This 1983 test proved a ‘limited’ nuclear strike doesn’t exist. But the Obama administration still pursued it
Code named Proud Prophet, the exercise changed our whole strategy
Things are contentious again between us and Russia — our only serious nuclear rival, and the only country that has the ability to destroy, not just America, but life on Earth as we know it. A growing number of security analysts are saying that the threat of nuclear war is steadily increasing, and that it might actually be higher now than it was at the height of the Cold War. In 2015 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists even moved their Doomsday Clock, a representation of how close the world is to nuclear armageddon, to three minutes to midnight.
One of the main reasons for the alarming movement of the clock’s minute hand is “…the United States and Russia [embarking] on massive programs to modernize their nuclear triads-thereby undermining existing nuclear weapons treaties.” Basically, we’ve been developing smaller, sleeker, and more precise nuclear weapons that some critics say make the concept of a “limited nuclear war” more thinkable.
The problem is that a 1983 war game already definitively proved that there can’t be such a thing as a “limited” nuclear war: Any nuclear war would trigger an armageddon scenario.
When Ronald Reagan was elected president in the early 1980s, the Cold War was still very much threatening to go hot. Our nuclear deterrence consisted of a triad of land-based missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and bombers. At the root of our strategy for avoiding nuclear conflict with the Soviets was mutually assured destruction (MAD), which basically ran something like “let’s make the idea of a nuclear exchange so unappealing, so definitively an end-of-the-world scenario, that no one would be crazy enough to actually engage in it.”
However, there was also a sort of counter-tradition running parallel to MAD within the Pentagon, best captured by a double-speak catchphrase of the time: “escalate to de-escalate”. To understand the thinking of defense planners who advocated for this type of nuclear engagement, imagine a scenario where the USSR invaded an American ally in Europe. Rather than engaging them with conventional forces, or launching a complete nuclear armageddon, America uses smaller nuclear weapons to destroy the invading force and demonstrate our willingness to “go all the way.” This line of thinking assumes that a such thing as a “limited nuclear strike” is possible.
But 1983’s war game Proud Prophet obliterated that thinking.
War games aren’t new, and they certainly weren’t new in 1983 when Reagan decided to conduct Proud Prophet. Military exercises and simulations have been around since the beginning of recorded history — they’ve just grown more complex as our technology has advanced, moving from cavalry games of capture the flag to computer simulations crunching massive amounts of data. During the Cold War, war games entered a previously unheard of level of sophistication, made possible by the post-World War II revolution in cybernetics and communications technology.
Proud Prophet itself was a revolution within a revolution. As Yale Political Science professor Paul Bracken explains in his book The Second Nuclear Age, instead of using CIA and think tank staffers to play the role of American defense leadership during war game scenarios, Proud Prophet actually used the higher level people who would be the ones making snap-decisions in the event of a nuclear exchange. Bracken writes, “Proud Prophet was the most realistic exercise involving nuclear weapons every played by the government during the Cold War.” Previous games had been almost like highly regimented drills, with participants going through what amounted to checklists. Think of the script of a telemarketer and you’re not too far off. These practiced scenarios lacked the freeform movement, the give and take, of an actual game. All that changed with Proud Prophet.
Proud Prophet was played in real time over the course of two weeks with hundreds of military officers taking part. National Command Authority, the chain of command from the president to the Joint Chiefs of Staff were forced to make choices, think outside of the box, and communicate with people playing their Soviet counterparts. Perhaps the most innovative part of the exercise was that for the first time ever the actual Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs participated. And the results of the exercise, according to Bracken, revealed “…many of the strategic concepts proposed to deal with the Soviet Union…to be either irresponsible or totally incompatible with current U.S. capabilities and immediately thrown out.” The most stunning lesson learned was that there’s no such thing as a limited nuclear war.
Rules only work if all sides agree to them. The logic of the Soviet forces, their national goals, principles, and animating logic, were very different from America’s. Proud Prophet explored a bunch of scenarios, but what was most surprising was that any limited nuclear engagement inevitably descended into a nuclear holocaust.
For example, say Soviet forces launched a small land invasion in Europe and America attempted to “de-escalate by escalation” through launching a limited nuclear strike on the invading troops. In keeping with their own political and strategic doctrine, the Soviets interpreted a nuclear attack on their forces as an assault against all of the Soviet Union and her culture. They would inevitably respond with massive retaliation, which America would then match.
Five hundred million people were projected to die in the initial salvo, and the entire Northern Hemisphere was rendered uninhabitable. There was simply no way to conduct a strategic nuclear exchange with another nuclear power.
Proud Prophet profoundly changed the way American leaders thought about nuclear war. After the exercise there was no more bombastic nuclear rhetoric emanating from the US leadership. As Bracken writes, “Launch on warning, horizontal escalation, early use of nuclear weapons, tit-for-tat nuclear exchanges — these were banished conceptually and rhetorically.” Nuclear exchange was traded for meeting Soviet forces conventionally and head on.
But now it seems that we’ve forgotten the wisdom of cold war-era exercises and have reverted to a pre-Proud Prophet nuclear posture. A chilling example is the Obama administration’s development of the B61–12 nuclear bomb, which (besides also being the most expensive bomb ever developed) has a “dial-a-yield” feature and incredibly advanced targeting systems, meaning that it’s functionally a battlefield nuke, meant to be used in a limited and strategic way. According to Zachary Keck writing in The National Interest, this makes it “the most usable nuclear bomb in America’s arsenal.”
But as Proud Prophet taught us more than 30 years ago, there really are no “usable” nuclear weapons—which is a potentially catastrophic lesson to forget.
