Remarks at the
USS Benjamin
Franklin
(SSBN-640)
Reunion
Ambassador
Linton F. Brooks
Administrator,
National Nuclear Security Administration
XO SSBN 640
GOLD (1972-74)
September 11, 2004
Good Evening
Shipmates. Thank you for having me
speak to you tonight. When the organizing committee asked me to speak, I had a
natural question. What should I speak about?
I first thought about just telling sea stories, but I was an exec, and
XOs are not people who tell sea stories, they’re people you tell sea stories
about. Besides, my sea stories cover
only two of
Franklin
’s 28 years. So instead of trying
to help us remember what we did, I thought I’d try to look back a little bit
from the perspective of today and ask what it all meant.
Franklin
made 69 patrols – close to 14 years under water – spread out over almost 30
years. She patrolled in the
Atlantic, in the Pacific, and the
Mediterranean
. She carried Polaris, Poseidon and
Trident missiles. She was, in many
ways, the most complex self-contained entity ever devised by human beings.
But, so what? It was all so
long ago. I stepped off
Franklin
and saw her for the last time 30 years ago.
For some of you, it’s been even longer. For most in the room it has
been at least 20 years and there is no one for whom it has been less than a
decade. So why, after all this time, does it matter what
Franklin
did and what we did when we served in her?
First of all, of course, it
matters because of the people. Most of life – at least most of the important
parts – is about people. We’re
here tonight not because of any fascination with technology or any nostalgia for
maintaining alert or because we want to rhapsodize over the glories of the
Reactor Plant Manual. We’re here
for each other, for our shipmates. Shipmate
is a wonderful word. It refers to
people who are thrown together by duty but bound together by shared experience
and common affection. So first and
foremost, we’re here to celebrate our shipmates, the friends of our youth.
Many of my shipmates are in the
room tonight. Many
others are gone. I served under
three Commanding Officers. Two are
dead. One – Jack Darby – died as
a Commander of the Pacific Fleet Submarine Force.
The one living Commanding Officer is John Leonard, sitting over there
with his honor restored by a country that, as Churchill says, always does the
right thing, but only after it has exhausted all other possibilities.
So one reason we are here is for our shipmates.
A second reason we’re here is
because going to sea is an intense experience that’s hard to forget.
Going to sea is different and it always has been.
That’s why there are lots of ship reunions and not very many Pentagon
office reunions or SUBASE machine shop reunions.
We’re also here because there is
something in all of us that makes us want to preserve the past.
We see evidence of this desire to remember our roots all around us.
From biographies of the founding fathers to histories of the submarine
force, books to help us remember the past are always popular and special.
In 1984, George Orwell’s
frightening vision of totalitarian future, a Party slogan was “Whoever
controls the present, controls the past. Whoever
controls the past controls the future.” That
nightmarish slogan embodies a fundamental truth.
The past has made us who we are today, both as individuals and as a
nation. The past shapes the future. But
as free people we don’t seek to control the past but to preserve it so it can
help us to understand who we are. That’s
why it’s important to remember the Cold War history of SSBNs and our part in
it.
But I think we’re here for a
fourth reason, one that may be the most important of all, even if we don’t
recognize it all the time. Human
beings need to know that their lives have meaning.
We’re here because at some level we know that what we did mattered
deeply, then and now. And that’s
what I want to talk to you about tonight.
At one level, what we did was
pretty mundane. We got on a bus,
then we got on a plane, then we had a turnover, then we went to sea where we
spent a couple of months trying to make sure nothing happened.
Then we had another turnover, got on another plane, got on another bus,
and came home. Our wives turned to
each other for support, took care of things that we couldn’t deal with because
we weren’t there, took pictures of milestones that we missed because we were
at sea, waited to meet us when we got off the bus, put up with our inclination
to immediately try to take charge--as if things hadn’t been running perfectly
well while we were gone--watched the off-crew period fly by, kissed us goodbye,
and watched us get back on the bus and then did it all again and again and
again.
And while we were gone, what did
we do? Nothing very glamorous.
We fixed lube oil pumps; we cooked meals and maintained communications;
we trained a lot; we kept a propulsion plant running and a weapons system ready;
we watched a few good movies and a lot of bad ones; we tracked contacts and
monitored atmosphere quality and did paperwork.
At a human level, it was a routine, if somewhat odd, existence.
We just got on a bus and went off to do our routine and repetitious job.
But we did a good deal more than
that. We won the Cold War.
