Command and Control

The Best, the Biggest, and the Most

Hamilton Holt’s dream of world peace finally seemed within reach. For decades he’d campaigned with one civic group after another, trying to end the perpetual conflict between nations, races, and religions. A graduate of Yale from a wealthy family, he’d worked closely with Andrew Carnegie at the New York Peace Society before the First World War. Holt championed the American Peace Society, the World Peace Foundation, the League to Enforce Peace, the League of Nations, the Conciliation Internationale, and the American Society of International Law. He was also a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He edited a reform newspaper, ran for the U.S. Senate in 1924, lost by a wide margin, became the president of Rollins College the following year, and created a unique educational system there. Lectures were eliminated, and faculty members were hired by the students. College life didn’t end his work on behalf of disarmament. During the 1930s, Holt erected a Peace Monument on the Rollins campus in Winter Park, Florida. The monument was a German artillery shell from the First World War set atop a stone plinth. The inscription began: “PAUSE, PASSER-BY, AND HANG YOUR HEAD IN SHAME…”

In the spring of 1946, Holt hosted a conference on world government at Rollins. An idea that had long been dismissed as impractical and naive was now widely considered essential. Much of Europe, Russia, China, and Japan lay in ruins. About fifty million people had been killed during the recent war. The United States had been spared the destruction of its cities — and at first, the stunning news of the atomic bomb inspired relief at the swift defeat of Japan, as well as pride in American know-how. And then the implications began to sink in. General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the United States Army Air Forces, warned the public that nuclear weapons “destructive beyond the wildest nightmares of the imagination” might someday be mounted on missiles, guided by radar, and aimed at American cities. Such an attack, once launched, would be impossible to stop. Despite having emerged from the conflict with unprecedented economic and military power, the United States suddenly felt more vulnerable than at any other time in its history. “Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear,” CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow noted, “with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”

Hamilton Holt had attended the San Francisco Conference that created the United Nations, only weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the United Nations, Holt thought, wasn’t really a world government. It was just another league of sovereign states, doomed to failure. The men who attended the conference at Rollins College felt the same way, and they were hardly a bunch of wild-eyed radicals. Among those who signed Holt’s “Appeal to the Peoples of the World” were the president of the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, three U.S. senators, one U.S. Supreme Court justice, a congressman, and Albert Einstein. The appeal called for the United Nations’ General Assembly to be transformed into the legislative branch of a world government. The General Assembly would be authorized to ban weapons of mass destruction, conduct inspections for such weapons, and use military force to enforce international law. “We believe these to be the minimum requirements,” the appeal concluded, “of a world government capable of averting another war in the atomic era.”

Within weeks of the conference at Rollins, a collection of essays demanding international control of the atomic bomb became a New York Times bestseller. Its title was One World or None. And a few months later, an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become “a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.”

To a remarkable degree, even the U.S. military thought that the atomic bomb should be outlawed or placed under some form of international mandate. General Arnold was a contributor to One World or None. He’d been a leading proponent of strategic airpower and supervised the American bombing of both Germany and Japan. The stress had taken its toll. Arnold suffered four heart attacks during the war, and his essay in One World or None was a final public statement before retirement. The appeal of nuclear weapons, he wrote, was simply a matter of economics. They had lowered “the cost of destruction.” They had made it “too cheap and easy.” An air raid that used to require five hundred bombers now needed only one. Atomic bombs were terribly inexpensive, compared to the price of rebuilding cities. The only conceivable defense against such weapons was a strategy of deterrence — a threat to use them promptly against an enemy in retaliation. “A far better protection,” Arnold concluded, “lies in developing controls and safeguards that are strong enough to prevent their use on all sides.”

General Carl A. Spaatz, who replaced Arnold as the Army Air Forces commander, was an outspoken supporter of world government. General George C. Kenney, the head of the recently created Strategic Air Command, spent most of his time working on the military staff of the United Nations. General Leslie Groves — the military director of the Manhattan Project, who was staunchly anti-Communist and anti-Soviet — argued that the atomic bomb’s “very existence should make war unthinkable.” He favored international control of nuclear weapons and tough punishments for nations that tried to make them. Without such a system, he saw only one alternative for the United States. “If there are to be atomic bombs in the world,” Groves argued, “we must have the best, the biggest, and the most.”

AT A CABINET MEETING on September 21, 1945, members of the Truman administration had debated what to do with this powerful new weapon. The issue of international control was complicated by another question: Should the secrets of the atomic bomb be given to the Soviet Union? The Soviets were a wartime ally, lost more than twenty million people fighting the Nazis, and now possessed a military stronger than that of any other country except the United States. Canada and Great Britain had been invited to join the Manhattan Project, while the Soviets hadn’t even been informed of its existence. In a memo to President Truman, Henry Stimson, the outgoing secretary of war, worried that excluding the Soviets from the nuclear club would cause “a secret armament race of a rather desperate character.” He proposed a direct approach to the Soviet Union, outside of any international forum, that would share technical information about atomic energy as a first step toward outlawing the atomic bomb. Otherwise, the Soviets were likely to seek nuclear weapons on their own. Stimson thought that a U.S.-Soviet partnership could ensure a lasting peace. “The only way you can make a man trustworthy,” he told the president, “is to trust him.”

Stimson’s proposal was strongly opposed by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. “We tried that once with Hitler,” Forrestal said. “There are no returns on appeasement.” The meeting ended with the Cabinet split on whether to share atomic secrets with the Soviet Union. A few weeks later, George F. Kennan, one of the State Department’s Soviet experts, gave his opinion in a telegram from Moscow, where he was posted at the U.S. embassy. “There is nothing — I repeat nothing,” Kennan wrote, “in the history of the Soviet regime which could justify us in assuming that the men who are now in power in Russia, or even those who have chances of assuming power within the foreseeable future, would hesitate for a moment to apply this [atomic] power against us if by doing so they thought that they might materially improve their own power position in the world.” In the absence of formal guarantees or strict controls, it would be “highly dangerous” to give the Soviets any technical information about how to make an atomic bomb. President Truman reached the same conclusion, and the matter was soon dropped.

The United States had good reason to distrust the Soviet Union. In 1939 the Soviet nonaggression pact with Germany was followed by the Nazi invasions of Poland, Belgium, and France. Two years later the Soviet neutrality pact with Japan was followed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During the war, the Soviet Union launched its own surprise attacks on Finland, the Baltic states, and Poland — and then executed tens of thousands of their citizens. After encouraging Japanese diplomats to believe it would mediate a peace agreement with the United States, the Soviet Union attacked and occupied Manchuria in the closing days of the war, causing the deaths of perhaps three hundred thousand Japanese soldiers and civilians. The ideology of the Soviet Union sought the overthrow of capitalist governments like that of the United States. And the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, was not only paranoid and megalomaniacal, but had already killed almost as many Russians as the Nazis had.

The Soviets had reason to distrust the United States, too. It had intervened militarily in the Russian civil war, using American troops to fight the Red Army until 1920. It had withheld diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union until 1933. It had suffered vastly fewer casualties fighting the Nazis during the Second World War and yet claimed an equal role in the administration of occupied Germany. The United States government had a long history of opposing almost every form of socialism and communism. Armed with nuclear weapons, it was now the greatest impediment to Soviet influence in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

President Truman decided that a domestic policy on atomic energy had to be adopted before the issue of international control could be addressed. The War Department favored the May-Johnson bill, which would give the military a prominent role in atomic matters. The bill was also backed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who’d become a celebrity since the end of the war, renowned as “the father of the atomic bomb.” But the legislation was vehemently opposed by most of the young scientists who’d worked on the Manhattan Project. For years they had resented the strict, compartmentalized secrecy imposed by General Groves. Few of the Manhattan Project scientists had been allowed to know how the atomic bomb would be used. Many now regretted that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed. They considered themselves far more qualified than anyone in the Army to make decisions about atomic energy — and warned that passage of the May-Johnson bill could turn the United States into a secretive, totalitarian state. Some still had an idealized vision of the Soviet Union and thought that the War Department’s bill would endanger world peace. At the heart of the debate were fundamentally different views of who should control the atomic bomb: civilians or the military.

Physicists representing groups like the Federation of American Scientists and the Association of Los Alamos Scientists traveled to Washington, D.C., testified before Congress, wrote editorials, gave impassioned speeches, and publicly attacked General Groves. An ambitious first-term senator from Connecticut, Brien McMahon, soon embraced their cause, asserting that the atomic bomb was too important to be left in the hands of “a militaristic oligarchy.” He was particularly upset that General Groves would not tell anyone in Congress how many atomic bombs the United States possessed or where they were kept — and that Groves refused to share that information with Cabinet members, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or even the secretary of war. President Truman backed the Army’s insistence that details of the atomic stockpile should remain top secret, for the sake of national security. But he sided with the young scientists on the issue of civilian control and threw his support to legislation sponsored by Senator McMahon.

McMahon’s bill, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, was passed by Congress in a somewhat amended form and signed into law by the president. It created an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) run by civilians and a Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that provided congressional oversight. Members of the military could serve on a liaison committee that advised the AEC, but they could not determine the agency’s policies.

The president was given the sole authority to decide how many atomic bombs the United States should have, when they should be handed over to the military, and whether they should be used against an enemy. One person now had the power to end the lives of millions, with a single command. All of the laboratories, reactors, processing plants, fissile material, and atomic bomb parts belonging to the Manhattan Project were transferred to the AEC. Civilian control of the atomic bomb was now an American principle firmly established by law — but that did not prevent the military, almost immediately, from seeking to undermine it.

“WE ARE HERE TO MAKE a choice between the quick and the dead,” Bernard Baruch told a gathering of United Nations delegates on June 14, 1946, at the Hunter College gymnasium in the Bronx. “We must elect World Peace or World Destruction.” Baruch was an elegant, silver-haired financier in his midseventies who’d been asked by President Truman to offer a proposal for international control of the atomic bomb. The “Baruch plan” called for the creation of a new agency, affiliated with the U.N., that would own or control “all atomic-energy activities potentially dangerous to world security.” The agency would have the power to inspect nuclear facilities throughout the world, so that any attempt to make nuclear weapons could be discovered and severely punished. The new system of international control would be imposed in stages — and would eventually outlaw the manufacture, possession, or use of atomic bombs. The United States was willing to hand over its “winning weapons,” Baruch said, but would require “a guarantee of safety” stronger than mere words.

The selection of Bernard Baruch to help formulate the American plan had been controversial within the Truman administration. Many liberals criticized Baruch for being too old, too ignorant about atomic weaponry, and too suspicious of the Soviet Union. The Baruch plan was attacked by Oppenheimer, among others, for not being bold enough — for emphasizing inspections and punishments instead of cooperation with the Soviets. Oppenheimer favored a scheme that would share technical information about atomic energy and promote goodwill. On June 19 the Soviet Union offered its own plan. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, proposed that first the United States should destroy all of its nuclear weapons, and then an agreement should be reached on how to prevent other nations from obtaining them. The Soviet response confirmed liberal doubts about the Baruch plan — and conservative doubts about the Soviet Union.

During the summer of 1946, some form of international agreement to outlaw the atomic bomb still seemed within reach. Although the Soviets complained that the United States was trying to prolong its nuclear monopoly, America’s defense policies were hardly those of an imperialist power seeking world domination. In fact, the United States was quickly dismantling its armed forces. The number of soldiers in the U.S. Army soon dropped from about 8 million to fewer than 1 million; the number of airplanes in the Army Air Forces fell from almost 80,000 to fewer than 25,000 and only one fifth of those planes were thought ready for action. Ships and tanks were permanently scrapped, and the defense budget was cut by almost 90 percent.

American servicemen were eager to come home after the war and resume their normal lives. When the pace of demobilization seemed too slow, they staged protest marches in occupied Germany. The American people expressed little desire to build an empire or maintain a strong military presence overseas. Although the War Department sought to acquire a wide range of foreign bases, the likelihood of any military challenge to the United States seemed remote. “No major strategic threat or requirement now exists, in the opinion of our country’s best strategists,” Major General St. Clair Street, the deputy commander of SAC, said in July 1946, “nor will such a requirement exist for the next three to five years.”

At the very moment when hopes for world government, world peace, and international control of the atomic bomb reached their peak, the Cold War began. Without the common enemy of Nazi Germany, the alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States started to unravel. The Soviet Union’s looting of Manchuria, its delay in removing troops from Iran, and its demand for Turkish territory along the Mediterranean coast unsettled the Truman administration. But the roots of the Cold War lay in Germany and Eastern Europe, where the Soviets hoped to create a buffer zone against future invasion. Ignoring promises of free elections and self-determination, the Soviet Union imposed a Communist puppet government in Poland. George Kennan told the State Department that the Soviets were “fanatically” committed to destroying “our traditional way of life,” and Winston Churchill warned that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe, along with the expansion of Communist, totalitarian rule.

By March 1947, American relations with the Soviet Union had grown chilly. In a speech before Congress, President Truman offered economic aid to countries threatened by a system relying on “terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.” Although the speech never mentioned the Soviet Union by name, the target of the Truman Doctrine was obvious. The United States now vowed to contain Soviet power throughout the world. The divide between east and west in Europe widened a few months later, when the Soviets prevented their allies from accepting U.S. aid through the Marshall Plan. In February 1948 the Communist overthrow of Czechoslovakia’s freely elected government shocked the American public. The Soviet-backed coup revived memories of the Nazi assault on the Czechs in 1938, the timidity of the European response, and the world war that soon followed.

President Truman’s tough words were not backed, however, by a military strategy that could defend Western Europe. During the early months of 1947, as Truman formulated his anti-Communist doctrine, the Pentagon did not have a war plan for fighting the Soviet Union. And the rapid demobilization of the American military seemed to have given the Soviets a tremendous advantage on the ground. The U.S. Army had only one division stationed in Germany, along with ten police regiments, for a total of perhaps 100,000 troops. The British army had one division there, as well. According to U.S. intelligence reports, the Soviet army had about one hundred divisions, with about 1.2 million troops, capable of invading Western Europe — and could mobilize more than 150 additional divisions within a month.

Instead of being outlawed by the U.N., the atomic bomb soon became integral to American war plans for the defense of Europe. In June 1947 the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a top secret report, “The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon,” to President Truman. It contained the latest thinking on how nuclear weapons might be used in battle. The first postwar atomic tests, conducted the previous year at the Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, had demonstrated some of the weapon’s limitations. Dropped on a fleet of empty Japanese and American warships, a Mark 3 implosion bomb like the one used at Nagasaki had missed its aiming point by almost half a mile — and failed to sink eighty-three of the eighty-eight vessels. “Ships at sea and bodies of troops are, in general, unlikely to be regarded as primary atomic bomb targets,” the report concluded. “The bomb is preeminently a weapon for use against human life and activities in large urban and industrial areas.” It was a weapon useful, most of all, for killing and terrorizing civilians. The report suggested that a nuclear attack would stir up “man’s primordial fears” and “break the will of nations.” The military significance of the atomic bomb was clear: it wouldn’t be aimed at the military. Nuclear weapons would be used to destroy an enemy’s morale, and the some of best targets were “cities of especial sentimental significance.”

The Joint Chiefs did not welcome these conclusions, but assumed them to be true — the hard, new reality of strategy in the nuclear age. If other countries obtained atomic bombs, they might be used in similar ways against the United States. The destructive power of these weapons was so great that the logic of waging a preventive war, of launching a surprise attack upon an enemy, might prove hard to resist. Like a shootout in the Old West, a nuclear war might be won by whoever fired first. A country with fewer atomic bombs than its adversary had an especially strong incentive to launch an attack out of the blue. And for that reason, among others, a number of high-ranking American officers argued that the United States should bomb the Soviet Union before it obtained any nuclear weapons. General Groves thought that approach would make sense, if “we were ruthlessly realistic.” General Orvil Anderson, commander of the Air University, publicly endorsed an attack on the Soviets. “I don’t advocate preventive war,” Anderson told a reporter. “I advocate the shedding of illusions.” He thought that Jesus Christ would approve of dropping atomic bombs on the Soviet Union: “I think I could explain to Him that I had saved civilization.” Anderson was suspended for the remarks.

Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. Bertrand Russell — the British philosopher and pacifist, imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War — urged the western democracies to attack the Soviet Union before it got an atomic bomb. Russell acknowledged that a nuclear strike on the Soviets would be horrible, but “anything is better than submission.” Winston Churchill agreed, proposing that the Soviets be given an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from Germany, or see your cities destroyed. Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace, crusader for world government, lifelong advocate of settling disputes through mediation and diplomacy and mutual understanding, no longer believed that sort of approach would work. Nuclear weapons had changed everything, and the Soviet Union couldn’t be trusted. Any nation that rejected U.N. control of atomic energy, Holt said, “should be wiped off the face of the earth with atomic bombs.”

DURING THE SPRING OF 1948, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved HALFMOON, the first emergency war plan directed at the Soviet Union. It assumed that the Soviets would start a war in Europe, prompted by an accident or a misunderstanding. The conflict would begin with the United States losing a series of land battles. Greatly outnumbered and unable to hold western Germany, the U.S. Army would have to stage a fighting retreat to seaports in France and Italy, then await evacuation by the U.S. Navy. The Red Army was expected to overrun Europe, the Middle East, and Korea. Fifteen days after the first shots were fired, the United States would launch a counterattack in the form of an “atomic blitz.” The plan originally called for 50 atomic bombs to be dropped on the Soviet Union. The number was later increased to 133, aimed at seventy Soviet cities. Leningrad was to be hit by 7 atomic bombs, Moscow by 8. The theory behind the counterattack was called “the nation-killing concept.” After an atomic blitz, Colonel Dale O. Smith explained, “a nation would die just as surely as a man will die if a bullet pierces his heart.”

The defense of Great Britain was one of HALFMOON’s central aims, and much of the atomic blitz was to be launched from British air bases. But that would only encourage the Soviets, one Pentagon official warned, to begin the war with a “devastating, annihilating attack” on Great Britain. Denied access to British airfields, American planes would be forced to use bases in Egypt, India, Iceland, Greenland, Okinawa, or Alaska. The limited range of B-29 and B-50 bombers might require some American crews to fly one-way “suicide” missions. “It will be the cheapest thing we ever did,” Major General Earle E. Partridge said. “Expend the crew, expend the bomb, expend the airplane all at once. Kiss them good-bye and let them go.”

President Truman was given a briefing on HALFMOON and the atomic blitz in May 1948. He didn’t like either of them. Truman told the Joint Chiefs to prepare a plan for defending Western Europe — without using nuclear weapons. He still hoped that some kind of international agreement might outlaw them. The Joint Chiefs began to formulate ERASER, an emergency war plan that relied entirely on conventional forces.

A month later the Soviets cut rail, road, and water access to the western sectors of Berlin. Truman now faced a tough choice. Defying the blockade could bring war with the Soviet Union. But backing down and abandoning Berlin would risk the Soviet domination of Europe. The U.S. military governor of Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, decided to start an airlift of supplies into the city. Truman supported the airlift, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff expressed doubts, worried that the United States might not be able to handle a military confrontation with the Soviets. Amid the Berlin crisis, work on ERASER was halted, Truman issued a series of directives outlining how nuclear weapons should be used — and the atomic blitz became the most likely American response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

The new strategy was strongly opposed by George Kennan and others at the State Department, who raised questions about its aftermath. “The negative psycho-social results of such an atomic attack might endanger postwar peace for 100 years,” one official warned. But the fiercest opposition to HALFMOON and the similar war plans that followed it — FLEETWOOD, DOUBLESTAR, TROJAN, and OFFTACKLE — came from officers in the U.S. Navy. They argued that slow-moving American bombers would be shot down before reaching Soviet cities. They said that American air bases overseas were vulnerable to Soviet attack. And most important, they were appalled by the idea of using nuclear weapons against civilian targets.

The Navy had practical, as well as ethical, reasons for opposing the new war plans. Atomic bombs were still too heavy to be carried by planes launched from the Navy’s aircraft carriers — a fact that gave the newly independent U.S. Air Force the top priority in defense spending. For more than a century, naval officers had regarded themselves as the elite of the armed services. They now resented the aggressive public relations efforts of the Air Force, the disparaging remarks about sea power, the books and articles claiming that long-range bombers had won the Second World War, the propaganda films like Walt Disney’s Victory Through Air Power, with its jolly animated sequences of cities in flames and its tagline: “There’s a thrill in the air!” The Navy thought the atomic blitz was the wrong way to defend the free world, and at the Pentagon a battle soon raged over how the next war in Europe should be fought.

Hoping to resolve the dispute, James Forrestal, who’d become secretary of defense, appointed an Air Force officer, General Hubert R. Harmon, to lead a study of whether a nuclear strike would defeat the Soviet Union. In May 1949 the Harmon Committee concluded that the most recent American war plan, TROJAN, would reduce Soviet industrial production by 30 to 40 percent. It would also kill perhaps 2.7 million civilians and injure an additional 4 million. Those were conservative estimates, not taking into account the fires ignited by more than one hundred atomic bombs. But TROJAN wouldn’t prevent the Red Army from conquering Europe and the Middle East. Nor would it lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. “For the majority of Soviet people,” the committee noted, “atomic bombing would validate Soviet propaganda against foreign powers, stimulate resentment against the United States, unify these people and increase their will to fight.” Nevertheless, Harmon saw no realistic alternative to the current war plan. The atomic blitz was “the only means of rapidly inflicting shock and serious damage” on the Soviet military effort, and “the advantages of its early use would be transcending.”

On August 29, 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic device, RDS-1, at a test range in eastern Kazakhstan. The yield was about 20 kilotons, roughly the same as that of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki — and for good reason. RDS-1 was a copy of the Mark 3 implosion bomb. While American policy makers worried and fretted and debated whether to share classified atomic information with the Soviet Union, a network of Communist spies infiltrated Manhattan Project laboratories and simply took it. Soviet physicists like Yuli Borisovich Khariton were brilliant and inventive, but their task was made easier by the technical knowledge gained through espionage at Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge.

The United States also provided the Soviet Union with the means for delivering an atomic bomb. In 1944, three American B-29 bombers were forced to make emergency landings in Siberia after attacking Japanese forces in Manchuria. The planes were confiscated by the Soviets, and one of them, the General H. H. Arnold Special, was carefully disassembled. Each of its roughly 105,000 parts was measured, photographed, and reverse engineered. Within two years the Soviet Union had its first long-range bomber, the Tupolev-4. The plane was almost identical to the captured B-29; it even had a metal patch where the General Arnold had been repaired.

News of the Soviet bomb arrived at an unfortunate moment. General Groves had assured the American people that the Soviet Union wouldn’t develop an atomic bomb until the late 1960s. The United States had just signed the North Atlantic Treaty, promising to defend Western Europe — and America’s nuclear monopoly was the basis for that promise. China was on the verge of falling to Mao Tse-tung’s Communist army. And now, for the first time since the War of 1812, a devastating attack on the continental United States seemed possible. The rapid demobilization after the Second World War had, for more than a year, left North America without a single military radar to search for enemy planes. As late as 1949, the U.S. Air Defense Command had only twenty-three radars to guard the northeastern United States, and they were largely obsolete units that couldn’t detect Soviet bombers flying at low altitudes. In the event of war, the safety of American cities would depend on the Air Force’s Ground Observer Corps: thousands of civilian volunteers who would search the sky with binoculars.

The news of the Soviet bomb was made all the more ominous by a sense of disarray at the Pentagon. Overwhelmed by stress, lack of sleep, and fears of international communism, Secretary of Defense Forrestal had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and leaped to his death from a sixteenth floor window at Bethesda Naval Hospital. When the new secretary of defense, Louis A. Johnson, canceled plans to build the United States, an enormous aircraft carrier, angry naval officers spread rumors that the Air Force’s new long-range bomber, the B-36, was deeply flawed. What began as an interservice rivalry over military spending soon became a bitter, public dispute about America’s nuclear strategy, with top secret war plans being leaked to newspapers and war heroes questioning one another’s patriotism.

At congressional hearings in October 1949, one high-ranking admiral after another condemned the atomic blitz, arguing that the bombing of Soviet cities would be not only futile but immoral. They advocated “precision” tactical bombing of Soviet troops and supply lines — using planes from American aircraft carriers. Admiral William F. Halsey compared the Air Force’s new bomber to the siege weapons once used to destroy medieval castles and towns. “I don’t believe in mass killings of noncombatants,” Admiral Arthur W. Radford testified. “A war of annihilation might bring a pyrrhic military victory, but it would be politically and economically senseless.” The harshest criticism of the Air Force came from Rear Admiral Ralph A. Ofstie, who’d toured the burned-out cities of Japan after the war. He described the atomic blitz as “random mass slaughter of men, women, and children.” The whole idea was “ruthless and barbaric” and contrary to American values. “We must insure that our military techniques do not strip us of self-respect,” Ofstie said.

The Navy’s opposition to strategic bombing, soon known as “the revolt of the admirals,” infuriated the Truman administration. A conventional defense of Europe seemed impossible. Congress had failed to renew the draft, defense spending was being cut, and even the Army, lacking sufficient manpower, supported the Air Force’s bombing plans. The Navy’s moral arguments were undercut by the main justification for building a supercarrier like the United States: it would be large enough to launch planes carrying atomic bombs. The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, finally ended the revolt with a dramatic appearance before Congress. Bradley had earned enormous respect during the Second World War for his soft-spoken, humane leadership of the Army, and his reputation for fairness made his testimony all the more powerful. Bradley accused the Navy of being in “open rebellion” against the civilian leadership of the United States. The admirals were “Fancy Dans” and “aspiring martyrs” who just didn’t like to take orders. As for the accusation that targeting cities was immoral, Bradley responded, “As far as I am concerned, war itself is immoral.”

Although the Air Force and the Navy were willing to fight an ugly bureaucratic war over how atomic bombs should be used, the two services were in complete agreement about who should control them. David E. Lilienthal, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, faced unrelenting pressure, from his first day in office, to hand over America’s nuclear arsenal to the military. The Joint Chiefs of Staff repeatedly asserted that the nation’s most powerful weapons should be kept securely in the custody of officers who might one day have to use them. At the height of the Berlin crisis, Secretary of Defense Forrestal asked President Truman to transfer the entire atomic stockpile to the Air Force, warning that a Soviet attack on AEC storage facilities could leave the United States defenseless. James Webb, one of Truman’s advisers, wasn’t persuaded by that argument and told Lilienthal: “The idea of turning over custody of atomic bombs to these competing, jealous, insubordinate Services, fighting for position with each other, is a terrible prospect.” The president denied the military’s request and publicly reaffirmed his support for civilian control of the atomic bomb. Privately, Truman explained that he didn’t want “to have some dashing lieutenant colonel decide when would be the proper time to drop one.”

WHITE HOUSE APPROVAL of the atomic blitz gave the Strategic Air Command a role of singular importance: SAC had the only planes that could drop atomic bombs. “Destruction is just around the corner for any future aggressor against the United States,” an Air Force press release warned. “Quick retaliation will be our answer in the form of an aerial knockout delivered by the Strategic Air Command.” A wide gulf existed, however, between the rhetoric and reality. Demobilization had left SAC a hollow force, with a shortage of skilled pilots and mechanics. During one major exercise in 1948, almost half of SAC’s B-29s failed to get off the ground and reach their targets. The public controversy surrounding the atomic blitz obscured a crucial point: the United States couldn’t launch one. The nation’s emergency war plans called for a counterattack against the Soviet Union with more than one hundred atomic bombs — but SAC had just twenty-six flight crews available to deliver them. Perhaps half of these crews would be shot down trying to reach their targets, while others would have to ditch their planes after running out of fuel. Although SAC’s retaliation might still be devastating, it wouldn’t be quick. An estimated thirty-five to forty-five days of preparation would be necessary before an all-out nuclear attack could be launched.

The problems at the Strategic Air Command extended from its enlisted personnel to its leading officers. General George Kenney, the head of SAC, had little prior experience with bombers, and his deputy commander hadn’t served in a combat unit since the late 1920s. During the spring of 1948, as tensions with the Soviets increased, Charles A. Lindbergh was asked to provide a secret evaluation of SAC’s readiness for war. Lindbergh found that morale was low, landings were rough, training was poor, equipment was badly maintained, and accidents were frequent. A month after Lindbergh’s findings were submitted, General Kenney was relieved of command.

Kenney’s replacement, General Curtis E. LeMay, was a bold, innovative officer who’d revolutionized bombing practices in both the European and Pacific campaigns of the Second World War. Admired, feared, honored as a war hero, considered a great patriot by his supporters and a mass murderer by his critics, LeMay soon transformed the Strategic Air Command into a model of lethal efficiency. He created a vast organization dedicated solely to nuclear combat and gave it a capacity for destruction unmatched in the history of warfare. The personality and toughness and worldview of Curtis LeMay not only molded an entirely new institutional culture at SAC, but also influenced American nuclear operations in ways that endure to the present day. And his nickname was “Iron Ass” for good reason.

Curtis LeMay was born in 1906 and raised mainly in Columbus, Ohio. His father was a laborer who held and then lost a long series of jobs, constantly moving the family to new neighborhoods in Ohio, to Montana, California, and Pennsylvania. His mother sometimes worked as a domestic servant. Again and again he was the new kid in school, shy, awkward, bullied. To counter the unsettled, anarchic quality of his family life, LeMay learned self-discipline and worked hard. At the age of nine, he got his first paying job: shooting sparrows for a nickel each to feed a neighbor’s cat. He delivered newspapers and telegrams, excelled at academics but felt, in his own words, “cut off from normal life,” earning and saving money while other kids played sports and made friends. He graduated from high school without ever having been to a dance. He’d saved enough, however, to make the first tuition payment at Ohio State University. For the next four years, LeMay attended college during the day, then worked at a steel mill from early evening until two or three in the morning, went home, slept for a few hours, and returned to campus for his nine o’clock class.

After studying to become a civil engineer, LeMay joined the Army Air Corps in 1929. Flying became his favorite thing to do — followed, in order of preference, by hunting, driving sports cars, and fishing. Socializing was far down the list. While other officers yearned to become fighter pilots, like the air aces of the First World War, LeMay thought that long-range bombers would prove decisive in the future. He learned to fly them, became one of the nation’s finest navigators, and showed that planes could find and destroy battleships at sea. When LeMay led a bomber group from the United States to England in 1942, he was the only pilot among them who’d ever flown across an ocean.

Within days of arriving in Great Britain, LeMay began to question the tactics being used in daylight bombing runs against the Nazis. American B-17s zigzagged to avoid the heavy antiaircraft fire; the conventional wisdom held that if you flew straight and level for more than ten seconds, you’d be shot down. But the evasive maneuvers caused bombs to miss their targets. After some late-night calculations about speed, distance, and rate of fire, LeMay came up with a radically new approach. Planes flying straight went much faster than planes that zigzagged, he realized — and therefore would spend less time exposed to enemy fire. He devised a “combat box,” a flight formation for eighteen to twenty-one bombers, that optimized their ability to drop bombs and defend against enemy fighters. When his men questioned the idea of heading straight into antiaircraft fire, LeMay told them that he’d fly the lead plane — the one most likely to be shot down.

On November 23, 1942, during the final approach to railway yards and submarine pens in Saint-Nazaire, France, the B-17s of LeMay’s bombardment group flew straight and level for a full seven minutes. None was shot down by antiaircraft fire. Bombing accuracy was greatly improved. And within weeks the tactics that LeMay had adopted for his first combat mission became the standard operating procedure for every American bomber crew in Europe.

