What Eisenhower Accomplished, Part Two
Our Mighty Stockpile
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” all from a somewhat different angle—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. . . . This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.
President Dwight Eisenhower, Chance for Peace/Cross of Iron speech, April 16, 1953[T]he United States is piling up armaments which it well knows will never provide for its ultimate safety. We are piling up these armaments because we do not know what else to do.
Statement by Dwight Eisenhower, according to a memo of a meeting with the National Security Council in 1956Like my contemporaries, I ... believed that superior technology brought strategic advantage, that greater numbers meant stronger security, and that the ends of containment justified whatever means were necessary to achieve them….
Throughout my professional and military career, I shared [these beliefs,] I professed them and I put them into operational practice. And now it is my burden to declare with all of the conviction I can muster that in my judgment they served us extremely ill.
General George Lee Butler (retired), former Commander in Chief of the Strategic Command, Uncommon Cause, 261The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Albert Einstein 1946
When it came to nuclear weapons, what did President Eisenhower accomplish in his two terms? Let’s take a look.
It’s pretty breathtaking.
In 1953, at the beginning of Eisenhower’s administration and the end of Truman’s administration, we had in our stockpile 800 atomic bombs, more or less. None was yet a Super hydrogen bomb. Just before Ike’s election as President, the process that would be used to make Super bombs had been successfully demonstrated in the Ivy Mike test. But by the time Ike was inaugurated we wouldn’t have had time to produce any actual Super bombs yet.
We had only atomic bombs.
By the time Ike took office, the Soviet Union had atomic bombs, but maybe only 100. We didn’t really know how many they had. Fewer than we did, we were sure of that. For them also none would yet be a Super bomb. They hadn’t even successfully tested the process yet. They wouldn’t do that until 1955, near the end of Eisenhower’s first term.
Which was sooner than we had thought they might.
When they did test it, however, it was already a droppable bomb.
When Eisenhower left office, we had in our stockpile not 800 but 18,000 nuclear weapons. How about that? By now, a good number of them were the thermonuclear, or Super, bombs. Those were the ones that could yield a hundred, and much more than a hundred, Hiroshimas.
Actually, here at the end of Eisenhower’s administration, we both had the Super weapons.
Some of the nuclear weapons in our stockpile now were now the newer “tactical” ones, nuclear weapons with smaller yields (but yields that were still huge, many times more than those of our largest conventional weapons). “Tactical” weapons would be for use, possibly, on a battlefield. Some of these had yields as great as the Hiroshima bomb, 12-15 kilotons, though this would now be “tactical.”
President Truman had wanted our use of the atom bombs in Japan to be “strategic,” in the way the word was used then—that is, specifically directed at and limited, if possible, to resources that allowed Japan to make war, like, say, arms factories surrounded by the homes of workers. Perhaps to his surprise, very few of the 70,000 people killed on that day in Hiroshima had been soldiers or workers in arms factories. With the fires and firestorms that got started by the bomb, the whole city had ended up being destroyed, not just the things in it that had military significance. Also killed had been the schoolchildren, the old people, and the doctors.
After the war, during Eisenhower’s administration, “strategic” came to have a new meaning. At the end of Eisenhower’s administration, when our war planners talked about the “strategic” use of nuclear weapons, they meant 1. the weapon would be one with a very large yield, much larger than the Hiroshima bomb, and 2. that it would be used on a city and whatever and whoever happened to be there.
The newer “tactical” weapons with smaller yields that we delivered over to Europe during Eisenhower’s administration could be used, possibly, for all sorts of other things—to demolish dams, to blow up mountain passes, as depth bombs to destroy submarines, to blow up big formations of bombers, to attack invading hordes. For that last purpose, we had developed some nuclear artillery rounds we could fire from howitzers that would be set to go off above the invading hordes at an altitude that would, as it had in Hiroshima, maximize the destruction done on the ground.
There had been no invading hordes in Hiroshima, of course.
Some of these tactical weapons were light enough that a couple of soldiers could carry them. We would need to keep an especially close eye on those, wouldn’t we. We wouldn’t want one of those to be shoplifted.
When Eisenhower left office in 1961, the Soviet Union had a total of six hundred nuclear bombs, more or less, not even as many as had been in our stockpile when Ike first took office. But on November 22, 1955, in the third year of Ike’s administration, the Soviets had successfully tested their first staged hydrogen bomb. Their first test was of a dropped “bomb,” not a “device,” so some of the six hundred they had at the end of Eisenhower’s administration would have been actual deliverable thermonuclear bombs.
