CHAPTER 21

The Heroes

ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1954, the Soviet Army fired off a twenty-kiloton A-bomb only a thousand feet over a mock battlefield near the town of Totskoe. Seven minutes later “attack troops” in protective clothing moved into the area, “taking” the target at ground zero. The fact that there were no immediate adverse effects on the troops encouraged the Soviet leadership, all the way up to Khrushchev, to decide that nuclear weapons were just better artillery. Marshal Sokolovsky, chief of the general staff, wrote as much in Military Strategy, the prime military text of the time.

By the mid 1950s the leaders of the Soviet Union had come to believe that nuclear war was a reasonable military and political option. Leaders of the U.S. Strategic Air Command may have felt the same way, but in reality it was not. The real heroes of the Cold War were the officers and civilians who stood their ground between the red meat of nuclear weapons and the hungry dogs of political war. There were many such heroes, but the tales of a typical four follow: two engineers from Leningrad and two sailors from Annapolis. Only because of their steady hands and good judgment are we all here today.

THE SOVIET MONSTER ROCKETS

By 1957 the Soviet Union had begun testing intercontinental ballistic missiles; within three years the first large and cumbersome R-7 rockets were being deployed. These were the same boosters that put Sputnik into orbit, a kluge of monster parts, fueled immediately prior to launch from railroad tank cars nearby. Only six R-7s were ever deployed, despite Khrushchev’s threats to “crank them out like sausages.” By 1961 a more sophisticated two-stage rocket, the R-16, was making its appearance. This weapon system also used a storable liquid fuel and oxidizer, delivered from movable tanks on trucks or railroad cars. The rockets were stored horizontally, without fuel, until made ready for use. According to Russian nuclear scientists visiting the United States in 2002, both of these rocket systems—R-7 and R-16—carried 2.8-megaton thermonuclear warheads, tested twice in the Soviet nuclear test series of 1958.

Orders to fire these R-7 and R-16 rockets were to come from Moscow over very bad telephone lines, by hard-wired telegraph, by Morse code over a shortwave radio link, and/or by couriers. When received, the orders were to be authenticated by comparison with a code sealed inside a paper envelope and held by a regimental commander. He was to acknowledge receipt of the valid order back to Moscow over the same archaic phone lines. There would ensue the hours needed to erect, fuel, and launch those rockets. While any such launch was supposed to be authorized by Moscow, the launch crews could have fired without such permission. There was no centrally controlled lockout key, only the discipline of the Red Army. This was the system in place in October 1962 when the Cuban missile crisis erupted.

In Russia, those days are known as the Caribbean Crisis. Valery Yarynich remembers them well. As a staff officer from rocket corps headquarters, he was on a business trip to the Urals, driving between regiments, when he saw tank trucks filled with rocket fuel heading toward the rocket launch platforms. What is going on? he wondered.

Yarynich raced to the telegraph desk at the Nizhny Tagil division command post. Picking up the tape, he saw the instructions from Moscow: the rocket forces were to go to “Combat Mode.” In combat mode, weapons are loaded, communications frequencies changed, and operational documents distributed. That had never happened before in the Strategic Rocket Force (SRF), but everyone knew about the confrontation building up in Cuba. The regimental commander tried to open the secret package containing the authenticator. His hands were shaking so badly that he could not do it. The paper envelope was to be cut open with scissors or knife, but the officer cut himself instead. Yarynich still can see the faces of those officers, showing three feelings at once: alarm but not fear; shock, because the SRF had never before gone to combat mode; and determination, a legacy of the Great Patriotic War (World War II). Those troops would do whatever had to be done, at whatever personal cost, to protect Mother Russia.

In July of that year, prior to his departure for Cuba, General Issa Pliyev, the Soviet commander-designate in Cuba, met with Khrushchev to receive his instructions. If, in the heat of combat, he could not contact Moscow, Pliyev was given the authority to use his tactical nuclear weapons. During the closing weeks of October 1962 there were ninety-eight such weapons in Cuba, with another twenty-four slated for attachment to the intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) that never arrived. ⁷⁴

On October 28, Khrushchev and Kennedy came to an understanding that defused the crisis. The Soviet ships bearing IRBMs turned around and returned to the Soviet Union. The Americans would forswear an armed attack on Cuba and, in time, would remove their IRBMs from Turkey. General Pliyev never fired a rocket. The launch order never came to Nizhny Tagil. But the events of those six days, in October 1962, opened a lot of Soviet and American eyes.

