Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

realistic instead of idealistic, as we appear to be,” he wrote in a secret report, “Our Army of the Future,” “we would not permit any foreign power with which we are not firmly allied, and in which we do not have absolute confidence, to make or possess atomic weapons. If such a country started to make atomic weapons we would destroy its capacity to make them before it has progressed far enough to threaten us.” The Joint Intelligence Committee plan explored doing just that.

What the US military planned contingently and some military leaders vigorously advocated was not official policy. The US government never endorsed or authorized preventive war. Harry Truman evidently found the idea morally repugnant as well as politically suicidal. “Such a war is the weapon of dictators,” the President said publicly in 1950, “not of free democratic countries like the United States.” But the extreme conviction that the only sure way to protect America from what one Air Force general, Nathan Twining, would call “the whims of a small group of proven barbarians” was to destroy the industrial capacity of the USSR preemptively — to strike Soviet cities by surprise with atomic bombs, that is, with the potential loss in a few apocalyptic days of tens of millions of human lives — persisted within the military, the USAAF in particular.

Norstad's more ambitious study of September 1945, which incorporated the strategic chart of Russian and Manchurian urban areas that Groves had seen in late August, found that the Soviet Union could be defeated at the outset of a war if the United States destroyed sixty-six Soviet “cities of strategic importance,” neutralized a few air bases the Soviets might use outside the USSR and isolated “the battlefield” by atomic-bombing such tactical targets as the Dardanelles and the Kiel and Suez Canals. For these purposes, and estimating that only 48 percent of the bombs would get through and find their targets, Norstad concluded that the United States would need to stockpile 466 atomic bombs of Nagasaki scale. The USAAF general sent his study to Groves for comment. Groves dismissed this first air effort impatiently. It underestimated the destructiveness of atomic bombs, he told Norstad, and overestimated how destructive they would need to be to disable a city. “My general conclusion would be that the number of bombs indicated as required, is excessive.”

The day before Norstad sent his study to Groves for review, September 14, he and USAAF Lieutenant General Hoyt Vandenberg had been appointed to a board headed by Carl Spaatz charged to report on “the effect of the atomic bomb on the size, organization, composition, and employment of post-war Air Forces.” A few of Norstad's findings made their way into the report the Spaatz Board issued in October, but overall its conclusions were cautious. It noted that the USAAF knew very little about atomic bombs because of Manhattan Project secrecy, which the President had recently extended postwar. The weapon was large, heavy, “enormously expensive and definitely limited in availability.” For these and other reasons, the Spaatz Board recommended that the USAAF wait and see, concluding that “the atomic bomb does not at this time warrant a material change in our present conception of the… Air Force.” The board proposed assigning a bloodhound to follow the trail — a new Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development — and recommended appointing Curtis LeMay, just back from Hokkaido in his long-range B-29.

Production that autumn from Oak Ridge and Hanford confirmed the limits the Spaatz Board had assessed. Oak Ridge separated 1.063 kilograms of U235 per day at a daily cost of $158,300. The Little Boy uranium gun used sixty-four kilograms, which was two months’ production (six Little Boys per year), and with composite cores in the offing for the implosion bomb, Groves decided to stockpile the U235 rather than make it up into wasteful and obsolete guns. Hanford produced about four to six kilograms of plutonium per month, enough for about ten to twelve Fat Man bombs per year (with just over 6 kg of plutonium per core), but composite cores would need only 3.2 kg of plutonium each (plus 6.5 kg of U235). So the only bomb assemblies Los Alamos produced for the rest of the year and during 1946 were Fat Man designs, now called Mark Ills, which could accommodate a solid Christy core or a new composite. The composite, however, could not be certified for military use until the design had been tested at full scale, and no such test was in the offing. Effectively, then, the US production of U235 — by far the larger quantity of fissionable material — was long-term reserve with no short-term military application.

Before Curtis LeMay took up his new duties of research and development, he went on leave, back to his native Ohio, “spending [a] few weeks with my family,” he said, “getting acquainted with them once more” in the midst of “the most beautiful Indian Summer I have ever seen.” On his way to Washington in November he found time to speak to the Ohio Society of New York. Like most returning veterans, he was full of feeling and of resolve.

He could not describe, he told his fellow Ohio State alumni, “the difference between the bomb-blackened ruins and the desolation of our enemies’ cities and the peaceful Ohio cities and landscape, untouched and unmarred by war. I can only say to you, ‘If you love America, do everything you can to make sure that what happened to Germany and Japan will never happen to our country.’”

On leave, he had thought through the last four years of war, he said. America had not been prepared. “She escaped the ruin visited upon other nations because she was given time to prepare, and because of distance.” But in the next war, LeMay warned, “distance will be academic and there will be no time for preparation.” The next war would be launched in the air. It would be fought with fantastic new weapons. “December 7,1941, will seem like a quiet day in the country in comparison with the first day of the next war.” The next war would be a war of “rockets, radar, jet propulsion, television-guided missiles, speeds faster than sound and atomic power.” They had not had enough bombers at the beginning of the last war, LeMay recounted in horror; “American unpreparedness… extended to the point where on September 1, 1939, the day Hitler smashed into Poland, United States strategic air power consisted of nineteen poorly-equipped heavy bombers.” Before the next war “the air force must be allowed to develop unhindered and unchained. There must be no ceiling, no boundaries, no limitations to our air power development.”

Then LeMay came to the contradiction that he would chew over for years to come. First he offered one of his touchstone concepts: “No air attack, once it is launched, can be completely stopped.” In late 1945, that meant to LeMay that the US would have to have an air force “in being” that could move immediately to retaliate if the country was attacked. But if no air attack can be completely stopped, then retaliation would not protect the country — it would only destroy the enemy's country in turn. That threat of retaliation, that preparation, might be sufficient to prevent attack in the first place. “If we are prepared it may never come. It is not immediately conceivable that any nation will dare to attack us if we are prepared.” So in November 1945, Curtis LeMay was already thinking in terms of what came to be called deterrence. But it was only not immediately conceivable that an enemy might attack us if we were prepared. Evidently it was still conceivable if conditions changed. “International gangsters have twice made the mistake of leaving America until last. They will not make the same mistake a third time.” And if they did not — if they were not deterred — what then?

Moving on to the Pentagon after his stop in New York, LeMay remembered feeling like a square peg in a round hole at first, out of his depth technically in research and development, “but it didn't take me long to become mighty interested.” To glean the spoils of advanced technology from defeated Germany, he organized Project Paper Clip, which brought German scientists to the US as prisoners of war and put them to work continuing the research they had begun for the Third Reich. LeMay's chief catches were Walter Dornberger and Werner von Braun, who had developed the V-2 rocket, the first long-range ballistic missile. He built a wind-tunnel complex for advanced aircraft research in Tullahoma, Tennessee. He commissioned the consulting company that became the Rand Corporation — the first “think tank” — and assigned it the research that resulted in May 1946 in its first report, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship (that is, a satellite). “The reason for having Rand do the study,” comments Herbert York, “was to get a jump on the Navy, which also was studying satellites. LeMay was determined that it wasn't going to be a Navy program, it wasn't going to be a joint Navy-Air Force program, it was going to be an Air Force program.” The report noted pointedly that “the development of a satellite will be directly applicable to the development of an intercontinental rocket missile.” LeMay also lobbied the USAAF during his R&D tenure to develop the long-distance capability to detect an atomic explosion, but his proposal fell on deaf ears. Why bother to look for what everyone knew the Soviets couldn't soon make?

In the midst of these duties LeMay won another assignment. An aide to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, an investment banker with longstanding connections in the physics community named Lewis L. Strauss, had recommended shortly after the end of the war that the Navy “test the ability of ships of present design to withstand the forces generated by the atomic bomb” to scotch “loose talk to the effect that the fleet is obsolete in the face of this new weapon.” Such talk, Strauss feared, would “militate against appropriations to preserve a postwar Navy.” An alert young Democratic senator, Brien McMahon of Connecticut, made a similar proposal on