Command and Control (11 page)

Once the escape hatch was open, the PTS team went down to level 3, wearing gas masks. The missile combat crew members grabbed their handguns and put on their holsters. Before departing from the control center, they took the phone off the hook, so that officers on the line at Little Rock could hear if any Klaxons, alarms, or portable vapor detectors went off. And the crew switched the diesel generator to manual. That way the generator wouldn't automatically turn on if power to the entire complex was later shut off, an option being considered. Motors and pumps in the equipment areas of the silo were still running—because the circuit breakers to shut them off were inside the silo. Ideally, the crew wouldn't have left anything running that might cause a spark. But they'd done the best they could. They put on their gas masks and hurried downstairs.

Fuller entered the hatch first, carrying a flashlight. It was pitch black in the narrow tunnel as he crawled toward the air shaft on his hands and knees. The PTS team and Serrano went next. Childers told them to look after the trainee.

“
Put him in the middle of you guys,” Childers said, “because I'm not going to have him hurt.”

Holder followed them into the tunnel. He'd fought hard against evacuating the place, but now that it was time to go, he couldn't wait to get the hell out. Upstairs in the control center, the intruder alarm went off. Fuller must have reached the surface and pushed open the grate, interrupting the radar beams aimed at the air shaft. The tipsie unit had detected the movement and activated the alarm, as though someone was trying to get into the control center, not out of it.

Childers went through the hatch, leaving Captain Mazzaro to go last. The tunnel was dank and dark, like a drainage pipe, and he had to crawl through a pool of rusty water to the air shaft. Childers was terrified. The rungs of the ladder were on the far side of the shaft, you had to reach across to grab them, and it was incredibly dark. Childers was breathing hard in the gas mask as he climbed and couldn't see the ladder. He raised a hand and felt above his head for each rung, anxious to move as fast as possible, afraid of slipping and falling to the bottom of the shaft. The control center had felt safe—now they really were vulnerable and unprotected. At the top
of the ladder, Holder and Fuller pulled him from the air shaft onto the gravel. The three waited for Mazzaro, lifted him out, and started to run.

The wind seemed to be blowing to the east, carrying the white cloud from the exhaust vents toward the entry gate. So the men headed west. The PTS crew had already found the breakaway section of the fence, removed the quick-release pins, and pushed it down. Mazzaro, Childers, Fuller, and Holder followed them through the gap in the fence, trying to circle the site and reach the front gate without passing through the cloud. The masks would protect their lungs, but fuel vapor could be readily absorbed through their skin. The crew made it about three quarters of the way around the fence before the wind changed direction, blowing the white mist right toward them. “
You've got to be kidding me,” Holder thought, ready to be miles away from this place.

When Sergeant Thomas A. Brocksmith arrived at the access road to the complex, he noticed that some law enforcement officers and reporters were already there. He introduced himself to the Van Buren County sheriff. Brocksmith was the on-scene supervisor, responsible for Air Force security at the site. The sheriff asked what was going on. The only information we have, Brocksmith replied, is that there's a possible hazard on the complex, but there's no need for an evacuation at this point. About twenty minutes later, Brocksmith was ordered by the command post to drive toward the complex. He put on a gas mask, guided his pickup truck down the access road, and could see that something was seriously wrong. Gray smoke was billowing about fifty feet into the air and drifting over the entry gate. He parked the truck in the clear zone surrounding the fence. The complex was empty, quiet, and still. He looked around for anything out of the ordinary. Aside from the smoke, nothing about the complex seemed unusual. And then someone pounded hard on the passenger door of his truck, yelling, “
Get out of here, get out of here.” The noise scared Brocksmith, who looked at the door and saw ten men in the dark wearing gas masks and Air Force uniforms. Somehow, they all crowded into the pickup, and he drove it out of there fast.

In the abandoned control center, the hazard lights flashed, the intruder alarm rang, the escape hatch hung wide open, and water slowly dripped from the tunnel onto the concrete floor.

H
amilton Holt's dream of world peace finally seemed within reach. For decades he'd campaigned with one civic group after another, trying to end the perpetual conflict between nations, races, and religions. A graduate of Yale from a wealthy family, he'd worked closely with Andrew Carnegie at the New York Peace Society before the First World War. Holt championed the American Peace Society, the World Peace Foundation, the League to Enforce Peace, the League of Nations, the Conciliation Internationale, and the American Society of International Law. He was also a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He edited a reform newspaper, ran for the U.S. Senate in 1924, lost by a wide margin, became the president of Rollins College the following year, and created a unique educational system there. Lectures were eliminated, and faculty members were hired by the students. College life didn't end his work on behalf of disarmament. During the 1930s, Holt erected a Peace Monument on the Rollins campus in Winter Park, Florida. The monument was a German artillery shell from the First World War set atop a stone plinth. The inscription began:
“
PAUSE, PASSER-BY, AND HANG YOUR HEAD IN SHAME
 . . .”

