 689).
While President Nixon and some of his senior advisors, especially Henry Kissinger, recognized that this MAD strategy inherited from the Johnson administration was deeply flawed, they felt the United States could not change course, given, on one side, the pressures by arms control advocates and their Congressional supporters, and, on the other side, the exigencies of the Vietnam War (which had also been inherited from the Johnson administration). So in 1972, Nixon and Brezhnev signed the ABM Treaty prohibiting missile defenses and the U.S. Senate ratified it with only one dissenting vote.
9. During its last two years, the Clinton administration sought to obtain Russia’s consent to the deployment of limited missile defenses that would preserve the ABM Treaty and the MAD strategy. To this end it transmitted a memo to Moscow that explained Russia need not fear such limited U.S. defenses since the United States would have to assume Russia’s missiles “would be launched after tactical warning.” Arms control experts expressed dismay that U.S. negotiators would encourage Russia to maintain such a dangerous alert posture, as if it were something beneficial to the stability of deterrence. See Steven Lee Myers and Jane Pevlez, “Documents Detail U.S. Plans to Alter ’71 Missile Treaty,” New York Times, April 28, 2000, A1; also William J. Broad, “U.S.-Russian Talks Revive Old Debates on Nuclear Warnings,” New York Times, May 1, 2000, A8.
10. Fred Charles Iklé, “Can Deterrence Last Out the Century?” Foreign Affairs (January 1973): 267–85.
11. A carefully researched study of accidents and near-accidents regarding nuclear weapons is Scott D. Sagan’s The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Also, my above-mentioned Foreign Affairs article lists several accidents in military command-and-control systems that should give pause to anyone favoring launch-on-warning. Bruce Blair has studied the Russian launch-on-warning policies of the 1990s and has warned about how these might dangerously interact with U.S. practices (The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War [Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1993]).
12. Peter Hannaford describes this briefing session of Governor Reagan in greater detail in his book The Reagans: A Political Portrait (New York: Coward-McCann, 1983), 206–207. A photograph in Hannaford’s book (160) captures the episode to which I refer here.
A few weeks after this meeting, Reagan (as presidential candidate) visited the underground command center of the North American Defense Command. There he was told the United States could not defend
