The Real Eisenhower: Planning to Win Nuclear War
Peace activists love to quote Dwight Eisenhower. The iconic Republican war hero spoke so eloquently about the dangers of war and the need for disarmament. He makes a terrific poster-boy for peace. But after years of research and writing three books on Ike, I think it’s time to see the real Eisenhower stand up. The president who planned to fight and win a nuclear war, saying “he would rather be atomized than communized,” reminds us how dangerous the cold war era really was, how much our leaders will put us all at risk in the name of “national security,” and how easily they can mask their intentions behind benign images.From first to last, Eisenhower was a confirmed cold warrior. Years before he became president, while he was publicly promoting cooperation with the Soviet Union, he wrote in his diary: “Russia is definitely out to communize the world….Now we face a battle to extinction.” On the home front, he warned that liberal Democrats were leading the U.S. “toward total socialism.”
Everyone knows that, in his Farewell Address, he warned about the military-industrial complex (MIC). But few recall the words that immediately followed: “We recognize the imperative need for this development [of the MIC]. … Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action,” because the danger of the communist foe, “a community of dreadful fear and hate[,] … promises to be of indefinite duration.”
This was not merely rhetoric for public consumption. Eisenhower never saw any hope of rapprochement with the Soviets. He always saw them as irredeemably treacherous, “implacably hostile and seeking our destruction,” as he wrote to Winston Churchill. “Where in the hell can you let the Communists chip away any more? We just can’t stand it,” he complained to a meeting of Congressional leaders in 1954, as he considered intervening in Vietnam. (He held back only because Britain and France refused to support him.)
Ike wanted to avoid nuclear war, but not at all costs. He told his National Security Council (NSC): “If the Soviets attempt to overrun Europe, we should have no recourse but to go to war.” The U.S. must be “willing to ‘push its whole stack of chips into the pot’ when such becomes necessary,” he told Congressional leaders, adding, “We are going to live with this type of crisis for years.” If World War III erupted during his term in office, he boasted, “he might be the last person alive, but there wouldn’t be any surrender.”
In private conversations with foreign leaders he said: “To accept the Communist doctrine and try to live with it” would be “too big a price to be alive. He said he would not want to live, nor would he want his children or grandchildren to live, in a world where we were slaves of a Moscow Power.” “The President said that speaking for himself he would rather be atomized than communized.”
Eisenhower signed NSC 5810/1, which made it official U.S. policy to treat nuclear weapons “as conventional weapons; and to use them whenever required to achieve national objectives.” “The only sensible thing for us to do was to put all our resources into our hydrogen bombs,” he told the NSC. He found it “frustrating not to have plans to use nuclear weapons generally accepted.” He and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, were “in complete agreement that somehow or other the taboos which surround the use of atomic weapons would have to be destroyed.”
(Historians long ago debunked the popular image of Dulles as the hard-line cold warrior who was really in charge and undermined a peace-seeking president. Dulles acknowledged that Eisenhower called the shots. The president himself wrote the famous words in a Dulles speech pledging the U.S. to “massive retaliation.”)
For Eisenhower, the point of amassing a huge nuclear arsenal was not to deter war but to win it. This was enshrined as official policy in NSC 5810/1: “The United States must make clear its determination to prevail if general war occurs.” The only meaningful war aim, he told the NSC, was “to achieve a victory.” He described his war plan as “Hit the guy fast with all you’ve got if he jumps on you”; “hit ‘em … with everything in the bucket.”
By 1957, the president announced publicly that he would use nuclear forces in some “future small war.” NSC 5810/1 made it official policy to use nuclear weapons to “deter limited aggression” as well as a full-scale Soviet attack. At various times, Eisenhower considered plans for using nuclear weapons in Korea, Vietnam, China, Germany, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere.
At the end of his presidency, when he was most aware of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, he still insisted “that the only practical move would be to start using them from the beginning without any distinction whatever between them and conventional weapons.” And if he used nuclear weapons anywhere, he expected it to trigger a global war against the Soviet Union: “He would ‘want to go to the head of the snake.’ If we get our prestige involved anywhere then we can’t get out.”
The crux of Eisenhower’s strategy for victory was to strike first. “Shoot your enemy before he shoots you,” he insisted. That became official, albeit implicit, policy in NSC 5904/1, “U.S. Policy in the Event of War,” which assumed the possibility of a preemptive response to an impending Soviet attack. In a “real” emergency, the president expected to launch an “all-out” nuclear war without consulting Congress.
