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 Air Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff would raise the number of bombs that could be used in a first strike against the Soviets from 30 to 133. LeMay was also one of the most powerful advocates of the creation of a new and thousand-times-bigger nuclear bomb, called the hydrogen bomb, the plans of which were being spearheaded by Dr. Edward Teller. Over the next forty-four years, seventy thousand nuclear weapons would be produced by the United States. LeMay was definitely not interested in spy planes or overhead. Spy planes didn’t have guns and they couldn’t carry weapons. Military might was the way to keep ahead of the enemy in the atomic age. That was the way to win wars.
Halfway across the world, in Moscow, in a military fortress called the Kremlin, Joseph Stalin saw what was going on at Operation Crossroads but with an altogether different set of eyes. First excluded from but then invited to the Navy’s nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, the Soviet Union had two representatives observing, one physicist and one spy. The physicist was with the Radium Institute, and the spy was a member of the MBD, the Ministry of State Security, which was the precursor to the KGB. The cover story for the spy was that he was a correspondent for the newspaper Pravda.
To Joseph Stalin, the atomic tests at Bikini were America’s way of signaling to the rest of the world that the nation was not done using nuclear bombs. It also confirmed for the already paranoid Stalin that the Americans were ready to deceive him, just as Adolf Hitler had four years earlier when Stalin agreed to a nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany and then was double-crossed in a deadly sneak attack. Unknown to the Americans, as Stalin watched Crossroads he did so with confidence, knowing that his own nuclear program was well advanced. In just five months, the Soviet Union’s first chain-reacting atomic pile would go critical, paving the way for Russia’s first atomic bomb. But what has never before been disclosed is that Joseph Stalin was developing another secret weapon for his arsenal, separate from the atomic bomb. It was almost straight from the radio hoax War of the Worlds—something that could sow terror in the hearts of the fearful imperialists and send panic-stricken Americans running into the streets.
Ten months passed. It was nighttime on the Rio Grande, May 29, 1947, and Army scientists, engineers, and technicians at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico were anxiously putting the final touches on their own American secret weapon, called Hermes. The twenty-five-foot-long, three-thousand-pound rocket had originally been named V-2, or Vergeltungswaffe 2, which means “vengeance” in German. But Hermes sounded less spiteful—Hermes being the ancient Greek messenger of the gods.
The actual rocket that now stood on Test Stand 33 had belonged to Adolf Hitler just a little more than two years before. It had come off the same German slave-labor production lines as the rockets that the Third Reich had used to terrorize the people of London, Antwerp, and Paris during the war. The U.S. Army had confiscated nearly two hundred V-2s from inside Peenemünde, Germany’s rocket manufacturing plant, and shipped them to White Sands beginning the first month after the war. Under a parallel, even more secret project called Operation Paperclip—the complete details of which remain classified as of 2011—118 captured German rocket scientists were given new lives and careers and brought to the missile range. Hundreds of others would follow.