The idea of the atomic bomb as a weapon of last resort, to be used only when national survival was considered at stake and all other means to prevent defeat or achieve victory in general war were deemed inadequate, was undermined, though not subverted completely, by the intervention of Chinese forces in the Korean War. Planning for all-out war with the Soviet Union increasingly relied on the use of nuclear weapons in Europe to offset Soviet conventional strength; in the standard picture of the time, the advance of dozens of Red Army divisions would be met with a series of shattering atomic blows at the centres of Russian power. By 1950, Strategic Air Command (SAC) was also beginning to redirect its targeting priorities to Soviet nuclear facilities and the airfields that might be used to launch Moscow's small stockpile of atomic bombs. In this overall context then, the strategic value of Korea in any general war with the Soviet Union had always been considered dubious by the JCS, and limited hostilities on the East Asian mainland served to tie down valuable resources that could be better deployed to more decisive areas. At the same time, the psychological and emotional shock that had been registered by the entry of China into the war, and the powerful images that were conveyed of mass ‘oriental’ armies overwhelming vastly outnumbered Western forces, generated strong impulses for the crude use of nuclear supremacy to redress the military balance in the Far East, even though, according to many evaluations, vital national interests were not imperilled.