“The Incident at Laredo”: faulty assessment of nuke en route from Cuba

“Ralston! Turn up the damn air conditioning. It’s getting hot in here.”

The room was uncomfortable. Eighty-five outside at two in the afternoon, and all those vacuum tubes in the amps were glowing hot. The radar control room had just the one door and no windows.

Eric Finlander wiped his brow on his sleeve and put his glasses back on.

He’d been on tough jobs for G.E. before, but the one in Laredo was right up there with the head shakers. The Air Force flew him down from the Shemya Island radar station in the Bering Sea with the big CRT monitor four days ago.

Except for a couple of short nights at the Sands Motel, he hadn’t got much sleep for a week.

When he took off from the air strip in the Aleutians on a dark afternoon, the breeze was sprinkling grains of graupel on his parka. In South Texas 16 hours later and 70º warmer, he’d seen a roadrunner cross the sun-bleached road through the mesquite and cactus that took him to the radar station. At the station’s gate, somebody had draped a dead rattlesnake over the chain-link fence. An omen. But of what?

No wonder he was hot.

A couple of days before, when the October heat wave hit the mid-90s, Finlander sent a driver into town to buy some cotton clothes. The wool pants and Pendleton hunting shirt were impossible in the heat. The Air Force kid came back from Don Antonio’s with a damn guayabera. Finlander was dressed for hot weather, but now he looked like a guy at a wedding carne asada. The MPs laughed.

First you have a close call. A truck comes over the hill on the wrong side of Highway 59. But you both swerve, and it’s just a close one.

You rocket along on the adrenaline rush. Once you see you made it, your heart slows down, and you can catch your breath again. Relief washes over you. The cold sweat and knot in your stomach disappear.

When your life was hanging in the balance, you gasped a forbidden word you learned as a child. It could have been your dying word. It echoes in your ears.

Next thing you know, you are asking “What if…?”

The phone rings again.

“Hello, Laredo? Major Phibbs at NORAD. The FPS-17 up yet?”

It was hard enough turning a 30-foot radar antenna 180º and getting the tilt angle recalibrated. Connecting the mismatched monitor and cables cannibalized from the Alaska unit was harder.

“Of course it isn’t working yet. Whaddya think we are? Magicians?”

Finlander never had liked flag officers. Four years as a non-com doing radar all over hadn’t given him a very good impression of them.

“Okay, I haven’t seen the new Distant Early Warning FPS-50’s in Alaska and Greenland. But I’ve set up and repaired plenty of FPS-17s. Officers don’t even know how to turn the damn radar on. Us trade school guys keep it running.”

When he didn’t re-up, it was easy to get a job as a G.E. contractor for the Air Force. G.E. made whatever radar equipment RCA and Raytheon didn’t. But they’d never been in a rush like this. No planning. Just figure it out as you go. And hurry up!

That must be how he ended up in Laredo on this big conversion job with no spare parts and without the operating manual.

“An accidental nuclear war could begin, in theory, in three different ways: an unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, an accidental launch or detonation of a weapon, or a false warning that an enemy attack was imminent or actually under way. The frightening specter of all three scenarios appeared in the U.S. nuclear alert operations during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

 Scott Sagan, Limits of Safety, p. 117.

Whoa! An accidental nuclear war?

Finlander adds a new 220 circuit to the main panel. Those 200 vacuum tubes in the radar controller draw a hell of a lot of amps. And make a hell of a lot of heat, too.

“Ralston! Did you turn up the air conditioner?”

Time passes, but you keep returning to imagine your near-death scene.

It’s easy to forget what happened that saved your life, the swerve out of the other car’s way. You didn’t crash. Why is it so forgettable and you keep coming back to visualize the head-on collision on the Freer highway?

What a lot of time thinking about things that didn’t happen.

As soon as he heard about the Russians putting missiles on Cuba, Finlander could have told you there’d be a panic at the Defense Department. In his Air Force days and at G.E. running FPS-17s across Alaska and Canada, every radar station was aimed north. Everything was set up to track Russian missiles attacking from over the pole.

They were all built on permafrost. If those were freezer jobs, Laredo was an oven job.

