The Secret Pentagon War Game That ​Offers a Stark​ Warning for Our Times

Nuclear confrontation is fundamentally a form of communication — even after the first blows fall. Some in government see it as a language and revel in its complexity. This has been so ever since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 and the Soviet Union responded by testing its own device four years later. The ensuing dialogues have, with varying degrees of subtlety, involved tests, bans on tests, arms agreements, embargoes, clandestine and nonclandestine technology transfers and the occasional grand speech — a high-stakes conversation in which all sides have understood the fearsome price of miscommunication. These exchanges echo around the edges of a devil’s spiral. At the top of the spiral stand the preparations meant as deterrents. At the bottom stands all-out nuclear war.

The descent — in the language of nuclear war, an escalation — is shaped by grave uncertainties. How well do my enemies understand me, and how well do I understand them? Furthermore, how does my understanding of their understanding affect their understanding of me? These and similar questions stand like the endless images in opposing mirrors, but without diminishing in size. The threat they pose is immediate and real. It leaves us to grapple with the central truth of the nuclear age: The sole way for humanity to survive is to communicate clearly, to sustain that communication indefinitely and to understand how readily communications can be misunderstood. Crucial to handling the attendant distrust are fallback communications integral to the art of de-escalation — an art that has been neglected and is now dangerously foundering.

After the Cold War, the two great powers paid less attention to the matter. Surprise attacks were their main concern, but they assumed that the existing warning systems and retaliatory capabilities were sufficient to ward off such events. At the Pentagon, ambitious officers chose some other track to advance their careers. Terrorism, cyberwarfare, even global warming — that’s where the action lay.

But the conversation continued. Britain, France, China, Israel, India and Pakistan had already made their voices heard, then North Korea joined in, with Iran seemingly poised to follow, with all the chatter multiplying the opportunities for miscommunication. Now China, after years of contenting itself with a diminutive retaliatory arsenal, has changed its mind and is striving to rival the United States and Russia. All three countries are investing heavily in improvements to their nuclear arsenals, introducing new warheads and delivery vehicles, expanding into the fight into orbital space, integrating conventional weapons and cybertools into their nuclear warfighting capabilities, worrying about electromagnet pulses and stirring in heaps of subterfuge. Key arms-control treaties have expired or been abandoned, and there is little immediate hope for new ones. Having fallen from 70,000 warheads at the height of the Cold War to about 12,000 today, the global arsenal has begun again to grow, according to the Federation of American Scientists. The emphasis now is on smaller, more precise nuclear weapons meant to limit radioactive fallout and civilian deaths — just the sorts of warheads that countries might be tempted to use during a conventional battle and that also, when coupled with cyberattacks and advanced surveillance systems, arouse worldwide concerns that particularly the United States may achieve a practical first-strike capability. Whether justified or not, these concerns are destabilizing. They make adversaries distrustful. They undermine the conversation. They compress the spiral.

No one knows exactly how a war would unfold, only that the sort of “bolt from the blue” surprise attack around which all three great nuclear powers have built their deterrent structures is unlikely because of the strength of those very structures. The critical challenge now is not how to ward off a sneak attack but how to control an escalation that occurs in plain sight — for instance, a conventional conflict that goes wrong, leading to nuclear saber rattling, leading to the first use of a few small nuclear weapons on the battlefield, leading to the counteruse of small nuclear weapons, leading to much of the world sliding uncontrollably into extinction.

The best available model of such an event is an ultrasecret 1983 Pentagon war game called Proud Prophet. That game was a nuclear test of sorts, and it provided critical lessons that remain crucial today. It was unique in that by design it was largely unscripted, involved the highest levels of the U.S. military and its global warfighting commands and used actual communication channels, doctrines and secret war plans. One of its great strengths was that unlike any other war game involving the possibility of small-yield nuclear weapons, it ran freely and was allowed to play out to its natural conclusion: global devastation.

The conclusion was a shock. The lesson drawn from it — that nuclear war cannot be controlled — had a decades-long effect on American strategy and therefore, in a world of opposing mirrors, on global strategies. It may be that someday in the future a survivor will be able to look back at our times and observe that the greatest tragedy in all of human history is that among current leaders in Russia and the United States, and perhaps other countries, the lesson was forgotten.

