The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

dimethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide – and the fact that they were called
'storable' liquids was a relative statement. They were more stable than
cryogenic fuels, insofar as they did not require refrigeration, but they were
toxic to the point of nearly instant lethality to human contact, and they were
necessarily highly reactive. One safeguard was the encapsulation of the missiles
in steel capsules which were loaded like immense rifle cartridges into the
silos, a Soviet design innovation that protected the delicate silo
instrumentation from the chemicals. That the Soviets bothered with such systems
at all was not – as American intelligence officers carped – to take advantage of
their higher energy impulse, but rather a result of the fact that the Soviets
had lagged in developing a reliable and powerful solid fuel for its missiles, a
situation only recently remedied with the new SS-25. Though undeniably large and
powerful, the SS-18 – given the ominous NATO codename of 'SATAN' – was an
ill-tempered, pitiless bitch to maintain, and the crews were delighted to be rid
of them. More than one Strategic Rocket Forces soldier had been killed in
maintenance and training accidents, just as Americans had lost men with its
counterpart U.S. missile, the Titan-II. All of the Alyesk birds were tagged for
elimination, and that was the reason for the presence of the men and the
transporter trucks. But first, the warheads had to be removed. The Americans
could watch the missiles in the destruction process, but the warheads were still
the most secret of artifacts. Under the watchful eyes of a colonel, the nose
shroud was removed from Rocket Number 31 by a small crane, exposing the MIRVs.
Each of the conically shaped multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles
was about forty centimeters in width at the bottom, tapering to a needle point
one hundred fifty centimeters above its base. Each also represented about half a
megaton of three-stage thermonuclear device. The soldiers treated the MIRVs with
all the respect they so clearly deserved.
***
'Okay, getting some pictures now,' Fowler heard Major Costello say. 'Not much
activity. . . sir, we're isolating on just a few of the silos, the ones that we
can see the best – there's woods all over there, Mr President, but because of
the angle of the satellite we know which ones we can see clearly . . . okay,
there's one, Tobe Silo Zero-Five . . . nothing unusual . . . the command bunker
is right there . . . I can see guards patrolling around . . . more than usual .
. . I see five – seven people – we can get them real good in infra-red, it's
cold there, sir. Nothing else. Nothing else unusual, sir . . . good. Okay,
coming up on Alyesk now – Jeez!'
'What is it?'
'Sir, we're looking at four silos on four different cameras. . .'
'Those are service trucks,' General Fremont said, from the SAC command center.
'Service trucks at all four. Silo doors are open, Mr President.'
'What does that mean?'
Costello took the question: 'Mr President, these are all -18 Mod 2s, fairly old
ones. They were supposed to be deactivated by now, but they haven't been. We now
have five silos in sight, sir, and all five have service trucks there. I can see
two with people standing around, doing something to the missiles.'
'What's a service truck?' Liz Elliot asked.