Command and Control

the Soviets were “fanatically” committed to destroying: Kennan’s quotes come from his famous “long telegram,” whose full text can be found at “The Charge in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State,” February 22, 1946 (SECRET/declassified), in United States State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1946, Volume 6, Eastern Europe; The Soviet Union (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), pp. 696–709.

an “iron curtain”: For the speech in which Churchill first used that phrase, see “Text of Churchill’s Address at Westminister College,” Washington Post, March 6, 1946.

“terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio”: For Truman’s speech, see “Text of President’s Speech on New Foreign Policy,” New York Times, March 13, 1947.

the Pentagon did not have a war plan: The first major study of potential targets in the Soviet Union was conducted in the summer of 1947. For America’s lack of war plans, see L. Wainstein, C. D. Creamans, J. K. Moriarity, and J. Ponturo, “The Evolution of U.S. Strategic Command and Control and Warning, 1945–1972,” Institute for Defense Analyses, Study S-467, June 1975 (TOP SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), pp. 11–14; Ernest R. May, John D. Steinbruner, and Thomas W. Wolfe, “History of the Strategic Arms Competition, 1945–1972,” Pt. 1, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Historical Office, March 1981 (TOP SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), pp. 21–22; and James F. Schnabel, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy; Volume 1, 1945–1947 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Joint History, Office of the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1996), pp. 70–75.

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.