THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR ---- Episode 32

THE UNITED STATES INSISTED ON INTIMIDATING THE
WORLD WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN THE 1950s

Soviet leaders were particularly irked by the dangers of proliferation. Five top scientists, including nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov asserted that "the development of the industrial use of atomic energy by itself does not only exclude, but leads directly, to an increase of military atomic potential." Foreign Minister Molotov reiterated this point in meetings with Dulles and in a note stating that it was "possible for the very application of atomic energy for peaceful purposes to be utilized for increasing the production of atomic weapons." When Molotov again raised the proliferation risk at their May 1 meeting, Dulles couldn't grasp the concept and and replied that he "would seek out a scientist to educate him more fully." 

If Eisenhower's UN address raised hopes for an easing of international tensions, Dulles's January 12 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations dashed them thoroughly. He warned that local defenses against communism would be backed by "massive retaliatory power" deployed "at places and with means of our own choosing." 

Reliance on nuclear weapons represented a fundamental departure from previous policy. Whereas Truman, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had had viewed atomic bombs as weapons that would be used only in the most desperate circumstances, Eisenhower made them the foundation of U. S. defense strategy. The Wall Street Journal reported, "There was a wide assumption that here was a reckless policy of turning every minor clash into an atomic Armageddon." The New York Times' James Reston was stunned that Eisenhower and Dulles were enacting a " 'new strategy', potentially graver than anything ever proposed by any United States Government," and not a single congressman even questioned this commitment to "sudden atomic retaliation." He worried about the constitutional implications of such expanded presidential powers. If the Chinese moved into Indochina or the Soviets into Iran, who, he asked, would give the order to deploy "massive retaliatory power" against Beijing or Moscow ? How, he wondered, could the president "seek the consent of the Congress without alerting the Kremlin and risking a sudden atomic blow upon the United States?"

RAND analyst Joseph Loftus became concerned that the new SAC Emergency War Plan was targeting Soviet cities and civilian populations. While Loftus was visiting SAC headquarters in Omaha, General James Walsh, the director of SAC intelligence, invited him over to his house for cocktails and began lecturing him on the need to maximize destruction. Walsh suddenly exploded. "Goddammit, Loftus, there's only one way to attack the Russians, and that's to hit them hard with everything we have and" ---he shouted, pounding his fist on the enormous Bible on the table --- "knock their balls off ! "

By the spring of 1954, SAC's war plan called for attacking the Soviet Union with 600 to 750 bombs and turning it into "a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours." The plan involved killing 80 percent of the population in 118 major cities, or 60 million people. Later that year, the United States began deploying nuclear weapons on the soil of its European allies. By 1958, almost three thousand had been placed in Western Europe. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. arsenal continued to grow at a dizzying pace, expanding from slightly over 1,000 when Eisenhower took office to over 22,000 bombs when he left office eight years later. 

Massive retaliation might frighten the Soviets, but it would do little to thwart the revolutionary upsurge in the developing world, where the Soviet Union was poised to take advantage of widespread discontent. The most important third-world leaders ---Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, and Jawaharlal Nehru of India ---- steered a neutral course between the capitalist and socialist blocs and thought it obscene to spend billions of dollars and rubles on arms when money for economic development was in short supply. On his first trip abroad, in May 1953, Dulles learned of hostility toward the United States in Asia, where the Soviet system had real appeal, and the Middle East. During his trip, he wrote to Eisenhower about "bitterness" in the Arab world, where "the United States suffered from being linked with British and French imperialism" and from its blind support for Israel.

Dulles wasn't sure that the United States could ever win the allegiance of third-world peoples. He noted that asking underdeveloped countries to embrace capitalism was like asking people who were undernourished and suffering from rickets to play rugby : " You say to them, 'Have a free competitive system.' And they say, 'Good God, there must be a better way of doing things!' " Eisenhower was also troubled by the depth of animosity toward the United States among the world's impoverished masses. He raised the issue at a March 1953 NSC meeting, wondering why it wasn't possible "to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us."