Heck, I reckon you wouldn’t even be human beings if ya didn’t have some pretty strong feelings about nuclear combat. But I want ya to remember one thing, tha folks back home is a countin’ on ya, and by golly

SAC’s Mission and Means

New airmen had a lot to learn. Basic training was the introduction, tech school concentrated on the principals of a given technology and OJT taught the actual mechanics. But SAC required that we know a lot more than our own job. This was addressed on wing level. During my first six months at Plattsburgh, I was sent to a seemingly endless number of “schools.” More properly, these were four to twenty hour courses in specialized subjects that pertained to our duties, but were not directly related to our job. They covered many subjects and included: SAC and its Mission; Nuclear Weapon Design and Safety; the Fail Safe System; Chemical, Biological and Radiological Warfare; Flight Line Security; Ejection Seat Safety; Surviving a Nuclear War and Automobile Driver Safety. Surprisingly, the last named was the most controversial. That was because it required sitting through a film showing car wrecks and horribly-mangled bodies. It was gruesome footage and several students in each class would get so sick, they had to leave.

The first “school” was more in the nature of a briefing than classroom study. It was an introduction to the Strategic Air Command and its mission. We were told that the Soviet Union was a very real threat. The communists were committed to world domination and had often vowed to conquer democracies like the United States. It had a large nuclear arsenal and had publicly stated that it would use it to achieve political goals. In response, the United States established a deterrent force consisting of jet bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarines. The Triad, as it was called, was capable of delivering an onslaught of nuclear weapons against targets in the Soviet Union.

Military Strategists think in terms of profit and loss, just like a business. During the early days of World War II, Germany bombed England in preparation for invasion and Japan attacked the American Fleet to prevent it interfering with it’s expansionist plans. They launched these attacks because they perceived that their enemy did not have the means and/or the will to resist. The possible gains were far greater than the possible losses.

But suppose that in 1940, the United States had the awesome power that it had in 1961. Would Hitler have bombed England? Would Japan have attacked the American fleet? Certainly not, as the leaders of those nations would have feared that their ally, the United States, would come to their aid. The U.S. could easily have completely destroyed their countries within a few hours without fear of counterattack or reprisal. An attack against an American ally could easily result in losses far, far greater than any possible gain. This threat of total annihilation would have held them at bay.

An effective deterrent requires three elements: (1) A force of sufficient strength to cause a potential enemy losses far greater than any possible gain. (2) It must be postured in such a way that a potential enemy knows that it cannot escape retaliation, and (3) the country having such a force must also have the determination to use it if and when necessary. Historically, the United States has never been an aggressor, rather it has responded to attacks. In the past, it had time to gear up it’s industries and mobilizes it’s forces. That situation no longer existed. The high speed of intercontinental ballistic missiles and jet aircraft made it imperative for the deterrent force be in place and ready to respond on a moment’s notice. This led the concept of having a “force in being.”

SAC was established as a major command when the Air Force was organized as a separate service after World War II. In 1948, the Soviets blockaded Berlin, Germany and the United States responded by supplying the city by air, in what became known as the Berlin Air Lift. Today, many historians regard it as the beginning of the Cold War. General Lemay commanded the Berlin Air Lift and was soon appointed Commander In Chief - Strategic Air Command. Power became his deputy commander. Starting with a few prop-driven B-29s left over from World War II and less than a dozen nuclear bombs. In 1954, General Power was sent to head the Air Force Systems Command, where he developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Lemay became Air Force Chief of Staff in 1957, and Power took over as SAC’s commander.

General Lemay built SAC into the most powerful military force that had ever existed. He was the one who obtained the appropriations, the planes the bases, and the men. He established the rigid training and safety procedures. He even overhauled to the chow halls to insure that his men had good food to boost moral. During his tenure, timing was not as critical, but about the time he was promoted to Chief of Staff the Soviet Union launched it’s Sputnik space satellite, demonstrating it’s masterly of the technology. It embarked upon a major program to build vast numbers of missiles. Powers was confronted with the situation that if the Russians could use their missiles to deliver nuclear warheads to the United States and destroy the deterrent bomber force while it was still on the ground. That would nullify the deterrent.

Lemay had provided the overwhelming force, and Power was confronted with the situation of insuring that it was properly postured. This led to two things.

First the aircraft were disbursed. A B-52 wing contained three squadrons of at least 15 planes each, plus they usually had a squadron of tankers. This was a big fat target for one missile. Powers established the B-52 Strategic Wings, consisting of only one squadron each. Each was disbursed to a different base. By creating more targets, he made it more difficult for the Soviets to take them out. B-47 were rotated to bases outside the United States on a temporary basis. Such bases were located in Labrador, England, Spain and Morocco.

