Carl h builder biography

This report shows how Carl H. Builder and his RAND colleagues looked at launch-on-warning when they considered future roles for ICBMs. Strongly interested in identifying the possibility for special roles for the Minuteman force, e.g., for limited strategic operations or counterforce missions, the RAND analysts assumed that the value of ICBMs as a deterrent depended on their survivability when under attack. While they believed that worries about a preemptive counterforce attack were exaggerated, they saw no good choices for assuring Minuteman survivability.

Builder and his co-authors considered whether a "launch-under-attack-assessment" would be useful for giving the Minuteman force enough time to be used in a crisis. Highlighting "attack assessment" instead of "warning," their definition of attack assessment demanded more authoritative information than warning from DSP satellites. Moreover, for the decision-making process to be credible, two problems had to be solved. One was "the attack assessment thresholds for considering launch commitment," for example, weighing the consequences of launching or not. The other was the "level of confidence in assessment information for launch decision." Was it necessary to have "confirmed reports" that Soviet warheads had detonated on U.S. soil? Also necessary for credible launch under attack assessment" were targets other than (empty) missile silos.

According to the report, once the President had made a decision, Minutemen could reach high altitudes "seven minutes" after a president's launch decision. Although the report mentioned possible vulnerabilities of ICBM silos to SLBM strikes, during this period Soviet SLBMs were not accurate enough to pose such a threat.

To support a launch-under-attack assessment, the authors drew on a logic similar to that employed by INR's Frank Perez: "we believe that the technical capabilities to launch ICBMs on attack assessment should be developed for their deterrence value--so that no adversary would dare assume that the U.S. could not launch the force out from any attempted disarming attack." Nevertheless, the authors argued against openly declaring the policy; the idea of launch-on-warning was so controversial that "it would be rigorously opposed as both dangerous and unstable (an accident could theoretically precipitate a nuclear war)." They also argued that the survivability of U.S. ICBMs was not important enough to require a decision to launch-under-attack. Implicitly, the danger of nuclear war was too terrible to allow the "assurance of ICBM retaliatory capabilities [to] rest upon such an awesome commitment."