19 - The Federal Republic of Germany as a “Battlefield” in American Nuclear Strategy, 1953-19

Summary

the strategic change in the “new look” of the eisenhower administration and what it meant for europe

Following the principle that “we must not destroy what we are attempting to defend,” President Dwight D. Eisenhower was unwilling to permit American society to be transformed into a “barracks state” through inflation or government intervention in the American economy resulting from unbridled defense expenditures. At the same time, he by no means dissociated himself from the portrayal of communism as the enemy in National Security Council paper NSC 68. However, whereas NSC 68 considered Communist ideology to be merely a tool but not a determinant of Soviet policy, Eisenhower and Dulles obviously believed that the objective of Soviet policy was “to extend its system throughout the world and establish its 'one world' of state socialism.” This interpretation of Soviet foreign policy, which emphasized its ideological premises, allowed the new American administration to concentrate more on Soviet intentions than on Soviet capabilities. Concentration on Soviet intentions in turn facilitated the Eisenhower administration's search for a longer-term containment strategy accompanied by a simultaneous reduction of costs. Under this premise, the U.S. government conducted, from May 1953 onward, large-scale evaluations as part of “Project Solarium” in an attempt to arrive at a concrete reformulation of the American policy of containment toward the Soviet Union.