Fail Safe (7 page)

The door was labeled TACTICAL CONThOL. Colonel Cascio opened the door and the two men walked in. The room was served by a sergeant who even as he snapped to attention continued to let his -eyes roam over the controls and lights and mechanisms which filled the room. The central machine in the room was a long lean console with a bank of switches running down its spine. The room hummed, a faint, rather pleasant hum, like beehives heard at a great distance on a warm day. On a table in front of the console was a desk with a single telephone on it.

"All command posts to Condition Red, Sergeant," General Bogan said.

"All command posts to Condition Red," the sergeant repeated.

With an expert practiced gesture he ran his hand down the row of thirty switches and beneath each of them a light instantly glowed red. Identical green

lights above each switch went off.

"Verification?" Colonel Cascio said, looking at the sergeant.

General Bogan felt a flash of confidence as Colonel Cascio spoke. His aide knew every drill, procedure, maneuver, and manual of every room which served the War Room, and it pleased the General. Partly, he thought, because it confirmed his judgment of men, partly because Colonel Cascio's pure and simple ability was reassuring.

The sergeant wheeled and looked at the face of another machine. The machine did two things: it verified that the long central console was operating properly and it also confirmed that each of the command posts of SAC throughout the world was actually "cut in" and had received the "Condition Red." It was merely another precaution to make sure that no mechanical failure could occur.

"All command posts cut in and tactical control circuits operative," the sergeant said.

General Bogan picked up the phone on the table. When he spoke his voice would be transmitted over a network of transmitters on at least three frequencies to each of the SAC command posts.

"This is General Bogan at Omaha," General Bogan said. "I am ordering a Condition Red, not a 'go'; please confirm."

This was the "Condition Red" system. It was the step between alarm and action. It was the bringing of a massive network of men and machines to a condition of readiness. Fragments of the system would, in fact, be active, but the enormous bulk would merely come to a tense ready. Long ago the SAC researchers had learned that "color alerts" were confusing. For veterans of World War II "Red" was ominous. For others it simply meant a casual stop at a casual traffic signal.

Everyone in the widespread system knew that the ultimate alert simply meant a riding of tension, enormous preparation, an intricate series of precautionary steps. The moment that the switches were tripped and the words were spoken, a mechanism went into operation which was such a blending of the delicate and the gross, the individual and the chorus, that it was an orchestration.

As General Bogan listened to the individual duty officers confirm both the mechanical and spoken order he remembered something Colonel Cascio had said months ago about Condition Red.

It's like the start of a 100-yard dash, the colonel had said. Except that you keep coming through "on your marks" and "gets sets" and you hang there with sweat breaking out on your face and every muscle tensed to go . . . and the pistol never cracks, no one ever says

General Bogan never thought of it that way. But then Colonel Cascio had been a sprint star in college, had run the hundred in 9.6. Even now there was a rumor among the enlisted men that he could run the hundred in under 10 seconds. General Bogan had never asked but the colonel looked it; he had a jaguar-lean look about him. He kept in perfect physical shape, but never made a point of it. He never talked of his workouts at the gym, never lectured anyone on obesity or physical fitness. He merely kept himself taut.

When General Bogan finished receipt of the acknowledgments, the Condition Red order was completed. It was initiated by a man, checked by a machine, counterchecked by a man, who was countercounterchecked by another machine, and all men and thachines were carefully watched by other counterpart men and machines. The immense man-machine activated itself, checked itself, coordinated itself, re

strained itself, passed information to itself, carefully filtered incoming information, automatically tripped other systems that were serving it.

At Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, the officer in charge of the Second Air Force put down the telephone after he had confirmed General Bogan's order. He pushed a machine which electronically checked to make sure that General Bogan's verbal order had also been fed into the responsible machine at Omaha. He then pressed a button close to the telephone. At once a scream went up from a score of klaxon horns scattered around the base. A gigantic barracks building transformed itself. An entire wall rolled away. Inside were ten station wagons, each with its exhaust plugged into a special hole in the floor, and each turning over slowly. An enlisted man sat behind each wheeL In the area behind the station wagons there were a snack bar, card tables, television sets, sofas and chairs. The space was occupied by approximately fifty men. The mood thirty seconds ago had been tranquil, an odd mixture of a fraternity house, a BOQ, and a ready room. The moment that the door swung open and the klaxons started to wail, each of the men ran for the predesignated station wagon. With a beautiful practiced precision, the station wagons tore across the vast expanse of the field. Each station wagon's journey ended beside a Vindicator bomber and the crews piled out. The supersonic bombers were already prepared by special warmup crews. They not only warmed up the engines but they kept a constant running check on every part of the intricate bomber. The warm-up crews turned over their planes to men who were perfect strangers, keeping their eyes on the instruments until the last moment, then grinning at the strangers and relinquishing command, swinging out of the plane and into the waiting station wagons.

Two and a half minutes after the alert had sounded the first of the bombers wheeled to the head of the runway and started to whine down the long black asphalt track. Five minutes later all of the "ready" planes were in the air.

The activity at Barksdale did not cease. Instead it speeded up. As the first wave of bombers took off another series of bombers were being warmed up and another series of crews had occupied the barracks. The station wagons were back idling.

The barracks doors had slid shut. Neither the people who had gone through them a few moments ago nor the present occupants knew whether they were at war or repeating a familiar drill. The men appeared to be casual. This was also their inner reality. Anxiety had long ago been burned out.

At some bases the metabolic rate was increased so slightly by the Condition Red that it was hardly perceptible. The crews of jet tankers, for example, walked to their huge aircraft knowing there were only two alternatives: if enemy missiles were already in flight not one of the crewmen would reach his plane, but all Would be crisped black somewhere along their leisurely walk. Their tankers were unprotected and in the open. The other alternative was that they were participating in a drilL The crewmen had long ago given up worrying about the two alternatives. They had learned a lesson: there was nothing they could do to alter anything in any situation.

