Fail-Safe

by Eugene Burdick

  “The picture will now come to maximum close-up,” the words on the bottom of the screen said.

  General Black always enjoyed this particular process. It was marvelous, intricate, and it was dizzying. He a!ways bad to remind himself that the Samos pictures were being transmitted instantly. What he saw was happening halfway around the world a split second previously. By a combination of processes done at Colorado Springs and in the Samos III itself the picture grew as if the Sanios III had turned and were rushing toward the earth.

  The picture took on definition with a speed that was terrifying. Water suddenly showed in the great river and the next second it glinted in the tributaries. Villages popped into view as small rectangles and an instant later individual houses could be identified. Huge forests came into focus and then copses and then single trees. The picture centered on a cleared area pocked with the unmistakable circles of rocket silos. Scattered behind revetments were trucks. Casually, for this was only a drill, the picture bore down on one of the trucks. The rest of the ICBM reservation was squeezed out of the picture.

  The technician operating Samos #15 was pushing the equipment to its limit. It was a marvel to observe, an almost unbelievable scientific spectacle. It sent Black’s mind spinning ahead into the future. He had heard scientists discussing the ultimate possibilities of such long-range technical espionage. One day there would be more than a vague outline of a truck, its details would be clear and sharp. Black’s thoughts, captivated by the prospect, filled in the fuzzy picture now on the screen before him. Two men were leaning against the truck. They wore leather boots, Red Army uniforms, and their caps were pushed back on their heads. One of them held out something to the other. The definition became sharper, zoomed in closer, focused on the exchange. Gradually the huge screen was filled by four enormous hands, hair on the back of them, the fingernails dirty. Two fingers of one of the hands held a picture of a girl. The details were contrasty, not clear, but she had a round Slavic face, was smiling, and had her head twisted to one side in a coquettish manner. At this point the picture on the Big Board dissolved and with it Black’s fanciful enlargement.

  The truck be had just seen on the Big Board was real, though, Black reminded himself. Its driver was completely unaware that his mission had been caught by a camera 800 miles in the sky, transmitted 8,000 miles to an information center, and then projected another 2,500 miles and viewed on this screen with an interval of no more than one second between the action and its depiction on the screen. For the first time the Samos III, its marvelous camera and its future portent, made Black restless. It seemed somehow an invasion of privacy, this subtle and soundless observation of anything on the surface of the world. Blackie, he said to himself, for a man who supported the U-2 flights, all versions of the Samos and a dozen other ventures, you are getting soft. He turned to Stark, determined to make small talk.

  “What do you hear about Wilcox?” Black asked.

  “The usual stuff, but he pulled a smartie two days ago,” Stark said and laughed. “Someone sent him a two-page memo for circulation to the entire staff. Wilcox stuffed a sixty-page essay by Emerson between the two pages and approved it for circulation. It came back all duly initialed, but not one damn comment or question about contents. Wilcox called everyone in for a chewing-out session. They say the blood was ankle deep before he finished.”

  Black laughed. The story fitted well with his mood. Wilcox sounded like he might liven things up a little. No wonder Stark was a little on edge over today’s briefing session.

  Black glanced idly around the room. It was filling up now. One group had gathered at the opposite side of the room around the red telephone which connected directly to the President at all times. It was like a fire-insurance policy. Your main hope was that it never would be used.

  Black walked toward the long conference table in the center of the room. It was an impressive slab, as if the designers had tried to combine a large board of directors’ table with a university graduate-seminar table.

  Around the long table, neatly placed, were high-backed leather armchairs. In front of each chair was a precise blotter layout, a fat, large new scratch pad, and two pencils, precisely arranged and guarding either side of the scratch pad. At intervals, in the center of the table, were sterling thermos jugs and official tumblers. Beyond the table on the other side along the wall was “the reservation.” There were two rows of slightly less impressive armchairs, carefully designed to show that their occupants, while significant, were the less important staff assistants. The barrier was invisible. Someone could, if he wanted and there was a vacancy, sit at the big table. But no “reservation Indian” ever made that mistake. He might hunger to sit at that table, but he would know precisely when he was qualified.

  By now the room contained about twenty men, over half of them in uniform. They had a sameness of look: graying, middle-aged, ruddy, powerful-looking men. Did men look this way because they were the power types, Black wondered, or were they chosen for power because they looked this way? Black watched Stark making his way from group to group. Stark was obviously pleased today, pleased with himself. He was assured that Black would not bring up disturbing doubts about credibility. It would be a Groteschele-Stark day. These briefings, necessary and valuable, were becoming increasingly unpleasant to Black. The disagreements were difficult to state, but once stated they had to be pursued and they were impossible to resolve. Much as Black loved SAC and the men he worked with in and out of the Air Force, for five years he had had the growing sensation that “things” were slipping out of control.

  The calculations of Soviet intention and capability had Started as a straightforward and direct exercise in logic. But at some point the logic had become so intricate, so many elements were involved, so many novelties flowed into the system, that for Black it had blurred into a surrealistic world.

