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This fact did not deter LeMay. He is a thoroughgoing professional soldier. To him warfare reduces itself to a simple alternative: kill or be killed. He would not hesitate for a moment—indeed he would not consider any moral problems to be involved at all—in unleashing the terrible power that now lies in his hands. . . . LeMay is a tough man: the kind of man the Russians respect.43

Yet as with Dulles’s CIA, this golden age of the Strategic Air Command carried with it implications that largely escaped notice.

In the eyes of the press and of Congress, the SAC commander—not the president or the secretary of defense—became the ultimate judge of whether the American air arsenal was sufficiently robust. For LeMay to express the slightest doubt about the relative adequacy of American power was to induce something resembling panic in Washington.

In May 1956, appearing before a Senate subcommittee, LeMay testified that Soviet aircraft production was outpacing that of the United States—the Communists were making more warplanes and better ones. In a showdown, the United States could still prevail, he said, but not “without this country receiving very severe damage.” The reaction was immediate. Senators professed indignation and called for investigations. Life weighed in with a pugnacious article entitled “Second Best in Air Is Not Good Enough.” Adorning the essay were side-by-side photographs comparing U.S. and Soviet military aircraft. The captions declared “Air Force Trails Russia in Most Combat Planes” and “Soviet Lead over U.S. Will Be Even Greater in 1958.” The only problem with this flap: Both qualitatively and quantitatively, Soviet air capabilities lagged well behind those of the United States—which LeMay almost certainly knew.44 Still, he had created a stir that worked to SAC’s advantage.

Yet the real key to LeMay’s success lay not in his ability to set the political agenda but in his absolute control over war planning. As SAC commander, he guarded the secrets pertaining to nuclear war as carefully as Dulles guarded the secrets pertaining to clandestine operations. Like his CIA counterpart, LeMay enjoyed almost unlimited autonomy. Here lay the ultimate source of his personal power.

LeMay—not the president, the secretary of defense, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff—calculated the capacity for inflicting damage on the Soviet Union that would suffice to deter aggression or win a nuclear war if deterrence failed. LeMay’s approach to fighting such a war held nothing back. During World War II, he wrote, the idea had been to “bomb and burn them until they quit. That was our theory, and history has proved we were right.”45 With the advent of nuclear weapons came a further refinement of that theory: to deliver a knock-out blow in one concentrated spasm of destruction.

At SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, far from Washington’s prying eyes, preparations for delivering that blow were literally ceaseless. With each successive revision of the war plan, the list of essential targets grew more extensive. This, not incidentally, generated a plethora of requirements for additional weapons, bases, aircraft, and supporting equipment.

Early versions of SAC’s war plan had envisioned dropping bombs on a few dozen Soviet cities. Once LeMay took command, that changed. The planning process took on greater rigor and, counterintuitively, SAC’s target list began to grow like Topsy. By 1957, LeMay’s last year at SAC, plans for war with the Soviet Union envisioned attacks on more than 3,200 targets, each requiring multiple nuclear bombs to guarantee “assured destruction,” not to mention countless millions of casualties. Aware that SAC had effectively seized control of war planning, President Eisenhower complained that “[t]hey are trying to get themselves into an incredible position of having enough to destroy every conceivable target all over the world, plus a three-fold reserve.”

Such complaints were to no avail. Under LeMay’s successors at SAC, the process continued. By 1963, the war plan