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Project Solarium was an American national-level exercise in strategy and foreign policy design convened by President
Dwight D. Eisenhower Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (born David Dwight Eisenhower; ; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was an American military officer and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, ...
in the summer of 1953. It was intended to produce consensus among senior officials in the national security community on the most effective strategy for responding to Soviet
expansionism Expansionism refers to states obtaining greater territory through military empire-building or colonialism. In the classical age of conquest moral justification for territorial expansion at the direct expense of another established polity (who ...
in the wake of the early Cold War. The exercise was the product of a series of conversations between President Eisenhower and senior cabinet-level officials, including Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles John Foster Dulles (, ; February 25, 1888 – May 24, 1959) was an American diplomat, lawyer, and Republican Party politician. He served as United States Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959 and was briefly ...
and
George F. Kennan George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly hist ...
, in the Solarium room on the top floor of the
White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in 1800 ...
. Through these conversations, Eisenhower realized that strategic guidance set forth in
NSC 68 United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, better known as NSC68, was a 66-page top secret National Security Council (NSC) policy paper drafted by the Department of State and Department of Defense and presented to President Harry ...
under the
Truman administration Harry S. Truman's tenure as the 33rd president of the United States began on April 12, 1945, upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and ended on January 20, 1953. He had been vice president for only days. A Democrat from Missouri, he ran ...
was insufficient to address the breadth of issues with which his administration was presented, and that his cabinet was badly divided on the correct course of action to deal with the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
. He found that internal political posturing threatened to undermine policy planning, and thus U.S. national security. Project Solarium's findings produced
NSC 162/2 NSC 162/2 was a policy paper of the United States National Security Council approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on 30 October 1953 which defined the Cold War national security policy during the Eisenhower administration. NSC162/2 was base ...
, a national strategy directive commonly assessed to have guided U.S. strategy from its publication to the end of the Cold War.


History

On the heels of his 'Cross of Iron' speech in April 1953, Eisenhower was increasingly concerned about the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy, which took a militaristic approach to the Soviet Union. Eisenhower's campaign platform included harsh criticism of unsustainable military expenditures as a danger to the stability and long-term growth of the U.S. economy. Senior figures in his administration were generally split into two camps over the nature of the United States' policy of engagement towards the Soviet Union: one group asserted that the U.S. must actively combat and " roll back" the sphere of Soviet influence, while the other supported the " strategy of containment" espoused by
George F. Kennan George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly hist ...
, the author of the
Long Telegram The "X Article" is an article, formally titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", written by George F. Kennan and published under the pseudonym "X" in the July 1947 issue of ''Foreign Affairs'' magazine. The article widely introduced the term " ...
and erstwhile director of the Policy Planning staff at the
State Department The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other nat ...
. Eisenhower realized that unless his administration could agree on a narrative for countering the Soviet Union, efforts to further competing agendas would produce incoherence instead. So the president ordered that a strategy design exercise be convened to help his senior staff come to agreement.


Process structure

The exercise created three teams, or Task Forces, composed of leading experts from the
federal government A federation (also known as a federal state) is a political entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a central federal government (federalism). In a federation, the self-governing ...
and academia known for their particular knowledge of Soviet strategy, politics, economics, military capability, intelligence activities, diplomatic posture and history. Each team received the same reference documents and intelligence assessments and was assigned to analyze and present a supporting case for one of three overarching themes as the basis for U.S. policy on the Soviet Union. Each Task Force was initially set the task of analyzing its given position and providing critical assessment of that position's efficacy, including its strengths and weaknesses. Though Eisenhower realized that the three courses of action to be analyzed could be combined or modified in any number of varying interpretations, he thought it most effective to set down three specific lines of thought for comparison to ensure that all three positions could be evaluated on their own merit. Each task force met individually or in plenary format between June 10 and July 15, 1953, then submitted summary reports of their findings to Eisenhower and the National Security Council.


