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September 27 - October 24, 2017
American planes struck Tokyo with two thousand tons of bombs containing napalm and jellied gasoline. Although a major industrial area was destroyed, the real targets were block after block of Japanese buildings made of wood, paper, and bamboo. Within hours the firestorm consumed one quarter of the city. It killed about one hundred thousand civilians,
About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that.
“The bomb is pre-eminently 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.
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.
“I can’t afford to differentiate between the incompetent and the unfortunate,”
“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.”
Eisenhower’s plans for an interstate highway system were justified by the need to evacuate American cities during wartime.
In April 1956, Eisenhower signed a predelegation order that authorized the use of atomic weapons for air defense within the United States and along its borders.
the AFSWP study proposed some acceptable probabilities that the American public, had it been informed, might not have found so acceptable. The odds of a hydrogen bomb detonating by accident, every decade, would be one in five.
On at least one occasion, a drunken enlisted man had overpowered a guard at a nuclear storage site and attempted to gain access to the bombs.
Confronted with the choice between destroying Soviet military targets or cities, Eisenhower decided that the United States should destroy both.
One high-value target in the Soviet Union would be hit by a Jupiter missile, a Titan missile, an Atlas missile, and hydrogen bombs dropped by three B-52s, simply to guarantee its destruction.
Within three days of the initial attack, the full force of the SIOP would kill about 54 percent of the Soviet Union’s population and about 16 percent of China’s population—roughly 220 million people. Millions more would subsequently die from burns, radiation poisoning, exposure.
Every safety mechanism had failed, except one: the ready/safe switch in the cockpit. The switch was in the SAFE position when the bomb dropped. Had the switch been set to GROUND or AIR, the X-unit would’ve charged, the detonators would’ve triggered, and a thermonuclear weapon would have exploded in a field near Faro, North Carolina.
The high explosives did not detonate, and the primary was largely undamaged. But the dense uranium secondary of the bomb penetrated more than seventy feet into the soggy ground. A recovery team never found it, despite weeks of digging.
Baran’s work later provided the conceptual basis for the top secret communications networks at the Pentagon, as well as their civilian offshoot, the Internet.
During the same week that Kennedy appealed for an end to the arms race at the United Nations, he met with a handful of military advisers at the White House to discuss launching a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. General
A Soviet first strike could kill as many as 100 million Americans.
The following month, McNamara repeated many of these themes during a commencement speech at the University of Michigan, in his hometown of Ann Arbor. The speech was poorly received.
Half a million American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam, the war seemed unwinnable, and most Americans blamed the number-crunching secretary of defense and his Ivy League advisers for the fiasco.
“War is never ‘cost-effective,’” LeMay argued. “People are killed. To them the war is total.”
The additional weight would reduce the number of nuclear weapons that a B-52 could carry—and that’s why the supersafe bomb was never built.
By 1980, according to the Pentagon’s own surveys, about 27 percent of all military personnel were using illegal drugs at least once a month. Marijuana was by far the most popular drug, although heroin, cocaine, and LSD were being used, too.
Meyer told the Milwaukee Journal that almost every one of the more than two hundred men in his unit regularly smoked hashish. They were often high while handling secret documents and nuclear warheads. A survey found that one out of every twelve members of the United States Army in Germany was smoking hashish every day.
missiles, despite a history of psychiatric problems. The squadron was understaffed, and its commander feared that hippies—“people from the Haight-Ashbury”—were trying to steal nuclear weapons.
“A more accurate appraisal,” a top secret WSEG study concluded in 1971, “would seem to be that our warning assessment, attack assessment, and damage assessment capabilities are so limited that the President may well have to make SIOP execution decisions virtually in the blind, at least so far as real time information is concerned.”
John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara had fought hard to ensure that only the president could make the ultimate decision. But they hadn’t considered the possibility that the president might be clinically depressed, emotionally unstable, and drinking heavily—like Richard Nixon, during his final weeks in office.
But what disturbed Odom the most about the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff in Omaha was that they didn’t seem to have any postattack plans: “Things would just cease in their world about 6 to 10 hours after they received the order to execute the SIOP.”
technician had put the wrong tape into one of NORAD’s computers. The tape was part of a training exercise—a war game that simulated a Soviet attack on the United States. The computer had transmitted realistic details of the war game to SAC headquarters, the Pentagon, and Site R.
The combination necessary to launch the missiles was the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000.
Mark 28 bombs were routinely carried by B-52 bombers on ground alert. And those B-52s sometimes caught on fire, even when they never left the ground. The bomber carried more than 300,000 pounds of highly flammable JP-4 jet fuel, a mix of gasoline and kerosene.
Climbing into a B-52 that was on fire, without power, in the middle of the night, loaded with nuclear weapons, was no big deal. If you’re an Air Force firefighter, he thought, that’s what you do.
control center during an emergency, that the shortage of RFHCO suits often forced maintenance teams to be selected on the basis of who’d fit into the available suits instead of who knew how to do a particular job,
By the end of the 1980s, the United States would have about fourteen thousand strategic warheads and bombs, an increase of about 60 percent.
On the evening of September 1, Soviet fighter planes shot down a civilian airliner, Korean Airlines Flight 007, killing all 269 of its passengers.
An investigation later found that the missile launches spotted by the Soviet satellite were actually rays of sunlight reflected off clouds.
About 100 million Americans watched The Day After, roughly half of the adult population of the United States. And unlike most made-for-television movies, it did not have a happy ending.
With strong encouragement from his wife, Nancy, he publicly called for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Reagan’s criticism of the Soviet Union became less severe, and his speeches soon included this heartfelt sentiment: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
Gorbachev left Geneva viewing Reagan not as a right-wing caricature, a puppet of the military-industrial complex, but as a human being who seemed eager to avoid a nuclear war.
Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction.
Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow—dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city.
For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed.
For the first time since 1957, SAC’s bombers wouldn’t be parked near runways, loaded with fuel and hydrogen bombs, as their crews waited for the sound of Klaxons.
What appeared to be the rare exception, an anomaly, a one-in-a-million accident, was actually to be expected. It was normal.
Chelyabinsk-65, the site of a nuclear weapon facility in central Russia, has been called “arguably the most polluted spot on the planet.”
And its B-52 bombers haven’t been manufactured since John F. Kennedy was president. The B-52s are scheduled to remain in service through the year 2040.
AS OF THIS WRITING, the United States has approximately 4,650 nuclear weapons. About 300 are assigned to long-range bombers, 500 are deployed atop Minuteman III missiles, and 1,150 are carried by Trident submarines. An additional 200 or so hydrogen bombs are stored in Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands for use by NATO aircraft.
