The dramatic finale of World War II at Hiroshima and Nagasaki rescued the doctrine of strategic bombardment. Without the atom bomb the theorists of airpower would have been pushed on to the defensive, hard put to justify the pounding of cities for limited rewards. The bomber had not always ‘got through’, and when it had done the results had been less than decisive. Air raids took their toll, but only over time. The bomber was not a means of breaking a deadlock, but yet another instrument of attrition, another method by which industrial societies could beat each other down. With atom bombs airpower could be said to have come of age. These weapons were absolutely devastating and, if the experience of the Japanese surrender was anything to go by, promised quick results.
Without the bomb the critics of airpower—from civilians who were repelled by the reliance on mass destruction, to sailors and soldiers who sensed an unwarranted downgrading of their own importance—would have had many points to make. The immediate impact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, was to silence such criticism. ‘Strategic bombing had won its case, and the ignored lessons of World War II could remain ignored by the public, Congress and all others except the inquiring scholar or the parochial Army or Navy man’.1 The US Strategic Bombing Survey was a thorough investigation, directed by civilians, into the effects of the bombing campaigns on the economies and civilian morale of Germany and Japan. When, in 1946, its first reports were released, one newspaper columnist commented: ‘What might have become a good old fashioned row now becomes an academic discussion thanks to the atomic bomb. Come the next war there will be no fleets of bombers pouring down death on civilian populations. Just one little atom bomb will do the work of a thousand blockbusters’.2 The detailed analyses contained in the Survey were seen to refer to an era that had just passed. The challenge they represented to Air Force articles of faith failed to make an impact.
The influence of atomic energy on air power can be stated very simply. It has made air power all important … [The] only known effective means of delivering atomic bombs in their present state of development is the very heavy bomber …
This country … must recognize that real security … in the visible future will rest on our ability to take immediate offensive action with overwhelming force. It must be apparent to a potential aggressor that an attack on the United States would be followed by an immensely devastating air attack on him.
The atom bomb was a weapon that would be delivered by air and against large targets, which basically meant cities. As long as the supplies of the bomb were limited there would be no point in wasting them against small point targets of limited value on a battlefield or at sea. It was a palpably blunt instrument and would be used in a blunt manner. It made airpower more efficient by decreasing the ‘cost of destruction’. General Arnold calculated that substituting atomic for conventional explosives would make a given amount of destruction ‘at least six times more economical’. Fewer aircraft would be needed; the dropping of a single atom bomb by a B-29 on Hiroshima caused as ‘much damage as 300 planes would have done’. Arnold admitted that his calculations were ‘rough’. The USSBS estimate for the number of B-29s needed to commit an Hiroshima was 210, and 120 for Nagasaki. Their conclusion was that: ‘The atomic bomb in its present state of development raises the destructive power of a single bomber by a factor of between 50 and 250 times, depending upon the nature and size of the target.’ This conclusion was not altogether popular with those airmen who looked forward to ever-expanding fleets of long-range bombers.3 Not only would fewer planes be required but also effective range would be increased, as an atom bomb would represent a lighter load than a full complement of conventional explosives. The violence would be more concentrated in terms of both space and time.
It took time for the US government to organise itself for the new era. After a debate on whether the military or civilians should be the custodians of the new weapons, a new civilian-led Atomic Energy Commission was established with responsibility for all elements of weapons design and production. The National Security Act of September 1947 restructured the US system, creating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US Air force, separated out from the Army, and put all three services under the Department of Defense. The National Security Council now became the focal point for all the big inter-departmental debates about the big issues of the cold war and the nuclear age. Under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the actual plans for future war were developed. Over time it was here that work began on how the slowly accumulating stock of atomic weapons could be effectively employed in an actual conflict. At first the planning was focussed on USAF’s Strategic Air Command. As new types of weapons were developed all three services became involved. Over time as well think tanks such as the RAND Corporation, established in 1948 with close links to the Air Force, began to assert the value of independent and often quite technical analyses of nuclear strategy.
