Abstract
The strategic debate that developed in the US during the mid-1950s was impressive both for its vigour and, viewed in retrospect, its underlying consensus. The debate found the Administration, with qualified support from the Air Force, ranged against almost every other interested party. The immediate stake was the size and composition of the defence budget. The Army and the Navy sought to check the rise in the proportion of the budget devoted to strategic air power. There have been few greater stimuli to creative thought than competition over the allocations of resources to the armed services.
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Notes
- 1.
The growing concern on these matters is described in Robert A. Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate 1954–60 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
- 2.
P. M. S. Blackett, Atomic Weapons and East-West Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 3.
- 3.
Robert Oppenheimer, ‘Atomic weapons and American policy’, Foreign Affairs, XXXI:4 (July 1953), p. 529.
- 4.
‘Hungary: Salami Tactics’, Time Magazine, 14 April 1952.
- 5.
Henry A. Kissinger, ‘Military Policy and Defense of the “Grey Areas”’, Foreign Affairs, April 1955.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Paul Kecskemeti, Strategic Surrender; The Politics of Victory and Defense (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958).
- 8.
See James King, ‘Strategic Surrender: The Senate Debate and the Book’, World Politics, XI (April 1959).
- 9.
Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach, p. 25. On Liddell Hart’s theories see Brian Bond, Liddell Hart: A Study of his Military Thought (London: Cassell, 1977).
- 10.
Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare, pp. 99–102.
- 11.
Edward Mead Earle, ‘The Influence of Air Power upon History’, op. cit.
- 12.
Taken from a piece written in April 1954 that was later reprinted in B. H. Liddell Hart, Deterrent or Defence (London: Stevens & Sons, 1960), p. 23.
- 13.
Letter of 26 April 1957: ‘you led all the rest of us in advocating the principle of limited war’. Quoted in Bond, op. cit., p. 196.
- 14.
Bernard Brodie, ‘Unlimited Weapons and Limited War’, The Reporter (1 November 1954).
- 15.
William Kaufmann (ed.), Military Policy and National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), pp. 21, 24–5.
- 16.
Robert Endicott Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (The University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 26, 242.
- 17.
Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1957).
- 18.
Brodie, ‘Unlimited Weapons and Limited War’, op. cit.
- 19.
Osgood, op. cit., p. 18.
- 20.
W. Kaufmann, Military Policy, p. 117.
- 21.
James King, ‘Limited War’, Army (August 1957).
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Freedman, L., Michaels, J. (2019). Limited Objectives. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_8
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