Interviewed by Tom Mangan

Jon Anderson, U.S. Air Force officer, former keeper of nuclear keys, GPS whiz kid.

His homepage is here.

Most of us get our knowledge of nukes and missile silos from the movies. What are some of the myths you'd straighten out if they let you make the next nuclear war-themed movie?

In 1982, one year before I arrived there, Nicholas Meyer filmed "The Day After" at The University of Kansas. Like any good nuclear war film, it was a horror movie that left you feeling very depressed. I can't think of any way to portray the subject in a positive light. The best attempt was "The Planet of the Apes," where humanity's demise at least put the apes at the top of the food chain. Even "Dr. Strangelove," one of the funniest movies of all time, left you somewhat worried that, at any minute, something might go terribly wrong.

The most unrealistic Hollywood plot is that some terrorist or teenage hacker could somehow gain control of the missiles and hold the nation hostage or accidentally launch them. It will never happen. Even if a single missile crew conspired to launch their missiles (and had somehow obtained the codes), their launch order would be stopped by the other crews in the squadron. As for hackers, there is no connectivity to the outside world.

In "War Games," crew members were replaced with computers when many crews failed to execute launch during an exercise. Missile crews are never led to believe an exercise is real. No one knows how many officers might panic if the real order came - but my guess is that very few would fail their mission. They've been trained to respond quickly and automatically. The idea of taking people out of the loop is ridiculous.

The great Cold War Nuclear War Movie is now a thing of the past. The Air Force still has ICBMs, as do Russia and China. But the real nuclear stakes have shifted to the "rogue nations" of North Korea and Iraq. The next horror is likely to hit South Korea, Japan, or Israel. Unfortunately, it may not just be a movie.

It's sobering enough to me to think there are guys down in those holes, waiting for their orders to end the world. What was it like in your head when you were, for want of a better term, at ground zero?

During my tour in missiles, I always believed that in a post-nuclear war crimes trial, there would be sufficient grounds to hold me guilty for crimes against humanity. The launch of a nuclear-tipped missile requires positive action, and I was always aware that the deaths from my 10 missiles alone would add me to the genocide A-list (along with a few hundred other American and Russian troops).

However, at the moment of truth, the missileer has no real decision-making power. I was a cog in the nuclear machine, willing to execute the presidential decree unquestioningly. The order wouldn't explain why we were going to war. It wouldn't attempt to persuade us to launch. It would merely command. My decision to launch had already been made when I swore the Oath of Office and marched off to the Cold War.

Civilians might wonder if missile crews talk about nuclear horror or question the morality of their jobs. The answer is no. The missile force is made up of college-educated officers from every imaginable background and their opinion on nuclear weapons is nearly universal. The weapons exist solely for the sake of deterrence. The mission is accomplished only when the enemy refrains from attack for fear of retaliation. Should deterrence fail, the missile force has failed. No one on missile crew duty actually believes they will ever have to execute a launch order. Although much ridiculed by others, the Strategic Air Command slogan, "Peace is our Profession," was believable to us.

Therein lies the paradox. I sat in a missile launch capsule ready to go to war, yet believing it would never happen. And if it did? I wouldn't have time to think about it. The training of missileers is intended to incite a Pavlovian response. Crews are trained to quickly follow a checklist (see a step, do a step, get a banana). There is no time to think about what you are doing. After the missiles were gone, we would just wait and hope for a direct hit on our site. There was no post-nuclear survival plan.

I watched the end of the Cold War from the front lines. Our wing was scheduled for deactivation. My last year on crew, they "safed" the missiles, and began to remove them from their silos. Near the end of my assignment, I spent many alerts in command of ten empty holes. For me, the war was over.

What was a typical shift like down in the hole?

I should point out that my tour in missiles ended in 1992 - so things have changed considerably. The details of crew life are available on the Web and in the media, so I will only add a few comments.

Except for weekends, there was always plenty of activity. There was usually maintenance on the missiles or within the capsule. The crew was in constant communication with the maintainers, the security police, and with base authorities. On top of this, we received a constant stream of exercise messages over the various communications channels.

Besides the normal duties, nearly everyone worked on a Master's degree. Several universities had on-base programs which catered to the schedules of missileers and pilots. I was one of the few getting a degree at the local engineering school. They didn't cater to the needs of the base - but I was helped greatly by the wing schedulers who ensured I would miss few classes.

The typical line crew would go on eight alerts per month. One thing I remember clearly is how all sense of the calendar would become distorted. Weekends and holidays would pass unnoticed, as we lived by the alert schedule. While we had more free time than most people, this life was far more tiring than the nine-to-five routine.

Let's talk about your work with global positioning satellites: GPS is all the rage these days among people who must have the latest tech toys, but the only reason it's possible is that the military is allowing civilian use of its satellites. Why was the U.S. military willing to share its birds with the general public?

GPS has become far more than a tech toy. It's critical for many civilian activities: geodesy, surveying, civil aviation, marine navigation, satellite orbit determination, precision farming, timing standards; the list is endless. It has become more than a military space system - it's now a free public utility.

No civil agency or cartel would ever have built something as massive as the Global Positioning System. It was nearly canceled by the DoD many times. It's another artifact of the Cold War (like the Manned Space Program). There are far more civil users (and uses) than military ones, but GPS is becoming the core of everything the military does, like dropping bombs, guiding missiles and moving tanks around the desert.

