Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

The loss of a U-2 over the Soviet Union was only the latest in a string of safety nightmares haunting the Strategic Air Command. Nuclear bombers had gone astray, reconnaissance planes had been shot down, bombs had been dropped accidentally, and early warning systems had given false alerts of a Soviet attack. An accidental nuclear war was not just the stuff of popular fiction. It was within the realm of actual possibility.

SAC already had more planes and missiles and warheads on alert than at any time in its history. One-eighth of its B-52 heavy bomber force—a total of sixty airplanes—was in the air at all times, ready to attack targets throughout the Soviet bloc. Another 183 B-47s had been dispersed to thirty-three civilian and military airfields around the United States, ready to take off in fifteen minutes. A total of 136 long-range missiles were on alert. A “Cuba Fact Sheet” supplied to the president by his military aide reported that General Power had been instructed to mobilize his “remaining force of 804 airplanes and 44 missiles as of 10 a.m. this morning.” By midday Sunday, SAC would have a “cocked”—meaning “ready to fire”—nuclear strike force of 162 missiles and 1,200 airplanes carrying 2,858 nuclear warheads.

The more planes and missiles were placed on alert, the more stressed the system became. Even as the Maultsby drama unfolded, senior SAC officers worried about the possibility of an unauthorized launch of the revolutionary new Minuteman missile from underground silos in Montana. Unlike previous liquid-fueled missiles, which required a launch preparation time of at least fifteen minutes, the solid-fueled Minuteman could blast out of its hole in just thirty-two seconds. Deployment of the missile system had been accelerated because of the crisis, but nuclear safety officers were now concerned that too many corners might have been cut.

The decision to activate the first flight of ten Minuteman missiles had been taken soon after Kennedy went on television to announce the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Power wanted every available missile system targeted on the Soviet Union. He called the commander of the 341st Strategic Missile Wing, Colonel Burton C. Andrus, Jr., to find out if the Minuteman could be made ready for firing immediately, circumventing approved safety procedures.

In normal times, firing a Minuteman required four electronic “votes” from two teams of officers, located in two different launch control centers, twenty miles apart. The problem was that only one control center was complete. Contractors were still pouring concrete at the second center, which would not be operational for several weeks. But the “last thing” Andrus wanted to tell his short-fused boss was, “It can’t be done.” He knew that Power was “trying frantically to upstage LeMay’s great record as CINCSAC.” He would find a way to “kluge the system.”

A World War II pilot, Andrus had inherited some of the theatricality of his father, the former commander of the military prison at Nuremberg and jailer of Nazi war criminals like Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess. Burt Andrus, Sr., decked himself out with a riding whip and shellacked green helmet, telling friends, “I hate these Krauts.” Burt Junior liked to jump up on a desk at the missile maintenance hangar at Malmstrom Air Force Base in his blue flight suit and growl at scared-to-death enlisted men: “Khrushchev knows we’re after his ass.” He walked around with three radio-telephones and told reporters that he could never be more than six rings from a phone, in case the president needed him. He was believed to be the only missile base commander with a license to drive the sixty-four-feet-long tractor-trailers that dragged the missiles out to their silos.

After serving in SAC almost since its inception, Andrus was “convinced that the weapons system had not yet been invented that professional airmen could not outsmart.” The solution was to jerry-rig the apparatus so that the “critical part” of the shoebox-sized electronic control panel from the second launch center was plugged directly into the circuitry of the first launch center. All that was required was a screwdriver, some rapid rewiring, and a little Yankee ingenuity.

Over the next three days, Andrus roamed the back roads of Montana in his blue station wagon, pushing his crews to get the missiles ready to fly. Leaving Malmstrom Air Force Base on the edge of Great Falls, he drove up U.S. 87 into the heavily forested Little Belt Mountains. After about twenty miles, the road forked. Route 87 continued in a southeasterly direction to the Alpha One launch control center, six miles further on. Route 89 led south for another twenty miles across a mountain pass to the once booming silver-mining town of Monarch. A few miles beyond Monarch, on the right-hand side of the road, a plain link fence enclosed a couple of acres of barren land and some drab slabs of concrete. This was silo Alpha Six. Hidden beneath the concrete, protected by an 80-ton steel door, lay America’s first fully automated, push-button missile.

There was something very impersonal about the Minuteman. The earlier generation of liquid-fueled missiles had required constant maintenance and observation. Missile crews were in attendance as they were fueled, lifted up out of their silos, and fired. The Minuteman was operated by remote control by crews ten, twenty, even thirty miles away. To make the missiles invulnerable to attack, they were stored in hardened silos, at least five miles apart from each other. It was impossible to destroy more than one Minuteman with a single nuclear weapon. If the Kremlin attempted a first strike, the American missiles could be launched while the Soviet missiles were still in the air. There were plans to install some eight hundred Minuteman missiles, scattered across Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. Kennedy referred to them as his “ace in the hole.”

Operating a Minuteman was a bit like getting a new car without being given the keys, according to the lieutenant colonel in charge of Alpha flight. “You can’t drive it. You have no sense of ownership. With a liquid missile, you can run it up out of the silo on the elevator, fuel it, go into the countdown. We can’t touch a thing.” Sitting in their bunkers a hundred feet below the ground, the launch officers could not even see the Minuteman blast out of its silo. The closest contact they had with the enemy was a playful sign that boasted: “Worldwide delivery in 30 minutes or less—or your next one is free.” Nuclear apocalypse was as mundane as delivering pizza.

By Friday afternoon, Andrus and his chief technician were ready to bring the first Minuteman on line. Viewed from outside, the Alpha One control center resembled a modest ranch home on a prairie. Once inside, the missileers descended by elevator to a small command post, known as “the capsule.” As they ran through the final checklist, Andrus told the technician that he would keep his thumb on the shutdown switch. “If I don’t get a light, or if you hear anything, see anything, or even smell something that seems irregular, yell, and I’ll shut her down,” he instructed.

“If we seemed nervous, it was because we were,” he later acknowledged. “Being only ninety-nine percent sure that you can’t have an inadvertent launch is not good enough when you are looking at the possibility of starting World War III.”

The test went well enough for the first Minuteman to be declared operational. Several hours later, the secretary of the Air Force, Eugene Zuckert, reported to the president that three Minuteman missiles “have had warheads installed and have been assigned targets in the USSR.”