Launch Code

TWENTY-FIVE

November 1983, Norwegian Sea

‘Don’t do it, son. Do what you have been ordered to do. You owe it to your country.’

Commander Driscoll’s eyes were steady as they looked down the barrel of the Colt 1911, his left hand clutching the shoulder that had been smashed by Lars’s wrench.

My aim was remarkably firm as I focused on Driscoll’s forehead. The control room was crammed full of men, and they were all staring at me in silence.

‘You gotta shoot him, Bill,’ Lars said. He was standing barely a foot away from the captain, the wrench still in his hand. Williamson, a large navigation petty officer, was poised just behind Lars, ready if Lars took another swing at the captain.

I ignored them all.

Driscoll was right, of course. My duty as a naval officer was to put down the gun and let him go ahead with the launch. My duty as a naval officer was to play my part in sending three nuclear missiles – thirty warheads – to Moscow, Leningrad and East Berlin. Warheads that would flatten cities and kill millions. Warheads that would probably provoke massive nuclear retaliation from the Warsaw Pact.

Certainly provoke it, if what the XO had said the night before about the Soviets’ nervousness was true.

Unless the Soviets had already launched their missiles, getting their own pre-emption in first before NATO could initiate the first strike the Russians were convinced was on its way under cover of Able Archer 83.

In that case, we were the second strike. Our job, our duty, was to launch our missiles.

All of them. Not three of them. Why three? And why the same three targets that we had been given in a training exercise two weeks before? And why East Berlin?

The standard orders for a nuclear submarine launch, the ones that occurred most often in their drills, were a response to an all-out Soviet nuclear strike. That was, after all, the principal reason for the existence of the American ballistic missile submarines. Dotted around the world’s oceans, gliding quietly at three knots several hundred feet down, they were impossible for the Soviets to find and destroy. So if the Russians ever launched a nuclear attack on the United States, even a surprise one, the submarines would be there to retaliate. Between them they had the firepower to destroy every major Russian city, to kill tens of millions of Russian citizens.

Which was why the Russians would have to be insane to launch a nuclear attack on the United States.

But drill EAMs usually contained a section giving background, declaring that the Russians had launched their missiles, or were on the brink of launching their missiles. This one didn’t. In fact, neither had any of the EAMs we had received over the previous twenty-four hours.

No explanation at all. Odd.

Moscow and Leningrad made sense as targets, but East Berlin? That was seriously strange. East Berlin was never included in the Hamilton’s targets and for a very good reason. Nuclear warheads detonating there would destroy West Berlin too, massacring not just a couple of million of the citizens of one of the United States’ closest allies, West Germany, but also thousands of NATO servicemen. Including Americans.

Never included? East Berlin had been featured in that one drill EAM we had received three weeks before. At the time, we had assumed that was an exercise in retargeting to unfamiliar co-ordinates. Could it be, as the captain had suggested, that it was preparation for the target package that the National Military Command Center always expected the Hamilton to use in a war?

Maybe. But I thought it unlikely. It seemed more likely to me that the same message had simply been resent in error.

If there were already thousands of missiles criss-crossing the skies above the waves, then three more wouldn’t make any difference. But if there were none as yet, if the Soviets did indeed have their own fingers hovering above the nuclear button, then the Alexander Hamilton’s three missiles would set all the others on their way.

The world would be finished.

So I should shoot the man in front of me. Commander Driscoll, a man whom I liked and admired. A man whom I was pleased to call my commanding officer. A man with an ex-wife and two kids.

Despite being in the Navy for eight years, I had never killed anyone before. I had never been asked to kill anyone before.

Did I have the courage to do it?

To save the human race?

Yes, I did.

What would God want? Would God want me to take another man’s life? I wasn’t an avid Christian, I never went to the small services on the submarine led by Chief Kunkel, but I had been to Sunday school as a kid and I did still occasionally attend church with my parents. I believed in God.

Would God expect me to kill one man to save mankind? Yes. But was God trying to end the world? Was this some biblically inspired Armageddon?

I’d need a theology degree to sort that one out. I had no idea what God wanted, and no time to figure it out.

What would Donna say?

