Although the development of an alternative policy came slowly and with much agonizing, the United States government committed the nation—with public approval—to a new strategy. Instead of waiting for general war to engulf the United States or depending upon the nation’s industrial and manpower potential to discourage potential enemies, the United States adopted the strategy of deterrence. To deter war, so policymakers and theorists reasoned, the nation required ready military forces and the political will to threaten their use or to use them if deterrence failed. For sheer destructiveness, accomplished with shocking speed, nuclear weapons appeared to be the ultimate deterrent, and from the birth of the first atomic bombs, policymakers pondered the potential of nuclear weapons to make war obsolete. The more farsighted strategists like academic Bernard Brodie, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, diplomat George Kennan, and scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer wondered, however, if the threat of nuclear retaliation would be a truly credible deterrent, since the enormity of nuclear war might be out of proportion to the threat.
Drawing upon its experience in coalition warfare in two world wars, the United States complemented unilateral nuclear deterrence with a commitment to collective defense and nonnuclear deterrence. One instrument of collective security became the United Nations (UN), an international body championed by the United States and created by international agreement by forty-six nations on June 26, 1945. The second instrument was the regional military alliance, allowed by the United Nations Charter. The United States joined its first such alliance since its 1778 treaty with France when it signed the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (the Rio Pact) on September 2, 1947, and bound itself with nineteen other nations for the defense of the Western Hemisphere.
The concept of nuclear deterrence and collective security did not develop in a political vacuum, for the United States found itself at odds with the Soviet Union over a wide array of international issues. Although American diplomats in Russia warned that the Soviet Union did not view the postwar world in terms acceptable to American interests, the Truman administration attempted to deal with the Stalin regime as if it had some interest in postwar cooperation. In one sense the United States and the Soviet Union shared similar characteristics. Both were latecomers to the arena of international politics; both had large populations and industrial resources that spanned entire continents; both had been drawn into continental rivalries that had produced two global wars; both had messianic visions about the nature of political organization and economic development; both had just demonstrated an awesome ability for military action; both had no intention of allowing the traditional European patterns of nationalism and imperialism to define the international system in the last half of the twentieth century.
At the heart of the American-Soviet rivalry lay an irreconcilable bond between national interest and ideology that ensured global competition. If the United States and the Soviet Union had behaved only according to the dictates of state interest, the course of history since 1945 might have been different. Such was not the case. The two nations tended to see their rivalry as a clash between principles, with their own national futures tied to the success of such concepts as capitalism and socialism, individual liberty and state security, religious freedom and scientific materialism, and international diversity and the ultimate victory of the Communist commonwealth. The opposing system represented the greatest threat to peace, for its very nature ensured war. Global conflict was inevitable and indivisible as long as the opposing system existed.
The primary arena of East-West competition was Europe. The rivals’ sphere of concern ran from Great Britain to the borders of prewar Eastern Europe, but the rivals’ writ ran along the borders of their occupation forces. By 1949 the United States had merged its occupation zone in Germany with those of Great Britain and France into a single West Germany that had all the attributes of an independent state except an armed force and a foreign policy. The Soviet Union took similar steps to ensure that its portion of divided Germany fell into its political orbit. In 1948 the only nation that had a coalition government that included non-Communists, Czechoslovakia, fell to a Russian-approved internal coup. The Russians then closed overland communications between West Germany and the jointly occupied city of Berlin, but an Allied airlift of nine months’ duration saved West Berlin from Communist absorption. In Eastern Europe the Russians established Communist governments in Poland, Romania, and Hungary. Nationalist Communist resistance movements provided new regimes in Albania and Yugoslavia; the former remained under Russian influence, but the latter, governed by the guerrilla hero Josip Broz (Tito), did not fall entirely into the Soviet embrace.
The developing anti-Communist coalition in the West had its share of early “Cold War” victories during the same period. With the assistance of American funds, channeled through intelligence agencies and international labor organizations, France and Italy eliminated their Communist parties from their new republican governments by 1949. In military terms Great Britain created a new continental alliance system in 1946 by joining France in the Dunkirk Agreement, which joined those two countries in an alliance. In the Brussels Pact of 1948 the Dunkirk partners extended the alliance to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. Recurring crises in Greece and Turkey provided the Truman administration with an opportunity to meet the Communist challenge directly. Informed by the British that they could no longer support the Greek royalist government in its civil war against Communist rebels and responding to a Turkish plea for assistance against Russian pressures to revise the international convention on control of the Straits, the president requested $400 million in military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey in March 1947. The program for Greece included a military mission to reform the Greek army. President Truman described his request in terms of a new diplomatic principle, labeled “the Truman Doctrine,” which committed the United States “to help free peoples to maintain . . . their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes.” To support the policy of “containment” described by Truman, Congress voted the aid package two months later. Again responding to a presidential initiative, Congress a year later approved a $13 billion program of economic assistance—the Marshall Plan—for Western Europe.
