President Harry Truman accepted that the diminishing credibility of a nuclear strategy argued for enhanced conventional forces. His successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, was unconvinced that a military build-up was either affordable or strategically necessary. During 1953, his first year of office, US strategic options were reviewed in a project known as ‘Solarium’. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles reported the results in January 1954 in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. The new doctrine he reported was described as the ‘New Look’, after the latest trends in women’s fashion, and came to be known as ‘massive retaliation’. It was widely assumed to be founded on an indiscriminate threat to respond to any communist-inspired aggression, however marginal the confrontation. This would take the form of a massive nuclear strike against the centres of the Soviet Union and China. Dulles’s speech, and a later article in Foreign Affairs, in which he attempted to clarify some of those points where he felt he had been misunderstood, indicated it was more complicated than a simple belief in the value of all-out nuclear threats as a deterrent to virtually any unwelcome Soviet move. Nonetheless, far greater emphasis was now being given to nuclear weapons in US strategy.
The doctrine reflected concern that the West was being forced into fighting the Cold War, and potentially any future hot war, according to ground rules laid down by the communists. The West’s policy of containment conceded the initiative, allowing Moscow to pick the time and place for each new challenge. The West might be on the offensive with its broad ideological, political, and economic challenge to communism, yet was always on the defensive when it came to military crises. Prior to the 1952 election, Republicans had toyed with the idea of reversing this pattern by picking fights with communism where its writ had been established in a particularly illegitimate manner. But this policy of ‘roll-back’ never moved beyond rhetoric. The lack of response to East German uprisings in June 1953 demonstrated that rhetorical support for rebellions in the satellite states was unlikely to lead to active action to help them succeed. The policy of containment was maintained.
Under the new doctrine, Communists were allowed the first move, but they were not allowed to set the rules for the subsequent fighting. In part this was a reaction against Korea where the enemy had picked the point of attack and had chosen the weapons—conventional forces. The West had accommodated them by restricting fighting to the original combat zone, accepting areas crucial to the enemy’s war effort but outside North Korea’s territory as sanctuaries, and obliging further by resisting the temptation to use the most modern weapons in the American arsenal. The consequences of this attempt to fight on communist terms meant that no benefit was gained from the nuclear programme. An excessive strain was now being placed on the US economy by the attempt to match the communists in conventional forces. The Government budget was being thrown out of balance. To Democrats, subject to some Keynesian influences, this was regrettable but not a tragedy. To Republicans it was a tragedy. It could, they suggested, even be part of the communist plot—to force the West into high military expenditure and so cause economic turmoil. They wished to avoid choosing between ‘security or solvency’. The belief of the fiscal conservative in the need to reduce the budgetary burden of military expenditures encouraged strategies based on nuclear rather than conventional weapons because the former promised ‘a bigger bang for a buck’.
This seemed possible because of a fundamental change in the perception of nuclear weapons. By 1953, many of the various projects initiated during the Truman years had come to fruition. On 31 October 1952 the first Hydrogen bomb was tested successfully. The United States now had a range of nuclear capabilities, from bombs large enough to take out a city of any size, to small weapons for battlefield use. In 1951 atomic artillery shells were tested and in production. From 1952 fighter aircraft as well as long-range bombers were equipped to carry atomic weapons. While ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons each had their own proponents, and were often offered as alternatives, they were increasingly presented as two sides to a comprehensive nuclear strategy, in which the ‘strategic’ weapons would threaten devastation of Soviet and Chinese cities, while ‘tactical’ weapons would compensate for the West’s lack of manpower by increasing available firepower.
Proponents of smaller, ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons argued that these employed the most modern explosives for traditional purposes. The military found this idea seductive. In December 1953 the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Arthur Radford, observed that ‘Today atomic weapons have virtually achieved a conventional status within our armed forces’. Later, in a March 1955 press conference, Eisenhower argued that ‘Where these things are used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else’. This dual approach was made possible by the fact that both types were being produced in large quantities. The age of nuclear plenty had arrived. In early 1954, Brodie noted that nuclear weapons ‘can no longer be regarded as exceedingly scarce or costly’.1 The net effect of the move towards small tactical weapons, even though it was parallel to the development of massive terror weapons for destroying cities, was to make nuclear weapons seem quite ordinary. As ‘just another weapon’ it could be used without any special qualms.
