Atom bombing the jungle

Abstract

In 1960, the senior Air Force officer in Europe published an article in the Air Force's premier journal in which he advocated using nuclear weapons to combat insurgency. His ideas, as outlandish as they sound to modern ears, were consistent with a belief that a nuclear-armed military designed to flatten a superpower could ably handle lesser contingencies. While most of the theoretical exploration of using America's “best” weapons was in the realm of limited war against major powers, some of that thinking was dedicated to small wars. This article focuses on how the air-atomic USAF envisioned using nuclear weapons in small conflicts against minor powers or insurgencies. The Air Force of the mid- to late-1950s sought solutions to problems using its existing doctrine and equipment. It depended on blunt (nuclear) force delivered by manned aircraft operating independently of ground forces, the USAF struggled with emerging trends in conventional and unconventional warfare, but had confidence it could handle the challenge. As one airpower thinker of the period stated, “The dog we keep to lick the cat can lick the kittens too.”