WAR AND PEACE IN THE NUCLEAR AGE – TAPES C02003, C03001-C03002 JAMES GAVIN

Nuclear Weapons in Korean War

Interviewer:
OKAY. SO GENERAL CAN YOU EXPLAIN WHAT YOUR INVOLVEMENT WAS IN THE KOREAN WAR WITH OUR, WITH THE WEAPONS EVALUATION GROUP AND SO ON, IF YOU'D JUST...
Gavin:
Yes, I was with the Weapons System Evaluation Group and the war had already gotten underway when the scientists talked to me about it. The scientists of this country were very much in support of the Nuclear Weapons Program and testing, going back to Trinity shot. And here we had the first war come upon us in which the bomb wasn't very responsive to what we had to do. And the scientists were beginning to get concerned about it. I was in meetings with Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Charles Larson of MIT, Phillip Morse of MIT, Ed Bowles of MIT -- the electronics expert, and they asked me, the seniors asked me to take three or four of them to Korea. And they wanted to go see what the problem was that enabled the North Koreans to keep going and apparently keep winning and we were having trouble and not getting anywhere. And couldn't science do something to solve or to help solve that problem for us. So I took off. I was the chief briefcase-carrier, and we had a fascinating time. I'd had a lot of combat in Europe, and a lot of my friends now were in another grade higher up in Korea. And I saw them all and took these fellows to their mess and had them spend a night's sleep in their command posts and so on. They were very taken by the thing. I could describe many scenes that took place. The battalion commanders at four or five in the afternoon, and it's dripping, soaking wet and not having had anything to eat all day under fire, and had to make decisions whether to go one more mile before dark and get in dug on a mountain ridge that overlooked where they were, or just stay where they were and try to make the best of it. Practical, every day decisions. So we took a look around. We spent about six weeks there I guess, and again, that was the group, Dr. Charles Larson of Cal Tech, Ed Bowles of Raytheon/MIT, and so on, and they had Bill Shockley, a biologist now, he was a physicist then, and so on. We came back and met at Cal Tech, and there Lee DuBridge, the president of Cal Tech, agreed with us that the science community must get together to help the Armed Forces solve the nuclear problem as it pertains to the tactical forces, combat forces. Did it mean tactical nuclear forces? They were going to walk right into that. The first problem was the Air Force wouldn't participate in a study like that, because they could see what the outcome might be. So they didn't quite want to do it. We went ahead without them, and then they took part in part of it. I'll tell you a story that means a very great deal. But I can't substantiate it except to talk about the man who told me, who is now dead. But when they were talking about -- and this was called Project Vista, when they were talking about...the armed forces in Project Vista and what nuclear weapons could be done about it, one scientist said very strongly, I believe it was Oppenheimer, he said, "Now, we've got to change this national policy of the United States that allocates all fissile material to strategic weapons. We want to allocate some fissile material for making weapons for the ground forces." Well, a young man got up from the table and went out and made a telephone call to Washington, called his boss back there, and he said that "if this guy, Oppenheimer, isn't a communist, he sure sounds like one now. He wanted to change national policy that would allocate all fissile material to strategic weapons." Well, that built up the Oppenheimer case that led to the Gray board as you know and so on. I was very depressed--not depressed, I felt very sad about the whole thing, that intellectually you couldn't be more candid and outspoken and meetings of that sort and get an understanding and, and...people want to reciprocate with you and exchange ideas. But that was the tone of it. And when the study was all over, all the recommendations were made, all leading to helping the ground forces with the nuclear problem. And it was shelved. The interesting thing is it was shelved in the White House, the Office of the Science Advisor. And years later when I'd ask them if they'd read that study, they'd tell me how good it was. And that it was still there, maybe it's still there now, I don't know.
Interviewer:
SO THE RECOMMENDATION TO DEVELOP TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS TO HELP THE ARMY IN KOREA WAS SHELVED.
Gavin:
Yes. Yeah, Norstad particularly opposed it, to me personally. He said it's crazy, we're not going to do that.
Interviewer:
WHO OPPOSED IT?
Gavin:
Norstad.
Interviewer:
NORSTAD.
Gavin:
Lauris Norstad, yes. He was chief of NATO for a while and so on. And we were out of West Point, we're contemporaries, about the same time, and this attacked the very saint they all followed... the theory of doing -- the whole theory of warfare.
Interviewer:
BUT AM I NOT RIGHT THAT GENERAL EISENHOWER WAS ASKING FOR TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS EVEN AT THE TIME THAT HE WAS AT SHAPE?
