Command and Control

Childers spent six months studying Titan II operations at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Like all Titan II trainees, he carefully read the Dash-1, the technical manual that explained every aspect of the missile system. He spent hours in simulators, mock-ups of the control center where launch checklists and hazard checklists were practiced again and again. But he never saw a real Titan II missile until he pulled his first alert in Arkansas and stepped into the silo. It felt cold in there, like walking into a refrigerator, and the missile looked really big.

If an emergency war order arrived from SAC headquarters, every missile crew officer would face a decision with almost unimaginable consequences. Given the order to launch, Childers would comply without hesitation. He had no desire to commit mass murder. And yet the only thing that prevented the Soviet Union from destroying the United States with nuclear weapons, according to the Cold War theory of deterrence, was the threat of being annihilated, as well. Childers had faith in the logic of nuclear deterrence: his willingness to launch the missile ensured that it would never be launched. At Vandenberg he had learned the general categories and locations of Titan II targets. Some were in the Soviet Union, others in China. But a crew was never told where its missile was aimed. That sort of knowledge might inspire doubt. Like four members of a firing squad whose rifles were loaded with three bullets and one blank, a missile crew was expected to obey the order to fire, without bearing personal responsibility for the result.

After six weeks of training at Little Rock, Childers became the deputy commander of a Titan II site in 1979. The following year he was promoted, joining Mazzaro, Holder, and Fuller on an instructor crew. Unlike a typical crew that spent months or years pulling alerts at the same launch complex, an instructor crew brought trainees to different sites. On the morning of September 18, Childers and his crew were planning to bring a student, Second Lieutenant Miguel Serrano, to an overnight alert at Launch Complex 374-5, outside the town of Springhill. The crew always liked going to “4–5.” It was closer to the base than some of the other complexes, which meant they could get there faster and get home sooner the next day.

Predeparture briefings always started with a roll call. Once it was clear that every launch complex would be fully staffed, the wing’s senior officers talked to the eighty or so combat crew members about maintenance issues, new safety guidelines, changes in the emergency war order, and the latest weather report. The weather was a crucial factor in any maintenance work that involved fuel, oxidizer, or the reentry vehicle. Sometimes the briefings included a slide presentation on intelligence issues and the state of the world.

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On September 18, 1980, the world was unsettled. The president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, had announced the previous day that the treaty defining the border between his country and Iran was no longer in effect. Troops from the two nations were already fighting skirmishes in southern Khuzestan, Iran’s foreign ministry had condemned “the hostile invasion… by the Iraqi regime,” and a war over the disputed territory seemed imminent. In Tehran, fifty-two American hostages were still being held captive, almost a year after being seized at the U.S. embassy there. A failed rescue attempt by the U.S. military, during the spring of 1980, had prompted Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to remove the hostages from the embassy and scatter them at locations throughout the city. Televised images of Iranian crowds burning American flags and shouting “Death to the Great Satan!” had become a nightly routine, and the American government seemed powerless to do anything about it.

Meanwhile, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union had reached their lowest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan nine months earlier, deploying more than 100,000 troops in a campaign that many feared was just the first stage of a wider assault on the oil-producing nations of the Middle East. The United States had responded to the invasion by imposing a grain embargo on the Soviet Union and boycotting the recent Summer Olympics in Moscow. Neither of those punishments, however, seemed likely to force a Soviet withdrawal from Kabul. The influence of the United States seemed everywhere in decline. On September 17, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a prominent British think tank, issued a report suggesting that the Soviet Union’s new and more accurate ICBMs had made America’s ICBMs vulnerable to attack. The United States was falling behind not only in nuclear weaponry, the report claimed, but also in planes, tanks, and ground forces.