A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  Clay turned to Curtis LeMay, that Cromwellian wielder of bombers who had leveled Japan’s cities, now a lieutenant general commanding the U.S. Air Force in Europe, to accomplish what no air force had ever done before. LeMay had anticipated a blockade and when the Soviets closed the land routes on June 24 was ready to begin flying eighty tons of supplies a day into Berlin with the workhorse transports of the Second World War, the C-47 Dakotas that comprised his troop carrier squadrons. Meanwhile, the Teletypes clattered out orders and the newly independent U.S. Air Force and the other services mobilized to back him. The Tactical Air Command and the Military Air Transport Service scoured the United States and Alaska and the Caribbean for more C-47s and the newer four-engine C-54s, which could carry three times as much cargo. The Air Force’s airlift specialist, Major General William H. Tunner, who had supervised the flying of supplies from India over the Himalayas to the Chinese Nationalists during the Second World War—over the Hump, as the pilots had named those forbidding mountains—was ordered to Germany to set up a special task force headquarters and conquer this new challenge. The British joined in and LeMay persuaded them to integrate their transports under Tunner, who acquired a Royal Air Force deputy.

  Navy tankers ferried across the Atlantic the many additional tons of aviation gasoline required. The trucks of the Army Transportation Corps formed a relay hauling sustenance for Berlin from the ships unloading at Bremerhaven to Wiesbaden and Rhein-Main and the other airfields that were the loading points. The Army Corps of Engineers improved and maintained the runways at the two existing airfields in Berlin, Tempelhof in the American sector and Gatow in the British one, and built a third at Tegel in the French zone. To keep the planes in the air, flocks of military and civilian mechanics were mustered for around-the-clock maintenance depots in Germany and England. Because men tire before aircraft do, relief pilots and crews were dispatched to Germany so that the planes could be flown in consecutive shifts. Tunner soon had a stream of transports moving back and forth along the air corridors to Berlin twenty-four hours a day, landing, unloading, taking off to return to an airfield in the west, and then loading once more for Berlin. By December, the airlift was supplying 4,500 tons a day, 500 tons more than the city’s minimum requirement, the biggest portion bulky coal for heating, and the tonnage continued to rise despite the closing in of the German winter.

  As Schriever remarked, it was Hap Arnold’s technological vision that provided the edge to defeat the blockade. The all-weather air force he had told Bennie he wanted in 1938 had finally come to pass. Arnold had encouraged advances in ground control radar during the Second World War and by the end of the conflict the system had reached near perfection. Whether in day or at night, whether in snow or sleet or rain, the controllers at the Berlin air traffic center would pick out a plane on their radar when it reached the point where it was supposed to start its descent and then talk the pilot down a glide path, giving him heading, airspeed, and rate of descent until the aircraft finally broke out over the illuminated runway. Only fog so dense that it reduced visibility to close to zero forced the cancellation of flights. Throughout that winter the controllers brought in a transport every three minutes. The pilot had one opportunity to land. If he or his co-pilot somehow muffed the controller’s instructions and he had to climb back up again, he returned to his airfield of origin and reentered the stream of aircraft once more. Tunner permitted no interruptions. The airlift’s accident rate averaged less than half that of the Air Force as a whole, but besting the blockade nevertheless cost lives—a total of thirty pilots and crew members and one civilian in twelve crashes.

  Soviet aircraft occasionally appeared in the designated corridors, but there was no serious harassment of the transports, because Stalin apparently decided this would be interpreted as an act of war. Truman reinforced that impression with a show of force by sending sixty B-29s to England in July 1948 and more B-29s and a group of the Air Force’s first operational jet fighters, the F-80, to Germany. The bombers were a bluff. Although by now the U.S. nuclear arsenal had grown to about fifty atomic bombs of the Nagasaki type, none of these B-29s was equipped to carry them.

