Atomic Diplomacy Essay, Research Paper

Atomic Diplomacy Revisted: U.S. Nuclear Security Policy, Kennen to Kissenger The outgrowth of the United States as a dominant party in balance of power equations is a comparatively new phenomenon in universe history. New military engineering coupled with increased planetary integrating has allowed the United States to reinvent the fundemental premises of international diplomatic negotiations while impeling itself to the top of the hedgemonic step ladder. This placement was achieved peacemeal during the class of the first two universe wars, but it wasn & # 8217 ; t until the deployment of the atomic bomb that the U.S. assumed its place as a true world power. The old ages that followed this unparalled Ascension are the most absorbing times in the history of U.S. international dealingss. Hopefully, an probe into this atomic diplomatic negotiations, along with a balanced analysis of the jobs of gestating and implementing containment, will supply penetration for our current attempts to invent a feasible post-war national security policy. There is no manner to state the sotry of post-war national security without besides teling the narrative of George Kennen. Kennen, the formost expert of Soviet Affairs in early post-war America, is about entirely responsbile for the policy of containment. What we must retrieve under Kennen & # 8217 ; s containment is that atomic diplomatic negotiations is non separate from other national security steps as it is frequently today. Nuclear arms were portion of an incorporate system of containment and deterence. Truman told Kennen in early 1947 that & # 8220 ; our arms of mass destuction are non fail-safe devices, but alternatively the fundemental bedrock of American security & # 8221 ; ( Gaddis 56 ) . They were ne’er intended as first work stoppage arms and had no existent tactial value. The bomb is strictly strategic, and its value comes non from its destructive capabilties, but from its political and psychological branchings. Kennen was ne’er naif plenty to see the bomb as an violative arm. In his long memoranda & # 8220 ; The International Control of Atomic Energy, & # 8221 ; Kennen noted that & # 8220 ; there could be no manner in which arms of mass destuction could be made to function rational terminals beyond merely discouraging the eruption of belligerencies & # 8221 ; ( Kennen 39 ) . Even at this early point, Kennen began to besides acknowledge the potency of the bomb to wholly bust up balance of power arrangments. Simply accomplishing higher potencies of devastation would non necessiarily take to a better negotioating place with the Soviets. Truman had ne’er considered non making the H bomb, despite Kennen & # 8217 ; s expostulations. Truman & # 8217 ; s justified his inexorable support of the ace bomb for bargaining intents with the Russians. Kennen & # 8217 ; s point, of class, had been that the really determination to construct the H bomb would suppress dickering with the Russians on international control, since the Kremlin was improbable to negociate from a place of failing. Most of the American national security construction viewed this as unsound. Truman & # 8217 ; s preception was that the United States, as a engineering rich but adult male power short state, was runing from a place of failing, since of necessity is relied more to a great extent than did the Soviet Union on arms of mass devastation to keep the balance of power. The Soviet atomic trial in 1949 had upset that balance. Merely by constructing the super bomb, it was thought, could equilibrium be regained. It would non be until the Kennedy disposal that Kennen would be vindicated and an consciousness would develop & # 8220 ; of the basic unsoundness of a defence position based chiefly on arms randomly destructive and suicidal in their deductions & # 8221 ; ( Kennen 365 ) . The late errors of the Truman disposal would be carryed over into the Eisenhower old ages. Nuclear deployment became the primary American security step, of course taking the Soviets to make the same. The jobs of the Eisenhower old ages stemmed straight from the certitude in the U.S. atomic plan to accomplish touchable military aims in the face of increased belligerencies. John Foster Dulles, the symbol of bipartizan cooperation on foreign policy, began to recommend the atomic response. The powerlessness of our standing ground forces compared to the Soviet & # 8217 ; s military giant was clear to all U.S. policy advisers. There was no manner in which we could fit Russia gun for gun, armored combat vehicle for armored combat vehicle, at anytime, in any topographic point. John & # 8217 ; s brother Allen Dulles, CIA manager under Eisenhower, said & # 8220 ; to make so would intend existent strength nowhere and bankruptcy everyplace & # 8221 ; ( Gaddis 121 ) . Alternatively, the U.S. response to Soviet agressions would be made on our footings. J.F. Dulles & # 8217 ; solution was typical strategic dissymmetry, but of a peculiar sort. His recomendations prompted a universe in which & # 8220 ; we could and would strike back where it hurts, by agencies of out ain choosing. This could be done most efficaciously by trusting on atomic arms, and on the strategic air and naval power necessary to present them & # 8221 ; ( Dulles 147 ) . This imbalanced strategic equation between the two world powers was non even the most unsafe defect of the fiftiess. In retrospect, the most startling lack of the Eisenhower disposal & # 8217 ; s scheme was its bland assurance that it could utilize atomic arms without get downing an all out atomic war. Limited atomic struggle was possible, as Kissenger argued in Nuclear Weapons and Foriegn Policy, & # 8220 ; but merely if those take parting in it had agreed beforehand on the boundries beyond which it would nto widen & # 8221 ; ( Kissenger 124 ) . This was clearly impossible with the Soviets, doing Eisenhower & # 8217 ; s policy foolhardy and naif. Given the high sum of activity by the U.S. intellegence aparatus during the clip, espcially in Russia and South Asia, it is suprising that an international incident of cataclysmal proportions did non take topographic point. Strategic dissymmetry, supplemented by atomic high quality, would non last long after Eisenhower. Alternatively, it was replaced with Kennedy & # 8217 ; s & # 8220 ; flexible response. & # 8221 ; The critics of & # 8220 ; The New Look & # 8221 ; and past atomic dimplomacy pointed out that merely newfound symmetricalness allows us adequate political flexibilty to react to Russian agression in whatever manner suits U.S. involvements at the clip. Kennedy, possesing an economic principle for ignoring costs, placed his accent on minimising hazards by giving the U.S. sufficent flexibleness to react to Russia with neither escalation or humiliation. This required a capacity to move on all degrees, runing from diplomatic negotiations through covert action, guerrilla operations, coventional and atomic war. Equally of import, though, it would necessitate careful control. Walt W. Rostow, Kennen & # 8217 ; s replacing as Chairman of The Policy Planning Council, was chosen as usual on behalf of the Kennedy disposal to spell out the jobs 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”