3 - Nuclear war and crisis stability

Summary

When I became president of the United States I inherited the awesome threat of a nuclear holocaust during the later years of the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other with arsenals of an indescribable power. I knew the entire time I was president, that twenty-six minutes after we detected the launching of an intercontinental ballistic missile, that the missile would strike Washington D.C. or New York or any other target that the Soviets had chosen. Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and I knew that we had an equally strong retaliatory capability centred primarily in the intercontinental ballistic missile submarines. They were almost invulnerable to any kind of surprise attack. Just the nuclear warheads from one of those ships could have destroyed every city in the Soviet Union with a population of 100,000 or more.

This nuclear threat strengthened our commitment to peace. After I left the White House and formed the Carter Center, President Gerald Ford joined me in chairing our first major international conference, which included the foremost experts and political leaders from the Soviet Union and the United States. Our goal was to analyse the existing nuclear threat and the opportunities to reduce these remaining dangers to human existence on the face of the earth.

Desmond Ball was one of those experts we invited to that Consultation on International Security and Arms Control in April 1985: we already knew that his stature and the recognition accorded to his positions would add significantly to the strength of the enterprise. That was a particularly dangerous period in United States-Soviet Union relations, a time when the prospect of nuclear war was no distant fantasy. Ball's ideas were very valuable and contributed to the success of the project, and I was grateful for his participation.

In the following two or three years I met with Ball on a number of occasions, both privately and in relation to a project by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on nuclear war and crisis stability. I was asked on a number of occasions to bring a presidential input into that work, to give a sense of what would have been in my mind in certain situations.