THE EISENHOWER ERA ★^961Massive Retaliation
Soon after he entered office, Eisenhower approved an armistice that ended
fighting in Korea. But this failed to ease international tensions. Ike took office
at a time when the Cold War had entered an extremely dangerous phase. In
1952, the United States exploded the first hydrogen bomb—a weapon far more
powerful than those that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The follow-
ing year, the Soviets matched this achievement. Both sides feverishly devel-
oped long-range bombers capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction
around the world.
A professional soldier, Ike hated war, which he viewed as a tragic waste.
“Every gun that is made,” he said in 1953, “every warship launched... signifies
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.” But his secretary of state, John
Foster Dulles, was a grim Cold Warrior. In 1954, Dulles announced an updated
version of the doctrine of containment. Massive retaliation, as it was called,
declared that any Soviet attack on an American ally would be countered by a
nuclear assault on the Soviet Union itself. In some ways, this reliance on the
nuclear threat was a way to enable the budget-conscious Eisenhower to reduce
spending on conventional military forces. During his presidency, the size of
the armed services fell by nearly half. But the number of American nuclear
warheads rose from 1,000 in 1953 to 18,000 in 1960.
Massive retaliation ran the risk that any small conflict, or even a miscal-
culation, could escalate into a war that would destroy both the United States
and the Soviet Union. Critics called the doctrine “brinksmanship,” warning
of the danger of Dulles’s apparent willingness to bring the world to the brink
of nuclear war. The reality that all-out war would result in “mutual assured
destruction” (or MAD, in military shorthand) did succeed in making both great
powers cautious in their direct dealings with one another. But it also inspired
widespread fear of impending nuclear war. Government programs encour-
aging Americans to build bomb shelters in their backyards, and school drills
that trained children to hide under their desks in the event of an atomic attack,
aimed to convince Americans that nuclear war was survivable. But these mea-
sures only increased the atmosphere of fear.
Ike and the Russians
In his inaugural address, Eisenhower repeated the familiar Cold War formula:
“Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against dark.” But the end of the
Korean War and the death of Stalin, both of which occurred in 1953, con-
vinced him that rather than being blind zealots, the Soviets were reasonable
and could be dealt with in conventional diplomatic terms. In 1955, Ike met in
How were the 1950s a period of consensus in both domestic policies and foreign affairs?