Gavin:
Well, I don't know, but I'll tell you what happened with me and the General. When I left WSEG, I went to Europe. And you see, weapons are more than bombs. It could be contaminated soil, it could be detonations fired in Banner Pass that would make the pass absolutely uninhabitable for quite some distance around. It could be a lot of things. We were thinking of using devices that could be traced by the isotopes that are used in their manufacturing. It could be a lot of things besides bombs. Well, when I went to Europe from WSEG, I went to General Eisenhower and talked to him about it. And I urged that he get a nuclear physicist on his staff so the staff would understand what these problems are that they're going to have to deal with when they're starting to plan to use nuclear weapons. And he brought in a Dr. Robinson, who served on his staff for a couple of years. But out of Korea, which to a lot of us was a laboratory, came a lot of ideas about how we might do something for the infantry. Because after all, it was just a few years before when we were not going to need any infantry.
Interviewer:
WAS THERE DISCUSSION ABOUT THE ACTUAL USE OF TACTICAL WEAPONS IN KOREA? OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS?
Gavin:
Well, yes, the Air Force had a study group, headed by a man by the name of Colonel Don Zimmerman, who was a classmate of mine in the military academy. And I met him over there and he told me that his study clearly established the fact that if you got to beyond 25 high-explosive bombs in one bombing attack, when you got beyond that effort, you'd do much better to use one tactical nuclear weapon. Because in the ...explosives, these craters were made, but then there were enormous gaps in which people could be unharmed if they had dug a hole, a hole in the ground. But with the high explo— with the, rather, nuclear weapon, you had a blanket effect, the whole thing would go up.
Interviewer:
BUT DO THINK THERE WAS A — WERE YOU AWARE OF THE DISCUSSIONS AT THE POLITICAL LEVEL AS TO WHETHER OR NOT NUCLEAR WEAPONS SHOULD BE USED?
Gavin:
Well, I would, I would bet if you went through the records and looked through it with a fine-tooth comb you could find a dozen places where this was...thought about. People were concerned about it. That is why a university of the stature of Cal Tech wanted to do something about this problem. So, I personally didn't get into any other studies, but I talked with Zimmerman and I talked to other people about it quite a bit. We didn't know where we'd go after Korea. We thought the United States--that Korea may be a part of a global conspiracy that would involve the United States all over the place. We might get back in Western Europe again the first thing you know. So we were very anxious to learn more knowledge about this weapon, more-- get more ideas of what could happen if you used it and so on.
Interviewer:
DID YOU BELIEVE AT THE TIME, AND DID YOUR COLLEAGUES IN THE ARMY, THAT NUCLEAR WEAPONS SHOULD BE USED IN KOREA? WERE YOU DISAPPOINTED THAT THEY WEREN'T?
Gavin:
No, I wasn't disappointed, but I knew that we had to be open-minded about their use. The direction we were taking with Cal Tech was the correct direction. We examined the national policy which allocated all strategic weapons — all the material of nuclear was strategic weapons.
Interviewer:
WHAT DID YOU THINK ABOUT THE AIR FORCE'S REQUEST OR DESIRE TO USE STRATEGIC WEAPONS IN KOREA?
Gavin:
Well, they certainly didn't follow up on it, and that's a good thing. I don't know. I often wondered. I flew a couple strategic Air Force missions at, at one time or another in WSEG. I'll always remember Curtis LeMay saying about the Vietnam War, "bomb them back to the Stone Age." Well, that was the idea we wanted to get away from. That was the very idea that we wanted to leave alone. We wanted to use nuclear power, if it could be used discriminately, against targets that nothing else would deal with. We talked about it, did a lot, but didn't get the thing done.
Interviewer:
DO YOU THINK POLITICALLY IT WOULD HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE TO USE—-
Gavin:
No. Not now. I would say not now. Korea was a very close thing. Our allies stayed with us with much concern about the casualties and where the thing was going. I did sit in the Pentagon when we had questions arise about should we do this, should we do that? Should MacArthur be allowed to go down and get Chiang Kai-shek, come up and come ashore. Remember, he went down and saw Chiang Kai-shek at one time in Taiwan. And Mr. Truman was very unhappy with him when he did that, because he didn't have authority to do that. But what all should be done about this; we were all very concerned about it.
Interviewer:
BUT YOU DON'T THINK POLITICALLY IT WOULD HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE TO USE--
Gavin:
I don't think so, at all.
Interviewer:
COULD YOU TELL ME WHY NOT?
Gavin:
Oh a reasonably articulate person could outline what this would mean, the casualties that would occur, the casualties worldwide, it was just an unthinkable thing, and what would be the chain reaction. If we were to use a tactical weapon, what would be the next weapon we'd use? Maybe the other side would use a bigger one and we'd use a bigger one. And then there were books coming, like Mr. Shue's book about the nuclear world we'd have to live in if those weapons were used.
Interviewer:
SO IT WAS MORE A POLITICAL THAN A MILITARY DECISION NOT TO USE THEM?
Gavin:
Yes. At that point, yes.
Interviewer:
DO YOU HAVE ANY RECOLLECTIONS OF GENERAL MACARTHUR'S VIEWS ON THIS?
