Command and Control

By launching a surprise attack on five targets — the White House, the Pentagon, Camp David, Site R, and High Point — the Soviet Union had a good chance of wiping out the civilian leadership of the United States. None of the bunkers at those locations would survive the blast from a multimegaton weapon. And two of the emergency command posts, Site R and High Point, weren’t regularly staffed with high-ranking officers. By hitting nine additional targets, the Soviet Union could eliminate America’s military leadership. The destruction of America’s command-and-control system could be achieved, with a 90 percent chance of success, through the use of only thirty-five Soviet missiles. Four would be aimed at the White House and five at Camp David, to ensure that the president was killed. “Under surprise attack conditions, there can be little confidence,” the report concluded, “that the Presidential decision would be made and military execution orders be received by the combat elements of the strategic nuclear forces before the high command is disrupted.”

Moreover, the command bunkers built during the Eisenhower years lacked the communications equipment that would allow the controlled escalation of a nuclear war or pauses for negotiation with the Soviets — even if the president survived the initial attack. The high-frequency radio system used to communicate with SAC’s bombers and the very-low-frequency system used to contact the Navy’s Polaris submarines relied on a handful of terminals that could easily be destroyed. According to one classified account, the Eisenhower administration had installed “a one-shot command, control, and communication system.” It hadn’t been designed to fight a limited or prolonged nuclear war. The SIOP required only that a Go code be transmitted, and after that, nothing needed to be said — because nothing could be done to change or halt the execution of the war plan. The underground command posts were little more than hideouts, where military and civilian leaders could ride out a nuclear attack and then emerge, perhaps, to rebuild the United States.

America’s early-warning systems were also woefully inadequate. The DEW Line of radar stations stretching across the Arctic, the SAGE direction centers, the mighty IBM computers — built with great urgency, at enormous expense — had been designed to track Soviet bombers. They could not detect Soviet missiles. The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, created for that task, was just becoming operational. At best, the BMEWS could spot missiles launched from the Soviet Union roughly fifteen minutes before they hit the United States. But if the missiles were launched from Soviet submarines off the coast, the warning time would be zero. The BMEWS couldn’t detect missiles approaching at such a low altitude. And the reliability of the system, McNamara learned, still left much to be desired.

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During a tour of NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a few months earlier, Peter G. Peterson, the executive vice president of the Bell & Howell Company, had been allowed to sit in the commander’s chair. Peterson was visiting the facility with Bell & Howell’s president, Charles H. Percy, and Thomas J. Watson, Jr., the president of IBM. The first BMEWS radar complex, located at Thule Air Base, Greenland, had come online that week, and the numerical threat levels of the new warning system were being explained to the businessmen.

If the number 1 flashed in red above the world map, unidentified objects were traveling toward the United States. If the number 3 flashed, the threat level was high; SAC headquarters and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to be notified immediately. The maximum threat level was 5—a computer-generated warning, with a 99.9 percent certainty, that the United States was under attack. As Peterson sat in the commander’s chair, the number above the map began to climb. When it reached 4, NORAD officers ran into the room. When it reached 5, Peterson and the other executives were quickly escorted out and put in a small office. The door was closed, and they were left there believing that a nuclear war had just begun.

The vice commander of NORAD, Air Marshal C. Roy Slemon, a dapper Canadian with a small mustache, managed to track down the head of NORAD, General Laurence S. Kuter, who was in an Air Force plane above South Dakota.

“Chief, this is a hot one,” Slemon said.

The BMEWS indicated that the Soviets had launched an all-out missile attack against North America. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were on the phone, awaiting confirmation. The United States had only minutes to respond.

“Where is Khrushchev?” Slemon asked his officers.

Khrushchev’s in New York today, at the United Nations, NORAD’s chief of intelligence said.