Presidential Predicaments: Eisenhower (IV of VIII)-What now?
President Eisenhower once told an adviser that his greatest fear was a surprise attack with nuclear weapons.
The greatest fear of the Soviet leaders too, we might suspect.
It’s not hard to see why. A surprise attack with a nuclear weapon, just one nuclear weapon, if it took place on, for example, Washington, D.C. or Moscow, would be much more terrible in its effects than all the bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
We’d realized, President Eisenhower had anyway, that a surprise attack on Washington D.C. with just one nuclear bomb, even one that yielded no more than the Nagasaki bomb had—about twenty kilotons—could “decapitate” us. “Decapitate” means that it could cut off our head, figuratively speaking. What it would actually do is kill all our national leaders, including the President.
That’s right. If a bomb with the yield of the Nagasaki bomb went off in the center of everything in Washington D.C and everybody were in town, it could do that.
No “strategic” bomb is as small as the Nagasaki bomb any more. The warheads on our Minuteman III ICBMs today are twelve times more powerful.
What then? Imagine the aftermath.
If you think about it for a second, you have to realize we have almost no idea about how things would unfold in our country after something like that.
Think 9/11 was good practice? Think again.
So let’s ask a more narrow question: If the President, who is the “sole nuclear launch authority,” were dead, would we still be able to retaliate massively with our own nuclear weapons on whoever had attacked us ?
We’d want anyone who was thinking about attacking us with nuclear weapons to believe we could. Which would, we hoped, “deter” them.
Deter the leaders, the decision makers, I mean. It wouldn’t deter the soldiers who had been ordered to launch the attack, of course. It couldn’t deter an attack that happened by accident either or an attack by someone who had gone crazy. The kinds of attacks that couldn’t be deterred could also decapitate our country, but we couldn’t worry about that kind of thing, could we? Just about intentional, rational acts.
During Eisenhower’s presidency the Soviets would also have been worried about intentional, rational surprise attacks, but with a slight difference. During Eisenhower’s time in office, the Soviets were pretty sure that if we conducted a surprise attack on them with what we had developed by then, they would not be able to retaliate on us with what they had.
Their best hope, their military strategists came to think, would be a “preemptive attack.” In a “preemptive attack,” you attack before you are attacked to try to prevent the other side from doing something you think they are planning.
Our military leaders had developed plans to do preemptive attacks on the Soviets too, first during Truman’s administration to prevent the Soviets from acquiring the atomic bomb, and again in Eisenhower’s administration to prevent them from getting the hydrogen bomb.
Presidents Truman and Eisenhower had both decided not to.
There were some moral questions that might have been asked about us doing something like a preemptive attack on the Soviets. I can’t tell you if anyone in the administration was asking them.
By 1955, the Soviets had both kinds of bombs.
After 1955, a preemptive attack on the Soviets was still being urged by, for example, General Curtis LeMay, the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command. He didn’t think that even now the Soviet Union would be able to retaliate effectively with the nuclear weapons and delivery systems they had.
There was some uncertainty about this. We just didn’t know that much about what their capabilities were. They sure were talking big.
Until 1957, we didn’t think a preemptive surprise attack on us with nuclear weapons was likely. The Soviet bombers didn’t have the range to reach us and get back home. Nor did the Soviets have “forward bases” around us like those we had built around them.
I think we at home were still supposed to think a surprise attack might come “at any time.” That’s what one of the films we were shown when I was in elementary school had said: “An attack could come at any time.” I believed it.
We were told to get under our desks or if we were on the street to snuggle up against a curb. Or if we were on a picnic to put the picnic blanket over us.
In 1957, though, things changed. I was a junior in high school now. The Soviet Union, using a big rocket they had developed, put the very first satellite up into orbit around the earth. Sputnik, it was called. On the radio, we heard the darned thing beeping and beeping as it passed overhead at thousands of miles an hour, we were told.
The Soviets began to claim also to have developed an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.
An ICBM would be able to fly from inside their country to inside ours. In thirty minutes. If it could carry a nuclear warhead, it would certainly allow them to pull off a preemptive surprise attack.
Their premier, Nikita Khrushchev, said they were making ICBMs “like sausages.”
With the lines of radars we had built across the north of Canada and our jet fighter airplanes, we might have been thinking that we could defend ourselves against attacks by bombers. Some might still get through, the way they always had in World War II. Only now they would be carrying bombs thousands of time more powerful than the biggest bombs those bombers had been carrying.
When it came to ICBMs, we knew it would be silly to think we could defend against them. Some of us did. I’m sure some of us didn’t.
Maybe some of us still don’t.