Skunk Works

Around the time we started working three shifts getting the U-2 built in the summer of 1955, a national poll of adult Americans indicated that more than half the population thought it more likely that they would die in a thermonuclear war than of old-age diseases. Around the country some anxious people began digging fallout shelters in their backyards and stocking them with Geiger counters and oxygen tanks. They were motivated to keep on digging by front-page diagrams in their papers showing how an H-bomb exploded over Manhattan would trigger a four-mile fireball, vaporizing all in its path from Central Park to Washington Square, and creating more than a million casualties in less than two minutes.

Like millions of other couples raising a family, my wife and I were forced to ponder the unthinkable: what would we do if L.A. was nuked? Assuming we survived the blast, where would we go? How would we protect ourselves from radiation and fallout? To even raise such questions was heartbreaking because there were no answers apparent at all.

So I had no trouble motivating myself to work hard, long hours to build the U-2. This was the airplane our government was impatiently waiting for to breach the Iron Curtain and finally discover the scope and dimensions of the Soviet threat. There was no way to hide from our cameras. And there was no hostile action the Russians could take that could stop us from our flights. We would be flying beyond reach of their defenses.

Eisenhower was being regularly briefed on our progress and sent word to Kelly via John Foster’s brother, Allen Dulles, who ran the CIA, to crack the whip and get that U-2 launched. The president was receiving persistent warnings from the Joint Chiefs and the CIA that the Russians might be preparing to launch a preemptive first-strike nuclear attack against the United States. The evidence was fragmentary but unsettling. Khrushchev had bragged, “We will bury you,” and at the 1954 May Day parade he gave our military attachés a chilling glimpse at what seemed to be his latest grave-makers: a half dozen new long-range missiles on huge portable launchers being trucked through Red Square, while overhead wave after wave of a new heavy bomber rattled the Moscow rooftops. Our military observers from the embassy counted one hundred bombers, nicknamed the Bison, that were capable of reaching New York with a nuclear payload. Only after the first U-2 flights was this estimate reassessed and our observers realized they had probably been duped: the Russians appeared to have flown the same twenty or so bombers over the Kremlin in a big circle. But the missiles seemed to confirm spy reports that the Soviets were working on a huge 240,000-pound-thrust rocket engine. Why this crash program in long-range weapons?

We were countering the Bisons with a new bomber of our own, the long-range B-52, but the trouble was we didn’t have enough reliable information on precise locations of Russian bases and key industries to devise strategic targeting plans. We possessed only the most rudimentary idea of where vital Soviet bases and industrial centers were located or how well they were defended, or the kinds of terrain that a bombing mission would encounter going in and coming out. A massive amount of photomapping and technical intelligence was needed to provide the Strategic Air Command with an up-to-date comprehensive targeting plan.

Without an airplane like the U-2 that could overfly at heights above harm, the blue-suiters were driven to use aggressive, dangerous tactics. Had the American public known about the ongoing “secret air war” between the two superpowers they would have been even more in despair than many already were about the state of the world. There had been dozens of American attempts during the early 1950s to gather important Russian radar and electronic communications frequencies by flying provocatively up against the Soviet coastline and occasionally overflying their territory by as much as two hundred miles. Several of these unarmed reconnaissance aircraft were shot down either by Soviet jets or ground fire. Most of the crews, totaling more than a hundred servicemen, simply disappeared off the scope and were presumed to have been sent to Siberia and/or killed.