You Might Want to Know - XIII. ICBMs Arriving - Through the Doors
XIII. Through the Doors
The elevator stopped, not so far down, it seemed to me. How far down would you think a Launch Control Center would have to be to withstand an attack with a 500 kiloton nuclear warhead?
It wouldn’t be easy to test something like this, would it? And it depends on what we mean by “withstand.”
The elevator had gone down maybe forty feet is all.
In front of us now, a great dark rounded metal blast door with big bolts around its perimeter. Lt. Roy went up to it, turned a big wheel in the center of the door, and pulled it open. He had to use his back and legs. I measured: the thickness of the door was as long as my forearm, the bolts on the edge were as big as the palm of my hand, the locking pins in the door seemed even bigger.
When Lt. Roy opened the blast door, we suddenly heard a lot of noise, machines running. Of course. Launch Control Centers would have to have their own power supplies. Every Launch Control Center probably had an equipment room like this one, to power the monitors, the computers, the radios, to circulate air, to keep the lights on, to fire up the missiles. Cities seem to put their power plants where we least can see them, as if we don’t want to be reminded of what it is that allows us to turn on the lights or run the fan or make a call. This power plant couldn’t be ignored. It couldn’t be easy to work next to either.
Off to the right, a smaller blast door, this one already open. It led into the launch control room. Standing in the door was one of the two officers on alert, never just one. Behind the officer in the door, you could see the other officer. Lt. Roy gave our driver’s licenses to the officer in the door. She went inside, came back, and invited us across the threshold. We took the not-so-small step up and over.
In the beginning, with the first ICBM, the Atlas, women hadn’t been allowed to serve in Launch Control Centers. When the Titan came on alert, women had started to serve in the facilities and later in the Minuteman facilities too. The women were also called “airmen.”
The facilities were often being “upgraded,” I’d read. Some of the upgrades might have had to do with the fact that women were in there now. Maybe the fact that women were in there now should itself be considered an upgrade.
Near the door, we passed by a small toilet that had a seat but no lid. Alerts, meaning alert duty, lasted twenty-four hours. A toilet would be required. And a sewage lagoon somewhere.
Food was brought down to them. Must be a kitchen upstairs. Some Launch Control Centers were known to have better food than others, Lt. Roy told me. But I bet you couldn’t choose your LCC. Maybe you could choose certain menu items. Pizza would be one of the menu items, I’d bet.
A sign on the wall coming down had shown a missile with a pizza box and the legend, “Guaranteed delivery in 30 minutes.” That’s right. That’s about how long it would take. To get anywhere.
On the far wall, you could see a curtained sleeping area. Only one officer was supposed to sleep at a time, obviously.
The floor we were standing on was a metal grate that you could see was suspended in a capsule. Might the capsule be shaped like an egg? The shapes of egg shells have been shown to be hard to break, relatively speaking. But maybe the capsule was just a cylinder, like a pill. I couldn’t tell from where I was on the grate inside it.
In the corners, you could see something like great big automobile shock absorbers. Lt. Roy called them “shock isolaters.” Our launch control center was “hardened,” no doubt. Might it be one of the superhardened ones or were those just for the Peacekeepers? Did we ever actually try to build those superhardened sites? I guessed this one was probably just hardened. Did that mean it was capable of withstanding a direct hit by, say, a W87 with its 300 kilotons upgradable to 475 kilotons? Twenty to thirty-five Hiroshimas? I doubted it. What could survive a direct hit by something like that?
You could always pin your hopes on the probabilities in the CEP and hope the warhead targeted on you was one of the 50% that hit somewhere outside the area of the missile’s CEP. And hope that warhead was the only one coming in, which of course it wouldn’t have been. If one was coming in, it wouldn’t be the only one. The tests we saw pictures of were misleading in that respect. Always just one. And from a safe distance. The mushroom clouds could look beautiful from a distance. Especially the biggest ones.
The higher ranking of the two airmen in the capsule was the woman who had invited us in, whose name was Natalie Quinn, Captain Natalie Quinn. Captain Quinn had been born in the Philippines, an Air Force Brat, she said. She had been a missileer for four years. She was not a big person. Lt. Roy would have to duck every now and then as he moved around down here. Captain Quinn wouldn’t have to.
Her deputy on the alert was Lt. Alan Knapp, also not a big person. This was Lt. Knapp’s fourth alert. He didn’t seem entirely comfortable yet, if that’s the right word for how you want people to feel when they are on alert in a Launch Control Center.
On metal shelves above Captain Quinn’s console was a row of folders and snap binders, many of them marked “Top Secret.” Captain Quinn showed me how they could all be secured on their shelves with a metal barrier that could be raised from the bottom. She showed us how the filing cabinet could also be secured. What was in those folders and binders? Codes. Instructions. Check-lists. I knew I couldn’t ask to see but now I did know they could be secured if an attack was coming.
I was surprised to see how ancient the computer consoles looked. The screens and the icons on them looked like something from the Pac-Man era, low-definition, two-toned screens. Captain Quinn said their age would make them harder to hack.
Several virtual tabs ran across the bottom of the screen at Captain Quinn’s console. Captain Quinn explained that each tab opened up an area they could work in, like one would allow them to check on the condition of the missiles and order repairs if they were needed.
Some tabs had to do with security at the missile silos. The fences around the silos all had sensors. The sensors sent false alarms sometimes. Rabbits could make them do that, Captain Quinn said, and the wind in west Nebraska. Only once had it been protesters. I forget what year that had been.
I didn’t make a note of what was written on each of the tabs, would that have been permitted? Some of the labels on the tabs didn’t mean anything to me, but one did, the one that said “Targeting.” I knew that was one area in which we had made a lot of progress with our ICBMs, in how quickly we could re-target them. For the Atlas, that had taken hours. For the Minuteman III it would take much less time, I didn’t know how much less. Not something I should ask about, I suppose, but it must be down to minutes now.
I did think of a question about targeting I could ask. “Do you know where your missiles are targeted or are you just given codes?”
“Oh, we know,” replied Captain Quinn. “We know who we would be killing.”
I was surprised that the missileers would know this, and then not. Lt. Roy had told me that prospective missileers go through a lot of testing. Even if they pass, the training and the testing reveals to some of them that this kind of duty isn’t for them. I’m sure there are different reasons why they decide this. But we wouldn’t want a missileer, would we, who could do her job if she was just entering codes and not do it if she somehow learned what the codes stood for?
But Captain Quinn’s answer was interesting for another reason. She hadn’t used the abstract word I had used in the question, “targets.” She had used the word that recognized that when these “targets” were struck, people would be killed. She of course knew many, many people would be killed. Only some of whom might be soldiers. Our missileers would have to be able to face this too, wouldn’t they?
Captain Quinn might have overstated the point though, I thought. “People” is less abstract than “target” but still abstract, isn’t it? The next step down the ladder of abstraction and up the ladder of reality would be to something like mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandparents. Families. Individual people. People who are no threat to us. People with whom, given the opportunity, the missileers might have enjoyed a meal, a pizza maybe.
The missileers might know the places and populations they would be destroying, but that’s different from knowing who you are killing.
They don’t know who they would be killing any more than a bomber pilot does, any more than soldiers do, when you think about it, even if they kill someone in hand-to-hand combat. To do that sort of thing, you have to not-know your adversary at some level, right?
Happily, not knowing others is easy. Even if it’s people we know well.
That’s where my mind went. It’s obvious I could never be a missileer, isn’t it?
On Captain Quinn’s console I saw a dark patch that was about the size of a piece of sandwich bread. It had on it a graphic of “Jolly Roger” and a skull and crossbones. I knew that “Jolly Roger” was the insignia for their squadron, the 320th, but not what the patch was for. Captain Quinn explained that it covered a small screen that had classified information on it.
I’m sure I wouldn’t have understood what was on the screen, not right away. I might have been able to figure it out later if I thought it was important.
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