133 bombs (although only 50 existed) hitting 70 cities. A committee led by General Hubert R. Harmon reported in May 1949 that even if all precisely hit their targets, the USSR would not surrender, its leadership would not be seriously weakened, and its military could still operate in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The attacks would reduce Soviet industrial capacity by 30 to 40%, but only temporarily without follow-up attacks. The Harmon report had three immediate results: 1) It supported those within the United States Navy and elsewhere who criticized the centrality of atomic bombs and mass attacks on cities in American war planning. 2) It led to a substantial rise in nuclear-weapons production. 3) It caused the Joint Chiefs of Staff to, in fall 1949, assign SAC with the duty of slowing a Soviet invasion of Western Europe as part of NATO. Erroneous US and British intelligence reports led to exaggerated NATO estimates of Soviet conventional forces. One 1951 estimate foresaw 175 combat divisions allegedly prepared to simultaneously attack Western Europe, the United Kingdom, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North America. The perceived imbalance in forces was so great that American planners feared that even Britain would have to be abandoned during the invasion, a possibility they did not discuss with their British counterparts. Stalin did consider the possibility of war in Asia, as opposed to Europe. In January 1950, he approved Kim Il Sung's proposal to conquer South Korea in what became the Korean War that summer, believing that victory there would discredit NATO. The gambit backfired, however; despite their initial optimism the Communists were unable to defeat the US-led forces in Korea, and the war greatly increased Western military spending, for the first time making NATO a significant threat against the Soviets in Europe. By late 1950, the USSR notified its Eastern European satellites to prepare for war by the end of 1952, a date matching Western estimates. In early 1951, based on an alleged NATO plan to launch a European war that year from Western proxy Yugoslavia during the Informbiro period as a response to its defeat in Korea, he ordered a massive increase in Eastern European forces that hurt the weaker Communist economies. Based on the Korean precedent, the Soviets apparently expected that the West would not use atomic weapons in a European war. During Stalin's lifetime, Soviet doctrine foresaw the next