Forty years ago, I served on a local Colorado government committee that put together and mailed a pamphlet about the effects of nuclear war to every county household. I’ve been thinking about it and the Cold War tensions that set us to work on that project as Ukrainians continue mauling the Russian army, navy, and air force because there’s been talk about the possible Russian use of nukes if Vladimir Putin feels cornered.
Foreign policy specialists and leaders—both military and civilian—have for decades argued that deterrence of attacks against each other by the planet’s most powerful nations is the only thing nuclear weapons are good for. The equation is simple: Nuke us and we’ll nuke you back. But as Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown, these weapons are also good as a cover for conventional aggression. The message: Attack us for attacking someone else and we’ll nuke you.
Putin himself and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have rattled the nuclear saber, though with weak attempts at ambiguity. Central Intelligence Agency Chief William Burns says we should not rule out the possibility Putin will use nukes, or at least a nuke. So has Henry Kissinger. Both say Putin is unlikely to use nukes. And President Joe Biden has wisely chosen not to amp up nuclear rhetoric, instead seeking deescalation and new arms control talks with Russia.
“Unlikely” seems right. Nonetheless, in a survey last month by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Levada Center, 69% of people in the U.S. and 83% in Russia fear the risk of a nuclear exchange.
Even launching a tactical mini-nuke opens up possibilities Pandora never released on the world. Putin, the clever, ruthless, former KGB apparatchik cannot be unaware of the apocalyptic potential of taking out a live target with a nuke 77 years since the last one was detonated on Japan. Whatever else he is, Putin is not stupid. He knows how far-reaching the impacts of such a move could be. But rumors about his state of mind and his state of health aren’t soothing even though it’s uncertain how much of these are true, how much are propaganda, and how much are just drifting wisps of the fog of war.
So on Saturday, I was interested to see The New York Times hosting a guest column from Sen. Mitt Romney titled “We Must Prepare for Putin’s Worst Weapons.” If you’re squeamish, you should turn away now because I’m going to commit heresy. I reject most of what Romney has to say on most subjects, I would never vote for the man, and I strongly disagree with parts of his column. But he offers good advice on this:
Some will conclude that to avoid provoking Russia — and thus avoid the prospect of a possible Russian nuclear strike — we should pre-emptively restrain Ukraine from routing the Russian military. We could limit the weapons we send, hold back on intelligence and pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky to settle. I disagree; free nations must continue to support Ukrainians’ brave and necessary defense of their country. ...
The right answer is to continue to give Ukraine all the support it needs to defend itself and to win. Its military successes may force Mr. Putin to exit Ukraine or to agree to a cease-fire acceptable to the Ukrainian people. Perhaps his control of Russian media would enable him to spin a loss into a face-saving narrative at home. These are the outcomes he would be smart to take. But if a cornered and delusional Mr. Putin were to instead use a nuclear weapon — whether via a tactical strike or by weaponizing one of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants — we would have several options.
There are some who would argue for a nuclear response. But there is a wide range of options, and they need not be mutually exclusive.
Indeed, some Western leaders would definitely call for a nuclear response to Russian use of any nukes, tactical or otherwise. After all, they’ve more than once proposed worse in the past, including a first strike. The obvious problem is that escalation can beget escalation until pretty soon we’ve got armageddon.
Romney reminds us that there are tough responses that don’t require going nuke for nuke. You can be pretty certain the Biden administration has considered various scenarios regarding what should be done if Putin does the unlikely, and the senator says as much. In that light, his column probably isn’t meant as unneeded advice for the administration but rather as a preemptive strike on members of his own party (and probably a few Democrats) who can be counted on to demand a nuclear tit for tat or something more ferocious in such circumstances. But let me come back to Romney.
CIVIL DEFENSE
In 1956, in the days before intercontinental ballistic missiles, the federal Office of Civil Defense of the federal government came up with an evacuation plan in case of nuclear war that was more like a fantasy than a plan. It was rejected as impractical. Since building blast shelters for the entire population was prohibitively expensive, the federal government searched communities nationwide for potential fallout shelters in existing structures. In the early 1960s, more than $150 million was spent to stock these with first-aid kits, radiological monitoring devices, biscuits, and candy. Some Americans built or bought their own shelters in the optimistic belief they would emerge two weeks after a nuclear war as if returning, according to a CD pamphlet, from “an extended family camping trip.”
But as tensions cooled and fallout shelter contractors went bankrupt, the Office of Civil Defense was reduced to counting shelter spaces, and its responsibility was shifted from agency to agency with most work concentrated on peacetime disasters. Meanwhile, the biscuits went rancid, the medicine lost potency, and the Geiger counters were removed to thwart thieves.