In 1954, Eisenhower told the NSC that “the United States might have to contemplate a 12-year mobilization program to achieve final victory.” By 1958 planning for prolonged war seemed unrealistic. So he intended to “economically paralyze the Russian nation … to destroy the will of the Soviet Union to fight.” His entire policy, therefore, was simply to “hit the Russians as hard as possible,” “hitting the big industrial and control complexes” in and around Soviet cities.
Eisenhower’s plans always assumed that the U.S. would somehow survive the war. In 1959, when he was well aware that a nuclear war would kill 100 million or more Americans, he still approved NSC 5904/1, the official U.S. policy for global war, which made the nation’s first objective “to prevail, and survive as a nation capable of controlling its own destiny” by planning for a “quick recovery.” “We are simply going to have to be prepared to operate with people who are ‘nuts,’” he told his Cabinet, to “preserve some common sense in a situation in which everybody is going crazy.”
Exploring plans for widespread bomb shelters, Ike told his Cabinet that he wanted to “get private industry active on many of the little ‘practical’ problems as perhaps designing a small air purifier for use by individuals.” When he realized that the “little ‘practical’ problems” of shelters could not be solved, the president turned to the evacuation of cities as the key to survival. He wanted simulated evacuations to continue “until they became a regular part of our lives.”
Eisenhower assumed that a post-holocaust America would be a totalitarian state, ruled by martial law. But he worried about (among other things) what would happen to the credit structure of the country and how to print and sell war bonds to finance the next war if Washington were destroyed. At one NSC meeting he complained that if the President and the Vice President were “knocked off,” the “damnable” law of succession would result in the Democrats (he called them “the other team”) taking the White House. “To assure against that happening, the President thought the Vice President should be put in cotton batting.”
Ike spent a lot of time discussing plans for government relocation during a general war, but only in the case of “possibly 25 or 30 cities being shellacked.” As damage estimates rose, he ordered that postwar planners ignore these terrifying realities and keep “assumptions as to the extent of damage within limits which provide a basis for feasible planning.” “While we don’t get off scot free in case of an attack, we should make assumptions which describe a realm in which humans can operate.”
This was hardly the only way that he substituted fantasy for reality when it came to nuclear weapons. He told press conferences: “The H-bomb in proportion to its size is probably one of the cleanest [weapons]”; he hoped that the U.S. would soon have totally “clean” weapons with no fallout. Privately, he ordered the Joint Chiefs that “targeting should avoid unnecessarily high population losses.” He wanted to “avoid non-military destruction and casualties” in the Soviet satellites during World War III, so that the surviving population would rise up and form governments friendly to U.S.
interests.
How could this be the same man who spoke so often and so quotably about the need to pursue nuclear disarmament and lead the world away from war? His private expressions of anxiety about the nuclear danger, though they were relatively rare, may have been quite genuine. But he went on approving most of the new weapons programs that anyone in the Pentagon could invent. His personal secretary summed up his approach to the issue in her diary during the 1958 Berlin crisis: “More serious talk of possible war. The president at one point said ‘You might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself’– which indicates a remarkably depressed view for him to take. But this mood does not last, and routine matters go on pretty much as usual. The President first greeted representatives of the Investment Bankers Association of America.”
In public, of course, it was a different matter. Eisenhower carefully crafted his image as a “man of peace” for public effect. He urged the NSC to pursue disarmament because of “the enormous importance of the psychological and public relations aspect.” “Everybody seems to think that we’re skunks, saber-rattlers and warmongers. We ought not to miss any chance to make clear our peaceful objectives.” For Eisenhower “everybody” meant, above all, the NATO nations of western Europe, where nuclear fear was eroding support for waging cold war. Only rarely did he show concern for public opinion in the U.S.
Ike admitted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that U.S. disarmament offers were usually designed to make it “very unlikely that the Soviets would accept our proposal, and if they were to accept, it is very unlikely that we would suffer disadvantage.” This was true of his two most famous proposals, “Atoms for Peace” and “Open Skies.” He put forth both plans mainly to score points in the public relations battle; he knew the plans were stacked in U.S. favor, making Soviet acceptance unlikely.
