Table of Contents

Tragedy and Hope

A History of the World in Our Time

By Carroll Quigley

PART EIGHTEEN







Part Eighteen: Nuclear Rivalry and the Cold War: the Race for H-Bomb: 1950-1957

Chapter 66: "Joe I" and the American Nuclear Debate, 1949-1954

     In May 1947, at one of the earliest meetings of the Atomic Energy Commission, the members discussed a suggestion made by one of the commissioners, the Wall Street investment banker Lewis L. Strauss. Four months later, at the request of the commission, the air force was ordered to begin a continuous monitoring of the upper atmosphere to test for radioactive particles which would indicate if a nuclear explosion had taken place anywhere in the world. The monitoring service was tested on our own nuclear explosions in the Marshall Islands early in 8, and continued thereafter on funds from AEC.

     Late in August 1949, a B-29, modified for this service, returned to its base in the Far East and found that the photographic plates it had been carrying to a great height were covered with streaks. As the local scientists examined these, they became convinced that the plane had passed througl1 a heavily radioactive cloud, which must have originated farther west on the mainland of Asia. Code messages to Washington sent similar planes over the United States to collect raindrops and high-flying dust particles. These soon revealed the bad news: a highly efficient plutonium bomb ("Joe I") had been exploded over Soviet Asia in August. President Truman, on September 23, 1949, made a public announcement: "Within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR."

     The news of "Joe I" brought to crisis level, and merged together, two conflicts which had been going on, more or less behind the scenes, in the American strategic community. One of these conflicts was among the scientists over the possibility of making a "super" bomb by fusing hydrogen; the other conflict, involving billions of dollars in defense contracts and the lives of millions of people, was the struggle among the armed services over American strategic-defense policies.

     Discussion over "Super" had been going on for years, but only intermittently and among a few advanced scientists. In 1927 a young Austrian, Fritz Houtermans, studying physics at G๖ttingen, took a walk with Lord Rutherford's assistant, Geoffrey Atkinson. Houtermans suggested that the energy of the sun came from the fusion of four hydrogen atoms to make a single helium atom. They talked about the problem and told a Russian fellow student, George Gamow, who returned to the Soviet Union shortly afterward. In 1933 Houtermans fled from Hitler's anti-Semitic laws to Russia. During Stalin's purges he was imprisoned as a foreign spy and tortured to extract a confession. In 1940, when Stalin was allied with Hitler, Houtermans's wrecked but still living body was turned over to the Germans to receive new indignities from the Gestapo.

     In 1933 Gamow fled from Russia and was given a professorship at the George Washington University in the American capital. In 1935 Gamow invited the Hungarian refugee scientist Edward Teller to join him at George Washington. They worked together and talked a good deal about the problem of hydrogen fusion. After listening to them, another refugee, Hans Bethe, winner of the Enrico Fermi award in 196', then at Cornell, worked out the now accepted equations for nuclear fusion on the sun. Bethe's equations assumed that Carbon-12, by the addition of hydrogen nuclei (protons), one at a time, was raised through Nitrogen-13, N-14, Oxygen-15, and N-15 which then added a final proton and split into C-12 and Helium-4. The carbon thus acted as a catalyst for the fusion of hydrogen to form helium.

     Teller, a restless man, fertile with suggestions, but incapable of sustained cooperation with others, went to Columbia University in 1941, to Chicago in 1942, to Berkeley, California, in the summer of 1942, and to Los Alamos in the spring of 1943. He was obsessed with the idea of a fusion bomb and was greatly encouraged by Oppenheimer who obtained special security clearance for him and invited him both to California in 1942 and to Los Alamos in 1943. In both places he worked on the H-bomb, although it was generally known (as suggested by Fermi) that no H-bomb was possible until there was an A-bomb to ignite it.

     Hydrogen nuclei (protons), carrying the same (positive) electrical charges, repel each other so strongly that they cannot be pushed together to fuse into helium unless they are raised to tremendous collision speeds by being heated to hundreds of millions of degrees of temperature. Only an A-bomb could produce such heat. In 1942 Fermi suggested that such fusion could be achieved at a somewhat lower temperature by using heavy hydrogen (deuterium). This is an isotope of hydrogen which is twice as heavy as ordinary hydrogen, since its nucleus consists of two unit particles instead of one. Its discovery, for which Harold Urey won the Nobel Prize in 1934, showed that it existed in nature, chiefly in the form of heavy water (D2O compared to ordinary water H2O), in the proportion of about one part of deuterium for every 5,000 of ordinary hydrogen.

     Shortly afterward, it was calculated that it might be possible to make an even heavier isotope of hydrogen of triple weight (tritium) with a nucleus of three particles. These could be fused to make helium at an even lower temperature. However, it would be so expensive to make tritium that each bomb would cost billions of dollars. By the end of 1942, it seemed clear that the most feasible way to make a bomb would be to use both deuterium and tritium. Collisions of these at over 100 million degrees of temperature should give helium atoms and enormous energy. At that point the project was put on the shelf, and work concentrated on making the A-bomb, which had to be obtained first.

     After the war ended, the outstanding scientists gradually returned to their peacetime teaching and research, so that the AEC laboratories, including Los Alamos, quieted down. The super-patriots subsequently criticized the scientists for this, arguing that the latter should have stayed on the job with AEC to develop better weapons than the Russians. This is nonsense, and is most nonsensical when it is implied that the scientists' reluctance for weapon development was based on Soviet sympathies. The fact is that America's whole future depended on getting scientists back to the universities to train new scientists, a job which had been neglected for five years. Moreover, there was another and potent influence working against weapons development in the nuclear area. This was the air force.

     The air force could keep its monopoly of atomic weapons only as long as these remained in the large, ungainly shape they had first had in 1945. Accordingly, the air force, through General Brereton's participation on an AEC committee at the end of 1947, was able to block AEC development of smaller, tactical atom bombs. Only three years later, when these were being developed in spite of its opposition, did the air force try to recapture its privileged nuclear monopoly by beginning to insist on development of the H-bomb. This shift brought it into alliance with Teller who had been vainly advocating the H-bomb all the time since 1942.

     Ironically enough, once this alliance had been made, sympathizers and allies of both the air force and of Teller conveniently forgot the former's earlier opposition to nuclear weapons development and began to question the loyalty of others who had opposed development of the H-bomb, including those "official scientists" who had done so because they realized it would jeopardize the development of tactical A-bombs. Because he cooperated in this attack on Oppenheimer, Teller's prestige among scientists (but not among congressmen and journalists) was almost irreparably damaged.

     The turn toward the H-bomb began in 1949, even before "Joe I," largely because of the agitations of Teller and his supporters in the California Radiation Laboratory led by E. O. Lawrence and Luis Alvarez. At the same time, Soviet pressure, especially in Berlin, made it increasingly clear that our nuclear weapons system must be reviewed. Teller at once insisted, "H-bomb! " but the official scientists, led by Oppenheimer, suggested development of a wide panoply of nuclear weapons in all sizes and utilities. In general, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) group were reluctant to work for either change. Until 1950, however, the development of smaller A-bombs was prevented by the air-force veto of 1947. As a result, the only testing of A-bombs in the five-year period from Bikini in 1946 to April 1951 vv7as a test at Eniwetok in the spring of 1948 which sought to secure larger bombs by more effective use of nuclear material. At these 1948 tests four bombs were exploded, reaching a size of over 100 kilotons, or almost six times the blast of the 1945 bombs on Japan. This lack of testing from 1948 to 1951, for which the air force was responsible, was later attributed by air-force supporters to Oppenheimer's Communist sympathies!

     "Joe I" brought this stalemate to a crisis. The question of proceeding toward an H-bomb was submitted to the Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC in October, and this group, including Oppenheimer, Conant, Fermi, Lee DuBridge (president of California Institute of Technology), I. I. Rabi of Columbia (Nobel Prize, 1944), and three businessmen, voted unanimously against a crash program to make an H-bomb. Glenn Seaborg (Nobel Prize, 1951), who was absent, was noncommittal. The most vigorous opposition came from Conant. In general, the opposition felt that concentration on an all-out effort to make an H-bomb, whose feasibility was very dubious, would be a poor response to "Joe I" and that a better response would lie in: (1) complete reform of American ground forces, including universal military training; (2) reorganization of the defenses of Western Europe, including Germany; and (3) a drive to make a large and varied assortment of A-bombs, especially by decreasing their size for tactical use.

     Teller was chagrined at this decision, a view which was shared by Senator Brien McMahon of the joint congressional committee and by the air force. Teller had been visiting about the country, in his impetuous way, even before this decision, seeking to build up support for "Super" and to recruit scientists, with special attention to Bethe (who opposed the effort to make an H-bomb and finally joined the effort, the following year, because he hoped to prove it was impossible).

     The GAC's unanimous vote against a crash program for the H-bomb in October 1949 was based on a number of considerations, which still seem valid: (I) The scientists feared that the use of the Hanford reactors to make tritium from lithium, instead of continuing to make plutoniun1 from uranium, would jeopardize the development of tactical A-bombs, especially as the manufacture of a pound of tritium would cost the loss of 80 pounds of plutonium; (2) they felt that the threat of our nuclear retaliation was not a sufficient guarantee against nibbling by Soviet ground forces and wanted our ground forces and those of our European supporters reorganized, expanded, and equipped with tactical atomic weapons; (3) they felt that the atom bomb was sufficiently large for any possible target in Soviet industrial plants or Russian cities and that for such targets the hydrogen bomb was not really necessary; (4) they felt that the advantages of adding the H-bomb to the world's arsenals, in terms of cost, was so slight that the Russians would not try to make it if we abstained from doing so; (5) they felt that the scientific manpower needed to develop the H-bomb could be obtained only from the A-bomb plants or from teaching, and was, for the immediate future, more valuable in these two places; (6) they doubted if any H-bomb would be made small enough to be carried in a plane, and, accordingly, thought it unwise to sacrifice possible strengthening of our defense response where it was urgently needed (on land) for a possibly unobtainable increment of power to our defense response in an area (strategic bombing) where it was not urgently needed, especially as it was not yet established that we would make any nuclear response at all to a minor or moderate Soviet aggression.

     These considerations, which so deeply disturbed Conant, Oppenheimer, Lilienthal, and others, were ignored by Teller and his allies, who continued to agitate for a crash program for "Super." The strong support which Teller found in the air force, from the joint congressional committee under Senator McMahon, and from William Liscum Borden, executive director of the joint committee, eventually led President Truman to reverse the GAC. On January 31, 1950, the President gave a decision which has frequently been misrepresented: he ordered the AEC to proceed with its efforts to make the H-bomb and at the same time to continue its work for more varied A-weapons, within the framework of a new over-all survey of American strategic plans which was simultaneously ordered from the National Security Council. This triple order, which is usually misrepresented as the single order for a crash H-bomb, effort, required new nuclear reactors.

     The order to make an H-bomb was easier to issue than to carry out, because no one knew how to make it. It must be clearly understood that the H-bomb, as tested in November 1952 and subsequently developed, was not based on the lines being followed by Teller in 1946-1951. The true sequence of events has been concealed under enormous waves of ... propaganda which have tried to show that Teller's development of the H-bomb was held up because the Truman Administration was deeply infiltrated with Communists and fellow travelers. This propaganda came fron1 neo-isolationist, Republican, and air-force sources which formed a tacit alliance to discredit the Democratic administrations of 1933-1953— "Twenty Years of Treason," as they called it.

     The chronology here is of some importance. Klaus Fuchs confessed to atomic espionage in England on January 27th; President Truman ordered work on the H-bomb four days later; and McCarthy made his first accusations at Wheeling nine days after that.

     One of the reasons the GAC had opposed working on the H-bomb was that such work would jeopardize the production of plutonium and would not overcome the unbalance in our defenses between strategic and tactical forces. On February 24th the Joint Chiefs of Staff demanded that Truman's order to the AEC "to continue" work on the H-bomb be changed into a "crash program." About the same time, the White House ordered the reevaluation of our strategic position by the National Security Council; this led eventually to NSC 68. And, finally, the AEC initiated steps to obtain new nuclear reactors. Work on these, begun in 1951, included a tritium production plant on the Savannah River and two U-235 gaseous-diffusion plants at Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Kentucky. This gave five great nuclear centers, of which the three diffusion plants used 5.8 million kilowatts of electricity, about half the total output of the TVA, and sufficient for the ordinary needs of 32 million persons. In 1960 this electricity cost over a quarter of a billion dollars, and the total cost of nuclear explosives was running at $2 billion a year.

     The method pursued to achieve a thermonuclear explosion up to June 1951, by fusing tritium and deuterium into helium, was possible as a scientific experiment, and was achieved at the beautiful atoll of Eniwetok in April 1951. But this method could not be used for a bomb, since the whole mechanism had to be enclosed in a complex refrigerator the size of a small house. The problem of the bomb was to get the hydrogen isotope particles close enough together so that they would fuse. This could be done at the almost unobtainable temperatures over 400 million degrees. It could be done at lower temperatures if the particles were already close together, as they would be when very cold. As hydrogen gets colder, it liquefies at—423ฐ below zero Fahrenheit, but it is very difficult to keep it that cold. It can be kept at the temperature of liquid air,—414ฐ F., by immersing it in this, but at that temperature, 9ฐ higher than its own vaporizing point, hydrogen will stay liquid only if it is under pressure of about 2,700 pounds per square inch..

     The successful hydrogen fusion at Eniwetok in April, 195 1, was achieved with a very small quantity of tritium and deuterium held at these fantastic conditions, then suddenly exposed to the 100-million-degree blast of an exploding A-bomb. The additional energy released by the fusing hydrogen was so small that it was not noticeable to eyewitnesses, but could be inferred from the electronic recording apparatus. Thus it would be a mistake to call this explosion, known as Operation Greenhouse, an H-bomb. As the AEC would say, it was "a thermonuclear device."

     The successful way to the thermonuclear bomb emerged from a suggestion made to Teller in February 1951 by a brilliant young Polish mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam. Teller presented the idea, as developed by himself and his assistant Frederic de Hoffman, to a meeting of the GAC held at the Institute for Advanced Study on June 19-20, 1951. Everyone present realized that the problem was solved. As Oppenheimer said, "It was sweet." Briefly, the idea was to merge the two separate operations of making tritium out of lithium and fusing the tritium with deuterium into a single operation as a bomb. The feasibility of this new plan was tested in a successful thermonuclear explosion (called "Mike”) as part of the tests of Operation Ivy at Eniwetok on November 1, 1952. This produced a blast equal to about lo million tons of TNT, creating a fireball 3 ฝ miles wide, whose heat was felt 30 miles away, and which completely destroyed the small islet on which it occurred, leaving a hole in the lagoon 175 feet deep and a mile wide. But this was not a bomb, since the mechanism weighed 65 tons and filled a cubical box 25 feet on each edge.

     The great significance of the thermonuclear bomb was that, unlike the A-bomb, it could be made of limitless power. An A-bomb explosion was measured in thousands of tons of TNT (kilotons) and could be made up to a few hundred kilotons in power. The thermonuclear bomb had to be measured in millions of tons of TNT (megatons) and had no limit on its size.

     The world's third thermonuclear explosion was a shocker, exploded by the Russians on August 12, 1953, and revealed to the world by American atmosphere-testing devices. It may have been dropped from a plane; if so, the Russians were far in advance of us, since we did not achieve a droppable bomb until May 21, 1956. In that interval we exploded, at Bikini on March 1, 1954, our first real thermonuclear bomb. It was a horrifying device, a triple-stage fission-fusion-fission bomb which spread death-dealing radioactive contamination over more than 8,000 square miles of the Pacific and injurious radiation over much of the world.

     This first American thermonuclear bomb had a trigger of two A-bombs exploded simultaneously to detonate a second stage consisting of Lithium-6 deuteride. This latter was a compound of a lithium isotope of mass 6 (which makes up about one-fifteenth of natural lithium and has a nucleus of three protons with three neutrons) and of heavy Hydrogen-2. This compound, a white crystalline substance, was surrounded with a shiny sphere of almost a ton of metallic natural uranium. The neutrons from the A-bomb trigger, blasting through the lithium deuterium crystals, split the Lithium-6 into helium and tritium ( Hydrogen-3); in a tremendous explosion, the latter then fused with the deuterium to make helium, at the same time emitting a great shower of extra neutrons which split the surrounding natural uranium in a super-atomic fission holocaust. The whole process occurred almost instantaneously, with a shattering blast equal to 18,000,000 tons of TNT. With the blast was released a vast quantity of deadly radioactive isotopes, including the dangerous Strontium-90, which, like calcium, is readily absorbed into human bones, where its deadly radiations may easily engender cancer.

     The test of this inhuman weapon (called "Bravo") was announced to the world by the AEC as the test of an H-bomb (it was really a U-bomb, or a "fission-fusion-fission bomb"), and for almost a year (until February 15, 1955) its real nature was concealed by the AEC, apparently at the insistence of the new Republican chairman, Lewis L. Strauss. Secrecy from Strauss left the world with two mistaken ideas: (1) that the successful thermonuclear bomb was simply an H-bomb and (2) that it was, accordingly, made on the lines Teller had been following in 1945-1951. From these errors partisan inference could conclude that our delay in achieving an H-bomb resulted from the restraints placed on Teller's work during the Truman Administration. This, of course, was not believed by the atomic scientists, but seemed convincing to many well-informed persons from the strange fact that William L. Laurence, science editor of The New York Times, spread these two mistaken ideas.

     As the best-known scientific journalist in America, Laurence's stories were accepted as true by the ordinary well-informed public (though not by scientists). Laurence, the only newspaper reporter allowed to see the test at Alamagordo or the nuclear explosion on Japan, wrote a book on the H-bomb, which he called The Hell Bomb, in 1950. It was full of misleading ideas, forgivable at that date, but totally erroneous in following years, when the book continued to be read. It stated that the H-bomb would be exploded by direct fusion of deuterium and tritium, a method which it attributed to Teller. Years later, in The New York Times, Laurence still insisted that the test of March, 1954, was not a fission-fusion-fission (F-F-F-bomb) but was simply a fission-fusion H-bomb and not a U-bomb. This version of "Bravo" apparently originated with Strauss, who denied that "Bravo" was a U-bomb, and explained the surprisingly large noxious fallout as a consequence of irradiation of the coral reef on which the bomb exploded. This story entrenched in the public mind that Teller was the "Father of the H-bomb," that he had been held back to the injury of American security by Soviet sympathizers during the Truman Administration, and that there was some basis for the AEC condemnation of Oppenheimer as a security risk in June 1954. Behind much of this was the air force, allied to Teller, Laurence, and Strauss, and very opposed to Oppenheimer. This opposition arose because of Oppenheimer's work for diversification of weapons (which was regarded by the air force as a treasonable diversion of both money and nuclear materials from it to the other services) and for his efforts to get smaller nuclear warheads. These latter paved the way for long-range missiles, for tactical nuclear weapons, and for the Polaris nuclear submarine which supplanted the air force manned bombers and, by the middle 1960'S, threatened to shift America's primary deterrence of Soviet aggression from SAC to the navy.

     It should be recorded that Teller had little to do with the actual making of the successful thermonuclear bomb. As usual, he was very restless and felt hampered at Los Alamos in 1951 and spent most of his time lobbying with the air force and the Radiation Laboratory trying to get a new second-weapons laboratory of his own. To free himself for this activity, he left Los Alamos in November 1951. When the AEC refused to establish a second laboratory, Teller went to the air force and obtained its support for a second-weapons laboratory, the so-called Livermore Laboratory attached to E. O. Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, California. This was established in July 1952. All the thermonuclear tests and the final H-bomb which we have mentioned were achievements of Los Alamos, whose operations, under Norris Bradbury, Teller disapproved. Teller himself was present at none of the tests of the lithium bomb, and his Livermore Laboratory did not participate in the tests.

     None of this was in fact as it was built up in public opinion in the period 1951-1955. The public record on these matters was rectified in 1955 by Teller, by Laurence, and by the AEC, but by that time Oppenheimer had been condemned, the Republicans were in office, and the story of subversion in the American government had become an established American myth, along with the thermonuclear bomb as a hydrogen bomb and Teller as its father.

     These myths were, of course, not believed by the nuclear scientists, a fact that helped to intensify the suspicion the ... Right held for them and for all educated people. The truth about "Bravo" had been revealed to the nuclear scientists of the world, including the Russians, almost immediately after the test and in a most dramatic fashion.

     Shortly after the "Bravo" blast at Bikini, a small Japanese fishing boat, The Lucky Dragon, was caught in the edge of the lethal radiations from the test. It was, indeed a lucky Dragon for only one of the crew subsequently died, although the rest were sick for months. The vessel was ninety miles east of the blast, but, had it been only ten miles farther south, all the crew would have died horrible deaths. Two weeks after the blast, when the doomed vessel reached Japan, Professor Kenjiro Kimura, the first discoverer of Uranium-237, found this rare isotope in the fallout ash all over The Lucky Dragon. The U-237 could have come only from fission of U-239. This discovery, published in Japanese in August 1954, revealed that "Bravo" had been a gigantic U-bomb whose deadly nature resided more in its radioactive fallout than in its heat and blast.

     Under the tight blanket of the secrecy of Strauss, the scientists who knew asked themselves: Why did the AEC make such a "dirty" bomb? Why was it all kept such a secret? The answer now seems clear: the Soviet H-bomb explosion of August 1953 showed that the Russians were ahead of us in the H-bomb race. This the AEC could not publicly admit. This disadvantage had to be overcome as rapidly as possible, and the best way to do so was to shift from blast warfare to radioactivity warfare. The movement in this direction, which was fortunately only temporary (1953-1956), was intensified by the early, and very secret, stages of the missile race. Late in 1952, immediately following the test of "Mike," John von Neumann headed a committee which recommended an intensified effort to develop a long-range missile (ICBM). At that time the American effort in missiles was restricted very largely to variations of the German V-2 weapon and to lesser rockets such as Aerobee and Wac Corporal. The new effort soon showed that longer range would be easier to achieve than greater accuracy and that it would be very difficult to build a missile which could be depended upon to hit within ten miles of target. At such a distance, blast, even at ten megatons, would do little damage, and if such targets were to be knocked out, this would have to be done by a spreading cloud of radioactive fallout and not by the blast. Hence the U-bomb.

     The U-bomb, concealed from public view by secrecy and by misleading statements from AEC, usually from Strauss, remained the weapon of last resort in the American arsenal throughout the Dulles era. The launching of the first "Polaris" submarine in January 1954, six weeks before "Bravo," did not change this situation. The first American test of an airdrop lithium bomb in May 1956 was a delayed fall from a B-52 jet bomber at 55,000 feet; it exploded at 15,000 feet in a four-mile-wide fireball, but was almost an equal distance off its target.

     To prepare public opinion to accept use of the U-bomb, if it became necessary, Strauss sponsored a study of radioactive fallout whose conclusion was prejudged by calling it "Project Sunshine." By selective release of some evidence and strict secrecy of other information, the Strauss group tried to establish in public opinion that there was no real danger to anyone from nuclear fallout even in all-out nuclear war. This gave rise to a controversy between the scientists of the BAS group, led by Ralph E. Lapp, and the Eisenhower Administration, led by Strauss, on the nature and danger of fallout and of nuclear warfare in general.

     As we shall see in a moment, the Eisenhower government through Dulles's doctrine of "massive retaliation," enunciated in January 1954, was so deeply committed to nuclear warfare that it could not permit the growth of a public opinion which would refuse to accept the use of nuclear weapons because of objections to the danger of fallout to neutrals and noncombatants. In this struggle Strauss, Dulles, and Teller were supported by the air force, which feared and resented the efforts of the Oppenheimer group to shift the defense expenditures over a much wider range than that of massive retaliation. They were particularly alarmed by the efforts of Oppenheimer, Lee DuBridge, and others to spend money on anti-air defenses. By 1953 this struggle became so intense that the supporters of the air force and of massive retaliation decided they must destroy the public image and public career of Oppenheimer, to influence public opinion and to deter other scientists of his view from opposition to the new Republican-air-force party line.

     The end of the American nuclear monopoly in late 1950 made necessary a reopening of the strategic debate which had been stabilized on the Truman doctrine of "containment" in 1947. "Containment" strategy was based on a strategic balance between Soviet mass armies and the American nuclear monopoly, in which each of these would deter use of the other, thus establishing an umbrella under which the United States could use its economic power to win the Cold War. The strategic balance had been established as the "Truman Doctrine" early in 1947 and had been followed by the containment weapon, in aid to Greece and Turkey and, above all, by the Marshall Plan. This policy in the years 1947-1950 won numerous victories for the West, all along the Soviet-bloc periphery and especially in West Germany and in Japan, both of which became solidly attached to the West. The major failure, justified as inevitable in terms of the magnitude of the problem and the resources available, was the loss of China to the Soviet bloc, but this was generally accepted by the supporters of containment on the double ground that the available resources must go to Europe (as more important than China) and that China would never be a strong or dependable satellite of Russia.

     This doctrine of containment, by depriving each side of its strongest weapon (the Soviet mass army and the American SAC force) tended to neutralize these and forced each side into supplementary strategic plans. On the Soviet side, these new plans involved the use of nibbling tactics by its satellites. On the American side, these new plans involved the development of a balanced and flexible defensive posture based on all services and weapons.

     The new Soviet plans required a diversion of American aims from the Soviet Union itself to its periphery and to its satellites. They also involved keeping aggression below the level which would trigger a SAC retaliation. This level was much higher for a satellite state than for the Soviet Union itself. In fact, while almost any military aggression by the USSR might trigger a SAC nuclear strike in return, almost no aggression by a satellite (especially a lesser satellite) would do so. The areas in which such indirect adventures by the USSR might take place were obvious: the Near East and the Far East. In both of these areas the ineptness of American policy made the Soviet task fairly easy.

     The American response to this shift in Soviet strategy appeared, not as a response to an overt manifestation of Soviet policy, but as a response to "Joe 1." Moreover, it was not a Defense Department or JCS response, but was sponsored and pushed through by the policy planning staff of the State Department under Paul Nitze. It arose from the needs of NATO as a defensive force against Russia, and advocated a policy very similar to that desired by Oppenheimer and the GAC (increased emphasis on a balanced defense with strengthened ground forces, including those of our allies, and rapid development of tactical nuclear weapons and a tactical air-force role). This effort, which would have required an increase in the defense budget from the 1950 figure of $13 billion to about $35 billion, was accepted in April 1950 by the National Security Council as directive NSC 68, but with a cost figure of only $18 billion a year. The dominant thought of NSC 68 was the expectation of a strategic nuclear stalemate between the United States and the USSR by 1954 and the necessity of preparing for methods of defense, other than massive bombing, to resist Soviet aggression. Naturally, this directive was abhorrent to the "Big Bomber Boys." The extraordinary thing is that their resistance was successful, and NSC 68 was replaced by "massive retaliation" and a new directive, the so-called NSC 162, in October 1953, in spite of all the lessons of the Korean War of 1950-1953, which the air force and the Eisenhower Administration jointly ignored.

Chapter 67: The Korean War and Its Aftermath, 1950-1954

     The emphasis by the American armed forces on nuclear retaliation as their chief response to Communist aggression anywhere in the world made it necessary to draw a defense perimeter over which such aggression would trigger retaliation from us. Such a boundary had been established in Europe by the military occupation forces and NATO, but, at the end of 1949, was still unspecified in the Far East because of the recent victory of the Communists in China. At the insistence of the military leaders, especially General MacArthur, that perimeter was drawn to exclude Korea, Formosa, and mainland China; accordingly, all American forces had been evacuated from South Korea in June 1949. In March of that year, MacArthur publicly stated, "Our defense line runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia. It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu archipelago which includes its broad main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain to Alaska."

     The MacArthur defense perimeter in the Far East was accepted by Secretary of State Acheson in a speech on January 12, 1950, but not at all in the sense in which partisan Republicans attacked it later. Acheson specifically stated that America's guarantee was given only to areas east of that line but that American power might be used to the west of it where independent nations must first seek their security on their own initiative and the organized security system of the United Nations. To Acheson, therefore, the boundary was not between areas we would defend and those we would not defend, but between those we would defend unilaterally and those we would defend collectively.

     However, it seems clear that in private, by the end of 1949, all parts of the Administration in Washington looked forward to the fall of Formosa, the complete disappearance of Chiang Kai-shek, the recognition of Red China and its admission to the United Nations, as preliminaries to an intensive diplomatic effort to exploit the split between Soviet Russia and Communist China which was regarded as inevitable. This vision of Chinese "Titoism" never became public policy, but on October, 12, 1949, after the JCS under Eisenhower voted that Formosa was not of sufficient strategic importance to warrant its occupation by American troops, the three defense departments and the Department of State agreed unanimously that Formosa would be conquered by Red China by the end of 1950.

     Whatever merits there may have been in our Far Eastern defense perimeter and its implications for Formosa, it clearly left Korea in an ambiguous position. The Soviet Union interpreted this ambiguity to mean that the United States would allow South Korea to be conquered by North Korea, just as Red China, about the same time, assumed that the United States would permit it to conquer Formosa. Instead, when Russia, through its satellite, North Korea, sought to take Korea before Red China had taken Formosa, this gave rise to an American counteraction which prevented either aggressor from getting its aim..

     There can be little doubt that [key leaders of] the United States, along with the rest of the world, underestimated the almost insanely aggressive nature of Red China. From 1949 onward, this newly established regime tried to trite every friendly hand which tried to lead it into the community of established nations. It made it perfectly clear to all its neighbors in Asia that its policies would be based on hatred for any country which did not break with the United States and line up with the Soviet Union. Even India, which leaned over backward to be friendly, was upbraided almost daily in extravagant insults of which one of the more moderate was a charge that Nehru was "the running dog of British-American imperialists." When Great Britain offered diplomatic recognition in January 1950, it was rebuffed.

     Nor was this aggressive behavior only verbal. In spite of the devastation and economic dislocation of the Civil War, Red Chinese plans for aggression continued. The general level of Chinese production in 1949 was about half what it had been in 1942, and the country clearly needed an interval to recuperate, but the budget for 1950 allotted 40 percent of its funds for the armed services, imposed a tax of 20 percent on peasant agricultural incomes, and anticipated a deficit of nearly 20 percent to be covered by printing paper money. Its declared immediate plans included the conquest of Hainan Island, Formosa, and Tibet. Hainan was conquered in April 1950, and the buildup against Formosa continued for at least two months more. About 20,000 Koreans in the Chinese forces were detached and returned to North Korea, where they joined the armed forces of the People's Republic of Korea (PRK, that is, North Korea Communist Republic). This may have been done at Russia's request.

     On June 25, 1950, after a two-hour artillery bombardment, 60,000 North Koreans, led by a hundred Soviet tanks, crossed the 38th parallel and flung themselves on 90,000 lightly armed and already dis-spirited South Korean troops. The latter, lacking tanks, planes, or heavy artillery, reeled backward to the south and did not stop until August 6th, when they finally made a stand before Pusan in the southeast corner of the Korean Peninsula. In this retreat the ROK troops suffered 50,000 casualties in the first month..

     For forty-eight hours after the Korean attack, the world hesitated, awaiting America's reaction. On June 26, 1950, the fifth birthday of the United Nations, many feared a "Munich," leading to the collapse of the whole United Nations security system at its first major challenge. Truman's reaction, however, was decisive. He immediately committed American air and sea forces in the area south of 38ฐ, and demanded a UN condemnation of the aggression. Thus, for the first time in history, a world organization voted to use collective force to stop armed aggression. This was possible because the North Korean attack occurred at a time when the Soviet delegation was absent from the United Nations Security Council, boycotting it in protest at the presence of the delegation from Nationalist China. Accordingly, the much-used Soviet veto was unavailable. On June 27, 1950, the Security Council, with Yugoslavia casting the only opposing vote, condemned the aggression and asked its members to give assistance to South Korea. On the same day President Truman ordered American forces into action and sent the United States Seventh Fleet to neutralize the Formosa Strait, where the Red Chinese armies were still poised for their invasion of Formosa. This rapid response won general approval within the United States, even from those who later condemned and opposed it. One of these was Senator Taft, who prefaced his temporary approval by charging that all the troubles in the far East arose from the Democrats' "sympathetic acceptance of Communism" and that the North Korean attack was in response to the invitation contained in Acheson's speech of January r 2th: "Is it any wonder that the Korean Communists took us at the word given by the Secretary of State?" He demanded Acheson's immediate resignation, a cry which continued, almost uninterruptedly, over the next two and a half years.

     The President's order for ground forces to rescue the South Koreans w as not easy to carry out. Air-force success in its budget struggles with the other services and the general budget cutting by the Republican Eightieth Congress (January 1947-January 1949) had left the ground forces with only ten army and two Marine Corps divisions, all seriously undermanned. The four occupation divisions in the Far East, which had to respond to the Korean attack, had a total of only 25 infantry battalions, instead of the 36 allotted. These, and other units, had to be brought up to strength by calling up reservists. Nevertheless, one division from Japan reached Korea by July 9th, a second by July 12th, and a third on July 18th.

     The intervention of American forces in Korea was undoubtedly a great shock to the Communists, especially as the North Korean attack was a Soviet operation, while the American landing directly threatened the security of Red China. Coordination between the two Communist Powers was far from perfect and was certainly slow. The Red Chinese had no desire to see American forces reestablished on the Asiastic mainland or in occupation of all Korea up to the Chinese boundary along the Yalu River; on the other hand, they had no desire to get into a war with the United States to prevent this undesired consequence of what was really a Moscow operation, especially as Soviet support was very remote, at the farther end of a long single-track railway across Siberia. Nevertheless, the Red Chinese suspended their attack on Formosa and, in the course of July, assembled several hundred thousand troops in northeast China, considerably withdrawn from the Yalu.

     For weeks the successful advance of the North Koreans gave the Chinese hope that they need do nothing. The South Koreans were quickly hurled down to the southeastern corner of the country at Pusan, and for several weeks were on the verge of being pushed into the sea. Their line held, however, and American forces began to assemble in the protected beachhead.

     The United States was as cager as the Chinese to avoid a direct clash between the two countries, because such a clash could easily build up into a major war in the Far East, leaving Russia free to do its will in Europe. Washington was fearful that Chiang Kai-shek, since he could not reconquer China himself and hoped America would do it for him, might seek to precipitate such a war by making an attack from Formosa on mainland China. There was also a strong chance that MacArthur might encourage or allow Chiang to do so because that haughty general agreed with Chiang that Europe was of no importance and that the Far East should be the primary, almost the only, area of operations for American foreign policy. He had bitterly opposed the "Germany First" strategy throughout World War II and had begrudged men or supplies sent there on the grounds that these diversions delayed his triumphant return to the Philippines. As the war drew to its close, he had said: "Europe is a dying system. It is worn out and run down and will become an economic and industrial hegemony of Soviet Russia.... The lands touching the Pacific with their billions of inhabitants will determine the course of history for the next ten thousand years."

     These views were shared by the ... isolationist groups of the Republican Party with whom MacArthur had been in close touch for much of his life and to whom he owed some of his success. In American politics these groups had power to do considerable damage because of their influence on the Republican congressional party and the fact that the bipartisan foreign policy under Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, which operated elsewhere in the world, did not exist in regard to the Far East. The danger of any Chiang-MacArthur cooperation to build the Korean action up into a major war was intensified by the fact that this would be opposed by the United Nations and by our allies, neither of whom was considered important by the neo-isolationists or by MacArthur, but whom the Truman Administration refused to alienate unnecessarily because they were essential, as bases, in the containment of Russia.

