the Berlin blockade if the US, Britain and France would postpone establishing a West German state until the Council of Foreign Ministers could renew its meetings. Stalin answered that his government was prepared to do so on those terms if the counterblockade was also lifted. Charles Bohlen, one of the State Department's Soviet experts, noticed that Stalin had not mentioned the currency problem, which had stymied previous diplomatic efforts.
Truman had won the November election against all predictions and had just been inaugurated for his first full term as President; he had appointed Dean Acheson his new Secretary of State, following upon George Marshall's retirement because of illness. Acheson brought Stalin's signal to Truman's attention; the American leaders responded with a signal of their own at an Acheson press conference on February 2. Secret negotiations began soon thereafter to end the crisis, and rail traffic into Berlin resumed in May.
Why did the Berlin blockade not come to war? At the outset of the conflict, Winston Churchill, brooding out of office, had propounded a much more belligerent course to the US ambassador to Britain, Lewis Douglas. “When and if the Soviets develop the atomic bomb,” Douglas had reported Churchill's views, “war will become a certainty… He believes that now is the time, promptly, to tell the Soviet[s] that if they do not retire from Berlin and abandon Eastern Germany, withdrawing to the Polish frontier, we will raze their cities. It is further his view that we cannot appease, conciliate or provoke the Soviet[s]; that the only vocabulary they understand is force; and that if, therefore, we took this position, they would yield.” LeMay had favored military action at the beginning as well:
[Army] General [Arthur G.] Trudeau, who commanded the constabulary, and I concocted a plan where he would run a small military force up the autobahn and open Berlin by force. I would have a communications van, and when he started up, I would have the B-29s based in England in the air over Germany with the fighters that I had also moved up closer. If General Trudeau made the decision that he was at war, instead of just pushing through token resistance, then I would let the air force go and hit the Russian airfields. The Russians were all lined wingtip to wingtip on their airfields. We presented this plan to General Clay… and he sent it to Washington, but the answer was “No.”
Instead of military confrontation, with caution and restraint, the two suspicious adversaries had limited themselves to an extended, nonviolent exploration of their mutual positions and commitments, improvising communications as they went along. Though both were revolutionary systems with messianic pretensions, they had found it expedient to cooperate first of all during the Second World War. Through that four years of cooperation, the Soviet leadership had learned just how immense was the productive capacity the United States could deploy in war — capacity sufficient to sustain the USSR with Lend-Lease while fighting a two-ocean war, capacity sufficient also to absorb the immense cost (as the Soviets were now learning at first hand) of developing a capability to manufacture atomic bombs. If the US had removed all but token forces from Europe since the victory, it had continued to enlarge its atomic capability, as its tests at Bikini and Eniwetok in 1946 and 1948 confirmed. And however much Soviet leaders publicly belittled atomic weapons, Stalin evidently judged them sufficiently valuable to invest a major portion of his limited resources in acquiring them as rapidly as possible.
Faced with Western determination not only to establish a separate West German government but also (as Donald Maclean had probably reported) to rearm that traditional Russian foe, Stalin in blockading Berlin chose a significant but peripheral challenge to US authority. He calculated that the United States would not consider access to Berlin a cause sufficient to justify going to war. He was right, although he failed to anticipate the effectiveness of an airlift to thwart his blockade.
What restrained the US leadership from issuing a Churchillian ultimatum or probing the blockade with Clay and LeMay? Operationally, lack of readiness — atomic or conventional — made the US cautious and limited its response. But Truman's reluctance to reinforce a precedent he himself had introduced — of pursuing military goals with weapons of mass destruction — should not be underestimated as an influence, possibly decisive, on US restraint. “This isn't just another weapon,” the President told Lilienthal again in February 1949, “not just another bomb. People make a mistake when they talk about it that way… Dave, we will never use it again if we can possibly help it.” That early in the Cold War, the President as yet had no experience with Soviet attitudes toward atomic weapons and still assumed the worst, adding, “But I know the Russians would use it on us if they had it.” Truman's conviction that the Soviets would use atomic weapons on the West if they had them boded ill for the approaching time when there would be two atomic powers in the world. But it probably also gave him an additional reason to resist using them to resolve the confrontation over Berlin. Which suggests that a degree of mutual deterrence had already been installed between the United States and the Soviet Union even before the Soviet Union finishing building its first atomic bomb.
18
‘This Buck Rogers Universe’
Since Curtis LeMay had found no war plan on that bloody day in October 1948 when he arrived to take over the Strategic Air Command, he set out to prepare one. No one in the world knew more about strategic bombing than he did; only he had actually commanded and carried out a successful full-scale strategic bombing campaign against an enemy nation. The Air Force had analyzed the firebombing and atomic-bombing of Japan carefully in the years since the end of the war; LeMay had sifted the bombing results thoroughly for revelation. “The fact that Japan,” he told an audience in 1946, “while still in possession of a formidable and intact land army, surrendered without having her homeland invaded by enemy land forces, represents a unique and significant event in military history.” LeMay was convinced that the heavy bomber, devastating “Japan's cities, factories, transportation and shipping,” had been a principal factor in determining the Japanese surrender.
Time and space had favored the United States in the last war, LeMay believed. “We had space between us and our enemies which could not be spanned by the then-existing weapons… This in conjunction with our allies who fought the holding battle gave us ‘time’ — time to build a fighting machine to defeat our enemies.” Since the war, however, the US had begun development of long-range bombers capable of carrying ten thousand pounds of bombs ten thousand miles. Our “potential enemies” could do likewise, LeMay warned. “Super rockets” were coming as well. These developments meant that “our space factor has disappeared.” So had our time factor. “If there is another war, we will be first, instead of last to be attacked, and the war will start with bombs and missiles falling on the United States.”
LeMay judged that new technology and new political conditions were moving the US into the same circumstances of exposure that had made Japan vulnerable during the Second World War. “Since the problems are similar,” LeMay proposed, “Let us place ourselves in the position of the Japanese. What could they have done to prevent atomic bombs being delivered on Japanese targets?” LeMay saw “three possible solutions,” all military (he did not consider negotiation or surrender). One solution would have been to build fighter and antiaircraft defenses sufficient to shoot down the bombers. But “throughout the war, not one of our attacks was ever turned back by enemy action.” Defense, then, was “the most inefficient method, and the one least likely to succeed.”
A second solution, LeMay thought, would have been to destroy the B-29s at their bases in the Marianas. But it would have been “virtually impossible to destroy every single airplane, and even if that happened, others could be flown in and staged through the battered fields.” With atomic bombs the effort would be futile, since “one airplane does the work of hundreds.”
LeMay concluded that only his third solution might have saved the Japanese: “Destroy our factories and laboratories that were producing the bombs.” To do so, Japan would have needed a long-range bombing force, which it had not built. “So the Japanese found themselves without an answer and went down in defeat before modern methods, even though [they] still had intact over seven million men under arms, most of which were never committed to combat. Let us hope that we never find ourselves in a similar position.”
Now, taking over SAC, the new commander was assuming responsibility for making sure that his country did not find itself without an answer to the challenge of atomic attack by long-range bomber. “Preparation” had been the answer he had offered the Ohio Society in New York shortly after the end of the war — deterrence. But then he had skirted a mortal question: what if the enemy was not deterred?
LeMay was prepared now to face that question. He had remembered that the decisive attacks on Japan, 91 percent of the total bomb tonnage dropped, had been concentrated into the last five months of the war. He
