Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/May 2017/Book reviews




 * By Hawkeye7

I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops, uh, depending on the breaks.

This book is a history of doctrinal development in the Strategic Air Command (SAC), rather than a history of SAC as such. It emphasises that throughout the 1945–1965 era, the USAF received the lion's share of the US defence budget, and was dominated by officers with a background in bombers. Neither of these would be true after 1965. To Kill Nations divides thinking into distinct periods, noting that doctrinal development usually preceded reality by several years, mainly because the United States Air Force (USAF) consistently overestimated the capabilities of the Soviet Union.

The first period was from 1945 to about 1950, when the United States had a monopoly of nuclear weapons, but lacked the capacity to wage a nuclear war. After about 1950, this capacity was very real, and for the next 15 years SAC had the capability of devastating the Soviet Union and winning a nuclear war. As the Soviet Union's capability improved, both in terms of defences and ability to counter-attack the United States, doctrine shifted to a preemptive attack on the Soviet defenses and nuclear delivery systems. The book is careful to distinguish preemption from prevention, i.e. an American first strike, talk of which would get a military or civilian official quickly fired.

The author dates this doctrinal shift (fairly well summarised by the quote above, which appears in the book more than once) to around 1954; the reality would not be there for several more years. Around 1960, doctrine began to shift again, as Soviet developments of missile technology rendered it hopeless, resulting in the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Again, the reality was that this would not actually be the case until the 1970s. This not only meant abandonment of the idea that a nuclear war could be won, it meant profound change in USAF culture. The cancellation of the B-70 bomber brought an end to the faster-higher-stronger era of aviation.

During the period covered by the book, SAC was led by Curtis LeMay from 1948 to 1957, and then by Thomas S. Power until 1964. The author notes that their willingness and preparedness to wage a nuclear war was crucial to SAC's credibility, and therefore to preventing one from occurring. In identifying the source of American strategic doctrine in Air Force culture and doctrine dating back before World War II, the author has an important lesson for students of strategic studies. Deterrence theory arose from this thinking, and a country with a different culture (say North Korea) may not follow it or view nuclear weapons in the same way.

Publishing details: