By Land, Sea, and Air

The three aspects of the strategic nuclear triad are land, sea and air. The land leg today consists of 1,054 inter-continental ballistic missiles in underground silos, over half of which are the Minuteman III vehicles, each equipped with three 200-kiloton re-entry bodies that can be directed against separate targets.

The air wing consists of 496 intercontinental B-52 bombers. Over two hundred of these aircraft are the later “G” and “H” models which comprise the backbone of the Strategic Air Command. Each bomber can be equipped with up to twenty nuclear-tipped missiles to launch against ground targets.

The sea leg is presently comprised of ten Polaris and 31 Poseidon submarines, each carrying sixteen ballistic missiles. The missiles on the older Polaris submarines are each loaded with three 200-kiloton bombs. Poseidon boats, of course, carry Poseidon missiles which are equipped with up to 14 individually-targeted reentry bodies. One Poseidon submarine has the potential to destroy 160 cities with bombs having at least twice the explosive energy that was unleashed against Hiroshima.

This vast array of power does not satisfy the American military. Their thirst for bigger and better weapons is supported by a significant number of large business firms which reap lavish profits from weapons contracts. Virtually every leg of the strategic triad is undergoing modernization.

Studies on mobile missiles, called Missile-X or M-X, have been underway for many years but have intensified recently. The Pentagon wants to start replacing land-basal intercontinental missiles with mobile Missile-X by the mid-1980s. They claim that silo-based weapons will be vulnerable by then. Missile-X will be either air-mobile or land-mobile, maybe both.

The B-1 supersonic bomber has now completed flight testing. Showing no regard for facts or logic, the Pentagon insists that 244 B-1s are needed. The truth is that without them, the Air Force could not justify its lavish allotment of officers. Production of the B-1 is a hotly disputed decision right now.

Finally, in the sea-based category, the Trident system will start being deployed in 1979. This will be discussed in greater detail below.

A new dimension to the strategic triad has quietly slipped into development and is gaining popularity in military circles: the cruise missile. This species of weapons has been described by one U.S. senator as “a fourth leg of the triad” which is “a provocative arms control problem.” Many question the wisdom of having long-range cruise missiles which can be launched from a wide variety of aircraft, manned vehicles and surface ships as well as the torpedo tube of every submarine.

Cruise missiles are not new. They are the outgrowth of the German buzz bombs of World War II and are similar to pilotless aircraft after the wings and tail unfold. A small jet engine propels them at subsonic speeds for distances of up to 2,000 miles and they fly so low that they cannot be detected. A guidance system that follows the earth’s terrain like a map gives this missile almost 100 percent kill probability against hard targets.

All of these programs fit well into the United States’ new counterforce strategy, a policy switch that bothers me very much. Deterrence has always been a defensive posture in a sense, whereby a country’s assault missiles are aimed at the potential enemy’s cities and industrial areas to threaten retaliation only if attacked. For those types of targets a low explosive force is adequate and pinpoint accuracy is not required.

Counterforce, on the other hand, has offensive connotations because a country’s attack missiles are aimed against an opponent’s military targets, such as missile emplacements and command posts. Counterforce targeting is a step toward a disarming first-strike capability. The targets are well protected, so that a high explosive yield is desirable, while precision is mandatory.

Up until the late 1960s the announced position of the United States was that nuclear weapons would only be used to retaliate against a country that attacked first. Although that second-strike posture has been fairly successful in deterring thermo-nuclear war while only the U.S. and the Soviet Union were involved, the deterrent theory becomes more complex and less workable as more nations develop atomic and hydrogen bombs. Determining which country to retaliate against could become very difficult and even impossible. Perhaps it was because the Pentagon foresaw this eventuality that they were prompted to center their attention on sophistication of weapons rather than increasing the quantity. That decision came during the 1960s, after the 1,054 silo-based missiles and 41 missile-launching submarines were put to use.

The first U.S. sophistication was the multiple individually-targeted reentry vehicles, more commonly called MIRVs. MIRVs were used on the land-based Minuteman III and Poseidon in 1970. It was the MIRVs for Poseidon on which I started working in 1965. Thirty-one of the ballistic missile submarines were later converted to carry Poseidon missiles.

Maneuvering re-entry vehicles (MARVs) for the Trident missile was another qualitative improvement. Maneuvering vehicles, like MIRVs, were at first justified to evade enemy interceptors during the final seconds of flight. It was on this project that I first recognized the trend toward greater accuracy and more explosive power.

When Russia and the United States signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972, defensive interceptor missiles were restricted to only 200 for each country. With such a severe limitation there should have been no more need for MIRVs or MARVs if their true nature was to assure penetration of enemy defenses. But design of these vehicles continued for Trident.

About mid-1972, just after the SALT I treaty was signed, the United States quietly adopted counterforce as a strategy. Missiles were re-targeted to destroy military targets. To implement that switch it was necessary to develop weapons with more power and accuracy. News of this activity leaked into the media, but it was hushed up quickly by a Pentagon spokesman who claimed that the government’s interest was only in developing the technological capability to destroy hard targets but that there were no plans at that time to deploy such a system. He admitted, however, that this research could allow the United States to adopt a first-strike policy--that it would give some future president the option of deploying that ability if he wanted the flexibility to retaliate against one or two key Russian targets without launching an all-out nuclear war.

In May of 1973, Richard Nixon told the U.S. Congress that deterrence based on the ability to kill tens of millions of people was “inconsistent with American values.” He claimed that the president must have “greater flexibility” in his choice of options. But Nixon’s allusion to his forthcoming policy went virtually unnoticed at that time.

