Tragedy and Hope
A History of the World in Our Time
By Carroll Quigley
PART EIGHTEEN
Part Eighteen: Nuclear Rivalry and the Cold War: the Race for H-Bomb: 1950-1957
Chapter 66: "Joe I" and the American Nuclear Debate, 1949-1954
In May 1947, at one of the earliest meetings of the Atomic Energy Commission, the members discussed a suggestion made by one of the commissioners, the Wall Street investment banker Lewis L. Strauss. Four months later, at the request of the commission, the air force was ordered to begin a continuous monitoring of the upper atmosphere to test for radioactive particles which would indicate if a nuclear explosion had taken place anywhere in the world. The monitoring service was tested on our own nuclear explosions in the Marshall Islands early in 8, and continued thereafter on funds from AEC.
Late in August 1949, a B-29, modified for this service, returned to its base in the Far East and found that the photographic plates it had been carrying to a great height were covered with streaks. As the local scientists examined these, they became convinced that the plane had passed througl1 a heavily radioactive cloud, which must have originated farther west on the mainland of Asia. Code messages to Washington sent similar planes over the United States to collect raindrops and high-flying dust particles. These soon revealed the bad news: a highly efficient plutonium bomb ("Joe I") had been exploded over Soviet Asia in August. President Truman, on September 23, 1949, made a public announcement: "Within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR."
The news of "Joe I" brought to crisis level, and merged together, two conflicts which had been going on, more or less behind the scenes, in the American strategic community. One of these conflicts was among the scientists over the possibility of making a "super" bomb by fusing hydrogen; the other conflict, involving billions of dollars in defense contracts and the lives of millions of people, was the struggle among the armed services over American strategic-defense policies.
Discussion over "Super" had been going on for years, but only intermittently and among a few advanced scientists. In 1927 a young Austrian, Fritz Houtermans, studying physics at G๖ttingen, took a walk with Lord Rutherford's assistant, Geoffrey Atkinson. Houtermans suggested that the energy of the sun came from the fusion of four hydrogen atoms to make a single helium atom. They talked about the problem and told a Russian fellow student, George Gamow, who returned to the Soviet Union shortly afterward. In 1933 Houtermans fled from Hitler's anti-Semitic laws to Russia. During Stalin's purges he was imprisoned as a foreign spy and tortured to extract a confession. In 1940, when Stalin was allied with Hitler, Houtermans's wrecked but still living body was turned over to the Germans to receive new indignities from the Gestapo.
In 1933 Gamow fled from Russia and was given a professorship at the George Washington University in the American capital. In 1935 Gamow invited the Hungarian refugee scientist Edward Teller to join him at George Washington. They worked together and talked a good deal about the problem of hydrogen fusion. After listening to them, another refugee, Hans Bethe, winner of the Enrico Fermi award in 196', then at Cornell, worked out the now accepted equations for nuclear fusion on the sun. Bethe's equations assumed that Carbon-12, by the addition of hydrogen nuclei (protons), one at a time, was raised through Nitrogen-13, N-14, Oxygen-15, and N-15 which then added a final proton and split into C-12 and Helium-4. The carbon thus acted as a catalyst for the fusion of hydrogen to form helium.
Teller, a restless man, fertile with suggestions, but incapable of sustained cooperation with others, went to Columbia University in 1941, to Chicago in 1942, to Berkeley, California, in the summer of 1942, and to Los Alamos in the spring of 1943. He was obsessed with the idea of a fusion bomb and was greatly encouraged by Oppenheimer who obtained special security clearance for him and invited him both to California in 1942 and to Los Alamos in 1943. In both places he worked on the H-bomb, although it was generally known (as suggested by Fermi) that no H-bomb was possible until there was an A-bomb to ignite it.
Hydrogen nuclei (protons), carrying the same (positive) electrical charges, repel each other so strongly that they cannot be pushed together to fuse into helium unless they are raised to tremendous collision speeds by being heated to hundreds of millions of degrees of temperature. Only an A-bomb could produce such heat. In 1942 Fermi suggested that such fusion could be achieved at a somewhat lower temperature by using heavy hydrogen (deuterium). This is an isotope of hydrogen which is twice as heavy as ordinary hydrogen, since its nucleus consists of two unit particles instead of one. Its discovery, for which Harold Urey won the Nobel Prize in 1934, showed that it existed in nature, chiefly in the form of heavy water (D2O compared to ordinary water H2O), in the proportion of about one part of deuterium for every 5,000 of ordinary hydrogen.
Shortly afterward, it was calculated that it might be possible to make an even heavier isotope of hydrogen of triple weight (tritium) with a nucleus of three particles. These could be fused to make helium at an even lower temperature. However, it would be so expensive to make tritium that each bomb would cost billions of dollars. By the end of 1942, it seemed clear that the most feasible way to make a bomb would be to use both deuterium and tritium. Collisions of these at over 100 million degrees of temperature should give helium atoms and enormous energy. At that point the project was put on the shelf, and work concentrated on making the A-bomb, which had to be obtained first.
After the war ended, the outstanding scientists gradually returned to their peacetime teaching and research, so that the AEC laboratories, including Los Alamos, quieted down. The super-patriots subsequently criticized the scientists for this, arguing that the latter should have stayed on the job with AEC to develop better weapons than the Russians. This is nonsense, and is most nonsensical when it is implied that the scientists' reluctance for weapon development was based on Soviet sympathies. The fact is that America's whole future depended on getting scientists back to the universities to train new scientists, a job which had been neglected for five years. Moreover, there was another and potent influence working against weapons development in the nuclear area. This was the air force.
The air force could keep its monopoly of atomic weapons only as long as these remained in the large, ungainly shape they had first had in 1945. Accordingly, the air force, through General Brereton's participation on an AEC committee at the end of 1947, was able to block AEC development of smaller, tactical atom bombs. Only three years later, when these were being developed in spite of its opposition, did the air force try to recapture its privileged nuclear monopoly by beginning to insist on development of the H-bomb. This shift brought it into alliance with Teller who had been vainly advocating the H-bomb all the time since 1942.
Ironically enough, once this alliance had been made, sympathizers and allies of both the air force and of Teller conveniently forgot the former's earlier opposition to nuclear weapons development and began to question the loyalty of others who had opposed development of the H-bomb, including those "official scientists" who had done so because they realized it would jeopardize the development of tactical A-bombs. Because he cooperated in this attack on Oppenheimer, Teller's prestige among scientists (but not among congressmen and journalists) was almost irreparably damaged.
The turn toward the H-bomb began in 1949, even before "Joe I," largely because of the agitations of Teller and his supporters in the California Radiation Laboratory led by E. O. Lawrence and Luis Alvarez. At the same time, Soviet pressure, especially in Berlin, made it increasingly clear that our nuclear weapons system must be reviewed. Teller at once insisted, "H-bomb! " but the official scientists, led by Oppenheimer, suggested development of a wide panoply of nuclear weapons in all sizes and utilities. In general, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) group were reluctant to work for either change. Until 1950, however, the development of smaller A-bombs was prevented by the air-force veto of 1947. As a result, the only testing of A-bombs in the five-year period from Bikini in 1946 to April 1951 vv7as a test at Eniwetok in the spring of 1948 which sought to secure larger bombs by more effective use of nuclear material. At these 1948 tests four bombs were exploded, reaching a size of over 100 kilotons, or almost six times the blast of the 1945 bombs on Japan. This lack of testing from 1948 to 1951, for which the air force was responsible, was later attributed by air-force supporters to Oppenheimer's Communist sympathies!
"Joe I" brought this stalemate to a crisis. The question of proceeding toward an H-bomb was submitted to the Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC in October, and this group, including Oppenheimer, Conant, Fermi, Lee DuBridge (president of California Institute of Technology), I. I. Rabi of Columbia (Nobel Prize, 1944), and three businessmen, voted unanimously against a crash program to make an H-bomb. Glenn Seaborg (Nobel Prize, 1951), who was absent, was noncommittal. The most vigorous opposition came from Conant. In general, the opposition felt that concentration on an all-out effort to make an H-bomb, whose feasibility was very dubious, would be a poor response to "Joe I" and that a better response would lie in: (1) complete reform of American ground forces, including universal military training; (2) reorganization of the defenses of Western Europe, including Germany; and (3) a drive to make a large and varied assortment of A-bombs, especially by decreasing their size for tactical use.
Teller was chagrined at this decision, a view which was shared by Senator Brien McMahon of the joint congressional committee and by the air force. Teller had been visiting about the country, in his impetuous way, even before this decision, seeking to build up support for "Super" and to recruit scientists, with special attention to Bethe (who opposed the effort to make an H-bomb and finally joined the effort, the following year, because he hoped to prove it was impossible).
The GAC's unanimous vote against a crash program for the H-bomb in October 1949 was based on a number of considerations, which still seem valid: (I) The scientists feared that the use of the Hanford reactors to make tritium from lithium, instead of continuing to make plutoniun1 from uranium, would jeopardize the development of tactical A-bombs, especially as the manufacture of a pound of tritium would cost the loss of 80 pounds of plutonium; (2) they felt that the threat of our nuclear retaliation was not a sufficient guarantee against nibbling by Soviet ground forces and wanted our ground forces and those of our European supporters reorganized, expanded, and equipped with tactical atomic weapons; (3) they felt that the atom bomb was sufficiently large for any possible target in Soviet industrial plants or Russian cities and that for such targets the hydrogen bomb was not really necessary; (4) they felt that the advantages of adding the H-bomb to the world's arsenals, in terms of cost, was so slight that the Russians would not try to make it if we abstained from doing so; (5) they felt that the scientific manpower needed to develop the H-bomb could be obtained only from the A-bomb plants or from teaching, and was, for the immediate future, more valuable in these two places; (6) they doubted if any H-bomb would be made small enough to be carried in a plane, and, accordingly, thought it unwise to sacrifice possible strengthening of our defense response where it was urgently needed (on land) for a possibly unobtainable increment of power to our defense response in an area (strategic bombing) where it was not urgently needed, especially as it was not yet established that we would make any nuclear response at all to a minor or moderate Soviet aggression.
