Command and Control (42 page)

Both leaders had feared that any military action would quickly escalate to a nuclear exchange. They had good reason to think so. Although Khrushchev never planned to move against Berlin during the crisis, the Joint Chiefs had greatly underestimated the strength of the Soviet military force based in Cuba. In addition to strategic weapons, the Soviet Union had
almost one hundred tactical nuclear weapons on the island that would have been used by local commanders to repel an American attack. Some were as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Had the likely targets of those weapons—the American fleet offshore and the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo—been destroyed, an all-out nuclear war would have been hard to avoid.

Pushed to the brink, Kennedy and Khrushchev chose to back down. But Kennedy emerged from the crisis looking much tougher—his concession to the Soviets not only remained secret but was vehemently denied. LeMay, among others, suspected that some sort of deal had been struck. Asked at a Senate hearing whether the Jupiters in Turkey had been traded for the missiles in Cuba, McNamara replied, “
Absolutely not . . . the Soviet Government did raise the issue . . . [but the] President absolutely refused even to discuss it.” Secretary of State Rusk repeated the lie.
In order to deflect attention from the charge, members of the administration told friendly journalists, off the record, that Adlai Stevenson, the American ambassador to the United Nations, had urged Kennedy to trade NATO missiles in Turkey, Italy, and Great Britain for the missiles in Cuba, but the president had refused—another lie. A reference to the secret deal was later excised from Robert Kennedy's diary after his death. And a virile myth was promoted by the administration: when the leaders of the two superpowers stood eye to eye, threatening to fight over Cuba, Khrushchev was the one who blinked.

Within the following year, President Kennedy gave a speech at American University that called for a relaxation of the Cold War and “
genuine peace” with the Soviets. The United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting nuclear detonations in the atmosphere, the ocean, and outer space.
And a hot line was finally created to link the Kremlin and the Pentagon, with additional terminals at the White House and the headquarters of the Communist Party in Moscow. The Soviet Union welcomed the new system. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urgent messages from the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been encoded by hand and then given to a Western Union messenger who arrived at the embassy on a bicycle. “
We at the embassy could only pray,” Ambassador Dobrynin recalled, “that he would take it to the Western Union office without delay and not stop to chat on the way with some girl!”

Unlike the hot line frequently depicted in Hollywood films, the new system didn't provide a special telephone for the president to use in an emergency. It relied on Teletype machines that could send text quickly and
securely. Written statements were considered easier to translate, more deliberate, and less subject to misinterpretation than verbal ones. Every day, a test message was sent once an hour, alternately from Moscow, in Russian, and from Washington, in English. The system would not survive nuclear attacks on either city. But it was installed with the hope of preventing them.

•   •   •

D
URING
THE
C
UBAN
M
ISSILE
C
RISIS
, the Strategic Air Command conducted
2,088 airborne alert missions, involving almost fifty thousand hours of flying time, without a single accident. The standard operating procedures, the relentless training, and the checklists introduced by LeMay and Power helped to achieve a remarkable safety record when it was needed most. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the crisis, public anxieties about nuclear war soon focused on the dangers of SAC's airborne alert. The great risk—as depicted in the 1964 films
Fail-Safe
and
Dr. Strangelove—
wasn't that a hydrogen bomb might accidentally explode during the crash of a B-52. It was that an order to attack the Soviet Union could be sent without the president's authorization, either through a mechanical glitch (
Fail-Safe
) or the scheming of a madman (
Dr. Strangelove
).

