CONFIDENTIAL 

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lO Janua17 1957 

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REF ID:A484784 

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P'U>feet 

RESEARCH MEMORANDUM 

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------7kR.tlnD~ SANTA MONICA • CALIFORNIA---------

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RESEARCH MEMORANDUM 

IS THERE A DEP'ERSE? (0) 

Bernard Brodie 

RM-1781 

ASTIA DoOUlll8nt Nullber 4D 112396 

3 October 1956 93 

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CONFIDENTIAL 
PREFACE 

RM-1781 

10-3-56 

ii 

The following paper is intended as a chapter of a longer 

study on a general theory of air power in the atomic age. 

Another chapter has already been released as RM-1013, "The 

Heritage of Douhet, 11 and others will be similarly released as 

rapidly as possible. 

This chapter is ~ intended for specialists in the field 

of its subject matter. It does not concentrate upon one limited aspect of the air-defense problem with a view to recommending new kinds of hardware or operational techniques. It 

seeks 1 rather, to appraise the basic capabilities of air 

defense, now and in the future. The object is to discover the 

degree to which we can rely upon such capabilities in formulating our over-all military strategy, and indeed our national 

security policy. 

The appraisal starts with an analysis of the adverse 

doctrinal background against which defense claims have to 

struggle for a share of the national military budget. It 

proceeds with an examination of the warning problem, and then 

of the prospects for worth-while defenses of both the active 

and passive kinds. Positive conclusions are avoided as not 

justified by the character of the analysis, but the discussion 

in general tends toward the follo~ing position: we must 

CONFIDENTIAL 
RM-1781 

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iii 

establish certain critical priorities in defense with respect 

to the objects to be defended (SAC obviously being at the top 

of the list among the latter); the over-all investment in 

defense necessary to protect suitably even the most carefully 

selected objects will in the future take a greater proportion 

of the national defense budget than it has heretofore, 

especially for provision of the passive varieties of defense; 

but, finally, even the most generous imaginable expenditures 

on defense will still leave us in a situation where all our 

larger cities and much of our civilian population are inevitably at risk. The latter estimate naturally forces the conclusion that the security of the country must rest fundamentally 

on military and political capabilities such as are not normally 

included in the catalog of defense measures. 

Most of the factual information and many of the ideas I 

have picked up from others, especially from among my RAND 

colleagues. The number of my debts has prevented me from 

making suitable acknowledgment in every case. 

COIFIDENTIAt 
REF ID:A484784 

COIFIDENllAL 

CONTENTS 

RM-1781 

10-J-56 

iv 

PREFACE • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • ii 

THE DOCTRINAL CONTEXT •••·•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 1 

THE PROBLEM OF WARNING ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 19 

ACTIVE DEFENSES ••••••••••••••••••••••••••.••••••••••••••• JO 

PASSIVE DEFENSES ••••••·•••••••••·•••••••••••••••••••••••• 43 

SlJ ~ARY • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 60 

-COllFIDEllTIAl 
REF ID:A484784 

GGltf lDUTIAL 

The Doctrinal Context 

~uch of the historical discussion of strategic and 

'.tM-1781 

10-J-5fS 

1. 

tactical doctrine has revolved around the perennial question 

of offense versus defense: ltfuich is at what particular times 

the most appropriate form of war? The discussion has not been 

free of an immense charge of emotion, which itself is often 

deliberately inculcated. Soldiers are not trained to be 

objective in questions of this sort. They are trained to be 

emotionally in favor of the offensive, just as ordinary persons 

are trained to be emotionally in favor of virtue -- and for 

much the same reason, which is that normal human impulses 

tend, or are suspected to tend, in the oppos~te direction. 

Aggressiveness in a commander is considered a great merit, 

and military history suggests that it should be so viewed. The 

responsibilities of high command juring wartime have often 

induced excessive caution in those who had it. The conunander 

has always known that his decisions, besides having a direct 

effect on casualty rates, involved large risks and affected 

great political stakes. During battle he could see the hurt 

to his own fo~ces (whose dangers he often shared), but could 

only guess at that to the enemy; he could see the weariness in 

his troops, and yet had to drive them to that superhuman 

exertion and resulting exhaustion that on a mass scale are 

peculiar to war. General Meade excused himself for his passivity 

CDllFIDENTIAL 
RM-1781 

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z. 

at the close of Gettysburg partly on the ground that his men 

were tired. His observation was certainly correct, but his 

judgment was profoundly wrong. His already passive attitude 

had no doubt been confirmed by seeing his renowned adversary, 

General Lee, fail in several costly attacks culminating in the 

desperate waste of Pickett's charge. 

Meade's behavior cost the Union dear. It is significant 

that it is his kind of error, and not Lee's, that has been 

kept alive for the military lessons to be derived from it. 

Pickett's charge has certainly not been forgotten; but if it is 

occasionally called a blunder, it is treated as an isolated 

and atypical one in the career of a very great general. It 

was, in short, an error in the right direction, and therefore 

not the stuff of which lessons are properly ma.de. 

That is no doubt a just evaluation. Our purpose here is 

not to condemn the doctrinal bias in favor of the offensive, 

but simply to note it. Although bias in the scholar is clearly 

a fault, the military commander practices a very different art. 

War has always entailed strains and agonies and dangers, and it 

would be absurd to assume that its chief actors could face up to 

it without the support of a doctrine which may to some degree 

offend against reason or sensibility. Ardant de Picq saw that 

fact clearly as a scholar, and as a soldier he confirmed it in 

CONFIDENTIAL 
REF ID:A484784 

CONFIDENTIAL RM-1781 

10-3-56 

3. 

the manner of his own death. 1 On the other hand, it would 

also be absurd to deny that this bias has been responsible for 

many disastrous blunders. 2 

Eagerness to attack and persistence in it despite strong 

resistance, which to the civilian often spells callousness or 

worse, may to the trained soldier signify adherence to the 

highest standards of professional conduct. There have been 

ups and downs in this tradition, and certainly the period just 

before and during World War I ~as one in which the offensive 

idea was pushed to grotesque extremes at the very moment that 

technological conditions gave it the least support. Nevertheless, beginning with NapoleonJ there has not been a time when 

1 

2 

Col. Ardant du Picq, who was killed while leading his 

regiment near Metz in the early days of the FrancoPruss ian War in 1870, wrote some highly original studies 

of the psychology of the soldier in combat. A complete 

edition o~ his writings was published in 1902 under the 

title of Etudes sur le Combat. 

Of the many examples that could be cited, an intriguing 

one ia discovered in the writing of two Japanese naval 

air commanders present at the Battle of Midway, who 

attribute the Japanese disaster there to inadequate search 

resulting from overemphasis on preserving offensive 

strength. "Ten per cent of total strength was all they 

were willing to spare for search operations, feeling that 

the rest should be reserved for offensive use." (Mitsuo 

Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya, "Prelude to Mid""ay," U.S. 

Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 81, No. 5, May 1955, 

p. 511; also p. 513. See also the same authors' book, 

Midway, The Battle That Doomed Japan: The Japanese Navy's 

Story, ed. by Clarke Kawakami and Roger Pineau, U.S. Naval 

Institute, Annapolis, 1955.) 

COllFIBENl IAl; 
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the doctrine of the offensive actually yielded its ascendancy 

in the scale of military values. Even in the era of the 

Maginot Line, French generals insisted that their over-all 

strategy was still offensive, although the ardor for the 

offensive of the previous generation of generals had undoubtedly been dimmed. No listing of the "principles of 

strategy" ever fails to include, at or near the top, one called 

the "principle of the offensive," which takes the form of an 

elegant restatement of the truism that "wars are not won by 

remaining on the defensive." 

This bias for the offensive creates special problems in 

any technologically new situation for which there is little 

or no war experience to assist one in reaching a balanced 

judgment. For example, through the interwar period, and until 

nearly a full year after the United States entered World War II, 

the prevailing doctrine in the U.S. Navy concerning the amount 

of antiaircraft armament to put aboard combat ships was: "Don't 

sacrifice offensive for defensive armament!" In practice this 

slogan resulted in extremely lean allotments of antiaircraft 

guns on our major ships at the time of Pearl Harbor. Yet at 

the same time our battleships, old and new, were carrying armor 

amounting to 35-40 per cent of their unloaded weight -- the 

major part of it, incidentally, being vertical, above-water 

COlf:IDENTIAl 
REF ID:A484784 

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5. 

armor useful against gun projectiles but not against bombs or 

torpedoes. The value of the armor had been proved in naval 

engagements over the previous eighty years, but that of antiaircraft guns had yet to be similarly demonstrated. 

We must therefore be prepared, in considering the problems of strategic air defense in the atomic age, to find the 

military selling the defense somewhat short, We may in the 

end agree that they are in general right, but this general 

judgment does not provide the answers for particular problems, 

such as whether we ought to spend more or less than we are 

currently spending on defense, and on precisely what kinds of 

defenses we should spend our limited allotments. 

The common attitude of disdain for defensive functions 

and machines tends to be an important factor in determining 

our own defensive capabillties. There are aspects of our 

defenses which could conceivably become very important but with 

which the military simply do not wish to become involved. That 

vast range of facilities, activities, and functions that might 

be grouped under "civil defense" are a case in point. The view 

that this field should be left to the civilians implicitly 

contains the argument that it should not get too much attention, 

i.e,j money. Yet it is probable that many of the counteroffensive capabilities of the country following a thermonuclear 

tiONFIBENTIAL 
REF ID:A484784 

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6. 

attack, at any rate the kinds of capabilities the Army is 

concerned about, would depend among other things on the 

preservation of domestic order, which might require a considerable intervention by the Army. 

