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December 21 - December 31, 2018
Within three days of the initial attack, the full force of the SIOP would kill about 54 percent of the Soviet Union’s population and about 16 percent of China’s population—roughly 220 million people. Millions more would subsequently die from burns, radiation poisoning, exposure.
Eisenhower agreed to let high-ranking commanders decide whether to use nuclear weapons, during an emergency, when the president couldn’t be reached. He had wrestled with the decision, well aware that such advance authorization could allow someone to do “something foolish down the chain of command” and start an all-out nuclear war.
At first, Eisenhower told the Joint Chiefs that he was “very fearful of having written papers on this matter.” Later, he agreed to sign a predelegation order, insisting that its existence never be revealed. “It is in the U.S. interest to maintain the atmosphere that all authority [to use nuclear weapons] stays with the U.S. President without delegation,” he stressed. Eisenhower’s order was kept secret from Congress, the American people, and NATO allies. It made sense, as a military tactic. But it also introduced an element of uncertainty to the decision-making process.
Design errors were often easier to correct than to anticipate. As a result, the reliability of America’s early missiles left much to be desired. “Like any machine,” General LeMay noted, with understatement, “they don’t always work.”
Nevertheless, the first Atlas went on alert in 1959. At a top secret hearing two years later, an Air Force official admitted to Congress that the odds of an Atlas missile hitting a target in the Soviet Union were no better than fifty-fifty.
did the Air Force really need four different types of ICBM? It had already committed to the development of the Minuteman, a missile that would be small, solid-fueled, mass-produced, and inexpensive.
The Titan II was the first American long-range missile designed, from the outset, to have an inertial guidance system. It didn’t require any external signals or data to find a target. It was a completely self-contained system that couldn’t be jammed, spoofed, or hacked midflight.
Air Force’s demand for self-contained, inertial guidance systems played a leading role in the miniaturization of computers and the development of integrated circuits, the building blocks of the modern electronics industry.
Four-seven often served as a home complex, and one of Sergeant Green’s teams had pointed out a major security breach there, just a few weeks before the accident. Green had been amazed by their discovery: you could break into a Titan II complex with just a credit card.
Amid the darkness, the boom operator of the tanker noticed fuel leaking from the B-52’s right wing. Spray from the leak soon formed a wide plume, and within two minutes about forty thousand gallons of jet fuel had poured from the wing. The command post at Seymour Johnson told the pilot, Major Walter S. Tulloch, to dump the rest of the fuel in the ocean and prepare for an emergency landing. But fuel wouldn’t drain from the tank inside the left wing, creating a weight imbalance. At half past midnight, with the flaps down and the landing gear extended, the B-52 went into an uncontrolled spin.
Every safety mechanism had failed, except one: the ready/safe switch in the cockpit. The switch was in the SAFE position when the bomb dropped. Had the switch been set to GROUND or AIR, the X-unit would’ve charged, the detonators would’ve triggered, and a thermonuclear weapon would have exploded in a field near Faro, North Carolina. When Air Force personnel found the Mark 39 later that morning, the bomb was harmlessly stuck in the ground, nose first, its parachute draped in the branches of a tree. The other Mark 39 plummeted straight down and landed in a meadow just off Big Daddy’s Road, near
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A year after the North Carolina accident, a SAC ground crew removed four Mark 28 bombs from a B-47 bomber and noticed that all of the weapons were armed. But the seal on the ready/safe switch in the cockpit was intact, and the knob hadn’t been turned to GROUND or AIR.
The spirit of youthful optimism sweeping the United States would have been dimmed by the detonation of a hydrogen bomb in North Carolina and an evacuation of the nation’s capital.
The B-52 crash in North Carolina wasn’t the only accident that involved fully assembled, sealed-pit weapons—and
The plane entered a vertical dive, hit the ground, and vanished in a fireball. The high explosives of the hydrogen bomb detonated but didn’t produce a nuclear yield.
A few weeks later a B-47 carrying a Mark 39 bomb caught fire on the runway at Chennault Air Force Base in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The crew escaped, and the weapon didn’t explode. It melted into radioactive slag.