In the spring of 1946, Holt hosted a conference on world government at Rollins. An idea that had long been dismissed as impractical and naive was now widely considered essential. Much of Europe, Russia, China, and
Japan lay in ruins.
About fifty million people had been killed during the recent war. The United States had been spared the destruction of its cities—and at first, the stunning news of the atomic bomb inspired relief at the swift defeat of Japan, as well as pride in American know-how. And then the implications began to sink in. General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the United States Army Air Forces, warned the public that nuclear weapons “
destructive beyond the wildest nightmares of the imagination” might someday be mounted on missiles, guided by radar, and aimed at American cities. Such an attack, once launched, would be impossible to stop. Despite having emerged from the conflict with unprecedented economic and military power, the United States suddenly felt more vulnerable than at any other time in its history. “
Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear,” CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow noted, “with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”

Hamilton Holt had attended the San Francisco Conference that created the United Nations, only weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the United Nations, Holt thought, wasn't really a world government. It was just another league of sovereign states, doomed to failure. The men who attended the conference at Rollins College felt the same way, and they were hardly a bunch of wild-eyed radicals. Among those who signed Holt's “Appeal to the Peoples of the World” were the president of the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, three U.S. senators, one U.S. Supreme Court justice, a congressman, and Albert Einstein.
The appeal called for the United Nations' General Assembly to be transformed into the legislative branch of a world government. The General Assembly would be authorized to ban weapons of mass destruction, conduct inspections for such weapons, and use military force to enforce international law. “
We believe these to be the minimum requirements,” the appeal concluded, “of a world government capable of averting another war in the atomic era.”

Within weeks of the conference at Rollins, a collection of essays demanding international control of the atomic bomb became a
New York Times
bestseller. Its title was
One World or None
. And a few months later,
an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become “
a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.”

To a remarkable degree, even the U.S. military thought that the atomic bomb should be outlawed or placed under some form of international mandate. General Arnold was a contributor to
One World or None
. He'd been a leading proponent of strategic airpower and supervised the American bombing of both Germany and Japan. The stress had taken its toll. Arnold suffered four heart attacks during the war, and his essay in
One World or None
was a final public statement before retirement. The appeal of nuclear weapons, he wrote, was simply a matter of economics.
They had lowered “the cost of destruction.” They had made it “
too cheap and easy.” An air raid that used to require five hundred bombers now needed only one. Atomic bombs were terribly inexpensive, compared to the price of rebuilding cities. The only conceivable defense against such weapons was a strategy of deterrence—a threat to use them promptly against an enemy in retaliation. “
A far better protection,” Arnold concluded, “lies in developing controls and safeguards that are strong enough to prevent their use on all sides.”

General Carl A. Spaatz, who replaced Arnold as the Army Air Forces commander, was an outspoken supporter of world government. General George C. Kenney, the head of the recently created Strategic Air Command, spent most of his time working on the military staff of the United Nations. General Leslie Groves—the military director of the Manhattan Project, who was staunchly anti-Communist and anti-Soviet—argued that the
atomic bomb's “very existence should make war unthinkable.” He favored international control of nuclear weapons and tough punishments for nations that tried to make them. Without such a system, he saw only one alternative for the United States. “
If there are to be atomic bombs in the world,” Groves argued, “we must have the best, the biggest, and the most.”

•   •   •

A
T
A
C
ABINET
MEETING
on September 21, 1945, members of the Truman administration had debated what to do with this powerful new
weapon. The issue of international control was complicated by another question: Should the secrets of the atomic bomb be given to the Soviet Union? The Soviets were a wartime ally, lost more than twenty million people fighting the Nazis, and now possessed a military stronger than that of any other country except the United States. Canada and Great Britain had been invited to join the Manhattan Project, while the Soviets hadn't even been informed of its existence. In a memo to President Truman, Henry Stimson, the outgoing secretary of war, worried that excluding the Soviets from the nuclear club would cause “
a secret armament race of a rather desperate character.” He proposed a direct approach to the Soviet Union, outside of any international forum, that would share technical information about atomic energy as a first step toward outlawing the atomic bomb. Otherwise, the Soviets were likely to seek nuclear weapons on their own. Stimson thought that a U.S.-Soviet partnership could ensure a lasting peace. “
The only way you can make a man trustworthy,” he told the president, “is to trust him.”

Stimson's proposal was strongly opposed by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. “
We tried that once with Hitler,” Forrestal said. “There are no returns on appeasement.” The meeting ended with the Cabinet split on whether to share atomic secrets with the Soviet Union. A few weeks later, George F. Kennan, one of the State Department's Soviet experts, gave his opinion in a telegram from Moscow, where he was posted at the U.S. embassy. “
There is nothing—I repeat nothing,” Kennan wrote, “in the history of the Soviet regime which could justify us in assuming that the men who are now in power in Russia, or even those who have chances of assuming power within the foreseeable future, would hesitate for a moment to apply this [atomic] power against us if by doing so they thought that they might materially improve their own power position in the world.” In the absence of formal guarantees or strict controls, it would be “
highly dangerous” to give the Soviets any technical information about how to make an atomic bomb. President Truman reached the same conclusion, and the matter was soon dropped.

