In the autumn of 1961, newly orbited United States reconnaissance satellites revealed that the Soviet Union had fewer strategic delivery systems than our intelligence had previously estimated—only forty-four ICBMs and a hundred and fifty-five heavy bombers (compared to the United States’ hundred and fifty-six ICBMs, hundred and forty-four Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and thirteen hundred strategic bombers). Paul Nitze, a prominent hawk then serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, warned the Soviet Ambassador over lunch one day that the “missile gap”—which President John Kennedy had made a campaign issue in 1960—favored the United States; for good measure, the government leaked the story to the journalist Joseph Alsop, who reported the gap in a column. Kennedy may also have warned Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko directly in a private meeting at the White House.
Partly as a result of these warnings, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, decided to install nuclear missiles secretly in Cuba early in 1962. By August, the C.I.A. was reporting that medium-range ballistic missiles might be part of the deployment. A U-2 overflight on October 14th first found MRBM sites in western Cuba. Kennedy condemned the secret installation and announced an impending naval “quarantine” on October 22nd—Monday night of a harrowing week when the superpowers verged on full-scale nuclear war.
The SAC commander at that time was Thomas Power, a LeMay protégé, who had led the March 10, 1945, fire-bombing mission over Tokyo. LeMay had been promoted to Air Force Chief of Staff, which put him in the Pentagon during the Cuban missile crisis. (“Those were ten days when neither Curt nor I went home,” General David Burchinal, then LeMay’s deputy chief for plans and programs, recalled. “We slept in the Pentagon right around the clock”) Power, it seems, was at least as eager as LeMay to “get World War III started.” According to the political scientist Scott Sagan, in “The Limits of Safety,” Power had been told by LeMay’s predecessor as Chief of Staff, Thomas White, that he had the authority to do so. General White wrote Power in 1957 that “authority to order retaliatory attack may be exercised by CINCSAC”—the SAC commander—“if time or circumstances would not permit a decision by the President.” McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national-security adviser, had warned the young President of just such a possibility. “A subordinate commander,” Bundy alerted Kennedy in January, 1961, “faced with a substantial Russian military action could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you (by failure of communication at either end of the line).” LeMay acknowledged in retirement that Power was “a sadist”; Sagan quotes one of Power’s subordinate commanders who confirms that view:
A hard, cruel individual. . . I would like to say this. I used to worry about General Power. I used to worry that General Power was not stable. I used to worry about the fact that he had control over so many weapons and weapon systems and could, under certain conditions, launch the force. Back in the days before we had real positive control, SAC had the power to do a lot of things, and it was in his hands, and he knew it.
By Presidential order, the United States military went from DefCon(Defense Condition) 5 to DefCon 3 during Kennedy’s Monday-night speech. DefCon 5 was business as usual; DefCon 3 was halfway up the scale. When Kennedy began speaking on national television, at seven o’clock, fifty—four SAC bombers, each carrying as many as four thermonuclear weapons, thundered off from continental bases to join the routine twelve-plane around-the-clock airborne alert. Some of the sixty-six bombers orbited the Mediterranean; others circumnavigated North America; others flew an Arctic route across Greenland, north of Canada, across Alaska, and down the Pacific Coast of North America. One orbited above Thule, Greenland, to observe and report any pre-attack Soviet assault on the crucial United States early-warning radar there. Polaris submarines put to sea. SAC armed the remaining planes of its bomber force, dispersed them to military and civilian airfields, and prepared some hundred and thirty Atlas and Titan ICBMs for firing. Kennedy and Khrushchev began an exchange of belligerent messages. Kennedy had convened an executive committee, or ExComm, of government officials the crisis; opinion in the committee ranged from blockade to air strike to Cuban invasion. The President said afterward that the purpose of the alert was to deter a Soviet military response to whatever Caribbean action the United States decided to carry out: “The airborne alert,” he congratulated SAC, “provided a strategic posture under which every United States Force could operate with relative Freedom of action.” General Power saw a more threatening purpose, however; from his point of view, “This action by the nation’s primary war deterrent force gave added meaning to the Presidents declaration that the U.S. would react to any nuclear missile launched from Cuba with a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union itself.” Kennedy, that is, was thinking regional engagement under a nuclear umbrella; Power and LeIMay were thinking global war.