The widening domestic consensus to challenge the Soviet Union in international affairs drew much of its force from the conviction that Soviet agents or “fellow travelers” had infiltrated Western governments. The impetus of the concern over Communist subversion came from several highly publicized cases that linked American and British citizens with Soviet spying, primarily upon the wartime development of the atomic bomb. Although Soviet espionage had limited influence upon the development of a Russian military threat, the Truman administration and its Republican critics vied with one another to purge the federal bureaucracy—especially the State Department—of people they regarded as agents (few in number and quickly eliminated) or “Communist sympathizers,” who could be variously defined and counted. Anti-Communism in every form became the rage of the time. The “Second Red Scare,” unlike its predecessor of 1918–1921, popularized a more aggressive foreign policy, at the substantial cost of individual rights and sober analysis of the real Soviet threat. The issue of internal security, however, alerted otherwise complacent Americans to the fact that the Soviet Union had interests beyond its formal borders.
The collapse of European influence throughout the rest of the world added another dimension to the Cold War. In a sense the United States replaced Great Britain as the Western player in the “Great Game,” as the Anglo-Russian competition of the nineteenth century had been called. From the Middle East to China, the world war had rewritten the terms of political competition, and those terms pitted the United States and Russia as the missionaries for two very different forms of postcolonial political organization. With few exceptions the resistance movements of World War II had fallen to native leaders dedicated or sympathetic to Communism, if not Russian domi
nation. China provided the most conspicuous example of a new form of conflict: A Communist inspired “people’s revolutionary war.” Built on the foundation of rural-based partisan warfare, political indoctrination and organization, and subversion, the Chinese Communists under the leadership of Mao Zedong defeated the Nationalists (the Quomindang) in 1949 and chased Chiang Kai-shek and his surviving followers to Taiwan.
The “loss” of China suggested an international Communist conspiracy orchestrated from Moscow. Certainly there was real evidence of Communist activism in several guerrilla wars that blossomed after V-J Day. In French Indochina, the Philippines, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma, anticolonial insurgents preached and fought for an Asian version of Marxism. In a divided Korea the Soviet Union adopted a Communist regime while the United States accepted a nationalist, anti-Communist government. Only the civil war that accompanied the division of independent India and Pakistan and the Jewish-Arab war of 1948, which created the state of Israel, fell outside the pattern of Communist revolution. In one way or another, largely through the provision of military and economic assistance or indirect political support, the United States became a party to most of the wars of decolonization. American policymakers feared that Communist victories meant losses to the “Free World,” and their European partners insisted that containment in Europe depended upon continued access to the resources of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The Truman administration did not embrace the concept of indivisible containment, but it did not accept Communist victories in the Third World either, for to do so weakened the role of the United Nations and strengthened the position of those domestic critics (largely Republican) who held the administration responsible for the fall of China.
Foreign policy problems, then, abounded in the postwar world. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson repeatedly stated, the problems did not lend themselves to quick, easy, inexpensive solutions. Nor did a general policy of containment or a strategy of deterrence and collective defense translate themselves into military programs. Instead, the federal government moved from crisis to crisis, from budget to budget, extemporizing programs characterized by political controversy and public misunderstanding. Nevertheless, by the time the Truman administration left office in 1953, it had laid the foundations of an enduring national security policy and organization.
Groping for a New Strategy
The crises of the Cold War’s first five years forced Harry S. Truman to look hard at American military capability, and he found very little. Driven by domestic politics, which focused upon the performance of the economy, the reduction and balancing of the federal budget, and the close rivalry of the Democrats and Republicans, the president shared with Congress the responsibility for the nation’s pallid defenses. In April 1947, as Congress considered aid to Greece and Turkey, he learned that the United States had no ready atomic bombs and that the Strategic Air Command (SAC) might not hit its targets anyway. At the height of the Berlin crisis a year later, Truman told his advisers he would like to give the Russians hell, but Secretary of State George C. Marshall responded that he thought one American division in Europe was not an adequate instrument for even the threat of hell. Briefed in February 1949 on planned atomic bomb production, Truman exclaimed, “Boy, we could blow a hole clean through the earth.” But he then soberly remembered that the stockpile of bombs would not be ready until 1951, and by then the Soviets might have nuclear weapons too. Truman doubted that he would ever again order the use of atomic bombs unless the Russians struck first. In September 1949 Air Force reconnaissance planes picked up the first radioactive evidence of a Russian nuclear explosion on August 29, in Siberia.
