Missile Gaps
In January 1956, the Eisenhower administration announced further cuts in the fiscal year 1957 defense budget as part of an overall austerity measure. Senator Stuart Symington and other Democrats cried foul, condemning Eisenhower for creating an atmosphere where “the security of the nation was being thrown into the marketplace for political advantage.”1 In April 1956, with the approval and support of Senate Armed Services Committee chair Richard B. Russell (D–Georgia), Symington formed the defense policy subcommittee, with himself as chair. Symington and fellow subcommittee member Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D–Washington) were vociferous in their condemnation of Eisenhower’s budget cutting, declaring that the president’s efforts to balance the budget had conceded the strategic advantage to the Soviet Union. What Stuart Symington wanted was for the Air Force to buy missiles and more importantly, one in particular: the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile.2
On October 4, 1957, the Soviets announced an achievement that dramatically affected America’s perception of Soviet power. Using a two-stage R-7 rocket (known in the U.S. as the SS-6) and operating from the Tyuratam-5 space range in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, the Soviets lifted into geocentric orbit a small, 100-kilogram sphere that contained a simple radio transmitter. This satellite, named Sputnik-1, captured the world’s imagination. The Soviet launch planners had requested that the larger second-stage of the rocket be equipped with polished reflectors so that as it followed in trace of the smaller satellite once the satellite separated from the stage, observers on the ground could see it with the naked eye, in addition to monitoring the distinctive “beep-beep-beep” sound of the satellite’s transmitter. While the Russians bragged about their accomplishment, and the rest of the world looked and listened in amazement, America went into deep shock. The Soviets now had a foothold in space, as well as a rocket system not only capable of placing a satellite in orbit but more ominously, of delivering a nuclear warhead to American soil.3
President Eisenhower approached RAND’s chair, H. Rowan Gaither, to form a panel of experts—officially known as the Security Resources Panel but better known as the Gaither Panel—for the purpose of reviewing defense initiatives coming from RAND and elsewhere with an eye on their respective fiscal and operational viability in countering the new Soviet threat. Gaither fell deathly ill on the eve of the release of report, and the final draft was prepared by Paul Nitze, a key player in the formulation of NSC-68 in the waning months of the Truman administration.
The Gaither Panel’s report, Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age, continued the underlying assertion that the Soviet Union was an expansionist power that sought military advantage over the United States and the West. According to the report, the Soviets had the capacity to produce more than 1,500 nuclear weapons, and they were positioned to eliminate America’s sole strategic deterrent, Strategic Air Command (SAC), with a surprise nuclear attack. The Gaither Panel recommended that the United States spend $44 billion on a crash nuclear shelter program to safeguard the American public from a nuclear attack and to disperse SAC bases and provide hardened shelters for SAC’s bombers. The Soviet launch of Sputnik on the eve of the release of the Gaither Panel’s report gave it even more credibility because the panel held that the Soviets were ahead of the United States in building and deploying missiles, something the Soviet rocket launch seemed to underscore.4
The Gaither Report was political dynamite. Leaked to the press a full two days prior to being sent to President Eisenhower, the report gave rise to one of the greatest intelligence failures in modern American history: the so-called missile gap. The passage in the Gaither Report that seemed to garner a great deal of attention was quite specific in terms of defining the threat: “By 1959, the USSR may be able to launch an attack with ICBMs carrying megaton warheads, against which SAC will be almost completely vulnerable under existing programs.”5
The pessimistic tone of the Gaither Report was reinforced by the release of a series of reports by the CIA. The first, presented in October 1957, concluded that the United States was two to three years behind the Soviet Union in the field of ballistic missiles and that the Soviets could have a force of a dozen ICBMs deployed by the end of 1958.6 Immediately following the release of the Gaither Report, the CIA published a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that assessed the Soviets as possibly having a force of ten ICBMs to deploy by 1959. A Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE), released two weeks later, dramatically altered this assessment, stating that a force of ten Soviet ICBMs would be operational in 1958, and that between 1959 and 1960, this number would be raised to 100 ICBMs, growing to a force of 500 ICBMs between 1960 and 1962. These numbers were backed up by the CIA in testimony given before the Preparedness Investigations Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee.7
