Fear Itself (70 page)

So it was. A 1948 SAC emergency war plan prepared by General LeMay envisioned a thirty-day atomic war that would use 133 bombs to strike seventy urban targets in the USSR.
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A 1949 Joint Chiefs war plan “called for attacks on 104 urban targets with 220 bombs, plus a re-attack reserve of 72 weapons.”
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But with what intention? On November 8, 1947, General Vandenberg had sent a memorandum to the first secretary of the air force, Stuart Symington, who later served as a Democratic senator from Missouri, from 1953 to 1976, where he continued to specialize in military affairs. “Is our purpose,” Vandenberg asked, “to destroy the Russian people, industry, the Communist Party, the Communist hierarchy, or a combination of these?”

These were not questions an air force secretary could answer, but they swiftly defined a key aspect of the National Security Council’s agenda, especially during the Berlin airlift crisis, when the balance of conventional forces was clearly seen to favor the USSR. Presented with the results of accelerated strategic planning, President Truman approved two policy documents. The first, NSC-30, “United States Policy on Atomic Weapons,” the first official statement on the use of atomic weapons, instructed the military on September 18, 1948, to “be ready” in the event of war “to utilize promptly and effectively all appropriate means available, including atomic weapons,” once the president directed that they be brought into play in order to reserve losses that were expected if a conventional war began. The second, NSC 20/4, defined “U.S. Objectives with Respect to the USSR to Counter Soviet Threats to U.S. Security” on November 23. Prepared by the State Department at the request of the Defense Department, it provided the answer that Vandenberg had been requesting, a change to the regime that governed the Soviet Union. The purpose of an atomic attack, it stated, “would be to reduce or eliminate Soviet or ‘bolshevik’ control inside or outside the Soviet Union.”
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The prospective instrument of a war broadly undertaken for ideological reasons against civilian populations was the Strategic Air Command. First fashioned under Gen. George Kenney in March 1946, before airpower had been separated from the army, SAC was a small unit of just some twenty-five B-29s when Curtis LeMay took command in October 1948. LeMay’s sense of the role atomic weapons should play was already on record. Following Operation Crossroads, the Pacific tests conducted in July 1946, he was asked to assess their results for the Joint Chiefs.
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Summarizing the report’s three main conclusions, he argued on July 28, 1947, that the bomb’s utility and capacity had been underestimated:

(1) Atomic bombs
in numbers conceded to be available in the foreseeable
future can nullify any nation’s military effort and demolish its social and economic structures.

(2) In conjunction with other mass destruction weapons
it is possible to depopulate vast areas of the earth’s surface, leaving only vestigial remnants of man’s material works.

(3) The atomic bomb emphasizes the requirement for the most effective means of delivery.
In being there must be the most effective atomic bomb striking force possible.
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The Berlin crisis, which had begun in June, had tremendously raised the chance of armed conflict. LeMay’s announced goal was to build SAC’s capabilities into an instrument that could deliver at least 80 percent of the country’s stockpile of atomic bombs simultaneously in order to be able to strike a decisive blow against Soviet targets. By the start of the Korean War, June 1950, the fleet LeMay directed had grown to 250 B-29, B-39, and B-50 bombers that were manned by elite crews led by veterans of the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II. SAC also became an instrument of espionage. Unhappy at having to rely on captured German photographs of Soviet installations, it pioneered the use of photo spy missions from the air, initially flying air reconnaissance missions close to the Soviet Union while sending balloons with cameras across its borders.

