Early in September, just as the committee started working heavily on analysis of the problem, Rowan Gaither fell ill with cancer and had to enter the hospital. Robert Sprague and William Foster took over as co-chairmen; but by this time, certainly by no later than mid-August, Gaither’s early proposal to broaden the mandate of the so-called Gaither Committee had taken hold.
The influence of Wohlstetter’s R-290 did not stop with the expansion of the Gaither Committee’s mandate. Herman Kahn, the jolly, corpulent RAND physicist who by this time had heavily immersed himself in the strategic side of the nuclear-weapons business, was a consultant to the Gaither Committee. Originally, he was to be one of the seventy-one project researchers, but he was denied the special security clearance required because of his wife’s Communist Party relatives. (This once-removed Communist connection, in fact, was on the verge of jeopardizing Kahn’s career at RAND, until a security hearing, demanded by Kahn, cleared up the whole business and allowed him to carry on.)
Kahn was mainly working on the civil-defense side of the Gaither Committee, but he was also very keen on Wohlstetter’s R-290, and pushed that report within the lower levels of the committee as best he could. One man he talked to about R-290 was Spurgeon Keeny. Keeny had been one of the few men in all of the United States to be drafted into the military in the few years following World War II. Having studied Russian and physics at Columbia University, he was able to talk the Air Force into giving him an officer’s commission and putting him in the intelligence division, where he spent the next six years trying to locate atomic-energy plants inside the Soviet Union and integrating that intelligence with nuclear-war targeting plans. Keeny came to the Gaither Committee as the atomic-energy specialist in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. He started working with the committee part-time, but soon became so engrossed that, throughout the summer and early fall of 1957, he made it his full-time task.
Keeny was not involved in top-level meetings, but he did a great deal of staff work for Jerry Wiesner and Hector Skifter, helping to write the supporting analysis papers on passive defense, active defense and especially strategic policy. Herman Kahn acquainted Keeny with the shocking findings of the report by Wohlstetter and Fred Hoffman. The paper that Keeny finally wrote on strategic policy was essentially a distillation of R-290, incorporating its basic points.
The steering panel of the committee spent most of its time reading the reports written by the project staff and listening to dozens of briefings from Air Force generals about how badly the Air Force needed more weapons and more money, from intelligence officers on the growing magnitude of the Soviet long-range missile and bomber threat, from the Army’s Operations Research Office on how the Army’s wonderful proposed air-defense missiles would shoot down 98 percent of incoming bombers and missile warheads.
And they received a briefing from Albert Wohlstetter on the findings of R-290. The briefing had a particularly galvanizing effect on Robert Sprague, who since Gaither’s hospitalization had become the committee’s co-chairman. Sprague was naturally receptive to the ideas of R-290, for many of them had been expressed earlier in the Killian Panel on surprise attack, on which Sprague had been chief consultant.
Formally called the Technological Capabilities Panel and, like the Gaither Committee, created under the auspices of the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization, the Killian Panel turned in to Eisenhower, in February 1955, a lengthy two-volume report called Meeting the Threat of Surprise Attack. The report called for improving intelligence technology both for seeing what the Soviets were up to and for warning of an impending attack, strengthening defensive measures (both anti-missile missiles and civil defense), improving communications and, “through innovation in technology,” improving U.S. retaliatory power by making SAC less vulnerable to surprise attack. This would be done mostly through a strengthened continental air-defense force, but also through some of the measures that Wohlstetter quite independently urged in the overseas-base study of 1953–1954 and in the R-290 report of 1956—greater warning time, more bases and dispersal of equipment on those bases.
The TCP recommended doing just about everything that could be done through science and technology—a crash program on ICBMs, on intermediate-range missiles based in Europe, on new military communications systems, intelligence systems, new weapons of all sorts. Its overall impact was enormous. It helped accelerate the ICBM and IRBM programs, it sparked Presidential endorsement of the Navy’s Polaris submarine program, it led to the development of the U-2 spy plane (thanks to Edwin Land’s photographic genius), and it spurred Eisenhower to establish his own office of the special assistant for science and technology.
More generally, it added scientific legitimacy to the general feeling among many in government that the arms race must be continued and accelerated at all costs. Even after both the United States and the Soviet Union reach the stage where each could destroy the other with multimegaton bombs, where, in short, “the contest is drawn and neither contestant can derive military advantage,” that would be no reason to stop. “We need not assume that this stage is unchangeable or that one country or the other cannot move again into a position of relative advantage.” The search for “technological breakthroughs” must continue.
But that was for the future. For now, Sprague was intrigued and slightly infuriated by what Wohlstetter had to say. Nothing seemed to have happened to SAC’s readiness between the time that the TCP filed its report in 1955 and now, more than two and a half years later, when the Gaither Committee was sitting and listening to Wohlstetter. The committee had been told by Air Force officials that SAC had developed a plan that would ensure getting 25 percent of the bombers off the ground in the event of a surprise attack, that, in effect, the criticisms made by the TCP more than two years earlier had now been taken care of.
In the month of September, the Gaither Committee’s steering panel and some of the staff members made trips to various military facilities—SAC headquarters in Omaha, NORAD in Colorado Springs, several radar sites, and so forth. Most appalling to the members was the trip to SAC. General LeMay told the panel that SAC was second to none, that they were wasting their time, that this business about a missile threat was nothing to worry about, that missiles would have no real significance in his military lifetime, that the manned B-52 bomber could solve any problem.
Back in Washington, Robert Sprague approached Robert Cutler, Eisenhower’s national security adviser, and told him that the session with LeMay was entirely unsatisfactory, that he would not deal with any of their questions seriously and gave them nothing of value generally. After conferring with Eisenhower, Cutler gave four of the top steering panel members—Sprague, Bill Foster, Jerry Wiesner and Bill Webster—authority to go back to SAC headquarters and get more information from LeMay. A few days later, the four men made their journey.
On September 16, they flew with LeMay to headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command, NORAD, in Colorado Springs. Sprague and Bill Foster had asked LeMay to stage a spontaneous alert of the entire SAC force, to see if the planes could indeed take off in time. The alert signal was sent out to all bases. Over the next six hours, the amount of warning time the United States might receive in the event of a surprise Soviet bomber attack, not a single airplane was able to take off from the ground; only a few that happened to be on a test flight at the time of the alert were airborne.