CAPTAIN COLEMAN'S CHALLENGING JOB
Day, Samuel H. Jr.
CAPTAIN COLEMAN'S CHALLENGING JOB AND WHY HE DECIDED TO LEAVE IT BY SAMUEL H.DAY JR. It was a long, dull day in August 1972— a day much like any other for those who pull duty at the eighteen...
...The last few months were agonizing and all-consuming, Jenna recalls...
...One member with whom the Colemans were particularly close was later to resign his job as a civilian employe at Wright-Patterson's logistics command because of growing religious scruples...
...In the 1950s and 1960s, George admired the Reverend Billy James Hargis and the John Birch Society, and worked for an organization called the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade...
...Thus, in a recent "fact sheet" issued by SAC headquarters: The Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), the general war plan for U.S...
...All strategic weapons allocations are determined by this plan, which starts with information provided by intelligence systems and the performance characteristics of all U.S...
...After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, he was commissioned and went on to receive a master's degree from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio...
...and allied strategic weapons...
...It had the 360/85 to calculate weapons blast and radiation effects...
...In time, after the initial exhilaration of SAC headquarters' rarefied computer atmosphere had worn off, Coleman began to notice a growing cynicism in himself and his colleagues...
...In a number of places in the Sermon on the Mount Christ makes quite clear that what our intentions are is just as important as what we actually do...
...One of the gifts bestowed on Ron and Jenna Coleman by the close friend with whom they studied at the American Baptist group in Dayton was a subscription to The Other Side, a monthly magazine published by a Christian community in Germantown, Pennsylvania...
...What about the kids...
...The job held as many variables as did SIOP, for which analysts worked with a list of 40,000 potential targets ranging from a single hangar at a remote Siberian airstrip to the city of Moscow itself...
...In weeks, the fire and brimstone of gospel fundamentalism ate through a lifetime's crust of enlightened liberalism protecting the dogma of nuclear deterrence...
...One of the things I really liked about this job is that it was continually one new problem after another...
...He showed me pictures of himself and his wife, Jenna, at their 1964 wedding in Boise, Idaho...
...And it was obvious that the Soviets were building up horrendously in that period...
...To me, it was just fun—like playing chess and bridge all day long," he said...
...I was never the same after that," she says...
...Beginning with Robert McNamara (SIOP-2), the targeting policy moved toward destruction of "enemy" military installations as well as cities, as more delivery systems needing more targets entered the arsenal...
...It was a time of growth for her and tension for them...
...lift off...
...ordered the first crude one put together on the eve of John Kennedy's election, in the simple days when "massive retaliation" against Soviet and Chinese cities was the principal targeting criterion...
...Only the intellectual surfaced, and that was strictly along the lines of' 'me and my project...
...Beneath the headline—"Granddaddy Payloads Bristle in a Deadly Ring Around Tucson"—the close-cropped, clean-shaven figure pictured in the commander's chair was only faintly recognizable...
...Despite his politics and despite the fact that he was almost totally blind, he was the first and only promoter who could successfully sell advertising space in a liberal political newspaper I was editing at the time in Boise...
...But now he could no longer believe even that...
...It was just the sort of thing I like to do: dig into the textbooks, do a little research, fool around, and fill the pages with equations...
...In the end, the systems analyst solved the ethical equation with a simple finding of faith: "For a Christian it is totally incompatible to take part in the mass murder of millions of innocent people...
...He estimates the value of the pension and other benefits he would have received had he stayed the normal minimum of twenty years at about a quarter of a million dollars...
...Today the former commander wears a full lush beard...
...In the fours years since Ronald Coleman left the Air Force, the family has grappled further with the problem of how to lead a non-exploitative life in middle-class America...
...Why people wanted to gather more and more work under their control always amazed me...
...Working from SAC's master targeting plan for the 9,000 to 10,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S...
...DAVID JOHNSON As the visitors filed out, Captain Coleman recited the words which have become obligatory for missile commanders everywhere: "I don't ever want to have to turn that key...
...Both projects called for making the most efficient use of U.S...
...A few weeks ago, on the eve of his departure for Portland, Oregon, where he and his family will be starting a new life, I returned to Omaha to talk to him about it...
...It has always interested me to see personal examples of people living their beliefs," he says...
...When political, economic, intellectual, and even strategic arguments are exhausted, the ultimate collective decision may well be taken on simple faith that, as a people, we cannot turn the key...
...A February 1977 issue of Sojourners, devoted largely to the religious implications of the nuclear arms race, hit Ron and Jenna Coleman with the force of an atomic bomb...
