Command and Control (21 page)

Administration officials called Operation Alert a great success. The secretary of the Treasury, George M. Humphrey, said that the exercise demonstrated
the United States would “be able to take it” and “recover surprisingly rapidly.” Out of a U.S. population of about 165 million,
only 8.2 million
people would be killed and 6.6 million wounded—and
more than half of those casualties would be in New York City. If everybody took the right precautions, Val Peterson assured reporters, “
we might—ideally—escape without losing any lives from fall-out.”

In a public statement, Eisenhower said the drill had brought him “
great encouragement.” But at a Cabinet meeting, he summed up his feelings in one word: “
staggering.” On the first day of Operation Alert, the president had declared martial law, transferring power from the state governments to half a dozen Army field commands. The casualty figures released to the press vastly understated the likely impact of a thermonuclear war.
A new word had entered the lexicon of nuclear war planning: megadeath. It was a unit of measurement. One megadeath equaled one million fatalities—and the nation was bound to suffer a great many megadeaths during a thermonuclear war. On January 23, 1956, President Eisenhower recorded in his diary the results of a top secret study on what would really happen after a Soviet attack:

The United States experienced practically total economic collapse, which could not be restored to any kind of operative conditions under six months to a year. . . . Members of the Federal government were wiped out and a new government had to be improvised by the states. . . . It was calculated that something on the order of 65% of the population would require some sort of medical care, and in most instances, no opportunity whatsoever to get it. . . .

Eisenhower was infuriated by the Army's constant requests for more troops to help defend Western Europe. “
It would be perfect rot to talk about shipping troops abroad when fifteen of our cities were in ruins,” he told an aide. The Army would be needed at home to deal with the chaos. “
You can't have this kind of war,” Eisenhower said at a national security meeting a couple of years later. “There just aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”

T
hree weeks after winning an Oscar for best actor in
The Philadelphia Story,
Jimmy Stewart enlisted in the Army. It was the spring of 1941, long before Pearl Harbor, but Stewart thought the United States would soon be at war and wanted to volunteer his skills as a pilot. The previous year he'd failed an Army physical for being ten pounds underweight. This time he passed, just barely, and at the age of thirty-two entered the Army Air Corps as a private. By 1944, Major Jimmy Stewart was flying the lead plane in bombing runs over Germany. While other Hollywood stars like Ronald Reagan and John Wayne managed to avoid combat during the Second World War, Stewart gained a reputation in the Eighth Air Force as a “lucky” commander who always brought his men back from dangerous missions.
He flew dozens of those missions, shunned publicity about his wartime exploits, and never discussed them with his family. “
He always maintained a calm demeanor,” a fellow officer recalled. “His pilots had absolute faith in him and were willing to follow him wherever he led.”

After the war, Colonel Jimmy Stewart returned to Hollywood and starred in a series of well-received films—
It's a Wonderful Life, Harvey, Rear Window—
while serving in the Air Force Reserve. Deeply concerned about the Soviet threat, he decided to make a movie about the importance of America's nuclear deterrent.
Stewart visited SAC headquarters in 1952 to
discuss the idea with General Curtis LeMay. The two had met in England, while serving in the Eighth Air Force. LeMay gave the project his blessing, worked closely with the screenwriter Beirne Lay, Jr., and allowed the film to be shot at SAC air bases.

Strategic Air Command
was released in 1955. It tells the story of a major league infielder, Dutch Holland, whose baseball career is interrupted when the Air Force returns him to active duty. For most of the film, Holland, played by Jimmy Stewart, is torn between his desire to enjoy civilian life and his duty to protect the United States from a Soviet attack.
Strategic Air Command
focuses on the hardships endured by SAC crews, the dangers of their job, the sacrifices that overseas assignments imposed on their families. Even the bubbly, upbeat cheer of the actress June Allyson, playing Stewart's wife, is briefly deflated by the challenges of being married to a SAC officer. Shot in Technicolor and wide-screen VistaVision, featuring spectacular aerial photography and a rousing score, the film offers an unabashed celebration of American airpower. “She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life,” Stewart says, at his first glimpse of a new B-47 bomber.

More compelling than the film's plot, the onscreen chemistry between Allyson and Stewart, or the footage of SAC bombers midflight was the performance of actor Frank Lovejoy as General Ennis C. Hawkes. Gruff, unsentimental, fond of cigars, unwilling to tolerate mistakes, and ready at a moment's notice to unleash a massive retaliation, the character was a flattering, barely fictionalized portrait of Curtis LeMay. It was another demonstration of SAC's skill at public relations. LeMay had already become a national celebrity, a living symbol of American might.
Life
magazine described him as the “
Toughest Cop of the Western World” and repeated an anecdote about his boundless self-confidence. Warned that if he didn't put out his cigar, the bomber he was sitting in might explode, LeMay replied: “
It wouldn't dare.”

The premiere of
Strategic Air Command
was held in New York's Times Square, with searchlights piercing the sky and more than three thousand guests, including Air Force generals, politicians, businessmen, Hollywood starlets, and Arthur Godfrey in the lobby of the Paramount Theatre, broadcasting the event live on television. Godfrey was a popular radio and
television personality, as well as a good friend of LeMay's, who frequently promoted SAC during his shows.
Strategic Air Command
was one of the highest-grossing films of 1955. It fit the national mood. And a few years later Jimmy Stewart, as a member of the Air Force Reserve, was appointed deputy director of operations at SAC, one of the top jobs at the command.

Behind the public facade of invincibility, questions were secretly being raised at the Pentagon about whether SAC could survive a Soviet attack. LeMay had spent years building air bases overseas—in Greenland, Great Britain, Spain, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Japan—where his planes would begin and end their bombing missions against the Soviet Union. But
a study by the RAND analyst Albert Wohlstetter suggested that a surprise attack on those bases could knock SAC out of the war with a single blow, leaving the United States defenseless. LeMay felt confident that sort of thing would never happen, that his reconnaissance planes, flying daily missions along the borders of the Soviet Union, would detect any unusual activity. Nevertheless, he accelerated SAC's plans to base most of its aircraft in the United States and to refuel them en route to Soviet targets. And LeMay continued to demand perfection from his officers. “
Training in SAC was harder than war,” one of them recalled. “It might have been a relief to go to war.”

The town of
Rhinelander, Wisconsin, became one of SAC's favorite targets, and it was secretly radar bombed hundreds of times, thanks to the snow-covered terrain resembling that of the Soviet Union. By 1955,
the SAC battle plan called for 180 bombers, most of them departing from the United States, to strike the Soviet Union within twelve hours of receiving an emergency war order from the president. But constant training and the radar bombing of Wisconsin could not guarantee how aircrews would perform in battle with real weapons. During tests at the Bikini atoll in May 1956, the Air Force got its first opportunity to drop a hydrogen bomb from a plane. The 3.8-megaton weapon was carried by one of SAC's new, long-range B-52 bombers, with the island of Namu as its target. The B-52 safely escaped the blast—but
the bombardier had aimed at the wrong island, and the H-bomb missed Namu by four miles.

Withdrawing most of SAC's planes from overseas bases did not,
however, eliminate the threat of a surprise attack. The continental United States—code-named the “zone of the interior” (ZI)—was also considered highly vulnerable to Soviet bombers. During Operation Tailwind,
94 SAC bombers tested the air defense system of the ZI by approaching from Canada, flying at night, and using electronic countermeasures to simulate a Soviet raid. Only 7 of the planes were spotted by radar and “shot down.” The failure to intercept the other 87 planes raised the possibility of a devastating attack on the United States. Now that the Soviets had hydrogen bombs and jet bombers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended a large investment in America's air defense and early-warning system. General LeMay strongly disagreed with that proposal, arguing that in the nuclear age it made little sense to waste money “playing defense.” If the Soviets launched an attack with 200 bombers and American forces somehow managed to shoot down 90 percent of those planes, the United States would still be hit by at least 20 H-bombs, if not more.

Instead of air defense, LeMay wanted every available dollar to be spent on more bombs and more bombers for the Strategic Air Command—so that Soviet planes could be destroyed before they ever left the ground. His stance gained support in Congress after the Soviet Union demonstrated its new, long-range jet bomber, the Bison, at Moscow's “Aviation Day” in 1955.
Ten Bisons flew past the reviewing stand, turned around, flew past it again in a new formation—and tricked American observers into thinking that the Soviet Air Force had
more than 100 of the planes. The CIA predicted that within a few years
the Soviets would be able to attack the United States with 700 bombers. Democrats in the Senate, led by presidential hopeful Stuart Symington, claimed that the Soviets would soon have more long-range bombers than the United States, raised fears of a “bomber gap,” and accused the Eisenhower administration of being weak on defense. “
It is clear that the United States and its allies,” Symington warned, “may have lost control of the air.” Defying Eisenhower, Congress voted to appropriate
an extra $900 million for new B-52s. The Soviet Union's bluff had an unintentional effect: it widened the bomber gap, much to the benefit of the United States.
By the end of the decade, the Soviet Union had about 150 long-range bombers—and
the Strategic Air Command had almost 2,000.

