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Wasting Lead. When President Eisenhower installed Lewis Strauss as AEC chairman last July, Strauss was reluctant to take up residence once again behind the guards and electronic safety devices in the Atomic Energy Commission's headquarters at 1901 Constitution Avenue. He knew well that the free world's military defense against Communism depends heavily on the U.S. atomic lead to offset the Russians' overwhelming strength in ready ground forces. He had helped to hold that lead by his long minority battle, but the U.S., still vaguely hopeful and confused, had not used the extra time to clarify its policy or to harness the bomb to a political program for getting and keeping a peace. Now, it is only a matter of years (most experts guess three) before the Soviet Union will have a stockpile of atomic and superbombs large enough to cripple the U.S. After that point, the U.S. lead in quantities of bombs will mean much less than it does now.
More conscious of the situation than perhaps any other U.S. citizen, Lewis Strauss once again feels that he is in the old minority position, this time on a broader battlefield. In neither Washington nor the tight-packed industrial targets across the land does he detect signs of concern, signs that the U.S. is energetically using its dwindling atomic advantage to head off the apparently inevitable.
The real solution, if any is to be found, will lie largely outside Strauss's province. One kind of proposal would counter the Russian atomic challenge by: 1) strengthening the U.S. strategic air arm so that the threat of certain and swift retaliation might postpone Russia's Dday; 2) building a deep radar and interceptor defense network between the U.S. and the pole; or 3) dispersing U.S. industrial targets so the Russians would need a larger stockpile to insure a crippling attack. But even those plans (and of the three, only the retaliatory air force stands much scrutiny) would only push the deadline of 1956 into 1957 or 1958. The time would still come when two completely atom-armed nations would face each other across the pole, with enormous advantage to the one that strikes first.
Conceivably, the atomic bomb might become a weapon that both sides would fear to use even if they went to war with other weapons. It is possible that limited wars such as Korea and Indo-China will be fought without atomic bombs. The balance of non-atomic forces, unimportant as they might become in total war, will still affect political calculations, and the U.S. must be prepared to fight non-atomic as well as atomic wars.
Does the armed free world just sit and wait for the clock to strike in 1956 or 1957 or 1958? It can, but it doesn't have to. Outside the Iron Curtain there is immense room for improvement—in unity, economic progress, political order—which could alter the power balance as effectively as superbombs. Inside the Iron Curtain there is unrest and division which can be increased. In both these fields, opportunity for U.S. action is greater, and the risk less, today than it will be after the clock reaches the 1956 deadline.