...It had the Honeywell 6080, the UNIVAC 1100/42, and much more...
...Refusal to do so, when ordered, can be a capital offense...
...They talked about Robert and Janet Aldridge, and about the friend in Dayton who had left the Air Force logistics command...
...The death knell was also tolling now for Ronald Coleman's career—not just in the targeting headquarters or in the Strategic Air Command but in the United States Air Force itself...
...The shift intensified under Richard Nixon's Defense Secretaries, Melvin Laird (SIOP-3) and James D. Schlesinger (SIOP-4), culminating in Jimmy Carter's enunciation a year ago, through Defense Secretary Harold Brown, of Presidential Directive Fifty-nine (SIOP-5), in which the concept of winnable, limited nuclear war achieved its purest expression to date through targeting of carefully selected military objectives...
...What Ronald D. Coleman didn't tell the visitors or his fellow crew members or anyone else that day was that he was well on his way toward deciding that, should a real order come, he would not turn the key...
...And the whole rest of your career would be less than the best, to say the least...
...To Ronald Coleman for whom the mysteries of a laser-guided bomb's computer program had provided a full night's preoccupation, the far weightier challenges of Offutt were almost too good to be true...
...Regardless of what the target happened to be (and Coleman could not be sure of what it was), the notion of a missile commander deciding such things for himself was the height of irregularity, and Coleman kept his feelings to himself...
...He was right about that—although in his first year at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona his team broke a record in training proficiency...
...nuclear weapons will hit what targets when, where, and how...
...Born April 4, 1941, at Delano, California, the son of a farmer turned electrician, he quit junior college at twenty-one to join the service at a time when the Pentagon was scouring the country for bright young men with an aptitude for mathematics...
...Ron recalls that the only real reservation he felt in late 1973, upon learning to his delight that he was being reassigned to SAC's nuclear war-waging nerve center, was that "Nebraska was too flat, and I didn't think I could feel politically comfortable in a state represented [in the U.S...
...The trouble started with the "Christian books" they read at an American Baptist Church study group in Dayton...
...and of the other two children, Tom and Mark, who were to come later...
...They introduced themselves to me as the son-in-law and daughter of two old friends of mine, George and Virginia Spriggel...
...Could I come up with something...
...But the Colemans were still a long way from their fateful decision...
...Ronald paid little attention to politics until he was almost twenty, when, as a student at Compton Junior College in southern California, he hustled votes for John F. Kennedy...
...Coleman himself displayed in his office a popular Vietnam-era poster that ridiculed nuclear civil defense practices by listing mock safety rules, ending with the instruction to "bend down and kiss your ass goodbye...
...It was all I could have asked for...
...In May he spoke to a Presbyterian study group in Omaha...
...It was there that he saw a chance to complete his undergraduate education through the Air Force...
...There were a great many doubts...
...With the help and encouragement of peace activists and other friends in the Omaha area, the former nuclear targeter who saw the weapons system from its innermost depths has begun to speak out in recent months...
...Could we make it economically...
...Late one afternoon, just before quitting time, some Air Force engineers came to Coleman with a problem...
...SIOP, a document of enormous length, detail, and complexity, is the basic blueprint designating which U.S...
...But nowadays the Pentagon speaks expansively about the subject...
...It was a horrendously complicated problem...
...The final decision came on an agonizing, non-stop-talking weekend late in the spring of 1977...
...silo soft...
...Two of the couples in the group sold their homes and moved into a poor neighborhood to find a simpler life...
...Offutt Air Force Base, built in a curve of the Missouri River in the southeast corner of Nebraska ten miles south of downtown Omaha, is the heart and soul of the U.S...
...And then he could do it no more...
...The problems they threw at him at Wright-Patterson were so fascinating that he hated to drag himself away at night...
...I did not realize it at the time, but my interior attitude was shifting from a "thing-relationship" to concern for others—a change which tolled the death knell for my engineering career in the defense industry...
...As a scientific analyst in the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, he had become a key participant in designing the most efficient nuclear strike force money can buy...
...He added, "Mass murder is our specialty...
...I came to understand that, whatever else happened, Ron wouldn't let us starve...
...The extraordinary, often trying, and sometimes tortured lives of Ron and Jenna Coleman had come to my attention through an unusual set of circumstances...
...And they talked about each other...
...asked the commander...
...I didn't look at it in human terms...