These considerations, which so deeply disturbed Conant, Oppenheimer, Lilienthal, and others, were ignored by Teller and his allies, who continued to agitate for a crash program for "Super." The strong support which Teller found in the air force, from the joint congressional committee under Senator McMahon, and from William Liscum Borden, executive director of the joint committee, eventually led President Truman to reverse the GAC. On January 31, 1950, the President gave a decision which has frequently been misrepresented: he ordered the AEC to proceed with its efforts to make the H-bomb and at the same time to continue its work for more varied A-weapons, within the framework of a new over-all survey of American strategic plans which was simultaneously ordered from the National Security Council. This triple order, which is usually misrepresented as the single order for a crash H-bomb, effort, required new nuclear reactors.
The order to make an H-bomb was easier to issue than to carry out, because no one knew how to make it. It must be clearly understood that the H-bomb, as tested in November 1952 and subsequently developed, was not based on the lines being followed by Teller in 1946-1951. The true sequence of events has been concealed under enormous waves of ... propaganda which have tried to show that Teller's development of the H-bomb was held up because the Truman Administration was deeply infiltrated with Communists and fellow travelers. This propaganda came fron1 neo-isolationist, Republican, and air-force sources which formed a tacit alliance to discredit the Democratic administrations of 1933-1953— "Twenty Years of Treason," as they called it.
The chronology here is of some importance. Klaus Fuchs confessed to atomic espionage in England on January 27th; President Truman ordered work on the H-bomb four days later; and McCarthy made his first accusations at Wheeling nine days after that.
One of the reasons the GAC had opposed working on the H-bomb was that such work would jeopardize the production of plutonium and would not overcome the unbalance in our defenses between strategic and tactical forces. On February 24th the Joint Chiefs of Staff demanded that Truman's order to the AEC "to continue" work on the H-bomb be changed into a "crash program." About the same time, the White House ordered the reevaluation of our strategic position by the National Security Council; this led eventually to NSC 68. And, finally, the AEC initiated steps to obtain new nuclear reactors. Work on these, begun in 1951, included a tritium production plant on the Savannah River and two U-235 gaseous-diffusion plants at Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Kentucky. This gave five great nuclear centers, of which the three diffusion plants used 5.8 million kilowatts of electricity, about half the total output of the TVA, and sufficient for the ordinary needs of 32 million persons. In 1960 this electricity cost over a quarter of a billion dollars, and the total cost of nuclear explosives was running at $2 billion a year.
The method pursued to achieve a thermonuclear explosion up to June 1951, by fusing tritium and deuterium into helium, was possible as a scientific experiment, and was achieved at the beautiful atoll of Eniwetok in April 1951. But this method could not be used for a bomb, since the whole mechanism had to be enclosed in a complex refrigerator the size of a small house. The problem of the bomb was to get the hydrogen isotope particles close enough together so that they would fuse. This could be done at the almost unobtainable temperatures over 400 million degrees. It could be done at lower temperatures if the particles were already close together, as they would be when very cold. As hydrogen gets colder, it liquefies at—423ฐ below zero Fahrenheit, but it is very difficult to keep it that cold. It can be kept at the temperature of liquid air,—414ฐ F., by immersing it in this, but at that temperature, 9ฐ higher than its own vaporizing point, hydrogen will stay liquid only if it is under pressure of about 2,700 pounds per square inch..
The successful hydrogen fusion at Eniwetok in April, 195 1, was achieved with a very small quantity of tritium and deuterium held at these fantastic conditions, then suddenly exposed to the 100-million-degree blast of an exploding A-bomb. The additional energy released by the fusing hydrogen was so small that it was not noticeable to eyewitnesses, but could be inferred from the electronic recording apparatus. Thus it would be a mistake to call this explosion, known as Operation Greenhouse, an H-bomb. As the AEC would say, it was "a thermonuclear device."
The successful way to the thermonuclear bomb emerged from a suggestion made to Teller in February 1951 by a brilliant young Polish mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam. Teller presented the idea, as developed by himself and his assistant Frederic de Hoffman, to a meeting of the GAC held at the Institute for Advanced Study on June 19-20, 1951. Everyone present realized that the problem was solved. As Oppenheimer said, "It was sweet." Briefly, the idea was to merge the two separate operations of making tritium out of lithium and fusing the tritium with deuterium into a single operation as a bomb. The feasibility of this new plan was tested in a successful thermonuclear explosion (called "Mike”) as part of the tests of Operation Ivy at Eniwetok on November 1, 1952. This produced a blast equal to about lo million tons of TNT, creating a fireball 3 ฝ miles wide, whose heat was felt 30 miles away, and which completely destroyed the small islet on which it occurred, leaving a hole in the lagoon 175 feet deep and a mile wide. But this was not a bomb, since the mechanism weighed 65 tons and filled a cubical box 25 feet on each edge.
The great significance of the thermonuclear bomb was that, unlike the A-bomb, it could be made of limitless power. An A-bomb explosion was measured in thousands of tons of TNT (kilotons) and could be made up to a few hundred kilotons in power. The thermonuclear bomb had to be measured in millions of tons of TNT (megatons) and had no limit on its size.
The world's third thermonuclear explosion was a shocker, exploded by the Russians on August 12, 1953, and revealed to the world by American atmosphere-testing devices. It may have been dropped from a plane; if so, the Russians were far in advance of us, since we did not achieve a droppable bomb until May 21, 1956. In that interval we exploded, at Bikini on March 1, 1954, our first real thermonuclear bomb. It was a horrifying device, a triple-stage fission-fusion-fission bomb which spread death-dealing radioactive contamination over more than 8,000 square miles of the Pacific and injurious radiation over much of the world.
This first American thermonuclear bomb had a trigger of two A-bombs exploded simultaneously to detonate a second stage consisting of Lithium-6 deuteride. This latter was a compound of a lithium isotope of mass 6 (which makes up about one-fifteenth of natural lithium and has a nucleus of three protons with three neutrons) and of heavy Hydrogen-2. This compound, a white crystalline substance, was surrounded with a shiny sphere of almost a ton of metallic natural uranium. The neutrons from the A-bomb trigger, blasting through the lithium deuterium crystals, split the Lithium-6 into helium and tritium ( Hydrogen-3); in a tremendous explosion, the latter then fused with the deuterium to make helium, at the same time emitting a great shower of extra neutrons which split the surrounding natural uranium in a super-atomic fission holocaust. The whole process occurred almost instantaneously, with a shattering blast equal to 18,000,000 tons of TNT. With the blast was released a vast quantity of deadly radioactive isotopes, including the dangerous Strontium-90, which, like calcium, is readily absorbed into human bones, where its deadly radiations may easily engender cancer.
The test of this inhuman weapon (called "Bravo") was announced to the world by the AEC as the test of an H-bomb (it was really a U-bomb, or a "fission-fusion-fission bomb"), and for almost a year (until February 15, 1955) its real nature was concealed by the AEC, apparently at the insistence of the new Republican chairman, Lewis L. Strauss. Secrecy from Strauss left the world with two mistaken ideas: (1) that the successful thermonuclear bomb was simply an H-bomb and (2) that it was, accordingly, made on the lines Teller had been following in 1945-1951. From these errors partisan inference could conclude that our delay in achieving an H-bomb resulted from the restraints placed on Teller's work during the Truman Administration. This, of course, was not believed by the atomic scientists, but seemed convincing to many well-informed persons from the strange fact that William L. Laurence, science editor of The New York Times, spread these two mistaken ideas.
As the best-known scientific journalist in America, Laurence's stories were accepted as true by the ordinary well-informed public (though not by scientists). Laurence, the only newspaper reporter allowed to see the test at Alamagordo or the nuclear explosion on Japan, wrote a book on the H-bomb, which he called The Hell Bomb, in 1950. It was full of misleading ideas, forgivable at that date, but totally erroneous in following years, when the book continued to be read. It stated that the H-bomb would be exploded by direct fusion of deuterium and tritium, a method which it attributed to Teller. Years later, in The New York Times, Laurence still insisted that the test of March, 1954, was not a fission-fusion-fission (F-F-F-bomb) but was simply a fission-fusion H-bomb and not a U-bomb. This version of "Bravo" apparently originated with Strauss, who denied that "Bravo" was a U-bomb, and explained the surprisingly large noxious fallout as a consequence of irradiation of the coral reef on which the bomb exploded. This story entrenched in the public mind that Teller was the "Father of the H-bomb," that he had been held back to the injury of American security by Soviet sympathizers during the Truman Administration, and that there was some basis for the AEC condemnation of Oppenheimer as a security risk in June 1954. Behind much of this was the air force, allied to Teller, Laurence, and Strauss, and very opposed to Oppenheimer. This opposition arose because of Oppenheimer's work for diversification of weapons (which was regarded by the air force as a treasonable diversion of both money and nuclear materials from it to the other services) and for his efforts to get smaller nuclear warheads. These latter paved the way for long-range missiles, for tactical nuclear weapons, and for the Polaris nuclear submarine which supplanted the air force manned bombers and, by the middle 1960'S, threatened to shift America's primary deterrence of Soviet aggression from SAC to the navy.
It should be recorded that Teller had little to do with the actual making of the successful thermonuclear bomb. As usual, he was very restless and felt hampered at Los Alamos in 1951 and spent most of his time lobbying with the air force and the Radiation Laboratory trying to get a new second-weapons laboratory of his own. To free himself for this activity, he left Los Alamos in November 1951. When the AEC refused to establish a second laboratory, Teller went to the air force and obtained its support for a second-weapons laboratory, the so-called Livermore Laboratory attached to E. O. Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, California. This was established in July 1952. All the thermonuclear tests and the final H-bomb which we have mentioned were achievements of Los Alamos, whose operations, under Norris Bradbury, Teller disapproved. Teller himself was present at none of the tests of the lithium bomb, and his Livermore Laboratory did not participate in the tests.
