The Night I Nearly Started World War III Part 2

    Panic began to surge through my body as I stood there shaking at what I was witnessing.  This cannot be happening! STOP IT! STOP IT!, the inside of me was screaming.
    I wanted to jump over the console and grab the cutters away from the Commander as if I were disarming a lunatic with a gun, but i knew I’d only be shot by the Deputy.  This has got to be a mistake, i wanted to yell.  Everything had been fine when we came out on Alert.  What in the name of God could have gone wrong in the world to start a war in the past 18 hours?
    Then it happened!  Just as the Commander began to cut the seal on the Launch Enable Button, a hysterical voice broke out over the EWO (Emergency War Order) Communications Network.  “All missile crews disregard that last message!” the voice screamed.  “It’s a mistake!  Do you hear me?”  The message began to repeat, but in the middle of the transmission the sound went dead.  The whole crew sat there in disbelief.
    At no time was the EWO communications Network ever to be used for verbal orders.  Nothing but top-secret codes came in over this system.  When we were all in EWO school, it was drilled into us that the only legitimate authorization for aborting a Launch Countdown was via coded message direct from Strategic Air Command HQ in Omaha.
    We were told that if we ever got an authenticated Launch message and if it was followed by someone ordering us verbally to abort the Launch Procedure, we were to disregard the Abort Order at all costs- because it would be the Russians trying to deceive us.  We were informed that the Russians had the electronic know-how to plug into our internal-communications system.
    The silence of the EWO communications Network was the breaking point of my disbelief that this was some kind of joke.   I had just heard with my own ears the first outside proof that something horrible had to be happening between the superpowers.
    Against all reason I truly believed I had just heard a Russian voice impersonating an American officer.  It was really happening.  We were going to have to press the Button.  Rivers of adrenaline began shooting through me.  My chest was pounding.
    I had a vision of the next half hour.  BOOM! There go my parents in Jefferson, Iowa.  Never knew what hit them! BOOM! I saw an American passenger ship going down in the ocean, torpedoed by Russian subs.  BOOM! There goes SAC Headquarters.  BOOM! By the time the bombs stopped going off, there would be nothing left.  Everything would be gone.  we had six months of food and water down in the Launch Control Center.  But even if we did survive, would we want to stay alive?
    My thoughts were interrupted when I saw the Commander waving his arms and shaking his head no at the Deputy, indicating that he should disregard the verbal Russian order.  Clearly, he was convinced as I was the Final Countdown had begun.
    “Crew, we will be proceeding with the Launch Procedure,” he announced coldly.  “I’m cutting the Launch Enable Seal now.”
    Just as his trembling hands reached out to sever the wire seal, the EWO warning warble sounded again! We all froze in terror.  This was it! This would be a Red Dash 1: The Launch Order.  The Commander dropped the wire cutters and grabbed his code book. The Deputy reached for his.
    The voice on the final message was strong and professional: “Mole Hole, Mole Hole.  This is Mother SAC, Mother SAC. Prepare to copy a Green Dash 5!”  This code was a new one to me, and from the reactions of the Commander and Deputy, they seemed just as confused as i was.  Holding my breath, I watched as the copied, decoded and authenticated.
    Had the Russians taken over SAC and broken our codes?  Were they stopping our launch? Or was this a legitimate Air Force fuckup? Who in the hell was in command?  As these questions tumbled through my mind, the Commander began speaking over our headsets.  “Crew, we have just received a valid Green Dash 5, and I’m going to that Checklist...Step 1.  Return to Ready Green.”
    Ready Green simply, quietly and without fanfare returned the missile site to normal status.  Green Dash 5 had been a stand-down order.  The crisis was over.  Or was it?  We were all too stunned to speak.
    “What the hell just happened?” asked the Commander finally.  The Deputy and I could only shrug our shoulders  “Better call the Base Command Post and see what’s up, Deputy.”
    At this time the Sergeant came sashaying down the stairs with fresh coffee- didn’t seem to have a care in the world.  He looked as if he had just shit, showered, shaved and shampooed.  With a big grin on his face he set the pot down on the crew table and said, “I just woke up.  What’s goin’ on?”
    “We don’t know,” the Commander answered.  “The Deputy is trying to find out now.”
        A moment later the Deputy finished his call.  “Seems they don’t know any more than we do,” he said.  “They got the same messages we did from SAC.  They said they’re checking now to find out what happened and would get back to us as soon as they knew.”
    “Coffee, anyone?” the Sergeant asked.
    The phones began to ring off the wall.  It was other crew members from other sites who had just gone through the same thing.  “Did you copy that Blue Dash 1?” they all asked anxiously.
    The speculations began to fly.  We sat there on the edge of our chairs watching every little light on our Control Console, expecting that something horrible might still happen.