CONSEQUENCES OF A MISTAKE

Things could have gone wrong. In Cuba, General Pliyev could have lost contact with Moscow during an American naval maneuver. Back in the Soviet Union, a confused regimental commander could have misunderstood an order sent over those primitive telephones. Any of those commanders could have lost communication with higher headquarters and feared the worst. Any officer could have taken foreign policy into his own hands, as young men sometimes do. By any number of routes, Soviet rockets could have been launched without the approval of Moscow.

An attack on the U.S. heartland in October 1962 might have started with an attack on a few key military bases. The submarine base in New London and the Electric Boat Company shipyard in Groton across the river would be one candidate. A 2.8-megaton warhead landing there would have burned and destroyed much of central Connecticut. The naval and air facilities in and around Norfolk, Virginia, might have been another target. A multimegaton warhead there would have obliterated everything in the Hampton Roads estuary of the James River.

Whatever the military targets, a 1962 Soviet war plan certainly would have focused on the political centers of the United States. A 2.8-megaton weapon targeted on the White House would have killed virtually everyone inside the Beltway. The firestorms would have reached as far as Dulles Airport and halfway to Baltimore. The core of the U.S. federal government would have ceased to exist. One weapon allocated to New York City, the heart of “capitalist imperialism,” would have left few survivors on the island of Manhattan, in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Jersey City. Firestorms would have devoured Staten Island, Kennedy Airport, New Rochelle, Yonkers, and the stately homes of Great Neck, Long Island.

One Soviet regiment, acting on its own, could have killed almost everyone on the island of Manhattan and within the Washington Beltway while incapacitating key parts of the U.S. military establishment. The United States, of course, would have struck back. The President might have been reluctant to order a retaliatory launch based on a few electronic signals from radars and HF transmitter screens, but once nuclear detonations in Greenland and in the northern U.S. had been detected by the Vela Hotel satellites orbiting overhead, he would have known that this was the real thing. Every bomber already in the air, submarine hidden at sea, and missile silo not yet destroyed would have wrought its ghastly havoc.

As the 1960s began to unfold, such scenarios could have come to pass. Those regimental commanders in the Soviet SRF and that general in Cuba really were out there on their own, at the far ends of the world’s worst telephone system. With the support of only a few fellow officers, those commanders could have fired.

Such a launch was improbable. There was, first of all, the discipline of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On top of that lay the professionalism of the SRF officer corps. Then there was the practical consideration of time. The half-dozen hours it took to fuel and fire an R-16 left a lot of time for the staff to ask questions. And there was the omnipresent surveillance by the KGB. These considerations, taken together, made an unauthorized launch unlikely. But to cooler heads in the SRF, “unlikely” was not good enough. Besides, the Soviet military-industrial complex was making things worse. Soviet design bureaus were spawning new generations of ballistic missiles, with individual, uncoordinated schemes for the control and launch of those weapons. A nuclear Tower of Babel was in the making.

As the Cuban missile crisis unfolded, reality was injected into the thinking of the Soviet general staff. In my conversations with senior Russian officers today, most point to October 1962 as the time when reality dawned. That week of watching and waiting on full nuclear alert while Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off, gave officers up and down the line on both sides time to think about their families. Most military officers expect to come into harm’s way. That is their job. But that week of forced reflection made Americans and Soviets realize that their families, their children, and millions of other innocents, would be consumed by the fires of hell if things went wrong. During those six days in October the possibility of nuclear war changed from a policy option to a dreaded disaster.

THE ENGINEERS OF LENINGRAD

Although they did not know each other then, Vladimir Petoukhov and Valery Yarynich grew up together in Leningrad. Petoukhov was born there in 1936, the son of a communications engineer. Yarynich was born nearby on Kronstadt Island in 1937, the son of a naval officer. Theirs was not to be an innocent childhood. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, expecting as easy a trip across the Slavic flatlands as he had enjoyed in Poland the previous fall. His troops did not bother with equipment for the Russian winter, and he already had chosen the historic Astoria Hotel in Leningrad for his victory banquet. Hitler did not understand the tenacity of the Russian people or the harshness of their winters. By September 8, 1941, the Wehrmacht had fought its way to the outskirts of Leningrad, where it was stopped.

