Warday Read online

  Naturally, neither the polls nor our use of them in any way reflects the opinions of the Consolidated American Polling Group Inc.

  Do you think that the destiny of this country is presently in the hands of other nations?

  - 1993 1992

  AGREE 46% 49%

  DISAGREE 47 43

  NO OPINION 7 8

  When queried about which regions or nations of the world were most influential, the responses were:

  Region 1993 1992

  WESTERN EUROPE 45% 41%

  JAPAN / ASIA 25 22

  AFRICA 5 5

  LATIN AMERICA 10 12

  AUSTRALIA / PACIFIC 6 7

  MIDDLE EAST 7 9

  OTHER 2 4

  When asked about specific nations, the responses were:

  Nation 1993 1992

  UNITED KINGDOM 32% 33%

  WEST GERMANY 12 13

  FRANCE 10 11

  SWEDEN 7 6

  JAPAN 26 21

  SAUDI ARABIA 4 6

  ARGENTINA 3 4

  BRAZIL 4 4

  OTHER 2 2

  Will the United States ever again emerge as a world economic power?

  - 1993 1992

  AGREE 37% 32%

  DISAGREE 57 62

  NO OPINION 6 6

  Will the United States ever regain its status again as a military power?

  - 1993 1992

  AGREE 32% 29%

  DISAGREE 65 67

  NO OPINION 3 4

  Documents from the Emergency

  There was no doubt that it was fire. They felt it burn their skin, then their bones, then their brains.

  —J. Hillyer, Passion for War

  THE BUREAUCRAT’S COLD EYE

  The first test of my ability to get sensitive documents from official sources came immediately. Both Whitley and I wanted to have a selection of documents that had been produced in the months following Warday.

  Most people were too busy dealing with blown out radios, televisions, and telephones, and trying to understand what had happened to us, to worry about bureaucrats and their pronouncements.

  But they were there, and they were pronouncing.

  Many times since Warday I have imagined the places where the postwar planning and thinking took place, the quiet offices at the edge of the fire. I have wondered who the men—or the women—were who divided the doomed from the saved, who conceived of triage, who looked upon the rest of us with cold eyes.

  Much of what I did to get documents was “illegal” in the old sense of the word. I not only took things off desks, I opened files that were supposed to be sealed. But the documents in those files cannot be stolen, especially not the two collected here, which relate to the most fundamental of wartime experiences.

  Like the people behind the numbers and the places in the radioactive zones, they belong to all of us.

  ESTIMATED CASUALTIES ASSOCIATED WITH THE OCTOBER 1988 WAR

  Deaths as a Result of October 28, 1988 Attack

  New York City Area 2,961,881

  San Antonio, Texas 1,081,961

  Washington, D.C. Area 2,166,798

  The Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming 1,121,802

  EMP-Related Accidents 8,106

  Total Warday Deaths 7,340,548

  Cumulative Deaths Since October 28, 1988 Attack

  Cincinnati Flu 21,600,000

  Famine of 1988 26,200,000

  Radiation Related Illnesses 17,000,000

  Other 3,000,000

  Total Post-Warday Deaths 67,800,000

  Total Deaths to Data 75,140,548

  Total U.S. Population Changes

  1987 U.S. Population 237,625,904

  1992 U.S. Population, Estimated 174,384,000

  [Source: CDC, 1993]

  * * *

  0 14 1500 ZULU MARCH 89

  TO ALL DIVISIONS OF THE UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES

  FROM JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF

  COLORADO HDQ/JCS. 173.A888

  UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, THE FOLLOWING DESIGNATIONS WILL BE EMPLOYED IN DESCRIBING RADIOACTIVE ZONES:

  DEAD ZONE

  BLAST CENTER. VIRTUALLY UNPASSABLE. RECON ONLY BY AIRPLANE. AVOID ALL CONTACT.

  NO ATTEMPT WARRANTED TO FOLLOW ILLEGAL ENTRIES.