     In the first two weeks of August, another American division and parts of other units, including a Marine Corps brigade, landed at Pusan. By the middle of the month, that enclave was entrenched, and a counteroffensive to drive the North Korean forces back to the 38th parallel was being prepared. At that point MacArthur made a brilliant suggestion: To avoid the hard push up the peninsula, he proposed landing two American divisions at Inchon, halfway up the west side of Korea, fifty miles south of the 38th parallel and only 25 miles from Seoul, the capital. Everything was adverse to the plan, unless there was complete tactical surprise. Fortunately, this was achieved, a rather unexpected event in the East. Marine units landed at Inchon from the sea on September Isth and found little opposition. On September 22nd they captured Seoul and, six days later, were joined by the main United Nations offensive driving up the peninsula from Pusan. About half the PRK forces were captured in the bag, while the rest fled northward across the 38th parallel into North Korea. That frontier was reached by the UN forces as the month ended.

     The Red Chinese decision to intervene in North Korea was made about the third week in August and began on October 15th, nine days after American troops crossed the 38th parallel into North Korea. Such an intervention was almost inevitable, as Red China could hardly be expected to allow the buffer North Korean state to be destroyed and American troops to occupy the line of the Yalu without taking some steps to protect its own security. China would have welcomed the restoration of the boundary along the 38th parallel, which Russia had so carelessly destroyed by instigating the PRK attack in June. By October they feared that the United States was about to use the Korean area as a base for a general war on China. In such a war, the Chinese expected to become the target of A-bombs, but believed that they could survive if they could wipe out the United Nations Korean base for ground operations. Accordingly, as soon as it became clear that American forces would continue past the 38th parallel to the Yalu, the Chinese intervened, not to restore the 38th parallel frontier, but to clear the United Nations forces from Asia completely.

     The Chinese intervention in Korea, which began on October 15, 1950, was a much greater surprise than Inchon, and gave rise to one of the most bitter controversies in American political history, the so-called Truman MacArthur controversy. The dispute arose fron1 the fact that MacArthur did not accept his government's strategic and political plans, and systematically sought to undermine and redirect them, while in constant communication with the press and with the leaders of the opposition party for this purpose.

     The Truman Administration, after the victory at Inchon, did not intend to stop at the 38th parallel, and hoped to reunite the country under the Seoul government. It is probable that this alone triggered the Chinese intervention, but, to reduce that possibility, Washington set certain restrictions on MacArthur's actions which he soon sought to evade. Washington and Tokyo both knew that the Chinese had about 300,000 troops ready for action in Manchuria north of the Yalu and that neither Russia nor China was attempting to reequip the shattered North Korean forces. To discourage any Chinese intervention, the White House forbade any attack by Chiang on the Chinese coast, any naval blockade of China itself (Korea, of course, was blockaded), or any attack on China or Siberia north of the Yalu, or the use of non-Korean troops in the immediate vicinity of the Yalu as the conquest of North Korea was completed.

     On October 9, 1950, two of MacArthur's planes attacked a Russian air base sixty-two miles inside Russian territory and only eighteen miles from Vladivostok. To make certain that MacArthur understood the reasons for these restrictions, President Truman the next day instructed MacArthur to meet him at Wake Island on October 15th. The two leaders had a lengthy discussion, in which these restrictions were reiterated, but within two months of his return to Japan, MacArthur recommenced his almost daily interviews and letters agitating against these limits.

     At Wake Island, General MacArthur assured President Truman that any Chinese intervention into Korea would be most unlikely, and, in any case, would be on a scale which could he handled. Even as he spoke, the first Chinese units were already crossing the Yalu River from Manchuria into North Korea. These engaged in combat on October 26th, and by October 30th some had been captured. MacArthur continued to deny that any significant Chinese intervention was present or likely, and tried to discourage it by a vigorous attack northward against the North Korean remnants. Because of lack of American troops for an attack across the width of the peninsula, he divided his forces into two separate attacks on either side of the peninsula with no direct liaison between the two where a considerable gap was left. Moreover, MacArthur on October 24th canceled the restrictions on use of non-Korean forces close to the Chinese and Russian borders. His special communique of November 5th which opened his northward offensive spoke of it as one which would for "all practical purposes end the war" and bring the United Nations forces "home by Christmas."

     Until November 26th the MacArthur offensive rolled northward against only moderate resistance, but, just as it reached the Yalu frontier at some points, a gigantic Chinese offensive of 33 divisions counterattacked into the gap between the two UN wings.

     MacArthur's communique of November 28th spoke of the Chinese attack as a "new war," which "has shattered the high hopes we entertained that the intervention of the Chinese was only of a token nature on a volunteer and individual basis...." At once he began an intensive propaganda campaign both to obtain his earlier aims for direct attacks on coastal China and air attacks on interior points and to rewrite the history of the preceding month so that his own actions would seem to be premeditated and skilled ripostes to Chinese plans. In fact, his public statement of November 28th was in sharp contrast with his private message to Washington almost four weeks earlier which estimated the Chinese forces across the Yalu as half a million men in 56 regular army divisions supported by 370,000 district security forces....

     The Chinese attack in MacArthur's mind reduced the American situation in the Far East to a simple choice between two extreme alternatives: either all-out war on China, and possibly Russia, to destroy world Communism once for all or the immediate evacuation of our forces from Korea. The former would have given the Soviet Union a free hand in Europe; the latter would have made it impossible for us to obtain resistance against Communist nibbling from any small states or even from our greater allies elsewhere in the world and would have destroyed our prestige in Asia and Africa. [Neither of these two option are true. General Douglas MacArthur was right. He was one of the three greatest military leaders in American history. The other two great military leaders were General George Washington and General George Patton. These two military genius’ would have ended the war much earlier and they would have eliminated communism on earth if the American people and members of Congress has supported them.] A rapid visit by Generals J. Lawton Collins and Hoyt S. Vandenberg to Korea in January 12-17, 1951, convinced them that the middle alternative, which was still Washington's policy, namely, to maintain the independence of South Korea, was still possible.

     Rather than accept this alternative, MacArthur intensified his press barrage against the Administration, as well as his numerous messages to isolationist Republican politicians in Washington. A directive of December which ordered him to clear his public statements on foreign and military policy with the respective departments was violated, for some months, with impunity. The congressional elections of 1950 had been disastrous to Administration supporters and had been successful for isolationists of both parties, with the Administration's majority in both Houses cut almost to nothing.

     Senator Taft, now unchallenged leader of the isolationist bloc, argued that Governor Dewey's "internationalist" approach had lost the presidential election of 1948 and that his own wholesale opposition to the Administration on an isolationist basis had been victorious in 1950 and would win the Presidency (apparently for himself) in 1952. On this basis a powerful attack was built up against Secretary of State Acheson, against NATO and other American commitments in Europe, and against foreign aid or any efforts to extend America's ground forces. Truman's efforts to send four divisions to Europe and to make General Eisenhower Supreme Commander of NATO were violently opposed, by Taft (who had voted against ratification of NATO) and by Senator Wherry, the Republican floor leader. Every effort was made to reduce the defense of the United States to a simple matter of control of the air and the oceans without need for overseas forces or overseas allies. All this, of course, was simply a refusal to face twentieth-century conditions by men with nineteenth-century ideas, and gave great support to MacArthur's insubordination..

     This insubordination and the general's alliance with the Republican opposition in the Congress was brought to a head on April 5, 1951, when the House Republican Leader, Joseph Martin, read to the Congress a letter from MacArthur which was a broad-gauged propagandist attack on the Truman Administration's policies in the Far East. Truman used this as an excuse to remove MacArthur, although his real reason was the general's sabotage of American and British efforts to negotiate an end of the war along the 38th parallel.

     Five days after the MacArthur-Martin letter had been read in Congress, Truman removed the general from all his commands in the Far East. This was used by the isolationist opposition for a great triumphal homecoming for MacArthur. The Republican leaders spoke publicly of impeaching the President; Senator Nixon wanted congressional censure of the President and restoration of MacArthur to his commands, since his removal was "appeasement of World Communism." McCarthy said the President had made the decision while he was drunk, while Senator William Jenner said from the Senate floor: "This country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. We must cut this whole cancerous conspiracy out of our Government at once. Our only choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction." Sentiments similar to these were frequent, both in public and in private, for the next few years.

     MacArthur's return to the United States after an absence of almost fifteen years was built up into an amazing display of popular hysteria. On landing at San Francisco he was greeted by half a million people in one of the greatest traffic jams in the city's history. At Washington's airport, after midnight on April 19th, the crowds broke out of control. That afternoon, before a joint session of Congress and over a nationwide television broadcast, he made a speech which ranged from old-fashioned eloquence to pure ham. It ended on pathos: "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-by." This was followed by a parade in Washington before 250,000 spectators, but the real climax was reached in New York, the following day, when, for six and a half hours, more than seven million people, spread over a nineteen-mile parade route, cheered themselves hoarse over the general. This was twice the crowd which had seen Eisenhower's return from Europe after the defeat of Germany in 1945.

     The general did not fade away immediately. By May he was back in Washington as star witness for the prosecution in a congressional investigation into the country's Far East policies. Only an infinitesimal fraction of those svl1o had cheered the general so heartily two weeks before paid any attention to the hearings. This was unfortunate. MacArthur seriously maintained that his policies could lead to the total defeat of Communist China, without any increase in ground forces, simply by naval and economic blockade of China, by air attack on Chinese industry, and by "lifting the wraps" off Chiang Kai-shek. On this basis he promised immediate victory with a minimum of risk and casualties. The Administration's policy, he insisted, was not victory but "to go on indecisively fighting with no mission for the troops except to resist and fight . . . a continued and indefinite extension of bloodshed."

     Subsequent testimony from others, including the country's leading military experts and the Joint Chiefs of Staff ... rejected MacArthur's ideas as unrealistic and impossible: the bombing of Manchuria alone would take twice as many bombers as SAC had available; bombing of Chinese industry would not deprive the Chinese of military supplies, as their arsenals were in the Soviet Union; an economic and naval blockade could not seriously injure a country as self-sufficient as China, with an open land frontier, and could not be effective at all unless active military combat on the ground increased consumption rates; efforts to adopt these policies would alienate the United States from its allies and the United Nations and would jeopardize the whole anti-Soviet position in Europe. [Of course, this is not true. The Administration was simply carrying out the secret agreements made at Yalta by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. Of course, these secret agreements were unknown to the American people and most members of Congress.]

     Few Americans followed the arguments to this point, but MacArthur had given the opposition a new war cry: "In war there is no substitute for victory." This slogan, in which neither war nor victory was defined, was used as a weapon by the neo-isolationists, partisan Republicans, and ... Right for more than a decade, although by 1960 it had been shortened to the charge that the Democrats favored a "No-win policy." After a decade of reiteration, many persons seriously believed that it was impossible to stop Communism without all-out nuclear war and that continued survival, instead of mutual destruction, could not possibly be regarded as winning! Peace had become appeasement.

     These neo-isolationist policies ... exerted great pressure on the last two years of the Truman Administration, driving it toward an increasingly unrealistic course. In 1951 Senator Taft was advocating a three-fold program of reduced military preparedness, reduced government expenditures, and a more aggressive foreign policy in the Far East. This combination could be supported only by assuming a number of things which were not true. One of these was that Chiang Kai-shek's regime on Formosa was still a great Power and that Red China, on the other hand, was on the verge of collapse and was, indeed, so weakened that Chiang would be enthusiastically welcomed back if he merely landed on the mainland. This unrealistic version of the present could be sustained only by an equally unrealistic version of the past, that the Red victory in China was the inevitable consequence of opposition to Chiang by the Democratic Administrations of Roosevelt and Truman and that this opposition was caused by the existence within the Administrations of Communists and Communist sympathizers from the top down. Since almost all experts, including scientists, area and subject experts, and military men, did not accept this version, either of the past or the present, all experts were regarded as suspect and insulted or ignored. In fact, educated or thoughtful men were generally rejected. Instead, emphasis was placed on "practical men," defined as those who "had met a payroll or carried a precinct." This admitted to the charmed circle businessmen and politicians of local stature (like Senator Wherry). [Of course subsequent history and publication of secret government documents have substantiated that China was deliberately lost to the communists.]

     On the whole, the neo-isolationist discontent was a revolt of the ignorant [deliberately uninformed] against the informed or educated, of the nineteenth century against the insoluble problems of the twentieth, of the Midwest of Tom Sawyer against the cosmopolitan East of J. P. Morgan and Company, of old Siwash against Harvard, of the Chicago Tribune against the Washington Post or The New York Times, of simple absolutes against complex relativisms, of immediate final solutions against long-range partial alleviations, of frontier activism against European thought, a rejection, out of hand, of all the complexities of life which had arisen since 1915 in favor of a nostalgic return to the simplicities of 1905, and above all a desire to get back to the inexpensive, thoughtless, and irresponsible international security of 1880.

     This ... impulse swept over the United States in a great wave in the years 1948-1955, supported by hundreds of thousands of self-seeking individuals, especially peddlers of publicity and propaganda, and financed no longer by the relatively tied-up funds of ... Wall Street international finance, but by its successors, the freely available winnings of self-financing industrial profits from such new industrial activities as air power, electronics, chemicals, light metals, or natural gas, which, although utterly dependent on government spending or government-protected exploitation of limited natural resources (such as uranium or oil), pretended to themselves and their listeners that their affluence was entirely due to their own cleverness. At the head of this list were the new millionaires, led by the Texas and southwest oil and natural-gas plungers, whose fortunes were based on tricky tax provisions and government-subsidized transportation systems.

     This shift occurred on all levels from changing tastes in newspaper comic strips (from "Mutt and Jeff" or "Bringing Up Father" to "Steve Canyon" or "Little Orphan Annie"), to profound changes in the power nexus of the "American Establishment." lt was evident in the decline of J. P. Morgan itself, from its deeply anonymous status as a partnership (founded in 1861) to its transformation into an incorporated public company in 1940 and its final disappearance by absorption into its chief banking subsidiary, the Guaranty Trust Company, in 1959. Incorporation reflected the need to escape the incidence of the inheritance tax, while its final disappearance was based on the relative decrease in large security flotations in contrast to the great increase in industrial self-financing (best represented by du Pont and its long-time subsidiary General Motors, or by Ford).

     The less obvious implications of this shift were illustrated in a story which passed through Ivy League circles in 1948 in connection with the choice of a new president for Columbia University. This, of all universities, had been the one closest to J. P. Morgan and Company, and its president, Nicholas Murray Butler, was Morgan's chief spokesman from ivied halls. He had been chosen under Morgan influence, but the events of 1930-1948 which so weakened Morgan in the economic system also weakened his influence on the board of trustees of Columbia, until it became evident that Morgan did not have the votes to elect a successor. However, Morgan (that is, Tom Lamont) did have the votes to preserve the status quo and, accordingly, President Butler was kept in his position until he was long past his physical ability to carry on its functions. Finally, he had to retire. Even then Lamont and his allies were able to prevent choice of a successor, and postponed it, making the university treasurer acting-president, in the hope that a favorable change in the board of trustees might make it possible for Morgan, once again, to name a Columbia president.

     F ate decreed otherwise, for Lamont died in 1948 and, shortly afterward, a committee of trustees under Thomas Watson of International Business Machines was empowered to seek a new president. This was not an area in which the genius of IBM was at his most effective. While on a business trip to Washington, he confided his problem to a friend who helpfully suggested, "Have you thought of Eisenhower?" By this he meant Milton Eisenhower, then president of Penn State, later president of Johns Hopkins; Watson, who apparently did not think immediately of this lesser-known member of the Eisenhower family, thanked his friend, and began the steps which soon made Dwight Eisenhower, for two unhappy years, president of Columbia.

     In the face of the public opinion of 1950-1952, the Truman Administration had to make some concessions to the power of neo-isolationism. The loyalty program to ferret out subversives was established in the government; during the MacArthur hearings of May 1951, Dean Acheson promised that, under no circumstances, would Red China be accepted into the community of nations; aid and support to Chiang was increased; and John Foster Dulles was brought into the State Department. None of these changes helped the Truman Administration's popularity, as was clearly shown in the election of 1952, but they had major repercussions on history. One of these was Dulles's success in obtaining a peace treaty for Japan (September 8, 1951).

     Dulles, like the Columbia presidency, was a former Morgan satellite wl1icll had been lost, about the same time and for the same reasons. As a partner in Sullivan and Cromwell, one of the Wall Street legal firms closely associated with Morgan, Dulles operated very much in the Morgan vineyard until the late 1940's. An early advocate of bipartisanship in foreign affairs (a Wall Street specialty), he was first brought into Democratic State Department circles, largely under Morgan sponsorship, in 1945, as adviser to Secretary of State Stettinius at the San Francisco Conference. These associations continued, at various meetings and conferences, mostly at the United Nations and at the four postwar Foreign Ministers' conferences of 1945-1949.

     But in 1948 a change occurred when Dulles's naturally exaggerated personal ambition got out of hand at the same time that he drifted out of the Wall Street constellations with which his whole career had been associated. Apparently he decided he could get further on his own, especially by adapting himself to the swelling tide of neo-isolationism. The marks of this change were his appointment to the United States Senate by Governor Dewey of New York in July 1949 and his resignation from Sullivan and Cromwell at that time. In the election of November 1949, Dulles was defeated for the full senatorial term by ax-Governor Herbert Lehman, also of a Wall Street background. In the campaign Dulles tried to portray Lehman as having Communist inclinations and went so far as to say that the election of Lehman would permit the Communists to "chalk up another victory in their struggle to get into office here." [It is important to remember the old Morgan trick of infiltrating both parties in order to guide policies down a preconceived path..]

     In retirement after this electoral defeat, Dulles continued his movement toward isolationism and unilateralism, a process which was completed by his article "A Policy of Boldness" in Life magazine May 19, 1952, and in his subsequent efforts to keep President Eisenhower from standing up against McCarthyism. This movement was marked by increasing neglect of Europe and opposition to our chief allies there and increasing concern with the Far East and the curative powers of strategic nuclear bombing..

     The Japanese peace treaty was one of the last constructive achievements of Dulles and was reached without support of the Soviet Union, which refused to sign it. Communist China was also excluded. The treaty's chief aim was to end the Pacific war within a larger security structure which bound the previous enemies into a mutual security system. It had three parts: the peace treaty with Japan, which accepted its loss of the already detached areas and islands; the ANZUS Treaty, which allied Australia, New Zealand, and the United States; and a bilateral mutual defense pact between Japan and the United States.

     The neo-isolationist surge in American public opinion so paralyzed the freedom of action of the Truman Administration that it was unable to negotiate any settlement of the war in Korea. Every effort at negotiation gave rise to howls of "appeasement' or "treason." Moreover, the Communists, while willing to negotiate, showed no eagerness to make an agreement, with the result that negotiations crawled along for two years in the isolated military quarters at Panmunjon in Korea. The Kremlin was quite willing to keep America's men, money, and attention tied down in Korea, and could find each day an additional argument to throw as an obstacle into the negotiations. Most of these o1Jstacles were concerned with the disposition of prisoners of war, thousands of whom did not want to return to Communist territory, while only twenty-one captured Americans were unwilling to return to the United States. Simply by insisting that al1 prisoners must be forced to return, the Communists could extend the negotiations indefinitely in time and thus postpone the day when the United States might be free to turn its men and resources to other areas closer to the Soviet Union and thus more dangerous to it, such as Europe.

     Only the death of Stalin in March 1953 broke this stalemate. As soon as the first confusion over this issue had passed temporarily, it became possible to make a Korean truce, an achievement helped by the accession of a new Republican administration in Washington in January. The truce was signed on July 27, 1953, after 37 months of war in which the United States had lost 25,000 dead, 115,000 other casualties, and about $22 billion in costs.

     The Korean War had a totally different impact on the scientists, the Democratic leaders, the army, some of the navy, the new group of strategic intellectuals and non-middle-class educated persons in general than it had on the neo-isolationists, the Republican leaders, the air force, Big Business, and the newly forming ... Right publicists. To the latter groups it was a totally unnecessary and frustrating experience, resulting from the incompetence, or treason, of their opponents, an aberration and throwback to World War I which must never be permitted to reoccur. To the former alignment, however, the limited war in Korea was an inevitable consequence of nuclear stalemate, arising from the very nature of Communist aggression and of the revolutionary discontents of the buffer fringe, and would be a constantly threatening possibility in the future, either in Korea itself or in a dozen other places along the edges of the Communist bloc. Accordingly, this motley alignment, led by its scientists and liberals, began to work to strengthen America's ability to face any new challenge similar to Korea. In a military sense, this inevitably led to efforts to increase the ability of Europe and America to wage limited war, whatever the cost. The Right, as the defenders of material comforts, were unwilling to engage in such an effort, on the basis of cost alone, and soon convinced themselves that it was unnecessary.

     The tactical experience of Korea showed clearly that we had neither the weapons nor the training for limited war and that the air force's claims for the effectiveness of its strategic weapons were as unrealistic as they had been since Douhet. Even the tactical air units had been ineffective, chiefly because they were designed and used in a separate service dominated by "Big Bomber" generals. Some of the most effective work had been done by tools, such as helicopters, which the air force refused to study or order..

     To remedy this weakness, the army's specialist on airborne warfare, General James M. Gavin, was sent with a team of scientists to Korea in the autumn of 1950. At the time General Gavin, longtime officer of the heroic 82nd Airborne Division, was much worried at the air force's efforts to monopolize all the air and all nuclear weapons, at its resentment at possession of aviation by the navy and marines, and at its refusal to provide effective tactical support from the air for ground forces or to buy the equipment needed to provide proper airborne mobility, both of men and supplies, for ground troops. The team of scientists who went to the Far East with General Gavin in September-November 1950, included C. C. Lauritsen, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, who had developed the whole array of navy and air-force rockets in World War II and had been Oppenheimer's assistant at Los Alamos during the last year of the war; Dr. William B. Shockley of Bell Telephone Laboratories, developer of the transistor, who won the Nobel Prize in 1956; and Dr. Edward Bowles of MIT, our chief expert on military applications of radar in World War II.

     From their discussions emerged a series of scientific research projects in 1951-1952 which had a profound effect on American defense capabilities. Project Vista, with President Lee DuBridge of Caltech as chairman and Lauritsen as his deputy, made an over-all study of defense problems for the Department of Defense. In general it sought to reach a well-rounded, diverse defense establishment which could respond effectively to any degree of aggression and do it on land, sea, or air. One of its chief efforts was to get tactical air power for the ground forces and to counteract the massed Soviet Army in Europe by development of tactical nuclear weapons, as well as nuclear warheads to be carried on rockets of 50- to 300-mile range, so that the forcible dispersion of Russian infantry to avoid annihilation would sharply reduce its offensive impact. These weapons could also be used to get "all-weather" tactical bombing support under army control to replace the fair-weather air-force tactical bombing which had proved so ineffective in Korea.

     The Vista Report, which was submitted to the secretaries of the forces in February 195Z, made at least a dozen suggestions of which at least ten were eventually carried out, despite the fact that the report was never accepted. The reason for its rejection was the violent opposition of the air force, which disliked most of it but really exploded when they found, in Chapter 5, that it recommended dividing nuclear materials among the three services. The air force flatly refused to yield up any fissionable materials to the other services. At first it insisted that there was not enough. When months of argument proved there was plenty, the air force simply tripled its requirements. When the air force discovered that Oppenheimer had written the introductory section of Chapter 5, his fate was sealed. Stories about his unreliability were passed about, and eventually it was said that he had somehow rewritten Chapter 5 and inserted it without the committee members knowing what he was doing.

     Project Charles and its sequel Project Lincoln were equally objectionable to the air force, although they had been instigated by it. "Charles" suggested that a permanent research laboratory should be established to study the technical problems of air defense. Accordingly, in September 1951, the Lincoln Laboratory was set up at MIT. This eventually had a staff of 1,600 on an annual budget of $20 million. Its special summer Project Lincoln in 1951 included many of the scientists, such as DuBridge, Lauritsen, Zacharias, and Oppenheimer of Project Vista; it estimated that American defense against a Soviet air attack was woefully weak and could not expect to knock down more than 20 percent of the attacking planes, a rate far too low to be acceptable in nuclear warfare. Setting a 70 percent "kill-rate" as a minimum aspiration, Project 1,incoln recommended establishment of a Distant Early Warning radar detection net across Canada and Greenland (the so-called "DEW Line"), much improved fighter and missile interception in deep air defense (DAD), and the development of an elaborate, integrated, automatic air-defense communications system.

     The cost of this program, billions of dollars, made it less than welcome to the air force. To combat it, air-force supporters spread rumors that a clique of scientists which they called "ZORC" (Zacharias, Oppenheimer, Rabi, and Charles Lauritsen) were out to destroy SAC by devising, or pretending to devise, a near-perfect air defense for the United States. Thus DEW DAD, according to SAC supporters, would be America's Maginot Line behind which the country would lie helplessly bankrupt from its cost of $100 billion. The air force, from its control over the Lincoln Laboratory's budget, was successful in forcing MIT to suppress the DEW DAD report; at least, it was never published. But part of the story, including the horror story about ZORC, was published in the May issue of Fortune magazine, and some of the rest came out in the 1954 hearing on Oppenheimer's security.

     The third significant effort in the scientists' campaign for American survival in the early 1950's was known as Project East River. It was also instigated by the air force, early in 195Z, and studied the problem of civil defense through a scientific team headed by Lloyd Berkner of Associated Universities. It advocated a fantastically expensive program of air-raid warnings, civilian defense shelters, and radar decentralization, but little was ever done about it. Since such a defensive system would undoubtedly save scores of millions of lives in any all-out nuclear war, and would permit the United States to withstand a Soviet "first strike," the failure to follow up these recommendations is clearly attributable to the cost, a sum which many felt we could not afford and which the air force was convinced could be far better spent on building up the offensive power of SAC. Some of it did go for this purpose.

     The air force, which had 48 wings (of which 18 were in SAC) in June 1950, when the Korean War began, had 95 wings in July 1952, as the presidential campaign began, and had 110 wings (of which 42 wings were in SAC) at the end of 1953 in the last Truman budget. During these years, covering the last four budgets of the Truman period, expenditures on national security increased from $13 billion in 1949-1950 to over $50 billion in 1952-1953. A fair amount of this increase went for the changes recommended by the scientists, such as the DEW Line, increase in army ground forces from 10 to 20 divisions, and increased air transportation. As a consequence, American power relative to Soviet power reached its highest point in the postwar period about the end of 1953. It then lost ground until its recovery in the missile race of 1958-1963. The lines of the earlier buildup, as recommended by the various scientific defense projects of 1950 1952, were summed up in a general survey for the incoming Eisenhower Administration in NSC 141. This document did not replace, but supplemented, more intensive efforts in air defense, civil defense, and in military assistance in the Near East and Far East.

Chapter 68: The Eisenhower Team, 1952-1956

     The last two years of the Truman Administration were marked by waves of partisan propaganda which quite concealed the major improvements being made in the American defense posture. The American people were irritated and puzzled by the stalemate in Korea exactly as the Soviets intended them to be. Disruption of the lives of individuals in a war which was not a war, in which nothing seemed to be achieved except unnecessary casualties, and which disrupted the pleasures of the postwar economic boom with military service, shortages, restrictions, and cost-of-living inflation could not help but breed discontent. The Republican-Dixiecrat alliance in the Congress made it impossible to deal with domestic problems in any decisive way or with foreign problems outside the independent authority of the presidential office. And through it all the mobilized wealth of the country, in alliance with most of the press, kept up a constant barrage of "Communists in Washington," "twenty years of treason," or "corruption of the Missouri gang" in the Truman Administration, and created a general picture of incompetence and bungling shot through with subversion. In creating this picture the leaders of the Republican Party totally committed themselves to the ... [policies] of the neo-isolationists and of the ... Right.

     In June 1951, Senator McCarthy delivered in the Senate a speech of 60,000 words attacking General Marshall as a man "steeped in falsehood," who has "recourse to the lie whenever it suits his convenience," one of the architects of America's foreign policy made by "men high in this Government [who] are concerting to deliver us to disaster . . . a conspiracy of infamy so black that when it is finally exposed, its principals shall he forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men...."

     When Truman tried to defend his subordinates, an action which Dulles resolutely refused to do when he became Secretary of State in 1953, Senator Taft attacked the President for this combination of human decency with the established legal privileges of the English-speaking world: he was wrong, according to Taft, to "assume the innocence of all the persons mentioned in the State Department.... Whether Senator McCarthy has legal evidence, whether he has overstated or understated his case, is of lesser importance. The question is whether the communist influence in the State Department still exists." Following the tendencies of the day, Taft reversed his previous support of the Korean War, calling it an "unnecessary war," an "utterly useless war," a war "begun by President Truman without the slightest authority from Congress or the people."

     A semiofficial version of the Republican position appeared in John Foster Dulles's article "A Policy of Boldness," which was published in Life on May 19, 1952. This advocated rejection of "containment" in favor of "liberation," to be achieved on a smaller budget and with reduction of the armed forces leading to a conclusive victory in the near future. All concessions to reality were rejected out of hand: containment itself was damned as fragmentary reactions to Soviet pressure, as negative, endless, and partial, as "treadmill policies which, at best, might perhaps keep us in the same place until we drop exhausted." In place of these, Dulles offered liberation and massive retaliation. These two were not expressly linked together since, apparently, the former (applied chiefly to eastern Europe) would be achieved simply by making clear that the United States wanted it. At least, Dulles believed it would come when American policy made "it publicly known that it wants and expects liberation to occur." The disastrous consequence of this ... [policy] appeared in 1956 when East Germany and Hungary rose against the Russians and were crushed by Soviet tanks without Dulles raising a hand to help. The threat of instant massive retaliation as the sole weapon by which the United States would get Russia to adopt more acceptable policies was equally unrealistic. No one, not even Dulles, dared to use it in the face of the Soviet Union's capability for retaliation. Nuclear blackmail is bad, but nuclear blackmail in which the blackmailer has no intention or opportunity to inflict his penalty is pointless and dangerous—unless, perhaps, such threats help to win elections.

     It helped win an election for Eisenhower in 1952. The candidate had no particular assets except a bland and amiable disposition combined with his reputation as a victorious general. He also had a weakness, one which is frequently found in his profession, the conviction that anyone who has become a millionaire, even by inheritance, is an authoritative person on almost any subject. With Eisenhower as candidate, combined with Richard Nixon, the ruthless enemy of internal subversion, as a running mate, and using a campaign in which the powers of Madison Avenue publicity mobilized all the forces of American discontent behind the neo-isolationist program, victory in November, 1952, was assured. The coup de grโce was given to the Democratic candidate, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, darling of the academic intellectuals, when Eisenhower adopted Emmet Hughes's suggestion that he promise, if elected, to go to Korea to make peace.

     Although not himself a neo-isolationist or a reactionary, Eisenhower had few deep personal convictions, and was eager to be President. When his advisers told him that he must collaborate with the ... Right, he went all the way, even to the extent of condoning Senator McCarthy's attack on General Marshall. This occurred when Eisenhower, under McCarthy's pressure, removed from a Wisconsin speech a favorable reference to Marshall.

     Once elected, the new President reintroduced the Republican conception of the Presidency which had been used in 192 l-1933. This conception saw the President as a kind of titular chairman of the board who neither acted himself directly nor intervened indirectly in the actions of his delegated assistants. Fully aware of his own limitations of both knowledge and energy, Eisenhower allotted the functions of government to his Cabinet members ("eight millionaires and a plumber,'' according to one writer) and expected to be consulted himself only in unsettled disputes or major policy changes.

     Over-all government operations were divided into two parts, with John Foster Dulles, as secretary of state, in charge of foreign affairs, and ex-Governor Sherman Adams of New Hampshire (in place of Taft, who died in 1953) as assistant President in charge of domestic matters. Apart from these, the real tone of the Administration was provided by three businessmen: George Humphrey, a Taft Republican and president of the great holding company of M. A. Hanna and Company, was secretary of the treasury and the most influential member of the Cabinet; Charles Wilson, president of General Motors, was secretary of defense; and Joseph M. Dodge, a Detroit banker with extensive government experience, was director of the budget, the only man in the government who could, with impunity, do or undo Acts of Congress. The chief aim of the Administration, and almost the sole aim of these three, was to reduce government spending, and subsequently business taxes, by the greatest amount that would not jeopardize reelection in 1956. Dulles and Adams had to work within the financial framework thus provided.

     Within this framework foreign policy was boxed, even more narrowly, between the realities of the country's world position and the constant hounding of the neo-isolationist groups in Congress who had been roused to a pitch of unholy expectation by the encouragement they had received from Eisenhower and Nixon during the electoral campaign of 1952. In that campaign they had discovered that Eisenhower could be pushed. They now concluded that their pushing from without, combined with the pulling of Dulles and Nixon from within, could overthrow the foreign-policy lines established by the Truman Administration in the preceding six years and create a new policy more in accord with their ... ideas of the nature of the world. Opposed to this change were the old defenders of the Atlantic System, the remnants of former Wall Street influence, the Ivy League colleges, the foundations, the newspaper spokesmen of this point of view (The New York Times and Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, and Washington Post) led by Walter Lippmann, and the unrepentant scientists and “eggheads” straggling behind Adlai Stevenson.

     Eisenhower as President can be summed up in one word: amiability. He not only liked people; he was also eager to be liked, and was, indeed, likable. If he gave the impression that he had no firmly held convictions, that was because of two other qualities: he was relaxed, fully willing to live and let live, in an easy-going tolerance of anything which did not disturb his own peace of mind. He was quick-tempered but not a fighter. He had convictions, none of them very firm, but he was not prepared to sacrifice his own rest and relaxation for them, except for brief occasions. His span of attention was neither long nor intense. As a consequence, he was a wonderful companion, but not a leader.

     In all this, the President was the antithesis of his secretary of state. John Foster Dulles was a tireless and energetic fighter, full of convictions, most of which he saw in black-and-white terms. He rarely rested and had little time for any relaxation because the world was full of evil forces with which he must wage constant battle. Tolerance and the right to be neutral were to him largely words which had little real meaning in his tightly wound neurological system. To Dulles it was a real effort not to equate opposition with evil. As he hurried throughout the world, traveling 226,645 miles in his first three years in office, in pursuit of Communism, he was like John Wesley, two centuries earlier, racing through England in pursuit of sin, both men fully convinced that they were doing the work of God. Eisenhower, who saw the world as a place almost without evil, once told an adviser, "You and I can argue issues all day and it won't affect our friendship, but the minute I question your motives you will never forgive me." This lesson would have been lost on the secretary of state, for Dulles, almost alone in a world full of sin, was always seeking the reason behind the event, the motive behind the action, and was obligated by his own alignment with righteousness to denounce the reason and the motive when he had discovered them.

     It must be evident from this that Eisenhower and Dulles, in spite of their close cooperation and almost unruffled personal relations, were very dissimilar, both in personality and in outlook. Dulles was considerably to the right of Eisenhower, and the Republican congressional party was far to the right of Dulles. As a result, the two were under constant pressure from the party's isolationist leaders in Congress and from the party's big financial supporters to go further toward neo-isolationism and the Right than either Dulles or Eisenhower considered safe. To avoid this, the Administration had to do two basically contradictory things: to make verbal concessions to the Right and to find its congressional legislative support among the Democrats. In 1953 alone, according to the Congressional Quarterly Almanac, the "Democrats saved the President . . . fifty-eight times" by their votes in Congress.

