The political economy of national security in the nuclear age: John F. Kennedy and the missile gap

In the late 1950s, many journalists, politicians and military leaders warned of a "missile gap"---a perceived strategic deficiency brought on by the Soviet Union's gains in the fields of rockets, missiles and nuclear weapons. John F. Kennedy skillfully exploited the range of uncertainties about the United States' national security policies represented by the missile gap to challenge, and ultimately displace, Dwight D. Eisenhower's New Look with a new military strategy known as Flexible Response.; This dissertation shows that the missile gap succeeded as a critique of the New Look because of a coalition of economic and national security concerns---referred to throughout this dissertation as the political economy of the missile gap---that became acute in 1958. Eisenhower and Kennedy's national security strategies reflected their own views of the proper balance between nuclear weapons and conventional forces. These strategies also reflected their economic philosophies. Combined with the broader military and strategic critiques of the missile gap voiced by James Gavin, Maxwell Taylor, Henry Kissinger and others, the economic aspects of the missile gap critique---articulated by leading economists, including Walter Heller, John Kenneth Galbraith, James Tobin, and Leon Keyserling---opened the door for Kennedy's Flexible Response strategy that promised to spend more on defense, in general, and more on conventional, non-nuclear forces, in particular.; Kennedy spoke of very real concerns. The perception of the United States' declining prestige was spreading, and perception was reality. The missile gap, however, was a fiction. Kennedy received proof that there was no missile gap in early 1961. Yet, in spite of this new evidence, Kennedy refused to declare the missile gap closed. Instead, he pressed on with his promised defense build-up during the spring and summer of 1961. The missile gap served as partial justification for this build-up. The political economy of the missile gap led Senator John F. Kennedy to advocate policies necessary to rectify the potentially dangerous and destabilizing inferiority represented by the presumed gap. These same forces led President Kennedy to implement changes to the nation's military that were unnecessary once the gap was proved to have been a fiction.