Shoot him. Shoot him now.

But Donna was wrong about this stuff. Wasn’t she?

If I didn’t shoot him, Donna would die. But perhaps there was a missile heading for New York right now. Perhaps Donna would die anyway.

‘Do your duty, son.’ Driscoll’s voice was calm. Almost friendly. His blue eyes, as always, commanded.

These thoughts flashed through my brain in seconds. A very few seconds. But I had to make a decision.

The Navy had anticipated this. Some of the brightest minds in the country had spent years thinking about moments like this. It wasn’t up to me, a lowly lieutenant, to make this decision. How could it be? How could someone like me possibly be relied upon to make a decision this difficult this quickly and under this pressure?

The Navy had it figured out. There were other people who decided. In particular, the President of the United States. Then there were others further down the line. On the Hamilton, there were at most two men who could decide not to follow orders, the captain and the executive officer, and in a case like this it was clear they should do what they were commanded to do.

And so should I.

‘COB?’ I said.

Piatnik, the chief of the boat, or ‘COB’, who was standing not six feet away from me responded. ‘Sir?’

I lowered the pistol and handed it to him, along with the holster.

The relief in the control room was palpable. Petty Officer Williamson immediately grabbed Lars, and hurled him to the floor. Another crewman snatched the wrench. It only took Driscoll a second to reassert his authority.

‘COB, give me the weapon. Arrest Lieutenant da Silva and lock him up with an armed guard.’

He strapped on the holster, and approached me, stopping right in front of me, his face not six inches from mine. ‘Lieutenant Guth. You did your duty. We are going to need you in the next few minutes. Are you willing to continue doing your duty?’

There was only one answer now. I stood to attention. ‘Aye aye, captain.’

Driscoll stared at me for a moment. Given what I had just done, he was taking quite a leap of faith to trust me. Almost done. What I had actually done was save his life. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Now, I’m going to my stateroom for the keys.’

There was silence as the captain left the control room. The crew were still transfixed by what had happened.

‘Back to work, gentlemen,’ said Robinson from the conn. ‘COB. Take Lieutenant da Silva to my stateroom and lock him in there.’ The submarine was too small to carry its own brig. The XO’s stateroom was as good a place as any to hold a prisoner.

I waited for the captain to return. He was quick.

‘Captain in the control room,’ announced a petty officer. Driscoll appeared with four keys on dull green lanyards around his neck: the CIP key and three missile launch keys.

The captain took off the lanyard holding the purple CIP key and inserted it into the captain’s indicator panel, turning it and flipping up the Permission to Fire toggle switch. The panel lit up with green and red lights indicating the status of the sixteen missiles.

Driscoll took off the three lanyards for the launch keys, and handed them to me. I hurried at a rapid walk aft to the missile compartment and slid down the ladder to the missile control centre, where I passed the keys on to a missile tech to insert in the gas generators attached to missiles one, two and nine. This would arm them, generating the steam that would propel the missiles out of the submarine and above the ocean’s surface, where their solid-fuel rockets would then ignite and take them up and away through the earth’s atmosphere.

It took about twenty minutes to ‘spin up’ the missiles. ‘Spinning up’ referred to the tiny beryllium balls spinning at thousands of revolutions per second within each missile’s inertial navigation system. During that time a host of other operations were initiated for each of the three missiles. The three-stage solid-fuel propulsion system was activated, and target coordinates and the coordinates of the submarine were fed into the fire control computer, which downloaded the results to each missile. Diagnostic tests were run on everything.

Once the missiles were spun up, the captain would grant the weapons officer permission to launch. The weapons officer would open a small safe in the missile control centre with a combination only he knew. Inside was a grey removable handle on which nuzzled a simple red pistol trigger. The weapons officer would insert the lead from the handle into the launch control console, give the order to prepare the first missile and, once the missile hatch was open to the outside sea, squeeze the trigger. The missile would fly. It would take about a minute to prepare the second missile and then the third.

Launching missiles made a lot of noise. Every Soviet attack submarine in the area would know exactly where we were. So the tactical systems officer would be devising a torpedo evasion plan to go deep, go quiet and hide the instant the birds were away. Except the tactical systems officer was Lars, who was now locked up in the XO’s stateroom; one of the other junior officers would have to do it.

