Command and Control (22 page)

Although dubious about the usefulness of SAGE, General LeMay thought that SAC's command-and-control system needed to be improved, as well. He wanted to know where all his planes were, at all times. And he wanted to speak with all his base commanders at once, if war seemed imminent. It took years to develop those capabilities.

When SAC's Strategic Operational Control System (SOCS) was first unveiled in 1950, its Teletype messages didn't travel from one base to another with lightning speed. During one early test of the system, they were received
almost five hours after being sent. And it could take as long as half an hour for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company to make the SOCS circuits operable. That sort of time lag would make it hard to respond promptly to a Soviet attack. Transmission rates gradually improved, and the system enabled LeMay to pick up
a special red telephone at SAC headquarters in Omaha, dial a number, gain control of all the circuits, and make an announcement through loudspeakers at every SAC base in the United States. The introduction of single-sideband radio later allowed him to establish voice communications with SAC's overseas base commanders—and with every one of its bomber pilots midair. The amount of information constantly streaming into SAC headquarters, from airplanes and air bases throughout the world, led to the creation of
an automated command-and-control system that used the same IBM mainframes developed for SAGE. The system was supposed to keep track of SAC's bombers, in real time, as they flew missions. But until the early 1960s, the information displayed at SAC headquarters stubbornly remained anywhere
from an hour and a half to six hours behind the planes.

All of these advances in command and control could prove irrelevant, however, if SAC's commander didn't survive a Soviet first strike. General LeMay's attitude toward civil defense was much the same as his view of air defense. “
I don't think I would put that much money into holes in the ground to crawl into,” he once said. “I would rather spend more of it on offensive weapons systems to deter war in the first place.” Nevertheless, the plans for SAC's new headquarters building included an enormous command bunker.
It extended three levels underground and could house about eight hundred people for a couple of weeks. One of its most distinctive features was a wall about twenty feet high, stretching for almost fifty yards, that was covered by charts, graphs, and a map of the world. The map showed the flight paths of SAC bombers. At first, airmen standing on ladders moved the planes by hand; the information was later projected onto movie screens. A long curtain could be opened and closed by remote control,
hiding or revealing different portions of the screens. It gave the underground command center a hushed, theatrical feel, with rows of airmen sitting at computer terminals beneath the world map and high-ranking officers observing it from a second-story, glass-enclosed balcony.

While ordinary families were encouraged to dig fallout shelters in their backyards, America's military and civilian leadership was provided with elaborate, top secret accommodations.
Below the East Wing at the White House, a small bomb shelter had been constructed for President Roosevelt during the Second World War, in case the Nazis attacked Washington, D.C. That shelter was expanded by the Truman administration into
an underground complex with twenty rooms. The new bunker could survive
the airburst of a 20-kiloton atomic bomb. But the threat of Soviet hydrogen bombs made it seem necessary to move America's commander in chief someplace even deeper underground. At Raven Rock Mountain in southern Pennsylvania, about eighty miles from the White House and six miles from Camp David, an enormous bunker was dug out of solid granite.
Known as Site R, it sat about half a mile inside Raven Rock and another half a mile below the mountain's peak. It had power stations, underground water reservoirs, a small chapel, clusters of three-story buildings set within vast caverns, and
enough beds to accommodate two thousand high-ranking officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Council. Although the bunker was huge, so was the competition for space in it; for years
the Air Force and the other armed services disagreed about who should be allowed to stay there.

The president could also find shelter
at Mount Weather, a similar facility in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near the town of Berryville, Virginia. Nicknamed “High Point,” the bunker was supposed to ensure the “continuity of government.” It would house Supreme Court justices and members of the Cabinet, as well as hundreds of officials from civilian agencies. In addition to making preparations for martial law,
Eisenhower had secretly given nine prominent citizens the legal authority to run much of American society after a nuclear war. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson had agreed to serve as administrator of the Emergency Food Agency; Harold Boeschenstein, the president of the Owens Corning Fiberglas Company, would
lead the Emergency Production Agency; Frank Stanton, the president of CBS, would head the Emergency Communications Agency; and Theodore F. Koop, a vice president at CBS, would direct the Emergency Censorship Agency. High Point had its own television studio, from which the latest updates on the war could be broadcast nationwide.
Patriotic messages from Arthur Godfrey and Edward R. Murrow had already been prerecorded to boost the morale of the American people after a nuclear attack.

