Massive Retaliation
Air Force General Curtis LeMay had his own private ideological play toy. Formed in the aftermath of the Second World War as an adjunct to the Douglas Aircraft Company, the RAND Institute was conceived as a think tank for the U.S. Air Force, an organization of intellectuals who would conceptualize how the Air Force could fight and win future wars. LeMay, who after the war was named the deputy chief of air staff for research and development, not only forcefully pushed for the creation of RAND but in 1946 gave the fledgling organization its first mission: to research the feasibility of intercontinental ballistic missiles as a weapon for the Air Force. By mid-1946, RAND had produced a paper that postulated an orbiting spacecraft, the birth of the U.S. satellite program.
But LeMay had bigger fish to fry than the new frontiers of space. Ever the ideological warrior, LeMay was firmly focused on the Soviet Union as the greatest threat to American power and had become obsessed with positioning America and, in particular, the U.S. Air Force not only to contain the Soviet menace but ultimately destroy it. In order to better predict Soviet behavior for the purpose of devising an appropriate American response, the analysts at RAND turned to “game theory” to prepare and test their various concepts. RAND undertook to transform the Russian-American relationship into a global game of power politics where each side became quantified into tidy collective “utility functions” that would permit cause-effect analysis to be performed on any number of given scenarios, including thermonuclear war. In this manner, the RAND analysts were able to transform the Soviet Union into an elegantly simplistic construct in which massive resource allocations were expended in a single-minded effort to achieve not only military supremacy over the United States but also global domination—thus creating the perfect enemy for LeMay.1
The RAND assessments, combined with national security documents such as NSC-68, postulated a real and imminent threat to the United States demanding a capable response that, in the mind of LeMay and others, was best defined by the capabilities of the Strategic Air Command, or SAC. General LeMay built SAC after his own vision, and in doing so he created a military force designed to inundate the Soviet Union with more than 700 atomic bombs in a period of a few hours. Such an attack would transform the Soviet Union, in LeMay’s own words, into “a nation infinitely poorer than China, less populated than the United States, and condemned to an agrarian existence perhaps for generations to come.”2
LeMay sought to provoke a conflict that would enable the United States to obliterate the Soviet Union before that nation ever in fact threatened America. To wage this war, LeMay procured for SAC a new generation of high-altitude bombers, the jet-powered B-47 and B-52, capable of penetrating the great depth of the Soviet Union’s landmass. These bombers were designed to deliver nuclear weapons to targets inside the Soviet Union. A target list was developed and a program established to build both the weapons needed to target these cities and the bombers needed to deliver these weapons. Following the detonation of a Russian atomic device in 1949, the Air Force dramatically increased its target list and in doing so correspondingly increased the number of nuclear bombs needed as well as the number of bombers to deliver them. In short, the Air Force was justifying its own dizzying growth through a strategy designed to counter the potential of the Soviet Union, not the reality. With the analysts at RAND prepared to manipulate data in a manner that quantified the Soviet Union as a grave threat, plenty of ideologically based ammunition was available to sustain the argument. By 1952, the U.S. Air Force had manipulated the politics of fear and uncertainty to achieve a 90 percent growth rate.
The new Eisenhower administration inherited a confusing mix of policies created by the Truman administration that had relied heavily on U.S. atomic superiority to back up the overarching Cold War containment of the Soviet Union. Developing a coherent defense plan, and with it a corresponding defense budget, was made difficult by the ongoing conflict in Korea. The Korean War had long since stopped being a struggle where the outcome was in doubt. Instead, the American-dominated UN forces had squared off against the Chinese-dominated communist forces roughly around the area of the 38th Parallel, the original demarcation line between North and South Korea, and were engaged in a struggle defined not simply by maneuvering troops on a battlefield, but rather by killing each other in a bloody war of attrition. The costs in maintaining this kind of fight, both in terms of money and lives, was prohibitive, and President Eisenhower had made ending the war in Korea his top priority.
