Destroying the Village: Preface

Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War

Campbell Craig

1998

Preface

Up until the mid-1950s President Dwight D. Eisenhower believed that waging all-out war against an enemy threatening to end your national existence was right, natural, and necessary. In the wake of World War Two this was hardly a controversial position, as memories of Munich, Pearl Harbor, and Adolf Hitler had made the notion of just total war unobjectionable to all but a very few Americans. For Eisenhower, however, to defend what America had done during World War II was not simply a matter of abstract justification, but rather one of direct personal responsibility. He had been the American who authorized the total destruction of Nazi Germany: the violent elimination of the Wehrmacht, the fire-bombing of German cities. Perhaps no one in history is more properly associated with the phenomenon of total war than he.

Yet in 1955 and 1956, Eisenhower looked at the megaton thermonuclear weapons that the United States and the Soviet Union were building and threw this belief away. He had begun to realize that a general war waged to preserve the United States would not simply be immensely destructive—as the architect of the obliteration of Germany, he could accept that. Instead, a total thermonuclear war between the two Cold War superpowers would put a permanent end to everything it was being fought to protect. It would destroy America in order to save it. Like the burning down of Vietnamese villages to save them from communism, this was not just lamentable, or even criminal: it was absurd.

The prospect of being responsible for the purposeless, cataclysmic destruction of an all-out thermonuclear war horrified Eisenhower in a modern, existential sense. If World War Three would annihilate everything he believed to be important and worthwhile, then permitting it to happen for such a traditional reason as national security would be ridiculous, not only because by killing all Americans it would fail to preserve American security, but also because such a war would repudiate any claim Eisenhower and his nation might make to be on the side of reason or justice. Whatever moral distinctions there were between the United States and its twentieth-century adversaries would be quite meaningless to any survivors of World War Three: words like"democracy,""security," and"Eisenhower" would mean the same things to anyone left alive after a thermonuclear war that"national socialism" or"Hitler" mean to a survivor of the Holocaust.

But even if Eisenhower could abstractly permit himself to believe that general war was no longer acceptable, how could he renounce the idea of American national security during the height of the Cold War? There was simply no way that he could straightforwardly suggest to his military and civilian advisers, the nation as a whole, and America’s allies around the world that the advent of intercontinental thermonuclear weaponry meant that the United States would no longer wage all-out war. To do so would convulse the international order, unleash political chaos at home, and lead immediately to his removal from office. It was not an option.

To resolve this dilemma, Eisenhower decided in 1955 and 1956 that his primary mission as president must be to develop a plan to prevent the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union without formally abandoning the basic national security policy of the United States. To be sure, to accomplish this it would be necessary to establish stable relations with the Soviet Union and construct a regime of nuclear deterrence. But such steps would not be sufficient. Eisenhower had known international politics and crisis for a long time, and he knew that a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union could occur despite the rhetoric of peaceful coexistence, despite arms control agreements, and despite both sides’ deployment of retaliatory megaton nuclear weapons. If the two Cold War superpowers found themselves facing one another down over a genuine dispute, Eisenhower wanted to be sure that he could always steer the crisis toward compromise. To ensure this, Eisenhower developed a strategy to evade nuclear war. How he did that is the subject of this book.

The book is divided into three parts. The introduction and chapters 1 and 2 are really meant to define the predicament Eisenhower found himself facing after taking office: namely, the U.S. policy to defend its presence in unresolved areas, most notably West Berlin, with the threat of general thermonuclear war. This first part is based upon secondary as well as primary sources and is not intended to offer a new interpretation. Chapters 3 through 7 show how Eisenhower used American military policy to devise his strategy of evading war, and how he implemented this strategy, especially during the Quemoy–Matsu crisis of 1958 and the Berlin crisis of 1958–59. These chapters stem from the declassification of crucial documents relating to Eisenhower’s making of basic national security policy and his actions during the Quemoy–Matsu and Berlin crises. Chapters 8 and 9 provide an account of Kennedy administration planning for a possible showdown with the Soviet Union over Berlin during the period January–October 1961. I show how Eisenhower’s strategy to evade war extended into this period, despite the desires of many of Kennedy’s advisers to wield a more flexible and assertive strategy on Berlin. This last section is also based upon recent declassification. In an epilogue I compare Eisenhower’s strategy to a more traditional one conceived by Thomas Schelling during the early 1960s and embraced by Robert S. McNamara before October 1962.

