XV. ICBMs Arriving - Aftermath
This is the last of the entries on my visit to a Minuteman III Launch Control Center. Upcoming entries will soon look at nuclear war planning.
See here the test launch of a Minuteman III missile.
XV - ICBMs Arriving: Aftermath
I thought of another question it might be okay to ask Captain Quinn. I asked if their training dealt with what to do after they had launched their missiles in what they’d been told was an actual attack. I imagined them having gotten their keys out of those little lockers and inserted them into their respective slots on the console and counted down and turned their keys together and sent their own missiles off, sitting there now, waiting for the incoming missiles to arrive. If it wasn’t a false alarm, they wouldn’t have at all long to wait. They’d want to be sure their blast doors were closed. They were supposed to be closed already. What else? Fasten their seat belts if they weren’t fastened already.
And after the incoming missiles arrived? They didn’t have much to tell me about this. We moved on to another subject. I couldn’t tell if there was something in their training they thought they couldn’t tell me about or if there was nothing to tell.
How were they and how were our leaders imagining what their world would be like in the aftermath? How do we imagine it? Do we have any idea? Really? Isn’t what we know utterly eclipsed by what we don’t know? Couldn’t know?
We can of course try to imagine it. We probably should try if we want to figure out what we should be doing about nuclear weapons. Cormac McCarthy took a crack at imagining it in a book called The Road. Would it be that bad? From what I’ve learned about the business, we sure can’t say it wouldn’t be.
After the incoming warheads arrived, if the missileer’s capsule was intact and they were still alive, they’d first want to put out any fires, if they could, that was obvious. Get their air system going so they wouldn’t be breathing in the radioactive air that was out there now. Lt. Roy had shown me that there were three air systems in the capsule, one of which could be operated by hand.
Then what? Go up to take a look? That might be iffy because of the radioactivity that would be up there now and might be up there for quite a while, a couple of weeks at least. Maybe a lot longer. I remember that Lt. Roy said they could survive “buttoned up” down there for thirty days, but I could be wrong about that. It was thirty days about something.
While they were down there waiting, would they be hearing from anyone? The buried capsule might have survived but one thing that seemed certain not to survive a nuclear detonation anywhere nearby was the Missile Alert Facility building on the surface and the antennas I’d seen up there around it. If they hadn’t, the missileers would have no way to talk to anyone, or to hear from anyone, if there was someone to talk to or hear from. Maybe someone would be trying to get in touch with them. Maybe not. They wouldn’t know which.
What could they do while they waited for a signal? Did they have a deck of cards or any board games in those cabinets?
A page came in on the printer. Captain Quinn reached over and pulled it out. It was that thin paper that curls. She looked at it and handed it to me. It was a poem. It had been written by a missileer at another of the ICBM bases we had now, the one at Minot in North Dakota. The poem was entitled “Missileer.” I read it. Over the years, I’d read and responded to a lot of writing. Revision is usually where the action is, as far as I’m concerned. This poem was promising start, I would have said.
I asked everyone there if they’d like me to read it aloud. They said yes and I did. To get my voice over the noise from the equipment room, I had to put extra air under it.
I don’t know if sending a poem from one Launch Control Center to another counts as publication but I probably shouldn’t publish the whole thing here without permission. I bet the writer hadn’t thought it would fall into the hands of an English professor. Wait. Maybe he’d gotten word that an English professor was in the house at F.E. Warren and that’s why he had sent it. Either way it was brave and generous of him, or her, I would have said. Anyway, what I’ll do here is quote some of it and paraphrase the rest.
The poem was in six stanzas of four lines each with a three-line stanza at the end, all in capital letters. The first stanza began,
IN VACANT CORNERS OF OUR LAND, OFF RUTTED GRAVEL TRAILS
THERE IS A WATCHFUL BREED OF MEN--I looked up at Captain Quinn and smiled when I read that, but she didn’t react—WHO SEE THAT PEACE PREVAILS.
Okay, the poet overdoes it a little there. Nuclear weapons have never been able to see that peace prevails, except possibly as between us and the Soviet Union, and only in a manner of speaking. An absence of war is not the same thing as peace, is it?
For these “men,” the stanza goes on, there are “NO WAVING FLAGS,” no “ROMANCE,” no “GLORY.”
He was right about that, wasn’t he? I’d heard the complaints. The pilots got the glory. Fighter pilots especially.
When I’d lived in Laramie, we’d sometimes wondered whether the young man sitting next to us in a bar or restaurant might be an ICBM missileer from F.E. Warren between alerts. You wouldn’t know. They wouldn’t be telling. We knew not to ask. There was some romance, some mystery, to that, maybe.
