Readers may recall an earlier post about Vasili Alexandrovich Arkipov and the Cuban missile crisis. Arkipov was one of three officers on board the Soviet diesel sub B-59 who voted on whether to fire their nuclear-tipped torpedo while being depth charged to the surface by the U.S. Navy. Arkipov voted nay, vetoing the idea. This wasn’t the only near catastrophe during the Cuban missile crisis.
Scott Sagan recounts another hair-raising event that occurred at Vandenberg Air Force Base in his book, The Limits of Safety:
When DEFCON 3 was declared at the beginning of the crisis, one Atlas ICBM was ready for a test launch that had been previously scheduled for later that week. Although nuclear weapons were being placed on the ICBMs in surrounding launch facilities [adding nine nuclear warheads to the U.S. order of battle – MK], the test reentry vehicle was maintained on this single missile. Despite the severity of the crisis and the emergency alert operations taking place, this Atlas ICBM was actually launched, without further orders from Washington political authorities, at 4:00 A.M. on October 26th. Ironically, while senior leaders in Washington were carefully monitoring the operational alert status of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, a U.S. missile was actually being launched, without their knowledge, in California.
How could this happen? Crisis management techniques and situational awareness were still at rudimentary stages in 1962. President Kennedy and his team were focusing as hard as they could on Cuba and its environs, not on Vandenberg Air Force Base. The missile flight test was pre-planned and pre-approved. Perhaps the base commander didn’t connect the dots, or perhaps he wanted to send the Kremlin a message. If anyone out there can shed further light on this episode, please do. In any event, the Atlas missile flight test went arcing over the Pacific Ocean during the worst crisis in our nuclear history.
Washington and Moscow have come to rely heavily on satellites to provide early warning of missile attacks. Fortunately, Moscow didn’t have one in orbit back in 1962.
The subtitle of Scott’s book was Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons. It might just as well have been subtitled Don’t Presume You Have a Handle on this Problem. The Limits of Safety was published in 1993, the same year the paperback version of Bruce Blair’s The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War appeared. The powerful intellects who ordered the field of nuclear deterrence dealt mostly with rational, unitary actors. Scott and Bruce dwelled on accidents, bureaucratic screw ups and potential breakdowns of command and control.