History of Strategic Air and Ballistic Missile Defense: Volume I 1945-1955

CMH Publication 40-5-1.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 de fense against an increasingly sophisti­cated offensive threat. For the most part, the history of that sequential selection of defenses from avail able 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, con cerns elite perceptions and motivations— the calculus of costs and returns whereby leaders assessed threats, risks and capabilities and devised stra­tegy. The evidence provided by research on the first question offers only partial explanations for the second; observable weapons systems do not explain but only manifest prior decisions. Chapters I to III offer judg­ments about the relative importance of those decisions between 1945 and 1955 and about internal versus external factors that sustained the alloca tion of enormous Soviet and American resources to homeland defense against enemy bomber and missile threats.