So far as our most immediate retaliatory arm is concerned, 

there is no doubt that the Strategic Air Command is keenly 

concerned with its own security against enemy attacks. But 

that tells us nothing about the methods for achieving security for which that organization is likely to show a predilection, nor the price in offensive armament (within the 

context of an always-limited budget) that it is willing to 

pay for such security. In this realm of vital choices, it 

would be surprising indeed if one did not observe the bias 

described above operating in potent fashion. 

In a previous paper we gave Douhet good marks for detaching himself from what he called "the mystique of the offensive." 

Perhaps "detachment" is not the right word, because he not only 

separated himself from that "mystique" but railed against it.3 

We noted that his view that in ground war the defensive was 

vastly superior to the offensive was in fact proved by subse3 RAND Research Memorandum RM-1013, "The Heritage of 

Douhet," December Jl, 1952. 

881FIDENTIAL 
REF ID:A484784 

;, ~u- NFIDEN __ ~ TIAL - RM-1781 

10-3-,~ 

quent events to be wrong. But he was right when he insisted 

that in the air the situation is the exact opposite from what 

he presumed it to be on the ground, and that in the air the 

offense is not simply the stronger but the only valid form of 

war. 

Why should the situation in the air be so different from 

that on the ground? Let us first consider ground war. We 

know that an army has always moved somewhat ponderously, limited 

in speed until very recently by the marching capability of the 

foot soldier, and that its movements are canalized by various 

features of geography, especially the highway and railroad 

system. In the remoter past swift mounted couriers, and for 

the past hundred years the telegraph, have served to bring 

the defender days and even weeks of warning of a descent upon 

his vital areas, usually with much information about the 

direction and schedule of the enemy's movement and the magnitude 

of his power. Important strategic surprise could be won by 

the attacker through deception or exceptional marching prowess, 

or through willful blindness on the part of the defender; but 

once a march began to proceed through l'ostile territory further 

achievement of surprise was likely to be limited and qualified. 

Moreover, since the attacker was normally descending upon the 

llHFIDENTIAL 
RM-1781 

10-3-56 

8. 

heart of a country from its periphery, the defender had the 

advantage of interior lines. This advantage made it relatively 

easy for the latter to redeploy to confront unexpected threats. 

In 1914 the Germans were surprised at the speed of the 

Russian mobilization, which brought the Russian offensive into 

East Prussia at an earlier date than it had been expected; but 

once the Russian armies crossed the frontier their movements 

could be checked and clocked, and the arrangements for their 

decisive defeat at the Masurian Lakes could be thoroughly 

organized. Similarly, the French were surprised to learn that 

the German armies were pouring into Belgium earlier and in much 

greater strength than predicted, and that the direction of their 

movement was not in accord with French expectations. Nevertheless, following the collapse of their own ill-starred offensive 

in the east, the French were able entirely to redeploy their 

own and the British armies and to check decisively the descent 

from the north at the first Battle of the Marne. 

Their failure similarly to contain the German penetration 

in the Ardennes in May, 1940 which also was a surprise in 

that the French expected the major weight of the German attack 

to fall elsewhere -- was due not to any fabulous speed of 

movement on the part of the invaders, the bulk of whom were 

after all moving on foot, but mostly to the fact that the French 

CONFIDENTIAL 
RM-1781 

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9. 

high command had no reserve "mass of maneuver" to throw against 

the gap. Eisenhower was not comparably in want when the 

Germans accomplished exactly the same kind of surprise breakthrough in the Battle of the Bulge in December, 1944. 

On the tactical level there are, as a rule, few physical 

factors that favor the attacker over the defender, but many 

that favor the defender. The defender usually has the advantage 

of cover: he characteristically fires from behind some form of 

shelter while his opponent crosses open ground. As armies have 

increased the range, accuracy, and volume of their firepower, 

this advantage has tended to become more important, though in 

battle it has often been qualified by the necessity (real or 

presumed} for the defender to make local counterattacks where 

the opponent has temporarily gained an advantage. 

For such reasons, even the most enthusiastic exponents of 

ground offensive doctrine in modern times have considered a 

decided local superiority of some kind to be essential to the 

launching of a tactical offensive. It has been considered one 

of the major advantages of the strategic initiative that it 

enables the shrewd commander to choose the time and place for 

the battle, and in so doing to achieve a tactical superiority 

at that place, even when his over-all superiority is not 

commanding and is possibly even nonexistent. That is the theory 

?

1

! 9NFIDENTIAL 
en[.- ,IJ;t:~!IB4 784 I t 'F t .. ii1 -~ • .. if! • ' i .• ., RM-1781 

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10. 

anyway. and historically it has often worked. Of course, it 

has almost always worked better -- certainly more continuously 

and smoothly -- where the side that held the strategic initiative enjoyed also a considerable over-all superiority. 4 

The air attack is intrinsically and radically different 

in all the above respects. In form, it consists not of a 

series of relocations of one's force, as is true of the advance 

of an army, but of a series of raids, each of which is incredibly swift in execution and completion as compared with movements on land or sea. They could be called swift in Douhet's 

time, and are much more so now. They are subject to no 

canalization by features of terrain. They have not only a wide 

latitude in choice of routes between base and target (within 

the limits of the range of invading aircraft), but they also 

have a choice of altitudes which can add tremendously to the 

bafflement of the defender. The invaders may have the capability to come in so high that the defender's interceptors 

4 A striking example from the naval history of World War II 

is seen in the contr.ast between the six-month-long and 

frequently-critical .campaign for Guadalcanal in the latter 

part of 1942, when we insisted on seizing the strategic 

initiative before we had developed any clear naval superiority in the Pacific, and the quick decisiveness with which 

we were able to take islands of comparable size and 

garrisons in all succeeding campaigns, when we enjoyed a 

coonnanding (and steadily increasing) over-all naval 

ascendancy. See Bernard Brodie, Guide to Naval Strategy, 

3rd ed., Princeton, 1944, pp. 123-127. 

MIFIDEI I IAL 
REF ID:A484784 

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11. 

either cannot reach their elevation at all or cannot maneuver 

there; or they may choose to come in so low that his radar 

detection systems fail. 

Thus the problem of interception has always been a 

difficult one to solve. It was especially so before the advent 

of radar, and now the difficulties are again rising as a result 

of the steadily mounting speeds of attacking planes and the 

development of various devices for confusing search radar, 

despite marked concurrent advances in the gathering and transmission of radar data as represented in the SAGE system. 

Also, air combat offers nothing comparable to the cover 

afforded by features of the terrain, including man·made earthworks, which in ground war favor the defensive. Defense through 

air combat is inherently paradoxical, for the defending plane 

is an interceptor that can engage the offensive bomber only by 

attacking it. Being designed to fight over relatively short 

distances rather than to carry bombs over long ones, the 

fighter, though economizing in over-all dimensions, has usually 

been able to outrun, outmaneuver, and outshoot the bomber. But 

its advan ta.ges in one or more of these re spec ts have often been 

only marginal. With the speeds of the modern interceptor 

tending to enter well into the region of the supersonic, its 

maneuverability at high altitudes may in fact be much inferior 

CDIFllEHIAL 
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12. 

to that of the bomber it is attacking, because of the high 

wing-loadings which such speeds normally require. 

There are, to be sure, certain contrary considerations. 

The defending interceptor is usually easier to replace than the 

larger bomber, and interceptor pilots forced to take to their 

parachutes are more likely to fall in friendly territory and 

to fight again than are the crews of downed bombers. Thus, if 

the defender is not caught too short-handed to begin with, is 

not too inferior to his opponent in inherent power or "war 

potential," and manages to protect the means of building his 

fighter planes and other defenses, he can expect during a 

campaign to build up his fighters more rapidly than the attacker 

can build up his bomber forces. The antiaircraft gun which 

contributes to the defense is not generally expended in action, 

so that its numbers and effectiveness grow in the course of a 

campaign. 

The factors just described were dominant in the months 

during and following the Battle of Britain in 1940-1941. They 

were also present in the Allied air assault on Germany, but 

two major elements served in the latter case to upset the 

trend favoring the defender and to give the victory to the 

attacker. First was the fact that the two sides were far from 

comparable in the resources they could throw into the air 

CllFIDEITIAL 
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13. 

struggle, especially after Germany had become enmeshed in 

Russia. Not only could the Allies take their losses and still 

keep their bomber forces growing, but they were also able 

toward the end to pour vast numbers of long-range fighters 

into the air battle as cover for their bombers. It was these 

invading fighters more than any one other thing that broke the 

back of the German air force. 

The second factor that shifted the scale in favor of the 

Allies was, under the conditions of World War II, much less 

important, but it was the one on which Douhet had banked. 

Because he felt that a relatively modest weight of bombs could 

destroy the enemy air defenses and air-defense industries, the 

fact that some bombers could always get through any air defense 

was to Douhet absolutely crucial. Those that got through would 

make the job much easier for the next wave, and that wave for 

the one following, and so on. And while World War II proved 

that Douhet's reliance on that principle was vastly excessive, 

in the end the successful bombing of the German oil industry 

did help to ground the remainder of the German air force. 

Presumably in a future war the use of nuclear weapons will 

make the victory of the air offensive over the defense much 

more quick and certain than previously. But the issue is 

complicated by the fact that the process works both ways: 

GllFIDEITIAL 
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14. 

a concurrent counter-offensive would also benefit from the 

introduction of nuclear weapons. 

