Warday

This caused SAC and the U.S. Navy Submarine Command to go to One Alert status, and the other services to respond byentering their highest states of readiness. It was at this point that war became inevitable, but at the time there was still a sense of control in the NEACP The President activated the hot line to Moscow. The telephone at their end was not answered. At last the President put the instrument down. “Gentlemen” he said, “I am afraid that the Premier will not talk to me.” We then instructed Ambassador Underwood in Moscow to call on the Premier at once and inform him that the United States was willing to negotiate a settlement of the question that had arisen between us. We further attempted communication by the hot line teletype on the chance that the telephone system might be out of order.

There had been a massive failure on the part of Western intelligence to correctly evaluate the Soviet response to the deployment of Spiderweb. This system, utilizing ultra-high-power laser beams, which targeted and destroyed warheads in space after they were ejected from their missile buses, was intended to render the United States invulnerable to land- or sea-based attacks. As the target acquisition system was optical, the Soviet low-radar-profile systems were no defenses. We did not know at the time how far in advance of existing Soviet weaponry this system was, or deployment would have been evaluated differently.

It was our stated intention before the deployment to begin dismantling the American offensive missile force once we were protected by the Spiderweb system. The Soviet leadership had given us no indication that they did not believe this, and had not even protested the deployment of Spiderweb.

In retrospect it is obvious that they were so far behind technologically that they were afraid to so much as whisper a protest, lest their weakness become known to us.

Although I was not a party to the decision to deploy Spiderweb, I am trying to come to grips with the fact that I was assisting in the management of a system of defense that had drifted into a state of extreme brittleness, in the sense that our own technological superiority was making our enemy increasingly desperate, and thus was actually causing the very war it was intended to prevent.

As per plan, the NEACP proceeded due south toward its intended operational area, approximately 100 miles SSW of the Cape Charles Lighthouse, over the Atlantic Ocean.

At 1555 the National Security Agency informed us that three Soviet satellites had begun unusual orbital maneuvers. NSA said that these were designated as unusually large communications relay satellites, and that there had been optical and electronic surveillance confirming this. However, this remarkable maneuver capability made them highly suspect. The President then ordered SAC to destroy these satellites, utilizing the ground-based Slingshot missiles, which are a classified weapons system. The Slingshots were fired. Less than two minutes passed before the threatening satellites were destroyed. But it was too late. We were soon informed that they had successfully ejected four large weapons, which were dropping to an altitude level of 100,000 feet over California, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Manitoba. The President made a sighing sound, as if he had been struck in the chest. We all knew what terrific damage the country was soon going to sustain.

It is far easier to create high-level electromagnetic energy in pulsed form than it is to shield against it.

We were aware of the classified studies on this. We knew that a vast number of electronic circuits in the United States would be damaged, most of them beyond easy repair. Even those shielded to resist a 50,000-volt pulse would be destroyed by the explosion of such large bombs in near space, as the pulse each generated would far exceed 50,000 volts.

At 1620, we watched our entire fighter escort, consisting of six F-15s of the 113 TAC Group out of Andrews, corkscrew into the sea. The Soviet EMP weapons had just detonated. The fighters’ shielding had clearly proved insufficient, and these aircraft had undoubtedly lost their on-board computers, without which the F-15 cannot fly. At the same time, most of the commercial airliners in the air over the United States and Canada began to crash or became dangerously disabled. Approximately three hundred million radio and television sets, and most radio and television stations, ceased to function. All microwave relay stations in the United States and Canada ceased to function, meaning that long-distance telephone and telemetric communications were no longer possible.