by Jeff Edwards
He checked his briefing notes. “USS Tucson is operating near Japan. I can have her through the Kuril Islands and into the Sea of Okhotsk in about six hours. I can get the Seawolf up there in about 12 hours, and the Bremerton about three or four hours after that. I’d like to have one of the other Seawolf class boats, but the Connecticut and the Jimmy Carter are both too far out of position. So we have to make do with one Seawolf class and two Los Angeles class boats. I don’t see that as a problem, though. The Los Angeles class are top-notch boats. Born hunters. They’ll get the job done.”
“Are three submarines going to be enough?” the president asked. “The Sea of Okhotsk looks like a big piece of water.”
“It is, sir,” the admiral said. “It’s over 600,000 square miles. Roughly two and a half times the size of Texas. But we’re fairly confident that the K-506 will keep to the eastern half of the sea. Governor Zhukov isn’t going to want his ace in the hole to get too close to Mother Russia. He doesn’t want to risk losing it. Also, the farther west that submarine moves, the more U.S. targets he puts out of missile range. If he wants to keep his strike options open, he can’t stray too far west. I think three attack subs are about right to search the eastern end of the sea. Any more, and they’ll start getting in each other’s way.”
The president nodded. “What’s your fall-back plan?”
“We’re going to try to figure out how Zhukov is communicating with his submarine. If we can interrupt his channel of communication, we can keep him from sending launch orders to the sub. That won’t necessarily help us kill the K-506, but it should prevent any more nuclear strikes while we track it down.”
“So you have to zero-in on their radio frequency, and break their encryption?” Secretary Solomon asked.
The admiral shook his head. “No, Madam Secretary. Ordinary radio waves only penetrate a few feet into water. A submerged submarine can’t transmit or receive radio unless it extends an antenna above the surface, or floats what we call a trailing wire. Neither one of those options works under ice. To transmit through water and ice, you have to use extremely low frequencies, with long enough wavelengths to penetrate. Our navy uses this method, and so do the Russians. We call our system ELF. They call their system Zevs. We use slightly different frequencies and transmission technologies, but the basic idea is the same. But Zhukov can’t access the Zevs system. There’s only one transmitter station, and it’s located near Murmansk. The Russian navy controls it, so there’s no chance that Zhukov is using it.”
The Secretary of State rested her elbows on the table. “Could he have built his own transmitter station? For Zevs, or ELF?”
‘No, Madam Secretary,” the admiral said. “The facilities are enormous, and far too expensive. The entire economy of Kamchatka for twenty years wouldn’t cover the cost. In any case, the antenna feed lines have to be about thirty miles long. You can’t hide a construction project that large. Not in the Congo, not in the arctic, not in the Sahara. Not even in Kamchatka. We don’t know what method they’re using, but do know that it’s not Zevs or ELF.”
“ONI is looking at this right now,” he said. “So are DARPA, and the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins. There’s got to be an answer. We’ll find it.” He faced the national security advisor. “With your permission, Mr. Brenthoven, I’d like to put the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office on the problem as well. Those guys spend all their time peeking over fences and listening at keyholes. They might have some ideas about how Zhukov is talking to his sub.”
Gregory Brenthoven nodded. “I’ll put them on it.”
The president looked around the table. “We deploy the Tucson, Seawolf, and Bremerton into the Sea of Okhotsk to locate and destroy the K-506. We simultaneously investigate Zhukov’s method of communicating with his missile submarine. Does anyone have any objections to the plan, or any refinements to add?”
No one spoke.
The president pushed back his chair and stood up. “Go with it, Admiral. And keep me informed at every step.”
He paused, and was about to speak again when the door opened and a Secret Service agent walked in, escorting White House Communications Director Roger Chu.
The man crossed quickly to the head of the table. He was visibly trembling. “Please forgive the interruption, Mr. President, but there’s a breaking story on CNN that you need to see immediately, sir.” His eyes darted to the screen and then instantly back to the president. “My assistant is burning the clip onto disk right now. It should be here in a couple of minutes.”
“Thank you, Roger,” the president said. “While we’re waiting for the video, why don’t you give us the short version?”
Chu swallowed. “Yes, sir.” He looked around the table and saw that every face was turned in his direction. His voice wavered. “Mr. President, Governor Zhukov has just made another public statement to the media. Actually, it was a demand—issued to the United States, the Russian Federation, and Japan. He wants every submarine in our collective military inventories on the surface in the next three hours. He says he has agents in numerous countries, monitoring commercial imaging satellites. He says he knows exactly how many submarines we have at our disposal, and he wants every one of them out in the open, where he can see it. Attack subs, missile subs, all of them. Then he wants us to put them all in port, and keep them there. But first we have to bring them all to the surface, where he can see them.”
“That’s crazy,” the Secretary of Defense snapped. “Mr. President, we can’t do that.”
