Nitze and Foster had both approached Sprague to join them in this more intimate effort to go public with the report itself, but Sprague declined, thinking it was improper for a group appointed by the President to make end runs and report to anyone else.
Two days later, on December 11, a story about the Foster dinner appeared in The New York Times, with another, more detailed story appearing the next day, as well. They were only the beginnings of the press leaks. Before the dinner, only one story had appeared: on November 23, just more than two weeks after the big NSC meeting, the headline “U.S. Report Urges Atomic Shelter at 20 Billion Cost” graced page one of the Times. But it was not until after the Foster dinner that the big stories appeared.
The biggest came under Chalmers Roberts’ by-line in the December 20 Washington Post. The headline: “Enormous Arms Outlay Is Held Vital to Survival.” The lead paragraphs read powerfully, if luridly:
The still-top-secret Gaither Report portrays a United States in the gravest danger in its history.
It pictures the Nation moving in frightening course to the status of a second-class power.
It shows an America exposed to an almost immediate threat from the missile-bristling Soviet Union.
It finds America’s long-term prospect one of cataclysmic peril in the face of rocketing Soviet military might and of a powerful, growing Soviet economy and technology which will bring new political, propaganda, and psychological assaults on freedom all around the globe.
On it went like that for nearly a page.
Eisenhower was furious. The Post story embodied everything that he hated: leaks to the press, attempts to pressure him into doing something that needed careful deliberation, exaggerations of the dangers to national security. And he knew there would be political heat to take, as well. The Democrats were already making successful capital of the Sputnik affair, claiming that the Republican Administration was behaving too complacently, was endangering the nation by not spending enough money on more bombers and missiles. Now the Gaither Report was turning into another cause for political jubilation among the opposition. Almost at once, after the Washington Post story appeared, dozens of Democratic senators and congressmen took the floor to request or demand that President Eisenhower release the report to the public, which had a right to know the facts on which their lives as Americans were hanging. Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Henry Jackson, Mike Mansfield, John Sparkman, William Proxmire, Stuart Symington and others all eagerly boarded the Gaither bandwagon.
All these demands and all the panic, over Sputnik and over the Gaither Report, conveniently fed into another phenomenon that the Democrats were simultaneously doing their best to exploit—a sharp turn inside the American intelligence community that produced what came to be known as the “missile gap.”
10
THE MISSILE GAP
IN THE MONTHS leading up to Sputnik and the Gaither Report, but following the transmittal of Albert Wohlstetter’s R-290 report for RAND, Air Force Intelligence was predicting the end of deterrence for the United States in a matter of a few years. On September 30, 1957, a special Air Force panel delivered a report to General Thomas White, Air Force Chief of Staff, noting that the Soviet Union’s major objectives were “first, destroy or neutralize U.S. capabilities and nuclear retaliatory forces; and second, to deliver an attack on urban, industrial, political and psychological targets in the U.S. so as to prevent mobilization of the U.S. weapons potential.”
Having a substantial ICBM force would give the Soviets the means to fulfill their objectives, and the panel predicted that by 1963 a Soviet attack that aimed three missiles at each SAC air base and missile site would destroy so much of America’s nuclear strength that “the Soviets might well consider that they would be in a position to initiate general war with very little risk of retaliatory major destruction to their national strengths.”
On November 12, the intelligence community’s official National Intelligence Estimate stated that the Soviets could have 500 operational ICBMs by the end of 1962 or, if they built their program on a crash basis, by the end of 1961. Some officers in SAC Intelligence figured that the Soviets might have many more than that, perhaps up to 1,000. Meanwhile, the United States was scheduled to have only twenty-four Atlas missiles ready to go by 1960 and only sixty-five by 1961. This estimate was not a matter of controversy within the intelligence community; it was a position held by Air Force Intelligence and by estimators inside the CIA alike.
Yet there was no hard evidence for these claims of a missile gap. The estimate sprang from the demise of worries about a “bomber gap,” which the intelligence community had also commonly predicted a few years earlier, but which was now commonly agreed to have been a gap that never was and that almost certainly would never be.
By 1954, it was clear that the Soviets had built a prototype design of a bomber with potential intercontinental range that the United States dubbed the Bison. After surreptitiously observing from afar an April rehearsal for the May Day air show, American air attachés in Russia reported seeing at least twelve and maybe twenty Bison planes in the air. Intelligence analysts in the U.S. Air Force reasoned that if the Russians were putting that many in the air at one time, then they could have something like twenty-five to forty Bisons off the production line.
The real intelligence scare came a year later, on July 13, 1955, the U.S.S.R.’s Aviation Day, when the Russians proudly display their air power. American attachés reported seeing ten Bisons flying by, then another formation of nine Bisons, then still another nine—twenty-eight planes in all. Again, Air Force Intelligence reasoned that the Soviets must have about twice that number actually built, which meant that the production lines were cranking out many more Bisons than they had previously guessed. The intelligence estimates for what the Soviets would have a few years hence began to explode. The 1956 National Intelligence Estimate, known as the NIE, predicted that the Soviets could have 500 bombers with the range to attack the United States four or five years into the future; at one point, Air Force was predicting as many as 600 to 800 Bisons.
The air attachés’ reports did not form the basis of these projections; they merely provided what seemed to be concrete evidence supporting a massive array of data that was beginning to come in. The plant that produced all the Bisons, called the Fili Plant, happened to be in Moscow. Americans naturally were not allowed to enter the plant, but they could fairly easily observe activities going on around it. They could hear and often even see the planes taking off from the runway; and since they knew that the planes flew from the plant to a nearby military air base and never came back, they were not faced with the problem of distinguishing takeoffs from landings. From captured German reconnaissance photos taken from the air during World War II, analysts back in the U.S. could calculate the plant’s size and floor space, as well as the most efficient use of that space and, from that, infer some numbers on likely production rates. The attachés in Moscow could report the approximate size of any expansions or new annexes to the plant.
Air Force Intelligence also knew of a measure devised by American aircraft companies called the “learning curve,” which assumed that over time, and with greater efficiencies gradually built in, production of aircraft would grow at a certain, calculable rate. Air Force Intelligence also assumed that the plant had two labor shifts, and that sometime in the next couple of years, after the Fili Plant had reached the peak of its “learning curve,” the Soviets would have constructed a second plant to build still more Bison bombers.