You Might Want to Know: George Lee Butler IV— How SAC's Capabilities Developed
Since its creation in 1946, SAC had come a long way by the time George Lee Butler became its Commander in Chief in January 1991.
The first Commander in Chief was General George Kenney (1889-1977). Kenney had been a fighter pilot all the way back in World War I, the earliest days of military aviation. Before the days of heavy bombers. Before the days of “strategic” operations. In Kenney’s two years as CINCSAC, the capacity to execute SAC’s “strategic” mission hadn’t developed much, or at all.
In July 1946, the United States had conducted its first atomic bomb tests since the end of World War II. In Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, two Nagasaki-type bombs were detonated. One was dropped from a bomber on a large array of decommissioned ships that had been anchored in a lagoon. Unfortunately, the bomb had missed its aim point by almost half a mile. The other had been detonated under water with the remaining ships in the lagoon. The ships that were still afloat had been badly contaminated with radioactivity. In the end, no ships had survived. Life magazine had a big spread about the tests with striking photographs of big ships being tossed about after the second test like little sticks. I was almost 6. I think I remember seeing the photographs.
Seeing the tests would have reminded anyone who needed reminding of what nuclear weapons could do. Soviet observers had been invited to see the tests.
In April and May of 1948, the United States had conducted its second series of nuclear weapons tests, in Operation Sandstone at Enewetak Atoll, near Bikini. New more powerful bombs we’d designed at our Los Alamos National Laboratory were tested. Soviet observers were not invited to Operation Sandstone.
Nuclear weapons, the first ones a thousand times more powerful than our largest conventional bombs, were becoming even more powerful. How powerful could they be made to be?
Jumping ahead a little, in 1952, in the Ivy Mike test at our Pacific Proving Ground, we successfully tested a hydrogen (scientists prefer the term “thermonuclear”) device that was 666 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, give or take. It was a “staged” device. It now seemed likely that by adding stages, these devices could be made more and more powerful. As powerful as you wanted. The sky was the limit.
The second CINCSAC, General Curtis LeMay is acknowledged to be the person who made SAC into an elite and capable force. Here we’ll be looking not so much at how LeMay made SAC into the elite force it was considered to be but at what SAC became capable of doing during his tenure and afterwards. Assisted, of course, by our private defense contractors. The contractors made their money by being awarded contracts by our military procurement services. The money came from taxes paid by Americans.
In 1948, just before LeMay became CINCSAC, the B-50 bomber had come into service. A modified B-29, built by our Boeing Company, had delivered the two atomic bombs to Japan. The B-50 was a B-29 modified further to have a longer-range. In September 1948, the even bigger and longer-range B-36, built by the Convair company and designed in the first place to carry atomic bombs only, had come into service. The B-36 was huge. It had a wingspan more than two-thirds the length of a football field. It was powered by six of the new turbo-prop engines. The engines were faced backward on the wings, and could be assisted by two jet engines at the tips of the wings. I was now 7 1/2. My home town of Tucson was then the site of a SAC base, Davis Monthan. I definitely remember seeing some B-36s in the skies over Tucson.
All that was in service in November 1948 when General LeMay was made Commander in Chief of SAC.
In March 1949, LeMay’s second year as CINCSAC, a B-50 named Lucky Lady II flew all the way around the world without ever landing, getting refueled in the air four times on the way. We’d figured out how to do that—refuel our bombers in the air. Anyone who was watching would now know that the range of our “strategic” bombers was, for all practical purposes, infinite.
In March 1949, LeMay had drawn up the first Emergency War Plan for SAC. It called for dropping 133 atomic bombs, our whole stockpile at the time, on 70 cities in the USSR over thirty days. These would be considered “strategic” attacks, of course. They were being conducted by the Strategic Air Command, so there you are.
In August 1949, less than a year after LeMay took the job of CINCSAC, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb. Long before many of us had been thinking they’d be able to do it. This scared a lot of us. I don’t know if General LeMay was one of those who had thought it would take a lot longer.
But already, from early in LeMay’s time as CINCSAC, the Strategic Air Command had amazing capabilities in firepower and weapons delivery. The next question would be whether the airmen who handled our nuclear weapons were motivated and competent.
