The Bomb Lives!

One day in the summer of 1961, we all turned on television to watch our new President, John F. Kennedy. When his face came onto the screen, we saw from the way he had wet his hair and combed it back that he could not be more serious. He had had some meetings in Vienna with the Russian premier, Khrushchev. He told us the Soviets were threatening to make a separate peace with East Germany, the purpose of which was to dislodge us from Berlin. He told us the United States would never abandon the people of West Berlin. He told us he was increasing the draft and calling up reservists. He told each of us to start thinking how best to protect our family in the event of a nuclear attack. It was a chilling speech and its consequences were widespread. All over the back yards of America, Cold War entrepreneurs, like the soldiers of Cadmus, popped up as if the ground had been sown with serpents' teeth. They were offering to build atom-bomb shelters. There were stories in the papers about highly paid executives quitting their jobs and moving with their families to New Zealand, where the global wind patterns were least likely to bestow fallout. A churchman declared that it was ethical to keep the neighbors out of your bomb shelter, even if you had to use a gun. This was the era of the Berlin Wall--the last period of acute bomb consciousness in America.

It is difficult now to define the quality of that consciousness. I can think of it only as a kind of imprisonment. For 15 years the tomb had been the governing issue of our lives. After World War Two, against the advice of our best scientists, we expected to have a long-term bomb monopoly. When this proved not to be the case, we found numbers of Communist spies and sent them to jail. Atom spies, we called them. Two of the atom spies, a man and wife, we put to death in the electric chair. We argued about our bomb-development policy and those who came out on the wrong side of the argument, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, were disgraced. We purged ourselves of eggheads and fellow travelers and dupes. We lived in a state of armed terror. We computed megadeaths. One Congress after another invested in bombs, and the bombs got bigger and bigger. We were assured that the quaint devices that had scorched the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obsolete. The more bombs we built, the more terrified we became. In the corridors of our schools, Children were drilled in the postures of suppliant defense. We discovered that by arming our nation and testing our arms, we were poisoning our children's milk. The philosopher Bertrand Russell marched to ban the bomb. Committees arose for a sane nuclear Policy.

And then something truly mysterious happened. We passed from the rapids to the still water. The bomb ceased to be an issue. No one believed any longer that a nuclear war could occur. "When exactly this astonishing change occurred, or why it should have occurred at all, would be very hard to say," wrote Norman Podhoretz in Commentary. It didn't seem to match the objective situation. In 1962 there was another Kennedy-Khrushchev confrontation--over Cuba. And, say what you would about a thaw, until the SALT agreements of 1972, there would be no international checks of any kind on the Production of bombs. Indeed, all through the Sixties, our nuclear capability increased. We installed our ICBMs. The Russians installed their ICBMs. The Chinese picked up the art. And the French. Nevertheless, in America the bomb no longer locked us in contemplation of itself. The nature of our apprehension had been somehow transformed. The most crucial questions of disarmament were a bore and thinking about them became a rather esoteric discipline. In the Sixties, black People arose in great numbers and began to create for themselves a political identity as the adversaries of whites. A student class came into being, something the United States had never had before, and it flourished for five years before it disappeared in 1969 as if it had never existed. But in the meantime, it characterized political life for all of us. As an arbiter of style it was merciless and everything that had marked our appearance in the Fifties was reviled and buried. Music changed, clothing and hair changed, speech changed. There was a mass defection from schools and jobs. A small war in Asia organized our outrage and turned us into political enemies of one another. And by the end of the decade, it was not nuclear pollution we shouted about but the pollution of our normal industrial landscape. On the heights of public passion of this past dozen years or so, the bomb seemed to have been obscured in such a thick atmosphere of problems as to appear illusory by comparison.

Yet the bomb is still with us. Last autumn, at a hot moment in the eternal Mideast crisis, President Nixon put our Armed Forces on alert. Pointedly included in the alert was the Strategic Air Command--the men who fly the nuclear bombers and launch the nuclear missiles. A friend of mine was not impressed. "Poor Nixon," he said. "Still running plays from Jack Kennedy's playbook."

• • •

I visited the Strategic Air Command last summer, spending two days with them at their headquarters in Nebraska, and then at a bomber-and-missile base in North Dakota. SAC is geared for visitors and it has a cadre of amiable and articulate information officers to act as guides. They provided me with briefings, press kits and a seemingly endless parade of commanding officers, pilots and technicians, all of whom were happily prepared to talk about their specialties, I was shown through a B-52 and descended to the dungeon of a missile-control station. I wasn't told how many nuclear bombs a B-52 carries, nor what the pay load is on a Minuteman missile, but the atmosphere was so friendly and unsecretive as to suggest a guided tour of Disneyland. When I was shown the famous SAC Underground Command Post, With its blue-phone and gold-phone hotlines, with its red phone to the President and its giant black screens flashing with computerized color graphs and print-outs, I met a vacationing gray-haired couple from Orlando, Florida. Cozily the three of us listened to a colonel describe just how a nuclear war would be administered.