Of the slew of interested parties delving into the issue of a socalled missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union, one voice emerged as dominant in terms of not only influencing policy but also shaping a national mind-set: RAND mathematician and nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter. Building on the reputation he established with his SAC basing study, in November 1958, Wohlstetter captured the schizophrenic reality of a nuclear-armed America with his essay, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” published in Foreign Affairs. Wohlstetter believed that the United States had been lulled into a false sense of complacency and was once again using the concept of nuclear deterrence based upon the notion of Massive Retaliation as a crutch. This notion of nuclear deterrence, Wohlstetter stated, was merely wishful thinking. “Matching weapons,” he wrote, “misconstrues the nature of the technological race. To deter an attack means being able to strike back in spite of it. It means, in other words, a capability to strike second.”8
Terms such as first strike and second strike had been bandied around at RAND and within the circles of nuclear strategists for some time, but Wohlstetter held that few truly understood the implications behind the relationship between the two. The situation, according to Wohstetter, was precarious. “A sober analysis of Soviet choice,” Wohlstetter assessed, “from the standpoint of Soviet interest and the technical alternatives, and taking into account the uncertainties that a Russian planner would insure against, suggests that we must expect a vast increase in the weight of attack which the Soviets can deliver with little warning, and the growth of a significant Russian capability for an essentially warning-less attack. In short, the Soviets had the capability to be far better prepared to launch their first strike than America was to respond with its second strike, thereby eliminating any sense of deterrence.”9
Deterrence, Wohlstetter argued, was aimed at a rational enemy. In the age of Sputnik, America no longer had the luxury of operating under the assumption that their enemy was, in fact, rational. Wohlstetter advocated in favor of what he termed a “protected retaliatory capability” that not only deterred rational attack but also created the conditions in which America could hope to fight, and win, a nuclear war. Arms control and disarmament measures, he argued, were not only fruitless but dangerous in that they invited “catastrophe and the loss of power to retaliate.”10
Sputnik had, in one fell swoop, turned the world upside down. Fears of a missile gap combined with held-over anticommunist paranoia from the reign of terror of the McCarthy era created an environment of dread that was exploited by those in the defense industry, the military, and Congress who were proponents of massive defense spending. It was no longer a matter of matching the Soviets in capability, or even in achieving superiority. Wohlstetter and those who embraced his line of thinking were proponents of American supremacy.
President Eisenhower understood that he was standing on the edge of a nuclear abyss and tried to engage in policies that would help America and the world take a collective step back. On December 8, 1953, barely a month after authorizing his New Look defense posture that led to the publicly announced policy of Massive Retaliation, President Eisenhower stood before the General Assembly of the United Nations and delivered his famous “atoms for peace” speech. Reversing the policy trends of the Truman administration, which had sought to retain exclusive control over the technologies and means associated with nuclear power, and thus weapons, Dwight Eisenhower sought to partially embrace the call for sharing the secrets of the atom with the entire world in an effort to promote the peaceful, versus military, uses of nuclear energy.
“Today, the United States stockpile of atomic weapons, which, of course, increases daily, exceeds by many times the total explosive equivalent of the total of all bombs and all shells that came from every plane and every gun in every theatre of war in all the years of World War II,” Eisenhower warned. He pointed out the obvious, stating that “the secret is also known by the Soviet Union,” and underscoring that “If at one time the United States possessed what might have been called a monopoly of atomic power, that monopoly ceased to exist several years ago.”11
The solution President Eisenhower sought was nothing short of momentous: “The United States would seek more than the mere reduction or elimination of atomic materials for military purposes. It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.”12
These weren’t simply words for the president. Action was taken, and quickly. By August 1954, the Atomic Energy Act was rewritten to allow U.S. companies to export nuclear material and technology to recipient nations who undertook not to use them for military purposes. The giant flaw in the Eisenhower approach was that, in seeking to use the exportation of nuclear capability as a means of containing the Soviet Union, an emphasis was placed on getting the nuclear know-how and capability distributed. The critical aspect of safeguarding against any diversion of this capability away from its intended purpose was largely ignored. Eisenhower had designated southern Asia as a critical front in the Cold War, and nowhere more so than the subcontinent of India. The United States pushed nuclear technology into India, often without adequate safeguards, setting in motion the spread of nuclear know-how that would manifest itself decades later in a viral outbreak of nuclear weapons capability worldwide.
The creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), headquartered in Vienna, Austria, gave voice to the international aspect of Eisenhower’s “atoms for peace” speech. But the reality was that when it came to nuclear politics in the 1950s, it was a two-player game: the United States and the Soviet Union (Great Britain, by 1954, had developed its own independent nuclear weapons capability, but it was, and always would be, overshadowed by the capabilities of the United States). The nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union had led to the open-air testing of dozens of nuclear and thermonuclear devices, so much so that by 1954 there was a growing frustration internationally about the widespread contamination the fallout from these tests was causing. Dealing with the political consequences of nuclear testing became a high priority for Eisenhower. The president personally favored a nuclear test moratorium but was held in check by deep divisions within his administration, especially from AEC chair Lewis Strauss and the Pentagon, who believed that only through continued testing could the United States maintain its nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union.13
In May 1954, Eisenhower, at a meeting of his National Security Council, proposed a halt to all nuclear testing.14 Once again, the proponents of nuclear testing, citing in a large part Eisenhower’s own New Look policy that had demanded a strong nuclear weapons capability, won out. It was therefore an embarrassment when the Soviet Union, on May 10, 1955, seized the diplomatic initiative by proposing, as part of its submission to the United Nations Disarmament Conference, a ban on all nuclear weapons testing. The United States rejected the Soviet initiative, largely on the grounds that it lacked any inspection mechanism from which any assurance of verification could be obtained.15
The ratcheting up of Cold War tensions brought about by the launch of Sputnik once again highlighted the issue of nuclear testing. Eisenhower’s Presidential Scientific Advisory Council, flush with increased credibility in the aftermath of Sputnik, gave added gravitas to the concerns about nuclear testing, which continued to be expressed domestically and around the world. Eisenhower was inclined toward action, but once again the Soviets beat the United States to the punch, first by again proposing a moratorium on nuclear testing in early 1958, and then in March 1958, announcing that it was engaging in a unilateral cessation of nuclear weapons testing.16
Rather than rush into matching the Soviets moratorium for moratorium, President Eisenhower—together with British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan—was able to get Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (who had emerged from the post-Stalin leadership muddle to take the helm at the Kremlin) to agree to an international conference of scientists and experts to discuss the technology and methodology of seismic monitoring and detection of nuclear tests. This conference, held in Geneva, Switzerland, in the summer of 1958, produced a report that provided a scientific blueprint for a monitoring regime. This blueprint could provide 90 percent certainty of detection of underground tests over 5 kilotons and could also detect any atmospheric test greater than 1 kiloton. Missing was any political agreement on how to implement this mechanism, as well as what would trigger any on-site inspection activity, how such an inspection would be carried out, and by whom.17
The Geneva meeting was sufficiently successful to prompt President Eisenhower to announce that the United States, together with Great Britain, would likewise participate in a one-year moratorium on nuclear testing starting in October 1958. The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union also agreed to begin formal test ban negotiations in Geneva at the end of October 1958. These negotiations were scheduled to last three years, during which time all parties involved agreed not to test nuclear weapons. If no progress toward an acceptable agreement governing a nuclear test ban was reached by that time, then the moratorium would automatically expire.18
In Geneva, the conference of scientists and experts had concluded that verification of a nuclear test ban was possible within specified limits. Armed with this information, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union began negotiating a comprehensive test ban in the fall of 1958. There was significant opposition in certain influential circles in the United States to a test ban, foremost of whom were many of the scientists involved in carrying out the tests themselves, and none more so than the father of the American hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller.
