Launch Code

FIFTEEN

September 1983, Groton, Connecticut

Craig, Lars and I met Vicky, Kathleen and Donna at the New London Union Station in my old 1975 Mustang.

I had phoned Donna the evening after our date in Little Italy and the conversation had gone well. We had spoken several times and then I received a wonderful letter from her: warm, witty, frank. I had thought I was not much of a letter writer, but my reply had gone better than I had expected. I told her about life on the base, and about Craig’s mood swings between despair over Maria and a determination to get very drunk. She told me about the woman at the desk next to hers who had taken the day off because she was too embarrassed to show up for work with a giant spot on her nose, and the old guy who liked to declaim filthy Restoration poetry to her on the steps of her apartment building. It had taken her some time to identify the poems, but now she was sure they were by the Earl of Rochester.

Then she wrote me a six-page letter about her brother. She had just received a letter from him; the first for three years. He was living in the woods somewhere in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He said he was ‘getting his shit together’ and had gotten a job at a hotel as a bartender for the summer. I wrote her about my dad’s newspaper, how proud I was of it, and how I thought maybe the real reason I hadn’t taken up journalism was that I couldn’t do it justice. I asked her for more about her brother.

She said he had been really smart in high school. His teachers encouraged him to apply to an Ivy League college, but he had decided not to defer his Vietnam draft. He had gone; he had come back; he had changed for ever. He had refused to speak about it to her or to anyone else, except for once, when he was drunk and in tears. He had told her it wasn’t what he had suffered in Vietnam, or even what he had seen that screwed him up, it was what he had done. He wouldn’t say what that was and Donna wouldn’t ask him.

She didn’t have to say that that was what had made her a pacifist, but I knew she wanted to explain it to me, that she wanted me to understand. I took that to mean she cared about my opinion of her, and that pleased me. But I couldn’t help thinking about the guy in Battery Park I had tried to give ten dollars to.

The phone calls were brief and light; it was always good to hear her voice. The letters were the real communication between us.

I went down to New York to stay for the weekend with Donna in her tiny studio apartment in the East Village. I don’t know whether it was the letters, or what it was, but it seemed like we knew each other really well, even though this was only the third time we had met. I knew her and yet there was so much I wanted to find out. We talked and talked. I had a lot I wanted to tell, a lot I wanted to hear.

We avoided discussing nuclear weapons directly, or nuclear power in general, but it was obvious she had been an active protester in college, and still was. She was upset about South Africa too, and apartheid; she wanted the big multinational firms to divest from the country. I hadn’t really given the subject much thought before, but she persuaded me.

Of course, we didn’t just talk. We fooled around. A lot.

She announced that she, Kathleen and Vicky had decided to come up to Groton for the following weekend. Being married, Craig had his own small house off base, and their idea was that the women would stay there with him. There must be plenty of room now Maria had moved out.

I wasn’t so sure. I came up with a plan.

Donna smiled when she saw me at the train station and she kissed me, but unlike the week before in New York, I sensed she didn’t quite share my excitement. It worried me for an instant, then I decided to ignore it. At least she had left the little anti-nuclear buttons off her denim jacket for her visit to a naval base.

The New London Submarine Base wasn’t in New London at all, but over the bridge on the opposite side of the Thames River from that port, a couple of miles north of the town of Groton. Craig’s house was in a large development of small cookie-cutter cream-and-light blue dwellings plopped down on to acres of sun-browned mown grass just a half mile away. It might have seemed bland and suburban, but actually the place had a warm, friendly, secure feel to it. There were kids and signs of kids everywhere: swings, bikes, small trampolines. It was a little patch of suburban America that the men who lived half their lives there were serving to protect when they were away at sea: the loyal wives waiting to greet their husbands after their tour, the toddlers running to Dad.

Maria had left Craig a single man among happy families, and he hated it. But his house was a good place for Lars, him and me to bring a case of beer and drink it.

Lars joined us. It was a warm September day, in the seventies, and Craig poured the girls iced tea, and a beer for himself. Lars and I stuck to the iced tea.

‘This is a great place!’ said Kathleen with credible politeness.

‘It’s a little small,’ said Vicky.

‘Yeah. It’s probably too small for the three of you,’ said Craig. ‘But Bill has a solution.’

Donna looked at me, eyebrows raised, half-smile poised.

