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Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War
Campbell Craig
1998
4. Eisenhower Takes Over, July 1955–April 1957
Amid little fanfare and with no debate, Eisenhower ordered the Pentagon in the summer of 1955 to make the production of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) an objective of the "highest national priority." The president’s reasoning, like Truman’s reasoning in deciding to stay in Berlin and to build the superbomb, was simple. Eisenhower had received two reports early that year indicating that the Soviet Union was likely to acquire, in the relatively near future, hundreds of megaton thermonuclear warheads and the ballistic missiles on which to deliver them to American targets. A report by the Technological Capabilities Panel (commonly known as the Killian committee), entitled "Meeting the Threat of Surprise Attack," warned of a Soviet "multimegaton capability" by as early as 1958; this was confirmed by a National Intelligence Estimate presented to the president in June. 1
Once the Russians perfected this technology they would be able to deliver a thermonuclear warhead to American cities in about thirty minutes, as opposed to the twelve hours or so needed by a manned bomber. Without the threat of American retaliation in kind the Soviets could, conceivably, launch an attack out of the blue, crippling the nation utterly and making American defeat surely inevitable. More plausibly, the mere possibility of such an attack could encourage the Soviets to go on a Cold War offensive that the West would be too terrified to obstruct. "We had simply got to achieve such missiles as promptly as possible," Eisenhower argued, "if only because of the enormous psychological and political significance of ballistic missiles." 2
Eisenhower’s decision to move quickly on ICBM production carried with it none of the drama of the Berlin and H–Bomb decisions that preceded it. An order to accelerate the development of delivery systems was not as dramatic as flying food to the people of West Berlin or going ahead with a program to develop thermonuclear fusion. But from the perspective of the history of military technology the creation of ICBMs was perhaps an even greater step. The prospect of fighting a thermonuclear war with manned bombers was gruesome, even insane, but it was, for the moment at least, military: pilots could panic, defect, or be ordered to turn around; American skill in evading Soviet air defense and in shooting down Russian planes could maybe make a real difference in the outcome of the war. But with the advent of ICBMs this last bit of human volition in modern war disappeared. There is no way to stop thousands of missiles from annihilating your nation absolutely. World War III, if both sides fought it in the total manner of World War II, would be an event of immediate and unstoppable holocaust, not a military phenomenon at all.
Yet this grim view of a thermonuclear war waged with intercontinental missiles did not stop the president from pushing his defense bureaucracy hard to get them built quickly. In the short run, getting missiles before the Soviets, or at least at roughly the same time, would prevent the Russians from exercising the blackmail envisioned in the worst-case analyses of the Killian report. Once in place, moreover, ICBMs would over the long haul surely deter the Soviet Union from embarking upon any aggression that could foreseeably trigger an American response. Indeed, thermonuclear missiles could create a stable Cold War deterrence, as rational nations would avoid risking general war.
Perhaps this was so, but Eisenhower was too pessimistic about the ability of statesmen to act rationally, and too unwilling to evade difficult questions, to see in the advent of ICBMs a panacea of deterrence. Yes, large thermonuclear arsenals would deter statesmen from courting World War III. But the Cold War was volatile: deterrence could fail. To avoid planning for that possibility, on the grounds that rational actors of course would never initiate a thermonuclear war, was simple abrogation. As the ultimate author of American basic national security policy, it was still his responsibility to decide under what circumstances the United States would wage war against the Soviet Union.
In response to the Soviet Union’s approaching attainment of an ICBM arsenal, Eisenhower altered American military policy in three ways. First, he sought to deploy a sufficient number of long-range nuclear weapons and a good warning system so that the United States could promise a massive nuclear retaliation in response to a Soviet attack. This would deter the Soviets from launching such an attack in the first place, and would also prevent the Russians from enjoying the psychological advantage that a first-strike nuclear capability could provide. This effort at attaining a nuclear force capable of deterring a Soviet ICBM attack began in earnest in 1955, and intensified after the Sputnik launch in 1957. Second, Eisenhower restructured America’s conventional force posture, giving the U.S. Army primary responsibility for dealing with smaller wars away from major regions of Cold War conflict. The advent of mutual nuclear deterrence might encourage the Soviets to promote local communist advancement in areas of the world which the United States was not willing to defend with general war. Eisenhower therefore wanted forces able to deal with the "brushfire" wars that might ensue.
Third, Eisenhower moved between 1955 and 1957 to remove limited, non-nuclear military planning from American general war policy, so as to ensure that any war directly between the United States and the Soviet Union would escalate automatically into an all-out thermonuclear war. While his reasons for making the two changes listed above are generally agreed upon, the president’s motivation in taking this third step remains unclear and disputed. 3 What follows is an account of the rancorous struggle between Eisenhower and his major advisers over his efforts to banish the idea of limited war with the Russians from American military policy, and a new interpretation of his odd decision.