You, me, our shipmates who aren’t with us tonight, our counterparts on
other FBMs, we won the Cold War. Not
by ourselves, of course, but without us, it might have come out differently.
We preserved the peace for decades until the inherent contradictions of
communism caught up with the
Soviet Union
and drove it into the dustbin of history. That’s
a pretty impressive achievement. The
first great philosopher of war, Sun-Tzu, wrote 2,500 years ago “to win one
hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill.
To win without fighting is the acme of skill.” That’s
what we did. We won without
fighting.
Let me take you back to the world
that
Franklin
inhabited. It started years before
she was even thought of. In 1946, in
a small midwestern city named
Fulton
,
Missouri
, Winston Churchill sent a sobering message to the world.
He said:
From Stettin in the Baltic
to
Trieste
in the
Adriatic
, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all
the capitals of the ancient states of central and
Eastern Europe
…. All these famous cities … lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.
Churchill’s speech gave a name
to an oppression that would lead
America
and its allies to spend trillions of dollars to prevent aggression and preserve
peace, a peace that was built on the bedrock of the American nuclear deterrent.
The Cold War became more than a
slogan when a barbed wire fence and later a wall divided a city and imprisoned
its people. The Berlin Wall was one
terrifying embodiment of Cold War. There
were many others, but the most frightening symbol was nuclear confrontation,
which reached its peak 42 years ago next month.
At 8:45 a.m.,
October 16, 19
62, President John F. Kennedy received an assessment from the Central
Intelligence Agency that Soviet missiles were in
Cuba
. The President went before the
American people and said, “I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and
eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace….
He has an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of
destruction.” The following days
were filled with fear. We all know
now just how close the world came to the brink of nuclear confrontation.
But catastrophe was averted. And
seven months later, on
May 25, 19
63,
Franklin
’s keel was laid.
Franklin
was born of the marriage of three great ideas, ideas we’ve lived with for all
our life, so we sometimes forget how radical they were.
The first was that nuclear power could be used to propel a submarine.
Three weeks from now we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of
the commissioning of Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine.
Without nuclear power there would have been no SSBN 640.
The
second idea was a ballistic missile could be carried on such a submarine and
that the country could make a nuclear warhead small enough to be delivered by
such a ballistic missile. It is easy
to forget what a monumentally difficult task this was.
Those two technical tasks were
solved. They enabled a third great
idea, a conceptual and strategic innovation.
Starting with Albert Wohlsteter’s 1959 article, “The Delicate Bounce
of Terror,” the
United States
gradually formed a theory of stable nuclear deterrence.
The theory was very simple. If
America
had enough capability to devastate the
Soviet Union
, and if that capability could survive a Soviet first strike—either by being
at sea, by being airborne, or by launching under attack—then major war between
the superpowers became essentially impossible.
Crucial to the success of that theory was the existence of an
invulnerable and capable component called the ballistic missile submarine.
That was Franklin and her sisters.
The first decade of Franklin’s
life saw America deepen its involvement in Vietnam, argue over the relation
between that war and what seemed like the implacable spread of international
communism, watch as society was wrenched apart by a conflict that almost
destroyed the army, which a handful of brilliant officers would spend the coming
decades rebuilding. Throughout this
period,
Franklin
made patrols, starting with her departure on her
first one on
May 6, 19
66. Month after month, year after
year, we took
Franklin
to sea, standing watch and making expansion of the conflict unthinkable.
The second ten years of
Franklin
’s life--starting in the early seventies--brought great technological and
political change. Missiles with
multiple warheads meant that American retaliation was assured regardless of what
the Soviets did or did not do with ballistic missile defense.
Serious efforts were made to contain the so-called arms race through
formal arms control. And
Franklin
made patrols, helping to guarantee that no side could gain a nuclear advantage
over the other, and thus making arms control possible.
The final decade of
Franklin
’s life saw the major defense build-up of the Reagan years, the deployment of
new weapons to
Europe
—Ground Launch Cruise Missiles and Pershing 2 missiles—and their subsequent
elimination through the first successful treaty to actually reduce arms.
And
Franklin
made patrols, ensuring that even though the conventional wisdom was that NATO
forces could not prevail against the Soviet juggernaut, war remained
unthinkable.
By now the Cold War had become an
integral part of who we were as a people. And
then, in a three-year frenzy it ended.
In 1989, Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev told the peoples of
Eastern Europe
they had the right to choose their own future.
The Polish Communist government began talks on how to shift to democracy.
Other states followed. And
then came the historical moment that many see as the true end of the Cold War
and the Iron Curtain.
