by James Philip
The EWO checked his consoles.
“The goddam light just came on!” He complained. “Must be one of the bogeys I’m painting...”
While Nathan Zabriski’s mind only incidentally registered the fact that he and his comrades were probably about to die; he was distracted by other, more mundane considerations. Every big bomb which exploded in the atmosphere generated a highly destructive electromagnet pulse. The Big Cigar’s systems were as hardened as the American tax payer’s hard-earned cash could make them but even so, not a great deal was going to be fully functional in the unlikely event they got home. The B-52 was going to be in the maintenance hangar for weeks, perhaps months having practically every circuit, relay, connection, box, screen and gizmo ripped out and replaced. If, that was, they got home...
As if to emphasise the point his air-to-air repeater showing the surrounding airspace suddenly greyed out.
“Five seconds to Gorky air burst on my mark!”
Given that Nathan did not believe The Big Cigar was yet outside the notional ‘kill circle’ of the Gorky bomb worrying about the state of the bomber’s electronics suite was probably somewhat academic.
“FIVE! FOUR! THREE!”
He took one last gasp of air.
His oxygen mask chafed his face.
“TWO!”
The moment when he killed hundreds of thousands of people he had never met was NOW!
“ONE!”
“Shit!” Muttered the EWO.
His display screens had just died.
“Where were the bandits when that thing went off?” Inquired the pilot laconically.
“Right on top of it, skipper!”
Then blast wave hit The Big Cigar.
Chapter 3
22:59 Hours Zulu (Washington DC Time)
Saturday 27th October 1962
NORAD, Ent Air Force Base, Colorado Springs, Colorado
It was purely by chance that Carl Drinkwater was the duty Burroughs NSCAC – Network Systems Communications Analyst Consultant – that night. Technically, he managed the Burroughs Corporation Systems Integration (Peterson Air Force Base) Network Implementation and Testing Team and very rarely experienced the visceral, febrile, frankly erotic, joy of actually getting up close and dirty to the business end of the vastly expensive state of the art, unbelievably cutting edge computers at the heart of NORAD’s day to day operations. Normally, his deputy, Solomon Kaufmann, would step up to the plate if their ‘A’ Team had a man down but Solomon’s father had died two days ago and Max Calman’s – the duty analyst’s – wife had been rushed into hospital that afternoon. Lena Calman was expecting twins pretty much about now, which meant that Carl Drinkwater was the guy holding the ball on the night the World went mad.
If the World had waited another year or two NORAD’s – the North American Aerospace Defence Command’s – purpose-built nuclear bunker under nearby Cheyenne Mountain would have been fully operational. But globally that was not going to make much difference tonight; it just meant that Carl Drinkwater’s personal chances of surviving Armageddon were somewhat reduced. The basement of the building in which he was working might provide minimal protection from a conventional bombing attack but if the Air Base was targeted by a nuke, well...
Nevertheless, what rational mind could not marvel at the peerless technological wizardry, and untold scientific treasure which had been brought together to create the control room around which the man from the Burroughs Corporation now prowled like a tiger protecting his cubs?
Carl Drinkwater was a balding, bespectacled man who had fallen in love with electronics in his teens. Having served as a humble radar man on destroyers in the Pacific War under the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 – more generally known as the ‘GI Bill’ – he had gone back to college between 1946 and 1948. College had been Caltech, the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, where later he had joked, among fellow believers, that he had found ‘God’. Carl Drinkwater’s bespoke ‘God’ was not affiliated to any particular religion or existential belief system, Carl’s ‘God’ was firmly anchored in the miracles of the physical universe in which the immutable laws of pure mathematics, physics, chemistry and ‘coding’ algorithms would one day explain everything. It was at Caltech that he had encountered most of the friends, colleagues and competitors within the brotherhood of brilliant minds and hard-headed, far-seeing military visionaries which had created and under-pinned the ongoing development of the SAGE system, around which the aerial defence of the North American continent had been set, quite literally, in stone.
Drinkwater had almost become an IBM man but a couple of his old Navy buddies had been headhunted by Burroughs, so he had turned his back on the Big Blue, not knowing that in years to come he would be working hand in glove with the very corporation that the American public regarded as his company’s biggest, most ruthless competitor.
By the late 1950s there were nine great US computing powerhouses: IBM was the biggest by a distance but the other eight were all world players and market leaders; Burroughs, Honeywell, NCR (National Cash Register), General Electric, CDC (Control Data Corporation), RCA (Radio Corporation of America), Sperry, and DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation). By the dawn of the 1960s IBM’s market position had seemed so dominant that computer industry insiders – who knew well enough to leave Burroughs out of the equation – had begun to refer to ‘IBM and the seven dwarves’ to describe the unquestioned ascendancy of International Business Machines in global computing.
