Presidential Predicaments: Eisenhower I (of VII)-- The New Nuclear Weapon
This posting resumes the series on Presidential Predicaments produced by the nuclear arms race, this time those of President Eisenhower. Addressed earlier were the considerable predicaments of Presidents Truman and Kennedy. Entries available in the You Might Want to Know archive.
When President Roosevelt died in April 1945 and Vice President Harry Truman became president, Truman heard for the first time about our super secret effort to build an atomic bomb—the Manhattan Project. A nice surprise.
Soon after General Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in November 1952, he too got a surprise. His was to learn about the first successful test, three days earlier, of what had sometimes been referred to as the Super Bomb. We didn’t know it yet, most of us, but on November 1, in the Mike test in Operation Ivy out at our Pacific Proving Ground in among the Marshall Islands, a device we had built had yielded an explosive force of over ten megatons, more than six hundred Hiroshimas. One device.
Ike hadn’t witnessed the Mike test, of course. None of our presidents has ever witnessed a nuclear test.
Most of us haven’t either of course.
As a general, President Eisenhower had no doubt seen some terrible things during World War II. Still, several months later, when Ike was first shown pictures of the Mike test, he was reported by someone with him there to have “blanched.”
As far as we knew, the Soviets didn’t yet have a Super Bomb. We did know that as of August 1949, they’d successfully tested an atomic bomb with the yield of our Nagasaki bomb. A bomb that was a third larger in yield than the Hiroshima bomb.
They’d gotten their first atomic bomb a lot faster than some of President Truman’s advisors had thought they would. The Manhattan Project scientists had been right about the time it would take them, 3 or 4 years, not 20 years as
some had thought.
When Eisenhower took office, the Korean War was still on. In his first year in office, he hinted darkly several times that, unlike President Truman, and in spite of the fact that the Soviets now also had the atomic bomb, he was willing to use our nuclear weapons in the war, and not just on Korea. Maybe on Communist China and the Soviet Union too.
Did he mean it?
He didn’t actually do it.
On July 27, still in Ike’s first year in office, an armistice was signed in the Korean War. In an armistice, you agree to stop fighting even though nobody surrenders and nobody can claim victory. So the armistice didn’t actually end the war.
Our possession of nuclear weapons didn’t seem to have won us much here.
China had to sign the armistice agreement along with us and North and South Korea since China had come into the war when General MacArthur took UN forces up close to North Korea’s border with China and hinted he might not stop there.
President Eisenhower hinted also that he’d use nuclear weapons if the armistice didn’t hold.
He was reputed to be a good poker player. Was he bluffing?
In August 1953, still in Ike’s first year in office, the Soviet Union claimed to have successfully tested a hydrogen bomb.
In October 1953, just a few months after President Eisenhower saw pictures of the Mike test and the Soviets claimed to have detonated a hydrogen bomb, still in the first year of his presidency, Ike’s National Security Council laid out this administration’s policy for how we would respond to Soviet aggression.
The policy, set out in a document called NSC 162/2, came to be called New Look. It declared that the United States would maintain "a strong military posture, with emphasis on the capability of inflicting massive retaliatory damage by offensive striking power." “Offensive striking power” was what our growing stockpile of nuclear bombs and bombers gave us a lot more of.
What was “new” about the policy was, I guess, our declared intention to respond to any attack of any size on us, even with conventional weapons, or on any of our allies, with a “massive” retaliation that would employ nuclear weapons.
President Eisenhower and his National Security Council were concerned, as President Truman had been, about Communist incursions taking place at the time in a number of countries, not just Korea. The armistice with China and North Korea had been signed in July of 1953, but other incursions were going on in Europe, Southeast Asia, even closer to home in Latin America. Communist incursions. “Incursions” are different from “invasions.” They aren’t done by countries. Not officially. These incursions were all being done by communists, as far as I could tell.
Ike was also concerned, he often said, about keeping up the strength of the U.S. economy. He didn’t think we could be militarily strong unless we were economically strong. Eisenhower and his NSC seem to have thought that the New Look policy and nuclear weapons might save money by letting us reduce our very expensive conventional forces in Europe. It might also prevent the Soviets from draining our resources with small aggressions here, there, and elsewhere.
These other “incursions” weren’t exactly “Soviet aggression” though, so New Look didn’t apply.
The New Look policy had its critics. Winston Churchill was one. What, he asked, if you thought about it, would be the consequences for Europe if we executed a massive retaliation with nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union for invading Europe? Also, was it credible that the U.S. would massively retaliate on the Soviets if a communist-run country, Poland, say, sent some tanks and troops into, say, Belgium?
These criticisms didn’t seem to change President Eisenhower’s mind. For now, New Look was going to be our policy.
We were building nuclear weapons like crazy now. When Ike took office in 1953, we’d had about 1000 nuclear weapons in our stockpile, none of them Super (hydrogen) bombs. When Ike left office in 1961, we would have at least 18,000 nuclear weapons. Many would be the “strategic” hydrogen bombs, each of which yielded many hundreds of Hiroshimas.
Many of our weapons were by then, though, the smaller “tactical” nuclear weapons that had been developed during Eisenhower’s administration and stationed in Europe and probably in South Korea too for use against invading communist forces. A question you might have here is: if we were using the tactical weapons against invading forces in Europe, would we have been massively retaliating on the Soviet Union at the same time?
I guess that was the idea.
I still can’t tell you how all that was supposed to work. Except maybe as a bluff.
Next: Presidential Predicaments: Eisenhower II (of VII)—Going Tactical