Atomic Diplomacy Essay, Research Paper

Atomic Diplomacy Revisted: U.S. Nuclear Security Policy, Kennen to Kissenger The emergence of the United States as a dominant party in balance of power equations is a relatively new phenomenon in world history. New military technology coupled with increased global integration has allowed the United States to reinvent the fundemental assumptions of international diplomacy while propelling itself to the top of the hedgemonic stepladder. This positioning was achieved peacemeal during the course of the first two world wars, but it wasn’t until the deployment of the atomic bomb that the U.S. assumed its position as a true superpower. The years that followed this unparalled ascension are the most fascinating times in the history of U.S. international relations. Hopefully, an investigation into this atomic diplomacy, along with a balanced analysis of the problems of conceptualizing and implementing containment, will provide insight for our current efforts to devise a workable post-war national security policy. There is no way to tell the sotry of post-war national security without also teling the story of George Kennen. Kennen, the formost expert of Soviet Affairs in early post-war America, is almost wholly responsbile for the policy of containment. What we must remember under Kennen’s containment is that nuclear diplomacy is not separate from other national security measures as it is often today. Nuclear weapons were part of an integrated system of containment and deterence. Truman told Kennen in early 1947 that “our weapons of mass destuction are not fail-safe devices, but instead the fundemental bedrock of American security” (Gaddis 56). They were never intended as first strike weapons and had no real tactial value. The bomb is purely strategic, and its value comes not from its destructive capabilties, but from its political and psychological ramifications. Kennen was never naive enough to view the bomb as an offensive weapon. In his long memorandum “The International Control of Atomic Energy,” Kennen noted that “there could be no way in which weapons of mass destuction could be made to serve rational ends beyond simply deterring the outbreak of hostilities” (Kennen 39). Even at this early point, Kennen began to also recognize the potential of the bomb to completely wreck balance of power arrangments. Simply achieving higher potentials of destruction would not necessiarily lead to a better negotioating position with the Soviets. Truman had never considered not creating the hydrogen bomb, despite Kennen’s objections. Truman’s justified his adamant support of the super bomb for bargaining purposes with the Russians. Kennen’s point, of course, had been that the very decision to build the hydrogen bomb would inhibit bargaining with the Russians on international control, since the Kremlin was unlikely to negotiate from a position of weakness. Most of the American national security structure viewed this as fallacious. Truman’s preception was that the United States, as a technology rich but man power short nation, was operating from a position of weakness, since of necessity is relied more heavily than did the Soviet Union on weapons of mass destruction to maintain the balance of power. The Soviet atomic test in 1949 had upset that balance. Only by building the super bomb, it was thought, could equilibrium be regained. It would not be until the Kennedy administration that Kennen would be vindicated and an awareness would develop “of the basic unsoundness of a defense posture based primarily on weapons indiscriminately destructive and suicidal in their implications” (Kennen 365). The late mistakes of the Truman administration would be carryed over into the Eisenhower years. Nuclear deployment became the primary American security measure, naturally leading the Soviets to do the same. The problems of the Eisenhower years stemmed directly from the overconfidence in the U.S. nuclear program to achieve tangible military objectives in the face of increased hostilities. John Foster Dulles, the symbol of bipartisan cooperation on foreign policy, began to advocate the nuclear response. The impotence of our standing army compared to the Soviet’s military behemoth was clear to all U.S. policy advisors. There was no way in which we could match Russia gun for gun, tank for tank, at anytime, in any place. John’s brother Allen Dulles, CIA director under Eisenhower, said “to do so would mean real strength nowhere and bankruptcy everywhere” (Gaddis 121). Instead, the U.S. response to Soviet agressions would be made on our terms. J.F. Dulles’ solution was typical strategic asymmetry, but of a particular kind. His recomendations prompted a world in which “we could and would strike back where it hurts, by means of out own choosing. This could be done most effectively by relying on atomic weapons, and on the strategic air and naval power necessary to deliver them” (Dulles 147). This unbalanced strategic equation between the two superpowers was not even the most dangerous flaw of the 1950s. In retrospect, the most startling deficiency of the Eisenhower administration’s strategy was its bland self-confidence that it could use nuclear weapons without starting an all out nuclear war. Limited nuclear conflict was possible, as Kissenger argued in Nuclear Weapons and Foriegn Policy, “but only if those participating in it had agreed beforehand on the boundries beyond which it would nto extend” (Kissenger 124). This was clearly impossible with the Soviets, making Eisenhower’s policy foolhardy and naive. Given the high amount of activity by the U.S. intellegence aparatus during the time, espcially in Russia and South Asia, it is suprising that an international incident of cataclysmic proportions did not take place. Strategic asymmetry, supplemented by nuclear superiority, would not last long after Eisenhower. Instead, it was replaced with Kennedy’s “flexible response.” The critics of “The New Look” and past nuclear dimplomacy pointed out that only newfound symmetry allows us enough political flexibilty to respond to Russian agression in whatever way suits U.S. interests at the time. Kennedy, possesing an economic rationale for disregarding costs, placed his emphasis on minimizing risks by giving the U.S. sufficent flexibility to respond to Russia with neither escalation or humiliation. This required a capacity to act on all levels, ranging from diplomacy through covert action, guerilla operations, coventional and nuclear war. Equally important, though, it would require careful control. Walt W. Rostow, Kennen’s replacement as Chairman of The Policy Planning Council, was chosen as usual on behalf of the Kennedy administration to spell out the problems the new flexible response policy would solve: It should be noted that we have generally been at a disadvantage in crisis, since the Communists command a more flexible set of tools for imposing strain on the free world than we normally command. We are often caught in circumstances where our only available riposte is so disproportionate to the immediate provocation that its use risks unwanted escalation or serious political costs to the free community. This asymmetry makes it attractive for Communists to apply limited debilitating pressures upon us in situations where we find it difficult to impose on them an equivilent price for their intrusions (Rostow 173). The administration’s desire to reduce it’s dependence on nuclear weapons did not, however, imply any corresponding determination to cut back on either their number or variety. “Nuclear and non-nuclear power complement each other,” Robert McNamara insisted in 1962, “just as together they complement the non-military instruments of policy” (Gaddis 218). McNamara is only partially correct. Widespread nuclear deployment as a means to complement peacetime diplomatic goals often backfires. For example, the presence of Jupiter missles in Turkey becaem a public issue in 1962 when Khrushchev made their withdrawl a condition for removing Soviet IRBMs from Cuba. Although somewhat over-dramatized in most historical accounts, the Cuban Missle Crisis proves the awkard relation between nuclear security and political reality. But whatever the frustrations of dealing with Cuba after the missle crisis, the administration regarded the handling og that affair as a textbook demonstration of “the flexible response” in action, and therefore a model to be followed elsewhere. A draft of National Security Action Memorandum of Feburary 1963 emphasized the need in the future to employ this “controlled and graduated application of integrated political, military, and diplomatic power” (Gaddis 231). The peaceful end to the crisis had shown that none of these concerns lay beyond the capacity of a “flexible response” strategy now validated by the test of practical experience. Once Kennedy was killed, there was an era of make-believe in the Pentagon. Vietnam was starting for real, and the constant deployment of U.S. troops against Communist forces added a new element to our national security equation. Vietnam stands testament that the atomic bomb is a tactically useless weapon that aids an attacking nation in no way tangible way. Perhaps simply posessing the bomb is a psychological advatange over the enemy, but the effects of this in Vietnam will nil. Later, Henry Kissenger would point out that in no crisis since 1962 had the strategic balance determined the outcome. There is no easy answer that best explains the Johnson administration’s inability to come up with alternatives in Vietnam. Whatever the answer, we can say with relative confidence that it had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Kissenged has pinpointed the reason early in the war: “Nuclear weapons, given the constraints on their use in an approaching era of parity, were of decreasing practical utility” (Kissenger 29). Around this time, we can conclude that the world has entered an age in which there is a strong and binding nuclear taboo. A nation that employs nuclear weapons to attack its enemies is considered evil. Therefore, all the hedgemonic power gained from atomic weapons was absolutely worthless in Vietnam. While limited success was achieved in some international arenas during the Kennedy and Johnson years, Vietnam seals the coffin on the flexible response. Gaddis agrees, saying Vietnam “was the unexpected legacy of the flexible response: not fine tuning, but clumsy overreaction, not coordination but disproportion, not strategic precision, but in the end, a strategic vacuum” (Gaddis 273). The 1968 campaign was unusual in that, unlike 1952 and 1960, it provided little indication of the direction in which the new administration would move into office. In addition, the world facing the new administration of 1968 was one ripe with possibilities of new approaches. To usher in these new strategies, Nixon choose Dr. Henry Kissenger as his national security advisor. Kissenger’s conceptual approach to the making of national security policy eliminated the crisis based flexible response system. “Crises,” he said, “were symptoms of deeper problems that if allowed to fester would prove increasingly unmangable” (Kissenger 275). Kissenger was one of the first to recognize the shift from a bipolar to multipolar world. This was a natural result modernization, and therefore, traditional bipolar nuclear strategy began to lose importance, like Kissenger had predicted five years earlier. Before this point, United States interests were effectively met by its Pax Americana enforced on the world by U.S. weapons of war. By 1968, however, Nixon knew he had to deal with the world in a much less dynamic fashion. What Nixon and Kissenger did with their concept of a multipolar world order was to arrive at a conception of interests independant of threats. Gaddis points out that “since those interests required equilibrium but not ideological consistency, it followed that the United States could feasibly work with states of differeing and even antithetic social systems as long as they shared the American interest in countering challenges to global stability” (Gaddis 285). This has become the primary guiding doctrine in American foriegn policy since that time. Once this official policy shift was made, nuclear weapons became exactly what they originally were: symbols for deterrence. The only continuing reason any nations of the nuclear club still deploy nuclear weapons is to deter hostility from other nations. The depth and complexity of American security policy reaches far beyond the scope of this investigation, but hopefully the role of the atomic bomb in U.S. foriegn affairs is somewhat more clear. Today, nuclear diplomacy is dead. The world has somehow adpated to weapons of mass destruction, and the diplomatic and miltary strategy of nuclear weapons is far from the minds of U.S. officials in the State Department. The world has moved on to a new age in international relations. Kissenger said in 1968 that “there was now no single decisive index by which the influence of states can be measured” (Kissenger 277). As much as we might like to indict the policies of nuclear diplomacy for all its self-indlugent insanity, we must bear in mind that it was somehow successful. Not one atomic bomb fell onto a nation from Kennen to Kissenger, and that should show the altruisitic commitment by men of power to keep the unthinkable unthinkable. hat “the gothic revival in American cinema is filmmaking at its most vital: cryptic, moody, and provocative”