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Cold War Threats 55
Program monies to go to this former enemy as well as old allies. And underline the
US commitment to both Western Europe and Western Germany by mounting sturdy
resistance to the Soviet Union’s Berlin “blockade.”
The correlation of Cold War concerns and transatlantic policy innovation continued
into the early 1950s – because the concerns would simply not subside. For
all the exhilaration that came with being “Present at the Creation” of a postwar
world in which the US exercised stunning global leadership – to use the typically
self-aggrandizing title of Dean Acheson’s memoirs – anxieties abounded. The Marshall
Plan and NATO notwithstanding, the decade’s end brought a sense that there
was, as Acheson put it in March 1950, “a trend against us.” The US ambassador to
Moscow simultaneously noted that “The Russians gave every evidence of feeling
that the tide was running in their favor” and “were active everywhere.” Successful
testing of an atomic bomb and the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party, in particular,
seemed to generate “a mounting militancy” in the Kremlin – “a boldness
that is essentially new – and borders on recklessness,” according to the State
department’s Paul Nitze. 12
Nitze, of course, would play a key role at just this time in drafting the notorious
NSC-68, a call to arms whose basic premise was the purported death threat issued
by the international communist conspiracy. It was the outbreak of war in Korea that
really mobilized US actions, however, very much including a shake-up in policies
toward Europe. Even allowing for a measure of purposeful exaggeration, it seems
clear that the troubled early course of the conflict in Korea jolted policy makers and
average citizens alike. Meeting with a group of Congressmen, Secretary of State
Acheson confessed to the fear that time “is running out on us”: the United States
“was in the greatest danger in its history, more so even than the crucial days marked
by the battle of Gettysburg and the debacle at Pearl Harbor.” Massive unexpected
aggression in Korea suggested that reckless communists might go on the move anywhere.
General Omar Bradley, for example, worried about an invasion across the
38th parallel being “a tactical or strategical diversion – tactical to cover a Chinese
communist invasion of Formosa, strategical to cover a Soviet invasion of Western
Europe.” 13
Concern about potential Kremlin forays was doubled by the sense that the
strength required to throw them back was seriously underdeveloped. Even before
the Korean explosion, NSC-68 had warned that while “the United States has a large
potential military capability (...) actual capability (...) is declining relative to the
USSR” 14 Nor had NATO made much headway in building European preparedness.
Under such circumstances, how would Washington be able to deal with any crisis
added on to the one raging in Korea? And wouldn’t the very fact of inadequate military
strength-in-being actually create a vicious cycle in which it would become
12. FRUS, 1950, I, 206-208; FRUS, 1950, III, 821; R. FOOT, The Wrong War: American Policy and
the Dimensions of the Korean Conflict, 1950-1953, Ithaca 1985, 39.
13. FRUS, 1950, III, 200-201; Bradley quoted in Dockrill, Britain’s Policy For West German Rearmament,
1950-1955, 32.
14. FRUS, 1950, I, 276.