How US Presidents Countered the Cold War Soviet Nuclear Threat

• By Peter Huessy – Warrior Senior Nuclear Weapons Analyst, Senior Fellow, Warrior Maven, Atlantic Council, Hudson Institute

(Washington DC) In 2017 former Dartmouth College professor and nuclear policy expert Tom Nichols wrote “The Mirage of Knowledge” about the apparent disregard or antipathy many Americans have for “experts.”. In an essay published by the Harvard Magazine in March-April 2018, Lydialyle Gibson followed up and reviewed Nichol’s book. She emphasized how the Trump administration epitomized the disdain for experts, noting the former President’s supposed nonchalant attitude about not having a “foreign policy” expert upon whom he relied as evidence that foreign policy expertise was being belittled and its necessity downplayed.

Professor Nichols was particularly worried that when it came to preserving nuclear deterrence, experts were needed, and the strong rhetoric he deemed reckless between the former President and North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un should not replace the calm diplomacy of nuclear experts necessary to preserve peace.

While experts have their place, the assumptions held by the experts need illumination but are often not revealed, let alone challenged. By their nature, assumptions go beyond facts. We can all agree current US oil production is at eleven million barrels a day. But there are no “facts” that can tell you for sure what oil production could be a decade hence and what impact that would have on US Middle East policy.

Part of the continued questioning of “experts” goes beyond the foreign policy sphere for sure. The media-designated covid vaccine experts over the past three years got much wrong. As is now understood, the pandemic was not one of the unvaccinated. Masks were not needed. Schools did not have to be closed. And society was gravely harmed, unnecessarily, by the shutdown—a shutdown the advocates are now (after the fact) fast running away from.

As noted, on foreign and security policy, including nuclear deterrence, there is not a mechanical or science right way to do things. Even those things we did successfully that in retrospect everyone now supports, were not automatic, such as the April 1948 Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO a year later in April 1949. Isolationist sentiment was strong in America, but with the Berlin blockade and the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia, the Senate overcame those concerns and easily approved NATO 83-13.

But a short year later, after getting NATO and the Marshall Plan right, the experts failed miserably. On January 12, 1950, the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, just six months after signing the NATO Instrument of Accession, declared the ROK to be beyond our defense perimeter. To partially remedy US reticence about supporting the ROK, the administration instead sent a military assistance proposal to Congress. Alas, by a vote of 197-195 the House initially turned President Truman down. But in March, Congress thankfully reversed itself and approved $10.2 million in military assistance.

In a subsequent report to Truman in April, however, US intelligence “experts” assumed there was no urgency, as North Korea did not have the military capability to invade the South unless accompanied by massive Soviet forces, and they explained there was no indication of such Soviet forces in North Korea.