|
|
|
|
Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War
Campbell Craig
1998
7.Intermission, July 1959–January 1961
The scheduling of Khrushchev’s visit to the United States of course doomed the Geneva talks, which had been persisting only in deference to Eisenhower and his now-discarded principles. On August 5 the delegates adjourned, having produced no tangible agreements at all. On that day Eisenhower announced "with anything but enthusiasm," as he later portrayed it, 1 that the talks had failed and Khrushchev would be visiting the United States. The August 5 announcement signified the official end of the 1958–59 Berlin Crisis; Nikita Khrushchev came to America in September.
The August 5 announcement also signified, as it happened, an end to the turmoil over nuclear policy that began with the Soviet thermonuclear test in 1953. For six years the question of how the United States should regard thermonuclear war had divided the Eisenhower administration: in NSC and White House discussions, in the annual making of basic national security policy, and finally during the Berlin crisis of 1958–59, Eisenhower struggled to enforce his decision, codified in NSC–5707/8, that general war against the Soviet Union would invariably mean all-out thermonuclear warfare, which in turn was unsuitable for anything other than a final, world-destroying retaliation. With the crisis now over, and with his main adversary in this struggle—John Foster Dulles—gone, Eisenhower and his stark military policy had survived its two greatest challenges.
Eisenhower’s aides, in particular his new national security adviser, Gordon Gray, did try to revive the case for limited war in the summer of 1959. The president indulged Gray, perhaps to avoid the political risks of appearing too dogmatic on the volatile question of thermonuclear war as the 1960 election neared. He did not, however, alter the basic military policy he had created in 1957 and put to use during the Berlin Crisis. It was this policy that he would pass on to the incoming administration in January 1961.
Basic Policy After the Fact
While Eisenhower worked in the summer of 1959 to avoid a showdown over Berlin, his main national security aides sat down for the final time to write a basic national security policy. Critics of his policy, most notably Gray and the new Secretary of State, Christian Herter, took their mission seriously and tried once again to talk Eisenhower out of his all-or-nothing policy. In a July 2, 1959 conference with the president, Herter wondered why the initiation of "any hostilities involving the U.S. and U.S.S.R. forces would automatically be a situation of general war," and grilled Eisenhower on the sticky question of exactly how he would distinguish between limited and general warfare. 2 Herter, the Joint Chiefs, Dillon, and Gray all lobbied to have NSC 5801/1’s paragraph 12-a, the text incorporating Eisenhower’s demand that the United States now place "main, but not sole, reliance on nuclear weapons," replaced with one endorsing the possibility of limited war against the Russians.
Debate on this question went on throughout July. It exasperated Eisenhower. Though willing to allow his subordinates to raise this issue for the sixth straight year, he was unable to see why his colleagues did not understand that he, the maker of American security policy, was happy with it just as it was. "My guess is that paragraph 12-a represents the President’s thinking," wrote Policy Planning Staff director Howard Furnas, "and was perhaps drafted by Gray under instructions." Eisenhower, according to Furnas, had told Dillon that this paragraph "was what the President intended, and that he would not want a big campaign of oppostion built up against it." Yet his advisers continued to raise objections. Eisenhower wished he could find a better way to "communicate to everyone his clear intention." 3
Stubbornly, critics of paragraph 12-a, especially Herter, would not relent. To appease them, Eisenhower permitted Gray to add this new sentence: "Planning should contemplate situations short of general war where the use of nuclear weapons would manifestly not be military necessary nor appropriate to the accomplishment of national objectives, particularly in those areas where main Communist power will not be brought to bear." 4
Even though the subordinate clause restates Eisenhower’s position that limited war is possible only in areas away from "main Communist power," it is true that this passage moves slightly away from Eisenhower’s all-or-nothing policy. This would have been important had Eisenhower, after an intense NSC debate in say 1956 or 1957, allowed Dulles to impose the new text. But it was now the summer of 1959. Eisenhower had utilized his all-or-nothing policy in the Berlin crisis, which was coming to an end. His authority on the question of when and how the United States would wage war was now unquestioned, whatever basic policy said. Any operational effects of Gray’s semantic change, moreover, would occur well after Eisenhower had left office and a new administration would be doing as it chose. In case any of this was in doubt, Eisenhower made a point of inserting a footnote into the new text, which stated that he approved of paragraph 12-a only "with the understanding that it is not to be interpreted as a change in policy but rather as a clarification of existing policy with respect to the use of nuclear weapons and the requirement for maintaining balanced forces." 5
The writing of NSC–5906/1 was an exercise in indulgence. Eisenhower allowed Gray, Herter, and the Chiefs to add the new sentence to avoid a showdown, since there was no longer any important reason not to avoid one. It seems needless to say that had another crisis broken out, the new sentence would have had no effect on Eisenhower’s decisionmaking. The NSC wrote no new BNSP for 1960; the obvious reason for this was that the new adminstration would be making its own policy, but one suspects also that Eisenhower saw no reason to endure another season of his advisers’ fruitless complaining.
