"These war games are being practised in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California." "Somewhere, across thousands of miles of blue water, the Russians, no doubt, are doing the same." "For a quarter of a century now, the world has looked on, sometimes with relief, often with dread, at the increasing and competing might of the two superpowers." "It's assumed by most people everywhere under 40, I should say, that America has always been a military mammoth." "On the contrary, one of the most dogged traditions of the United States through its first 160 years was a distrust of a permanent armed force." "Both in colonial times and beyond, the only military establishment the Americans had was this." "A rifle by your own fireside." "No professional army." "They'd enough of that in England, with press gangs and recruiting sergeants, and when the colonies won independence they abolished the national army." "They trusted instead to a citizen's army on tap, a well-regulated militia." "That's the point." "It's the only point the Constitution makes in sanctioning a citizen's right to bear arms." "There's no constitutional right to go out and shoot an elk, or stick up a neighbour or assassinate the president." "Now, this militia tradition sprang from their own experience of secessionist uprisings, trade and tax riots, and especially Indian raids." "Every farmer and mechanic knew in his bones, if not by heart, Adam Smith's precept." ""Every man must in some measure join the trade of soldier" ""to whatever other trade or profession he happens to carry on."" "The idea was that when there was trouble you were obliged to grab your rifle, the militia was mobilised overnight, and when the trouble died down the militia was disbanded and you put the rifle back where it belonged." "(BAND PLAYS "FROM THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA")" "Why, then, the Marines?" "Well, like other noble principles proclaimed by independent America, this one was soon defeated by the hazards of independence." "The seas were no longer protected by the British Navy." "American shipping was such a prime target for pirates that the first two American presidents paid them off with a couple of millions, while begging for an American navy, which Congress eventually established." "It contained a handful of amphibious warriors who were to capture the popular imagination as the fire eaters of the armed forces." "The United States Marines." "As late as the 1920s and 30s, whenever trouble brewed in South or Central America - which Americans regarded as their southern safety zone - the cry was always "Send in the Marines!"" "(SERGEANT) Go on back!" "Come on!" "They are aware of their reputation as the original terrors of land and sea." "The first and last tough hombres in uniform." "War may have grown impersonal and complex, but not to these Marine recruits." "They may well be the last physical soldiers." "(OFFICER) Alignment to the left." "(SERGEANT) Left!" "To the rear, turn!" "In time, a small national army had to be formed to put down regional uprisings, and the cavalry became the prime protector from the Indians of the settlers on the frontier." "Down the decades, the frontier had moved west from the forests of the Atlantic coast to Fort Bliss in the present state of Texas." "This is Apache country and Fort Bliss lies to the south." "This is where when the Apaches swooped down on a wagon train - or, a little later on, on a stagecoach or a small settlement - the cliffhanging tension was relieved by the sound of a bugle and the arrival from Fort Bliss" "of Errol Flynn, John Wayne, and a troop of cavalry with its colours flying." "That's one movie legend that's true enough." "For over 50 years, certainly, in the 19th century, the United States Cavalry was the civilian protector." "It was the essential land force of the army and, more often than not, its officers were Southerners." "They had been riding and hunting since they were boys." "For the first two years of the Civil War, it was the Southern cavalry that held off the Northern forces." "Yet at the start of that war, a famous old cavalry general said that since the invention of the rifled cannon, the day of the cavalry was over." "They've been saying that ever since." "And they said it for keeps when, in 1942, the first American cavalry unit sent to the Pacific was captured on Bataan in the Philippines." "Shortly after that, I asked a bandy-legged colonel at Fort Riley, Kansas, if there was any future for horses in warfare." ""They used them on Bataan," he said." ""They ate them."" "Today there are 16 horses left and they still have their uses." "So, for a century or more," "Americans kept their pride in the Marines and cavalry and paid little heed to the rest of the tiny army, which, in a national emergency, could balloon from a few thousand to a couple of million and collapse again, as it did