Spyflights and Overflights: US Strategic Aerial Reconnaissance, 1945-1960

[AL]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1902109503?refRID=1EJ0RM546ATFZQV7SFVS&ref_=pd_rhf_eetyp_p_img_1

 

[CJGibson]

You'll like this. A very interesting read and highly enlightening, for me anyway. This is the first of three volumes.

Chris

Cover blurb

Former USAF RC-135 pilot Robert S. Hopkins, III, combines newly declassified material with first-hand experience in strategic aerial reconnaissance to provide a comprehensive analysis of American, British, and allied peripheral missions and overflights and their impact on the evolution of the early cold war.

Hopkins shows why these flights were critical to Western security and describes efforts to provide the airplanes, crews, and resources necessary to determine Soviet intentions and capabilities. He links military and political requirements for intelligence with specific reconnaissance missions and aircraft. Hopkins dispels the myth that these flights were undertaken illegally by Strategic Air Command to provoke World War Three, and questions long-standing beliefs that the missions limited defense spending, were essential in preventing or ending regional crises, and needlessly antagonized East-West relations. For the first time Hopkins shows the Soviet perspective on the flights, arguing that the Soviet response was hardly the product of paranoid leaders terrified of an impending American attack.

In addition to chapters based on rigorous research and interviews with participants, this book includes a detailed accounting of known overflights as well as incidents and losses, maps depicting mission objectives and what really happened when Soviet fighters attacked US ferrets, and a summary of US aerial reconnaissance aircraft types.

Well illustrated and accessibly written, Spy Flights and Overflights challenges what we know about cold war aerial reconnaissance, and is a fitting tribute to those who undertook these missions in great secrecy and peril.