Command and Control

Once the scheme is uncovered, the general’s air base is assaulted by the U.S. Army. The president of the United States tries without success to recall SAC’s bombers, and the Soviets question whether the impending attack really was a mistake. As an act of good faith, SAC discloses the flight paths of its B-52s so that they can be shot down. After negotiations between the leaders of the two nations and revelations about “the ultimate deterrent”—doomsday weapons capable of eliminating life on earth, to be triggered if the Soviets are facing defeat — all but one of the SAC bombers are shot down or recalled. And so a deal is struck: if the plane destroys a Soviet city, the president will select an American city for the Soviets to destroy in retaliation. The president chooses Atlantic City, New Jersey. The lone B-52 drops its hydrogen bomb over the Soviet Union — but the weapon misfires and misses its target. Although Atlantic City is saved and doomsday averted, Red Alert marked an important cultural shift. The Strategic Air Command would increasingly be portrayed as a refuge for lunatics and warmongers, not as the kind of place where you’d find Jimmy Stewart.

General Power was unfazed by protest marches in Great Britain, apocalyptic fears, criticism in the press, freak accidents, strong opposition at the AEC, President Eisenhower’s reluctance, and even doubts about the idea expressed by LeMay. Power wanted an airborne alert. The decision to authorize one would be made by Eisenhower. The phrase “fail safe” had been removed from Air Force descriptions of the plan. The word “fail” had the wrong connotations, and the new term didn’t sound so negative: “positive control.” With strong backing from members of Congress, SAC proposed a test of the airborne alert. B-52s would take off from bases throughout America, carrying sealed-pit weapons. At a White House briefing in July 1958, Eisenhower was told that “the probability of any nuclear detonation during a crash is essentially zero.” The following month, he gave tentative approval for the test. But the new chairman of the AEC, John A. McCone, wanted to limit its scale. McCone thought that the bombers should be permitted to use only Loring Air Force Base in Maine — so that an accident or the jettison of a weapon would be likely to occur over the Atlantic Ocean, not the United States. During the first week of October, President Eisenhower authorized SAC to take off and land at Loring, with fully assembled hydrogen bombs. The flights secretly began, and SAC’s airborne alert was no longer a bluff.

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Fred Iklé completed his rand report, “On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation,” two weeks after Eisenhower’s decision. Iklé’s top secret clearance had gained him access to the latest safety studies by Sandia, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, and the Air Force Special Weapons Center. He’d read accident reports, met with bomb designers at Sandia, immersed himself in the technical literature on nuclear weapons. He’d discussed the logistical details of SAC’s airborne alert, not only with the officers who would command them but also with the RAND analysts who’d come up with the idea in 1956. Iklé’s report was the first thorough, wide-ranging, independent analysis of nuclear weapon safety in the United States — and it did not confirm the optimistic assurances that President Eisenhower had just been given.

“We cannot derive much confidence from the fact that no unauthorized detonation has occurred to date,” Iklé warned: “the past safety record means nothing for the future.” The design of nuclear weapons had a learning curve, and he feared that some knowledge might come at a high price. Technical flaws and malfunctions could be “eliminated readily once they are discovered… but it takes a great deal of ingenuity and intuition to prevent them beforehand.” The risk wasn’t negligible, as the Department of Defense and the Air Force claimed. The risk was impossible to determine, and accidents were likely to become more frequent in the future. During Air Force training exercises in 1957, an atomic bomb or a hydrogen bomb had been inadvertently jettisoned once every 320 flights. And B-52 bombers seemed to crash at a rate of about once every twenty thousand flying hours. According to Iklé’s calculations, that meant SAC’s airborne alert would lead to roughly twelve crashes with nuclear weapons and seven bomb jettisons every year. “The paramount task,” he argued, “is to learn enough from minor incidents to prevent a catastrophic disaster.”