When we remember a wish that didn’t come true, we talk about fantasy or regret, or a near-miss.

“What if I’d bought a thousand shares of Apple in December 1980. Today I’d have $156,800,000!” Or, “If only I’d apologized…”

Close call on the other hand is for talking about disasters avoided. “That was a close call. I almost won the lottery!” is nonsense.

Things that never happened exist in our imagination. Which is also the place where novels, operas, tragedies, comedies, movies, and epic poetry live. A lot of life is spent consuming and imagining fictions.

 “The official mission of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) is to provide ‘timely, reliable, and unambiguous warning’ of an attack on the United States and Canada. This command faced a severe challenge after the October 1957 Sputnik launch, as the Soviet Union demonstrated a capability to deploy intercontinental range ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The priority Washington officials placed on getting reliable warning of a Soviet missile attack can be seen in their immediate willingness to spend unprecedented sums of money on the BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) radars. Congress acted quickly and… eventually authorized almost a billion dollars for the system.” Limits of Safety, p. 118

Finlander smirked. “What a joke! None of the genius war gamers ever thought of incoming missiles from the south? The bow ties at RAND think they’re so smart. How smart was it for the eggheads to forget about Cuba until the missiles were already there?”

“In October 1962, two of the three scheduled BMEWS stations (at Thule, Greenland and Clear, Alaska) were in operation… Yet, when the Soviet missiles in Cuba were discovered by the United States, a serious deficiency became immediately obvious: despite the enormous sums spent on the BMEWS radars facing north, the United States had absolutely no capability in place to detect a missile launched from the south, from Cuba. Washington policymakers had simply never anticipated that the Soviets would outflank the BMEWS radars in this manner… In response, the Air Force quickly initiated an emergency Cuban Missile Early Warning System (CMEWS) program, code-named Operation Falling Leaves, to provide tactical warning in the event that the Soviet missiles in Cuba were launched.”

Limits of Safety, p. 122

The phone is ringing again.

“Hey, Fin!”

It was the Ralston kid from G.E. headquarters in Pittsfield. He’d come down with the technicians who were going to operate the radar.

“The brass at NORAD want to know when the techs can start using the screen monitor.”

“If they’d stop interrupting me with all the phone calls…” Finlander groaned. “Tell Colorado to kiss my grass. I’m working on it.”

The contract flunkeys had already screwed up a couple of times. The night before, Ralston almost fried the CRT from Shemya. The fool was screwing around while Finlander was catching some Z’s back at the motel and crossed some wires at 3 a.m.

“Lucky the circuit breaker cut the juice in time. If it hadn’t… Don’t even want to think about it.”

When we imagine the future, it’s either to worry about health or money, to daydream about fun, or to make up better versions of ourselves. It is comforting to think, “If I stop eating junk food, I’ll lose weight and be healthier.” That New Year’s resolution is a possibility …until around mid-January when you backslide into ice cream spooned out of the tub while you watch Netflix. At that point, quitting junk food has become a counterfactual. Then you can only say, “If I had stopped eating junk food, I’d’ve…” But I didn’t.

The magic of fantasy diets, perennial near-misses. Another of the alternative lives we imagine for ourselves.

The Air Force hadn’t had time to put together a crew from the 14^th Missile Warning Squadron of ADCOM, so there were no soldiers to watch the radar.

What if I were President of the United States? Ha ha ha! Now that’s a hilarious counterfactual. Obviously, there are no limits on how far-fetched what-if questions can be.

The first and most important Falling Leaves operation took place at the Air Force Systems Command FPS-49 radar installation at Moorestown, New Jersey. On October 24, the Air Defense Command assumed operational control of the radar, immediately turned the antenna south to face Cuba, and began to operate it, with the assistance of the RCA contract personnel, as an active warning system twenty-four hours a day.

Limits of Safety, p. 123

If you are the speculative type, you may have wondered “What if my parents (or grandparents, or any other ancestor in the headwaters of your DNA) had never met?”

For the time being, it would be just the RCA employees in New Jersey and the G.E. civilians in Laredo keeping their eyes on the skies over the Straits of Florida.

