Approved for Release: 2013/06/25
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Secret NOFORN
Chapter 1
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scientists. Thus, new and extremely powerful weapons were coming into the hands of a government whose actions greatly disturbed the leaders of the West. Only two months before the successful hydrogen bomb test, Soviet troops had crushed an uprising in East Berlin. And, at the United Nations, the Soviet Bloc seemed bent on causing dissension between Western Europe and the United States and between the developed and undeveloped nations. This aggressive Soviet foreign policy, combined with advances in nuclear weapons, led officials such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to see the Soviet Union as a menace to peace and world order.
The Soviet Union’s growing military strength soon became a threat not just to US forces overseas but to the continental United States itself. In the spring of 1953, a top secret RAND study pointed out the vulnerability of the SAC’s US bases to a surprise attack by Soviet long-range bombers.³⁴
Concern about the danger of a Soviet attack on the continental United States grew after an American military attache sighted a new Soviet intercontinental bomber at Ramenskoye airfield, south of Moscow, in 1953. The new bomber was the Myasishchev-4, later designated Bison by NATO. Powered by jet engines rather than the turboprops of Russia’s other long-range bombers, the Bison appeared to be the Soviet equivalent of the US B-52, which was only then going into production. Pictures of the Bison taken at the Moscow May Day air show in 1954 had an enormous impact on the US intelligence community. Unlike several other Soviet postwar aircraft, the Bison was not a derivative of US or British designs but represented a native Soviet design capability that surprised US intelligence experts. This new long-range jet bomber, along with the Soviet Union’s large numbers of older propeller and turboprop bombers, seemed to pose a significant threat to the United States, and, in the summer of 1954, newspapers and magazines began publishing articles highlighting the growing airpower of the Soviet Union. Pictures of the Bison bomber featured prominently in such stories.³⁵
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³⁴ RAND Corporation, Plans Analysis Section, “Vulnerability of U.S. Strategic Power to a Surprise Attack in 1956,” RAND Special Memorandum No. 15, Santa Monica, California: the RAND Corporation, April 15, 1953 (TS, declassified May 1967).
³⁵ “AF Cites Red Bomber Progress,” *Aviation Week*, May 24, 1954, p. 14; “Is Russia Winning the Arms Race?,” *US News and World Report*, June 18, 1954, pp. 28-29; “Russia Parades Airpower as ‘Big Stick’,” *Aviation Week*, June 28, 1954, p. 15; “Red Air Force: The World’s Biggest,” *Newsweek*, August 23, 1954, pp. 28-33.
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Secret
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Approved for Release: 2013/06/25