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

The United States does not have an intercontinental missile, otherwise it would also have easily launched a satellite of its own…. Now we are capable of directing a rocket to any part of the earth and, if need be, with a hydrogen warhead … it is not a mere figure of speech when we say we have organized serial production of intercontinental ballistic rockets … let the people abroad know it, I am making no secret of this — that in one year 250 missiles with hydrogen warheads came off the assembly line in the factory we visited…. The territory of our country is immense. We have the possibility of dispersing our rocket facilities, of camouflaging them well…. Two hundred rockets are sufficient to destroy England, France, and Germany; and three hundred rockets will destroy the United States. At the present time the USSR has so many rockets that mass production has been curtailed and only the newest models are under construction.

Khrushchev had condemned Stalin’s crimes in 1956, released political prisoners, gained a reputation as a reformer, and proposed a ban on nuclear weapons in central Europe. But he’d also ordered Soviet troops to invade Hungary and overthrow its government. More than twenty thousand Hungarian citizens were killed by the Red Army, and hundreds more were later executed. The thought of Khrushchev in command of so many long-range missiles seemed chilling.

President Eisenhower tried to calm the hysteria about Soviet missiles and address the criticism that his administration had become passive, timid, and out of touch. He felt confident that large increases in defense spending were unnecessary — and that the Strategic Air Command had more than enough nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. He was particularly irritated by a secret report submitted to him during the first week of November. A high-level committee led by H. Rowan Gaither, a former president of the Ford Foundation, called for tens of billions of dollars to be spent on new missile programs and a nationwide system of fallout shelters. Eisenhower thought that the Gaither committee had an exaggerated view of the Soviet threat. In a televised speech on November 7, 1957, Eisenhower stressed that there was no reason to panic: the military strength of the free world was much greater than that of the Communists. “It misses the whole point to say that we must now increase our expenditures on all kinds of military hardware and defense,” he said, with frustration.

The speech had little effect. On the morning of November 25, Lyndon Johnson opened the Senate hearings by asserting that “we have slipped dangerously behind the Soviet Union in some very important fields,” and an influential newspaper columnist described the Gaither report as “just about the grimmest warning” in American history. While working in the Oval Office that day, Eisenhower had a stroke and suddenly found himself unable to speak. A week and a half later, a Vanguard rocket carrying America’s first manmade satellite was launched at Cape Canaveral, Florida, before hundreds of reporters and a live television audience. The Vanguard rose about four feet into the air, hesitated, fell back to the launchpad, and exploded.

The Pentagon had good reason to be concerned about the Soviet Union’s long-range missiles, regardless of the actual number. A Soviet bomber would approach the United States at about five hundred miles per hour — and the warhead of a Soviet missile would come at about sixteen thousand miles per hour. With luck, a bomber might be shot down. But no technology yet existed to destroy a nuclear warhead, midflight. And a missile attack would give the United States little time to prepare its response. Soviet bombers would take eight or nine hours to reach the most important American targets; Soviet missiles could hit them in thirty minutes or less. Early warning of a ballistic missile attack would be necessary to protect the nation’s leadership and ensure that SAC’s retaliatory force could get off the ground. That sort of warning, however, might never come. The DEW Line radars had been designed to track enemy aircraft, not missiles, and the Pentagon had no means of detecting ICBMs once they’d been launched.