On November 9th, 1989,
a mid-level bureaucrat in
East Germany
prematurely announced to journalists that the ban on travel to the west would
be lifted immediately. The East
German government had meant for the announcement to be made the next day and
that it would be done in a phased approach.
That November 9th announcement led to a flooding of West
Berliners to the Brandenburg Gate. They
began to demolish the Wall and in days it had fallen completely.
In the
Soviet Union
, Gorbachev unleashed forces he could not control.
His lifting of some internal controls led Soviet citizens to call for an
end to the Communist Party’s stranglehold on political power.
In a stunningly short time, the Communist Party --- a political
organization that had ruled since the October Revolution of 1917 --- fell.
The 15 constituent Republics of
the
Soviet Union
move quickly to gain their independence. Finally,
at
Minsk
on
December 8, 1991
,
Russia
,
Belarus
and
Ukraine
moved to dissolve the
Soviet Union
. In an act that symbolized the
irrelevance of the Soviet system, those three states informed President George
Bush of their action before telling Gorbachev what they had done.
And on Christmas Day in 1991, the
Soviet Union
, that great experiment in communist totalitarianism, went into the dustbin of
history where it belonged. The Cold
War was over. Eleven months later,
on
November 19, 1992
,
Franklin
returned from her last patrol. And
then in November of 1993, she was decommissioned.
I have a picture of her being towed up the
Hood
Canal
, that ship I still think of as new and pristine and a marvel of technology.
Franklin
’s life matched almost exactly the period from the greatest crisis of the Cold
War to the ultimate triumph of freedom. Why
was it only a Cold War? Why, when
the West was faced with an expansionist power with a messianic ideology, did
global war never break out? I
suggest it was because the American nuclear deterrent made global war
unthinkable.
The Cold War wasn’t peace.
In
Korea
,
Vietnam
,
Afghanistan
, Africa, and
Central America
huge numbers perished. But the
apocalypse never came. We don’t
know why it never came. The nature
of deterrence is that you can never prove that it worked, only that it failed.
But I believe that nuclear deterrence played a major role and I know that
all of us in this room played a major part in that deterrence.
The end of the Cold War, of
course, did not mean the end of history.
Franklin
’s watch, which began shortly after the most terrifying crisis of the Cold
War, came to its close shortly after the Cold War ended in triumph, not just for
America
but for all humanity. But the
legacy that we built continues today. As
we sit here reminiscing others are at sea standing watch.
There aren’t as many of them. Fourteen
Trident submarines have replaced the 41 for Freedom.
And the patrols have more flexibility now because the threat is not
immediate.
But deterrence still matters.
Deterrence isn’t just a nuclear concept; it’s a concept as old as
conflict itself. But now, the country practices a new and more complex kind of
deterrence. Indeed, I spend part of
my current professional life trying to understand how our nuclear policy should
adapt to the post-Cold War world. That
world is very different. On this
somber anniversary of the terrorist attack on
America
everyone in this room understands that the world remains a dangerous place.
But make no mistake, the threat of annihilation of civilization that we
lived with, and that we held at bay, has been all but eliminated, and we did
that.
So, that’s one look at what we
did and what it meant. I said at the
beginning that one reason we were here was because at some level we know that we
all were part of something important. I
hope I’ve helped remind you what it was.
There’s one last thought I’d
like to leave with you. We were, all
of us, extraordinarily lucky. Not
everybody gets to make a difference, but we did.
Not everybody gets work with shipmates on whom our very lives depended
and to know that we were in good hands, but we did.
Not everybody gets to work with exciting technology, but we did.
And, above all, not everybody gets to know they did something in the
service of the greatest country in the history of the world, but we did.
Perhaps that’s what it all meant.
Thank you for letting me talk to
you tonight. God bless you all, God
bless our successors on patrol tonight, and, above all, God bless
America
.
Ambassador Linton F. Brooks is the Administrator of the
National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the Undersecretary of Energy
for Nuclear Security. The NNSA
includes 37,000 federal, military, and contractor personnel who carry out the
national security responsibilities of the Department of Energy, including
maintaining the
U.S.
nuclear weapons program, providing naval nuclear propulsion, and promoting
nonproliferation. Since leaving
Franklin in 1974 Ambassador Brooks has served as Commanding Officer, USS Whale
(SSN-637), Assistant Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Chief
U.S. Negotiator for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, Director of Arms
Control for the National Security Council and in a number of Navy and Defense
Department assignments.
