FAIL SAFE
THE date was Aug. 26, 1957. The announcement from the Kremlin was heavy with meaning to the free world's defenses. The Soviet Union had test-fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile, and as days went by, Russia's Khrushchev pushed a new form of missile diplomacy, pouring it into every cocked ear at every diplomatic coop that Europe might become "a veritable cemetery," and that the U.S. was "just as vulnerable."
Poised around the U.S.S.R.'s 37,500-mile perimeter, the U.S. Air Force's Strategic Air Command, a 2,000-bomber force capable in a single sortie of hitting the U.S.S.R. with 2,000 times the total explosive power of World War II, took K.'s rocket-rattling with professional seriousness. SAC began to cut down the "reaction time" of its strike force—hundreds of bombers—from two hours to 15 minutes. This was the Air Force's best estimate of the warning SAC bases would get before an enemy missile strike (TIME, Nov. 25). If an "instant readiness" deterrent force was to be any deterrent at all, it had to be airborne before the threatening missiles could cripple it on the ground. Since then, SAC has learned how to get B-52 heavy-jet and B-47 medium-jet bombers airborne, hydrogen bombs in their bellies, within an astonishing seven minutes of alarm klaxon's howl (including two minutes for taxiing down a 10,000-ft. apron to the runway). SAC has keyed its 3,700 combat crews so tautly to what SAC Commanding General Thomas Sarsfield Power calls "the compression of time in the Atomic Age" that SAC is even designing a new type of slip-on shoe to save alert crews the few seconds spent on fumbling with shoelaces.
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of SAC's reply to Khrushchev is that SAC has also fashioned a safety catch for its hair trigger, a crucial check upon the deterrent power, so as to rule out the minuscule but horrifying chance that World War III might explode out of one aircrew's accident or aberration or miscalculation. Name of SAC's safety catch: Fail Safe.
Fail Safe is a cold-war projection of an engineering principle used for decades in aircraft design and around dangerous machinery. The principle: if a device can fail, it must be assumed that it will fail, and it must be designed so that its failure will do minimal or no harm. Fail Safe on U.S. railroads, for example, means "the dead man's throttle." If an engineer dies at the controls, his pressure on a foot pedal or hand lever is released, and the train automatically goes into an emergency stop. Fail Safe at SAC means that SAC bomber crews, launched in an alert, do not proceed toward their preassigned target beyond a preassigned coordinate point without a coded follow-up command. Only beyond the Fail Safe point are SAC crews permitted even to arm their nuclear weapons.