     Some examples of this skirmishing, in what was locally known as the "Battle of the Potomac," form a necessary background to the development of international affairs in Eisenhower's eight years.

     The Republican platform of July 1952 had promised to "repudiate all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslavements." In his first speech as secretary, Dulles spoke of the liberation of satellite peoples, and told them, "You can count upon us." The Republicans in Congress from then on kept demanding support of these two promises, beginning with a resolution to repudiate Yalta and Potsdam. The Administration ... oppose[d] this congressional desire to take campaign talk seriously, since any repudiation of past agreements could be done by Russia more easily than by us.... Eventually the resolution was dropped.

     A somewhat similar struggle arose over the Bricker and the substitute Dirksen Amendments to the Constitution. These would have forbidden the Federal government to make any foreign treaties which could not be carried out by powers granted to the Federal government elsewhere in the Constitution. This would have greatly hampered the State Department in making agreements, such as those with Canada to protect migrating game birds, since power to do so was not granted elsewhere in the Constitution. The Amendment was finally defeated by the Administration after a bitter struggle with Republicans in the Congress, and only by the support of Democrats.

     The Administration condoned or suffered through all kinds of ... attacks, many of them supported by members of the Cabinet. Some government employees were harassed for years, even suspended without pay for months or years, before final clearance of unfounded charges. Wolf Ladejinsky, the country's greatest authority on East Asian agriculture and a known anti-Communist writer, had been responsible for much of MacArthur's success in occupied Japan as the author of a land-reform program which increased agricultural production and largely eliminated agrarian discontent, so that Communism in Japan, quite opposite to China, ceased to be a rural phenomenon and was, indeed, largely restricted to student groups in cities. Cleared by the State Department to return to Japan, he was suddenly declared a security risk and suspended by Secretary of Agriculture Benson.

     Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., confided to a businessmen's luncheon in Chicago that President Truman, knowing that Harry Dexter White was a Russian spy, had promoted him from assistant secretary of the treasury to executive director of the United States Mission to the International Monetary Fund in 1946. Chairman Harold Velde of the House Committee on Un-American Activities at once issued a subpoena to the ex-President to testify before the committee. The summons was ignored. In the resulting controversy Senator McCarthy attacked the Administration over a nationwide broadcast for its failure to force all nations, beginning witl1 Britain, to cease their trade with Red China by threatening to cut off our economic aid. We should say, "If you continue to ship to Red China . . . you will not get one cent of American money."

     The fact that our allies provided us ... with military bases on their own soil from which our strategic pressure on the Soviet Union was maintained meant nothing to the ... Right.... [The East-West conflict is a myth. That should be obvious to the reader. However, a quick purview of the works of professor Antony Sutton will confirm the reality of the myth.]

     Such harassments of the new Administration were almost constant, especially from the Right, which was confident it had won the election of 1952 and should be obeyed as a consequence. On April 30th, in Cabinet, Taft blasted the Administration for its inability to cut more than $5 billion or $6 billion out of the defense budget. The foreign aid "mutual-security" budget of $7.6 billion left by Truman was cut by Chairman John Tabor of the House Appropriations Committee to $4.4 billion in spite of Eisenhower's request for $5.5 billion. Chairman C. W. Reed of the House Ways and Means Committee, despite Eisenhower's appeal, knocked out the new Truman taxes of 1951 on July I, 1953, six months before they would have ended anyway.

     Under Right-wing attacks such as these, Eisenhower was largely disillusioned with his job by the summer of 1953 and spent much time over the next two years considering how he might get rid of the dominant Republican Right and form a new, middle-of-the-road Eisenhower Party. The impracticality of this became apparent to him long before the election of 1956.

     These attacks from the Right were much less disturbing to Dulles than they were to the President. The Secretary of State was clear in his own mind on what his aims in foreign policy should be. These aims were largely acceptable to the neo-isolationists and congressional Republicans. Basic to these ideas was his conception of "massive retaliation."

     This was publicly announced in his speech of January 12, 1954, before the Council of Foreign Relations, but had been forecast in his article in Life almost two years earlier. "Massive retaliation" here meant nuclear reprisal by strategic bombing. It w-as conceived as an alternative to limited war and was intended to be a deterrent to Soviet instigation of such local limited wars. The points at which it would be applied or the degree of aggression necessary to trigger it were both left ambiguous, in the hope that the threat would deter aggression in all areas and on all levels. Dulles was really rejecting the whole idea of limited war, and saw local defense only as a trigger mechanism for tripping massive retaliation. In this view he was at one with most of the Eisenhower Administration. Secretary Wilson, for example, said, "'We can no longer afford to fight limited war." Of course, he was thinking in monetary terms. General Gavin, who heard this statement, replied, "If we cannot afford to fight limited wars, then we cannot afford co survive, for that is the only kind of war we can afford to fight." He was thinking of the cost in terms of human lives

     As a corollary to the idea of massive retaliation as deterrence, Dulles had the additional idea of local defense, and especially local alliances, as triggers. Combined with this was his refusal to accept anything but a two-bloc world, by his resolute refusal to recognize any right to anyone to be neutral. On June 9, 1956, in a speech at Iowa State College, he said that America had made bilateral treaties with forty-two countries and that these agreements "abolish, as between the parties, the principle of neutrality, which pretends that a nation can best gain safety for itself by being indifferent to the fate of others. This has increasingly become an obsolete conception, and, except under very exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception." Thus the Secretary of State indicated his readiness to abandon the nonaligned countries to the Soviet bloc, and gave Stalin's successors in the Kremlin a tactical opportunity they were already exploiting. At the same time, as we shall see in a moment, Dulles's treatment of our chief allies was generally so autocratic and even contemptuous that they were soon alienated, especially France, which did not have the "special relationship" with us which kept Great Britain at our side through any slights.

     The reason for these actions by Dulles was that he was really an isolationist, convinced that American defense rested wholly on American strength, and, accordingly, he did not regard his treaty partners as allies at al1, but rather as a part of an elaborate network of triggers surrounding the Soviet Union. The chief portions of this network were three regional pacts: NATO, the Baghdad Pact (later called CENTRO, or Central Treaty Organization), and SEATO (or Southeast Asian Treaty Organization). NATO included the United States, Canada, and thirteen other states from Iceland to Turkey (by May 1955).

     The Baghdad Pact of 1955 was largely a Dulles creation but did not include the United States. Its members were Britain, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. It was renamed Central Treaty Organization in 1959 when Iraq withdrew and the United States signed bilateral alliances with all its members.

     The third pact, SEATO, signed in 1954, had eight members (United States, Britain, France, New Zealand, Australia, Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan). With Turkey acting as a link between NATO and CENTRO, and Pakistan in a similar role between CENTRO and SEATO, the three pacts were intended to enclose the Soviet bloc in an unbroken perimeter of paper barriers which would deter a Communist movement outward anywhere, by serving as a trigger for American retaliation. Otherwise, CENTRO and SEATO had little military or political merit, and created more problems than they solved.

     Dulles was not primarily concerned about the military strength of these pacts or about the military contribution any of these countries could make to a war on the Soviet Union. Above all, he was not concerned with any contribution of a military character the United States could make to the defense of these pacts or areas in any non-nuclear war. Moreover, as triggers, Dulles was not much concerned with the character of the regimes involved or with their military strength. Some mountainous country or tropical jungle of Asia was, for his purposes, about as significant as England or France.

     Since England and France were already alienated by the whole idea of massive retaliation, which could so easily, by some independent American act, deluge them with Soviet nuclear bombs, they were even further alienated by Dulles's almost total lack of concern for the fact that they were more cultured and more civilized than other members of Dulles's pacts, that they shared our common Western traditions (of which, indeed, they were the creators), and could contribute more to their own defense with conventional weapons than could some Moslem or pagan areas of Asia. It is no wonder that Dulles, with his unilateralism, his lack of concern for cultural kinship, his readiness to sacrifice all European states in response to a trigger mechanism in some remote and backward jungle, his almost total unconcern with the possible contribution of limited and conventional warfare to save any areas from Communism, it is no wonder, indeed, that Dulles alienated the United States from its natural associates in Western Europe to a degree hitherto unknown in the twentieth century.

     At the same time, Dulles alienated himself domestically from all his older associations within American life, and from the forces of rationalization and science which were increasingly a force there. Like Eisenhower, Dulles had an unusual conception of his office; indeed, it was much more unusual than was Eisenhower's. Dulles refused to take any responsibility for the internal functioning of the State Department. His concern was, he thought, only with the high policy of international politics on a world basis as the eyes, ears, and probably the mind of the President. Accordingly, instead of the usual under secretary of state, Dulles appointed two: General Walter Bedell Smith to the regular post, and Donald B. Lourie, president of Quaker Oats Company, as a second one in charge of all departmental administration. Under Lourie he named a McCarthyite, R. W. Scott McLeod, as State Department security officer. In this way the full disruptive force of McCarthyism was brought into the inner fortress, that is, into the personnel security files of the department against which McCarthy and his associates had directed their most blasting assaults. Nor was that all. In his first week in office Dulles announced his policies to the department, and informed its employees that he expected "competence, discipline, and positive loyalty." There is nothing objectionable in these three qualities except that Senator McCarthy had temporarily made "positive loyalty" his own criterion of condemnation.

     This beginning became worse. Dulles made no effort to protect his subordinates from the attacks made upon the department or on them individually. His justification for this attitude soon destroyed the morale of much of the department and especially of the Foreign Service. Dulles felt that once an employee became the target of a public attack as unreliable, the question of his guilt or innocence became definitely secondary to the question of whether his value to the department had not been destroyed simply by the fact that he had become a subject of controversy. If so, he should be released from service, even if innocent. This point of view, which was almost an invitation to the McCarthyites to increase their attacks, was never, however, applied to Dulles himself when he became, in a short time, a figure of controversy. The real damage to the Department arose from the elimination of some of its most knowledgeable members. The ... Right, having eliminated almost everyone who knew anything about the Far East, especially those who knew the Chinese language, now, under Dulles, shifted their target to those who knew anything about Russia, especially the language. In this way, George Kennan was eliminated, and Charles Bohlen narrowly escaped. Paul Nitze resigned in disgust. Some of those eliminated found refuge in Ivy League academic posts.

     The chief victim of these purges was Robert Oppenheimer. The attack on the "father of the A-bomb" began in the summer of 1953, as soon as Lewis Strauss succeeded Gordon Dean as chairman of the AEC. On July 7th, at the request of Strauss, the AEC ordered that classified documents in Oppenheimer's possession in Princeton be taken from him. On November 7, 1953, W. L. Borden, who had earlier left the Joint Congressional Committee for private employment with Westinghouse Electric, wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI: "The purpose of this letter is to state my own exhaustively considered opinion, based upon years of study of the available classified evidence, that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union." This charge was supported by a biased rehash of all the derogatory stories about Oppenheimer which had been known when Oppenheimer was appointed to Los Alamos by General Groves in 1943. Much of the letter was made up of wild charges which no responsible person has ever been willing to defend: "He has been instrumental in securing recruits for the Communist Party," and "He was in frequent contact with Soviet espionage agents." According to Borden, "The central problem is not whether J. Robert Oppenheimer was ever a Communist; for the existing evidence makes abundantly clear that he was.... The central problem is assessing the degree of likelihood that he in fact did what a communist in his circumstances, at Berkeley, would logically have done during the crucial 1939-1942 period—that is, whether he became an actual espionage and policy instrument of the Soviets."

     On the basis of this letter and at the direct order of President Eisenhower, Chairman Strauss suspended Oppenheimer's security clearance and thus his access to classified information without which scientific work for defense is impossible. The news was given to Oppenheimer by Strauss on December 21, 1953, four days after he received an honorary degree from Oxford University. As provided hy law, Oppenheimer appealed the AEC decision to an ad hoc investigation committee of three men, one of whom was a scientist. The hearings, from April 12 to May 6, 1954, allowed Oppenheimer to have counsel who were permitted to cross-examine witnesses, but the conduct of the hearings was most unsatisfactory.

     The older assumption, which had been practiced regularly in American history and continued, fairly generally, in the Truman Administration, was that any person had a right to be employed hy the government unless something adverse could be proved against him. The chief adverse something, in scientific work, would be disloyalty. In the course of the years 1951-1953, these concepts were changing and were formally modified by President Eisenhower's Security Order 10450 of April, 1 953. The first change was that public employment no longer was a right but became a privilege; the second was that disloyalty was no longer the chief criterion, but security was; and the third change was that the government no longer had to prove anything derogatory, hut merely needed to have a doubt that a person's employment was consistent with the security of the country.

     Taken together, these three modifications placed the burden of proof on the employee rather than on the accuser and made the area of proof so wide that it could hardly be met. The government has to prove nothing; it merely must have a doubt, and that doubt need have nothing to do with loyalty or with the employee’s work, but may simply be about his discretion, his drinking habits, his truthfulness, or any other personal characteristics of an adverse kind whether these operate in the area of his work or not. The task of an employee seeking to dispel the doubt that he may drink one too many cocktails before dinner, or that he may gossip, or even talk in his sleep is formidable. For example, one of the AEC commissioners who sat in judgment on Oppenheimer fell asleep in a railroad car on June Il, 1954, with the transcript of the case on his lap, and awoke later to find it gone. This was why the transcript was immediately printed and released on June 16th, in spite of the assurances to its forty witnesses throughout its pages that it would be kept secret. A case might be made that an AEC commissioner who lost classified materials by falling asleep while reading them in public was a "security risk." He would have some difficulty removing that doubt.

     The shifting of the burden of proof from the board to the accused and the use of an investigatory tribunal rather than the more familiar technique (to English-speaking peoples) of an adversary trial made the hearings even less satisfactory. For the accused, faced with the need to establish the truth in order to dispel any doubts of the members of the tribunal, could hardly establish the truth when he had access only to those documents which had been selected by the counsel for the AEC. In this case the AEC counsel, a one-time United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, conducted the hearings as if he were the prosecutor in an adversary trial. He was allowed to use secret data, from which evidence was pulled at short or no notice, while Oppenheimer's counsel was excluded from access to classified documents for security reasons.

     After hearing forty witnesses through 3,000 pages of typed testimony and perusing an equal quantity of file documents, the board voted 2 to 1 (the scientist member dissenting) to recommend continued suspension of Oppenheimer's clearance. They concluded that Oppenheimer was loyal and that he was discreet. It would seem, on the face of it, that a person who filled these two qualifications must be secure, but two members of the board had doubts.

     These hearings have endless interest to the historian of recent American history because they provide one of the few glimpses we have behind the scenes into the decision-making processes of our recent government. As far as Oppenheimer is concerned, they show that the animosity against him largely originated with the air force and its close or recent associates. The attack on Oppenheimer came chiefly from the former air-force pilot Borden, from a long-term air-force employee, David T. Griggs, and from Edward Teller and his close associates L. W. Alvarez and W. M. Latimer. There was obvious personal resentment against Oppenheimer by this group, and cross-examination showed that the majority of them had no personal knowledge of Oppenheimer's work in the matter under discussion. This appeared most clearly when they tried to maintain that Oppenheimer opposed or obstructed the H-bomb effort after Truman's directive to make it had been issued or that he tried to persuade other scientists not to work on the project. The evidence from persons in a position to have personal knowledge of this matter showed that this charge was not true, and the board rejected it. It is clear from the testimony that the real basis for these men's resentment against Oppenheimer was air-force resentment of Project Vista and its sequels, especially at Oppenheimer's efforts to provide the American defense forces with a full arsenal of diverse weapons, including tactical nuclear weapons, so that the country would not be forced to rely solely or mainly on strategic nuclear bombing to play its role in world politics.

     This point was put very well by Professor Walter G. Whitman of MIT, who was a member of GAC from 1950—and had been chairman of the Research and Development Board of the Department of Defense in 1951-1953. He said: "Dr. Oppenheimer was trying to point out the wide variety of military uses of the bomb, the small bomb as well as the large bomb. He was doing it in a climate where many folks felt that only strategic bombing was a field for the atomic weapon.... I should say he, more than any other man, served to educate the military to the potentialities of the atomic weapon for other than strategic bombing purposes, its use possibly in tactical situations or in bombing 500 miles back. He was constantly emphasizing that the bomb would be more available and that one of the problems was going to be its deliverability, meaning that the smaller you could make your bomb in size perhaps you would not have to have a great big strategic bomber to carry it, you could carry it in a medium bomber or you could carry it even in a fighter plane. In my judgment, his advice and his arguments for a gamut of atomic weapons, extending even over to the use of the atomic weapon in air defense of the United States, has been more productive than any other one individual. You see, he had the opportunity to not only advise in the Atomic Energy Commission, but advise in the military services of the Department of Defense. The idea of a range of weapons suitable for a multiplicity of military purposes was a key to the campaign which he felt should be pressed and with which I agreed.... The Strategic Air Command had thought of the atomic weapon as solely restricted to its own use. I think that there was some definite resentment at the implication that this was not just the Strategic Air Command's weapon."

     On the basis of the recommendation of the Hearing Board, the AEC voted 4 to 1 (with the scientist Henry D. Smyth dissenting) not to restore Oppenheimer's clearance. On June 29, 1955, the great scientist's career in government was ended. But his work had been a success. In the interval before the achievement of the thermonuclear bomb in 1955, atomic weapons had been made so plentiful and diverse that they were available for tactical weapons to defend Europe and in sizes small enough to serve as warheads on American missiles of limited boosting power.

     The motivations of the Eisenhower Administration were emotional and complex, and represent a sharp reaction against the forces of rationalization and science which we have discussed. They seem to have been based on three narrowing circles of outlook. Broadest of all was a violent neurotic rebellion of harassed middle-class persons against a longtime challenge to middle-class values arising from depression, war, insecurity, science, foreigners, and minority groups of all kinds. This broad problem will be discussed elsewhere. A second, and narrower, circle of outlook was the basic Republican opposition to all kinds of collective action, including collective security, social welfare, and national security. The third was the obsession of business wealth in the country with the wickedness of unbalanced budgets and high taxes.

     The Republican opposition to collective action was, of course, of long standing. It is not generally recognized that it appears frequently as an opposition to national security expenditures, especially to defense expenditures for men rather than for equipment, but often for both. Such opposition by Republicans was generally true in the whole period following 1945, and is clearly shown in their votes in Congress. These votes, however, can be understood only in terms of the whole situation.

     This situation involves at least three levels: public opinion, Congress, and the Administration and, in each of these, the two parties. In studying these we have available the information of public-opinion polls, voting records, and formal statements. From these records it is clear that public opinion always supported large defense forces and did not object to higher taxes or government spending to sustain them. Moreover, this support was stronger from persons of lower educational and income levels, although generally found on all levels. In sharp contrast to this, public opinion gave much less support to foreign aid, and such support was less on low-er educational or income levels and was reflected in far greater opposition to taxation or government spending for economic foreign aid than for defense forces. These statements are based on the file of public-opinion polls at the Public Opinion Research Center at Williams College, as studied by Professor Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University. This study shows that public-opinion support for stronger armed forces for the whole period 1945-1960 was usually of the order of two to one, and reflected changes in international tensions to a surprisingly limited degree.

     In Congress, over the same fifteen years, there was quite a different situation. There we find, just as existed in the decade before Pearl Harbor, strong Democratic support for armed strength and a strong world role for the United States, and fairly consistent Republican opposition both to defense expenditures and to American involvement in world affairs. On the contrary, the congressional Republican Party members, in troth periods, were more concerned with what they called "fiscal responsibility" (meaning balanced budgets, reduced government spending, and reduced taxes) than it was with defense or world affairs. Thus the Democratic Party in Congress was much closer in behavior to public opinion than the Republican congressional party was.

     Professor Huntington has illuminated this difference by an analysis of congressional voting records over the period 1945-1960. He has examined votes on 79 controversial defense issues in Congress over the 15-year period and found that a majority of Democrats voted pro-defense on 74 of the 79 issues, while a majority of Republicans voted pro-defense on only 39 of the 79 issues. On all these issues, Democratic senators voted 78.8 percent pro-defense and Republican senators voted only 43 percent pro-defense, while Democratic representatives voted 78.4 percent pro-defense and Republican representatives voted 53.8 percent pro-defense. Moreover, the Republican votes in both Houses were less pro-defense in the Eisenhower period than in the Truman period, the Senate Republican pro-defense votes falling from 47.1 to 33 percent with the change in Administration, and the House Republican pro-defense votes falling from 54.8 to 50.4 percent. Moreover, analysis of these votes, on a sectional basis, shows that the Republican pro-defense votes were concentrated in the Northeast and on the Pacific Coast, while the Democratic pro-defense votes were spaced relatively evenly around the country.

     When we shift from the Congress to the Administration, we see that the Democratic Administration, while still pro-defense, was less so than Democratic congressmen, but that the Republican Administration, while not pro-defense, was somewhat more favorable to defense than Republican congressmen.

     This situation can be explained in terms of three forces acting upon politicians: (1) the need for votes, (2) the need for campaign contributions, and (3) awareness of world conditions. On the Democratic side, public opinion, which means votes, works from the people to congressmen, while awareness of world conditions works from outside upon the Administration and through it to Congress. The lobbying of special-interest groups and the need for campaign contributions is less significant than the other two forces, but do make the Administration somewhat less pro-defense (because more pro-balanced budget) than Congress..

     On the Republican side the influence of special interests is much greater simply because the Republican Party is the party of middle-class and business interests. In fact, the influence of lobbying by special interests is so great that it makes both the Republican Congress and the Republican Administration relatively immune to the need for defense, with the immunity less general in the Administration than in the Congress because the former is compelled, by its position, to pay some attention to world conditions. The Republican congressmen, on the other hand, are relatively immune both to public opinion and the pressure of world conditions, being shielded from the former by the influence of special-interest lobbyists and shielded from the latter by the Administration.

     The history of the Eisenhower Administration in defense and strategic matters is largely the story of how its sincere efforts to respond to Big Business demands for balanced budgets and tax reductions were frustrated by the constant challenge of world conditions demanding an intensified defense effort. A significant element in this story is the efforts of the Administration to conceal these frustrations by the manipulation of public opinion by propaganda, especially by propaganda which tried to make it appear much more aggressive against Communism than it actually was. It really reversed Theodore Roosevelt's dictum into "Speak roughly and carry a small stick." The rough speaking was done by Dulles; the small stick was the Republican defense effort; when the smallness of the stick made it necessary to suspend Dulles's bluster briefly, Eisenhower charmed the country, if not the world, with a few words of sweet reasonableness.

     The characteristics of the Eisenhower Administration were set immediately after the election. His hurried visit to Korea was little more than a propaganda stunt, required by his campaign promise, and contributed little if anything to the eventual truce in Korea. En route home he had a conference with Dulles, Charles Wilson, General Bradley of JCS, and Admiral Arthur W. Radford (Commander in Chief, Pacific) on the cruiser Helena at Wake Island. There, a month before inauguration, he set the pattern of his Administration—fiscal conservatism: "A prodigal outlay of borrowed money on military equipment could in the end, by generating inflation, disastrously weaken the economy and thus defeat the purpose it was meant to serve." Subsequently this point of view was often supported by a favorite quotation of the ... Right—a quotation attributed to Lenin, although he never said it, that capitalist states could be destroyed by making them spend themselves bankrupt. (The ... Right had a great love for ambiguous Lenin quotations; another favorite was, "For world communism the road to Paris lies through Peking and Calcutta.")

     Another example of the tone of the Eisenhower Administration was given on January 20,1953, 1953. In his inaugural speech the new President announced that he was unleashing Chiang Kai-shek against Red China. Although "unleashing" was not the word used, this was the chief implication of the statement. All the implications were wrong: (a) that the Seventh Fleet was patrolling the Formosa Straits to protect Red China against Chiang, (b) that Chiang had the strength seriously to threaten China, and (c) that the previous situation reflected the "soft" sympathies of Truman's State Department. The validity of the latter's policy in the area was fully supported over the next eight years, as Chinese threats to Formosa again and again required American support to protect Chiang and, eventually in 1955, fear that Chiang might try to recover China by precipitating a general war between China and the United States led the Eisenhower Administration to "re-leash" him, quietly, once again.

     This is very much the whole story of Dulles's foreign policy: eventual quiet adoption of the Truman line under cover of loud verbal denunciations of it. The chief real change appeared in a slight reduction in America's defense capabilities, especially in coping with local war by means of conventional weapons, at a time when the Soviet Union's capabilities for waging all types of wars were increasing.

     When Eisenhower came to office he found the budget already set by Truman for Fiscal Year 1954 (FY 1954) at $78.6 billion, of which $46.3 billion was military. The latter item was a slight cut from military FY 1553 of over $50 billion. On March 4, 1953, the NSC cut Eisenhower's new FY 1954 budget by $5.1 billion. When the Joint Chiefs (JCS) protested that any cuts would seriously endanger national security, they were ignored. The chief reduction was made in the air force, from $16.8 to $11.7 billion—this at the very time when Dulles was establishing "massive retaliation." The Truman air-force target of 143 wings by 1956 was reduced to 120 wings. An Eisenhower supporter, Admiral Arthur Radford, was made chairman of the reorganized JCS, and the defense changes were given the ambiguous name of the "New Look." The NSC was ordered to prepare a new strategic survey, which ultimately emerged as NSC 162. The pressure they were under may be gathered from the fact that Humphrey and Dodge wanted the FY 1954 defense expenditures cut to $36 billion.

     In the meantime, the new JCS, meeting on the secretary of the navy's yacht Sequoia, in August, came up with its own suggestions: increased reliance on SAC in retaliatory power, withdrawal of some American forces from overseas positions, increased reliance upon local forces for local defense, with America's contribution restricted to sea and air power; a strengthened reserve pool at home, and improved continental air defense. These views were incorporated in NSC 162 in October 1953, and accepted by the President on October 30th. The chief modification was abandonment of the hope that any significant future war would be fought without nuclear weapons. Shortly afterward, military expenditures were set on a "long-haul" basis at not over $34 billion for FY 1957 and subsequent years. This compares with an average of $43 billion a year over the last four Truman budgets. As a matter of fact, defense spending did decrease fairly steadily, averaging $37.4 billion over the six years 1955-1960. One consequence of this was that there was no general tax increase passed by Congress in the 1950's after January 1951, but this expenditure represented a considerable reduction in real defense expenditures, since the six-year period, covering the Soviet missile challenge, was also a period of rising prices in which money bought less.

     The "New Look," like "massive retaliation," was based on a series of erroneous conceptions of which two were paramount: (1) that nuclear weapons were cheaper than conventional weapons and would require less manpower and ( 2 ) that strategic weapons could deter all kinds of Communist aggression.

     Even on the strategic level nuclear weapons were not cheaper than conventional weapons nor did they use less manpower, and, once they were introduced into tactical levels of combat as well, costs rose astronomically. Really, costs were irrelevant, as long as they were essential, as they indeed were and would continue to be until there was either (1) relaxation between the United States and Russia or (2) one or more substantial new Powers grew up on the land mass of Eurasia.

     The costs of modern weapons arose from their intrinsic costs to some extent but also from their rapid rate of obsolescence and the gigantic costs of development. Each of the strategic B-52 bombers cost $8 million, almost ten times the cost of the B-29's of 1945. Bases and costs of skilled manpower rose proportionately, especially w hen the rise of Soviet retaliatory power made necessary drastic dispersal of SAC bases and a great increase in the constant airborne alert. Moreover, whatever the cost, deliveries of B-52's were slow, only 41 by New Year's 1956, with a production rate of about one a week (with about 25 percent rejected by the air force) after that. This compared with Soviet production of their equivalent planes, the "Bison" and the "Bear" (TU-95) of over five a week in 1956. The display of at least ten "Bisons" in the Red Square "fly-over" on May Day 1955 was a considerable shock to the "New Look," but a year later Eisenhower was ready to take it in stride: "It is vital that we get what we believe we need; that does not necessarily mean more than somebody else." Five days later, he introduced a new concept: "Enough is certainly aplenty."

     The gradual obsolescence of the manned bomber and the use of nuclear missiles, especially ICBM's, raised the cost of nuclear retaliation. The Minute Man ICBM, of which we needed hundreds, cost over a million dollars each, with tens of millions more for manning and maintenance, while the nuclear submarine with its 16 Polaris missiles ran over $120 million each. Moreover, all these strategic weapons were obsolescent almost as soon as they were operational.

     The costs of conventional forces, armed as they must be with nuclear tactical weapons, also soar. The "New Look's" assumption that introduction of the latter types would reduce the need for manpower was quite mistaken. The necessary manpower increases, and, because of a higher degree of training and skill, is more expensive. The introduction of nuclear tactical weapons, which the Russians obtained almost as soon as we did, required that ground forces be widely dispersed and provided with great mobility in small groups (both by air and ground vehicles). This required more men and more money.

     The "New Look" curtailment of money was also reflected in men. All services except the air force were cut, so that the total figure for military manpower, at 3.7 million in December 1952, was almost z.5 million six years later. The army was cut by one-third, from 1,481,000 representing 20 divisions to below a million in 14 divisions. In this way, army expenditures were cut almost in half, from $16,242 million in FY 1953 to $8,702 million in FY 1956. Protests against this by men like Army Chief of Staff General Matthew Ridgway were answered with the bland assertion that these smaller forces had greater fighting power, "a bigger bang for a buck." In 1955, however, when Eisenhower returned from the first, relatively successful, "Summit Conference" with Khrushchev in Geneva, filled with determination to achieve his $33 billion defense-expenditure level in FY 1956 instead of FY 1957 as originally planned, even Dulles and Wilson objected. One reason for the objection was that price inflation of several percent a year had already reduced the amount of defensive strength being obtained without getting within several billions of the budgeting goal.

     This dispute over the primacy of fiscal or defense considerations reached a turning point in 1955-1956 in a series of controversies and minor shifts of position by the Administration. These shifts of position were concessions to aroused public opinion and were not a consequence of any real change of ideas within the Administration, as can be seen from the fact that other budget-cutting drives occurred in 1957 and, to a lesser extent, in 1959, both in the face of growing evidence of Soviet capabilities, growing evidence of Soviet unfriendly intentions, increasingly irritated relationships with our European allies, a steady attrition of support from the Administration to the opposition, and an increasingly restive American public opinion..

     The Administration's new strategy found relatively little support in military circles except in the air force and in Admiral Radford, who had been made chairman of JCS, in succession to General Bradley, in August 1953, chiefly because he was an Asia First supporter. General Ridgway opposed the Administration's military policies, from his position as army chief of staff, hy his testimony before congressional committees. After his retirement in June 1955, he declared in his memoirs that the military budget "was not based so much on military requirements, or on what the economy of the country could stand, as on political considerations."

     Six months later, Trevor Gardner resigned as civilian head of Research and Development for the air force with blasts at Secretary W:ilson for hampering research on guided missiles and for general obstructionism, even in strategic retaliation, with the single exception of the B-47 medium-range jet bomber (whose use was completely dependent on air bases in allied countries). Gardner's colleague, the well-known scientist and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development Dr. Clifford C. Furnas also resigned in disgust in February 1957. He was followed by others, notably by General Gavin in 1958..

     Most of these later protests arose from Secretary Wilson's opposition to the development of missile weapons and will be mentioned later, but the obstructionism was fairly general. In 1951, as a consequence of Korea, the army demanded tactical airlift equipment for at least two divisions and strategic airlift for one division. More than five years later, Secretary Wilson stated that airlift capacity was adequate when there was still none for even a single division. When his military adviser tried to point out the underrating of our ground forces in view of our obligations to NATO, the secretary replied that we had no commitment to NATO. In November 1954, three years before "Sputnik," a journalist asked Wilson for comment on the possibility that the Russians might beat the United States in the satellite race; the secretary replied, "I wouldn't care if they did." Two years later, in 1956, Furnas made the same warning, and received the secretary's reply, "So what?" The culmination of all this was Wilson's orders of November and December 1956, which crippled the army's ability to use contemporary tactics by restricting it to missiles of less than 200 miles' range, and forbidding it to use planes of over five thousand pounds or helicopters of over ten thousand pounds' weight. As one chief staff said of Wilson, "He was the most uninformed man, and the most determined to remain so, that has ever been secretary."

     Unfortunately, President Eisenhower, who prided himself on ceasing to be a military man when he became a politician, invariably supported Wilson even in his most mistaken decisions.

Chapter 69: The Rise of Khrushchev, 1953-1958

     The United States was saved from the consequences of this shortsighted and ignorant policy by two factors: (a) the Soviet Union had no intention of risking any direct clash with the United States, and (b) the Soviet Union during most of this period was in the midst of an intense internal struggle which made it impossible for it to follow any course of sustained aggression.

     At the end of the war, Stalin's rule in Russia was as firmly established as it had ever been. He was head of the government as well as leader of the Communist Party, with the army completely subordinate to his will. The army played only a small role in the domestic politics of the country, but Stalin had shown his power over it in the Great Purge of 1937 when he had destroyed at least 5,000 of its officers on falsified charges of disloyalty. The survivors were under close scrutiny both from secret police units established, for security reasons, throughout its organization and from the party commissars attached to its major units. The secret police, under the Ministry of State Security, was a state within a state, with its own armed forces, including armored divisions and completely autonomous air units. It controlled millions of prisoners and slave laborers, large industrial enterprises, and wide territories (chiefly in northern Asia). Stalin was exempt from the authority of these secret police and, at the same time, had his own secret police powers within the party organization, because the party statutes of 1934 (prepared by Lazar Kaganovich) had given him an independent police apparatus for use within the party; this was controlled from his personal secretariat under Lieutenant General A. N. Poskrebyshev.

     The party, like the police, had units (originally called "cells") in almost every industrial enterprise, in many collective farms, in residential neighborhoods, and rose thence, in a hierarchy of cities, regions, provinces, and nations, parallel to the governmental system.

     Stalin nullified possible opposition by encouraging division and rivalry not only among the diverse hierarchies of power radiating downward from his own position in government, in party, army, police, and economic life, but also within each hierarchy, by encouraging the ambitious to seek to rise, step by step, through vacancies created by his periodic purges. These purges not only opened the way upward for younger and more ruthless men, but served as justifications for Stalin's growing paranoia.

     Within the party the purges of 1924-1929 had eliminated, usually by death, most of the "Old Bolsheviks" (those who had been party members before the 1917 Revolution). In 1929-1934, using a new and younger group, Stalin had killed 10,000,000 Russians (his own estimate) in the drive to establish collective farms. The second great purge of 1934-1939 had killed off a large part of the Stalinists who had assisted Stalin's rise to power and about 5,000 officers of the armed forces. The third great purge, which was shaping up at the end of 1952, was intended to eliminate the rest of the Stalinists who had come to positions of power, in succession to the Old Bolsheviks, in 1929-1935. They were already a dwindling group, from Stalin's insatiable thirst for blood, as can be seen by examining the fate of the members of the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934, the congress which first raised Khrushchev and Lavrenti Beria to the Central Committee. Of the 1,966 delegates to that Seventeenth Congress, 1,108 were arrested for "anti-revolutionary crimes" in sequel to the assassination of S. M. Kirov (party leader in Leningrad), which Stalin himself had arranged in December 1934. Of the 139 members and alternates elected to the Central Committee by that congress of 1934, 98 (or 70 percent) were arrested and shot. Among the survivors were Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgi Malenkov, Beria, Anastas Mikoyan, K. Voroshilov, and Khrushchev. The new purge of 1953 was apparently aimed at some or most of these survivors.