The plot of both films strongly resembled that of the novel
Red Alert
. Its author, Peter George, cowrote the screenplay of
Dr. Strangelove
and sued the producers of
Fail-Safe
for copyright infringement.
The case was settled out of court. The threat of accidental nuclear war was the central theme of the films—and
Strangelove
, although a black comedy, was by far the more authentic of the two. It astutely parodied the strategic theories pushed by RAND analysts, members of the Kennedy administration, and the Joint Chiefs. It captured the absurdity of debating how many million civilian deaths would constitute a military victory. And it ended with an apocalyptic metaphor for the arms race, conjuring a Soviet doomsday machine that's supposed to deter an American attack by threatening to launch a nuclear retaliation, automatically, through the guidance of a computer, without need of any human oversight. The failure of the Soviets to tell the United States about the contraption defeats its purpose, inadvertently bringing the end of the world. “
The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost,”
Dr. Strangelove, the president's eccentric science adviser, explains to the Soviet ambassador, “IF YOU KEEP IT A SECRET!”

The growing public anxiety about accidental war prompted a spirited defense of America's command-and-control system. Sidney Hook, a prominent conservative intellectual, wrote a short book
dismissing the fears spread by Cold War fiction. “
The probability of a mechanical failure in the defense system,” Hook wrote in
The Fail-Safe Fallacy
, “is now being held at so low a level that no accurate quantitative estimate of the probability . . . can be made.” Senator Paul H. Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois praised the book and condemned the misconception that America's nuclear deterrent was a grave danger to mankind, not “
the Communist determination to dominate the world.” And Roswell L. Gilpatric, one of McNamara's closest advisers, assured readers of the
New York Times
that any malfunction in the command-and-control system would make it “‘
fail safe,' not unsafe.” Gilpatric also suggested that permissive action links would thwart the sort of unauthorized attack depicted in
Dr. Strangelove.

In fact, there was nothing to stop the crew of a B-52 from dropping its hydrogen bombs on Moscow—except, perhaps, Soviet air defenses. The Go code was simply an order from SAC headquarters to launch an attack; bombers on airborne alert didn't have any technological means to stop a renegade crew. General Power had waged a successful bureaucratic battle against the installation of permissive action links in SAC's weapons. All of its bombs and warheads were still unlocked, as were those of the Navy. The effort to prevent the unauthorized use of nuclear weapons remained largely administrative. In 1962, SAC had created a Human Reliability Program to screen airmen and officers for psychological problems, drug use, and alcohol abuse. And a version of the two-man rule was introduced in its bombers. A second arming switch was added to the cockpit. In order to use a nuclear weapon, both the ready/safe switch and the new “war/peace switch” had to be activated by two different crew members. Despite these measures, an unauthorized attack on the Soviet Union was still possible. But the discipline, training, and esprit de corps of SAC's bomber crews made it unlikely.

As a plot device in novels and films, an airborne alert gone wrong could
provide suspense. A stray bomber would need at least an hour to reach its target, enough time to tell a good story. But one of the real advantages of SAC's bombers was that their crews could be contacted by radio and told to abort their missions, if the Go code had somehow been sent by mistake. Ballistic missiles posed a far greater risk of unauthorized or accidental use. Once they were launched, there was no calling them back. Missiles being flight-tested usually had a command destruct mechanism—explosives attached to the airframe that could be set off by remote control, destroying the missile if it flew off course. SAC refused to add that capability to operational missiles, out of a concern that the Soviets might find a way to detonate them all, midflight. And for similar reasons, SAC opposed any system that required a code to enable the launch of Minuteman missiles. “
The very existence of the lock capability,” General Power argued, “would create a fail-disable potential for knowledgeable agents to ‘dud' the entire Minuteman force.”

After examining the launch procedures proposed for the Minuteman,
John H. Rubel—who supervised strategic weapon research and development at the Pentagon—didn't worry about the missiles being duds. He worried about an entire squadron of them being launched by a pair of rogue officers. A Minuteman squadron consisted of fifty missiles, overseen by five crews housed underground at separate locations. Only two of the crews were necessary to launch the missiles—making it more difficult for the Soviet Union to disable a squadron by attacking its control centers. When both of the officers in two different centers turned their keys and “voted” for a launch, all of the squadron's missiles would lift off. There was no way to fire just a few of them: it was all or nothing. And a launch order couldn't be rescinded. After the keys were turned, fifty missiles would leave their silos, either simultaneously or in a “ripple order,” one after another.

