Foreign Relations: The Great Deflation

On the New Frontier, the faces of foreign-policy officials were grimmer, paler and wearier than at any time since the Cuba missile crisis last October. White House and State Department spokesmen talked somberly of a sudden shift from thaw to freeze in the cold war.

The most worrisome sign was the renewed shooting in Laos (see THE WORLD). A Communist takeover there, President Kennedy warned at his press conference, would "put additional pressure" on neighboring Thailand and South Viet Nam, as well as on neutralist, militarily feeble Cambodia.

The Apocalyptic Vision. To a latter-day Rip Van Winkle awakening from a sleep of a few years, the week's rumblings would at first have seemed quite familiar, reminiscent of earlier cold war crises. But closer examination might indicate a profound change. There was a crisis in Laos that might prove to be painful and prolonged. But missing were the verbal and psychological accompaniments of the cold war crises of the '50s: the apprehension that the scales of power might be about to tip against the West, the warnings that a climactic showdown might loom ahead.

The apocalyptic vision of a thermonuclear war that would annihilate mankind has, in fact, slowly receded, giving way to the idea, voiced by Winston Churchill back in 1950, that the frightfulness of nuclear weapons makes total war improbable. Peace "through mutual terror." Churchill called it. A corollary of this concept is that in a nuclear stalemate the threat of nuclear retaliation ceases to be an effective deterrent to small-scale aggression with conventional weapons. In other words, nuclear stalemate can deter big wars but not little wars. To lessen the U.S.'s reliance on what the late John Foster Dulles called "massive retaliatory power," the Kennedy Administration has built up the U.S.'s conventional military forces, increasing Army combat divisions from 11 to 16 and Air Force tactical wings from 16 to 21.

The Traumatic Wallop. Recent years have also seen a drastic deterioration of Communism's image: it no longer seems anywhere near as powerful, cunning and successful as it did in the late 19505.

The West overestimated the power of Communism from the very start of the cold war. The Communist conquest of mainland China, Russia's achievement of a thermonuclear explosion only nine months after the U.S., Russian claims of rapid economic growth—all these added to the Communist image of vast and growing power. Then, in October 1957. Sputnik I struck the U.S. a traumatic psychological wallop. Alarmed voices warned that Russia was speedily wiping out the U.S.'s scientific and technological lead. The climax of the national inferiority complex came in 1960, when the U.S. public became convinced that a "missile gap" confronted the nation, and when John F. Kennedy ran for President insisting that "our power relative to that of the Communists is declining."