Defense against hostile missiles in all forms of warfare, 

whether on land, sea, or in the air, has always basically 

consisted of a combination of two things: first, measures to 

reduce the number of enemy missiles thrown~ or to spoil their 

aim, by hitting the enemy as he attacks (i.e., active defenses); 

and secondly, ability to absorb those missiles that actually 

strike home (i.e .. passive defenses). 

A naval force under air attack during World War II sought 

to avoid being hit by dispersing and maneuvering of ships, 

and relied on armor, compartmentation, and "damage control" 

activities in the individual units to minimize the damage of 

the hits received. These were its passive defenses. But all 

the while the naval force was shooting at the enemy planes 

attacking it, to their constant discomfort and frequent 

destruction. Fewer bombs and torpedoes were released against 

it, and at much longer ranges, than would have been the case 

had this firepower comprising its active defenses been lacking. 

Naturally) this combination of active and passive devices sometimes proved adequate and sometimes not, depending on circumstances and luck, but certainly one's chances for survival 

were better for having a defense. 

GOIFIDENTIAL 
REF ID:A484784 

CGllFIDEITIAL RM-1781 

10-3-56 15. 

However, our example stresses the tactical situation. 

The old dictum that "the best defense is a strong offense" 

emphasizes the strategic idea that by taking the offensive a 

nation can forestall the enemy 1 s blows and gain the advantage 

of hitting him at a time and in a manner for which he is least 

prepared. This idea is essentially an expansion upon the conception of active defense; but it is distinct enough so that 

it ought to be called by another term which dispenses with the 

word "defense." We might call it the idea of "securitythrough-offense. 11 

All these considerations apply in air as well as in land 

and naval warfare, with, however, at least one major distinction. In ground warfare, force composition and tactics of 

fighting need not be markedly affected by whether one is on 

the strategic offensive or defensive. The target in either 

case is the enemy army. In air war, the forces involved and 

the methods of fighting are wholly different between the 

5 

offense and the defense. In strategic air war, defensive 

5 In naval warfare, which falls somewhere between air and 

ground war in these respects, the offensive takes. the 

form of asserting command of the sea in a critical area, 

and of efforts both to expand the area of effective command 

and to increase the degree of naval control within that 

area. "Command of the sea 11 is in turn best de fined as 

ability to use the sea for one 1 s own shipping and to 

deny it to the enemy. The instruments for asserting and 

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RM-1781 

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fighting is done with missiles fired from the ground or from 

fighter planes operating on, over, or near home or friendly 

territories; offensive fighting, on the other hand, is done 

by bombers releasing bombs over targets on enemy territory 

which may be on the other side of the world. 

There are several important consequences of this difference between air and ground war, one of which affects the 

basic character of force organization. Since in ground warfare it is in general the same kind of army that assumes the 

defensive or goes over to the offensive, a commander's bias 

in favor of an offensive strategy may be only modestly refleeted in the kind of field forces he asks for. But a 

comparable predisposition in the air war affects fundamentally 

the forces that the air conn:nander requests. 

(cont'd from preceding page) 

exercising command on the one hand, and for disputing it 

on the other 1 do tend to differ -- the former pursuit 

usually requiring a heavy commitment, among other things, 

to escort vessels for the protection of one's shipping, 

and the latter usually making much heavier demands on 

the use of raiding-type craft, especially submarines. 

Thus, naval war presents the paradox that the side that 

asserts counnand (i.e., the "offensive") appears to be 

engaged mostly in defensive activities against the 

opponent 1s raiding attacks. Such was certainly the 

character of the crucial Atlantic campaigns in both World 

Wars. The key to the paradox is that the fighting mostly 

concerns a value -- i.e., retention of ocean-going commerce 

-- of which the inferior side has already been deprived. 

COIFIDENTIAL 
RM-1781 

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17. 

Obviously, the commitment to the offensive will entail 

first of all a predilection for bombers rather than interceptors, but it is likely also to go far beyond the choice of 

aircraft. It might, for example, affect the character of the 

air-base structure. A complex of operating bases is very 

expensive to build, and it becomes more expensive as its 

designers attempt to provide protection against enemy attack 

either through surplus bases for dispersion of aircraft or 

through the "hardening" of bases by putting shelters around 

aircraft and important facilities. The extra cost of such 

additional protection comes out of funds which might otherwise be spent on more aircraft. The temptation to those who 

think in terms of the offensive is to rely chiefly on ioitiative to ensure getting off the ground on time, and to put the 

extra money into additional bombers to ensure sufficient 

survivors in the event of attack. The charge "Maginot 

mentality," with its connotation of cravenness and futility, 

can go a very long way toward stilling doubts about the wisdom 

of relying for security upon initiative rather than shelter. 

In time of crisis, the offensive predisposition of the 

force structure will tend to induce conformity with the ideas 

that molded it. There will be pressure upon the government to 

guarantee that its forces will hit before being hit, just as 

CONFIDENTIAL 
in 1914 all the European general staffs pressed their 

RM-1781 

10-3-56 18. 

respective governments to guarantee the security of mobilization by getting it started soon enough. Of course, such 

pressure is not going to be unresisted, and there is a high 

probability that it will be resisted successfully. A military 

planner should not rely for the security of his forces on a 

national initiative that will depend on governmental decisions 

and actions over which he can have no real control. It cannot 

be too strongly stressed that governments are rarely if ever 

monolithic in a way that encompasses both the military and 

civil branches; and democratic governments are the least so 

of all. 

Let us now divide the air-defense problem into its 

separate components and consider each one in turn. We have 

seen that defensive activities are of two kinds: the active 

defenses, which consist of shooting at enemy planes, and the 

passive defenses, which involve mainly hiding, shielding, or 

dispersing the targets. To these unequivocally defensive 

functions is added the security-through-offensive mission of 

the strategic air forces, now connnonly called the "blunting" 

mission, which seeks its targets on enemy ground in the form 

of grounded aircraft, airfield installations, and the like, 

including enemy nuclear stockpiles if accessible. The blunting 

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19. 

mission is operati.onally almost indistinguishable from the 

other offensive missions of long-range bombers. It differs 

from them mostly in the nature of the targets primarily 

selected for destruction and in the special value of speed 

in accomplishing it. 

However, before we discuss each of the first two methods 

of defense, we should take up a problem that is common to both, 

and that also affects the blunting mission: that of getting 

some degree of warning of impending enemy attack. 

The Problem of Warning 

Warning is the key to the entire defense problem. Our 

expectations concerning what warning we will get largely 

determine both what kinds of defenses (including the warning 

system itself) we think are worth spending money on, and how 

good they will be. If we could count with very high confidence 

on having three or four hours' warning of an impending strategic 

attack, and if the enemy knew that our confidence was justified, 

we should probably have nothing further to worry about with 

respect to that kind of attack. That much time would suffice 

to get most of the aircraft of our Strategic Air Command off 

the ground and out of harm's way, and the enemy would have to 

count on a retaliation so powerful (assuming his own defenses 

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20. 

were not magically impenetrable) as to be utterly unacceptable 

as the price of an attack on us. The anticipation of retaliation would therefore surely restrain his hand, and we would 

have strategic deterrence operating with nearly perfect 

efficiency and reliability. 

Without pausing now to dwell on the qualifications and 

exceptions to this idea (or on the question of its feasibility), 

let us note that it highlights two basic principles about 

defense in general, and about warning in particular. First, 

whatever else it may be possible or desirable to defend, it is 

absolutely essential to defend one's retaliatory force, or a 

substantial portion of it. Known ability to defend it in fact 

constitutes the only thing (short of complete world-wide 

nuclear disarmament) that is potentially a complete and 

perfect defense of everything else. Conversely, of course, a 

conspicuous inability or unreadiness to defend the retaliator1 

force must tend to provoke the opponent to destroy it; in other 

words, it tempts him to an aggression he might not otherwise 

contemplate. How can he permit our SAC to live and constantly 

threaten his existence, if he believes he can destroy it with 

6 

impunity? 

6 The fact that this question need not be peculiarly onesi ded in its application is attested to by the one-time 

existence in this country of a "preventive war" school 

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10-3-56 21. and 22. 

Secondly, if there must be a choice, a reliable and 

unequivocal warning measured in hours is far more valuable 

than a much longer period of warning that cannot, by its 

nature, be reliable and unequivocal. The longer-term warning 

is what we tend to expect. from secret intelligence, and it is 

reasonable to suppose tha.t if we rely upon such a warning 

system to trigger action when trouble is brewing, we should 

probably have to depend on indicators that are fairly 

equivocal. 

There is in these matters a stupendous difference between 

hindsight and foresight. The intelligence indicators of the 

Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor could hardly look more unequivocal to the historian who studies them now, expecially in 

view of the information we received through the cracked 

Japanese codes. But they were not read as such by the appropriate people at the time; they did not then point the finger at 

Pearl Harbor rather than elsewhere. This was so for a number 

(cont'd from preceding page) 

of thought. Nevertheless, Nathan Leites has developed 

the thesis that in Bolshevik ideology there is a special 

compulsion to destroy the opponent's capability to destroy 

oneself, and whether or not this compulsion is acted out 

depends entirely on the prevalent estimate of feasibility. 

Cf. RAND Report R-239, A Study of Bolshevism, Santa Monica, 

May 1, 1953, chapter xvii and passim. 

CONFIDENTIAL 
RM-1781 

10-3-56 23. 

of reasons which, however, did~ include anything that one 

could call obtuseness. The few persons few because of 

extreme security precautions -- who had the opportunity to 

read the decoded Japanese messages included men of outstanding 

intelligence and dedication, and they were as good a group as 

we ever are likely to have in comparable positions. But they 

were too harassed by other preoccupations, including the whole 

European war and the affairs of the Atlantic, to concentrate 

their attention on the suggestive items of intelligence that 

7 

were somewhat spasmodically brought to their attention. 

