50 Years Ago, Scientists Clarified the Threats

“We simply cannot afford to defend against all possible threats. We must know accurately where the threat is coming from and concentrate our resources in that direction. Only by doing so can we survive the Cold War.”

Almost 50 years ago, Edwin Land, then nationally famous for inventing Polaroid instant photography and an adviser to President Eisenhower, spoke these words to Albert D. Wheelon, a government analyst.¹ Land’s advice that threats had to be clearly defined for U.S. security to be protected seemed so relevant that the FAS Panel on Weapons in Space used the quote in its report Ensuring America’s Space Security (see page 8).

The early 1950s were similar to today in some ways. The U.S. public was still shocked by the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack on the homeland. Instead of postwar peace, the public discovered that our wartime ally the Soviet Union would be our foe. Then our atomic bomb of 1945 was matched by the Soviets’ first fission weapon detonation in 1949. Their thermonuclear weapon development closely tracked ours. Communist forces made war in Korea. Threats from a mysterious, amorphous enemy spurred Americans’ fear of traitors and McCarthyism. In military circles, the 1950 report known as NSC 68 reinforced the view a general war was likely to be set off by a Soviet surprise attack. When the first Soviet bombers capable of carrying nuclear bombs intercontinentally were seen by visitors to Moscow in 1953, U.S. intelligence predicted rapid production of these “Bisons” and “Bears,” as the vehicles of their future dominance.²

In April 1966, Sen. Stuart Symington (D-Mo.) held hearings that publicized the horror of a new surprise attack by Soviet bombers carrying a growing nuclear arsenal. The Air Force presented “evidence” that the Soviet heavy bomber force would be twice the size of SAC’s by 1959. Congress promptly award­ed the Air Force almost a billion dollars more than first requested to supply SAC with additional B-52s.

Privately, President Eisenhower doubted these arguments and was reluctant to spend what his generals asked. Behind the scenes, he had put in motion an answer to the unlimited threat scenarios that were scaring so many.

In March 1954 he had tasked James R. Killian, president of MIT, to form a panel of outside experts to look at how vulnerable to surprise attack the United States could be. Killian’s Technological Capabilities Panel (TCP), which gave its secret report in February 1955, proved to be one of the seminal interventions by outside scientists of the era.

Land was a key member of the TCP and, in his own right, had Eisenhower’s ear. Land’s approach — that “we simply cannot afford to defend against all possible threats” — expressed the panel’s view. After discussions with the Air Force, the scientists determined that bomber-versus-bomber war would be made obsolete by nuclear-armed missiles. Whichever side got these first could launch a faster surprise attack. The panel advised Eisenhower to speed up U.S. ICBM programs, which helped America’s be as far along as they were in 1957, when the Soviets beat us to the punch again with the surprise launch of a missile carrying the Sputnik satellite into space.

The panel also concluded that a working U.S. ICBM force was off in the future; so it also advised Eisenhower to kick U.S. medium-range missile development into high gear; these would give us a leg up in the new missile-on-missile arms race, sooner. Eisenhower agreed; the result was that Thor and Jupiter missiles were being deployed in Europe and offsetting the Soviets’ bomber threat by 1960.

Historically, many forces shaped these U.S. missile programs; the unique historic contribution of Killian’s panel was through its intelligence subcommittee headed by Land. It convinced the president that a high-flying plane design that the Air Force had rejected, which was being tested by a maverick at Lockheed, was the right vehicle to undertake systematic photographic reconnaissance of the vast, blank Soviet landmass. As Land said, “we must know accurately where the threat is coming from.” We needed to know if hundreds of Soviet nuclear-armed bombers would have the goods on us before we could counter with missiles.

Simple historical verdicts are always ques­tionable. Still, the TCP — and Eisenhower’s confidence in members such as Killian and Land — caused the United States to develop the U-2 aircraft and do so in record time. The U-2 launched a new era of hard infor­mation for U.S. military threat assessment. By mid-1956 the first U-2s began secretly overflying Soviet territory, photographing away with a camera system that Land had overseen. By December, the incontrovertible films showed no long rows of Bison heavy bombers lined up on Soviet airfields. And if so few were seen, how could Soviet bomber production whip past SAC’s bomber force in a few years? The new intelligence technology gave a clear answer: There was no bomber gap.

The story of the Killian panel shows that scientists do not have to be public opponents to be effective. Land’s biographer Victor K. McElheny writes: “Most commentators [on the 1950s arms race] see an inability to stuff the genie back in the bottle, or failed attempts at international control and restraint.” But by “helping open up a powerful new channel for intelligence, one that revealed the true size of the Soviet effort in atomic weapons, Land gave a powerful example of rational inquiry imposing restraint on supposedly uncontrollable tendencies to make war.” ³

The story is also about intelligence reform. Eisenhower also did not want the agencies that made up target lists for SAC controlling the film or its interpretation of the threat. CIA Director Allen Dulles had balked at getting his agency into the plane-flying business. But once the CIA was given the job of running the U-2 program, Dulles insisted that the CIA analyze the film as well. In these secret debates, Killian, Land, and others pushed for the CIA to adopt this new role, and the arrangement served U.S. intelligence well.

Later the missile programs stepped up by the panel’s intervention were hardly trouble-free. And the revolutionary U-2 program caused an international crisis in 1960 when the Soviets shot one down revealing this new form of espionage. Still, the Killian panel helped the country to follow a sounder military and intelligence path from 1955 than it would have taken otherwise.

1. Albert D. Whelon. Corona: The First Reconnaissance Satellites, Physics Today, February 1997, pp. 24-30.
2. John Prados. The Soviet Estimate: US Intelligence Analysis and Russian Military Strength. The Dial Press, 1982.
3. Victor K. McElheny. Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land, Inventor of Instant Photography. Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1998.