LeMay’s greatest strength as a commander wasn’t a subtle grasp of the historical, political, or psychological aspects of an enemy. It was his focus on the interplay between men and machines — a vision of war designed by an engineer. He also cared deeply about the safety and morale of his men. Strategic bombing required a particular form of courage. Unlike fighter pilots, who flew alone, free to roam the skies in pursuit of targets, bomber crews had to work closely with one another, follow a designated route, and stay in formation. The seven minutes from the initial aiming point to the target could induce feelings of helplessness and sheer terror, as flak exploded around the plane and enemy fighters tried to shoot it down. The death rate among American bomber crews was extraordinarily high: more than half would be killed in action before completing their tour of duty.

Curtis LeMay was hardly warm and cuddly. He was gruff, blunt, sarcastic, socially awkward, a man of few words, with a permanent frown left by a case of Bell’s palsy and an unlit cigar perpetually stuck in his mouth. But he earned the deep loyalty of his men by refusing to tolerate incompetence and by doing everything possible to keep them alive. Instead of asking for bravery, he displayed it, flying the lead plane on some of the most dangerous missions of the war, like an old-fashioned cavalry officer leading the charge.

At the age of thirty-six, LeMay became the youngest general in the Army. During the summer of 1944, he was transferred from Europe to help fight Japan. Although incendiaries had been used on a small scale, it was LeMay who ordered the firebombing of Tokyo. “Japan would burn if we could get fire on it,” one of his deputies explained.

LeMay was involved in almost every detail of the plan, from selecting the mix of bombs — magnesium for high temperatures, napalm for splatter — to choosing a bomb pattern that could start a firestorm. He hoped that the firebombing would break the will of the Japanese people, avoid an American invasion, end the war quickly, and save American lives. The massive civilian casualties were unfortunate, LeMay thought, but prolonging the war would cause even more. The destruction of Japanese cities, one after another, fit perfectly with his philosophy on the use of military force. “I’ll tell you what war is about,” LeMay once said. “You’ve got to kill people and when you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”

LeMay’s managerial and logistical skills made him an ideal candidate to head the Strategic Air Command. His most recent assignment had been to organize the Berlin airlift. But he also knew a lot about the atomic bomb. He’d been involved with the preparations to drop Little Boy and Fat Man, later served as a military adviser to the Manhattan Project, supervised the aircraft during the atomic test at the Bikini atoll — and, as deputy chief of staff for research and development at the Air Force, helped to formulate the atomic blitz. LeMay recognized the destructive power of nuclear weapons but didn’t feel the least bit intimidated by them. “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo,” he later recalled, “than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” And he didn’t lose any sleep over the morality of Truman’s decision. Killing was killing, whether you did it with a rock, a rifle, or an atom bomb. LeMay’s appointment to run SAC sent a clear message to the Soviets: if necessary, the United States would not hesitate to fight a nuclear war.

After arriving at SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, during the fall of 1948, LeMay was angered by what he found. Bomber crews had no idea what their targets would be, if war came. Navigators lacked up-to-date maps, and pilots rarely consulted checklists before takeoff. As an exercise, LeMay ordered every SAC crew in the country to stage a mock attack on Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, at night, from high altitude, under heavy cloud cover, conditions similar to those they might encounter over the Soviet Union. Many of the planes didn’t get anywhere near Ohio — and not a single one hit the target. The bombardiers who did simulate the dropping of an atomic bomb, aiming their radar at reflectors on the ground, missed Wright Field by an average of two miles. LeMay called it “about the darkest night in American military aviation history.”

The top officers at SAC were let go, and LeMay replaced them with veterans of his bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan. He hoped to create a similar esprit de corps. Promotions weren’t given to individuals, but to an entire crew, sometimes on the spot. And when one person screwed up, the rest of the crew also paid the price. Officers lost their jobs because of accidents and honest mistakes. “I can’t afford to differentiate between the incompetent and the unfortunate,” LeMay explained. “Standardization” became the watchword at SAC, repeated like a mantra and ruthlessly pursued, with manuals and checklists and numeric measures of success created for every job. Team players were rewarded, iconoclasts and prima donnas encouraged to go elsewhere. LeMay wanted SAC to function as smoothly as the intricate machinery of a modern bomber. “Every man a coupling or a tube; every organization a rampart of transistors, battery of condensers,” he wrote in his memoir. “All rubbed up, no corrosion. Alert.”

Within hours of the Japanese surrender, LeMay had flown low over cities that his planes destroyed. The experience confirmed his belief that America needed an Air Force so overwhelmingly powerful that no enemy would ever dare to launch a surprise attack. After Pearl Harbor it had taken years for the United States to mobilize fully for war. Nuclear weapons eliminated that option. If a counterattack couldn’t be swift, it might never occur. LeMay wanted everyone at SAC to feel a strong sense of urgency, to be ready for war not next week or tomorrow but at any moment — to feel “we are at war now.” His goal was to build a Strategic Air Command that could strike the Soviet Union with planes based in the United States and deliver every nuclear weapon at once. SAC bomber crews constantly trained and prepared for that all-out assault. They staged mock attacks on every city in the United States with a population larger than twenty-five thousand, practicing to drop atomic bombs on urban targets in the middle of the night. San Francisco was bombed more than six hundred times within a month.

One of LeMay’s greatest concerns was the command and control of nuclear weapons — the system of rules and procedures that guided his men, the network of radars and sensors and communications lines that allowed information to travel back and forth between headquarters and the field, the mechanisms that prevented accidental detonations and permitted deliberate ones, all of it designed to make sure that orders could be properly given, received, and carried out. To retaliate against a surprise attack, you needed to know that one had been launched. You needed to share that news with your own forces and ensure they could immediately respond. Command and control had always been a crucial element in warfare. But in a nuclear war, where decisions might have to be made within minutes and weapons could destroy cities in an instant, the reliability of these administrative systems could be the difference between victory and annihilation. A breakdown in command and control could make it impossible to launch a nuclear attack — or could order one by mistake.

LeMay thought that the Strategic Air Command should control all of America’s atomic bombs and select their targets. Such an arrangement would simplify things, creating a unified chain of command. It would give oversight and accountability to one military organization: his. The atomic arsenal should be viewed, according to SAC doctrine, as “a single instrument… directed, controlled, if need be, from a single source.” The Army, the Navy, and other units in the Air Force didn’t like that idea. As LeMay worked hard to gain control of America’s nuclear weapons, his rivals at the Pentagon fought to get their own, expand their influence, and limit the power of the Strategic Air Command.

LOUIS SLOTIN WAS TICKLING the dragon in a laboratory at Los Alamos, carefully lowering a beryllium shell over the plutonium core of a Mark 3 implosion bomb. The beryllium served as a tamper; it reflected neutrons, increased the number of fissions, and brought the assembly closer to a chain reaction. The clicks of a Geiger counter gave an audible measure of how fast the fissions were multiplying. Slotin knew what he was doing. He’d assembled the core for the Trinity test and performed dozens of criticality experiments like this one. A coworker had asked to see how it was done and, on the spur of the moment, Slotin decided to show him. The core looked like an enormous gray pearl resting inside a shiny beryllium shell. Slotin used a screwdriver to lower the top half of that shell — and then, at about 3:20 in the afternoon on May 21, 1946, the screwdriver slipped, the shell shut, the core went supercritical, and a blue flash filled the room. Slotin immediately threw the top half of the tamper onto the floor, halting the chain reaction. But it was too late: he’d absorbed a lethal dose of radiation. And he, more than anyone else in the room, knew it.

Within hours Slotin was vomiting, his hands were turning red and swollen, his fingernails blue. General Groves flew Slotin’s parents down from Winnipeg on a military plane to say good-bye. A week later, Slotin was gone, and his death was excruciating, like so many tens of thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been. It was recorded on film, with his consent, as a sobering lesson on the importance of nuclear safety. Three of the other seven men in the lab that day eventually died of radiation-induced illnesses. But Slotin had added years to their lives by thinking quickly and stopping the chain reaction. In the absence of any fast-acting safety mechanism at the laboratory, a report on the accident later concluded, “Slotin was that safety device.”

The same plutonium core that took Slotin’s life had already killed one of his assistants, Harry Daghlian. The previous August, while Daghlian was performing an experiment, alone in the laboratory at night, a small tungsten brick slipped from his hand. The brick landed near the core, which became supercritical for a moment, and Daghlian was dead within a month. Having taken the lives of two promising young physicists, it was nicknamed “the Demon Core,” placed in a Mark 3 bomb, and detonated during a test at the Bikini atoll.

Slotin’s mishap was the fourth criticality accident at Los Alamos within a year, raising concern about the management practices at America’s nuclear weapon facilities. The reactors at Hanford were not only dangerous but largely incapable of making plutonium. Most of the famous scientists who’d worked on the Manhattan Project had left government service after the war. The manufacture of atomic bombs didn’t seem to be a wise career choice, at a time when the world appeared ready to ban them.

In April 1947, David Lilienthal visited Los Alamos for the first time after becoming head of the Atomic Energy Commission. He was shocked by what he saw: rudimentary equipment; dilapidated buildings; poor housing; muddy, unpaved roads — and plutonium cores stored in cages at an old icehouse. Lilienthal was a liberal, one of the last New Dealers in the Truman administration, and he’d seen a lot of rural poverty while running the Tennessee Valley Authority during the Great Depression. But that first day at Los Alamos, he later noted, was “one of the saddest days of my life.” Nuclear weapons were now thought indispensable for the defense of the United States; Lilienthal had expected to find them neatly and safely stored for immediate use. “The substantial stockpile of atom bombs we and the top military assumed was there, in readiness, did not exist,” Lilienthal subsequently wrote. “Furthermore, the production facilities that might enable us to produce quantities of atomic weapons… likewise did not exist.”

The number of atomic bombs in the American arsenal was considered so secret that it could not be shared with the Joint Chiefs of Staff — or even recorded on paper. After visiting Los Alamos, Lilienthal met with President Truman in the Oval Office and told him how many atomic bombs would be available in the event of a war with the Soviet Union: at most, one. The bomb was unassembled but, in Lilienthal’s view, “probably operable.” The president was stunned. He’d just announced the Truman Doctrine before Congress, vowing to contain the worldwide spread of communism. Admirals and generals were fighting over the atomic stockpile, completely unaware that there wasn’t one. “We not only didn’t have a pile,” Lilienthal recalled, “we didn’t have a stock.” The threat to destroy the Soviet Union, if it invaded Western Europe, was a bluff.

During his visit to New Mexico, Lilienthal also discovered a shortage of scientists trained to make atomic bombs. The physicists, chemists, and engineers who’d put together the bombs at the end of the Second World War were now scattered throughout the United States. The Mark 3 implosion bomb was, in Oppenheimer’s words, a “haywire contraption,” difficult and dangerous to assemble. But at least some of the scientists in Los Alamos still knew how to make one. Nobody had bothered to save all the technical drawings necessary for building another Little Boy, the uranium-based, gun-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The exact configuration of the various parts had never been recorded on paper — an oversight that, amid the current shortage of plutonium, created some unease. As files and storerooms at Los Alamos were searched for information about Little Boy’s design, a machinist offered to demonstrate how one of the bomb’s aluminum tubes had been forged. He’d wrapped the metal around a Coke bottle.

After the war, the Z Division at Los Alamos, which had designed the firing and fuzing mechanisms of both atomic bombs, was moved an hour and a half south to an old Army air base near Albuquerque. The Z Division’s headquarters was soon renamed the Sandia Laboratory, and a new military outfit called the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP) was located at the base, too. When the production of Mark 3 bombs resumed, the work was now divided among three organizations: Los Alamos fabricated the cores and the explosive lenses; Sandia was responsible for the rest of the weapon; and the AFSWP trained military personnel how to complete the assembly in the field. Norris Bradbury, the director of Los Alamos, pushed for improved designs that would make atomic bombs simpler, smaller, lighter, and safer to handle. It would take years for such improvements to be made. Until then, the safety of America’s nuclear weapons depended on checklists, standard operating procedures, and a laboratory culture with a low tolerance for mistakes.

Bradbury worried about what would happen if a B-29 bomber crashed in the United States while carrying a fully assembled Mark 3 bomb. The B-29 had a high accident rate — two had crashed and burned on the runways at Tinian while trying to take off the night before the bombing of Nagasaki. In 1947 the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project decided that the final assembly of Mark 3 bombs must always occur outside the United States. The reliability of the weapon’s electronic, mechanical, and explosive components was unknown, and Bradbury thought that a crash during takeoff would pose “a very serious potential hazard to a large area in the vicinity.”

The Mark 3 was considered too dangerous to be flown, fully assembled, over American soil. But no safety restrictions were imposed on flights of the bomb over Great Britain. Atomic bomb — making facilities were secretly constructed at two Royal Air Force bases, in Sculthorpe and Lakenheath. Before attacking the Soviets, American B-29s would leave the United States with partially assembled Mark 3s and land at the British bases. Plutonium cores would be inserted into the weapons there, and then the B-29s would head for their Soviet targets. If one of the B-29s crashed during takeoff, the RAF base, as well as neighboring towns, might be obliterated. Anticipating that possibility, the U.S. Air Force explored sites in the countryside of Norfolk and Suffolk where atomic bombs could be hidden, so that “if one blew, the others would survive.”

During the AFSWP’s first attempt to assemble an atomic bomb, it took a team of thirty-six men two weeks to finish the job. That did not bode well for a quick retaliation against a Soviet attack. Through constant practice, the assembly time was reduced to about a day. But the Mark 3 bomb had a number of inherent shortcomings. It was a handmade, complicated, delicate thing with a brief shelf life. The electrical system was powered by a car battery, which had to be charged for three days before being put into the bomb. The battery could be recharged twice inside the Mark 3, but had to be replaced within a week — and to change the battery, you had to take apart the whole weapon. The plutonium cores radiated so much heat that they’d melt the explosive lenses if left in a bomb for too long. And the polonium initiators inside the cores had to be replaced every few months. By the end of 1948, the United States had the necessary parts and cores to assemble fifty-six atomic bombs, enough for an atomic blitz. But the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project could deploy only one bomb assembly team overseas. It would take months for that team to put together so many atomic bombs — and a stray wire, some static electricity, or a little mistake could end the entire operation in a flash.

ROBERT PEURIFOY WAS A SENIOR at Texas A&M when a recruiter from Sandia visited the campus. America’s nuclear weapons program was expanding, and it needed engineers. Peurifoy was intrigued. Unlike his father — a prominent civil engineer who designed roads, buildings, dams, and other concrete structures — Peurifoy was drawn to the study of electricity. Recent inventions like radar, television, the transistor, and the computer promised to transform American society. The typical A&M student with a degree in electrical engineering went to work for Dallas Power & Light or other utility companies after graduation. Designing nuclear weapons at a mysterious, top secret laboratory sounded a lot more interesting to Peurifoy. And he was deeply patriotic. During the spring of 1952, the United States was at war. With the backing of Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, the Communist regime of North Korea had invaded South Korea two years earlier, starting a conflict that eventually killed more than two million civilians. The threat of Communist aggression was no longer hypothetical; young American soldiers were once again fighting and dying overseas. When Sandia offered Peurifoy a job, he eagerly accepted. It seemed like a good way to serve his country — and satisfy his curiosity.

Right after graduation, Peurifoy and his wife, Barbara, packed up their belongings in College Station and moved to a small rental house in Albuquerque, not far from the lab. He was twenty-one, ready to help the war effort, thrilled to be employed for $395 a month. But he was forced to work in Sandia’s “leper colony” for the first ninety days, denied access to the classified areas at the lab. While the FBI conducted a background check, he spent six days a week recording weather information onto IBM computer cards with a pencil. It was not a thrilling job. In the fall of 1952, Peurifoy obtained a “Q clearance,” allowing him access to top secret material and Tech Area I, the lab’s research facilities. But his early work at Sandia didn’t enable him to visit Tech Area II, a separate group of buildings surrounded by guard towers and a perimeter fence. It was America’s first atomic bomb factory.

