Another role of strategic deterrence was to extend it to America’s alliance system. From its creation, NATO had enjoyed the ultimate protection of America’s nuclear weapons, but the growing Soviet nuclear threat to the United States introduced doubt that SAC would come flying to Europe’s rescue if war occurred. To defend Western Europe—and South Korea and Japan as well—the United States developed nuclear forces for forward deployment: Intermediate-range missiles stationed in NATO countries, Air Force fighter-bombers with the ability to drop nuclear weapons, and carrier-based aircraft. The option of regional nuclear war proved a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it demonstrated the indivisibility of the American nuclear umbrella and created nuclear alternatives short of general war. On the other hand, it tied American strategy to the behavior of its allies and opened the question of whether American guarantees had any meaning when the survival of the United States was at risk.
The intricacies of nuclear diplomacy brought strains upon the Free World and Communist alliance systems, opening fissures between the United States and Soviet Union and their allies. Unhappy with American reluctance to assist its modest nuclear weapons program, the French government went ahead on its own force de frappe, exploded a warhead in 1960, and withdrew from the NATO military system in 1966. The Soviets, however, faced an even greater dilemma in Asia. Invoking its 1950 alliance with Russia, the People’s Republic of China demanded assistance with its nuclear program. When the Russians refused, the Chinese exploded their own nuclear device in 1964. Nuclear proliferation joined an ever-increasing set of international concerns.
The ominous shadow of nuclear war gave the United States and the Soviet Union an incentive to supplement their military programs with arms control negotiations. President Eisenhower appreciated the role arms control might play in preventing “the stupid starting of stupid war.” Nikita S. Khrushchev regarded U.S.-U.S.S.R. arms talks as a weapon of Soviet policy, for they bought time for Russian strategic programs, offered international recognition of Russia’s military strength, divided NATO, and encouraged the peace movement in the West.
As if the politics of strategic deterrence were not complex enough, the United States attempted to build a regional alliance system outside Europe that would contain Russian and Chinese intervention and subversion. The Korean War experience served as the model of what might be done and what should be avoided. “No more Koreas” served as a slogan for the deeply held belief that the United States should avoid another protracted land war for limited objectives. Instead, the NATO pattern of forward and collective defense, already extended to Latin America by the Rio Pact and applied on a bilateral basis in the Pacific, might work as well in Asia and the Middle East. In 1954 the United States decided not to use nuclear weapons or conventional forces to save French Indochina, but tried to salvage the anti-Communist position in Southeast Asia by forming the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). It extended SEATO’s military guarantees to the new states of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It sponsored a similar arrangement for the Middle East, the Baghdad Pact, in 1955. Much of American foreign policy found its stimulus in alliance reinforcement.
The United States did not rely solely upon its military alliances to contain Communist subversion. It also battled revolutionary insurgents with economic aid, military assistance, and covert action with success in Greece and the Philippines. The government then employed the CIA to topple governments with Communist participants in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954). When similar techniques did not prove feasible in Lebanon in 1958, the Eisenhower administration sent a Marine Corps–Army task force to stop a civil war and deter Syrian intervention. The policy of countersubversion flowered in the early 1960s in Allen Dulles’s CIA, which mounted covert operations against Fidel Castro in Cuba and against Communist-influenced guerrillas in the Congo. Among the battlefields of covert action and military assistance, Laos and South Vietnam proved to be the most persistent problems.
American security policy required a high degree of presidential freedom of action. Although their successes varied, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson enjoyed relative freedom from congressional interference except in the annual budget process. Regardless of party, the presidents maintained the security policy initiative through the manipulation of a bipartisan, internationalist congressional coalition that included all the important floor leaders and committee members. When it came to a test of strength, the presidents prevailed. Eisenhower successfully beat back a congressional effort to curb his powers to make executive agreements with foreign governments. In 1954 he received congressional support to help the Chinese Nationalists defend the offshore islands of Quemoy, Matsu, and the Pescadores; the House vote was 410 to 3, the Senate vote 83 to 3. Copying Eisenhower’s effort a decade later, Johnson took a blank check from Congress to use military force in Southeast Asia. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution vote dramatized the president’s ability to drive the political process.
Congressional enthusiasm for collective security depended upon public support. Until the end of the 1960s the opinion polls and the elections sent a consistent message to Washington: Beware of the Soviets and maintain American military superiority. Defense spending did not distress the public, since its share of the federal budget and gross national product dropped in the decade after the post-Korea demobilization. Some defense spending, in fact, seemed to have benefits beyond military security: interstate highways; improved public education; high-technology research and development; and the support of the aviation, electronics, shipbuilding, and transportation industries. To some degree the sense of national purpose that flowered in World War II persisted for another twenty years. When John Kennedy vowed at his inauguration that the nation would “pay any price, bear any burden . . . for the success of liberty,” he expressed sentiments shared by his countrymen since 1941.