However, what the man in the street did not know, but what many in corporate America and elsewhere in the West suspected, and as time went by came to understand and to rue, was that IBM’s and the entire US computer industry’s research, development and core advanced technology production had been, ever since 1945 almost wholly underwritten by the US Department of Defence. The plain fact of the matter was that the mammoth scale of that support in the form of mind-bogglingly lucrative contacts – year after year - coming out of the Pentagon had been so vast, and the political gerrymandering behind the open-ended subsidies priced into those contracts so complex and so gross, that not even IBM could think of ways to spend all the monies that had poured like great rivers in flood into its coffers; hence the Burroughs Corporation, and every one of the other ‘seven dwarves’ had also grown fat on the Government’s largesse via huge, often long-term IBM-managed and or, contracted out projects.
At the heart of the unstoppable, meteoric rise and rise of the American computing industry, remorselessly fuelled with ever more urgency and well, paranoia, during the 1950s as successive Administrations battled to close first the non-existent ‘bomber gap’, the equally imaginary ‘missile gap’ and then to combat the highly embarrassing apparent – and very public – propaganda nightmare of the Soviets gaining a march in the ‘space race’, was SAGE. The acronym SAGE – the letters standing for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment – described a system comprising tens of large, so-called mainframe computers, and all the hard-wired networking equipment and communications infrastructure required to co-ordinate data inputs from all connected radar and related intelligence resources; thereby to enable NORAD to detect, analyse and control its response to a Soviet air attack on the North American continent. SAGE was a rapacious monster which had by the early 1960s sucked up and greedily consumed a budget that made the cost of the Manhattan Project look like loose change, so much petty cash.
It had only cost the American tax payer a piffling $2 billion to build the atomic bomb; IBM had been handed $10 billion – and change - to create and to implement SAGE. Leastways, that was what Carl Drinkwater had been told by his boss; and why would the man lie to him about a thing like that?
Back in 1949 Carl Drinkwater had had no idea what he was actually working on, and nobody at Burroughs with the necessary security clearance had gone out of his way to explain. Burroughs had still been called the Burroughs Adding Machine Company in those days, not becoming a ‘Corporation’ until 1953. However, Carl had know
n the company was working on ‘something big’ and on a number of ‘top secret military projects’; he had not gone to Caltech and discovered the ‘God’ of the natural universe just to spend the rest of his working life designing and building better and bigger ‘adding machines’. What he had not known, and what he would not have believed had he been told back then, was the incredible, breathtaking scope and ambition of SAGE.
When the Headquarters of NORAD at Ent Air Force Base located at Colorado Springs became operational in 1957 it was at the hub of a system of nearly two hundred radar stations and regional ADCs – Air Defence Centres - covering the entire North American continent. Each ADC was a giant four-storey concrete blockhouse with a ground footprint large enough to accommodate a football pitch, hardened against over-blast pressures of up to five pounds per square inch, which accommodated not one but two one hundred and thirty-five ton IBM-Burroughs mainframe computers, and was responsible for its own designated airspace defence sector.
Notwithstanding that SAGE was still a work in progress, since it had become operation in 1957 most of the envisaged two dozen ADCs – great reinforced concrete blockhouses like the one at Ent Air Force Base with identical equipment and communications inputs and outputs – had been completed and the newest additions to the network were in the process of final commissioning. Each individual ADC was a monolithic marvel of American applied science and unambiguous symbols of unrivalled technological might. The two great computers within every one acre-sized four storey concrete ADC each took up 7,500 square feet of floor space, mounted 60,000 vacuum tubes, 175,000 diodes and 13,000 transistors and incorporated a seemingly astonishing 256 kilobytes of magnetic core or, as it was increasingly referred to, Random-Access Memory. Carl Drinkwater found himself staring dreamily into thin air every time he thought about that amount of magnetic core RAM. The British, who had invented the first true electronic programmable computers to break the German Enigma code in the Second World War were still tinkering with improved versions of Colossus, the first 1940s Bletchley Park code-breaking machine; nobody else in the World had anything remotely like SAGE. Each SAGE mainframe computer consumed three megawatts of electricity and ran so fast and got so hot that each ADC kept the second mainframe at immediate readiness to take the load if the first one crashed. Connected to the other ADCs with unbelievably fast state of the art top secret modems – capable of a lightning 1,300 baud data transfer rates – and able to consistently execute up to 75,000 instructions per second, SAGE could literally churn out more data than the ADC had cathode ray tubes on which to display it!
Every time Carl Drinkwater walked into the control room he felt like a character out of a science fiction novel transported in the blink of an eye by some magical time machine into the far distant future. Now and then he allowed himself to speculate – whimsically – if, assuming the current trend towards miniaturisation continued whether in ten or twenty years time a machine with super-advanced transistors and circuit boards might one day be so small, that computers as stunningly capable as the SAGE mainframes would fit into a small room, or even a box on a desk in his office?
God in heaven, science was great!
Carl tried not to daydream when he was at work.