When nuclear weapons were involved, the cost of a mishap had gone up. Way up.
When the B-29 came into service during World War II, it was crashing a lot. If one crashed with a load of conventional strategic bombs, that would be one thing. If the B-29 called the Enola Gay that was carrying the Hiroshima bomb had crashed on take-off, it might have been something else. Like 700 bombers loaded conventional bombs crashing, only worse. That was why the Hiroshima bomb hadn’t been put together finally until the Enola Gay had taken off. We’d put on the Enola Gay a scientist from Los Alamos to do that.
As CINCSAC, LeMay was known to accept no excuses. He said once, “I have neither the time nor the inclination to differentiate between the incompetent and the merely unfortunate.” If something you did didn’t turn out right, it didn’t matter why.
He also quickly rewarded excellent performance, with promotions and such. He made sure his airmen were well provided for and had opportunities for recreation. Including himself. He liked race cars, a friend has told me, who has it on good authority that LeMay had his own race cars maintained by air force mechanics and flown around to different tracks on SAC aircraft. There was nothing secret about this. He also sometimes let race car enthusiasts use the runways on SAC bases.
In 1948, the year LeMay became CINCSAC, the U.S. had begun to mass produce atomic bombs. By the end of that year, we would have 235 in the stockpile, up from 110 at end of 1947. In 1957, when LeMay retired, there would be 6444 bombs in the stockpile. Many were by then the “strategic” thermonuclear bombs that were a hundred times more powerful than the first atomic bombs.
By the time Eisenhower completed his second term, we would have 18,000 bombs in the stockpile. As the stockpile grew, so did the numbers of nuclear bombs that would be employed in executing the war plans.
In 1951, a new jet-powered medium bomber with swept back wings, the B-47, was introduced. Like the B-29 and B-50, it was made by the Boeing company but they’d had some competition from Convair and the Martin and North American Aviation companies. In 1955, Boeing’s longer range heavy all-jet bomber, the B-52, was introduced. The B-52 could carry more than one of the thermonuclear bombs we had by then developed. It got to where each B-52 could carry a load with an explosive power several times greater than all the explosives used by all sides in World War II.
LeMay stationed “cocked” B-52s—loaded with fuel and bombs—on alert on runways. Their crews were trained to take off in 15-second intervals in something called MITO, for Minimal Interval Take-off. That must have been exciting.
LeMay stepped down as CINCSAC in 1957. By then, SAC had 224,000 airmen, nearly 2000 heavy bombers, all now jet-powered, and some 800 tankers, also jet-powered.
He stepped down on the verge of the missile age. In 1957, the Soviets successfully tested an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile and put a satellite called Sputnik into orbit.
We had been working on ICBMs for a while, as well as on Intermediate Range ballistic missiles, but in 1957 weren’t quite there yet. The companies working on our missiles were the Douglas Aircraft Company, the Chrysler Corporation, General Dynamics, and the Glenn L. Martin Company. Many other companies worked on different parts of the missiles, Rocktdyne on the rocket engines, for example. General Electric had made the engines for Boeing’s B-47 and B-52 bombers.
At the time LeMay stepped down, the Navy was also working on an IRBM, the Polaris, built by the Lockheed Corporation, that might be launched from a submerged submarine, if you can imagine that. It would come into service in 1960, the same year our first ICBM, the Atlas—built by the Convair division of the General Dynamics company—did.
At first, LeMay hadn’t been a fan of missiles. One problem he saw was that they couldn’t carry payloads that weighed as much as our nuclear bombs did. Another was whether you could trust them to deliver the payloads where you wanted them to go. A third problem was you couldn’t change plans once the missiles were launched. Bombers were slower and more vulnerable, for sure, even our jet-powered B-52s. But they could carry the bombs we had to the targets we had given them, if they could get there, and be called back if we changed our minds.
Our weapons designers kept figuring out, though, how to reduce the weight of our “strategic” thermonuclear bombs and warheads. By the end of LeMay’s time as CINCSAC, our warheads weighed ten times less than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs while being hundreds of times more powerful. Guidance had improved and would probably keep improving. The problem of not being able to change plans after launch was something we would just have to live with.