At age five, as the Germans approached Leningrad, young Vladimir Petoukhov was evacuated to Omsk. He and his mother got there by barge across Lake Ladoga, then by railroad freight car across Russia, all the while under German aerial bombardment. They went to live with Vladimir’s uncle, a kind man who loved his sister. But she cried a lot during those years, for there was little or no food for young Vladimir. He still remembers the big treat: powdered eggs and sausage from America. Valery Yarynich, a boy of four, was sent to Kirov by train. When he got there, the village was devoid of men and food. The winters were bitterly cold. The summer brought only the opportunity to subsist on tree roots.

Both boys’ fathers stayed behind to defend the old imperial capital. For nine hundred days the Nazis besieged the city, but for nine hundred days the citizens of Leningrad held out. Under constant bombardment, workers subsisted on a few hundred grams of bread per day. In Leningrad’s darkest hours that ration shrank to 250 grams. Elders and other nonproducers were only allocated half rations. This led old women and young children to work in the eight armament factories in town in order to double their food rations. A quarter of the population died, mostly from starvation and disease.

As Americans gathered around family tables for their Christmas dinner in 1941, reeling from the shock of Pearl Harbor but otherwise not inconvenienced, a top-secret KGB report was being issued to the Leningrad party leadership. During the earlier part of that month alone, about 39,000 Leningrad residents died. During the previous week, 656 Soviet citizens dropped dead in the streets. There were twenty-five reported cases of cannibalism; countless more in reality.

On the other hand, starvation was not a problem for the Communist party leadership in Leningrad. The archives now open at party headquarters in the Smolney Institute confirm the operation of a cafeteria during the siege serving flown-in caviar and other goodies to the elite. Photos show a roomful of tables for eight at the Smolney, an arrangement hardly needed for a once-a-day serving of bread and tea. An internal memorandum now available states: “There was no limit to [party boss Andrei] Zhdanov’s buffet.” Only city officials, Komsomol youth, and party regulars were welcome at that buffet.

I am a contemporary of Vladimir Pethoukov and Valery Yarynich, but I spent those war years in Washington, D.C., in reasonable comfort. My father came home every night from his job at the War Production Board to help with my homework. We always had a good dinner, and he tucked me into a warm bed at night. To me, World War II was the story of the few to whom so many owed so much in the skies over Britain, or it was the story of Admiral Spruance and the American dive bombers at Midway; but to Vladimir and Valery, it was separation from fathers and homes they might never see again, fathers left to suffer from German artillery and the arctic cold.

Vladimir’s father, Efrem Ivanovich Petoukhov, is the sort of man who has made Russian history for generations. On June 22, 1941, he was already thirty-five years old, a technical instructor working on an automatic machine for delivering forage to farm animals. He was living peacefully in Leningrad with his family. Two days later he was a junior lieutenant in the Soviet Army. As his wife and son disappeared into the east, Efrem stayed behind to build communications equipment for the troops.

His masterpiece was a six-railroad-car mobile command post. To get it out of Leningrad, to the forces in need, he drove it across frozen Lake Ladoga on tracks laid on the ice. Calculations said the ice would not crack under that load, but there was not a lot of supporting evidence. Valery Yarynich’s father was already a naval officer when war broke out. Yevgeny Andreevich Yarynich stayed behind, in Leningrad, to help repair ships. He traveled back and forth, under fire, to the shipyard on Kronstadt.

During the long years of the Cold War, we Americans often would say to each other, “The Russians are just like us,” but that is not true. Americans cannot possibly comprehend the horrors of the Great Patriotic War in Russia nor the impact it left on that younger generation.

When World War II was over, young Petoukhov returned to Leningrad to find his father still alive. Vladimir was a bright child. He returned to school, graduating from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1959. In 1960 he began work there with Professor Taras Sokolov, an expert in automatic control. Valery Yarynich also made it home to Leningrad, and he too found his father alive and well. Valery entered the Leningrad Military Communications Academy in 1954. In October 1957 the U.S.SR launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. It was an exciting time for both young men. To Petoukhov, the young scientist, it was tangible evidence of the role technology would play in postwar Russia. To Yarynich , the young soldier, Sputnik foretold the coming of the SRF.