  RED ZONE

  HIGH RADIOACTIVITY AREA. ADMITTANCE LIMITED TO 10 MINUTES WITH PROTECTIVE CLOTHING OR SUITABLE VEHICLE.

  ILLEGAL ENTRIES MAY BE SHOT ON SIGHT.

  ORANGE ZONE

  VARIABLE RADIOACTIVITY. SUSTAINED ENTRY WITH SUITABLE PROTECTION.

  VIOLATORS SHOULD BE GIVEN WARNING SHOT.

  BLUE ZONE

  VARIABLE LOW RADIATION, USE CAUTION AND PROTECTIVE CLOTHING WHENEVER POSSIBLE.

  GREEN ZONE

  PERIMETER AREAS. USE STANDARD MILITARY PROCEDURES FOR SECURITY IMPLEMENTATION.

  ALL ROAD ENTRY TO ZONED AREAS SHOULD BE IDENTIFIED WITH APPROPRIATE NOMENCLATURE. SECURITY PROCEDURES APPLICABLE EXCEPT WHERE NOTED FOR CONTAMINATED AREAS.

  THIS ORDER TO TAKE EFFECT 1300 ZULU 15 MARCH 1989

  INTERVIEW

  Wilson T. Ackorman, Undersecretary of Defense (Ret.)

  [THE CONDUCT OP THE WAR. Wilson Ackerman is well known in Dallas, in the same way that somebody with an exotic contagion might be well known. People glance at him in the streets, ask him questions. Sometimes, I suppose, they do more than that.

  Ackerman was aboard the Doomsday Plane on Warday. His testimony seemed essential, and he was available. The man is deeply afraid. His eyes never stop moving. Although I don’t think he is more than forty-five, like so many of us he seems much older. His hands touch and caress his face as he talks, in a dry, quick voice that seems at times too precise, and at other times curiously rich.

  There is an almost lyrical terror in this man. It is an emotional state, perhaps, beyond guilt. I do not think it has a name.

  As Wilson Ackerman spoke in his careful tones I thought of a lover’s murmuring, and the quarrels of children, and the voices of the night.]

  I did not know that we were in a war situation until the Secretary telephoned my office and told me in a brusque tone to activate Case Quick Angel. I then set in motion the series of actions that were designed to disperse upper echelons of the Executive Branch during a nuclear war. This order was given by me at exactly 1530 on 28 October 1988.

  Shortly after that I joined the Secretary, as per plan, on the helicopter pad. We left the Pentagon via helicopter at once, heading for Andrews Air Force Base. With Secretary Forrest was Air Force General Potter Dawes, who was carrying the backup codes.

  We reached Andrews at 1545 hours and found that the White House contingent had already entered the E-4B aircraft. Under the Quick Angel basing protocols, the E-4B had recently been returned to Andrews from a base in Indiana. Donald Meecham informed us that the President was aboard and the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP) was ready for takeoff.

  We then entered the aircraft and proceeded directly to the Presidential suite. The President greeted us and we sat down to a briefing from SAC General Joe Point. General Point indicated that there had been a Soviet response to the Space Shuttle’s deployment of the first satellite in the Spiderweb warhead-killer system.

  This response was to open the doors of a group of SS-18 silos in central Siberia. Altogether they were preparing a launch of twelve missiles containing a total of fifty-four warheads in the 5- to 10-megaton range. At that time they had not launched any missiles.

  As our aircraft took off, we received telemetry from NORAD indicating that there had been an explosion, probably nuclear, in near space over the western Pacific Ocean. NASA then announced that the Space Shuttle had ceased to communicate with Houston due to this detonation, and had probably been destroyed.

  As the Spiderweb satellites were radiation hardened, the one deployed remained operational, but it was far from its intended orbit, and we now had no means to transport it. It was effectively useless, and in any case, formed only a small part of the total system. At that point the President
decided that it was probable that we would soon be in a hot war. He therefore authorized Defense to transmit a War Warning to all U.S. military commands. I carried out that order at 1550 hours. Here is the text of the document:

  The Space Shuttle Enterprise was destroyed by a nuclear device of unknown origin at approximately 1545 hours U.S. Eastern Standard Time this day. It was engaged in a Defense Department mission. Please consider this a War Warning, and proceed to your designated alert level immediate.

