The first strike doctrine.

• Author: Morland, Howard
• Position: Letters to the Editor - Letter to the editor

Readers of the Mikhail Gorbachev article in the August issue, "Get Rid of Your Nukes," might be interested to learn why we still have so many strategic nuclear warheads on Cold War alert status, ready to launch in minutes. The answer is that U.S. nuclear weapon deployments are still based on a mission that dates back to the beginning of the Cold War in the 1940s: a preemptive, disarming surprise attack, by the United States against the Soviet Union.

In the 1970s, The Progressive magazine was pretty much alone in trying to publicize this policy, which is incomprehensible to the vast majority of Americans.

The United States held onto its superior first strike capability until 1970. In 1970, the Russians caught up, not just in missiles and bombers, but also in underground silos to protect their missiles from U.S. attack. So the United States needed a new generation of more accurate missiles to nullify that protection and regain the lost first-strike capability.

The new plan to attack missile silos introduced a use-'em-or-lose-'em factor, which is where things stood till the end of the Cold War. Both superpowers kept their nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert so if they thought they were being attacked by the other side, they could launch the weapons before the first strike hit.

An interesting thing happened on the way to the post-Cold War world. The United States did not take the sensible step back from hair trigger alert. The multiple-warhead Trident D5 submarine missile was not...