None of this was in fact as it was built up in public opinion in the period 1951-1955. The public record on these matters was rectified in 1955 by Teller, by Laurence, and by the AEC, but by that time Oppenheimer had been condemned, the Republicans were in office, and the story of subversion in the American government had become an established American myth, along with the thermonuclear bomb as a hydrogen bomb and Teller as its father.
These myths were, of course, not believed by the nuclear scientists, a fact that helped to intensify the suspicion the ... Right held for them and for all educated people. The truth about "Bravo" had been revealed to the nuclear scientists of the world, including the Russians, almost immediately after the test and in a most dramatic fashion.
Shortly after the "Bravo" blast at Bikini, a small Japanese fishing boat, The Lucky Dragon, was caught in the edge of the lethal radiations from the test. It was, indeed a lucky Dragon for only one of the crew subsequently died, although the rest were sick for months. The vessel was ninety miles east of the blast, but, had it been only ten miles farther south, all the crew would have died horrible deaths. Two weeks after the blast, when the doomed vessel reached Japan, Professor Kenjiro Kimura, the first discoverer of Uranium-237, found this rare isotope in the fallout ash all over The Lucky Dragon. The U-237 could have come only from fission of U-239. This discovery, published in Japanese in August 1954, revealed that "Bravo" had been a gigantic U-bomb whose deadly nature resided more in its radioactive fallout than in its heat and blast.
Under the tight blanket of the secrecy of Strauss, the scientists who knew asked themselves: Why did the AEC make such a "dirty" bomb? Why was it all kept such a secret? The answer now seems clear: the Soviet H-bomb explosion of August 1953 showed that the Russians were ahead of us in the H-bomb race. This the AEC could not publicly admit. This disadvantage had to be overcome as rapidly as possible, and the best way to do so was to shift from blast warfare to radioactivity warfare. The movement in this direction, which was fortunately only temporary (1953-1956), was intensified by the early, and very secret, stages of the missile race. Late in 1952, immediately following the test of "Mike," John von Neumann headed a committee which recommended an intensified effort to develop a long-range missile (ICBM). At that time the American effort in missiles was restricted very largely to variations of the German V-2 weapon and to lesser rockets such as Aerobee and Wac Corporal. The new effort soon showed that longer range would be easier to achieve than greater accuracy and that it would be very difficult to build a missile which could be depended upon to hit within ten miles of target. At such a distance, blast, even at ten megatons, would do little damage, and if such targets were to be knocked out, this would have to be done by a spreading cloud of radioactive fallout and not by the blast. Hence the U-bomb.
The U-bomb, concealed from public view by secrecy and by misleading statements from AEC, usually from Strauss, remained the weapon of last resort in the American arsenal throughout the Dulles era. The launching of the first "Polaris" submarine in January 1954, six weeks before "Bravo," did not change this situation. The first American test of an airdrop lithium bomb in May 1956 was a delayed fall from a B-52 jet bomber at 55,000 feet; it exploded at 15,000 feet in a four-mile-wide fireball, but was almost an equal distance off its target.
To prepare public opinion to accept use of the U-bomb, if it became necessary, Strauss sponsored a study of radioactive fallout whose conclusion was prejudged by calling it "Project Sunshine." By selective release of some evidence and strict secrecy of other information, the Strauss group tried to establish in public opinion that there was no real danger to anyone from nuclear fallout even in all-out nuclear war. This gave rise to a controversy between the scientists of the BAS group, led by Ralph E. Lapp, and the Eisenhower Administration, led by Strauss, on the nature and danger of fallout and of nuclear warfare in general.
As we shall see in a moment, the Eisenhower government through Dulles's doctrine of "massive retaliation," enunciated in January 1954, was so deeply committed to nuclear warfare that it could not permit the growth of a public opinion which would refuse to accept the use of nuclear weapons because of objections to the danger of fallout to neutrals and noncombatants. In this struggle Strauss, Dulles, and Teller were supported by the air force, which feared and resented the efforts of the Oppenheimer group to shift the defense expenditures over a much wider range than that of massive retaliation. They were particularly alarmed by the efforts of Oppenheimer, Lee DuBridge, and others to spend money on anti-air defenses. By 1953 this struggle became so intense that the supporters of the air force and of massive retaliation decided they must destroy the public image and public career of Oppenheimer, to influence public opinion and to deter other scientists of his view from opposition to the new Republican-air-force party line.
The end of the American nuclear monopoly in late 1950 made necessary a reopening of the strategic debate which had been stabilized on the Truman doctrine of "containment" in 1947. "Containment" strategy was based on a strategic balance between Soviet mass armies and the American nuclear monopoly, in which each of these would deter use of the other, thus establishing an umbrella under which the United States could use its economic power to win the Cold War. The strategic balance had been established as the "Truman Doctrine" early in 1947 and had been followed by the containment weapon, in aid to Greece and Turkey and, above all, by the Marshall Plan. This policy in the years 1947-1950 won numerous victories for the West, all along the Soviet-bloc periphery and especially in West Germany and in Japan, both of which became solidly attached to the West. The major failure, justified as inevitable in terms of the magnitude of the problem and the resources available, was the loss of China to the Soviet bloc, but this was generally accepted by the supporters of containment on the double ground that the available resources must go to Europe (as more important than China) and that China would never be a strong or dependable satellite of Russia.
This doctrine of containment, by depriving each side of its strongest weapon (the Soviet mass army and the American SAC force) tended to neutralize these and forced each side into supplementary strategic plans. On the Soviet side, these new plans involved the use of nibbling tactics by its satellites. On the American side, these new plans involved the development of a balanced and flexible defensive posture based on all services and weapons.
The new Soviet plans required a diversion of American aims from the Soviet Union itself to its periphery and to its satellites. They also involved keeping aggression below the level which would trigger a SAC retaliation. This level was much higher for a satellite state than for the Soviet Union itself. In fact, while almost any military aggression by the USSR might trigger a SAC nuclear strike in return, almost no aggression by a satellite (especially a lesser satellite) would do so. The areas in which such indirect adventures by the USSR might take place were obvious: the Near East and the Far East. In both of these areas the ineptness of American policy made the Soviet task fairly easy.
The American response to this shift in Soviet strategy appeared, not as a response to an overt manifestation of Soviet policy, but as a response to "Joe 1." Moreover, it was not a Defense Department or JCS response, but was sponsored and pushed through by the policy planning staff of the State Department under Paul Nitze. It arose from the needs of NATO as a defensive force against Russia, and advocated a policy very similar to that desired by Oppenheimer and the GAC (increased emphasis on a balanced defense with strengthened ground forces, including those of our allies, and rapid development of tactical nuclear weapons and a tactical air-force role). This effort, which would have required an increase in the defense budget from the 1950 figure of $13 billion to about $35 billion, was accepted in April 1950 by the National Security Council as directive NSC 68, but with a cost figure of only $18 billion a year. The dominant thought of NSC 68 was the expectation of a strategic nuclear stalemate between the United States and the USSR by 1954 and the necessity of preparing for methods of defense, other than massive bombing, to resist Soviet aggression. Naturally, this directive was abhorrent to the "Big Bomber Boys." The extraordinary thing is that their resistance was successful, and NSC 68 was replaced by "massive retaliation" and a new directive, the so-called NSC 162, in October 1953, in spite of all the lessons of the Korean War of 1950-1953, which the air force and the Eisenhower Administration jointly ignored.
Chapter 67: The Korean War and Its Aftermath, 1950-1954
The emphasis by the American armed forces on nuclear retaliation as their chief response to Communist aggression anywhere in the world made it necessary to draw a defense perimeter over which such aggression would trigger retaliation from us. Such a boundary had been established in Europe by the military occupation forces and NATO, but, at the end of 1949, was still unspecified in the Far East because of the recent victory of the Communists in China. At the insistence of the military leaders, especially General MacArthur, that perimeter was drawn to exclude Korea, Formosa, and mainland China; accordingly, all American forces had been evacuated from South Korea in June 1949. In March of that year, MacArthur publicly stated, "Our defense line runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia. It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu archipelago which includes its broad main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain to Alaska."
The MacArthur defense perimeter in the Far East was accepted by Secretary of State Acheson in a speech on January 12, 1950, but not at all in the sense in which partisan Republicans attacked it later. Acheson specifically stated that America's guarantee was given only to areas east of that line but that American power might be used to the west of it where independent nations must first seek their security on their own initiative and the organized security system of the United Nations. To Acheson, therefore, the boundary was not between areas we would defend and those we would not defend, but between those we would defend unilaterally and those we would defend collectively.
However, it seems clear that in private, by the end of 1949, all parts of the Administration in Washington looked forward to the fall of Formosa, the complete disappearance of Chiang Kai-shek, the recognition of Red China and its admission to the United Nations, as preliminaries to an intensive diplomatic effort to exploit the split between Soviet Russia and Communist China which was regarded as inevitable. This vision of Chinese "Titoism" never became public policy, but on October, 12, 1949, after the JCS under Eisenhower voted that Formosa was not of sufficient strategic importance to warrant its occupation by American troops, the three defense departments and the Department of State agreed unanimously that Formosa would be conquered by Red China by the end of 1950.
Whatever merits there may have been in our Far Eastern defense perimeter and its implications for Formosa, it clearly left Korea in an ambiguous position. The Soviet Union interpreted this ambiguity to mean that the United States would allow South Korea to be conquered by North Korea, just as Red China, about the same time, assumed that the United States would permit it to conquer Formosa. Instead, when Russia, through its satellite, North Korea, sought to take Korea before Red China had taken Formosa, this gave rise to an American counteraction which prevented either aggressor from getting its aim..
