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Pages
449-450:
… [President Eisenhower] believed that over time
the Soviet Union would mellow. It therefore made sense to
negotiate with the Russians. Even so, American forces not only
had to strong enough to deter Soviet aggression in Europe, or
anywhere else of vital interest to the U.S.; if deterrence
failed, the U.S. had to be ready to destroy the Soviet Union.
He intended to do this not, after but before
any attack on the United States could be launched. This
was the most important single element in Eisenhower’s Cold War
strategy; he was not going to base American security on
a strike from beyond the grave.
Eisenhower explicitly ruled out a preventive war,
but not a preemptive strike. He began to create a strategic
force capable of detecting any Soviet move toward a nuclear
attack. Once detected, it might only be possible to tell the
Soviets to back down or else, but if a warning was tried and
failed, or if there was not enough time to warn the Kremlin,
he was going to beat the enemy to the punch.
Any serious move toward launching a surprise
attack would be interpreted as a casus belli. The bombs
didn’t have to explode first. As the most obvious and banla,
it was the dramatic device of a thousand westerns - at the
climax, all the bad guy has to do is reach for his gun to
justify the good guy drawing quicker and shooting him dead.
“Our own chance of victory,” Eisenhower told the
NSC [National Security Council] on December 3, 1953, “would be
a paralyze the enemy at the outset of the war… If war comes,
the other fellow must have started it. Otherwise we would not
be in a position to use the nuclear weapon and we have got to
be in the position to use that weapon.
Two days later, he told Winston Churchill, “Anyone
who holds up too long in the use of his assets in atomic
weapons might suddenly find themselves subjected to such
widespread and devastating attack that retaliation would be
next to impossible," and when senior congressional figures
protested that his strategy ignored the requirement for
congress to declare war, he responsed that if faced with “a
gigantic Pear Harbor, I will act to protect the United
States.”
In January 1954, [Secretary of State John Foster]
Dulles gave a widely reported speech in which he spoke of
America’s “massive retaliatory power.” Eisenhower was
repeatedly pressed to explain what “massive retaliation” mean,
but he invariably took refuge in ambiguity, giving many people
the impression that he hadn’t though clearly about how nuclear
weapons would be used. In truth, he knew exactly what he had
in mind. “When we talk about power and massive retaliation,”
he told members of the NSC, “we mean retaliation against an
act that to use means irrevocable war. On another occasion,
he told his staff plainly, “SAC must not allow the enemy to
strike the first blow.”
Page 457-459:
In retrospect, it isn’t surprising that his
relationship with the Army he loved would turned out hat way.
Eisenhower had been an outstanding soldier not because he was
interested in relighting the last war - a common criticism of
military men - but because he was always think about winning
the next one. He national security strategy, based first and
foremost on developing a preemptive strike capability, meant
that the Air Force was going to have priority. Second would
come the Navy which could project American power in the most
remote parts of the work and might one day supplement to SAC’s
preemptive attack.
In the Army, however, it was agonizing to be
relegated to third place under a soldier-President. There was
a lot of bitterness and muted grumbling in the O Clubs that
Ike seemed to have forgotten where he came from.
… Eisenhower and [Secretary of Defense Charles]
Wilson intended to make [changes] in the defense budget. The
budget would go to Congress in January for fiscal year 1955.
It proposed to reduce defense expenditures from the current
level of $43 billion down to $37.5 billion. The Air Force
would get roughly 45 percent of the defense budget, the Navy
30 percent and the Army only 25 percent. [The amount was
later increased].
Eisenhower … was selling it hard, first in his
State of the Union address in January 1954, and again a few
days later in his budget message to Congress. Dulles
meanwhile, gave a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations
in which he talked about the new strategy, presenting it as
one based entirely on deterrence, but deterrence with a hair
trigger. “the way to deter aggression is for a free community
to be willing able to respond vigorously and at place and with
means of its own choosing. The basic decision was made to
depend primary on a great capacity to retaliate instantly by
means and at places of our choosing.
This speech gave the impression that the Unite
State would strike back, hitting the Soviet Union, only after
it had been attacked, which wasn’t true. In fact, even as
Dulles gave his speech, Curtis LeMay, the commander of the
Strategic Air Command, was working - with what glow of
satisfaction we can only guess - on a report that spelled out
in detail SAC’s ability to fulfill its primary mission. There
were finally enough bombers, trained crews, forward bases and
nuclear weapons for SAC to take out all six hundred Soviet
military airfields and most of the command-and-control centers
in a first strike. Every major urban industrial center , such
as Moscow and Leningrad, plus important urban-military
centers, such as Vladivostok and Murmansk, would be destroyed
in the same attack. The Soviets might have enough military
power remaining in Eastern Europe to strike the cities of
Western Europe in retaliation, but they would be incapable of
posing any significant threat to the United States.
Eisenhower’s national security strategic now rested on the
firmest possible foundation - American invulnerability to
nuclear attack.
Page 460
[Head of the State Dept. Policy Planning Staff, George] Kennan
declared bluntly, "Massive retaliation is only another
expression for the principal of first strike.” |