Tests conducted in the Marshall Islands a few years earlier had shown that “composite” cores made from a mix of plutonium and uranium would detonate, ending fears at the Pentagon about a potential shortage of fissile material. The United States would have more than enough for a large stockpile of atomic bombs. In 1949 full-scale production of a new implosion bomb had begun at Sandia: the Mark 4. It had a composite core. It could be assembled in a couple of hours, then stored for a couple of weeks. And it was much safer than previous designs. According to the final evaluation report, the Mark 4 had a variety of features to “prevent premature detonation under all predictable circumstances.” The X-unit didn’t charge until the bomb fell from the plane, greatly reducing the risk to the aircrew. More important, the nuclear core was stored in the plane’s cockpit during takeoff and inserted through a trap door into the nose of the bomb, midflight. As long as the core was kept physically separate from the rest of the bomb, it was impossible for a plane crash to cause a nuclear explosion.

The days of handmade nuclear weapons were over. At Sandia the Mark 4 was now being manufactured with standardized, interchangeable parts — and so was its replacement, the Mark 6, a lighter, sleeker weapon with a yield as much as ten times larger than that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Once a weapon was assembled at Tech Area II, it was shipped to Site Able, an AEC storage facility tunneled into the nearby Manzano Mountains, or to Site Baker in Killeen, Texas, or to Site Charlie in Clarksville, Tennessee. The storage sites were located near SAC bases, so that in an emergency bombs could be quickly retrieved and loaded onto planes.

The military’s demand for nuclear weapons was so great that Sandia could no longer handle the production. An “integrated contractor complex” was being formed, with manufacturing increasingly outsourced to plants throughout the United States. Polonium initiators would be made by the Monsanto Chemical Company, in Miamisburg, Ohio; explosive lenses by the Silas Mason Company in Burlington, Iowa; electrical components by the Bendix Aviation Corporation in Kansas City, Missouri; and so on. What had begun as a handcrafted laboratory experiment was now the focus of a growing industrial system. And the idea of placing atomic bombs under international control, the idea of outlawing them, the whole notion of world government and world peace, now seemed like an absurd fantasy.

Bob Peurifoy was asked to help redesign the arming and fuzing mechanisms of the Mark 5 and the Mark 7, new bombs small enough to be carried by naval aircraft. Work had already begun on the Mark 12, the Mark 13, and the Mark 15, a bomb that promised to be more powerful than all the rest.

In Violation

Jeff Kennedy had just gotten home from playing racquetball when the phone rang. It was about seven in the evening, and he was getting ready for dinner with his wife and their two small children. The call was from job control.

There’s a problem out at 4–7, the dispatcher said. The Klaxons are going off, and a white cloud is rising from the exhaust vents. We think there’s a fire in the silo.

Kennedy had dealt with fuel leaks, oxidizer leaks, and all sorts of mechanical breakdowns — but he’d never seen a fire at a Titan II complex.

Report immediately to the command post, job control said. We’re going to chopper you out to the complex.

Things must be pretty bad, Kennedy thought. He’d been in the Air Force for years, and this was the first time somebody had offered him a ride in a helicopter. He knew Charles Heineman, the PTS team chief working at 4–7 that day. Heineman was good, Heineman could tell the difference between fuel, smoke, and oxidizer. Maybe there was a fire in the silo. That would be incredible.

Kennedy put on his uniform, said good-bye to his family, and headed for the command post. He was a quality control evaluator for the 308th Missile Inspection and Maintenance Squadron. More important than his official title was a fact widely acknowledged in the 308th. Kennedy was the best missile mechanic at the base. He understood the Titan II propulsion system better than just about anyone else. He knew how to fix it. And he seemed to embody the swagger and the spirit of the PTS crews. Kennedy was tough, outspoken, and fearless. He was six foot five and powerfully built, a leader among the enlisted men who risked their lives every day in the silos. Commanding officers didn’t always like him. But they listened to him.

At Little Rock Air Force Base, Kennedy was briefed by Colonel John T. Moser, the wing commander, and Colonel James L. Morris, the head of the maintenance squadron. A large socket had been dropped in the silo, piercing the missile and causing a leak in the stage 1 fuel tank. The sprays were on, flooding the silo with water. The missile combat crew was trying to make sense of all the hazard lights flashing in the control center. The deputy commander, Al Childers, thought it was just a fuel leak. The missile systems analyst technician, Rodney Holder, thought there was a fire. The PTS team topside had reported seeing smoke — but then hurriedly left the scene and couldn’t be reached. Nobody knew where they were. Pressure in the stage 1 fuel tank was falling. Pressure in the stage 1 oxidizer tank was rising. One was threatening to collapse, the other to burst.

Kennedy was surprised to hear how quickly the pressure levels had changed in the hour or so since the socket was dropped. The stage 1 fuel tank was now at 2.2 psi, about one fifth of what it should be; the stage 1 oxidizer was at 18.8 psi, almost twice as high as it should be. He’d never seen pressure levels change that fast.

Colonel Morris was preparing to leave for 4–7 by helicopter and wanted Kennedy to join him. The two men weren’t particularly fond of each other. Morris was an officer in his midforties, cautious and by the book, just the sort of person that the PTS guys liked to ignore. He needed to know what was happening at the launch complex and thought Kennedy was the right man to find out. The Missile Potential Hazard Team had tentatively come up with a plan of action: enter the silo, determine the size of the hole in the missile, vent the fuel vapors, and try to stabilize the stage 1 fuel tank so that it wouldn’t collapse. Of course, none of that would be possible if the silo was on fire. Was there smoke drifting from the exhaust vents, fuel vapor, or both? That was the critical question. Morris and Kennedy left the command post, went to the flight line, climbed into a chopper, and took off.

Kennedy had never been in an Air Force helicopter. His job focused largely on machinery that was underground — and like most of the PTS guys, his career in missile maintenance had come as a surprise, not as the fulfillment of a lifelong ambition. Kennedy was born and raised in South Portland, Maine. He played basketball in high school, graduated, got married, and worked as a deckhand on the Casco Bay Lines, a ferry service that linked Portland to neighboring islands. In 1976 he decided that being a deckhand just didn’t cut it anymore. He had a one-year-old daughter and another child on the way. He needed to earn more money, and his brother suggested joining the military. Kennedy met with recruiters from the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. He chose the Air Force because its basic training was the shortest.

After enlisting, Kennedy hoped to become an airplane mechanic stationed in Florida or California. Instead, he soon found himself learning about missile propellant transfer at Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois. The training course did a fine job with the technical details of the missile system. But it didn’t give a sense of how dangerous the work could be. The Titan II mock-up at Chanute was loaded with water, not oxidizer or fuel, and accidental spills didn’t seem like a big deal. Kennedy learned about the risks through his on-the-job training with the 308th in Arkansas. During one of his first visits to a launch complex, the PTS team was doing a “recycle,” removing oxidizer from the missile. An enormous propane tank, known as a “burn bot,” sat near the silo door topside, burning excess propellant as it vented, roaring like a jet engine and shooting out a gust of flame. This sort of controlled burn was routine, like the flares at an oil field. Then the burn bot went out, the oxidizer leaked, a dirty orange cloud floated over the complex, and the sergeant beside Kennedy said, “You know that bullshit right there? You get that shit on your skin, it’ll turn to nitric acid.”

Kennedy thought, “Wow,” and watched with some concern as the cloud drifted over the control trailer and the rest of the PTS team continued to work, hardly noticing it. He felt like running for the hills. Clearly, the textbooks at Chanute didn’t tell you what really happened in the field. Kennedy soon realized there was the way you were supposed to do things — and the way things got done. RFHCO suits were hot and cumbersome, a real pain in the ass to wear — and if a maintenance task could be accomplished quickly and without an officer noticing, sometimes the suits weren’t worn. The PTS team would enter the blast lock, stash their RFHCOs against a blast door, and enter the silo unprotected. The risk seemed less important than avoiding the hassle. While disconnecting a vent hose in the silo, Kennedy once forgot to close a valve, inhaled some oxidizer, and coughed up nasty stuff for a week. On another occasion, oxidizer burned the skin off the top of his left hand. Working without a RFHCO violated a wide range of technical orders. But it forced you to think about the fuel and the oxidizer and the fine line between saving some time and doing something incredibly stupid.

Within a few years, Kennedy had become a PTS team chief. He loved the job and the responsibility that it brought. And he loved the Air Force. Where else could a twenty-five-year-old kid, without a college degree, be put in charge of complicated, hazardous, essential operations at a missile site worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The fact that a nuclear warhead was involved made the work seem even cooler. Over time, Kennedy had gained an appreciation for the Titan II, regarding it as a thing of beauty, temperamental but awe inspiring. He thought you had to treat the missile with respect, like you would a lady. Keeping the Titan IIs fueled and ready to go, ensuring the safety of his men — those were his priorities, and he enjoyed getting the work done.

The recycles were one of Kennedy’s favorite parts of the job. They took weeks to prepare. The weather had to be just right, with at least three knots of wind and the outdoor temperature rising, so that a leak wouldn’t linger over the complex. Once the valves were turned and the fuel or the oxidizer started to flow, the team chief was in charge of the operation, and the adrenaline kicked in. The danger was greatest when propellants were being loaded and off-loaded; that’s when something bad was most likely to happen, something unexpected and potentially catastrophic. It always felt good to finish a recycle, pack up the tools, load up the trucks, and send the PTS team home to Little Rock at the end of a long day.

Some of the missile combat crew commanders were a pleasure to work with, Kennedy thought, and some of them were real pricks — officers who liked to meddle with things they didn’t know anything about. The launch control center and the silo were only a few hundred feet apart, but the distance between the men who worked in them often felt like miles. Once, while Kennedy was learning the ropes, his team chief was criticized by a missile crew commander, over the radio, for skipping a few lines in a technical order. “Commander, if you want to tell me how to do my job,” the team chief replied, “then you get your ass off your chair, and you come and sit your ass in my chair.” Kennedy soon adopted a similar way of dealing with combat crew officers, most of whom seemed afraid of the propellants: just leave me alone, the work will get done the right way — and then I’ll get the hell off your launch complex.

Most of all, Kennedy valued the intense loyalty among the PTS crews, a bond strengthened by the stress and the dangers of the job. They looked out for each other. At the end of a late-night shift, Kennedy’s team members would sometimes flip a coin to see who’d babysit his kids. And then Kennedy’s wife would dress in fatigues and sneak onto the base to join everybody for midnight chow in the cafeteria. The PTS crews didn’t like it when someone couldn’t take a joke. They didn’t like it when someone couldn’t work well with others. And they found all kinds of unofficial ways to impose discipline. At one missile complex a PTS team waited until an airman with a bad attitude put on his RFHCO. Then they grabbed him, stuck a hose down the neck of his suit, filled the suit with cold water, and left him lying on the ground, shouting for help, unable to stand up or take the RFHCO off, rolling around and looking like a gigantic water balloon. He got the message.

For the past year, Kennedy had served as a quality control evaluator, a job that required him to visit all the launch complexes and make sure that the work was being done properly. He’d been out to 4–7 many times. As the helicopter approached it, the command post radioed the latest pressure levels: the stage 1 oxidizer tank had climbed to 23.4 psi, and the stage 1 fuel had fallen to –0.7. The fuel reading unnerved Kennedy. The negative pressure meant a vacuum was forming inside the tank that supported the rest of the missile. The stage 1 fuel tank was like a tin can with the air getting sucked out of it — and a ten-pound can sitting on top of it. First the tank would crumple, then it would collapse. Word that the missile crew had just evacuated the control center pissed him off. That was chickenshit, Kennedy thought. That would make everything a lot more difficult. They would have been safe and sound behind those blast doors.

The chopper pilot circled the complex, shining a spotlight toward the ground. Amid the darkness, Kennedy could see a thick, white cloud rising from the exhaust vents. He told Colonel Morris that the cloud looked like fuel vapor, not smoke. It was a fuel leak, Kennedy thought, not a fire. And that meant maybe, just maybe, they could find a way to fix it.

AROUND THE SAME TIME that Kennedy got a call from job control, Jim Sandaker got one, too. Sandaker was a twenty-one-year-old PTS technician with a wife and a baby daughter, and the call reached him at home on the base. Job control said there was a fuel leak at 4–7 and asked him to round up a bunch of other PTS guys to head out there. Sandaker hung up, told his wife, “Well, I got to go,” put on his uniform, and went to the barracks. He was good natured and well liked, low key and solid, a country boy from Evansville, Minnesota, who’d dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade and joined the Air Force at the age of seventeen. When he reached the barracks and asked for volunteers, saying that it was an emergency, nobody believed him. They all thought it was a prank.

“All right,” Sandaker said. “You call job control and ask them.”

Someone called and learned that Sandaker wasn’t kidding. Airmen started throwing on their uniforms and hurrying to the PTS shop, not because they had to go, but because it felt like the right thing to do. Their buddies at 4–7 needed help. PTS Team B was assembled from a makeshift group of volunteers, the guys who were gung ho. They gathered things that might be needed at the site: RFHCO suits, air packs, dewars filled with liquid air, tool kits, radios. Their team chief, Technical Sergeant Michael A. Hanson, told them to assume that nothing at 4–7 could be used and start from scratch. The PTS shop was a converted aircraft hangar, big enough to hold a few Titan IIs, with smaller rooms devoted to specialized tasks. The men of Team B loaded their gear onto half a dozen trucks, eager to leave, like reinforcements coming to the rescue.

In addition to the PTS team, a flatbed truck with about 450 gallons of bleach and a tractor trailer with about 5,000 gallons of mineral oil were sent to Damascus. The bleach could be used to neutralize rocket fuel and render it less explosive. The mineral oil, dumped by hose into the silo vents, might form a layer on top of the fuel, trapping the vapors. The “baby oil trailer,” as some people called it, was brand new — and nobody had ever tried using baby oil to prevent an explosion at a Titan II missile site.

Elsewhere at Little Rock Air Force Base, the Disaster Response Force was getting ready to depart. Its commander, Colonel William A. Jones, was also the base commander and head of the 314th Combat Support Group, a squadron of cargo planes stationed there. Jones was new to Little Rock, having arrived just two months earlier. He had not yet taken a disaster control course and didn’t have much experience with Titan II missiles. His cargo planes were part of the Military Airlift Command, the missiles were part of the Strategic Air Command — and although both commands shared the same base, their missions rarely intersected. The Disaster Response Force was supposed to handle any military emergency, large or small, that involved units at Little Rock. During his brief tenure as its commander, the only emergency that Jones had faced was a search for the missing tail gunner of a B-52 bomber. The tail gunner had ejected from the plane by mistake, afraid that it was about to crash. The B-52 landed safely, as did the tail gunner, whose parachute was easily spotted floating above the Arkansas River.

After hearing about the problem at 4–7, Jones decided not to recall the entire Disaster Response Force. In his view, a disaster hadn’t happened yet. The force didn’t pack any gas masks, toxic vapor detectors, radiation detectors, or firefighting equipment. Jones did, however, bring a press officer to deal with the media and a judge advocate general (JAG) to process any legal claims filed by neighbors of the missile site.

At about nine o’clock the dozen or so members of the force left the base in a small convoy. A few of them rode in the mobile command post, a pickup truck with two rows of seats and a camper shell. A bioengineer traveled in a van that carried equipment to monitor the vapor from a fuel leak. A physician and two paramedics followed in an ambulance. And the press officer joined Colonel Jones in the base commander’s car, along with the JAG, who brought his disaster claims kit.

SID KING STOOD IN THE DARK beside the Live Ear. It was parked on the shoulder of Highway 65, overlooking the entrance to the missile complex. A camera crew from KATV was on the way, and reporters from the other Little Rock television stations and local newspapers weren’t far behind. Nothing much seemed to be happening. The white cloud was still rising from the complex, but nobody appeared to be dealing with it. About a dozen men in Air Force fatigues were hanging around a blue pickup at the end of the access road. A security policeman sat in the cab, talking to the command post on the radio. And a helicopter hovered overhead, shining its spotlight toward the ground, looking for someplace to land.

