The bomber will always get through

His speech stated that contemporary bomber aircraft had the performance necessary to conduct a strategic bombing campaign that would destroy a country's cities and there was little that could be done in response.

By the mid-1930s the same techniques were being applied to fighter design, once again handing them a significant performance advantage that allowed them to chase down even the fastest bomber aircraft.

During the same period, the introduction of radar created an early warning system that gave interceptors sufficient time to climb to altitude before bombers arrived.

[6] In contrast, H. G. Wells, in The War in the Air (1908), had predicted that aerial warfare would destroy cities, fleets, and armies, but such would not bring military victory, only the collapse of human civilization.

Likewise, Olaf Stapledon, in his 1930 novel Last and First Men, depicts a very brief but devastating war in which fleets of bombers deliver huge payloads of poison gas to the cities of Europe, leaving most of the continent uninhabited.

Nevil Shute’s novel What Happened to the Corbetts, published in early 1939, posited a surprise attack on British cities, and described the experiences of a family during the bombing campaign that followed.

[12][13] Later analysis of the strategic bombing during World War II indicated that Baldwin's statement was essentially correct in that bombers would get through but at a cost in aircrew and aircraft.

Using the Dowding system, fighters directed by radar were able to disrupt the German daytime offensive during the Battle of Britain, forcing the Luftwaffe to turn to less accurate night-time bombing in The Blitz.

On 17 August 1943, US Army Air Forces launched strategic bombing raids on the German cities of Schweinfurt and Regensburg with 376 B-17 bombers without long-range fighter escorts.

[15] The disparity in loss rates was reflected in the fact that at one point in the war, Bomber Command considered making sorties over France count as only a third of an op towards the "tour" total.

The US military could not make effective use of the single radar installation based in Hawaii (it was used part-time as a training device) and visual spotters in the Philippines that should have provided an early warning to their fighter squadrons.

By the 1960s advances in ground-based radar, guided missiles, radar-guided anti-aircraft guns, and fighter planes greatly decreased the odds that bombers could reach their targets, whether they used the traditional high-altitude or newer low-altitude approach.

The United States Air Force found converting its large fleet of manned bombers to non-nuclear roles more difficult.

It attempted to redesign the B-70 Valkyrie high-altitude supersonic bomber project as a platform for reconnaissance and launch of standoff missiles such as the Skybolt.