So it is true that even here, on the technological edge of our nuclear consciousness, we are no longer in the drawn-faced days of the Fifties. We no longer question one another's loyalty nor send some of our number to prison for contempt of Congressional committees. Not undue secretiveness but Public relations is the keynote of our nuclear establishment. Yet if a war of superpowers were to break out tomorrow, our Government would dispatch its nuclear weapons by a trinity of delivery systems--Manned bombers, inter-continental Minuteman and Titan missiles now buried in silos, and short-range Polaris and Poseidon missiles launched from nuclear submarines under the sea-- the combined might of which is enough to make our planet flash like the sun.

This trinity, or triad, as it is called, is acclaimed for its flexibility. Each means of distribution is seen to have advantages that the others do not. The land-based Minuteman, for instance, can reach its target in a matter of minutes. But it cannot be rerouted nor called back, unlike the slower but more manageable manned bomber. The advantage of our nuclear submarines is in not providing a stationary target for enemy missiles. Behind each of these component systems is a military bureaucracy that maintains it and jealously guards its claims in the yearly budget wars in Washington. And behind these bureaucracies are the enormous contracting and subcontracting manufactories with the brand names--such as Rockwell International and General Electric and Boeing--that consume yearly a large share of the billions of dollars Washington allots for our defense.

Our nuclear industry is not restricted to these weapons: It also produces tactical nuclear bombs for the Army and various nuclear ABMs designed to bring down enemy bombers and enemy missiles. In short, In short, the bomb today is an ongoing industrial establishment that provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of people, military and civilian, and suggests by its very prosperity that it has become essential for the proper functioning of American life.

At the base of this entire structure is a Government agency known as the Atomic Energy Commission. It is the AEC that is responsible for the manufacture of the bomb itself. Some years ago, an enterprising reporter, Stuart Loory, decided to find out how many nuclear weapons the AEC had caused to be made and stockpiled. The AEC felt it was privileged to keep this information secret, but by one means or another, Loory came up with an educated estimate of some 40,000 bombs ready to go, not counting the bombs at our bases overseas. As well as he could determine, we were secretly making and storing nuclear weapons in 100 different, locations in the continental United States. This was in 1969. It is unlikely that the numbers of our bombs or bomb-storage depots have since decreased.

• • •

Aside from the mushroom cloud, our most hoary nuclear symbol is the B-52. It is a huge plane weighing nearly a half million pounds at take-off. It holds the fuel of two and a half railroad tank cars. On the ground, it sits on eight wheels the height of a man's shoulders. Its wings attach to the top of the fuselage and when they are loaded with fuel, they dip toward the ground in their sweep-back geometry like the wings of a bird. In fact, at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, Where a covey of nuclear-armed B-52s is Kept on continuous alert, the flight crews continuous alert, the flight crews commonly refer to the bird. Another name they use is the beast, perhaps because of the creature it suggests in profile--a flying reptile, with an elongated body and the curved throat of a lizard.

A B-52 is entered through a hatch in its belly just forward of its four front wheels. It carries a six-man crew and, sur-prisingly for a craft so large, it leaves them very little room. They cannot stand upright. The racks of dials and instrument faces crowd the pilots' chairs. Behind the pilots, facing aft, sit the gunner and the electronic-warfare officer. The gunner has no window but manages his defensive armament by means of a radar screen on the panel in front of him. He programs his guns and they fire themselves. The electronic-warfare officer also faces a radar screen. His job is to detect tracking enemy missile radar and confuse (continued on page 208)The Bomb Lives!(continued from page 116) it with false information and jamming signals.

On a tiny windowless deck directly below the pilots sit the bombardier and the navigator. They are surrounded with glowing red dials, radarscopes, computer racks, banks of switches and gauges. They customarily refer to their dark little underdeck as the wine cellar. It is here the button is pushed that causes the bomb load to drop or the missiles slung under the wings to fire. The button is prominently situated at the right hand of the bombardier. But it is not the simple gadget seen in World War Two movies on TV, where the bombardier in the fleece-lined leather cap closes one eye, lines up the cross hairs and presses down with his thumb. This is a computer-operated mechanism with a radarscope that paints a picture of the target terrain before the flight gets there and automatically releases the bombs to arrive at that target. The load of 108 iron bombs of the kind we dropped on Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia gives a very slight physical indication to the crew at the moment it leaves the plane--perhaps a slight upward bump in flight; nuclear bombs will give no physical indication at all that they are gone.

