Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

A naval officer at the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project suggested that the yield of a nuclear weapon accident should never exceed the explosive force produced by four pounds of TNT. The four-pound limit was based on what might happen during an accident at sea. If a nuclear detonation with a yield larger than four pounds occurred in the weapon storage area of an aircraft carrier, it could incapacitate the crew of the engine room and disable the ship. Los Alamos proposed that the odds of a yield greater than four pounds should be one in one hundred thousand. The Department of Defense asked for an even stricter definition of one-point safety: odds of one in a million.

The likelihood of a Mark 28 producing a large detonation during a plane crash or a fire, Osborne now thought, was uncomfortably high. The one-point safety tests conducted in Nevada had assumed that the most vulnerable place on a weapon was the spot where a detonator connected to a high-explosive lens. That’s why the tests involved setting off a single lens with a single detonator. But Osborne realized that nuclear weapons had an even more vulnerable spot: a corner where three lenses intersected on the surface of the high-explosive sphere. If a bullet or a piece of shrapnel hit one of those corners, it could set off three lenses simultaneously. And that might cause a nuclear detonation a lot larger than four pounds of TNT.

A new round of full-scale tests on the Mark 28 would be the best way to confirm or disprove Osborne’s theory. But those tests would be hard to perform. Ignoring strong opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Eisenhower had recently declared a moratorium on American nuclear testing. He was tired of the arms race and seeking a way out of it. He increasingly distrusted the Pentagon’s claims. “Testing is essential for weapons development,” General Charles H. Bonesteel had argued, succinctly expressing the military’s view, “and rapid weapons development is essential for keeping ahead of the Russians.” But Eisenhower doubted that the United States was at risk of falling behind. The Air Force and the CIA had asserted that the Soviet Union would have five hundred long-range ballistic missiles by 1961, outnumbering the United States by more than seven to one. Eisenhower thought those numbers were grossly inflated; top secret flights over the Soviet Union by U-2 spy planes had failed to detect anywhere near that number of missiles.

Despite the Democratic attacks on his administration and dire warnings of a missile gap, President Eisenhower thought it was more important to preserve the secrecy of America’s intelligence methods than to refute his critics. The nuclear test ban was voluntary, but he hoped to make it permanent. In the words of one adviser, Eisenhower had become “entirely preoccupied by the horror of nuclear war.” The harsh criticism of his policies — not just by Democrats but also by defense contractors — led Eisenhower to believe in the existence of a “military-industrial complex,” a set of powerful interest groups that threatened American democracy and sought new weapons regardless of the actual need.

The Air Force was in a bind. The hydrogen bomb scheduled to become its workhorse, deployed at air bases throughout the United States and Europe, might be prone to detonate during a plane crash. And full-scale tests of the weapon would violate the nuclear moratorium that Eisenhower had just promised to the world. While the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission debated what to do, the Mark 28 was grounded.

Norris Bradbury, the director of Los Alamos, recommended that a series of tests be secretly conducted. The tests would be called “hydronuclear experiments.” Mark 28 cores containing small amounts of fissile material would be subjected to one-point detonations — and more fissile material would be added with each new firing, until a nuclear yield occurred. The largest yield that might be produced would be roughly equivalent to that of one pound of TNT. None of these “experiments” would be done without the president’s approval. Eisenhower was committed to a test ban, disarmament, and world peace — but he also understood the importance of the Mark 28. He authorized the detonations, accepting the argument that they were “not a nuclear weapon test” because the potential yields would be so low. At a remote site in Los Alamos, without the knowledge of most scientists at the laboratory, cores were detonated in tunnels fifty to one hundred feet beneath the ground. The tests confirmed Osborne’s suspicions. The Mark 28 wasn’t one-point safe. A new core, with a smaller amount of plutonium, replaced the old one. And the bomb was allowed to fly again.

FOUR YEARS AFTER ANNOUNCING the policy of massive retaliation, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was having doubts. “Are we becoming prisoners of our strategic concept,” he asked at a meeting of Eisenhower’s military advisers, “and caught in a vicious circle?” A defense policy that relied almost entirely on nuclear weapons had made sense in the early days of the Cold War. The alternatives had seemed worse: maintain a vast and expensive Army or cede Western Europe to the Communists. But the Soviet Union now possessed hydrogen bombs and long-range missiles — and the American threat of responding to every act of Soviet aggression, large or small, with an all-out nuclear attack no longer seemed plausible. It could force the president to make a “bitter choice” during a minor conflict and risk the survival of the United States. Dulles urged the Joint Chiefs of Staff to come up with a new strategic doctrine, one that would give the president a variety of military options and allow the United States to fight small-scale, limited wars.

General Maxwell D. Taylor, the Army’s chief of staff, wholeheartedly agreed with Dulles. For years Taylor had urged Eisenhower to spend more money on conventional forces and adopt a strategy of “flexible response.” The Army hated the idea of serving merely as a trip wire in Europe; it still wanted to bring the battle back to the battlefield. The need for a more flexible policy was backed by RAND analysts and by a young Harvard professor, Henry A. Kissinger, whose book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy had become an unlikely bestseller in 1957. Kissinger thought that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union didn’t have to end in mutual annihilation. Rules of engagement could be tacitly established between the superpowers. The rules would forbid the use of hydrogen bombs, encourage a reliance on tactical nuclear weapons, and declare cities more than five hundred miles from the battlefield immune from attack. Unlike massive retaliation, a strategy of “graduated deterrence” would allow the leadership on both sides to “pause for calculation,” pull back from the abyss, and reach a negotiated settlement. Kissinger believed that in a limited war — fought with a decentralized command structure that let local commanders decide how and when to use their nuclear weapons — the United States was bound to triumph, thanks to the superior “daring and leadership” of its officers.

The Navy had also begun to question the thinking behind massive retaliation. It was about to introduce a new weapon system, the Polaris submarine, that might revolutionize how nuclear wars would be fought. The sixteen missiles carried by each Polaris were too inaccurate to be aimed at military targets, such as airfields. But their 1-megaton warheads were ideal for destroying “soft” targets, like cities. The Polaris would serve best as a retaliatory, second-strike weapon — leading the Navy to challenge the whole notion of striking the Soviet Union first.

Admiral Arleigh Burke, the chief of naval operations, became an outspoken proponent of “finite deterrence.” Instead of maintaining thousands of strategic weapons on Air Force bombers and land-based missiles to destroy every Soviet military target — a seemingly impossible task — Burke suggested that the United States needed hundreds, not thousands, of nuclear warheads. They could be carried by the Navy’s Polaris submarines, hidden beneath the seas, invulnerable to a surprise attack. And they would be aimed at the Soviet Union’s major cities, in order to deter an attack. Placing the nation’s nuclear arsenal on submarines would eliminate the need for split-second decision making during a crisis. It would give the president time to think, permit the United States to apply force incrementally, and reduce the threat of all-out nuclear war. Burke argued that a strategy of massive retaliation no longer made sense: “Nobody wins a suicide pact.” A decade earlier the Navy had criticized the Air Force for targeting Soviet cities, calling the policy “ruthless and barbaric.” Now the Navy claimed that was the only sane and ethical way to ensure world peace.