The Rhetorical Offensive
On September 24, not long after the NSC formally rendered his order for a rapid buildup of ICBMs, Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. During his four-month period of convalescence, the president for the most part did not participate in decisionmaking. 4
At the beginning of 1956, Eisenhower returned to full-time duty, and on January 12 attended his first NSC meeting since his heart attack. Among the items on the agenda was the question of government stockpiling during a general war, and the president took the opportunity to express some things he may have been dwelling on privately in his sickbed. He first said that stockpiling made sense even in the nuclear age, that "in any future war, the U.S. would have to pick itself up from the floor and try to win through to a successful end." Pleased to see that during his convalescence Eisenhower had gotten rid of his earlier skepticism about winning a nuclear war, Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson naturally concurred, but it turned out the president had spoken tongue-in-cheek. He turned to Wilson and said, with "some warmth," that "the only thing we could really know about the nature of a future war was that it would be completely different from any wars fought in the past." Moving on to a projected study on the human effects of nuclear weapons, Eisenhower went further. These weapons, he stated, were pushing us "past the point of human endurance." He did not want "a lot of long-haired professors" to examine that problem, but "we must pause and think where we are going in the field of these weapons." Of one thing Eisenhower "was dead sure. No one was going to be the winner in such a nuclear war. The destruction might be such that we might have ultimately to go back to bows and arrows." 5
At the next NSC meeting a week later Eisenhower continued with this theme. The council was meeting primarily to discuss a top-secret report by the retired Air Force General Harold L. George, which predicted that a war on the hypothetical date of July 1, 1956 would destroy the American economy and undermine American cultural institutions. The president expressed his "astonishment at our inability to defend ourselves better from aerial attack after a strategic warning" and later that day entered in his diary his fear that after such a calamity "it would literally be a business of digging ourselves out of ashes, starting again." 6 At another NSC meeting on February 7 Eisenhower persisted with this argument, urging his colleagues several times to remember the "transcendent consideration—namely, that nobody can win a thermonuclear war." 7
By this time the NSC was facing the annual task of rewriting basic national security policy for 1956. The president’s recent commentary suggested that his views on war with the Soviets were not in accord with current policy, yet in a preliminary memorandum attached to the 1956 version, the NSC Planning Board noted that the new BNSP would continue to emphasize "flexible capabilities to deter or defeat local aggression. . . to avoid the broadening of hostilities into general war." 8 The president and those who would maintain existing policy were on a sort of collision course, and it happened on February 27, in perhaps the richest NSC meeting on nuclear strategy during the entire Eisenhower era. On that day the NSC went over the Dulles version line by line, and Eisenhower made his opposition to it plain for everyone to see.
The participants in the meeting immediately turned to the question of nuclear strategy. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Arthur M. Radford, argued strongly that nuclear weapons must be accorded conventional status. Eisenhower answered that world opinion would be repelled by the American use of such weapons in small wars. Dulles insisted that "in operations short of general war," the Planning Board language of February 13 should be retained. 9 Eisenhower’s reply here perfectly demonstrated his disbelief in limited war. He
asked that the Council imagine the position of a military commander in the field. His radar informs him that a flock of enemy bombers is on the point of attacking him. What does the military commander do in such a contingency? Does he not use every weapon at hand to defend himself and his forces? 10
It was all well and good to speak of limited war in the abstract, Eisenhower was saying. But in a war between great powers, like World War II, no one was going to accept defeat when there were powerful weapons still at hand.
Dulles responded to Eisenhower’s scenario literally, noting that it was not relevant to actual policy since the president was supposed to authorize any use of nuclear weapons anyway. Either relinquish that power, the lawyer Dulles was saying, or admit that what the "local commander" wants to do is not important. It was time to stop engaging in thought-experiments and get administration policy clear. What, he asked, should the United States do if, for example, "the Soviets impose a new blockade on Berlin?" 11
Eisenhower was caught off guard by Dulles’s response. He was trying to talk about the central problem of military instinct during the heat of war, and here was Dulles raising prosaic objections. Eisenhower asked the council to "suspend action" on the issue of revising NSC&-;5602’s two paragraphs dealing with nuclear strategy. Dulles urged that the council instead adopt the Planning Board language, but Eisenhower insisted upon waiting. 12
The NSC turned next to the problem of "local Communist aggression," and Eisenhower wasted no time in restating his case. The Korean War had shown that
in the future these peripheral wars must not be permitted to drag out. We must now plan to fight peripheral wars on the same basis as we would fight a general war. After all, there was no good reason for drawing distinctions between peripheral and general wars. 13
The Secretary of State thought that there was good reason indeed to distinguish between peripheral and general wars. What would the United States do, the prescient Dulles asked, "if the Vietminh undertook to attack South Vietnam? Would we proceed to drop atomic bombs on Peking?" 14
Dulles, discerning the new direction that Eisenhower was taking, had seized upon its weakness. An all-or-nothing nuclear strategy left the United States with no options in a major crisis other than backing down or unleashing general thermonuclear war. Not only was this dangerous from a military perspective, but it also threatened to neutralize America’s key allies. Could the French, Dutch, or West Berliners really be expected to believe that the Americans would come to their rescue by initiating a war that would automatically annihilate the United States? The Secretary of State thought this a fatal defect of Eisenhower’s apparent strategy, pardonable perhaps in the days of bombers and Soviet inferiority but not so on the eve of the missile age.