  We matched and surpassed their capability and then guessed at their intentions. They then ran a series of tests and surpassed our capability and guessed at our intentions. And then we guessed what they guessed we were guessing. Meanwhile years ago each side had developed the capacity to destroy the other even after suffering a massive surprise first strike.

  Black often had the sensation in a meeting that they had all lost contact with reality, were free-floating in some exotic world of their own. It was not just SAC or the Pentagon, Black thought. It was the White House, the Kremlin, 10 Downing Street, De Gaulle, Red China, pacifists, wild-eyed right-wingers, smug leftwingers, NATO, UN, bland television commentators, marchers for peace, demonstrators for war—everyone. They were caught in a fantastic web of logic and illogic, fact and emotion. No one seemed completely whole. No one could talk complete sense. And everyone was quite sincere.

  Black remembered when the sense of unreality had started. It was a few years before when Groteschele had brought up the Kahn example of what would happen if’ an American Polaris submarine accidentally discharged a missile at us. The submarine commander would have time to make radio contact and explain what had happened so that SAC would know the missile was an accident. Everyone at the briefing had nodded, thinking that ended the discussion. But Groteschele bad persisted. The Soviet would detect the missile in flight, would know it was our accident and would detect the explosion. But they would worry about our reaction. How could they be sure that we knew it was our own missile? Might they not fear our “retaliation” and, prompted by this fear, attack us in the confusion? So might not the best Soviet tactic be to strike at once? Indeed, might not the best strategy for each side, even if both knew it was an accident and both knew whose accident, be to strike at once?

  They had, Black thought, slipped by that one cheaply. They had decided that all possible steps should be taken to assure against accidental discharge of a missile.

  Maybe he should resign his commission. It hit him again. It had been coming to a head within him for a long time. Curious, he thought: he could live with his conscience and with his beliefs in almost any other
arm of the service but the one he loved. But SAC and especially his own role in SAC (the link he furnished between operations and the Strategy Analysis and Evaluation Section) made his private thoughts seem like rank heresy. But why did it torment him so much more than it did the others? From the outside they looked happy in their jobs, but who could tell? He supposed he looked as untroubled as they.

  A stir on the other side of the room caught his eye. There he was. Groteschele. It was as if he had opened a door from last night’s party and walked right into the Pentagon: the same confident, aggressive, jutting thrust. The same stride. In company with Groteschele came Wilcox, Carruthers, the Navy Chief of Staff, and Allen, of the National Security Council.

  Everyone in the room had observed the entry of the big brass at the same time. The room “knew” it. An instant before it had been a room with one personality, relaxed and informal. Now it had become a room which had snapped to attention in all sorts of little ways hard to detect. It was the effort everyone was making to seem to behave as if the brass were not there that made the difference.

  Groteschele proceeded to the head end of the long conference table. As he did so everyone else began finding seats around the table. It was clear that the Secretary of Defense was either not coming or would arrive late and had sent word for the briefing to start.

  Stark handled the opening remarks easily and deftly. Then Groteschele began talking in his positive, slightly patronizing way. He announced the subject: accidental war. The subject had been cropping up in the news lately. There had been a few articles in magazines. The military people had, of course, been working on the problem for years and in detail.

  “In the old days, six months ago,” Groteschele said with a chuckle, “most of the talk about accidental war was what we now call the madman theory.” He went on about the possibility of SAC squadron commanders going berserk and trying to save the world from the Communists.

  It hadn’t been a joke, as Black knew well. Groteschele’s reference was to the special psychological screening system which the Air Force had inaugurated in 1962 to assure that no “mentally unfit persons” would have contact with the preparation or discharge of atomic weapons. Black had been among the first within the Air Force to propose and support the program. He was not sure even now that the problem could be disposed of summarily. The men in SAC were trained for destruction. They were “preprogrammed” to attack Russia.

  “What frightened us was not so much the madman problem,” Groteschele was saying, “but its opposite: at the last moment someone might refuse to drop the bombs. A single act of revulsion could foil the whole policy of graduated deterrents. Say, for example, that some PFC at a transmitter simply decided not to carry out the order for an attack. That could ruin us right there.”

  It was behavior in a showdown that the whole SAC training program was designed to prepare for. The tests, the indoctrinations, the training-all were designed to convert normal American boys into automatons.

  “Automatons. That’s what some of our critics call them,” Groteschele said evenly. “But they are also patriots and they are courageous. And haven’t we always honored the Marines simply because they did exactly what they were ordered to do?”

  To hell with Stark, Black thought.

  “Professor Groteschele, one moment,” he said. “Isn’t it true that the ‘go’ reflex, the will to attack, is so deeply indoctrinated in our SAC people that even those who pass our psychological screening are more likely to err on the side of ‘go,’ rather than on withdrawal?”

