Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

President Truman was given a briefing on HALFMOON and the atomic blitz in May 1948. He didn’t like either of them. Truman told the Joint Chiefs to prepare a plan for defending Western Europe — without using nuclear weapons. He still hoped that some kind of international agreement might outlaw them. The Joint Chiefs began to formulate ERASER, an emergency war plan that relied entirely on conventional forces.

A month later the Soviets cut rail, road, and water access to the western sectors of Berlin. Truman now faced a tough choice. Defying the blockade could bring war with the Soviet Union. But backing down and abandoning Berlin would risk the Soviet domination of Europe. The U.S. military governor of Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, decided to start an airlift of supplies into the city. Truman supported the airlift, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff expressed doubts, worried that the United States might not be able to handle a military confrontation with the Soviets. Amid the Berlin crisis, work on ERASER was halted, Truman issued a series of directives outlining how nuclear weapons should be used — and the atomic blitz became the most likely American response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

The new strategy was strongly opposed by George Kennan and others at the State Department, who raised questions about its aftermath. “The negative psycho-social results of such an atomic attack might endanger postwar peace for 100 years,” one official warned. But the fiercest opposition to HALFMOON and the similar war plans that followed it — FLEETWOOD, DOUBLESTAR, TROJAN, and OFFTACKLE — came from officers in the U.S. Navy. They argued that slow-moving American bombers would be shot down before reaching Soviet cities. They said that American air bases overseas were vulnerable to Soviet attack. And most important, they were appalled by the idea of using nuclear weapons against civilian targets.

The Navy had practical, as well as ethical, reasons for opposing the new war plans. Atomic bombs were still too heavy to be carried by planes launched from the Navy’s aircraft carriers — a fact that gave the newly independent U.S. Air Force the top priority in defense spending. For more than a century, naval officers had regarded themselves as the elite of the armed services. They now resented the aggressive public relations efforts of the Air Force, the disparaging remarks about sea power, the books and articles claiming that long-range bombers had won the Second World War, the propaganda films like Walt Disney’s Victory Through Air Power , with its jolly animated sequences of cities in flames and its tagline: “There’s a thrill in the air!” The Navy thought the atomic blitz was the wrong way to defend the free world, and at the Pentagon a battle soon raged over how the next war in Europe should be fought.

Hoping to resolve the dispute, James Forrestal, who’d become secretary of defense, appointed an Air Force officer, General Hubert R. Harmon, to lead a study of whether a nuclear strike would defeat the Soviet Union. In May 1949 the Harmon Committee concluded that the most recent American war plan, TROJAN, would reduce Soviet industrial production by 30 to 40 percent. It would also kill perhaps 2.7 million civilians and injure an additional 4 million. Those were conservative estimates, not taking into account the fires ignited by more than one hundred atomic bombs. But TROJAN wouldn’t prevent the Red Army from conquering Europe and the Middle East. Nor would it lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. “For the majority of Soviet people,” the committee noted, “atomic bombing would validate Soviet propaganda against foreign powers, stimulate resentment against the United States, unify these people and increase their will to fight.” Nevertheless, Harmon saw no realistic alternative to the current war plan. The atomic blitz was “the only means of rapidly inflicting shock and serious damage” on the Soviet military effort, and “the advantages of its early use would be transcending.”

On August 29, 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic device, RDS-1, at a test range in eastern Kazakhstan. The yield was about 20 kilotons, roughly the same as that of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki — and for good reason. RDS-1 was a copy of the Mark 3 implosion bomb. While American policy makers worried and fretted and debated whether to share classified atomic information with the Soviet Union, a network of Communist spies infiltrated Manhattan Project laboratories and simply took it. Soviet physicists like Yuli Borisovich Khariton were brilliant and inventive, but their task was made easier by the technical knowledge gained through espionage at Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge.

The United States also provided the Soviet Union with the means for delivering an atomic bomb. In 1944, three American B-29 bombers were forced to make emergency landings in Siberia after attacking Japanese forces in Manchuria. The planes were confiscated by the Soviets, and one of them, the General H. H. Arnold Special , was carefully disassembled. Each of its roughly 105,000 parts was measured, photographed, and reverse engineered. Within two years the Soviet Union had its first long-range bomber, the Tupolev-4. The plane was almost identical to the captured B-29; it even had a metal patch where the General Arnold had been repaired.

News of the Soviet bomb arrived at an unfortunate moment. General Groves had assured the American people that the Soviet Union wouldn’t develop an atomic bomb until the late 1960s. The United States had just signed the North Atlantic Treaty, promising to defend Western Europe — and America’s nuclear monopoly was the basis for that promise. China was on the verge of falling to Mao Tse-tung’s Communist army. And now, for the first time since the War of 1812, a devastating attack on the continental United States seemed possible. The rapid demobilization after the Second World War had, for more than a year, left North America without a single military radar to search for enemy planes. As late as 1949, the U.S. Air Defense Command had only twenty-three radars to guard the northeastern United States, and they were largely obsolete units that couldn’t detect Soviet bombers flying at low altitudes. In the event of war, the safety of American cities would depend on the Air Force’s Ground Observer Corps: thousands of civilian volunteers who would search the sky with binoculars.

The news of the Soviet bomb was made all the more ominous by a sense of disarray at the Pentagon. Overwhelmed by stress, lack of sleep, and fears of international communism, Secretary of Defense Forrestal had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and leaped to his death from a sixteenth floor window at Bethesda Naval Hospital. When the new secretary of defense, Louis A. Johnson, canceled plans to build the United States , an enormous aircraft carrier, angry naval officers spread rumors that the Air Force’s new long-range bomber, the B-36, was deeply flawed. What began as an interservice rivalry over military spending soon became a bitter, public dispute about America’s nuclear strategy, with top secret war plans being leaked to newspapers and war heroes questioning one another’s patriotism.

At congressional hearings in October 1949, one high-ranking admiral after another condemned the atomic blitz, arguing that the bombing of Soviet cities would be not only futile but immoral. They advocated “precision” tactical bombing of Soviet troops and supply lines — using planes from American aircraft carriers. Admiral William F. Halsey compared the Air Force’s new bomber to the siege weapons once used to destroy medieval castles and towns. “I don’t believe in mass killings of noncombatants,” Admiral Arthur W. Radford testified. “A war of annihilation might bring a pyrrhic military victory, but it would be politically and economically senseless.” The harshest criticism of the Air Force came from Rear Admiral Ralph A. Ofstie, who’d toured the burned-out cities of Japan after the war. He described the atomic blitz as “random mass slaughter of men, women, and children.” The whole idea was “ruthless and barbaric” and contrary to American values. “We must insure that our military techniques do not strip us of self-respect,” Ofstie said.