Command and Control (12 page)

The selection of Bernard Baruch to help formulate the American plan had been controversial within the Truman administration. Many liberals criticized Baruch for being too old, too ignorant about atomic weaponry, and too suspicious of the Soviet Union. The Baruch plan was attacked by Oppenheimer, among others, for not being bold enough—for emphasizing inspections and punishments instead of cooperation with the Soviets. Oppenheimer favored a scheme that would share technical information about atomic energy and promote goodwill. On June 19 the Soviet Union offered its own plan. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, proposed that first the United States should destroy all of its nuclear weapons, and then an agreement should be reached on how to prevent other nations from obtaining them. The Soviet response confirmed liberal doubts about the Baruch plan—and conservative doubts about the Soviet Union.

During the summer of 1946, some form of international agreement to outlaw the atomic bomb still seemed within reach. Although the Soviets complained that the United States was trying to prolong its nuclear monopoly, America's defense policies were hardly those of an imperialist power
seeking world domination. In fact, the United States was quickly dismantling its armed forces.
The number of soldiers in the U.S. Army soon dropped from about 8 million to fewer than 1 million; the number of airplanes in the Army Air Forces fell
from almost 80,000 to fewer than 25,000 and
only one fifth of those planes were thought ready for action. Ships and tanks were permanently scrapped, and
the defense budget was cut by almost 90 percent.

American servicemen were eager to come home after the war and resume their normal lives. When the pace of demobilization seemed too slow, they staged protest marches in occupied Germany. The American people expressed little desire to build an empire or maintain a strong military presence overseas. Although the War Department sought to acquire a wide range of foreign bases, the likelihood of any military challenge to the United States seemed remote. “
No major strategic threat or requirement now exists, in the opinion of our country's best strategists,” Major General St. Clair Street, the deputy commander of SAC, said in July 1946, “nor will such a requirement exist for the next three to five years.”

At the very moment when hopes for world government, world peace, and international control of the atomic bomb reached their peak, the Cold War began. Without the common enemy of Nazi Germany, the alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States started to unravel. The Soviet Union's looting of Manchuria, its delay in removing troops from Iran, and its demand for Turkish territory along the Mediterranean coast unsettled the Truman administration. But the roots of the Cold War lay in Germany and Eastern Europe, where the Soviets hoped to create a buffer zone against future invasion. Ignoring promises of free elections and self-determination, the Soviet Union imposed a Communist puppet government in Poland. George Kennan told the State Department that
the Soviets were “fanatically” committed to destroying “our traditional way of life,” and Winston Churchill warned that
an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe, along with the expansion of Communist, totalitarian rule.

By March 1947, American relations with the Soviet Union had grown chilly. In a speech before Congress, President Truman offered economic aid to countries threatened by a system relying on “
terror and oppression, a
controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.” Although the speech never mentioned the Soviet Union by name, the target of the Truman Doctrine was obvious. The United States now vowed to contain Soviet power throughout the world. The divide between east and west in Europe widened a few months later, when the Soviets prevented their allies from accepting U.S. aid through the Marshall Plan. In February 1948 the Communist overthrow of Czechoslovakia's freely elected government shocked the American public. The Soviet-backed coup revived memories of the Nazi assault on the Czechs in 1938, the timidity of the European response, and the world war that soon followed.

President Truman's tough words were not backed, however, by a military strategy that could defend Western Europe. During the early months of 1947, as Truman formulated his anti-Communist doctrine,
the Pentagon did not have a war plan for fighting the Soviet Union. And the rapid demobilization of the American military seemed to have given the Soviets a tremendous advantage on the ground.
The U.S. Army had only one division stationed in Germany, along with ten police regiments,
for a total of perhaps 100,000 troops.
The British army had one division there, as well. According to U.S. intelligence reports,
the Soviet army had about one hundred divisions, with
about 1.2 million troops, capable of invading Western Europe—and could mobilize
more than 150 additional divisions within a month.

