Command and Control

Hoping to resolve the dispute, James Forrestal, who’d become secretary of defense, appointed an Air Force officer, General Hubert R. Harmon, to lead a study of whether a nuclear strike would defeat the Soviet Union. In May 1949 the Harmon Committee concluded that the most recent American war plan, TROJAN, would reduce Soviet industrial production by 30 to 40 percent. It would also kill perhaps 2.7 million civilians and injure an additional 4 million. Those were conservative estimates, not taking into account the fires ignited by more than one hundred atomic bombs. But TROJAN wouldn’t prevent the Red Army from conquering Europe and the Middle East. Nor would it lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. “For the majority of Soviet people,” the committee noted, “atomic bombing would validate Soviet propaganda against foreign powers, stimulate resentment against the United States, unify these people and increase their will to fight.” Nevertheless, Harmon saw no realistic alternative to the current war plan. The atomic blitz was “the only means of rapidly inflicting shock and serious damage” on the Soviet military effort, and “the advantages of its early use would be transcending.”

On August 29, 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic device, RDS-1, at a test range in eastern Kazakhstan. The yield was about 20 kilotons, roughly the same as that of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki — and for good reason. RDS-1 was a copy of the Mark 3 implosion bomb. While American policy makers worried and fretted and debated whether to share classified atomic information with the Soviet Union, a network of Communist spies infiltrated Manhattan Project laboratories and simply took it. Soviet physicists like Yuli Borisovich Khariton were brilliant and inventive, but their task was made easier by the technical knowledge gained through espionage at Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge.

The United States also provided the Soviet Union with the means for delivering an atomic bomb. In 1944, three American B-29 bombers were forced to make emergency landings in Siberia after attacking Japanese forces in Manchuria. The planes were confiscated by the Soviets, and one of them, the General H. H. Arnold Special, was carefully disassembled. Each of its roughly 105,000 parts was measured, photographed, and reverse engineered. Within two years the Soviet Union had its first long-range bomber, the Tupolev-4. The plane was almost identical to the captured B-29; it even had a metal patch where the General Arnold had been repaired.

News of the Soviet bomb arrived at an unfortunate moment. General Groves had assured the American people that the Soviet Union wouldn’t develop an atomic bomb until the late 1960s. The United States had just signed the North Atlantic Treaty, promising to defend Western Europe — and America’s nuclear monopoly was the basis for that promise. China was on the verge of falling to Mao Tse-tung’s Communist army. And now, for the first time since the War of 1812, a devastating attack on the continental United States seemed possible. The rapid demobilization after the Second World War had, for more than a year, left North America without a single military radar to search for enemy planes. As late as 1949, the U.S. Air Defense Command had only twenty-three radars to guard the northeastern United States, and they were largely obsolete units that couldn’t detect Soviet bombers flying at low altitudes. In the event of war, the safety of American cities would depend on the Air Force’s Ground Observer Corps: thousands of civilian volunteers who would search the sky with binoculars.

The news of the Soviet bomb was made all the more ominous by a sense of disarray at the Pentagon. Overwhelmed by stress, lack of sleep, and fears of international communism, Secretary of Defense Forrestal had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and leaped to his death from a sixteenth floor window at Bethesda Naval Hospital. When the new secretary of defense, Louis A. Johnson, canceled plans to build the United States, an enormous aircraft carrier, angry naval officers spread rumors that the Air Force’s new long-range bomber, the B-36, was deeply flawed. What began as an interservice rivalry over military spending soon became a bitter, public dispute about America’s nuclear strategy, with top secret war plans being leaked to newspapers and war heroes questioning one another’s patriotism.