There can be little doubt that [key leaders of] the United States, along with the rest of the world, underestimated the almost insanely aggressive nature of Red China. From 1949 onward, this newly established regime tried to trite every friendly hand which tried to lead it into the community of established nations. It made it perfectly clear to all its neighbors in Asia that its policies would be based on hatred for any country which did not break with the United States and line up with the Soviet Union. Even India, which leaned over backward to be friendly, was upbraided almost daily in extravagant insults of which one of the more moderate was a charge that Nehru was "the running dog of British-American imperialists." When Great Britain offered diplomatic recognition in January 1950, it was rebuffed.
Nor was this aggressive behavior only verbal. In spite of the devastation and economic dislocation of the Civil War, Red Chinese plans for aggression continued. The general level of Chinese production in 1949 was about half what it had been in 1942, and the country clearly needed an interval to recuperate, but the budget for 1950 allotted 40 percent of its funds for the armed services, imposed a tax of 20 percent on peasant agricultural incomes, and anticipated a deficit of nearly 20 percent to be covered by printing paper money. Its declared immediate plans included the conquest of Hainan Island, Formosa, and Tibet. Hainan was conquered in April 1950, and the buildup against Formosa continued for at least two months more. About 20,000 Koreans in the Chinese forces were detached and returned to North Korea, where they joined the armed forces of the People's Republic of Korea (PRK, that is, North Korea Communist Republic). This may have been done at Russia's request.
On June 25, 1950, after a two-hour artillery bombardment, 60,000 North Koreans, led by a hundred Soviet tanks, crossed the 38th parallel and flung themselves on 90,000 lightly armed and already dis-spirited South Korean troops. The latter, lacking tanks, planes, or heavy artillery, reeled backward to the south and did not stop until August 6th, when they finally made a stand before Pusan in the southeast corner of the Korean Peninsula. In this retreat the ROK troops suffered 50,000 casualties in the first month..
For forty-eight hours after the Korean attack, the world hesitated, awaiting America's reaction. On June 26, 1950, the fifth birthday of the United Nations, many feared a "Munich," leading to the collapse of the whole United Nations security system at its first major challenge. Truman's reaction, however, was decisive. He immediately committed American air and sea forces in the area south of 38ฐ, and demanded a UN condemnation of the aggression. Thus, for the first time in history, a world organization voted to use collective force to stop armed aggression. This was possible because the North Korean attack occurred at a time when the Soviet delegation was absent from the United Nations Security Council, boycotting it in protest at the presence of the delegation from Nationalist China. Accordingly, the much-used Soviet veto was unavailable. On June 27, 1950, the Security Council, with Yugoslavia casting the only opposing vote, condemned the aggression and asked its members to give assistance to South Korea. On the same day President Truman ordered American forces into action and sent the United States Seventh Fleet to neutralize the Formosa Strait, where the Red Chinese armies were still poised for their invasion of Formosa. This rapid response won general approval within the United States, even from those who later condemned and opposed it. One of these was Senator Taft, who prefaced his temporary approval by charging that all the troubles in the far East arose from the Democrats' "sympathetic acceptance of Communism" and that the North Korean attack was in response to the invitation contained in Acheson's speech of January r 2th: "Is it any wonder that the Korean Communists took us at the word given by the Secretary of State?" He demanded Acheson's immediate resignation, a cry which continued, almost uninterruptedly, over the next two and a half years.
The President's order for ground forces to rescue the South Koreans w as not easy to carry out. Air-force success in its budget struggles with the other services and the general budget cutting by the Republican Eightieth Congress (January 1947-January 1949) had left the ground forces with only ten army and two Marine Corps divisions, all seriously undermanned. The four occupation divisions in the Far East, which had to respond to the Korean attack, had a total of only 25 infantry battalions, instead of the 36 allotted. These, and other units, had to be brought up to strength by calling up reservists. Nevertheless, one division from Japan reached Korea by July 9th, a second by July 12th, and a third on July 18th.
The intervention of American forces in Korea was undoubtedly a great shock to the Communists, especially as the North Korean attack was a Soviet operation, while the American landing directly threatened the security of Red China. Coordination between the two Communist Powers was far from perfect and was certainly slow. The Red Chinese had no desire to see American forces reestablished on the Asiastic mainland or in occupation of all Korea up to the Chinese boundary along the Yalu River; on the other hand, they had no desire to get into a war with the United States to prevent this undesired consequence of what was really a Moscow operation, especially as Soviet support was very remote, at the farther end of a long single-track railway across Siberia. Nevertheless, the Red Chinese suspended their attack on Formosa and, in the course of July, assembled several hundred thousand troops in northeast China, considerably withdrawn from the Yalu.
For weeks the successful advance of the North Koreans gave the Chinese hope that they need do nothing. The South Koreans were quickly hurled down to the southeastern corner of the country at Pusan, and for several weeks were on the verge of being pushed into the sea. Their line held, however, and American forces began to assemble in the protected beachhead.
The United States was as cager as the Chinese to avoid a direct clash between the two countries, because such a clash could easily build up into a major war in the Far East, leaving Russia free to do its will in Europe. Washington was fearful that Chiang Kai-shek, since he could not reconquer China himself and hoped America would do it for him, might seek to precipitate such a war by making an attack from Formosa on mainland China. There was also a strong chance that MacArthur might encourage or allow Chiang to do so because that haughty general agreed with Chiang that Europe was of no importance and that the Far East should be the primary, almost the only, area of operations for American foreign policy. He had bitterly opposed the "Germany First" strategy throughout World War II and had begrudged men or supplies sent there on the grounds that these diversions delayed his triumphant return to the Philippines. As the war drew to its close, he had said: "Europe is a dying system. It is worn out and run down and will become an economic and industrial hegemony of Soviet Russia.... The lands touching the Pacific with their billions of inhabitants will determine the course of history for the next ten thousand years."
These views were shared by the ... isolationist groups of the Republican Party with whom MacArthur had been in close touch for much of his life and to whom he owed some of his success. In American politics these groups had power to do considerable damage because of their influence on the Republican congressional party and the fact that the bipartisan foreign policy under Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, which operated elsewhere in the world, did not exist in regard to the Far East. The danger of any Chiang-MacArthur cooperation to build the Korean action up into a major war was intensified by the fact that this would be opposed by the United Nations and by our allies, neither of whom was considered important by the neo-isolationists or by MacArthur, but whom the Truman Administration refused to alienate unnecessarily because they were essential, as bases, in the containment of Russia.
In the first two weeks of August, another American division and parts of other units, including a Marine Corps brigade, landed at Pusan. By the middle of the month, that enclave was entrenched, and a counteroffensive to drive the North Korean forces back to the 38th parallel was being prepared. At that point MacArthur made a brilliant suggestion: To avoid the hard push up the peninsula, he proposed landing two American divisions at Inchon, halfway up the west side of Korea, fifty miles south of the 38th parallel and only 25 miles from Seoul, the capital. Everything was adverse to the plan, unless there was complete tactical surprise. Fortunately, this was achieved, a rather unexpected event in the East. Marine units landed at Inchon from the sea on September Isth and found little opposition. On September 22nd they captured Seoul and, six days later, were joined by the main United Nations offensive driving up the peninsula from Pusan. About half the PRK forces were captured in the bag, while the rest fled northward across the 38th parallel into North Korea. That frontier was reached by the UN forces as the month ended.
The Red Chinese decision to intervene in North Korea was made about the third week in August and began on October 15th, nine days after American troops crossed the 38th parallel into North Korea. Such an intervention was almost inevitable, as Red China could hardly be expected to allow the buffer North Korean state to be destroyed and American troops to occupy the line of the Yalu without taking some steps to protect its own security. China would have welcomed the restoration of the boundary along the 38th parallel, which Russia had so carelessly destroyed by instigating the PRK attack in June. By October they feared that the United States was about to use the Korean area as a base for a general war on China. In such a war, the Chinese expected to become the target of A-bombs, but believed that they could survive if they could wipe out the United Nations Korean base for ground operations. Accordingly, as soon as it became clear that American forces would continue past the 38th parallel to the Yalu, the Chinese intervened, not to restore the 38th parallel frontier, but to clear the United Nations forces from Asia completely.
The Chinese intervention in Korea, which began on October 15, 1950, was a much greater surprise than Inchon, and gave rise to one of the most bitter controversies in American political history, the so-called Truman MacArthur controversy. The dispute arose fron1 the fact that MacArthur did not accept his government's strategic and political plans, and systematically sought to undermine and redirect them, while in constant communication with the press and with the leaders of the opposition party for this purpose.
The Truman Administration, after the victory at Inchon, did not intend to stop at the 38th parallel, and hoped to reunite the country under the Seoul government. It is probable that this alone triggered the Chinese intervention, but, to reduce that possibility, Washington set certain restrictions on MacArthur's actions which he soon sought to evade. Washington and Tokyo both knew that the Chinese had about 300,000 troops ready for action in Manchuria north of the Yalu and that neither Russia nor China was attempting to reequip the shattered North Korean forces. To discourage any Chinese intervention, the White House forbade any attack by Chiang on the Chinese coast, any naval blockade of China itself (Korea, of course, was blockaded), or any attack on China or Siberia north of the Yalu, or the use of non-Korean troops in the immediate vicinity of the Yalu as the conquest of North Korea was completed.
On October 9, 1950, two of MacArthur's planes attacked a Russian air base sixty-two miles inside Russian territory and only eighteen miles from Vladivostok. To make certain that MacArthur understood the reasons for these restrictions, President Truman the next day instructed MacArthur to meet him at Wake Island on October 15th. The two leaders had a lengthy discussion, in which these restrictions were reiterated, but within two months of his return to Japan, MacArthur recommenced his almost daily interviews and letters agitating against these limits.
