The Cold War (37 page)

The final scenario is in two parts: a “world scene,” usually presented docu-mentary-style on a video screen; and the “crisis,” in written form. The world scene—maps, clips of news broadcasts—thrusts the players into the future and lays out the situation in which the crisis is taking place. The staff strives to make the video presentation realistic. “We get support from the Defense Communications Agency, which as a matter of course records all the news programs, and they save that, and we can go and raid those clips,” says a Pentagon briefing officer. “The world scene creates synthetic history to bring participants forward. We project into the future to change history a little bit and to get participants away from current-day policy restraints and let them freewheel.”

Players are assigned to a U.S. Blue Team or a Soviet-bloc Red Team, with a Control Team presenting the scenario—typically, a description of a potential crisis just over the horizon—and running the game. Control might be represented by a military officer from the War Games Control Group or an Ivy League professor of political science.

The game does not move rapidly. It can last four days, from about eight in the morning to about four in the afternoon, with occasional overtime. A typical move takes three or four hours to make and report to Control. “When they begin to address the new situation, time is stopped. The four hours fit on one
tick of the clock,” the briefing officer says. “There are no late-breaking news flashes, no démarche from the Soviets. The reason is because we want them to achieve consensus and discuss the policy aspects of it. We don't want them to prove how they can respond with the right actions.”

Olympiad was different, for its principal players were merely civilians with imaginations. And they played not one game over three or four days, as was usual, but four separate games, each seemingly designed to stimulate extreme reaction among the participants.

Assassinations of world leaders, for example, occur frequently in the Olympiad scenarios. Most of the assassinations are the work of the scenario writers, but sometimes they originate with the players. (For some time, I was told, assassinations had become quite the vogue in game playing.) West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer is poisoned. Soviet agents posing as anti-Gaullists kill French president Charles de Gaulle in one scenario and gravely wound him in another. Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and British prime minister Harold Macmillan are also assassinated. Serial regicide, in a Pentagon-sponsored game eleven months before the assassination of President Kennedy, undoubtedly helps to explain why the Department of Defense kept Olympiad 1-62 classified as top secret for over a quarter of a century.

But even when a game is pried from the Department of Defense through the Freedom of Information Act, the document bears the “sanitizing” black streaks of a Pentagon censor who blots out the names of the speakers in wargame dialogue. The words of players are not attributed lest rash comments during a game come back to haunt them.

The same courtesy was extended to the Olympians. So although a slip of the censor's pen revealed that Serling and Caniff were on the Blue Team, there is no way of knowing who said what. Nor are there any authors' credits for the initial scenarios or the teams' reactions to the events in the scenarios. What emerges from the released report on Olympiad is a series of anonymous interlocking narratives. But when compared to records of other games, Olympiad stands out as unique. There can be no doubt of the credits:

The Olympians warm up on three relatively routine games: negotiations for a disarmament treaty; simultaneous crises in Berlin and Cuba; and turmoil in the Middle East. The games introduce the Olympians to a world in which the United States is threatened by Communists around the globe. (Playing the third warm-up game, the Blue Team decides to explode a nuclear bomb a hundred miles off the Soviet coast as a warning. The game report notes that the Olympians did not balk at any action “even though it means full-scale nuclear war.”) The crucial fourth game, dubbed DAFT (for “decade after”), departs from the Blue-Red team format; instead, the Olympians are asked to respond to three scenarios that might have come straight out of the Twilight Zone. Each scenario breaks off at a crucial moment. The Olympians must produce an ending that will help guide planners of U.S. strategy in the decade ahead.

The first scenario envisions America's defeat in a nuclear war in the early 1970s. Enraged, one of the players says, “The real reason why we lost the war was the failure of the President.” Criticism of President Kennedy punctuates the scenarios. Those same scenarios had circulated among Kennedy's military and civilian policy planners but had not been played. “I tried unsuccessfully for several months to get anyone to use them,” an anonymous Control tells the Olympians. “You were a heaven-sent opportunity.”

As the first scenario opens, NATO has begun to crack following 1963 elections of Communist governments in France and Italy. West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt (who really would become chancellor of West Germany in 1969) makes a deal with East Germany, and a united Germany is reborn.

The scenario continues:

The United States and Canada, expecting a Soviet nuclear attack, evacuate all cities. Soviet missiles knock out early-warning radar and then destroy Detroit, Pittsburgh, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities.
Khrushchev telephones the U.S. president, unnamed but presumably Kennedy, to say: “This is not nuclear blackmail. This is it. Only one-quarter of my force was launched. If you retaliate, I'll wipe out the rest of the U.S.” The president, who has sent Strategic Air Command bombers on retaliatory strikes, calls them back and agrees to negotiate with Khrushchev.

But, says the scenario, “two squadrons of B-52s, either through communication garble or madly enraged, pushed on—delivering 100 megatons on Moscow, Minsk, and Pinsk.” The Soviets answer this Steve Canyonesque mutiny with another wave of missiles. The United States sues for peace.

Soviet troops and officials arrive in the United States, which is divided for occupation. The old Confederacy states east of the Mississippi, plus Kentucky and Tennessee, are turned over to Castro. Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona are put under control of Mexico, which is a Communist nation. Alaska and Hawaii are directly annexed by the Soviet Union, along with the states of the Pacific Northwest. The Northeast and Midwest as far as the Rockies are largely a nuclear wasteland and are occupied by Soviet troops until a puppet government is set up.

The Cuban Confederacy, as it is called, gives American blacks new status as Cuban “blood brothers.” There are wholesale executions of whites in the Orange Bowl. But in this scenario there is hope—at least for the white Ameri-cans—for within a year, a “strongly organized underground of firm discipline” and “growing power” challenges the rule of the Cubans and the blacks. The new organization calls itself the Centennial Ku Klux Klan.

