Life: An Exploded Diagram (21 page)

“We went eyeball to eyeball with the Russians,” Rusk would say when it was all over, “and the other guy blinked.”

Well, maybe, Dean. Or maybe this: you and the Russians were like two guys in a cellar, up to their waists in petrol, arguing about who’s got the bigger box of matches.

And besides, the truth is that the face-off, with my life and Frankie’s and the planet’s at stake, wasn’t between Kennedy and Khrushchev. It was between Kennedy and his bomb-happy generals, in particular, a cigar-chomping maniac called Curtis LeMay. I, we, owe our continuing existence to the fact that JFK held his nerve against his own armed forces. Or, to put it another way, that he had the courage to show fear when his generals hadn’t.

I’ll get to that, and LeMay, in a minute. First, we need to have a stab at the mental arithmetic of annihilation.

Y
OU’LL HAVE SEEN
the photos of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the American atomic bombs hit them in August 1945. Those black-and-white pictures of what looks like an archaeological dig: the husks and shadowy traces of an ancient civilization revealed by scraping the surface of the earth away. The grid of streets traced in pale ash. Here and there, rectangular shadows that might have been houses, office blocks. Black holes, pits, that once had a purpose, once had been part of something. Scorched wisps of what look like hair but are congealed tangles of steel. Of human beings, those frail things, there is no sign or remnant.

Strangely, Hiroshima and Nagasaki look gray and frozen, as though they’d been scoured by some awful polar wind. Actually, they were purged by a fire so intense that their inhabitants were vaporized by it. Their last breaths set fire to their lungs as their eyeballs melted.

A mother takes her baby to suckle her breast; the world roars, explodes; for a microsecond, they are linked joints of cooked meat; for another, white-hot bones; then they are gone, particles of dust whirled away in the exhale of the holocaust.

At the square-mile epicenter of the blast, the heat would have melted granite. Most of the buildings in Hiroshima were made of wood.

Twenty minutes after the initial explosion, while the mushroom cloud towered and boiled above the city, while the fires raged, rain began to fall on the remains of western Hiroshima. It was black rain, and radioactive, and it continued for two hours.

One hundred and forty thousand or so people were killed by the bomb. Most died either during the impact or within the following two weeks, of burns or other radiation injuries. For several days, a southerly wind blowing across Hiroshima carried with it a smell like burning fish.

There were survivors, of course. Some were unwise enough to flee southwestward to the city of Nagasaki, upon which, three days after Hiroshima, the Americans dropped an even bigger bomb.

Nuclear weapons go on killing long after the fires have gone out and the toxic fallout has settled. Within weeks of the bombings, people in the environs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began to sprout keloids, grotesque rubbery scars that claw and spread across the surface of the body and face. The incidence of these disfiguring growths peaked in the years 1946 and 1947, after the war was over. Babies of mothers exposed to radiation were born deformed or were condemned to early death from diseases of the nerve and brain tissue. Eye disorders, especially cataracts, became increasingly commonplace. The long legacy of nuclear bombing is, of course, cancer. By the mid-1950s, Japan had more people dying from leukemia than anywhere else in the world. And for a very long time, the fields around the two cities produced poisonous harvests.

For all this, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were feeble squibs compared to the infernal firecrackers that Kennedy and Khrushchev had at their disposal in 1962. Nuclear warheads are measured in tons, kilotons, and megatons. A ton, here, is not a measurement of weight; it’s a measurement of blast power. It’s the equivalent to the bang you’d get from a ton of high explosive. A ton of trinitrotoluene, or TNT, which was the stuff in the bombs used during the Second World War. A ton of TNT will make a very big hole in the ground, or demolish a large factory, or erase a neighborhood. A kiloton produces an explosion equivalent to a
thousand
tons of TNT. The Hiroshima bomb was about thirteen kilotons. More than enough to convert a city into a furnace. But, as I say, it was a baby compared to what came later. A big, ugly baby. And quite primitive, really. It was ten feet long and weighed nine thousand pounds. It looked like a small whale with only tail fins. The humorous Americans called it Little Boy. (And the Nagasaki bomb Fat Man.) It took two dozen technicians three days to complete the nerve-racking task of assembling its various parts, arming it, locking in its safety devices, and loading it into the belly of a B-29 bomber. (The plane was called
Enola Gay,
after the pilot’s mum. Cute.) Then it took six and a half hours to fly it to its target from the Pacific island of Tinian. All very laborious and troublesome.

