Dr Strangelove and the Soviet spy satellite - 10 February 1978

Last time I promised to go into a story which is probably the only story of general interest in decades to come out of the vast tundra of Canada’s Northwest Territories.

It came at us first as a scare, like something out of Dr Strangelove, and then it turned into a technological puzzle, as remote from the interests of ordinary people as the workings of a breeder reactor so that, more or less out of boredom, we were ready to sink back into our own affairs when the New York Times published a long piece that suggested, for the first time in print, appalling possibilities for all of us. The White House prompted denial of the gist of the story and then the whole thing was, surprisingly, dropped.

Now, what I am talking about in the first place is the Soviet satellite that fell out of its orbit into the earth’s atmosphere, burst into flame and disintegrated above North America. For a day or two, the main concern of Canadians and Americans was to know if the explosion had taken place over any well-populated part of this continent. But once it was run to ground in the empty pinelands surrounding the Great Slave Lake, everybody breathed again and we all chuckled and quoted the man who said, "Chicken Little was right".

Yet the Russian satellite was, admittedly, a spy plane whose job was to orbit the earth 150 miles above it and keep track of the movements of all the ocean-going American warships – what we now call defence ships, including submarines deeply submerged. The satellite carried a load of radioactive materials and that was what caused the fright. The debris from the explosion rained across a 250-mile stretch, but once it was established that none of the sample fragments picked up was radioactive, the scare died down.

It shows how far we’ve come in 18 years, how far in stoicism, or a sense of reality maybe, that in May 1960 when an American spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, President Eisenhower denied that American reconnaissance planes ever flew over Russia at all, then he broke down and said, "Well, you do it too". And this happened just when the big four leaders assembled in Paris for a summit meeting. But in the uproar over the American U2 plane, Mr Khrushchev, the Soviet prime minister, stomped off home, the other three looked foolish, packed their bags, and the summit never took place.

What has produced our new sense of reality, the rather fearful recognition that we are in a steady, warm, war with the Soviet Union has nothing to do with the change of heart or with policy or indeed with Mr Carter or Mr Brezhnev. It's due to the simple inescapable fact that spy planes can'not fly too high to be reached. The U2 planes flew at 65,000 feet which is roughly ten and a half miles up. And from that height the Americans at least had, so long ago as 1962, cameras that could define with astonishing accuracy objects as small as the woodshed ten miles below.

The Russians must not have known this because when they were shown, at the United Nations, the American reconnaissance blow-ups of the Russian missiles being installed in Cuba they blustered and swore that the pictures were fakes. But the photographs plainly showed missiles, all the paraphernalia of bases, and launch pads that could not possibly be mistaken for woodsheds. So it wasn’t so much the initiative of President Kennedy that persuaded the Russians to abandon their bluff and dismantle their bases, it was the cameras of the U2s with their 9 x 18 inch negatives and their incredible 36-inch lenses.

Well by now photographs of landscape from 65,000 feet are so taken for granted that NASA, the national space administration, puts out infrared prints – you can buy them – of every section of the United States, in reaches of country 30 to 40 miles across, on which you can see the sharp divisions of streets in cities of several million population. Obviously these pictures would not be made public if they represented the known limit of the technical resources of reconnaissance, or spying. Clearly, since 1962 enormous advances must have been made in the ways that one nation can scan the land, the industry, the defence establishment, of another. We now spy not from ten miles up but 150 miles.

Neither the Russians nor the Americans deny it. In fact, since this scanning through radar has passed over into space, we have a situation that could have been imagined a hundred years ago only by WS Gilbert and Jules Verne working in partnership. The two superpowers have become so aware – through several accidents – so aware of the lethal consequences of mismanagement in space that they keep each other posted on the movement of their spy ships, the orbiting labs that are monitoring each other’s military movements. The crash of the Soviet satellite Cosmos 954 provided the ordinary citizens with, I believe, the first glimpse we have had into this involuntary partnership. I say involuntary, because whether or not the Pentagon or the Soviet defence department wants it, the possibilities of accidental devastation from satellites floating untracked through space are too awful to be ignored.

So it’s worth taking a look into how it works, and today it can be done quite openly and the findings published without a squeak of protest from the North American Air Defence Command whose headquarters are buried deep in the granite of the Colorado Rockies. Only six years ago, when I was doing a television programme about the working of the Strategic Air Command's underground headquarters in Nebraska, though we were given extraordinary freedom to film the whole process that could lead to the president's final cue for a nuclear attack, there were things that were off limits – we were not allowed to guess at the number of missiles that the Americans had at the ready.

