Kennedy

1 Pages 372 Words

Kennedy came to office with flair. He offered a new vision and a new frontier for America. He also inherited a secret war in Cuba, a Cold War with the Soviet Union and China, and an emerging crisis in Southeast Asia. He preferred a flexible security strategy over Eisenhower's heavy-handed nuclear threats.
Flexible Response was no highly explicit theory nor written in a single authoritative source. Flexible Response was realistic in that nuclear weapons couldn't be used. It tried to provide credible means to match non-nuclear escalation. The word "flexible" stressed the value of having "multiple options" available should a crises arise. Having multiple options during a crisis appeared to be better than reference to a few preset war scenarios. Having multiple options was thought to enhance the credibility of the U.S. deterrent (reassuring allies while deterring the opponent). At the same time, however, flexibility made it also improbable that the U.S. would want or need nuclear attack. In effect Flexible Response called for the continued presence (in Europe) of sizable conventional forces. Conventional forces were to serve two functions, a deterrent function and the function to fight limited wars. The main argument of the Eisenhower administration had been that conventional forces were too costly and nuclear weapons would have "more bang for the buck." Kennedy wanted to deter all wars, general or limited, nuclear or conventional, large or small. Eisenhower and Dulles wanted to achieve similar goals but at minimal cost. Their risk was to either not act at all or respond at all levels of threat beyond the original provocation. Kennedy disregarded costs and emphasized sufficient flexibility to avoid either escalation or humiliation. In particular Kennedy wanted to increase the range of available options prior to resort to nuclear war. The threshold beyond which the President might have to decide to initiate the use of nuclear weapons had t...