Conventional antiaircraft weapons seemed inadequate for destroying hundreds of Soviet bombers during a thermonuclear attack. Failing to shoot down a single plane could mean losing an American city. The Air Force believed that detonating atomic warheads in the skies above the United States and Canada would offer the best hope of success—and
There are few ideas more awesome that deploying massive nuclear weapons in defense. It initially seems unthinkable to explode hydrogen bombs above your own soil, but it is a matter of picking the least worse alternative.
The engineer in me and the sociopath in me, if they are different things, strongly approves of this.
I do wonder if there were areas where we decided we needed the fields for growing things, so we would prefer to have a downwind city vaporized rather than risk our farmland.
