Command and Control (25 page)

A strong believer in systems analysis and the use of multiple disciplines to solve complex questions, Carlson thought that adding heat-sensitive fuses to nuclear weapons wasn't enough. The real safety problem was more easily stated than solved: bombs were dumb. They responded to simple electrical inputs, and they had no means of knowing whether a signal had been sent deliberately. In the cockpit of a SAC bomber,
the T-249 control box made it easy to arm a weapon. First you flicked a toggle switch to
ON
, allowing power to flow from the aircraft to the bomb. Then you turned a knob from the
SAFE
position either to
GROUND
or to
AIR
, setting the height at which the bomb would detonate. That was all it took—and if somebody forgot to return the knob to
SAFE
, the bomb would remain armed, even after the power switch was turned off. Writing on behalf of Sandia and the other weapon labs, Carlson warned that an overly simplistic electrical system increased the risk of a full-scale detonation during an accident: “
a weapon which requires only the receipt of intelligence from the delivery system for arming will accept and respond to such intelligence whether the signals are intentional or not
.”

The need for a nuclear weapon to be safe and the need for it to be reliable were often in conflict. A safety mechanism that made a bomb less likely to explode during an accident could also, during wartime, render it more likely to be a dud. The contradiction between these two design goals was succinctly expressed by the words “
always/never.” Ideally, a nuclear weapon would always detonate when it was supposed to—and never
detonate when it wasn't supposed to. The Strategic Air Command wanted bombs that were safe and reliable. But most of all, it wanted bombs that worked. A willingness to take personal risks was deeply embedded in SAC's institutional culture. Bomber crews risked their lives every time they flew a peacetime mission, and the emergency war plan missions for which they trained would be extremely dangerous. The crews would have to elude Soviet fighter planes and antiaircraft missiles en route to their targets, survive the blast effects and radiation after dropping their bombs, and then somehow find a friendly air base that hadn't been destroyed. They would not be pleased, amid the chaos of thermonuclear warfare, to learn that the bombs they dropped didn't detonate because of a safety device.

Civilian weapon designers, on the other hand, were bound to have a different perspective—to think about the peacetime risk of an accident and err on the side of
never
. Secretary of the Air Force Quarles understood the arguments on both sides. He worried constantly about the Soviet threat. And he had pushed the Atomic Energy Commission to find methods of achieving “
a higher degree of nuclear safing.” But if compromises had to be made between always and never, he made clear which side would have to bend. “
Such safing,” Quarles instructed, “should, of course, cause minimum interference with readiness and reliability.”

A
super long-distance intercontinental multistage ballistic rocket was launched a few days ago,” the Soviet Union announced during the last week of August 1957. The news didn't come as a surprise to Pentagon officials, who'd secretly monitored the test flight with help from a radar station in Iran. But the announcement six weeks later that the Soviets had placed the first man-made satellite into orbit caught the United States off guard—and created a sense of panic among the American people.
Sputnik 1
was a metallic sphere, about the size of a beach ball, that could do little more than circle the earth and transmit
a radio signal of “beep-beep.” Nevertheless, it gave the Soviet Union a huge propaganda victory. It created the impression that “the first socialist society” had surpassed the United States in missile technology and scientific expertise. The successful launch of
Sputnik 2
, on November 3, 1957, seemed even more ominous. The new satellite weighed about half a ton; rocket engines with enough thrust to lift that sort of payload could be used to deliver a nuclear warhead.
Sputnik 2
also carried the first animal to orbit the earth, a small dog named Laika—evidence that the Soviet Union was planning to put a man in space. Although the Soviets
boasted that Laika lived for a week in orbit, wearing a little space suit, housed in a pressurized compartment with an ample supply of food and water,
she actually died within a few hours of liftoff.

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 man-made 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
Sputnik
s 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.

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.”

•   •   •

“
D
AY
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.