by M. Dobbs
"Bail out! Bail out!" yelled Lieutenant Dean Rands, the lead F-102 pilot.
But Maultsby refused to panic. He lowered his wing flaps and shut down his idling J-57 engine, as it was giving him too much thrust. Everything looked good, except he was approaching the runway with more airspeed than he wanted. As he passed fifteen feet over the truck, he deployed a parachute out of the back of the plane and kicked the rudder back and forth to slow down. Without a mobile officer racing along the runway behind him, it was difficult to judge his altitude precisely. The U-2 "did not seem to want to stop flying, even without an engine." It finally did the required belly flop onto the runway, skidded along the ice, and came to rest in the deep snow.
Maultsby sat trancelike in his ejector seat, unable to think or move. He was physically and emotionally drained. After sitting numb for several minutes, he was startled by a knock on the canopy. He looked up to see "a bearded giant" wearing a government-issue parka.
"Welcome to Kotzebue," said the giant, a huge grin on his face.
"You don't know how glad I am to be here," was all Maultsby could manage in return.
He tried to climb out of the cockpit, but his legs were numb. Seeing that he was in difficulty, his new friend "put his hands under my armpits and gently lifted me out of the cockpit and placed me on the snow as if I had been a rag doll." Radar station personnel and half a dozen Eskimos gathered round to greet the unexpected visitor. The two F-102s bid farewell by buzzing the airfield and rocking their wings.
The bearded giant helped Maultsby off with his helmet. A blast of bitterly cold air hit him in the face, momentarily reviving him and reminding him of the one piece of business he needed to take care of before anything else. He excused himself from the welcoming committee and shuffled laboriously to the other side of the U-2, where he emptied his bursting bladder into a bank of virgin snow.
CHAPTER TWELVE
"Run Like Hell"
2:27 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (12:27 P.M. MONTANA)
The loss of a U-2 over the Soviet Union was only the latest in a string of safety nightmares haunting the Strategic Air Command. Nuclear bombers had gone astray, reconnaissance planes had been shot down, bombs had been dropped accidentally, and early warning systems had given false alerts of a Soviet attack. An accidental nuclear war was not just the stuff of popular fiction. It was within the realm of actual possibility.
SAC already had more planes and missiles and warheads on alert than at any time in its history. One-eighth of its B-52 heavy bomber force ― a total of sixty airplanes ― was in the air at all times, ready to attack targets throughout the Soviet bloc. Another 183 B-47s had been dispersed to thirty-three civilian and military airfields around the United States, ready to take off in fifteen minutes. A total of 136 long-range missiles were on alert. A "Cuba Fact Sheet" supplied to the president by his military aide reported that General Power had been instructed to mobilize his "remaining force of 804 airplanes and 44 missiles as of 10 a.m. this morning." By midday Sunday, SAC would have a "cocked" ― meaning "ready to fire" ― nuclear strike force of 162 missiles and 1,200 airplanes carrying 2,858 nuclear warheads.
The more planes and missiles were placed on alert, the more stressed the system became. Even as the Maultsby drama unfolded, senior SAC officers worried about the possibility of an unauthorized launch of the revolutionary new Minuteman missile from underground silos in Montana. Unlike previous liquid-fueled missiles, which required a launch preparation time of at least fifteen minutes, the solid-fueled Minuteman could blast out of its hole in just thirty-two seconds. Deployment of the missile system had been accelerated because of the crisis, but nuclear safety officers were now concerned that too many corners might have been cut.
The decision to activate the first flight of ten Minuteman missiles had been taken soon after Kennedy went on television to announce the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Power wanted every available missile system targeted on the Soviet Union. He called the commander of the 341st Strategic Missile Wing, Colonel Burton C. Andrus, Jr., to find out if the Minuteman could be made ready for firing immediately, circumventing approved safety procedures.
In normal times, firing a Minuteman required four electronic "votes" from two teams of officers, located in two different launch control centers, twenty miles apart. The problem was that only one control center was complete. Contractors were still pouring concrete at the second center, which would not be operational for several weeks. But the "last thing" Andrus wanted to tell his short-fused boss was, "It can't be done." He knew that Power was "trying frantically to upstage LeMay's great record as CINCSAC." He would find a way to "kluge the system."
