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Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War
Campbell Craig
1998
3. The Rise and Fall of Massive Retaliation, January 1953–July 1955
The Republican candidate for president in 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his Secretary of State-in-waiting, John Foster Dulles, believed that unresolved situations like the one in Berlin signified the problem with Truman’s basic Cold War policy. The tenuous American position in Berlin was simply one of the more grievous examples of the Truman administration’s propensity to react, marionette-like, to communist aggression on every front. Not only had NSC–68 created an American bunker mentality in Europe, it had also led to the stalemated war in Korea and $50 billion defense budgets. Eisenhower and Dulles played up these issues in the fall campaign, offering an alternative foreign policy that would at the same time wage the Cold War more actively and demand less from the American taxpayer.
This foreign policy, which the Eisenhower campaign dubbed the "New Look," originated in the writings of John Foster Dulles. A powerful Wall Street lawyer and devout Presbyterian, Dulles had headed during the war the Federal Council of Churches’ "Commission on Just and Durable Peace," an interdenominational Protestant organization set up to oppose more pacifistic Protestant groups. After 1945 the future Secretary of State effectively positioned himself as the leader of the internationalist wing of the Republican party. Dulles argued tirelessly in support of the vast involvement in overseas affairs that the Cold War entailed, especially in opposition to isolationist Republicans like the Ohio Senator Robert Taft. In books and articles, in front of Republican groups, and as an official American delegate at the United Nations and in Japan, he denounced isolationism as an immoral stance in a world of Hitlers and Stalins.
Yet Dulles opposed Truman’s Cold War strategy. He sincerely viewed the Cold War as a struggle between a West that still retained spiritual values and a communist world proud to boast of its absolute materialism. Like the American religious philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, he worried that in its necessary efforts to confront the Soviets the West would find its moral bearings overwhelmed by expedient power calculations; unlike Niebuhr and other pessimistic moralists, he believed that it was America’s mission to spread good, not just resist evil. 1 Truman was waging a "nonmoral diplomacy," as Dulles put it during the 1952 campaign, because his policy, to contain potential communist aggression by deploying American military force against it, had robbed the United States of its initiative. 2 By concentrating on material resistance to the communist threat, the Democrats were allowing the Cold War to devolve into an old-style geopolitical power struggle in which outrage over the immorality of communist designs was being eclipsed by secular calculations of deterrence and balance-of-power. "Limited policies inevitably are defensive policies," Dulles wrote in 1950, "and defensive policies inevitably are losing policies." 3 A protracted policy of reactive containment would create a moral malaise in the West comparable to that found in France after the construction of the Maginot Line. America needed to assert its moral superiority by going on the offensive, by seeking unlimited, not limited, objectives.
What did an "unlimited" Cold War policy mean? In "A Policy of Boldness," a major article published in the May 19, 1952 issue of Life magazine, Dulles unveiled his approach to the American public. Much of the article, while surely original to most of Life’s mass readership, reiterated points Dulles had been making for years. Current United States strategy, he wrote, was "far-flung," "erratic," and "militaristic," designed to stop emerging crises rather than achieve some longer-term objective. Not only was Truman’s approach ultimately futile and unequal to the traditions of American morality, it also imperiled American prosperity with its "gigantic" defense expenditures. 4
What made "A Policy of Boldness" significant was Dulles’s decision to include a specific strategic alternative to Truman and Nitze’s containment policy. Rather than reacting to Soviet moves around the globe, the United States should "retaliate instantly" to communist expansion by striking "back where it hurts, by means of our own choosing." How to retaliate effectively against the vast armies of the East? The West must develop a "community punishing force" willing to attack the communists with America’s nuclear weapons. Dulles elaborated:
So far these weapons are merely part of general arsenals for use in fighting general war when it has come. If that catastrophe occurs, it will be because we have allowed these new and awesome forces to become the ordinary killing tools of the soldier when, in the hands of statesmen, they could serve as effective political weapons in defense of the peace. 5
In other words: instead of deploying nuclear weapons like most weapons of war, to be used in battle as military conditions demanded, why not threaten to use such weapons in order to avoid war in the first place? What this meant, although Dulles was unwilling to be so specific, was that the West should launch a nuclear attack "where it hurts" in the event of any significant communist aggression.