Gavin:
Well, we didn't talk about nuclear weapons. He talked a lot to me about airborne warfare he, he talked about going a thousand miles deep and landing and really creating a whole second battlefield. All sorts of visionary things, but some things I was concerned about and trying to write about. Uh, he was a very inspiring man to sit with and listen to, that's what you did with him-- And kind of remarkable you know, how he had things at his fingertips. Before you went in-- if you had an appointment with MacArthur, before you went in and sit down and get to talk to him, he'd go over the whole thing. He knew all about you, where you came from, where you were going, what you'd done, what you did in World War II in Europe. When I came out of my meeting with him, there was a colonel sitting at a side desk who was a contemporary of mine -- I hadn't seen him for a long time. And he kind of bent over, he said, Jim, now you've met God. And I walked out believing the guy said something real.
Interviewer:
BUT YOU DIDN'T EVER DISCUSS THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN KOREA WITH HIM?
Gavin:
He didn't. And maybe God's above that, I don't know. He didn't talk about nuclear weapons.
Interviewer:
OK.
Gavin:
I think he didn't know much about them, you know, probably. We didn't know much about them. After Hiroshima I guess it was— the Navy had the first big test. But a lot of us didn't know much about them for the longest while. And yet we were all talking a lot.
Interviewer:
DO YOU THINK THEY'VE EVER BEEN ANY REAL... USE?
Gavin:
Well... you see, with my background, I'm inclined to say, whenever you get new information, that's good. You've got to find out as fast as you can how good it is and what bad is co— there is about it. But new information is a good thing, if you're in— searching for a new thing. And we didn't know. We-- since the Hiroshima bomb, we have used isotopes in surgery, blood tracing, for many things. We lost-- we saved hundreds of lives by using isotopes in surgery in Korea. Uh, we don't know yet what the President's going to do with his strategic defense initiative, which involves, as I recall, using nuclear weapons out in space. We don't know where we're going with nuclear knowledge. This is one of the first things that's beyond Man's grasp and ability to understand that we've run into -- certainly in my time the first. I don't think we understand the bomb yet at all. I've always looked at the sun with awe and know that that's fusion. And we brought it down and packaged it in ( ), we've made it available to Man on the earth, and we don't quite understand it yet. I don't think I do at all.
[END OF TAPE C02003]

Nuclearization of the US Military

Interviewer:
General could you tell me what the Army's reaction was President Eisenhower's decision to cutback Army manpower in 1953-54. And rely much more heavily, then before, on nuclear weapons and massive retaliation?
Gavin:
Yes, well the Army was very much influenced by its experiences in Europe and in the Pacific in World War II. And knew it needed to be able to fight and apply power with some discrimination and some responsiveness to the actual situation rather than just overkilling. And the idea of tying it to a nuclear weapon left us cold, we didn't think much of that at all. We had a feel that, that we should be responsive to the challenge or the danger or the threat in a way that discriminates as power is applied, not just overkill with nuclear weapons. That didn't appeal to us at all.
Interviewer:
SO COULD YOU PUT THAT SLIGHTLY MORE IN LAYMAN'S LANGUAGE? I MEAN, WHAT WAS IT YOU WERE REALLY WORRIED ABOUT?
Gavin:
Yes, well, we had a Secretary of Defense who proudly announced that he was going to give us a bigger bang for our buck, that's what was supposed to intrigue us. And it didn't at all. And we'd been through the war, and we'd been through the planning for future wars, and we knew we had to have some more flexibility in our system than just simply build bigger bombs and bigger bombs. This wasn't the right theory, gone mad. And we didn't, we didn't believe in it.
Interviewer:
BUT THEY WERE BUILDING SMALLER BOMBS AS WELL AT THE TIME. WASN'T THAT A SUBSTITUTE FOR MEN?
Gavin:
Well, that was on our own initiative. I went to the Livermore Laboratories and talked about that. And we were able to bring them down from a, quite a big size. While Hiroshima was six feet, damn big. We had them down around the size of a football about, so quite small. And we thought, if you went for nuclear weapons to be used tactically, to destroy a tank, say, in the vastness of North Africa, where there's not a lot of people in cities. Wherever you would go with nuclear weapons, we wanted them to be small enough to be just precisely applied, surgically, to the target. And yes, we thought that was a great idea to get them small. They were much more useful to us.
Interviewer:
DID YOU THINK THEY WOULD REALLY BE USABLE, THAT IS, SMALL TACTICAL WEAPONS?
Gavin:
Well, I did. I testified before Congress on this point, and Senator Jackson talked to me about it quite a bit privately, and he wanted me to come into Congress with some kind of a plan that would show about how many would be used under what conditions. So I, I took a situation involving a war in the Middle East, and we'd been through several by that time, and developed a tactical situation that would require the use of a bomb against a battalion attack, say, for example. And that was a, that was an economic exchange, whether or not it was tactical advantage exchange had to be determined. But we thought it would. And I came to the final conclusion that we would need available to us something on the order of about ten tactical nuclear weapons in one day, though we'd only use maybe one or two, but this was a potential (?)( ) to have available.