A further factor was a shift in British strategy prior to the Eisenhower Administration taking office. In 1951, a year before the Republican victory over the Democrats, the Conservatives won the British general election. The new government, led by Winston Churchill, saw the rearmament programme as already hurting the British economy. The answer was to give more weight to nuclear deterrence. As their own nuclear programme had yet to produce an actual capability, the new strategy was not one they could introduce by themselves. They therefore had to convert the United States.
a feeling that Britain must possess so climacteric a weapon in order to deter an atomically armed enemy, a feeling that Britain as a great power must acquire all major new weapons, a feeling that atomic weapons were a manifestation of the scientific and technological superiority on which Britain’s strength, so deficient if measured in sheer numbers of men, must depend.3
After the Soviet test in 1949, the British government agreed with the Americans that it was unwise to depend too much on nuclear weapons. They could not serve as a ‘panacea’ for all defence problems—‘something entirely new with which aggression could be quickly, easily and permanently eliminated’. Atomic bombs were seen very much as weapons of last resort. The government therefore supported the drive for conventional rearmament, despite the heavy burden it imposed on Britain’s weak economy.
Churchill, back in power, was disquieted by the inflationary impact of the rearmament programme and convinced that nuclear weapons deserved more of a role in Western strategy. He had always felt a proprietary interest in nuclear matters, and had often expressed his view that the main source of Western strength was the American nuclear arsenal: only this had held back the advance of communism. Once briefed in the United States on the recent advances in nuclear technology he became even more convinced of the bomb’s vital role. Also, the scare that had prompted the massive conventional rearmament programme was now subsiding. It was evident that Korea was not just the decoy or a prologue for a Soviet attack on Western Europe. The communists would present a challenge for many years to come. Events were not moving inexorably to a great showdown. Preparation would have to be made for a long period of bad relations with the Soviet Union which would be punctuated by high and low points, including some moments of great danger.
In the summer of 1952 the British Chiefs of Staff constructed a global strategy for Britain, which reflected these concerns. They noted that there was no defence against atomic attack, and suggested that the primary deterrent against this or any other aggression should be the knowledge that it would invite immediate and crushing retaliation. For this reason priority ought to be given to the long-range air forces of NATO. The Allies could not afford to build up sufficient conventional strength in Europe to defeat the Soviet Union in a clash of land armies. What was needed was sufficient forces in Europe to hold the Russians until the atomic counter-offensive made its impact felt. Given the fact that Britain was only on the verge of testing its first atomic bomb, and therefore unable to contribute much to the Great Deterrent, the Chiefs of Staff were not so much offering guidelines for the British Government as sending a message to the United States.
When Sir John Slessor, Chief of the Air Staff, arrived in Washington with the British paper in July 1952, his reception was cool. The Joint Chiefs in Washington saw it as ‘a rationalization of a British intent to renege on their NATO force commitment’. In six months, with a new Administration, the atmosphere changed. The British approach, in its sense of economic realities and the forward-looking perspective of a ‘long haul’, was now viewed with sympathy. Strategic Air Command, in particular, were delighted that the British emphasised the importance of airpower.4 Slessor became a major propagandist for the nuclear armed long-range bomber—‘the Great Deterrent’. In a July 1953 article he recorded his frustration at the lack of regard paid to the USAF’s Strategic Air Command—‘ready to strike a mortally decisive blow, against which there is at present no defence’—because of the preoccupation with conventional rearmament. This ‘Great Deterrent’ was ‘the counter-threat to the vast armies and tactical air forces of our potential enemy. Moreover it gives us some degree, and an increasing degree, of initiative in the cold war, instead of always dancing to the enemy’s tune’.
This theme of using the Western advantage in air power to regain the initiative was a major feature of Dulles’s presentation of the New Look, and reappeared in a later article by Slessor: ‘We cannot rely’, he wrote on the enemy ‘solving our problems for us by using the bomb first’. It would suit him ‘to fight a war with the weapons in which he would have a decisive advantage’. Instead the ‘atomic weapon may well be used to do what thousands of high explosive bombs were formerly required to do’. How and whether they were used would ‘depend upon whether they are to our tactical and strategic advantage rather than to that of the enemy’.5
Brodie considered Slessor’s book, Strategy for the West, the ‘clearest exposition’ of massive retaliation, with its absolutist insistence on the principle of deterrence. ‘No line of thinking, let alone of action, must be permitted to impair the value or effectiveness of deterrence.’ The role for Britain in this strategy, of being prepared to initiate nuclear hostilities, was, however, ‘ultimately suicidal’. It was not that there was no sense in the policy, but it depended on demonstrating that it really could ‘be carried through consistently and persistently’ and that there were no less risky alternative policies.6
Influenced as much by the logic of a situation in which the new Administration expected existing military commitments to be met at low cost, as by the British arguments, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff moved towards a commitment to use nuclear weapons whenever it was deemed appropriate. If the uncertainty surrounding the question of the use of nuclear weapons could be resolved, the Chiefs argued, they would be able to relinquish requirements for forces that would only be necessary if use was unlikely. Adoption of a nuclear strategy promised a rationalization of defence requirements, with a cut in the most expensive component of the military force structure—manpower.
