A constructed Peace The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963

Eisenhower and Dulles wanted to share America's nuclear weapons with the NATO countries, and they made their wishes quite clear to the main allied governments. The French ambassador in Washington, Maurice Couve de Murville, had an important meeting with Dulles in January 1956. Nuclear weapons were becoming normal weapons, Dulles said, and the American government wanted to provide the European allies with an atomic capability. It would be foolish and wasteful for the various allies to duplicate each others' efforts and develop nuclear forces on an independent national basis. It made much more sense to capitalize on the enormous investment the United States had already made. The weapons could be produced relatively cheaply in the United States and, he thought, provided directly to the allies. But he and Eisenhower first had to overcome one great obstacle: the U.S. Congress. The Atomic Energy Act first had to be liberalized, and this would not be easy.⁶⁰⁴

This issue, in fact, turned out to be quite important. Eisenhower strongly believed that the law needed to be changed. The McMahon Act, as the Atomic Energy Act was sometimes called, was in his view foolish, antiquated and destructive. At a time when the United States was trying to get the allies to put nationalist sentiment behind them--especially in the context of MC 48--here was the American Congress taking a more nationalistic line than anyone else. Here was this Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, given great powers under the McMahon Act, which seemed to think that it knew better than Eisenhower himself what the heart of American defense policy should be. All of this was just poison in the alliance, it was just intolerable, and yet the administration simply did not have the votes to change the law.⁶⁰⁵ The American people, Eisenhower felt, therefore had to be "educated" about these new weapons. They had to be made to see that they were "becoming conventional and that we cannot deny them to our allies."⁶⁰⁶

Nuclear sharing with thus implicit in the MC 48 strategy. But that strategy only made sense at a time when the United States enjoyed an enormous military advantage over the Soviet Union, and it was clear from the outset that that advantage would not last forever. No matter how much the United States spent, no matter how many nuclear weapons were constructed, it was taken for granted, certainly from 1954 on, that America's great strategic edge would eventually waste away. The United States might retain a large lead in numbers of weapons, and if America struck first, the U.S. force might be able to wipe out the bulk of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. But if that arsenal was big enough, and if the Soviets were able to retaliate with even part of what they had left, America would still suffer enormous devastation. And with thermonuclear weapons, the surviving force did not have to be very large. A force that could place even forty or fifty bombs on target could effectively destroy America as a functioning society. And it was clear that sooner or later the Soviets were bound to develop such a force; sooner or later, they would build up their forces to a point where a full-scale American nuclear attack on Russia would for all intents and purposes be suicidal. No matter how massive that American attack, no matter how rapidly it was mounted, no matter how thoroughly Soviet society was destroyed, thermonuclear weapons were so enormously powerful that the USSR's surviving forces would at that point be able to utterly devastate the western countries in a retaliatory strike.

And it was assumed in the mid-1950s that this sort of world was not very far off. Within a few years, perhaps by the end of the decade, general war would mean total devastation. Would the United States at that time still be able to threaten to attack the Soviet Union with strategic nuclear weapons, or would America be held back by fear of retaliation? But the threat of nuclear bombardment was the heart of American military power. If this threat were effectively neutralized by the growth of Soviet nuclear capabilities, what then would protect western Europe? What then would counterbalance the massive land power of the USSR?

Even forces that were in theory capable of holding the line in Europe against a full-scale Soviet conventional attack would not be a complete answer: the NATO armies might be able to keep the Soviet ground forces from overrunning Europe, but they could not keep Soviet planes and missiles from conducting a nuclear offensive well behind the front lines. With American cities increasingly at risk, the American nuclear deterrent was bound to decline in value: the Americans might not retaliate against Russia even in the event of a nuclear war in Europe. In such circumstances, how could the Europeans put their fate so completely in American hands? Didn't they need nuclear forces under their own control? And wasn't it in the interest of the United States to make sure that the Europeans developed a nuclear capability of their own, so at least part of the burden of maintaining a credible deterrent could be removed from American shoulders? What all this implied was that the NATO allies needed a deterrent force free of American control. This concern with the implications of strategic parity was thus the third great taproot of the nuclear sharing policy.

For the time being, of course, the United States had very much the upper hand in strategic terms. When MC 48 was adopted, NATO leaders were no longer worried that the USSR might invade western Europe in the near future. In late 1954, General Gruenther said "flatly that we have such an enormous edge over the Soviet bloc that there is absolutely no danger of their attacking us now."⁶⁰⁷ In 1955, he thought that "if the Soviets were to attack now, the NATO forces could lick them."⁶⁰⁸ The Americans were capitalizing on their very heavy advantage in strategic nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and this advantage lasted throughout the Eisenhower period and into the Kennedy years. "There was a time in the 1950s," according to General LeMay, the SAC commander during this period, "when we could have won a war against Russia. It would have cost us essentially the accident rate of the flying time," because Soviet air defenses were so weak.⁶⁰⁹ Eisenhower himself made a similar point in 1959. "If we were to release our nuclear stockpile on the Soviet Union," the president said, "the main danger would arise not from retaliation but from fallout in the earth's atmosphere."⁶¹⁰

[PUT FIGURE SEVEN ABOUT HERE]

In keeping with standard bureaucratic practice, formal estimates were generally a good deal more cautious, but even at the start of the 1960s, some of the people most closely involved with these issues felt that the United States had something close to a first-strike capability. When Carl Kaysen, then a top White House official, analyzed the issue during the Berlin crisis in 1961, he reached the conclusion that with a limited attack the United States could have destroyed the USSR's ability to inflict really heavy damage on America.⁶¹¹ And during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, a high Air Force general said that "if it came to a U.S. strike," the military authorities "could give a 90 percent assurance that 99 percent of the Soviet nuclear force aimed at the United States would be destroyed before it could get off the ground, or a 99 percent assurance that 90 percent would be destroyed."⁶¹² This calculation did not take into account either the damage that would be inflicted by the nuclear forces under NATO command, nor the damage that Europe would suffer through Soviet retaliation. But according to a major Defense Department historical study, the Soviet strategic situation might well have seemed "little short of desperate," and a "coordinated U.S.-NATO first strike" might have been able to destroy enough of the Soviet force targeted on the NATO area "to negate the deterrent effect of hostage Europe."⁶¹³

This sort of superiority was important not because anyone thought that American's enormous nuclear strength was likely to be used. No one, for example, thought that if the Soviets did something minor, such as stopping a couple of jeeps on the autobahn to Berlin, the "go code" would be issued and a full-scale nuclear attack would be launched. That was never the strategy, although it was often caricatured that way. The basic idea was that the American authorities would be in a position to undertake more limited forms of military action, regardless of what the balance of forces was at that level, because they were in a position to escalate the conflict. America, in the final analysis, had the ability to launch a full-scale nuclear attack; the USSR had nothing comparable. The Soviets would therefore have to back down if the American government pushed things far enough. It was like a game of chess, Dulles said: "In a chess game you wouldn't normally ever go so far as to take your opponent's king; you checkmate that king and don't play out the rest." And America could accept Soviet challenges because she knew her "own military establishment was superior to Russia's and that the Russians knew it was superior. Thus, if necessary, we could call checkmate on the Soviet Union."⁶¹⁴

It was only in late 1963 that the U.S. government finally came to the conclusion that a preemptive strike was no longer a viable option. In September of that year, the NSC's Net Evaluation Subcommittee, the group responsible for assessing the damage that would result from a nuclear war, delivered a report to top administration officials. President Kennedy wondered whether Soviet retaliation would result in unacceptable losses, "even if we attack the USSR first." The NESC chairman, General Leon Johnson, said that this was indeed now the case, that "even if we preempt, surviving Soviet capability is sufficient to produce an unacceptable loss in the U.S. The President asked whether then in fact we are in a period of nuclear stalemate. General Johnson replied that we are." The President then summed up the basic conclusion he was drawing from the report: the new facts showed that "preemption was not possible for us."⁶¹⁸

But it had taken many years for this conclusion to be reached, and the fact that American nuclear superiority was going to last as long as it did was by no means obvious in the early 1950s. And the problem of mutual deterrence--not as a current condition, but as a situation that was bound to arise sooner or later--was from the outset a great source of concern. High officials, and especially Dulles, were worried about what would happen when America's freedom to "initiate the use of strategic nuclear bombing" was "circumscribed" by the fear of retaliation.⁶¹⁹ How then would Europe be defended? How could the alliance be kept together if America remained wedded to a military strategy that might result in the destruction of European society, and perhaps of civilization itself? And if the present strategy would soon be bankrupt, what was the alternative?

