LeMay had done more than shape SAC up; he had created a religion. The gospel he preached was a simple parable: the schoolyard bully and the gentle giant. The Soviets were the schoolyard bullies, aiming to seize Europe, crush America, and spread communism throughout the world. SAC was the gentle giant, the muscle-bound kid who stuck up for the skinny geeks and pimply weaklings, the kid who didn't want to hurt anyone but could knock you out with one punch if he had to. The Strategic Air Command, and no one else, stood as America's shield and protector.
In the years to come, LeMay would never waver from this core message. Increasingly, those who doubted this truth or questioned its morality were labeled fools, cowards, or Commies.
The year 1952 began the golden age of SAC. The command had a clear mission, a strong leader, and the American public on board. In the early 1950s, the Bomb loomed over everything. Those were the years when schoolchildren ducked under their desks for atomic air-raid drills and teachers handed out dog tags so they could identify students after a nuclear blast. The year 1952 also brought a new president—Dwight Eisenhower—who announced that strategic airpower and nuclear weapons were now the nation's top defense priority.
Disgusted by the slogging stalemate of the Korean War, Eisenhower viewed nuclear deterrence as a far cheaper way to keep the nation safe and oversaw a massive buildup of SAC and the nation's nuclear stockpile. He also believed that there could be no such thing as a “limited” nuclear war. Because such a war would destroy both countries, if not the world, it had to be prevented at all costs. Eisenhower had joined LeMay's church of deterrence: America could prevent nuclear war only by showing spectacular strength.
Eisenhower's philosophy led to a windfall for the nuclear military, especially the Air Force. Between 1952 and 1960, the Air Force received 46 percent of America's defense money. SAC more than doubled its personnel in five years, from 85,473 in 1950 to 195,997 by 1955. During those five years the bomber fleet also grew dramatically, from 520 to 1,309. In 1951, SAC had thirty-three bases, including eleven outside the continental United States. By 1957, SAC operated out of sixty-eight bases. Thirty of these were spread around the world, in North Africa, Canada, New Zealand, England, Guam, Greenland, and Spain. Although other services had nuclear weapons by the mid-1950s—Army soldiers could fire small nuclear artillery shells, and the Navy could launch cruise missiles from submarines—SAC ruled the nuclear kingdom. “SAC was still the big daddy,” said Jerry Martin, command historian for the U.S. Strategic Command. “They had the nuclear hammer.”
On March 19, 1954, at the height of this expansion, SAC hosted a classified briefing at its headquarters in Omaha. Major General A. J. Old, director of SAC operations, spoke to about thirty military officers from various service branches, regaling the crowd with charts, graphs, and maps detailing SAC's capabilities. Afterward, LeMay answered questions for a half hour.
Sitting in the audience that day was a Navy captain named William Brigham Moore. Moore took detailed notes at the meeting and later wrote a memo describing it for his director. The top secret memo, declassified in the 1980s, gives a small but rare glimpse inside SAC at the apex of its power.
According to Moore, Old told the crowd that SAC had several hundred strike plans. Then he described SAC's optimum strike plan, what defense insiders called the “Sunday Punch.” With enough warning time, SAC could send 735 bombers flying toward the Soviet Union. The bombers, approaching from many different directions, would hit the Soviets' early warning screen simultaneously and overwhelm their defenses. Old estimated that the planes could drop somewhere between 600 and 750 bombs. “The final impression,” wrote Moore, “was that virtually all of Russia would be nothing but a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours.”
General Old concluded the meeting by raising an issue that would come to dominate SAC policy, the concept of “alert time.” Old framed it this way: If the Soviets launched a surprise attack against the United States, would SAC have enough time to load its planes and get them off the ground before Russian bombs blew them to bits? With two hours' warning, he said, Russian bombs could destroy about 35 percent of the command. But if the Soviets sneaked in a total surprise attack and caught SAC with its pants down, the bombs could decimate the command, obliterating 90 percent of its infrastructure. “The amount of alert time,” concluded Moore, “is the most important factor as far as SAC is concerned.”