     This terror was made worse by the fact that it did not originate only from Stalin, although it undoubtedly required his acquiescence to proceed very far. Such acquiescence could often be obtained by his top subordinates, for the autocrat undoubtedly appreciated those w-ho were prepared to demonstrate their complete ruthlessness in his service. At the end of the war, Khrushchev, although not yet near the top of the pile, had shown more bloodthirsty ruthlessness combined with more groveling obsequiousness to Stalin than anyone else in Russia.

     At the war's end the top trio in the gang were Stalin, Malenkov, and Andrei Zhdanov. The last pair hated each other. Malenkov in 1945-1946 was the most active figure in the government, especially as chairman of the Committee for the Rehabilitation of Liberated Areas, and chairman of the committee in charge of dismantling German industry for reparations. Large-scale bungling in the administration of reparations gave Zhdanov the opportunity he wished. Through Mikoyan, he instigated an attack on Malenkov's handling of reparations, and recommended that dismantling be replaced by the setting up of Soviet-owned corporations to take over German industry in Germany to make goods for the Soviet Union. As a consequence of this failure, Malenkov (with his associates) was demoted from several of his posts for about a year (June 1947-June 1948). Immediately after his rehabilitation, Zhdanov died mysteriously, and his chief supporters were arrested and shot (the so-called "Leningrad Case").

     In the meantime, Khrushchev was deeply involved in the effort to restore the collective farms, which had suffered great attrition during the war, and the more difficult task of bringing them under party control. In view of the ruthless way in which the collective farms had been established in 1928-1934, it was not surprising that neither the farms nor the party were popular with the peasants. Both were quietly sabotaged in ways which could neither be observed nor prevented, especially as party members and the secret police were both rare in rural districts. Evidence for such sabotage could be seen in the constant failure of the agricultural section of the economy to fulfill quotas or expectations, in the fact that the peasants produced four times as much (in yield per unit areas) on their small personal plots of ground as they did on the wide acreage of the collective farms, and in the fact that farm animals in 1953 were well below the figures for 1928 (while cows were 13 percent fewer than in 1916), despite a population increase of 25 percent from 1928 to 1953. Moreover, in the confusion of the war, at least 15 million acres of land belonging to the collective farms had been diverted to peasants' private plots, while millions of peasants on the collective farms were living in inefficient semi-idleness.

     Early in 1950 Khrushchev returned from twelve years of party butchery in the Ukraine and took over the agricultural problem. His solution, totally unworkable, was to move more vigorously in the Stalinist direction of increased centralization. He wished to merge the collective farms into increasingly large units and to work the peasants in increasingly large "work brigades," in order to bring them under the control of the few Communist Party members to be found in the countryside. A party cell required three members as a minimum, and in 1950 a substantial fraction of the existing collective farms had no party cells at all, while the majority had cells of less than six members each.

     In two years, by merging collective farms, Khrushchev reduced the total number of such units from 252,000 to 94,800, but 18,000 still had no party cells, while only 5,000 had cells with over 25 members. Khrushchev wanted to carry the process of concentration even further by destroying the existing villages and centralizing the peasants in large urban settlements (so-called "agro-towns"). In such towns they would be remote from their small private plots, would not spend so much time on them, and would be escorted in large gangs out to work each day on the collective fields. This fantastic scheme was blocked by Beria and Molotov in 1951.

     Another scheme, which may have been associated with Khrushchev, was vetoed by Stalin in 1952. This would have distributed the personnel and machinery of the rural Machine Tractor Stations (MTS) among the collective farms, thus, at one strike, increasing the locally available party members from their personnel to build up rural party cells and making available, at short notice, necessary farm machinery. This suggestion was blocked by Stalin as a step backward from Socialism. In its place, he suggested that the peasant's incentive to work on his private plot to produce for sale in the private market be destroyed at one blow by forbidding the peasant access to any market, or even to money, by forcing him to dispose of all his surplus produce, on a barter basis, to the state.

     On the whole, Khrushchev's achievements as agricultural leader were far from successful, but this did not injure his reputation with Stalin, who recognized his personal devotion and energy and saw that his efforts were directed toward increasing party control in the countryside rather than the desirable, but clearly less important, goal of increased production. As a mark of this favor, at the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952, Khrushchev presented the report on the new party rules and saw one of his supporters, A. B. Aristov, take over charge of all personnel appointments in the wide-spaced party network. Both of these developments were at the expense of Malenkov, the nominal head for party matters, but the latter was more than compensated by the privilege of taking Stalin's place as the chief party speaker (in an eight-hour speech) at the congress.

     As this congress of October 1952 assembled and dispersed, Stalin was already laying the groundwork for his third great purge of the party. No one, except perhaps Beria, could guess who was a target for elimination, but the rumors and hints from Stalin's personal secretariat made it appear that every one of the Old Guard of Stalinists should fear the worst. From October 1952 onward, these chief associates of Stalin lived in mounting terror. Like gangsters of the Capone era, they did not dare go to their homes at night, ventured nowhere without personal bodyguards, and carried weapons on their persons. Beria remained dominant until November 1952, because Moscow was garrisoned by secret police divisions, the Kremlin guard was entirely in his control, and no one else was allowed to bring weapons into that enclave.

     Stalin moved with his customary skill, steadily dispersing and diluting the authority of the Old Guard: the number of ministries was increased, the Politburo ceased to meet, its ten members were dissolved into a large Presidium of thirty-six, and the Old Guard were shifted from operating ministries to posts without portfolios: Molotov from Foreign Affairs, Kaganovich from Heavy Industry, Nikolai Bulganin from Defense, Mikoyan from Trade. The last of these shifts, in November 1952, was the replacement of Beria as minister of state security by S. D. Ignatiev. By that time, Poskrebyshev and his assistant, Mikhail Ryumin, were already preparing the frame-up of Beria. This was the so-called "doctor's plot," a fabrication which pretended that Zhdanov and other leaders had been poisoned by a group of Kremlin doctors, mostly Jewish, who were, with Beria’s knowledge, about to carry out a similar elimination of other leaders, including high military officers. Under torture so severe that two of the nine doctors died, the rest gave confessions.

     At this point, just when the purge was to begin, Stalin died, possibly from a series of strokes, on March 5, 1953. Within six hours, the physician in charge of Stalin's last few days; Stalin's son, Vasily, who commanded the air force of the Moscow Military District; Poskrebyshev; and the commanders of the Kremlin, the city, and the local military district all disappeared. Beria was recalled from semi-exile to lead the merged ministries of Interior and State Security, and the administrative changes since October 1952 were undone: the large Presidium was replaced by the previous smaller Politburo of ten men; the number of ministers was reduced from 55 to 25; and the inner Cabinet was cut from fourteen to five. Most significantly, the Old Guard, which Stalin had been slowly moving away from the levers of power, were, at his death, quickly moved back to the center. Malenkov was made secretary of the party and premier of the government with five deputy premiers: Beria, Molotov, Bulganin, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan. Each of these was restored to his previous ministry, while Voroshilov became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Marshal Zhukov was recalled from rural exile to be first deputy to Bulganin in the Defense Ministry, and Khrushchev, with no major post, was made chairman of Stalin's funeral obsequies. Under his care, the deceased autocrat's body was placed, with the reverence becoming a demigod, alongside that of Lenin, in the shrine overlooking Red Square. Then, "at Premier Malenkov's request," Khrushchev took over one of his two posts, that of secretary of the party. It was a fateful change.

     During Stalin's rule, the autocrat had held both chief positions, in the state and in the party. Now, a week after the despot's death, the universal distaste for any revival of his power compelled Malenkov to yield up one of the positions to Khrushchev. We do not know why he decided to keep the premiership and give up the secretaryship of the party. Indeed, we do not know if he had any choice, but it may have seemed from the evidence of Stalin's later years that the premiership was a more significant post than the secretary's. It was not; certainly it was not in the hands of a tactician such as Khrushchev. During the next five years, in a struggle for power whose details are still concealed, Khrushchev rose from the secretary's post to be supreme autocrat, eliminating in the process all other possible claimants to power. The process by which he succeeded Stalin was almost a repetition of that by which Stalin had succeeded Lenin. In each case, the ultimately successful contender was the least prominent of a group of contenders; in each case this victor used the post of secretary of the party as the chief weapon in his upward rise; in each case, this rise was achieved by a series of chess moves in which the most powerful rival contenders were eliminated, one by one, in a series of shifts, beginning with the most dangerous (in one case Trotsky, in the later case Beria). And in both, this whole process was done under a pretense of "collective leadership."

     Immediately after Stalin's death, the "collective leadership" was headed by a triumvirate of Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov. Malenkov supported a policy of relaxation, with increased emphasis on production of consumers' goods and rising standards of living, as well as increased efforts to avoid any international crisis which might lead to war; Beria supported a "thaw" in internal matters, with large-scale amnesties for political prisoners as well as rehabilitation of those already liquidated, at home and in the satellite states; Molotov continued to insist on the "hard" policies associated with Stalin, full emphasis on heavy industry, no relaxation of the domestic tyranny, and continued pressure in the Cold War with the West.

     Wild rumors, especially among the satellites, and some relaxation, at Beria's behest, in East Germany gave rise to false hopes among the workers there. On June 16, '953, these workers rose up against the Communist government in East Berlin. After a day of hesitation, these uprisings were crushed with the full power of the Soviet occupation armored divisions. Using this event as an excuse, the leaders in the Kremlin suddenly arrested Beria and shot him with six of his aides (either immediately or in December, depending on the version of these events).

     The overthrow of the master of terror was supported by the regular army, whose chief leaders were present in the next room, armed with smuggled machine guns, when the showdown between Beria and his colleagues occurred in the Kremlin conference room. Beria apparently suspected nothing, and set down his briefcase, in which he had a pistol hidden. During the conference, while one leader distracted his attention another removed the pistol from the briefcase. Beria was then told he was under arrest. He dived for his briefcase, found his pistol gone, and looked up into the muzzle of his own gun. He was at once turned over to the army officers in the next room. These had already moved four divisions of their forces into Moscow to replace the usual secret police forces guarding the city. This use of the army to settle the personal struggle in the Kremlin is the chief factor which was different in Khrushchev's rise to power from the earlier rise to power of Stalin in 1924-1929. There can be little doubt that the introduction of this new factor was due to Khrushchev and that his secret speech denouncing Stalin in February 1956 was part of his payoff to the armed forces for their role in the process.

     The overthrow of Beria was followed by an extensive curtailment of the secret police and its powers. Most of the latter went to the Interior Ministry, while its forces were subjected to separate control, and its system of secret courts was abolished. Many of its prisoners were released, and there was considerable relaxation of the censorship, especially in literature. Some of the powers of the police were taken over by the party.

     In February 1954, a large conference of agricultural leaders in Moscow was thunderstruck by a suggestion from Khrushchev for a radical new approach to the chronic agricultural shortages. This "virgin-lands" scheme advocated opening for cultivation in Asia large areas of grassland which had never been cultivated before. Khrushchev's plan was detailed and dazzlingly attractive. It entailed use of over 100,000 tractors and great hordes of manpower to cultivate grain on 6 million new acres in 1954 and an additional 25 million acres in 1955. The scheme, carried out in an atmosphere of heated discussion, was not supervised by Khrushchev. Its requirements in machinery and equipment were so great that it represented a sharp restriction on Malenkov’s shift of emphasis from heavy industry to consumer goods, while Khrushchev’s refusal to supervise it placed the responsibility for its success at Malenkov’s door. At the same time, Malenkov’s public advocacy of a “thaw” in Soviet-American relations was equally weakened by the secret Soviet drive to perfect the H-bomb.

     While the undermining of Malenkov was thus in process in 1954, Khrushchev began to undermine Molotov in the foreign field by organizing a series of spectacular foreign visits without the foreign secretary. One of the first of these, in September r954, took Bulganin, Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and others to Peking to celebrate the fifth birthday of Red China. During the visit Khrushchev apparently made a personal alliance with Mao Tse-tung as well as a complicated commercial treaty which offered Soviet finance, equipment, and specialized skills for an all-out industrialization of China (the so-called "great leap forward").

     These events made it possible for Khrushchev to organize a campaign against Malenkov during the winter of 1954-1955. Ostensibly this was based on Malenkov's desire to relax the intense emphasis on heavy industrialization, but, in fact, Malenkov's lack of aggressiveness in foreign policy was equally significant. In combination the two issues created pressure which Malenkov could not resist. On February 8, rg5s, his resignation was read to the Supreme Soviet. He assumed responsibility for the unsatisfactory state of Soviet agriculture, and relinquished the post of premier, although remaining on in the Central Committee in the new post of minister of power stations. The new premier was Bulganin, who released his previous post of defense minister to his deputy, Marshal Zhukov, hero of World War II.

     These struggles within the Kremlin are based on persons, not on issues, since the latter are used chiefly as weapons in the struggle. In the shift from Malenkov to Bulganin, the critical issues were the chronic agricultural problem and the choice between Stalin's policy of relentless industrialization, regardless of the cost to peasants and workers, and a new policy of increased consumers' goods. In this last issue the needs of defense brought Khrushchev support from Marshal Zhukov, the armed forces, and the "Stalinists," such as Molotov and Kaganovich. Zhukov was rewarded with a ministry and a seat in the Presidium, the only army officer ever to have the latter.

     The gradual elimination of Molotov found Khrushchev on the opposite side of the Stalinist versus anti-Stalinist debate, as champion of a "thaw" in the Cold War. This involved a rejection of Stalin's doctrine of the inevitable enmity of non-satellite countries and the inevitable onset of imperialist war from capitalist aggression. In this struggle Khrushchev found support in Bulganin, Mikoyan, and probably Zhukov. The new policy was established while Molotov was still foreign minister through a series of elaborate state visits by Bulganin and Khrushchev ("B and K," as they were called) to foreign countries. The most significant of these visits, because it marked a sharp reversal troth of Stalin and of Molotov, was a six-day visit to Tito in Yugoslavia in May 1955. This acceptance of Titoism is of great importance because it showed Russia in an apologetic role for a major past error and because it reversed Stalin's rule that all Communist parties everywhere must follow the Kremlin's leadership.

     The "Belgrade Declaration" admitted that different countries could "walk different roads to Socialism" and that such "differences in the concrete application of Socialism are the exclusive concern of individual countries." Khrushchev and Tito both knew that this statement was playing with fire. The former's motives are obscure; it was probably done simply as a challenge to Molotov's whole past record; Tito unquestionably hoped the dynamite would explode sufficiently to blow the East European satellites out of Soviet control. With his customary shrewdness Khrushchev did not sign the Belgrade Declaration himself, but had Bulganin, the new premier, do it, thus protecting himself from direct responsibility if anything went wrong.

     This declaration was not the only stick of dynamite which Khrushchev was juggling as he returned from Yugoslavia. En route home he stopped off in Bucharest and Sofia. In the latter capital he placed the fuse in another, even larger, stick of dynamite, by a secret denunciation of Stalin personally as a bloodthirsty tyrant.

     Back in Moscow in early July, Molotov made an uncompromising attack on the Belgrade Declaration, denouncing it as encouragement to the satellites to pursue independent policies, a consequence which all agreed would be totally unacceptable to anyone in the Kremlin, but Khrushchev w-on over the majority by arguing that the loyalty of the satellites, and especially their vital economic cooperation, could be ensured better by a loose leash than by a club. He scorned Molotov's opposition to an agreement with Tito by contrasting it with Molotov's agreement of August 1939 with Ribbentrop. The solidity of the satellites was to be preserved by the Warsaw Pact of May 14, 1955, which established a twenty-year alliance of the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and East Germany. This was the Communist riposte to NATO, which the newly sovereign West German state had joined, as a fifteenth member, five days earlier (May 9, 1955)

     Straight from his arguments with Molotov in the Central Committee, Khrushchev dashed off with Bulganin, Molotov, and Zhukov to the 1955 "Summit Meeting" in Geneva. There he kept quietly in the background, while his companions discussed the fate of Germany with President Eisenhower, Dulles, Eden, and Premier Faure of France.

     The 1955 Summit Conference at Geneva on July 18-24 was Anthony Eden's contribution to the "thaw." Dulles participated most reluctantly, but there had been increasingly unfavorable comment on his inflexible attitude toward the Russians, and he felt compelled to yield to Eden's insistence in order to help Eden's Conservative Party in the British General Elections of May, 1955. Once these were successfully passed, the meeting had to be carried out, but Dulles had no hopes of its success. He contributed little in this direction himself when he insisted that disarmament must be discussed before German reunion. Outsiders, trying to interpret the Russian attitude toward the "thaw" on the basis of no reliable information, placed much greater hopes in the Summit Meeting than Dulles did, chiefly because of the surprising Soviet shift which had produced the Austrian Peace Treaty of May 15, 1955, with its subsequent evacuation of Austria by Russian troops. The Austrian treaty restored the country's frontiers of January 1938 and promised free navigation of the Danube, while prohibiting any union with Germany and binding Austria to neutrality.

     The neutralization of Austria gave rise, in 1955, to a good deal of vague talk about "disengagement" in Europe. The idea, however defined, had considerable attraction in Europe, even for experienced diplomats like Eden. Nothing very definite could be agreed upon as making up "disengagement," but everyone was eager for anything which would reduce the threat of war, and the Germans especially had longing thoughts of a neutralized and united country. France, which was deeply involved at the time in Indochina and in the Muslim countries, particularly Algeria, was eager for any relaxation in Europe which would allow a breathing spell to devote to its colonial problems. To help the discussion along, the Russians spoke favorably about disarmament, Europe for the Europeans, and German reunion. When details of these suggestions appeared, however, they usually justified completely Dulles's skepticism. Disarmament, for example, meant to the Russians total renunciation of nuclear weapons and drastic cuts in ground forces, a combination which would make the United States very weak against Russia while leaving Russia still dominant in Europe. Sometimes this result was sought more directly: withdrawal of both the United States and the Soviet Union from Europe, the former to North America, thousands of miles away, and the latter merely to the Russian frontiers. Another Russian suggestion was to replace NATO with a European security pact which would include only European states.

     The Soviet suggestions for Germany were equally tricky and show clearly their fear to subject their East German satellite to a popular election and their real reluctance to see Germany united. They demanded unification first and elections later, while the United States reversed the order. The merging of the two existing German governments, followed by a peace treaty along the lines of the Austrian treaty, would have given the Russians what they wanted in Europe, a Germany freed from Western troops ruled by a coalition government, which would allow elections when it judged best.

     The Americans wanted elections first to establish an acceptable central German government with which a final peace could be made. The creation of two sovereign German states in 1954 made any settlement remote because the Kremlin insisted that its East German satellite regime, which was not recognized by the United States, must be a party to any settlement and thus be recognized by the United States. This same point became a permanent obstacle also to any agreement to unify Berlin, since the United States was willing to negotiate with Russia but not with East Germany. Eden's own contribution to these discussions was that a demilitarized zone be established along the line of physical contact between East and West in Europe with international inspection of armed forces in Germany.

     Suddenly, on the fourth day of the conference, President Eisenhower made a speech which jolted the delegates, and even more the world, out of their casual attention. This was his "open-skies" plan, which never came to anything but which gave the United States a propaganda advantage the Soviet Union could not overcome. It had two parts: the two super-Powers "to give to each other a complete blueprint of our military establishments, from beginning to end, from one end of our countries to the other"; and "Next, to provide within our countries facilities for aerial photography to the other country." Nothing could be more repugnant to the ingrained Soviet love of secrecy except full inspection of the country on the ground, but nothing could more clearly show the world that the United States was as frank and honest as its President's own face: neither had anything to hide.

     Nothing significant was achieved at the Geneva Conference, but the discussions were conducted in an unprecedented atmosphere of friendly cooperation which came to be known as the "Geneva spirit," and continued for several years. In fact, it was never completely overcome even when matters were at their worst in the weeks following the U-2 incident of May 1960 and the Cuban crisis of October 1962. This was because the Soviet Union, having emerged from the isolation imposed on it by Stalin's mania, never returned to it completely but continued to cooperate with non-Communist countries in scientific interchange, athletic events, and social intercourse. From 1955 onward, speakers of Russian and of English were in cooperation somewhere on some project. The most amazing of these projects was the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958, in which scientists of sixty-six countries cooperated over eighteen months to wring from the physical universe of earth, sea, and sun some of its secrets.

     Returned to Moscow from Geneva, Khrushchev abandoned his unwonted quiet and resumed his stalking of Molotov. In September 1955, the harassed foreign minister had to make a public confession of error, admitting that he did not know what point the Soviet Union had reached in its progress along the road to Socialism. In February he had told the Supreme Soviet that the foundations of the Socialist society had been built. It now appeared that the society itself was built. Such a mistake, regarded as picayune in the outside world, could inflict almost irreparable damage on a Soviet leader if publicly confessed, as this was. It was a clear indication to other such leaders that Molotov was on the way out.

     During all this, Khrushchev had held no office in the Soviet government, and had functioned only as party leader, but what he did in that capacity was of vital significance. Systematically he replaced party functionaries on all levels, moving upward those he could depend on and eliminating those he could not trust to support him personally. The other rival leaders in the government knew what was going on, but ignored it, since they made the one basic error which could not be remedied: they believed that the government was the ruling structure in the Soviet Union, while Khrushchev, quietly at his work within the party structure, looked forward to the day on which he would demonstrate their error.

     In February 1956, in what is unquestionably one of the most significant events in the history of Communism, Khrushchev lighted one of his sticks of dynamite. The subsequent explosion is still echoing, and the resulting wound to international Communism still bleeds freely.

     Khrushchev's preparation-for a Party congress was as careful as Stalin's had ever been: it was to be a sounding board for coordinating party policy by speeches to his hand-picked subordinates. In July 1955 the congress was called for February 14, 1956. At the same time, two Khrushchev agents were added to the Presidium, Mikhail Suslov and Igor Kirichenko, and three Khrushchev agents were added to the party secretariat: Averky Aristov, Ivan Belyaev, and Dmitri Shepilov. The last, who was editor of Pravda, the party newspaper, gave the speech on foreign policy at the congress, although Molotov was still foreign minister and was not replaced by Shepilov until August. Aristov soon took over the role Poskrebyshev had previously played for Stalin, in charge of loyalty purges within the party.

     The Twentieth Party Congress met for eleven days, February 14-25, 1956, within the Kremlin walls. Its 1,436 hand-picked delegates formed the oldest congress which had ever assembled, with 24 percent over fifty years of age, compared to 15.3 percent over fifty at the Nineteenth Congress, and only 1.8 percent over fifty at the Eighteenth Congress of February 1941. These men were fully prepared to support whatever was told them, but none could have anticipated the shocking revelations they would hear..

     It all began in a rather routine fashion. The first speech, of 50,000 words, delivered by Khrushchev over seven hours (one hour less than Malenkov's parallel speech in October 1952), was full of factual details. It was notable only for its frequent reference to the urgent need for coexistence with the West and its infrequent use of the name "Stalin." The emphasis on co-existence was part of the campaign against Molotov, and, as is usual in Communist speeches, was filled with references, by volume and page, to the writings of Lenin. Most of these references proved, on examination, to be embedded in a context expounding the inevitable clash between Communism and Capitalism. The delegates, fully trained in such dialectic, had no difficulty in seeing the point: coexistence was merely a temporary tactic in the larger framework of inevitable struggle. Similar references were made to the possibility of peaceful, rather than revolutionary, change from capitalism to Socialism in single countries. In this case, examples were given: the Baltic States, the East European satellites, and China! The reference to Lenin (Volume XXXIII, pages 57-58) made perfectly clear that the "peaceful road to "Socialism" could be followed only where a small capitalist state was overrun by a powerful Communist neighbor.

     The chief surprise of the general sessions of the party congress was the speech from that old party chameleon, Anastas Mikoyan. It openly criticized Stalin for his disregard of party democracy and his "cult of personality" which insisted on personal adulation and on the constant rewriting of party records and Russian history so that Stalin would always appear as the infallible and clairvoyant leader.

     The real explosion came at a secret all-night session on February 24-25 from which all foreign delegates were excluded; those who listened were warned to take no notes or records. In a speech of 30,000 words Khrushchev made a horrifying attack on Stalin as a bloodthirsty and demented tyrant who had destroyed tens of thousands of loyal party members on falsified evidence, or no evidence at all, merely to satisfy his own insatiable thirst for power. All the charges which had been made by anti-Communists and anti-Stalinists in the 1930's were repeated and driven home with specific details, dates, and names. The full nightmare of the Soviet system was revealed, not as an attribute of the system (which it was), but as a personal idiosyncrasy of Stalin himself; not as the chief feature of Communism from 1917 (which it was), but only as its chief feature since 1934; and nothing was said of the full collaboration in the process of terror provided to Stalin by the surviving members of the Politburo led by Khrushchev himself.

     But all the rest, which the fellow travelers throughout the world had been denying for a generation, poured out: the enormous slave-labor camps, the murder of innocent persons by tens of thousands, the wholesale violation of law, the use of fiendishly planned torture to exact confessions for acts never done or to involve persons who were completely innocent, the ruthless elimination of whole classes and of whole nations (such as the army officers, the kulaks, and the Kalmuck, Chechen, Ingush, and Balkar minority groups). The servility of writers, artists, and everyone else, including all party members, to the tyrant was revealed, along with the total failure of his agricultural schemes, his cowardice and incompetence in the war, his insignificance in the early history of the party, and his constant rewriting of history to conceal these things.

     A few passages from this speech will indicate its tone:

     "Stalin's negative characteristics, which in Lenin's time, were only beginning, changed in his last years in a grave abuse of power which caused untold harm to the Party.... Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his ideas and by demanding complete submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this or tried to argue his own point of view was doomed to be purged and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation.... Stalin originated the concept 'enemy of the people,' a term which made it unnecessary to prove the ideological errors of the victim; it made it possible to use the cruelest repression and utmost illegality against anyone who disagreed in any way with Stalin, against those who were only suspected or had been subjects of rumors. This concept 'enemy of the people' eliminated any possibility of ideological fight or of rebuttal. Usually the only evidence used, against all the rules of modern legal science, was the confession of the accused, and, as subsequent investigation showed, such 'confessions' were obtained by physical pressure on the accused.... The formula 'enemy of the people' was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating these persons.... He abandoned the method of ideological struggle for administrative violence, mass repressions, and terror.... Lenin used such methods only against actual class enemies and not against those who blunder or err and whom it is possible to lead through theory and even retain as leaders.... Stalin so elevated himself above the party and above the state that he ceased to consider either the Central Committee or the party.... The number of arrests based on charges of counterrevolutionary crimes increased tenfold from 1936 to 1937.... When the cases of some of these so-called 'spies' and 'saboteurs' were examined, it was found that all their cases were fabricated. Confessions of guilt of many were gained by cruel and inhuman tortures.... Comrade Rudzutak, candidate member of the Politburo, party member from 1905, who spent ten years in a czarist hard-labor camp, completely retracted in court the confession which had been forced from him.... This retraction was ignored, in spite of the fact that Rudzutak had been chief of the party Central Control Commission established by Lenin to ensure party unity.... He was not even called before the Central Committee's Politburo because Stalin refused to talk to him. Sentence was pronounced in a trial of twenty minutes, and he was shot. After careful reexamination of the case in 1955, it was established that the accusation against Rudzutak was false and based on falsified evidence.... The way in which the NKVD manufactured fictitious 'anti-Soviet centers and blocs' can be seen in the case of Comrade Rozenblum, party member from 1906, who was arrested in 1937 by the Leningrad NKVD.... He was subjected to terrible torture during which he was ordered to confess false information about himself and other persons. He was then brought to the office of Zakovsky, who offered him freedom on condition that he make before the court a false confession fabricated in 1937 by the NKVD concerning 'sabotage, espionage, and subversion in a terroristic center in Leningrad.' With unbelievable cynicism, Zakovsky told about the method for the creation of fabricated, 'anti-Soviet plots.' . . . 'You yourself,' said Zakovsky, 'will not need to invent anything. The NKVD will prepare for you an outline for every branch of the center; you will have to study it carefully and to remember well all questions and answers which the court may ask. . . . Your future will depend on how the trial goes and on its results. If you manage to endure it, you will save your head, and we will feed and clothe you at the government's expense until your death.' . . . The NKVD prepared lists of persons whose cases were before the Military Tribunal and whose sentences were prepared in advance. Yezhov would send these lists to Stalin personally for his approval of the punishments. In 1937-1938 such lists of many thousands of party, government, Communist Youth, army, and economic workers were sent to Stalin. He approved those lists.... Stalin was a very distrustful man, morbidly suspicious; we knew this from our work with him. He would look at a man and say, 'Why are your eyes so shifty today?' or, 'Why are you turning so much today and why do you avoid looking at me directly?' This sickly suspicion created in him distrust of eminent party workers he had known for years. Everywhere and in everything he saw 'enemies,' 'two-facers,' and 'spies.' . . . How is it possible that a person confesses to crimes which he has not committed? Only in one way—by application of physical pressure, tortures, bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, deprivation of his judgment, taking away of his human dignity. In this way were 'confessions' obtained.... Only a few days before the present congress we called to the Central Committee Presidium and interrogated the investigative judge Rodos, who in his time investigated and interrogated Kossior, Chubar, and Kosaryev. He is a vile person, with the brain of a bird, and morally completely degenerate. And it was this man who was deciding the fate of prominent party workers.... He told us, 'I was told that Kossior and Chubar were people's enemies and for that reason, I, as investigative judge, had to make them confess that they are enemies.... I thought that I was executing the orders of the party."

     The "secret speech" also destroyed Stalin's reputation as a military genius:

     "During the war and afterward, Stalin said that the tragedy experienced by the nation in the early days of the war resulted from the unexpected attack by the Germans. But, Comrades, this is completely untrue.... By April 3, 1941, Churchill through his ambassador to the USSR, Cripps, personally warned Stalin that the Germans were regrouping their armed units to attack the Soviet Union.... Churchill stressed this repeatedly in his dispatches of April 18 and in the following days. Stalin took no heed of these warnings. Moreover, he warned that no credence he given to information of this sort in order not to provoke the beginning of military operations. Information of this kind on German invasion of Soviet territory was coming in from our own military and diplomatic sources.... Despite these particularly grave warnings, the necessary steps were not taken to prepare the country properly for defense and to prevent it from being caught unawares. Did we have time and resources for such preparation? Yes, we did. Our industry was fully capable of supplying everything the Soviet Army needed.... Had our industry been mobilized properly and in time to supply the Army, our wartime losses would have been decidedly smaller.... On the eve of the invasion, a German citizen crossed our border and stated that the German armies had orders to start their offensive on the night of June 22 at 3:00 A. M. Stalin was informed of this immediately, but even this was ignored. As you see, everything was ignored.... The result was that in the first hours and days the enemy destroyed in our border regions a large part of our air force, artillery, and other equipment; he annihilated large numbers of our soldiers and disorganized our military leadership; consequently we could not prevent the enemy from marching deep into the country. Very grievous consequences, especially at the beginning of the war, followed Stalin's destruction of many military commanders and political workers during 1937-1941, because of his suspiciousness and false accusations.... During that time the leaders who had gained military experience in Spain and in the Far East were almost completely liquidated.... After the first severe disaster and defeats at the front, Stalin thought that this was the end. He said, 'All that which Lenin created we have lost forever.' After this, Stalin for a long time actually did not direct the military operations and ceased to do anything whatever.... Therefore, the danger which hung over our Fatherland in the first period of the war was largely due to the faulty methods of directing the nation and the party by Stalin himself. Later the nervousness and hysteria which Stalin showed, interfering with actual military operations, caused our army serious damage. He was very far from any understanding of the real situation which was developing on the front. This was natural, for, in the whole war, he never visited any section of the front or any liberated city.... When a very serious situation developed for our army in the Kharkov region in 1942, we decided to give up an operation seeking to encircle Kharkov to avoid fatal consequences if the operation continued.... Contrary to sense, Stalin rejected our suggestion and issued orders to continue the operation.... I telephoned to Stalin at his villa, but he refused to answer the phone, and Malenkov was on the receiver.... I stated for a second time that I wanted to speak to Stalin personally about the grave situation at the front. But Stalin did not consider it convenient to raise the phone and insisted that I must speak to him through Malenkov, although he was only a few steps away. After listening in this fashion to our plea, Stalin said, 'Let everything remain as it is!' What was the result of this? The worst that we had expected. The Germans surrounded our army concentrations and we lost hundreds of thousands of our soldiers. This is Stalin's military genius and what it cost us.... After this party congress we shall have to reevaluate our military operations and present them in their true light.... After our great victory which cost us so much, Stalin began to belittle many of the commanders who contributed to the victory, because Stalin excluded every possibility that victories at the front should be credited to anyone but himself.... He began to tell all kinds of nonsense about Zhukov.... He popularized himself as a great leader and tried to inculcate in the people the idea that all victories won in the war were due to the courage, daring, and genius of Stalin and no one else.... Let us take, for instance, our historical and military films and some written works; they make us feel sick. Their real purpose is the propagation of the theme of Stalin as a military genius. Remember the film The Fall of Berlin. Here only Stalin acts; he issues orders in a hall in which there are many empty chairs, and only one man approaches him and reports to him—that is Poskrebyshev, ills loyal shield-bearer. Where is the military command? Where is the Politburo? Where is the government? What are they doing? There is nothing about them in the film. Stalin acts for everybody; he pays no attention to them; he asks no one for advice. Where are the military who bear the burden of the war? They are not in the film; with Stalin in, there is no room for them.... You see to what Stalin's delusions of grandeur led. He had completely lost consciousness of reality.... One characteristic example of Stalin's self-glorification and of his lack of elementary modesty was his Short Biography published in 1948. It is an expression of most dissolute flattery, making a man into a god, transforming him into an infallible sage, 'the greatest leader and most sublime strategist of all times and nations.' No other words could be found to raise Stalin to the heavens. We need not give examples of the loathsome adulation filling this book. They were all approved and edited by Stalin personally, and some of them were added in his own handwriting to the draft of the book.... He added, 'Although he performed his task of leader of the party and the people with consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the whole Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit, or self-adulation.' . . . I'll cite one more insertion made by Stalin: 'The advanced Soviet science of war received further development at Comrade Stalin's hands. He elaborated the theory of the permanently operating factors that decided the issue of wars.... Comrade Stalin's genius enabled him to divine the enemy's plans and defeat them. The battles in which Comrade Stalin directed the Soviet armies are brilliant examples of operational military skill.'

     "All those who interested themselves even a little in the national situation saw the difficult situation in agriculture, but Stalin never even noticed it. Did we tell Stalin about this? Yes, we told him, but he did not support us. Why? Because Stalin never traveled anywhere, did not meet city or farm workers; he did not know the actual situation in the provinces. He knew the country and agriculture only from films. And these films had dressed up and beautified the existing situation in agriculture. They so pictured collective farm life that the tables were bending from the weight of turkeys and geese. Stalin thought it was actually so.... Stalin proposed that the taxes paid by the collective farms and by their workers should be raised by 4o billion rubles; according to him the peasants are well off, and the collective farm worker would need sell only one more chicken to pay his tax in full. Imagine what this meant. Certainly, 4o billion rubles is a sum greater than everything the collective farmers obtained for all the products they sold to the state. In 1952, for instance, the collective farms and their workers received 26,280 million rubles for all their products sold to the government.... The proposal w-as not based on an actual assessment of the situation but on the fantastic ideas of a person divorced from reality."

