New military
technology coupled with increased global integration has allowed the United
States to reinvent the fundamental assumptions of international diplomacy while
propelling itself to the top of the hegemonic stepladder. This positioning was
achieved piecemeal during the course of the first two world wars, but it wasn't
until the deployment of the atomic bomb that the U.S.. assumed its position as
a true superpower. The years that followed this unparalleled ascension are the
most fascinating times in the history of U.S. international relations.
Hopefully, an investigation into this atomic diplomacy, along with a balanced
analysis of the problems of conceptualizing and implementing containment, will
provide insight for our current efforts to devise a workable post-war national
security policy.
There is no way to tell the story of post-war
national security without also telling the story of George Kennen. Kennen, the
foremost expert of Soviet Affairs in early post-war America, is almost wholly
responsible for the policy of containment. What we must remember under Kennen's
containment is that nuclear diplomacy is not separate from other national
security measures as it is often today. Nuclear weapons were part of an
integrated system of containment and deterrence. Truman told Kennen in early
1947 that "our weapons of mass destruction are not fail-safe devices, but
instead the fundamental bedrock of American security" (Gaddis 56). They
were never intended as first strike weapons and had no real tactical value. The
bomb is purely strategic, and its value comes not from its destructive
capabilities, but from its political and
psychological ramifications. Kennen was never naive enough to view the bomb as
an offensive weapon. In his long memorandum "The International Control of
Atomic Energy," Kennen noted that "there could be no way in which
weapons of mass destruction could be made to serve rational ends beyond simply
deterring the outbreak of hostilities"
(Kennen 39). Even
at this early point, Kennen began to also recognize the potential of the bomb
to completely wreck balance of power arrangements. Simply achieving higher
potentials of destruction would not necessarily lead to a better negotiating
position with the Soviets. Truman had never considered not creating the
hydrogen bomb, despite Kennen's objections.
Truman's justified his adamant support of the
super bomb for bargaining purposes with the Russians. Kennen's point, of course, had been that the very decision to
build the hydrogen bomb would inhibit bargaining with the Russians on
international control, since the Kremlin was unlikely to negotiate from a
position of weakness. Most of the American national security structure viewed
this as fallacious. Truman's perception was that the United States, as a
technology rich but man power short nation, was operating from a position of
weakness, since of necessity is relied more heavily than did the Soviet Union
on weapons of mass destruction to maintain the balance of power. The Soviet
atomic test in 1949 had upset that balance. Only by building the super bomb, it
was thought, could equilibrium be regained. It would not be until the Kennedy
administration that Kennen would be vindicated and an awareness would develop
"of the basic unsoundness of a defense posture based primarily on weapons
indiscriminately destructive and suicidal in their implications" (Kennen
365).
The late mistakes of the Truman administration
would be carried over into the Eisenhower years. Nuclear deployment became the
primary American security measure, naturally leading the Soviets to do the
same. The problems of the Eisenhower years stemmed directly from the
overconfidence in the U.S. nuclear program to achieve tangible military
objectives in the face of increased hostilities. John Foster Dulles, the symbol
of bipartisan cooperation on foreign policy, began to advocate the nuclear
response. The impotence of our standing army compared to the Soviet's military
behemoth was clear to all U.S. policy advisors. There was no way in which we
could match Russia gun for gun, tank for tank, at anytime, in any place. John's
brother Allen Dulles, CIA director under Eisenhower, said "to do so would
mean real strength nowhere and bankruptcy everywhere" (Gaddis 121).
Instead, the U.S. response to Soviet aggressions would be made on our terms.
J.F. Dulles' solution was typical strategic asymmetry, but of a particular kind. His recommendations
prompted a world in which "we could and would strike back where it hurts,
by means of out own choosing. This could be done most effectively by relying on
atomic weapons, and on the strategic air and naval power necessary to deliver
them" (Dulles 147). This unbalanced strategic equation between the two
superpowers was not even the most dangerous flaw of the 1950s.
In retrospect, the most startling deficiency of
the Eisenhower administration's strategy was its bland self-confidence that it
could use nuclear weapons without starting an all out nuclear war. Limited
nuclear conflict was possible, as Kissenger argued in Nuclear Weapons and
Foreign Policy, "but only if those participating in it had agreed
beforehand on the boundaries beyond which it would not extend" (Kissenger
124). This was clearly impossible with the Soviets, making Eisenhower's policy
foolhardy and naive. Given the high amount of activity by the U.S. intelligence
apparatus during the time, especially in Russia and South Asia, it is sunrising
that an international incident of cataclysmic proportions did not take place.
Strategic asymmetry, supplemented by nuclear superiority, would not last long
after Eisenhower. Instead, it was replaced with Kennedy's "flexible response."
The critics of "The New Look" and past nuclear diplomacy pointed out
that only newfound symmetry allows us enough political flexibility to respond
to Russian aggression in whatever way suits U.S. interests at the time.
Kennedy, possessing an economic rationale for disregarding costs, placed his
emphasis on minimizing risks by giving the U.S. sufficient flexibility to
respond to Russia with neither escalation or humiliation. This required a
capacity to act on all levels, ranging from diplomacy through covert action,
guerilla operations, conventional and nuclear war. Equally important, though,
it would require careful control. Walt W. Rostow, Kennen's replacement as
Chairman of The Policy Planning Council, was chosen as usual on behalf of the
Kennedy administration to spell out the problems the new flexible response
policy would solve: It should be noted that we have generally been at a
disadvantage in crisis, since the Communists command a more flexible set of
tools for imposing strain on the free world than we normally command. We are
often caught in circumstances where our only available riposte is so
disproportionate to the immediate provocation that its use risks unwanted
escalation or serious political costs to the free community. This asymmetry makes
it attractive for Communists to apply limited debilitating pressures upon us in
situations where we find it difficult to impose on them an equivalent price for
their intrusions (Rostow 173).