Teller cobbled together seismic test data derived from underground nuclear detonations carried out at the Nevada Test Site since 1951 and, together with a team of analysts from RAND, interpreted it to read that the threshold for detecting underground nuclear tests would be much higher than that agreed upon by the Geneva conference. Furthermore, Teller and the RAND analysts came up with cheating scenarios assessing how the Soviets could evade any monitoring regime, especially one constructed from the Geneva conference. These included conducting nuclear tests in outer space (on the far side of the moon, shielded from observation from earth) and constructing giant holes in the ground that would “decouple,” or muffle, the nuclear detonation, making it much more difficult to detect.19 When the United States tried to introduce the new Teller-RAND data on remote testing, the Soviets balked, believing this to be a ploy to facilitate additional inspections, and with them intelligence collection. Although the Soviets had agreed upon the theory of inspections, they wanted to retain the ability to veto any inspection activity requested, a provision to which the United States would not agree.20
By April 1959, the United States put its diplomatic cards on the table, telling the Soviets that the United States would agree to a test ban if the Soviets backed down on their demands for a veto to inspections as well as accepted an adequate frequency of inspections to detect underground nuclear activity. The Soviets refused to budge on the issue of inspections, and by December 1959, the Geneva talks had stalled. To get the talks back on track, in January 1960, the U.S. side raised the threshold concept, where all tests above a specific measurable seismic magnitude would be banned. The United States and the Soviet Union would engage in joint research to improve monitoring techniques and methods, and thus lower the agreed-upon threshold limits. In this way, the issue of inspection levels above that already agreed to would not need to be raised.21
The U.S. side was skeptical whether the Soviets would agree to this new approach and were thus surprised when, in March 1960, the Soviets announced that they were prepared to discuss a treaty based upon the threshold concept. But the Soviets added a caveat: they wanted a suspension of all tests above a 4.75 seismic magnitude, whereas the United States was only prepared to agree to a set moratorium period, during which time there would be more technical work to nail down an acceptable threshold level.22 The shooting down of a CIA U-2 reconnaissance plane, flown by Gary Powers, over Soviet territory on May 1, 1960, soured U.S.-Soviet relations, and once again the test ban talks ended without reaching a conclusion.
An effort by the United States to propose a suspension of fissionable material during the ten-nation disarmament conference in March 1960 likewise met with disappointment when the Soviets walked out of the four-month conference on June 27, 1960.23 Other approaches to disarmament considered by the Eisenhower administration, including one that would subject the nuclear devices tested by all parties to a trilateral inspection regime (possibly conducted under the supervision of the United Nations), fell victim to election-year politics. Congress balked at any agreement that had U.S. nuclear devices inspected by the Soviets with little or nothing offered in return.24 All effective talks between the Eisenhower administration and the Soviets hit an impasse when it became clear that the Soviets, frustrated by what they viewed as the inconsistencies of the U.S. negotiation position, were holding out for a new presidential administration before resuming discussions. Substantive arms control would have to await the arrival of the next president in 1961.
Void of any confidence-building derived from meaningful disarmament talks, politics and paranoia soon seized Congress. A missile gap paranoia had been building for several years. On August 15, 1958, Senator Stuart Symington’s position as the Senate’s foremost critic of Eisenhower’s defense priorities and as purveyor of the looming threat of the so-called missile gap, was usurped by a new Democratic senator from the state of Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Like Symington, Kennedy was concerned about the state of affairs between the United States and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of Sputnik. Kennedy was an up-andcoming politician and had ingratiated himself with several Washington power brokers, including the syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop. Alsop authored a column published on August 1, 1958, that propelled the missile gap into the public eye. Alsop charged President Eisenhower with perpetuating a “gross untruth concerning the national defense of the United States,” declaring that President Eisenhower himself had been either “consciously misleading” the American public or had himself been misinformed about the reality of America’s defenses.”25
On January 16, 1959, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy gave secret testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he allegedly told the committee that the Soviet Union would have an edge of some 100 ICBMs over the United States by 1960.26 McElroy’s testimony was leaked to Alsop, who then wrote a column that opined that the real gap was actually in the area of 300 missiles.27
In more than six columns starting on January 23, 1959, Joe Alsop laid out his case that the Soviets were well ahead of the United States in missile development. He built his argument on the premise that with 150 ICBMs attacking the United States, and a further 150 intermediate-range missiles firing on European targets, the Soviets could destroy all of NATO’s nuclear weapons. He then set out to explain that if the Soviet missile factories were as efficient as the factory that produced the Atlas rockets, then the Soviets would have their 150 ICBMs in ten months time.28
Eisenhower knew some things about the Soviet Union and its capabilities that Alsop and John Kennedy did not. The high-flying U-2 reconnaissance aircraft had not only debunked the so-called bomber gap but had likewise provided a peek into the depths of the Soviet Union that provided for facts-based analysis about the true capabilities of the Soviets. During a four-year period, nearly twenty U-2 flights over Soviet territory were conducted, most of which were directed against the Soviet missile threat. But continued U-2 flights over Russia were growing increasingly risky in light of improved Soviet air defense systems. The CIA, which ran the U-2 missions, pressed for a surge in flights to collect against remaining information gaps, in particular rail lines in the Ural region where it was assessed that the Soviets might be establishing secret, heretofore undetected, missile launch sites.29
In May 1960, President Eisenhower was preparing for a crucial summit conference between western nations and leaders of the Soviet Union in Paris, where disarmament was to be the main focus. On April 25, 1960, Eisenhower approved one last U-2 flight, again with Soviet ICBMs as the primary target. The CIA had detected, via intercepted communications, suspicious activity in and around the vicinity of Plesetsk. They wanted to fly one last U-2 mission to film the area and see if a missile launch site could be found. Eisenhower approved the mission with the caveat that the flight be completed no later than May 1, 1960.30 Soviet-American relations were improving, and Eisenhower did not want to do anything that would undermine the potential thaw.
