buttons on his control panel. Since he was alone in the cockpit, no one could override his decision.
One of the interceptor pilots was Lieutenant Leon Schmutz, a twenty-six-year-old recently out of flight school. As he climbed into the skies above the Bering Strait to search for the missing U-2, he wondered what he would do if he ran into the Soviet MiGs. His only means of defense was a nuclear warhead capable of destroying everything within a half-mile radius of the explosion. To use such a weapon was virtually unthinkable, particularly over American territory. The detonation of even a small warhead could result in all-out nuclear war. But to fail to respond to an attack by a Soviet fighter went against a pilot's basic survival instincts.
Maultsby made a quick mental summary of his situation. The main plus was that he could no longer hear the Russian radio station. The principal minus was that his plane carried sufficient fuel for nine hours and forty minutes of flight. He had been airborne for nine hours and twenty-eight minutes, having taken off at midnight. Twelve minutes of fuel remained.
To have any hope of making it back to Alaska alive, Maultsby knew he would have to make full use of his plane's extraordinary gliding capabilities. With its long, billowing wings and exceptionally light airframe, a U-2 could travel up to two hundred miles without power, buoyed by the wind currents as it slowly descended through the earth's atmosphere. It was a glider as much an airplane.
He needed to save some fuel for an emergency, and also wanted to conserve his battery power. He made a final call in the clear to announce that he was going off the air. 'A sense of despair set in' as he reached out to the control panel in front of him and shut down the plane's single Pratt & Whitney J-57 engine. He settled into a gentle glide.
By switching off the engine, Maultsby had also disabled the cockpit pressurization and heating system. The capstans in his flight suit inflated with a
'This is a fine mess you've got yourself into, Charlie.'
The latest message from Khrushchev had only confirmed the worst suspicions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military brass was convinced that the Soviet leader had no intention of taking his missiles out of Cuba. He was merely playing for time, dragging the United States into an endless round of pointless bargaining. By the time Kennedy realized what was happening, it would be too late. The missiles would be mated with nuclear warheads, pointed at America and ready to fire.
The way the Joint Chiefs saw it, any conciliatory words or gestures from Moscow were merely a feint. A top Marine general warned the chiefs that 'Khrushchev, like every doctrinaire Communist before him, is a slavish follower of Sun Tzu.' To prove his point, he cited several aphorisms from the venerated Chinese military strategist, drawing parallels between the Middle Empire in 512 B.C. and the Soviet Empire of A.D. 1962:
• Speak in humble terms, continue preparations and attack;
• Pretend inferiority and encourage the enemy's arrogance;
• The crux of military operations lies in the pretense of accommodating to the designs of the enemy.
The chiefs were meeting in the Tank, their Pentagon inner sanctum dominated by a huge map of the world. Seated around the polished wooden table, they debated the latest intelligence from Cuba, including evidence of nuclear-capable FROG missiles and many more Soviet troops than previously suspected. Curtis LeMay dominated the session as usual, even though he spoke in monosyllables and refused to engage in discussion. The Air Force chief wanted his colleagues to recommend execution of a full-scale air strike against thousands of military targets in Cuba, followed by a ground invasion in seven days. At LeMay's insistence, the generals began drafting a document to send to the White House accusing Khrushchev of 'diplomatic blackmail.'
'Delay in taking further direct military action toward solving the Cuban problem is to the benefit of the Soviet Union,' the chiefs warned. 'Cuba will be harder to defeat. U.S. casualties will be multiplied. The direct threat of attack on the Continental United States by Cuban-based nuclear missiles and nuclear capable aircraft will be greatly increased.'
The chiefs were discussing the timing of the initial attack on Cuba when McNamara walked into the Tank. Having come straight from the ExComm meeting, he was preoccupied by the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, easy targets for the Soviets if the United States attacked Cuba. One way to reduce the temptation to Khrushchev to 'knock out' the Jupiters would be to station a Polaris nuclear submarine off the coast of Turkey, and let Moscow know it was there. The invulnerable submarine, with sixteen Polaris ballistic missiles on board, was a much more effective deterrent to a Soviet attack on Turkey than the vulnerable Jupiters. Sending a nuclear submarine to Turkey would also pave the way for the withdrawal of the obsolete Jupiters.
The defense secretary instructed the chiefs to prepare a plan for redeploying at least one nuclear sub to the eastern Mediterranean. He also wanted to know what exactly they had in mind when they talked about 'early and timely execution' of the air strike plan against Cuba.
'Attacking Sunday or Monday,' LeMay replied gruffly.
The generals made little secret of their impatience with McNamara. They had clashed with him repeatedly over the purchase of new weapons systems, and suspected him of 'pacifist views.' After McNamara vetoed the new B-70 bomber and insisted on limiting the Minuteman to one thousand missiles, LeMay asked his colleagues whether things could be 'much worse if Khrushchev were secretary of defense.' He found such squeamishness difficult to stomach. When McNamara asked whether it was possible to bomb Soviet missile sites without killing many Russians, LeMay looked at him with amazement. 'You must have lost your mind.'
McNamara's feelings about his Air Force chief were more ambivalent. Their relationship went back to World War II. The brilliant statistician from Berkeley had served under LeMay in the Far East, plotting ways to maximize the devastation caused by the bombing of Japanese cities. McNamara considered his former boss 'the ablest combat officer' he ever knew. LeMay was brutal, but he got the job done. He thought in the simplest of terms: loss of his own crews per unit of target destruction. McNamara had helped LeMay make the calculations that led to the burning to death of a hundred thousand residents of Tokyo ? men, women, and children ? in a single night. But his admiration for the general was mixed with revulsion. McNamara had been prepared to accept the fire-bombing of Tokyo. A nuclear war with the Soviet Union that could result in millions of American casualties was a different matter.
'Who will win such a war?' he would ask the Air Force chief, when they debated the subject.
'We will, of course,' LeMay would reply. 'The country that ends up with the greatest number of nuclear weapons wins.'
'But if we lose ten million people, what's the point of winning?'
McNamara was tired. The last few days had been a whirlwind of meetings, conference calls, and hundreds of decisions. He slept on a cot in the dressing room of his third-floor Pentagon office overlooking the Potomac. He had only managed to get home for dinner once, on Friday evening. He ate most of his meals at a card table in his office. He rose by 6:30 a.m. and worked as late as 11:00 p.m. or midnight. His sleep was often interrupted by calls from the president or senior officials. His only relaxation was the occasional game of squash in the Officers' Club in the Pentagon basement. His mind still worked like a computer, but he was losing some of his trademark sharpness and no longer dominated ExComm meetings with his crisp analyses and multipoint options.
In the midst of this strained conversation, McNamara received an urgent message, passed on to him by LeMay. He looked through it quickly.
'A U-2 has been lost off Alaska.'
It had taken SAC commanders an hour and a half to report the loss of the plane to civilian authorities, despite strong evidence that Maultsby had strayed over the Soviet Union. The initial reports were fragmentary. The Pentagon told the White House that the pilot 'got off course' after developing 'gyro trouble,' and was picked up by a 'high frequency direction finder' off Wrangel Island. 'Then seems to have overflown, or came close to, Soviet territory. Not clear at this time exactly what cause was. Russian fighters scrambled ? ours too.'
The first reports were alarming enough. An American spy plane had probably overflown Soviet territory at a time when both countries were close to nuclear war. It had almost certainly run out of fuel. McNamara rushed out of the room to call the president. The logs of the meeting show that it was 1:41 p.m.
