An airman came out of the tower onto the concrete apron and saluted and spoke to Colonel Sims. The wing commander nodded and followed the airman inside. Forrester listened to Bill Ryan’s idle talk with half his mind and flicked his eyes over the others. Top Spode had something on his mind and that was disturbing because Forrester needed Top alert today. Moskowitz beside him was, dwarfed—neat, gray, small, potbellied; the Professor had been awarded the Medal of Freedom for his work on the Titan missile program but he looked as if he’d be at home in a quarter-half poker game or in a bar with a schooner of draft beer. He had the knobby knuckles of a longshoreman.
Bill Ryan was saying, “You’ll have to go the rest of the way without me. I’ve got to stick around the admin block. This job keeps me strapped to a watch and I get the feeling we’re overdue for a surprise alert inspection. They spring them on us all the time to test our reaction time—we don’t want to get caught with our planes down, do we?” Ryan smiled without pleasure; he seemed irritable.
Forrester said, “We’ll try to keep out of your hair.”
“Sure. Bud Sims will take you around—the birds are really his bailiwick. I’m just the landlord. Major Chandler here has authority to clear you into any area you want to see. Professor, good to meet you.” Ryan shook hands with Moskowitz and Spode, batted Forrester’s arm and went inside the tower. Colonel Sims was corning through and held the door for him and they exchanged a few words in the doorway, and when Sims came out onto the apron his face was screwed up into a mild perplexity.
“Gentlemen, I’m very sorry to cop out on you but I’ve just had a call from a hospital in Yuma—my wife was down there looking over some real estate and she’s been taken ill. I’m sure it’s nothing serious, but I’m going to fly down there.”
“Of course,” Forrester said. “I’m terribly sorry to hear that—I hope she’ll be all right.”
“I’m sure she will. But she’ll want me there. My deputy will be taking over my duties until I get back. I’m afraid Colonel Winslow can’t run the store and show you folks around at the same time but I’ve told him to cooperate with you to the best of his ability. Major Chandler here will guide you wherever you want to go. I’m sorry to duck out this way but they’re warming up a plane for me down there right now. Gentlemen?”
There was a quick round of handshaking and Sims went, walking fast, a tall man who wore the uniform as if he’d been born to pose for a recruiting poster.
Jaime Spode’s outdoor eyes were crinkled into suspicious slits. “They’re dropping off like flies. If I didn’t know better I’d think we had bad breath.”
Major Chandler uttered an uneasy laugh. “It must look like that. But I’ll do my best to fill in for the Colonel.” Chandler’s eyes were covered by huge curved mirror-lensed motorcycle sunglasses and he wore gray Air Force coveralls, cut very tight, with a dozen zipper pockets. Forrester thought he must have spit-shined his boots with lighter fluid and a nylon stocking: the toes had a wicked shine and altogether the meaty-shouldered chief of base security gave a sinister impression of latent violence. The polished ones were often the pathologically sadistic ones.
Standing rigidly with his chest out like an aquatic bird’s, Chandler said, “At your service, gentlemen. Where to?”
“The launch complex, I think,” Forrester said and Chandler took them downstairs through the admin tower and whistled up a gray USAF Chevrolet, For Official Use Only. Forrester got in back with Moskowitz; Spode slid into the middle of the front seat between the Major and the driver, and Chandler turned with his left arm over the back of the seat and said, “We’ll be bumping into a little more confusion than you’d normally find out there today. We’ve got a standardization-and-evaluation team down here from Z.I. Command to inspect our combat capability. I’d like to avoid getting underfoot—if they trip over us they’ll score points against the base.”
Moskowitz’ eyes twinkled and Forrester nodded; Chandler was going by the book but he wasn’t going to go out of his way to make things easy.
A B-52 bomber circled high overhead with vapor trails spreading from its eight jets and Major Chandler kept up a running monologue thick with jargon that both explained and obscured the installations they drove past. The road went through a guarded gate in the security fence and across absolutely empty desert—greasewood, cholla, manzanita, ocotillo, paloverde, sand. A narrow side road ran off to the right and Chandler said, “One of our ABM silos, about a mile over there.”
