LeMay took over SAC in 1948 from General George Kenney, who was retiring. LeMay’s first job, as he saw it, was to show his crewmen that they didn’t know the first thing about what they were doing. He planned an exercise. All the bombers from all the SAC bases across the country would launch a full-scale simulated attack on Dayton, Ohio. The result was devastating: not a single airplane finished the mission, not a single crew demonstrated competence at finding specific targets or “dropping” bombs. Just two years later, LeMay had whipped SAC into a formidable force that trained with a fair degree of realism, displayed high morale, and could probably complete some sort of mission.
In short, LeMay owned the bomb. And he did not like the ideas going on inside the heads of planners in the Air Staff. A strategic air offensive against Soviet Russia would best be handled like his air war against Japanese cities—by attacking industrial complexes, which in effect meant cities. He had no objection to the Air Staffs predilection for destroying liquid-fuel industries, for that seemed to have been effective in Germany and, besides, there were many other choice targets by those factories. But atomic-energy facilities and electric-power plants? Who knew how many the Soviets had or where they all were? Even if somebody did know, they would be difficult for pilots to find. Most of the plants that anybody did know something about were sited outside cities, some of them out in the middle of nowhere. What was the point of dropping something as big as the atom bomb just to hit one target? LeMay’s proposed war plan, called SAC Emergency War Plan 1-49, was to “deliver the entire stockpile of atomic bombs… in a single massive attack,” pounding 133 A-bombs on seventy cities within thirty days.
The Air Staff intelligence analysts were persistent. At one point, they succeeded in moving the aim point of one bomb targeted on the Kremlin a half mile to the south to make it explode halfway between the Kremlin and an electric-power plant just outside Moscow. LeMay convinced the Joint Chiefs, though, that striking the Soviet atomic-energy and electric-power industries was not feasible. It would require far greater prewar reconnaissance than LeMay could provide with existing technology and resources.
LeMay was not the only internal critic of the Air Staff plan. Officers on the interservice Joint Intelligence Committee were coming to the conclusion that the whole basis of the JCS war plan might be resting on shaky foundations. Nobody could quite figure out what targets corresponded to the Bravo and Romeo missions, to the ideas of “blunting” the Soviet Union’s nuclear-weapons force and “retarding” a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. These missions might, by definition, involve “targets of opportunity,” objects at which a pilot could only “see and shoot” once he flew over them. If so, as one Joint Intelligence Committee report put it to the JCS, this “condition precludes a specific appraisal of intelligence adequacy”—jargon that, coming from an intelligence officer, could be translated as meaning, “Quit wasting your time, this mission is impossible.”
It was in this context that Bernard Brodie’s Reporter article—the article talking about the fatuousness of bombing cities indiscriminately and the importance of selecting targets judiciously—caught General Lauris Norstad’s eye. This was the setting when General Hoyt Vandenberg asked Professor Bernard Brodie to take a step into the savage jungle of nuclear war planning.
Brodie read the targeting plans—SAC’s and the Air Staffs—and was appalled by the loose, illogical, second-rate thinking that had gone into both. The Air Staffs seemed a bit better since it talked about specific targets instead of blasting brick walls; but both hinged on the notion that somehow the bombing campaign would, just like that, force the Soviet Union to “collapse.” Brodie thought that the Air Staff was profoundly misreading the Strategic Bombing Survey. To the degree that the bombing of Germany in World War II had been effective, it took the additional pressures from the Allied ground forces to make it in any way decisive to the outcome of the war. Yet this future war that the Air Force was planning involved no ground forces; it would be waged entirely through air power. The apotheosis of Douhet had been realized.
Brodie went around town—inside Pentagon conferences and briefings, over to the Target Divisions branch of Air Intelligence in an office hidden away in a building on the corner of 12th and Constitution in downtown Washington—basically making a pest of himself. A man of no small ego, who had made a name for himself as the leading civilian military thinker of the day, Brodie felt no qualms about letting majors and colonels and generals know what he thought of their work.
He particularly annoyed the Target people downtown, telling them that LeMay was right, they didn’t know where all the Soviet electric-power plants were; how could they hope that such an attack would have any effect at all?
On a broader level, Brodie had serious questions about the assumptions underlying the whole war plan. He told General Charles Pearre Cabell, director of the Air Intelligence Division, that he simply could not figure out this business of “killing a nation,” how the process of “collapse” would take place, just what would happen to the Soviet economy, how that would ruin the Soviet war effort and how that would in turn doom the Soviet regime. He kept hearing the phrase “Sunday punch” tossed around casually.
Finally, Brodie did not see why SAC had to hit the Soviet Union with all its atom bombs at once, why it had to be in such a hurry when the Soviet Union had hardly any bombs at all. He posed this question directly to LeMay, but LeMay found it a bit daffy. LeMay had no use for ideas such as a “reserve force.” The notion violated one of the “principles of war,” the principle of “concentration of attack.” These principles had been around for centuries. Nobody violated them lightly, and if someone did, it shouldn’t be a civilian who, as a basic rule, had no business fooling around with the military’s war plans.
LeMay’s plan came down, in the final analysis, to city bombing, the very type of strategic bombing that Brodie had labeled as utterly ineffective in his Reporter article. As early as 1948, Brodie had pinned the critical question as being “How many bombs will do what? And the ‘what,’” he continued, “must be reckoned in overall strategic results rather than merely in acres destroyed.” Now, inside the war machine, Brodie observed that SAC was still thinking basically about destroying acres; and while Air Staff officers were talking about specific targets, they had only the vaguest ideas about what it was they thought these bombs would do.
Two years earlier, at a conference on technology and international relations, held at the Shoreland Hotel in Chicago, Brodie speculated about how the strategic situation might change once the Soviets acquired their own atomic arsenal. He thought American policy might adapt in one of two directions. The existence of even some Soviet atom bombs “may, on the one hand, put a greater urgency upon our using those [bombs] we have in order to anticipate [the U.S.S.R.’s] attack and to weaken the potential strength of that attack; or it may, on the other hand, cause us to hold our bombs as a threat to induce him to hold his.”
The key point was the idea of holding the release of American atom bombs as a bargaining lever, as a measure of coercion, as a way of threatening the Soviets to back down. The idea did not loom large in Brodie’s speech; he was not forcefully arguing a case for adopting such a strategy; he was merely presenting it as a possibility. Yet now, in 1950, looking at the SAC and Air Force war plans—which involved the release of the entire atomic arsenal, as quickly as possible, against every target on the target list—and seeing just how senseless those plans were, made that passage from Brodie’s 1948 essay sparkle.