Abstract
The diminishing credibility of a nuclear strategy and the consequent advisability of a more conventional approach impressed the Truman Administration, but not its successor, the Administration of General Dwight Eisenhower. A year after taking office, in January 1954, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, outlined a change of direction from the strategic doctrines that had been developing under Truman. This new doctrine, known as one of ‘massive retaliation’, was widely assumed to be founded on an undiscriminating threat to respond to any communist-inspired aggression, however marginal the confrontation, by means of a massive nuclear strike against the centres of the Soviet Union and China. In this chapter the origins of this doctrine will be discussed.
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Notes
Bernard Brodie, ‘Nuclear weapons: strategic or tactical’?, Foreign Affairs XXXII:2 (January 1954), p. 222.
Sir John Slessor, ‘The place of the bomber in British strategy’, International Affaires, XXIX:3 (July 1953), pp. 302–3; idem., ‘Air power and world strategy’, Foreign Affairs, XXXI:1 (October 1954), pp. 48, 51; idem., Strategy for the West (London: Cassell 1954).
Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, ‘A look through a window at World War III’, The Journal of the Royal United Services Institute:596 (November 1954), p. 508.
See John Foster Dulles, ‘A policy of boldness’, Life (19 May 1952), p. 151; Snyder, ‘The new look’, in Schilling, Hammond and Snyder, op. cit., p. 390.
See also Martin C. Fergus, ‘The massive retaliation doctrine: a study in United States military policy formation’, Public Policy, XVII (1968).
Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report (New York: Harper, 1961), pp. 102, 48–9;
David Rees, Korea: The Limited War (London: Macmillan 1964), pp. 417–20;
Robert J. Donovan, Eisenhower: The Inside Story (New York: Harper, 1956), pp. 116–19.
John Foster Dulles, ‘Policy for security and peace’, Foreign Affairs, XXXII: 3 (April 1954).
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© 1983 The International Institute for Strategic Studies
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Freedman, L. (1983). Massive Retaliation. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04271-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04271-5_6
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