Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

At the very moment when hopes for world government, world peace, and international control of the atomic bomb reached their peak, the Cold War began. Without the common enemy of Nazi Germany, the alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States started to unravel. The Soviet Union’s looting of Manchuria, its delay in removing troops from Iran, and its demand for Turkish territory along the Mediterranean coast unsettled the Truman administration. But the roots of the Cold War lay in Germany and Eastern Europe, where the Soviets hoped to create a buffer zone against future invasion. Ignoring promises of free elections and self-determination, the Soviet Union imposed a Communist puppet government in Poland. George Kennan told the State Department that the Soviets were “fanatically” committed to destroying “our traditional way of life,” and Winston Churchill warned that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe, along with the expansion of Communist, totalitarian rule.

By March 1947, American relations with the Soviet Union had grown chilly. In a speech before Congress, President Truman offered economic aid to countries threatened by a system relying on “terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.” Although the speech never mentioned the Soviet Union by name, the target of the Truman Doctrine was obvious. The United States now vowed to contain Soviet power throughout the world. The divide between east and west in Europe widened a few months later, when the Soviets prevented their allies from accepting U.S. aid through the Marshall Plan. In February 1948 the Communist overthrow of Czechoslovakia’s freely elected government shocked the American public. The Soviet-backed coup revived memories of the Nazi assault on the Czechs in 1938, the timidity of the European response, and the world war that soon followed.

President Truman’s tough words were not backed, however, by a military strategy that could defend Western Europe. During the early months of 1947, as Truman formulated his anti-Communist doctrine, the Pentagon did not have a war plan for fighting the Soviet Union. And the rapid demobilization of the American military seemed to have given the Soviets a tremendous advantage on the ground. The U.S. Army had only one division stationed in Germany, along with ten police regiments, for a total of perhaps 100,000 troops. The British army had one division there, as well. According to U.S. intelligence reports, the Soviet army had about one hundred divisions, with about 1.2 million troops, capable of invading Western Europe — and could mobilize more than 150 additional divisions within a month.

Instead of being outlawed by the U.N., the atomic bomb soon became integral to American war plans for the defense of Europe. In June 1947 the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a top secret report, “The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon,” to President Truman. It contained the latest thinking on how nuclear weapons might be used in battle. The first postwar atomic tests, conducted the previous year at the Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, had demonstrated some of the weapon’s limitations. Dropped on a fleet of empty Japanese and American warships, a Mark 3 implosion bomb like the one used at Nagasaki had missed its aiming point by almost half a mile — and failed to sink eighty-three of the eighty-eight vessels. “Ships at sea and bodies of troops are, in general, unlikely to be regarded as primary atomic bomb targets,” the report concluded. “The bomb is preeminently a weapon for use against human life and activities in large urban and industrial areas.” It was a weapon useful, most of all, for killing and terrorizing civilians. The report suggested that a nuclear attack would stir up “man’s primordial fears” and “break the will of nations.” The military significance of the atomic bomb was clear: it wouldn’t be aimed at the military. Nuclear weapons would be used to destroy an enemy’s morale, and the some of best targets were “cities of especial sentimental significance.”

The Joint Chiefs did not welcome these conclusions, but assumed them to be true — the hard, new reality of strategy in the nuclear age. If other countries obtained atomic bombs, they might be used in similar ways against the United States. The destructive power of these weapons was so great that the logic of waging a preventive war, of launching a surprise attack upon an enemy, might prove hard to resist. Like a shootout in the Old West, a nuclear war might be won by whoever fired first. A country with fewer atomic bombs than its adversary had an especially strong incentive to launch an attack out of the blue. And for that reason, among others, a number of high-ranking American officers argued that the United States should bomb the Soviet Union before it obtained any nuclear weapons. General Groves thought that approach would make sense, if “we were ruthlessly realistic.” General Orvil Anderson, commander of the Air University, publicly endorsed an attack on the Soviets. “I don’t advocate preventive war,” Anderson told a reporter. “I advocate the shedding of illusions.” He thought that Jesus Christ would approve of dropping atomic bombs on the Soviet Union: “I think I could explain to Him that I had saved civilization.” Anderson was suspended for the remarks.

Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. Bertrand Russell — the British philosopher and pacifist, imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War — urged the western democracies to attack the Soviet Union before it got an atomic bomb. Russell acknowledged that a nuclear strike on the Soviets would be horrible, but “anything is better than submission.” Winston Churchill agreed, proposing that the Soviets be given an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from Germany, or see your cities destroyed. Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace, crusader for world government, lifelong advocate of settling disputes through mediation and diplomacy and mutual understanding, no longer believed that sort of approach would work. Nuclear weapons had changed everything, and the Soviet Union couldn’t be trusted. Any nation that rejected U.N. control of atomic energy, Holt said, “should be wiped off the face of the earth with atomic bombs.”

DURING THE SPRING OF 1948, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved HALFMOON, the first emergency war plan directed at the Soviet Union. It assumed that the Soviets would start a war in Europe, prompted by an accident or a misunderstanding. The conflict would begin with the United States losing a series of land battles. Greatly outnumbered and unable to hold western Germany, the U.S. Army would have to stage a fighting retreat to seaports in France and Italy, then await evacuation by the U.S. Navy. The Red Army was expected to overrun Europe, the Middle East, and Korea. Fifteen days after the first shots were fired, the United States would launch a counterattack in the form of an “atomic blitz.” The plan originally called for 50 atomic bombs to be dropped on the Soviet Union. The number was later increased to 133, aimed at seventy Soviet cities. Leningrad was to be hit by 7 atomic bombs, Moscow by 8. The theory behind the counterattack was called “the nation-killing concept.” After an atomic blitz, Colonel Dale O. Smith explained, “a nation would die just as surely as a man will die if a bullet pierces his heart.”

The defense of Great Britain was one of HALFMOON’s central aims, and much of the atomic blitz was to be launched from British air bases. But that would only encourage the Soviets, one Pentagon official warned, to begin the war with a “devastating, annihilating attack” on Great Britain. Denied access to British airfields, American planes would be forced to use bases in Egypt, India, Iceland, Greenland, Okinawa, or Alaska. The limited range of B-29 and B-50 bombers might require some American crews to fly one-way “suicide” missions. “It will be the cheapest thing we ever did,” Major General Earle E. Partridge said. “Expend the crew, expend the bomb, expend the airplane all at once. Kiss them good-bye and let them go.”