Destroyer of Worlds

The Hindu (India)
December 20, 1998

C. RAMMANOHAR REDDY reviews Atomic Audit, an exhaustic study of the U.S. nuclear programme, asking what India can learn from America's innumerable, expensive, grandlose and destructive atomic exercises.

In the late 50s, one of the first long-range missiles that the U.S. developed was called the Atlas, a version of which carried a nuclear warhead of one megatonne - an explosive power of 1,000,000 tonnes of TNT. In comparison, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was of ``only'' 12,000 tonnes of TNT.

But why did the Atlas have a warhead of one megatonne?

It was simply ``because one million tonnes is a particularly round number in our culture... Human beings have two hands with five fingers each and therefore count by tens... (If) evolution had given us six fingers on each hand, our first ICBM would have had to be three times as big, (and) the rockets to deliver them would have threatened the lives of up to three times as many human beings... It really was that arbitrary...''

These are not the words of an anti-nuclear activist but of Herbert York, the first director of a U.S. government laboratory where nuclear bombs were designed and tested.

Nuclear weapons are among the most technically complex creations of mankind. Yet, the secrecy about them that has been legitimised by the destructive power of these weapons has meant that arbitrariness has governed their development. There can be no other explanation for why in the mid '80s the total destructive power of the U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons was equivalent to 40 billion tonnes of TNT, enough we know to have destroyed the world many times over.

``Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,'' Robert Oppenheimer recalled these lines from the Gita after witnessing the first ever nuclear test. From that test sprang a programmes which could and still can annihilate the world.

We now have with us an idea of what the arbitrariness of the programmes cost the United States.

Atomic Audit is the result of a four-year-long study at the Brookings Institution, Washington, that totes up the full costs of production and maintenance of 70,000 nuclear weapons and their accoutrements. By putting a number to the U.S. nuclear adventure, a team of 10 researchers headed by Stephen I. Schwartz has done what nobody else - within governments or outside - has done ever before in any country.

The numbers are mind-boggling. From 1940 to 1996, the U.S. spent $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons (all costs here are at 1996 prices). To give an idea of what this amount means - it is equivalent to 20 times the GNP of India in 1997-98.

Nuclear weapons themselves come fairly cheap. The U.S. spent the (relatively) small amount of $409 billion - seven per cent of the total - on production of 70,000 nuclear weapons. It is all the paraphernalia that comes with the bombs that is expensive. About 86 per cent - $5 trillion - of the total expenditure in the U.S. went into acquiring missiles and aircraft for delivering the bombs, into developing communications and satellite systems for finding out what was happening in the Soviet Union and into building air, land and sea defences against a Soviet attack that never came. The remaining $396 billion, another seven per cent of the total, was the outlay on cleaning up the environment and on dismantling bombs.

The numbers dull the mind, but this book is much more than a tabulation of dollars and cents. Drawing on official records, from a careful sifting of associated evidence and with collaborative information, Schwartz and his co-authors have detailed a history that shows how the Cold War threw all reason and accountability to the winds. Scientists were able to get government backing to build bigger and more destructive bombs. The intelligence and political establishments were successful in manufacturing information to show Soviet superiority and thereby got sanction for more bombs, more missiles and more aircraft. And the army, navy and air force jostled with each other to get as large a piece of the action as possible.

Atomic Audit is not written from an ``anti-nuclear'' perspective. Indeed, its authors seem to believe in the debatable concept of a small nuclear arsenal which would have been inexpensive and yet effective for the U.S. The core argument is that ``The United States came to associate deterrence with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Logic and fiscal accountability were subordinated to uncertainty, fear, inter-service rivalry, pork- barrel politics, and an ultimately futile attempt to maintain the upper hand in the face of unimaginable destruction'' (p. 28).

To cite just a few couple of examples of the nuclear madness that Atomic Audit has unearthed:

* $182 billion was spent on fortifying command posts, delineating the line of command and securing communications. Yet, secret assessments had to conclude that ``The U.S. could not confidently ride out a sudden Soviet strike aimed at the command and communications network'' (p220). It only required ``a few nuclear weapons detonated at high altitude above the United States...(to) generate an electromagnetic pulse capable of burning out electronic circuits in command, control and communications systems...'' (p 214).

* When Eastman Kodak, the manufacturers of photographic film, complained in the '50s that radioactive fall-out from nuclear tests was damaging its stocks of film, the firm was given advance notice of the tests and information of downwind patterns. But people living close to the test sites were not given such information. They were told that as long as they stayed indoors or they had a shower and dusted their clothes and shoes, they would not be harmed by any fall-out.