It is an old story that one can pay a great price for 

security when it takes the form of limiting vital information 

to a few highly-placed persons who do not have time to think 

about it. The responsiveness of U.S. government agencies to 

war indicators has no doubt been improved over the Pearl 

Harbor situation by appropriate organizational changes. But 

one should not forget the powerful predisposition to believe 

that an existing peace will continue. Modern war is so hideous 

in its immediate effects, and so huge a gamble, that it is 

7 See in this connection the forthcoming RAND study Signals 

for Pearl Harbor, by Roberta M. Wohlstetter, chapter iv 

and passim. 

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always difficult for any normal person to believe that some8 

one or some group could be planning to start one soon. 

During the cold war, the Soviets have almost succeeded in 

suppressing this bias among some Americans, but the mere 

passage of time would tend to restore it even if there were 

no shift to relatively benign behavior on the part of the 

Russians. One gets used in time even to cold war, and the 

more one gets used to it the more one appreciates how different 

it is from hot war. 

Paradoxically, it is their very attachment to the 

offensive spirit that creates a strong impulse an:ong the 

military to disbelieve that the enemy may have comparable 

attachments, and that he may therefore attempt to initiate 

hostile action. Too much worrying about ~hat the enemy may do 

is almost by definition "defensive thinking," which is considered all right for specialists with specific defensive 

assignments, but dubious for war planners or theater commanders. 

It is interesting that the precautions actually taken at Pearl 

8 However, the degree to which Stalin was able to deceive 

himself in 1941 about the peacefulness of German intentions, 

despite specific warnings from Churchill and Roosevelt as 

well as his own functionaries, reflects a degree of willful 

blindness which, historically, is highly abnormal. It 

would be difficult to find another instance where such 

positive warnings of attack were so flagrantly disregarded. 

See in this connection Khrushchev's secret speech before 

the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet 

Union. (The New Le~g~_f, Special Supplement, July 16, 1956; 

pp. S-36 to S-43.) 

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25. 

Harbor before the attack were exclusively concerned with 

sabotage, which is essentially nonmilitary in form. Perhaps 

for that very reason it is regarded as not unbecoming to fear 

it.9 

The utility of long-range warning depends not alone on 

its reliability or degree of equivocality but also on what 

one wants to do with it. It is one thing to use it to trigger 

an attack that will anticipate and forestall the enemy's attack, 

and quite another to use it simply to intensify alertness to 

shorter-term warning and to take other elementary precautions 

of a strictly defensive nature. These are differences of 

basic attitude toward the nature of the problem. There is 

a school of thought that argues that our whole system of 

defense must be based on the concept of anticipatory attack, 

that is, of an attack provoked by, yet preceding, an enemy 

attack; one wag has described this as the principle of "I 

won't hit first unless you do." The probability that such fine 

anticipation will be realized is, of course, ridiculously low. 

9 The responsible commanders at the time could not know, as 

we know now, how empty was the threat of sabotage from the 

large population of Japanese descent on Oahu. But it is 

characteristic of the perennial fear of sabotage that the 

threat is almost never quantified by those who express 

fear of or make preparations against it. The enemy's 

"Or1er of Battle" is the gauge of his military capabilities, which one wishes neither to overrate nor to underrate, and the value attached to it by intelligence 

operatives is extremely high. But no one thinks of 

devising an "Order of Battle" for prospective saboteurs. 

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26. 

Unless a government is willing to be the aggressor -- in 

which case it surely does better to forget about warning and 

to choose its own time to attack the "an tic ipa tory attack'' 

type of response implicitly requires that warning be unequivocal. But early warning is almost certain to be equivocal. 

Only if the enemy is very clumsy or stupid, or both, will he 

signal well in advance his intention to attack. 

There may be no lack of early, equivocal warning. It is 

appropriate in the nuclear age to be alert to the possibility 

of deliberate unrestricted attack unheralded by any apparent 

worsening of relations. But it is also appropriate occasionally to remind ourselves that that sort of thing has never 

happened in modern times between great nations, although it 

has often been feared. The factors militating against its 

happening remain at least as powerful now as they have ever 

been. 

We should note also that the considerations determining 

the utility of short-term warning are different now from what 

they were in World War II. In that war, radar warning of 

enemy approach was useful primarily because of the assistance 

it gave to defending fighter groups. It permitted the bulk of 

interceptor aircraft to remain in advance readiness on the 

ground, instead of wasting their limited flight endurance in 

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27. 

"stooging" aloft; and it greatly assisted airborne fighters 

to make contact with the enemy. In that role the British 

radar screen at the time of the Battle of Britain proved to be 

one of the important technological surprises of the war. But 

it mattered relatively little if air-raid sirens sometimes did 

not sound until bombs were already falling. Few lives or aircraft were lost by those unannounced first bombs. 

Today, however, the first bomb is likely to be the only 

one that a community or an air base will hear or feel. One 

major object of short-term warning is still to aid interceptors 

or other active defenses, but probably a greater object is to 

get out of harm's way whatever targets are movable: people, 

vehicles, and especially the crews and aircraft of the 

Strategic Air Command. The reason we want to save the latter 

is not that we are interested in retribution for its own 

sake, but that the whole deterrent value of our long-range 

bombing force rests, as we have already noted, on its known 

immunity to destruction by surprise attack. 

The rapidly advancing speeds of bomber aircraft are tending 

to defeat the utility of search radar, which is intrinsically 

incapable (because of its line-of-sight operating limitations) 

of compensatory advances in range. It is necessary, instead, 

to push the actual stations farther forward. In Europe there 

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28. 

is often too little space to do this. But the United States, 

among the major powers, is uniquely able to surround itself 

with advance warning screens to gain a few hours of warning 

before hostile planes can cross its main frontiers. 

The United States and Canada are presently completing 

three main radar lines in the north. The closest, sometimes 

called the Pinetree Line, lies in some depth along the CanadaUnited States frontier. Farther out is the Mid-Canada or 

McGill Line. And in the arctic wastes, roughly along the 

parallels between 68° and 70° north, is the DEW (Distant Early 

Warning) Line. The flanks of these lines continue out to sea 

through the use of picket ships, "Texas Towers," and airborne 

search radar carried in large routinely-operated military aircraft. Buttressing these electronic alarm systems, at least 

in the more temperate climates, is the Ground Observer Corps 

of volunteer civilians. 

Although the costs of erecting and operating this 

system are bound to be quite substantial, even as national 

security budgets are now reckoned, the result is far from 

foolproof. An opponent could attempt to confuse or desensitize 

it in its outer reaches by "spoofing," that is, by deliberately 

penetrating it simply to register false alarms. We know also 

that there are various devices, familiar from World War II, 

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29. 

for confusing a radar screen (e.g., "chaff" or "window"); 

and new ones will no doubt be thought of. There is also a 

great deal of legitimate commercial traffic in peacetime, 

which presents an enormous discrimination problem. Finally, 

radar screens may off er no useful warning at all against 

missiles or aircraft which may be launched from submarines 

and which may have ranges sufficient to penetrate 500 miles 

or more inland, or against very-long-range ballistic missiles. 

And they are likely also to prove inadequate against low-flying 

aircraft. 

Not much more can be said descriptively about the longerterm warning system discussed previously, which depends on 

intelli~ence indicators. It is an area quite properly shrouded 

in close secrecy, so that those who are not actually dealing 

with the relevant operations cannot judge whether there is 

much or little to be expected from them. 

But the problem of warning is not only one of getting 

relevant information, whether from radar screens or secret 

operatives; it is also necessary to know how to handle the 

information when it comes. A warning system must be sensitive 

enough to be promptly and reliably triggered at the appropriate 

time, which means that it has to be sensitive enough to produce 

occasional false alarms. Yet it might become politically 

intolerable for the false alarms to be too frequent, especially 

COlff.IDENTIAt 
RM-1781 

10-3-56 30. 

if the response to every one of them were elaborate enough to 

create considerable disturbance in the population. The 

"appropriate time" will come only once, if it comes at all, and 

the problem of maintaining a fine balance between alertness and 

calm will, if we are lucky, prevail over many years. During 

those years, the permitted reaction time will become steadily 

less, until the long-range ballistic missile reduces it to a 

hard minimum so small as probably to allow no time for counteractions that are not fully automatic. 

Active Defenses 

By "active defenses" in air war we generally mean two 

major categories of instruments: the interceptor aircraft with 

the system of weapons it carries aloft; and the various latterday derivatives of the antiaircraft gun, which is to say mostly 

ground-to-air self-propelled missiles. In the projected longrange, unmanned, expendable interceptor, such as the Boma.rc 

missile, the two categories tend to merge. Both categories 

have undergone impressive technological development since World 

War II, but at the usual price of greatly increasing unit costs. 

Thus steeply ascending costs make it increasingly burdensome to 

provide the necessary numbers of weapons to assure good defense. 

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31. 

Although it appears that in the net active defenses have 

gained considerably, and are continuing to gain, in their 

ability to cope with the conventional manned bomber as an 

invading aircraft, this gain has been far more than offset by 

the change in the weapons that the bomber carries. The problem 

of defense against bombers carrying thermonuclear bombs, or 

even fission bombs, is simply not in the same category as that 

of defense against bombers carrying the old types of explosives 

or incendiaries. The basic difference lies in the rate of 

bomber kills that the defender must consider necessary and 

the attacker tolerable; from this difference, which is an 

extreme one, all sorts of other differences follow. 

