“I know. I read your speech in the paper.”
“And you think I’m wrong.”
“Senator, we don’t keep moving, they’ll move right ahead and figure out ways to neutralize our birds. Then it’s not overkill any more, it’s We Lose. God knows we don’t want a thermonuclear war but maybe the real danger isn’t in going to the brink of war but in shrinking from the brink of war.”
It was a speech he’d heard Woody Guest make once and hearing it from Chandler’s lips made him smile slightly. “You have a lot of faith in technology, don’t you, Major?”
“Kept us alive this long, sir.”
The door to the concrete dugout was marked simply WING HQ and it was guarded by armed sentries in white helmets and a KMS machine which compared the thumbprints on their ID cards with their own thumbs. Chandler said, “Be pretty tough for a saboteur to get in past this, Senator, if that was on your mind.”
“I see you have seen my speeches.” Forrester smiled his political smile.
“Yes, sir. It usually pays.”
“Know your enemy.”
Chandler slid his card into the machine and pressed his thumb to the scanner. “An unauthorized visitor would have an easier time getting into Fort Knox. The cards are magnetically coded like a printed circuit sealed inside the plastic. It took a direct order from the Secretary of Defense to get them for you and they’ll be destroyed the minute you leave the base. Well then, in we go—after you, gentlemen?”
The nerve center reminded Forrester of an airport controllers’ console room: tiers of screens above a vast curved desk surface. Chandler kept up a running commentary: “If one of my inspectors spots any of these boys goofing off just once his ass is grass.… I guess you already know we’ve got all kinds of redundancies and duplications so it’s impossible for a crazy to go off his nut and shoot off a bird. The President has to push the button. Nobody else. We’ve got double-check, verification procedures and the whole procedure can be stopped at any point right up to ignition by a countermand from the President or NORAD. It’s a whole lot easier to stop it than it is to start it.”
Jaime Spode was looking at everything and Forrester knew the information was being absorbed into Spode’s mental computer, sorted for weaknesses, filed for later recovery.
Professor Moskowitz watched with a detached expression and when he turned toward Chandler he said, “You’re talking about a preignitiont countermand. On the old birds we had self-destruct mechanisms but I understand they’ve eliminated them on these. What if the missiles have already been launched? Can you still stop them?”
“No. Once they’re in the air they’re gone. Unless you can shoot them down and that’s damned unlikely. If we had a radio signal to stop them the Reds could use it to neutralize our strike—you can’t keep a radio code private forever. I mean, everything’s got to be tested and the Reds watch us with everything they’ve got whenever we test a bird. If we used open radio transmission to control them they’d pick up the signals and work out the codes and frequencies. Can’t be done, Professor.”
Forrester said, “You’ve never tested the missiles with live warheads.”
“No sir, but we’ve tested the warheads underground and we’ve tested the birds with dummy warheads. Everything works, Senator, honest to God, I give you my word.”
They went through low tunnels, heels ringing on the echoing concrete; they wore hard hats and flashed their ID badges at the checkpoints. The low roar of ventilator blowers was an oppressive rumble Chandler led them on to a circular balcony and when Forrester looked up and down all he could see was the massive polished skin of the ICBM and the confusion of machinery around it—pipes, cables, platforms, wheels, ladders, lights, joints, cylinders, gears, devices.
Chandler delivered himself of his set-piece speech: “This is one of our eighteen Minuteman Threes, a multiple-warhead three-stage missile with a tri-gyroscope guidance system like the ones that put the Apollo ships down on pinpoints on the moon. After she’s launched the first and second stages burn out. They’re decoupled by explosive connectors and they fall free. When the third stage ignites it accelerates the payload to orbital speed. She’s up at a ballistic altitude zenith of about eight hundred miles and once she’s up there above the atmosphere she sheds her ceramic heat shield to lighten weight. Then she coasts in orbit until her micro-circuit computer, which is programmed with the target information, fires the retro-rockets and brings her down toward the first target.
“You’ve got three warhead reentry vehicles—RV’s—triggered by altitude fuses. If the target’s a city they’ll detonate high above the target to maximize the area of destruction. A twenty-megaton blast at altitude will destroy brick buildings in a circle maybe fifteen miles in diameter. But if your target’s an enemy missile base your RV has to get in low to dig the enemy’s missiles right out of their hard silos. That means impact inside four hundred yards of the silo. That kind of accuracy requires meticulous programming and that’s why the ground-support systems for each one of these silos are as big and complicated as the inside of an aircraft carrier.”
Forrester listened with half his mind; when Chandler stopped for breath Forrester changed the subject: “And what if you don’t get your Phaetons, Major?”
“In other words why can’t we make do with what we’ve already got here? Senator, how much do you know about the Russian SS-9?”
“Not very much.”
“The SS-9’s a lot bigger than this bird here: big enough to carry five times as many warheads as our bird. So far they’ve deployed about four hundred SS-9S, which is enough to target our whole deployment of one thousand Minutemen, assuming they’ve got a good enough delivery system to knock out our hard silos. Naturally we hope they don’t—we hope they’ll leave enough unhit for us to retaliate and cripple them. Our clout depends on convincing the Reds we can penetrate our warheads into their turf no matter what they do. The object of the game is to keep them convinced we can inflict unacceptable damage on them. If they line up enough SS-9s to kill our whole system they don’t have to worry about that any more unless we’re lining up something against them—like the Phaeton Three.”
Moskowitz said, “It’s funny the way you Air Force people ignore the Navy.”
“Professor, there’s a limit to the size and speed of a bird you can launch from a submarine. We’ve got maybe thirty nuclear submarines deployed on station at any given time, and they may have a few hundred missiles and warheads among them but all the Reds have to do is knock out those thirty submarines to destroy the whole Polaris-Poseidon system. The Navy puts a lot of store in mobility and concealment but I wouldn’t bet my ass the Reds couldn’t attack all our subs simultaneously—they’ve got a sophisticated sub-tracking system and you can be damn sure they know where every one of our subs is right now. Let’s don’t forget they don’t need to make a direct hit to knock out a sub. Set off a nuke anywhere in the neighborhood and you make a shock wave that’ll take any submarine out of action. But even supposing they did miss two or three of our subs we’d still be talking about thirty-ton missiles with a maximum range of maybe twenty-five hundred miles. A submarine-launched bird is a lot easier for their ABM defenses to handle.
“No,” Chandler concluded, “the only real knockout punch we’ve got is this Minuteman Three and if they deploy enough SS-9s to cancel these birds out, then where’s our deterrent against a preemptive first strike?”
Moskowitz wore a bemused little smile that implied he didn’t believe a word of it. Forrester couldn’t get away from the notion he was listening to a computer. Chandler’s pronouncements were set pieces right out of the little propaganda booklets printed up for Public Information Officers. To Forrester’s mind they were all infected with a tragic blindness: the generals talked only to other generals; they parroted 1950 slogans of deterrents, weapons gaps, the Communist monolith. The machinery had grown in sophistication; the commanders had not. I have seen the futre, and it does not work. He ran his eyes up the dismal great column of the missile, gleaming dully in the antiseptic artificial light, and he heard Moskowitz begin to speak in his wry classroom voice.