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

During 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.