national policy.” Sprague remembered LeMay responding, “I don't care. It's my policy. That's what I'm going to do.” Wiesner says LeMay responded, “It's my job to make it possible for the President to change his policy” — a less insubordinate answer, but only barely. Sprague chose not to report the renegade commander to the President and buried the incident for thirty years. At least, he reasoned, US strategic bombers would not be destroyed on the ground.
Nineteen fifty-four, the year of maximum danger, passed without preventive war or preemption when the National Security Council determined that “the USSR, by a maximum effort, could launch about 300 aircraft from the Chukotski and Kola areas, 200 to 250 of which might reach their targets.” LeMay would not have agreed with this assessment, but it was evidently sufficient to give pause at the Pentagon. A gap had opened between SAC and Washington, SAC believing that it could still deliver a preemptive first strike, Washington already to a considerable degree deterred.
The Soviet Union tested a two-stage, lithium-deuteride-fueled thermonuclear device on November 22, 1955, dropping it from a Tu-16 bomber to minimize fallout. It yielded 1.6 megatons, a yield deliberately reduced for the Semipalatinsk test from its design yield of 3 MT. According to Yuri Romanov, Andrei Sakharov and Yakov Zeldovich worked out the Teller-Ulam configuration in conversations together in early spring 1954, independently of the US development. “I recall how Andrei Dmitrievich gathered the young associates in his tiny office,” Romanov writes, “… and began talking about the amazing ability of materials with a high atomic number to be an excellent reflector of high-intensity, short-pulse radiation.” The Sarov designers had to fight Vyacheslav Malyshev for resources to develop the new design; the Minister of Medium Machine Building, conservative as his predecessor, wanted them to stick to weaponized layer-cake thermonucle-ars, and such a device was tested on November 6,1955, three weeks before the two-stage design, as a backup in case the new system should fail.
Victor Adamsky remembers the shock wave from the new thermonuclear racing across the steppe toward the observers. “It was a front of moving air that you could see that differed in quality from the air before and after. It came, it was really terrible; the grass was covered with frost and the moving front thawed it, you felt it melting as it approached you.” Igor Kurchatov walked in to ground zero with Yuli Khariton after the test and was horrified to see the earth cratered even though the bomb had detonated above ten thousand feet. “That was such a terrible, monstrous sight,” he told Anatoli Alexandrov when he returned to Moscow. “That weapon must not be allowed ever to be used.”
The increasing Soviet capability did not prevent the United States from practicing diplomacy by nuclear threat through the second half of the 1950s. An emboldened Nikita Khrushchev followed suit. Eisenhower had passed an implicit nuclear threat to the Chinese in 1953 that may have contributed to the Korean armistice signed that July, although Stalin's death was a far more important factor in the Chinese decision. Khrushchev, through Bulganin, threatened Britain and France during the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt at Suez in 1956, the first such threat from the Soviet Union; Eisenhower checked it by warning that attacks on France or Britain would force a US response and by putting SAC on a modified alert. The President alerted SAC again during the US invasion of Lebanon in 1958, deploying SAC tanker aircraft forward deliberately, he wrote afterward, to show “readiness and determination without implying any threat of aggression.” Of that movement Khrushchev commented to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, according to a Nasser confidant, that “he thought the Americans had gone off their heads. ‘Frankly,’ [Khrushchev] said, ‘we are not ready for confrontation. We are not ready for World War III.’” In 1958, John Foster Dulles's State Department authorized the Secretary of the Air Force to acknowledge publicly that the US was prepared to use nuclear weapons in the conflict with the People's Republic of China over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu; in response, Khrushchev wrote Eisenhower to warn that “an attack on the People's Republic of China… is an attack on the Soviet Union.”
