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medium-range bombers on overseas bases poised to strike the Soviet Union. These bombers were deployed to back up Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' 1954 policy of massive retaliation for any Soviet behavior that threatened vital interests of the West, as he put it. The West did have ample reason to fear the vast Soviet land forces available to Joseph Stalin, and to fear Stalin himself. And the nuclear threat did serve as an effective deterrent for a few years. Unfortunately, Dulles' use of the nuclear threat backfired, frightening the Western allies as well as Stalin. Shortly after the United States adopted the policy of massive retaliation, the American intelligence community began to suspect that the Soviet Union was building a large intercontinental-bomber force, and it sounded an alert. It was predicted that in the late 1950s the Soviet Union would have several hundred intercontinental and shorter-range bombers, a force that could easily reach overseas American bases and possibly even the United States in oneway missions. In response to this estimate, the United States began the production of a truly intercontinental bomber, the B-52. In fact, however, while the Soviet Union did have a substantial force of TU4 medium-range bombers, it lacked an overseas base complex from which to stage them. Its nuclear-bomb supply was also small, so in retrospect, the actual threat was minimal.
It became evident in the mid-1950s that the Soviet Union was not creating a long-range bomber force on the scale previously feared, and the estimates of its threat began to shrink, more or less as shown by the dotted line on Figure 1. In the late 1950s, the United States achieved a reconnaissance capability that unequivocally showed the Soviet force to be much smaller than previously estimated. The solid lines on Figure 1 show the actual Soviet and American bomber capabilities from 1958 on. Until recently I believed that our mistaken estimate of Soviet bomber capability was the result of faulty intelligence. Careful examination of the facts now makes it seem more likely a case of deliberate deception, or at the very least, vigorous self-deception. In 1950, a report to President Harry Truman by his Air Policy Commission, compiled after a study of the aircraft industry, concluded that it would require 13 million pounds of additional aircraft production in 1948 and 30 million pounds more in a 1949 to maintain |
adequate military production readiness. In testimony before Congress, Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington said, "The Russians possess air equipment capable of delivering a surprise attack against any part of the United States, and this country has no adequate defense against such an assault." He said that the Soviet Union "has an Air Force whose strength in nearly all categories is now the largest in the world and growing larger month by month." Such statements mobilized many of us for work on American defenses. On July 14 of that year, a Senate Appropriations subcommittee was urged to drive toward a 150group Air Force in three years, instead of the 87 groups it had already approved at an estimated cost of $96 billion. These numbers required the aircraft production capacity recommended by the Finletter Commission. Incoming Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Finletter not only supported the buildup but in a congressional appearance urged a major increase in the production of fissionable material (which the United States did undertake). The Congressional Record reported, "The testimony of all witnesses except those speaking for the Department of the Navy was so uniformly of a classified nature that it does not lend itself to publication in any form." Yet most of the testimony regarding the extent of the threat quickly found its way into the press.
Looking now at the very recent past (1978 to 1981), the country was confronted by the 'window of vulnerability" allegation that provided campaign fodder for Ronald Reagan. This argument also served as the Reagan Administration's first rationale for building the MX missile. The windowof-vulnerability concept was put forth by the Committee on the Present Danger, a private group of individuals formed in the 1970s to press for larger and stronger US military programs. A careful look at their arguments showed that their scenario was severely flawed in many ways. They concerned themselves only with the security of the landbased position of the American strategic triad. Two-thirds of the Soviet strategic force was in land-based missiles, compared with approximately one-third of that of the United States. It ignored the American bomber force and sea-based ballistic missiles. |