History of Strategic Air and Ballistic Missile Defense: Volume I (1945–1955)

As part of a larger study of the strategic arms competition which developed after World War II between the United States and the U.S.S.R., this study of the two countries' strategies for air and ballistic missile defense addresses two broad subjects: (1) How did each country approach the problem of defense against the threat from the air? (2) Why did each country accent particular elements of an air defense strategy at various periods between 1945 and 1972? The first question concerns the means that leaders chose for defense against an increasingly sophisticated offensive threat. For the most part, the history of that sequential selection of defenses from available technology and budgetary resources is a matter of evidential fact. In Chapters IV and V and several appendices of chronologies, tables, charts, maps and notes, this volume provides a distillation of those facts for the 1945-1955 period. The second question, by far the more difficult of the two, concerns elite perceptions and motivations...