A Study On The Reasons Of The Rise And Decline Of United States' Massive Retaliation Strategy

The Massive Retaliation Strategy which is the core of The New Look policy is one of the foremost important contents of the U.S. government's foreign and military policies in 1950s. It symbolized the American military strategy shifting from the conventional deterrent to the nuclear deterrent. The strategy is paid a good deal of attention after it came into being and arouses strong reproaches not only in the eastern and western countries, but also in American allies and in the United States itself. Animated debates are set off in the academic circles. Scholars analyze the strategy from various angles, for example, from the angles of international politics, military science, and sociology, and meanwhile concentrate their study on how it was arising and transformed, and the characteristics and influence of it. However, all the studies have paid little attention to the reasons of its rise and decline, and even lack of systematic examinations and macro historical thinking.The rise and decline of the Massive Retaliation Strategy is a significant historical phenomenon in the process of cold war. It is of crucial historical importance to approach the reasons of the rise and decline of it. On one hand, while examining the reasons why it was replaced by the Flexible Reaction Strategy, a thorough master of the process of how American military strategies evolve can be reached. On the other hand, summarizing the regular pattern of American military strategies evolvement can have a deepened understanding of all sorts of factors which may exert influence on the evolvement. Therefore, the study has both the theoretical value and practical significance.There are four reasons of the rise of the Massive Retaliation Strategy. Firstly, it was the production of the time, the Cold War. Secondly, it came into being under various political pressures including not only the postwar partisan struggle between the Republic and the Democratic but also the McCarthyism. Thirdly, it was the outcome of the economic fluctuation in the postwar American economic development. And finally, the advancement of American's military techniques in nuclear weapons and delivery system laid the technological basis of the rise of the strategy.The declination of the strategy also has four reasons. First of all, the drawbacks of the policy itself and the criticisms therefrom and the internal divergence cause it in a dilemma. Second, the formation of Soviet Union's trinity strategic nuclear power made it lost the material and technological foundation of its existence. Third, the anti-nuclear and anti-war movement advocated by Russell and Einstein promoted the changes of American military strategy. Fourth, American allies suspect of the effect of the strategy and their opposition of American's using military power in all previous crisis forced the U.S. government to strike out on a new path.