ARMED FORCES: The Power For Now

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In the shifting dynamics of the cold war, the Kremlin, oft-defeated, is turning to a new offensive technique: "missile diplomacy." Every day of every week Moscow rolls out pronouncements about the successes of its experiments with intercontinental ballistic missiles. In the day of the missile, says Russia's Boss Nikita Khrushchev, Europe might become "a veritable cemetery," and the U.S. is "just as vulnerable." His own recurring theme, tossed off at cocktail parties, pounded home by Moscow radio and repeated last week: "Bombers are useless, compared to rockets."

Khrushchev's line, backed by the U.S.S.R.'s scientific triumph with Sputniks I and II, is a bold and daring line indeed, and the spearhead of what may well be modern diplomacy's most brazen propaganda gambit. For if the Communists, whose missilery is a threat of the near future, should succeed by big talk in persuading U.S. allies, and the U.S. itself, that the day of the bomber is over, they could win for Communism a cold-war victory over the most powerful armed force ever assembled—an armed force that in the here and now is the free world's only deterrent to major aggression and, in the familiar words of its weather-beaten air men, a loaded pistol pointed squarely at Khrushchev's head.

The pistol is the thermonuclear strike force of the manned bombers and fighter-bombers of the U.S. Air Force, backed up by the Navy's far-ranging carrier planes and submarines. Operating out of 270-odd air bases in a score of countries, this thermonuclear strike force is poised all day, every day, to deliver a 360° assault (see map) against the 37,500-mile borders of the Soviet Union, each single aircraft capable of unloading on target the mighty equivalent of all the bombs dropped by all nations during World War II. Unlike the Kremlin's-headline-making experimental missiles, the U.S. thermonuclear strike force is lethal in the fighting man's sense of what is operational and what is now.

Says General Thomas Dresser White, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force: "The very real ability of our long-range bomber force is understood by the Kremlin. The Russians' understanding of this primary military truth has caused them to postpone their aggressive plans until such time as they might be able to alter the balance of power in their favor."

A Matter of Batting. In the midst of Russia's dangerous mixture of bluster and acknowledged technological performance, the free world can take considerable satisfaction from the fact that the U.S. Air Force is in command of a brilliant, unobtrusive West Pointer with a flair for understatement. Tommy White, 56, a tall, austere airman with a ramrod-back carriage, well knows the Russian danger, well knows the need to tighten and use the bomber force-in-being to best advantage while the U.S. brings in its missile force-to-be.