ABSTRACT
Americans were newbies at living and working under the constant threat of nuclear holocaust. For them, the thought of a sneak attack was newly terrifying and moments away.
Th e vast majority, including the military, felt that the country was vulnerable. Th e decade-old yet horrifi c memories of Pearl Harbor were still hauntingly fresh, as were newsreels of V-2s falling from the sky over London, and the ultimate of terrors: mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Th ose attacks had all come quickly from the air, were startlingly deadly, and succeeded in forcing the eyes of the world to look skyward with dread and foreboding. Strangely, although the likely contender for such an attack and how it would be carried out were well known, not much was done in the way of defensive diligence to prevent one. Such oversight came into sharp focus on the night of April 16, 1952 .2