Interviewer:
DID YOU GET THE IMPRESSION THAT FROM THE ADMINISTRATION'S POINT OF VIEW, NUCLEAR WEAPONS WAS WHERE THE FUTURE WAS, THAT THAT'S WHERE THE BUDGET WAS, FOR EXAMPLE, IF YOU WERE GOING TO KEEP YOUR BUDGET, YOU HAD TO BE ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS?
Gavin:
Well, you've talked about a couple of things. Keeping a budget is very-- is a very important thing. If this effort was going to go that-- in that direction, we would use nuclear weapons to satisfy our budgetary needs, this, we're getting into another territory. Because we were beginning to believe that the whole strategic posture of the United States in global affairs rests upon this strategic response, how well it could do, and those exotic things beyond the battlefield itself. So much as we went— were going in that direction, we were very uncomfortable about it. Because we didn't see that it would solve the problems, it would create more problems than it solved. And we thought in a lot of ways, it was...in response to those with dull minds who didn't have the capacity to figure out what the bomb meant. We didn't know what the bomb meant. We must talk about that. What's the bomb going to do? Would it serve any useful purpose? If so, what? And it was quite a thing, you know, careers were lost and so on, and were advanced by the views you took of the bomb.
Interviewer:
AND, BUT THE ARMY BASICALLY WANTED THE BOMB TO BE KEPT TO THE BATTLEFIELD IF POSSIBLE?
Gavin:
Yes, We did, indeed. We didn't want...in space, aero defense and so on,...talk about that. Since the army was responsible for the...missiles of...defense. But yes, keep it to the battlefield.
Interviewer:
CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT WHAT THE STUDIES REVEALED ABOUT THE POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES OF STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND'S WAR PLAN?
Gavin:
The consequences of?
Interviewer:
OF STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND'S MASSIVE RETALIATION WAR PLAN.
Gavin:
I was in a Weapons Systems Evaluation Group for a couple of years. And one of our very high priority ventures was to study the war planning in view of all of what was then in the inventory and available to us to use. That meant particularly nuclear weapons, both fission and fusion as well. Well, out of that came a judgment on the part of some higher-up in defense, that the war plans weren't exactly responsive. They were more used to bomb cities in the Hiroshima pattern rather than to get to the nuclear capacity of an opponent, Soviet or whoever. So studies were made following WSEG, the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group studies, that caused us to get into those areas, and we had one study done, second, third, fourth, and the fourth I got into it deeply. We were considering the need to bomb Western Europe if the Red army and Red air force moved in that direction and intended to stay and showed every evidence of succeeding and staying and establishing itself. And we were going to use surface burst nuclear weapons to fission diffuse, and fallout patterns were quite beyond what we expected at first. These were very critical. And they were to, in the end, cause some several hundred million casualties.
Interviewer:
CAN YOU JUST SPELL IT OUT FOR US A BIT MORE CLEARLY. YOU FOUND THAT THE WAR PLAN WAS PROPOSING TO DO EXACTLY WHAT IN WESTERN EUROPE? PLEASE REPEAT FOR ME. IF THE RED ARMY OCCUPIED PART OF WESTERN EUROPE, WHAT WAS THE RESPONSE GOING TO BE TO THAT SITUATION?
Gavin:
Alright, well, let's take it back a little bit to, to create the situation we had. Uh, we came back and were settling down to peace when we had to send troops to Europe, and we established ourselves all over again in Europe -- a lot of people don't realize that. And the army was there and there to stay, no matter what happened. Well, we were seriously threatened, we felt, by the Red army and knew that was the real danger in Western Europe. And if it came rolling across the frontiers of Czechoslovakia, Romania, Austria, Hungary, and so on, spreading itself into Western Europe, what will we do? Well, the services planned according to their ability and their particular skills. And the Air Force had a strategic weapons plan, and we were part of that planning and approved of it or not, you know. Now, that plan envisioned stopping the Red army, not in any way letting it move into Western Europe. And the question was asked then, suppose they occupy the airfields that we need to use in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and so on? Well, there was only one thing, and that was to drive the Red air force out of there or make them unusable. Well, how do you do that? You had-- you had to surface burst nuclear weapons that would crack the runways, destroy them, and incidental to that there would be a big fallout pattern downwind.
Interviewer:
WHAT SORT OF SIZE BOMBS WOULD BE THESE HAVE BEEN?
Gavin:
There would be probably 25-megaton weapon bombs.
Interviewer:
AND WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE RESULT OF THAT?
Gavin:
Well, the result of that would have been something in the order of several hundred million casualties -- quite a few. I was asked that very question by Senator Duff of Pennsylvania...Chairman of the Committee, and I might say there was a censor present and what I'm saying now was censored long ago as being acceptable to publish in the press. Now, I knew that if I answered that it is going to cause several hundred million casualties, there would be a lot of unhappy people in Washington. So I says, well, I believe the Strategic Air Command should be asked this question themselves. But I can tell you it's going to cost several hundred million casualties. And of course, the roof fell in because the Western Europeans were terribly upset. And yet, people in the planning position I was in, planning for something less than global total nuclear war, had to find other ways of fighting wars. And we had, in doing that, exposed the fallacy of what a great nuclear war would do for us. It wouldn't do anything for us but kill us all. This was what we had to talk about. And it's, as I say, it's been approved for talking about.