  The Berlin Airlift was high drama, an extraordinary achievement that riveted the attention of the West. There was no need to speak of the courage and dedication of the pilots and aircrews. The news films of the transports coming in over the rooftops in the falling snow, as these men held steady course for a runway they could not see, spoke for them. Then there were the grateful Berliners, men and women, unloading the sacks of coal and crates of foodstuffs alongside the American and British and French soldiers who had not long ago been their enemies, and the films of the children cheering and waving at the pilots who tossed them candy. It was heady and emotional and more powerful anti-Communist propaganda than anyone in Washington could have imagined. The blockade and the airlift turned many who were undecided among the peoples of Europe against the Soviets and propelled the nations of Western Europe and Britain and the United States toward closer cooperation. The Russians were laying siege to a city and attempting to conquer it with the weapons of starvation and cold, but the American and British airmen were defeating them by keeping the people of this beleaguered Berlin warm and well fed. As Lucius Clay observed, the blockade was “the stupidest move the Russians could make.”

  By the spring of 1949, Stalin understood how badly he had miscalculated and was desperate to end the blockade under terms that would not be humiliating, but the administration was in no hurry. With an airlift working this well, there was no need for ground transportation. During one twenty-four-hour period in April, the controllers set a record by bringing 1,398 flights into Berlin, about a landing a minute. The blockade was finally lifted in mid-May 1949 and the land routes reopened. The quid pro quo was an agreement to convene in Paris yet another meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers. The Soviets attempted to negotiate a return to the original four-power governing system and abort the formation of the new West German state. It was fruitless. Stalin had lost. That same month, May 1949, the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany, with its capital at Bonn, was adopted.

  18.

  STALIN GETS HIS BOMB

  Then Joseph Stalin got his atomic bomb, although Kurchatov and Khariton and their colleagues were not able to hold to their two-and-a-half-year timetable. Problems with the plutonium production reactor delayed the test for eighteen months. Nevertheless, they moved with a speed unexpected in Washington. At 6:00 A.M. on August 29, 1949, four years and nine days from the date Stalin had signed the order setting the postwar nuclear arms race in motion, they exploded a device identical to the Nagasaki bomb at a spot on the barren steppes of Kazakhstan in Central Asia northwest of the city of Semipalatinsk. The device was subsequently code-named Joe One by American intelligence. Beria, who came to observe this Soviet version of Trinity, and personally report to Stalin on the phone line to Moscow, embraced Kurchatov and Khariton and kissed them on the forehead as the mushroom cloud rose. There were indications later that Beria had been worried about his own fate if the enterprise had been a fiasco.

  At the end of October, Stalin signed a secret decree, drawn up by Beria, passing out the rewards. In deciding who received what, Beria is reported to have followed the principle that the highest awards went to those who would have been shot first in case of a fizzle. David Holloway in Stalin and the Bomb says that the story may have been apocryphal, but that it accurately reflected the feeling of the scientists involved. Kurchatov and Khariton received the highest honors possible, Hero of Socialist Labor and Stalin Prize Laureate of the first degree; large amounts of cash; ZIS-110 cars, the best the Soviet automotive industry was making at the time; dachas; free education for their children in any establishment; and free public transportation for themselves and their families. In an enticement of what the future could hold, Stalin had already, back in 1946 when tens of thousands of rural families were living in dugouts under the rubble of their homes, built a fancy eight-room
house for Kurchatov at his laboratory near Moscow, importing Italian craftsmen to furnish it with parquet floors, marble fireplaces, and elegant wood paneling. A number of the other leading physicists, engineers, and managers were similarly rewarded with the honor of Hero of Socialist Labor and with money, cars, and sundry other privileges in lesser degrees. Khariton was eventually also to be awarded his own private railway car.

  In time, through the remaining years of Stalin and during the rule of his successors, Arzamas-16, its sister sites in the atomic industry network, and research centers for other branches of the Soviet military-industrial complex were to grow into self-contained cities, with their own schools, concert halls, hospitals, and, by Russian standards, first-class shops for food and clothing. Although officially secret, they became known as the “white archipelago,” and their privileged inhabitants, the scientists and engineers and their families, were referred to as chocolatniki by less fortunate Russians. Already by 1953, one of Stalin’s henchmen in the Politburo, Lazar Kaganovich, complained that the atomic cities had become like “health resorts.”

