Bruce Blair examines operational safety hazards for nuclear forces deployed on combat alert in Russia, the United States, and elsewhere. He provides new information on command and control procedures and deficiencies that affect the risks of accidental, unauthorized, or inadvertent use of nuclear weapons, particularly those in the former Soviet Union. Blair proposes changes in nuclear operations that would reduce these risks. Remedies range from eliminating targets from missiles to taking all nuclear forces off alert (" zero alert" ) so that no weapons are poised for immediate launch. In the " zero alert" scenario, missiles and bombers lack nuclear warheads or other vital components and require extensive preparations for redeployment. Blair assesses the effects of such measures on strategic deterrence and crisis stability in the event of a revival of nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia. He also describes the burdens of verification that his remedies impose. This book is the first in a series devoted to aspects of operational safety and nuclear weapons. Other topics in the series include joint U.S.- Russian missile attack early warning, ensuring the security of dismantled warheads and bomb materials, and command-control problems in the emerging nuclear states. Bruce G. Blair is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program at Brookings and the author of numerous books, including The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Brookings, 1993).

Among its many important effects, the political revolution in central Europe has provided a sharp reminder that international security is as much a state of mind as it is a physical condition. The threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, long hypothesized by Western defense ministries on the basis of a perceived imbalance in inherent conventional force capability, is now acknowledged to be a practical impossibility because shifts in political alignment have been credited. In the wake of that judgement, the force deployments themselves are virtually certain to be reduced, equalized, and disengaged, thereby removing firepower advantage as a threat to international stability. Moreover, though the intrinsic connection is remote, a similar judgement seems to be affecting global strategic deployments. As strategic forces are projected to be reduced to common ceilings by mutual agreement, the fear of preemptive attacks on theoretically vulnerable land-based installations appears to be receding more rapidly than the inherent capability that originally inspired it. This relief from the narrowly focused, obsessive fears that have dominated U.S. security policy for several decades is certainly a constructive development, but unfortunately it is not comprehensively valid. For strategic forces in particular, some subtle interaction between human judgement and physical capability remain potentially dangerous, presenting a security problem that will not be resolved simply by completing the projected agenda of national weapons development and international arms control agreements. The problem arises from conceivable combinations of events that are undoubtedly improbable but unprecedentedlycatastrophic should any of them ever occur. The standards of safety that have evolved for improbable disasters of much smaller magnitudenuclear reactor meltdown, for examplehave been applied to only peacetime operations and have not been extended to the circumstances of advanced crisis or to the actual implications of combat operations. To appreciate the implications of this limitation and the dangers that emerge from it requires a substantial revision of standard perspectives on strategic security.