Project Solarium II--The Search for Policy: June 10 to July 15,1953
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The release of atomic energy has changed everything save our mode of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Albert Einstein, 1946
The contention is that what is dying is a kind of total concept of the world, a one worlding of presupposed progress. The question for each of us is whether we believe the problems we face call merely for gentle institutional and policy reform, more radical ideational reform, or whether modernity is beyond repair and has to be allowed to die.
Jonathan Rowson, June 28, 2025, Perspectiva
The usual assumption was, wasn’t it?, that in our country “foreign policy” would be decided upon by a few elected leaders and whomever they might consult, with the rest of us being brought, one way or another, to go along with the policy decided upon. The purpose of Ike’s Age of Peril speech in May, a few weeks ago, had been to get the American people to support the tax hike Ike had already decided would be the “necessary action of government” he called “partial mobilization” which would provide “an adequate level of security.”
Ike had noticed, however, that when it came to what should be our overall “foreign policy” toward the Soviet Union, there were significant differences of opinion among his advisors.
He decided, in the first year of his administration, to form three teams of experts from different areas—from the military, the intelligence community, and foreign service staff. Each team would be given the same materials to work from and be instructed to assess one of three specified strategies and foreign policies. The project would be called Solarium, after the place on the roof of the White House where the teams first met on June 10, not long after Ike first saw the film of the Ivy Mike test and a few days before the Rosenbergs were to be executed in the electric chair if Ike didn’t grant their petition for clemency.
Solarium would be a top secret undertaking, Ike decided, kept secret from everyone but the “experts” of the Solarium group. Candor would have no role—not outside the group of experts anyway.
The secret group’s “cover” would be that they were working on a seminar on foreign policy for the National War College at Fort McNair, about three miles from the White House. The NWC was a place where young officers and diplomats who had been identified as promising were invited to come think and talk about “grand strategy.”
The three Project Solarium teams had gone on to meet for a month at Fort McNair, sometimes separately, sometimes as a group of the whole.
A majority of the members of the three teams constituted for Project Solarium turned out to be from the military but there were also some diplomats and intelligence officers. The military certainly had to be included in a discussion about foreign policy but did we want them to be the main voice in setting it? Especially when it came to questions of policy? Ike, who had been a General before being elected president, seems to have thought so.
I would have disagreed. If you are military and want to be good at it, you have to divide the world, from the get-go, into them and us, don’t you? Us all good, them all bad.
It’s never that simple though, is it? It couldn’t possibly be. Not unless you make it so. Which we find it easy to do. Hard not to do. We seem to be built that way.
When we do that, it’s true, isn’t it?, that we may be creating and bringing about the relations we are assuming to exist of hostility between “us” and “them.”
Luckily, we don’t have to do that. It may be hard not to divide the world up like that, but it’s not impossible. Thank goodness. Because obviously if you divide the world in two like that, you could be missing something important that isn’t being comprehended by either side. Something that might not even have been thought of yet.
It wasn’t a simple either-or for Ike, apparently, in one respect, anyway. He’d been a General but now he didn’t see war as any way to go about things. In 1946, shortly after our victory in World War II and even before he’d been elected President, he’d said in a speech in Ottawa,
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.
In any case, in Project Solarium one team, Team A, was to be organized around the ideas of George Kennan, who was made the chair of that team. Kennan was not in the military. Back in February 1946, Kennan, who at the time was a diplomat posted to the U. S. Embassy in Moscow, had sent a “Long Telegram” to the Truman administration under the heading “the sources of soviet conduct.”
The “sources of Soviet conduct” were of interest to President Truman because after World War II ended in August 1945, Soviet conduct had been troubling. The Soviet Union was taking over the formerly independent countries in Eastern Europe and the Baltics and installing Communist governments in those countries. Not only that. In February 1946, Joseph Stalin, the dictator in the Soviet Union, had delivered a speech in which he described the Second World War as the “inevitable result . . . of modern monopoly capitalism,” and suggested that capitalism and socialism could never coexist. That was stark. Definitely either/or.
Did he really believe it? Or was it a way of him trying to consolidate his power over there? In any case, that sure made it easy for us to see Stalin and the Soviet Union as one of “them.”
Stalin had also said, however, in 1934,
There is not, nor should there be, an irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective.… There should be no such contrast, because collectivism, Socialism, does not deny, but combines individual interests with the interests of the collective. Socialism cannot abstract itself from individual interests. More than that, socialist society alone can firmly safeguard the interests of the individual. In this sense there is no irreconcilable contrast between Individualism and Socialism.
So the “contrast” did not not seem, in his eyes, “irreconcilable.” It hadn’t in 1934, anyway.
In World War II, the Soviet Union had been our ally. But now? Just a few months after the end of the war? What had happened?
After World War II, Communism appeared to have strong appeal in some of the countries of Western Europe and elsewhere. Kennan had argued in the Long Telegram that the reason Communism had the appeal it did in countries outside the Soviet Union was that it fed on “diseased tissue” caused by the Depression and the aftermath of the war. The best thing we could do to combat its expansion, Kennan had argued, was to focus on the “health and vigor” of our own society. In the Long Telegram, he’d written,
This is the point at which domestic and foreign policies meet. Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués.
Kennan had also emphasized the profound “insecurity” the Soviets felt. If you knew some history and thought about it for a moment, you could see why they might feel insecure. In 1812, Russia had been invaded by Napoleon who got all the way to Moscow before finally being driven back and out. In World War II, the Nazis had invaded, taken all of western Russia, including Moscow, and laid siege to Stalingrad. The Soviets had fought them off and finally driven them out of Russia and out of the Eastern European countries, but the Soviet Union, as you can imagine, was in rough shape.
In 1946, Germany and other European countries, especially Italy, were also a wreck. They had been damaged by the war, and before the war, they’d also been deeply affected by the Great Depression.
That had created the “diseased tissue” Kennan referred to.
We had lost 400,000 soldiers in World War II (the Soviets had lost five times that number) but economically our country had been almost untouched. And the war had brought us out of the Great Depression. Everybody over there was in debt to us.
Kennan predicted that not right away but eventually, the Soviet system of Communism would collapse on itself. As to what we needed to be careful about, he’d said,
… the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.
Kennan’s recommendation was that we just keep the Soviet Union contained and let the contradictions in their system of government do their work, even though it would take some time for this to happen. The policy had come to be called “containment.” President Truman had been taken with it. He had circulated the Long Telegram among those in his government he thought had a need to know what was in it.
In Project Solarium Kennan’s team would be working with the idea that the best policy with respect to the Soviet Union at this point would be some version of “containment.”
But there were other ideas.
Next: Project Solarium III: June 10 to July 15, 1953