The second stanza began
IN AN OFT’ REPEATED RITUAL, THEY CASUALLY HANG THEIR LOCKS.
There he had to be talking about how when the missileers come on duty for an alert, they bring with them personal combination locks that they hang on the small metal lockers up there between the consoles of Captain Quinn and Lt. Knapp. Each locker held a launch key. I’d noticed that the locks on those little lockers were combination locks. “We never share the combinations,” Captain Quinn had said. They could, of course, but they never did, she said.
The second stanza went on to describe this “breed of men” working in
A WORLD OF FLICK’RING COLORED LIGHTS, AND ENDLESS ROBOT DIN
From where I stood, that seemed an accurate line, vivid too. “Robot” adds an ominous note. “Din” is just right. “Endless” is okay. Consider replacing with “unremitting?” For the meter, among other things.
The next stanza talked about the missileers responding to the lights and tones in
CONDITIONED ACTS but never forgetting the BOMBS THAT LIE BEYOND and experiencing THE QUIET MURMUR OF THE HEART, THAT HOPES IT’S NEVER USED. Hopes “they’re” never used might be better. That “quiet murmur of the heart” is nice.
The fourth stanza begins
THEY FEEL THE LIVING THROB, OF THE MINDLESS TOOL THEY RUN
THEY HEAR THE CONSTANT WHIR, OF A WORLD THAT KNOWS NO SUN.
The “living throb” of the “mindless tool” is good, isn’t it?
The next stanza says that in this world that knows no sun, no stars, no clouds in which to DANCE IN FLIGHT the way the pilots do, the missileers are AS CERTAIN AS THE SUN and EVER GRIMLY READY, FOR SOMEONE HAS TO BE.
I liked “as certain as the sun” for the sound and the way it conveyed certainty and uncertainty at the same time. The sun doesn’t always shine here below.
The next stanza says these grimly ready people are
COMMON MEN, standing THEIR THANKLESS VIGIL, ON THE BRINK OF MAN-MADE HELL. Common men in a most uncommon situation.
The last stanza begins
IN BOREDOM FLUXED WITH STRESS, ENCAPSULATED THEY RESIDE
“Fluxed with stress” was good, I thought. “Encapsulated” doesn’t work metrically but the metaphor is a good one.
The missileers do what they do, the last line says,
FOR DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY, AND A MATTER OF SELF-PRIDE.
The first three nouns are just a recital of the standard military litany, right? They may be, and no doubt are, important to the airmen, but they don’t do much in the poem. The last one—SELF-PRIDE—isn’t part of the litany. Interesting that it comes last. There’s the rhyme, of course, but “reside” was chosen to rhyme with it, I suspect, not the other way around.
“Self-pride” couldn’t very well come first or in the middle, could it? We might not like to think so but maybe something like self-pride is what it comes down to when the going gets really rough. Maybe the poet wanted to invite this inference.
I asked if I could have a copy of the poem. They said they’d send me one. They might not have been allowed to let me take anything out of the capsule.
Not long after that, we said our goodbyes to Captain Quinn and Lt. Knapp. I shook Lt. Knapp’s hand first, then Captain Quinn’s. Hers felt like the smallest hand I’d ever held in mine that wasn’t a child’s hand. Big enough to turn a key though.
Up top again, we were counted out of the Launch Control Center into the security room. We said hello to the airmen again and goodbye and stepped out of security room into the entryway. I heard the door with the thick glass in it lock behind us.
We left the building and started toward Lt. Roy’s car. Another black Silverado, or maybe the same one, was in the yard pointed toward the gate. I saw an airman wearing a sidearm climb slowly into it. He didn’t look at us. He looked tired.
Very pregnant Holly eased herself into our vehicle. She hadn’t said much during our time in the Launch Control Center. She might have had other things on her mind.
Lt. Roy drove us slowly by the Silverado and on out the gate onto the dirt road that led to the bigger dirt road that led to Dix and the Interstate that would take us back to F. E. Warren.
Down in their sunless capsule, in the robot din, Captain Quinn and Lt. Knapp remained on alert. Their consoles connected to fifty mindless Minuteman III ICBMs in widely scattered underground silos around them. The W87 warheads on those fifty missiles would yield a minimum of fifteen thousand kilotons.
One thousand Hiroshimas.
See here the test launch of one Minuteman III missile.
Next: How do we keep unauthorized persons from setting off our nuclear weapons?