The declaratory military policy Eisenhower had put into place by 1958, therefore, was the one that the incoming administration would be inheriting in January 1961. This policy, as we have seen, contained three elements. The first was the American nuclear deterrent. Heeding Eisenhower’s 1955 directive to make the production of ballistic missiles a national priority, the Pentagon spent billions of dollars over the ensuing five years on several new programs, including the burgeoning "Minuteman" ICBM and "Polaris" submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). Eisenhower approved of a Pentagon plan to combine, with these missile programs, a large deployment of long-range manned bombers loaded with thermonuclear gravity bombs. Bombers served to bolster the deterrent in its early years while the missile arsenal was still small, and they also could be recalled once sent on their way. ICBMs, SLBMs, and the manned bombers then formed the "triad" that would underpin America’s nuclear deterrent force for the next three decades. 6 The second element was the signficant downgrading of America’s conventional force capabilities. Non-nuclear forces would not play a serious role in any war with the Soviet Union; nuclear missiles and bombers would now be taking care of that mission. Instead, American conventional forces would serve two, lesser, purposes: to provide a "tripwire" in Europe and east Asia, and to put out "brushfire" wars in more peripheral areas before they spread. As basic policy stated, the explicit purpose of American conventional forces was to prevent limited wars from expanding into general war. By 1959 and 1960 the budgets for the Army and Navy were reduced considerably, with the money being sent to the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command. 7
The final element, the policy with which we have been dealing here, was Eisenhower’s elimination of the idea that war with the Soviet Union could be limited. By far the most controversial of the three, Eisenhower’s policy had by 1960 worked its way into actual military planning, most notably in the form of the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), a new command system developed by SAC and the Defense Department designed to facilitate the delivery of thermonuclear weapons to enemy targets once a president gave the order. The SIOP was in complete accord with Eisenhower’s all-or-nothing approach to thermonuclear weaponry. In the event of general war, the SIOP gave the president the ability to bypass traditional layers of command and directly launch just about every nuclear warhead the United States owned. A president who executed the SIOP would have little flexibility or room for reconsideration: a blunt instrument, it was meant to be used once. That, of course, was the president’s intention: anyone advocating the initiation of war with the Soviet Union, while Eisenhower’s policy was still in effect, would have to make the case that it justified putting the SIOP into operation-and that it justified absorbing the inevitable, all-out Soviet retaliation. This was something Kennedy and his advisers would discover in their first year. 8
Astutely, strategists in the Kennedy campaign were able to identify and attack each of the three elements of Eisenhower’s military policy. Employing the political rhetoric that Senator Kennedy had used effectively in the wake of Sputnik, they complained that Republican inattention to the American deterrent had created a "missile gap" between U.S. and Soviet forces. If the United States did not take immediate and drastic measures, the USSR would soon be able to overcome the American deterrent and dictate terms. Kennedy strategists also accused the president of neglectfully allowing America’s conventional forces to deteriorate, a decision for which General Maxwell Taylor hoped to make Eisenhower pay.
Finally, they attacked Eisenhower for his curious elimination of American limited war strategies. This latter problem received special attention from a group of scholars and other military writers 9 who supported and advised the Kennedy campaign; these strategists fashioned an alternative for Kennedy which differed in no substantial way from the policy Dulles had been recommending since 1954.