By the close of the Truman administration, the air force was the fastest-growing unit in the armed services, commanding fully 40 percent of the military budget. As LeMay and his air force colleagues pushed for an ever larger force, they faced initial resistance from key congressional Republicans who wanted to keep the military budget in check. John Taber, who chaired the House Appropriations Committee during the Eightieth Congress, and Walter Andrews, who headed the Armed Services Committee, both of whom were from upstate New York, sharply criticized the scale of the air force’s ambitions.
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Their efforts at cost cutting were checked by key southern figures, especially Carl Vinson, who marshaled his fellow Democrats and some Republicans to press Taber to back an increase in that service’s appropriations for fiscal year 1949 by $822 million, just $100 million less than the Defense Department had requested. Vinson argued on the floor that only airpower could counter the massive Soviet army of 175 divisions. Only in the air, he argued, was the United States “capable of competing with the Russians—and they are capable of competing with us. Preponderance of air power is in the balance. It is this element in which the decisive struggle is likely to take place.”
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Mississippi’s John Rankin rose to endorse this view. Noting how “the next war will be an atomic conflict . . . fought with airplanes and atomic bombs,” he contended that “this movement to increase our Air Force is to me the most encouraging step that has yet been taken on this floor. We have reached the time when our Air Force is the first line of defense.”
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Taber, meanwhile, was complaining that although it made sense to move more deliberately, “that seems impossible with the present feeling in the House.”
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The amendment offering the scale of appropriation that Vinson and Rankin championed was approved without opposition, 115–0, before the full defense appropriations bill was endorsed by an emphatic 343–3 vote.

With the Democrats back in control after the 1948 elections, such spending decisions were reviewed and sponsored by a single House Subcommittee on Armed Services Appropriations.
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Given the new structure created by the National Security Act, it dealt for the first time with all the services together. Chaired by a Texan, George Mahon, it held eleven weeks of hearings. Among others, it heard from Vinson, who now led Armed Services, before it produced a budget that cut army appropriations, held the navy steady, and, most important, meaningfully increased the scale of the air force. The committee also received a briefing, off the record, about Soviet intentions from none other than George Kennan.
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During the two days of floor debate—discussion that left almost all the members ignorant about why a certain level of spending was desirable and what it would buy—Mahon explained only in broad terms why this strategic posture was necessary. He argued that the United States must “prepare [itself] to strike a quick and deadly blow at the very heart of the potential enemy,” and that “the only force under heaven that can now deliver the quick and devastating blow is the United States Air Force.”
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With atomic weapons as its centerpiece, strategic planning took a turn toward making “a first strike on the Soviet Union’s nuclear capability the highest priority in the event of war.”
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A key May 1949 review for the Joint Chiefs concluded that “from the standpoint of national security, the advantages of its early use would be transcending,” and called urgently for a considerable increase in the atomic stockpile.
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As war planning proceeded, it was understood that consultation with Congress would take place only “if time permitted.”
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But time, it was becoming clear, would not permit. With the Soviet Union’s detonation of its first bomb and the war in Korea, U.S. strategic thinking took a turn toward the quick use of the superior American stockpile to first destroy the atomic capability of the USSR, even, perhaps, to the point of launching preventive bombing strikes at key targets.