The missile combat crew was glad to be outdoors, with a good half a mile between them and the silo. The night was warm, help was on the way, everybody had made it out of the complex safe and sound. The problem with the missile hadn’t been solved, but the mood was calm. Then Rodney Holder looked up and saw that the helicopter was about to hit some power lines. The pilot couldn’t see them in the dark, and the chopper was descending straight toward them. Holder started to yell and wave his arms, and then Mazzaro, his commander, noticed, too. “Tell the helicopter not to land,” they both shouted, frantically, to the security officer in the pickup. “Tell it not to land!” In an instant, Holder had gone from feeling chilled and relaxed to being absolutely terrified, convinced that the chopper was going to hit the power lines, spin out of control, and explode. It didn’t. At the last minute, the pilot saw the wires, dodged them, and landed safely in a field near a farmhouse on the other side of the highway.

Morris and Kennedy climbed from the copter and joined the men waiting on the access road. While Mazzaro spoke to the colonel about the accident, Kennedy and Holder discussed what should be done next. Kennedy didn’t think much of Mazzaro and couldn’t believe that his crew had abandoned the complex. But Kennedy got along with Holder. The two had taken some college classes together at the base and felt a mutual respect. They disagreed now, however, about whether there was a fire in the silo. Kennedy decided to see for himself. He asked Colonel Morris for permission to enter the site — and to bring David Powell, the airman who’d dropped the socket, with him.

Powell was one of Kennedy’s closest friends in the Air Force. When Kennedy was a PTS team chief, Powell served as his right-hand man. Kennedy could count on Powell to do just about anything. He used Powell to train new PTS technicians, and Powell hoped to become a team chief himself, maybe a noncommissioned officer. Powell was always calm and reliable. But now he seemed anxious, agitated, upset. After the helicopter landed, Powell had run up to him and said, “Jeff, I fucked up like you wouldn’t believe.”

Powell added another detail: not only had he dropped the socket but he’d also used the wrong tool with it. A recent technical order said that a torque wrench always had to be used when tightening or loosening a fuel cap in the silo. The torque wrench ensured that a precise amount of pressure could be applied to the cap. Earlier that evening, Powell and Plumb had reached level 2 of the silo, fully dressed in their RFHCOs, before realizing that they’d left the torque wrench behind in their truck.

PTS Team A had already spent ten hours on the job that day. Everybody was tired, and instead of sending someone topside to get the torque wrench, wasting another ten or fifteen minutes, Powell grabbed the ratchet hanging on the wall near blast door 9. The socket fit on the ratchet, and for years PTS teams had used that ratchet instead of a torque wrench, without any problems. Powell had done it, Kennedy had done it, just about every PTS team had done it. This time the socket slipped off. And using the wrong tool could get Powell in even more trouble.

“Oh, David,” Kennedy said. “David, David, David.”

Colonel Morris liked Kennedy’s idea. They could use a better look at what was coming out of the exhaust vents. But Morris didn’t want anyone venturing too close to the silo. Captain Mazzaro approved the plan, as well. Technically, he was still in command of the launch complex. After arriving at the site that morning, he’d signed for the missile and the warhead — they were his responsibility — and he didn’t want Kennedy and Powell to go near the complex unaccompanied. Mazzaro and his deputy, Al Childers, still wearing their handguns, would go with them. The two officers and the two enlisted men started down the access road in the darkness, carrying flashlights.

SAM HUTTO’S FAMILY HAD FARMED the same land for generations. The inscription on his great-great-grandfather’s tombstone said: PIONEER OF VAN BUREN COUNTY AND FOUNDER OF DAMASCUS. The Huttos had come to Arkansas before the Civil War, and the town they settled had originally been called Huttotown — until another set of Sam’s ancestors, the Browns, decided to find a name with a more biblical flavor. “Damascus” sounded like a place that would one day be important, a worthy rival to Jerusalem, Arkansas, about thirty miles to the east. For decades, life in Damascus remained largely the same, as farmers struggled on small landholdings with thin topsoil. The poverty seemed as unchanging as the landscape. Even the Great Depression didn’t leave much of a mark. “We went into, through, and out of the Depression,” Hutto’s father once said, “and never knew we had one.”

Despite the challenges of rural life, Sam Hutto thought his childhood was perfect. He was born in 1954, the same year his father quit raising chickens and opened a feed mill in Damascus. Everybody in the community seemed to know one another and be related to one another, somehow. Their children roamed everybody’s land and hunted pretty much wherever they liked. The feed mill was about two miles from Hutto’s house, and his parents let him leave home in the morning with a fishing pole and slowly make his way to the mill, as long as he arrived by quitting time. Hutto went to school a couple of miles from the farm, left town to attend the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, spent about a year or so there, dropped out, lasted a semester at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville, then came home. He had little use for the world beyond Damascus. Working at his father’s mill gave him a chance to attend feed meetings and conferences throughout the United States — and Hutto never went anywhere that he didn’t want to come home from.

For years, the Titan II sites in Van Buren County didn’t attract much attention. Their construction had briefly provided some high-paying jobs, and the fire in the silo at Searcy had taken the lives of a few men from Damascus. But once the launch complexes were operational, most people never thought about them. Sam Hutto would occasionally see crews in their Air Force blue pickups, coming or going from the site near Damascus. Sometimes they’d stop at the little grocery store to buy sodas and candy. The launch complex was just another local landmark, useful for giving directions. You could tell somebody who wanted to visit Ralph and Reba Jo Parish: head north from Damascus on Highway 65 for a few miles, pass the access road to the missile base, and their house will be the first one on the left.

The oxidizer leak in January 1978 was the first sign that having a Titan II in the neighborhood might be a problem. Hutto was working in the barn when he heard about the leak. He was twenty-three years old, helping his father and his older brother, Tommy, run the farm. A few years earlier the family had sold the feed mill and gone into the dairy business. As a milk truck backed into the barn, the driver said something about passing through a bright orange cloud on the way over. Hutto stepped outside to take a look. Their farm was on a hillside about three quarters of a mile southeast of the launch complex, with Highway 65 running between them. Down below Hutto could see an orange cloud encircling the complex and slowly drifting south. He didn’t think much of it and went back to work. His father, who was chopping wood about two miles due south of 4–7, thought the cloud tasted funny as it drifted past. It gave him a headache but didn’t make him sick. When word spread that the orange fumes had killed some cattle and sent Sheriff Anglin to the hospital, the residents of Damascus began to wonder about the safety of the Titan II missile that sat about a mile from their elementary school. The Air Force response to the leak — the assurances that everything was under control and that the missile was perfectly safe — did not reassure them.

Sam Hutto was at home on the evening of September 18, 1980, with his pregnant wife and their one-year-old daughter. The baby was expected any day. Hutto’s father called at about half past seven and told him to get out of the house. There was another leak or something at the missile site. Sheriff Anglin had gone out there to see what was happening, bumped into an Air Force security officer near the fence, and asked him whether there was any need to evacuate. Nope, everything is under control, the security officer had said. The sheriff got on his radio and ordered an evacuation of all the homes within a mile of the launch complex. The Parishes lived the closest to the site, less than half a mile from the missile itself, and perhaps twenty-five other homes were within the evacuation zone, mainly on the east side of the highway. To the west of the complex, woods and open fields stretched for hundreds of acres. Sheriff’s deputies knocked on doors, and neighbors phoned one another to spread the word. Sam Hutto drove his family to his brother Tommy’s house in Damascus, helped them get settled, and then left.

It was a bad night to evacuate the farm. The heat cycles of the heifers had been synchronized, and about twenty were ready to give birth. They were grazing in a field right across the highway from 4–7. Hutto wanted to make sure the cows and their calves were all right. He knew the back roads of Damascus pretty damn well and felt confident that he could safely make his way to the farm.

THE ARKANSAS OFFICE of Emergency Services had been notified by the Air Force, at 6:47 P.M., that there was a fuel leak and possibly a fire at the Titan II complex outside Damascus. For the rest of the evening, however, the Air Force provided few additional details about what was happening and whether the leak could pose a threat to public safety. Despite repeated calls to Little Rock Air Force Base, the Office of Emergency Services was told only that the problem was being addressed — and that more information would soon be forthcoming. Spokesmen at SAC headquarters in Omaha were no more helpful, claiming that the Air Force didn’t know what had caused the fuel leak, the white cloud rising from the silo wasn’t toxic, and there was no danger of a nuclear incident.

State officials had good reason to be skeptical of reassuring words from the federal government. A few months earlier, when about fifty thousand gallons of radioactive water leaked at a nuclear power plant outside Russellville, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had waited five hours before telling the Office of Emergency Services about the accident. And then the NRC allowed radioactive gas to be vented from the reactor into the air above Pope County, ignoring objections by the Arkansas Department of Health.

The cultural differences between the Strategic Air Command and the Arkansas state government may have contributed to the feelings of mistrust. SAC’s devotion to order, discipline, secrecy, and checklists was at odds with the looser, more irreverent spirit that guided policy making in Little Rock. Steve Clark, the Arkansas attorney general, was thirty-three years old. Paul Revere, the secretary of state, was also thirty-three. And William Jefferson Clinton, at thirty-four, was the youngest governor in the United States.

Educated at Georgetown University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School, Bill Clinton was an unlikely person for the Air Force to include in deliberations about the fate of a ballistic missile. He’d organized a demonstration against the Vietnam War, never served in the military, and supported the decriminalization of marijuana. During his gubernatorial campaign in 1978, the New York Times described Clinton as “tall, handsome, a populist-liberal with a style and speaking manner as smooth as Arkansas corn silk.” His landslide victory that year seemed to mark a generational shift — the rise to power of a brilliant, charismatic representative of the 1960s youth counterculture. Many conservatives were disgusted by the idea of Clinton and his young, idealistic friends running the state government. “He was a punk kid with long hair,” one Arkansas legislator said, “he had all those longhaired people working for him, and he was a liberal.”

Governor Clinton began his two-year term in office with an ambitious agenda for one of America’s most impoverished states. He gained passage of the largest spending increase for public education in Arkansas history. He created a Department of Energy to subsidize research on conservation, alternative fuels, and solar power. He proposed a rural health policy that would bring physicians and medical care to low-income communities. And he set out to fix the state’s badly deteriorated highway system, promising infrastructure investments to create jobs and improve the lives of ordinary Arkansans. A number of Clinton’s top aides and cabinet officers were recruited from out of state — sending a clear message that posts in his administration would be filled on the basis of merit, not as a reward for political favors. Instead of having a chief of staff, Clinton relied upon three close advisers who had long hair, beards, and an aversion to wearing jackets or ties. Nicknamed “the Three Beards,” they looked like junior faculty members at Berkeley. Among Democratic officials nationwide, Little Rock was now considered a cool place to be, and the young governor became a frequent guest at the Carter White House.

By the second year of the Clinton administration, most of the enthusiasm and idealism was gone. Personal differences, political disputes, and feelings of betrayal had led two of the Three Beards to quit. Industry groups worked hard to block or dilute many of Clinton’s reforms, and the governor’s willingness to compromise alienated many of his allies. Instead of subsidizing road construction with higher taxes on the use of heavy trucks — a move opposed by the state’s trucking companies and poultry firms — Clinton agreed to raise the taxes paid by the owners of old pickup trucks and cars. The lofty rhetoric and grand ambitions of the young governor lost much of their appeal, once people realized they’d have to pay more to renew their license plates. During the spring of 1980, a series of tornadoes struck Arkansas. During the summer, the state was hit by a heat wave and the worst drought in half a century. Hundreds of forest fires burned. Cuban refugees, detained by the federal government at an Army base in the state, started a riot. They tried to escape from the base and fought a brief skirmish with the Arkansas National Guard, terrifying residents in the nearby town of Barling. Each new day seemed to bring another crisis or a natural disaster.

Having gained almost two thirds of the popular vote in 1978, Bill Clinton now faced a tough campaign for reelection, confronting not only the anger and frustration in his own state but also the conservative tide rising across the United States. Frank White, the Republican candidate for governor, was strongly backed by the religious right and many of the industry groups that Clinton had antagonized. The White campaign embraced the candidacy of Ronald Reagan, attacked Clinton for having close ties to Jimmy Carter, ran ads that featured dark-skinned Cubans rioting on the road to Barling, raised questions about all the longhairs from out of state who seemed to be running Arkansas, and criticized the governor’s wife, Hillary Rodham, for being a feminist who refused to take her husband’s name.

While Lee Epperson, director of the Office of Emergency Services, tried to find out what was happening at the Titan II site in Damascus, Governor Clinton spent the evening in Hot Springs. The state’s Democratic convention was about to open there, and Vice President Walter Mondale would be arriving in the morning to attend it. Hillary Rodham remained in Little Rock, where she planned to spend the weekend at the governor’s mansion with their seven-month-old daughter, Chelsea.

JEFF KENNEDY WANTED a closer look at the white cloud drifting about two hundred feet away, on the other side of the perimeter fence.

“Captain Mazzaro, we have to get that propane tank off the complex,” Kennedy said. A fire in the silo could ignite it. The tank was sitting on the hardstand, near the exhaust vents, attached to a pickup truck. Kennedy suggested that they enter the complex and drive the tank out of there.

Mazzaro thought that sounded like a good idea. But he and Childers had no desire to do it. They hadn’t brought their gas masks, and the idea of running through clouds of fuel vapor without the masks didn’t sound appealing. Kennedy and Powell seemed eager to move the tank; Mazzaro told them to go ahead. He and Childers would wait by the fence.

The gate was still locked, and so Kennedy and Powell had to leave the access road, circle the complex, and enter through the breakaway section of the fence. Kennedy wore combat boots and fatigues. Powell was still in long johns and the black vinyl boots from his RFHCO. They walked along the chain-link fence, looking for the gap.

Kennedy had no intention of moving the propane tank. He planned to enter the underground control center and get the latest pressure readings from the stage 1 tanks. That was crucial information. In order to save the missile, they had to know what was going on inside it. Mazzaro wouldn’t have liked the plan, and that’s why Kennedy didn’t tell him about it. The point was to avert a disaster. “If Mazzaro hadn’t abandoned the control center,” Kennedy thought, “I wouldn’t need to be doing this.”

Fuel vapors swirled above the access portal, but the escape hatch looked clear. Kennedy ran for it, with Powell a few steps behind. During all the visits that Kennedy had made to Titan II complexes over the years, to fix one thing or another, he’d never been inside the escape hatch. The metal grate had been removed topside, and the two men climbed inside the air shaft, Kennedy going first.

“Stay here,” Kennedy said.

“Hell no,” Powell replied.

It’ll be safer if I go down there alone, Kennedy said. I can get out of there quicker.

“I’ll give you three minutes — and then I’m coming down.”

Kennedy climbed down the ladder wearing his gas mask, then crawled through the narrow steel tunnel. He felt confident that the blast doors were sealed tight and that the control center hadn’t been contaminated. But he didn’t want to stay down there too long. The air in level 3 seemed clear, and the lights were still on. He got out of the escape hatch and ran up the stairs. Everything looked good; there was no sign that blast door 8 had been breached. Kennedy sat at the launch commander’s console and pushed the buttons on the PTPMU. As the tank pressures flashed, he recorded them on a piece of paper.

“We’re in some serious shit,” Kennedy thought.

The pressure in the stage 1 oxidizer tank had risen to 29.6 psi. It was never supposed to exceed 17 psi. And the burst disk atop the tank was designed to pop at 50 psi. If the tank hadn’t already ruptured by then, the burst disk would act like a safety valve and release oxidizer into the silo, relieving some of the pressure. Normally, that would be a good thing, but at the moment there were thousands of gallons of fuel in the silo.

The pressure in the stage 1 fuel tank had dropped to –2 psi. Kennedy had been told that the tank would probably rupture once it reached between –2 and –3. He was surprised that the pressure had fallen so much in the past hour.

I’m not even wearing a watch, Powell realized, moments after Kennedy disappeared down the hatch. After counting the seconds for a while, Powell figured that three minutes had passed. He climbed down the ladder to find Kennedy, made it about halfway, and then heard Kennedy yell, “There’s not enough room for two people!” Kennedy was quickly climbing back up.

