Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

In the absence of live footage from Cuba or the blockade line, the Security Council was the closest the television networks could get to the climactic superpower confrontation. The Council provided the perfect backdrop for a contest of rhetorical gladiators. The chamber was dominated by a giant wall tapestry of a phoenix arising from the ashes—representing mankind recovering from the destruction of World War II. There was space for only twenty chairs around the circular table, providing an intimacy and dramatic intensity that the much larger General Assembly lacked. At moments of crisis, diplomats and officials would crowd around the entrances, watching the debate unfold.

As luck would have it, the Soviet ambassador, Valerian Zorin, was chairing the meeting when Stevenson asked for the floor. Zorin was tired and ill, and had been showing signs of mental deterioration in recent months. Sometimes, during private meetings, he would look up, as in a daze, and ask, “What year is this?” He had been left to fend for himself by Moscow. Without instructions, he had relied on the traditional techniques of Soviet diplomats: obfuscation and denial. Zorin continued to deny the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, even as Khrushchev was privately confirming them to the visiting American businessman, William Knox.

Zorin’s denials had become too much, even for the patient, well-mannered Stevenson. Seated four chairs around the table from the Russian, Stevenson insisted on asking “one simple question.”

“Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the U.S.S.R. has placed, and is placing, medium and intermediate range missiles and sites in Cuba?”

There was nervous laughter around the chamber as Stevenson pressed his question. “Yes or no—don’t wait for the translation—yes or no.”

“I am not in an American courtroom, sir, and I do not wish to answer a question put to me in the manner in which a prosecutor does,” replied Zorin, in his whining, high-pitched voice. He smiled and shook his head as if amazed by Stevenson’s effrontery.

“You are in the courtroom of world opinion right now, and you can answer yes or no. You have denied that they exist, and I want to know if I have understood you correctly.”

“You will receive your answer in due course. Do not worry.”

There was more nervous laughter as Stevenson tried to corner his opponent.

“I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over, if that is your decision.”

The phrase “until hell freezes over” would soon become celebrated as the perfect put-down to the stonewalling Soviet ambassador. In fact, it was the opposite of what Stevenson really meant. The Americans were not prepared to wait for a Soviet answer. They wanted it immediately. To force a response from Zorin, Stevenson had a pair of wooden easels set up at the back of the chamber and proceeded to produce the photographic evidence.

As everybody else in the room strained to see the photographs, Zorin ostentatiously scribbled notes to himself.

“He who has lied once will not be believed a second time,” he told the Council, after a long pause for the consecutive French translation of his tormentor’s remarks. “Accordingly, Mr. Stevenson, we shall not look at your photographs.”

Among the millions of Americans watching the Security Council debate via television was the president. Seated in his rocking chair in the Oval Office, he made notes on a legal pad, circling and underlining key words.

“Missile,” he wrote at the top of the pad. He drew a box around it, and then repeated the word, this time with a circle around it. “Veto, veto, veto, veto.” “Provocative,” he scrawled, with a heavy circle. He repeated the word “provocative,” this time with a slightly lighter circle. He underlined the words “close surveillance” and “Soviet ship.” At the bottom of the page, he drew a series of interlocking boxes that trailed off into the margins.

After Stevenson finished, Kennedy looked up from his legal pad. “Terrific,” he told his aides. “I never knew Adlai had it in him. Too bad he didn’t show some of this steam in the 1956 campaign.”

The nightwatchman was on his regular rounds. Everybody was on alert for surprise raids by Russian commandos known as spetsnaz infiltrated into the United States in advance of war. War planners had warned that a Soviet nuclear first strike could be preceded by sabotage attacks against military command-and-control facilities. The sector direction center on the southern edge of Duluth Airport was an obvious target as it housed the computers and radar systems that pulled together air defense information across the Great Lakes. If Soviet saboteurs could blow up the fortresslike concrete blockhouse, the United States would lose much of its ability to track Soviet bombers flying in from the North.

The guard was patrolling the back of the four-story building when he saw a shadowy figure climbing a fence near the electricity generating plant. He fired a few shots into the darkness and ran off to sound the alarm. Within seconds, the klaxon had begun to wail, startling pilots in the mess hall several hundred yards away. Nobody knew what to make of the alarm, which was different from the standard scramble signal. They were still wondering what to do when someone reported that it was a sabotage siren, not a scramble siren.

While the pilots at Duluth were waiting for instructions, alarms began going off all over the region, from Canada to South Dakota. Could a Soviet sabotage plot be under way? The antisabotage plan called for “flushing” the interceptor force, Air Force terminology for getting as many planes into the air as quickly as possible. Unable to figure out what was happening in the Duluth direction center, the controller responsible for Volk Field in Wisconsin decided that “discretion was the better part of valor” and proceeded to implement the plan.

It had already begun snowing in central Wisconsin and temperatures were hovering around the freezing point. Volk Field was in an isolated area known for its deep ravines and dramatic rock formations. The field was mainly used for training purposes by the Air National Guard. There was no hangar for the alert planes, no radar-guided landing system, no control tower, inadequate runway overruns, and a chronic shortage of deicing equipment. Technicians were still tinkering with the klaxons, and were relying on a jerry-rigged phone system to distribute and authenticate a flush order.

Conditions at some of the other fields being used to host the nuclear-armed F-101s and F-106s of the Air Defense Command were even more rudimentary. Siskiyou County Airport in California lacked virtually everything “except a runway and a converted dental van” that served as a control tower. At Williams Air Force Base in Arizona, an Air Force pilot watched in horror as an inexperienced civilian contractor spilled twenty gallons of fuel onto the tarmac. It turned out that the contractor had pushed the wrong button. Instead of pumping fuel into the plane, he was pumping fuel out of it.

Aircraft from the big Air Force bases at Duluth and Detroit had been dispersed to Volk, ready to be flushed in the event of a Soviet attack. The Detroit pilots had flown in from Hulman Field outside Terre Haute, a couple of days after one of their colleagues overshot the runway. The pilots bunked down in hospital beds in the dispensary, a thirty-second jeep ride across the tarmac from their planes. They slept in their flight suits.

The order to flush came at 12:14 a.m. Central Time, eleven minutes after the klaxons went off in Duluth. Roused from their sleep, the pilots pulled on their zippered boots, and ran outside into a snowstorm. As he jumped into a jeep and headed to his plane, Lieutenant Dan Barry was convinced that war had broken out. It would be crazy to launch fully armed nuclear interceptors in these conditions in peacetime. He ran up the ladder into the plane, and flicked a switch to bring the engine from shutoff to idle. While the engine warmed up, he strapped on his helmet and the parachute, which was part of the seat. The F-106 was already fully loaded with an MB-1 “Genie” nuclear-tipped missile, two infrared heat-seeking missiles, and two radar-guided missiles.