Despite his clear and fundamental disagreement with it, Eisenhower decided, in an NSC session to sign on to the final BNSP for 1956, to leave Dulles’s flexible strategy intact. 15 NSC–5602/1 stipulated, like its predecessors, that the United States must maintain a "flexible and selective nuclear capability," so as to avoid both "not responding to local aggression" and "applying force in a way which our own people or our allies would consider entails undue risks of nuclear devastation." 16 This language was in direct, plain contradiction to Eisenhower’s recent statements.
There were several reasons for Eisenhower to leave the BNSP the way it was. He may have believed that what he said superseded written policy, and that it was therefore not worth the trouble to argue over words, especially as an election was coming up and it would be best to avoid disagreement among his main security advisers. He knew as well that sometime later that year NATO would be meeting to revise its military policy in the light of the Soviet Union’s emerging thermonuclear capabilities. Then he would probably have to show his hand, and there would be no advantage in writing a policy now, having it leak out, and alienating his European allies. Moreover, he knew that a definitive policy decision was not yet necessary. Intelligence continued to predict that the Soviets would be without massive retaliatory capabilities until 1958 at the earliest; hence basic policy still remained an exercise, a procedure that would not constrain future action. The documentary evidence does not indicate which, if any, of these reasons really persuaded Eisenhower to leave basic policy alone. What can be said is that in 1957, when none of these considerations remained, he quickly replaced the existing policy with his own.
Dissent from the Pentagon and State Department
Eisenhower’s main security advisers recognized what the president was doing, and for the rest of 1956 and early 1957 they took steps to oppose him. Dulles, as mentioned above, was especially worried about the effect an all-or-nothing nuclear policy would have on America’s European allies. The Joint Chiefs disliked greatly having no guidance as to when they could use nuclear weapons other than in an all-out retaliation. Though the Suez Crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the showdown in Little Rock over school desegregation, and the election campaign diverted White House attention from nuclear policy during the summer and fall of 1956, Dulles and the Chiefs made their resistance evident enough to convince Eisenhower that he would have to impose his views more forcefully.
The Joint Chiefs’ attitude toward the president in 1956 and thereafter can best be described as suspicious. Charged with planning for war, the chiefs wondered with increasing exasperation why Eisenhower refused to say under exactly what circumstances he would authorize the use of thermonuclear weapons. They raised the issue repeatedly.
On March 30 Eisenhower met with the four joint chiefs alone. Radford, speaking for all four, wanted to raise "basic questions on which clarification is needed." The first, Radford continued, was "whether we will use atomic weapons in war." 17 After lecturing the chiefs for awhile on the tragedy of interservice rivalry, Eisenhower got to the point. The Chiefs need not worry about any hesitancy on his part when it came to nuclear weapons—he was clear in his own mind "that in any war with the Soviets we would use them." 18 Of course, this begged the question: when, under what contingencies, would Eisenhower actually approve of their use? NSC policy stipulated clearly that the president would have final say on all decisions to use nuclear weapons. But the Chiefs had to make rough war plans. Would Eisenhower be willing to wage nuclear war flexibly? In a May 10 meeting Radford "pleaded" for a decision on this question, complaining that the NSC "could not continue to straddle it." The Chairman stated his case plainly:
The problem is not what we do in global war, but whether we can use nuclear weapons in military situations short of global war. We must be clear whether or not our armed forces can use nuclear weapons in this latter type of situation. 19
Eisenhower responded to the Chiefs’ demands over the following weeks; during May of 1956 the president met with the Joint Chiefs more frequently than in any other month of his presidency. In a May 14 meeting with Radford alone Eisenhower suggested that "we would not get involved in a ‘small war’ extending beyond a few Marine battalions or Army units. If it grew to anything like Korea proportions, the action would become one for use of atomic weapons." 20 On the 24th, Eisenhower met with Radford and Army Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor, who argued that the inevitable advent of thermonuclear arsenals would "deter both sides from a big war," thus compelling the United States to retrain its focus on fighting smaller wars. Taylor also suggested that talk of using atomic weapons in every kind of war "contravened" current NSC policy, which stipulated "flexibility" in small war situations.
Eisenhower’s response to Taylor’s queries deserves lengthy quotation. "The president [wrote his staff secretary, Colonel Andrew J. Goodpaster],"
said he thought General Taylor’s position was dependent on an assumption that we are opposed by people who would think as we do with regard to the value of human life. But they do not, as shown in many incidents from the last war. We have no basis for thinking that they abhor destruction as we do. In the event they should decide to go to war, the pressure on them to use atomic weapons in a sudden blow would be extremely great. He did not see any basis for thinking other than that they would use these weapons at once, and in full force. The President went on to say that he did not care too much for the definition of general war as given. To him the question was simply one of a war between the United States and the USSR, and in this he felt the thinking should be based on the use of atomic weapons—that in his opinion it was fatuous to think that the U.S. and the USSR would be locked into a life and death struggle without using such weapons. We should therefore develop our readiness on the basis of use of atomic weapons by both sides. 21
Here is a summary of Eisenhower’s view of modern war. Clausewitz held that war tends toward total war—that military commanders will always use "every weapon at hand" rather than go down to defeat. Any tempering of this tendency by moral, religious, or chivalric limitations on violence—well, the two World Wars had ushered that right out. If the two superpowers went to war there was no reason to believe—indeed, it was fatuous to believe—that the tyrants in the Kremlin would moderate their attack in any way. What point was there, then, in developing limited strategies to initiate war against the Soviet Union by attacking this supply line or that tank division, when the first thing the Russians would do is propel every weapon they had toward American cities? World War III would be a spasmodic, all-out thermonuclear war; planning for other scenarios was purposeless. 22
Eisenhower took a similar line in his 1956 dealings with Dulles, who was also proving resistant to the president’s new thinking. Their debate manifested itself—when the two were not otherwise occupied with the Suez Crisis—over the question of NATO policy. Dulles did not want to offer to his European colleagues an American strategy that would turn any war on that continent into an all-out thermonuclear war. Since Eisenhower had not officially changed the basic policy, Dulles guessed that it would be possible to propose an American position to the Europeans that did not conform to the president’s wishes.
