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

The top officers at SAC were let go, and LeMay replaced them with veterans of his bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan. He hoped to create a similar esprit de corps. Promotions weren’t given to individuals, but to an entire crew, sometimes on the spot. And when one person screwed up, the rest of the crew also paid the price. Officers lost their jobs because of accidents and honest mistakes. “I can’t afford to differentiate between the incompetent and the unfortunate,” LeMay explained. “Standardization” became the watchword at SAC, repeated like a mantra and ruthlessly pursued, with manuals and checklists and numeric measures of success created for every job. Team players were rewarded, iconoclasts and prima donnas encouraged to go elsewhere. LeMay wanted SAC to function as smoothly as the intricate machinery of a modern bomber. “Every man a coupling or a tube; every organization a rampart of transistors, battery of condensers,” he wrote in his memoir. “All rubbed up, no corrosion. Alert.”

Within hours of the Japanese surrender, LeMay had flown low over cities that his planes destroyed. The experience confirmed his belief that America needed an Air Force so overwhelmingly powerful that no enemy would ever dare to launch a surprise attack. After Pearl Harbor it had taken years for the United States to mobilize fully for war. Nuclear weapons eliminated that option. If a counterattack couldn’t be swift, it might never occur. LeMay wanted everyone at SAC to feel a strong sense of urgency, to be ready for war not next week or tomorrow but at any moment — to feel “we are at war now.” His goal was to build a Strategic Air Command that could strike the Soviet Union with planes based in the United States and deliver every nuclear weapon at once. SAC bomber crews constantly trained and prepared for that all-out assault. They staged mock attacks on every city in the United States with a population larger than twenty-five thousand, practicing to drop atomic bombs on urban targets in the middle of the night. San Francisco was bombed more than six hundred times within a month.

One of LeMay’s greatest concerns was the command and control of nuclear weapons — the system of rules and procedures that guided his men, the network of radars and sensors and communications lines that allowed information to travel back and forth between headquarters and the field, the mechanisms that prevented accidental detonations and permitted deliberate ones, all of it designed to make sure that orders could be properly given, received, and carried out. To retaliate against a surprise attack, you needed to know that one had been launched. You needed to share that news with your own forces and ensure they could immediately respond. Command and control had always been a crucial element in warfare. But in a nuclear war, where decisions might have to be made within minutes and weapons could destroy cities in an instant, the reliability of these administrative systems could be the difference between victory and annihilation. A breakdown in command and control could make it impossible to launch a nuclear attack — or could order one by mistake.

LeMay thought that the Strategic Air Command should control all of America’s atomic bombs and select their targets. Such an arrangement would simplify things, creating a unified chain of command. It would give oversight and accountability to one military organization: his. The atomic arsenal should be viewed, according to SAC doctrine, as “a single instrument … directed, controlled, if need be, from a single source.” The Army, the Navy, and other units in the Air Force didn’t like that idea. As LeMay worked hard to gain control of America’s nuclear weapons, his rivals at the Pentagon fought to get their own, expand their influence, and limit the power of the Strategic Air Command.

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