Warday

[THE CONDUCT OP THE WAR. Wilson Ackerman is well known in Dallas, in the same way that somebody with an exotic contagion might be well known. People glance at him in the streets, ask him questions. Sometimes, I suppose, they do more than that.

Ackerman was aboard the Doomsday Plane on Warday. His testimony seemed essential, and he was available. I The man is deeply afraid. His eyes never stop moving. Although I don’t think he is more than forty-five, like so many of us he seems much older. His hands touch and caress his face as he talks, in a dry, quick voice that seems at times too precise, and at other times curiously rich.

There is an almost lyrical terror in this man. It is an emotional state, perhaps, beyond guilt. I do not think it has a name.

As Wilson Ackerman spoke in his careful tones I thought of a lover’s murmuring, and the quarrels of children, and the voices of the night.]

I did not know that we were in a war situation until the Secretary telephoned my office and told me in a brusque tone to activate Case Quick Angel. I then set in motion the series of actions that were designed to disperse upper echelons of the Executive Branch during a nuclear war. This order was given by me at exactly 1530 on 28 October 1988.

Shortly after that I joined the Secretary, as per plan, on the helicopter pad. We left the Pentagon via helicopter at once, heading for Andrews Air Force Base. With Secretary Forrest was Air Force General Potter Dawes, who was carrying the backup codes.

We reached Andrews at 1545 hours and found that the White House contingent had already entered the E-4B aircraft. Under the Quick Angel basing protocols, the E-4B had recently been returned to Andrews from a base in Indiana. Donald Meecham informed us that the President was aboard and the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP) was ready for takeoff.

We then entered the aircraft and proceeded directly to the Presidential suite. The President greeted us and we sat down to a briefing from SAC General Joe Point. General Point indicated that there had been a Soviet response to the Space Shuttle’s deployment of the first satellite in the Spiderweb warhead-killer system.

This response was to open the doors of a group of SS-18 silos in central Siberia. Altogether they were preparing a launch of twelve missiles containing a total of fifty-four warheads in the 5- to 10-megaton range. At that time they had not launched any missiles.

As our aircraft took off, we received telemetry from NORAD indicating that there had been an explosion, probably nuclear, in near space over the western Pacific Ocean. NASA then announced that the Space Shuttle had ceased to communicate with Houston due to this detonation, and had probably been destroyed.

As the Spiderweb satellites were radiation hardened, the one deployed remained operational, but it was far from its intended orbit, and we now had no means to transport it. It was effectively useless, and in any case, formed only a small part of the total system. At that point the President decided that it was probable that we would soon be in a hot war. He therefore authorized Defense to transmit a War Warning to all U.S. military commands. I carried out that order at 1550 hours. Here is the text of the document: The Space Shuttle Enterprise was destroyed by a nuclear device of unknown origin at approximately 1545 hours U.S. Eastern Standard Time this day. It was engaged in a Defense Department mission. Please consider this a War Warning, and proceed to your designated alert level immediate.