Instead of being outlawed by the U.N., the atomic bomb soon became integral to American war plans for the defense of Europe. In June 1947 the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a top secret report, “The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon,” to President Truman. It contained the latest thinking on how nuclear weapons might be used in battle. The first postwar atomic tests, conducted the previous year at
the Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, had demonstrated some of the weapon's limitations. Dropped on a fleet of empty Japanese and American warships, a Mark 3 implosion bomb like the one used at Nagasaki had missed its aiming point by almost half a mile—and failed to sink eighty-three of the eighty-eight vessels. “
Ships at sea and bodies of troops are, in general, unlikely to be regarded as primary atomic bomb targets,” the report concluded. “
The bomb
is pre-eminently a weapon for use against human life and activities in large urban and industrial areas.” It was a weapon useful, most of all, for killing and terrorizing civilians. The report suggested that a nuclear attack would stir up “
man's primordial fears” and “
break the will of nations.” The military significance of the atomic bomb was clear: it wouldn't be aimed at the military. Nuclear weapons would be used to destroy an enemy's morale, and the some of best targets were “
cities of especial sentimental significance.”

The Joint Chiefs did not welcome these conclusions, but assumed them to be true—the hard, new reality of strategy in the nuclear age. If other countries obtained atomic bombs, they might be used in similar ways against the United States. The destructive power of these weapons was so great that the logic of waging a preventive war, of launching a surprise attack upon an enemy, might prove hard to resist. Like a shootout in the Old West, a nuclear war might be won by whoever fired first. A country with fewer atomic bombs than its adversary had an especially strong incentive to launch an attack out of the blue. And for that reason, among others, a number of high-ranking American officers argued that the United States should bomb the Soviet Union before it obtained any nuclear weapons. General Groves thought that approach would make sense,
if “we were ruthlessly realistic.” General Orvil Anderson, commander of the Air University, publicly endorsed an attack on the Soviets. “
I don't advocate preventive war,” Anderson told a reporter. “I advocate the shedding of illusions.” He thought that Jesus Christ would approve of dropping atomic bombs on the Soviet Union: “
I think I could explain to Him that I had saved civilization.” Anderson was suspended for the remarks.

Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. Bertrand Russell—the British philosopher and pacifist, imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War—
urged the western democracies to attack the Soviet Union before it got an atomic bomb. Russell acknowledged that a nuclear strike on the Soviets would be horrible, but “
anything is better than submission.”
Winston Churchill agreed, proposing that the Soviets be given an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from Germany, or see your cities destroyed.
Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace,
crusader for world government, lifelong advocate of settling disputes through mediation and diplomacy and mutual understanding, no longer believed that sort of approach would work. Nuclear weapons had changed everything, and the Soviet Union couldn't be trusted. Any nation that rejected U.N. control of atomic energy, Holt said, “
should be wiped off the face of the earth with atomic bombs.”

•   •   •

D
URING
THE
SPRING
OF
1948,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved HALFMOON, the first emergency war plan directed at the Soviet Union. It assumed that the Soviets would start a war in Europe, prompted by an accident or a misunderstanding. The conflict would begin with the United States losing a series of land battles. Greatly outnumbered and unable to hold western Germany, the U.S. Army would have to stage a fighting retreat to seaports in France and Italy, then await evacuation by the U.S. Navy. The Red Army was expected to overrun Europe, the Middle East, and Korea. Fifteen days after the first shots were fired, the United States would launch a counterattack in the form of
an “atomic blitz.” The plan originally called for 50 atomic bombs to be dropped on the Soviet Union. The number was later increased to 133, aimed at seventy Soviet cities.
Leningrad was to be hit by 7 atomic bombs, Moscow by 8. The theory behind the counterattack was called “
the nation-killing concept.” After an atomic blitz, Colonel Dale O. Smith explained, “
a nation would die just as surely as a man will die if a bullet pierces his heart.”