“Oh, God,” Powell said, after hearing the latest tank pressures. They got out of the escape hatch, left the complex through the breakaway fence, and made their way back to the gate.

Kennedy told Mazzaro that they couldn’t move the propane tank — and nothing more. The four of them walked down the access road to Highway 65. Colonel Morris was sitting in a pickup truck beside the road. Kennedy called him over and took him aside.

“Sir, this is what the tank readings are,” Kennedy said.

Morris asked, “Where in hell did you get those?”

Kennedy told him about entering the control center. The situation was urgent. They needed to do something about the missile, immediately.

Morris was glad to have the new readings but upset about what Kennedy had just done.

Something has to be done, and right away, Kennedy said. Earlier in the evening, he’d thought that the tank pressures would stabilize, but they hadn’t. He explained to Morris how precarious things had become. There was a major fuel leak, not a fire — and the stage 1 fuel tank wouldn’t hold much longer. If something wasn’t done soon, it would collapse like an accordion.

Colonel Morris asked Mazzaro if he knew what Kennedy had just done. After hearing about it, Mazzaro became furious.

Morris called the command post on the radio and provided the latest tank pressure readings, without revealing how he’d obtained them. Then Mazzaro got on the radio and told Little Rock that Kennedy had disobeyed orders and violated the two-man rule.

Kennedy didn’t care about any of this bullshit. He wanted to save the missile. And he had a plan, a good plan that would work.

Morris agreed to hear it.

We need to open the silo door, Kennedy said. That would release a lot of the fuel vapor, lower the heat in the silo, and relieve the pressure on the stage 1 oxidizer tank. Then we need to drop the work platforms — all nine levels of them — to support the missile and keep it upright. The platforms could prevent the missile from collapsing or falling against the silo wall. And then we need to send a PTS team down there to stabilize the stage 1 fuel tank, to fill it with nitrogen and restore the positive pressure.

For Kennedy’s plan to work, somebody would have to reenter the control center so that the platforms could be lowered and the silo door opened. Al Childers and Rodney Holder said they were willing to do it, if there was any chance of saving the missile.

Colonel Morris listened carefully and then spoke to the command post.

About fifteen minutes later, Morris told Kennedy the command post’s response: nothing, absolutely nothing, was to be done without approval from SAC headquarters in Omaha. Lieutenant General Lloyd R. Leavitt, Jr., the vice commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, was now in charge of the launch complex in Damascus. The problem with the missile and ideas about how to resolve it were being discussed. It was 9:30 P.M., almost three hours since the socket had been dropped. Until new orders came from Omaha, Morris said, everyone would have to sit tight.

Megadeath

Fred Charles Iklé began his research on bomb destruction as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Born and raised in an alpine village near Saint Moritz, he’d spent the Second World War amid the safety of neutral Switzerland. In 1949, Iklé left his studies in Chicago and traveled through bombed-out Germany. The war hadn’t touched his family directly, and he wanted to know how people coped with devastation on such a massive scale. One of the cities he visited, Hamburg, had suffered roughly the same number of casualties as Nagasaki — and had lost an even greater proportion of housing. A series of Allied bombing raids had killed about 3.3 percent of Hamburg’s population and destroyed about half of its homes. Nevertheless, Iklé found, the people of Hamburg were resilient. They had not fled the city in panic. They’d tried to preserve the familiar routines of daily life and now seemed determined to rebuild houses, businesses, and stores at their original locations. “A city re-adjusts to destruction somewhat as a living organism responds to injury,” Iklé later noted.

After returning to the United States, Iklé wrote a doctoral thesis that looked at the relationship between the intensity of aerial bombing and the density of a city’s surviving population. The proponents of airpower, he suggested, had overestimated its lethal effects. Before the Second World War, British planners had assumed that for every metric ton of high-explosive bombs dropped on a city, about seventy-two people would be killed or injured. The actual rate turned out to be only fifteen to twenty casualties per ton. And the Royal Air Force strategy of targeting residential areas and “de-housing” civilians proved disappointing. The supply of urban housing was much more elastic than expected, as people who still had homes invited their homeless friends, neighbors, and family members to come and stay.

Iklé devised a simple formula to predict how crowded the houses of a bombed-out city might become. If P1 = the population of a city before destruction, P2 = the population of a city after destruction, H1 = the number of housing units before destruction, H2 = the number of housing units after destruction, and F = the number of fatalities, then “the fully compensating increase in housing density,” could be expressed as a mathematical equation:

Iklé was impressed by the amount of urban hardship and overcrowding that people could endure. But there were limits. The tipping point seemed to be reached when about 70 percent of a city’s homes were destroyed. That’s when people began to leave en masse and seek shelter in the countryside.

Iklé’s dissertation attracted the attention of the RAND Corporation, and he was soon invited to join its social sciences division. Created in 1946 as a joint venture of the Army Air Forces and the Douglas Aircraft Company, Project RAND became one of America’s first think tanks, a university without students where scholars and Nobel laureates from a wide variety of disciplines could spend their days contemplating the future of airpower. The organization gained early support from General Curtis LeMay, whose training as a civil engineer had greatly influenced his military thinking. LeMay wanted the nation’s best civilian minds to develop new weapons, tactics, and technologies for the Army Air Forces.

RAND’s first study, “Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship,” outlined the military importance of satellites, more than a decade before one was launched. RAND subsequently conducted pioneering research on game theory, computer networking, artificial intelligence, systems analysis, and nuclear strategy. Having severed its ties to Douglas Aircraft, RAND became a nonprofit corporation operating under an exclusive contract to the Air Force. At the RAND headquarters in Santa Monica, California, not far from the beach, amid a freewheeling intellectual atmosphere where no idea seemed too outlandish to explore, physicists, mathematicians, economists, sociologists, psychologists, computer scientists, and historians collaborated on top secret studies. Behind the whole enterprise lay a profound faith in the application of science and reason to warfare. The culture of the place was rigorously unsentimental. Analysts at RAND were encouraged to consider every possibility, calmly, rationally, and without emotion — to think about the unthinkable, in defense of the United States.

While immersed in a number of projects at RAND, Fred Iklé continued to study what happens when cities are bombed. His book on the subject, The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction, appeared in 1958. It included his earlier work on the devastation of Hamburg and addressed the question of how urban populations would respond to nuclear attacks. Iklé warned that far more thought was being devoted to planning a nuclear war than to preparing for the aftermath of one. “It is not a pleasant task to deal realistically with such potentially large-scale and gruesome destruction,” Iklé wrote in the preface. “But since we live in the shadow of nuclear warfare, we must face its consequences intelligently and prepare to cope with them.”

Relying largely on statistics, excluding any moral or humanitarian considerations, and writing with cool, Swiss precision, Iklé suggested that the Second World War strategy of targeting civilians had failed to achieve its aims. The casualties were disproportionately women, children, and the elderly — not workers essential to the war effort. Cities adapted to the bombing, and their morale wasn’t easily broken. Even in Hiroshima, the desire to fight back survived the blast: when rumors spread that San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles had been destroyed by Japanese atomic bombs, people became lighthearted and cheerful, hoping the war could still be won.

A nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, however, would present a new set of dilemmas. The first atomic bomb to strike a city might not be the only one. Fleeing to the countryside and remaining there might be the logical thing to do. Iklé conjured a nightmarish vision of ongoing nuclear attacks, millions of casualties, firestorms, “the sheer terror of the enormous destruction,” friction between rural townspeople and urban refugees, victims of radiation sickness anxiously waiting days or weeks to learn if they’d received a fatal dose. It was naive to think that the only choice Americans now faced was “one world — or none.” Nuclear weapons might never be abolished, and their use might not mean the end of mankind. Iklé wanted people to confront the threat of nuclear war with a sense of realism, not utopianism or apocalyptic despair. A nation willing to prepare for the worst might survive — in some form or another.

Iklé had spent years contemplating the grim details of how America’s cities could be destroyed. His interest in the subject was more than academic; he had a wife and two young daughters. If the war plans of the United States or the Soviet Union were deliberately set in motion, Iklé understood, as well as anyone, the horrors that would be unleashed. A new and unsettling concern entered his mind: What if a nuclear weapon was detonated by accident? What if one was used without the president’s approval — set off by a technical glitch, a saboteur, a rogue officer, or just a mistake? Could that actually happen? And could it inadvertently start a nuclear war? With RAND’s support, Iklé began to investigate the risk of an accidental or unauthorized detonation. And what he learned was not reassuring.

THE THREAT OF ACCIDENTS had increased during the past decade, as nuclear weapons became more numerous, more widely dispersed — and vastly more powerful. In the fall of 1949, American scientists had engaged in a fierce debate over whether to develop a hydrogen bomb, nicknamed “the Superbomb” or “the Super.” It promised to unleash a destructive force thousands of times greater than that of the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While those weapons derived their explosive power solely from nuclear fission (the splitting apart of heavy elements into lighter ones), the hydrogen bomb would draw upon an additional source of energy, thermonuclear fusion (the combination of light elements into heavier ones). Fission and fusion both released the neutrons essential for a chain reaction — but fusion released a lot more. The potential yield of an atomic bomb was limited by the amount of its fissile material. But the potential yield of a thermonuclear weapon seemed limitless; it might only need more hydrogen as fuel. The same energy that powered the sun and the stars could be harnessed to make cities disappear.

The physicist Edward Teller had devoted most of his time during the Manhattan Project to theoretical work on the Super. But the problem of how to ignite and sustain fusion reactions had never been solved. After the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in August 1949, Teller began to lobby for a crash program to build a hydrogen bomb. He was tireless, stubborn, brilliant, and determined to get his way. “It is my conviction that a peaceful settlement with Russia is possible only if we possess overwhelming superiority,” Teller argued. “If the Russians demonstrate a Super before we possess one, our situation will be hopeless.”

The General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission discussed Teller’s proposal and voted unanimously to oppose it. Headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the committee said that the hydrogen bomb had no real military value and would encourage “the policy of exterminating civilian populations.” Six of the committee members signed a statement warning that the bomb could become “a weapon of genocide.” Two others, the physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi, hoped that the Super could be banned through an international agreement, arguing that such a bomb would be “a danger to humanity… an evil thing considered in any light.”

David Lilienthal, the head of the AEC, opposed developing a hydrogen bomb, as did a majority of the AEC’s commissioners. But one of them, Lewis L. Strauss, soon emerged as an influential champion of the weapon. Strauss wasn’t a physicist or a former Manhattan Project scientist. He was a retired Wall Street financier with a high school education, a passion for science, and a deep mistrust of the Soviet Union. At the AEC, he’d been largely responsible for the monitoring system that detected the Soviet atomic bomb test. Now he wanted the United States to make a “quantum leap” past the Soviets, and “proceed with all possible expedition to develop the thermonuclear weapon.”

Senator Brien McMahon, head of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, agreed with Strauss. A few years earlier, McMahon had been a critic of the atomic bomb and a leading opponent of military efforts to control it. But the political climate had changed: Democrats were under attack for being too “soft on Communism.” The Soviet Union now loomed as a dangerous, implacable enemy — and McMahon was facing reelection. If the Soviets developed a hydrogen bomb and the United States didn’t, McMahon predicted that “total power in the hands of total evil will equal destruction.” The Air Force backed the effort to build the Superbomb, as did the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and the Joint Chiefs of Staff — although its chairman, General Omar Bradley, acknowledged that the weapon’s greatest benefit was most likely “psychological.”

On January 31, 1950, President Truman met with David Lilienthal, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson to discuss the Superbomb. Acheson and Johnson had already expressed their support for developing one. The president asked whether the Soviets could do it. His advisers suggested that they could. “In that case, we have no choice,” Truman said. “We’ll go ahead.”

Two weeks after the president’s decision was publicly announced, Albert Einstein read a prepared statement about the hydrogen bomb on national television. He criticized the militarization of American society, the intimidation of anyone who opposed it, the demands for loyalty and secrecy, the “hysterical character” of the nuclear arms race, and the “disastrous illusion” that this new weapon would somehow make America safer. “Every step appears as the unavoidable consequence of the preceding one,” Einstein said. “In the end, there beckons more and more clearly general annihilation.”

Truman’s decision to develop a hydrogen bomb had great symbolic importance. It sent a message to the Soviet leadership — and to the American people. In a cold war without bloodshed or battlefields, the perception of strength mattered as much as the reality. A classified Pentagon report later stressed the central role that “psychological considerations” played in nuclear deterrence. “Weapons systems in themselves tell only part of the necessary story,” the report argued. The success of America’s defense plans relied on an effective “information program” aimed at the public:

The usefulness of the Super wasn’t the issue; the willingness to build it was. And that sort of logic would guide the nuclear arms race for the next forty years.

The debate over the hydrogen bomb strengthened the influence of the military in nuclear weapons policy, diminished the stature of the Atomic Energy Commission, and created a lasting bitterness among many of the scientists and physicists who’d served in the Manhattan Project. But all the passionate arguments about genocide and morality and the fate of mankind proved irrelevant. The Soviet Union had secretly been working on a hydrogen bomb since at least 1948. According to the physicist Andrei Sakharov, considered the father of the Soviet H-bomb, Joseph Stalin was determined to have such a weapon — regardless of what the United States did. “Any U.S. move toward abandoning or suspending work on a thermonuclear weapon would have been perceived either as a cunning, deceitful maneuver or as evidence of stupidity or weakness,” Sakharov wrote in his memoirs. “In any case, the Soviet reaction would have been the same: to avoid a possible trap and to exploit the adversary’s folly.”

TWO WEEKS AFTER NORTH KOREAN TROOPS crossed the border and invaded South Korea, President Truman approved the transfer of eighty-nine atomic bombs to American air bases in Great Britain. The Joint Chiefs of Staff feared that the outbreak of war in Korea might be a prelude to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The Atomic Energy Commission readily agreed to hand over the bombs, minus one crucial component: the nuclear cores. They remained at storage facilities in the United States, ready to be airlifted overseas if war seemed imminent. The Department of Defense was still pushing hard for custody of America’s nuclear arsenal. General Kenneth D. Nichols, head of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, asserted that the military should not only control the atomic bombs but also design and manufacture them. Frustrated that so many Los Alamos scientists had opposed the Super, Edward Teller sought the creation of a new weapons laboratory, backed by the Air Force, in Boulder, Colorado.

The AEC fought against those proposals, while recognizing the need for military readiness. In August 1950, Truman approved the transfer of fifteen atomic bombs without cores to the Coral Sea, an aircraft carrier heading to the Mediterranean. The Air Force didn’t like the precedent — and insisted that, in the future, all nuclear weapons stored on carriers should be under the formal control of the Strategic Air Command, not the Navy. The following year, as U.N. troops battled the Chinese army in Korea, the Air Force finally gained custody of atomic bombs and their nuclear cores. Allowing the military to have possession of them seemed, at the time, to be a momentous step. General Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force chief of staff, assumed personal responsibility for the nine weapons. They were shipped to an air base in Guam, ready for use, if necessary, against the Chinese.

By the end of 1950, the United States had about three hundred atomic bombs, and more than one third of them were stored, without nuclear cores, on aircraft carriers or at air bases overseas. The rest were kept at the AEC’s American storage sites, ostensibly under civilian control. And yet that custody, required by the Atomic Energy Act, had in many respects become a legal fiction. For example, at Site Baker, the storage facility in Killeen, Texas, the AEC had eleven employees — and the military had five hundred, including all two hundred security personnel. The storage sites were well defended against saboteurs and intruders, but not against every kind of unauthorized use. General LeMay later admitted that special arrangements had been made at Site Able, the facility in the Manzano Mountains near Sandia:

The arrangement seemed necessary, given the rudimentary nature of command and control in those days. “If I were on my own and half the country was destroyed and I could get no orders and so forth,” LeMay explained, “I wasn’t going to sit there fat, dumb, and happy and do nothing.”

