Countdown To Zero Page #5

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and thats what i mean to do, seal it tight

Now I want you to transmit Plan R

"R" for "Robert"

to the wing.

- Plan "R",for "Robert".

- Is it that bad, sir?

looks like its pretty hairy

- Yes, sir.

I remember watching

"Dr. Strangelove"

and thinking they

had it all wrong.

You dont need to be a general.

We were only lieutenants,

but we could have started

World War III just as

easily as Gal. Jack Ripper.

We could have triggered

implementation

of the U.S. nuclear war plan

involving thousands and thousands

of nuclear weapons

fired at the

Soviet Union and China.

Standby

Message followed / I

Alpha, Tango, Golf, Reamer. / i

The life of a

watch officer

is really Pavlovian.

You have been trained and conditioned

so thoroughly

you kind of march up a long step

into a very well rehearsed script

thats written by check lists.

Step 1:
All keys inserted. / i

Roger

We would jump up unlock our safe

take out codes

Check the codes against the mesage

and then proceed through a launch check list that

takes about one minute to carry an armour

Lets enable the missiles.

Key program activated. / I

All in flight. BF all.

Unlock code inserted. / I

Standby...

Unlock code inserted.

enable

Its enabled.

At the end of that process to

turn the keys

and launch upto 50 missiles

at Soviet Union and / or China.

Today, the position of

United States and Russia

is exactly the same as

it was during the Cold War.

So if the orders came

down,during now

fall of the Berlin Wall,

It would take about

two minutes

to launch all of the US nuclear ballistic missiles

their tunnels

in central U.S.

out of their tubes

in the midwest

It would time for the

Russians to do the same thing

and then it would take another 10 to 12 minutes

for everything else

thats on

launch ready alert

to be fired

So that within 15 minutes

all the forces on the launch ready alert

would be in the air in their flight

to the other side of the planet.

strategic nuclear weapons,

very high yield.

And they could kill

over a 100 million

Russians and Americans

within 30 minutes.

When we are working on nuclear

apps control

i found myself in a briefing in the Pentagon with a colonel

we had a short exchange about this

and in this context of this exchange

he said:

"But I do not understand what

would be such a big deal"

"If there was a

nuclear exchange"

"Only about 500 million

people would die.

"Life would go on afterwards."

And I can remember having a feeling like Woody Allen

and recall

"I'm sorry i have got an appointment

back on planet earth"

I dont think that anyone

really knows

how many nuclear weapons

there are on the planet today.

- I have a ...

- Does anyone know?

May be thousands,i dont know

Far more than I know.

I do not know. 15 000.

- 20 000.

- 50 000?

- 100 000.

- 500 000.

There is enough firepower

on a US nuclear sub

to annihilate

probably half the planet.

I have heard people say that we

have enough

nuclear weapons to create a new sun.

I think couple to

eliminate this city.

Do you know how many are there?

We estimate that there are about

The good news is

there used to be 60 000.

So we have cut those

arsenals by more than half.

But we, the United States,

still has about

on missiles poised for launch

in 50 minutes or less.

The really bad news is

that the Russians have the same.

If the Russians fired

missiles at the United States

the first warning

would come from satellites,

and they could detect

the flame from the booster rocket

within seconds,

easily

within a minute.

Suddenly, this early warning

hub in the United States

would become very frenzy

to try figure out

whether this is a false

alam or whether this is a real attack

and determine this

in 60 seconds.

The President would receive a briefing

from the duty officer

at Strategic Command Headquaters

That briefing of the President

of his response options

and their consequences

has to be delievered in as

little as 30 seconds

The president normally

would have no more than 12 minutes

to make a decision,

and maybe its little

as 10 seconds.

I knew that if the Soviets

did launch an attack,

that it would take 26 minutes for an

ICBM to leave russian soil

and land in Washington

or New York.

And I had that much time to

decide how to respond.

And the timeline was very short

We had just a few minutes to make a decision

how to respond at

what level of intensity.

Somewhere before the 10th minute

the order to execute

would be issued

The Strategic Air Command

probably would be airbourne by then

just as a precaution.

There might be a Presidential evacuation

so that the president would survive

an attack on Washington

But I know of cases

in which the President

chose not to be evacuated

And roughly by the 28th

minute, at the latest,

those of us not evacuated

would be dead.

For us it was a

kind of suicide duty

Any missile landing within

half a mile of our location

would probably have killed us

If we had survived the attack,

we were supposed to go to

a randezvous farm

Our air will only

So we go out through an escape

which was filled with sand

We would have to release the bolts

on cover and let the sand fall through

and then

crawl up the tube

Our tube came up the parking lot

so we would have to break through asphalt to get out

The randevous point be

and we would have to walk.

Disnt really matter though

Everyone knew that the radiation

would kill us quickly anyway

and you would never make

it to the rendezvous

In 1995, Pete Sampras won the

U.S. Open and Wimbledon.

George Clooney made his

first big movie

A bomb destroyed the

federal building in Oklahoma city

OJ Simpson was

acquitted of murder.

And we also came close

to an accidental nuclear missiles launch.

On January 25, 1995,

the United States launched a

rocket from Norway

to study

the northern hights

We told the Russians that

we were gonna launch that rocket

but somebody must have

forgot how to pass word on it

When they picked up the 4 stages of this rocket

they initially interpreted

this as 4 warheads

from a U.S nuclear submarine

which we often station off the coast of Norway

possibly

directed at Moscow.

That fit exactly

the characteristics

of the beginning of a

nuclear strike

One missile, coming over

exploding in the atmosphere

and sending out an electromagnetic pulse

that would fry all the electronics

radar surveillance,

Computers in the country to be attacked,

followed by an onslought of nuclear weapons

And for the first

in the nuclear age,

the Russians actually opened up the nuclear football

They went to

President Yeltsin,

they opened up the command and

launch codes, the button,

put on the desk and said:

"We are under attack."

Boris Yeltsin was basically given

Fortunately, Yeltsin

wasnt drunk

and he didnt believe what

the military was telling him.

He said:

"There must be some mistake."

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