linked reconnaissance with provocation in an interview after he retired:
There was a time in the 1950s when we could have won a war against Russia. It would have cost us essentially the accident rate of the flying time, because their defenses were pretty weak. One time in the 1950s we flew all of the reconnaissance aircraft that SAC possessed over Vladivostok at high noon. Two reconnaissance airplanes saw MiGs, but there were no interceptions made. It was well planned, too — crisscrossing paths of all the reconnaissance airplanes. Each target was hit by at least two, and usually three, reconnaissance airplanes to make sure we got pictures of it. We practically mapped the place up there with no resistance at all. We could have launched bombing attacks, planned and executed just as well, at that time.
Soviet defense forces had no way of knowing if LeMay's crisscrossing reconnaissance aircraft carried nuclear weapons or not. If Soviet aircraft had crisscrossed US cities under similar circumstances, SAC would certainly have preempted. The Soviets hunkered down because they had no adequate response, but their lack of defenses predictably emboldened LeMay.
One of LeMay's US reconnaissance crews remembered flying a B-47 deep into the USSR on May 8, 1954, and taking damage from a MiG-17. The mission made it back to England leaking fuel. LeMay ordered the crew to the US, the pilot, Hal Austin, recalled many years later:
[LeMay] said, “I tried to get you guys a Silver Star,” but he said “you gotta explain that to Congress and everybody else in Washington… so here's a couple of [Distinguished Flying Crosses] we'll give you for that mission.” There wasn't anybody in the room except the wing commander and us three guys, General LeMay and his intelligence officer…
Then General LeMay said, “Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.”
I think that was just a loose comment for his staff guys, because General Tommy Power, his hatchet man in those days, chuckled and he never laughed very much. So I always figured that was a joke between them. But we thought maybe that was serious.
Austin raised the question with LeMay after the SAC commander retired. “I brought up the subject of the mission we had flown. And he remembered it like it was yesterday. We chatted about it a little bit. His comment again was, ‘Well, we'd have been a hell of a lot better off if we'd got World War III started in those days.’”
Was LeMay joking? The best evidence that he was not is his own testimony, in a lecture he delivered to the National War College in April 1956. Decisive victory in a nuclear war, he emphasized on that occasion, would “have been reached in the first few days” of battle. The Soviet Union was not yet capable of achieving such a decisive nuclear victory, but it was “building a global bombing force with aircraft and nuclear weapons of satisfactory quality” to make it capable in time “of devastating the heartland of the United States.” The US did have such decisive capability, however, LeMay asserted. He went on to describe “in cold terms what the United States is capable of doing to the Soviet Union today,” a description as chilling as any in the literature of war:
Let us assume the order had been received this morning to unleash the full weight of our nuclear force. (I hope, of course, this will never happen.) Between sunset tonight and sunrise tomorrow morning the Soviet Union would likely cease to be a major military power or even a major nation: the bulk of its long-range air power would be shattered, its centers of industry and control devastated. Communications would have been disrupted and much of their economic strength depleted. Dawn might break over a nation infinitely poorer than China — less populated than the United States and condemned to an agrarian existence perhaps for generations to come.
Everything depended on “the forces in being at the outset,” LeMay emphasized. “… Today, shooting wars are won or lost before they start. If they are fought at all, they would be fought principally to confirm which side had won at the outset — The most radical effect of the changes in warfare is not upon how wars are won or lost, but upon how they will start… The dominant fact is that no nation can arrive at a deliberate decision to wage war today unless it is clear, beyond any doubt, that victory is assured.” What those facts meant, LeMay went on significantly, was that “we are at war
LeMay sketched three phases of “today's war.” The first was a decision phase — that is, deciding to wage war. “This decision is reached during what we used to call peace, and now call ‘cold war.’ We are in the decision phase today.” The second was the “proof phase,” “the application of… power to the enemy to confirm the decision… ” The third was the “exploitation phase,” which commenced “when the level of radiation in a vanquished belligerent has lowered sufficiently for imposition of the national will of the victor upon the survivors of the vanquished.” LeMay saw evidence that the Soviet leaders were “reasonable men,” but they had “as their primary goal the perpetuation of their own regime, the retention of power inside the USSR in the few hands in which it now resides,” and only secondarily did they desire “to insure the continued security of the Soviet homeland and its people… More than once, millions of Soviet citizens have, in time of peace, had their security and their very lives taken from them for the greater glorification of the all-powerful Party. More than once, the heads of that party have gambled with the security of the USSR, and subjected it to the risk of war, not for national survival, but for the consolidation of their own strength.” The ultimate threat, LeMay argued, was “the growing Soviet capability to launch a massive nuclear assault against the free world.” And SAC was the answer to that threat. “It can react not in weeks or days, but in hours and minutes, from its present position… SAC is fighting the decisive phase, the IN PLACE WAR [sic], today.”
If the Soviet capability was growing, and the bombers always got through, then the time would come when SAC would no longer be able to deliver a victory. The US and the USSR would then be mutually deterred. Robert Oppenheimer had predicted that consequence in his 1953
LeMay evidently found the prospect of such stalemate intolerable. It made the force that he had built with such prodigious energy a wasting asset. “While we had all this superiority,” he said in retirement, “we invaded no one; we didn't launch any conquest for loot or territory. We just sat there with the strength… We didn't threaten to use it when it might have brought advantages to the country.” If the politicians were craven, he would seize the initiative. The United States, the SAC commander believed, was already at war with a ruthless enemy. He readied his nuclear armada while he prodded the Soviet bear with reconnaissance overflights.
SAC was subject to presidential authority. The Constitution authorized the President, not the SAC commander, to determine when to order the use of military force. But LeMay had decided at the beginning of the Korean War, if not before, that there were circumstances under which he would override the Commander-in-Chiefs prerogative. In 1950, LeMay had attempted to arrange privately with the officer commanding Sandia Base “to take the bombs” if “we woke up some morning and there wasn't any Washington or something.” By 1957 he no longer needed to take the bombs. He had them, and they would not be fitted with electronic Permissive Action Link (PAL) locks until early in the Kennedy era. (Even then, SAC had the codes.) All that constrained him from delivering them was his soldier's oath. In 1957, a committee Eisenhower appointed to study civil and continental defense sent a delegation to SAC to review the command's defenses against a Soviet surprise attack. The delegation included Robert Sprague, president of the Sprague Electric Company of Massachusetts, and Jerome Wiesner of MIT. LeMay dismissed the delegation with a superficial tour. Sprague arranged for the President to order LeMay to cooperate. From air defense headquarters in Colorado Springs, Sprague had LeMay stage an alert. SAC needed more than six hours to take to the air. To Sprague that performance meant the command was vulnerable to surprise attack: Soviet bombers could make the flight over the North Pole in less than six hours.
At SAC headquarters in Omaha, Sprague challenged LeMay. The general dismissed Sprague's concerns contemptuously. SAC had reconnaissance aircraft flying secret missions over the Soviet Union twenty-four hours a day, he explained. “If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I'm going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.” Sprague was shocked. “But General,” he countered, “that's not
