The Drell Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety submitted its report to the House Armed Services Committee in December 1990. The report confirmed what Bill Stevens and Bob Peurifoy had been saying for almost twenty years: America’s nuclear arsenal was not as safe as it should be. Recent improvements in computing power, the report noted, had led to “a realization that unintended nuclear detonations present a greater risk than previously estimated (and believed) for some of the warheads in the stockpile.” The Drell panel recommended that every nuclear weapon should be equipped with weak link/strong link devices, that every weapon carried by an airplane should contain insensitive high explosives and fire-resistant nuclear cores — and that the Pentagon should “affirm enhanced safety as the top priority of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.”
A separate study on nuclear weapon safety was requested by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The study was conducted by Ray E. Kidder, a Lawrence Livermore physicist, and released in 1991. It gave a safety “grade” to each nuclear weapon in the American stockpile. The grades were based on their potential risk of accidental detonation or plutonium scattering. Three weapons received an A. Seven received a B. Two received a C plus. Four received a C. Two received a C minus. And twelve received a D, the lowest grade.
On January 25, 1991, General George Lee Butler became the head of the Strategic Air Command. During his first week on the job, Butler asked the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff to give him a copy of the SIOP. General Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had made clear that the United States needed to change its targeting policy, now that the Cold War was over. As part of that administrative process, Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction. Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow — dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city. During his previous job working for the Joint Chiefs, Butler had dealt with targeting issues and the damage criteria for nuclear weapons. He was hardly naive. But the days and weeks spent going through the SIOP, page by page, deeply affected him.
For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled. “I came to fully appreciate the truth… we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”
Butler eliminated about 75 percent of the targets in the SIOP, introduced a targeting philosophy that was truly flexible, and decided to get rid of the name SIOP. The United States no longer had a single, integrated war plan. Butler preferred a new title for the diverse range of nuclear options: National Strategic Response Plans.
Mikhail Gorbachev was on vacation in the Crimea on August 18, 1991, when a group calling itself the “State Committee for the State of Emergency” entered his house and insisted that he declare martial law or resign. After refusing to do either, Gorbachev was held hostage, and the communications lines to his dacha were shut down by the KGB. His military aides, carrying the nuclear codes and the Soviet equivalent of a “football,” were staying at a guesthouse nearby. Their equipment stopped functioning — and the civilian leadership of the Soviet Union lost control of its nuclear weapons.
Two other Soviet officials possessed nuclear codes and footballs: the minister of defense and the chief of the general staff. Both of them supported the coup d’état. It has never been conclusively established who controlled the thousands of nuclear weapons in the Soviet arsenal during the next few days. The head of the air force later claimed that he, the head of the navy, and the head of the Strategic Rocket Forces took over the command-and-control system, preventing anyone else from launching missiles at the United States. After the coup failed on August 21, communications were restored to Gorbachev’s dacha, and the football carried by his military aides became operable once again.
