A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  26.

  A NUCLEAR REACTOR IN THE SKY

  The precise sequence is hazy in retrospect, but Schriever’s slide into an increasingly dangerous confrontation with LeMay probably began over the nuclear-powered airplane. For airmen, the dream of a flying machine propelled by atomic fission meant the possibility of unlimited range. A plane would be able to stay aloft for weeks and even months without refueling. As Theodore von Kármán had told Hap Arnold in Where We Stand, his preliminary report to Toward New Horizons, nuclear propulsion, if attainable, would “secure us the conquest of the air over the entire globe.” Although they ignored almost all the rest of von Kármán’s visionary theorizing, the bomber men of the postwar U.S. Air Force, the “operators” like LeMay, paid enthusiastic attention to his thoughts on this subject.

  The program for the atomic-powered airplane, subsequently titled Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP), had begun in 1946. The Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission were to spend more than $7 billion on the project. Most of the work was conducted in secret, but with unstinting funds and support from the atomic power enthusiasts among the congressmen and senators on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, particularly the nuclear weaponry hawks Senators Brien McMahon of Connecticut and Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, both Democrats.

  While the entire Air Force hierarchy wanted an atomic-powered airplane, LeMay didn’t want just any nuclear-driven bomber that would fly from the United States directly to the Soviet Union, drop its hydrogen bombs, and then return for more without ever having to bother with midair refueling or refueling stops at overseas staging bases. He wanted a supersonic one and had levied this attribute on the Air Staff in Washington as a SAC requirement. He was convinced that supersonic flight gave a bomber a much greater chance of survival against enemy fighters and other air defenses. As assistant for development planning, Schriever was charged with recruiting the scientists and engineers who could build the plane for LeMay. As far as he could determine from the men already working on the project and from other extensive exploration, it was possible to design a reactor light enough to power a subsonic bomber, but a supersonic one was out of the question. Generating enough power within the reactor to achieve supersonic flight would create temperatures so extreme that no materials in existence or foreseeable could withstand them. The reactor would melt. His findings were not welcomed at SAC and he was summoned to Omaha.

  The meeting took place in LeMay’s office in SAC’s original headquarters at Offutt, fashioned by partitioning up an abandoned Second World War aircraft assembly plant on the base. As was his custom, LeMay was chewing on his cigar as he sat behind his desk. In front of it was a large couch with a couple of generals who were ranking members of his staff and Dr. Carroll Zimmerman, a civilian analyst who was chief of SAC’s Operations Analysis section. Behind the couch were more chairs with other senior members of the SAC staff. Tommy Power, who had circled over Tokyo assessing the damage for LeMay when they had lit that first horrendous firestorm and killed 72,000 to 83,000 people on the night of March 9, 1945, was now a major general and LeMay’s deputy as vice commander of SAC. He sat in a chair close beside the desk. Schriever was beckoned to an empty chair next to him. Bennie was not afraid, but he felt alone, and he was. LeMay pointed a finger at him and said, addressing him coldly by his rank and not by his name, “Colonel, I understand that somebody in the Pentagon is against the supersonic nuclear bomber.” Schriever waited, breathed deeply, and said, “Yes, it is me.” LeMay’s head snapped back a bit at the directness of the answer. Bennie went on to say that he was not opposed to the plane as such, that it was simply a technological impossibility, explaining how subsonic seemed feasible, but that the ferocious heat of supersonic would melt any material they had or could foresee.

  They went back and forth for half an hour. LeMay was not going to settle for a subsonic nuclear-powered bomber. Supersonic was what he wanted, that was that. Schriever held his line. “Look,” he said, “I am running the Development Planning Office and I have access to all the top scientists and engineers in this country. And I have not had a single one tell me that they could, in fact, build a nuclear-powered engine that will operate at supersonic speeds. And it’s not me that’s saying that; it is the experts in the country who are saying that.” LeMay did not appear convinced. “If you can find someone who is knowledgeable, a scientist or engineer who understands all the technology that is involved in supersonic flight with a nuclear power plant, I will stand corrected,” Bennie said. “But that has been my job to look into these things.” He was a bit surprised that LeMay did not throw him out of the office right then. Instead, the general appeared to take what had been said in good nature and addressed him by name this time. “Schriever,” he said, “I am going down to the gym to do some judo. Would you like to come down?” Power had become an expert at this Japanese art of unarmed combat. He held the highest rank, black belt. LeMay had apparently decided to try it as well. Schriever could see in a flash in his mind’s eye what would happen to him in a judo bout with Curtis LeMay after what he had just told the big man. “No, not today, General,” he said. LeMay chuckled. The meeting broke up.