With such a retaliatory threat in place, Dulles concluded, the communists would not dare risk aggressive military action. The West could then confidently proceed with a dynamic political offensive against the immoral communist regimes without having to worry about getting bogged down in another Korea.
Eisenhower had his own Cold War strategy, which at the outset of his new administration seemed to correspond well with the Dulles plan. His strategic views stemmed from his experiences as a military commander during World War II, during which Eisenhower rose rapidly through the ranks to become Supreme Commander of the European theater and the Allied expeditionary forces. By 1944, put in charge of a multinational command bureaucracy that conducted the largest military operation of all time, with the aim of defeating Nazi Germany, conquering Western Europe, and transforming the balance of global power, Eisenhower had a chance to become familiar with the problem of weighing political interests against military planning. 6 Commanding an all-out military campaign to defeat Hitler unconditionally, moreover, he also had the opportunity to think about the morality of attacking German civilians. Eisenhower confronted both of these matters directly. On one hand, he deftly managed the gigantic ambitions of subordinates like General George Patton and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, while at the same time fending off the political maneuverings of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, in order to achieve without deviation his objective of taking France, defeating Hitler’s armies, and winning the war in Europe. 7 On the other hand, to ensure and hasten the Nazi surrender, he also approved the strategic bombing of crowded French and German cities and hence the incineration of tens of thousands of noncombatants.
World War II confirmed for Eisenhower a lesson from the Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz’s book On War—a work that a superior officer, General Fox Conner, had ordered him to read three times in the 1920s. 8 Clausewitz issued the famous warning in On War that mass military operations become increasingly difficult for political authorities to control: in spite of all reason and planning modern war escalates toward absolute violence, as even well-meaning, politically sophisticated military commanders cannot help but use their most powerful weapons rather than risk defeat. 9
Yet Eisenhower was less concerned in 1952 than he had been in 1944 with the military side of American policy. At that moment of vast American military superiority and economic prosperity Eisenhower believed that a greater threat to United States national interest lay in excessive government spending than in potential military defeat. He repeatedly warned that the logic of NSC&-;68—that national security was an absolute objective to which unlimited resources should be allotted—threatened to undermine the end of national interest in the name of military security. Of course he wanted to maintain basic American Cold War military deployments, but he wanted to do so at a lower cost, and he wanted also to wean the American public away from the Keynesian (and "Nitzean") notion that the government could spend whatever it wanted to. 10
This was why Eisenhower initially went along with Dulles’s concept of massive retaliation. He preferred it over other prospectively inexpensive strategies because Dulles’s apparent rejection of the idea of limited war with the Soviet Union was in accord with his Clausewitzean conviction that any war with the Soviet Union would eventually become total. 11
The Short-Lived Policy of Massive Retaliation
Eisenhower handily beat the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, in the November election. Upon taking office in January 1953, he organized a foreign policy planning exercise, which came to be called "Operation Solarium." Eisenhower directed three task forces to draft competing approaches to national security policy. 12 Group "A," which Eisenhower appointed George Kennan to head, was charged with presenting the case for traditional containment, along the lines of the Truman administration’s policy. Group "B," headed by Air Force Major General James McCormick, formulated a strategy based primarily upon nuclear weapons: communist advancement beyond a given perimeter would trigger an immediate American nuclear attack upon the Soviet Union. Group "C," headed by the Navy’s Vice Admiral Richard Conolly, developed a more intricate and activist strategy designed to roll back communist bastions by employing a variety of means, including nuclear and conventional warfare, covert action, and propaganda. 13
The National Security Council studied the alternatives provided by Solarium in the fall of 1953, and under Eisenhower’s direction, blended them into the new administration’s first basic security policy, NSC–162/2. A sampling from each of the three Solarium alternatives, NSC–162/2 in the end looked a lot like Dulles’s "Policy of Boldness." 14 From Group C came Eisenhower’s third-world policy: while the United States would not "roll back" established communist states in Europe, it would adopt active and various military initiatives against lesser adversaries. From Group A, which is to say from Kennan, NSC–162/2 took the general ideology of containment, the conviction that the Soviet Union was a moribund experiment which, if it were effectively contained, would eventually collapse. From Group B came the most obvious feature of the New Look, the emphasis on nuclear forces and the corresponding downplaying of conventional deterrence.
