Command and Control

As the debate over nuclear strategy grew more heated within the Eisenhower administration and in the press, General Curtis LeMay showed absolutely no interest in limited war, graduated deterrence, finite deterrence — or anything short of total victory. The United States should never enter a war, LeMay felt, unless it intended to win. And a counterforce policy that targeted the Soviet Union’s nuclear assets was far more likely to prevent a war than a strategy that threatened its cities. Unlike “the public mind” that feared a nuclear holocaust, he argued, “the professional military mind” in both nations worried more about preserving the ability to fight, about losing airfields, missile bases, command centers. SAC claimed that a counterforce strategy was also “the most humane method of waging war… since there was no necessity to bomb cities.” But that argument was somewhat disingenuous. In order to hit military targets, LeMay acknowledged, “weapons must be delivered with either very high accuracy or very high yield, or both.” Because the accuracy of a bomb was less predictable than its yield, he favored the use of powerful weapons. They could miss a target and still destroy it, or destroy multiple targets at once. They would also, unavoidably, kill millions of civilians. LeMay wanted SAC to deploy a hydrogen bomb with a yield of 60 megatons, a bomb more than four thousand times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima.

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By the late 1950s, the absence of a clear targeting policy and the size of America’s stockpile had created serious command-and-control problems. The Army, the Navy, and the Air Force all planned to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons but had done little to coordinate their efforts. Until 1957 the Strategic Air Command refused to share its target list with the other armed services. When the services finally met to compare war plans, hundreds of “time over target” conflicts were discovered — cases in which, for example, the Air Force and the Navy unwittingly planned to bomb the same target at the same time. These conflicts promised to cause unnecessary “overkill” and threaten the lives of American aircrews. The Joint Chiefs of Staff soon recognized that the chaos of war would be bad enough, without competing nuclear war plans to make it worse. They decided that the United States had to develop “atomic coordination machinery”—an administrative system to control what targets would be attacked, who would attack them, which weapons would be used, and how those attacks would be timed. The decision prompted the Army, Navy, and Air Force to battle even more fiercely over who would control that system.

The Air Force wanted a single atomic war plan, run by a centralized command. SAC would head that command — and take over the Navy’s Polaris submarines. The Navy was outraged by that idea and joined the other services in offering a counterproposal: the Navy, the Air Force, and NATO should retain separate war plans but coordinate them more efficiently. The issues at stake were fundamental, and basic questions needed to be addressed — should the command structure be centralized or decentralized, should the attack be all out or incremental, should the strategy be counterforce or city busting? The president of the United States, once again, had to decide the best way not only to fight the Soviet Union but also to settle a dispute over nuclear weapons at the Pentagon.

During a meeting at the White House in 1956, President Eisenhower had listened patiently to General Taylor’s arguments on behalf of a flexible response. Eisenhower wasn’t persuaded that a war could be won without hydrogen bombs. “It was fatuous to think that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would be locked into a life and death struggle,” he told Taylor, “without using such weapons.” Eisenhower thought both sides would use them at once. Four years later, his views remained largely unchanged. If NATO forces were attacked, he said during another White House discussion of limited war, “an all-out strike on the Soviet Union” would be the only “practical” choice. Pausing to negotiate a diplomatic settlement seemed unrealistic; that sort of thing happened only in novels like Red Alert. Confronted with the choice between destroying Soviet military targets or cities, Eisenhower decided that the United States should destroy both. The new targeting philosophy combined elements of Air Force and Navy doctrine. It was called the “optimum mix.”