ABSTRACT
Few people expect to survive nuclear war, and few believe that nuclear war could be limited once it began. The Navy, whose Seventh Fleet had by 1990 become a massive force for the fighting of tactical nuclear war, was the most successful in this interservice rivalry and aspired to an independent voice in deciding what happened within its area of command. The Commander in Chief Pacific, based in Honolulu, is widely believed to have ignored the orders of the President soon after the war began. Escalation from conventional to nuclear weapons was far quicker than it would have been in a confrontation between forces on land such as those of NATO and the Warsaw Pact in Europe. Whereas the American National Command Authority possessed electronic means of controlling the firing of nuclear weapons by the Army and the Air Force, it had no way of preventing the unauthorised launch of nuclear missiles from submarines.