Of the participants, a man named Paul Bracken, who is now 76, serves as the principal keeper of the flame. Bracken teaches at Yale, often on subjects related to systems analysis and business management, but he yields his greatest influence outside the academy, in U.S. military circles, where he is sought for his wisdom on matters of nuclear war. Until recently, he lived in the vanilla town Ridgefield, Conn., where he and his wife raised their three very smart children and he walked the pleasant downtown in vanilla anonymity. I told him that on first impression he looks like an insurance agent, and that in his profession it is probably a useful look to have. I meant a placid look. A peaceful look. “Funny,” he said, because his father had sold insurance.

That was near Philadelphia, where Bracken grew up. Afterward, he studied engineering at Columbia, went home for a stint in an Italian restaurant and almost by chance landed a Beltway job that awarded him his first security clearances. This was around 1972, when he was 24. Then he went to work for Herman Kahn — the iconoclastic head of the Hudson Institute, a think tank he founded in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. It is said that Kahn was a model for Dr. Strangelove, the crazed scientist in Stanley Kubrick’s war comedy of the same name. Kahn’s friends delighted in his sense of humor and thought he could have succeeded as a borscht-belt comedian. His critics did not agree. He was best known for his 1960 book “On Thermonuclear War,” which many regarded with dismay because of its dispassionate assessment of tolerable levels of civilian casualties, measured by the wholesale destruction of American and European cities and the deaths of multiple millions in the United States alone. The book’s central argument was that for a country willing to take the hit, nuclear war might be winnable. People believed that therefore Kahn was advocating such a war. He answered that, far from it, he was simply thinking the unthinkable because not to do so was to be unprepared, and to be unprepared was to create vulnerabilities that would invite attack and defeat.

Bracken did not buy into the winnable-war part. He was agnostic. But he believed, then as now, in the need to think clearly about such matters, and for a few years he became Kahn’s protégé. Over a decade working at Hudson, Bracken earned a Ph.D. from Yale in operations research, wrote a dissertation titled “The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces” that was subsequently published as a book and topped things off by accepting a teaching position at Yale. He was 35 and richly equipped with security clearances. It was 1983.

That March, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” To Moscow, such rhetoric seemed recklessly provocative. Two weeks later, Reagan doubled down by proposing to abandon the pact of mutually assured destruction upon which the peace had long relied. In its place, the United States would develop a hyperexpensive, multilayered shield against ballistic missiles. He called it the Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.). The press called it Star Wars. It remains far from possible even today, despite Donald Trump’s recent vow to expand on Israel’s modest and ultimately inadequate missile-defense system and build a comprehensive “Iron Dome” over the United States.

Reagan at least was not a huckster. He may have been naïve, but he was also sincere, and an avowed visionary. In the speech that introduced the concepts that would lead to Star Wars, he asked, “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” Then he called on the scientific community, “those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”

The nuclear weapons he seemed most immediately interested in rendering obsolete belonged to the Soviet Union. Certainly the Soviets thought so. Four days after Reagan introduced the initiative, the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, condemned it. Andropov said, “In fact, the strategic offensive forces of the United States will continue to be developed and upgraded at full tilt and along a quite definite line” — to acquire a first-strike nuclear capability that rendered the Soviet Union “incapable of dealing a retaliatory strike.” In short, missile defenses would be “a bid to disarm the Soviet Union in the face of the U.S. nuclear threat.”

Our dear Andropov. He worried too much. Reagan’s missile shield was not to be. Soviet leaders came to understand this and abandoned thoughts they may have had of overwhelming it physically. But the misunderstandings remained profound on both sides. Moscow suspected that Washington was preparing for a first strike, Washington suspected the same of Moscow and each, we now know, was wrong.

If the antagonists agreed on one thing, it was the advantage of shooting first, and perhaps — to avoid that regrettable step — the need to brandish survivable retaliatory arsenals. Despite those shared realizations, though, there was now one important difference. The Soviets had come to believe that their nuclear arsenal, though central to the country’s survival, was useful exclusively as a political tool. The Americans, by contrast, had been waffling over a wealth of choices. Bracken notes a few of them: attack pre-emptively to decapitate the enemy; launch on warning; launch under attack with enemy warheads exploding; escalate “horizontally” by shifting a war in Europe to Asia; create a two-front war by getting China to attack the Soviet Union; pre-position weapons in space; invade Eastern Europe with NATO armies; or of course, the new plan, to coolly execute a nuclear escalation with the goal of controlling and winning a limited nuclear war.

