In 1995 Russian early warning radar mistook a Norwegian weather rocket for a ballistic missile launched from an American submarine. And the risk of a nuclear exchange between the superpowers remains very real. The cold war has ended, but the thermo-nuclear infrastructures of the US and Russia are still in place. On one occasion, Jimmy Carter, the sanest of US presidents, left nuclear launch codes in his suit when it was sent to the dry cleaners. Nuclear weapons security will always be a human issue – at all levels. But when the PALs were installed, the Strategic Air Command had all the codes set to 00000000 so that the locks would not impede a quick launch in a crisis. McNamara ordered that PAL locks (Permissive Action Links) be fitted to all ICBMs. The worst nightmare for US defence secretary Robert McNamara was the unauthorised launch of a nuclear weapon. The fact that Britain and western Europe were regarded by some in the Pentagon as expendable pawn sacrifices was the great unmentionable of the cold war.įifty years on, what lessons can be drawn from the Cuban missile crisis? One is that governments lose control in a crisis.
It seems likely that America would have suffered far fewer casualties than its European allies.
The very reason that Khrushchev sent missiles to Cuba was because the Soviet Union lacked a credible long range ICBM deterrent against a possible US attack. What would have happened to the US itself is uncertain. Meanwhile, the Pentagon's SIOP, Single Integrated Operational Plan – a doomsday scenario that echoed Dr Strangelove's orgiastic Götterdämmerung – would have hurled 5,500 nuclear weapons against a thousand targets, including ones in non-belligerent states such as Albania and China.
The next wave of bombs would have wiped out "economic targets", a euphemism for civilian populations – more than half the UK population would have died. The first targets would have been Moscow, London, the airbases of East Anglia and troop concentrations in Germany. If the B-59's torpedo had vaporised the Randolf, the nuclear clouds would quickly have spread from sea to land.
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