On 30 October 1953 these conclusions were enshrined in a National Security Council Paper (NSC-162/2) on Basic National Security Policy.7 It began by defining the basic problem of national security policy as ‘meeting the Soviet threat’ while, at the same time, ‘avoiding seriously weakening the US economy or undermining our fundamental values and institutions’. The description of the threat was grim; any diplomatic moves of apparent peaceful intent from the East were dismissed as gestures. ‘[T]he basic Soviet objectives continue to be consolidation and expansion of their own sphere of power and the eventual domination of the non-communist world’. It also warned that the capability of the Soviet Union to attack the United States with atomic weapons and soon, hydrogen bombs, using aircraft on one-way missions, was growing. Nevertheless, there was little expectation that this growing Soviet power would tempt the Kremlin into deliberately launching a general war. ‘The uncertain prospects for Soviet victory in a general war, the change of leadership, satellite unrest, and the US capability to retaliate massively, make such a course improbable’.
- 1.
a strong military posture, with emphasis on the capability for inflicting massive retaliatory damage by offensive striking power;
- 2.
US and Allied forces in readiness to move rapidly initially to counter aggression by Soviet bloc forces and to hold vital areas and lines of communication; and
- 3.
a mobilization base, and its protection against crippling damage, adequate to insure victory in the event of general war.
The paper also emphasized the importance of allies to provide forces, to accommodate bases and to co-operate in the general conduct of the Cold War. It was necessary to build up ‘the strength, cohesion and common determination of the free world’. Confidence was placed in collective security systems. These would dissuade aggressors through the prospect of a united front. To create this moral strength in the free world it was necessary that allies understood the purposes and assumptions that informed US strategy.
39(a) In specific situations where a warning appears desirable and feasible as an added deterrent, the United States should make clear to the USSR and Communist China, in general terms, or with reference to specific areas as the situation requires, its intention to react with military force against any aggression by Soviet bloc armed forces.
(b) In the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions.
Before moving on to the manner in which the judgments of this paper were publicly presented, a few points can be noted. First, the term ‘massive retaliation’ (or a derivative) was used a number of times. It was not invented by journalists and academics as a useful label to hang on to the Administration’s policy. It was however, used solely in connection with the deterrence of Soviet moves towards a general war, most likely to begin with an assault on Europe. The doctrine extended deterrence through threat of punishment to areas other than Europe in place of a US contribution to local defence, but it was not stated that this punishment would take the form of massive retaliation.
Second, the paper anticipated the major criticisms of ‘massive retaliation’. It was not oblivious to the fact that current US superiority in nuclear weapons would not last forever. Indeed, the President personally added to the original paper a requirement to reconsider the ‘emphasis on the capability of inflicting massive retaliatory damage’ if this came to ‘work to the disadvantage of national security’, thus anticipating a ‘New New Look’ of 1956. Unlike NSC-68, it was expected that when the two major powers reached ‘a stage of atomic plenty and ample means of delivery’ the result could be a ‘stalemate, with both sides reluctant to initiate general warfare’. Drawing on the experience of the Korean War it was suggested that if general war came it would, as likely as not, be the result of miscalculation rather than deliberate intent. ‘To avoid this, it will in general be desirable for the United States to make clear to the USSR the kind of actions which will be almost certain to lead to [general war]’. But it was recognized, as the Administration’s opponents later claimed had not been recognized, that ‘as general war becomes more devastating for both sides the threat to resort to it becomes less available as a sanction against local aggression’.