The nuclear strategy which emerged from Group B and found its final form in NSC–162/2 was the product of intensive debate in two NSC meetings in July and August. 15 Dulles, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Arthur Radford called for a liberal interpretation of Group B’s recommendations, advocating the maintenance of significant conventional forces and a broader array of nuclear weaponry. Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey and Director of the Budget Joseph Dodge—whose very presence at high-level security meetings illustrated Eisenhower’s preoccupation with economy—supported a basic nuclear retaliatory force. Eisenhower sided with Humphrey and Dodge, and their position therefore prevailed. Dulles did not make this an issue during the early meetings, but that would change.
The resulting American nuclear force posture from 1953 to 1955 consisted of three main components: a small deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe; a modest Civil Defense Program; and the centerpiece of the New Look, an integrated bomber force, still under the direction of LeMay’s Strategic Air Command, which would carry out massive nuclear retaliation against an enemy nation that was preparing for or initiating war against the United States or its close allies. 16 By the end of 1953 the United States had adopted a policy, and was in the process of deploying military forces designed to fulfill that policy, which stipulated that any major Cold War confrontation would probably bring nuclear war.
Amid this policymaking process the Russians, again, raised the stakes of American nuclear strategy earlier than anticipated. In August 1953, four years after its atomic test, the Soviet Union successfully exploded a device that produced radioactivity comparable to a small thermonuclear blast. It appears now that the 300-kiloton explosion was that of a boosted fission bomb, but Eisenhower administration officials chose to be less skeptical about the Soviet achievement than Truman had been four years earlier. As far as Eisenhower and Dulles were concerned, the test showed that the Soviets had acquired the superbomb, or at least were about to. United States security policy now had to account for an imminent Soviet thermonuclear capability.
The news had an immediate effect upon American security policy. In early September, even as the NSC was developing NSC–162/2, Dulles composed a general memorandum which began, "Our collective security policies require urgent reconsideration." NATO strategy, he stated, had been based on the assumption that the American nuclear arsenal would deter the Soviets from invading Europe, but "that assumption is now shaken." The Europeans would recognize that the United States, soon to be vulnerable to a Soviet nuclear attack, might stay out of a European war. That, Dulles warned, could give rise to neutralism. He offered a potential solution to this problem: the United States should make a "spectacular effort to relax world tensions" while the Soviet arsenal was still small. Perhaps the United Nations could even establish international control of atomic weapons. 17
"If we are to attempt real revision in policies," Eisenhower replied on September 8, ". . . we must begin now to educate our people in the fundamentals of these problems." The "problems" he was referring to were the military dilemmas created by the "capabilities now and in the near future of the H–Bomb, supplemented by the A–Bomb."
Eisenhower got to the point: if the Soviet leaders, "aware of the great destruction of these weapons," would not make "any honest effort" toward such a plan for international control, then they "must be fairly assumed to be contemplating their aggressive use." To meet this threat the United States would have to maintain a constant state of full mobilization, and if this showdown were
to continue indefinitely, the cost would either drive us to war—or to some form of dictatorial government. In such circumstances, we would be forced to consider whether or not our duty to future generations did not require us to initiate war at the most propitious moment that we could designate. 18
Thus in early September 1953, the messianic brinksman John Foster Dulles was recommending a "spectacular" détente with the Soviet Union, while the golfing Eisenhower was suggesting a nuclear attack against an adversary whose crime would have been to decline to turn over its weapons to the United Nations. But this first exchange provided a misleading, if not entirely inaccurate, picture of their emerging positions. The moralist Dulles, seeing little hope for a future just war against communism, offered, for the sake of argument, the drastic but logical alternative of "spectacular" arms control. The pessimist Eisenhower, seeing no hope for a future winnable war, replied with the extreme, but logical solution of preventive war. 19
A month later the NSC met to discuss NSC–162/2, and after an arduous debate on military spending the discussion turned to the coming Soviet nuclear arsenal. Talk of preventive war was in the air, but Eisenhower expressed his aversion to using the "special weapons." Secretary of Defense Wilson demanded to know: "Do we intend to use weapons on which we are spending such great sums, or do we not?" Eisenhower replied that of course he would use them if "the interests of U.S. security" so dictated, but the military should not "plan to make use of these weapons in minor affairs." Dulles then "repeated his often-expressed view that somehow or other we must manage to remove the taboo from the use of these weapons." Eisenhower noted that using "these weapons" might make it appear that the "U.S. were initiating global war," and with this the discussion came to an end. 20
