You Might Want to Know - ICBMs Arriving -XIV. Intimacy
XIV. ICBMs Arriving: Intimacy
Captain Quinn asked me if I wanted to sit in her chair at the console. Would you want to sit in the chair of a Launch Control Officer in an ICBM Launch Control Facility that was on alert? I wasn’t sure I did. Was it supposed to give me some kind of thrill?
I did sit in it.
The chair was notched into metal runners anchored to the floor. It had seat belts. Of course it had seat belts. Expect turbulence. They were like the belts for pilots that also have shoulder straps. I secured the belts. Now what? Nothing. I felt embarrassed. I unhooked and stood up.
Captain Quinn explained some things about the console. I had a hard time following her account because she used lots of acronyms--you know, the words that are made up of the first letters of several words, like “ICBM” and “MIRV” and “CEP.” I knew what some of the acronyms stood for but had to interrupt to ask about some of them. Captain Quinn sometimes had to ask Lt. Roy because she’d forgotten what the actual words were. She didn’t need them. That happens to a lot of us, doesn’t it, when we are working in our area of expertise. We forget.
By now I knew more about our atomic weapons than I had during the Cold War. A lot more. We all could know more now if we wanted to. It’s public knowledge if not common knowledge, for instance, that the warhead on our Minuteman IIIs is the W87, developed originally for the Peacekeeper. The Peacekeepers had been decommissioned already, in the 2000’s. Their advanced W87 warheads and re-entry vehicles had been moved over to the Minuteman IIIs. The W87 had been designed to yield 300 kilotons, 20 Hiroshimas, and be upgraded to 475 kilotons. When I’d ventured that information in the car on the way out, Lt. Roy had not confirmed it. He had looked at me with a small smile, that had some pain in it? In any case, even this public knowledge wasn’t something he felt that he could respond to, one way or the other. The regime of secrecy, you know.
I knew enough about the regime of secrecy to know that in it information was compartmentalized. Lt. Roy probably had a level of clearance that would allow him to know almost anything, certainly anything to do with nuclear weapons. But even Lt. Roy didn’t know some things and couldn’t be told them if he asked, unless he could show a “need to know.” He would have to to show that what he was asking about was something he needed to know to do his job.
That’s tricky, isn’t it? How do you know what you need to know if you don’t know what it is? And here’s another question: what, as citizens, do we need to know about, say, nuclear weapons, if we are to do our job as citizens?
Certainly Lt. Roy would know what warheads were on his Minuteman missiles, what they might yield, what their CEPs were.
The only person to whom none of these limitations applied was, in theory, our President. He could ask anything about anything and if he did, he was supposed get a straight answer, if there was one. For our presidents, the question would be whether they knew what they needed to ask about.
One thing I had learned was that none of our presidents had ever seen an atomic bomb explode except in films, not any of the big hydrogen bombs we had exploded out at our Pacific Proving Grounds, not even any of the smaller ones we had tested in the air at our test site in Nevada. We had stopped exploding them in the air in the fall of 1963, the beginning of my senior year in college. This was something we all knew about, that we had agreed with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom to stop all our testing in the atmosphere. By now, France also had exploded nuclear weapons in the atmosphere but they hadn’t agreed with us to stop. They conducted more tests in the atmosphere, learned what they thought they needed to learn, and then agreed to stop.
The problem with testing in the atmosphere was the radioactive fallout it inevitably produced that went around the world and fell you couldn’t be sure where and produced effects you couldn’t directly predict. Some of it would cause deaths that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. That was a statistical certainty.
The only president who’d had any direct experience with atomic energy was Jimmy Carter. He had served on a nuclear submarine when he was in the Navy. When a nuclear reactor at Chalk River in Canada had had a bad accident in December 1952, he’d been sent up there to help them clean up the radioactive material that had escaped, only into the facility luckily .
In 1962, President Kennedy’s brother Bobby had seen an atmospheric test at the Nevada Test Site, a test of the smallest nuclear weapon we had, the Davy Crockett artillery piece with its W54 warhead that yielded only eighteen tons. Eighteen tons of TNT is no small amount but when it comes to atomic weapons, it is nothing. That test, it turned out, was the last atmospheric test we’d conduct. That’s as close as we’d come to a president actually witnessing a nuclear detonation.
Was it a good thing or a bad thing that none of our presidents had ever seen one? President Reagan never saw one but in 1983 he had seen an advance screening of the The Day After, the made-for-TV movie that some people thought had done the best job of showing what it would be like during and after an actual nuclear exchange. President Reagan had written in his journal that seeing it had left him “deeply depressed.”
It was after this, as you know, that he and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik and reached the agreements they did.
We aren’t going to get to see a detonation now, none of us, as long as the Partial Test-Ban Treaty holds, unless we are attacked with a nuclear weapon. That could happen. We don’t think a full-on nuclear exchange is as likely now as it was during the Cold War but an attack with a small nuclear weapon, ten kilotons, say, might be even more likely now. We know there are people who don’t represent a country who would be eager to detonate such a weapon in our country and wouldn’t care if they died doing it. And not only in our country. A supposed nuclear deterrent would mean nothing to them.
According to Ted Taylor, the weapons designer at Los Alamos whose story John McPhee told in The Curve of Binding Energy, it wouldn’t be at all hard today to make a nuclear bomb that would yield ten kilotons. The big question would be whether you could get hold of the necessary fissile material, the plutonium, or preferably, the highly enriched uranium.
It would not be easy to manufacture this fissile material without us knowing about it. It would require an industrial operation that would probably be too big to hide. But terrorists might be able to steal some of the fissile material that has already been produced that is being stored in different places. We and the Russians have many tons of it. The UK, France, and Israel have a good amount. Pakistan and India too now. China. North Korea. Or the terrorists might be able to buy it. A lot of us believe in the market, or say we do, as being the best way to distribute things.
An exception might be made in this case.
While we were talking and Captain Quinn was explaining things, the console was emitting chirps and beeps and other tones, and little lights would come on. Every time this happened, Captain Quinn or Lt. Knapp would look away from the conversation to the console and most of the time reach down to press a button or toggle a switch, to acknowledge receipt, I suppose. It didn’t look like they were performing any other action.
They usually didn’t even stop talking while they did this and afterwards would turn back to the conversation. Sometimes a light on the console came on that seemed to get extra attention but it didn’t make them stop and go sit in the chair, nothing like that. Not while we were there. You might be able to guess what color that light was.
I didn’t know what the different tones meant and still don’t. But I’d found a website that was run by ex-missileers. We’d been training missilleers since 1958 for our different ICBMs. There must be quite a few ex-missileers by now. Some of them had formed an alumni group, I guess you could call it: The Association of Air Force Missileers. Their newsletter was called The Warble Tone, and when you brought up the page for it on your computer, you would hear what must be the warble tone. It was a real attention getter. You wouldn’t be able to do any talking while the warble tone was sounding. I’m guessing it was a good thing we didn’t hear it while we were down there.1
Next: Aftermath