“The deadline is 6:00 AM, Greenwich Mean Time,” Roger Chu said. The man was close to tears. “Governor Zhukov says if a single submarine from any of our nations is not clearly visible on the surface, he’ll launch nuclear weapons against …” Chu looked down at a piece of paper in his hand. It was shaking so badly that he had trouble reading the list he had copied there. “Moscow, Vladivostok, Saint Petersburg, Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver.”
Chu lowered the paper, still clutched in his trembling hand. “Mr. President … Governor Zhukov said something about a surprise package, sir. He said he would also hit three cities that are not on the list. But he didn’t say which country those three cities were in.”
The room was utterly silent.
Roger Chu emitted a sound that might have been a sob.
“Mr. President, we can’t do that,” the Secretary of Defense said again. “I’m not just talking about our national policy against negotiating with terrorists, sir. I’m talking about strategic defense. Our attack subs would be bad enough, but we can’t reveal the locations of our missile submarines. The second we put those missile boats on the surface, our national security goes up in smoke. Our deterrence will be gone. Our second strike capability will be gone. We have to keep our missile submarines hidden. Otherwise, we can’t protect this country.”
The president looked at his Director of Communications. The normally rock-solid man was on the verge of breaking down.
“Does anyone see any alternatives?” the president said. “Any ideas at all, I don’t care how crazy.”
Gregory Brenthoven exhaled sharply. “We … My God, I can’t believe I’m saying this … We launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Kamchatka. We wipe out Zhukov before he can issue launch orders to his submarine.”
“That’s not going to work,” the Chief of Naval Operations said. “The Kamchatka peninsula is about 140,000 square miles. That’s nearly the size of California, and we don’t have any idea where—in all of that territory—Zhukov might be hiding. How do we know we can even hit him? And what happens if we don’t hit him?”
“I agree,” the president said. “If we launch nuclear strikes against Kamchatka and we don’t kill Zhukov, he’s going to incinerate every city and town west of the Rocky Mountains.”
“Then we hit it all,” Brenthoven said. “We turn the entire peninsula into a fucking parking lot.”
The Secretary of State shook her he
ad. “No, Greg. They’re right. We don’t know what instructions Zhukov has given to the captain of his missile submarine. Maybe the guy’s got orders to nuke everything if he loses communication with Zhukov. We can’t take that chance. If we can’t take the submarine out of the equation, we can’t shoot at Zhukov.”
“Well, shit!” the president said. “Shit, shit, shit, and double-shit. What do we do now?”
“I hate to say this,” the CNO said. “But we’re going to have to put our subs on the surface.”
“We cannot knuckle under to a fucking madman,” Secretary of Defense Kilpatrick said. “We can’t do it. We just can’t.”
“We don’t have a choice,” the president said. “I’m not going to sacrifice six million American lives to protect our national prestige. If we have to kiss this guy’s ass, then we get on our knees and pucker up. Right up until the moment that we stick a knife in his heart.”
He turned his eyes to the Chief of Naval Operations. “Put the submarines on the surface Bob. All of them. Do it now.”
He shifted his gaze to his secretary of state. “Liz, we need to open immediate diplomatic dialogues with Japan and Russia. Make sure they intend to comply with Zhukov’s deadline. Hopefully, they’re smart enough to realize that this nutcase is not bluffing. If they balk, tell them we’re working on a plan to neutralize the threat, and that we’ll share it with them as soon as we nail down the details. In the meantime, they need to get their submarines on the surface so that Zhukov doesn’t start launching nuclear missiles.”
The president lowered himself into his chair. “We’re back to square one,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out how to destroy the K-506 without submarines.”
He slammed his fist on the table. “And then we’re going to go and kill the maniac who started this nightmare.”
CHAPTER 30
ICBM: A COLD WAR SAILOR’S MUSINGS ON THE ULTIMATE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
(Reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)
At the close of the Second World War, German rocket engineers under the direction of Wernher von Braun were engaged in developing the A9/A10: a powerful two-stage missile capable of reaching across the Atlantic Ocean to attack New York and other American cities. The A9/A10 development effort was part of a larger program called Project Amerika, which was dedicated to the creation of specialized bombers, rockets, and other weapons, to be used in Germany’s eventual conquest of the United States.
If it had ever been completed, the A9/A10 would have been the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile in history. Instead, it became the theoretical model from which later ICBMs would be built.
The program came to a halt in 1945 with the surrender of the German military, but Wernher von Braun and a number of his fellow scientists were quietly whisked away to America, where they became the core of the rocket and missile research programs for the U.S. military.
Having foreseen the collapse of the Nazi regime, von Braun’s team had managed to conceal and protect many of their blueprints and research papers. In some cases, the recovered technical documents were nearly as useful as the scientists themselves.
This was certainly true for the Soviet Union. Because Soviet agents in post-war Germany did not immediately recognize the potential value of Hitler’s rocket scientists, the Soviets acted too slowly to capitalize on this brief opportunity. Consequently, when Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev began constructing his nation’s missile program, he had captured German blueprints to work from, but almost no German technical expertise to help him decipher them. To paraphrase a prominent military historian: The United States had already snatched up all the good German engineers.