The bomb bay of the B-52 is capacious, taking up the entire undersection between the fore and aft landing wheels. It is roughly the size of a mass grave.

I should have thought this grisly flying machine was sufficient to its task. But it is virtually obsolete. Our recent adventures in Southeast Asia have given the plane a contemporaneous sheen, but the last one was made in 1962. The truth is the B-52 is an electrical nightmare. I was told this by a senior officer who pointed to some of the miles of wires running like nerves through the organs and limbs of the plane. The eight jet engines themselves are indestructible and can run forever. But the electronics are a bitch. That is why the Air Force has a new craft in mind that it hopes will replace the B-52 in not too many years. It is a needle-nosed superbomber whose wings can be extended or folded in close, depending on the exigencies of flight. That is more in the manner of a bird than the 52. This new plane, it is said, will fly so low and under the guidance of such advanced electronic navigating equipment that it will practice terrain avoidance, a radar-proof kind of flight that literally silhouettes the contours of the ground. The plane has been designated the B-1, thus suggesting a new era, as with the coming of Christ. At SAC headquarters, a visitor walking through the front door sees displayed in the lobby a gleaming-white model of the B-1 mounted on a stand. It is the kind of model to make a boy gasp. It resembles a Brancusi and is fair indication of the shame of the military mind--that it finds instruments of destruction beautiful. We may all share that weakness to one degree or another, but we are not all consumers of weapons technology. I subscribe to the idea that if the B-52 is an electrical nightmare, the B-1 will hardly be less so. It is a peculiar fact that in the two days I was a visitor to two separate Air Force installations, one staff car assigned to the officer escorting me would not start, the window knob of another staff car came off in the driver's hand and the slide projector in the briefing room at SAC headquarters caught fire and burned up a slide. Technology has its demons, does it not? As I watched the burning slide projected on the screen, it first turned red, and then it turned black, and then it dissolved in white light, scorching outward from the center in what seemed to my eyes the shape of a human body.

The select SAC crews at Minot, North Dakota, live with their planes on seven-day alerts, grueling periods of awesome yet tedious responsibility during which they are billeted close to the flight line. They live in captivity to the equipment. They must sign for their planes and their bombs. They may be visited by their families on Sundays in special visitation trailers set up for that purpose. Until 1968, it was our custom to keep one or more flights of B-52s armed with nuclear warheads continuously in the air. But in January of that year, one of the planes crashed in Thule, Greenland, and the radioactive effulgence of four thermonuclear bombs was sprayed over the snow. Since that time, ground-alert procedures have been in effect. The bombers are said to be able to be airborne well within the response time provided by the Distant Early Warning system. Ground-alert techniques are practiced regularly by SAC crews--particularly a pattern of minimum-interval take-offs in which the B-52s and their mating tankers, the K-135s of Dr. Strangelove fame, roar down the runway in each other's exhaust or jet wash something under 15 seconds apart. What this means is that they take off on each other's tails under conditions approximating gusty winds. It must have seemed to some chief of staff at one time or another that in a genuine alert, a flight of lumbering B-52s taking to the air in their own turbulence more or less at the same time while loaded with thermonuclear bombs would be a reasonable risk.

The members of the B-52 flight crew I spoke with were a personable lot, amiable, if correct, and with that kind of disposition to banter of people who do their job well and have reason to think they are envied and admired. Certainly, their commanding officer seemed to admire them. Since Vietnam, the military have huddled closer among themselves and are wary of outsiders. The crew members wore colorful shoulder patches designating them as veterans of the 11 Day War. I had heard of the six-day war of the Israelis in 1967, but I didn't know about the 11-day war. It is what the Air Force calls our Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi.

I would venture that in the Strategic Air Command, the fight crews are almost all hostages to their love of flying. To love flying is to want to be free of the gravity of the body and the mind. But flying a nuclear-armed bomber is another story, and a rueful one, I suspect, in the view of pilots. When they fly these bombers, they sit strapped in over their bombs and they are programmed in everything they do. Their training is designed to prepare them for all eventualities, and the operating procedures leave little room for independent judgment. When you fly these mothers, you are a sequence of learned responses. When you live in technology, you become a technological man. "If the go code came, I would drop the bomb," the pilot of this crew told me. "I wouldn't know what else to do."

The men who fly the B-52 suffer a high incidence of hemorrhoids. This is explained as a consequence of the long hours spent in flight chairs combined with a general reluctance to use the facilities aboard. These facilities are a canister with a lid on it and a receptacle primitive enough to be called a honey bucket. Even on long flights, crew members in these cramped quarters would rather induce constipation in themselves than use the honey bucket. But man is a symbolizing animal and I cannot believe it only a clinical fact that men trained to fly through the sky and drop bomb loads find reason in that pursuit to retain their feces.