  It would be erroneous, however, to conclude that these Soviet physicists lent their ingenuity to the building of the bomb because a life of privilege was held out before them if they succeeded. On the contrary, their motives were complicated. Imprisonment in a labor camp or execution were ever-present threats in Stalin’s Russia for failure to succeed or unwillingness to cooperate. On the other hand, David Holloway discovered in questioning them that they were also motivated forcefully by love of country, by the defense of their motherland. Many of them might not have liked Stalin’s system, but they could not change it. The Soviet Union was their country, the only one they had, a conviction ingrained all the more keenly by the war of survival, the Great Patriotic War, as Russians called it, that they had just emerged from with Nazi Germany. The atomic bomb project was, in an emotional way, a continuation of that primeval conflict. Andrei Sakharov was to become a world-renowned figure and to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 because of the persecution and internal exile he suffered in the cause of promoting civil liberties in the Soviet Union. In 1948, however, he was an imaginative twenty-seven-year-old physicist beginning the research that led to Russia’s hydrogen bomb. “I regarded myself as a soldier in this new scientific war,” he subsequently remarked of those years. “We … believed that our work was absolutely necessary as a means of achieving a balance in the world.”

  Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall did not hand Stalin’s Russia the bomb, as most of the American public thought that the Rosenbergs and David Greenglass and other Soviet spies unknown and unnamed had done. Kurchatov and those with whom he chose to collaborate were notably competent physicists who, given time, would have created a bomb on their own without any intelligence input. In 1951, they detonated a much improved version of the Nagasaki bomb that weighed only half as much and yielded twice the force, forty kilotons, with a mixed core of U-235 and plutonium. The real secret of the atomic bomb was whether such a hellish device could be devised at all. That secret was exposed in the dawn of the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, with Trinity and then dramatized to the world when its monstrous power was unleashed on the inhabitants of Hiroshima.

  What Fuchs and Hall did accomplish was to save the Soviet Union time, probably a year to two years, in the race to achieve strategic parity with the United States after the explosion of Trinity a bit more than four years prior to Joe One. Ironically, Stalin initially kept the achievement of his physicists secret for some unknown reason and it was Truman who announced that the Soviets had the bomb. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, set up in 1946 to take charge of all things nuclear, had not been unwatchful under its first chairman, David Lilienthal, despite the illusions at the top. It had persuaded the Air Force to cooperate in the Long Range Detection Program, which involved high-altitude flights off the Soviet Union by aircraft equipped with filters to capture nuclear residue from the air. A B-29 flying at 18,000 feet over the North Pacific on September 3, 1949, collected a slightly higher count of radioactive material than would normally be found in the air. Further checks as the high-level winds continued in their stream over the United States, the Atlantic, and Europe confirmed that the Soviets had tested an atomic bomb in the last few days of August.

  The Soviet Union still lacked adequate means of striking the United States with atomic bombs. Even the hundreds of copies of the B-29, called Tu-4s (more than a thousand were to be built), that the Soviet aircraft industry was turning out on Stalin’s instructions lacked the range to reach most American cities and as propeller-driven aircraft were also vulnerable to the new American jet fighters in daylight bombing.

  The practicalities of how the Soviet Union might drop an atomic bomb on the United States did not matter for the moment. The broken monopoly had been replaced by a balance of terror; the threat of nuclear devastation thrust into the minds and emotions of the American public and its leaders. The Berlin Blockade, while a defensive move by Stalin, had been interpreted yet again in the United States as evidence of aggressive intent. In Asia, a new Communist danger was rising as the armies of Mao Tse-tung neared their conquest of all of mainland China. Now the news that Russia had the bomb created a tangible sense of danger, a keener sense of insecurity in a nation already suffering from that malady.

  The first response was to end the debate that had been going on over whether to build the hydrogen, i.e., thermonuclear, bomb. Truman reacted to his own apprehension and the clamor from the recently independent U.S. Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and their allies in Congress by issuing an order on January 31, 1950, to begin developing this weapon, thousands of times more powerful than the Nagasaki bomb. It was created and detonated within less than two years, on November 1, 1952.