...It was a long, dull day in August 1972— a day much like any other for those who pull duty at the eighteen Titan II silos of the 390th Strategic Missile Wing near Tucson, Arizona...
...And there was his well-thumbed PV Handbook for solving targeting problems— Mathematical Background and Programming Aids for the Physical Vulnerability System for Nuclear Weapons, published by the Defense Intelligence Agency Director for Intelligence...
...The software section which he headed quickly grew from one staff person to six...
...Amidst the reams of computer printouts in Offutt's "Building 500," it was easy to forget the feel of the cold steel of the launch key...
...As for Ron, thrown into the exciting new world of operations research—applied math, analysis, optimization technique, mathematical modeling—he was like a kid let loose in a candy store...
...The intoxicating challenge of SAC's systems analysis was more than enough to overcome the doubts that had begun to torment the former missile crew commander...
...However, the fact that world rulers are now marching us all into nuclear oblivion makes Christian resistance to that insanity an imperative...
...During his first year in Arizona, Coleman began to entertain doubts about whether he would turn the key...
...And there was Sojourners, a somewhat more intellectual magazine in the same political-religious vein published by the People's Christian Coalition in Washington, D.C...
...His former colleagues failed to recognize him, or pretended not to know him...
...Coleman had always been able to cling to the rationalization that, whatever its other evils, the nuclear weapons program at least deterred nuclear war...
...Wes Michaelson...
...So I came to the conclusion that the threat of their use—just the mere possession—was wrong...
...The work can get tiring, but I enjoy doing it...
...Politics and religion were not always a big thing with Ronald Coleman...
...I came up with an equation from which to compute the release point of the weapon...
...And Robert Aldridge, a Lockheed missile engineer who had forsaken his employer because of religious and political convictions, told in Sojourners, with his wife Janet, a personal story that held a particular fascination for Ron and Jenna Coleman: / observed very little joy within the guarded gates of Lockheed...
...It was a prospect that gave him and Jenna little pause because, with each passing year, the military life looked better and better to them...
...The SIOPs are usually revised at six-month intervals...
...I found a man still in conflict with himself, but one who has forever left behind him the pretense that masked his self-doubts in that Arizona missile silo nine years ago...
...What gives Offutt Air Force Base its unique importance even beyond the command of such a formidable strike force is its designation as the home of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, an agency of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, which has charge of the nation's entire strategic nuclear strike force—the Navy's submarine-launched missiles as well as the Air Force's bombers and ICBMs...
...of their first child, Brenda, born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1966 while he was getting a university education at Air Force expense...
...Coleman took basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, specialized in electronics communication and cryptography, and was assigned to Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho...
...I met them for the first time last November in Omaha, where I had gone to address a meeting of the Nebraska Civil Liberties Union...
...The relationships we developed were very real...
...We worried about what kind of a statement we would be making to the Air Force people with whom we had lived and whom we care about...
...Through the 1960s he was an admirer of Senator Henry M. Jackson, the hawkish Democrat from the state of Washington...
...They talked about the imbalance in the world, in the country, and in their own lives...
...She remembers how ready her Air Force friends were to help in an emergency, how warmly the Air Force neighbors would make newcomers feel at home...
...Strategies and Actions for Conversion, loosely affiliated with Omaha Pax Christi, a Catholic peace action group, was just beginning to make contact with Ronald and Jenna Coleman at the time of my first visit...
...intervention in Vietnam...
...Altogether, it was an incongruous mix: baby photos, graduation pictures, and formal dinner programs amidst equations to compute the "distance damage functions" of nuclear bombs...
...Captain Ronald D. Coleman and his crew of three welcomed the diversion of a tour group which had been cleared to visit their control room deep beneath the desert floor...
...Would you like to see a simulated launch...
...It was far and away the best job I ever had," says Coleman, who for all his adult life has found computers endlessly challenging...
...She felt a sudden tightness in her throat one day at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona when her three-year-old son, Tom, saw the pistol on his father's hip and asked for a chance to pull the trigger...
...I mourned, as did others on our staff, when George and Virginia left Idaho in the early 1970s for the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, to join a little-known pastor named Jerry Falwell...
...Computers are used throughout the process of developing and optimizing the war plan, as well as for simulating the execution of the war plan against our best estimate of the enemy's plan (war gaming...
...With Jenna, the change came more in fits and starts...
...His mother and father were registered Republicans, but they voted Democratic because Thomas Paul Coleman was a union man, a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers...
...strategic arsenal, and using the world's most sophisticated computers, he helped design the Air Force's "future force structures"—the new nuclear weapons systems for the 1980s...