• • •

After I saw the bombers, I drove with three SAC officers to the farm village of Velva, North Dakota, which happens to be not far from the geographical center of the North American continent. We met with little traffic as the driver sped down the country roads that split great rolling squared-off acres of durum wheat. Some of the fields were turning from green to gold, which meant that in perhaps a month the harvest combines would arrive. A big blue sky floated over the wheat plains and nothing obstructed the long horizon except for an occasional stand of windbreak trees or a small boarded-up farmhouse. We reached Velva and drove a few more miles beyond, and then the car turned off the road and bumped a few yards over a dirt path and stopped. We all got out of the car. The officers yawned, but I was looking at a shrine, an arid rectangle of ground scattered with gravel and surrounded by a Cyclone fence. Outside the fence the grass grew wild and goldenrod and black-eyed Susans dipped in the warm summer wind. Inside the fence were low-lying structures of green metal and concrete that gave no indication of their purpose or function. I moved forward. "Don't get too close," the senior officer, a lieutenant colonel, said to me. "The security sensors pick you up before you ever reach the fence." He pointed to three metal poles in the enclosure that stood in relation to one another as the points of a triangle.

I was standing topside of what is called a Launch Facility, or LF, a common enough installation in these parts. Within the area triangulated by the sensors was what appeared from my vantage as some sort of concrete disk bound in steel, like a giant cistern cover. In fact, this was an 80-ton blast door, or rather two blast doors, that would on proper electronic command spring open like the most alacritous pair of thighs as a flaming-white 60-foot steel-and-titanium phallus passed between them and went off into the sky.

There are 150 bare fenced-in areas like this scattered about the farmers' fields in this region of North Dakota, and they're all under the guardianship of the 91st Strategic Missile Wing. The wing is divided into three squadrons of 50 missiles each; and each squadron is composed of five flights of ten missiles each. Every flight of ten missiles is buried in a roughly circular pattern with at least three or four miles between missiles. And in the middle of the circle is the Launch Control Center, also underground, where two officers constantly monitor each of the missiles in the flight and know in a split second, deep in their subterranean cavern, if something larger than a fly gets near one of the sites.

"If security is violated," the lieutenant colonel said, "launch control sends in the security fieldmen. The fieldmen don't waste time getting to where they're going. With snow on the ground, they can helicopter in." He pointed to a wind sock flying from a pole.

Actually, if someone did decide to jump the fence and if for some reason he were not detected, his options would still be fairly limited. You cannot use a crowbar on an 80-ton door designed to withstand nuclear attack. When a missile-maintenance crew is authorized to go into the hole, it is accompanied by a security team. Only together, maintenance and security, do they know all the combinations to the locks and procedures for opening the steel hatches--and it takes them over an hour to get a man down inside.

And turning on the lights what do they find: overall, a concrete silo 100 feet deep. Within this silo, an inner cylinder of steel that functions as a gantry for the missile. Within this steel gantry the missile is positioned vertically and pointing at the sky. The steel gantry cylinder is 12 feet in diameter. It is painted white. Between the white cylinder of steel and the concrete silo wall are catwalks around the top of the silo, at the middle level and at the bottom. On these catwalks rest the missile's support and maintenance systems, in racks. There are guidance-control racks and computer-programming racks and control-capsule communication racks, and monitoring racks and U.H.F. racks and battery racks and power-supply racks. And there are air conditioners hooked up to the computer racks to keep them cool because they're working all the time. All these systems are humming away.

Acoustically, the sense is of being in a tunnel. Voices resound. Footsteps ring on the metal catwalks.

The missile is aligned in its berth by means of a gyrocompass it carries within itself and by a backup astronomical device that moves along a track around the concrete silo wall at the mid-level catwalk. This surprisingly ancient machine with gear teeth and gauge numbers provides true-north references and azimuth.

The warhead at the tip of the missile is about ten feet long.

From my observation point on the mid-level catwalk of a training silo, looking through an opening in the steel gantry cylinder, I judged the Minuteman to be three or four stories tall. It started well below me and tipped out well above me. Like the gantry cylinder, it was painted white. Its shank was about four and a half feet wide. It had an Air Force decal pasted to its shining white shaft, just like the plastic models in the toy store. It was thinner at the top than at the bottom. Plugged into its side was a looping bundle of cables and hoses that connected through a portable to the equipment on the catwalks. It is through these cables and hoses, known inevitably as the umbilicals, that the missile sends continuous messages concerning its welfare and state of being to the officers in the Launch Control Center. If the missile were to be fired, the umbilicals would snap off and retract into an alcove in the silo wall.