The concept of alert time had been cooked up by defense analysts at the RAND Corporation, a California think tank sponsored by the Air Force. In the early 1950s, RAND analysts became convinced that SAC bases, especially those overseas, were vulnerable to a surprise attack. SAC leaders soon realized that these vulnerabilities could work in their favor. For SAC to survive an all-out surprise attack and retaliate in kind, it would need a striking force at least double the size of the Soviets'. Building such a force would require a massive influx of funding. SAC could ask for the sky.
On April 30, 1956, Curtis LeMay sat at a long table in the Capitol building, facing a row of somber senators. LeMay had flown to Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Forces Subcommittee about the strength of SAC's bomber fleet and its vulnerability to surprise attack. The hearings had been in the making for about a year. Senate Democrats had accused President Eisenhower of pinching military funds excessively in order to balance the budget. With a presidential election looming, the subcommittee had called for hearings to examine, specifically, Eisenhower's Air Force policies. The sessions, which became known as the Congressional Air Power Hearings of 1956, brought the question of SAC's vulnerability to the American public and made “bomber gap” a household term.
Worrisome intelligence had trickled in from Russia over the past year. One incident in particular had caused grave concern. The previous summer, the Soviets had invited a number of U.S. Air Force attachés to an air show near Moscow. The day of the air show had started pleasantly enough—one news report describes the attachés sitting under colored umbrellas, drinking beer, and chatting with other foreigners. Then came the air parade, which included Soviet Bison bombers, four-engine jet planes suspected to have intercontinental range. At the time, Air Force Intelligence guessed that the Soviets had about twenty-five Bisons, maybe up to forty. But at the air show, the Americans saw ten Bisons flying overhead, then another nine, then yet another nine. There were twenty-eight planes in all, just at the parade.
The Air Force representatives realized—or rather, thought they did—that they had grossly underestimated the size of the Soviet bomber force. Returning home, they fed the information to Air Force intelligence, who figured that twenty-eight Bisons in the air meant the Soviets must have fifty-six already finished. Adding in what they knew about Soviet factory space and learning curves, intelligence analysts predicted that by 1959 the Soviets could have five hundred to eight hundred Bisons.
We know today, and some suspected even then, that the Soviets had nowhere near that number of long-range bombers. In fact, the Soviets had only ten Bisons at the time, and those had rolled off the assembly line just weeks before the air show. Analysts later speculated that the Soviets had fooled the American attachés by flying the same planes over the viewing area again and again.
The suspected Soviet bomber strength became public knowledge during Curtis LeMay's testimony before the Senate subcommittee. LeMay's testimony was a bit odd—because the hearings involved issues of national security, the senators had given LeMay written questions and he read the censored answers. (One reporter speculated that Air Force PR had dreamed up this tactic to keep LeMay from shooting his mouth off.) Despite the stilted setting, LeMay got his point across. Looking “guarded” and “somber,” he told the senators that the Russians were beating America in the bomber race. SAC's new long-range B-52 bomber, he said, had a serious engineering flaw: a flywheel in the B-52's alternator had a nasty habit of breaking off. The defect had already caused one crash and led to serious production delays. Boeing had delivered seventy-eight B-52s so far, and
SAC had returned thirty-one to the shop. This left SAC with only forty-seven of the new long-range bombers. The Air Force guessed that the Soviets already had about a hundred.
LeMay's testimony on this “bomber gap” made front-page headlines, and Americans reacted with dismay. How did Russia get ahead of us? Both houses of Congress demanded that the president add an additional billion dollars to the Air Force budget. (The budget already included $16.9 billion for the Air Force, $10 billion for the Navy, and $7.7 billion for the Army.) Eisenhower, sensing trouble, cautioned against getting caught up in a “numbers racket” and trying to match the Russians plane for plane. He pointed out that the United States had a massive fleet of midrange bombers stationed all over the globe, not to mention the most powerful navy in the world. When the full story came out, he said, the American public would “feel a lot better.”
The president's soothing words calmed the storm for a few weeks. The House of Representatives passed Eisenhower's budget as it stood, without additional funds for the Air Force. Then LeMay returned for one more Senate hearing. It was his “guess,” he said on May 26, that the Soviets could destroy the United States in a surprise attack by 1959. From 1958 on, he said, the Russians would be “stronger in long-range airpower than we are, and it naturally follows that if [the enemy] is stronger, he may feel that he should attack.”
