Winning Armageddon: Curtis LeMay and Strategic Air Command 1948–1957 (History of Military Aviation)

Was General Curtiss LeMay, commander of the Strategic Air Command from 1948-1957, a military extremist, who advocated nuclear war? He was “caricatured by smoldering anger and being ready to start a war,” (186) as well as parodied as paranoid General Jack D. Ripper, who attacked the Soviet Union on his own volition, in the movie Dr. Strangelove. Trevor Albertson from Lassen College in Susanville, California as well as a former Air Force officer and congressional aide, answers emphatically No! He concludes, LeMay “was a collected, thoughtful, and calm nuclear commander who sought a better way to fight a war and avoid a national catastrophe.” (177) In this well-researched and tightly argued work, LeMay is thus pictured as a man of peace, even though he also called for the use of a nuclear first strike.How can one reconcile this contradiction? Albertson argues that the key to unraveling this paradox is LeMay’s advocacy of preemption, which the author differentiates from a preventive war. What the head of SAC desired was to protect the United States from the effects of a Soviet nuclear strike. SAC could do this by deterrence, convincing the Soviet leaders that a nuclear war was not worth the potential costs. A second way was preemption, which called for the destruction of Soviet bombers, the means of Russia delivering nuclear weapons, before they were launched and still on the ground. The U.S. destruction of the Soviet capacity to wage war would quickly follow. This would assure the safety of the American people, but it would also save the lives of millions of Soviet citizens. The only way to achieve this goal was to launch a first strike when it appeared that the Soviet Union was planning to initiate war. Such action would require good, accurate intelligence, which was not always available.LeMay advocated his doctrine of preemption throughout his time at SAC. He did this in letters and meetings with his superiors and in public lectures to various defense and civilian groups. He also addressed the Secretaries Conference at Quantico in July 1955. Attending were the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the service secretaries, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the secretaries of defense and treasury, and several presidential advisers, including Vice-President Richard Nixon.While Albertson is convincing in portraying LeMay as a pragmatist who created a SAC built around preemption, for the most part, he limits the story to the military, especially the Air Force. How did President Dwight Eisenhower and other administration officials feel about America launching a first strike? After all, the stated U.S. policy was massive retaliation which implies responding to an attack and not hitting first. The president also opposed the use of tactical nuclear weapons for fear that it would escalate into an all-out nuclear war. Therefore, would Ike have agreed to preemption? This needs to be explored. Albertson only alludes to this issue in a brief comment on page 201.Another issue was LeMay’s belief that preemption required the destruction of Soviet bombers on the ground. However, as he was leaving SAC, ICBMs were in the near future. How would preemption have worked when each side had ICBMs? Did LeMay ever comment on this in the early 1960s? While this does go beyond the scope of the present book, it is still an intriguing question that needs exploration.Overall, this is a good read; it is only marred by the occasional use of one and a half to nearly three page paragraphs. Albertson should be read in conjunction with Melvin G. Deaile’s "Always at War: Organizational Culture in Strategic Air Command, 1946-62" and John M. Curatola’s "Bigger Bombs for a Brighter Tomorrow: The Strategic Air Command and American War Plans at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, 1945-1950."

By focusing upon one of the most important--and underrated--military commanders of the 20th-century, "Winning Armageddon" offers a critical insight into American nuclear strategy during the Cold War, including the key distinction between preemption and preventive war.