A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  While LeMay wished to be absolutely certain that enough planes got through with enough big bombs to “kill” every target on his list, it is clear from his correspondence and statements over the years that he also simply wanted to blast the Soviet Union, and any targets he thought worthy of his attention in Eastern Europe and China, with as much explosive force as he could muster. He apparently did not understand how different in nature nuclear weapons were from the conventional explosives he had dropped on Nazi-occupied Europe. He seems to have thought of hydrogen bombs essentially as just vastly more powerful bombs. He had a pitiless, smug vision of what he was going to do to the peoples of the Soviet Union with them, a vision he described in a lecture to the National War College in April 1956:

  Let us assume the order had been received this morning to unleash the full weight of our nuclear force. (I hope, of course, this will never happen.) Between sunset tonight and sunrise tomorrow morning the Soviet Union would likely cease to be a major military power or even a major nation.… Dawn might break over a nation infinitely poorer than China—less populated than the United States and condemned to an agrarian existence perhaps for generations to come.

  What LeMay did not realize was that if he ever launched the war for which he had prepared, the result would be national suicide. It would hardly matter should the Soviet Union fail to strike the United States with a single nuclear bomb. If he dropped all of this megatonnage on the Soviets, the American people would perish too. And he would also be condemning to an agonizing perdition the peoples of Canada, Europe, and most of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere through the Middle East and Asia. The puny, by comparison, bombs that had shocked the world in demolishing Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been fused to burst in the air. (The Little Boy Uranium-235 bomb dropped on Hiroshima had been detonated at 1,900 feet above the courtyard of one of the city’s hospitals.) The air burst technique had been deliberate in order to focus the maximum pressure and heat of the bomb’s blast on the buildings and people below, obliterating both in an instant. While there was extensive radiation, it did not extend far beyond the area covered by the blast, because comparatively little dirt and debris was blown up into the atmosphere.

  LeMay, however, as he wrote to Twining, was going to fuse a lot of his monster bombs for ground or near-ground bursts to be certain of crushing underground bunkers and so-called hardened targets, such as concrete revetments with thick overhead cover used to protect aircraft. These ground-level bursts would hurl massive amounts of irradiated soil and the pulverized remains of masonry and concrete structures high into the upper atmosphere. The clouds of poisoned soil and debris would spread as they were carried around the earth by the upper atmospheric winds. One result would be a nuclear winter, a catastrophic change in climate of unknown duration, with frigid temperatures at the height of summer, because the dirt in the upper atmosphere would block out the sun’s rays. Agriculture, on which human beings depend for sustenance, would become impossible. Most animal and bird life would be extinguished because the plants, shrubs, and trees on which so many of these creatures depend would also die from the cold and lack of sunlight, without which plants cannot perform the photosynthesis process that nourishes them. And as precipitation brought down the irradiated particles, humans and animals and birds would be stricken with fatal radiation sickness. The water resources would be contaminated too as this deadly residue from LeMay’s thermonuclear devices was gradually absorbed into them. Civilization as we know it in the Northern Hemisphere would cease to exist.

  To give the man his due, he created a force that posed a formidable deterrent to Soviet military adventurism in Western Europe, had the Soviet dictator been so inclined. That Stalin had no intention of launching such adventures, as was revealed with the opening of the Soviet Union’s archives after its collapse in 1991, did not negate the fact that the threat was perceived as real by Americans in the early 1950s. And the promise of overwhelming retaliation from SAC undoubtedly kept Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, from being more rash than he was. LeMay’s deterrence mission was thus a legitimate one, given the thinking of the period. Although he would later express regret that the United States missed an opportunity in the early 1950s to unleash SAC and destroy the Soviet Union at what he believed would have been little or no cost to itself, there is no evidence that LeMay actively sought to provoke what was referred to at the time as “preventive war.”

  He was subsequently to be accused of this because he ran SAC spy flights along the edges of Soviet territory and an occasional flight that deliberately penetrated Russian airspace and flew over outlying regions to conduct photoreconnaissance. The espionage flights along the periphery, called “spoofing,” were a ruse to gather information on Soviet air defenses by tricking the Russians into turning on their radars, scrambling fighters, and activating their radar jammers. LeMay was perpetually worried about the Soviets jamming the radar in his bombers, without which the planes could not bomb at night. The spy flights enabled SAC to stay abreast of this capability and teach crews to switch the bomber radar frequencies to alternates the Russians might not be jamming. Time and the release of secrets also absolved him on the penetrations of Soviet airspace for photoreconnaissance. Truman and Eisenhower gave permission for the flights because of reports of Soviet aviation buildups. Both presidents feared a sneak attack, a nuclear Pearl Harbor, from which the United States would not be able to recover.

  LeMay did assume that if war with the Soviet Union appeared imminent, he would be released to launch a preemptive strike with the bolts of nuclear lightning held in a mailed fist on SAC’s unit patch. “The United States cannot under any circumstances suffer the first blow of having bombs fall on this country,” he remarked in his March 21, 1955, memorandum to Twining. “Therefore, Soviet action short of general war could force the United States to initiate an offensive.” Again, this position did not differ radically from the presidential one. While Truman and Eisenhower would have been far more reluctant than LeMay to order a general nuclear assault, both presidents, and their successors throughout the Cold War for that matter, consistently refused to abjure the first use of nuclear weapons.

