In August, the meeting with White took place. Attending were General White, Wohlstetter and the top management echelon of RAND—president Frank Collbohm and vice-presidents Larry Henderson and J. R. Goldstein. White became convinced of the study’s importance and assured them that it would be placed on the Air Force Council agenda.
That same month, Wohlstetter was given an additional boost by the Russians. Soviet Premier Georgi Malenkov announced on August 8 that the Soviets had exploded their first hydrogen bomb. As it turned out, it was not remotely of the same design as the American H-bomb and carried an explosive punch of about 400 kilotons—hardly small, but no larger than the mightiest fission weapon detonated by the United States. Still, at the time, the mere existence of a Soviet H-bomb, of whatever design, heightened most Air Force officers’ apprehensions about possible Soviet aggression, a point that Wohlstetter unabashedly exploited in subsequent briefings.
By October, the Ad Hoc Committee, under General Tommy White’s orders, presented its analysis of the RAND basing study to the Air Force Council, with separate comments from the director of plans, the director of operations and SAC. On October 29 and 30, the Council made its own report to General White and Acting Secretary of the Air Force Jim Douglas. It recommended:
“a. That the vulnerability of Air Force facilities be recognized in all Air Staff planning and actions.
“b. That specific vulnerability factors be developed on a zonal basis [within each air base].
“c. That a program of hardening bases to atomic attack be initiated…. Also, a capability for achieving rapid recuperability of attacked bases shall be developed.
“d. New advanced bases shall be constructed and stocked to ground refueling standards with atomic toughening and rapid refueling capacity unless construction to other standards is required either by national or political agreements or overriding operational requirements….
“e. That the material resources in overseas areas be reduced to the minimum extent possible consistent with the planned utilization….”
General White and Secretary Douglas approved the Air Force Council’s decision.
In April 1954, Wohlstetter, Rowen, Hoffman and Lutz expanded their briefing into a massive 424-page top-secret study, RAND Report R-266, entitled Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases. By the time of its release, the Air Force was already implementing some of the recommendations that Wohlstetter had made in his briefings. References to the “programmed system” were thus tactfully changed to read the “formerly programmed system.”
Nevertheless, the RAND recommendations were never put in full force. For one thing, while the Soviet H-bomb heightened the urgency of doing something about vulnerability, it also made RAND’s alternative proposal somewhat obsolete. When Wohlstetter and his team talked about hardening and dispersing airplanes and various facilities on overseas bases, they were assuming Soviet bombs in the tens or low hundreds of kilotons. At one point during Wohlstetter’s research, Charlie Hitch—who, at the same time, was working on the highly secretive H-bomb study with Bernard Brodie and Ernie Plesset—discreetly told him, without any elaboration, that he should make sure that the overseas-base study’s conclusions were not sensitive to nuclear explosions of one megaton or so. Wohlstetter, not knowing of the RAND H-bomb study but respecting Hitch’s judgment, made some alterations in the proposed base design to deal with one-megaton explosions. But now that the Soviets appeared to be on the verge of having an arsenal of H-bombs, multimegaton explosions would have to be anticipated. No overseas base, not even the truncated one proposed by Wohlstetter’s team, could survive an attack employing weapons that powerful.
Moreover, LeMay was still determined to solve the problem through acceleration of a new intercontinental bomber—the B-52—that would depend on no overseas bases at all. Anything making medium-range bombers, like the B-47, seem more attractive would only delay the day that LeMay was waiting for.
A compromise came in almost accidental fashion, thanks to a fortuitous error in SAC communications and some ingenious planning by a B-47 Wing Planner at MacDill Air Force Base, near Tampa, Florida, named Colonel Ed Jones. SAC had two sets of basic flight plans—the “40 Series,” which covered the flight from the United States to the overseas bases, and the “50 Series,” which was the strike plan for the first missions flying from the base to the targets. At about the time of the RAND study’s approval, the B-47s at MacDill were being fed into the new SAC Emergency War Plan, and SAC sent out a rather puzzling communique. The B-47s in Tampa were accidentally put into the “50 Series,” the attack phase of the bombing mission.
Nobody had given much thought before to flying B-47s straight from the United States—or the ZI, standing for Zone of the Interior, as the Air Force called the U.S. in those days—but Colonel Jones had his orders, and that is what he would try to do. Jones locked himself away for a few days and emerged with a plan calling for refueling the bombers in the air over Iceland, proceeding toward the North Sea, bombing targets around Leningrad and then recovering on overseas bases.
Jones’s wing commander delivered the briefing to planning and operations officers at SAC—to, predictably, rancorous response. “You know,” one colonel said after the shouting had died down, “there’s this nut from RAND who’s been going around briefing everybody about the vulnerability of our bases,” pronouncing “vulnerability” with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “We’ve been getting a lot of static on this from Washington. Gentlemen,” he continued, “this is our answer.”
The Jones flight plan became Air Force policy. Developed in 1954, it was called the Fullhouse Concept, and was later refined and modified and given such names as Leap Frog, High Gear, Air Blast and Hot Point. The basic idea behind all these concepts was the same: “to limit the importance of the overseas areas as pre-strike bases and [reduce] their role to principally that of en route aerial refueling bases and post-strike support.” As a result, “targets could be attacked from the ZI, with minimum reliance on overseas bases, in a matter of hours after the initiation of hostilities.”
Wohlstetter and his team had rejected this type of plan because it would cost too much. So many additional tankers would have to be bought that, for the same amount of money, SAC would have fewer bombers than it would have under the RAND concept. To that argument, SAC’s response was simply that the Air Force would have to get more money.
Furthermore, there were few in Omaha who supported the nub of Wohlstetter’s argument—the idea that SAC had to sit out a surprise attack from the Russians. Instinctively, the men of SAC still could not conceive of the Russians’ one-upping the U.S. If they were worried about vulnerability, they thought that the way to solve that problem was to destroy the enemy before he destroys them. Concepts such as Fullhouse and its successors were planned not just to reduce vulnerability, but to get SAC bombers over their targets more quickly, to get in a better, faster preemptive strike. The RAND study on overseas bases prompted a series of events and coincidences that finally led SAC to reduce its dependency on elaborate overseas bases, but its precise recommendations were not the ones that SAC actually adopted.
The main impact of the Wohlstetter study was much larger and of broader importance. Among its more enthusiastic supporters in the Air Staff and especially among many of Wohlstetter’s colleagues at RAND, it fostered the notion that imbalances and vulnerabilities that were revealed through complex calculations changed everything about the likelihood of war and the meaning of victory. It helped reinforce the assumption that once the Soviets acquired a theoretical capability to launch a dazzling, partially disarming first-strike, they might very well launch one, despite the many uncertainties and risks involved.