Yet what the scientific committee in its report had called “an evil thing”, had a racing start. Like a self-playing piano at top speed. For most of those involved in the development of the hydrogen bomb, everything must have been broken down into detaiclass="underline" thousands of challenging intellectual and practical problems needing to be solved—until the entirety became a fact. Once again, scientific curiosity took over.
Many of those involved have testified to the almost unbearable silence after the test of the first hydrogen bomb, “Mike”, in November 1952, during the age of slow communications. The telegram from Teller to one of his key collaborators, Marshall Rosenbluth, therefore came as a great relief.
It contained just four words, in the typically low-key jargon of scientists. A confirmation that history’s hitherto worst weapon of mass destruction had now been born without mishap.
“IT WAS A BOY,” the message read. No more, no less.
7.03
The last night, I lived that nightmare again. Dreamed that I was back in the subterranean eternity of the facility, carrying out the Test. The missile itself was as ever only a few hundred feet away. Eerily silent in its specially constructed silo, like a gigantic chained beast, a chrysalis brooding day and night under temperature control and exact monitoring of levels and flows.
No detail could ever go wrong. Once a month each of us had to do the Test, to ensure that we still remembered the correct procedures—in case anything should happen, unlikely as it might seem.
Otherwise, here we were to sit all day long, throughout the year, decade after decade, deep underground, so the status quo could continue. Up on the surface the concluding phases of the Cold War would soon be over, the world would spin forward to the fall of the Wall, détente, eventually 9/11, our invasions, global terrorism as a kind of counter-attack, the President’s fine words about a world free of nuclear weapons. But down here, time had stopped.
I often thought of it as the strangest assignment in the world. The enormous tension which never found its release: 100 per cent concentration on total inactivity. On nothing other than nothing ever happening. The fact that we had created a system all around the world which could never be used, on a scale that was larger than human life.
Equally often I wondered why we operators never received a fraction of the attention the missiles themselves did. Nobody ever checked our levels, flows, the temperature of our brains. So long as we passed the Test, all our lights showed green.
The first question this month was what we would do if the seismic alarm went off in gate L.04 after the obligatory L.F.F. test, the control routines for seeking out Launch Facility Faults. I read swiftly through the multiple choice answers.
(A) Sound the Security Alert.
(B) Contact F.S.C. (Flight Security).
(C) Contact the next gate, L.05, and obtain two confirmations from the E.M.T. team.
(D) Contact M.M.O.C. (Missile Maintenance Operations Control).
And then my mind went blank.
I tried to control my breathing. Knew after all that help was within reach: the crib that had been circulating among us without any fuss, with our commanders’ approval, for many decades. That all I needed to do was to make that little sign behind my back to be told the secret, the one that in fact no longer needed to be kept secret from anybody, except during inspections. As was the case now.
The crib was our insurance. As well as that of our superiors, the whole system’s.
Because the rigid and non-negotiable requirement from the nuclear weapons command, in other words our political establishment, was that we had to score 100 per cent on the long and demanding Test, each and every time. We were all playing to the gallery. No operator could achieve that. Not in this subterranean solitude, with the inhuman psychological pressure that we faced all day long, with only the mighty missile and its gently sighing premonition of Doomsday for company.
But all I ever needed to do was shape my fingers to make that sign behind my back. Discreetly enough so that only the necessary people would see it: the commander and the person with the crib within reach. My breathing was already back to normal, just the realization that the commander would soon be pushing that paper gently into my hand helped with that.
Which must have been why it took so long—a minute, maybe closer to two—before my pulse really started to race. When I realized that no-one was coming to my rescue this time.
I cast my eyes around the examination hall at Gate L11, hardly bothering to hide my desperation, even from the inspector, the sullen gentleman furthest back along the wall. At last I caught sight of his smirk. It was the most recently arrived operator, a ginger kid from somewhere in the Mid West, and he was pointing discreetly at his knee under the desk. That is where he had put the crib.
There was a roaring in my temples, I felt the blood coursing in time with my pulse, rising with each second. My uniform jacket was becoming soaked with sweat, everything seeping through.
Desperately I tried to concentrate on the next question. What measures should be taken if “M.O.S.R. X.” appeared on the screen in the control room.
The only thing I could recall was that the acronym stood for “Missile Operational Status Response X.”. Again I looked over at the new recruit. His eyes were focused downward. Moving between the Test on the desk, and the crib on his knee. No glance in my direction.
I read through the choice of answers as slowly as I could. The acronyms flickered before my eyes. Panic at the thought that I would not be allowed to remain down here, in my blessed sealed-off refuge, poured through my body. That they would dismiss me right away. I heard myself breaking the soft rustling quiet of the examination hall, mumbling the different options:
(A) Begin with an L.F.F. to check whether the information on the computer screen really is correct.
(B) Contact Flight Security immediately.
(C) Call Team immediately using the separate S.I.N. telephone network.
(D) Order an immediate and total evacuation of the facility with the exceptional command Emergency Launch L.F.F. Evacuation.
When I caught up with the new arrival after the Test—just outside the hall, on the way into tunnel T24 heading toward the canteen, in full sight of all the inspectors—I just took him down. Before I smashed his head into the metal floor, not once but repeatedly, the answer suddenly occurred to me.
“Of course, answer ‘D’,” I said, looking straight into his terrified eyes—and went on: anything can happen when it’s “Status Response ‘X’!”
7.04
Before they came and fetched me, after a number of days or weeks in my isolation cell, and when I had told them that my chronicle for Edelweiss was complete, I was granted one last telephone call. Custom dictated that one should ring home. A pointless and heart-rending conversation, a repugnant punishment, certainly, for the soon-to-be-deceased, but maybe even more so for the dependents.
Yet I could not stop myself from putting Amba through it. She was now my only hope of hearing some form of truth before it was all too late. Who would recall what I had told her about my mother, maybe even that scene at the kitchen table when I was thirteen, or my spider phobia. Whether I had revealed things I should not have during our first night together, immediately after the welcome for new teachers at The Catholic University. When she and I had poured out our memories to each other: lifetimes in fast-forward. Perhaps said something about once having been a violent young man, which Ingrid had referred to during our interrogation, and not at all the pacifist, before she had started working on me. Or muttered something in my sleep.