     It was inconceivable that this extraordinary speech could be kept a secret, in spite of all the warnings at its delivery that it must be. Versions of it, some of them softened, were sent out by the Kremlin to foreign party leaders. One of these found its way to the United States government and was published on June 2, 1956. There is not the slightest doubt that the speech is authentic and that almost everything it says is true. But the mystery remains: Why did the Kremlin leaders decide to speak thus of a situation which every student of the subject knew, at least partially, but which could still be denied so long as it was not admitted? One factor in the making of the speech was undoubtedly the determination of the army to clear itself of the unjust accusations made against its officers in 1937-1941 and against the effort to attribute the disasters of 1941-1942 to professional incompetence. Just as the German generals after 1945 wanted to blame their defeats on Hitler, so the Russian generals, with much greater justification, wanted to blame their early defeats on Stalin. But there undoubtedly must have been other causes of which we are not yet aware.      The anti-Stalin speech, like the admission of error in the alienation from Tito, inevitably had an injurious influence on Communism throughout the world, especially in the satellite Powers, and ultimately became the ideological basis for the splitting of these Powers into Stalinist and anti-Stalinist groupings led by Red China and the Soviet Union.

     Certain points about this speech are noteworthy. In the first place, all the criticism of Stalin is directed at his actions subsequent to 1934; these are criticized, not because they were vile in themselves, but because they were injurious to the party and to loyal party members. Throughout this speech, as in everything else he did in this period, Khrushchev was working to strengthen the party. Moreover, by directing his criticism at Stalin personally, he exculpated himself and the other Bolshevik survivors who were fully as guilty as Stalin was—guilty not merely because they acquiesced in Stalin's atrocities from fear, as Khrushchev admitted in the speech, but because they fully cooperated with him.

     A study of Khrushchev's own life shows that he supported Stalin's atrocities fully at the time, often anticipated them, benefitted personally from them, and egged Stalin on to greater ones. In fact, even as Khrushchev in his speech condemned Stalin's acts which caused the deaths of thousands in the party, he defended Stalin's acts which caused the deaths of millions in the country. The fault was not merely with Stalin; it was with the system; and, even wider than that, it was with Russia. Any system of human life which is based on autocracy and authority, as Russian life has always been, will turn up sadistic monsters, as Russia has throughout its history, again and again. And the more completely total and irresponsible power is concentrated in one man's hands, the more frequently will a monster of sadism be produced.

     The very structure of Russian life on the authoritarian lines it had always possessed drove Khrushchev, as it had driven Stalin thirty years before, to concentrate all power in his own hands. Neither man could relax halfway to power for fear that someone else would continue on, seeking the peak of power. The basis of the whole system was fear and, like all neurotic drives in a neurotic system, such fear could not he overcome even by achievement of total power. That is why it grows into paranoia as it did with Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Paul I, Stalin, and others.

     During all the struggle for power within the Kremlin, foreign affairs were still actively pursued hy the Soviet leaders. The chief event was a change in direction from Europe to Asia which took place in the spring of 1955. The Austrian treaty, the reconciliation with Tito, the stalemate over the German problem, the Warsaw Pact, and the "Geneva spirit" were all parts of a plan to put Europe "on ice" in order to shift attention to Southeast Asia, to India, and to the Near East. This new direction was opened by beginning arms shipments to Colonel Gamal Nasser of Egypt in the spring of 1955 and reached its peak in the so-called Suez Crisis of October 1956. A similar effort in India, seeking to win its support for the Soviet bloc, began with the state visit to India and Burma by Bulganin and Khrushchev in November 1955. This new direction and its consequences will be described in a moment, but it must be recognized that the continuing struggle for control within the Kremlin and the satellite states ran parallel with the growing crisis in the Near East and that both reached the critical stage at the same time in October 956.

     The struggle between the Stalinists and the anti-Stalinists within the satellite states and the discontent of the inhabitants with both groups kept public affairs agitated along the whole zone of satellite areas from the Baltic to the Balkans. Khrushchev's "secret speech" increased this agitation. Pressure on Khrushchev inside the Kremlin to reverse his professed policy of de-Stalinization grew. Khrushchev struck back. On June 2, 1956, the same day that Tito arrived for a state visit to Moscow, Molotov was removed as foreign minister and replaced by Khrushchev's agent, Shepilov, the editor of Pravda. But the satellite turmoil continued.

     This turmoil, which agitated eastern Europe for many years, may be regarded as a series of clashes between Stalinism and Titoism. Neither of these is an extreme pole of dualistic opposition but rather two positions on a number of scales, concerned rather with methods than with goals. Both have as a goal the creation of powerful and prosperous Communist systems, but they do not agree on methods, or rather on the relative mixture of methods to be used to reach their goal. Each sees industrialization as necessary to such a goal, but Tito is, perhaps necessarily, more willing to use foreign investment and foreign technical guidance, if these are free from any political control.

     Stalinism in general distrusts all foreign help as spying. Relying on domestic capital accumulation, and determined to raise it speedily, Stalinism puts severe pressures on the peasantry and thus emphasizes collective farms under political pressure, while Titoism is prepared to make much more use of private agriculture and of economic incentives for food production. This entails a slower rate of industrialization and more emphasis on improved standards of living. There are also other, more pervasive, differences. Stalinism insists on uniformity and centralized authority, while Titoism is more willing to allow diversity and collegial control. This, in their terms, is the distinction between a "monolithic block" and "collective leadership"; when the "monolithic bloc" is subject to criticism, it is called the "cult of personality."

     In the satellites, for historical reasons, there are other sharp distinctions between Stalinism and Titoism. The former favors Russian domination, while the latter favors local nationalism. As a consequence, in 1945-1960, the former favored those local leaders who had spent the prewar and war periods in exile in the Soviet Union, while the latter favored the underground fighters who had stayed at home in the Left-wing resistance groups. And, finally, the Stalinists upheld their road to Socialism as the only road, while the Titoists contended there were many roads to Socialism. As might be expected, political oppression and the rule of the monolithic party was associated with the one point of view, while a greater readiness to allow diversity of outlook and coalition regimes marked the other.

     There is no doubt that Stalin intended to establish a fully Stalinist system as just described in eastern Europe, "the Zone," as Seton-Watson calls it. But this could not be done immediately in the chaos of war's ending. Accordingly, a period of real coalition regimes was established, based on the association of all groups and parties which had resisted Nazism. Most of these groups were made up of peasants, workers, and intellectuals led by a combination of exiles back from Russia and hardened resistance fighters. One of the chief acts of these coalition regimes, in most countries, was agrarian reform, that is, the division of former large estates into the hands of peasant owners.

     Within a few years, and in most cases by 1948, this coalition was broken down and replaced by narrow Stalinist control, governed by a typical Stalinist tyranny. This was achieved by getting the significant government posts into the hands of hard-core Stalinists, usually the former Moscow exiles, and forcing other groups out of the coalition. In this process, the presence of Soviet troops was often the vital factor. Along with this went a social, economic, and propagandist campaign to split the farmers by calling the more affluent, better educated, or more obstinate ones "agrarian reactionaries" and "enemies of the people." These were liquidated, frequently by death. The chief index showing that this stage had been reached was usually a reversal of the agricultural policy from agrarian reform to collectivization similar to that achieved in Russia in 1930-1934.

     As one consequence of this change, each satellite found its welfare, especially in economics, subordinated to that of the Soviet Union. This was reflected in numerous economic and commercial agreements which set up conditions of commercial exchange and joint-owned public corporations able to milk the satellite countries for Russia's benefit. Some of this was based on reparations. As examples of this exploitation, we might mention that the joint corporations in East Germany drained from that area goods worth a billion Reichsmarks a year in terms of 1936 prices in the 1946-1948 period. The Soviet-Polish coal agreement of 1945 bound Poland to sell coal to Russia at one-tenth the price obtainable elsewhere. In all, it has been estimated that the Soviet Union extracted goods worth $20 billion out of eastern Europe in 1945-1946.

     By 1952, eastern Europe, with the notable exception of Yugoslavia, was being organized, as a colony of the Soviet Union, along Stalinist lines. The bitter attacks on Tito arose from Tito's refusal to accept this and from the challenge which the existence of his different system offered to Stalin's control. Tito was able to resist because he was outside the zone of Soviet military occupation and had built up a military and bureaucratic hierarchy loyal to him, while inside that zone these hierarchies had been constructed under Soviet guidance and were loyal to Stalin rather than to the local leaders. The one exception, Albania, sided with Stalin because it feared Yugoslavia, just as Tito feared the Soviet Union, as a too powerful neighbor.      In 1951-1952 the incipient purge in the Soviet Union was extended to the satellites where its anti-Semitic overtones were even more evident. Rudolf Slansky, leader of the Czech Communist Party, was tried and executed in spite of his abject subservience to Stalin, while Anna Pauker was removed from her offices in Romania. This drove Tito closer to the Western camp and led Tito's friend Milovan Djilas to recognize that the problem of Stalinism was not personal but institutional, caused by the structure of the system, a disease fatal to any real social welfare; he called this disease "bureaucratic degeneration." When Djilas went further, at the end of 1953, and recognized that the real issue was between freedom and absolutism, a choice for all the Zone between the West and the East, he broke with Tito because his criticism clearly applied to Tito's authoritarian bureaucracy as well. Many persons in the satellites, even the young who had lifelong indoctrination in the authoritarian outlook, reached similar conclusions and were like tinder to any anti-Soviet spark.

     The sparks were provided by Khrushchev, with his continued curtailment of the secret police, his acceptance of Titoism, and, above all, his "secret speech." Few recognized that Khrushchev was basically an ultra-Stalinist himself, fully committed to foreign aggression, to ultra-industrialization, and to ruthless discipline of the working masses, especially the peasants. His tactical shifts were taken as indicators of a moderate personality, while, in fact, Khrushchev was as extreme as Stalin and more reckless.

     As part of the thaw in eastern Europe there was a considerable shift from Stalinism. Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were either released or given reduced sentences, and party leaders who had been purged were restored to the party. Some who had been executed were posthumously rehabilitated. That key indicator, pressure to build up collective farms, was reversed. In Hungary in a single year (May 1953 to May 1954) the acreage under collective farming decreased one-third, while the number of peasants on such farms fell 45 percent. This was fairly typical of the Zone as a whole.

     This general shift undoubtedly encouraged resistance to Soviet domination, a feeling which was greatly increased in 1956 by three other factors: (1) the growing impoverishment of the Zone from Soviet exploitation, from the poor crops and food shortages of 1956, and from the equally grave fuel shortages (both coal and petroleum); (2) the shift of Soviet attention from Europe to Asia; (3) the unexpected reaction to the "secret speech." The consequences of these disturbing influences were general in the Zone, but the specific cases of Poland and Hungary hold great interest, because they worked in such totally different ways.

     The chief difference, of course, was the great strength of the Polish leaders and people, going back to their terrible experiences at the hands of troth Russians and Germans and their memories of the extraordinary feats of the underground resistance. Soviet reactions to Polish demands for liberalizing the regime were undoubtedly influenced by a reluctance to meet that resistance again. However, the chief difference lay in the related fact that the leaders of the Polish Communist Party led the demand for liberalization and maintained a united front while doing so, while the Hungary movement was resisted by the party leaders and could be split by personal ambitions.

     The crisis began in both countries in the last week of June 1956. A stoppage of work at the Polish railway factory in Poznan grew into a mass demonstration against the Communist regime. Shots were fired, and eventually over so were killed and 323 arrested. Polish Party Secretary Ochab made concessions to the opposition and attributed the episode to "social roots . . . the existence of serious disturbances between the party and the various sections of the working class." This was rejected three days later by Bulganin during a sudden and unexpected visit of the Kremlin leaders to Warsaw; their version attributed the troubles to foreign capitalist agitators. Ochab continued his concessions and, on August 4th, readmitted to the party the popular Vladislov Gomulka, a strong nationalist Communist who had been removed and imprisoned at Stalin's orders in 1951.

     Because the continued worsening of economic conditions in the late summer of 1956 made it impossible for the Polish Communists to offer the people any substantial economic concessions, they continued the political relaxation, which alarmed the Kremlin. The trials of those arrested in the June disturbances were fair and punishments lenient, amid growing nationalist enthusiasm. On October 15th Moscow learned of a Polish decision to convene the Polish Central Committee on October 18th to elect a new Politburo which would not include Soviet Marshal K. K. Rokossovsky, defense minister of Poland since the days of Stalin, and would make Gomulka party secretary. After a hurried meeting of the Soviet Presidium on October 18th, Soviet troops and naval contingents began to converge on Poland, and Khrushchev, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan burst into the Polish Central Committee session of October 19th just as it began. The presence of that rigid Stalinist Molotov, who had been dismissed as foreign secretary in June, was significant of the precarious decline of Khrushchev's position in the Kremlin.      Khrushchev, however, acted as Soviet spokesman at the session in the Belvedere Palace. He was violent and bellicose, calling Gomulka a "traitor" and threatening dire consequences if the old Politburo, including Rokossovsky, was not reinstated. Ochab, still Polish secretary, was firm, and ordered the immediate halt of Soviet troop advances, or all negotiations would be ended and the Poles would take the consequences. This meant resistance to the Russians by the tough, well-armed Polish Security Corps. Khrushchev stopped his troop movements, the Russians withdrew, and the session of the Polish Central Committee finished its work, electing a new non-Soviet Politburo which excluded Rokossovsky and made Gomulka secretary. The latter in the course of the discussions with Khrushchev had indicated that his liberalization would extend only to domestic affairs and would not injure Polish-Soviet "friendship" or the Warsaw Pact. In his speech to the committee, Gomulka sought to reconcile nationalist Communism with Polish-Soviet friendship, and made a severe attack on the "cult of personality" with its hideous atrocities under the Stalinist regime. Rokossovsky resigned as defense minister and returned to Russia with more than thirty other Soviet high military officers in November.

     Khrushchev publicly yielded in the Polish crisis on October 23rd when he issued a statement that he saw no obstacles to relations between the two countries from the committee's actions and that the Soviet troops would be withdrawn to their bases. On the same day, he was taking steps to crush the parallel crisis in Hungary.

     The troubles in the Magyar state in the summer of 1956 took the same forms as in Poland, but instead of being directed by the Communist party secretary, they were directed against him. They appeared as agitations against the indefatigable Stalinist Mแtyแs Rแkosi and in favor of the mild Imre Nagy, who had been premier in 1953-1955 as Malenkov's choice and had been removed at Khrushchev's order. On July 18th Khrushchev tried to deflate these agitations by ordering some minor reforms and replacing Rแkosi as party secretary by his deputy, the uncouth and obstinate Stalinist Erno Gero. This simply intensified the agitations, which rose to a crescendo in September, chiefly from the meetings and resolutions of students, workers, and literary groups. Some of their demands were successful, including, on October 19th, abolition of the compulsory study of the Russian language.

     On October 22nd a meeting of about 4,000 students discussing changes in university life became diverted to political agitations and drew up "Sixteen Points" which they tried to force Radio Budapest to broadcast. Omission of some of the points, demanding a new economic policy, the withdrawal of Soviet troops, free elections, freedom of the press, and reform of the Communist Party, led to a mass demonstration on October 23rd. When Gero refused their demands, the students began to riot, smashing to pieces the huge statue of Stalin in the center of the city. The security police killed several demonstrators, but when the regular Hungarian troops were called to restore order they joined the agitators.

     By that time Soviet troops began to move from fifty miles away, and arrived in the capital by 2:00 A.M. on October 24th; Mikoyan had preceded them. It soon became clear that the Soviet tanks could not control the situation, because they could be blocked by overturned streetcars or other obstacles and could not subdue rioters in strong buildings: Mikoyan dismissed Gero and put in, as party secretary, Jแnos Kแdแr, until then a known opponent of the Stalinist group. By that time, October 25th, the revolt had spread through Hungary under the passive eyes of the Soviet troops. On the following day, Nagy, still in touch with Mikoyan, formed a new government and negotiated a cease-fire. The Russian forces withdrew from Budapest, and negotiations were opened between their officers and the Nagy government for their withdrawal from the country. By that time the whole Communist system in Hungary had collapsed; unofficial elected groups had seized power throughout the country; the secret police and the party had disintegrated; a revolutionary council had taken control of the Hungarian Army, and Colonel Pแl Maleter, a leader of the revolt, had been made a major general and minister of defense. Most significant of all, the one-party system had been ended, and members of the revived non-Communist parties had joined the Cabinet. On October 31st the official Soviet news agency, Tass, announced that the Kremlin was ready to recognize the new government and negotiate withdrawal of all Soviet troops from the country.

     However, as October ended, large Soviet forces had begun to invade Hungary, crossing into the country on numerous temporary combat bridges. On November 1st Kแdแr, who had pretended to be one of Nagy's closest supporters, fled from Budapest to the Soviet headquarters at Szolnok. There he set up a new government under Soviet control. The same day Nagy called to the United Nations, appealing for help and announcing Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and its resumption of neutrality.

     In the meantime, the Soviet invasion was in full operation, overrunning the country and smashing into Budapest before dawn on November 4th. Most of the resistance was overwhelmed that day. As it collapsed, the Nagy government and their families took refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy. The Yugoslavs, including Tito, were obviously confused by Kแdแr's change of sides, and accepted his promise of safe-conduct to their homes for Nagy and his associates. However, when these people left the security of the embassy on November 22nd, they were seized by Soviet forces and deported to prisons outside Hungary. By that date the flight of refugees from Hungary was in flood, despite efforts by the Kแdแr government to prevent it. Many were killed as they tried to pass the frontiers, but thousands escaped to the West, where many of them were able to continue their studies in a new way of life. The costs of the uprising were catastrophic. On the Hungarian side there were about 2,800 killed, 13,000 wounded, and 4,000 buildings destroyed, but tens of thousands were in exile or in hiding, the country was shattered, and lay, as a conquered country, under the armed forces of its oppressor.

     The unanticipated consequences of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization efforts in eastern Europe were bound to injure Khrushchev in the Kremlin power struggle. Indeed, they brought him to the brink of final disaster early in 1957. As usual, the shifts of power were indicated by changes in personnel. Kaganovich, who had been removed from the government on June 5, 1956, was restored as minister of building materials on September 22nd; Shepilov, who had been Khrushchev's appointee as foreign minister in June, lost his other post as secretary to the Central Committee on Christmas Day 1956. Above all, on November 22nd, Molotov was made minister of state control, a post which had budgetary functions in all parts of the state-controlled economy and could have been built up into a state power, in opposition to Khrushchev's party power, in the economic system. Moreover, de-Stalinization ceased after July 1956, and even Khrushchev found it necessary to praise the old ogre. On December 2 3rd Pravda denied that there had ever been any Stalinism in the Soviet Union. Eight days later, Khrushchev said, "We can state with contrition that we are all Stalinists in fact." On January 17, 1957, at the Chinese Embassy in Moscow, he said, "Stalinism, like Stalin himself, is inseparable from Communism.... In the fight against the enemies of our class, Stalin defended the cause of Marxism-Leninism."

     For Khrushchev, as for all the Soviet leaders, the great issue was to prevent Titoism from spreading into the Soviet Union and, if possible, to curtail its spread among the satellites. Every effort was made to prevent knowledge of the "Polish October" and the Hungarian revolt from reaching the Soviet people, and the attacks on Tito and Yugoslavia were resumed. Tito struck back on November 11th with the charge that Stalin had taken the domestic and foreign policies of the Soviet Union to dead ends and that his errors were not personal ones but intrinsic in the Soviet system of monolithic authoritarianism. He was refuted in Pravda, a week later.

     The Hungarian invasion destroyed much of the appeal of Communism to the Leftists of Western Europe and the world; this had already been left in shreds by the "secret speech." Even in the Soviet Union, university students and intellectuals disapproved of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Many literary works written during the de-Stalinization phase in the spring were published the following winter, when the tide had turned again. Khrushchev struck hard at these groups and continued to do so for several years, with the result that the alienation of Russian intellectuals from Khrushchev became established. This was reflected in the expulsion from the universities later in 1956 of hundreds of students who refused to applaud the Soviet attack on Hungary. The official Soviet line was that most disturbances of this kind arose from the activities of foreign agitators of capitalist aggressors.

     Simultaneously with the Soviet political and intellectual reaction after June 1956, came a series of efforts to alienate the economic stringency: wages were raised, taxes reduced on the poorest payers, social benefits were extended, and the labor unions were urged to protect them; numerous projects in heavy industry under the Five-Year Plan were slowed up and their resources diverted to consumer goods. Most significant of all, there was a sharp increase in the influence of state officials and a corresponding decrease in that of party officials.

     This reversal was fully evident in the Central Committee session of late December 1956, but the following meeting, in February 1957, showed Khrushchev in an aggressive counterattack. This took the form of suggestions for a drastic reorganization of Soviet economic life toward a more decentralized system. Undoubtedly this plan had considerable merit, but in Khrushchev's eyes it had an additional advantage, since it would remove much of economic life from the influence of the central state ministries and leave it open to increased influence from local party groups. He proposed the division of the Soviet Union into several dozen economic regions, each under an economic council, or sovnarkhozy, of diverse groups, and the devolution to these groups of the economic functions of the majority of the economic ministries in Moscow. These ministries would be abolished, along with the State Commission for Current Planning (GEK) and Molotov's Ministry of State Control. This would leave only the long-range economic planning agency (Gosplan) and a few economic ministries at the center, with annual planning and most execution left to the regional or lower groupings.

     This plan had real merits which can hardly be covered here. Clearly, the growing complexity of the Soviet economy, over a widely diverse terrain and people, could not be operated efficiently by uniform regulations from the center. Moreover, each economic ministry, because of the constant shortages of resources, materials, and labor, sought to build up, within itself, its own sources of supply and also had a constant urge to hoard equipment and parts, even when they were not needed by it and were urgently needed by enterprises of a different ministry in the next street or district. This hampered expansion and also resulted in very expensive cross-hauling of the freight of one ministry from remote areas at the very time that a different ministry might be hauling similar resources in the opposite direction. The serious overworking of the Soviet railway system, a constant weakness in the economy, was intensified by such needless hauling..

     In spite of its merits, the anti-K group in the Presidium was unwilling to adopt this reform because it would drastically weaken centralized state control and strengthen localized party control in the Soviet economy. The state hierarchy of Soviets had fallen into decay, partly because of Stalin's use of the party and secret police, partly as a means to avoid use of the fraudulently democratic Soviet constitution and of its federalist features. As a consequence, the state hierarchy lacked effective or flexible control down through its levels, while the party hierarchy had these well developed. Much of the state's power locally was exercised through the economic ministries, which Khrushchev now wished to abolish. And because of his control of the party and through it of the party press, headed by Pravda, Khrushchev could keep up a steady drum of propaganda for his economic reorganization. Every local figure was for it, and it appeared to other rival leaders as an anti-state move. Khrushchev, on the other hand, could make the opposition seem "anti-party," with all the treasonable overtones Stalin had given to that expression.

     The economic reorganization law was passed on May 10, 1957, abolishing twenty-five economic ministries (retaining nineteen) and devolving their functions to twenty-nine regional sovnarkhozy; the State Economic Commission (GEK) was also abolished, leaving, as the only central economic control, the State Committee for Long-Term Planning under Yosif Kuzmin (a Khrushchev party official), who simultaneously became first deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union. Shepilov was restored to the secretaryship of the Central Committee, which he had lost in December. These changes were pushed through by an alliance of the party, the army, and all the forces of localism, both economic and state. Khrushchev had won a great victory, which could make the party dominant in economic life.

     Having failed to block Khrushchev's economic plans, his rivals in the Presidium were reduced to a last resort: they had to get rid of the man himself. On June 18th, at a meeting of the Presidium, the motion was made to remove Khrushchev as first party secretary. The discussion grew violent, with Malenkov and Molotov attacking and Khrushchev defending himself. He was accused of practicing a "cult of personality" of his own, of ideological aberrations which threatened the solidarity of Communism, and of economic mismanagement. It soon became clear that the vote was 7-4 against him, with Mikoyan, Kirichenko, and Suslov his only supporters. He was offered the reduced position of minister of agriculture.

     Khrushchev refused to accept the result, denying that the Presidium had authority to remove a first secretary and appealing to the Central Committee. The members of this larger group joined in the discussion as they arrived, while Khrushchev's supporters sought to delay a final vote until his men could come in from their party posts in the provinces. Marshal Zhukov provided army planes to bring in the more distant and more reliable ones. The discussion became bitter, especially when Zhukov threatened to produce documentary evidence that Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich had been deeply involved in the bloody purges of 1937. Madame Furtseva, who was, like Zhukov, an alternate member of the Presidium, filibustered with a speech of six hours. Surprisingly, Khrushchev's agent Shepilov spoke against him, but M. A. Suslov, the head of the security police and the most cold-blooded killer left in the Soviet Union, shifted to Khrushchev's side. Eventually there were 309 members present, with 215 wanting the floor, over 60 actually making speeches.

     When the vote was finally taken, Khrushchev's loyal supporters in the party hierarchy voted for him solidly, and his removal, already voted by the Presidium, was reversed. Khrushchev at once counterattacked. He moved and carried the expulsion from the Presidium of Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Shepilov for "anti-party activities." Then came the election of a new Presidium, from which Pervukhim and Saburov, the two strongest supporters of a centralized, state-controlled economy, were also removed. Pervukhim became an alternate member, but Saburov was dropped completely. The new Presidium had fifteen full members instead of the previous eleven, and nine alternate members instead of six. The old alternate members, Zhukov, Furtseva, L. I. Brezhnyov, and N. M. Shvernik, who had supported Khrushchev, were moved up to be full members, joining the holdovers Khrushchev, Bulganin, Kirichenko, Mikoyan, Suslov, and Voroshilov, while five loyal agents of Khrushchev, led by Aristov and F. R. Kozlov, were added.

     This change of July 23, 1957, was Khrushchev's most smashing personal victory and the most significant event in Russia's internal history after the death of Stalin. It led Khrushchev to a position of political power more complete (except for the ambiguous position of the army) than Stalin's had been, although it was clear that Khrushchev would never be allowed to abuse his power the way Stalin had done..

     Khrushchev did not rest on his oars. During the summer of 1957 he made notable concessions to the peasants (especially the ending of compulsory deliveries from the products of their personal plots), slammed down the lid on freedom of writers and artists with a strict cultural directive of August z 8th, pushed vigorously both the "virgin lands" scheme and the decentralization of industry, and worked to curtail the growing autonomy of the armed forces. On October 27th, while Zhukov was in Albania, he was removed from the Ministry of Defense and, at the same time, was dropped from the Central Committee because of unsatisfactory cooperation with the party's political work in the army. The next few months saw a twofold advance of party influence, on a lesser scale into the army and on a greater scale, both directly and through the intermediary of the revived trade unions, into the new regional economic councils.

     The final cap of Khrushchev's rise to power came in the spring of 1958. Following the elections and assembly of the new Supreme Soviet on March 28th, Bulganin resigned as premier and was replaced by Khrushchev. In the autumn, Bulganin, who had cooperated so well with the new autocrat's rise to power, was expelled from the Presidium and condemned as an enemy of the party. This left Khrushchev as complete ruler of the Soviet Union, head of both state and party, as Stalin had been, but resting his power more on the latter than on the former.

     In the five years following Stalin's death, military strategy in the Soviet Union underwent a major debate almost as confused as the simultaneous debate going on in the United States during Eisenhower's Presidency. On the whole, the range of theories of war, both strategic and tactical, was much less in the Soviet Union than in the United States, and changes have been much slower. But the basic issues were the same.

     The orthodox military ideas of the Russians, like everything else, had been stated by Stalin and were not allowed to change, under the impact of new ideas or of new weapons, until after his death. Thus Stalin orthodoxy regarded war as a struggle between whole societies, each with its distinctive way of life, and judged that the outcome would be determined by what was called the "permanently operating factors." These factors emphasized the characteristics of the society, such as industrial strength, morale, level of training, and reserve forces. Other, "accidental," factors, such as weather, surprise, ability of individual commanders (even Napoleon), or the outcome of single battles, were regarded as of little significance. Accordingly, the Russians had no faith in lightning wars or strategic bombing or in new or, above all, "absolute" weapons. To them, victory was achieved by destruction of the enemy's armed forces by a series of blows and conflicts over a long time, during which the permanent factors, especially the forces of industrial strength and national morale, would be decisive. They regarded attacks on the enemy's population, cities, or industry as wasted effort, except where these could be directly linked to a battle. And each battle would be determined by a balance of forces from all branches of the defense services persistently concentrating on the enemy forces over extensive time and space.

     In this outlook there was no place for the nuclear bomb, for strategic air attack, or for twenty-four-hour wars, and, accordingly, the American possession of the A-bomb was largely ignored. Protests against its use, and the desire to outlaw it, were undoubtedly based on the fact that it was an American monopoly, but the Russian objection to city-bombing or to strategic terror of the V-2 kind as ineffective and a waste of resources was undoubtedly sincere.

     Soviet efforts to get the A-bomb and the H-bomb and to build up a fleet of TU-4's were partly a desire to possess what the enemy had, partly based on a desire to deter our use of SAC against Russia, and partly derived from Stalin's astonishment at the damage our strategic bombers had inflicted on Berlin. ...

     A change in strategic thinking arose in 1954 as a consequence of a debate among Soviet military leaders over the role of surprise in military victory. The possibility of a sudden American nuclear attack on Russia from the air had to be examined. As a consequence of this dispute, the role of surprise was considerably increased, although there was no general feeling that it could be decisive or even that wars might be shortened as a result of nuclear weapons. To this day the Soviet leaders still believe that victory will go to their country after a long war of mass forces using a balance of all arms and weapons. But they now include in this balance of weapons nuclear arms at all stages and ranges. However, they do not believe, as many Americans do, that strategic bombing can be decisive. It is simply an additional arm added on to the older arsenal, and will be used in war against military objectives primarily because wars are fought with the military sectors of a society.

     As a consequence of these views, the Soviet Union has no idea of being able to achieve military victory over the United States, simply because they have no method of occupying the territory of the United States at any stage in a war. They hope to defeat the United States as a society by nonviolent means: propaganda, subversion, economic collapse, and diplomatic isolation. If the rivalry with the United States comes to the violent stage, they have every hope that the Soviet Union itself will not be directly involved, but can wear the United States down by fighting through third parties, as in Korea. The Russians generally reject the idea of mutual annihilation or the total destruction of all Civilization in war, and insist that any war, however severe, will leave some remnant of the Soviet Union surviving as victor on the field. They accept the possibility of limited war, in a geographical sense, but have little hope of any war limited to non-nuclear weapons, because this would be, they feel, to their advantage and, accordingly, not acceptable to us. Thus they are unlikely to use nuclear weapons first, although fully prepared to resort to them once they are used by an enemy.

     One confusing consequence of the Soviet discussion of the role of surprise in war was an effort to distinguish between "preventive" and "preemptive" war. Because the generals, planners, and staff theorists were convinced that the West must be aggressive because of the "contradictions" of the capitalist economic system, they were convinced that they were in danger of a surprise attack by SAC. Their weakness in this aspect of war made it unlikely that their retaliatory strike would be of decisive significance, so they developed a theory of preemptive strike; this said that they would counter-surprise our surprise attack by beating us to the punch with a nuclear attack of their own. Such a "preemptive strike" would be justified only on the basis of conclusive evidence that we were about to launch a surprise attack, since our retaliatory strike after their preemptive strike would still be very damaging to them. The problem arises, however, as to how they can ever be sure that we are about to attack them, and, failing that, how does such a "preemptive" war differ from a "preventive" war, which the Soviet abjures because it is unnecessary to them?

     Soviet military thinkers have been very reluctant to accept any theories of nuclear deterrence or of limited war under an umbrella of nuclear deterrence. Since war is a struggle to the death by antipathetical societies, such societies will, in war, use any weapons they have. Accordingly, the Soviet Union believes that any general war involving the United States and themselves would be a nuclear war in which their ground forces, with tactical air support and nuclear weapons of all sizes and ranges, would fight its way overland, against nuclear armed enemies, to occupy most of Europe and possibly Asia.

     They believe that there are three defenses against tactical nuclear weapons: (1) dispersal of their own forces as widely as possible until the last moment before assault; (2) contact as rapidly and as closely as possible with the enemy in order to deter the enemy from use of nuclear weapons which would also destroy its own forces; and (3) protection of as many of their troops as possible under cover, usually in tanks. The first two of these place great emphasis on rapid mobility of troops, and the third helps to provide this. Accordingly, the Russians anticipate the use of many if not entirely armored forces in overrunning Europe and very extensive use of air transport of troops (with conventional planes, gliders, and helicopters). Such mobility will allow Europe to be overrun rapidly, creating a situation which, they feel, will make a victory for the West impossible, while our strategic attack on the Soviet Union itself will be reduced and eventually ended by strong defensive measures and retaliation.

     However, such a war, which would jeopardize the Communist way of life by threatening the Soviet Union, its only accurate embodiment, is regarded by the Soviet leaders as highly undesirable, and to be avoided at almost any cost, while they, in a period of almost endless Cold War, can seek to destroy "capitalist society" by nonviolent means or by local violence of third parties. This theory of "nibbling" the capitalist world to death is combined with a tactic which would resist "capitalist imperialism" by encouraging "anti-colonialism." Such a change called forth, on the part of the United States, a defensive tactic which shifted from Dulles's insistence that the "uncommitted nations" must join the West to the more moderate aim of keeping them from becoming Communist.

     This shift in aims, in reference to the "uncommitted nations," occurred both in the Soviet Union and in the United States and is of major importance in creating the contemporary world. Stalin and Dulles saw the world largely in black-and-white terms: who vv-as not with them was obviously against them. Accordingly, the world must be either slave or free, each man applying the former adjective to his opponent's side and the more favorable, latter term, to his own group. They were enemies, but they agreed basically that the world must be a two-Power system. This meant that each was aggressive in terms of the "uncommitted nations" because each insisted these must either join his own side or be regarded (and treated) as an enemy.

     The great change which occurred in the middle 1950'S was that both of the super-Powers had to recognize that most of the "uncommitted nations" were too weak, too backward, and too independent to be forced to be either capitalist or Communist. They had to be something different, something of their own. This view was forced upon the super-Powers, with perhaps greater difficulty in Washington than in the Kremlin, but it was an aspect of reality which had to be recognized. From it came the acceptance of neutralism and the rise of the Buffer Fringe.

     This shift was a double one. On the one hand it meant that the super-Powers' attitudes toward the Buffer Fringe shifted from a basically offensive one to a basically defensive one, shifted from an effort to get them to join one's own side to an effort to keep them from joining the opponent's side. And at the same time, it marked the first beginnings of ... recognition that there are more than two alternative fashions for organizing a functioning economic, social, and political system.... The acceptance of diversity and of pluralism, by the inevitable failure of both capitalism and Communism in the Buffer Fringe, has forced the West to accept and apply its own, often-unrecognized, traditions. [Of course, convergence of finance and monopoly capitalism with monopoly communism was always the long-range goal of the Money Power, as William Gladstone called them.]

     Moreover, the forcing of this recognition upon both the Soviet Union and the West, in respect to the Buffer Fringe, may have the consequence, in time, of forcing each of these to accept it in respect to their internal systems. Here again this would mark a great victory for the West, because the acceptance of diversity and pluralism is part of the tradition of the West and is not acceptable to Russia (whose traditions have always been basically dualistic, seeing reality as a contrast between an unattainable ideal of perfection and a horrible, sinful morass of ordinary living—the imperfections of the latter being acceptable as a necessary consequence of the unattainability of the former, with both extremes being uniform and one). Such an acceptance will reduce the tension of the Cold War by allowing each polar super-Power to develop features of a mixed system which will make them approach each other in their characteristics of organization, a development which is, of course, already apparent to any unbiased observer. [It is important to remember that the Cold War was in reality a myth. The soviet Union had no intention of attacking the West and the West had no intention of attacking the East. In the interim period billions and billions were spend on armaments and the armament industries around the world grew richer and richer through a contrived conflict that was not real, at least at the top level of the power structures. The conflict between the East and West was designed to scare the people of the world into accepting a convergence of these two monopoly systems of authoritarian power. The end result was to be a new Imperial Order and a New World Empire run by an elite self-perpetuating oligarchies from the leading nations of the earth.]

     The shift from dualism to pluralism and from uniformity to diversity was forced upon the Soviet Union in its most critical form by the rise of Titoism. This, of course, was chiefly evident in Europe, where conditions of industrial development make it more reasonable for the Kremlin leaders to expect the Soviet example to be followed slavishly by non-capitalist states. The same lesson should, however, have been learned, even earlier, in Asia, because there it became evident to many observers that most nations were neither able nor willing to follow either the Soviet Union or the United States. This observation, however, was impossible under Stalin because his ... theories of the nature of both capitalism and imperialism made him regard the two as identical and thus to regard colonial areas as being parts of the capitalist system.

     [In reality this was true. Stalin was referring to finance and monopoly capitalism. These differ greatly from free market capitalism. But it was also true of the communist countries. They too had their captive colonies. An empire cannot exist without colonies and people to plunder and exploit. The Roman Empire was not the people of Rome. It was an authoritarian system to rule and reign over people in a tyrannical way. Is the German empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the American Empire any different? The people in these nations and the colonies which the governments preside over are being exploited through rigid tax structures and regulations designed to create and maintain monopolies and cartels.]

     As a consequence of these intellectual errors, the Kremlin under Stalin was prepared to see the fringes of Asia either continuing as colonial areas or breaking away from European domination to become Communist zones, but it did not see the possibility of them becoming non-Communist and non-colonial independent states. This meant that where Stalin intervened in certain areas of Asia he intervened on behalf of the microscopic Communist parties and rebuffed the local native, nationalist, anti-colonialist groups. Khrushchev, as we shall see, did the opposite.

     Stalin's policy was quite bankrupt even before his death, and it was thus fairly easy for his successors to abandon it and to adopt a more feasible policy of Communist cooperation with local anti-colonial (and thus largely anti-Western) forces to detach them, as new, independent, but still non-Communist, nations from the West. The Soviet assistance such new nations was largely economic, although the limited productivity of the Soviet Union's own economic system, especially in food, made any substantial foreign aid to neutral nations a considerable burden on the Soviet Union itself. For this reason much of the burden of such foreign aid was pushed onto the Soviet satellite states, especially Czechoslovakia.

     This shift in the Soviet attitude toward neutralism was helped by Dulles's refusal to accept the existence of neutralism. His rebuffs tended to drive those areas which wanted to be neutral into the arms of Russia, because the new nations of the developing Buffer Fringe valued their independence above all else. The Russian acceptance of neutralism may be dated about 1954, while Dulles still felt strongly adverse to neutralism four or even five years later. This gave the Soviet Union a chronological advantage which served in some small degree to compensate for its many disadvantages in the basic struggle to win the favor of the neutrals.

     While these changes were occurring, the strategic debate in the Soviet Union continued. In this subject also, the fact that the Soviet Union was straining its economic resources was of great importance. The demands of the unsuccessful Soviet agricultural program made it necessary to put more and more manpower into agriculture at the very time that the demands of the defense effort and the civilian economy (and the rampant waste and inefficiency in the Soviet system) were increasing the demands for manpower in industry. Moreover, the heavy casualties of the period 1928-1945 from purges and warfare had reduced the population figures and the birthrate to such a degree that the Soviet population figures, even in 1970, would be tens of millions below normal. The only source from which such demands for manpower could be met was in the conventionally armed units of the Soviet defense forces.

     As a consequence of these conditions, the Soviet defense strategy debate from 1955 onward took a form somewhat parallel to that going on in the United States; that is, some of the political leaders, including Khrushchev, began to force upon the Soviet military leaders a shift in emphasis from mass conventional forces toward greater reliance upon strategic bombers and missiles. Khrushchev's version of the Eisenhower "New Look," in which the latter's "Bigger bang for a buck" was played by a Soviet version of "More rubble for a ruble," was adopted by Soviet Chief of Staff Marshal Sokolovsky and, less vigorously, by Defense Minister Marshal Malinovsky. The former's view was stated in a widely read book, Military Strategy, published in Moscow in September 1962 [Edited by V. D. Sokolovsky and published by Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1963.] but it is quite clear that the military leaders were prepared to yield, slowly, to Khrushchev and other political leaders. The net result seems likely to be a mixed one, somewhat similar to the similar struggle in the United States. The chief difference is that Soviet production and wealth is so much less than that of the United States that all such critical decisions must be made within much narrower parameters.

     In spite of these limitations of resources and demonstrations of inexperience and lack of competence parallel to that of the United States, the impact of the super-Powers was tremendous, especially in eastern and southern Asia and in the Near East.

Chapter 70: The Cold War in Eastern and Southern Asia, 1950-1957

     In the Far East, as a consequence of the Yalta Conference, the Soviet government decided that the chief feature of its policy in the postwar period would be public collaboration with the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. This non-Communist area was to be held within limits by Soviet control, through local Communist groups, of various peripheral areas of which the chief would be Korea, Outer Mongolia, Sinkiang, possibly Manchuria, and some portions of Southeast Asia. Soviet control of Korea was envisaged as a threat to Japan as much as a buffer on Nationalist China. [The secret agreements at Yalta which created the Great Power’s spheres of influence stated that Mao would be allowed to take over China.]

     This Soviet attitude toward China was reflected in the Sino-Soviet Treaty of August 14, 1945, which obtained Chiang's consent to the concessions which had been made, on his behalf, by Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta. The most significant section of the agreement was in Molotov's note of the same day which promised that the Soviet Union's moral and material support "be entirely given to the National government as the central government of China" and promised to end any Soviet support of the Chinese Communists in Sinkiang, since it "has no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of China." As implementation of this agreement, Stalin summoned the Chinese Communists to Moscow, told them that "the uprising in China had no prospects and that the Chinese comrades should seek a modus vivendi with Chiang Kai-shek, that they should join the Chiang government and dissolve their army." The Chinese Communists agreed, but returned to China to continue their struggle against the Nationalist government. Only when that struggle was achieving its final success, four years later, did Stalin accept a Communist regime in China and seek to bring it under his influence by means of the Red Chinese-Soviet treaty of February 14, 1950. [Of course this is the standard U. S. State Department propaganda line. The exact opposite is true. That is why Chiang Kai-shek was not invited to Yalta. The documents he was given were falsified to pretend that Russia would support him. The exact opposite was true. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had devised an elaborate scheme to defeat Chiang Kai-shek and his forces and create a communist government to rule China.]

     The lack of Soviet support for the Chinese Communists in the period of their final victory does not mean that the Russians were completely loyal to their commitments with Chiang Kai-shek. They fully expected him to remain the ruler of China, but they wished to hem him in so that he would find it difficult to cooperate with the United States in any anti-Soviet policy in eastern Asia. Accordingly, they not only expected the Communists to remain dominant in Sinkiang; they were also eager to see them take over an additional zone or buffer belt in northwestern China and in Manchuria. For this reason, the Soviet forces, in violation of the treaty of 1945, yielded parts of Manchuria to Communist rather than to Nationalist Chinese forces as they withdrew from that province. [This indicated the true designs of Soviet Union and the true nature of the secret agreements that were reached at Yalta. In addition, Stalin was secretly helping the communist forces of Mao solidify their control over China.]

     Stalin's real concern in the Far East was with Japan, which he feared might become an aggressive and militarized agent of the United States. He wished to participate in the military administration of Japan but was excluded by ... MacArthur. There can be little doubt that the Kremlin under Stalin was much more concerned with getting a Communist Japan than a Communist China, and hoped to see the former reduced to economic and social chaos as a step on the way to a Communist Party victory there. All these hopes were frustrated. The growing prosperity of Japan, and especially the success of Ladejinsky's agrarian reforms, steadily reduced the influence of Communism, with the result that the Communist Party of Japan obtained less than 3 percent of the vote in the parliamentary elections of October 1952 and lost all of its twenty-two seats in the Diet. [This is not true. Stalin knew that Japan was not in his future sphere of influence, while China had been given to the Communist Empire.]

     As protection against such an eventuality, Stalin insisted on the total demilitarization of Japan, the breakup of the industrial complexes like Mitsui, and possession or domination of surrounding areas such as south Sakhalin Island, the Kuriles, and Korea. The decartelization of Japan was never seriously considered by the MacArthur regime, and the demilitarization, although guaranteed by the new Japanese constitution, was abandoned by MacArthur in the name of Japanese defense needs, beginning in December 1950.

     These defeats in Japan made it all the more urgent that Stalin get control of all of Korea, but here again he met a resounding defeat which largely destroyed Soviet prestige in the Far East. The vital event in this process was the need for Soviet-dominated North Korea to call for Red Chinese help to bail it out of the dangerous situation to which the Moscow-encouraged attack on South Korea had brought it.

Southeast Asia

     Stalin's disappointments in the Far East were also extended to Southeast Asia. This area forms the triangle between the great land masses of India, China, and Australia. It is a jumble of islands and peninsulas occupied by a jumble of peoples of diverse origins and cultures. The indigenous peoples with their animistic religions have been subjected to cultural, religious, and political intrusions of very diverse characteristics. The chief of these intrusions have been those from India and China, a somewhat later Muslim influence from the West, and finally, in recent centuries, the political and commercial influence of Europe and America. For generations there has been persistent Chinese immigration from the north.

     By 1939 there was only one independent state in southeast Asia: Siam (Thailand), left as a buffer between the British areas of Burma and the Malay States to the west and French Indochina in the eastern portion of the Malay Peninsula. Southward of the peninsula, in a great sweep eastward to New Guinea, were the multitudinous islands of Indonesia, ruled by the Netherlands from Batavia on the island of Java. To the north of these islands were the Philippines, still under American administration in 1939. Between Java and the Philippines, the great mass of the island of Borneo had a fringe of British dependencies (Sarawak, Brunei, and North Borneo) along its northern coast, while, far to the east, the eastern half of Timor was under Portuguese administration. Thus all Southeast Asia, except Thailand, was under the colonial domination of five Western states in 1939.

     The interest of these imperial Powers in Southeast Asia was chiefly strategic and economic. Strategically, these lands lay athwart the waters joining the Pacific with the Indian Ocean, a situation symbolized by the great British naval base of Singapore, at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, between Sumatra and Borneo. Economically these areas produced substantial qualities of tin, rubber, petroleum, bauxite, and other products. More significant, perhaps, from the Chinese point of view, many parts of the Malay Peninsula were fertile, were substantially underpopulated, and exported great quantities of rice (especially from Burma).

     Western prestige in Malaysia was irretrievably damaged by the Japanese conquests of the Philippines, the Dutch Indies, and Malaya in 1942, so that the reestablishment of the colonial Powers after the Japanese collapse in 1945 was very difficult. Burma and the Philippines were granted their independence by Great Britain and the United States, respectively, soon after the war's end. French Indochina emerged from the Japanese occupation as the three states of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, each claiming independence, while Java claimed sovereignty over the whole Netherlands East Indies as a newly independent state of Indonesia. Efforts by the European Powers to restore their prewar rule led to violent clashes with the supporters or independence. These struggles were brief and successful in Burma and Indonesia, but were very protracted in Indochina. Burma became an independent state in 1948, followed by Indochina in 1949, by Malaya in 1957, and by Singapore (under a special relationship) in 1959. Controversy and intermittent fighting between Indonesia and the Dutch over western New Guinea continued until 1962, when American pressure persuaded the Netherlands to yield, but left Indonesia, led by Achmed Sukarno, unfriendly to the West.

     In all these areas, native nationalists were inclined to the political Left, if for no other reason than the fact that the difficulties of capital accumulation and investment to finance economic improvements could be achieved only under state control. But such independent Socialism merged into other points of view which were clearly Communist. In some cases, such Communism may have been ideological, but in most cases it involved little more than the desire to play off the Soviet Union or Red China against the Western imperialist Powers.

     The Communists of Southeast Asia were thus Communists of convenience and tactical maneuver, and originally received little support from the Soviet Union because of Stalin's well-known reluctance to engage in political adventures in areas where he could not dominate the armed forces. But in February 1948, the new Cominform sponsored a Southeast Asia youth conference at Calcutta where armed resistance to colonialism was demanded. A Communist revolt in the Philippines had already begun and was joined, in the course of 1948, by similar uprisings in Burma, Indonesia, and Malaya. Most of these revolts took the form of agrarian agitations and armed raids by Communist guerrilla jungle fighters. Since these guerrillas operated on a hit-and-run basis and had to live off the local peasantry, their exploitation of peasant life eventually made them decreasingly welcome to this very group for whom they pretended to be fighting. In the Philippines the Hukbalahap rebels were smashed in 1953 by the energetic and efficient government of President Ramon Magsaysay. In Indonesia, Sukarno repressed the insurrection and executed its leaders. In Malaya, where the Communists were almost entirely from the Chinese minority, these rebels were systematically hunted down and destroyed by British troops in long-drawn jungle combat. In Burma, the long Chinese frontier provided a refuge for the rebels, and they were not eliminated until 1960.

     The real problem was Indochina. There the situation was complex, the French Army was uncompromising, and Communist leadership was skillful. As a result, the struggle there became part of the Cold War and contributed to a vv7orld crisis. The Malay Peninsula as a whole is dominated by a series of mountain ranges, with their intervening rivers, running southward from Chinese Yunnan. These rivers fan out, in the south, into fertile alluvial deltas which have attracted invaders of Mongolian type from the less-hospitable north throughout history. Even today they produce surplus food for undemanding peoples. From west to east the chief rivers are the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Menam, the Mekong, and the Red River. Following this geographical pattern, political units have tended to fall into similar north-south strips with Burma and south-thrusting Malaya in the west, Thailand in the center, Laos and Cambodia in the Mekong drainage, and Tonkin with Annam in the east.

     Indochina brought considerable wealth to France, so that in the late 1930'5 the Banque de l'Indochine spawned in France an influential political group, who played a major role in the defeatism of 1940 and the subsequent collaboration. After the Japanese withdrawal in 1945, the Paris government was reluctant to see this wealth, chiefly from the tin mines, fall into the hands of Japanese-sponsored native groups, and, by 1949, decided to use force to recover the area.

     Opposed to the French effort was Ho Chi Minh, a member of the French Communist Party since its founding in 1920, who had subsequently studied in Moscow and had been leader of the anti-colonial agitations of the Indochinese Communist Party since 1931. Ho had set up a coalition government under his Viet Minh Party and proclaimed independence for Vietnam (chiefly Tonkin and Annam) in 1945, while French troops, in a surprise coup, seized Saigon in the south. Unfortunately for Ho, he obtained no support from the Kremlin. The French Communist Party was at that time a major element in the French coalition government, with its leader, Maurice Thorez, holding the office of vice-premier. Stalin had no wish to jeopardize the Communist chances to take over France by his support for a remote and minor Communist like Ho Chi Minh. In fact, Thorez signed the order for military action against Ho's Republic of Vietnam. At first Ho sought support from the United States and from Chiang Kai-shek, but, after the establishment of Red China in 1949, he turned to that new Communist state for help. Mao's government was the first state to give Vietnam diplomatic recognition (January 1950), and at once began to send military supplies and guidance to Ho Chi Minh. Since the United States was granting extensive aid to France, the struggle in Vietnam thus became a struggle, through surrogates, between the United States and Red China. In world opinion this made the United States a defender of European imperialism against anti-colonial native nationalism.

     During this turmoil, independent neutralist governments came into existence in the interior, with Laos to the north and Cambodia to the south. Both states accepted aid from whoever would give it, and both were ruled by an unstable balance of pro-Communists, neutralists, and pro-Westerners. The balance was doubly unstable because all three groups had armed supporters. On the whole, the neutralist group was the largest, and the pro-Western was the smallest, but the latter could obtain support from America's wealth. The decisive influence in the 1950's, however, was that the Communists, following the death of Stalin, were prepared to accept and support neutralism years before Dulles could get himself to condone it, a situation which gave considerable advantages to the extreme Left.

     The intensity of the struggle in Vietnam increased fairly steadily in , a situation which gave considerable the years following 1947. The creation of the Cominform and the subsequent Communist withdrawal from the coalition governments of Europe, including France, freed the Kremlin to support anti-colonial movements in Europe's overseas territories. At the same time, the reestablished French Army was left with a wounded pride which became, in some cases, a neurotic drive to wipe out the stains of 1940 1942 by subsequent victories in colonial wars. The growing aggression of Communist China and Dulles's fantasies about liberation all contributed to build the Indochina confusion into a flaming crisis. The final step came from the Korean truce of 1953 which freed Red China's hands for more vigorous action in the southeast. The defeat of the Communist risings of 1948 elsewhere in Malaysia turned the new Chinese activities full into Indochina, which had an open frontier for passage of Chinese Communist supplies and advisers.

     This intensification of Chinese-supported Communist activities in Vietnam in 1953-1954 was ... just entering the post-Stalin "thaw" and already moving toward the "Geneva spirit" of 1955. At the same time, the readiness of Dulles and the French Army to force a showdown in Vietnam was equally unacceptable to the British and to many persons in divided France. Out of these confusions came, on February 18, 1954, a Soviet suggestion for a conference on Indochina to be held at Geneva in April.

     By the early months of 1954, the Communist guerrillas were in control of most of northern Indochina, were threatening Laos, and were plaguing the villages of Cochin-China as far south as Saigon. About 200,000 French troops and 300,000 Vietnamese militia were tied in knots by about 335,000 Viet Minh soldiers and guerrillas. France was being bled to death, both literally and financially, with little to show for it, but the French Army was obstinate in its refusal to accept another defeat.

     The French strong point at Dien Bien Phu w as invested by Viet Minh on March 13, 1954, and by the end of the month its outer defenses were crumbling. The French chief of staff, General Ely, flew to Washington and found Dulles willing to risk an all-out war with Red China by authorizing direct American intervention in Indochina. As usual, Dulles thought that wonders could be achieved by an air strike alone against the besiegers of Dien Bien Phu, where the conflict increased in intensity daily. For a few days the United States, at Dulles's prodding, tottered "on the brink of war." Dulles proposed "a united action policy" which he described in these terms: "If Britain would join the U.S. and France would agree to stand firm,... the three Western states could combine with friendly Asian nations to oppose Communist forces on the ground just as the U.N. stepped in against the North Korean aggression in 1950 . . . and if the Chinese Communists intervene openly, their staging bases in south China [will] be destroyed by U.S. air power...."

     President Eisenhower agreed, but his calls to Churchill and Eden found the British government opposed to the adventure. The foreign secretary hastened to point out that the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1950 bound Russia to come to the assistance of China if it were attacked by the United States as Dulles contemplated. Discussion at Geneva, said Eden, must precede any such drastic action.

     Few international conferences have taken place amid such external turmoil as the Far Eastern Geneva Conference of April 25-July 20, 1954. During it, two American aircraft carriers, loaded with atomic weapons, were cruising the South China Sea, awaiting orders from Washington to hurl their deadly bombs at the Communist forces besieging the 15,000 exhausted troops trapped in Dien Bien Phu. In Washington, Admiral Radford was vigorously advocating such aggressive action on a generally reluctant government. In Paris, public outrage was rising over Indochina where the French had expended 19,000 lives and $8 billion without improving matters a particle. At Geneva, delegates from nineteen nations were talking and stalling to gain as much as possible without open warfare. The fall of Dien Bien Phu on May 7th opened a vigorous debate in the French Assembly and led to the fall of Premier Joseph Laniel's government, the eighteenth time a Cabinet had been overturned since the end of World War II in 1945. The new prime minister, Pierre Mendes-France, promised a cease-fire in Indochina or his own retirement within thirty days. He barely made the deadline.

     The Indochinese settlement of July 20, 1954 was basically a compromise, some of whose elements did not appear in the agreement itself. A Communist North Vietnam state, with its capital at Hanoi (Tonkin), was recognized north of the 17th parallel of latitude, and the rest of Indochina was left in three states which remained associated with the French Union (Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam).

     The new state system of Southeast Asia was brought within the Dulles network of trip-wire pacts on September 8, 1954, when eight nations of the area signed an agreement at Manila establishing a Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The eight (United States, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines) made no specific commitments, but set up a council, to meet at Bangkok and operate on a unanimous basis for economic, social, and military cooperation in the area. By special protocol they extended their protection to Laos, South Vietnam, and Cambodia.

     The Geneva agreement, in effect, was to neutralize the states of Indochina, but neutrality was apparently not acceptable to the Dulles brothers, and any possible stability in the area was soon destroyed by their activities, especially through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seeking to subvert the neutrality of Laos and South Vietnam. This was done by channeling millions in American funds to Right-wing army officers, building up large (and totally unreliable) military forces led by these Rightist generals, rigging elections, and, when it seemed necessary, backing reactionary coups d’้tat. These techniques might have been justified, in the eyes of the CIA, if they had been successful, but, on the contrary, they alienated the mass of the natives in the area, brought numerous recruits to the Left, gave justification for Communist intervention from North Vietnam, disgusted our allies in Britain and France, as well as many of our friends in Burma, India, and elsewhere, and by 1962 had almost destroyed the American image and the American position in the area.

     In Laos the chief political figure was Prince Souvanna Phouma, leader of the neutralist group, who tried to keep a balance between the Communist-supported Pathet Lao on his Left and the American-subsidized politicians and militarists led by General Phoumi Nosavan on his Right. American aid was about $40 million a year, of which about $36 million went to the army. This was used, under American influence, as an anti-neutralist rather than an anti-Leftist influence culminating in a bungled army attack on two Pathet Lao battalions in May 1959, and openly rigged elections in which all the Assembly seats were won by Right-wing candidates in April 1960. In August 1960, an open revolt in behalf of the neutralist Souvanna Phouma by Captain Kong Le gave rise to a Right-wing revolution led by General Phoumi Nosavan. This drove the neutralists into the arms of the Pathet Lao and to seek direct Soviet intervention. The SEATO Council refused to support the American position, the Laotian Army was reluctant to fight, and the America military mission w as soon involved in the confused fighting directly. The American bungle in Laos was repeated, with variations, elsewhere in southern and southeastern Asia. In South Vietnam, American aid, largely military, amounted to about two-thirds of the country's budget, and by 1962, when it was running at about $400 million a year, it had reached a total of $2 billion. Such aid, which provided little benefit for the people, corrupted the government, weakened the swollen defense forces, and set up a chasm between rulers and people which drove the best of the latter Leftward, in spite of the exploitative violence of the Communist guerrillas. A plebiscite in 1955 was so rigged that the American-supported Right-wing candidate won over 98 percent of the vote. The election of 1960 was similarly managed, except in Saigon, the capital, where many people refused to vote. As might have been expected, denial of a fair ballot led to efforts to assassinate the American-supported President, Ngo Dinh Diem, and gave rise to widespread discontent which made it possible for the Communist guerrillas to operate throughout the country. The American-sponsored military response drove casualties to a high sustained figure by 1962 and was uprooting the peasantry throughout the country in an effort to establish fortified villages which the British had introduced, with success, in Malaya.

     These errors of American policy, which were repeated in other places, arose very largely from two factors: (1) American ignorance of local conditions which were passed over in the American animosity against Russia and China, and (2) American insistence on using military force to overcome local neutralism which the mass of Asiatic peoples wanted. The ignorance of local conditions was well shown in the American bungling in Cambodia and in Pakistan.

     In Cambodia a neutralist regime was primarily concerned with maintaining its independence between its two hereditary enemies, the Thai to the west and the Vietnamese to the east. The American militarization of both Thailand and South Vietnam was used by these countries to increase pressure on Cambodia, which, in spite of its pro-Western desires, was driven to seek support for its independence from China and Russia. This opened a wedge by which Communist pressure from North Vietnam could move across Laos and southward into Cambodia, between Thailand and South Vietnam, a possibility which would never have arisen if United States aid had not been used to corrupt and to militarize the two exterior states in the trio. At the same time, North Vietnam, with a greater population than South Vietnam (16 million to 14 million in 1960), has a deficiency of food, while South Vietnam, like all the delta areas, is a zone of rice surplus and thus a shining target for North Vietnamese aggression, especially when the agricultural collapse of Communist China made any food supply from the north almost hopeless.

     In the west, where Burma is also an area of rice surplus, with much of the population dependent upon the export of this commodity at a remunerative price, this factor alone was sufficient to tie Burma into the Communist bloc. The collapse of the world price of rice at the end of the Korean War left Burma with an unsellable surplus of almost two million tons. Within the next three years (1954-1957) Burma signed barter agreements with Red China and Soviet Europe by which Burma got rid of over a third of its surplus each year in return for Communist goods and technical assistance. These returns were so poor in quality, high in price, and poorly shipped and handled that Burma refused to renew the agreements in 1958.

Southern Asia

     Farther west, in southern Asia (the correctly called Middle East, extending from the Persian Gulf to Burma) American bungling also opened many opportunities for Soviet penetration which the Communists generally failed to exploit with sufficient skill to earn any significant rewards.

     American error in southern Asia can be expressed very simply the key to that area was India; the United States acted as if it were Pakistan. The reason for this was equally simple, but should have been sternly resisted, and might have been except for Dulles. India was determined to be neutral; Pakistan was willing to be an ally of the United States. Dulles tried to make Pakistan the key because he preferred any kind of ally, even a weak one, to a neutral, however strong. But the choice undermined any possible stability in the area and opened it to Soviet penetration.

     From the broadest point of view the situation was this: The rivalry between the two super-Powers could be balanced and its tensions reduced only by the coming into existence of another Great Power on the land mass of Eurasia. There were three possibilities of this: a federated and prosperous western Europe, India, or China. The first was essential; one of the others was highly desirable; and possibly all three might be achievable, but in no case was it essential, or even desirable, for the new Great Power to be allied with the United States. A strong and prosperous neutral in at least two of the three positions would box in the Soviet Union and force it to seek its needs in an intensive rather than extensive expansion, and in an economic rather than a military direction. A Soviet Union which was not boxed in would expand outward extensively, and by military means as much as any others. It would seek its needs, as it had done in eastern Europe in 1945-1948, by bringing more resources, including manpower, under its control as satellite areas..

     If the Soviet Union were boxed in by allies of the United States, it would feel threatened by the United States, and would seek security by more intensive exploitation of its resources in a military direction, with a natural increase in world tension. If, on the other hand, the Soviet Union were boxed in by at least two great neutral Powers, it could be kept from extensive expansion by (1) the initial strength of such great Powers and (2) the possibility that these Powers would ally with the United States if the Soviet Union put pressure on them. On the other hand, in such a situation, the Soviet Union would be likely to turn to intensive expansion within these boundaries in economic and social directions, not only from the demand within the Soviet Union but also because of its own increased feeling of security from the existence of buffer Powers between the United States and itself.

     Some solution such as this had been directly seen by Marshall and Acheson in regard to China in 1948-1950 but had been destroyed by the aggressive Stalinism of Mao's China and the errors leading to the Korean War. In the west the possibility had been destroyed by the immediacy of Soviet pressure which had shifted American emphasis from European Union to American alliance with Europe and from economic revival there to NATO. And in southern Asia the possibility had been lost by Stalin's early pressure on Iran which led Dulles to regard Pakistan instead of India as the key to the area.

     The necessity for choice between these two arose from the partition of India before independence in 1947. In India, as in Palestine and earlier in Ireland, partition before independence received a strong impetus from the Round Table Group, and in all three cases it led to horrors of violence. The cause, in all, was the same: lines which seem to divide different peoples on the map often do not do so on the ground, because peoples are intermingled with each other, there are always third or even fourth groups which belong to neither, and their positions are often marked by separation in levels in a social hierarchy rather than by separation side by side in geography.

     In India's case, the partition was a butchery rather than a surgical process. Imposed by the British, it cut off two areas in northwestern and northeastern India to form a new Muslim state of Pakistan (cutting right through the Sikhs in the process). The founders of the two states, Gandhi in India and Jinnah in Pakistan, both died in 1948, the former assassinated by a Hindu religious fanatic, so that the two new nations began under new leaders. In the post-partition confusion, minorities on the wrong side of the lines sought to flee, as refugees, to India or Pakistan, while the Sikhs sought to establish a new homeland for themselves by exterminating the Muslims in East Punjab. In a few weeks, at least 200,000 were killed and twelve million were forced to flee as refugees, in most cases with almost no possessions. An additional problem arose from the Indian princely states. Most of these joined the dominion enclosing their territory, but two acute problems arose: in Hyderabad, where a Muslim prince ruled over a Hindu majority, and in Kashmir, where a Hindu prince ruled over a Muslim majority. Hyderabad was settled when Indian troops invaded and took over the area, but Kashmir, on the border of Pakistan itself, could not be settled in such a summary fashion without precipitating war between the two dominions. Fighting broke out, but was eventually suppressed by a United Nations cease-fire team. At this writing, Kashmir still remains a cause of enmity and controversy un-joined to either state.

     The death of Jinnah in 1948 left Pakistan, which was so largely his creation, in confusion. Its two sections were separated from each other by 1,100 miles of India territory, its boundaries were irrational, its economic foundations were torn to shreds by the partition, raw materials were left separated from their processing plants in India, irrigation canals separated from their reservoirs, herds separated from their pasturage, ports cut off from hinterland, and traders from their markets. Pakistan looked with yearning on Kashmir, but at the same time feared the greater size and population of India; forced by its insecurity to regard the army as the chief representation of the state, it built its unifying ideology on Islam at a time when belief in Muhammad's teachings was dwindling everywhere. It had no recognized capital city, but began administration from Karachi, and could not agree on a constitution until February 1956. By that time Pakistan was filled with corruption and unrest. Its first Five-Year Plan for economic development was breaking down, foreign exchange was lacking, and inflation with food-hoarding threatened. The Five-Year Plan (1955-1960) failed to make any improvement in living conditions, since its disappointing 2-percent-a-year increase in production was absorbed by an increase of similar size in population. In October 1958, martial law was established and the commander in chief, General Muhammad Ayub Khan, became president and quasi-dictator as martial-law administrator.

     In the next four years (October 1958-June 1962), under military rule, Pakistan was put on a more hopeful course. A sweeping land-ref`7,rm program restricted owners to 500 acres of irrigated, or l,000 acres of non-irrigated, land, with the surplus distributed to existing tenants or other peasants. Former landlords received compensation for lost lands in long-term bonds. Extensive efforts were made to establish cooperative villages copied from those of Yugoslavia, and to reduce the birthrate. The second Five-Year Plan (1960 1965) got off to a good start with extensive foreign aid, including that of the World Bank, the United States, a European consortium, and increasing help from the Soviet Union. In March 1962 a new constitution with a strong presidency (reserved for three years to Ayub Khan) was announced, martial law ended, and elections were held. But the precarious international position of the country, going back to its original rejection of neutrality, continued.

     This rejection of neutrality was based on a mixture of resentment toward India and Afghanistan, a vague feeling of fellowship with other Muslim states of the Near East, and a basic instability of political life. These impelled Pakistan toward a more dynamic foreign policy than India and led it to involvement in the Dulles network of treaties, including SEATO and CENTRO.

     This network of treaties in Dulles's eyes was aimed at the Soviet Union, but in Karachi it was much more likely to be viewed in terms of Pakistan's enmities with Afghanistan and India. This, in turn, tended to increase Soviet influence in Kabul and in Delhi. The Kremlin made vigorous protests against the Pakistan-Turkish Treaty of Cooperation of April 1954, the Pakistan-Iraqi alliance of January 1955, the United States-Pakistan negotiations for military cooperation of 1954-1955, and, above all, against the Baghdad Pact of November 1955. The growing militarization of Pakistan, not only from its domestic instability but from the advent of American arms, led to a growing Indian concentration of its military forces in the west. This in turn was interpreted in Pakistan as a threat to Kashmir, and drove tension upward. At the same time, Afghanistan, whose independence of Russian influence had been guaranteed by the British position in India for over a century, found itself, at the British withdrawal, exposed to increasing pressure both from the Soviet Union and from Pakistan. The nature of these pressures may be seen in the fact that a concession to France to explore Afghanistan for oil in 1952 had to be canceled because of Russian protests. On the other hand, American military aid to Pakistan was protested by Kabul, and led it to accept Soviet aid agreements in 1954.

     Afghanistan was a multinational, or rather multi-tribal, state in which the chief group was the Pushtu. The creation of Pakistan in 1948 left almost half of this language group in Pakistan, and Afghanistan at once began to agitate for self-determination for the Pushtu. Success in this endeavor would create a new Pushtunistan state which would absorb much of western Pakistan and would extend from Soviet Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. The Russians naturally supported these claims, to retaliate against Pakistan cooperation with the United States and to open a Russian outlet to the southern ocean. In counter-retaliation, in 1955, Pakistan tightened its control over its Pushtu areas and closed the Afghan border, stopping all Afghan commerce to the south and leaving Afghanistan almost completely dependent on Soviet outlets. This opened the way to a great increase in Communist influence, including that of Soviet satellites, in Afghanistan. These relations were sealed by a state visit of Khrushchev and Bulganin to Kabul in November 1955. From this came a Soviet loan of $100 million (of which $40 million for arms) at 2 percent interest over thirty years. Large amounts of Soviet arms and hundreds of Czech technicians began to move into Afghanistan.

     For the Soviet Union the critical area in Asia was that on either side of the Caspian Sea. That was the only frontier where no buffer state stood between the Western bloc and the Soviet Union itself. This was a consequence of Stalin's aggressive threats to Iran and Turkey in 1946, which had driven them into alliance with the West, but it went far back in history to the old Russian ambitions to reach the Persian Gulf and the Aegean Sea. Because of the danger to the Soviet Union in that area, especially to the Soviet oil fields of the Caucasus, the Kremlin was for a long time reluctant to bypass the Turkish-Iran-Pakistan barrier to seek to intervene in the troubled conditions of the Arab Near East. Those conditions obviously provided ample opportunities for Soviet economic, ideological, and political disturbances which could he injurious to the West, especially to western Europe, which was so dependent upon Middle East petroleum supplies. Stalin never was willing to intervene in any area which could not be directly accessible to Soviet troops, and, once his territorial ambitions in northeast Turkey and north\vest Iran were defeated in 1946-1947, he left the whole Near East relatively alone.