  Despite what Bennie had learned about the heat barrier, the supersonic nuclear-powered bomber remained a project of extremely high priority for the Air Force, and work on it continued through the 1950s, long after Schriever had moved on. The success of Admiral Hyman Rickover of the Navy in building nuclear-powered attack submarines, the first of which, the USS Nautilus, was commissioned in 1954, undoubtedly honed the envy of the Air Force leadership. In his March 21, 1955, memorandum to Twining on the future structure of the Air Force, LeMay posited two wings of supersonic nuclear-fueled bombers, a total of ninety such aircraft, in SAC’s inventory by 1965. In January 1955, the Air Force Council, the committee of lieutenant generals at Air Force headquarters under the chairmanship of the vice chief, recommended accelerating the program in order to have an operational atomic-powered bomber by 1963. The idea of airplanes flying around with nuclear reactors in them might seem daft to subsequent generations, given the appalling consequences if one crashed. In the edge-of-battle atmosphere of the Cold War, such risks were rationalized as necessities.

  In fact, the Air Force and the AEC secretly installed a three-megawatt, air-cooled nuclear reactor in the aft bomb bay of a converted B-36, designated the NB-36H or Nuclear Test Aircraft, and staged forty-seven flights with it between July 1955 and March 1957. The objective was to test the feasibility of having a reactor in an airplane and find ways to adequately protect the crew from the radiation it gave off. Accordingly, a twelve-ton lead-and-rubber-shielded compartment, with leaded glass windows almost a foot thick, was built into the nose of the bomber. The pattern was to fly the B-36 from a Convair plant at Carswell Air Force Base outside Fort Worth, Texas, to another base near Roswell, New Mexico. There, the reactor would be turned on and the plane sent up again to test-fly over New Mexico before returning to Fort Worth. The B-36 was always followed by a B-50 carrying a unit of specially trained paratroopers who, in the event of a crash, were to jump and cordon off the impact area from the public until cleanup crews of nuclear specialists could arrive.

  The path of its forty-seven flights took the B-36 with its radioactive cargo directly over Lake Worth, Fort Worth’s main water supply. Had the plane gone into the lake, the paratroopers could hardly have been of much assistance to the thirsty inhabitants of the city. Schriever became convinced in retrospect that LeMay’s supersonic demand helped to sabotage the project by delaying the creation of a subsonic nuclear-powered aircraft until time and cost and the safety issue doomed the idea. It seems likely, however, that other technological Gordian knots may have rendered the vision of an atomic-powered airplane of limitless range a mirage. Fitting a nuclear reactor into an immensely sturdy vehicle like a submarine was one thing; installing one in a comparatively fragile vehicle like an aircraft quite another. President Kennedy put an end to the dream in 1961 by canceling the p
roject as impractical and unnecessary.

  27.

  LOW-LEVEL TACTICS AND THE FLYING BOOM

  Schriever’s subsequent confrontations with LeMay were to become less civil. Not that LeMay was always wrong. While the B-52 was in its early stages of development, Schriever proposed extending the life of the existing B-47s by strengthening their wings and reducing the number of B-52s to be built. He argued that given the rapidity with which the nuclear weapons designers were slimming down the weight of bombs while simultaneously increasing the explosive yield, the Air Force didn’t need the 50,000-pound carrying capacity of the big bomber. It could get by with the 25,000-pound bomb load of the smaller B-47 and save billions of dollars. LeMay, in a rage, ridiculed the idea. It was abandoned and Schriever admitted afterward that LeMay had been right: the B-52 was a much better airplane and therefore a much better long-term investment. The problem was not who was right and who was wrong in what was supposed to be a mutually beneficial exchange. The problem was that LeMay was so overcome by hubris, he had turned into a caricature of his former self. He listened now only to Curtis LeMay. He could not sense that what he might least want to hear was what he might most need to know.

