A fission! We all fall down . . .
“Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee”
—
Ring-a-ring o’neutrons,
A pocket full of positrons,
A fission! A fission!
We all fall down.
— Paul Dehn
General Buck Turgidson on the prospect of a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviets: “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say . . . no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh . . . depending on the breaks.”
— Stanley Kubrick/Terry Southern, Dr. Stranegelove screenplay<$>IT’S a Cold War ghost town, returned to Bermuda by the Pentagon just over a decade ago but not yet fully reintegrated into the rest of the island. The former St. David’s baselands, called Southside for official purposes but still routinely referred to as “the base” by Bermudians who have yet to break with a 50-plus-year habit, is incessantly touted as the next logical hub for residential and commercial development. One day it doubtless will be built on, its relics from the age of a superpower arms race razed and built on or landscaped. But whatever the plans for its future, the 1,100-acre area still remains very much rooted in its past. In fact, there are few places in Bermuda — an island certainly not lacking in sites of historic and cultural interest — that still hark back to a specific time and set of circumstances as forcefully as Southside does.
Perhaps because the thought of imminent thermonuclear obliteration now seems at once so very remote and so utterly insane, this outdoor time-capsule resonates so powerfully. Perhaps because it was an unlikely but nevertheless vital cog in a doomsday machine that at its peak numbered 50,000 nuclear weapons, the former US Naval Air Station continues to haunt our present with reminders of a near past in which omnicide — the destruction of all peoples — was an accepted, everyday possibility.
Bermuda would have been obliterated in the event of a nuclear exchange, a first-strike target for the Soviet Union. Its strategic importance was two-fold. The US Naval Air Station’s primary role was as a surveillance centre from which to shadow the Soviet submarines patrolling in this section of the Atlantic, massive submerged silos armed with ballistic missiles targeted at East Coast cities.
Bermuda sat at the centre of a huge spiderwork of sonar and other underwater listening devices, charting the movements of these ballistic missile submarines (or “boomers” in US Navy slang). Less widely known was the fact the island also served as a forward operating base for the inelegantly named TACAMO (“Take Charge And Move Out”) aircraft — flying, very low-frequency communications centres. In event of a nuclear war, TACAMOs woud have relayed orders from the US National Command Authority to their Atlantic forces. These included packs of attack submarines, submarines designed to hunt down and destroy the Soviets’ steel leviathans as remorselessly as blood-maddened sharks in a feeding frenzy.
But in the all-too likely event the attack submarines couldn’t find their prey, recently declassified memoranda from Anglo-American diplomatic exchanges in the 1960s and ‘70s have confirmed what has long been suspected. In times of “advanced readiness” the P3 Orion patrol aircraft which flew out of the base would be carrying nuclear payloads rather than the sonabuoy arrays they routinely dropped in the Atlantic waters to help track the silent-running Soviet Yankee-class submarines.
Because by the late 1960s the stealthy new Yankees could no longer be detected with anything approaching pinpoint accuracy, only nuclear depth bombs haphazardly lobbed into the general areas where the Soviets were believed to be operating were considered capable of destroying them.
It was a case of overkill, literally, fully in keeping with the nuclear “Sunday Punch” strategy conceived by the Strategic Air Command’s General Curtis LeMay. The model for Strangelove’s bomb-happy Buck Turgidson, LeMay fully believed a nuclear war could be won despite paying reluctant lip service to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction which maintained the balance of terror throughout the Cold War — the tenuous peace between Moscow and Washington that resulted from the fact both sides were terrified of ushering in a world-destroying thermonuclear Armageddon.
In the event of a US pre-emptive strike, up to 24 nuclear-armed depth charges — carrying a combined destructive yield equal to 12 of the Little Boy atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 — were to be flown out of Bermuda to eliminate the three or four submarines before they could unleash their cargoes of mega-death against Washington and New York and Boston. The seas around Bermuda would have been transformed into vast, irradiated cauldrons
But that destructiveness would have been as nothing if the Soviets had drawn first blood. Curtis LeMay had his fanatical counterparts in the Soviet command and control structure who believed a knock-out nuclear punch could be delivered against the Americans before they could react.