A World War II pilot, Andrus had inherited some of the theatricality of his father, the former commander of the military prison at Nuremberg and jailer of Nazi war criminals like Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess. Burt Andrus, Sr., decked himself out with a riding whip and shellacked green helmet, telling friends, "I hate these Krauts." Burt Junior liked to jump up on a desk at the missile maintenance hangar at Malmstrom Air Force Base in his blue flight suit and growl at scared-to-death enlisted men: "Khrushchev knows we're after his ass." He walked around with three radio-telephones and told reporters that he could never be more than six rings from a phone, in case the president needed him. He was believed to be the only missile base commander with a license to drive the sixty-four-feet-long tractor-trailers that dragged the missiles out to their silos.
After serving in SAC almost since its inception, Andrus was "convinced that the weapons system had not yet been invented that professional airmen could not outsmart." The solution was to jerry-rig the apparatus so that the "critical part" of the shoebox-sized electronic control panel from the second launch center was plugged directly into the circuitry of the first launch center. All that was required was a screwdriver, some rapid rewiring, and a little Yankee ingenuity.
Over the next three days, Andrus roamed the back roads of Montana in his blue station wagon, pushing his crews to get the missiles ready to fly. Leaving Malmstrom Air Force Base on the edge of Great Falls, he drove up U.S. 87 into the heavily forested Little Belt Mountains. After about twenty miles, the road forked. Route 87 continued in a southeasterly direction to the Alpha One launch control center, six miles further on. Route 89 led south for another twenty miles across a mountain pass to the once booming silver-mining town of Monarch. A few miles beyond Monarch, on the right-hand side of the road, a plain link fence enclosed a couple of acres of barren land and some drab slabs of concrete. This was silo Alpha Six. Hidden beneath the concrete, protected by an 80-ton steel door, lay America's first fully automated, push-button missile.
There was something very impersonal about the Minuteman. The earlier generation of liquid-fueled missiles had required constant maintenance and observation. Missile crews were in attendance as they were fueled, lifted up out of their silos, and fired. The Minuteman was operated by remote control by crews ten, twenty, even thirty miles away. To make the missiles invulnerable to attack, they were stored in hardened silos, at least five miles apart from each other. It was impossible to destroy more than one Minuteman with a single nuclear weapon. If the Kremlin attempted a first strike, the American missiles could be launched while the Soviet missiles were still in the air. There were plans to install some eight hundred Minuteman missiles, scattered across Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. Kennedy referred to them as his "ace in the hole."
Operating a Minuteman was a bit like getting a new car without being given the keys, according to the lieutenant colonel in charge of Alpha flight. "You can't drive it. You have no sense of ownership. With a liquid missile, you can run it up out of the silo on the elevator, fuel it, go into the countdown. We can't touch a thing." Sitting in their bunkers a hundred feet below the ground, the launch officers could not even see the Minuteman blast out of its silo. The closest contact they had with the enemy was a playful sign that boasted: "Worldwide delivery in 30 minutes or less ― or your next one is free." Nuc
lear apocalypse was as mundane as delivering pizza.
By Friday afternoon, Andrus and his chief technician were ready to bring the first Minuteman on line. Viewed from outside, the Alpha One control center resembled a modest ranch home on a prairie. Once inside, the missileers descended by elevator to a small command post, known as "the capsule." As they ran through the final checklist, Andrus told the technician that he would keep his thumb on the shutdown switch. "If I don't get a light, or if you hear anything, see anything, or even smell something that seems irregular, yell, and I'll shut her down," he instructed.
"If we seemed nervous, it was because we were," he later acknowledged. "Being only ninety-nine percent sure that you can't have an inadvertent launch is not good enough when you are looking at the possibility of starting World War III."
The test went well enough for the first Minuteman to be declared operational. Several hours later, the secretary of the Air Force, Eugene Zuckert, reported to the president that three Minuteman missiles "have had warheads installed and have been assigned targets in the USSR."
