Command and Control

Morris called the command post on the radio and provided the latest tank pressure readings, without revealing how he’d obtained them. Then Mazzaro got on the radio and told Little Rock that Kennedy had disobeyed orders and violated the two-man rule.

Kennedy didn’t care about any of this bullshit. He wanted to save the missile. And he had a plan, a good plan that would work.

Morris agreed to hear it.

We need to open the silo door, Kennedy said. That would release a lot of the fuel vapor, lower the heat in the silo, and relieve the pressure on the stage 1 oxidizer tank. Then we need to drop the work platforms — all nine levels of them — to support the missile and keep it upright. The platforms could prevent the missile from collapsing or falling against the silo wall. And then we need to send a PTS team down there to stabilize the stage 1 fuel tank, to fill it with nitrogen and restore the positive pressure.

For Kennedy’s plan to work, somebody would have to reenter the control center so that the platforms could be lowered and the silo door opened. Al Childers and Rodney Holder said they were willing to do it, if there was any chance of saving the missile.

Colonel Morris listened carefully and then spoke to the command post.

About fifteen minutes later, Morris told Kennedy the command post’s response: nothing, absolutely nothing, was to be done without approval from SAC headquarters in Omaha. Lieutenant General Lloyd R. Leavitt, Jr., the vice commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, was now in charge of the launch complex in Damascus. The problem with the missile and ideas about how to resolve it were being discussed. It was 9:30 P.M., almost three hours since the socket had been dropped. Until new orders came from Omaha, Morris said, everyone would have to sit tight.

Megadeath

Fred Charles Iklé began his research on bomb destruction as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Born and raised in an alpine village near Saint Moritz, he’d spent the Second World War amid the safety of neutral Switzerland. In 1949, Iklé left his studies in Chicago and traveled through bombed-out Germany. The war hadn’t touched his family directly, and he wanted to know how people coped with devastation on such a massive scale. One of the cities he visited, Hamburg, had suffered roughly the same number of casualties as Nagasaki — and had lost an even greater proportion of housing. A series of Allied bombing raids had killed about 3.3 percent of Hamburg’s population and destroyed about half of its homes. Nevertheless, Iklé found, the people of Hamburg were resilient. They had not fled the city in panic. They’d tried to preserve the familiar routines of daily life and now seemed determined to rebuild houses, businesses, and stores at their original locations. “A city re-adjusts to destruction somewhat as a living organism responds to injury,” Iklé later noted.

After returning to the United States, Iklé wrote a doctoral thesis that looked at the relationship between the intensity of aerial bombing and the density of a city’s surviving population. The proponents of airpower, he suggested, had overestimated its lethal effects. Before the Second World War, British planners had assumed that for every metric ton of high-explosive bombs dropped on a city, about seventy-two people would be killed or injured. The actual rate turned out to be only fifteen to twenty casualties per ton. And the Royal Air Force strategy of targeting residential areas and “de-housing” civilians proved disappointing. The supply of urban housing was much more elastic than expected, as people who still had homes invited their homeless friends, neighbors, and family members to come and stay.

Iklé devised a simple formula to predict how crowded the houses of a bombed-out city might become. If P1 = the population of a city before destruction, P2 = the population of a city after destruction, H1 = the number of housing units before destruction, H2 = the number of housing units after destruction, and F = the number of fatalities, then “the fully compensating increase in housing density,” could be expressed as a mathematical equation:

Iklé was impressed by the amount of urban hardship and overcrowding that people could endure. But there were limits. The tipping point seemed to be reached when about 70 percent of a city’s homes were destroyed. That’s when people began to leave en masse and seek shelter in the countryside.