The Age of Radiance (51 page)

This aspect in the history of arms escalation reveals a deep paradox in the administration of every American president. After three months in office, Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, famously told the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some fifty miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.

Yet, simultaneously under Ike’s watch, when the nation was—in practice if not in demeanor—at peace, America made for itself a surfeit of Armageddon. In 1950, the country had around 400 atomic bombs; by 1955, she had 2,280, twenty times more than the Russians and the start of a spiral of warhead escalation:

Over the Cold War’s four decades, every American president except Nixon publicly spoke of his regret at this state of affairs, yet under the watch of every president, including Nixon, the tools of apocalypse exponentially grew. John Kennedy’s science adviser Jerome Wiesner discussed 1963’s twenty-three-thousand-bomb arsenal:
“I will give you a simple piece of calculus. For most cities it is reasonable to equate one bomb in one city. It would take a bigger bomb for Los Angeles or New York. . . . In any event, it does not take many. And if you ask yourself, ‘Where would you put three
hundred large nuclear weapons to be most destructive?’ You run out of vital cities and towns and railroad junctions and power plants before you get to three hundred. The same thing is true in the United States and the Soviet Union. If I was not trying to be conservative, I would say fifty bombs, properly placed, would probably put a society out of business, and three hundred in each of the two countries leading the arms race would destroy their civilizations. That is a pretty clear-cut fact.” Yet, his president did not ask the Pentagon why it had to have those twenty-three thousand Bombs when it only needed three hundred.

Immediately after Nagasaki, Yale political scientists Bernard Brodie and Jacob Viner began to develop theories of nuclear strategy to try to answer Oppenheimer’s question of what the atom is good for in battle beyond Bradley’s “psychological” use. Viner almost immediately arrived at a revolutionary concept:
“The atomic bomb makes surprise an unimportant element of warfare. Retaliation in equal terms is unavoidable and in this sense the atomic bomb is a war deterrent, a peace-making force.” It took a year before Brodie was able to see this point, with the 1946 paper that would make him famous, “The Atomic Bomb and American Security”: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.” He also echoed Oppenheimer’s math, arguing, “If two thousand bombs in the hand of either party is enough to destroy entirely the economy of the other, the fact that one side has six thousand and the other two thousand will be of relatively small significance.”

The State Department was so taken with these ideas that Brodie was made an agency consultant on nuclear control, but Pentagon chiefs did not share his viewpoint. By 1950, Vandenberg’s air staff had created a strategy of nuclear bombing three categories of Soviet targets—liquid-fuel refineries, electrical power stations, and nuclear energy plants—a strategy it called Killing a Nation. The Strategic Air Command’s Curtis LeMay predicted the next war would be nuclear—
“If there is another war, we will be first, instead of last to be attacked, and the war will start with bombs and missiles falling on the United States”—and the American defense would be conducted and her atomic victory won by his global force of nuclear bombers. His idea was to strike the USSR with the entirety of his arsenal, killing over 77 million people in 188 Soviet cities—three-fourths of the population—in thirty days. But instead of Killing a Nation, he called it the Sunday Punch. Now at State, Bernard Brodie countered that the air staff was wrong—since it didn’t know enough about the Soviet Union to be sure that it had the full target list to kill a nation—and that SAC was wrong—since why would the United States use
all of its nuclear weapons at once; why not hold some in reserve to use as a coercive threat? Again, the military wasn’t interested.

LeMay’s first major decision on becoming SAC chief in 1948, in fact, was to have the whole Strategic Air Command simulate a Sunday Punch against Dayton, Ohio—“a realistic combat mission, at combat altitudes, for every airplane in SAC that we could get in the air.” The exercise was an out-and-out failure, LeMay calling it “just about the darkest night in American military aviation history. Not one airplane finished that mission as briefed. Not one. . . . I’ll admit the weather was bad. There were a lot of thunderstorms in the area; that certainly was a factor. But on top of this, our crews were not accustomed to flying at altitude. Neither were the airplanes, far as that goes. Most of the pressurization wouldn’t work, and the oxygen wouldn’t work. Nobody seemed to know what life was like upstairs.” His men practiced again and again, targeting Baltimore as military intelligence insisted she resembled Soviet cities, and dummy-bombing San Francisco over six hundred times in one month. LeMay: “We attacked every good-sized city in the United States. People were down there in their beds, and they didn’t know what was going on upstairs. . . . My determination was to put everyone in SAC into this frame of mind: We are at war now! So, if we actually did go to war the very next morning, or even that night, no preliminary motions would be wasted.”

As seen when he kept his warheads after threatening America’s foes in the Korean War on behalf of Eisenhower, LeMay had little regard for civilian oversight of the armed forces. He decided the USAF’s sniffer planes patrolling the Soviet Union’s borders weren’t enough; he wanted aerial reconnaissance, which he started in early 1950. Almost immediately, Soviet fighters brought down an American PB4Y-2 eavesdropping over Soviet territory, killing ten crewmen. As the Kremlin could interpret these flights as acts of war, Truman had them banned. But after getting approval from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Winston Churchill in March 1952, in exchange for English crews conducting reconnaissance flights over the USSR and sharing the results with him, LeMay gave the British the best high-altitude American craft currently in production, the B-45. This sidestepping of Truman continued for two years, ending only when the US resumed its own direct surveillance, notably with the infamous and spectacular U-2.

Before the switch to satellites, the Soviets brought down at least twenty US reconnaissance craft, killing an estimated one hundred to two hundred Americans. But these flights weren’t just for surveillance, as LeMay revealed after his retirement from the service: “There was a time in the 1950s when
we could have won a war against Russia. It would have cost us essentially the accident rate of the flying time, because their defenses were pretty weak. One time in the 1950s we flew all of the reconnaissance aircraft that SAC possessed over Vladivostok at high noon. Two reconnaissance airplanes saw MiGs, but there were no interceptions made. It was well planned, too—crisscrossing paths of all the reconnaissance airplanes. Each target was hit by at least two, and usually three, reconnaissance airplanes to make sure we got pictures of it. We practically mapped the place up there with no resistance at all. We could have launched bombing attacks, planned and executed just as well, at that time.”

In January 1956, he scrambled many of his bombers in a simulated nuclear attack. In another exercise, Operation Powerhouse, SAC crews flew nearly a thousand simultaneous sorties from more than thirty bases around the world to intimidate Moscow. A few weeks after, Operation Home Run sent B-47 Stratojets from Thule, Greenland, over the north pole and into Siberia looking for gaps in Soviet radar, as well as a squadron of RB-47 Stratojets flying in attack formation, in daylight, over the USSR. The Soviets had no way of knowing if the bombers were armed and about to launch nuclear strikes. And that was the point.

The most egregious SAC insult to civilian oversight came during the Kennedy era, when Robert McNamara decided that Minutemen ICBMs needed tighter security controls. In 1962 he arranged for an executive order that all silos be outfitted with secret launch codes—Permissive Action Links, or PALs—to keep a local officer from launching, on his own initiative, nuclear war. SAC commanders, however, came to believe that using these PALs might cause a delay in defending the homeland and decided to upend the president’s order with a policy they would maintain for two decades. “The Strategic Air Command in Omaha quietly decided to set the ‘locks’ to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard,” missile launch officer Bruce G. Blair said.
“During the early to mid-1970s during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. . . . So the ‘secret unlock codes’ during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at 00000000.” At the same time, missile silo operators worried about a fail-safe aspect that required two officers, standing at separate consoles, to turn their keys in unison and hold them for two seconds before their ICBMs would fire. What would happen if an order came down, one of the men refused to
obey, or what if only one man was alive in the silo? They practiced with various alternatives and found that a key tied with string could be turned with a spoon from the other console, and the fail-safe of two consenting officers was thwarted.

Today, SAC headquarters outside Omaha, Nebraska, is called the Underground Command Post, with steel-lined corridors and doors immune against a five-megaton warhead and its radioactive breath. Nuclear Armageddon would be started from the Command Balcony, a mezzanine of SAC’s two-story war theater. At the theater’s center is the swivel chair for CINCSAC, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, and his two telephones. The red phone is for incoming calls from the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the gold phone is for CINCSAC to pass along their commands to his staff. If the bunker is destroyed, command would be assumed by the Looking Glass Plane, presumably secure against any threat, which has been continuously floating over the Midwest since February of 1961.

A
t the end of World War II, Army Air Forces chief Hap Arnold decided,
“We have to keep the scientists on board. It’s the most important thing we have to do.” On September 31, 1945, he took $10 million of the $30 million in funds he had left over from the war research budget to start a new R&D outfit in California far from the Pentagon. RAND was a think tank investigating science, engineering, psychology, sociology, weapons, tactics—anything that would keep Arnold’s the best air force in the world. General LeMay engaged RAND to research what would become, in May 1946, its first report, “Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship” (i.e., a satellite), which “would inflame the imagination of mankind, and would probably produce repercussions in the world comparable to the explosion of the atomic bomb. . . . The development of a satellite will be directly applicable to the development of an intercontinental rocket missile.” This would, of course, all come true, as the Soviets’
Sputnik.
Herb York:
“The reason for having RAND do the study was to get a jump on the navy, which also was studying satellites. LeMay was determined that it wasn’t going to be a navy program, it wasn’t going to be a joint navy–air force program, it was going to be an air force program.”

At various times, employing a cavalcade of American intellects, including John Forbes Nash Jr., Donald Rumsfeld, Daniel Ellsberg, Francis Fukuyama, Condoleezza Rice, Henry Kissinger, and Margaret Mead, RAND followed
a state-of-the-art curriculum in assessing the future of war. At its very birth the agency was dead right about
Sputnik
, but over the ensuing decades it would be dead wrong about almost everything else. While the CIA reported during the Eisenhower administration that the Russians had fewer than fifty ICBMs, RAND insisted they had over five hundred and fed enough backing data to presidential candidate John Kennedy’s staff on this “missile gap” that it could be used in his campaign against Richard Nixon. After Kennedy won, being president included the security clearance to learn what the U-2 surveillance program had uncovered—that the USSR had, indeed, forty-one ICBMs. RAND continued to get things wrong over the following decades, with many of the agency’s misfires rising from RAND’s strategy of finding out what Pentagon brass wanted, then recommending that they get exactly that. In regards to nuclear arms, what service chiefs wanted was more, more, and more, so what RAND recommended was bounce, bounce, bounce . . .