...The two pretended to turn their keys...
...nuclear firepower...
...Nor did he imagine that his inner struggle would lead him in the next few years to abandon his Air Force career and relinquish an awesome role in America's plans and preparations for waging nuclear war...
...I can't think of one of them who bought what SAC was saying publicly about the need for new weapons systems...
...In his first months out of uniform the former nuclear targeter would occasionally join the Pax Christi vigils at the gates of Offutt Air Force Base...
...But at that point I had never been taught them...
...It is simply wrong...
...As far as the Air Force was concerned, Captain Coleman had met its sternest requirements for command over the highest nuclear weapons technology—keenness of mind and spirit, a competitive edge, and the capacity to avoid seeing the end product in human terms...
...By the time he left the Air Force in September 1977, Coleman had advanced far beyond the station of a missile crew commander with his finger on a nine-megaton button...
...He was liberal in the areas I was liberal, and conservative in the areas I was conservative...
...The free master's degree extended Coleman's military service obligation to fifteen-and-one-half years—enough to ensure that the Air Force would be his career...
...You have to have the intention of using them...
...The Spriggels, kind and warm-hearted people, are also religious fundamentalists...
...When Ronald Coleman's resignation became effective on September 11, 1977, after fifteen and one-half years in the Air Force, his annual income dropped from $25,000 to $12,500—-the salary he was to receive later as a mathematics instructor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha...
...Senate],by Roman Hruska and Carl Curtis...
...Coleman, an engineer in his early thirties, took his seat at the control room console, opened a thick binder, and read off a long "pre-launch" checklist with the air of a man who could have recited it backwards...
...So I just stayed at the office and worked until I had the thing finished about a quarter to eight the next morning...
...Coleman's branch chief took delight in a grim addendum to SAC's official motto, "Peace is our profession...
...To plan for nuclear wars in which tens of millions would die—in this nation as well as others—on the basis of the nation's survival is to say, quite simply, that crimes against humanity are justifiable in the interest of national security...
...Computers produce the instructions which are distributed to SAC crews throughout the world...
...He told me that he felt "virtually certain" he would not do so if the missile were targeted .on a large city, but "pretty sure" he would comply with the order under any other conditions...
...What this manifests at the heart, biblically speaking, is the idolatry of nationhood...
...Two days later he gave a similar talk to a busload of Iowa ministers brought to Omaha by an ecumenical task force...
...I finally diagnosed this "empire building" as groping for security—a need to become indispensable...
...They were seeing a marriage counselor...
...junior officer at each table responsible for wine...
...By the late 1960s he had lost all enthusiasm for the war, but for reasons having mainly to do with professional self-interest: "It was very obvious to us at Aeronautical Systems that we were seeing all sorts of programs being canceled because of an austerity program...
...A budget cut or administrative reshuffle could result in being squeezed out of line in the pecking order...
...Ron Coleman loved it...
...It introduced the couple to a continuing radical political analysis based on Christian gospels...
...Two-and-one-half years later, when he was reassigned to systems analysis work eighteen months short of the normal tour of duty for a missile commander, it wasn't because the Air Force doubted that Coleman would turn the key upon command...
...I think we both knew all along, from way back, that it would come to this," says Jenna...
...Unlike others who have helped to build and maintain the most destructive war machine the world has ever known, Ronald Coleman was unable, in the end, to conquer his misgivings...
...The assumption was that the targeting work at SAC headquarters would enable the "National Command Authority"—that is, the President or his successor—to bring America successfully through an atomic war...
...Back again with his textbooks and his calculator, Coleman was happy to be doing his own thing...
...From behind a bank of equipment came word from his deputy that he, too, was prepared to turn his key, triggering ignition of the launch...
...APS power...
...Arriving at SAC headquarters late in the fall of 1973, Coleman was given the job of helping determine SAC's weapons "requirements" for the next ten years—the mix of weapons systems, the number and the size of warheads, the type of basing, and so on...
...In the imagination of all those gathered there that day, a 150-ton cylinder sprang from its pit a few hundred feet away and began its irrevocable journey to some distant Soviet target, carrying more explosive power than all the bombs dropped by all the planes in World War II...
...On April 25,1981, Ronald Coleman appeared for the first time in public, at an Omaha Pax Christi teach-in on the worldwide dangers presented by SAC's nuclear targeting system at nearby Offutt Air Force Base...
...So many of the resources were needed in Vietnam...
