General Curtis LeMay

• WE presume President Donald Trump is an original when it comes to OTT statements about warfare.

Well, 60 years ago, in 1957, the head of the Strategic Air Command, General Curtis LeMay, declared to members of an Office of Defence Mobilisation Security Panel, investigating US military policy, that if a Soviet bomber attack seemed likely he planned to “knock the s**t out of them before they take off the ground”.*

*Quoted in Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, Stanford University Press, 1991.

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