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

SAC's new long-range B-52 bomber, he said, had a serious engineering flaw: a flywheel in the B-52's alternator had a nasty habit of breaking off. The defect had already caused one crash and led to serious production delays. Boeing had delivered seventy-eight B-52s so far, and SAC had returned thirty-one to the shop. This left SAC with only forty-seven of the new long-range bombers. The Air Force guessed that the Soviets already had about a hundred.

LeMay's testimony on this “bomber gap” made front-page headlines, and Americans reacted with dismay. How did Russia get ahead of us? Both houses of Congress demanded that the president add an additional billion dollars to the Air Force budget. (The budget already included $16.9 billion for the Air Force, $10 billion for the Navy, and $7.7 billion for the Army.) Eisenhower, sensing trouble, cautioned against getting caught up in a “numbers racket” and trying to match the Russians plane for plane. He pointed out that the United States had a massive fleet of midrange bombers stationed all over the globe, not to mention the most powerful navy in the world. When the full story came out, he said, the American public would “feel a lot better.”

The president's soothing words calmed the storm for a few weeks. The House of Representatives passed Eisenhower's budget as it stood, without additional funds for the Air Force. Then LeMay returned for one more Senate hearing. It was his “guess,” he said on May 26, that the Soviets could destroy the United States in a surprise attack by 1959. From 1958 on, he said, the Russians would be “stronger in long-range airpower than we are, and it naturally follows that if [the enemy] is stronger, he may feel that he should attack.”

It's impossible to tell if LeMay believed his own rhetoric. Some considered him a cynical opportunist, using spotty intelligence and scare tactics to build SAC into an empire at the expense of the other services. One anonymous administration spokesman told Time magazine that “Curt LeMay thinks only of SAC.” But many believed him a patriot defending his country against an ominous enemy. Most Americans assumed that the Communists were hell-bent on world domination and would like nothing better than to bomb America into a nuclear wasteland. If the United States gave them an inch or fell behind at all, they would try it.

At the conclusion of the airpower hearings, the Senate sided with LeMay. Over Eisenhower's objections, Congress gave the Air Force an additional $928.5 million to bulk up against the Soviet threat. SAC could move its mission forward.

To counter the threat of a surprise attack, SAC started experimenting with a program called “ground alert” in November 1956. In this system, maintenance crews kept a handful of SAC bombers poised on the airstrip, filled with fuel and bombs. Flight crews lived and slept in nearby barracks. They could leave the barracks while on alert duty but never wander more than fifteen minutes away from their planes. Frequent drills kept the airmen in line. When the alarm — a blaring klaxon that could wake the dead — sounded, the crews ran to their planes at full speed, as if Curtis LeMay himself were chasing them. The first plane took off within fifteen minutes; the others followed at one-minute intervals. On October 1, 1957, ground alert became official SAC policy.

The new system came just in the nick of time. Three days later, on October 4, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth. Sputnik by itself was no threat to the United States. Barely bigger than a basketball, it contained scientific instruments to measure the density of the atmosphere. But Sputnik hadn't climbed into orbit by itself; the Soviets had shot it up there with a rocket. And if Soviet rockets could shoot satellites into space, they could certainly shoot nuclear missiles at the United States. “Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses,” said Senator Lyndon Johnson. SAC's new ground alert seemed like a brilliant, prescient move. By the following year, SAC had reorganized its structure to keep one third of the bomber force on alert at all times.

That same year, SAC began testing another program, called “airborne alert.” Instead of holding bombers ready on the ground, this program kept loaded SAC bombers in the air at all times, flying in prearranged orbits that approached Soviet airspace. Proponents argued that airborne alert gave SAC added security. “Any Soviet surprise attack,” wrote one reporter, “would find the ‘birds’ gone from their nests.” Airborne bombers, closer than planes on the ground to Soviet targets, also posed a more powerful deterrent. With those bombers in the sky, the Soviets would think twice before trying any funny business.

Tommy Power told Congress about the new program in 1959, after he had finished initial testing.