battle but one who led them there. During the war in the Pacific, LeMay often flew lead on bombing raids. But now the war was over and LeMay was thinking about a military strategy for the future. Beginning at Crossroads, he would shape the U.S. Air Force in a way no other individual has since. As deputy chief of air staff for research and development of the U.S. Army Air Forces, LeMay was at Bikini to determine how effective the bomb could be in nuclear naval battles against the Soviet Union.
Operation Crossroads was a huge event, described as “the apocalypse with fireworks.” To someone who didn’t know World War II was over, the scene on the lagoon at Bikini that day might have seemed surreal. An armada of captured German and Japanese warships had been lined up alongside retired American cruisers and destroyers. These were massive, football-field-size warships whose individual might was dwarfed only by the combined power of them all. Eight submarines had been tethered to anchors on the ocean floor. There were over one million tons of battle-weary steel floating on the ocean without a single human on board. Instead, thousands of pigs, sheep, and rats had been set out in the South Pacific sunshine, in cages or in leg irons, and they would face the coming atomic blast. Some of the animals had metal tags around their necks; others had Geiger counters clipped to their ears. The Navy wanted to determine how living things fared against nuclear bombs.
Forty miles west of the lagoon, Alfred O’Donnell stood below deck in the control room of an observation ship watching the control bay. Above him, on deck, Los Alamos scientists, generals, admirals, and dignitaries waited in great anticipation for the bomb. Shielding their eyes were dark, 4.5-density goggles, necessary measures to prevent anyone from being blinded by the nuclear flash. O’Donnell worked the instrument panel in front of him. There were sixty seconds to go. He watched the auto sequence timer perform its function. With less than a minute remaining, the firing system moved into automation. The bars on the oscilloscopes moved from left to right as the signals passed down through the DN-11 relay system. There were ten seconds left. Then five seconds. The light for the arming signal blinked on. Two seconds. The firing signal flashed. It was zero time.
O’Donnell kept his eyes on the control panel down to the last second, as was his job. In the event of a malfunction, it would be up to him to let the commander know. But the signal had been sent without a problem, and now it was moving down the underwater wires, racing toward the Baker bomb. If O’Donnell moved fast, he could make it onto the ship’s deck in time to see the nuclear blast. Racing out of the control room, he pulled his goggles over his eyes. Up on the ship’s deck he took a deep breath of sea air. There was nothing to see. The world in front of him was pitch-black viewed through the goggles. He stared into the blackness; it was quiet and still. He could have heard a pin drop. He listened to people breathing in the silence. Facing the lagoon, O’Donnell let go of the ship’s railing and walked out farther on the deck. He knew the distance from the button to the bomb and the time it took for the signal to get there. In a matter of seconds, the signal would reach its destination.
There was a blinding flash and things were not black anymore. Then there was a white-orange light that seemed brighter than the sun as the world in front of O’Donnell transformed again, this time to a fiery red. He watched a massive, megaton column of water rise up out of the lagoon. The mushroom cloud began to form. “Monstrous! Terrifying! It kept getting bigger and bigger,” O’Donnell recalls. “It was huge. The cloud. The mushroom cap. Like watching huge petals unfold on a giant flower. Up and out, the petals curled around and came back down under the bottom of the cap of the mushroom cloud.” Next came the wind. O’Donnell says, “I watched the column as it started to bend. My eyes went back to the top of the mushroom cloud where ice was starting to form. The ice fell off and started to float down. Then it all disappeared into the fireball. Watching your first nuclear bomb go off is not something you ever forget.”
Mesmerized by the Baker bomb’s power, O’Donnell stood staring out over the sea from the ship’s deck. He was so overwhelmed by what he’d witnessed, he forgot all about the shock blast that would come his way next. The wave of a nuclear bomb travels at approximately one hundred miles per hour, which means it would reach the ship four minutes after the initial blast. “I forgot to hold on to the rail,” O’Donnell explains. “When the shock wave came it picked me up and threw me ten feet back against the bulkhead.” Lying on the ship’s deck, his body badly bruised, O’Donnell thought to himself: You damn fool! You had been forewarned.