after all the wars whose dead lie in this national cemetery" "across the river from Washington." "The War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First and Second World Wars." "But a navy was a permanent necessity recognised by the Constitution." "For America was a vast island of incomparable natural resources." "Since the British obligingly owned the Atlantic, America's protective moat was the Pacific." "By the 20th century, the United States Navy matched the British." "But the army remained small and inconspicuous." "Even at the end of 1941, when America entered the Second War, she had an army the size of the standing army of Sweden." "(OFFICER) Fire!" "These pictures of Americans in training would, I imagine, have greatly amused Adolf Hitler." "He had bypassed the old ways of war with the innovation of the blitzkrieg, which synchronised machines on the ground with machines in the air." "The bombers razed whole cities." "The tanks moved in against armies on the ground and foot soldiers mopped up the pockets of resistance." "He mopped up Europe from Warsaw to the English Channel." "The French surrendered." "The British were left alone to recognise very late that their 18-mile moat was no protection against the war in the air." "The British had to work in hundreds of small factories scattered to evade the disaster of a single strike from the air." "But there was a steady, essential flow of arms from America and a flood when Congress repealed its Neutrality Act, a change of mind which President Roosevelt defended as vital to America's own security." "(ROOSEVELT) The people of Europe defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting." "They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns." "Which will enable them to fight for their liberty and our security." "We have the men, the skill, the wealth, and above all, the will." "We must be the great arsenal of democracy." "When Britain had no more money left, he rammed through Congress an act to lease and lend Britain everything she needed - too much for millions of Americans who did not share his prejudice that if Britain was conquered and her navy captured," "America would be the Nazis' next port of call." "The country divided furiously between those for open intervention and those America Firsters preaching isolation in what they called Fortress America." "One of the heroes of the isolationists was Charles Lindbergh." "We believe that the security of our country lies in the strength and character of our own people and not in fighting foreign wars." "(CHEERING)" "Then there came a Sunday afternoon, the first in December, a cold, brilliant jewel of a day." "I had come down to Washington to cover a huge rally of America Firsters." "But by that time, the war was two years in." "For most of that, Britain had been fighting alone." "My British newspaper readers were not enchanted by reports of the strength of isolationist sentiment." "And frankly, I'd had rallies." "The last one I went to was a freak, but it was a frightening affair in Madison Square Garden of the German-American Bund, whose leader ranted up against three enormous, floodlit portraits of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln" "and Adolf Hitler." "There was another reason to stay home." "Sunday afternoons in winter were an American institution." "The New York Philharmonic Orchestra piped from coast to coast its regular concert over the only mass medium we had, the radio." "So my host persuaded me to skip the rally and we settled in and the orchestra started to tune up and the strings and woodwinds went skittering up and down the scale." "Suddenly, there was an abrupt halt." "(ANNOUNCER) One moment, please." "(REPORTER) The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States' naval base on Oahu Island in the Hawaiian Islands." "This means that war is underway between Japan and the United States." "Frankly, I didn't know, and I gathered that most Americans didn't know, what or where Pearl Harbor was." "Well, it's here in Hawaii and it was the main base of the American Pacific fleet." "But the man who sat in this chair, he knew." "He'd been 25 years before Assistant Secretary of the Navy." "Since boyhood, he'd been crazy about ships of all kinds, and he hung them around the house literally in hundreds." "And he was President Roosevelt." "Now, Japan had been a remote Asiatic nuisance, a friend of Hitler, it had invaded China, Indochina, and was now under the heel of a fire-eating general, Tojo, who actually demanded that the United States consent to the expansion of the Japanese Empire" "through South-East Asia." "But this was a bolt from the blue." "Two days after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt held a press conference." "I remember going in expecting to see a shattered man." "Not at all." "He flashed his famous smile." "He said he was feeling fine and