Toward the end of his second term, as pressure for a ban on nuclear testing built, Eisenhower agreed to pursue a test ban but noted that “he could not see why we could not conduct experiments underground.” “If we could keep the secret from the press, he would authorize small clandestine shots.” Even if the U.S. were forced to a total test ban, he assured Edward Teller, nuclear researchers should continue “with their current vigor and devotion. … It will be necessary that we maintain our weapons development progress during the period and with no less urgency than in the past.”
“Our public relations problem almost defies solution,” Eisenhower complained more than once. The problem was indeed insoluble. He spent eight years trying to persuade the world that he wanted to reduce nuclear weapons, while every day he built more of them, planned how to use them, and resisted efforts for disarmament.
If you are looking for a Republican president to admire, you may want to scratch Eisenhower off your list. It is a shame to give up the “man of peace” that peace activists have come to admire. But the historical record on Eisenhower’s nuclear policy is so consistent and so extensive (I’ve offered only a small sampling here) that it is hard to ignore.
And we ignore it at our peril, because it was a policy that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would “push [his] whole stack of chips into the pot” and “hit ‘em … with everything in the bucket”; who would “shoot your enemy before he shoots you”; who believed that the U.S. could “pick itself up from the floor” and win a nuclear war, even though “everybody is going crazy,” as long as “only” 25 or 30 American cities got “shellacked” and nobody got too “hysterical.”
That’s how one president talked about nuclear war, a president who is now widely admired across the political spectrum. It should make us wonder how less admired presidents talked, and thought. And it should remind us how easily presidents can create images that mask a very different, much more dangerous, reality.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity. A much longer version of this article appears on History News Network.
The real Eisenhower also help oust the government in Iran in 1953 and re-install the Shah. Most Americans don’t know this, but most Iranians do. This is one reason that the USA is hated there.
Half my ancestry is Polish. From my standpoint the Soviets won WWII. The Brits went to war in 1939 to defend the Poles, but by 1945 the Soviets had extended their empire all the way to Berlin. Ike was right to prepare for a vicious, nasty war with the Soviets.
Ira, Ira, Ira, you’re sniping at the heels of one of our best presidents for wanting to be ready for any eventuality. Ike played it correctly. He much preferred a peaceful world but realized there might be contrary intentions. That’s known as being smart. Give credit where it’s due.
The effects of a full out nuke war are still not known; after all, we’ve not had one. It’s quite likely that all of humanity would die, but not certain… That being said, why would someone prefer death to life? Does that not strike you as, at the least, suicidal? When, in all of humanity’s history, has any one country ever ruled the entire world? Even today, the usa hasn’t got the moxie required to rule the world. So why did people ever think that the USSR could do what they should have known the USA was incapable of doing???
Thanks for the update on the real Eisenhower, who obviously helped fuel the mad arms race and the push toward empire, both of which are bankrupting our country financially and ethically and decimating our reputation worldwide.
(Hear this, realveive?)
I’m sorry to hear that Eisenhower wasn’t the man he could/should have been.
“he would rather be atomized than communized.” So would I. I presume Ira Chernus would not. Red fascism is still fascism.
It’s scary to think that if there was a nuclear war today, the only creatures that will live through it will be the cockroaches and Dick Cheney.
And an economic system that:
1. makes it’s primary objective to provide food, a home, healthcare, education, and empowering work for all…
2. Which even in it’s deeply flawed form, brought a poor peasant country, utterly destroyed by the Nazis, to providing basic food, shelter, employment and a high life expectancy (higher than today) for all, plus sent the first man into space, in just 14 years;
…is so evil and abominable that we risked anihllating all of humanity, because????
Please, I want to know.
The Soviet Union never wanted to take over the world. Capitalism and teh governments thst empower it, as their very raison d’etre, DO want to take over the world.
To elaborate, we need to seperate the abominable dictatorship of Stalin from the socialist economic system the Soviet Union promoted.
And, I hope it should be obvious that what Eisenhower preferred death of all humanity over wasn’t Stalin’s tyranny; he installed plenty of tyrants of his own. What Eisenhower feared and loathed to the point of holding the threat of anhllation over humanity, was any chance that an economic system based on the Sermon on the Mount, might succeed anywhere on earth.
The War on Terror is the new cold-war beast, Armageddon is it’s language, fear is it’s soul
PS: USAn you nailed it
USAn,
I agree.
