Dulles was more aggressive about broadcasting this policy than Eisenhower. Dulles viewed the superpower competition as a titanic struggle between freedom and slavery, the shining beacon and the web of darkness, God and the Devil. Eisenhower approached the New Look mainly as a technique of saving money, keeping the country out of faraway wars against enemies about whom we knew nothing, and convincing the Russians that we would destroy their country in retaliation to serious aggression as a means of deterring such aggression in the first place. Nevertheless, Eisenhower bought the fundamental premise of his Secretary of State’s thinking: referring to nuclear weapons, he wrote Dulles in the spring of 1955 that it was necessary to “remind individuals that we are really regarding these weapons as ‘conventional.’”
The speech that Foster Dulles delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations in January 1954, that made “massive retaliation” practically a household phrase, was, in short, the culmination of top-level thinking inside the Eisenhower Administration, a carefully worked-out position that completely reflected the views not just of the Secretary of State but of the President of the United States as well.
And yet, whether they knew it or not, the Dulles speech merely codified the military policy that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had already formulated in the late Truman Administration. The Air Force, dominated by Curtis LeMay’s Strategic Air Command with its almost theological worship of Air Power, naturally disdained reliance on the old-fashioned tools of warfare; this was the Atomic Age, and the atomic weapon should dominate. The philosophy was clearly spelled out as early as 1948 in the official top-secret Air Force guidance, Doctrine of Atomic Air Warfare: “Progression from the spear through the bow, musket, rifle and artillery to the weapons of World War II was simply a matter of ever-increasing firepower…. The atomic bomb does not appear to have deviated from this evolutionary trend.”
Once the Navy began to acquire atomic weapons of its own in 1951, fleet officers started to spout the same doctrine: “It is in our interest,” wrote L. D. McCormick, Acting Chief of Naval Operations in July of that year, “to convince the world at large that the use of atomic weapons is no less humane than the employment of an equivalent weight of so-called conventional weapons. The destruction of certain targets is essential to the successful completion of a war with the U.S.S.R. The pros and cons of the means to accomplish their destruction is purely academic.”
The Army, assigned the chore of fighting out battles on the ground, sought to dispel these grandiose theories of Air Power. In September 1952, Army General Omar Bradley, who was then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told newsmen at NATO headquarters that “it would be premature for any planners to attempt to substitute atomic weapons for sound balanced forces. Actually, no matter how many atomic weapons or bombs the collective NATO defense may eventually have on hand, there will always be a need for sufficient ground strength to force the enemy to concentrate for attack.” Bradley was trying to get the West European nations to build strong conventional armies, dozens of divisions on top of the four that the United States already had deployed there. The plan was being severely undermined by those who claimed with total confidence that the U.S. nuclear shield was sufficient. “In my opinion,” Bradley stated, “no tested knowledge of atomic weapons to date indicates any reason to let up in our efforts to build up our collective security forces to at least those that we are planning for the next few years.”
Indeed, an Army study completed the previous summer concluded that the bombing operations against the Soviet industrial potential, as planned by the Air Force, would not prevent the Soviets from successfully mounting a ground attack across the plains of Western Europe. In the intricate intramural schemings and competitions permeating the Joint Chiefs, the Navy sided with the Army on the conclusions of that study—but only to bolster its own claims that the Navy’s attack-aircraft carriers could do the job better than the Air Force. On the fundamental issue of whether large ground forces were needed or whether air (and sea) power could savage an enemy without much assistance from the more traditional tools of warfare, the Navy, for its own budgetary reasons, sided with the Air Force.
With the Army outnumbered, a JCS statement of December 1951 declared, “It is United States policy on atomic warfare that, in the event of hostilities, the Department of Defense must be ready to utilize promptly and effectively all appropriate means available, including atomic weapons, in the interest of national security and must therefore plan accordingly.” Throughout the early 1950s, the official war plans ordered that a “strategic air offensive with atomic and conventional bombs will be initiated at the earliest possible date subsequent to the outbreak of hostilities”—a notion remarkably similar to the ideas laid out in the mid-1950s by Dwight David Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles.
The basic effect of the new Administration’s New Look was that the Air Force-Navy position was sanctified, given the seal of total legitimation at the highest level. In the Truman Administration, the Army dissent was frequently supported, directly or indirectly, by many top officials who believed that large conventional forces were necessary, among them Secretary of State Dean Acheson and his policy planning director, Paul Nitze. Now they were out and all progress made toward building a case for massive conventional forces received a powerful setback. With the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff replaced, and with Admiral Radford at the helm as Chairman—the first JCS Chairman never to have served previously as a service Chief—the conventional-force argument was set back further still.
Before the first year of the Eisenhower Administration was over, it was very clear in the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States was unambiguously relying on its atomic arsenal to counter all but the slightest motions of Communist aggression. With Foster Dulles’ Council speech in January of the second year, it was also very clear to the general public.
Admiral Radford put the thesis even more bluntly than Dulles in a confidential speech delivered to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, on May 25, 1954: “What does all this mean?” he asked of the New Look policy. “It means that atomic forces are now our primary forces. It means that actions by other forces, on land, sea or air are relegated to a secondary role.” It “means that nuclear weapons, fission and fusion, will be used in the next major war. Availability of fissile material, the economy of its use, the magnitude of its destructive effects, and the flexibility of its use makes it the primary munition of war. Victory will come to the side that makes the best use of it.”
12
THE LIMITED-WAR CRITIQUE
VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE foreign-policy establishment turned out that cold January evening in New York to hear what Foster Dulles had to say before the august Council on Foreign Relations. And they were nearly all horrified. Part of their revulsion was toward the self-righteousness of the speech, the condescending tone which said in effect that Dulles was wiser, more morally sensible, more sensitive to the nation’s true security interests than were the men of Truman and Acheson, many of whom were sitting in the audience. The Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the formation of NATO—all considered noble achievements by those who participated in them—were dismissed by Dulles as mere reactions to emergencies, unaffected by broader strategic interests or a sense of the initiative.