Free Fail Safe by Eugene Burdick, Harvey Wheeler

perfectly each time and it was. But it came to nothing. Hundreds of times they had run through their procedure, checked off the thousands of items, made the hundreds of thousands of reports, tabulated the millions of facts.. - and then stopped just short of climax.
    As the Titan started up its massive elevator, and passed between its open 200-ton concrete doors, as its umbilical cord began to fall away in the clouds of chill swirling LOX, each man worked as if war were about to start. But each time, each of the hundreds of previous times, the order had come to stand down. The Titan had been carefully lowered back to its base.
    Although an intercontinental ballistic missile requires only twenty minutes to reach a target in Eurasia, hours are required to get a missile ready for its short white-hot trajectory. Scores of men working with a network of computers, calculating, checking, double-checking, all moved at top speed but with great deliberation. The total operation was coordinated by the firemaster. Each missile also had its Fail-Safe point, but
    it was a point in the process of checking rather than a point in space. It was a clerical, a calm, a well-ordered Fail-Safe. But it could only proceed to a certain time. Past a precise and well-known "Positive Control" point in the countdown each missile passed into the "terminal sequence." The sequence could only be started at the order of the President of the United States.
    The cavernous life, the manufactured secrecy, the incredible pitch of training, made a missile base into a strange experience. The crews lived a buried existence. The end of a tour of duty was like the end of a sentence. As the crewmen were relieved they came out into the air, blinking at the brightness, never certain that they were returning to a normal world of shopping centers and baby-tending and love-making. They had been taught that it was altogether possible that they would emerge into a black incinerated world in which their chief duties would be to avoid deep contamination and then to wage a savage fight for existence.
    The details of this fight were deliberately kept ambiguous. To prepare a corps of men for defeat is almost certain to destroy their capacity for retaliation. They knew that in the ultimate situation their mood should be ferocious, but the object of the ferocity was not specified.
    The men who expended their lives raising and lowering these gigantic masses of intricate and explosive material were not without intelligence or heart. They were aware of the eerie, nightmarish quality of their existence. They thought of their strange condition and they discussed it. It was a surrealistic dialogue. It was conducted by technicians with no more than an eighthgrade education and by officers with a Ph.D. The environment gave them an awesome quality. These subterraneans moved nervelessly through their artificial
    world, developed new outlooks and insights and oddly twisted views of themselves and of reality, evoked a new humor which was both loving and profoundly cynical, grinned a new way, were nostalgic for things like fresh air and grass, had fantasies which no man had known before because no man had lived as they lived.
    Out of their subterranean places they reverted to the life aboveground without effort or strain. They seemed as normal, as uniform, as ordinary, as anyone else. But while they were below ground they were a separate breed.
    In a form which would surprise a student of the classics they told the ancient myth of Sisyphus in which Sisyphus was condemned to roll a boulder laboriously up a hill only to have it tumble back again ready for another push upward. The myth trickled down from the officers to the men in strange and vulgar forms but no one mistook its import. It was always told, regardless of the language, with a strange sense of wonder and relevance.
    The more speculative of the missilemen, the egg-heads among them, had also discovered an unofficial poet laureate: Albert