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The specific procedure is that whenever unidentified and unidentifiable shapes show up on U.S. radar, e.g., the $500 million DEW line across Northern Canada and Alaska, or the ship-based radar networks in mid-Atlantic and mid-Pacific, a SAC alert is declared. In his underground command post at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, General Power or a deputy orders one of scores of Emergency War Plans—E.W.P.s—designed to meet every calculated contingency to be put into immediate operation. SAC flashes its orders—"PLAN BLANK"—to any or all of some 70 SAC bases worldwide. At the bases the alert crews scramble and head off with a roar toward target—via a Fail Safe point that varies with every mission.
In today's kind of instant warfare, SAC will know long before the alert crews get to the Fail Safe point whether the attack upon the West is real or just a commonplace false alarm. Chances are overwhelming that the alert airplanes will be recalled long before they get to Fail Safe point.
Should they get to Fail Safe point without getting coded follow-up orders to proceed, they must automatically turn around and head home. Should they get the order to go on—e.g., "Implement Plan Red Fox Eight"—they must still check the order with base command; they must go through several cross checks on message and frequency to ensure against decoy; they must get yet another confirmatory order to proceed. In a normal tactical situation, the only man who can give the final order to attack is the President of the U.S., who relays it to General Power, who relays it to his commands. In a catastrophe situation with the President out of action, the order can be given by a complex of top officials in Washington. And even beyond Fail Safe point and all the way to bomb-drop point, the war order can be reversed and the aircraft called home. Fail Safe, says Air Force General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is foolproof.
In actual practice—contrary to United Press President Frank Bartholomew's report* on an imaginary SAC flight that the Kremlin was waving around as the basis for its propaganda onslaught—SAC planes have never reached their Fail Safe points in an emergency scramble caused by unidentifiable radar blips, let alone flown beyond Fail Safe points. This is the basis of the U.S.'s denial of the U.S.S.R.'s charges. But SAC constantly scrambles on real and test alerts; so realistic are SAC scrambles that SAC crews always head out toward Fail Safe point not knowing whether their mission is for test or the real thing. And the U.S. has even put SAC alert crews into the air deliberately to reinforce U.S. diplomacy at precise pressure points, e.g., during Russia's threats of intervention in the 1956 Suez crisis, to show on Communist long-range radarscopes that the U.S. carries a thermonuclear stick big enough to last at least until the U.S.'s own big ballistic missiles are operational.
It would be a major propaganda victory indeed if Khrushchev could bamboozle the West into keeping SAC's bombers on the ground. For then Khrushchev could rattle his rockets without fear of successful contradiction.