Team A

Led by Kennan, Team A was bound to a mainly political strategy toward the Soviet Union, focused primarily on Europe, and eschewing significant military commitments elsewhere. It also relied heavily on U.S. allies and alliance cohesion. Team A would make the best possible argument for the existing policy of containment, seeking to prevent Soviet expansion in Europe while minimizing the risk of general war. Although Team A's report is widely seen as the "containment option" of Project Solarium, some scholars argue that "Task Force A supported a policy that went well beyond traditional conceptions of containment." According to Gregory Mitrovich, Team A consisted of Chairman Kennan, C. Tyler Wood, Rear Admiral H. P. Smith, Army Colonel George A. Lincoln, Army Colonel
Charles H. Bonesteel III Charles Hartwell Bonesteel III (September 26, 1909 – October 13, 1977) was an American military commander, the son of Major General Charles Hartwell Bonesteel Jr. and grandson of Major Charles H. Bonesteel Sr. (1851–1902). He served in t ...
, Navy Captain H. E. Sears, and John M. Maury of the
CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
.


Team B

Eisenhower gave Team B a similar mandate but allowed it to take a harder line towards the Soviet Union, and instructed it to contemplate policies that relied less on allies and more on the U.S. nuclear arsenal. It was given, therefore, a more unilateral mission but one that nevertheless held to a clear line against taking direct military action within the Soviet sphere of influence. Team B would accept containment as a viable policy, but be less tentative about its implementation. It would assert that any Soviet or Soviet-sponsored aggression would lead to general war and threaten massive U.S. and allied retaliation using any means necessary. Team B included Army Major General
James McCormack James McCormack, Jr. (8 November 1910 – 3 January 1975) was a United States Army officer who served in World War II, and was later the first Director of Military Applications of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. A 1932 graduate of ...
, John C. Campbell, retired Army Major General
John R. Deane Major General John Russell Deane (March 18, 1896 – July 14, 1982) was a senior United States Army officer who served as Chief of the United States Military Mission in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during World War II. As such, he was the prin ...
, Calvin B. Hoover, Air Force Colonel Elvin S. Ligon, Philip E. Mosely, and James K. Penfield.


Team C

Team C was the "roll-back" team. Nitze was excluded from the project but Team C's mandate was taken almost verbatim from the prescriptive passages of
NSC 68 United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, better known as NSC68, was a 66-page top secret National Security Council (NSC) policy paper drafted by the Department of State and Department of Defense and presented to President Harry ...
: diminish Soviet power – and Soviet-controlled territory – everywhere and by any means available. It stated: "The United States cannot continue to live with the Soviet threat. So long as the Soviet Union exists, it will not fall apart, but must and can be shaken apart." It concluded that "time has been working against us. This trend will continue unless it is arrested, and reversed by positive action." The rest of this section is deleted from the published version of the document.
Marc Trachtenberg Marc Trachtenberg (born February 9, 1946) is a professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974 and taught for many years for the histor ...
suggests that the deletion probably indicates that it is even more extreme than what was left in. Team C included Navy Vice Admiral
Richard L. Conolly Richard Lansing Conolly (April 26, 1892 – March 1, 1962) was a United States Navy admiral, who served during World War I and World War II. Early life Conolly was born in Waukegan, Illinois, attended Lake Forest Academy and was appointed to the ...
, LTG L. L. Lemnitzer USA, Russia expert and future ambassador to Vietnam and Italy G. Frederick Reinhardt, Kilbourne Johnston, COL Andrew J. Goodpaster USA, Leslie S. Brady, COL Harold K. Johnson USA


Proposal for Team D

The President's top foreign policy advisors summarily rejected the recommendation that a fourth policy alternative be considered: Give Moscow an ultimatum to come to terms with Washington within two years or face the prospect of general war.


