15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation [Hardcover]

L. Douglas Keeney (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 1, 2011

Packed with startling revelations, this inside look at the secret side of the Cold War exposes just how close America came to total annihilation

During the Cold War, a flight crew had 15 minutes to get their nuke-laden plane in the air from the moment Soviet bombers were detected—15 minutes between the earliest warning of an incoming nuclear strike and the first flash of an enemy warhead. This is the chilling true story of the incredibly risky steps our military took to protect us from that scenario, including:

• Over two thousand loaded bombers that crossed American skies. They sometimes crashed and at least nine times resulted in nuclear weapons being accidentally dropped

• A system that would use timers and rockets to launch missiles even after everyone was dead

• Disastrous atmospheric nuclear testing including the horrific runaway bomb—that fooled scientists and put thousands of men in uniform in the center of a cloud of hot fallout

• A plan to use dry lake beds to rebuild and launch a fighting force in the aftermath of nuclear war

Based on formerly classified documents, military records, press accounts, interviews and over 10 years of research, 15 Minutes is one of the most important works on the atom bomb ever written.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

America™s cold war defensive strategy relied on possessing a striking force so powerful that, even after absorbing a devastating Soviet attack, it could deliver a nation-killing blow. This deterrence matured under the aegis of Gen. Curtis LeMay (1906–1990), the brilliant WWII bomber commander. Military historian Keeney (Gun Camera Pacific) reports that when LeMay took over the Strategic Air Command in 1948, he found several understaffed B-29 groups left over from WWII, a few dozen primitive atomic bombs, and no coherent strategy. With access to newly declassified documents, Keeney delivers a jolting year-by-year history of SAC™s transformation into a massive worldwide force primed to launch bombers within 15 minutes of the order. He also reveals alarming numbers of lost nuclear bombs, disastrous atmospheric tests, and nuclear war near-misses. Bitterly opposed to SAC™s diversion to conventional bombing in Vietnam, LeMay retired in 1965, and Keeney™s detailed, often squirm-inducing account ends in an anticlimax in 1968 with SAC dwindling to a minor adjunct to America™s swelling ballistic missile arsenal. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

In the 1950s, before land- and submarine-based missiles formed the backbone of American nuclear deterrence, the U.S. relied primarily upon the Strategic Air Command (SAC). When an alert was issued, it was assumed that the crews of our long-range bombers had only 15 minutes to scramble to the runways and takeoff to guarantee the credibility of a retaliatory strike against the Soviet Union. Keeney, a military historian and co-founder of cable television’s Military Channel, has utilized great amounts of recently declassified documents to tell a fascinating, often chilling story of the policies, technologies, and men responsible for maintaining our nuclear defense posture in that period. At the center of the narrative is General Curtis LeMay, a brilliant, cigar-chomping innovator who was haunted by the specter of Pearl Harbor and determined that we wouldn’t be caught unprepared again. Keeney avoids excessive technical jargon and recounts in straightforward fashion the successes and sometimes dangerous and devasting failures and miscalculations of men operating on the razor’s edge while coping with the terror of unprecedented consequences for misjudgments. --Jay Freeman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (February 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312611560
• ISBN-13: 978-0312611569
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #300,272 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Making sense of the Cold War chaos. February 19, 2011

By Donald Farmer

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Keeney's book was a bit perplexing at first but the point he makes well is that there was more chaos during the Cold War than anyone could imagine. So he jumps from wave heights to thermonuclear discoveries to SAC penetration tatics in a way that makes you feel the confusion and chaos, as if you were there. Well, I was there. Like Keeney says we all had Emergency War Plans -- and as a Cold War fighter pilot and tanker pilot I saw many sides of the situation, I can say that we were ready to go. Reading this well and exhaustively researched, well written book I can say that Keeney introduces declassified documents in a way that brings the reality of our Cold War to life in a way I could never before share with my family. I'm buying copies for my in-laws! Hooray!

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Rise and Fall of the Strategic Air Command February 13, 2011

By William Holmes VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

At first, I found the organization of "15 minutes" to be a little off putting--especially in the early going, the author describes a series of seemingly unrelated events in short, jarring paragraphs, many of which end in a somewhat melodramatic one-word teaser. Keeney does this to set up several different stories at once, which is why you'll wonder why the second paragraph in the chapter on "1945" is about the development of offshore oil and gas drilling in Louisiana in 1907 (it makes sense eventually).

I suspect the book's style owes a lot to Keeney's experience with television documentary (he's a co-founder of The Military Channel), and it actually works fairly well as the book builds momentum. If the book's thesis is that things had to happen at a faster and faster pace to preserve a credible strategic deterrent, the book's short, punchy paragraphs do an efective job of conveying the sense of urgency that must have pervaded SAC for nearly forty years.

"15 Minutes" tells several intertwined stories in parallel, each of which is interesting in its own right: the founding, growth and eventual demise of the US Strategic Air Command (SAC) (which dissolved on June 1, 1992); the development of the hydrogen bomb, the sometimes disastrous outcomes of nuclear "shots" and the surprisingly frequent near-detonation or loss of armed nuclear weapons (including one still missing near Savannah, Georgia); the deployment of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line and associated deep water radar facilities, one of which was destroyed by a rogue wave that killed its crew in January 1961; the ruthless but effective vision of General Curtis LeMay, who created a force so demanding and disciplined that "[n]ot for the thinnest fraction of a second did Washington or Moscow ever doubt that his SAC would do what it said it could do" (p.320); and the descent of SAC into irrelevance as a strategic deterrent, as more and more nuclear weapons were deployed on missiles and SAC assets were "degraded" to drop "iron bombs" on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

All in all, "15 Minues" is a pretty gripping narrative of the Cold War, deterrence, near misses, disasters and unsung heroes. Although there are a few jarring errors in the text, this is only a minor distraction from an otherwise well-told story that does a great service to the men and women who succeeded, against the odds, in keeping the Cold War cold.

48 of 53 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A SAC Officer finds this a great book February 12, 2011

By John Hagan III MD

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I served in the Strategic Air Command from 1970-1972 being stationed in Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota. Our base had a wing of B-52s bombers and KC-135 tankers plus Minuteman III missles. The dedication of SAC men/women, officers, and their families was outstanding, the work grueling but indispensible to national defense and detering an expansion minded Soviet Union. General Curtis LeMay of the USAF, and the subject of this 372 page book, is one of this country's most important and influential military figures dating from his ending WWII with bombing of Japan, through breaking the blockaid of Berlin and keeping the peace with the Soviet Union by 'mutual assured destructrion". General LeMay's 2613 bombers and tankers and 27,387 nuclear warheads (vs Soviet Union's 3,300) are the principle reason that the Russians withdrew their missles from Cuba in the 1962 crisis.

This is a good book and deserves a wide audience. This book was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal February 12, 2011 by Arthur Herman and was highly recommended. Americans, past, present and future, owe much to this short, blunt talking, cigar smoking General. This is a fitting book that chronicles the service of Curtis LeMay, an American military giant.