National Affairs: Maginot Line of the Air

In more than 150 U.S. newspapers last week, Columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop offered their readers an intimate portrait of Dwight Eisenhower unable to sleep at night as he wrestled with a problem which might end in “the physical and final destruction of this republic.” Ike’s sleeplessness, according to the Alsops, was caused by worry as to whether his Administration should adopt the recommendations of Project Lincoln, a study of U.S. air defenses carried out at Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the request of the armed services.

Though the Project Lincoln report was classified “secret,” the Alsops devoted a series of three columns to an analysis of its conclusions. The M.I.T. scientists, they said, had decided that within two years the U.S.S.R. would be able to deliver an atomic attack “large enough to cripple or even devastate this country . . .”At present, the Alsops went on, U.S. defenses against such an attack were so inadequate that they “really amount to no air defense at all.” To remedy this situation, the nation must follow the Project Lincoln blueprint: “An early-warning net must be thrown around the almost inaccessible northern fringes of the hemisphere . . . All the parts [of the warning net] must automatically guide the defenders to the attackers . . . Fighter air bases and guided-missile launching sites must be arranged in echelons, from the air frontier to the American industrial heartland.” The estimated cost of such a program, said the Alsops, was $16 billion to $20 billion.

When other reporters began to check the Alsops’ story, however, the implication that Project Lincoln was the Government’s prime concern collapsed like a pricked balloon. At a presidential press conference, Dwight Eisenhower quietly remarked that he had never studied the report in detail. Other Administration spokesmen made it clear that Project Lincoln is only one of several air-defense studies, none of which is now under active consideration.

The fact was that, even if the U.S. had an extra $20 billion to spend, most U.S. strategists would want to use the money to buy bombers rather than for a more elaborate air-warning and air-defense system. No matter how much money is spent, a complete defense of the U.S. against atomic attack cannot be constructed, and the best way to deal with the threat, according to most military men, is to be ready to hurt the enemy more than he can hurt the U.S. “A Maginot Line on the ground is bad enough,” said one Air Force officer last week. “There isn’t any line you can hold in the air.”