•   •   •

D
ESPITE
SERIOUS
DOUBTS
THAT
the United States could ever be protected against a nuclear attack, work began on an air defense and early-warning system. At the very least, the Joint Chiefs concluded,
such a system would “provide a reasonable degree of protection for the essential elements of the war-making capacity”—SAC bases, naval bases, command centers, and nuclear weapon storage sites in the ZI. The Army erected batteries of Nike antiaircraft missiles to defend military installations and American cities. The Navy obtained radar-bearing “picket ships” and built “Texas towers” to search for Soviet bombers approaching over the ocean. The picket ships lingered about five hundred miles off the coast of the United States; the Texas towers were moored to the seafloor, like oil platforms, closer to shore. The Air Force assembled squadrons of jet fighter-interceptors, like the F-89 Scorpion, and developed its own antiaircraft missile, the BOMARC—infuriating the Army, which had traditionally controlled the nation's antiaircraft weapons.

More important, the Air Force started to build a Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line of radar stations two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Stretching from the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, across Canada, to Greenland, the DEW Line was supposed to scan the polar route from the Soviet Union and provide
at least two hours' warning of an attack. It was later extended west to Midway Island in the Pacific and east to Mormond Hill in Scotland,
a distance of about twelve thousand miles. Its construction required the transport of
almost half a million tons of building material into the Arctic, where thousands of workers labored in
temperatures as low as –70 degrees Fahrenheit. A sense of urgency pervaded the effort; the United States seemed completely unprotected against Soviet planes carrying hydrogen bombs. Begun in February 1955, construction of the DEW Line's fifty-seven Arctic radar stations—some of them featuring radio antennae forty stories high, airstrips more than a mile long, and housing for the civilian and Air Force personnel who manned the facilities around the clock—was largely completed in about two and a half years.

Through an agreement with the Canadian government, the North
American Air Defense Command (NORAD) was organized in 1957, with its headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado. NORAD's mission was to provide early warning of an attack and mount a defense against it. If Soviet bombers were detected approaching North American airspace, fighter-interceptors would be sent to shoot them down as far as possible from the United States. Antiaircraft missiles would be fired at enemy planes that managed to get past the interceptors—first BOMARC missiles, then Nike. Coordinating the many elements of the system during an attack would be an extraordinarily complex task. Signals would be arriving from picket ships, Texas towers, DEW Line sites, airborne radars. Hundreds of Soviet bombers might have to be spotted and followed, their positions sent to antiaircraft batteries and fighter bases separated by thousands of miles. During the Second World War, Army radar operators had tracked enemy planes and used shared information about their flight paths verbally. That sort of human interaction would be impossible if large numbers of high-speed bombers approached the United States from different directions. The Air Force proposed a radical solution: automate the system and transfer most of its command-and-control functions to machines.

“
The computerization of society,” the technology writer Frank Rose later observed, was essentially a “side effect of the computerization of war.”
America's first large-scale electronic digital computer, ENIAC, had been built during the 1940s to help the Army determine the trajectory of artillery and antiaircraft shells. The war ended before ENIAC was completed, and its first official use was to help Los Alamos with early calculations for the design of a thermonuclear weapon. Los Alamos later relied on the more advanced MANIAC computer and its successor, MANIAC II, for work on the hydrogen bomb. Driven by the needs of weapon designers and other military planners, the U.S. Department of Defense was soon responsible for most of the world's investment in electronic computing.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
researchers concluded that the Whirlwind computer, originally built for the Navy as a flight simulator, could be used to automate air defense and early-warning tasks. Unlike computers that took days or weeks to perform calculations, the Whirlwind had been designed to operate in real time. After extensive
testing by the Air Force, an updated version of the Whirlwind was chosen to serve as the heart of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE)—a centralized command-and-control system that linked early-warning radars directly to antiaircraft missiles and fighter-interceptors, that not only processed information in real time but also transmitted it, that replaced manpower with technology on a scale reminiscent of pulp science fiction. It was
the first computer network.

Built during roughly the same years as the DEW Line, SAGE consisted of twenty-four “direction centers” and three “combat centers” scattered throughout the United States. The direction centers were enormous four-story, windowless blockhouses that housed a pair of AN/FSQ-7 computers, the first mainframes produced by IBM. They were the largest, fastest, and most expensive computers in the world. Each of them
contained about 25,000 vacuum tubes and covered about half an acre of floor space.

Analog signals from early-warning radar sites were converted into digital bits and sent via AT&T's telephone lines to SAGE direction centers, where the huge computers decided whether an aircraft was friend or foe. If it appeared to be an enemy bomber, the computers automatically sent details about its flight path to the nearest missile batteries and fighter planes. Those details were also sent to NORAD headquarters. Human beings would decide whether or not to shoot down the plane. But that decision would be based on information gathered, sorted, and analyzed by machines. In many respects
SAGE created the template for the modern computer industry, introducing technologies that would later become commonplace: analog to digital conversion, data transmission over telephone lines, video monitors, graphic displays, magnetic core memory, duplexing, multiprocessing, large-scale software programming, and the light gun, a handheld early version of the mouse. The attempt to create a defense against Soviet bombers helped to launch a technological revolution.