“Too bad nobody remembered to bring the two binders of operating instructions along with the equipment,” Finlander thought. “The Air Force jerks will probably blame me.” The techs who’d be operating the missile radar would have to rely on what they remembered from other installations — or make it up as they went along.

And if something broke, too bad. No spare parts.

“Hah! If something breaks… The fan is spinning, and I know what’s going to hit it.”

Why we spend so much of our time imagining answers to what-if questions is less clear than the fact that we do.

To provide independent and redundant sensors, the Air Defense Command also immediately proceeded to alter two other radars and turned them to face Cuba. At Laredo, Texas, an Air Force MPS-17 space-tracking radar was shifted to the ballistic missile warning mission after real-time radar display equipment was sent from the Shemya, Alaska, sensor site. The Laredo radar became operational on the night of October 28-29, and was considered to be a backup system for the more capable Moorestown radar. It, too, had to overcome significant operational problems. Several outages were caused by lack of spare parts and a failure to send the maintenance instructions for the display equipment sent from Shemya. Inadequately trained contractor crews manned the control center throughout the crisis. Most importantly there was no capability for a rapid and accurate test of the Laredo system.

 Limits of Safety, p. 125

The pressure was wearing everyone down, and the whole crew was way past exhausted.

Anyway, the Ralston kid was a bit too jumpy for this kind of work. He always had another cup of coffee in his hand and a jittery look in his eyes. “What the hell kind of medal does he think he’s going to get for being gung-ho?”

“If we had another week to turn the antenna around and set up the live monitor, the job wouldn’t be a big deal. Hell, we could even test it. But oh no, this one has to be finished yesterday. I mean, Jeez!”

Alternate versions of what might have happened and of who we might have been (but aren’t) are part of being human – and having the faculty of imagination. My poodle Coco never asks, “What if I obeyed instead of…?” or “What if I lived among wolves?” or “What if I could fly?”

Once ADCOM found out that the Russians had sneaked nuclear missiles into Cuba, they realized that there were only days –maybe only hours – to get their radar aimed south. Laredo and two other radar sites would be the only warning the U.S. would have of a surprise nuclear attack from 90 miles off the tip of Florida.

Because of the the extremely close range of the Soviet missiles in Cuba to the United States, the Falling Leaves operators expected to receive only five minutes warning, and perhaps less, between detection of a medium-range ballistic missile in flight and its impact in the southern United States.

Limits of Safety, p. 123

Finlander kept thinking as he connected wires and checked circuits, “Five minutes after launching, a Cuban ICBM will be incinerating Washington, D.C. Maybe only three or four. Just seconds.”

 “Not enough time for anything to be done about it. Warning? What warning? Everything will happen way too fast for any evacuations or deployments. They’ll be lucky if they get President Kennedy out of the Oval Office and into the basement of the White House before a strike. Get him on board the B-52 White House? Not even close.”

“This cock-eyed job doesn’t make any sense. How can they call this an early warning system? Early? Yeah, right! What kind of half-assed warning is 200 seconds?”

“No wonder the NORAD headquarters brass up at Ent AFB in Colorado are in a panic,” Finlander thought as he moved the display into place on the table.

In 1961, all around America, small, cylindrical canisters were being installed at the top of Western Union telegraph poles. The canisters were colored white and topped with a Fresnel type lens, the same refractive technology that allowed lighthouses to beam light far from its source… In the case of a nuclear attack, they would provide the first alert to the military’s nuclear commanders, signaling where the Soviet Union had hit the United States.

The “Bomb Alarm System,” designed and implemented by Western Union, wasn’t a secret, but it was unobtrusive enough that unless you were looking for it, you wouldn’t know it was there. Operational from 1961 to 1967, it was a part of the hidden infrastructure that was rapidly built to allow the U.S. military to respond to nuclear attacks — an extensive communications and monitoring system that presaged today’s networked world. “Bomb Alarm Sensor System 201-A,” Western Union Technical Review 17, January 1963.

When there were only minutes between launch in Cuba and atom bombs exploding above American cities or military installations, there would be no timely warning. The little white Bomb Alarm System cylinders mounted on poles would be the first indication of an attack, not radar.