The best place to be if there is a nuclear war, is ground zero of the first strike.
Vinlander: “he would rather be atomized than communized.” So would I. I presume Ira Chernus would not. Red fascism is still fascism.”
This is the simplistic, ignorant, pseudo-moral mindset which has been giving America a bad name for so long.
Did you ask the bloody Russian People if they would prefer to be atomized than communized?
If you are so willing to sacrifice you life (and that of others obviously) it’s odd you are not fighting “islamo-fascism” in Iraq when the US Army desperately needs recruits.
USAn, you hit the nail on the head!
I don’t understand how Ike could have said “better atomized than communized” and then come out and say even if we survive (”win”) a nuclear war, we’ll be under a totalitarian government anyway. If we’re going to end up with a totalitarian government, why bother with nuclear war?
Eisenhower pioneered two concepts that are central to today’s neocon manifesto:
1) Overthrowing democratically elected governments and installing dictators that enable US corporate exploitation.
As Ken Mitchell pointed out , authorizing the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected Government of Iran was one of Eisenhower’s first official acts (Truman repeatedly told the CIA where to shove it whenever they previously pressured him to authorize this), and
2)Privatizing profit and socializing costs.
Air, barge, truck and car transportation industries that contributed minimal taxes were heavily subsidized by US taxpayer-funded air ports, waterways, roads and bridges. The heavily taxed railroads were put at a competitive disadvantage to the point that the taxes they paid directly subsidiized infrastructure for the other transportation modes. As a result, the US lost tens of thousands of miles of railroad that can never be regained. This will have a dramatic negative impact on the future US transportation needs.
The Eisenhower legend has grown as we’ve seen the leaders since. The repubs have had both Bush’s Reagan, Ford and Nixon.
The dems have had Clinton, Carter, Johson and Kennedy. Several idiots and couple of crooks and a few that were in over their heads.
However, this article begs a big question. If Eisenhower was so bent on preemptive nuclear war, why didn’t he do it?
Anyone who is willing to kill me because of their own idealogical beliefs is a dangerous fanatic.
Take note of how incredibly far this has come from the original idea of America. Think of the America in the Declaration of Independence … where all people are created equal and blessed by their Creator with unalienable rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And that governments are instituted among men to protect and defend these rights.
Instead, by the Eisenhower era and the creation of the national security state, we see a President who’s willing to instantly trade away my own right to life because of his own idealogical beliefs.
That’s twisted and sick. One way of looking at this is that he was willing to kill us all to protect corporate profits. Because, if the country had indeed gone socialist, that’s who would have had the negative impacts. Corporations loosing their profits and maybe having their assets nationalized. To prevent that, good ol’ Ike was willing to incinerate us all in a nuclear hell.
Thanks Ike!
militantliberal
However, this article begs a big question. If Eisenhower was so bent on preemptive nuclear war, why didn’t he do it?
Why not indeed? He had motive and method– perhaps it was just our luck that the USSR’s involvement with Cuba did not ripen until Ike left office. That would certainly have been an opportunity for one predisposed to use nuclear weapons!
So. EVERY president since at least WW II has been a criminal.
If communists wanted to bury the US it is because they were very much aware of the modus operandum of the US. They called the US imperialistic. Any doubts that this is so? Were they imperialistic too? That is a good debate.
I cringe every time I see some fellow antiwar activists bring out their banners with the saying of Eisenhower ‘warning’ about the MI complex. It’s as if they don’t realize that The Devil has a very good knack of talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time.
Eisenhower was a total disaster of a president, just as Truman was, too. This was the the McCarthy Era, for crying out loud, and also the time that Eisenhower helped grow his famous Military Industrial complex into a monster.
The MI Complex grew out of our success in Germany and Japan, based largely on the willingness of the world’s self-proclaimed Land of Freedom to forego all restraints in the killing of innocent civilians……(fire-bombing, atomic bombs, etc). Ergo, we acquiesced in accepting ourselves as essentially evil, and have Never apologized to the world for these abject and utterly unnecessary acts. Until some expiation for these acts and countless others including the wars of Vietnam AND Iraq, the USA labors on in an increasingly dark and lonely place, where the ghosts and phantoms of the past now consume and torment our individual souls to the point where rational discourse has become impossible in the official sphere. A true spiritual regeneration is widely recognized as necessary, but we find ourselves confused building our privatized and gated towers of babel. Most of the people do not see the mistakes of the past or what the future holds, because such awareness is rightly painful. Goddess have mercy. Om Mani Padme Hum.