The United States was not the only nation struggling under the burden of the Korean War. China and North Korea recognized that the dream of forcefully unifying the two Koreas was over and that the best course of action would be to terminate the conflict and get on with economic reconstruction. The death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953 further pushed the Chinese toward seeking a ceasefire. Newly elected President Eisenhower worked with his national security team, led by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, to formulate an approach toward the Korean conflict that would pressure the Chinese to push for peace. In May 1953, Secretary of State Dulles, speaking through an Indian intermediary (India maintained relations with both the United States and China), hinted that the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons if a settlement could not be reached in Korea. Whether this implied threat pushed the Chinese to accept peace, or whether the Chinese had already decided that peace was in their best interest, by July 1953, the fighting was over.3
President Eisenhower was determined to take advantage of the Korean War’s end to fulfill his pre-election promises of fiscal responsibility. The defense budget for 1954 had been devised with the war in Korea still a reality. The fighting now stopped, Eisenhower sought to drastically cut the defense budget and to reformulate national security policy in a manner not predicated on spending such high amounts of capital but rather would tame the spiraling upward trend of the defense budget during the last three years of the Truman administration.4
The U.S. Air Force, ever alert to any potential threat to the dominant position it had carved out for itself when it came to national defense, sought to preempt Eisenhower by defining the strategic situation along lines that precluded any significant deviation. As far back as 1950, General LeMay had identified the year 1954 as being particularly critical in terms of U.S.-Soviet strategic comparison, a time in which the United States must be prepared to “meet, and effectively counter, the full military force of the Soviet Union.”5 General LeMay had positioned SAC to be the premier American response to the Soviet threat during the Truman administration. Now, with 1954 looming and the election of President Eisenhower bringing with it the potential for change, LeMay made a concerted effort to ensure that the civilian leadership of the United States never took its eye off the real threat posed by a nuclear-armed Russia and the critical role of the Air Force in dealing with this threat.
The Air Force helped orchestrate a special subcommittee of the National Security Council to which it reported, using data prepared by RAND, that the current defense posture of the United States was not enough to prevent, neutralize, or deter a Soviet nuclear surprise attack. Building upon this, the Air Force then convened its own special committee, headed by retired Air Force general James Doolittle, that proposed giving the Soviet Union a two-year deadline for coming to agreeable terms with the United States or else face a massive nuclear assault. By August 1953, the Air Force had rejected retaliation as a strategic concept, noting that in the nuclear age only the first strike mattered and that the United States should be preparing to do just that in the face of a growing Soviet threat.
Fears about a Soviet nuclear first strike were driving a series of RAND studies that would dominate U.S. strategic thinking for years to come. The first concept was put forward by a brilliant theorist named Bernard Brodie. In his treatise on atomic warfare, titled The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, Brodie noted that “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.”6 “Deterrence Strategy,” as Brodie’s concept was known, required the reality of massive destruction in order to be viable. There was no more destructive force than the hydrogen bomb, so it was no surprise that Brodie recommended that the United States stockpile as many hydrogen bombs as it could. The Soviet Union represented an adversary far too unpredictable and belligerent for any other course of action to be justified. To Brodie, the unimaginable devastation of the hydrogen bomb made nuclear war unthinkable. And yet, the destructiveness of these weapons made the concept of a preemptive first strike against a similarly armed enemy an all-too-tempting proposition. Brodie realized that the only true way to deter nuclear preemption by an enemy was to create a second-strike capability, designed to survive any preemptive attack with enough striking power to nonetheless ensure the destruction of the attacking power. In addition to building bigger thermonuclear weapons, Brodie recommended that the strategic infrastructure of the United States be dispersed so that a surprise decapitation attack (i.e., the elimination of critical leadership and industrial targets in one blow) would be nearly impossible.7
