The Cold War (1953–1962) refers to the period in the Cold War between the end of the Korean War in 1953 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It was marked by tensions and efforts at détente between the USA and Soviet Union.
After the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, Nikita Khrushchev rose to power, initiating the policy of De-Stalinization which caused political unrest in the Eastern Bloc and Warsaw Pact nations. Khrushchev's speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 shocked domestic and international audiences, by denouncing Stalin’s personality cult and his regime's excesses.
Dwight D. Eisenhower succeeded Harry S. Truman as US President in 1953, but US foreign policy remained focused on containing Soviet influence. John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, advocated for a doctrine of massive retaliation and brinkmanship, whereby the US would threaten overwhelming nuclear force in response to Soviet aggression. This strategy aimed to avoid the high costs of conventional warfare by relying heavily on nuclear deterrence.
Despite temporary reductions in tensions, such as the Austrian State Treaty and the 1954 Geneva Conference ending the First Indochina War, both superpowers continued their arms race and extended their rivalry into space with the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 by the Soviets. The Space Race and the nuclear arms buildup defined much of the competitive atmosphere during this period. The Cold War expanded to new regions, with the addition of African decolonization movements. The Congo Crisis in 1960 drew Cold War battle lines in Africa, as the Democratic Republic of the Congo became a Soviet ally, causing concern in the West. However, by the early 1960s, the Cold War reached its most dangerous point with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, as the world stood on the brink of nuclear war.
Eisenhower and Khrushchev
When Harry S. Truman was succeeded in office by Dwight D. Eisenhower as the 34th U.S. President in 1953, the Democrats lost their two-decades-long control of the U.S. presidency. Under Eisenhower, however, the United States' Cold War policy remained essentially unchanged. Whilst a thorough rethinking of foreign policy was launched (known as "Project Solarium"), the majority of emerging ideas (such as a "rollback of communism" and the liberation of Eastern Europe) were quickly regarded as unworkable. An underlying focus on the containment of Soviet communism remained to inform the broad approach of U.S. foreign policy.
While the transition from the Truman to the Eisenhower presidencies was a mild transition in character (from moderate to conservative), the change in the Soviet Union was immense. With the death of Joseph Stalin (who led the Soviet Union from 1928 and through the Great Patriotic War) in 1953, Georgy Malenkov was named leader of the Soviet Union. This was short lived however, as Nikita Khrushchev soon undercut all of Malenkov's authority as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and took control of the Soviet Union himself. Malenkov joined a failed coup against Khrushchev in 1957, after which he was sent to Kazakhstan.
During a subsequent period of collective leadership, Khrushchev gradually consolidated his hold on power. At a speech to the closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 25, 1956, First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev shocked his listeners by denouncing Stalin's personality cult and the multiple crimes that occurred under Stalin's leadership. Although the contents of the speech were secret, it was leaked to outsiders, thus shocking both Soviet allies and Western observers. Khrushchev was later named premier of the Soviet Union in March 1958.
The effect of this speech on Soviet politics was immense. With it Khrushchev stripped his remaining Stalinist rivals of their legitimacy in a single stroke, dramatically boosting the First Party Secretary's domestic power. Khrushchev followed by easing restrictions, freeing some dissidents and initiating economic policies that emphasized commercial goods rather than just coal and steel production.
U.S. strategy: "massive retaliation" and "brinksmanship"
Conflicting objectives
When Eisenhower entered office in 1953, he was committed to two possibly contradictory goals: maintaining—or even heightening—the national commitment to counter the spread of Soviet influence; and satisfying demands to balance the budget, lower taxes, and curb inflation. The most prominent of the doctrines to emerge from this goal was "massive retaliation", which Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced early in 1954. Eschewing the costly, conventional ground forces of the Truman administration, and wielding the vast superiority of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and covert intelligence, Dulles defined this approach as "brinksmanship" in a January 16, 1956, interview with Life: pushing the Soviet Union to the brink of war in order to exact concessions.
Eisenhower inherited from the Truman administration a military budget of roughly US$42 billion, as well as a paper (NSC-141) drafted by Acheson, Harriman, and Lovett calling for an additional $7–9 billion in military spending. With Treasury Secretary George Humphrey leading the way, and reinforced by pressure from Senator Robert A. Taft and the cost-cutting mood of the Republican Congress, the target for the new fiscal year (to take effect on July 1, 1954) was reduced to $36 billion. While the Korean armistice was on the verge of producing significant savings in troop deployment and money, the State and Defense Departments were still in an atmosphere of rising expectations for budgetary increases. Humphrey wanted a balanced budget and a tax cut in February 1955, and had a savings target of $12 billion (obtaining half of this from cuts in military expenditures).
Although unwilling to cut deeply into defense, the President also wanted a balanced budget and smaller defense allocations. "Unless we can put things in the hands of people who are starving to death we can never lick communism", he told his cabinet. With this in mind, Eisenhower continued funding for America's innovative cultural diplomacy initiatives throughout Europe which included goodwill performances by the "soldier-musician ambassadors" of the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra. Moreover, Eisenhower feared that a bloated "military–industrial complex" (a term he popularized) "would either drive U.S. to war—or into some form of dictatorial government" and perhaps even force the U.S. to "initiate war at the most propitious moment." On one occasion, the former commander of the greatest amphibious invasion force in history privately exclaimed, "God help the nation when it has a President who doesn't know as much about the military as I do."
