by Mike Jenne
Blue Gemini was by no means a casual endeavor. To elude notice by even the most diligent of outside auditors, its massive budget was carefully dispersed across hundreds of “black” funding accounts. Tew’s expertise in managing exceedingly complex projects was indispensable to the effort, but although he was handpicked by Schriever, Tew was an odd candidate to lead such an expansive but clandestine space program. Unlike virtually all of his Air Force contemporaries, Tew would never willingly kneel at the altar of nuclear weapons.
Within AFSC, Tew was renowned for his vocal opposition to McNamara’s apocalyptic vision of Mutually Assured Destruction. As the leader of the nation’s ballistic missile program, Schriever was effectively the premier architect of Armageddon, so his choice of the misfit Tew was a mystery to the few AFSC insiders who even knew about Blue Gemini. But despite Schriever’s own affinity for nukes, he was still a practical man who recognized talent.
As a professional warrior, the very notion of wholesale atomic annihilation sickened Tew. To him, war was an endeavor only for armed combatants. Despite this, he was also a realist; he knew that the modern world had grown so complex that it was necessary to strike deep within an opponent’s territories to destroy their means and will to make war. His years of strategic bombing, of pulverizing factories and rail yards from the air, had hammered that lesson home.
He also understood that there was no practical means to escape collateral damage, but to him it was entirely unacceptable that cities—teeming with thousands, if not millions, of defenseless civilians—could be targeted for destruction. He could not imagine any legitimate justification for such inhuman actions as the Dresden fire bombings, where thousands of civilians had been burned alive. While he hadn’t flown in the Dresden raids, since he had been a POW at the time, he had participated in the Hamburg bombings in 1943. The firestorm sparked by the Hamburg raids rivaled Dresden, virtually leveling the city and killing an estimated 50,000 civilians in the process. To this day, he could not speak of it.
To a limited extent, Tew understood Truman’s decision to subject Japan to the Bomb. The campaign to capture the Japanese mainland would have cost over a million lives on both sides, so it was absolutely essential to break the national will of the Japanese people. But at what cost? Could it have been done in some other manner? Couldn’t a simple demonstration of the Bomb, detonated on an isolated and uninhabited island, have sufficed? And was it absolutely necessary to drop Fat Man on Nagasaki after Little Boy had been unleashed on Hiroshima?
Oddly, Tew had been rather ambivalent about the Bomb until he was stationed in Japan just before the onset of the Korean War. After all, it was extremely likely that he would have been dispatched to the Far East at the end of the War, to participate in the final push on Japan, so there was a strong possibility that the Bomb may have saved his life, just as it had theoretically saved millions of other lives.
What changed Tew’s mind was a chance encounter with a Japanese-American orphan when he visited the ruins of Hiroshima in 1949. The half-white teenager—Jimmy Hara—was the son of a Marine embassy guard and a Japanese housekeeper, born ten years before Pearl Harbor. After the War started in the Pacific, he endured countless beatings as a brutal consequence of his mixed heritage. Shunned by his embarrassed grandparents, cast out into the streets, he and his mother wandered the fringes of Tokyo, barely eking out an existence.
After his mother had succumbed to typhoid, a kindly aunt and uncle took him to live in the town of Kumano-cho, roughly eight miles southeast of Hiroshima. He was there when Little Boy decimated the city on the morning of August 6, 1945. Before dawn on the day of the Bomb, Jimmy’s aunt had walked into the city to buy food at a market. Hours after their world had been permanently altered, even as buildings still burned and the earth smoldered, Jimmy and his anguished uncle ventured into the rubble to find her. Oblivious to latent radiation and other hazards, they searched for two days, futilely probing the depths of the man-made Hell, but found no trace of her. Like so many others, she had just ceased to exist.
As the years passed, because he was marginally fluent in English, Jimmy became sort of a tour guide to the scores of American servicemen who made a pilgrimage to Hiroshima to witness and study the aftermath of the Bomb. Four years later, retracing his steps with Tew and several other visitors, he calmly described a surreal landscape, the scorched and broken remains of a once-thriving city, populated by the dead and not-yet-dead.
