Nuclear Conversion

“I got a fair idea the kinda personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinkin.’ Heck, I reckon you wouldn’t even be human bein’s if you didn’t have some pretty strong personal feelin’s about nuclear combat. I want you to remember one thing, the folks back home is a-countin’ on you and by golly, we ain’t about to let ’em down.”  Maj Kong to his B-52 crew as they are about to deploy nuclear weapons; Dr. Strangelove;  Stanley Kubrick; 1964

One night I found myself holding the military’s set of keys to nuclear Armageddon in my own hand. 

Me, Kevin.

Let me explain. At some point during my abysmal time as an Air Defense Lieutenant in an air defense battery in Germany, I rediscovered philosophy and spirituality. (I would not discover ‘formal’ religion until a much more abysmal time … but that is another story.)  

The nights pulling duty were long, long, nights. A few of those interminable nights were, however, broken-up by terrifying ‘exercises’ that very effectively simulated a Cold War threat to America. Those exercise nights began, usually about 2:00 a.m., with receipt of an emergency message. Immediately, our isolated unit would  transform from night shift soldiers working on maintenance issues to a lethal ready-to-fire Nike Hercules nuclear weapons battery. When I say ‘ready,’ I mean everything but arming the weapon and pressing the firing button.  

However, such exercises were the exception. Most of those long, cold, routine nights, I would read books to pass the time. I would sit in the back room of the command trailer, huddled next to a space heater, with a single-bulb overhead light to read books I’d found at some kind of swap meet or book fair. For five or ten bucks I could get a lot of reading material.  

During one trip to a local swap meet, I picked up a bunch of paperback books that changed my life. They were all together in the bin as if placed there as a set. They looked well loved. They were by authors I recognized (because of Father Brown and Narnia) including Joseph Campbell, C.S. Lewis, C. K. Chesterton, Thomas Merton, along with some George MacDonald guy I’d never heard of. The topics of these  books seemed perilously close to a couple of topics I usually avoided (so I could  deny them) – theology and spirituality. However, finding a bunch of books by entertaining authors for only a few dollars was too good to pass up.

These astonishing books cracked my hard-ass façade and made me start thinking again about the big wide world and its amazing unlikely existence. They rekindled the open, accepting mind I had as a child, the easy, tolerant mind that I had before it was exiled by battles of comparison and competition. These books exposed that old Kevin—the Kevin I had deliberately banished (along with all the other profitless things of my youth) to the deepest, cobwebby archives of my memory.  

As a child I had been amazed by everything. Stars, gentle breezes, waterfalls, forests, apple trees – everything seemed to me to be beautiful … and sacred. I had no trouble believing in the Divine. I had no trouble believing in goodness and loving and caring. But as years passed and other beliefs – like winning and patriotism and achieving – were more highly valued in my country, my community, and my family, I not only subjugated those feelings, I crushed them into scrap.  

As I grew even older and was subjected to economic and academic arrogance with its attendant flourishes of sneering and faith-scoffing, I completely snuffed those easy, innate beliefs and replaced them with layers of hard-edged scorn and glib sophistry. I became a dismissive, arrogant atheist.  

I mean … I had achieved some pretty great things, had I not? And weren’t these accomplishments my own achievements, attained by the sweat of my brow and the application of my own intellect? Well, they were, weren’t they? I mean if there was some kind of God, wouldn’t that mean that I would have to attribute some of this  success, some of these accomplishments, to something/someone other than myself?  Well, my self-absorbed, Ayn Rand, leading-scorer, school record holding, high test score, gifted-and-talented ego was not going to take that step; ever! No sir, never.  

Not until, that is, I began to absorb these books. Even my well-defended ego could not dispute the authors’ brilliance. I mean, it wasn’t logically  disputable—these authors were so learned and so gifted that I could not  just arrogantly disregard their writing by glibly referring to them as with my go-to derisive reference—”dumbass  Christian idiots.” No indeed.  

So, in a painful act of intellectual honesty, I shushed my ego and began to think very hard about what I was reading. Slowly, ever so slowly, I began to unlock the  vault imprisoning the divine wonder of my childhood. But ego-constructs play a waiting game, a game of attrition. And my ego was well versed in self-defense  and trench warfare, so reading books alone— as beautiful as their prose, as concise as their logic, as compelling as their arguments—was not going to be enough to provoke a complete transformation into the Kevin I wanted to be. No, I needed something more to effect a conversion. Like many a chemical experiment, what I needed was a catalyst. 

That catalyst came late one cold winter’s evening. Here is what happened. 

It is sometime around November of 1983. It is very late at night. I am on duty. We  are the Hot Battery on this dark winter’s evening. I am working on some minor mechanical issues with one of the warrant officers. We are interrupted by the communications sergeant. The sergeant says we had just received an emergency communication from HQ to come to full readiness and be prepared to fire our Nike Hercules Missiles at the enemy.  