The “New Look”
In the year after his election President Dwight D. Eisenhower redirected American defense policy for the post-Korean era of neither war nor peace. Eisenhower’s policy, labeled the “New Look,” required redefinition of the Soviet threat. Essentially, Eisenhower believed that proxy wars like Korea and the pressure of defense spending would fatally weaken the American economy, and he pledged to cut the federal budget by $14 billion in his first two years in office. The major target for budget cutting was defense, and Harry Truman had already proposed similar cuts in 1952.
Announcing its intention to have “security with solvency,” the Eisenhower administration designed the New Look between December 1952 and October 1953. The new chairman of the JCS, Admiral Arthur W. Radford, assumed the task of turning fiscal guidance into strategy. The administration lopped $5 billion in authorizations from the fiscal year 1954 defense budget and then submitted a 1955 proposal for $35 billion, a figure well below the $42 billion requested by the JCS. Although the administration never reached its fiscal goals, it held defense expenditures around the $40 billion level. During the two Eisenhower administrations, the defense budget fell from 64 percent of federal spending to 47 percent and averaged about 10 percent of gross national product. Even pressured by inflation in the late 1950s and the escalating real cost of high-technology weapons, the administration held to its New Look fiscal assumptions.
To stabilize defense spending, the Eisenhower administration deemphasized conventional forces and stressed the deterrent and war-fighting potential of nuclear weapons. Inheriting a standing force of 3.5 million, the government reduced it to 2.47 million by 1960, well below levels the JCS thought safe. The manpower cuts forced the services to cancel their Korean era expansion plans and eliminate six Army divisions, 15 Air Force wings, and 300 Navy ships by 1960. Alarmed by the New Look, the JCS argued that it needed more insight on Ike’s strategic expectations. Assisted by ad hoc study groups and the newly established professional staff attached to the National Security Council, Eisenhower provided the guidance in NSC Memorandum 162/2 (October 1953), a study that directed the Department of Defense to arm all the s
ervices with nuclear weapons. Local wars of the Korean variety would have to be fought by America’s allies, who would use their own ground forces, backed by American air and sea forces.
Anxious to link the New Look to its foreign policy goals, the administration tied the exploitation of nuclear technology to the more aggressive containment of Communism. Impressed by the development of small nuclear warheads, Eisenhower believed they could be directed at more precise military targets “just as you would use a bullet or anything else.” Vice President Richard M. Nixon suggested that nuclear superiority gave the United States an exploitable edge over the Russians: “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 at our discretion against the major source of aggression at times and places that we chose.” Following the 1953 review of American defense policy, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced in January 1954 that the administration would rely upon the threat of nuclear escalation to deter or stop Communist-inspired local wars. Russian adventurism would put at risk the very existence of the Soviet Union, for the United States would “depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing.”
The New Look reflected the administration’s belief that the Russians would do everything within their power to weaken the United States, disrupt NATO, and draw newly independent Third World nations into the Communist orbit. In assessing Soviet military capability, the administration faced greater uncertainty. Its difficulties in collecting information took on greater importance after the Russians exploded a fusion device in 1953, since the New Look depended upon an accurate judgment of the Russians’ ability to destroy SAC’s bomber bases and America’s major cities. The administration made great strides in collecting information, but its problems allowed its critics to charge that Eisenhower was too optimistic. By 1960 the character of the Soviet threat had become a major political issue.
At the beginning of the Cold War, American intelligence experts, principally the Central Intelligence Agency, depended primarily upon human observers to report upon Russian scientific and military activities. Until the mid-1950s the flood of refugees, returning German prisoners, and Russian defectors provided reasonably good information, but improved Soviet internal security, directed by the ruthless KGB, soon made human intelligence scarce. The CIA tried to insert agents in Russia, exploit the network of spies run by the West Germans, and work with its British and French counterparts. The results were not altogether satisfactory, since the British, French, and German intelligence agencies had been penetrated by Russian agents. The CIA complicated its problems when it merged its intelligence collection and covert operations in a single Directorate of Plans, which was dominated by men who had more enthusiasm for covert action than information collection. The American government turned to technology rather than agents. Inheriting the new National Security Agency (NSA), created in 1952, the Eisenhower administration expanded its funding and staffing. NSA’s mission was to listen. Intercepting radio communications and eventually radio-transmitted phone calls, NSA stations tried to translate and analyze millions of encrypted messages, with limited success. The CIA was more successful in communications interception, tapping Russian phone lines in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, communications intelligence did not give the CIA much confidence that it had a good grip on Russian military developments. Its military collaborators, especially Air Force intelligence, shared its disquiet.
