Surprise nuclear missile attack
Published: 11/11/1999 at 1:00 AM
J.R. Nyquist
The official Russian acronym for surprise nuclear attack is VRYAN. It derives from the Russian words, “vnezapnoye raketno-yadernoye napadenie.” In the early 1980s the Russians began one of their most intensive intelligence operations, which went by the code-name of VRYAN. This operation involved an unprecedented collaboration between the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) and the Soviet secret police (KGB). This operation was tasked with examining a wide range of U.S. actions to determine if America was preparing for nuclear war.
According to Russian strategists, preparations for a world war cannot be hidden. After all, nuclear war isn’t something you decide on Tuesday morning and initiate on the following Friday afternoon. Such a war requires intensive planning and preparation over a period of months and years. The destructive effects of nuclear weapons cannot be otherwise mitigated. Therefore, special tasks must be carried out to assure post-war recovery, and for the exploitation of what Russian strategists call “nuclear rocket supremacy.” For example, an attacker must quietly move key factories to secret underground locations. An attacker must also stockpile strategic supplies, raw materials, food, fuel, and machine tools for rebuilding vital industries. In fact, the most dramatic advanced measures would have to appear in open press reports.
The Russian generals believe that only an extensive disinformation campaign could mask such preparations. If factories are to be moved, a benign explanation must be offered. If troops are mobilized, if security is to be increased at strategic facilities, a phony internal crisis must be presented as the root cause.
But how could anyone expect to win a nuclear war?
Nuclear war has two basic objectives. The first objective is the elimination of the enemy’s strategic weapons. The second objective is the preservation of friendly nuclear strength in order to blackmail the surviving countries. A country that successfully destroys all opposing nuclear weapons (while retaining a large nuclear reserve) can dictate the shape of the future.
In Russian thinking, a nuclear war is not simply an exchange of nuclear strikes. Many countries would be invaded and occupied in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. Lacking the firepower to strike back, these countries wouldn’t dare to resist with conventional forces. In fact, all resistance would be smashed by Russia’s reserves of nuclear and biological weapons. A resisting country’s administrative centers would immediately suffer obliteration. Biological attacks would depopulate leading cities. Armies would collapse after the bombing of their supply bases. Horrible consequences would follow for millions of people.
This is how the successful side in a nuclear exchange can translate wholesale slaughter and destruction into a new world order. Even if the prevailing country has been devastated by counter-strikes, its reconstruction is assured by means of nuclear blackmail against undestroyed countries. Such blackmail would allow the prevailing country to rebuild its destroyed infrastructure and feed its people.
Even if half the people in a country are killed, this is no argument against victory.
It is true that other countries, besides Russia and America, possess nuclear weapons. Great Britain, France and Israel have several hundred nuclear weapons between them. But these arsenals are small and vulnerable. Bombing Russia and stirring the rubble of cities already bombed would be a laughable kind of deterrence.
If America’s nuclear forces were ever destroyed, Russia and China would control the earth. No power could resist them. No defense exists to stop them. Therefore, the eyes of the Russian General Staff are on America’s missiles. That is what they care most about. And it’s what they worry about. America’s nuclear forces protect Western civilization from destruction and conquest by the nuclear-armed barbarism of Russia and China.
The strategists who developed Russia’s VRYAN program understand all of this. In the early 1980s they listed hundreds of indicators of impending nuclear attack. In his book, “War Scare,” former CIA analyst Peter Vincent Pry mentions only a few of the VRYAN indicators. Among these, Pry lists any change in the day-to-day posture of U.S. or NATO forces, unusual high-level meetings, increased intelligence activity, suspicious disinformation, repressive measures against subversives, increased security at strategic sites. Among the economic indicators would be an increase in gold purchases and a drive by American blood banks to build up the blood supply.
Russian military doctrine has always stressed the need for striking first. A first strike is vital to final success. According to Pry, “Soviet military textbooks written in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s generally endorsed the view that nuclear war could be won and that victory was likely to go to the side that struck first.”
Any indication of a U.S. first strike would mean that Russia would have to strike even earlier. The reason a first strike is so important has to do with the nature of nuclear missile weapons. One defector from the Soviet General Staff, writing under the name Viktor Suvorov, compared the problem of nuclear war to that of two gunmen in the old West. The man who draws first will probably win the fight. His opponent might well be shot down before he can even pull the trigger.
