Destroying the Village: Introduction

Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War

Campbell Craig

1998

Introduction: Basic American Security Policy

You might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, on what to do in case of war with the Soviet Union

During the summer of 1948 George Frost Kennan wrote down two "fundamental objectives"of American foreign policy. First, the United States had to "protect the security of the nation"from interference by foreign powers. Second, Americans needed to promote a world order in which the United States "can make the maximum contribution to the peaceful and orderly development of other nations and derive maximum benefit from their experiences and abilities." ₁

In this book the term basic American security policy refers to the efforts made by the U.S. government to achieve the former of these objectives—the physical defense of the United States from outside threats. However one wants to interpret the latter passage, the indisputable fact remains that the United States would have had a difficult time promoting world order and benefiting from the global economy had it ceased to exist. Basic security has to be the first requirement of any nation’ foreign policy: if it is conquered and wiped out, it is no longer that nation.

For the first century and a half of its existence, however, this was a requirement the U.S. found effortless to meet. Once it had shaken off the last of British and French mercantilism, America was able to obtain a kind of physical national security unknown to the older European states. Indeed, from 1815 to 1941, speaking roughly, Americans did not really have to prepare a peacetime security policy for fear of another nation’ conquest. The great European powers had been kind enough to balance one another off—when they were not actually at war—and this prevented the formation of a European superstate that realistically could have hoped to invade and conquer the North American continent. Even if such a regime had arisen, the great oceans made the prospect of such an invasion, in the days before airplanes and ocean-floor cables, at best formidable. This happy combination delivered Americans from the collective fear and militarism that comes with chronic national insecurity. ₂

Naturally, American governments sought to sustain this situation, by staying well away from serious Old World conflict. The only president who substantially deviated from this course, Woodrow Wilson, met political and personal disaster. Most American statesmen were quite content to limit U.S. foreign policy to the search for new markets and resources for American businessmen, and the spread of American institutions and culture—the pursuit, to put it in broad terms, of Kennan’ second objective. ₃ While European statesmen had to worry about intricate alliance shiftings and minute military innovations, American diplomats were busy paving the way for Singer sewing machines, the United Fruit Company, and the YMCA. The United States’ geographical security made it easy to emphasize this kind of diplomacy.

By December 1941 the two historical sources of American security were coming to an end. First, military technology, in the form of long-range airplanes, was making it possible to launch a surprise and sustained attack over the oceans and across American borders. Second, Adolf Hitler was on the verge of creating the very kind of superstate capable of invading America without opposition from other European powers. Moreover, Nazi Germany was a regime capable not merely of invading the North American continent and governing it remotely, like the British in 1760, but actually of dominating it directly in the totalitarian manner available to twentieth-century superpowers. Modern forms of communication, transportation, and social control made the prospect of a violent Nazi conquest fundamentally different from the old mercantile threats of Great Britain or France. These modern capabilities caused the United States to regard the Second World War far more fearfully and intensively than it had the first.

It is true that World War II did not put an end to traditional American commercial diplomacy; indeed, American officials continued to focus great effort upon economic expansion during and after the war. The destruction of the main industrial rivals of the United States provided American businessmen, working in tandem with U.S. diplomats, with an opportunity to dominate world markets and realize tremendous profits, and that was what many of them did. Nations that prevail in world wars tend to find ways to benefit materially from their success, and the United States was no exception.

American material exploitation of the postwar world would have occurred no matter who remained standing at the end of the war. What made American foreign policy different after 1945 was its simultaneous concern with the peacetime security of the United States. This new policy stemmed from two factors: American memories of the war, and an assessment of the Soviet Union. The two most visceral disasters of the war—appeasement at Munich and surprise attack at Pearl Harbor—persuaded Americans that the free security they had enjoyed was indeed gone. Hitler had demonstrated that ambitious regimes could, in the twentieth century, accumulate the kind of power sufficient to threaten North America. The Japanese had proven that modern military technology gave such regimes the capability to attack the United States. ₄

