Defense: The Atomic Arsenal

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Everyone knows—or should—that the U.S., with its nuclear arsenal, is the mightiest nation in human history. But few people really realize the staggering dimensions of that might. For one thing, facts about the arsenal have been shrouded by military secrecy. For another, the destructive power possessed by the U.S. simply beggars imagination.

Last week the world got its best glimpse yet of the size and condition of the U.S.’s nuclear nest egg. It came when Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara testified on behalf of the recently signed nuclear test ban treaty before the Senate Foreign Relations, Senate Armed Forces and Joint Atomic Energy Committees.

Up to a point, McNamara was merely propagandizing for the treaty. But beyond that point, McNamara, who seems to look upon himself as the world’s only real authority on security regulations, had plainly decided that it was time for the U.S., its friends and its enemies, to get a better idea of what U.S. nuclear power actually means.

McNamara’s major points were both enormously revealing and profoundly encouraging. Among them:

> The U.S. is vastly superior to the Soviet Union in its nuclear arsenal, and it is increasing its lead every day.

> The U.S., of its own strategic choice, relies on thousands of relatively small nuclear warheads, rather than on the explosive force of a few monster superbombs.

> The U.S. has nuclear weapons scattered and hidden all over the Western world. Thus, thousands of missiles and planes would definitely survive any conceivable atomic attack by the Soviets and could strike back with a barrage of missiles and bombs that could obliterate Russia or Red China.

> The U.S. even has its master || command system so organized that there is little, if any, chance that Russian assault would so disrupt it as to prevent nuclear retaliation.

As always, McNamara was crisp and decisive, clicking off facts with computerlike precision. But candid as he was, he was still cautious. And in many instances, what he said could only serve as a launching point for what he did not say. Thus, the real, breathtaking picture of U.S. nuclear power could only be seen with the help of other, previously published facts, of earlier testimony before Congress, and of educated estimates and extrapolation.

In Tens of Thousands. “We maintain,” said McNamara, “a total number of nuclear warheads, tactical as well as strategic, in the tens of thousands.” The actual number may be reckoned with reasonable accuracy at some 33,000 warheads on station; or held, carefully stored, in ready reserve; or otherwise committed to the arsenal. Another 15,000 are in preparation.*

Of the U.S.’s ready warheads, more than 25,000 are “tactical”—designed for short-range (mostly under 30 miles) battlefield or defensive use. Many are tiny power-packages of less than a kiloton (equal to 1,000 tons of TNT) that could be sent on slender, supersonic missiles to wipe out a company, sink a ship or shoot down planes.

The rest—over 7,000 warheads—are “strategic,” built to travel thousands of miles and explode deep in enemy homelands. They are perched in the nose cones of intercontinental missiles or snugly enclosed in bomb casings aboard long-range aircraft. McNamara told the Senate group that “in the past 24 months alone, there has been a 100% increase in the number of nuclear warheads in the strategic alert forces.” He said that the “megatonnage” of the force had “more than doubled”—which is pretty impressive, considering that a single megaton equals the explosive power of 1,000,000 tons of TNT.

The Big Punch. America’s strategic alert force—missiles, bombers and Polaris-armed submarines—is loaded with AP multimegaton warheads. The atomic arsenal currently includes:

> 126 Atlas missiles with 5-mega-ton warheads.

> 68 Titan missiles with 10-mega-ton packages.

> 150 flashy new Minutemen (two-thirds of them installed in the last six months, with 800 more to come within two years) with 800-kiloton warheads.

>144 Polaris missiles with 800-kiloton warheads on nine submarines at sea (with 32 more subs and 512 more missiles by 1968).

> 400 Hound Dog air-to-ground missiles with 1-megaton warheads.

In addition to these, the strategic force has 2,000 10-megaton bombs for delivery by its 720 old, slow B-47 bombers and its 80 new supersonic B-58s. The biggest operative punch in the U.S. -arsenal—a 24-megaton bomb—is carried by the 630 SAC B-52s.

Such a bomb dropped over a large city would instantly burst into a fireball about four miles in diameter, start fires 40 miles away, open a crater a mile wide and hundreds of feet deep. It would puff a gigantic poisonous cloud of radioactive dust 25 miles into the sky, rain down enough fatal debris to kill humans more than 350 miles from the blast center. The U.S. has something like 1,600 such bombs ready for delivery by its B-52s.

