Killianstädten, West Germany
WILLIAM LEE TROLAN BELIEVED HIS DNA Compelled him to serve his country.
A great-great-grandfather was one of the first company commanders in the States, leading the 15th of Virginia during the Revolutionary War. Relatives fought each other at the Battle of Murfreesboro during the Civil War. Family lore held that both died while holding their respective flanks while battling for the same small piece of terrain. Trolan, who went by his middle name, graduated near the top of his class at West Point in 1979 and had his choice of assignments. He wanted to be part of the action. That meant cavalry or artillery.
In 1981, he was promoted to second lieutenant and joined a nuclear artillery unit: the Bravo Team of the 501st US Army Artillery Detachment, 5th Group, 59th Ordinance Brigade. The teams of the 501st had custody of dozens of nuclear warheads called W31s, each packing up to 30 kilotons of explosive power.1
Trolan had wondered why, as an air defender, he had to guard nukes. Why wouldn’t an ordinance officer with an explosives team be in charge?
“The answer I got was that it was to make the point to our allies in Germany that this unit was important enough to assign combat soldiers to,” he recalled.
The 501st held about four acres near Killianstädten; it was the southernmost nuclear custodial unit of 5th group and the closest to the East German border.
It lay smack dab in the middle of the Fulda Gap, the navigable expanse of land that stretched from the German border to Frankfurt-am Main.2 The Fulda corridor furnished Napoleon with his escape route after Leipzig; it was the treeless plain along which American armies marched to secure Germany late in World War II, and the focus of NATO strategy since the mid-1950s. Creighton Abrams, the commander of the 7th Armored Cavalry in Europe during the Cuban Missile Crisis, called it a “playground for tanks.” It was the smallest geographical container of earth that could reasonably claim bragging rights for having convinced weapons designers to titrate nuclear yields precisely to destroy tanks that rumbled across it. If the Warsaw Pact, led by the 8th Soviet Guards Army, took the Fulda from the US Army V Corps, North would be cut off from South, supply lines would be snipped off in the middle, and NATO would have to retrench in or behind France.3 Keeping the Fulda was essential to maintaining the integrity of nearly 700 miles of NATO’s main lines. It was ground zero for World War III.
The military tends to describe the estimates damage incurred by an enemy as an “effect.” If Warsaw Pact aircraft and tanks begin to cross down the Fulda, the effect called for in NATO’s General Defense Plan was a dose of 8,000 rads across 30 percent to 40 percent of the target area, enough atom-splitting power to cause “immediate permanent incapacitation,” according to an army field manual.4 But corps commanders couldn’t simply call for nuclear artillery shells or air-burst weapons. A “package” had to be requested in advance. Commanders were taught to “backtime” their desired employment of nuclear weapons by at least 14 hours, because it would take at least that for the request to be considered and authorized from higher headquarters—and from the president of the United States. The decision chain worked like this: the commander of the field artillery unit that Trolan supported, or one of the army corps commanders that the field artillery unit was chopped to, would send a request to employ nuclear weapons to the Central Army Group (CENTAG) headquarters in Heidelberg or perhaps its secret wartime bunker. There, nuclear planners would vet the request against the needs of the V Corps Artillery commanders and the 4th Tactical Air Force, charged with patrolling the area of Northern Germany from the ground and air, respectively. From there, the request would move to the two-star general at Camp Hendrick in the Netherlands, home to AFCENT—the Allied Forces Central Europe headquarters—which would noodle, validate, and send it up to Supreme Commander of Allied Command Europe, the SACEUR, in Casteau, Belgium. The SACEUR’s nuclear operations cell would approve the request and throw it across the Atlantic to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose nuclear operational cell would then prepare a “selective release” package for the president of the United States.5 The president and his advisors would look at this request and then decide whether to consult with allies; the National Command Authority was allotted three hours to make the decision whether to approve the nuclear package.
And then the decision had to be communicated back down, through the SACEUR, to the custodial commanders of about ninety-five sites, each of which would release its armed nuclear weapons to the field forces of eight allies: West Germany, Greece, Turkey, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, and the United Kingdom.6
“It was played at varying lengths in exercises, but in reality you couldn’t expect that the minute the command group at SHAPE decided they want to go they would get an instant response to sort of go ahead and go,” Captain William Bliss, a NATO nuclear planner, said. “And I would certainly never expect an instant reply to come back; if it did, it meant that it was being played in a response cell and due regard was not being given to it. But I mean this would have been the most massive end to Europe as we knew it.”7
As the military gears churned, a parallel political process would begin in NATO. In 1975, with an eye toward demonstrating resolve, NATO’s defense committee decided to unify its separate fall exercises by merging them; the political preconditions would be common among them. And this made sense: in real life, deteriorating conditions on the Continent would indeed trigger the plans that major troop reinforcement exercises like Crested Cap, aimed at clearing a path for American warplanes to fly across the Atlantic, and Reforger, which brought actual troops to Germany, were meant to practice. Each year, the final exercise in the series would rehearse the nuclear weapons release procedures. It was called Able Archer.