But such is the furious inventiveness of man when it comes to weapons of mass destruction that just twelve years later, the U.S. had built enormous rockets — one type called Thor, the other Jupiter — capable of carrying nuclear warheads of one and a half megatons. A megaton, as you will have worked out, explodes with the force of a
million
tons of TNT. So a single Thor or Jupiter could do as much damage as 115 Hiroshimas, or thereabouts. (You might want to check my figures. I enjoy math, but I’m not terribly good at it. Calculation would be easier for me if I had ten fingers, and I don’t.) If I’m right, that works out to 115 times as many deaths, grotesque disfigurements, deformed babies, cancers, etc., as Hiroshima.

All the same, it wasn’t good enough. Thors and Jupiters couldn’t
quite
reach America’s enemy, which was the Soviet Union. They certainly couldn’t reach
all
of the Soviet Union, which consisted of most of the far side of the world, from Germany in the west to Manchuria in the east. And then there was China, which was Communist, too. So, quietly, the Americans placed their huge missiles in friendly countries closer to Russia: England, Italy, Turkey. Places that put Moscow within half an hour of a rocket’s launch.

Even that was unsatisfactory. By the time I was delighted by the belated arrival of my pubic hair, the United States had developed rockets — called Atlases and Titans — that could travel seven thousand miles to dump four megatons of explosive onto Russia. Given the aftereffects of these multiple Hiroshimas — let alone the Soviet response — America had acquired the power to destroy the world several times over.

The Russians were not, of course, sitting idly by while all this was going on. They’d built and exploded an atomic bomb of their own by 1949. The Americans were shocked by how quickly the Communists had caught up. (They didn’t know, then, that Soviet spies were embedded in their weapons research projects.) By the 1950s, it seemed that, as far as rockets were concerned, the Soviet Union had pulled ahead in the arms race. Or at least in the space race, which, in the eyes of many Americans, was the same thing.

In early October 1957, the Russians fired the first man-made object to orbit Earth. It was a small satellite called
Sputnik 1.

A month later they launched
Sputnik 2.
On board was the first living mammal to journey into space. She was a small, bright-eyed, black-and-white dog called Laika.

She didn’t make it back. She was already dead when
Sputnik 2
burned up on reentering Earth’s atmosphere. The first
man
in space did make it back, however. He was a Russian called Yuri Gagarin. On April 12, 1961, his spacecraft made a single orbit of the planet in 108 minutes. He was the first human being to see Earth suspended in its dark and awful solitude. Afterward he said, “Earth was blue. There was no God.”

I think I was less impressed by these feats than I should have been. By the time I was twelve, I’d already traveled to various parts of the universe in the company of Dan Dare, Captain Condor, and other heroes of my comics. Compared to battles with the Mekon’s evil empire or the vast mechanical centipedes of Zardos, a satellite the size of a beach ball and an incinerated dog seemed pretty unimpressive. But I was sixteen when Gagarin circled the earth, and his words gratified the narky little atheist I’d then become. I read them aloud to my grandmother, sadly announcing the nonexistence of God. Her reaction disappointed me.

“I shunt be surprised,” Win said placidly, “if that Rushun wunt lookun the wrong way.”

While Win and I took the Soviet conquest of space calmly, America and the rest of the so-called Free World didn’t. Russian satellites! Russians in space! It was just a tiny step of the imagination to get to Russian satellite
missiles
in space! My God!

When Gagarin’s spacecraft passed over the U.S., it was less than two hundred miles up. No distance at all! Commuting distance. From that height, a tiny puff of rocket fuel could send all hell down on America’s head. The U.S. Paranoia Meter swung into its red zone.

Then the Russians created the biggest man-made explosion in the history of humanity (so far).

A few months after Yuri Gagarin had landed and confirmed the nonexistence of God, a Soviet Tupolev took off and flew north into the Arctic Circle. It carried, like a gross and ugly pregnancy — so big that the doors of its underbelly had been removed to accommodate it — a huge nuclear bomb. Five miles above the frozen wastes, the crew released it, suspended from a vast parachute. Two and a half miles from the surface of the earth, it exploded with a force of
fifty
megatons. Fifty million tons of TNT. Ten times the total power of all the explosives used by all sides in the six years of the Second World War. When it was detonated, it created a fireball five miles in diameter. Its base touched the ground and melted it. Its crown reached the altitude of the plane that had dropped it. It was like the invasion of a furious planet. It was like the ferocious roar of God (had He existed). Dropped onto the inhabited parts of the world, it would have stopped civilization in its tracks.

Which was all to the good. It meant that the U.S. and the Soviet Union each had the ability to annihilate the other. Therefore — in theory, at least — neither of these growling superpowers would dare attack the other, because to do so would result in its own immolation.

That was the basis of peace while I was growing up.

It was called Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD.