‘Have you ever been to Mystic, Donna?’ Mystic was the next town up the coast, an old port and shipbuilding centre.

‘No,’ she said.

‘I’ve booked us a night at an inn there. Right in the middle of town. You know, to make space here for the others.’

Vicky laughed. ‘Can’t you take me as well?’

For a second, Donna’s half-smile froze. Then she grinned. ‘That sounds great.’

We had lunch at Craig’s house, tuna-melt sandwiches – his specialty and then Donna and I set off for Mystic, which was only ten miles away.

‘Are you OK with this?’ I asked as we hit the highway just outside the development. ‘It’s just I wanted to spend some time alone with you. And it’s a nice inn.’

Donna smiled warmly. ‘Of course I’m OK with this,’ she said, and she leaned over to kiss my cheek. ‘I said it’s a great idea.’ She put her hand on my leg. She had sensed my apprehension. ‘I meant that.’

Donna was as charmed by Mystic as I hoped she would be. The inn I had booked was right by the river in the centre of the small town, next to an old iron drawbridge that was periodically raised in a grand salute to let a yacht pass through on its way out into Long Island Sound.

We found a place for dinner with a terrace overlooking the water.

In the nineteenth century, the port had been a thriving centre of New England industry, and many of the old buildings and ships still survived. On one side of the river they were preserved in a museum, exactly as they would have looked over a century before. On the other, they gleamed in white clapboard, with immaculate lawns and picket fences beneath a green wooded ridge.

One house in particular caught my eye. It was slightly bigger than the others, stuck out on a point in the river. I wondered who owned it. A current captain of industry, probably, or finance. Maybe it was inherited. I wondered if I would ever own a house like that. I couldn’t quite see how, unless I became an admiral. I had no idea how much admirals earned or houses like that cost, but it seemed like a suitable house for an admiral.

‘What are you looking at?’ Donna asked.

‘I was looking at that house,’ I said, pointing to it. ‘And wondering whether I could ever own one like it.’

‘Dream on,’ said Donna. ‘Where would you get that kind of money? Unless you became a pirate? You know, a kind of modern-day John Paul Jones, sneaking up on galleons in your submarine.’

‘He wasn’t a pirate,’ I said. ‘He was a hero of the US Navy. I could become an admiral one day, I guess. An admiral should be able to live in a house like that.’

Donna’s eyes widened. ‘An admiral? That’s ambitious.’

I shrugged. I was tempted to apply modesty, and I normally would have done, but with Donna I felt an urge to be honest. Honest with myself as much as with her.

‘I guess I am. Secretly. I really like the Navy. And I’m a pretty good naval officer. Our commanding officer is a guy called Ray Driscoll. He has this air of calm about him that makes you trust him, makes you want to please him. Makes you want to do the right thing for him and for your crew. I admire him. And I think I could do what he does just as well as him.’

For a moment, I thought Donna was going to tease me, but she smiled. ‘I can see that. You’d be good at it.’

‘Of course, being an admiral is different to commanding a submarine. Administration. Politics. But I like to think I can do that too. So I guess I am ambitious. What about you?’

‘Me? God, I don’t know.’ Donna sipped her wine. ‘I’d like to make the world just a little bit better, but that turns out to be really hard. You’d think the UN Development Program would be able to do that. All those people. All that money. The big shiny offices. All those staplers.’ She smiled. ‘But sometimes I wonder how much it achieves. Whether its purpose isn’t just to make people like me feel good about themselves.’

‘They must achieve something, surely?’

‘Oh they do, I guess. But I have this friend who was at Swarthmore with me. He wanted to do the same thing as me, make the world a better place. He’s doing a master’s in Agriculture. He says it’s all about digging one well at a time. He’s right.’

A couple of sculls glided along the calm evening water, their oars flowing in an easy rhythm. It was almost dark. The restaurant was full now, conversation a relaxed murmur as the diners enjoyed the dusk.

Donna grinned and reached across to take my hand. ‘Hey. This is a lovely place. I’m glad you brought me here.’

‘So am I.’

‘Did you ever do that?’ Donna asked. ‘Row? It looks fun. Especially on an evening like tonight.’

‘I did it for a couple of years when I was a kid. It’s hard work. There was a river that flowed right by our house.’

‘Which one was that?’

‘The Susquehanna.’

‘Wait. Lancaster County. Isn’t that near Three Mile Island?’

