Bad déja vu

Back when I was in seventh grade, we had to do “science projects”. I put the term in quotes because frankly, they were barely science at all, but they were assigned as part of Science class and the projects purported to engage us in the scientific method. I’ve come to realize that the scientific method is actually kind of a facade, a way of using some vaguely Baconian concepts to justify funding from the people who approve grants at universities, foundations, pharmaceutical companies, and governments, but in 1987 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, the idea that we’d propose a hypothesis and then test it seemed like a good way to consume a few weeks of time and maybe engage the twenty odd kids in the class to do something other than pretend they’d read about meiosis or the carbon cycle.

My topic was “is it possible for an average American to build a workable fission device”. My hypothesis – this was a science project, ostensibly – was “yes”. My rigorous testing demonstrated that, at least in 1987, it was feasible to build a Little Boy-style U-235 gun mechanism fission device, but probably not feasible to build a Fat Man-style Pu-239 implosion device, owing not so much to the construction of the implosion shell but due to the difficulties of legally obtaining enough shaped explosives to successfully build the staging device. I then showed what I believed the likely maximum theoretical yield to be of said Average American atomic weapon, and its damage zones as superimposed on two maps, one a tourist map of Manhattan, and the other a nautical chart of Casco Bay.

I got an A-minus, which is the ideal grade in any class: the headline demonstrates you’re smart, and the by-line indicates the wisdom which made sure you only put in the bare effort to achieve the lower tier of the headline grade. Also, I think I got extra points for my presentation: seventh graders in Reagan’s America, oddly, liked thinking about nuclear war, because we had to think about it a lot for civil defense drills, and actually having some applied knowledge as to why we’d need to duck and cover when a 150 kiloton Soviet MIRV warhead hit the naval station in Brunswick helped put things in perspective.

Before you critique the project on procedural grounds, let me do the work for you. No, I never defined what an “average American” was. And I also didn’t explore at all the fact that my question wasn’t scientific at all: it was an exploration of culture and economics, with just a bare reporting of the best modelled understanding of the explosive, radioactivity, and fallout impacts of weapons as applied to US urban and (in the case of Maine) barely semi-urban centres. But I put together four really good looking large posterboard displays, ordered a small quantity of U-238 from a scientific supply catalog and displayed it with a small working model of a gun-design device, and my teacher, Mr. Plummer, thought it all well done enough. I didn’t tell my parents about it as I thought they might view my fascination with nuclear weapons to be, well, morbid. It wasn’t; I was really just fascinated with the Bohrian model of the atom and how it implied a force model I couldn’t really comprehend yet – but also I was a child of the Reagan era so yeah, I thought a lot about nuclear weapons

We were – excuse the pun – bombarded with nuclear weapons knowledge when I was a child in the 80s. This was the era of intense arms reductions talks – SALT, START, START II – and of course the steady drumbeat of missile technologies: Pershing, Pershing II, Minuteman, MX; SS-18, SS-20. Maine has always been a shipbuilding centre so of course we learned about the ships and submarines, and because I was always a bit precocious, I learned about the Deltas and Typhoons and Ohios, the submarines that made up the “third leg” of the nuclear deterrant triad. We had B-52s stationed out of northern Maine, out of Loring Air Force Base, famous for its three mile long runway that was constructed of a solid slab of concrete fifteen feet deep to be able to withstand both Maine winter potholing and Soviet ground burst attacks, so we were deeply familiar with the first leg of the triad just by going to sports and speech meets up to Aroostock county every winter. And my uncle had served in the second leg of the triad as a missile launch control officer in North Dakota, service which would eventually sterilise him and give him cancer from sitting next to poorly shielded 1.5 megaton plutonium core weapons for ten years. The Cold War ran deep and pure in my viens, and it wasn’t anything to be particularly unhappy or shameful about – indeed, it was kind of cool, hence my selection of a seventh grade science project.

This isn’t to say it wasn’t occasionally scary. I watched enough avant garde movies and television to be aware of the fact that nuclear war was both (a) unfortunately quite likely to occur in my lifetime and (b) very, very, very bad. There used to be bad gallows humour jokes about how bad it would be, and then for good measure, you’d be shown an aftermath of Hiroshima filmstrip in social studies class, or unexpectedly there would be a bad miniseries like “The Day After” when you were really just hoping to watch “Dallas” and see if JR was dead yet, and despite you being 11 or 12 years old, you’d have the full force of just how dramatically bad CBS could demonstrate nuclear war could be would be in your face. You wouldn’t sleep for a few days, but then eventually you’d recover, and go back to reassuring yourself that the combination of advanced early warning detection arrays in northern Canada and failsafe point circling B-52s would make sure that the Soviets would never hit the button first.

And you were reasonably sure that even if Ron did think that launching a first strike was the thing to do tonight, either Nancy would give him some warm milk and put him to bed early, or else George Bush (the older one) was smart enough to hide the football.