But in the first few years of the nuclear age there was very little expertise around that could explain the new state of affairs and how it might develop. Most of the literature written by those outside official circles was of the more speculative variety. Some were little more than collections of sensational predictions. At first the only people who could talk with any authority about the bomb were the scientists who had been directly involved in the Manhattan Project, and they were often voluble. Many were distressed that they had been responsible for such a terrible weapon and began to lobby at once for international controls on nuclear energy. They became articulate contributors to public debate and developed their ideas in journals such as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, established in 1945 to educate the public about the risks of nuclear war and how it might be prevented. Some of the scientists were interested in further weapons development but few were concerned about developing new strategies to govern any use of the weapons. They did not become a serious influence again on the debates on future nuclear developments until the controversy surrounding the development of the Hydrogen Bomb that began in late 1949. Two leading scientists who had contributed to the war effort—Vannevar Bush and Patrick Blackett—did write early books trying to explain the issues.4
The most serious group of scholars and commentators then working on the big questions of national strategy was a group around Edward Mead Earle at Princeton University’s Institute of Advanced Studies. Earle is best known for editing the landmark Makers of Modern Strategy in 1943.5 In 1950 (the year that he died), Earle’s seminar was described as a highlight of the Institute for Advanced Studies, part of ‘one of the most dramatic assemblages of intellectual power to be found anywhere in the world today’.6 One of the participants in Earle’s seminar was Bernard Brodie. Brodie had undertaken his PhD at Chicago under Jacob Viner, an economist who wrote one of the first substantial think pieces on the meaning of the nuclear age.7 Supported by Earle, Brodie had written on naval strategy,8 before joining the Navy Department during the war. On seeing the New York Times headlines following Truman’s announcement of the attack on Hiroshima, Brodie told his wife, “Everything that I have written is now obsolete.”9 That year he became a member of Yale’s Institute of International Studies where he helped produce some of the landmark early work on nuclear strategy.
His work at this time, and that of his colleagues, which now in retrospect stands out, was peripheral to the main concerns of the 1940s. The question for immediate consideration was whether atomic bombs meant that strategic bombardment was now the most profitable strategy for the West to adopt. The most challenging criticism to the prevailing view came from Blackett and Bush, though both their books were quickly overtaken by events, supported by some self-interested arguments from the US Navy.
When one considers that such a super-super bomb might be delivered on an enemy target by the principle of a robot bomb or guided missile, or even without this possibility from a bomber coming at night or in overcast guided by modern radar devices, we see how vulnerable would be centers of population in a future war … every center of population in the world in the future is at mercy of the enemy that strikes first.10
[M]iles above the surface of the earth, noiseless battles will be fought between blast and counterblast. Now and again an invader will get through, and up will go London, Paris, or New York in a 40,000 foot high mushroom of smoke and dust; and as nobody will know what is happening above or beyond or be certain who is fighting whom-let alone what for the war will be a kind of bellicose perpetual motion until the last laboratory blows up.12
[T]he era of push-button warfare, in which inter-continental rockets with atomic warheads wipe out tens of millions over-night has not yet arrived. It is extremely unfortunate that the mistaken idea has been planted in so many minds that that era is now present.