The respective positions of Dulles and Eisenhower in their correspondence in early September and in the above meeting were less inconsistent than they might appear. Dulles took the "special weapons" more in stride: they could be dealt with by establishing a regime of international control or, more realistically, by removing the taboo from atomic weaponry and deciding to use the bombs as one would conventional forces. Eisenhower countered that the problem could be solved right away by launching an unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union, or, more realistically, by accepting the fact that the United States would have to avoid conflict that might lead to global war. At a private dinner with the recently re-elected British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, his foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and Dulles, Eisenhower promoted the idea of preemptive war one final time, suggesting that the United States could promote peace by destroying Soviet thermonuclear production. 21 On January 12, 1954 Dulles publicized his view in a speech given to the Council on Foreign Relations. The Secretary of State summarized the strategy in a single sentence: "The way to deter aggression is for the free community to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with means of its own choosing." 22 One of these "means," Dulles emphasized, was "the deterrent of massive retaliatory power." This expression gained widespread attention, and contemporary observers of American policy began to talk about the new official strategy of "massive retaliation." 23
In office for only a year, Eisenhower and Dulles by early 1954 had developed a new American nuclear policy. Each of them had endorsed the unilateral, offensive use of nuclear weaponry in their private security planning, while Dulles had made the unilateral defensive use of such weaponry the public basis of American foreign policy. These strategic expressions had two effects. First, and more immediately, they served as a conspicuous signal to weaker nations whom the United States wanted to intimidate that the new American administration was not so squeamish about using atomic weapons to achieve military objectives. Putting nuclear weaponry at the center of American security policy made it easy for Eisenhower and Dulles to wage "atomic diplomacy" against North Korea and China in 1953, the North Vietnamese in 1954, and China again in 1955, in each case securing political arrangements more favorable to the United States than the military situation on the ground warranted. 24
Second, and for the longer run, by clearly making the threat of nuclear war the basis of American Cold War policy, Eisenhower and Dulles forced themselves to consider thermonuclear war. By skirting the question of how the United States would wage all-out war, and by emphasizing conventional and atomic forms of deterrence, NSC–68 had allowed Truman and his advisers to avoid thinking about this difficult problem. This was not possible for Eisenhower or Dulles—the price of the New Look was having explicitly to face the prospect of a thermonuclear World War III. And it became obvious during secret policy debates in 1954 and 1955 that this prospect meant something very different to the president than it did to his Secretary of State.
Early Dissent
In March 1954 the NSC met to revise an old Truman policy statement, NSC–20/4, "U.S. Objectives Vis-à-Vis the USSR in the Event of War." Eisenhower at this meeting put forth some opinions about what a war with a fully-armed Soviet Union would be like. First, he said, such a war would create chaotic conditions impossible to plan for or even foresee. Second, the only objective of the United States would be to destroy the Soviet Union as completely as possible. His third point was a final repudiation of his earlier support for preventive war: the United States would never launch its thermonuclear arsenal "except in retaliation against a heavy attack." Fourth, in the aftermath of a general nuclear war the United States would have to become a dictatorship. Eisenhower scoffed at Radford and Cutler for even attempting to develop a list of war objectives and scenarios. 25
Paying heed to Eisenhower’s four arguments, on August 7 the NSC issued a new Basic National Security Policy (BNSP), NSC 5422/2. 26 The Soviet Union, the new document said, would likely attain a substantial nuclear weapon capability during the period 1956–59. Once it did a total war between the two superpowers "would bring about such extensive destruction as to threaten the survival of Western Civilization and the Soviet regime." Nevertheless, because limited war was not feasible the United States would wage a war against the Soviet Union "with all available weapons." NSC 5422/2 also included a skeptical paragraph on disarmament, suggesting that there was "serious question" whether any arms control regime could be developed in the near future. 27
NSC–5422/2 was a rejection of Dulles’s position. The Secretary of State had made clear his desire to remove the stigma from nuclear weapons, his support for limited nuclear wars against local communist aggression, and, for good measure, his idealistic notion that disarmament might provide an escape from the coming dilemma. Each of these wishes was explicitly ruled out in NSC–5422/2. But dealing with this rebuff was the sort of challenge at which Dulles excelled. Not a personable figure, he had risen to the top of the Republican Party’s foreign policy hierarchy by sheer force of contention. In addition, he knew that there were others on the NSC who opposed Eisenhower’s categorical views of nuclear war. Recognizing the breach between himself and the president, Dulles set out to provide an alternative strategy to NSC–5422/2.
