In the late 1950s and early '60s, a particularly horrendous fight erupted between the Navy and the Air Force over which service would control the principal weapon in the strategic nuclear arsenal. (The Navy held the Polaris submarine, the Air Force the B-52 bomber.) In my 1983 book, The Wizards of Armageddon, I quote declassified transcripts of secretly taped conversations in the office of Adm. Arleigh Burke, then the chief of naval operations. Of the Air Force chiefs, Burke says: "This is just like Communism being here in the country. It needn't have happened that … Castro with a very few people and no following at the beginning, can take over a country with a well-disciplined force, small but well-disciplined." The Air Force is the same way, he said. "They're smart and they're ruthless. It's the same way as the Communists. It's exactly the same techniques. … They're dishonest. … They have no feeling at all that they are responsible for anything but the Air Force." The Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Thomas White, and the commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Curtis LeMay, felt no more affection for the Navy.