The Myth of Flexible Response: United States Strategy in Europe during the 1960s

up any book on post-war United States foreign relations and you will almost certainly be told that US national security policy changed dramatically on 20 January 1961, when the incoming John F. Kennedy administration began to replace Dwight D. Eisenhower's 'massive retaliation' with a new military strategy of 'flexible response'. The strategy, which focused largely on the Soviet threat to Western Europe, was, and is, seen as a radical change which supposedly enhanced deterrence by providing the president with flexible nuclear options and increased conventional capabilities to deal with a variety of military crises. This view of flexible response is widely held among both strategists and historians.1 However, the operational changes in US strategy in Europe during the 1960s have been exaggerated. Recently declassified documents and transcribed recordings reveal that senior officials, including the president and secretary of defence, were not persuaded by the core strategic assumptions underlaying the doctrine of flexible response as they applied to the role of the United States in Europe. Like Eisenhower before them, they were not convinced that 'controlled' nuclear war was possible, entertained the possibility of assisting independent European nuclear