Bruce Blair, the missileer turned nonproliferation scholar and activist, died Sunday following a sudden illness, Global Zero, the advocacy organization he co-founded in 2007, announced Monday.
The Global Zero statement did not specify the cause of death, nor identify any survivors for Blair — a prolific writer and advocate for nuclear arms-minimization who often warned about the unintended launch of nuclear weapons. The Washington Post reported Blair died from a stroke and was survived by his mother, three sisters, and children and grandchildren from two marriages.
Blair was 72, based on a biography published by the MacArthur Foundation in 1999, when the nonprofit awarded him one of its signature genius grants. Blair was working at the Brookings Institution at the time of the award.
According to the same MacArthur biography, Blair’s Air Force career spanned 1970-74 and included stints at the Strategic Reconnaissance Wing of Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, and as a launch control officer in Montana.
Blair also served in Congress’ since-eliminated Office of Technology Assessment, where according to a Wall Street Journal report published in 1986, he published a retroactively classified study about nuclear decapitation and the potential failure of command and control infrastructure.
In 2004, Blair claimed that, during his time in the launch control centers in Montana, the Air Force intentionally bypassed devices intended to prevent the unauthorized launch of Minuteman nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. The service, Blair said, set every coded lock on the devices to the combination 00000000, then told service members the combination.
The Air Force, in a memo first obtained and published by Foreign Policy, denied it had ever used such a code on Minuteman missiles.
Global Zero is a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates, inside and outside of government, for the goal of verifiable, worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons and fissile material stockpiles.
Blair stayed involved with government advocacy in Washington until his final years. In 2018, just before Democrats retook the House of Representatives and Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) took the gavel on the House Armed Services Committee, Blair penned a 100-page paper arguing in favor of a smaller nuclear arsenal limited to ballistic-missile submarines backstopped by a limited number of bombers — and no intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In the paper, Blair argued this smaller nuclear force was enough to deter any rational adversary from launching a nuclear first-strike on the U.S., as the assured retaliation from hidden submarines would be enough to wipe out the attacker’s economy.
The Smith-led Armed Services Committee later produced a 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that proposed slowing procurement of next-generation silo-based missiles, along with limiting spending on planned National Nuclear Security Administration facilities to make new plutonium cores for those missiles’ warheads. Even some Democrats balked at the idea, and those provisions evaporated after that year’s defense authorization bill emerged from joint House-Senate negotiations.