In fact, the system was plagued by problems. There were only two telephone lines linking the launch control center to the support facility at Malmstrom Air Force Base. Communications failed repeatedly. Workmen from Boeing wandered through the supposedly secure site, making last-minute fixes. Lack of equipment "required many workarounds." Individual missiles were taken on and off alert as technicians tried to iron out the problems, which included short circuits and miswirings.
Having encouraged Andrus to deploy his missiles as soon as possible, his superiors at SAC headquarters began to have second thoughts. They had sufficient safety concerns about the jerry-rigged launch procedures to insist on a jerry-rigged safety precaution. To prevent an accidental launch, they ordered manual disabling of the heavy steel lids on top of the silos. If a missile was fired without authorization, it would blow up in its silo. Before a Minuteman could be launched, a maintenance crew had to reconnect the explosive charges that blew the lid away prior to liftoff. The SAC instruction outlining the new procedures was sent at 2:27 p.m. Washington time on Saturday, twenty-four hours after Alpha Six first became "operational."
The technicians who had the job of reconnecting the lids on the silos referred to themselves, only half-jokingly, as the "suicide squad." If alerted by launch officers that the missile was about to be fired, they had to plug the cable back in, jump into a waiting pickup truck, and "run like hell." They calculated that they had roughly three minutes to get out of the way before the big white bird exploded out of the ground. If they weren't killed by the outgoing American Minuteman, there was a good chance they would be targeted by an incoming Soviet R-16.
Two B-52 Stratofortresses lifted off from Carswell Air Force Base in Texas, powered by eight Pratt & Whitney jet engines. Nicknamed BUFF, for "Big Ugly Fat Fucker," each plane carried a six-man crew, plus a third pilot to allow the original pilots to grab some rest during the twenty-four-hour flight. Loaded in the bomb bay of each plane were four Mark-28 thermonuclear devices, SAC's primary Cold War weapon. Measuring some fourteen feet long by two feet across, the Mark-28 resembled a giant cigar tube, and carried an explosive charge of 1.1 megatons, seventy times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The crews had spent hours studying their targets in the Soviet Union, bombing techniques, and escape maneuvers. They were "ready to go to war." But they were also resigned to the fact that "it was unlikely that we would accomplish the whole mission." A nuclear exchange would probably mean that "the world as we knew it would be at an end." And they understood that their own bomber bases back in the United States were prime targets for a Soviet nuclear attack. Before leaving, many of the men had told their wives to pack up the family station wagon, fill it with gas, and head for the most remote place they could find if the crisis took a turn for the worse.
The B-52s headed out across the Atlantic on the southern route of the Chrome Dome airborne alert. Other BUFFs flew northward around Canada, circling the fringes of the Arctic Ocean. One pair of B-52s kept a constant watch over the ballistic missile early warning radar station in Thule, Greenland, just in case the Soviets bombed it. The number of bombers on airborne alert had increased fivefold with the declaration of DEFCONs-3 and 2. This was SAC's way of signaling Moscow that it was ready and able to deliver the "full retaliatory response" threatened by the president in his television address on Monday evening.
The bombers were refueled as they overflew Gibraltar and southern Spain on their way to the Mediterranean, and again on the way back. The traffic was so heavy that it was not uncommon to see six BUFFs being refueled at the same time. The refueling operation took about thirty minutes, with the B-52 hanging on to the boom of the tankers and sucking up every last drop of gas. As they headed toward their forward patrol zones, the Chrome Dome planes were often "spoofed" by Soviet electronic warfare experts. A mysterious radio station identifying itself as "Ocean Station Bravo" routinely requested flight information from Air Force planes off Greenland. The BUFF pilots were trained to ignore unauthenticated calls, but the jamming could be a nuisance. On Saturday afternoon, tanker pilots reported radio interference from a trawler off the southern coast of Spain as they flew in tandem with a pair of B-52s.
After skirting Spain and the southern coast of Italy, the BUFFs made a left turn as they approached Crete and headed up the Adriatic coast of Greece and Yugoslavia. This was their turnaround point. They were still an hour's flying time from the Soviet border, two hours from Moscow. They monitored their high-frequency radio receivers for "emergency action messages" from Omaha. If the president wanted them to bomb the Soviet Union, SAC would broadcast a coded order in the form of a jumbled six-character string of letters and numbers. At least two crew members had to authenticate the message from large black code books stored next to the pilot.