High above the lagoon, Colonel Richard Leghorn piloted his airplane through the bright blue sky. To the south, in the distance, cumulus clouds formed. The U.S. Army Air Forces navigators had sent Leghorn close enough to ground zero to assess what had happened down below on the lagoon, but far enough away so as not to be irradiated by the mushroom cloud. What Leghorn witnessed horrified him. He watched Baker’s underwater fireball produce a hollow column, or chimney, of radioactive water six thousand feet tall, two thousand feet wide, and with walls three hundred feet thick. The warships below were tossed up into the air like bathtub toys. The Japanese battleship Nagato, formerly the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man responsible for planning the attack on Pearl Harbor, was thrown four hundred yards. The retired USS Arkansas, all twenty-seven thousand tons of it, was upended against the water column on its nose. Eight mighty battleships disappeared in the nuclear inferno. Had the armada floating in the lagoon been crewed to capacity, thirty-five thousand sailors would have been vaporized.
From up in the air Colonel Leghorn considered what he was witnessing in the exact moment that the bomb went off. It was not as if Leghorn were a stranger to the violence of war. He had flown more than eighty reconnaissance missions over enemy-controlled territory in Europe, from 1943 to 1945. On D-day, at Normandy, Leghorn made three individual passes over the beachheads in a single-seat airplane without any guns. But like O’Donnell, Leghorn was able to recollect Operation Crossroads with precise detail after more than sixty years. For Colonel Leghorn, this is because he remembered exactly how it made him feel. “I knew in that life-defining moment the world could not ever afford to have a nuclear war,” Leghorn says. The only sane path to military superiority in an atomic age was to spy on the enemy so that you always had more information about the enemy than the enemy had about you. Leghorn says, “That was the way to prevent war and that is how I formulated the original idea of overhead.”
At the time, in 1946, America’s intelligence services had virtually no idea about what was going on in Russia west of the Volga River and absolutely no idea what was happening west of the Ural Mountains. Leghorn believed that if the United States could fly secret reconnaissance missions over Russia’s enormous landmass and photograph its military installations, the nation could stay ahead of the Russians. By spying on the enemy, America could learn what atomic capabilities the Russians had, what plutonium- or uranium-processing facilities existed, what shipyards or missile-launch facilities the Soviets were constructing. And because Leghorn was a scientist, he could imagine precisely the way the military could accomplish this. His idea was to create a state-of-the-art spy plane that could fly higher than the enemy’s fighter jets could climb or than their antiaircraft missiles could travel. In that moment during Operation Crossroads, Leghorn committed himself to developing this new philosophy of spying on the enemy from above, a concept that would come to be known as overhead, or aerial, espionage. Leghorn’s efforts would take him from the halls of Congress to the corridors of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command. There, he would be at odds with a third set of eyes watching the twenty-three-kiloton Baker bomb at Crossroads. The eyes of Curtis LeMay.
LeMay’s perspective could not have been more diametrically opposed to Leghorn’s spy plane idea. LeMay believed that atomic bombs, not conventional explosives, won wars. Japan did not surrender after the firebombing of Tokyo. The empire surrendered only after America dropped its second nuclear bomb. During the atomic tests at Bikini, LeMay knew what only a few others knew, and that was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recently reversed America’s longstanding national policy of only going to war if attacked first. The JCS’s new and top secret first-strike policy, code-named Pincher, now allowed the American military to “strike a first blow if necessary.” A single effort could include as many as thirty atomic bombs dropped at once. The new and unprecedented policy had begun as a planning document less than one month after the Japanese surrendered, on August 15, 1945. Ten months later, on June 18, 1946, the policy legally took effect. No doubt this influenced LeMay’s perspective at Crossroads.
When it came time for LeMay to present his observations on the test series to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he narrowed them down to three succinct points. “Atomic bombs in numbers conceded to be available in the foreseeable future can nullify any nation’s military effort and demolish its social and economic structures.” In other words, LeMay would argue, America needed lots and lots of these bombs. LeMay’s second point was even more extreme: “In conjunction with other mass destruction weapons, it is possible to depopulate vast areas of the Earth’s surface, leaving only vestigial remnants of man’s material works.” But it was LeMay’s third point that would fundamentally shape the future U.S. Air Force, which would come into existence the following year: “The atomic bomb emphasizes the requirement for the most effective means of delivery in being; there must be the most effective atomic bomb striking force possible.” What LeMay was arguing for was a massive fleet of bombers to drop these nuclear bombs.