Cosmologists get an easy “Wow!” every time they remind us in a TED Talk that if any of the underlying constants of our universe were ever so slightly different, the universe we know would not exist. If every neutron in the universe were not precisely 1.00137841870 times heavier than the protons, there would be no hydrogen. No hydrogen, no stars. No stars, no possibility of life. There are six of these improbably just-right constants in our universe.

You and I can call it the “Goldilocks Universe.” Metaphysicians call it the “Fine-Tuned Universe.”

From our armchairs, we idlers wonder, “What if the strong nuclear force were not what it is and there were no atoms in the universe, but only particles?” “What if there were no hydrogen to power the sun’s heat and light engine?”

What-if questions persist for some people.

The AN-FPS 49 over in Moorestown, New Jersey that RCA built had an 84-foot wide antenna, but it was easy. It had been built to display space objects live on CRT TV screens. All they had to do in New Jersey was to swing the 112-ton antenna around toward Havana and turn it back on.

Even so, they had a close call.

A tired and frustrated Finlander had heard about the mishap in New Jersey. “The right hand has got no idea what the left one is doing. What were they thinking at Cape Canaveral? Test-firing a Titan II over Cuba in the middle of a crisis? No wonder it showed up on the screens at Moorestown as a launch from Cuba.”

On the afternoon of October 26, before the second sensor site was available to provide redundant warning information, a Titan II ICBM was fired on a test launch toward the south Atlantic. The Moorestown radar operators had not been anticipating this missile launch when, suddenly, it appeared on their display screens… The radar operators recall in interviews that they were, quite naturally shocked when a missile suddenly appeared on their radar screen. It took a few tense minutes, in the crisis control room at Moorestown, for Air Force duty officers and contract civilian personnel to recognize, as the radar began to show the missile heading southeast, that this was “a friendly” missile with no impact point predicted inside the United States. 128-29

As it was, by the time Moorestown figured it out, a real attack would have reached its targets. There were many white knuckles in American command centers.

The second radar was on an Air Force base in Thomasville, Alabama. It was crappy, outdated equipment, but at least it was close to Cuba.

The Laredo station cost $1.2 million to build in 1956. It had been state-of-the art, but radar technology was developing so fast, six years later it wasn’t good enough for Operation Falling Leaves. It was built as a satellite and rocket tracker facing west, toward the White Sands launch site. Laredo data was saved for analyzing later: it couldn’t track missile launches live.

That’s why Eric had to race to Laredo with the monitor and cables so it could be the third radar of the improvised triangle.

You’ve seen the classic Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. In the Frank Capra film, Jimmy Stewart plays a character named George Bailey, who, on a snowy Vermont Christmas Eve, depressed with business failures and personal problems, stands on a bridge contemplating suicide.

You remember the rest: how the bumbling angel played by Henry Travers, pulls George back from the railing to show him what life would be like if he’d never been born. George’s kind guardian angel guides him on a bleak tour of a small town gone sordidly wrong. Without all of George Bailey’s unappreciated but essential contributions to life in Bedford Falls, homes are broken, institutions fail, lives are ruined, and, in general, everything has fallen apart.

The tear-jerker ending has George Bailey stepping back from throwing himself off the bridge because he has seen how much of the good in Bedford Falls depends on him.

The what-if plot mechanism that pushes It’s a Wonderful Life forward to its final catharsis came from a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern called “The Greatest Gift.” The story had been written in 1943 as a Christmas present for family and friends. When Stern tried to sell it to magazines, the eight-page story was rejected. Just like George Bailey, “The Greatest Gift” needed the intervention of an angel, in its case a Hollywood writer who happened upon a second-hand copy. The story and its main character were both unappreciated but eventually recognized for the gifts they are.

What if no one in the film industry ever saw the almost forgotten little Christmas story?

Once you start noticing them, you run into what-if stories everywhere you look.

One of the Air Force MP’s hanging out in the control building has a radio tuned in to KVOZ.

He makes a face, eyes wide. “Holy Shinola! The Russians just shot down a U2 over Cuba!”

Eric thought, “This is how you start a war. What’s gonna be Kennedy’s next move?”