The premise of nuclear stockpiles is terrorism, isn’t it?
Also, the real Ike sent a CIA agent to assassinate Africa’s first democratically elected president 1960 who was a serious panAfrican and was adamantly anti-tribal. He wanted the Western mining corporations out of Africa! Imagine where the poorest 900 million people on earth might be now had Ike instead embraced Lumumba and helped him secure Africa’s future? Lumumba and Ike could have liberated the will of an entire continent.
Ike sucked.
lizard,
good questions.
First, the Khrushchev quote “we will bury you” is exactly like the recent one by Ahmadinejad. Krushcheb did NOT mean “we will kill you all”. He meant that we would be buried economically by what he believed to be the superior productivity and scientific advances of the Soviet system.
As far as Imperialism, the Soviets did maintain a grip on the original empire they inherited from the Czar. After WW2 they also maintained control over eastern Europe As a buffer against a clearly malevolent west. One cannot defend their dictatorial and sometimes violent hegemony over eastern Europe, but one can understand why they did what they did.
The Soviet Union also provided moral and material support, and some advisors, for otherwise entirely home-grown, populist, leftist liberation movements against dictators and colonial regimes in Latin America, the middle east, SE Asia and Africa. If we had let these movements flourish without waging war and economic war against them - Mossadeq in Iran, Nasser in Egypt, Lumumba in the Congo, Allende and many several others in Latin America, Uncle Ho in Vietnam, labor and leftist parties in Indonesia, and many other places, I’m sure the world would be a much more peaceful place today.
“If you are looking for a Republican president to admire, you may want to scratch Eisenhower off your list.” - fantastic article until this beginning to a weak ending.
The strength of the article isn’t in it’s condemnation of Eisenhower, but in it’s elucidation of Eisenhower’s “how”.
As pointed out by commentators there is a vast difference betweem communism and red communism (see W. Reich The Mass Psychology of Fascism), and that there remains in our intellectual processing a catastrophic devide between “realism” (see Condescending “Condi” Rice) and humanistic spirituality.
If we focus on the “how” as much or more than the “end” we will be much better served — Estebandido: the Mercy of the Goddess is eternal - our heads would not balance on top of our necks without the Mercy of the Goddess, never mind the digestion of over 5,000 enzymes in our livers.
COmarc: “Anyone who is willing to kill me because of their own idealogical beliefs is a dangerous fanatic.” — what is the “how” of their fanaticism? - there in lies the answer to the danger.
“The wisdom of heaven is all about them, but they do not see it.”
Excellent postings: ESTE BANDIDO & COMARC
As a writer, I recognize that words hold power, as do abbreviations. The concept of M.A.D - mutually assured destruction lives up to its meaning. AS COMARC pointed out, how dare a “leader” make the decision whether others should live or die?
Those who say they’d rather die than live under fascism, as much as I love freedom and hope we may retain it in this now depraved land of the hardly free, the bottom line is that people still laugh, make love, find causes to celebrate, write poetry, suffer and risk rising to a higher faith regardless of the political systems in which they find themselves.
I must admit, I did NOT know this (what the article reveals) about Eisenhower. It once again reinforces the mantra I share in this forum, that this over-identification with the warrior archetype truly has maddened the politics of this nation and darkened its soul. The whole war thing, the whole “win” thing, the whole misuse of resources thing, the whole Hollywood/sports lionizing macho “heroes,” etc is all posturing and homage to the god of war. People don’t recognize it as such, but as one who studies the ancient archetypes and daily sees evidence of this configuration in the modern psyches and workings of persons, it is blindingly clear that over-identification with THIS particular aspect of human identity and possibility has rendered the entire “as above, so below” human (in a process intended to become more Divine) equation asymmetrical and off kilter.
Teaching the circle, the 12 quintessential archetypes that make each of us a FULL WHOLE person, rather than celebrating one major type of trait & its related behaviors, would do much to heal the broken template of humanity. Given that the “holy” land is most littered in the detritus of war, and has become the ultimate killing fields, what does this say about the supposed bases for “faith” and what/whom they serve?
