Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Democrats in Congress whipped up fears of Soviet missiles and attacked the Eisenhower administration for allowing the United States to fall behind. The Democratic Advisory Council said that President Eisenhower had “weakened the free world” and “starved the national defense.” Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democratic senator from Washington, called Sputnik “a devastating blow to U.S. prestige.” Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Senate majority leader, scheduled hearings to investigate what had gone wrong with America’s defense policies. Johnson’s staff director, George Reedy, urged him “to plunge heavily” into the missile controversy, suggesting that it could “blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic Party, and elect you President.” Another Democratic senator, John F. Kennedy, later accused Eisenhower of putting “fiscal security ahead of national security” and made the existence of a “missile gap” one of the central issues in his presidential campaign.

The Democratic effort to create anxiety about a missile gap was facilitated by Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In a series of public comments over the next few years, Khrushchev belittled the American military and bragged about his nation’s technological achievements:

The United States does not have an intercontinental missile, otherwise it would also have easily launched a satellite of its own…. Now we are capable of directing a rocket to any part of the earth and, if need be, with a hydrogen warhead… it is not a mere figure of speech when we say we have organized serial production of intercontinental ballistic rockets… let the people abroad know it, I am making no secret of this — that in one year 250 missiles with hydrogen warheads came off the assembly line in the factory we visited…. The territory of our country is immense. We have the possibility of dispersing our rocket facilities, of camouflaging them well…. Two hundred rockets are sufficient to destroy England, France, and Germany; and three hundred rockets will destroy the United States. At the present time the USSR has so many rockets that mass production has been curtailed and only the newest models are under construction.

Khrushchev had condemned Stalin’s crimes in 1956, released political prisoners, gained a reputation as a reformer, and proposed a ban on nuclear weapons in central Europe. But he’d also ordered Soviet troops to invade Hungary and overthrow its government. More than twenty thousand Hungarian citizens were killed by the Red Army, and hundreds more were later executed. The thought of Khrushchev in command of so many long-range missiles seemed chilling.

President Eisenhower tried to calm the hysteria about Soviet missiles and address the criticism that his administration had become passive, timid, and out of touch. He felt confident that large increases in defense spending were unnecessary — and that the Strategic Air Command had more than enough nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. He was particularly irritated by a secret report submitted to him during the first week of November. A high-level committee led by H. Rowan Gaither, a former president of the Ford Foundation, called for tens of billions of dollars to be spent on new missile programs and a nationwide system of fallout shelters. Eisenhower thought that the Gaither committee had an exaggerated view of the Soviet threat. In a televised speech on November 7, 1957, Eisenhower stressed that there was no reason to panic: the military strength of the free world was much greater than that of the Communists. “It misses the whole point to say that we must now increase our expenditures on all kinds of military hardware and defense,” he said, with frustration.

The speech had little effect. On the morning of November 25, Lyndon Johnson opened the Senate hearings by asserting that “we have slipped dangerously behind the Soviet Union in some very important fields,” and an influential newspaper columnist described the Gaither report as “just about the grimmest warning” in American history. While working in the Oval Office that day, Eisenhower had a stroke and suddenly found himself unable to speak. A week and a half later, a Vanguard rocket carrying America’s first manmade satellite was launched at Cape Canaveral, Florida, before hundreds of reporters and a live television audience. The Vanguard rose about four feet into the air, hesitated, fell back to the launchpad, and exploded.

The Pentagon had good reason to be concerned about the Soviet Union’s long-range missiles, regardless of the actual number. A Soviet bomber would approach the United States at about five hundred miles per hour — and the warhead of a Soviet missile would come at about sixteen thousand miles per hour. With luck, a bomber might be shot down. But no technology yet existed to destroy a nuclear warhead, midflight. And a missile attack would give the United States little time to prepare its response. Soviet bombers would take eight or nine hours to reach the most important American targets; Soviet missiles could hit them in thirty minutes or less. Early warning of a ballistic missile attack would be necessary to protect the nation’s leadership and ensure that SAC’s retaliatory force could get off the ground. That sort of warning, however, might never come. The DEW Line radars had been designed to track enemy aircraft, not missiles, and the Pentagon had no means of detecting ICBMs once they’d been launched.

After Sputnik, the Air Force gained swift approval to construct the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), three huge radars that would spot Soviet missiles heading toward the United States. One of the radars would be built at Thule Air Base, Greenland; another at Clear Air Force Base, Alaska; and the third in the North Yorkshire Moors, England. Until the BMEWS was completed, however, the first sign of a Soviet missile attack would probably be mushroom clouds rising above SAC bases and American cities. Work immediately began on a bomb alarm system that would instantly let the president know when cities and air bases were being destroyed. Hundreds of small, innocuous-looking metal canisters were placed atop buildings and telegraph poles throughout the United States. Optical sensors inside the canisters, according to a classified account of the system, would detect the characteristic flash of a nuclear explosion, “locate precise blast locations, and indicate the intensity and pattern of the attack.” At SAC headquarters, green lights dotting a map of the United States would turn red to display each nuclear detonation. The amount of warning time that the Bomb Alarm System could provide was far from ideal, especially if the Soviets managed to synchronize their missile launches, so that all the warheads landed at once — but it seemed better than nothing.

General LeMay had been concerned for years about the threat that missiles could pose to the Strategic Air Command. In 1956, SAC had begun to test a plan that would keep some of its bombers constantly on alert and get them airborne half an hour after being warned of an attack. The logistics of such a “ground alert” were daunting. Crews would need to sleep near the runways and run for their planes the moment that a Klaxon sounded. Bombers would be parked fully loaded with nuclear weapons and fuel; the planes were said to be “cocked,” like the hammer of a pistol. Tankers for aerial refueling would be loaded as well and prepared for takeoff. By the fall of 1957, ground alerts had become routine at SAC bases in the United States, Great Britain, and Morocco. And the Strategic Air Command hoped that, within a year, at least one third of its bombers would always be parked beside runways, ready to get off the ground within fifteen minutes.

The successful launch of the two Sputniks created the possibility that, during a missile attack, SAC might not have fifteen minutes to launch the ground alert planes. LeMay had recently been promoted to serve as the vice chief of staff at the Air Force, and his replacement at SAC, General Thomas S. Power, pushed hard for approval of an even bolder tactic: the “airborne alert.” Power was widely considered, among fellow officers at SAC, to be a mean son of a bitch. Born in New York City and raised in Great Neck, Long Island, he’d dropped out of high school, worked in construction, returned to high school at the age of twenty, earned a degree, and joined the Army Air Corps in 1928. He later flew the lead plane during the firebombing of Tokyo and served as vice commander at SAC. He often played the role of LeMay’s “hatchet man,” firing people, enforcing discipline, and making sure that orders were carried out. The two men shared a strategic outlook but had different management styles. LeMay expressed disapproval with a stony silence or a few carefully chosen words; Power yelled and swore at subordinates. The warmth behind LeMay’s gruff exterior, the intense devotion to the well-being of his men, was harder to find in his successor. Even LeMay admitted that Power was a sadist, “sort of an autocratic bastard” — and yet “he got things done.” Kindness, sensitivity, and a genial disposition were not essential traits for a commander planning to win a nuclear war.