    Hours went by. The relief crew finally showed up, and they didn’t have any answers either.  In fact, it was the first they’d heard something had gone wrong.  There was no word during the top-secret briefing they’d had just before coming down to relieve us.  No word from anyone hours after the incident.  The only thing we knew for sure was that something had gone wrong at SAC Headquarters.
    Two days later at our regular briefing all crews that had been on Alert that night were given the official version of what had happened.  It wasn’t a computer error or an equipment foul-up. It was worse: human error, pure and simple.  A Colonel in charge of the EWO system had transferred a friend of his-a Major-to a new command at SAC Headquarters.  The Major’s assignment would be to work in the EWO room and broadcast Emergency War Orders to Air Force outposts.
    Shortly after the newcomer arrived at Headquarters, the Colonel arranged to meet with him in the broadcast room at about 3 a.m.  On one side of the room was a primary broadcast console, where another Major was sitting on active duty.  He had all of his coded messages on the wall in front of him.  On the other side of the room was the alternate broadcast console, a backup in case something should go wrong with the primary unit.
    The Colonel went over to the primary table, picked a message off the wall and motioned his friend over to the alternate console.  Seated at the controls, the Colonel asked the Major to read the coded message while he operated the broadcast console controls as if it were a real situation.  After his friend-continuing their little charade-asked all missile sites to acknowledge receipt of the Blue Dash 1, imagine the Colonel’s surprise when he saw the whole fucking Missile Indicator Board in the War Room light up like a Christmas tree.
    “Why are the lights doing that?” the Colonel asked the Major on duty at the primary console across the room.
    “Holy fucking shit, Colonel!” the Duty Major yelled.  “You just sent that message out! Your console is alive!”  The Defcon II message-triggering a Global Launch Standby Alert-had gone out to every Air Force missile site in the world.
    Without a moment’s hesitation the Colonel grabbed the console microphone from the new Major and began yelling, “All missile crews disregard that last message.  It’s a mistake!”  He was starting to repeat himself when the Major on duty at the primary console shut him off by switching the primary back on the line.  The Duty Major then took a few precious seconds to locate an opposing order to the Blue Dash 1 - A green Dash 5 - and sent it out immediately.  We were back to Ready Green, just like that.
    This was what the Air Force told us had happened.  After the briefing we went back out to Alert at the missile site, and the Commander assembled us at the crew table to review how we had handled the crisis.  He said he was impressed that this grave error had been safely corrected.  Then he asked that none of us ever tell what had taken place, because of the bad publicity it would cause the Air Force.
    “Bad publicity?!” I yelled, “What if the Colonel had picked up a Red Dash 1- a Launch Order?  What if the Duty Major had blown it and not stopped us in time?”
    “What ifs don’t matter,” the Commander replied coolly.  “What was done was done!”
    I can tell you what would have happened.  Not one human being would be left alive to read these words today.
    But the worst part of this confession is the last: Nothing has changed since then.  The system’s still the same.  Pressure on the crews, as the missiles get newer and trickier, is even worse.  Drinking on the job is a real problem with the U.S. as well as Russian crewmen.  We have 33,000 nuclear warheads now.  The Russians have nearly as many.  There is no crisis-communications center between the two superpowers to prevent all-out war in case of an accidental launch.
    Unless you’ve served in the nuclear madhouse and gone out and touched that smooth white missile looked up at the Bomb and sensed its awesome destructive power, you can’t realize that we dare all probably dead already and just don’t know it.  Once you’ve baby-sat the Bomb, the reality of nuclear annihilation by accident or by design seems so close every minute of every day, it strikes me as a miracle we’ve survived this long.
    Each night of my life since that terrible night 20 years ago I awaken in a cold, sweaty terror from the same nightmare-back in the hole praying for sanity and salvation as we lunge toward Armageddon.  No human being can retain his sanity, let alone be trusted to perform, under the pressure of being “the one” who must push the button to end the world.  Yet never must the task be placed in other than human hands, for anyone who’s ever been in the service knows that the military’s machines and electronics have a way of getting away from you.  In the multiplying missile systems, this means that it’s just a matter of time before a missile gets launched by accident.
    This is a truth only those who have stood in the Valley of the Shadow of the Missile can understand.  None of us who felt the future die inside us that night will ever sleep in peace until all the nuclear missiles in he world are gone.  This is our secret dream.  But to come true, it will have to be every-one's dream.

