Mushroom Cloud: Book I of the First Strike Series

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1816

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas J. Yeggy is a graduate of the University of Iowa College of Law and practiced law in Davenport, Iowa, and Rock Island, Illinois, for many years. He served as the mental health and substance abuse judge for Scott County, Iowa, for more than 25 years. In that position he developed a keen understanding of the difficulties that everyday life presents regardless of social or economic status. As a judge, he authored more than 1,500 opinions, and only one was reversed by the appellate courts. He was also a licensed Series 7 broker at Beyer & Company Investments in Davenport, Iowa, for more than two decades.

Yeggy’s interest in the development and control of nuclear weapons goes back to images he once saw of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With his keen insight into the nature of mankind and their proclivity to use violence as a problem-solving mechanism, he wondered how we had made it through crisis after crisis without destroying ourselves. In 1992, when Robert McNamara stated that we had made it through the Cuban Missile Crisis with just plain dumb luck, Yeggy decided to investigate just how lucky we have been. He explains what he found in this First Strike series. We have been very lucky, but it may not continue.

Yeggy currently resides in Pensacola Beach, Florida, with his wife, Eileen, and spends summers in Davenport with his grandchildren, Jeff and Ashley Brown. You can usually find Thomas and Eileen at Emeis Park in Davenport on a late summer afternoon running with their granddogs, Otis and Emme. The author’s photo is from Fort Pickens Road in Pensacola Beach, courtesy of Eileen Yeggy.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Historical fiction always presents a challenge. Melding the real with the imagined puts authors in a tight situation. I want to be true to the events as they happened while either filling in the blanks or adding my own perspectives or twists.

Most of the characters in Mushroom Cloud are actual people from history, as are the circumstances surrounding the Manhattan Project and paramilitary operations. In fact, a large part of the dialogue can be sourced to reliable historical journals and presidential libraries. Although some may try to suggest real-life identities for various characters in the story, Mushroom Cloud is a work of fiction and should be read only as such. The characters, especially the main character, Dr. Caleb Young, a prodigy who received his PhD in physics from Princeton University in 1939 at the age of eighteen, should be construed as a creation of the author’s imagination and a composite of the many brilliant scientists of that period.

You won’t find Caleb Young in any history books or scientific journals, but he is not without basis in fact. Although sprinkled with a liberal dose of imagination, Caleb’s character rises from reams of historical lore about countless scientists who offered their extraordinary talents at a critical juncture in history. They realized that psychopaths such as Hitler and Stalin had to be stopped, and they rose to the occasion. Scientists such as Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann all played a crucial role in the Manhattan Project. Their heritage can be traced to Hungary in the early 1900s. Similarly, Caleb Young’s parents fled from the Hungarian government’s Magyarization process around 1918 to become professors at the University of California, Berkeley. Our story begins there. Other scientists were also utilized to create Caleb Young’s character, including Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development from 1941 to 1951, and James R. Killian, the first Chairman of the President’s Science Advisory Committee. Many others made noteworthy contributions, and the parts they played in shaping Caleb’s character are what make this story worth telling.

In 1943, the world found itself in a dark place. Hitler had laid waste Eastern Europe and was driving toward Moscow. England was struggling for survival as London was being bombed daily. The Allies were regaining their foothold in North Africa. In the Asia Pacific region, Japanese imperialism had strewn tens of millions of bodies across the landscape. The United States Armed Forces in the Pacific were still reeling from the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. But the scientific and industrial might of the United States, coupled with the Russian strategy of overwhelming better-equipped German forces with its sheer number of troops, offered a glimmer of hope.

After the war and during the Cold War, US civilian and military leaders often turned to the scientific community for answers to questions concerning the United States’ vulnerability to a preemptive strike by the Soviet Union. Many scientists produced answers, laboring in obscurity in organizations such as the RAND Corporation. Other scientists produced essential reports such as the Lincoln Project and the Gaither Report. But there were also many so-called Caleb Youngs in these and other scientific organizations who were relegated to obscurity by mainstream historians who elevated others to fame beyond their contributions. This book and the others in the First Strike series are fictional insights into those in the scientific community who dedicated their lives to the defense of freedom. It is intended to put them in their proper place in history.