In the meantime, however, attention was being diverted elsewhere in Asia. The continuing pressure from the "China lobby" or "Asia firsters", who had insisted on active efforts to restore Chiang Kai-shek to power was still a strong domestic influence on foreign policy. In April 1953 Senator Robert A. Taft and other powerful Congressional Republicans suddenly called for the immediate replacement of the top chiefs of the Pentagon, particularly the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Omar Bradley. To the so-called "China lobby" and Taft, Bradley was seen as having leanings toward a Europe-first orientation, meaning that he would be a possible barrier to new departures in military policy that they favored. Another factor was the vitriolic accusations of McCarthyism, where large portions of the U.S. government allegedly contained covert communist agents or sympathizers. But after the mid-term elections in 1954–and censure by the Senate–the influence of Joseph McCarthy ebbed after his unpopular accusations against the Army.
Eisenhower administration strategy
I think most of our people cannot understand that we are actually at war. They need to hear shells. They are not psychologically prepared for the concept that you can have a war when you don't have actual fighting.
— Admiral Hyman G. Rickover addressing U.S. Senate Committee on Defense Preparedness on January 6, 1958
The administration attempted to reconcile the conflicting pressures from the "Asia firsters" and pressures to cut federal spending while continuing to fight the Cold War effectively. On May 8, 1953, the President and his top advisors tackled this problem in "Operation Solarium", named after the White House sunroom where the president conducted secret discussions. Although it was not traditional to ask military men to consider factors outside their professional discipline, the President instructed the group to strike a proper balance between his goals to cut government spending and an ideal military posture.
The group weighed three policy options for the next year's military budget: the Truman-Acheson approach of containment and reliance on conventional forces; threatening to respond to limited Soviet "aggression" in one location with nuclear weapons; and serious "liberation" based on an economic response to the Soviet political-military-ideological challenge to Western hegemony: propaganda campaigns and psychological warfare. The third option was strongly rejected.
Eisenhower and the group (consisting of Allen Dulles, Walter Bedell Smith, C.D. Jackson, and Robert Cutler) instead opted for a combination of the first two, one that confirmed the validity of containment, but with reliance on the American air-nuclear deterrent. This was geared toward avoiding costly and unpopular ground wars, such as Korea.
The Eisenhower administration viewed atomic weapons as an integral part of U.S. defense, hoping that they would bolster the relative capabilities of the U.S. vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The administration also reserved the prospects of using them, in effect, as a weapon of first resort, hoping to gain the initiative while reducing costs. By wielding the nation's nuclear superiority, the new Eisenhower-Dulles approach was a cheaper form of containment geared toward offering Americans "more bang for the buck".
Thus, the administration increased the number of nuclear warheads from 1,000 in 1953 to 18,000 by early 1961. Despite overwhelming U.S. superiority, one additional nuclear weapon was produced each day. The administration also exploited new technology. In 1955 the eight-engined B-52 Stratofortress bomber, the first true jet bomber designed to carry nuclear weapons, was developed.
In 1961, the U.S. deployed 15 Jupiter IRBMs (intermediate-range ballistic missiles) at İzmir, Turkey, aimed at the western USSR's cities, including Moscow. Given its 1,500-mile (2,410 km) range, Moscow was only 16 minutes away. The U.S. could also launch 1,000-mile (1,600 km)-range Polaris SLBMs from submerged submarines.
In 1962, the United States had more than eight times as many bombs and missile warheads as the USSR: 27,297 to 3,332.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis the U.S. had 142 Atlas and 62 Titan I ICBMs, mostly in hardened underground silos.
Fear of Soviet influence and nationalism
Allen Dulles, along with most U.S. foreign policy-makers of the era, considered a number of Third World nationalists and "revolutionaries" as being essentially under the influence, if not control, of the Warsaw Pact. Ironically, in War, Peace, and Change (1939), he had called Mao Zedong an "agrarian reformer", and during World War II he had deemed Mao's followers "the so called 'Red Army faction'". But he no longer recognized indigenous roots in the Chinese Communist Party by 1950. In War or Peace, an influential work denouncing the containment policies of the Truman administration, and espousing an active program of "liberation", he writes:
Thus the 450,000,000 people in China have fallen under leadership that is violently anti-American, and takes its inspiration and guidance from Moscow... Soviet Communist leadership has won a victory in China which surpassed what Japan was seeking and we risked war to avert.
Behind the scenes, Dulles could explain his policies in terms of geopolitics. But publicly, he used the moral and religious reasons that he believed Americans preferred to hear, even though he was often criticized by observers at home and overseas for his strong language.
Two of the leading figures of the interwar and early Cold War period who viewed international relations from a "realist" perspective, diplomat George Kennan and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, were troubled by Dulles' moralism and the method by which he analyzed Soviet behavior. Kennan disagreed with the notion that the Soviets even had a world design after Stalin's death, being far more concerned with maintaining control of their own bloc. However, the underlying assumptions of a monolithic world communism, directed from the Kremlin, of the Truman-Acheson containment after the drafting of NSC-68 were essentially compatible with those of the Eisenhower-Dulles foreign policy. The conclusions of Paul Nitze's National Security Council policy paper were as follows:
What is new, what makes the continuing crisis, is the polarization of power which inescapably confronts the slave society with the free... the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority... [in] the Soviet Union and second in the area now under [its] control... In the minds of the Soviet leaders, however, achievement of this design requires the dynamic extension of their authority... To that end Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass.