Chapter 6
No new incoming ICBM track had appeared on the main ‘battle board’ for thirty-one minutes. However, it was still far too early to start hoping that the Soviets had shot themselves dry; the first Tupolev Tu-95 turbo-prop and Myasishchev M-4 jet long-range bombers — codenamed Bears and Bisons — were over northern Canada, their tracks marked like the flickering tendrils of a silky spider’s web, were beginning to criss-cross the screens of the Air Defence Controllers. Several interceptors were already rising to meet the enemy intruders and others were standing — hot and ready — at quick reaction alert hardstands across the North American Continent. Land-based and ship borne surface-to-air missile systems were locked into the NORAD command net. Phase two of the nation’s battle for survival was about to commence.
The tracks of the incoming missiles targeting Colorado Springs had vanished off the ‘battle board’ four minutes short of impact. There were two possibilities; they might have been radar ‘ghosts’, or the incoming missiles might simply have broken up or crashed.
Carl Drinkwater, the duty Burroughs NSCAC — Network Systems Communications Analyst Consultant — was fighting fires of his own, attempting to correlate the known strikes and the likely damage on the ground so far, with the disproportionately widespread disruption to and impairment of the giant, hideously complicated dispersed SAGE, or Semi-Automated Ground Environment, network. The system had been built with massive inbuilt redundancies with each individual node overlapped by as many as three or four others, but it had not been designed to counter, cope with, or to remotely withstand an attack mounted with inter-continental ballistic weapons. SAGE was created to protect the continent from an attack by enemy bombers, not by ICBMs.
The ambitious, somewhat speculative and obscenely expensive Nike-Zeus Project was in hand to shoot down incoming rockets with two or three stage very long range surface-to-air missiles tipped with one to three hundred kiloton warheads; but that was still pie in the sky even assuming the project eventually bore fruit. Most people at NORAD were unconvinced Nike-Zeus would ever work; and for the time being wise men took the promises of the Nike-Zeus project team with a pinch of salt and would continue to do so until extended trials proved conclusively that it was capable of actually intercepting incoming ICBMs. In any event such a system would take years to integrate into the SAGE command and control system. For the moment NORAD could do nothing but watch the Soviet ICBMs hurtling down from space; other, that is, than to issue expertly calculated circular error probability predictions about each weapon’s imminent ground zero.
One thing was now abundantly clear.
From the observed evidence of the targeting and the accuracy of the enemy’s retaliatory counter strikes the Soviets had not been caught with their pants down. Well, not down around their ankles, leastways. To have flushed so many ICBMs — as many as fifteen so far — those missiles must have already been standing ready on their pads at less than thirty minutes readiness for launch. The evidence of the Soviet counter strikes was unambiguous. Given that Soviet missiles were much bigger beasts than their US counterparts and could not be left fuelled on the pad for any length of time, it followed that the Soviets must have been partially prepared for the worst some hours before they detected the first incoming Atlas, Titan and Minutemen over the Arctic. Moreover, since none of the Soviet missiles were hidden away in silos — they were too big — the execution of Strategic Air Command’s ICBM targeting intelligence and target acquisition must have been, at best, spotty.
Back in the 1950s the inadequacy of the United States’ intelligence gathering organs had been gratuitously exposed first by Sputnik, and then by the first manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin, so it probably should not have come as a great shock that SAC had no idea where many of the USSR’s ICBMs were located.
However, the reasons why would have to wait for the post-war inquest.
Right now tens of thousands, possibly millions of Americans had died and were dying in the ruins of half-a-dozen cities because the CIA and the United States military’s immense and unbelievably profligate intelligence gathering community had comprehensively failed the American people.
Carl Drinkwater carried on burrowing through the reams of printouts spread across the long table at the back of the control room. The other big post-war inquest — more likely an ‘inquisition’ which would inevitably closely resemble a mediaeval witch hunt — would be into the highly questionable system-wide resilience and survivability of the SAGE network. SAGE had dropped off line in areas hundreds of miles from the nearest nuclear strike. Theoretically, the system was supposed to be hardened against big bombs going off within thousands of yards of key installations; and yet multiple distant nodes were down and the numerous built-in network redundancies had failed to compensate for the lost connectivity. Either the SAGE communications links ‘hardening’ specifications were faulty, or the hardening had been botched by AT&T. The mainframes in the Air Direction Centres ought to be more or less immune to anything but a direct hit, but clearly parts of the communications net — thousands of modems, buried dedicated lines and probably every other microwave communications tower — had apparently been taken out by the EMPs, the electromagnetic pulses, generated by relatively distant air bursts. Almost as troubling was the realisation that widespread general failures in the power and telephone grid in the immediate vicinity of nuclear strikes had shorted out large sections of the national network, which ought not to have been possible because SAGE ought not to have been just plugged into the mains, anywhere!
The great American defence contractor scam had struck again!
Unconsciously, Drinkwater had crumpled a sheet of paper and thrown it across the room. He kicked over a wastepaper basket.
“Fuck!” He spat angrily. If one of those approaching bombers got through — or was not tracked through the cloud of chaff it, and every other attacking aircraft was scattering — it might simply be because a few dozen contractors who did not know, or care, what they were building had padded their ‘bottom lines’ by failing to bury vital cables, modems, switching gear and relays deep enough or by pouring less concrete than specified.
The ‘battle board’ was tracking seventeen incoming bombers.
The Soviets had almost certainly known what was coming; they just could not do anything about it. In recent exercises to test SAGE in a purely air defence role combating a simulated Soviet attack by Strategic Air Command B-47s and B-52s several of the attacking aircraft always ‘got through’ to their targets. However, SAC had employed every electronics counter measure in the book, swarmed newly operational Air Direction Centres, routed bombers around and between ADCs, flown high and very, very low level sorties and had previously been in receipt of the latest SAGE readiness reports. The Soviets were in no position to ‘swarm’ SAGE, they did not know — leastways, they should not know — any of its ‘weak points’, or possess electronic warfare capabilities remotely on a par with SAC’s most modern B-52 bomb wings.
Somebody had put a mug of black coffee in front of Carl Drinkwater.