NATO was a collection of member states, each with its own political and military concerns. Diplomats looked at the world differently. Political and military interests occasionally overlapped, but they often undercut each other. And no country wanted to centralize too much power in NATO as an institution. The member countries argued whether exercises took up too much time, but also, as the price of oil rose, whether they consumed too much fuel. Generals would complain when major field exercises were reduced to command post rehearsals. NATO ambassadors would get pressure from their own defense departments, who were concerned about individual readiness requirements. These exercises might sap them of supplies they’d need in a real war. On the other hand, the generals had a point: how the hell were the forces going to exercise their war plans?
But NATO countries had a much easier contingency plan: if NATO itself was wiped out, diplomats in the country’s capitals would simply take over NATO’s planning functions. No backup headquarters was needed.
There was no way to tell whether NATO would act as one unit during a crisis. The member nations shared a doctrine—flexible response—that few understood until Alexander Haig, during his tenure as SACEUR, led a Europe-wide effort to standardize training and make sure that words that meant something in one language were associated with proper words in the others.
Broadly, the war games exercised two contingencies: how to hold the line in a conventional war against a Soviet force with superior numbers and just what events would convince NATO to employ its nuclear weapons. For NATO exercises, the NATO Council Operations and Exercise Committee (COEC), which was comprised of senior war planners from NATO member states, would sketch a series of movements, maneuvers, and inciting incidents. They’d then submit the draft to all of the NATO countries for approval. Each country, in turn, would show the draft exercise to their defense ministries and their chief diplomats. Feedback would then flow back to the NATO cell, which would rewrite the script. The NATO military committee, made up of its defense representatives, would have final approval.
The scenarios often stretched the imagination. During one war game, NATO exercise planners proposed to rile its players by suggesting that Poland and Czechoslovakia would persecute German minorities in their own countries, a move that would almost certainly have triggered a vicious response by other Warsaw Pact countries, notably East Germany.
The game writers could get too glib. Would a Soviet leader, even after a hardline coup, style himself as “Generalissimo,” like Stalin did? Or would he continue to call himself “General Secretary”? The State Department thought the latter.
And occasionally, they scripted events that had already happened in the real world. The HiLEX exercise in 1977 initially called for Norway to establish a larger fishing zone around its territory, leading to immediate Soviet protests and aggressive naval exercises. But Norway had done that in real life, a year earlier, and the Soviets had simply moved their exercises farther away.8
The exercises were prime target for rival spies. Targeting the communication networks across which the military and nuclear consultations would flow was probably the highest tactical priority of Soviet and Warsaw Pact officers in the field. Most of these networks were secure, protected by scramblers or code machines. The members of NATO’s political committee would confer over a high-frequency system called NATO Secure Voice if they were not in the same room,9 which they never were.10
The nuclear execution messages themselves—the last line of communication—were protected by a theoretically unbreakable cipher; not only would the transmissions themselves be encrypted, but the alphanumerics within them would have been pre-enciphered before transmission. You could only decrypt them if you had the exact same codebooks provided by the National Security Agency, and getting those codebooks was next to impossible. They were protected like the nuclear material themselves, individually numbered, and required two-person control at all times.
But possessing the codebooks was not required to get a sense of what was going on. The length of messages was a clue to their content, as was their “loudness”—a receiver could figure out where it was sent from by analyzing the hills and valleys of voice or electronic prints. Voice operators themselves had ticks that could be used to discriminate among them. By November of 1983, the Soviet Union had thousands of analysts working solely on these patterns.
“In an emergency situation and when military exercises are taking place, operation of lines of communication may be switched to the ‘minimize’ system, in which the volume of ordinary telephone calls and telegraphic messages is sharply curtailed, and channels of communication cleared for transmitting urgent messages,” a secret Soviet spy cable noted.
“If this system is institution in countries which have nuclear weapons, especially if it [is] on a global scale, this may provide a serious warning signal that the adversary is preparing for R”—Ryan—preemptive attack. Only intercept stations could provide this warning. “In addition, changes in the method of operating communications systems and the level of manning may in themselves indicate the start of preparation for [sudden nuclear war].”11
The Emergency Message Authentication System (EMAS) console that spit out the nuclear control orders in Lee Trolan’s security shack was connected to a network of microwave towers called the Central European Line of Sight system, itself of a larger network called the European Command and Control Console System. It relied on patches in the German public telephone backbone to connect field sites with headquarters, so although transmissions could be rerouted in emergencies, the lines could be tapped. A backup system on the high-frequency band, Cemetery Net, would retransmit all nuclear release orders. NATO had one communications satellite in operation in 1983, although it wasn’t clear whether it was reliable enough to transmit nuclear orders. The European Command could use some of the frequencies controlled by the US Air Force’s main satellite communication constellation, but during a real war, those might not be available.12 If all worked perfectly, and it never did, commanders could choose one (or all) of six different ways to get Trolan the release order. If his unit had been dispersed to its secret field site, he would have the orders with him—perhaps a “time on target” authorization that instructed him to release the weapons at a certain point—or he would wait for the HF radios to squawk.