What about putting something into our missiles that would allow us to destroy them in flight, as we’d had do in some missile tests that went wrong. But consider: if we had something in our missiles that could destroy them in flight, the Soviets might figure out how to send the signal that made that happen. We couldn’t have that. When it came to missiles in actual use, once they were launched, what would be would be.
The advent of the Intermediate Range and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles would, of course, begin to bring down the number of bombers we thought we needed. SAC would need to be reorganized to accommodate the missiles. We wouldn’t need so many bombers. Military budgets wouldn’t have to come down though, this was clear. Missiles and the facilities for them were massively expensive.
By now the word “strategic” did not refer to an operation that focused only upon the military resources of the enemy. “Strategic” now referred to any operation that employed our “strategic,” that is, our most powerful nuclear weapons. Cities and their non-combatant populations were now taken to be legitimate strategic targets.
I don’t know how many of us realized that the meaning of “strategic” had changed for our leaders in this way. Or cared that it had, when it came to Communists. In the Soviet Union or in China. By the 60’s, our nuclear war plans called for massive retaliatory attacks simultaneously on both countries, regardless of which one might have attacked us.
LeMay was known—according to McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson—to advocate a strategy of “preemptive “counterforce.” “Preemptive” attacks were first strikes, not retaliatory attacks. “Counterforce” attacks would supposedly target the military assets of the Communists. LeMay was still claiming, then, that nuclear weapons could have a strategic purpose in the original sense of the word, attacking only military targets, not just everything.
The law of war had not changed. It was still a war crime to bomb a city or kill non-combatants on purpose. In 1996, two years after General Butler had retired from the Air Force, the International Court of Justice in the United Nations issued an advisory opinion that said any use of nuclear weapons or even a threat to use them was a war crime. We ignored the opinion. So did the other states that now had nuclear weapons—Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan, probably Israel.
LeMay served as CINCSAC for nine years, which would turn out to be the longest term of any CINC. The CINCSAC who replaced LeMay was General Thomas Power. He would hold the position for seven years. The CINCSACs who followed Power would all serve shorter terms than Power, some for only a year. The CINCSAC who immediately preceded General Butler, General John Chain, had been one of the longer serving, five years.
To the surprise of many, President Kennedy had chosen General LeMay in 1961 as his Chief of the Air Force. He had done this, it was suspected, to deflect accusations being made by some political opponents—that is to say, by Republicans—that he was “soft on Communism.” That seemed to go without saying if you weren’t a Republican.
In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, LeMay, along with the Chiefs of the other armed services, had been put on the Executive Committee JFK formed to advise him and help manage the crisis, along with the Chiefs of the other services. On the committee LeMay had urged preemptively bombing the island flat, using nuclear weapons even. That way we would be sure to catch all the missiles and warheads the Soviets had sneaked into Cuba.
As you probably know, Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved the crisis peacefully. The Soviets took their Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles out of Cuba and a little later we took our Jupiter IRBMs out of Turkey. LeMay said he regarded this outcome as “the greatest defeat in our history.”
In February 1965, LeMay retired from the Air Force. Forced out by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, it seemed.
1965 was the year, it was later said, in which our ICBM system reached “maturity.” We deployed our new Minuteman II ICBM in 1965 with its W56 warhead that yielded over a megaton. It used solid fuel as did Polaris and as had the Minuteman I we had introduced in 1962. That meant it could be launched in just a few minutes after the order came. But it used in the computer in its guidance system the new “integrated circuits” and was much more accurate than the Minuteman I. Defense Secretary McNamara had decided we should eventually have a thousand Minuteman missiles in place in the hardened underground silos we would dig out around the country. The Air Force had wanted more.
Was LeMay still urging—at his retirement in 1965—the strategy of “preemptive counterforce”? I don’t know, but by then other military leaders and Secretary McNamara had come to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed the capacity to assure our destruction, or at any rate kill some millions of us in retaliation, if we ever did a preemptive attack—a “first strike”—on them. Even in 1961, JFK’s first year in office, JFK had been told in a briefing by the Chairman of Joint Chiefs, General Lyman Lemnitzer, that if we attacked the Soviets, their return attack would likely kill some millions of us.
Still, we’d “prevail,” General Limnitzer had told him.
That was good to know.
Next: The First Hard Thing General Butler Had to Do as CINCSAC