Practicing For Doomsday

  • (2 of 5)

    This one wasn't. In wartime, any number of things could garble a message: enemy jamming or attacks on transmitters, rough seas or atmospheric disturbances that break up the reception. The last thing the Navy wants is a Trident captain confused about his orders, so the Nebraska has thick, top-secret manuals with elaborate instructions and contingency plans along with page after page of options matrices for how its officers should deal with garbles. During missile drills, the Strategic Command rarely sends a clean message. Most have missing information or code letters mixed up to test how quickly the crew can resolve errors. After cutting and pasting, the four officers in the op-con room had produced a readable message. This one wasn't yet an order to launch. But the world was becoming more tense. The DefCon level would soon be raised to 1, the highest alert level.

    The launching of nuclear weapons is such a monumental act for any human being to take that the U.S. military's high command has left nothing in the procedure to chance. Everything the men now did, every action they took with the missiles, every word they uttered, was scripted. Redundancy was built into every decision they made, no matter how minor it was. Nothing was trusted to memory. There were safes on the sub bulging with confidential manuals with procedures written out for everything the missile technicians could do with the nuclear weapons. The officers had practiced receiving EAMS and simulating missile launches so many times that it came to them as naturally as tying their shoes. But for every missile drill, they still hauled out thick manuals to verify the tasks they had to perform. A technician couldn't remove the cover from a missile-compartment cabinet without reading a checklist on how to unscrew the bolts.

    Commander Volonino sat back in his captain's chair and began quietly reviewing top-secret manuals as sailors, chiefs and officers busied themselves around him. Volonino was convinced that they must practice the missile launches with the same intensity they had during the cold war. It was not enough simply to have the Tridents on patrol, he believed. For deterrence to be credible even today, the subs had to maintain their finely tuned capability to fire missiles at a moment's notice.

    It was almost impossible for Volonino to comprehend the power placed in his hands. The responsibility would have been as grave if it had given him only one missile with one warhead that could kill 1 million people. But 24 missiles with more than 100 nuclear warheads? Who could ever be emotionally prepared to unleash that kind of megatonnage?

    1:35 P.M.
    In the op-con room, Lieutenant (J.G.) Chad Thorson and Lieutenant Joe Davis were busy decoding. The message was garbled, so they had to splice to come up with a complete message. It was an order to launch.

    Calling out four-letter groups, Thorson and Davis wasted no time decoding the message. Nuclear-control orders, as they were called, always had the same format, with the same four parts. The first part of the message told the Nebraska the war plan that STRATCOM wanted the sub to execute--in other words, how many nuclear weapons it wanted launched and the coordinates of the targets they were supposed to hit. The Pentagon's strategic war plans were flexible and constantly being updated. The President could strike practically any target or combination of targets he wanted. Every conceivable option the generals could dream up was on his menu, from a single surgical strike to limited attacks to all-out nuclear war. The second part of the message spelled out the date and time window the Pentagon wanted the missiles fired. The strategic war plans were carefully choreographed. Exact times were prescribed for atomic bombs falling on targets. The war planners didn't want the Nebraska's warheads exploding over an area outside the window and frying Air Force B-2 bombers swooping in at the same time to drop their nuclear payload.

    The last two parts of the message assured both Volonino and the President of the U.S. that the two men could trust each other. They contained the combination to a safe and the codes for the cookies, the nickname for a key part of the exercise.

    The combination was a recent innovation. While the firing of intercontinental ballistic missiles from land could always be controlled by a higher headquarters with electromechanical interlocks, a Trident submarine doesn't come with a 5,000-mile extension cord. To fire the Navy's nuclear weapons, a radio message has to be sent to a Trident, and then that sub, on its own, launches the missiles. No one has ever been completely comfortable with this arrangement, however, so over the years, elaborate safeguards have been put in place to keep a rogue sub from launching missiles without an order from the President.

    1. 1
    2. 2
    3. 3
    4. 4
    5. 5