by Oliver Stone
As with his anticommunism, Eisenhower’s embrace of nuclearism came later in life. He had opposed the atomic bombing of Japan on both military and moral grounds. He was actually in Moscow when he learned about Hiroshima. He told a journalist, “Before the atom bomb was used, . . . I was sure we could keep the peace with Russia. Now, I don’t know. I had hoped the bomb wouldn’t figure in this war. Until now I would have said that we three, Britain . . . , America . . . , and Russia . . . could have guaranteed the peace of the world for a long time to come. But now, I don’t know. People are frightened and disturbed all over. Everyone feels insecure again.”86
After the war, he supported efforts at international control, wanting atomic bombs to be turned over to the United Nations and destroyed. He spoke out consistently for civilian rather than military control of the bomb. And he continued to raise moral concerns about the use of such a weapon. In 1947, he told a luncheon, “I decry loose and sometimes gloating talk about the degree of security implicit in a weapon that might destroy millions overnight.”87
As David Rosenberg notes, “Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the presidency in January 1953 with a more thorough knowledge of nuclear weapons than any President before or since.” As army chief of staff, temporary chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and NATO supreme commander, he had been intimately involved in early nuclear-war planning. During those years, his abhorrence of nuclear weapons had abated considerably, but it had not disappeared. In March 1953, he warned his cabinet not to think of the bomb as “a cheap way to solve things.” He reminded them, “It is cold comfort for any citizen of Western Europe to be assured that—after his country is overrun and he is pushing up daisies—someone still alive will drop a bomb on the Kremlin.”88
He was determined to build on the United States’ lead in the nuclear arms race. In summer 1953, the CIA reported reassuringly that there was no evidence that the Soviets were working on a hydrogen bomb. On August 12, 1953, much to the CIA’s chagrin, the Soviets exploded what was believed to have been a 400-kiloton hydrogen bomb in Kazakhstan. Though far less powerful than the U.S. model, the Soviet bomb was not only deliverable, it was “dry,” needing no refrigeration. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight. It had stood at three since the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949.89 The Soviets were closing the gap at a stunning pace.
The New York Times took “comfort in the fact that” the United States still possessed a lead in atomic and hydrogen bomb production but recognized that “these advantages are bound to diminish with time.” The Times noted that even Secretary of State Dulles had declared that “the central problem now is to save the human race from extinction.”90
Dulles and his relatives had helped design the American Empire. John Foster Dulles’s maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, and his uncle Robert Lansing had both served as secretary of state. John W. painstakingly tutored his eldest grandson throughout his childhood, instilling a firm belief in the United States’ global role. John Foster Dulles’s paternal grandfather and his father had both been Presbyterian ministers, his grandfather serving as a missionary in India. His younger brother, Allen, became director of the CIA. When his uncle Lansing served as Wilson’s secretary of state during and after the First World War, Dulles was secretary-treasurer of the government’s new Russian Bureau, whose main function was to assist anti-Bolshevik forces challenging the Russian Revolution. Financier Bernard Baruch, an old family friend, next tapped the young lawyer to serve as legal advisor to the U.S. delegation to the Inter-Allied Reparations Commission at Versailles, after which he returned to practice law at Sullivan and Cromwell, overseeing the accounts of some of the pillars of the emerging empire: J. P. Morgan & Company; Brown Brothers Harriman; Dillon, Read; Goldman Sachs; United Fruit Company; International Nickel Company; United Railways of Central America; and the Overseas Securities Corporation.91
Though journalistic accounts of Dulles’s unabashed affection for Hitler in the early years of the Nazi dictatorship are hard to verify, there is no doubt that he maintained some involvement in German business activities. He participated actively in the vast interwar cartelization, which afforded a means to stabilize the shaky U.S. economy, reduce competition, and guarantee profits. Dulles dealt extensively with I. G. Farben through the nickel and chemical cartels. Despite his later vehement denials of any dealings with the Nazi regime, he is known to have visited Berlin in 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1939.92 In assessing Dulles’s involvement, award-winning New York Times and Boston Globe foreign correspondent Steven Kinzer, citing Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius’s “exhaustive study” of Sullivan & Cromwell, writes that “the firm ‘thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime,’ and Dulles spent much of 1934 ‘publicly supporting Hitler,’ leaving his partners ‘shocked that he could so easily disregard law and international treaties to justify Nazi repression.’ ”93
Dulles never wavered in his commitment to maintaining U.S. hegemony and protecting U.S. business interests or in his hatred of communism. Despite outward appearances, the rigid, sometimes belligerent secretary of state and the affable president differed little on substantive policy issues. Eisenhower understood that even with income tax rates topping 90 percent for the wealthiest Americans, the nation’s bloated military budget would prove impossible to sustain, ultimately bankrupting the country. He worried, “This country can choke itself to death piling up military expenditures.”94 He decided to curb ballooning defense spending by relying on nuclear arms, which were cheaper than maintaining a large standing army. In late October 1953, he approved a new Basic National Security Policy, NSC 162/2, the core of his “New Look” defense policy, which stated, “in the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions.”95 Based on the assumption that any war with the Soviet Union would quickly evolve into a full-scale nuclear war, the New Look downplayed conventional military capabilities and relied upon massive nuclear retaliation by the fortified Strategic Air Command. Thus the savings made by reducing the size of the army were offset, in large part, by increased spending on the air force and navy. Eisenhower ended up cutting Truman’s 1954 defense budget from $41.3 billion to $36 billion.
