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without any guns. But like O’Donnell, Leghorn was able to recollect Operation Crossroads with precise detail after more than sixty years. For Colonel Leghorn, this is because he remembered exactly how it made him feel. “I knew in that life-defining moment the world could not ever afford to have a nuclear war,” Leghorn says. The only sane path to military superiority in an atomic age was to spy on the enemy so that you always had more information about the enemy than the enemy had about you. Leghorn says, “That was the way to prevent war and that is how I formulated the original idea of overhead.”

At the time, in 1946, America’s intelligence services had virtually no idea about what was going on in Russia west of the Volga River and absolutely no idea what was happening west of the Ural Mountains. Leghorn believed that if the United States could fly secret reconnaissance missions over Russia’s enormous landmass and photograph its military installations, the nation could stay ahead of the Russians. By spying on the enemy, America could learn what atomic capabilities the Russians had, what plutonium- or uranium-processing facilities existed, what shipyards or missile-launch facilities the Soviets were constructing. And because Leghorn was a scientist, he could imagine precisely the way the military could accomplish this. His idea was to create a state-of-the-art spy plane that could fly higher than the enemy’s fighter jets could climb or than their antiaircraft missiles could travel. In that moment during Operation Crossroads, Leghorn committed himself to developing this new philosophy of spying on the enemy from above, a concept that would come to be known as overhead, or aerial, espionage. Leghorn’s efforts would take him from the halls of Congress to the corridors of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command. There, he would be at odds with a third set of eyes watching the twenty-three-kiloton Baker bomb at Crossroads. The eyes of Curtis LeMay.

LeMay’s perspective could not have been more diametrically opposed to Leghorn’s spy plane idea. LeMay believed that atomic bombs, not conventional explosives, won wars. Japan did not surrender after the firebombing of Tokyo. The empire surrendered only after America dropped its second nuclear bomb. During the atomic tests at Bikini, LeMay knew what only a few others knew, and that was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recently reversed America’s long-standing national policy of only going to war if attacked first. The JCS’s new and top secret first-strike policy, code-named Pincher, now allowed the American military to “strike a first blow if necessary.” A single effort could include as many as thirty atomic bombs dropped at once. The new and unprecedented policy had begun as a planning document less than one month after the Japanese surrendered, on August 15, 1945. Ten months later, on June 18, 1946, the policy legally took effect. No doubt this influenced LeMay’s perspective at Crossroads.

When it came time for LeMay to present his observations on the test series to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he narrowed them down to three succinct points. “Atomic bombs in numbers conceded to be available in the foreseeable future can nullify any nation’s military effort and demolish its social and economic structures.” In other words, LeMay would argue, America needed lots and lots of these bombs. LeMay’s second point was even more extreme: “In conjunction with other mass destruction weapons, it is possible to depopulate vast areas of the Earth’s surface, leaving only vestigial remnants of man’s material works.” But it was LeMay’s third point that would fundamentally shape the future U.S. Air Force, which would come into existence the following year: “The atomic bomb emphasizes the requirement for the most effective means of delivery in being; there must be the most effective atomic bomb striking force possible.” What LeMay was arguing for was a massive fleet of bombers to drop these nuclear bombs.

LeMay got all three wishes. Three years later, after he was promoted to commander of Strategic