Command and Control

The need for a nuclear weapon to be safe and the need for it to be reliable were often in conflict. A safety mechanism that made a bomb less likely to explode during an accident could also, during wartime, render it more likely to be a dud. The contradiction between these two design goals was succinctly expressed by the words “always/never.” Ideally, a nuclear weapon would always detonate when it was supposed to — and never detonate when it wasn’t supposed to. The Strategic Air Command wanted bombs that were safe and reliable. But most of all, it wanted bombs that worked. A willingness to take personal risks was deeply embedded in SAC’s institutional culture. Bomber crews risked their lives every time they flew a peacetime mission, and the emergency war plan missions for which they trained would be extremely dangerous. The crews would have to elude Soviet fighter planes and antiaircraft missiles en route to their targets, survive the blast effects and radiation after dropping their bombs, and then somehow find a friendly air base that hadn’t been destroyed. They would not be pleased, amid the chaos of thermonuclear warfare, to learn that the bombs they dropped didn’t detonate because of a safety device.

Civilian weapon designers, on the other hand, were bound to have a different perspective — to think about the peacetime risk of an accident and err on the side of never. Secretary of the Air Force Quarles understood the arguments on both sides. He worried constantly about the Soviet threat. And he had pushed the Atomic Energy Commission to find methods of achieving “a higher degree of nuclear safing.” But if compromises had to be made between always and never, he made clear which side would have to bend. “Such safing,” Quarles instructed, “should, of course, cause minimum interference with readiness and reliability.”

The Optimum Mix

A super long-distance intercontinental multistage ballistic rocket was launched a few days ago,” the Soviet Union announced during the last week of August 1957. The news didn’t come as a surprise to Pentagon officials, who’d secretly monitored the test flight with help from a radar station in Iran. But the announcement six weeks later that the Soviets had placed the first manmade satellite into orbit caught the United States off guard — and created a sense of panic among the American people. Sputnik 1 was a metallic sphere, about the size of a beach ball, that could do little more than circle the earth and transmit a radio signal of “beep-beep.” Nevertheless, it gave the Soviet Union a huge propaganda victory. It created the impression that “the first socialist society” had surpassed the United States in missile technology and scientific expertise. The successful launch of Sputnik 2, on November 3, 1957, seemed even more ominous. The new satellite weighed about half a ton; rocket engines with enough thrust to lift that sort of payload could be used to deliver a nuclear warhead. Sputnik 2 also carried the first animal to orbit the earth, a small dog named Laika — evidence that the Soviet Union was planning to put a man in space. Although the Soviets boasted that Laika lived for a week in orbit, wearing a little space suit, housed in a pressurized compartment with an ample supply of food and water, she actually died within a few hours of liftoff.

Democrats in Congress whipped up fears of Soviet missiles and attacked the Eisenhower administration for allowing the United States to fall behind. The Democratic Advisory Council said that President Eisenhower had “weakened the free world” and “starved the national defense.” Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democratic senator from Washington, called Sputnik “a devastating blow to U.S. prestige.” Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Senate majority leader, scheduled hearings to investigate what had gone wrong with America’s defense policies. Johnson’s staff director, George Reedy, urged him “to plunge heavily” into the missile controversy, suggesting that it could “blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic Party, and elect you President.” Another Democratic senator, John F. Kennedy, later accused Eisenhower of putting “fiscal security ahead of national security” and made the existence of a “missile gap” one of the central issues in his presidential campaign.

The Democratic effort to create anxiety about a missile gap was facilitated by Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In a series of public comments over the next few years, Khrushchev belittled the American military and bragged about his nation’s technological achievements: