Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

As we shall see in a moment, the Eisenhower government through Dulles’s doctrine of “massive retaliation,” enunciated in January 1954, was so deeply committed to nuclear warfare that it could not permit the growth of a public opinion which would refuse to accept the use of nuclear weapons because of objections to the danger of fallout to neutrals and noncombatants. In this struggle Strauss, Dulles, and Teller were supported by the air force, which feared and resented the efforts of the Oppenheimer group to shift the defense expenditures over a much wider range than that of massive retaliation. They were particularly alarmed by the efforts of Oppenheimer, Lee DuBridge, and others to spend money on antiair defenses. By 1953 this struggle became so intense that the supporters of the air force and of massive retaliation decided they must destroy the public image and public career of Oppenheimer, to influence public opinion and to deter other scientists of his view from opposition to the new Republican-air-force party line.

The end of the American nuclear monopoly in late 1950 made necessary a reopening of the strategic debate which had been stabilized on the Truman doctrine of “containment” in 1947. “Containment” strategy was based on a strategic balance between Soviet mass armies and the American nuclear monopoly, in which each of these would deter use of the other, thus establishing an umbrella under which the United States could use its economic power to win the Cold War. The strategic balance had been established as the “Truman Doctrine” early in 1947 and had been followed by the containment weapon, in aid to Greece and Turkey and, above all, by the Marshall Plan. This policy in the years 1947-1950 won numerous victories for the West, all along the Soviet-bloc periphery and especially in West Germany and in Japan, both of which became solidly attached to the West. The major failure, justified as inevitable in terms of the magnitude of the problem and the resources available, was the loss of China to the Soviet bloc, but this was generally accepted by the supporters of containment on the double ground that the available resources must go to Europe (as more important than China) and that China would never be a strong or dependable satellite of Russia.

This doctrine of containment, by depriving each side of its strongest weapon (the Soviet mass army and the American SAC force) tended to neutralize these and forced each side into supplementary strategic plans. On the Soviet side, these new plans involved the use of nibbling tactics by its satellites. On the American side, these new plans involved the development of a balanced and flexible defensive posture based on all services and weapons.

The new Soviet plans required a diversion of American aims from the Soviet Union itself to its periphery and to its satellites. They also involved keeping aggression below the level which would trigger a SAC retaliation. This level was much higher for a satellite state than for the Soviet Union itself. In fact, while almost any military aggression by the USSR might trigger a SAC nuclear strike in return, almost no aggression by a satellite (especially a lesser satellite) would do so. The areas in which such indirect adventures by the USSR might take place were obvious: the Near East and the Far East. In both of these areas the ineptness of American policy made the Soviet task fairly easy.

The American response to this shift in Soviet strategy appeared, not as a response to an overt manifestation of Soviet policy, but as a response to “Joe I.” Moreover, it was not a Defense Department or JCS response, but was sponsored and pushed through by the policy planning staff of the State Department under Paul Nitze. It arose from the needs of NATO as a defensive force against Russia, and advocated a policy very similar to that desired by Oppenheimer and the GAC (increased emphasis on a balanced defense with strengthened ground forces, including those of our allies, and rapid development of tactical nuclear weapons and a tactical air-force role). This effort, which would have required an increase in the defense budget from the 1950 figure of $13 billion to about $35 billion, was accepted in April 1950 by the National Security Council as directive NSC 68, but with a cost figure of only $18 billion a year. The dominant thought of NSC 68 was the expectation of a strategic nuclear stalemate between the United States and the USSR by 1954 and the necessity of preparing for methods of defense, other than massive bombing, to resist Soviet aggression. Naturally, this directive was abhorrent to the “Big Bomber Boys.” The extraordinary thing is that their resistance was successful, and NSC 68 was replaced by “massive retaliation” and a new directive, the so-called NSC 162, in October 1953, in spite of all the lessons of the Korean War of 1950-1953, which the air force and the Eisenhower Administration jointly ignored.

The Korean War and Its Aftermath, 1950-1954

The emphasis by the American armed forces on nuclear retaliation as their chief response to Communist aggression anywhere in the world made it necessary to draw a defense perimeter over which such aggression would trigger retaliation from us. Such a boundary had been established in Europe by the military occupation forces and NATO, but, at the end of 1949, was still unspecified in the Far East because of the recent victory of the Communists in China. At the insistence of the military leaders, especially General MacArthur, that perimeter was drawn to exclude Korea, Formosa, and mainland China; accordingly, all American forces had been evacuated from South Korea in June 1949. In March of that year, MacArthur publicly stated, “Our defense line runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia. It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu archipelago which includes its broad main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain to Alaska.”

The MacArthur defense perimeter in the Far East was accepted by Secretary of State Acheson in a speech on January 12, 1950, but not at all in the sense in which partisan Republicans attacked it later. Acheson specifically stated that America’s guarantee was given only to areas east of that line but that American power might be used to the west of it where independent nations must first seek their security on their own initiative and the organized security system of the United Nations. To Acheson, therefore, the boundary was not between areas we would defend and those we would not defend, but between those we would defend unilaterally and those we would defend collectively.

However, it seems clear that in private, by the end of 1949, all parts of the Administration in Washington looked forward to the fall of Formosa, the complete disappearance of Chiang Kai-shek, the recognition of Red China and its admission to the United Nations, as preliminaries to an intensive diplomatic effort to exploit the split between Soviet Russia and Communist China which was regarded as inevitable. This vision of Chinese “Titoism” never became public policy, but on October 12, 1949, after the JCS under Eisenhower voted that Formosa was not of sufficient strategic importance to warrant its occupation by American troops, the three defense departments and the Department of State agreed unanimously that Formosa would be conquered by Red China by the end of 1950.

Whatever merits there may have been in our Far Eastern defense perimeter and its implications for Formosa, it clearly left Korea in an ambiguous position. The Soviet Union interpreted this ambiguity to mean that the United States would allow South Korea to be conquered by North Korea, just as Red China, about the same time, assumed that the United States would permit it to conquer Formosa. Instead, when Russia, through its satellite, North Korea, sought to take Korea before Red China had taken Formosa, this gave rise to an American counteraction which prevented either aggressor from getting its aim.