During a press interview in January of 1974, then Defense Secretary Schlesinger remarked: “In the pursuit of symmetry we cannot allow the Soviets unilaterally to obtain a counterforce option which we ourselves lack. We must have a symmetrical balancing of the strategic forces on both sides.” He was referring to the Soviet’s attempt to catch up with U.S. MIRVs and other sophisticated weapons.

Almost a month later Schlesinger was asked during Senate hearings on the Pentagon budget if this newly announced counterforce policy would have an adverse effect on disarmament negotiations. His reply then was: “. . . we have no announced counterforce strategy, if by counterforce one infers that one is going to attempt to destroy silos. We have a new targeting doctrine that emphasizes selectivity and flexibility.” (Emphasis added.) But regardless of those carefully chosen words, counter-force is the direction the U.S. has chosen. While not being announced, there has never been assurance that the policy does not exist.

Finally, on May 30, 1975, Secretary Schlesinger admitted that the U.S. favors first-use of nuclear weapons to stop communist advances in Europe or Korea. That statement was backed up by Gerald Ford and has since been reaffirmed by Jimmy Carter.

This new strategy will also allow the Pentagon to perpetrate surgical strikes in some undeveloped country during some future Third World insurrection. It is accepted knowledge that the U.S. military wanted to use hydrogen bombs in Korea and Vietnam but world opinion and domestic pressure prevented them from doing so.

There is a vast array of activity that supports the new U.S. counterforce policy. I will briefly mention a few. Besides MIRVs and MARVs, warhead miniaturization allows replacing the bomb in Minuteman III reentry bodies with one of 350 kilotons without increasing overall weight and size. New guidance platforms for submarine-launched missiles will allow updating the trajectory after being launched. The NAVSTAR Global Positioning Satellite network will provide very accurate fixes for mid-course navigation updating of missile computers. The command data bugger computer controller will allow the entire Minuteman III force to be re-targeted in 20 minutes--a task which otherwise takes a day and a half. A program called Pave Pepper put twice as many smaller, more precise, re-entry bodies on a Minuteman missile to destroy a greater number of targets. These activities give some idea of the direction the American military establishment is leading the United States.

Now let us see how Trident fits into this picture. The Trident missile/submarine combination is the most deadly weapons system ever designed. The submarine looks not unlike a Polaris/Poseidon boat from the outside, except that it is much larger and quieter. Rather than carrying 16 missiles, it will contain 24. The construction schedule is to build three boats every two years. Number one will be available in 1979. Navy officials want 30 of these 560-foot-long underwater monsters by 1990.

Trident will operate in the Pacific, with its home port at Puget Sound in the state of Washington. Construction of that base is continuing in spite of a lawsuit to stop it because the Navy did not adequately consider the environmental impact. Other local people, including the Pacific Life Community (made up of both Canadian and U.S. citizens), are resisting the Trident presence through nonviolent actions and civil disobedience. In addition, Canadian legislators are strenuously protesting the Trident home port’s location only 60 miles south of their border and the provincial capital of British Columbia. In the words of one member of Parliament, “This base will make Vancouver and the lower mainland of British Columbia the number-one target in North America in the event of nuclear hostilities.”

There are two generations of Trident missiles planned. These are being built near my home in California, and we also have a resistance campaign mounting in that area. The Trident I is now being tested, but it is having troubles with micro-miniaturization of electronic circuits and with rocket motors blowing up. This missile is the same size as Poseidon--34 feet long and 74 inches in diameter.

Whereas Poseidon can fly 2,500 nautical miles with a full load of reentry bodies, Trident is supposed to reach out 4,000 nautical miles. If weight is reduced by removing some of the reentry bodies, it can almost double the range of Poseidon.

Trident I is an intermediate step toward a full counterforce weapon. It will be backfitted into ten of the Poseidon submarines as well as the new Trident ships. But research and development funding has just started on the Trident II missile. Being much larger than Trident I, it will only fit in the new submarines. Its range will be 6,000 nautical miles or more.

Trident II will be able to carry approximately 17 precision maneuvering reentry bodies with an explosive punch of 100 thousand tons of TNT. Let us consider what all this means. On each Trident submarine equipped with 24 Trident II missiles, which in turn have 17 reentry bodies capable of being individually targeted and with terminal homing, there is the capacity to destroy 408 different hard targets or cities, each with a blast five times that which devastated Hiroshima. That is a lot of death and destruction to put under the control of one submarine commander.

The Trident II missile in the Trident submarine will be the ultimate counterforce system. In conjunction with a profound system of computer-integrated anti-submarine warfare weapons and sensors, Trident will give the United States first-strike capability. That is why I say Trident is the most lethal weapon ever built.

The main reason the weapons race continues is that it is profitable for U.S. business. Almost half of the disproportionate Pentagon budget goes directly to large corporations in the form of defense contracts. Although these contracts are justified by exaggerating the fear of Russia, it is interesting to note that the threat diminishes as the opportunities for corporate profits increase.

The two top weapons builders in the United States want to sell commercial airliners to the U.S.S.R. Other companies are also eyeing Russian trade. Bank of America has an office in Moscow. The manager of that branch claims there is no risk in dealing with the Soviets because they have always lived up to their commercial agreements.

The pattern seems to be that the communist threat grows strong when there are prospects for weapons contracts but diminishes in importance as the opportunities to market American goods in Russia present themselves.

This manifestation of corporate greed is only an extension of the self-serving interests within each of us. The dollar standard has subjugated all other values. There is need for a change, and there isn’t much time.

Robert Aldridge had served as a design engineer for Lockheed missiles and Space Company for 16 years, working on the Trident Missile System. When this article appeared, he was living in Santa Clara, California and working with others in resistance activities against nuclear arms. A personal account of the effects of his past work on his family, written by him and his wife, Janet, appears on page 29 of this issue.