Every output from the other ADCs fed back into the control room at Ent Air Force Base via a hardened network of AT&T - American Telephone & Telegraph – dedicated lines and modems in real time. The air defence controllers manning the serried ranks of gun metal consoles stared constantly at their flickering big round cathode ray tubes. At any time individual displays could be projected singly, or in combination onto the big, backlit wall projections of the North American continent. SAGE had never been just a computer project. To make it work, to actually make it useable research in countless related fields had been lavishly funded, university research departments and American business had been showered with money to investigate obscure areas of apparently ‘pure science’, often with no idea what they were involved in, nor the least inkling what possible purpose their work might serve. Out of the mass of scientific and technological discovery, and the frenzy of development and innovation that SAGE had spurred had emerged vastly improved transistor technologies, new microwave radio applications, countless quantum leaps and breakthroughs in data handling, storage and analysis, and ever better and more efficient means of displaying images, data, and giant strides forward had been achieved in the transmission and reception of television pictures. Some of the fruits from the ongoing development of the core SAGE technologies and from the myriad of related projects, were already fuelling a new American high-tech manufacturing boom. But all that was ephemeral to the mission of NORAD.
SAGE had been created at such immense cost and effort to enable NORAD to command the skies over North America.
At the touch of a button interceptors and missiles could be brought to readiness, launched, and vectored manually or automatically, or via Buck Rogers’s type electronic uplinks directly to aircraft or formations in the field. Air raid warnings could be ordered or cancelled, the vast aerial battlefield intricately managed at ranges of hundreds and thousands of miles. Every air defence sensor and fighting asset available to either the United States or to the Canadian Government was at the finger tips of the men in the NORAD Air Direction Control Room in this single shallow bunker located in the Knob Hill district of Pasadena, Colorado Springs.
However, all was not what it seemed.
Given the gargantuan outlay of national treasure and the priority re-direction of a huge proportion of the United States of America’s intellectual capital to SAGE over a period of well over a decade, a reasonable person might reasonably have entertained with a high level of confidence, that Americans ought to have been able to sleep soundly in their beds that night.
While day by day the crisis over Cuba ratcheted up Strategic Air Command had been at DEFCON 2, Codename ‘FAST PACE’ at six hours notice to deploy and engage the enemy for the last five days.
NORAD had been on a war footing, ready to go to DEFCON 1, ‘COCKED PISTOL’ for over a hundred straight hours.
And then the signal had come through to NORAD like a bolt of lightning.
WAR!
The uplink to Offutt Air Force Base, the Headquarters of Strategic Air Command, near Omaha, Nebraska, was automatically updating NORAD plots, likewise updating the tactical inputs and outputs from the network of ADCs, and fighter and missile bases from Alaska to Florida.
Carl Drinkwater glanced periodically at the central wall projection.
SAGE was undoubtedly the greatest technological marvel of the age; the one unfortunate fly in the ointment was that SAGE was a magnificent technological solution to a pre-space age problem.
And unfortunately it did not actually work.
Having struggled for years to reliably differentiate airborne threats from flocks of migrating geese and other infuriatingly intractable obstacles to its supposed perfection, like thunder clouds, poorly regulated civilian air traffic and myriads of buggy SAGE software generated ‘ghosts’, very soon now everybody in the whole World would know what insiders had known for years.
The moment of truth – that dreadful moment when they had all realised that SAGE was a comprehensively ‘busted flush’ – had been just over five years ago when the Soviets had put a satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit. Even had SAGE been everything its designers and promoters claimed it to be – which it was not - after that day anybody who pretended NORAD could guarantee that American citizens could, or would ever sleep safely in their beds again, was either a fool or a charlatan, in denial, a senior executive of an American computer corporation, or a spokesman for the US Air Force. It was not as if the people ‘in the know’ had not expected that the day would inevitably arrive when the battle for space would begin in earnest. In war the high ground was, is and always will be everything and no ground is higher than space. In retrospect only the politicians had honestly believed that they could buy real safety with billions of dollars of other people’
s money; and nobody in the Air Force or in the boardrooms of corporate America had wanted to be the first to admit that SAGE had no clothes.
Carl Drinkwater sometimes felt he ought to feel a little ashamed of his part in burning through the Government’s limitless stream of ‘free money’. But that would have been dishonest on several levels. Back in the fifties they had all genuinely believed that NORAD, underpinned by SAGE, would probably safeguard the American people at least until the mid-1960s. The CIA ought to have known the Soviets were marching ahead in the space race, and besides, just because the party was over it did not mean that he did not have enormously happy memories of the decade long Mardi Gras.
It had been a Helluva ride!
SAGE and its client, NORAD, were technological achievements without compare that had launched the American computer and electronics industry to a position of total commercial global dominance. For a short period it had also promised to protect the continent from all airborne evil. But that day was gone and the pre-eminence of the United States of America’s high technology was about to count for precisely nothing in the brave new World in which the survivors of the cataclysm would awaken to in the morning.
If NORAD survived long enough it would almost certainly shoot down anything that flew into its airspace; except, that was, the incoming Soviet inter-continental ballistic missiles which had just appeared on the master plot.
Nothing could shoot down the Soviet ICBMs tracking down across the Arctic and the frozen wilderness of northern Canada, remorselessly falling towards the United States borderlands with Canada in unstoppable hypersonic sub-orbital trajectories.
One had already come down somewhere east of Vancouver.
One had hit in the Seattle area.
More were falling towards Chicago, Nebraska, and New England.
It was no swarm of missiles; the Soviets had obviously been caught relatively unprepared. The enemy was retaliating as best he could, launching a counter-strike through the nightmare firestorm that must by now be consuming his heartlands.