Eisenhower felt constrained by the fact that neither the U.S. public nor his British allies were as sanguine as he and Dulles about the use of nuclear weapons. He set about to erase the line between conventional and nuclear weapons. According to the minutes of a late March 1953 NSC discussion of using nuclear weapons in Korea, “the President and Secretary Dulles were in complete agreement that somehow or other the tabu which surrounds the use of atomic weapons would have to be destroyed.”96
Dulles called for breaking “down this false distinction” between conventional and nuclear weapons, which he attributed to a Soviet propaganda campaign.97 Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Arthur Radford explained to listeners at the Naval War College in May 1954 that “atomic forces are now our primary forces . . . actions by forces, on land, sea or air are relegated to a secondary role . . . nuclear weapons, fission and fusion, will be used in the next major war.”98
In meetings in Bermuda with Britain’s Churchill and French Premier Joseph Laniel in December 1953, Eisenhower sought his allies’ support for using atomic bombs if fighting started in Korea again. Churchill sent his private secretary Jock Colville to Eisenhower to express his concerns. Colville was taken aback by Eisenhower’s response: “whereas Winston looked on the atomic bomb as something entirely new and terrible, he looked upon it as just the latest improvement in military weapons. He implied that there was no distinction between ‘conventional’ weapons and atomic weapons: all weapons in due course become conventional.”99 Colville later wrote, “I could hardly believe my ears.” Eisenhower similarly told Anthony Eden, “The development of smaller atomic weapons and the use of atomic artillery makes the distinction [between atomic and conventional weapons] impossible to sustain.”100
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In 1955, Eisenhower responded to a reporter’s question about using tactical atomic weapons: “Yes of course they would be used. In any combat where these things can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.”101
The very next day, Nixon reinforced the point: “tactical atomic explosives are now conventional and will be used against the targets of any aggressive force.”102 A few weeks later, Ike told Congress that “a wide variety” of tactical atomic weapons “have today achieved conventional status in the arsenals of our armed forces.”103
Eisenhower prepared for their use by transferring control of the atomic stockpile from the AEC to the military. Truman had transferred nine weapons to Guam in 1951 but had otherwise insisted on retaining civilian control. He said he did not want “to have some dashing lieutenant colonel decide when would be the proper time to drop one.”104 Eisenhower had no such compunctions. In June 1953, he began transferring atomic bombs from the AEC to the Defense Department to enhance operational readiness and protect them from surprise Soviet attack. In December 1954, he ordered 42 percent of atomic bombs and 36 percent of hydrogen bombs deployed overseas, many menacingly close to the Soviet Union. By 1959, the military had custody of more than 80 percent of U.S. nuclear weapons.
The United States’ European allies were terrified that the United States would start a nuclear war, and they pressured Eisenhower to lower the tensions. He responded on December 8, 1953, mesmerizing the 3,500 delegates at the United Nations with his “Atoms for Peace” speech declaring that the United States would devote “its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life” by spreading the benefits of peaceful atomic power at home and abroad.105
The U.S. media rang out with praise. New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin wrote that Eisenhower’s “eloquent” and “moving argument for peace . . . represented an earnest attempt to halt the atomic arms race.” However, Baldwin regretted that the prospects for success remained bleak because “the Soviet Union’s whole concept is built upon world struggle and ultimate world domination.”106
Eisenhower was so desperate to put a smiling face on the atom that he ignored numerous warnings about the danger of proliferation. The AEC’s only nuclear physicist, Henry Smyth, dismissed Atoms for Peace as a “thoroughly dishonest proposal” that ignored proliferation risks and exaggerated the prospects of nuclear power.107 Others echoed his dissent.
