Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [77]
“I shunt be surprised,” Win said placidly, “if that Rushun wunt lookun the wrong way.”
While Win and I took the Soviet conquest of space calmly, America and the rest of the so-called Free World didn’t. Russian satellites! Russians in space! It was just a tiny step of the imagination to get to Russian satellite missiles in space! My God!
When Gagarin’s spacecraft passed over the U.S., it was less than two hundred miles up. No distance at all! Commuting distance. From that height, a tiny puff of rocket fuel could send all hell down on America’s head. The U.S. Paranoia Meter swung into its red zone.
Then the Russians created the biggest man-made explosion in the history of humanity (so far).
A few months after Yuri Gagarin had landed and confirmed the nonexistence of God, a Soviet Tupolev took off and flew north into the Arctic Circle. It carried, like a gross and ugly pregnancy — so big that the doors of its underbelly had been removed to accommodate it — a huge nuclear bomb. Five miles above the frozen wastes, the crew released it, suspended from a vast parachute. Two and a half miles from the surface of the earth, it exploded with a force of fifty megatons. Fifty million tons of TNT. Ten times the total power of all the explosives used by all sides in the six years of the Second World War. When it was detonated, it created a fireball five miles in diameter. Its base touched the ground and melted it. Its crown reached the altitude of the plane that had dropped it. It was like the invasion of a furious planet. It was like the ferocious roar of God (had He existed). Dropped onto the inhabited parts of the world, it would have stopped civilization in its tracks.
Which was all to the good. It meant that the U.S. and the Soviet Union each had the ability to annihilate the other. Therefore — in theory, at least — neither of these growling superpowers would dare attack the other, because to do so would result in its own immolation.
That was the basis of peace while I was growing up.
It was called Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD.
MAD has worked fairly well, I guess. I mean, here we both are, me writing, you reading, both of us breathing. It was delicate, though. The thing about MAD is that it depends upon powerful people being sane. That nobody sensible would actually want to convert to lifeless ash the hand that traced the lovely curve of Frankie’s breasts and belly in the gathering darkness of a Norfolk barn. Or turn to radioactive vapor a mother and child in Minsk or Memphis. Unfortunately, however, weapons of mass destruction tend to attract maniacs: men — it’s almost always men — who want to jab the red button and yell, “Take that, you heathen infidel bastards!” and sit in their revolving leather chairs in their underground lead-lined bunkers or caves, watching World War Three or the Final Jihad or whatever on their monitors. Watching Anchorage and Islamabad, Istanbul and Aberdeen flicker and vanish.
Unluckily, in 1962, America’s nuclear arsenal was under the command of just such a man.
DURING THE DAYS that followed the discovery of missiles on Cuba, the White House — and the Pentagon and the State Department — rapidly came to the boil. Further U-2 photographs revealed that as well as MRBM sites, the Russians and Cubans were building launchpads for IRBMs — intermediate-range ballistic missiles. These had twice the range of MRBMs; launched from Cuba, they could reach all of the U.S. apart from the far Northwest. The CIA wanted to send