Near the beginning of the Cold War many U.S. analysts, generals and politicians realized that nuclear missile weapons were inherently destabilizing because of the need to strike first. There would be strong temptations, they argued, for hitting an opponent that fell behind in a nuclear arms race. The idea was to strike before the weaker side could close the gap.
This temptation to strike first is so strong that it has even affected Western leaders. At a time when the United States had the only working atomic bombs, Winston Churchill privately urged U.S. leaders to deliver an ultimatum to Russia. In Marc Trachtenburg’s critically acclaimed book, “History and Strategy,” Churchill is quoted as saying, “We ought not to wait until Russia is ready.” In 1948 Churchill argued in the House of Commons for “bringing matters to a head” while America yet retained its atomic monopoly. Churchill told the House of Commons that this approach offered “the best chance of coming out of it alive.”
Churchill pointed to the extreme aggressiveness of the Russians at a time when the U.S. had all the nuclear weapons. Imagine, said Churchill, what will happen “when they get the atomic bomb and have accumulated a large store.”
Churchill was not alone in suggesting that the West should destroy its enemy while it had the chance. John von Neumann, a leading mathematician and the founder of game theory, said, “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock.”
This way of thinking may seem shocking for its immorality, and President Truman quickly moved to suppress it, but nobody can deny its logical character. According to Trachtenburg, State Department moderates like Charles Bohlen and George Kennan flirted with the idea of preventive war. Even the New York Times made unusual suggestions when William L. Laurence, the Times science correspondent in 1948, wrote about preemptively bombing Russia’s atomic plants before they could produce any bombs.
It was all empty talk, of course, because Americans don’t believe in unprovoked nuclear attacks — even against hair-trigger psychopaths like Stalin. Gen. Orvil Anderson, the head of the Air War College, was dismissed by President Truman for advocating a preventive war with Russia. According to Trachtenburg, Anderson had delivered long lectures to students on carrying out a preventive nuclear strike. “Give me the order to do it,” boasted Anderson, “and I can break up Russia’s five A-bomb nests in a week.
And when I went up to Christ — I think I could explain to Him that I had saved civilization.”
Similar attitudes were present in other Air Force commanders — most notably in Gen. Curtis LeMay, the first general to command a nuclear offensive, famous for boasting that he was “bombing Japan into the stone age” during World War II. LeMay and Gen. George Kenney, first chief of America’s Strategic Air Command, along with Gen. Nathan Twining, were sympathetic to Anderson’s idea of a preventive nuclear war.
But as Marc Trachtenburg points out in his book, all the leading officials of the Truman administration hated the preventive war idea. Later, in 1953, President Eisenhower seriously considered expanding the Korean War into China because it had become a bloody mess with no end in sight. Eisenhower did not like the war’s lingering quality. Already, by late 1952 the Korean War had claimed 3 million lives, including more than 50,000 Americans. It was believed that widening the war might bring the Communists to the peace table, or trigger a full blown atomic war with Russia.
A major U.S. government study was conducted on the consequences of an atomic war with Russia in 1953. The study predicted that most of our European allies would retreat into neutrality. The study also predicted that the war would cost ten million American lives and last for ten years. Nonetheless, the study said that America would win the war. The Communists apparently agreed with this analysis, because after Eisenhower told them his intentions they quickly changed their position and agreed to an armistice on July 27, 1953.
Never again did an American president seriously threaten world war against the Communist bloc. By 1957 the idea of a winnable nuclear war against Russia had completely died out. It was no longer acceptable. Atomic bombs were being replaced by even more powerful “city busters” of thermonuclear design. By the early 1960s Khrushchev was boasting that Russia was mass producing intercontinental rockets “like sausages.” America’s nuclear superiority finally declined into nuclear parity and then into nuclear inferiority.
The nuclear stand-off lingers into the present. While the Russians watched carefully for signs of American nuclear war preparations, America remains totally oblivious to Russian preparations.
What would an American VRYAN list look like?
In next Monday’s column I will present a list of approximately 30 indicators of things you would expect to see if Russia were contemplating a nuclear war. Do Russia’s present moves conform with these indicators — many of them used by the Kremlin to predict an American nuclear attack?
http://www.wnd.com/1999/11/6392/
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