...Since August 1960, when land- and submarine-based missiles began entering the U.S...
...The trouble was that once he began to doubt, there was no turning back...
...We are not a Godfearing family," he says...
...Normally, the response I would get from our director would be, 'Gee, that's nice, uh-huh'—and that's as far as it would ever get...
...It was because his skills were needed more at nuclear targeting headquarters...
...But even more than the books, people began to influence Ron and Jenna...
...It was the simple fact that a man stood up and told her that he had once been part of something that was wrong, and that he could no longer do it...
...To them—and to others—he was just another bearded protester...
...Ron taught mathematics and computer science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha for the first year, doubled his salary in 1979 by going to work for Northern Natural Gas Company as a "data acquisition system analyst," then returned to the University last August...
...Now, it turned out to be not a very hard problem—it involved the kind of basic techniques I now teach my own undergraduate students...
...Such events made an impression on Ron...
...The fact that Coleman and his colleagues worked behind vaulted doors, seldom disturbed by generals or other high-ranking officials, permitted the venting of their feelings through raucous humor...
...Jim Wallis, Sojourners editor, thundered against the complicity of the Christian community: As the Christian community was complied in the holocaust which occurred against the Jews in Nazi Germany, the church is now complicit in the holocaust which will occur in a nuclear war...
...I often did a little unauthorized analysis on the side, showing that we really didn't need this system or that one...
...That gave me a chance to do some ranting and raving about these things...
...He and his older brother Fred went to church as boys, but that was only because their parents insisted on it...
...Twenty-three of SAC's thirty-nine general officers are stationed at Offutt—one of them always aboard a command plane, called "Looking Glass," which is aloft at all times and prepared to take over in case SAC's underground nerve center is destroyed...
...Everyone in my branch had a graduate degree in mathematics or engineering or computer science...
...Coleman applied for the Airman's Education Commissioning Program and was assigned to the University of Wisconsin in Madison...
...SAC headquarters had some formidable computers to assign weapons, perform penetration and damage analysis, determine the timing of missile and aircraft sorties...
...For two years they lived in Bemis Park, one of the poorest sections of Omaha...
...They were going to run more tests the next day...
...I guess I've always been a traditional liberal—a Humphrey/ Kennedy-type liberal, even in the military, where being a traditional liberal is a little out of place...
...It wasn't the former SAC officer's information or his arguments that impressed the woman...
...But for Ronald Coleman it only worked for a while...
...nuclear arsenal in heavy numbers, the staff has had responsibility for developing a "national strategic target list" and devising a "single integrated operational plan" (SIOP) for attacking the targets...
...an associate editor, inveighed against the "idolatry of nationhood": The poignancy of the Word of God dismembers the trust which this nation, or any nation, places in its obliterating destructive capability...
...There were a lot of things to consider...
...More tests were run the next day—and they were successful...
...There have been five SIOPs since Defense Secretary Thomas S. Gates Jr...
...The transfer to the Arizona missile base, with its endless hours of tedium, gave Ron Coleman plenty of time for reading...
...Ron Coleman and the Air Force seemed made for each other...
...The children learned what it was like to be bused long distances to white schools in the more affluent parts of town...
...With Coleman, the accumulating of doubt was a gradual process—two steps forward and one step back...
...This summer he joined an Oregon computer firm...
...I saw Vietnam as not being in the public interest because of the amount of money it was diverting from other military programs which I felt were much more important to the national interest...
...deterrent forces, is one of the most comprehensive plans ever conceived...
...He would dread the approach of a three-day weekend, not knowing what he would do with all that time off...
...And it helped...
...My trip to Omaha last November also included a visit with some people whose new organization, Strategies and Actions for Conversion, was aimed at making the walls come tumbling down, somehow, at Strategic Air Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base...
...It was during their Wright-Patterson days, in the late 1960s, that doubts first began to creep in for Ron and Jenna Coleman...
...guidance go . . . engines firing...
...This, with its prospect of professional employment, gave her an opportunity to ease the economic burden...
...and Soviet strengths and weaknesses in the coming decade...
...Politically, they are conservative—most would say reactionary...
...Later she became a social worker with the Eastern Nebraska Community Office of Mental Health...
...There was the Welcome to Offutt booklet, with its helpful hints and lists of dos and don'ts for new arrivals at the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command: Category 1 weapons, defined as any instrument capable of propelling a projectile by compressed air, gases, springs, or other mechanical device (such weapons include, but are not limited to, pellet guns, BB guns, bows and arrows, underwater spear guns, hunting slingshots and throwing spears), may not be stored in bachelor quarters...