An interesting note for ecologists is that missile silos are designed to be reused. Assuming the opportunity would present itself, huge vans would drop a new rocket-and-missile pay load into the hole, all the umbilicals would be reconnected, the damned thing would be aimed, the blast doors would be closed and the nuclear war would be ready to continue.

• • •

The descent to a Launch Control Center is cleared for you by a sergeant armed with a pistol. He has first checked by phone with the missile crew. You get on a large elevator, hospital size, and are lowered at a grindingly slow speed some 60 feet into the earth. You walk a few steps through a drafty, dimly lit concrete foyer and face a steel door 12 feet square. The colonel who is your guide works the combination, spins the wheels and, digging in his heel, pulls on the massive door until it slowly swings open. When you are through, the colonel pushes the massive door shut and locks it. You are now in another concrete foyer. Another steel door with wheel locks is slowly opening from the inside. It is smaller but no less formidable. It is 36 inches thick and weighs eight tons. Ducking, you find yourself on a short footbridge. Across this footbridge, through an open hatch, is the fluorescent-lit Launch Control Center. A sign says No Lone Zone: Two Man Policy Mandatory.

Making this descent, I thought that my spiritual guide should be not the poet Virgil but a friend of mine, Olivia Mezey. I had seen Ollie and her husband, Bob, in Salt Lake just before undertaking my trip to SAC. When I told her I was going to look at a missile, she turned very pale. Ollie teaches a course in interplanetary law at the Free University. Her text is a work by the master Aetherius, who communicates with mankind on behalf of the Interplanetary Council, an august parliament of all the advanced civilizations of the universe. Since the Fifties, the Interplanetary Council has been warning us not to tamper with the atomic structure of the cosmos. Particularly urgent communiqués have been received from Mars Sector Six. The council is doing what it can to save us from our own monstrous stupidity, but time is running out. Ollie knows her friends are sometimes embarrassed when, with a shy smile, she speaks of the Interplanetary Council. Ollie is a lovely woman with a face that once prompted someone to ask her to play the role of Christ in a movie. She's a vegetarian and when her children cut or scrape themselves, she treats them with herbal medicine. She advises "the practice of the presence," a tuning into the logos of the earth, as a way of nullifying the effects of radioactivity. She says it is nothing else but what the Hopi, Navaho and Mayan people used to do.

A Launch Control Center is a chamber suspended in a concrete cave from four huge springlike devices called isolators. These are, in effect, 1875-pound shock absorbers. In a nuclear war, the launch-control chamber would be self-sustaining for several days. A ground shock would automatically seal the air-conditioning valves connecting to the earth's surface. End to end with the launch-control chamber is a support capsule containing backup diesel generators that would switch on automatically and regenerate oxygen, purify ground water and keep food refrigerated. Even if this equipment failed, the oxygen regenerator could be hand-cranked. In short, one could expect to be buried alive comfortably as a missile crewman.

Inside the capsule, the control center is about the size of an efficiency kitchen in an expensive apartment. At the closed end is a monitoring console with vertical rows of light panels--one for each missile--a built-in phone and another panel under a clear-plastic cover labeled War Plan Launch Control. Above the console are radio speakers. This is the duty station of the capsule commander. It is here on the commander's console that the missiles communicate their condition and the missile sites record violations of their security. It is here the missiles can be launched. The printed words on the console light panels become more serious the farther down they go. The top light Says Test. The middle lights indicate the status of a missile preparatory to launch. The bottom panel light is printed with the words Missile Away.

The second member of the missile combat crew, the deputy commander, sits in front of the long wall. Like the commander, he has a K-135 pilot's chair, with seat belt. The chair is not bolted to the floor in front of his console but slides along tracks so that he can position himself anywhere in front of the computer racks and teletype equipment in his charge. At his console he has a phone and an isolated panel with a clear-plastic cover, just like the commander's. Both covered panels have keyholes in their faces. The keys that fit these keyholes are locked in a red strongbox over the deputy commander's console. The agreement of both crew members is required to unlock this red metal box--each knows how to open only one of its two combination locks. When the red box is opened, the commander takes one key and the deputy one key and each goes to his station. The stations are 12 feet apart. Upon receipt of a message from the President, which may come to them in any one or more of six or seven ways--by SAC voice landline, or two or three different teletype circuits, or U. H. F. radio or V. H. F. radio or H. F. radio--and upon authentication of the message, each crewman must put the key in his console and turn it for two seconds, and they must do this simultaneously. Their turned keys constitute one half of the necessary programming to send the nuclear missile on its way. In Strategic Air Command lingo, the two turned keys constitute one launch vote. In an identical launch-control capsule, another team of two officers must go through the same procedure: With two votes recorded, or the separate but coordinated action of four men, the rocket fires.