I want to make it absolutely clear that we at SHAPE are basing all our planning on using atomic and thermonuclear weapons in our defence. With us it is no longer: ‘They may possibly be used’. It is very definitely: ‘They will be used, if we are attacked’.8
In many respects, however, there was not much that was new from the perspective of military planners. Nuclear weapons had always been central to post-war US and NATO plans to counter Soviet aggression. For instance, General Bradley would later refer to the 1948 US emergency war plan ‘Halfmoon’ as the ‘first formal and comprehensive enunciation of what later became known as a strategy of nuclear “massive retaliation”’.9 Nevertheless, it was the enunciation of the ‘new’ policy, rather than the originality of its content, provoked a strong reaction.
The controversy was largely a result of John Foster Dulles’s interpretation and presentation. He was not greatly involved in its development. He understood it in terms of his own concepts and theories concerning the importance of punishing aggression and the value of collective security. After Hiroshima he had been a firm advocate of international disarmament but Korea confirmed his shift to an ardent Cold Warrior. In December 1950, reflecting views popular in Republican circles, he had spoken of ‘the capacity to counter-attack … by action of our own choosing’ as the ‘ultimate deterrent’ and the ‘only effective defense’. In May 1952 he spoke of ‘instant massive retaliation’ and the need for the ‘free world to develop the will and organize the means to retaliate instantly against open aggression by Red armies, so that if it occurred anywhere, we could and would strike back where it hurts, by means of our choosing’.10
Perhaps more important, he had a diplomat’s view of the utility of nuclear power which he believed to have been validated in the first year of the new Administration in ending the stalemate in Korea. One of the Republican complaints against the Truman Administration was that it had been too feeble in prosecuting the Korean War. The hesitation over the use of atomic weapons, plus recognition of sanctuaries beyond the Yalu River in Chinese territory, meant that the Western forces were severely constrained. When the Eisenhower Administration took over in January 1953, the Korean Armistice talks were deadlocked. Over the next year the deadlock was broken.
The Administration believed that this was due to skilful employment of nuclear threats. The first break in the deadlock came in February 1953 after ‘discreet’ suggestions that ‘In the absence of satisfactory progress, we intended to move decisively without inhibition in our use of weapons, and would no longer be responsible for confining hostilities to the Korean Peninsula’. Then, as the talks bogged down again, more hints were dropped in July 1953 to the effect that it would not be possible to observe the self-imposed restriction on US activity and that hostilities might not, in the future, be confined to Korea. In April 1954 Dulles claimed that progress had been achieved because the communists had realized that in its absence ‘the battle area would be enlarged so as to endanger the sources of aggression in Manchuria’. The enemy could not rely on their sanctuaries.11 As rumours that the Eisenhower Administration was prepared to ‘raise the ante unless a ceasefire was negotiated’ were spreading through Korea, there were good reasons for the Chinese to take note of an evident, developing American impatience. There is, however, no evidence that they received or were influenced by any direct warnings from the Eisenhower administration that the restrictions on the use of atomic weapons were about to be lifted. In addition, there were a number of other factors encouraging the armistice, including the death of Stalin in March, political unrest in communist Europe, and a new Soviet leadership wanting to calm the international situation.12
We need allies and collective security. Our purpose is to make these relations more effective, less costly. This can be done by placing more reliance on deterrent power and less dependence on local defensive power….
… Local defense will always be important. But there is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty landpower of the Communist world. Local defenses must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power. A potential aggressor must know that he cannot always prescribe battle conditions that suit him. Otherwise, for example, a potential aggressor, who is glutted with manpower, might be tempted to attack in confidence that resistance would be confined to manpower. He might be tempted to attack in places where his superiority was decisive.
The basic decision that had been made was to ‘depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing’.
Rather than let the Communists nibble us to death all over the world in little wars we would rely in the future primarily on our massive mobile retaliatory power which we could use in our discretion against the major source of aggression at times and places that we choose.
It should not be stated in advance precisely what would be the scope of military action if new aggression occurred…. That is a matter as to which the aggressor had best remain ignorant. But he can know and does know, in the light of present policies, that the choice in this respect is ours and not his.