  An example was the reception he gave Schriever’s warning that SAC needed to change its tactics to survive against advances in Soviet air defenses. On the assumption that bombers would always be able to fly higher than fighters, LeMay believed firmly that, after speed, height was the second most important attribute for a bomber’s survival. Given the intelligence reports the Air Force was receiving on Soviet air defense innovations, Bennie grew doubtful. The progress in Soviet jet fighters showed gains in altitude. The air defense radars to vector the fighters to engage incoming American bombers were also improving. Most worrisome of all were the reports of intensive efforts to field a surface-to-air missile system, the weapon that was to evolve into the infamous SAM of the Vietnam War. As with so much else, the Germans had devised the first surface-to-air missiles. One might have wreaked havoc with the B-17s and B-24s and with the RAF’s Lancasters had it been perfected and mass-produced. It was called the Wasserfall (Waterfall). Twenty-six feet in length with a 674-pound warhead, a speed of 1,900 miles per hour, and an altitude of 42,000 to 52,000 feet, it was radar-guided and designed to destroy an approaching bomber at a distance up to thirty miles. As with the V-2, the Soviets had picked up on this and another German surface-to-air missile called the Rhein-tochter and improved immensely on the German lead.

  The Soviets’ first-generation surface-to-air missiles were deployed in batteries around Moscow in 1957. Designated the MK-6 by the Soviets and referred to as the SA-2 Guideline by NATO intelligence, the missiles were steadily upgraded in subsequent years and thousands were emplaced around other Russian population centers and important military sites. Tracking radars at the batteries first picked up the intruding aircraft. The missiles were then guided to their targets by radio control. A proximity fuse detonated the 441-pound warhead as soon as the missile was close enough to destroy or seriously damage the plane. The missile demonstrated its efficacy on May 1, 1960, when the explosion from a near miss caused enough damage to knock down the U-2 photoreconnaissance spy plane being flown by Francis Gary Powers at 68,000 feet over Sverdlovsk in the Urals. What all these innovations in Soviet air defenses added up to for Schriever was that to maximize the chance of a bomber reaching its target, the plane had to come in not high as LeMay thought, where it would display a sharp profile on the radar screens for the fighters and worst of all for the SAMs, but low and under the radar.

  Bennie got together with Colonel Delmar Wilson, who, as a major with one of the first groups to come to England in the fall of 1942, had observed bombs flung wildly about, tearing up rutabaga gardens in German-occupied Europe until LeMay arrived and proved that a B-17 could make a straight and level bomb run and survive. By 1952–53, Wilson was a colonel heading up the Strategic Air Requirements Division of the Air Staff. He had been having similar thoughts about how to survive against Soviet air defenses. They contacted Boeing to find out what a B-47 could withstand in low-level flight, where the denser air puts a lot more stress on the airframe, in order to contrive evasive maneuvers that could be added to the low-level approach to heighten survivability. They also gathered information from the Special Weapons Command at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico on low-level delivery of atomic bombs. There were various ways in which this could be done. One was to throw the bomber at the last moment into an Immelmann, a maneuver named for Max Immelmann, the German fighter pilot who originated it during the First World War. This was a half loop upward followed by a half roll away, resulting in a reversal of direction and increased height. While still climbing, the plane would toss the bomb at the target in a parabolic arc and thus be far enough away when the bomb detonated to escape being destroyed by the blast. They designed some charts to illustrate their points and flew out to Offutt to try to convert the man whose bomber crews would want to stay alive and reach their targets against those Soviet antiaircraft defenses.

  The session took place this time in the formal briefing room at SAC headquarters. There was a stage a foot or so high and facing it were rows of chairs with folding seats like those in movie theaters. The rows were well filled by about thirty to forty members of the SAC staff, with LeMay and Power up front as would be expected. Bennie mounted the stage first. Wilson, who was to go on to the two stars of a major general before his Air Force career was completed, recalled long afterward what happened next:

  Schriever started our presentation and had no more than introduced the subject of low-level approach and bombing, when LeMay stood up, grunted, stuck his cigar in his mouth, and stomped out of the room. Schriever continued a few minutes more before Power and a few other general officers left.… Needless to say, I never had a chance to unfold my briefing charts. We put our tails between our legs and headed for our airplane.