The wreckage of the two planes covered an area of roughly twenty-seven square miles. The hydrogen bombs were torn open by the crash. The nuclear cores of their primaries were discovered, intact, resting on piles of broken high explosives.
The shelter contained most of the radioactivity. But water from the fire hoses had swept plutonium residue under the doors, down the street, and into a drainage ditch.
General Maxwell Taylor’s book, The Uncertain Trumpet, and its call for a nuclear strategy of flexible response had greatly impressed Kennedy. He agreed with Taylor’s central thesis: in a crisis, the president should have a wide range of military options. Kennedy wanted the ability to fight limited wars, conventional wars—and a nuclear war with the Soviets that could be stopped short of mutual annihilation.
Admiral Arleigh Burke, warned that such a large, undiscriminating attack on the Soviet Union would deposit lethal fallout not only on American allies like South Korea and Japan but also on the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet.
But the authors of WSEG R-50 had also reached a conclusion that nobody in the Kennedy administration wanted to hear: America’s command-and-control system was so complex, outdated, and unreliable that a “controlled” or “flexible” response to a Soviet attack would be impossible. In fact, the president of the United States might not be able to make any response; he would probably be killed during the first moments of a nuclear war.
The destruction of America’s command-and-control system could be achieved, with a 90 percent chance of success, through the use of only thirty-five Soviet missiles.
The first BMEWS radar complex, located at Thule Air Base, Greenland, had come online that week, and the numerical threat levels of the new warning system were being explained to the businessmen. If the number 1 flashed in red above the world map, unidentified objects were traveling toward the United States. If the number 3 flashed, the threat level was high; SAC headquarters and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to be notified immediately. The maximum threat level was 5—a computer-generated warning, with a 99.9 percent certainty, that the United States was under attack. As Peterson sat in the
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subsequent investigation found the cause of the computer glitch. The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.
Both of America’s early-warning systems were deeply flawed—and, as a result, the most reliable indicator of a Soviet attack might be the destruction of those systems by nuclear blasts.
Three weeks after the Goldsboro accident, Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy sent Kennedy and McNamara a top secret report, based on a recent tour of NATO bases. It warned that the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation in Europe was unacceptably high—not just in wartime, but also during routine NATO maneuvers. NATO’s command-and-control problems were so bad, the bipartisan committee found, that in many respects the United States no longer had custody of its own nuclear weapons.
But none of these weapons, except the land mines—formally known as Atomic Demolition Munitions—had any sort of lock to prevent somebody from setting them off without permission. And the three-digit mechanical locks on the land mines, like those often found on gym lockers, were easy to pick.
Agnew walked over and asked the young enlisted man, who carried an old-fashioned, bolt-action rifle, what he’d do if somebody jumped into one of the planes and tried to take off. Would he shoot at the pilot—or the bomb?
The Jupiters were located near a forest, without any protective covering, and brightly illuminated at night. They would be sitting ducks for a sniper. “There were three Jupiters setting there in the open—all pointed toward the sky,” Holifield told the committee. “Over $300 million has been spent to set up that little show and it can be knocked out with 3 rifle bullets.”
A few months after the joint committee’s visit to NATO bases, a group of dissident French officers sought to gain control of a nuclear device in Algeria, as part of a coup.
During initial inspection after receipt of a War Reserve Mk 7 Mod 5 bomb, it was observed that the safing and arming wires were in reversed locations in the Arm/Safe Retainer assembly, i.e., the arming wires were in the safing wire location and the safing wires were in the arming wire location. Four screws were missing from the assembly.
The risk of a nuclear accident at a European base was increased by the fact that the training and operating manuals for the Mark 7—indeed, for all the weapons in the NATO atomic stockpile—were written in English. But many of the NATO personnel who handled the weapons could not read or speak English.
And two would fly to the ballistic missile early-warning facility in Thule, Greenland, and orbit it for hours, maintaining visual or radio contact with the base—just to make sure that it was still there. Thule would probably be hit by Soviet missiles during the initial stage of a surprise attack. Known as the “Thule monitor,” the B-52 assured SAC, more reliably than any bomb alarm system, that the United States was not yet at war.