MAD has worked fairly well, I guess. I mean, here we both are, me writing, you reading, both of us breathing. It was delicate, though. The thing about MAD is that it depends upon powerful people being sane. That nobody sensible would actually want to convert to lifeless ash the hand that traced the lovely curve of Frankie’s breasts and belly in the gathering darkness of a Norfolk barn. Or turn to radioactive vapor a mother and child in Minsk or Memphis. Unfortunately, however, weapons of mass destruction tend to attract maniacs: men — it’s almost always men — who want to jab the red button and yell, “Take that, you heathen infidel bastards!” and sit in their revolving leather chairs in their underground lead-lined bunkers or caves, watching World War Three or the Final Jihad or whatever on their monitors. Watching Anchorage and Islamabad, Istanbul and Aberdeen flicker and vanish.

Unluckily, in 1962, America’s nuclear arsenal was under the command of just such a man.

D
URING THE DAYS
that followed the discovery of missiles on Cuba, the White House — and the Pentagon and the State Department — rapidly came to the boil. Further U-2 photographs revealed that as well as MRBM sites, the Russians and Cubans were building launchpads for IRBMs — intermediate-range ballistic missiles. These had twice the range of MRBMs; launched from Cuba, they could reach all of the U.S. apart from the far Northwest. The CIA wanted to send low-level flights over Cuba, to get a much closer look at the Devil’s handiwork. JFK was hesitant. Sending warplanes into Cuban airspace, even on photographic missions, would clearly be an act of aggression. If the Cubans had got their hands on Russian surface-to-air missiles, they might just be crazy enough to shoot down an American plane, and that would force Kennedy’s hand; an all-out war would be almost inevitable. Besides, U.S. planes scooting over Cuba would give the clear message to the Beardies and the Russkies that America had found out what was going on. And Kennedy didn’t want that. Not yet.

The president had formed an executive committee — ExComm, for short — to deal with the crisis. It consisted of people he liked and trusted, people he didn’t like but trusted, people he didn’t trust but who were good at what they did, and people he neither liked nor trusted but who had to be there. Among that last group were a number of people in military uniform whose usual habitat was the Pentagon.

After a week of fearful debate and fierce wrangling, two rough options emerged. And ExComm had divided, although not cleanly, into two groups that JFK would later refer to as the Hawks and the Doves.

Option One was the Hit the Bastards Right Now option. Bomb the missiles sites, bomb the Cuban air defenses, their military bases, without warning. Then send troops in to whack Castro and take over the damn island, the way we should have done years ago. This was the Hawks’ preference.

The Doves pointed out the obvious problem: we’d kill lots of Russians. Moscow would then have an excuse to nuke Berlin, or Turkey, or Iran, or anywhere else that America had parked missiles. They might even launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. itself. Then we’d do the same to them. So good-bye, world.

Nah, the Hawks said. Khrushchev isn’t gonna do that. He’s not going to bet his whole empire on Cuba. No way. Cuba doesn’t mean that much to him. What he’s doing in Cuba is like an adventure, a game. He’s not going to bet his personal ass, let alone the entire Soviet Union, on it. He’ll bluster and bang his shoe on the desk and rant. But he’s not crazy enough to start World War Three over this thing. Besides, he knows that we’ve got more firepower than they do. So let’s do it.

But Kennedy was not perfectly sure that Khrushchev was an entirely rational being. He was not absolutely certain that the Soviet Union wouldn’t be happy to rule a world that was half toxic ash.

Option Two was a sea blockade of Cuba. Send ships and submarines and planes to stop any ships that might be bringing war materials to Cuba. Draw a circle two hundred miles out from Havana, say. Stop anything we don’t like the look of from going any farther. This was the Doves’ preference. Actually, no, they said, let’s not call it a blockade. That sounds warlike. Let’s call it a
quarantine
. As if Cuba has got a disease we need to stop from spreading. Then we talk to Khrushchev. Tell him that enough is enough. He has to remove his missiles from Cuba, and we’re not going to let him send any more material in. Especially not nuclear warheads. If we’re right, and those warheads aren’t in Cuba yet, the priority is to stop them from getting there.

(The Doves had a point. They didn’t know it, but while ExComm was arguing back and forth, a Russian freighter called the
Aleksandrovsk,
stuffed with warheads, was steaming across the Atlantic en route to Havana. Another thing the Americans didn’t know — and it’s just as well they didn’t, really — was that there were already ninety warheads on the Cuban mainland. They’d arrived at the port of Mariel on the fourth of October, in a ship designed to carry frozen fish.)

This talk of quarantine and diplomacy caused the Hawks to huff their feathers and narrow their raptor eyes.

What if, they wanted to know, one of those Commie ships refuses to stop?

Well, the Doves said, guess we’d have to board it. Or disable it. Shoot its rudder off, or something.

Well, that would be an act of war, wouldn’t it? And where do you think that will lead?

Hmmm, the Doves murmured.