This was in contrast to NSC-162/2 where great clarity in the description of deterrent threats had been considered necessary to avoid general war through miscalculation. In opting for ambiguity, Dulles hinted at a posture later known as ‘brinkmanship’, whereby caution is forced on the aggressor, uncertain as to how far to the ‘brink’ the United States would be willing to go. He remarked in 1956 that: ‘The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.’ Thereafter ‘brinkmanship’ was used when referring to the recklessness of Dulles’s foreign policy.15 The worth of a massive retaliatory threat, declining in the face of an equivalent threat from the Soviet Union, would be upheld by fearless diplomacy. This was not based on any careful appreciation of how a nuclear war would actually be conducted. As Jones has noted, Dulles had ‘little detailed knowledge’ at this point or thereafter ‘of the nuclear plans that actually underpinned the approach to deterrence and war fighting that was so closely associated with his name’.16
There was also an indication of a formula that might be used to measure the amount of retaliation deemed necessary as a response to a given amount of aggression: ‘The heart of the problem is how to deter attack. This, we believe, requires that a potential aggressor be left in no doubt that he would be certain to suffer damage outweighing any possible gains from aggression’. This formula that the costs to the aggressor must always outweigh his gains—was repeated thereafter. The important thing was to have the capacity to retaliate massively, because that would be the only fitting punishment to the greatest crime—an all-out attack on Western Europe. For lesser crimes a more appropriate measure of retaliation would have to be found. Dulles was thus talking about ‘flexible retaliation’. This suggested a continuum of nuclear responses, and thus potentially blurred any distinction which may have been in the mind of the Joint Chiefs of Staff between ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’ weapons.
As formulated the policy attempted to affect adversary calculations through ensuring that the prospective costs of any provocative military action were greater than the prospective gains. This did not do justice to the variety of forms deterrence could take. If the aim was to ensure that costs outweighed gains, then an alternative to the imposition of costs was the denial of gains. This was described as ‘defence’ as distinct from ‘deterrence’, but if it involved local forces sufficient to beat off any attack then it could act to deter any adventures. NATO had been moving towards this sort of strategy in the early 1950s, but now the stress on punishment uncoupled the response from the offending action. The West would not reply in kind to an Eastern invasion but raise the stakes of war. Thereafter Western strategy would depend on convincing the Soviet leaders that it had the nerve to do this. This problem would become progressively more difficult as Soviet capabilities to fight at the new level increased.
We keep locks on our doors; but we do not have an armed guard in every home. We rely principally on a community security system so well equipped to punish any who break in and steal that, in fact, would-be-aggressors are generally deterred. That is the way of getting maximum protection at bearable cost. What the Eisenhower Administration seeks is a similar international security system.
The analogy was, however, somewhat misleading. A legal system provides authorities able to pronounce definitively on matters of interpretation. There is a police force responsible for the general maintenance of law and order. This is why states are defined by reference to a monopoly of legitimate violence. A sanction of tough punishment can be an effective deterrent when would-be offenders know that there is a high chance of (a) being apprehended and (b) being punished severely. The direst threats diminish in impact when there is little certainty that they can ever be put into effect. It is the fact that one is to be put at the mercy of the court, as much as what the court does, that constitutes the deterrent.
In strategic terms, with airpower any country could put another country at its mercy. There were no problems making the offender available for punishment. The sanction could be applied with, in all probability, a minimum of resistance. There would be no need for officers of the law to take the offender into custody (which strategically would take the form of occupation of his territory). But that also meant that the offender would remain a free agent, with options other than full compliance with the dictates of international law, including replying in kind to any sanction. This undermined the credibility of the threat of sanctions and represented the central problem in the developing theory of nuclear deterrence.
For the moment the new approach became NATO’s official strategy. In November 1954 NATO’s Military Committee approved MC 48, ‘The Most Effective Pattern of NATO Military Strength for the Next Few Years’. Previous strategy documents alluded to nuclear weapons with the phrase ‘all types of weapons without exception’ due to Danish objections over explicit references to the atomic bomb. Now MC 48 was explicit that ‘the advent of atomic weapons systems will drastically change the conditions of modern war’. NATO had to convince the Soviets that ‘In the event of aggression they will be subjected immediately to devastating counter-attack employing atomic weapons’. Even if there was a ‘remote possibility’ of the Soviets attempting to overrun Europe with conventional means alone, it was stated that NATO would be ‘unable to prevent the rapid overrunning of Europe’ unless it ‘immediately employed these weapons both strategically and tactically’. Realizing this, it was believed the Soviets would have little choice but to initiate an ‘atomic onslaught’ against NATO. A conflict with the Soviets was expected to consist of two phases. The initial phase was conceived of lasting thirty days or less, with ‘maximum destruction’ occurring ‘within the first few days or weeks’ as both sides attempted to ‘gain atomic superiority’. At the end of this phase, the ‘atomic stockpiles of the weaker side will have been virtually expended’. What was crucial in order to defeat the Soviets was the ‘ability to survive and gain superiority in the initial phase’, thereby requiring a peacetime posture ‘designed primarily to achieve success during this initial phase’. A second phase was vaguely described as consisting of a ‘period of readjustment and follow-up leading to a conclusion of the war’.17