Thanks for revealing the real Ike. Conservatives are soooo straight that they would kill us all for their principles. Sonofabitchin shitheads all…except for my dear conservative father.
Mao was a true genius, he is the one who said that if during Cuban missile crisis if he had to make a decision on behalf of China he would have responded with nukes – so what if 400 million Chinese were to perish there would still be 300 million Chinese left to rebuild the nation. That is true even today, only China can successfully survive a nuclear holocaust
“After WW2 they also maintained control over eastern Europe As a buffer against a clearly malevolent west.”
Maybe I need a little edu, but could someone give me some tangible reasons why the USSR felt so threatened by the West immediately after WWII that they were somewhat justified in conquering and/or controlling Eastern Europe for a buffer against the West?
I haven’t heard of any actions demonstrating that the West was bent on the USSR’s demise during WWII and in the years immediately after. The West on the other hand had great reason to be wary of the USSR. The USSR clearly demonstrated a penchant for the invasion and conquering of sovereign nations. Remember the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany and then the subsequent mutual invasion and carving up of Poland by Nazi Germany and the USSR? How about the Winter War with Finland three months later, an unprovoked illegal invasion for the conquest of Finland which resulted in the expulsion of the USSR from the League of Nations?
Given this history, seems the West had more to fear from the Soviet Union that the other way around.
‘Ol Ike, always remembered for his warning of the military industrial complex and thought of as a somewhat benign individual was in actuality a nutcake like the current repub prez candidate.
General Eisenhower’s war-mentality was similar to that of Dean Gooderham Acheson. Professor Chernus did not mention that in the article above.
Professor Chernus omitted another very important thing about Gen. Eisenhower. That was the enormous sexual appetite of the General. No woman, especially who worked around him, could free herself before having intense sexual intercourse with him.
But, we do not want to talk about that; because, we learned not to talk about General Eisenhower’s sexual perversity.
My guess is the soviets wanted an empire. It was there for the taking so they took Eastern Europe. Another in a long line of occupations that didn’t work. They let it go when it dawned on their dim bulb brain stem that the occupation was more trouble than it was worth. The same thought will slowly penetrate the US occupation and empire crowd, but don’t hold your breath. Corporations expect to get the service they paid for when they bought the majority in Congress and most of the presidents.
The disconnect between corporate and wealthy tax rates and the operation of the government is important. People and groups who are not paying for government services want a lot of them. Note the absurd growth in government under Bu$h the inferior coupled with the borrow and spend policies punishing all but the extremely wealthy.
> He makes a terrific poster-boy for peace.
When I quote Goebbel or Goering, it’s not because I believe they were Saints.
I’d never mistake General Ike for Gandhi.
Of course he planned to win. What, you think Generals get to be Generals because they give up easy?
> only China can successfully survive a nuclear holocaust
I’m thinking that greater numbers just means they’ll starve faster once a nuclear war shatters transportation and storage. Chinese will survive. Not so sure China will. On the plus side, maybe Tibet will finally shake loose of China. Then again, maybe the only remaining Chinese troops will be in Tibet but now without any restraint. Alternate universes are such fun.
> seems the West had more to fear from the Soviet Union that the other way around.
Um. The US actually dropped a nuke on people. Twice. And whether it was US>USSR or US<USSR fear-wise, I doubt that really mattered to the rest of the ants who were watching 2 titanic elephants facing off.
“> seems the West had more to fear from the Soviet Union that the other way around.
Um. The US actually dropped a nuke on people. Twice. And whether it was US>USSR or US<USSR fear-wise, I doubt that really mattered to the rest of the ants who were watching 2 titanic elephants facing off.”
True, true. But what I was more referring to was a fear of unprovoked acts of imperialist aggression such as I mentioned in Poland and Finland. The two nukes dropped on Japan were the disastrous result of their imperialist aggression. And yes, I agree that after the Cold War started in earnest, the rest of ants were indeed scurrying for cover from the two crazed, rampaging elephants.
Both the US and the USSR want/ed to rule the world. These guys are all the same. How can I get more and more and more for me. They fight foreigners. They fight the other political groups inside their own country, they fight other people inside of their own party. They just like to fight. The thing about the history of this era and the present era is the extreme complexity of the relationship that makes it almost impossible to figure out who was doing who why. The UK was afraid of russia getting a warm water port, of the Japanese getting too many battleships, of Germany becoming too strong etc. Wall street backed both the USSR and Hitler according to some sources. The bankers will do anything/anyone, as long as they can make some money at it.