The formation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955, following the admission of West Germany into NATO, had only increased the level of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. Any notion of the Iron Curtain liberalizing in the aftermath of Stalinism was quickly dismissed after the Soviet crackdown in Hungary in 1956. East Germany was another hot spot. The western enclave in Berlin served as a magnet for qualified East German laborers seeking a better life in the West. The “brain drain” was so severe that in November 1958, Nikita Khrushchev issued an ultimatum, calling for the withdrawal of all Allied occupation forces from West Berlin within a six-month period. Eisenhower rejected this demand, and tensions rose quickly.31
In August 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon, in an effort to help reduce the level of stress between the United States and the Soviet Union, visited the latter and engaged in a series of friendly debates with Khrushchev. In September 1959, Khrushchev returned the favor, touring the United States for a period of two weeks. After touring parts of America, including a farm in Iowa, Khrushchev visited with President Eisenhower at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland. In a series of intimate discussions, the two leaders talked openly about the issue of Berlin, as well as the reduction of nuclear weapons by both sides.
Khrushchev visited the United Nations on September 19, 1959, and in a major speech suggested that general and complete disarmament could be the best approach to peace. Khrushchev’s statements were a preview of the “Declaration of the Soviet Government on General and Complete Disarmament,” a document he delivered to the United Nations the next day.32 Building on this momentum, on December 1, 1959, the United States and the Soviet Union, together with ten other nations, signed the Antarctic Treaty, which banned all weapons and military activities from Antarctica. Both Eisenhower and Khrushchev agreed to a major powers summit to be held in Paris in May 1960, when the ideas discussed at Camp David and in New York could be worked out in greater detail.
However, the Paris summit collapsed after Gary Powers was shot down on May 1, 1960. At first the United States denied that there had been any reconnaissance flight, but when the Russians produced Gary Powers, alive and well, not only was Eisenhower deeply embarrassed, but on May 17, Premier Khrushchev stormed out of the summit after delivering a withering condemnation of American espionage. Khrushchev threatened to use force against American U-2 bases abroad, prompting the United States to raise its own defense condition level. Following the Powers incident, President Eisenhower brought an end to all U-2 operations over Russia.
Prior to the downing of Gary Powers, the CIA had recommended that the president authorize work on a follow-up system concerning imagery reconnaissance over the Soviet Union to replace the U-2. The CIA, with Eisenhower’s approval, had begun work on a highly classified imaging satellite program known as Corona, which used a series of reconnaissance satellites known as Discoverer that were launched into space. In August 1960, barely three months after the downing of the U-2 over Sverdlovsk, a Discoverer satellite was launched and successfully recovered, descending into the Pacific by parachute, enabling an orbiting U.S. Air Force plane to retrieve it before it splashed into the ocean. This flight, number 13, did not carry a camera. Discoverer 14 did, however, and on August 19, 1960, it succeeded, in one mission, to image one-fifth of the land mass of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.33
The resolution of the Discoverer 14 mission imagery was good enough to locate sites the size of Soviet missile launch facilities, including for the first time ever images of the new Soviet missile base at Plesetsk. The United States could now confirm that the Soviets had only two facilities (and another two under construction) capable of launching SS-6 rockets, one in Tyuratam with a single launch pad, and the other at Plesetsk with two launch pads operational. At best, the Soviets could launch three to five missiles, a far cry from the massive surprise attack envisioned by Albert Wohlstetter, Joseph Alsop, and others. Eisenhower now knew for certain that there was no missile gap, although he was unable to share the basis of his confidence with his detractors in politics and the media.