He wastes no time on the question, no time for this right now. He re-checks the computer control’s connection to the radar antenna out in the dome. Then he checks one more time the bundle of tangled wires from the wall to the monitor on his desk. The cables are running across the floor in a jumble somebody could trip over. Time to straighten it up later.

It looks good. He flips the switch.

The monitor flickers, and he can see on the black-and-white screen the beacon’s arc beaming southeast over Hebbronville and Falfurrias, across the Gulf of Mexico toward Cuba.

It works. Finlander hadn’t been working on FPS-17s all these years for nothing.

Historians do what-if questions, too. They imagine hypothetical scenarios like “What would have happened if the Confederate States had won the Civil War?” Or, “What if the indigenous peoples of the Americas had the same immunity to smallpox that the Europeans had?”

“What would have happened if Cristóbal de Olea hadn’t heroically saved Hernán Cortés’ life in the assault on Xochimilco in 1521?” Without Cortés, would the Aztecs have prevailed? Or was the Conquista inevitable?

“What if Lee Harvey Oswald had missed that afternoon in Dallas?” Would there have been a war in Vietnam?

In college history department offices, they call this parlor game counterfactual history.

The tracker is working. But Finlander growls, “Crap! The antenna is aimed too high. Those blips must be low-orbit satellites. Distracting. The missile watchers are going to need the radar to track a lot closer to the horizon. Down where the missiles would show up first, not higher when they’re already half-way to Washington.”

Finlander calls out, “Hang on, guys. Hold it. Shut the system down. We’re getting too much upper atmosphere stuff.”

There goes the phone again.

“NORAD here. This is Major Baxter. When will the radar be available? We’ve just gone on DEFCON 2. All we have is Moorestown. Let’s go. We need the Laredo angle. You got the squawk line open?”

“Sorry, slight delay here. The antenna is aimed too high. I’ve got guys on the tower cranking it down a few notches. When we’re back on, I’ll call in on the squawk line.”

The need for immediate warning of any missile launched from Cuba was considered so pressing that a live telephone voice link, a so-called ” squawk line,” was created between the three Falling Leaves sensors and the NORAD Command Center, pp. 131-32.

Eric isn’t just sweating from the crummy air conditioning.

Things must be heating up at the White House and the Pentagon. They’ve turned up the burners under the officers in the Colorado.

The futility of the radar warning system is driving Finlander crazy. “Ridiculous! To think you can catch a Cuban missile launch in time to do anything about it.”

Ralston calls from outside, “Eric! Eric! They got the antenna tilt fixed. The guys are out of the dome. Quick! Turn it back on.”

“Okay. Take it easy. Calm down.”

Eric checks again before turning the system back on. The kid is too jazzed up. You have to do this stuff like a slow dance. Ralston looks like he’s rocking to the beat of “Good golly, Miss Molly.” Way too frantic. That’s how you make the worst mistakes.

Novelists play with what-if questions, too. Robert Harris’ bestseller, Fatherland, is an imagined answer to the question “What if the Germans had won World War II?” There are so many of these novels, such bricks-and-mortar bookstores as still exist have a shelf for them. It’s called “Alternative Histories.”

What-if scenarios are very common in science fiction. Phillip K. Dick wrote his Man in the High Castle during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This novel imagines what the US would be like if it were defeated in World War II and occupied by Germany and Japan. It won the Hugo Award for best sci-fi novel in 1963.

Any more delays and NORAD would call G.E. corporate military liaison, and he’d be out on the street. Not that it would matter much if anyone launched a missile.

Finlander brings the radar system back online one component at a time. Circuit breakers don’t blow. The monitor comes last. There it is.

“Good. We can see near the horizon now.”

He nods in the direction of the phone. Time to alert NORAD in Colorado that Laredo is online, watching southeast.

Ralston grabs the phone, “NORAD, Laredo. We’re up! Watching Cuba now.”

“Okay, Laredo. Turn on the squawk line and leave it on. You see anything, say so right away. We’re listening. Don’t sit on it. If there’s a strike, we only have seconds to get the President and Cabinet evacuated.”

Eric rips open the TOP SECRET envelope, picks up the yellow phone, and dials the emergency number. He connects to the conference call on the shielded phone lines that link the other radar stations and NORAD HQ.