By requiring a launch vote from at least two crews, SAC hoped to prevent the launch of Minuteman missiles without proper authorization. But Rubel was surprised to learn that SAC had also installed a timer in every Minuteman control center. The timer had been added as a backup—an automated vote to launch—in case four of the five crews were killed during a surprise attack. When the officers in a control center turned their launch
keys, the timer started. And when the timer ran out, if no message had been received from the other control centers, approving or opposing the order to launch, all the missiles lifted off. The problem with the timer, Rubel soon realized, was that a crew could set it to six hours, six minutes—or zero. In the wrong hands, it gave a couple of SAC officers the ability to wipe out fifty cities in the Soviet Union. An unauthorized attack on that scale, a classified history of the Minuteman program noted, would be “
an accident for which a later apology might be inadequate.”

In 1959, Rubel sent a copy of
Red Alert
to every member of the Pentagon's Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles. He thought that the Minuteman launch control system needed much stronger safeguards against unauthorized use, as well as some sort of “stop-launch” capability. The committee agreed with him. But the Air Force fought against any modifications of the system, arguing that they would be too expensive and that the Minuteman, America's most important land-based missile, was “
completely safe.”

Rubel's concerns were taken seriously by the Kennedy administration, and
an independent panel was appointed to investigate them. The panel found that Minuteman missiles were indeed vulnerable to unauthorized use—and that an entire squadron could be launched, accidentally, by
a series of minor power surges. Although that sort of mistake was unlikely, it was possible. Two young SAC officers might be sitting innocently at their consoles, on an ordinary day, their launch keys locked away in the safe, as small fluctuations in the electricity entering the control center silently mimicked the pulses required by the launch switch. The crew would be caught by surprise when fifty Minuteman missiles suddenly left the ground.

“
I was scared shitless,” said an engineer who worked on the original Minuteman launch control system. “The technology was never to be trusted.” Secretary of Defense McNamara insisted that a number of command-and-control changes be made to the Minuteman, and
the redesign cost about $840 million. The new system eliminated the timer, allowed missiles to be launched individually, and prevented minor power surges from causing an accidental launch. Minuteman missiles became operational for the first time during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
To err on the
side of safety, the explosive bolts were removed from their silo doors. If one of the missiles were launched by accident, it would explode inside the silo. And if President Kennedy decided to launch one, some poor enlisted man would have to kneel over the silo door, reconnect the explosive bolts by hand, and leave the area in a hurry.

•   •   •

W
HILE
THE
D
EPARTMENT
OF
D
EFENSE
publicly dismissed fears of an accidental nuclear war, the Cuban Missile Crisis left McNamara more concerned than ever about the danger. At a national security meeting a few months after the crisis, he opposed allowing anyone other than the president of the United States to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. A secret memorandum on the meeting summarized his views:

Mr. McNamara went on to describe the possibilities which existed for an accidental launch of a missile against the USSR. He pointed out that we were spending millions of dollars to reduce this problem, but we could not assure ourselves completely against such a contingency. Moreover he suggested that it was unlikely that the Soviets were spending as much as we were in attempting to narrow the limits of possible accidental launch. . . . He went on to describe the crashes of US aircraft, one in North Carolina and one in Texas, where, by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted. He concluded that despite our best efforts, the possibility of an accidental nuclear explosion still existed.

The supreme commander of NATO should not be granted any type of predelegation “
to fire nuclear weapons,” McNamara argued—and even the president should never order their use without knowing all the details of a nuclear explosion, whether it was deliberate or accidental, “
whether or not it was Soviet launched, how large, where it occurred, etc.” Secretary of State Rusk agreed with McNamara. But their views did not prevail. The head of NATO retained the authority to use nuclear weapons, during an emergency, on the condition that “
every effort to contact the President must be made.”