Even though Eisenhower had confidence—reinforced by the U-2 imagery and later the Discoverer photographs—that the missile gap was little more than a myth, he was beset by a panicked America that believed otherwise. The Soviets did not help quell this panic when they declared that their factories were churning out missiles “like sausages.”34 In the months following the launch of Sputnik, Eisenhower increased the budget for missile development by twenty times. Leading the charge were the Atlas and Titan missile programs. Like the Soviet SS-6, however, both the Atlas and Titan missiles were overly complex and fickle. Requiring long lead times to fuel and launch, neither system could be described as a genuine “force in readiness.” Albert Wohlstetter would have been correct in fearing that a Soviet decapitation attack, if one could have indeed been launched, might very well catch the American missiles sitting on their launch platforms, unable to be fired.
The Air Force’s marriage to these complex liquid-fueled missiles was driven by the reality that, until the mid-1950s, the lack of advancement in the field of solid propellant had precluded an ICBM based on that technology. The Air Force was able to build on the progress made by the Navy in pursuing its Polaris missile and by August 1957, had come up with a simple three-stage missile design, known as Weapon System Q. This new system was capable of being mass-produced and stored, ready to launch, in hardened underground missile silos. By February 1958, the Department of Defense had approved the new missile, renamed the Minuteman.35
New ICBMs were not the only nuclear weapons the United States could employ against the Soviet target. Medium-range Redstone missiles were approved for production in 1956, and by June 1958, the first fully operational Redstone unit had been deployed to West Germany. In October 1957, the first Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) was successfully launched, and by 1959, the United States had negotiated with Italy and Turkey for basing rights for this missile. The Jupiter joined the Thor, based in Great Britain since September 1958, as the other IRBM in Europe that targeted the Soviet Union.36
The Redstone, Jupiter, and Thor missiles were all liquid-fueled systems, possessing the same complexity and operational deficiencies as their liquid-fuel ICBM counterparts. But the solid fuel revolution that made the Minuteman missile possible also paved the way for the design of a new, solid-fuel missile with a range of 750 miles. Begun in January 1958, the U.S. Army’s Pershing missile, a two-stage system, was successfully launched in February 1960.
The revolution in missiles cut both ways. The surface-to-air missiles that brought down Gary Powers would likewise bring down any B-52 bomber attempting to enter Soviet airspace at high altitude (or any bomber, for that matter, including the controversial B-58). Not to be nullified, SAC sought to modify its aging B-47 and B-52 fleets to operate at low altitude, enabling them to slip in beneath Soviet radar coverage and reach their targets. The advent of the missile age meant that the Air Force needed to fight hard to come up with a viable mission for its nuclear bombers. Having finally received permission to wrest control of fully assembled operational nuclear weapons from the AEC so that they could be loaded onto bombers flying on nuclear standby missions, the Air Force did not want to see the nuclear bomber go the way of the dinosaur.
The B-47 simply wasn’t up to the task of low-altitude penetration bombing, and fourteen aircraft were lost when the wings failed under the stress of the low-level flying. The B-52 did not fare much better, and when three were lost under similar circumstances, the entire B-52 fleet had to be modernized so that it could withstand low-level flight profiles. The advent of surface-to-surface missiles also represented the death knell for the B-70 bomber. Political gamesmanship, especially from John F. Kennedy—who proclaimed his wholehearted support for the B-70—prevented Eisenhower from cutting off the funding for the B-70. However, the program survived on much-reduced expenditures, awaiting a new administration’s final decision as to its fate.37
The U.S. Navy got into the nuclear game as well. In 1956, the Navy came up with the concept for a solid-fuel missile that could safely be launched from a submerged submarine. Named the Polaris, this missile was successfully flight tested in 1959. In July 1960, it was launched without incident from the USS George Washington, the world’s first submarine capable of launching ballistic missiles. The Navy had just officially become part of the United States’s national security nuclear retaliation force.
