Barbara Moran: The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

After World War II, Germany had been divided into four sectors, under American, French, British, and Soviet control. Deep within the Soviet sector, the city of Berlin was subdivided into four sectors.

The Soviets had long bristled at this arrangement, and in June 1948 they ramped up their efforts to assert themselves in the city by blocking all road, rail, and barge traffic to the western sectors of Berlin, leaving the Berliners marooned without adequate food or fuel. The United States responded with a massive airlift, hauling tons of milk, flour, medicine, and coal into the starving city. But Western leaders feared that the Berlin blockade was merely a prelude, that the USSR would soon try to push beyond Berlin and deep into Western Europe. If the Soviets made a move, Washington might need the bumbling Strategic Air Command to intervene. On October 19, 1948, SAC got a new commander: Curtis LeMay.

LeMay, who had been running the Berlin airlift, started his new job by visiting SAC headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. The situation shocked him. “Not one crew — not one crew — in the entire command could do a professional job,” he said. “Not one of the outfits was up to strength — neither in airplanes nor in people nor anything else.” LeMay grew annoyed when people at SAC told him that “everything was rosy.” He knew that pilots had been running practice bombing raids and asked about their accuracy. The commanders bragged that bombardiers were hitting targets “right on the button.”

They produced the bombing scores, and they were so good I didn’t believe them…. I found out that SAC wasn’t bombing from combat altitudes, but from 12,000 to 15,000 feet…. It was completely unrealistic. It was perfectly apparent to me that while we didn’t have much capability, everyone thought we were doing fine.

LeMay saw history repeating itself. SAC was just like the ragtag bomber groups he had initially commanded in Europe. But this time, America faced an even bigger threat: the Soviet Union would undoubtedly have its own atomic bomb soon. LeMay felt a tremendous sense of urgency. “We had to be ready to go to war not next week, not tomorrow, but this afternoon, today,” he said. “We had to operate every day as if we were at war.”

With Air Force leadership backing him, LeMay sprang into action. Seven days after taking command, LeMay put Tommy Power, his old friend from the Pacific, into the deputy commander slot. Power was not well liked (even LeMay said he was a “mean sonofabitch”), but he got things done. LeMay replaced virtually all SAC’s commanders and headquarters staff with his pals from the Pacific bombing campaign. Their first mission was to prepare at least one group for atomic combat.

They started with the 509th Bomber Group at Walker Air Force Base in Roswell, New Mexico. The Army had created the 509th for the sole purpose of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now it was the only group even close to atomic readiness. LeMay’s staff stocked their warehouses with supplies and made sure that the planes had parts, guns, and gas. They weeded through personnel, replacing dead wood with crack crews.

LeMay worked nearly every day, from eight in the morning until well into the evening, and his housecleaning touched every corner of SAC. “My goal,” he said later, “was to build a force that was so professional, so strong, so powerful, that we would not have to fight. In other words, we had to build this deterrent force. And it had to be good.” He argued to Air Force leaders that SAC must be their top priority in funding, research, planes, and personnel. Aided by his reputation and zeal and the growing Soviet threat, LeMay convinced them to give him carte blanche. He created a recruitment and screening system that filled SAC’s ranks with bomber crews handpicked for their self-discipline and maturity. He arranged for new housing to be built so the airmen would have decent places to live. He made his leaders write detailed manuals for every job and train the airmen relentlessly. SAC developed elaborate war strategies, which it planned to change every six months.

It built a million-dollar telephone and teletype system to link all SAC bases with the new headquarters at Offutt Field in Omaha, Nebraska. In six months, LeMay had turned SAC around and landed on the cover of Newsweek . Underneath his scowling portrait ran the headline “Air General LeMay: A Tough Guy Does It Again.” Inside the magazine, a glowing article called LeMay a genius and described how he had turned SAC from a “creampuff outfit” into an atomic force with real teeth. “When LeMay first came in, we were nothing but a bunch of nits and gnats,” one young officer told Newsweek . “Today, we’re a going concern.” LeMay had done more than shape SAC up; he had created a religion. The gospel he preached was a simple parable: the schoolyard bully and the gentle giant. The Soviets were the schoolyard bullies, aiming to seize Europe, crush America, and spread communism throughout the world. SAC was the gentle giant, the muscle-bound kid who stuck up for the skinny geeks and pimply weaklings, the kid who didn’t want to hurt anyone but could knock you out with one punch if he had to. The Strategic Air Command, and no one else, stood as America’s shield and protector.

In the years to come, LeMay would never waver from this core message. Increasingly, those who doubted this truth or questioned its morality were labeled fools, cowards, or Commies.

The year 1952 began the golden age of SAC. The command had a clear mission, a strong leader, and the American public on board. In the early 1950s, the Bomb loomed over everything. Those were the years when schoolchildren ducked under their desks for atomic air-raid drills and teachers handed out dog tags so they could identify students after a nuclear blast. The year 1952 also brought a new president — Dwight Eisenhower — who announced that strategic airpower and nuclear weapons were now the nation’s top defense priority.

Disgusted by the slogging stalemate of the Korean War, Eisenhower viewed nuclear deterrence as a far cheaper way to keep the nation safe and oversaw a massive buildup of SAC and the nation’s nuclear stockpile. He also believed that there could be no such thing as a “limited” nuclear war.

Because such a war would destroy both countries, if not the world, it had to be prevented at all costs.

Eisenhower had joined LeMay’s church of deterrence: America could prevent nuclear war only by showing spectacular strength.

Eisenhower’s philosophy led to a windfall for the nuclear military, especially the Air Force. Between 1952 and 1960, the Air Force received 46 percent of America’s defense money. SAC more than doubled its personnel in five years, from 85,473 in 1950 to 195,997 by 1955. During those five years the bomber fleet also grew dramatically, from 520 to 1,309. In 1951, SAC had thirty-three bases, including eleven outside the continental United States. By 1957, SAC operated out of sixty-eight bases. Thirty of these were spread around the world, in North Africa, Canada, New Zealand, England, Guam, Greenland, and Spain. Although other services had nuclear weapons by the mid-1950s — Army soldiers could fire small nuclear artillery shells, and the Navy could launch cruise missiles from submarines — SAC ruled the nuclear kingdom. “SAC was still the big daddy,” said Jerry Martin, command historian for the U.S. Strategic Command. “They had the nuclear hammer.” On March 19, 1954, at the height of this expansion, SAC hosted a classified briefing at its headquarters in Omaha. Major General A. J. Old, director of SAC operations, spoke to about thirty military officers from various service branches, regaling the crowd with charts, graphs, and maps detailing SAC’s capabilities. Afterward, LeMay answered questions for a half hour.