Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

The U.S. Army had only one division … along with ten police regiments: Cited in Steven T. Ross, American War Plans, 1945–1950: Strategies for Defeating the Soviet Union (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1996), p. 40.

for a total of perhaps 100,000 troops: In May 1945 the United States had about 2 million troops in Europe; two years later it had 105,000. Cited in “History Timeline,” United States Army Europe, U.S. Army, 2011.

The British army had one division: Cited in Ross, War Plans, p. 40.

the Soviet army had about one hundred divisions: See Schnabel, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Volume 1, p. 71.

about 1.2 million troops: Cited in Ross, War Plans, p. 53.

more than 150 additional divisions: Cited in ibid., p. 33. Some intelligence reports claimed that the Soviet Union had 175 divisions in Europe, with 40 of them ready to attack West Germany. The Pentagon estimates of Soviet troop numbers varied widely — and, according to the historian Matthew A. Evangelista, deliberately overstated the strength of the Red Army. A more innocent motive might have been a desire to prepare for the worst. In any event, by early 1947, the U.S. Army was greatly outnumbered in Europe. See May et al., “History of Strategic Arms Competition,” Pt. 1 pp. 37, 139–41; and Matthew A. Evangelista, “Stalin’s Postwar Army Reappraised,” International Security, vol. 7, no. 3 (1982), pp. 110–38.

the Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands: For a patriotic account of the test, which somehow inspired the name for a woman’s two-piece bathing suit, see W. A. Shurcliff, Bombs at Bikini: The Official Report of Operation Crossroads (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1947).

“Ships at sea and bodies of troops”: “The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon,” Enclosure “A,” The Final Report of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Evaluation Board for Operation Crossroads, June 30, 1947 (TOP SECRET/declassified), p. 12.

“The bomb is preeminently a weapon”: Ibid., p. 32.

“man’s primordial fears”: Ibid., p. 36.

“break the will of nations”: Ibid.

“cities of especial sentimental significance”: Ibid., p. 37.

if “we were ruthlessly realistic”: Quoted in Marc Trachtenberg, History & Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 100.

“I don’t advocate preventive war”: Quoted in “The Five Nests,” Time, September 11, 1950, p. 24.

“I think I could explain to Him”: Quoted in ibid.

Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military: Marc Trachtenberg offers a fine summary of American thinking about “preventive war” in History & Strategy, pp. 103–7. For other views of the subject, see Russell D. Buhite and W. Christopher Hamel, “War for Peace: The Question of an American Preventive War Against the Soviet Union, 1945–1955,” Diplomatic History, vol. 14, no. 3, (1990), pp. 367–84; and Gian P. Gentile, “Planning for Preventive War,” Joint Force Quarterly, Spring 2000, pp. 68–74.

Russell: … urged the western democracies to attack: Bertrand Russell and his admirers later denied that he’d ever called for such an attack. But his rejection of pacifism, when dealing with the Soviets, had already been made clear. See “Russell Urges West to Fight Russia Now,” New York Times, November 21, 1948; Bertrand Russell, “The Atomic Bomb and the Prevention of War,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (October 1, 1946), pp. 19–21; and Ray Perkins, “Bertrand Russell and Preventive War,” Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (1994), pp. 135–53.

“anything is better than submission”: Quoted in New York Times, “Russell Urges West to Fight.”

Winston Churchill agreed: See Trachtenberg, History & Strategy, p. 105.

Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace: See Kuehl, Hamilton Holt, pp. 250–51.

“should be wiped off the face of the earth”: Quoted in ibid., p. 250.

the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved HALFMOON: For an abridged version of HALFMOON, see “Brief of Short Range Emergency War Plan (HALFMOON), ” JCS 1844/13, July 21, 1948 (TOP SECRET/declassified), in Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 315–24. For additional details, see May et al., “History of Strategic Arms Competition,” Pt. 1, pp. 38–39; Ross, War Plans, pp. 79–97; and Kenneth W. Condit, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy, Volume 2, 1947–1949 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Joint History, Office of the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1996), pp. 156–58.

an “atomic blitz”: See “Conceptual Developments: The Atomic Blitz,” in Wainstein et al., “Evolution of U.S. Command and Control,” pp. 11–16.

Leningrad was to be hit by 7 atomic bombs, Moscow by 8: Cited in Condit, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Volume 2, p. 158.

“the nation-killing concept”: Quoted in Wainstein et al., “Evolution of U.S. Command and Control,” p. 15.