While Bernard Brodie was ruminating on the issue of “second-strike” and survivability, another RAND analyst was prepared to make his mark. Albert Wohlstetter was New York City-born and -educated, having earned degrees in mathematics from both the City College of New York and Columbia University. After service on the War Production Board during the Second World War, Wohlstetter tried his hand at private industry before landing a job as a consultant with RAND in 1951. One of his first assignments was to put together an analysis of SAC’s requirements for basing its bombers during the period between 1956 and 1960. In this analysis Wohlstetter was heavily influenced by a parallel study being done by his wife, Roberta, also an analyst at RAND. Roberta Wohlstetter was putting together a study of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. When considering SAC basing options, Wohlstetter’s analysis was dominated by the notion of preventing a modern-day nuclear Pearl Harbor. He assessed that, across the board, SAC was lacking in real base security, noting that the Soviets would need only 120 atomic bombs of 40 kilotons each to be able to destroy up to 85 percent of SAC’s European-based bomber force. Drawing on the influence of his wife’s work, Wohlstetter’s analysis made the SAC bombers in Europe the contemporary equivalent of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, noting that each was intended to contain the aggression of the Soviet Union and Japan, respectively. The Japanese had chosen to preemptively eliminate the American fleet by attacking Pearl Harbor. Wohlstetter opined that this was the logical course of action for the Soviets when it came to implementing their grand design in Europe.8
From the White House’s point of view, studies such as Wohlstetter’s were trending in the wrong fiscal direction. President Eisenhower was looking for ways to reduce, not increase, defense spending. In exchange for a reduction in military hardware and infrastructure, the Eisenhower administration constructed a national security strategy that emphasized regional alliances (such as NATO), covert operations carried out by the new Central Intelligence Agency, effective propaganda, and nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons were deemed indispensable to national security, and it was assessed that as long as the United States maintained a sufficient stockpile of nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, the Soviet Union would be deterred from irresponsible aggression through the threat of “Massive Retaliation.” In short, the fiscal frugality of the new Eisenhower defense budget was built on the back of a huge nuclear arsenal that the United States was willing to hold over the head of the world as a means of checking communist expansion. This strategy was dubbed the “New Look.”
The New Look national security strategy of Eisenhower was unveiled to the world on January 12, 1954, at a speech given by Secretary of State Dulles before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. In addition to the established doctrine of deterrence, Dulles’s speech introduced the new concept of Massive Retaliation as the centerpiece of U.S. strategic thinking. Local defenses, Dulles argued, were useless in the face of massive Soviet ground power and must therefore be backed up with massive retaliatory power. “A potential aggressor,” Dulles noted, “must know that he cannot always prescribe battle conditions that suit him. The way to deter aggression is for the free community to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with means of its choosing.” Dulles indicated that this was the approach being adopted by the Eisenhower administration. He pointed out that the recent conclusion of the Korean War (“on honorable terms”) had only come about because the United States had threatened the Chinese with an expansion of the war beyond the limits China was comfortable with fighting (a reference to the implied threat of nuclear force by Eisenhower, which may or may not have influenced the eventual Chinese decision).9
Dulles’s Massive Retaliation policy was not well received within the United States or abroad. Under attack by the U.S. Senate and NATO allies alike, Dulles was forced to restate the New Look strategy, which he did in an article in Foreign Affairs, where he explained that the United States did not intend to rely upon massive strategic bombing as the sole means to deter and counter aggression. There was a role for local defense, as well, to manage and deter crisis. “The essential thing,” Dulles wrote, “is that a potential aggressor should know in advance that he can and will be made to suffer for his aggression more than he can possibly gain from it.”10
Massive Retaliation may have worked in theory as a vehicle of deterrence, but when confronted by reality, it failed to deliver on its promise. In Indochina, the French were entangled in a postcolonial war with an indigenous communist force known as the Viet Minh. In March 1954, the Viet Minh had succeeded in surrounding a large French military force in the valley of Dien Bien Phu. Unable to break the siege, France appealed to the United States for help. Options ranging from dropping nuclear weapons to carpet bombing Viet Minh positions with massive B-29 air strikes were considered, but in the end all were rejected.11 The French garrison surrendered on May 7, 1954, paving the way for a total French withdrawal from the region and the division of Vietnam into two parts, north and south. Far from being made to suffer from their “aggression,” the communists in Vietnam emerged victorious and relatively unscathed. Massive Retaliation as a policy had failed its very first test.
