Q: With the testing of the first hydrogen bomb, how did President Eisenhower
view the possibility of a large-scale war with the Soviet Union?
GAP: Now, Eisenhower himself made clear his view and repeated that one should
not think about large-scale war without realizing that it, in all likelihood,
would become a nuclear war. And the notion of any large-scale, full-scale war
without using nuclear weapons he thought would be an illusion. At an earlier
point, he had said that the fission weapon was simply a much more powerful step
in the escalation of weapons effects that we had seen over the centuries. But
once the hydrogen weapon was available, and more and more as he thought about
that, you began to hear from him that any idea of nuclear war would be, as he
said, and absurdity or a form of insanity. That no longer was war an extension
of policy by other means, but it was a form of mutual, could be a form of
mutual suicide.
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