Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

The two superpowers had agreed to a moratorium on nuclear testing in 1958. But Khrushchev ordered a resumption of Soviet tests in September 1961, brushing aside the objections of scientists like Andrei Sakharov who had come to regard atmospheric testing as “a crime against humanity.” Every time the Soviet Union or the United States exploded a nuclear bomb above ground, the air was poisoned for future generations. Sakharov pointed out that the radiation released by a big explosion—around 10 megatons—could lead to the deaths of a hundred thousand people. Such concerns meant little to Khrushchev, who argued that the Soviet Union was behind in the nuclear arms race and needed to test in order to catch up. “I’d be a jellyfish and not Chairman of the Council of Ministers if I listened to people like Sakharov!” he fumed.

“Fucked again,” exploded Kennedy, when he heard the news. He responded by ordering a resumption of American tests in April 1962. By October, the two superpowers were engaged in a frenetic round of tit-for-tat nuclear testing, detonating live bombs two or even three times a week while preparing to fight a nuclear war over Cuba. They had gone beyond mere saber-rattling. Their threats to use the weapons were backed up by weekly—sometimes daily—practice demonstrations of their destructive power.

Since the beginning of October, the United States had conducted five tests in the South Pacific. During the same period, the Soviet Union exploded nine nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, most of them at Novaya Zemlya. The weather on Novaya Zemlya had taken a sharp turn for the worse at the beginning of October. There were blizzards and snowstorms practically every day, and only two to three hours of faint daylight, the best time for an airdrop. Technicians had to wade through deep snow-drifts to install cameras and other recording devices prior to a test. They left the equipment in thick metal canisters inside concrete blockhouses a few miles from the epicenter near Mityushikha Bay. When they returned after the test to collect the “samovars,” the frozen tundra had become an ashtray, with smoke rising from the blackened rocks.

On the morning of Black Saturday, a Tu-95 “Bear” heavy bomber carrying the latest Soviet test device took off from Olenye Airfield on the Kola Peninsula. It headed northeast, across the Barents Sea, into what was already twilight in these northern latitudes. An observation plane tagged along to record the scene. To confuse American intelligence, both planes emitted false radio signals during the six-hundred-mile flight to the drop location. Fighter-interceptor jets patrolled the airspace around Novaya Zemlya to scare away U.S. spy planes.

“Gruz poshyel,” reported the pilot of the Bear, as he passed over the drop zone and banked steeply away. (“The cargo has gone.”)

The 260-kiloton bomb floated gracefully down to earth on a billowing parachute. The crew of the two bombers donned their tinted goggles and waited for the flash.

Captain Charles W. Maultsby wished he were somewhere else. He could have been racking up combat experience over Cuba like many of his fellow U-2 pilots. Or he might have been sent somewhere warm, like Australia or Hawaii, where the Wing also had operating locations. Instead, he was spending the winter in Alaska. His wife and two young sons were living on an Air Force base in Texas.

He had tried to get some rest before his long flight to the North Pole, but had only managed a couple of hours’ fitful sleep. Pilots had traipsed in and out of the officers’ quarters all evening in their heavy snowboots, laughing and slamming doors. The more he tried to sleep, the more awake he felt. In the end, he gave up and went down to the operations building, where there was a vacant cot. He set his alarm for 8:00 p.m., four hours before takeoff.

The mission was to collect radioactive samples from the Soviet nuclear tests at Novaya Zemlya. Compared to flying a U-2 over hostile territory and taking photographs of missile sites, the assignment lacked glamour. The participants in “Project Star Dust” did not usually fly anywhere near the Soviet Union. Instead, they flew to some fixed point, like the North Pole, to inspect the clouds that had drifted up there from the testing site, more than one thousand miles away. They collected the samples on special filter paper, which were mailed off to a laboratory for analysis. Often there was nothing, but sometimes, when the Soviets had conducted a big test, the Geiger counters clicked away furiously. Out of forty-two missions already flown in October from Eielson Air Force Base outside Fairbanks in central Alaska, six had returned with radioactive material.

Maultsby was used to the routine. As the pilot of a single-seater plane, he would be on his own for nearly eight hours. He had plotted the route ahead of time with navigators. For most of the way, he would navigate by the stars, with the help of a compass and sextant, like the seamen of old. A search and rescue team, known as “Duck Butt,” would tag along for part of the trip, but there was little they could do if something went wrong. It was impossible for them to land on an icecap. If he had to bail out near the North Pole, he would be alone with the polar bears. “I wouldn’t pull the ripcord,” was the best advice they could give him.

The preflight ritual was always the same. After waking up from his nap, he went to the officers’ mess for a high-protein, low-residue breakfast of steak and eggs. The idea was to eat something solid that would take a long time to digest, avoiding trips to a nonexistent bathroom. He changed into long underwear, put on a helmet, and started his “pre-breathing exercises,” inhaling pure oxygen for one and a half hours. It was important to expel as much nitrogen as possible from his system. Otherwise, if the cabin depressurized at seventy thousand feet, nitrogen bubbles would form in his blood, causing him to experience the bends, like a deep-sea diver who comes to the surface too quickly.

Next, he climbed into his partial-pressure flight suit, which had been specially cut to his 150-pound frame. The suit was designed to expand automatically in response to a sharp loss of cabin pressure, forming a corset around the pilot and preventing his blood from exploding in the rarefied air.

A half hour before takeoff, he was attached to a walk-around oxygen bottle and transported to the plane in a van. He settled into the cramped cockpit and strapped himself into the ejection seat. A technician hooked him up with the internal oxygen supply, and connected various straps and cables. The canopy was closed above him. Neatly sewn into the seat cushion was a survival kit, which included flares, a machete, fishing gear, a camp stove, an inflatable life raft, mosquito repellant, and a silk banner proclaiming, in a dozen languages, I am an American. A pamphlet promised a reward to anyone who helped him.

Maultsby’s compact build—he was only five foot seven—was a plus for a U-2 pilot. The cockpit was exceptionally cramped. To build a plane capable of soaring to a height of fourteen miles, the designer, Kelly Johnson, had ruthlessly cut back on both the weight and size of its fuselage. At one point, he vowed to “sell my own grandmother” for another six inches of precious space for an extra-long camera lens. He dispensed with many of the features of a modern airplane, such as conventional landing gears, hydraulic systems, and structural supports. The wings and tail were bolted onto the fuselage rather than being held together with metal sheets. If the plane was subjected to too much buffeting, the wings would simply fall off.

The U-2 had many other unique design features, in addition to its flimsy construction. To gain lift at high altitude, the plane needed long, narrow wings. Maultsby’s plane was eighty feet wide wingtip to wingtip, nearly twice the distance from nose to tail. The willowy wings and light airframe allowed the plane to glide for up to 250 miles if it ever lost power from its single engine.