it.
By presidential order, the US military went from DefCon (Defense Condition) 5 to DefCon 3 during Kennedy's Monday night speech. DefCon 5 was business as usual; DefCon 3 was halfway up the scale. When Kennedy began speaking on national television, fifty-four SAC bombers each carrying as many as four thermonuclear weapons thundered off from continental bases to join the twelve-plane around-the-clock airborne alert. Some of the sixty-six bombers orbited the Mediterranean; others circumnavigated North America; others flew an Arctic route across Greenland, north of Canada, across Alaska and down the US Pacific Coast. One orbited above Thule, Greenland, to observe and report any pre-attack Soviet assault on the crucial US early-warning radar there. Polaris submarines put to sea. SAC armed its bomber force, dispersed it to military and civilian airfields and prepared 136 Atlas and Titan ICBMs for firing. Kennedy and Khrushchev began an exchange of belligerent messages. Kennedy had convened an executive committee of government officials to manage the crisis; options discussed by the ExCom ranged from blockade to air strike to Cuban invasion. The President said afterward that the purpose of the alert was to deter a Soviet military response to whatever Caribbean action the US decided to carry out: “The airborne alert,” he congratulated SAC, “provided a strategic posture under which every United States force could operate with relative freedom of action.” General Power saw a more threatening purpose, however; from his point of view, “This action by the nation's primary war deterrent force gave added meaning to the President's declaration that the US would react to any nuclear missile launched from Cuba with a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union itself.” Kennedy, that is, was thinking regional engagement under a nuclear umbrella; Power and LeMay were thinking global war.
Wednesday, October 24, when the naval quarantine took effect, SAC ratcheted from DefCon 3 to DefCon 2, the first and only time it ever did so. SAC alerted nuclear weapons increased to 2,952; with 112 Polaris SLBMs, their total destructive force exceeded seven thousand megatons. “We got everything we had in the strategic forces… counted down and ready and aimed,” General Burchinal said afterward, “and we made damn sure they saw it without anybody saying a word about it.” In fact, Power said several words about it, unauthorized and publicly, when he broadcast in the clear — in English rather than in code — to all SAC wings immediately after the move to DefCon 2 was announced:
This is General Power speaking. I am addressing you for the purpose of reemphasizing the seriousness of the situation the nation faces. We are in an advanced state of readiness to meet any emergencies and I feel that we are well prepared. I expect each of you to maintain strict security and use calm judgment during this tense period. Our plans are well prepared and are being executed smoothly… Review your plans for further action to insure that there will be no mistakes or confusion…
SAC routinely transmitted DefCon increases as unclassified messages until 1972, and Power was clearly emphasizing control. His broadcast was nevertheless a warning to the Soviets, whom Power knew monitored such transmissions, that the US had gone to full alert and might be planning “further action.”
Equally unsanctioned, and potentially catastrophic, was the launch of an Atlas ICBM from Vandenberg Air Force Base across the Pacific to the Kwaja-lein test range at four a.m. on October 26, the height of the Cuban missile crisis. SAC had taken over the test missiles at Vandenberg at the time of the DefCon 3 alert, programmed them with Soviet targets and begun attaching nuclear warheads. The Atlas had been scheduled for testing; it was launched on its precrisis schedule with SAC concurrence, a deliberate provocation.
