Cold War

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In 1952, a new President took the seat and role of commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. The new President Eisenhower was put into his seat at the White House with the mess of a cold war in our hands. Truman’s policy of containment had worked so far at pushing Communism back, to a certain extent. Eisenhower wanted something more effective and more aggressive that could possibly turn the Soviets around, and ultimately end the Cold War. However, instead of devising a new, more efficient way to quickly end the Cold War, Eisenhower, working with secretary of defense John Foster Dulles, just revised Truman’s original containment policy. A more powerful policy was put into place utilizing ideas include in policies such as the New Look, and Massive Retaliation. In 1952, Republicans deemed containment as negative, futile, and immoral and demanded for a “new look” into foreign policy. Secretary of state John Foster Dulles wanted to roll back the gains of communism and liberate those in captive by it, and at the same time, reduce the budget through military cuts. These two plans, however, are very self-contradicting and to make up for this they created a plan called massive retaliation. This, in theory, would cut down tremendously on all ground troops in the army and focus more funds and effort towards the air force. At the time they were engineering smaller nuclear weapons to fit on planes that could carry massive amounts and very large distance. This was supposed to allow us to cut the budget by making fewer, but more powerful, weapons, and hopefully, at the same time, scare the Soviets into submission.

Eisenhower, however, was reluctant to use these new nuclear weapons and instead turned towards a more aggressive form of containment. This went against the goal of reducing the military and cutting spending, however it satisfied the army, who, at the time, was preparing for another world war in case the Cold War got too hot, too quickly. Eisenhower acted...
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