This is horrific news, indeed. I run to the front of the site, just beyond the lime pit latrine, and look down the hill. I see no vehicles at our gate. This is worse news  because, usually, when we receive one of these emergency communications, it is part of an elaborate readiness exercise and evaluators would be pulling up to the gate to evaluate our emergency duties performance.

There were no evaluators.  

Panicking, I immediately told the Sergeant to get on the radio and ask for a retransmission of this dire message. He did so. The message did not change – no  indeed, it was now just one minute more exigent.  

For a chilling reference to this ethos (I’m not saying this was the actual exercise … though it was November of  1983) – may I refer you to any recent article written about the 1983 Able Archer exercise that nearly resulted in the end of the world.

Immediately I activated the radars and glancing down at the radar screen, did indeed see several planes to the northeast of our location. The commo sergeant is rapidly decoding the next message and the news is getting worse. We are now to prepare our nuclear warheads for firing. I grabbed the message from the sergeant and decoded it myself. It was truly just such an order. This meant the commo sergeant and I now both needed to arm ourselves. In addition to needing weapons, we would both be needing to use the keys we wore around our necks while on duty. These keys would unlock the double-lock safe that contained all the ‘cookies’ – the  affectionate (if ironic) name we gave to the cryptographs that enabled the arming  of the nuclear warheads. The missiles on our site were, I believe, armed with 40 kiloton warheads—about three times the strength of the bomb used on Hiroshima. We had rather a lot of them.

These cookies were contained in a small foil-like packet. When the packet was opened, arming/enabling information was revealed. These were, without question, the most classified items in the unit. Only a few of us were authorized to access them and then, only under the strictest of protocols. This authorization required not only the highest security clearance one could get, it also required a great deal of additional training and testing for such a top secret duty.

During our training, we were told that if an officer accessed or opened an incorrect cookie, it invalidated every single cookie that had been issued to every U.S. nuclear custodian in the entire world; and that the security breach and cost of replacement associated with this action was immeasurable; and so, anyone unsealing the wrong cookie would go straight to Leavenworth Prison to await trial, conviction, and imprisonment for compromising the security of the United States of  America. So much for due process … it was, after all, the Army. 

Well, because I am writing this from Austin, Texas and not Leavenworth, Kansas, I  can skip ahead a bit and let you know that after locking ourselves in the room with the safe (with weapons at the ready and the keys in our hands), we turned the keys and I opened the safe. This itself was a terrifying experience. My apprehension intensified, however, as I reached for the appointed notebook. It was but one of many and within each notebook were numerous sleeves, each of which contained a number of cookies. In them were the cyphers that could unleash upon the Earth an unimaginable, hellish inferno. 

I picked up the designated notebook.

In my hand … In my own hand … I held a set of keys to Armageddon— they were so  very small: so remarkably light—and suddenly, this entire set of circumstances seemed utterly absurd.  

I … me … Kevin … idiot Kevin … was about to unlock either a training aid or the door to Oppenheimer’s nightmare. I staggered … and sagged. I did not want to, “Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” I wanted to be philosophical Kevin, innocent child Kevin, the embracer of magic and mystery and love and apple trees and forests and waterfalls. So, I stood there. Just stood there.  

How had my life come to this? 

By now, the sergeant is losing his mind and ventures to ask me, “Uh Lieutenant, what  now?” In extremis I cannot describe, I located the designated cookie and to my great relief discovered that it was … a training exercise after all. I took a deep breath and relayed the information to the duty staff. We sprang into action and, in a few short minutes, our unit was fully capable of firing a nuclear warhead at the enemy. 

But, as I sat at the radar tracking console in the command trailer and reflected on the incident I had just experienced, that little foil catalyst completed its work and I literally transformed into philosophical, spiritual, Kevin.  

In an epiphanic instant, I suddenly understood that Life on this tiny planet— in all  its forms, colors, hues, and variations—was a literal miracle and far too precious to be subject to the whims of politicians and the loyalty of a solitary young  lieutenant standing atop a hill in Germany holding in his hand the means of its extinction.  

And so, I knew … I just knew … beyond the shadow of a doubt … that no matter  what happened: no matter what order was given: no matter what the circumstance,  I … me … New/Old Kevin … would never, ever, push a button that would fire a nuclear weapon; nor would I ever engage in war or mass trauma toward any of the 4.5 billion (at that time) souls with whom I shared this sacred planet. My career as an officer in the Army was effectively over.

The next morning, with a clear conscience and a smile on my face, I walked out of the gate and into a new life. A few months later, I was selected as a general’s aide de-camp and spent my last 20 months in Germany reading as many spirituality and philosophy books as I could find. And as I contemplated my New/Old Kevin future, for the first time in my adult life, I started thinking about what I might be able to do to validate and improve the lives of others. After completing my military commitment, I went to law school hoping to become a civil rights lawyer. It didn’t exactly work out that way, but just maybe, during my many years of practice, I was able  to do a few good things as an environmental prosecutor. It’s all thanks to a terrifying late night rediscovery of wonder and love and beauty and the sacred.

What if God was one of us 
Just a slob like one of us 
Just a stranger on the bus 
Trying to make his way home 

Joan Osborne