missiles, President Kennedy invited the Chiefs to the White House so that he could thank them for their support during the crisis, and there was one hell of a scene. LeMay came out saying, ‘We lost! We ought to just go in there today and knock ‘em off!’”
At the height of the crisis, according to a retired SAC wing commander, SAC airborne alert bombers deliberately flew past their turnaround points toward Soviet airspace, an unambiguous threat which Soviet radar operators would certainly have recognized and reported. “I knew what my target was,” the SAC general adds: “Leningrad.” The bombers only turned around when the Soviet freighters carrying missiles to Cuba stopped dead in the Atlantic.
Nuclear crises are not poker games. What Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power did not know — what no one in the US government knew until it was revealed at a conference between Soviet and US missile crisis participants in Moscow in 1989 — was that, contrary to CIA estimates, the Soviet forces in Cuba during the missile crisis possessed twenty nuclear warheads for medium-range R-12 ballistic missiles that could be targeted on US cities as far north as Washington, DC, as well as nine tactical nuclear missiles which the Soviet field commanders in Cuba were delegated authority to use — the only time such authority was ever delegated by the Soviet leadership. The medium-range missiles would probably have been launched as well, McNamara believes. “If they'd been NATO missiles without PALs, then the NATO officers, acting without Presidential authorization, would have been likely to use them rather than lose them. The fear that Soviet or Cuban officers might have reacted the way NATO officers might have was one reason I was extremely reluctant to risk the air strike.”
In 1954, when LeMay calculated that he could deliver a Sunday punch of 750 atomic bombs to targets in the Soviet Union overnight, the Defense Department Weapons Systems Evaluation Group estimated that Soviet and Soviet bloc casualties would total seventeen million injured and sixty million dead. In 1962, Power was prepared to deliver almost three thousand strategic nuclear weapons, many of them thermonuclear bombs, with yields totaling seven thousand megatons. Under such a rain of destruction, the United States would have killed at least 100 million human beings[52] in pursuit of the small group of Soviet leaders, as LeMay said, “[who] have as their primary goal the… retention of power inside the USSR in the few hands in which it now resides.” If the Soviet field commanders in Cuba had launched their missiles as well, more millions of Americans would have been killed. Seven thousand megatons was also more than enough fire and brimstone to initiate a lethal nuclear winter over at least the Northern Hemisphere, freezing and starving yet more millions in Europe, Asia and North America — a phenomenon that scientists had not yet identified and that neither SAC nor Washington had yet assessed. How extraordinary that Curtis LeMay believed for the rest of his life that the United States “lost” the Cuban missile crisis and the Cold War. If John Kennedy had followed LeMay's advice, history would have forgotten the Nazis and their terrible Holocaust. Ours would have been the historic omnicide.
The Soviet Union never went to full nuclear alert in all the years of the Cold War. After the Cuban missile crisis, the United States never did again. Nor did the two nations ever again directly confront each other.
Epilogue: The Gradual Removal of Prejudices’
Robert Oppenheimer turned fifty during his security hearing in 1954; he went home to Princeton visibly aged. A former student who saw him there remarked that he had always looked younger than his years, but now looked older. He continued to direct the Institute for Advanced Study for another decade, “eating out his heart in frustration,” George Kennan would say at his funeral, “over the consciousness that the talents he knew himself to possess, once welcomed and used by the official establishment of his country to develop the destructive possibilities of nuclear science, were rejected when it came to the development of the great positive ones he believed that science [offered].”
From Princeton, in 1959, Oppenheimer could watch with the rest of the country the public humiliation of Lewis Strauss, two grueling months of Senate hearings reviewing Strauss's fitness to serve as Secretary of Commerce. The manipulative financier was pilloried for his arrogance and rigidity and caught in a lie under oath; at one point he feared his phones had been tapped. With Clinton Anderson of New Mexico leading the fight, the Senate rejected Strauss 49–46. His brother said he never got over it. In that despondency, Lewis Strauss and Robert Oppenheimer finally had something in common.
Oppenheimer was called to speak to the world from Paris, from South America, from England and Japan and finally from within the US. John Kennedy invited him to dine at the White House with forty-nine Nobel laureates in 1961 and planned to present him the Enrico Fermi Award, the AEC's highest honor, on December 2, 1963; Lyndon Johnson, in a time of mourning, made the presentation to Oppenheimer in the White House Cabinet Room — a medal and fifty thousand dollars to take home from an agency that still denied him clearance as a security risk.
Edward Teller sought personal reconciliation with Oppenheimer then. Teller had received the Fermi Award the previous year. He nominated Hyman Rickover, Leo Szilard and Oppenheimer as possible successors. When he heard that Oppenheimer had been chosen, he sent him a note of congratulation. Teller wrote that he was happy remembering their 1942 Berkeley summer. He still thought the Acheson-Lilienthal Report was the only “honest and effective” arms control proposal anyone had ever made. He had wanted to speak to Oppenheimer before the occasion of the award, he confessed, but had not been sure that he would be doing the right thing. He thought it might have been better if Oppenheimer had received the Fermi Award first. He wished his old colleague good luck.
Oppenheimer had been wounded too deeply for reconciliation. At the Institute for Advanced Study he drafted a friendly note and thought of enclosing a recent lecture. He thought again, refiled the lecture and reduced the note to formality:
Dear Edward:
Thank you for writing me. I am very glad that you did.
With good wishes.
Robert Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer retired from the institute in 1966, when illness weakened him. He died of cancer of the throat on February 18, 1967, at the age of sixty-two. His ashes were scattered on the ocean off the Virgin Islands, where he often vacationed. Among his last published words were these: “Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.”
He left behind an evocative self-portrait. In 1963,
The Bhagavad-Gita
The notebooks of Michael Faraday
Edward Teller became the Richard Nixon of American science — dark, brooding, indefatigable. As he predicted, many of his colleagues turned away from him. Their rejection hurt him deeply, he told his biographers one bitter day in 1974:
