Nuclear Apartheid: The Quest for American Atomic Supremacy from World War II to the Present

4. The President in the Gray Flannel Suit: Conformity, Technological Utopianism, and Nonproliferation, 1953–1956

4 The​President​in​the​​ Gray​Flannel​Suit conformiTy, TechnoloGicAl uTopiAnism, � nonproliferATion, 1953–1956 “Soon even little countries will have a stockpile of these bombs, and then we will be in a mess,” exclaimed Dwight D. Eisenhower in spring 1954.1 The president had grown frustrated with his advisers’ resistance to a nuclear test ban and other nonproliferation measures. Many administration officials viewed the spread of nuclear weapons as inevitable. They also saw nuclear weapons as the only guarantor of U.S. security and sought technological solutions for both national security and propaganda challenges. Eisenhower’s desire to control nuclear weapons did inspire several studies of nonproliferation measures from 1953 to 1956. But because the president refused to impose his views on a resistant bureaucracy, these reviews did little to alter administration policy. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace proposal actually increased the risk of proliferation. By 1956, multiple converging factors—ignorance of the link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, Cold War suspicions, internal administrative disagreement, and presidential inefficacy—together subordinated nonproliferation to other American policy goals, namely maintaining nATo unity and winning over nonaligned states with Atoms for Peace aid. Instead of “Happy Days,” Eisenhower ushered in a period of happy denial 82 The presidenT in The GrAy flAnnel suiT where problems were ignored in public and discussed only behind closed doors. Chance​for​Peace? Althoughhehadlittlecomprehensionof theproliferationthreatwhenhetook office, the new president had a more nuanced understanding of the nuclear arms race than had his predecessor. As U.S. Armychief of staff (1945–48) and as nATo supreme commander (1951–52), Eisenhower helped supervise the integration of atomic weapons into U.S. strategy. As president, he combined this experience with adherence to the German military thinker Carl von Clausewitz’s theories on the interconnection of war and politics. But Clausewitz offered a confusing compass for the nuclear age. Eisenhower feared that if he sustained the high level of defense spending inherited from Truman, it would damage the U.S. economy. A military policy based primarily on nucleardeterrence offered a feasible means to reduce defense spending while ensuring sufficient striking force to deter Soviet aggression. The new president nonetheless worried that large-scale nuclear attack violated the Clausewitzian principle that military victory must serve a clear political purpose. Eisenhower challenged military leaders to imagine the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the Soviet bloc. He observed, “Here would be a great area from the Elbe toVladivostok and down through Southeast Asia torn up and destroyed, without government, without its communications, just an area of starvation and disaster. I ask you what would the civilized world do about it?”2 The president also contended that nuclear armaments posed a greater threat to U.S. than to Soviet security because atomic weapons favored “the side that attacks aggressively and by surprise.” Since the United States would presumably never initiate an undeclared war, the continued nuclear threat worked to the Soviets’ advantage. Nuclear abolition would conversely favor the United States because the Soviet Union could not match its industrial capacity in the event of conventional war. Eisenhower’s fears about atomic weapons ultimately compelled him to embrace nuclear disarmament as the third major pillarof his national security policy, along with defense and deterrence . But these three national security approaches did not receive equal emphasis , and the Eisenhower administration achieved few clear disarmament gains.3 Eisenhower’s thoughtfulness and wariness about nuclear weapons and military spending startled scholars in the 1980s who had been reared on depictions of a bland and disengaged Ike. But notions of Eisenhoweras a genius The presidenT in The GrAy flAnnel suiT 83 that filled journals in the late twentieth century have also faded. While declassified records exposed his cunning, they also revealed how it “was erratically and sometimes foolishly deployed” by a leader who too often confused “sincere distaste for public bombast with simple cowardice about taking strong stances” and “good intentions with concrete progress.” Eisenhower may have been a general, but he would never be mistaken for a charismatic man on horseback. In the age of Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Eisenhower embraced the culture of conformity and the ethic of groupthink. His envisioned corporate commonwealth thrived on consensus and order, and he seldom challenged the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy and business establishments. William Whyte’s definition of the “organization man” as someonewho cared less about his own “creativity...