Command and Control

In May 1951 a pair of nuclear tests in the South Pacific demonstrated that a nuclear explosion could initiate thermonuclear fusion. A device nicknamed “George,” containing liquefied tritium and deuterium, produced the largest nuclear yield ever achieved: 225 kilotons, more than ten times that of the Nagasaki bomb. Although fusion was responsible for just a small part of that yield, radiation implosion did occur. The detonation of “Item” a few days later had a much lower yield, but enormous significance. It confirmed Teller’s belief that fission bombs could be “boosted”—that their explosive force could be greatly magnified by putting a small amount of tritium and deuterium gas into their cores, right before the moment of detonation. When a boosted core imploded, the hydrogen isotopes fused and then flooded it with neutrons, making the subsequent fission explosion anywhere from ten to a hundred times more powerful. Boosted weapons promised to be smaller and more efficient than those already in the stockpile, producing larger yields with much less fissile material.

A full-scale test of the Teller-Ulam design took place on November 1, 1952. One of the world’s first electronic, digital computers had been assembled at Los Alamos to perform many of the necessary calculations. The machine was called MANIAC (Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer), and the device that it helped to create, “Mike,” looked more like a large cylindrical whiskey still than a weapon of mass destruction. Mike was about twenty feet tall and weighed more than 120,000 pounds. The device was housed in a corrugated aluminum building on the island of Elugelab. When Mike detonated, the island disappeared. It became dust and ash, pulled upward to form a mushroom cloud that rose about twenty-seven miles into the sky. The fireball created by the explosion was three and a half miles wide. All that remained of little Elugelab was a circular crater filled with seawater, more than a mile in diameter and fifteen stories deep. The yield of the device was 10.4 megatons, roughly five hundred times more powerful than the Nagasaki bomb.

The Teller-Ulam design worked, and the United States now seemed capable of building hydrogen bombs. “The war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past,” President Truman said, a couple of months later, during his farewell address. Then he added, somewhat hopefully, “Such a war is not a possible policy for rational men.”

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The thought of using nuclear weapons may have seemed irrational to Truman, but a credible threat to use them lay at the heart of deterrence. And planning for their use had become a full-time occupation for many of America’s best minds. Fundamental questions of nuclear strategy still hadn’t been settled. Project Vista, a top secret study conducted by the California Institute of Technology, revived the military debate about how to defend Western Europe from a Soviet invasion. In 1950 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had agreed to create an allied army with 54 divisions — enough to stop the Red Army, which was thought to have 175 divisions. The European members of NATO, however, failed to supply the necessary troops, and by 1952 the alliance seemed incapable of fielding anywhere near the requisite number. The small U.S. Army contingent in Western Europe served on the front line as a “trip wire,” a “plate glass wall.” American troops would be among the first to encounter a Soviet attack, and they’d be quickly overrun, forcing the United States to enter the war. The Strategic Air Command would respond by destroying most of the Soviet Union. But the Red Army would still conquer most of Europe, and civilian casualties would be extraordinarily high.

The prominent academics and military officers who led Project Vista, including Robert Oppenheimer, concluded that SAC’s atomic blitz was the wrong response to a Soviet invasion. Bombing the cities of the Soviet Union might provoke a nuclear retaliation against the cities of Western Europe and the United States. Instead of relying on strategic bombing, the members of Project Vista urged NATO to replace manpower with technology, use low-yield, tactical atomic weapons against the advancing Soviet troops, and bring the “battle back to the battlefield.” Such a policy might limit the scale of any nuclear war and save lives, “preventing attacks on friendly cities.” The field officers of the U.S. Army and the fighter pilots of the U.S. Air Force’s Tactical Air Command (TAC) wholeheartedly agreed with those conclusions, on humanitarian grounds. They also stood to benefit from any policy that reduced the influence of the Strategic Air Command.