Nuclear Strategy

Nuclear Strategy during the Cold War

The U.S. detonation of nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains the only actual use of nuclear weapons in war. U.S. planners apparently hoped that the destructive power of the new weapon, combined with the realization that the U.S. forces were free to rain death and destruction over Japan at will, would shock the Japanese government into coming to terms with their hopeless situation and surrender.

The administration of Pres. Harry Truman was slow to integrate nuclear weapons into U.S. force planning and force structure, but the 1949 Soviet test of a nuclear weapon and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 accelerated the development of nuclear strategy and force structure in the United States. In the event of a war in Europe with the Soviet Union, the U.S. plan was to use low-yield nuclear weapons in a strategic bombing campaign. In this scenario, the U.S. Air Force would switch to conventional bombs after exhausting its small arsenal of fission bombs in the effort to prevent the Soviet Army from reaching the English Channel. Limited nuclear capability, however, did not prevent the Truman administration from making veiled nuclear threats during the 1948 Berlin Crisis—by moving nuclearcapable B-29 bombers to England—or hinting that it might use nuclear weapons at the outbreak of the Korean War.

The Eisenhower administration was the first to exploit fully U.S. nuclear weapons in defense policy. By the mid1950s, new fusion weapons (hydrogen bombs) were being incorporated throughout the U.S. military, new intercontinental bombers were being fielded, and medium-range systems capable of reaching the Soviet Union were being forward-deployed to U.S. allies. These new fusion weapons could produce large explosive blasts equivalent to many megatons of TNT, orders of magnitude greater than the fission weapons (atomic bombs) used against the Japanese, or could be engineered in lightweight designs for air-to-air missiles, artillery projectiles, or even man-portable packages. Eisenhower, a fiscal conservative who believed that the Cold War could ruin the United States financially, saw nuclear weapons—which cost about 10 percent of the U.S. defense budget during the Cold War—as an inexpensive way to deter the Soviet Union. His “New Look” policy shifted resources away from the U.S. Army toward the U.S. Air Force, cut military personnel, and fully integrated nuclear weapons into the U.S. military, thereby gaining “more bang for the buck.” The New Look relied on the declared nuclear doctrine of massive retaliation, whereby the United States threatened to use nuclear weapons at times and places of its own choosing in response to communist aggression. The Eisenhower administration made nuclear threats repeatedly—to end the Korean War and to twice threaten the People's Republic of China during the Offshore Islands Crises—but Eisenhower himself balked at a French request to use nuclear weapons to relieve their besieged garrison at Diem Bien Phu in Vietnam.

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