Provocation

During the 1950s, SAC commander Curtis LeMay and the US Air Force became absorbed in the idea of a preventive war against the Soviet Union. Eisenhower had specifically rejected the idea, but LeMay engaged in tactics that some considered designed to provoke such a war, in particular, repeated overflights of Russia with various US spy planes. Such flights apparently cost at least 20 planes and the lives of about 100 aviators - some of whom went to the Gulag.

One of LeMay’s US reconnaissance crews remembered flying a B-47 deep into the USSR on May 8, 1954, and taking damage from a MiG-17. The mission made it back to England leaking fuel. LeMay ordered the crew to the US, the pilot, Hal Austin, recalled many years later:

[LeMay] said, “I tried to get you guys a Silver Star,” but he said “you gotta explain that to Congress and everybody else in Washington . . . so here’s a couple of [Distinguished Flying Crosses] we’ll give you for that mission.” There wasn’t anybody in the room except the wing commander and us three guys, General LeMay and his intelligence officer. . . . Then General LeMay said, “Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.”

I think that was just a loose comment for his staff guys, because General Tommy Power, his hatchet man in those days, chuckled and he never laughed very much. So I always figured that was a joke between them. But we thought maybe that was serious.2549

Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (pp. 565-566). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

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