Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

When LeMay became vice chief of staff of the Air Force in 1957, he was succeeded as SAC commander by Power, his longtime deputy. Power had the reputation of being even more of a disciplinarian than LeMay. He seemed to take a perverse delight in ridiculing his subordinates in public. One of his deputies, Horace Wade, described Power as “mean,” “cruel,” and “unforgiving,” and wondered whether he was psychologically “stable.” He worried that his boss “had control over so many weapons and weapons systems and could, under certain conditions, launch the force.” LeMay was “kind-hearted” compared to Power, Wade thought.

Power, who had flown bombing raids over Japan, shared LeMay’s views about the virtues of a devastating first strike, even if it led to horrifying retaliation. “Why are you so concerned with saving their lives?” he asked one of McNamara’s civilian whiz kids, who was trying to develop a no-cities, limited war strategy known as “counterforce.” “The whole idea is to kill the bastards.” For Power, if there were “two Americans and one Russian” left alive at the end of the war, “we win.”

You had better make sure that the “two Americans” are “a man and a woman,” McNamara’s aide replied.

The McNamara aide who tangled with Power was William Kaufmann, a Yale-educated historian who had written his doctoral dissertation on nineteenth-century balance-of-power politics. A short man, with a high-pitched voice and a dour sense of humor, he now sat in a Pentagon office trying to answer one of JFK’s bottom-line questions: what difference would Soviet missiles on Cuba make to the balance of nuclear terror? The Joint Chiefs believed the impact was considerable; McNamara felt that the missiles did little to change the big picture.

Using maps and charts, Kaufmann analyzed the likely consequences of a no-warning Soviet attack on the United States. He noted that thirty-four out of seventy-six SAC bomber bases were within range of the Soviet MRBMs on Cuba, and most of the remaining bases could be hit by the longer-range IRBMs. On the other hand, most of the hardened U.S. missile sites and the Polaris submarines would survive a Soviet attack. According to Kaufmann’s calculations, a Soviet first strike without the Cuba-based missiles would still leave the United States with a minimum retaliatory force of 841 nuclear weapons. If the Soviets fired their Cuba-based missiles as well, the United States would be left with at least 483 nukes.

In other words, both the Joint Chiefs and McNamara were right. Deploying missiles to Cuba strengthened Khrushchev’s hand, and compensated for his shortage of intercontinental missiles. On the other hand, Khrushchev could not deliver a knockout blow against the United States under any circumstances. The surviving U.S. nuclear strike force would still be able to wreak much greater damage on the Soviet Union than the Soviets had inflicted on America.

The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction—MAD for short—was alive and well even after the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba.

An army was on the move. To prepare for a possible invasion of Cuba, the president had ordered the greatest emergency mobilization of U.S. troops since World War II. All of a sudden, everybody in the military seemed to be heading toward Florida, by road, rail, and air, accompanied by huge amounts of equipment. There were bottlenecks everywhere.

Just to move the 1st Armored Division, 15,000 men plus tanks, armored vehicles, artillery pieces, required 146 commercial airplanes and 2,500 railcars. The logistics experts decided that tanks and other tracked vehicles should remain on the railcars, in case they had to be moved rapidly somewhere else. Railcars were soon backed up all over the southeastern United States. To store the railcars, the Army needed at least thirty miles of sidings, but only six and a half miles were immediately available. Railroad storage space became a prized commodity, jealously guarded by each military service. SAC commanders refused to release siding space to the Army because it might “interfere” with their own mission.

So many soldiers and airmen converged on Florida that there was no place for them to sleep. Some airfields introduced the “hot bunk” principle, with three men assigned to the same bed, sleeping in eight-hour shifts. The Gulfstream race course at Hallandale, Florida, became a temporary base for the 1st Armored Division. “Soon military police were placed at all entrances,” an observer recorded. “Parking lots became motor pools, and the infield was used for storage and mess. Troops were billeted on the first and second floors of the grandstand. Weapons and duffel bags were stacked next to the betting windows. Church services were held in the photo-finish developing rooms.”

Ammunition was an additional headache. Several ordnance factories went over to three-shift, seven-day weeks to produce sufficient quantities of ammunition for the fighter aircraft that were expected to strafe Soviet and Cuban troops. Napalm bombs were stacked like “mountains of cordwood” at airfields in Florida.

The British consul in Miami was reminded of the atmosphere in southern England prior to D-Day. Military planes were landing at Miami International Airport every minute, troop trains headed southward to Port Everglades, and trucks trundled through the streets loaded with weapons and explosives. An armada of nearly six hundred aircraft waited for orders to attack Cuba and intercept Soviet IL-28 bombers taking off from Cuban airfields. So much military hardware was in Florida that Air Force officers joked the state would sink into the sea under the weight of all the equipment.

The further south you went, the more imposing the military presence became. The laidback resort of Key West, on the tip of the Florida Keys, suddenly found itself on the front line of the Cold War, like Berlin or the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. Every government agency wanted a piece of the action. The Navy ran reconnaissance and code-breaking operations out of the naval air station; the CIA established safe houses on neighboring islands; the army moved into the venerable Casa Marina Hotel, built at the beginning of the century by the railroad tycoon Henry Flagler. Soldiers in combat fatigues took over the local baseball stadium, the public beach, and most of the city’s parking lots. Marines set up machine-gun nests on the beach, surrounded by rolls of concertina wire.

Florida was now the soft underbelly of the United States. Prior to October 1962, military strategists had expected a Soviet attack to come from the North, over the pole. Early warning radar systems all faced northward, toward the Soviet Union. Fighter-interceptor squadrons were trained to deploy along the so-called “pine tree line” in Canada against the heavy Soviet bombers known to NATO as “Bears” and “Bisons.” Antiaircraft missile systems with small atomic warheads were deployed around East Coast cities like New York and Washington as a last line of defense against a surprise Soviet attack. Almost overnight, American defenses had to be reoriented from north to south.

Military shipments did not always receive priority. On the morning of Wednesday, October 24, a convoy of three trucks headed down U.S. Highway 1 from an Army depot in Pennsylvania. The commercial tractor-trailers, which had been leased by the Army, were carrying HAWK surface-to-air missiles to protect southern Florida from a Soviet air attack. But the Army had neglected to inform the Virginia State Police that the missiles were on the way. An alert highway patrolman pulled the trucks over at a weighing station in Alexandria, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. His suspicions were confirmed: the trucks were two thousand pounds overweight. The civilian drivers tried to explain that the shipment was “classified,” but failed to sway the patrolman.