Abstract

The longstanding motto of the Strategic Air Command—“Peace is our Profession”—was often seen by critics as irony: “Yeah, war is just a hobby.” But for those who served in that organization during the Cold War, there was no contradiction at all: In a nuclear world, where the two major adversaries had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at each other, the term “victory” had little meaning: To fight would be to lose. Thus came the strategy of nuclear deterrence, a preventative approach mirroring the wisdom of Sun Tzu in the Art of War: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”