These new realities would have seemed less significant had, say, France been the other powerful nation standing at the end of the war. ₅ Some sort of postwar rivalry might well have developed between the two nations, and certainly their competition for economic hegemony would have been fierce, perhaps something like the relationship between America and Britain during the 1920s. But the United States would never have regarded France after 1945 as a nation interested in threatening America directly with military conquest and totalitarian rule. The primary reason American officials instigated the Cold War was that it was possible for them to regard the Soviet Union in this way. The official ideology of the Soviet Union was to seek the eradication of capitalist regimes like the United States. The Soviet Union had cynically signed a peace treaty with Nazi Germany, its leader, Josef Stalin, had killed millions of his fellow citizens, and the Red Army, having brutally pillaged its way to Germany, continued to dominate, in violation of wartime agreements, several eastern European states. This did not mean, despite the rhetoric of American militarists, that the Soviet Union was destined to mount a Hitler-like campaign against the United States. But it was possible to believe, especially given the vivid lessons of recent history, that it might.

For the first time in its history, the United States perceived a peacetime threat to its national survival. This threat derived from the existence of military technology capable of traversing the oceans, and of a regime potentially interested in using such technology for the purposes of conquering the United States. The American government therefore was forced to develop, for the first time, a basic national security policy. This phenomenon distinguishes United States foreign policy during the years 1945&-;1989 from eras before and since. ₆

The Development of Basic American Security Policy

American security policy during the Cold War consisted of two basic elements. The first was the decision to contain the Soviet Union and its main allies—to prevent them from expanding into important areas of the world. This would deny them the geopolitical momentum that would have allowed them eventually to isolate and encircle the United States. The second was to ensure that the Soviet Union and its main allies did not attain a military capability so far superior to that of the United States that it could push aside these forces of geopolitical containment and threaten the United States directly. Both of these elements emerged in 1946 and 1947.

The architect of the element of American security policy dealing with containment was George F. Kennan, a career diplomat, expert on the Soviet Union, and, by 1948, head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff. In the immediate aftermath of World War II it became clear to Kennan that the Soviet Union would project its power beyond its own borders, as victorious empires are in the habit of doing. However, Kennan believed that the Soviet Union might go further; that if unchecked it could drive violently toward a worldwide empire hostile to the United States and indeed threatening to American survival. This possibility was sufficiently remote for the United States to prevail by opposing Soviet expansion with political and economic means, in a patient rather than a panicky manner. Thus in 1946 and 1947, Kennan devised a strategy of containing the Soviet Union. ₇ He wanted to demonstrate that the Soviet Union was not a normal adversary, but one against which the United States needed to exercise unusual vigilance. He also contended that the United States had to concern itself with seemingly minor Soviet advancements, because the balance of power in key areas like Europe was so fragile. Both of these arguments became staples of American Cold War policy.

Kennan’ Cold War career began in February 1946. The State Department, under orders from the White House, asked its embassy in Moscow to explain why the Soviets were being so hostile. Kennan, the embassy’ specialist on Soviet politics, seized this opportunity to make a name for himself. On the 22nd, he issued his famous "Long Telegram,"in which he warned his superiors in Washington that the Soviet threat to American survival was real and needed to be taken seriously.

The Soviet government, Kennan argued, regarded the outside world in a manner so cynical, fearful, and antagonistic as to be almost incomprehensible to the American mind. It was a long Russian tradition to view international agreements and treaties as bourgeois legalisms, to be used only to take advantage of nations naive enough to adhere to them. It was another long Russian tradition to venerate the more "civilized"West on one day and hold it in contempt the next. It was a third Russian tradition to see an adversary not as a rival to be deterred or even subdued but as a sworn enemy to be destroyed. All of these Russian characteristics were reinforced by the official Soviet ideology of Marxism–Leninism, which provided Soviet leaders with a "scientific"justification for their diplomatic emotions and imbued in them a sense of inevitable conflict. ₈

Kennan’ "Long Telegram"captivated official Washington: by giving American officials a cogent explanation of the Soviet Union’ strangely pugnacious postwar behavior, and by providing them as well with a series of recommendations for dealing with the USSR, Kennan decisively contributed to the commencement of the Cold War. Yet he knew that for all his provocative warnings the Soviet Union was too battered in 1946 to pose an imminent threat to the United States. How might the Soviet Union, in the future, endanger American survival? Kennan was asked in the summer of 1946 to lecture at the National War College, and it was there that he addressed this question and developed an American strategy to deal with it.