The United States had good reason to distrust the Soviet Union. In 1939 the Soviet nonaggression pact with Germany was followed by the
Nazi invasions of Poland, Belgium, and France. Two years later the Soviet neutrality pact with Japan was followed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During the war, the Soviet Union launched its own surprise attacks on Finland, the Baltic states, and Poland—and then
executed tens of thousands of their citizens. After encouraging Japanese diplomats to believe it would mediate a peace agreement with the United States, the Soviet Union attacked and occupied Manchuria in the closing days of the war, causing
the deaths of perhaps three hundred thousand Japanese soldiers and civilians. The ideology of the Soviet Union sought the overthrow of capitalist governments like that of the United States. And the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, was not only paranoid and megalomaniacal, but had already
killed almost as many Russians as the Nazis had.

The Soviets had reason to distrust the United States, too. It had intervened militarily in the Russian civil war, using American troops to fight the Red Army until 1920. It had withheld diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union until 1933. It had suffered vastly fewer casualties fighting the Nazis during the Second World War and yet claimed an equal role in the administration of occupied Germany. The United States government had a long history of opposing almost every form of socialism and communism. Armed with nuclear weapons, it was now the greatest impediment to Soviet influence in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

President Truman decided that a domestic policy on atomic energy had to be adopted before the issue of international control could be addressed. The War Department favored the May-Johnson bill, which would give the military a prominent role in atomic matters. The bill was also backed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who'd become a celebrity since the end of the war, renowned as “the father of the atomic bomb.” But the legislation was vehemently opposed by most of the young scientists who'd worked on the Manhattan Project. For years they had resented the strict, compartmentalized secrecy imposed by General Groves. Few of the Manhattan Project scientists had been allowed to know how the atomic bomb would be used. Many now regretted that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed. They considered themselves far more qualified than anyone in the Army to make decisions about atomic energy—and warned that passage of the
May-Johnson bill could turn the United States into a secretive, totalitarian state. Some still had an idealized vision of the Soviet Union and thought that the War Department's bill would endanger world peace. At the heart of the debate were fundamentally different views of who should control the atomic bomb: civilians or the military.

Physicists representing groups like the Federation of American Scientists and the Association of Los Alamos Scientists traveled to Washington, D.C., testified before Congress, wrote editorials, gave impassioned speeches, and publicly attacked General Groves. An ambitious first-term senator from Connecticut, Brien McMahon, soon embraced their cause, asserting that the atomic bomb was too important to be left in the hands of “
a militaristic oligarchy.” He was particularly upset that General Groves would not tell anyone in Congress how many atomic bombs the United States possessed or where they were kept—and that Groves refused to share that information with Cabinet members, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or even the secretary of war. President Truman backed the Army's insistence that details of the atomic stockpile should remain top secret, for the sake of national security. But he sided with the young scientists on the issue of civilian control and threw his support to legislation sponsored by Senator McMahon.

McMahon's bill, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, was passed by Congress in a somewhat amended form and signed into law by the president. It created an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) run by civilians and a Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that provided congressional oversight. Members of the military could serve on a liaison committee that advised the AEC, but they could not determine the agency's policies.

The president was given the sole authority to decide how many atomic bombs the United States should have, when they should be handed over to the military, and whether they should be used against an enemy. One person now had the power to end the lives of millions, with a single command. All of the laboratories, reactors, processing plants, fissile material, and atomic bomb parts belonging to the Manhattan Project were transferred to the AEC. Civilian control of the atomic bomb was now an American principle firmly established by law—but that did not prevent the military, almost immediately, from seeking to undermine it.

•   •   •

“
W
E
ARE
HERE
TO
MAKE
a choice between the quick and the dead,” Bernard Baruch told a gathering of United Nations delegates on June 14, 1946, at the Hunter College gymnasium in the Bronx. “We must elect World Peace or World Destruction.” Baruch was an elegant, silver-haired financier in his midseventies who'd been asked by President Truman to offer a proposal for international control of the atomic bomb. The “Baruch plan” called for the creation of a new agency, affiliated with the U.N., that would own or control “
all atomic-energy activities potentially dangerous to world security.” The agency would have the power to inspect nuclear facilities throughout the world, so that any attempt to make nuclear weapons could be discovered and severely punished. The new system of international control would be imposed in stages—and would eventually outlaw the manufacture, possession, or use of atomic bombs. The United States was
willing to hand over its “winning weapons,” Baruch said, but would require “a guarantee of safety” stronger than mere words.