High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [87]
A changeable wooden sign—similar to the ones the Forest Service uses to warn that the fire danger today is MEDIUM—hung above the controls to announce the day’s STRATEGIC FORCES READINESS CONDITION. You might suppose it went to ultimate-red-alert (or whatever it’s called) only a few times in history. Not since the Cuban missile crisis, maybe. You would be wrong. Our guide explained that red-alerts come up all the time, sometimes triggered by a false blip on a radar, and sometimes (unbeknownst to crew members) as a test, checking their mental steadiness. Are they truly sane enough to turn that key and strike up nuclear holocaust? For twenty-two years, every activity and every dollar spent here was aimed toward that exact end, and no other.
“But only the President can issue that order,” Dave said. I believe he meant this to be reassuring.
We walked deeper into the artificially lit cave of the silo, down a long green catwalk suspended from above. The entire control chamber hangs on springs like huge shock absorbers. No matter what rocked and raged above, the men here would not be jostled.
On the catwalk we passed an eyewash facility, an outfit resembling a space suit, and a shower in case of mishaps involving toxic missile-fuel vapors. At its terminus the catwalk circled the immense cylindrical hole where the missile stood. We peered through a window into the shaft. Sure enough it was in there, hulking like a huge, dumb killer dog waiting for orders.
This particular missile, of course, is impotent. It has been relieved of its nuclear warhead. Now that the Titans have been decommissioned, they’re being used as launch missiles for satellites. A man in our group piped up, “Wasn’t it a Titan that blew up a few weeks ago, when they were trying to launch a weather satellite?”
Dave said yes, it was, and he made an interesting face. No one pursued this line of thought, although questions certainly hammered against the roof of my mouth. “What if it’d been headed out of here carrying a payload of death and destruction, Dave, for keeping Tucson safe and free? What then?”
Like compliant children on a field trip, all of us silently examined a metal hatch opening into the missile shaft, through which service mechanics would gain access to the missile itself. A sign on the hatch reminds mechanics not to use their walkie-talkies while inside. I asked what would happen if they did, and Dave said it would totally screw up the missile’s guidance system. Again, I felt strangely inhibited from asking very obvious questions: What does this mean, to “totally screw up the missile’s guidance system”? That the bomb might then land, for example, on Seattle?
The Pentagon has never discussed it, but the Titan missiles surrounding Tucson were decommissioned, ostensibly, because of technical obsolescence. This announcement came in 1980, almost a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall; it had nothing to do with letting down the nation’s nuclear guard. Make no mistake about this: in 1994 the U.S. sank $11.9 billion into the production and maintenance of nuclear missiles, submarines, and warheads. A separately allocated $2.8 billion was spent on the so-called Star Wars weapons research system. The U.S. government document providing budget authority for fiscal year 1996 states, “Although nuclear forces no longer play as prominent a role in our defense capability as they once did, they remain an important part of our overall defense posture.” It’s hard to see exactly how these forces are on the wane, as the same document goes on to project outlays of roughly $10 billion for the nuclear war enterprise again the following year, and more than $9 billion every year after that, right on through the end of the century. In Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Texas, the Great Plains, and many places we aren’t allowed to know about, real live atomic bombs stand ready. Our leaders are hard-pressed to pretend some foreign power might invade us, but we are investing furiously in