In the early ‘70s, however, Pentagon advisers began publicly worrying over the “threat” posed by Soviet civil defense measures. In 1975, then-Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger said an evacuation could hold fatalities to 800,000 in case of a Soviet attack on U.S. military targets. Congress soon learned that contrary to Schlesinger’s optimistic assessment, even an attack of such limited nature might kill 22 million Americans.
In 1978, plans for a full-bore civil defense program were revived under the name Crisis Relocation Program (CRP), a proposed evacuation of 145 million Americans living in cities over 50,000 to smaller towns in case an “imminent” Soviet attack was suspected. The next year, the newly formed Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) took on the task of drawing up a CRP blueprint. Included in the plan’s advice to residents in case “imminent” became reality was everything from crazy reminders to evacuees to leave a forwarding address of their unknown destination with their local post office as well as warnings that firefighters might not be immediately available after a bombing.
Shortly afterward, Dr. Herbert L. Abrams of the Harvard Medical School painted a bleak picture in “Medical Problems of Survivors of Nuclear War” in the New England Journal of Medicine. Within moments of a full-scale attack, he wrote, 86 million Americans would be dead, another 34 million badly injured. During the two-week shelter period, 50 million more would die. Initially, the biggest medical problem would be caring for victims burned by the intense heat of atomic fireballs. As many as 25 million might suffer second- and third-degree burns. Under peacetime circumstances, people with such injuries might be saved with skin grafts and other extensive hospital treatment. But most of the 2,000 burn units existing in the United States at the time and 75% of the doctors and nurses assigned to such specialist care would be dead after an all-out attack, Abrams wrote. And that was just the beginning of the medical problems. If one city were nuked, a deluge of assistance would flow. If 100 were nuked, any assistance would be sparse.
One reason for choosing evacuation was that … the Russians were doing it. CIA officials called for eliminating this supposed evacuation gap. In fact, the average Ivan and Svetlana were rather skeptical of the Kremlin’s nuclear evacuation plans, according to a report overseen by President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Defense Harold Brown. It said Russian citizens had cynically mimicked the Soviet government’s penchant for acronyms by labeling its evacuation plan with the first four letters of “civil defense”—grazhdanskaya oborona—GROB, Russian for “coffin.”
John Caswell, who in 1982 was the assistant director of civil defense for Harris County, Texas, told me at the time that his office wouldn’t be planning any nuclear evacuations. “Why would we do anything of it if it won’t work?” he asked. “We try twice every day to evacuate 12% of the population and it takes hours just to get from one side [of Houston] to the other. What would you do with 100%?” He depicted the chaos of an evacuation grimly: ”You’re going to have people taking shotguns with them and ’taking out’ people in traffic jams. There’ll be lots of casualties. Who’ll take the blame for a false alarm? It won’t be me.”
citizens say no to crisis evacuation
Other opponents said evacuation could itself cause the very nightmare it was designed to mitigate if the Soviets perceived relocation as preparation for a U.S. first strike. A 1979 study for Congress conducted by the federal Office of Technology Assessment made similar assertions:
Pre-attack evacuation, moreover, is not a neutral instrument of strategic policy. If poorly timed or badly implemented, it runs the risk of undermining government legitimacy and credibility when these factors are critically important. [...] Evacuation can also impose major constraints on international mobilization, can be interpreted as a preparation for war and therefore a provocative act, if not a signal for the initiation of hostilities.
The study’s chief finding: “The effects of a nuclear war that cannot be calculated are at least as important as those for which calculations are attempted.”
Nearly 20 years earlier, in his game theory treatise On Thermonuclear War, Herman Kahn had done his own calculations, arguing that “objective studies indicate that even though the amount of human tragedy would be greatly increased in the postwar world, the increase would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of the survivors and their descendants.”
Despite the congressional report and objections similar to Caswell’s, the CRP got the go-ahead first from then-President Carter, who initiated the creation of FEMA to handle the job, and then from President Ronald Reagan.
However, when details of CRP got local media exposure as well as a scathing assessment in my friend Robert Scheer’s 1982 book With Enough Shovels, they sparked a public outcry. That soon led to the CRP being dumped by several communities, and ultimately by FEMA. Boulder County, Colorado, was one of them.
The uproar over the CRP brought 60 Minutes to town and spurred the elected county commissioners to appoint a citizen committee to collectively research, write, edit, design, and produce an official pamphlet delivered to every county household: the Boulder County Nuclear War Education Booklet. I was one of the 27 people who served. The purpose was straightforward: to educate citizens about the effects of nuclear war so that they might be better informed about federal civil defense policy. The committee—which included three physicists, two physicians, and two FEMA representatives determined to shoot down the whole project every step of the way—met for long hours every weekend for months to hash out what the booklet would say and how it would say it. We were assigned tons of homework. It was a grim and exhausting process as we explored scores of relevant topics, from missile accuracy to the spread of once-conquered diseases in a post-nuclear war world.