In his testimony, McNamara pointed out that the U.S. always has a certain number of nuclear-armed bombers in the air, ready to head for enemy targets in the event of an attack on the U.S. Beyond these, said McNamara, there are “over 500 SAC bombers on quick-reaction alert”—a term meaning that they can be in the air within 15 minutes after receiving a warning that an attack is imminent. Continued McNamara: “Today the Soviets could place less than half as many bombers over North America on a first strike; the Soviets are estimated to have today only a fraction as many ICBM missiles, and their submarine-launched ballistic missiles are shortrange, require surface launch, and generally are not comparable to our Polaris force. Between now and 1966, it is estimated that our ballistic missile superiority will increase both absolutely and relatively.”

Power-Package. McNamara devoted a considerable share of his calmly-delivered, matter-of-fact statement to discussing “yield-to-weight ratios.” This involves putting the greatest possible destructive power into the smallest, most easily transportable package. Said McNamara: “The Soviet Union appears to be technologically more advanced than we are in the high-yield range, in the tens of megatons.”

He was, of course, referring to the monster thermonuclear device exploded by the U.S.S.R. during its 1961 test series. Said McNamara: “They have demonstrated a device of 60 megatons which we believe could be weaponized at about 100 megatons. The Soviets probably have no missile at this time which will deliver a 100-megaton warhead.” As to that, some U.S. scientists and military leaders disagree with McNamara, believe that the 100-megaton giant, weighing between 20,000 and 30,000 Ibs., could already be hung on the end of the Soviets’ gigantic Vos-tok-launching rocket, nicknamed “The Beast” by U.S. intelligence agents, and fired with reasonable accuracy over 3,500 miles.

McNamara, while admitting that the treaty, by barring atmospheric testing, would prevent the U.S. from developing a 100-megaton bomb, told the Senators that without any testing the U.S. “can develop a warhead with a yield of 50 to 60 megatons for a B-52 delivery,” and with underground tests could develop “a 35-megaton warhead for Titan II.”

In any event, Secretary McNamara does not believe that the U.S. arsenal requires a superbomb. Said he: “One possible use of the very high-yield weapons would be to deliver them by missile and detonate them at altitudes of 100,000 feet and above, presumably over cities. Detonation at such altitudes could cause significant thermal damage—fire—over hundreds of square miles. But a better way to achieve even greater destruction, and a way which is within the present U.S. capabilities, is to divide the attack among several smaller weapons so as to saturate any defenses.”

Doubling the Megaton. The U.S. is —and has been for several years—committed to such “saturation” strategy. In its simplest terms, this means avoiding reliance on a few huge bombs, peppering an enemy nation with hundreds of relatively small ones. Since devastation does not increase arithmetically with megaton power, two 10-megaton warheads properly placed can do almost as much damage as one 100-megaton giant. The Pentagon goes under the assumption that accuracy—even in saturation—is the key to success, that if a missile’s accuracy is bettered by 20%, it is equivalent to doubling the megaton force of the warhead. This can be done without nuclear tests of any kind.

Concluding his criticism of a strategy which would depend on superbombs, McNamara said: “Very high-yield warheads are relatively inferior as second-strike retaliation weapons; it is much more difficult and costly to make them survivable—to harden, camouflage or make mobile the huge missiles required to deliver these weapons.”

Survival Silos. A “second-strike retaliation weapon,” such as Minuteman or Polaris, must be able to withstand enemy attack, and have all its intricate systems, including communications, intact when the pounding is over. Said McNamara: “Our missile force is deployed so as to assure that under any conceivable Soviet first strike, a substantial portion of it would remain in firing condition. Most of the land-based portion of the force has been hardened as well as dispersed.”

Minuteman silos, sunk 80 feet deep in the earth, are “hardened” by thick concrete walls. About 150 such silos, holding a Minuteman apiece, are dispersed over hundreds of miles of rugged western U.S. terrain. McNamara argued that no single Soviet missile—no matter how big—could be expected to knock out more than two silos at once. Less reassuring is the fact that the Minutemen’s hardened sites have never been tested definitively by nuclear explosion effects, and McNamara admitted there are “uncertainties” in the design. But if the silos did survive the crushing pressures and ground fires of a first strike, the Minutemen would blast off with a combined power of hundreds of megatons. Already, they are aimed (by special tapes at SAC’s underground command post near Omaha) at Russian and Chinese Communist targets, over 5,000 miles away.