In November, as the first Quemoy–Matsu crisis unfolded, Dulles proposed that the NSC consider "clarification and changes in emphasis" to the new policy. Regarding general war, he argued, the United States had to be prepared to meet hostilities "in a manner and on a scale which will not inevitably broaden them into total nuclear war." In particular, he continued, the nation needed to remember that it was "morally committed" either to use nuclear weapons in a European war or supply them to NATO allies; the West "should explore urgently" the possibility of developing a strategy flexible enough to avoid turning any war in Europe into an all-out nuclear war. 28
Having watched Dulles jump safely into the water, other opponents of NSC–5422/2 began to send in their own criticisms of the president’s strategy. The Secretary of State’s brother Allen 29 , who was the director of the CIA, warned in an NSC paper that unless there were "improvement in defensive measures presently contemplated," the Europeans "will show increasing reluctance to engage in diplomatic or military action which seems to involve a risk of war." Director of Defense Mobilization Arthur Flemming demanded that the United States never "adopt a defeatist or fatalistic attitude" about war once the Soviets attained their arsenal. The Joint Chiefs, with concurrence from Secretary Wilson, warned that if the United States were afraid to engage in "timely and dynamic action" it would soon become isolated from its allies and eventually face the choice between appeasement and general war. 30
Eisenhower and his critics met for a volatile NSC meeting on November 24. Dulles, Wilson, and Flemming reiterated their fear that the coming Soviet arsenal threatened American security and alliances. Eisenhower demanded that "the critics of our current policy" be more specific. Admiral Radford stated that "soon the U.S. could no longer count on the Russians being afraid of starting general war.. . . some time or other the Soviet Union will elect to force the issue." 31
Eisenhower, "speaking with considerable forcefulness," insisted that he was unable to see any "fundamental difference. . . among the departments, despite whatever the words spelled out." 32 But Dulles and his colleagues were determined to get rid of NSC–5422/2. After considerable argument Wilson recommended that a "high-level interdepartmental group" meet to work on a "revised basic national security policy." Relenting, Eisenhower said that he would "consider this recommendation. . . " Minutes of the meeting noted that the NSC would direct its Planning Board "to prepare for early Council consideration a restatement of basic national security policy in the light of the above-mentioned suggestions and discussions." 33
The reasons why Eisenhower capitulated on this issue are unclear. It is possible that he felt that he could not govern effectively while holding a distinctly minority view in the NSC; certainly he did not want to wage a more conspicuous conflict with his Secretary of State. Another possibility is that it was late 1954: the Soviet Union would not be attaining "atomic plenty" for another few years, and policies could always be changed before then. 34
On December 14 the Planning Board produced NSC 5440, which was "intended to supersede NSC 162/2 and NSC 5422/2." The new document omitted talk of waging any war "with all available weapons" and recommended instead the deployment of
military forces with sufficient strength, flexibility and mobility to enable them to deal swiftly and severely with Communist overt aggression in its various forms and to cope successfully with general war should it develop.
NSC–5440 continued,
The ability to apply force selectively and flexibly will become increasingly important in maintaining the morale and will of the free world to resist aggression. As the fear of nuclear war grows, the United States and its allies must never allow themselves to get into the position where they must choose between (a) not responding to local aggression and (b) applying force in a way which our own people or our allies would consider entails undue risk of nuclear devastation. However, the United States cannot afford to preclude itself from using nuclear weapons even in a local situation, if such use. . . will best advance U.S. security interests. In the last analysis, if confronted by the choice of (a) acquiescing in Communist aggression or (b) taking measures risking either general war or loss of allied support, the United States must be prepared to take these risks if necessary for its security. 35
NSC 5440 was a fundamental revision of the earlier BNSP. Its authors (a) renounced massive retaliation, (b) precisely articulated the strategy of "flexible response" as it would become known seven years later, and (c) predicted, in the last sentence, exactly the dilemma which the Eisenhower administration would face in Berlin four years hence.