The massive amount of firepower the United States brought to bear against the Soviet Union in 1959 contradicted any real notion of there being a gap of any sort when it came to strategic capabilities in the nuclear arena. Senator Kennedy continued to blast the Eisenhower administration on the issue of the missile gap, charging that Eisenhower just didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of the situation. In testimony before the Senate committee on which Senator Kennedy sat, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Nathan Twinning, became exasperated when continuously confronted with the idea of a missile gap. “Let’s don’t pick one system and call it a ‘gap’,” Twinning responded. He pointed out that in the face of a Soviet ICBM threat, the United States could respond with IRBMs based in Europe, which were more numerous and more accurate than anything the Soviets had, not to mention a sizable SAC bomber fleet based around the periphery of the Soviet Union. “We are surrounding them,” he noted. “The only thing they can hit us with is the ICBM in the missile field, and we can hit them with all kinds of missiles.”38
While Eisenhower pursued disarmament through diplomacy, he also recognized the need to bring the growing American nuclear arsenal under control through a coordinated nuclear targeting strategy to be used in case of a nuclear war. The fact that the United States had “all kinds of missiles,” as General Twinning put it, to hit the Soviet Union with dictated that there be some sort of coordinated approach to actually targeting these missiles. The plan approved by Eisenhower in August 1959 targeted a mix of industrial and urban centers, including the totality of the known Soviet nuclear infrastructure, especially all offensive weapons. This plan was designed to provide a 75 percent assurance that at least one nuclear weapon would detonate on each designated target. President Eisenhower made SAC the central authority for developing a nuclear target list. But when SAC tried, in August 1960, to implement its first integrated nuclear target plan, it ran into opposition from the U.S. Navy. Through its Polaris submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) program, the Navy had assumed an important second strike retaliatory mission and wanted a greater degree of flexibility in planning and executing for it. President Eisenhower rejected the Navy’s arguments and directed the secretary of defense to establish a Joint Strategic Planning Staff (JSPS) under the direction of SAC. By the end of 1960, the JSPS had developed what became known as the “Single Integrated Operational Plan,” or SIOP. Even though he was satisfied with the consolidation of nuclear strike planning, President Eisenhower was dismayed at the level of nuclear overkill that existed in the SIOP, with the U.S. having far more nuclear weapons than targets.39
By 1960, time was running out on the Atlas missile program. Increased costs and overall system complexity made the Atlas ICBM, once embraced as the savior of the United States in the post-Sputnik era, seem more like a lemon. The Titan missile, its liquid-fuel competitor, was proving to be a more robust, simpler design, and the Minuteman missile, once theory, was rapidly becoming reality. The Atlas’s supporters in Congress, led by Senator Symington, attempted to parlay concerns about a Soviet missile advantage into a reason to provide even more funding for the beleaguered missile. Symington was so persistent on this point that he lost all objectivity on the matter. After one particularly aggressive pitch to both the president and the secretary of defense, which was turned down by both, Symington first leaked classified information to the press that argued for the existence of a missile gap with the Soviets, and then noted that this gap could be rapidly closed if the U.S. Air Force would simply buy more Atlas missiles.40
This brazen manipulation of U.S. national security in order to promote the economic well-being of a defense contractor by a U.S. senator was a wake-up call to President Eisenhower. At the end of his presidency, Eisenhower delivered one of the most memorable and insightful speeches of his term in office. His farewell address to the nation, delivered on January 17, 1961, has become better known as the “military-industrial complex” speech. President Eisenhower had originally planned to speak about the military-industrial-congressional complex, but politics interceded in the form of Congressional objection, and the reference to the legislative branch of government was removed. But there can be no doubt as to the original intent, and therefore target, of his speech. And given the role played by Convair and Senator Stuart Symington in pushing the so-called missile gap, and with it the development and acquisition of the Atlas missile (and the bomber gap and the B-58 “Hustler” before that), the models Eisenhower drew on while drafting his speech are clear, and by no means complimentary.