Nuclear blackmail continued after 1958, but the stakes increased because the superpowers confronted each other directly, because the conflicts concerned what historian Richard K. Betts calls “the core geographic security zones of the superpowers” — Berlin and Cuba — and because the Soviet nuclear arsenal significantly increased (to 1,050 by 1959 and to 3,100 by 1962). Sputnik, the first earth satellite, which the Soviets had orbited in 1957, had panicked the US, much to Eisenhower's disgust; the US was well along in intercontinental ballistic missile development when Sputnik began beeping and quickly surpassed Soviet deployment. The hemorrhage of East Germans defecting to the West through Berlin in the late 1950s challenged Khrushchev sufficiently that he threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and permanently close off Western access. The Cuban revolution, culminating in 1959, brought what turned out to be a Communist government to power ninety miles off US shores. John F. Kennedy, succeeding Eisenhower as President in 1961, moved SAC to 50 percent ground-alert status beginning in July 1961, when Berlin was fulminating: half SAC's bomber fleet held ready for a fifteen-minute scramble. SAC also maintained at least twelve B-52 heavy jet bombers airborne at all times. The Soviet military made its corresponding point by inviting foreign attaches to observe Soviet military maneuvers, including maneuvers of tactical nuclear weapons, four days before the East Germans began throwing up the Berlin Wall.
In the autumn of 1961, newly orbited US reconnaissance satellites revealed that the Soviet Union had fewer strategic delivery systems than US intelligence had previously estimated — only 44 ICBMs and 155 heavy bombers (compared to the US's 156 ICBMs, 144 Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles and 1,300 strategic bombers). Paul Nitze warned the Soviet ambassador over lunch one day that the missile gap favored the US; for good measure, the government leaked the story to journalist Joseph Alsop, who reported the gap in a column. Kennedy may also have warned Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko directly in a private meeting at the White House.
Partly as a result of these threatening warnings, Khrushchev decided to install nuclear missiles secretly in Cuba, to match fifteen Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles that the US had deployed in Turkey, on the southern border of the USSR. He wanted to protect Cuba from US invasion, he claimed in retirement, and to “[equalize] what the West likes to call ‘the balance of power.'… We had no desire to start a war. On the contrary, our principal aim was only to deter America from starting a war. We were well aware that a war which started over Cuba would quickly expand into a world war.” The Soviets would not need many missiles in Cuba to right the balance. “Before the Soviets put missiles in Cuba,” Kennedy Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon recalls, “it was doubtful whether they could deliver any warheads from Soviet territory at all. So while the Cuban installation didn't add very much to their numbers or didn't change the overall balance very much, my impression at the time was that they radically altered the numbers of
The Soviets began a military build-up in Cuba early in 1962. By August, the CIA was reporting that medium- range ballistic missiles might be part of the expansion. A U-2 overflight found MRBM sites in western Cuba first on October 14. Kennedy condemned the secret installation and announced an impending naval “quarantine” on October 22, Monday night of a harrowing week when the world feared (justifiably) that the superpowers verged on full-scale nuclear war.
Thomas Power was SAC commander by then; LeMay had moved up to USAF Chief of Staff, which put him in the Pentagon and at the White House during the Cuban missile crisis. (“Those were ten days when neither Curt nor I went home,” General David Burchinal, LeMay's Deputy Chief for Plans and Operations, recalled. “We slept in the Pentagon right around the clock.”) Power was at least as eager to “get World War III started” as LeMay. He had been instructed by LeMay's predecessor Chief, Thomas D. White, that he had the authority; White wrote Power in 1957 that “authority to order retaliatory attack may be exercised by CINCSAC [i.e., Commander-in-Chief, SAC] if time or circumstances would not permit a decision by the President.” McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's National Security Adviser, had warned the young President of just such a possibility; “a subordinate commander,” Bundy alerted Kennedy in January 1961, “faced with a substantial Russian military action could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you (by failure of communication at either end of the line).” LeMay would acknowledge in retirement that Power was “a sadist”; one of Power's subordinate commanders confirms that view:
General Power… was demanding; he was mean; he was cruel, unforgiving, and he didn't have the time of day to pass with anyone. A hard, cruel individual… I would like to say this. I used to worry about General Power. I used to worry that General Power was not stable. I used to worry about the fact that he had control over so many weapons and weapon systems and could, under certain conditions, launch the force. Back in the days before we had real positive control [i.e., PAL locks], SAC had the power to do a lot of things, and it was in his hands, and he knew