He also developed the reflex alert concept that called for a percentage of the bombers to always be fully armed and fueled and ready to immediately strike back, any time day or night. They had to be off the ground and heading for their target any time, day or night, within fifteen minutes. By the end of 1957, SAC had eleven percent of its bombers on alert. By the end of 1959, it had grown to twenty percent, then to thirty. In July 1961, two months before I arrived at Plattsburgh, President Kennedy raised the ante and SAC soon had a full fifty percent of its bombers on alert.

As the Soviet’s increased their arsenal, SAC had to insure the viability of it’s deterrent force. General Power established the airborne alert force, which kept full armed B-52s in the air at all times. He hung nuclear-tipped Hound Dog missiles under the wings of B-52s transforming them from bombers into what we today call “weapon platforms. He also brought Atlas, Titan and Minutemen missiles into the SAC arsenal.
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The single most devastating action of World War II was the fire bombing of Tokyo. It was the first big test of Lemay’s new plan for eliminating Japan’s will and ability to continue the war. As his operations officer, Power led the mission and provided a detailed first hand account. “I circled high above the attacking bombers for nearly two hours. I watched block after block go up in flames until the holocaust had spread into a seething, swirling ocean of fire, engulfing the city below for miles in every direction.”

Lemay also used American B-29s for the strategic bombing of industrial targets using high-explosive bombs and the aerial mining of Japanese harbors. By July of 1945, Japan’s cities and industries were reduced to ashes and it’s people were starving. It’s leaders wanted to end the war, but found Truman’s demand for “unconditional surrender” unacceptable. Although the country was on the brink of collapse, it still had a large army that would make an invasion very expensive in terms of American lives. Japan’s leaders hoped to use that threat to obtain better surrender terms.

On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The Little Man bomb was rated at fifteen kilotons, which meant that it’s explosive power was the equivalent of fifteen thousand tons of TNT. There was a “blinding flash of light,” followed by shock waves from the blast. Then an enormous mushroom shaped cloud rose over the city. 4.7 square miles of the city was totally destroyed while the remainder suffered extensive damage. 71,379 Japanese died instantly and another 68,023 were horribly burned or seriously injured. Many of them would later die. A second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki a six days later.

In 1959, General Power wrote, Design for Survival. It was an in-depth examination of SAC’s strategic deterrent concept and the alternatives to it. Neil H. McElroy was then the United States Secretary of Defense and prohibited it’s public release. Publication waited until after General Power retired in November, 1964.

General Power was the Operations Staff Officer during the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He did not go on the raids, but later visited what was left of the cities. He “found it incomprehensible that such enormous and widespread destruction had been caused by one bomb, dropped from a single airplane.” A year later he was the Assistant Deputy Task Force commander for Operations Crossroads, the atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll and observed the first of a series of increasingly powerful atomic explosions. He later witnessed the testing of the first hydrogen bomb. He wrote “Only those very few who have actually witnessed a nuclear explosion have a fair concept of its unimaginable destructiveness,” then added, “No hydrogen bomb has ever been dropped in wartime, but this much we have learned testing it - the bomb is so unbelievably powerful that, in comparison, the atom bombs loosed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem like mere fire crackers.”

During World War II, the United States and Great Britain dropped 3,350,000 tons of bombs on Germany and Japan. German cities were leveled and Japan’s were incinerated. In modern nuclear terms, the same figure would be expressed as 3.35 megatons. A megaton has the equivalent explosive power of one million tons of TNT. General Power pointed out that such a force was then less than the yield of one medium-size hydrogen bomb and that it would have taken millions of B-17 Flying Fortresses to carry a load of conventional bombs that would match such explosive power. He described the effect of a medium size atomic bomb:

“The resulting fireball would be about four miles and diameter, and temperatures within that fireball would probably be around 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit. All matter within that area - animate and inanimate - has been pulverized. And lingering radioactive would make impossible to rebuild the area, at least within our lifetime.