The White House argued that any linkage between the New Look’s Massive Retaliation deterrence policy and the communist victory in Vietnam was specious. For Massive Retaliation to succeed, there first had to be in place a multilateral system of collective defense around which to rally. The situation in Vietnam, where the United States was asked to defend the fading vestiges of French colonialism, did not provide the proper foundation required by a comprehensive policy such as the New Look. Recognizing this shortfall, the Eisenhower administration began fashioning a series of treaty organizations like NATO in Europe, that would foster the multilateral springboard for a policy of Massive Retaliation to deter against communist aggression and expansion.12
In September 1954, the United States brought together France, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines, and Pakistan to sign the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, which established the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), ostensibly to contain communist expansion in the region. This action was followed up in February 1955 with the creation of the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which linked Turkey, the United Kingdom, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan in a mutual defense pact (the United States formally joined in 1958). Together, NATO, CENTO, and SEATO created a multilateral ring around the Soviet Union and China that formed the local defense “shield” that could be backed up by the thermonuclear “sword” of American Massive Retaliation.
While Eisenhower built his ring of alliances, the policy of Massive Retaliation was again tested in a crisis involving the Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu, the result being a policy fiasco. When Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist forces withdrew to Taiwan from mainland China in 1949, they maintained a series of garrisons on coastal islands just off the Chinese coast, including Quemoy and Matsu, which were planned to be used as a springboard for the reconquest of China. In August 1954, Chiang Kai-shek dispatched 54,000 troops to Quemoy and another 15,000 to Matsu, prompting the Chinese communist forces to begin an artillery bombardment of the former. The Eisenhower administration warned the Chinese against any attempt to liberate either Taiwan or any area controlled by the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek. In keeping with his overall policy of building vehicles of containment of communism, President Eisenhower pushed for a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan, which was signed in late 1954.13
There was increased talk in the Pentagon about using America’s nuclear arsenal against China, either to disrupt ongoing Chinese attacks against nationalist-controlled islands such as Quemoy and Matsu or as part of a strategy that would help Chiang Kai-shek regain control of the Chinese mainland. On March 10, 1955, Secretary of State Dulles indicated that the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend Quemoy and Matsu. The very next day, President Eisenhower unleashed a stream of controversy when he stated that, in his opinion, atomic bombs were to be treated as just another piece of ammunition, “as you would use a bullet.”14 NATO ministers—concerned that any U.S. nuclear strike on China could escalate into a full-scale war with Russia, which would obliterate Europe—voiced their strong objection to any nuclear attack on China. Eisenhower himself understood the limited options available to him in this regard, telling the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were pressing him to attack China, “We’re not talking now about a limited, brush-fire war … We’re talking about going to the threshold of World War III. If we attack China, we’re not going to impose limits on our military actions, as in Korea. Moreover, if we get into a general war, the logical enemy will be Russia and China, and we’ll have to strike there.”15
In the end, the Chinese communists backed down, stopping their bombardment of Quemoy and Matsu. It had become clear to the Chinese that the Soviets were not willing to be drawn into a larger conflict with the West over what amounted to a Chinese civil war, and the threat of nuclear attack by the United States proved too much of a price for China to pay for the liberation of two coastal islands. But once again the policy of Massive Retaliation had been tested and found wanting. The all-or-nothing approach such a policy entailed could not stand up to the realities of a limited conflict involving the peripheral interests of the United States.
