Command and Control

the number of personnel at SAC increased by almost one third, and the number of aircraft nearly doubled: In 1952 the Strategic Air Command had 1,638 aircraft and employed 166,021 people; by 1956 it had 3,188 and employed 217,279. Cited in Norman Polmar, ed., Strategic Air Command: People, Aircraft, and Missiles (Annapolis, MD: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1979), pp. 28, 44.

more than one fifth of its funding and about one quarter of its troops: According to the historian A. J. Bacevich, in 1953 Eisenhower cut the Army’s fiscal year 1955 budget from $13 billion to $10.2 billion and lowered the number of troops from 1,540,000 to 1,164,000. See Bacevich, “The Paradox of Professionalism: Eisenhower, Ridgway, and the Challenge to Civilian Control, 1953–1955,” Journal of Military History, vol. 61, no. 2, (April 1997), p. 314.

“national fiscal bankruptcy would be far preferable”: Quoted in ibid., p. 321.

151,000 nuclear weapons: For the number of weapons that the Army sought and how it hoped to use them, see “History of the Custody and Deployment,” p. 50.

“emergency capability” weapons: For the definition of the phrase, see “History of the Early Thermonuclear Weapons: Mks 14, 15, 16, 17, 24, and 29,” Information Research Division, Sandia National Laboratories, RS 3434/10, June 1967 (SECRET RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), p. 17.

Code-named Project Brass Ring: See ibid., p. 15; and Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, Volume 2, pp. 119–20, 262.

Agnew remembered seeing footage of Nazi tasks: Agnew interview.

“We’ve got to find out”: Ibid.

The program, known as Project Paperclip: For details of the program, see John Gimbel, “U.S. Policy and German Scientists: The Early Cold War,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 101, no. 3 (1986), pp. 433–451; Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (New York: St. Martin’s 1991); and Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Hunt for the Nazi Scientists (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987).

“rescue those able and intelligent Jerries”: LeMay, Mission with LeMay, p. 398.

“Oh yes,” Knacke replied: Agnew interview.

Bob Peurifoy led the team at Sandia: Peurifoy interview.

a temperature of about -423 degrees Fahrenheit: Cited in Hansen, Swords of Armageddon Volume 3, p. 56.

he’d climbed two hundred feet to the top: Bernard O’Keefe and a friend flipped a coin to see who’d have to disarm the nuclear device. O’Keefe lost, got into a Jeep, and headed to the tower. See O’Keefe, Nuclear Hostages, pp. 154–6.

“Is this building moving or am I getting dizzy?”: Quoted in ibid., p. 178.

“My God, it is”: Ibid.

“like it was resting on a bowl of jelly”: Ibid., p. 179.

Shrimp’s yield was 15 megatons: Cited in Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace p. 174.

almost three times larger than… predicted: Cited in ibid.

about two hundred billion pounds of coral reef and the seafloor: The crater dug by the blast was roughly two thousand yards wide, with a maximum depth of eighty yards. As Bob Peurifoy and his son, Steve, a fellow engineer, explained to me, the crater was “an inverted, very-high-aspect ratio, right circular cone.” The volume of such a cone is one third of the base area multiplied by the height. According to their calculations, the volume of the Bravo crater was about eighty million cubic yards — and a cubic yard of sandy topsoil weighs about twenty-five hundred pounds. That means the amount of material displaced by the explosion weighed about two hundred billion pounds. To get a visual sense of that amount, imagine a pile of sand and coral the size of a football field that extends about seven miles into the sky. I am grateful to the Peurifoys for these figures. For the dimensions of the crater formed by the Bravo test, see “Operation Castle, Crater Survey,” p. 24.

cloud that soon stretched for more than sixty miles: The mushroom cloud reached a maximum height of about 310,000 feet and a width of about 350,000 feet. See Vincent J. Jodoin, “Nuclear Cloud Rise and Growth” (dissertation, Graduate School of Engineering, Air Force Institute of Technology, Air University, June 1994), p. 89.

The dangers of radioactive fallout: For a good explanation of how residual radiation is created, how long it can last, and what it can do to human beings, see Glasstone, Effects of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 414–501, 577–663.

The “early fallout” of a nuclear blast: See ibid., pp. 416–42.

A dose of about 700 roentgens is almost always fatal: See ibid., p. 461.

“Delayed fallout” poses a different kind of risk: See ibid., pp. 473–88.

an amount of fallout that surprised everyone: See ibid., pp. 460–61; and Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace, pp. 171–82, 271–79.

The villagers had seen the brilliant explosion: See Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace, p. 174.

a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon: The story of the unfortunate crew can be found in ibid., pp. 175–77; and Ralph E. Lapp, The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958).