there was darn little news." "We were not daunted, but he knew then what we didn't know until the going was good what had been done at Pearl Harbor." "The Pacific fleet had been pulverised." "Of the fleet's eight battleships, one was blown up, two sunk, four crippled, three destroyers gone, and 177 army and navy planes demolished on the ground." "Now, in spite of Roosevelt's gravity, he knew this was a godsend." "It deflated the isolationists with a single thrust." "It was no more a question of American boys in foreign wars - this was an all-American war." "Disused factories lit up like firecrackers." "America became a continental workshop, safe from aerial bombing." "These shells were produced by 30,000 people in a factory town which in 1941 had been a village with 72 inhabitants." "This, the world's largest bomber factory, had been only months before an empty meadow on the prairie." "It was the adaptability of the assembly line that gave the lie to Goering's calm assurance to Hitler," ""The Americans make excellent refrigerators and razor blades."" "Well, one year after Pearl Harbor, the razor blade manufacturer had outstripped the war production of Germany, Japan, and the forced labour of their conquered countries." "Shipping was another story." "There was no miracle formula known to the shipbuilders who had to provide transport and supplies for the Pacific as well as the Atlantic Ocean." "It was these undramatic tubs that saved us." "They were called liberty ships, the brainchild of a Californian, a great bullfrog of a construction man," "Henry Kaiser, who had built the world's biggest dam, Grand Coolie, against the warnings of the army engineers that it couldn't be done." ""All right," said Kaiser, "then let's see how it can be done."" "And did it." "Henry Kaiser had never built a ship." "But he'd adapted other skills to the ruthless demands of mass production." "These ships had no furnaced plates, no emergency generators, no fire-detection devices." "When steel was scarce, they shortened the anchor chains." "The crew, instead of being scattered below, lived in a single mid-ship house." "But the parts were interchangeable and the sections were welded." "These were not meant to be specimens of a shipbuilder's pride." "They were great, lumbering, slow, sea-going improvisations." "At the start, some of them snapped and went to the bottom a thousand miles from the enemy." "I remember going into Kaiser's Richmond shipyard in California." "Assembly yard would be better." "It was like a gigantic chessboard with cranes hovering overhead like storks depositing parts, engines, booms, in alphabetically marked and numbered squares." "30,000 components came in this way like something out of Disney." "Trolleys whizzing and hooters honking and buzzing, a whole deckhouse moving to the weighs, upside down, then it would be up-ended and the welders came in like an army of woodpeckers." "So, you'd have a stem and a keel and then part or plate A1 would be welded to A2 and S13 to S14." "You see, the workers knew less about shipbuilding than Kaiser." "Only one in 200 had ever been in a shipyard." "Kaiser himself talked about the front and back end of a ship and Roosevelt said, "I don't care what he calls them," ""provided he delivers."" "And he did." "The first liberty ship, which was built on the East Coast, took 245 days from assembly to launch." "In no time at all, Kaiser got this down to four days." "The first liberty ships replenished the dwindling food stocks of Britain." "The later ones would replace transport ships in the Pacific, make possible a continuous supply line of arms and matériel across the English Channel, and guarantee the invasion of Europe." "Very few Europeans, I think, ever appreciated the vast scope of the naval war in the Pacific, a quarter of the globe for a battleground;" "at first, these carriers the only airfields along the 6,000-mile approach to Japan, the enemy's homeland." "In fact, the Americans never set foot on it, but for three and a half years, had to inch along the loose chain of the enemy's outer-island bases, making contact with guerrillas, threading through bush in which the Japanese were at home." "Surprisingly, so were many Americans from Chicago and Pittsburgh, who, a year before, had learned jungle fighting in the swamps of Louisiana, in a huge war game commanded by the then totally unknown Major Dwight D Eisenhower." "To these men, Hitler was on another planet and so was the clockwork precision of a blitzkrieg." "They were picked off singly or trapped in batches or died from diseases carried by ticks planted in the underbrush by the retreating Japanese." "The outcome of the Japanese war was not decided in the Pacific." "It was pre-ordained a decade before by one early, pathological mistake of Hitler's, his obsession with suppressing intellectuals, the burning of the books, of authors who recognised no master