SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2011, Issue No. 100
October 25, 2011

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

PURPOSE OF 1969 NUCLEAR ALERT REMAINS A MYSTERY

For two weeks in October 1969, the Nixon Administration secretly placed U.S. nuclear forces on alert. At the time, the move was considered so sensitive that not even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was briefed on its purpose. Still today, no conclusive explanation for the potentially destabilizing alert can be found. Even with full access to the classified record, State Department historians said in a new volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series that they were unable to provide a definitive account of the event.

Previous historical scholarship has inferred from selected declassified documents that the alert was somehow intended to communicate a firm resolve to end the Vietnam War by whatever means necessary. (See "Nixon's Nuclear Ploy" by William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball, National Security Archive, December 23, 2002; and "The Madman Nuclear Alert" by Scott D. Sagan and Jeremi Suri, International Security, Spring 2003.)

But based on the classified record, that interpretation remains unproven and uncertain, according to the gripping new State Department FRUS volume on "National Security Policy."

"The documentary record offers no definitive explanation as to why U.S. forces went on this alert, also known as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Readiness Test," the editors of the FRUS volume said (Document 59).

"There are two main after-the-fact explanations: first, that nuclear brinkmanship was designed to convince the Soviets that President Nixon was prepared to launch a nuclear attack against North Vietnam in order to convince Moscow to put pressure on Hanoi to negotiate an end to the war in Southeast Asia" along the lines that previous historians have suggested.

The second proposed explanation is "that the President ordered the alert as a signal to deter a possible Soviet nuclear strike against China during the escalating Sino-Soviet border dispute." Consistent with the second interpretation, the FRUS volume provides new documentation of intelligence reports indicating that Soviet leaders were considering a preemptive strike against Chinese nuclear facilities.

Astonishingly, even the most senior U.S. military leaders were kept in the dark by the White House about the nature of the alert-- before, during and after the event.

"It is difficult to measure the success of this operation," wrote JCS Chairman General Earle G. Wheeler to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird on November 6, 1969, "since... the objectives of the test are unknown."

"It seems prudent if maximum benefit is to be gained from an operation of this type that at least you and I and the senior commanders are informed of the objectives and goals," General Wheeler suggested (Document 92).

In the end, the secret U.S. military alert -- one of only a few such cases involving U.S. nuclear forces -- had little discernable impact. "There has been no reflection of acute concern by the Soviets...," the CIA reported in an October 27, 1969 memorandum included in the FRUS volume (Document 89). "There has been no reflection of the US military alert posture in Soviet or Chinese news media or diplomatic activity."

Of the small White House group that directed the secret 1969 alert, perhaps only Henry Kissinger remains alive and active. He did not mention the alert in his memoirs, the FRUS editors noted, except perhaps in an oblique statement that the United States "raised our profile somewhat to make clear that we were not indifferent" to Soviet threats against Chinese facilities.

FRUS LEADS DECLASSIFICATION, BUT SOMETIMES LAGS BEHIND

At its best, the State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series serves as a driver of declassification, propelling it farther and faster than it would otherwise go. But it's not always at its best.

In 1992, Congress enacted a law concerning FRUS that represented one of only a couple of continuing statutory requirements to conduct declassification of official records. (The Atomic Energy Act, which also imposes continuing declassification requirements, is the other statute that comes to mind.) The 1992 law directed the State Department to publish FRUS in such a way as to provide "a thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of major United States foreign policy decisions" and to do so "not more than 30 years after the events recorded." This implied an ongoing obligation to declassify historical records in a timely fashion.

The State Department has never met the statutory 30 year deadline. Nor has Congress effectively required that it do so. In fact, Congress has not even conducted regular oversight of the FRUS program, which has experienced significant turmoil in recent years.

But the statute has not been altogether forgotten or ignored, either. In numerous areas of historical research, FRUS represents the vanguard of declassification, opening up otherwise inaccessible collections for the first time. This is notably true in the latest FRUS volume on "National Security Policy" published last week. It includes previously unreleased material declassified specifically for FRUS, "some of it extracted from still-classified documents."

On the other hand, because the FRUS declassification process is often so slow and prolonged, it can produce erratic and misleading results. The latest FRUS volume began a declassification review in 2005 that was not completed until 2011. This created the awkward circumstance that information which may have been properly classified in 2005 could be withheld from release in FRUS in 2011 despite the fact that the information had ceased to be classified in the interim.

Thus, the new FRUS volume included a redacted version of President Nixon's 1971 National Security Decision Memorandum 128 on the FY 1972-1974 Nuclear Weapons Stockpile (Document 196). "The President approves a total stockpile of [deleted] for the end of FY 1973 and a total stockpile [deleted] for the end of FY 1974," according to the FRUS version which treats the stockpile numbers as still-classified information.

This version of the document fails to recognize that the stockpile totals for 1973 and 1974 (among other years) were declassified by the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Energy in May 2010.

Yet this information cannot be found in the new FRUS volume, suggesting a need for improved coordination of the declassification process to make it even more productive.

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Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.

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