Kennedy’s Critique of Eisenhower’s All-or-Nothing Policy
Several critics of Eisenhower administration military policy had voiced their dissent early on, among them the retired Army General James Gavin, and civilian strategists such as Bernard Brodie, William Kaufmann, Henry Rowen, and Herman Kahn. The latter three worked for the RAND corporation, a California think-tank devoted to analyzing military problems. RAND had made Eisenhower’s all-or-nothing nuclear policy the great focus of its studies in the latter part of the 1950s. 10 Probably the two most important critics of Eisenhower, however, were the Harvard political scientist Henry Kissinger and General Maxwell Taylor, who had retired from the Army in 1959. Both Kissinger and Taylor ended up working for the Kennedy administration, no doubt due in part to their trenchant critique of Eisenhower’s military policy, and their advocacy of a clear alternative, "flexible response," that proved attractive in contrast.
"Does the nuclear age permit the establishment of a relationship between force and policy?" 11 This was the question Henry Kissinger meant to answer in his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. In 1957 Kissinger’s mission was clear. The Eisenhower administration, he believed, had shirked its obligation to implement a rational military policy by using the awesome technology of the nuclear age, together with the excuse of fiscal conservatism, to avoid dealing with the difficult task of creating a real nuclear strategy. Kissinger would propose a new strategy for the future, one that dealt with realities and could be applied to objectives, one that could "create alternatives less cataclysmic than a thermonuclear holocaust." 12
Kissinger wanted to replace Eisenhower’s massive retaliation with a new strategy of flexibility, one that would require decisionmakers to forget the taboo of nuclear weapons and become willing to think of nuclear war as an extension of policy. The problem, Kissinger wrote, was that "we have thought of war more in moral than in strategic terms." 13 Americans needed to lose their fondness for righteous wars and adopt a more dispassionate approach, using warfare here, diplomacy there, in order to achieve realistic objectives that grew out of national interests. A more flexible approach to war would harmonize the relationship between politics and armed force.
Instead of clumsily responding to communist aggressions by threatening all-out war, Kissinger continued, America needed to take an activist approach to the Cold War by invigorating its forces in Europe, designing tactical nuclear war strategies that could respond quickly to aggression, as in the case of Korea, and at the same time dangle the carrot of eased tensions as a reward for acquiescence. By using America’s military forces for real objectives rather than reaction, the United States could put the Soviet Union on the defensive and eventually prevail in the Cold War rather than co-exist with a nation determined to dominate the world.
In chapter six of his book Kissinger laid out his argument for limited war. His first point was that Americans had to adjust their mentality to new technological realities. Just as automobile manufacturers had figured out not to design motorcars along the lines of the horse-drawn carriage, military decisionmakers had to modify their "design" of warfare to conform to the nuclear age. "Yet the dilemma of nuclear war is with us not by choice," Kissinger emphasized, "but because of the facts of modern technology." 14 His second point stressed that limited war, unlike the total wars of recent history, was a process, a game with tacit rules, an extension of diplomacy. During hostilities Americans had to "convey to our opponent what we understand by limited nuclear war, or at least what limitations we are willing to observe." 15 Kissinger’s third point spoke to the paradox of limited war, the one which, unbeknownst to him, was driving Eisenhower’s all-or-nothing military policy. The paradox grew out of this question: how would a nation surrender when it still retained powerful weapons, weapons that could obliterate its enemy instantaneously? Kissinger had an answer to this central problem. If neither side would surrender with weapons in hand, he argued, then a limited war strategy would lead either to a stalemate or to an all-out war-in other words, to the situation created by Eisenhower’s NSC&-;5707/8 policy. But, according to Kissinger, this scenario begged the question: "A power which is prepared to unleash an all-out holocaust in order to escape defeat in a limited nuclear war," he wrote, would hardly be more restrained by an initial distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons." 16
Kissinger was, in effect, trying to refute Eisenhower’s most important argument, the one he had made with such force in the February 1956 NSC discussion and his meeting with Taylor. The president had declared that it was "fatuous" to believe that a limited war with the Soviet Union was possible, because no nation in a modern, total war would surrender with devastating weapons in hand. Kissinger replied to this logic by saying that a nation brutal enough to blow up the world rather than accept defeat in a limited nuclear war would also blow up the world if a conventional war was leading to the same kind of political defeat. Therefore it was fallacious to argue that limited nuclear war strategies would make all-out nuclear war more likely. Eisenhower, however, was one step ahead of Kissinger. He was not simply opposed to limited nuclear war: he was opposed to limited war itself. By eliminating all conventional means of waging war against the Soviet Union, the president had in effect already foreseen Kissinger’s objection. Eisenhower, in order to avoid war with the Soviets altogether, wanted his advisers to believe that he was "prepared to unleash an all-out holocaust" to escape defeat in a conventional war, much less a limited nuclear one. But Kissinger had no way of knowing this.