  This caused SAC and the U.S. Navy Submarine Command to go to One Alert status, and the other services to respond by entering their highest states of readiness. It was at this point that war became inevitable, but at the time there was still a sense of control in the NEACP. The President activated the hot line to Moscow. The telephone at their end was not answered. At last the President put the instrument down. “Gentlemen” he said, “I am afraid that the Premier will not talk to me.” We then instructed Ambassador Underwood in Moscow to call on the Premier at once and inform him that the United States was willing to negotiate a settlement of the question that had arisen between us. We further attempted communication by the hot line teletype on the chance that the telephone system might be out of order.

  There had been a massive failure on the part of Western intelligence to correctly evaluate the Soviet response to the deployment of Spiderweb. This system, utilizing ultra-high-power laser beams, which targeted and destroyed warheads in space after they were ejected from their missile buses, was intended to render the United States invulnerable to land- or sea-based attacks. As the target acquisition system was optical, the Soviet low-radar-profile systems were no defenses. We did not know at the time how far in advance of existing Soviet weaponry this system was, or deployment would have been evaluated differently.

  It was our stated intention before the deployment to begin dismantling the American offensive missile force once we were protected by the Spiderweb system. The Soviet leadership had given us no indication that they did not believe this, and had not even protested the deployment of Spiderweb.

  In retrospect it is obvious that they were so far behind technologically that they were afraid to so much as whisper a protest, lest their weakness become known to us.

  Although I was not a party to the decision to deploy Spiderweb, I am trying to come to grips with the fact that I was assisting in the management of a system of defense that had drifted into a state of extreme brittleness, in the sense that our own technological superiority was making our enemy increasingly desperate, and thus was actually causing the very war it was intended to prevent.

  As per plan, the NEACP proceeded due south toward its intended operational area, approximately 100 miles SSW of the Cape Charles Lighthouse, over the Atlantic Ocean.

  At 1555 the National Security Agency informed us that three Soviet satellites had begun unusual orbital maneuvers. NSA said that these were designated as unusually large communications relay satellites, and that there had been optical and electronic surveillance confirming this. However, this remarkable maneuver capability made them highly suspect. The President then ordered SAC to destroy these satellites, utilizing the ground-based Slingshot missiles, which are a classified weapons system. The Slingshots were fired. Less than two minutes passed before the threatening satellites were destroyed. But it was too late. We were soon informed that they had successfully ejected four large weapons, which were dropping to an altitude level of 100,000 feet over California, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Manitoba. The President made a sighing sound, as if he had been struck in the chest. We all knew what terrific damage the country was soon going to sustain.

  It is far easier to create high-level electromagnetic energy in pulsed form than it is to shield against it.

  We were aware of the classified studies on this. We knew that a vast number of electronic circuits in the United States would be damaged, most of them beyond easy repair. Even those shielded to resist a 50,000-volt pulse would be destroyed by the explosion of such large bombs in near space, as the pulse each generated would far exceed 50,000 volts.

  At 1620, we watched our entire fighter escort, consisting of six F-15s of the 113 TAC Group out of Andrews, corkscrew into the sea. The Soviet EMP weapons had just detonated. The fighters’ shielding had clearly proved insufficient, and these aircraft had undoubtedly lost their on-board computers, without which the F-15 cannot fly. At the same time, most of the commercial airliners in the air over the United States and Canada began to crash or became dangerously disabled. Approximately three hundred million radio and television sets, and most radio and television stations, ceased to function. All microwave relay stations in the United States and Canada ceased to function, meaning that long-distance telephone and telemetric communications were no longer possible.

