Conner talked a great deal with Eisenhower about the critical importance of the second paragraph, the Commander’s Estimate of the Situation—assessing each course of action open to the enemy and each corresponding move available to you, examining each action and response in combination to see what was the worst thing that could happen and, in that context, which opportunities to best exploit.
The technique was in many ways like John von Neumann’s Theory of Games, the art and science of calculating the best strategy assuming a rational opponent who is doing his best to do you in under all circumstances. In fact, when Eisenhower was President and the Atlas ICBM program was under development, he met von Neumann, grew to admire him greatly, became fascinated with Game Theory, and told von Neumann of its amazing similarity to the commanders’ guidelines taught to him thirty years earlier.
When President Eisenhower applied Conner’s method to the question of fighting small conventional wars, especially in Asia, he could only be dubious about any chance of military success. The “Estimate of the Situation” required knowing fairly well how the situation looked in the mind of the enemy, and Eisenhower simply did not believe that any Westerner could truly comprehend the Oriental mind. To Eisenhower, via Conner, the less one knew about where the successive steps of a battle might lead, the less one could formulate a sensible strategy and, therefore, the less willing one should be to jump into a violent fray of mystery.
Still, while all these influences shaped Eisenhower’s judgments about what not to do, they provided little guidance for a positive defense policy. He was still lost on how to solve what he frequently called “the great equation”—how to maintain a strong defense over “the long haul” without wrecking the free economy in the process. Guidance was where John Foster Dulles came in.
Dulles’ idea of massive retaliation did not originate with his January 1954 speech before the Council on Foreign Relations. For several years, Dulles had accepted the use of nuclear weapons in war as an almost foregone conclusion. As early as October 1948, at the height of the Truman-Dewey campaign, Dulles, speaking as the Republican Party’s official foreign-policy adviser, told General George Marshall, at the time Truman’s Secretary of State, in a private conversation, “Why, the American people would execute you if you did not use the bomb in the event of war.”
A coherent outlook had developed in his mind by 1951 at the latest, when on February 2, after working on the Japanese peace treaty, he sought to assure an audience in Tokyo that the United States would protect Japan by the threat to destroy any aggressor with “a striking power, the immensity of which defies imagination.”
On May 5, 1952, he suggested to the French National Political Science Institute in Paris that “we might consider whether open military aggression by Red armies could not best be prevented by the readiness to take retaliatory action, rather than by attempts to meet the aggression on the spot where it occurs.” In a passage most foretelling of the Council speech, Dulles stated, “So long as the Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders can pick the time, place and method of aggression… and so long as we only rush ground troops to meet it at the time they select, at the place they select, and with the weapons they select, we are at a disadvantage which can be fatal.
“On the other hand,” he continued, “the free world possesses, particularly in air and sea power, the capacity to hit an aggressor where it hurts, at times and places of our own choosing. If a potential aggressor knew in advance that his own aggression would bring that answer, then I am convinced that he would not commit aggression.”
Dulles’ position on the atomic bomb and its use took on an almost religious quality. In the mid-1940s, he had been chairman of the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, an organization established in the early days of World War II by the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. On August 9, 1945, immediately after the United States dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima, Dulles released a nationwide press release urging Truman to suspend the air attack for a long enough time to give the Japanese leaders a chance to react. To do otherwise would be to tell the world that “we, a professedly Christian nation, feel morally free to use atomic energy in that way.” That being the case, “men elsewhere will accept that verdict. Atomic weapons will be looked upon as a normal part of the arsenal of war and the stage will be set for the sudden and final destruction of mankind.”
Similarly, exactly five months later, in a speech published in The Christian News Letter, Dulles warned that a failure of the United States to turn over custody of atomic weapons to “the dictates of… world opinion” would “wholly destroy our moral influence in the world and seriously set back the possibility of developing the greater fellowship we need.” We would then live in a world in which, when war occurs, “nations avail themselves of any weapons which they think will make the difference between victory and defeat.”
Before long, it was clear that the United States had no such intention of sharing its ownership of nuclear power. Gradually, Dulles began to embrace the negative side of his earlier predictions—that the bomb “will be looked upon as a normal part of the arsenal of war” and that nations will use “any weapon which they think will make the difference between victory and defeat”—with equal moralistic fervor.
At first, Eisenhower felt uncomfortable with the idea of massive retaliation. When he discovered in the summer of 1952 that the Republican platform statement on defense policy contained the phrase “retaliatory striking power,” a phrase composed by Dulles, he had it removed, finding it offensively cold-blooded.
Eventually, however, Eisenhower caught on to just how nicely the concept fit in with his own ideas about defense and economy. It all came together during the transition period between Eisenhower’s victory in November 1952 and his inauguration the following January. During the campaign, Eisenhower had dramatically promised to visit the front lines of Korea as the first step toward ending the war. On November 29, carrying out his commitment, Eisenhower embarked on the trip, taking along his designated Defense Secretary, Charles Wilson, head of General Motors. The plane stopped for refueling at Iwo Jima, where Admiral Arthur Radford, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, was brought on board at the request of Wilson, who wanted to size him up as possible Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
After the tour of Korea, the group flew to Guam, picked up a group of Eisenhower’s advisers who had flown there from New York, and headed back to the United States aboard the cruiser U.S.S. Helena. Among them were the future Treasury Secretary, George Humphrey; the designated Budget Director, Joseph Dodge; and Eisenhower’s natural choice for Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. In the relaxed atmosphere, out in the Pacific Ocean, they talked about how to solve Eisenhower’s “great equation,” how to protect the national security without wrecking society in the process.
It was here that the ideas came together, that Eisenhower’s concerns blended in with Dulles’ solution. Radford backed Dulles up from a military point of view; Dodge and Humphrey readily saw the economic advantages; Eisenhower saw a mixture of both. The Eisenhower defense policy took formal shape. Eisenhower suddenly saw the virtue of relying primarily on the “retaliatory striking power” that he had rejected as distasteful only a few months earlier. The “New Look” in national defense policy was born.
Eisenhower started to believe, and maintained the belief throughout his two terms as President, that any military action that grew to the scope of the Korean War or beyond “would become one for use of atomic weapons.” He adamantly felt that any direct clash between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would undoubtedly involve nuclear weapons used in full force at the outset; that it was “fatuous” to believe that any such “life and death struggle” between these two great nations would develop in any other fashion.