Presidential Predicaments: Eisenhower (VIII of VIII)--Inside the Tiger?
In the year before President Eisenhower left office at the end of his second term, he began to get photographs returned from our new top secret Corona photoreconnaissance satellites. When he saw what the Soviets had when it came to Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or rather didn’t have, he must have realized that they had bluffed him, bluffed the CIA, and bluffed our several military intelligence services into thinking they had much more in the way of nuclear weapons and ICBMs than they did.
During the campaign for president between Ike’s vice-president, Richard Nixon, and a senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy, there had been much worried talk about a “missile gap” that existed between us and the Soviet Union. In their favor.
Most of us had been worried about this, I suspect, since they’d gotten that Sputnik into orbit. We’d all been made to be so scared of the Soviet Union and Communists. I was going to graduate from high school in 1959, and I sure had been made scared of them. President Eisenhower had been scared of them. Or maybe it was just the existence of nuclear weapons that had scared him. Or maybe those two things had fed each other.
By 1960 and the campaign for who would be the next president, however, President Eisenhower knew that any missile gap there might be was in our favor. Very much in our favor. Like 10 to 1.
His vice-president, Richard Nixon, who was running for president, was one of the very few who had been told what our Corona program had shown. During the campaign, neither Eisenhower nor Nixon corrected our mistaken belief about the missile gap. They thought it was more important to keep secret the Corona program and what it told them than to tell us how things actually stood and thereby let the Soviets know what we knew. What they knew.
Might President Eisenhower have been a little embarrassed when the Corona photographs started to come back and he learned how things actually stood? After all, look at the huge buildup of nuclear weapons and delivery systems that he had overseen during his time in office. When he took office, we’d had maybe a thousand nuclear weapons. When he left, we’d have about twenty-thousand. Some were the “tactical” nuclear weapons now in the custody of our Army on the ground in Europe. But many were the “strategic” nuclear bombs and warheads each of which yielded many hundreds of times more than the Hiroshima bomb had.
As Eisenhower came to the end of his second term, the “total yield” of all the nuclear weapons in our stockpile was more than 3000 times the total yield of all the bombs used by all sides in all of World War II. Not many people knew this. I certainly didn’t.
Had it gotten us anything? Anything? Government sponsored jobs, I guess.
To deliver all this destruction, we had in service at the end of Ike’s administration the B-47 and B-52 jet bombers that could be refueled in air, and Thor and Jupiter Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles on alert in the United Kingdom, Turkey and Italy, and the Polaris missiles that could be launched from submerged submarines. In 1960, the last year of Eisenhower’s presidency, we would be putting into service inside our own country our first land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, the Atlas. With more to come.
In January 1961, just before President Eisenhower left office and President Kennedy was inaugurated, Eisenhower gave a Farewell Address that surprised a lot of people.
It was a warning, a warning against something that he recognized had developed during his two terms in office, something he called the “military-industrial complex.”
In the speech, he claimed we’d had no choice but to develop this complex. But we were now, he said, in danger from it. It had acquired, he said, “undue influence.” The danger wasn’t just political or economic. It was, he said, “spiritual.” I wished he’d said more about that.
What were we supposed to do about this new danger, this danger that came not from outside but from inside? In the speech, he said the only protection against this new danger was an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”
Just a minute there. Is that what President Eisenhower had been trying to create during his time in office? Or was it rather a citizenry who knew little about what was going on and would just get out of the way of what he was wanting to do?
Interestingly, in 1953, President Eisenhower’s very first year in office, he’d been urged by the great physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who’d headed the Scientific Division of the Manhattan Project, to get going an active educational program—called Operation Candor. It would be all about creating an alert and knowledgeable citizenry. It should be, Oppenheimer said, an “affirmative” program, not one that only responded to current events that forced revelations.
At first Ike had seemed taken by the idea.
He sure ended up going the other way.
In 1954, Oppenheimer, the scientist everybody thought deserved a whole lot of the credit for developing our atomic bomb, had his security clearance revoked by the Atomic Energy Commission that was now being chaired by Eisenhower’s appointee, the businessman Lewis Strauss.
In an essay called “Atomic Weapons and American Policy” that Oppenheimer published a year earlier arguing for candor with the American people, he had written “Until we have looked this tiger in the eye, we shall be in the worst of all possible dangers, which is that we may back into him.”
“More generally,” he said, “I do not think that a country like ours can in any real sense survive if we are afraid of our people.”
Is that what had happened to us? We’d backed into the tiger and were now inside it?
This concludes the series on Eisenhower’s Presidential Predicaments when it came to nuclear weapons. A series on “The Very Idea of Deterrence” follows.