But—Germans or no-Germans—the race was on. Although they had been allies in the fight against the Nazis, the United States and the Soviet Union had very different plans for reconstructing the world in the aftermath of the war. The relationship between the two nations had been strained even when they’d been in formal alliance. With the dissolution of the alliance, mutual suspicion deepened into outright hostility. Even as World War II was ending, the Cold War was beginning.
As a result of military and industrial buildup, economic capacity, and postwar positioning, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as the so-called superpowers. The rivalry between them was intense from the outset, but it was also one-sided. America had the atomic bomb. Soviet Russia did not.
Then, in August of 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic bomb at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. The US intelligence community would later learn that the Russian weapon had been an almost direct copy of the American ‘Fat Man’ bomb dropped on Nagasaki. In point of fact, the Russian atomic bomb was more a product of espionage than research. But the source of the information paled beside a single inescapable fact … The Soviet Union now had nuclear weapons.
The balance of power no longer leaned in America’s favor. It had become a true balance, with the growing might of the US on one side, offset by the growing might of the USSR on the other.
In 1952, America briefly regained a significant technological edge with the first successful test of a nuclear fusion weapon: the infamous hydrogen bomb. This development brought another quantum leap in destructive potential. Previous fission-type nuclear weapons had yielded explosive forces in the kiloton range, equal to the destructive power of several thousand tons of TNT. Fusion-type or hydrogen weapons offered explosive yields in the megaton range, equal to the destructive power of several million tons of TNT. The deadliest weapon in history had just become, quite literally, a thousand times more destructive.
This new capability gave the United States a tremendous strategic advantage, but the shelf-life of that advantage was very short. In 1953, the Soviet Union tested its own fusion weapon, the Sloika (“Layer Cake”). Once again, the US and USSR had rough military parity, and the nuclear balance of power had been reestablished.
The superpowers differed on virtually everything, from political ideologies, to economic models, to human rights, to the very future of mankind. The Soviets believed that the Communist ideal was destined to spread to every nation on earth. Fearing that very thing, the US began building military and political alliances in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The intent was to ‘contain’ the threat of communism, and to guard against Soviet military aggression.
This philosophy led to the signing of the Treaty of Brussels in 1948, and a year later, to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.
The Soviet Union interpreted these alliances as a direct strategic threat, and responded in 1955 by forming the Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (better known to history as the ‘Warsaw Pact’). Essentially a military alliance of socialist states in Eastern and Central Europe, the Warsaw Pact was intended to counterbalance the threat posed by NATO.
Sides had been chosen. The battle lines had been drawn for an entirely new kind of war.
Until the 1940s, even the most lethal of weapons had been limited in their capacity for destruction. As horrific as the machineries of warfare had become, their deadliness had never been absolute. Even the bloodiest battles tended to leave survivors on both sides—among the victors and among the vanquished. No matter how high the death toll rose, it was never high enough to completely eradicate the population of the defeated nation.
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed that. With the advent of nuclear warfare, it became possible (at least theoretically) for one country to utterly annihilate the inhabitants of another country.
In hindsight it seems incredible, but the nuclear warhead became both the symbol of absolute national power, and the ultimate tool of military force projection. In their ceaseless contest for strategic dominance, the United States and the Soviet Union poured enormous amounts of funding and effort into building, testing, and stockpiling new and more powerful nuclear weapons.
As the nuclear arse
nals of the superpowers grew, the technology of weapons delivery platforms advanced to keep pace. Propeller driven bombers gave way to jet bombers, and then to supersonic jets.
By the mid 1950s, the jet bombers of America’s Strategic Air Command were operating in a state of around-the-clock readiness, continually prepared to obliterate every city and military target in Soviet Russia. The Soviets held their own bombers in a similar state of readiness, poised to rain nuclear death on the United States with equal efficiency.
The total extermination of a nation’s inhabitants was no longer an abstract theory. The assembled firepower of either of the nuclear superpowers was now sufficient to virtually guarantee the annihilation of populations on a national scale.
For the first time in history, two adversarial nations had become so powerful that they did not dare take their disagreements to the field of battle. Any direct military contact between the superpowers might lead to an exchange of nuclear weapons, and any nuclear combat—no matter how small in scale—could lead to a cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, until a small conflict escalated into a full-scale nuclear war. Neither nation could hope to survive an unrestricted nuclear attack, and a growing body of scientific research suggested that a major nuclear war might well destroy all life on planet earth.
In the context of nuclear warfare, traditional concepts of victory and defeat lost all meaning. No one could win a war in which there were no survivors. Victory and defeat were replaced by a doctrine known as mutually assured destruction, which is often referred to by the somewhat-appropriate acronym: MAD.
The threat of mutual destruction kept the NATO alliance and the Warsaw Pact from battling each other directly, so the superpowers sought and found indirect methods of combat. They fought small wars by proxy, taking opposite sides in battles between third-party countries as a substitute for the direct military confrontation that neither side dared to risk. They competed for supremacy in industrial capacity, scientific achievement, technological advancement, space exploration, and even cultural development. The competition for military dominance was more intense than ever.