“In addition,” said McNamara, “we have duplicative facilities which will in the future include the capability of launching each individual Minuteman by a signal from airborne control posts.” The mobile control posts are KC-135 jet tankers of the Strategic Air Command which have been converted into communications centers under the control of an Air Force general officer. Such an officer could, from his airborne headquarters, launch the Minuteman flights.

Safe at Sea. The Minutemen, however powerfully protected, are immobile. But the submarine-based Polaris missile relies on swift movement and concealment. The Polaris A-2 has a range of 1,725 miles, can fire at Russia or China from beneath the ocean’s surface. Thus, even if a significant number of Minutemen were knocked out, virtually all the Polaris missiles would survive to strike back.

Following the Minuteman and Polaris on the arsenal list is the Army’s upcoming Pershing missile—a 400-mile supersonic “tactical” weapon that can be zipped around combat areas via truck, helicopter or airplane. It can be set up, aimed and fired from its portable launcher in less than an hour; it delivers a bang of up to one megaton —which makes it a threat to entire cities, if needed.

The rest of the tactical atomic wallop comes in comparatively “little” packages. Yet many of these nuclear runts can carry up to a 100-kiloton load—which is five times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. These include the Army’s 75-mile Sergeant (now replacing the aging Corporal), Lacrosse (for pinpoint blasting of pillboxes, bunkers, etc. less than 20 miles away), the 12-mile Honest John and the 10-mile Little John, the 1,200-yard Davy Crockett (smallest of all the nuclear weapons, it can be hauled about on a Jeep, is designed to blast such targets as tanks, gun emplacements, troop concentrations). The Navy has the 8-mile Asroc and the 11-mile Astor (both ship-launched torpedoes), the 65-mile Talos (a ship-launched, 1,850-m.p.h. antiaircraft and shore-bombardment weapon), the not-yet-operational 25-mile Subroc (a submarine-launched antisubmarine rocket), and the Navy and Air Force both use the 6-mile Bullpup (fired from airplanes at tactical ground targets).

Upsetting the Balance. Thus, the offensive potential of the U.S. atomic arsenal is staggering. But offense is by no means everything—and serious questions have been raised about the possible effect of the test ban treaty on U.S. development of an anti-missile missile system. Said Dr. Edward Teller, pioneering scientist in the development of the H-bomb, in his testimony before a Senate subcommittee last week: “The fact that an atmospheric test ban interferes with the development of our missile defense is one of the most serious objections to the proposed partial test ban. An effective defense against ballistic missiles is one of the developments which can upset the strategic balance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In this field the Soviet Union is at present ahead of us.”

In the anti-ICBM area, there seems to be some confusion at the highest levels of the Kennedy Administration. Only three weeks ago, President Kennedy seemed to throw up his hands at the very notion that an effective defense system could be devised against enemy missiles. Said he at a press conference: “The problem of developing a defense against a missile is beyond us and beyond the Soviets technically, and I think many who work on it feel that perhaps it can never successfully be accomplished.”

McNamara is not t)iat pessimistic, although he obviously entertains grave doubts about U.S. ability to develop an effective anti-missile defense system. And he certainly seems to disagree with Teller’s belief that the Soviet Union is well ahead of the U.S. in that field. Said he to the Senators last week: “Any deployed system which the Soviets are likely to have in the near future will probably not be as effective, almost certainly not more effective, than the Nike-Zeus.”

Ideal Intercept. But in his very next breath, McNamara noted that he considered the Nike-Zeus to be “inadequate.” In fact, Nike-Zeus is a high-altitude (above 70 miles) operator which in past tests in the Kwajalein area of the Pacific has made at least seven successful intercepts of Atlas missiles. But those tests were carried out under ideal intercept conditions, with the courses of the “enemy” Atlases pretty well known beforehand. With this in mind, McNamara believes that the Nike-Zeus, having already cost the U.S. millions of dollars, is not worth the further billions of full-scale development and deployment. Instead, the U.S. is now trying to develop the Nike-X, an anti-missile missile that in many ways makes Nike-Zeus look like a Tin Lizzie. Nike-X will use a single target-finding system (compared with Zeus’s antiquated multicomponent system), and it will knock down missiles at both high and low altitudes. And in McNamara’s opinion, even Nike-X may not, in terms of effectiveness, be worth all the trouble.