It suggested that a weapon of the ‘transpolar or transoceanic’ ranges was some twenty-five years away.13 This estimate was shared by many others, including the Navy: ‘[I]t seems a wholly reasonable and safe assumption that rockets with atomic warheads capable of thousands of miles of range are not to be expected for at least another 25 years’.14
[A]s long as atomic bombs are scarce and highly expensive in terms of destruction accomplished per dollar disbursed, one does not trust them to a highly complex carrier of inherently low precision, for lack of precision decidedly increases such costs.16
Up until this point the air force had seen itself as the most futuristic force. Airmen viewed the possibility of the heavy bomber being replaced with pilotless machines with misgivings, for this threatened them with redundancy. The Air Force was lukewarm to the prospect of intercontinental missiles and therefore pursued their development with limited enthusiasm.17
Because of the loss of accuracy with range, the expectation grew that no rocket with a range of over 1000 miles would be feasible. Some recognized that one might possibly compensate for this lack of range by placing rockets on ships or submarines. The Navy noted that such a deployment would provide for retaliatory attacks with the ‘flexibility and surprise available only to mobile instruments’. Bush considered submarines as effective carriers because the ‘scales have recently tipped in favour of attack as far as undersea warfare is concerned’; Patrick Blackett acknowledged the possibility but suggested this ‘could hardly be considered an effective method of waging war’.18
The beginning of a new war will surely involve not only the launching of the missiles, but the explosion of the mines that have secretly been set near key targets to provide the pinpoint accuracy that long-range weapons may possibly lack. Government buildings will fall, the great communications facilities will be destroyed, ports of rail and air and sea traffic will be disabled, the crucial industrial installations will be attacked.20
Few were ready to dismiss the problem completely, but gradually it came to be accepted that to introduce the component parts of a bomb and then assemble them without detection would not be as simple as had been presumed. An aggressor would worry that plans might be exposed by untimely detection of just one bomb, or, more generally, there were risks in depending on planted bombs whose reliability could not readily be checked. In 1945 Brodie wrote that atom bombs would place ‘an extraordinarily high premium’ on ‘national competence in sabotage on the one hand and in counter-sabotage work on the other’. A war of the future, he suggested, ‘might take the form of a revelation by one nation to another that the latter’s major cities had atomic bombs planted in them and that only immediate and absolute submission to dictates would prevent them from going off’.21 A year later Bernard Brodie was writing: ‘The new potentialities which the atomic bomb gives to sabotage must not be overrated’.22
The consensus that grew during the 1940s, encouraged by the Air Force’s expert opinion, was that for the foreseeable future, exotic methods would be unnecessary for carrying atomic bombs to their targets. The ‘only vehicle for the delivery of an atomic bomb with adequate accuracy over the next ten years will be the conventionally piloted aircraft’.23 Push-button warfare was a matter for long-term speculation, not immediate planning.
There were only two weapons in the stockpile at the end of 1945, nine in July 1946, thirteen in July 1947, and fifty in July 1948. None of these weapons was assembled. They were all Mark 3 “Fat Man” implosion bombs, which weighed 10,000 pounds, were relatively inefficient in their use of fissionable material, and took 39 men over two days to assemble. Because the bombs were so large and heavy, they could only be loaded on their bombers by installing a special hoist in a twelve foot by fourteen foot by eight foot deep pit, trundling the bomb into the pit, rolling the aircraft over it, and then hoisting the weapon into the specially modified bomb bay. Through 1948, there were only about 30 B-29s in the Strategic Air Command modified to drop atomic bombs, all in the 509th Bomb Group based in Roswell, New Mexico.
Unsurprisingly the size of the stockpile was a closely guarded secret, so that even senior members of the government had no idea of the true number. This secrecy was one of the problems in military planning, as few knew for sure how many would actually be available in the event of war.24 It was accepted by those ‘not in the know’ to be small, though how small was not realized. This was true even of the generally well-informed Brodie. In 1946 he guessed a figure of twenty bombs while recognizing that it might be smaller. The next year he chastised the US Navy for assuming that the weapon would be scarce for some time to come. While acknowledging that ‘[t]oday the atomic bomb is apparently a commodity of great scarcity and very high unit cost’ he speculated that this situation ‘may evaporate a good deal faster than the Navy expects’.25 Generally the expectation was of steady rather than spectacular growth in the stockpile so that plans should still assume it to be a scarce resource.