Operational security measures associated with Solarium

Given the sensitive nature of the exercise, significant measures were taken to obfuscate its true purpose. Though the exercise itself was conceived by Eisenhower at the White House, he chose to hold the exercise at the
National War College The National War College (NWC) of the United States is a school in the National Defense University. It is housed in Roosevelt Hall on Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C., the third-oldest Army post still active. History The National War Col ...
under the rubric of the 'First National War College Round Table Seminar,' the subject of the seminar being 'American Foreign Policy, 1953 - 1961.' To add layers of backstopping to this cover story, the National War College produced conference agendas, booklets and pamphlets about the seminar to hand out to Solarium participants and National War College staff. Participants were held to strict standards of non-disclosure regarding their participation in Solarium leading up to its execution and following the presentation of the exercise findings to the
National Security Council A national security council (NSC) is usually an executive branch governmental body responsible for coordinating policy on national security issues and advising chief executives on matters related to national security. An NSC is often headed by a na ...
in June 1953. Even the existence of Solarium itself, the participants and the outcomes, were not declassified or officially acknowledged until 1985.


Findings

The three panels submitted reports to the National Security Council after approximately 45 days of analysis and an additional 30 days of deliberation. Though each team presented a different case as was prescribed, President Eisenhower summarized the findings of the exercise in these general terms, which aligned generally with the findings of Team A: 1. The Soviet Union was a long term, rather than an imminent, threat, and one that would diminish if the United States acted prudently. 2. The threat was from Soviet troop strength, conventional weaponry, and a tendency to use intimidation and alliances to further its goals of creating a security zone in Eastern Europe and Asia, and of overthrowing independent governments. None of these were as important, however, as the increasing number of nuclear weapons in the possession of the Soviets and concomitantly their capacity to deliver them. 3. The United States needed to avoid both public alarm – which could bring excessive military preparations - and complacency – which might encourage the Soviet Union and its allies to take risks, as in Korea. The United States thus should maintain a system of alliances circumscribing the
Soviet Bloc The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America under the influence of the Soviet Union that existed du ...
and military readiness, both conventional and nuclear. 4. The United States would pursue its national security in conjunction with its allies, and this pursuit would involve, not rollback of Soviet power, but a continuation of containment. 5. The most useful strategy for the United States, once it had established its deterrent capacity and resolve, would be political and educational – conveying the truth about capitalism, democracy and human rights by various means to the populations of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Eisenhower found the alternative of Team C possible—the United States would win the nuclear war—but rejected this alternative due to an enormous task of cleaning the mess after victory: "You can't have this kind of war. There just aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets."


Effect on U.S. national strategy


NSC 162/2

The summary report from the Solarium exercise formed the basis for
NSC 162/2 NSC 162/2 was a policy paper of the United States National Security Council approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on 30 October 1953 which defined the Cold War national security policy during the Eisenhower administration. NSC162/2 was base ...
, which in many ways solidified the policy of containment toward the Soviet Union. The text of NSC 162/2 can be seen to incorporate lines of thought from Kennan's camp,
Paul Nitze Paul Henry Nitze (January 16, 1907 – October 19, 2004) was an American politician who served as United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department. He is best kn ...
and President Eisenhower's own beliefs in the prudent limitation of military spending in the interest of maintaining the long-term growth of the U.S. economy. The blending of these three lines of thought led to a document that prescribed a strategy that played to U.S. strengths, emphasized alliances with developed and developing nations, and supported constant partial military mobilization with a buildup of the U.S. nuclear arsenal to unprecedented levels, while continuing to place an overall priority on
Measures Short of War
as the primary means of containing Soviet aggressive behavior. NSC 162/2 underpinned the Eisenhower administration's " New Look" U.S. foreign policy, and ultimately guided US policy toward the Soviet Union for the bulk of the Cold War. As an exercise in national strategy design, Solarium has yet to be repeated in any comprehensive fashion, although various presidential administrations have tried.http://www.ndu.edu/ITEA/storage/796/Strategic%20Planning%20for%20NatSec.pdf


See also

* The Hawk and the Dove (book) * Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department *
The Wise Men (book) ''The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made'' is a non-fiction book authored by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas. Published by Simon & Schuster in 1986, it describes the actions of a group of U.S. federal government officials and members ...


References


Further reading

* *


External links

{{Library resources box
Documents from Project Solarium, including the task force reports

Project Solarium - Memorandum to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary (Lay) - Summaries of the three task force reports

'Cross of Iron' speech excerpt

CIA.gov
United States foreign policy