One argument that is often made is that even if the weapons programme was frightfully expensive it did after all win the Cold War for the U.S. The 1980s Star Wars programme of the U.S. is supposed to have pushed the Soviets into making a matching response, leading to a Soviet bankruptcy in the late '80s and early '90s. Atomic Audit contests this argument pointing out that there was no increase in Soviet military spending during the '80s - which means Star Wars did not increase the military burden on the Soviet economy.

The most tragic outcome of the U.S. nuclear weapons programme is that while the Cold War ended without a single atomic weapon being exploded, more people will die as a result of the programme than the U.S. military personnel killed in World Wars I & II, the Korean War, Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Atomic Audit estimates (p 429) that eventually 800,000 people will die because of the fall-out from the 215 atmospheric tests that the U.S. conducted. And U.S. fatalities in the five wars since 1914 in which the country has taken part number 617,389.

It is unlikely that as detailed a book as Atomic Audit can be written about the history of the other nuclear weapon states. Though even now the cost of something as fundamental as a nuclear bomb remains classified in the U.S., there is sufficient declassified information in the U.S. for a team of careful and persistent researchers to piece together the costs of ``secret'' nuclear weapons. Nothing like that is available in Russia, France, the United Kingdom or China. And it will be a remarkable achievement if anything even remotely like Atomic Audit ever gets written about the Indian nuclear weapons programme.

What lessons does Atomic Audit hold for India which has embarked on its own nuclear adventure? Some commentators have pointed out that the scale of the U.S. nuclear programme is simply irrelevant for India. This is a trite observation. Obviously India cannot spend $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons even if it wanted to. But there is a lot to be learnt from the processes that lay under the U.S. experience.

First, successive U.S. governments were able to assemble a huge arsenal because there was no public debate or accountability as they were able to whip up fears of a threat to national security. The similarities with the recent Indian experience are obvious.

Second, from the early '50s onwards, the development of the more powerful hydrogen bomb, the increased testing and the establishment of production facilities to churn out warheads was ``driven by the advice of scientists working on the nuclear programme'' (p13). This resemblance to the situation in India is also ominous. The Indian decision to openly go nuclear was a political one, but the case had been strongly advocated for years by the scientists who worked in the atomic and defence establishments.

Third, when decisions on nuclear weapons are taken secretly and without any accountability, it sets the stage for inter-service rivalry as took place in the U.S. Unfortunately with the Indian navy now openly arguing that it needs nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarines, which are extremely costly to build, we may well start mimicking the U.S. on a small scale.

Fourthly, the lack of accountability and the so-called considerations of national security give scope for grandiose projects which serve no purpose other than consumption of public money. For example, the U.S. spent almost one trillion dollars on trying to protect itself against a nuclear attack. There were programmes meant to destroy missiles before they entered U.S. air space, bring down bombers carrying nuclear weapons, sink ships and submarines, destroy satellites and on evacuating people from cities. But in the end the considered opinion was that if there had been a nuclear attack, nothing would have saved the U.S. people (pp 269-272). Missile defences in particular are believed to be of no help against incoming missiles. Yet, the Government of India has reportedly approved recently a Rs. 2,000-crore plan to build a missile shield around New Delhi. Is this the first of more such plans?

Fifthly, Atomic Audit effectively demolishes the idea that nuclear weapons are inexpensive or what in the jargon is crudely called a ``bigger bang for a buck'' spent on these bombs. This has found its echo in India where many have said that a bomb for India would cost no more than Rs. one crore. The U.S. experience shows that even if the bombs are cheap, everything else that comes with a nuclear weapons programme is frightfully expensive. The Brookings Institution study also demonstrates that there is neither empirical nor logical validity to the ``bigger bang for a buck'' claim.

The only way we can avoid even a miniscule variant of the U.S. nuclear adventure is if there are Indian scholars like the authors of Atomic Audit who will be able to alert public opinion to what the Government, behind closed doors, may be wanting to do. Unfortunately, the nuclear euphoria in India may well have swept away those who could have performed such a service. Two books, both a collection of articles, have been written and published after the May nuclear tests (Nuclear India and India's Nuclear Deterrent: Pokhran II and Beyond). Of the numerous articles in the two books, three articles (by Jasjit Singh in Nuclear India and by Vijai K. Nair and Kanti Bajpai in India's Nuclear Deterrent) indirectly deal with the financial implications of India acquiring a nuclear strike force.

The one article (``A Thermonuclear Deterrent'' by Bharat Karnad) that does try to add up the costs is an effort to show that India should assemble an arsenal of not 50 or 100 bombs but as many as 330 nuclear weapons, including 50 hydrogen bombs. And that it would cost the country only Rs. 60,000 crores over the next 35 years to put together this deterrent.

What may we be going in for?