1957–1962: The Wave of the Future

Abstract

A few days after the orbiting of Sputnik, the mood of the United States, as it pressed on with its own Titan and Atlas ICBM programme, was well expressed by the Christian Science Monitor: ‘Military — and diplomatic — logic today is posing one single desperately essential task for the United States. That is to catch up, at whatever cost, with the Soviet Union in missile development.’ (Following numerous fiascos the first American Atlas ICBM was fired from Cape Canaveral on 17 December 1957.) As if recognising that his grand strategy of ‘Massive Retaliation’ was dead, there was an article by Dulles in the October 1957 edition of Foreign Affairs which noted that ‘in the future it may be feasible to place less reliance upon deterrence of vast retaliatory power….’. The wheel had come round to the ideas of the containment policy which had been elaborated in the same magazine ten years before by George Kennan.