To drive home the strategic significance of these “super” weapons, the outgoing secretaries of state and defense, Dean Acheson and Robert A. Lovett, prepared an alarming report for the new administration. Their message must have made Ike’s blood run cold: despite its increasingly powerful arsenal of atomic bombs, the United States could do almost nothing to halt a Soviet first strike. “As of mid-1952,” Acheson and Lovett wrote, “probably 65–85% of the atomic bombs launched by the USSR could be delivered on target in the United States.” Only a crash program of investment in building a
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