The US's first squadron of Minutemen I solid-fuel missiles was undergoing testing and certification prior to deployment at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana when the missile crisis began. SAC, the Air Force Systems Command and contractor personnel worked nonstop to ready the Minutemen for launch. A declassified history of the missile wing reports that “lack of equipment, both standard and test, required many work-arounds.” The first Minuteman was up on October 26; five had been made operational by October 30. But miswiring, wire shorts and other problems left the missiles capable of being accidentally armed; one had to be shut down and restarted five times because its guidance and control systems failed, and all ten Minutemen at Malmstrom had to be taken off alert repeatedly for repair in the course of the crisis. Missiles did not have PAL locks in 1962; for safety and control, launch required redundant, coordinated keying by four officers in two physically separate launch control centers. The Malmstrom work-around overrode that safety system. One officer who controlled the Minutemen during the missile crisis told nuclear safety expert Scott Sagan, “We didn't literally ‘hot wire’ the launch command system — that would be the wrong analogy — but we did have a second key… I could have launched it on my own, if I had wanted to.” An Air Force safety inspection report noted after the crisis that “possible malfunctions of automated equipment… posed serious hazards [including] accidental launch… ” Another possibility that the inspectors chose not to mention was
Air Defense Command F-106s armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles scrambled at Volk Field in Wisconsin on October 25 when a launch klaxon went off in the middle of the night. With practice alert drills canceled at DefCon 3, the interceptor crews assumed they were going to war. Since they had not been briefed that SAC bombers were aloft dispersing and did not know SAC airborne alert routes, nuclear friendly fire was a real possibility. The launch klaxon sounding was a mistake; an Air Force guard at the Duluth Sector Direction Center had sounded a sabotage alarm that somehow keyed the klaxon at Volk Field. The guard had seen someone climbing the base security fence and had fired at the figure. An officer flashing his car lights managed to stand down the F-106s; on closer inspection, the saboteur had turned out to be a bear.
There were other serious command-and-control snafus during the Cuban missile crisis as well: a U-2 strayed over Siberia, leading Khrushchev to complain to Kennedy “that an intruding American plane could be easily taken for a nuclear bomber, which might push us to a fateful step”; air defense interceptors flew fully armed with nuclear rockets with all safety devices removed; US radar picked up an apparent missile launch from Cuba with a near- Tampa trajectory on Sunday morning, October 28, that was determined only after predicted impart to be a computer test tape. The US Navy tracked Soviet submarines aggressively throughout the world — forcing them to surface and reveal their positions, a serious provocation — when it had been ordered to do so only in the area of quarantine.
More dangerous by far than all these incidents was Curtis LeMay's overconfident and belligerent advice to President Kennedy, whom he believed to be a coward. Knowing that the US and the USSR were approaching mutual deterrence and that SAC was therefore a wasting asset, LeMay pushed Kennedy to up the ante, bomb Cuba and take out the missile sites. “The Kennedy administration thought that being strong as we were was provocative to the Russians and likely to start a war,” the SAC general said with disgust in retirement. “We in the Air Force, and I personally, believed the exact opposite… We could have gotten not only the missiles out of Cuba, we could have gotten the Communists out of Cuba at that time… During that very critical time, in my mind there wasn't a chance that we would have gone to war with Russia because we had overwhelming strategic capability and the Russians knew it.” Believing the crisis a poker game, LeMay imagined that the US held the best cards. “The Russian bear has always been eager to stick his paw in Latin American waters,” he taunted during the crisis. “Now we've got him in a trap, let's take his leg off right up to his testicles. On second thought, let's take off his testicles, too.” As LeMay's castration imagery implies, he may have been goading Kennedy to attack Cuba as an excuse to launch full strategic preemption; discussing the missile crisis twenty years later with historian Ernest May, he said “that it was his belief that at any point the Soviet Union could have been obliterated without more than normal expectable SAC losses on our side… ” Kennedy administration Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara remembers that “LeMay talked openly about a first strike against the Soviet Union if the Russians ever backed us into a corner.”
Kennedy fortunately resisted LeMay's goading, Robert Kennedy writes:
When the President questioned what the response of the Russians might be, General LeMay assured him that there would be no reaction. President Kennedy was skeptical… “They, no more than we, can let these things go by without doing something. They can't, after all their statements, permit us to take out their missiles, kill a lot of Russians and then do nothing. If they don't take action in Cuba, they certainly will in Berlin.”
The President's instincts were sharper than the general's. The blockade worked; the crisis passed; Khrushchev capitulated. LeMay was outraged. Daniel Ellsberg, then a member of the ExCom staff under McNamara, says LeMay chewed Kennedy out. McNamara confirms the story: “After Khrushchev had agreed to remove the
