Barbara Moran - The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

Sitting in the audience that day was a Navy captain named William Brigham Moore. Moore took detailed notes at the meeting and later wrote a memo describing it for his director. The top secret memo, declassified in the 1980s, gives a small but rare glimpse inside SAC at the apex of its power.

According to Moore, Old told the crowd that SAC had several hundred strike plans. Then he described SAC’s optimum strike plan, what defense insiders called the “Sunday Punch.” With enough warning time, SAC could send 735 bombers flying toward the Soviet Union. The bombers, approaching from many different directions, would hit the Soviets’ early warning screen simultaneously and overwhelm their defenses. Old estimated that the planes could drop somewhere between 600 and 750 bombs. “The final impression,” wrote Moore, “was that virtually all of Russia would be nothing but a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours.” General Old concluded the meeting by raising an issue that would come to dominate SAC policy, the concept of “alert time.” Old framed it this way: If the Soviets launched a surprise attack against the United States, would SAC have enough time to load its planes and get them off the ground before Russian bombs blew them to bits? With two hours’ warning, he said, Russian bombs could destroy about 35 percent of the command. But if the Soviets sneaked in a total surprise attack and caught SAC with its pants down, the bombs could decimate the command, obliterating 90 percent of its infrastructure. “The amount of alert time,” concluded Moore, “is the most important factor as far as SAC is concerned.”

The concept of alert time had been cooked up by defense analysts at the RAND Corporation, a California think tank sponsored by the Air Force. In the early 1950s, RAND analysts became convinced that SAC bases, especially those overseas, were vulnerable to a surprise attack. SAC leaders soon realized that these vulnerabilities could work in their favor. For SAC to survive an allout surprise attack and retaliate in kind, it would need a striking force at least double the size of the Soviets’. Building such a force would require a massive influx of funding. SAC could ask for the sky.

On April 30, 1956, Curtis LeMay sat at a long table in the Capitol building, facing a row of somber senators. LeMay had flown to Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Forces Subcommittee about the strength of SAC’s bomber fleet and its vulnerability to surprise attack. The hearings had been in the making for about a year. Senate Democrats had accused President Eisenhower of pinching military funds excessively in order to balance the budget. With a presidential election looming, the subcommittee had called for hearings to examine, specifically, Eisenhower’s Air Force policies. The sessions, which became known as the Congressional Air Power Hearings of 1956, brought the question of SAC’s vulnerability to the American public and made “bomber gap” a household term.

Worrisome intelligence had trickled in from Russia over the past year. One incident in particular had caused grave concern. The previous summer, the Soviets had invited a number of U.S. Air Force attachés to an air show near Moscow. The day of the air show had started pleasantly enough — one news report describes the attachés sitting under colored umbrellas, drinking beer, and chatting with other foreigners. Then came the air parade, which included Soviet Bison bombers, four-engine jet planes suspected to have intercontinental range. At the time, Air Force Intelligence guessed that the Soviets had about twenty-five Bisons, maybe up to forty. But at the air show, the Americans saw ten Bisons flying overhead, then another nine, then yet another nine. There were twenty-eight planes in all, just at the parade.

The Air Force representatives realized — or rather, thought they did — that they had grossly underestimated the size of the Soviet bomber force. Returning home, they fed the information to Air Force intelligence, who figured that twenty-eight Bisons in the air meant the Soviets must have fifty-six already finished. Adding in what they knew about Soviet factory space and learning curves, intelligence analysts predicted that by 1959 the Soviets could have five hundred to eight hundred Bisons.

We know today, and some suspected even then, that the Soviets had nowhere near that number of long-range bombers. In fact, the Soviets had only ten Bisons at the time, and those had rolled off the assembly line just weeks before the air show. Analysts later speculated that the Soviets had fooled the American attachés by flying the same planes over the viewing area again and again.

The suspected Soviet bomber strength became public knowledge during Curtis LeMay’s testimony before the Senate subcommittee. LeMay’s testimony was a bit odd — because the hearings involved issues of national security, the senators had given LeMay written questions and he read the censored answers. (One reporter speculated that Air Force PR had dreamed up this tactic to keep LeMay from shooting his mouth off.) Despite the stilted setting, LeMay got his point across. Looking “guarded” and “somber,” he told the senators that the Russians were beating America in the bomber race.

SAC’s new long-range B-52 bomber, he said, had a serious engineering flaw: a flywheel in the B-52’s alternator had a nasty habit of breaking off. The defect had already caused one crash and led to serious production delays. Boeing had delivered seventy-eight B-52s so far, and SAC had returned thirty-one to the shop. This left SAC with only forty-seven of the new long-range bombers. The Air Force guessed that the Soviets already had about a hundred.

LeMay’s testimony on this “bomber gap” made front-page headlines, and Americans reacted with dismay. How did Russia get ahead of us? Both houses of Congress demanded that the president add an additional billion dollars to the Air Force budget. (The budget already included $16.9 billion for the Air Force, $10 billion for the Navy, and $7.7 billion for the Army.) Eisenhower, sensing trouble, cautioned against getting caught up in a “numbers racket” and trying to match the Russians plane for plane. He pointed out that the United States had a massive fleet of midrange bombers stationed all over the globe, not to mention the most powerful navy in the world. When the full story came out, he said, the American public would “feel a lot better.”

The president’s soothing words calmed the storm for a few weeks. The House of Representatives passed Eisenhower’s budget as it stood, without additional funds for the Air Force. Then LeMay returned for one more Senate hearing. It was his “guess,” he said on May 26, that the Soviets could destroy the United States in a surprise attack by 1959. From 1958 on, he said, the Russians would be “stronger in long-range airpower than we are, and it naturally follows that if [the enemy] is stronger, he may feel that he should attack.”

It’s impossible to tell if LeMay believed his own rhetoric. Some considered him a cynical opportunist, using spotty intelligence and scare tactics to build SAC into an empire at the expense of the other services. One anonymous administration spokesman told Time magazine that “Curt LeMay thinks only of SAC.” But many believed him a patriot defending his country against an ominous enemy. Most Americans assumed that the Communists were hell-bent on world domination and would like nothing better than to bomb America into a nuclear wasteland. If the United States gave them an inch or fell behind at all, they would try it.

At the conclusion of the airpower hearings, the Senate sided with LeMay. Over Eisenhower’s objections, Congress gave the Air Force an additional $928.5 million to bulk up against the Soviet threat. SAC could move its mission forward.