To quote an old post of mine:
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I suggest that people here read pp. 102-3 (available online) of George H. Quester, *Nuclear Monopoly.*
https://books.google.com/books?id=OqGXS1spsrcC&pg=PA102
Quester points out the paradox that "those who feared Soviet future intentions the most, who most would see war as inevitable sooner or later, would be more hesitant to threaten a preventive war before larger American nuclear forces were ready." These people circa 1948 thought that Stalin very possibly would *already* start a war even while the US had a nuclear monopoly because he was counting on his superiority in conventional forces and would callously accept the danger of a few nuclear bombs being dropped on the USSR because he supposedly thought the USSR could survive the loss of a major city or two and still prevail.
From this point of view, the objective was *not* to prevent the USSR from getting the bomb; it was for the US to develop a sufficiently overwhelming nuclear superiority to *defeat* the USSR decisively, even after the Soviets had the bomb. That's why a preventive war was actually much more likely after the huge US Korean War build-up (both in nuclear weapons and in bombers, and in conventional forces as well) than in 1945-49. Thus, in the late 1940's it was people like Curtis Le May who urged a *delay* in preventive war; it was an idealist like Bertrand Russell who suggested acting immediately:
"Someone like Bertrand Russell, who feared the pain of nuclear war first and foremost, would be much more ready to entertain thoughts of applying that pain to Stalin, to keep him from acquiring his own force of painful weapons. For those of this world outlook, even a few dozen American atomic bombs, and the bombers to deliver them, were enough, and it would hardly be important to recover each bomber after it had inflicted a repetition of Hiroshima on a Soviet city.
"But most Air Force generals and other military planners in the United States were, by morality or by habit, disinclined to talk about war-fighting as the mere imposition of pain. If it was instead the crippling of the enemy's *ability* to fight, a much larger venture was required, with more bombs and more bombers, with repeated missions, and hence greater concerns about the hazards of Soviet air defenses, and about the recovery of US bombers.
"Here we come back closer to the classic calculations of preventive war speculation, whether "now" would be the time to wage war with a better total chance of winning, or whether the optimal time was a decade or two later. Unless one had *all* the military components in line for such a preventive war, the advantage might still rest with waiting.."
Once again, I think people are asking about preventive war *in the wrong era*--it was much more likely in say, 1953-4 (at least if Stalin had lived and the Korean war showed no signs of ending, etc.) when the overall advantage of the US over the USSR was much greater than it was in 1949 despite the Soviet development of nuclear weapons.
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To put this in perspective: as late as 1947, the US had "perhaps seven" nuclear bombs.
https://books.google.com/books?id=8NQMsSZ8O4wC&pg=PA161 That's hardly enough to dictate terms to the rest of the world, especially the USSR...
