Today a catastrophe owing to a Blunder of blunders in starting a civilization-ending nuclear war remains an historically unprecedented threat 24/7. There is a crack in the dam; yet many seem to be hoping that the dam will hold indefinitely.
The present book by William J. Perry, the 19th Secretary of Defense, and Tom Z. Collina, Director of Policy at Ploughshares Fund, reveals that no President, no National Leader, should possess the full authority to end humanity by facing a decision to start a nuclear war which must be made in mere minutes during what some may call the ultimate Fog of War. As to that Fog: are we seeing evidence or “evidence” of an attack by another nuclear power?
Is there any decision case in all of History in which the consequence of an honest but wrong decision would come even close to the finality of the scenarios dramatized in The Button?
We may well be talking here of the end of Homo sapiens and almost certainly at least the ushering in of a regressive state of barbarism worldwide among the presumptive unlucky survivors facing extended nuclear effects (“nuclear winter” etc).
Yet as Perry and Collina superbly explain, and brilliantly define remedies for, we Americans and Russians (and other nuclear powers) have allowed over changing times the creation of actual scenarios in which opposing nuclear forces might well be launched by national leaders solely responsible for sending those weapons in an attack BUT BASED ON THE MOST AWFUL SPECULATION. After all, incoming missiles would be mere minutes from US targets. Were the warning systems of integrity? Is the evidence real? You must imagine that such a determination could take longer than the few minutes needed for a strike to occur.
The ultimate “hedging” decision!
Indeed, an inhuman one!
It is an astonishing risk.
In short, what about a false alarm? Could Mutual Assured Destruction slip from its much-cited preventive function and, now diametrically opposed to deterrence theory in a supreme irony, actually occur on the basis of an erroneous though “empirically” convincing threat detection? Imagine a case in which the President knows only that there may have been a launch against the US–he has a few minutes to decide whether the threat is real enough to respond with a nuclear counterattack–and concludes in that hellishly brief few minutes that he must make the most awful decision in History.
Well, as Perry and Collina inform us, the gravest of such “near misses” have already occurred both in the US and in Russia; and we have come extremely close to blundering into nuclear war in each case. Extremely close. Somebody leaves a highly credible nuclear missile-attack training tape in the NORAD detection system or just as likely the Russian monitoring systems and in an awful irony its false realism carries the day. And certainly we can imagine more than one highly believable form of false detection in warning systems that an all-out attack, minutes away, has been launched.
The corrective nuclear policy changes Perry and Collina recommend are authoritative and crucial.
Perry and Collina recount the history of nuclear policy and the causes of the decision predicament we are now in. They convincingly cite the chilling cases of near catastrophe and soberingly convey that we must find our way to changing nuclear policy to eliminate those supreme risks and make the world safer.
The good news: Most importantly, the authors draw on their great experience to recommend profound changes in nuclear policy to allow us greater margin in decision-making: from the curtailment of the development of the eminently targetable land-based ICBMs to the abnegation of launch-on-warning doctrine to ending any policy of the “first use” of nuclear weapons to a distributed authority to launch nuclear weapons. They make these and other cases in The Button better than anyone else.
But one can can only list these and other crucial measures in a review; doing justice to the expertise and subtleties in these arguments must be understood in the context of the deep understanding of the authors. In short, Perry’s and Collina’s narrative is essential.
Indeed, this book is riveting and will make you expert. It is that good. And what a pivotal point in human history! You owe it to yourself to get informed. Please read The Button.