These were the great questions which dominated not just American policy but the politics of the North Atlantic alliance in the period from 1954 on. The problem of "mutual deterrence" was the object of intense interest within the Eisenhower administration in the mid-1950s. Beginning in late 1954, various "time charts" were developed to enable the administration to get a handle on this problem.⁶²⁰ What they all suggested was that the world was moving inexorably and probably quite rapidly toward a "condition of mutual deterrence, in which each side would be strongly inhibited from deliberately initiating general war or taking actions which it regarded as materially increasing the risk of general war."⁶²¹

[Put Figure Eight about here]

Eisenhower, however, was very reluctant to accept this argument about mutual deterrence. It was "fatuous," he thought, "to think that the U.S. and USSR would be locked into a life and death struggle without using such weapons."⁶²² But in rejecting it out of hand, he felt himself to be on increasingly shaky ground. Things would soon reach the point, he said in 1955, where full-scale warfare would be absurd. With long- and medium-range missiles, general war would no longer make sense, and he himself "would never wage" such a war.⁶²³ "War up to now," he said the following the year, "has been a contest," but with "nuclear missiles, it is no longer a contest, it is complete destruction."⁶²⁴

So the whole Eisenhower strategy, so clear in 1953-54, was coming unglued. The president understood the problem, but he had no real answer. Some world problems, he told the NSC in early 1957, seemed "insoluble." The problem posed by ballistic missiles was the main case in point. "The concept of deterrent power," he said, had "gone as far as it can. In view of this incredible situation we must have more fresh thinking on how to conduct ourselves."⁶²⁵ And indeed in early 1956 he even seemed ready to concede the heart of the "mutual deterrence" argument: both sides would back away from situations that could lead to general war, "the deterrent against the use of all-out thermonuclear warfare would grow in proportion to the magnitude of the capability." But practically in the same breath he said that the United States had to continue to rely primarily on her nuclear capability, and if American forces ever were engaged in battle, it would be vital to strike "at the heart of the enemy's power."⁶²⁶

So Eisenhower could never quite bring himself to break with the fundamental tenets of his original strategic philosophy: that in a major U.S.-Soviet conflict, neither side would be willing to fight for long with one hand tied behind its back, that escalation was therefore inevitable, that strategic nuclear weapons were the dominant instrument of warfare, and that primary reliance had to be placed on America's ability to fight a general nuclear war. The very idea of restraint in general war he continued to dismiss out of hand. "Once we become involved in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union," he said in 1959, "we could not stop until we had finished off the enemy." There was no point to talking about "negotiating a settlement in the midst of the war," no alternative therefore to hitting "the Russians as hard as we could."⁶²⁷

Dulles, on the other hand, was not quite so fatalistic. He knew that there was a real problem here and pressed for an alternative policy. It is perhaps ironic, given Dulles's reputation as the great champion of the "massive retaliation" strategy, that he was the leader of those forces within the administration who wanted to do away with that strategy, at least in the near future, and put something very different in its place. "The massive nuclear deterrent," Dulles told the NSC in 1958, "was running its course as the principal element in our military arsenal"; he had been arguing along similar lines since at least 1953.⁶²⁸ The Secretary of State had accepted the argument about "mutual deterrence" very early on, and was probably largely responsible for making sure that language expressing this general idea was included in the basic policy documents.⁶²⁹

The idea that "nuclear parity" was unavoidable had certain very important implications. It meant that the United States would have to move toward what would later be called "flexible response": with the "coming of nuclear parity," the BNSP documents pointed out, "the ability to apply force selectively and flexibly" would become "increasingly important."⁶³⁰ The West needed to make sure that it could deal with local aggression without automatically running a great risk of nuclear devastation--or, as people would later say, that "holocaust" and "surrender" were not the only options. Dulles argued repeatedly, especially in 1958, for shifting the emphasis away from strategic nuclear forces and toward area defense.⁶³¹ The United States, he told the NSC, "must be in a position to fight defensive wars which do not involve the total defeat of the enemy."⁶³² America should "cut down on the nuclear effort," he noted later that year, "on the theory that all we needed there was enough to deter; that we did not need to be superior at every point."⁶³³ Greater emphasis had to be placed on conventional forces, which, as he pointed out, "we use everyday in our business."⁶³⁴

