there might be no response. The US, with its priceless collection of bombers and missiles and million-man army, could not strike back for the simple reason that the nation’s field officers would have no way to talk to each other, or to commanders in Washington. The military radio and telephone systems America depended on for her safety would not likely endure an initial Soviet strike. This was the problem Baran had been told to solve.“At the time we didn’t know how to build a communication system that could survive even collateral damage by enemy weapons,” he recalled later. RAND determined through computer simulations that the AT&T Long Lines telephone system, a copper web that carried essentially all the nation’s military communications, would be cut apart by relatively minor physical damage.!°> The military had spent, already, a fortune on the problem. (They had spent half a fortune, it turned out, trying to hide it.) The result was an expensively designed, gorgeously featured telephone network linking military bases to strategic command posts. But because the lines and their switching centers were laced out in a pattern with just a few big central nodes, like a bicycle wheel with spokes, it had almost no chance of surviving the very thing it was designed to help prevent, a Soviet strike. If you gazed at an inked-out map of this network, with its central hub staffed by senior commanders and then radiating lines out to bases and missile silos, it even looked, well, like a target. If the USSR could bullseye those hubs with a bomb or two, the rest of the network would fold. The Soviets could do whatever they wanted: Invade Berlin, roll into France, obliterate Los Angeles. America’s military would be deaf. And as Soviet missiles became more accurate, this seemed an inevitability. “We will soon be living in an era,” Baran wrote, “in which we cannot guarantee survivability of any single point.” The situation, as a carefully screened handful of scientists at RAND knew,