  Niels Bohr and other idealistic physicists who had lobbied to place international controls on atomic weaponry and thereby avoid a nuclear arms race after the Second World War were, it has become clear, scholarly Don Quixotes. All the control plans put forward by the Truman administration, such as the Baruch Plan promoted by the financier Bernard Baruch on the administration’s behalf in the United Nations, preserved an American monopoly, and Stalin would never have settled for second place. To have satisfied Stalin, Truman would have had to share the atomic bomb with him, a political impossibility.

  Similarly quixotic was the attempt earlier in 1949 by Robert Oppenheimer and other physicists who had been involved in the Manhattan Project to stop development of the hydrogen bomb on the grounds that it was “in a totally different category from an atomic bomb” and might become a “weapon of genocide” with “extreme dangers to mankind.” (They also argued that technical problems stood in the way and higher-yield atomic weapons would serve any military needs, but it is clear that moral objections most concerned them.) As is now known, Kurchatov, undoubtedly at the behest of Stalin and Beria, had organized serious theoretical and design studies for a hydrogen bomb in 1948. By the end of that year, long before they had broken the American atomic monopoly, the Soviets had a basic design for an intermediate hydrogen weapon, Sakharov’s “Layer Cake,” which combined fission (atomic) and fusion (thermonuclear) elements. (“Nuclear fission” is the term for the explosive reaction that occurs in an ordinary atomic bomb, while “nuclear fusion” is the term used to describe the vastly more powerful release of energy that occurs when a hydrogen, or thermonuclear, device detonates.) Advanced design and experimental work got under way at Arzamas-16 in 1950, along with the creation of manufacturing facilities to produce the thermonuclear fuel, lithium deuteride, and other materials. The Layer Cake device was detonated at the test site on the Kazakhstan steppes on August 12, 1953, and yielded 400 kilotons, twenty times the power of the Nagasaki bomb. A bit over two years later, on November 22, 1955, just three years after the United States had detonated its first hydrogen bomb, a full-scale Soviet hydrogen weapon was exploded at the same Kazakhstan site. Kurchatov, Sakharov, and other Soviet physicists felt none of the moral qu
alms of their American counterparts. They saw the development of thermonuclear weapons as a logical second step to keep pace with the United States. Years later in his memoirs, Sakharov was certain that Stalin would not have reciprocated any American restraint in creating the hydrogen bomb. He would have seen it as either a trick not to be fooled by or as stupidity of which he should take advantage.

  19.

  THE CONSEQUENCES OF DELUSION

  The second response to Stalin’s acquisition of the atomic bomb was a policy reassessment that was to reinforce, like the domino theory, the oversimplification and distortion of American thinking during the Cold War. Known as NSC-68 after its designation as a National Security Council memorandum, the paper’s patron was Dean Acheson and its principal author was a man in the Acheson mold, Paul Nitze. An Easterner and 1928 graduate of Harvard, Nitze was a clever financier who had made a fortune as an investment banker with the tony New York firm of Dillon Read & Co. at a time when others were reaping bankruptcy. He had first been recruited for government service as a high-level economic administrator during the Second World War by James Forrestal, one of his associates at Dillon Read. As he had no need to return to New York and make more money, he decided that he liked the life of a Washington insider and stayed. Nitze was a polished, articulate man with a knack for convincing himself and others that he had knowledge of a subject when he, in fact, had little or none. He also had a talent for sensing and projecting fear of Communism and the Soviet Union, which was to serve him well in a long and distinguished career as a senior Washington official and public figure.

  By 1949, George Kennan and Acheson, who had succeeded Marshall as secretary of state, had had a falling out. Kennan had been having second thoughts about the image of a relentlessly militant Soviet Union that he had portrayed in his Long Telegram and was disturbed about the hardening of the attitudes that his famous missive had sanctioned. He had come to believe that Russia did not constitute a military threat to Western Europe. He thought that containment ought to rely on political and economic means rather than a larger military establishment and the increasing militarization of foreign policy that he was seeing. Acheson had in turn come to regard him as naive. “There were times when I felt like a court jester,” Kennan said in his memoirs. In January 1950, Acheson replaced him as head of the department’s Policy Planning Staff with Nitze, who was of Acheson’s way of thinking. Nitze, Acheson said in his memoirs, was “a joy to work with because of his clear, incisive mind.”