“NORAD, Laredo here. We’re monitoring everything coming up from Cuba. We’ll stay on the squawk line.”

At this point Eric Finlander is done with the Laredo job.

It’s easy to think that the biggest difference between facts and counterfactuals is just that the former happened and the latter didn’t.

It’s not.

A greater difference is one of scale. At every moment of life there is only a unique way that things actually occurred. There can be some differences of perspective or interpretation and, sure, some memories diverge among participants. But the number of events that might have happened is infinite, — or close to it. For everything I’ve done, at every fork in the road and in every choice, there are implied many more things I didn’t do.

Most of the alternatives are trivial. I’m drinking a cup of black tea. I could have been drinking a cup of green tea or coffee, but I’m not. With milk, not lemon. I’m not spilling it on my shirt, but I could have. It’s in a ceramic cup, not a porcelain one. I’m picking it up with my left hand, not my right. And so forth, multiplying alternatives without end. What-if questions about these insignificant things are mostly meaningless.

Others on the vast list of counterfactuals are not trivial at all: I didn’t fall down the stairs, but I could have. I didn’t borrow $100,000 to bet in Vegas on a losing team in a football game. I didn’t threaten an elected official. A big one: I didn’t die in my sleep, but what if?

The submerged 90% of an iceberg has nothing on counterfactuals.

The true ratio what actually happened to what might have is closer to 1 / ∞.

The cobbled-together satellite tracker in Laredo is now scanning east.

Sure, they should’ve run the test diagnostics on the hacked system. Maybe there won’t be time to do anything about it, but the monitor should show anything fired from Cuba. Turn it over to Ralston and the crew’s eyeballs. Too bad they haven’t done the radar operator training.

The only Air Force people at the station are four MPs and a lieutenant. If they can just get through this showdown, they’ll eventually get some servicemen from a Missile Warning Detachment trained and then they can turn it over to them. Ralston and the G.E. guys are looking forward to checking out of their motel rooms and saying good-bye to the menu at the Western Grill.

No spare parts for the FPS-17. If anything blows, the whole system shuts down. Offline. Kaput.

But Finlander will be gone by then. “Pretty good for a rush job,” he is thinking. “Time to head back to the Sands, maybe have a drink at the Matador Club, and get some sleep.”

It was Sunday, October 28. Monday would be a good day to think about whether he wanted to keep doing radar for General Electric.

An hour later, as he worked on a second tequila sour, Finlander forgot about Ralston’s nerves. Not his problem. Just like the corrida de toros across the river in Nuevo Laredo, somebody else’s thing.

What if you were Greer Epstein, Rob Herzog, or Elise O’Kane?

All three of them would have perished in the 9-11 terrorist attack if they hadn’t varied their morning routines in an apparently insignificant way.

Around nine o’clock that morning Epstein took the elevator down from her office at Morgan Stanley in the Twin Towers for a cigarette break outside in the nice sunshine. She looked up to see the first plane hit her office. Smoking saved her life.

Herzog missed a subway train and was late to work. In his Marsh & McLennan Securities office in the Twin Towers, 295 of his more punctual co-workers perished.

American Airlines flight attendant, Elise O’Kane entered the wrong computer code the day before when she tried to get the airline’s online scheduler to reassign her to Flight 175. Her mistake meant that she wasn’t serving drinks and coffee on the Boston-Denver run that took out the North Tower.

They’ve lived their lives ever since asking, “What if I hadn’t been a smoker? What if I hadn’t missed the train? What if I hadn’t entered the wrong code?” The simple answer: “You’d be dead.”

Back in the claustrophobic control room, Ralston has another cup of coffee. He’s sweating, but he’s glued to the monitor. Lewis offers to do a shift, and then Clark, but Ralston won’t let them.

One of them asks, “So Ralston, how can you tell if it’s a missile or a satellite?”

“Go take a nap. I can tell.”

Ralston twitches every time a white blip appears on the dark screen. He’s hit the big time. He’s important.

If the Russians launch anything from Cuba, he’ll spot it first. He’ll be the guy who goes down in history for having saved the President and Cabinet of the United States!