Well the perils of free-floating satellites have changed all that. Today, we know, and the Soviets know, that there are 4,600 machines of various sorts in space, and precisely 930 satellites – perhaps now 938. And somewhere in the Urals, or wherever, Soviet technicians are tracking them. And in the bowels of the Rockies, American technicians are doing the same – they marked the launching of Cosmos 954 on 17 September last, they knew its job was to scan the oceans with its radar, tell Soviet ground stations what it saw by way of ships and submarines, they knew that its penetrating radar equipment was powered by a nuclear reactor.

Well three months after it was launched in mid-December the Cosmos 954 began to sag out of its prescribed orbit. The Russians ordered it to break into three parts and dissipate, but evidently it stayed intact and every time it went round the earth it swung a little nearer. In early January the Americans figured it would fall into the earth’s atmosphere over this continent. The Soviet ambassador was invited to the White House, the Russians were asked for all relevant information.

The American anxiety was over the amount of uranium on board the satellite and its chances of exploding on or above the earth. Teams of observers, decontamination experts, flew out to the likely points of impact. The afternoon before it exploded the men of the air defence command watched it go across Australia, then the Pacific and on into northern Canada. And when a Canadian mountie reported a meteorite, they knew it was all over. When the fragments had been tested it seemed certain that the satellite and its nuclear power cell had burned up completely on re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The air defence command relaxed, the newspapers cooled down, all was well.

Not quite. What came out a few days later was the admission from space scientists that the location of the crash was not contrived by human skill or the magic of computers – it was sheer luck. If the satellite had managed to hobble once more around the earth, it would have come down somewhere close to New York City between eight and nine in the morning. Now this afterthought was not publicised, it seemed the story was all over, except for a plea from President Carter for a law, an agreement at least, to ban from space any satellites that contain nuclear reactors. The secretary of energy said, Amen, but he didn’t quite see how it was to be done. Mr Brezhnev said there must not be another war. But apart from that, the Russians said nothing.

However, the doubt remains whether any satellite like Cosmos 954 would be able to spot the movement of submarines unless its radar was powered by a nuclear reactor. In other words, the evidence is undeniable that we are already embarked on a military usage of space. And just how far we have gone was chillingly exposed two days later, by a piece in the New York Times. It was a long complex story but so was the story of the splitting of the atom which, in the end, was simplified into Hiroshima.

The Times recalled that in 1959 the United States became the first nation to put a spy satellite in orbit. But more recently, Mr Carter became the first president to admit that both countries are developing weapons meant to destroy each other’s satellites and that the defence department is well aware of Russian experiments in space with laser weapons.

And then the Times dropped its bombshell – it reported that the Russians have outstripped the Americans, probably by years, in developing what are known as 'hunter-killer satellites' which, I quote, 'could knock out the Pentagon’s ability to communicate with and give orders to ships, planes, submarines, missile silos, and ground forces around the world'.

Now this, of course, means, that the United States could be paralysed from outer space, and rendered impotent even to order an act of retaliation if she were attacked. The subject was evidently too touchy for security experts in the White House and the Pentagon – they wouldn’t talk about it. But the recently-retired chief of air force intelligence would, and did.

He is General George Keegan, he said 18 years ago a Russian spy working for the allies in the Kremlin warned Washington that the Russians were about to invest on a grand scale in a military space research, and he was ignored, that two years ago American experts were startled when the Russians put into orbit a hunter-killer that could destroy a target on earth after making only one pass around it. General Keegan says the threat of the hunter-killers is grim.

And what does President Carter say? He brushed the story off quickly at a press conference. How could he have said anything else? To say "Yes the Russians have them and we don’t" could have dealt a stunning blow to the morale of the people. But what we have to face is that whether it true or not, it is going to be – we are already far gone towards preparing for the kind of war that HG Wells conceived as scientific fiction, and that Bertrand Russell 22 years ago saw as the almost certain consequence of American and Russian nuclear research.

It surely should give an aching urgency to the coming talks on limiting strategic arms for, if the wind out of Canada has blown any good, it is the warning that satellites are already beyond absolute human control, that the technology of war is requiring a momentum independent of national policy or the men who make it. Like that ghoulish computer in an old 1969 movie, the hunter-killer may come to have a mind of its own.

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