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against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographic and political points.
     
    The U.S. won the race to detonate a thermonuclear device. “Ivy Mike” was exploded November 1, 1952, on a Pacific atoll named Elugelab. It demolished the atoll and yielded an awesome 10.4 megatons, 700 times more powerful than the yield of the Hiroshima bomb and 500 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. But the device was, at 62 tons, not deliverable as a practical weapon.
    The first Russian H-bomb test followed on August 12, 1953, 16 days after North and South Korea signed their armistice. Yet America did not test an operational H-bomb, carried by a bomber, until May 1956. The official American reaction to early nuclear bomb milestones was to treat potential nuclear war as merely souped-up conventional conflict. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, propounded his “massive retaliation” policy at the beginning of 1954: any kind of attack launched by the Soviet Union would be met—at least, in theory—with an all-out nuclear response. In October 1953 President Eisenhower authorized full-scale production of the B-52 Stratofortress strategic heavy bomber in anticipation of America deploying a deliverable H-bomb. The massive eight-jet plane, designed to reach the Soviet Union at high subsonic jet speed and deliver H-bombs without refueling, entered service in 1955 and remains in the U.S. inventory today.
    The prime consequence of these thermonuclear weapons has turned out quite different from what was originally forecast. The early bombs’ massive devastation gave them, as noted by the eminent strategist Herman Kahn, the plausible potential to literally destroy civilizations, not just to level small cities, as atom bombs could. Uranium or plutonium atomic bombs produce explosive yields in kilotons—the equivalent of thousands of tons of conventional explosives like TNT. (The Hiroshima device was estimated to yield 14 kilotons.) But hydrogen bomb yields are theoretically without limit. The largest devices yield megatons (millions of tons of TNT), whereas the highest yield ever achieved with an A-bomb is 500 kilotons. (The 1961 test of Russia’s Tsar Bomba produced a stupefying yield of 50 megatons.) Though that huge bomb—too large to fit in a bomb bay, let alone inside a missile warhead—was not deliverable as a weapon, a 25-megaton H-bomb was—still is—very deliverable.
    Yet the longer-term impact of H-bombs was to enable packing more explosive power into smaller, lighter warheads and not to destroy the largest possible area. Miniaturization was driven by the need to maximize firepower carried by bombers and missiles and, in the West, to reduce collateral casualties—especially arising from use of tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Western Europe, which might have had to be fired against targets on Allied soil.
    In a 1959 article, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter evaluated strategy in a world containing such devastating weapons. In the early 1950s, he had led a team at a new research-and-development think tank for the armed forces (the storied RAND Corporation, founded in 1948), which had stunned air force brass in its evaluation of the extreme risks posed by Soviet A-bombs to U.S. forces overseas—risks that early warning systems, hardened shelters for bombers, and more intelligent basing of bombers and ballistic missiles could drastically reduce. In his seminal article, Wohlstetter concisely laid down the theoretical foundation for strategic nuclear force structure. He saw that a force should be designed to deter first strikes by promising effective retaliation if deterrence failed.
    For that strategy to work the American force had to be able to survive a massive nuclear attack and still retain enough forces to