Soviet leaders were particularly irked by the dangers of proliferation. Five top scientists, including nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov, asserted that “the development of the industrial use of atomic energy by itself does not only not exclude, but leads directly, to an increase of military atomic potential.” Foreign Minister Molotov reiterated this point in meetings with Dulles and in a note stating that it was “possible for the very application of atomic energy for peaceful purposes to be utilized for increasing the production of atomic weapons.” When Molotov again raised the proliferation risk at their May 1 meeting, Dulles couldn’t grasp the concept and replied that he “would seek out a scientist to educate him more fully.”108
If Eisenhower’s UN address raised hopes for an easing of international tensions, Dulles’s January 12 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations dashed them thoroughly. He warned that local defenses against communism would be backed by “massive retaliatory power” deployed “at places and with means of [our] own choosing.”109
Reliance on nuclear weapons represented a fundamental departure from previous policy. Whereas Truman, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had viewed atomic bombs as weapons that would be used only in the most desperate circumstances, Eisenhower made them the foundation of U.S. defense strategy. The Wall Street Journal reported, “There was a wide assumption that here was a reckless policy of turning every minor clash into an atomic Armageddon.”110 The New York Times’ James Reston was stunned that Eisenhower and Dulles were enacting a “ ‘new strategy,’ potentially graver than anything ever proposed by any United States Government,” and not a single congressman even questioned this commitment to “sudden atomic retaliation.” He worried about the constitutional implications of such expanded presidential powers. If the Chinese moved into Indochina or the Soviets into Iran, who, he asked, would give the order to deploy “massive retaliatory power” against Beijing or Moscow? How, he wondered, could the president “seek the consent of the Congress without alerting the Kremlin and risking a sudden atomic blow upon the United States?”111
RAND analyst Joseph Loftus became concerned that the new SAC Emergency War Plan was targeting Soviet cities and civilian populations. While Loftus was visiting SAC headquarters in Omaha, General James Walsh, the director of SAC intelligence, invited him over to his house for cocktails and began lecturing him on the need to maximize destruction. Walsh suddenly exploded. “Goddammit, Loftus, there’s only one way to attack the Russians, and that’s to hit them hard with everything we have and”—he shouted, pounding his fist on the enormous Bible on the table—“knock their balls off!”112
By the spring of 1954, SAC’s war plan called for attacking the Soviet Union with 600 to 750 bombs and turning it into “a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours.”113 The plan involved killing 80 percent of the population in 118 major cities, or 60 million people. Later that year, the United States began deploying nuclear weapons on the soil of its European allies. By 1958, almost three thousand had been placed in Western Europe.
Meanwhile, the U.S. arsenal continued to grow at a dizzying pace, expanding from slightly over 1,000 when Eisenhower took office to over 22,000 bombs when he left office eight years later.
Massive retaliation might frighten the Soviets, but it would do little to thwart the revolutionary upsurge in the developing world, where the Soviet Union was poised to take advantage of widespread discontent. The most important third-world leaders—Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, and Jawaharlal Nehru of India—steered a neutral course between the capitalist and socialist blocs and thought it obscene to spend billions of dollars and rubles on arms when money for economic development was in short supply. On his first trip abroad, in May 1953, Dulles learned of hostility toward the United States in Asia, where the Soviet system had real appeal, and the Middle East. During his trip, he wrote to Eisenhower about “bitterness” in the Arab world, where “the United States suffered from being linked with British and French imperialism”114 and from its blind support for Israel.
Dulles wasn’t sure that the United States could ever win the allegiance of third-world peoples. He noted that asking underdeveloped countries to embrace capitalism was like asking people who were undernourished and suffering from rickets to play rugby: “You say to them, ‘Have a free competitive system.’ And they say, ‘Good god, there must be a better way of doing things!’ ”115 Eisenhower was also troubled by the depth of animosity toward the United States among the world’s impoverished masses. He raised the issue at a March 1953 NSC meeting, wondering why it wasn’t possible “to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us.”116
The United States’ role in the Iranian conflict should have provided all the answer Eisenhower needed. Upon taking office, Eisenhower confronted a crisis in Iran, where the government of Mohammad Mossadeq was challenging the monopoly held by Britain’s Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the forerunner of British Petroleum (BP) and the world’s third largest crude-oil producer. The company, which was 51 percent owned by the British government, had developed cozy relations with Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had seized power after World War I and become shah in 1925, and with his son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who replaced his father in 1941, when the elder’s Nazi sympathies had provoked a joint occupation of Iran by Britain and the Soviet Union.
Anglo-Iranian kept 84 percent of
the revenue for itself, leaving at most a paltry 16 percent for the Iranians. It paid taxes in Britain rather than Iran. In fact, its British taxes were more than double the amount that the Iranians received in royalties.117 While the British got rich off Iranian oil, the Iranians lived in poverty. Oil-field workers earned less than 50 cents per day and received no benefits or vacations. The Iranians’ outrage was ignited in 1950 when the U.S. oil company ARAMCO signed a contract giving Saudi Arabia 50 percent of the profits from Saudi oil. Under pressure, Anglo-Iranian offered improved terms. But Mossadeq so hated British colonialism that he refused to consider the company’s offer. The Iranian parliament, reflecting Iranians’ near-universal antipathy toward Anglo-Iranian, voted unanimously to nationalize the oil industry and compensate the British for their investment. Britain’s Labour government seemed hardly in a position to object, having nationalized Britain’s coal and electricity companies and railroads.
A former finance and foreign minister, Mossadeq, despite his legendary eccentricities, was an enormously popular figure inside Iran and a well-respected one internationally. He was the first Iranian to earn a doctor of law degree from a European university. He had attended the Versailles Conference in a futile attempt to block the assertion of British control and had led the decolonization fight in succeeding decades. Time magazine named him Man of the Year for 1951. The U.S. ambassador reported that Mossadeq “has the backing of 95 to 98 percent of the people of this country.”118 His defiance of the colonial masters thrilled the Arab masses throughout the region.