American intelligence agencies looked for other ways to peek at Russian programs. One technical means was to establish radar stations along the borders of the Soviet Union in order to monitor aircraft and missile test flights, and by the end of the 1950s such stations ranged from Europe through Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. There was no substitute for penetrating Soviet air space for a direct look, but the operational problems of such overflights proved difficult. In Operation SKYHOOK, the Air Force launched high-altitude balloons to transit the Soviet Union, but erratic wind currents limited their usefulness. Manned aircraft were far more reliable—and more vulnerable. In 1952–1953 Russian interceptors contested fly-around and modest overflight penetrations in Europe and Asia by the Air Force and Royal Air Force. Unless the CIA could find an aircraft that could fly above Soviet air defenses, overflights could not be made. Developed by Kelly Johnson of the Lockheed Corporation, the U-2, a thin, gull-like plane, answered the CIA’s needs, since it could fly across the Soviet Union above 70,000 feet. Making its first flight in 1956, the U-2 produced photographs from twenty to thirty flights in the next four years and gave intelligence analysts, according to one CIA official, about 90 percent of their hard data on Russian military developments. The National Photographic Interpretation Center became a key intelligence agency. In 1960 the Russians, outraged by the overflights, brought down a U-2 with an air-defense missile. Amid an international furor, Eisenhower canceled the overflights.
The administration had other collection means near at hand to replace the U-2. Eisenhower’s scientific advisers, especially James R. Killian Jr., and the Air Force’s research and development community joined forces with the CIA to win funding for reconnaissance satellites. Receiving high-priority funding after 1955, the satellite reconnaissance program produced an effective satellite equipped with high-resolution cameras from the Polaroid Corporation. Finding an adequate launch booster proved more difficult, in part because of bureaucratic competition within the armed forces, CIA, and the aerospace industry. To direct the satellite programs, Eisenhower authorized the creation of the National Reconnaissance Office in 1959 under the general supervision of the Air Force. By the end of 1960 the first satellite system was in operation. Through British intelligence, the CIA also in 1960 recruited a disaffected colonel in Soviet military intelligence, Oleg Penkovsky, who provided significant details about Soviet missile programs. In short, the administration’s technical means of intelligence collection, supplemented by Penkovsky, gave it a clearer picture of the Soviet threat than it could admit to its critics for fear of compromising its sources.
The slim flow of hard data on Soviet aviation and missile development in the 1950s encouraged the Air Force to exaggerate the growth of Russia’s strategic forces. The debate on the Soviet threat might have been contained to a dispute between the NSC staff, CIA, and the Air Force except for the fact that national security had become tempting partisan politics. Four Democratic senators with presidential ambitions—Lyndon B. Johnson, Henry Jackson, Stuart Symington, and John F. Kennedy—made sure that the New Look became a campaign issue. The first conflict was the “bomber gap” affair of 1954–1956. Using exaggerated assessments of Soviet aircraft productivity, supported by an alarmist count of an “Air Force Day” bomber flyover, Air Force experts projected that the Russian heavy-bomber force would grow from around 50 to 800 by 1961. Although this prediction receded by 1957 to a realistic prediction of around 200 bombers, the bomber gap affair left the impression that the United States faced a threat its air-defense system could not meet. The alarm became panic in 1957 when the Soviets used a liquid-fueled SS-6 missile to place a Sputnik satellite in earth orbit. Sputnik surprised intelligence experts, who did not expect the SS-6 to be operational before 1960. The next CIA estimate in 1958 was that the Soviets could deploy a force of 500 ICBMs by 1961. The “missile gap” set off another round of recrimination and criticism of “massive retaliation” and the New Look.
The Eisenhower administration pointed with pride to Strategic Air Command as the centerpiece of American defense. During the New Look, SAC adopted new aircraft and the nuclear weapons, expanded its base system, and improved its communications. In 1954 SAC’s bomber force numbered about 1,000 B-36s and B-47s. By 1960 this force had increased to almost 2,000 bombers. Although the B-47 remained the backbone of SAC despite its range limitations, SAC supplemented it with 500 new bombers—the Boeing B-52. Operational in 1955, the B-52, loved by its crews for its dep
endability and handling ease, gave SAC the intercontinental jet bomber it wanted. To reduce its vulnerability, SAC placed 20 percent of its bombers on strip alert (1957–1960), then extended this program to airborne alert. SAC also continued to expand its base system to confuse Russian planners. Its continental bases increased from thirty-seven (1954) to forty-six (1960); its overseas bases climbed in the same period from fourteen to twenty.
The deterrent monopoly of SAC’s bombers, however, eroded under the pressure of three developments: Soviet air defenses and ICBMs, civilian scrutiny of strategic deterrence and force structure, and interservice rivalry. The result was an acceleration of America’s own intercontinental missile program. Although all of the services had experimented with missiles since 1945, no service had given its program top priority. Within the Air Force, scientific committee investigations and RAND Corporation studies cast doubt upon the future of the bomber force. Additional studies recommended that guided missiles—ballistic and cruise—join America’s deterrent force, and this position received the strong approval of the Air Force’s two most influential scientific consultants, Theodore von Karman and John von Neumann. A handful of Air Force generals urged a more aggressive missile program, prodded in part by the knowledge that the Army had assembled its own missile development team under the aggressive Wernher von Braun. The strategic part of the pro-missile argument was critical. If the United States expected to have a portion of its nuclear forces survive a Russian first strike, it needed something to complement the bomber force.
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