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

Eisenhower was infuriated by the Army’s constant requests for more troops to help defend Western Europe. “It would be perfect rot to talk about shipping troops abroad when fifteen of our cities were in ruins,” he told an aide. The Army would be needed at home to deal with the chaos. “You can’t have this kind of war,” Eisenhower said at a national security meeting a couple of years later. “There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”

PART THREE ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN

Acceptable Risks

Three weeks after winning an Oscar for best actor in The Philadelphia Story, Jimmy Stewart enlisted in the Army. It was the spring of 1941, long before Pearl Harbor, but Stewart thought the United States would soon be at war and wanted to volunteer his skills as a pilot. The previous year he’d failed an Army physical for being ten pounds underweight. This time he passed, just barely, and at the age of thirty-two entered the Army Air Corps as a private. By 1944, Major Jimmy Stewart was flying the lead plane in bombing runs over Germany. While other Hollywood stars like Ronald Reagan and John Wayne managed to avoid combat during the Second World War, Stewart gained a reputation in the Eighth Air Force as a “lucky” commander who always brought his men back from dangerous missions. He flew dozens of those missions, shunned publicity about his wartime exploits, and never discussed them with his family. “He always maintained a calm demeanor,” a fellow officer recalled. “His pilots had absolute faith in him and were willing to follow him wherever he led.”

After the war, Colonel Jimmy Stewart returned to Hollywood and starred in a series of well-received films — It’s a Wonderful Life, Harvey, Rear Window — while serving in the Air Force Reserve. Deeply concerned about the Soviet threat, he decided to make a movie about the importance of America’s nuclear deterrent. Stewart visited SAC headquarters in 1952 to discuss the idea with General Curtis LeMay. The two had met in England, while serving in the Eighth Air Force. LeMay gave the project his blessing, worked closely with the screenwriter Beirne Lay, Jr., and allowed the film to be shot at SAC air bases.

Strategic Air Command was released in 1955. It tells the story of a major league infielder, Dutch Holland, whose baseball career is interrupted when the Air Force returns him to active duty. For most of the film, Holland, played by Jimmy Stewart, is torn between his desire to enjoy civilian life and his duty to protect the United States from a Soviet attack. Strategic Air Command focuses on the hardships endured by SAC crews, the dangers of their job, the sacrifices that overseas assignments imposed on their families. Even the bubbly, upbeat cheer of the actress June Allyson, playing Stewart’s wife, is briefly deflated by the challenges of being married to a SAC officer. Shot in Technicolor and wide-screen VistaVision, featuring spectacular aerial photography and a rousing score, the film offers an unabashed celebration of American airpower. “She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Stewart says, at his first glimpse of a new B-47 bomber.

More compelling than the film’s plot, the onscreen chemistry between Allyson and Stewart, or the footage of SAC bombers midflight was the performance of actor Frank Lovejoy as General Ennis C. Hawkes. Gruff, unsentimental, fond of cigars, unwilling to tolerate mistakes, and ready at a moment’s notice to unleash a massive retaliation, the character was a flattering, barely fictionalized portrait of Curtis LeMay. It was another demonstration of SAC’s skill at public relations. LeMay had already become a national celebrity, a living symbol of American might. Life magazine described him as the “Toughest Cop of the Western World” and repeated an anecdote about his boundless self-confidence. Warned that if he didn’t put out his cigar, the bomber he was sitting in might explode, LeMay replied: “It wouldn’t dare.”

The premiere of Strategic Air Command was held in New York’s Times Square, with searchlights piercing the sky and more than three thousand guests, including Air Force generals, politicians, businessmen, Hollywood starlets, and Arthur Godfrey in the lobby of the Paramount Theatre, broadcasting the event live on television. Godfrey was a popular radio and television personality, as well as a good friend of LeMay’s, who frequently promoted SAC during his shows. Strategic Air Command was one of the highest-grossing films of 1955. It fit the national mood. And a few years later Jimmy Stewart, as a member of the Air Force Reserve, was appointed deputy director of operations at SAC, one of the top jobs at the command.