The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

Of the three types of strategic nuclear launchers—bombers, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and land-based ICBMs—the ICBMs were at once the most potent and the most vulnerable: that is, their accuracy made them most capable of destroying blast-hardened targets, such as ICBM silos. Yet, by the same token, their fixed positions made them vulnerable to an adversary’s accurately guided missiles. MIRVs compounded this precariousness. If both sides had only single-warhead ICBMs, an arms race would be senseless: one side could easily match the other’s buildup. But if one side had MIRVs, adding one more missile would mean adding three to ten more warheads—and the ability to destroy, theoretically, three to ten of the other side’s missiles. If both sides had MIRVs, they would both have a dramatic edge—and they would both be vulnerable to the other side’s dramatic edge. In a crisis, a desperate or risk-prone leader might be tempted to launch a first strike, if just to preempt the other side’s leader from launching a first strike. In short, the very existence of MIRVs created a hair-trigger situation, in which both sides might feel an incentive to strike first.