Neste clima de antagonismo entre EUA e Rússia, fomos buscar um documento da década de 1970 a respeito da possibilidade de conflito entre Estados Unidos e União Soviética (para quem chegou há pouco, ou nasceu depois de 1991, a União Soviética era a Rússia com armadura vermelha do Homem de Ferro). Em um momento de grande tensão, o então assessor do Presidente Richard Nixon, o genial Henry Kissinger (ícone e patrono de todos nós realistas em Relações Internacionais) aconselhou o Governo redirecionar sua estratégia de guerra nuclear de uma política de retaliação massiva para ataques nucleares limitados, porém com efeitos militares decisivos para alcançar os objetivos políticos, ou seja, “fazer o inimigo parar”. Afinal, os soviéticos já dispunham de um poder de destruição total do planeta tão ou mais estupendo que o dos EUA, e um conflito direto entre os dois países sob uma perspectiva de um grande ataque em larga escala com os foguetões intercontinentais significaria um único resultado: a famosa destruição mútua assegurada (MAD em inglês).
Vale a pena conferir os documentos. A propósito, o memorando sobre a conversa com Kissinger pode ser acessado clicando aqui. Chamo atenção para os trechos que ainda permanecem protegidos pelo sigilo. Sempre falo sobre isso em minhas aulas. Vejam como eles são dispostos no texto. Só no Brasil que nós temos uma lei de acesso à informação que desclassifica tudo irresponsavelmente por decurso de prazo…
Aí você, meu caro leitor, me pergunta: e o que eu tenho a ver com isso? Se você for estudante ou estudioso de Relações Internacionais, História, Inteligência ou Estratégia, recomendo a leitura desses documentos, muitos deles desclassificados há pouco. Se você não liga para nada disso, ressalto que ao menos deveria estar atendo à situação do mundo e lendo nosso site (e curtindo nossa fanpage no Facebook, por favor), pois a notícia triste é que, apesar de estar sem a sua armadura de Homem de Ferro bolchevique, a Rússia continua com uma capacidade destrutiva espetacular e mantém seus arsenais nucleares… Se o mundo entrar em uma guerra nuclear, nós estamos nele (você, inclusive, caro leitor) e nossa batatinha literalmente irá assar… Melhor não brigar com a Rússia, porque senão sobra para o mundo. Ah, e quem governa o urso é Putin. Gosto de Putin. Putin é KGB.
“Ok, mas isso não me interessa!”, dirá você! Então não leia este blog, volte para dentro do formigueiro e vá se entreter com a Valeska Popozuda que você faz melhor…
Segue matéria da Federation of America Scientists sobre o tema, com um monte de links para documentos interessantes sobre Guerra Fria espionagem…
Ah! E curta nossa fanpage clicando aqui!
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2014, Issue No. 27
April 3, 2014
“TOO MILD A NUCLEAR OPTION”? NATIONAL SECURITY IN THE 1970s
U.S. nuclear weapons strategy evolved during the Nixon administration from a reflexive policy of massive retaliation against a Soviet attack to a diverse range of options for more limited nuclear strikes. The transition was not without some bumps.
A declassified 1974 memo recorded that National Security Adviser Henry
Kissinger at first needed some persuading about the efficacy of limited
strikes.
http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/frus-toomild.pdf
Kissinger “expressed concern that many of the options appeared to him as
too timid. He judged that nuclear use must have a decisive military effect
in order to achieve the desired political goal– convince enemy to stop.”
“Too mild a nuclear option is likely to convince the enemy to persevere,
or respond tit for tat, or both,” Kissinger said, as paraphrased in the
1974 Pentagon memo.
The formerly Top Secret memo (document 36) is one of many that appeared in
a richly informative, 1,000-page new volume of the State Department’s
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series on National Security
Policy, 1973-1976 that was released this week.
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v35
Kissinger was soon convinced of the need for greater flexibility, and
presented the argument himself to President Nixon.
“The concept that we could ‘win’ a war through virtually unlimited nuclear
exchanges has become increasingly irrational as the Soviets acquired the
capability to destroy the United States– even if the U.S. were to strike
first,” he wrote in a memorandum to the President (document 30). “This has
resulted in concern that such a strategy is no longer credible and that it
detracts from our overall deterrent.”
The proposed new nuclear policy would therefore provide “for the
development of a broad range of limited options aimed at terminating war on
terms acceptable to the U.S. at the lowest level of conflict feasible.”
Still, it would preserve “the major SIOP-type options in the event that
escalation cannot be controlled.”