Some parts of the system were nothing more than great offices. They were part of the "logistic pipeline." Their men and their machines performed a clerkly function, but a necessary one. They made sure that everyone in the operation had adequate supplies of everything: chewing gum, one million tons of jet fuel, tiny needles in plastic containers which had a smear of

poison on the tip that could kill a man in three seconds, fresh tomatoes, black boxes in infinite variety, tubes, screws, bolts, typewriters, rubber tires, little gray cubes that, soaked in water, expanded into beef steaks, aspirin, morphine syrettes, paper and carbon paper in every size known to man, "canned" jet engines, ready to ship jet engines fresh and tuned, beans both canned and dried, life jackets, codebooks, cigarettes, leather jackets, brandy flasks, comic books, straitjackets, Geiger counters, Demarol pills, death jackets in wood or silk. You name it, we got it, a sleepy and very proud master sergeant said as he looked over his rows of filing cabinets and calculating machines. Around the world a hundred other men like him did the same. . . in confidence, with pride, and without question.

Thousands of sleek fighter planes were being readied but only a few of them were launched. They were loaded behind revetments and in ready rooms and at the ends of runways, poised like polished needles, their wings drooping. Their time would come later.

In all of this vast system there was not a single man who knew for certain what had started the operation. Not a single man knew whether this was a genuine "go alert" or another of the hundreds of practices they had endured. The men were calm. The whole intricate mechanism functioned flawlessly.

The second system that General Bogan had activated was the Gold System. This was different from the gold telephone which connected a handful of policy-making men directly to the White House. This was the global system of missiles. These were the strange new vehicles which were launched by men, but had no living creature aboard them. Once launched, some were guided by men. But others used stars and planets to position themselves, constantly making small alterations in di. rection while moving at a speed of 20,000 miles an

hour. They could not be launched by the men who readied them but only by the man at the very top of the pyramid. Once launched they could not be recalled. And the fact of the launching could not be concealed from the enemy.

The missiles ranged in size from the big bulky stub-nosed strategic missiles weighing hundreds of tons down to the light-weight jeweled devices for tactical operations.

The work of readying the giant missiles was complex and time-consuming. Missiles like the Atlas and the Titan began to give off weird clouds as liquid oxygen filled their tanks. The Minute Man and the Polaris, which used solid fuel, began the elaborate countdown which had been done hundreds of times before.

At the Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado there was no visible sign from the air or from the ground that a huge missile operation occupied seventy square miles of Colorado prairie. This was a "hard site" base. Everything was deeply submerged below ground. Only a direct hit could incapacitate one of the three Titan missiles operated from each of the six shock-mounted complexes comprising the Lowry Missile Wing. Even if one of the complexes were put out of commission the other five would remain operational, for no one of the complexes was closer than eighteen miles to another. Inside each submerged missile complex life was completely self-contained, sealed off from the rest of the world. The missile-site base was the enemy's prime target.

The crews of the bases, depending on their literacy and background, expressed it differently: bull's-eye, homer, 4.0, knockout, prime, top priority, ten-strike, No. I, après vows le deluge, horse's ass, the first goodbye. They all meant the same thing. They all knew that the enemy, any enemy, would strike first at these

bases. The cities, the seaports, the ships, the planes, those could come-or go-later.

When one descended into the deeply buried command post and personnel quarters there was the sensation of entering an ingenious collective coffin. Each time might be the last. But no one really believed in either extreme-that it might be the last time, or that it was just another practice. They were emotional neuters. Long ago, under the scrutiny of hard-eyed psychologists, the claustrophobic and the easily panicked men had been weeded out. The rest had been made deliberately nerveless. They were technicians of a greater terror taught to ignore the unalterable end of their work. And, in honest fact, most of them did not believe in their work. It was a gigantic child's play, a marvelous art. It had to be done perfectly each time and it was. But it came to nothing. Hundreds of times they had run through their procedure, checked off the thousands of items, made the hundreds of thousands of reports, tabulated the millions of facts.. - and then stopped just short of climax.

As the Titan started up its massive elevator, and passed between its open 200-ton concrete doors, as its umbilical cord began to fall away in the clouds of chill swirling LOX, each man worked as if war were about to start. But each time, each of the hundreds of previous times, the order had come to stand down. The Titan had been carefully lowered back to its base.

Although an intercontinental ballistic missile requires only twenty minutes to reach a target in Eurasia, hours are required to get a missile ready for its short white-hot trajectory. Scores of men working with a network of computers, calculating, checking, double-checking, all moved at top speed but with great deliberation. The total operation was coordinated by the firemaster. Each missile also had its Fail-Safe point, but

it was a point in the process of checking rather than a point in space. It was a clerical, a calm, a well-ordered Fail-Safe. But it could only proceed to a certain time. Past a precise and well-known "Positive Control" point in the countdown each missile passed into the "terminal sequence." The sequence could only be started at the order of the President of the United States.

The cavernous life, the manufactured secrecy, the incredible pitch of training, made a missile base into a strange experience. The crews lived a buried existence. The end of a tour of duty was like the end of a sentence. As the crewmen were relieved they came out into the air, blinking at the brightness, never certain that they were returning to a normal world of shopping centers and baby-tending and love-making. They had been taught that it was altogether possible that they would emerge into a black incinerated world in which their chief duties would be to avoid deep contamination and then to wage a savage fight for existence.

The details of this fight were deliberately kept ambiguous. To prepare a corps of men for defeat is almost certain to destroy their capacity for retaliation. They knew that in the ultimate situation their mood should be ferocious, but the object of the ferocity was not specified.