You Might Want to Know - ICBMs Arriving - XII. Starting Down
XII. Starting Down
Inside the entrance to the building, we rejoined Holly. To my left now was another door with glass in it, very thick glass. Holly and I were instructed to slide our driver’s licenses through a slot in the door. Behind the guy who was checking our licenses I could see several airmen in the room. One was a woman. Computer screens around the walls. Banks of windows on two walls that looked out at the road we’d come in on and at the yard we were parked in. In the far corner a gun case. Maybe ten assault weapons in it. Some shotguns too, it looked like.
The door opened after a bit, and we stepped in. Some introductions by Lt. Roy and a little easy small talk and then we gathered in front of another door in the wall away from the windows that was opened somehow by the airman who had checked our licenses. He counted us in and closed the door. I heard it lock behind us.
Ahead of us on the left was the elevator down to the Launch Control Center, a good-sized freight elevator, with a grate in front. We stepped in and drew the grate closed. The elevator descended slowly along a wall of concrete. The wall had brightly colored art work on it. Graffiti, I guess you could call it, but art work, not just tags, not just Kilroy was here, that kind of thing.
Lt. Roy said that there was art on the walls of the other Launch Control Facilities too, with different themes. Star Wars was one. This one, he said, was Super Mario Brothers, a computer game that had come out in 1983, when Ronald Reagan was president and we were working on the Peacekeeper, which wouldn’t be ready to go for another couple of years. 1983 was also the year the The Day After was shown on TV. That was the made-for-TV movie that depicted the effects of an ICBM attack on Lawrence, Kansas, not from a safe distance, from inside the attack. Whiteman AFB, a Minuteman ICBM base we had at the time, was not far from Lawrence.
A hundred million people had watched The Day After. Some people said the movie made the effects of an attack with nuclear weapons seem much too horrible, some said not nearly horrible enough. Unless we were one of those who had been in Hiroshima or Nagasaki in 1945, we didn’t know how horrible such a thing could be. We had to try to imagine it. Or maybe try not to think about it.
Some of the scientists at Los Alamos, Niels Bohr was one, had thought that because the effects of atomic bombs were going to be so obviously horrible, the prospect of their use might be something that could get countries’ leaders started working together to create a more open world that would, among other beneficial things, keep more wars from happening. That isn’t what had happened. I’m sure Niels Bohr thought this had been a missed opportunity. I’ve come to think so too.
The elevator bumped to a stop.
Next: Through the Doors