American Nukes

About THE MARK 36 Bomb

If a nuclear war was happening now, if Russian missiles were at the threshold of space releasing their warheads to rain down upon the United States, if those warheads were racing down upon you, you would never know it. The time from launch to detonation is only thirty minutes and though surely the United States military, with its surveillance capabilities, has detected the launches, computed the trajectories of the missiles, and is, right now, responding with its own missiles, there wouldn’t be the time or any real purpose in alerting you.

There is less to worry about than you might think. For tens of millions of people—and maybe for you—there would be no experience of nuclear war at all, no moment when you realized that the end was near, that your own personal apocalypse was upon you. You would just be, and then you would just not be.

If you were less lucky, if you weren’t vaporized or incinerated in the blast, if you were in the smoke and dust below the bomb, horribly injured but alive still, or if you were farther away, shocked by the shock wave, looking up at the rising mushroom cloud’s unexpected colors, you might, in some corner of your mind, think to yourself, “At least I’m still alive.”

That’s admirable optimism and impressive fortitude but both entirely misplaced, for the nuclear strike you had just experienced will unfortunately be only the first. Several more will soon follow, in minutes, in seconds. The warhead that struck was one of several released by a single missile and there will be more, from that missile or from others, their arrival times staggered to increase the combined shock waves of the explosions or to avoid the first blast inadvertently damaging an incoming warhead.

Any target worth striking is worth destroying and with a percentage of the missiles malfunctioning, a percentage maybe intercepted in some way by the target country, and with inaccuracies in aiming mattering more than you might think, the smart move is to hit your targets again and again.

Up until 1990 the United States planned to hit the Moscow area with 689 nuclear weapons, after all.

Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the period when the Mark 36 bomb was deployed, it was much the same. There were 920 Mark 36 bombs made and at one point this bomb alone made up half of the explosive power of the entire US nuclear arsenal. War plans called for a total of 3200 warheads to hit the Soviets (and China, too, even if they were not part of the conflict, such was the indiscriminate nature of nuclear war planning), including twenty-six nuclear strikes on Moscow.

So much the same and yet so much different. The Mark 36 would have been a primary weapon in the nuclear planner’s vision of a nuclear war because it was a world with ICBMs still in their infancy. Their nuclear war, say in 1958, would not have been an all-all-at-once, over-in-hours type of war we that we would expect. Their nuclear war would have lasted for days.

In one dramatized scenario, in the film Power of Decision, produced by the Strategic Air Command in the late 1950s, Soviet bombers attack the United States and SAC responds with a well-laid and well-rehearsed plan. Once mysterious radar blips appear on early-warning screens, over fifteen hundred aircraft are launched to fail-safe positions, poised to continue on their bomb runs into the Soviet Union. Then unconfirmed missile strikes occur in Ohio, Michigan, Colorado, and at advance military bases. Further attacks occur throughout Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe. The details are sketchy and the US bombers hold at their fail-safe positions until multiple nuclear missile detonations are confirmed in Japan. Then the SAC bombers are released, ordered to continue on to their targets. All nuclear missiles are launched.

The missiles get to their targets first but the main strike force, the bombers, takes time. Even after reaching the outer edge of the Soviet’s early-warning radar it is another four hours of flight time to reach the innermost targets.

1517 US bombers take off, 1219 strike their targets, and 142 planes are destroyed in this first wave. Hundreds more bombers (some just back from their missions) are lost in Soviet strikes on forty-six US-located airfields, utterly devastating the bases, and another twenty sites are heavily damaged. The overseas bases are hit, too, of course, but information on their condition is “spasmodic.” Air Force officers seem to like that word.

The United States homeland suffers, too. New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles’ industrial areas are completely destroyed. Boston, Buffalo, Richmond, Knoxville, St. Louis, Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and San Francisco “suffered severe damage and high casualties” according to the intelligence officer in the film. Fort Worth, Dallas, and Miami are also struck by Soviet missiles and bombers. The bombers come in two waves, four hours apart, on that first day.

The intelligence offer, standing before his commanders, briefs them that:

“We have failed in our primary mission, deterrence. However, our secondary mission, of destroying the enemy, is apparently fulfilled. Catastrophic damage has been inflicted on the United States. We have only spasmodic communications with the most affected areas…Total personnel causalities are estimated to exceed sixty million. This includes approximately twenty million wounded” with no emotion or additional commentary shown by anyone.

Over a fourth of the 1958 population of the United States killed on the first day of the war, with tens of millions more wounded, with tens of millions more exposed, or soon to be exposed, to massive amounts of radiation.

The US sends its second attack seven hours after the first, adding and subtracting targets based on first-wave battle-damage reports and other new intelligence. A third wave will be launched twenty-four hours after that. The war lasts four days, although no nuclear explosions occur outside of the Soviet Union after the morning of the third day.

Then, at the end of the film, General “Pete” Larson speaks the film’s summation after learning of the vast damage to the Soviet Union’s forces, and after hearing that eighteen unofficial cease-fire requests have been sent by the Soviets:

“They must quit. They have no other choice. We have the air. We have the power. And they know it.”

Nuclear war was different then, a little slower, a little less automatic. It was to be an air war fought the way the air war against Japan was fought, the way the B-29s dropped firebombs on Japanese cities again and again, the way the bombers dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a war fought and won by the new power in war, air power.

To instill fear in the enemy to prevent nuclear war, and to end that war with the upper hand if the enemy ignored that fear, the Air Force wanted thermonuclear bombs, lots of them, they wanted long-range bombers, lots of them, and they wanted globe-spanning nuclear missiles, lots of them, too.

“We must keep it that way,” wrote SAC commander Curtis LeMay in 1956, “at the same time pushing forward our research and development programs on advanced type aircraft and guided missiles to guarantee future leadership in the air.

The airman knows the futility of war and his job today is to help prevent war from happening. We can and must insure our security by our continuing efforts toward a peaceful solution to world problems, backed up with the type of military strength our potential enemies fear most. In such an atmosphere, with that strength behind our position of moral leadership in the world, we can look to the future with confidence.”

Maybe. Maybe the vast nuclear arsenal of the 1950s and 1960s kept the peace, kept the Soviets from invading Western Europe, each side fearing to use the weapons first because the other guy had them, too, a technology so terrible that nuclear arms, such powerful weapons, were, somewhat counterintuitively, too powerful to use.

Maybe.

Or maybe we just got lucky.

Gallery

Nukemap

NUKEMAP is a web-based mapping program that attempts to give the user a sense of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. It was created by Alex Wellerstein, a historian specializing in nuclear weapons (see his book on nuclear secrecy and his blog on nuclear weapons). The screenshot below shows the NUKEMAP output for this particular weapon. Click on the map to customize settings.

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