Nor, as the decade progressed, was the danger of a Soviet stockpile considered pressing. In 1945 informed scientific opinion put the date of the first Soviet test two to five years away. This accurate estimate was gradually dismissed as being too alarmist. There was a slide into complacency. A War Department paper of 1947 estimated that: ‘For a number of years, perhaps as many as 8 to 15, only the U.S. will possess atomic bombs in significant quantities’. The Compton Report, also of 1947, noted that: ‘We cannot safely assume that we will have sole possession of atomic explosives beyond 1951, although most scientists and engineers familiar with the production of the atomic bomb believe it will be 1955 at the earliest before an attack in quantity can be made.’ In 1949, at the time of the Soviet test, it was reported that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had not been expecting the first Soviet A-bomb until 1952.26
They [the Russians] lack men of special skill, plants adapted to making special products, and possibly materials … [T]hey lack the resourcefulness of free men, and regimentation is ill-adapted to unconventional efforts. [Before the time when] a war would be primarily an atomic war, many things may happen. We may be living by then in a different sort of world.28
The small country will again be more than a cipher or a pawn in power politics, provided it is big enough to produce atom bombs. The small country will still not have a defense against an aggressor great country, but even the strongest country will no longer have any reasonable prospects of a costless victory over even the smallest country with a stock of atomic bombs.29
Although Fox doubted that small countries would find bombs much use for ‘blackmail’ purposes, ‘they might strengthen respect for neutrality’. Others were less certain of the advantages: ‘Even small countries can make these bombs in numbers if they are such utter fools as to engage in this lethal business. They will not because they know they would be completely destroyed if bombs were used’.30 But all this was a problem for the future. In the near-term the only three conceivable nuclear powers were the ‘big three’—Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union.
The strategic implications of the atom bomb could therefore be treated in two distinct ways. First, as a speculative exercise, postulating a world with a number of powers possessing significant stockpiles of atomic bombs and the means to deliver them. Second, as an immediate question of military planning based on capabilities either in existence or under development. In both cases there was some confusion over time-frames and the mix of capabilities that would be available at any moment. The latter debate was the major one. It involved the military services and influential civilians. The Air Force was lobbying for defence resources to be devoted to airpower, while the Navy and Army were anxious lest over-reliance on atom bombs resulted in the neglect of provisions for traditional forms of warfare.
The new Air Force recognized the bomb to be their strongest bargaining card and played it for all it was worth, carefully fudging the question of whether the vast destructive power concentrated in a single device ought really to allow for contraction, rather than expansion, in numbers of aircraft. The other services felt this competition keenly in the tough struggle to keep forces intact and prepare for the future in the atmosphere of post-war demobilization and budgetary stringency. The Navy was particularly anxious to secure support for its own expensive investment programme, for ‘super-carriers’, and felt it had little choice but to oppose the Air Force and its atomic strategy head-on. Admirals warned of the unreality of expectations of quick and easy victory, the need to prepare for a wide variety of contingencies and the affront to American values represented by strategies based on mass destruction. This did little to dampen the enthusiasm for an atomic strategy or to promote the Navy’s case. The Navy was seen as parochial and backward-looking, desperate to justify its existence in a world in which the reach of airpower was being extended all the time, and in which the most likely enemy had only a modest maritime tradition. The budgetary battle came to a head in 1949 and the Admirals lost. A new Navy leadership accepted that if the proponents of an atomic strategy could not be beaten then they would have to be joined. The Navy’s own potential for delivering nuclear weapons came to be stressed by noting how aircraft carriers could obviate the need for fixed bases close to enemy territory. This new approach was far more successful in gaining support in both the executive branch and Congress.
There was a consensus view that little could be done to spare cities if aircraft carrying atom bombs got through active defences. Passive measures would involve protecting key targets through dispersion and by encasing them, as much as possible, in reinforced concrete. To survive nuclear war a society would have to be cellular, consisting of thin, independent and self-sufficient units. Few could believe that any such measures were practicable in Europe, let alone in the United States where the pattern of life was well established and had never been disrupted by air raids. In the absence of such radical measures, only Blackett argued forcefully that a city might recover from atomic bombardment with sufficient speed to restart industrial operations.
The possibility of countering an atomic attack became the main question during the 1940s. There were those who took comfort in the thought that an effective antidote to the bomb itself would eventually be discovered. On 23 October 1945 President Truman told Congress: ‘Every new weapon will eventually bring some counter defence to it.’ Earlier the same month Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz commented on the ‘historical truth’ that ‘there has never yet been a weapon against which man has been unable to devise a counter-weapon or a defense’.31 There was no such historical truth. As Brodie pointed out, there had been little noteworthy progress on defences against the V-2 and that ‘after five centuries of the use of hand arms with fire-propelled missiles, the large number of men killed by comparable arms in the recent war indicates that no adequate answer has yet to be found for the bullet’.32 Informed opinion came strongly round to the view that there was no direct counter (such as jamming its inner workings) to the atom bomb.