Thomas J. Yeggy

PREFACE

For the greater part of the last half of the twentieth century, two nations—the Soviet Union and the United States of America—stood eyeball to eyeball on the brink of a nuclear war involving the equivalent of more than 10,000 megatons of TNT. Although scientific minds differ on whether a nuclear exchange (full or limited) would have resulted in long-lasting effects that would threaten human existence on the planet, they do agree that hundreds of millions of lives would have been lost. Civilization as we know it with electricity, fossil fuels, edible food, healthcare, and shelter would have been inexorably altered for decades if not centuries.

In retrospect, many questions have been asked but not answered. Many wonder why leaders—even those with many flaws—would allow such a choice to be entertained in their universe of thought. In 1945, at the end of World War II and on the brink of the Cold War, the decision portal through which people traveled in order to have the godlike ability to decide whether hundreds of thousands (or even hundreds of millions) lived or died was extremely narrow. While the decision by one man—President Harry S. Truman—near the end of WWII was arguably justified, in the years that followed, the nuclear weapons system floodgates opened wide at an uncontrolled rate.

In the early years of the Cold War—loosely the period from 1947 through the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963—the determination to unleash massive tactical nuclear weapons rested in the hands of field commanders on both sides who held an ingrained hatred of the opposition. Their antagonism was based solely on fidelity to their respective economic systems, which generated and distributed wealth differently. Fanatical hardliners on both sides pushed their intelligence and scientific communities for information and advantages designed to find an edge for a decisive, preemptive first strike—an advantage that existed more often than not for the United States for many reasons.

For two decades after the end of WWII, civilian and military leaders of the Western World fervently sought advice from academic institutions on a myriad of offensive and defensive weapons systems designed to deliver that decisive, preventive first strike. The decision on when—and, more importantly, whether—such a strike might be necessary was a direct function of intelligence-gathering by US military and civilian intelligence services. At the end of WWII, the United States had about 16,000 individuals distributed around the world through the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), headed by William Donovan. There had been abuses in wartime that a nation at peace was not willing to tolerate. Change was demanded.

Then-President Harry S. Truman and his cabinet dismantled the organization, which had indiscriminately killed tens of thousands of the country’s presumed enemies. The OSS had hundreds of double agents, some of whom secretly served the interests of the Soviet Union. The next two intelligence-gathering agencies, the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) (1945–1946) and the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) (1946–1947) employed, among other unsavory individuals, former Nazi SS (Schutzstaffeln) and SD (Sicherheitsdienst) officials who were guilty of war crimes. They were retained because they had information on the Soviet Union that was deemed essential to the United States’ national interest. All three groups—the OSS, the SSU, and the CIG—were run by the military, despite purported Executive Branch control, and often employed Gestapo-like tactics.

In August 1947, Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as part of the National Security Act. The Agency, as it was commonly called, would answer to the President, the National Security Council, and Congress. It never did. It was designed, in fact, to be under civilian control, ostensibly promising to curb abuses in the previous paramilitary intelligence organizations. The optimism would prove illusory over the next two decades. Agency operations included the overthrow of the democratically elected communist government of Guatemala, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (the legitimate President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and perhaps most damning, the CIA cover-up and subsequent lies to the Warren Commission that would investigate the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Agency had a few other major honorable mention hiccups as well.

After Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 plane was shot down from an altitude of 70,000 feet 1,300 miles inside Russia on May 1, 1960, fomenting howling allegations by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that it was a spy plane, the U.S. State Department led the parade of lies by claiming it was an off-course weather reconnaissance plane. A few days later, Powers, who had somehow survived, was paraded throughout Moscow, exposing US lies. Powers admitted he worked for the CIA as a spy plane pilot, and the U.S. State Department was both exposed and humiliated.

Though taking the heat, President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to bow to Khrushchev’s demand for an apology at the Paris Summit later that month. At the summit, France’s President Charles de Gaulle essentially told Khrushchev to grow up and admit that everyone used spies in one form or another. Privately, Eisenhower was deeply disappointed that any chance to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle had passed.

The next stumble for the CIA came less than a year later. On April 19, 1961, newly elected President John F. Kennedy refused to be bullied by the military into ordering a full-scale invasion for an ill-planned, ill-advised Bay of Pigs CIA operation in Cuba involving hundreds of freedom fighters. They were left to twist in the wind on a sandy beach in the Gulf of Cazones 93 miles southeast of Havana. Kennedy vowed to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.¹ CIA Director Allen Dulles was gone by November 1961. Richard Bissell, the Deputy Director for Plans (DDP) and architect for covert operations that deposed or assassinated leaders in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and the Republic of the Congo, was reassigned in February 1962.

