The bomber and other so called gaps were known to be unfounded at the time.
From
Baiting the Bear BBC Timewatch 1996
Dino Brugioni CIA photo analyst 1948-82
"...supposedly the Soviets had more bombers than the United states and not only had more bombers, but were going to produce more bombers. Keep in mind what we did, we saw a bomber, we counted that bomber as being operational, when we knew that there was no bomber force in the World which you could look down on and say , all bombers are operational"
Narrator
"The President doubted Airforce claims (about the bomber gap), but in 1956 intelligence chiefs persuaded him to authorise a series of spy-plane over flights (of the USSR). Eisenhower insisted the CIA not the Airforce be in charge ....."
The first mission of the U2 spy-plane over the Soviet Union was on the 4th of July 1956 .....
Dino Brugioni CIA photo analyst 1948-82
"That particular mission we flew over the long range bomber bases in the Ukraine and Leningrad we flew deeper into the Soviet Union over Moscow and coveraged [sic] more bomber bases. The missions that we flew that essentially went up to the Urals, proved fairly conclusively that there was no bomber gap. Two months after the National Photographic Interpretation Centre came into being we had solved one major problem, and that was the bomber gap didn't exist.
Narrator
Despite photographic evidence that Lemay had greatly over estimated the Soviet bomber threat, in June 1957 with the help of powerful friends in Congress he (Lemay) was promoted to vice chief of the Airforce.
Dino Brugioni
...well when we flew the satellites in '60, that proved conclusively that not only was there was no bomber gap, no missile gap and no megatonnage gap, and that's when Eisenhower in one of his last ventures as a President got up and denounced the danger of an unbridled Military Industrial Complex.