On Wednesday, October 24th, when the naval quarantine took effect, SAC ratcheted from Def-Con 3 to DefCon 2—the first and only time it was ever ordered to do so. SAC-alerted nuclear weapons increased to two thousand nine hundred and fifty-two; with a hundred and twelve Polaris SLBMs, their total destructive force exceeded seven thousand megatons. “We got everything we had in the strategic forces . . . counted down and ready and aimed,” General Burchinal said afterward, “and we made damn sure they saw it without anybody saying a word about it.” In fact, Power said several words about it, unauthorized and publicly, when he broadcast in the clear—in English rather than in code—to all SAC wings immediately after the move to DefCon 2 was announced:
‘This is General Power speaking. I am addressing you for the purpose of reemphasizing the seriousness of the situation the nation faces. We are in an advanced state of readiness to meet any emergencies and I feel that we are well prepared. I expect each of you to maintain strict security and use calm judgement during this tense period. Our plans are well prepared and are being executed smoothly. . . .Review your plans for further action to insure that there will be no mistakes or confusion.
SAC routinely transmitted DefCon increases as unclassified messages until 1972, and Power was clearly emphasizing control. His broadcast was nevertheless a warning to the Soviets—who Power knew monitored such transmissions—that the United States had gone to full alert and might be planning “further action.” Equally unsanctioned, and potentially catastrophic, notes Sagan, was the launch of an Atlas ICBM from Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California, across the Pacific to the Kwajalein test range, in the Marshall Islands, at 4 AM. on October 26th, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. SAC had taken over the test missiles at Vandenberg at the time of the Def Con 3 alert, programmed them with Soviet targets, and begun attaching nuclear warheads. The Atlas, which was unarmed, had been scheduled for testing; it was launched on its pre-crisis schedule with SAC concurrence—a deliberate provocation.
When the missile crisis began, the United States’ first squadron of Minuteman I solid-fuel missiles was undergoing testing and certification prior to deployment at Malmstrom Air Force Base, in Montana SAC, the Air Force Systems Command, and contractor personnel worked non-stop to ready the Minutemen for launch. A declassified history of the missile wing reports that “lack of equipment, both standard and test, required many work-arounds.” The first Minuteman was ready to go on October 26th; five had been made operational by October 30th. But mis-wiring, wire shorts, and other problems left the missiles capable of being accidentally armed; one had to be shut down and restarted five times, because its guidance and control systems failed, and every Minuteman at Malmstrom had to be taken of alert repeatedly for repairs in the course of the crisis. For safety and control, immediate launch required redundant, coordinated keying by four officers in two physically separate launch—control centers. The Malmstrom work—around overrode that safety system. One officer who controlled the Minutemen during the missile crisis later told Sagan, “We didn’t literally ‘hot wire’ the launch command system—that would be the wrong analogy—but we did have a second key. . . .I could have launched it on my own, if I had wanted to.” An Air Force safety-inspection report noted after the crisis that “possible malfunctions of auto-mated equipment . . . posed serious hazards [including] accidental launch.” Another possibility, which the inspectors did not mention, was unauthorized launch.
According to Sagan, Air Defense Command F-106s armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles scrambled at Volk Field, in Wisconsin, on October 25th, when a launch klaxon went off in the middle of the night. Practice alert drills had been cancelled at DefCon 3, so when the klaxon sounded the interceptor crews assumed that they were going to war. Since they had not been briefed that SAC bombers were aloft, and they did not know SAC airborne-alert routes, there was a real possibility of U.S. missiles attacking U.S. bombers——nuclear friendly fire. The launch klaxon sounding was a mistake: an Air Force guard at the Duluth Sector Direction Center had sounded a sabotage alarm that somehow keyed the klaxon at Volk Field. The guard in Duluth had seen someone climbing the base security fence and had fired at the figure. An officer flashing his car lights drove onto the Volk Field runway and managed to stand down the F-106s; on closer inspection, the saboteur in Duluth had turned out to be a bear.
There were other serious command-and-control snafus during the missile crisis as well: a U-2 strayed over Siberia, leading Khrushchev to complain to Kennedy that “an intruding American plane could be easily taken for a nuclear bomber, which might push us to a fateful step”; air-defense interceptors flew fully armed with nuclear rockets from which all safety devices had been removed; United States radar picked up an apparent missile launch from Cuba with a near-Tampa trajectory on Sunday morning, October 28th, which was determined only after predicted impact to have been a computer test tape; the United States Navy tracked Soviet submarines aggressively throughout the world, forcing them to surface, when it had been ordered to do so only in the area of quarantine.
