16 April 2010

(Learning to Loath) The Bomb

I can neither confirm nor deny anything, you need to know that going in. But there are some hallucinations I cannot clear from my mind, and I am not alone.
 
There was a nuclear museum on Kirkland Air Force Base, with a real B-29 Boeing bomber parked outside. I have written about that, thinking the plane might have been "The Great Artiste," the aircraft that actually went to both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Didn't pan out, since the real historic aircraft was lost in a crash shortly after the war. The air frames that actually delivered the only operational atomic strikes- Enola Gay and Bock's Car- survived, but not the one that went with them both.
 
Due to the horror of 9/11, the public is no longer permitted free access to the military base they paid for, so the plane and the collection of old nuke hardware was moved to Old Town.
 
The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History is now located at 601 Eubank Blvd. SE in Albuquerque. New Mexico, along with Nevada, is unique in the amount of public land controlled by the government, and due to the exigencies of WW II, largely thrown open to use by the Manhattan Project in the interest of total victory.
 
I should mention that the works of the Project are all still out there, from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the state of Washington, through the Nevada test site, the scattered National Laboratories, and parts of Tennessee. Rocky Flats in Colorado was closed, though I suspect the effort to clean the place up could continue for another century or two.
 
The National Museum of Nuclear Science is the only congressionally chartered institution of its kind, and charts the history of the Atomic Age, from early research, to weaponization through today’s peaceful uses of nuclear technology for the good of mankind.
 
When I saw what remained of the collection at Kirkland, the move to town was incomplete. A lot of the ancillary stuff was lying around in the lot behind the building. You know the stuff- built to nuclear standards. Containers, support stuff, shipping gear, all of it worth a king's ransom back in the day and now just scrap and trash. But my pals and I had we seen it when seeing the contents of the crates would have meant a Marine would have been authorized to kill us.
 
I have been thinking about learning to love and hate the Bomb this week, since we are all panicked about the prospect of the Iranians- or other nut-jobs- getting a device and using it here.
 
Being in the Atomic business gave you terms of reference in an alternate universe. I recall being responsible for planning the wrong nuclear targets for the Mediterranean region. I had to sweat that one pretty hard until I could produce the documentation that I had been ordered to do it by the Strategic Command. It was a Boat One and Boat Two problem that was not resolved until STRATCOM woke up and realized the Navy had changed force levels in the Med to a single carrier and was quite petulant about it.
 
On that cruise, we were responsible for the joint planning of one-way nuclear strike missions. There would not be enough fuel in the aircraft (or in the air) to enable a return to the ship, so part of the planning challenge was to identify a Selected Area for Evasion (SAFE) zone.
 
You can imagine how bizarre that was, using a term that was a complete oxymoron about the end of the world, working with a pilot to select the least possible radioactive area into which to parachute.
 
A friend of mine had a mission that was even stranger.
 
He was in a reconnaissance squadron which had the unenviable mission of following the strike birds and take pictures of the damage inflicted on the enemy to determine what to do next. We called it “bomb damage assessment, or BDA.”
 
When his squadron pilots and navigators were doing their nuclear madness mission planning (also known as the Single Integrated Operations Plan or SIOP), there was no sun coming through our windows.
 
Life in the Atomic World meant working in vaults of steel. We were consigned to spaces that made us feel like we were living at the bottom of a grave.
 
We all got through those planning drills by wishing our SIOP inspectors would hurry up, query and correct us and let us go on our miserable way.
 
One time I was attempting to ensure two-man control of Sealed Authenticators and one of the Jerks from Omaha deliberately tried to get me to stop looking at the cookie, and break the chain of atomic custody.
 
Snakelike, I struck his arm away without blinking. We were pretty focused then.
 
My pal recalls a tale from those sojourns in the boom-boom asylum that recently reappeared, like the memories of an old parish priest.
 
It occurred during late ‘74 or early ‘75.  Back then the emphasis was creating pretty route folders for the aircrews so they could answer any and all questions about flying the routes, memorizing the way points and such.
 
No one ever bothered asking the spook schmucks in the USS Forrestal’s Integrated Operational Intelligence Center (IOIC, or “101 Clowns” to the pilots) whether we were prepared.  He became very curious what the total devastation was going to look like.
 
He wrote that he wanted to size up how much photo interpretation would be required after my squadron’s RA-5C Vigilante crews came back with miles of film for bomb damage assessment of Balkan Peninsula targets.
 
He was assigned to Heavy 7 (RVAH-7), the first and last RA-5C Vigilante squadron tasked to panoramically photograph these black holes at 500' while travelling at .9 mach.  So he counted the number of smoking crater coordinate pairs on each trans-and-post SIOP Balkan theater Coordinated Reconnaissance Plan (CRP) mission route.  We had acronyms for everything. He counted.  And counted.
 
The incalculable absurdity of this whole effort became clear only after many years had passed.  I remember along with him. We didn’t know whether we would be living the tomorrow after the day of the missions, let alone through that day.
 
After cross checking with the onboard A6 Intruder and A7 Corsair II squadron air intelligence officers, my pal discovered that the photo interpreters had many more craters to look at than our Eastern Med boat’s air wing had targets.
 
Simple math back then told him that the US was planning to throw weapons at everything.  It was as if Omaha was running a KMart blue light special on nuke reentry vehicle warheads and gravity bombs.  Simple scaling from this small Balkan theater target sample told him the SIOP must have been planning to smash tens of thousands of targets.
 
When he was done with the count, there were more than a hundred craters per mission. He also recognized that some of the targets were almost ten miles off the mandated ground track.
 
Stifling a WTFO impulse, he sent a plain vanilla, record copy, back-channel message to AIRLANT, FICEURLANT and CINCLANTFLT with an info copy to the crazy ones in Omaha, Nebraska, (Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (JSTPS)) that his pilots wouldn't be seeing those distant targets of our massive nuclear belch.
 
He thought that he was done and the crazy ones would adjust the routes accordingly.  Omaha thought differently.  They informally told my pal that he should direct the pilots to pop up along these “creep” routes to photograph the distant stretch targets.
 
He was not happy delivering that message to my squadron CO and OPS Officer.
 
He was relieved when his Operations Officer responded that he should tell them formally to "bite him."
 
He didn’t, but he wrote me and said he should have.
 
Me too.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra and My Aisle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!