The availability of GPS for civilian use was always part of the system. The reason is that the technology of the 1970's required an unencrypted signal for military receivers to use for initial acquisition - which means that the encrypted signal was impossible to lock onto until the receiver first locked onto the unencrypted signal. A byproduct was that GPS would be freely available for civil use. In 1983, when a Korean airliner was shot down over Soviet territory, President Reagan proclaimed that the unencrypted signal would always be available for civil use. With a presidential guarantee, the unencrypted acquisition signal became the "civilian" signal.

So when the constellation was fully populated with satellites and GPS receivers became available, civilian use exploded. Now the military has no choice but to always provide a civilian signal. It is U.S. Government policy that GPS is a national asset and it's in the best interest of the U.S. to make it a worldwide standard. The only competitor is GLONASS, the Russian equivalent, which has been fraught with problems. The key issue now is how to improve GPS for both civilian and military use. Sometimes those two requirements contradict each other. Currently, the military has better signals available - and it is unreasonable for it to give these up for civil use. And in these days of multi-billion dollar spectrum auctions, trying to add new signals is as difficult financially and politically as it is technically. But the Air Force was able to find solutions that satisfied nearly everybody - and GPS Modernization is well underway.

I saw a magazine article that credited you with "bringing GPS to the masses." What exactly did you do?

The person who wrote that was very kind, but what I did was far less heroic. GPS has been available to the masses from the beginning. I was just one of the people who helped start GPS Modernization.

I was working in the GPS Joint Program Office in Los Angeles. My job was systems engineer for the Navigation Warfare Program. Our task was to solve some of the military problems with GPS - the most significant being its vulnerability to enemy jamming.

At that time ('96-'97) there was significant pressure on the DoD to put a second civil signal on future GPS satellites. The new satellite contract made provisions for a second frequency. The critical issue was finding a suitable frequency, which was the job of an interagency group in Washington, D.C. The talks broke down because the DoD and FAA couldn't agree on a frequency - largely a factor of existing users on the most attractive bands.

I was then tasked to find a technical solution. I put a team of engineers together and we evaluated all kinds of ideas. One engineer, from The Aerospace Corp., which supports the Air Force, suggested a means of putting new signals within the existing spectrum. The advantage was that we would solve the Navigation Warfare problem and provide a second civil frequency at the same time. Everybody would get what they wanted.

My team developed the idea and I began to advocate it. The initial resistance almost killed it. Many within the DoD didn't believe it would work - that military users would give up performance. Some even accused us of pandering to the civil community. After 18 months we prevailed, thanks to the outstanding technical work of my team and support from senior officers in the program office. The new signals are undergoing development and will likely appear on the satellites within the next five years.

You're an engineer with all this management experience and technical expertise -- seems to me you could double your income with one well-placed phone call. What keeps you in the Air Force?

From the purely financial perspective, my Air Force benefits are very competitive. I receive a decent salary, free housing and utilities, full medical benefits, and I pay no state income taxes. I get 30 days of paid leave per year (most of us have trouble using all of it). The Air Force is now sending me full time to graduate school to get my Ph.D., while paying my salary for doing it. They have already paid for my B.S. and M.S. degrees. Eight years from now, at the age of 42, I can retire from the Air Force and receive half my pay and full medical benefits for life. Or, if I get promoted high enough, I can retire at age 52 with 75 percent of my pay.

But this is not why I'm still in the Air Force. The simple reason is that I'm still having fun. The frequent change of jobs (every three to four years) suits me. I like moving around the country. So far I've been in Rapid City, Dayton, and Los Angeles. My next probable assignment is Boston. The work is fascinating, and I have far more responsibility and authority than my civilian counterparts. I won't be a millionaire, but I'm working for the people of the United States and what I do makes a difference.

The Air Force is in trouble right now. Eight years ago, the entire U.S. military began a rapid downsizing. Many good people were forced out, and many didn't get promoted. Now the situation has reversed. Retention is at an all-time low, and recruiting quotas are not being met. Many units are underfunded. Morale is low in some career fields, with the constant deployment to places like Bosnia and Kuwait. In my field, Acquisition, we have trouble keeping our young engineers because the economy is so good. Often these young officers have a spouse with a career - and the pressure to settle down is strong.

Some might see this as a good time to get out. I see it as a time with great opportunities. Already, Congress has raised our salaries. Hopefully they will increase investment in research and development - and I'd like to be here when that happens. The world is still a scary place. So far, we've been living off the technological fruit of the Cold War. I think that the national leadership is now beginning to see our precarious position.

How do you maintain your can-do attitude in the midst of all the pressures described in Q6?

My hometown is Abilene, Kansas. It's also the hometown of Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1938, only a year before Hitler invaded Poland, Eisenhower was a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army and an aide to General MacArthur in the Philippines.

He was a brilliant organizer and strategist - but his career had not taken him very far. He was not sent to Europe during World War I; and in the U.S. Army of the late 30s, officers stayed in a very long time and promotions were hard to come by. When the war started in Europe, the Army began to purge its officer corps. Only six years after leaving the Philippines, Ike was Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe. He went on to be the first commander of NATO and President of the United States.

The point is, you never know where your career will go. The pendulum of military funding swings widely over the years. On one end, units are underfunded, morale is low and recruits must be wooed with incentives. On the other end, new weapons programs are initiated, salaries and bonuses go up and the recruiting offices turn good people away.

I may never see a time like the '80s when military spending was so high. But good times for the military may not coincide with good tidings in world events. The world is fairly peaceful now, and if the lack of perceived threat hampers military research and development, so be it. I'm still having fun.

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