The Seventh Angel (32 page)

The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed that. With the advent of nuclear warfare, it became possible (at least theoretically) for one country to utterly annihilate the inhabitants of another country.

In hindsight it seems incredible, but the nuclear warhead became both the symbol of absolute national power, and the ultimate tool of military force projection. In their ceaseless contest for strategic dominance, the United States and the Soviet Union poured enormous amounts of funding and effort into building, testing, and stockpiling new and more powerful nuclear weapons.

As the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers grew, the technology of weapons delivery platforms advanced to keep pace. Propeller driven bombers gave way to jet bombers, and then to supersonic jets.

By the mid 1950s, the jet bombers of America’s Strategic Air Command were operating in a state of around-the-clock readiness, continually prepared to obliterate every city and military target in Soviet Russia. The Soviets held their own bombers in a similar state of readiness, poised to rain nuclear death on the United States with equal efficiency.

The total extermination of a nation’s inhabitants was no longer an abstract theory. The assembled firepower of either of the nuclear superpowers was now sufficient to virtually guarantee the annihilation of populations on a national scale.

For the first time in history, two adversarial nations had become so powerful that they did not dare take their disagreements to the field of battle. Any direct military contact between the superpowers might lead to an exchange of nuclear weapons, and any nuclear combat—no matter how small in scale—could lead to a cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, until a small conflict escalated into a full-scale nuclear war. Neither nation could hope to survive an unrestricted nuclear attack, and a growing body of scientific research suggested that a major nuclear war might well destroy all life on planet earth.

In the context of nuclear warfare, traditional concepts of victory and defeat lost all meaning. No one could win a war in which there were no survivors. Victory and defeat were replaced by a doctrine known as
mutually assured destruction
, which is often referred to by the somewhat-appropriate acronym:
MAD
.

The threat of mutual destruction kept the NATO alliance and the Warsaw Pact from battling each other directly, so the superpowers sought and found indirect methods of combat. They fought small wars by proxy, taking opposite sides in battles between third-party countries as a substitute for the direct military confrontation that neither side dared to risk. They competed for supremacy in industrial capacity, scientific achievement, technological advancement, space exploration, and even cultural development. The competition for military dominance was more intense than ever.

Advances in jet bomber technology had given each side the ability to reach and destroy the cities of its adversary within hours. But the dawning of the space age made that timeline seem almost ludicrously slow. Each side wanted—and felt that it needed—a vehicle that could deliver nuclear attacks against its national enemies within minutes.

The solution had already been addressed, at least in principle, by the Nazi A9/A10 missile program. Hitler’s unfinished ocean-spanning missile incorporated liquid fueled engines for supersonic flight speeds, multiple rocket stages for altitude and flight range, and enough payload capacity to carry a nuclear warhead.

Under the technical guidance of expatriated German engineers, the United States undertook several separate programs to build Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. In part, the division of effort was a reflection of the rivalries between the different branches of the US military, but notes and documents from the 1950s suggest that President Eisenhower may have seen value in taking several different approaches to solving such a difficult technical problem.

The Army Ballistic Missile Agency, and the recently-formed US Air Force, concentrated on land-based missile designs. By contrast, the US Navy plan was to launch nuclear ballistic missiles from submerged submarines. Navy leaders reasoned that land-based launch facilities could be located and bombed. Submarines, on the other hand, could move freely and stealthily around the world, remaining hidden from America’s enemies, and launching nuclear strikes from unexpected locations.

Despite the advantage of multiple programs and the benefit of German engineering expertise, the United States did not win the race to launch the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. The Russians reached that milestone first, launching the R-7
Semyorka
missile in August of 1957. The first successful launch of an American Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, the
Atlas-A
, took place four months later, in December of the same year.

This emerging class of nuclear super-weapons was initially referred to by the abbreviation ‘IBM,’ short for
I
ntercontinental
B
allistic
M
issile. This caused some confusion, because the International Business Machine company was already popularly identified by those same three letters. To avoid further misunderstanding, the US military revised the missile abbreviation to include the letter ‘c’ from the word ‘Inter
c
ontinental.’ The new weapons were re-designated as ICBMs.

The superpowers continued to build newer and more advanced ICBMs. Hardened concrete missile silos were carved into the mountains, fields, and prairies of Russia and the United States. The American Atlas ICBMs were joined by
Titan I
missiles,
Titan II
missiles,
Minuteman I
,
Minuteman II
, and
Minuteman III
missiles, and the
MX Peacekeeper
missile series. The Soviets followed the R-7 ICBMs with the
R-9
series missiles, the
R-16
series,
R-24
,
R-29
,
R-36
, and their successors.

The US Navy’s planned fleet of nuclear ballistic missile submarines became a reality with the active deployment of the submarine-launched
Polaris
series missiles, and then the
Poseidon
series, and then the
Trident
series. The Soviets designed and deployed their own nuclear ballistic missile submarines, each generation with increasingly lethal nuclear weapons aboard.

The nuclear superpowers had finally obtained the Holy Grail of modern warfare: the ability to completely exterminate an enemy nation in mere minutes. By way of ultimate consequence—whether intended or unintended—each of the major adversaries now had the power to destroy the entire human race.

The last war and ultimate destruction of mankind, was just the push of a button away. The world found itself hovering on the brink of Armageddon.

WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF’S OFFICE

WASHINGTON, DC

SUNDAY; 03 MARCH

5:59 PM EST

White House Chief of Staff Veronica Doyle rummaged in the top drawer of her desk until she found the slim plastic form of a television remote control. She pointed the remote toward a small high-definition screen tucked into a bookshelf to the right of her desk.

The screen flared to life, and Doyle caught the last twenty seconds of a commercial about medical insurance. She fiddled with the remote, bringing the volume up to an audible level just in time to hear the insurance firm’s duck mascot blurt the name of the company in a brassy nasal twang that could easily be mistaken for a quack.

Doyle smiled, briefly. That silly duck always made her want to laugh, which—she understood quite well—was the entire point of the advertising campaign.

The famously-trademarked quack faded into silence, to be instantly replaced by the opening musical fanfare of an equally-famous news debate program.

The
Crosstalk
logo appeared: a pair of animated three dimensional arrows—one red, the other blue—rushing toward each other from opposite sides of the screen. They collided in the center with an explosion of silver light, which dissolved quickly to an establishing shot of a television news studio. The camera held this angle long enough for the viewing audience to register the elegantly high-tech trappings of the studio set, and its three-sided interview table. Then the camera zoomed in for a close-up of the show’s celebrated moderator.

The moderator smiled, revealing a set of perfect white teeth below piercing blue eyes. “Good evening,” he said, “and welcome to Crosstalk. I’m your host, Darren Cartwright.”

The camera panned right, revealing the show’s first guest, a lean and hawkish looking man in his late thirties, a flawlessly-tailored black business suit stretched over his angular frame. “With us tonight, we have John Gohar of the National Center for Strategic Analysis, and Republican Senator Richard Blair, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.”

The camera panned left, centering on the show’s other guest, a fiftyish man in slightly rumpled tweed jacket. The senator nodded toward the camera, with the tiniest suggestion of a wink. His maroon necktie was loose, and it was obvious that the top button of his shirt wasn’t fastened. The message of his wardrobe was reinforced by his thoughtful but relaxed facial expression, and the easy set of his shoulders.

Veronica Doyle smiled. Dick Blair had long been a bitter opponent of the Chandler administration, but the old scoundrel was good; she had to give him that. He was the very image of a seasoned elder statesman: purposeful, intelligent, informed, consummately professional, and—above all—clearly undaunted by the challenges of national leadership.

The camera cut back to the moderator of the show. With the opening pleasantries out of the way, Cartwright traded his introductory smile for a more serious expression. On a wall-sized video screen behind his head, the Crosstalk logo gave way to an aerial shot from a helicopter, loitering above the entrance to a harbor. Superimposed lettering identified the scene as San Diego, California.

In the foreground, the black shape of a submarine was silhouetted against rolling waves, its wake a line of white foam across blue water. In the middle distance, two more submarines could be seen making their way toward the breakwater.

The screen shuffled through a series of similar scenes: submarines tied to piers or returning to various harbors, sometimes accompanied by Navy tug boats, sometimes not. With each changing scene came an identifying caption … Kings Bay, Georgia; New London, Connecticut; Bangor, Washington; Norfolk, Virginia; Pearl Harbor, Hawaii …

The screen finally settled on a view looking out across empty ocean waves, with no submarines in sight. The subtext of the video was clear;
our nation has no submarines at sea
.

The moderator looked into the camera. “We are witnessing an event that is literally without precedent. For the first time since the creation of America’s nuclear submarine force, every submarine in our country’s arsenal has been ordered to return to port.”

He turned toward the guest on his right. “Mr. Gohar, you’re first in the hot seat tonight. How does the recall of our submarines affect national military strategy? And, more to the point, does this move leave our country open to attack?”

Gohar frowned slightly. “Those are deceptively simple questions, Darren. I can’t really give useful answers without putting your questions into some kind of meaningful context. For all practical purposes…”

Senator Blair cut him off. “Thirty seconds into the program, and you’re already starting with the doubletalk!” he snapped. “President Chandler has handed over control of our nuclear submarines to a proven enemy of the United States. Not
one
of our submarines. Not
some
of our submarines.
All
of them!”

He gestured toward the video screen, the gently rolling waves devoid of any manmade object. “How much context do we need to understand that?”

The moderator raised a hand. “Please, Senator… You’ll get your chance to respond.”

Gohar cut a quick sideways glance toward the senator. “As I was saying…” He paused, as though waiting for another interruption. “For all practical purposes, we already
have
been attacked. We’ve had a nuclear detonation within a hundred miles of a major U.S. city, and—if we hadn’t managed to intercept them—we would have had two more detonations within a few hundred miles of the west coast.”

Gohar looked directly into the camera. “We’re dealing with a madman here. He has an entire arsenal of nuclear warheads at his disposal, and he’s already proven that he’s not afraid to use them against the United States.”

“
Of
course
Zhukov is not afraid,” the senator said. “We’ve got a president who goes belly-up at the first sign of a threat. Why in the hell should
anybody
be afraid to attack us?”

“
Excuse me,” the moderator said. “I’d like to get back to my original question.”

Gohar ignored him. “Six and a half million,” he said. “That’s how many people would be dead if those three warheads had reached their targets.”

He glared across the table toward his opponent. “I realize that they’re not your constituents, Senator Blair, but surely we don’t have to risk the incineration of six and a half million Americans to uphold your sense of national dignity.”