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The idea of massive retaliation sparked public controversy [2] in a speech by Eisenhower administration Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, on January 12, 1954: We need allies and collective security. Our purpose is to make these relations more effective, less costly.
- Overview
- Massive retaliation
- First and second strikes
- Mutual assured destruction
The administration of U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, which came to power in January 1953, saw things differently. It reflected on the frustrating experience of the inconclusive conventional war fought in Korea and wondered why the West had not made more use of its nuclear superiority. Eisenhower was also extremely worried about the economic burden of conventional rearmament. Assigning a greater priority to nuclear weapons provided the opportunity to scale down expensive conventional forces. By that time the nuclear arsenal was becoming more plentiful and more powerful.
The strategy that emerged from those considerations became known as “massive retaliation,” following a speech made by U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in January 1954, when he declared that in the future a U.S. response to aggression would be “at places and with means of our own choosing.” That doctrine was interpreted as threatening nuclear attack against targets in the Soviet Union and China in response to conventional aggression anywhere in the world.
The administration of U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, which came to power in January 1953, saw things differently. It reflected on the frustrating experience of the inconclusive conventional war fought in Korea and wondered why the West had not made more use of its nuclear superiority. Eisenhower was also extremely worried about the economic burden of conventional rearmament. Assigning a greater priority to nuclear weapons provided the opportunity to scale down expensive conventional forces. By that time the nuclear arsenal was becoming more plentiful and more powerful.
The strategy that emerged from those considerations became known as “massive retaliation,” following a speech made by U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in January 1954, when he declared that in the future a U.S. response to aggression would be “at places and with means of our own choosing.” That doctrine was interpreted as threatening nuclear attack against targets in the Soviet Union and China in response to conventional aggression anywhere in the world.
Massive retaliation was also criticized for failing to appreciate possible areas of Soviet superiority. That criticism grew after the Soviet Union demonstrated its technological prowess by successfully launching the first artificial Earth satellite (Sputnik 1) in October 1957, not long after it had also made the first tests of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the SS-6. Concern grew that the Soviet Union was outpacing the United States in missile production and thereby leading to a “missile gap.” (It might have been argued that after a certain level of destructive capability had been reached by both sides, an effective stalemate would be reached and extra weapons would make little difference, promising only, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it, to make “the rubble bounce.”)
However, by that time nuclear strategy was becoming much more sophisticated. With the RAND Corporation, a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, taking the lead, new analytical techniques were being developed. Those were often drawn from engineering and economics, rather than the more traditional strategic disciplines of history and politics. In a celebrated RAND study of the mid-1950s, a team led by Albert Wohlstetter demonstrated that the air bases of the Strategic Air Command could be vulnerable to a surprise attack, after which retaliation would be impossible, a situation that would expose the United States and its allies to Soviet blackmail.
A devastating surprise attack was considered possible because, with improved guidance systems, nuclear weapons were becoming more precise. Therefore, it was not inevitable that they would be used solely in countervalue strikes against easily targeted political and economic centres. Instead, it was just as likely that they would be used in counterforce strikes against military targets. A successful counterforce attack that rendered retaliation impossible—known as a “first strike”—would be strategically decisive. If, however, the attacked nation possessed sufficient forces to survive an attempted first strike with retaliatory weapons intact, then it would have what became known as a “second-strike” capability.
Other strategists, such as Thomas Schelling, warned that if both sides sought a first-strike capability, that could lead to an extremely unstable situation, especially during a period of high political tension when both were nervous as to the other’s intentions. If it was feared that an enemy first strike was imminent, then there would be powerful pressures to attack first, and if the enemy recognized those pressures, then that would encourage him to get in his strike. Schelling described that as the “reciprocal fear of surprise attack.”
In the event, technological developments supported the second strike. Initially, long-range bombers had to be kept on continual alert to prevent them from being eliminated in a surprise attack. When ICBMs moved into full production in the early 1960s with such systems as the U.S. Titan and Minuteman I and the Soviet SS-7 and SS-8, they were placed in hardened underground silos so that it would require an unlikely direct hit to destroy them. Even less vulnerable were submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) such as the U.S. Polaris and the Soviet SS-N-5 and SS-N-6, which could take full advantage of the ocean expanses to hide from enemy attack.
Meanwhile, attempts to develop effective defenses against nuclear attack proved futile. The standards for antiaircraft defense in the nuclear age had to be much higher than for conventional air raids, since any penetration of the defensive screen would threaten the defender with catastrophe. Progress was made, using surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) such as the U.S. Nike series, in developing defenses against bombers, but the move to ICBMs, with their minimal warning time before impact, appeared to render the defensive task hopeless. Then, during the 1960s, advances in radars and long-range SAMs promised a breakthrough in antiballistic missile defense, but by the early 1970s those in turn had been countered by improvements in offensive missiles—notably multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs), which could swamp any defenses. (The first MIRVed ICBMs were the U.S. Minuteman III and the Soviet SS-17.)
Measures of civil defense, which could offer little protection to the civilian populace against nuclear explosions and, at best, only some chance of avoiding exposure to nuclear fallout, also appeared hopeless in the face of the overwhelming destructive power being accumulated by both sides.
By the mid-1960s, fears had eased of a technological arms race that might encourage either side to unleash a surprise attack. For the foreseeable future, each side could eliminate the other as a modern industrial state. Robert McNamara, U.S. secretary of defense for much of that decade, argued that so long as the two superpowers had confidence in their capacity for mutual assured destruction—an ability to impose “unacceptable damage,” defined as 25 percent of population and 50 percent of industry—the relationship between the two would be stable.
John Foster Dulles on “massive retaliatory power” (1954) John Foster Dulles was the United States Secretary of State from January 1953 until April 1959. A leading figure in the Eisenhower administration, Dulles was instrumental in shaping US foreign policy. He was a vehement anti-communist who viewed the Soviet Union as a hostile power ...
New Look (policy) Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, right, shown here with President Eisenhower in 1956, became identified with the doctrine of "massive retaliation." The New Look was the name given to the national security policy of the United States during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Editorial Note. In an address before the Council on Foreign Relations at New York City on January 12, 1954, Secretary Dulles expounded the doctrine of “massive retaliation” which he had first enunciated during a speech at the National Press Club at Washington on December 22, 1953. Dulles subsequently discussed this doctrine at greater ...
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John Foster Dulles. John Foster Dulles[a] (February 25, 1888 – May 24, 1959) was an American politician, lawyer, and diplomat who served as United States secretary of state under president Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 until his resignation in 1959. A member of the Republican Party, he was briefly a U.S. senator from New York in 1949.