The British Prime Minister Anthony Eden wrote to Eisenhower on July 18, wondering what effect the "Radford Plan" to reduce U.S. troops in Europe would have upon NATO allies edgy about being defended by thermonuclear weaponry. Eisenhower responded nine days later by assuring Eden that the Radford plan was rumor only, and that the American position on NATO military policy would be forthcoming. "[W]e hope to be ready about the middle of August to give you our views," Eisenhower predicted. 23
The Suez Crisis, igniting as Eisenhower penned his reply, delayed the NATO conference, and this gave Dulles an opportunity to try to persuade Eisenhower to change his mind. On October 1 he presented the president with a formal memorandum on the "United States Position of Review of NATO strategy and Force Levels." In this memorandum Dulles openly described his flexible strategy as official U.S. policy, as if Eisenhower’s repeated rejections of it over the past several months had not occurred. "Our presentation to the Council and to the British would be based on the following," Dulles wrote:
1. The NATO military mission now includes the defense of the NATO area against all types of aggression, including any local attack.. . . The maintenance of an effective shield for these purposes must include sufficient conventional ground forces to avoid inflexibility.
2. Accordingly, we find unacceptable any proposal which implies the adoption of a NATO strategy of total reliance on nuclear retaliation. 24
Eisenhower couldn’t have made his rejection of this, at a White House conference the next day, more plain. The United States would not remove divisions from Europe, he conceded: that would have an "unacceptably damaging" effect upon the West German president Konrad Adenauer. But from now on "we will proceed with plans and preparations on the basis that, if the Soviets attack, atomic weapons will be used." 25 Dulles had his orders for the NATO meeting, postponed by Suez but now scheduled for December.
Despite this directive, Dulles tried to dilute Eisenhower’s position during the Paris meetings. The Secretary of State warned in an informal preliminary speech that the NATO allies "dare not put our eggs in one basket. There must be diversity of capability and must be flexibility." Nor, Dulles argued in the first formal session, "could the US accept the idea that there was no need for substantial manpower because any attack would set off massive retaliation and in that provide a sufficient deterrent." 26 Later in the conference he continued to fudge the issue, declaring at the last ministerial meeting that "NATO should not rely wholly on atomic weapons, though [it is] proper to say we have primary reliance upon them. Conventional forces are necessary, and [the] burden of supplying conventional forces should increasingly be assumed by Europeans." 27 Caught between his own convictions and his direct orders, Dulles equivocated.
NSC–5707/8
Eisenhower did not have an easy time of it in 1956. In addition to the fervent dissent of his Secretary of State and the Joint Chiefs, he had to face increasingly numerous and gruesome reports on what a general war would entail. Back in November several members of the Federal Civil Defense Administration presented a "Human Effects of Nuclear Weapons Development" study that Eisenhower had commissioned after the George report. 28 It concluded that an all-out war with the Soviet Union would leave fifty million Americans dead or injured and endanger basic American social institutions. A month later, after Eisenhower’s return from his annual vacation at Augusta, the NSC met to consider a report submitted by General Gerald C. Thomas of the Net Evaluation Committee, a war-planning arm of the NSC. Thomas said that by 1959 an all-out Soviet nuclear attack upon an alert United States would, after the American retaliation, result in the effective destruction of both nations. Such a war, Thomas estimated, would leave forty percent of the United States’ population dead and another thirteen percent injured. If the Soviets managed to launch such an attack upon an insufficiently alert America, the Soviet Union would "emerge as the dominant world power in 24 hours." 29
If Dulles’s and the Joint Chiefs’ objections were not sufficient, then here was strong persuasion that Eisenhower moderate his new policy. Yet the president’s reaction to these chilling scenarios was not to concede the necessity of limited-war strategies or to advocate a new program of civil defense. Instead, the president wondered, after hearing Thomas’s presentation,
why we should put a single nickel into anything but developing our capacity to diminish the enemy’s capacity for nuclear attack. Rather than worry too much about the submarine menace, protecting shipping on the seas, etc., the United States should continue to concentrate on producing a force that is so good and so well distributed that the Soviets will not attack.. . . 30
Undaunted, the next day Radford and Taylor resumed their case for a more flexible and elaborate military posture, insisting at an NSC discussion that the United States was on the verge of military overextension. Dulles responded that the Soviet Union was actually in much worse shape than America; but this could tempt Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to act desperately. Eisenhower seemed to be thinking on a different level: his concern was not American overextension or Soviet instability but whether "the suggested courses of action would markedly reduce the threat of the holocaust described yesterday." 31 He continued with this theme after the New Year, concluding another NSC discussion by noting that "War had always been hitherto a contest, but it was preposterous to describe a war of missiles as a contest.. . . The concept of deterrent power has gone as far as it can. In view of this incredible situation we must have fresh thinking on how to conduct ourselves." 32
In February it was time to rewrite basic policy for 1957. In a preliminary discussion of this task Eisenhower instructed war planners to "concentrate on what measures we should undertake in the first week of the war. It would all be over by that time." Given that fact, he continued, we might as well "put all our resources into our SAC capability and into hydrogen bombs." 33 Three weeks later, the Assistant for National Security Affairs, Robert Cutler, presented the first draft of the new strategy, NSC–5707. But the Planning Board had not heeded Eisenhower’s suggestions, instead preserving Dulles’s flexible strategy from the previous year and noting Eisenhower’s instructions only in a footnote.