The reality was that the policy of Massive Retaliation never had a chance of succeeding. Events in far-off Semipalatinsk, nestled amid the steppes of Kazakhstan, were about to change the nuclear calculus forever. Andrei Sakharov, the brilliant Russian physicist, had overseen the manufacture of a “layered-cake” nuclear device that alternated layers of enriched uranium with lithium-6 deuteride. Nicknamed “Joe 4,” Sakharov’s device was detonated on August 12, 1953, achieving a yield of 400 kilotons.16 Although crude by American standards, the Soviets had exploded a thermonuclear weapon, and in doing so, they actually pulled even with the United States in deliverable thermonuclear capability. Whereas the Mike test of November 1952 was a success, the device, dependent on huge cryogenic support facilities, was in no way near to being a deliverable system. When the Soviets detonated Joe 4, they were six months away from adapting the design to a form that could be delivered by an aerial bomb.
The scientists at the nuclear weapons laboratory in Lawrence Livermore, California, were scrambling to develop a smaller, lighter version of Mike that could be realistically weaponized. On March 1, 1954, this new device, weighing in at 23,000 pounds and designed to be delivered by a B-47 bomber, was tested. It was designed to achieve a yield of 5 megatons, more than twelve times more powerful than the Joe 4 device. A miscalculation led to the resulting explosion being much larger than anticipated, measuring some 15 megatons. The Soviets would be able to produce a few Joe 4 bombs a year until their nuclear infrastructure was expanded for mass production. With the new, lighter-weight Mike design, known as “Castle Bravo,” the United States was able to produce hundreds of city-killers per year.17 Even though the Soviets may have pulled even with the United States for a brief, fleeting moment, the United States quickly recovered and never again came close to yielding its overwhelming thermonuclear advantage.
The emergence of a Soviet thermonuclear capability, however minute, breathed new life into the growing paranoia that was sweeping the United States. This paranoia was perhaps best put on display when the anticommunist witch hunt turned on the father of the American atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had grown increasingly disillusioned by the reality of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and in particular the mad rush on the part of the United States to accumulate more and more nuclear weapons. In an article written for Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1953, Oppenheimer noted that there was little difference between 2,000 nuclear bombs and 20,000, that in the end the 2,001st bomb dropped would have accomplished all that was capable of being accomplished in terms of destructive capability. He likened the American and Soviet Union’s rush to acquire nuclear weapons to “two scorpions in a bottle,” each capable of destroying the other, but only at the risk of themselves being destroyed.18
This was not a message America’s nuclear weapons designers wanted to hear. Indeed, many of these designers, including Edward Teller, viewed Oppenheimer’s comments, and his track record of opposing the overall direction of the American nuclear weapons program, as bordering on treason. The chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, likewise held a grudge against Oppenheimer because, in his mind, Oppenheimer helped delay the development of the hydrogen bomb. Strauss convinced President Eisenhower that Oppenheimer was a threat to national security and succeeded in having Oppenheimer totally cut off from the nuclear weapons community. Edward Teller provided the FBI with testimony that reinforced Strauss’s concerns that Oppenheimer was actively conspiring with the Soviets to delay the American development of the hydrogen bomb until the Soviets could catch up.19
On April 12, 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission initiated a formal hearing into J. Robert Oppenheimer in which his considerable service to the United States would come under direct attack. After hearing scores of witnesses—including Edward Teller, who condemned Oppenheimer not for any specific action or deed but rather for what he thought—the AEC found Oppenheimer to be a “loyal citizen,” deserving of the nation’s gratitude for his service. However, the AEC did revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearances, and the father of the American atomic bomb was effectively excised from America’s nuclear hierarchy.20
The public humiliation of Oppenheimer established a precedent that psychologically linked any philosophical approach opposing the expansion of nuclear weapons activity, such as arms control or disarmament, as being not only harmful to the national security of the United States but also as providing evidence of collusion with America’s enemies, and as such bordering on treason. Even though Oppenheimer’s security clearances had been revoked on a lesser, technical argument, and indeed he had been cleared of any wrongdoing in terms of collaborating either against the United States or on behalf of the Soviet Union, the mere fact that a man of Oppenheimer’s stature could be so publicly crucified based on the mere allegation of impropriety served as a sobering brake to the development of any rational policy of nuclear constraint at the very moment in American history when such a policy was most needed.
