Bomber gap

The bomber gap was the Cold War belief that the Soviet Union's Long Range Aviation department had gained an advantage in deploying jet-powered strategic bombers. Widely accepted for several years by US officials, the gap was used as a political talking point in the United States to justify a great increase in defense spending.

Two main causes of the gap were the 1955 Soviet Aviation Day, which created the appearance of a larger bomber fleet than actually existed, and a 1956 U-2 surveillance mission which counted the number of bombers at a single Soviet airbase and extrapolated from that to an estimate of an entire bomber fleet, when in fact the entire bomber fleet was at the airbase in question. In response to these estimates, the US Air Force undertook a massive buildup of its bomber fleet, which peaked at over 2500 bombers to counter the perceived Soviet threat.

By 1960, subsequent U-2 surveillance flights had proven that the bomber gap did not exist.