Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The Air Force didn’t like most of the Pentagon’s new spending priorities, which seemed to favor the Army and the Navy. The B-47 bomber — long the mainstay of the Strategic Air Command and the favorite ride of Colonel Jimmy Stewart — was to be taken out of service. No additional B-52 bombers would be built. The fate of a supersonic replacement for the B-52 was suddenly uncertain, and plans for a nuclear-powered bomber were scrapped. McNamara had concluded that bombers were not only too costly to operate but increasingly vulnerable to Soviet air defenses. The B-47 and the B-52 had been designed for high-altitude bombing; they would now have to attack at low altitudes to avoid Soviet radar. And the Soviets were beginning to put atomic warheads on their antiaircraft missiles, as well. During an attack on the Soviet Union, about half of SAC’s bomber crews, if not more, were expected to lose their lives.

General Curtis LeMay, the second in command at the Air Force, had little use for McNamara and his whiz kids. Few of them had served in the armed forces, let alone seen combat — yet they acted like military experts. They seemed arrogant and clueless. General Thomas D. White, the Air Force chief of staff, had similar misgivings, later criticizing the “pipe-smoking, tree-full-of-owls type of so-called professional ‘defense intellectuals’ who have been brought into this nation’s capital.” LeMay was convinced that long-range bombers were still the best weapons for strategic warfare. The Pentagon had never allowed SAC to test-launch a ballistic missile with a live nuclear warhead, despite many requests. Such a launch, with a flight path over the United States, was considered too risky. Dummy warheads were successfully tested instead, on missiles fired from Vandenberg — and the same fuzing and firing mechanisms would presumably detonate a real one. But LeMay didn’t want the survival of the United States to depend on a weapon that had never been fully tested. And the idea of a “limited war” still seemed ridiculous to him. The phrase was an oxymoron. If you won’t fight to win, LeMay argued, then you damn well shouldn’t fight. His protégé at SAC, General Power, felt the same way and continued to push for a counterforce strategy, aiming at military targets. For that task, Polaris missiles — relatively inaccurate and impossible to launch simultaneously, as one massive salvo — were useless.

To placate the Air Force and gain additional security against a surprise attack, McNamara raised the proportion of SAC bombers on ground alert from one third to one half. The number of bombers on airborne alert was increased, as well. Twelve B-52s were soon in the air at all times, loaded with thermonuclear weapons, as part of Operation Chrome Dome. Every day, six of the bombers would head north and circumnavigate the perimeter of Canada. Four would cross the Atlantic and circle the Mediterranean. And two would fly to the ballistic missile early-warning facility in Thule, Greenland, and orbit it for hours, maintaining visual or radio contact with the base — just to make sure that it was still there. Thule would probably be hit by Soviet missiles during the initial stage of a surprise attack. Known as the “Thule monitor,” the B-52 assured SAC, more reliably than any bomb alarm system, that the United States was not yet at war.

Feuds between the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force continued, despite McNamara’s vow that the Pentagon would have “one defense policy, not three conflicting defense policies.” Interservice rivalries once again complicated the effort to develop a rational nuclear strategy. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had been instructed to alter the SIOP, so that President Kennedy would have a number of options during a nuclear war. Studies were under way to make that possible. But the nuclear ambitions of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force still seemed incompatible — and, at times, incomprehensible.

General Maxwell Taylor had contended in his bestselling book that the Army needed more money to fight conventional wars, an argument that helped to make him the principal military adviser to President Kennedy. Nevertheless, with Taylor’s support, the Army was now seeking thirty-two thousand nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield. Even the little Davy Crockett was portrayed as an indispensable weapon, despite the risk of theft. The handheld atomic rifles were as urgently needed, the Army claimed, as intercontinental ballistic missiles. McNamara still couldn’t understand the rationale for battlefield nuclear weapons and challenged the Army to answer a series of questions about them: Is the purpose of our tactical weapons to prevent the Soviets from using their tactical weapons? Can the Army defend Europe with them, without destroying Europe? And how will our own troops survive the fallout? The maximum range of the Davy Crockett was so short — about a mile and a half — that the soldiers who fired it stood a good chance of being killed by it.

In response to McNamara’s questions, the Army admitted that its request for thirty-two thousand nuclear weapons might “appear to be unreasonably high.” But General Taylor insisted that tactical weapons would serve as a valuable first step on the ladder of nuclear escalation. They would demonstrate American resolve — and the United States obviously needed to have them “if the enemy does.”

The latest intelligence reports on the Soviet Union added a new twist to the debate over America’s nuclear strategy. Within weeks of taking office, President Kennedy found out that the missile gap did not exist. Like the bomber gap, it was a myth. For years it had been sustained by faulty assumptions, Soviet deception, and a willingness at the Department of Defense to believe the worst-case scenario — especially when it justified more spending on defense. The CIA had estimated that the Soviet Union might have five hundred long-range ballistic missiles by the middle of 1961. Air Force Intelligence had warned that the Soviets might soon have twice that number. But aerial photographs of the Soviet Union, taken by U-2 spy planes and the new Discoverer spy satellite, now suggested that those estimates were wrong. The photos confirmed the existence of only four missiles that could reach the United States.

Instead of deploying long-range missiles to attack the United States, the Soviets had built hundreds of medium- and intermediate-range missiles to destroy the major cities of Western Europe. The strategy had been dictated, in large part, by necessity. Khrushchev’s boasts — that his factories were turning out 250 long-range missiles a year, that the Soviet Union had more missiles than it would ever need — were all a bluff. For years the Soviet missile program had been plagued with engineering and design problems. Medium-range missiles were less technologically demanding. It wasn’t easy to build a weapon that could fly six thousand miles and put a warhead near its target. And on October 24, 1960, the Soviet program had secretly endured a major setback.

Like the Atlas, the first Soviet long-range missiles used liquid oxygen as a propellant, and they required a lengthy fueling process before launch. A new Soviet missile, the R-16, used hypergolic propellants stored separately within its airframe, like the Titan II. The R-16 would be able to lift off within minutes. It was the largest missile that had ever been built, and Khrushchev was eager for its inaugural flight to take place before November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Marshal Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin, head of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, traveled to Kazakhstan and supervised preparations for the launch of an R-16 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

As the giant missile sat on the launchpad, full of oxidizer and fuel, a series of malfunctions occurred. Angry about the delay, under tremendous pressure from the Kremlin, and eager to know what was wrong, Nedelin drove to the pad. Half an hour before the scheduled launch, a crew of technicians was working on the missile when its second-stage engine started without warning. Flames from the engine shot downward and ignited the fuel tank of the first stage. Marshal Nedelin was sitting in a chair about fifty feet from the missile when it exploded. He was killed, along with many of the Soviet Union’s top rocket scientists and about one hundred other people. The chief designer of the R-16, Mikhail Yangel, happened to be taking a cigarette break in an underground bunker and survived the explosion. Movie cameras set up to record the launch instead captured some horrific images — men running for their lives, as an immense fireball pursues and then engulfs them; men falling to the ground, their clothes on fire; everywhere, clouds of deadly smoke with a reddish glow. The following day, TASS, the official Soviet news agency, announced that Nedelin had been killed in a plane crash.