Although his intelligence advisers missed the end of the American nuclear monopoly by three years, Truman had been facing the nuclear future since 1945, when his own scientists and Secretary of War Stimson had urged him to provide a system of controls that would prevent the future use of the atomic bomb. In domestic terms, nuclear controllers wanted an organization for research and development outside military control; in 1946 Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act, which created a five-man civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The AEC included a military applications division, so military concerns were not slighted, but the agency became a cockpit of controversy about nuclear programs. A study directed by Dean Acheson and David E. Lilienthal urged that the United States establish an international regime for the control of nuclear weapons. As Congress considered the law that created the AEC, Truman approved a proposal to internationalize nuclear weapons and sent Bernard Baruch to the UN to present what became known as the “Baruch Plan.” The plan asked that the UN create an international atomic energy commission that would control all aspects of atomic affairs, from the mining of fissionable materials to the use of nuclear power for peaceful purposes. The Security Council would mete out “condign punishment” to any nation that turned nuclear power to military purposes. Although the administration’s commitment to the plan was at best modest, its proposal foundered on the provisions for on-site inspection. Already committed to its own nuclear program, the Soviet Union ensured that the Baruch Plan disappeared into the mire of UN debate and study.
In 1946 and 1948 the United States conducted atomic tests at the Pacific atolls of Bikini and Eniwetok and learned more about nuclear effects and weapons design. The 1946 tests did little to advance the deliverability of atomic bombs. The weight of each nuclear device remained in the five-ton range and the yield stayed below 50 kilotons [the explosive equivalent of thousands of tons of TNT]. Now working on reduced budgets, the nuclear engineers had a limited capacity to produce fissionable materials and bomb assemblies. In 1949 the United States could have assembled 169 atomic bombs for a war plan that required more than twice that number of weapons. The 1948 SANDSTONE tests at Eniwetok, however, produced important breakthroughs for bomb design by producing a re-engineered core of plutonium and uranium that dramatically reduced the cost and size of each bomb while increasing its yield. The available uranium, thought to be in short supply, could now be distributed to many more bombs of greater accuracy and explosive power. The AEC in 1949 believed it could meet a JCS program target of 400 atomic bombs by 1953; in fact, the bomb builders produced 429 bombs by 1951, and by 1953 the American arsenal of nuclear weapons had grown to 1,152.
To deliver the bombs, however, produced other challenges. Not until 1948 did the Air Force have a single team capable of assembling a droppable bomb, and the custody of nuclear weapons remained in the hands of the AEC until 1953. The Strategic Air Command, equipped with B-29s and the postwar improved B-29 (the B-50), had little ability to deliver nuclear weapons. In 1948 SAC had around thirty trained crews and properly equipped aircraft, but when SAC’s new commander, General Curtis E. LeMay, tested his force, not one crew could place a weapon on target in conditions approaching those of wartime.
The nation’s nuclear weakness did not prevent policymakers from putting the atomic bomb at the center of U.S. strategy. A presidential Air Policy (Finletter) Commission and a similar congressional committee both reported in 1948 that the threat of nuclear retaliation was the cornerstone of defense policy. Atomic warheads and intercontinental delivery systems would probably outstrip the ability of defensive systems to stop them, so ready offensive air forces seemed essential to deter war in the first place. After several false starts, the JCS approved its first postwar joint emergency war plan, HALFMOON, in 1948, followed by a more elaborate plan in 1949, DROPSHOT. These plans placed primary emphasis on the use of nuclear weapons to strike Russian urban-based industry, especially petroleum and electrical targets. The military planners believed that Western Europe could not be defended in a general war. Instead, the United States would have to depend upon air strikes mounted from Great Britain, the Middle East, and Japan to defeat the Russians. The only commitment of nonnuclear air and ground forces would be related to holding air bases and the oil resources in the Middle East. The difficulty with the war plans was that the number of bombs the planners require
d exceeded the supply of weapons and aircraft needed to deliver them. The JCS also recognized a further complication: The war plans demanded overseas bases for SAC, since the Air Force did not have an adequate intercontinental capability. Truman paled at the prospect, but he approved the military’s concept of fighting a nuclear war if deterrence failed.
Within the government, argument raged in 1949 on how to make nuclear weapons a credible deterrent. One obvious answer was to improve the size and effectiveness of Strategic Air Command, an Air Force responsibility pursued in the development of the B-36, an intercontinental bomber, and of an in-flight refueling capability for the B-29s and B-50s. Within SAC, General LeMay drove his crews to higher efficiency through morale-building programs and realistic, demanding training. The major issue, however, became the development of a more awesome weapon. A civilian-military coalition of advocates, led by scientists Edward Teller and E.O. Lawrence and AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss, urged the government to give top priority to producing a fusion, or hydrogen, bomb. Fraught with both theoretical and engineering problems, the “super bomb” program, which promised to produce weapons in the megaton (a million tons of TNT) range, had taken a backseat to the perfection of fission weapons, largely through the influence of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, dominated by J. Robert Oppenheimer. In brutal bureaucratic infighting that eventually drove Oppenheimer from government service, the AEC recommended in 1949 that the “super” project go forward on a crash basis. Convinced by JCS and AEC studies that the H-bomb represented only a logical extension of nuclear strategy, Truman approved the new emphasis on the fusion weapon program in January 1950.
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