After Cutler finished presenting NSC–5707 the NSC commenced debate. Cutler stated that—given the obvious discord about the subject—the Planning Board was looking for guidance on nuclear weapons strategy. "Certain members of the Planning Board," he said, "had expressed fear that the United States would refrain from [limited war] lest the result of the involvement end up with the United States becoming involved in general nuclear war." Secretary of the Treasury Humphrey, counting himself among the discontented, complained that despite the declared policy of flexibility, the military always said that it could not win without nuclear escalation. It was time to decide once and for all whether the United States was going to use nuclear weapons in a limited war or not. 34
Dulles complained that a footnote in NSC–5707 contained the "fallacy" of assuming that any nuclear war would develop into all-out war with the Soviet Union: "it is not true," he protested, "that we would be obliged to choose between doing nothing in the event of local Soviet aggression or else of engaging in general nuclear war." Eisenhower’s reply was curt. If the Soviets were to be deterred from starting a war with the United States, he stated, "they would not be swayed by any fear that the United States would bomb airfields in Communist China. Their calculations would be based on quite other considerations." 35
The NSC returned to work out this disagreement on April 11. But on that day Dulles was absent, and that gave Eisenhower an opportunity to push his position more easily through the council. The dissent of the past year had to stop; it was time, he said, to "write the right kind of directive in the matter of the use of atomic weapons." Cutler reminded the president that "the State Department had a certain interest in this area." Undersecretary of State Christian Herter tried to stand up for his absent boss, observing that "Secretary Dulles felt that we still needed a considerable degree of flexibility in the weaponry of our armed forces." 36 Eisenhower ended the debate by stating
very clearly his opinion that we had now reached a point in time when our main reliance, though not our sole reliance, should be on nuclear weapons. Up until recently our main reliance has been on conventional forces, to which we have added here and there in various units atomic capabilities. This situation must henceforth be revised. 37
Recognizing that the days of suggestion were over and the day of directive had arrived, Cutler returned to the White House basement to rewrite basic policy along Eisenhower’s lines.
Basic national security policies written during the Eisenhower administration would first spell out the purposes of national survival. 38 The whole point of having a security policy was to preserve not only the physical survival of the United States but its "fundamental values and institutions" as well. This language remained intact throughout the Eisenhower era. The next section, entitled "Elements of National Strategy," then stated how the government would attempt to assure that survival. Listed first here of course was the military element, and it was in this subsection that one would find the basic military policy of the United States—a general outlining of different forms of international conflict and the degrees of armed force that should be brought to bear upon them. 39
The military policy that the NSC planning board presented on May 27 for the council’s approval differed in three fundamental respects from existing policy. First, the United States would now place "main, but not sole, reliance upon nuclear weapons." Instead of deploying a diverse force structure that combined nuclear weapons with atomic and conventional ones, the American military would henceforth wage thermonuclear war "when required to achieve national objectives." Second, the new policy emphasized that limited warfare, whether in conventional or nuclear form, was to be restricted to local wars, defined as "conflicts occurring in less developed areas of the world, in which limited U.S. forces participate because U.S. interests are involved." In such a war, "force will be applied in a manner and on a scale best calculated to avoid hostilities from broadening into general war." Third, and most important, the planning board simply removed Dulles’s paragraph on flexible response. That passage had argued that "with the coming of nuclear parity, the ability to apply force selectively and flexibly" was crucial if the United States was to avoid finding itself in the position of having to choose in a crisis between the horrors of thermonuclear war and the humiliation of backing down. Flexibility would not only provide a sane alternative to these two unacceptable outcomes, but would also reassure allies who were skeptical of the American willingness to respond to an invasion of Luxembourg or Turkey with all-out thermonuclear war. The planning board eliminated this passage entirely, and replaced it with nothing.
This new policy can be distinguished best by its clean separation of general from limited war. 40 The old policy conceived by Dulles back in 1954 sought to blur this line, reserving to the United States the freedom to wage war flexibly and unexpectedly in different situations. The one that Eisenhower was imposing renounced this indeterminateness: general war was going to be fought with thermonuclear weapons, period. In a limited war the military might use conventional, atomic, and/or nuclear ones, but above all the goal would be to stop local aggression without courting general war. 41
Eisenhower’s new policy guidelines signified something more than just the alteration of words. By rewriting BNSP Eisenhower demonstrated that he was determined to impose his view of war upon formal decisionmaking. If a crisis broke out he wanted his advisers to have no doubt about the basic military policy he would pursue. Eisenhower may have originally believed that his statements of 1955 and 1956 would be sufficient for that purpose, but the dissent of his advisers indicated that they were not. By overhauling BNSP, and in so doing prominently tossing Dulles’s doctrinal statement on flexible response into the trash, Eisenhower hoped to erase this doubt, to make his understanding of warfare the indisputable basis of American military policy.