Dulles's views were to one extent or another shared by a number of key officials--by Robert Cutler, the President's National Security Advisor, by General Maxwell Taylor, the Army Chief of Staff (who, however, irritated Eisenhower by repeatedly speaking out publicly in this sense), by the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, and by Air Force General Lauris Norstad, Gruenther's successor as SACEUR.⁶³⁵ This general approach emphasized the importance of the NATO shield forces--that is, the forces designed for the direct defense of the NATO area. The shield forces, as Norstad put it, would provide an "'essential alternative' to the employment of ultimate capability."⁶³⁶

What was at stake in this debate was of fundamental importance, and in the course of the 1950s the lines began to be drawn more sharply. On both sides, there was movement away from the MC 48 strategy. On the "massive retaliation" side, people began to feel that direct defense in Europe was hopeless, that whatever happened on the front lines, no one could prevent the Soviets from devastating all of Europe, that all the West really had was the strategic nuclear deterrent, and that (in the more extreme versions of this argument) this was all it really needed, since these great capabilities on both sides would make all war impossible--even limited aggression and conventional war, because of the irreducibly high risk of escalation.

This was, for example, the British view, or at least the view the British government put forward in pressing for a reassessment of NATO strategy: U.S. officials assumed (quite accurately in fact) that this British concept was mainly a way of rationalizing cuts in their defense budget, and especially reductions in British force levels in Germany.⁶³⁷ Norstad, in fact, told the British that it would be better to follow "a frank and open policy" and admit they had to reduce their forces in Europe for economic reasons, than to base those cuts on a strategic concept that he felt to be deeply flawed. But this was something the British government could not do. To explain the cuts in terms of Britain's "financial plight," would, as their defense minister pointed out, "further weaken the pound, endanger British financial stability, and prove generally damaging to Britain's economic situation."⁶³⁸

Economic factors also played a certain role on the U.S. side in the late Eisenhower period. Since cutting back on force levels was a way of dealing with America's growing balance of payments problem, Treasury officials generally favored the idea of moving toward a tripwire strategy.⁶³⁹ But many people--Secretary of Defense McElroy, for example--were coming to support this kind of strategy for mainly military reasons.⁶⁴⁰ Eisenhower himself, although by no means dogmatic on this issue and unwilling to force his personal views on the government as a whole, was increasingly coming to favor a purer "massive retaliation" strategy. As early as May 1956, he considered current NATO strategy, which of course did aim at a direct defense of Europe, as "completely outmoded" in the light of "recent weapons developments."⁶⁴¹ By 1959, he had become more assertive. A limited war in Europe, in his view, was impossible; the NATO shield should therefore be "symbolic"; and the U.S. troop presence in Europe could be cut back dramatically, perhaps to only a single division.⁶⁴²

But the other side--the people thinking more in terms of an effective shield, limited war, a high threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, and even, in its more extreme forms, in terms of a "no first use" policy and nuclear forces designed for simply deterring the enemy from initiating a nuclear exchange--was at the same time moving toward an even more radical break with the MC 48 strategy.⁶⁴³ Even under MC 48, sizeable ground forces had a major role to play. Their function was to "raise the stakes" to the point where the enemy attack, to have any chance of success, would have to be on such a scale as to lead virtually automatically to general war; a strong shield was thus an integral part of a strategy of deterrence. This point remained intact, but by 1956 it was being supplemented by a new argument. That same strong shield force, Gruenther now argued, would also make it possible to contain local aggression "on a scale less than that likely to lead to general war." The deterrent was being rounded out. No matter what the enemy did, aggression would be unprofitable. The same forces needed for the "strategic" function of forcing an enemy contemplating large-scale aggression to attack on such a scale that he would have to reckon with general war, would also serve the "tactical" function of enabling NATO to defend against limited aggression.⁶⁴⁴