The Digby team was about halfway done with its work, and in fact had presented a preliminary briefing to some Air Force officers, when Albert Wohlstetter conducted a raid on Digby’s operation to assemble a group of analysts to help him and Fred Hoffman with their next project on SAC vulnerability, which when finished in 1956 would be numbered R-290. Wohlstetter, who had been busy in 1953 and 1954 briefing the overseas-base study in Washington, had not been a part of the Strategic Objectives Committee, and so had little interest and only scant awareness of the rationales for a counterforce strategy. Indeed, one premise of R-290 was that our “principal deterrent… must be our ability to destroy their [Soviet] cities.” As Wohlstetter’s raid decimated Digby’s ranks, the counterforce project slowly ground to a halt, and further elaboration or systematic thinking on the counterforce idea fell into a state of limbo.
Two people at RAND who did try to keep the flame burning were Andy Marshall and a man who joined RAND’s economics division just as Digby began his study, Joseph Loftus. Before coming to RAND, Loftus had for four years been civilian director of the Target Programs office in Air Force Intelligence. The Air Target Division, of which Target Programs was a part, was filled with military targeteers busily applying to the atomic age the principles that they had pursued in the strategic-bombing campaigns of World War II. It was these officers who came up with such atomic targeting concepts as “the Sunday Punch” and “killing a nation.”
Loftus found himself growing skeptical of these strategic-bombing concepts. When he came on board in June 1950, the SAC Emergency War Plan (EWP) in effect had only twenty-four weapons allotted to Bravo targets, and most of them aimed so that they could pick off Bravo and Delta targets—airfields and cities—at once, with the emphasis on Delta. In fact, the whole EWP was geared primarily to Delta, far more than Loftus thought necessary or wise.
The atomic-energy division of Loftus’ office, run by a young nuclear physicist and Russian expert named Spurgeon Keeny, was finding evidence of a growing Soviet atomic-energy industry, suggesting that the Soviets would soon be amassing their own atomic arsenal. With that in mind, Loftus figured that the number of Bravo targets would soon be expanding and that, therefore, Air Intelligence would have to devote far more careful attention to collecting and analyzing data on such targets as air bases.
Loftus was not entertaining no-cities concepts, nor was he mulling over the implications of a Soviet atomic force on the credibility of the U.S. deterrent, as Brodie and Bill Kaufmann did later. Loftus would have considered those lines of thinking too abstract, irrelevant to his own concerns. To Loftus, the issue was simpler: the Soviets were soon going to build more A-bombs, those bombs would be able to destroy America; as a target planner, he had to develop better intelligence on Bravo targets so that SAC could destroy the airplanes carrying those bombs first in the event of war.
The problem was that the officers in the Evaluation Division of Air Targets were thoroughly ingrained in the LeMay/World War II tradition and thus thought that airfields were inappropriate targets for bombing, especially for the big blasts that blew out of the A-bomb. And as it happened, all intelligence tasks concerning Soviet airfields were assigned to Evaluation.
In a bureaucratic end run around this obstacle, Loftus set up within his own Targets Program shop something he called a “Research Unit.” Surreptitiously, Loftus put the Research Unit to work on determining the physical vulnerability of an airfield—not only of the runway and the bomber themselves, but also of essential supplies, fuel and tools—and on figuring out which airfields could support the long-range Soviet air force. Obviously, SAC had to get in the act to provide much of the data. Eventually, General Jim Walsh, head of SAC Intelligence, became actively involved in the effort—mainly because, once Walsh and LeMay discovered what was going on, they didn’t want it to be left under the control of a civilian like Loftus. A study finally emerged out of the joint SAC-Target Programs effort. SAC insisted on controlling distribution and no more than a dozen copies were made.
The study was numbered ATD-751, and it was an outline of a war plan that would emphasize counterforce targeting much more heavily than prior EWPs had done. The basic idea behind the study, and formulated as a result of the Research Unit’s computations, was that a 500-kiloton weapon exploded high above an airfield could not only make a big mess but leave the base inoperative for roughly a week: even if the landing strip could be repaired before then, simple items like screwdrivers and other essential supplies would have been destroyed.
Loftus worked like a madman on the study all through 1952, frequently staying up all hours making sure that everything was just right. To some analysts in Target Plans, the job was routine and mechanical—Kharkov today, Kiev tomorrow…. But Loftus behaved as if the war were starting tomorrow. He was a moody man, with a black sense of humor and a grim seriousness. He worried about the problem all the time. He had nightmares that war had come and he had not properly counted all the Soviet airfields. Loftus also had great faith in the power of analysis, that if you worked long and hard enough at it, you could solve any problem. And so Loftus worked long and hard at making sure he knew every Bravo target in the U.S.S.R.
A lot of data was available even as early as 1952, much more than SAC wanted anyone on the outside to know. There were aerial photographs taken by German pilots during World War II, interrogations of captured German scientists who had worked on Soviet military projects, reports from spies and émigrés, communications intelligence (known in the trade as COMINT) intercepted by the supersecretive National Security Agency. Since prior to this time not very many in SAC or Air Intelligence paid close attention to the Bravo mission, Loftus and his Research Unit were the first to examine this enormous haystack of intelligence data systematically, at least in the context of atomic-weapons targeting.
ATD-751 was completed late in 1952. Somewhat to Loftus’ surprise and much to his delight, it was implemented the next year as an integral part of SAC’s Emergency War Plan. The EWP written in 1953 called for nearly 200 sorties devoted to the Bravo mission. All the Delta targets would also be attacked at the same time, according to the EWP. But that didn’t bother Loftus. He wanted to cover the targets of a soon-expanding Soviet long-range bomber force; he was interested in counterforce, in war-fighting, not in no-cities. And here were his ideas, virtually unaltered, set down in the official EWP.
As the EWP guidelines were translated into actual operational plans at the beginning of 1954, however, Loftus noticed something strange. The programming people in Air Targets were changing the desired “aim points” on the target maps—just slightly, but enough to compromise Loftus’s objectives. Many Soviet airfields were situated within five miles of cities, a degree of proximity tempting to military targeteers trained in the World War II style of strategic bombing. They moved the aim points slightly away from the air base and closer to the city, trying to “kill” both with the same big shot. They called this “Bonus.” Still more disturbing to Loftus was that, in case killing both proved technically difficult, the targeteers would put far greater emphasis on Bonus than on counterforce.
The more Loftus thought about it, the more he realized that the Air Force, and especially SAC, were interested not in counterforce, but in mass destruction. The first time Loftus went out to SAC Headquarters in Omaha, General Jim Walsh, director of SAC Intelligence, had invited him over to his house for cocktails. As they entered the foyer, Loftus noticed a huge Bible on an end table just to the side of the entrance. Walsh was in the middle of a frequently delivered mini-lecture, explaining to Loftus that the big bomb was meant for big damage.