There is a long history of deceptive practices and bogus military displays designed to project greater firepower than is actually available. In my military dictionary, this is known as creative deterrence, or deterrence on the cheap. A classic case in point occurred during the July, 1955 Moscow Aviation Day, which stoked fears in the United States of a bomber gap.
The bomber gap preceded Sputnik; the missile gap would soon follow. President Dwight David Eisenhower took heavy flak for downplaying all three, believing these threats to be inflated and not as important as trying to hold the line against budget deficits. Ike’s public reaction to Sputnik, just six weeks after the Kremlin launched the world’s first ICBM, was purposely low key. The Soviets merely “put one small ball in the air” which did not raise his apprehensions “one iota.” Ike’s popularity plummeted.
As early as 1948, US proponents of air power were issuing warnings of dire consequences over a bomber gap, calling for ramped up production. The January 1948 Report of the President’s Air Policy Commission, “Survival in the Air Age,” better known as the Finletter Report, called for 120 more bombers than President Harry S Truman thought advisable.
The push to increase US production rates went into high gear after the July, 1955 air show, when the Soviets flew the same ten Bear and Bison bombers six times over the reviewing stand. Extrapolations of Soviet production rates, based on the sighting of 60 bombers, had the intended effect of unnerving an anxious country.
Senator Stuart Symington, a Democrat from Missouri with presidential ambitions who previously served as the first Secretary of the Air Force, convened three months of hearings in 1956 that painted an extremely bleak picture. The Airpower hearings concluded that the Soviets possessed more “B-52 class” bombers than the United States. Continuing fiscal constraints would mean the additional loss of qualitative US advantages in three to five years. And unless the Air Force got more money, the Kremlin would achieve strategic superiority in airpower between 1958 and 1960. In sum, “The vulnerability of the United States to sudden attack has increased greatly during the past decade and this vulnerability will continue to increase in the foreseeable future.”
General Curtis LeMay testified at the Airpower hearings that, “The only thing I can say is that from 1958 on, he [the USSR] is stronger than we are, and it naturally follows that if he is stronger, he may feel that he should attack.”
Henry Kissinger wrote in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957) that, “The consensus of Air Force testimony at the Symington hearings was that by 1959 the Soviet Long-Range Air Force would outnumber ours and for this reason we would be in dire peril.”
Columnist Stewart Alsop (brother of Joseph) warned in the New York Herald Tribune that, “The Soviets will soon attain a commanding lead in aircraft capable of operating efficiently at intercontinental ranges.” Alsop had plenty of company.
The bomber gap turned out to as fictitious as the Moscow air show fly-bys.