race only the human race." "He made, it seems to me, the fatal error in his persecution of the Jews and the forced exile of their most brilliant scientists." "Whether German or the neighbours of Germany, they saw the threat of the handwriting on the wall and they fled to America." "Among them, Hitler should've trembled to think, were a half-dozen or more of the world's leading physicists." "Albert Einstein." "Enrico Fermi, an Italian," "Edward Teller, a Hungarian, like Leo Szilard, so obscure that the two of them had to enlist Einstein's help in getting a warning to the White House." "In 1943, four years after Roosevelt received the warning," "America secretly formed a team of refugee, native and British scientists to prepare an apocalyptic revenge in the loneliness of the New Mexico desert." "Today, their final retreat looks like some old silver miner's cabin or the relics of a road gang." "This is what's left of the base camp of a band of eminent men who had built a primitive lab and lived and worked in a secret society, carried false driving licences and went under assumed names." "Fermi was Henry Farmer." "Nils Bohr, the Dane, was Nicholas Baker." "Their leader was a young American, Dr Robert Oppenheimer." "Their families were not allowed any contact." "They could write only to a post office box number in New Mexico." "They lived in tar-paper shacks." "The cleaning women and the other routine workers were chosen for illiteracy, so if they came on a engineering tool or a formula on a scrap of paper, it would be all Greek to them." "Even a United States senator, whose investigating committee had achieved some fame for exposing fraud and extravagance in war costs, he was forbidden by President Roosevelt even to look into the enormous costs of this mysterious project." "But to the scientists, when they got into this valley, it was the end of two and a half years of the most intensely private and exciting research on something they called the Manhattan Project." "Now, what these scientists were doing was, you must've guessed, making the atomic bomb." "They didn't know if it would go off or, if it did, whether they could control the chain reaction." "They were 99% sure, but between the theory and the proof, there was the 1% possibility of the end of all of us." "The final assembly of the bomb was made in this ranch house beginning 12th of July 1945." "Two days later, they had it mounted on a 100-foot tower." "They locked in the central core of the bomb and by the night of the 15th, they were ready." "Then there came a tremendous hailstorm and thunderstorm, a final explosion of defiance of the elements they could not control." "But the thunder rumbled away and the rain stopped." "And at dawn on the 16th, they stretched out on the ground and covered their eyes." "And the signals were ready and they pressed the button." "The prostrate scientists were stunned out of all professional pride." "Their leader could think only of a line from a Hindu poem." ""I am become death," ""the shatterer of worlds."" "Three weeks later, the shattered city of Hiroshima began to count 100,000 dead." "And three days later, Nagasaki received the second bomb." "The decision to drop the bomb was made on the calculation that an invasion of Japan might cost a million American lives." "That decision was made by the man forbidden to look into the project, by that senator who, when Roosevelt dropped dead in April 1945, was now President Truman." "So the Second War ended in a flash brighter than a thousand suns." "When the Japanese were led onto the "Missouri" in Tokyo Bay to surrender, the American Commander in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur, said it in four crisp words." "These proceedings are closed." "The proceedings in Europe had been closed too by conventional bombing, which in one city, Dresden, had been more lethal than Hiroshima." "The Germans camped out amid the ruins of the Third Reich which was meant to last a thousand years." "This was a good time to remember Churchill's recipe of magnanimity in victory, and the Americans were to devise a grand plan to practise it." "By means of the Marshall Plan, the railroads would be rebuilt, factories and farmers subsidised, the fabric of European life restored." "It would cost the American people between ten and 15 billion dollars and be sold to the Congress as an emergency plan of resistance to Russia's takeover of Eastern Europe." "But half the world was wounded." "The 50 victorious nations swore to heal it through a new League of Nations, the United Nations." "Down the years, it was to repair the health, agriculture and economies of innumerable poor countries." "There was one thing more than another the United Nations was set up to do - in its own words, to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." "This was where it would be done, the Chamber of the Security Council." "This