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| This article is part of the series Cold War |
| 1947-1953 |
| 1953-1962 |
| 1962-1991 |
When Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as president in 1953, the Democrats lost their twenty year control of the US presidency. Under Eisenhower the United States' Cold War policy remained essentially unchanged. While a thorough rethinking of foreign policy known as " Operation Solarium" was launched, most of the ideas such as a thoroughgoing "rollback of Communism" and "liberation" of Eastern Europe were soon found to be unworkable. The basic focus on " containment" remained.
However, while the change from Truman to Eisenhower was a moderate one, seeing a continuation of most foreign and US policies, the change in the Soviet Union was immense. After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev was named First Secretary of the Communist Party.
During a period of collective leadership, Khrushchev gradually consolidated his hold on power. At a speech to the closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev shocked his listeners by denouncing Stalin's crimes, unnecessary use of mass repression and his personality cult. 1 Although the contents of the speech were secret, it was leaked to outsiders, thus shocking both Soviet allies and the West soon afterwards. Khrushchev also attacked the crimes committed by Stalin's closest associates. He was later named Premier of the Soviet Union in 1958.
The impact on Soviet politics was immense. The speech stripped Khrushchev's remaining Stalinist rivals of their legitimacy in a single shot, dramatically boosting the First Party Secretary's power domestically. He was then able to ease restrictions, freeing some dissidents and initiating economic policies that emphasized commercial goods rather than coal and steel production.
When Eisenhower entered office in 1953, the new president was committed to two possibly contradictory goals: maintaining— or even heightening— the national commitment to counter the spread of Soviet influence; and satisfying demands to balance the budget, lower taxes, and curb inflationFor alternative meanings see inflation (disambiguation). In economics, inflation is a fall in the market value or purchasing power of money. This is equivalent to a rise in the general level of prices. Inflation is the opposite of deflation. Zero or very. The most prominent of the doctrines to emerge out of this goal was "massive retaliation," which Secretary of State John Foster DullesJohn Foster Dulles ( February 2, 1888 May 24, 1959) was an American statesman who served as Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 1959. He was a noted Cold Warrior advocating an aggressive stance against communism around the wo announced early in 1954Events January events January 14 The Hudson Motor Car Company merges with Nash-Kelvinator forming the American Motors Corporation January 14 Marilyn Monroe weds Joe DiMaggio. January 15 Mau Mau leader Waruhiu Itote is captured in Kenya January 20 The Nati. Eschewing the costly, conventional ground forces of the Truman administration, and wielding the vast superiority of the US nuclear arsenal and covert intelligence, Dulles defined this approach as "brinksmanship" in a January 16January 16 is the 16th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. There are 349 days remaining (350 in leap years). Events 27 BC Octavian Caesar given the title Augustus by the Roman Senate. 1362 One of the North Sea's greatest stormtides ever destroys th, 1956 interview with Life: pushing the Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ( Russian: ; tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) also called the Soviet Union ( ; tr. Sovetsky Soyuz , was a state in much of the northern region of Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1 to the brink of war in order to exact concessions.
Eisenhower inherited from the Truman administration a military budget of roughly $42 billion, as well as a paper (NSC-141) drafted by Acheson, Harriman, and Lovett calling for an additional $7-9 billion in military spending. 2 With Treasury Secretary George Humphrey leading the way, and reinforced by pressure from Sen. Taft and the cost-cutting mood of the Republican Congress, the target for the new fiscal year (to take effect on July 1, 1954) was reduced to $36 billion. While the Korean armistice was on the verge of producing significant savings in troop deployment and money, the State and Defense Departments were still in an atmosphere of rising expectations for budgetary savings. Humphrey wanted a balanced budget and a tax cut in February 1955, and had a savings target of $12 billion (obtaining half of this from cuts in military expenditures).
Although unwilling to cut deeply into defense, the president also wanted a balanced budget and smaller allocations for defense. Nothing, not even communism, seemed to obsess Eisenhower as much as his fear that capitalists would ruin their system by spending too much on defense. "Unless we can put things in the hands of people who are starving to death we can never lick Communism", he told his cabinet. Moreover, Ike feared that a bloated military-industrial complex (a term he popularized) "would either drive US to war— or into some form of dictatorial government" and perhaps even force "US to initiate was at the most propitious moment." On one occasion after thwarting the demands of private corporations and Congress for more defense spending, the former commander of the greatest amphibious invasion force in history privately exclaimed, "God help the nation when it has a President who doesn't know as much about the military as I do." 3
In the meantime, however, US attention was being diverted elsewhere in Asia, especially due to domestic influence on foreign policy. The continuing pressure from the "China lobby" or "Asia firsters," who had insisted on active efforts to restore Chiang Kai-shek was still a strong domestic influence on foreign policy. In April 1953, for example, Sen. Robert Taft and other powerful Congressional Republicans suddenly called for the immediate appointments to the top chiefs the Pentagon, particularly with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Omar Bradley in mind. To the so-called "China lobby" and Taft, he was seen as having leanings toward a Europe-first orientation, meaning that he would be a possible barrier to new departures in military policy that they favored. Then, there was the problem was the ever-ubiquitous McCarthyism. But after the mid-term elections in 1954— and censure by the Senate— the influence of the Wisconsin demagogue ebbed after his witch-hunt against the Army.