“Sure,” Moskowitz said, “to defend our investment.”
“To defend our strike capability, Professor. We can’t just leave the birds wide open for the Reds to knock out with their first strike.”
“I know, but it’s still a strange world in which people are defenseless and only strategic weapons can be protected.”
“We could protect everybody”—Chandler’s face twisted toward Forrester—“if Congress gave us the money to build a full-scale ABM system.”
Forrester said, “I’m not the department of sympathetic cars, Major. That’s over in Congressman Breckenyear’s office.”
Chandler’s face made no visible change. Forrester wished the man would take off those infernal sunglasses. Chandler said, “War travels fast these days, Senator—we’re just keeping up with the Ivans.”
“Or are they the ones who’re just keeping up with us?”
“You rather let them get ahead of us, Senator?”
“Ahead and behind are words that don’t mean much when you’ve already passed the finish line. I’m talking about overkill now.”
“I know. I read your speech in the paper.”
“And you think I’m wrong.”
“Senator, we don’t keep moving, they’ll move right ahead and figure out ways to neutralize our birds. Then it’s not overkill any more, it’s We Lose. God knows we don’t want a thermonuclear war but maybe the real danger isn’t in going to the brink of war but in shrinking from the brink of war.”
It was a speech he’d heard Woody Guest make once and hearing it from Chandler’s lips made him smile slightly. “You have a lot of faith in technology, don’t you, Major?”
“Kept us alive this long, sir.”
The door to the concrete dugout was marked simply WING HQ and it was guarded by armed sentries in white helmets and a KMS machine which compared the thumbprints on their ID cards with their own thumbs. Chandler said, “Be pretty tough for a saboteur to get in past this, Senator, if that was on your mind.”
“I see you have seen my speeches.” Forrester smiled his political smile.
“Yes, sir. It usually pays.”
“Know your enemy.”
Chandler slid his card into the machine and pressed his thumb to the scanner. “An unauthorized visitor would have an easier time getting into Fort Knox. The cards are magnetically coded like a printed circuit sealed inside the plastic. It took a direct order from the Secretary of Defense to get them for you and they’ll be destroyed the minute you leave the base. Well then, in we go—after you, gentlemen?”
The nerve center reminded Forrester of an airport controllers’ console room: tiers of screens above a vast curved desk surface. Chandler kept up a running commentary: “If one of my inspectors spots any of these boys goofing off just once his ass is grass.… I guess you already know we’ve got all kinds of redundancies and duplications so it’s impossible for a crazy to go off his nut and shoot off a bird. The President has to push the button. Nobody else. We’ve got double-check, verification procedures and the whole procedure can be stopped at any point right up to ignition by a countermand from the President or NORAD. It’s a whole lot easier to stop it than it is to start it.”
Jaime Spode was looking at everything and Forrester knew the information was being absorbed into Spode’s mental computer, sorted for weaknesses, filed for later recovery.
Professor Moskowitz watched with a detached expression and when he turned toward Chandler he said, “You’re talking about a preignitiont countermand.
On the old birds we had self-destruct mechanisms but I understand they’ve eliminated them on these. What if the missiles have already been launched? Can you still stop them?”
“No. Once they’re in the air they’re gone. Unless you can shoot them down and that’s damned unlikely. If we had a radio signal to stop them the Reds could use it to neutralize our strike—you can’t keep a radio code private forever. I mean, everything’s got to be tested and the Reds watch us with everything they’ve got whenever we test a bird. If we used open radio transmission to control them they’d pick up the signals and work out the codes and frequencies. Can’t be done, Professor.”
Forrester said, “You’ve never tested the missiles with live warheads.”
“No sir, but we’ve tested the warheads underground and we’ve tested the birds with dummy warheads. Everything works, Senator, honest to God, I give you my word.”
They went through low tunnels, heels ringing on the echoing concrete; they wore hard hats and flashed their ID badges at the checkpoints. The low roar of ventilator blowers was an oppressive rumble Chandler led them on to a circular balcony and when Forrester looked up and down all he could see was the massive polished skin of the ICBM and the confusion of machinery around it—pipes, cables, platforms, wheels, ladders, lights, joints, cylinders, gears, devices.
