It was a beautiful day in northern Virginia. A great day for a baseball game, even if you were in the Army, as I was on that day in the summer of 1953. I wasn’t a very talented baseball player, but I was a scrapper, the kind of guy who ran out every ground ball to the shortstop no matter how certain it was that I would be thrown out easily at first base. I was “Charlie Hustle” long before Pete Rose came alone.
I was stationed at an Army Security Agency base near Warrenton, Virginia, and a baseball team from Fort Myer, just across the Potomac River from Washington. D.C., came down to play us. Being up there so close to the Pentagon and all the brass, the Fort Myer team had more than its share of really good baseball players, even some major-leaguers who were subject to the military draft in force at that time. We were more like the ragtag and bobtail of the military diamond.
But we played a good game that day, and when I came to bat in the bottom of the ninth, our team was trailing by just a run. We had the bases loaded with two out. The Fort Myer manager strolled confidently from the visitor’s dugout, called time, and waved in his ace reliever from the bullpen. He was a fireballing right-hander who delivered a wicked snake of a sidearm pitch, much like the former Cincinnati Reds great Ewell Blackwell. I must admit my knees were knocking as I dug in at the batter’s box while the outfielders moved in for the weak hitter.
The pitcher curled two quick called strikes on me as his curve ball seemed to leave his hand somewhere in the vicinity of third base. I figured, “O.K., so you’ve set me up with curve balls. Now you’ll want to burn a fastball right down the middle and get out of here.” And I was right. There it came, right down the pipe, and I hit it square on with everything I had. All I needed was a single to tie the game or maybe to win it, but I had visions of a grand-slam home run as I sped down the line toward first base.
I saw the Fort Myer center fielder turn his back on the ball and start running toward the deepest part of the park. He was running even faster than I was. And he ran and ran. When he finally caught up with the ball, he made a spectacular catch going away in full stride. I was crushed. I just stood there at second base in disbelief as he came jogging in, still holding the ball in his glove. As he ran past me on the way to the dugout, he slowed just a bit, smiled graciously, and said, “That sure was some poke, Shorty.” It was the only time in my life I ever met Willie Mays.
A year later he made the same kind of catch in the first game of the 1954 World Series in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, robbing Vic Wertz of an extra-base hit. Baseball analysts have called that the greatest catch in the history of the sport. I call it the second greatest.
—William T. Harper lives in Bryan, Texas.
Planned Inferiority
Sometime in December of 1976 I listened in stunned silence as staffers from President-elect Jimmy Carter’s transition team floated a trial balloon that would eliminate every one of the Strategic Air Command’s bombers and ICBMs, leaving only a handful of missile-firing submarines to deter Russian nuclear forces. Dubbed “Planned Inferiority,” the radical concept would become the cornerstone of the incoming administration’s defense policy.
To get to the conference room at the SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, Carter’s bright young men walked by the scowling bronze bust of Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, past a replica of the red telephone, and detoured around the gleaming model of the new B-1 supersonic bomber in the center of the lobby. None of this impressed them. In the midst of the Cold War, the new administration planned to cut defense and pour the savings into social programs.
The briefers spoke in the confident tones of trial lawyers, presenting the post-World War II nuclear arms race in vertical bar graphs. The slides were crisp. Soviet nuclear strength was depicted in a red column; our own in blue.
The first slide, titled “Superiority,” described the arms race during the 1950s. The blue U.S. warhead count towered like a skyscraper over the red column, which barely rose above the base line representing zero. The next slide, titled “Rough Equivalence,” compared the two stockpiles in the late 1960s. The columns were almost equal, but the blue was still taller than the red. The briefer explained the strategy behind the phrase: We would cap our warhead count with the expectation that once the two sides were about even, Moscow would quit building super-bombs and be content with parity, as agreed to in the SALT I treaty of 1972.
The third slide seemed to irritate the transition team. It was called “Current Status.” The red column was well above the blue one. If it climbed any higher, it would be off the chart.
The briefer offered a summation. “Superiority” was probably a good thing from the American perspective, but no longer attainable because of political and economic considerations. Unfortunately the Soviets hadn’t bought “rough equivalence” and had gone for numerical advantage. The new administration did not want to heat up the arms race by matching the higher Soviet warhead counts. There was an alternative.