More dangerous by far than all these incidents was Curtis LeMay’s overconfident and belligerent advice to John F. Kennedy, whom he had believed since at least the stillborn invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, in 1961, to be a coward. Knowing that the United States and the Soviet Union were approaching mutual deterrence and that SAC was therefore a wasting asset, LeMay pushed Kennedy to up the ante, bomb Cuba, and take out the missile sites. “The Kennedy administration thought that being strong as we were was provocative to the Russians and likely to start a war,” he said with disgust in retirement. “We in the Air Force, and I personally, believed the exact opposite. . . . We could have gotten not only the missiles out of Cuba, we could have gotten the Communists out of Cuba at that time. . . . During that very critical time, in my mind there wasn’t a chance that we would have gone to war with Russia because we had overwhelming strategic capability and the Russians knew it.” According to Dino Brugioni, in his book “Eyeball to Eyeball,” LeMay argued at one Pentagon briefing during the crisis that “the Russian bear has always been eager to stick his paw in Latin American waters. Now we’ve got him in a trap, let’s take his leg off right up to his testicles. On second thought, let’s take off his testicles, too.” As LeMay’s castration imagery implies, he may have been goading Kennedy to attack Cuba as an excuse to launch full strategic preemption; discussing the missile crisis a decade later with the historian Ernest May, he said, according to May, that “it was his belief that at any point the Soviet Union could have been obliterated without more than normal expectable SAC losses on our side.” In “On the Brink,” an oral history of the crisis compiled by James Blight and David Welch, Robert McNamara, Kennedy‘s Secretary of Defense, remembers that, characteristically, “LeMay talked openly about a first strike against the Soviet Union if the Russians ever backed us into a corner.”
Soon after the missiles were discovered, LeMay and the Joint Chiefs unanimously urged the President to order an immediate air strike against all military targets in Cuba. Fortunately, Kennedy resisted such pressure. Robert Kennedy later wrote, in “Thirteen Days”:
When the President questioned what the response of the Russians might be, General LeMay assured him there would be no reaction. President Kennedy was skeptical ‘They, no more than we, can let these things go by without doing something. They can t, after all their statements, permit us to take out their missiles, kill a lot of Russians, and then do nothing. If they don’t take action in Cuba, they certainly will in Berlin.”
The President’s instincts were sharper than the General’s. The blockade worked; the crisis passed; Khrushchev capitulated. LeMay was outraged. At the Hawk’s Cay Conference, a 1987 reunion of ExComm officials, McNamara remembered that LeMay made his feelings clear to Kennedy. “After Khrushchev had agreed to remove the 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 customary turnaround points toward the Soviet Union—an unambiguous threat that Soviet radar operators would certainly have recognized and reported. (“I knew what my target was,” the SAC general adds. “Leningrad.”) The bombers did eventually turn back, but, again, the provocation was clear.
NUCLEAR crises are not poker games. What Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power did not know—what no one in the United States government knew for certain until it was revealed at a conference between Soviet and U.S. missile-crisis participants in Moscow in 1989-was that, contrary to C.l.A. estimates, the Soviet forces in Cuba during the missile crisis possessed one— to three-megaton hydrogen warheads for some twenty medium-range ballistic missiles that could have been targeted on U.S. cities as far north as Washington, as well as warheads for short—range tactical artillery rockets that the Soviet field commanders in Cuba were authorized to use against a U.S. invasion force. The MRBMs would probably have been launched as well. At the Hawk’s Cay Conference, McNamara recalled a conversation with a retired admiral who told him that “if they’d been NATO missiles. . . then the NATO officers, acting without Presidential authorization, would have been likely to use them rather than lose them.” McNamara then admitted that “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 seven hundred and fifty 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 more than seven thousand megatons. Under such a rain of destruction, the United States would have killed at least a hundred million human beings in pursuit of the small group of Soviet leaders, who, as LeMay said in his 1956 lecture at the National War College, “have as their primary goal the . . . retention of power inside the U.S.S.R. 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 would also have been 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. 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 discovery, in 1938, of how to release nuclear energy introduced a singularity into the human world, a deep new reality, a region where the old rules of war no longer applied. Total war—nuclear war—would be suicidal. The Cuban missile crisis finally taught the superpowers that lesson. The Soviet Union never went to full nuclear alert in all the years of the Cold War. After the missile crisis, the United States never did so again. Nor did the two nations ever again directly confront each other. That the exercise of national sovereignty was limited in a nuclear world was not a lesson that LeMay was willing to learn. He went on to champion unsuccessfully the strategic bombing of North Vietnam, dams and all; in 1968, three years after he retired from the Air Force, he teamed with George Wallace to run unsuccessfully as an independent candidate for Vice-President of the United States. Until his death, in 1990, this remarkable leader, whose efforts to carry out an impossible assignment took the world within a hair’s breadth of nuclear destruction, continued to believe that the United States had “lost” the Cuban missile crisis and the Cold War. We had not lost, nor had we won. The world had won. Science had revealed a limit to total war.
[CINCSAC / Commander in Chief, SAC]