The Safety Catch On the Deterrent

FAIL SAFE

THE date was Aug. 26, 1957. The announcement from the Kremlin was heavy with meaning to the free world's defenses. The Soviet Union had test-fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile, and as days went by, Russia's Khrushchev pushed a new form of missile diplomacy, pouring it into every cocked ear at every diplomatic coop that Europe might become "a veritable cemetery," and that the U.S. was "just as vulnerable."

Poised around the U.S.S.R.'s 37,500-mile perimeter, the U.S. Air Force's Strategic Air Command, a 2,000-bomber force capable in a single sortie of hitting the U.S.S.R. with 2,000 times the total explosive power of World War II, took K.'s rocket-rattling with professional seriousness. SAC began to cut down the "reaction time" of its strike force--hundreds of bombers--from two hours to 15 minutes. This was the Air Force's best estimate of the warning SAC bases would get before an enemy missile strike (TIME, Nov. 25). If an "instant readiness" deterrent force was to be any deterrent at all, it had to be airborne before the threatening missiles could cripple it on the ground. Since then, SAC has learned how to get B-52 heavy-jet and B-47 medium-jet bombers airborne, hydrogen bombs in their bellies, within an astonishing seven minutes of alarm klaxon's howl (including two minutes for taxiing down a 10,000-ft. apron to the runway). SAC has keyed its 3,700 combat crews so tautly to what SAC Commanding General Thomas Sarsfield Power calls "the compression of time in the Atomic Age" that SAC is even designing a new type of slip-on shoe to save alert crews the few seconds spent on fumbling with shoelaces.

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of SAC's reply to Khrushchev is that SAC has also fashioned a safety catch for its hair trigger, a crucial check upon the deterrent power, so as to rule out the minuscule but horrifying chance that World War III might explode out of one aircrew's accident or aberration or miscalculation. Name of SAC's safety catch: Fail Safe.

Fail Safe is a cold-war projection of an engineering principle used for decades in aircraft design and around dangerous machinery. The principle: if a device can fail, it must be assumed that it will fail, and it must be designed so that its failure will do minimal or no harm. Fail Safe on U.S. railroads, for example, means "the dead man's throttle." If an engineer dies at the controls, his pressure on a foot pedal or hand lever is released, and the train automatically goes into an emergency stop. Fail Safe at SAC means that SAC bomber crews, launched in an alert, do not proceed toward their preassigned target beyond a preassigned coordinate point without a coded follow-up command. Only beyond the Fail Safe point are SAC crews permitted even to arm their nuclear weapons.

The specific procedure is that whenever unidentified and unidentifiable shapes show up on U.S. radar, e.g., the $500 million DEW line across Northern Canada and Alaska, or the ship-based radar networks in mid-Atlantic and mid-Pacific, a SAC alert is declared. In his underground command post at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, General Power or a deputy orders one of scores of Emergency War Plans--E.W.P.s--designed to meet every calculated contingency to be put into immediate operation. SAC flashes its orders--"PLAN BLANK"--to any or all of some 70 SAC bases worldwide. At the bases the alert crews scramble and head off with a roar toward target--via a Fail Safe point that varies with every mission.

In today's kind of instant warfare, SAC will know long before the alert crews get to the Fail Safe point whether the attack upon the West is real or just a commonplace false alarm. Chances are overwhelming that the alert airplanes will be recalled long before they get to Fail Safe point.

Should they get to Fail Safe point without getting coded follow-up orders to proceed, they must automatically turn around and head home. Should they get the order to go on--e.g., "Implement Plan Red Fox Eight"--they must still check the order with base command; they must go through several cross checks on message and frequency to ensure against decoy; they must get yet another confirmatory order to proceed. In a normal tactical situation, the only man who can give the final order to attack is the President of the U.S., who relays it to General Power, who relays it to his commands. In a catastrophe situation with the President out of action, the order can be given by a complex of top officials in Washington. And even beyond Fail Safe point and all the way to bomb-drop point, the war order can be reversed and the aircraft called home. Fail Safe, says Air Force General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is foolproof.

In actual practice--contrary to United Press President Frank Bartholomew's report* on an imaginary SAC flight that the Kremlin was waving around as the basis for its propaganda onslaught--SAC planes have never reached their Fail Safe points in an emergency scramble caused by unidentifiable radar blips, let alone flown beyond Fail Safe points. This is the basis of the U.S.'s denial of the U.S.S.R.'s charges. But SAC constantly scrambles on real and test alerts; so realistic are SAC scrambles that SAC crews always head out toward Fail Safe point not knowing whether their mission is for test or the real thing. And the U.S. has even put SAC alert crews into the air deliberately to reinforce U.S. diplomacy at precise pressure points, e.g., during Russia's threats of intervention in the 1956 Suez crisis, to show on Communist long-range radarscopes that the U.S. carries a thermonuclear stick big enough to last at least until the U.S.'s own big ballistic missiles are operational.

It would be a major propaganda victory indeed if Khrushchev could bamboozle the West into keeping SAC's bombers on the ground. For then Khrushchev could rattle his rockets without fear of successful contradiction.

* Sample: "Imagine that you are the commander of a B-52 jet bomber of the United States Strategic Air Command. You are in flight toward an enemy target. You are carrying thermonuclear bombs ... Do you proceed to your target, does your bombardier press the button and does the first nuclear bomb 'go down the chimney' to start World War III? All this because one of the Strategic Air Command's vast fleet failed to receive a turn-back order? Not so. You are saved, you and many others, by a powerfully simple plan called Fail Safe. It is proof against error, human or mechanical."

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