was to be the core of the United Nations' authority." "Whenever this Council agreed on a threat to the peace, it would order action, and action could mean in the end military action." "Now, the Council was to consist of several elected members and five great powers:" "The Soviet Union, United States," "United Kingdom, France and China." "All this sounded very rousing in 1945." "It roused those of us who were present at the foundation in San Francisco to look on it as a honeymoon." "When the Council got down to regular meetings, it became obvious that there were not five big powers but two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States." "It's entirely an alphabetical accident that the United Kingdom is in between to keep them apart." "It was obvious that the rising conflict between these two superpowers would progressively paralyse the Council's authority." "Because the United Nations had been set up on the assumption that the wartime alliance would last and that unless the big five agreed, nothing could be done, since any one of them could veto a unanimous vote." "The UN did, in time, stop wars in Indonesia, Kashmir, the Congo and the Middle East, and its Security Council voted unanimously to conduct a war against the northern invaders of South Korea." "But that vote was unanimous only because Russia happened to be absent." "She has never stayed away since." "While the Korean War was the first United Nations war, it was the last in which the Americans would carry the brunt of the fighting." "After two years, they'd had enough." "A year later, General, now President Eisenhower, stopped it by a secret threat to use atomic weapons." "So America alone had the ultimate weapon of the 20th century." "She meant to keep it that way." "After the second war, there was a literally fearful period in which a new kind of spy appeared." "Atomic spies were caught in Canada, the United States and Britain." "And it led in this country to a terrified hunt for spies in the government and the hounding of men who wouldn't have known the difference between a secret code and a quadratic equation." "It took us several years to learn that the secrets of nuclear energy are as open as the laws of gravity." "And today schoolchildren troop through this government museum in New Mexico and look over the whole range of America's nuclear arsenal, and they're as quick to spot an early Atlas from a Minuteman as the children of the Second War could tell a Heinkel from a Messerschmitt." "But there is a sombre contradiction in the possession of these weapons." "At one time, the Spanish galleon was the ultimate weapon." "It built an empire and cowed Europe." "In the 19th century, the British Navy more or less guaranteed a century of peace, dictated the Pax Britannica." "But the first use of the atomic bomb on Japan caused a worldwide moral revulsion against its further use." "America became the first supreme power that could not use its ultimate weapon." "Now, this impotence was obviously disguised by the gigantic virility of this war machine." "America's dominion was very brief - from 1945 to '53, when the Russians exploded their bomb." "But throughout the 1950s and well into the '60s, the triumphant feeling persisted that America could dictate a Pax Americana." "Let every nation know whether it wishes us well or ill that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty." "In the euphoria of owning the best and biggest bombs, the United States concluded treaties of protection with 43 nations, offered to play Saint George to 43 possible dragons." "America, which 40 years before had renounced Europe forever, now had its President Kennedy go there and proclaim West Berlin as America's front line against the Communist world." "There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world." "Let them come to Berlin." "(WILD CHEERING)" "Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is" ""Ich bin ein Berliner"." "(WILD CHEERING)" "This was heady stuff." "But since the bomb could not be dropped," "America's huge nuclear umbrella was a grand illusion." "It fostered the conviction that nations with different ideologies and needs could, in Woodrow Wilson's phrase, be made safe for democracy." "In the result, America had given a worldwide pledge to leaders who would fight their own conventional wars and use the bait of the American pledge to oblige America to join in." "Otherwise, the Americans would never have gone into Vietnam, which they did with advisors and technicians, then with massive aerial bombing." "But it didn't work." "The American elephant could make the earth tremble but it couldn't conquer the ants who lived on it." "The nightmares of three presidents were realised in the despatch of half a million men, more than had gone to Korea, suffering more casualties than Korea." "(CLAPPING AND COWBELLS)" "Many Americans, especially the young, who