World War II had demonstrated the importance of national morale. By making their conquest of Europe appear inevitable to unstable and war-weary populations, the Nazis had easily defeated several European countries whose aggregate material power outmatched that of Germany. If the Soviet Union were someday to embark on a similar campaign, the United States, to avoid defeat, would have to ensure that the war-weary and unstable nations of Europe and East Asia would be able to stand up to it. A Soviet Union contained within its own borders could not threaten American survival. Nor could one that had expanded in a limited way, seizing control over adjacent and undeveloped nations and abetting sympathetic movements elsewhere. What the United States had to prevent was a widespread resignation to the inevitability of Soviet conquest—it had to prevent the coming of that crucial moment when the industrial nations of Europe and East Asia, observing the Soviet Union confidently expand, would begin to see the writing on the wall and would reconcile themselves to Soviet domination. There was a line somewhere—and it was impossible to know exactly where it lay as it was psychological as much as it was geographical—which the United States could not let the Soviets cross. "One of the vital facts about the international communist movement,"Kennan told his students in March 1947,

. . . is the pronounced "bandwagon"character that movement bears. By that I mean a given proportion of the adherents to the movement are drawn by no ideological enthusiasm, indeed not even in many instances by any particular illusions about its real nature. Many followers to communism are drawn primarily by the belief that it is the coming thing, the movement of the future—that it is on the make and there is no stopping it. They believe those who hope to survive let alone to thrive in the coming days when it will be the movement of the present will be the people who had the foresight to climb on the bandwagon when it was still the movement of the future. ₉

How might this "bandwagon"effect threaten American survival? Again, the question was as much psychological as geographical. To abandon "Eurasia to whatever the future might spell for it,"

. . . we would be abandoning not only the fountainheads of most of our own culture and traditions; we would also be abandoning almost all the other areas in the world where progressive, representative government is a working proposition. We would be placing ourselves in the position of a lonely country, culturally and politically. To maintain confidence in our own traditions and institutions, we would henceforth have to whistle loudly in the dark. I’m not sure that whistling could be loud enough to do the trick. ₁₀

Here was the foundation of Kennan’ strategy, as it related to American security. Contemporary history had shown beyond a doubt that the comfortable realities of a given international situation can change quickly. The United States, however powerful and secure its current position, had to recognize how suddenly the "bandwagon effect"could destabilize a familiar international order. Most important, Americans had to realize that continuing to survive as a "lonely, threatened power on the field of world history"would not be so easy in the twentieth century. ₁₁ "The fact of the matter,"Kennan told his students,

is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each of us. It is only the cheerful light of confidence and security which keeps this evil genius down at the usual helpless and invisible depth. If confidence and security were to disappear, don’t think that the totalitarian impulse would not be waiting to take their place. ₁₂

Kennan’ point here was not simply to remind his audience that Americans were not immune to the tyrannical impulses that beset other societies, ₁₃ but also to argue that such impulses were most likely to emerge in the climate of insecurity and panic that would accompany enemy advancements overseas. Containment was about keeping Soviet tyranny at bay, both in its physical and psychological forms.

Kennan had urged that the United States emphasize non-military forms of containment, such as economic aid and diplomatic pressure. The Soviet Union had been so devastated by the war that a confrontational, militaristic American policy not only wasted resources, but also risked making the Kremlin desperate and vengeful. Kennan opposed American plans to remilitarize central Europe and East Asia, downplaying the likelihood of a Soviet military attack against these crucial regions. ₁₄ He supported initiatives like the Marshall Plan, which restored morale to allies and utilized American strengths. He believed that the struggle with Russia could be won without a war, and without the United States having to prevail in an arms race, provided American diplomats were skillful enough in reviving independent forms of power in Europe and Asia. Faced with a unified moral front, the Russians would eventually forget about world conquest.

