With more than 300,000 tactical aircraft and a fleet of the most advanced bombers on Earth (the B-29 Stratofortress), America knew a potential World War III would be fought largely in the skies… but that posed a problem. At the onset of World War II, the United States maintained just 2,500 or so military aircraft, but by the end of the war, America was an aviation powerhouse. One area of particular concern was America’s newfound air power. There was also a pressing need to develop strategies and technologies that would be able to fight after the first few volleys of a nuclear exchange. Of course, not all military planning was based on finding new ways to use nuclear weapons. Because these weapons were so capable, many military leaders began devising entire strategies around their creative use (from developing what would become America’s nuclear triad to fielding backpack nukes on skiing Green Berets). But prior to the advent of the MAD doctrine, nuclear weapons were largely seen like any other weapon in a nation’s arsenal. If any single nuclear attack could bring about the end of the world, it was in the best interest of all nations never to launch such an attack at all. MAD ensured there would be no winners in a nuclear conflict - effectively rendering nuclear weapons moot on the battlefield. The result, everyone knew, would be the end of life as we know it. The premise behind MAD was simple as laid out by President Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara: Any single Soviet nuclear attack would be met with a barrage of American nuclear weapons, which would prompt a full-fledged launch of Soviet nuclear weapons in a deadly cascade. Since the early 1960s, the nuclear powers of the world have operated under the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. Today, it’s difficult to fully appreciate the scope of the challenge nuclear weapons posed to military operations in those early days.
The massive destructive power of these new weapons forced a strategic shift in military operations the world over. While America’s use of atomic weapons may have brought the world into the atomic age, it was truly the Soviet test that hurled the world’s two dominant superpowers into the decades-long staring contest we now know as the Cold War. But on August 29, 1949, America’s former World War II allies in the Soviet Union conducted their own nuclear test at the Semipalatinsk test site in modern-day Kazakhstan. For a short time in the late 1950s, America had plans to put them together into a single GI Joe style superweapon: A submarine aircraft carrier.įor a short four years after the United States dropped the only atomic bombs ever used in anger on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America enjoyed a monopoly on the destructive power of splitting the atom. But what if these two warships could somehow be merged together? Today, America’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and ballistic missile submarines represent two of the most potent forms of force projection wielded by any force in military history. Navy has some of the most powerful aircraft carriers and submarines on the planet today.
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