Sleepwalking With the Bomb by John C. Wohlstetter Page B

warheads, including two dozen for ballistic missiles, which could deliver one megaton 2,800 miles away (roughly the distance from Havana to Seattle). Khrushchev recalled these to Russia—weapon security on Cuba was dicey. The island heat made storage hotter than was safe for the warheads; accidental megaton-level ground detonation was a serious possibility. Without trigger locks, most nuclear weapons on Cuba could be released by the local commander—in some cases, a lieutenant—ignoring orders to the contrary from Moscow. Had an invasion come, as one Russian former soldier stationed in Cuba then put it, “You have to understand the psychology of the military person. If you are being attacked, why shouldn’t you reciprocate?” Ironically, the minimal level of perimeter and site security at the Bejucal nuclear storage bunker led CIA analysts to conclude that the facility did not house nuclear weapons.
    Things were better, but far from secure, on the U.S. side. Pilots had unilateral release discretion for nuclear-armed air-to-air missiles, designed to vaporize strategic bomber squadrons. During the course of the 1950s and 1960s, several nuclear-armed strategic bombers crashed. One was carrying a pair of hydrogen bombs, each able to wipe out a major city. A crash cannot detonate a modern nuclear bomb, but such events are extremely dangerous nonetheless, in that any explosion can scatter highly radioactive nuclear material.
    America’s fighter jets also could carry nuclear bombs. A nuclear-armed F-106 interceptor, armed with the MB-1 Genie air-to-air missile (a one-kiloton device that could be armed and fired at the pilot’s sole discretion), had a near mishap taking off. Designed to destroy all enemy planes within a quarter-mile radius, it was called by one pilot “the dumbest weapons system ever purchased.” F-102 interceptors had similar armament, and F-100 Super Sabres based in Europe carried hydrogen bombs to drop inside Russia. A young Navy pilot named John McCain sat in his A-4D Skyhawk jet on the aircraft carrier
Enterprise
, awaiting orders to drop A-bombs on selected Cuban targets.
    Slow communications made matters worse. Both sides sent signals over broadcast television, sacrificing privacy for celerity. The Russian ambassador in Washington sent telegrams via Western Union, complete with pick-up via bicycle messenger. Informed by this potentially catastrophic infirmity, the superpowers established the Washington-Moscow Hot Line in 1963.
    The Cuban Missile Crisis ended without millions perishing because at crucial moments Kennedy and Khrushchev chose caution. On October 24, three days before the crisis ended, Russian ships sailed away from the American “quarantine” line, avoiding what could have been a catastrophic confrontation at sea. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk said upon hearing the news, “We were eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow just blinked.” In reality, Khrushchev had ordered the missile-carrying ships to turn back a day earlier, and only a few minor ships had proceeded to the quarantine line. But newspapers printed and broadcasters printed the legend.
The Twenty-first Century Mideast: Cuban Crisis Revisited?
    T HE DANGER in the twenty-first century Mideast with a nuclear-armed Iran would be vastly greater than that posed by Cuba and the USSR in 1962 for four reasons:
    1. Greater vulnerability of geographically small states to nuclear strikes.
    2. Inability to absorb a blow and retaliate due to short warning times.
    3. A near-complete lack of rapid communication channels.
    4. Leaders who have no experience in managing nuclear crises, and thus may either overestimate their chances of success with a surprise attack, or in extreme cases may succumb to an apocalyptic impulse to bring about the end of days.
    Vulnerability. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the two superpowers faced each other with strategic forces that were primarily above ground and small in number. But missiles were not nearly