15 April 2010

Death…and Taxes

(Pre-Department of Homeland Security Civil Defense Logo)

I am not sweating this tax day. The die was cast more than a month ago for me, and with some effort, we got Mom and Dad’s done, too. For me, it seems a distant memory. The snow was deep, the forms received from the banks, and there was nothing else to do.
 
I give so much money away that a refund was inevitable, so I just went ahead and did it, mashing the button on the computer to file the return after an afternoon in the thin dying light of winter. I got my money back from an ailing but affable government in just a few weeks, and paid off some lingering debt by mashing the same button on the same computer.
 
All done without paper by the transfer of electrons, thoroughly imaginary in our analogue adult world, but real in their sub-atomic way. I checked the bank balance this morning, out of old habit, and sure enough, the electrons had worked their persistent magic.
 
I was thinking about that this week. The power of imaginary things is profound. We used to believe in all sorts of things that I now find curious. Personally, we all dealt with the prospect of thermo-nuclear holocaust. I heard Dan Schorr, the impossibly ancient commentator on Public Radio, talk about it in the context of the big summit the President held this week in our fair city.
 
He mentioned the old Civil Defense system, and the “duck-and-cover” drills we learned in grade school, and termed the way we thought about sudden annihilation as “unlikely, but possible.”
 
It colored all out days, to some degree.
 
The conference was supposed to be about reducing existing nuclear stockpiles, though it was really about something else unspoken. That was Iran, and their intense desire to gain respect through the possession of The Bomb.
 
It is funny. The Pakistanis became a nuclear power largely through the patronage of the Saudis, who gained the first Islamic nuclear capability through indirection. I should be precise about this; the Pakis and the Saudis gained the first Sunni atomic capability. There was, of course, an existing Israeli solution to the matter, and that may be what is driving the Shia Iranians to their current fixation with balancing the unacknowledged atomic equation.
 
I was in Moscow a decade ago, and had the opportunity to tour the Kurchatov Institute with a delegation of earnest government people. We were shown the original Soviet atomic reactor, basically unchanged since the late 1940s. It was what they used to call “a pile,” which referred to the way it was constructed of dense brick-sized blocks of graphite. It was the same sort of reactor that had been pioneered at the University of Chicago, and then harnessed in the titanic effort to win a global struggle of unimaginable horror.
 
It was a really cool visit, sort of like walking into a black-and-white science fiction novel. As a Cold Warrior, the concept of The Bomb had not been imaginary at all. It was something we did for a living.
 
My comrades and I were integral and tangential to the end of the world by turn. In the Pacific, we attempted to track the Soviet nuclear-armed submarines that patrolled the mid-Pacific, holding the West Coast of the United States at risk. We did a fairly good job of it, utilizing overhead imagery of the Sakhalin Peninsula navy bases and an acoustic system that wired the ocean for sound, and aircraft and other sleek black attack submarines. The criterion for “neutralizing” the atomic threat was what we called a “constructive kill,” which meant that we had localized a deployed Soviet Boomer at a moment in time, and could have destroyed it if we were ordered to do it.
 
There were not enough resources in this world to follow them all the time, so it was a bit like catch-and-release trout fishing. Anything more threatening would tend to increase tensions, and could have escalated into something that no one wanted.
 
Cat and mouse in the world ocean was one thing. The offensive side of the balance-beam of terror was something else again. That is where were tangential. The Navy had suffered a near-mortal blow with the birth of the Air Force, and the Strategic Air Command, whose birthright was the Enola Gay. The proponents of Air Power cited the seminal work of Giulio Douhet, the originator of the doctrine, and cited the legacy of the firebombing of Europe and Japan, and claimed the capability to deliver atomic weapons to any place on earth.
 
You can imagine how intoxicating the notion was to an America that stood unscathed by the global struggle. You can also understand the imperative to gain parity by the Soviets, and the old imperial powers of Europe, and then the Chinese.
 
