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... hold be noted that we have generally been at a disadvantage in crisis, since the Communists command a more flexible set of tools for imposing strain on the free world than we normally command. We are often caught in circumstances where our only available riposte is so disproportionate to the immediate provocation that its use risks unwanted escalation or serious political costs to the free community. This asymmetry makes it attractive for Communists to apply limited debilitating pressures upon us in situations where we find it difficult to impose on them an equivalent price for their intrusions (Rostov 173). The administration's desire to reduce it's dependence on nuclear weapons did not, however, imply any corresponding determination to cut back on either their number or variety. "Nuclear and non-nuclear power complement each other, " Robert McNamara insisted in 1962, "just as together they complement the non-military instruments of policy" (Gaddis 218). McNamara is only partially correct.
Widespread nuclear deployment as a means to complement peacetime diplomatic goals often backfires. For example, the presence of Jupiter missle's in Turkey became a public issue in 1962 when Khrushchev made their withdrawl a condition for removing Soviet IRBMs from Cuba. Although somewhat over-dramatized in most historical accounts, the Cuban Missle Crisis proves the award relation between nuclear security and political reality. But whatever the frustrations of dealing with Cuba after the missle crisis, the administration regarded the handling og that affair as a textbook demonstration of "the flexible response" in action, and therefore a model to be followed elsewhere.
A draft of National Security Action Memorandum of Feburary 1963 emphasized the need in the future to employ this "controlled and graduated application of integrated political, military, and diplomatic power" (Gaddis 231). The peaceful end to the crisis had shown that none of these concerns lay beyond the capacity of a "flexible response" strategy now validated by the test of practical experience. Once Kennedy was killed, there was an era of make-believe in the Pentagon. Vietnam was starting for real, and the constant deployment of U.
S. troops against Communist forces added a new element to our national security equation. Vietnam stands testament that the atomic bomb is a tactically useless weapon that aids an attacking nation in no way tangible way. Perhaps simply processing the bomb is a psychological advantage over the enemy, but the effects of this in Vietnam will nil. Later, Henry Kissenger would point out that in no crisis since 1962 had the strategic balance determined the outcome. There is no easy answer that best explains the Johnson administration's inability to come up with alternatives in Vietnam.
Whatever the answer, we can say with relative confidence that it had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Kissenger has pinpointed the reason early in the war: "Nuclear weapons, given the constraints on their use in an approaching era of parity, were of decreasing practical utility" (Kissenger 29). Around this time, we can conclude that the world has entered an age in which there is a strong and binding nuclear taboo. A nation that employs nuclear weapons to attack its enemies is considered evil. Therefore, all the hegemonic power gained from atomic weapons was absolutely worthless in Vietnam. While limited success was achieved in some international arenas during the Kennedy and Johnson years, Vietnam seals the coffin on the flexible response.
Gaddis agrees, saying Vietnam "was the unexpected legacy of the flexible response: not fine tuning, but clumsy overreaction, not coordination but disproportion, not strategic precision, but in the end, a strategic vacuum" (Gaddis 273). The 1968 campaign was unusual in that, unlike 1952 and 1960, it provided little indication of the direction in which the new administration would move into office. In addition, the world facing the new administration of 1968 was one ripe with possibilities of new approaches. To usher in these new strategies, Nixon choose Dr.
Henry Kissenger as his national security advisor. Kissenger's conceptual approach to the making of national security policy eliminated the crisis based flexible response system. "Crises, " he said, "were symptoms of deeper problems that if allowed to fester would prove increasingly unmanageable" (Kissenger 275). Kissenger was one of the first to recognize the shift from a bipolar to multi polar world. This was a natural result modernization, and therefore, traditional bipolar nuclear strategy began to lose importance, like Kissenger had predicted five years earlier. Before this point, United States interests were effectively met by its Pax Americana enforced on the world by U. S.
weapons of war. By 1968, however, Nixon knew he had to deal with the world in a much less dynamic fashion. What Nixon and Kissenger did with their concept of a multi polar world order was to arrive at a conception of interests independant of threats. Gaddis points out that "since those interests required equilibrium but not ideological consistency, it followed that the United States could feasibly work with states of different and even antithetic social systems as long as they shared the American interest in countering challenges to global stability" (Gaddis 285). This has become the primary guiding doctrine in American foriegn policy since that time. Once this official policy shift was made, nuclear weapons became exactly what they originally were: symbols for deterrence.
The only continuing reason any nations of the nuclear club still deploy nuclear weapons is to deter hostility from other nations. The depth and complexity of American security policy reaches far beyond the scope of this investigation, but hopefully the role of the atomic bomb in U. S. foriegn affairs is somewhat more clear. Today, nuclear diplomacy is dead.
The world has somehow adopted to weapons of mass destruction, and the diplomatic and military strategy of nuclear weapons is far from the minds of U. S. officials in the State Department. The world has moved on to a new age in international relations. Kissenger said in 1968 that "there was now no single decisive index by which the influence of states can be measured" (Kissenger 277). As much as we might like to indict the policies of nuclear diplomacy for all its self-indulgent insanity, we must bear in mind that it was somehow successful.
Not one atomic bomb fell onto a nation from Kennedy to Kissenger, and that should show the altruistic commitment by men of power to keep the unthinkable unthinkable. hat "the gothic revival in American cinema is filmmaking at its most vital: cryptic, moody, and provocative" Bibliography:
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