What if there is no Government?
Chapter 17
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America pushed away the mug of strong black coffee and rose stiffly to his feet. He listened to the conversations going on around him, trying hard to tune out the background noise. Last night he had made the most terrible decision any man in history had ever had to make; and sometime in the next few minutes he knew he had to make another, possibly even more monstrous decision.
Jack Kennedy’s closest civilian advisors and all the military men had been appalled when he had decided to stay at his post ‘in the White House’. He was adamant; if the American people did not have anywhere to run their President was morally bound to stand with them. By then War Plan Alpha had been activated and the clock to Armageddon was remorselessly ticking.
The chain of command was secure; the Vice-President was high above the Mid-West in SAM 26000, the specially modified long-range Presidential Boeing 707. If the White House was nuked Lyndon Baines Johnson would ‘run with the ball’.
McGeorge Bundy, the United States National Security Advisor, was prowling the middle of the Oval Office with a telephone pressed to his ear trailing a long cable haphazardly across chairs, sofas, and between the feet of White House staffers and the stone-faced officers from the Pentagon. Bundy’s high brow was furrowed but throughout the last fraught hours he had remained cool, calm, collected and oddly dispassionate.
He clunked the receiver down onto its rests and balanced the phone on a chair before approaching the President.
“The Chiefs of Staff need to know if we’re executing War Plan Alpha Zero-Two?” He half asked, half-stated.
Jack Kennedy nodded acknowledgement.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy and McGeorge ‘Mac’ Bundy were probably going to go down in history as the greatest mass murderers of all time; and now they were about to discuss compounding their sins.
“We seem to have a bit of a crowd in here, Mac,” the President observed.
While he waited for his National Security Advisor to winnow the ‘crowd’ down to a more appropriate and manageable size, for the thousandth time that night he replayed the events which had brought the Unites States of America to all out nuclear war. Less than twenty-four hours ago the situation had been bad, a crisis, but the idea of actually going to war over Cuba had still seemed a distant, unlikely prospect. The blockade of Cuba was in place, the CIA had eyes in the sky on the missile sites on the island, his younger brother Bobby and Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, were still talking to the Soviets. Nobody really wanted war. And then everything had begun to unravel and once the genie was out of the bottle there had been no way to get it back in.
First the Cubans, or the Russians — it did not matter who, what or why — had shot down a U-2 over Banes near the western extremity of Cuba, and Major Rudolph Anderson had become the first casualty of World War III. Shortly afterwards destroyers attached to the USS Randolph’s task group had been attacked by a Soviet submarine in international waters. The submarine, believed to be one of four Foxtrot type diesel-electric vessels en route to Cuba from Murmansk, had fired a Hiroshima yield nuclear-tipped torpedo. The USS Beale had been lost with all hands and two other vessels seriously damaged. After that things had raced out of control. Within two hours missiles launched from Cuban soil had killed tens of thousands of Americans in Texas and Florida, and after that there had been no alternative to ‘taking out’ the Soviet missiles on Cuba.
Discovering that the Air Force had no plan in its locker for ‘surgical’ nuclear strikes on the island; he had authorised ‘Operation Sledgehammer’, the one sure fire way to ensure that no more Cuban-launched missiles fell on the cities of the South. If at any time there had there been an unambiguous statement of ‘good intent’ or of non-escalation from the Soviets perhaps, War Plan Alpha could have been put on hold. There had been no such statement; to the contrary, the Soviet leadership had said nothing…
“Mister President?”
Jack Kennedy realised he had been lost in his brooding.
His National Security Advisor’s composure was finally fraying a little around the edges; otherwise he was businesslike, in control.
Forty-three year old Boston born Bundy was the second son of a wealthy Massachusetts family inextricably involved in Republican politics. Emerging from Yale he had spent Hitler’s war in US Army Intelligence; after the war, he had co-authored Henry L. Stimson’s — President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of War’s — autobiography, On Active Service in Peace and War. Stimson had been a family friend for over two decades and in the way of such things, Mac Bundy’s brilliant early career had encountered very few obstacles. This was not to say that his career would have been just as brilliant with or without Stimson’s influence; because Mac was that sort of guy. In 1949, aged only thirty, he had joined the Council on Foreign Relations — along with giants of the international stage like Dwight Eisenhower, Allen Dulles and the veteran diplomat George Kennan — to study the Marshall Plan. In 1954 Bundy, aged just thirty-four, had been appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Art and Sciences. At the time he had become Jack Kennedy’s National Security Advisor many considered Bundy the most brilliant of ‘best and the brightest’ men surrounding the President.
Bundy cleared his throat.
“General LeMay reports that eighty-seven bombers are airborne or at quick reaction alert status and available for an immediate second strike,” he reported. “Surviving aircraft from the first strike are now landing back at continental bases. LeMay says losses have been very heavy but it may be possible to refuel, re-arm, and re-crew a ‘small number’ of the returning aircraft and to re-task them for subsequent strikes if required. However, few if any of these returning aircraft are likely to be ready in time to participate in a second strike within a time window of less than twelve hours. LeMay says most of the returning aircraft will have suffered potentially disabling EMP — electro-magnetic pulse — damage to their flight, navigation and targeting systems and are likely to be grounded for several weeks. The Chief of Naval operations reports two of our Polaris boats did not launch any of their birds during the first strike. One was under the Arctic ice and never received the ‘shoot’ command and the other was attacked by Soviet destroyers in the Barents Sea. Several other Polaris boats experienced technical issues and failed to fire full salvoes. The CNO says he can contribute at least forty-three Polaris submarine launched ICBMs to a second strike. From what little we can tell the British seem to have pretty much shot their bolt,” this last was said with nakedly mixed emotions. Bundy and his President both felt bad about the way they had treated the Brits; not trusting their old allies with any advanced notice of the first strike was going to have generation-long consequences down the road. But that was for the future and their problem was very much the here and the now. “We have no communications with tactical or theatre deployed units equipped with nuclear weapons in Germany or Turkey.”
Jack Kennedy stifled an inner groan of despair.
“Do we have any direct communications with the British?”
“No, Mister President.” Bundy did not linger on this point. “In the Mediterranean the Sixth Fleet remains intact but communications are ‘spotty’ due to post-exchange atmospheric conditions. In the Pacific the C-in-C Seventh Fleet reports that three of the SSNs operating in the north-west of his command area — that is, the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk — have been authorised to conduct unrestricted submarine warfare operations against Soviet naval units. The Chief of Naval Operations endorses this on the basis that intelligence reports indicate the Soviets have been putting medium range ballistic missiles on surface ships and submarines, in addition to equipping the latter with nuclear-tipped torpedoes as we have already discovered off Cuba.”