Global strategy: the impact of the hydrogen bomb
Since the United States was by far the senior partner in the Anglo-American
‘special relationship’, the context for the impact of technical change on
strategy is best provided by looking at American strategic thought, as
represented by Bernard Brodie. Brodie’s Strategy in the Missile Age
(1959) did not, as he modestly noted, cause the changes that occurred in
American strategy after 1960, but it did set out the intellectual frame-
work within which the movement from the doctrines of the Eisenhower
era to those of the Kennedy era took place.
103
After the Korean War had
ended, Congress was unlikely to continue to vote increased funds for
military expenditure, and the destructive power of atomic weapons
seemed to provide a cost-effective means of counte ring Soviet super-
iority in conventional forces. In a speech on 12 January 1954 the
Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles described American strategic
doctrine as one of ‘massive retaliation’. Instead of ad hoc responses with
conventional forces to Communist aggressi on, as in Korea, the National
Security Council had decided to rely primarily upon ‘a great capacity to
retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing’. Where,
on a sliding scale of possible examples of aggression, the massive reta-
liation princip le would be applied was not specified, app arently in a
deliberate attempt to keep Communist leaders guessing. In December
1954 ministers on the North Atlantic Council authorised NATO
planners to proceed on the basis that thermonuclear weapons would be
used from the outset of a war, even in the unlikely event of the Soviet
forces refraining from using atomic weapons. On the other hand, by
October 1957 – the month when the first Soviet space satellite was
launched – Dulles was retreat ing from the doct rine of massive retaliation
by referring publicly to the development of tactical nuclear weapons as
an alternative.
104
103
Preface to paperback edition (Princeton University Press, 1965), p. v.
104
Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 229,
248–54, 261–2. For the origins of the doctrine of massive retaliation, and its
implementation, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal
of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1982), pp. 146–52, 165–75. For NATO doctrine, see ‘The most effective pattern of
NATO military strength for the next few years’, report by the Military Committee to
the North Atlantic Council, 18 Nov. 1954, MC 48, paras. 3–4, 6–7, reproduced in
NATO Strategy Documents 1949–1969, ed. Gregory W. Pedlow (NATO Graphics
Studio, 1997), pp. 231–50. For the debate on the balance between massive retaliation
and the use of conventional forces, see Stephen Twigge and Alan Macmillan, ‘Britain,
the United States, and the development of NATO strategy, 1950–1964’, Journal of
Strategic Studies, 19 (1996), no. 2, 260–81.
Arms, economics and British strategy316