Chandler delivered himself of his set-piece speech: “This is one of our eighteen Minuteman Threes, a multiple-warhead three-stage missile with a tri-gyroscope guidance system like the ones that put the Apollo ships down on pinpoints on the moon. After she’s launched the first and second stages burn out. They’re decoupled by explosive connectors and they fall free. When the third stage ignites it accelerates the payload to orbital speed. She’s up at a ballistic altitude zenith of about eight hundred miles and once she’s up there above the atmosphere she sheds her ceramic heat shield to lighten weight. Then she coasts in orbit until her micro-circuit computer, which is programmed with the target information, fires the retro-rockets and brings her down toward the first target.
“You’ve got three warhead reentry vehicles—RV’s—triggered by altitude fuses. If the target’s a city they’ll detonate high above the target to maximize the area of destruction. A twenty-megaton blast at altitude will destroy brick buildings in a circle maybe fifteen miles in diameter. But if your target’s an enemy missile base your RV has to get in low to dig the enemy’s missiles right out of their hard silos. That means impact inside four hundred yards of the silo. That kind of accuracy requires meticulous programming and that’s why the ground-support systems for each one of these silos are as big and complicated as the inside of an aircraft carrier.”
Forrester listened with half his mind; when Chandler stopped for breath Forrester changed the subject: “And what if you don’t get your Phaetons, Major?”
“In other words why can’t we make do with what we’ve already got here? Senator, how much do you know about the Russian SS-9?”
“Not very much.”
“The SS-9’s a lot bigger than this bird here: big enough to carry five times as many warheads as our bird. So far they’ve deployed about four hundred SS-9S, which is enough to target our whole deployment of one thousand Minutemen, assuming they’ve got a good enough delivery system to knock out our hard silos. Naturally we hope they don’t—we hope they’ll leave enough unhit for us to retaliate and cripple them. Our clout depends on convincing the Reds we can penetrate our warheads into their turf no matter what they do. The object of the game is to keep them convinced we can inflict unacceptable damage on them. If they line up enough SS-9s to kill our whole system they don’t have to worry about that any more unless we’re lining up something against them—like the Phaeton Three.”
Moskowitz said, “It’s funny the way you Air Force people ignore the Navy.”
“Professor, there’s a limit to the size and speed of a bird you can launch from a submarine. We’ve got maybe thirty nuclear submarines deployed on station at any given time, and they may have a few hundred missiles and warheads among them but all the Reds have to do is knock out those thirty submarines to destroy the whole Polaris-Poseidon system. The Navy puts a lot of store in mobility and concealment but I wouldn’t bet my ass the Reds couldn’t attack all our subs simultaneously—they’ve got a sophisticated sub-tracking system and you can be damn sure they know where every one of our subs is right now. Let’s don’t forget they don’t need to make a direct hit to knock out a sub. Set off a nuke anywhere in the neighborhood and you make a shock wave that’ll take any submarine out of action. But even supposing they did miss two or three of our subs we’d still be talking about thirty-ton missiles with a maximum range of maybe twenty-five hundred miles. A submarine-launched bird is a lot easier for their ABM defenses to handle.
“No,” Chandler concluded, “the only real knockout punch we’ve got is this Minuteman Three and if they deploy enough SS-9s to cancel these birds out, then where’s our deterrent against a preemptive first strike?”
Moskowitz wore a bemused little smile that implied he didn’t believe a word of it. Forrester couldn’t get away from the notion he was listening to a computer. Chandler’s pronouncements were set pieces right out of the little propaganda booklets printed up for Public Information Officers. To Forrester’s mind they were all infected with a tragic blindness: the generals talked only to other generals; they parroted 1950 slogans of deterrents, weapons gaps, the Communist monolith. The machinery had grown in sophistication; the commanders had not. I have seen the futre, and it does not work. He ran his eyes up the dismal great column of the missile, gleaming dully in the antiseptic artificial light, and he heard Moskowitz begin to speak in his wry classroom voice.
“Of course your whole position goes into a cocked hat, Major, the minute you admit our early-warning system will give us enough time to launch these missiles before any incoming ICBMs have a chance to knock out the silos. The Russians haven’t devised any methods yet of sneaking an SS-9 across twenty thousand miles of airspace without its being seen.”