The persecution of J. Robert Oppenheimer came at the high-water mark of the madness known as McCarthyism. By 1954, Senator Joe McCarthy’s penchant for baseless attack had alienated many, including former supporters such as Stuart Symington. When McCarthy chose to take on the U.S. Army, he quickly found he had bitten off not only more than he could chew but more importantly, more than the rest of the nation was willing to digest. When McCarthy attacked a colleague of the U.S. Army’s chief counsel, Joseph Nye Welch, Welch eviscerated him before the Senate, and America, declaring that “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”21 By the end of 1954, America was done with McCarthy, and the Senate voted to censure their fellow senator.
But the demise of McCarthyism did not bring with it any reduction of anticommunist sentiment or any lessening of the paranoia regarding the Soviet Union. Massive Retaliation as a policy required weapons capable of achieving such unprecedented levels of destruction and of delivering them to their targets. Senator Stuart Symington may have railed against the excesses of Joe McCarthy, but he never once softened his position on the need for a powerful nuclear weapon–based counter to the perceived ongoing menace of the Soviet Union and communism. Symington had long-established relations with both the U.S. Air Force and a major defense contractor, Convair. Like Symington, Convair was convinced that long-range missiles were the weapon of the future, but it was having difficulty in getting the Air Force to invest in its ballistic missile design.22
Fortunately for Convair, at RAND there was a German-born mathematician and physicist named Bruno Augenstein who was a leading proponent of long-range missiles. Like many RAND associates, Augenstein believed that the Soviet Union was pressing ahead on all fronts, and he feared that the Soviets would soon take the lead in the field of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which in the nuclear age meant the United States would be ceding nuclear supremacy. With the successful test of the hydrogen bomb, coupled with the efforts undertaken at Lawrence Livermore to reduce the size and weight of a hydrogen bomb, Augenstein argued that the stringent performance and accuracy requirements that had heretofore hindered the operational and fiscal (and thus political) viability of the ICBM as a weapon were no longer valid.
Smaller warheads meant that not only could the ICBM deliver them to their targets at greater ranges but that the enormous destructive power of the hydrogen bomb also dictated that accuracy requirements could likewise be significantly reduced. Convair had previously assessed that it would take until 1965 to field a viable, operational ICBM. Based on Augenstein’s work, it now appeared as if Convair would be able to shorten this deadline to 1960. Bruno Augenstein detailed his analysis in a memorandum published in early 1954, titled A Revised Development Program for Ballistic Missiles of Intercontinental Range. In the memo, Augenstein encouraged the Air Force to throw its weight behind Convair and its ICBM missile concept, known as the Atlas missile, warning that “If the Soviet Union beat the United States in a race for the ICBM, the consequences would be catastrophic.”23
The impact of the RAND/Augenstein Report resulted in the Air Force directing that a fully operational ICBM weapon system should be put into the hands of the Strategic Air Command within six years. The missile proposed to accomplish this mission was the Atlas ICBM, built by Convair. In 1954 the Atlas represented the height of ballistic missile technology, and yet no prototype had been flight tested. Not willing to gamble everything on a single missile system, in October 1954, the Air Force contracted with the Martin Company to develop a second liquid-fueled ICBM, a more conventional two-stage design known as the Titan.24
Another analysis was conducted that pushed the case for an American ICBM. In March 1954, President Eisenhower had asked a panel headed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology president James R. Killian Jr. to consider the vulnerability of the United States to a surprise attack. The resultant product, known as the “Killian Report,” was released on February 14, 1955, and it warned of a growing disparity between the strategic capabilities of the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly in the field of ICBMs, which exposed North America to the risk of a surprise nuclear attack. Like the RAND/Augenstein Report that preceded it, the Killian Report recommended that the development of American ICBM capability become a national priority.25
While the Air Force wrestled with the issues surrounding the creation of a viable ICBM capability, the foundation of America’s nuclear weapons delivery capability, Strategic Air Command’s bomber fleet, was likewise undergoing a dramatic revision both in terms of its current composition and its vision for the future. Whereas the B-47 medium-range and B-52 long-range bombers were the mainstay of the SAC order of battle, both were deemed less than satisfactory—the B-47 because of its limited range, payload, and altitude, and the B-52 because of its lack of speed and the fact that it was, in the minds of many, an already outdated platform (conceived and designed during the Second World War) by the time it entered service in 1955. The Air Force had its eyes on sleeker, more modern aircraft on the drawing board, such as the B-58 medium-range and B-70 long-range bombers.
