Practicing For Doomsday

(4 of 5)

"I concur," Davis said after reading the message.

"I concur, Captain," Boyd said next. The control room was silent except for the four men at the conn, who talked in low voices. Volonino and Boyd had top-secret manuals, binders and code books opened and spread out over the lip of the railing.

"I concur," Volonino finally repeated.

Could someone beat the system? The idea made a great movie plot, but it seemed to him practically impossible for a rogue commander, even one with several conspirators, to launch the weapons without authorization of the President. At least four people on board had to turn keys in different parts of the ship. One of the keys was locked up in a safe, and no one on board had its combination.

Could the crew circumvent the security? Of course they could, Volonino knew. His sailors had hammers, picks and blowtorches, which they could use to break into the safes holding the captain's indicator-panel keys. For that matter, he didn't even need the keys to launch the missiles. His men were skilled technicians who knew practically everything about the Nebraska's electronics. They could drill screws out of cabinets, open them up and hot-wire circuits for the keys like car thieves.

But that would take a lot of people being in on the conspiracy--dozens of them in the missile-control center and the missile compartment and at the conn. At the very least, more than a third of the men on board would have to be involved. And even that might not be enough. There were other sailors scattered throughout the sub who, on their own, could flip a switch or pull a lever to prevent a launch. A rogue captain would have to brainwash practically the entire crew into doing something it knew was seriously wrong. He found it impractical in the extreme.

"Request permission to authenticate the message," Thorson said. Davis and Boyd both concurred, so Volonino ordered: "Very well, authenticate."

"Authenticate, aye," Thorson responded.

Real SAS code cards were expensive and weren't wasted for training drills. So for the simulation, they used a green card with a piece of tape sealed over it, which Thorson now peeled off to read the series of numbers and letters. The alphanumeric code on the green card matched the code in the EAM.

"The message is authentic," Thorson said.

"I concur," Davis said.

"I concur," Boyd said.

"I concur," Volonino said. "The message is authentic."

If the Nebraska were actually ordered to launch nuclear weapons, there would be one more verification step for the commander. This one was a sanity check he had to make in his own mind. No radio net could be 100% safe, and every security system had a weakness. Computer hackers were becoming more ingenious by the day. What if one of them could break into the Pentagon net and somehow broadcast an emergency-action message to a Trident with authentication codes that matched the captain's cookies?

If the world was at peace and an EAM came to a Trident out of the blue, its captain was now under orders to rise to periscope depth and, even though it might put his sub in danger, break communications silence to radio the Strategic Command to find out if it really meant to fire these weapons. The Navy didn't want a Trident captain sitting out in the ocean with his finger on a hair trigger, thinking that he was expected to default to a nuclear war.

Volonino ordered Kinman to prepare the sub for the simulated launch. The lieutenant reached for the overhead microphone. "Man battle stations, missile, for training without guidance with launcher," Kinman's voice boomed over the sub's speaker system. "Simulate spinning up all missiles."

1:40 P.M. Over a loudspeaker in the missile-control center came Volonino's voice: "Set condition one-SQ for training without guidance with launcher. This is the captain. This is an exercise."

At their lowest stage of alert, missiles sat inert in their tubes at a condition level designated as four-SQ. One-SQ brought the rockets to the level of readiness needed for immediate launch.

Freeland repeated the order in the missile-control center: "Set condition one-SQ for training without guidance with launcher." Mark Lyman pushed the "twogle" button on the fire-control console to Freeland's left. That setting--training without guidance with launcher, or TWOGL, as it was marked on the button--would simulate the "spinning up" of the missiles for this drill. The fire-control console ran the computers that rapidly fed millions of bytes of targeting, fusing and start-up instructions into the missiles just before launch. Before blasting off, each missile had to be spun up, which took at least 10 minutes. During that time, the gyroscope inside the missile's inertial-navigation unit was put in motion and aligned so it could begin sensing the rocket's position in the Atlantic and its movement once it launched.