I had been wondering about escape for so long, been looking for the opportunity, indeed ever since my basic training at West Point. And when I became part of the Team, that temptation had only grown. After I got involved in the nuclear weapons administration and was given my assignment, became one of the carriers. Saw how far-reaching the issue was.
The simple thought had been to just vanish, never again to reappear. Some quick changes of identity during my escape, the way we normally would, and then lower myself into the eternal ice with the briefcase.
Yet I knew that it would make no difference. Other than to me personally: that I alone would be spared my moral dilemma. But the rest of it would stay intact. They said the briefcase became unusable as soon as the system was broken. After they had altered the codes, and the whole security structure down to the minutest detail, somebody else would take my place and the whole caboodle would go back to what they called normal.
But now—with each new message to the cell phone at the abandoned playground, always synchronized with another brown envelope in the mailbox—everything became as much possible as impossible. To leave my family and my whole double life. In some way break out of the Team together with Alpha. Escape with the briefcase still fully functional, my finger on the launch button. We two against the world.
I had no idea what the plan could be, beyond the rudimentary instructions which came to the cell phone during the seven months between February and September 2013, until two days before the official visit to Stockholm. But I took it for granted that Alpha knew exactly.
And I had for so long been straining at the leash, testing the limits of my civilian identity, been stirred by the mysterious envelopes with the articles. My presence in the School of Philosophy coffee room had long since become a trial for most people. I would kick off with a simple assertion, already at the time when we withdrew from the A.B.M. Treaty in 2002: that the nuclear weapons issue was troubling me. How strange it was that so few people talked about the biggest issue of all. That here we were, as close to extinction as we had been during the Cold War.
Most of my idealistic, left-leaning colleagues gave the same answer: that there was surely no longer any nuclear threat worth talking about. Weapons of that kind had after all been taken off the apocalyptic daily agenda after the Wall fell. I had begun to argue back, with quiet determination, confining myself of course to public sources yet still getting ever closer to the line.
For more than a decade I had held forth in the coffee room, pointing out that there were still upward of twenty thousand nuclear warheads distributed across the world’s surface. That the Doomsday Clock, which a group of committed natural scientists set periodically based on their judgment of how close the world is to man-made catastrophe, had been moved to just two minutes to midnight to reflect the nuclear threat. That, according to the U.N., mankind could end world starvation by giving only one third of the global expenditure on nuclear weapons to the poorest countries. That the cost of the world’s stock of nuclear weapons had been calculated at close to a trillion dollars per decade. Yes, I clarified for these godforsaken humanists, that’s a one followed by twelve zeros.
Later, I could only recall all this as if through a haze. How I had ground on that in the U.S. alone we had produced more than seventy thousand nuclear warheads between 1945 and 1996, more than all other countries put together. In recent years, compared to those before 9/11, we had at the same time increased our defense budget by more than 50 per cent—while our national debt was greater than our G.N.P. Now we were spending five times more than China, ten times more than Russia, on our military apparatus.
Then I would go on to lecture them about the renewal. The “Revitalization”, as it was called: the coming generation of nuclear weapons. I stressed that this was what really caught the eye—and was yet rarely commented on. That the whole of our nuclear arsenal was in other words going to be renewed, at a cost of at least a trillion dollars during the coming thirty years. Once again: a one and twelve zeros.
Many commentators, I would go on, claimed those figures were way too low. That to replace the twelve Ohio-class atomic submarines would cost at least 110 billion dollars. And that renewing the B.61 atomic bomb, our faithful servant from the Cold War days which was still loaded onto F.16 aircraft at our bases all over Europe and elsewhere in the world, would cost five billion dollars per year for the next decade.
Somewhere around there, the majority of my colleagues would have taken themselves back to their offices with many a sigh. Only the most radical stayed and chimed in.
Sooner or later one of them would also take up the internal aspect. For example, say that they had seen a documentary about the fabled “nuclear code” and learned that for a long time it had consisted of just eight zeros, 00000000—because it should be as easy as possible to send off the missiles in a crisis.
I used to say that I had seen the very same documentary.
And that the lead times, according to what I had read, were still at least as short as during the Cold War. The Russians’ intercontinental missiles could reach us in half an hour—and in the continental U.S. we needed two minutes before the corresponding rockets, and twelve before the nuclear weapons on our U-boats, were airborne and counter-attacking. That would give the President between eighteen and twenty-eight minutes to reach a critical decision. Under the greatest possible pressure, dealing with all of the controls needed to ensure that the alarm was not a technical glitch, which was by no means a rare occurrence.
I could have told them that the internal scenario was more rapid. By the time it would come to light that a handful of people with the necessary level of authority had gone to pieces, or had consciously and resolutely decided to take matters into their own hands, not much time at all would be left to arrest the process.
But I never did tell them. That is where I drew the line.
I had, however, begun to refer to the books written by Bruce Blair, a former missile operator, which were published in the 1990s. According to him, during the Cold War it would have required at the most four moles to set off a full-scale nuclear attack, including two personnel at the operational level to confirm each other’s breaches of orders, thereby rendering the whole so-called “No Lone Zone” rule meaningless. Our fail-safe regulations prescribed that no one person could be alone with the critical controls and were still cited by our authorities as a guarantee that nothing unforeseen could happen within the system. Furthermore, a maximum of two personnel would be needed at a sufficiently high strategic level.
It was also Blair who had disclosed that, a long way into the ’70s, the security codes had been no more advanced than those eight zeros, so as not to slow down launch procedures. After he had lectured at one of our highly classified internal security conferences, Zafirah asked him how many moles it would take these days. How many do you yourself think, he had answered, bearing in mind digital vulnerability, mobility, the deliberate nature of our decentralized war plan? Twenty? Ten? Two?
If some of my very few Republican colleagues stayed on in the coffee room, they would be capable of defending our security routines with a strange fervor. Insist, for example, that the briefcase was always within reach of the President—according to what they had read in magazines without any “alarmist agenda”.
I could have answered that there was indeed in theory a close proximity between the President and the briefcase; also a complicated structure of bodyguards, competing security teams, the chance of lightning-fast and unpredictable things happening. The human factor. That the physical distance between the President and the briefcase could in practice change—but that it never was short enough to stop one worrying about it.