General Hoyt Vandenberg, Air Force Chief of Staff, ordered a team to investigate the causes and extent of the damage, and then had another board of inquiry, composed of senior officers, determine “whether, as a result of the lessons of the experience, changes of policy concerning the dispersion of aircraft may be advisable.”
To Wohlstetter, the storm confirmed the team’s conclusions about SAC vulnerability, plus some. A forty-kiloton bomb could have produced that tornado’s wind gusts even if it missed the base by 9,000 feet. It would also have created a powerful explosion of blast, intense heat and radiation, and it all probably would have happened so quickly that nobody would have had the time—maybe they would not even have been alive—to shut off the electric power, meaning that fire would have engulfed the base as well.
Not only did the storm confirm the RAND group’s findings, but it would also make its conclusions appear more credible—and many of its recommendations more compelling—to Air Force officers when they would hear them in the months to come.
By January 1953, Wohlstetter felt sufficiently confident of the study’s conclusions to start lining up briefings throughout the Air Force hierarchy. Over the next two months, he, Rowen, Hoffman and Lutz prepared a paper, numbered RAND Report R-244-S, the S signaling that this was a special report not even to be listed in the RAND index of publications. It would, for the time being, do the Air Force, RAND’s sole sponsor, no good to have some congressman or reporter discover the existence of a study suggesting that SAC, history’s most powerful fighting force and the very rationale of the Air Force’s independent existence, could easily be wiped out on the ground.
The team’s first out-of-town briefing came in March, at SAC headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. Everyone was nervous. There was some doubt as to whether General LeMay, SAC commanding general, would even stay in the room after listening to the first few minutes of so critical an assessment of his operations. As it turned out, LeMay did not show up at the briefing, but his deputy, General Tommy Power, and most of the other top SAC officers did.
Wohlstetter went through the briefing, flipping over one chart after another, holding discourse on the dilemmas of base location, describing the vulnerability and concentration of the programmed bases, the inadequacy of the early-warning net, the attrition that the Soviets could impose with a surprise attack, the enormous differences in cost and effectiveness among various alternative bases, and the case for having only refueling bases overseas.
Power sat through the briefing without expression. At its conclusion, he stood up, said, “Very interesting,” turned around and walked out the door.
Power’s subordinates sat silent for a moment, not knowing just what to do. Finally, a few of them gingerly stepped up to the podium and asked Wohlstetter and his team a few questions. Some of them expressed frank amazement. In SAC’s own analyses, the staff had never considered the impact that a Soviet attack against the bases might have on SAC’s ability to launch a devastating “Sunday punch” of its own. They had always assumed that SAC would have enough warning to get off the ground, that the Russians would never lay a finger on any of the bombers while they were still on the ground.
Next stop on the circuit was the Pentagon in Washington. The first audience there was a group of about forty senior staff Air Force colonels, among them the assistant for development planning, Bernard Schriever; the executive assistant to the director of operations, L. C. Coddington; executive assistant to the director of plans, Jim Whisenand; assistant to the director of installations, C. A. Eckert; and executive assistants in nearly all the other commands within the Air Staff.
Colonel Coddington was the most articulate of the group, a laconic, no-nonsense fellow. He had also previously been deputy to General Harold Maddux, who had ordered the RAND basing study in the first place, a fortuitous connection since Coddington most enthusiastically touted the study’s findings.
Some of the others were not so enthusiastic. The installations command had spent all of the previous week, including all weekend, working up their budget for overseas bases for the next fiscal year. Its officers were in no mood to face something that might force them to start all over again. Colonel Eckert, representing installations at the Pentagon briefing, tried to shunt the RAND study off.
“I hope none of you are taken in by all this slide-rule razzmatazz,” he scoffed, noting that the kinds of bases these RAND guys were advocating would cost “millions.”
Coddington sharply interrupted. “Look,” he said, “you’re talking millions. He’s talking billions. You’re talking about spending another weekend redoing the budget. He’s talking about the survival of the United States strategic force.”
But there were more briefings to come before policy could be changed. They had to talk to the general officers for plans, for operations, for logistics, for intelligence, for communications, all the different commands. In the process, an Ad Hoc Committee of the Air Staff was appointed to examine the RAND study independently. They had to brief this committee and all of its constituent offices.
Wohlstetter, Rowen, Hoffman and Lutz would spend virtually the entire summer of 1953 in Washington. In all, they would deliver the overseas-bases briefing ninety-two times.
After a while, it became clear that the main obstacle to any action’s being taken on the RAND proposals lay in the Strategic Air Command. LeMay and his disciples disliked the notion of spending a lot of money on protecting the bomber force. If the bombers were vulnerable, that only meant that SAC should get more bombers so that the number surviving would be higher. More to the point, it meant that SAC should make sure to get in the initial blow instead of waiting around for the Soviets to strike first.
There was a political reason for SAC’s resistance, as well. Although SAC was a command of the Air Force, it took orders only from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet the RAND study grew out of the Air Staff. If SAC succumbed to RAND’s recommendations, it might mean the first in a series of Air Staff incursions into SAC plans and operations. LeMay was fiercely jealous of any trespassing. SAC was a fiefdom all to itself in those days. LeMay tried to keep all SAC planning to himself. There was the issue of security as well. Who knew whether someone—maybe even the President of the United States—could really be trusted? LeMay often said, “On some Mondays I don’t even trust myself.”
The Ad Hoc Committee of the Air Staff, appointed to study the RAND briefing and present its independent findings to the Air Force Council, was proving to be another obstacle. The committee, by its rules, had to reach a consensus before passing recommendations to the top-level Council. This rule of consensus allowed some of the more reluctant commands to use the study as a delaying tactic, to refuse to join any consensus for as long as they felt like holding out—which could, theoretically, be forever.
Wohlstetter was growing frustrated. He had convinced himself that those charts and diagrams and calculations proved that unless his recommendations were implemented, the Soviets could engulf the United States in a nuclear war before the end of the decade, and that the West would lose. He went over to RAND’s downtown Washington office, a cramped, windowless basement in the Cafritz Building on Eye Street near Eighteenth, to talk with RAND’s D.C. representative, Larry Henderson. Henderson suggested that they line up an interview with General Thomas D. White, who was acting Air Force Chief of Staff while Hoyt Vandenberg lay dying of cancer. This would be a major step, the highest-level end run around the Air Force bureaucracy that anyone could imagine. But Henderson and Wohlstetter thought it was worth the attempt.