In the Democratic Peoples Federation of Mexico, “Spanish-speaking Americans of intelligence and standing” become local officials. In the Democratic Republic of Mid-America, an underground movement called the Sons of Liberty II has developed ray guns that can “stop nuclear and internal-combustion engines, paralyze or kill life, and possibly influence weather.” But freedom for them and all other Americans is only a dream.
The End.

“Too downbeat,” one of the Olympians, presumably John Ford, says of this scenario, adding: “I'm not buying it for a motion picture….” Another brushes aside the dismal vision. Americans, he declares, “are not going to quit, and we are going to have arms all over that are hidden.” We must begin caching arms right now, the Olympians urge as they quickly veer from the hypothetical future to a present threatened by the enemy “at our doorstep.”

No weapon, an Olympian passionately declaims, “is better than the hand or the heart of the man who carries it. We urge that while one American lives who
can pull a trigger, it is his duty to do so.” Only two months before, Khrushchev had been caught putting Soviet missiles in Cuba. Most Americans believed that Kennedy had won the nuclear showdown with Khrushchev, but the DAFT scenarios reflect a fear that Khrushchev's bold move in Cuba was far more significant than his retreat. The futures presented to the Olympians are haunted by nuclear confrontations even more ominous than the real Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States is imperiled on every side. Besides the Soviets, with their missiles, there is also “the indistinct shadow of the sleeping Chicom giant … a menace that needed to be chained.”

Caught up in this vision, the Olympians make recommendations that seem more suited to the 1962 present than the 1972 future. They want “subterranean armories of small arms scattered throughout the country and available to any civilian population.” They suggest that the United States go beyond its shores to set up “great secret armories.” The Olympians want missile-equipped submarines hidden in the Antarctic and remote “super-secret bases” manned by covert troops “who can retaliate” from overseas if “we are shot down in the street.” They advise the immediate building of “basic vaults of production units” to preserve vital apparatuses, such as communications equipment, along with the ingredients and blueprints for manufacturing nuclear weapons. Resistance forces, aware of these caches, then can make their own nuclear bombs to use against the Soviet occupiers.

To stave off this looming conquest, the Olympians say, American youth must be taught that “in case of enemy invasion,” everyone is “expected to carry on the fight,” from “the ash cans of the lower East Side of New York to the apple orchards of Oregon.” Special Forces and the CIA should “arm those who are with us behind the iron and bamboo curtains.” And America must prepare to “mercilessly introduce biological and meteorological warfare” against our enemies.

To preserve civilization, the Olympians create a new form of citizenship— “Canambrian,” which encompasses the people of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, and Australia. Canambrian citizenship could even be extended to Latin Americans, as long as there are “educational safeguards.”

The second DAFT episode, weaving domestic politics with world affairs, opens in August 1963, when “the shamed representatives of the new African states went into virtual hiding” at the U.N. because “most Caucasians south of the Sahara to the Union of S. Africa had been wiped out in a gruesome cannabalistic
[
sic
] orgy of Inter-tribal MauMau murder more shocking than anything in history.”

The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. (then Adlai Stevenson) “introduced only an insipid motion of censure against the responsible African governments.” So “the U.S. Congress, Press and public, surfeited with our namby-pamby reactive policy (dubbed ‘shrinkmanship’ by ex-governor Tom Dewey), blew up.”

Congress demands U.S. withdrawal from the U.N. and impeaches the president. In the new Cabinet, United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther is secretary of state and Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa is secretary of labor. (In real life, Hoffa, just convicted of jury tampering, was the major target of Attorney General Robert Kennedy's investigation of labor racketeering.) General Matthew B. Ridgway is recalled to active duty to head the new War Department as the one chief of staff. The scenario abolishes the office of the Joint Chiefs—the game's sponsor.

Under a resolute new president (presumably Lyndon Johnson), the U.S. Air Force destroys Cuba for no apparent reason. Panama and Puerto Rico jointly become the fifty-first state. All foreign aid is stopped. Taiwan is “turned over to Japan, with the concurrence of China.” American technicians help China build nuclear weapons. “Senator Wayne Morse made an impassioned plea for liberalism, claiming neutralism was really only isolationism, but retired, visibly shaken by his colleagues' roaring boos.”

Europe, with both NATO and Eastern bloc troops withdrawn, forms United Western Europe. A Syrian Muslim known as Saladin II forges a new Saracen empire that encompasses the Arab world. “The Mid-African continent was again ‘Darkest Africa,’ practically out of touch with the rest of the world, consumed by inter-tribal battles.”

Saladin, backed by the Soviet Union and China, conquers Israel. Senator Jacob Javits of New York, a firm supporter of Israel in real life, is mocked in the scenario, which has him demanding that “the United States immediately invade the Saracen Empire and restore a free Israel stretching from the Suez to the Dardanelles.” Only one nation, the Dominican Republic, offers asylum to Israeli refugees. The Saracens take over Israeli nuclear facilities and manufacture small weapons so that individual Arabs are able to carry nuclear bombs into the cities of the West.

When the Olympians respond to DAFT II, laughter greets one remark: “The Kennedy dynasty has been broken.” In that post-Kennedy America, fallout
shelters and domed cities guarantee the nation will survive even with “tens of millions of casualties from a massive nuclear attack.” U.S. scientists are working on “a global satellite-borne anti-ballistic missile boost and mid-course intercept system” that uses laser beams to stop enemy missiles. And the Saracens who are toting nuclear bombs will be detected by “cheap portable fluoroscopes for surveillance in guarding against suitcase weapons.”

The Olympians also come up with a “substitute for aid funds”: an antifertility powder that can be secretly slipped into a needy nation's drinking water “if it is to our advantage somewhere to check the growth of a population.”