<text id=00he1602><title>Cold War Strategy</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>Cold War Strategy</hdr><body>
<p>The Air Force was, after all, inextricably a part of the nation's nuclear strategy. In fact, USAF officers had fought courageously against their top adversary—the US Navy—to win a dominant position in the nuclear warfighting business.
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<p>American policy went under different names, and plans to implement it changed often, but the priority always remained the same. Looking at Soviet bombers, missiles and warheads (the number of which was overestimated in both public and secret assessments), the Pentagon sought to deter a Soviet attack and to defend against it, if it came. As far back as the Korean War, new items of equipment (the F-86 fighter, the C-124 transport) were made available to the nation's strategic forces before they reached airmen who were fighting and dying in a faraway Asian war.
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<p>The strategy of containment (1947-52) aimed for more. Hard-liners wanted to prevent any encroachment across any border line by the Soviets or their allies. Containment had worked in Korea and had been ignored in Indo-China. Too rigid, too unrealistic, and in no way reflecting the mood of the postwar electorate, containment was replaced in the Eisenhower years (1953-61) by a policy of massive retaliation.
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<p>This was a rigid policy, too, and was one of many developments which frightened the hell out of everybody (a 1954 issue of Collier's magazine gave readers a colorfully-illustrated 'history' of World War III which ended with American paratroopers making a suicide drop to take out the last atomic stockpiles in the Ural Mountains, and with American tanks rolling into Moscow). Massive retaliation meant, as a White House aide put it, that "if the Soviets stick their head up anywhere, they're going to get sledgehammered." The US would retaliate not merely for an attack on its soil, not merely for an attack on an ally with whom it shared a mutual defense treaty (NATO, Japan, Korea) but against any Soviet incursion, anywhere. Never mind that most Americans cared very little what the Russians were doing in the Congo or Laos. The slightest act of aggression by the Soviets, under this policy, would be met with a thermonuclear response. And the warheads would be aimed not at Soviet military bases but at cities.