At Wake Island, General MacArthur assured President Truman that any Chinese intervention into Korea would be most unlikely, and, in any case, would be on a scale which could he handled. Even as he spoke, the first Chinese units were already crossing the Yalu River from Manchuria into North Korea. These engaged in combat on October 26th, and by October 30th some had been captured. MacArthur continued to deny that any significant Chinese intervention was present or likely, and tried to discourage it by a vigorous attack northward against the North Korean remnants. Because of lack of American troops for an attack across the width of the peninsula, he divided his forces into two separate attacks on either side of the peninsula with no direct liaison between the two where a considerable gap was left. Moreover, MacArthur on October 24th canceled the restrictions on use of non-Korean forces close to the Chinese and Russian borders. His special communique of November 5th which opened his northward offensive spoke of it as one which would for "all practical purposes end the war" and bring the United Nations forces "home by Christmas."
Until November 26th the MacArthur offensive rolled northward against only moderate resistance, but, just as it reached the Yalu frontier at some points, a gigantic Chinese offensive of 33 divisions counterattacked into the gap between the two UN wings.
MacArthur's communique of November 28th spoke of the Chinese attack as a "new war," which "has shattered the high hopes we entertained that the intervention of the Chinese was only of a token nature on a volunteer and individual basis...." At once he began an intensive propaganda campaign both to obtain his earlier aims for direct attacks on coastal China and air attacks on interior points and to rewrite the history of the preceding month so that his own actions would seem to be premeditated and skilled ripostes to Chinese plans. In fact, his public statement of November 28th was in sharp contrast with his private message to Washington almost four weeks earlier which estimated the Chinese forces across the Yalu as half a million men in 56 regular army divisions supported by 370,000 district security forces....
The Chinese attack in MacArthur's mind reduced the American situation in the Far East to a simple choice between two extreme alternatives: either all-out war on China, and possibly Russia, to destroy world Communism once for all or the immediate evacuation of our forces from Korea. The former would have given the Soviet Union a free hand in Europe; the latter would have made it impossible for us to obtain resistance against Communist nibbling from any small states or even from our greater allies elsewhere in the world and would have destroyed our prestige in Asia and Africa. [Neither of these two option are true. General Douglas MacArthur was right. He was one of the three greatest military leaders in American history. The other two great military leaders were General George Washington and General George Patton. These two military genius’ would have ended the war much earlier and they would have eliminated communism on earth if the American people and members of Congress has supported them.] A rapid visit by Generals J. Lawton Collins and Hoyt S. Vandenberg to Korea in January 12-17, 1951, convinced them that the middle alternative, which was still Washington's policy, namely, to maintain the independence of South Korea, was still possible.
Rather than accept this alternative, MacArthur intensified his press barrage against the Administration, as well as his numerous messages to isolationist Republican politicians in Washington. A directive of December which ordered him to clear his public statements on foreign and military policy with the respective departments was violated, for some months, with impunity. The congressional elections of 1950 had been disastrous to Administration supporters and had been successful for isolationists of both parties, with the Administration's majority in both Houses cut almost to nothing.
Senator Taft, now unchallenged leader of the isolationist bloc, argued that Governor Dewey's "internationalist" approach had lost the presidential election of 1948 and that his own wholesale opposition to the Administration on an isolationist basis had been victorious in 1950 and would win the Presidency (apparently for himself) in 1952. On this basis a powerful attack was built up against Secretary of State Acheson, against NATO and other American commitments in Europe, and against foreign aid or any efforts to extend America's ground forces. Truman's efforts to send four divisions to Europe and to make General Eisenhower Supreme Commander of NATO were violently opposed, by Taft (who had voted against ratification of NATO) and by Senator Wherry, the Republican floor leader. Every effort was made to reduce the defense of the United States to a simple matter of control of the air and the oceans without need for overseas forces or overseas allies. All this, of course, was simply a refusal to face twentieth-century conditions by men with nineteenth-century ideas, and gave great support to MacArthur's insubordination..
This insubordination and the general's alliance with the Republican opposition in the Congress was brought to a head on April 5, 1951, when the House Republican Leader, Joseph Martin, read to the Congress a letter from MacArthur which was a broad-gauged propagandist attack on the Truman Administration's policies in the Far East. Truman used this as an excuse to remove MacArthur, although his real reason was the general's sabotage of American and British efforts to negotiate an end of the war along the 38th parallel.
Five days after the MacArthur-Martin letter had been read in Congress, Truman removed the general from all his commands in the Far East. This was used by the isolationist opposition for a great triumphal homecoming for MacArthur. The Republican leaders spoke publicly of impeaching the President; Senator Nixon wanted congressional censure of the President and restoration of MacArthur to his commands, since his removal was "appeasement of World Communism." McCarthy said the President had made the decision while he was drunk, while Senator William Jenner said from the Senate floor: "This country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. We must cut this whole cancerous conspiracy out of our Government at once. Our only choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction." Sentiments similar to these were frequent, both in public and in private, for the next few years.
MacArthur's return to the United States after an absence of almost fifteen years was built up into an amazing display of popular hysteria. On landing at San Francisco he was greeted by half a million people in one of the greatest traffic jams in the city's history. At Washington's airport, after midnight on April 19th, the crowds broke out of control. That afternoon, before a joint session of Congress and over a nationwide television broadcast, he made a speech which ranged from old-fashioned eloquence to pure ham. It ended on pathos: "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-by." This was followed by a parade in Washington before 250,000 spectators, but the real climax was reached in New York, the following day, when, for six and a half hours, more than seven million people, spread over a nineteen-mile parade route, cheered themselves hoarse over the general. This was twice the crowd which had seen Eisenhower's return from Europe after the defeat of Germany in 1945.
The general did not fade away immediately. By May he was back in Washington as star witness for the prosecution in a congressional investigation into the country's Far East policies. Only an infinitesimal fraction of those svl1o had cheered the general so heartily two weeks before paid any attention to the hearings. This was unfortunate. MacArthur seriously maintained that his policies could lead to the total defeat of Communist China, without any increase in ground forces, simply by naval and economic blockade of China, by air attack on Chinese industry, and by "lifting the wraps" off Chiang Kai-shek. On this basis he promised immediate victory with a minimum of risk and casualties. The Administration's policy, he insisted, was not victory but "to go on indecisively fighting with no mission for the troops except to resist and fight . . . a continued and indefinite extension of bloodshed."
Subsequent testimony from others, including the country's leading military experts and the Joint Chiefs of Staff ... rejected MacArthur's ideas as unrealistic and impossible: the bombing of Manchuria alone would take twice as many bombers as SAC had available; bombing of Chinese industry would not deprive the Chinese of military supplies, as their arsenals were in the Soviet Union; an economic and naval blockade could not seriously injure a country as self-sufficient as China, with an open land frontier, and could not be effective at all unless active military combat on the ground increased consumption rates; efforts to adopt these policies would alienate the United States from its allies and the United Nations and would jeopardize the whole anti-Soviet position in Europe. [Of course, this is not true. The Administration was simply carrying out the secret agreements made at Yalta by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. Of course, these secret agreements were unknown to the American people and most members of Congress.]
Few Americans followed the arguments to this point, but MacArthur had given the opposition a new war cry: "In war there is no substitute for victory." This slogan, in which neither war nor victory was defined, was used as a weapon by the neo-isolationists, partisan Republicans, and ... Right for more than a decade, although by 1960 it had been shortened to the charge that the Democrats favored a "No-win policy." After a decade of reiteration, many persons seriously believed that it was impossible to stop Communism without all-out nuclear war and that continued survival, instead of mutual destruction, could not possibly be regarded as winning! Peace had become appeasement.
These neo-isolationist policies ... exerted great pressure on the last two years of the Truman Administration, driving it toward an increasingly unrealistic course. In 1951 Senator Taft was advocating a three-fold program of reduced military preparedness, reduced government expenditures, and a more aggressive foreign policy in the Far East. This combination could be supported only by assuming a number of things which were not true. One of these was that Chiang Kai-shek's regime on Formosa was still a great Power and that Red China, on the other hand, was on the verge of collapse and was, indeed, so weakened that Chiang would be enthusiastically welcomed back if he merely landed on the mainland. This unrealistic version of the present could be sustained only by an equally unrealistic version of the past, that the Red victory in China was the inevitable consequence of opposition to Chiang by the Democratic Administrations of Roosevelt and Truman and that this opposition was caused by the existence within the Administrations of Communists and Communist sympathizers from the top down. Since almost all experts, including scientists, area and subject experts, and military men, did not accept this version, either of the past or the present, all experts were regarded as suspect and insulted or ignored. In fact, educated or thoughtful men were generally rejected. Instead, emphasis was placed on "practical men," defined as those who "had met a payroll or carried a precinct." This admitted to the charmed circle businessmen and politicians of local stature (like Senator Wherry). [Of course subsequent history and publication of secret government documents have substantiated that China was deliberately lost to the communists.]
On the whole, the neo-isolationist discontent was a revolt of the ignorant [deliberately uninformed] against the informed or educated, of the nineteenth century against the insoluble problems of the twentieth, of the Midwest of Tom Sawyer against the cosmopolitan East of J. P. Morgan and Company, of old Siwash against Harvard, of the Chicago Tribune against the Washington Post or The New York Times, of simple absolutes against complex relativisms, of immediate final solutions against long-range partial alleviations, of frontier activism against European thought, a rejection, out of hand, of all the complexities of life which had arisen since 1915 in favor of a nostalgic return to the simplicities of 1905, and above all a desire to get back to the inexpensive, thoughtless, and irresponsible international security of 1880.
This ... impulse swept over the United States in a great wave in the years 1948-1955, supported by hundreds of thousands of self-seeking individuals, especially peddlers of publicity and propaganda, and financed no longer by the relatively tied-up funds of ... Wall Street international finance, but by its successors, the freely available winnings of self-financing industrial profits from such new industrial activities as air power, electronics, chemicals, light metals, or natural gas, which, although utterly dependent on government spending or government-protected exploitation of limited natural resources (such as uranium or oil), pretended to themselves and their listeners that their affluence was entirely due to their own cleverness. At the head of this list were the new millionaires, led by the Texas and southwest oil and natural-gas plungers, whose fortunes were based on tricky tax provisions and government-subsidized transportation systems.
