aligned, while the phone network into which signals from the plane’s five-mile-long, 5/8-inch cable could be fed into the silos and other elements of the triad were being repaired.
From the line of twenty-eight stern-faced computer operators in Kneecap came the information that the targets of the seventeen missiles almost certainly included Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, Omaha, Nebraska, the Trident SLBM sub bases at Bangor, Washington, Kings Bay, and the Trident tracking facilities at Point Magu in California and Cape Canaveral. The remaining eleven 550-kiloton warheads were expected to zero in on the MX silos in the Midwest.
The situation, bad as it was, became more terrible because of what General Carlisle, SAC’s commander, who had already launched Stealth fighter intercepts to fire “spoiler” rockets and B-1 bombers with cruise missiles, told the president in the last phone call he would ever make — that they were faced with the “old north/south problem.”
President Mayne and Paul Trainor, sitting before the banks of small TV screens in the presidential command room aboard Kneecap, knew Carlisle wasn’t talking about the Civil War. The old north/south problem was the fact, not generally known among either the public at large or the military, that all tests of Soviet ICBMs had, for no other reason than the geography of the country, been carried out on east/west axes and not on north/south axes, which, in any hostile launch, such as the one now on the way, would be the axis used in attacking the United States.
To the man in the street, a missile, like a bullet, presumably operated the same way, no matter in what direction it was fired. But, as the president’s aides explained, missiles, due to the necessity of accurately predicting trajectories that would leave the earth’s atmosphere and then reenter it, were not only subject to wind and weather in general but were particularly dependent upon the shifts in the earth’s magnetic field. It was the reason why, even under the most favorable atmospheric circumstances, a missile still had a circular
This rather esoteric mathematical consideration translated into a monumental decision for the president because of the fact that, unlike the Soviet Union, many U.S. missiles, such as the Tridents deployed in nuclear sub storage areas such as Bangor, near Seattle, were close to, if not part of, American cities. How could the president know, given the vicissitudes of missiles’ circular
On one level the question seemed purely academic — even, as the president acknowledged, cold-blooded — but it was nevertheless one he had to entertain, for he would not have much time to decide what the Russian strategy was. And if he made the wrong decision — to go countervalue rather than counterforce in any retaliatory strike — it could mean an escalation that could result in utter annihilation for both countries’ industries and most of their people. Could he confine retaliatory strikes to military targets like those selected by the
Then Kneecap received a flash message that one of the SS-19s had exploded in a nonnuclear detonation during reentry, its warheads tumbling down harmlessly before they could explode.
“An intercept?” asked the president.
“No, sir. Mechanical malfunction.”
“Pray God the other two will malfunction.”
They didn’t.
Intercepts took out three of the remaining twelve warheads of the other two rockets during reentry, but that left nine incoming.
The SAC B-1 bombers were disappearing quickly, the screens full of swarms of intercept fighters from both sides. Trainor was shouting, “Mr. President! Goddamn it — we’re down to the wire here. If we don’t strike back now—”
Mayne raised his hand to steady him. He felt strangely calm. It was now down to a Hobbesian simplicity: “If you use your sword, I must use mine,” and the life of man did indeed appear to be “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Accordingly, he wanted to alert General Carlisle to the possibility of all-out countervalue, city-for-city attack. But Carlisle was already dead, Omaha no more. The last thing Rick Stacy saw was the incoming trajectory, the computers’ cold neutrality announcing the incoming missile’s CEP was plus or minus three miles.
“Way off,” someone in Cheyenne Mountain said. It was, but the air burst of the SS-19’s 550 kilotons at four thousand feet above Omaha produced a multilevel but quickly flattening mushroom cloud, its coronas, like enormous smokers’ rings, transforming the merely colorful sunset of Nebraska into an explosion of astonishing beauty, the stunningly vibrant orange core of the mushroom turning the vast, undulating snowfields to watermelon pink, the circles now rising about the mushroom’s stalk vermilion-tinted, thinning as the red stalk rose through them, the circles now fading to purest white, like a host heaven-bound.
The overpressure of six pounds per square inch produced winds in excess of 130 miles per hour over an MDZ— maximum danger zone — of fourteen square miles, flattening every house in the area, pressures on them in excess of 115 tons, the supercyclonic winds blowing people out of office towers and buildings not already destroyed by the wind.
Three-quarters of the four hundred thousand people of Omaha were killed in a hurtling cyclone of debris as it rose higher and higher, obscuring the lower rings of the air burst, turning the atmosphere a reddish brown. Much of this “shrapnel” swirl consisted of thousands of bodies, superheated, many vaporized — the number of outright fatalities estimated by the superhardened-domed sensors to be 67 percent, the remainder fatally injured.
There were no survivors in a sixteen-square-mile area directly below the air burst’s center, and while, beyond the maximum danger zone of fourteen square miles, the survival rate climbed from 10 percent to 90 percent, at two hundred miles from the zone, these “survivors” were the unlucky ones— faces melted, all body hair gone, and for many, no visible injury, but all of them, particularly given the flatness of the terrain, walking receptacles of huge doses of radiation, doomed to agonizing deaths caused by radiation sickness and multiple cancers, those in SAC HQ dying through suffocation, trapped by the millions of tons of rubble over the venting systems and air intakes, the fireballs having raised the temperature so high that emergency oxygen-generating plants either exploded or were too warped to operate.
The first priority of outside rescuers, for whom not nearly enough anticontamination suits were available, was to get to the children of the outlying districts. For many of these, a half hour delay in reaching them meant death.
As the first tremors of the Omaha “strike” registered on the silo cluster known as Romeo, 750 miles away in Montana. Melissa Lange, deep in Romeo 5A on her last shift before her vacation had been due to begin, knew that Rick Stacy was either dead or dying. Immediately she informed both her crew partner, Shirley Cochrane, and Romeo’s MLC — master launch control — that she was “in violation of WESSR — weapons systems safety rules.”
“Reason?” inquired the duty officer in Romeo’s MLC.
“Emotional stress, sir.” Her voice was thin, all but inaudible. She paused. “My fiance is — was — in SAC HQ.”
“Hold on.” There was a two-second delay, Shirley Cochrane tense in her chair, already buckled up, fully expecting the launch code to come chattering in at any moment, her seat pulled forward on the guide rails, her hands checking the belt for the third time. The Romeo MLC duty officer was back on the line. “Lange, you able to carry on?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good. Your WESSR violation duly noted and negated by circumstances. Override command issued by Colonel Beaton. You are still on shift. Repeat, you are still on shift. Go to prelaunch status.”
“Yes, sir.”
Melissa turned back to her console gratefully, for the console was now the real world. She was allowed — had been
“Light on,” confirmed Cochrane. “Light off.”
There was the ten-second delay before Melissa could instruct, “Hands on keys.”
