Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The prominent academics and military officers who led Project Vista, including Robert Oppenheimer, concluded that SAC’s atomic blitz was the wrong response to a Soviet invasion. Bombing the cities of the Soviet Union might provoke a nuclear retaliation against the cities of Western Europe and the United States. Instead of relying on strategic bombing, the members of Project Vista urged NATO to replace manpower with technology, use low-yield, tactical atomic weapons against the advancing Soviet troops, and bring the “battle back to the battlefield.” Such a policy might limit the scale of any nuclear war and save lives, “preventing attacks on friendly cities.” The field officers of the U.S. Army and the fighter pilots of the U.S. Air Force’s Tactical Air Command (TAC) wholeheartedly agreed with those conclusions, on humanitarian grounds. They also stood to benefit from any policy that reduced the influence of the Strategic Air Command.

As would be expected, Curtis LeMay hated the idea of low-yield tactical weapons. In his view, they were a waste of fissile material, unlikely to prove decisive in battle, and difficult to keep under centralized control. The only way to win a nuclear war, according to SAC, was to strike first and strike hard. “Successful offense brings victory; successful defense can now only lessen defeat,” LeMay told his commanders. Moreover, an atomic blitz aimed at Soviet cities was no longer SAC’s top priority. LeMay now thought it would be far more important to destroy the Soviet Union’s capability to use its nuclear weapons. Soviet airfields, bombers, command centers, and nuclear facilities became SAC’s primary targets. LeMay did not advocate preventive war — an American surprise attack on the Soviet Union, out of the blue. But the “counterforce” strategy that he endorsed was a form of preemptive war: SAC planned to attack the moment the Soviets seemed to be readying their own nuclear forces. Civilian casualties, though unavoidable, were no longer the goal. “Offensive air power must now be aimed at preventing the launching of weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its Allies,” LeMay argued. “This transcends all other considerations because the price of failure might be paid with national survival.”

The newly elected president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had to reconcile the competing demands of his armed services — and develop a nuclear strategy that made sense. Eisenhower was well prepared for the job. He’d served as the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe during the Second World War, as Army chief of staff after the war, and most recently as the supreme commander of NATO forces. He understood the military challenges of defending Western Europe and the revolutionary impact of nuclear weapons. The Manhattan Project had reported to him, until the AEC assumed its role. He had worked closely with LeMay for years and had been briefed by Oppenheimer on the findings of Project Vista. Eisenhower didn’t like the Soviet Union but had no desire to fight a third world war. After being briefed on the details of how Mike had made an island disappear, he privately questioned the need “for us to build enough destructive power to destroy everything.”

After replacing Truman’s appointees to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Eisenhower asked his national security team to take a “new look” at America’s defense policies. He’d campaigned for the presidency vowing to lower taxes and reduce the size of the federal government. Despite his military background, he was eager to cut the defense budget, which had tripled in size during the Truman administration. In June 1953, while a wide range of proposals was being considered, the Soviets crushed a popular uprising in East Germany. Two months later they detonated RDS-6, a thermonuclear device. Although the yield of RDS-6 was relatively low and its design rudimentary, the test had ominous implications. Eisenhower was fully committed to preserving the freedom of Western Europe and containing the power of the Soviet Union — without bankrupting the United States. In his view, the simplest, most inexpensive way to accomplish those aims was to deploy more nuclear weapons. And instead of choosing between a strategy based on large thermonuclear weapons or one based on smaller, tactical weapons, Eisenhower decided that the United States should have both.

In the fall of 1953, the administration’s national security policy was outlined in a top secret document, NSC 162/2. It acknowledged that the United States didn’t have enough troops to protect Western Europe from a full-scale Soviet invasion. And it made clear that a Soviet attack would provoke an overwhelming response: “In the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons as available for use as other munitions.”

During his State of the Union address in January 1954, President Eisenhower publicly announced the new policy, declaring that the United States and its allies would “maintain a massive capability to strike back.” Five days later his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, said that the security of the United States would depend on “a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing.” The two speeches left the impression that America would respond to any Soviet attack with an all-out nuclear strike, a strategy soon known as “massive retaliation.”

The Air Force and the Strategic Air Command benefited the most from Eisenhower’s “new look.” SAC became America’s preeminent military organization, its mission considered essential to national security, its commander reporting directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While the other armed services faced cutbacks in spending and manpower, SAC’s budget grew. Within a few years the number of personnel at SAC increased by almost one third, and the number of aircraft nearly doubled. SAC’s demand for nuclear weapons soared as well, driven by the new focus on counterforce targets. The Soviet Union had far more airfields than major cities — and destroying them would require far more bombs. The Navy’s shipbuilding budget stagnated, but the new look didn’t inspire another revolt of the admirals. The Navy no longer seemed obsolete. It had gained approval for new aircraft carriers, every one of them equipped to carry nuclear weapons. The Navy also sought high-tech replacements for many conventional weapons: atomic depth charges, atomic torpedoes, atomic antiship missiles.

Although Eisenhower had served in the Army for nearly forty years, the Army suffered the worst budget cuts, quickly losing more than one fifth of its funding and about one quarter of its troops. General Matthew B. Ridgway, the Army chief of staff, became an outspoken critic of massive retaliation. Ridgway had demonstrated great leadership and integrity while commanding ground forces during the Second World War and in Korea. He thought that the United States still needed a strong Army to fight conventional wars, that an overreliance on nuclear weapons was dangerous and immoral, that Eisenhower’s policy would needlessly threaten civilians, and that “national fiscal bankruptcy would be far preferable to national spiritual bankruptcy.” Ridgway’s unyielding criticism of the new look led to his early retirement. The Army, however, found ways to adapt. It lobbied hard for atomic artillery shells, atomic antiaircraft missiles, atomic land mines. During secret testimony before a congressional committee, one of Ridgway’s closest aides, General James M. Gavin, later spelled out precisely what the Army required: 151,000 nuclear weapons. According to Gavin, the Army needed 106,000 for use on the battlefield and an additional 25,000 for air defense. The remaining 20,000 could be shared with America’s allies.

AT LOS ALAMOS AND SANDIA, a crash program had been launched to make hydrogen bombs, long before it was clear that the Teller-Ulam design would even work. A six-day week became routine, and the labs were often busy on Sundays, as well. The goal was to produce a handful of H-bombs that the Air Force could use if Western Europe were suddenly invaded. Unlike the fission bombs being manufactured at factories across the United States, these “emergency capability” weapons would be assembled by hand at Sandia and then stored nearby at Site Able. Their components weren’t required to undergo the same field testing as those used in the stockpile’s other bombs. While Teller and Ulam wrestled with the theoretical issues of how to sustain thermonuclear fusion, the engineers at Sandia faced a more practical question: How do you deliver a hydrogen bomb without destroying the aircraft that carried it to the target?