Tew’s stalwart aversion to the Bomb solidified as he listened to Jimmy describe that fateful day and the terrible days that followed. Before coming to Hiroshima, Tew had read the official transcripts and documents that detailed the effects of atomic weapons, but the boy’s vivid accounts could not be neatly packaged into the sterile terminology of a field manual.
Although Tew could not condone the wanton sacrifice of civilians, he was most appalled by the incomprehensible suffering of those left living after the Bomb. To him, the radii around Ground Zero were not unlike Dante’s Circles of Hell, with each successive concentric ring yielding its own unique brand of suffering. Obviously, right in the vicinity of Ground Zero, most victims were instantly and completely vaporized. Moving slightly away from the detonation, others were mercifully rendered into desiccated lumps of charcoal. At the outermost Circles, thousands of victims were spared from immediate death but were exposed to doses of radiation that would doom them to die years later of leukemia, cancer or other insidious diseases.
For everything that Jimmy told him, one gruesome vignette remained indelibly lodged in Tew’s mind. As Jimmy and his uncle approached within a mile of the city’s center, they happened upon several children aimlessly wandering in shock. Miraculously, they were alive, but their faces—along with every square centimeter of uncovered skin on their bodies—were gone. Scraps of shredded skin dangled from their raw flesh, like a flimsy curtain ripped to tatters by a hurricane’s winds. Their mouths were agape, as if they were shrieking in agony, but they made no sound. Judging by their relative size, Jimmy guessed that they were roughly his age or slightly older; on any other day, they probably would have spat on him and pummeled him with sticks or their fists. For a brief moment, he actually laughed at their suffering. The high and mighty Japanese children who had tormented him for being an illegitimate half-breed were now without their precious yellow skins.
Later, Tew discovered the cause of the children’s horrific dilemma. They were unfortunate enough to have been trapped in one of those Circles of Hell where they initially survived, at least for a day or so, but where their very identities were stripped away in the blink of an eye. How? A nuclear detonation sends out an intense pulse of thermal energy which literally causes the subcutaneous fat layer of exposed skin to spontaneously boil and explode; the bomb’s shock wave, following just fractions of a second later, instantly peels the loosened skin from the underlying muscle tissue.
Tew shuddered as he recalled the horrific image of the children deprived of their faces, but perhaps even more terrifying was Jimmy’s emotionless recollection, told in matter-of-fact monotone. As he spoke, the boy’s eyes were blank and dry, as if his soul had been excised and he had no more tears to cry.
Thankfully, Jimmy Hara’s story didn’t end there in the ruins of Hiroshima. After learning the details of his lineage, Tew had arranged for him to obtain American citizenship and join the Air Force, where he was currently a counter-intelligence agent assigned to Blue Gemini. Although he had regained at least a portion of his humanity, he was still a spooky character. A lethal master of jiujutsu, learned from his uncle, he was ultra-patriotic; as someone raised as a stranger in a strange land, he appreciated the United States as few naturally born Americans could.
Blinking, Tew opened his eyes and returned from the shattered ruins of Hiroshima. He cringed at the dire thought that these nuclear monstrosities could soon be overhead, if they weren’t already there. He thought of Schriever’s decision that brought him here; instead of overlooking Tew’s disdain for nuclea
r weapons, Schriever may have chosen him because of it. After all, who could possibly be more perfect to lead such a concerted effort to swat Soviet nukes from orbit?
Tew yawned broadly. Although his peculiar sleeping pattern was a long-engrained habit, he still hovered on the verge of exhaustion most of the time. Right now, he wanted no more than to retreat to his cot to sleep for a few hours, perhaps to grant himself the indescribable luxury of dozing until the dawn broke over Ohio. But despite that temptation, he clearly understood the strategic implications of Blue Gemini and the potential consequences if he failed. And so he stayed at his task, conscious that his vigilance might be the vital bulwark to save America from nuclear annihilation.
