| This dissertation examines American foreign and security policy in the early postwar period to determine the impact of nuclear weapons upon American foreign policy. In particular, it compares and contrasts the effect of nuclear weapons on four early Cold War crises. The first two of these crises, Berlin in 1948 and the war in Korea from 1950-52, took place during the Truman Administration. The next two, the 1953 debate as to how to conclude the Korean War and the 1954 deliberation over intervention to save the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, occurred in the first two years of the Eisenhower presidency. In addition, and as a backdrop to examining these crises, this dissertation also analyzes many aspects of Truman's and Eisenhower's security and foreign policies, including NSC 68, the origins of NATO, Massive Retaliation and Eisenhower's "New Look" policy. The central issue is to determine why nuclear arms--the most powerful weapons ever developed by humanity--were not fully integrated into American policy as a key element in its dominance of the international system.; There appear to be a number of reasons why nuclear weapons did not give the United States the power over the international system that many observers anticipated after the Second World War. The first is that, by virtue of their immense force, nuclear arms are weapons of annihilation, and their use, far from being a political act, would be essentially one of nihilism--a fact recognized by many military officers long before their civilian counterparts.; This quantum increase in power represented by atomic arms leads to a second important point: the enormous impact these weapons had on key decisionmakers. Their concentrated power meant that a miscue by the President could lead to disaster for the United States.; A third consideration, reinforced by the first two, is that the great power made these most offensive of weapons an essentially defensive political instrument. Considerations of proportionality and vulnerability were inherent in any decision concerning nuclear weapons. |
