Working his way through Eric Schlosser's Command and Control the Phantom retrieves memories which are now brought into perspective.
How well The Phantom recalls the Russians' launch of Sputnik in August 1957, and the general hysteria that wrought in Washington, DC. The Phantom, as a boy, reading about it in Popular Mechanics could not fathom why adults thought launching a beach ball into space caused such alarm among the adult population. But the idea was, if the Russians could launch a beach ball into space that beach ball could be, next time, a hydrogen bomb, which could land in Washington, DC. Around this time the Russians managed to shoot down a U-2 spy plane, with an air to ground missile and that suggested they could use rockets in a pin point and accurate fashion, again suggesting they could put a hydrogen bomb down the chimney of the White House.
Nikita Krushchev, a pugnacious reformer, who de Stalinized the Soviet Union, was also a bit of a dope, a blustery short man possessed of that short man syndrome, and he apparently wanted to remind the US it wasn't the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog, and knowing the Soviet Union did not have nearly as many nuclear weapons as the United States, claimed he had or would have thousands of rocket mounted bombs targeted at all the US cities and the USSR could annihilate the entire continent.
That threat, was actually a stupid move. The United States Army was feuding with the Air Force and with the Navy, each service demanding a starring role in the next war, and each wanted its own role to drive the approach to responding the USSR's challenge. Krushchev played right into the hands of the American armed forces, the corporations who wanted to sell the bombs and planes and missiles and the Democratic candidates for President, most notably John F. Kennedy, who wanted to ride the "missile gap" into the White House.
In the background, American efforts to launch rockets which could reach the Soviet Union were public and catastrophic: Missile after missile launched from Cape Canaveral in full view of the television cameras rose tentatively from the launch pad, up, up a few hundred feet, only to collapse, and explode.
A few Air Force generals, Curtis LeMay among them, had devised our defense system on the idea that we would have hours to get bombers off the ground, but with the Soviets capable of launching a surprise attack, which would reach us in minutes, that systems was rendered instantly obsolete, a new Maginot line, which technology had leap frogged. The Air Force, in the form of the Strategic Air Command, desperately sought to stay relevant, and its new leader a General Power, came up with the idea of keeping American B-52's in the air 24/7/365, so when the Soviets launched their missile attack, the planes would simply turn right and head for targets in the Soviet Union.
Problem was, the technology was not up to the promise. It was all a lie. The bombs in the planes could not be active atomic weapons because if they were, when a plane crashed in bad weather or blew a tire landing back at base, the United States would suffer a nuclear detonation from its own planes. Keeping a substantial number of planes aloft constantly was beyond the capabilities of the Air Force. But, because the whole game was about "deterrence" and psychology, we could bluff and tell the world and the Soviets we had a plan for mutual assured destruction. Of course, the Soviets were lying too: They simply did not have the missiles or capabilities Krushchev said they had.
Meanwhile, American planes based in Turkey, England and Morocco kept crashing with nuclear weapons aboard. A crash in Morocco just narrowly avoid setting of a North African mushroom cloud. The American government denied the dangers of all those bombs carried aloft along the Alaska, Greenland, Main perimeter; the government, or parts of it, lied about the risks of accidental nuclear detonation connected to its Strategic Air Command.
Most extraordinary, was the phenomenon of the rise of instant, bogus seers. A Harvard professor, Henry Kissinger, wrote a book which appealed to a nation hungry for news Armageddon could be avoided. Kissinger assured disaster could be avoided, by limiting nuclear weapons to "tactical" nuclear weapons used in Europe to halt the advance of Soviet troops who could overwhelm American Army defenders by sheer numbers any time they wanted to sweep from the East to the Atlantic. The American Army had been demobilized and only a skeleton crew remained along the Russian front, to act as a trip wire to slow the Russians and give time for the nuclear response. But, Kissinger said, we could have just a little, limited exchange of nuclear bombs with Russia and then everyone could pull back for a breather and negotiate. Which would make shrewd diplomats like Henry Kissinger central int he scheme of things.
As technology started to catch up to the rhetoric, the idea of shifting away from World War II vintage airplanes to land based missiles in silos which could withstand a surprise attack and launch a devastating reply emerged. This was good news for the Army, which commanded some of the silos, and for the Air Force missile command, but the Navy felt ignored. It was also wonderful news for Boeing, and for other large American corporations who would reap huge profits, building thousands of missiles.
Eventually, the Navy developed the Polaris submarine missiles, which could not be attacked even by a surprise attack which wiped out all life on the continental United States. With every land bound American dead, all its silos kaput, the Navy could deliver annihilation from the sea, and continue the threat of mutual assured destruction (MAD). So, for a while, the Air Force was happy because it still had funding for the B52's circling around, and the Army was happy with its ground silo missiles, and the Navy had a crucial role as the invulnerable instrument of final revenge.
All the while, President Dwight Eisenhower, who, as it happened, actually had real experience with war, tried to talk good sense to the American public, but he was largely ignored. He had presided over our passive unpreparedness in the first place. He was the old, the gray, the tired and the obsolete warrior. John F. Kennedy was the new, the young, the vigorous guy who could lead us into battle against the forces of evil who now out gunned or rather out missiled us.
The Phantom recalls how dull and slow Eisenhower seemed on television, compared to Kennedy. The Phantom had no idea what Ike meant by his warning about an emerging "Military/Industrial" complex. Ike could see the real motivations of generals who wanted to be the key players, of corporations who wanted to build missiles and submarines with missiles and air planes with bombs. And he could assess the reality of what the Soviets had, because he had his U-2 spy planes, which, when they weren't getting blown out of the air by Soviet rockets, pretty clearly showed what the Russians had and did not have.
The Phantom rejoiced when Kennedy was elected, and was relieved to see Eisenhower, old dull, bald, slow, inarticulate Ike, driven away to his farm in Gettysburg. The Phantom ran home after school to see Kennedy's wonderful televised press conferences, where he looked like a movie star, spoke with that wonderful Boston brogue, called on members of the press and responded with sly wit and occasional eloquence and generally inspired the idea that if you were young, good looking and you had a Harvard education, you could be the leader of men, the creme de la creme and that's what a real 20th century hero looked like.
Women like Marilyn Monroe, who had steamed up the screens and adolescent minds in "Some Like It Hot" went for guys like Kennedy.
It was a wonderful story line.
Unfortunately, it was not the whole story.
No comments:
Post a Comment