The modern interceptor aircraft costs between one-half 

million and one million dollars per unit. In level flight and 

at higher altitudes, it moves at speeds close to, or well above, 

that of sound. In its "all-weather" form it carries aloft an 

AI (airborne intercept} radar, and all models will probably 

use some form of radar in fire control. The armament used is 

already vastly superior to the World War II kind, and is 

getting better. The new interceptor will fire explosive 

rockets (air-to-air self-propelled missiles), guided and 

10 unguided, of 2.75-inch caliber and larger. It is possible 

10 An excellent unclass.ified survey of aircraft armament in 

use and under development at the time of writing is 

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10-3-56 32. 

also that small atomic warheads will be provided in the future. 

The fighter is an impressive and a beautiful object. Why then 

do experts usually attribute to it an effectiveness that to the 

layman seems astonishingly low? 

The answer lies in the fact that an effective kill of an 

enemy bomber depends on a sequence of discrete operations, each 

of which introduces a chance of failure. The probability that 

each stage will be successfully accomplished is of course less 

than 1 -- in some stages much less -- and to get the probabilityof-success for the entire sortie (measuring success by some such 

index as the killing of a single enemy bomber), the various 

fractional values representing the success-probabilities for 

each of the separate stages have to be multiplied together. 

The product is bound to be a smaller fraction than any of the 

multipliers. 

Let us briefly consider what happens to a single squadron 

of twenty-five interceptors. At any one time during routine 

operations a certain proportion of the planes will be undergoing a sufficiently extensive servicing to make them unavailable for dealing with a surprise strike. Of the remainder, 

(cont'd from preceding page) 

contained in "Aircraft Armament," Flight and Aircraft 

Engineer (London), January 28, 1955, pp. 105-110, 114-

122, 129. 
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33. 

only a small proportion will be in an advanced state of 

readiness -- i.e., with crews standing by and able to take off 

within five minutes -- though increasing proportions will be 

available as the warning time is increased. Thus the availability factor will vary importantly with the warning time. 

The more advanced the position of the bases, however, the 

shorter the warning time is likely to be. 

Of those planes that take off in time, a certain proportion will abort for some mechanical reason. Others will abort 

because of some gross pilot error. Even then, a plane properly 

vectored out to the location of the enemy bomber may fail to 

make its own AI detection,, or convert a detection into a 

proper firing pass. The former is especially likely for aircraft which are not equipped for all-weather operation, and, 

under modern speed conditions, the latter is a considerable 

probability for any aircraft. At best, the interceptor can 

count on a single firing pass, which will very likely be a 

collision-course intercept from abeam requiring a difficult 

and fleeting deflection shot rather than the stern-pursuit 

kind of shooting connnon in World War II. The latter condition 

does carry with it one advantage over World War II conditions: 

the fighter is more likely to survive the bomber-fighter duel. 

For fighter survival rema.i.ns another factor to be reckoned with 

in the calculation. 

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Finally, if everything has gone well up to this point, 

the functioning of the fire-control apparatus and of the 

armament itself has to be equal to the extremely severe requiremeats laid upon them. Incidentally, the planned use of atomic 

warheads in airborne armament is intended, not to enable an 

interceptor to shoot down more than one plane at a time, as 

one might suppose, but simply to increase the kill probability 

against the single plane at which the interceptor makes its 

(usually single) firing pass. 

Thus, if we should find that of our original twenty-five 

interceptors only one or two have actually shot down enemy 

bombers, we might have no justified fault to find with the 

performance, though we should indeed be entitled to regard the 

result as unsatisfactory. 

We have so far assumed that the interceptors will be 

properly designed for the task that awaits them. But the 

enemy may steal a technological march and use bombers that 

arrive at altitudes which our interceptors cannot even reach, 

let alone operate at effectively. And if we design an interceptor for extremely-high altitude performance, which inevitably 

means increasing the cost per unit and sacrificing loweraltitude performance (partly because of requirements for larger 

size and lighter wing loading), we might find that the enemy 

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JS. 

elects to come in "on the deck," this is, at very low altitudes, 

where he may hope to escape radar detection. Inevitably, the 

attacker will be using all the electronic countermeasures (ECM) 

his scientists make available to him for confusing our search, 

airborne intercept, and gunnery radars. 

The enemy can also avail himself of the ancient prerogative of the attacker to concentrate his forces, in both 

space and time, and thus overwhelm the inevitably dispersed 

defenses. The interceptor does not represent "local defense" 

in quite the limited way that the antiaircraft gun does, but 

in terms of defending an area as large as the United States 

and adjacent Canada, its legs are pretty short. The requirernents for very high performance and for a size modest enough 

to make quantity procurement possible limit the fighter's 

opportunity to extend its legs. What is more, we must remember 

that the utility of range in the interceptor depends also on 

the time available for tracking the enemy bomber. There is no 

use building more range into the interceptor than our radar 

system will ever permit it to utilize. 

In World War II the defending fighters were effective 

enough to oblige the German and British air forces to do their 

bombing at night, when their bombing accuracy was very much 

impaired; (the U.S. Air Force held to daylight bombing, but, 

CDIFIDEITIAt= 
after a few disasters, had to put long-range fighters in 

escort). The modern long-range bomber, with its almost 

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36. 

complete reliance on radar navigation and bombing, is about 

as effective at night and in bad weather as at any other time. 

The influence which the interceptor may still have in forcing 

the invading bomber to elect night approaches therefore brings 

it much less credit than it had in World War II. The fighter 

must now actually shoot down the bomber before it reaches the 

target. And even if the bomber is shot down short of its 

target, a thermonuclear bomb in its hold may be set to go off 

at or near contact with the ground, in which case it will still 

do a lot of damage either directly or through radioactive fallout. 

Yet, despite these many drawbacks, the interceptor furnishes the only means, other than the projected Bomarc missile, 

of reaching out for the bomber before it can reach the vicinity 

of its target. 

The other kind of active-defense weapon is the missile 

fired from the ground. The scorn in which Douhet, Mitchell, 

and their followers held the antiaircraft gun followed from 

an understandable inability to foresee the marvelous electronic 

fire-control devices that would be perfected in time for use 

in World War II. Before the end of that war we had gun 

IDIFIDEllTIAL 
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37. 

directors (especially on naval vessels) that could fix on an 

aircraft target by radar, follow that target, and automatically 

compute the proper lead for the antiaircraft guns which were 

moving in complete synchronization with them. The guns, in 

turn, fired shells (of 5-inch caliber or larger) armed with 

the proximity or "variable time" (VT) fuseJ which was itself a 

miniature radar sending out impulses and responding to their 

echoes. 

Progress since has moved mainly in the direction of 

substituting guided, self-propelled missiles for the gun 

11 

projectiles. The Army NIKE, which is the prototype of this 

family of weapons, has enormously greater range (approximately 

twenty-five miles) than any antiaircraft gun. It also has much 

greater killing power as a result of its large size and its 

ability, under automatic command guidance, to adjust to evasive 

maneuvers of the target plane. It will no doubt develop further 

in range, and it may increase its lethal radius or killing power 

by adopting an atomic warhead, though its accuracy may make that 

11 The conspicuous exception is the "Skysweeper, 11 a 75-mm. 

radar-controlled automatic gun, which is especially useful against low-flying aircraft. But further development 

of the type is rendered doubtful by the apparently inherent 

combination of very limited range and high unit cost. 

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unnecessary. So far so good. Some regar1 the NIKE-type of 

missile as already worth more on a dollar-for-dollar basis 

than the interceptor, and as iefinitely the more promising 

of the two for the future. 

On the other hand, the antiaircraft missile has certain 

grave limitations. First, while it is of remarkably long 

range as compared with a gun, it has very short legs as 

compared with an interceptors. This means, among other 

things, that it is an inherently dispersed kind of weapon, 

the units of which tend to be fixed not only to the defense 

of a single area but to a single quadrant of that area. The 

NIKE installation that defends Chicago from the south would 

hardly be of much help against planes approaching that city 

from the north. 

The site of a NIKE battery is not easily concealed, and 

the locations of established ones will no doubt be well known 

to the enemy. The invading bombers would know pretty well 

what it would take to saturate the NIKE defenses of any given 

area. Manned bombers are also likely to develop means of 

remaining outside the ran~e of local defense weapons while 

shooting in supersonic air-to-surface missiles to destroy 

the target. Or they might even (conceivably though 

improbably} rely on lethal fallout rather than blast or heat 

to make cities untenable, thus having only to drop their 

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39. 

bombs in the countryside beyond the range of local defense 

missiles surrounding cities. 

The NIK~ is further limited in its r-ate of fire. .Sach 

battery of launchers has but one radar-nirector system, which 

must remain fully occupied with one missile for the full time 

of its flight. If each missile in flight takes two or three 

minutes to get to its target, the number of missiles that one 

battery can fire at any one enemy formation cannot be large. 

Uirector systems and even whole batteries can be multiplied, 

of course, but they are not cheap. 

Above all, any system that is heavily dependent upon 

radar fthe NIK~ uses radar for search or "acquisition" of the 

target, for target tracking, and for missile tracking end 

guidance command} is inherently subject to confusion by 

appropriate measures.

12 The answer to enemy electronic countermeasures is counter-countermeasures; but the attacker has the 

initiative, and available learning time for the defender is 

going to be short or nonexistent. Naturally, the limitations 

and weaknesses characteristic of NIKE are not necessarily 

12 See unclassified description of NIKE, with photographs, 

in "NIK.h:'s i\iest," The Army Combat Forces Journal, 

January, 1955, p. lhf. 

