Before the order to release the nukes came in, the sun had set over the dry pines of the patch of land called the Fulda Gap in West Germany, the autumn cold was hard, and Captain Lee Trolan, commander of the 501st Army Artillery Detachment, a nuclear weapons custodial brigade, tried to keep warm and focus on the intricate set of procedures he was shortly to execute.
Three hours had elapsed since the start of the “special weapons” portion of a major North Atlantic Treaty Organization military exercise called Able Archer 83, an annual dry run, practicing for what would happen during a real war: when NATO’s nuclear warheads would be transferred, upon orders from higher authorities, from their American custodians to their foreign counterparts across Europe.
With only about thirty American infantrymen and weapons technicians, and a smaller, rotating crew of nineteen- and twenty-year-old German conscripts, Trolan controlled enough nuclear firepower to destroy the advancing armies of the Warsaw Pact (named after a treaty of friendship between the Soviets and her allies in 1955) as well as cities, the countryside, and who knows what else. He was often kept in the dark about his targets.
Trolan’s base jutted out from the eastern edge of a tiny town called Killianstädten. The missile launch and radar site were situated a half a kilometer south, straddling a rural road that led to a smaller town named Mittelbuchen. The Germans often placed the missiles in the middle of working farmers’ cornfields at least a half a kilometer down the way from any township. They had become prominent features of West Germany’s Cold War landscape. You couldn’t get from there to here without seeing one.
Trolan and a lieutenant were locked inside the 501st’s crypto shack, tucked inside of a metal barn, its exterior patrolled by military policemen with automatic weapons. Two sets of cyclone fences guarded its perimeter. The Germans who manned them also ran the kitchen.
The boss of these Western forces, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, General Bernard Rogers, hated having to “mortgage” the defense of Europe to a nuclear response.1 This meant that the numbers of conventional forces his armies were destined to face were just too overwhelming for nuclear weapons not to be contemplated as a first response. The placement of those weapons on German (and Polish and Italian and Dutch) soil was Europe’s existential burden.
During war, the Warsaw Pact armies would attack with 90 divisions of troops and tanks; NATO would have 40, at most, because they had spent the past decade focusing on better technology and doctrine, while Eastern Europe, led by the Soviets, churned out war machines, fueled by a conviction that might would force NATO to submit early. For NATO, then, nuclear weapons were the gap fillers. Americans back home, conditioned to assume that only the adversary or the devil on his shoulder would usher in Armageddon,2 probably did not know that, by the reckoning of both West and East, the first nation to break the nuclear taboo would be their own, using warheads, very likely, held by the unit that Trolan commanded. For the past forty years, the war plans of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact predicted the first volley of nuclear weapons would come from the NATO forces to ward off a crushing Warsaw Pact air and ground invasion—an “assumed penetration into the corps area” was the official term.
As the military gears churned, a parallel political process would begin in NATO, because you couldn’t do anything with a nuclear weapon unless a lot of really important non-military people agreed. These procedures were complicated, and they had to be rehearsed, in the open, and regularly. In 1975, with an eye toward demonstrating resolve, NATO’s defense committee decided to unify its separate fall exercises by merging them under an umbrella called Autumn Force. Each year, the final exercise in the series would rehearse the nuclear weapons release procedures themselves. It was given the name Able Archer. Able was a random adjective allocated by a Pentagon computer to Allied Command Europe’s forces for exercises and special projects; Archer was picked off a list of nouns.3
At the start of the Able Archer exercise, some of those warheads, W-31s, cylinders with the diameter of a bicycle wheel and the length of a peacock feather, had been mated to the bodies of their delivery units, the aging but potent, wing-shaped Nike Hercules missiles. Others rested in a below ground vault about 60 feet from the crypto shack.
If Trolan ever received a type of message known as an Emergency War Order, he and his crew would unlock the Permissive Action Link (PAL) that disabled the nuclear triggering mechanism, plug in an arming pin, and then transfer a live missile down range, to the custody of a German anti-aircraft unit, the 2nd Battery/23 FLARAK battalion. The Luftwaffe controlled the launch complex and their radars and had a commanding, unobstructed view of the surrounding countryside, into the city of Hanau, with its huge army base, over Frankfurt, Germany’s transport hub, and to the east, with the Fulda plains merging into the border with East Germany.
A Nike-Hercules missile would shoot skyward at a rate of more than 1,400 miles per hour, dropping its booster after just 5 seconds; it could travel as high as 9 miles, if need be. The warheads would home in on radio frequency pulses to find their targets, and then angular momentum, gravity, and drift would take over. The Nike Hercs had an effective range that allowed them to target huge chunks of massed armored cavalry inside East Germany. Mainly, they were designed to immolate the incoming enemy air force, like the hulking Russian T-95 Bears, or their sleek Tu-22 Backfire bombers.