would've seen a villain in Hitler and fought him, saw no vital American interest in South-East Asia, and saw the villains close at home in successive administrations that sustained the war" "and also in universities committed to research in the technology of nuclear or biochemical warfare." "# All we are saying is give peace a chance #" "Only in the last decade have we become aware of a break in the history of warfare, and it began quite quietly during the Second War, when a few scientists started meeting in a very modest hotel in California." "Now, that was the beginning of "RD", research and development, the full dependence of the military on scientists thinking the unthinkable." "The unthinkable was, of course, nuclear annihilation." "That's what rattled the students and the other academics, because most of the thinkers were university professors on government grants." "But the moral problem is a little trickier than that." "This lab, which is in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which developed both the A and the H bombs, is theoretically involved in weapons research 50% and pure nuclear research 50%." "But you never know which is gonna turn into which." "The man who invented the wheel probably never figured it would carry artillery." "Certainly, Albert Einstein, when he devised his famous formula about the nature of energy, never remotely guessed that e=mc2 would also come to equal Hiroshima." "Now, here's a moral problem." "This generator is capable of testing the ability of nuclear warheads to withstand hostile environments." "But it may also discover a beam that would search out and destroy cancer cells." "Of course, it's no comfort to the conscience to say that a lethal weapon might do good, and the men who work here are committed to weapons research." "It is possible that as a by-product of research on these weapons our cities might obtain all the power - and clean power - they'll ever need." "Nonetheless, the Congress, remembering the Russians too are thinking the unthinkable, has tended to appropriate eight or nine times as much money for weapons research as it has for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy." "Someone will reflect it ought to be the main problem of the UN:" "What has it done to dissolve the nuclear rivalry of the superpowers?" "Well, in 1945, the UN's 50 original members agreed to put all kinds of military forces into a common pool." "It has never been done." "The UN has never had the force to assert the authority it claimed." "For the United Nations is no wiser, no more courageous, than the humans who compose it, and is infinitely less powerful than the superpowers that go their independent ways, probing the mysteries of technological war." "The ultimate defence, not only of the United States, but of the NATO and the other American allies, is spread around the world in 46 bases." "But they and all their nuclear weapons are under the instantaneous control of this Strategic Air Command headquarters planted deep underground in Omaha, Nebraska," "1150 miles inland from the Atlantic, deep in the bowels of the Midwest." "These controllers work in shifts around the clock." "They hold at the ready never less than a thousand missiles, any one of which packs the destructive force of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War." "The order for war can come only from the President of the United States." "The final command to start it can go out only over this red telephone." "If the SAC headquarters were totally destroyed, there are alternatives, among them a fleet of planes, one of which is always aloft." "Each of them, reflecting the power of the original, is called "The Looking Glass"." "This is the overground counterpart of the underground command post." "It carries a flight crew of four, plus three radio operators, two maintenance men." "And here in the Looking Glass itself is a battle staff of eleven." "And since a man might need a snack to sustain him through Armageddon, there is one steward." "Now, remember that this is an area of last resort." "This small room alone can command all the bases, all the submarines, all the airborne forces." "It can launch all the missiles that we own anywhere in the world." "Here, they're in direct touch with the president's plane, whether on the ground or in the air." "Here, with the chiefs of staff." "Here, with the others who comprise the National War Command." "This is the holy of unholies, the red box." "It's under constant surveillance." "If any unauthorised person tries to open it... (LOUD RAPID TICKING) ...an alarm to petrify the drowsiest member of the crew." "Strangely, in a technological world that lives by its own jargon, it's called the red box." "It contains the president's secret orders." "And only two people here have access to them." "One man, who sits here, is chief of the airborne battle staff, and further along the