You can only call perverse a habit that has us obsessing over our close calls. It must be what sends us to horror movies. We enjoy watching horrifying events from the safety of our comfortable theater seat as we munch popcorn.

“It’s just a movie. There’s dangerous world out there. At least I’m safe.”

And while Laredoans looked over the river at the sunset, some of us worried about the missile in Cuba, some not, Finlander contemplated his future at the Sands Motel bar.

And then it happened.

A white dot popped up on the lower right corner of the monitor. Ralston jumped up and bent down with his nose almost touching the screen as the blip inched up. Right behind it, a second dot pops up above the horizon line.

“They launched!”

Ralston grabs the yellow squawk box phone and shouts, “NORAD! NORAD! Missile launch in Cuba! Repeat. Missile launch in Cuba!”

“This is NORAD. Confirm missile launch.”

Ralston is gasping, jumping up and down. “Confirm. Repeat. Two missiles heading north on radar! Looks like over Georgia”

The officer in Colorado turns his ashen face toward his staff, “The balloon is up. Get the White House on the line. Evacuate the White House and Congress. Get me the missile command and SAC on the line.”

Around the world fingers are flipping the safety guards off buttons that will launch a massive retaliatory attack. Deep breaths are drawn. Someone says, “God help us.” Families in distant target zones are remembered in silent prayers.

In the next 60 seconds an atom bomb will be exploding over an American city. By the time people hear a warning on CONELRAD, it will be too late to take shelter. The second hand ticks around the dial as officers at NORAD and the Pentagon watch the board for the bomb sensors to flash locations of the blasts.

At 5:26 P.M., a verbal report came over the “squawk line” warning that two unidentified objects, potential missiles appearing one minute apart, were in the air. The objects were apparently somewhere over Georgia, exactly where a missile launch from Cuba might have been picked up. The operators were unable to discern, however, whether these objects were moving toward or away from the United States. Limits of Safety, p. 132

A different voice comes on the squawk box. “Who is calling missile launch?”

Ralston, “I am. I am. I see it!”

“Moorestown, any estimates on missiles strike zones?”

“No, no! Not Moorestown! It’s me, James Ralston, AT LAREDO!”

“Wait! Laredo? We thought you were Moorestown. Moorestown, Moorestown, are you there? What do you see?”

“NORAD, hang on. This is Moorestown. We don’t see any missile launches here.”

“What? Look there they are. I see them heading up! It’s a launch!” Ralston is screaming.

“NORAD. Disregard Laredo. I repeat: No launch. Confirm.”

“Moorestown, are you sure?”

“Yes, NORAD. Certain. No launch. Laredo must be seeing a satellite. Yup, it looks like USA Explorer 6. Repeat no missile launch from Cuba.”

“Any reports from the bomb sensors anywhere?” the General turns in his swivel chair and asks the officers watching the big board.

“No, sir. No blast reports anywhere.”

The NORAD commander shouts over to his officers already on phones to the White House, SAC, and ADCOM, “STOP. False alarm. No missile launch from Cuba! Tell everyone to cancel. Repeat CANCEL all attack procedures.”

Everyone in the command room takes a deep breath. “Close one…”

“Laredo, keep monitoring, but calm down, for Christ’s sake. You damn near started a war!”

Miraculously, no button had been pushed. No irretrievable bomber headed over the pole. No missile silos took a step that could not be walked back.

Ralston’s head slumps on the table. Thirty seconds ago, he was a hero. Now he’s another guy who screwed up and lost his job.

There was, again, no detonation reported through the bomb alarm system. The officers at NORAD once again were only able to figure out what happened, in the evocative phrase of the command post logs, “after the smoke cleared.” The Laredo tracker — a much less capable radar than Moorestown — had just become operational when it picked up what was later determined to be a single satellite orbiting the earth and moving away from the United States. Compound errors had then occurred. The operators at the new Falling Leaves Laredo site could neither accurately count the number of objects detected nor identify the direction of their movement. (The existing documents do not report on whether this inability was due to the radar’s limited capacity or an operator’s error, or a mixture of both.)

Limits of Safety, p. 132

No one except the people listening to the squawk line phones knew that a civilian radar technician at the Laredo Test Site mistook a satellite for a nuclear missile and almost started World War III.