But at the end of Eisenhower’s administration we also had deliverable hydrogen bombs in our stockpile. So nothing to worry about.
At the end of Truman’s administration, all our atomic bombs had been kept in the custody of the Atomic Energy Commission, that is, in civilian hands. By the end of Eisenhower’s administration, all our nuclear weapons had been transferred to the custody of the military. The big “strategic” thermonuclear bombs had gone to the Strategic Air Command of the Air Force, and the “tactical” nuclear weapons to the Army and Navy.
Eisenhower clearly considered it better that our military have custody of our nuclear weapons. The point was debatable, I’d say, but it hadn’t gotten debated that I saw. Ike had just gone ahead and made it happen. Or maybe let it happen. The military had always thought they should be who had custody.
President Truman hadn’t agreed.
When it came to what Oppenheimer had called the “art of delivery” of nuclear weapons, there had been huge changes since the end of Truman’s administration. Truman had available the propeller-driven B-29 bombers from World War II, like the ones that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan; the B-50’s, which were B-29s with more powerful engines that had been modified to carry atomic bombs; and our new B-36, a great big propeller-driven bomber that had become operational soon after the war. The B-36 had a combat radius of 4000 miles when carrying over 70,000 pounds of bombs. That would allow it to carry seven Hiroshima bombs, not just the single bomb the Enola Gay had been able to carry.
The B-36, like the B-50, was designed to carry only atomic bombs.
After 1951, Truman had also had a jet-powered medium bomber to call on, the B-47. The B-47 may have been a “medium” bomber but it could fly much faster than the B-29, the B-50 or the B-36. It could carry 18,000 pounds of bombs so maybe two of the atomic bombs we had at the time that weighed what the atomic bomb used in Hiroshima had, over nine thousand pounds.
The B-47 quickly became the “workhorse” of the Strategic Air Command. All those propeller driven bombers were pretty quickly retired.
Some nostalgia was felt there, I’m sure.
Late in the Truman administration and in the early days of the Eisenhower administration, the B-47s were also used by our military to spy on the Soviet Union from the air. This had to be cut back when the Soviet Union came up with jet fighters that could sometimes catch up to the B-47s and shoot them down. Some were shot down. We didn’t hear anything about this. I don’t know what the families of the pilots that got shot down were told.
By the time Eisenhower left office, in 1961, the Soviets had developed fighter jets that could pretty easily catch up to the B-47s. B-47s were still in service but since 1955, Ike had been able also to call on our jet-powered B-52 heavy bombers that could fly faster, higher and farther than the B-47, like twice as far. The B-52s could carry more than three times more ordnance, like 70,000 pounds of bombs. The B-52’s combat range was around 8,800 miles. That range could be extended by refueling the B-52s in the air, something we’d also been able to do with the B-47s.
If we refueled the B-52s in the air, they would be able to reach the Soviet Union even from bases here in the United States and return home without having to land anywhere along the way.
In 1961, the first year of the Kennedy administration (John F. Kennedy had been elected president at the end of Eisenhower’s two terms), in a program called Airborne Alert, the B-52s would start doing just that. Some B-52s would be kept in the air twenty-four hours a day every day, loitering along the borders of the Soviet Union, ready for the order to go in, until they were relieved by another B-52 that had flown over from the United States. Each B-52 might be carrying four of the strategic thermonuclear bombs we had developed by now, the B28. The B28 had a yield of almost a hundred Hiroshimas. Four of them.
Airborne alert missions were flown along the southwestern and the northwestern borders of the Soviet Union. That meant that after Eisenhower we would have had—all day every day—the yield of eight hundred Hiroshimas loitering in the air just beyond the Soviet borders.
At the end of World War II, the Soviets didn’t have any bombers to speak of. By 1948, they had developed bombers that were comparable to our B-29s. That’s all. In the middle of Eisenhower’s administration, they’d introduced a Tu-95 bomber that could make a round trip to the United States without refueling but it was powered only by turbo-prop engines, not by true jet engines.
At the end of Eisenhower’s administration they still had nothing comparable to the B-52.
We were clearly ahead in this area.
Whew.
Next: What Eisenhower Accomplished, Part Three