Interviewer:
WHAT SORT OF DATE WAS THIS EVENT THAT YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT?
Gavin:
Oh, that was about '56.
Interviewer:
HMM.
Gavin:
It's in the open press.
Interviewer:
BUT THAT PARTICULAR REPLY WAS NOT PUBLISHED?
Gavin:
Yes, it was.
Interviewer:
IT WAS?
Gavin:
Yes, it was. It's in the Congressional Record.
Interviewer:
WHAT WAS YOUR IMPRESSION OF THE AIR FORCE'S ATTITUDE AT THE TIME? I MEAN, WAS THERE A LOT OF CONFLICT THERE BETWEEN THE ARMY, THESE CRITICISMS OF THE ARMY-- HOW DID THE AIR FORCE REACT TO THAT?
Gavin:
Well, I had a lot of friends in the Air Force, and they of course, reacted violently to it, because that might stop what they were planning on doing. I felt very concerned about the Air Force at the time. Some good men who were professionals of a lifetime service worked with me, and we worked on this together and we're best of friends now. And they couldn't establish themselves within the public mind or in the Department of Defense with having a unique mission that could not be done someone else. They had to do something unusual and unique, and they had the rare skills to do that with the big bombers. The B-36 and so on were just coming into the inventory, and they thought they could do it. They didn't think much of missiles, they were a little not too enthusiastic about the Von Braun V-1s and V-2s, they thought that's what he was talking about. But he was talking about something bigger and different entirely. Missiles going out to 1,500 miles and possibly beyond. So they approached it tongue in cheek, they weren't sure that it was going to serve their needs, and yet they had to have a unique mission, and that's what they would get from that. And the other services went the same way. And my friends in the Navy and on the carriers went nuclear as fast as they could. And I went to tests with them, to Enewetak for 50 kT tests. And we had a tremendous amount of information about what weapons would do to people and weapons, and aircraft on the ground, dwellings, and so on.
Interviewer:
WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION WHEN YOU SAW THE UNITED STATES MILITARY NUCLEARIZING FROM TOP TO BOTTOM IN THE '50S? WHAT WAS YOUR OWN FEELING ABOUT THAT?
Gavin:
Well, it so happened that in 1956-- '56, if we didn't begin to nuclearize, we were going out of business. The Secretary of Defense told us he was going to give us a bigger bang for the buck and get down to it, none of this flexible warfare and so on. That was it. If you had to think your way through something like that, no one was going to help you.
Interviewer:
SO YOU WERE EFFECTIVELY TOLD IF YOU DIDN'T NUCLEARIZE...
Gavin:
You had to. Other things were cut. For example, we have troops all over the world, in Hawaii and Alaska and Panama, and they're...that is, say, 5,000 in Panama; Hawaii, 4,500; Nome, Alaska, another 5,000. Well, they'd be up there in service working the docks and piers, doing many things, doing tests in the Arctic environment or in Panama. And the Secretary of Defense just took a big colored pencil and drew a big circle about that and says that's a combat division now, that's, that's it. Well, a combat division is about 13,000 to 15,000 rough, tough fighting men who are trained to fight as a team, with all of the components of a good team, engineers, artillery and so on. And you can't just draw a circle on a map and say that's a division -- that doesn't make a division at all, that makes nonsense. So we ran into all kinds of things like that, that if you had any sense of responsibility, which I hope they had, to the American people, and to our armed forces, I had to tell the truth and ask the questions if they weren't being asked: What is this going to cost to us? What's it going to cost us, and what will it do to our combat capabilities? It would make them nil if you just went along blindly following it.
Interviewer:
WHY DOES THAT AFFECT THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS ISSUE? I MEAN, WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION, KNOWING WHAT THEY COULD DO TO SEE...
