Project Solarium III--The Search for Policy: June 10 to July 15,1953
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The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Albert Einstein 1946
Coherence refers to the ongoing dynamic alignment and integration of diverse elements within a system that allows for effective functioning despite differences. Coherence is crucial for navigating uncertainty and complexity within and with social groups. It facilitates the emergence of shared understanding and purpose, enabling members to work together effectively even when they hold differing views or identities. Coherence is characterised by the coexistence of multiple identities that fit together harmoniously where needed. When conflict and tension arise, they are worked with as energy, fuelling the unfolding process, not as events to avoid.
Ivo Mensch, Perspectiva Substack, June 10, 2025
Plans are nothing, but planning is everything. The secret of a sound satisfactory decision made on an emergency basis has always been that the responsible official has been ‘living with the problem’ before it becomes acute.
Attributed to Dwight Eisenhower
In 1946 George Kennan, a diplomat who was posted at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, had sent home a long telegram about “the sources of Soviet conduct.” It came to be called that—the “Long Telegram”—and the policy it recommended for dealing with the Soviets came to be called “containment.” President Truman, who along with many others had been troubled by Soviet conduct after World War II, had been taken with what it recommended.
But in a speech to Congress on March 12, 1947, President Truman announced he would be adding a military component to containment, saying we would provide military support to countries that were experiencing insurgencies from Communists (were the insurgents getting support from the Soviets?), as was apparently happening in Greece and Turkey at the time. Both countries lay along on the southwestern border of Yugoslavia, close to the Soviet Union.
The new “Truman Doctrine” of promising military support to resist communist insurgencies pretty much ended any relationship we had with the Soviets where we could consider ourselves “allies.” We’d been allies for most of World War II.
The invasion in 1950 of South Korea by North Korea and our military response to it under the aegis of the United Nations had put a nail in it.
We and the Soviet Union hadn’t quite become “enemies,” as we would if a war started between us, but we were certainly now “adversaries.” All “enemies” are “adversaries,” right?, but not all “adversaries” are “enemies.” Like if you are playing a baseball game, you are playing with “adversaries.” Against them, of course. But also with them. Following the rules of the game. Which is what allows the game to continue as a game. And what allows that game to be followed by another game.
In 1953, the first year of his administration, President Eisenhower had noticed that his advisors and cabinet members had different and incompatible ideas as to what should be our policy now when it came to the Soviet Union. He wanted us to have a single coherent policy.
In June, Eisenhower set up a project called Solarium, after the place on the rooftop of the White House where the first meeting of the group had taken place. Three different teams were formed. Each was directed to make the best case it could for one of three different approaches.
One team, Team A, was chaired by George Kennan. Kennan said later that he didn’t like having an approach specified in advance, but at least it was the approach he had formulated in his Long Telegram in 1946. His group was directed to focus on the approach of “containment” and the argument that now we should concentrate on maintaining good relations with our allies in Western Europe while we worked, though diplomacy and economic measures, to combat Soviet influence elsewhere and possibly change Soviet behavior. Using the nuclear weapons we now had, or threatening to use them, wasn’t part of the picture.
The second team, Team B, chaired by Army Major General James McCormack, was to assume that if the Soviet Union sent its forces in any way beyond its “sphere of influence,” we would retaliate in ways that would use our nuclear weapons. The Soviet “sphere of influence” would be taken to be those countries in eastern Europe (and now maybe North Korea) where the Soviets had installed Communist governments after World War II. But Team B was to take the position that if the Soviets committed any aggression outside that sphere of influence, they would start a “general” war.
If they committed any “aggression”? Did that mean we would use our nuclear weapons right away and massively if they invaded some part of, say, Greece? Use them where? In Greece on the invading troops? What would the Greeks think about nuclear weapons being detonated in their small country?
If we used our nuclear weapons inside Russia itself in a “general war,” would we use everything we had just on the Soviet Union? Then what? Occupy a radioactive Russia? Team B left us with some tough questions.
Some people in Team B seemed to favor a strategy of “rollback”— pushing the Communists back from their sphere of influence to inside the Soviet Union, maybe even beyond that, maybe all the way back to Russia. Maybe even beyond that. Maybe into the Pacific ocean.
Team B might have considered that option. Or it might not have. This isn’t something we would be told.
The third team, Team C, chaired by Admiral R. L. Connolly, was to propose measures short of war—including political, economic, diplomatic, and covert—to eliminate Soviet influence from the free world and weaken communist control in both Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself. Team C assumed that we were losing ground to Communism and time was against us. Team A, which supported containment, had taken the position that time was on our side, politically and economically anyway, though not in terms of the Soviets’ growing nuclear capability. There time wasn’t on anyone’s side.
Team C said we should work to reduce, not just contain, Soviet influence and power everywhere though not primarily by military means. Subversion and covert action would play a big part. What we accused the Soviets of habitually engaging in.
The three teams gave their recommendations to President Eisenhower on July 15, 1953. President Eisenhower called a big meeting of officials from different areas of government for the next day, July 16. An informational meeting, not a deliberative one. In it, Eisenhower summarized the findings of Project Solarium. George Kennan said later that he did a wonderful job of it.
Ike seems to have rejected right away the recommendations of Team B. He had been a general and the general in Europe at the end of World War II. But he hated war, he said, and was against pre-emptive war, which he had called a war that would start a war. In 1950, in some remarks made at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he’d said,
Possibly my hatred of war blinds me so that I cannot comprehend the arguments they adduce. But, in my opinion, there is no such thing as a preventive war. Although this suggestion is repeatedly made, none has yet explained how war prevents war. Worse than this, no one has been able to explain away the fact that war creates the conditions that beget war.
In any case, Ike and the NSC now had the Solarium reports to refer to try to come up with a coherent foreign policy when it came to the Soviet Union and the threat we took it to pose to us in the “free world.”
Team A was looking like the favorite but elements from the other teams might be folded into the final policy. The recommendations of Team B weren’t exactly compatible with the other two.
In his essay “Atomic Weapons and American Policy” on the requirements of an Operation Candor, published last July, Oppenheimer had said, about the policy already in place,
We have made our decision to push our stockpiles and the power of our weapons. We have from the first maintained that we should be free to use these weapons and it is generally known we plan to use them. It is also generally known that one ingredient of this plan is a rather rigid commitment to their use in a very massive, initial, unremitting strategic assault on the enemy.
Oppenheimer’s essay was published in the journal Foreign Affairs on July 15, 1953, the same day that the three Solarium teams submitted their reports to President Eisenhower. That’s interesting. How could the question of what our foreign policy should be be an open question if we already had “a rather rigid commitment” to using our atomic weapons in “a very massive, initial, unremitting strategic assault on the enemy.” Oppenheimer not only believed there was such a policy in place already but Ike, who had allowed publication of the essay, had thought it was all right for him to say so in a published essay.
“Massive” and “unremitting”? Not much ambiguity there, was there? What about that word “initial” though. Maybe it didn’t imply approval of a preemptive first strike but it did allow for us to be the first to use atomic weapons in a war, didn’t it?
Which I guess we already had been, in World War II. We were also, so far, the last to use them in a war. Obviously, though, we weren’t committed to keeping it that way.
In any case, the National Security Council would now take the Solarium reports and put them together in a policy directive for Ike’s approval.
With Project Solarium concluded, it should be time to execute the domestic policy of candor. A meeting of the NSC was scheduled for July 22 to discuss next steps.
Next: Drafting the Speech that would Begin Operation Candor? July 22, 1953