arsenal; by 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis, 27,100.
LeMay's bomber forces increased accordingly, from 668 at the end of 1951, most of them B-50s and B-29s, to about 500 long-range jet B-52s and more than 2,500 air-refuelable medium-range B-47s in 1959. Another 1,000 SAC jet and propeller aircraft supplied transport, aerial refueling and reconnaissance.
In 1950, LeMay had identified 1954 as the year of maximum danger, “the critical year at which time we must be prepared to meet, and effectively counter, the full military force of the USSR… ” The Soviet atomic arsenal, though small, was growing, as was the inventory of Soviet bombers; as 1954 approached, this meager strategic counterpart to SAC began to pose a quantifiable threat. A special subcommittee of the National Security Council reported in June 1953 that continental defense programs were “not now adequate either to prevent, neutralize or seriously deter the military or covert attacks which the USSR is capable of launching… ” That inadequacy, the subcommittee found, “constitutes an unacceptable risk to our nation's survival.” The subcommittee recommended enlarging SAC while developing early-warning radar systems as well as continental air defenses. Joe 4, tested two months later, increased the kilotonnage a single Soviet bomber could carry and therefore raised the stakes.
The Air Force greatly preferred offense to defense; it was axiomatic to LeMay that the bombers always got through. Both civilian and military strategists, including John von Neumann, had soberly discussed preventive war in the late 1940s, before the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb; as the year of maximum danger approached, the question came up again for serious review within the US government. In the spring of 1953, a committee headed by retired Air Force General James Doolittle proposed giving the Soviet Union a two-year deadline to come to terms and attacking it if it failed to do so. Eisenhower promptly rejected this bizarre nuclear ultimatum. In August 1953, the new Air Force Chief of Staff, Nathan Twining, reviewed an air staff study, “The Coming National Crisis,” which warned that the US would soon have to choose between submitting to “the whims of a small group of proven barbarians [or] be militarily prepared to support such decision as might involve general war.” Retaliation — a second strike as opposed to a first — would mean disaster in a nuclear war, the study argued; such a policy was the diabolic invention of a “pseudo-moralist who insists that we must accept this catastrophe.”
The question of preventive war came on to Eisenhower for review in the spring of 1954, when a JCS advance study group briefed the President on a plan proposing that the US “deliberately precipitatfe] war with the USSR in the near future… before the USSR could achieve a large enough thermonuclear capability to be a real menace to [the] Continental US.” Army Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway forthrightly denounced the proposal, he reported afterward:
At the end of the briefing the President invited comments and I stated that this presentation left me with but one clear impression, which was that this Group was advocating the deliberate precipitation of aggressive war by the US against the USSR; that I thought this was contrary to every principle upon which our Nation had been founded, and which it continued to profess; and that in my opinion it would be abhorrent to the great mass of the American people.
Eisenhower concluded the debate in late 1954 by issuing an updated Basic National Security Policy statement: “The United States and its allies must reject the concept of preventive war or acts intended to provoke war.”
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LeMay had no interest in dribbling out his forces on three disparate missions. The Soviets might need a month in 1954 to deliver their arsenal of about 150 atomic bombs; his 1,008 bomber crews, once deployed, could deliver as many as 750 bombs in a few hours. The SAC commander continued to believe obstinately that the most effective attack would be his “Sunday punch”: simultaneous assault from all sides with everything in the stockpile. A Navy officer, Captain William Brigham Moore, attended a SAC standard briefing on March 15,1954, kept notes and came away appalled:
SAC considers that the optimum situation would be to have adequate tankers deployed to overseas bases and also that the bombers would be similarly deployed prior to the major attack. It was estimated that SAC could lay down an attack under these conditions of 600–750 bombs by approaching Russia from many directions so as to hit their [radar] early warning system simultaneously. It would require about two hours from this moment until bombs had been dropped by using the bomb-as-you-go system in which both [airfields] and [urban] targets would be hit as they reached them. This part of the briefing was skillfully done by showing successive charts of Europe based on one-half-hour time intervals after SAC bombers first hit the Russian early warning screen. Many heavy lines, one representing each wing, were shown progressively converging on the heart of Russia with pretty stars to indicate the many bombs dropped on DGZs [i.e., designated ground zeros]. The final impression was that virtually all of Russia would be nothing but a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours.
During the post-briefing question period, someone asked LeMay what course he would advocate if hostilities were renewed in Korea — by then at truce. He answered that he would drop a few bombs in China, Manchuria and southeastern Russia. “In those ‘poker games,’” the Navy captain paraphrases him, “such as Korea and Indo-China [where the French were then engaged], we… have never raised the ante — we have always just called the bet. We ought to try raising sometime.”
By 1954, Curtis LeMay had apparently begun raising the ante with the Soviet Union on his own, covertly and extralegally. LeMay's crews needed target information to carry out their mission as well as information about Soviet defenses, particularly fighter bases and radar frequencies. In the late 1940s, SAC routinely flew reconnaissance missions in stripped-down B-29s around the perimeter of the USSR; it was from these “weather” squadrons that the first long-range atomic detection aircraft were drawn. But LeMay wanted more than sideward glances into the Soviet Union; he wanted overflights. Those began no later than early 1950.
They quickly drew a response from Soviet defense forces. A Navy long-range PB4Y-2 engaged in electronic- intelligence gathering was shot down by Soviet fighters on April 8, 1950, probably over Soviet territory; ten men were killed. Such intrusive and provocative flights — legally acts of war — might justify a Soviet attack on Europe; to forestall that eventuality, Truman ordered overflights banned. But LeMay still required reconnaissance, particularly photographs of the images of targets on aircraft radar scopes. He intended to turn such photographs into etched Lucite plates that his crews could overlay onto their radar scopes to practice atomic-bombing. The determined SAC commander thought up a way to work around Truman's ban. With the approval of the JCS he made a deal with the British: the US would supply the Royal Air Force with B-45 medium jet bombers, the newest, fastest high-altitude aircraft available; the RAF would fly photo- and radar-reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union and share the intelligence with SAC. RAF crews began overflights in March 1952, after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and approved the risky venture. One of the pilots remembers the Soviet Union distinctly from populous Europe as “one large black hole with odd lights here and there… There were big areas we were supposed to be photographing; most of them were installations out of their radar range, armed installations which are not lit, and once we came up south of Moscow itself you [could] see all the lights. Moscow's a big place and lit up so you do get a good reference point from that.”
Soviet interceptors were unable to locate the night-flying B-45s, but the planes were tracked on Soviet radar and sometimes encountered antiaircraft flak. The Soviets believed the flights were American. By 1954 they were, and US overflights continued in a variety of aircraft, including the notorious U-2, until reconnaissance satellites took their place beginning in I960. The Soviet Union shot down at least twenty planes during overflights with the loss of an estimated one to two hundred US airmen, some of whom went to the gulag.
LeMay used these reconnaissance flights not only to gather electronic and photographic intelligence; he also used them to probe Soviet air defenses, knowing as he did so that he might be provoking war. There is testimony that he may have meant to do just that. If he could not initiate preventive war, he seems to have concluded, he might be able to push the Soviets to high enough levels of alert to justify launching a full preemptive attack. He
