Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [166]
Meanwhile, in the mid-1950s, the Americans began developing another innovation in delivering nuclear warheads. As bombers could not always get through, and land-based missiles were potentially vulnerable to strikes by their counterparts in the Soviet Union, military planners thought it desirable to put a third set of weapons in motion, and to permit their concealment from an enemy’s prying eyes. These were missiles launched from submarines, or SLBMs. (Robert Oppenheimer had named the Trinity test for John Donne’s ‘three-person’d God’; the Cold War American nuclear posture would be termed the ‘triad’.) Polaris missiles, as they were called, were first deployed in 1960 on the George Washington, a nuclear-powered submarine. Second and third iterations of the Polaris improved range and accuracy, and version three could be topped with three warheads, which clustered around a target and thus increased the likelihood of its destruction. Late in the decade, the United States produced a missile that carried up to ten warheads, each of which could be programmed to strike a different target—these were multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIR Vs. What would have taken ten bombers to deliver a decade earlier could now be launched at an adversary with greater speed and accuracy than most air strategists had dreamed of.56
Despite such innovations, by 1960 there was in the United States ominous talk of a ‘missile gap’ favoring the Soviet Union. Yet, by every objective measure, the American nuclear arsenal, its weapons and delivery systems, far outstripped that of its rival. Khrushchev bluffed about Soviet capabilities, bragging about his missiles and crowing that Soviet satellites were growing lonely in space while they waited for their American friends to join them. But no boasting could conceal that the Soviet economy was far less productive than the American throughout the 1950s. The index of American striking power was in 1955 some forty times greater than that of the Soviet Union. The United States had B-47 Stratojet bombers and B-52s, all able to refuel in mid air and thus reach the Soviet Union with their nuclear payloads. Soviet bombers were far more limited. Nor were Soviet air defenses much good; Curtis LeMay believed that the US Strategic Air Command (SAC) could destroy the entire Soviet military apparatus ‘without losing a man to their defenses’. US bases in Europe and Asia offered proximity to the Soviet homeland that the Soviets could not match.
And, despite their early gains in missile technology, the Russians quickly fell behind there too: by the end of 1962 the Soviets had roughly two dozen ICBMs on station, while the Americans had 284. As yet the Soviets had no SLBMs.57
It was Khrushchev who recognized that nuclear superiority was not essential for his nation to be taken seriously as a great power. It was enough to have some nuclear weapons, tested for all to see, or at least bragged about, and to threaten occasionally to use them. When, in October 1956, Israel invaded Egypt and was quickly supported at Suez by Britain and France, Khrushchev (through a subordinate) asked British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, ‘What situation would Britain find itself in if she were attacked by stronger states possessing all kinds of modern destructive weapons?’ Khrushchev credited this blunt warning for the British decision to back down. It was Khrushchev’s revelation, according to his biographer William Taubman, that the menace of Soviet missiles, small in number though they might be, would be enhanced if they were protected against an American first strike by their placement in underground silos. British and American fears that Khrushchev might be crazy or a ‘megalomaniac’ gave the Russian leader room to