It was 50 years ago and Douglass Ray feared that the world was at death's door.
Nuclear war was knocking."I got a DefCon 2 message change from Looking Glass, the airborne command post," said the retired Air Force captain, who lives in Fort Worth. "It was the highest state of readiness we'd been in since World War II."Stationed at a Thor missile site in England, Ray was the senior authentication and control officer in charge of a crew of Americans working with the Royal Air Force to keep 60 intermediate-range nuclear-tipped missiles ready to fly up to 1,500 miles into Eastern Europe.On Oct. 22, 1962, he was called to a meeting where he and several other site commanders were told to listen to the BBC at midnight, "because President Kennedy had an important message for our country."Ray didn't get to listen to much of Kennedy's speech about Soviet missile installations in Cuba. The message from Looking Glass came earlier, and the crew was suddenly busy."It was the first message of that type we'd ever received on the Thor," said Ray, whose wife and two children lived in their home just across an abandoned airfield from the missile site.The high alert continued for almost a month before "cooler heads prevailed" and the world went back to a more manageable level of paranoia, Ray said."We were at DefCon 2 more than three weeks," he said. "I believe we dropped straight back to DefCon 4, where we were normally in those days."Ray helped shut down the site and dismantle its missiles in June 1963. He was reassigned to a stateside base and eventually moved to Fort Worth."The Navy took over our targets with Polaris submarines based in Scotland," he said. "I upgraded to the Atlas F. It had the same characteristics but was capable of 8,000 miles."And the band played on.Terry Evans, 817-390-7620Twitter: @fwstevans
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