Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [23]
In practical terms, providing absolute assurance that “nobody would want to tackle it” was mission impossible—whatever payload, range, or standard of accuracy might seem adequate today would surely be inadequate tomorrow. Yet from an institutional point of view mission impossible was mission perfect.
Since LeMay and his commanders knew—or at least professed to believe—that the United States had no intention of ever implementing a policy of preventive war, they viewed their relentless pursuit of nuclear dominance as a source of stability. That the Soviets might interpret U.S. intentions and capabilities differently was not a matter to which they devoted any significant attention. Yet were intimidation to fail—were the Soviets to miscalculate or panic or mount some ill-advised response to SAC’s goading—well, that too was all right. If the showdown had come, in the 1950s at least, LeMay was supremely confident of the outcome: “There was definitely a time when we could have destroyed all of Russia,” he bragged in his memoirs, “without losing a man to their defenses.”51
YIN AND YANG
To avert the outbreak of cataclysmic war, Strategic Air Command threatened destruction on a scale never before seen, with LeMay giving every indication that he was more than willing to make good on that threat. To ensure the survival of freedom, democracy, and liberal values, the Central Intelligence Agency engaged in activities that in our own day would satisfy the definition of state-sponsored terrorism, with Allen Dulles giving every indication that even the dirtiest of dirty tricks were acceptable as long as they were perpetrated by the honorable men of the CIA.
In the 1950s, Americans spent little time contemplating such ironies. In the midst of a never-ending national security crisis, the preference was for accepting at face value the self-image projected by institutions entrusted with ensuring the nation’s safety. The tendency was to defer to those with inside knowledge and ask few questions. The CIA and SAC numbered at the very top of the organizations that benefited from this inclination. In this regard, Dulles and LeMay, the emblematic semiwarriors of the early Cold War, accurately sized up the zeitgeist of the era and skillfully turned it to their advantage.
The anxieties and insecurities of 1950s America derived from many sources. In culture and religion, at the workplace and in the home, the acids of modernity were dissolving much that Americans once had found reassuring and familiar. By pointing to communism as the essence of the problem, the semiwarriors convinced their fellow citizens that whatever uncertainties the country might be facing at home, dealing with external threats had to come first—indeed, facing down the danger “out there” just might provide the surest route to dealing with problems back here. Persuading Americans that nothing was more important than national security qualified as a formidable achievement.
Nominally, these two men and the institutions they led were competitors. Intent on controlling all reconnaissance missions over the USSR, LeMay, for example, waged a fierce, ultimately unsuccessful campaign to have control of the CIA’s U-2 “spy plane” transferred to SAC. In a deeper sense, however, the CIA and SAC enjoyed a reciprocal relationship, the existence and actions of one justifying the existence and actions of the other.
During the early, formative days of the Cold War, the CIA and SAC elevated a cult of global activism to a national first principle and so laid the foundation for what became the Washington consensus. Dulles’s CIA waged World War III in the shadows. LeMay’s SAC waged it through ostentatious saber rattling. Yet each complemented