Lyle Don Clawson was a button-push away from starting World War
III. Flying airborne alerts around Russia, he was one of several
hundred men with the single-handed ability to send nuclear weapons
Russia’s way.
Lyle Don Clawson was a button-push away from starting World War III. Flying airborne alerts around Russia, he was one of several hundred men with the single-handed ability to send nuclear weapons Russia’s way.
Clawson, 82, flew B-52 bombers during 15 missions over Europe and Northern Africa during the Cuban missile crisis, which lasted 20 days from Oct. 8 to Oct. 28 in 1962.
The Cuban missile crisis marked the height of the Cold War and the closest the United States came to World War III, according to military historian and San Jose State University professor Jonathan Roth. Through a spy plane, the United States discovered that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba and that Soviet officials were authorized to use them if the U.S. invaded. On Oct. 25, 1962, President John F. Kennedy announced that if any nuclear missile were launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere, the United States would consider it a direct attack and would retaliate, Roth said. The conflict was resolved when Kennedy reached an agreement with the Soviets to dismantle the missiles in Cuba in exchange for a no invasion agreement and secret removal of U.S. missiles in Turkey.
During this same time, Clawson, an energetic, boisterous man with glistening blue eyes, was a major in the U.S. Air Force. Clawson flew airborne alerts, code named “Chrome Domes.” During the alerts, the B-52 crews awaited the call to action. The B-52s Clawson flew were equipped with six nuclear missiles each – and could be detonated by any one of three people on each plane. All that was needed to go into an attack was an execution message, or Emergency War Order, that could be sent by a single person.
According to Clawson, each primary crew member – aircraft commander, co-pilot and radar navigator – knew the format and had the codes to start an attack, and could have sent the message from the air. Once a war order was sent, it was go time: according to the rules in place, no recall message would be honored, Clawson said.
“Individually, any one of the three primary crew members could have constructed this message and sent it out on (high frequency) since they had all the information needed and it would have required the entire (Strategic Air Command) airborne alert force to proceed to their targets and expend their nuclear weapons.”
“Depending on who you want to believe, there were between 60 and 176 B-52s flying at any one time during the crisis,” Clawson wrote in an essay. “This means there were from 180 to 528 individual crew members with this capability. Talk about devolution, this was incredible.”
Clawson said during his training at the Montgomery, Ala. Air War College in 1955 his class was given an off-the-cuff, unorthodox lecture by a major general that the prudent move would be to pre-emptively strike the Soviet Union. Had just one of Clawson’s classmates been convinced, “there could have been a catastrophe,” he said.
Clawson maintains it was the integrity of his crew and the dozens of other B-52 crews circling Russia – who were well aware that they had half a dozen idle nuclear missiles below their feet – that prevented World War III from starting.
“The citizens of the Soviet Union have no idea how much they owe their survival to the integrity of the B-52 crews,” he said.
So was he scared, flying across the world with nuclear missiles nestled under his plane? Not at all, he said. He was more concerned about being comfortable during the 25-hour flight across the Atlantic from Griffiss Air Force Base in New York to Spain, then south to Tripoli, Libya and back, he said.
Clawson wrote a book of anecdotes, “Is That Something the Crew Should Know?,” detailing close calls he experienced as an airman during his 26 years of service.
Clawson said his then wife Margaret Lois and seven children, based in Rome, N.Y., knew “practically nothing” of what he did during the crisis. It wasn’t until decades later when his grandson asked to hear war stories that Clawson shared what he did. It was these storytelling experiences that led him to writing the book, he said.
Curiously, the title of his book does not come from the Cuban missile crisis incident. It’s from one of the many other close calls he recalls in the book.
After retiring from the Air Force in 1973, Clawson and his family moved to Morgan Hill. He worked as an intelligence analyst for GTE Government Systems in Mountain View until 1989, and later worked in real estate.
He holds the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal awards from the U.S. Air Force.
Emergency war order
The following is the emergency war order, the beginning of the high frequency code U.S. Air Force pilots waited to hear during the Cuban missile crisis: “Skyking, skyking, do not answer, do not answer. This is drop kick standby to copy (an execution) message.”
Upcoming event
Who: Lyle Don Clawson
What: Speaks about U.S. Air Force experiences
Where: BookSmart, 80 E. Second St., Morgan Hill
When: 7 p.m. Oct. 23