By the time Yarynich graduated from the communications academy, in 1959, those forces were in formation. As a new lieutenant, Yarynich was assigned to the first Soviet ICBM division. He was sent to Yuriya, near Kirov, where he served for a year at a construction site. His first combat operations were pretty simple, shooting the bears and wolves trying to attack the construction workers to steal their food. At the end of 1960, Yarynich moved up to the corps headquarters in Kirov where five new missile divisions were being formed. In America, John Kennedy was decrying the “missile gap.” Subsequent history would show there was no such gap, but there certainly was a race. Yarynich was there when the starting gate opened.

THE RACE TO RELIABILITY: KAZBECK AND SIGNAL

In the 1950s, while Vladimir Petoukhov was still a student at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, Professor Sokolov was beginning to think about computers. But it was only after the Cuban crisis that Sokolov got serious about the challenge of reliable and fail-safe communications to the new SRF. The Soviet general staff got serious too. Once the lessons of that crisis had sunk in, and faced with the proliferation of different rocket programs, the general staff initiated a design competition for a standardized command and control system for their nuclear forces.

Two design teams were asked for proposals. The design group in Moscow, led by future academician Vladimir Semenikhin, and known as the Institute of Automatic Apparatus, proposed an approach using new digital computers and software. Given the state of Soviet computer technology in the early 1960s, most Soviet analysts thought components of the resulting system would be huge and that the system itself would be unreliable.

The Leningrad Polytechnic Institute proposal, developed by Professor Sokolov, called for a hard-wired system based on ferromagnetic cores. Logic elements were to be plated onto a substrate, then covered with a plastic compound to assure reliability and security. This system was not flexible, nor was it capable of executing many commands, but unlike the Moscow approach, it would be reliable. The Leningrad Polytechnic Institute won the competition, and their first prototype was built in 1964. Young Vladimir Petoukhov was part of the design team.

At the same time, Yarynich was reassigned from SRF corps headquarters in Kirov to the Soviet Army communications school at Stavropol. Once there, he became part of the control system evaluation team. He returned to Leningrad, posted to work with the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, where he met up with Vladimir Petoukhov. Thus began a thirty year partnership to secure the strategic nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union. When the design competition was settled, Yarynich was assigned to the central office for the SRF in Vlasikha, fifteen miles west of downtown Moscow. In due course he moved to the general staff, all the while retaining his focus on the need for careful and foolproof control of nuclear weapons. During this same period, the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute spun off its strategic nuclear controls work to a new design bureau, known today as NPO Impuls.

Over the next twenty-five years the scientists (like Petoukhov) and the soldiers (like Yarynich) developed and built an integrated system that would absolutely control their strategic nuclear forces. It ended up as a true Soviet system: rigid, hard-wired, with every box checking up on every other box. Deviant behavior, be it electrical or human, was to be reported to higher headquarters, with the deviant elements disconnected at once. The oddity of the design was the disconnect between the political leadership and the military general staff.

The presidential part of this system is now known as Kazbek. It pulls in warning and attack assessment information from the data fusion center at Solnechnogorsk (Krokus); it displays the data and offers up options on the president’s terminal (the Cheget); and it then disseminates decisions to the general staff. The Cheget is a standard, hard-shell briefcase containing a laptop computer with a “special program” on its hard disk. It stays plugged into the Kavkaz communications net via cable, radio, and satellite antenna. Kavkaz maintains continuous communications between the president, the minister of defense, and the general staff, whether they were at the poolside, dacha, or office.

In theory, the president of Russia can sit down at his Cheget , punch in his password, and find out what’s going on. In practical fact, the Cheget is operated by a “special officer” who carries it around and stays close to the president. By these means, the president of Russia is to sanction the use of nuclear weapons. The Cheget does not contain a “Red Button.” There is no electrical connection between the president’s Cheget and the operational communication systems or the rockets. The presidential system can only deliver the “Permission Command,” which includes the authenticating Goschislo, or “state number,” to the military headquarters. In Brezhnev’s time the Goschislo was thought to be his birthday so he could remember it.

This Permission Command from the president does become the basis for the “Direct Command” flowing from the general staff to the troops, but the general staff can shoot (or not shoot) regardless of any physical action taken by the president. Yarynich reports, and several other retired officers confirm, that at the time of the attempted coup in August 1991, as the American government worried about Soviet nuclear anarchy, the Soviet nuclear force commanders took matters into their own hands. They agreed to conduct no nuclear operations without mutual agreement among themselves as to the rationality of such orders. In effect, the Soviet general staff disconnected the presidential Cheget, and they are proud of that fact.