An immediate result of the ‘New Look’ therefore was that NATO strategy became oriented around the hope that nuclear weapons could be employed in such a way as to particularly favour the West. With the armistice in Korea still fresh, and contingencies involving Indo-China and Formosa in mind, the Asian dimension was also important. In September 1953 Dulles warned China that any large-scale intervention in Indo-China ‘could not occur without grave consequences, which might not be confined to Indo-China’.18 In December Admiral Radford proposed that the US respond to any new Chinese intervention in Korea with nuclear counter-attacks against their positions in Korea, Manchuria and North China. These would be intended to ‘defeat the Chinese communists in Korea and make them incapable of aggression there or anywhere else in the Far East for a very considerable time’. Dulles responded that ‘there were grave disadvantages to a course of action that would lead to a general war against both the PRC and the USSR’. His more cautious (by contrast to Radford’s) proposal was to start with a full atomic strike in Korea and then bomb troop concentrations in and near the area of Korea.19 However, as the US response to the deteriorating situation in Indo-China would soon demonstrate, the Administration was not quite as daring with atomic weapons as it might care to think.20
The use of atomic weapons whenever it is to our military advantage to do so might necessarily be coupled with a severe reaction by those Asian countries now attempting to maintain a neutralist posture. It should therefore be understood that, in our view, adverse political reactions should be expected from most of Asia to our use of such weapons.
The use of nuclear weapons in Indochina would hardly reduce the ground force requirement in this area. … The use of nuclear weapons would also cause an adverse Vietnamese reaction, which might inhibit the formation of indigenous armies, and seriously adverse reactions in Asian neutral nations.22
How then are we to view the ‘New Look’? On one level it was a revival of the spirit of the offence in military strategy. The strategic concepts of the Truman years were cautious and restrained. The communists would only be contained; the main aim was defence. In battle there should be nothing provocative, nothing that might extend the conflict into a cataclysmic war. To those reared in the tradition of total war for unconditional surrender this all seemed unnecessarily restrictive. MacArthur spoke of ‘no substitute for victory’, the Strategic Air Command scornfully of a ‘Maginot Line mentality’ as if the German circumvention of France’s static defences in 1940 served as a judgment on all attempts to ‘hold a line’. With a cry that the ‘best defence is offence’ and a conviction that the communists had far more to fear from a general war than had the free world, the nuclear enthusiasts argued that the American advantages should be capitalized to the full. The Eisenhower Administration endorsed these sentiments but not the policies associated with them. It spoke at length, through Dulles, about the need to ‘seize the initiative’ and refused to accept any restrictions on targets or weapons. But, though the new Administration’s policy appeared more muscular in practice, it still recognised the restraints imposed by the horrendous consequences of a slide into total war, and of the growing strength of the Soviet Union’s own capacity for massive retaliation. Dulles remained torn between his convictions that on the one hand the Soviet Union was a force for evil and could not be trusted and on the other that without international agreements the human race risked extinction.
If anything the strategy was more retrospective than prospective. It explained how the Korean War ought to have been fought. It suggested how a new war might be fought during the remaining period of grace of patent nuclear superiority. Observing the influence of US airpower on Soviet conduct, it sought to exploit this to avoid meeting the cost of conventional rearmament. This strong economic advantage was a major point in the New Look’s favour. It remained impressive, even after the margin of superiority that the US enjoyed in the mid-1950s evaporated, and was one reason for the persistent nuclear bias in NATO’s strategy until the end of the Cold War. The notion that the West could not afford to match the East in conventional forces became firmly established in NATO minds. American troops in Europe served to signify a US commitment to NATO—not a means of blocking a Soviet advance. Their role was not as a shield but as a ‘trip-wire’, capable of triggering the entry into a war of America’s nuclear arsenal.
The economic logic remained forceful if the military logic could be only temporary. The circumstances which made the strategy plausible would pass. Dulles, however, appeared to suggest that the new posture was a statement of basic principles appropriate for the new age, and not just the coming few years. His rigid presentation offered critics a ready target. When he attempted to qualify and elaborate, he only made it worse. A flawed strategy that arguably increased the risk of nuclear war sufficed to stimulate an interest in military matters amongst intellectuals. A strategy that was inconsistent and contradictory was a positive incitement for intellectual criticism.