‘About fifteen miles away. Next county down the river.’

‘So that’s why you give off that faint glow in the dark. And I thought it was the submarine.’

‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘That was not the nuclear industry’s greatest moment.’ I braced myself for a broadside. After that first night, we had successfully managed to avoid quarrelling about things nuclear, but Three Mile Island was the site of the worst nuclear accident in US history, and it had only happened three years before.

‘I’ve been there, you know?’ Donna said. ‘Three Mile Island.’

‘Driving a uranium delivery truck?’

‘Chaining myself to a fence. And I’ve been to Groton before. A couple of years ago.’

‘Two years ago? The launch of the Corpus Christi?’

A pack of demonstrators had tried to disrupt the launch of a nuclear submarine from the General Dynamics boatyard in Groton itself, a few miles downriver from the sub base.

‘That’s the one.’

‘Were you arrested?’

‘Not that time.’

I was tempted to ask what time Donna had been arrested, but decided against it.

She was looking at me, quizzically.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘I know we’ve been careful to avoid the subject of your job…’

‘But?’

‘But. I’ve been thinking about it. I get that you genuinely believe in nuclear deterrence. I know you’ve thought a lot about it, and I respect that. But if you were ordered to press the button or whatever you do on a submarine, would you really do it?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Unless everyone knows that people like me will do what they are ordered to do, then the deterrence won’t work. War will become more likely not less.’

‘OK. I get that. Or I get that you believe that. But by that stage, a major nuclear war will have started and the planet will be over. And you would want to play a part in that?’

‘You’re right, I have thought about it,’ I said. ‘The truth is, on the submarine we would never know for sure that there was a full nuclear exchange going on. It’s possible that there is a limited nuclear war. Just a few missiles. Or the United States is firing first.’

‘And that’s OK? It sounds worse, if anything.’

‘No. No, it’s not OK at all. But it’s not my job to think about that. Other people have that job, in particular the president, who is elected by the people. It’s my job to follow orders. Nothing will work as it should unless people like me follow orders.’

Donna didn’t look convinced. But I got the impression she was trying to understand me as much as convert me.

‘What about an accident? An accidental launch?’

‘That couldn’t happen. There are so many measures in place to make sure that couldn’t happen.’

‘They said that about Three Mile Island, didn’t they? They thought they had safety procedures in place for every eventuality. But then a combination of things went wrong: a filter got blocked, a valve got stuck, an operator missed a warning light and manually overrode the automatic emergency cooling system. They hadn’t prepared for that particular combination. And the darn thing nearly went into meltdown.’

She had a point about Three Mile Island, and she had clearly taken the trouble to study the details, as had I. That accident had shaken me, and some of the others. Especially Lars. He hadn’t liked the thought that so many smart people could be so stupid.

‘The Navy is much more thorough,’ I said. But even as I said it I wasn’t entirely sure I believed it.

‘So what if the captain goes crazy and decides to take out Russia by himself and orders the launch of his missiles?’

‘We have procedures to deal with that,’ I said.

‘What are they?’

‘I can’t tell you but, believe me, a captain couldn’t launch missiles on his own authority.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Certain.’ Unless everyone heard the XO repeat the captain’s instructions, the crew wouldn’t obey his orders. And then the weapons officer had to extract the firing trigger from a safe to which only he knew the combination, so the captain and XO together couldn’t order a launch. A rogue captain was something the Navy had prepared for and indeed something the crew trained for.

‘What if the order comes from some Dr Strangelove wireless operator pretending he got it from the president?’

‘They’ve thought of that too.’ Authentication codes would ensure any launch order was properly authorized.

‘OK. So they’ve thought of the obvious stuff. But what about the stuff they haven’t thought about? The non-obvious stuff? Or the combinations of the obvious stuff? Combinations like Three Mile Island.’

‘Donna. There are so many checks and counter-checks, an accidental launch just couldn’t happen. Believe me, it just couldn’t.’

Donna paused, thinking it through. Her logical thought process was unnerving me more than emotional idealism would have done. ‘All right. But let’s say your submarine receives an order to launch its missiles, and you personally are not sure about it. You think there might be something wrong. What do you do then? Do you follow orders? Do you press the button? Or do you use your common sense and refuse?’

‘That wouldn’t happen,’ I said.

Donna raised her eyebrows.

‘That wouldn’t happen.’ And then I repeated it again to myself.