Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of acronyms
- Introduction
- 1 In the shadow of Hiroshima: the United States and Asia in the aftermath of Japanese defeat
- 2 The Korean War, the atomic bomb and Asian–American estrangement
- 3 Securing the East Asian frontier: stalemate in Korea and the Japanese peace treaty
- 4 A greater sanction: the defence of South East Asia, the advent of the Eisenhower administration and the end of the Korean War
- 5 ‘Atomic Madness’: massive retaliation and the Bravo test
- 6 The aftermath of Bravo, the Indochina crisis and the emergence of SEATO
- 7 ‘Asia for the Asians’: the first offshore islands crisis and the Bandung Conference
- 8 A nuclear strategy for SEATO and the problem of limited war in the Far East
- 9 Massive retaliation at bay: US–Japanese relations, nuclear deployment and the limited war debate
- 10 The second offshore islands crisis and the advent of flexible response
- 11 The Chinese bomb, American nuclear strategy in Asia and the escalation of the Vietnam War
- Conclusion: from massive retaliation to flexible response in Asia
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - ‘Atomic Madness’: massive retaliation and the Bravo test
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of acronyms
- Introduction
- 1 In the shadow of Hiroshima: the United States and Asia in the aftermath of Japanese defeat
- 2 The Korean War, the atomic bomb and Asian–American estrangement
- 3 Securing the East Asian frontier: stalemate in Korea and the Japanese peace treaty
- 4 A greater sanction: the defence of South East Asia, the advent of the Eisenhower administration and the end of the Korean War
- 5 ‘Atomic Madness’: massive retaliation and the Bravo test
- 6 The aftermath of Bravo, the Indochina crisis and the emergence of SEATO
- 7 ‘Asia for the Asians’: the first offshore islands crisis and the Bandung Conference
- 8 A nuclear strategy for SEATO and the problem of limited war in the Far East
- 9 Massive retaliation at bay: US–Japanese relations, nuclear deployment and the limited war debate
- 10 The second offshore islands crisis and the advent of flexible response
- 11 The Chinese bomb, American nuclear strategy in Asia and the escalation of the Vietnam War
- Conclusion: from massive retaliation to flexible response in Asia
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The overriding conviction held by Eisenhower throughout his two terms as president was that the Cold War would be a long-drawn-out contest, where the United States would require a strong and healthy economy to prevail. The continual strain of heavy defence spending, Eisenhower feared, would eventually necessitate the imposition of economic controls by the state which would undermine the core American values of individual freedom that were presumed to differentiate the United States from its principal Soviet adversary. Surveying the landscape of national security policy on arrival in office, the new President, along with his Secretary of the Treasury, George Humphrey, believed that the rearmament efforts of NSC 68 and the demands of the Korean War had transformed the size and shape of the US military establishment in ways which were financially unsustainable and foreshadowed a ‘garrison state’ which would eventually undermine the Republic. Rejecting the notion of preventive war against the Soviet Union, Eisenhower would spend the first months of his presidency trying to inculcate the federal bureaucracy with his parsimonious philosophy and to find a new basis on which to contain the global Communist threat which most Americans discerned.
Just before the Korean armistice, almost 1 million out of America's total military force of 3,555,000 were deployed overseas, compared with June 1950 figures of 281,000 overseas out of 1,460,000 service personnel. Germany, Japan and Korea, the key battlegrounds of the Cold War, were home to the bulk of overseas deployments.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- After HiroshimaThe United States, Race and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945–1965, pp. 162 - 198Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010