Read Fail Safe for Free Online Page A

over to the machine and tore off a piece of tape. He handed it to General Bogan. It read, "UFO at Angels 30, speed 525, heading 196."
    "That means that it's at 30,000 feet going 525 miles an hour on a compass heading of 196," General Bogan said.
    "Just suppose, General, that the planes get there right on schedule, what are they likely to find?" Raskob asked.
    "Usually it is a commercial airliner that has neglected to file a flight plan or has been blown off course by high winds," General Bogan said. "But keep in mind, sir, that there is a big blank space over the Atlantic where neither the radar sets from Europe nor America have the range to pick up planes. This wasn't much of a problem with slow-flying planes at low altitudes, but with jets going at high speeds and altitude they can drift a couple of hundred miles while they are 'in the gap.' Occasionally the radar itself makes a mistake and gets a blip off the moon or a swarm of geese or gets a false echo from a satellite. But the radar mistakes have pretty well been eliminated since 1960."
    "Suppose it just looks like a commercial airliner but has actually been loaded up with thermonuclear bombs and is trying to sneak through, masquerading as a commercial plane?" Raskob asked.
    "It's possible, but not likely," General Bogan shrugged. "The fighter pilots would raise the plane on radio and ask where it had started from and what its destination was and this would then be checked out with Federal Aviation Agency operators to make sure it was a legitimate flight. Also the fighter pilots, if they are the least suspicious, get dose enough to the plane to give it a good inspection. If there were seams and
    hinges that indicated a bomb bay on what looked like a DC-8 that would change the situation. Plenty."
    "What would you do in that case?" Knapp asked. "I mean that even after the fighters see the plane they still have some suspicions?"
    "Probably not a great deal," General Bogan said. "The fighter pilots would order the plane to land or to turn around and if it ignored orders then we would have a tough decision. We would probably go to Condition Yellow and would start to launch more fighters and also bring up some of the bombers to a higher degree of readiness. But just a single unidentified plane by itself, still over a thousand miles from any Canadian or American city, doesn't constitute a very great danger. Any conceivable enemy would be launching a number of planes at us. What we would do is make sure that the single plane did not have a runaway pilot who wanted to commit hara-kiri on New York or MontreaL"
    "General, can you add the SAC bombers that are flying toward their Fail-Safe point to the board?" Raskob asked.
    "Yes, sir," General Bogan said. He nodded at Colonel Cascio. Colonel Cascio started to move some levers. "What you will see is a fuller projection of the Northern Hemisphere. It's something like looking down at the earth from directly above the North Pole and at an altitude of about one hundred miles."
    Again there was a slow dissolve on the Big Board. When it had firmed up, the longitude lines came together at a neat point in the center of the board. The unidentified flying object and the six fighters were now tiny and because the scale was much greater they were closing at what seemed a much slower pace. Six large green blips, fragmented into small dots of luminosity, swam into clear visibility. Even to the unaccustomed
    eyes of Raskob and Knapp it was dear that these blips were moving at a much higher speed than either the fighters or the unidentified flying object. Each of the green fragmented blips was moving toward a green cross which in each case was well àutside the Soviet boundaries, but which formed a rough circle around
    her borders.
    "As you can see, the bombers are moving much faster than either the fighters or the UFO," Colonel Cascio said. "Those are Vindicator Bombers and they fly at over 1500 miles an hour. You also notice that some of them,