The Race Is On
Momentum drove the nuclear arms buildup from the beginning. There never was a decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Once it was decided to build the bombs two years earlier, it was inevitable they would be dropped.1 The United States had just two A-bombs in early August 1945; the Japanese emperor surrendered before a third bomb was ready to go.
After the war, as the Cold War got underway, it was assumed — no doubt correctly — that the Soviets would build A-bombs once they figured out how (they exploded their first roughly four years after Hiroshima); so the American weapons labs preemptively churned out more bombs. Once American scientists tested the much more powerful hydrogen bomb in 1952, there was little doubt that it too would be built (though many who had helped build the A-bomb protested) or that the Soviets would build their own (which they did three years later).
President Dwight Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general and WWII commander, was not at all bloodthirsty; once he understood the power of nuclear weapons, he feared and detested them. But he also believed, as did most officials and analysts, that if the U.S. and the USSR ever locked arms, even in a “small” war over a narrow strip of territory in Europe or Asia, it would soon escalate to nuclear exchanges. So the wise policy would be to deter the Soviets from attacking in the first place, and the best way to do that, he figured, was to warn them that we’d blow them to smithereens if they did. His secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, called the policy “massive retaliation,” and the Joint Chiefs of Staff — composed of the top U.S. military officers — translated it into a war plan that italicized massive.2
Few realized at the time, or in the years since, just how massive it was. By 1960, the U.S. war plan called for launching the entire nuclear arsenal — at the time, 3,423 weapons, exploding with the blast power of 7,847 megatons — against 1,043 targets in the Soviet Union, its satellite countries in Eastern Europe and Communist China.3 This was not a plan to strike back if the Soviets launched a nuclear attack on the U.S.; it was a plan to strike first if the Soviets mounted a non-nuclear invasion against U.S. allies.
Some in Washington asked how many people such an attack would kill. The answer that came back from those who devised the war plan at Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha was 275 million.4 Such a figure had previously been inconceivable. No one could imagine a war aim that required killing so many civilians.