The NSC met on May 27 to consider the new policy. Cutler reminded the council that the main differences between it and previous policies—the "major area of policy cleavage," as Cutler described it—were the paragraphs on nuclear war. The only NSC member to record his opposition to the proposed changes was John Foster Dulles. Dulles asked if he could speak generally about the "new concept" Eisenhower had put forth. He then proceeded to advance an interesting, though certainly on the face of it incongruous, argument against the new policy. Dulles admitted that one had to adjust to military technology; he was more "realistic" about the nuclear age than many of his State Department colleagues. But, the founder of massive retaliation insisted, global opinion would condemn the United States for using nuclear weapons, especially in local conflicts. If America resorted to such a war "we will, in the eyes of the world, be cast as a ruthless military power, as was Germany earlier." 42
The problem, Dulles explained, was not that the use of nuclear weapons was immoral per se but that other nations had yet to understand how these weapons could be used in limited ways. Until the rest of world opinion came around, therefore, it would be best that the limitations on war as "set forth in NSC 5602/1 should be retained in the new basic national security policy paper." 43 But Dulles did not press his point. Indeed, after declining an offer from Cutler to establish a study group on limited nuclear war, he left the meeting early to meet with President Adenauer. Eisenhower interrupted Dulles only once, to reassure the NSC that by local war he meant a conflict specifically not involving American basic interests and hence not to be expanded into general war. Upon Dulles’s departure, the NSC approved the changes as written and the meeting came to an end. A week later, the NSC completed the final version, NSC–5707/8. 44 Eisenhower’s new military policy was now official.
The Strategy to Evade Nuclear War
A word to describe recent scholarship on Dwight Eisenhower and nuclear weapons might be puzzled. Here is a capable president, astute on many issues, masterly when it came to military policy. About his understanding of the ramifications of thermonuclear war there can be no doubt: dozens of times he warned that the only result of such a war would be misery and destruction. And the president did not issue these warnings in front of UN assemblies or Boy Scout troops—he issued them, as we have seen, in top-secret NSC and White House meetings that the public would know nothing about for decades, directing fist-pounding diatribes on the horror of thermonuclear holocaust toward hardened diplomats and military men.
Yet in 1956 and 1957 Eisenhower rearranged official American basic security policy so that a war with the Soviet Union would escalate, automatically, into general thermonuclear war. He made a point of eliminating strategies that could be used to moderate or prevent that escalation; he derided advisers, like his Secretary of State, who thought such moderation possible and desirable. By getting rid of NSC plans for conventional or limited nuclear warfare in the event of conflict with the Soviet Union, Eisenhower put the Cold War on a hair-trigger. In any confrontation between the two sides the United States would soon face a choice between capitulation and initiating thermonuclear war. Eisenhower regularly assured his colleagues that when that moment came he would be ready to launch the missiles.
The evidence is plain: a masterly chief executive, terrified by the specter of nuclear annihilation, pushes through with a great exertion a military policy which makes any war with the chief adversary of the United States an automatic, all-out thermonuclear war. How can this paradox be accounted for? Students of Eisenhower’s military policy have advanced two explanations: that Eisenhower resisted the more expansive strategies of Dulles and the Joint Chiefs in order to save money; or that he rejected conventional strategies to persuade American’s NATO allies to take greater responsibility for their own local defenses. 45
Neither of these interpretations, however, explains Eisenhower’s mysterious behavior in 1956 and 1957. If it were the president’s intention to keep defense spending low, or to put pressure on NATO allies, then what possibly could be gained by dwelling on the specter of thermonuclear war? One might expect a president advocating a risky policy for economic or alliance purposes to play down, not call attention to, its unprecedented dangers. Yet in one NSC meeting after the next, Eisenhower interjects into an otherwise dispassionate discussion on civil defense or politics in Hungary anguished laments about the horror of modern war. These are experienced officials he is speaking to, quite well aware of what thermonuclear weapons can do. But Eisenhower keeps returning to the topic. 46
This behavior makes sense only if one sees that the purpose behind it was not to keep spending down, or allies in line, but to avoid war with the Soviet Union. After his decision in 1955 to rush ICBM production, Eisenhower began to express with more clarity two views he had about modern war. 47 First, he revived his old Clausewitzean conviction that general war is not limitable. A war between the United States and the Soviet Union would escalate into an all-out thermonuclear exchange, for the simple reason that neither nation would give up when it still had powerful weapons at hand—and, realizing this, each would stand to gain by delivering a knockout punch at once. This was the belief that put him in opposition to Dulles and the Joint Chiefs, the one he hammered home in the February 1956 NSC meeting and in the conversation with General Taylor.