This shift occurred on all levels from changing tastes in newspaper comic strips (from "Mutt and Jeff" or "Bringing Up Father" to "Steve Canyon" or "Little Orphan Annie"), to profound changes in the power nexus of the "American Establishment." lt was evident in the decline of J. P. Morgan itself, from its deeply anonymous status as a partnership (founded in 1861) to its transformation into an incorporated public company in 1940 and its final disappearance by absorption into its chief banking subsidiary, the Guaranty Trust Company, in 1959. Incorporation reflected the need to escape the incidence of the inheritance tax, while its final disappearance was based on the relative decrease in large security flotations in contrast to the great increase in industrial self-financing (best represented by du Pont and its long-time subsidiary General Motors, or by Ford).
The less obvious implications of this shift were illustrated in a story which passed through Ivy League circles in 1948 in connection with the choice of a new president for Columbia University. This, of all universities, had been the one closest to J. P. Morgan and Company, and its president, Nicholas Murray Butler, was Morgan's chief spokesman from ivied halls. He had been chosen under Morgan influence, but the events of 1930-1948 which so weakened Morgan in the economic system also weakened his influence on the board of trustees of Columbia, until it became evident that Morgan did not have the votes to elect a successor. However, Morgan (that is, Tom Lamont) did have the votes to preserve the status quo and, accordingly, President Butler was kept in his position until he was long past his physical ability to carry on its functions. Finally, he had to retire. Even then Lamont and his allies were able to prevent choice of a successor, and postponed it, making the university treasurer acting-president, in the hope that a favorable change in the board of trustees might make it possible for Morgan, once again, to name a Columbia president.
F ate decreed otherwise, for Lamont died in 1948 and, shortly afterward, a committee of trustees under Thomas Watson of International Business Machines was empowered to seek a new president. This was not an area in which the genius of IBM was at his most effective. While on a business trip to Washington, he confided his problem to a friend who helpfully suggested, "Have you thought of Eisenhower?" By this he meant Milton Eisenhower, then president of Penn State, later president of Johns Hopkins; Watson, who apparently did not think immediately of this lesser-known member of the Eisenhower family, thanked his friend, and began the steps which soon made Dwight Eisenhower, for two unhappy years, president of Columbia.
In the face of the public opinion of 1950-1952, the Truman Administration had to make some concessions to the power of neo-isolationism. The loyalty program to ferret out subversives was established in the government; during the MacArthur hearings of May 1951, Dean Acheson promised that, under no circumstances, would Red China be accepted into the community of nations; aid and support to Chiang was increased; and John Foster Dulles was brought into the State Department. None of these changes helped the Truman Administration's popularity, as was clearly shown in the election of 1952, but they had major repercussions on history. One of these was Dulles's success in obtaining a peace treaty for Japan (September 8, 1951).
Dulles, like the Columbia presidency, was a former Morgan satellite wl1icll had been lost, about the same time and for the same reasons. As a partner in Sullivan and Cromwell, one of the Wall Street legal firms closely associated with Morgan, Dulles operated very much in the Morgan vineyard until the late 1940's. An early advocate of bipartisanship in foreign affairs (a Wall Street specialty), he was first brought into Democratic State Department circles, largely under Morgan sponsorship, in 1945, as adviser to Secretary of State Stettinius at the San Francisco Conference. These associations continued, at various meetings and conferences, mostly at the United Nations and at the four postwar Foreign Ministers' conferences of 1945-1949.
But in 1948 a change occurred when Dulles's naturally exaggerated personal ambition got out of hand at the same time that he drifted out of the Wall Street constellations with which his whole career had been associated. Apparently he decided he could get further on his own, especially by adapting himself to the swelling tide of neo-isolationism. The marks of this change were his appointment to the United States Senate by Governor Dewey of New York in July 1949 and his resignation from Sullivan and Cromwell at that time. In the election of November 1949, Dulles was defeated for the full senatorial term by ax-Governor Herbert Lehman, also of a Wall Street background. In the campaign Dulles tried to portray Lehman as having Communist inclinations and went so far as to say that the election of Lehman would permit the Communists to "chalk up another victory in their struggle to get into office here." [It is important to remember the old Morgan trick of infiltrating both parties in order to guide policies down a preconceived path..]
In retirement after this electoral defeat, Dulles continued his movement toward isolationism and unilateralism, a process which was completed by his article "A Policy of Boldness" in Life magazine May 19, 1952, and in his subsequent efforts to keep President Eisenhower from standing up against McCarthyism. This movement was marked by increasing neglect of Europe and opposition to our chief allies there and increasing concern with the Far East and the curative powers of strategic nuclear bombing..
The Japanese peace treaty was one of the last constructive achievements of Dulles and was reached without support of the Soviet Union, which refused to sign it. Communist China was also excluded. The treaty's chief aim was to end the Pacific war within a larger security structure which bound the previous enemies into a mutual security system. It had three parts: the peace treaty with Japan, which accepted its loss of the already detached areas and islands; the ANZUS Treaty, which allied Australia, New Zealand, and the United States; and a bilateral mutual defense pact between Japan and the United States.
The neo-isolationist surge in American public opinion so paralyzed the freedom of action of the Truman Administration that it was unable to negotiate any settlement of the war in Korea. Every effort at negotiation gave rise to howls of "appeasement' or "treason." Moreover, the Communists, while willing to negotiate, showed no eagerness to make an agreement, with the result that negotiations crawled along for two years in the isolated military quarters at Panmunjon in Korea. The Kremlin was quite willing to keep America's men, money, and attention tied down in Korea, and could find each day an additional argument to throw as an obstacle into the negotiations. Most of these o1Jstacles were concerned with the disposition of prisoners of war, thousands of whom did not want to return to Communist territory, while only twenty-one captured Americans were unwilling to return to the United States. Simply by insisting that al1 prisoners must be forced to return, the Communists could extend the negotiations indefinitely in time and thus postpone the day when the United States might be free to turn its men and resources to other areas closer to the Soviet Union and thus more dangerous to it, such as Europe.
Only the death of Stalin in March 1953 broke this stalemate. As soon as the first confusion over this issue had passed temporarily, it became possible to make a Korean truce, an achievement helped by the accession of a new Republican administration in Washington in January. The truce was signed on July 27, 1953, after 37 months of war in which the United States had lost 25,000 dead, 115,000 other casualties, and about $22 billion in costs.
The Korean War had a totally different impact on the scientists, the Democratic leaders, the army, some of the navy, the new group of strategic intellectuals and non-middle-class educated persons in general than it had on the neo-isolationists, the Republican leaders, the air force, Big Business, and the newly forming ... Right publicists. To the latter groups it was a totally unnecessary and frustrating experience, resulting from the incompetence, or treason, of their opponents, an aberration and throwback to World War I which must never be permitted to reoccur. To the former alignment, however, the limited war in Korea was an inevitable consequence of nuclear stalemate, arising from the very nature of Communist aggression and of the revolutionary discontents of the buffer fringe, and would be a constantly threatening possibility in the future, either in Korea itself or in a dozen other places along the edges of the Communist bloc. Accordingly, this motley alignment, led by its scientists and liberals, began to work to strengthen America's ability to face any new challenge similar to Korea. In a military sense, this inevitably led to efforts to increase the ability of Europe and America to wage limited war, whatever the cost. The Right, as the defenders of material comforts, were unwilling to engage in such an effort, on the basis of cost alone, and soon convinced themselves that it was unnecessary.
The tactical experience of Korea showed clearly that we had neither the weapons nor the training for limited war and that the air force's claims for the effectiveness of its strategic weapons were as unrealistic as they had been since Douhet. Even the tactical air units had been ineffective, chiefly because they were designed and used in a separate service dominated by "Big Bomber" generals. Some of the most effective work had been done by tools, such as helicopters, which the air force refused to study or order..
To remedy this weakness, the army's specialist on airborne warfare, General James M. Gavin, was sent with a team of scientists to Korea in the autumn of 1950. At the time General Gavin, longtime officer of the heroic 82nd Airborne Division, was much worried at the air force's efforts to monopolize all the air and all nuclear weapons, at its resentment at possession of aviation by the navy and marines, and at its refusal to provide effective tactical support from the air for ground forces or to buy the equipment needed to provide proper airborne mobility, both of men and supplies, for ground troops. The team of scientists who went to the Far East with General Gavin in September-November 1950, included C. C. Lauritsen, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, who had developed the whole array of navy and air-force rockets in World War II and had been Oppenheimer's assistant at Los Alamos during the last year of the war; Dr. William B. Shockley of Bell Telephone Laboratories, developer of the transistor, who won the Nobel Prize in 1956; and Dr. Edward Bowles of MIT, our chief expert on military applications of radar in World War II.
From their discussions emerged a series of scientific research projects in 1951-1952 which had a profound effect on American defense capabilities. Project Vista, with President Lee DuBridge of Caltech as chairman and Lauritsen as his deputy, made an over-all study of defense problems for the Department of Defense. In general it sought to reach a well-rounded, diverse defense establishment which could respond effectively to any degree of aggression and do it on land, sea, or air. One of its chief efforts was to get tactical air power for the ground forces and to counteract the massed Soviet Army in Europe by development of tactical nuclear weapons, as well as nuclear warheads to be carried on rockets of 50- to 300-mile range, so that the forcible dispersion of Russian infantry to avoid annihilation would sharply reduce its offensive impact. These weapons could also be used to get "all-weather" tactical bombing support under army control to replace the fair-weather air-force tactical bombing which had proved so ineffective in Korea.
