Command and Control

The Air Force and the Strategic Air Command benefited the most from Eisenhower’s “new look.” SAC became America’s preeminent military organization, its mission considered essential to national security, its commander reporting directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While the other armed services faced cutbacks in spending and manpower, SAC’s budget grew. Within a few years the number of personnel at SAC increased by almost one third, and the number of aircraft nearly doubled. SAC’s demand for nuclear weapons soared as well, driven by the new focus on counterforce targets. The Soviet Union had far more airfields than major cities — and destroying them would require far more bombs. The Navy’s shipbuilding budget stagnated, but the new look didn’t inspire another revolt of the admirals. The Navy no longer seemed obsolete. It had gained approval for new aircraft carriers, every one of them equipped to carry nuclear weapons. The Navy also sought high-tech replacements for many conventional weapons: atomic depth charges, atomic torpedoes, atomic antiship missiles.

Although Eisenhower had served in the Army for nearly forty years, the Army suffered the worst budget cuts, quickly losing more than one fifth of its funding and about one quarter of its troops. General Matthew B. Ridgway, the Army chief of staff, became an outspoken critic of massive retaliation. Ridgway had demonstrated great leadership and integrity while commanding ground forces during the Second World War and in Korea. He thought that the United States still needed a strong Army to fight conventional wars, that an overreliance on nuclear weapons was dangerous and immoral, that Eisenhower’s policy would needlessly threaten civilians, and that “national fiscal bankruptcy would be far preferable to national spiritual bankruptcy.” Ridgway’s unyielding criticism of the new look led to his early retirement. The Army, however, found ways to adapt. It lobbied hard for atomic artillery shells, atomic antiaircraft missiles, atomic land mines. During secret testimony before a congressional committee, one of Ridgway’s closest aides, General James M. Gavin, later spelled out precisely what the Army required: 151,000 nuclear weapons. According to Gavin, the Army needed 106,000 for use on the battlefield and an additional 25,000 for air defense. The remaining 20,000 could be shared with America’s allies.

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At Los Alamos and Sandia, a crash program had been launched to make hydrogen bombs, long before it was clear that the Teller-Ulam design would even work. A six-day week became routine, and the labs were often busy on Sundays, as well. The goal was to produce a handful of H-bombs that the Air Force could use if Western Europe were suddenly invaded. Unlike the fission bombs being manufactured at factories across the United States, these “emergency capability” weapons would be assembled by hand at Sandia and then stored nearby at Site Able. Their components weren’t required to undergo the same field testing as those used in the stockpile’s other bombs. While Teller and Ulam wrestled with the theoretical issues of how to sustain thermonuclear fusion, the engineers at Sandia faced a more practical question: How do you deliver a hydrogen bomb without destroying the aircraft that carried it to the target?

The latest calculations suggested that an H-bomb would weigh as much as forty thousand pounds, and the only American bomber large enough to transport one to the Soviet Union, the B-36, was too slow to escape the blast. The Air Force investigated the possibility of turning the new, medium-range B-47 jet bomber into a pilotless drone. The B-47 would be fitted with a hydrogen bomb and carried to the Soviet Union by a B-36 mothership. Code-named Project Brass Ring, the plan was hampered by the cost and complexity of devising a guidance system for the drone.

Harold Agnew, a young physicist at Los Alamos, came up with a simpler idea. Agnew was an independent, iconoclastic thinker from Colorado who’d been present at some of the key moments in the nuclear age. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he’d helped Enrico Fermi create the first manmade nuclear chain reaction in 1942. Agnew subsequently worked on the Manhattan Project, flew as a scientific observer over Hiroshima when Little Boy was dropped, snuck his own movie camera onto the plane, and shot the only footage of the mushroom cloud. He’d helped to construct Mike and watched it detonate from a ship thirty miles away, amazed to see the island disappear. The heat from the blast kept growing stronger and stronger, as though it might never end. While thinking about how to deliver an H-bomb safely, Agnew remembered seeing footage of Nazi tanks being dropped from airplanes by parachute. He contacted a friend at the Air Force and said, “We’ve got to find out how they did that.”