Massive retaliation

thumb|350px|Nuclear tests [[Upshot–Knothole Grable|Grable in 1953, the year massive retaliation became US policy, and Apple-2 in 1955]]

Massive retaliation is a military doctrine and nuclear strategy that commits a state to retaliate to an attack in much greater force, especially with the use of nuclear weapons.

During the early stages of the Cold War, the New Look national security policy of the Eisenhower administration dictated that the United States threaten "its atomic capability and massive retaliatory striking power" to deter aggression from the Soviet Union. This strategy was seen as a cheaper alternative to maintaining a large conventional military, and cutting costs was a high priority for Eisenhower.

The US was the only country with atomic weapons, from their invention until 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its first.

Strategy

Massive retaliation is essentially a preemptive nuclear first strike.

The aim of massive retaliation was to deter the Soviet Union from attacking Western Europe, which lacked enough conventional forces to counter the vast Soviet military. These are the same principles underlying mutual assured destruction. However, massive retaliation implies that even a minor conventional attack on a nuclear state could conceivably result in all-out nuclear retaliation.

Massive retaliation was part of Eisenhower's broader New Look national security policy, which attempted to balance a healthy economy with military strength. Military expenditures could be greatly reduced by relying more on nuclear weapons as a substitute for conventional military strength. in a speech by Eisenhower administration Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, on January 12, 1954:

<blockquote>We need allies and collective security. Our purpose is to make these relations more effective, less costly. This can be done by placing more reliance on deterrent power and less dependence on local defensive power. ... Local defense will always be important. But there is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty land power of the Communist world. Local defenses must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power. A potential aggressor must know that he cannot always prescribe battle conditions that suit him.</blockquote>

Although Dulles did not explicitly use the words massive retaliation, However, no decision was made by the Eisenhower administration to rely exclusively on the threat of strategic nuclear bombing,

thumb|1958 deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in KoreaThe New Look policy was applied in East Asia, where defense budgets could be reduced by withdrawing troops from Korea, and increasing reliance on nuclear weapons. Eisenhower planned and advocated for their tactical use on the Korean peninsula should the Korean Armistice Agreement (which ended fighting in the Korean War) have been broken and either China or North Korea invaded the south.

Later the same year, during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, Eisenhower again relied on the threat of nuclear retaliation to deter China, under Mao Zedong, from attacking Taiwan. US armed forces were put on full alert, and a large naval force was deployed to the region. This was particularly risky, as the unpredictable Mao regime could have decided to attack anyway. Had this happened, the US would have been forced to make a difficult choice: either risk allowing Taiwan to fall and accept a serious blow to US credibility, or follow through on nuclear threats, killing potentially millions of civilians.

RAND strategist Bernard Brodie, who outlined the foundation of nuclear deterrence theory that remains relevant in US policy today, wrote in 1959 that massive retaliation, similar to a preventive or preemptive first strike, is a seductive option to military planners owing to its potential to completely eliminate a threat. Because of the difficulty of defending against nuclear attack, it is assumed that whoever strikes first will have a major advantage: They could ostensibly wipe out their enemy's retaliatory forces. However, because of the inherent uncertainty of military planning, and the terrible damage should even one enemy hydrogen bomb slip through defenses, Brodie argued against most forms of first strike: it is likely not possible to outright win a nuclear war, and the costs of such an attempt are very high. Instead, Brodie strongly advocated for deterrence through secure second strike capability.

According to Brodie, threats of massive retaliation were simply not credible, and that in practice, military planners would always choose limited responses to less-than-total aggression; due to ambiguity about the precise threshold for massive retaliation, disagreement among armed services, and political forces urging restraint.

In areas such as Korea or Taiwan, where US adversaries did not yet possess nuclear weapons, Brodie argued that the use of nuclear weapons would be seen as abhorrent enough to alienate any allies protected in this manner.

Policy shift

In 1957, three years after his announcement of massive retaliation, Dulles wrote in Foreign Affairs that there had been no alternative to massive retaliation at the time, but that it now seemed possible confine the effects of nuclear weapons to limited targets. According to Cold War historian Marc Trachtenberg, Dulles shifted toward what would later be called flexible response, having said in 1958: "...the United States must be in a position to fight defensive wars which do not involve the total defeat of the enemy."

Nevertheless, Eisenhower continued to dismiss the possibility of restraint in general war against the Soviet Union throughout his term. In 1959, he said: "...once we become involved in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, we could not stop until we had finished off the enemy; that is, forced him to stop fighting."

thumb|US President Kennedy (left) and Secretary of Defense [[Robert McNamara in 1962]]

By the time Eisenhower's second term as president ended, there was a widespread, false public perception that the US had fallen behind the Soviet Union in terms of military strength. This belief was spurred by the Soviet Union's successful test of the world's first ICBM in 1957, followed shortly by the launching of the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik. The supposed military shortfall was termed the missile gap in 1958 by John F. Kennedy during his presidential campaign, which heavily criticized Eisenhower's strategic policies. Kennedy offered a new doctrine, flexible response, that would increase the defense budget, procure a greater variety of conventional military options, and respond to smaller threats more proportionately. Bolstered by support for this platform, Kennedy won the 1960 US presidential election, and assumed office in January the next year.

In Europe, Kennedy had to assuage fears from NATO allies, reassuring them that the change in doctrine did not reduce US commitment to their defense. Across the third world, Kennedy applied flexible response in the form of counterinsurgency against revolutionary guerilla forces, such as by deploying Green Berets to fight against the Viet Cong, but these efforts faced great difficulty. According to Cold War historian Samuel F. Wells, the phrase was a form of political communication designed to impress upon the US public and its allies that a new, stronger stance against communism was being taken, one which exploited the efficiency and savings offered by atomic weapons. When Eisenhower was elected, there was strong political and public demand for such a stance. By the end of his presidency, public perceptions had shifted against Eisenhower, and Kennedy used a new catchphrase, flexible response, to label and distinguish his own policies. According to Wells, Kennedy's policies developed upon Eisenhower's rather than abandoning them. Wells also argued that massive retaliation was deliberately ambiguous, which can be useful in foreign policy.

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Massive retaliation

Strategy

Policy shift

Sources

Further reading