Massive Retaliatory Power

Thousands of words have been written and spoken around the world about the philosophy underlying the Eisenhower Administration's foreign and defense policies. Last week John Foster Dulles achieved the clearest interpretation of what the new policy means.

The old policy, Dulles pointed out in a speech in Manhattan before the Council on Foreign Relations, reacted to Communist moves and met local aggressions on a local basis. The new policy is based on an entirely different concept. It places "more reliance on community deterrent power and less dependence upon local defensive power"; it plans for the "long haul," and not merely for the sudden emergency.

"Local defense will always be important," said the Secretary of State. "But there is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty land power of the Communist world. Local defense must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power.

"A potential aggressor must know that he cannot always prescribe the battle conditions that suit him. Otherwise, for example, a potential aggressor who is glutted with manpower might be tempted to attack in confidence that resistance would be confined to manpower. He might be tempted to attack in places where his superiority was decisive. The way to deter aggression is for the free community to be willing & able to respond vigorously at places and with means of its own choosing.

"Now, so long as our basic concepts in these respects were unclear, our military leaders could not be selective in building our military power . . . We had to be ready to fight in the Arctic and in the tropics, in Asia, in the Near East and in Europe, by sea, by land and by air, by old weapons and by new weapons . . ."

The inability of the military leaders to select weapons caused the swollen defense budget. They could have continued to buy everything that might turn out to be useful in situations picked by the enemy if Eisenhower & Co. had not formulated a political policy which gives the military a standard of selection. Said Dulles:

"Before military planning could be changed, the President and his advisers, represented by the National Security Council, had to make some basic policy decisions. This has been done. And the basic decision was ... to depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate instantly by means and at places of our choosing . . . And as a result, it is now possible to get, and to share [with allies], more security at less cost."

Sharpening the broad picture to fit a specific case, John Foster Dulles said: "This change gives added authority to the warning . . . that, if the Communists renewed the aggression [in Korea], the United Nations response would not necessarily be confined to Korea."

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