The American Air Force general Curtis LeMay believed that the only sure nuclear defense was to launch a preëmptive first strike. During the Cuban missile crisis, which began on this day in 1962, he almost did it.
In 1945, the Air Force sent a thirty-eight-year-old major general named Curtis LeMay to the Pacific to direct its ineffectual air war against Japan, where the newly discovered jet stream was playing havoc with high-altitude precision bombing. Thereporter St.
Then LeMay came to a contradiction that he would chew over for years to come. First, he offered one of his touchstone concepts: “No air attack, once it is launched, can be completely stopped.” That meant to LeMay that the United States would have to have an air force “in being” that could move immediately to retaliate if the country was attacked. The preparation for retaliation, the threat of it, might be sufficient to prevent attack in the first place. “If we are prepared it may never come.
In the spring of 1953, a committee headed by retired Air Force General James Doolittle proposed giving the Russians a two-year deadline to come to terms and attacking them if they failed to do so . The following year, President Eisenhower rejected this bizarre nuclear ultimatum and issued an updated Basic National Security Policy statement: “The United States and its allies must reject the concept of preventive war or acts intended to provoke war.
There was a time in the 1950s when we could have won a war against Russia. It would have cost us essentially the accident rate of the flying time, because their defenses were pretty weak. One time in the 1950s we flew all of the reconnaissance aircraft that SAC possessed over Vladivostok at high noon. Two reconnaissance airplanes saw MiGs, but there were no interceptions made. It was well planned, too—crisscrossing paths of all the reconnaissance airplanes.
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