Soviet incentive programs

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 60.

The biggest change was the appointment of General Curtis LeMay as bomber commander-in-chief. He was responsible for the Emergency War Plan called ‘Offtackle’, under which 104 Soviet cities would be hit by 292 atomic bombs, with a further 72 bombs for targets identified by parallel reconnaissance flights. The B-29s and newer B-36s would fly from Britain and Morocco as well as the US, arriving in small groups, in which only one plane would carry the most deadly ordnance. While much of what SAC did was necessarily secret, it had no difficulty recruiting 300,000 people to watch for Soviet aircraft seeking to fly under the US’s rudimentary radar shield, while the Nevada test site spawned a whole subculture of ‘atomic cocktails’ (four ounces combined of grapefruit and pineapple juice, half an ounce of Galliano and one of Plymouth Gin) or picnic baskets for families who wanted to gawp at mushroom clouds expanding in the clear skies of the desert.

Cocktail hour turned to deep dread when in early September 1949 US reconnaissance planes registered unusually high levels of radiation of a thousand counts per minute where normal background radiation counts were around fifty. Stalin had acquired and tested an atomic bomb, called RDS 1 or ‘First Lightning’ at a site named Semipalatinsk-21 in Kazakhstan. The Soviet spy chief Lavrentii Beria was on hand to watch the blast from the twenty-kiloton device. Afterwards he recommended such medals as Hero of Soviet Labour or the Order of Lenin for the scientists involved: the recipients did not know that the specific decoration they received was determined by their ranking on a list of those to be shot or imprisoned had they failed. Americans dubbed the weapon ‘Joe 1’. Fear of Communist subversion was thenceforth overshadowed by the prospect of mushroom clouds rising from US cities, even though the Soviets had no means of delivering such a weapon on a US target. After several months of secret debate, Truman decided in late January 1950 to authorize a hydrogen device whose explosive power dwarfed that of the bombs he had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.