Quotes

Quote 269 of 521

The Navy, in its new official line, had come full circle: from an
abhorrence of city destruction in 1950 to its doctrinal glorification
in 1958.  The one consistent element in this 180-degree shift, and
that ultimately underlay all the phases of strategic rhetoric, was
opposition to whatever the Air Force happened to be plugging at the
time.  In the 1950s, the Air Force had the bomb, and the Navy did not,
so the Navy made a moral case against the mass destructiveness of
these evil weapons.  In the late 1950s, both sides had the bomb, but
the Air Force had far more, and the Navy had the new Polaris, with
which the admirals now wanted to supplant the Air Force from the
strategic arena altogether.  Moreover, submarine-launched missiles
would lack the accuracy to hit anything but enemy cities.  So a case
was made for keeping the necessary number of strategic weapons to a
minimum, restricting targets to major enemy ciites (of which there
were only a couple of hundred) and thereby making a strong case for
putting all the strategic weapons underwater.

Fred Kaplan, <cite>The Wizards of
		   Armageddon</cite>, p. 235

Tags: enemycities degreeshift moralcase necessarynumber destructiveness abhorrence glorification admirals 1950s polaris missiles rhetoric airforce navy bomb weapons opposition accuracy element targets