Command and Control

Behind the public facade of invincibility, questions were secretly being raised at the Pentagon about whether SAC could survive a Soviet attack. LeMay had spent years building air bases overseas — in Greenland, Great Britain, Spain, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Japan — where his planes would begin and end their bombing missions against the Soviet Union. But a study by the RAND analyst Albert Wohlstetter suggested that a surprise attack on those bases could knock SAC out of the war with a single blow, leaving the United States defenseless. LeMay felt confident that sort of thing would never happen, that his reconnaissance planes, flying daily missions along the borders of the Soviet Union, would detect any unusual activity. Nevertheless, he accelerated SAC’s plans to base most of its aircraft in the United States and to refuel them en route to Soviet targets. And LeMay continued to demand perfection from his officers. “Training in SAC was harder than war,” one of them recalled. “It might have been a relief to go to war.”

The town of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, became one of SAC’s favorite targets, and it was secretly radar bombed hundreds of times, thanks to the snow-covered terrain resembling that of the Soviet Union. By 1955, the SAC battle plan called for 180 bombers, most of them departing from the United States, to strike the Soviet Union within twelve hours of receiving an emergency war order from the president. But constant training and the radar bombing of Wisconsin could not guarantee how aircrews would perform in battle with real weapons. During tests at the Bikini atoll in May 1956, the Air Force got its first opportunity to drop a hydrogen bomb from a plane. The 3.8-megaton weapon was carried by one of SAC’s new, long-range B-52 bombers, with the island of Namu as its target. The B-52 safely escaped the blast — but the bombardier had aimed at the wrong island, and the H-bomb missed Namu by four miles.

Withdrawing most of SAC’s planes from overseas bases did not, however, eliminate the threat of a surprise attack. The continental United States — code-named the “zone of the interior” (ZI) — was also considered highly vulnerable to Soviet bombers. During Operation Tailwind, 94 SAC bombers tested the air defense system of the ZI by approaching from Canada, flying at night, and using electronic countermeasures to simulate a Soviet raid. Only 7 of the planes were spotted by radar and “shot down.” The failure to intercept the other 87 planes raised the possibility of a devastating attack on the United States. Now that the Soviets had hydrogen bombs and jet bombers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended a large investment in America’s air defense and early-warning system. General LeMay strongly disagreed with that proposal, arguing that in the nuclear age it made little sense to waste money “playing defense.” If the Soviets launched an attack with 200 bombers and American forces somehow managed to shoot down 90 percent of those planes, the United States would still be hit by at least 20 H-bombs, if not more.

Instead of air defense, LeMay wanted every available dollar to be spent on more bombs and more bombers for the Strategic Air Command — so that Soviet planes could be destroyed before they ever left the ground. His stance gained support in Congress after the Soviet Union demonstrated its new, long-range jet bomber, the Bison, at Moscow’s “Aviation Day” in 1955. Ten Bisons flew past the reviewing stand, turned around, flew past it again in a new formation — and tricked American observers into thinking that the Soviet Air Force had more than 100 of the planes. The CIA predicted that within a few years the Soviets would be able to attack the United States with 700 bombers. Democrats in the Senate, led by presidential hopeful Stuart Symington, claimed that the Soviets would soon have more long-range bombers than the United States, raised fears of a “bomber gap,” and accused the Eisenhower administration of being weak on defense. “It is clear that the United States and its allies,” Symington warned, “may have lost control of the air.” Defying Eisenhower, Congress voted to appropriate an extra $900 million for new B-52s. The Soviet Union’s bluff had an unintentional effect: it widened the bomber gap, much to the benefit of the United States. By the end of the decade, the Soviet Union had about 150 long-range bombers — and the Strategic Air Command had almost 2,000.

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