The defense of Great Britain was one of HALFMOON's central aims, and much of the atomic blitz was to be launched from British air bases. But that would only encourage the Soviets, one Pentagon official warned, to begin the war with
a “devastating, annihilating attack” on Great Britain. Denied access to British airfields, American planes would be forced to use bases in Egypt, India, Iceland, Greenland, Okinawa, or Alaska. The limited range of B-29 and B-50 bombers might require some American crews to fly one-way “suicide” missions. “
It will be the cheapest thing we ever did,” Major General Earle E. Partridge said. “Expend the crew, expend the bomb, expend the airplane all at once. Kiss them good-bye and let them go.”

President Truman was given a briefing on HALFMOON and the atomic blitz in May 1948. He didn't like either of them. Truman told the Joint Chiefs to prepare a plan for defending Western Europe—without using nuclear weapons. He still hoped that some kind of international agreement might outlaw them. The Joint Chiefs began to formulate ERASER, an emergency war plan that relied entirely on conventional forces.

A month later the Soviets cut rail, road, and water access to the western sectors of Berlin. Truman now faced a tough choice. Defying the blockade could bring war with the Soviet Union. But backing down and abandoning Berlin would risk the Soviet domination of Europe. The U.S. military governor of Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, decided to start an airlift of supplies into the city. Truman supported the airlift, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff expressed doubts, worried that the United States might not be able to handle a military confrontation with the Soviets. Amid the Berlin crisis, work on ERASER was halted, Truman issued a series of directives outlining how nuclear weapons should be used—and the atomic blitz became the most likely American response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

The new strategy was strongly opposed by George Kennan and others at the State Department, who raised questions about its aftermath. “
The negative psycho-social results of such an atomic attack might endanger postwar peace for 100 years,” one official warned. But the fiercest opposition to HALFMOON and the similar war plans that followed it—FLEETWOOD, DOUBLESTAR, TROJAN, and OFFTACKLE—came from officers in the U.S. Navy. They argued that slow-moving American bombers would be shot down before reaching Soviet cities. They said that American air bases overseas were vulnerable to Soviet attack. And most important, they were appalled by the idea of using nuclear weapons against civilian targets.

The Navy had practical, as well as ethical, reasons for opposing the new war plans. Atomic bombs were still too heavy to be carried by planes launched from the Navy's aircraft carriers—a fact that gave the newly independent U.S. Air Force the top priority in defense spending. For more than a century, naval officers had regarded themselves as the elite of the armed services. They now resented the aggressive public relations efforts of the Air
Force, the disparaging remarks about sea power, the books and articles claiming that long-range bombers had won the Second World War, the propaganda films like Walt Disney's
Victory Through Air Power,
with its jolly animated sequences of cities in flames and its tagline: “There's a thrill in the air!” The Navy thought the atomic blitz was the wrong way to defend the free world, and at the Pentagon a battle soon raged over how the next war in Europe should be fought.

Hoping to resolve the dispute, James Forrestal, who'd become secretary of defense, appointed an Air Force officer, General Hubert R. Harmon, to lead a study of whether a nuclear strike would defeat the Soviet Union. In May 1949
the Harmon Committee concluded that the most recent American war plan, TROJAN, would
reduce Soviet industrial production by 30 to 40 percent. It would also
kill perhaps 2.7 million civilians and
injure an additional 4 million. Those were conservative estimates, not taking into account the fires ignited by more than one hundred atomic bombs. But TROJAN wouldn't prevent the Red Army from conquering Europe and the Middle East. Nor would it lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. “
For the majority of Soviet people,” the committee noted, “atomic bombing would validate Soviet propaganda against foreign powers, stimulate resentment against the United States, unify these people and increase their will to fight.” Nevertheless, Harmon saw no realistic alternative to the current war plan. The atomic blitz was “
the only means of rapidly inflicting shock and serious damage” on the Soviet military effort, and “the advantages of its early use would be transcending.”