     This condition continued almost unchanged, in spite of domestic disturbances of a major character in Iran and among the Arab States particularly Egypt. It was not until the summer of 1955 that the new Khrushchev effort to exploit the troubles of the Near East in order to build up local nationalism against the West was made possible by the growing instability of conditions in the area and was called forth by Dulles's persistent efforts to organize the area on an anti-Soviet basis. Thus in this area, as in southeastern and southern Asia earlier, the American insistence on the non-committed nations adopting anti-Soviet lines opened the way for the Soviet to pose as the friend of such nations by supporting their neutralism.

     In Iran and Turkey, already burned by Soviet fire, this effort was a failure, but south of this barrier the situation in the Arab world was from Moscow's point of view, far more promising. There is little doubt that the Soviet decision to upset the apple cart in the Near East by selling arms to the Arab States was a reprisal for Dulles's long-drawn efforts to get the northern tier of Near Eastern states (Turkey, Iran and Pakistan) into the Western bloc.

     These efforts began as far back as May 25, 1950, when the Western Powers offered to sell arms to the Near Eastern states themselves, if the recipients would guarantee not to use such arms for aggression. Fortunately, nothing came from this foolish offer, because the Arab states refused to promise not to use any arms against Israel. In fact, they were very definite that they would do just that as soon as they could untangle their own intra-Arab squabbles. In the interval, Iran and Egypt had domestic disturbances which created severe international repercussions.

     Until recent years Iran remained a fairly typical underdeveloped Muslim country, but with distinctive features of its own from the fact that it was not an Arab but an Indo-European country and had an ancient heroic cultural tradition of Persian origin which was distinctly different from the Arab traditions of the Near East. It shared, however, the tribal, patriarchal, pastoral, and poverty-stricken nature of the Near East, and was included in a common geographic pattern by semi-aridity, emphasis on animal husbandry, survival of nomadic life, and the fact that its chief natural resource was oil.

     Although most of Iran's inhabitants are Muslim, only about one in ten speaks Arabic as his primary language, while over half speak Persian. The rest speak a variety of dialects of which about a fifth are Turkic. Only about one person in seven is literate, usually in Persian, using Arabic script. Most persons know more than one language, and it is not uncommon to speak one language in the family, write a different language, and pray in a third.

     At the end of World War II about 80 percent of the population were peasants, in spite of the fact that geographic and social conditions made agriculture a most difficult way of life. Only about one-tenth of the land was tilled (and only half of that at any one time), while another tenth was used for grazing. The rest, amounting to four-fifths, was almost entirely useless, being either mountainous or arid. Moreover, the peasants who tilled the land were much oppressed by heavy rents to absentee landlords who also controlled, as separate rights, essential access to water. Only about a seventh of the land was owned by the peasants who worked it, and that was either more remote or of poorer quality. These burdens on the land were often so heavy that peasants retained little more than a fifth of what they produced. In consequence many peasants had to supplement their incomes by work as laborers, as small traders, or by village handicrafts. Generally the rigid categories of economic activities in which we think did not exist in Iran, so that most people had a variety of activities as peasants, herdsmen, traders, government employees, laborers, and soldiers moving seasonally or intermittently from one activity to another. Even the landlords were, as often as not, government emplo;7ees, moneylenders, traders, or all combined.

     This fluidity of economic functions was more than canceled out by social rigidity. Family and personal relationships were rigid and hierarchical, and the former were often tribal in nature. The whole of Iranian life was imprinted with leader-follower characteristics of a very personal character, with loyalty and honor two of the outstanding features of all human relationships. Where these did not operate, human relationships were precarious and filled with suspicion, so that many of the patterns of life which form the modern world, such as political or public relationships and impersonal business relationships, were very weak, and, without stable principles, fell readily into nepotism and corruption.

     This "leadership" principle in Iranian social life supported a privileged ruling group, or elite, which dominated the country. Made up of landowners and gentry, with substantial interests in business (especially government contracts), it was also the chief source of high government officials and of army officers. The members of this elite, mostly resident in Tehran, have, in most cases, powerful local interests of an economic, family, and social kind in various provinces and are usually the leaders of these districts. Between this elite and the peasantry is a small middle class of businessmen, professional persons, bureaucrats, and educated people who generally differ from the elite because they are less wealthy, have few if any personal followers, and, lacking personal support in land or family, are much less likely to be associated with local districts. This middle class is the principal source of nationalist feeling; one of the chief features of recent Persian life has been the way in which the shah has shifted the basis of his support from the elite landed group to this growing middle class and to those whose social position is based on know-how and training rather than on wealth and family. Chief roles in this shift have been played by the army and the agrarian question.

     A century ago, political power in Iran was concentrated in the hands of the autocratic shah supported by the interlocking elite of landlords and army officers. At that time the shah, in fact, was not Persian, but Turkic, the Qajar dynasty of 1796-1925. It was a period in which Persia was a zone of political conflict between the imperialism of czarist Russia and that of Victorian Britain. On two occasions, in 1907 and again in 1942, these two Powers made agreements setting up spheres of influence in Iran. Since these agreements were reached because of their common enmity toward Germany, it was almost inevitable that these agreements would break down and rivalry be resumed on the defeat of Germany in 1918 and again in 1945. It was almost equally inevitable that Iran should seek support from some outside Power against the joint or parallel Anglo-Russian pressure, as it did from Germany before , before 1941, and from the United States since 1946.

     Iran's ability to resist any outside pressure was reduced by the general weakness and confusion of its own governmental system. This was a personal royal autocracy resting upon a feudalized substructure of tribal chiefs, great landlords, and religious leaders, even after the establishment of a constitutional government and a National Assembly (the Majlis) in 1906. The strong role played by personal influence, especially that of the shah, prevents the formation of real political parties or the functioning of the governmental structure as a system of principles, laws, conventions, and established relationships.

     In the days of his autocratic power, before 1914, the shah sought to raise funds for his personal use by selling concessions and monopolies to foreign groups. Most of these, such as those on tobacco or sugar, were exploitative of the Iranian peoples and were very unpopular. Of these concessions the most significant was one granted in 1901 to William Knox D'Arcy for the exclusive right to exploit all stages of the petroleum business in all Iran except the five provinces bordering on Russia. The control of this concession shuffled from one corporate entity to another until, in 1909, it came into possession of the new Anglo-Persian Oil Company. This company established the world's largest refinery at Abadan on the Persian Gulf and, by 1914, signed an agreement with the British government which made it the chief source of fuel for the British Navy. It gradually extended its activities, through a myriad of subsidiary corporations, throughout the world and simultaneously came to he controlled, through secret stock ownership, by the Britisi1 government.

     At the end of World War I, Iran was a battleground between Russian and British armed forces. By 1920 the withdrawal of British forces and the Bolshevization of Russia left the anti-Bolshevik Russian Cossack Brigade as the only significant military force in the country. The chief Iranian officer in that force, Reza Pahlavi, in the course of 1921-1925, gradually took over control of the government and eventually deposed the incompetent, twenty-eight-year-old Shah Ahmad.

     Reza Shah Pahlavi followed the pattern of modernization established hy Kemal Atatrk in Turkey but was constantly hampered by inadequate financial resources, by the underdeveloped economic system, and by the backward social development of the area. Nevertheless, he did a great deal of uncoordinated modernization, especially in education, law, and communications. His chief aim was to break down tribalism and localism and to establish national loyalty to a unified Iran. To this end he defeated the autonomous tribes, settled nomadic groups in villages, shifted provincial boundaries to break up local loyalties, created a national civil service and police force, established a national registration with identity cards for all, and used universal conscription to mingle various groups in a national army. One of his chief efforts, to improve communications and transportation, culminated in the Trans-Iranian Railway from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, built in eleven years (1929-1940) at a cost of about $150 million. Roads were constructed where only local paths had existed before, and some effort was made to establish industries to provide work for a new urban class.

     All these projects required money, which was very difficult to find in a country of limited natural resources. The chief resource, oil, was tied up completely in the concession held by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later called Anglo-Iranian or AIOC), with the inevitable result that it became the target of the Iranian nationalist desire for additional development funds. In this struggle the older elite of Iranian life, including the shah, the army, and the landlords would have been satisfied with a renegotiated deal with AIOC yielding additional funds to Iran, but the newer urban groups of professional and commercial origin combined with the religious agitators to demand the complete removal of foreign economic influence by nationalization of the petroleum industry.

     In this division within Iran, control of the situation gradually moved from the older elite to the newer nationalist groups for a variety of reasons. The years of the world depression, the financial crisis, and the Second World War greatly intensified all the objectionable features of the AIOC system and, at the same time, seemed to show that no new agreement with the company could remedy these objections. Such a new agreement had been made in 1933, but the situation became worse (from the Iranian nationalist point of view). Accordingly, when the government in 1950 tried to obtain a new supplemental agreement, nationalist feeling rose quickly against it and demanded complete nationalization of the oil business instead. In June 1950, the shah put in as prime minister his man, General Ali Razmara, formerly chief of the General Staff:, to force through the supplemental agreement. Opposing groups introduced nationalization bills in opposition to the government.

     Gradually the nationalization forces began to coalesce about 3 strange figure, Dr. Muhammad Mossadegh of an old, wealthy, landed family which had served the Qajar dynasty as ministers of finance since the eighteenth century. Mossadegh was a Westernizer with an earned doctorate in economics from a Swiss university, a man of great personal courage and few personal ambitions or desires, who was convinced that national independence could be established and the obvious corruption of Iranian political life eliminated only by the recovery of Iranian control of its own economic life by nationalization of AIOC. Politically he was a moderate, but his strong emotional appeal to Iranian nationalism encouraged extremist reactions among his followers.

     Long and fruitless discussions between AIOC and the Iranian government, with constant interference by the British government led to stalemate. The company insisted that its status was based on a contractual agreement which could not be modified without its consent, while the British government maintained that the agreement was a matter of international public law, like a treaty, which it had a right to enforce. The Iranian government declared that it had the right as a sovereign state to nationalize an Iranian corporation operating under its law on its territory, subject only to adequate compensation and assumption of its contractual obligations.

     The Iranian nationalist arguments against the company were numerous and detailed:

     1. It had promised to train Iranians for all positions possible, but instead had used these only in menial tasks, trained few natives, and employed many foreigners.

     2. It had reduced its payments to Iran, which were based on its profits, by reducing the amount of its profits by bookkeeping tricks. For example, it sold oil at very low prices to wholly owned subsidiaries outside Iran or to the British Navy, allowing the former to resell at world prices so that AIOC made small profits, while the subsidiaries made very large profits not subject to Iranian royalty obligations. Iran believed that the profits of such wholly owned subsidiaries were really part of AIOC and should fall under the consolidated balance sheet of AIOC and thus make payments to Iran, but as late as 1950 AIOC admitted that the accounts of 59 such dummy corporations were not included in the AIOC accounts.

     3. AIOC generally refused to pay Iranian taxes, especially income tax, but paid such taxes to Britain; at the same time, it calculated the Iranian profit royalties after such taxes, so that the higher British taxes went, the less the Iranian payment became. In effect, thus, Iran paid income tax to Britain. In r933 AIOC paid ฃ305,418 in British taxation and ฃ274,412 in Iranian taxes; in 1948 the two figures were ฃ28,310,353 and ฃ1,369,328.

     4. The payment to Iran was also reduced by putting profits into reserves or into company investments outside Iran, often in subsidiaries, and calculating the Iranian share only on the profits distributed as dividends. Thus in 1947, when profits were really ฃ40.5 million, almost ฃ14.9 million went to British income tax, ฃ11.5 million went to reserves, over ฃ7.l million went to stockholders (of which ฃ3.3 million to the British government), and only ฃ7.1 million to Iran. If the payment to Iran had been calculated before taxes and reserves, it would have been at least ฃ6 million more that year.

     5. Moreover, AIOC was exempt from Iranian customs tariffs on goods necessary to its operation brought into the country. Since it considered everything it brought in, whatever it was, to be necessary, it deprived Iran of about ฃ6 million a year by this.

     6. The company paid only a very small portion of the social costs of its operations in Persia, drawing many persons to arid and uninhabited portions of the country and then providing very little of the costs of housing, education, or health.

     7. The AIOC, as a member of the international petroleum cartel, reduced its oil production in Iran and thus reduced Iran's royalties.

     8. The AIOC continued to calculate its payments to Iran in gold at ฃ8.10s. per ounce for years after the world gold price had risen to ฃl3 an ounce, while the American corporation, Aramco, in Saudi Arabia raised its gold price on demand.

     9. The AIOC's monopoly on oil export from Iran prevented development of other Iranian oil fields in areas outside the AIOC concession.

     As a consequence of all these activities, the Iranian nationalists of 1952 felt angered to think that Iran had given up 300 million tons of oil over fifty years and received ฃ105 million, while Britain had invested only ฃ20 million and obtained about ฃ800 million in profits.

     The Iranian opposition to nationalization was broken in March 1951, when the prime minister, Ali Razmara, and his minister of education were assassinated within a space of two weeks. The nationalization law was passed the following month and, at the same time, at the request of the Majlis, the shah appointed Mossadegh prime minister to carry it out. This was done with considerable turmoil, which included strikes by AIOC workers against mistimed British wage cuts, anti-British street riots, and the arrival of British gunboats at the head of the Persian Gulf. Rather than give up the enterprise or operate it for the Iranian government, AIOC began to curtail operations and ship home its engineers. On May 25, 1951, it appealed to the International Court of Justice in spite of Iranian protests that the case was a domestic one, not international. Only on July 22, 1952, did the court's decision uphold Iran’s contention by refusing jurisdiction.

     At first the United States, and especially its ambassador in Tehran, supported the Iranian position. It feared that British recalcitrance would drive Iran toward Russia, and was especially alarmed at the possibility of any landing of British forces, since this would allow the Soviet Union to invade the North Iranian provinces as provided in the Soviet-Iran Treaty of 1921. However, it soon became evident that the Soviet Union, while supporting Iran's position, was not going to interfere. The American position then became increasingly pro-British and anti-Mossadegh. This was intensified by the shift in administration from Truman to Eisenhower early in 1953, and by the pressures on the American government by the international petroleum cartel. At the same time, the American oil companies, which had briefly hoped that they might replace AIOC in the Persian area, decided that their united front with AIOC in the world cartel was more valuable to them.

     This world oil cartel had developed from a tripartite agreement signed on September 17, 1928 by Royal Dutch-Shell, Anglo-Iranian, and Standard Oil. The three signers were Sir Henri Deterding of Shell, Sir John (later Lord) Cadman of AIOC, and Walter C. Teagle of Esso. These agreed to manage oil prices on the world market by charging an agreed fixed price plus freight costs, and to store surplus oil which might weaken the fixed price level. By 1949 the cartel had as members the seven greatest oil companies of the world Anglo-Iranian, Royal Dutch-Shell, Esso, Calso, Socony-Vacuum, Gulf, and Texaco). Excluding the United States domestic market, the Soviet Union, and Mexico, it controlled 92 percent of the world's reserves of oil, 88 percent of the world's production, 77 percent of the world's refining capacity, and 7o percent of the world's tonnage in ocean tankers.

     As soon as Britain lost its case in the International Court of Justice and it became clear that Iran would go ahead with its nationalization, Britain put into effect a series of reprisals against Iran which rapidly crippled the country. Iranian funds in Britain were blocked; its purchases in British-controlled markets were interrupted; and its efforts to sell oil abroad were frustrated by a combination of the British Navy and the world oil cartel (which closed its sales and distribution facilities to Iranian oil). These cut off a substantial portion of the Iranian government's revenues and forced a drastic curtailment of government expenditures..

     To deal with this situation, especially to cut the military budget, Mossadegh, in July 195z, asked for full powers from the Assembly. He was refused and resigned, but the Ahmad Ghavam government which replaced him lasted only six days, resigning under pressure of pro-Mossadegh street riots. Back in office, Mossadegh obtained dictatorial power for six months. He broke off diplomatic relations with the British, closed down nine British consular offices, deported various British economic and cultural groups, and dismissed both the Senate and the Iranian Supreme Court, which were beginning to question his actions.

     By that time (summer, 1953) almost irresistible forces were building up against Mossadegh, since lack of Soviet interference gave the West full freedom of action. The British, the AIOC, the world petroleum cartel, the American government, and the older Iranian elite led by the shah combined to crush Mossadegh. The chief effort came from the American super-secret intelligence agency (CIA) under the personal direction of its director, Allen W. Dulles, brother of the secretary of state. Dulles, as a former director of the Schroeder Bank in New York, was an old associate of Frank C. Tiarks, a partner in the Schroeder Bank in London since 1902, and a director of the Bank of England in 19121945, as well as Lazard Brothers Bank, and the AIOC. It will be recalled that the Schroeder Bank in Cologne helped to arrange Hitler's accession to power as chancellor in January 1933.

     Managing Mossadegh's fall in August, 1953, was considerably easier, since he left his defense wide open by an attack on the prerogatives of the Iranian Army, apparently in the belief that the army would be prevented from moving against him by his influence over the mobs in the streets of Tehran. But throughout the Near East, street mobs are easily roused and directed by those who are willing to pay, and Dulles had the unlimited secret funds of the CIA. From these he gave $10 million to Colonel H. Norman Schwartzkopf, former head of the New Jersey State Police, who was in charge of training the Imperial Iranian Gendarmerie, and this was judiciously applied in ways which changed the mobs' tune considerably from July to August 1953. The whole operation was directed by Dulles himself from Switzerland where he was visited by Schwartzkopf, the American ambassador to Tehran, Loy Henderson, and messengers from the shah in the second week of August 953.

     Mossadegh purged the army of opposition elements without complete success in the spring of 1953, going so far as to arrest the chief of staff on March 1st. In July he sought to bypass the Assembly and demonstrate his irresistible popular support by having all his supporters resign from the Majlis (thus paralyzing its operations), and held a plebiscite in August to approve his policies. The official vote in the plebiscite was about two million approvals against twelve hundred disapprovals, but Mossadegh's days were numbered. On August 13th the shah precipitated the planned anti-Mossadegh coup by naming General Fazlollal1 Zahedi as prime minister. and sent a messenger dismissing Mossadegh. The latter refused to yield, and called his supporters into the streets, where they rioted against the shah, who fled with his family to Rome. Two days later, anti-Mossadegh mobs, supported by the army, defeated Mossadegh's supporters in Tehran, killing several hundred. Mossadegh was forced out of office and replaced by General Zahedi. The shah returned from Italy on August 22nd.

     The fall of Mossadegh ended the period of confusions which had ensued since the forced abdication of Reza Shah in 1941. From 1953 on, the shah and the army, backed by the conservative elite, controlled the country and the docile Majlis. Two weeks after the shah's counter-coup, the United States gave Iran an emergency grant of $45 million, increased its annual economic aid payment to $23 million, and began to pay $5 million a month in Mutual Security Funds. These payments reached a total of a quarter of a billion dollars over five years. In return Iran became a firm member of the Western bloc, joined the Baghdad Pact (Central Treaty Organization) in 1955, and provided a close base for surreptitious actions (such as U-2 overflights) against the Soviet Union. The Communist-controlled Tudeh Party, the only political party in Iran with the established doctrine and organized structure of such a party in the Western sense, had been officially banned in 1949 but had supported Mossadegh from underground, w here it was relentlessly pursued after 1953.

     By 1960 the shah felt his position sufficiently strong to try to pursue a policy of his own, and began to shift his alignment from the older elite group of landlords and army toward the more progressive groups of urban middle-class professional peoples which had supported Mossadegh. The chief evidence of this was an effort to adopt, more or less as his personal policy, a program of agrarian reform which sought to restrict each landlord's holdings to a single village, taking all excess lands over for government payments spread over ten years and granting the lands to the peasants who worked them in return for payments spread over fifteen years. The shah's own estates were among the first to be distributed, but by the end of 1962 over five thousand other villages had also been granted to their peasants.

     In the meantime the oil dispute was settled by a compromise in October 1954. The exploitation and marketing of Iran's oil was taken over by a consortium of existing petroleum companies from the world cartel and some American "independents," with a 40 percent interest held by AIOC itself. The previous disputes were compromised without too much difficulty once it was recognized that both sides had a common interest in preserving the world structure of managed oil prices in order to ensure substantial incomes to both. The incomes to Iran were considerably increased, averaging about $250 million or more a year.

     The oil crisis in Iran was limited in scope and duration. Neither of these can be said of the great and continuing crisis experienced by the Arabic Near East in the twentieth century. The crisis of these countries was a crisis of the system itself, the collapse of Islamic civilization culminating in the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire which ruled over it in its later stages. The Near East today is the wreckage of that civilization, and as such presents problems far greater than the simple one of inadequate natural resources. Rather, the problem is a triple one of resources, of creating a workable and viable social organization, and of developing patterns of belief, outlook, and feelings which have some constructive value for human survival.

     In this colossal problem the influence of the Soviet Union, or of the Western Powers, or even of the Cold War conflict itself are relatively minor matters which could be reduced to much less significance if the peoples of the area could get themselves organized, both externally and internally, into some viable arrangement of living patterns. The same problem is being faced throughout the broad band of countries from Indonesia and Japan, across China and India, throughout Africa, to Latin America; but almost nowhere is the problem more acute, and apparently more hopeless, than in the Near East. This arises from the area's strategic importance between Asia, Africa, and Europe, its nearness to the Soviet Union, its central position in the air routes and the water communications of the world (symbolized by the Suez Canal), and its great significance in the world's petroleum supplies.

     The broadest aspects of the Near East's problems must be reserved to a later discussion dealing with the general problems of the Buffer Fringe and the underdeveloped areas. At the moment we must concentrate on the two most acute and immediate problems of the area. These are Israel and Egypt.

     These two problems are working within a background of five significant factors. First is the continuing Soviet-American rivalry, which benefits no one in the Near East. Second is the sordid and grinding poverty of Near Eastern life, a poverty made up, in almost equal parts, of poor natural resources (especially water shortages), wasteful and irrational social organization, and hopelessly uncooperative and spiteful personality patterns. Third is the shifting but perpetual dynastic and political rivalries of the area among the Arab countries themselves. Fourth is the almost incredibly misdirected interferences from the Western Powers, especially the United States. And fifth is the dominant role played by the armed forces in Near Eastern life.

     Of these five background factors, only the last requires any amplification here. Wherever a modern state structure appears in an impoverished environment, the possession of arms is restricted to a small group and tends to bring control of the whole society under the influence of those who possess the arms. This problem becomes particularly acute in areas where other countervailing factors, such as religion, family influence, or traditional organizations are weak and where the social values of the society place a high esteem on military prowess or violence. The Arabs had always been warlike; by adopting Islam in the seventh century, they acquired a religion which intensified this tendency. This was clearly shown in the Saracen conquests of the Near East, North Africa, and southwestern Europe within a century of Muhammad's death. Certain restraints, however, were placed upon this militarism by other factors, such as the religious elements in Islam and the powerful influence of family and tribal loyalties. By the twentieth century the steady dwindling of these alternative influences and finally the total disintegration of Islamic society left militarism in a much more dominant position. This situation is evident wherever Arabic influence spread, including North Africa, Spain, and Latin America, so that today the army is the chief political force all the way from the Persian Gulf to Peru. We have already seen the chief example of this in Spain.

     The situation is roughly the same throughout the Arabic Near East. This dominance by the armed forces would not be so objectionable were it not that their leaders are (1) ignorant, (2) selfish, (3) outstanding obstacles to any progressive reorganization of the community, especially by their diversion of the limited wealth available for social or economic investment, and (4) are so lacking in military morale or competence that they provide almost no protection for the areas which they are presumably supposed to defend. Certainly any area needs some organized force of arms-bearing persons to maintain public order and to protect the area from external interference, but the incompetence of the existing armed forces from Kuwait to Bolivia is so great that a superior degree of public order and defense could have been achieved with a greater degree of stability from a simple gendarmerie equipped with motorcars and hand guns than from the expensive arrays of complicated and misused equipment which have been provided for, or forced upon, the armies of this great area from the United States, the West European Powers, or, (since 1955) the Communist bloc.

     Although parliamentary regimes, in imitation of Britain and France, had been established throughout the Near East, as in much of the world, they never functioned as democratic or even constitutional systems because of the lack of organized political parties and of any traditions of civil and personal rights. Political parties remained largely personal followings or blocs, and political power, based on the arbitrary autocracy of Semitic patriarchal family life, was also personal, and never took on the impersonal characteristics associated with Western rule of law and constitutional practices. The weakness of any conception of rules, and of the material benefits which help rules to survive, made it impossible for the Near East to grasp the conventions associated with cooperation in opposition found in the Western two-party system, parliamentary practices, and sports.

     The whole range of human and universal relations of the Arabs was monistic, personal, and extralegal, in contrast to that of the West, which was pluralistic, impersonal, and subject to rules. As a result, constitutional and two-party politics were incomprehensible to the Near East, and the parliamentary system, where it existed, was only a facade for an autocratic system of personal intrigues. It is no accident that two-party politics functioned in the Near East only briefly and in two non-Arabic, if Muslim, countries: Turkey and the Sudan. It is also no accident that in most of the Near East, the chief method for changing a government was by assassination and that such actions usually took place in the most cowardly fashion (to Western eyes) such as shooting in the back.

     The growth of militarism in the Near East modified these political practices to some extent but without changing them in any fundamental way. The parliament was ignored or abolished, political groups and blocs were eliminated or outlawed, often being replaced by a single amorphous and meaningless party whose sole purpose was propaganda; and military administration generally replaced civil parliamentary government. Most obviously, perhaps, changes of regime now take place by military coups instead of by rigged elections or by assassinations. Even the Sudan and Turkey had their two-party parliamentary regimes overturned by military coups d'้tat in 1958 and in 1960. Elsewhere factions within the officers' corps have replaced parliamentary political parties as the significant units of political conflict. Thus Iraq had military coups in 1936, 1941, 1958, and 1963. Similar events were frequent in Syria, notably in 1949, 1951, 1961, and 1962.

     That the poverty, chaos, and disunity of the Arab world was a consequence of organizational and morale factors rather than of such objective obstacles as limited natural resources is clear from the case of Israel. There, in less than eight thousand square miles with no significant resources and hampered by endless external obstacles, the Zionist movement has constructed the strongest, most stable, most progressive, most democratic, and most hopeful state in the Near East. This was possible because of the morale of the Israeli, which was based on outlooks antithetical to the attitudes of the Arabs. The Israeli were full of self-sacrifice, self-discipline, social solidarity, readiness to work, cooperation, and hopes for the future. Their ideology was largely Western, with a devotion to science, democracy, individual respect, technology, and the future which could match or exceed the best periods of the Western past. All these things made them anathema to the Arabs, whose hysterical hatred was not really aimed at the loss of Palestine as a land but at the presence of the Israeli, whose qualities were a refutation of generations of Arab self-deceptions and pretenses.

     The precarious balance the British had tried to keep in Palestine between their promises to the Zionists and their efforts to placate the Arabs were destroyed by Hitler's determination to annihilate the Jews of Europe and the conditions of World War II which made it seem that he would be successful. The Jews, their supporters, and allies tried to smuggle in any Jews who could be saved from Europe. Since there was nowhere else they could go, many were smuggled into Palestine. British efforts to prevent this, in fulfillment of their obligations to the Arabs under the League of Nations Mandate, led to a kind of guerrilla warfare between Jews and British, with the Arabs attacking the former intermittently. This problem reached acute form when the conquest of Germany opened the doors for surviving Jews to escape from the horrors of Nazism. In August 1945, President Truman asked British permission to admit 100,000 European Jews into Palestine, but his repeated requests were refused. Ignoring such permission, large-scale efforts were made to smuggle Jewish refugees into Palestine, where they could be cared for by Jewish groups. Many of these were transported under frightful conditions in overcrowded, leaky ships, which were often intercepted by the British, who took their passengers to concentration camps in Cyprus. From such actions came reprisals and counter-reprisals.

     The Zionist settlement in Palestine was largely agricultural, the immigrants being settled in close-knit village communities on lands, often semiarid lands, purchased by funds raised by the World Zionist conference or its friends and administered under the Jewish Agency for Palestine. These organizations gave the Zionist groups, over several decades, the political and administrative experience and the patterns of self-sacrifice for a common cause which provided the functioning political structure for the state of Israel as the British mandate for Palestine was ended in 1948. The Zionist communal villages, under constant danger of attack by Arab raiders, developed a mentality somewhat like that of early American frontier settlements amid hostile Indians. Each village developed a force of trained defense fighters, its Haganah, with arms hidden in the village, or in a regional center, for the day in which they must fight for their continued existence. This Haganah organization subsequently became the Army of Israel.

     British raids on Zionist centers to arrest illegal immigrants or to seize hidden arms, and Arab attacks upon incautious Zionist settlements, soon led to reprisals and counter-reprisals and to the creation of violent and bitter splinter groups within the Zionist effort. The Jewish Agency did not have absolute control over the Haganah and had decreasingly less over a number of minute reprisal groups of which the chief were the extremist Irgun Zvai Le'umi, with several thousand members, or the terrorist "Stern Gang" of less than two hundred. The latter group had murdered the British high commissioner, Lord Moyne, in November 1944, and later assassinated the United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, in September 1948.

     During the years 1945-1948, the Jewish Agency sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, to remove the rigid British restrictions on Jewish immigration and Jewish land purchases, and to obtain an international loan to finance its Jewish settlement policies. These were resisted, not only because of Britain's desires to remain on amicable relations with the Arab states, but also from the obvious lack of sympathy for the Zionist cause within the British government, especially after Churchill's National government was replaced by a Labour Party regime in 1945. The immediate demand for admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe was rejected by the British, and efforts to smuggle some of these in gave rise to conditions of quasi-warfare between Britain and the Zionist groups. A League of the neighboring Arab states which had been formed under British sponsorship in March 1945 took as its chief aim the destruction of the Zionist plans, and sought to block Jewish immigration or use up Haganah arms by sneak raids on Zionist frontier settlements.

     When the Labour government in June 1946 refused the Zionist request for admission of the 100,000 refugees, and, instead, sought to arrest the members of the Jewish Agency, the Irgun Zvai Le'umi in reprisal exploded 500 pounds of TNT under the British headquarters in the east wing of the luxurious King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing almost a hundred persons. The World Zionist Congress elections of December showed decreasing support for more moderate figures like Dr. Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion. The former won reelection as president of the World Zionist Movement by a bare majority, and refused to offer his name for reelection as president of the Jewish Agency. This increase in the extremist influence within the Zionist movement made it clear to Britain that peace in Palestine could be maintained only at a great cost which the Labour government was unable and unwilling to pay. Support for the mandate from the United States was unobtainable, since Washington generally tended to favor the Jewish side, while the British, in spite of their valiant efforts to appear impartial, clearly favored the Arabs. Death sentences on Jewish terrorists, first carried out by the British in 1947, merely intensified the violence, with the British armed forces suffering about three casualties a week, one-third fatal.

     In April 1947, the British sought to escape from the situation by appealing to the United Nations, which voted in November to partition Palestine into two intertwining Jewish and Arab zones, with an international zone in Jerusalem. The Arab League rejected partition, and its members swore to resist it by force, hy a "relentless war," according to a Cairo newspaper. This war opened with Arab riots in Palestine against the UN vote at the very time that the Jews were welcoming it. Arab irregulars began to enter Palestine from Syria and Egypt as the British began to withdraw from their long effort to administer the country.

     This British withdrawal from Palestine was but one aspect of the general withdrawal of Britain from its prewar world and imperial position. It was a consequence of the general political weakening of Great Britain, its acute economic and financial position in the postwar period and, above all, by the growing preference of the ordinary British voter for social welfare and higher living standards at home over the remote and impersonal glories of imperial prestige abroad.

     On September 26, 1947, the British announced they would withdraw from Palestine and that failure to obtain a United Nations administration or any accepted Arab-Zionist partition would not delay this process. However, the British were determined not to hand over the administration to the only organization available which was capable of handling the job, the Jewish Agency, and as a result simply abandoned or closed down many public services and destroyed or left many essential administrative records. This created a chaotic situation in which the Arab League was unable to rule, the United Nations and Britain were unwilling to rule, and the Jewish Agency was prevented from taking over hy the retiring British forces.

     At the beginning of April 1948, small forces from Syria, Iraq, and Egypt entered Palestine to support the local Arabs' efforts to prevent the Jewish Agency taking control of the country. They were followed by the Arab Legion of Transjordan, under British officers, which came in as soon as the British mandate ended on May 14, 1948. Although the Zionists were outnumbered and had inferior equipment, their courage, tenacity, and persistence, combined with the mutual rivalries and divisions among the five Arab groups, allowed the Israeli to establish and consolidate a Zionist government in several areas of Palestine. During the interval, financial support from American sympathizers allowed the Zionists to rectify the arms disequilibrium, chiefly by purchases from Czechoslovakia, which had-just joined the Iron Curtain bloc in March.

     As early as January, many Arab families had begun to flee from Palestine, and by June this became a flood. Many left voluntarily, encouraged by the unrealistic promises of the Arab League to return them as conquerors after the total defeat of Zionism, but a substantial number were uprooted and expelled by Zionist retaliatory actions. Eventually, in spite of the Jewish Agency's promise that Arabs would be welcome to continue to live in Israel if they did not act to subvert the new state, the number of refugees reached an estimated 652,000 persons. Most of these were settled in camps along the frontiers in Jordan and in Egypt and were maintained by international charity administered under the United Nations.

     Efforts to resettle these unfortunates within the Arab States of the Near East were blocked by these states, which refused to cooperate in any such recognition of the changed situation in Palestine and which welcomed refugee discontent as an instrument for stirring up hatred of Israel and the West among their own citizens. Large numbers of the refugees eventually left these camps and integrated themselves by their own efforts into the life of the Arab States of the Near East, but birthrates in the camps were so high that the total number in the camps decreased very slowly. In Jordan the refugees who became assimilated were so numerous and so bitter that they came to dominate that precarious state, were a constant threat to the stability of its government, forced it to destroy its friendly relations with Britain, which had founded it, and remained as an explosive threat against Israel.

     The new state of Israel was proclaimed by Ben-Gurion on May 14, 1948, and was recognized by President Truman sixteen minutes later, in a race to beat the Soviet Union (whose recognition came on l\lay 17th). Efforts by both to use the United Nations machinery to stop the Israeli-Arab war in Palestine were frustrated by conflicting opinions and especially by British efforts to restrict Israeli acquisition of arms and immigration without placing comparable restrictions on the surrounding Arab States.

     A truce imposed by the UN on June 11th was violated hy both sides and broke down with a resumption of fighting in July, but by that time the Arab states were squabbling bitterly among themselves, and were increasingly involved in embarrassment because their propaganda falsehoods to their own peoples about their glorious victories over Zionism could not be sustained in the face of the precipitous retreats of their forces under Israeli attacks. Some of the Arab states tried to excuse their defeats as resulting from Transjordanian "treason." Ten days of renewed fighting from July 8-18, 1948, mostly favorable to Israel, were ended by a three-day UN ultimatum threatening sanctions against any state which continued fighting. This curtailment of Israeli successes by United Nations actions and the UN mediator's suggestion that Jerusalem be given to the Arabs led directly to his assassination by Israeli extremists in September.