All of this came back to me the other night when, thinking a bit nervously, I checked the current deployment status of the Russian nuclear forces. I used to know it cold – I could tell you just how many of their (at the time) roughly 12,000 warheads were on active deployment and on which leg of the triad they were placed. They got down to about 5,000 warheads at some point but since the early 2000s and since Putin came into power for the second time, it’s been creeping up, back to about 9,000 at best estimates today, although that’s the best estimates of available cores, not deployed and active weapons.

The Russian nuclear triad, as the Soviet triad before, always relied slightly more on a smaller but potent first strike capability focused on both mobile and fixed ICBMs scattered through Eurasia; they never had the scale of the US for submarine based deterrant forces, and most of their subs also required coming to the surface to launch weapons, which they still do, making them more suited to second strike weapons or even third or reserve forces. Their main second strike weapons are their large, heavy, slow bomber forces, dispersed again throughout Russia but like the US B-52 forces, at least a quarter of them are designed to be airborne and circling at failsafe points when strategic threats reach a certain level. Being airborne, they would survive the first and response strikes from missile forces, and would then rumble over the pole and bomb cities and targets from above given the likely destruction of ground-based air defences.

Isn’t this fun? There’s a great book, On Thermonuclear War, by Herman Kahn – he’s the model for Dr. Strangelove in Kubrick’s masterpiece – that I bought from a used bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in high school, and I still have the copy. Nuclear warfare strategy is fascinating as long as you don’t think about it.

Anyhoo, the Russians would be assumed to launch ground-based rocket forces first, and would then be assumed to have their bomber forces launch the second wave, roughly two to four hours after the first wave. The first wave, mind you, would be expected to destroy most of Western civilisation, but not all of it, and since the West would have destroyed most of Soviet – er, sorry, Russian, and probably Chinese – civilisation, the mop-up second wave would be vital for determining who would win the post-apocalyptic peace. But since that wouldn’t be enough either, the Russians would keep their third leg of the triad in reserve, to eliminate any last traces of humanity outside of the Eurasian steppes; the West, meanwhile, would still likely have its submarines as well, to exchange one final volley with the hated but, at that point, largely cellular enemy.

Ah, those old memories. I’d wait every month for the new issue of The Journal of Atomic Scientists, with their ticking clock getting ever closer to an armageddon midnight, and their accurate reporting on updates to warhead designs in both blocs. That was high school; things were already getting weird, with Gorbachev and Reagan agreeing to eliminate intermediate range weapons, with the clock ticking backward, with “Amerika” on ABC seeming trite and silly immediately upon release. By the time I graduated from high school, the Czechs had revolted, and the Wall was down, and Trabants could be had for a song.

Ah, those were the days.

But as I mentioned, the other night, I looked up the current Russian nuclear force deployment status, flexing memories and tactical knowledge that had lain dormant for three decades in my mind. I quickly tallied their submarine forces – 2400 active warheads at the upper range, or about 360 megatons assuming the typical warhead in a MIRV with 150 kiloton yield, enough to hit every military, command and control, and significant civilian target in the West on a first strike. Let’s assume they still bulk up their force, though, in first strike ground launched ICBMs, which would tend towards higher yields – say 400 kilotons on average, arrayed between higher yield air burst warheads for civilian and industrial targets and slightly lower yield but dirtier weapons to attack embedded military and command targets – say probably 3600 warheads, maybe 1500 megatons. And then whatever’s left in the bombers, higher yield simple gravity and medium range air-to-surface cruise missiles, maybe 1500 weapons, probably higher blockbuster yields for shock-and-terror effects, maybe 750 to 1000 megatons.

And then there’s the US and allied forces – the UK Trident deterrent force, the French weapons – and whatever the Israelis and the Chinese and the rest have. The West has fewer weapons but more of them are likely working; their yield is more targeted and has fewer targets. Let’s assume if the Russians have around 2500 to 3000 megatons of deployment capability, the West has around 2000 megatons, maybe a bit more. Enough.

Trolling the internet was a lot more efficient than what I did as an 11 year old; back then, I spent hours and hours in the government document repository in Portland, poring through declassified records, reading research books from the RAND Corporation and from university presses, months of effort obsessing over the likelihood of vaporisation given my home in southern Maine. On Monday night, it took me a few hours – I’ve learned Boolean search optimisation long ago; finding the source materials on Google and DuckDuckGo took very little time – and since I’d learned the strategy and tactics in my formational years, I really only needed to update data, not learn anything fundamentally new.

Except: I reminded myself that the Soviet Union is gone, replaced by a one-man dictatorship. Except to remind myself that the Cold War strategic consensus has vanished, replaced by bitter civil discord about whether it even makes sense to view authoritarians as enemies. That does change the calculus, doesn’t it.

New data, new frameworks, same old weapons of mass destruction.

I miss the first time around, when I was eleven, and when my confidence that I’d live to middle age was more or less unchallenged. Was this what my parents felt like, looking at their eleven year old son, and watching the nightly news, and wondering?

It’s bad déja vu in any event. Good night, and good luck.