Kennedy also sacked key members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) who expressed their outrage that the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended peacefully. We lost, members of the military yelled at Kennedy in a meeting with General Curtis LeMay and Admiral George Anderson, Chief of Naval Operations. Kennedy thought everyone would be happy that the crisis had been quashed, but they were not. They knew they had lost a first strike opportunity where deliverable nuclear warheads favored the United States by a 17–1 margin.

On November 22, 1963, just thirteen months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach became convinced that John McCone, Director of the CIA, and the CIA itself had been involved in the assassination. However, he wasn’t sure if the Agency had taken an active part in planning it or was merely withholding image-damaging information. When Katzenbach learned about Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s similar concerns regarding CIA involvement in the murder, Katzenbach arranged a secret meeting with Rusk on November 30, 1963. Katzenbach then convened a grand jury and used the Department of Justice witness office subpoena powers to hold an inquiry into Caleb’s activities.

And here our story begins.

1

December 1963 – 0830 Hours

Office of William Forde, Esq., Chief of the Criminal Division and CIA Liaison

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, Suite 710

Washington, DC

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883

Dr. Caleb Young was a good and conscientious man. That’s how General George Marshall described this chief scientist for the CIA. In November 1963, just days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Marshall and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach wanted to tap Dr. Young for what they hoped would be an inside view of the CIA and its possible nefarious activities. They longed to know what Young knew about the CIA’s potential involvement in Kennedy’s assassination. Katzenbach appealed to the grand jury and got what he wanted. Its subpoena powers pulled Young in for a lengthy and clandestine inquiry.

Caleb Young arrived early to the hearing in December 1963. He wanted to arrange the sixty-eight neatly indexed binders in chronological order across the huge conference room table at the Department of Justice (DOJ). He had been debriefed by CIA agents Sidney Graybeal, Chief of the Guided Missile and Space Division, and field agent Joseph Bulik. He now knew the Justice Department was primarily concerned with what involvement the CIA may have had in the Kennedy assassination, but they also wanted to know what communications he’d had with a Soviet GRU agent, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, at the ten Pugwash Conferences from July 1957 through September 1962. Penkovsky had not attended the first conference in July 1957, and Young needed to set that record straight.

The Justice Department also wanted to do a deep dive into Young’s mental status. His abrupt resignation from the CIA had taken everyone by surprise. There were unsubstantiated reports regarding his involvement in the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. And then there was his disagreement with Director McCone over the involvement of the National Security Council and three generals in the Kennedy assassination. It had raised many eyebrows. Young’s refusal to consider continuing his role with the CIA when Vice President Lyndon Johnson suddenly became President earned him an invitation to visit with the Justice Department. In addition, he had been identified as the probable source of a leak out of the National Security Council about the enhanced likelihood of a nuclear war and the advice to build bomb shelters—not good. The American public was scared.

Assistant U.S. Attorney William Forde trudged up seven flights of stairs toward the meeting room and reflected on the previous day’s conversation with CIA Director McCone and Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach. McCone’s comments seemed strange at the time.

Bill, you’ll have your hands full with this guy. You will need your degree in psychiatry and all your legal experience to deal with Dr. Young. He is extremely bright and loyal to a fault, but we just can’t have our people going around scaring the hell out of our population, telling them to build fallout shelters only thirty days after Kennedy’s assassination. We don’t want to prosecute him because of the sensitive nature of his position over the years. The last thing we need right now is to have a trial with a judge deciding what should and should not be made public, so see if you can reason with him. We have given you most everything we have, but if you need more, let us know.

When Forde opened the door to his office, the receptionist pointed toward the conference room without looking up.

Good morning, Dr. Young, Forde said. I see you came fully prepared.

Wouldn’t be necessary for more than half of these binders if your boss had granted me transactional immunity as I asked, Young said. But I’ve only been granted use immunity. I’ve kept a daily journal since age twelve and have summarized or copied every unclassified document I have seen during my service to our country, and I plan on going through all of them. As I understand it, you are somewhat interested in my communications with Colonel Penkovsky during the Pugwash Conferences.

Well, there’s a little more to it than that. Katzenbach is especially interested in your knowledge of the OSS, CIG, and OSO, Forde said. I really do not need this tiring oaf of a man consuming my time. I hope he gives us something good. I believe we will need to see a full history of the Agency. To be clear, I understand you are waiving your right to have your attorney present during this interrogation.

Yes, that’s correct. But you do know that the first contact I had with the Agency was with the CIG, and my knowledge of OSS operations is limited?

Yes, but by all means, let’s get started. Looks like we’ll be here for several months.

I have brought my own tape recorder. I will be turning it over to my attorney as Mr. Katzenbach agreed.

Yes, that’s right, Forde said. "You will have a complete record you can access if charges are brought. But I need more out of you than you may be willing to divulge. I’ve been tasked with determining your mental state, as well as recommending whether charges should be brought against you under the Espionage Act. Quite frankly, the DOJ feels that stress over the years has made you unstable. So if you have anything in your childhood history relating to what makes you tick, I’d like to hear it. Then we need to know why you resigned from the CIA and what drove you to share your opinion in a public forum about building bomb shelters. We were able to censor your comments only because Katharine Graham, editor of the Washington Post, is a friend of Katzenbach."

Young frowned. All I want to know is if you will hear me out before you toe the company line. If you’ll do that, we can proceed. If not, bring your charges. It probably won’t make a difference anyway. My narrative may be long, but if you let me finish, I’ll be grateful. Many of the details and story lines may seem off-topic, but they are part of why I’m here today. The ‘papering job’ you did linking me to the DDP covert operations will require explanations from me on operations where I was not involved. Even though I didn’t witness or take part in most of them, they all played a hand in putting me in this chair today. The sum of my life’s experiences has me convinced of how close we are to a limited strategic or global war. I believe it is time to go into survival mode.

Why can’t we just stop that from happening with the right information from you? Forde raised his voice with each word. The way you are talking, it seems you are holding something back. Your reluctance indicates that you think war is imminent. What the hell are you not telling me? I want specifics, not generalized paranoid ideations. If you are afraid, I want to know of whom and about what!

The sound of palms slapping the table made Forde jump. Young’s eyes burned with evangelical fire. "You do not understand, Young bellowed. No one understands. There are hundreds of situations where a deliberate act like the firing of a TNW—that’s a tactical nuclear weapon in case you didn’t know—with a 20 kiloton yield that isn’t secured by a PAL—oh, and that’s a permissive action link—will escalate at a speed beyond our capacity to respond. If the Russians amass thirty divisions on NATO’s border, we cannot afford to let them strike first. It would be suicide! The Soviet Union was embarrassed on the world stage in late ’62. It will not suffer such an indignity again. In a few years, the window will be closed, and our military commanders know it. They feel fifty million dead Americans are twenty-five million too many, but most of our . . . uh . . . leaders will accept ten million dead without losing a moment of sleep."

Forde shook his head, which was already beginning to hurt. You can’t be serious, Dr. Young. All men have a basic survival instinct, even our generals.

Caleb Young took a moment to compose himself. He lowered his pitch but not his intensity. My concept of the basic nature of man and his relationship with a governing body is intertwined with many philosophers—Freud, Hobbes, Kant, and Aristotle, to name a few. Men will kill if they are in a situation where the greater good demands it. I have spent enough time with LeMay, Power, Gates, Groves, and many other military strategists to pigeonhole their philosophical bents as utilitarian at best. John Stuart Mill, Bentham, and Hume would have been proud of them, but those cretins are not fit to control nuclear weapons without civilian oversight. At the end of a general war, they would claim victory if there were only two Americans alive as long as we outnumbered the surviving Russians. We are in serious trouble.

Forde could feel his eyelid begin to twitch. What did I do to piss Katzenbach off enough to get this assignment? Okay, Forde said. Enough with the foreplay. I have a good idea of where you’re going, Dr. Young. Proceed with your narrative however you choose. But at the end of each day, I want fifteen minutes for questions. They may or may not appear in my notes.

Young nodded. At least Forde would listen to his theory of Kennedy’s flexible response doctrine—the options for responding to the Soviet Union—and why it was so terrifying. Young had developed Eisenhower’s 1954 massive retaliation policy—an easy concept to understand and implement. It was a hard-and-fast rule—cross the nuclear line, and we will destroy you . . . end of story . . . end of the world . . . so don’t go there.

