Read Online Fail Safe by Eugene Burdick, Harvey Wheeler - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Eugene Burdick, Harvey Wheeler
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straitjackets, Geiger counters, Demarol pills, death jackets in wood or silk. You name it, we got it, a sleepy and very proud master sergeant said as he looked over his rows of filing cabinets and calculating machines. Around the world a hundred other men like him did the same. . . in confidence, with pride, and without question.
Thousands of sleek fighter planes were being readied but only a few of them were launched. They were loaded behind revetments and in ready rooms and at the ends of runways, poised like polished needles, their wings drooping. Their time would come later.
In all of this vast system there was not a single man who knew for certain what had started the operation. Not a single man knew whether this was a genuine "go alert" or another of the hundreds of practices they had endured. The men were calm. The whole intricate mechanism functioned flawlessly.
The second system that General Bogan had activated was the Gold System. This was different from the gold telephone which connected a handful of policy-making men directly to the White House. This was the global system of missiles. These were the strange new vehicles which were launched by men, but had no living creature aboard them. Once launched, some were guided by men. But others used stars and planets to position themselves, constantly making small alterations in di. rection while moving at a speed of 20,000 miles an
hour. They could not be launched by the men who readied them but only by the man at the very top of the pyramid. Once launched they could not be recalled. And the fact of the launching could not be concealed from the enemy.
The missiles ranged in size from the big bulky stub-nosed strategic missiles weighing hundreds of tons down to the light-weight jeweled devices for tactical operations.
The work of readying the giant missiles was complex and time-consuming. Missiles like the Atlas and the Titan began to give off weird clouds as liquid oxygen filled their tanks. The Minute Man and the Polaris, which used solid fuel, began the elaborate countdown which had been done hundreds of times before.
At the Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado there was no visible sign from the air or from the ground that a huge missile operation occupied seventy square miles of Colorado prairie. This was a "hard site" base. Everything was deeply submerged below ground. Only a direct hit could incapacitate one of the three Titan missiles operated from each of the six shock-mounted complexes comprising the Lowry Missile Wing. Even if one of the complexes were put out of commission the other five would remain operational, for no one of the complexes was closer than eighteen miles to another. Inside each submerged missile complex life was completely self-contained, sealed off from the rest of the world. The missile-site base was the enemy's prime target.
The crews of the bases, depending on their literacy and background, expressed it differently: bull's-eye, homer, 4.0, knockout, prime, top priority, ten-strike, No. I, après vows le deluge, horse's ass, the first goodbye. They all meant the same thing. They all knew that the enemy, any enemy, would strike first at these
bases. The cities, the seaports, the ships, the planes, those could come-or go-later.
When one descended into the deeply buried command post and personnel quarters there was the sensation of entering an ingenious collective coffin. Each time might be the last. But no one really believed in either extreme-that it might be the last time, or that it was just another practice. They were emotional neuters. Long ago, under the scrutiny of hard-eyed psychologists, the claustrophobic and the easily panicked men had been weeded out. The rest had been made deliberately nerveless. They were technicians of a greater terror taught to ignore the unalterable end of their work. And, in honest fact, most of them did not believe in their work. It was a gigantic child's play, a marvelous art. It had to be done
Thousands of sleek fighter planes were being readied but only a few of them were launched. They were loaded behind revetments and in ready rooms and at the ends of runways, poised like polished needles, their wings drooping. Their time would come later.
In all of this vast system there was not a single man who knew for certain what had started the operation. Not a single man knew whether this was a genuine "go alert" or another of the hundreds of practices they had endured. The men were calm. The whole intricate mechanism functioned flawlessly.
The second system that General Bogan had activated was the Gold System. This was different from the gold telephone which connected a handful of policy-making men directly to the White House. This was the global system of missiles. These were the strange new vehicles which were launched by men, but had no living creature aboard them. Once launched, some were guided by men. But others used stars and planets to position themselves, constantly making small alterations in di. rection while moving at a speed of 20,000 miles an
hour. They could not be launched by the men who readied them but only by the man at the very top of the pyramid. Once launched they could not be recalled. And the fact of the launching could not be concealed from the enemy.
The missiles ranged in size from the big bulky stub-nosed strategic missiles weighing hundreds of tons down to the light-weight jeweled devices for tactical operations.
The work of readying the giant missiles was complex and time-consuming. Missiles like the Atlas and the Titan began to give off weird clouds as liquid oxygen filled their tanks. The Minute Man and the Polaris, which used solid fuel, began the elaborate countdown which had been done hundreds of times before.
At the Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado there was no visible sign from the air or from the ground that a huge missile operation occupied seventy square miles of Colorado prairie. This was a "hard site" base. Everything was deeply submerged below ground. Only a direct hit could incapacitate one of the three Titan missiles operated from each of the six shock-mounted complexes comprising the Lowry Missile Wing. Even if one of the complexes were put out of commission the other five would remain operational, for no one of the complexes was closer than eighteen miles to another. Inside each submerged missile complex life was completely self-contained, sealed off from the rest of the world. The missile-site base was the enemy's prime target.
The crews of the bases, depending on their literacy and background, expressed it differently: bull's-eye, homer, 4.0, knockout, prime, top priority, ten-strike, No. I, après vows le deluge, horse's ass, the first goodbye. They all meant the same thing. They all knew that the enemy, any enemy, would strike first at these
bases. The cities, the seaports, the ships, the planes, those could come-or go-later.
When one descended into the deeply buried command post and personnel quarters there was the sensation of entering an ingenious collective coffin. Each time might be the last. But no one really believed in either extreme-that it might be the last time, or that it was just another practice. They were emotional neuters. Long ago, under the scrutiny of hard-eyed psychologists, the claustrophobic and the easily panicked men had been weeded out. The rest had been made deliberately nerveless. They were technicians of a greater terror taught to ignore the unalterable end of their work. And, in honest fact, most of them did not believe in their work. It was a gigantic child's play, a marvelous art. It had to be done
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