“They’re working on it,” Chandler said, and when Forrester looked at him he couldn’t see any sign that the man was joking.
Top Spode had been wandering along the platform poking his brown beak into niches. When he came by Forrester he said, “Like to have another look at the ROG command post on our way back.”
When they emerged from the ROG access tunnel a fat Tech Sergeant intercepted them, red-faced and out-of-breath as a volunteer fireman: there was a telephone call for Mr. Spode; would he mind taking it over here?
Major Chandler excused himself and went across the thrumming cavern to have a word with an officer at the far end of the Iconorama and Forrester said to Moskowitz, “Do you see how young these men are? We’ve given these things to children to play with.”
“I don’t know,” Moskowitz said. “Did you ever read Poe’s essay on simpletons and bluffing in ‘The Purloined Letter’? It ought to be required reading in Washington. The thesis is, when you’re trying to guess your opponent’s next move your best chance is to identify your own reasoning intellect with your opponent’s. If you value his intellect too high or too low, you’ll guess wrong. Now it takes a high scale of intelligence to identify deliberately with an opponent’s cunning, but the next best choice is to pick somebody whose intellect is the equivalent of the opponent’s. Most likely to think the same way, you see?”
“Professor, you’re way beyond my limits of subtlety.”
“All I’m saying is, the intellectual level of Russian leadership is third-rate and we may actually have a better chance if our own leadership isn’t vastly superior to theirs. Kennedy was a brainy man but he made the mistake of assuming Khrushchev was too intelligent to try planting missiles in Cuba: we almost had a war over that. But if they know our leadership is just as dumb and trigger-happy as theirs they won’t try to run dangerous bluffs on us. Maybe we need to keep it on that level, because we know what happens if we don’t.
“Pu
t yourself five miles away from a one-megaton blast. The force would destroy most of the concrete and brick buildings inside that radius and earthquake-effect and the wind-drag pressures behind the blast would knock down most of what was left; anything left standing would probably be melted by the heat of the fireball. If you were still alive somehow, your clothes would burst into flame and you’d suffer flash burns and retinal burns—the kind that killed half the victims at Hiroshima and blinded thousands more. Your eardrums might burst, your lungs might be ruptured, you might be killed or maimed by flyipg bricks and glass. Everything around you might burst into flame and if you weren’t burned to death, you might suffer heat stroke or carbon-monoxide poisoning. Oxygen depletion and extreme heat can cause respiratory damage from inhalation of radiated heat. Then there’s the whole gamut of radiation-fallout effects on human biology—beta and gamma and X rays, always bearing in mind China and Russia use very dirty bombs. The effects aren’t pretty. Quick death, slow death, permanent injuries of every degree—ulcerated cutaneous lesions, burns, internal destruction, blood and tissue deterioration, genetic mutation, cancer, fibrosis, disintegration of bone marrow.… Senator, you know what we’re trying to fight. It’s what Lapp called the technological imperative: if a weapon can be built it will be built. These gadgets have become a central object of worship in our time and you can’t take a society’s idols away from it. Sometimes I think you and I are just lying down on the tracks.”
“No,” Forrester said. “We’re going to lick them this time. I’m not a bad in-fighter, Professor. And we’re gathering support every day.”
“But we’ve got this damned technological clock ticking away—maybe it’s too late to stop it. Each side keeps goading the other into a first-strike psychosis; there’s always the temptation to turn a so-called retaliatory weapon into a first-strike weapon. Remove the other side’s deterrent by knocking out their missiles before they can be fired. Leave them helpless to hit back. It’s the old Why-Not-Victory idea—feebleminded cretins. This Phaeton system—what’Il they do with all the lethal radioactive wastes from the spent elements? It’ll multiply the permanent storage problem out of sight. And the risk of accident? A radioactive leak, a chemical reaction, some stupid little component that got passed through quality control when the inspector was yawning? We’ve always had those risks but when you multiply them a thousandfold you go right off the crap table. Speaking purely as a mathematician I’d say the odds stink.”
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