The theory sounded intimidating but had no teeth for a while. But once the United States stocked countless silos with missiles and put Polaris-laden submarines to sea in ’59, there was sufficient nuclear bite to back up the diplomatic bark.

During World War II, the Soviets lost 21 million people. By contrast, US losses were fewer (in numbers, not emotional pain) at 250,000. Caleb knew the Russians envisioned a conventional struggle after any nuclear engagement. Suffering more pain and enduring more losses didn’t bother them. They only backed down in Cuba because they were hopelessly outgunned. Three days earlier and the Soviets would have activated five regiments in Cuba backed by more than eighty fully operational, armed, and fueled SS-4 and SS-5 ballistic missiles. The weapons would have locked on targets up and down the East Coast of the United States.

Probably wouldn’t be having this ridiculous conversation, Caleb thought. We’d be dust.

In Caleb’s opinion, the flexible response doctrine was like a psychology experiment. It had a built-in escalation dominance component that was bound to lead to nuclear war in the event of the slightest miscalculation. Just keep pushing your opponent up the escalation ladder until the next step leaves them no choice but general war. But where was that top rung? How far could you push an enemy before they had the military equivalent of a nervous breakdown?

Even with his degree in psychiatry, Forde couldn’t determine this early on if Caleb Young was clinically disturbed or prescient. After all, McGeorge Bundy—the only person ever to achieve a perfect score on all three of Yale’s entrance exams—had described Young as the most intelligent person on the planet. There was a long and difficult road ahead.

Caleb, start your narrative, Forde said. Begin anywhere you want.

Mr. Forde, kindly address me as Dr. Young. I haven’t been addressed by my first name since I earned my doctorate at age eighteen. Every president I’ve known has addressed me as Dr. Young.

Caleb Young was the only child of two physicists. They had emigrated from Central Europe in 1919 and taken teaching positions at the University of California, Berkeley. Efforts by the Agency to trace Caleb’s parents’ history while they were in Europe were largely unsuccessful. Caleb, recognized early as gifted, was homeschooled. At sixteen, he was admitted to Princeton University, received his PhD at the age of eighteen, and then joined the U.S. State Department until he became part of the mathematics division of the Manhattan Project.

He worked with Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann on implosion calculations necessary to detonate the Fat Man bomb over Nagasaki. After the war, he began working as a science officer for the newly established Central Intelligence Agency.

Blunt and forthcoming, Young was outspoken in his criticisms of newly inaugurated President Lyndon B. Johnson, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, CIA Director John McCone, and Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. He held deep suspicions of the Warren Commission’s composition, thoughts he freely shared with Robert Kennedy, the late President John F. Kennedy’s brother. Caleb had talked with Winston Scott and was well aware of the Agency’s machinations in Mexico City where they fabricated alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s phone call and trips to the Soviet Embassy. He became aware that George Joannides, John Whitten, and Jane Roman lied to McCone. But he didn’t know for sure why.

Katzenbach and Hoover knew all about Young—his public carping was hard to ignore. Eager to uncover the nefarious activity leading to the popular young president’s death, Katzenbach and Hoover had appointed a special prosecutor, William E. Forde, and charged him with reining in both the power of the CIA and the money to which it had access. In addition, Forde was now tasked with interviewing Dr. Caleb Young to determine what part, if any, the Agency had played in the Kennedy assassination.

Fearful of what might come to light, the dark lords of the CIA had fabricated reams of paper that connected Caleb Young to more than twenty covert operations during his time with the Agency. The charges were so meticulously crafted and so devastating that Young accepted an immunity offer in exchange for his unfettered cooperation and full, truthful testimony.

Now, seated at the large conference table with the huge binders of paper, Young looked at Forde who was doing everything he could to hide what he was thinking. Again, Forde felt his eye twitching a bit. Caleb just stared across the table and mused, I am already forming a distinct dislike for this bespectacled, diminutive, top-of his-class Harvard government bureaucrat.

2

December 1963

DOJ Conference Room

"Well, as you know, Caleb began, President Kennedy has been dead for about thirty days. In my opinion, he was our last hope for a peaceful end to the arms race. I say this based on fifteen years of experience as a physicist working for the heads of several agencies of the United States government but ultimately being responsible only to the President of the United States. Jack Kennedy readily accepted my counsel based on his interview with Eisenhower’s chief science officer, James Killian. Eisenhower thought I was okay because