For General LeMay and SAC, however, there was only one bomber in mind: the long-range, high-altitude, supersonic B-70. The B-70 was designed to penetrate Soviet airspace, flying higher and faster than any fighter the Soviets could bring to bear. For LeMay, the B-58 had the same lack of payload, range, and altitude that plagued the B-47. SAC didn’t want the B-58, but the Air Force had funded its development in 1954, naming SAC as the end-user. LeMay took his dissatisfaction with that decision up the chain of command. In 1955, the Air Force concurred, dropping the B-58 as an operational bomber but agreeing to continue funding of the bomber as a research and design platform, with thirteen aircraft authorized at a cost of over $500 million.26
Politics then reared its ugly head. The huge Convair facility in Fort Worth, Texas, which had until recently been producing B-36 bombers, was now out of work. Convair was able to garner the support of former secretary of the Air Force (and long-time Convair friend) Stuart Symington, newly elected as a senator from the State of Missouri, as well as Texas’s own Lyndon B. Johnson, a member of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee. Pressure was building on the Air Force to reverse its decision regarding the B-58.
The supporters of the B-58 bomber, in and out of the Air Force, were able to build upon the growing paranoia that existed in the United States since the detonation of the Soviet hydrogen bomb in August 1953. Fears of falling behind the Soviet Union in any strategic capacity abounded. On May Day, 1954, the Soviet Air Force displayed a new jet bomber, the M-4 Bison, in a flyover witnessed by western observers. Until that time, the Soviets were thought only to have the TU-4, a B-29 copy. The M-4 bomber was intended to provide the Soviets with a true strategic bomber, capable of delivering a nuclear weapon against targets in the United States and then returning to the Soviet Union. In July 1955, the Soviets again displayed the M-4 in flight but this time had the aircraft fly past the reviewing stand over and over, giving the impression that there were many more aircraft than existed. Some observers counted up to sixty M-4 bombers, when in fact all the Soviets had were eighteen. Furthermore, the M-4 was a subpar aircraft, unable to achieve the range or payload specifications required. The Soviets were aware of their weaknesses and had perpetrated the flyover hoax as a way of bluffing the United States into believing that the Soviets were more powerful than they really were.27
In this endeavor the Soviets were extremely successful. The CIA assessed the M-4 to be in full-scale mass production and estimated that there would be anywhere from 600 to 800 M-4 bombers in service by 1960. Soon Stuart Symington and others in Congress were announcing the existence of a “bomber gap” and were demanding that appropriate measures be taken to build up America’s capabilities, both in terms of matching the Soviets bomber for bomber but also in defending against the new threat of long-range, jet-powered, nuclear-capable M-4 bombers.28 Convair benefited greatly from this new panic. The B-58 bomber was ordered into full production, and the flawed F-102 fighter-interceptor, in danger of being canceled, was likewise given the green light for full-scale production. Both aircraft were built by Convair.