  The ignitions of many automobiles built after 1977–78 were rendered inoperable. Many local power systems failed due to fused relays and subsequent overload. A staggering number of computers, and most of the automated factories used to manufacture them, were destroyed. Of course, repairs began at once, and some AM stations such as WOR in New York were on at low power within a week, but isolated cases of resiliency did little to ameliorate the overall effect of the pulse. Generally, the negative synergy of technological breakdown and economic chaos has meant very slow recovery from this damage. WOR, for example, ran for eight months, but was closed down when New York was abandoned.

  Our NEACP aircraft was also damaged in a number of ways, and the pilot soon informed us that he would prefer to return to an over-land situation.

  SAC called, using the still-functional UHF communications channel, which was designed to be proof against any level of EMP.

  The President then ordered Case Dream Eagle to be activated. At 1625.12, six bomb-carrying satellites were armed to detonate automatically as they reached their target positions over the Soviet Union. To compensate for their greater state of EMP readiness, we generated an ambient voltage level of 120,000 volts with each bomb. This probably caused the destruction of ninety percent of all electronic devices in the USSR, as even their best shielding was not effective past 100,000 volts. Our own decision to limit protection to the 50,000-volt level had been the classic wargame mistake of assuming that the other side would hit us with whatever maximum force we could conveniently defend against, and not with the maximum force they could muster.

  We now went to our emergency communications systems, which consisted of the UHF channel to SAC, and an infrared laser communicator to keep us in touch with Washington. These were effective devices, and the NEACP maintained its essential communications despite the enemy’s best efforts.

  CIA came on the laser communicator with an evaluation to the effect that the Soviets would release their SS-18s within three to five minutes. The President then opened the code boxes for Minuteman and unlocked the switches. I remember that Mr. Forrest put his hands over the President’s hands, because the President was shaking.

  The Defense Intelligence Agency then pulsed via UHF an analysis of the targeting of the Soviet weapons that had been rendered operational. While I was having this downloaded to screen for the President, he activated Minuteman. There were three flights containing a total of 56 warheads planned for the first wave. It was our intention to remove the Soviet government without excessive loss of life in the population. We intended to destroy Moscow, Leningrad, and Sevastopol, and hit the administrative capitals of all the republics. This would result in destruction of only eight percent of the population, but would cause the USSR to lose the means of government.

  The NEACP System Commander then informed us that the EMP damage had compromised the ability of the aircraft to maintain trim, and it was now in a nose-low attitude, and was unable to maintain altitude indefinitely. We could expect to be on the ground, one way or another, within the half hour.

  At that time the President again tried the hot line. It was inoperative. An attempt to reach Mr. Underwood in Moscow failed.

  The President was in
formed that the British Prime Minister and the French President were both on the phone. The secret NATO Omninet communications system had also survived EMP.

  The President spoke briefly with each of them. The French President told him that he and the Germans and the British had informed the Soviets of the existence of a secret treaty between the three nations, under which all American military installations in those countries were in the process of being entered by local nationals. The treaty had been designed to go into effect in the event that a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the USSR occurred without the prior knowledge of NATO and France.

  So we found ourselves alone. Our European allies had abandoned us, or so it seemed then. I hope that the Treaty of Coventry proves to have been a wise one. If it had not been in place, the exchange of 28 October 1988 would undoubtedly have escalated into at least four more salvos, two of them against the NATO allies and France. Inasmuch as the eventual damage done by the limited war we did have was so very much greater than we imagined, an exchange on that scale would have rendered humankind a minor species, or perhaps an extinct one.

  The President begged the European leaders to inform the Soviet Premier that we would in no case fire our missiles unless he first fired his, even at this late time. But the EMP exchange had caused them to lose contact with him. To this day his fate is not known.

  The DIA targeting analysis had been downloaded, and I briefed the President. The indications were appalling. Washington, D.C., was going to receive a total load of sixty megatons. New York would get seventy. This was enough to cause the land itself to melt, which is what actually did happen in Washington. The remaining missiles were all targeted for Minuteman, SAC, and the USAF refit and supply center at Kelly Air Force Base in Texas.

  So the Soviet first wave was primarily a military targeting.

  Even so, we were going to take a serious population hit. Nearly twelve million Americans lived in target areas. It was now 1630 hours.