  The bomber gap episode helped confirm LeMay in his conviction that his opponents were seeking to imitate him. In a fly-past in Moscow on July 13, 1955, their Aviation Day, the Soviets showed off their new four-jet Mia-4 Bison bombers. American military attachés counted nine bombers in the first formation, then ten in the second, then another nine in the third. Air Force intelligence, eager to create pressure for higher production of B-52s, immediately concluded that if the Soviets were willing to display twenty-eight Bisons, they must have twice that many in service. Citing their estimate of Soviet production capacity, Air Force intelligence officers also predicted that the Russians would have a fleet of 600 to 800 Bisons within four to five years. This prediction and reports of Andrei Tupolev’s four-engine turboprop Tu-95 Bear bomber, which was to enter Soviet service in 1956, set off an outcry in the United States of a bomber gap that would negate SAC.

  LeMay made the most of it. In testimony before the Air Force Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Armed Services in April and May of 1956, he claimed that unless appropriations for B-52s, then coming off the Boeing assembly lines at six aircraft a month, were increased, the Soviet Union would achieve air superiority over the United States. By 1960, he said, “the Soviet Air Force will have substantially more Bisons and Bears than we will have B-52s.… I can only conclude then that they will have a greater striking power than we will have.” Congress voted an additional $1 billion (in these years before the severe inflation set off by the Vietnam War a substantial sum of money) for the Air Force budget in fiscal 1957 and again in fiscal 1958. While LeMay, who had become adept at manipulating legislators, was hyping his testimony to extort more funds, his top secret correspondence with Twining, where he had no reason to conceal his true feelings, demonstrates that he really did believe the Soviets were attempting to match his SAC. “As you
know,” he wrote in a June 1956 memorandum to Twining, “the first enemy targets that would have to be destroyed are the bases of the Soviet long-range air force. Destruction of these targets is the number one task of the Strategic Air Command.”

  The CIA, which had no budgetary interest, discovered that the Russians were turning out far fewer Bisons and Bears than the Air Force contended. The analysts in its economic intelligence section did so by studying the tail numbers on the Soviet bombers and matching these to known Soviet production schedules. The Soviets had apparently displayed all of the Bisons they had on July 13, 1955. Some civilian intelligence analysts also guessed, but could never prove, that the Soviets might have flown the nine-plane formation by twice to further impress the American military attachés watching through their binoculars. Then, in 1958, when the Russians had about 85 bombers of both types and SAC had 1,769, including 380 B-52s, the Soviets curtailed their bomber production. They ended up a few years later with a long-range air force that consisted primarily of 85 Bisons and 50 to 60 Bears.

  25.

  MOSCOW OPTS FOR ROCKETS

  Curtis LeMay could not understand that his bombers were in danger of being undermined as a credible deterrent by the advance of technology. In strategic terms, they were coming to represent the past. He was not heeding von Kármán’s warning to Arnold in 1945 that “the men in charge of the future Air Forces should always remember that problems never have final or universal solutions and only a constant inquisitive attitude toward science and a ceaseless and swift adaptation to new developments can maintain the security of this nation through world air supremacy.” Stalin’s successors after his death on March 5, 1953, initially a committee and then Nikita Khrushchev alone when he overcame his rivals, did not intend to rely on bombers to counter America’s nuclear might. Long-range bombing was not part of the Russian military experience. The aircraft they had deployed during the Second World War, such as Sergei Ilyushin’s famous Il-2 Shturmovik fighter-bomber, were designed to support the Red Army as flying artillery and tank destroyers. They built bombers, but these were mainly medium-range types, again meant to enhance the fighting power of the army. Tupolev’s Tu-4 copies of the B-29 on which Stalin had lavished resources in the immediate postwar period were impractical because of their lack of range. The Soviets would never be able to overcome this obstacle. There was no way, short of going to war, for them to acquire the type of staging bases with which LeMay had encircled their empire and, because of the distances involved, midair refueling was also not an answer. With everything having to take off from the Soviet Union or its satellites, the tankers, to stay aloft, would be using up the fuel they were supposed to pass to the bombers.

  The Russians had difficulties as well with the long-range bombers of their own design. As a would-be intercontinental, the Bison was deficient in range at about 5,600 miles and the turboprop Bear was vulnerable to American jet fighters. Neither approached being an equal of the B-52. The designer of the Bison, Vladimir Miasishchev, suggested to Khrushchev that they might overcome the range deficiency by landing in Mexico after bombing the United States. “What do you think Mexico is—our mother-in-law?” Khrushchev replied. “You think we can go calling anytime we want? The Mexicans would never let us have the plane back.”