Gavin:
Well I knew all about the, the theories of war by Duohet and the people like that, Billy Mitchell, and all that stuff. And I had a feeling, and I talked to my scientist friends -- I had a good science advisory committee, a good one -- I talked to them a lot about this. War should serve some useful purpose. It isn't just done to create the loss of lives on a Napoleon-scale. That doesn't accomplish anything. And you should have a capability of accomplishing something when you go to war and have some vague idea how the thing's going to come out. You don't have to have-- know the answer. But you don't go into it blindly and just follow it, taking losses day in day out not knowing where you're going. And we felt that nuclear war, as they were seeing it, would mean the loss of the city of Washington, the whole thing would go maybe, we didn't know. New York, Chicago, where all -- where else would these bombs go? On the war plans, they were talking about things that would give us a fallout you couldn't believe. We had just finished the Pacific tests when we had people in meteorological stations 250 miles downwind when the "Shrimp" shot went off and took a whole island up into the sky and scattered it all over the islands all the way down the, down through the Pacific. Lapp has written a fine book on that, "The Voyage of a Lucky Dragon". These all were we were becoming aware of all these things. I'll tell you a little story -- when we got through with that shot, we began, it reminded me -- it was an awful fallout problem. We didn't realize how serious it was. Dr. Warren came to me from Boston College and told me about strontium-90 from the weapons would be into the grass, the cows would eat the grass, the babies would get nuclear weapons effects, through strontium-90 which they got into their system. Well aside from that, when we got through with the first big test, the "Shrimp" shot, I thought I'd take our people to Tripler General Hospital in Hawaii and check them to see, against the people who were in the hospital. So they had all the strontium-90, of course, iodine-135, caesium and things like that in their system, those people who were caught out in it. I went to Tripler and found that people in the hospital had in their systems, too. And we couldn't understand that. So we came right here to Washington, went out to Walter Reed and told them we wanted to do tests of the people there about what their systems retained from the fallout cloud that had been created in the mid-Pacific. Well, we found at Walter Reed we have people who were all subject to the effects just as though they were out there. And for the first time, we realized that the cloud traveled around the earth. And that began to really get to us then, because we knew what we were doing was something that possibly would lead to mass genocide of unprecedented millions. We had to find other solutions to solve our defense problems... than just blindly follow that.
Interviewer:
AND YOU DIDN'T FEEL THAT THE AIR FORCE WERE TERRIBLY-- AS CONCERNED AS THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABOUT THAT?
Gavin:
Well, as individuals when we would sit around the Officer's Club and talk about things and have a drink or something like that, yes, you got considerable concern. I think professionally, they had to find a, a role for their service. And they were good people, good professionals themselves. A lot of them I knew at West Point who were trained to do different things in the war. But when you get right down to it, as I say, the professional demands on them were such that they had to plan for what the could do and do uniquely as no one else could do. They couldn't, like the Navy, use a carrier. And the Navy, incidentally, got nuclear weapons as soon as they could. And if the Army had then been the Air Force, which is what it was, they had the capability of doing something, so they used the Air Force to do it. And as soon as the Air Force could break out -- that's one of the reasons they wanted to break out, having a unique nuclear capability of contributing directly to the winning of wars in the future, that no one else could do. I don't blame them a bit. If they took it seriously, that's what they would do.
Interviewer:
BUT THE ARMY WAS PRETTY KEEN TO GET IN THERE ITSELF WITH THINGS LIKE THE JUPITER MISSILE, WASN'T IT?
Gavin:
Well, we didn't hear the end of that in my time in the service that we were doing it just because we wanted to do something that everybody else was doing. The 240-millimeter artillery piece we have, why in the world did we get that? It was just to get established in the field of having nuclear capability. If you didn't have a nuclear capability around this city in 1957, you might as well fold up your shop. That was it, having nuclear capability. How good was it? How flexible were the weapons? Were they all great big monsters? We knew what the Soviets were doing, we used to follow every test they had. And they were making an awful lot of tests with small weapons, so much so that I was quite convinced they'd probably be used in surface to air missiles, and they would use them in surface to surface missiles, tactical missiles, in time. They were capable of it. Didn't have to use it.
Interviewer:
BUT YOU'RE SAYING THE ARTILLERY SHELL WAS INTRODUCED NOT BECAUSE THE ARMY REALLY THOUGHT IT NEEDED IT TO FIGHT, BUT BECAUSE IT NEEDED TO HAVE A NUCLEAR CAPABILITY.
Gavin:
Yes. How do you say this? We at that time felt that we had to be established, but to be established meant you had to have weapons that would show promise and usefulness in the service. I was in the Weapons System Evaluation Group, and we approved of the 240-millimeter, which is a big weapon, enormous thing about 8-10 inches in diameter, and very hard to move around in Europe, especially in the small European cities and towns. But if we didn't have a nuclear capability, a tactical nuclear capability, who would in land warfare? You know, the last time I saw Douglas MacArthur...and he said to me, and I had known him before, I'd seen him in the Philippine islands, and I just saw him, said hello, that's all. And I,...talked to him for a half an hour. He says, I want you all to remember now, you've got to make the infantry independent on its own environment. What he was saying is, as long as we have an army, the army's got to have the capability to fight in its own environment, protect itself, and seize what it has to hold and have an ability to hold it. We owe our people in this country, when you pay us to be soldiers and to understand and study and train, we owe them answers to the problems we're going to encounter.