Getting the “release” order did not mean that Trolan’s nukes would be launched. It simply meant that the permission to launch them had been given to the tactical commander. The German Luftwaffe unit would receive the actual order to fire—or not fire—over entirely separate communication lines.13
The nuclear warhead itself was pretty safe; you could drop it on its nose and it wouldn’t go off. You could try to destroy it with explosives, or with a bullet, but the worst that would happen is that the explosives inside the warhead would detonate, killing everyone within 50 yards or so and leaking plutonium. No one ever managed to steal a warhead, but the arming and fusing mechanism were so precisely engineered by 1982 that a thief who didn’t belong to a nation-state wouldn’t know what to do with it and might well have used it as a giant doorstop.
The psychological pressure of nuclear custodial duties was hard enough for Trolan, but evaluators from SACEUR would press the limits of the system he had developed on base—and then push past it. You were expected to be perfect as you went through your wartime paces. Trolan dealt with the avalanche of expectations by rationalizing. If he could open up the safe just a second faster, punch the warheads to the Germans more quickly, then maybe, just maybe, he could forestall something.
The unit held Tac Evals—Tactical Evaluations—weekly. As a commander, he could shed his chem-bio-nuke gear and walk around with the evaluators. To bring home the realities of war, his team would practice the nuclear release procedures under unusual conditions. “Okay, the team commander is dead,” the evaluator might say. Or “communications with higher headquarters have been cut off.” How his guys responded to those deviations, within the confines of procedures, tested their tensile strength.
Pulling the nuke duty did not set up Trolan for a good army career, as his wife reminded him constantly. But his lack of professional ambition freed him to focus on the mission. The warheads themselves were fairly secure. But the site itself was a hellhole. He found it dilapidated. Fence fabric designed to keep nosy neighbors from watching the drills was easily torn off. Watchtowers that reminded him of Stalag 13 were in different states of disrepair. The German conscripts who manned the outer perimeter were not well trained and were unreliable. He was down staff, too. As captain, he was authorized to have two second lieutenants; during his tenure at the base, he only had one. That meant he had to work weekends, often. His salary was $1,000 a month.14
Trolan saw his first East German MiG fighter jet after just a few weeks at the base.
On a cloudless day, one flew across his field of view without any warning, leaving a loud guttural wake. The Group of Soviet Forces in Germany regularly tested NATO air defense readiness with these “accidental” flights; they used these flights to collect intelligence on the state of readiness at Trolan’s camp. The Soviets knew that their MiGs were pretty safe if they stayed within 30 kilometers of the border; standard NATO operating procedures called for an air defense stand-down when they first detected a stray. The US Air Force would scramble a combat air patrol to chase them away if they stayed too long. If the Soviet pilots ever did take fire during one of these “accidents,” they’d automatically know that NATO had enhanced its combat posture.15 The saber rattling jangled his nerves and reinforced Trolan’s belief that, at some point during his stay in Germany, he was going to see something big go down. He would often wonder if the stray MiG he saw was the one that would be carrying a missile aimed at his nuclear vault.
By 1983, Bernard Rogers, the SACEUR, had 7,000 individual nuclear warheads—most of them artillery shells—under his command.16 At the higher DEFCONs, the Defence Planning Committee of NATO had to sign off on any changes he wanted to make. At DEFCON 3, he could authorize the custodial brigades to “generate” them for wartime conditions, a process that took about two hours. (Once “generated,” the warheads were ready for immediate use.)
At DEFCON 2, he had the authority to order their dispersal to secret wartime sites;
At DEFCON 1, he alone could order the transmission of the nuclear release order, wearing his NATO hat, for non-US forces, or as commander of US forces in Europe, for US forces.
During the first stages of a war, or at the first register of an alert or a real change in the DEFCON status, the custodial units of these nukes would almost certainly be targeted for sabotage by the Soviet military special forces teams that had burrowed into West Germany. By intercepting these orders, they could “ignite the Soviets’ avowed doctrine of preemption.” During the volatile period where DEFCON 2 had been declared the command and control system would be at its most fragile, paradoxically, so—once again—NATO relied on what had to be exceptional intelligence in order to give these units the chance to prepare. Its General Defense Plan assumed as much.17
But Lee Trolan’s 501st AAD was told they’d get a few hours of warning at most. His team would practice emergency self-destruction, under the illusion that his ragtag mix of infantry and German conscripts could hold off an assault for two hours—that was how long it took to disable the nuclear warheads for good and destroy the codebooks. “We were taught to expect war every day,” Trolan said. They had secret-secret emergency self-destruct plans that weren’t even shared with the Germans: they could call in air strike from friendly A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft, or they could mate the warhead to the missile and deliberately create a fault in the firing circuit. If the short was created at precisely the right point, the missile would launch about 10,000 feet into the air, and then its C-4 would explode. So long as Trolan and his team hadn’t completed the procedure to enable the nuclear control module to fire, the explosion would rain down nuclear particles, but there would be live human beings below it.18