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There is no real argument about the power of SAC, backed up by the nuclear-armed fighters of the Tactical Air Command in Europe, to deter a Soviet attack on the U.S. this year. But earnest and patriotic men are haunted by doubts as to whether the U.S. can complacently rely on SAC to bridge the missile gap as it widens in 1961 and beyond, and whether the President's $41 billion defense budget for fiscal 1961 is an adequate response to the challenge of that gap. The critics do not argue that the 1961 budget fails to provide for adequate security during its own time span—July 1960 through June 1961—but that it fails to provide an adequate safety margin for the years beyond that. And the complexity of military technology in the missile age, the long "lead time" between a decision to undertake a program and the translation of the decision into ready-for-use hardware, requires that the defense budget for any year take account of the foreseeable problems and perils of the future.
The most insistent worry is that sometime in the early 1960s the U.S.S.R. might be tempted by its edge in missiles to try to knock out U.S. retaliatory power with a surprise attack on U.S. bomber and missile bases. The warning by SAC's commander, General Thomas S. Power, that with a mere 300 ballistic missiles the U.S.S.R. could "wipe out our entire nuclear strike capability within a span of 30 minutes," is much to the point. General Power's answer to the threat—an "airborne alert" that would keep 25% of SAC's B-52s in the air at all times — would be enormously strenuous and costly. It would require more flight and maintenance crews, more spare parts to keep up with wear and tear, more tankers, enormous quantities of fuel, all adding up to $1 billion a year. But without it, SAC will be vulnerable, and the U.S. will be in danger.
A second widespread worry, inside and outside the Pentagon, is the possibility that Soviet advances in air defense might largely cancel out SAC's bombers before the U.S. gets around to closing the missile gap. To assure that SAC keeps ahead of Soviet air defense progress, SAC's Power and the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Thomas D. White, want to start placing orders for North American Aviation Inc.'s B70 bomber, designed to fly at three times the speed of sound. In its money requests for fiscal 1961, the Air Force asked for $464 million to get started on a B70 program. The Administration slashed the request to $70 million, which will buy two militarily worthless prototype B-70s by 1963.