Today the booklet is nowhere to be found online and my only remaining copy was lost to a water heater flood years ago. But you can scroll below to read screenshots of a copy a friend recently scanned for me. I suspect most readers won’t find anything they aren’t already aware of in the booklet. These days, you can view animated videos showing every nuclear explosion since 1945, grim tales of nuclear-caused dystopias, and interactive maps that allow users to adjust the amount of devastation and fallout plumes for whatever city they choose. When we wrote the booklet, however, none of that was available, and there was no access to now-declassified material. Carl Sagan was a year away from alerting us to the prospect of nuclear winter.
Serving on the committee with people who really knew what they were talking about wasn’t the first time I had thought seriously about nuclear war. That had come 20 years earlier with the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962, when I was a 15-year-old high school junior. It’s hard to explain to younger generations born shortly before or since then just how scary the situation was for a couple of weeks. Of course, the average American, 15 or 50, had little idea about all the maneuverings going on. But the three network news shows and newspapers in those pre-Internet days were overflowing with speculation about the perils involved.
At school, we had little idea what a nuclear war might entail since we’d been raised with “duck-and-cover” as our safeguard in case of attack. We talked about possible war in social studies classes, our teachers barely more sophisticated about the issue than we. Kids with fathers in the all-male parts of the 1962 military whispered that their dads had been called up but told nothing else. It was unnerving. But in a snap it was over: Nikita Khrushchev called back the missiles with the saving-face promise from President John F.Kennedy that U.S. nuclear missiles based in Turkey would be removed. U.S. generals had urged an attack. And the next year they drafted a plan for a first strike against the Soviet Union, although the general public didn’t learn of that for decades.
The potential of nuclear war had had a greater impact on popular perceptions by 1982. For one thing, the post-apocalyptic film On the Beach that appeared in 1959 now had a lot of company: Failsafe, Seven Days in May, and the black comedy of Dr. Strangelove had appeared in 1964. Rising temperatures over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Reagan administration’s push for huge amounts of new military spending, and other matters, including tough talk from both sides, combined to attract 1 million antiwar protesters to New York City that June.
By 1985, there were 64,000 nuclear warheads in the arsenals of the seven nuclear-armed nations of the time, with all but about 1,000 of them in the hands of the U.S. and Soviets. Thanks to those who saw (at least partially) the insanity of this collection of megadeath, Russia and the United States currently have 8,185 of the world’s estimated 9,440 warheads, the consequence of treaty-making backed by members of both political parties. Surprising nearly everyone, Ronald Reagan supported a move to zero nuclear weapons, as did the Russian reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. Many of Reagan’s most avid fans decried President Barack Obama when he too proposed the zero option nearly three decades later. In the past few years, however, several of those treaties have expired or have been abandoned. Both Russia and the United States are modernizing their nuclear arsenals even though the current stockpile is more than enough to kill tens of millions instantly and hundreds of millions, perhaps more, in the aftermath.
Putin in extremis
What happens if Ukrainian victories place Putin the would-be czar into the embarrassing position of not just failing to achieve any clear gains from his profound miscalculations in Ukraine, but actually losing ground in the eastern part of the country where Russian separatists have been fighting since the Kremlin seized Crimea eight years ago? Would a “cornered and delusional” Putin ignore the planetwide cataclysm he knows could result and choose to terrorize everyone with a tactical nuke or two? Would some of the surviving Russian generals or other top officials step in to block this move, perhaps even remove Putin from power altogether? We can only hope and speculate. But let’s say the unlikely happens: Putin gives the order and it is carried out.
As Romney suggests, some prominent Americans and other Western leaders would no doubt call for a response in kind. That could be the end of it. One Ukrainian target for one Russian target. Or it could start a global conflagration with all the possible outcomes summarized by congressional reports and medical studies and our education booklet. A true horror show of unprecedented dimensions, one in which survivors won’t live “normal and happy,” but will rather—as sane experts have said all along—“envy the dead.“
Unlikely as Putin’s use of a nuke may be, the response if he actually does should not reflexively be to fly U.S. nukes in retaliation. Romney rightly concludes there are powerful military and economic actions short of nuclear retaliation:
Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon would unarguably be a redefining, reorienting geopolitical event. Any nation that chose to retain ties with Russia after such an outrage would itself also become a global pariah. Some or all of its economy would be severed from that of the United States and our allies. Today, the West represents over half of the global G.D.P. Separating any nation from our combined economies could devastate it. The impact on Western economies could be significant, but the impact on the economies of Russia and its fellow travelers would be much worse. It could ultimately be economic Armageddon, but that is far preferable to nuclear Armageddon.
A Mad Max world may be fun to watch on screen, but nobody wants to live there.
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Below is a scanned version of the Boulder County Nuclear War Education Booklet (1982).