And what if we shoot up some ship that turns out to be carrying baby food? How’s that gonna look? We end up with a goddamn public-relations disaster on our hands.

Hmmm.

And what if, the Hawks further demanded, Khrushchev turns around and tells us to go screw ourselves? That he’s gonna keep his nukes in Cuba, blockade or no blockade. Excuse us,
quarantine.
What then?

Well, the Doves flustered, we suppose we’d have no choice but to go for the bombing and the air strikes and so forth.

Right, the Hawks glittered, so why wait? Why give them any warning? Let’s hit the mothers now, when they’re not expecting it.

Leading the Hawks were the military men, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and fiercest of them was the aforementioned nightmare and chief of the air force, General Curtis LeMay. During the final stages of World War II, LeMay had initiated the strategy of firebombing Japanese cities. Flying at night, his planes dropped thousands of tons of explosives, incendiaries, and napalm (that’s the stuff that glues itself to people when it’s burning) onto military and civilian targets alike. LeMay proudly boasted, “Our B-29s scorched, boiled, and baked to death three hundred thousand people.” He cheerfully admitted that if he’d been on the losing side, he’d have been executed as a war criminal. Postwar, LeMay was the architect of SAC, Strategic Air Command, a huge fleet of nuclear-capable aircraft and an arsenal of missiles that tipped the MAD balance in America’s favor. His attitude toward Russia, as toward any enemy of the U.S., was uncomplicated: “We should just bomb them back to the Stone Age.”

JFK was repelled by and frightened of LeMay. “I don’t like that man,” he told Bobby. “I don’t want him near me.”

When LeMay was promoted to head of the air force, he was replaced as head of SAC by General Thomas Power. Power, believe it or not, was worse than LeMay. His own deputy was profoundly worried that such a “mean and cruel” and “psychologically unstable” man had control over so many weapons and weapon systems and could, under certain conditions, “launch the force.” Even LeMay considered Power “mad.”

It still, after all these years, puts frost into my blood to remember that men like LeMay and Power had their fingers so close to the button.

On the morning of Friday, October 19, 1962, President Kennedy braced himself for a meeting in the Cabinet Room. Among the men waiting for him were LeMay, Maxwell Taylor, and the heads of the navy, the army, and the marines. The navy guy was Admiral George Anderson. He looked like a Hollywood actor cast in the role of Head of the Navy. His sermons on clean living had earned him the nickname Straight Arrow. The army guy was General Earle Wheeler, a clever man and politically connected to Kennedy’s opposition, the Republicans. The marines guy was Commandant David Shoup. Shoup was a warrior who’d been involved in lots of bloody business, fighting the Japanese during World War II. His way of speaking involved biting off bits of the English language and randomly spitting them out in lumps of profanity.

All in all, they were not JFK’s ideal audience.

The meeting did not go well.

When it became clear that JFK was leaning toward the Doves’ quarantine option, with military action kept on hold, LeMay could barely conceal his contempt.

“We made pretty strong statements about Cuba, that we would take action against offensive weapons. I think that a blockade and political talk would be considered by our friends, and neutrals, as being a pretty weak response to this. And I’m sure a lot of your own citizens would feel that way, too.”

There it was again, that word:
weak.
Kennedy bridled.

“You’re in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President,” LeMay added.

“What did you say?”

“You’re in a pretty bad fix,” LeMay repeated flatly. The indifference in his tone was worse than a sneer.

Kennedy’s face wore an expression of restrained disgust, like a man watching his wife throw up into the toilet.

He said, “Well, you’re right in there with me. Personally.”

A flutter of nervous laughter from around the table. Taylor shuffled papers. The discussion turned to military preparedness.

LeMay announced that the air force would be ready for attack at dawn on Sunday, although Tuesday would be better. The implication was clear: we professionals are getting ready; you politicians are sitting on your thumbs.

When the meeting adjourned, the men in uniform lingered in the Cabinet Room. Blissfully unaware that it was bugged, they waxed candid.

“You really pulled the rug right out from under him,” Shoup told LeMay admiringly.

“Yeah,” Wheeler agreed, chuckling.

LeMay soaked it up.

Then Shoup made what was, by his standards, a speech.

“Somebody’s got to keep him from doing the goddamn thing piecemeal. That’s our problem. Go in there and friggin’ around with the missiles. Go in there and friggin’ around with the airlift. You’re screwed, screwed, screwed. Some goddamn thing . . . some way, that they either do the son of a bitch and do it right and quit friggin’ around.”

The others nodded in solemn agreement.

Such was the level of debate among the American military on the subject of human annihilation.

Listening to the tapes later, JFK could have been left in no doubt that his dogs of war were eyeing their master’s crotch. As he said to his personal assistant, Dave Powers, “These bastards have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they were wrong.”