One who might have had a better grasp of Eisenhower’s real intentions was Maxwell Taylor. Taylor had had the tense meeting with the president back in 1956, and had given a speech in the summer of 1958 spelling out more clearly his desire to see a flexible military policy that provided a central role for conventional forces. And he had given the insubordinate testimony to Congress during the Berlin Crisis. This record of criticism suggests that Taylor had an inkling of what Eisenhower was up to, and in any case he knew quite well, as Kissinger did not, that Eisenhower’s policies were directed toward the elimination of limited war itself, not limited nuclear war.
Immediately upon Taylor’s departure from government he published a best-selling book, The Uncertain Trumpet. In this work Taylor got at the weakness of Eisenhower’s policy more acutely than did Kissinger, and in calling his alternative policy "flexible response" he coined a phrase that Kennedy would adopt in the upcoming election. Taylor advanced the familiar argument that the threat of nuclear war had become incredible, except as a deterrent to an all-out attack on the United States or NATO. Thus the Soviet Union could feel free to move against lesser objectives—like West Berlin—without having to fear American retaliation. To avoid being overwhelmed by a series of such moves, the United States needed to develop a comprehensive new strategy based upon a vast expansion of conventional forces—and a much higher defense budget.
Taylor tried to deal with the argument Eisenhower had always used in his rejection of Taylor’s pleas for more money. There "are still voices," he suggested, in a not-so-subtle allusion,
who assert the impossibility of having a limited war in the NATO area. Such an assertion means that any collision of patrols over, say, Berlin would automatically result in general atomic war. It offers no alternative other than reciprocal suicide or retreat in the face of the superiority of Soviet forces. 17
Like Kissinger, however, Taylor danced around Eisenhower’s central point. He argued that the United States should use tactical nuclear weapons "where their use would be to our national interest" while avoiding general war, which would produce "no real victory." Yet he never said when the use of tactical nuclear weapons would stop being "in the national interest." 18 If that point would be, presumably, somewhere short of general war, then was the United States to surrender before general war commenced?
Flexible response had a fundamental flaw that Eisenhower had discerned long before Kissinger or Taylor put pen to paper. It presumed that American military and political decisionmakers would be able to surrender to the Soviet Union if it came to that or to escalation to a general war, and Eisenhower believed that this was not a realistic presumption. He was sure that the Soviet Union, and probably the United States as well, would be unable to resist the fierce temptation to launch its full arsenal once a war had begun, in the desperate hope that such an attack might destroy the other side’s ability to counterattack. Indeed, since both sides recognized this temptation, their determination to get in the first punch would be that much more firm. This was why many of his military advisers, above all Twining, spoke so often of pre-emptive attack.