[END OF TAPE C03001]

Army Develops Jupiter Missile

Interviewer:
GENERAL, IF YOU WERE SO-- IF THE ARMY WERE SO KEEN ON KEEPING NUCLEAR WEAPONS RESTRICTED TO THE BATTLEFIELD, WHY DID IT GO IN FOR A 1,500 MILE RANGE JUPITER MISSILE? I MEAN—
Gavin:
Yeah. Good question. Actually, it went into that range to keep the Von Braun team together, keep it under his wing. Making missiles is a very tricky and dangerous business, as we found out with the recent disaster down in Florida. I remember so many of them went to the smallest component would fail on us every once in a while, and the whole thing would blow up just off the pad. The Von Braun team was the best engineers I'd encountered up to my time when I was in the service. There were about a hundred twenty of them, you know, under a thing we called Operation Paperclip they were brought back from Panama, and they were good. And we learned a lot from them, and we wanted to keep them together as a team, and they wanted to work as a team with us.
Interviewer:
SO YOU MEAN THAT THE MISSILE WAS BUILT BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO KEEP THE VON BRAUN TEAM, NOT BECAUSE YOU REALLY NEEDED THAT MISSILE FOR ANY OFFENSIVE OR STRATEGIC FUNCTION?
Gavin:
No, that's not -- not quite like that. We wanted to develop a good missile and a reliable missile. We had the "Honest John," which is around 10-12 miles, it wasn't worth much... We had the (Corporal) but it was seen in Around the World in 80 Days. It was a good missile, it was 80 miles, but not really good enough, not accurate enough and so on, not portable enough. And then we got on to the Redstone, 200 miles. Now, when I got to the Redstone, I could see clearly we could get that proven, then we could put a satellite in orbit, then we could communicate around the earth -- and the Army had responsibility for global communications for the Department of Defense. Up to that time there were cables on ocean beds and so on. But we were going to put a satellite in, and we intended to do that in order to enable us to communicate. But you could get a hundred percent good, accurate, able performing missile when you go to 1,500. If you got that good there, you were awfully good at, say, 1,000 -- you had no problems anymore at 1,000. So we — and we saw the Russians--we got into their test network with them; we knew what they were doing, what they were talking about, and what they were planning on doing, and we had pictures of what they were doing, and we listened to them by radar when they talked, and so on. And we were going to get the best system we could devise. That's why we went to 1,500 miles.
Interviewer:
BUT IT WAS ORIGINALLY DESIGNED TO PUT A SATELLITE IN ORBIT, NOT TO CARRY A NUCLEAR WARHEAD?
Gavin:
Yes, that's right. That's right. On the way out there we, we launched a warhead that was weightless. We launched a warhead, a second one, that had an ablation nose, that is to say, the nose could burn. But not to the very core. Within the core would be the warhead or the bomb or whatever it would be. And then we were ready to go into orbit when we were not allowed to. But when we were told we could, we did in 90 days. We got one, got our first, Explorer I, into orbit. But that to us was more than the, just the satellite going into orbit. This was the opening of the door to the world of space. And we didn't know what was out there, but we were going to learn an awful lot fast. That we were sure about.
Interviewer:
SO WHICH WERE YOU MORE INTERESTED IN? GETTING INTO SPACE OR BEING ABLE TO DROP A HYDROGEN BOMB ON SOMEBODY 1,500 MILES AWAY?
Gavin:
Oh, well, we weren't thinking about a hydrogen bomb on people 1,500 miles away. That really would be an Air Force mission I would suspect. Anyway I think that developing the technical capability to do this--reach this level of performance is what we wanted to do. You know, people often say, why do you want to go to the moon for. Well, you can say, well it's there. But what it means is that you just have achieved the capability of getting there and doing that, and you know you can measure the performance. If the moon was halfway out to where it is now, we'd want to go there too, for sure.
Interviewer:
BUT WHAT I'M SAYING IS IN THE END THE JUPITER WAS USED NOT...IT WAS ORIGINALLY USED FOR SPACE PURPOSES, BUT IT ENDED UP BEING USED TO DELIVER H-BOMBS.
Gavin:
Well, let's get into it a little more in terms that explain I think more convincingly. In the first place, it was very difficult to go out to 1,500 miles. And we didn't have the nose cone licked. The nose cone, when we finally solved it, used what is called an ablation technique in the resins in the cone. The cone would burn molten flow, and you'd get through the core, the wall of that cone, burning, flowing material that's in flame. But inside where you would have the warhead would be perfectly safe. The heat wouldn't get in, the pressure and so on, wouldn't get into it. Next, you had the engines. In the Redstone, we had carbon veins that were in the flame, and as the flame impacted on those, as they moved, they caused the missile to move. With the Jupiter, we had a very unique system of gimbaling the engine, so that the engine movement steered the missile. The engine would move, and it would...move in response to this table it was under that enabled us to fly-- it's the principle of gyroscopes -- that caused it to react to itself, and it would move and so on, you know. Now, when-- as we went through each of these stages, each breakthrough and each system of getting more information, we doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and a thousand times increased our information back to the base from the thing in space. That was the greatest breakthrough, in getting that information back. There's so much of it. It would take days and days to reduce it all on the computer. But we learned to do our job, and learned to get the missile out there, and learned to do what had to be done. And every bit of information we've learned -- and I've tried to describe three — then was applied at once to the best missile we had, which was the Redstone.
