That was appalling enough to the panel. More shocking was that LeMay seemed totally unimpressed by the exercise. He simply grunted, said the Soviets could never coordinate the sort of attack that could bring all their bombers over all the SAC targets simultaneously, that SAC would always get off the ground in time. Beyond that, he explained no more.
Back at SAC, LeMay showed Robert Sprague a huge map depicting the location of all the SAC air bases and how long it would take the bombers on each of these bases to get off the ground, combat ready, if they received “tactical warning” only—that is, if the first sign of a Soviet attack were the warning flash that appeared on NORAD screens once the Soviet airplanes passed through the Distant Early Warning Line, the DEW Line, up around the North Pole.
Sprague had served on surprise-attack panels before, and knew roughly the time it would take for a Russian bomber to get from the DEW Line to each SAC base in the United States. The bombers could take off with fairly short notice, at least theoretically, and each SAC base was assigned three auxiliary civilian bases where the bombers could land and disperse in the event of warning. But Sprague also knew that the bombers would have only limited crews, limited fuel loadings and no atomic weapons on board. The bombs were stored on the SAC bases, separated from the planes; they were not protected from the overpressures of blast, and it would take some time to load them onto the bombers. In other words, they were highly vulnerable. And there were no atomic bombs on the auxiliary bases. In short, the SAC bombers might get off the ground, but they would have nothing to drop on Russian territory, nothing with which to carry out the national policy of “massive retaliation.”
Looking at the numbers on the big map at SAC headquarters, which showed the time it would take for the bombers to get off the ground fully loaded, Sprague calculated that in nearly every instance they exceeded the time it would take for a Russian bomber to fly from the DEW Line to the bases. The only exception was the base in Morocco, holding about a dozen SAC bombers. Sprague was genuinely frightened. That exercise in Colorado Springs was no anomaly; the conclusions of Wohlstetter’s R-290 were not theoretical; a surprise Soviet attack might very well destroy America’s ability to retaliate in kind, and therefore, once the Soviets acquired the means to launch such an attack, the United States might no longer be able to deter nuclear war and win the war if the Soviets provoked one.
Sprague pointed all this out to LeMay, who calmly responded that this didn’t scare him. He told Sprague that the United States had airplanes, flying secret missions over Soviet territory twenty-four hours a day, picking up all sorts of intelligence information, mostly communications intelligence from Soviet military radio transmissions. He offered to take Sprague into the office where this data was sent and stored. All those statements the Soviets periodically made about American spy planes penetrating Russian airspace were true. We always said the incidents were accidental, but they were not; they were very deliberate.
“If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack,” LeMay continued, “I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.”
Sprague was thunderstruck by the revelation. This was knowledge that only a very, very small number of Americans possessed or knew anything about. Most startling was LeMay’s final bit of news, that he would order a preemptive attack against Soviet air bases.
“But General LeMay,” Sprague said, “that’s not national policy.”
“I don’t care,” LeMay replied. “It’s my policy. That’s what I’m going to do.”
Sprague was both relieved and stunned. He was relieved that at least the United States would not allow its bombers to be destroyed on the ground on the opening day of a nuclear war, that there were spy planes continuously relaying communications intelligence to SAC headquarters about Soviet military moves, that therefore the country could rely on something more timely than mere tactical warning. Nevertheless, he was stunned that under the assumptions that most people talked about, a surprise attack with tactical warning only, the United States did not have the ability to retaliate massively, hardly the ability to retaliate at all, and that to the extent we did have this ability, it was only because of a preemptive-strike war plan that SAC held secretly, separate from the war plans developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and signed by the President of the United States.
This was why LeMay seemed unfazed by that exercise at NORAD, where not a single SAC plane could take off the ground during the entire period of tactical warning, and why LeMay was unimpressed with all the studies—the one that Sprague had worked on for the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, the Killian TCP study, Wohlstetter’s overseas-base study and R-290—that concluded that SAC was devastatingly vulnerable.
Sprague decided that no staff member of the Gaither Committee, or anyone else he ever talked with, would know anything about it.
By October 1957, the steering panel of the Gaither Committee had decided that a massive civil-defense program—the one they were assigned to evaluate originally—should take a back seat to what they saw as the much more pressing need of building up a much larger offensive missile force and protecting it from an attack through dispersal and hardened shelters, so that SAC might survive an attack without having to implement LeMay’s secret war plan.
Then on October 4, as the committee was near completion of its work, something happened that rocked the nation into a state of near panic: Sputnik. The very word was enough to send shivers up just about every American’s spine. For Sputnik was the name of the 184-pound satellite that a Russian rocket launched into orbit in outer space that day. A Russian rocket! The very notion that the Russians, previously thought of as primitive Asiatics when it came to advanced technology, could beat the United States of America in something so ultimately technological as the launching of an object into outer space was absolutely horrifying, a threat to national security in its own right.
It was an event that evoked hysterical public pronouncements. John Rinehart of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory proclaimed that “no matter what we do now, the Russians will beat us to the moon…. I would not be surprised if the Russians reached the moon within a week.” Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, declared on national television that America had lost “a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.” In the U.S. Congress, Clare Boothe Luce called Sputnik’s beep “an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority.” Senator Lyndon Johnson’s aide, George Reedy, summed it up in a memorandum to his boss written two weeks after the launch: “the American people are bound to become increasingly uneasy. It is unpleasant to feel that there is something floating around in the air which the Russians can put up and we can’t…. It really doesn’t matter whether the satellite has any military value. The important thing is that the Russians have left the earth and the race for control of the universe has started.”
To some, the directly military implications of Sputnik were also haunting. A few months earlier, Nikita Khrushchev had boasted that the Russians had developed an intercontinental-range rocket. Now he was demonstrating to the world that the Russians could launch such a rocket. The rest of the argument seemed, at the time, all too clear. If the Russians could put a satellite on the tip of that rocket, they might also load a nuclear warhead; if they could send it up into outer space, they might also be able to make it come back down to earth—specifically, down to American territory—and all this a few years before the United States would even have an ICBM ready for deployment.