Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

In fact, the system was plagued by problems. There were only two telephone lines linking the launch control center to the support facility at Malmstrom Air Force Base. Communications failed repeatedly. Workmen from Boeing wandered through the supposedly secure site, making last-minute fixes. Lack of equipment “required many workarounds.” Individual missiles were taken on and off alert as technicians tried to iron out the problems, which included short circuits and miswirings.

Having encouraged Andrus to deploy his missiles as soon as possible, his superiors at SAC headquarters began to have second thoughts. They had sufficient safety concerns about the jerry-rigged launch procedures to insist on a jerry-rigged safety precaution. To prevent an accidental launch, they ordered manual disabling of the heavy steel lids on top of the silos. If a missile was fired without authorization, it would blow up in its silo. Before a Minuteman could be launched, a maintenance crew had to reconnect the explosive charges that blew the lid away prior to liftoff. The SAC instruction outlining the new procedures was sent at 2:27 p.m. Washington time on Saturday, twenty-four hours after Alpha Six first became “operational.”

The technicians who had the job of reconnecting the lids on the silos referred to themselves, only half-jokingly, as the “suicide squad.” If alerted by launch officers that the missile was about to be fired, they had to plug the cable back in, jump into a waiting pickup truck, and “run like hell.” They calculated that they had roughly three minutes to get out of the way before the big white bird exploded out of the ground. If they weren’t killed by the outgoing American Minuteman, there was a good chance they would be targeted by an incoming Soviet R-16.

Two B-52 Stratofortresses lifted off from Carswell Air Force Base in Texas, powered by eight Pratt & Whitney jet engines. Nicknamed BUFF, for “Big Ugly Fat Fucker,” each plane carried a six-man crew, plus a third pilot to allow the original pilots to grab some rest during the twenty-four-hour flight. Loaded in the bomb bay of each plane were four Mark-28 thermonuclear devices, SAC’s primary Cold War weapon. Measuring some fourteen feet long by two feet across, the Mark-28 resembled a giant cigar tube, and carried an explosive charge of 1.1 megatons, seventy times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The crews had spent hours studying their targets in the Soviet Union, bombing techniques, and escape maneuvers. They were “ready to go to war.” But they were also resigned to the fact that “it was unlikely that we would accomplish the whole mission.” A nuclear exchange would probably mean that “the world as we knew it would be at an end.” And they understood that their own bomber bases back in the United States were prime targets for a Soviet nuclear attack. Before leaving, many of the men had told their wives to pack up the family station wagon, fill it with gas, and head for the most remote place they could find if the crisis took a turn for the worse.

The B-52s headed out across the Atlantic on the southern route of the Chrome Dome airborne alert. Other BUFFs flew northward around Canada, circling the fringes of the Arctic Ocean. One pair of B-52s kept a constant watch over the ballistic missile early warning radar station in Thule, Greenland, just in case the Soviets bombed it. The number of bombers on airborne alert had increased fivefold with the declaration of DEFCONs-3 and 2. This was SAC’s way of signaling Moscow that it was ready and able to deliver the “full retaliatory response” threatened by the president in his television address on Monday evening.

The bombers were refueled as they overflew Gibraltar and southern Spain on their way to the Mediterranean, and again on the way back. The traffic was so heavy that it was not uncommon to see six BUFFs being refueled at the same time. The refueling operation took about thirty minutes, with the B-52 hanging on to the boom of the tankers and sucking up every last drop of gas. As they headed toward their forward patrol zones, the Chrome Dome planes were often “spoofed” by Soviet electronic warfare experts. A mysterious radio station identifying itself as “Ocean Station Bravo” routinely requested flight information from Air Force planes off Greenland. The BUFF pilots were trained to ignore unauthenticated calls, but the jamming could be a nuisance. On Saturday afternoon, tanker pilots reported radio interference from a trawler off the southern coast of Spain as they flew in tandem with a pair of B-52s.

After skirting Spain and the southern coast of Italy, the BUFFs made a left turn as they approached Crete and headed up the Adriatic coast of Greece and Yugoslavia. This was their turnaround point. They were still an hour’s flying time from the Soviet border, two hours from Moscow. They monitored their high-frequency radio receivers for “emergency action messages” from Omaha. If the president wanted them to bomb the Soviet Union, SAC would broadcast a coded order in the form of a jumbled six-character string of letters and numbers. At least two crew members had to authenticate the message from large black code books stored next to the pilot.

The B-52s would make their approach into Russia flying low to avoid enemy radars, just as LeMay’s bombers had done against Japan during World War II. Some of the older B-47s carried weapons that had to be physically “armed” by a crew member, who crawled into the bomb bay to insert a rod into the core of the nuclear device. But the arming process was automatic on the BUFF.

The pilots had studied the ballistics of their weapon, and knew when to release it so that it would be “tossed” onto the target. The weapon was fitted with a delay fuse to allow the BUFF, flying at 400 knots, to escape the fireball and blast. The targeting was much less accurate than the test shots in the Pacific, which were conducted under near-perfect conditions. The pilots did not have sophisticated radar systems to guide the bombs to their targets. There was no “Kitty” back at SAC headquarters to make complicated ballistic calculations in the middle of a mission. They were on their own. To make up for the lack of accuracy, SAC insisted that the same targets be attacked multiple times to guarantee destruction.

The targets on the SIOP list included missile sites, airfields, defense plants, and command-and-control centers like the Kremlin, in the heart of Moscow, a city with a population of more than 6 million. The plan listed six “target complexes” in the Soviet capital, to be covered by twenty-three nuclear weapons, nearly four weapons per target. That worked out at around 25 million tons of TNT, at least five times the total amount of explosives used in World War II.

In theory, all the targets had some kind of “strategic” significance. But there was one notable exception. In case the BUFF failed to reach its target, and the crew was killed or incapacitated by a Soviet missile, the plane was equipped with a mechanism that provided for “automatic release of prearmed weapons” over enemy territory. Rather than “waste” the nuclear weapons altogether, SAC planners preferred to trigger an automatic detonation wherever the bomber happened to go into a final nose-dive. The macabre device was known to B-52 crews as the “dead man’s switch.”

Cuban national radio, Radio Reloj, broke into its afternoon programs just at 3:02 p.m. Washington time to announce that “unidentified war planes” had “penetrated deep into the national soil” that morning, but had been chased away by antiaircraft fire. “Cuban air forces are in a state of maximum alert, maximum fighting deployment, and are ready to defend the sacred rights of the motherland.”