But flexible response contained an attractive feature that, on the surface, made it look so much more sensible than the Eisenhower policy—its provision of an alternative in the event of any Cold War crisis other than holocaust or humiliation. This was alluring to a presidential candidate hoping to portray himself as a vigorous leader determined to address problems rather than ignore them, and as early as 1958 Kennedy began to use the arguments put forth by the new strategists. Eisenhower’s policy of mutual destruction was, in Kennedy’s view, defeatist: it gave the side willing to take chances every advantage. Showing off his erudition in an August 1958 Senate speech, Kennedy said that
we have developed what Henry Kissinger had called a Maginot-line mentality—a dependence upon a strategy which may collapse or may never be used, but which prevents the consideration of any alternative. When that prop is gone, the alternative seems to many to be inaction and acceptance of the inevitability of defeat. After all, once the Soviets have the power to destroy us, we have no way of absolutely preventing them from doing so. But every nation, whatever its status, needs a strategy. Some courses of action are always preferable to others; but there are alternatives to all-out war or inaction. 19
A year later Kennedy reiterated this point, lamenting that a choice between "world devastation or submission" not only recklessly endangered American security, but also "leaves the initiative in the hands of our enemies." His argument was clear: Eisenhower’s manifestly dangerous nuclear policy was a result of, above all, laziness. His new adminstration would use a vigorous strategy—one senses that exactly which kind of strategy it should be was a less important matter—to approach the Cold War. 20
Eisenhower’s Response
Eisenhower’s response to Kennedy’s criticisms was muted. He did deny that a missile gap existed, and he defended the condition of America’s conventional forces. But on the question of whether it made sense to try to wage limited war against the Soviet Union, the dilemma that had provoked so many rancorous debates within his administration. Eisenhower was quiet. He declined to stand up for this element of his military policy, allowing the Kennedy campaign’s attacks on the issue to go unanswered. It is hard to know whether his silence played a decisive part in Kennedy’s victory in November; the votes of Cook County’s dead may have been more important. But what one can say is that the margin of Kennedy’s victory was so slim that Nixon could have used all the help he could get.
What can explain Eisenhower’s silence? The nuclear danger facing the United States in 1960 was still acute. An American president could try to end it by seeking international accord, but Eisenhower, poised perhaps like no other president in the century to pursue a bold course of peace, chose to end his career anticlimactically. Why? Mundane interests do not seem to provide clues: there were no apparent economic costs in reducing tensions with the Soviet Union; one cannot imagine that Eisenhower contrived a dangerous situation at the end of his reign in the hopes that it would unravel a future Democratic administration.
The answer to this riddle seems to lie in Eisenhower’s personal approach to policy, and his negative approach to politics. He had attained his objective of avoiding war with the Soviet Union by engaging in a form of personal administration. Eisenhower had contrived an atmosphere in which he, and only he, would be able to resist the demands of military men and hard-line diplomats that the United States back down no further. Only he knew what he was doing, what his real purpose was—no one could fill in for him. Officially, both the writing of nuclear policy and the decisionmaking during the 1958–59 Berlin crisis incorported the efforts of dozens of American planners, negotiators, and soldiers. Effectively, both endeavors were undertaken by the president himself, with aides from Dulles on down simply accomplices.
Eisenhower’s inclination to pursue negative rather than positive objectives stemmed from his formative experience during World War II. His orders were merely to drive the Germans out of France, to restore the status quo ante, a mission to which he steadfastly held in the face of more aggressive types such as Montgomery and Patton. This experience played a major part in forming his view of political ends. His ideology, so to speak, was defensive. 21 Others could try to perfect society; he would work to make sure it survived for another day. This was how he had approached politics since taking command of Allied forces in Europe, and it was how he ended his last days in office.
Eisenhower’s modesty during the last year of his term was certainly understandable, but with the coming of a new administration in January 1961 it was also dangerous. By eschewing improved relations with Khrushchev and leaving nuclear policy as it was, Eisenhower was putting Kennedy in an extremely difficult situation. None of the real political disputes over Berlin was actually resolved during the 1958–59 crisis, and it was obvious to many that Khrushchev would simply revive the crisis once Eisenhower was gone. Moreover, Eisenhower bequeathed to his successor a military policy that would give him no option in the event of war over Berlin other than all-out nuclear war, and a force posture—the SIOP—which conformed utterly to this policy. Thus John F. Kennedy entered office in January 1961 to find a Berlin crisis imminent, a policy to defend the city only with general war, and an operational plan that made waging a general war a simple matter of launching the entire American nuclear arsenal at once.