Beneath the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, a bunker was built for members of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and hundreds of their staff members. Known as Project Greek Island, it had blast doors that weighed twenty-five tons, separate assembly halls in which the House and Senate could meet, decontamination showers, and a garbage incinerator that could also serve as a crematorium.
A bunker was later constructed for the Federal Reserve at Mount Pony, in Culpeper, Virginia, where billions of dollars in currency were stored, shrink-wrapped in plastic, to help revive the postwar economy. NATO put its emergency command-and-control center
inside the Kindsbach Cave, an underground complex in West Germany with sixty-seven rooms. The cave had previously served as a Nazi military headquarters for the western front.

The British government had planned to rely on a series of deep underground shelters built in London during the Second World War. But the Strath report suggested the need for an alternate seat of government far from the capital. In the Wiltshire countryside, about a hundred miles west of London, a secret abandoned aircraft engine factory hidden inside a limestone mine was turned into a Cold War bunker larger than any in the United States. Known at various times by
the code names SUBTERFUGE, BURLINGTON, and TURNSTYLE, it was large enough to provide more than one million square feet of office space and house almost eight thousand people. Although the original plans were scaled down, the completed bunker had miles of underground roads, accommodations for the prime minister and hundreds of other officials, a BBC studio, a vault where the Bank of England's gold reserves could be stored, and
a pub called the Rose & Crown.

•   •   •

D
URING
THE
CLOSING
MONTHS
of the Truman administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had once again asked for control of America's nuclear weapons. And once again, their request had been denied. But the threat of Soviet bombers and the logistical demands of the new look strengthened the arguments for military custody. By keeping the weapons at
half a dozen large storage sites, the Atomic Energy Commission maintained centralized, civilian control of the stockpile. The arrangement minimized the risk that an atomic bomb could be stolen or misplaced. Those AEC sites, however, had become an inviting target for the Soviet Union—and a surprise attack on them could wipe out America's nuclear arsenal. The Joint Chiefs argued that nuclear weapons should be stored at military bases and that time-consuming procedures to authorize their use should be scrapped. Civilian custody was portrayed as a grave threat to readiness and national security. A democratic principle that seemed admirable in theory could prove disastrous in an emergency.

According to the AEC's rules, if the Strategic Air Command wanted to obtain the nuclear cores of atomic bombs,
the president of the United States would have to sign a directive. Local field offices of the AEC and the Department of Defense would have to be notified about that directive. Representatives of those field offices would have to contact the AEC storage sites. Once the proper code words were exchanged, keys would have to be retrieved, storerooms unlocked, nuclear cores carried outside in their metal containers. At best,
SAC would get the cores in about twelve minutes. But the process could take a lot longer. Local officials might have to be tracked down on vacation or awakened in the middle of the night. They might have to be persuaded that this was the real thing, not a test.

In June 1953, President
Eisenhower approved the shipment of nuclear cores to American naval vessels and overseas bases where the other components of atomic bombs were already stored—and where foreign governments had no authority to dictate how the bombs might be used. Cores were removed from the AEC stockpile, placed under military control, and
shipped to sites that met those criteria: American naval vessels and the island of Guam. The following year the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked for permission to store bomb components and nuclear cores at SAC bases. Dispersing the weapons to multiple locations, the Pentagon argued, would
make the stockpile much less vulnerable to attack. The AEC didn't object to handing over more nuclear cores. The chairman of the commission, Lewis Strauss, agreed with most of LeMay's strategic views. And the new general manager of the AEC, General Kenneth Nichols, had not only argued for years that the military should control America's atomic bombs,
he'd pushed hard for dropping them on Chinese troops during the Korean War.

