Command and Control

Russell:… urged the western democracies to attack: Bertrand Russell and his admirers later denied that he’d ever called for such an attack. But his rejection of pacifism, when dealing with the Soviets, had already been made clear. See “Russell Urges West to Fight Russia Now,” New York Times, November 21, 1948; Bertrand Russell, “The Atomic Bomb and the Prevention of War,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (October 1, 1946), pp. 19–21; and Ray Perkins, “Bertrand Russell and Preventive War,” Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (1994), pp. 135–53.

“anything is better than submission”: Quoted in New York Times, “Russell Urges West to Fight.”

Winston Churchill agreed: See Trachtenberg, History & Strategy, p. 105.

Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace: See Kuehl, Hamilton Holt, pp. 250–51.

“should be wiped off the face of the earth”: Quoted in ibid., p. 250.

the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved HALFMOON: For an abridged version of HALFMOON, see “Brief of Short Range Emergency War Plan (HALFMOON), ” JCS 1844/13, July 21, 1948 (TOP SECRET/declassified), in Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 315–24. For additional details, see May et al., “History of Strategic Arms Competition,” Pt. 1, pp. 38–39; Ross, War Plans, pp. 79–97; and Kenneth W. Condit, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy, Volume 2, 1947–1949 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Joint History, Office of the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1996), pp. 156–58.

an “atomic blitz”: See “Conceptual Developments: The Atomic Blitz,” in Wainstein et al., “Evolution of U.S. Command and Control,” pp. 11–16.

Leningrad was to be hit by 7 atomic bombs, Moscow by 8: Cited in Condit, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Volume 2, p. 158.

“the nation-killing concept”: Quoted in Wainstein et al., “Evolution of U.S. Command and Control,” p. 15.

“a nation would die just as surely”: Quoted in Robert F. Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, Volume 1, Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force, 1907–1960 (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1989), p. 240.

a “devastating, annihilating attack”: Quoted in Jeffrey G. Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945–1950 (Washington, D.C.: Government Reprints Press, 2001), p. 109.

“It will be the cheapest thing we ever did”: Quoted in Moody, Building a Strategic Air Force, p. 109.

“The negative psycho-social results”: The State Department official was Charles E. Bohlen, quoted in Futrell, Ideas, vol. 1, p. 238.

the Harmon Committee concluded: An abridged version of the Harmon Report—“Evaluation of Effect on Soviet War Effort Resulting from the Strategic Air Offensive” (TOP SECRET/declassified) — can be found in Etzold and Gaddis, Containment, pp. 360–64.

reduce Soviet industrial production by 30 to 40 percent: Ibid., p. 361.

kill perhaps 2.7 million civilians: Ibid., p. 362.

injure an additional 4 million: Ibid.

“For the majority of Soviet people”: Ibid.

“the only means of rapidly inflicting shock”: Ibid., pp. 363–64

The Soviets detonated their first atomic device: For the making of the Soviet bomb, see ibid. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

The yield was about 20 kilotons: Cited in ibid., p. 218.

Each of its roughly 105,000 parts: For the extraordinary story of how the B-29 was reverse-engineered, see Van Hardesty, “Made in the U.S.S.R.,” Air & Space, March 2001; and Walter J. Boyne, “Carbon Copy,” Air Force Magazine, June 2009.

Soviet Union wouldn’t develop an atomic bomb until the late 1960s: In 1947, General Groves predicted it would take the Soviets another twenty years. See Gregg Herken, “‘A Most Deadly Illusion’: The Atomic Secret and American Nuclear Weapons Policy, 1945–1950,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 49, no. 1 (February 1980), pp. 58, 71.

without a single military radar to search for enemy planes: See Wainstein et al., “Evolution of U.S. Command and Control,” p. 90.

twenty-three radars to guard the northeastern United States: Cited in ibid., p. 94.

a bitter, public dispute about America’s nuclear strategy: For an excellent overview of the military thinking that led not only to the “revolt of the admirals” but also to Pentagon support for a hydrogen bomb, see David Alan Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,” Journal of American History, vol. 66, no. 1 (June 1979), pp. 62–87. For the cultural underpinnings of the revolt, see Vincent Davis, The Admirals Lobby (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967). And for the dispute itself, see Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals, p. 109.

“precision” tactical bombing: See John G. Norris, “Radford Statement Sparks Move for Curb Over Money Powers of Johnson,” Washington Post, October 8, 1949.

“I don’t believe in mass killings of noncombatants”: Quoted in Ibid.