Once the staffs of the SRF, air force, and navy decide to commence operations, they prepare the Direct Command, which is pumped out to the forces via two different systems. It gets to the SRF via Signal, traversing the whole system automatically in about fifteen seconds. The air force bases and navy communication facilities receive the Direct Command through the KSBU system. These Direct Commands unblock the weapons and identify which war plan is to be executed.

Signal is at the heart of the Russian strategic nuclear security system. It consists of reliable and redundant communications nets, keyboards, and screens all organized to send the Direct Command down and to receive acknowledgments back up at great speed. At every level these orders are compared with numbers located inside hard-wired authenticators. These authenticators, known as “code blocking devices,” are the size of egg cartons and are delivered directly to, and are installed into, the machines at corps, division, and regimental headquarters by couriers from the general staff and the main staff of the SRF. If the electronic orders coming down match the authenticator, they are passed along. If not, there is an immediate report-back, delivered all the way up to SRF headquarters and the general staff, and the system will shut down. In the event of tampering, there are algorithms which feed back reports to the SRF main staff and the general staff in real time. If a marauder or hacker tries to access Signal to read an incoming message, the system will erase that message, send a notification back up the chain of command, then block all downward messages.

In the thirty-five years since the Cuban missile crisis, the scientists at NPO Impuls and the soldiers of the Soviet Army have continually modernized that system. Signal gave way to Signal-M, then Signal-A. Vyuga radio and satellite links have been added. Perimetr relieves the need for hair-trigger response to a perceived attack, an action sometimes known as “launch on warning.” Perimetr allows the military commanders to wait until there is unambiguous evidence of nuclear detonations on Russian soil before being required to act.

These and other assurances built into the electronics, hardware, and rocket force procedures have made an accidental, unauthorized, or irrational Russian launch a virtual impossibility. Things are now beginning to fall apart, but for the duration of the Cold War the scientists and soldiers, like Vladimir Petoukhov and Valery Yarynich, dedicated their lives to preventing the escape of the nuclear genie. They did their job well.

AMERICAN SSBN OPERATIONS

On the other side of the world, most of America’s nuclear firepower is carried aboard its fleet of ballistic-missile-firing submarines, known as SSBNs. In theory, the decision to unleash that nuclear deterrent can only be made by the President of the United States. That may be the individual elected a few years earlier, or it may be his Vice-President or another successor who escaped the destruction of the White House in some awful confrontation or terrorist surprise.

He communicates with his nuclear forces—the submarines, bombers, and land-based missiles—through the communications system organized and managed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The President selects a nuclear option, conveys that decision to the military representative always at his side with the nuclear briefcase known as “the football,” and the decision is pumped through the World Wide Military Command and Control System directly to the unit commanders, the boat skippers, bomber pilots, and launch control officers. The transmission is known as an Emergency Action Message, or EAM.

The validity of the EAM is confirmed by an authentication code, carried by the President and his constitutional successors. Copies of the authenticators are carried in the submarines, on the bombers, and in vaults of the missile launch control centers, with no one person ever having sole access to them. EAMs are not chatty newsgrams as depicted in the movies. They are a string of letters and numbers, which, taken together, tell the boat commander that it is truly the President speaking, that he wishes to execute option X (a total retaliation against a nuclear superpower or a single weapon against an aggressor), and that he wishes the attack to commence at a certain E-hour. The latter is important because nuclear war plans constitute an intricate ballet of complimentary forces.

Aboard the SSBNs it is not likely that an EAM would be received out of the blue. As world crises develop, the Department of Defense raises its forces to higher levels of alert, or DEFCON levels. Submarines are in continuous contact with their naval communications stations, receiving messages over the Very Low Frequency (VLF) or Extra Low Frequency (ELF) net. If communication is lost, the submarines will come to periscope depth to listen for messages, including the awful EAM, from satellites or standard shortwave. An EAM is first received in the radioroom aboard an SSBN. Upon receipt, the radioman immediately announces that fact: “We have an EAM.” Another communicator confirms the message. When hearing the alarm, the officer of the deck brings the boat to launch depth and begins readiness procedures. At the same time, the communicators bring the EAM to the captain. He and his executive officer proceed to the captain’s cabin, where there is a red safe within a gray safe, each with its own combination dial. The exec opens the first or outer vault door with the memorized combination known only to him, then the captain opens the inner door with his different combination. In the vault they find the sealed authenticator card, known as “the cookie” and the “Permission to Fire” key. Together, the captain and exec break open the cookie and compare the string of letters on the card inside with those on the EAM received. If they match it’s a “go.”