Work on the hydrogen bomb gained more urgency after it became clear that the Soviet Union was trying to build one. A few days after Truman’s announcement that the United States would develop the Super, the British physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to having spied for the Soviets. At Los Alamos, Fuchs had worked on the original design of the implosion bomb and conducted some of the early research on thermonuclear weapons. In January 1951, despite a year of intense effort, American scientists were no closer to creating a hydrogen bomb. Teller had proposed using a fission device to initiate the process of fusion. But he could not figure out how to contain the thermonuclear reaction long enough to produce a significant yield. The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam suggested a couple of new ideas: the hydrogen fuel should be compressed before being ignited, and the detonation of the bomb should unfold in stages. Teller was greatly inspired by Ulam’s suggestions, and in March 1951 the two men submitted a paper at Los Alamos that laid out the basic workings of a thermonuclear weapon — “On Heterocatalytic Detonations I: Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors.” And then they applied for a patent on their H-bomb design.

Ulam had called his initial proposal “a bomb in a box.” The Teller-Ulam design that emerged from it essentially placed two fission bombs in a box, along with hydrogen isotopes like deuterium and tritium to serve as thermonuclear fuel. Here is what would happen, if everything worked as planned: an implosion device would detonate inside a thick metal canister lined with lead. The X-rays emitted by that explosion would be channeled down the canister toward hydrogen fuel wrapped around a uranium-235 “spark plug.” The fuel and the spark plug would be encased in a cylindrical layer of uranium-238, like beer inside a keg. The X-rays would compress the uranium casing and the hydrogen fuel. That compression would make the fuel incredibly dense — and then would detonate the uranium spark plug in the middle of it. Trapped between two nuclear explosions, the first one pressing inward, the second one now pushing outward, the hydrogen atoms would fuse. They would suddenly release massive amounts of neutrons, and that flood of neutrons would accelerate the fission of the uranium spark plug. It would also cause the uranium casing to fission. All of that would occur within a few millionths of a second. And then the metal canister holding everything together would blow apart.

The physics and the material science behind the Teller-Ulam design were highly complex, and there was no guarantee the bomb would work. It relied on a concept, “radiation implosion,” that seemed plausible in theory but had never been accomplished. X-rays from the detonation of the first device, called the “primary,” would have to be accurately focused and reflected onto the “secondary,” the cylinder housing the fuel and the spark plug. Using X-rays to implode the secondary was a brilliant idea: the X-rays would move at the speed of light, traveling much faster than the blast wave from the primary. The difference in speed would prolong the fusion process — if the interaction of the various materials could be properly understood.

The steel, lead, plastic foam, uranium, and other solids within the bomb would be subjected to pressures reaching billions of pounds per square inch. They would be transformed into plasmas, and predicting their behavior depended on a thorough grasp of hydrodynamics — the science of fluids in motion. The mathematical calculations necessary to determine the proper size, shape, and arrangement of the bomb’s components seemed overwhelming. “In addition to all the problems of fission… neutronics, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics,” Ulam later recalled, “new ones appeared vitally in the thermonuclear problems: the behavior of more materials, the question of time scales and interplay of all the geometrical and physical factors.” And yet the Teller-Ulam design had an underlying simplicity. Aside from the fuzing and firing mechanism that set off the primary, there were no moving parts.

In May 1951 a pair of nuclear tests in the South Pacific demonstrated that a nuclear explosion could initiate thermonuclear fusion. A device nicknamed “George,” containing liquefied tritium and deuterium, produced the largest nuclear yield ever achieved: 225 kilotons, more than ten times that of the Nagasaki bomb. Although fusion was responsible for just a small part of that yield, radiation implosion did occur. The detonation of “Item” a few days later had a much lower yield, but enormous significance. It confirmed Teller’s belief that fission bombs could be “boosted” — that their explosive force could be greatly magnified by putting a small amount of tritium and deuterium gas into their cores, right before the moment of detonation. When a boosted core imploded, the hydrogen isotopes fused and then flooded it with neutrons, making the subsequent fission explosion anywhere from ten to a hundred times more powerful. Boosted weapons promised to be smaller and more efficient than those already in the stockpile, producing larger yields with much less fissile material.

A full-scale test of the Teller-Ulam design took place on November 1, 1952. One of the world’s first electronic, digital computers had been assembled at Los Alamos to perform many of the necessary calculations. The machine was called MANIAC (Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer), and the device that it helped to create, “Mike,” looked more like a large cylindrical whiskey still than a weapon of mass destruction. Mike was about twenty feet tall and weighed more than 120,000 pounds. The device was housed in a corrugated aluminum building on the island of Elugelab. When Mike detonated, the island disappeared. It became dust and ash, pulled upward to form a mushroom cloud that rose about twenty-seven miles into the sky. The fireball created by the explosion was three and a half miles wide. All that remained of little Elugelab was a circular crater filled with seawater, more than a mile in diameter and fifteen stories deep. The yield of the device was 10.4 megatons, roughly five hundred times more powerful than the Nagasaki bomb.

The Teller-Ulam design worked, and the United States now seemed capable of building hydrogen bombs. “The war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past,” President Truman said, a couple of months later, during his farewell address. Then he added, somewhat hopefully, “Such a war is not a possible policy for rational men.”

THE THOUGHT OF USING nuclear weapons may have seemed irrational to Truman, but a credible threat to use them lay at the heart of deterrence. And planning for their use had become a full-time occupation for many of America’s best minds. Fundamental questions of nuclear strategy still hadn’t been settled. Project Vista, a top secret study conducted by the California Institute of Technology, revived the military debate about how to defend Western Europe from a Soviet invasion. In 1950 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had agreed to create an allied army with 54 divisions — enough to stop the Red Army, which was thought to have 175 divisions. The European members of NATO, however, failed to supply the necessary troops, and by 1952 the alliance seemed incapable of fielding anywhere near the requisite number. The small U.S. Army contingent in Western Europe served on the front line as a “trip wire,” a “plate glass wall.” American troops would be among the first to encounter a Soviet attack, and they’d be quickly overrun, forcing the United States to enter the war. The Strategic Air Command would respond by destroying most of the Soviet Union. But the Red Army would still conquer most of Europe, and civilian casualties would be extraordinarily high.

The prominent academics and military officers who led Project Vista, including Robert Oppenheimer, concluded that SAC’s atomic blitz was the wrong response to a Soviet invasion. Bombing the cities of the Soviet Union might provoke a nuclear retaliation against the cities of Western Europe and the United States. Instead of relying on strategic bombing, the members of Project Vista urged NATO to replace manpower with technology, use low-yield, tactical atomic weapons against the advancing Soviet troops, and bring the “battle back to the battlefield.” Such a policy might limit the scale of any nuclear war and save lives, “preventing attacks on friendly cities.” The field officers of the U.S. Army and the fighter pilots of the U.S. Air Force’s Tactical Air Command (TAC) wholeheartedly agreed with those conclusions, on humanitarian grounds. They also stood to benefit from any policy that reduced the influence of the Strategic Air Command.

As would be expected, Curtis LeMay hated the idea of low-yield tactical weapons. In his view, they were a waste of fissile material, unlikely to prove decisive in battle, and difficult to keep under centralized control. The only way to win a nuclear war, according to SAC, was to strike first and strike hard. “Successful offense brings victory; successful defense can now only lessen defeat,” LeMay told his commanders. Moreover, an atomic blitz aimed at Soviet cities was no longer SAC’s top priority. LeMay now thought it would be far more important to destroy the Soviet Union’s capability to use its nuclear weapons. Soviet airfields, bombers, command centers, and nuclear facilities became SAC’s primary targets. LeMay did not advocate preventive war — an American surprise attack on the Soviet Union, out of the blue. But the “counterforce” strategy that he endorsed was a form of preemptive war: SAC planned to attack the moment the Soviets seemed to be readying their own nuclear forces. Civilian casualties, though unavoidable, were no longer the goal. “Offensive air power must now be aimed at preventing the launching of weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its Allies,” LeMay argued. “This transcends all other considerations because the price of failure might be paid with national survival.”

The newly elected president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had to reconcile the competing demands of his armed services — and develop a nuclear strategy that made sense. Eisenhower was well prepared for the job. He’d served as the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe during the Second World War, as Army chief of staff after the war, and most recently as the supreme commander of NATO forces. He understood the military challenges of defending Western Europe and the revolutionary impact of nuclear weapons. The Manhattan Project had reported to him, until the AEC assumed its role. He had worked closely with LeMay for years and had been briefed by Oppenheimer on the findings of Project Vista. Eisenhower didn’t like the Soviet Union but had no desire to fight a third world war. After being briefed on the details of how Mike had made an island disappear, he privately questioned the need “for us to build enough destructive power to destroy everything.”

After replacing Truman’s appointees to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Eisenhower asked his national security team to take a “new look” at America’s defense policies. He’d campaigned for the presidency vowing to lower taxes and reduce the size of the federal government. Despite his military background, he was eager to cut the defense budget, which had tripled in size during the Truman administration. In June 1953, while a wide range of proposals was being considered, the Soviets crushed a popular uprising in East Germany. Two months later they detonated RDS-6, a thermonuclear device. Although the yield of RDS-6 was relatively low and its design rudimentary, the test had ominous implications. Eisenhower was fully committed to preserving the freedom of Western Europe and containing the power of the Soviet Union — without bankrupting the United States. In his view, the simplest, most inexpensive way to accomplish those aims was to deploy more nuclear weapons. And instead of choosing between a strategy based on large thermonuclear weapons or one based on smaller, tactical weapons, Eisenhower decided that the United States should have both.

In the fall of 1953, the administration’s national security policy was outlined in a top secret document, NSC 162/2. It acknowledged that the United States didn’t have enough troops to protect Western Europe from a full-scale Soviet invasion. And it made clear that a Soviet attack would provoke an overwhelming response: “In the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons as available for use as other munitions.”

During his State of the Union address in January 1954, President Eisenhower publicly announced the new policy, declaring that the United States and its allies would “maintain a massive capability to strike back.” Five days later his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, said that the security of the United States would depend on “a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing.” The two speeches left the impression that America would respond to any Soviet attack with an all-out nuclear strike, a strategy soon known as “massive retaliation.”

The Air Force and the Strategic Air Command benefited the most from Eisenhower’s “new look.” SAC became America’s preeminent military organization, its mission considered essential to national security, its commander reporting directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While the other armed services faced cutbacks in spending and manpower, SAC’s budget grew. Within a few years the number of personnel at SAC increased by almost one third, and the number of aircraft nearly doubled. SAC’s demand for nuclear weapons soared as well, driven by the new focus on counterforce targets. The Soviet Union had far more airfields than major cities — and destroying them would require far more bombs. The Navy’s shipbuilding budget stagnated, but the new look didn’t inspire another revolt of the admirals. The Navy no longer seemed obsolete. It had gained approval for new aircraft carriers, every one of them equipped to carry nuclear weapons. The Navy also sought high-tech replacements for many conventional weapons: atomic depth charges, atomic torpedoes, atomic antiship missiles.

Although Eisenhower had served in the Army for nearly forty years, the Army suffered the worst budget cuts, quickly losing more than one fifth of its funding and about one quarter of its troops. General Matthew B. Ridgway, the Army chief of staff, became an outspoken critic of massive retaliation. Ridgway had demonstrated great leadership and integrity while commanding ground forces during the Second World War and in Korea. He thought that the United States still needed a strong Army to fight conventional wars, that an overreliance on nuclear weapons was dangerous and immoral, that Eisenhower’s policy would needlessly threaten civilians, and that “national fiscal bankruptcy would be far preferable to national spiritual bankruptcy.” Ridgway’s unyielding criticism of the new look led to his early retirement. The Army, however, found ways to adapt. It lobbied hard for atomic artillery shells, atomic antiaircraft missiles, atomic land mines. During secret testimony before a congressional committee, one of Ridgway’s closest aides, General James M. Gavin, later spelled out precisely what the Army required: 151,000 nuclear weapons. According to Gavin, the Army needed 106,000 for use on the battlefield and an additional 25,000 for air defense. The remaining 20,000 could be shared with America’s allies.

AT LOS ALAMOS AND SANDIA, a crash program had been launched to make hydrogen bombs, long before it was clear that the Teller-Ulam design would even work. A six-day week became routine, and the labs were often busy on Sundays, as well. The goal was to produce a handful of H-bombs that the Air Force could use if Western Europe were suddenly invaded. Unlike the fission bombs being manufactured at factories across the United States, these “emergency capability” weapons would be assembled by hand at Sandia and then stored nearby at Site Able. Their components weren’t required to undergo the same field testing as those used in the stockpile’s other bombs. While Teller and Ulam wrestled with the theoretical issues of how to sustain thermonuclear fusion, the engineers at Sandia faced a more practical question: How do you deliver a hydrogen bomb without destroying the aircraft that carried it to the target?

The latest calculations suggested that an H-bomb would weigh as much as forty thousand pounds, and the only American bomber large enough to transport one to the Soviet Union, the B-36, was too slow to escape the blast. The Air Force investigated the possibility of turning the new, medium-range B-47 jet bomber into a pilotless drone. The B-47 would be fitted with a hydrogen bomb and carried to the Soviet Union by a B-36 mothership. Code-named Project Brass Ring, the plan was hampered by the cost and complexity of devising a guidance system for the drone.

Harold Agnew, a young physicist at Los Alamos, came up with a simpler idea. Agnew was an independent, iconoclastic thinker from Colorado who’d been present at some of the key moments in the nuclear age. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he’d helped Enrico Fermi create the first manmade nuclear chain reaction in 1942. Agnew subsequently worked on the Manhattan Project, flew as a scientific observer over Hiroshima when Little Boy was dropped, snuck his own movie camera onto the plane, and shot the only footage of the mushroom cloud. He’d helped to construct Mike and watched it detonate from a ship thirty miles away, amazed to see the island disappear. The heat from the blast kept growing stronger and stronger, as though it might never end. While thinking about how to deliver an H-bomb safely, Agnew remembered seeing footage of Nazi tanks being dropped from airplanes by parachute. He contacted a friend at the Air Force and said, “We’ve got to find out how they did that.”

The Air Force had already taken an interest in those parachutes. Theodor W. Knacke, their inventor, had been brought to the United States after the Second World War as part of a top secret effort to recruit Nazi aerospace and rocket scientists. The program, known as Project Paperclip, had been run by Curtis LeMay, who later explained its aims: “rescue those able and intelligent Jerries from behind the barbed wire, and get them going in our various military projects, and feed them into American industry.” Theodor Knacke now worked for the U.S. Navy at an air base in El Centro, California. Agnew promptly flew to California, met with Knacke, and asked, hypothetically, if he could design a parachute strong enough to bear the weight of something that weighed forty thousand pounds. “Oh yes,” Knacke replied. “No problem.”

Inspired by the German designs, Project Caucasian, a collaboration between the Air Force and Sandia, developed a three-parachute system that would slow the descent of a hydrogen bomb and give an American bomber enough time to get away from it. The bomb would be dropped by a B-36 at an altitude of about forty thousand feet. A small pilot chute would open immediately, followed by a slightly larger extraction chute. The first two chutes would protect the bomb from being jerked too violently, and then the third chute would open — an enormous ribbon parachute, Theodor Knacke’s invention, with narrow gaps in the fabric that let air pass through it and prevented the whole thing from being torn apart. The hydrogen bomb would float gently downward for about two minutes, just a tiny little speck in the sky. And then it would explode, roughly a mile and a half above the ground.

Bob Peurifoy led the team at Sandia that designed the arming, fuzing, and firing mechanisms for the emergency capability weapons. Radar fuzes promised to be the most accurate means of detonating the bombs, but pinpoint accuracy wasn’t essential for a weapon expected to have a yield of about 10 megatons. Klaus Fuchs had most likely given the Soviet Union information about the Archies and other radar fuzes used on atomic bombs, raising concern that the Soviets could somehow jam those radars and turn America’s H-bombs into duds. A barometric switch or a mechanical timer seemed a more reliable way to trigger the X-unit, fire the detonators, and set off a thermonuclear explosion. Each of those fuzes, however, had potential disadvantages. If a mechanical timer was used and the main parachute failed, the bomb would plummet to the ground and smash to pieces before the timer ran out. But if a barometric switch was used and the main parachute failed, the bomb would fall to the designated altitude too fast and explode prematurely, destroying the B-36 before it had a chance to escape.

