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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.
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