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William Burr - 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski sitting to the
right of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. While Brzezinski kept Vance in
the loop on the nuclear targeting review, eventually the State
Department was cut out. (Photo from National Archives Still Pictures
Branch, RG 59-SO, box 18)
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Zbigniew Brzezinski's military assistant Colonel William E. Odom
played a central role in drafting PD-59 (Photo from William E. Odom
Papers, box 30, Library of Congress Manuscript Division).
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President Jimmy Carter greeting Secretary of State Edmund Muskie
at a reception at the close of the administration. (Photo from National
Archives Still Pictures Branch, RG 59-SE, box 8, file VS-121-81)
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An exmple of the extensive press coverage of PD-59 during August 1980, The Washington Post, August 6, 1980.
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Washington, D.C., September 14, 2012 – The National
Security Archive is today posting - for the first time in its
essentially complete form - one of the most controversial nuclear policy
directives of the Cold War. Presidential Directive 59 (PD-59), "Nuclear
Weapons Employment Policy," signed by President Jimmy Carter on 25 July
1980, aimed at giving U.S. Presidents more flexibility in planning for
and executing a nuclear war, but leaks of its Top Secret contents,
within weeks of its approval, gave rise to front-page stories in the
New York Times and the
Washington Post that stoked wide-spread fears about its implications for unchecked nuclear conflict.
The National Security Archive obtained the virtually unexpurgated
document in response to a mandatory declassification review request to
the Jimmy Carter Library [See
Document 12].
Highly classified for years, PD 59 was signed during a period of
heightened Cold War tensions owing to the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, greater instability in the Middle East, and earlier strains
over China policy, human rights, the Horn of Africa, and Euromissiles.
In this context, the press coverage quickly generated controversy by
raising apprehensions that alleged changes in U.S. strategy might lower
the threshold of a decision by either side to go nuclear, which could
inject dangerous uncertainty into the already fragile strategic balance.
The press coverage elicited debate inside and outside the government,
with some arguing that the PD would aggravate Cold War tensions by
increasing Soviet fears about vulnerability and raising pressures for
launch-on-warning in a crisis. Adding to the confusion was the fact that
astonishingly, even senior government officials who had concerns about
the directive did not have access to it.
With other recently declassified material related to PD-59, today's
publication helps settle the mystery of what Jimmy Carter actually
signed,
[1]
as well as shedding light on the origins of PD-59 and some of its
consequences. Among the disclosures are a variety of fascinating
insights about the thinking of key U.S. officials about the state of
nuclear planning and the possible progression of events should war break
out:
- PD-59 sought a nuclear force posture that ensured a "high high
degree of flexibility, enduring survivability, and adequate performance
in the face of enemy actions." If deterrence failed, the United States
"must be capable of fighting successfully so that the adversary would
not achieve his war aims and would suffer costs that are unacceptable."
To make that feasible, PD-59 called for pre-planned nuclear strike
options and capabilities for rapid development of target plans against
such key target categories as "military and control targets," including
nuclear forces, command-and-control, stationary and mobile military
forces, and industrial facilities that supported the military. Moreover,
the directive stipulated strengthened command-control-communications
and intelligence (C3I) systems.
- President Carter's first instructions on the U.S. nuclear force
posture, in PD-18, "U.S. National Strategy," supported "essential
equivalence", which rejected a "strategic force posture inferior to the
Soviet Union" or a "disarming first strike" capability, and also sought a
capability to execute "limited strategic employment options."
- A key element of PD-59 was to use high-tech intelligence to find
nuclear weapons targets in battlefield situations, strike the targets,
and then assess the damage-a "look-shoot-look" capability. A memorandum
from NSC military aide William Odom depicted Secretary of Defense Harold
Brown doing exactly that in a recent military exercise where he was
"chasing [enemy] general purpose forces in East Europe and Korea with
strategic weapons."
- The architects of PD-59 envisioned the possibility of protracted
nuclear war that avoided escalation to all-out conflict. According to
Odom's memorandum, "rapid escalation" was not likely because national
leaders would realize how "vulnerable we are and how scarce our nuclear
weapons are." They would not want to "waste" them on non-military
targets and "days and weeks will pass as we try to locate worthy
targets."