Over the ensuing year Eisenhower deferred to his Secretary of State, allowing the "clarifications" in NSC–5440 to go unchallenged. Debate over the 1955 BNSP, NSC–5501, was relatively mild and short-lived: in a meeting on the subject in January Eisenhower raised no objections to the retaining of NSC–5540’s emphasis on flexibility. 36 In March the world witnessed perhaps the most conspicuous demonstration of atomic diplomacy used during the Cold War, as the president cooperated with Dulles in threatening the Chinese with nuclear war unless they backed off Quemoy and Matsu. On March 8, 1955 Dulles referred in a radio address to "new and powerful weapons of precision which can utterly destroy military targets without endangering unrelated civilian centers"; on the 16th Eisenhower declared, in response to a reporter’s question, that in a combat situation the United States would use tactical nuclear weapons "just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else." 37 The Chinese then ended their efforts to take the two islands. 38
In 1954 and 1955 Dulles promoted to the NSC a nuclear strategy that he knew conflicted substantially with Eisenhower’s views (just as it conflicted with popular perceptions that official American security policy during the Eisenhower administration was based upon massive retaliation). By vigorously pushing his ideas forward, Dulles had been able to make the basic National Security policies of those two years reflect his, not his president’s, vision of war with the Soviet Union. Had there been a major crisis during this period, Eisenhower might well have ignored the Dulles strategy and acted as he saw fit. But that possibility did not make Dulles’s dissent unimportant. Forced by their New Look to reckon with the prospect of thermonuclear war, the debate between Eisenhower and Dulles really was more about the future orientation of American basic security policy—about how the United States should regard general war once the Soviet Union acquired a serious arsenal—than about devising working contingency plans for an immediate crisis. By taking on the president in 1954 Dulles made it known that he opposed the all-or-nothing approach found in NSC–5422/2, and would presumably continue to oppose it as Soviet thermonuclear capability neared. Dulles, in other words, was communicating to Eisenhower, via the medium of national security planning, the message that he did not share his president’s understanding of general war in the thermonuclear age. That was something Eisenhower could not dismiss.
Endnotes
Note 1: Dulles, "The Christian Citizen in a Changing World," (originally published in August 1948) and "Principle vs. Expedience in Foreign Policy" (originally published in September 1952), both in Henry P. Van Dusen, ed., The Spiritual Legacy of John Foster Dulles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), pp. 159–74, 121–32. Back.
Note 2: Dulles, "The Spiritual Foundations of World Order," in ibid., p. 124. Back.
Note 3: Dulles, War or Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 253. Back.
Note 4: Dulles, "A Policy of Boldness," Life 32 (May 19, 1952): 146. Back.
Note 5: Ibid., pp. 149–50. Back.
Note 6: See Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, volume 1 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 146. Back.
Note 7: As George Marshall stated, in a letter of commendation to Eisenhower at the end of the war: "You have met and successfully disposed of every conceivable difficulty incident to varied national interests and international political problems of unprecedented complications." Quoted by Forrest Pogue, "The Genesis of The Supreme Command: Personal Impressions of Eisenhower the General," in Gunter Bischof and Stephen Ambrose, eds., Eisenhower: A Centenary Assessment (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), p. 39. Back.
Note 8: While the influence of specific ideas upon policymakers can be (and often is) vastly overrated, the effect of Clausewitz’s main ideas upon Eisenhower is certain. Indeed, Eisenhower, not normally wont to drop philosophers’ names during security meetings, brought him up on several occasions. During an NSC discussion on South Korean militarism, for example, Eisenhower out of the blue reminded his colleagues that it "was high time to remember the words of wisdom of people like Clausewitz." See memorandum of September 20, 1956 NSC discussion, DDC 1994, number 2248, p. 9. Also see Peter J. Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 83. Back.
Note 9: On Eisenhower’s attention to Clausewitz, also see Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) p. 138; Ambrose, Eisenhower, p. 76; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 135; and Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New Look National Security Policy, 1953–61 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 4. Back.
Note 10: On this point see Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 132–136, and Richard Immerman, "Confessions of an Eisenhower Revisionist," Diplomatic History 14 (Summer, 1990): 327–28. Back.
Note 11: Cf. Immerman, "Confessions," p. 331, and Gaddis, The Long Peace, pp. 123–26. Back.
Note 12: A summary of operation Solarium is reprinted in FRUS 2 (1952–54): "National Security Affairs," part 1, pp. 399–434. Solarium is discussed in Gaddis, Strategies, pp. 146–48; H. W. Brands, "The Age of Vulnerability: Eisenhower and the National Insecurity State," American Historical Review 94 (October 1989): 966–68; Immerman, "Confessions," pp. 336–37; and Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, pp. 136–37. Robert Cutler, Eisenhower’s special assistant for national security affairs, incorrectly argued that Dulles was actually the one who set up the exercise. See Cutler, No Time to Rest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), pp. 307–10. Oddly, Bundy does not mention Solarium at all. Back.