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40. 

inherent in all antiaircraft self-propelled missiles. For 

example, a missile with a built-in homing device might be free 

of the peculiar rate-of-fire limitation to which NIKE is 

subject. Also, it is probable that unguided missiles thrown 

up in barrages can supplement the guided ones. 

One must repeat, however, that the kinds of defenses 

mounted against high-level attack are generally of not much 

use against bombers that stay roughly under 1,500 feet during 

most of their approach to target. An additional low-level 

defense capability therefore has to be provided, at great 

additional cost. 

Our observations have so far tended to stress the limitations of active air-defense instruments. But there are also a 

few general observations to be made on the positive side. 

First, if the active defenses succeed only in obliging attacking 

bombers to concentrate in groups against individual targets, 

thus depriving them of the freedom to attack a separate target 

with a single aircraft, much has already been accomplished. In 

World War II, even where defenses could be disregarded, planes 

had to concentrate or converge upon individual targets in vast 

armadas in order to drop enough bombs on those targets. With 

atomic and especially thermonuclear weapons, one bomber over 

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target is usually quite enough. If it were not for active 

defenses, therefore, there would be nothing to keep an attacking bomber fleet from spreading out over the land to destroy 

every target on its list in one strike. But if the defenses 

oblige it to assume tactics which restrict it to, say, onefourth of its target list for the first strike, perhaps much 

of the remaining three-fourths can be permanently saved, 

especially if one's own surviving bombers are meanwhile 

reducing the enemy air force. 

The above argument, if sound, is no doubt enough in itself to justify a very large expenditure on active air defenses. 

Their existence greatly raises the requirements for the enemy's 

strategic bombing force. He must raise and maintain a multistrike capability, which is disproportionately more expensive 

than a one-strike capability. 13 Above all, his confidence in 

his ability to carry through a successful surprise attack 

should also be disproportionately reduced. 

13 A one-strike capability means that an attacker need not 

retrieve his bombers,. whatever provision is made for the 

rescue of crews (or their temporary internment in neutral 

territory). Thus, one-way ranges are adequate and there 

is no need for air-refueling tankers. A multi-strike 

capability means that one must retrieve a high percentage 

of dispatched bombers (thus reducing the attritiontolerance level) and bomber designs must provide for something like two-way ranges as well as for a large supporting 

force in tankers. What is more, regrouping becomes a 

difficult problem in a multi-strike capability. 

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42. 

But, of course, there is not much solace in raising the 

enemy's requirements, if he is still able to meet them. And 

even if his first (inevitably devastating) strike is significantly confined in its effects, we have to allow for subsequent 

strikes if we cannot meanwhile succeed in destroying his air 

force. These facts should incidentally remind us that defenses 

that are enough to worry the commander of an attacking force 

do not necessarily warrant comfort to the defender. The real 

value of one's active defenses lies, as we have suggested, in 

what they contribute to deterring an attacker, if they are 

effective in that respect at all. 

Large countries such as the United States or the Soviet 

Union can by dint of great expenditures and much ingenuity 

devise methods of active defense which, with luck, will exact 

high attrition of attacking bombers, at least of the manned 

type. But the destructiveness of the nuclear weapons carried 

by the bombers that will get through any defense has grown to 

the point where further growth seems almost uninteresting. 

Also, the passing of time brings us inexorably closer to the 

advent of very-long-range ballistic missiles that almost defy 

14 

all existing conceptions of active defense. If the cause 

14 Apart from the technical problems involved, which are 

enormous but at least in theory not insuperable, defenses 

against ballistic missiles are likely to require a kind of 

CONFIDENTIAi. 
RM-1781 

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43. 

of active defenses is thus not altogether lost, its prospects 

for the future are scarcely bright. 

Passive Defenses 

Active defenses seek to reduce enemy bombing by downing 

the aircraft carrying the bombs. Passive defenses, on the 

other hand, seek to minimize the effects of those bombs that 

are dropped. We have seen that active defenses can almost 

always be defeated regionally by a strong attacker, at least 

by sheer saturation, if not also by surprise. In Douhet's 

words, 11 the bomber will always get through." This fact suggests 

the need for passive defenses. 

There is also a special quality about passive defense 

which suggests in reverse .a quality comparable to saturation in 

the attack. Just as saturation is in theory an answer to any 

kind of active defense, so the removal or sufficient hardening 

of a target is theoretically an answer to any kind of attack. 

In practice, of course., many attractive targets do not lend 

themselves to protection by passive means. But once the 

special quality of passive defense is grasped -- once the curse 

(cont'd from preceding page) 

automatism of response that may prove politically unacceptable in peacetime. That will be especially true if antiICBM missiles have to carry nuclear warheads. 

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44. 

is taken off the term "passive," that is -- it may be iiscovered that much can be accomplished by reasonable efforts. 

Passive defenses fall into one or more of three different 

patterns: first, measures involving concealment of the target 

(including devices desi~ned to deceive or confuse enemy 

bombers); secondly, measures involving some form of armoring 

or hardenin~ of ~he tar~et (e.g., provision of underground 

shelters); and, t~irdly, measures involving removal or 

~ispersion of targets. Perhaps one could add stockpiling of 

replacements for thin~s, such as Aircraft, which are likely 

to be enemy targets, but replacements also have to be dispersed or otherwise protected in order to survive. 

There are several other generic differences between 

active and passive riefen:3es. The former tenJ to be defenses 

of a locality rather than of an object. They comprise interceptors and antiaircraft armament, which, because they are 

detached from the targets they defend, can be relatively 

easily shifted ~n short notice. 

Passive defenses, on the other hand, vary with the nature 

of the obJects they protect, and are usually quite intimately 

integrated with those objects. An air-raid shelter is fixed 

in a way that an interceptor aircraft is not; a shelter suitable 

for covering people is not suitable for protecting the equipment 

eaNFIDENT.JP.l 
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45. 

of an oil-refinery plant. Thus, in order to provide meaningful 

passive defenses, governments have to decide well ahead of a 

crisis just what objects they are going to protect, and how 

thoroughly they will do so. Such decisions are not likely to 

be easy, either conceptually or politically. 

There is also an enormous difference in minimum cost. 

Active defenses, to be of any use at all, require a very 

considerable minimum expenditure, one measured in billions of 

dollars annually. Simply to provide a "no-holes" radar warning 

network, without which active defenses are essentially useless, is itself a considerable undertaking. In passive defense, 

on the other hand, much of value can be done at relatively little 

cost. The dissemination of information to people about what to 

do in the event of attack, for example, costs relatively little, 

but might be invaluable in a crisis. 0£ course, it is also easy 

to think of extremely expensive passive measures, such as putting 

milit•ry forces, populations, or large industrial facilities 

underground. However, the fact that such measures are costly 

is not in itself sufficient to establish that they are inappropriate. We have already several times stressed the importance 

of making SAC secure, and doing so is bound to involve 

considerable outlays for passive defense. 

CONFIDENTIAL 
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£8NFID£NTIAl :tM-17~1 

10-J-56 -~6. 

The things that one wants to protect throur.;h assorted 

measures of passive defense may be roughly grouped into three 

general cate~ories: people, production capital, and military 

forces in being. These a.re of course not mutually exclusive 

categories. People require a certain basic supply of consumer 

goods, and, in the longer run, enough production capital to 

meet at least the recurring needs of bare subsistence. People 

also represent cherished political and social institutions, 

which, however importantp are imponderables and therefore 

defended, if at all, only by defending people and their 

property. Similarly, extant military forces always comprise 

personnel, in addition to material objects and such nonmaterial 

elements as group integrity. Yet, despite overlappin~, the 

rough threefold classification seems a useful one for our 

purposes. 

Despite our previous remarks about the absolute necessity 

of protecting our SAC, even if everything else must go undefended, it still remains tn.ie that of our three generai 

categories only the first, people, represents an end value. 

People are individually precious, regardless of how many or 

how few survive. The other two categories are means to an 

end, that is, they provide for the welfare and protection of 

the people. 

CONFIDENTIAl 
RM-1781 

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47. 

It is necessary to make this point, because military 

officers of undoubted decency and humanity have often permitted 

their remarks on defense needs to reflect an apparent unconcern 

with the desirability of saving human lives for their own sake. 

Calculations which embrace the possibility of gigantic casualty 

lists tend to induce in the people who make them a callousness 

that, however superficial, may be operationally important in 

planning. On the other hand, civilians of established wisdom 

and temperateness have sometimes expressed impatience at a 

scale of priorities in defense which explicitly and overwhelmingly favors military forces. 

A permanent and comprehensive dispersal of existing 

industries would, to a large degree, automatically entail a 

comparable dispersal of population. The result, in effect, 

would be dispersal of our cities. The expected advantages of 

such a program are, first, that it would minimize dependence on 

the timely receipt of warning of enemy attack, and, secondly, 

that production capital would be protected along with the 

people who service it. The decisive disadvantages of urban 

decentralization are that it seems to be enormously difficult 

to carry out, both economically and politically, and that the 

protection gained even by a high degree of dispersal is hardly 

likely to be commensurate with the effort of achieving it. 

CONFIDENTIAL 
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48. 

Capital and people are dispersed permanently in order to 

reduce the density of valued objects in any one target location. If the atomic bomb had remained of a power roughly 

comparable to the "nominal" weapon exploded at Nagasaki, a 

reasonably feasible kind of dispersal couli have meant that 

more bombs, perhaps very many more, wouli have to be delivered 

by the enemy to effect a given amount of injury. Although it 

is likely over the short term to be harder for the defender 

to increase the number o.f tarr:ets than for the attacker to 

increase proportionately the number of bombs delivered, over 

the long:er term the race woulri not have looked so bad for the 

iefender. if weapon technolocy had remained at a standstill. 

Even if there were no f:lnal limit to the number of bombs an 

enemy coul1 produce, there would cert.ainly be a limit to the 

size of the delivery force he could maintain indefinitely 

during peacetime. Ani once hostilities broke out, that force 

would suffer attrition, especially if the aircraft comprising 

it could make repeated sorties to complete a bombing program. 

But as atomic bombs, besides multiplying exuberantly in 

numbers, also increased in unit power, the attractiveness of 

permanent dispersion inevitably faded. With the coming of 

the H-bomb, potentially available in whatever numbers might be 

desired, and with discovery of the radioactive fallout effect 

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49. 

of large-yield ground-burst weapons, it became clear that 

costly dispersion can to a large extent be countered by the 

very cheap expedient of delivering a vastly more powerful 

bomb. The combination of increased numbers and enormously 

greater power per unit gives the nuclear weapon a completely 

dispiriting lead in such a race. If a metropolis as naturally 

dispersed as Los Angeles can be effectively destroyed by a 

single weapon, we know that the forced dispersion of denser 

communities would have to proceed to much more drastic lengths 

than was previously thought necessary in order to be of any use 

at all. 

A modified dispersal action that concerns itself only with 

the placement of new defense plants and the populations that 

service them is already bE!ing actively pursued by the United 

States Government, which holds a certain leverage of inducement 

in its methods of awarding defense contracts, and in the 

provisions for amortization in the income-tax laws. In a 

steadily expanding economy such as ours, significant effects 

of such governmental action should eventually be discernible 

in that part of it directly concerned with military production. 

This is cheap dispersal, even though it is relatively slow and 

only partial. 

COllFIDENTIAL 
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GDllFIDENTIAL 

But it is very easy to exaggerate both the cheapness and 

the benefits of such a program. Thus far, pressures for 

dispersal on the part of government agencies have not reflected 

any well-thought-out plan which sought 1 among other things, to 

anticipate weapons developments or the enemy's future capabilities. 

The government has acted as though some of the more 

obvious vulnerabilities can be corrected even by unsystematic 

intervention . One such, for example, would break up the concentration of plants producing military aircraft in a single 

coastal section of southern California. That section may indeed 

be vulnerable, but the attack that eliminated the plants in it 

would almost certainly not be an isolated one, and it is doubtful 

whether plants situated anywhere in the United States could 

continue to build aircraft on a substantial scale after an allout nuclear attack, unless far more drastic steps were taken 

to protect all industries related to the manufacture of 

military aircraft than have yet been contemplated. Meanwhile, 

forced dispersion could hurt not only the collllllunities involved 

but the industries themselves (e.g., by causing the loss to 

research organizations of skilled engineers who would not 

wish to move), and could postpone the availability of new types 

of aircraft and missiles that we want to have on hand before 

COIFIDEITIAL 
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10-3-56 51. 

any attack. There is, of course, no objection to free or 

unforced dispersal_, such as results from normal movements to 

metropolitan suburbs, or from determination of new factory 

locations by the relative cheapness of land values outside big 

cities. 

Nothing that has been said above should be construed as 

expressing objection to carefully planned, selective dispersion. 

On the contrary, certain limited segments of our polity and 

economy, particularly those concerned with the governance of 

the armed services during wartime, seem to cry out for such 

planning. The Pentagon, a prime target in itself, situated in 

a city which would be a prime target without it, forces one to 

ask whether the reasons for such a concentration of military 

leadership and authority in so exposed a place are really 

compelling. 

Nor should objections to permanent industrial dispersion 

be interpreted to mean that there should be no preparations 

for temporary evacuation of cities during a crisis. If there 

were enough warning time, evacuation of cities to prepared 

locations would probably be at least a partially effective way 

of protecting our urban populations. Developments with respect 

to radioactive fallout make city evacuation less attractive 

as a defense measure than it once appeared; but it is probably 

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52. 

true that ordinary dwellings, especially those provided with 

cellars, can furnish considerable protection if suitably 

equipped for a siege with foods and other supplies, including 

instruments for measuring intensities of radioactivity. 

A wry hopefulness for the defense of civilians resides in 

the fact that there is no obvious reason for the enemy to 

destroy refugee populations in addition to the cities from 

which he has forced them to flee. On the contrary, he has 

every interest in burdening the opposing government with 

masses of utterly dispossessed and panic-stricken citizens. 

Corpses, by contrast, present few problems other than 

disposal. 

There is, to be sure, a common tendency to regard every 

additional increment of injury inflicted upon the opponent 

as unquestionably a military advantage. But fortunately 

there always have to be scales of priorities in a bombing 

program. The kind of destruction that is perhaps too 

readily regarded as "bonus" damage if it follows from attacks 

against other objectives is not necessarily the kind that 

either belligerent seeks to accomplish or feels he can 

afford to accomplish if it requires a large special effort. 

On concealment as a form of passive defense, only a few 

general remarks can be made. There is an enormous disparity 

eaNFIDEITIAL 
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GONFiiEiiTiAL 

between the Iron Curtain countries on the one hand, and the 

United States and its allies on the other, in the degree to 

which each camp permits target information for strategic 

bombing to be made available to the other. Except for a very 

few kinds of highly specialized military targets in the United 

States 3 the Soviet Union need employ no secret agents to get 

the information required to fill its target folders. It needs 

only a staff to select out the more germane data from what is 

openly and abundantly reported to it in numerous unclassified 

publications, including highly detailed maps, or from what is 

plainly visible to visitors who have a free run of the land. 

Regardless of how good our own intelligence may be, the Soviets 

can probably always be more confident of the adequacy and 

accuracy of their target information than we can be about ours. 

Nevertheless, the disparity has clearly diminished as a 

result of the development of ever more powerful bombs. Even 

the Soviet Union can hardly hide the existence or location of 

its larger cities, and, with H-bombs available, that information 

may be all we need to maintain a very respectable deterrent 

threat. When it comes to the targets of the so-called 11 blunting11 

missions, however, that i.s, mainly the opponent's long-range 

air forces, there can hardly be any doubt that the Soviet Union 

must have a decided advantage in target information. How 

CONFIDENTIAL 
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···.:..:.._ 

RM-1781 

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54. 

critical this disparity is only a few intelligence officers 

can tell, if anyone can, and they may be deceived. Of course, 

even perfect target information would not assure the Soviet 

Union the ability to destroy our SAC, so long as it could not 

be sure of denying us all significant warning. 

There is another kind of concealment, which depends on 

the use of devices such as decoy targets (whether against 

visual or radar bombing) or radar-jamming. ln this re3pect 

there need be no inherent advantage to the Soviet Union (or 

disadvantage either), but there may well be an inherent 

advantage accruing to the attacker, whoever he may be, as 

against the defender~ particularly with respect to the availability and utility of surprise. 

Yinally we come to the kind of passive defense called 

"hardening," of which the air-raid shelter is a typical example. 

It comprises putting a shield between the objects to be protected, 

whether human or inanimate, and the position of the bomb burst. 

Against the bombs of World War lI, the function of the shield 

was to stop the bomb itself, its fragments, or missiles caused 

by the explosion, such as flying fragments of masonry. Against 

nuclear weapons, however, the shield must protect also against 

blast (usually measured in ?Ounds of "overpressure" per square 

inch, abbreviated "p.s.i.") and ground shock, and, if the 

objects protected are persons or other living beings, against 
REF ID:A484784 

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55. 

gamma rays emanating from the nuclear explosion. Anything 

suffic.ient to protect against blast and direct gamma rays will 

surely suffice against thermal radiation. Thermal radiation 

is, however, dangerous at much greater ranges than are blast 

or gamma radiation, and the same is even more true of radioactive fallout, so that some kind of shelter may be necessary 

even at very considerable distances from the point of bomb 

burst. 

A thermonuclear weapon detonating on the ground will cause 

a large crater around the point of impact (the one at Bikini 

in the Ivy shot was over a mile in diameter), and we probably 

should write off any shelter in the area covered by such a 

crater. On the other hand, at very short distances beyond the 

rim, deep shelters would offer effective protection to people 

within them, and, with modest increase in distance, the amount 

of depth or thickness of shelter necessary to offer protection 

would fall off quite rapidly. Thus, on an over-all statistical 

basis, the chances for people in underground shelters even 

within cities to survive nuclear attack are sure to be very 

much greater than those of people in the same area who are not 

comparably protected. 

There remains much that we do not know about the relevant 

problems. One of the only two nuclear bombs thus far dropped 

tOllFIDENTIAL 
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56. 

on cities caused a firestorm (at Hiroshima), and that one was 

of about 15 KT yield. People in shelters may be preserved 

from destruction by blast or gamma rays and yet perish from 

suffocation -- unless suitable provision be made for providing 

oxygen for the duration of a firestorm. There is also the 

problem of the intense radioactive fallout in the near proximity 

of ground zero, which may conceivably prevent egress from the 

shelters for days or even weeks. 

These considerations qualify the value of shelters but do 

not negate them. However, there is the further problem of 

seeing to it that people are inside the shelters when the bomb 

explodes. Inanimate objects of high strategic importance can 

be stored indefinitely in highly bomb-resistant shelters --

as no doubt most of our stockpiled nuclear weapons already 

are -- but people cannot be. This is a problem of warning, 

though the warning time necessary is obviously less than that 

required to conduct a successful evacuation of cities. 