Second, Eisenhower concluded, especially after absorbing the awful reports on the effects of nuclear war in 1956, that once the Soviet Union had acquired a substantial ICBM arsenal, it would be impossible to prevent an all-out thermonuclear war from destroying the United States utterly. The destructive power of thermonuclear warheads, together with the technological and economic barriers to building a defense against them, made for a new level of warfare. In a general war not only would the United States suffer the physical destruction of the American state, but also the annihilation of national institutions and culture. World War III would kill American society.
So the logic is obvious: any war with the Soviet Union will lead to all-out war; all-out war will destroy the United States; ergo, do not get into a war with the Soviet Union. For the logician this is an easy one, but for a president of the United States during the height of the Cold War it was otherwise. He could not announce one day that the United States would no longer be willing to wage war against the Soviet Union. How, then, could he avoid such a war surreptitiously?
Here was how NSC–5707/8 could be put to use. A Hitler-like invasion was not going to happen, as long as the United States maintained a solid nuclear deterrent and the Soviet Union was not ruled by a omnicidal madman. On the other end of the spectrum, a "brushfire" war in a place vital to neither superpower would not be allowed to escalate into general war: Eisenhower had specified this clearly in basic policy. What could lead to serious hostilities was the outbreak of a political crisis in an area important to each side. It was in this kind of conflict that pressure would accumulate to push the crisis toward war.
In such a crisis the option of going to war with the Soviet Union would have to become unavailable. A way to do this was to reduce the alternatives available to American decisionmakers to compromise, or all-out thermonuclear war. And the way to do this was to persuade everyone involved in the making of decisions that (a) limited options did not exist, (b) in the event of war the president will push every button, and (c) the war that ensues would be a ghastly holocaust killing hundreds of millions and destroying American society. By contriving such a stark dichotomy, a strong leader could resist the pressure of those heretofore determined to wage war rather than conciliate.
Eisenhower determined in 1956 to make the primary objective of his presidency the avoidance of a thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union. His strategy to evade nuclear war was to make American military policy so dangerous that his advisers would find it impossible to push Eisenhower toward war and away from compromise. NSC–5707/8, in other words, was not so much a military policy stating basic American approaches to warfare as a strategy designed to allow Eisenhower to avoid war altogether.
This interpretation ascribes an unusual amount of sophistication and foresight to President Eisenhower. But it answers questions other interpretations have not. It accounts for the paradox of Eisenhower’s military policy. It is in accord with two current scholarly perceptions of Eisenhower: that he was a president who knew what he was doing in the field of national security, and that he was a leader who pursued private political objectives to the exclusion of even his closest advisers. 48 And, finally, it explains Eisenhower’s strange actions during the Berlin crisis of 1958–59, when his war evasion strategy became operational.
Endnotes
Note 1: February 14, 1955 report by the Technological Capabilities Panel of the Science Advisory Committee, "Meeting the Threat of Surprise Attack," FRUS 19 (1955–57), pp. 43–44; National Intelligence Estimate number 100–5–55, "Implications of growing nuclear capabilities for the communist bloc and the free world," ibid., p. 86. Back.
Note 2: Memorandum of December 1, 1955 NSC discussion, ibid., pp. 168–69. Back.
Note 3: Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, pp. 86–87. Back.
Note 4: On December 1 Eisenhower did approve an NSC plan to direct the defense department to acquire intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) with the same urgency as intercontinental ones. The U.S. effort to build missiles with a range of 1,500 miles was, in late 1955, more promising than the ICBM program, and the NSC plan Eisenhower approved was meant to ensure that even if the Soviets did indeed get the ICBM first the United States could deter them temporarily with IRBMs deployed in Europe. See memorandum of September 8, 1955 NSC discussion, FRUS 19 (1955–57): 119–20, and memorandum of December 1, 1955 NSC discussion, ibid., pp. 168–70. For an interesting treatment of Eisenhower’s illness, see Clarence G. Lasby, Eisenhower’s Heart Attack: How Ike Beat Heart Disease and Held on to the Presidency (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997). Back.
Note 5: Memorandum of January 12, 1956 NSC discussion, DDC 1987, number 427, pp. 3, 6, 8, 18. Back.
Note 6: Memorandum of January 23, 1956 meeting with Eisenhower, FRUS 19 (1955–57): 189; Diary Entry, ibid. Back.
Note 7: Memorandum of February 7, 1956 NSC discussion, from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library (hereafter DDEL), Ann Whitman Files, NSC Series, Box 7, p. 5. Back.
Note 8: February 13, 1956 memorandum by the NSC Planning Board (NSC–5602), FRUS 19 (1955–57): 195. Back.
Note 9: Memorandum of February 27, 1956 NSC discussion, ibid., pp. 202–04. Back.
Note 11: Ibid., pp. 205–06. Back.
Note 12: Ibid., pp. 206–07. Back.
Note 13: Ibid., pp. 210–11, emphasis added. Back.
Note 15: ee memorandum of March 1, 1956 NSC discussion, ibid., p. 230n. Back.
Note 16: NSC–5602/1, ibid., p. 247 Back.
Note 17: Memorandum of March 30, 1956 conference, in ibid., p. 280. Radford here is using the term "atomic" generically, as did other policymakers on occasion. The context normally makes it apparent whether they mean nuclear weapons generally or fission bombs specifically. Back.