As long as the infrastructure that sustains our societies stays reasonably intact, the human race will survive more or less as it is (but hopefully in sustainable way..)
Once the infrastructure is destroyed or damaged or seriously impeded, then our survival is in question.
Any body whoever they are who thinks that the use of nuclear weapons between those who already have them would be limited and somehow survivable, is simply barking mad.
Anybody who thinks that the use of such weapons against another state that does not have them (i.e IRAN) is simply criminally mad.
It really is as simple as that…
And I don’t give a flying fuck what the “scholars” at AEI and their NeoCon puppet/Masters think
Looks as if the monkey with his thumb on the red button is now verifiably, barking and criminally mad. NS.
Well at least we got interstate highways out of the deal.
Deterrent is only effective if the other side actually believes that you are nuts enough to revenge even if it means suicide. There is no point in having a single weapon (nuclear or otherwise) unless this deterrent is backed by readiness to use it. If the other side knows you will not revenge, that is an incentive to attack first. As crazy as it sounds, few nukes and the readiness to use them to make a crazy revenge, can make the nuclear war less likely, since then the other side will not dare to attack. 10000 nukes with a promise of never using them under any circumstances, is equivalent with 0 nukes. Nuclear free world is something we should aim to, but it will only happen with everyone disarming.
As far as fearing the US expansionism is concerned. the US has always treated South America as its little fief.
The US and Britain INVADED RUSSIA!! to try and stop the Bolsheviks. Isn’t that warning enough??
My father literally cried when Adlai Stevenson lost to Eisenhower. Now I know why. My parents were appalled at McCarthy and the Red Scare. They were pretty smart, but as a child I didn’t understand.
I do remember as other posters may, about “surviving nuclear war”, but then there were movies like “On the Beach” or even “I was a teenage caveman” that were morality plays about nuclear war. The people have generally been ahead of the (MAD) leaders.
Rent “The Atomic Cafe” to get an insight to the institutional attempts to drive the American people crazy. 911 did the trick if the Red Scare didn’t.
Last point, Eisenhower allowed according to reports, a million German POW’s to starve to death after WWII ENDED.
Nevertheless, the apparent psychopathic behavior of the man teaches that they do have an understanding of right and wrong–he did know that every weapon made is less for
money for educating each child. but he just didn’t care.
That is the cynicism and pathology of it.
but at least we know, thanks to Chernus, that they’ve always been nuts and they will always be nuts, and if there is to be real change, it will take a lot of On Mane Padme Hums, and a lot of Gaia wisdom to set things straight, cuz I sure don’t see the American people up to the task.
COmark:
Ditto what you said. I couldn’t agree more.
jehosepha
Well first there was Napoleon.
Then the reign of Czars who were largely owned by the west and in service to teh west kept Russia in extreme poverty.
Then Czar Nicolas took the impoverished Russian people into the bloody WW1 conflict which the Russian people had absolutely no reason to be in. This event led to the February 1917 revoluton.
Then there was the 1917 to 1923 western-instigated and equipped White russian war against the new Soviet state.
Then there was Hitler.
Then, after a war that led to Russian death on a scale much greater than anything the west suffered, they immediately faced bellicose rhetoric from Churchill, various US General, Truman, Eisenhower.
The Russian were and are to this day very justified in being deeply suspicious of the west.
peaceistruth March 18th, 2008 12:54 pm
“It’s scary to think that if there was a nuclear war today, the only creatures that will live through it will be the cockroaches and Dick Cheney.”
peaceistruth: Aren’t you being redundant?
““Where in the hell can you let the Communists chip away any more? We just can’t stand it,” he complained to a meeting of Congressional leaders in 1954, as he considered intervening in Vietnam. (He held back only because Britain and France refused to support him.)”
I have to ‘call bullsh*t” on that — regardless how many books-you-wrote on Ike.
