The Day We Lost the H-Bomb: Cold War, Hot Nukes, and the Worst Nuclear Weapons Disaster in History

According to Moore, Old told the crowd that SAC had several hundred strike plans. Then he described SAC's optimum strike plan, what defense insiders called the “Sunday Punch.” With enough warning time, SAC could send 735 bombers flying toward the Soviet Union. The bombers, approaching from many different directions, would hit the Soviets' early warning screen simultaneously and overwhelm their defenses. Old estimated that the planes could drop somewhere between 600 and 750 bombs. “The final impression,” wrote Moore, “was that virtually all of Russia would be nothing but a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours.” General Old concluded the meeting by raising an issue that would come to dominate SAC policy, the concept of “alert time.” Old framed it this way: If the Soviets launched a surprise attack against the United States, would SAC have enough time to load its planes and get them off the ground before Russian bombs blew them to bits? With two hours' warning, he said, Russian bombs could destroy about 35 percent of the command. But if the Soviets sneaked in a total surprise attack and caught SAC with its pants down, the bombs could decimate the command, obliterating 90 percent of its infrastructure. “The amount of alert time,” concluded Moore, “is the most important factor as far as SAC is concerned.”

The concept of alert time had been cooked up by defense analysts at the RAND Corporation, a California think tank sponsored by the Air Force. In the early 1950s, RAND analysts became convinced that SAC bases, especially those overseas, were vulnerable to a surprise attack. SAC

leaders soon realized that these vulnerabilities could work in their favor. For SAC to survive an allout surprise attack and retaliate in kind, it would need a striking force at least double the size of the Soviets'. Building such a force would require a massive influx of funding. SAC could ask for the sky.

On April 30, 1956, Curtis LeMay sat at a long table in the Capitol building, facing a row of somber senators. LeMay had flown to Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Forces Subcommittee about the strength of SAC's bomber fleet and its vulnerability to surprise attack. The hearings had been in the making for about a year. Senate Democrats had accused President Eisenhower of pinching military funds excessively in order to balance the budget. With a presidential election looming, the subcommittee had called for hearings to examine, specifically, Eisenhower's Air Force policies. The sessions, which became known as the Congressional Air Power Hearings of 1956, brought the question of SAC's vulnerability to the American public and made “bomber gap” a household term.

Worrisome intelligence had trickled in from Russia over the past year. One incident in particular had caused grave concern. The previous summer, the Soviets had invited a number of U.S. Air Force attachés to an air show near Moscow. The day of the air show had started pleasantly enough — one news report describes the attachés sitting under colored umbrellas, drinking beer, and chatting with other foreigners. Then came the air parade, which included Soviet Bison bombers, four-engine jet planes suspected to have intercontinental range. At the time, Air Force Intelligence guessed that the Soviets had about twenty-five Bisons, maybe up to forty. But at the air show, the Americans saw ten Bisons flying overhead, then another nine, then yet another nine. There were twenty-eight planes in all, just at the parade.

The Air Force representatives realized — or rather, thought they did — that they had grossly underestimated the size of the Soviet bomber force. Returning home, they fed the information to Air Force intelligence, who figured that twenty-eight Bisons in the air meant the Soviets must have fifty-six already finished. Adding in what they knew about Soviet factory space and learning curves, intelligence analysts predicted that by 1959 the Soviets could have five hundred to eight hundred Bisons.

We know today, and some suspected even then, that the Soviets had nowhere near that number of long-range bombers. In fact, the Soviets had only ten Bisons at the time, and those had rolled off the assembly line just weeks before the air show. Analysts later speculated that the Soviets had fooled the American attachés by flying the same planes over the viewing area again and again.

The suspected Soviet bomber strength became public knowledge during Curtis LeMay's testimony before the Senate subcommittee. LeMay's testimony was a bit odd — because the hearings involved issues of national security, the senators had given LeMay written questions and he read the censored answers. (One reporter speculated that Air Force PR had dreamed up this tactic to keep LeMay from shooting his mouth off.) Despite the stilted setting, LeMay got his point across. Looking “guarded” and “somber,” he told the senators that the Russians were beating America in the bomber race.