Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Although dubious about the usefulness of SAGE, General LeMay thought that SAC’s command-and-control system needed to be improved, as well. He wanted to know where all his planes were, at all times. And he wanted to speak with all his base commanders at once, if war seemed imminent. It took years to develop those capabilities.

When SAC’s Strategic Operational Control System (SOCS) was first unveiled in 1950, its Teletype messages didn’t travel from one base to another with lightning speed. During one early test of the system, they were received almost five hours after being sent. And it could take as long as half an hour for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company to make the SOCS circuits operable. That sort of time lag would make it hard to respond promptly to a Soviet attack. Transmission rates gradually improved, and the system enabled LeMay to pick up a special red telephone at SAC headquarters in Omaha, dial a number, gain control of all the circuits, and make an announcement through loudspeakers at every SAC base in the United States. The introduction of single-sideband radio later allowed him to establish voice communications with SAC’s overseas base commanders — and with every one of its bomber pilots midair. The amount of information constantly streaming into SAC headquarters, from airplanes and air bases throughout the world, led to the creation of an automated command-and-control system that used the same IBM mainframes developed for SAGE. The system was supposed to keep track of SAC’s bombers, in real time, as they flew missions. But until the early 1960s, the information displayed at SAC headquarters stubbornly remained anywhere from an hour and a half to six hours behind the planes.

All of these advances in command and control could prove irrelevant, however, if SAC’s commander didn’t survive a Soviet first strike. General LeMay’s attitude toward civil defense was much the same as his view of air defense. “I don’t think I would put that much money into holes in the ground to crawl into,” he once said. “I would rather spend more of it on offensive weapons systems to deter war in the first place.” Nevertheless, the plans for SAC’s new headquarters building included an enormous command bunker. It extended three levels underground and could house about eight hundred people for a couple of weeks. One of its most distinctive features was a wall about twenty feet high, stretching for almost fifty yards, that was covered by charts, graphs, and a map of the world. The map showed the flight paths of SAC bombers. At first, airmen standing on ladders moved the planes by hand; the information was later projected onto movie screens. A long curtain could be opened and closed by remote control, hiding or revealing different portions of the screens. It gave the underground command center a hushed, theatrical feel, with rows of airmen sitting at computer terminals beneath the world map and high-ranking officers observing it from a second-story, glass-enclosed balcony.

While ordinary families were encouraged to dig fallout shelters in their backyards, America’s military and civilian leadership was provided with elaborate, top secret accommodations. Below the East Wing at the White House, a small bomb shelter had been constructed for President Roosevelt during the Second World War, in case the Nazis attacked Washington, D.C. That shelter was expanded by the Truman administration into an underground complex with twenty rooms. The new bunker could survive the airburst of a 20-kiloton atomic bomb. But the threat of Soviet hydrogen bombs made it seem necessary to move America’s commander in chief someplace even deeper underground. At Raven Rock Mountain in southern Pennsylvania, about eighty miles from the White House and six miles from Camp David, an enormous bunker was dug out of solid granite. Known as Site R, it sat about half a mile inside Raven Rock and another half a mile below the mountain’s peak. It had power stations, underground water reservoirs, a small chapel, clusters of three-story buildings set within vast caverns, and enough beds to accommodate two thousand high-ranking officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Council. Although the bunker was huge, so was the competition for space in it; for years the Air Force and the other armed services disagreed about who should be allowed to stay there.

The president could also find shelter at Mount Weather, a similar facility in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near the town of Berryville, Virginia. Nicknamed “High Point,” the bunker was supposed to ensure the “continuity of government.” It would house Supreme Court justices and members of the Cabinet, as well as hundreds of officials from civilian agencies. In addition to making preparations for martial law, Eisenhower had secretly given nine prominent citizens the legal authority to run much of American society after a nuclear war. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson had agreed to serve as administrator of the Emergency Food Agency; Harold Boeschenstein, the president of the Owens Corning Fiberglas Company, would lead the Emergency Production Agency; Frank Stanton, the president of CBS, would head the Emergency Communications Agency; and Theodore F. Koop, a vice president at CBS, would direct the Emergency Censorship Agency. High Point had its own television studio, from which the latest updates on the war could be broadcast nationwide. Patriotic messages from Arthur Godfrey and Edward R. Murrow had already been prerecorded to boost the morale of the American people after a nuclear attack.

Beneath the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, a bunker was built for members of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and hundreds of their staff members. Known as Project Greek Island, it had blast doors that weighed twenty-five tons, separate assembly halls in which the House and Senate could meet, decontamination showers, and a garbage incinerator that could also serve as a crematorium. A bunker was later constructed for the Federal Reserve at Mount Pony, in Culpeper, Virginia, where billions of dollars in currency were stored, shrink-wrapped in plastic, to help revive the postwar economy. NATO put its emergency command-and-control center inside the Kindsbach Cave, an underground complex in West Germany with sixty-seven rooms. The cave had previously served as a Nazi military headquarters for the western front.

The British government had planned to rely on a series of deep underground shelters built in London during the Second World War. But the Strath report suggested the need for an alternate seat of government far from the capital. In the Wiltshire countryside, about a hundred miles west of London, a secret abandoned aircraft engine factory hidden inside a limestone mine was turned into a Cold War bunker larger than any in the United States. Known at various times by the code names SUBTERFUGE, BURLINGTON, and TURNSTYLE, it was large enough to provide more than one million square feet of office space and house almost eight thousand people. Although the original plans were scaled down, the completed bunker had miles of underground roads, accommodations for the prime minister and hundreds of other officials, a BBC studio, a vault where the Bank of England’s gold reserves could be stored, and a pub called the Rose & Crown.

DURING THE CLOSING MONTHS of the Truman administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had once again asked for control of America’s nuclear weapons. And once again, their request had been denied. But the threat of Soviet bombers and the logistical demands of the new look strengthened the arguments for military custody. By keeping the weapons at half a dozen large storage sites, the Atomic Energy Commission maintained centralized, civilian control of the stockpile. The arrangement minimized the risk that an atomic bomb could be stolen or misplaced. Those AEC sites, however, had become an inviting target for the Soviet Union — and a surprise attack on them could wipe out America’s nuclear arsenal. The Joint Chiefs argued that nuclear weapons should be stored at military bases and that time-consuming procedures to authorize their use should be scrapped. Civilian custody was portrayed as a grave threat to readiness and national security. A democratic principle that seemed admirable in theory could prove disastrous in an emergency.