The new missiles, bombers, and subs gained the most attention in the press. But the “highest priority element” of Reagan’s strategic modernization program was the need to improve the command-and-control system. “This system must be foolproof in case of any foreign attack,” Reagan said. A handful of limited-war options would finally be included in the SIOP, and the ability to fight a protracted nuclear war depended on the survival of command-and-control facilities for days, weeks, or even months. The Pentagon also sought greater “interoperability”—a system that could quickly transmit messages between civilian and military leaders, between the United States and NATO, even between different branches of the American armed services. General Richard Ellis, the head of SAC, told Congress that, at a bare minimum, the command-and-control system had “to recognize that we are under attack, to characterize that attack, get a decision from the President, and disseminate that decision to the forces prior to the first weapon impacting upon the United States.”
The Reagan administration planned to make an unprecedented investment in command and control, spending about $18 billion on new early-warning radars and communications satellites, better protection against nuclear weapon effects and electromagnetic pulse, the creation of a Global Positioning System (GPS) to improve weapon guidance and navigation, upgrades of the bunkers at SAC headquarters in Omaha and at Site R within Raven Rock Mountain, and an expansion of Project ELF, the extremely low frequency radio system for sending an emergency war order message to submarines. Three new ELF antennae would be built in upper Michigan — one of them twenty-eight miles long, the others about fourteen miles long. Project ELF was a scaled-down version of SANGUINE, a plan that had been strongly backed by the Navy. It would have buried six thousand miles of antenna, four to six feet deep, across an area covering almost one third of the state of Wisconsin.
One of the principal goals of the new command-and-control system was to ensure the “continuity of government.” The vice president would assume a larger role in the planning for nuclear war and would be swiftly taken to an undisclosed location at the first sign of a crisis, ready to serve as commander in chief. New hideouts for the nation’s leadership would be built throughout the country. And mobile command centers, housed in tractor-trailer trucks and transported by special cargo planes, would provide a backup to the National Emergency Airborne Command Post.
During the Kennedy administration, the problems with America’s command-and-control system were deliberately hidden from the public. But as President Reagan prepared to adopt an updated version of “flexible response,” the issue of strategic command was discussed in newspapers, books, magazines, and television news reports. Desmond Ball, an Australian academic, made a strong case that a nuclear war might be impossible to control. John D. Steinbruner — who’d helped to write a top secret history of the nuclear arms race for the Pentagon in the 1970s — reached much the same conclusion, warning that a “nuclear decapitation” of America’s leadership could be achieved with as few as fifty warheads. Steinbruner had read the classified studies on decapitation that so alarmed Robert McNamara, but did not mention them in his work. Bruce G. Blair, a former Minuteman officer, described how the command-and-control systems of the United States and the Soviet Union were now poised on a hair trigger, under tremendous pressure to launch on warning if war seemed likely. Paul Bracken, a management expert at Yale University, wrote about how unmanageable a nuclear exchange would be. And Daniel Ford, a former head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, revealed that, among other things, the destruction of a single, innocuous-looking building in Sunnyvale, California, located “within bazooka range” of Highway 101, could disrupt the operation of Air Force early-warning and communications satellites. Although many aspects of Reagan’s strategic modernization program provoked criticism, liberals and conservatives agreed that a robust command-and-control system was essential — to wage nuclear war or to deter it.
