SAC “on the alert for some atomic operations based out of Okinawa. Apparently the aircraft of the 9th [Bomb Group] are being considered for this job.” LeMay arranged to fly to Washington to meet with Vandenberg the next morning.
Omar Bradley, chairman of the JCS, took the decision to Truman for approval that morning of April 6, 1951. Truman saw an opportunity in the Joint Chiefs’ conviction that they needed nuclear weapons in Korea to negotiate MacArthur's removal from command, an action the military leaders had been resisting. How could he release nuclear weapons to a commander in whom he had no confidence, who had shown himself to be a loose cannon? Evidently Bradley took the point and carried it back to the JCS.
Truman called Dean to the White House that afternoon, the AEC chairman recorded in his diary:
I… was told by [the President] that the situation in the Far East is extremely serious; that there is a heavy concentration of men just above the Yalu River…; that there is a very heavy concentration of air forces on several fields and the planes are tip-to-tip and extremely vulnerable; that there is a concentration of some seventy Russian submarines at Vladivostok and a heavy concentration on Southern Sakhalin — all of which indicates that not only are the Reds and the Russians ready to push us out of Korea, but may attempt to take the Japanese Islands and with the submarines cut our supply lines to Japan and Korea.
He told me he had a request from the Joint Chiefs of Staff [deleted; probably “to transfer nine atomic bombs to military custody;”] that no decision had been made to use these weapons and he hoped very much that there would be no necessity for using them; that before there was any decision to use them the matter would be fully explored…; that in no event would the bomb be used in Northern Korea where he appreciated, as I pointed out to him, that they would be completely ineffective and psychological “duds.”…
He then said that if I saw no objection he would sign the order to me directing me to release to the custody of General Vandenberg, Chief of Staff, USAF, nine nuclears…
The same day, Dean wrote, he “called General Vandenberg and told him the President had signed the order; that we were prepared to discuss details with him.” Two days later, after a Sunday afternoon discussion, the Joint Chiefs endorsed Truman's decision to fire MacArthur. He did so on Wednesday, April 11, to a firestorm of national hostility. By then the nine Mark IV nuclear capsules had been transferred (on April 10) and were in USAF custody.
Fairfield-Suisun AFB had been renamed Travis AFB in honor of the only US general ever killed by an atomic bomb. The 9th Bomb Group there was assigned once again to carry the bombs, deploying to Guam “on a normal training mission,” as LeMay's aide noted deadpan in the general's diary, “and then maneuvering] to Okinawa where they will stay for possible action.” (This decision was quickly rescinded in Washington and the 9th was ordered to hold on Guam, probably because Okinawa was within range of the Soviet bombers.) LeMay assigned his deputy commander at SAC, Thomas Power, to direct the mission. Power had led the first and most destructive firebomb-ing of Tokyo; he was “a man so cold, hard and demanding,” writes a LeMay biographer, “that several of his colleagues and subordinates have flatly described him as sadistic. LeMay himself, when asked if Power was actually a sadist, has said, ‘He was. He was sort of an autocratic bastard. But he was the best wing commander I had on Guam [during the Second World War]. He got things done.” Power left for Tokyo to meet with MacArthur's successor, General Matthew Ridgway, on April 24, by which time the 9th Bomb Group appears to have deployed to Guam. LeMay wrote the USAF director of plans on May 7 that Power had negotiated an arrangement with Ridgway that “the use of A-bombs… must be approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff upon request of the theater commander.”
Whether or when the nine nuclear capsules were mated up with their HE assemblies is not reported in the declassified record of this first US military nuclear deployment since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomber squadron and its replacements continued to be based on Guam, as did the nuclear and nonnuclear bomb components. As of May 18, Vandenberg and LeMay “determined that General Power's status in the Far East would be unchanged for the time being.” Ridgway asked the JCS on August 28, according to LeMay's diary, “that SAC be prepared to deliver on twelve-hour notice an atomic attack if necessity arrives,” but the Korean commander may simply have been preparing for future contingencies; he also asked for an aircraft carrier that could “lay… down an atomic attack if needed” and wanted “atomic artillery… prepared and forwarded as soon as a capability exists.” The Navy had only begun to develop such an atomic capability, and atomic artillery was more than a year away. Far from nuclear plenty, LeMay was still working to build up SAC's capability to deliver its Sunday punch; he wrote Vandenberg on August 3, 1951, that his ability to put “bombs on [Soviet] targets” within six days after being ordered to do so had increased from 140 bombs to 146 since April. In a lecture the previous year he had called this order of magnitude “small-scale.”
Four months later, on November 27, 1951, LeMay proposed to Vandenberg “discontinuing the Guam deployment,” based on the judgment of the interservice watch committee “that the Communists in Korea are not preparing for a general ground offensive in the near future” — SAC could, LeMay pointed out, “quickly redeploy the squadron.” Since LeMay's reason for discontinuing the deployment was nothing more urgent than its disruption of his training program — implying that he judged unit training to have higher priority than atomic-bombing China at that time — the bombs and bombers presumably soon came home.
The weapons on which the United States had gambled its security in the years immediately after the Second World War had turned out to be notably useless when war tested the new conditions of the atomic age. Robert Op-penheimer had foreseen that they might. “I have the impression that the general glow which surrounds the atom,” he told an audience of officers at the National War College a few months after the beginning of the Korean War, “the excitement about atomic propulsion and super-super bombs and radioactive poisons, have made it hard to concentrate on the question of how many bombs we can use.” The experience in Japan had set no precedents, he thought:
Are [atomic bombs] useful in ground combat? Are they useful in preventing the delivery of atomic bombs? What can we do with them?… It seems that it is a very hard job, when all the experience you have is of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of an essentially defeated enemy looking for a chance to get out of the war; of undefended targets with no air cover, of air superiority all on our side; of an army decimated; of a fleet with its shipping all gone — when you have that as your only experience, it is a job that calls for a great deal of imagination to think what is the atom good for in war.
The JCS, who had been fighting for custody for years, never returned the nine bombs to the Atomic Energy Commission; they remained in Curtis LeMay's arsenal. He would have cherished them; Vandenberg had informed him early in 1951 that his side bet with “the guy who had the key” was off:
I agree with you [Vandenberg wrote] as to the confusion that a major attack against Washington would produce with respect to orders that should emanate from the Seat of Government. However, under existing law, authority to initiate the atomic offensive cannot be formally delegated either to field agencies of the Atomic Energy Commission or major commands of the Air Force.
The prospect of atomic-bombing Asia for the second time in less than a decade made Harry Truman sufficiently uncomfortable that he never again deployed armed atomic bombs abroad. His forbearance during a difficult war did not prevent him from indulging the bloody fantasy that atomic bombs might cut the Gordian knot of US-Soviet relations. He wrote a note to himself early in 1952 imagining a brutal ultimatum:
The situation in the Far East is becoming more and more difficult. Dealing with Communist Governments is like an honest man trying to deal with a numbers racket king or the head of a dope ring. The Communist governments, the heads of numbers and dope rackets have no sense of honor and no moral code.
It now looks as if all that the Chinese wanted when they asked for a cease fire was a chance to import war materials and resupply their front lines.
It seems to me that the proper approach now, would be an ultimatum with a ten-day expiration limit, informing Moscow that we intend to blockade the China coast from the Korean border to Indo-China, and that we intend to destroy every military base in Manchuria, including submarine bases, by means now in our control, and if there is further interference we shall eliminate any ports or cities necessary to accomplish our peaceful