  On the other hand, Russia had a long record of experimental rocketry and visionary theories of space travel, beginning with the end-of-the-nineteenth-century writings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a provincial math teacher with dreams and a knowledge of physics. Marshal Tukhachevsky, the star of the prewar Red Army leadership, had an intense interest in rocketry, seeing it as a way to hurl large charges of explosive beyond the range of conventional artillery. He established a flourishing laboratory for military rocketry in Leningrad in the 1920s. One of its inventions, a prototype bazooka, might have proved quite useful against German tanks. But after Stalin had Tukhachevsky purged and executed in 1937 during the Great Purge, the laboratory was suppressed and about 200 of its specialists suffered the marshal’s fate. Nevertheless, a number of the more imaginative scientists and engineers, including Sergei Korolev, who was to become the senior Soviet rocket designer in the postwar era, managed to evade an executioner’s bullet. The Red Army also employed what rocket artillery it had developed to powerful effect during the conflict. The German soldier had trembled at the whooshing salvos of high explosive from the massed batteries of 122mm Katyusha rockets.

  At the close of hostilities, the bombproof V-2 production plant tunneled into a mountain near Nordhausen in north-central Germany and run full-tilt with the lives of thousands of slave laborers turned out to be located within the Soviet occupation zone. So were the V-2 engine test facilities in the Frankenwald Mountains. The U.S. Army got to the Nordhausen plant first, however, and hauled off all the documentation along with as many intact V-2s as it could before the occupation lines were formalized. But there were enough parts and engines left to serve the Russians. The Americans also got the best of the German rocket engineers from the group of 400 rocketeers who, with Wernher von Braun, had fled to them. The Soviets still managed, sometimes willingly and sometimes by force, to assemble their own group of competent German rocket men. The leader was an engineer named Helmut Gröttrup, a left-winger who came to the Russians voluntarily. He had been one of the ranking guidance and control specialists at Peenemünde. Altogether, about 5,000 German engineers and technicians of various skills were rounded up and transported to the Soviet Union for rocket work. The V-2 blueprints and associated documentation were reconstructed, German-made V-2s assembled and fired, and copies then manufactured by the Soviets themselves.

  As the Russians acquired enough expertise of their own, the Germans became superfluous and were sent back home. Steady progress was made in subsequent years devising more advanced ballistic missiles under the direction of Korolev and the rocket engine builder Valentin Glushko. Stalin’s heirs set the course of the Soviet Union firmly at the end of 1953. The Politburo of the Communist Party, the highest governing body, formally decided to have Korolev create an intercontinental ballistic missile that would carry as its warhead the hydrogen bomb the Russians were to acquire two years later in November 1955. Andrei Sakharov, the most talented of the young Soviet physicists, had just completed his preliminary design for the Russian hydrogen weapon in November 1953. While the development of bombers continued, as the appearance of the Bison and Bear demonstrated, the Politburo decision held. The pattern of the future had been drawn. The Soviet Union would rely, not on bombers as LeMay continued to think it would, but on intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver most of its nuclear warheads.

  If the Soviets had fielded a considerable force of ICBMs with nuclear warheads before the United States possessed equivalent weapons or had them well in progress, panic certainly would have ensued at home and among America’s allies in Europe. LeMay’s Strategic Air Command would have been trumped. SAC would have ceased to be, in the minds of much of the American public and among West Europeans, a credible deterrent force. The appearance of the Bison and Bear bombers had already raised worries about the safety of SAC bases beyond the simple one at the beginning of the decade that had prompted Bennie Schriever’s inane amphibious bomber scheme. Soviet ICBMs in quantity would have transformed those worries into a genuine fear that SAC could be eliminated in a surprise attack and the United States left with no adequate means of retaliation.

  LeMay needed six hours to load nuclear weapons into all of his bombers and get them into the air. The American radars of the day would give only fifteen minutes’ warning of an ICBM assault because the radars could not pick up the incoming missile warheads until they had reached their apogee halfway through their flight. Some SAC bombers could be kept on strip alert, as was always being done, and some could be rotated aloft on aerial alert, but this could never be more than a portion of the force. To keep all of SAC permanently on alert twenty-four hours a day wasn’t feasible. The task would have required triple manning of the aircraft and
doubling or tripling the ground crews and support staff. LeMay would have argued, and with logic, that in real circumstances there would be sufficient warning of imminent war with the Russians for him to prepare his bombers. He would have argued in vain, for many would not have believed him.

  (In 1960, three years after LeMay departed to become vice chief of staff of the Air Force, SAC reached a personnel strength of 266,788 officers, men, and civilian specialists and was able to keep a third of its bombers and tankers on fifteen-minute strip alert around the clock. The following year SAC adopted an airborne alert in which some of its bombers were always aloft and on station waiting for a go order, along with a permanent airborne command post, named Looking Glass, under a general officer. The command post planes flew eight-hour shifts day and night in converted KC-135 tankers equipped with communications, radars, and other necessary gear to direct SAC’s bombers. But the strategic equation was changing by 1960 and 1961. SAC’s bombers were no longer so important. Earlier, when the bombers represented all that the country had, not even a third of the force on perpetual fifteen-minute alert might have been enough to silence the skeptics and alarmists like Paul Nitze who were on a perpetual alert of their own to arouse and batten on fear.)