The so-called bomber gap coincided with other developments internationally that fueled a growing animosity between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1954, the Soviet Union, concerned over the growing capabilities of NATO, suggested that it should join the treaty organization to preserve peace in Europe. NATO and the United States rejected this advance, believing that it was merely a ploy designed to weaken the alliance. What the Soviet Union objected to the most, however, was a NATO decision to invite West Germany, which was formed out of the territory of former Nazi Germany that had been occupied by the U.S., the UK and France in 1949, into the alliance as a full member, which meant that the Russian nightmare of a rearmed Germany would become reality. NATO extended its invitation in 1954, and on May 9, 1955, West Germany was incorporated as a NATO member. The Soviet reaction was immediate, creating its own European defense alliance, the Warsaw Pact, which was signed into effect on May 14, 1955, and joined the Soviet Union together with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and East Germany (i.e., Soviet-occupied Germany, incorporated as a separate state in 1949 following the creation of West Germany) in a Cold War counter to NATO.29
The Cold War was now a reality, with two military alliances ideologically opposed to one another facing off along the length of the entire European continent. Increased tension brought with it the paranoia of surprise military attacks. It was imperative that the United States gain access to high-quality intelligence information that would better define the Soviet capabilities when it came to manned bombers, the weapon the Soviet Union would use to deliver any new Pearl Harbor. The Lockheed Aircraft Company came up with a design for a high-altitude photographic reconnaissance aircraft, the U-2, which seemed to fit the bill. The first U-2 operational flights started in July 1956. One early mission, flown on July 4, 1956, flew over Engels Airfield near Saratov and photographed twenty M-4 Bison bombers sitting out on the ramp. At first CIA analysts thought that this was the normal complement of bombers for every Soviet airfield, and concerns grew anew about Soviet bomber supremacy. However, continued U-2 imaging missions showed that the July 4, 1956, mission had actually captured the entire M-4 Bison inventory for the Soviet Union, and soon it became clear that when it came to bombers, supremacy was overwhelmingly on the side of the United States. 30 Events just over the horizon, however, were about to make the issue of manned bombers, and with it any discussion of a so-called bomber gap, moot.
ENDNOTES
1 David Barash, The Survival Game: How Game Theory Explains the Biology of Human Cooperation and Competition (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 190–191.
2 Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (New York: Macmillan, 2007), 168.
3 John Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 14.
4 Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 320–322.
5 Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 365.
6 Jacek Kugler, ed., Parity and War: Evaluations and Extensions of the War Ledger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 231–232.
7 Bernard Brodie, The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946), 74.
8 Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 97–98.
9 Ibid., 174.
10 John Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 148.
11 Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam (New York: Da Capo Press, 2005), 569.
12 Gaddis, 176.
13 Robert Accinelli, Crisis and Commitment: United States Policy Toward Taiwan, 1950–1955 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 196.
14 Christopher Gacek, The Logic of Force: The Dilemma of Limited War in American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),125.
15 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953–1956: The White House Years (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 463–464.
16 David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 313.
17 Richard Miller, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing (Woodlands, TX: Two Sixty Press, 1986), 192.
18 J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” Foreign Affairs (July 1953): 529.
19 Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Macmillan, 2002), 290–293.
20 Ibid., 295.
21 Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 204.
22 Kaplan, 163.
23 Ibid., 113.
24 Nathan Twining, Neither Liberty nor Safety: A Hard Look at U.S. Military Policy and Strategy (Geneva, IL: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 291.
25 Matt Bille and Erika Lishok, The First Space Race: Launching the World’s First Satellites (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2004), 74.
26 Twining, 249.
27 Peter Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 24.
28 Eugene Jarecki, The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 150.
29 Wilfried Loth, Stalin’s Unwanted Child: The Soviet Union, the German Question, and the Founding of the GDR (New York: Macmillan, 1998), 169–171.
30 Norman Polmar, Spyplane: The U-2 History Declassified (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Imprint, 2001), 92–94.