Yet Eisenhower was not entirely indifferent to this awful legacy, and in the records of his last year in office one can find a few glimmers of anguish. One warning came of course in his famous farewell address, a radical statement that ought to have given his most cynical critics pause. 22 Every study of Eisenhower has its own interpretation of this address, and the conventional one—that the manic fear—mongering after Sputnik prompted Eisenhower to identify a "military-industrial complex" in America, one which would quash American freedom if not stopped—remains the most persuasive. Yet Eisenhower’s concerns about the power of the American military may also have stemmed from his experience during the Berlin crisis. For it was all he could do to keep his military advisers’ intensive, almost inexorable demands for pushing the crisis toward war in check, and that was after having installed a military policy designed to do just that. How would a less capable leader, and one who did not command his considerable authority in military circles, have fared in his place?
On May 10, 1960, nine days after the downing of an American U–2 spy plane and a few days before the Paris Summit was to begin, Khrushchev warned that continued American flights over the Soviet Union "might lead to war." Herter presented Eisenhower with a draft statement of response, warning Khrushchev that Soviet belligerence could provoke a NATO response in Berlin. Eisenhower responded to Herter’s proposal not by belittling the possibility of limited war over Berlin, or by taking the familiar, procrastinating tack of saying that it would be impossible to know what to do ahead of time. Instead, "the President read through the statement, suggesting changes and additions. In particular, he wanted to say that the use of force or threat of force would lead to such serious consequences in the Berlin situation that none of the participants should even think of it." 23
Endnotes
Note 1: Eisenhower, Waging Peace, p. 411. Here is another example from his memoirs where Eisenhower exaggerates his toughness. Back.
Note 2: July 2, 1959 conference with the president, FRUS 3 (1958–60): 228–35. Back.
Note 3: NSC 5906/1, in DDC 1983, number 1305; memorandum of July 15, 1959 White House conversation, DDC 1985, number 2142. On these debates also see Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, pp. 80–82. Back.
Note 4: NSC 5906/1, in FRUS 3 (1958–60): 295–96. Back.
Note 5: Ibid., footnote 1. Back.
Note 6: Bundy, in Danger and Survival (esp. pp. 543–44), argues that the Triad was the invention of the Kennedy administration, but as Roman (pp. 64, 108–9) shows, it really originated in the last years of Eisenhower’s term. Also see Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill," pp. 48–51. Back.
Note 7: See Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 166–69. Back.
Note 8: On this latter point see Bundy, Danger and Survival, p. 354. Also see Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, p. 225. On Eisenhower and the SIOP itself see Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, pp. 104–5; and Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 258. Back.
Note 9: Lawrence Freedman calls this group "a collection of Democrats, soldiers, sailors, and a growing band of academic specialists in defence." See his The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), chapters 7 and 8. The quotation is from page 96. Back.
Note 10: For a brief discussion of these RAND analysts see ibid., pp. 230–39. Back.
Note 11: Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, p. 131. Back.
Note 17: Maxwell Taylor, The Uncertain Trumpet (New York: Harper, 1959), p. 137. Back.
Note 18: Ibid., pp. 146, 173. Back.
Note 19: Kennedy, "The Missile Gap," August 14 speech delivered to the U.S. Senate, reprinted in John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace (New York: Harper, 1960), p. 38. Back.
Note 20: Kennedy, "Conventional Forces in the Atomic Age," speech given at Lake Charles, Louisiana, on October 16, 1959, ibid., p. 184. In this speech he also discussed his support for a major buildup of conventional forces. On Kennedy’s inclination to "above all, do something," also see Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 199. Back.
Note 21: I owe this assessment to Robert Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War, p. 154. Back.
Note 22: Insufficient attention seems to be paid to Eisenhower’s "Veblenian" feelings about American capitalism. His derogation of the military-industrial complex, together with his adamant opposition to national debt, appear both to stem from a traditional (and from the perpective of the 1990s, prescient) belief that societies can no more withstand unproductive spending than can individuals. To mention another example: in a January 1960 NSC meeting, Allen Dulles noted that the Soviets devoted about twice as much of their GNP to defense than did the United States. Eisenhower reminded the council that this figure was misleading, because the U.S. GNP contained a number of items not included in the Soviet economy, "such as advertising." Discussion of January 21, 1960 NSC meeting, FRUS 3 (1958–60): 368. Back.
Note 23: Memorandum of May 10, 1960 conference with Eisenhower, NSA number 1890, p. 2. Back.
Email this citation