plane, a general officer." "Now, information, the president's sealed orders, come here by courier under armed escort." "And they are deposited, locked, in this box." "Now, the president has always at his side, no matter where he is, at home and abroad, at all times, a man who carries a code." "It changes unpredictably but always corresponds with the code that is used in the sealed orders." "Those orders may be, oh, the shift of a bomber force, or they might be the order for total war." "And if that word comes in, these two responsible officers would each take his own key." "No one man can open that box or launch a missile." "It takes two keys." "They would open the box, take out the orders, break the seal, decode them, and then check to see that their verbal order corresponded to these orders." "And only then, in that last extremity, would they move to this telephone, the equivalent of the red telephone in the underground post, and by lifting it, give the war alert to all the sites and the carriers and the bombers." "(YELLING)" "This would be the fateful scramble." "The dash of the SAC alert force to B-52 bombers and their nuclear payload." "They can each fly 10,000 miles without refuelling." "Their crews eat and sleep at all times close by the aircraft." "They average a 74-hour week." "(ENGINES ROAR)" "Their control system is proof against a false alarm." "They fly to predetermined points well short of enemy territory and they automatically return to base unless they get the final word from the President of the United States." "We've seen America in 200 years go from a small nation trusting to a rifle by a fireplace to the biggest nation, able to become the "shatterer of worlds"." "When I came to this country first, I took ribbing from my college friends over a popular song called "Bang, Bang, Here Come the British"." "Incidentally, it was banned over the BBC." "If it were revived, it would now have to be" ""Bang, Bang, Here Come the Yanks"." "There's another irony." "The first soldiers of the American Revolution, the first casualties, are united in a single word with the men who guard our arsenal today." "And the word is minuteman." "Because in the early 1770s, when it became clear a showdown with England was inevitable, the colonists formed secret regiments of ordinary men - farmers, parsons, lawyers, carpenters - who promised to be ready with a rifle at a minute's warning." "They were called minutemen." "Well, not many miles from here there is a minuteman." "He's not a carpenter or a lawyer, has no rifle, he's not human." "It is a missile." "And night and day, this Minuteman is guarded in shacks like this by modern soldiers, who no longer are required to have physical endurance and bulging muscles, only steadiness and patience and technological training." "And they keep what is surely the loneliest and could be the last vigil of human warfare." "Chief Captain Heinz plus one." "OK, sir." "It is a Saturday morning." "These two men are the new shift." "May I see your ID cards, sir?" "(COOKE) Similar relief crews are going through the same motions down in the earth on other continents." " Thank you, sir." " We're ready to go down now." "Yes, sir, the new crew's ready." "All security verification accomplished?" " Yes, sir." " (BUZZER)" "These men are not specially conditioned types." "They have families, play pool, do carpentry, follow the football scores." "One of these two men looks to the day when he'll be free to plant trees in New Hampshire." "Stay clear of the door." "Hi." " Hi, Frank." " How was your trip?" " Oh, not too bad." " Ready for changeover?" "Sure are." "LF status?" "All are strategic alert." "No maintenance schemes are scheduled." " Brief?" " Check." " Classified documents status?" " No change." " Verified?" " Check." "Conditions affecting flight operations?" "Security alert team is topside." "Weather conditions are normal." " Brief?" " Check." "Enable panel switch?" "Set." "Check." " Launch switch?" "Off." " Check." "They have had a thorough psychiatric test." "Each man watches the other." "If one of them breaks down, it's the other's duty to shoot him." "They now go through the last motions of the changeover, prove they know the new combination of their red box, check the authenticity of the keys, which would need to be turned simultaneously before the president's order to fire the missile could be carried out." "All that remains is for them to take over the guns of the retiring crew." "They are locked in for a 12-hour stretch." "And who is to decide whether they will remain simple family men or the triggers of Armageddon?" "America, Russia," "China, the United Nations?" "Let us hope that the sure deterrent will be a human one." "The greatest danger seems to me that the technology of the unthinkable war will grow so strong and subtle as to acquire a momentum all its own, which mere men will be powerless to resist."