Interviewer:
BUT ALL THIS INFORMATION AND ALL THIS EFFORT WAS GOING IN TO PRODUCE A MISSILE THAT WAS ALMOST IDENTICAL IN FUNCTION TO THE MISSILE -- THE THOR MISSILE -- THE AIR FORCE WERE PRODUCING.
Gavin:
No, I wouldn't say that was so. I wouldn't say that.
Interviewer:
WHAT WAS THE DIFFERENCE, FUNDAMENTALLY?
Gavin:
Well...the, the Thor was a missile that was built as airplanes were built. It was built and taken down to Canaveral and tried. And if it failed, then you had a lot of others you brought down there and stacked them up, and you took components off them and put them, put them into the one that had failed. Jupiter was based on a building block principle. Each component of the missile was checked out before it moved farther ahead to the, to the next phase of its flight. And in research -- and I've done a lot of it, industrial research as well as military research -- duplication isn't a sin. Very often you really make progress that way by being able to duplicate what someone else is doing beside you and comparing those with what you've accomplished. I wouldn't have thrown Thor out, nor the Jupiter out, and I think both of them made each other perform well.
Interviewer:
WHAT WAS THE ATMOSPHERE LIKE AT THE TIME BETWEEN THE AIR FORCE AND THE ARMY TEAMS?
Gavin:
Well, it was very competitive. I guess by nature the Germans are very competitive when they get into a team effort like that. And I got to know them quite well, and they were. And they knew that if they failed very often in their flights, they were out of business. So they had to succeed. And I walked into the laboratory one day, and I saw a little placard on the wall. It said, "A breakthrough a day keeps the Air Force at bay." So they recognized the competition they had. And you know, it urged them on; that very competition was a good thing.
Interviewer:
YOU DON'T THINK IT WAS WASTEFUL.
Gavin:
Oh, no. I don't know how future years will judge our space program. But so far I don't think that there's been any waste in it. We've learned an awful lot.

SAC War Plans

Interviewer:
CAN I JUST GO BACK TO THE AIR FORCE, THE SAC WAR PLAN ONCE AGAIN? WHAT WERE THE REACTION OF THOSE THAT YOU TOLD ABOUT THESE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF CASUALTIES, OR TO THE POLITICIANS, THE DEFENSE, THE PEOPLE IN THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, WAS ANYBODY, WAS ANYONE PERSUADED BY THAT TO GO TO SAC AND DISCUSS THE WAR PLAN AND TRY AND GET IT CHANGED?
Gavin:
No could do that. Even I couldn't do that very well. I'd be completely out of orbit and...out of my place in the scheme of things. I was chief of R and D, and I could tell my boss, "You can be unhappy about what's going on, but let me tell you this..." And he could go to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and say, "Are you really doing this?" and so on. And, "Shouldn't we talk about this in the Joint Chiefs? Should we really understand this before we go any farther?" And it's got to go that way. I could have, as a more junior officer in the chief of staff, I could talk to some colleague and say, "What's this going on I've been reading in plans and so on?" We could talk it over. But
Interviewer:
I'VE HEARD IT SAID THAT THE COMMANDERS IN CHIEF OF STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND IN THE '50S WERE REALLY CONTROLLED BY NOBODY.
Gavin:
Well, I guess they were controlled better than one of those institutions in the Pentagon are controlled. I was thinking that -- I shouldn't bring this up, but it's been on my mind, the launching of our Challenger. We're coming down to where there is an awful lot of disagreement about what should be done. And nobody seems to be making the decisions. You've got to have that in a military establishment. If you're not making decisions, if someone isn't taking the responsibility, you're nobody, you're not getting anywhere. So, I don't know. No and then we did things. We got into conflicts with helicopters for example. The helicopter was an air force vehicle, and the army was ordered not to have any. Finally, you were allowed to have one that weighed so many pounds, like five thousand pounds and so on, and you were always compromised on issues like that. And people could go ahead and go pretty far on those without having a higher-up approve of what they did. Prog-- compromise is a price of progress. You have to pay for progress. And compromise is where you get that. That's a political statement rather than military.
Interviewer:
I GUESS WHAT I'M ASKING IS DO YOU THINK THAT ANYONE AT ALL, EVEN THE PRESIDENT, COULD REALLY AFFECT THE NATURE OF THOSE AIR FORCE WAR PLANS IN THE '50S? DID THEY EVEN REALLY UNDERSTAND OR KNOW ABOUT THEM?
Gavin:
I would think so. I would think so. I... we've got a very strong democracy, and we have great respect for the office of President. And one word from him, and things happen. I think we-- the system works all right. I've thought a lot about that in the last few days, because I was two years in the Philippine army: '36, '37, '38. And I hate to see them getting into trouble like they're into. But they seem to be working their way out of it. We, we haven't had anything like that in a long, long time, and that's with the Civil War, and then it was different.
[END OF TAPE C03002 AND TRANSCRIPT]