  The next confrontation came over midair refueling. There were two methods in use. One was called the probe and drogue. With probe and drogue, the tanker aircraft trailed behind itself a hose with a funnel-shaped device, the drogue, attached to the end. The aircraft needing refueling maneuvered up from behind and plugged the probe, a pipelike fixture attached to the front of its fuselage and connected to its fuel tanks, into the center of the drogue. As soon as a firm connection was made, the pilot of the thirsty plane notified the tanker over the radio and a crewman turned on the fuel. The second method was called the flying boom. A metal fuel pipe that telescoped and was also capable of being turned up and down and from side to side was slung under the tail section of the tanker. This was the boom. The aircraft wanting fuel approached the tanker’s tail and moved into station just below. An operator sitting in a control compartment in the tanker’s tail, with a Plexiglas window that gave him full view downward, extended and maneuvered the boom until he had succeeded in plugging it into a receptacle built into the front part of the receiving plane’s fuselage. He then turned on the fuel and filled its tanks.

  The advantage of the flying boom was that it could replenish an aircraft’s tanks faster because the pipe had a wider diameter than the hose used in probe and drogue and the fuel was transferred under high pressure. The disadvantage was that it could refuel only one aircraft at a time. The probe and drogue system, on the other hand, could simultaneously refuel up to three aircraft by trailing hoses from near the end of each wing as well as from the tail section. The boom was best suited to bombers. They drank the most, yet because of the size of their tanks usually had a margin of safety. It was normally not that critical if they had to wait in line for the boom to be free. The opposite was true of fighters and fighter-bombers, which was why probe and drogue worked best for them: they needed less in a gulp from a tanker. Their far smaller tanks, however, meant they might not be able to wait in line. The Navy, most of whose carrier aircraft were similar in size to Air Force fighters and fighter-bombers, had standardized on probe and drogue with its tankers for thi
s reason. The admirals wanted the ability to keep a maximum number of planes aloft at any one time and without losing pilots and planes in the sea because tanks ran dry.

  The boom was the method in widest use in the Air Force because SAC, which favored it, possessed the most tankers. By the early 1950s, however, the time had come to standardize so that any Air Force plane could fill its tanks from any Air Force tanker. Bennie’s Development Planning Office was tasked to do a study. It soon became clear to him that midair refueling had become an absolute necessity, not just for SAC’s long-range bombing missions, but for the entire Air Force, and that the measure was not a stopgap but a permanent demand that would persist indefinitely into the future. The need to refuel fighters and fighter-bombers on their way across the Atlantic in support of NATO, to sustain transport aircraft on long hauls, or to keep planes in the air fighting in one area when they were based at a distance in another—as was now occurring with aircraft flying out of Japan to prosecute the war in Korea—all called for midair refueling.

  To help with the study, Bennie recruited a colonel working in research and development at Air Force headquarters in the Pentagon named Jewell “Bill” Maxwell, who had conducted a previous inquiry on midair refueling and was considered the expert on the subject. Maxwell had been a bomber pilot, but he favored probe and drogue because of the versatility it would give the Air Force to refuel various types of aircraft in virtually any situation. Pilots, he had discovered, preferred it as well, since it was easier to hold in position behind the tanker, particularly if there was turbulence, when hooked up to a flexible hose that allowed for some movement in contrast to being attached to a stiff pipe. Another characteristic of probe and drogue also made pilots less nervous about the possibility of a midair collision: the hoses were longer than the flying boom and the refueling aircraft therefore did not have to approach as close to the tanker. The objection that the boom fed fuel to bombers faster could be overcome simply by installing wider-diameter hoses and higher-capacity pressure pumps. A memo summing up the study that Bennie sent to Major General George Price, a powerful man as head of the overall Requirements branch of the Air Staff, won him over to the probe and drogue method, principally because of the versatility it offered. He told Bennie he would endorse a recommendation that the Air Force standardize on it. If the recommendation went through, SAC would have to convert. LeMay, apparently alerted to what was happening, summoned Bennie out to Offutt to brief him.