But to McNamara, all that sort of debate is really irrelevant to the issue of the test ban treaty. Said he to the Senate group last week: “In designing an antiballistic missile system, the major factors are reaction speed, missile performance, traffic-handling capacity, capacity for decoy discrimination, resistance to blackout effects and warhead technology.” Only these last two depend on atmospheric testing.

The reaction speed of such a missile must be almost instantaneous to blast off the ground, intercept and, through a precisely timed nuclear blast, destroy enemy missiles coming in at 17,000 miles an hour. “Traffic handling” refers to a system that prevents a flock of U.S. anti-missile missiles from blowing up each other as they climb to find enemy weapons. “Decoy discrimination” is a system that keeps the ABM from exploding harmlessly on contact with phony missiles and other chaff shot along with an attack. “Blackout effects” are caused by nuclear explosions of ABMs attacking an enemy bombardment, disrupt sound and electronic impulses in the gear that is tracking the incoming missiles.

As McNamara said, work on most of these problems could be carried out without the atmospheric atomic tests that would be banned by the treaty. Atmospheric tests would surely be useful in perfecting a warhead for an antimissile missile, but McNamara insisted that satisfactory progress could also be achieved with the underground tests that the treaty permits. As for solving the blackout problem, which cannot be duplicated without actual atmospheric testing, McNamara only said lamely: “We will be able to design around the remaining uncertainties.”

Caveat to Cheaters. But what might be the effect upon today’s U.S. nuclear superiority of Russian treaty cheating? McNamara argued that the U.S. could almost certainly detect any Russian nuclear tests of a size worth conducting. He conceded that the Soviets might get away with a test in deep space—20 million or more miles away from the earth —but such tests “would involve years of preparation, plus several months to a year of actual execution, and they could cost hundreds of millions of dollars per successful experiment.” Anyway, he said, the U.S. plans to launch within two months twin satellites under the Vela-Hotel program (TiME, Aug. 9). These space-snooping detectors are designed to spot unshielded nuclear blasts 200 million miles away from the earth.

The U.S. is also considering ordering more high-flying U-2 aircraft for scooping radioactive debris out of the air, more acoustic and pressure-sensing devices for feeling the pressure waves of a nuclear blast, more sensitive radio devices for detecting a shift in radio signals caused by 10,000-mile-high blasts, more instruments for spotting fluorescence caused when X rays from a nuclear explosion in space excite nitrogen in the ionosphere.

Still, what if the Soviets suddenly abrogated the treaty and started testings without attempt at concealment? McNamara, again, was reassuring: “The consensus is that the Soviets could not in a single series of tests, however carefully planned, achieve a significant or permanent lead in the strategic field, much less a ‘superweapon’ capable of neutralizing our deterrent force.” More important, McNamara promised that the U.S. would maintain “the vitality of our weapons laboratories” and “the administrative and logistic capabilities required to conduct a test series in any environment.”

Lead from Strength. Throughout his testimony, McNamara—sometimes in the past a thin-skinned congressional witness—displayed calm confidence, repeated his conviction that the U.S., in the immensity of its nuclear arsenal, will maintain, or even increase, its military superiority over the rest of the world’s powers. He faced squarely up to the fact that there are risks under the treaty provisions: “I do not pretend that this or any other agreement between great, contending powers can be risk-free. This one is not. Perhaps the most serious risk of this treaty is the risk of euphoria. We must guard against a condition of mind which allows us to become lax in our defenses.” But he pledged against such laxity: “This treaty is a product of Western strength. Further progress in arms-control arrangements with the Soviet Union—progress which we all want to make—depends critically on the maintenance of that strength.”

Certainly, no Government leader with any semblance of sanity would ever publicly advocate anything but maintaining vastly superior U.S. nuclear strength. But an omnipotent arsenal must continue to be a fact—never just a politician’s platitude.

Although the U.S. no longer has a perfect world monopoly on atomic power, as it had in the late 1940s, its strength is still so overwhelming that it can indeed use it to preserve the peace with the absolute confidence it had 15 years ago. Thus, any treaty-inspired euphoria that softens the arsenal or lets down the nuclear guard is unthinkable.

*The fissionable material—raw plutonium or uranium 235—for U.S. atomic weapons is in thousands of steel containers buried somewhere west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies. Of about 600 tons produced since World War II, some 400 tons are for weapons, the rest for peaceful projects.