Tyuratam Cosmodrome, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR
3:12 a.m., Friday, April 19, 1968
Just as he had countless times before, Rustam Abdirov emerged from the concrete blockhouse and strolled toward the launch pad where the experimental rocket waited. He had inadvertently left his favorite slide rule—a precision-crafted Dietzgen, confiscated from a German rocket engineer at the end of the War—in the bunker and had momentarily left the pad to retrieve it.
The test wasn’t going well, and technicians raced to replace key components so the rocket would be ready for liftoff. Ignoring even the most fundamental of safety precautions, the rocket was still fully fueled even as it was hastily repaired. Worse yet, scores of men milled around at the base of the rocket as the work was underway.
Abdirov had not taken more than a few steps when the rocket inexplicably exploded, igniting an immense inferno that engulfed the pad and most of the men gathered there.
He instinctively threw up his hands to guard his face. The blast’s shock wave slammed him like a massive fist, literally picking him up off the ground and pitching him backwards over a hundred meters, into a retaining pond brimming with filthy, stagnant water.
Initially knocked unconscious, he almost drowned, but came to in time to claw his way out of the pool. Flailing with his arms, he struggled to the surface, only to discover that the air was choked with dense toxic smoke. Preferring a death by drowning rather than asphyxiation from the noxious fumes, he dunked his head back under. For whatever reason, even as he was on the verge of death, he groped for his treasured slide rule, but could not find it. He held his breath until his lungs burned and then came up again. The flames had subsided somewhat, but the air was still vile. Sputtering, wiping gunk and mud from his eyes, he crawled out of the pond and over the earthen revetment that encircled it.
Wracked with pain from a fractured pelvis and a broken arm, he heard agonized screaming. He pushed himself to his feet, ran into the flames—twice—and retrieved two badly burned men who had somehow survived the initial conflagration. As he emerged from the flames, he fell to his knees. The exposed skin of his head crackled with burning fuel; as he swatted at his face to abate the flames, he felt a foreign object protruding from his right eye socket—and realized that it was his missing slide rule.
Drenched in sweat and trembling, Abdirov was jolted awake from the horrific nightmare. When his heart stopped pounding in his chest, he pushed the bed covers aside, switched on the table lamp, and sat up. A Lieutenant General in the RSVN—Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces—he nightly worked until he was absolutely exhausted, simply because he dreaded the thought of falling asleep. Every night, almost without fail, not long after he drifted into slumber, his subconscious would deliver him to a place that he was loath to visit.
He slowly climbed out of bed and went to the mirror to remind himself that his recurring dream was not a vivid figment of his imagination, but a regurgitation of painful memories of an event that had changed him forever. He grimaced as he gazed at his ghastly reflection. Simply stated, he looked like a creature from a Western horror movie. Most of the right side of his head was encased in crinkled pink scar tissue. His right eye and right ear were gone, and he was missing two fingers on his right hand and three on his left. And there was more: his pajamas, tailored from white silk, concealed scar tissue that covered over fifty percent of his body. He didn’t wear silk out of extravagance, but rather because it was the only fabric that was even somewhat tolerable when worn against his badly damaged flesh.
Abdirov’s appalling visage was a reminder of the constant hazards inherent in working around rockets. He had sustained his scars in 1960, when he barely survived the infamous Nedelin catastrophe at Tyuratam, a disaster of such horrific magnitude and tragic consequences that it was still a tightly held state secret. In a freak accident, the second stage of an experimental R-16 ICBM prematurely ignited on the launch pad, spawning a massive fire that incinerated Abdirov’s boss, Chief Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, Commander in Chief of the RSVN, and nearly a hundred others. The R-16 was one of the first Soviet rockets fueled with a potent hypergolic concoction—nicknamed “Devil’s Venom” for its dangerously corrosive properties—much like the self-igniting mixture that Americans successfully used in their Titan II ICBMs.
Had he not gone back to the blockhouse for his slide rule, Abdirov would have also been spontaneously immolated like Nedelin and the other unfortunates. In the aftermath, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev dispatched none other than Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev to investigate the incident.
