Emphasis on "Capacity"

Almost all week long, John Foster Dulles was busy explaining and elaborating on the "instant retaliation" policy. His explanations were directed at the press, at the Congress, and at the public.

For 40 minutes at his regular press conference, Dulles answered reporters' questions on the subject. His basic text was still his Jan. 12 speech. Said he: "In no place did I say we would retaliate instantly, although we might indeed retaliate instantly under conditions that call for that. The essential thing is to have the capacity to retaliate instantly. It is lack of that capacity which in my opinion accounted for such disasters as Pearl Harbor. If we had had the capacity to retaliate instantly, in my opinion, there would have been no Pearl Harbor. But it took about four years to retaliate against Tokyo."

No "Privileged Sanctuary." Did the present policy mean that the U.S. had the choices only of I) all-out war or 2) no resistance at all? Definitely not, said Dulles. "Let us take the declaration which was made by the 16 powers in relation to Korea ... It has been stated there that, if aggression should be resumed, the reaction would not necessarily be confined to Korea . . . That does not mean necessarily that there will be an effort made to drop atom bombs on Peiping or upon Moscow. It does mean that there are areas of importance to the aggressors in that vicinity which . .-. would no longer be what General MacArthur called a 'privileged sanctuary.' "

On this point, Dulles took a look backward: "I believe that the original Korean attack would not have occurred if it had not been assumed either that we would not react at all, or, if we did react, would react only at the place and by the means that the aggressors chose."

If the free world has the capacity to strike an aggressor where it hurts, said Dulles, "the deterrent power of that is sufficient so that you do not need to have local defense all around the 20,000-mile perimeter of the orbit of the Soviet world." With that capacity, he said, the free world can place more reliance on deterring attack and less on being able to stop it everywhere.

A Wide Range of Power. Later in the week, Dulles sat before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and carefully moved on with his mission of clarification: "The best way to deter aggression is to make the aggressor know in advance that he will suffer damage outweighing what he can hope to gain . . . The free world must maintain and be prepared to use effective means to make aggression too costly to be tempting . . . The greatest deterrent to war is the ability of the free world to respond by means best suited to the particular area or circumstances." And that ability, said Dulles, requires "a wide range of air, sea and land power, based on both conventional and atomic weapons."

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