Note 19: Memorandum of May 10, 1956 NSC discussion, from DDEL, Ann Whitman Files, NSC series, Box 7, p. 12. Back.
Note 20: Memorandum of May 14, 1956 White House conference, FRUS 19 (1955–57): 302. Back.
Note 21: Memorandum of May 24, 1956 White House conference, ibid., p. 312. Back.
Note 22: Taylor left the government in 1959, and immediately wrote a book, The Uncertain Trumpet, that attacked Eisenhower’s nuclear policy for its immorality and inflexibility. I suspect this meeting launched Taylor’s literary career. See chapter 7, below. Back.
Note 23: July 18, 1956 letter from Eden to Eisenhower, FRUS 4 (1955–57), "Western Security and Integration," pp. 90–92, and footnote 7, pp. 92–93. Back.
Note 24: October 1, 1956 memorandum from Dulles to Eisenhower, ibid., p. 97. Back.
Note 25: October 2, 1956 memorandum of conference with Eisenhower, ibid., p. 101. Back.
Note 26: December 11, 1956 telegram from Dulles to Department of State, ibid., p. 115; memorandum of December 11, 1956 conversation between U.S. and British delegates, ibid., pp. 125–26. Back.
Note 27: December 11, 1956 Dulles memorandum, ibid., p. 115; Dulles report from December 14, 1956 NATO Ministerial Meeting, ibid., p. 154. Back.
Note 28: On Eisenhower’s reaction to the "Human Effects" report also see Brands, "The Age of Vulnerability," p. 987; and Wm. F. Vandercook, "Making the Very Best of the Very Worst,"International Security 11 (Summer 1986): 190–91. Back.
Note 29: Memorandum of December 20, 1956 NSC discussion, FRUS 19 (1955–57): 380. Back.
Note 31: Memorandum of December 21, 1956 NSC discussion, ibid., p. 390. Back.
Note 32: Memorandum of January 11, 1957 NSC discussion, ibid., p. 409. Back.
Note 33: Memorandum of February 7, 1957 NSC discussion, ibid., pp. 414–16. Back.
Note 34: Memorandum of February 28, 1957 NSC discussion, ibid., pp. 427–28. Back.
Note 36: Memorandum of April 11, 1957 NSC discussion, ibid., pp. 471–73. Back.
Note 38: There is a growing literature on the formal NSC process during the Eisenhower administration, of which the writing of BNSP was the annual pinnacle. For a recent review, see Anna Kasten Nelson, "The Importance of Foreign Policy Process: Eisenhower and the National Security Council," in Bischof and Ambrose, eds., Eisenhower: A Centenary Assessment, pp. 111–125. Back.
Note 39: The way Eisenhower defines basic national security policy, and then its section on "military elements," resembles quite closely the way Barry Posen defines grand strategy ("the identification of likely threats to a nation’s security, and devising of political, economic, and military remedies for these threats") and military doctrine (the component of grand strategy "that deals explicitly with military means"). See Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). Back.
Note 40: On this point also see Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New Look, pp. 198–200. Back.
Note 41: Eisenhower was, I think, unsure about whether he supported using nuclear weapons in limited wars or not. Certainly this policy endorsed that option, and Eisenhower did approve the development of new tactical nuclear weapons. Yet he worried on more than one occasion about the public revulsion to waging nuclear war, and was particularly squeamish about the idea of using nuclear weapons against Asian peoples after Hiroshima. To threaten their use was a different matter entirely, as Eisenhower had demonstrated between 1953 and 1955. As will be seen in the next chapter, however, when another opportunity to wage atomic diplomacy arose in 1958, during the second Taiwan straits crisis, Eisenhower was the model of caution. Back.
Note 42: Memorandum of May 27, 1957 NSC discussion, FRUS 19 (1955–57): 500–501. Back.
Note 43: Ibid. Dulles repeated this strange argument in a Foreign Affairs article that was published later in 1957; I will examine it more closely in the next chapter. Back.
Note 44: NSC–5707/8 is reprinted in ibid., pp. 509–24. A copy of the original document, still in its orange folder, can be found in the White House Office Files, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC series, Policy Papers Subseries, Box 20, at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene. Back.
Note 45: See, respectively, Gaddis, Strategies of Containment pp. 165–75, and Ambrose, Eisenhower, p. 435; Robert A. Wampler, "Eisenhower, NATO, and Nuclear Weapons: The Strategy and Political Economy of Alliance Security," in Bischof and Ambrose, eds., Eisenhower: A Centennial Assessment. My argument follows that of Richard Immerman, who in his article "Confessions of an Eisenhower Revisionist," advances a similar thesis—though in speculative form—to the one put forth here. Also see Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 232. Back.
Note 46: Another oddity of NSC meetings is that Eisenhower’s is the only voice, after 1954 or so, speaking out on nuclear war in this way. I have a mental picture of NSC members uneasily looking down at the table as the president once again declaims on the subject. Back.
Note 47: These conclusions comprised his "most basic strategic insight," writes Stephen Ambrose, in Eisenhower: A Centenary Assessment, p. 250. Back.
Note 48: The classic expression of this argument is Fred Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency (New York: Basic Books, 1982). Back.
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