As Director of Telecommunications in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, I oversaw the manufacture and the very closely guarded distribution of those plastic laminated cards by the National Security Agency. For all the power it reflects, the nuclear authenticator looks just like a bank ATM card, carefully sealed in plastic. Upon confirmation of the valid EAM, the captain orders the weapons officer and his assistant to start the countdowns, for execution at the E-hour specified in the EAM. These two men ready the launchers, pressurize the launch tubes, spin up the gyros, and do all the things necessary to launch. The two weapons officers retrieve their firing key from their own separate safe within a safe, and in practical fact they must agree that the orders they have received from the captain and the executive officer make sense. Those officers are located on a different level of the ship from the control room.

The captain now holds the Permission to Fire key which he took from the two-door safe. If he inserts it into the lock and turns it, he can give the Permission to Fire order. The computers give the actual orders to each missile once the launch sequence is started, the Permission to Fire key has been inserted and turned, and the firing key is held closed by the weapons officer.

In the 1960s some options available to the President would have resulted in the launch of only one or a few of the sixteen missiles aboard a Polaris submarine, perhaps because a war in Europe had “gone nuclear,” or a terrorist state made good on a threat to attack New York. The Navy in general, and submarine skippers in particular, do not like such options because they give away the boat’s location. Today, in a world constantly orbited by surveillance satellites, the skipper of a boat launching missiles or anything else must anticipate an immediate counterattack. For that reason, the Polaris boats could have fired their entire load of sixteen missiles in less than four minutes.

The boat skippers do not know at which targets they are shooting, although they could figure it out from the target tapes if they wanted to. The target coordinates for various options are installed while in port, with the capability to change them at sea if so directed. A Polaris skipper in the 1960s, executing a legitimate EAM, would be sending sixteen nuclear warheads on their way. The keys to such an Armageddon lay in the hands of America’s submariners. They were supposed to open their vaults and extract the Permission to Fire key only upon receipt of authentic instructions from the President, but the skipper and his exec had the physical ability to do so any time they jointly decided that the world situation merited such action.

KEN CARR AND BOB AUSTIN

Long ago and far away, during World War II, submarines crept into Purvis Bay only at night. There were no lights and no docks to welcome them. But neither were there Japanese aircraft or destroyers to bother them. Purvis Bay was a deserted cove in the Florida Islands, around the coast from Tulagi and across the sound from Guadalcanal. Since snorkels and nuclear power had not been invented, the American submarine skippers had to surface to run their diesels and recharge their batteries. They could do so safely in Purvis Bay.

KEN CARR was then an eighteen-year-old seaman first class. He too was technically a skipper, coxswain of an LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel). At thirty-six feet in length, the LCVP could carry a jeep or three dozen fully equipped men. Carr’s crew consisted of an engineer, who operated the ramp and one of the .50 caliber machine guns, and one other deckhand. During those dark nights of 1943, Carr watched the American submarines come in from patrol. He watched them disappear again into the darkness of night and sea, and he knew then that those skippers had a real advantage. Only later would he hear the submariners’ mantra: “There are only two kinds of ships: submarines and targets.”

When the war ended, Carr came home to pursue his naval career via Annapolis. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1949 with honors. He spent some time aboard a submarine during his Annapolis summers, but assignment to submarine duty required first qualifying as an officer of the deck underway on a surface ship. He served his first year as an ensign aboard the destroyer Eversole as the assistant gunnery officer. In the process, he earned his certification, so in June 1950 he was off to submarine school in New London. As part of the curriculum, a visionary young Navy captain named Hyman Rickover came to talk about the possibility of nuclear power plants driving submarines. Such boats could travel around the world unrefueled, staying underwater for months at a time. They would have power to spare, enough to manufacture oxygen out of seawater. There would be no need to surface, to expose oneself to the enemy, until returning to home port. It all sounded like Jules Verne and his fictional Nautilus, which traveled for 20,000 leagues under the sea, but Rickover made it sound real.

