The “New Look” in Foreign Policy

To meet his goals of balancing the budget and cutting taxes, Eisenhower was determined to control military expenditures. Moreover, he feared that massive defense spending would threaten the nation’s economic strength. Reflecting American confidence in technology and opposition to a large peacetime army, Eisenhower’s “New Look” in defense strategy concentrated U.S. military strength in nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. Instead of maintaining large ground forces of its own, the United States would arm friendly nations and back them up with an ominous nuclear arsenal, providing, according to one defense official, “more bang for the buck.” Dulles believed that America’s willingness to “go to the brink” of war with its intimidating nuclear weapons—a strategy called brinksmanship—would block any Soviet efforts to expand.

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Missiles in the Nuclear Age By the 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union were arming missiles with nuclear weapons, and the U.S. Air Force had begun to deploy those missiles in Europe before it had achieved the capability to strike Moscow from a launching site in the United States. This photograph shows the first Thor Ballistic Missile arriving at an RAF Base in Norfolk, England, in 1958. © Mary Evans/The Image Works.

Nuclear weapons could not stop a Soviet nuclear attack, but in response to one, they could inflict enormous destruction. This certainty of “massive retaliation” was meant to deter the Soviets from launching an attack. Because the Soviet Union could respond similarly to an American first strike, this nuclear stand-off became known as mutually assured destruction, or MAD. As leaders of both nations pursued an ever-escalating arms race, the United States stayed on top of the Soviet Union in nuclear warheads and delivery missiles.

Nuclear weapons could not roll back the iron curtain. When a revolt against the Soviet-controlled government began in Hungary in 1956, Dulles’s liberation rhetoric proved to be empty. A radio plea from Hungarian freedom fighters cried, “SOS! They just brought us a rumor that the American troops will be here within one or two hours.” But help did not come. Eisenhower was unwilling to risk U.S. soldiers and possible nuclear war, and Soviet troops soon suppressed the insurrection, kill-ing or wounding thousands of Hungarians.