It's impossible to tell if LeMay believed his own rhetoric. Some considered him a cynical opportunist, using spotty intelligence and scare tactics to build SAC into an empire at the expense of the other services. One anonymous administration spokesman told Time magazine that “Curt LeMay thinks only of SAC.” But many believed him a patriot defending his country against an ominous enemy. Most Americans assumed that the Communists were hell-bent on world domination and would like nothing better than to bomb America into a nuclear wasteland. If the United States gave them an inch or fell behind at all, they would try it.
At the conclusion of the airpower hearings, the Senate sided with LeMay. Over Eisenhower's objections, Congress gave the Air Force an additional $928.5 million to bulk up against the Soviet threat. SAC could move its mission forward.
To counter the threat of a surprise attack, SAC started experimenting with a program called “ground alert” in November 1956. In this system, maintenance crews kept a handful of SAC bombers poised on the airstrip, filled with fuel and bombs. Flight crews lived and slept in nearby barracks. They could leave the barracks while on alert duty but never wander more than fifteen minutes away from their planes. Frequent drills kept the airmen in line. When the alarm—a blaring klaxon that could wake the dead—sounded, the crews ran to their planes at full speed, as if Curtis LeMay himself were chasing them. The first plane took off within fifteen minutes; the others followed at one-minute intervals. On October 1, 1957, ground alert became official SAC policy.
The new system came just in the nick of time. Three days later, on October 4, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth. Sputnik by itself was no threat to the United States. Barely bigger than a basketball, it contained scientific instruments to measure the density of the atmosphere. But Sputnik hadn't climbed into orbit by itself; the Soviets had shot it up there with a rocket. And if Soviet rockets could shoot satellites into space, they could certainly shoot nuclear missiles at the United States. “Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses,” said Senator Lyndon Johnson. SAC's new ground alert seemed like a brilliant, prescient move. By the following year, SAC had reorganized its structure to keep one third of the bomber force on alert at all times.
That same year, SAC began testing another program, called “airborne alert.” Instead of holding bombers ready on the ground, this program kept loaded SAC bombers in the air at all times, flying in prearranged orbits that approached Soviet airspace. Proponents argued that airborne alert gave SAC added security. “Any Soviet surprise attack,” wrote one reporter, “would find the ‘birds’ gone from their nests.” Airborne bombers, closer than planes on the ground to Soviet targets, also posed a more powerful deterrent. With those bombers in the sky, the Soviets would think twice before trying any funny business.
Tommy Power told Congress about the new program in 1959, after he had finished initial testing. Airborne alert was ready to go, but SAC needed more money. “I feel strongly that we must get on with this airborne alert,” Power told Congress in February. “We must impress Mr. Khrushchev that we have it, and that he cannot strike this country with impunity.”
Power's arguments did not convince Eisenhower. It would be “futile and disastrous,” said the president, to strive for constant readiness against any Soviet attack. It was madness to sit around thinking, every minute of the day, that bombs were about to fall on Washington. Airborne alert, he implied, promoted just that type of thinking.
Eventually the two sides reached a compromise. Eisenhower gave SAC permission to start an airborne alert training program, just in case America ever needed such a system in place. On January 18, 1961, Power publicly announced that airborne alert had begun. Reports said that SAC now kept at least twelve bombers in the air at all times; the exact number remained classified. SAC named the program “Chrome Dome,” probably because most of the bombers' flight paths arched over the Arctic Circle, drawing a cap over the top of the world. Power refused to confirm or deny if the flights carried nuclear bombs (they did), but an Air Force spokesman said that “the training is conducted under the most realistic conditions possible.” The flights were still called “indoctrination” or “training” flights because they wouldn't actually be dropping bombs on the USSR—unless, of course, an order came through from the president, and then, in an instant, a training flight would become a bombing mission.