What would have been unleashed on Bermuda in the event of a pre-emptive Soviet strike would have been thousands of times more powerful than the crude fission bomb dropped on Japan.
Each Soviet submarine operating in the Bermuda patrol box carried 16 intermediate-range SS-N-6 ballistic missiles in the twin rows of launching tubes running down its deck.
Each missile carried up to three independently targetable warheads.
Each warhead had a destructive capability in the 0.4 to 0.8 megaton range (a kiloton is the equivalent of the energy released by 1,000 tons of TNT — a megaton is the equivalent of the energy released by one million tons of TNT; the Hiroshima Little Boy bomb had a yield of 15 kilotons; so each individual warhead aboard the Yankee-class ballistic missile submarines was at least 30,000 times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb).
At least one of these warheads would have had Bermuda’s co-ordinates fed into its guidance system.
An air-bursting thermonuclear warhead detonating at 8,000 feet above the US Naval Air Station to cause maximum blast effect would have caused a local disaster on a scale that few people — if any — would have survived.
The first effect of a nuclear explosion would have been an intense flash of light, as quick as the lightning flashes that abruptly illuminate the horizon during a summer storm but a thousand times more brilliant. It would have been accompanied by a powerful pulse of heat radiation, sufficient to set fire to light combustible material — the clothes you are wearing, for instance — out to a distance of almost nine miles. Wooden structures, trees and the paint on buildings would have instantaneously combusted within a four-mile radius of the detonation.
There is also an intense pulse of X-rays released at the moment of detonation, sufficient to kill every living thing within a distance of two miles. But, in fact, the X-rays would play only a small part in the devastation since people that close to ground zero would all be killed by the ensuing blast.
Immediately after the flash, a “fireball” forms in the air and rises to the height of several thousand feet in several seconds, blindingly bright and radiating heat that in nature is only found on the surface of the sun. On a clear day or night, people up to 40 miles away who happened to be facing in the direction of the the exploding warhead would have been permanently blinded.
Within five miles of “ground zero” — the point directly under the explosion — all parts of the body exposed to the flash would be burned. Superficial burns would be caused at greater distances, out to 10 miles at least. Clothing that caught fire would cause many more burns as far away as Warwick.
Starting at the same instant but travelling more slowly, much like the sound of rolling thunder following a lightning flash, would be an enormously powerful blast wave. It would destroy even reinforced concrete buildings for a radius of a mile and ordinary brick buildings out to a distance of five miles. The entire town of St. George’s would have been vaporised. Major damage to houses would extend out to ten miles and windows would have been broken as far away as Dockyard.
Within two miles, almost everyone would be killed, either directly by the blast or by collapsing or flying masonry. At a distance of five miles it is estimated that about 50 per cent of people would be killed by the effects of the blast.
Immediately following the blast wave would be hurricane-force winds, first outwards from the explosion, and many seconds later inwards to replace the air that was expelled. Within three miles, the wind would be of hurricane force, sufficient to drive ballpoint pens into wooden utility poles or glass splinters into concrete. People in the open would be picked up and hurled into any object strong enough to be still standing.
Then the firestorm would have followed.
Hundreds of fires would have been ignited as a result the first flash. Burst fuel tanks on the base and at the Ferry Reach oil depots as well as collapsed buildings would have provided more fuel. And it is likely that the confluent fires would have caused a tidal wave of superheated flame to spread out over a two or three mile radius, a fire capable of consuming all of the oxygen in the immediate vicinity — as well as all of the people and structures in its paths.
The winds created by the firestorm would have been of gale force so that even uninjured people would have had difficulty trying to run outwards away from the fire as far away as Flatts.
