Eisenhower's Pentagon

Abstract

After long delay, the Historical Office of the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) has published the third volume in its series of histories of OSD (the last volume was published in 1988).1 Whatever caused the delay – whether the study’s sheer magnitude,2 the inter-agency declassification process, or the Historical Office’s internal review – the result is an important study of a formative period in Cold War history. During the late 1950s, the Eisenhower administration presided over the development of a huge “overkill” nuclear weapons capability epitomized by the “triad” of U.S. nuclear-delivery forces of strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM). Paying for the “triad” would be enormously expensive, and the annual budgetary process that financed nuclear weapons systems and the U.S. military generally is at the heart of Watson’s narrative. His story, however, is also about national security planning, centralization of policymaking authority, nuclear strategy, arms control, U.S.–European and U.S.–Japanese relations, and, not least, Cold War crises. Indeed, this study’s scope is so broad that a brief review cannot do it justice.