After the incident, Abdirov languished for nearly three years in a Moscow burn ward. In the first days, he screamed as nurses used stiff-bristled brushes to scour away charred tissue. As the weeks and months passed, he suffered through endless rounds of agonizing surgery to excise dead flesh and graft on new. He stubbornly remained alive, but if he had it all to do over, knowing the torture that he would eventually endure, he would have walked back into the flames to die with Nedelin and the others.
After emerging from the hospital and returning to the RSVN, his courageous actions were quietly hailed by those aware of the disaster. Although a closely held document read only by a few, the official report of Brezhnev’s investigation acknowledged Abdirov as a significant hero of the incident, and noted that he would not have suffered his terrible burns had he not chosen to run into the flames—not once, but twice—to rescue others. Brezhnev personally commented that Abdirov’s selfless actions reflected that he was the epitome of a true Soviet officer. In a secret ceremony in the Kremlin, Abdirov was formally honored as a Hero of the Soviet Union, receiving his gold star from none other than Nikita Sergeyevich himself, only a few months before Khrushchev was ousted by his rivals.
Abdirov was offered a substantial pension, by Soviet standards, and a comfortable place to retire. Although enticed by the proposition, he fought to remain in military service. Personally backed by Brezhnev, who had since succeeded Khrushchev as the First Secretary of the Communist Party, he was successful in his bid. He made up for lost time by swiftly shooting up the ranks as he excelled in one difficult assignment after another. His contemporaries would have been grateful if he just went away—permanently—to live out his remaining years, but he refused to be shunted into seclusion.
Anxious to make excuses for their own shortcomings, Abdirov’s detractors quietly claimed that his meteoric progression could be at least partially attributed to the fact that he was not distracted by a wife and family. To some extent, they were probably right; in his younger years, Abdirov had put his career ahead of all else, and it was highly unlikely that he would find a bride in his current state. Even he conceded that only a blind woman could share his bed. To make matters worse, he joked, he couldn’t marry a Muslim—even though he hailed from the Kazakh Republic, where submission to Allah was at least tacitly accepted by the Soviet regime—because he had received so many grafts of pigskin that he was now at least part swine.
In a sense, Abdirov also effectively became an orphan on that terrible day. His close relationship with Nedelin had dated back over two decades. Abdirov had served in the Soviet Army since the mid-thirties, starting his military career as a cavalry officer, since as a Kazakh he had practically grown up on a horse. As comfortable as he wa
s atop a steed, Abdirov also possessed solid mathematical skills, and found himself—much to his chagrin—drafted into the horse artillery. Rising up through the ranks of the artillery, he became involved in the design and testing of missiles at the outset of World War II, and eventually became a favored protégé of Nedelin, a renowned artillery officer who ultimately rose to become one of the prominent leaders in rocket development.
But his loyal allegiance to his mentor also proved to be highly detrimental. As Nedelin’s acolyte, Abdirov had no allies within the powerful aerospace design bureaus. This was very significant, because within the Soviet system, the design and development of rockets and related hardware was confined to a very insular world of aerospace design bureaus. As the Commander in Chief of the RSVN, Nedelin personally directed the actions of the bureaus, so Abdirov found himself bearing orders to the bureaus on behalf of his boss.
While the development of military technology was certainly critical, all the design bureaus desperately vied for the most prestigious prize of all, control of the manned spaceflight program. The premier Korolev design bureau—OKB-1—headed by the brilliant and all-powerful “Chief Designer,” Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, held sway over manned space flight. Abdirov fervently believed that the design bureaus should be working toward a common goal instead of their own interests, and counseled Nedelin to compel them toward cooperation.
Now, Abdirov wanted to join the crusade toward manned spaceflight, but his path was inextricably blocked. With his mentor gone, Korolev and his bureau wanted nothing to do with him, and Korolev’s main rival, Vladimir Chelomei, ostracized him as well. Certainly, when Nedelin was still around, they were compelled to curry favor with his emissary, but now that the Chief Marshal was dead, Abdirov was all but a nonperson.