It is of interest that an authenticated order from the President, which the crew members have no choice but to obey, is construed in their hands as a vote. I have given some thought to this. If the 20th Century teaches anything, it is that destruction of meaning in language precedes all other destruction. The word vote implies choice. It suggests volition, a state of self-government and, above all, personal responsibility. Perhaps the word is used to impress the missile crewmen and the rest of us that nothing they are called upon to do can be done lightly. But that is not the same thing as the personal responsibility that is assumed only when a choice is possible. The safeguards against unauthorized launching seem foolproof--one man operating alone, for instance, could not physically turn two keys simultaneously for two seconds in consoles 12 feet apart. Further, any other launch-control facility could abort a launch if it were not properly authorized--the actions of all capsule crews can be electronically monitored by all other crews in that squadron. These safeguards are all directed against the lowest levels of command--the missile officers themselves. In theory, then, an officer's only choice would be in refusing to turn the key if properly authorized and commanded to do so. But he does not have that option as far as his superior officers and commander in chief are concerned. Therefore, why is he said to have a vote?

The missile officers on duty in the capsule were articulate and responsive to my questions, though they clearly didn't feel as genericaliy adored as the B-52 crewmen. They wore dark-blue Service fatigues, neatly pressed, with the red cravat, around their neck that identifies their unit and their calling. They wore sidearms. The capsule commander, a captain, was 31 years old. The deputy commander, a second lieutenant, was 24. Neither had volunteered for combat missile service. The captain wore wings on his shirt pocket. I asked them if they thought they would ever have to turn the keys. The captain said he didn't believe it would happen. The lieutenant said he wished he could be that sure, but the most he could say was that he hoped it would never happen. I realized that when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the captain was three years old and the lieutenant was not yet born. They were two of the children drinking milk laced with strontium 90 when Adlai Stevenson discussed the subject in his 1956 campaign for President.

It is not an impression of free men in a democratic society that you get from a visit to a launch-control capsule. As with the pilots on the flight line, the sense is definitely of imprisonment. Such depth of residence is associated in history with the dungeon. The steel doors are locked. The fluorescent lights are on all the time. The lights buzz and the air conditioners hum and the radio crackles and the teletype spits out its tape messages and the whole place mounts a constant assault on the privacy of the mind. At the exact locations of our nuclear-consciousness technology is a total environment, one that has replaced all other landscapes and made irrelevant all considerations other than its own functioning. The men who guard us with our bombs live in airplanes or in underground capsules or in submarines--anywhere but on the face of the earth.

During my visit, the two crew members were constantly interrupted by the routine of their shift. They answered phones, communicated with missile-maintenance crews and read teletype printouts. The officers have two 12-hour shifts in a 36-hour period, and then they are off for a few days. At one time all missile combat crews were volunteers. Now officers are given four-year tours of duty through normal assignment channels. They must receive top-security clearance, of course, and meet the usual physical requirements. But they are subject to no special psychological-fitness test beyond that given to everyone in the Air Force. On the other hand, neither are joint chiefs of staff and Presidents of the United States subject to psychological-fitness tests.

I asked the crew members if it didn't get fairly dull in this underground vault 12 hours at a time with only routine monitoring duties. And this was the answer: "Well, sir, it can go from very dull to stark terror."

"Well," I said, "what is it that could put you into a condition of stark terror? Because if you're terrified. I think we all have a right to be terrified." The escorting colonel cleared his throat and hastened to explain that he was sure the officer meant only the anxieties one feels under the pressure of ordinary duties. The officer who made the remark agreed. There was a general stammering agreement that stark terror was an inappropriate phrase. The officers all nodded. Yes, stark terror meant only that sometimes the routine could get very busy.

I later made inquiries and found out that the training these officers receive never takes place in operational launch-control centers. In other words, no practice alerts are sent down for training purposes. The common sense of that is clear enough. But then if something had occurred in the experience of these men that had generated stark terror, and if it was, after all, more than the pressure of routine work, it must have been in the nature of a malfunction, real or imaginary, a message from the President or a message from the missile, that for a while terrified them with the absolute consequences of its demands. We'll never know. But the Interplanetary Council advises of a severe radioactive disturbance a year ago last winter on the lower astral planes.

