Reply #102: IKE was ready, willing and able to do that to the Soviet Union.

[Octafish]

His generals wanted him to, too.

The Real Eisenhower: Planning to Win Nuclear War

by Ira Chernus
CommonDreams.org
Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Peace activists love to quote Dwight Eisenhower. The iconic Republican war hero spoke so eloquently about the dangers of war and the need for disarmament. He makes a terrific poster-boy for peace. But after years of research and writing three books on Ike, I think it’s time to see the real Eisenhower stand up. The president who planned to fight and win a nuclear war, saying “he would rather be atomized than communized,” reminds us how dangerous the cold war era really was, how much our leaders will put us all at risk in the name of “national security,” and how easily they can mask their intentions behind benign images.From first to last, Eisenhower was a confirmed cold warrior. Years before he became president, while he was publicly promoting cooperation with the Soviet Union, he wrote in his diary: “Russia is definitely out to communize the world….Now we face a battle to extinction.” On the home front, he warned that liberal Democrats were leading the U.S. “toward total socialism.”

Everyone knows that, in his Farewell Address, he warned about the military-industrial complex (MIC). But few recall the words that immediately followed: “We recognize the imperative need for this development . … Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action,” because the danger of the communist foe, “a community of dreadful fear and hate<,> … promises to be of indefinite duration.”

This was not merely rhetoric for public consumption. Eisenhower never saw any hope of rapprochement with the Soviets. He always saw them as irredeemably treacherous, “implacably hostile and seeking our destruction,” as he wrote to Winston Churchill. “Where in the hell can you let the Communists chip away any more? We just can’t stand it,” he complained to a meeting of Congressional leaders in 1954, as he considered intervening in Vietnam. (He held back only because Britain and France refused to support him.)

Ike wanted to avoid nuclear war, but not at all costs. He told his National Security Council (NSC): “If the Soviets attempt to overrun Europe, we should have no recourse but to go to war.” The U.S. must be “willing to ‘push its whole stack of chips into the pot’ when such becomes necessary,” he told Congressional leaders, adding, “We are going to live with this type of crisis for years.” If World War III erupted during his term in office, he boasted, “he might be the last person alive, but there wouldn’t be any surrender.”

In private conversations with foreign leaders he said: “To accept the Communist doctrine and try to live with it” would be “too big a price to be alive. He said he would not want to live, nor would he want his children or grandchildren to live, in a world where we were slaves of a Moscow Power.” “The President said that speaking for himself he would rather be atomized than communized.”

Eisenhower signed NSC 5810/1, which made it official U.S. policy to treat nuclear weapons “as conventional weapons; and to use them whenever required to achieve national objectives.” “The only sensible thing for us to do was to put all our resources into our hydrogen bombs,” he told the NSC. He found it “frustrating not to have plans to use nuclear weapons generally accepted.” He and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, were “in complete agreement that somehow or other the taboos which surround the use of atomic weapons would have to be destroyed.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/18/7742/

Thank you for the information on the Robert L. Capp collection. I never would have known.

Here's an eyewitness you father and his friends may have known:

Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear War:

Wilfred Burchett and Hiroshima

by Richard Tanter
August 13, 2005

“Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me. Still does. My first reaction was personal relief that the bomb had ended the war. Frankly, I never thought I would live to see that end, the casualty rate among war correspondents in that area being what it was. My anger with the US was not at first, that they had used that weapon -- although that anger came later. Once I got to Hiroshima, my feeling was that for the first time a weapon of mass destruction of civilians had been used. Was it justified? Could anything justify the extermination of civilians on such a scale? But the real anger was generated when the US military tried to cover up the effects of atomic radiation on civilians -- and tried to shut me up. My emotional and intellectual response to Hiroshima was that the question of the social responsibility of a journalist was posed with greater urgency than ever.”

-- Wilfred Burchett 1980 <1>

Wilfred Burchett entered Hiroshima alone in the early hours of 3 September 1945, less than a month after the first nuclear war began with the bombing of the city. Burchett was the first Western journalist -- and almost certainly the first Westerner other than prisoners of war -- to reach Hiroshima after the bomb. The story which he typed out on his battered Baby Hermes typewriter, sitting among the ruins, remains one of the most important Western eyewitness accounts, and the first attempt to come to terms with the full human and moral consequences of the United States’ initiation of nuclear war.

For Burchett, that experience was a turning point, ‘a watershed in my life, decisively influencing my whole professional career and world outlook.’ Subsequently Burchett came to understand that his honest and accurate account of the radiological effects of nuclear weapons not only initiated an animus against him from the highest quarters of the US government, but also marked the beginning of the nuclear victor’s determination rigidly to control and censor the picture of Hiroshima and Nagasaki presented to the world.

The story of Burchett and Hiroshima ended only with his last book, Shadows of Hiroshima, completed shortly before his death in 1983. In that book, Burchett not only went back to the history of his own despatch, but more importantly showed the broad dimensions of the ‘coolly planned’ and manufactured cover-up which continued for decades. With his last book, completed in his final years in the context of President Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ speech of March 1983, Burchett felt “it has become urgent -- virtually a matter of life or death -- for people to understand what really did happen in Hiroshima nearly forty years ago . . . It is my clear duty, based on my own special experiences, to add this contribution to our collective knowledge and consciousness. With apologies that it has been so long delayed . . .” <2>

CONTINUED...

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=17&ItemID=8502

The photographs at the Hoover Institution Archives fill in the story. Thank you.