Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The basic premise of SAC’s airborne alert was hard to refute: planes that were already in the air wouldn’t be destroyed by missiles that hit bases on the ground. Keeping a portion of the bomber fleet airborne at all times would allow the United States to retaliate after a surprise attack. During an airborne alert, American bombers would take off and fly within striking distance of the Soviet Union. If the planes failed to receive a “Go” code, they’d turn around at a prearranged spot, circle for hours, and then return to their bases. The plan erred on the side of safety — a breakdown in communications between SAC headquarters and one of the bombers would end its mission without any bombs being dropped. The mission would “fail safe,” an engineering term for components designed to break without causing harm. The fail-safe measures of an airborne alert could reduce the effectiveness of SAC’s nuclear retaliation, once America was at war: bombers that didn’t receive a Go code would circle and then return home, leaving their targets untouched. But the alternative — an airborne alert in which crews were ordered to fly to the Soviet Union and bomb it, unless they received some sort of “Don’t Go” code from headquarters — could easily start a war by mistake. That sort of mission was bound, at some point, to “fail deadly.”

“DAY AND NIGHT, I HAVE a certain percentage of my command in the air,” General Power told the press, the week after the second Sputnik launch. “These planes are bombed up and they don’t carry bows and arrows.” The message to the Soviet Union was unmistakable: SAC’s ability to retaliate wouldn’t be diminished by intercontinental ballistic missiles. But Power was bluffing. The airborne alert existed only on paper, and the United States didn’t keep bombers in the air, day and night, ready to strike. Carrying nuclear weapons over populated areas was still considered too dangerous. Designers at the weapons labs had been surprised to hear about SAC’s ground alert. Aside from the occasional training exercise, the Atomic Energy Commission had always assumed that hydrogen bombs and atomic bombs would be safely locked away in igloos until the nation was at war. The idea of parking bombers near runways, loaded with nuclear weapons and fuel, had been proposed by LeMay, backed by the Joint Chiefs, and approved by President Eisenhower without input from Los Alamos or Sandia.

An airborne alert would be much riskier. The safety questions about the new sealed-pit weapons hadn’t been resolved. And if older weapons were used during an airborne alert, their nuclear cores would have to be placed, before takeoff, into an “in-flight insertion” mechanism. It held the core about a foot outside the sphere of explosives, while the plane was en route to the target — and then pushed the core all the way inside the sphere, using a motor-driven screw, when the bomb was about to be dropped. The contraption made the weapon safer to transport, but not much. Once the core was placed into this mechanism, according to a Sandia report, “nuclear safety is not ‘absolute,’ it is nonexistent.” The odds of a nuclear detonation during a crash or a fire would be about one in seven.

Weapon safety became an ongoing point of contention between the Strategic Air Command and the Atomic Energy Commission. General Power not only wanted to start an airborne alert as soon as possible, he also wanted SAC’s ground-alert bombers to take off and land with fully assembled weapons during drills. When the AEC suggested that dummy weapons could be used instead, the Air Force came up with a series of arguments for why that would be “operationally unsuitable.” During an emergency, having dummy weapons onboard would “degrade the reaction time to an unacceptable degree,” SAC’s director of operations argued. They’d hurt “crew morale and motivation,” and they were hard to obtain. The typical air base had only seven dummy weapons, SAC claimed, a scarcity that made it necessary to train with real ones. Although the Atomic Energy Commission no longer retained physical possession of the hydrogen bombs stored at SAC bases, it still had legal custody. The AEC refused to allow any fully assembled bombs to be flown on SAC bombers. That prohibition applied to sealed-pit weapons and to older weapons with their cores attached. Crews were permitted, however, to train with fully assembled bombs and to load them onto planes — so long as the planes never left the ground.

SAC’s arguments on behalf of an airborne alert were strengthened by the apparent shortcomings in the American missile program. A week before the launch of Sputnik 1, an Atlas long-range missile had failed spectacularly in the sky above Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was the second Atlas failure of the year. Near the end of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union had fiercely competed to recruit Nazi rocket scientists. Although the three leading figures in Germany’s V-2 program — Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, and Walter Dornberger — were secretly brought to the United States and protected from war crimes trials, for almost a decade after the war the Air Force showed little enthusiasm for long-range missiles. The V-2 had proven to be wildly inaccurate, more effective at inspiring terror in London than hitting specific targets. An intercontinental ballistic missile with the same accuracy as the V-2, fired at the Soviet Union from an American launchpad, was likely to miss its target by about one hundred miles. Curtis LeMay thought bombers were more reliable than missiles, more versatile and precise. He wanted SAC to develop nuclear-powered bombers, capable of remaining airborne for weeks. But as thermonuclear weapons became small enough and light enough to be mounted atop a missile, accuracy became less of an issue. An H-bomb could miss a target by a wide margin and still destroy it. Even LeMay admitted that an accurate intercontinental ballistic missile would be “the ultimate weapon.”

During the fall of 1957, the United States had six different strategic missiles in development, with rival bureaucracies fighting not only for money but also for a prominent role in the emergency war plan. On behalf of the Army, Wernher von Braun’s team was developing an intermediate-range missile, the Jupiter, that could travel 1,500 miles and hit Soviet targets from bases in Europe. The Air Force was working on an almost identical intermediate-range missile, the Thor, as well as three long-range missiles — Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman. The Navy was pursuing its own intermediate-range missile, the Polaris, having decided not to deploy the Army’s Jupiter in submarines. The interservice rivalry over missiles was exacerbated by the competition among the defense contractors hoping to build them. The General Dynamics Corporation lobbied aggressively for Atlas; the Martin Company, for Titan; Boeing, for Minuteman; Douglas Aircraft, for Thor; Chrysler, for Jupiter; and Lockheed, for Polaris. President Eisenhower planned to fund two or three of these missile programs and cancel the rest, based on their merits and the nation’s strategic needs. Amid Democratic accusations of a missile gap, Eisenhower agreed to fund all six.

The Sputnik launches also complicated America’s relationship with its NATO allies. The Soviet Union appeared to have gained a technological advantage, and the United States no longer seemed invincible. NATO ministers began to wonder if an American president really would defend Berlin or Paris, when that could mean warheads landing in New York City within an hour. Khrushchev’s boasts about long-range missiles were accompanied by a Soviet “peace campaign” that called for nuclear disarmament and an end to nuclear weapon tests. For years, the World Peace Council, backed by the Soviet Union and Communist China, had been promoting efforts to “Ban the Bomb.” The slogan had a strong resonance in Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, countries that felt trapped in the middle of an arms race between the superpowers, that had already endured two world wars and now rebelled against preparations for a third. While public opinion in Western Europe increasingly turned against nuclear weapons, the leadership of NATO sought an even greater reliance on them. The French, in particular, had long argued that the United States should cede control of its nuclear weapons based in Europe. Giving the weapons to NATO would allow the alliance to use them quickly in an emergency — and prevent an American president from withholding them, regardless of any last-minute doubts. It would demonstrate that the fate of Europe and the United States were inextricably linked.