Those had been the eight main bright ideas for a little while. Each had vigorous proponents, none of whom meant to propose suicide, but some of whom were baldly opportunistic. People were grandstanding for the new Reagan administration. Turf fights within the Pentagon further complicated the scene. For whatever reason, the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not decide between the competing strategies, and the new secretary of defense, Casper Weinberger, came under fire for allowing chaos to reign.

Weinberger sought a way through the morass. He turned to an experienced hand in such realms, a horseman and former Marine named Phillip Karber, who today — bearded, gruff, cigar-smoking — teaches military matters at the National Defense University between forays to the front lines of Ukraine. Karber, in turn, engaged a Harvard professor named Thomas Schelling, who began setting up a secret war game. Schelling was an influential economist and future Nobel Prize winner best known then for his work in game theory, particularly as it applied to great-power rivalries and nuclear war. He had worked at Rand alongside Herman Kahn and Daniel Ellsberg, where among his other pursuits he had run a string of tabletop crisis games. The Rand games were thinking exercises closer to chess matches than to the blackboard musings and applied mathematics of formal logic, let alone to realistic war games.

The war game that Weinberger proposed was something new — an ambitious setup meant primarily to educate him and the most senior decision makers in the United States. Based in offices at Fort McNair in Washington, it was to be played round the clock for two weeks, continue longer if necessary, stretch globally through classified communication channels to major American commands, involve hundreds of active-duty officers and civilian officials and use the actual ultrasecret war plans and vulnerability assessments to examine competing strategies in as realistic a manner as possible. Unknown to nearly all of the participants, Weinberger himself would be included, playing his authentic role as the leader of what would be called the blue team — though behind a stand-in who would obscure Weinberger’s presence by pretending to confer with lower-ranking advisers before reacting to events. Likewise, Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would secretly join the exercise behind another stand-in.

The blue team would of course confront a Soviet red team, made up primarily of Pentagon officials, along with experts from the C.I.A. and the academic community. The third key player was a control team. The players would make their moves via connected computer terminals, paper communiqués or in-person meetings. The setup would allow the red team to see everything the red team did, and the blue team to see everything the blue team did. Only the control team would be able to see what both sides did. For instance, if the red team launched a strike, it would be up to the control team to take that in, make a damage assessment and communicate the assessment to both sides. Then play would proceed.

Paul Bracken was brought in to serve as a chronicler, with full access to wander the game and write down his observations. The designers could not have picked a better person for the job. Bracken saw the setup as genius, much as he saw its chief architect, the great Thomas Schelling himself. Speaking to me about Schelling, he said: “Tom always said that for generating situations you don’t anticipate, gaming is the best method. Why? Because somebody else is playing the enemy, and you’re not having to think up, ‘Here’s what the enemy might do.’ The problem is you can never surprise yourself.”

On June 13, 1983, the curtain went up. The game’s rules had been worked out, and hundreds of players were in position at Fort McNair and military bases around the globe. The control team, overseen by Schelling, informed the blue team of the situation. Soviet forces were maneuvering inside Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia in what appeared to be a giant training exercise — but drifting westward toward West Germany. Ominously, residents of Bonn, the seat of the West German government, were starting to sicken mysteriously. Had the red team covertly released biological agents against them? Weinberger hesitated, awaiting further intelligence. He refused to embarrass himself, even within the game, by going to World War III in reaction to a medical scare.

After four days, the control team confirmed the blue team’s suspicions. The red team had indeed released biological agents against Bonn. War was coming to Europe.

The blue team moved NATO troops swiftly into defensive positions along a 440-mile front that stretched from the Baltic to the Austrian border and beyond. The shooting started, and things began moving faster still. The control team determined that German and American troops were fighting well enough in the center and the south to hold the line. But then the Soviets fired a salvo of chemical weapons against Ramstein and other nearby NATO air bases west of the Rhine, significantly slowing the sortie rate for close air support against the advancing Soviet armor. In the north, Belgian and Dutch contingents began to bow backward under the pressure.

So far, the Soviets had refrained from using even the smallest of their nuclear weapons in the hope that the Americans might do the same. But on the fifth day, as Soviet troops neared the suburbs of Hamburg and it seemed that the Belgians and Dutch were about to be overrun, the blue team reached for the only tool it had in such circumstances, and Weinberger took a step he had hoped to avoid: he authorized the first limited use of “tactical” nuclear weapons.

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