Peurifoy asked the Air Force to consider the risks of the two fuzes and then make a choice. One fuze might fail to detonate the bomb; the other might kill the crew. When the Air Force couldn’t decide, Peurifoy ordered that both fuzes be added to the firing mechanism. The decision could be made before the bomb was loaded on the plane, with or without the crew’s knowledge.

Sandia was no longer a small offshoot of Los Alamos. It now had more than four thousand employees, state-of-the-art buildings with blast walls for work on high explosives, and a year-round test site in the California desert. Plans were under way to open another division in Livermore, California, where the Atomic Energy Commission had recently established a new weapons laboratory to compete with Los Alamos. The University of California managed the labs at Livermore and Los Alamos, but Sandia was a nonprofit corporation operated by AT&T. The mix of public and private management, of academic inquiry and industrial production, helped to form a unique, insular culture at Sandia — rigorous, grounded, and pragmatic; eager to push the boundaries of technology, yet skeptical of wild and abstract schemes; highly motivated, collegial, and patriotic. Nobody took a job at Sandia in order to get rich. The appeal of the work lay in its urgency and importance, the technical problems to be solved, the sense of community inspired by the need to keep secrets. Most of the engineers, like Peurifoy, were young. They couldn’t tell their friends, relatives, or even spouses anything about their jobs. They socialized at the Coronado Club inside the gates of Sandia, hiked and skied the nearby mountains, conducted experiments on new fuzes and detonators and bomb casings. They perfected America’s weapons of mass destruction so that those weapons would never have to be used.

THE THERMONUCLEAR DEVICE that had vaporized Elugelab was too large to be delivered by plane. And that type of device presented a number of logistical challenges. Mike’s thermonuclear fuel, liquefied deuterium, had to be constantly maintained at a temperature of –423 degrees Fahrenheit. Although the feasibility of liquid-fueled hydrogen bombs was being explored, weapons that used a solid fuel, such as lithium deuteride, would be much easier to handle. On March 1, 1954, a solid-fueled device named “Shrimp” was tested at a coral reef in the Bikini atoll. The code name of the test was Bravo, and the device worked. But miscalculations at Los Alamos produced a yield much larger than expected. The first sign that something had gone wrong was detected at the firing bunker on the island of Enyu, twenty miles from the explosion. While awaiting the blast wave, the lead scientist in the bunker, Bernard O’Keefe, grew concerned. He was hardly the nervous type. The night before the Nagasaki raid, he’d violated safety rules and secretly changed the plugs on Fat Man’s master firing cable. In 1953, after an implosion device mysteriously failed to detonate at the Nevada Test Site, he’d climbed two hundred feet to the top of the shot tower and pulled out the firing cables by hand. Now he felt uneasy. About ten seconds after Shrimp exploded, the underground bunker seemed to be moving. But that didn’t make any sense. The concrete bunker was anchored to the island, and the walls were three feet thick.

“Is this building moving or am I getting dizzy?” another scientist asked.

“My God, it is,” O’Keefe said. “It’s moving!”

O’Keefe began to feel nauseated, as though he were seasick, and held on to a workbench as objects slid around the room. The bunker was rolling and shaking, he later recalled, “like it was resting on a bowl of jelly.” The shock wave from the explosion, traveling through the ground, had reached them faster than the blast wave passing through the air.

Shrimp’s yield was 15 megatons — almost three times larger than what its designers had predicted. The fireball was about four miles wide, and about two hundred billion pounds of coral reef and the seafloor were displaced, much of it rising into a mushroom cloud that soon stretched for more than sixty miles across the sky. Fifteen minutes after the blast, O’Keefe and the eight other men in his firing crew tentatively stepped out of the bunker. The island was surrounded by a dull, gray haze. Trees were down, palm branches were scattered everywhere, all the birds were gone — twenty miles from ground zero. O’Keefe noticed that the radioactivity level on his dosimeter was climbing rapidly. A light rain of white ash that looked like snowflakes began to fall. Then pebbles and rocks started dropping from the sky. The men ran back into the bunker, slammed the door shut, detected high levels of radioactivity within the bunker, and after a few moments of confusion, turned off the air-conditioning unit. Inside, the radiation levels quickly fell, but outside they continued to rise. The men were trapped.

The dangers of radioactive fallout had been recognized since the days of the Manhattan Project but never fully appreciated. A nuclear explosion produces an initial burst of gamma rays — the source of radiation poisoning at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The blast also creates residual radiation, as fission products and high-energy neutrons interact with everything engulfed by the fireball. The radioactive material formed by the explosion may emit beta particles, gamma rays, or both. The beta particles are relatively weak, unable to penetrate clothing. The gamma rays can be deadly. They can pass through the walls of a house and kill the people inside it.

Some elements become lethal after a nuclear explosion, while others remain harmless. For example, when oxygen is bombarded by high-energy neutrons, it turns into a nitrogen isotope with a half-life of just seven seconds — meaning that within seven seconds, half of its radioactivity has been released. That’s why a nuclear weapon exploded high above the ground — an airburst, like the detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki — doesn’t produce much radioactive fallout. But when manganese is bombarded by high-energy neutrons, it becomes manganese-56, an isotope that emits gamma rays and has a half-life of two and a half hours. Manganese is commonly found in soil, and that’s one of the reasons that the groundburst of a nuclear weapon can create a large amount of deadly fallout. Rocks, dirt, even seawater are transformed into radioactive elements within the fireball, pulled upward, carried by the wind, and eventually fall out of the sky.

The “early fallout” of a nuclear blast is usually the most dangerous. The larger particles of radioactive material drop from the mushroom cloud within the first twenty-four hours, landing wherever wind or rain carries them. On the ground, radiation levels steadily increase as the fallout accumulates. Unlike the initial burst of gamma rays from a nuclear explosion, the residual radiation can remain hazardous for days, months, or even years. A dose of about 700 roentgens is almost always fatal to human beings — and that dose need not be received all at once. Radiation poisoning, like a sunburn, can occur gradually. Gamma rays are invisible, and radioactive dust looks like any other dust. By the time a person feels the effects of the radiation damage, nothing can be done to reverse it.

“Delayed fallout” poses a different kind of risk. Minute particles of radioactive material may be pulled into the upper atmosphere and travel thousands of miles from the nuclear blast. Most of the gamma rays are emitted long before this fallout lands. But a number of radioactive isotopes can emit beta particles for long periods of time. Strontium-90 is a soft metal, much like lead, with a radioactive half-life of 29.1 years. It is usually present in the fallout released by thermonuclear explosions. When strontium-90 enters the soil, it’s absorbed by plants grown in that soil — and by the animals that eat those plants. Once inside the human body, strontium-90 mimics calcium, accumulates in bone, and continues to emit radiation, often causing leukemia or bone cancer. Strontium-90 poses the greatest risk to children and adolescents, whose bones are still growing. Along with cesium-137, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 30 years, it may contaminate agricultural land for generations.

In 1952, Mike’s thermonuclear explosion had deposited high levels of fallout in the ocean near the test site. The following year, New York milk tainted with strontium-90 was linked to the detonation of fission devices at the Nevada Test Site. But the unanticipated size of Shrimp’s yield, the volume of coral reef and seafloor displaced, and the stronger-than-expected winds combined to produce an amount of fallout that surprised everyone involved with the Bravo test. Thousands of scientists and military personnel, watching the detonation from ships thirty miles away, were forced to head belowdecks and remain there for hours amid stifling heat. O’Keefe and his men had to be rescued by helicopter. They taped bedsheets over every inch of their bodies before fleeing the bunker, trying to avoid any contact with the fallout.

Seaplanes evacuated an Air Force weather station 153 miles from ground zero, and two days after the blast, the Navy removed scores of villagers from the island of Rongelap in the Marshall Islands. The villagers had seen the brilliant explosion 115 miles in the distance but had no idea the white dust that later fell from the sky might be harmful. It settled on their skin and in their hair. They walked barefoot in it for hours. About eighty of them got radiation sickness. Many also developed burns, lesions, and discolored pigment from beta particles emitted by the fallout on their skin. And Rongelap was blanketed with so much of the white dust that the island’s residents weren’t allowed to return there for three years.

The dangers of fallout were inadvertently made public when a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, arrived at its home port of Yaizu two weeks after the Bravo test. The twenty-three crew members were suffering from radiation poisoning. Their boat was radioactive — and so was the tuna they’d caught. The Lucky Dragon had been about eighty miles from the detonation, well outside the military’s exclusion zone. One of the crew died, and the rest were hospitalized for eight months. The incident revived memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sparking protests throughout Japan. When Japanese doctors asked for information about the fallout, the American government refused to provide it, worried that details of the blast might reveal the use of lithium deuteride as the weapon’s fuel. Amid worldwide outrage about the radiation poisonings, the Soviet Union scored a propaganda victory. At the United Nations, the Soviets called for an immediate end to nuclear testing and the abolition of all nuclear weapons. Although sympathetic to those demands, President Eisenhower could hardly agree to them, because the entire national security policy of the United States now depended on its nuclear weapons.

THE FATE OF THE LUCKY DRAGON was soon forgotten. But the Bravo test led to an alarming realization at the weapons laboratories, the Pentagon, and the White House: fallout from a hydrogen bomb was likely to kill far more people than the initial blast. At the Atomic Energy Commission, the fallout pattern from the Bravo test was superimposed on a map of the northeastern United States, with Washington, D.C., as ground zero. According to the map, if a similar 15-megaton groundburst hit the nation’s capital, everyone in Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia could receive a fatal dose of radioactivity. Residents of New York City might be exposed to 500 roentgens, enough to kill more than half of them. People as far north as Boston or even the Canadian border might suffer from radiation poisoning.

The British prime minister, Winston Churchill, was disturbed by the results of the Bravo test. Churchill had been an early proponent of defending Western Europe with nuclear weapons, not conventional forces. In 1952, Great Britain detonated a fission device, and its first atomic bomb, the “Blue Danube,” had recently been transferred to the Royal Air Force. The Blue Danube, with a yield of about 16 kilotons, now appeared minuscule and obsolete. “With all its horrors, the atomic bomb did not seem unmanageable as an instrument of war,” Churchill told the House of Commons a month after the Bravo test. “But the hydrogen bomb carries us into dimensions which… have been confined to the realms of fancy and imagination.” A small, densely populated nation would be especially vulnerable to such a weapon. Churchill asked William Strath, an official at the Central War Plans Secretariat, to lead a top secret study of what a thermonuclear attack would do to the United Kingdom.

Strath submitted his report in the spring of 1955, and its findings were grimly apocalyptic. According to the latest intelligence, a Soviet assault on the United Kingdom would have three main objectives: destroy the airfields hosting U.S. or British bombers, destroy the British government, and “render the UK useless as a base for any form of military operations.” That would be relatively easy to accomplish. “The heat flash from one hydrogen bomb,” the Strath report noted, “would start in a built-up area anything up to 100,000 fires, with a circumference of between 60 to 100 miles.” If the Soviets detonated ten hydrogen bombs along the west coast of the United Kingdom, the normally prevailing winds would blanket most of the country with fallout. Almost one third of the British population would be killed or wounded immediately. Most of the nation’s farmland would be rendered unusable for two months, some of the most productive land might “be lost for a long time,” and supplies of drinking water would be contaminated. In a section entitled “Machinery of Control,” the report warned that society would collapse in much of the United Kingdom. Local military commanders would be granted “drastic emergency powers,” and civil order might have to be restored through the use of “rough and ready methods.” Strath urged the government to release accurate information about the hydrogen bomb so that families could build fallout shelters, store canned foods, and prepare for the worst.

The Strath report was kept secret, its plea for greater openness ignored. Instead, Prime Minister Churchill ordered the BBC not to broadcast news about the hydrogen bomb that might discourage the public. Telling the truth about nuclear weapons, the British government feared, would weaken popular support for a defense policy that required them. Churchill had already chosen a different sort of response to the threat of thermonuclear war. “Influence depended on possession of force,” he told advisers, not long after the Bravo test. Great Britain would develop its own hydrogen bombs. Once again, the appeal of the H-bomb lay in its symbolism. “We must do it,” Churchill explained. “It’s the price we pay to sit at the top table.”

The Eisenhower administration also struggled with how to handle public fears of the hydrogen bomb. The head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, waited almost a year to acknowledge that the Bravo test had spread lethal fallout across thousands of square miles. While Strauss tried to limit publicity about the dangers of fallout, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) conveyed a different message. Val Peterson, the head of the FCDA, advised every American family to build an underground shelter “right now.” Once the Soviets deployed their hydrogen bombs, Peterson added, “we had all better dig and pray.”

The FCDA had argued for years that people could survive a nuclear attack by seeking some form of shelter. An animated character, Bert the Turtle, urged America’s schoolchildren to “duck and cover” — to hide under classroom tables or desks as soon as they saw the flash of an atomic bomb. And a widely distributed civil defense pamphlet, “Survival Under Atomic Attack,” provided useful and encouraging household tips:

The destructive power of the hydrogen bomb forced civil defense planners to alter their recommendations. Suburban families were advised to remain in underground shelters, windowless basements, or backyard trenches for four or five days after a thermonuclear blast. Urban families were told to leave their homes when an attack seemed likely. Eisenhower’s plans for an interstate highway system were justified by the need to evacuate American cities during wartime. Val Peterson called for concrete pipelines to be laid alongside the new roads, so that refugees could sleep inside them and avoid fallout. “Duck and cover,” one journalist noted, was being replaced by a new civil defense catchphrase: “Run for the hills.”

Hoping to boost morale and demonstrate that a nuclear war would not mean the end of the world, the FCDA staged Operation Alert 1955 during June of that year. It was the largest civil defense drill in the nation’s history. During a mock attack, sixty-one cities were struck by nuclear weapons, ranging in yield from 20 kilotons to 5 megatons. As air-raid sirens warned that Soviet bombers were approaching, fifteen thousand federal employees were evacuated from Washington, D.C. The president and members of his Cabinet were driven to secret locations and remained there for three days. Throughout the United States, families climbed into shelters or rehearsed their escape routes. In New York City, everyone was cleared from the streets and kept indoors for ten minutes, bracing for the arrival of a Soviet hydrogen bomb — whose ground zero, for some reason, would be the corner of North 7th Street and Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Administration officials called Operation Alert a great success. The secretary of the Treasury, George M. Humphrey, said that the exercise demonstrated the United States would “be able to take it” and “recover surprisingly rapidly.” Out of a U.S. population of about 165 million, only 8.2 million people would be killed and 6.6 million wounded — and more than half of those casualties would be in New York City. If everybody took the right precautions, Val Peterson assured reporters, “we might — ideally — escape without losing any lives from fallout.”

In a public statement, Eisenhower said the drill had brought him “great encouragement.” But at a Cabinet meeting, he summed up his feelings in one word: “staggering.” On the first day of Operation Alert, the president had declared martial law, transferring power from the state governments to half a dozen Army field commands. The casualty figures released to the press vastly understated the likely impact of a thermonuclear war. A new word had entered the lexicon of nuclear war planning: megadeath. It was a unit of measurement. One megadeath equaled one million fatalities — and the nation was bound to suffer a great many megadeaths during a thermonuclear war. On January 23, 1956, President Eisenhower recorded in his diary the results of a top secret study on what would really happen after a Soviet attack:

Eisenhower was infuriated by the Army’s constant requests for more troops to help defend Western Europe. “It would be perfect rot to talk about shipping troops abroad when fifteen of our cities were in ruins,” he told an aide. The Army would be needed at home to deal with the chaos. “You can’t have this kind of war,” Eisenhower said at a national security meeting a couple of years later. “There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”