ABSTRACT
A system of general collective security is effective only against a threat so overpowering that it obliterates all disputes about the nature of the threat or about the strategy for dealing with it. When the services become competitors for available appropriations, an incentive is provided for developing a doctrine about the purpose of war and about the contribution which each service can make to the security. All the truisms of American strategic thought were reiterated—the concern with Europe, the war won by superior productivity, the identification of deterrence with maximum destructive power. As the Soviet nuclear stockpile has grown, the American strategic problem has been transformed. The B-36 hearings were chiefly important for affording yet another forum for perhaps the most inclusive restatement of what had become truisms of American strategic thought. The policy of containment was based on the assumption that military strategy and diplomacy represented successive phases of national policy.