The most dangerous part of the whole process for the crew of the Alexander Hamilton was in the couple of hours after launch.

Unless you counted the inevitable day when we would be forced to surface and face a world poisoned by radioactivity in the depths of a nuclear winter. And you probably should count that.

The time waiting for the missiles to spin up was tense, even in an exercise. It was even tenser now in the missile control centre.

I took my seat in front of the launch control console. The missile control centre was cooler than the rest of the ship, in an attempt to counteract the heat generated by the rows of computers down there.

‘What was the delay?’ Craig asked me.

‘They were discussing the order.’

‘The targeting? East Berlin?’

I nodded.

‘That seemed weird to me,’ said Craig. ‘But they decided to go ahead?’

There were two missile techs near us, who could easily hear what we were saying. I lowered my voice to just above a whisper. ‘Lars objected.’

‘He did?’

‘Yes. He said he thought the order might be an error. They had given us no context. East Berlin didn’t make sense. Only three missiles didn’t make sense. The fact it was the same target package as the exercise they gave us a couple of weeks ago didn’t make sense.’

‘I get what he’s saying,’ said Craig. ‘What did the captain say?’

‘He thought about it. Said we go ahead.’

‘And the XO?’

‘Concurred.’

Craig frowned. He didn’t look as if he agreed with that conclusion. ‘OK,’ he said with a sigh.

He paused as an instruction came through the intercom from the conn. ‘The firing order will be one, nine, two,’ he announced to his team over the missile control centre circuit.

‘Lars took a swing at the captain,’ I said. ‘With a wrench. Could have killed him. He was trying to kill him.’

‘What!’

The missile tech in the seat next to Craig, a petty officer named Morgan, glanced up at me, shocked. But everyone on the boat would know what had just happened in the control room soon enough.

‘He was stopped,’ I said. ‘I stopped him. Now he’s under arrest.’

‘I bet he is. So he cracked?’

I nodded. But as I did so, I wasn’t sure that Lars had cracked. And I knew I hadn’t explained my own role to Craig entirely accurately.

The minutes ticked by. The missile department was a good team. We worked well together. We had practiced this countless times.

This was going to happen.

The missile control centre lurched and tilted as the submarine rose toward launch depth of one hundred and fifty feet.

As I leafed through the checklists in the launch manuals and played my part in the dozens of procedures required to ready the missiles, to check and double check the targeting, my mind was divided in two. One half was concentrating on what I was doing, what I had been trained to do.

The other half was thinking about what the consequences were.

And I knew I wasn’t alone. The team appeared to be entirely focused on their job. But I could tell from the tension in the shoulders of those missile techs hunched over their instruments and in the sneaked glances between one crew member and another, especially those whom I knew were close buddies, that they were all thinking of what was about to happen, what might be happening at that very moment.

The New London Submarine Base would be on the Soviet target list. It was unlikely that families would be evacuated in time. So every crew member with a wife would probably lose her that day, lose their children.

Maybe they would be the lucky ones, dying instantly in a thermonuclear explosion, rather than slowly from radiation poisoning.

The world had finally gone mad.

Or had it? There was a chance, a slim chance perhaps, that Lars was right. That despite the Soviet leadership’s paranoia, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Deterrence was holding. That the EAM we had received was just an enormous screw-up.

Suddenly it was clear to me. If the launch order was genuine, we were already involved in a nuclear war or soon would be. A war no one would win. The Alexander Hamilton’s participation would make no difference one way or another.

But if the launch message was an error? Then what we did would make a very great deal of difference.

This was a problem with only one correct answer. And Lars had found it.

I heard Craig talking into his headset next to me. ‘Conn, weapons. Three minutes to 1SQ.’

I glanced over to the fire control console. There were sixteen columns, one for each missile, but only three were lit up. The bottom four lights were labelled 1SQ, DENOTE, PREPARE and AWAY. All four buttons shone red. Soon, one by one, they would turn to green. The DENOTE and PREPARE launch phases took less than sixty seconds, during which the outer hatch of each missile was opened to the sea one by one. When the AWAY button turned green the missiles would be in the air.

