They had, Black thought, slipped by that one cheaply. They had decided that all possible steps should be taken to assure against accidental discharge of a missile.
Maybe he should resign his commission. It hit him again. It had been coming to a head within him for a long time. Curious, he thought: he could live with his conscience and with his beliefs in almost any other arm of the service but the one he loved. But SAC and especially his own role in SAC (the link he furnished between operations and the Strategy Analysis and Evaluation Section) made his private thoughts seem like rank heresy. But why did it torment him so much more than it did the others? From the outside they looked happy in their jobs, but who could tell? He supposed he looked as untroubled as they.
A stir on the other side of the room caught his eye. There he was. Groteschele. It was as if he had opened a door from last night’s party and walked right into the Pentagon: the same confident, aggressive, jutting thrust. The same stride. In company with Groteschele came Wilcox, Carruthers, the Navy Chief of Staff, and Allen, of the National Security Council.
Everyone in the room had observed the entry of the big brass at the same time. The room “knew” it. An instant before it had been a room with one personality, relaxed and informal. Now it had become a room which had snapped to attention in all sorts of little ways hard to detect. It was the effort everyone was making to seem to behave as if the brass were not there that made the difference.
Groteschele proceeded to the head end of the long conference table. As he did so everyone else began finding seats around the table. It was clear that the Secretary of Defense was either not coming or would arrive late and had sent word for the briefing to start.
Stark handled the opening remarks easily and deftly. Then Groteschele began talking in his positive, slightly patronizing way. He announced the subject: accidental war. The subject had been cropping up in the news lately. There had been a few articles in magazines. The military people had, of course, been working on the problem for years and in detail.
“In the old days, six months ago,” Groteschele said with a chuckle, “most of the talk about accidental war was what we now call the madman theory.” He went on about the possibility of SAC squadron commanders going berserk and trying to save the world from the Communists.
It hadn’t been a joke, as Black knew well. Groteschele’s reference was to the special psychological screening system which the Air Force had inaugurated in 1962 to assure that no “mentally unfit persons” would have contact with the preparation or discharge of atomic weapons. Black had been among the first within the Air Force to propose and support the program. He was not sure even now that the problem could be disposed of summarily. The men in SAC were trained for destruction. They were “preprogrammed” to attack Russia.
“What frightened us was not so much the madman problem,” Groteschele was saying, “but its opposite: at the last moment someone might refuse to drop the bombs. A single act of revulsion could foil the whole policy of graduated deterrents. Say, for example, that some PFC at a transmitter simply decided not to carry out the order for an attack. That could ruin us right there.”
It was behavior in a showdown that the whole SAC training program was designed to prepare for. The tests, the indoctrinations, the training-all were designed to convert normal American boys into automatons.
“Automatons. That’s what some of our critics call them,” Groteschele said evenly. “But they are also patriots and they are courageous. And haven’t we always honored the Marines simply because they did exactly what they were ordered to do?”
To hell with Stark, Black thought.
“Professor Groteschele, one moment,” he said. “Isn’t it true that the ‘go’ reflex, the will to attack, is so deeply indoctrinated in our SAC people that even those who pass our psychological screening are more likely to err on the side of ‘go,’ rather than on withdrawal?”
“At one point, General Black, maybe,” Groteschele said. He controlled his impatience with the interruption. “But we analyzed the possibility and built in some protections. Even if you had a madman in command of a wing-even, General, if he had several colleagues who shared his madness, they could not carry out their will.”
Groteschele glanced at SecArmy. Wilcox was bent forward attentively. Groteschele then launched into a description of the elaborate checks, decoding systems, and other devices designed to assure that war could not happen through human error.
“It is impossible, quite impossible,” Groteschele concluded. “The statistical odds are so remote that it is impossible. Or as impossible as anything can be. The ‘go’ process will not operate until the President orders it. Even then the Positive Control routine requires a double check.”
Black hesitated. He knew Groteschele wanted to move on. But he also knew that Groteschele was skirting a real problem.
“What if the President went mad?” Black asked abruptly. “He is a man under considerable pressure.”
Black, as some in the room knew, was the single person there who could, because of his friendship with the President, raise such a question. But Groteschele, with a pang of envy, also knew that Black would have said it even if he had never seen the President.
The shock in the room’ was palpable. The SecArmy frowned at Black. Groteschele glanced quickly at the SecArmy, then around the table. He knew he did not have to answer Black directly.
“Then we would have trouble,” Groteschele said with a laugh. He shrugged, held his hands up as if imploring for common sense. “But it is not likely.”
The room relaxed. Black was still unsatisfied, but he knew when to stop. Still, he thought, it was possible. Woodrow Wilson had been President for two years after a stroke. High officials have cracked under the strain. Forrestal had jumped out a window. It was possible for the President to come down with paranoid schizophrenia, Black thought. Not likely, for American politics ruthlessly screened out the unstable personalities, but a possibility.
Maybe, Black thought, the whole damned game is taking me apart. He felt the diminutive terror start somewhere in his guts. It was something to do with the
Dream. At sessions like this the individual stripes of hide were sliced off his skin, each one leaving him less intact, more pained. And yet, he thought desperately, this is where I belong, where I am needed, where I can contribute. He allowed his mind to wander, searching for the moment when the real face of the matador would be revealed, for the instant when the real sword would slice in between his shoulders and end his indecision.
Groteschele was now proceeding to the possibilities of machine error. This was new stuff. Nobody really knew anything about it. Groteschele was always the statistical type. it was odd how flesh-and-blood human events disappeared into numbers. Groteschele was explaining that of course there was a remote mathematical possibility of machine error. He had calculated the error. In any year the odds were 50 to 1 against accidental war. This, Black remembered, had already been made public in the Hershon Report. But the report was several years old and the people at Ohio State who put it together made it dear that they did not have access to confidential information. The situation was much worse than they had reported because everything had gotten more complicated.