Laying the groundwork for his administration's new approach to defense planning, which would attempt to placate the conflicting pressures from the "Asia firsters" and pressures to cut federal spending while continuing to fight the Cold War effectively, Eisenhower announced a "radical change" on April 30. He rejected the idea that "we must build up to a maximum attainable strength for some specific date... Defense is not a matter of maximum strength for a single date," but instead a matter for the "long haul," meaning that military expenditures should be sustainable for many years without serious strain. To illustrate such reasoning, one could note how the defense spending was such an extraordinary burden on the Soviet economy. Perhaps a quarter of the actual share of the USSR's economy was devoted to the military sector. Defense in the United States came nowhere close to consuming such a disproportionate share of resources (Americans spent six percent of a much larger GNP).
This, of course, was a reaction to the policies of Truman and Acheson, as codified by NSC-68. 4 Prepared by the Departments of State and Defense in late 1949 (following the first test of a Soviet atomic device), the report assumed that by 1954 the Soviets would likely be capable of launching a devastating nuclear attack on the US, which would neutralize American nuclear superiority. In such a hypothetical event, the Soviets could take advantage of their superiority in conventional forces. Thus, NSC-68 called for the US to redress the balance in conventional capabilities. Hence, the report recommend, among other goals, the rapid build-up of conventional forces, a large increase in taxes, and "sacrifice" by the public.
On May 8, 1953, Eisenhower and his top advisors tackled this problem in " Operation Solarium", named after the White House sunroom where the president conducted secret discussions. Although it was untraditional to ask military men to consider factors outside their professional discipline, the president instructed the group to strike a proper balance between his goals to cut government spending and an ideal military posture.
The group weighed three policy options for the next year's military budget: the Truman-Acheson approach of containment and reliance on conventional forces; threatening to respond to limited Soviet "aggression" in one location with nuclear weapons; and serious "liberation" based on a thoroughgoing economic response to the Soviet political-military-ideological challenge to Western hegemony: propaganda campaigns, and psychological warfare. The third option was strongly rejected.
Eisenhower and the group (consisting of Allen Dulles, Walter Bedell Smith, C.D. Jackson , and Robert Cutler) instead opted for a combination of the first two, one that confirmed the validity of containment, but with reliance on the American air-nuclear deterrent. This was geared toward avoid costly and unpopular ground wars.
In addition, the threat of the usage of nuclear weapons was to play a larger role in the diplomacy and military actions surrounding the increasing numbers of insurgencies in the third world. The Eisenhower administration viewed the atomic bomb as an integral part of US defense, hoping that they will bolster the relative capabilities of the US vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The administration also reserved the prospects of using them, in effect, as a weapon of first resort, hoping to gain the initiative vis-à-vis the Soviets while reducing costs. Viewing international relations from a realist perspective, relative capabilities are the central element of the international system: units within the system that fail to adjust to threats and opportunities arising changing capabilities will not survive.
Ike increased the number of nuclear warheads from 1,000 in 1953 to 18,000 by early 1961. Despite overwhelming US superiority, one additional nuclear weapon was produced each day. The administration also exploited new technology. In 1955 the eight-engined B-52 bomber, the first true jet bomber designed to carry nuclear weapons, was developed.
Moreover, by wielding the nation's huge nuclear superiority, the new Eisenhower-Dulles approach was a cheaper form of containment geared toward offering Americans "more bang for the buck." However, rather than a rejection of the Truman-Acheson containment, Eisenhower and Dulles decided on a policy resting on the impact of nuclear weapons on regional balances, and the role of nuclear weaponry in strategic thinking and military doctrines. Perhaps most influentially, the Eisenhower-Dulles approach adjusted American policy to the emergence of new nations in the third world.
The Eisenhower-Dulles foreign policy was not a rejection of the Truman-Acheson containment as formulated by NSC-68, but a reformulation based on the impact of nuclear weapons on regional balances, the role of nuclear weaponry in strategic thinking, and the emergence of new nations in the Third World. The Truman Doctrine was reformulated in the Eisenhower Doctrine, but its goal of containing Soviet power remained by same.
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