In addition to all the above, somewhat theoretical, military considerations, there was also a tangible historical experience that helped shape the massive retaliation concept, and that was the Korean War, which claimed 33, American lives without any significant military or political objectives being achieved.
It demonstrated that the US could be easily dragged into limited, yet highly expensive proxy wars in the periphery and drained of its military and economic resources.
This concern with the concept of all-out war was, in fact, a highly entrenched theme in traditional US strategic thinking, stemming primarily from past experience, and perhaps collective psyche. The economy was to be restructured in a way that would allow it to endure what was foreseen as a long struggle against communism.
Balancing the budget meant reducing, among others, military expenditures, and consequently a general, yet cautious, demobilisation. The changes that the new administration was ideologically committed to make started taking place almost immediately. Given these economic concerns problematising the designing of a military doctrine that would not sacrifice prosperity for security, or vice versa, massive retaliation, with its reliance on the perceived deterrent capacity of the asymmetrical nuclear retaliation with which potential aggressors were threatened, seemed to serve all objectives in an effective and frugal way.
Wells, Jr. The speech was a reflection of two of the main tenets of foreign policy under Eisenhower and Dulles. Dulles consistently reiterated the need for a more proactive and vigorous approach to rolling back the communist sphere of influence. Eisenhower was a fiscal conservative and believed that the U.
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