Nevertheless, with Taylor’s support, the Army was now seeking thirty-two thousand nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield. Even the little Davy Crockett was portrayed as an indispensable weapon, despite the risk of theft. The handheld atomic rifles were as urgently needed, the Army claimed, as intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The latest intelligence reports on the Soviet Union added a new twist to the debate over America’s nuclear strategy. Within weeks of taking office, President Kennedy found out that the missile gap did not exist. Like the bomber gap, it was a myth.
Instead of deploying long-range missiles to attack the United States, the Soviets had built hundreds of medium- and intermediate-range missiles to destroy the major cities of Western Europe. The strategy had been dictated, in large part, by necessity. Khrushchev’s boasts—that his factories were turning out 250 long-range missiles a year, that the Soviet Union had more missiles than it would ever need—were all a bluff. For years the Soviet missile program had been plagued with engineering and design problems.
Far from being grounds for celebration, the absence of a missile gap became a potential source of embarrassment for the Kennedy administration.
Political concerns, not strategic ones, determined how many long-range, land-based missiles the United States would build.
Before Sputnik, President Eisenhower had thought that twenty to forty would be enough. Jerome Wiesner advised President Kennedy that roughly ten times that number would be sufficient for deterrence. But General Power wanted the Strategic Air Command to have ten thousand Minuteman missiles, aimed at every military target in the Soviet Union that might threaten the United States. And members of Congress, unaware that the missile gap was a myth, also sought a large, land-based force. After much back and forth, McNamara decided to build a thousand Minuteman missiles. One Pentagon adviser later
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And the relative weakness of the Soviets, the small size of their missile arsenal, had oddly become a source of anxiety. It might encourage the Soviet Union to strike first. A decapitation attack, launched without warning, like a “bolt out of the blue,” might be the Kremlin’s only hope of achieving victory.
The task was further complicated by the efforts of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force to retain as much authority as possible over their own facilities and resist any centralized system run by civilians.
Amid all the consideration of how to protect the president and the Joint Chiefs, how to gather information in real time, how to transmit war orders, how to devise the technical and administrative means for a flexible response, little thought had been given to an important question: how do you end a nuclear war?
The problem was so serious and so obvious, Schelling thought, everybody must have assumed somebody else had taken care of it. Pauses for negotiation would be a waste of time, if there were no way to negotiate. And once a nuclear war began, no matter how pointless, devastating, and horrific, it might not end until both sides ran out of nuclear weapons.
During the same week that Kennedy appealed for an end to the arms race at the United Nations, he met with a handful of military advisers at the White House to discuss launching a surprise attack on the Soviet Union.
As Khrushchev continued to make public threats against West Berlin and raise the specter of war, President Kennedy followed the advice of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. “If a crisis is provoked,” Acheson had suggested, “a bold and dangerous course may be the safest.”
The “spasm war” demanded by the current SIOP, they agreed, was a “ridiculous and unworkable notion.”
If President Kennedy launched the current SIOP, the United States would have to kill more than half of the people in the Soviet Union—and millions more in Eastern Europe and China—just to maintain the freedom of West Berlin. Doing so would be not only morally questionable but impractical. The scale of the military operations required by the SIOP was so large, it would “inevitably” tip off the Soviets that a nuclear strike was coming.
The Berlin Wall, at least, had preserved the status quo. “It’s not a very nice solution,” Kennedy said, the day the barbed wire went up, “but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
American tanks were sent to Checkpoint Charlie as a show of strength. Soviet tanks appeared there at about five in the evening on the twenty-seventh. The British soon deployed two antitank guns to support the Americans, while all the French troops in West Berlin remained safely in their barracks.
The Soviet foreign minister met with the American ambassador in Moscow to discuss the situation. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s younger brother, had a secret, late-night meeting with Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet intelligence officer, in Washington, D.C. The negotiations were successful. Sixteen hours after arriving at the border, the Soviet tanks turned around and left. The American tanks departed half an hour later.