• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 845 0

initiated a program called Operation Dragon Return. CIA officers were dispatched to Germany to hunt down the scientists who had been working in Russia, and the information gleaned from the returnees was considerable. It included technical data on Russian advances in radio technology, electronics, and armaments design. But to the CIA’s great frustration, when it came to NII-88, the repatriated German scientists claimed to have no clear idea about what was really going on there. It seemed that NII-88, like Area 51, worked with strict need-to-know protocols, and the German scientists hadn’t been cleared with a need-to-know. All the Germans could tell the CIA agents debriefing them was that Moscow’s top scientists and engineers were developing something there that was highly classified. Unlike in America, where German rocket scientists were put in charge of America’s most classified missile program at White Sands Missile Range, German scientists in Russia had been relegated to the second tier. With no hard facts about the extraordinary technological enterprise that was under way at NII-88, the CIA was left guessing. The speculation was that the Russians were developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, that could reach the United States by traveling over the top of the world.

The missile threat needed to be addressed, and fast. By 1956 Americans were constantly being reminded about this foreboding Red menace by the media. A January 1956 issue of Time magazine made Soviet missile technology its big story. The cover featured a drawing of an anthropomorphic rocket, complete with eyeballs and a brain, carrying a nuclear bomb and bearing down on a major U.S. city. The magazine’s analysts declared that in a little more than five years, Russians would be winning the arms race. The editors went so far as to prophesize a nuclear strike on the Pacific Ocean that would send a “cloud of radioactive death drift[ing] downwind” over America. Making the threat seem worse was the fact that there was no end to the confidence and bravado projected by the Soviet premier. “We’re making missiles like sausages,” Nikita Khrushchev declared on TV. If Russia succeeded in making these ICBMs, as was feared, then Russia really could place a nuclear warhead in the missile’s nose and strike anywhere in the United States. “I am quite sure that we shall have very soon a guided missile with a hydrogen-bomb warhead which would hit any point in the world,” Khrushchev boasted shortly after the Time magazine article appeared.

While the Soviets were concentrating efforts on advancing missile technology, the powerful General LeMay had convinced the Joint Chiefs of Staff that long-range bombers were a far better way for America to go to war. LeMay was not shy about expressing his disdain for missiles; he brazenly opposed them. LeMay’s top research-and-development commander, General Thomas S. Power, told Pentagon officials that missiles “cannot cope with contingencies” the way bomber pilots could. Another one of LeMay’s generals, Clarence S. Irvine, stated, “I don’t know how you show… teeth with a missile.” While the Joint Chiefs were deciding whether it was better to build up America’s arsenal with missiles or bombers, the nuclear warheads continued to roll off the production lines at Sandia, in New Mexico, with astonishing speed. Ten years earlier, in 1946, the U.S. nuclear stockpile had totaled two. In 1955, that stockpile had risen to 2,280 nuclear bombs. The reason for LeMay’s opposition to the missile programs was obvious: if the Pentagon started pumping more money into missiles that could carry nuclear warheads, LeMay’s bombers would lose importance. As it was, he was already losing money and men to the overhead reconnaissance nonsense being spearheaded by the CIA’s Richard Bissell over at Area 51.

In early 1956, the Air Force retaliated against Khrushchev’s war of words with the kind of response General Curtis LeMay knew best: threat, intimidation, and force. LeMay scrambled nearly a thousand B-47 bombers in a simulated attack on Russia using