  “At one point, General Black, maybe,” Groteschele said. He controlled his impatience with the interruption. “But we analyzed the possibility and built in some protections. Even if you had a madman in command of a wing-even, General, if he had several colleagues who shared his madness, they could not carry out their will.”

  Groteschele glanced at SecArmy. Wilcox was bent forward attentively. Groteschele then launched into a description of the elaborate checks, decoding systems, and other devices designed to assure that war could not happen through human error.

  “It is impossible, quite impossible,” Groteschele concluded. “The statistical odds are so remote that it is impossible. Or as impossible as anything can be. The ‘go’ process will not operate until the President orders it. Even then the Positive Control routine requires a double check.”

  Black hesitated. He knew Groteschele wanted to move on. But he also knew that Groteschele was skirting a real problem.

  “What if the President went mad?” Black asked abruptly. “He is a man under considerable pressure.”

  Black, as some in the room knew, was the single person there who could, because of his friendship with the President, raise such a question. But Groteschele, with a pang of envy, also knew that Black would have said it even if he had never seen the President.

  The shock in the room’ was palpable. The SecArmy frowned at Black. Groteschele glanced quickly at the SecArmy, then around the table. He knew he did not have to answer Black directly.

  “Then we would have trouble,” Groteschele said with a laugh. He shrugged, held his hands up as if imploring for common sense. “But it is not likely.”

  The room relaxed. Black was still unsatisfied, but he knew when to stop. Still, he thought, it was possible. Woodrow Wilson had been President for two years after a stroke. High officials have cracked under the strain. Forrestal had jumped out a window. It was possible for the President to come down with paranoid schizophrenia, Black thought. Not likely, for American politics ruthlessly screened out the unstable personalities, but a possibility.

  Maybe, Black thought, the whole damned game is taking me apart. He felt the diminutive terror start somewhere in his guts. It was something to do with the

  Dream. At sessions like this the individual stripes of hide were sliced off his skin, each one leaving him less intact, more pained. And yet, he thought desperately, this is where I belong, where I am needed, where I can contribute. He allowed his mind to wander, searching for the moment when the real face of the matador would be revealed, for the instant when the real sword would slice in between his shoulders and end his indecision.

  Groteschele was now proceeding to the possibilities of machine error. This was new stuff. Nobody really knew anything about it. Groteschele was always the statistical type. it was odd how flesh-and-blood human events disappeared into numbers. Groteschele was explaining that of course there was a remote mathematical possibility of machine error. He had calculated the error. In any year the odds were 50 to 1 against accidental war. This, Black remembered, had already been made public in the Hershon Report. But the report was several years old and the people at Ohio State who put it together made it dear that they did not have access to confidential information. The situation was much worse than they had reported because everything had gotten more complicated.

  “Putting it another way,” said Groteschele, “and with the present rate of alerts and the present computerized equipment, the odds are such that one accidental war might occur in fifty years.”

  “Does not the increasing intricacy of the electronic systems and the greater speed of missiles make that figure worse each year?” Black asked. He had in mind the public warning, several years previously, by Admiral L D. Coates, the Chief of Naval Research, which admitted what all insiders knew: electronic gear was becoming so complex that it was outstripping the ability of men to control it; complexity of new generations of machines was increasing the danger of accidents faster than safeguards could be devised. The statement had never been countered but simply ignored.

  Groteschele paused, smiled tolerantly at Black. The SecArmy leaned toward one of his aides and asked a question. The aide looked at Black, smiled as he talked quickly in SecArmy’s ear. Black knew what he was saying: General Black is the professional heretic.

  “In theory, yes,” Groteschele said. “But we completely pretest every component and every system is checked by another. The chance of war by mechanical fa
ilure is next to zero.”

  This was not true, but Black did not choose to contest it. He forced his anger down and deliberately looked at the Big Board. It was like a vast moving mosaic, decorative rather than functional. Blips appeared, grew bright, traveled short distances, then vanished. The Big Board was not taken seriously until the light over it indicated that someone had decided to come to some degree of alert.

  In how many places in the world, Black mused, were there just such strategy boards run by just such computer systems, picking up, identifying, and discarding just such radar signals? Our big operation at Omaha, of course. Probably at least one other standby “Omaha” at some other part of the country. Then there was the President’s bomb shelter: probably another computerized strategy board layout there. Maybe there was more than one Presidential bomb shelter. Maybe one at Camp David, or the summer White House, or who knows where else.

  Then, in addition, he knew there was always, every minute of every day, a converted KC-135 aloft: a miniatore, emergency “Omaha,” in case everything else should blow. Probably another one on some super aircraft carrier somewhere. Still another on one of the nuclear submarines. How many others? Several in England, certainly, France, perhaps, and West Germany. Russia? Yes, surely there would be almost as many as there are in the United States.

  Black knew that four KC-135s were reserved exclusively for Presidential use as a flying command post in case of emergency. Since 1962 they had been scattered about the country so that the Preskknt was never far from one. Whenever the President flew overseas one of these planes was quietly and unobtrusively included in his escort.