The B-52s would make their approach into Russia flying low to avoid enemy radars, just as LeMay's bombers had done against Japan during World War II. Some of the older B-47s carried weapons that had to be physically "armed" by a crew member, who crawled into the bomb bay to insert a rod into the core of the nuclear device. But the arming process was automatic on the BUFF.
The pilots had studied the ballistics of their weapon, and knew when to release it so that it would be "tossed" onto the target. The weapon was fitted with a delay fuse to allow the BUFF, flying at 400 knots, to escape the fireball and blast. The targeting was much less accurate than the test shots in the Pacific, which were conducted under near-perfect conditions. The pilots did not have sophisticated radar systems to guide the bombs to their targets. There was no "Kitty" back at SAC headquarters to make complicated ballistic calculations in the middle of a mission. They were on their own. To make up for the lack of accuracy, SAC insisted that the same targets be attacked multiple times to guarantee destruction.
The targets on the SIOP list included missile sites, airfields, defense plants, and command-and-control centers like the Kremlin, in the heart of Moscow, a city with a population of more than 6 million. The plan listed six "target complexes" in the Soviet capital, to be covered by twenty-three nuclear weapons, nearly four weapons per target. That worked out at around 25 million tons of TNT, at least five times the total amount of explosives used in World War II.
In theory, all the targets had some kind of "strategic" significance. But there was one notable exception. In case the BUFF failed to reach its target, and the crew was killed or incapacitated by a Soviet missile, the plane was equipped with a mechanism that provided for "automatic release of prearmed weapons" over enemy territory. Rather than "waste" the nuclear weapons altogether, SAC planners preferred to trigger an automatic detonation wherever the bomber happened to go into a final nose-dive. The macabre device was known to B-52 crews as the "dead man's switch."
3:02 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (2:02 P.M. HAVANA)
Cuban national radio, Radio Reloj, broke into its afternoon programs just at 3:02 p.m. Washington time to ann
ounce that "unidentified war planes" had "penetrated deep into the national soil" that morning, but had been chased away by antiaircraft fire. "Cuban air forces are in a state of maximum alert, maximum fighting deployment, and are ready to defend the sacred rights of the motherland."
Around the time the government statement was being broadcast, the convoy of vehicles carrying nuclear warheads from Bejucal arrived at Calabazar de Sagua, 160 miles east of Havana. The special storage facilities for the warheads were still incomplete. Concrete foundations had been poured at one site, but work had not yet begun on assembling the ribbed aluminum arches that had been transported from Russia. At the second site, construction troops had just installed a chimneylike vent in the end wall and were waterproofing the roof. But the interior of the bunker was unfinished, and climate control equipment had not been installed. Since there was nowhere to properly store the warheads, they were kept in the humpback vans near regimental headquarters, about a mile from the launch positions. Technicians checked out the warheads inside the vans.
The missile site at Calabazar was tucked away amid palm trees and sugarcane fields between some low hills. The hills were no more than 150 feet high, but offered some protection to the north and east. There were four separate launch positions, several hundred yards apart. A launch stand consisted of a heavy steel table on which the missile was placed for firing, with a large hole in the center and a cone-shaped flame deflector beneath. A tractor-trailer waited near each launch stand to winch the missile up to the vertical position. The missiles themselves were stored in nearby tents.
The Calabazar site was one of two missile batteries under Colonel Ivan Sidorov, commander of the 79th missile regiment. A second battery, with four more launch positions, was located twelve miles away, closer to Sagua la Grande. These sites were more exposed to American attack than the sites in western Pinar del Rio, which were protected by wooded mountains. But they had one huge advantage, which explains why they were given top priority: they were some fifty miles closer to the heavily populated eastern seaboard of the United States than the sites around San Cristobal. Soviet missiles could not hit New York from San Cristobal, but the metropolis of 8 million people was just within range of missiles fired from the Sagua la Grande area. The maximum range of the R-12 was 1,292 miles; the distance between the Calabazar missile site and Manhattan was 1,290 miles.