By the time the first Chrome Dome mission went up, LeMay had moved on. In 1957, he had been promoted to Air Force vice chief of staff. Tommy Power was now in charge of the thriving Strategic Air Command. LeMay left Power a force of 1,655 bombers, 68 bases, and 224,014 men. In his nine years at SAC, LeMay had transformed the force from a national joke into a nuclear powerhouse.
Over the next seven years, Power carried the torch through changing times. As engineers made nuclear weapons smaller and lighter and missiles more reliable, other services—especially the Navy, with its nuclear submarines—began to get a larger share of the nuclear pie. By the 1960s, the United States had a nuclear “triad” of long-range land-based missiles, manned bombers, and submarine-launched missiles. SAC controlled everything but the subs and wanted to keep it that way. But as missiles grew more sophisticated and accurate, some asked whether bombers were becoming obsolete. Robert McNamara, who became secretary of defense in 1961, was seen as a missile man, hostile to the continued reliance on manned bombers. But Power, who had circled the burning Tokyo and seen the devastating power of bombers firsthand, argued that the manned bombers, which he called the “backbone of SAC's deterrent strength,” would always have a role in nuclear strategy. SAC, he insisted, must continue to demonstrate its power through programs like airborne alert. In order to deter nuclear war, said Power, the Soviets had to see America's strength and know that America stood ready to use it.
2.
The Accident
At midmorning on January 17, 1966, Captain Wendorf and his crew approached their midair refueling point over southeastern Spain. In the cockpit, Wendorf and Larry Messinger piloted the plane. Twenty feet behind them, facing backward, sat two men side by side: First Lieutenant George Glesner, an electronic warfare officer in charge of defending the B-52 (and arming the nuclear bombs), and the gunner, Technical Sergeant Ronald Snyder. Between the pilots and the defensive team a short ladder led down to a cramped, windowless compartment where Major Ivens Buchanan, the radar officer, and First Lieutenant Stephen Montanus, the navigator, sat facing forward. Mike Rooney, taking a break from his copilot duties, sat in the jump seat a few feet behind Buchanan and Montanus, reading a novel called Thy Tea
rs Might Cease, by the Irish writer Michael Farrell.
The lower compartment, where Rooney sat, was about the size of a big closet—twelve feet long, three feet wide, and barely high enough to stand up in. Crew members called it “the box”—once they were strapped in, they couldn't tell whether it was day or night. At the back of the box crouched a chemical toilet. With the lid down and a cushion on top, it doubled as Mike Rooney's jump seat. Retired Chrome Dome airmen love to talk about the toilet. More precisely, they love to explain, in great detail, the proper eating strategy for long flights. Steak, bread, and hamburgers were okay; chili or anything “foreign” was off limits. The goal was to avoid having a bowel movement for the duration of the flight. This was partly out of deference to the unfortunate airmen stuck a few grim feet away from the toilet. But crews also had a custom that the first man to do his business in the “honeypot” earned the unsavory job of cleaning it once they got home.
So far, the trip had been uneventful in all respects. Wendorf, during his break, had time to nap, eat some fruitcake, and smoke a cigarette. The crew expected an easy journey back to North Carolina and needed just one final refueling to get home. The KC-135 tanker that would fill the bomber's fuel tanks had already left the SAC airfield near Morón, Spain, and was circling in the air waiting for the bomber. When the two planes were about twenty-one miles apart, the tanker began its “rollout,” a long, curving maneuver that placed it directly in front of the bomber. Soon the bomber pilots could see the tanker about two miles in front of them and a thousand feet above. Messinger, at the B-52's helm, began to close the distance.
Messinger was about to attempt one of the marvels of modern flight—a midair refueling. In the early days of aviation, flying long distances meant packing your plane with fuel. During its historic flight across the Atlantic, The Spirit of St. Louis carried extra fuel under the wings and a main tank so big it partially blocked Charles Lindbergh's view. Army pilots of the early twentieth century, dreaming of long-range bombing, knew that Lindbergh's strategy would never work for them. Where would they put the bombs? In military lingo, planes with limited range are said to have “short legs.” To give planes longer legs, the airmen needed a way to refuel them in the air.
The Day We Lost the H-Bomb: Cold War, Hot Nukes, and the Worst Nuclear Weapons Disaster in History Page 3