Background For War: MAN IN THE FIRST PLANE

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For an airliner, the 463-mile flight from Fort Worth to Kansas City is a matter of two hours, but for the B-36 bomber that waddled out onto the runway one day last week, the flight would take some 30 hours and its course would take it over 7,000 miles. Shortly after noon, the long, blimp-nosed craft, her six propellers glinting in the sun, climbed out westward from her Texas base, on past the sandy fringes of California, high over the glazed emptiness of the Pacific; then her navigator pointed her northward to the tip of the Aleutians. She did not have an atom bomb aboard, but she had its equivalent weight.

She headed east through the long twilight of the 55th parallel—which also crosses Moscow—over the frosted spikes of southern Alaska, and rumbled southward to bore through the storms that lay down the spine of the Rockies. At 2 a.m., in the cold, sub-zero blackness eight miles above the earth, she found the telltale bend in the Missouri River on her radar, opened her bomb bays, and sent—not a bomb, but a long flash on her radio.

In the brightly lit war room at Offutt

Air Force Base (Neb.), mid-continent headquarters of the U.S. Air Force's Strategic Air Command, an operations control officer made a routine notation in his log. Another night's work was done, another major U.S. city had been theoretically demolished by the U.S.'s mightiest atom-bomb carrier. More important, another weary plane crew had flown through much the same kind of weather over precisely the same number of mile it would have taken to deliver the bomb to the industrial heart of Russia.

At the Ready. This was the Air Force's intercontinental bomber at the ready last week. The free world's Sunday punch was getting its daily windup. These were the men and this was the weapon, which in Winston Churchill's words, form the one "effective deterrent" hanging over the heads of the Soviet Politburo—the likeliest reason why Russia's aggressors have so far started only a proxy war in Korea, and not the big one.

In the middle of a nation pursuing a faraway war in a faraway mood, a tough, hard-driving Air Force bombardment expert had tirelessly trained the Sunday punch to battle fitness. Lieut. General Curtis Emerson LeMay, commanding general of the Strategic Air Command, was leaning on no hope that the world might get better or the U.S.S.R. more reason able. His 16 air bases, strung across the nation from Puerto Rico to California—and his outposts in England, Japan and Okinawa—bristled with readiness. His officers wore their sidearms at desks, at meals and in the air; his "A.P.s" (air police—Air Force for M.P.s) cradled loaded carbines ready for sabotage or parachute attack. Even ground crewmen worked at their big planes with their guns beside them. At one base Curt LeMay strode by a master sergeant who had laid aside his piece to dive into his lunch bag. The C.G. rounded up all the maintenance men for one of his longer speeches. "This afternoon," said he, "I found one man guarding a hangar with a ham sandwich. There will be no more of that."