The Night I Nearly Started World War III Part 1

Late last year columnist Jack Anderson made headlines by charging that a ten-megaton thermonuclear warhead had almost been launched by mistake during a test at a Titan base in Kansas. The Air Force- predicitably-responded by denying the allegations as “completely false.” Five months later, however, former CIA Director William Colby admitted that the Pentagon has in fact “received false alarms of nuclear attack from our highly computerized warning systems more than 100 times.” 

    Details remain cloaked in secrecy, but HUSTLER has obtained absolute confirmation of just such a near-catastrophe-an authentic first-person account of exactly how, when and where it happened.  Clair Tomlinson, the author of this article, was not only a witness, but also a protagonist in this incredible true-life drama.  It took place one night in the spring of 1964, when he was serving as Air Force Crewman First Class with the 571st Strategic Missile Squadron at one of the 18 top-secret Titan sites near Tucson, Arizona.

    Haunted ever since by deeply disturbing memories of that fateful night, Tomlinson drifted from job to job, lost his wife, home and savings-and decided only after years of soul-searching to break security by telling this harrowing true tale for the first time exclusively in these pages.
   

It was 3 am.  We were on Alert at one of the Titan II missile sites scattered out in the desert around Tucson, Arizona.  Down on Level 2 of the Launch Control Center we were baby-sitting “the Bomb”-a ten-megaton thermonuclear warhead mounted on top of a ten-story-tall ICBM.

 

    Each four-man crew pulled two of three 24-hour Alerts a week.  They were dull, boring, giant pains in the sass during which we were responsible for two things: We had to keep the tons of electronics and on-site machinery in perfect working order, and we had to be prepared to launch the missile if so ordered.  Thank god, we had never received that order, for it would mean that America had gone to war-almost certainly for the last time.

    I was monitoring the missile-support systems-guidance, fuel, electronics, air conditioning, hydraulics, pneumatics, fire and toxic vapor-indicators, all displayed on dozens of panel lights and dials mounted over the Control Console.

    Level 2 was called the “No Lone Zone” because it was the brain of the weapons system and the location of the Launch Button.  For that reason no one could ever be left alone there at any time.  This was to make it impossible for any one person to launch the missile on is own without official military authorization.

    As usual, the air conditioning was not working; so I was sitting there in my underwear, sweating profusely, bleary-eyed after 18 mind-numbing hours of watching the dials and listening to the electronic drone of the control-center support gear and the missile-guidance computer. The Commander and Sergeant, a Ballistic Missile Analyst Technician, were upstairs on the well-deserved sleep shift.  The Deputy Commander sat slumped forward in the Command Chair, sound asleep with his head on his hands at the Control Console, his Launch Key on a chain around his neck.  Looking some what ridiculous with a pistol strapped on over his boxer shorts, he was completely exhausted from the wear and tear of Alert after Alert with never enough time to rest in between.

    The Deputy was breaking the “No Sleeping on Level 2 Rule,” but that’s the first part of my confession: Nuclear missile crews break the rules.  They do it all the time.  We all slept on level 2.  We did it every chance we got-while the missile stood ready in its underground cement silo, 275 feet away from two sets of 7000-pound steel blast doors.

    i was just about to drifting off the sleep myself when the weird, high-pitched warble of the Emergency War Order signal began sounding its shrill warning.  I bolted up out of my chair, cursing the damn thing for waking me up.  The signal always meant a Practice Launch message, designed to test us on our reaction time and performance efficiency.

    Then came a hollow voice over my earphones: “Mole hole, Mole Hole. This is Mother SAC [Strategic Air Command], Mother SAC with a Blue Dash 1. I repeat, Mole Hole, Mole Hole. This is mother SAC with a Blue Dash 1. Blue Dash 1. I repeat Blue Dash 1...”

    Blue Dash 1 was no practice code.  It wasn’t one of the endless exercises Base Command was always throwing at missile crews in the middle of the fucking night to keep us on our toes.  A Blue Dash 1 was a real Emergency war Order! The only time they had ever sent a Blue Dash 1 before, as far as I knew, was on a standby basis the year before, when President Kennedy was assassinated.
 
    I yelled at the Deputy Commander, who was raising his head up off the Launch Console, eyes wide from the rude awakening of the screeching warning signal. “Wake up! We’ve got a Blue Dash 1 coming in!”

    He blinked his eyes, reaching for the top-secret code book. “Roger, I hear it. I wasn’t asleep.  I was just resting my eyes.  Wait a minute, did you say a Blue Dash 1?”

    “Yeah!” I Shouted.

    He grabbed his headset and put it on.  We both picked up our grease pencils and began copying: “MESSAGE IS...ALPHAS... FOXTROT... CHARLIE... ZULU... TANGO... VICTOR... KILO... LIMA... BRAVO... HOTEL.  ALL CREWS ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT OF MESSAGE ON MY COUNT OF 3. 1...2...3.”

