Massive Retaliation
Massive retaliation became the official policy of the administration of US
President Dwight D. Eisenhower after 1954, in the wake of the USA’s
involvement in theKorean War. It was, very simply, the idea that any
aggression by the Soviet Union in Europe or elsewhere would be met by a
huge nuclear onslaught on the Soviet homeland. This was only plausible
because, at that stage, there was neither a convincing alternative for the West,
given comparative figures for conventional capacity, nor any danger of the East
launching any sort of nuclear counter-strike. As the Soviet Union’s nuclear
arsenal grew in the late 1950s and early 1960s US strategic theory developed
doctrines ofescalationandflexible response, leading ultimately tomutual
assured destruction, in order to preserve the goal ofdeterrence.
Materialism
According to the philosophical or sociological doctrine of materialism only the
material, or physical, world need be or can be used in the explanation of social
processes and institutions. Most commonly associated with theories ofMarx-
ism(though by no means limited to them), materialism,inter alia, denies the
meaningfulness of, for example, religious experience or consciousness except
as projections by people of their physical experience. In one of its forms,
dialectical materialism, it is the quasi-Marxist doctrine that only technical
changes in the modes and means of production cause development and change
in societies and economies. Materialism thus insists that social consciousness is
the product of the material conditions of life, and therefore that all other
human institutions, whether legal and political systems, ideologies, religions,
kinship patterns or even art forms are ultimately dependent on the economic
infrastructure.Engels, rather thanMarxhimself, is largely responsible for the
‘materialist conception of history’ which, invertingHegel, insists on the
physical world and man’s struggle with it for survival being basic, rather than
human ideas, reason and spirit. It is materialism, whether in Marxism,
socialism or other ideologies, thatChristianity, and especially Roman
Catholicism, has always sought to combat in politics. The term itself is less
often used today, being frequently replaced by the more general idea of
‘reductionism’, the material world being only one of many possible things to
which ideas can be ‘reduced’ when seeking to invalidate them.
Menshevik
Mensheviks were members of a faction inside the All-Russian Social Demo-
cratic Labour Party (RSDLP), theMarxistparty which provided the ideas and
leadership for the Russian Revolution and subsequent Soviet state. In 1903,
Massive Retaliation