The Vista Report, which was submitted to the secretaries of the forces in February 195Z, made at least a dozen suggestions of which at least ten were eventually carried out, despite the fact that the report was never accepted. The reason for its rejection was the violent opposition of the air force, which disliked most of it but really exploded when they found, in Chapter 5, that it recommended dividing nuclear materials among the three services. The air force flatly refused to yield up any fissionable materials to the other services. At first it insisted that there was not enough. When months of argument proved there was plenty, the air force simply tripled its requirements. When the air force discovered that Oppenheimer had written the introductory section of Chapter 5, his fate was sealed. Stories about his unreliability were passed about, and eventually it was said that he had somehow rewritten Chapter 5 and inserted it without the committee members knowing what he was doing.
Project Charles and its sequel Project Lincoln were equally objectionable to the air force, although they had been instigated by it. "Charles" suggested that a permanent research laboratory should be established to study the technical problems of air defense. Accordingly, in September 1951, the Lincoln Laboratory was set up at MIT. This eventually had a staff of 1,600 on an annual budget of $20 million. Its special summer Project Lincoln in 1951 included many of the scientists, such as DuBridge, Lauritsen, Zacharias, and Oppenheimer of Project Vista; it estimated that American defense against a Soviet air attack was woefully weak and could not expect to knock down more than 20 percent of the attacking planes, a rate far too low to be acceptable in nuclear warfare. Setting a 70 percent "kill-rate" as a minimum aspiration, Project 1,incoln recommended establishment of a Distant Early Warning radar detection net across Canada and Greenland (the so-called "DEW Line"), much improved fighter and missile interception in deep air defense (DAD), and the development of an elaborate, integrated, automatic air-defense communications system.
The cost of this program, billions of dollars, made it less than welcome to the air force. To combat it, air-force supporters spread rumors that a clique of scientists which they called "ZORC" (Zacharias, Oppenheimer, Rabi, and Charles Lauritsen) were out to destroy SAC by devising, or pretending to devise, a near-perfect air defense for the United States. Thus DEW DAD, according to SAC supporters, would be America's Maginot Line behind which the country would lie helplessly bankrupt from its cost of $100 billion. The air force, from its control over the Lincoln Laboratory's budget, was successful in forcing MIT to suppress the DEW DAD report; at least, it was never published. But part of the story, including the horror story about ZORC, was published in the May issue of Fortune magazine, and some of the rest came out in the 1954 hearing on Oppenheimer's security.
The third significant effort in the scientists' campaign for American survival in the early 1950's was known as Project East River. It was also instigated by the air force, early in 195Z, and studied the problem of civil defense through a scientific team headed by Lloyd Berkner of Associated Universities. It advocated a fantastically expensive program of air-raid warnings, civilian defense shelters, and radar decentralization, but little was ever done about it. Since such a defensive system would undoubtedly save scores of millions of lives in any all-out nuclear war, and would permit the United States to withstand a Soviet "first strike," the failure to follow up these recommendations is clearly attributable to the cost, a sum which many felt we could not afford and which the air force was convinced could be far better spent on building up the offensive power of SAC. Some of it did go for this purpose.
The air force, which had 48 wings (of which 18 were in SAC) in June 1950, when the Korean War began, had 95 wings in July 1952, as the presidential campaign began, and had 110 wings (of which 42 wings were in SAC) at the end of 1953 in the last Truman budget. During these years, covering the last four budgets of the Truman period, expenditures on national security increased from $13 billion in 1949-1950 to over $50 billion in 1952-1953. A fair amount of this increase went for the changes recommended by the scientists, such as the DEW Line, increase in army ground forces from 10 to 20 divisions, and increased air transportation. As a consequence, American power relative to Soviet power reached its highest point in the postwar period about the end of 1953. It then lost ground until its recovery in the missile race of 1958-1963. The lines of the earlier buildup, as recommended by the various scientific defense projects of 1950 1952, were summed up in a general survey for the incoming Eisenhower Administration in NSC 141. This document did not replace, but supplemented, more intensive efforts in air defense, civil defense, and in military assistance in the Near East and Far East.
Chapter 68: The Eisenhower Team, 1952-1956
The last two years of the Truman Administration were marked by waves of partisan propaganda which quite concealed the major improvements being made in the American defense posture. The American people were irritated and puzzled by the stalemate in Korea exactly as the Soviets intended them to be. Disruption of the lives of individuals in a war which was not a war, in which nothing seemed to be achieved except unnecessary casualties, and which disrupted the pleasures of the postwar economic boom with military service, shortages, restrictions, and cost-of-living inflation could not help but breed discontent. The Republican-Dixiecrat alliance in the Congress made it impossible to deal with domestic problems in any decisive way or with foreign problems outside the independent authority of the presidential office. And through it all the mobilized wealth of the country, in alliance with most of the press, kept up a constant barrage of "Communists in Washington," "twenty years of treason," or "corruption of the Missouri gang" in the Truman Administration, and created a general picture of incompetence and bungling shot through with subversion. In creating this picture the leaders of the Republican Party totally committed themselves to the ... [policies] of the neo-isolationists and of the ... Right.
In June 1951, Senator McCarthy delivered in the Senate a speech of 60,000 words attacking General Marshall as a man "steeped in falsehood," who has "recourse to the lie whenever it suits his convenience," one of the architects of America's foreign policy made by "men high in this Government [who] are concerting to deliver us to disaster . . . a conspiracy of infamy so black that when it is finally exposed, its principals shall he forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men...."
When Truman tried to defend his subordinates, an action which Dulles resolutely refused to do when he became Secretary of State in 1953, Senator Taft attacked the President for this combination of human decency with the established legal privileges of the English-speaking world: he was wrong, according to Taft, to "assume the innocence of all the persons mentioned in the State Department.... Whether Senator McCarthy has legal evidence, whether he has overstated or understated his case, is of lesser importance. The question is whether the communist influence in the State Department still exists." Following the tendencies of the day, Taft reversed his previous support of the Korean War, calling it an "unnecessary war," an "utterly useless war," a war "begun by President Truman without the slightest authority from Congress or the people."
A semiofficial version of the Republican position appeared in John Foster Dulles's article "A Policy of Boldness," which was published in Life on May 19, 1952. This advocated rejection of "containment" in favor of "liberation," to be achieved on a smaller budget and with reduction of the armed forces leading to a conclusive victory in the near future. All concessions to reality were rejected out of hand: containment itself was damned as fragmentary reactions to Soviet pressure, as negative, endless, and partial, as "treadmill policies which, at best, might perhaps keep us in the same place until we drop exhausted." In place of these, Dulles offered liberation and massive retaliation. These two were not expressly linked together since, apparently, the former (applied chiefly to eastern Europe) would be achieved simply by making clear that the United States wanted it. At least, Dulles believed it would come when American policy made "it publicly known that it wants and expects liberation to occur." The disastrous consequence of this ... [policy] appeared in 1956 when East Germany and Hungary rose against the Russians and were crushed by Soviet tanks without Dulles raising a hand to help. The threat of instant massive retaliation as the sole weapon by which the United States would get Russia to adopt more acceptable policies was equally unrealistic. No one, not even Dulles, dared to use it in the face of the Soviet Union's capability for retaliation. Nuclear blackmail is bad, but nuclear blackmail in which the blackmailer has no intention or opportunity to inflict his penalty is pointless and dangerous—unless, perhaps, such threats help to win elections.
It helped win an election for Eisenhower in 1952. The candidate had no particular assets except a bland and amiable disposition combined with his reputation as a victorious general. He also had a weakness, one which is frequently found in his profession, the conviction that anyone who has become a millionaire, even by inheritance, is an authoritative person on almost any subject. With Eisenhower as candidate, combined with Richard Nixon, the ruthless enemy of internal subversion, as a running mate, and using a campaign in which the powers of Madison Avenue publicity mobilized all the forces of American discontent behind the neo-isolationist program, victory in November, 1952, was assured. The coup de grโce was given to the Democratic candidate, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, darling of the academic intellectuals, when Eisenhower adopted Emmet Hughes's suggestion that he promise, if elected, to go to Korea to make peace.
Although not himself a neo-isolationist or a reactionary, Eisenhower had few deep personal convictions, and was eager to be President. When his advisers told him that he must collaborate with the ... Right, he went all the way, even to the extent of condoning Senator McCarthy's attack on General Marshall. This occurred when Eisenhower, under McCarthy's pressure, removed from a Wisconsin speech a favorable reference to Marshall.
Once elected, the new President reintroduced the Republican conception of the Presidency which had been used in 192 l-1933. This conception saw the President as a kind of titular chairman of the board who neither acted himself directly nor intervened indirectly in the actions of his delegated assistants. Fully aware of his own limitations of both knowledge and energy, Eisenhower allotted the functions of government to his Cabinet members ("eight millionaires and a plumber,'' according to one writer) and expected to be consulted himself only in unsettled disputes or major policy changes.
Over-all government operations were divided into two parts, with John Foster Dulles, as secretary of state, in charge of foreign affairs, and ex-Governor Sherman Adams of New Hampshire (in place of Taft, who died in 1953) as assistant President in charge of domestic matters. Apart from these, the real tone of the Administration was provided by three businessmen: George Humphrey, a Taft Republican and president of the great holding company of M. A. Hanna and Company, was secretary of the treasury and the most influential member of the Cabinet; Charles Wilson, president of General Motors, was secretary of defense; and Joseph M. Dodge, a Detroit banker with extensive government experience, was director of the budget, the only man in the government who could, with impunity, do or undo Acts of Congress. The chief aim of the Administration, and almost the sole aim of these three, was to reduce government spending, and subsequently business taxes, by the greatest amount that would not jeopardize reelection in 1956. Dulles and Adams had to work within the financial framework thus provided.