For one, Ike was well-aware of MacArthur’s misuse of the former Japanese Imperial-Army to restore the colony of Vietnam to France post-war (isolating our Ally in WW-II, Ho, in the North of the now-divided ‘prize’). France may have Envied our ‘post-war might’/Role, but not ‘objected’ to anything. And, Britain was ALL OVER our dividing Korea AND Vietnam for future ‘proxy-Wars’ — even before war’s-end, and the OSS morphed-into Wall-Street’s CIA…
Ike merely wasn’t ‘prepared’ (nor was our Economy) for another BS-war in Asia — or anywhere-else [he’d have targeted the Balkans/Caspian, if he’d ‘had his way’…same as those Brit’s, who pushed us into Iraq and E. Europe — recently].
[And the ‘Commies’ were no more a ‘threat’ to us then than Iran is to US/Israel, now…and Ike WELL knew that (as did those pulling his/Stalin’s-strings).
It’s just a bunch of revisionist BS to say the Soviets weren’t a threat. They were a threat to us and their own people. It is not just Stalin either, the whole system was rotten. Even in the time post detente, post Brezhnev, every one was standing in line for the bare necessities like bread. Toilet paper was a luxury. It was no different from the days of the Tsars. The top one percent had a luxurious life and the other 99% were peasants and laborers. Stalin is the number two genocidal maniac of all time (Hilter was a piker by comparison) being behind only Mao. Ask a Czech in 1968 during the Prague revolution just what kind of sweetness and light the Sovs represented as they were crushing his guts out with the treads of a T-55. These were dangerous, scary people. Peaceniks don’t own three times the number of tanks as the rest of the world put together. Sure they put a man in space first - on the back of their ICBM research. They were a third world country, with a first world army, and a despot for a ruler.
We are exceedingly lucky as a nation, as a world, that they softly imploded and the USSR took its place in the “dustbin of history”. Containment and detterence succeeded for decades in minimizing their predation. Ike, while no angel, was the right man at the right time, for the job.
Anywhere and everywhere he went in the world, the signs came out and people lined the streets to see him. “We Like Ike!”
He was the hero of the free world AND the third world. Americans were the good guys.
Anywhere and everywhere he went in the world, the signs came out and people lined the streets to see him. “We Like Ike!”
He was the hero of the free world AND the third world. Americans were the good guys.
In all probability, Ike didn’t know all that was going on in his administration. But he never made any attempt to rein in the crazies.
A read of Dulles, by Leonard Mosley (1979) is in order. A book on the Dulles family. The dangerous crackpot John Foster (Secretary of State), and the dangerous smoothie, Allen (head of the CIA).
Well, well- this attitude was not secret from anyone. One does not need to see the memo’s to know we still have tridents! I think we can better understand Ike,if we realize he was a bridge player. If you’re good you try to never underplay or overplay your hand; it is hard. His wisdom was that he understood bridge to be a harmless game. But, relationships among people and nations are a game of a different sort. Yes he was an imperialist. He was an officer in the army that ruled our new possessions. Yet the madness of MAD did work, and it had a great cost. Welcome to historical study!!
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, which Eisenhower approved:
On May 23, 1997 the CIA released several hundred formerly classified documents pertaining to the United States involvement in the 1954 coup in Guatemala.
Eisenhower, convinced that President Arbenz threatened U.S. national security because of his alleged Communist sympathies, approved the first-ever clandestine military action in Latin America. Codenamed PBSUCCESS, the program aimed at not only deposing Arbenz in favor of a U.S.-selected leader, but also looked to send a clear warning to the Soviets that the American government would not tolerate the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere.
Despite widespread support for the Arbenz government, the CIA conducted an intense psychological battle against the supporters of Arbenz, ranging from phone warnings in the middle of the night to death threats. On June 18, 1954, after approximately one year of preparation, U.S.- backed troops invaded Guatemala with the intention of overthrowing Arbenz. Realizing his army had forsaken him and fearing for his life, Arbenz resigned as president on June 27th and fled to Mexico. The U.S.-chosen leader of the military coup, Carlos Castillo Armas, assumed control of the government, thus ensuring the promotion of American interests in Guatemala. Members of the army assassinated Armas three years later.
Dulles and other CIA officials exaggerated the efficiency of the program, claiming only one U.S.-backed soldier perished, when in reality, at least forty-eight men lost their lives in the attack. The unforeseen consequences of PBSUCESS (four decades of instability and civil war in Guatemala) remain the ultimate legacy of the initial CIA covert operation in Latin America.
http://www.coldwar.org/museum/coldwar_stories.html