From school, Carr went to sea aboard the diesel submarine Blackfin. In 1953 he was selected for nuclear submarine duty. After three months of training ashore, he reported to Rickover’s first nuclear-powered boat. It was aptly named the Nautilus. Carr served on the Nautilus for six years, with duty at sea interspersed with nuclear power training ashore. During those years, he built a reputation for calm leadership, the first requirement for command of a submarine. In 1960 he was posted to the Scorpion, another SSN, as its executive officer, the second in command.

With the arrival of the 1960s, another type of submarine appeared. The technology of nuclear power plants, sonar, and undersea navigation was married to the technology of ballistic missiles. The result was the Polaris missile-firing submarine. The first such SSBN, the George Washington ,went on patrol in December 1960. On leaving the Scorpion, Carr was assigned to serve as the executive officer of the James Monroe, the fourteenth SSBN to be commissioned. One stunning legacy of the 1950s was the commissioning of one American SSBN every two months; forty-one such boats were built between 1960 and 1967.

Nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarines, known as SSNs, carry only torpedoes as their major weapon. They are hot rods, fighting ships designed to hunt down and destroy their quarry, be it surface or submarine. Their skippers are fighter pilots. SSBNs are different. Their objective is to remain unfindable at sea but always ready to launch their terrible payload. Their skippers are like B-2 aircraft commanders: methodical, smart, and highly focused. The SSBNs carry torpedoes for defense, but their role is to patrol quietly and undetected until receiving an order to fire. SSBNs typically run at 20 percent power. The early Polaris boats carried sixteen ballistic missiles. They would patrol in the Norwegian or Mediterranean Seas within striking range of the Soviet Union. By the mid-sixties the new A2 Polaris missiles could carry a thermonuclear warhead to a range of 1,500 nautical miles. The Polaris fleet was becoming a key part of America’s nuclear deterrent.

Command of such arsenals was, and continues to be, an enormous responsibility, so the Navy applies the most stringent standards in selecting commanding officers for the SSBNs. A candidate has usually served as the skipper of something else, displaying the cool under pressure that is only evident when one has the responsibility of command at sea. He must have spent time on an SSBN, so there will be no novelty to the procedures. He must have been recommended by former SSBN skippers, and that recommendation approved by the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel, with full access to all the candidate’s files, and by the commander of the submarines in his proposed theater of operations (Atlantic or Pacific). There are some detail training requirements (computers, sonar, missile technology), and in those days the candidate had to have written an acceptable thesis on some aspect of submarine warfare. To complete his qualifications to command an SSBN, Carr was assigned to the new SSN Flasher as its prospective commanding officer. In 1966 he earned his first command as skipper of that boat.

Having passed through all of the gates, Commander Carr flew to Spain in September 1967 to take command of the John Adams , SSBN 620. Submarines of the Atlantic Fleet were home-ported in New London, Connecticut, and Charleston, South Carolina, but they were forward-deployed to bases in Holy Loch, Scotland, and Rota, Spain, for more efficient access to their respective operating areas in the Norwegian and Mediterranean Seas. The John Adams was a new boat, huge by any standards. At 400 feet long, displacing 8,000 tons, it was larger than some World War II cruisers. It carried a crew of thirteen officers and 133 enlisted men. It also carried sixteen Polaris A2 missiles. When he took command, Carr found an experienced executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Robert Austin, already on board. It was the first time they had met.

BOB AUSTIN was five years younger than Carr. Austin’s grandfather was a naval officer, one of the first to fly. He was the Navy’s first test pilot, and he piloted an NC-3 aircraft on its first transatlantic flight. He educated young Bob about the challenges of life at sea with visits to the Smithsonian Museum. In high school, Bob thought about Annapolis, but his math teacher was not supportive. Family finances were not compatible with such ambition, and connections to nominating members of Congress were nonexistent. So Bob Austin enlisted. He was sent to electronics school, and while there, saw the notice about examinations for admission to the U.S. Naval Academy. The Secretary of the Navy holds seventy-five nominations for use in the selection of enlisted men. Bob did well on the entrance exams, entered the Naval Academy in 1950, and graduated four years later with distinction.

From there his career progressed up the same steps as Ken Carr’s. In 1965, Austin was posted to the newly commissioned John Adams as its executive officer. He had been aboard two years by the time Carr assumed command. Entrusted with awesome responsibility for the security of Americans and the safety of all mankind, Carr and Austin formed a close team. For two patrols they would lurk beneath the sea, their fingers on the nuclear trigger that could unleash sixteen enormous nuclear weapons on the Soviet homeland.

If ever they had decided to shoot, with or without authority to do so, the target package for a U.S. Polaris A2 boat, operating in the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, might have included the early warning radars on Crimea; the headquarters of the Odessa Military District, an interceptor base in Southern Ukraine, the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, the shipyards of Nikolayev, the military industries in Dnepropetrovsk, the rail and industrial center of Kharkov, and the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev. Having expended half of its warheads on Ukraine, the John Adams target package could then have moved on to Belarus and Russia itself: Pervomaysk, Minsk, some interceptor base on the ingress route in southern Russia, and the general staff headquarters at Chekov, fifty miles south of Moscow. The Soviet capital would be on every boat’s hit list. Perhaps the John Adams would have been responsible for one shot at the city center and another at the ABM system defending Moscow. Lastly, one weapon might be assigned to the old monastery at Sarov. Stalin had assigned the mysterious name Arzamas-16 to that town when putting his first nuclear weapons design bureau there in 1945.

As a result of that one turn of the key, dozens of Russian and Ukrainian cities and towns could lie in ruins. Tens of millions of Soviet citizens would have died terrible deaths, and tens of millions more would be on the radioactive slide to a similar fate. The children would be gone. The heart of Mother Russia would be gone. The museums and icons, the great gate at Kiev, and the onion domes of St. Basil’s all would have disappeared with the bunkers, airfields, docks, and power plants. And as he watched the incoming warheads on his Krokus warning system, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would have reacted in kind.

The first evidence of a launch from the John Adams would have shown up on the Soviet radar at Mukachevo in Ukraine. These indications would have been passed to the general staff in Moscow. Without asking for political approval, the general staff immediately would have passed the Preliminary Command to the nuclear forces; they would at once go to Combat Mode. At the same time, this indication of an American launch would have brought Brezhnev’s military aide to his side with the Cheget. Faced with unambiguous evidence of an American SSBN launching its entire load of Polaris missiles, with a significant number of them headed toward Moscow, and with only minutes to decide how best to protect the Soviet Union, Brezhnev might well have ordered a full retaliatory strike against the U.S. and its NATO allies. Those orders would have flashed through the Soviet military communications network in seconds. Within half an hour of Brezhnev’s Permission Command, much of the United States would lie in ruins.

All of this might have been, and the power to do it all lay in the red safe in Ken Carr’s cabin aboard the John Adams. Ken Carr and Bob Austin to this day have no doubt they would have fired if they had received an authenticated EAM. Implied in their answers is the assumption that DEFCON levels or other world events would have made such an order credible. On the other hand, they never, ever, even thought about opening that red safe, to access its enclosed authentication card, on their own. They could have done it. They had the combinations in their heads, and with some forethought they might possibly have co-opted the communicators and the launch officers aboard ship. But they didn’t. And neither did the officers aboard any other American SSBN at any time during any of the darkest days of the Cold War.

While at sea, Bob Austin often lay awake at night reflecting on how this whole system could go wrong. He could not conceive of any way. Austin had no doubt that if the President so ordered, he would shoot, but he could not conceive of how such a shot would be fired without presidential orders, and he was dedicated to keeping it that way.

Men and women like Ken Carr and Bob Austin, Vladimir Petoukhov and Valery Yarynich, were the real heroes of the Cold War. They kept their cool and they promoted or tolerated the collapse of the Soviet empire without a holocaust sweeping over the planet. People make mistakes, human beings get confused, and dictatorships usually don’t give up without a bloodbath, but these men stood their ground between thousands of nuclear weapons on one hand and the chaos of the Cold War everywhere else. They could have triggered the end of civilization, but they did not. They allowed the politicians time to coax the camel through the eye of the needle.

ON THE BEACH

The scary book of that title was written by Nevil Shute in 1957. Two years later it was made into a movie, starring Gregory Peck. It described the aftermath of a nuclear war that left only an American submarine and its crew to patrol the world, looking for signs of life. I thought about that title forty years later when I sat on the beach in La Jolla, California, with Petoukhov and Yarynich.

The three of us are in our sixties now, and we have become good friends. As we sat there with our feet in the Pacific Ocean, watching the sun go down and waiting for the green flash, I congratulated those two Russians on keeping the Soviet nuclear dogs of war on a very tight leash. They expressed similar sentiments about the submarines still out there somewhere. We toasted each other with California wine and Russian vodka, and we passed around pictures of our grandchildren.