    I reached up and pressed the transparent plastic Acknowledge Button that sent an instant signal back to SAC Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska.  After decoding and authenticating, the Deputy and I exchanged code books to cross-check each other.  We had been through the procedure a thousand times.  Find the Blue Dash key-code word identification, turn to the page indicated in the code book, read down the list of numbers and then turn to that page for the message.  To our horror, there was no mistake.

    “Jesus H. Christ!” I muttered, my head beginning to pound. “This is a Defcon II!” That meant we were just one step away from launching the missile!

    I stared at the Deputy in disbelief.  he stared back.  Then with trembling hands he took a deep breath and said very quietly. “I’m officially informing you that I’m going to Launch Checklist...now! Prepare to follow along.”

    Because we had been told over and over that the Titan II was a “deterrent” weapon system, we believed that no authentic Launch Standby Order would ever be sent to the missile sites except in the even of the Real Thing.  In other words, no duty crew could ever receive, decode,  and authenticate a Launch Standby Order unless a nuclear attack had already been initiated against the United States.

    With his finger following along each word in the Checklist, the deputy began to read aloud from the Emergency War Order liek at rained robot: “Step 1. Sound the klaxon and topside siren.” His fingers automatically lifted from the Checklist to the klaxon button on the Launch Control and pushed it.  “Klaxon activated,” he said as the overhead warning began blasting out, piercing my one ear that wasn’t covered by a headset.

    “Check!” I said loudly, doing what I’d been trained to do over and over in Practice Launch. As the Deputy read, I followed each word in the Checklist and watched every move he made to make sure there wasn’t a single mistake.  Never were we to deviate one iota from the sacred Checklist.

    His finger went back to the Checklist: “Step 2,” he continued resolutely.  “Clear all personnel topside from the missile site.” The Deputy’s voice cracked as he announced over the PA syte, “Attention, all personnel topside; attention all personnel topside, this is Control Center. Evacuate the site immediately to a radius of ten miles.  I repeat, evacuate the site immediately to a radius of ten miles.”

    “Check,” I responded, feeling foolish.  Since the site was miles out in the Arizona desert at a supposedly classified location, nobody was topside except some roadrunners and coyotes. But regulations were regulations

    The Deputy then switched back to our intercom headsets and put his finger on the Checklist again. “Step 3,” he announced.  “Assemble crew to Launch Control Stations.”

    “Check,” I said in a shaky voice as the Deputy switched the sounds system back to the loudspeakers.

    “EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY-Commander, Level 2 IMMEDIATELY! I repeat, Level 2 IMMEDIATELY!”

    The gravity of what was taking place was beginning to sink in.  I had been through the endless calls to arms many times before in practice drills, in crew-evaluation checks, in operation-readiness inspections by the gods of Strategic Air Command. But they were always dry runs.  We never really believed it was anything but a game.  Nobody in his right mind would ever launch one of those ten story fuckers-yet it looked as if that was what was actually about to happen.  The nightmare that haunted all of us seemed to be coming true.

    I heard the pounding of the Commander’s feet as he came bounding down the stairs two at at time.  Al he wore were his BVDs, his Launch Key (on a chain around his neck.), his gun belt and his holster, which carried a .38 special.  Like the dedicated soldier he was, he headed right for his Command Chair to assume full charge of the situation.  “What’s going on?!” he was shouting over the klaxon. “What the hell happened?”

    The Deputy was standing at the Launch Control Console with his finger on the next step of the Checklist. “We got a real Blue Dash 1, and we are on Step 4 of the checklist.” he yelled.
    “Shut that s.o.b. off!” shouted the Commander.  Siting down in his chair, he reached up, put on his headset and turned the klaxon off himself.  The noise level dropped to the normal drone, but silence only intensified the tension.

    Standing at my duty station in front of the console, I watched as the Deputy gratefully turned command over to the groggy Commander and sat down in his own chair.  W were now all at our Launch Crew positions, except for the Sergeant, who still hadn’t come down from upstairs.

    Without waiting another moment, the Commander began to issue orders over the headsets. “Crew... check in... Commander here,” he said

    “Deputy here “ the Deputy Commander replied.

    “Missile Facilities Technician here,” I replied.

    The Commander then informed us officially that we had just received a valid Blue Dash 1 and we’re at Step 4 on the Checklist, at which point he said he was taking over.  “Deputy, follow me along on the Checklist.  MFT, you monitor.”

    “Roger, Commander.” we answered.

    “Step 4. Break seal on Launch Enable Button,” the Commander said. As I watched him reach into his console drawer for wire cutters to cut the Launch Seal, I saw the madness in his eyes and realized, We’re going through with this! We’re unlocking Pandora’s box!

Expose by Clair Tomlinson