Within this framework foreign policy was boxed, even more narrowly, between the realities of the country's world position and the constant hounding of the neo-isolationist groups in Congress who had been roused to a pitch of unholy expectation by the encouragement they had received from Eisenhower and Nixon during the electoral campaign of 1952. In that campaign they had discovered that Eisenhower could be pushed. They now concluded that their pushing from without, combined with the pulling of Dulles and Nixon from within, could overthrow the foreign-policy lines established by the Truman Administration in the preceding six years and create a new policy more in accord with their ... ideas of the nature of the world. Opposed to this change were the old defenders of the Atlantic System, the remnants of former Wall Street influence, the Ivy League colleges, the foundations, the newspaper spokesmen of this point of view (The New York Times and Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, and Washington Post) led by Walter Lippmann, and the unrepentant scientists and “eggheads” straggling behind Adlai Stevenson.
Eisenhower as President can be summed up in one word: amiability. He not only liked people; he was also eager to be liked, and was, indeed, likable. If he gave the impression that he had no firmly held convictions, that was because of two other qualities: he was relaxed, fully willing to live and let live, in an easy-going tolerance of anything which did not disturb his own peace of mind. He was quick-tempered but not a fighter. He had convictions, none of them very firm, but he was not prepared to sacrifice his own rest and relaxation for them, except for brief occasions. His span of attention was neither long nor intense. As a consequence, he was a wonderful companion, but not a leader.
In all this, the President was the antithesis of his secretary of state. John Foster Dulles was a tireless and energetic fighter, full of convictions, most of which he saw in black-and-white terms. He rarely rested and had little time for any relaxation because the world was full of evil forces with which he must wage constant battle. Tolerance and the right to be neutral were to him largely words which had little real meaning in his tightly wound neurological system. To Dulles it was a real effort not to equate opposition with evil. As he hurried throughout the world, traveling 226,645 miles in his first three years in office, in pursuit of Communism, he was like John Wesley, two centuries earlier, racing through England in pursuit of sin, both men fully convinced that they were doing the work of God. Eisenhower, who saw the world as a place almost without evil, once told an adviser, "You and I can argue issues all day and it won't affect our friendship, but the minute I question your motives you will never forgive me." This lesson would have been lost on the secretary of state, for Dulles, almost alone in a world full of sin, was always seeking the reason behind the event, the motive behind the action, and was obligated by his own alignment with righteousness to denounce the reason and the motive when he had discovered them.
It must be evident from this that Eisenhower and Dulles, in spite of their close cooperation and almost unruffled personal relations, were very dissimilar, both in personality and in outlook. Dulles was considerably to the right of Eisenhower, and the Republican congressional party was far to the right of Dulles. As a result, the two were under constant pressure from the party's isolationist leaders in Congress and from the party's big financial supporters to go further toward neo-isolationism and the Right than either Dulles or Eisenhower considered safe. To avoid this, the Administration had to do two basically contradictory things: to make verbal concessions to the Right and to find its congressional legislative support among the Democrats. In 1953 alone, according to the Congressional Quarterly Almanac, the "Democrats saved the President . . . fifty-eight times" by their votes in Congress.
Some examples of this skirmishing, in what was locally known as the "Battle of the Potomac," form a necessary background to the development of international affairs in Eisenhower's eight years.
The Republican platform of July 1952 had promised to "repudiate all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslavements." In his first speech as secretary, Dulles spoke of the liberation of satellite peoples, and told them, "You can count upon us." The Republicans in Congress from then on kept demanding support of these two promises, beginning with a resolution to repudiate Yalta and Potsdam. The Administration ... oppose[d] this congressional desire to take campaign talk seriously, since any repudiation of past agreements could be done by Russia more easily than by us.... Eventually the resolution was dropped.
A somewhat similar struggle arose over the Bricker and the substitute Dirksen Amendments to the Constitution. These would have forbidden the Federal government to make any foreign treaties which could not be carried out by powers granted to the Federal government elsewhere in the Constitution. This would have greatly hampered the State Department in making agreements, such as those with Canada to protect migrating game birds, since power to do so was not granted elsewhere in the Constitution. The Amendment was finally defeated by the Administration after a bitter struggle with Republicans in the Congress, and only by the support of Democrats.
The Administration condoned or suffered through all kinds of ... attacks, many of them supported by members of the Cabinet. Some government employees were harassed for years, even suspended without pay for months or years, before final clearance of unfounded charges. Wolf Ladejinsky, the country's greatest authority on East Asian agriculture and a known anti-Communist writer, had been responsible for much of MacArthur's success in occupied Japan as the author of a land-reform program which increased agricultural production and largely eliminated agrarian discontent, so that Communism in Japan, quite opposite to China, ceased to be a rural phenomenon and was, indeed, largely restricted to student groups in cities. Cleared by the State Department to return to Japan, he was suddenly declared a security risk and suspended by Secretary of Agriculture Benson.
Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., confided to a businessmen's luncheon in Chicago that President Truman, knowing that Harry Dexter White was a Russian spy, had promoted him from assistant secretary of the treasury to executive director of the United States Mission to the International Monetary Fund in 1946. Chairman Harold Velde of the House Committee on Un-American Activities at once issued a subpoena to the ex-President to testify before the committee. The summons was ignored. In the resulting controversy Senator McCarthy attacked the Administration over a nationwide broadcast for its failure to force all nations, beginning witl1 Britain, to cease their trade with Red China by threatening to cut off our economic aid. We should say, "If you continue to ship to Red China . . . you will not get one cent of American money."
The fact that our allies provided us ... with military bases on their own soil from which our strategic pressure on the Soviet Union was maintained meant nothing to the ... Right.... [The East-West conflict is a myth. That should be obvious to the reader. However, a quick purview of the works of professor Antony Sutton will confirm the reality of the myth.]
Such harassments of the new Administration were almost constant, especially from the Right, which was confident it had won the election of 1952 and should be obeyed as a consequence. On April 30th, in Cabinet, Taft blasted the Administration for its inability to cut more than $5 billion or $6 billion out of the defense budget. The foreign aid "mutual-security" budget of $7.6 billion left by Truman was cut by Chairman John Tabor of the House Appropriations Committee to $4.4 billion in spite of Eisenhower's request for $5.5 billion. Chairman C. W. Reed of the House Ways and Means Committee, despite Eisenhower's appeal, knocked out the new Truman taxes of 1951 on July I, 1953, six months before they would have ended anyway.
Under Right-wing attacks such as these, Eisenhower was largely disillusioned with his job by the summer of 1953 and spent much time over the next two years considering how he might get rid of the dominant Republican Right and form a new, middle-of-the-road Eisenhower Party. The impracticality of this became apparent to him long before the election of 1956.
These attacks from the Right were much less disturbing to Dulles than they were to the President. The Secretary of State was clear in his own mind on what his aims in foreign policy should be. These aims were largely acceptable to the neo-isolationists and congressional Republicans. Basic to these ideas was his conception of "massive retaliation."
This was publicly announced in his speech of January 12, 1954, before the Council of Foreign Relations, but had been forecast in his article in Life almost two years earlier. "Massive retaliation" here meant nuclear reprisal by strategic bombing. It w-as conceived as an alternative to limited war and was intended to be a deterrent to Soviet instigation of such local limited wars. The points at which it would be applied or the degree of aggression necessary to trigger it were both left ambiguous, in the hope that the threat would deter aggression in all areas and on all levels. Dulles was really rejecting the whole idea of limited war, and saw local defense only as a trigger mechanism for tripping massive retaliation. In this view he was at one with most of the Eisenhower Administration. Secretary Wilson, for example, said, "'We can no longer afford to fight limited war." Of course, he was thinking in monetary terms. General Gavin, who heard this statement, replied, "If we cannot afford to fight limited wars, then we cannot afford co survive, for that is the only kind of war we can afford to fight." He was thinking of the cost in terms of human lives
As a corollary to the idea of massive retaliation as deterrence, Dulles had the additional idea of local defense, and especially local alliances, as triggers. Combined with this was his refusal to accept anything but a two-bloc world, by his resolute refusal to recognize any right to anyone to be neutral. On June 9, 1956, in a speech at Iowa State College, he said that America had made bilateral treaties with forty-two countries and that these agreements "abolish, as between the parties, the principle of neutrality, which pretends that a nation can best gain safety for itself by being indifferent to the fate of others. This has increasingly become an obsolete conception, and, except under very exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception." Thus the Secretary of State indicated his readiness to abandon the nonaligned countries to the Soviet bloc, and gave Stalin's successors in the Kremlin a tactical opportunity they were already exploiting. At the same time, as we shall see in a moment, Dulles's treatment of our chief allies was generally so autocratic and even contemptuous that they were soon alienated, especially France, which did not have the "special relationship" with us which kept Great Britain at our side through any slights.
The reason for these actions by Dulles was that he was really an isolationist, convinced that American defense rested wholly on American strength, and, accordingly, he did not regard his treaty partners as allies at al1, but rather as a part of an elaborate network of triggers surrounding the Soviet Union. The chief portions of this network were three regional pacts: NATO, the Baghdad Pact (later called CENTRO, or Central Treaty Organization), and SEATO (or Southeast Asian Treaty Organization). NATO included the United States, Canada, and thirteen other states from Iceland to Turkey (by May 1955).
The Baghdad Pact of 1955 was largely a Dulles creation but did not include the United States. Its members were Britain, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. It was renamed Central Treaty Organization in 1959 when Iraq withdrew and the United States signed bilateral alliances with all its members.
The third pact, SEATO, signed in 1954, had eight members (United States, Britain, France, New Zealand, Australia, Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan). With Turkey acting as a link between NATO and CENTRO, and Pakistan in a similar role between CENTRO and SEATO, the three pacts were intended to enclose the Soviet bloc in an unbroken perimeter of paper barriers which would deter a Communist movement outward anywhere, by serving as a trigger for American retaliation. Otherwise, CENTRO and SEATO had little military or political merit, and created more problems than they solved.
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