Understanding it meant that we had to ramp up. To stay in the national security game, the Navy had to go nuke as well. The Air Force almost succeeded in killing the aircraft carrier as a weapon of war; the first super-carrier design was spiked by the argument. To be relevant in the atomic age, the Navy had to go nuke. Carrier aviation thus gained a nuclear mission, and the development of the nuclear submarine and the sea-launched ballistic missile went into overdrive.
 
The zenith of the nuclear age was forged from the National Labs and proven on the gently rolling fields of Nebraska. General Curtis LeMay ruled the Strategic Air Command from Offutt Air Force Base at Omaha. From there, the entire world lay at his feet.
 
Unless, of course, the Soviet could catch his silver-colored aluminum fleet on the ground.
 
The Soviet Boomers were a constant concern, since the depths of the ocean held the third leg of the strategic triad of land-based ICBMs and bombers.
 
With that uncertainty came a redundant constantly alert system. LOOKING GLASS command-and-control aircraft were airborne at all times, bombers flew the long race-track patterns toward the pole and teams of two officers were constantly on alert with their keys in bunkers next to their missiles deep under the plains of Wyoming and Montana.
 
Forces all around the world had their hands on the trigger, and the radio murmured the simulation of the orders to end it all, since any deviation from the norm- the presence or absence of communications- could be an indication of the beginning of the end.
 
One night, we were standing the watch at the Fleet Ocean Surveillance Facility at Makalapa Crater in Pearl Harbor. There were two Soviet submarines on patrol somewhere in what we called “the Yankee Box” in the eastern Pacific. Another was returning to port, which made the problem a game of three-card Monte.
 
The Yankees were the first class of Soviet subs to have comparable ballistic missile firepower to our George Washington-Class nuclear subs. They were quieter than their Hotel-class predecessors and had smoother lines to improve submerged performance. They carried sixteen SS-N-6 ballistic missiles, and their forward deployment was seen as a balance against the presence of American and NATO nuclear weapons in Western Europe.
 
There was a newer Delta lurking somewhere near Petropavlovsk, as well, armed with a longer-range set of missiles that permitted operations in the Bastion of the arctic waters.
 
The boundaries of the Yankee Box were defined by estimates of the effective range of the missiles the boomers carried, in this case the
 
We had scored constructive kills on one of them, while the other had been operated efficiently and was unlocated. It was a matter of some concern by the Captains in the morning briefings, and the team that was at that point in their rotating cycle, having been awake all night, were powerfully discomfited.
 
In point of fact, both subs were unlocated, since once on station they could shut down most operating systems and hover in the water column quietly. We were professional, though, and still confidently published estimates of their locations based on past history of other patrols.
 
One night- or morning or afternoon- all the watch strings blur together under the florescent lights in the vault- we got a call on the secure phone from Offutt. A Tech Sergeant was on the line, and he wanted to know the location of the unlocated Yankee. The Fleet Watch Officer answered, or maybe it was passed up to the Ops Officer, since the question was so precious.
 
“Do you know what you just asked, Sergeant?”
 
There was silence for a moment on the KY-4 telephone. Then the Sergeant asked again.
 
He said he really needed to know. He had read our twice-daily intelligence summary about the submarines, and couldn’t tell if they had crossed a magic line for launch purposes. If time-of-flight was less than that required to launch the bombers, he needed to notify the Flight Commander. That would result in having the alert crews get out of their racks in the Alert Shack, man up the airplanes and hook up the huffers to start the engines and be prepared to be airborne within seven minutes.
 
It was surreal to imagine that the rough guess of some kids in Hawaii could cause that to happen with nuclear weapons. We laughed about the whole notion at the time, since we only had an informed but vague estimate of where the Soviets might be loitering, and assumed that everyone knew it.
 
It didn’t occur to me until later that the fires of hell were a lot closer than I thought.
 
I have a couple stories about that, but we will have to get to that tomorrow.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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