Command and Control

On January 1, 1960, General Lauris Norstad, the supreme allied commander in Europe, placed all of NATO’s nuclear-capable units on a fifteen-minute alert, without consulting Congress. Every NATO air squadron was ordered to keep at least two fighter planes loaded with fuel and a nuclear weapon, parked near a runway. And thermonuclear warheads were mated to the intermediate-range Jupiter missiles in Italy and the Thor missiles in Great Britain. The new alert policy had the full support of President Eisenhower, who thought that NATO should be able to respond promptly to a Soviet attack. Eisenhower had faith in the discipline of NATO forces. And he had, most likely, a private understanding with Norstad similar to the one made with LeMay — granting the permission to use nuclear weapons, if Washington, D.C., had been destroyed or couldn’t be reached during a wartime emergency. The supreme commander of NATO reported directly to the president, not to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Norstad was fiercely protective of his authority. He disliked General Thomas Power, the head of the Strategic Air Command, and wanted to preserve NATO’s ability to destroy the Soviet Union without any help from SAC. The thermonuclear warheads atop NATO’s Jupiter missiles were aimed at Soviet cities. With those missiles, and the hundreds of other nuclear weapons under NATO command, Norstad could conceivably fight his own war against the Soviets, on his own terms.

Members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy visited fifteen NATO bases in December 1960, eager to see how America’s nuclear weapons were being deployed. The group was accompanied by Harold Agnew, the Los Alamos physicist who’d come up with the idea of attaching parachutes to hydrogen bombs and later helped to develop one-point safety standards. Agnew was an expert on how to design bombs — and how to handle them properly. At a NATO base in Germany, Agnew looked out at the runway and, in his own words, “nearly wet my pants.” The F-84F fighter planes on alert, each carrying a fully assembled Mark 7 bomb, were being guarded by a single American soldier. Agnew walked over and asked the young enlisted man, who carried an old-fashioned, bolt-action rifle, what he’d do if somebody jumped into one of the planes and tried to take off. Would he shoot at the pilot — or the bomb? The soldier had never been told what to do. The wings of the fighters were decorated with the Iron Cross, a symbol that powerfully evoked two world wars. Agnew realized there was little to prevent a German pilot from taking a plane, flying it to the Soviet Union, and dropping an atomic bomb.

The custody arrangements at the Jupiter missile sites in Italy were even more alarming. Each site had three missiles topped with a 1.4-megaton warhead — a weapon capable of igniting firestorms and flattening every brick structure within thirty square miles. All the security was provided by Italian troops. The launch authentication officer was the only American at the site. Two keys were required to launch the missiles; one was held by the American, the other by an Italian officer. The keys were often worn on a string around the neck, like a dog tag.

Congressman Chet Holifield, the chairman of the joint committee, was amazed to find three ballistic missiles, carrying thermonuclear weapons, in the custody of a single American officer with a handgun. “All [the Italians] have to do is hit him on the head with a blackjack, and they have got his key,” Holifield said, during a closed-door committee hearing after the trip. The Jupiters were located near a forest, without any protective covering, and brightly illuminated at night. They would be sitting ducks for a sniper. “There were three Jupiters setting there in the open — all pointed toward the sky,” Holifield told the committee. “Over $300 million has been spent to set up that little show and it can be knocked out with 3 rifle bullets.”

Foreign personnel weren’t supposed to enter the nuclear weapon igloos at NATO bases. But little had been done to stop them. A lone American soldier manned the entrance to the igloos, serving as a custodian of the weapons, not as an armed guard. Once again, security was provided by troops from the host nation, who also moved weapons in and out of the storage facilities. Senator Albert A. Gore, Sr., could hardly believe the arrangement: “Non-Americans with non-American vehicles are transporting nuclear weapons from place to place in foreign countries.” It was one thing to entrust these weapons to the Strategic Air Command, with its strict operating procedures and rigorous devotion to checklists. But the competence of NATO troops varied considerably. And their level of professionalism wasn’t the most important consideration, when it came to guarding America’s nuclear weapons. “The prime loyalty of the guards, of course, is to their own nation, and not to the U.S.,” the joint committee said.