Evening star., 1961-04-05
MILITARY
Headquarters at Sea
Proposed in Wartime
Continued From First Pagt

llOPOoCu
Continued From First Page
are, Of course, classified top
secrets
In brief, the problem is this:
Nuclear weapons. particularly
ICBMs,s are so destructive that
old military margins of error
in weapon use can not be ap-
piled to them. A mistake before
war could devaState this cou1-
try by accident. A mistake
during a war could turn an act
of defense into an act of suicide.
The existing solution to the
problem is to insure that If the
war does start-even by acci-
dent-our weapons will get the
signal to "GO!" We will devas-
tate the enemy, and the enemy
will presumably devastate us in
return
AS long as the go-signal gets
out, it makes little difference
whether the weapons are close
ly controlled or not. The
chicken might be dying, but it
would accomplish considerable
retaliatory destruction in its
death throes.
The new administration was
disturbed by the dead-chicken
CONFEDERATION of nuclear war
command and control. Mr..
Mcnamara is already changing
it to a gamecock configuration.
Plans Calculated War
He wants the means to fight
a cool, calculated war-like a
gamecock that strikes, parties,
feints, finds an unexpected
opening and kills. He wants
military and civilian head
quarters to survive an enemy
attack, and he wants to keep
a flow Of information coming
to the headquarters and orders
going out-no matter what the
enemy does.
The headquarters, communi-
cations and information gath
ering and processing equipment
are almost all thought" at
present. Any enemy attack
would destroy them. To in
sure that the go-signal will
get out, weapons must be on
hair trigger. They must blast
off toward their targets before
the President and his advisers
are really sure what is going on.
The underground headquar-
ters of the Strategic Air Com
mand could be destroyed with
ease, for instance. The Polaris
communications system is ex-
posed and vulnerable. And the
various "airborne command
posts" are only emergency
communications planes, not
complete headquarters.
Quick Flash Imperative
These well-publicised gim-
micks are really nothing more
than guarantees that during the
split second between the falling
of the ak and the severing of
the head, the military muscles
will get the signal to twitch.
Mr.. McNamara's first cor
rective more. taken a few days
after he came into office, was
to change the Strategic Air
Commands procedures so that
missiles and bombers will not
be dispatched by accident or
without specific orders from the
President.
Then he set UP study groups
in the Joint Chiefs of Staff and
the Office of the Director Of
Defense Research and En-
gineering to find means of
achieving stable control. One
proposal is to make the cruiser
Northampton into a national
command post. Or perhaps the
nuclear cruiser Long Beach will
have that role.
Headquarters at Sea
At any rate, the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, the Secretary of De-
fense and other civilian leaders
will have mobile headquarters
hidden at sea from which to
direct a war.
They could go to the ship
quickly by helicopter. They
would find there complete
communications facilities, COM
puters to process information
about American and enemy
strikes, display boards to give
a picture of the war at a glance
and even communications to
the enemy-just in case a quick
call to the Kremlin would elicit
the information that the one
or two exploded ICBMs were a
horrible mistake, not the OPEN
ing rounds of a deliberate war.
The budget revisions would
provide 1854 million for addi-
tional work on sea and air.
borne command posts and So
million for extension of the
bomb alarm system"
The system, to be installed
under an Eisenhower order in
100 cities and military install
lations, would be extended to
ring bells. at all the Strategic
Air Command bases If nuclear
bombs dropped on an alarm
point. This would give SAC
a chance to get alert bombers
off the ground even though
SAC headquarters were de-
stroyed.
Also, they would tell national
Observation-Disclosures