Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The number of nuclear weapons in the American arsenal had increased by more than 50 percent since the Eisenhower administration. The United States now had about thirty thousand of them, and each one could potentially be lost, stolen, sabotaged, or involved in an accident. Tactical weapons hadn’t been removed from Europe. On the contrary, the number of tactical weapons had more than doubled, and they were no longer safely tucked away in igloos. Putting locks in NATO’s weapons allowed them to be widely dispersed to units in the field — where they could be more easily stolen. And the question of how to keep the president alive and in command still didn’t have a satisfactory answer. The plans for a Deep Underground Command Center were scrapped after Kennedy’s death. The bunker had a good chance of surviving multiple hits from Soviet warheads. But its survival would prove meaningless. After an attack the president and his aides would most likely find themselves trapped two thirds of a mile beneath the rubble of the Pentagon, unable to communicate with the rest of the world or even get out of their bunker. The facility would serve primarily as a multimillion-dollar tomb.

Although McNamara’s efforts to avoid a nuclear war were tireless and sincere, he left office as one of the most despised men in the United States. Half a million American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam, the war seemed unwinnable, and most Americans blamed the number-crunching secretary of defense and his Ivy League advisers for the fiasco. A centralized command-and-control system — so essential for managing a nuclear war — had proven disastrous when applied to a civil war in Southeast Asia. Distrusting the Joint Chiefs of Staff and convinced that victories on the battlefield could be gained through cost-benefit analysis, the secretary of defense micromanaged the Vietnam War. McNamara personally chose targets to be bombed and supervised air strikes from his office at the Pentagon. “I don’t object to its being called McNamara’s war,” he said in 1964. “In fact I’m proud to be identified with it.”

Four years later hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians had been killed, tens of thousands of American servicemen had been killed or wounded, antiwar protests were spreading throughout the United States, and the Pentagon had become a symbol of bureaucratic malevolence and pointless slaughter. Known for his cool, detached manner, McNamara was now prone to bouts of sobbing in his office. While receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the day before his retirement, he apologized for being unable to speak. President Lyndon Johnson put a hand on McNamara’s shoulder, ended the ceremony, and guided him from the room.

Curtis LeMay withdrew from public life the same year, having left the Air Force in 1965. Once the darling of Hollywood and the media, he was now widely mocked and ridiculed. His well-publicized disputes with the Kennedy administration had given him a reputation for being a right-wing Neanderthal. When a fictionalized version of General LeMay appeared in film, the character was no longer a heroic defender of freedom. He was a buffoon, like General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove , willing to sacrifice twenty million American lives for the sake of defeating the Soviet Union. Or he was a crypto-fascist, like General James Mattoon Scott in Seven Days in May , preferring a coup d’état in the United States to a disarmament treaty with the Soviets.

LeMay seemed to confirm those stereotypes in October 1968, when he agreed to serve as the vice presidential candidate for the American Independent Party. George C. Wallace, an outspoken racist and segregationist, was the presidential candidate. LeMay had played a leading role in integrating the Air Force, and his support for equal rights, labor unions, birth control, and abortion seemed out of place in the Wallace campaign. But LeMay’s anger at how the Vietnam War was being fought — and his belief that both the Democratic and Republican candidates, Hubert H. Humphrey and Richard M. Nixon, were willing to appease the Communists — persuaded him to run. It was perhaps the worst decision of his life.

Tough and disciplined as a commander, LeMay was a supremely incompetent politician. At the press conference announcing his candidacy, he refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. The same implied threat that Eisenhower had made to end the Korean War sounded heartless and barbaric sixteen years later, as images of Vietnamese women and children burned by napalm appeared on the nightly news. LeMay had strongly opposed sending ground troops to Vietnam and disagreed with McNamara’s strategy for fighting a limited war there. “War is never ‘cost-effective,’” LeMay argued. “People are killed. To them the war is total.” At the press conference he stressed that the United States should always try to avoid armed conflict, “but when you get in it, get in it with both feet and get it over with as soon as you can.” The logic of his argument received less attention than the tone-deaf remark that preceded it: “We seem to have a phobia about nuclear weapons.”

On the campaign trail, the general who’d risked his life countless times fighting the Nazis was jeered by protesters yelling, “Sieg Heil.” He told reporters that the antiwar movement was “Communist-inspired,” lost his job as an aerospace executive for running with Wallace, and largely faded into obscurity after their defeat. LeMay and McNamara, polar opposites who’d battled over a wide range of national security issues, each convinced that the other was dangerously wrong, now found themselves in much the same place. They ended 1968 in humiliation and disgrace, their views repudiated by the American people.

On March 13, 1961, at about half past eleven in the morning, a B-52 took off from Mather Air Force Base in California, not far from Sacramento. The plane was on a Chrome Dome mission, carrying two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs. Twenty minutes after takeoff, the pilot, Major Raymond Clay, felt too much hot air coming from the vents in the cockpit. He and one of the copilots, First Lieutenant Robert Bigham, tried to turn off the heat. The vents wouldn’t close, and it became uncomfortably warm in the cockpit. Almost seven hours into the flight, the control tower at Mather instructed Clay to “continue mission as long as you can… if it gets intolerable, of course, bring it home.” Before the second refueling, Clay guided the plane to a low altitude and depressurized the cabin to cool it. But it heated up again, as the bomber climbed to thirty thousand feet. Fourteen hours into the flight, the temperature in the cockpit had reached 160 degrees Fahrenheit — so hot that one of the pilot’s windows shattered.

Clay descended to twelve thousand feet again and requested permission to end the mission. In addition to the broken window, a couple of the crew members were feeling sick. The cockpit had become so hot that Clay and his two copilots took turns flying the plane, going back and forth to the cabin below, where the temperature was a little cooler. Passing through overcast skies, the bomber flew off course, fell behind schedule by about half an hour, and lost another seven or eight minutes avoiding bad weather. Twenty-two hours into the flight, First Lieutenant Bigham realized that a gauge for one of the main fuel tanks was broken. The reading hadn’t changed for at least ninety minutes — but nobody had noticed, amid the heat and the hassle of coming and going from the cockpit. Bigham asked the control tower to send a tanker; they were running low on fuel. Forty minutes later, while approaching the tanker, the B-52 ran out of gas. All eight engines flamed out at once.

At an altitude of seven thousand feet, the crew started to bail out. Major Clay stayed in the cockpit and banked the plane away from Yuba City, California, just forty miles short of their base. Confident that the bomber wouldn’t hit the town, Clay ejected at an altitude of four thousand feet. The B-52 made a full 360-degree turn and then crashed nose first into a barley field. The high explosives of both hydrogen bombs shattered on impact and didn’t burn or detonate. The weapons harmlessly broke into pieces. All eight members of the crew survived the crash. But an Air Force fireman, rushing to the scene, was killed when his truck overturned.