“Large buildings as much as six miles from the impact point would not be nothing more than ripped-out shells of rubble and collapsing roofs and walls. In addition to the blast effect which have caused this damage, the intensive heat has sparked numerous big fires, and many more fires have resulted from broken gas lines, electrical short circuits and secondary explosions. Widespread devastation, raging fires and causalities in the millions extend to about eighteen miles from the impact point. Heavy radioactive fallout would start raining down on this area within twenty minute after detonation and would last for approximately half an hour before subsiding. Radiation would prevent anyone from entering this area for the ten hours at least. And for 48 hours after the time of the burst, lethal fallout pattern about eighteen miles would extend downwind to a distance of some 130 miles, resulting in additional heavy casualties.”
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I’d been at Plattsburgh only a few days when I saw my first nuclear bomb. It appeared to be little more than a very big metal cylinder, not unlike a giant trashcan. I was somewhat disappointed by it’s appearance, as I expected something more ominous. However, I was impressed by what it could do and gave it a wide berth.

We constantly worked around nuclear weapons (SAC did not call them bombs), but everything about them was highly classified. Our nuclear safety classes taught the principals of operation and common sense rules for working around them - don’t beat on them with a hammer or start a fire under them. Various SAC publications explained strategy and the various means of deployment. Time Magazine reported the results of atomic tests. Neither the Air Force nor SAC mentioned yield, the destructive power. The fuel cell crew would occasionally speculate on the subject and guesses ran from half a megaton to twenty five megatons.

C-124 cargo planes were frequent visitors to our base. They were used to shuffle nuclear bombs back and forth to the “bomb depot.” The frequency of their appearance and the fact that they delivered one batch and took back another suggested that older models were being replaced with newer ones.
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An abundance of formerly classified information about nuclear weapons has been made public in recent years and includes a great many details, such as yield, number produced, when produced, how deployed and much more. Little Boy was only the beginning. By 1961, the United States had produced over forty different major nuclear weapons. There were large, high-yield bombs for SAC, smaller bombs for the fighters, warheads for missiles and even nuclear tipped artillery shells. All were designated by an “Mk” prefix followed by the model number. I assume the “M” stood for munitions and the “k” further identified them as being nuclear. Munitions guys often substituted the word “Mark.” Little Boy was the Mk-1.

The Mark 28 was a highly dependable multipurpose tactical and strategic bomb carried by virtually all SAC's bombers.  It was in service thirty-three years: from 1958 until retired in 1991. Four thousand - five hundred were produced! It had a 1.1 megaton yield. There were 940 Mk-36s made produced between 1956 and 1958. A B-52 could carry two. Each yielded 8-10 megatons. The B-52G also carried a pair of Hound Dog missiles, one hung each wing. There were then 230 of them and each carried a specially-designed 1.45 megaton Mk-28. During 1954 and 1955, 200 Mk-17 were produced. Each had a yield of 10-15 megatons. Between 1956 and 1958, 940 Mk-36 were produced, each yielded 9-10 megatons. In 1960 SAC began taking delivery on the awesome 25-megaton Mk-41.

Numbers are abstract representations that simply fails to adequately describe such power. TNT is generally packaged as dynamite. A conventional railroad boxcar is 52 feet long and can carry 70,000 pounds, which is 35 tons. Imagine the explosion that would take place if an entire boxcar full of dynamite went off at one time. It would take 333 such boxcars to contain the explosive power of Little Boy. Strung end-to-end, they would be over three and half miles long. If each were placed in the center of a city block, the grid would be over eighteen blocks square. Imagine the effect of them all going off at one time. However the boxcar / city block example is misleading as the explosive power is greatly disbursed over a large area. That of Little Man was concentrated in one central blast that yielded far more devastating results.

In 1961, the Mark 28 was the smallest nuclear bomb in SAC’s arsenal. At 1.1 megatons, it had the explosive power of 24,444 dynamite-filled boxcars. Placed on a single track, they would stretch across two hundred and forty miles. Most of our B-47s carried the Mk-28, but some were loaded with larger ones. R.B.’s comment about our wing having enough nuclear power to destroy the state of New York twice over was fairly accurate.

Our instructor did not reveal the size of SAC forces, but U.S. News and World Report often published graphs showing the respective strike power of the United States and the Soviet Union, so we had a fairly good idea of it’s size. In writing this, I obtained a copy of Alert Operations of the Strategic Air Command 1957-1991, published by the Office of the Historian; Headquarters; Strategic Air Command. An appendix stated that in 1961, SAC had 1,526 bombers, 1,095 tankers, 63 ICBMs and 627 other missiles. The navy had just introduced nuclear subs that carried Polaris missiles, but SAC tended to dismiss their importance because of their relatively small strike power and the fact that the missiles had short range. Our instructor maintained that the Strategic Air Command was our nation’s primary retaliation force.

