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The End of Victory recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war-how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy-a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Edward Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks-and ones involving military force run grave ones-though they can rarely be known with precision.

Between 1945 and 1950, the United States had a global nuclear monopoly. The A-bomb transformed the nation’s strategic airpower and saw the Air Force displace the Navy at the front line of American defense. In To Kill Nations , Edward Kaplan traces the evolution of American strategic airpower and preparation for nuclear war from this early air-atomic era to a later period (1950–1965) in which the Soviet Union’s atomic capability, accelerated by thermonuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, made American strategic assets vulnerable and gradually undermined air-atomic strategy. The shift to mutually assured destruction (MAD) via general nuclear exchange steadily took precedence in strategic thinking and budget allocations. Soon American nuclear-armed airborne bomber fleets shaped for conventionally defined—if implausible, then impossible—victory were supplanted by missile-based forces designed to survive and punish. The Air Force receded from the forefront of American security policy. Kaplan throws into question both the inevitability and preferability of the strategic doctrine of MAD. He looks at the process by which cultural, institutional, and strategic ideas about MAD took shape and makes insightful use of the comparison between generals who thought they could win a nuclear war and the cold institutional logic of the suicide pact that was MAD. Kaplan also offers a reappraisal of Eisenhower’s nuclear strategy and diplomacy to make a case for the marginal viability of air-atomic military power even in an era of ballistic missiles.

The strategy of integrated deterrence is a repackaged version of Cold War strategies. The integration of assets to deter adversaries was part of both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations' overarching strategies that forced the military services to change their operating concepts, capabilities, and doctrine simultaneously. The US Army is an example of how national strategy forces organizational changes. This article assesses how the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations forced institutional change while considering the significance of integrating deterrence. These examples will assist US military and policy practitioners with adapting their organizations to existing national defense strategies.

The book description for \"Deterrence and Defense\" is currently unavailable.

This article examines the question of how serious President Eisenhower was in contemplating the use of nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula and Chinese mainland. To do this, it surveys Eisenhower's thinking and policies about the issue from 1953 to 1968 in regard to maintaining the security of South Korea. In contrast to many in the literature who argue that Eisenhower would have been very reluctant to authorize their use or who downplay the significance of his many statements about the use of nuclear weapons, it maintains that the president was much more willing to use nuclear compellent force than many have supposed. In regard to Eisenhower's reputation, this article adopts a post-revisionist stance that questions the consensus in the literature that he viewed them as instruments of deterrence, not war fighting. It also suggests that more research should be initiated to investigate the relationship between presidents' national security policies, commitments, and the option of nuclear compellence.

Waging Peace offers the first fully comprehensive study of Eisenhower’s “New Look” program of national security, which provided the groundwork for the next three decades of America’s Cold War strategy. Though the Cold War itself and the idea of containment originated under Truman, it was left to Eisenhower to develop the first coherent and sustainable strategy for addressing the issues unique to the nuclear age. To this end, he designated a decision-making system centered around the National Security Council to take full advantage of the expertise and data from various departments and agencies and of the judgment of his principal advisors. The result was the formation of a “long haul” strategy of preventing war and Soviet expansion and of mitigating Soviet hostility. Only now, in the aftermath of the Cold War, can Eisenhower’s achievement be fully appreciated. Waging Peace will be of interest to scholars and students of the Eisenhower era, diplomatic history, the cold war, and contemporary foreign policy.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC), whose task was to determine what damage the USSR could inflict in a surprise attack. The NESC was fundamental to the creation of US nuclear strategy, and its work is virtually unknown. For twelve years, the subcommittee quantified the cost of failure. During critical moments—such as the crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others—and during day-today containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports were the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. The reports show what presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy believed were plausible outcomes of nuclear war and delineated what the presidents thought was achievable in fighting a nuclear war, as opposed to peacetime deterrence. This assessment of the cost of failure came at a pivotal time in the history of US national security, between 1950 and 1965 as the Cold War's most direct confrontations between the superpowers occurred, and the NESC is a key to understanding that moment.

THIS IS AN AUDIO RECORDING OF THIS EDITION OF MEET THE PRESS. On this edition of Meet the Press: United States Army Chief of Staff, General Maxwell D. Taylor discusses the armed forces.

The spread of nuclear weapons outside the Western world has become the most important nuclear issue since the end of the Cold War. By contrast, the debate about Europe's nuclear strategy has subsided. Nuclear collaboration in Western Europe now seems an unlikely prospect and so too does proliferation, despite instability in the former Soviet Union, and occasional speculation about Germany's nuclear appetite. A very different atmosphere prevailed during the Cold War, when the need for a European nuclear force was endlessly debated, without any prospect of this political demand being fulfilled, and, in the late 1950s and 1960s, several European countries appeared to be at the threshold of obtaining nuclear power.

Pres Eisenhower's New Look of 1953 is often associated with the 1952 British Global Strategy Paper (GSP). Johnston examines the background and meaning of the GSP and discusses how UK's Chief of Air Staff Sir John Slessor's visit to the US in 1952 was an attempt to define UK's principal strategic dilemma at this time.