The Missileers

As a predawn fog oozed over the oak-rimmed ravines of California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, a disembodied voice roared out of the loudspeakers: "Strike order received! Clear the silo!" Moments later, the 400-ton steel and concrete doors of an underground Atlas silo yawned, and the missile poked its nose skyward. The countdown continued. At last, an intense yellow light bloomed through the fog as the Atlas rose from its pad like an inverted candle. The voice bawled: "Missile away!" The monster doors swung shut as the Atlas sped through the darkness toward its target 5,000 miles away in the Pacific.

The Ties That Bind. This practice firing, executed last week under condition EWO (Emergency War Operations) by the ist Strategic Aerospace Division of the Strategic Air Command, is a rarity; Atlases, even without warheads, cost nearly a million dollars apiece and are not to be treated casually. Yet in an age when an intercontinental thermonuclear strike order could be received at any moment, a key warrior breed will be the missileer, whose fighting environment, neither sea nor sky nor foxhole, will be a concrete blockhouse or an underground fortress. His ties to the world outside will be electric wires. TV screens, knobs, dials, microphones, buttons and bulbs. He will be the man who presses the button.

To train missileers, the U.S. had to start from scratch--and is only just beginning. The job was given to SAC, which has had to assemble crews and drill into them the sciences of inertial guidance, pneumatics, electronics, hydraulics, cryogenics. After hours and hours of such studies, the trainees are sent on to specialized courses on various missiles (Atlas, Titan, Minuteman), then are assigned to combat crews.

Alphabet Soup. At Vandenberg the crews get their most crucial training. Few get a chance to fire an actual missile like last week's. But they come close to the real thing with the help of the Atlas T-601 Trainer, an $800,000 simulator in which each crew must spend from six to eight hours a day for two weeks. The trainer has all the gear of a real block house, plus the machinery by which instructors can crank out data on 200-odd possible missile malfunctions. It is the trainees' job to run their countdowns and deal with any malfunctions that the ingenious instructors inflict on them.

During a simulated countdown, the instructor, watching the trainee crew from behind the broad glass pane of a control room, punches his troublemaking buttons and watches the countdown as the crew takes corrective action and snaps out comments and orders in bizarre alphabet-soup missile talk: PDU pressure low. Valve L14 in open position. Get a MOCAM team out here ASAP.

RV monitor shows red. Circuitry reads out of continuity. Gyro out of specs on countdown group.

Countdown Group Drawer on LSR out of specs.

BMAT and EPPO report EMCC shows a circuit breaker tripped.

LINHE system indicating red. How about sending out MAPCHE ASAP? As the countdown in the "hole" reaches its climax, the instructor flashes photo slides onto a TV monitor. One shows the silo doors opening, another the Atlas rising to vertical position. Depending on how well the crew has solved its malfunctions, the screen might also show the bird without the distinctive tendrils of liquid oxygen boiling off the missile (lox system in trouble), or even a slide showing an Atlas blowing up on the pad. Says Major Otis Erwin, a former F-86 pilot who directs procedures training for Atlas crews: "In an earlier trainer that we had in a wooden-floored building, the instructor would jump on the floor as heavily as he could, to simulate the boom of a bird blowing up. The tension really builds in there, and that boom would scare those guys out of their pants. I wish we could blow off a cannon shell or something when a crew messes up." Even without such a boom, says another officer, the crews "come out talking to themselves by the third or fourth day. They're determined to get that bird off and they treat the instructors like real enemies." In the Hole. Inevitably, the missileers will always be men apart. For they have been trained in a method of warfare about which it is hard to be sophisticated.

Says one ex-paratrooper: "All I had to learn in the Army was how to shoot a rifle and fall out of an airplane. Now this missile business is kind of a cold-blooded thing--all those buttons and plumbing.

But you realize the power you're controlling, and it's awesome. If I were back with a rifle on my shoulder, knowing what I know now, I'd feel pretty damned futile. You realize you'll be just another vaporized glob along with a lot of other globs. I'd rather be in the hole, watching the colored lights flashing."

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