Note 13: New documentation on Solarium has just been released, showing that task force C recommended that the United States "reduce Soviet capability for war before the U.S.S.R. reaches the stage of atomic plenty." See DDC 1996, number 78, p. 1. Back.
Note 14: On the transition from Solarium to NSC–162/2, see Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, pp. 136–41; Brands, "The Age of Vulnerability," pp. 968–72; Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 172n; Immerman, "Confessions," p. 338; and Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill," p. 28. Back.
Note 15: Memoranda of July 30, 1953 and August 27, 1953 NSC discussions, FRUS 2 (1952–54): 435–440, 443–55. Also see Brands, "The Age of Vulnerability," pp. 968–72. Back.
Note 16: Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill," pp. 28–32. Back.
Note 17: September 6, 1953 Dulles memorandum, FRUS 2 (1952–54): 457, 459. Back.
Note 18: September 8, 1953 Eisenhower memorandum to Dulles, ibid., p. 461; compare Immerman, "Confessions," p. 337. Back.
Note 19: On this exchange also see Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, pp. 139–40. Back.
Note 20: Memorandum of October 7, 1953 of NSC discussion, FRUS 2 (1952–54): 532–33. Back.
Note 21: Eisenhower memorandum of December 5, 1953 dinner with Dulles, Churchill, and Eden, DDC 1994, number 2934. Back.
Note 22: Dulles, "The Evolution of Foreign Policy," speech given to the Council of Foreign Relations on January 12, 1954, reprinted in Department of State Bulletin 30 (January 25, 1954). Dulles elaborated his point in an article, "Policy for Security and Peace," Foreign Affairs 32 (April 1954): 353–64. Back.
Note 23: See Gaddis, Strategies, p. 147. Back.
Note 24: On Eisenhower’s "atomic diplomacy" from 1953 through 1955, see Bundy, Danger and Survival, pp. 255–79. Back.
Note 25: Memorandum of March 25, 1954 NSC discussion, FRUS 2 (1952–54): 641. Back.
Note 26: On the formation of NSC 5422/2, also see Brands, "The Age of Vulnerability," pp. 977–80. Back.
Note 27: NSC 5422/2, reprinted in FRUS 2 (1952–54): 716–18. Back.
Note 28: Dulles, November 15, 1954 Department of State Paper, "Basic National Security Policy (Suggestions of the Secretary of State)," ibid., pp. 773–75. Back.
Note 29: To avoid confusion I will refer to Allen Dulles by his full name. Back.
Note 30: November 18, 1954 paper prepared by Allen Dulles, p. 777; November 19, 1954 paper prepared by Flemming, p. 783; November 22, 1954 memorandum from Wilson to Executive Secretary of the NSC Arthur Lay, pp. 785–86, all ibid. Back.
Note 31: Memorandum of November 24, 1954 NSC discussion, ibid., pp. 789–91. Back.
Note 32: Apparently Eisenhower considered this line of argument—to deny that there was really any disagreement—an effective tactic. In this meeting alone he used it several times, at one point asserting that "everyone really seemed to be in fundamental agreement. . . no policy change was required"; later he expressed his "inability to detect basic policy differences. . . " and declared toward the end of the meeting that "national security policies [are] now well stated." He would use this tactic again during the Berlin crisis in 1959. Back.
Note 33: Ibid., pp. 799–800. Back.
Note 34: On this point see Brands, "Age of Vulnerability," p. 980. Back.
Note 35: NSC 5440, reprinted in FRUS 2 (1952–54): 814–15. Back.
Note 36: Memorandum of January 5, 1955 NSC discussion, DDC 1994, no. 2259. Back.
Note 37: Both Dulles’s and Eisenhower’s statements are reprinted in "Editorial note," FRUS 19 (1955–57), "National Security Policy," p. 61. Back.
Note 38: For a broader discussion of Eisenhower’s diplomacy during this crisis, see Gordon H. Chang, "To the Nuclear War Brink: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Quemoy–Matsu Crisis," International Security 12 (Winter 1988). Back.
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