"The Facts of Power"

Informed opinion is shifting more and more to the view that U.S. strategic planning lags dangerously behind atomic-thermonuclear development. Last week, speaking to a Tulsa business group, American Airlines' President Cyrus Rowlett Smith, an Army Air Forces major general in World War II, put the case for a radical change in defense policy. "Is it not sensible," asked Smith, "to question that adequate security can best be provided merely by numbers of men? Has the time not come to re-examine the old criterion--divisions, divisions, divisions--in light of the effectiveness of new weapons?

"It seems to me to be fairly self-evident that so long as American strategy, and the military forces arrayed in support of that strategy, continue to rest upon existing assumptions, this nation cannot afford to meet the annual defense bills without something important giving way in the American scheme of things."

New Assumption. "When the present military buildup was begun, after the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, the strategic assumption . . . was that Soviet action on a world scale was imminent . . . Soviet scientists had successfully tested an atomic device ... In the face of this and other developments. American military planners marked the year 1954 as a date of acute danger . . .

"The present Administration seems to be proceeding on a somewhat different line. It has evidently discarded the view that Soviet world action is imminent. The new strategic assumption seems to be that we are in for a world struggle of indefinite duration and of uncertain pattern--a test which may go on for years without a major collision.

"The difficulty is that the military forces now in being were brought into place under the earlier and evidently now-discarded assumption. This country has today some 3,500,000 men & women in the three military services . . . There is already a heavy drain on American youth. Extended indefinitely, it could be a strangling weight on American society . . ."

Old Doctrines. "There is another point that to me is significant . . . These forces were assembled, trained and armed at a time when the American stockpile of atomic weapons was measured in limited numbers, when the value of such weapons was imperfectly understood, and when American military planning was still under the influence of doctrines developed during the last great war. Of the 3,500,000 men under arms, almost two-thirds are in the Army and Navy, the traditional agencies of surface strategy. Yet, at the same time these forces were rushed into being, the Government also set in motion an enormous expansion in the production of atomic weapons."

Smith gave a striking illustration of the atomic-thermonuclear revolution in firepower. If a one-inch cube were considered the equivalent of one ton of TNT. the average bomber load in World War II would stand four inches high; the Nagasaki-Hiroshima atomic bomb would be a 1,666-ft. column, more than three times the height of the Washington monument; the "conventional" atomic bomb of today would tower 4,998 ft. high; and the power of the thermonuclear superbomb, similarly expressed, would be represented by a column soaring 63 miles into the air.

Constant Symbols. "That much," said Smith, "has the potential power of destruction transportable in a single bomber increased in the span of one decade. The four-inch column standing for the destructive power of a World War II bomber would be lost in the grass at the base of the 63-mile-high column . . .

"These columns are symbols of the new facts of military power with which we Americans must live from this point on.

"This telescoping of the time element, deriving from the tremendous power of new weapons, seems to me to teach yet another lesson: it is that the decisive air battle would be fought to conclusion long before the traditional surface forces, except those already in position near the enemy's frontier, could be brought into action on a scale that could affect the outcome."

If this is true, said Smith, then the need no longer exists for vast numbers of troops, for a huge Navy to transport them and to protect the sea lanes for Army movements, or for such emphasis on tactical air power to support ground troops.

"An increasing number of well-informed people both inside and outside the military establishment," Smith said, "are convinced that the military budget can be greatly reduced, with an actual gain in our global military capability, by going to a strategy based upon those weapons systems wherein our margin of technical advantage is greatest." The possible results of such a move: a reduction to 2,500,000 men in the armed forces, a cut in the overall military budget of at least $10 billion, and a defense establishment shaped to meet the challenge of the Atomic Age.

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