The capacity to destroy, given control of the air and an adequate supply of bombs, is beyond doubt. Unless both of these conditions are met, however, any attempt to produce war decisive results through atomic bombing may encounter problems similar to those encountered in conventional bombing.33
No fleets of bombers will proceed unmolested against any enemy that can bring properly equipped jet pursuit ships against them in numbers, aided by effective ground radar, and equipped with rockets or guided air-to-air missiles armed with proximity fuses.
Against this the offence offered two likely technical improvements: the ability to fly faster and at higher altitudes. A senior RAF figure, Lord Tedder, observed that: ‘Very greatly increased bomber speeds will immensely increase the difficulties of providing adequate warning and effective interception, and indeed the fighter’s superiority of speed over the bomber … may well dwindle to almost nothing’.35
But, came the rejoinder, if bombers flew high their accuracy would be impaired, and cunning defence tactics involving camouflage and decoys could exacerbate this problem. The bombers would be unable to engage in precision attacks but would have to rely on area bombings, unlikely—if the strategic bombing survey was to be believed—to produce significant results unless prosecuted in greater strength and numbers than possible during the war.36
The atom bomb seemed to swing the scales back to the offence. Even if attrition rates were high, it would not need many bombs to get through for decisive results. If, with conventional bombing, a 10 per cent attrition rate was intolerable, with atom bombs a rate of up to 90 per cent would be manageable. The argument against this was twofold. First, it was suggested that the logic of a 90 per cent attrition rate had been accepted without an analysis of the practicalities (what, for example, might happen to the bombs on aircraft that were shot down). More important, it was pointed out that the readiness to accept large losses in making the attack presumed a plentiful supply of bombs.
So long as bombs were scarce then the offence had problems in mounting attacks. A lone bomber would be extremely vulnerable to a dedicated defence. A fleet of aircraft dedicated to the carriage of atomic weapons would be wasteful, constituting the sort of attack that could only be occasional. If the need to ensure that some atom bombs got through had to be balanced with the need to use available supply in an economical fashion, then the most likely form of attack would consist of a fleet of bombers, most armed with conventional explosives and a few with atom bombs. This would increase the chances of each atom bomb reaching its target, but at the cost of mounting an attack of World War II dimensions. ‘If it takes a whole fleet to carry an atomic bomb, then most of the advantage is lost, and we get right back to the question of whether mass bombing pays at all’. If the defending country had put all its resources in defensive, rather than offensive, equipment, such as jet fighters, ground-to-air missiles and radar, then any attack ‘would have to be launched on a huge scale to have a good chance of decisive success’. And in this huge attack it would be necessary to ensure that many atom bombs reached their targets. Blackett estimated that it would take 400 atom bombs of the Hiroshima type to reproduce the damage inflicted on Germany by strategic bombardment during World War II.37 Bush observed that when allowances were made for interceptors, more than a thousand atom bombs would have to be launched. ‘The principal point is that the atomic bomb is for the immediate future a very important but by no means an absolute weapon, that is, one so overpowering as to make all other methods of waging war obsolete.’38
The argument did not stop at analysis of the relative advantages of the offence and defence when locked in a straightforward duel. An attacker aware of a strong defence was unlikely to opt for a head-on clash. The attacker could take advantage of surprise, selecting the time and place to attack. The selection of targets was less of a problem in air warfare than ground warfare. There were only a limited number of strategic targets and, as important, only a limited number of routes by which they could be approached. The advantage of choice of time was more significant. The defence might not be able to mobilize quickly enough and, even if prepared, might not reach peak performance at once. Combat experience would be required. Thus getting in the first blow would add to the already considerable advantages of the atom bomb as the adversary would struggle to recover and prepare for future attacks. ‘War … always starts with a Pearl Harbor kind of attack. In an atomic war the first attack, no matter how well prepared for it we may be, will really be a disaster’.39 Indeed any improvement in the technology of the defence merely enhanced the importance of the surprise first strike.