If the strategic bombing of cities at the onset of war 

were not a foregone conclusion, the government would probably 

want to persuade people to stay in the cities. Adequate 

shelters and a promise of adequate warning might well be a 

necessary part of the inducement. Moreover, it is possible 

that having shelters available to which to send its people 

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57. 

might make a government more willing to take the initiative in 

a crisis. Such initiative would for the time being make the 

question of warning irrelevant: it is one's own decisions 

rather than the enemy's that trigger the resort to shelter. 

Provision of funds for the elaborate shelters necessary 

within cities would have to proceed in the face of the everrecurrent suspicion that evacuation would probably be preferable anyway, provided, of course, that the public apathy or 

skepticism which at this writing has effectively inhibited 

either defensive measure could first be overcome. Part of that 

apathy in the city dweller unquestionably stems from the 

realization that, though with heroic measures the statistical 

chances for his bare survival would be increased, the city with 

which his life is identified would inevitably be a charred and 

dismal waste after an attack. It would be hard to persuade 

him otherwise. 

So far as the protection of industry is concerned, a 

program to accomplish it through a combination of hardening 

and dispersion would have to start on a highly selective basis, 

and would almost certainly begin with industries manufacturing 

key military items. The first question that would arise is: 

What are the key items in this vastly new kind of warY Further, 

at each point there would be the question whether it would 

i:ONFIDENTIAL 
'R:lt''IO" TD: A4 84 78 4 ,~-----.... -.. -. u11r1UtllTIAL 

not be better as well as cheaper to store the 

finished commodities in dispersed shelters. 

relevant 

RM-1781 

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58. 

The protection of one 1 s retaliatory air arm is another 

matter. SAC constitutes a relatively small segment of the 

national community in terms both of the manpower and the 

materials it comprises. It has a special capability for 

defending itself in that its major implements, aircraft, can 

take to the air on very short notice. However, after a 

defensive takeoff, they would normally have to land to take on 

fuel and bombs before departing on their retaliatory mission~ 

and sufficient facilities for these operations would also have 

to survive any surprise attack. The temptation to combine an 

escape fly-away plan with direct retaliation against the enemy 

tends to be stymied by the! .fact that it takes a good deal 

longer to get off an organized strike against enemy targets 

than it does merely to get the same number of planes into the 

air for the purpose of getting them out of harm's way. 

In general, the strategic air arm must resort to some 

combination of dispersion 1 hardening of facilities, and provision of reserve strength. Just what the combination of 

h ld b h b b measures . f . . h 1 s s ou e as een a su Ject o intensive researc . 

15 By a RAND project team under the leadership of Albert J. 

Wohlstetter. 

Gllf 11£1TIAt 
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59. 

In this connection we must recall the observations made at 

the beginning of this chapter about the common military bias 

against "defense-mindedness." The Navy learned the hard way 

during World War II that while it was all very well to refuse 

to sacrifice offensive for defensive armament, a warship had 

to remain afloat in order to have any offensive capability at 

all. No doubt the applicability of this lesson to our Strategic 

Air Command is clear to all. Certainly the learning cannot. be 

left to the first year of another war. 

There can be no rule of thumb to determine what it is 

worth spending to secure the protection of SAC. Our SAC 

deserves an absolute priority charge upon the defense budget, 

and to provide for its security is as important as to provide 

for its existence. But perhaps some rough guides may help 

determine whether or not the matter is being pursued seriously 

at any particular time. One elementary test, certainly, must 

be an absence of arguments to the effect that the security of 

SAC resides in its taking the initiative at the moment of crisis. 

Such a presumption or hope is a weak reed for the military to 

lean on in a country such as ours) where they cannot control 

the decision for peace or war and should not wish to. It is 

also true that one of the glittering strategic prizes to be 

gained in making SAC reasonably secure is the freedom accorded 

CDIFID!ITIAL 
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60. 

our leaders to decide whether or not they are going to use 

that force at any particular level of crisis. An insecure 

SAC would oblige them to be trigger-happy; or, if they were 

capable of realizing the danger, would prevent them from 

facing up to a crisis. 

Summary 

From the facts reviewed above it is possible to make 

some tentative but important d'ed.tibtiora:s about the possibilities of defense against strategic nuclear attack. ~irst, 

the number of human casualties would probably be closely 

related to the extent and the wisdom of precautions taken 

before the event. Un the other hand, so long as large 

masses of our citizens are gathered in metropolitan centers, 

the minimum figure of fatalities to expect in a surprise 

enemy attack must inevitably be reckoned in scores of millions. 

The figure will vary with the degree of surprise actually 

achieved by the attacker, but it is hard to conceive of 

circumstances that would permit it to fall to a figure as 

low, say, as ten million. Much will depend on how anxious 

the attacker is to destroy human life, as distinct from 

simply rendering the target state militarily impotent. 

The past trend in weapons, with their ever-larger yields 

and greater potentialities for fallout, has certainly 

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61. 

increased the capability for human destruction of the aggressor who wishes to accomplish it. 

The larger cities themselves, that is, the buildings and 

other physical equipment of urban life, and the industrial 

production associated therewith, are irretrievably at risk. 

One cannot conceive of passive defenses that will protect 

urban dwellings or factories, and active defenses of the kind 

we know today and expect to see in existence in the reasonably 

near future can at best reduce the total number of targets 

struck. Such reduction offers little hope of protecting those 

important cities that the enemy may most want to hit. 

The old adage that every new offensive development inevitably provokes the development of a suitable defense has 

been exposed as excessively optimistic by the existing new 

weapons, and one should hesitate especially to apply it to the 

long-range ballistic missile of the future. That is not to 

say that effective active defenses against the missile are 

technically impossible, or that their development should not be 

pursued; it is only to point out that it requires extraordinary 

faith in technology, or a despair of alternatives, to make one 

face up to depending on them. In so far as such defenses require 

reliance on a completely automatic response (it is hard to see, 

with the very short flight times involved, how a defense system 

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that detects an enemy missile on the way can afford to permit 

human judgment and decision to intervene), the relevant problems 

are as much political and social as technological. A system 

with enough built-in sensitivity to react promptly to any rea.l 

attack must be sensitive enough to respond to false alarms or 

16 deliberate enemy ''spoofing." 

Regardless of what is done or not done to defend cities 

and populations, there can be no question that a very considerable defense effort. passive as well as active, deserves to be 

put upon our retaliatory air force" For that air force has the 

following characteristics: (1) it is sure to comprise the 

absolutely-top-priority enemy target system if there is any 

attack at all; (2) it is a naturally vulnerable target system 

in the absence of special and considerable defense provisions~ 

and (3) it appears that its "natural" vulnerability can be 

critically if not decisively reduced by measures that seem to 

be of reasonable cost in relation not only to our entire defense 

budget but even to the cost of the strategic air arm itself. 

And if we be permitted) because of its importance, to make the 

observation once again, an obviously vulnerable SAC does not 

16 If an opponent wants to, he can probably shoot missiles 

at us (to trip off our countermeasures) secure in the 

knowledge that none of them will hit the ground. For, 

unless specific provision is made against it, long-range 

missiles will tend to burn themselves out upon re-entering 

the atmosphere in the final stages of flight. 
REF ID:A484784 

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63. 

merely fail to be a deterrent against attack; it positively 

invites it. 

To the extent that reliance is put upon passive rather 

than active measures (i.e., hardening of base facilities and 

sheltering of bombers), the vulnerability of the retaliatory 

force would not appear to be sensitive to the attacker's 

shifting from manned bombers to ballistic missiles. Whether 

long-range missiles withi~ the retaliatory force would be more 

or less vulnerable to enemy air attack than bombers remains to 

be seen from the form they eventually take. However. it is 

clear that, in the air, a ballistic missile is bound to be less 

vulnerable than a manned aircraft, and that a surviving rump 

of a missile force would therefore be more certain to reach its 

targets than the surviving rump of a bomber force. 

The tentative conclusions ventured above have been 

inhibited far more by the lack of directly relevant research, 

particularly with respect to passive defenses, than by other 

considerations. However, while more research on defense 

measures of all kinds is much to be desired, it seems apparent 

that the injury received by an attacked state from nuclear 

strategic bombing must involve some colossally high minimums. 

Also, it is clear that, while some tractable portions of the 

defense problem are lamentably neglected by researchers, other 

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64. 

portions involve important conceptual questions for which we 

cannot hope to get good answers regardless of how much 

research is done. ~or these reasons, the strictly techno~ 

logical results of existing and future research on defense 

measures must be treated with caution and flexibility in 

making relevant deductions for national policy. 

One other point. We frequently see in the public press 

estimates of damage resulting from a hypothetical enemy 

attack. These estimates usually assume, explicitly or 

implicitly, fewer and usually smaller weapons than we have 

any right to expect the enemy would use, especially if he 

had the initiative in making the attack. The same is true 

of such "Operations Alert" as those of June 15-16, 1955, 

and July 20, 1956. 

Some of the justifications given for the relative 

modesty of the assumptions are entirely reasonable, provided 

the authorities keep in mind what they have done and why. 

We should, however, be clear that in view of our own strength 

now and in the :future, a.ny potential adversary would be mad to 

launch an attack on us unless his capabilities were enormously 

greater than those estimates mentioned above usually imply. 

One can conceive of an initial strike upon us being kept small 

in order to exploit surprise in getting at our SAC, but such 

a strike would almost cortainly be an immediate prelude to a 

lllPIDEITIAt 
\ RM-1781 10-3-56 '···· 

b5. 

"· 

much larger one, especially since the enemy could never plan 

with assurance on destroying our SAC with his first blow. The 

only kind of strategic air attack we have to fear is a gigantic 

one. 

CllFllEllTIAt