Every officer in the room was a veteran of alert duty with SAC bombers, aerial tankers, or ICBMs, and when the next slide came up, you could hear a pin drop. It was titled “Planned Inferiority.” There was probably a threshold of damage that would keep one nuclear power from attacking another, the briefer explained, even if the first-strike initiator was guaranteed victory, at least in a military sense. That threshold could be a single surviving Polaris submarine capable of launching a second strike against the aggressor’s capital and several large population centers with sea-launched missiles. The proposal was later given a more respectable name, “Minimal Deterrence.” Just a few nuclear submarines, capable of surviving a first strike so they could retaliate against population centers, would be as effective a deterrent as the expensive triad of bombers, ICBMs, and missile-firing submarines deployed by previous administrations. At least that was the transition team’s theory. Cost savings would be immense.
“Minimal Deterrence” never went into effect. After the Carter administration canceled the B-1 bomber, Congress loudly criticized the SALT II treaty, which sanctioned a numerically superior Soviet strategic force. Carter withdrew the treaty from congressional consideration once the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and, to prove his administration was not soft on communism, funded the MX missile, the Trident submarine, and the then-secret stealth bomber.
Years later, after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union broke apart, Carter’s concept reappeared under a slightly different name, “Minimum Deterrence.” New developments—the START I and II treaties downsizing both superpowers’ nuclear stockpiles, the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, and the defection of SAC’s last commander, Gen. Lee Butler, to the “no nukes” movement —gave minimum deterrence added respectability. This time there were no raised eyebrows, even in Omaha.
—Michael R. Boldrick is a retired Air Force colonel who lives in Santa Maria, California.
The Invitation
In 1953 I was inducted into the Army. Since I had studied physics at college and worked for a short time in private industry, I was assigned to the Enlisted Scientific and Professional Personnel (SPP) Program and sent to the Army Chemical Center, in Edgewood, Maryland. There were more than two thousand SPPs at the center when I arrived, many of them recent graduates. We lived in a dormitory, and at times it felt almost as if we were still at school. That is, for a while.
My job was to design and develop instruments to assess the yield of nuclear devices. Much of my work was stimulating, but other people were less fortunate. One evening at Drago’s Pizza & Bar, a group of us decided to stave off boredom by organizing a physics seminar, with each of us presenting a paper in his area of expertise. We asked Colonel Delmar, the laboratory commander, for permission, and he granted it, provided the seminar wouldn’t interfere with our assigned duties.
We met weekly, giving papers that, considering our circumstances, were quite professional. But inevitably we began to run out of topics, and rather than disband we decided to seek outside speakers. Dan Smith, an audacious Texan, came up with the outrageous suggestion that we invite Robert Oppenheimer, the principal scientist responsible for the Manhattan Project.
It was an awkward situation. We’d asked Oppenheimer to a visit secure installation, but his clearance had been revoked.
Since none of us knew Oppenheimer, this was akin to law students inviting the Chief Justice of the United States to participate in a moot court. Nevertheless, Smith and I agreed to write him at Princeton, where he worked. Several weeks later we received a letter accepting our invitation. Shock set in.
We now faced an awkward situation. The Army Chemical Center was a secure installation, and after the well-publicized hearings questioning his loyalty, Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance had been revoked. When we presented our problem to Colonel Delmar, he was appalled. Our reckless act had put the Army in an impossible position, he pointed out, and we risked humiliating Dr. Oppenheimer. The colonel recommended that we write a letter postponing the visit “due to pressing Army duties.” Dr. Oppenheimer graciously wrote back that he would be happy to address us at a more convenient time.
A few years later, separated from active service, I attended the annual conference of the American Physical Society in New York. The scheduled speaker was the eminent theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and as I entered the hotel lobby, I ran into my old friend Dan Smith. Suddenly there was a stir in the room, and I heard someone say, “Oppenheimer’s here.” We spotted him standing all alone in a corner of the room. This was surprising, given his celebrity, and Dan and I decided to go to him to explain what had happened back in 1954. We introduced ourselves, doubtful that he would recall the incident.
He remembered it vividly. After the hearings he had lost contact with most of his friends and associates, Oppenheimer told us. “Notice,” he said, “how everyone here except for you two nuts is avoiding me.” He had been so depressed he had considered suicide, he continued, but “when you GIs were mad enough to contact me, jeopardizing your own security status, my faith in man was somewhat renewed. I accepted your invitation knowing the possible outcome. When your second letter arrived, I knew what had probably occurred.”
We spoke for several minutes, wished each other good luck, and drifted into the lecture hall to hear Dr. Pauli. Dan and I never crossed paths with Robert Oppenheimer again. He looked extremely fragile at the conference, and in 1967 he died.
—Herbert Gresser lives in West Hills, New York.
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