One last comment

The reader may notice a polemical tone in certain parts of the book—especially the epilogue. This tone comes from my belief that many students of the Cold War have taken a rather nonchalant view of the nuclear peace attained by the superpowers since 1945. Such nonchalance reveals hypocritical and ahistorical thinking on both the traditional Cold War left and right. On one hand, many conservatives attribute American success of the last fifty years stems to toughness, suggesting that the primary lesson of the Cold War is that militarism and diplomatic rigidity pays. ₁ These kind of conservatives supported military action during every single Cold War crisis, and it was they who routinely accused American leaders able to resist the hard-line and achieve compromise, such as Eisenhower and Kennedy, of appeasement and even treason. Yet, looking back from the post-Cold War world, would anyone wish to contend that it was a mistake for the United States to cut a deal with the communists over the tiny islands of Quemoy and Matsu, or over western occupation policy in Berlin? Does anyone wish to argue that we really should have gone to thermonuclear war over these stakes? It is hypocritical to denounce compromise in theory but applaud it in fact.

Conversely, many observers of American foreign policy on the left have not seemed able to reconcile their pessimistic and sometimes even fatalistic predictions about the warlike direction of the American"national security state" with the remarkable nuclear peace achieved, at least in part, by the United States. A cynical view of aggressive American Cold War militarism, combined with the pessimistic (but theretofore historically valid) observation that weapons that are built eventually get used, made for the common presumption among many on the left that in its quest for Cold War supremacy the U.S. would inevitably blow up the world. ₂

With the end of the Cold War, these leftist critics of American policy have not, as far as I have seen, conceded that the United States may have done well in preventing World War Three. Like their counterparts on the right, these critics speak of nuclear peace unremarkably, as if it happened without anyone, or at least anyone in power, really seeking it. ₃ Nuclear weapons"deterred"war. Nations"of course" chose coexistence over confrontation. The critical and analytical dimension of Cold War history dies when it comes to accounting for its biggest story, replaced by the odd twentieth-century assumption that American and Russian leaders were somehow mechanistically destined to keep their rivalry from descending into war. Cold War accusations of appeasement are conveniently forgotten; so are cynical predictions of capitalist armageddon.

If this book makes only one point, it is that the American avoidance of nuclear war, like everything that takes place in history, did not just"happen." Actual people, above all Eisenhower, sought to evade nuclear war; many powerful figures at the center of decision believed that such a war was justifiable and regularly called for steps that would have begun one. In the historical struggle between these two sides during the crisis period of 1958–62, the former was barely able to prevail over the latter; had they failed we would not be able to write this history today. Those who see the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War as an unalloyed victory of American toughness ought to recognize this. Those who are advocating a twenty-first century international order governed by nuclear deterrence ought to as well. And those of us who are thankful that the Cold War came to an end without either side resorting to its most powerful weapons should not feel embarrassed, even if it means praising a member of the power elite, about giving credit where credit is due.

Endnotes

Note 1: See, for example, Joshua Muravchik, "How the Cold War Really Ended," Commentary 98 (November 1994), p. 10, and The Committee on the Present Danger, What Is the Soviet Union Up To? (Washington: The Committee, 1977). Back.

Note 2: See, for example, C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958). Back.

Note 3: For an uncharacteristically passive comment on nuclear peace, see Bruce Cumings, "The End of the 70-years Crisis: Trilateralism and the New World Order," World Policy Journal 8 (Spring 1991), p. 205. Back.