     On September 20th the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, chief Muslim religious leader of the Levant and a wartime collaborator with the Nazis, proclaimed an "Arab Government of All Palestine," which was at once recognized by all the Arab states except Jordan and w-as set up at Gaza on Palestine territory occupied by Egypt. Israel in return launched successful and successive week-long attacks on Egypt and Lebanon which were stopped by UN truces on October 31, 1948. Belated recognition of the truth about Egypt's weakness, if not its corruption, led to street riots in Cairo and assassination of the Egyptian prime minister.

     British efforts to invoke its 1936 alliance witl1 Egypt to justify British military action against Israel were blocked by Egypt's refusal to allow such a public display of Egypt's helplessness. Five British planes which "attacked" Israel were promptly shot down (January 7, 1949). This led to Britain's de facto recognition of Israel on January 28th and the gradual release of Jewish immigrants imprisoned on Cyprus. A series of armistice agreements w ere negotiated in the spring of 1949. These left various forces in approximately the positions they held, but were accompanied by explicit refusals by the Arab states to make peace with Israel, to recognize its existence, or to allow any steps to be taken to remedy the plight of Arab refugees outside Palestine. To this day these problems remain, with the Arab states still at war with Israel and publicly sworn to exterminate it.

     Egypt's defeat in the Israeli war brought to a head persistent Egyptian discontent, especially its hatred for the corrupt and lecherous King Farouk. Egypt's plight, however, was far deeper and more ancient than Israel, and Farouk's blame, in spite of his total failure as a ruler, was less than that of his great-great-grandfather, Muhammad Ali, who had been Khedive of Egypt under the Ottoman sultan in 1811-1848. Until Muhammad Ali's time, Egypt continued its ancient practice of raising a single crop of food from each annual flooding of the Nile Valley. Muhammad Ali, in order to finance his plans to conquer the whole Near East, took over state ownership of all the land and built a great network of irrigation canals which permitted perennial cultivation of the land with two to four crops a year. He also established state monopolies of industrial enterprises to equip his armed forces.

     Muhammad Ali's successors, especially his grandson, Ismail, ended state ownership of land and industry, allowing both to fall into private hands where they retained much of their monopolistic character. At the same time, they burdened the country with enormous debts to European bankers for public-works projects of irrigation, railroads, and the Suez Canal. In the same period, the demand for Egyptian long-lint cotton became so great during the world cotton shortage caused by the American Civil War that it became the favorite crop of the landlord class and the chief source of foreign exchange to pay off Egypt's debts. But this meant that Egypt's prosperity became linked to the uncontrolled fluctuations of prices on the Liverpool cotton market.

     The results of all this were to create the Egypt of 1936, the first year of Farouk's reign. Irrigation, with its perpetual-motion farming, greatly increased the output of food, and allowed an increase in population from 3.2 million in 1821 to 6.8 million in 1892 to 12.5 million in 1914. At the same time European science, by its control of epidemic diseases, reduced the infant mortality rate. The rise in population began to outstrip the increase in food supply by a wide margin, especially when the small group of large landowners insisted that the land be used for exported cotton rather than for home-consumed food..

     In 1914, production of cereals was 3.5 million tons for 12.5 million Egyptians; by 1940 there was only 4 million tons for 17 million persons. The output of food continued to crawl upward, following the great leaps in population. By 1960 the population was increasing at the rate of one person a minute, over half a million a year, and had already passed 26 million. Moreover, as a result of perennial irrigation, the population of 1940 was much less healthy than that of 1840, since it was infected with debilitating, chronic, water-borne, infectious diseases like malaria, bilharzia, ancylostomiasis, and irritating eye infections.

     Moreover, unlike the ancient cultivation based on annual flooding which replaced the fertility of the soil, the perennial irrigation of today requires artificial fertilizers (which the harassed peasant cannot afford) to retain the productivity of the soil. Thus by 1950 an enormously increased population, worn down by anemia and malnutrition, was crowded in a narrow valley under the greatest population density in the world, with neither land nor work for idle millions, their miserable fates entirely in the hands of the small ruling elite of landlords, commercial monopolists, and political exploiters of world economic changes.

     Until 1952 monopolization of land, although less complete than in other Near Eastern countries, was nevertheless extreme, since 3 percent of the landowners held 55 percent of the agricultural land and 28 percent of the owners held 87 percent of the land. The remaining 72 percent of landowners with 13 percent of the land were too poor to exploit their plots effectively since they could not afford fertilizer, choice seed, or adequate tools, and in most cases had to supplement their work on the land by other activities or by renting plots from other owners.

     Since the great owners did not work their lands themselves, most Egyptian soil was worked by renters and sharecroppers, often removed from the real owner by a series of intermediaries and sub-leasers. In addition, of course, millions without land of their own had to work for about five American cents an hour on the lands of others, and a third group eked out an existence entirely from rented land in which the rents were equal to about three-quarters of the net yield. The burden of population on the land (about 1,500 persons per square mile compared to about 200 in France) left everyone drastically underemployed, with at least half the rural population merely sitting around in the dust or napping all day. Because children were more healthy than their diseased-sapped parents, they were more energetic and often were skillful and could be obtained for wages less than half that of men (about twenty American cents for a day of ten or twelve hours in 1956), much of the agricultural work, especially in cotton, was done by children.

     The pressure of population, the productivity of the land from multiple cropping (average annual yields about twice those in Europe), and monopolized landownership drove land prices and rents upward just as they drove wages downward. This gave rise to a steady increase of renting and sharecropping before 1952. By 1948 the cash rental of land per acre was about 30 percent higher than the average net income per acre. Thus the situation in the rural economy was explosive.

     These problems reached this critical level under the shield of the artificial prosperity of Egypt during the war. As the chief base for the Allied war effort in the Near East and the center of the British resistance to Rommel's Afrika Korps, Allied supplies and money had poured into Egypt and provided wages and a higher standard of living for all. Moreover, high wartime prices for cotton had created a temporary boom. By 1947 all this collapsed, and hundreds of thousands who had been supported by British spending during the war were wandering the alleys of Cairo without money, work, or hope.

     In sharp contrast with the poverty of millions, about 400 families had made immense fortunes from the land since 1850. In 1952, when 250 acres brought its owner an income of about $20,000 a year, the royal family had close to 200,000 acres, and the few hundred landlord families held over a million acres. Little of these incomes was devoted to any constructive purpose, although few of their possessors lived such dissolute and wasteful existences as Farouk.

     These economic discontents were capped by political unrest. Egypt had been granted its independence by Great Britain in 1922, but the latter continued to interfere in the governing of the country by peremptory notes or even ultimatums (as in 1924 and 1938). Submission by the monarchy or the government to such pressure roused great animosity in the Assembly, which was generally dominated by the irresponsible nationalist party, the Wafd (led successively by Saad Zaghlul and Mustafa Nahas). Relations with Britain were finally regulated by a treaty in 1936 which established a twenty-year alliance, granted Britain continued possession of the naval base at Alexandria until 1944, and allowed it to keep a force of 10,000 men in the Canal Zone. Other British forces were withdrawn, and the disputed question of conflicting British and Egyptian rights in the Sudan were compromised to allow limited Egyptian migration and limited use of Egyptian troops in that area.

     The most significant result of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 was a double one. By providing for withdrawal of British troops from Egypt proper, it made it necessary for Egypt to establish its own army; at the same time, it established two political issues (British troops in the Suez Canal Zone and incomplete Egyptian control of the Sudan) on whicl1 that new army could agitate. Most significant of all, Mustafa Nahas's decree of 1936 establishing the Military Academy to train officers for the new army opened this career to any Egyptian, independent of class or economic status. This created the opening by which ambitious and relatively poor young men could work their way upward in power and wealth. It was the first essential step toward the Nasser government of the 1960's and, for the first time in thousands of years, made it possible for Egypt to be ruled by Egyptians (the Muhammad Ali dynasty of 1811-1952 was of Albanian origin). The first class of the Military Academy to graduate after the Treaty of 1936 was the class of 1938, whose members, led by Nasser, made the revolution of 1952. Most of the leaders of that revolt were either the sons or grandsons of poor peasants. The chief aims of their revolt were agrarian reform, elimination of waste, inefficiency, and corruption from the Egyptian government, and the completion of independence by the withdrawal of British influence from the Canal Zone and, if possible, the Sudan.

     The revolt moved forward under the impetus of increasing shame and hatred for the Farouk monarchy. In this process two chief steps were the British ultimatum of 1942 and the defeat by Israel in 1948, since these opened an unbridgeable gap between the dynasty and the officers' group.

     The conspiracies of the class of 1938 began almost immediately upon their graduation from the Military Academy, when Gamal Abdel Nasser joined a group which exchanged secret oaths to reform Egypt by expelling the British. By 1939 most of this group were in contact with the "Muslim Brotherhood," a secret band of fanatics founded in 1929 to establish (by assassination and violence, if necessary) a political regime founded on purely Muslim principles. Many of both groups were involved in the anti-British and pro-Nazi agitations throughout the Near East of 1938-1942. These centered around the fanatical Mufti of Jerusalem and culminated in the pro-Nazi revolt of Rashid Ali al-Kilani in Iraq, during Hitler's conquest of Crete in April 1941. Britain used force to overthrow the new pro-Hitler government in Iraq, but the anti-British agitations continued throughout the Arab world. M7hen they became acute in Egypt in February 1942, the British ambassador, accompanied by British tanks, visited King Farouk in the Abdin Palace and gave him a choice between cooperation with Britain or deposition. The king yielded at once, but many of the younger officers were outraged at this affront to Egyptian dignity, and Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad Naguib resigned his commission in protest at an army which was "unable to protect its king."

     Ten years later, when Farouk's disgraceful behavior had alienated most of the army and disquieted much of the world, this same Naguib, by then a heroic general who had been wounded three times in the war of 1948 with Israel, was the nominal head of the revolt.

     This revolt was engineered by a small group of five officers whose real leader was Nasser, although the latter, who had been conspiring against one thing or another since his schooldays, was virtually unknown to the police until the revolt had already started.

     Like most revolts, that of 1952 started from an event which had little to do with the conspirators' plans. In October 1951, Mustafa Nahas, who had signed the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, enacted a law to abrogate it. Shortly afterward, guerrilla attacks on the British military installations in the Canal Zone drove the British forces to seek to disarm the Egyptian police nearby. In the resulting fight about fifty Egyptians were killed and a hundred wounded. The next day (January 26, 1952) riots in Cairo burned down about four hundred buildings, including the famous Shepheard's Hotel, the center of British tourist life in Egypt. Damage ran to over $60 million, but the real destruction was to the Egyptian political system.

     Police and army both refused to fire upon the incendiaries of January 26th. Farouk, who had no wish to alienate the British, dismissed Prime Minister Nahas for the Cabinet's inadequate efforts to suppress the disturbances. But no successor could be found capable of winning the confidence of the diverse groups who sought to exploit the miseries of Egypt.

     On the night of July 22nd, eight young officers seized control of the army headquarters, the radio stations, and the government, and forced Farouk to make General Naguib head of the army. Only two soldiers were killed in the process. Four days later, with tanks surrounding the palace, Farouk was forced to abdicate and was sent into exile.

     The new revolution had neither doctrine nor program, and continued to improvise year after year. A civilian prime minister was replaced by General Naguib on September 7th, and he was replaced by Nasser on February 25, 1954. Most decrees, with the exception of the Agrarian Law of 1952 and its subsequent revisions, were concerned with the officers' junta's efforts to consolidate itself in power. Opposition groups from all parts of the political spectrum were arrested, usually imprisoned without trial, and sometimes tortured. Some were tried and executed. All political parties were dissolved and their assets confiscated "for the people." A rather vague pro-junta party, called the National Liberation Rally, was established to support the new regime, but without any real program. The Communists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and striking labor unions were persecuted, and most of the wealthy elite were cut down in wealth and influence.

     The source of these authoritarian moves was Nasser, even in the period when Naguib was both president of the republic (June 1953 to November 1954) and prime minister (September 1952 to February 1954). Nasser, who replaced Naguib as prime minister in February 1954, replaced him as president as well in November of that year. The general issue on which they broke was Nasser's autocracy, but the specific issue was his outlawing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nasser won out in the struggle because he was concerned only with the reality of power and was prepared to cooperate with any group, to adopt any program, or to sacrifice any friend if doing so would strengthen his control of Egypt. Originally his personal sympathies were with the peasant masses and with the West, and there is no evidence that he was possessed of the pleasure-loving indolent characteristics which weaken so many ambitious Arabs. He continued to regard himself as a man of the people, but his insatiable thirst was for personal power.

     The Agrarian Law of September 1952 determined much of the subsequent political and economic policy of the regime. It sought to alleviate the plight of the peasant and to force the landlord group, the center of Egyptian wealth, to shift their holdings from land to investment in industry and commerce. This was expected to create jobs for the numerous unemployed of the cities and to increase the Egyptian sector in trade, which was still largely in foreign hands. The original law set a maximum of landownership of 315 acres for each family, with 210 for the head of the family and a quarter as much for each of the first two children. Land beyond this amount had to be sold to the peasants who were actually working it, at a price seventy times the annual land tax, in plots of 2 to 5 acres. If not sold thus in six weeks, the surplus was taken by the state in return for thirty-year 3 percent bonds and was then sold to the peasants on long-term payments by the state. Since the peasants' cultivation, whether as laborer, renter, or sharecropper, had previously been strictly regulated by the owner, this regulatory function was, under the new law, taken over by cooperative societies which were made compulsory in each district. These societies also act as purchasing, marketing, and training cooperatives. The law also enacted a reduction in rents for peasants who rented land. Several years later the maximum limit for landownership was reduced to 52.5 acres per person.

     The agrarian reform undoubtedly helped the peasants who obtained ownership of plots or those whose rents were reduced, but it did nothing about the landless laborers or the growing mass of persons with no economic role who were multiplying so rapidly from the population explosion. The older landlord class, even on a fifty-acre maximum, was adequately provided for, but the method of compensation for their confiscated lands did not give them the free capital which it had been hoped would expand industry and trade. Moreover, few had sufficient confidence in the economic future of Egypt or the regime itself to put much of their current incomes into such activities, especially as the Nasser government took over many of the largest and most prosperous industrial enterprises. As a result, the government itself had increasingly to create new enterprises from government funds, and the system, although committed to a "mixed economy," increasingly had to move toward Socialism.

     It was clear from the beginning that the only remedy for the population explosion was additional land, and it was equally clear that this could be achieved only if the waters of the Nile were spread widely and more effectively over the uncultivated periphery of the Nile Valley. For this purpose the Nasser government proposed a High Dam three miles south of Aswan between the First Cataract of the Nile and the Sudan frontier. The project was technically feasible but enormously expensive, and involved complex political problems.

     The proposed dam, three miles long and 120 yards high, would back up a reservoir of about 130 billion cubic meters of water, much of it in Sudan territory, and displacing 60,000 inhabitants as well as submerging many archaeological treasures. The project, originally estimated to cost over a billion dollars, would increase Egypt's farm lands by about 30 percent, or two million acres, and, by equalizing the flow of the Nile throughout the year, would steady the country's whole system of agricultural production. If the flow of water from the reservoir were harnessed to generate electricity, it could yield 10,000 million kilowatt-hours, but this would drive the total cost up to about $4 billion over fifteen years. Such a project could not possibly be financed by Egypt itself, and could not be built without previous agreement with the Sudan. Such an agreement must modify an earlier compromise of 1929 which gave Egypt 48,000 million cubic meters of water and the Sudan only 4,000 million cubic meters out of the total Nile flow of 84,000 million cubic meters, leaving 32,000 million cubic meters which previously flowed to the sea to be divided from the new High Dam reservoir.

     From the beginning it should have been clear to Nasser that his regime would be a success only if he found a solution to Egypt's economic plight and that the most substantial contribution to such a solution would come from the High Dam. Such a dam could be built only with the financial assistance of the West, since the Soviet bloc lacked the free resources or the psychological outlook to do the job, and a dam of that size, seventeen times the mass of the pyramid of Cheops, could not be built by Egypt's own resources soon enough to alleviate Egypt's economy. If Nasser had concentrated on this problem and determined to retain relations with the United States sufficiently amicable to obtain the necessary American aid, some progressive solution of the problems of Egypt and the Near East might have been possible.

     However, Nasser allowed himself to be distracted by all kinds of emotional upheavals of an unconstructive kind. He maintained a constant state of hatred and tension toward Israel; he insisted on heavy armaments Egypt neither needed nor could afford and which Egyptians lacked the skill and the morale to use; he kept Egyptians and the whole Arab world in an uproar by his incendiary speeches and actions and his continual political intrigues and interventions in a fantastic and needless effort to make himself the leader of Arab political movements all the way from Morocco and Lake Chad to the Persian Gulf and Alexandretta; and he insisted on demonstrating his independence of the West by constant attacks and insults directed at the United States.

     The United States, in the Dulles era, contributed to this confusion by its mistaken idea that the Soviet Union was actively engaging in efforts to take over the Near East and by Dulles's efforts to force all the countries of the area into a single defensive pact, like the Baghdad Pact. Dulles's contribution to the confusions of the Near East, as elsewhere, was that he refused to see that the problems of primary concern to the local peoples were local problems and that these were merely worsened by his insistence that the only problem in any area was the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union.

     When the United States rejected Nasser's tentative requests for heavy weapons, Nasser went to the Soviet bloc with his demands and obtained a large part of his requests (far beyond his real needs) but on a barter arrangement which tied up the Egyptian cotton crop for years in the future and removed this major prop of Egypt's economy out of the economic picture. Without cotton to sell for foreign exchange, Nasser could not hope to ameliorate Egypt's immediate economic problems. At the same time, while filling the air with denunciations of the United States and threats to Israel, Nasser opened his discussions for the financial assistance necessary to construct the High Dam. When the International Bank, as well as the American government, agreed to contribute to the project in principle but insisted on certain necessary precautions, such as the right to scrutinize the accounts, Nasser tried to blackmail them by playing off the United States against Soviet Russia by circulating stories of Soviet offers to build the project.

     In the meantime, Nasser was engaged in intensive intrigues against the three Arab dynasties of Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom were linked with the West. To increase their local popular support these dynasties had to adopt policies more independent of the West, or even anti-Western, in order to avoid the subversive influence on their subjects of Nasser's wild talk about independence from the West. Most of these anti-Western actions took the form of anti-British actions. One of the chief of these was the dismissal by King Hussein of Jordan of General Sir John Glubb (so-called "Glubb Pasha"), who had trained and commanded the Jordanian "Arab Legion" for many years. This dismissal, in March 1956, left Jordan in a state of semi-dissolution and in grave danger of being partitioned by its Arab neighbors (Iraq, Egypt, Arabia), since the Arab Legion was one of the chief supports of the dynasty. It also gravely jeopardized British influence in Jordan.

     To counteract this, the British tried to shift Iraqi troops from Iraq, where the government of Nuri al Said was still friendly to Britain, to Jordan where they could be used to support King Hussein and perhaps be used to prevent the anticipated pro-Nasser and anti-British outcome of the Jordan election of October 1956. For the same reason, the British prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, adopted an increasingly anti-Israeli attitude, which culminated late in Igj5 when he suggested that the Israeli frontier be redrawn to give some disputed areas to Jordan. Since Israel was already under great threat from both Egypt and Jordan, it continued to rearm in 1956, and made perfectly clear that it would oppose in any way it could any union of the Arab states and especially any move to unite the Iraq and Jordan armed forces or to put them under Egyptian command.

     In this tense situation Dulles suddenly upset the balance by withdrawing the United States offer of financial aid for the Aswan Dam. This decision of July 19, 1956, was answered on July 26th, fourth anniversary of the expulsion of King Farouk, by Nasser with the sudden nationalization of the Suez Canal Company so that its profits could be used by Egypt to finance the High Dam.

     July to October 1956 was a period of mounting crisis in the Near East as all the principal states concerned mishandled the difficult situation with gross incompetence.

     There can be no doubt that Egypt had the right to nationalize an Egyptian corporation such as the Suez Canal Company, and the only concern of the outside world was the twofold on that the owners of record be adequately compensated and that the transl. operations through the Canal be efficiently conducted for all shipping. From the beginning the British took their stand on other grounds, maintaining, incorrectly, that the company was not an Egyptian corporation but an international organization, that the Egyptians could not operate it at all, and that Britain would use force, if necessary, to prevent Nasser from obtaining control of the Canal. France supported Britain, chiefly because it wished to strike at Nasser for his assistance to the anti-French rebels (the FLN) in Algeria. Israel supported these two, while following a completely independent policy, because it was increasingly convinced that its survival as a state depended on its ability to break out of the growing encirclement of the Arab states.

     Dulles, having precipitated the crisis, sought to placate both sides, refusing to support Britain's arguments yet unwilling to abandon it in public. Accordingly, as usual, Dulles spent most of his efforts trying to find some verbal formula which would gloss over the differences. Though he refused to support Britain and France for fear this would drive Nasser toward Moscow, he was unable to support the Arab states because he needed France and Britain in the American struggle with the Soviet Union. As a result, his ambivalent and changeable actions and statements alienated both sides.

     While the controversy raged, in public, in secret conferences, and at the United Nations, the Canal continued to operate with about a third of the dues (including those of American ships) being paid to the new Egyptian Canal authority and the rest going to the old company. The British insisted that the Egyptians were incapable of operating the Canal, and to prove the point recalled all British-controlled pilots and technical operators on September 15, 1956, and at the same time challenged the effectiveness of the new administration by presenting a large number of English and French ships for passage. This attempt was based on biased information accepted by Whitehall from the old Suez Company. It proved, in fact, to be wide of the mark, for the remaining "Egyptian" pilots successfully conducted fifty ships through the Canal in one day. Substitute pilots were obtained at very high wages by advertising throughout the world.

     The solution of this technical problem left only the second problem— compensation to the former owners. Because Egypt had the funds to make payment, the practical and legal crisis should have been ended. But Britain and France were still determined to force Egypt to accept some type of international control of the Canal, and many in both countries were determined to humiliate Nasser and bring about his downfall in order to end his intriguing against the two former imperial Powers in the Arab world, especially in the oil-rich Near East and in Algeria. For this reason the two old allies continued to press for an international Canal authority and to prepare their own armed forces in the Near East to compel internationalization. While conferences were still going on, in the United Nations and elsewhere, the showdown was precipitated, somewhat earlier than London and perhaps Paris had expected, by Israel..

     During the Suez crisis, the quite separate problem of Israel had become more intense, with increasingly frequent Arab raids on Israel and more violent Israeli reprisals. The situation was made more complex by French support and rearmament for Israel, in the face of continued British support for Jordan and Iraq. Israel felt certain that a complete victory for Nasser in the Canal crisis would encourage him to organize a general Arab attack on Israel. Nasser's trouble-making proclivities, even during the Canal crisis, were revealed when the French captured an Egyptian ship smuggling seventy tons of arms to the Algerian rebels on October 18th. Two days before, a secret Anglo-French conference in Paris discussed the situation and probably decided that the two Great Powers would intervene by an attack on Egypt, under the pretext of restoring order, if an Arab-Israeli war began. They probably expected this movement some time in November, and were not fully ready when it began on October 28th.

     The Jordan election of October 21, 1956, was a victory for the anti-Western, pro-Nasser activist parties pledged to revise the Anglo-Jordan alliance. Two days later, Egyptian and Syrian military missions arrived in Jordan and at once set up a joint Egyptian-Jordanian-Syrian military command with an Egyptian designated as commander in chief for any future hostilities with Israel. On the same day began the Soviet armed intervention in Hungary to repress the Budapest insurrection. On the following day Egyptian raiders began to penetrate into Israel, and Israel's mobilization began. Four days later, on the 29th, Israel attacked Egypt, and at once began a spectacular advance across the Sinai Desert toward the Suez Canal and Cairo..

     The nine-day Israeli Sinai campaign was a brilliant military success. Individual Egyptians and small units often fought fiercely, but the command was incompetent, morale was almost totally absent, and training was equally bad. Whole units fled like sheep, and much of the newly acquired heavy equipment was abandoned unused. On October 30th a joint Anglo-French ultimatum was sent to Israel and Egypt, ordering them to stop all warlike action, to withdraw their forces at least ten miles from the Canal, and to permit a temporary occupation of three Canal points, Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez, by Anglo-French forces. Israel accepted the ultimatum until it was clear that Egypt would not. The latter was attacked by British planes shortly after the ultimatum expired on October 31st, but Allied paratroops did not drop before November 5th, and the seaborne Anglo-Frencl1 invasion of Egypt did not begin until November 6th.

     The United States Department of State was wild with rage at what it regarded as British perfidy and Anglo-Israeli collusion to engage in war outside the Western alliance and collective security system (actions which had always seemed acceptable to Dulles if applied by the United States to the Formosa Strait or other areas of primary American concern). On October 30th Dulles tried to force through the Security Council of the United Nations a resolution condemning Israel and asking all United Nations members to cut off military, economic, or financial assistance to Israel. This was killed by Anglo-French vetoes, 7-2. Britain, the Commonwealth, and the London Cabinet itself were badly split, while world opinion was strongly against the use of force by any state. In London two ministers resigned, and others threatened to do so.

     On November 2nd the Assembly of the United Nations, by its largest majority to date, accepted, by a vote of 64-5, a Dulles resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Near East. Egypt and Israel accepted on November 5th, while the Anglo-French forces stopped their advance the following day, twenty-three miles south of Port Said. The Israel forces were already across Sinai. Of more permanent significance, the petroleum pipelines and pumping stations bringing oil to Levantine seaports across Syria were destroyed, and a number of block-ships sunk by Egypt in the Canal had cut off all Near Eastern oil supplies to western Europe by the direct routes. Most important of all, the parallel American-Soviet threats to France and England and the simultaneous Soviet attack on Hungary had made permanent splits in the two great super-Power blocs and had given a greatly increased impetus to the growth of an independent third bloc between them. This development of an increasingly independent Buffer Fringe between the two disintegrating super-Power blocs became the outstanding feature of the next seven years of world history under the awesome canopy of the Soviet-American missile and space race (1956-1963).

     Liquidation of the Suez crisis was not completed until the end of 1958, but in the interval the continued confusions of the whole Near East almost totally concealed the process of liquidation. Much of this confusion arose from inept handling by the Western Powers of the very real problems of the area. These problems w ere four in number: (1) the economic poverty of the area, especially the food crisis in Egypt; (2) the Israel issue; (3) the decline of British power leading to political instability; and (4) the challenge to the French position in Muslim North Africa, especially in Algeria. The decline in British and French influence was a consequence of World War II and especially of the decisions of the British and French peoples to devote their wealth to social welfare rather than to efforts to retain their imperial positions. This left a power vacuum, as the Arab states were obviously unable to maintain order in the area or even to govern themselves, and neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was willing to move into the almost insoluble problem of maintaining political stability in the area or to allow the other super-Power to make the effort to do so. Britain made feeble efforts to retain its influence in Jordan, Iraq, southern Arabia, and the Persian Gulf. In the case of Jordan and Iraq, at least, this was not worth the effort, and was doomed to failure, as became clear with the expulsion of Glubb Pasha in March 1956, and the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy and of Nuri al Said in July r958.

     American policy in the Near East was based on a series of assumptions which were so remote from the truth that no successful policy could be based on them. These were: (1) that the Near East was an area in which the Soviet Union had plans for immediate penetration and subversion in order to communize it; (2) that the Arab world was a unified bloc, with significant intrinsic power of its own, which would join the Soviet bloc (or at least contribute to increase its strength) if not constantly placated by concessions; (3) that no policy of neutralism of the Near East was feasible or acceptable to the West; (4) that the public opinion of the masses of Arab peoples was of some significance in the formulation of policy in the Arab states; and (5) that the arming of the Arab states would contribute to their ability to resist Soviet penetration and to the political stability of the area.

     All five of these assumptions were untrue. The Soviet Union had no significant plans to communize, to subvert, or to penetrate the Near East after 1948, and was eager to see it become a stable and neutral area in order to deprive the United States of any excuse to intervene there. Moreover, the Arab states were neither united nor strong, but were diverse, filled with mutual hatreds and petty jealousies, and almost totally incapable of acting as a bloc even when their primary interests were threatened. In fact, their only common interests were hatred of Israel, desire to be independent and neutral, and the desire for economic handouts (without any accompanying political commitments) from anyone who would give them. The public opinion of the Arab peoples, described in the previous sentence, was of little influence in the face of the concentration of local political power in the hands of the local armed forces, which were, with perhaps the exception of Nasser himself, corruptible. Efforts to arm these forces against a nonexistent Soviet armed threat contributed nothing to their ability to defend the area itself, and merely increased their corruption, their economic burden on the people, and the political instability of the area by increasing their abilities to threaten each other or Israel.

     Dulles's policies in the Near East were consistently the opposite of what they should have been. No possible alliance or rearming of the Arab states could have contributed anything to the area's ability to resist Communism, nor could the Arab states have contributed anything but headaches to the Kremlin if Washington's policies had "driven them into the arms of Russia." Over-all defense of the area should have been based on Ethiopia, Israel, and Turkey; the Arab states should have been given the independence, neutrality, and economic aid they wanted. The latter should have concentrated on the Aswan Dam and a Jordan Valley Authority (similar to TVA) for the mutual benefit of Jordan, Israel, and Syria, in return for the Arab states' acceptance of (1) a peace treaty with Israel and (2) resettlement of the Arab refugees from the Israeli war on the new agricultural lands provided by the Jordan Valley project. And, finally, the United States should have declared unilaterally that it would use any force necessary to prevent any Soviet intrusion into the Near East or any attack on the independence of Israel. As a supplementary, but probably unachievable, project the United States should have sought a pooling of the enormous oil revenues of the whole Near East to provide funds for the economic reconstruction of the area as a whole within the framework of an Arab economic community based on trade and free immigration within the Arab world.

     Instead of some such progressive solution of the Near East problem and the Suez crisis, the United States, acting through the United Nations, sought to restore the basically precarious status quo ante bellum without any guarantees. The real difficulty was Israel, which refused for several months to yield up the areas it had occupied without obtaining in return some solution of its grievances. These grievances were: (1) the refusal of the Arab states to make a peace treaty or to accept the existence of Israel by ending the 1948 war, (2) the Arab economic, social, and political blockade of Israel, which included boycotts of all world business firms which did business with Israel, (3) the denial of the Suez Canal to Israeli ships or identifiable Israeli goods since 1948, (4) constant harassment of Israeli shipping or fishing on the Gulf of Aqaba and the Jordan River, and (5) the use of the Gaza Strip, non-Egyptian territory occupied by Egypt under the 1948 armistice, as a basis for guerrilla raids on Israel.

     Eventually American pressure and world public opinion acting through the United Nations forced Israel to give up the territory it had captured, including the Gaza Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba shores, without any significant guarantees. A UN Emergency Force (UNEF) was sent to supervise the evacuation of Egyptian territory and the Gaza Strip, under pressure of severe economic and financial threats of an unofficial nature from Washington. The effectiveness of such threats rested on the fact that the whole Israeli economy was dependent on the flow of private funds from the United States, while the British attack on Egypt had been abandoned very largely as a consequence of the drain on British dollar and gold reserves, which fell $420 million in September-November 1956.

     The American threats of sanctions against its own friends and allies over Egypt at the very time when it was doing nothing to impose sanctions for the Soviet attack on Hungary, and its refusal to cooperate with the Soviet Union in stabilizing the Near East because of Hungary, presented a strange picture of political fantasy as 1956 ended. One of the methods of pressure used by the United States against the Western Powers was support of Egypt's refusal to allow any clearance of the Suez Canal until the withdrawal of troops from Egypt. This, of course, intensified the shortage of Near Eastern fuel oil in Europe as winter deepened. The evacuation of Anglo-French forces on December 22, 1956, and of Israeli forces on March 8, 1957, permitted clearing of the Canal and the reimposition of Egyptian blockade pressures on Israel. In the interval the American position, ignoring all the real problems of the area, was stated in the form of the so-called Eisenhower Doctrine in January 1957. Regarding the problem solely in terms of military opposition to Communism, this doctrine attacked the Soviet Union and threatened to use the armed forces of the United States to defend any "freedom-loving nations of the area . . . requesting such aid against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism...."

     In reply to this unconstructive promise the Soviet Union, in February 1957, suggested a joint effort by four Powers (Russia, the United States, Britain, and France) to reorganize the Near East on the basis of six principles: (1) peaceful settlement of all disputes there, (2) noninterference in internal affairs, (3) renunciation of all efforts to incorporate Near Eastern countries into military blocs of the Great Powers, (4) removal of foreign military bases from the area and the troops based on them, (5) a reciprocal ban on arms deliveries, and (6) promotion of economic development without political or military entanglements.

     This promising Soviet offer, which might have been negotiated into some settlement of the Near East's real problems, was rebuffed by the United States; instead, the Eisenhower Doctrine, in spite of the clear lack of any overt Communist threat, was used against Egypt and Syria in regard to Jordan and Lebanon.

     The Jordan monarchy was completely dependent upon the army, which was, in turn, completely dependent upon the financial subsidy from Britain. This subsidy (amounting to ฃ12 million a year) was ended by the new Parliament elected in October 1956. Syria and Saudi Arabia, which already had troops on Jordanian soil, joined with Egypt to continue the subsidy. To escape from growing Egyptian and Soviet influence, King Hussein dismissed his prime minister and sought aid from Washington. Rioting from opposition groups led to martial law, a $10 million grant under the Eisenhower Doctrine, and movement of the American Sixth Fleet to the Levant to support Hussein (April 1957).

     The rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Egypt for influence in the other Arab countries was marked by an Egypt-Syria economic union in September r9S7, a $112 million loan to Syria from the Soviet bloc, and (in February 1958) the union of these two countries into a United Arab Republic. Iraq and Jordan responded to this with a very ephemeral Arab Federation. By the spring of 1958, Nasser was engaged in controversies with all his neighboring states except Syria. A military coup by pro-Nasser officers in Iraq in July abolished the monarchy and assassinated Nuri al Said and his chief supporters and threatened to overthrow the insecure government of President Chemoun of Lebanon. To prevent this, American forces were landed in Lebanon in the same week (July 15-17) in which a United Nations commission on the spot reported a total lack of evidence of any outside forces trying to subvert Lebanon. On the following day, Hussein of Jordan asked, and obtained, a British parachute brigade to protect his position.

     Once again Khrushchev appealed for a Great Power conference (this time to include India) on the Near East, but was met by a series of evasions and legalistic obstacles from Washington. The United States refused to act outside the United Nations, and the suggestion finally ended in a series of recriminatory letters in August. A special session of the United Nations Assembly sent Secretary General Dag Hammarskj๖ld on a mission to the Near East which was able to evacuate the troops from Lebanon and Jordan by November 1958.

     This turmoil in the Muslim states continued during the subsequent period of Soviet-American missile rivalry (1956-1963). The United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria, established in February 1958, was broken by Syria after a military coup had overturned the Syrian government in September 1961. Another Syrian military revolt early in 1963 announced its re-establishment, but internal opposition, chiefly from the Ba'ath Party, prevented this. In Iraq the military revolt of July 1958, led by General Abdul Karim Qassim, remained in po\ver on a relatively pro-Communist and anti-Nasser basis until it was overthrown in a bloody military upheaval on February 8-9, 1963.

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