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A nuclear missile is inbound. What do you do?

From the Top of the Pile
Brian Zinchuk

It took me a while to get into this audiobook, Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, but eventually it got hold of me. I had two hours left in the nearly 21-hour long audiobook when the news from Hawaii broke.

If you were in Hawaii on Jan. 13 and had your cell phone on, you got a message you probably never knew could be sent to you.

“Emergency Alert – BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

If you had a heart condition, you probably were reaching for your nitroglycerin at that point.

While the governor of Hawaii was informed within two minutes it was a false alarm, it took 38 minutes for the rest of the population to start getting word. That’s two thirds of an hour of knowing the world not only could, but likely would, end any minute. After all, it was not a drill.

Thankfully, there was no ballistic missile inbound. With all the threats from North Korea, the most likely source of any attack these days, it sure seemed possible.

Curiously, the alert was missing a key phrase: nuclear. But that’s what anyone would think. And a hydrogen bomb, which North Korea recently tested, dropped on Pearl Harbour would make Dec. 7, 1941 look like a walk in the park.

Oddly enough, I’ve spent much of the last year listening to numerous audiobooks on the nuclear age and the Cold War. The interest stems from the fact the closest United States Air Force Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile silo is precisely 50.0 km from our front door, according to Google Maps. That’s close enough that a shock wave from an H-bomb would likely rattle our windows, never mind the fallout. And with Minot Air Force Base being one of only two remaining principle B-52 bases, it surely has numerous missiles aimed in its direction as well, in addition to all the nearby missile silos. If a nuclear war hit, everything south of 49 around here would glow in the dark, and we likely would, too.

The book I had completed just before Command and Control was called Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself - While the Rest of Us Die, by Garrett M. Graff. Very quaint book, given what happened in Hawaii. Basically, we all die.

Oh, the United States had plans, kinda, to save some people. But they gathered dust, fallout shelters were abandoned, and basically the plan was to just die. Only a select few would actually, hopefully, be saved.

For most of the Cold War, the various war plans of the United States and NATO boiled down to this: FIRE EVERYTHING! And do it in the first day. After that, it’s all over. There were no war plans after that.

Early in the cold war, a system of detectors that looked like coffee cans with a glass bubble on top were put on telephone poles across the country. They were designed to detect the flash of a nearby nuclear explosion and relay that signal to a headquarters before being wiped out itself. Eventually constellations of satellites went up to detect missile launches around the globe.

The Soviets had similar early warning satellites. And in 1983, those satellites told their defences that five American missiles had launched, and were on their way to the Soviet Union. It was only because of the cool-headedness of Lt.-Col. Stansilav Petrov, who figured it must be a false alarm, that the world didn’t end on Sept. 26, 1993, with a massive retaliation of Soviet missiles. I was eight and a half years old at the time.

Tensions were so high in the fall of 1983, the world could have ended many times. Yuri Andropov, the Soviet leader, had ordered all spies to watch for signs of impending attack – signs like mass slaughters of cattle. It was called Operation RYAN.

The Soviets, on a hair-trigger after American F-14s overflew one of their islands in the northwest Pacific earlier in the year, shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing all aboard. It strayed into restricted airspace. What most people don’t know is that the United States, when its fighters did that overflight, was operating three aircraft carriers together in that region in an effort to spook the Soviets. The only time so many carriers have gotten together, historically, was when America has been at war.

The climax was Able Archer 83, an annual war games in Germany that simulated all the communications that would take place in a conventional war in that theatre that would lead into a nuclear war. The Russians were expecting an attack any minute, because their own war plans called for using war games as a cover to initiate a war.

There were no cell phones back then to issue alerts. Just radio and TV. But there was a lot more fear, a fear most of the world has forgotten about.

Now, with this business of North Korean nukes, there is reason to fear again. What would you do if the missiles came?

Probably die.

Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.