The administration's desire to reduce it's
dependence on nuclear weapons did not, however, imply any corresponding
determination to cut back on either their number or variety. "Nuclear and
non-nuclear power complement each other," Robert McNamara insisted in
1962, "just as together they complement the non-military instruments of
policy" (Gaddis 218). McNamara is only partially correct. Widespread
nuclear deployment as a means to complement peacetime diplomatic goals often
backfires. For example, the presence of Jupiter misses in Turkey became a
public issue in 1962 when Khrushchev made their withdrawal a condition for
removing Soviet IRBMs from Cuba. Although somewhat over-dramatized in most
historical accounts, the Cuban Missile Crisis proves the award relation between
nuclear security and political reality. But whatever the frustrations of
dealing with Cuba after the missile crisis, the administration regarded the
handling of that affair as a textbook demonstration of "the flexible
response" in action, and therefore a model to be followed elsewhere. A
draft of National Security Action Memorandum of February 1963 emphasized the
need in the future to employ this "controlled and graduated application of
integrated political, military, and diplomatic power" (Gaddis 231). The
peaceful end to the crisis had shown that none of these concerns lay beyond the
capacity of a "flexible response" strategy now validated by the test
of practical experience.
Once Kennedy was killed, there was an era of
make-believe in the Pentagon. Vietnam was starting for real, and the constant
deployment of U.S. troops against Communist forces added a new element to our
national security equation. Vietnam stands testament that the atomic bomb is a
tactically useless weapon that aids an attacking nation in no way tangible way.
Perhaps simply possessing the bomb is a psychological outvoting over the enemy,
but the effects of this in Vietnam will nil. Later, Henry Kissenger would point
out that in no crisis since 1962 had the strategic balance determined the
outcome. There is no easy answer that best explains the Johnson
administration's inability to come up with alternatives in Vietnam. Whatever
the answer, we can say with relative confidence that it had nothing to do with
nuclear weapons. Kissenger has pinpointed the reason early in the war: "Nuclear
weapons, given the constraints on their use in an approaching era of parity,
were of decreasing practical utility" (Kissenger 29). Around this time, we
can conclude that the world has entered an age in which there is a strong and
binding nuclear taboo. A nation that employs nuclear weapons to attack its
enemies is considered evil. Therefore, all the hegemonic power gained from
atomic weapons was absolutely worthless in Vietnam. While limited success was
achieved in some international arenas during the Kennedy and Johnson years,
Vietnam seals the coffin on the flexible response. Gaddis agrees, saying
Vietnam "was the unexpected legacy of the flexible response: not fine
tuning, but clumsy overreaction, not coordination but disproportion, not
strategic precision, but in the end, a strategic vacuum" (Gaddis 273). The
1968 campaign was unusual in that, unlike 1952 and 1960, it provided little
indication of the direction in which the new administration would move into
office. In addition, the world facing the new administration of 1968 was one
ripe with possibilities of new approaches. To usher in these new strategies,
Nixon choose Dr. Henry Kissenger as his national security advisor. Kissenger's
conceptual approach to the making of national security policy eliminated the
crisis based flexible response system. "Crises," he said, "were
symptoms of deeper problems that if allowed to fester would prove increasingly
unmanageable" (Kissenger 275). Kissenger was one of the first to recognize
the shift from a bipolar to multipolar world. This was a natural result
modernization, and therefore, traditional bipolar nuclear strategy began to
lose importance, like Kissenger had predicted five years earlier. Before this
point, United States interests were effectively met by its Pax Americana
enforced on the world by U.S. weapons of war. By 1968, however, Nixon knew he
had to deal with the world in a much less dynamic fashion.
What Nixon and Kissenger did with their concept
of a multipolar world order was to arrive at a conception of interests
independent of threats. Gaddis points out that "since those interests
required equilibrium but not ideological consistency, it followed that the
United States could feasibly work with states of differing and even antithetic
social systems as long as they shared the American interest in countering
challenges to global stability" (Gaddis 285). This has become the primary
guiding doctrine in American foreign policy since that time. Once this official
policy shift was made, nuclear weapons became exactly what they originally
were: symbols for deterrence. The only continuing reason any nations of the nuclear club still deploy nuclear weapons
is to deter hostility from other nations. The depth and complexity of American
security policy reaches far beyond the scope of this investigation, but
hopefully the role of the atomic bomb in U.S. foreign affairs is somewhat more
clear. Today, nuclear diplomacy is dead. The world has somehow adapted to
weapons of mass destruction, and the diplomatic and military strategy of
nuclear weapons is far from the minds of U.S. officials in the State
Department. The world has moved on to a new age in international relations.
Kissenger said in 1968 that "there was now no single decisive index by
which the influence of states can be measured" (Kissenger 277). As much as
we might like to indict the policies of nuclear diplomacy for all its
self-indulgent insanity, we must bear in mind that it was somehow successful.
Not one atomic bomb fell onto a nation from Kennen to Kissenger, and that
should show the altruistic commitment by men of power to keep the unthinkable
thinkable.
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