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

It built a million-dollar telephone and teletype system to link all SAC bases with the new headquarters at Offutt Field in Omaha, Nebraska. In six months, LeMay had turned SAC around and landed on the cover of Newsweek. Underneath his scowling portrait ran the headline “Air General LeMay: A Tough Guy Does It Again.” Inside the magazine, a glowing article called LeMay a genius and described how he had turned SAC from a “creampuff outfit” into an atomic force with real teeth. “When LeMay first came in, we were nothing but a bunch of nits and gnats,” one young officer told Newsweek. “Today, we're a going concern.” LeMay had done more than shape SAC up; he had created a religion. The gospel he preached was a simple parable: the schoolyard bully and the gentle giant. The Soviets were the schoolyard bullies, aiming to seize Europe, crush America, and spread communism throughout the world. SAC was the gentle giant, the muscle-bound kid who stuck up for the skinny geeks and pimply weaklings, the kid who didn't want to hurt anyone but could knock you out with one punch if he had to. The Strategic Air Command, and no one else, stood as America's shield and protector.

In the years to come, LeMay would never waver from this core message. Increasingly, those who doubted this truth or questioned its morality were labeled fools, cowards, or Commies.

The year 1952 began the golden age of SAC. The command had a clear mission, a strong leader, and the American public on board. In the early 1950s, the Bomb loomed over everything. Those were the years when schoolchildren ducked under their desks for atomic air-raid drills and teachers handed out dog tags so they could identify students after a nuclear blast. The year 1952 also brought a new president — Dwight Eisenhower — who announced that strategic airpower and nuclear weapons were now the nation's top defense priority.

Disgusted by the slogging stalemate of the Korean War, Eisenhower viewed nuclear deterrence as a far cheaper way to keep the nation safe and oversaw a massive buildup of SAC and the nation's nuclear stockpile. He also believed that there could be no such thing as a “limited” nuclear war.

Because such a war would destroy both countries, if not the world, it had to be prevented at all costs.

Eisenhower had joined LeMay's church of deterrence: America could prevent nuclear war only by showing spectacular strength.

Eisenhower's philosophy led to a windfall for the nuclear military, especially the Air Force. Between 1952 and 1960, the Air Force received 46 percent of America's defense money. SAC more than doubled its personnel in five years, from 85,473 in 1950 to 195,997 by 1955. During those five years the bomber fleet also grew dramatically, from 520 to 1,309. In 1951, SAC had thirty-three bases, including eleven outside the continental United States. By 1957, SAC operated out of sixty-eight bases. Thirty of these were spread around the world, in North Africa, Canada, New Zealand, England, Guam, Greenland, and Spain. Although other services had nuclear weapons by the mid-1950s — Army soldiers could fire small nuclear artillery shells, and the Navy could launch cruise missiles from submarines — SAC ruled the nuclear kingdom. “SAC was still the big daddy,” said Jerry Martin, command historian for the U.S. Strategic Command. “They had the nuclear hammer.” On March 19, 1954, at the height of this expansion, SAC hosted a classified briefing at its headquarters in Omaha. Major General A. J. Old, director of SAC operations, spoke to about thirty military officers from various service branches, regaling the crowd with charts, graphs, and maps detailing SAC's capabilities. Afterward, LeMay answered questions for a half hour.

Sitting in the audience that day was a Navy captain named William Brigham Moore. Moore took detailed notes at the meeting and later wrote a memo describing it for his director. The top secret memo, declassified in the 1980s, gives a small but rare glimpse inside SAC at the apex of its power.