- An element of PD-59 that never leaked to the press was a pre-planned
option for launch-on-warning. It was included in spite of objections
from NSC staffers, who saw it as "operationally a very dangerous thing."
- Secretary of State Edmund Muskie was uninformed about PD-59 until he
read it about in the newspapers, according to a White House chronology.
The State Department had been involved in early discussions of nuclear
targeting policy, but National Security Adviser Brzezinski eventually
cut out the Department on the grounds that targeting is "so closely
related to military contingency planning, an activity that justly
remains a close-hold prerogative and responsibility" of the Pentagon.
- The drafters of PD 59 accepted controversial ideas that the Soviets
had a concept of victory in nuclear war and already had limited nuclear
options. Marshall Shulman, the Secretary of State's top adviser on
Soviet affairs, had not seen PD-59 but questioned these ideas in a
memorandum to Secretary Muskie: "We may be placing more weight on the
Soviet [military] literature than is warranted." If the Soviets perused
U.S. military writing, it could "easily convince them that we have such
options and such beliefs." Post-Cold War studies suggest that Shulman
was correct because the Soviet leadership realized that neither side
could win a nuclear war and had little confidence in the Soviet Union's
ability to survive a nuclear conflict.
Background
When Jimmy Carter became president in January 1977, he inherited
nuclear weapons targeting policies from his Republican predecessors, who
had sought ways
to give U.S. presidents alternatives to the terrifyingly massive and
rigid pre-planned options of the Single Integrated Operational Plan
[SIOP]. To make
nuclear threats more plausible and to give presidents more choices than
the SIOP attack options, in January 1974, Richard Nixon signed National
Security
Decision Memorandum [NSDM] 242. A few months later, in April 1974, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger signed
Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy [NUWEP]
which provided guidance for the creation of limited, selective, and
regional attacks, with more detail for
major attack options. Among the goals set for Major Attack Options
in the NUWEP was the destruction of "selected economic and military
resources of the
enemy critical to post-war recovery," including political and
military leadership targets. With respect to economic recovery targets,
the NUWEP called for
inflicting "moderate damage on facilities comprising approximately
70% of [the Soviet or Chinese] war-supporting economic base."
The perception that the NSDM-242 exercise had not given the President more options for crisis-confrontation situations [see
Document 1
below] led the
Carter White House to initiate a nuclear targeting review that
eventually produced PD-59. The Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff
[JSTPS] had shown
proficiency in creating massively destructive "pre-planned" nuclear
strikes against Soviet military targets, but the Carter White House saw
them as largely
irrelevant. As Bzezinski explained, the "very likelihood of all out
nuclear war is increased if all out spasm war is the only kind of
nuclear war we can
fight." Starting with the premise that conflict was more likely to
start in Central Europe or Northeast Asia, the architects of PD-59
believed that
high-tech reconnaissance systems could give the president and his
advisers a "look-shoot-look" capability to improvise targeting during
war. In this way,
they could strike Warsaw Pact forces on the move with nuclear
weapons instead of launching SIOP attacks against major military targets
in the Soviet Union.
The JSTPS had responsibility for the SIOP, under the direction of an
Air Force general who wore a second hat as Commander-in-Chief of the
Strategic Air
Command. In this capacity, he had a powerful influence in the
military bureaucracy. Brzezinski aide William Odom saw little value to
the massive SIOP
attack options, believing that a flexible targeting system could
help provide an adequate deterrent, but he could not wish SAC and the
SIOP out existence
because its leaders believed that those options were critical to the
national defense. Thus, PD 59 was necessarily a bureaucratic compromise
by providing
for pre-planned attack options, including launch-on-warning but also
flexibility to prepare war plans on "short notice" and strategic
reserve forces for
later stages of a conflict. War plans could range from massive
attacks to "flexible sub-options" against broad classes of targets. To
ensure that attack
plans could be improvised, PD-59 mandated the creation of "staff
capabilities" in the military and at the Pentagon that could "develop
operational plans on
short notice … based on the latest intelligence."