A speaker box chirped. The red light on a green phone flashed. “Message incoming,” his communications sergeant called out.
So it begins, Trolan thought. Everyone in the small command post tensed. The base was on alert; all the soldiers sweated in their full wartime kit, trucks were fueled, burping exhaust, and idling as the Nike Hercules missiles stood erect in their launchers.
Trolan’s 501st Army Artillery Detachment had to rehearse for war; these exercises were their only real chance to simulate at least some of the conditions they might face. The chain of command could scrutinize the speed and accuracy with which they carried out their assigned tasks.
A Telex next to the phone spit out a piece of paper. Trolan tore it off, sat down, pushed it next to his codebook, and began the elaborate fifteen-minute process of decryption. The preamble he decoded flagged it as an Emergency Action Message from the Commander in Chief of US forces in Europe, the CINCEUR. The CINCEUR, known in his NATO role as SACEUR, could authorize him to release the weapons. The CINC wore several hats, depending upon which part of the military he happened to be commanding or which country he happened to be from; the hats all endowed him with different powers, the product of forty years of compromises between the fragile democracies of Europe, who craved the protection afforded by NATO as much as they chafed at its martial prerogatives and argued about its priorities.
As Trolan began to decipher the instructions, he grimaced, then stopped, dropping his grease pencil. The message was too short, by half. In the lingo nuclear weapons officers used, it broke, meaning that someone who had the up-to-date codes had encoded it, and Trolan, after decoding, could read it. But the format was not right. By rule, if the format was off, he had to disregard the message.
The system of nuclear command and control was barely translucent even to Trolan, who was a cleared, trained, certified end user. Messages had to get from a dozen places to a thousand more, some of them deep underwater, some of them in the air, both realms where physics and logistics made it impossible for a commander to just pick up a phone and bark out an order. Nuclear messages were at once uncannily simple to understand even as they were frustratingly hard to compose. Every nuclear user around the world had to be on the same page, literally, so that they could decode the messages offline; that is, after they’d received it over whatever radio or telegraphic source they were using. The messages, therefore, had to be short; they had to be encrypted; they had to include some authentication so that Trolan and his colleagues would know that the instruction was legit, and above all, they had to be intelligible. A properly formatted message was essential. An incorrectly formatted message during real war could mean the difference between thousands of lives saved and millions of lives lost.
So, it was a big, big deal to Lee Trolan that some idiot had just sent him a message that was formatted incorrectly; it used an old format, actually, not the new one he had just spent three days at NATO school learning. Maybe, he thought, someone at HQ had screwed up—one hell of a mistake, right in the middle of the biggest exercise of the year.
Trolan pulled a phone to his ear and pushed a button that connected him with the duty officer in Heidelberg. He gave the colonel on the other end of the line the date and time of the message and the preamble that flagged it.
“Captain, I didn’t send out that message,” the colonel insisted.
Trolan held his composure. Maybe there had been a shift change, and maybe the colonel hadn’t been briefed on all the traffic.
“No, sir, I’m pretty sure you did.”
No, the colonel insisted. He was looking through the logbooks. “I don’t know what to tell you, Captain, but we didn’t send that message.”
When Trolan hung up, his mind began to cycle through the possibilities. How could a message like that, an EAM, be sent to his unit without coming from headquarters? Was it possible? The sender would need to have access to the microwave towers that shot beams of energy into his crypto shack. And he’d have to have stolen the updated NATO cipher book. Aside from the Emergency Action technicians who manually encrypted the messages in their secure command bunkers, no one was even supposed to see such highly classified cryptologic material. When those codebooks left their safes, two people had to have their eyes on them at all times.
So, this message was more than just an anomaly; it was an impossibility.
At this moment, as he began to lead his team through the most critical phase of the most sensitive and demanding nuclear release exercise of the year, something or someone certainly foreign and probably dangerous was pushing into the regimented and secure world that Lee Trolan controlled.
At around the same time that Lee Trolan huddled in his shack awaiting his release, General Colonel Ivan Yesin, the commander of the SS-20 Pioneer regiments for the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, spent the night in a special bunker somewhere in the hills outside Moscow.
If the order came, Yesin’s men could have launched the missiles, their warheads aimed at the NATO bases like Lee Trolan’s, in 2 minutes and 30 seconds.
Yesin had served in the Soviet military since the 1960s, through the Cuban Missile Crisis and numerous other scares.
He had never felt closer to war.