SAC’s greatest fear was an all-out surprise nuclear attack by the Soviet Union that would knock out its ability to retaliate. It’s leaders were ever-mindful of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and had devised many ways to monitor Soviet military activity, all designed to provide an early warning of a pending attack. SAC’s overwhelming power was justified by the premise that a first strike would cause awesome losses. It had to have a force so strong and so large, that even after incurring enormous losses, it would more than enough strength to effectively punish the aggressor. SAC’s goal was to have the Soviet military planners go into work every morning, review the arsenal aimed at their country, consider all the ways they could possibly hope to avoid retaliation, shake their heads in defeat, then tell the political bosses that “Today is not the day.” The title role character in the movie Doctor Strangelove put it more bluntly, “Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the fear to attack.”
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Our instructor explained that timing was critical. It took an ICBM only twenty-eight minutes to travel from the Soviet Union to the United States. At best, the U.S. would have fifteen minutes notice that an attack was in progress. The command centers had three minutes to decide to issue and attack order. That left twelve minutes. Thus it was essential that our planes be off the ground within as quickly as possible. The plan called for the bombers to take off on both the runway and parallel taxiway, followed by the tankers. This sounded great, but it was an impossible task. The planes were supposed to take off in an extremely tight formation, one breathing up the tail of the one in front of it, so that one was off the ground every fifteen seconds, it would still require seventeen minutes to launch the eighteen bombers and fifty tankers on alert. And trying to launch these big planes, two abreast, fifteen seconds apart, was really pushing Lady Luck to her limit. If one of the planes suffered a mechanical malfunction, the ones behind it would plow into it as there was not enough time to stop. The flight crews lived in a special building next to the aircraft for several days at a time before the next crew took over. Time was so important that they slept in their clothes.

He went on to explain that nuclear war was considerably different from conventional war. In the latter, such as in World War II, bombs were targeted against population and industrial centers to destroy the enemy’s desire and ability to wage war. In nuclear war, that was not a consideration. The goal was to quickly destroy the enemy’s ability to destroy you. The top Soviet targets would first attack our early warning systems, because they could detect and monitor incoming Soviet planes and missiles, and the communication centers, because they relayed the information. These were the “A-1” targets. Next would be the command and control centers, such as Washington and SAC Headquarters at Offutt AFB, Nebraska and its alternate command posts. They rated an “A-2.” Last on the Soviet high priority hit list was American’s ability to launch a counter strike - the planes, the missiles and subs. These were the A-3 targets. All of the Class A targets were expected to be attacked during the first wave of an enemy attack. There were around 150. Because of their importance, multiple missiles would be aimed at the A-1 targets, but A-3 targets, such as Plattsburgh, would normally not be the target for more than one or two nuclear blasts, but our case was unique. We would soon have a dozen Atlas Missiles in hardened underground complexes surrounding the base. Each would be a target for at least for a least two enemy missiles, so we would almost surely be showered by them.

Tension filled the room and the instructor tried to lighten things up. “Now I want all you guys to do a lot of exercises, especially touching your toes, because you have to loosen up your stomach muscles.” We had no idea of what he was talking about. He continued, telling us that nuclear weapons are detonated by altimeters so they would explode several thousand feet above the ground to inflict maximum damage. In all probability, we would see the blinding flash of light a few seconds before being fried by the blast. He instructed us that when we see that light, we should, “bend over, stick your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.” This got a good laugh and helped relieve the tension. When you can laugh at something, it helps to take away your fear. But that’s only momentary relief. The realization of the threat remains with you.

He pointed to the SAC crest on the wall behind him – the armored fist, striking through the air at lightning speed to protect the laurels of peace, proclaiming “Peace is our Profession.” He said, “No one wants a nuclear war, especially us in SAC, because we will be its first casualties. SAC’s goal is to be so powerful and so well prepared that no foreign power would dare launch a strike against the United States.

As SAC airman, our job is to support that mission. If we had any qualms or any hesitation about our ability to provide anything other than unquestioned loyalty to it, we did not belong in SAC. If we had any moral reservations about contributing to a nuclear war, we did not belong in SAC. In such case, we were free to leave any time we want. All we had to do was go to our supervisor and tell him we wanted out. We would immediately be transferred to another command without prejudice.

No one said a word. I can’t speak for the others, but every nerve in my body was tingling as if it had been bathed in a sudden flow of adrenalin. I felt a rattle in my soul. The magnitude of what I had just heard was so far outside my range of knowledge and experience, I found it difficult to digest. I was dumbfounded, but reconciled myself to doing my duty.