To kill nations

If a general war had broken out between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1950s, it is almost certain that its central and apocalyptic feature would have been an all-out nuclear offensive, conducted over a very short timespan, launched by the medium and heavy bombers of the US Air Force, designed to achieve ‘victory’ by destroying the bulk of Soviet war-making industrial capacity and military power. Only by hanging this sword of Damocles over the heads of America's adversaries, a generation of air force leaders schooled in air power theory and the bombing experience of the Second World War argued, could Communist aggression be resisted, and if war should nevertheless occur, the conflict ended quickly with the United States in an ascendant position. It was this air-atomic strategy which ultimately undergirded the New Look in national security policy introduced by President Dwight D. Eisenhower with approval of the National Security Council (NSC) document 162/2 in October 1953, and reached its Strangelovian climax with the production of the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) at the end of 1960. One of the results of inter-service wrangling between the US Air Force and Navy—the latter's Polaris submarines were starting to be deployed and offered the possibility of an alternative approach of minimal (‘finite’) deterrence through an invulnerable force of second-strike weapons—the SIOP, which came into effect on 1 July 1961, specified using over 3,000 nuclear weapons against a huge array of targets in the communist bloc countries. This fantastical and chilling scenario, which narrowed presidential options to an unacceptable extent when faced with crises which often called for the discriminating use of military power, only began to be challenged by the Kennedy administration during the early 1960s, when a dynamic new Defense Secretary, Robert S. McNamara, questioned such shibboleths and the air force's dominance of budgets and strategic thinking

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