A digital readout above the panel counted down to an estimate of when all three missiles would be spun up. Two minutes and fifty seconds.

Driscoll’s voice came over the 1-MC, echoing throughout the submarine. ‘This is the captain. Estimated time to 1SQ three minutes. Prepare for missile launch.’

‘Craig?’ I stood close to him, my voice low. I addressed him as ‘Craig’, not ‘Weps’.

‘Yes?’

‘That target package makes no sense, right?’

Craig turned to me. ‘Someone in NMCC must think it makes sense.’

‘There is a chance it’s an error, don’t you think?’

‘Hey, Bill. We only have ninety seconds to 1SQ. You said the captain and the XO discussed this. You and I have to obey orders.’

I glanced at the safe, positioned right above Craig between the fire control and the launch control consoles. ‘You don’t have to open that.’

Craig’s eyes darted to the combination lock and then back to me. He was hesitating.

‘If you don’t open it, and you refuse to tell anyone else the combination, then the birds won’t fly.’

Craig closed his eyes. Then he opened them. Doubt was replaced by determination. ‘Lieutenant Guth. We have our orders. You will follow them, as will I.’

‘Craig?’ I pleaded.

‘Back to your station, Lieutenant Guth.’ Craig grabbed the intercom.

I went back to my post. I glanced at the panel. The missiles would be spun up in less than a minute.

Then the captain would give Craig permission to fire and he would open the safe.

Lars’s words came back to me. You can stop a nuclear war if you shoot him. In the head. Because the captain’s head was where the combination to the safe in his stateroom was stored.

It was too late to stop the captain fetching his launch keys from the safe in his stateroom. The only way now to prevent the launch of the missiles was to stop Craig from opening the missile control centre safe and extracting the trigger. He was the only one who knew the combination. So he had to be stopped in such a way that he couldn’t tell a fellow officer those numbers.

He had to be killed.

My friend, one of my best friends, had to be killed. By me. In the next few seconds.

I didn’t have a gun. But Lars had chosen a good weapon. There were wrenches stowed all over the submarine in positions that were easy to grab in the event of a leak. In peacetime submarines didn’t leak, but in wartime when under attack from enemy torpedoes or depth charges, it could easily happen.

The nearest wrench was hanging in a pouch just behind me, maybe three feet from Craig.

Missile number nine spun up first, swiftly followed by number two.

Then the last 1SQ button turned from red to green.

‘Conn, weapons. The weapons system is at 1SQ.’ Craig was speaking into the intercom. He listened to an instruction and repeated it. ‘Permission to fire, aye.’

Do it!

I slowly got to my feet and moved nonchalantly towards the wrench as Craig stood and reached up to the safe, his fingers touching the tumbler.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Petty Officer Morgan watching me: he was the missile tech who had overheard what Lars had tried to do in the control room.

In one swift movement I whipped the wrench out of its pouch and lifted it. But Morgan was quick. He threw himself at me. I leapt backwards, crashing into an instrument panel, as Morgan clutched my free arm, the arm not holding the wrench.

I brought the tool down hard on his shoulder. He released his grip and fell to the floor screaming.

The other missile techs were slower than Morgan. They were still at their positions, staring at me and at their colleague writhing in agony on the floor. They hadn’t trained for this; it took them a second or two to tear themselves away from the procedures on which they were so totally focused.

Craig’s fingers were on the combination as he glanced swiftly back at me.

If he had turned to face me, he could almost certainly have protected himself from my blows for the couple of seconds necessary for the rest of the crew to overpower me. He would then have had plenty of time to open the safe.

But he didn’t make that choice. He turned his back on me and spun the dial five times to the left, stopping on the first number of the combination, and then spun it to the right to the next number.

Perhaps he thought the other missile techs’ reactions were as quick as Morgan’s. Perhaps he thought he had time to set the final number on the dial and return it to zero before I got to him.

He had misjudged.

Just as he was setting the third number, and the missile chief was finally rushing me, I brought the wrench crashing down on the back of Craig’s head.