American Arsenal: A Century of Waging War

336 Pages·2014·1.05 MB·English

by  Patrick Coffey

AMERICAN ARSENAL
PATRICK COFFEY
AMERICAN ARSENAL
A Century of Waging War
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© Patrick Coffey 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coffey, Patrick.
American arsenal : a century of waging war / Patrick Coffey.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-995974-7
1. Military weapons—Research—United States—History.
2. Military weapons—United States—History—20th century.
3. Weapons systems—United States—Technological innovations—History.
4. Inventors—United States—History—20th century.
5. Military research—United States—Case studies.
6. History, Military—United States—20th century. I. Title.
U393.C545 2014
355.80973—dc23 2013015070
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Ellen
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 Edison at War
2 Gassing the Senator
3 Mitchell’s War in Three Dimensions
4 The Bombsight
5 Precision Bombing Tested
6 Napalm
7 The Switch
8 The Atomic Bomb
9 The Weapon Not Used
10 The Cold War and the Hydrogen Bomb
11 Missiles
12 War Games
13 Four Lessons from Vietnam
14 Star Wars
15 Smart Bombs and Drones
Epilogue
Sources and Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
AMERICAN ARSENAL
Introduction
I
began to think about this book while writing a book on the history of science, a book
that described the intersection of science and war including chemical warfare,
submarine detection, and the atomic bomb.1 C. P. Snow spoke of a divide between
scientists and nonscientists, and that has certainly been evident in weapons
development. But America’s defense efforts are divided in other ways as well, and the
rifts have become more evident in the limited wars America has fought since World
War II. Both nonscientists and scientists put too much faith in technology, politicians
did not understand the military’s commitment to victory, military officers saw
politicians as hacks worried about reelection, and everyone blamed defense contractors
for inflated budgets. All participants were driven by both higher motives (patriotism,
loyalty to their service branches, saving lives, and the advancement of human
knowledge) and baser motives (career advancement, glory, and profit). Military
officers, scientists, politicians, and businessmen have often spoken past one another,
and the results have been usually inefficient and sometimes fatal.
Military technology has always been important, but the outcome of nineteenth-
century wars did not depend on new weapons being developed while the war was under
way. World War I was different. Scientists and inventors were active participants,
developing new poison gases, airplanes, tanks, and submarine detectors that influenced
the course of the conflict. That trend accentuated in World War II, where the Germans
introduced rockets, jet propulsion, and nerve gas, and the Americans and British
invented radar, napalm, and the atomic bomb. In that war, technology determined the
outcome—if Hitler had possessed an atomic bomb in 1942, the war would have ended
on his terms.
America’s military focus changed with the twentieth century. Before 1917, the
United States had limited its foreign wars to the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific,
and the United States had followed Thomas Jefferson’s advice to avoid “entangling
alliances” in Europe. That changed when Wilson sided with England and France after
World War I had been deadlocked for more than two years. America had a good navy
and almost no army at all, but in less than eighteen months, its citizen-soldiers and
industrial might tipped the balance against Germany and Austria. Then, for twenty
years, the United States returned to isolation. America demobilized and ignored the rise
of Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese militarism until shortly before Pearl Harbor, when
President Roosevelt began to prepare for United States entry on the side of England and
the Soviet Union. After that war, America has remained entangled abroad in ways that
might have appalled its founding fathers.
The transformation—from isolationist state to superpower—has been unplanned,
undesired by many, and enormously expensive. It was also inevitable. The change is too
large for a comprehensive history, and this book describes it selectively. It begins in
1917, when Progressivism was the political movement of the day. Progressivism was
neither isolationist nor expansionist, neither Democratic nor Republican: Woodrow
Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, Josephus Daniels, and William
Jennings Bryan—very different in their ideologies and politics—all claimed the label
“progressive.” They favored regulations of railroads and banks, child labor laws, and
workplace safety regulations, and they brought those same high-minded attitudes to
war. When America entered World War I, many claimed that it did so with only good
intentions, and that the nation’s Progressive ideals would save lives because the United
States, fighting on the side of democracy, would shorten the war.
America’s academic scientists were not up to European standards in 1917, but the
nation was proud of its inventors, such as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. They made
practical things that people wanted—telephones, electric lights, motion pictures, and
automobiles. America’s inventiveness, combined with its Progressivism, meant that the
nation’s weapons should be both innovative and lifesaving, and the century would see
repeated claims along those lines. America’s use of poison gas was humane, because
gassed soldiers died from its effects less often than did soldiers who suffered wounds
from high explosives or shrapnel; the Norden bombsight was so accurate that bombers
could destroy factories and rail yards without hitting workers’ homes; atomic bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made an invasion of Japan’s home islands unnecessary and
saved a million American casualties; the Strategic Defense Initiative would shield
America from nuclear attack; “smart” bombs would find the ventilator shaft of an
enemy’s command center and leave a hospital across the street undamaged; and the
operator of a drone aircraft could sit in a cubicle, hovering, watching terrorists, striking
only when nocivilians would be hurt. As will be seen, some claims proved more
accurate than others.
Each of this book’s chapters illustrates the unplanned nature and the unintended
consequences of America’s military transformation. All history is selective, this book
more than most. I have emphasized weapons and strategy over foreign policy, and have
chosen stories that have, in my view, been undertold—the plan for all-out nuclear attack
against the Soviet Union, for example, rather than the Cuban missile crisis. Subjects
include submarines, chemical weapons, strategic bombing, atomic and hydrogen
bombs, the nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union, the missile race, the Reagan-era
Strategic Defense Initiative, “smart” bombs, the M-16 rifle, handheld antiaircraft
missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Some patterns emerge, and I go into most detail
about chemical weapons, strategic air power, and nuclear weapons.
The book has its principal characters, figures who appear in more than one chapter
and who marked the century. James Bryant Conant, a Harvard chemist who managed
development of the poison gas Lewisite in World War I, was civilian head of the
Manhattan Project in World War II, and unsuccessfully opposed development of the
hydrogen bomb in the Cold War. Curtis LeMay, the youngest American lieutenant
general since Ulysses Grant, was World War II’s most influential air commander, and
led the Strategic Air Command and then the Air Force in the Cold War. Edward Teller,
a nuclear physicist in the Manhattan Project, was known as the “father of the hydrogen
bomb” and was a proponent of unrealistic projects in Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars”