As the Spiderweb satellites were radiation hardened, the one deployed remained operational, but it was far from its intended orbit, and we now had no means to transport it. It was effectively useless, and in any case, formed only a small part of the total system. At that point the President decided that it was probable that we would soon be in a hot war. He therefore authorized Defense to transmit a War Warning to all U.S. military commands. I carried out that order at 1550 hours. Here is the text of the document:
The Space Shuttle Enterprise was destroyed by a nuclear device of unknown origin at approximately 1545 hours U.S. Eastern Standard Time this day. It was engaged in a Defense Department mission. Please consider this a War Warning, and proceed to your designated alert level immediate.
This caused SAC and the U.S. Navy Submarine Command to go to One Alert status, and the other services to respond by entering their highest states of readiness. It was at this point that war became inevitable, but at the time there was still a sense of control in the NEACP. The President activated the hot line to Moscow. The telephone at their end was not answered. At last the President put the instrument down. “Gentlemen” he said, “I am afraid that the Premier will not talk to me.” We then instructed Ambassador Underwood in Moscow to call on the Premier at once and inform him that the United States was willing to negotiate a settlement of the question that had arisen between us. We further attempted communication by the hot line teletype on the chance that the telephone system might be out of order.
There had been a massive failure on the part of Western intelligence to correctly evaluate the Soviet response to the deployment of Spiderweb. This system, utilizing ultra-high-power laser beams, which targeted and destroyed warheads in space after they were ejected from their missile buses, was intended to render the United States invulnerable to land- or sea-based attacks. As the target acquisition system was optical, the Soviet low-radar-profile systems were no defenses. We did not know at the time how far in advance of existing Soviet weaponry this system was, or deployment would have been evaluated differently.
It was our stated intention before the deployment to begin dismantling the American offensive missile force once we were protected by the Spiderweb system. The Soviet leadership had given us no indication that they did not believe this, and had not even protested the deployment of Spiderweb.
In retrospect it is obvious that they were so far behind technologically that they were afraid to so much as whisper a protest, lest their weakness become known to us.
Although I was not a party to the decision to deploy Spiderweb, I am trying to come to grips with the fact that I was assisting in the management of a system of defense that had drifted into a state of extreme brittleness, in the sense that our own technological superiority was making our enemy increasingly desperate, and thus was actually causing the very war it was intended to prevent.
As per plan, the NEACP proceeded due south toward its intended operational area, approximately 100 miles SSW of the Cape Charles Lighthouse, over the Atlantic Ocean.
At 1555 the National Security Agency informed us that three Soviet satellites had begun unusual orbital maneuvers. NSA said that these were designated as unusually large communications relay satellites, and that there had been optical and electronic surveillance confirming this. However, this remarkable maneuver capability made them highly suspect. The President then ordered SAC to destroy these satellites, utilizing the ground-based Slingshot missiles, which are a classified weapons system. The Slingshots were fired. Less than two minutes passed before the threatening satellites were destroyed. But it was too late. We were soon informed that they had successfully ejected four large weapons, which were dropping to an altitude level of 100,000 feet over California, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Manitoba. The President made a sighing sound, as if he had been struck in the chest. We all knew what terrific damage the country was soon going to sustain.
It is far easier to create high-level electromagnetic energy in pulsed form than it is to shield against it.
We were aware of the classified studies on this. We knew that a vast number of electronic circuits in the United States would be damaged, most of them beyond easy repair. Even those shielded to resist a 50,000-volt pulse would be destroyed by the explosion of such large bombs in near space, as the pulse each generated would far exceed 50,000 volts.
At 1620, we watched our entire fighter escort, consisting of six F-15s of the 113 TAC Group out of Andrews, corkscrew into the sea. The Soviet EMP weapons had just detonated. The fighters’ shielding had clearly proved insufficient, and these aircraft had undoubtedly lost their on-board computers, without which the F-15 cannot fly. At the same time, most of the commercial airliners in the air over the United States and Canada began to crash or became dangerously disabled. Approximately three hundred million radio and television sets, and most radio and television stations, ceased to function. All microwave relay stations in the United States and Canada ceased to function, meaning that long-distance telephone and telemetric communications were no longer possible.
The ignitions of many automobiles built after 1977–78 were rendered inoperable. Many local power systems failed due to fused relays and subsequent overload. A staggering number of computers, and most of the automated factories used to manufacture them, were destroyed. Of course, repairs began at once, and some AM stations such as WOR in New York were on at low power within a week, but isolated cases of resiliency did little to ameliorate the overall effect of the pulse. Generally, the negative synergy of technological breakdown and economic chaos has meant very slow recovery from this damage. WOR, for example, ran for eight months, but was closed down when New York was abandoned.
Our NEACP aircraft was also damaged in a number of ways, and the pilot soon informed us that he would prefer to return to an over-land situation.
SAC called, using the still-functional UHF communications channel, which was designed to be proof against any level of EMP.
The President then ordered Case Dream Eagle to be activated. At 1625.12, six bomb-carrying satellites were armed to detonate automatically as they reached their target positions over the Soviet Union. To compensate for their greater state of EMP readiness, we generated an ambient voltage level of 120,000 volts with each bomb. This probably caused the destruction of ninety percent of all electronic devices in the USSR, as even their best shielding was not effective past 100,000 volts. Our own decision to limit protection to the 50,000-volt level had been the classic wargame mistake of assuming that the other side would hit us with whatever maximum force we could conveniently defend against, and not with the maximum force they could muster.
We now went to our emergency communications systems, which consisted of the UHF channel to SAC, and an infrared laser communicator to keep us in touch with Washington. These were effective devices, and the NEACP maintained its essential communications despite the enemy’s best efforts.
CIA came on the laser communicator with an evaluation to the effect that the Soviets would release their SS-18s within three to five minutes. The President then opened the code boxes for Minuteman and unlocked the switches. I remember that Mr. Forrest put his hands over the President’s hands, because the President was shaking.
The Defense Intelligence Agency then pulsed via UHF an analysis of the targeting of the Soviet weapons that had been rendered operational. While I was having this downloaded to screen for the President, he activated Minuteman. There were three flights containing a total of 56 warheads planned for the first wave. It was our intention to remove the Soviet government without excessive loss of life in the population. We intended to destroy Moscow, Leningrad, and Sevastopol, and hit the administrative capitals of all the republics. This would result in destruction of only eight percent of the population, but would cause the USSR to lose the means of government.