realize that this nutcase is not bluffing. If they balk, tell them we’re working on a plan to neutralize the threat, and that we’ll share it with them as soon as we nail down the details. In the meantime, they need to get their submarines on the surface so that Zhukov doesn’t start launching nuclear missiles.”
The president lowered himself into his chair. “We’re back to square one,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out how to destroy the K-506 without submarines.”
He slammed his fist on the table. “And then we’re going to go and kill the maniac who started this nightmare.”
CHAPTER 30
At the close of the Second World War, German rocket engineers under the direction of Wernher von Braun were engaged in developing the A9/A10: a powerful two-stage missile capable of reaching across the Atlantic Ocean to attack New York and other American cities. The A9/A10 development effort was part of a larger program called
If it had ever been completed, the A9/A10 would have been the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile in history. Instead, it became the theoretical model from which later ICBMs would be built.
The program came to a halt in 1945 with the surrender of the German military, but Wernher von Braun and a number of his fellow scientists were quietly whisked away to America, where they became the core of the rocket and missile research programs for the U.S. military.
Having foreseen the collapse of the Nazi regime, von Braun’s team had managed to conceal and protect many of their blueprints and research papers. In some cases, the recovered technical documents were nearly as useful as the scientists themselves.
This was certainly true for the Soviet Union. Because Soviet agents in post-war Germany did not immediately recognize the potential value of Hitler’s rocket scientists, the Soviets acted too slowly to capitalize on this brief opportunity. Consequently, when Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev began constructing his nation’s missile program, he had captured German blueprints to work from, but almost no German technical expertise to help him decipher them. To paraphrase a prominent military historian:
But — Germans or no-Germans — the race was on. Although they had been allies in the fight against the Nazis, the United States and the Soviet Union had very different plans for reconstructing the world in the aftermath of the war. The relationship between the two nations had been strained even when they’d been in formal alliance. With the dissolution of the alliance, mutual suspicion deepened into outright hostility. Even as World War II was ending, the Cold War was beginning.
As a result of military and industrial buildup, economic capacity, and postwar positioning, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as the so-called
Then, in August of 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic bomb at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. The US intelligence community would later learn that the Russian weapon had been an almost direct copy of the American ‘Fat Man’ bomb dropped on Nagasaki. In point of fact, the Russian atomic bomb was more a product of espionage than research. But the source of the information paled beside a single inescapable fact … The Soviet Union now had nuclear weapons.
The balance of power no longer leaned in America’s favor. It had become a true balance, with the growing might of the US on one side, offset by the growing might of the USSR on the other.
In 1952, America briefly regained a significant technological edge with the first successful test of a nuclear fusion weapon: the infamous
This new capability gave the United States a tremendous strategic advantage, but the shelf-life of that advantage was very short. In 1953, the Soviet Union tested its own fusion weapon, the
The superpowers differed on virtually everything, from political ideologies, to economic models, to human rights, to the very future of mankind. The Soviets believed that the Communist ideal was destined to spread to every nation on earth. Fearing that very thing, the US began building military and political alliances in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The intent was to ‘contain’ the threat of communism, and to guard against Soviet military aggression.
This philosophy led to the signing of the
The Soviet Union interpreted these alliances as a direct strategic threat, and responded in 1955 by forming the
Sides had been chosen. The battle lines had been drawn for an entirely new kind of war.
Until the 1940s, even the most lethal of weapons had been limited in their capacity for destruction. As horrific as the machineries of warfare had become, their deadliness had never been absolute. Even the bloodiest battles tended to leave survivors on both sides — among the victors and among the vanquished. No matter how high the death toll rose, it was never high enough to completely eradicate the population of the defeated nation.
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed that. With the advent of nuclear warfare, it became possible (at least theoretically) for one country to utterly annihilate the inhabitants of another country.
In hindsight it seems incredible, but the nuclear warhead became both the symbol of absolute national power, and the ultimate tool of military force projection. In their ceaseless contest for strategic dominance, the United States and the Soviet Union poured enormous amounts of funding and effort into building, testing, and stockpiling new and more powerful nuclear weapons.
As the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers grew, the technology of weapons delivery platforms advanced to keep pace. Propeller driven bombers gave way to jet bombers, and then to supersonic jets.
By the mid 1950s, the jet bombers of America’s Strategic Air Command were operating in a state of around- the-clock readiness, continually prepared to obliterate every city and military target in Soviet Russia. The Soviets held their own bombers in a similar state of readiness, poised to rain nuclear death on the United States with equal efficiency.
The total extermination of a nation’s inhabitants was no longer an abstract theory. The assembled firepower of either of the nuclear superpowers was now sufficient to virtually guarantee the annihilation of populations on a national scale.
For the first time in history, two adversarial nations had become so powerful that they did not dare take their disagreements to the field of battle. Any direct military contact between the superpowers might lead to an exchange of nuclear weapons, and any nuclear combat — no matter how small in scale — could lead to a cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, until a small conflict escalated into a full-scale nuclear war. Neither nation could hope to survive an unrestricted nuclear attack, and a growing body of scientific research suggested that a major nuclear war might well destroy all life on planet earth.
In the context of nuclear warfare, traditional concepts of victory and defeat lost all meaning. No one could