...remain seated except when toasting or when schedule indicates otherwise...
...The console lit up and the visitors heard the familiar space-age litany: "Launch enable . . . batteries activated...
...Some of the books he carried into the underground bunker capable of raining a fiery death on millions bore such titles as The Cost of Discipleship and A New Testament Basis for Pacifism...
...Like many liberal Democrats in and out of the military, Coleman backed the civil rights movement in the 1960s and initially supported U.S...
...To me, it was just a problem—and I was happy that someone could come at me with a problem and I could give them a satisfactory answer...
...It was then the height of the Vietnam war, but the likelihood that his solution to the problem would be used to kill people never registered with the young computer wizard...
...When, early in 1971, Captain Coleman began his missile crew duty to get some command experience on his record, his principal reservation about going underground was the knowledge that he would probably be bored stiff...
...In Ron Coleman's personal salvation we may well find the surest path to our salvation as a nation...
...Standing at parade rest against a wall bristling with dials and gauges, the men looked crisp and efficient in their freshly pressed uniforms, white scarves tucked in at the throat...
...Oh gee, is he good," a woman told Joyce Glenn, who works with Omaha Pax Christi...
...The Strategic Air Command controls most of the nation's strategic nuclear firepower through 415 long-range bombers and 1,053 intercontinental ballistic missiles, served by more than fifty air bases scattered all over the world...
...It was family to us," recalls Jenna, now a professional social worker...
...The very existence of a master targeting plan and a master targeting apparatus for nuclear weapons was little known and seldom publicly discussed in the United States until recent years...
...But I knew of very few who achieved any degree of permanency...
...Resistance to the military aggression of nation-states is always a Christian responsibility...
...His first job as an officer was at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, working on airborne computers, which were then beginning to undergo formidable technical advances...
...They had been testing a new laser-guided bomb at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and the bomb was consistently missing the target...
...I have a tendency to get bored with a job if it becomes routine—if I end up solving the same problem over and over again to the point where there's no challenge...
...Jenna was in graduate school at the time and was within a few months of receiving her master's degree in social work...
...If there had been any doubt whether you'd turn a key, that would be sufficient for you to lose that job on the spot," he says...
...Coleman counted backward from five to one...
...For Coleman and his fellow workers, there were new "designated ground zeroes" to be determined, new missile trajectories and bomber paths to be calculated, new firing schedules to be worked out to fit the changes projected in U.S...
...We spent a lot of time talking to each other...
...Members of the Mess are reminded of the following: No smoking until smoking lamp is lit...
...Air Force Strategic Air Command, which describes itself as "the world's most powerful military force operating on a global basis...
...For most of his friends, humor helped dispel the inevitable misgivings...
...Also, there was considerable skepticism among Coleman and some of his fellow analysts as to the real need for some of the future weapons systems—the B-l bomber, the MX missile—that their elaborate computer studies were intended to justify...
...But I can't remember anyone in our particular branch who really had much belief in the idea of a limited nuclear war," Coleman says...
...They felt the problem was in the computer program for the bomb release mechanism...
...While taking some preparatory courses at Boise Junior College, he met and married Jenna Spriggel...
...The yellowing pages from the magazine section of The Tucson Daily Citizen were part of the memorabilia Ronald Coleman showed me recently in his Omaha home...
...There was a faded blue program from the winter "dining-in" banquet ceremony at the Air Force Institute of Technology, School of Engineering, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, dated 1968: Samuel H. Day Jr., a contributing editor of The Progressive, is a special representative of the Nuclear Weapons Facilities Project, jointly sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee and the Fellowship of Reconciliation...
...This guy had a set of graphs showing what the optimal release point was under varying circumstances...
...He did it for three and one-half years...
...I spent months working on some major things...
...After graduation, Jenna got a job as a child protective service worker with the Sarpy County Social Services agency in Pa-pillion, near Bellevue, the Offutt Air Force Base bedroom community where they lived at that time...
...There was a mock launch command and Coleman announced, "I'm preparing to turn my key...
...Robert McNamara had been Defense Secretary for a year, and the armed services—especially the Air Force— were on the brink of the computer age...
...That sterile attitude, accompanied by tough competition to gain more responsibility, was the general rule...
...He was also remarkably hard-working and good humored...
...It was continually one new problem after another...
...First of all, to be credible, you've got to be ready and willing to use the weapons...
Vol. 45 • August 1981 • No. 8
