Eisenhower and the Cold War Arms Race: “Open Skies” and the Military-Industrial Complex by Helen Bury (review)

Some people have all the luck. The late President Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of them. His running mate and vice president, Richard M. Nixon, ended up tarred with the Vietnam War and accused of suborning democracy with Watergate. Plenty of similar things happened on Eisenhower’s watch. He almost got the country into the same Vietnam War at the time of Dien Bien Phu. He undertook to overthrow legitimate governments through covert operations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) across the globe. Eisenhower engaged in so many crises that his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, coined the term “brinkmanship” to denote the art of getting into a crisis but then out of it. Eisenhower pre-delegated authority to military commanders to use nuclear weapons. On his watch the United States innovated the thermonuclear bomb and began a nuclear buildup that ended with thousands of delivery vehicles and tens of thousands of warheads and bombs.

Eisenhower’s reputation by the end of his presidency was not high, but in retrospect historians have often reevaluated him favorably. Despite his brinkmanship, one school of thought considers him a peacemaker. Several of President Eisenhower’s speeches or diplomatic maneuvers have served his reputation well over the years. His 1961 farewell speech warning about the military-industrial complex is by far the greatest, but he also gets good press for his “atoms for peace” speech of 1953 and—the subject of this book—his “Open Skies” initiative of 1955.

In Eisenhower and the Cold War Arms Race, Helen Bury provides us with the latest examination of Open Skies, a diplomatic maneuver at the 1955 Geneva summit whereby Eisenhower sought to convince the Soviet Union to adopt, as a major confidence-building measure, a scheme that would permit both sides to conduct legal aerial photography of the other for intelligence purposes. Clear intelligence on the Soviet Union would have enabled Eisenhower to calibrate U.S. military budgets finely and might have avoided some of the crises that later arose. Nikita Khrushchev, afraid the CIA might discover how weak the Soviet Union actually was, rejected the proposal.

That much is familiar. What is extraordinary in Bury’s work is her argument that Eisenhower the peacemaker kept on the case. That is, she argues that the president made repeated attempts to induce Soviet leaders to accept what they had spurned. This is an intriguing proposition, and I would like to believe it. But I fall short of doing so for two reasons.

First, the Open Skies Eisenhower exists in tandem with the brinkmanship president. On nuclear issues, his proposal for a nuclear test ban as well as one for General and Complete Disarmament foundered on the issue of inspections (i.e., verification). By no means was the Soviet Union the only rejectionist. Eisenhower would have been no more successful in selling limited on-site inspections to John McCone at the Atomic Energy Commission or to Curtis LeMay at the Strategic Air Command than he was to the Soviet government.

Bury seems to treat Open Skies as if it existed by itself. But Eisenhower launched a massive nuclear buildup in response to each of the successive intelligence gaps—on missiles and bombers. He predelegated authority to employ nuclear weapons, creating a “Strangelovian” dilemma. He cooperated in giving the U.S. Navy a bigger share of the nuclear pie in the form not only of ballistic-missile submarines but also of nuclear-armed aircraft carriers. He integrated and coordinated all the targeting plans for those forces in the Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP). For Bury to be convincing in her depiction of an Open Skies Eisenhower, she would have to show that these military programs did not conflict with Eisenhower’s arms control efforts. That argument is absent here.

The second count is evidence. Bury marshals and carefully deploys the evidence on the Geneva summit proposal for...