• • •

After I said goodbye and left the capsule and watched the steel doors swing shut on the missilement. I decided that doing this kind of work for a number of years must gradually etch on the face of the brain the silhouettes of ten missiles, aligned like the bars of a cell. The men themselves, not their consoles, are the captive monitors of mechanical faults or security alarms or radiation leaks--it all comes to happen in the circuits of their own being. Riding the elevator back to the surface. I remembered what I had seen taped to the equipment near the lieutenant's chair. It was a brown paper trash bag with a home-drawn picture of Charlie Brown's dog, Snoopy, holding a sign that read Top Secret Waste.

Let's suppose the image provides us with some clue to the truth of our mysterious psyche-out, some idea of how we've lived and sublimated these past dozen years with our bombs. Every spring at Vandenburg Air Force Base in California, missile combat teams from every wing in the country convene for a competitive missile-launching exercise that goes on for five days. It is a kind of world series in missile launches, because the teams who represent their bases at Vandenburg have already demonstrated at the regional level whatever set of skills determines the superiority of one pair of missilemen to another. When a crew goes off to Vandenburg to turn its sights down the Pacific test range, it goes with a proven local reputation and the blessing and support of the surrounding community. Civilian boosters put up the money that buys distinctive uniforms for the crew members and erects the display at Vandenburg that is customary for each sponsoring locale. We are not, remember, speaking of little league. This is not the peewee team with Carl's Auto Body stitched across the backs of the uniforms. A clutch of these Olympians have under certain conditions the authority to send a flight of ICBMs tearing through space at 15,000 miles an hour to release upon re-entry into the earth's atmosphere enough megadeath to wipe out 30 cities. That is big league. And the folks in North Dakota know it. Last year the display they erected to celebrate the combined Grand Forks and Minot missileman contingent read North Dakota--World's Third Nuclear Power.

So what can we propose? To begin with, that the human race is infinitely adaptive, a fact zoologists have pointed to for years as the source of our survival as a species but that in actuality may be the imprinting of our destruction. Understand that when the farmers in North Dakota talk about being the world's third nuclear power, they are not talking as militarists, they are talking as a chamber of commerce. In my boyhood in the Bronx, there was a man in our neighborhood who became a state senator; we were proud in just the same way we were proud of the achievement of another neighbor who drew three to ten years for stock fraud. It's not that we love whatever it is that makes us special, it's that we have to take our identity where we can. The average human being's capacity for allegiance is indiscriminate, like pure sexual appetite, except that it increases with age. Whether to TV programs, ball teams, wine grapes, high schools or 60-foot steel-and-titanium missiles, our loyalties will fix with passionate disregard for what they fix on. The instructive analogy here is from Midsummer Night's Dream: Titania, having been touched in her sleep with Puck's mischievous love potion, awakens and has the bad luck to see Nick Bottom, the weaver, wearing the head of an ass. "Thou art as wise," she says, "as thou art beautiful."

Of course, among our most powerful allegiances are those relating to the sources of our income. The combined military and civilian payroll at Minot Air Force Base is more than $42,000,000 a year. For that kind of money, a community can work out any number of rationales for living in fields of missiles. Nevertheless, there is no question that part of the appeal in being a major target in a nuclear war is the appeal of having become a major anything. Minot is a farm town of about 40,000 people. Why not Minot? ask the city fathers in their promotional literature. We cup our hands to our mouths and shout into the wind rippling the endless miles of wheat fields rolling away in every direction as far as the eye can see: Why not Minot? If you have ever lived west of New York City or east of San Francisco, you recognize that cry. It is an existential cry. It will tune your bones. Virtually all of our 1000 or so ICBMs are installed in the longitudes between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. There are good and sound military reasons for this. But that our missiles sit within the cultural borders of what is known these days as middle America is a queer geographical fact that has resonance with what we feel if not with what we know.

Certainly, the conscientious and intelligent information officers of the Strategic Air Command who devote a large part of their work to ensuring community support for SAC seem to have a pretty good idea of where that support naturally lies. Tours of SAC headquarters in Omaha are readily arranged for entire planeloads of people flown in at Air Force expense from their home towns. Visitors arrive and see the model of the B-I in the headquarters lobby. They pass under the courteous but stern gaze of the Elite Guard, the special unit of military police who wear black berets, polished black boots, cravats and pistols, Perhaps, like the couple from Orlando, they even get to see the Underground Command Post. One senior information officer at SAC headquarters suggested to me that the bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia did, after all. supply our flight crews with combat experience. Presumably, this is not the kind of opinion that needs to be expressed to anyone besides journalists and effete intellectuals. This same officer told me Navy apologists have argued that if we were to put all our nuclear missiles on submarines under the ocean, in the event of war the enemy would have no reason to bomb the U.S. land mass. But that's a terrible idea, he said. Who would get exercised about losing a few lousy submarines? If the continental United States were not bombed, you could not get people to go to war.

But the devices of adaptation are not restricted to middle America, and it would be foolish to suggest that only one segment of our population has supported our policy of nuclear deterrence. Deterrence has been advocated and maintained by every President without exception since Harry Truman, the first President of the nuclear age. No Congress has ever seriously debated an alternative policy, and the major differences among our politicians have had to do only with the amount and kind of deterrence advocated. From the beginning, once we had that bomb, there was something as inevitable as a self-fulfilling prophecy about the kind of postwar world in which we found ourselves. In 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a symposium was held under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the subject of public reactions to impending nuclear disaster. The psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon of Harvard Medical School discussed the various defense mechanisms people employed to deal with the horror. These included a total repression of the thought of one's personal nuclear death, or a rationalization that it could never happen, or an intellectualization of the experience in terms of statistics and war-game scenarios (practiced in particular by think-tank researchers and war strategists). All very recognizable responses, even today, in dealing with the unthinkable. But there occur in history not only personal defense operations of the mind but collective psychological responses that symbolically transform society's experience. Thus we may begin to address ourselves to Mr. Podhoretz' puzzlement as to when and why we stopped believing as a society in the possibility of major nuclear war by considering the idea that with the atmospheric-test-ban treaty of 1963 the entire subject went underground. In the same period of time that all nuclear tests were consigned to the earth, our earliest Minuteman missiles were becoming operational in their subterranean silos. Is it not conceivable that, against all the evidence of our modern intellectual knowledge, some mass primeval apprehension was proposing the burial of our fear, the death of our horror?

We can probe the idea further. The essential weapon of the nuclear war in the early Fifties was the bomb. By the early Sixties, it was the missile. Clearly, if the power of imagery is to be invoked, bombs are detestable in part because they are unloaded in the manner of excrement, whereas the missiles partake of a life-giving symbol universally associated with regeneration. To my knowledge, no society in the history of mankind has ever venerated the cloaca. Surely, it is not impossible that at the level of mass communal consciousness, where only the most blatant mythic symbols can operate to universal effect, we made the kind of prescientific mental transformations that would assure us, once again, of a feasible, a continuing, world. This is a farfetched idea only if you happen to think that as a species we have advanced to a point of being independent of the psychic sources of our religions and our totems and our superstitions. And if we have, what is Snoopy, the fantasist, doing in the launch capsule?

But symbols cannot change reality, they may only reconstrue it. In that sense, symbols work and do not work at the same time. We know that there are enough bombs in the earth to blow up the planet, but we choose to believe in the restraining wisdom of mankind and the beneficence of our institutions. Clearly, this adaptation cannot be made on a purely intellectual level. We have opted for the coexistence of life and death. We are a mirror of the ancient Egyptians: One cannot listen to a technical sergeant describe the maintenance procedures in the underground missile silos without calling to mind the Egyptian slaves who preserved their dead masters in luxurious vaults with all the means to support their return to life, entombing them with their money and their jewels and their combs, with grain to eat and water in clay jars.

But we shall have to leave the proper analysis of our collective unconscious to the Jungians. And to our historians the role of the bomb in all the events and larger social movements in America since 1960--our space exploration, our social protest, our pastoralism, our little wars, our paranoia and our passion for the occult. Here let us be satisfied to say that since Hiroshima, images of the bomb have hidden in the texture of our lives like those grinning heads in the trees and shrubberies of children's puzzles. Can we hope to find them all? I can find one: our new awareness as a people of our society's contamination of the environment, our sensitivity to poisons, to poisons of the air and the water, to the chemical poisons in our food. We are extraordinarily sensitive now to the damage we do to the delicate web of life on earth simply by being ourselves. We used to fear the bomb, but now we fear everything. What can this be but the diffusion of our horror of this death-in-life weapon that we have given the world? For, of course, having buried our bombs, we are now seeing them stir and unwrap their mummy shrouds, returning to life transubstantiated as nuclear-energy plants, or radiation-waste storage facilities. The news as I write is of enormous radioactive liquid leakage in the Atomic Energy Commission's Han ford storage facility near Richland, in the state of Washington. The leaks have released deadly radio-nuclides into the earth. Similar disasters have occurred at Savannah River, South Carolina, and Idaho Falls, Idaho. We are beginning to accumulate in our soil and in our ground water enough plutonium to burn the bones and lungs of infants for the next 24,000 years. Conceivably, under the right conditions, we may some-day in our nuclear industry lose to the earth just the amount of radiant material necessary to effect a chain reaction. And then the failure of our vaunted adaptability will be manifest, and the truth will blaze upon us that what happened to the bomb was the it became the earth, and the earth became the bomb.

Hey, Kids!How many big nukes can you spot in this picture?