Kissinger asked President Nixon to approve the proposed steps and
“authorize me to sign” the new nuclear weapons policy. Nixon did approve,
but he wrote that “RN will sign.”
http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/frus-npol.pdf
The FRUS volume is full of impressive, candid and chatty source documents
on the diverse national security issues of the time, including
anti-satellite weapons, the notorious “Team B” competitive analysis project
that challenged CIA assessments of Soviet military strength, the Glomar
Explorer effort to raise a sunken Soviet submarine, and the growing threat
of Soviet surveillance and interception of U.S. communications.
The fear that Soviets were monitoring U.S. telephone communications
inspired a concerted effort to improve communications security against
espionage and the invasion of privacy.
“The President… recognizes that U.S. citizens and institutions should
have a reasonable expectation of privacy from foreign or domestic intercept
when using the public telephone system,” according to National Security
Decision Memorandum 338 of September 1, 1976 (document 180).
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdm-ford/nsdm-338.pdf
The Foreign Relations of the United States series has been an important
driver of the declassification process, identifying high-value historical
records for declassification review. While it sometimes represents the
state of the art in declassification, other times it lags behind, probably
due to the painfully slow pace of the review and production process. (The
latest volume was under declassification review from 2007 to 2014.)
In some peculiar cases, FRUS both leads and lags in declassification. So,
for example, the new FRUS volume includes a copy of the 1976 National
Security Decision Memorandum 333 on “Enhanced Survivability of Critical
U.S. Military and Intelligence Space Systems” (document 91). The newly
published document includes two declassified paragraphs that had been
withheld from public release as recently as 2008. Incongruously, however,
the new FRUS version of NSDM 333 also withholds two lines concerning
threats against U.S. satellites that it mistakenly says were “not
declassified.” In fact, those lines were declassified years ago in the NSDM
333 that is available from the Ford Presidential Library. The two
contrasting and complementary versions of NSDM 333 can be viewed here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdm-ford/nsdm-333-frus.pdf
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdm-ford/nsdm-333.pdf
CLASSIFIED NUCLEAR WEAPON DRAWINGS MISSING AT LABS
Classified design drawings used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons have
not been properly and reliably maintained at nuclear weapons labs managed
by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Department of
Energy Inspector General said in a report last week.
“NNSA sites could not always locate as-built product definitions or
associated drawings for nuclear weapons and components in official records
repositories.” At the Pantex Plant, “officials were concerned and surprised
at the difficulty in finding as-built product definitions for the nuclear
weapons,” the DoE IG report said.
At Los Alamos, the information system “allowed changes to classified
nuclear weapons drawings without using an approved change notice. This
practice could permit unauthorized changes to weapons drawings.” Questioned
about undocumented changes to a particular weapon drawing, “officials were
unable to explain why changes were made, but told us that they ‘assumed’
the changes were needed.”
“Over the decades of nuclear weapons development, neither NNSA nor its
sites treated the maintenance of original nuclear weapons… information as
a priority,” wrote DoE Inspector General Gregory Friedman.
“Not having complete and accurate [weapon production] information can have
significant effects on surveillance and safety, and can lead to
time-consuming and expensive recovery efforts.”
See “National Nuclear Security Administration Nuclear Weapons Systems
Configuration Management,” Audit Report DOE/IG-0902, March 26, 2014:
http://energy.gov/ig/downloads/audit-report-doeig-0902
“NNSA is on a trajectory towards crisis,” said Norman Augustine, the
venerable engineer and aerospace executive who serves as co-chair of the
Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security
Enterprise.
“The ‘NNSA experiment’ involving creation of a semi-autonomous
organization [within the Department of Energy] has failed,” he said.
NNSA “has lost credibility and the trust of the national leadership and
customers in DOD that it can deliver needed weapons and critical nuclear
facilities on schedule and on budget,” Mr. Augustine said. He spoke at a
March 26 briefing for the House Armed Services Committee.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/cap-interim.pdf
The problems are not entirely attributable to NNSA itself, he said, but
are due in part to an eroding consensus concerning the role of nuclear
weapons in national security policy.
“At the root of the challenges are complacency and the loss of focus on
the nuclear mission by the Nation and its leadership following the end of
the Cold War,” Mr. Augustine said.
He cited “the absence of a widely accepted understanding of, and
appreciation for, the role of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology in the
21st century, with the resultant well-documented and atrophied conditions
of plans for our strategic deterrent’s future– in DOD as well as in DOE.”
Frumentarius 