“Disarmament,” Eisenhower noted, “with mutual honor and confi-dence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent, I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment.” Issues such as the proliferation of nuclear-armed weapons and a SIOP to target them weighed heavily on the president. “As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war—as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years—I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.”
Dwight Eisenhower was unable to provide the American people with such assurance, noting that the reality of the present situation brought with it a “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” that was “new in the American experience.” Eisenhower recognized the need for this situation but cautioned against its implications, which threatened the “very structure of our society.”
In a statement that could have been aimed directly at Convair and Senator Symington, Eisenhower declared, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist… we must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”41
As President Eisenhower left office, the collective paranoia of the American people on all matters relating to the Soviet Union was fueled by the greed and ignorance of the military-industrial-congressional complex that hyped the Soviet threat at every opportunity, regardless of the lack of any supporting facts. In America in1961, the citizenry was not overly alert and knowledgeable. The only thing that could comfort Eisenhower was that the mechanics of nuclear war were perhaps too unwieldy, the weapons too complex and unreliable, for an all-out nuclear war to be a genuine threat. This, too, was about to change.
As 1960 ended, the first Minuteman missile was transported to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where it was to be flight tested. Three solid-fuel stages were stacked, one on top of the other, each filled with a rubber-like mixture of solid fuel and oxidizer. A conical-shaped reentry vehicle, designed to carry a thermonuclear warhead, was mounted on top. At 11:00 am on February 1, 1961, the Minuteman was launched. Unlike the slow, deliberate launch of the liquid-fueled Atlas or Titan, the Minuteman missile ignited with a loud bang before shooting into the sky like an arrow. All stages performed flawlessly, and the inert warhead impacted in its designated target zone in the Atlantic Ocean twenty-five minutes after lift-off, some 4,600 miles away. An engineer who witnessed the launch provided the most telling comment: “Brother,” he said, “there goes the missile gap.”42
1 Linda McFarland, Cold War Strategist: Stuart Symington and the Search for National Security (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001), 78.
2 Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 163.
3 Michael D’Antonio, A Ball, a Dog, and a Monkey: 1957, the Space Race Begins (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 11–14.
4 Victor Rosenberg, Soviet-American Relations, 1953–1960: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange During the Eisenhower Presidency (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 118.
5 Daniel Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 193–194.
6 Peter Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 32–33.
7 Ibid., 173–174.
8 Albert Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Foreign Affairs 37, no.1 (1959): 212.
9 Ibid., 218.
10 Ibid., 232.
11 Dwight Eisenhower, address to the UN General Assembly, on December 8, 1953, Congressional Record 100: 62.
12 Ibid., 63.
13 Richard Miller, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing (Woodlands, TX: Two Sixty Press, 1986), 197.
14 Gregg Herken, Cardinal Choices: Presidential Science Advising from the Atomic Bomb to SDI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 84.
15 Benjamin Greene, Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1945–1963 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 82–83.
16 Ibid., 209–210.
17 Ibid., 163.
18 Ibid., 165–166.
19 Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930’s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 220.
20 Glenn Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 16.
21 Ibid., 21–22.
22 Ibid., 22.
23 Dimitris Bourantonis, The United Nations and the Quest for Nuclear Disarmament (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 1993), 62.
24 Seaborg, 39.
25 George Lowe, The Age of Deterrence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 182.
26 Roman, 130.
27 Robert Slusser, The Berlin Crisis of 1961: Soviet-American Relations and the Struggle for Power in the Kremlin, June-November 1961 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973), 221.
28 George Kistiakowsky, A Scientist at the White House: The Private Diary of President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 251.
29 Norman Polmar, Spyplane: The U-2 History Declassified (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Imprint, 2001), 127–128.
30 Ibid., 130.
31 Hope Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 100.
32 Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security Policy, 1953–61 (New York: Macmillan, 1996), 253.
33 Mark Monmonier, Spying with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 22.
34 Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (New York: Macmillan, 2007), 63.
35 Roger Launius and Dennis Jenkins, To Reach the High Frontier: A History of U.S. Launch Vehicles (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 56.
36 Christoph Bluth, Britain, Germany and Western Nuclear Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 64.
37 Roman, 167.
38 Ibid., 130.
39 Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 158.
40 Roman, 131–132.
41 Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 537.
42 Jeffrey Engel, Local Consequences of the Global Cold War (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 256.