Command and Control

Truman’s decision to develop a hydrogen bomb had great symbolic importance. It sent a message to the Soviet leadership — and to the American people. In a cold war without bloodshed or battlefields, the perception of strength mattered as much as the reality. A classified Pentagon report later stressed the central role that “psychological considerations” played in nuclear deterrence. “Weapons systems in themselves tell only part of the necessary story,” the report argued. The success of America’s defense plans relied on an effective “information program” aimed at the public:

What deters is not the capabilities and intentions we have, but the capabilities and intentions the enemy thinks we have. The central objective of a deterrent weapons system is, thus, psychological. The mission is persuasion.

The usefulness of the Super wasn’t the issue; the willingness to build it was. And that sort of logic would guide the nuclear arms race for the next forty years.

The debate over the hydrogen bomb strengthened the influence of the military in nuclear weapons policy, diminished the stature of the Atomic Energy Commission, and created a lasting bitterness among many of the scientists and physicists who’d served in the Manhattan Project. But all the passionate arguments about genocide and morality and the fate of mankind proved irrelevant. The Soviet Union had secretly been working on a hydrogen bomb since at least 1948. According to the physicist Andrei Sakharov, considered the father of the Soviet H-bomb, Joseph Stalin was determined to have such a weapon — regardless of what the United States did. “Any U.S. move toward abandoning or suspending work on a thermonuclear weapon would have been perceived either as a cunning, deceitful maneuver or as evidence of stupidity or weakness,” Sakharov wrote in his memoirs. “In any case, the Soviet reaction would have been the same: to avoid a possible trap and to exploit the adversary’s folly.”

* * *

Two weeks after North Korean troops crossed the border and invaded South Korea, President Truman approved the transfer of eighty-nine atomic bombs to American air bases in Great Britain. The Joint Chiefs of Staff feared that the outbreak of war in Korea might be a prelude to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The Atomic Energy Commission readily agreed to hand over the bombs, minus one crucial component: the nuclear cores. They remained at storage facilities in the United States, ready to be airlifted overseas if war seemed imminent. The Department of Defense was still pushing hard for custody of America’s nuclear arsenal. General Kenneth D. Nichols, head of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, asserted that the military should not only control the atomic bombs but also design and manufacture them. Frustrated that so many Los Alamos scientists had opposed the Super, Edward Teller sought the creation of a new weapons laboratory, backed by the Air Force, in Boulder, Colorado.

The AEC fought against those proposals, while recognizing the need for military readiness. In August 1950, Truman approved the transfer of fifteen atomic bombs without cores to the Coral Sea, an aircraft carrier heading to the Mediterranean. The Air Force didn’t like the precedent — and insisted that, in the future, all nuclear weapons stored on carriers should be under the formal control of the Strategic Air Command, not the Navy. The following year, as U.N. troops battled the Chinese army in Korea, the Air Force finally gained custody of atomic bombs and their nuclear cores. Allowing the military to have possession of them seemed, at the time, to be a momentous step. General Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force chief of staff, assumed personal responsibility for the nine weapons. They were shipped to an air base in Guam, ready for use, if necessary, against the Chinese.

By the end of 1950, the United States had about three hundred atomic bombs, and more than one third of them were stored, without nuclear cores, on aircraft carriers or at air bases overseas. The rest were kept at the AEC’s American storage sites, ostensibly under civilian control. And yet that custody, required by the Atomic Energy Act, had in many respects become a legal fiction. For example, at Site Baker, the storage facility in Killeen, Texas, the AEC had eleven employees — and the military had five hundred, including all two hundred security personnel. The storage sites were well defended against saboteurs and intruders, but not against every kind of unauthorized use. General LeMay later admitted that special arrangements had been made at Site Able, the facility in the Manzano Mountains near Sandia: