by Richard Rhodes
In 1945, the Air Force sent a thirty-eight-year-old major general named Curtis LeMay to the Pacific to direct its ineffectual air war against Japan, where the newly discovered jet stream was playing havoc with high-altitude precision bombing. The New Yorker reporter St. Clair McKelway, who was serving as a public-relations officer on Guam, described the General’s arrival in these pages: “He was around a few days, said almost nothing to anybody, was what, by civilian standards, would be called rude to many people. He was a big, husky, healthy, rather stocky, full-faced, black-haired man.” He chewed a cigar stub to disguise the Bell’s palsy that he’d got from flying high and cold; it made one side of his lower lip droop. He spoke, McKelway wrote, “through teeth that had obviously been pried open only with effort, an effort with which the speaker had no real sympathy.” He was a warrior as hard as Ulysses S. Grant, a bomber pilot, a big-game hunter: dark, fleshy, smart. “I’ll tell you what war is about,” he once said with characteristic bluntness. “You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.”
LeMay studied the mission reports and reconnaissance photographs, realized that the Japanese had almost no air defense left, and sent three hundred and twenty-five planes loaded with jellied-gasoline firebomb clusters over Tokyo in the early hours of March 10, 1945. “You’re going to deliver the biggest fire-cracker the Japanese have ever seen,” he told his crews. As he waited impatiently for the bombers to return, he confided to McKelway, “In a war, you’ve got to try to keep at least one punch ahead of the other guy all the time. A war is a very tough kind of proposition. If you don’t get the enemy, he gets you. I think we’ve figured out a punch he’s not expecting this time.”
The mission succeeded: the United States Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that “probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” LeMay’s subsequent mission report emphasized that the object of the attack “was not to bomb indiscriminately civilian populations.” But the destruction that first windy night was infact indiscriminate to the point of atrocity, as LeMay himself understood: nearly seventeen square miles of the Japanese capital burned to the ground, with at least a hundred thousand people killed and hundreds of thousands injured. “CONGRATULATIONS,” LeMay’s boss, Air Force Chief of Staff Henry A (Hap) Arnold, telexed him from Washington. “THIS MISSION SHOWS YOUR CREWS HAVE GOT THE GUTS FOR ANYTHING.” LeMay laid on firebombings night after night until the end of the war, by which time sixty-three Japanese cities had been totally or partially burned out and more than a million Japanese civilians killed. Hiroshima and Nagasaki survived to be atomic-bombed only because Washington had removed them from Curtis LeMay’s target list. Years later, he told a cadet who asked how much “moral considerations” had affected his decisions, “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side.”
Three months after Hiroshima. LeMay gave a speech to the Ohio Society of New York. The next war, he warned, would be fought with fantastic new weapons—a war of “rockets, radar, jet propulsion, television-guided missiles, speeds faster than sound and atomic power.” It would be an air war. Before the next war, he insisted, “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 a 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.” That meant to LeMay that the United States would have to have an air force “in being” that could move immediately to retaliate if the country was attacked. The preparation for retaliation, the threat of it, 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 of 1945 LeMay was already thinking in terms of what came to be called deterrence. But therein lay the contradiction: If no air attack could be completely stopped, then retaliation would not protect the country—it would only destroy the enemy’s country in turn.
Before the invention of nuclear weapons, wars had been built by hand, so to speak, one engagement after another, until one side felt itself sufficiently damaged to capitulate. Nuclear weapons, encapsulating enormous violence in small, portable mechanisms, changed those conditions, making it possible for warring powers to deliver unacceptable damage immediately and mutually. The consequences of this revolution in the terms of war were not immediately obvious to American military and civilian leaders, though they seem to have been obvious to the Soviets. Working out how the rules had changed took time. In the four years that the United States held a monopoly on nuclear weapons, it reduced its military forces to bare bones, shrank the defense budget from its wartime high of nearly ninety billion dollars to less than fifteen billion dollars, and counted on a small but growing nuclear arsenal to deter a Soviet march to the Atlantic across a war-ravaged Western Europe.
The panic within the U.S. government when the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, in 1949, followed from the realization that nuclear deterrence would soon be mutual, leaving the Communist enemy with superior conventional forces (which is why the U.S. rushed to invent a new unique capability, the hydrogen bomb). At that point, LeMay and his military colleagues began to think of the U.S. nuclear arsenal as a “wasting asset,” and to consider ways that arsenal might be used before it was lost to mutual deterrence. Presidents from Truman and Eisenhower onward made it clear privately, if not always publicly, that they did not believe either nuclear superpower would dare start a war, but LeMay and other military leaders were responsible for fighting such a war, if it came. Like it or not, they had to think about how it might be fought, and they concluded it could only be fought if the United States struck first. But an explicit Presidential order denied them that option. The order did not always stop LeMay. As commander of the Strategic Air Command in the early nineteen-fifties, he found himself in a nuclear double bind—the political and the military interpretations of the new age simply could not be reconciled. During the Cuban missile crisis, the determination of LeMay and some of his subordinates to follow military logic, subverting Presidential authority to do so, nearly led to full-scale nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The United States came much closer to self-inflicted nuclear destruction at that time than most Americans realize.
The Strategic Air Command was created in March, 1946, as the United States’ atomic striking force. Its immediate purpose was to counter Soviet ambitions in Europe. By the time LeMay took it over, three years after the end of the war, the Soviets were actively probing U.S. intentions in Berlin and Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, as LeMay quickly realized, the force was far from combat ready.
“Everybody thought they were doing fine,” the new SAC commander recalled in retirement. “The first thing to do was convince them otherwise.” In January of 1949, LeMay ordered a maximum-effort mission against Wright Field, in Dayton, Ohio—“a realistic combat mission, at combat altitudes, for every air-plane in SAC that we could get air.” Since Air Force intelligence could into the supply only vintage prewar photographs of Soviet cities, LeMay gave his crews 1938 photographs of Dayton. He instructed them to bomb by radar from thirty thousand feet, instead of the lackadaisical fifteen thousand feet they had adopted for practice. “Nobody seemed to know what life was like upstairs,” he recalled in his autobiography. Not many crews even found Dayton. For those who did, bombing scores ran from one to two miles off target—distances at which even Nagasaki-yield atomic bombs would do only marginal damage. LeMay called the results of the Dayton exercise “just about the darkest night in American military aviation history. Not one airplane finished that mission as briefed. Not one.”
He decided that his goal was “to build a force so professional, so powerful that we would not have to fight. In other words, we had to build a deterrent force.” But as LeMay began turning SAC around, he had to face the mortal question he had skirted in his speech to the Ohio Society. Despite the poor performance over Dayton, atomic bombs made hitting the target right the first time far more probable than ordinary high explosives had allowed. Given a “war aim of complete subjugation of the enemy,” the Air Force War Plans Division had recently concluded, “it would be feasible to risk an all-out atomic attack at the beginning of a war in an effort to stun the enemy into submission.” So when LeMay took his ideas for a SAC war plan to his superiors in the Air Force, he proposed that “the primary mission of SAC should be to establish a force in being capable of dropping 80% of the stockpile in one mission.” By then he was confident, he assured them, that “the next war will be primarily a strategic air war and the atomic attack should be laid down in a matter of hours.” The Air Force agreed: the plan that resulted entailed destroying seventy Soviet cities in thirty days with a hundred and thirty-three atomic bombs, causing up to 2.7 million deaths and another four million casualties. American air-power strategists had a name for such an attack as LeMay was proposing: “killing a nation.”
In the spring of 1953, a committee headed by retired Air Force General James Doolittle proposed giving the Russians a two-year deadline to come to terms and attacking them if they failed to do so (thus using the wasting asset to force a decision). The following year, President Eisenhower rejected this bizarre nuclear ultimatum and issued an updated Basic National Security Policy statement: “The United States and its allies must reject the concept of preventive war or acts intended to provoke war.”
At the outset of the Korean War, in 1950, LeMay had asked the Pentagon, as he said later, to “turn SAC loose with incendiaries” on North Korea; Truman’s advisers had rejected such a blitz-krieg of mass destruction. SAC was ultimately authorized to bomb urban and rural North Korea anyway, piecemeal, and carried out its assignment brutally, burning out cities and breaking big agricultural dams, scouring out entire valleys of peasant villages and rice paddies as far as twenty-seven miles downstream, spreading the agony across the years of war. More than two million North Korean civilians died in that campaign, a little-known toll comparable to civilian losses in Japan during the Second World War. “Over a period of three years or so,” LeMay remembered, “we killed off-what-twenty percent of the population of [North] Korea. . . This seemed to be acceptable to everybody; but to kill a few people at the start right away, no, we can’t seem to stomach that.” Such inconsistencies further undermined LeMay’ s trust in Presidential decisiveness. If deterrence had to be his formal strategy, he would also prepare darker strategies against the hazard that deterrence might fail.
Since preventive war was not an available remedy to the enlarging Soviet capacity for a first strike, SAC was authorized to plan for preemption—for beating the Soviet forces to the punch if intelligence indicated they were be ginning a first strike. The C.I.A. estimated that the Soviet Union would need a month to assemble and deliver its small stock of nuclear weapons. The Joint Chiefs ordered SAC to assign highest priority to a “blunting mission” that would take out Soviet airfields first upon Presidential determination that a Soviet attack had begun, followed by attacks on advancing Soviet troops, followed finally by attacks on cities and government control centers.
LeMay had no interest in dribbling out his forces on three disparate missions. The Soviets might need a month in 1954 to deliver their arsenal of about a hundred and fifty atomic bombs; his thousand and eight bomber crews, once deployed, could deliver as many as seven hundred and fifty bombs in a few hours. The SAC commander continued to believe obstinately that the most effective attack would be his “Sunday punch”: simultaneous assault from all sides with everything in the stockpile. According to documents analyzed in International Security by the defense consultant David Alan Rosenberg, Captain William Brigham Moore, a Navy officer, attended a SAC standard briefing on March 15, 1954, kept notes, and came away appalled: “The final impression was that virtually all of Russia would be nothing but a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours.” During the post-briefing question period, someone asked LeMay what course he would advocate if hostilities were renewed in Korea—-by then at truce. He answered that he would drop a few bombs in China, Manchuria, and southeastern Russia. “In those ‘poker games,’ ” the Navy captain quotes LeMay, “such as Korea and Indo-China [where the French were then engaged], we . . . have never raised the ante—we have always just called the bet. We ought to try raising sometime.”
By 1954, Curtis LeMay had apparently begun raising the ante with the Soviet Union on his own, covertly and extralegally. Reconnaissance overflights of the Soviet Union had begun no later than 1950. LeMay used these flights not only to gather electronic and photographic intelligence; he also used them to probe Soviet air defenses, knowing as he did so that he might be provoking war. There is testimony that he may have meant to do just that. If he could not initiate preventive war, he seems to have concluded, he might be able to push the Soviets to sufficiently high levels of alert to justify launching a full preemptive attack. He linked reconnaissance with provocation in an interview after he retired:
There was a time in the 1950s when we could have won a war against Russia. It would have cost us essentially the accident rate of the flying time, because their defenses were pretty weak One time in the 1950s we flew all of the reconnaissance aircraft that SAC possessed over Vladivostok at high noon. Two reconnaissance airplanes saw MiGs, but there were no interceptions made. It was well planned, too—crisscrossing paths of all the reconnaissance airplanes. Each target was hit by at least two, and usually three, reconnaissance airplanes to make sure we got pictures of it. We practically mapped the place up there with no resistance at all. We could have launched bombing attacks, planned and executed just as well, at that time.
Soviet defense forces had no way of knowing if LeMay’s crisscrossing reconnaissance aircraft carried nuclear weapons or not. If Soviet aircraft had crisscrossed American cities under similar circumstances, SAC would certainly have preempted. The Soviets hunkered down, because they had no adequate response, but their lack of defenses predictably emboldened LeMay.
In 1954, LeMay remarked to a reconnaissance pilot whose plane had been damaged by a MiG-17 while over the Soviet Union, “Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.” The pilot, Hal Austin, told the documentary filmmaker Paul Lashmar that he assumed LeMay was joking, but years later, after LeMay retired, Austin saw him again and “brought up the subject of the mission we had flown. And he remembered it like it was yesterday. We chatted about it a little bit. His comment again was, ‘Well, we’d have been a hell of a lot better off if we’d got World War III started in those days.’ ”
Was LeMay joking? The best evidence that he was not is his own testimony, in a lecture he delivered to the National War College, in April, 1956. Decisive victory in a nuclear war, he emphasized on that occasion, would have been reached “in the first few days” of battle. The Soviet Union was not yet capable of achieving such a decisive nuclear victory, but it was “building a global bombing force with aircraft and nuclear weapons of satisfactory quality” to make it capable eventually “of devastating the heartland of the United States.” The United States did have such decisive capability, however, LeMay asserted. He went on to describe “in cold terms what the United States is capable of doing to the Soviet Union today,” a description as chilling as any in the literature of war:
Let us assume the order had been received this morning to unleash the full weight of our nuclear force. (I hope, of course, this will never happen.) Between sunset tonight and sunrise tomorrow morning the Soviet Union would likely cease to be a major military power or even a major nation. . . . Dawn might break over a nation infinitely poorer than China—less populated than the United States and condemned to an agrarian existence perhaps for generations to come.
Everything depended on “the forces in being at the outset,” LeMay emphasized. “The most radical effect of the changes in warfare is not upon how wars are won or lost, but upon how they will start. . . . The dominant fact is that no nation can arrive at a deliberate decision to wage war today unless it is clear, beyond any doubt, that victory is assured.” What those facts meant, LeMay went on, was that “we are at war now.” By defining the state of affairs between the United States and the U.S.S.R. as war in progress, LeMay blurred the difference between preventive attack and preemption: If the Soviet capability was growing, and some bombers always got through, then the time would come when SAC would no longer be able to deliver a clear victory. The United States and the Soviet Union would then be mutually deterred. Robert Oppenheimer had predicted that consequence in 1953 in an analysis in Foreign Affairs: “We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”
LeMay evidently found the prospect of such stalemate intolerable. SAC was subject to Presidential authority. When the nation is threatened with a nuclear attack, the President, not the SAC commander, assumes the authority to order the use of military force. But LeMay had decided at the beginning of the Korean War, if not before, that there were circumstances under which he would override the Commander-in-Chief’s prerogative. For example, the Atomic Energy Commission had custody of U.S. nuclear weapons, but in 1950 LeMay had attempted to arrange privately with the officer commanding the base in Albuquerque where the bombs were stored “to take the bombs” under SAC control if“we woke up some morning and there wasn’t any Washington or something.”
By 1957, he no longer needed to take the bombs. He had them. All that constrained him from delivering them was his soldier’s oath. That same year, a committee Eisenhower appointed to study civil and continental defense sent a delegation to SAC to review the command’s defenses against a Soviet surprise attack. The delegation included Robert Sprague, president of the Sprague Electric Company, in Massachusetts, and Jerome Wiesner, of M.I.T. As the Boston Globe reporter Fred Kaplan recounts ,” when LeMay dismissed the delegation with a superficial tour, Sprague arranged for the President to order LeMay to cooperate. Sprague then had LeMay stage an alert. SAC needed more than six hours to take to the air. To Sprague that meant the command was vulnerable to surprise attack: Soviet bombers could make the flight over the North Pole in less than that time.
At SAC headquarters in Omaha, Sprague challenged LeMay. The General dismissed Sprague’s concerns contemptuously. SAC had reconnaissance aircraft flying secret missions over the Soviet Union twenty-four hours a day. “If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.” Sprague was shocked. “But General,” he countered, “that’s not national policy.” Sprague remembered LeMay responding, “I don’t care. It’s my policy. That’s what I’m going to do.” According to another account, LeMay responded, “It’s my job to make it possible for the President to change his policy”—a less insubordinate answer, but only barely. Sprague chose not to report LeMay’s renegade remarks to the President and buried the incident for twenty years.
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