President Eisenhower allowed the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force to start moving nuclear cores to their own storage sites, both in the United States and overseas. But his faith in military custody had its limits. Eisenhower insisted that the AEC retain control of the cores for all of the nation's hydrogen bombs, even during an emergency. “
No active capsule will be inserted in any high yield weapon,” the new rules stated, “except with the expressed approval of the AEC custodian and in the custodian's presence.” Civilian employees of the Atomic Energy Commission were posted on aircraft carriers, ammunition ships, and air bases where H-bombs were stored. These AEC custodians were supposed to keep the cores securely locked away and hold on to the keys, until the president ordered them to do otherwise. But the Joint Chiefs considered this arrangement inconvenient, largely symbolic, and an insult to the military. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson agreed, and in 1956 the AEC custodians were withdrawn from ships and air bases. Instead, President Eisenhower allowed the captains of those Navy ships and the commanders of those Air Force bases to serve as “
Designated Atomic Energy Commission Military Representatives.” And they were given the keys to the nuclear storerooms.

Legally, the hydrogen bombs were still in civilian custody. But in reality, after nearly a decade of unrelenting effort, the military had gained control of America's nuclear weapons. The Navy carried them on ships in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Mediterranean.
The Strategic Air Command stored them at air bases in the ZI and overseas—at Homestead in Florida and Ellsworth in South Dakota, at Carswell in Texas and Biggs in South
Carolina, at Plattsburgh in New York and Castle in California; at Whiteman in Missouri, Schilling in Kansas, and Pease in New Hampshire; at Fairford, Lakenheath, Greenham Common, Brize Norton, and Mildenhall in Great Britain; at Nouasseur, Ben Guerir and Sidi Slimane in French Morocco; at Torrejón and Morón and Zaragoza in Spain; at Kadena in Okinawa; and at least nineteen other locations. Atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs had been liberated from civilian oversight and scattered throughout the world, ready to be assembled by military personnel.

For safety reasons, the nuclear cores and the bomb components were stored separately. On naval vessels they were kept in different rooms. At SAC bases they were kept in different bunkers, shielded by earthen berms and walls ten feet thick. The storage bunkers, known as “igloos,” were located near runways, by order of the Joint Chiefs, “
to provide rapid availability for use” and reduce “the possibility of capture.”

In addition to gaining custody of nuclear weapons, the military also assumed a much larger role in their design. The AEC's authority had been diminished by a revision of the Atomic Energy Act in 1954 and by an agreement signed the previous year with the Department of Defense. A civilian agency that had once enjoyed complete control over the stockpile became, in effect, a supplier of nuclear weapons for the military. The Army, Navy, and Air Force were now customers whose demands had to be met. The AEC labs at Livermore and Los Alamos aggressively competed for weapon contracts, giving the armed services even greater influence over the design process. The rivalry between the two labs became so intense that at times their dislike for each other seemed to exceed their animosity toward the Soviet Union. When Livermore's first three designs for hydrogen bombs proved to be duds, it was an expensive setback to America's weapons program, but a source of much amusement at Los Alamos.

•   •   •

A
S
THE
NUMBER
OF
storage sites multiplied, so did the need for weapons that were easy to assemble and maintain. Ordinary enlisted men would now be handling hydrogen bombs. The weapons in the stockpile during the mid-1950s were much simpler than the first generation of atomic
bombs, and yet they still required a good deal of maintenance. Their batteries were large and bulky and could hold a charge for only about a month. When a battery died, the bomb had to be taken apart. After the battery was recharged, the bomb had to be reassembled, and its electrical system had to be checked. One of the final steps was a test to make sure that all the detonators had been properly connected. If the detonators didn't work, the bomb would be a dud—but if they were somehow triggered by the maintenance procedure, the bomb could go off.
On at least three different occasions during the 1950s, the bridgewire detonators of nuclear weapons were set off by mistake during tests of their electrical systems. These accidents occurred during training exercises, and none resulted in the loss of life. But they revealed a worrisome design flaw. An error during routine maintenance or hurried preparations for war could detonate an atomic bomb.