Other policymakers in the Truman administration were not as sanguine. President Truman himself, for example, saw Stalin as a leader less concerned with morale or political unity, and more with tangible measures of power, like industrial capability and military might. Truman liked to relate the famous anecdote about Stalin’ indifference to the opinion of the Vatican—"How many divisions did you say the Pope has?"—not only to highlight the Soviet leader’ callousness, but also to remind his listeners that the United States ought not to find itself in the position of the Holy See. ₁₅ In 1946 Truman acted upon this cynicism on several occasions. He approved of Winston Churchill’ quite hard-line (for the time) "Iron Curtain"speech in March, to the dismay of many advisers still hopeful for some sort of accord with the Russians. He encouraged Bernard Baruch to toughen up the Acheson–Lilienthal plan, a complex proposal to transfer atomic energy knowhow to the United Nations, so much that the Soviet Union would never accept it. He authorized the writing of the militaristic Clifford–Elsey report on American security requirements. He eased, or pushed, doves like Henry Wallace out of power, and replaced them with hawks like James Forrestal and Fred Vinson, people who agreed more with his nuts-and-bolts measurement of power than with Kennan’ moral calculus. ₁₆

But it would be incorrect to argue that Truman had completely abandoned Kennan’ innovative diplomatic strategy by 1947 in favor of a more conventional, military one. Demobilization of the American armed forces was continuing apace, as was the diminishment of the military budget. Secretary of State George Marshall introduced the European Reconstruction Plan to the world in June; the Marshall Plan, by combining an offer to revitalize the economies of Western Europe with a gambit that the Soviet Union would not accept it (as it did not), was pure Kennan. Truman’ announcement in March that the United States would henceforth come to the aid of free peoples resisting aggression, while more open-ended than Kennan’ selective strategy, still was in tune with the latter’ emphasis upon political morale and initiative. In his speech Truman was careful to label the enemy "totalitarianism,"not the Soviet Union, and to emphasize political, not military, aid. ₁₇

There were reasons for Truman to maintain Kennan’ nonmilitaristic approach, at least for the moment. He was himself still unsure about how to regard the Soviet Union. He had approved of Churchill’ speech, but he also tried to keep his distance from its more inflammatory passages. There still was a significant wing of the Democratic party that opposed making the Soviet Union the enemy, and Truman himself wanted to continue expressing at least rhetorical support for a rapprochement with the Russians.

More important, the United States held monopoly possession over the atomic bomb. However clumsy and ineffective Secretary of State James Byrnes had been in late 1945 and early 1946 in trying to intimidate the Russians with it, the fact remained that the Soviets had to believe that if they started a war with the United States, atomic bombs would fall on their armies and cities. With this deterrent in place, American economic and diplomatic pressure became that much more effective. Ironically, Kennan’ selective, nonmilitarist strategy of containment was quite well-suited to a nation that had the atomic bomb in quiet reserve.

Formalizing Early National Security Policy

By the middle of 1947, then, one can discern the early objectives of American security policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. A primary objective was to contain the Soviets: to keep key nations, like Japan, the oil-rich regimes of the Middle East, and especially the industrial countries in western Europe, out of the communist orbit. To accomplish this containment the United States would employ economic and diplomatic pressure, measures made more effective by the tacit presence of the atomic bomb. American officials who wanted the United States and its allies to place its first reliance upon military forces, like Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, were met by people like Kennan and Marshall, who could point to the reconstruction plan as proof the Soviets could be stopped without vast American rearmament.

Despite this elegant formula, however, the Cold War in 1947 was hardly the picture of stability. There was still contested territory, above all Germany. The defeated nation was still under the occupation of France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States; these four powers each controlled regions in Germany, and, to make matters more contentious, they each also occupied sectors in the old capital of Berlin. Which side would get control when the occupation ended?

The stable balance created by Russian armies and the American bomb also had an uncertain future. Many American scientists were warning the Truman administration that the Soviet Union could build a bomb in several years, maybe sooner. Combined with his standing armies, the bomb would give Stalin an awesome military force. One need not have been a cynical Russophobe to worry that once he got the bomb he might be less inclined to respect the lines the West had drawn.

By early 1948 the Truman administration had begun to prepare a harder line. On March 17, the president spoke to a joint session of Congress on the "Threat to the Freedom of Europe."The enemy was no longer "totalitarianism,"and its target, "free peoples,"as Truman had declared a year earlier; now, the threat to freedom was the "Soviet Union and its agents,"who, if unchecked, meant to extend their domination "to the remaining free nations of Europe."Czechoslovakia had fallen, Truman warned, and Finland, Greece, and Italy could soon follow. ₁₈ Two weeks later the National Security Council (NSC), an interdepartmental body created back in July 1947, issued its first major policy statement. This new policy stated that "Stalin has come close to achieving what Hitler attempted in vain,"the conquest of the European continent. The United States, to prevent Stalin from completing his quest, had to adopt a "counter-offensive"policy. The long-term objective of this policy, as the name suggested, was simple: "The defeat of the forces of Soviet-directed world communism is vital to the security of the United States."To realize this objective, the United States needed to take several "immediate steps": the first two of these were to "strengthen promptly the military establishment"and to "[m]aintain overwhelming US superiority in atomic weapons." ₁₉ NSC–7, it is clear, did away with the generalities of the Truman doctrine, specifying quite precisely who the enemy was and how the United States would meet it.

Truman’ speech and NSC–7 ran counter to the diplomatic and economic emphases of Kennan and Marshall. But as of March 1948 a speech given to Congress and a more hard-line NSC document were rhetorical declarations, not implemented policies. Congress had yet to approve the new military expenditures called for in NSC–7; Soviet conventional forces still dominated on the continent, balanced only by the (secretly minuscule) American atomic arsenal. The catalyst for a genuine toughening of American security policy would soon arrive, however, in a Soviet move that went unanticipated in NSC–7 and Truman’ speech.

Endnotes

Note 1: August 20, 1948 paper, "Comments on the General Trend of U.S. Foreign Policy," from the George F. Kennan papers, Princeton University, Box 23. On this paper, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 27. Back.

Note 2: The classic articulation of this point is C. Vann Woodward, "The Age of Reinterpretation," American Historical Review 66 (October, 1960). Also see Russell Weigley, The American Way of War (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. xix. Back.

Note 3: My reading of the dominant role played by American economic and cultural expansionists in U.S. foreign policy before 1945 has been influenced especially by Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). Back.

Note 4: On this point see above all Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (New York: Knopf, 1948). Also see John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 7. Back.

Note 5: Not a ridiculous hypothesis, I think: one would begin with a French decision in the 1930s to extend the Maginot Line through Belgium. Back.

Note 6: The end of the Cold War has prompted some students of U.S. foreign policy who emphasize economic causation to acknowledge the exceptional nature of the Cold War; breaking from the thesis presented in William A. Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, they now regard the Cold War more as an aberration from the larger trend toward a world system dominated by capitalism than as its epitome. For two examples, see Bruce Cumings, "The End of the 70-years’ Crisis:" 195–222; and Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) pp. 2, 6–7, 14. Back.

Note 7: The standard account of Kennan’s strategy is Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 25–53. Also see Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), chapters 2–4, and Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 108–9. Back.

Note 8: Kennan’s "Long Telegram" is reprinted in his Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 547–59. Back.

Note 9: March 28, 1947 Kennan Lecture, "Comments on the National Security Problem," in Giles D. Harlow and George C. Maerz, eds., Measures Short of War: the George F. Kennan Lectures at the National War College, 1946–47 (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1990), p. 165. Back.

Note 10: Ibid., pp. 167–68. Back.

Note 11: June 18, 1947 Kennan lecture, "Planning of Foreign Policy," Measures Short of War, p. 213. Back.

Note 12: "Comments on the National Security Problem," ibid., p. 168. Back.

Note 13: In his more recent writings Kennan has become more critical of American society, and it would probably not be going too far to say that he fears that America won the Cold War battle but lost the war. See his Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (New York: Norton, 1993). Back.

Note 14: Kennan introduced one of his first policy planning documents, PPS 13, with this warning: "The danger of war is vastly exaggerated in many quarters." Policy Planning Staff (PPS) document 13, in the U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, vol. 1, "General: The United Nations." Hereafter in this form: FRUS 1 (1947): 770. Back.

Note 15: On Truman’s emphasis upon military over moral strength, see Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, passim; Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 166–75; Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 345; and Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York: Knopf, 1980), p. 79. Back.

Note 16: Hamby, Man of the People, pp. 348–55; Leffler, Preponderance of Power, pp. 130–34. Back.

Note 17: See Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 55–65. Back.

Note 18: March 17, 1948 speech by Truman to a joint session of Congress, reprinted in Public Papers of the President 1948 (Washington, 1964), p. 183. Back.

Note 19: NSC 7, issued on March 30, 1948, FRUS 1 (1948): 546–49. Back.