Abstract
Presidential Studies Quarterly, March 2005, Center for the Study of the Presidency.
Historians like Ike. Although the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration upped the Cold War nuclear ante through its New Look policy–which threatened “massive retaliation” with nuclear weapons in response to any attack against the United States–chroniclers of the period tend to portray the president as a rational, benevolent statesman who abhorred nukes. To the extent that Eisenhower publicly endorsed the military utility of nuclear weapons, these comments often have been downplayed as random musings or as tactical bluffs.
But in his article “Beyond Brinkmanship: Eisenhower, Nuclear War Fighting, and Korea, 1953-1968,” Brown University political scientist Michael Gordon Jackson suggests that historians have allowed their fondness for the “Man from Abilene” to soften their perceptions of the former general. Writing in Presidential Studies Quarterly–an interdisciplinary journal published by the Center for the Study of the Presidency in Washington, D.C.–Jackson argues that the real reason Eisenhower spoke so forcefully about using nuclear weapons is that, well, he actually believed it: “The fact of the matter is that President Eisenhower was much more committed to the necessity, if not the desirability, of nuclear war fighting than most have been willing to accept.”
Scouring through a paper trail of declassified documents, Jackson finds a striking consistency in Eisenhower's views both during and after his presidency. In meetings with his National Security Council in 1953, Eisenhower spoke frequently of employing nuclear weapons against Chinese forces (“hitting them hard”), should Beijing violate the recently signed Korean armistice. Jackson notes these comments should not be casually dismissed, since the administration launched a concerted diplomatic offensive to shore up support for the war plan among U.S. allies. Indeed, British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden recalled one discussion wherein, “Ike said the American public no longer distinguished between atomic and other weapons … nor is there logically any distinction…. Why should [the Americans] confine themselves to high explosives requiring thousands of aircraft … when they can do it more cheaply and easily with atoms?”
Years later, as an informal adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Eisenhower was a staunch advocate for using tactical nuclear weapons to bring about an end to the Vietnam War. In these and other case studies, Jackson reveals Eisenhower dismissed the dangers of nuclear escalation (“the Russians and the Chinese would be guided by their own interests”) and that he was often impatient with State Department concerns over political repercussions.
The parallels between the Eisenhower years and the current era are not lost on Jackson. He observes that the Bush administration's push to develop new classes of nuclear weapons for military use (such as the so-called mini-nukes) highlights the need for historians to reassess the extent to which Cold War presidents viewed nuclear weapons not merely as instruments of deterrence, but as arsenals of “compellence.” And it makes one wonder how eager Ike would have been to use nuclear weapons in an era in which a growing number of countries possess the capabilities to follow the U.S. example.