Accidental Armageddon.

My parents were worried about Kennedy and Khrushchev in Washington and Moscow. Little did they know that they might have been worrying about equally dangerous events taking place five miles north of our house on Garfield at the Laredo Test Site.

The addition of the jerry-rigged Laredo warning radar actually produced a false warning problem during the height of a serious superpower crisis. Although there were no further military actions taken in response to this false warning, the risk would have been significantly greater under other plausible circumstances. Indeed, it is fortunate that there was only one satellite on the horizon and that it was moving away from the United States when it was picked up by the CMEWS radar. Had more than one satellite appeared and had objects been moving toward the United States, it is more likely that the Laredo radar would have reported a set of false nuclear warhead impact points as well. The report would have been treated even more seriously.

This incident could have had a more frightening ending.

Limits of Safety, pp. 133-34

Every life coach, guru, self-help author, and enlightened friend tells us to be mindful: “Live in each moment.” “Be in the present.” “Look around and notice yourself and what surrounds you.” Many of us struggle with this good, but difficult, advice.

It’s not easy living completely in tune with the present moment when, on the one hand, nostalgia is distracting you with happy memories of a Laredo childhood, and on the other, what-if questions have you time-travelling back to alternative versions of the past.

In fact, it wouldn’t be misleading to say that what-if questions are the least mindful occupation there is.

Now that you know what happened, you have to wonder, “What if the officers at NORAD headquarters had believed the false alarm from Laredo and…?”

Let’s not spoil the season answering that question. The answer would have to deal with millions of deaths, nuclear winter, famine, and a radioactive planet. This particular what-if question is too horrible to contemplate.

This event belongs to a special subcategory of the close call.

Let’s call them Mr. Magoo Events.

In the Mr. Magoo cartoons we saw in the 1960s, the cranky, myopic geezer wanders through town blind and oblivious to the series of accidents he almost suffers. Cars narrowly miss him in the street, but he doesn’t see them. He walks off construction scaffolds on to implausibly appearing planks. Magoo never quite falls into the unseen holes gaping before him. The gag of the cartoon is that none of the imminent disasters that almost happen ever do AND Magoo never knows about it.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis the entire world had a Magoo moment.

Completely unaware of the danger, we stepped blindly into the path of a runaway truck. It just missed us, and like Mr. Magoo, we kept right on going.

But it was an authentic close call. The runaway truck was an accidental nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The truck swerved at the very last moment, and we went about our business unaware that the worst outcome possible almost happened. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended, and we went on with our lives and about our affairs. Some of us even grew up.

Then, 50 years later, we learned how much like Mr. Magoo we’d been in October 1962.

If close calls evoke in us strong physical responses and powerful emotions, the close calls we find out about later bring a special shudder. “It almost… and I never knew it!”

In the Laredo Incident, no one except for a few Air Force officers and some contract radar operators knew what a close call took place at the radar station north of town.

Our conjectures about what might have happened but didn’t and what didn’t happen but might have, scare us first. Then they make us recognize our good fortune and finally leave us with a sense of relief. “What if the mistake at the Laredo radar station during the Cuban Missile Crisis…?”

Now that’s an alternative history that makes you shudder.

Close one!

Scary thought!

Whew, lucky!

Yes, yes, and yes.

You might go on to consider this question: “how many other close-calls have I survived that I never knew about?”

The combination of didn’t happen with didn’t know, like counterfactuals, is potentially infinite. Even though we do find out later about some of our near disasters, we’ll never know all of them.

The phrase “just lucky” may be way more descriptive than we thought.

Sources:

Professor Scott Sagan, Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, includes the incident in The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 122-32. He based his account on the previously classified Operations Report, Falling Leaves, Task Force Able, 9th Aerospace Division (Thomasville, AL), December 1962, NSA-CMCC and the hour-by-hour command and control logs from NORAD headquarters at Ent AFB, Colorado.

Bomb Alarm Sensor System 201-A, Western Union Technical Review 17, January 1963. http://massis.lcs.mit.edu/archives/technical/western-union-tech-review/17-1/p032.htm