War plans developed under PD-59 were to "put the major weight of the
initial response on military and control targets." Target systems would
include
tactical and strategic nuclear forces, military command centers,
conventional military forces including armies in motion, and industrial
facilities
supporting military operations. Dropping "critical" recovery targets
as a priority, pre-planned options would include "attacks on the
political control
system and on general industrial capability" either promptly or as
"relatively prolonged withholds" that could be attacked later in a
conflict. Yet the
initial press coverage of PD-59 was slightly misleading by
suggesting that targeting before the directive had focused on urban
centers; the SIOP had always
given priority to military targets and had provisions for excluding
attacks on urban-industrial complexes unless Moscow had already attacked
U.S. cities.
That the White House had initiated a major review of nuclear targeting
remained largely secret until President Carter signed PD-59.
[2]
Nevertheless, the administration's interest in acquiring
capabilities, such as the MX ICBM, for counterforce strikes against
Soviet strategic targets had
been in the news before the existence of the PD leaked.
[3]
In
early August 1980 headline in national newspapers brought out the
larger secret: the existence a new directive changing nuclear war
planning, with the
first story appearing in the
Boston Globe on 3 August 1980.
The news stories correctly emphasized key elements of PD-59, that it
sought
capabilities for "prolonged but limited nuclear war," and that it
gave priority to military and leadership targets, and a capability to
"find new targets
and destroy them" once a war began.
[4]
The press coverage cited "shudders" among former government
officials such as Herbert Scoville who worried that the search for "less
fearsome options for
using nuclear weapons would reduce the inhibitions for employing
them." Moreover, Federation of American Scientists Director Jeremy Stone
asked "Who would
be there to turn off the war if we nuked Soviet command centers?"
Stone warned about pressures for "firing on warning", although the
language on
launch-on-warning was one element of the PD that stayed secret.
[5]
Those
concerns dovetailed with private misgivings among State Department
officials, such as Marshall Shulman who worried that the reported
emphasis on the role
of leadership and C3I targets could "only increase Soviet
perceptions of vulnerability" and introduce "further instability in the
strategic balance."
Newspaper stories about PD-59 raised questions whether President
Carter and his advisers had adequately consulted Secretary of State
Muskie and the State
Department before or after signing the PD. Muskie first learned
about the PD from the press coverage, which then noted his "unhappiness
that he knew so
little about the new doctrine." This became an issue at the State
Department, which did not have a copy of the directive and where senior
officials argued
that the Department should be involved in the "formulation and
assessment of national security decisions that have significant foreign
policy
implications." Muskie's top advisers recommended that he seek an
understanding with President Carter that this should not have happened
and should not
happen again, but whether the two reached a meeting of the minds on
this point is not clear.
One of the purposes of the PD was to influence more detailed
guidance on nuclear targeting. Top-level officials at the Pentagon and
the Joint Strategic
Target Planning Staff would use the ideas codified in the directive
to develop more detailed instructions for shaping the production of
pre-planned options
and for developing "look-shoot-look" capabilities. By October 1980,
Secretary of Defense Brown had approved the latest Nuclear Weapons
Employment Policy to
provide guidance for targeting in a crisis [see
Document 21]
Yet the ink had hardly dried on Brown's NUWEP when Ronald Reagan
defeated Jimmy Carter for the
presidency; in October 1981 the new administration supplanted PD-59
with National Security Decision Directive 13, "Nuclear Weapons
Employment Policy."
NSDD-13 influenced NUWEP-82 which replaced Brown's guidance.
NSDD-13
remains largely classified, but years later, Odom wrote that it
"carr[ied] the general thrust of PD-59, but with less comprehension of
what was needed,"
and that "little or nothing of consequence was done to pursue this
doctrinal change."
[6]
Future
declassifications may test the accuracy of Odom's judgments. In any
event, PD-59 (as well as NSDM-242) set the mold for target planning
during the decades
that followed, during and after the Cold War era. According to a recent
Government Accountability Office
report,
"the process for developing
nuclear targeting and employment guidance … has remained virtually
unchanged since 1991." Presidential directives and secretary of defense
guidance
approved during the George W. Bush administration included familiar
themes. They provided for a planning structure "designed to avoid an
'all-or-nothing'
response to a nuclear attack," identified "potential adversaries"
and "scenarios" requiring pre-planned options, and emphasized a
"capability to rapidly
develop new options." While President Obama has set a nuclear-free
world as a policy goal, it is unlikely that nuclear planning
arrangements will change
significantly in the foreseeable future.
More: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb390/
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