IL 5032 American Foreign Relations

How Successful was the Eisenhower-Dulles Policy of ‘Massive Retaliation’?

Lecturer            Dr. Susannah Riordan
Course              MA International Studies
Name               Eoghan Walsh
ID                    8906785

Introduction

At the start of the 1950s, in the early years of the Cold War, the perception in the West was that if this war became ‘hot’, the East had a superiority in manpower and industrial capacity to fight a conventional war which the West could not hope to match. The only way to counter such an attack would be through the use of nuclear weapons, in which the US enjoyed superior technology, quantities and means of delivery. As the Korean war ground back and forth over the 38^th parallel, President Truman threatened the use of nuclear arms against the Communist forces. Whether this threat was decisive in ending the Korean war is a moot point: the Eisenhower administration expanded this tactic into a major plank of foreign policy which became known as ‘massive retaliation’.

 

1.      Origins of Massive Retaliation

While the phrase and policy of ‘massive retaliation’ were often credited to John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State to the Eisenhower administration, neither were his creation. The press coined the phrase after Dulles’ address to the Council on Foreign Relations in 1954, and the policy was lifted from the Truman administration. While Dulles claimed in 1950 that the Truman administration was using this policy “without fully realising it”, once Eisenhower’s election campaign began in 1952 he was careful to present it as new and fresh thinking ( Wells, p47).

Following his election in 1942, Eisenhower faced two apparently conflicting goals: the need to protect against communist aggression while at the same time reducing military spending, which had reached 70% of the federal budget during the Korean war. It became clear that maintaining sufficient conventional forces on all potential fronts would bankrupt the US economy. At the end of his first year in office the polices of the ‘New Look’ and massive retaliation emerged. The New Look would invest in air superiority while scaling back the army and to a lesser extent the navy. This would support the policy of massive retaliation: rather than try and protect all fronts, the US would be in a position, as Dulles put it in 1954, “to depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing[1]” (Wells, p34). This has often been misinterpreted as a policy to launch a nuclear strike against Moscow or Beijing in response to any incursion outside the communist sphere of influence. While this tactic was not ruled out, the policy was to attack the aggressor at any place using conventional weapons and/or nuclear weapons as Eisenhower said “just as you would use a bullet or anything else.” (Eisenhower, 1955) Vice-President Richard Nixon put it thus “Rather than let the Communists nibble us to death all over the world in little wars we would rely in the future primarily on our mobile retaliatory power which we could use in our discretion against the major source of aggression at times and places that we choose.” (Wells, p35) Thus the US retained the initiative for the strike, by any means and on any scale seen as appropriate.

 

2.      Objectives of Massive Retaliation

To assess the effectiveness of massive retaliation we must understand the threefold aims of the policy.

Primarily it was to prevent the spread of communism and deter Communist aggression. Dulles stated it as follows in 1954 “How should collective defense be organised by the free world for maximum protection at minimum cost? The heart of the problem is to deter attack. This, we believe, requires that the potential aggressor be left in no doubt that he would be certain to suffer damage outweighing any possible gains from aggression.” (Dulles, 1954) Notice the shift in rhetoric here: away from Truman’s passive, almost subservient policy of ‘containment’ to the more aggressive, dominating language of ‘deterrence’. Eisenhower wanted “security forces… whose destructive and retaliatory power is so great that it causes nightmares in the Kremlin whenever they think of attacking us.” (Welles, p41)

Secondly it was to reduce military spending. The American public was weary of war and the taxes imposed on them to fund WWII and the Korean war. Immediately on coming into office in 1953, Eisenhower set his Joint Chiefs of Staff the task of reducing military spending. The military budget they presented in May of that year was down from US$41.2 to US$36. Eisenhower was not satisfied with the results of the economy drive and it was clear that only altered force goals of military forces could achieve the savings he desired.

Thirdly, Eisenhower, a seasoned military man, was determined to devise policies that would ensure national security for the “long haul”.

 

3.      Effectiveness of Massive Retaliation

The Eisenhower-Dulles policy toward the Communists in the 1950 can be likened to a game of poker with massive retaliation as a bluff and the stakes the entire human race. The French Foreign Minister of the time, Georges Bidault, remarked that Dulles described his polices as “calculated risks” but that in practice this meant he calculated a lot but risked nothing (Marks, 1993).

Massive retaliation was intended as a deterrent, i.e. a policy that hopefully would never have to be put into action. If however, the Communists were to call their bluff, there can be no doubt that they were perfectly prepared to use nuclear weapons in the face of aggression[2]. For this policy to be successful the Communists must believe that the US would follow through on this threat. At the same time it could not be stated too aggressively as this could provoke Communist pre-emptive action. The ambiguity was carefully constructed of bold and fiery rhetoric while a close reading of the doctrine showed it was purely  defensive without any automatic escalation to nuclear war.

For the threat to be believable the US had to show they not only had the will but also the means to deliver retaliatory strikes when and where they choose. From 1951 the US had long range jet bombers (B47s and later B52s) capable of delivering nuclear bombs well into the Russian heartland and in 1954 the first nuclear submarine. The industrial production centre of Western Europe was of huge strategic importance in any future large scale war and the US stationed troops and missile there to defend it. Russia, rather than seeing this as a defensive move, perceived it as a threat of possible aggression. Thus rather than a comfortable balance of power between East and West, the policy of massive retaliation upped the ante, fuelling an arms race that would continue for the next four decades.

In the short term, by reducing force levels military spending was reduced, but only by 20% of the 1952 wartime level. At the end of his second term of office Eisenhower expressed his disappointment that no lasting peace was in sight. He voiced concern that government and society was being overcome by the military-industry complex’s desire for greater numbers of more destructive weapons. His administration had warned that military spending could bankrupt the US economy. Now their policies had committed them to an arms race which ended 30 years later with the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union. Unlike the Soviets, the US in part funded their arms race through commercial spin-offs which exploited the military R&D projects. Using these military technologies in consumer goods not only created new lucrative markets but also gave consumers the impression they were directly benefiting from the military spending.

Despite Nixon’s vow that the US would not “be nibbled to death” by the Communists, and the threat of massive retaliation, they were drawn into costly wars in Vietnam and elsewhere.

 

4.      Conclusion

On balance we can conclude that the policy of massive retaliation was a successful deterrent to wide scale Communist aggression, if indeed the Communists harboured expansionist intentions. While it did nominally reduce military spending, it committed the US to unprecedented peace time spending on military personnel and technology. Undeniably Eisenhower established a stable military strategy for the “long haul”. However, it seems unlikely that as Dwight D. Eisenhower relaxed in front of a Western movie in the 1950s, he could conceive that Ronald Regan would finally bring the communist Soviet Union to its knees.

 

Bibliography

 

1.       Buzzard, A., 1956. “Massive Retaliation and Graduated Deterrence”, World Politics 8(2), pp.228-237

2.       Chaliand, G and JP Rageau, 1990, Strategic Atlas, Revised and Updated, New York, Perennial Library

3.       Dulles, J.F., 1954, “Policy for Security and Peace”, Foreign Affairs 32(3), pp.353-364

4.       Ferrell, R. 1987, American Diplomacy: The 20^th Century, Norton

5.       Marks, F.W., 1993, Power and Peace: The Diplomacy of John Foster Dulles, Westport CT, Preager Publishers

6.       Merrill, D. and T.G. Paterson, 2000, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, Vol 2, 5^th ed, Boston, Houghton Mifflin

7.       Wells, S.F., 1981, “The Origins of Massive Retalitation”, Political Science Quarterly 96(1), pp.31-52