On June 6, 1950, the sixth anniversary of D-day, General LeMay led a SAC exercise that simulated a full-scale atomic attack on the Soviet Union.
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As the Korean War remobilized the country, John Allison, the director of the State Department’s Office of Northeast Asian Affairs, argued for a very assertive policy, one aimed at conquering North Korea by any means possible. “That this may mean war on a global scale is true,” his memorandum of July 24, 1950, averred, “but when all legal and moral right is on our side why should we hesitate?” Using the term that had come to be widely used in the prior three years, he counseled that “the free world cannot any longer live under constant fear.” In January 1951, air force secretary Symington was counseling a shift from the ground war in Korea to an air assault on China. If this course were to lead to the participation of the Soviet Union, the result, he advised, would be “the atomic bombardment of Soviet Russia itself.”
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The development of an “early use” doctrine and the consideration of the possibility of overcoming inhibitions about the utilization of this terrible weapon raised questions about custody, which, under the terms of the Atomic Energy Act, belonged to the AEC. In 1949, after the Soviet Union developed the ability to strike the United States with atomic weapons, Maryland’s Millard Tydings led a congressional effort to persuade President Truman to shift control to the armed forces. By April 1951, after Mao’s two-year-old People’s Republic of China had entered the war, and with the potential use of atomic weapons on the agenda as a pressing as a pressing question, President Truman ordered the first exception to civilian custody of the bomb by transferring nine atomic weapons to the military command in Guam. By September 1952, as the Korean War raged on and fears for American vulnerability to Soviet attack grew, a new policy was put in place. Codified by the document “Agreed Concepts Regarding Atomic Weapons,” it gave the Department of Defense, rather than the AEC, “custodial responsibility for stocks of atomic weapons outside of the continental United States and for such numbers of atomic weapons in the continental United States as may be needed to assure operational flexibility and military readiness.”
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Hand in hand with this change was the exceptional buildup in both conventional and nuclear forces that began in the summer of 1950. Stimulated by the outbreak of war, a striking rationale for an energetic program of rearmament was sitting on the shelf as NSC-68, the landmark 1950 strategic assessment conducted jointly by the Departments of State and Defense at President Truman’s request that they “undertake a reexamination of our objectives in peace and war and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans, in the light of the probable fission bomb capability and possible thermonuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union.”
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Drafted from mid-February through March by a study group in the State Department led by Paul Nitze, this relatively brief document offered a hard-hitting, stern analysis that placed the incompatibility of the American and Soviet systems front and center. Unless spending on weapons were massively increased, and unless troop levels were substantially raised, this document counseled, the viability of the globe’s democracies would be threatened by likely Soviet assaults. This was more than a standard geopolitical struggle for power; it was, rather, a battle for a particular way of life based on a “determination to maintain the essential elements of individual freedom, as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights; our determination to create conditions under which our free and democratic system can live and prosper; and our determination to fight if necessary to defend our way of life, for which as in the Declaration of Independence, ‘with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.’” For this project to succeed, it concluded, “this Government, the American people, and all free peoples” must recognize “that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.”
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NSC-68 offered Americans four alternatives. They could continue to fund the military inadequately; undertake a preventive atomic war; withdraw to the Western Hemisphere; or do as the document proposed, ramp up American strength and preparedness through military investments and mobilize for a cold war of great range that would include the use of cultural and economic measures—that is, a crusade for freedom, with the United States at its center. Before the Korean War began, the document was yet to be approved. But with the outbreak of that fierce conflict, the country took the fourth course and broadly followed the document’s directions.

With the adoption of NSC-68 as security policy in September, and with the quick adoption of a supplemental budget, U.S. defense spending ramped up very quickly, from an original projection of some $13 billion in fiscal year 1951 to an actual figure of $58 billion. Strikingly, while much of this expenditure was devoted to Korea, the bulk of it was directed elsewhere—to strengthen NATO and the European allies, to build a new class of aircraft carriers, and especially to enhance the air force’s long-range capability to deliver atomic bombs. Military spending grew to $70 billion the next year, when expenditures on fighting in Korea reached their peak. Afterward, weapons and troop spending remained very high, just above $50 billion for fiscal 1953, never again to fall below $42 billion. A permanent war economy was born.
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Concurrently, the arms race took a more dramatic turn. Both the United States and the Soviet Union decided to develop and build a hydrogen bomb, a weapon based on plutonium fusion that could release one thousand times more energy than the bombs dropped over Japan, with each country’s military and civilian leaders thinking it would be intolerable to have the other exclusively possess a thermonuclear weapon. This was a fateful instance of what specialists call “the security dilemma.” Although the United States and the Soviet Union would have favored circumstances in which neither possessed hydrogen bombs, each was trapped by the desire, as a retrospective analysis recalled a decade later, “to avoid a world in which the other had the H-bomb and it did not.” Thus both powers “rushed to make it, and they ended in a worse position than that in which they had begun.”
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